I think this is an important point that is overlooked too often. It is also the weakness of many humans that they don't share as long a time horizon view.
Humans have mental states about their mental states.
My dog might feel a pang of envy at another dog's bone, or get riled at children who innocently trespass as they walk to school. He might feel shame upon reproach for some misbehavior. But he can't feel guilty about being envious or irascible.
Maybe some higher animals do have thoughts about their thoughts?
I have been looking at the details of the evolution of a brain that uses 20% of our metabolic energy and what complexity allowed our ancestors to move from a much lower energy demanding brain to our huge energy burner. We had to gain more net energy every step of the way, including famine times, for evolution to actually work.
Back when Homo erectus was our ancestor his stone tools were well developed (sharpened by flaking from both sides) and the smaller jaw indicated possible fire use to allow higher digestibility of cooked foods, but his brain was significantly smaller. He did have a very similar body plan and was probably a good runner.
It wasn't until Homo sapiens evolved, which is fairly recent, that we saw the big jump in brain size. What was new with a huge energy payoff to drive this brain evolution becomes the question?
It couldn't be tool use as stone and probably wooden tools had been around for millions years in primates before Homo sapiens. Wild fires had also been around and reasonably large tribes to keep track of lots of social interactions was typical of primates.
The hypothesis is that the main invention that drove human brain size is "specialization and trade" back when Homo erectus was evolving into us. Primate species are often nasty to outsiders as we see from primates today and our ancestors were probably also nasty.
However, rocks are not created equally and some rock is better for stone tools than other rocks. These rocks are not uniformly distributed on this planet with obsidian associated with volcanic activity. Even flint isn't everywhere. Obsidian trade is very old and well documented but I can't find much trade before humans.
Some long dead ancestor had a stranger come into his group with a hunk of better rock like obsidian that made better tools and he had a choice of killing him and stealing his rock (the common primate response) or giving him some food and shells to go back and get more rock. When he went back to his mountain of obsidian with the shells that the females likes, he got more sex and babies and the hunter with obsidian created better tools and became hero with more sex and babies. However, both had to deal with the complexity of trust and trade with different size and huge increase in social complexity with multiple groups becoming involved.
The energy payoff of specialization and trade would be large enough to evolve a larger brain.
If my hypothesis of specialization and trade driving the evolution of humans from the start of becoming human it should show in the patterns of trade. Where the stone tools are found can be further distance from the source rock which geologists can determine with accuracy.
The complexity created by specialization and trade among many groups would favor much smarter people who can keep track of all these interactions and that mean wasting more energy on brain size becomes optimal.
It may not be PC to make "specialization and trade" the energetic driving force for Homo sapiens evolution itself, but that may be the reality. "Specialization and trade" many not only created wealth among humans, but created our species.
In "The Goodness Paradox", Richard Wrangham emphasizes self-domestication.
It could also be called collaborative domestication.
Those humans best willing and able to collaborate with AI chatBots will, in the very very near future (2023!) are most likely to see an increase in their social mobility and social status.
I know this - but don't like messing around the ai stuff without a project. I'm going thru some tutorial stuff at cohere.ai, learning how they:
"Turn text into numerical representations of language for deeper insights at scale."
Not as much fun as commenting on blogs - or learning new songs to sing at karaoke - or dancing! (in the ball season before Lent starts with Ash Wednesday )
Unfortunately, there's a part you left out at the end: "Civil rights laws" are created and used to outlaw some of the mechanisms groups have necessarily used to exclude predators, moochers, and other people who are drains on productivity.
The best book I have read on what makes humans different is The Gap by Suddendorf. Highly recommended. He takes something as simple as human ability to imagine and shows when it arises in toddlers and how it differs from that in other species, even our closest primate cousins. He then connects our ability to imagine to our ability to plan, build tools, practice, speak, train others, share norms, coordinate human interaction and develop culture.
Well, I was chugging along nicely until I hit "Our brains evolved to develop skills involved in collaboration. One skill is the use of language." This sounds an awful lot like Chomsky's "universal grammar," the idea that language structure is somehow hardwired into our nervous system. This was the dominant paradigm a few decades ago, but today is decidedly wobbly.
The evidence is growing that rather than our brains adapting to language it was the other way around: language adapted to our brains. This is explored in Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater's recent book *The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World.* Recommended.
It should also be noted that it's more than just brains. Language is grounded in our perceptual and motor behavioral systems, what we can perceive and what we can do about it. Just as cognition is embodied, so is language.
I like the post and the emphasis on how collaboration is a key factor in human success. But I think we could strike any reference to primitive humanity and it wouldn’t be missing anything substantive. I felt the same about Henrich’s WEIRDest people book. To go one step further, human evolutionary narratives are actually dangerous because they aren’t grounded on anything but storytelling but they carry the weight and authority of “science.” The take-home policy message depends on your personal biases. The Nazis had their scientific policies based on assumptions about evolution and primitive human nature, the alt-right today has their own, and liberal intellectuals have their own take-home messages. While I prefer Arnold’s liberal version, the method is too adaptable for comfort.
I know I’m a crank on this issue, and I’ll stop bringing it up after this.
Evolution is driven by selection forces and that includes the evolution of homo sapiens. The question is what selection forces created a large brain burning huge amount of energy, while losing some of the strength of our primates ancestors?
I think the fundamental questions of this type of exploration are philosophical: “what is humanity?” and sociological: “what attributes gave rise to our tremendous success as a species and as a culture?” Arnold’s interest is more toward the second, perhaps with the background of our current cultural fragmentation and the desire to retain what is important. I think the evolutionary narrative is not the primary question and the fundamental answers can be achieved and communicated without resorting to (dangerous and unfalsifiable IMHO) speculation about primitive man.
I was trying to get at the evolutionary issue of getting past or over the trench in the fitness space. Evolution can be viewed as a blind hill-climbing algorithm that can't see the future. It is like putting you on a hill blindfolded and you going to the top (optium) of the hill by taking a step in one random direction and asking is that up or down and if it is up another step in that direction and if down go in the opposite direction (if neither another random direction). On a smooth N-Dimensional surface you can get to the top but you will not go down hill so you get built in errors, which is how you know we evolved and "intelligent design" is really just true believer nonsense. The vertebrate eye started evolving with the light sensor in the wrong direction resulting in a stupid design of having nerves and blood vessels between the lens and the light sensors. The squid eye was a separate co-evolution and it is correctly designed.
The high energy cost brain creates a trench in the fitness surface so to always go up requires a small evolutionary change to always have a fitness increase, but that means a huge payoff for a very small increase in intelligence. Other primates didn't evolve huge energy burning brains while decreasing their physical strength. So where is the big energy payoff as it took millions of years to go from Homo erectus to us.
Yes, once we got past that evolutionary energy trench of a large hunk of fat using 20% of our energy and started storing information in cultural formats, our available energy became huge and we were unstoppable on our way to dominate this planet.
"Human have a long time horizon"
I think this is an important point that is overlooked too often. It is also the weakness of many humans that they don't share as long a time horizon view.
Especially those humans who become successful. Impulse control might be as important as IQ for success, but much harder to measure.
Re: "What makes us different from other species?"
Humans have mental states about their mental states.
My dog might feel a pang of envy at another dog's bone, or get riled at children who innocently trespass as they walk to school. He might feel shame upon reproach for some misbehavior. But he can't feel guilty about being envious or irascible.
Maybe some higher animals do have thoughts about their thoughts?
Thanks for the pointer.
I have been looking at the details of the evolution of a brain that uses 20% of our metabolic energy and what complexity allowed our ancestors to move from a much lower energy demanding brain to our huge energy burner. We had to gain more net energy every step of the way, including famine times, for evolution to actually work.
Back when Homo erectus was our ancestor his stone tools were well developed (sharpened by flaking from both sides) and the smaller jaw indicated possible fire use to allow higher digestibility of cooked foods, but his brain was significantly smaller. He did have a very similar body plan and was probably a good runner.
It wasn't until Homo sapiens evolved, which is fairly recent, that we saw the big jump in brain size. What was new with a huge energy payoff to drive this brain evolution becomes the question?
It couldn't be tool use as stone and probably wooden tools had been around for millions years in primates before Homo sapiens. Wild fires had also been around and reasonably large tribes to keep track of lots of social interactions was typical of primates.
The hypothesis is that the main invention that drove human brain size is "specialization and trade" back when Homo erectus was evolving into us. Primate species are often nasty to outsiders as we see from primates today and our ancestors were probably also nasty.
However, rocks are not created equally and some rock is better for stone tools than other rocks. These rocks are not uniformly distributed on this planet with obsidian associated with volcanic activity. Even flint isn't everywhere. Obsidian trade is very old and well documented but I can't find much trade before humans.
Some long dead ancestor had a stranger come into his group with a hunk of better rock like obsidian that made better tools and he had a choice of killing him and stealing his rock (the common primate response) or giving him some food and shells to go back and get more rock. When he went back to his mountain of obsidian with the shells that the females likes, he got more sex and babies and the hunter with obsidian created better tools and became hero with more sex and babies. However, both had to deal with the complexity of trust and trade with different size and huge increase in social complexity with multiple groups becoming involved.
The energy payoff of specialization and trade would be large enough to evolve a larger brain.
If my hypothesis of specialization and trade driving the evolution of humans from the start of becoming human it should show in the patterns of trade. Where the stone tools are found can be further distance from the source rock which geologists can determine with accuracy.
The complexity created by specialization and trade among many groups would favor much smarter people who can keep track of all these interactions and that mean wasting more energy on brain size becomes optimal.
It may not be PC to make "specialization and trade" the energetic driving force for Homo sapiens evolution itself, but that may be the reality. "Specialization and trade" many not only created wealth among humans, but created our species.
In "The Goodness Paradox", Richard Wrangham emphasizes self-domestication.
It could also be called collaborative domestication.
Those humans best willing and able to collaborate with AI chatBots will, in the very very near future (2023!) are most likely to see an increase in their social mobility and social status.
I know this - but don't like messing around the ai stuff without a project. I'm going thru some tutorial stuff at cohere.ai, learning how they:
"Turn text into numerical representations of language for deeper insights at scale."
Not as much fun as commenting on blogs - or learning new songs to sing at karaoke - or dancing! (in the ball season before Lent starts with Ash Wednesday )
Think it should read "avoid many types of predators"
Joshua, I too noticed that typo.
Unfortunately, there's a part you left out at the end: "Civil rights laws" are created and used to outlaw some of the mechanisms groups have necessarily used to exclude predators, moochers, and other people who are drains on productivity.
The best book I have read on what makes humans different is The Gap by Suddendorf. Highly recommended. He takes something as simple as human ability to imagine and shows when it arises in toddlers and how it differs from that in other species, even our closest primate cousins. He then connects our ability to imagine to our ability to plan, build tools, practice, speak, train others, share norms, coordinate human interaction and develop culture.
Well, I was chugging along nicely until I hit "Our brains evolved to develop skills involved in collaboration. One skill is the use of language." This sounds an awful lot like Chomsky's "universal grammar," the idea that language structure is somehow hardwired into our nervous system. This was the dominant paradigm a few decades ago, but today is decidedly wobbly.
The evidence is growing that rather than our brains adapting to language it was the other way around: language adapted to our brains. This is explored in Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater's recent book *The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World.* Recommended.
It should also be noted that it's more than just brains. Language is grounded in our perceptual and motor behavioral systems, what we can perceive and what we can do about it. Just as cognition is embodied, so is language.
I like the post and the emphasis on how collaboration is a key factor in human success. But I think we could strike any reference to primitive humanity and it wouldn’t be missing anything substantive. I felt the same about Henrich’s WEIRDest people book. To go one step further, human evolutionary narratives are actually dangerous because they aren’t grounded on anything but storytelling but they carry the weight and authority of “science.” The take-home policy message depends on your personal biases. The Nazis had their scientific policies based on assumptions about evolution and primitive human nature, the alt-right today has their own, and liberal intellectuals have their own take-home messages. While I prefer Arnold’s liberal version, the method is too adaptable for comfort.
I know I’m a crank on this issue, and I’ll stop bringing it up after this.
Evolution is driven by selection forces and that includes the evolution of homo sapiens. The question is what selection forces created a large brain burning huge amount of energy, while losing some of the strength of our primates ancestors?
I think the fundamental questions of this type of exploration are philosophical: “what is humanity?” and sociological: “what attributes gave rise to our tremendous success as a species and as a culture?” Arnold’s interest is more toward the second, perhaps with the background of our current cultural fragmentation and the desire to retain what is important. I think the evolutionary narrative is not the primary question and the fundamental answers can be achieved and communicated without resorting to (dangerous and unfalsifiable IMHO) speculation about primitive man.
I was trying to get at the evolutionary issue of getting past or over the trench in the fitness space. Evolution can be viewed as a blind hill-climbing algorithm that can't see the future. It is like putting you on a hill blindfolded and you going to the top (optium) of the hill by taking a step in one random direction and asking is that up or down and if it is up another step in that direction and if down go in the opposite direction (if neither another random direction). On a smooth N-Dimensional surface you can get to the top but you will not go down hill so you get built in errors, which is how you know we evolved and "intelligent design" is really just true believer nonsense. The vertebrate eye started evolving with the light sensor in the wrong direction resulting in a stupid design of having nerves and blood vessels between the lens and the light sensors. The squid eye was a separate co-evolution and it is correctly designed.
The high energy cost brain creates a trench in the fitness surface so to always go up requires a small evolutionary change to always have a fitness increase, but that means a huge payoff for a very small increase in intelligence. Other primates didn't evolve huge energy burning brains while decreasing their physical strength. So where is the big energy payoff as it took millions of years to go from Homo erectus to us.
Yes, once we got past that evolutionary energy trench of a large hunk of fat using 20% of our energy and started storing information in cultural formats, our available energy became huge and we were unstoppable on our way to dominate this planet.
Ah, now I see what you were getting at. That is an interesting question.
Baby's gotta have a bath - we need care in keeping baby while the water goes down the drain.