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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Think it should read "avoid many types of predators"
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.