Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying appeared with Robby George to discuss an anthropological theory. They claim that it addresses two question. First, why do humans occupy many ecological niches, rather than just one. And second, why did consciousness emerge.
The answer that they offer is that humans adapt to many niches. In order to do so, they have to be able to innovate. In order to innovate, they need to brainstorm and to test out new ideas. In order to do that, we need to have an ability to recognize the minds of others and our own minds, which requires consciousness.
The wisdom that we accumulate gets embodied in culture. Culture is a conservative force, one that works well in stable environments. Consciousness is an adaptive force, one that works well in novel environments. In a stable environment, we should not disturb Chesterton’s fence. In a novel environment, perhaps we should.
This sounds a lot like Robert Boyd’s A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species, a very good, short look at human psychology from an evolutionary perspective.
” First, why do humans occupy many ecological niches”
Technology.
Lots of creatures occupy multiple niches, and arguably some of them do so without having fully differentiated genetically into different species. The difference is that when they hit a limiting transition in habitat, they have to wait until enough biological changes accumulate to thrive in the new environment.
A human example could be Tibetans at high altitude, having acquired a genetic adaptation that allows them to live in places other people can’t, but obviously without being a new species of hominid. But it seems they acquired that by admixture with another hominid group which probably had to wait a hundred thousand years or more to hit the right mutations.
What makes humans different is the extraordinarily rapid manner in which they were able to move across major habitat transitions, by creatively innovating and adapting material and social technologies to deal with the needs of new contexts and situations. In one place I can eat fish and make weapons out of wood. In another place without trees or water, I’ll need to eat bison and make weapons out of bone.
The Tibetans only didn’t become a distinct species of hominid because they weren’t isolated there for long enough.
Roger, I think what is different about this proposal is that there is an antagonistic trade-off involved. During good times culture dominates but under stressful periods consciousness dominates as it generates the innovation required to overcome the threat/disequilibrium. Perhaps continuous collective innovation vs disruptive individual innovation is a better description.
In my view, consciousness is synonymous with the cognitive language loop and the omni-environment characteristic of sapiens started with the change to an energy-dense omnivorous diet seen with erectus. Post Great Leap sapien culture seems to be a different phenomena.
Weinstein and Heying are working on a popular science style book so I’m guessing that this is one of the core themes. Thanks for the book reference.
Boyd is very big on the idea that humans are so successful because they have “cumulative culture”. Not only do they learn from the elders but they some times improve things and pass the improved culture on.
I was surprised by how uncontroversial I found the book. Boyd (and his longtime collaborator Pete Richerson) are notorious for using the term “group selection”. But he doesn’t mean genetic group selection, and admits in the book, “If I had to do it over again, I would not use the term ‘cultural group selection’ … Now, thirty years of arguments later, I can see that it would have been wiser to use the term suggested by Sarah Mathew and Matt Zefferman, ‘group-structured cultural selection’.”(pp. 108-9)
>During good times culture dominates but under stressful periods consciousness dominates
Interesting how this seems like the complete flip of Scott Alexander’s thrive/survive model of progressive/conservative political minds. Oddly both models seem to make sense. Maybe I’m making a false equivalence
Apparently exhibiting a common confusion of consciousness as such and self-consciousness. The former, in the sense of having qualia, is found in animals like cats or bats; the latter is a product of language, as is culture. And it’s culture itself that is adaptive, via the interactions of the elements that make up culture, namely self-conscious individuals.
I always found it rather strange that the default assumption is that animals do not think or have consciousness. For a pet owner, it is very hard to believe.
+1
Fraz de Waal has impressed me as well but of course I have no way of critically assessing the deeper truth of his observations.
I think the default assumption is just that they don’t have self-consciousness, not that they don’t have consciousness in the sense of conscious experience, like colors, sounds, etc. That assumption in turn seems to arise from the idea that the “self” is a concept, and as such requires language.
That seems like another big assumption. Wouldn’t the point of consciousness in the first place be to optimize the well being of the “self”, by reacting to fear, anger, hunger, etc?
Certainly, this consciousness would be pre-verbal, like young Hellen Keller.
The point of consciousness, I’d say, would be to maximize the well-being of complex, mobile organisms. I’d agree it’s pre-verbal. The “self”, on the other hand, is a concept constructed to function in cultural social systems.
My intuition (observation?) is that higher animals share our capacities for primary mental states, but not our capacities for “meta” or second-order mental states. For example, my dog may envy another dog’s bone, and separately may feel guilt if I reproach him about a behavior; but he doesn’t feel guilt about being envious.
Or perhaps there is a continuum or overlap among primates? And also among other “higher animals”?
The primary mental states I’m talking about are so-called “qualia” — such as the color red, for example, or the taste of peppermint. That is conscious experience, and I think most would say that it’s a capacity in many more than the higher animals, but maybe not worms or plants.
That theory for consciousness is a little like Jordan Peterson’s In that he poses it helps humans think out various scenarios without actually having to perform in real life so I can plan ahead /counterfactual et cetera but that does not explain the phenomenon of consciousness.
‘ In order to innovate, they need to brainstorm and to test out new ideas. In order to do that, we need to have an ability to recognize the minds of others and our own minds, which requires consciousness.’
You don’t ‘need’ consciousness for that. We could create computer programmes to do something similar to analyse other computers.
It seems a long-standing problem in philosophy that people who don’t want to explain consciousness in terms of the quality or ‘qualia’’ keep trying to reduce it to a ‘nothing but’ explanation but you can easily think of non conscious things that can do the same function without consciousness ( well, as far as we know as you can’t ‘see’ consciousness which is part of the problem with analysing it scientifically.)
In 1992, Daniel Dennett published Consciousness Explained, which didn’t. He came back to the question and I thought did a much better job in 2017’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.
Thomas Aquinas nailed this a few years back.;
a great way to get some insight into Aquinas is reading Edward Feser’s responses to critics of Nagel’s book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755 … eg this one http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/11/nagel-and-his-critics-part-iii.html