Our inner-life has a stronger resemblance to our direct experience than Nature’s genes have to organisms; so much so that it even spills over this presumed inner-outer divide as overt ‘playfulness’. Is this why we become easily ‘attached’ to our thoughts? (And why it’s taken me three days to write the next paragraph?)
A long tradition of dharma practice teaches us that it’s just this attachment which leads us to see our otherwise loosely wandering and untested thoughts as fore-sight. And while we happily concede that ‘natural selection’ is empty of foresight (hence again the use of lower case), the human intellect, grasping at its own ‘nature’, is not encountering any ‘thing’; it is simply choosing to see a well-defined ‘individual’ (allowing connection to ‘others’ only in similarly discrete terms). So how can it recognise what seems to be a boundlessly interconnected Nature as another, far from inferior, Intelligence in its own right? How can the thinking mind see Nature Selecting?19 (Of course this thought-ful interpretation, like all form-ulations of Wholeness, makes just as much sense when it’s turned on its head: natural selection and human selection can both seem quite ‘lower case’ when you’re not trying too hard to reify them. Am I doing that now? Time for a pause then.) [short pause . . . ]
This is the first time I’ve properly dealt with this human-‘inner-geography’-compromise idea on this website (though it played a big part in my 2019 book, Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice.20), and I hope you can now see how it might explain, from the ground up so to speak, why my posts here have been oriented to both science and dharma equally: it’s because our self knowledge cannot be scaled up to the species level without knowing this Emptiness of foresight at the personal level. But then I offer you this justification in leu of an apology (don’t become attached to it, I’m not): if we do begin to look at who we are collectively, in these non-coadapted species terms, we might also find a new way to understand, and talk about, our personal beings in terms of Natural History.
Are we ready for a brand-new finish for our origin story?
Our earliest forebears, let’s say those who could think better than a chimp, were a standup branch of mankind (in Latin: Homo erectus) that appeared about two million years ago, at the beginning of what we call the Great Ice Age (actually a long series of smaller ice-ages); and while their fair-weather cousins (also upright by the way) lost ground in these glacial times, erectus not only survived but thrived on account of they could wield stone axes and spears to get a meaty living from the big herds of big animals that grazed on the cold dry grassy steppes. They did this unfailingly through more than a dozen fifty-thousand-year glacial periods! It also helped of course that, after scrambling about in pine woods during the first two or three interglacial warm spells, and after trying to catch smaller and faster meat and eating roots and berries as a supplement, some of them got smart enough to circumvent (kind of) these pre-glacial landscape reversions (‘only’ lasting about twenty-thousand to thirty-thousand years) by recreating their preferred glacial steppe conditions; that is they learned to control and spread what all other species flee from: fire! (Cooked meat was just a tasty and digestible bonus.) Erectus was one of humankind’s better success stories. So far.
But Erectus’ brain had to be bigger than a Chimp’s, because room was needed in there to choreograph the skills for chipping and leather-binding stones onto long wood handles, and for coordinating with friends the least deadly ways to kill a Mammoth with this new ‘technology’. The need for ‘executive control’ in a brain, by which we mean consciously considering our goals and the ways to satisfy them before act-ually following through, is common enough in some other species—not only chimpanzees but elephants and even ravens; but the goals of shaping and combining objects for later use, and of controlling fire; these internal manipulations must have required a little more grey matter than ‘pealing’ a leaf so the midrib can be used to ‘fish’ for termites, or poking ‘sharpened’ twigs into tree-bark to extract grubs (even crows do that).21 The only thing Erectus couldn’t do, that we, their latest descendants, can do all too well, was connect their isolated imaginings into a further progression of erectus culture. And they couldn’t do this for one-and-a-half million years!
So why did things begin to shift radically during the second to last ice age?
Pretty much all of pre-history suggests that the evolution of brains and tools, beyond what’s needed for an already fully coadapted (i.e. ecologically stable) body is just not ‘allowed’ by a Natural Selection that discourages innovative behaviour in times of high diversity (i.e. Harmony-of-Nature times, when competitive-exclusion rules). But, during this most recent rapid cycling of cold/dry ice ages and warm/wet interglacials we’re looking at here, Erectus’ somewhat expanded brain and simple tools, together with a mute teacher’s requirement for extensive gesturing (Erectus‘ jaw was not structured to make more than a few simple sounds), seem to have been the perfect set-up for a virtuous spiral of cultural evolution. Symbolic language (which makes no sense at all without the runaway evolution of both social and physical culture) was the linking factor that allowed our predecessor’s limited graspings at ‘executive control’ to become ‘world domination’ by their descendants! Our more distant erectus ancestors were just not up to the kind of competition they got from their more talkative cousins who began to split off from the main family about this time.
Homos neanderthalensis, heidelbergensis, and our direct sapiens ancestors were the end products of this experiment in symbolic thinking—of ‘reinventing Creative Intelligence’! But it also didn’t help Erectus, I suppose, that these smaller and sporadically isolated populations were interbreeding whenever they got the chance; after all, when non-genetic adaptations (aka tools) can be shared between genetically divergent groups, the old evolutionary ‘language’ of sexual selection no longer serves its ‘racial discrimination’ purpose. The erectus ‘branch’ disappeared from, or was in the end absorbed by, the human evolutionary ‘vine’, along with all other proto-branches, when H. sapiens’ versatile chatterings (and pictorial mediation) began doing the job of speci-fying our wholly unprecedented adaptational structures and behaviours.
What’s the difference between how we see the ‘the world’ and how Homo erectus saw it? Or, for that matter, how does any other brain that accommodates executive control but not speech, see ‘the world’ even today? But [ another pause] shouldn’t our ‘watcher’ here, who we’re assuming has the power to see between worlds, look first at what our big brains mean by ‘the world’? Might this not be just more expanding of that inner geography which our erectus ancestors’ smaller brains, attending much closer to direct and immediate experience, could (and chimps and ravens still can) do without?
If the creative function of language is to link up our otherwise limited ‘graspings at executive control’ into larger and larger conceptualisations, then this is the only way to experience a ‘world’; and this experience, being neither direct and immediate nor wandering (wondering?) far away from the direct and immediate, simply does not exist for non-human brains; or even for human brains that have not yet learned to speak; or, by all accounts, for those which have re-learned how to experience directly and immediately. I’m sure Homo erectus experienced the touch and smell of the grass they trod upon at least as deeply as we enjoy the grass we mow today (perhaps ‘at least’ is an understatement here); but even as these not-quite-humans reflexively scanned the movement of that high flying mist, as the gravid shape hastened towards them (everything is a being to those who are just being) over those distant snow-covered peaks, exciting expectation of change in the what only we would bother to call ‘weather’; and later when they felt soft flakes brush and melt on their upturned faces; in their wordless this-is-what-I-am minds I expect they felt no need whatsoever for a ‘world’.
Our inner geography is of our own making; and with their proprietorial appetite for making (stuff up), our newly constituted ‘thinking minds’ hungrily find ways to justify, condemn, or ignore the very animal instincts that shape our hunger. Our thinking minds find ways to justify a ‘territoriality’ that is no longer appropriate for a non-coevolving species; they find ways to justify animal instincts for ‘rape’ as a weapon of war, and to condemn animal instincts for ‘gender-bending’ (claiming it’s an insult to family values) when the ‘offspring’ that will have the strongest effect on our futures don’t come out of our bodies, but out of our minds: ideas (the biological children they influence needn’t be our own), implements, and institutions. Closer to ‘home’ yet, our thinking minds also find ways to ignore what the body is always and immediately and directly experiencing; preferring to ruminate on its seductive or frightening in-directions of past experience. (They really really don’t like to just go silent and let us experience experience.)
The human mind’s busi-ness then is a phantasm of subtle-body wanderings—seemingly in our control but more often running amok, seemingly whole but necessarily incomplete—and yet, surprisingly (which is the hallmark of creativity in all cases) we Homo sapiens, unlike our rugged steppe-strolling, spear-chucking, erectus forebears, can out-compete all other species. It hardly seems likely that this is just a result of that fifty-or-so-percent quantitative difference in our capacity to ‘think ahead’; there is also the representative difference of being able to use short words or symbols to connect long thoughts into endless chains and branches. So what’s the qualitative difference? This will always be a matter of conjecture I suppose, but just knowing that this concatenation of thoughts can be done at all makes ‘the world’ of difference. And ‘the world’ makes the quality of this knowing a double-edged sword if, as I’ve argued here, the ‘ecologically surprising’ human mind is a creative compromise.
A qualitative difference indeed: in a phantasmagorical inner world that’s utterly convincing, it may be hard for some of us to get out again.
The moral of this story is we can’t adequately appreciate what it means to be Human in the Natural World without understanding ourselves in these fundamental eco-evolutionary terms. For just as Cambrian life didn’t ‘explode with species’ out of the promiscuous but adaptively stalled Precambrian scum until better organised sex arrived—with its adaptively irrelevant traits of sexual attraction—just so, the technological explosion and its implications for that earlier (and until lately ongoing) diversification, couldn’t have happened until adaptively irrelevant ‘language specification’ arrived to fully diversify the far more limited conceptual manipulations and rehearsings in our distant ancestors’ heads.
Which, even at that incipient stage, began the compromise on that far more distant ‘first step into genetic creativity’ that Homo sapiens made to create at the same level.
In questioning conclusion, and painful honesty, I have always had very little hope that this Extremophile Choice hypothesis will be taken seriously enough to influence what the governments we elect (especially at the higher levels) will do about the climate-ecocide crisis we’ve caused; or influence them to address it in time, or with the deeply resolved action it calls for. But sometimes it’s not hope that’s called for, but rather, it’s more and better questions: Can the small and irresolute measures we put in place now postpone the worst? Or at least can they postpone it long enough for our growing cohort of insight-meditation ‘pausers’ to infuse—with deeply-grounded confidence, understanding, and resolute ‘right collective action’—the parties we elect and the policies they put in place? https://www.extremophilechoice.com/about-extremophile-choice/
Even this mapmaker’s pauses must serve, like all evolutionary features, that which feeds into and upon this “inner geography” that Mankind has reinvented—though creatively imperfect—as a cultural proxy for Nature’s original “wandering replications” of genetic features; and the service this time is in our seeing that politics and democracy too are part of that geography. Specifically, the human need for politics and democracy are not only “animal instincts that shape our hungers”, but here our thinking minds have found so many constructive, disruptive or crippling ways to justify, condemn, or ignore the hunger that I’m beginning to think A Wonk’s Pause-3 (how Democracy might be reinvented with a better understanding of Humans and Nature) might now be necessary. In the next post. After this pause.
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Notes and Citations:
19) Notice that the term ‘thought behaviour’ does not have to imply the fundamental involvement of body activity—subtle or otherwise—that I prefer; it need only refer to thinking as something we ‘do’ in a metaphorical sense because either way it’s apparent from this anatomy (see what I did there?) of the creative process as a four-step algorithm that our ‘inner’ thoughts cannot be so easily distinguished from their outwardly reconstituted actions as DNA is from the organisms it transcribes.
20) Please scroll down to the epub, kindle, or pdf versions as these are more up-to-date. See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/extremophile-publishing/
21) Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, argues in an article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that a wide range of animal species exhibit so-called “executive control” when it comes to making decisions, consciously considering their goals and ways to satisfy those goals before acting. He acknowledges that language is required for some sophisticated forms of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. But bolstered by a review of previously published research, Buckner concludes that a wide variety of animals — elephants, chimpanzees, ravens and lions, among others — engage in rational decision-making. “These data suggest that not only do some animals have a subjective take on the suitability of the option they are evaluating for their goal, they possess a subjective, internal signal regarding their confidence in this take that can be deployed to select amongst different options,” he wrote. — Source: University of Houston November 1, 2017
