An excerpt from a chapter I'm writing on the origins of human consciousness. Looking for some feedback as to whether the narrative seems convincing. Any obvious evidence you philosophers can think of that necessitates a change?


The hominin mouth, throat and mind became reconfigured for the expressive artistry of primordial speech. As this self-symbolizing type of thought and behavior grew prevalent in the Homo genus, it evolved beyond projection of one’s own mental states and aesthetic sensibilities for the sake of inducing indistinct pleasure, and into a medium of increasingly precise representation conveying the qualities of obscurer experiences, whether introspective impressions or complex external phenomena. Detail in expressiveness gained a popularity which of course persists today, and protoculture of technological invention transitioned towards protoculture of mimetic inventiveness consisting in symbolic utterances that had a structure disassociated from phenomena themselves, but which were woven into the meaning of perception via a conceptual realm of primitively abstract ideas.

What we identify as full-blown symbolic art was probably seeded by narrational expression, both talking and singing for purposes of storytelling, joking and additional forms of entertainment. Hominins must have had some kind of use and modest talent for expressing themselves symbolically, but the trajectory of Homo sapiens’ evolution was clearly a huge leap forward, for our own species eventually showed the first signs of symbolism as a staple of all behavior. At least tens of thousands of years ago, humans were integrating symbols into technological objects, clothing, housing and body decoration, just as hunter-gatherers and civilized cultures alike do today. Symbolic design had progressed into the locus of sociality and life.

Hominins had of course perceived the environment as dimensional, a rudimentary abstraction that deduced imagined proportionalities between objects. These species applied the ability in crafting tools as well as working out how to catch many kinds of prey. With the advent of linguistic vocalization, a linear type of thought developed to organize sequences of sounds, and by increments these cognitive sequences evolved into syntactical awareness, a sense for utterance’s structure which in the present day has been resolved into parts of speech. While the first crude language was not infinitely generative, for short-term memory had yet to mutate into its modern form of limitless chronologicality, it was certainly a more openendedly abstract “train of thought” than phenomenal ideas of dimension with their close relationship to the causes and effects amongst concrete constituents of the material world.

Sometime between the origin of Homo sapiens and the first civilizations, with the most pivotal evolutionary step estimated at about 50,000 years ago, an extraordinary event occurred. Synesthesias materialized in the human brain which integrated modules responsible for syntax with those involved in dimensional perception. Abstraction was less and less differentiated into two types of cognitive imaginativeness, symbolic sequentiality and object dimensionality, but converted towards a type of introspection that hybridized properties of both. The openendedness of syntactical abstraction and the proportional relativity of dimensional abstraction were combined as a conceptual substrate of inferentially structural form, a kind of system-building abstraction that is the basis for advanced analytical reasoning, which would be developed and academically studied as applications of arithmetic, geometry, logic, algebra, and their derivations. Dimensionality was no longer constrained to its role in assembling objects, and syntax to its role in formulating expressions, but began to fuse as open-ended proportionality, with reflection and vocalization having an underlying mentality which performs deductions upon entities that are instantiated as concept and yet transcend the delimitations inherent in all palpable phenomena, an infinitely permutable, disembodied, pure form.

This was a huge evolutionary shift, for even prehistoric humans subsequently contextualized choice aspects of nature in technical systems. The species started experimenting with ecology to suit a variety of analytical goals, which gave rise to selective breeding and agriculture. Thinking in terms of flexible schemas of structurality, what can be called conceptual frameworks, provided much benefit to cognitive function even beyond the direct modeling of numerous causes, for it enhanced memory as a kind of cognitive scaffolding to which experiential detail affixed, reinforcing the preservation and cumulating of encyclopedic knowledge. Expansion in mind and culture effected by communication of synthetic abstraction made social life a forum for the expression of rare, novel and challenging concepts, so that techniques among much else could progress faster. When the ice age ended around 10,000 B.C.E. and environments had become favorable, human ingenuity amassed a series of technological and naturalistic breakthroughs that made practicable an innovation-based lifestyle in enlarging villages. A few thousand years later, humankind had become competent enough to permanently settle some regions as inaugural civilization.


Is this the evolutionary origin of Platonic form?