• Enrique
    842
    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?
  • Outlander
    2.1k
    as to whether the narrative seems convincingEnrique

    In a word, yes. Very well written. Can honestly say I feel I've gained 10 IQ points just reading it.

    Synesthesias materialized in the human brain which integrated modules responsible for syntax with those involved in dimensional perception.Enrique

    Bearing in mind I had to Google at least 2 words in your OP, could you explain this in a bit more detail? Examples, etc. I get the idea, heh I think :smile: , but essentially this stands above what animals can do, ie. birds recognizing themselves in the mirror, pigs being able to solve puzzles, whatever monkeys can do, etc?

    Also, genuinely curious I apologize if this sounds facetious but going by what I've read, does this mean all animals have the potential to become "human-like" or on par with us given enough time ie. becoming upright, using tools, their brain developing, etc. in your opinion? Thanks

    Also curious as to what more advanced members here that are more your speed have to say?
  • Enrique
    842


    I think the condition for complex language is detailed perception of the interface between body and environment, also the opportunity to think recreationally. Animals have no need to express what is already within their minds in a finely tuned way if they are merely feeding, mating, herding, flocking, fleeing etc., and no inclination to linguistically express what is in the external environment unless they are engaging in reflection while interacting with it. Reflectiveness only emerges when recreation is such that a species has the opportunity to think for prolonged stretches, and reflection only becomes linguistic when synesthesia synchronizes numerous physiological processes, such as conceptualizing, those responsible for basic self and socializing, coordination of the tongue, mouth and throat, nuanced recognition of features in the external environment, the bodily structures which allow an organism to interact with the environment, and inducement of pleasurable affect by all of this, a rare convergence of factors. The only species for which this confluence has in some measure emerged are probably songbirds, dolphins and humans.

    For many millions of years, songbirds have had recreational time to stretch their ability to sing, an intricate sense for the structure of objects due to nest-building, grasping, flitting around in trees and navigating long distances, also a social lifestyle, so their small brains were gradually reconfigured for expressing simple concepts of what surrounds them with a complex, rapid fire syntax.

    Dolphins move with a fast coordination that is somewhat inferior to birds, are highly recreational and social, and have a capable awareness of external objects due to echolocation, so their much larger brains mutated over many millions of years towards more complex expressing, giving each other names and such with a better than average syntax that is not quite on the level of songbirds or humans.

    Brains of the primate lineage have been naturally selected to carry out complex maneuvering amongst objects and fine grasping for fifty million years. Hominids somehow mutated towards bipedalism, probably allowing them to carry loads, and this constant interaction between the body and objects, combined with opposable thumbs and a relatively intelligent brain, led to extremely perceptive awareness of details in the external environment. Hominids were highly social, and hominins probably became more recreational than any other species as their improving reason mastered the immediate demands of environments, which among additional factors drove the lineage towards expressing a huge range of technological object-concepts, the largest vocabulary of any organisms by far, together with a self and socially stimulating facility in syntactical inventiveness comparable to songbirds. For humans, expressive socializing ascended towards a mimetic culture that seems to far exceed any known species.

    This is where the synesthesias of abstraction I was talking about come into the picture: prehistoric humans eventually did not participate in expressive reflection and object reflection separately, but instead hybridized these abilities in a system-building reflection of infinitely generative form, allowing them to integrate vast amounts of knowledge into an episteme, which gave rise to mimetically technological culture sufficient for civilization. Humans became philosophically introspective like you and me, dreaming up metaphysical and then epistemological systems. And then we manufactured AI and got eaten.

    THE END lol
  • Philosophim
    2.6k
    I believe you should be checking with prehistoric anthropologists, not us philosophers.

    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.Enrique

    A claim like this should have a citation of some kind. How did you conclude this?

    What we identify as full-blown symbolic art was probably seeded by narrational expression,Enrique

    Again, what do anthropologists say on this matter? If you are making claims to history, you need to cite people who have studied this history.

    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.Enrique

    That is one sentence. This is a massive run on that can be broken down into simple and clearer parts. And its one of many massive run on sentences in your paper. For example, your first paragraph is only two massive run on sentences. This is a writing no-no.

    This work is overloaded with SAT level words to lend the appearance of authority, but lacks any actual reference to authority. This narrative style implies lofty imagery, poetry, and a heavy use of a Thesaurus and Dictionary, not a clear set of premises with a conclusion.

    Persuasive arguments use very simple, straight forward, and easy to understand points. They use advanced terms like "colloquial" if it helps simplify the sentence, clearly conveys the idea, and there is no better colloquial term to use. Complexity of your sentence structure does not convey to the discerning reader that you have a complex idea. It is not the cleverness or use of advanced words that convince us that you have the authority to know what you are talking about, but clearly organized and easily followed logic.

    My apologies if this seems harsh, but I believe this is a seriously flawed paper if your intention is to convince us that this is the way humanity evolved.
  • Aryamoy Mitra
    156


    I imagine the grandiloquence your writings exert isn't deliberate, but concision in language might lend itself to be of utility to your arguments. Inordinately long sentences are not easily discernible, and thus cease to catalyze meaningful discourse. Nonetheless, having stated that;

    '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.'

    How do you parameterize how chronological short term memory is? In a psychological capacity, short term memory is defined as being a precursor of working memory: a faculty of one's cognition responsible for tentatively storing information that has been encoded prior. How does a mutated STM result in a generative language? Are you invoking Noam Chomsky's theories of the innate faculty of language - a disposition that is congenital to all individuals?

    Your argument on the 'phenomenal ideas of dimension' is a commendable one, though. Are you indicating that the spatial constraints associated with perception act as hindrances to abstract 'trains of thought'? That's what I gathered.

    '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.'

    This is a rather ambitious, biologically grounded claim. If memory was in fact subject to an analytic metamorphosis (ie. a growth necessitated by the fulfillment of the two objectives), then the genealogical divergence of the human species must indicate a weakened memory in the now extinct primates of the Homo genus (such as the Homo Habilis). While there may be anthropological evidence to this, I'm not aware of any.

    '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.'

    What precisely is the phrase 'proportional relativity of dimensional abstraction' attempting to convey? Dimensional abstraction, in the most intelligible meaning I can extract, is the cognitive reconstitution of material objects and their spatial features, into a generalized notion of how those spatial features assimilate in the real world. Is my definition compatible with yours? It's not particularly inferable from your writings.

    Your arguments on hybridization may be meritorious, but the way in which you have formulated them make them far too incomprehensible from an exoteric point of view - especially on a forum dedicated to philosophy.
  • Banno
    24.7k
    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.Enrique

    turgid prose...

    And probably wrong in its supposition that language was first used to express mental states. It would have first been used to coordinate group activities.
  • Enrique
    842
    turgid prose...Banno

    True, glad you pointed that out, I improved the phrasing. Still all a work in progress.

    How do you parameterize how chronological short term memory is?Aryamoy Mitra

    I replaced "chronologicality" with "consecution", I think that better captures what I'm getting at: the monologue.
  • Sir2u
    3.5k
    An excerpt from a chapter I'm writing on the origins of human consciousness.Enrique

    Before you say anything else, you should define what you mean by consciousness. Because the rest of your writing does not follow the title of the thread. Do you think that consciousness came before speech? Did they not have consciousness before they spoke?
    Was speech the first method of communication used by the "hominins"?

    I would certainly be interested in the research that backs up your statements about this, would it be possible to see some of it?

    The hominin mouth, throat and mind became reconfigured for the expressive artistry of primordial speech.Enrique

    Artistry? How did you reach that conclusion? The way you say this is as if the body just suddenly changed and speech appeared. Did cavemen actually practice the art of speaking? Exactly what is the difference between a homo sapiens speech apparatus and that of a ape's? There is actually little difference, mostly in the tongue, what is different is the neuron-control system of those body parts.
  • Aryamoy Mitra
    156
    Your speech construction is characterized by several polysyllabic words, but a rare few of them are legitimately derived. Be precise. Why have you introduced short term memory? Why is it consistent with synctatical creativity?
    'The only species for which this confluence has in some measure emerged are probably songbirds, dolphins and humans.'

    Are you certain that these determinants aren't eminent in primates evolutionarily proximal to human beings? The most intelligent of them may share synesthetic cognitive workings, in addition to bipedalism. Moreover, when you invoke the prehistoric human beings that facilitated the hybridization of artistic and material expression, are you referring to the ancestral roots of the homo genus, or merely homo sapiens in themselves? That's an important distinction to be made.
  • Enrique
    842


    I think the following addresses all these objections, but of course debate is welcome, that's the whole idea!

    A housecat, regardless of what it hears or how well it understands what you're saying to it, can only think in such a way that it vocalizes in short phrases such as "meow". It also perceives dimensionality, but this is not as capable as in humans, for cats commonly can't tell that your hand or an object you are holding is attached to you.

    Hominins were obviously much more able than housecats in both of these areas, dimensional awareness and linguistic expressiveness, but excelled most with dimensionality. Their spatial reasoning could craft effective tools of many kinds, they could figure out how to catch most available prey and adapt clothing to varying climates, essentially utilizing wilderness environments technologically such that a correlated decline in biodiversity throughout the hominin range is revealed by paleontology. Their phrases and maybe sentences, while probably not a humanlike train of thought that can spout fluent and complex verbal reasoning for hours, must have been more detailed in its expressiveness than housecats and somewhat syntactical, for they had the facial physique for humanlike speech.

    The hominin ability to express and think verbally must have been far inferior to Homo sapiens because they left no archaeological evidence of intricate symbolism. Hominin clans were not artistic like human cultures, and I assert the evolution of symbolic language was a bridge to symbolic expressiveness generally, the missing link between technological creativity and technological artistry. By some kind of incremental process, narrative meaning led all of reality to become saturated with suprafunctional meaning, evidenced by the arrival of myth and decorative symbolism. Symbolic culture went from nonexistent in hominins to the core of social life in humans, and narrative thinking is fundamental to this expressiveness.

    Facility with expressive thought gradually increased as early humans spent much of their time engaging in speech acts, a social selection pressure for language. This kind of thinking, the symbolic sequentiality I talked of, integrated to a modest degree with the rest of the brain as it progressed evolutionarily, but a huge leap forward occurred no earlier than fifty thousand years ago when some major synesthesias with object dimensionality developed. This is the synthetic abstraction I was talking about. Before these mutational events, the genus thought in syntax and reasoned about spatial proportionality, but afterwards, cognitively modern humans did much more than intuit the nature of simple causes and uses for objects. They could trace the shape of purely imagined form to a limitless degree while speaking, as if object-concept expressions interconnect within huge schematic architectures, what some philosophers have called conceptual frameworks. It is subsequent to this that the first evidence of ecology appeared, particularly cultivation of the Amazon rainforest, and eventually civilization.

    Schematic form is still the foundation for managing logistics of civilization today, vastly improved by way of cumulative culture. Once the mutations took effect, humans weren't even on the same spectrum as housecats or hominins anymore. As far as I know, its impossible so far to place these events on a precise timeline, but this was the likely sequence. Kind of a Jungian-Darwinian theory of human origins.
  • Aryamoy Mitra
    156

    These are very cogently put forth thoughts on the metamorphosis of human imagination and expression, but what are their philosophical underpinnings?
  • Enrique
    842
    These are very cogently put forth thoughts on the metamorphosis of human imagination and expression, but what are their philosophical underpinnings?Aryamoy Mitra

    I think metaphysics is a reifying of schematic architecture as transcendental essence. Kantian Idealism located this architecture in the nature of the mind, identifying the schematization of reality as resulting from the essential structure of reason and perception, his conditions of the possibility of experience. 19th century philosophy of will contra being criticized the concept of essence as failing to reference anything actual, a la Nietzsche. The logical positivists sought a universal system and technical language for making valid propositions as we construct theories, an essential method for architecting fact-based inference, and like many of the Romantics they denied the validity of metaphysical propositions. As far as implications for philosophy, that's a start. I'd be curious to know what you guys think the contemporary situation in philosophy is with this interpretation of the discipline's history in mind.
  • Sir2u
    3.5k
    Hominins were obviously much more able than housecats in both of these areas, dimensional awareness and linguistic expressiveness, but excelled most with dimensionality.Enrique

    Could you please demonstrate this by jumping around and walking in dangerous places as cats do. I think that while cats do not have the ability to tell you about dimensionality, probably because of your lack of understanding their communication methods, they are certainly better adapted to spacial perception than humans.

    Their spatial reasoning could craft effective tools of many kinds, they could figure out how to catch most available prey and adapt clothing to varying climates, essentially utilizing wilderness environments technologically such that a correlated decline in biodiversity throughout the hominin range is revealed by paleontology.Enrique

    Spatial reasoning? How does that help with the development of tools?

    Their phrases and maybe sentences, while probably not a humanlike train of thought that can spout fluent and complex verbal reasoning for hours, must have been more detailed in its expressiveness than housecats and somewhat syntactical, for they had the facial physique for humanlike speech.Enrique

    Most of speech is not in the facial physique but in the throat, a person can still speak even without the lips and teeth. Monkeys have similar facial physique, but I have not heard many of them speaking.

    It is subsequent to this that the first evidence of ecology appeared, particularly cultivation of the Amazon rainforest, and eventually civilization.Enrique

    How are you using the word ecology here? I am not sure exactly how the first evidence of it could appear.
  • Aryamoy Mitra
    156


    I think metaphysics is a reifying of schematic architecture as transcendental essence. Kantian Idealism located this architecture in the nature of the mind, identifying the schematization of reality as resulting from the essential structure of reason and perception, his conditions of the possibility of experience.

    I find it by no means an epistemic concession that transcendental idealism put forth these notions of schematic architecture, and contextualized them in the structure of human experience. That's an easily justifiable assertion.

    My question, however, was directed to cognitive hybridization, and why it was a determinant to the metaphysical propositions that gave rise to Kant's work.

    Are you implying that historically mutated syntactical and semantic architectures were what engendered metaphysical thought? If that's the case, then you're developing an anthropological argument that re-traces the nascent birthplace of philosophy in the human mind.
  • Enrique
    842
    Could you please demonstrate this by jumping around and walking in dangerous places as cats do. I think that while cats do not have the ability to tell you about dimensionality, probably because of your lack of understanding their communication methods, they are certainly better adapted to spacial perception than humans.

    Spatial reasoning? How does that help with the development of tools?
    Sir2u

    lol Jumping around and walking in dangerous places is made possible by phenomenal perception of dimensionality, not dimensional reasoning, different beasts. Cats have a body/mind awareness that rivals or surpasses humans in many respects, but their ability to scrutinize and figure out connections between technological objects as interrelationships of particulars is inferior. They don't have as well-developed a sense for how spatial details fit into a generalized conceptual picture, and that's what hominin and human reasoning accomplishes, allowing us to fashion technological items as hybrid structures and functions such that we can decimate animal populations with nonsustainable hunting and gathering while our populations grow unless we reflectively come up with better methods as per the origins of selective breeding and civilization.

    Most of speech is not in the facial physique but in the throat, a person can still speak even without the lips and teeth. Monkeys have similar facial physique, but I have not heard many of them speaking.Sir2u

    The brain of a chimpanzee, one of our closest extant relatives, has its vocalization centers deep in the limbic system, so their reasoning is unintegrated with utterance. They don't have the synesthesia that in humans allows us to reason verbally. Hominins must have been somewhere in between as human language couldn't have assumed its modern form instantaneously, and similarity between the hominin and human throat supports this.

    How are you using the word ecology here? I am not sure exactly how the first evidence of it could appear.Sir2u

    Evidence exists that prehistoric humans altered the Amazon River's course and cultivated the rainforest. That's ecological behavior, modifying nature to suit our purposes. I'm not familiar with the details, but you can research it.

    Are you implying that historically mutated syntactical and semantic architectures were what engendered metaphysical thought? If that's the case, then you're developing an anthropological argument that re-traces the nascent birthplace of philosophy in the human mind.Aryamoy Mitra

    I think metaphysics is the outcome of schematic thinking, but why exactly those architectures that are generated by distinctly human reasoning were commonly reified as transcendental essence at the beginning of philosophy, whereas this takes place much less in contemporary reasoning, is a ponderable. It probably has something to do with the theory that languagelike expressions are approximating representations rather than direct correspondence, like in Ockhamism and scientific modeling. Maybe the transition from unconditional truth in metaphysics to conditional truth in epistemology was simply brought about by cognizance of historical transition, proving the mutability of these architectures and leading to methodologies of skepticism.
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