I'm very interested in the process behind the evolution of human minds. How did it happen? How did this incredible creature - us - who see the world as they do, come to experience themselves as they do?
My studies have brought me to this conclusion. The self, or the thing we think about, as us, is a construction built out of a recursive, positive feedback between individual primate minds taking a bigger and deeper interest in one another. What is this 'bigger and deeper interest'? Michael Tomasellos ideas about shared intentionality, and in particular, his analysis of chimp and human communication in his book 'the origins of human communication' settles the body as the primary locus of cognitive development: chimp and bonobo (our closest genetic relatives) minds are 'built' up from the bottom - from the body; it is not their vocal attempts, but their gestural actions, that indicate the presence of a cognitive creature.
Tomasello and the other evolutionary psychologists (scientists and philosophers) I've read are more cognitively oriented, which for me misses a big piece of the puzzle. Tomasello is right about the primacy of the body - and thus in human speech - as the research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson has shown, large chunks of our language are unconscious metaphorical constructions of a metaphorically biased mind. The world makes sense this way because the brain is always organizing and cross-referencing different types of information. The types of creatures that we are - visually dominant with tool like hands - has to integrate different modalities to form a coherent reality. Sounds and vocalizations, pitches, timbers and other acoustic elements, present themselves 'this way or that way'. Take the devils note, the 'tritone' in music. When people hear that we all naturally react in a similar way. High tones are soft, sensuous, and safe. Words like nipple and tip and blip and sip - it isn't a coincide that these sounds share the same theme: smallness. They sound 'small' because it is high and pitchy. In fact, smaller creatures tend to produce a more high pitch sound while large creatures produce lower pitch sounds.
Integration, consolidation, and increased complexity, all have to operate in the service of coherency - homeostasis for the body - but psychologically speaking, a sense of stability for the mind. Evolution maintains a marvelous balance of forces within the body, so it should not be surprising that the mind is similarly organized.
But before I get ahead of myself, let me lay out three principles that I think operate in the evolution of human consciousness. They are aspects of one process, but because of it's nature, it's difficult, not to mention uncommon, for the human mind to be presented this way:
i) Adaptation
ii) Affect Regulation
iii) Coherency
The first idea is basically the working process of biological evolution. The organism at the cellular level is amazingly complexly organized; in multicellular creatures, each cell is exquisitely intertwined with the activity and function of other cells. But it can be hard, and even tempting, to exclude the very consciousness we use from this similar process.
Thankfully, us humans are hardy - and heartful - creatures equipped with tremendous plasticity. The second idea, affect regulation, is basically what the human mind is designed to do. The way we think, we're unconsciously brought to assume that we are the true deciders of our actions; and even worse, we develop philosophies and ideologies that reify certain ideas about the world (and ourselves) that fly in the face of a much sounder reflection.
Affect regulation is the way an organism self organizes in response to environmental threats and attractions. It is basically automatic (Ledoux, Anxious) but also has a basic consciousness component (what it is like to be aroused or distressed) for every creature with a complex nervous system. Negative experiences that hyper-arouse the organism destabilizes neuroendocrinological systems like the HPA axis. An organism needs to return to a normal equilibrium - or psychological 'homeostasis' - after hypo-arousal, and it appears there is a mechanism that follows severe arousal that allows a 'discharge' from an overly aroused procedural motor circuitry. Peter Levine sees this discharge as the "shake" an animal makes after an affectively traumatic experience.
Coherency is a distinctly human concept that is fundamentally related both to the nature of human consciousness, and the process of affect regulation itself.
Imagine Australopithecus, a creature that seems to be man 4 million years ago. Australopithecus already shows a departure from the great ape morphology, but is still very ape like. It's brain is small - chimp like - and so likely was its behavior. However, it was largely arboreal - living on the ground and so needing to become more aware of the threats below it.
Homo Habilis comes along 2.5 million years later and the head is bigger. What happened during this transition, phenomenologically? What engendered this shift?
Theories abound, but I want to consider one related to the communicative process itself. Working from Michael Tomasellos obvious theory (in light of modern traumatology) the shared-intentionality hypothesis, I am interested in the very nature and structure of modern human conscious itself. That is, the two poles which makes up our mind and even gives us the sense of a "self": Self and Object.
Shuffling back to Tomasellos theory about chimp communication, I am intrigued by the way he describes great ape minds as "cognition for competition". Tomasello presents chimps as acting imperatively - that is, for themselves - and when relating with humans, although they begin to learn that humans are benevolently disposed towards them, they nevertheless struggle with interpreting human action as concerned about them. When chimps see you pointing for something, after a while of learning that paying attention to the pointing gesture yields nice rewards (a treat), they begin to respond to a human pointing. But lets say one human drop a treat under a bucket, leaves, and another human comes in and points at the treat. The chimp won't get - doesn't have a working model to support - that the other human is similarly disposed. The chimp doesn't know that the pointing gesture is borne of a a concern that is shared between humans.
It seems the way to get to a steady state of Self-Object consciousness is to build into creatures a disposition towards inquiring about the intentional state of other actors, for their benefit (and also your own!). Tomasello does this by tracing human linguistic communication to gestural communication executed through the body. This is all very cognitive. Interesting, no doubt, but missing out on another sphere of communication - the right brain kind - that 'carries' the narrative-structure of a human life.
Intentional state is the end goal, perhaps, but what is that like on the inside? A gestural action, such as those seen in apes, is very affectively alive. The whole body is in it. In the pointing gesture - something chimps can do - the motion from the body to the object parallels the embodied experience of being a self that wants some thing. The pointing action represents that want, and hence, processes like these, inasmuch as they occur in actors biologically the same, will generate perceptual states that 'converge' on similar phenomenological experiences.
In discussion about human evolution, you seldom here mention of shame. And if it's mentioned, it often seems superficial in its descriptiveness. This is odd, because shame may in fact be - and to me, actually is - the phenomenological condition required to maintain states of "shared-intentionality" between human agents.
From the perspective of the human nervous system, the body can be either aroused via sympathetic, HPA networks mediated by ventral tegmental area, or hypoaroused by parasympathetic networks like the lateral tegmental area (PAG) and the dorsal portion of the vagus nerve. These two, oscillating systems keep the organism affectively alert to threats in the environment. This process is being called 'neuroception', and serves as an unconscious system that organizes object-relations with bodily processes like metabolic homeostasis.
But how does this system operate, phenomenologically? The phenomenology, it must be stated, is at first very passive vis-a-vis environmental input. The brain is very small and very unmyelinated at birth to pass through the cervix. Experiences to come will shape the brain and at the same time will shape subsequent experiences. Good experiences will stand out with particular objects, and likewise negative experiences. Those that occur most commonly will fill-out hyper myelinated circuitry with dense synaptic connectivity. Those that occur less will be 'crowded out' by those that occur most.
What really cements the brain-mind dualism is the process of meaning. Self-Object is the mind of a human being. The human being instinctively builds self with reference to the object. Since the object is essentially other human beings (the source of the self to begin with) the brain is constantly cataloging meanings as it works out a state of coherency. To put this differently, the closed system of the brain needs to 'make psychologically coherent' the various meanings the human organism encounters. This, of course, is a bizarre paradox: the closedness of the brain is BUILT by the openness of the mind; furthermore, the input is the activity of other minds, which our brains, instinctively, self-monitor and imitate as we struggle to make sense of the world around us.
Coherency is the phenomenological process of struggling with the affects that social interaction creates in individual actors. Shame occurs because that's what shared-intentionality required to create minds that cared about one another. Joy, laughter, pleasure - these too are dependent on dyadic interactions: they are emergent properties that follow from the complexities of human meanings.
So back to those old species, those homo's who biased our present brain structure. It bears to point out that not only our cortex, but our amygdala and our upper brain stem are disproportionately large in modern human beings. The biological sociologist Jonathan Turner sees this as a co-evolution between emotional and cognitive processes. So what sort of experiences made this possible?
What about the expanding phenomenology that came with a deeper, more recursive awareness of self and other? Self and other co-evolved, as access to the former follows from access to the latter. When ancient ape-lineages became more interested in one another's knowledge, at some point, the affective program (probably mediated by mirror neurons) referenced the other in constructing a present affect state. How does this happen?
Psychoanalytical and developmental research makes it perfectly clear that right-brain processes 'scaffold' attentional states (contents) that align with the past history and the general needs of an individual human organism. But this is something that is occurring from moment to moment; usually quieted and relaxed in moments of solitude, it becomes "conjoined" to the presence of others by simply being around them. Affective information (which would give the organism knowledge of a conspecifics intentional state) is picked up unconsciously in facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures and other types of movements. These types of information impel feeling states, especially those that occur most often and most often dissociated from: shame, or 'awardness', 'insecurity'; affects that are ubiquitous in relations, yet not spoken of, perhaps, not surprisingly, due to a secondary shame about their constant presence. What else is narcissism but an overcompensation against the self destroying affects of shame?
Shame is often regarded by emotion theorists and psychoanalysts as "destroying' the self and as well it should be. If the self is a construction made by a brain BUILT UP from an evolutionary process of deeper phenomenological awareness of the other - or object - than when the primary object, or the activity of another self, expresses disapproval, naturally, the self as "self-object" falls apart because the object is looking upon the self with disapproval. This could hardly be harder evidence that the self was made in the furnace of interaction - communication - and that the affects we feel from moment to moment are the 'carrots' and 'sticks' that promote Tomasello's shared intentionality in the evolutionary process.
Human minds are also dissociative, which gives us a microscope into the nature and purpose of moment-to-moment phenomenology.
Trauma breaks a part the mind simply because cortisol has neurotoxic effects on neurons. In a state of trauma, the neurons involved with working memory (hippocampus and surrounding structures) are damaged, which phenemonologically is experienced as not being able to think clearly or recall aspects of the traumatic event. To offset this neurotoxic effect, the brains periaquaductal grey region releases copious amounts of endogenous opiates, apparently for the purpose of blunting awareness of the 'object' out there in the environment that is causing such stress. The autonomic response to stress of this sort is to decouple the two systems - cognitive and affective - which may be useful in the short term, but long term creates havoc for the personality.
The cerebellum and brain stem seem to play a big part in keeping the affective elements alive in the procedural outputs of nervous system. The body doesn't feel right, which means affects don't feel right, which, if something is known to have gone wrong (the trauma) fills the mind with an endless focus on the negative experience.
Humans have no doubt responded to trauma in different and myriad ways, but I imagine that huddling closer together, and coming "closer to the object" played a significant role in the development and evolution of compassion and love. Pain served love by making awareness of self - and ones own vulnerability - vitally apparent to the organism. The organism then reached out to the other - other humans - as a way to soothe the self and its fears.
Trauma de-couples neurologically because neurons have been damaged and working memory has been deeply dysregulated, paradoxically, because of the continuity of affects that consciousness cannot give meaning to. A normal memory when made works its way from short term areas in the hippocampus, to more widely distributed areas throughout the temporal lobes. Traumatic memory seems not to have made that journey; furthermore, it is lodged in the mind still as affective inputs into ones normal stream of awareness.
I mentioned earlier the "discharge" that animals execute after a traumatic experience. Humans have something similar to this, but, being highly cognitive creatures, our affective systems and homeostatic systems "organize" trauma top-down, by instinct, with reference to the meanings and events we ascribe to it.
When people die, we grieve and mourn them. This process occurs because of a powerful buildup of affects. We cry. We share meaning. We make coherent. The brain, to it's credit, seems more able to 'open up' working memory and store the loss in long term memory following a grieving process of existential reflection.
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