Category Archives: cultural evolution

altruism, artificial intelligence, attention, automation, bioengineering, biology, brain, brain functions, brain structures, brain-computer interface, civil society, climate change, cognition, collaborative commons, complex adaptive systems, complexity, consciousness, creativity, cultural evolution, deep learning, Douglas Rushkoff, ecology, economics, embodied cognition, evolution, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, fact-based reasoning, framing, genetic engineering, genetics, interaction design, knowledge modeling, language, learning, learning, limbic system, machine learning, Mathematics, Max Tegmark, meditation, memetics, neural programming, pattern recognition, poverty, social organization, storytelling, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligence

Winter 2020 discussion prompts

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  • What is humanity’s situation with respect to surviving long-term with a good quality of life? (Frame the core opportunities and obstacles.)
  • What attributes of our evolved, experientially programmed brains contribute to this situation? (What are the potential leverage points for positive change within our body-brain-mind system?)
  • What courses of research and action (including currently available systems, tools, and practices and current and possible lines of R&D) have the potential to improve our (and the planetary life system’s) near- and long-term prospects?

Following is a list of (only some!) of the resources some of us have consumed and discussed online, in emails, or face-to-face in 2019. Sample a few to jog your thoughts and provoke deeper dives. Please add your own additional references in the comments below this post. For each, give a short (one line is fine) description, if possible.

anthropology, cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, meaning, natural selection, social organization, sociology, storytelling

Storytelling as adaptive collective sensemaking

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Bietti et al. (2018), Topics in Cognitive Science. The abstract:

“Storytelling represents a key element in the creation and propagation of culture. Three main accounts of the adaptive function of storytelling include (a) manipulating the behavior of the audience to enhance the fitness of the narrator, (b) transmitting survival‐relevant information while avoiding the costs involved in the first‐hand acquisition of that information, and (c) maintaining social bonds or group‐level cooperation. We assess the substantial evidence collected in experimental and ethnographic studies for each account. These accounts do not always appeal to the specific features of storytelling above and beyond language use in general. We propose that the specific adaptive value of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling the collaborative development of previously acquired skills and knowledge, but also promoting social cohesion by strengthening intragroup identity and clarifying intergroup relations.”

altruism, civil society, coevolution, cognition, communication, consciousness, cultural evolution, developmental psychology, economics, empathy, learning, meaning, paradigms, philosophy, psychology, social organization, sociology, spirituality

Cracking the code of rapid social transformation

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If interested sign up for this free one-hour presentation on Wednesday, January 15. The blurb:

Terry Patten and other activist leaders facing the grim implications of climate chaos are seeing surprising glimpses of evolutionary emergence in culture around the world.

Are we capable of making a huge, visible difference? How could each of us live differently to actually make it happen? Which cutting-edge communities and collectives are emerging to catalyze rapid social transformation?

Questions Terry will address include:

  • What is our best real-world evidence of change agents and spiritual practitioners around the world rapidly advancing culture?
  • What are the new potentials for technological breakthroughs that can open a window of opportunity for fundamental systems redesign?
  • What catalytic work is being done already by volunteers and organizers around the world, and particularly in the USA, leading up to the 2020 election?
  • What are the scientifically-grounded, realistic, transformative potentials disclosed by quantum social theory?
  • How might the emerging field of intentional cultural evolution already be setting the stage for rapid social transformation — visible now only in thousands of seemingly insignificant but daring conscious social experiments?
anthropology, civil society, collaborative commons, cultural evolution, economics, evolution, evolutionary psychology, natural selection, social organization, sociology

How cooperatives are driving the new economy

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See this Evonomics article on the topic based on Tomasello’s research in this article. You can also see his latest research in his 2019 book Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. You can find a free copy here. It supports that cooperatives are much more in line with our evolutionary heritage than the corporate structure, thus highlighting the different focuses in evolutionary theory itself.

“New peer-reviewed research by Michael Tomasello, an American psychologist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has synthesized three decades of research to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory of human cooperation. What can we learn about sharing as a result?

“Tomasello holds that there were two key steps that led to humans’ unique form of interdependence. The first was all about who was coming to dinner. Approximately two million years ago, a fledgling species known as Homo habilis emerged on the great plains of Africa. At the same time that these four-foot-tall, bipedal apes appeared, a period of global cooling produced vast, open environments. This climate change event ultimately forced our hominid ancestors to adapt to a new way of life or perish entirely. Since they lacked the ability to take down large game, like the ferocious carnivores of the early Pleistocene, the solution they hit upon was scavenging the carcasses of recently killed large mammals. The analysis of fossil bones from this period has revealed evidence of stone-tool cut marks overlaid on top of carnivore teeth marks. The precursors of modern humans had a habit of arriving late to the feast.

“However, this survival strategy brought an entirely new set of challenges: Individuals now had to coordinate their behaviors, work together, and learn how to share. For apes living in the dense rainforest, the search for ripe fruit and nuts was largely an individual activity. But on the plains, our ancestors needed to travel in groups to survive, and the act of scavenging from a single animal carcass forced proto-humans to learn to tolerate each other and allow each other a fair share. This resulted in a form of social selection that favored cooperation: ‘Individuals who attempted to hog all of the food at a scavenged carcass would be actively repelled by others,’ writes Tomasello, ‘and perhaps shunned in other ways as well.’ […]

“The second step in Tomasello’s theory leads directly into what kinds of businesses and economies are more in line with human evolution. Humans have, of course, uniquely large population sizes—much larger than those of other primates. It was the human penchant for cooperation that allowed groups to grow in number and eventually become tribal societies.

“Humans, more than any other primate, developed psychological adaptations that allowed them to quickly recognize members of their own group (through unique behaviors, traditions, or forms of language) and develop a shared cultural identity in the pursuit of a common goal. ‘The result,’ says Tomasello, ‘was a new kind of interdependence and group-mindedness that went well beyond the joint intentionality of small-scale cooperation to a kind of collective intentionality at the level of the entire society.'”

collaborative commons, cultural evolution, development, meaning, paradigms, social organization, sociology, storytelling, systems thinking

The age of entanglement

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It is superseding the Age of Enlightenment as the dominant paradigm. It also applies to our models, many of which still retain the apparent logical necessities of Enlightenment hierarchical categorization. Entanglement is much more hier(an)archically synplex. Yes, we are still in transition, retaining elements from the Enlightenment. And when we do see evidence of entanglement we try to fit that round peg into the old square hole. But it’s time begin to frame our evidence within that new paradigm where it makes the most sense.

From this  2016 piece that began framing it that way way back when. In the New Year and New Decade it’s time to play catch up.

“Unlike the Enlightenment, where progress was analytic and came from taking things apart, progress in the Age of Entanglement is synthetic and comes from putting things together. Instead of classifying organisms, we construct them. Instead of discovering new worlds, we create them. And our process of creation is very different. Think of the canonical image of collaboration during the Enlightenment: fifty-five white men in powdered wigs sitting in a Philadelphia room, writing the rules of the American Constitution. Contrast that with an image of the global collaboration that constructed the Wikipedia, an interconnected document that is too large and too rapidly changing for any single contributor to even read.”

“As we are becoming more entangled with our technologies, we are also becoming more entangled with each other. The power (physical, political, and social) has shifted from comprehensible hierarchies to less-intelligible networks. We can no longer understand how the world works by breaking it down into loosely-connected parts that reflect the hierarchy of physical space or deliberate design. Instead, we must watch the flows of information, ideas, energy and matter that connect us, and the networks of communication, trust, and distribution that enable these flows.”

artificial intelligence, brain functioning, brain-computer interface, coevolution, consciousness, cultural evolution, embodied cognition, evolutionary psychology, learning, meaning, metacognition, robotics, technological religion, transhumanism

Cognitive aspects of interactive technology use: From computers to smart objects and autonomous agents

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That is the title of a recent Frontiers ebook located here. This would make an excellent discussion topic as it’s pretty much the sort of things we’ve been investigating.  We are Borg. The blurb from the link follows:

Although several researchers have questioned the idea that human technology use is rooted in unique “superior” cognitive skills, it still appears that only humans are capable of producing and interacting with complex technologies. Different paradigms and cognitive models of “human-computer interaction” have been proposed in recent years to ground the development of novel devices and account for how humans integrate them in their daily life.

Psychology has been involved under numerous accounts to explain how humans interact with technology, as well as to design technological instruments tailored to human cognitive needs. Indeed, the current technological advancements in fields like wearable and ubiquitous computing, virtual reality, robotics and artificial intelligence give the opportunity to deepen, explore, and even rethink the theoretical psychological foundations of human technology use.

The miniaturization of sensors and effectors, their environmental dissemination and the subsequent disappearance of traditional human-computer interfaces are changing the ways in which we interact not only with digital technologies, but with traditional tools as well. More and more entities can now be provided with embedded computational and interactive capabilities, modifying the affordances commonly associated with everyday objects (e.g., mobile phones, watches become “smart watches”).

This is paralleled by novel frameworks within which to understand technology. A growing number of approaches view technology use as resting on four legs, namely cognition, body, tool, and context (of course including social, cultural, and other issues). The idea is that only by viewing how these notions interact and co-determine each other can we understand what makes the human invention, adoption, and use of technology so peculiar.

Consider for example how advanced artificial prostheses are expanding the human capabilities, at the same time yielding a reconsideration of how we incorporate tools into our body schema and how cognition relates to and interacts with bodily features and processes. Then, of course, the new mind/body-with-prostheses participates in physical, cultural, and social contexts which in their turn affect how people consider and use them. Analogously, technologies for “augmenting the human mind”, such as computational instruments for enhancing attention, improving learning, and quantifying mental activities, impact on cognition and metacognition, and how we conceptualize our self.

Conversely, while virtual environments and augmented realities likely change how we experience and perceive what we consider reality, robots and autonomous agents make it relevant to explore how we anthropomorphize artificial entities and how we socially interact with them.

All these theoretical changes then back-influence our view of more traditional technologies. In the end, even a Paleolithic chopper both required a special kind of mind and at the same time modified it, the users’ bodily schema, or the way in which they participated in their sociocultural contexts.

Technological changes thus inspire a renewed discussion of the cognitive abilities that are commonly associated with technology use, like causal and abductive thought and reasoning, executive control, mindreading and metacognition, communication and language, social cognition, learning and teaching, both in relation to more traditional tools and complex interactive technologies.

The current Research Topic welcomes submissions focused on theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues as well as reflections and critiques concerning how humans create, interact, and account for technology from a variety of perspectives, from cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, constructivism, phenomenology, ecological psychology, social psychology, neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
– Distributed cognition in interactive environments
– Social cognition and computer-mediated communication
– Theoretical and empirical investigation of embodiment and technology
– Affordances of “traditional objects” and technological devices
– Theory of mind and social interactions with intelligent agents and robots
– Cognitive models for designing, interacting with, or evaluating technology
– Empirical studies on human-technology interaction
– Evolutionary accounts of human tool use
– Differences between animal and human tool use
– Methodological issues and opportunities in human-technology interaction

cultural evolution, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, natural selection, social organization

Rutt interviews Bret Weinstein

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An excerpt from the transcript follows. The podcast is here. Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist. Weinstein:

“So more or less our problem is that the magic of humans arose through an evolutionary process driven by an arms race in which human beings were their own worst competitor. So at that point that one reaches what my PhD advisor called ecological dominance, that arms race causes a massive jump in, essentially, computing power. And that computing power came along with all of our best and worst characteristics. So it resulted in a spectacular capacity for collaboration, but the objective of that collaboration is increased competitive capacity against other groups with similar powers.

“Now I don’t think we can spend too much time worrying about whether or not that was a good process, it got us this far, and it has given us the capacity to understand where we are. But what it has done is it has created a drive that is now outstripping our capacity to compensate for its consequences. So that quote you read from my website, essentially, is about what I would call a sustainability crisis. Now conservatives often hear, when a liberal like myself starts talking about sustainability, they assume that we are cryptically talking about climate, about which there is much disagreement in some circles. I’m not talking in particular about climate, I do think we have a climate problem, but even if it were false, we still have a sustainability problem in which we are simply using resources and creating waste in a way that simply, mathematically, cannot continue indefinitely.

“So you have to at least be a cornucopian to imagine that the problems we are creating will be dealt with in due course by solutions that will magically emerge. I don’t think it’s reasonable to be a cornucopian, but you would have to at least make that jump and say, ‘Well yes, were we to continue down this road, we’d be in big trouble, but we all know that solutions arise when they’re needed.’ So if you don’t believe that, then you would end up in my camp and, what I know from experience, to be your camp thinking, ‘Oh shit, we’ve got a very serious problem, and we don’t have a very long time horizon with respect to figuring out what the solution looks like.'”

arts, consciousness, cultural evolution, evolution, evolutionary psychology, meaning, music, natural selection, social organization, sociology, spirituality, storytelling, trance

Divine transport

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From this article. Now if we can only interpret trance states postmetaphysically. The religions that formed around trance states in the article, though evolutionarily adaptive at the time, have solidified into metaphysical dogma and are no longer adaptive to our world today. It though does beckon us to create postmetaphysical rituals with music, dance, invocation, incense etc. so that we can bond together via embodiment instead of just intellectually.

“So there is a need for a new idea, and coming to the fore now is an old one revisited, revised and rendered more testable. It reaches back a century to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim who observed that social activities create a kind of buzz that he called effervescence. Effervescence is generated when humans come together to make music or perform rituals, an experience that lingers when the ceremonies are over. The suggestion, therefore, is that collective experiences that are religious or religious-like unify groups and create the energy to sustain them.”

“The explanation is resurfacing in what can be called the trance theory of religious origins, which proposes that our palaeolithic ancestors hit on effervescence upon finding that they could induce altered states of consciousness. Research to test and develop this idea is underway in a multidisciplinary team led by Dunbar at the University of Oxford. The approach appeals to him, in part, because it seems to capture a crucial aspect of religious phenomena missing in suggestions about punishing gods or dangerous spirits. ‘It is not about the fine details of theology,’ Dunbar told me, ‘but is about the raw feelings of experience, and that this raw-feelings element has a transcendental mystical component – something that is only fully experienced in trance states.'”

“Dunbar believes that a few hundred thousand years ago, archaic humans took a step that ramped up this capacity. They started deliberately to make music, dance and sing. When the synchronised and collective nature of these practices became sufficiently intense, individuals likely entered trance states in which they experienced not only this-worldly splendour but otherworldly intrigue. They encountered ancestors, spirits and fantastic beasts, now known as therianthropes. These immersive journeys were extraordinarily compelling. What you might call religiosity was born. It stuck partly because it also helped to ease tensions and bond groups, via the endorphin surges produced in trance states. In other words, altered states proved evolutionarily advantageous: the awoken human desire for ecstasy simultaneously prompted a social revolution because it meant that social groups could grow to much larger sizes via the shared intensity of heightened experiences.”

“Meaning-making, the transcendent, and openness to revelation and discovery are core parts of the human niche and central to our evolutionary success. […] The trance hypothesis is neutral about the truth claims of religions whether you believe or don’t, though it does suggest that transcendent states of mind are meaningful to human beings and can evolve into religious systems of belief.”

altruism, civil society, collaborative commons, compassion, cultural evolution, meaning, social organization, sociology, spirituality, storytelling

Does altruism exist?

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A question posed by this round table discussion with David Sloan Wilson, Kurt Johnson, Barbara Marx Hubbard,  Richard Clugston,  Zachary Stein, David Korten, Rev. Mac Legerton, Kevin Brabazon,  Doug King, Mike Morrell, Ken Wilber. 

Table of Contents

– Introduction: Science in a Spiritual Key, by David Sloan Wilson and Kurt Johnson

– Synopsis of Does Altruism Exist? Culture Genes and the Welfare of Others, by David Sloan Wilson

– Commentary 1: The Sacred and the Secular Can Unite on Altruism, by Kurt Johnson

– Commentary 2: When It Comes to Climate Change, Altruism Better Exist, By Richard Clugston

– Commentary 3: The Wolves of Wall Street and Superorganisms: How Social Justice Should Mimic Our Cells, by Barbara Marx Hubbard, Zachary Stein, and Marc Gafni

– Commentary 4: “Does Altruism Exist?” Wrong Question; Right Answer, by David Korten

– Commentary 5: Insects Model their Societies on Altruism. We need to become Planetary Altruists, by Rev. Mac Legerton

– Commentary 6: Altruism Comes with Age, by Kevin Brabazon

– Commentary 7: Altruism’s Path and the Rebirth of Spirituality, by Doug King and Mike Morrell

– Commentary 8: Altruism and Integral Spirituality, by Ken Wilber

– Discussion Questions about Does Altruism Exist?

– Reply to Commentaries on Does Altruism Exist?: Integrating Science and Spirituality through Action, by David Sloan Wilson

 

 

 

authoritarianism, brain functioning, brain imaging, brain structures, confirmation bias, cultural evolution, developmental psychology, framing, ideology, in-group bias, meaning, natural selection, neurodevelopment, neuroplasticity, neuroscience, paradigms, political orientation, systems thinking

More on Haidt

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Continuing this previous post:

I’m looking at the section “conclusion and critique” of Haidt starting on p. 31. Gibbs appreciates that we should account for our earlier human history and more primitive brain centers in describing morality. But to limit it to these structures and history at the expense of later brain structures and evolutionary development is another thing.

“The negative skew in Haidt’s descriptive work discourages study in moral psychology of higher reaches of morality such as rational moral reflection, empathy for the plight of entire out-groups, moral courage, and the cultivation of responsible, mature moral agency —broadly, study of ‘the scope of human possibilities, of what people can do morally, if they are prepared, through development and education, to approach life’s important issues in a thoughtful way’” (34).

Several neuroscientific studies make clear which parts of the brain are emphasized in liberals and conservatives. The amygdala (indicative of fight or flight fear) is a much older evolutionary brain structure, while the anterior cingulate cortex (higher thinking functions) much newer. Hence there is neuroscientific brain evidence for the evolution of morality per Kohlberg. Haidt admits that conservative morality is rooted in these more evolutionary earlier brain structures, and liberal morality in the newer structures.

The newer neocortex then coordinates and integrates the older brain functions so that the latter do not dominate and send us backward in evolution. It’s not that liberals don’t have the conservative moral traits like Haidt claims; it’s that those earlier evolutionary traits are now modified under neocortex control. Yes, there is a value judgment involved here, but it’s supported by evolutionary science, not ideology.

The abstract from “Neural correlates or post-conventional moral reasoning”:

“Going back to Kohlberg, moral development research affirms that people progress through different stages of moral reasoning as cognitive abilities mature. Individuals at a lower level of moral reasoning judge moral issues mainly based on self-interest (personal interests schema) or based on adherence to laws and rules (maintaining norms schema), whereas individuals at the post-conventional level judge moral issues based on deeper principles and shared ideals. However, the extent to which moral development is reflected in structural brain architecture remains unknown. To investigate this question, we used voxel-based morphometry and examined the brain structure in a sample of 67 Master of Business Administration (MBA) students. Subjects completed the Defining Issues Test (DIT-2) which measures moral development in terms of cognitive schema preference. Results demonstrate that subjects at the post-conventional level of moral reasoning were characterized by increased gray matter volume in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, compared with subjects at a lower level of moral reasoning. Our findings support an important role for both cognitive and emotional processes in moral reasoning and provide first evidence for individual differences in brain structure according to the stages of moral reasoning first proposed by Kohlberg decades ago.”

From Mendez, M. (2017). “A neurology of the conservative-liberal dimension of political ideology.” The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences.

“Differences in political ideology are a major source of human disagreement and conflict. There is increasing evidence that neurobiological mechanisms mediate individual differences in political ideology through effects on a conservative-liberal axis. This review summarizes personality, evolutionary and genetic, cognitive, neuroimaging, and neurological studies of conservatism-liberalism and discusses how they might affect political ideology. What emerges from this highly variable literature is evidence for a normal right-sided cconservative-complex’ involving structures sensitive to negativity bias, threat, disgust, and avoidance.”