II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

C. Earthica Learns as a Symbiotic Person/Planet, Collaborative Ecosmo Sapience

Donald, Merlin. An Evolutionary Approach to Culture. Bellah, Robert and Hans Joas, eds. The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. For context, the volume arose from a July 2008 conference on this view of cultural history at the University of Erfurt, Germany. “Axial Age” is originally from Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) to denote the founding two millennia ago of the major religions and philosophies. It has since had various treatments such as by Karen Armstrong, Ewert Cousins (search), and Charles Taylor in this edition. But in regard it is Merlin Donald’s sequential historic stages (search) of episodic primate, mimetic hominid, mythic sapience, and theoretic human culture that is turned to for deep perspective. Their value today, as theologian Cousins advises, is to outline a second, 21st century Global Age via an emergent “external memory,” a growing repository of humankind’s collective knowledge. As Donald then sketches, it might be seen to have a bicameral cast via earlier mythic narration and later rational analysis, which, although he does not say, would seem like right and left hemispheres of a nascent whole world brain.

I have called the outcome of this third cognitive state Theoretic culture because, where the superstructure of external symbolic control has become established to a sufficiently high degree, it has become the governing mode of representation. Paradigmatic or logico-scientific thought, a style of group thinking that is quite different from the narrative thought skills that govern traditional culture, is not innate to the human brain or even to the larger collective structures of culture. It consists of certain habits of thought – algorithms that function in a close iterative symbiosis with external symbols and that are governed by institutional structures in society. (66)

Theoretic culture is thus still in the formative stage, and the third transition is incomplete. Human beings have retained the major elements of the first two transitions, because they are, in effect, hardwired, whereas the algorithms of Theoretic culture are not. Even the most recent, cutting-edge postindustrial cultures encompass all these collective cognitive mechanisms and cultural levels at once, and certain aspects of the culture of the developed world remain totally dominated by the Mimetic and Mythic domains. Recent research on child development supports this notion, the cognitive enculturation of modern children is highly complex, as they are led through a tangled web of representational modes and intricate institutionalized algorithms. In effect, we have become complex, multilayered, hybrid minds, carry within ourselves, both as individuals and as societies, the entire evolutionary heritage of the past few million years. (67)

The notion, that every stage of human cognitive evolution found a permanent home in the evolving collective system, is somewhat familiar to the evolutionary principle of conservation of previous gains. Previous successful adaptations remained in the system where they proved themselves effective, and the system slowly became more robust and capable of surviving almost any major blow. The modern mind reflects this fact. It is a complex mix of mimetic, mythic, and theoretic elements. Art, ritual, and music reflect the continuation of the mimetic dimension of culture in modern life. The narratives of the great religious books reflect the mythic d8imension, as do the many secular myths of modern society. These two great domains are mandatory, hardwired, and extremely subtle and powerful ways of thinking. They cannot be matched by analytic thought for intuitive speed, complexity, and shrewdness. They will continue to be crucially important in the future, because they reside in innate capacities without which human beings could not function. (71-72)

Donald, Merlin. Hominid Enculturation and Cognitive Evolution. Renfrew, Colin and Chris Scarre, eds. Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1999. A collection devoted to Donald’s well-regarded perception (Origins of the Modern Mind, 1991) of knowledge acquisition through episodic primate, imitative erectus, mythic, linguistic sapiens, to humankind’s external, “theoretic” culture. This work is noted as “the most coherent statement on the development of human cognitive abilities.” A significant aspect covered in this chapter is its ramifying, adaptive utilization of functional brain modularity.

Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. The Queen’s University, Ontario, psychologist gives a grand synopsis of the evolution of cognition and culture from primates to a cultural homo sapiens. The work has since been seen as a most cogent exposition of and guide for understanding the growth of human knowledge capacities. Four stages are chronicled: Episodic: great ape experience as a series of events with predictable responses. Mimetic: prelinguistic, intentional representations so as to generate creative responses. Mythic: the use of language to begin to model and change the world. Theoretic: the growing creation of “extrasomatic,” symbolic representations in the collective social mind. By this insight, a major transition from separate individual to collaborative worldwide humankind is well delineated.

What the Greeks created was much more than a symbolic invention, like the alphabet, or a specific external memory medium, such as improved paper or printing. They founded the process of externally encoded cognitive exchange and discovery. (342-43) One thing is certain; if we compare the complex representational architecture of the modern mind with that of the ape, we must conclude that the Darwinian universe is too small to contain humanity. We are a different order. (382)

Donald, Merlin. The Exographic Revolution. Malafouris, Lambros and Colin Renfrew, eds.. The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute Monographs, 2010. The Queen’s University, Ontario, emeritus psychologist (search) provides in this volume about archaeological reconstructions of human thought an update synopsis of his influential theory. By virtue of its accrued “alphabetic literacy,” in retrospect cognitive history appears as an increasing transfer of information, memory, and knowledge into an external, “exogram” based, encyclopedic repository. As a result, a growing ability for self-reflective “metacognition” is achieved. It is a foundational basis of this website that “the larger cognitive capacities of the human species” (78) are just now reaching their own worldwide cognizance and comprehension.

However, there is a way in which certain manufactured objects serve the human species in a unique, and evolutionarily novel, manner. I am referring to a class of manufactured objects that are sometimes called ‘symbolic technologies.’ These are specifically designed to represent, communicate and store knowledge. Such objects introduce a completely new element into human cognition: external, that is non-biological, memory storage (as in an encyclopaedia, for example). Non-biological memory media enable us to record and display complex ideas in highly accessible formats that are easy to revise and refine. The Introduction of radically new memory media into the cognitive system of the human species has transformed the way human beings carry out their cognitive business, both individually and collectively. (71)

The emergence of writing systems early in human prehistory marked the beginnings (albeit a slow and uneven start) of a major evolutionary shift in the direction of moving the bulk of memory storage from the brains of individuals to manufactured cognitive artefacts. The size of the external store has grown enormously, and for all intents and purposes, its capacity is unlimited. Modern electronic media are combined with the personal-memory systems of individual brains in very large distributed networks. This has altered the structure of the wider social-cognitive systems that govern cultural evolution, making ‘distributed’ cognition a dominant presence in the cognitive governance of human society. (76)

Whether viewed in terms of the functional architecture of the brain, or the larger cognitive capacities of the human species, this trend toward externalizing memory and restructuring the larger social-cognitive system has generated a radical change in the intellectual powers collectively at the disposal of humankind. (78)

Donald, Merlin. The Slow Process: A Hypothetical Cognitive Adaptation for Distributed Cognitive Networks. Journal of Physiology-Paris. 101/4-6, 2007. In an issue on “The Evolution of Human Cognition and Neuroscience: A Dialogue between Scientists and Humanists,” the emeritus University of Toronto psychologist and author (search) muses that his oft-cited theory might help illume why Homo Sapiens is a special species. It is due to an evolved dual reciprocity of persons within our humankind membership. The course of history, from this global vantage, can be viewed as an on-going mutuality of individual and collective cerebration, a ramifying “distributed cognition,” and so to speak a “mindsharing” culture. Our lives thus proceed at two speeds: a “fast” personal mode, and a “slow” immersion in and avail of this vast repository. This emergent phase of increasingly common knowledge is distinguished by artifactual symbols and external memory storage, lately of a planetary scale. Another take by Merlin is the chapter “The Exographic Revolution” in Malafouris, Lambros and Colin Renfrew, eds. The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting Boundaries of the Mind. (Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute Monographs, 2010).

Human cognitive evolution is characterized by two special features that are truly novel in the primate line. The first is the emergence of “mindsharing” cultures that perform cooperative cognitive work, and serve as distributed cognitive networks. The second is the emergence of a brain that is specifically adapted for functioning within those distributed networks, and cannot realize its design potential without them. (214)

Whether viewed in terms of the functional architecture of the brain, or the larger cognitive capacities of the human species, this trend toward externalizing memory and restructuring the larger social-cognitive system has generated a radical change in the intellectual powers collectively at the disposal of humankind. (The Exographic Revolution, 78)

Downs, Roger. Coming of Age in the Geospatial Revolution: The Geographic Self Re-Defined. Human Development. 57/1, 2014. A Penn State behavioral geographer delineates how over the past decade or so our daily human lives have suddenly shifted from a long state of local individual separation to an instant reciprocal membership in a common global noosphere. This epochal change is displayed in a table with regard to information, data, and content under “Pre-Digital” and “Post-Digital” columns. While for centuries people were confined to partial knowledge, libraries at best, a youth generation has grown up in an online age, where “overwhelming, infinite volumes with many continual updates” are available. Similar changes are cited for Quality, Access, Format, Providers, and so on. If to reflect, this historic change, “Gutenberg to Google” per Peter Burke, is quite a human to humankind major evolutionary transition, as if an organic planetary progeny, with these novel algorithmic and linguistic codes.

The geospatial revolution has two human implications. First, as knowing actors, people make choices based on the analysis and presentation of geospatial data. Second, as known subjects, people’s choices become data as their behavior is monitored through real-time tracking. As a consequence, the geospatial revolution is reshaping the worlds of education, business, entertainment, government, security, and travel. The impacts are felt by individuals, families, and societies. The effects can be discretionary and voluntary, or imposed and unavoidable; some are empowering and liberating, others restraining and subjecting. (36)

Doyle, John, et al. Robustness and the Internet. Jen, Erica, ed. Robust Design: A Repertoire of Biological, Ecological, and Engineering Case Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. On the presence and enhancement of self-similar complex, informational structures and processes.

The new theoretical insights gained about the Internet also combine with our understanding of its origins and evolution to provide a rich source of ideas about complex systems in general. Most surprisingly, our deepening understanding from genomics and molecular biology has revealed that at the network and protocol level, cells and organisms are strikingly similar to technological networks, despite having completely different material substrates, evolution, and development/construction. (273-274)

Duguid, Paul. Search before grep. Becker, Konrad and Felix Stalder, eds. Deep Search: The Politics of Search beyond Google. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2009. “grep” is “a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression.” (Wikipedia) In this volume from the World-Information Institute, Vienna, a University of London research fellow alludes that such worldwide capacities are but the latest technical phase of “an innate human trait of information foraging” with a long evolutionary ancestry. See also in this copious volume “How to Follow Global digital Cultures” by Lev Manovich.

Without detracting from the remarkable success of these technologies, it does seem worthwhile to ask whether, as is often assumed, this progress is part of a continuing movement in the history of search from closed to open, from bounded to free information, from in sum a benighted past to an enlightened future. (14)

Dunbar, Robin, et al, eds. Social Brain, Distributed Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Volume 158 in the Proceedings of the British Academy of contributed papers from the “Lucy to Language Centenary Project.” The discourse follows the social brain hypothesis of Oxford University anthropologist Dunbar, whence hominid cerebration and group culture are seen to advance in tandem. Notable players such as Steven Mithen, Terrence Deacon, Dwight Read and others, consider this view from Neolithic times to the 21st century, and generally assume an encompassing societal mind and milieu beyond individual bodies. In all another take upon our transitional worldwide collaborative retrospective.

Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. The evolution of intelligence is now manifest on a global plane through electronic communications, networked computers and technological culture. Dyson contends that if symbiosis is added to Darwinian theory then an emergent vector of mind is traced.

The introduction of distributed object-oriented programming languages (metalanguages, such as Java, that allow symbiogenesis to transcend the proprietary divisions between lower-level languages in use by different hosts) is enabling numerical symbioorganisms to roam, reproduce, and execute freely across the computational universe as a whole. (123)

Ebersbach, Anja, et al. Wiki: Web Collaboration. Berlin: Springer, 2008. An accessible entry to the nature and implementation in its many aspects of creative, user-interaction web sites and their informative content.

What we mean by the “wiki effect” is primarily the self-organization processes that can be observed in well-known and successful wiki projects. It is astounding that people will independently research, organize, write, and publish to provide the general public with a free service. (23)

Eden, Amnon, et al, eds. Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment. Berlin: Springer, 2013. . In this Frontiers Collection edition, with co-editors Eric Steinhart, David Pearce and James Moor, philosophers of computation take on this nearing, looming technological takeover. Four Parts compose: A Singularity of Artificial Superintelligence, Concerns about Artificial Superintelligence, A Singularity of Posthuman Superintelligence, and Skepticisms. Cosmologist Eric Chaisson’s “A Singular Universe of Many Singularities: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context” is noted in Current Vistas. Typical papers are: “Why an Intelligence Explosion is Probable” by Richard Loosemore and Ben Goetzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Friendly Artificial Intelligence,” and The Biointelligence Intelligence” by David Pearce. For starters then, the chapters and commentaries are by 39 men and one woman (Diane Proudfoot, University of Canterbury, New Zealand), within a machine paradigm (or as John Horgan says “Geeks gone wild”). The very idea of or inquiry about a greater reality and creation of which everything and oneself is a phenomenon does not dawn, or seem admissible. A collection of opinions, sans any sense of a nascent noosphere coming to her/his own knowledge of an embryonic genesis cosmos. Although an immaterial (algorithmic) principle is broached, as long as abstractions persist with no narrative context, evolution runs from nothing to no one and nowhere.

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment offers authoritative, jargon-free essays and critical commentaries on accelerating technological progress and the notion of technological singularity. It focuses on conjectures about the intelligence explosion, transhumanism, and whole brain emulation. Recent years have seen a plethora of forecasts about the profound, disruptive impact that is likely to result from further progress in these areas. Many commentators however doubt the scientific rigor of these forecasts, rejecting them as speculative and unfounded. We therefore invited prominent computer scientists, physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists and other thinkers to assess the singularity hypotheses. Their contributions go beyond speculation, providing deep insights into the main issues and a balanced picture of the debate. (Publisher)

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