[text size]
I think; therefore, I can do.
Rocks don’t do; they are done to.
Different physics.
The poem summarizes an important fact: a sufficiently nimble living thing can run around a rock, but a rock cannot run around anything. A different physics is involved, since the rock doesn’t use information and a nimble living thing does. How does that difference arise?
Science has not addressed this question meaningfully, treating evolution as a set of changes in bodily forms. An obvious difference between rocks and living things is the capacity living things have for self-directed behaviors. When carefully considered, this capacity seems at odds with ideas of instinct.
Before and during the scientific revolution, the divinity schools that provided general educations treated humans as the only thinkers and everything else as a study of responsive objects – with animals having instincts. The sciences developed on that basis with the human-centered studies separated from the physical sciences. The mechanisms behind instincts were not studied, and plants were not even credited with having instincts. Biology reflected and still reflects that start, with evolutionary biology a study of bodily changes, not mental or behavioral changes.
Intelligence exists, behaviors have to be directed, so how did intelligence arise, how did it take its current forms, and how does it work?
This subject – my research – addresses one of the great mysteries: Life’s seeming purposefulness. My research indicates life is indeed purposeful, in the sense that each living thing acts purposefully by making intentional choices. The choices are possible because each living thing has a core of competency tuned to its physical capabilities and needs. That competency is mental; it evolves; and living does not exist without it.
—
Each member of each species has a means of sensing and controlling its interactions with other nearby things. We call our means thinking. Mental action is a better general descriptor, because when mental action starts it could only readily be recognized as thinking if one knew what to look for.
The evolution of mental activity begins with stepwise changes in activities that lead from primordial conditions to the formation of the first species. Along the way mental activity switches from being a form of bodily activity enhancing metabolic activities directly, to the information analysis activity separated from immediate metabolic influences that we usually associate with thinking.
The point of transition is the beginning of living.
At the other end of the evolutionary sequence are modern species, including our own. If one examines the problems solved by our recent ancestors, the differences between species that led to humanness come into focus. Uniquely human social interactions – anticipated actions as much as actual ones – eventually generated and continued to generate the tightly knit and unique human ecosystem. Few modern humans raise and harvest the food eaten by all afterwards; and that, perhaps more any other factoid, epitomizes the role of anticipating in maintaining civilized life.
Some phenomena that turn out to begin to develop early in an evolutionary sequence have been overlooked or denied as biological since biology’s inception. Living things have to understand their environments and anticipate events to make decisions. Making decisions requires implicit goals and preferences. These concepts are simpler for evolution to implement than it would have been for evolution to implement instinct without their aid.
As soon as predators began to seek prey, there was a race on by predators to be smarter than prey and by prey to be smarter than predators – a race sped by the smartest in each camp surviving to reproduce. So natural selection began before niches developed, and intelligence later allowed organisms to recognize preferred terrain and select niches.
Still later species formed – so species are the products of intelligence.
The research that led me here started elsewhere with an unexpected find. A series of logical steps led me first to examining human conversation as the alternating expression of ideas – a form of social thinking – and then led me to look more deeply into one aspect of what I had found; its other uses and a potential evolutionary source. A universe of possibilities opened. I spent much time wandering intellectual paths while working out what I had found and searching for existing research. It turned out that the general case of evolution of mental action and behavior had not been explored before, and that I was exploring it.
This is a big subject with too many details to explain here. After introducing some of the aspects of the subject in a different way, I will explain how you can join the project and learn more.
—
Standpoints
From our human standpoint, it’s obvious that a rock rolling down a steep hillside will be dodged by anything alive that’s nimble enough, but not by another rock in its way. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine the standpoint of either the rolling rock or the rock in the path about the events on the hillside. Or, more to the point, that a rock has a standpoint to imagine with. So, are there standpoints between the human and rock kinds?
In one sense, the answer is obviously yes. Pets have opinions and can learn; octopus and fish have been seen using tools; and crocodiles have been seen using tools and teaming up on hunts. So the question of humanness becomes what makes human standpoints substantively different from those of other animals.
In another sense, the question is more nuanced. Bacteria and plants communicate, but they do not share our concerns or methods, so they must have standpoints that differ substantively from ours – even leaving out the concept of being aware of having a standpoint. However, in some ways their standpoints should be similar: Even the simplest sorts of living things do have reasons to reason – to make choices, to cooperate with one another, to deal with day-to-night and other environmental variations – to beat the odds provided by acting at random. Standpoints likely first evolved by enabling the reasoning needed to generate behaviors that beat those odds – followed by natural selection ending the lineages of random actors by starvation or more direct means. It follows that we should expect even the simplest of modern living things to have standpoints and mentally simpler folk to not be found.
And last, we come to the missing standpoints of rocks. Rocks are passive, so a rock could have no evolutionary advantage to having a standpoint and no way of utilizing a standpoint if it had one. Rocks do not metabolize, so a rock would lack a means of implementing or powering a standpoint if it had one. Rocks do not reproduce, so no rock has a means of evolving a standpoint. Remove a standpoint from a living thing, and the resulting object is functionally a rock.
In conclusion, there is no standpoint or category of things between the simplest of modern living things and a rock: either something has a minimal standpoint or it does not. In the deep past unknown intermediate forms had to exist that led to today’s various standpoints, but they are long gone.
—
Standpoints in modern civilization
The human ecosystem: butcher, baker, candlestick-maker; grocer, professor, fiddle-maker; all with different expertises; all with different standpoints; each interdependent with the others; none complete by him or herself.
The civilized way is share standpoints and expertise by trading time for money. No matter how much one can try, no modern human can truly be a generalist, because we all depend on one another via manufactured materials and tools, etc. By subdividing specialties everyone can concentrate their use of time, and that has made humans rich and long-lived.
In contrast a wolverine mom raising kits is a generalist. She constructs the home, hunts, nurses or regurgitates food, and trains and protects her kits by herself. Each separate kind of act requires a different standpoint and different methods. She uses her standpoints in sequence, so she is limited in what she can get done by the need to get everything done.
To be civilized we need some standpoints the wolverine doesn’t need. The tradeoff for not having to know enough to accomplish some of the tasks to even a minimum standard is that we have to know where and how to find trustworthy specialists or their products. One downside is that we are each dependent on experts who know a lot more than any of us do about their specialties, and see the world differently. Finding and hiring them can be difficult, and trust can be eroded.
Consequently, if a photographer, a biologist, a geologist, a psychologist, a veterinarian and a politician were watching the nimble living thing on the slope below the rolling rock, they would likely have very different standpoints. The veterinarian would have potential responsibilities, as the others would be well aware. The psychologist would be likely to be watching the other watchers, with the others wondering about the politician’s standpoint. And none could be sure about what they were missing that the others were noticing.
—
A standpoint with which to understand standpoints
To see how standpoints fit together, one needs a suitable standpoint outside the others – an analytical expertise focused on standpoints. That, of course, is what this research offers, through mental and behavioral evolution.
—
The first standpoint and the modern way of understanding
I have two competing interests in explaining mental and behavioral evolution: making the material useful to generalists and making the material useful to experts. While generalists and experts have different wants and even needs, everyone needs an extended civilized standpoint, so making the material useful to generalists is the place to start.
The modern way of understanding evolved quite early, before species arose, with familiar mental functions. Complexity increased largely by cloning elemental mental structures and reconnecting them, with the components of mental action still functioning in much the same way they did by the time the first standpoint was fully useful.
Living started earlier with the first act using anticipation and led to the recognition of objects later. Since anticipation allows nimble living things dodge rocks today, that first standpoint is quite an important milestone in our history. The first book from this project, The Birth of Understanding, will explain the means through which the modern way of understanding and the first standpoint evolved.
Another page on this site offers a primer on the material covered in The Birth of Understanding. It does not cover as much ground as the book will, nor is it as complete on the material it does cover, but it is a stand-alone study more than it is a summary. The title is Mental Evolution and the Start of Living, Understanding and Volition. A link is found at the bottom of this page.
—
Supporting this research
The main reason for developing this website was to start a discussion, since the subject is effectively unrecognized and there seems to be no quick route to explaining it. This website offers a means.
If you want to be able to discuss this material, please help spread the ideas. Suggestions of ways to speed the spread are welcome.
If you find this research interesting, please consider making a financial contribution to support and speed its development and publication. This research project, which did not and does not fit the standard niches for funding, has been a personal effort for a very long time; and out-of-pocket costs are about to mount.
One set of costs involves illustrations. My intention is to use diagrams heavily as conceptual aids. These text-heavy pages could have been much improved with visual reinforcement and descriptions; some of the material I left out, more so. And doing short videos without visuals makes little sense. But I am no illustrator; there are other poor uses of my time, but illustration is extreme.
A contributions button is found below.
If you have other ideas for spreading the ideas, please get in touch.
Thank you,
Steve Staloff, Ph.D.
Portland, Oregon
Mental Evolution and the Start of Living, Understanding and Volition