Stephen J. Staloff, December 2014

The subject matter is, roughly speaking, mental and behavioral evolution. This study specifically examines mental evolution from its roots in primordial conditions through the development of its modern form of use by individual agents.

Placing the current study in the larger perspective of the sweep of history, this study covers the evolution and action of solo actors. Social actions result from interacting decisions of individual agents, so they come later. Species develop as a result of earlier social activities. Humans have a unique ecosystem, reflecting the further development of social interactions.

Mental action has, until recently, been perceived as a human quality. More recently it was perceived as a matter of brain activity. Then it was associated with neural activity. Finding neural and other transmitters in use by all cells, some neurobiologists are referring to the ubiquity of “neural action”. Nerves and intentional communication arose from the evolution of mental action.

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Mental and behavioral evolution is another way of describing the evolution of the control system directing bodies. Each body requires a control system tuned to its particular capacities or it could not act, so the control system coevolves with bodies, with bodies developing mental structures supporting mental activities.

Because it offers control, mental action ties directly to Charles Darwin’s niche finding based description of evolution by mating bodily changes (including those resulting from injuries) to local options. The mental system has to recognize possibilities before the body has a chance to test them. Niche location is a mental operation that occurs before the use of the niche is inherited after reproduction.

Mental action changes in form a few times between its roots in primordial conditions and the human use in the uniquely human civilized ecosystem. One of those steps begins understanding.

Focus for a moment on the concept of understanding, for it is an important scientific concept with tendrils running through every aspect of behavioral studies, rather than a soft idea unworthy of scientific scrutiny. The scientific question is how and when minerals – behaviorally inert responders – manage to become objects with the understandings that allow them to be proactive interpreters of their environments.

After understandings developed, predator-prey interactions assured that every living thing would attempt to stay up-to-date on other living things nearby and how to deal with them. So maintaining the understanding became an activity that also evolved. Curiosity is its motivator.

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The initial development of mental action in the primordial conditions is related to entity reproduction. Living starts later, after necessary preconditions evolve. After living starts, mental action gains roles that could not exist previously, with dedicated mental structures where dictated by efficiency. The new roles involve the self’s relationship to the environment.

Mental action takes place in structures that constitute a mind, although the mind and mental action begin evolving as an alternative interpretation of physical activity and then a dual use of an existing structure. With the development of the new structures after living starts, the term mind must refer to a system composed of interacting but functionally separated structures. The amorphous single concept associated with casual use and the mind/body problem is misleading.

Understanding begins after the new structures mature, as the anticipation-based relationship between the self and potential nearby events. Niches and social action, both of which are products of the capacity to understand, develop later. Species form still later, defining the trunk of the tree of life. Moving forward to our branch of the tree, other mental innovations – products of the evolution of the human way of understanding – are needed for the uniquely human civilized ecosystem to form.

When understanding begins, the basic mental operations that underpin the human way of understanding are in place. Afterwards new functionality is built into mental action mainly by cloning and repurposing existing structures.

This study outlines some aspects of the initial development of understanding – the birth of understanding, with excursions to provide additional context.

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Why was the evolution of bodies studied but not of behaviors?

Why is so little understood of the mental roots of evolution? Apparently a long history of misguided beliefs blinded researchers and others.

During the scientific revolution and the enlightenment the religiously enforced and widely accepted assumption was that only humans comprehended and had volition. In 1663 the Pope banned Descartes writings for heresy; oxygen was discovered – the beginning of modern chemistry – in 1783, only 120 years later. The term biology first appeared in print in 1802, signaling the end of treating plants and animals as inherently unrelated. That was a large step, but it did not challenge religious orthodoxy.

Divinity schools provided general educations until the mid nineteenth century, placing human activities within the province of moral philosophy and all other subjects within the province of natural philosophy. Mental properties were still only human. The separation of human and other phenomena was baked into every field of study by both self-censorship and the rejection of alternative views as natural philosophy spawned biology and the physical sciences, and moral philosophy spawned the human-centered sciences.

Behaving would seem to span both areas; since to play with a cat, the cat has to agree to play with you. The assumed answer was that only humans had mental capacities; that other species had instincts; and that what seemed to be choice and pleasure on the part of the cat was a set of complex responses devoid of willfulness and choice.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through niche finding and adaptation is mainly a behavioral theory. Darwin invented ecology and used ecological interactions to explain natural selection. It was published in 1859. Other biologists immediately focused on the molecular inheritance mechanism needed for evolution to function, rather than the behavioral aspects of the theory. Eventually genes were discovered, and much later chromosomal DNA, seemingly validating the molecular approach to evolution.

Discovering that the intense focus on the physical mechanism of inheritance within evolutionary biology to the exclusion of behavioral mechanisms surprised me. Reproduction and inheritance follow successful niche finding. Both niche finding and inheritance are necessary for evolution to take place, but different logical and probably physical mechanisms are involved. Since those mechanisms do not clash in either the timing or function, both should be equally subject to scrutiny for their physical mechanisms of inheritance. But only one was.

Singling out evolutionary biologists for ignoring behavioral control is not fair. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz noted it has been a broader problem while discussing animal behavior. Lorenz wrote in 1950 that, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the large and immeasurably fertile field which innate behaviour offers to analytic research was left unploughed because it lay, as no man’s land, between the two fronts of the antagonistic opinions of vitalists and mechanists.” He went on to suggest that behavior lay in a middle way.

To which I must add that Lorenz focused on animal behaviors largely ignoring both (1) the innate behaviors of plants and (2) the means by which innate behaviors could mature with bodies of all kinds so they would be present when appropriate. No field in biology seems to have noticed that behavioral control was understudied, even ethology, because within ethology the sources of instincts seem not to have been questioned.

In Lorenz’s view instinct was primary; human mental action derivative. I argue that when you consider the sources of instinctual behaviors, they are in ancestors who found a good practice within a niche. The successful practice then becomes inheritable. But flexibility came first and remains common among behaviors, so rarely are two trees identical.

So I believe the history of the scientific revolution continues to influence the sciences. I see physics envy within biology and the social sciences as oversimplifying – attempts to avoid recognizing that evolution only functions because individuals make discoveries and then influence their peers and future generations. Each discovery adds a variable to decision-making – one that did not exist previously – the mental equivalent of discovering a new variable in physics.

The ultimate corrective must be a mating of the concepts behind moral and natural philosophy within a single logical frame, providing a coherence between the human-centered sciences and biology and between the purely physical sciences and the behavioral sciences.

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The nature of understanding

I think of the general research problem in mental evolution as one of comprehending the different roles of understanding. Is there humanness? Yes, but there is also catness, as every house cat insists. The skills and knowledge needed to learn and fit into the ecological niche of a cat are built into a kitten at birth just as the skills and knowledge needed to learn and fit into the ecological niche of a human are built into a baby at birth. Similarly other species.

Everything alive has to understand its neighborhood and neighbors to make suitable decisions in a timely manner – as did every member of its lineage going back in time. Beingness (a general pattern) and personality (individuation) result from that process of adjustment through learning and evolution in every lineage, including our own. So beingness is inherited as is the tendency toward individuation. Since we observe through comparison with the familiar, individuation and wisdom are always easiest to see in those most akin to us.

It follows that in many ways human mental activities could not be unique because getting by in a variable and uncertain world is a problem common to all living things. Intelligence, evaluation of peers, recognizing threats and opportunities, hungers, fears, passions, etc., differ in some ways between species, but each has evolved to help fit individuals into their ecological and social milieus.

For example, to find a new niche, a member of a species (any species and any new niche) must recognize a new possibility – must think out of the box in some way and have an idea that others might find useful. Then, whether a new migration destination or a new scientific concept or a new combination of flower and a pollinator, the discoverer has to then convince others that the idea is worthwhile and should join in; else, the idea dies.

Wisdom is easiest to see in twists on familiar ideas, but wisdom implies the source of the information is sufficiently respected and trusted for others to make the effort before an idea is given a try – in any species. Some soil bacteria use scouts regularly, with groups trusting the scouts sufficiently to follow them to finds. So even bacteria demonstrate both leadership and followership.

Humanness, catness, treeness and various sorts of microbeness are the modern renditions of a long evolutionary history, one that had to have had at one point a single ancestorness. And that ancestorness had to have a start in primordial conditions, where the necessary precondition for a means of understanding the environment began to evolve.

What could that earliest ancestor have understood before living started? Nothing. And that lack of understanding is a very important factor when trying to comprehend the gestation and birth of understanding – the steps in mental action that started with minerals and eventually led to understanding.

The evolution of humanness is quite different. To understand humanness, one must first know the general form of beingness from which it diverged. To understand general form of beingness one must understand the way it came about – the process that led from the primordial conditions to the first ancestorness that provided an understanding of the local environment. Social action and species came later, but the connection to our way of understanding is obvious once the pattern is established.

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Separating living things from other things.

The poorly understood concept of living need not be, for everything alive recognizes other things as alive, even while young. It follows that a single important characteristic must exist that living things recognize in other living things. Science and philosophy have doubts about the existence of a single property, but they have not looked in the same place formally as other living things have been looking informally.

Live things are perceived as alive because they act with volition while dodging dangers and seeking food – even microbes anticipate, judge outcomes and change plans. Other things – all things that are not alive – have no volition, make no decisions and never anticipate; so, they do not do, they are only done to.

We interpret things as alive when we see them take intentional actions to influence outcomes or seek information – we interpret them as being alive when we see them proact. In contrast, other things only react in direct response to outside causes. So proaction is the perceived action of living things, while reaction is the only form of action of other things.

(A clarifying note on energetics: Proaction and reaction are defined in terms of information sources leading to responses, not in terms of energy sources powering specific responses. Reactors can react after being stimulated by using internal energy sources, and so are able take actions beyond those directly powered by the stimulus, but reactors always respond after being stimulated. Proactors must have and use internal energy sources when proacting, because proactions follow decisions based on low energy indicators of future events sensed before the events occur.)

More precisely, the capacity for proacting is what separates living things from other things, because acting often awaits opportunity. So anything seen gathering information for later use is perceived by other living things as alive.

Recognizing the importance of foresight allows me to provide a useful definition of living: Living things are those things that attempt to influence the outcomes of anticipated events, while other things are limited to being responsive to events that impact them directly.

It both follows from the definition and from personal experience that living is a behavioral property of anything alive; that anything alive requires sufficient knowledge and mental capacities to predict: and that the capacity to be alive is independent of bodily characteristics, physical form and molecular makeup. A whole object proacts, so one should consider living to be a property of the entity, not of its parts.

Death removes the capacity to anticipate and, because proaction is predicated on the capacity to anticipate, the ability to proact. At the moment of death, the molecular and physical changes can be trivial, but the entity has become a reactor.

The capacity to proact is reached once during a sequence of evolutionary development and is then passed between generations. It follows that proaction is a new physical property of objects at that moment during that evolutionary sequence when it first occurs.

It also follows that because there is a small change in behavior at that initiating moment, the earliest proaction is reversible. If the first proactor were never to proact a second time, it would be indistinguishable from the reactors around it. Soon after the ability to proact is inherited, specialized structures evolve that improve proactive outcomes at the cost dependency on continued proaction. After that, proaction is no longer reversible.

The huge difference we observe today between proactors and reactors is (1) a behavioral consequence of the advantages of proacting and (2) the use of the advantages to develop the capacity to seek and seize opportunities. Not-quite-alive reactors and simple proactors eventually became opportunities to be seized later by more advanced mobile proactors. Hunting and starvation eliminated the simpler folk and generated the gap in capacities between living and other things that has been present since.

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How does living start during an evolutionary sequence?

Living starts with the first useful sensory event. An indicator – probably a scent or sound – is sensed and triggers a response. Physically, the event is trivial; the change it brings about also trivial – apart from the new treatment of time and space.

Before indicators are in use, a reactive object only experiences its environment when something contacts its surface by chance. Resources arrive as surprises – we can assume that evolution provides a means of harvesting them. However, until sensing begins, the individual basically can do nothing but await accidents.

The usefulness of sensing is that by anticipating a harvesting opportunity, the yield can be increased. So at the onset of anticipating a sensory experience is correlated with a surface contact and proacts instead of reacting, with a happy result, the start of living.

The new act is trivially simple in the sense that it merely consists of substituting one switch for another, so it may have happened several times before the dominant lineage started. It makes a better story to suggest it only happened once, and that may be the case.

The start of living can be traced to that act because the sensory event opens the space outside the self’s surface to scrutiny. Eventually that scrutiny allows a volume of space be used for resource extraction instead of surface accidents, but even increasing the yield from accidental encounters increases the extracting resources from the nearby volume of space implying faster growth and maturation. So lineages derived from the first living thing eventually fill the environment.

All modern living cells sense events in their environments, but the question of how sensing may have started seems to not have attracted much attention. I have found no references or discussions that seemed relevant. Have one to share? Please do.

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Recognizing objects in the environment

We moderns never are aware of sensing indicators such as light or sound directly. We infer the presence of objects from the sensory events, and the objects are what we work with. In other words, sensing has to be meaningful to be useful.

Objects are recognized at a distance through inference from sensing, so the objects used for decision-making are symbolic references, internal to the mental structure when used. Within a mental structure an object is a bundles of characteristics; once a subset of the bundle is recognized, the rest of the bundle is known to present, so information gathering can end. Fast and allows the immediate use of canned responses. Because the internalized objects are inferred from the available sensory apparatus using a subset of indicators, the relationship to the external object is meaningful and over-determined, but is an inexact representation all the same.

After living starts a period of transition begins during which proaction remains primitive, but types of sensory experiences begin to be distinguished. First one object is recognized in a primitive way and then others. An object orientation slowly develops as sensing is only used through acts of recognition.

The initial development is quite primitive, but is the parent of our way of knowing. Because an internalized object is a symbol, other kinds of information can be treated similarly. And symbols can be manipulated, compared, contrasted, etc. Different kinds of information can be linked together for analysis or to build situations.

This is not an argument that a simple early living thing did much with object information (although they did have to do some of these things); rather my point is that the basic principles behind much human mental activity were established long before the first ancestral specie formed.

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The psyche, the mind’s eye and the capacity to choose

Recognizing objects is usually insufficient for useful action by itself. The self’s relationship to the other object is usually important as are the relationships between other objects. And then there is the matter of taking action.

Two familiar mental mechanisms evolve in basic form at a very early date to provide the necessary capacity to seize opportunities: a simple psyche paired with a simple mind’s eye. Other not so familiar concepts have to develop also, but we will aggregate them into a mental database storing a catalog of object knowledge. Each has a separate role, so each has a separate, if related evolutionary history.

The mind’s eye is the point of entry into the object database, connecting items in the database to objects as recently recognized nearby and everything known of those objects. The mind’s eye shows relationships between nearby objects as perceived. The information in the mind’s eye has to be used to decide whether, when and how to seize opportunities and the like. That is the role of the psyche.

By separating knowledge from the use of that knowledge, the psyche and mind’s eye provide very simple living things possessing very limited mental resources the capacity to understand situations and rapidly respond. Now we humans use the same process to apply our limited mental capacities complicated subjects by becoming experts with specialized objects in databases and with minds’ eyes and psyches to match.

The kinds of behaviors that we humans associate with being alive can only develop after the psyche and mind’s eye are in use. Mobility – whether in early living things or in modern microbes today – indicates that the object-oriented modern style of mental action is present.

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Objects as anticipations

Usually items of knowledge stored in minds are thought of as ideas ready to be thought. To us an object such as a table is invariant in terms of time; similarly our internalized image of that object. The table seems to have no time dimension. It really does though; we have the idea so it can be used in the future. Thus we can imagineer tables in various forms, places, etc. An internalized object – any idea –is an anticipation of a possible future use.

It follows that our knowledge is a set of anticipations; the mind’s eye a window into a set of anticipations much richer than the current sensory or imaginary experience; and the psyche a similar set of rich anticipations about what can be done with the information in the mind’s eye.

The result is that mere recognition using a snippet of information tells one a lot about a situation, providing instant clues about how and whether to act. This form of automation speeds the seizing of opportunities, whether feeding or escaping.

Viewing anticipations as ideas that could be pondered apart from direct use was a later step in mental evolution. Research such as this – divining the past from a set of ideas – is distant from sensing and acting. But ideas remain anticipations, even scientific ones, and are falsified by demonstrations that they fail to anticipate well. Both evolution and science work that way – in either case failure ends a lineage of ideas.

Every experience provides an opportunity to update our anticipations and keep them attuned to the environment, but some experiences offer more than mere updating. When new experiences or thoughts conflict with the anticipations, we notice immediately and focus our attention there. Those are the situations that offer the opportunity to substantively adjust or refine our existing anticipations.

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The first understanding

An understanding is a state of being, of knowledge. The first living thing that achieves a state of understanding cannot know it has, but it has a mastery of its environment that did not exist before, and that has a significance quite apart from the beginning of living. Alternative scenarios cannot be considered until one has a baseline, and that is what the first understanding offers its lineage. Since going somewhere to do something involves imagining an alternative scenario, mobility begins after an understanding is achieved.

With us moderns, that baseline, maintained by curiosity balanced with caution, means that new information comes as a surprise to our sense of understanding. Curiosity, caution and surprise do not exist when that first understanding forms.

Perhaps the cohesiveness of understanding is the reason the mind seems to be a single thing, but understanding is actually dispersed among functional areas of the mind: the mental database with background facts; the mind’s eye holding the view of the current environment; and the psyche as the analytical center. Each of the areas has its own anticipations so when a situation, object or other thing is recognized there is no need to seek additional information, and a failure to recognize is localized by the other areas having had suitable anticipations.

I cannot go into the evolution of the first understanding in detail here. Proacting continues even as the database fills and mind’s eye is refined, with success at moment seizing providing the psyche with potential responses to future unfolding situations. These early psyche anticipations can only involve recognizing time paths and changes in situations, choosing among alternative actions and timing of responses. Because the psyche cannot develop strategies yet, situations can be utilized in ever better ways, but cannot be manipulated directly.

Recognition improves because the mind’s eye, the psyche and the database are inherited, allowing subsequent generations to remember what their direct ancestor learned. (Bacteria also inherit ideas, with one generation learning a situation and subsequent generations using the decision by the ancestor without first emulating its decision process.)

The mind’s eye can be thought of as a passive device at this point in its evolution, holding references to the database, so the critical developments involve the database and the psyche. Generating the first understanding involves first filling the database such that new objects and situations are rare experiences, and then providing enough opportunities with the least frequent objects and situations that the psyche is rarely unprepared to respond. So the psyche is the last part of the mind to achieve the necessary capabilities.

Eventually a failure to recognize is uncommon and usually involves one anticipation at a time, just as it usually does in our lives. That failure is a curiosity, although the motivator that causes us to search for novelties has not evolved yet. At that point an understanding has been achieved. In the course of normal events the proactor and its lineage will maintain the understanding, with curiosities becoming ever rarer.

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Individuation and natural selection

Individuation and volition result from learning long before the mind’s eye and the psyche take form. Experiences present themselves and decisions must be made. Every generation starts two lineages – two potential evolutionary sequences with paths dependent on chance and the individuals (and their ancestors) not having had the experiences necessary to have determined best choices. So the evolution of anticipation sets starts with individuation and volition for every living thing.

After an understanding has formed, the mind’s eye, the mental dataset and the psyche stay tuned to one another and the local environment, with ongoing learning assuring individuation continues. Volition results from the survival requirement of making timely decisions in the presence of incomplete information. So mastery makes the range of variation smaller within a lineage, but leaves the fact of variation and the role of choice intact.

Individuation does not stop because experiences slowly refine the sets of anticipations available for use. There is always a first discoverer, an inventor, for any bit of new knowledge. That new bit builds on existing knowledge, but that doesn’t make it any less new. The result is the evolution of personalized repertoires of potential responses maintained by ongoing learning, with no two selves identical, no matter their DNA endowments. After enough generations in similar or repeated conditions the range of variation becomes quite small because there have been so many opportunities to polish best choices through the crucible of evolution, but the principle does not change. Each self – even the smallest living microbe – marches to its own drummer; and each has the potential for influencing the future behavior of its society.

To claim all living things have volition is to say (1) that all living things have minds and (2) that volition is a consequence of having a mind. I am not the first to say all living things, including microbes and plants, have minds – some biologists have said so before – but my conclusion is based on an evolutionary logic, not on observation, and that I believe is unique. The evolutionary logic implies that volition is a universal property of modern living things.

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A summing up

The story I sketched is probably too complex and novel to fully follow at one reading. I’ll summarize and expand on some key points along the evolutionary path.

The two main threads to follow are the beginning of and increase in the ability to anticipate in time and distance, and the depth of understanding within those limits. A proactor first has to conceive something new at the limits of it knowledge; only after that conception is in place can the supporting details be learned. Discovery is always a learning process that is done one proactor at a time, although it may be acting within a group sharing the new knowledge.

Mental activity begins before living starts, generating what could be called smart reactors – objects that cannot think past their own skins. Living starts when one of those smart reactors has a response keyed by a sensory event or experience before the physical event being predicted happens at its skin. That act turns the smart reactor into a simple proactor. No depth of knowledge, but the beginning of anticipation.

At first sensory experiences are associated with events at the surface, so the underpinnings of understanding are developed before anticipation increases in depth.

Eventually, because only some of the sensory events are followed by surface contacts, objects are discovered. The mental structures involved in the developing understanding of the object-related information will become a simple mind’s eye and a simple psyche. As they develop, responding becomes decoupled from sensing. Both understanding and anticipation deepen.

Later the basic mind’s eye and psyche mature. The kinds of choices made become similar to the kinds of choices modern living things make.

After the basic mind’s eye and psyche have matured, the self develops a basic understanding of its environment.

Mobility begins. With the beginning of mobility many new choices arise, and individuals deal with new experiences and learn from them and. With mobility and sensing, movement brings new sensory experiences, so existing anticipations lead to new anticipating.

Curiosity could not evolve before this point, and when it begins is associated primarily with a drive to perceive further ahead in time and distance, and secondarily to understand more deeply within the time and distance limits.

Modern thinking is associated with mobility and curiosity. The beginning of mobility introduces familiar kinds of behaviors, so behavioral evolution starts. Proactors individuate in their use of mobility, with the result that quickly nearby reactors are consumed, so food becomes scarce. Proactors that recognize other living things adjust their behaviors, but less intelligent and slower proactors suffer. Evolution prunes the population through hunger, with lineages in comparatively rich locales doing relatively well. By focusing anticipation and understanding on discriminating between locales, evolution has taken the first step in developing the capacity for locating preferred niches.

Actual niche finding, social action and the formation of species come later. Each step expands the time horizon over which the individuals’ lineages operate and the capacities within the horizon.

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Odds and ends

The beginning of mental evolution has been outlined, ending at the development of the first understanding, and a bit more for context. A few subjects were skipped that are needed for a full understanding of the material to ease the presentation. I’ll mention a few to provide a fuller picture of this subject.

The physics of living things involves a forecasting time horizon based on anticipation time, so living things have a dimension to work with other things do not. There are two main steps in the conversion of physics from a four dimensional problem of real time and space to a five dimensional problem with the addition of anticipation time.

Anticipation time allows the imaging of the future now. The dimension comes into existence as living starts.

One can think of entity reproduction as a geometric problem that replicates functionality, not molecules. Accurate molecular reproduction arises later, as a consistent means of delivering functions to new generations.

Before living starts an ecology forms, because multiple lineages develop based on somewhat different strategies. One of the lineages becomes alive, because of its pattern of specialization, so the others do not. The existence of the early ecology shapes evolution throughout the period of development of the initial understanding and for a while after.

Meaning, knowledge, purpose, goals, categorization, preference, novelty and intention are emergent concepts during the interval covered.

Konrad Lorenz seems to have been correct that there is a middle state between vitalism and determinism, implying that the philosophical dichotomy was false. The system I have described is mechanical but explains living without recourse to an external vital force. In the presence of any source of past random action – quantum or measurement error or the imprecision of pi are adequate – the world is not predetermined. Preferences matter; choices seem and are willful; invention is real; and there are new ideas.

Mental states seem to arise before any living thing recognizes that other living things exist. Mental states deserve their own section.

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Understandings and mental states

Mental states are not uniquely human. They first arise because any bodily movement shifts internalized objects in the mind’s eye relative to the external objects. Not only is recognition required for each object perceived and each behavior, but also for all objects and behaviors taken as a group. Hence a norm is needed for the understanding as a unity.

The modern mental state assuredly is more complex than its earliest form, but they have some characteristics in common. One is that the psyche becomes involved when recognition fails. When no anticipation is found, the search for a solution is obvious, not so when a mental state fails a norm – each single anticipation could be recognized and the entirety out of bounds. The feelings associated with modern mental states out of bounds are vague dissatisfactions. Something similar had to develop fairly early, as a device directing learning.

Another factor arises soon after mobility begins (and is the major reason for including this section of the study). Other living things become parts of each living thing’s understanding. The movements of the others can lead to automated responses, causing coordinated interactions to begin before any living thing has recognized that a general alive quality exists. So, I suspect that coordination can be expected to start before cooperation, competition, predator-prey interactions or communication. All it requires is using previously learned anticipations when situations are recognized.

These unbidden and learned responses seem to be part of common experience in human life, if mostly unnoticed. We become parts of the culture we are born into, attuned to the nuances – the rhythms – of the culture. Even sidewalk behavior is culturally determined, as I have observed and others have quantified.

To a lesser degree every group of humans interacting regularly develops its own culture, so newcomers adapt while developing their contextual understanding of the group.

Humans are not unique here. Understandings seem to be at work acting through learned responses wherever evolution could employ them. They are more efficient and faster to use than communication by requiring only recognition; leading to immediate responses while freeing the psyche to focus elsewhere.

That note leads to an application. When can the psyche be observed in simple organisms found in environments they have evolved in over very long periods? It is safe to assume that everything alive uses mental states and has means of becoming tuned to its environment. Hence, anytime the environmental conditions change for any living thing, the psyche can be assumed to have a role in the decision-making process. Perhaps that merely takes sampling the organisms and, thus, providing them with a new experience.

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What kind of computer does mental evolution develop? A meaning-based time-sensitive computer, rather than a digital or analog one. Recognition is a matter of classification; response under simple conditions a matter of fast recognition; and understandings speed recognition of important and novel things.

Forgetting is important in such a computer: it keeps understanding tuned for rapid responses to the seemingly meaningful anticipations that were not forgotten.

The material in this study will be expanded upon in The Birth of Understanding.