Posted on 10/27/2024 3:52:37 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
Transcript Summary (provided by ChatGPT)
The speaker discusses the unique human ability to share and build on abstract ideas, which has transformed human evolution by allowing us to solve complex problems collectively. This capacity, termed the “campfire” model, illustrates how humans gather to pool different perspectives and strengths, solving problems beyond individual abilities. Unlike other social animals, this exchange of ideas grants humans an emergent, collective intelligence that vastly exceeds individual capabilities.This collective problem-solving ability led to the evolution of consciousness, argued as initially collective, allowing humans to work together on complex tasks. Individual consciousness later became prominent, but collective consciousness remains fundamental.
The speaker relates this to Jesus’ teachings on compassion, especially “love your enemies.” By trying to understand opponents’ perspectives, one can grow, overcoming antagonism to find common ground and mutual benefit. This approach aligns with the spread of Christianity’s teachings, especially during the Age of Exploration. Expanding the “ingroup” and encouraging monogamy promoted societal stability and population growth, facilitating a cooperative, global expansion where the idea of community evolved vertically as well as horizontally.
Full Transcript (formatted by ChatGPT):
Human beings have a capacity to do something that no other creature, including all of the highly intelligent social creatures that we know of, can do, and that is to pass abstractions from one individual to another. What that does to us is it changes our evolutionary nature in a way that I think mirrors the distinction that you're drawing. Because what we describe in our book under the heading of campfire is that human beings can take—let's say that your tribe finds itself either with the failure of the niche that it inherited from its ancestors or having moved across space in a way that that niche is no longer applicable. Right? You've gone from being a coastal people to an inland people, and you're no longer gathering shellfish; you have to find some other way to feed yourselves.The way that problem is solved, we believe, is that people gather—we think at campfire—when our eyes are no longer capable of allowing us to be productive out in the world. We gather around campfire and take the amazing cognitive and perceptual machinery that we have and pool our resources. We parallel process problems asymmetrically: everybody around the campfire has different strengths and weaknesses. By putting something into the common space, we can take the puzzle: You know, I saw a creature, I do not know how we're going to get one, but I have reason to think it's edible and that it would be worth our time. You take that puzzle and you put it into the common space, and people process it independently, asymmetrically, and pool their understanding. This allows human beings, as a living instantiation of lineage, to have a capacity that far exceeds the sum total of the capacity of each of the individuals.
So, we have an emergent capacity that is leaps and bounds greater than we, as individuals pulled together, could do if we could not exchange abstractions. And any other creature that does amazing things in the world—be it wolves or orcas or whatever it might be—anything that they might be able to do, it’s different. The reason that becomes the story that you're telling is that once you have the ability to divide up a puzzle by handing over the abstraction to the other members of your tribe, then parallel process, put the sum total back together, and hopefully find the foothill of some new niche that you can climb and discover the full dimension of, once you can do that, you need consciousness.
Our argument in the book is that our consciousness is fundamentally collective first, and that individual consciousness has been overly focused upon because our individual consciousness is so much more vivid than our collective consciousness. Because I can tap into my own consciousness, I'm very convinced that it exists. If I think about the consciousness between people that I know, I don't know if I'm speaking in metaphor because I can't look at it. Voty, the Russian linguist and developmental linguist, had an idea that was parallel to that.
Great! So yeah, well, and obviously, we use words to think with, and the words are collective constructions. So that's the key: once you have built the architecture that allows you to have a collective consciousness in which you can share a puzzle, what you now have is the ability to take that same toolkit and play the game with yourself.
Yeah, exactly, that's—yeah, I think that's exactly right. And so, once you can do that and play the same game with yourself, well, now it gets elaborated, and the idea that I can be of two minds about something and actually argue both sides of the thing to try to figure out which thing I'm more compelled by—that's a pretty special trick.
That's for sure, man, to be able to have an argument. I think that's why Christ says that you're supposed to love your enemies. I think the reason for that, fundamentally, is that if you can practice that, you can take the perspective that's most antithetical to yours, which is where the revolutionary significance might lie, and you can give it a fair shake, separating the wheat from the chaff. You can't do that if you demonize everything that's not you. You have to presume that, in the antagonism to you, there's something that can be radically gained.
Yeah, maybe that's the reason there's an adversary in existence per se. So that's really an argument for a compassionate theory of mind. And one of the things—you know, who knows how much has been lost in translation, of course—but one of the things about the story of Jesus that I think is fascinating just from an evolutionary point of view is that what Jesus is effectively arguing in many different places—in the story of the Good Samaritan, in the Sermon on the Mount, in the Golden Rule—he's arguing for a broadening of the concept of self. Right? The ingroup is getting larger as a result of this. And what you're suggesting about the paradox of "love your enemy" actually has an interesting outgrowth, which is, if you do that, if you take all of the people that you're not supposed to get along with and make the attempt to feel things as they do—not even just understand how they feel but to actually extend compassion to them—some of them, you know, you shouldn't do that. I'm sure Jesus would say something different, but you shouldn't really do that with a psychopath because they're going to use it to parasitize you.
But for many people who you might initially think are your antagonists, if you consider that they might possibly actually be a collaborator, you will end up enlarging the number of people who are actually on your team. And so, if I can just—yes, definitely complete the story here—I think one of the reasons that Christianity took on such a dominant position in the world is because this message of broaden your ingroup is a perfect match for the Age of Exploration. Right? If you're on a landscape where the environment is zero-sum and you are fighting over resources that are already all known, then it doesn't make sense to radically ingroup, because somebody's not going to eat. On the other hand, if you are adopting a larger and larger piece of territory, the key is actually not fighting when you could make profit from an environment that doesn't fight back.
But also—and this is interesting—the Old Testament is not a book of monogamy, and the New Testament is. Here's why that seems to fit this whole model: the mating system that allows a population to grow at the maximum rate, if it's humans, is monogamy. And the reason is because human babies are so expensive to raise that bringing all capable adults into the process of contributing to the raising of children elevates the number of viable children that get produced per generation. So you go from an ancient, brutal world to a world in which your tendency towards violence drops and your tendency towards monogamy and investment in offspring goes up by virtue of the fact that all men are brought in on that process. That fits the moment in history perfectly.
So, that idea spreads vertically, right? It does spread horizontally, but vertically, as that population that believes these things is spreading out across the world, it's taking over territory, and the idea is spreading as the population that believes in it grows by virtue of a high birth rate.
I thought there were some very interesting points made in this video by both Bret and Jordan.
Bump.
Christ taught us to love one another (including our enemies) because we are all created in the image of God. None of us has a complete grasp on the truth, we are all dead in our trespasses and sin. Therefore we are to be patient with one another. Loving one another, but not necessarily affirming each other’s behavior. Our love for one another should extend to compassion for their souls, to the extent that we confront each other humbly when we see they are in sin, and offer the forgiveness of God to them through Christ.
Instead of being distracted by the errors or things you may disagree with, consider the interesting ideas conveyed.
“Our argument in the book is that our consciousness is fundamentally collective first, and that individual consciousness has been overly focused upon because our individual consciousness is so much more vivid than our collective consciousness.”
If there is a “collective consciousness” it came after our indiviual consciousness. Self indentification comes first, followed by that self being part of groups outside our self.
That said, the big problem is that no one knows what consciousness is--collective or individual. All we have are a bunch of hypotheses.
And then add on top of that the idea that 99% (very roughly) of the human mental state is thought to be "subconscious" and we have a really sticky definitional problem.
Rooster, you are so right. I have posted things that come from "unapproved" sources either because (1) there were some good points made, (2) it demonstrates a thought process we need to understand if we are ever to successfully confront it, or (3) both only to receive push back from folks who probably didn't even read the post.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.