From an instinctual creature to a person. Different worlds, different realities.
I see faces everywhere. In the clouds, on the tiles in the bathroom, on the old Indian carpet, in Sedona Red Rocks, instead of vortexes, I see faces. There are human faces, animals, aliens, or monsters- most often in upright positions- the evidence that it is my evolutionary (scarred of a saber-tooth tiger) brain makes them.
I am obsessed with my brain producing images, questioning and pondering on our ancestors’ concept of reality.
How can I question reality being a mere retired pediatrician?
The reason is global warming.
( I think the term “collapse of human niche” is more comprehensive than the narrow term-” global warming”- it includes all our problems not only hot summers. You can say “environmental disaster”- but you have to remember about socio-economic, psychological, anthropological, and even philosophical woes, among others. You know what I am talking about – Amazon fires and Arctic Ice- China and Ukraine.)
What does reality have to do with the environmental collapse?
Everything.
Nobody really questions reality, not the caveman, not the modern man. Yes, there is a sticker “Question Reality”, but it means only “be weird, irritate everybody, especially grown-ups”. Philosophers? They do not count. Moderns see reality as the most stable thing in this crazy World. Even if it is a wild, cruel World into which we were chased from Paradise? Yes. Things (our reality) are so easy, workable, measurable, and reliable. It works now and worked ok forever- on the local scale. Now, lift your head from the screen, look around, and you’ll see that it doesn’t work well anymore. While the intuitive picture worsens, let’s do some rational thinking while keeping the intuitive image active. This will be our introduction to our hybrid mind – more about it later.
In this essay, I want to talk about the magical events occurring in every human child around 9 to 18 months of age (or so).
This would be a base for this new understanding and as a pediatrician, I know something about it.
So, If we could shift our understanding of reality and see it just as a clever tool homo sapiens invented recently then the task of re-working and improving this tool might be doable.
Most importantly this solution, the shift in our worldview, by going straight to the source, would help with all types of niche collapse.
In my understanding, I tried to incorporate new discoveries and ideas from evolutionary neurobiology and anthropology.
1. The concept of hybrid brain unique to humans. (Merlin Donald)
I’ll explain what it means here, because on internet this means human/robot combination.
2. The concept of the recent, sudden acquisition of symbolic language at the dramatic period when Homo Sapiens were almost extinct.(Ian Tattersall, Noam Chomsky) I know, most cognitive scientists disagree, they are “gradualists”- getting language slow and gradually.
3. Comparative data from Max Planck Institute (Tomasello) on infant human versus non-human development and behavior.
100 years earlier, Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, working on intelligence testing, tried to understand this magical transformation he observed- from young infants using mostly instinctual system of “learning” based on sensory and motor reflexes to older infant so charming, alert and intelligent. It was a dramatic discovery then, his stages of cognitive development and a pivotal moment of recognizing “object permanence”. An infant suddenly sees that things and people have this incredible ability to continue to exist even if out of sight, and then, against any reason, are being able to appear again just the same!
I spent 50 years of examining babies, hands-on, in sickness and wellbeing on 3 continents. It was a “medical home” type of practice – I saw the same children, often since birth until they went to college.
Actually, now I do remember one 6-month-old baby girl I was able to help. I saw little Josie for the first time in the well-baby clinic.
Mom was worried as Jossie cried a lot and ‘did not talk much”.
I play with Josie, she lays on her back, I smile, talk to her, take her arms, and pull her gently up to the sitting position. She likes it, holds her head up, and looks into my eyes making some happy noises. She was fine! Later I found that the mother, very anxious and with some labor-related depressive mood, was worried about autism. So I reassured her, “ Jossie is fine, you need to see a shrink, get some pills and psychotherapy. Play more with your baby, talk, if you too sad- sing, dance with her.” This straight talk was only possible because I knew the mother since she was my patient as a teenager.
What I saw did not fit Piagetian stages. He saw babies as small adults going through stages of more and more adult-like levels of intelligence.
I saw them as building new reality. I saw two distinct processes overlapping and beautifully integrated.
- The first one we share with animals. We, like animals, are born with an inherited set of instinctual behaviors. They are automatic like breathing, and some are part of complicated systems of reactions, emotions, and actions. Especially social animals, they have their individual, intelligence and nest intelligence, being a part of a larger system- like a beehive or pack of wolves.
2. The second process: the young human infant starts as an instinctual being and continues to grow curious and intelligent. Bathed in the world of language, names, and people, she starts to mimic and understand its environment.
She sees the things – no name for this yet. But she learned for the last 3 months that the World is full of things and they are peculiar- they have a sound related to them, “name?” and the agent related to them, mom or other people. She loves this play, she tries to sound “ba, ba” and grab the thing and make eye contact. Happy. The difference is huge: babies building their shared social world consisting of things and people with their names and relationships.
Over the years, my experience showed me over and over that we were missing something, something so big like an elephant in the living room.
I was reading books and scientific articles trying to find an explanation. Well, the philosophers did not know pediatrics ( Famous Merlau-Ponty lectured in Sorbonne about child development !) and pediatricians were not interested in the concepts of reality.
Human infants in the first few months of life are propelled by a system of instinctual instructions, some inherited, others improving with daily baby experiences. Breathing, digesting, sucking, turning, smiling, crying then grabbing things.
At 18 month ,we see the same little person, fully conscious, talking, even arguing, loving and sometimes demanding. Magic!
Well, following evolutionary science we can observe a similar process in our ancestral past.
Hominids, at least 27 branches of them, including our ancestors passed through the last 8 million years along very similar transformations.
From australopithecus , instinctual, almost animal creature to today’s modern Homo Sapiens. Similarities are not only in evolution of behavior but also in anatomical and functional brain development. ( Our encephalographic waves, even in this crude reflection the brain activities, shift through different patterns depending on our activities.)
There is one more crucial component of that parallel story, one more domain. That is the dramatic influence of sociality on our species.
It is strange, but there is a lot written about human world – which is very complicated- but much less about the World of animal which is definitely simpler and easier to investigate.
Von Uexkull described 100 years ago the World of a tick ( today we would say- “ a little blood-thirsty computer”) and then 50 years ago Thomas Nagel famously asked “ What is it like to be a bat” and basically answered, “who knows?”.
Plenty of communication but no language. No names, so no things, no persons, others, so no self either, just behaviors.
Darwinists made it simple: the survival of the fittest- it is what animals do and know and live for. Their behavior is directed by the experience and wisdom of the nervous system, evolution-created and machined. A computer-like system, recently with an AI twist. A system of instruction codes, which in “higher” animals can be incredibly complicated- from bee dance to the alfa-male strategy of a gorilla.
Animal had it tough, no breakthrough for about half billion of years!
Since the development of multicellular organisms, origins of organs and the nervous system nothing new happened. Just painfully slow, stubborn evolution, working with mutations, improving niche, diversity, on and on, and on. The systems become more and more intelligent. Now people say that cognition or intelligence is not brain only, but body intelligence, nest intelligence , like bees and termites and primates, maybe forest intelligence. Others like Ervin Laszlo and Budapest Club adding concept of planetary intelligence, Gaia hypothesis.
We humans have all these intelligences accumulated, combined, working together.
According to some wise cognitive scientists ( Merlin Donald, Ian Tattersall for example) our mind can be imagined as a hybrid system. From animals we inherited all automatic, instinctual reflexive system, like animals have. On the top of that evolutionary old machinery, we have symbolic language, which we use when we talk, think and write. ( like electric motor on the top of combustion engine in Toyota Prius)
Babies are born with a fully functional old system but are getting a symbolic one within the first couple of years.
There are some dramatic and important differences between these two systems.
- Old system deals with subjective, not shared with others, elements like my pain, my skill to ride a bicycle, my anger etc.
“Not sharing “ requires some explanation: Two bees flying next to each other use almost identical, inherited instructions codes for their quest. But, like your fear or hunger can not be shared with mine, bee’s quest can not be shared with others, even being identical.
New system is shared: when me and my wife see a sofa – it is more or less same sofa, “what’s for dinner?” and even “nothing!” means more or less the same for her and for me.
- Old system is not only not shared but being pre-linguistic, the language if we try to describe it is poor and difficult- try to describe your pain, your skills, your anger.
The new system is the tool to describe the items of our reality.
- Old system lacks things, objects, persons- there are just instruction codes for evolutionary beneficial behaviors. For example: There is no tree, some tree’s characteristics appears in the “when you run, avoid this hard thing”, and “when you’re chased by a bear- look for something to climb on” and “ you might find some good fruit there”. Also these codes can not be shared! I have to show you how to pick up apples, can not point for the orchard in the distance and charade picking and eating apples. (no, animals do not play charades).
The baby learning new system, learns names of objects attached to people naming them. She learns and control them.
- In the old system, the codes are not modular,( half bee dance means nothing),they are “evolutionary very expensive” and clumsy for the brain to get them, the longer the worse, they “improve” or “branch out’ very slowly.
“Ball, mom, wall, bed”- easy, modular, ready to use, build on, like Lego blocks.
- This one is tricky: paradoxically the old system is subjective, organism‘s own, but in the same time is impersonal, maybe you can say- anonymous. It does not have the concept of “you” , and then “I” doesn’t make any sense.
The new system, being shared with others has somehow this notion of “you” in it even if not spoken. Like a baby, she learns the names of things and people together with the underlining notion of “namer”, which later is dropped and forgotten. I imagine that for the caveman this original translation was associated with acknowledging the person participating in the process of translating.
Off course in our daily life, these two systems co-exist and cooperate seamlessly- you breathe,(old) then you say “hallo” (new), then you are suspicious,(old) then you say “never mind”(new).
Actually the talking World is small, simple and created by humans only very recently and when I say ”Hello Sister, Hello Brother, my readers” with this “hello” we presently occupy such a tiny place, such a pigeon hole, the World of the symbolic language. When I go for a walk, I breathe and look around and wander. Around me are millions and millions of different worlds, they are ancient, almost eternal worlds of plants and animals. They burst with stories and wisdom accumulated since the beginning of the Universe. And I am a part of these teachings, my body, its structure built by evolution, my heart beating and feelings, sadness, love and fear. Would I try to describe it, our language, this simple recent tool, this tool would be so inadequate, missing the core meaning, so I just say “hello” and you answer …”hello”. And we may start to talk about the recent movie or dinner and all these worlds, mute, anonymous, poised to interact, but presently forgotten, or suspended, are waiting until we finish talking.
Philosophers, they usually do, made this mixture of two systems, the World of” raw’ experience much too complicated. I think, with having in mind the two systems described above, you can make a clear and simple distinction.
- The tiny world of words, things, we humans named since about 50 thousand years ago. This was a minuscule but useful homo sapiens invention creating a shared system of symbols and words assigned to them for us to communicate ( and trash the planet in the process).
- All Worlds and Dimensions include all other intelligence, past, present, and future attached to our human representations of the Worlds of plants and animals- a separate World for each sentient being, whatever your concept of that may be. It also includes our human subjective Worlds, also our Worlds when we are too young to talk, too sad, too stupid, or just too lonely.
- Remember: the human reality is only one, comes from caveman 50 ooo years ago, shared by all humans, via their infants, including Eskimos and Pygmies, but each insect has its own world, as each of us also has ( only humans have two).
- Also: imagine you are in the forest. Unless you came with an axe, your world do not participate in the world of an oak tree, but this oak tree is fully included in your (our) world- when you are there, or talk about it, photograph it, write about it- you know, all the business we do with things.
E.O. Wilson tells us that the core of human nature contains interest in others, the propensity to communicate, and the urge to belong. While, naturally, great apes share some of those characteristics, we excel in these skills and priorities. He says that we, humans, and 18, (only 18) other specia are eusocial. Obviously, the above characteristics of our nature relate very closely to eusociality. These eusocial guys have intelligence in their brains and they have Nest Intelligence. Each ant or wolf is stupid but the ants’s nest and wolf’s pack are very smart.
In our human case, language connects individuals to the nest intelligence, to the human culture. This unique capacity gives us the chance to modify our reality. Is it cheating? No, we cheated 10,000 years ago when we linked controlling material things to happiness (a subject of the other essay).
Happiness, EOWilson would agree, comes from being with others, from belonging and from talking.
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Tom Voychehovski
Ecohumanist Lab 