As our elected officials sell us further down the river for their own naked greed and interminable stupidity, I have to disconnect, retreat, and reflect on the nature of things or go insane, I think.
In that spirit, I have this to offer today. A current story on the internet about some research into animal intelligence has a lot of both "warm fuzzy" appeal as well as great food for thought regarding how we see ourselves.
Humans habitually consider themselves the smartest critters to ever live, and there is fair reason to think so, but this new research is suggesting that we grossly misunderestimate the intelligence and awareness of our animal brethern. And it is our collective best interest to attempt to understand better.
Part I is about the nature of animal intelligence. Part II is about how human consciousness evolved.
Animals Do the Cleverest Things
The latest studies into the unusual behaviour of a range of species suggest that we should no longer assume that animals are just the dumb creatures that we've been led to believe since the days of St Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century Italian monk whose moral philosophy formed the basis of our modern-day ethical treatment of animals. Indeed, scientists have found that animals are capable of all sorts of clever behaviour that we normally associate with human intelligence. They not only have good memories and a perception of the world around them, they also display feats of apparent far-sightedness and understanding that seem to go beyond the mental abilities of many people.
I completely overhauled my concept of "intelligence" because of the experiences with my last, dear Rotti who was so smart it was just scary.
Alternet has a nice report on a number of animal studies that simply confirms that we humans have a very exxagerated opinion of our intelligence relative to the "lower animals".
I was particularly intrigued by the dolphin report. Heh.. they say it with weeds!
Your place or mine?
The latest evidence of intelligence came this week, when researchers published the results of a study in the Brazilian Amazon which showed male members of pods carrying "gifts" in the form of sticks, or, most endearingly, makeshift bouquets made from seaweed, to attract mates. DNA tests revealed that the males who carried the most gifts proved the most successful fathers. Research in Australia showed bottlenose dolphins use bits of marine sponge to protect their noses while they probe the seabed. Scientists say the behaviour is evidence that they show signs of culture learned from their forebears, rather than passed down in genes.
Here is more about this particular dolphin behavior.
Dogs were shown to be able to internalize "dog-ness" in some training and testing.
Most dog owners will claim their pooch is the smartest in the park. But retrieving sticks or barking at postmen, while impressive when compared with the skills of, say, a jellyfish, is hardly rocket science. However, new research suggests mutts are capable of much more: in an experiment at the University of Vienna, two border collies, an Australian shepherd and a mongrel were presented with images on a touch screen. The pairs of photos offered the choice of a landscape or a dog. When the dogs used their nose to push against the dog image, they got a treat. If they plumped for the landscape, they were forced to wait a few seconds before the next round. The training stage complete, the dogs were shown landscape and dog photos, and continued to correctly pick out the dogs. In the final phase, the dogs were shown an unfamiliar dog superimposed on a landscape they had seen in training. Even then, the animals were able to pick out the dog. Scientists say the results show that dogs can use abstract concept, a skill which had been attributed only to birds and primates.
I now more or less fully accept that many of our fellow critters are far more aware and intelligent than we ever give them credit for and it's GOOD to revise our assessments of them upward.
Go read the whole piece - dogs, elephants, crows, chimps all demonstrate far more intelligence than we ever really imagine, even when we tacitly accept they are "bright". (Sorry...pooties didn't make the cut.)
Part II: The Origin of Consciousness
Chimps
Everyone knows man's closest living relative is the sharpest tool in the animal box. After all, what other animal can brew up a cup of PG Tips while wearing a bowler hat? This week, however, the publication Current Biology has shed new light on the brain power of chimpanzees, revealing them to have photographic memories far superior to our own. Until now, it was not thought chimps could match humans in mental tests. But researchers in Kyoto discovered that chimps could recall a sequence of numbers displayed to them (for a fraction of a second), outperforming students who took the same test. The research suggests that short-term memory may have been more important to earlier humans, possibly because of our modern reliance on language-based memory skills.
The salient difference between us and the rest of the animal world is our written language and the sense of self.
It's the discussion of chimpanzee intelligence that leads me to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which should get something of a boost from these collected studies.
Jayne's Bicamerality theory of Consciousness is part of Evolutionary Science, as far as I am concerned. And if you think the fundies have difficulties with Darwin and Evolution, once they grasp Jayne's theory, their heads will explode.
Julian Jaynes describes the "onset" of human consciousness as beginning when humans learned to write down language, something he hypothesizes occurred relatively recently in evolutionary terms. He says humans functioned by listening to voices in their heads called "gods" in the evolving literatures of the times.
The report above has a variety of descriptions of chimps and elephants having highly developed abstract thinking and communication and it makes the transition to Jayne's "bicameral mind" concept much easier to grasp, I think because consciousness is different from intelligence.
At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing. The implications of this new scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion - and indeed, our future. In the words of one reviewer, it is "a humbling text, the kind that reminds most of us who make our livings through thinking, how much thinking there is left to do."
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[Jaynes] Presents a theory of the bicameral mind which holds that ancient peoples could not "think" as we do today and were therefore "unconscious," a result of the domination of the right hemisphere; only catastrophe forced mankind to "learn" consciousness, a product of human history and culture and one that issues from the brain's left hemisphere. Three forms of human awareness, the bicameral or god-run man; the modern or problem-solving man; and contemporary forms of throwbacks to bicamerality (e.g., religious frenzy, hypnotism, and schizophrenia) are examined in terms of the physiology of the brain and how it applies to human psychology, culture, and history.
The "God-run" man means Jayne's idea that prior to the onset of conscious thinking humans functioned by listening to voices in their heads, stimulated by perceptions and events in the world.
Jaynes cites the hallucinations of people with psychotic decompensation as some of his evidence for this idea. My experiences with treating and understanding of psychotic decompensation and hallucination is that, given the proper circumstances and stressors, anybody can breakdown and experience these symptoms. The brain is set up to hallucinate and talk to itself.
Jaynes sees decompensation as a reversion to our previous mentality. What we experience as the "Sense of I" or "myself" disappears and reversion to religiosity is almost universal.
The description in the animal article above about the chimpanzee's virtually photographic memory is what prompted me to think of Jayne's theory. As humans evolved they inherited and refined the chimpanzee's mental/intellectual apparatus.
He posits that a series of cataclysms, one of the biggest being the Great Flood, references to which are found in the literature of most cultures. The Flood severaly damaged or completely wiped out the existing bicameral cultures (Egypt is the fabulous example) and for generations the organization that cultures offer was decimated.
Jaynes suggests that the unprecedented stresses of the 2nd millennium B.C. forced the individual into isolation, within which a sense of I-ness appeared to fill the void left by the inadequacy of the god. This hypothesis posits a relatively homogeneous and stress-free existence prior to the development of consciousness. In short, Jaynes must posit that there really was an Eden, from which humanity Fell.
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To establish the gods' disappearance, Jaynes cites a number of illustrations and cuneiform tablets dating from Sumerian times. He shows a stone-carven image of the King of Assyria kneeling in supplication before an empty throne, from which his god is conspicuously absent. The accompanying cuneiform script reads, "One who has no god, as he walks along the street,/ Headache envelopes him like a garment." Another tablet reads,
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My god has forsaken me and disappeared,
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My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.
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The good angel who walked beside me has departed.
Do you find this intriguing?
You can read excerpts from the book here. There's the picture there, as well, of the King of Assyria kneeling to the empty throne (Page 224).
His theory remains one of the most impactful concepts in my educational experience. I have read the book twice and would very highly recommend the interested persons to seek the most recent revisions as he has included forewords that temper some of his more outlandish suppositions. I find the first 2 chapters to be difficult reading but once you grasp that, it's a bit more enjoyable. (Note: I am a nerd.) The most recent revisions have a section that acts like an overview that is not present in my older edition. It's helpful.
Have a good day.
Doc
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