In my first post in this series, What is the Darwinian individual in the evolution of expressive culture? – which, incidentally, wasn’t a series when I posted it, and who knows how long it will be one, not very long? – I commented on a preprint by Daniel Nettle.
In particular, I asserted:
Biological evolution is about bodies. Cultural evolution is about minds. And yes, the mind is what the brain does and so the mind can never be free of the body. Ultimately, the cultural development of minds must at the very least not harm the biological integrity of bodies. But, over the long term, minds can evolve independently of bodies and that is what we see in the history of human societies. Brains are much the same everywhere, but cultures differ and so, I argue, do the minds that support those cultures.
What do I mean by that: “minds can evolve independently of bodies and that is what we see in the history of human societies.”
I’m talking about mental architecture. The fact of literacy, for example, means that the minds of people in a society possessing a literate culture have a different mental architecture from those on people in a pre-literate society. The brains of people in the people in both those societies will be pretty much the same. Oh, literate people have neocortical specializations that pre-literate people will not have. But that’s NOT a matter of genetically specified physical structure. We know that neocortical specialization is affected by the kinds of experience a person is exposed to. People maturing in a literate society have the various experiences of reading and writing. They need to be able to read fluently, and to write.
And when you write, what are you doing? You are addressing yourself to someone who isn’t there. You may have a specific someone in mind or it may just be a generalized other, as they say. Pre-literate people don’t do that, not in the same way, with the same intensity and requirements of continuity. And certainly not with visible marks on some surface carrying the linguistic signal.
This requires a different pattern of neural activation. To a first approximation, everyone neurofunctional area (NFA) is connected to every other NFA. Some connections may be direct, others indirect. Consider: NFA-q <> NFA-d <> NFA-t. NFA-Q and NFA-d are directly connected, as are NFA-d and NFA-t. NFA-q and NFA-t are only indirectly connected (through NFA-d). Incidentally, wouldn’t a diagram make that easier to understand? You could see those relations at a glance.
Such patterns are what David Hays and I have called behavioral modes [1], following Warren McCulloch [2]. If you will, think of the mind as neural weather. Physical topography remains constant – mountains, valleys, plains, rolling hills, and so forth – but the weather drastically can vary. I used this metaphor in Beethoven’s Anvil (72-73) [3]:
Thus in this view the mind is like the weather. The same environment can have very different kinds of weather. And while we find it natural to talk of weather systems as configurations of geography, temperature, humidity, air pressure etc., no overall mechanism regulates the weather. The weather is the result of many processes operating on different temporal and spatial scales.
At the global level and on a scale of millennia we have the long-term patterns governing the ebb and flow of glaciers which, in one commonly accepted theory, is a function of wobble and tilt in the earth’s spin axis and the shape of the earth’s orbit. At the global level and operating annually we have the succession of seasons, which is caused by the orientation of the earth with respect to the sun as it moves through the year. We can continue on, considering smaller and smaller scales until we are considering the wind whipping between the twin towers of the World Trade Center or the breeze coming in through your open window and blowing the papers off your desk.
Weather is regular enough that one can predict general patterns at scales of hours, days, and months, but not so regular that making such predictions is easy and routinely reliable. Above all, there is no central mechanism governing the weather. It just happens. [...]
So it is with the brain. The overall state is not explicitly controlled, at least not at a high degree of precision. Rather, that overall state reflects activities at various levels within the whole system. At the smallest level we have the individual neurons. Neurons are living cells and, as such, act to maintain their existence. Individual neurons, in turn, are grouped into functional units at several levels, with many neurons connected to others at distances ranging from fractions of a millimeter to several centimeters or more. Many of these functional units are coupled together into systems that explicitly control something else—whether it be another system within the nervous system, or something external to it, either elsewhere in the body (the muscles or the viscera) or in the external world. But there is no component of the brain that regulates all of this activity in detail. The overall activity just happens. That overall activity is what I am calling the mind.
The brain is a physical structure with parts, whose parts have parts, and so on down to individual neurons. These parts have many and various connections with one another. Does the mind have parts? I don’t know. Those different modes don’t strike me as being different parts of an overall mind. Their interrelations are different. What IS clear is that you cannot divide the mind into parts such that those parts align with the parts of the brain. That’s not how it works.
Moreover, it is not only that literacy affords different patterns of neural weather, but it remakes in external world in a very particular way. Now the world contains surfaces on which things are written; those surfaces become, in effect, part of one’s mental architecture – some talk of such media as encompassing an extended mind. What of arithmetic calculation? That requires a different pattern of neural activation, one that requires a great deal of drill and practice over a period of years if it is to be used comfortably and reliably.
THAT’s what I mean when I say that the evolution of culture supports the evolution of minds, while the underlying body, with its brain, remains much the same. And so we have a theory of mind-culture co-evolution. Biological evolution is about the body. Cultural evolution is about the mind.
References
[1] I have many posts on behavioral mode, collected under this URL, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/behavioral%20mode.
Benzon, W. L. and Hays, D. G. (1988). Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence. Journal of Social Biological Structures 11, 293-322, https://www.academia.edu/235116/Principles_and_Development_of_Natural_Intelligence.
[2] Kilmer, W. L., McCulloch, W. S. & Blum L. (1969). A Model of the Vertebrate Central Command System. International Journal Man-Machine Studies 1, 279-309.
[3] William Benzon, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, Basic Books, 2001. Final drafts of chapters 2 and 3 can be downloaded from the web, https://www.academia.edu/232642/Beethovens_Anvil_Music_in_Mind_and_Culture. For a shorter version of mind-as-weather, see William Benzon, NEURAL WEATHER, An Informal Defense of Psychoanalytic Ideas, Working Paper, August 25, 2013, 6 pp., https://www.academia.edu/37605450/NEURAL_WEATHER_An_Informal_Defense_of_Psychoanalytic_Ideas.
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