The Origin of Paper Money 7

It’s here that we finally get to what’s really the heart of this entire series of posts, which is this: in the West, paper money has been an instrument of revolution.

Both the American and French Revolutions were funded via paper money, and it’s very likely they could not have succeeded without it. It allowed new and fledgling regimes to command necessary resources and fund their armies, which allowed them to take on established states. While such states have mints, a tax base, ownership of natural resources, the ability to write laws, etc.; a rebellion against an established order has none of these things. So, to raise funds, the ability to issue IOUs as payment makes being able to start a revolution far more likely. As we’ve already seen, just about every financial innovation throughout history came about due to the costs of waging wars. Paper money was no exception.

One might even go so far as to say that the American, French and Russian Revolutions would never have been able to happen at all without the invention of paper money!

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, MMA-NYC, 1851.jpg

1. The United States

Earlier we looked at the financial innovations that the colonies undertook to deal with the lack of precious metals in circulation. Wherever paper money and banks had been created, commerce and prosperity increased.

Then it all came to a screeching halt.

The British government passed laws which forbade the issuing and circulation of paper money in the colonies. The monetary experiments came to an end. As you might expect, the domestic economy shrank, and commerce was severely constricted. Of course, the colonists became quite angry at this turn of events.

British authorities initially viewed colonial paper currency favorably because it supported trade with England, but following New England’s “great inflation” in the 1740s, this view changed. Parliament passed the Currency Act of 1751 to strictly limit the quantity of paper currency that could be issued in New England and to strengthen its fiscal backing.

The Act required the colonies to retire all existing bills of credit on schedule. In the future, the colonies could, at most, issue fiat currencies equal to one year’s worth of government expenditures provided that they retired the bills within two years. During wars, colonies could issue larger amounts, provided that they backed all such issuances with taxes and compensated note holders for any losses in the real value of the notes, presumably by paying interest on them.

As a further important constraint on the colonies’ monetary policies, Parliament prohibited New England from making any fiat currency legal tender for private transactions. In 1764, Parliament extended the Currency Act to all of the American colonies.

Paper Money and Inflation in Colonial America (Owen F. Humpage, Economic Commentary, May 13, 2015)

To get around the prohibition on governments issuing paper notes as IOUs, banking may have filled the void. But that option was also cut off by the British government. Last time we saw that the South Sea Bubble, along with a panoply of related schemes, had nearly taken down the entire British economy (as it had done in France). In response, Parliament passed the Bubble Act, which forbade any chartered corporations except those expressly authorized by a Royal Charter. This effectively put the kibosh on banking as an alternative source of paper money in the American colonies.

Given their instinct for experiment in monetary matters, it would have been surprising if the colonists had not discovered or invented banks. They did, and their enthusiasm for this innovation would have been great had it not also been systematically curbed.

In the first half of the eighteenth century the New England colonies, along with Virginia and South Carolina, authorized banking institutions. The most famous, as also the most controversial of these, was the magnificently named Land Bank Manufactory Scheme of Massachusetts which, very possibly, owed something to the ideas of John Law.

The Manufactory authorized the issue of bank notes at nominal interest to subscribers to its capital stock – the notes to be secured, more or less, by the real property of the stockholders. The same notes could be used to pay back the loan that their issue had incurred. This debt could also be repaid in manufactured goods or produce, including that brought into existence by the credit so granted.

The Manufactory precipitated a bitter dispute in the colony. The General Court was favorable, a predisposition that was unquestionably enhanced by the award of stock to numerous of the legislators. Merchants were opposed. In the end, the dispute was carried to London.

In 1741, the Bubble Acts – the British response, as noted, to the South Sea Company and associated promotions and which outlawed joint-stock companies not specifically authorized by law – were declared to apply to the colonies. It was an outrageous exercise in post-facto legestlation, one that helped inspire the Constitutional prohibition against such laws. However, it effectively ended the colonial banks. (Galbraith, pp. 56-57)

Benjamin Franklin, as we have seen, was a longstanding advocate of paper money. He wrote treatises on the subject, and even printed some of it on behalf of the government of Pennsylvania. It was this paper money, he argued, that was the cause of the colonies’ general prosperity in contrast to the widespread poverty and discontent he witnessed everywhere in England:

Before the war, the colonies sent Benjamin Franklin to England to represent their interests. Franklin was greatly surprised by the amount of poverty and high unemployment. It just didn’t make sense, England was the richest country in the world but the working class was impoverished, he wrote “The streets are covered with beggars and tramps.”

It is said that he asked his friends in England how this could be so, they replied that they had too many workers. Many believed, along with Malthus, that wars and plague were necessary to rid the country from man-power surpluses.

“We have no poor houses in the Colonies; and if we had some, there would be nobody to put in them, since there is, in the Colonies, not a single unemployed person, neither beggars nor tramps.” – Benjamin Franklin

He was asked why the working class in the colonies were so prosperous.

“That is simple. In the Colonies, we issue our own paper money. It is called ‘Colonial Scrip.’ We issue it in proper proportion to make the goods and pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power and we have no interest to pay to no one.” – Benjamin Franklin

Soon afterward, the English bankers demanded that the King and Parliament pass a law that prohibited the colonies from using their scrip money. Only gold and silver could be used which would be provided by the English bankers. This began the plague of debt based money in the colonies that had cursed the English working class.

The first law was passed in 1751, and then a harsher law was passed in 1763. Franklin claimed that within one year, the colonies were filled with unemployment and beggars, just like in England, because there was not enough money to pay for the goods and work. The money supply had been cut in half.

Hidden History: According to Benjamin Franklin, the real reason for the Revolutionary War has been hid from you (Peak Prosperity)

A good comment to the above article notes other factors which were also at work:

The timing of the shift in British policy toward colonial scrip (1763) also encompasses…the end of the Seven Years’ War, better known in the United States as the French and Indian War.

William Pitt’s prosecution of the war was conducted by running up government debt, and the settlement of this debt after the war’s conclusion required the raising of taxes by Parliament. Since, from Britain’s view, the war had been fought in order to protect its colonies, it felt that it was only fair that the colonies bore some of the financial burden. Colonial scrip was useless to Parliament in this regard, as was barter. The repayment of British lenders to the Crown could only be done in specie.

The colonies, as you correctly pointed out, did not have this in any significant quantity, although in the view of British authorities this was the colonies’ problem and not theirs. This policy also came on the heels of the approach of benign neglect conducted by Robert Walpole as Prime Minister, under which the colonies were allowed to do pretty much as they pleased so long as their activities generally benefited the British Crown. It should also be noted here that demands of payment of taxes in hard currency is a common tactic for colonial powers to undermine local economies and customs. It played that role in fomenting the American Revolution as well as the Whiskey Rebellion of the new Constitutional republic, not to mention how it was used in South Africa to compel natives participating in a traditional economy to abandon their lands and take up work as laborers in the gold mines.

Hidden History: According to Benjamin Franklin, the real reason for the Revolutionary War has been hid from you (Peak Prosperity)

Now, it would be unreasonable to say that this was THE cause of the American Revolution. In school, we’re taught that that taxes were the main cause: “No taxation without representation” went the slogan (and precipitated the Boston Tea Party). We’re also told that the colonists were much aggrieved by high customs duties, such as those of the unpopular Stamp Act.

But the suppression of paper money and local currency issuance by the British government appears to have been just as much of a cause, although it is probably unknown by the vast majority of Americans. The reason for this strange omission is unexplained. Galbraith thinks that that more conservative attitudes towards money creation in modern times have caused even American historians to argue that the British authorities were largely correct in their actions!

English historian, John Twells, wrote about the money of the colonies, the colonial Scrip:

“It was the monetary system under which America’s Colonies flourished to such an extent that Edmund Burke was able to write about them: ‘Nothing in the history of the world resembles their progress. It was a sound and beneficial system, and its effects led to the happiness of the people.

In a bad hour, the British Parliament took away from America its representative money, forbade any further issue of bills of credit, these bills ceasing to be legal tender, and ordered that all taxes should be paid in coins. Consider now the consequences: this restriction of the medium of exchange paralyzed all the industrial energies of the people. Ruin took place in these once flourishing Colonies; most rigorous distress visited every family and every business, discontent became desperation, and reached a point, to use the words of Dr. Johnson, when human nature rises up and assets its rights.”

Peter Cooper, industrialist and statesman wrote:

“After Franklin gave explanations on the true cause of the prosperity of the Colonies, the Parliament exacted laws forbidding the use of this money in the payment of taxes. This decision brought so many drawbacks and so much poverty to the people that it was the main cause of the Revolution. The suppression of the Colonial money was a much more important reason for the general uprising than the Tea and Stamp Act.”

Our Founding Fathers knew that without financial independence and sovereignty there could be no other lasting freedoms. Our freedoms and national sovereignty are being lost because most people do not understand our money system…

Hidden History: According to Benjamin Franklin, the real reason for the Revolutionary War has been hid from you (Peak Prosperity)

If paper money was the cause of the American Revolution, it was also the solution. The Continental Congress issued IOUs to pay for the war – called ‘Continental notes’ or ‘Continental scrip’:

With independence the ban by Parliament on paper money became, in a notable modern phrase, inoperative. And however the colonies might have been moving towards more reliable money, there was now no alternative to government paper…

Before the first Continental Congress assembled, some of the colonies (including Massachusetts) had authorized note issues to pay for military operations. The Congress was without direct powers of taxation; one of its first acts was to authorize a note issue. More states now authorized more notes.

It was by these notes that the American Revolution was financed….

Robert Morris, to whom the historians have awarded the less than impeccable title of ‘Financier of the Revolution’, obtained some six-and-a-half million dollars in loans from France, a few hundred thousand from Spain, and later, after victory was in prospect, a little over a million from the Dutch. These amounts, too, were more symbolic than real. Overwhelmingly the Revolution was paid for with paper money.

Since the issues, Continental and state, were far in excess of any corresponding increase in trade, prices rose – at first slowly and that, after 1777, at a rapidly accelerating rate…Eventually, in the common saying, ‘a wagon-load of money would scarcely purchase a wagon-load of provisions’. Shoes in Virginia were $5000 a pair in the local notes, a full outfit of clothing upwards of a million. Creditors sheltered from their debtors like hunted things lest they be paid off in worthless notes. The phrase ‘not worth a Continental’ won its enduring place in American language. (Galbraith, pp. 58-59)

Despite this painful bout of hyperinflation, as Galbraith notes, there was simply no other viable alternative to fund the Revolutionary War at the time:

Thus the United States came into existence on a full tide not of inflation but of hyperinflation – the kind of inflation that ends only in the money becoming worthless. What is certain, however, is the absence of any alternative.

Taxes, had they been authorized by willing legislators on willing people, would have been had, perhaps impossible to collect in a country of scattered population, no central government, not the slightest experience in fiscal matters, no tax-collection machinery and with its coasts and numerous of its ports and customs houses under enemy control.

And people were far from willing. Taxes were disliked for their own sake and also identified with foreign oppression. A rigorous pay-as-you-go policy on the part of the Continental Congress and the states might well have caused the summer patriots (like the monetary conservatives) to have second thoughts about the advantages of independence.

Nor was borrowing an alternative. Men of property, then the only domestic source, had no reason to think the country a good risk. The loans from France and Spain were motivated not by hope of return but by malice towards an ancient enemy.

So only the notes remained. By any rational calculation, it was the paper money that saved the day. Beside the Liberty Bell there might well be a tasteful replica of a Continental note. (Galbraith, p. 60)

While this is often used as yet another cautionary tale of “government money printing” by libertarians and goldbugs, a couple of things need to be noted. The first, and most obvious is the fact that: without government money printing there would be no United States. That seems like an important point to me.

The second is a take from Ben Franklin himself. He argued that inflation is really just a sort of tax by another name. And, as opposed to “conventional” government taxation, the inflationary tax falls more broadly across the population, meaning that it was actually a more even-handed and fair method of taxation!

And you can kind of see his point. With legislative taxes, government always has to decide who and what to tax—and how much. This inevitably means that the government picks winners and losers by necessity. Sometimes this can be done wisely, but in practice it often is not. But an inflationary tax cannot be easily controlled by government legislation to favor privileged insiders, unlike more conventional methods of direct taxation, where the rich and well-connected are often spared much of the burden thanks to undue influence over legislators:

From 1776 to 1785 Franklin serves as the U.S. representative to the French court. He has the occasion to write on one important monetary topic in this period, namely, the massive depreciation of Congress’ paper money — the Continental dollar — during the revolution. In a letter to Joseph Quincy in 1783, Franklin claims that he predicted this outcome and had proposed a better paper money plan, but that Congress had rejected it.

In addition, around 1781 Franklin writes a tract called “Of the Paper Money of America.” In it he argues that the depreciation of the Continental dollar operated as an inflation tax or a tax on money itself. As such, this tax fell more equally across the citizenry than most other taxes. In effect, every man paid his share of the tax according to how long he retained a Continental dollar between the time he received it in payment and when he spent it again, the intervening depreciation of the money (inflation in prices) being the tax paid.

Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy (PDF; Philidelphia Fed)

I’m not sure that many people would agree with that sentiment today, but it is an interesting take on the matter.

Once the war was won, and with the Continental notes inflating to zero, the new fledgling government could now issue money for real. The first government building constructed by the new government was the mint. The power to tax was authorized by Congress.

Although the war ended in 1783, the finances of the United States remained somewhat chaotic through the 1780s. In 1781, successful merchant Robert Morris was appointed superintendent of finance and personally issued “Morris notes”—commonly called Short and Long Bobs based on their tenure or time to maturity—and thus began the long process to reestablish the government’s credit.

In 1785, the dollar became the official monetary unit of the United States, the first American mint was established in Philadelphia in 1786, and the Continental Congress was finally given the power of taxation to pay off the debt in 1787, thus bringing together a more united fiscal, currency, and monetary policy.

Crisis Chronicles: Not Worth a Continental—The Currency Crisis of 1779 and Today’s European Debt Crisis (Liberty Street)
One of the more common silver coins used all over the world at this time was the Maria Theresa thaler (or taler), issued by the Holy Roman Empire from its silver mines in Joachimsthal, hence the name (today the town of Joachimsthal is known as Jáchymov and is located in the Czech Republic).

“Taler” became a common name for currency because so many German states and municipalities picked it up. During the sixteenth century, approximately 1,500 different types of taler were issued in the German-speaking countries, and numismatic scholars have estimated that between the minting of the first talers in Jáchymov and the year 1900, about 10,000 different talers were issued for daily use and to commemorate special occasions.

The most famous and widely circulated of all talers became known as the Maria Theresa taler, struck in honor of the Austrian empress at the Gunzberg mint in 1773…The coin…became so popular, particularly in North Africa and the Middle East that, even after she died, the government continued to mint it with the date 1780, the year of her death.

The coin not only survived its namesake but outlived the empire that had created it. In 1805 when Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire, the mine at Gunzberg closed, but the mint in Vienna continued to produce the coins exactly as they had been with the same date, 1780, and even with the mintmark of the closed mint. The Austro-Hungarian government continued to mint the taler throughout the nineteenth century until that empire collapsed at the end of World War I.

Other countries began copying the design of the Maria Theresa taler shortly after it went into circulation. They minted coins of a similar size and put on them a bust of a middle-aged woman who resembled Maria Theresa. Of they did not have a queen of their own who fit the description, they used an allegorical female such as the bust of Liberty that appeared on many U.S. coins of the nineteenth century.

The name dollar penetrated the English language via Scotland. Between 1567 and 1571, King James VI issued a thirty-shilling piece that the Scots called the sword dollar because of the design on the back of it. A two-mark coin followed in 1578 and was called the thistle dollar.

The Scots used the name dollar to distinguish their currency, and thereby their country and themselves, more clearly from their domineering English neighbors to the south. Thus, from very early usage, the word dollar carried with it a certain anti-English or antiauthoritarian bias that many Scottish settlers took with them to their new homes in the Americas and other British colonies. The emigration of Scots accounts for much of the subsequent popularity of the word dollar in British colonies around the world… (Weatherford, History of Money, pp. 115-116)

In 1782, Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on a Money Unit of the U.S. that “The unit or dolar is a known coin and most familiar of all to the mind of the people. It is already adopted from south to north.”

The American colonists became so accustomed to using the dollar as their primary monetary unit that, after independence, they adopted it as their official currency. On July 6, 1785, the Congress declared that “the money unit of the United States of America be one dollar.” Not until April 2, 1792, however, did Congress pass a law to create an American mint, and only in 1794 did the United States begin minting silver dollars. The mint building, which was started soon after passage of the law and well before the Capitol or White House, became the first public building constructed by the new government of the United States. (Weatherford, History of Money, p. 118)

In the nineteenth century, there were strong arguments around the establishment of a central bank in the United States. One was, in fact, chartered, and then its charter was later revoked. We’ll talk a little about this in the final entry of this series next time, but for now, it is beyond the scope of this post.

Scene from the French Revolution

2. France

In the late eighteenth century, France’s financial circumstances were still very dire. It constantly needed to raise money for its perennial wars with England who, as we saw earlier, successfully funded its own wars with paper money and state borrowing via the Bank of England an—option not available to France in the wake of the Mississippi Bubble’s collapse and the failure of John Law’s Banque Royale. France’s generous loan to the United States’ revolutionaries may have been well appreciated by us Americans, but in retrospect, it was probably not the best move considering France’s fiscal situation (plus the fact that Revolution would soon engulf it; something the French aristocracy obviously had no way of knowing at the time).

In the aftermath of the Revolution, the National Assembly repudiated the King’s debts. It also suspended taxation. But it still badly needed money, especially since many of the countries surrounding France (e.g. Austria, Prussia, Great Britain, Spain and several other monarchies) declared war on it soon after the King met the guillotine. The answer they came up with was, once again, monetizing land. In this case, it was the land seized from the Catholic Church by the Revolutionary government. “[T]he National Assembly agreed that newly nationalised properties in the form of old church land could be purchased through the use of high-denomination assignats, akin to interest-bearing government bonds, mortgaged (assignée) on the property.”

The Estates-General had been summoned in consequence of the terrible fiscal straits of the realm. No more could be borrowed. There was no central bank which could be commanded to take up loans. All still depended on the existence of willing lenders or those who could be apprehended and impressed with their duty.

The Third Estate could scarcely be expected to vote new or heavier levies when its members were principally concerned with the regressive harshness of those then being collected. In fact, on 17 June 1789 the National Assembly declared all taxes illegal, a breathtaking step softened by the provision that they might be collected on a temporary basis.

Meanwhile memories of John Law kept Frenchmen acutely suspicious of ordinary paper money; during 1788, a proposal for an interest-bearing note issue provoked so much opposition that it had to be withdrawn. But a note issue that could be redeemed in actual land was something different. The clerical lands were an endowment by Heaven of the Revolution.

The decisive step was taken on 19 December 1789. An issue of 400 million livres was authorized; it would, it was promised, ‘pay off the public debt, animate agriculture and industry and have the lands better administered’. These notes, the assignats, were to be redeemed within five years from the sale of an equivalent value of the lands of the Church and the Crown.

The first assignats bore interest at 5 per cent; anyone with an appropriate amount could use them directly in exchange for land. In the following summer when a new large issue was authorized, the interest was eliminated. Later still, small denominations were issued.

There were misgivings. The memory of Law continued to be invoked. An anonymous American intervened with Advice on the Assignats by a Citizen of the United States. He warned the Assembly against the assignats out of the rich recent experience of his own country with the Continental notes. However, the initial response to the land-based currency was generally favourable.

Had it been possible to stop with the original issue or with that of 1790, the assignats would be celebrated as a remarkably interesting innovation. Here was not a gold, silver or tobacco standard but one based solidly and logically on the good soil of France.

Purchasing power in the first years had stood up well. There was admiring talk of how the assignats had put land into circulation. And business had improved, employment had increased and sales of the Church and other public lands had been facilitated. On occasion, sales had been too good. In relation to annual income, the prices set were comparatively modest; speculators clutching large packages of the assignats had arrived to take advantage of the bargains.

However, in France, as earlier in America, the demands of revolution were insistent. Although the land was limited, the claims upon it could be increased.

The large issue of 1790 was followed by others – especially after war broke out in 1792. Prices denominated in assignats now rose; their rate of exchange for gold and silver, dealing in which had been authorized by the Assembly, declined sharply. In 1793 and 1794, under the Convention and the management of Cambon, there was a period of stability. Prices were fixed with some success. What could have been more important, the supply of assignats was curtailed by the righteous device of repudiating those that had been issued under the king. In those years they retained a value of around 50 per cent of their face amount when exchanged for gold and silver.

Soon, however, need again asserted itself. More and more were printed. In an innovative step in economic warfare, Pitt, after 1793, allowed the royalist emigres to manufacture assignats for export to France. This, it was hoped, would hasten the decay.

In the end, the French presses were printing one day to supply the needs of the next. Soon the Directory halted the exchange of good real estate for the now nearly worthless paper – France went off the land standard. Creditors were also protected from having their debts paid in assignats. This saved them from the ignominy of having (as earlier in America) to hide out from their debtors. (Galbraith, pp. 64-66)

The lands of aristocrats who had fled France was confiscated as well and used to back further issuances of paper currency. Despite this, as with the Continentals, the value of the assignats soon inflated away to very little. France then issued a new paper money, the mandats territoriaux, also carrying an entitlement to land, in an attempt to stabilize the currency. But distrust in the paper currency (and in the government) was so endemic that the mandats began to depreciate even before they were issued:

With the sale of the confiscated property, a great debtor class emerged, which was interested in further depreciation to make it cheaper to pay back debts. Faith in the new currency faded by mid-year 1792. Wealth was hidden abroad and specie flowed to surrounding countries with the British Royal Mint heavily purchasing gold, particularly in 1793 and 1794.

But deficits persisted and the French government still needed to raise money, so in 1792, it seized the land of emigrants and those who had fled France, adding another 2 billion livres or more to French assets. War with Belgium that year was largely self-funded as France extracted some rents, but not so for the war with England in 1793. Assignats no longer circulated as a medium of payment, but were an object of speculation. Specie was scarce, but sufficient, and farmers refused to accept assignats, which were practically demonetized. In February 1793, citizens of Paris looted shops for bread they could no longer afford, if they could find it at all.

In order to maintain its circulation, France turned to stiff penalties and the Reign of Terror extended into monetary affairs. During the course of 1793, the Assembly prohibited buying gold or silver at a premium, imposed a forced loan on a portion of the population, made it an offense to sell coin or differentiate the price between assignats and coin, and under the Law of the Maximum fixed prices on some commodities and mandated that produce be sold, with the death penalty imposed for infractions.

France realized that to restore order, the volume of paper money in circulation must decrease. In December 1794, it repealed the Law of the Maximum. In January 1795, the government permitted the export of specie in exchange for imports of staple goods. Prices fluctuated wildly and the resulting hyperinflation became a windfall for those who purchased national land with little money down. Inflation peaked in October 1795. In February 1796, in front of a large crowd, the assignat printing plates were destroyed.

By 1796, assignats gave way to specie and by February 1796, the experiment ended. The French tried to replace the assignat with the mandat, which was backed by gold, but so deep was the mistrust of paper money that the mandat began to depreciate before it was even issued and lasted only until February 1797…

Crisis Chronicles: The Collapse of the French Assignat and Its Link to Virtual Currencies Today (Liberty Street)

…In February 1797 (16 Pluvoise year V), the Directory returned to gold and silver. But by then the Revolution was an accomplished fact. It had been financed, and this the assignats had accomplished. They have at least as good a claim on memory as the guillotine. (Galbraith, p. 66)

FRA-A73-République Française-400 livres (1792) 2.jpgEventually, France’s money system stabilized once its political situation more-or-less stabilized, but entire books have been written about that subject. The military dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte sold off the French lands in North America to the United States to raise money for its wars of conquest on the European continent. Napoleon also finally established a central bank in France based on the British model.

In 1800, the lingering suspicion of the French of such institutions had yielded to the financial needs of Napoleon. There had emerged the Banque de France which, in the ensuing century, developed in rough parallel with the Bank of England. In 1875, the former Bank of Prussia became the Reichsbank. Other countries had acquired similar institutions or soon did…(Galbraith, p. 41)

It might to be going too far to say that without paper money, neither the American or French revolutions would have ever happened. But nor is entirely absurd to say that this may well be the case. It’s certainly doubtful that they would have succeeded. It’s difficult to imagine how much history would be different today had it not been for paper money and its role in revolution.

Paper money would continue to play that role throughout the Age of Revolutions well into the Twentieth Century, as Galbraith notes:

Paper was similarly to serve the Soviets in and after the Russian Revolution. By 1920, around 85 per cent of the state budget was being met by the manufacture of paper money…

In the aftermath of the Revolution the Soviet Union, like the other Communist states, became a stern defender of stable prices and hard money. But the Russians, no less than the Americans or the French, owe their revolution to paper.

Not that the use of paper money is a guarantee of revolutionary success. In 1913, in the old Spanish town of Chihuahua City, Pancho Villa was carrying out his engaging combination of banditry and social reform. Soldiers were cleaning the streets, land was being given to the peons, children were being put in schools and Villa was printing paper money by the square yard.

This money could not be exchanged for any better asset. It promised nothing. It was sustained by no residue of prestige or esteem. It was abundant. Its only claim to worth was Pancho Villa’s signature. He gave this money to whosoever seemed to be in need or anyone else who struck his fancy. It did not bring him success, although he did, without question, enjoy a measure of popularity while it lasted. But the United States army pursued him; more orderly men intervened to persuade him to retire to a hacienda in Durango. There, a decade later, when he was suspected by some to be contemplating another foray into banditry, social reform, and monetary policy, he was assassinated. (Galbraith, pp. 66-67)

3. Conclusions

Given that both the Continentals and the assignats both suffered from hyperinflation towards the end, they have been often held up as a cautionary tale: governments are inherently profligate and can not be trusted with money creation; only by strictly pegging paper money issuance to a cache of gold stashed away in vault somewhere can hyperinflation be avoided.

As Galbraith notes, this is highly selective. Sure, if you look just for instances of paper money overissuance and inflation you will find them. But this is also deliberately ignoring instances–often lasting for decades if not for centuries–that paper money functioned exactly as intended all across the globe; from ancient China, to colonial America, to modern times. It emphasizes the inflationary scare stories, but intentionally ignores the very real stimulus to commercial activity that paper money has provided, as opposed to the extreme constraints of a precious metal standard. It also totally ignores any extenuating circumstances in hyperinflations, such as Germany’s repayment of war debt in the twentieth century, or persistent economic warfare in the case of Venezuela today.

So the attitude that “government simply can’t be trusted” is more of a political opinion than something based on historical facts.

…in the minds of some conservatives…there must have been a lingering sense of the singular service that paper money had, in the recent past, rendered to revolution. Not only was the American Revolution so financed. So also was the socially far more therapeutic eruption in France. If the French citizens had been required to act within the canons of conventional finance, they could not, any more than the Americans, acted at all. (Galbraith, pp. 61-62)

The desire for a gold standard comes from a desire to anchor the value of money in something outside of the control of governments. But, of course, pegging the value of currency to a certain arbitrary amount of gold is a political choice. Nor does it guarantee price stability–the value of gold fluctuates. A gold standard is more of a guarantee of the stability of the price of gold than the stability of the value of money. Also, in almost every case of war and economic depression in modern history, the gold standard is immediately chucked into the trashbin.

The other thing worth noting is that the worth of paper money is related to both issues of supply AND demand. Often, it’s not just that there is too much supply of currency. It’s that people refuse to accept the currency, leading just as assuredly to a loss in value.

And the lack of acceptance is usually driven by a lack of faith in the issuing government. You can see why this might be the case for assignats and Continentals. Both were revolutionary governments whose very stability and legitimacy was in question, particularly in France. If the government issuing the currency (which are IOU’s, remember) may not be around a year from now, then how willing are you to accept that currency? James Madison pointed out that the value of any currency was mostly determined by faith in the credit of the government issuing the currency. That’s why he and other Founding Fathers worked so hard to reestablish the credit of the United States following the Continental note debacle.

As Rebecca Spang—the author of “Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution”—notes, many people in revolutionary France were vigorously opposed to the seizing of Church property. Thus, they would not accept the validity of notes based on their value. This led to a lack of acceptance which contributed just as much to hypernflation as did any profligacy on the part of the government:

Revolutionary France became a paradigm case for the quantity theory of money, the view that prices are directly and proportionately correlated with the amount of money in circulation, and for the deleterious consequences of letting the latter run out of control.

Yet Spang shows that such neat economic interpretations are inadequate. At times, for example, prices rose first and politicians boosted the money supply in response.

Spang reiterates that the first assignats were neither a revolutionary policy nor a form of paper money. But as her stylishly crafted narrative makes clear, this soon changed. Politicians made the cardinal error of thinking that the state could be stabilised by in effect destabilising its money.

Popular distrust of the “real” worth of assignats prompted a contagion of fraud, suspicion and uncertainty. How could one tell a fake assignat, when technology couldn’t replicate them precisely? How could they even be used, when there was no compulsion beyond patriotic duty for sellers to accept them as payment? Small wonder that so many artists made trompe l’oeil images out of them — what looked solid and real was anything but…

‘Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution’, by Rebecca Spang (Financial Times)

Note that the situation of a stable government is totally different. Britain’s government was eminently stable compared to the United States and France at that time, hence its money retained most of its value, even when convertibility was temporarily suspended. This also underlies the value of Switzerland’s currency today, since they have a legendarily stable, neutral government (and really not that much in the way of actual  resources).

So those who argue that America’s “fiat” money is no good would somehow have to make the case that the United States government is somehow more illegitimate or more unstable than the governments of other wealthy, industrialized nations. To my mind, this is tangential to treason. Yet no one ever calls them out on this point. From that standpoint, the biggest threat to the money supply comes not from overissuance (hyperinflation is nowhere to be seen), but from undermining the faith in, and credit of, the United States government. That’s been done exclusively by Republicans in recent years by grandstanding over the debt ceiling—an artificial borrowing constraint imposed during the United States’ entry into World War One. Really, this should be considered an unpatriotic and treasonous act. It almost certainly would have been perceived as such by the Founding Fathers.

I always have the same response to libertarians who sneer at the “worthlessness” of government fiat money. My response is this: if you truly believe it is worthless, then I will gladly take it off your hands for you. Please hand over all the paper money you have in your wallet right now at this very moment, as well as all the paper money you may have lying around your house. If you want, you can even take out some “worthless” paper money from the nearest ATM and hand it over to me too; I’ll gladly take that off your hands as well. You can give me as much as you like.

To date, I have yet to have a libertarian take me up on that offer. I wonder why?

Next: The Civil War finally establishes a national paper currency for the U.S.

The Origin of Paper Money 5

As noted last time, the issuance of printed money by Pennsylvania was highly successful. It increased trade and greatly expanded the economy.

One person who noticed this was a young printer by the name of Benjamin Franklin. At the age of only 23, he wrote a treatise strongly advocating the benefits of printing paper money to increase the domestic money supply.

Franklin arrived in Philadelphia the year paper money was first issued by Pennsylvania (1723), and he soon became a keen observer of and commentator on colonial money…Franklin noted that after the legislature issued this paper money, internal trade, employment, new construction, and the number of inhabitants in the province all in-creased. This feet-on-the-ground observation, this scientific empiricism in Franklin’s nature, would have a profound effect on Franklin’s views on money throughout his life. He will repeat this youthful observation many times in his future writings on money.

Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy

Franklin had noted the effects that the chronic shortage of precious metal coins had on the local economy. Something needed to be done, he thought. Franklin, of course, being a printer by trade, felt that his printing presses might be the solution to this problem.

Franklin’s proposal–and this was key–was that paper money could not be backed by silver and gold; because the lack of silver and gold was what the paper money was designed to rectify in the first place!

Source

Franklin also noted a point that critics of the gold standard have made ever since: the value of gold and silver is not stable, but fluctuates over time with supply and demand, just like everything else! Backing one’s currency by specie was no guarantee of stable prices or a stable money supply. As was seen in Europe, a sudden influx could send prices soaring, and a dearth would send prices crashing. As we’ll see, this was a major problem with precious metal standards throughout the nineteenth century—a point conspicuously ignored by goldbugs. Instead, he proposed a land bank, which, as we saw earlier, was a very popular idea at this time. Even though the colonies didn’t have sources of previous metals—and couldn’t mint them even if they did—they did have an abundant supply of real estate, far more than Europe, in fact. Land could be mortgaged, and the mortgages would act as backing for the new government-issued currency.

Economist (and Harry Potter character) Farley Grubb has written a definitive account of Franklin’s proposal:

Franklin begins his pamphlet by noting that a lack of money to transact trade within the province carries a heavy cost because the alternative to paper money is not gold and silver coins, which through trade have all been shipped off to England, but barter. Barter, in turn, increases the cost of local exchange and so lowers wages, employment, and immigration. Money scarcity also causes high local interest rates, which reduces investment and slows development. Paper money will solve these problems.

But what gives paper money its value? Here Franklin is clear throughout his career: It is not legal tender laws or fixed exchange rates between paper money and gold and silver coins but the quantity of paper money relative to the volume of internal trade within the colony that governs the value of paper money. An excess of paper money relative to the volume of internal trade causes it to lose value (depreciate). The early paper monies of New England and South Carolina had depreciated because the quantities were not properly controlled.

So will the quantity of paper money in Pennsylvania be properly controlled relative to the demands of internal trade within the province?

First, Franklin points out that gold and silver are of no permanent value and so paper monies linked to or backed by gold and silver, as with bank paper money in Europe, are of no permanent value. Everyone knew that over the previous 100 years the labor value of gold and silver had fallen because new discoveries had expanded supplies faster than demand. The spot value of gold and silver could fluctuate just like that of any other commodity and could be acutely affected by unexpected trade disruptions. Franklin observes in 1729 that “we [Pennsylvanians] have already parted with our silver and gold” in trade with England, and the difference between the value of paper money and that of silver is due to “the scarcity of the latter.”

Second, Franklin notes that land is a more certain and steady asset with which to back paper money. For a given colony, its supply will not fluctuate with trade as much as gold and silver do, nor will its supply be subject to long-run expansion as New World gold and silver had been. Finally, and most important, land cannot be exported from the province as gold and silver can. He then points out that Pennsylvania’s paper money will be backed by land; that is, it will be issued by the legislature through a loan office, and subjects will pledge their lands as collateral for loans of paper money.

Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy

Franklin argued that the amount of money circulating would be self-correcting. If too little was issued, he said, falling prices would motivate people to mortgage their land to get their hands on more bills. If too much money was circulating, its value would fall, and mortgagees would use the cheaper notes to buy back their land, thus retiring the notes from circulation and alleviating the oversupply.

Finally, Franklin argues that “coined land” or a properly run land bank will automatically stabilize the quantity of paper money issued — never too much and never too little to carry on the province’s internal trade. If there is too little paper money, the barter cost of trade will be high, and people will borrow more money on their landed security to reap the gains of the lowered costs that result when money is used to make transactions. A properly run land bank will never loan more paper money than the landed security available to back it, and so the value of paper money, through this limit on its quantity, will never fall below that of land.

If, by chance, too much paper money were issued relative to what was necessary to carry on internal trade such that the paper money started to lose its value, people would snap up this depreciated paper money to pay off their mortgaged lands in order to clear away the mort-gage lender’s legal claims to the land. So people could potentially sell the land to capture its real value. This process of paying paper money back into the government would reduce the quantity of paper money in circulation and so return paper money ’s value to its former level.

Automatic stabilization or a natural equilibrium of the amount of paper money within the province results from decentralized market competition within this monetary institutional setting. Fluctuations in the demand for money for internal trade are accommodated by a flexible internal money supply directly tuned to that demand. This in turn controls and stabilizes the value of money and the price level within the province.

Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy

Given that the United States was the major pioneer in the Western world for a successful paper fiat currency, it is ironic that we have become one of the centers for resistance to the very idea today. This in large part due to the bottomless funding by billionaire libertarian cranks to promote shaky economic ideas in the United States, such as Austrian Economics, whereas in the rest of the world common-sense prevails. Wild, paranoid conspiracy theories about money (and just about everything else) also circulate widely in the United States, much more widely than the rest of the developed world which has far better educational systems.

Returning to the gold standard is—bizarrely—appropriated by people LARPing the American Revolution today in tri-corner hats, proclaiming themselves as the only true “patriots”. Yet, as we’ve seen, the young United States was the world’s leading innovator in issuing paper money not backed by gold–i.e. fiat currency. And this led to its prosperity. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin was a major advocate of paper money not backed by gold. This is rather inconvenient for libertarians (as is most of actual history).

The young have always learned that Benjamin Franklin was the prophet of thrift and the exponent of scientific experiment. They have but rarely been told that he was the advocate of the use of the printing press for anything except the diffusion of knowledge. (Galbraith, p. 55)

That’s right, Ben Franklin was an advocate of “printing money.” Something to remember the next time a Libertarian glibly sneers at the concept. Later advocates of “hard money”, i.e. goldbugs like Andrew Jackson, would send the U.S. economy crashing to its knees in the early nineteenth century by returning to a gold standard.

Here’s Galbraith describing the theory behind paper money:

There is very little in economics that invokes the supernatural. But by one phenomenon many have been tempted. In looking at a rectangular piece of paper, on frequent occasion of indifferent quality, featuring a national hero or monument or carrying a classical design with overtones of Peter Paul Rubens, Jacques Louis David or a particularly well-stocked vegetable market and printed in green or brown ink, they have been assailed by the question: Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable? What, in contrast to a similar mass of fibres clipped from yesterday’s newspaper, gives it the power to command goods, enlist service, induce cupidity, promote avarice, invite to crime? Surely some magic is involved; certainly some metaphysical or extraterrestrial explanation of its value is required. The priestly reputation and tendency of people who make a profession of knowing about money have been noted. Partly it is because such people are thought to know why valueless paper has value.

The explanation is wholly secular; nor is magic involved.

Writers on money have regularly distinguished between three types of currency:

(1) that which owes its value, as do gold and silver, to an inherent desirability derived from well-established service to pride of possession, prestige of ownership, personal adornment, dinner service or dentistry;

(2) that which can be readily exchanged for something of such inherent desirability or which carries the promise, like the early Massachusetts Bay notes, of eventual exchange; and

(3) currency which is intrinsically worthless, carries no promise that it will be redeemed in anything useful or desirable and which is sustained, at most, by the fiat of the state that it be accepted.

In fact, all three versions are variations on a single theme.

John Stuart Mill…made the value of paper money dependent on its supply in relation to the supply of things available for purchase.
Were the money gold or silver, there was little chance, the plethora of San Luis Potosí or Sutter’s Mill apart, for the amount to increase unduly. This inherent limit on supply was the security that, as money, it would be limited in amount and so retain its value.

And the same assurance of limited supply held for paper money that was fully convertible into gold and silver. As it held for paper that could not be converted into anything for so long as the supply of such paper was limited. It was the fact of scarcity, not the fact of intrinsic worthlessness, that was important. The problem of paper was that, in the absence of convertibility, there was nothing to restrict its supply. Thus it was vulnerable to the unlimited increase that would diminish or destroy its value.

The worthlessness of paper is a detail. Rock quarried at random from the earth’s surface and divided into units of a pound and upward would not serve very happily as currency. So great would be the potential supply that the weight of rock for even a minor transaction would be a burden. But rock quarried on the moon and moved to the earth, divided and with the chunks duly certified as to the weight and source, though geologically indistinguishable from the earthbound substance, would be a distinct possibility, at least for so long as the trips were few and the moon rock retained the requisite scarcity. pp. 62-64

NEXT: England and France get on the paper money train. England succeeds; France fails.

The Origin of Paper Money 4

What’s often considered to be the first recorded issuance of government-backed paper money in the Western world was in Colonial America, and it was quite by accident.

There had been precedents, but they were very limited, and we only know about them through historical records. Paper money tends to disappear in the archaeological record, while coins survive, which means that earlier experiments in paper money may simply be lost to history.

Repeatedly in the European records we find mention of money made from leather during times of warfare and siege. Reports indicate that European monarchs occasionally used paper money during periods of crisis, usually war, and they do maintain that in Catalonia and Aragon, James I issued paper money in 1250, but no known examples have survived. Then, when the Spanish laid siege to the city of Leyden in the Lowlands in 1574, Burgomeister Pieter Andriaanszoon collected all metal, including coins, for use in the manufacture of arms. To replace the coins, he issued small scraps of paper.

On July 1661, Sweden’s Stockholm Bank issued the first bank note in Europe to compensate for a shortage of silver coins. Although Sweden lacked silver, it possessed bountiful copper resources, and the government of Queen Christina (1634-1654) issued large copper sheets called platmynt (plate money), which weighed approximately 4 pounds each. In 1644 the government offered the largest coins ever issued: ten-daler copper plates, each of which weighed 43 pounds, 7 1/4 ounces. To avoid having to carry such heavy coins, merchants willingly accepted the paper bills in denominations of one hundred dalers. one such bill could be submitted for 500 pounds of copper plates. (Weatherford, p. 130)

For an example of platmynt, see this link: Swedish “plate money” (TYWKIIDBI)

The issuance was by Massachusetts in 1690. It was in the form of government IOU’s issued to pay for a failed raid on Quebec which was successfully repelled. Due to the failure of the raid, the expected booty to pay for the cost of the expedition did not materialize. The government, reluctant to raise taxes to pay for an expedition that was a failure, issued IOU’s instead. Due to the shortage of metal coins, these IOU’s began circulating at their face value as a substitute for coins. And thus, by accident, paper money was created in the Western world:

The first issue of paper money was was by the Massachusetts bay Colony in 1690; it has been described as ‘not only the origin of paper money in America, but also in the British empire, and almost in the Christian world’. It was occasioned, as noted, by war.

In 1690, Sir William Phips – a man whose own fortune and position had been founded on the gold and silver retrieved from a wrecked Spanish galleon near the shores of what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic – led an expedition of Massachusetts irregulars against Quebec. The loot from the fall of the fortress was intended to pay for the expedition. The fortress did not fall.

The American colonies were operating on negligible budgets…and there was no enthusiasm for levying taxes to pay the defeated heroes. So notes were issued to the soldiers promising eventual payment in hard coin. Redemption in gold or silver, as these were returned in taxes, was promised, although presently the notes were also made legal tender for taxes. (Galbraith, pp. 51-52)

The colonial government intended to quickly redeem the certificates with tax revenues, but the need for money was so great that the certificates began changing hands, like money…[1]…For the next twenty years the notes circulated side by side with gold and silver of equivalent denomination. Notes and metal being interchangeable, there was pro tanto, no depreciation. (p. 52)…

The practice quickly caught on among the colonies as a means of supplying a circulating currency. The issuances were to be temporary, in fixed amounts, and accompanied by taxes and custom duties to redeem them. [1]

To retire these bills on credit, the colonial governments accepted them—along with specie—in payment of taxes, fines and fees. As with “bills on loan” the governments used any specie that they received in tax payments to retire and then burn the notes. Also like “bills on loan,” the notes circulated freely within the colonies that issued them and sometimes in adjacent colonies. [1]

[1] Paper Money and Inflation in Colonial America

This circulation of these paper IOUs gave cash-strapped governments an idea. Governments could issue IOUs (hypothetically redeemable in gold and silver coins) in lieu of levying taxes to enable the government to pay for stuff. Such IOUs could then circulate as cash money—valuable because they would theoretically be redeemed by governments for gold and silver, or be used to discharge debt obligations to the state like taxes, fines and fees. As noted above, when gold and silver did come into the state’s coffers, they could buy back the notes.

Unlike modern paper money, these IOUs typically had an expiration date. By redeeming the issued notes, the government could remove paper from circulation, lowering its debt obligations, while at the same time preventing paper money from losing too much of its value. (Note similarities with the Chinese system).

And so, as the 1700’s dawned, colonial governments started commonly issuing paper money—colonial scrip—in lieu of taxes to goose the domestic economy by increasing the amount of money in circulation. Since precious metals were in short supply, most of these schemes were based on the land banking concept (i.e. monetizing land):

The Pennsylvania legislature issued its first paper money in 1723 — a modest amount of £15,000 (the equivalent of just over 48,000 Spanish silver dollars), with another £30,000 issued in 1724. This paper money was not linked to or backed by gold and silver money. It was backed by the land assets of subjects who borrowed paper money from the government and by the future taxes owed to the government that could be paid in this paper money…after the legislature issued this paper money, internal trade, employment, new construction, and the number of inhabitants in the province all increased…The initial paper money issued in 1723 was due to expire in 1731. (Typically, paper money was issued with a time limit within which it could be used to pay taxes owed to the issuing government — the money paid in being removed from circulation.)

Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of a Paper Money Economy (PDF)

In addition to funding military spending, one major driver behind colonial governments issuing IOUs as currency came from the extreme recalcitrance of the colonists in paying their allotted taxes, which means that this unfortunate tendency was present in America from the very beginning, as Galbraith notes:

A number of circumstances explain the pioneering role of the American colonies in the use of paper money. War, as always, forced financial innovation. Also, paper money…was a substitute for taxation, and, where taxes were concerned, the colonists were exceptionally obdurate; they were opposed to taxation without representation, as greatly remarked, and the were also, a less celebrated quality, opposed to taxation with representation. ‘That a great reluctance to pay taxes existed in all the colonies, there can be no doubt. it was one of the marked characteristics of the American people long after their separation from England.’ (Galbraith, pp. 46-47)

In subsequent years, the various colonial governments would rely on more and more on issuing paper money. And when they did, it was noted, the volume of trade increased, and local economies expanded. There was always, however, the looming threat of too much colonial scrip being issued by governments, leading to depreciation:

Inevitably, however, it occurred to the colonists that the notes were not a temporary, one-time expedient but a general purpose alternative to taxation. More were issued as occasion seemed to require, and the promised redemption was repeatedly postponed.

Prices specified in the notes now rose; so, therewith did the price of gold and silver. By the middle of the eighteenth century the amount of silver or gold for which the note could be exchanged was only about a tenth of what it had been fifty years before. Ultimately the notes were redeemed at a few shillings to the pound from gold sent over to pay for the colonial contribution to Queen Anne’s War.

Samuel Eliot Morison has said of the notes issued by Massachusetts to pay off the soldiers back from Quebec that they were ‘a new device in the English-speaking world which undermined credit and increased poverty’. Other and less judicious historians have reflected the same view. But it is also known that rising prices stimulate the spirits of entrepreneurs and encourage economic activity just as falling prices depress both.

Were only so much paper money issued by a government as to keep prices from falling or, at most, cause a moderate increase, its use could be beneficial. Not impoverishment, but an increased affluence would be the result.

The question, obviously, is whether there could be restraint, whether the ultimate and impoverishing collapse could be avoided. The Law syllogism comes ominously to mind: If some is good, more must be better. (Galbraith, pp. 52–53)

The use of paper money as an alternative to government borrowing began to spread. More and more colonial governments (there obviously was no national government back then) would issue IOUs as a way to get around chronic shortages of gold and silver coins, and to avoid raising taxes. Meanwhile, although Europe had begun to experiment with paper money, it was still tied to amounts of gold and silver, limiting its application.

The results in the colonies were highly mixed. Some experiments were highly successful; other less so:

…the other New England colonies and South Carolina had also discovered paper money…Restraint was clearly not available in Rhode Island of South Carolina or even in Massachusetts. Elsewhere, however, it was present to a surprising extent. The Middle Colonies handled paper money with what must now be regarded as astonishing skill and prudence…The first issue of paper money there was by Pennsylvania in 1723. Prices were falling at the time, and trade was depressed. Both recovered, and the issue was stopped.

There appear to have been similar benefits from a second issue in 1729; the course of business and prices in England in the same years suggests that, in the absence of such action, prices would have continued down. Similar issues produced similarly satisfactory results in New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. As in Pennsylvania, all knew the virtue of moderation. (Galbraith, pp. 52-53)

Perhaps the most intriguing experiment was done by the state of Maryland. It had a combination of what looks like a UBI scheme, coupled with a public banking system (à la North Dakota):

The most engaging experiment was in Maryland. Elsewhere the notes were put into circulation by the simple device of using them to pay public expenses. Maryland, in contrast, declared a dividend of thirty shillings to each taxable citizen and, in addition, established a loan office where worthy farmers and businessmen could obtain an added supply which they were required to repay.

Remarkably, this dividend was a one-time thing; as in the other Middle Colonies the notes so issued were ultimately redeemed in hard money. A near contemporary historian with a near-gift for metaphor credited the experiment with ‘feeding the flame of industry that began to kindle’. A much later student has concluded that ‘this was the most successful paper money issued by any of the colonies’.

Two centuries later during the Great Depression a British soldier turned economic prophet, Major C.H. Douglas, made very nearly the same proposal. This was Social Credit. Save in much distant precincts as the Canadian Prairies, he acquired general disesteem as a monetary crank. He was two hundred years too late. (Galbraith, pp. 53-54)

Interestingly, we see some of those ideas once again being floated once again today.

As Galbraith notes, later economic historians would focus exclusively on the failures of such early experiments, and deliberately ignore the places were it was successful. Much of this was based on the “gold is real money” ideology, along with the ideas around the “inherent profligacy of governments” which would invariably cause inflation. In other words, the groupthink of the economics priesthood:

Towards the end of the nineteenth century expanding university facilities, an increased interest in the past and a pressing need for subjects on which to do doctoral theses and other scholarly research all led to a greatly expanded exploration of colonial economic history. By then, among historians and economists, the gold standard had become an article of the highest faith. Their research did not subordinate faith to fact.

By what amounted to a tacit understanding between right-thinking men the abandoned tendencies of Rhode Island, Massachusetts and South Carolina were taken to epitomize the colonial monetary experience. The different experience of the Middle Colonies was simply ignored.

A leading modern student of colonial monetary experience has noted that: ‘One looks in vain for any discussion of these satisfactory currency experiments in the standard works on American monetary and financial history.’ Another has concluded that ‘…generations of historical scholarship have fostered a mistaken impression of the monetary practices of the colonies’. (Galbraith, pp. 54-55)

History repeats itself: today we once again have an economics caste wedded to orthodoxy and unwilling to consider alternative points of view. The MMT school of economics is fighting a lonely battle against this tendency today.

Next: Ben Franklin discovers money printing

The Origin of Religion – Part 3

[Blogger note: I have apparently lost my USB drive, which contained all of my subsequent blog posts, thus, I’ll have to cut this short. I’ll try and finish this up using my recollection and some snippets lift on my hard drive]

In addition to what we spoke of before, there are several other “alternative” psychological ideas behind the origin and development of religion that the BBC article does not mention. Nonetheless, I feel these ideas are too important to be left out of the discussion. What follows is my summary below.

Terror Management Theory

Terror Management Theory (TMT) stems from a book written by psychotherapist Ernest Becker in 1973 called The Denial of Death. In it, he asserted that we invest in what are, in essence, “immortality projects” in order to stave off the subconscious fear of our own inevitable demise.This tendency is not exclusive to religions, but is also applicable to all sorts of other secular philosophies and behaviors.

The introduction to Becker’s book online provides a good summary:

Becker’s philosophy as it emerges in Denial of Death and Escape from Evil is a braid woven from four strands.

The first strand. The world is terrifying…Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates. We live, he says, in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is “tearing others apart with teeth of all types — biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue.”

The second strand. The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Human beings are naturally anxious because we are ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die. “This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression — and with all this yet to die.”

The third strand. Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. “The vital lie of character” is the first line of defense that protects us from the painful awareness of our helplessness. Every child borrows power from adults and creates a personality by introjecting the qualities of the godlike being. If I am like my all-powerful father I will not die. So long as we stay obediently within the defense mechanisms of our personality…we feel safe and are able to pretend that the world is manageable. But the price we pay is high. We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.

Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

Here’s Becker himself:

…of course, religion solves the problem of death, which no living individuals can solve, no matter how they would support us. Religion, then, gives the possibility of heroic victory in freedom and solves the problem of human dignity at its highest level. The two ontological motives of the human condition are both met: the need to surrender oneself in full to the rest of nature, to become a part of it by laying down one’s whole existence to some higher meaning; and the need to expand oneself as an individual heroic personality.

Finally, religion alone gives hope, because it holds open the dimension of the unknown and the unknowable, the fantastic mystery of creation that the human mind cannot even begin to approach, the possibility of a multidimensionality of spheres of existence, of heavens and possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic — and in doing so, it relieves the absurdity of earthly life, all the impossible limitations and frustrations of living matter. In religious terms, to “see God” is to die, because the creature is too small and finite to be able to bear the higher meanings of creation. Religion takes one’s very creatureliness, one’s insignificance, and makes it a condition of hope. Full transcendence of the human condition means limitless possibility unimaginable to us. [1]

Becker’s ideas are thoroughly grounded in the Freudian school, and Freud’s essential insight was that human actions, beliefs, desires and intentions are often motivated by hidden, subconscious forces which we are not fully aware of. In this case, the subconscious fear of death motivates us to embrace belief systems that allow us to symbolically transcend our own mortality.

One common trope I often hear about religion is that we simply came up with a bunch of fairy tales to cope with our existential fear of death, and that this explains religion.

But, as we’ve already seen, this is far from adequate in explaining the persistence and diversity of religious beliefs. As we saw, most ancient religions did not believe in a comfortable, cushy afterlife, and the tales of wandering spirits of the dead requiring constant appeasement do not provide much reassurance about what comes after death. If we just wanted to reassure ourselves in the face of our mortality, why didn’t we invent the “happy ending,” country-club afterlife straightaway? Why did such beliefs have to wait until after the Axial Age to emerge? And what about religions that believed in metempsychosis (transference of consciousness to a new body, i.e. reincarnation), rather than a comfortable afterlife?

Plus, this does not explain our beliefs in ghosts, spirits, and other invisible beings. Nor does it explain the extreme wastefulness and costliness of religion. The book itself says little about the origin and development of actual religion, and where it does, it deals exclusively with Western Judeo-Christian religions (the Christian existentialist Kierkegaard is especially cited).

Nevertheless, Terror Management Theory’s ideas have been empirically shown to have an effect on our belief systems and behavior. When knowledge of one’s own death has been subconsciously induced in test subjects (a technique called “priming”), people have been shown to be more clannish, more hostile to outsiders, more harsh to deviants, more likely to accept and dole out harsh punishments, and so forth (in short, more conservative). And, certainly the motivations for many strange behaviors—from the lust for power, to obsessive work and entrepreneurship, to desperate attempts to achieve lasting fame and stardom, to trying to create a “godlike” artificial intelligence, to beliefs about “uploading” one’s personal consciousness into computers, to scientific attempts to genetically “cure” aging and disease—can be seen as immortality projects motivated by a subconscious fear of death.

I would argue that a case can be made that the reason almost every culture known to man has believed that some sort of “life essence” survives the body after death stems from an existential fear of death similar to what Becker described. But the reason it took the forms that it did has more to do with some of the things we looked at last time–Theory of Mind, Hyperactive Agency Detection, the Intentional Stance, and so forth.

The noted anthropologist Bronislav Malinowski wrote an essay on the purpose of religion which in many ways echoes the ideas of Becker:

…in not a single one of its manifestations can religion be found without its firm roots in human emotion, which…grows out of desires and vicissitudes connected with life. Two affirmations, therefore, preside over every ritual act, every rule of conduct, and every belief. There is the affirmation of the existence of powers sympathetic to man, ready to help him on condition that he conforms to the traditional lore which teaches how to serve them, conjure them, and propitiate them. This is the belief in Providence, and this belief assists man in so far as it enhances his capacity to act and his readiness to organize for action, under conditions where he must face and with not only the ordinary forces of nature, but also chance, ill luck, and the mysterious, even inculculable designs of destiny.

The second belief is that beyond the brief span of natural life there is compensation in another existence. Through this belief man can act and calculate far beyond his own forces and limitations, looking forward to his work being continued by his successors in the conviction that, from the next world, he will still be able to watch and assist them. The sufferings and efforts, the injustices and inequalities of this life are thus made up for. Here again we find that the spiritual force of this belief not only integrated man’s own personality, but is indispensable for the cohesion of the social fabric. Especially in the form which this belief assumes in ancestor-worship and the communion with the dead do we perceive its moral and social influence.

In their deepest foundations, as well as in their final consequences, the two beliefs in Providence and Immortality are not independent of one another. In the higher religions man lives in order to be united to God. In simpler forms, the ancestors worshiped are often mystically identified with environmental forces, as in Totemism. At times, they are both ancestors and carriers of fertility, as the Kachina of the Pueblos. Or again the ancestor is worshiped as the divinity, or at last as a culture hero.

The unity of religion in substance, form and function is to be found everywhere. Religious development consists probably in the growing predominance of the ethical principle and in the increasing fusion of the two main factors of all belief, the sense of Providence and the faith in Immortality.

As we climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we look for different things from our religions. Due to the “vicissitudes of life” ancient peoples often sought after more basic things related to material security: adequate rainfall, bountiful harvests, growing herds, protection form diseases, protection from raids, and so forth. They consulted spirits for decisions—whom to marry, when to go to war, how to bring back the rains, and so on. Today, with most of us living in societies where our basic material needs are met, we look for things like fulfillment, purpose, belonging and meaning using the same religious framework.

Religion as a Memeplex

The idea of memetics was first proposed by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins made an explicit analogy between biological information (genes) which differentially reproduce and propagate themselves through time by using living organisms, and cultural information (memes), which live in human minds and reproduce via cultural imitation. A collection of related and reinforcing memes is called a memeplex (from the term, “coadapted meme complex”).

The underlying mechanisms behind genes (instructions for making proteins, stored in the cells of the body and passed on in reproduction), and memes (instructions for carrying out behavior, stored in brains, and passed on via imitation) were both very similar, Dawkins thought, and the ideas underlying Darwinism could apply to both. This is sometimes referred to as “Universal Darwinism”:

The creator of the concept and its denomination as a “meme” was Richard Dawkins. Other authors such as Edward O. Wilson and J. D. Lumsden previously proposed the concept of culturgen in order to designate something similar. At the present time the term of Dawkins has been imposed, although the theory of memes now includes contributions from many other authors. Therefore, talking of memes today is not simply the theories of memes of Dawkins.

Daniel Dennett, Memes and Religion: Reasons for the Historical Persistence of Religion. Guillermo Armengol (PDF)

The behavior of both memes and genes are based around three principle factors: variation, competition (or selection), and retention (or persistence):

For something to count as a replicator it must sustain the evolutionary algorithm based on variation, selection and retention (or heredity).

Memes certainly come with variation–stories are rarely told exactly the same way twice, no two buildings are absolutely identical, and every conversation is unique—and when memes are passed on, the copying is not always perfect….There is memetic selection – some memes grab the attention, are faithfully remembered and passed on to other people, while others fail to get copied at all. Then, when memes are passed on there is retention of some of the ideas of behaviours in that meme – something of the original meme must be retained for us to call it imitation or copying or learning by example. The meme therefore fits perfectly into Dawkins’ idea of a replicator and Dennett’s universal algorithm…

Where do new memes come from? They come about through variation and combination of old ones – either inside one person’s mind, or when memes are passed from person to person…The human mind is a rich source of variation. In our thinking we mix up ideas and turn them over to produce new combinations…Human creativity is a process of variation and recombination. [2]

Memetics is more of a theory about the evolution of religions that about their origins. Why do some ideas catch on while others die out? How and why do religions change over time? Memetics can provide an explanation.

One of my favorite definitions of “culture” is given by David Deutsch in his book The Beginnings of Infinity:

A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behavior. Thus the shared values of a nation, the ability to communicate in a particular language, the shared knowledge of an academic discipline and the appreciation of a given musical style are all, in this sense, ‘sets of ideas’ that define cultures…

The world’s major cultures – including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions – have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define them, including the inexplicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another. That makes these ideas memes – ideas that are replicators. [3]

We see by this definition that it is difficult to distinguish religion from any other form of culture—they all cause their adopters to behave alike in certain ways, and adopt similar ideas. This has caused some scholars to question whether we can even define such a thing as “religion” apart from every other type of social behavior, or whether it’s simply an academic invention:

[Jonathan Zittell] Smith wanted to dislodge the assumption that the phenomenon of religion needs no definition. He showed that things appearing to us as religious says less about the ideas and practices themselves than it does about the framing concepts that we bring to their interpretation. Far from a universal phenomenon with a distinctive essence, the category of ‘religion’ emerges only through second-order acts of classification and comparison…

A vast number of traditions have existed over time that one could conceivably categorise as religions. But in order to decide one way or the other, an observer first has to formulate a definition according to which some traditions can be included and others excluded. As Smith wrote in the introduction to Imagining Religion: ‘while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterised in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious – there is no data for religion’. There might be evidence for various expressions of Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and so forth. But these become ‘religions’ only through second-order, scholarly reflection. A scholar’s definition could even lead her to categorise some things as religions that are not conventionally thought of as such (Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance), while excluding others that are (certain strains of Buddhism).

Is religion a universal in human culture or an academic invention? (Aeon)

It used to be thought that ideas were passed down through the generations simply because they were beneficial to us as a species. But memetic theory challenges that. One important concept from memetics is that the memes that replicate most faithfully and most often are not necessarily beneficial—they are simply the ones most able to replicate themselves. For this reason, religion has often been called a “virus of the mind” by people attempting to apply the ideas of memetics to religion.

If a gene is in a genome at all, then, when suitable circumstances arise, it will definitely be expressed as an enzyme…and it will cause its characteristic effects. Nor can it be left behind if the rest of the genome is successfully replicated. But merely being present in the mind does not automatically get a meme expressed as behaviour: the meme has to compete for that privilege with other ideas – memes and non-memes, about all sorts of subjects – in the same mind. And merely being expressed as behavior does not automatically get the meme copied into a recipeient along with other memes: it has to compete for the reipients’ attention and acceptance with all sorts of behaviours by other people, and with the recipients’ own ideas. All that is in addition to the analogue of the type of selection that genes face, each meme competing with rival versions of itself across the population, perhaps by containing the knowledge for some useful function.

Memes are subject to all sorts of random and intentional variation in addition to all that selection, and so they evolve. So to this extent the same the same logic holds as for genes: memes are ‘selfish’. They do not necessarily evolve to benefit their holder, or their society – or, again, even themselves, except in the sense of replicating better than other memes. (Though now most other memes are their rivals, not just variants of themselves.) The successful meme variant is the one that changes the behaviour of its holders in such a way as to make itself best at displacing other memes from the population. This variant may well benefit its holders, or their culture, or the species as a whole. But if it harms them, it will spread anyway. Memes that harm society are a familiar phenomenon. You need only consider the harm done by adherents of political views, or religions, that you especially abhor. Societies have been destroyed because some of the memes that were best at spreading through the population were bad for a society. [4]

In this formulation, religions are seen as actually harmful, simply “using” us to replicate themselves for their own benefit, and to our own detriment, just like a virus. This is the stance taken by, for example, Dawkins and Dennett—both strident atheists. For them, it would be best if we could “disinfect” our minds and free ourselves from these pesky thought viruses.

Dawkins coined the term ‘viruses of the mind’ to apply to such memeplexes as religions and cults – which spread themselves through vast populations of people by using all kinds of clever copying tricks, and can have disastrous consequences for those infected…This theme has been taken up in popular books on memetics, such as Richard Brodie’s Viruses of the Mind and Aaron Lynch’s Thought Contagion, both of which provide many examples of how memes spread through society and both of which emphasize the more dangerous and pernicious kinds of memes. We can now see that the idea of a virus is applicable in all three worlds – of biology, of computer programs and of human minds. The reason is that all three systems involve replicators and we call particularly useless and self-serving replicators ‘viruses.’ [5]

Nevertheless, such “idea viruses” cannot inflict too much damage on their recipients, otherwise they will undermine their own viability:

The overarching selection pressure on memes is towards being faithfully replicated, But, within that, there is also pressure to do as little damage to the holder’s mind as possible, because that mind is what the human uses to be long-lived enough to be able to enact the meme’s behaviors as much as possible. This pushes memes in the direction of causing a finely tuned compulsion in the holder’s mind: ideally, this would be just the inability to refrain from enacting that particular meme (or memeplex). Thus, for example, long-lived religions typically cause fear of specific supernatural entities, but they do not cause general fearfulness or gullibility, because that would both harm the holders in general and make them more susceptible to rival memes. So the evolutionary pressure is for the psychological damage to be confined to a relatively narrow area of the recipients’ thinking, but to be deeply entrenched, so that the recipients find themselves facing a large emotional cost if they subsequently consider deviating from the meme’s prescribed behaviors. [6]

Blackmore herself, however, has retreated from this notion, citing all the apparently beneficial effects from adherence to various religions: more children, longer lifespans, a more positive outlook, and so on:

Are religions viruses of the mind? I would have replied with an unequivocal “yes” until a few days ago when some shocking data suggested I am wrong.

The idea is that religions, like viruses, are costly to those infected with them. They demand large amounts of money and time, impose health risks and make people believe things that are demonstrably false or contradictory. Like viruses, they contain instructions to “copy me”, and they succeed by using threats, promises and nasty meme tricks that not only make people accept them but also want to pass them on.

This was all in my mind when Michael Blume got up to speak on “The reproductive advantage of religion”. With graph after convincing graph he showed that all over the world and in many different ages, religious people have had far more children than nonreligious people…

All this suggests that religious memes are adaptive rather than viral from the point of view of human genes, but could they still be viral from our individual or societal point of view? Apparently not, given data suggesting that religious people are happier and possibly even healthier than secularists. And at the conference, Ryan McKay presented experimental data showing that religious people can be more generous, cheat less and co-operate more in games such as the prisoner’s dilemma, and that priming with religious concepts and belief in a “supernatural watcher” increase the effects.

So it seems I was wrong and the idea of religions as “viruses of the mind” may have had its day. Religions still provide a superb example of memeplexes at work, with different religions using their horrible threats, promises and tricks to out-compete other religions, and popular versions of religions outperforming the more subtle teachings of the mystical traditions. But unless we twist the concept of a “virus” to include something helpful and adaptive to its host as well as something harmful, it simply does not apply. Bacteria can be helpful as well as harmful; they can be symbiotic as well as parasitic, but somehow the phrase “bacterium of the mind” or “symbiont of the mind” doesn’t have quite the same ring.

Why I no longer believe religion is a virus of the mind (The Guardian)

I think memetics is a good way to describe cultural transmission, and I wish that it was used much more freely by sociologists, historians, anthropologists, economists, and other students of human behavior. Memes are a good way to describe how religions are transmitted, and why some religious ideas predominate over others. They provide a good description of how religious ideas evolve over time. But it does not provide much information about how and why religions got started in the first place.

Bicameral Mind Theory

Bicameral Mind Theory (BMT) was proposed by psychologist Julian Jaynes in his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (coincidentally, the same year as Dawkins and only three years after Becker).

Jaynes argued that what ancient peoples referred to as the “gods” were, in reality, aural hallucinations produced by their own mind. Such hallucinations stemmed from the partitioning of the human brain into two separate hemispheres (bicameral). Spoken language was produced primarily by the left hemisphere, while the right hemisphere was mostly silent. Jaynes noted from research on split-brain patients that if portions of the right hemisphere were electrically stimulated, subjects would tend to hallucinate voices.

This caused him to hypothesize that the thought patterns of ancient man were radically different than our own. In times of stress caused by decision-making, he argued, internal speech was perceived as something “alien” that was guiding and directing one’s actions from somewhere outside oneself.

One of his major pieces of evidence was a thorough study of ancient literature. Jaynes noted that ancient literature lacked a conception of the “self” or anything like a “soul” in living beings. Self-reflective and contemplative behavior simply did not exist. In addition, the gods are described as controlling people’s actions, and people frequently communicate directly with the gods. Most scholars simply took this communication as some sort of elaborate metaphor, but Jaynes was willing to take these descriptions seriously. Such depictions are very common in the Old Testament, for example. And he notes that in the Iliad—the oldest work of Western literature compiled from earlier oral traditions—the characters seem to have no volition whatsoever; they are merely “puppets” of the gods:

The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they are only seen and heard by particular heroes they are speaking to. Sometimes they come in mists or out of the gray sea or a river, or from the sky, suggesting visual auras preceding them. But at other times, they simply occur. Usually they come as themselves, commonly as mere voices, but sometimes as other people closely related to the hero. [7]

The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like…In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods. To another, a man seems to be the cause of his own behavior. But not to the man himself… [8]

In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then ‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure of ‘god’, or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not ‘see’ what to do by himself…[9]

The preposterous hypothesis we have come to…is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious…[10]

The gods would reveal themselves to people in times of stress. We saw earlier that stress—even in modern people—often causes an eerie sense of a “felt presence” nearby:

If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallucinations are similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply stress.

In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold for release is extremely high; most of us need to be over our heads in trouble before we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower…This is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of breakdown products of stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for genetic reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a normal person.

During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary because of some novelty in a situation. Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination. [11]

Jaynes’ other line of evidence was physiological, and came from the structure of the human brain itself:

The evidence to support this hypothesis may be brought together as five observations: (1) that both hemispheres are able to understand language, while normally only the left can speak; (2) that there is some vestigial functioning of the right Wernicke’s area in a way similar to the voices of the gods; (3) that the two hemispheres under certain conditions are able to act almost as independent persons, their relationship corresponding to that of the man-god relationship of bicameral times; (4) that contemporary differences between the hemispheres in cognitive functions at least echo such differences of function between man and god as seen in the literature of bicameral man; and (5) that the brain is more capable of being organized by the environment than we have hitherto supposed, and therefore could have undergone such a change as from bicameral to conscious man mostly on the basis of learning and culture. [12]

It’s important to note that when Jaynes uses the term “consciousness”, he is using it in a very specific and deliberate way. He is not talking about the state of simply being awake, or being aware of one’s surroundings. Nor is he talking about reacting to stimulus, or having emotional reactions to events. Obviously, this applies to nearly all animals. Rather, he’s talking about something like “meta-consciousness”, or the ability to self-reflect when making decisions:

The background of Jaynes’ evolutionary account of the transition from bicamerality to the conscious mind is the claim that human consciousness arises from the power of language to make metaphors and analogies. Metaphors of “me” and analogous models of “I” allow consciousness to function through introspection and self-visualization. According to this view, consciousness is a conceptual, metaphor-generated inner world that parallels the actual world and is intimately bound with volition and decision. Homo sapiens, therefore, could not experience consciousness until he developed a language sophisticated enough to produce metaphors and analogical models.

Jaynes recognizes that consciousness itself is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for sensation or perception, for concept formation, for learning, thinking, or even reasoning. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and unconsciously, then it is conceivable that there were, at one time, human beings who did most of the things we do – speak, understand, perceive, solve problems – but who were without consciousness. [13]

Jaynes saw echoes of this bicameral mentality in psychological phenomena such as schizophrenia and hypnosis. Hypnosis, he argued, was a regression to a conscious state prior to that of the modern type which constantly narratizes our lived experience:

If one has a very definite biological notion of consciousness and that its origin is back in the evolution of mammalian nervous systems, I cannot see how the phenomenon of hypnosis can be understood at all, not one speck of it. But if we fully realize that consciousness is a culturally learned event, balanced over the suppressed vestiges of an earlier mentality, then we can see that consciousness, in part, can be culturally unlearned or arrested. Learned features, such as analog ‘I’, can under the proper cultural imperative be taken over by a different initiative works in conjunction with the other factors of the diminishing consciousness of the induction and trance is that in some way it engages a paradigm of an older mentality than subjective consciousness. [14]

…[W]hy is it that in our daily lives we cannot get above ourselves to authorize ourselves into being what we really wish to be? If under hypnosis we can be changed in identity and action, why not in and by ourselves so that behavior flows from decision with as absolute a connection, so that whatever in us it is that we refer to as will stands master and captain over action with as sovereign a hand as the operator over a subject?

The answer here is partly in the limitations of our learned consciousness in this present millennium. We need some vestige of the bicameral mind, our former method of control, to help us. With consciousness we have given up those simpler more absolute methods of control of behavior which characterized the bicameral mind. We live in a buzzing cloud of whys and wherefores, the purposes and reasonings of our narratizations, the many-routed adventures of our analog ‘I’s. And this constant spinning out of possibilities is precisely what is necessary to save us from behavior of too impulsive a sort. The analog ‘I’ and the metaphor ‘me’ are always resting at the confluence of many collective cognitive imperatives. We know too much to command ourselves very far. [15]

And schizophrenia, he argued, was a vestige of how the bicameral mind routinely worked, but was now only present in those with the genetic disposition for it, perhaps because of some quirk of neurotransmitter functioning or something similar:

Most of us spontaneously slip back into something approaching the actual bicameral mind at some part of our lives. For some of us, it is only a few episodes of thought deprivation or hearing voices. But for others of us, with overactive dopamine systems, or lacking an enzyme to easily break down the biochemical products of continued stress into excretable form, it is a much more harrowing experience – if it can be called an experience at all. We hear voices of impelling importance that criticize us and tell us what to do. At the same time, we seem to lose the boundaries of ourselves. Time crumbles. We behave without knowing it. Our mental space begins to vanish. We panic, and yet the panic is not happening to us. There is no us. It is not that we have nowhere to turn; we have nowhere. And in that nowhere, we are somehow automatons, unknowing what we do, being manipulated by others or by our voices in strange and frightening ways in a place we come to recognize as a hospital with a diagnosis we are told is schizophrenia. In reality, we have relapsed into the bicameral mind. [16]

It is the very central and unique place of these auditory hallucinations on the syndrome of many schizophrenics which it is important to consider. Why are they present? And why is “hearing voices” universal throughout all cultures, unless there is some usually suppressed structure of the brain which is activated in the stress of this illness? And why do these hallucinations of schizophrenics so often have a dramatic authority, particularly religious? I find that the only notion which provides even a working hypothesis about this matter is that of the bicameral mind, that the neurological structure responsible for these hallucinations is neurologically bound to substrates for religious feelings, and this is because the source of religion and of gods themselves is in the bicameral mind. [17]

Interestingly, modern research has revealed that anywhere from 5-15 of the population hears voices on occasion, and sometimes quite regularly. Most of these people are non-clinical—only about 1 percent of the population is considered to be schizophrenic. These percentages happen to approximate those in tribal societies who are considered to be able to perform as religious priests or shamans. In many tribal cultures, the ability to hear voices is considered to be a sign of being able to communicate with gods and spirits and move “between worlds” and thus highly desirable, rather than stigmatized. Indeed, many scholars of religion have seen clear links between symptoms of schizophrenia and so-called shamanic abilities.

Wither hallucinations?

Whether of not one fully accepts Jaynes’ hypothesis, I would argue that there’s one clear point he makes that has influenced beliefs in unseen spirits and survival of ancestors after death: the presence of hallucinations.

It turns out that hallucinating dead relatives is extremely common, even in rationalist Christian Western countries. If that’s the case, how much more common was this phenomenon in ancient times?

Up to six in ten grieving people have “seen” or “heard” their dead loved one, but many never mention it out of fear people will think they’re mentally ill. Among widowed people, 30 to 60 per cent have experienced things like seeing their dead spouse sitting in their old chair or hearing them call out their name, according to scientists.

The University of Milan researchers said there is a “very high prevalence” of these “post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences” (PBHEs) in those with no history of mental disorders. They came to their conclusions after looking at all previous peer-reviewed research carried out on the issue in the English language.

Jacqueline Hayes, an academic at the University of Roehampton, has studied the phenomenon, interviewing people from across the UK who have lost spouses, parents, children, siblings and friends. She told the Daily Mail: “People report visions, voices, tactile sensations, smells, and something that we call a sense of presence that is not necessarily related to any of the five senses.”

She added: “I found that these experiences could at times be healing and transformative, for example hearing your loved one apologise to you for something that happened – and at other times foreground the loss and grief in a painful way.”

Six in ten grieving people ‘see or hear dead loved ones’ (Telegraph)

Now, you might think that those are just hallucinations, and no one could seriously take this as a sign that their dead relatives were still alive. But, it’s important to remember that ancient peoples did not make the distinction between “real” and “not real” the way we do. To them, all phenomena which were experienced—whether in visions, trances, dreams, or “normal” waking consciousness—were treated as equally “real”. The stance we would take in modern times—that our subjective consciousness is not real, while at the same time there is an objective reality which is exclusively real—is not one which would have been operative in past pre-scientific cultures, especially pre-literate ones.

And, indeed, we can see that there are valid reasons for believing this to be so:

Let’s count the many ways that hallucinated voices are real:

– They are real neurological patterns that exist in real human brains.

– They are subjectively real. The listener actually hears them.

– They satisfy the criterion for reality put forward by David Deutsch in his book The Fabric of Reality: they kick back.

– They have metaphorical reality. We can reason about the voices the same way we talk about a movie with our friends (discussing the characters’ motivations, their moral worth, etc.).

– They have real intelligence — because (this is crucial) they’re the products of a bona fide intelligent process. They’re emanating from the same gray matter that we use to perceive the world, make plans, string words together into sentences, etc. The voices talk, say intelligent things, make observations that the hearer might not have noticed, and have personalities (stubborn, encouraging, nasty, etc.).

They are, above all, the kinds of things toward which we can take the intentional stance — treating them like agents with motivations, beliefs, and goals. They are things to be reasoned with, placated, ignored, or subverted, but not things whose existence is to be denied.

Accepting Deviant Minds (Melting Asphalt)

By this criteria, whether or not people really experienced gods as aural hallucinations at one point in time, it is quite likely that they did experience hallucinations which they would have regarded as legitimate and real. Thus, beliefs in disembodied souls would have been a product of actual, lived experience for the majority of people, rather than just an “irrational” belief.

[1] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, pp. 203-204

[2] Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, pp. 14-15

[3] David Deutsch, The Beginnings of Infinity, p. 369

[4] David Deutsch, The Beginnings of Infinity, pp. 378-379

[5] Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, p. 22

[6] David Deutsch, The Beginnings of Infinity, p. 384

[7] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, p. 74

[8] ibid., p. 72

[9] ibid., p. 75

[10] ibid., p. 84

[11] ibid., p. 84, p. 93

[12] ibid., p. 84, p. 106

[13] The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis, A.E. Cavanna, et. al. Functional Neurology, January 2007

[14] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, p. 84, p. 398

[15] ibid., p. 402

[16] ibid., p. 404

[17] ibid., p. 413

The Origin of Religion – Part 2

Let’s take a look at the major components of religious belief according to scientists working on this problem:

1. Hypersensitive Agency Detection (HAD or HADD)

This is one of the things that almost always gets mentioned in the evolutionary psychology of religious belief. Basically, it’s a “false positive”—a default assumption that some event is caused by a conscious entity rather than by random chance. It is thought that such “constructive paranoia” helped us avoid attacks from predators and other hostiles:

Scientists working in the cognitive science of religion have offered…explanations, including the hyperactive agency-detecting device (HADD). This tendency explains why a rustle in the bushes in the dark prompts the instinctive thought: ‘There’s someone there!’ We seem to have evolved to be extremely quick to ascribe agency – the capacity for intention and action – even to inanimate objects.

In our ancestral environment, this tendency is not particularly costly in terms of survival and reproduction, but a failure to detect agents that are there can be very costly. Fail to detect a sabre-toothed cat, and it’ll likely take you out of the gene pool. The evolution of a HADD can account for the human tendency to believe in the presence of agents even when none can actually be observed. Hence the human belief in invisible person-like beings, such as spirits or gods.

There are also forms of supernatural belief that don’t fit the ‘invisible person-like being’ mould, but merely posit occult forces – eg, feng shui, supernaturally understood – but the HADD doesn’t account for such beliefs…

Belief in supernatural beings is totally natural – and false (Aeon)

2. Theory of Mind (ToM) and Existential Theory of Mind. (EToM)

Theory of Mind (ToM), or Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM) is basically our intuitive ability to read other people’s minds. It’s “the understanding that others have beliefs, desires and goals, influencing their actions. ToM allows us to have sophisticated social relationships and to predict how others will behave. You couldn’t “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” without it…” [1]

…we can think of ToM as the cognitive system that humans typically use to engage in social interactions with other people. By engaging your ToM when you interact with someone else, you are able to attribute human mental states – such as thoughts, emotions, and intentions – to that person.

It’s adaptive to engage your ToM when interacting with another person, because your ‘theory’ will usually be correct: the other person usually will, in fact, have a normal human mind. So if you assume they do have such a mind, you’ll generally be able to have a more successful social interaction than you would if you assumed that they had no mind, or some kind of non-human mind.

What religion is really all about (Psychology Today)

The perils of an overactive Theory of Mind

Humans, due to their social nature, possess the most sophisticated Theory of Mind in the animal kingdom, and this gives rise not only to the ability to model other people’s inner states and intentions, but also our own, leading to reflective self-consciousness:

It therefore appears at present that human beings, although probably not unique in possessing Theory of Mind, are nonetheless unusual in the degree of its sophistication, specifically in the extent to which they can accurately model the minds of others. It seems highly likely that those who possessed an accurate Theory of Mind enjoyed an advantage when it came to modelling the intentions of others, an advantage that continues to this day, and was an active ingredient in the evolution of human consciousness.

The self-conscious animal: how human minds evolved (Aeon)

Furthermore, “Humans…show extreme ToM, ascribing minds to inanimate or imagined things…” [1] In real life, people apply ToM to forces of nature, ancestor spirits and invisible gods. And they seem to think about these supernatural actors the same way they conceive of fellow humans: “fMRI studies have found ToM-related regions of the brain activate when people hear statements about God’s emotions and involvement in worldly affairs.” [1]

Experiments have confirmed that we attribute human characteristics and intentions to objects that we know do not have them, such as balloons and abstract shapes. A famous experiment in the 1940s demonstrated that even abstract shapes moving around in a film were perceived as having intentions and could be used to tell a story that the researchers wished to tell.


For example, there are a large number of movies where an inanimate object becomes a “character” in the film, and we apply our theory of mind to it just as much as we do for the flesh-and-blood characters. If we couldn’t do so, such films would make no sense. Take the French movie The Red Balloon. It is all about attributing human characteristics to a rubber ball filled with helium. Or take the “Herbie” movies by Disney. Herbie was a Volkswagen beetle who got into all sort of adventures with his human friends.

Functional MRI scans have confirmed that, in contemplating religious ideas, the theory of mind mechanism of our brain is engaged:

…researchers gave 40 religious volunteers functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans as they responded to statements reflecting three core elements of belief. …Overall, the parts of the brain activated by the belief statements were those used for much more mundane, everyday interpretation of the world and the intentions of other people. Significantly, however, they also correspond with the parts of the brain that have evolved most recently, and which appear to which give humans more insight than other animals.

“Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions,” say the researchers.

“It’s not surprising that religious beliefs engage mainly the theory-of-mind areas, as they are about virtual beings who are treated as having essentially human mental traits, just as characters in a novel or play are,” comments Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford.

‘Theory of mind’ could help explain belief in God (New Scientist)

Existential Theory of Mind (EToM) is the related idea that our theory of mind is so complex that we engage it not just with people, animals, and inanimate objects, but even with existence itself!

The idea of EToM is that people tend to engage their ToM in interactions not just with other people, but with ‘existence’ in general.
That is, humans seem naturally inclined to perceive their lives as ongoing interactions with some kind of transcendent mind(s) that, at least in some respects, seem(s) human-like. Across cultures, this transcendent mind-like power may be conceptualized as an explicitly-specified god or gods, or in more abstract terms (such as a universal spirit, karma, or ‘the force’).

It appears that more complex “higher order” religions may be connected with more recursive modes of Theory of Mind:

According to Robin Dunbar, it is through Theory of Mind that people may have come to know God, as it were… Dunbar argues that several orders of intentionality may be required, since religion is a social activity, dependent on shared beliefs. The recursive loops that are necessary run something like this: I suppose that you think that I believe there are gods who intend to influence our futures because they understand our desires. This is fifth-order intentionality. Dunbar himself must have achieved sixth-order intentionality if he supposes all of this, and if you suppose that he does then you have reached seventh-order…[3]

Interestingly, both the concept of the “soul” and such “higher-order” religions, religions where the participants are united by mutual self-professed beliefs in some sort of transcendent doctrine –emerge at roughly the same time. This appears to reflect the dawn of something approaching self-consciousness. I’ve previously argued that this has to do with recursion—see my review of The Recursive Mind.

Another consequence of Theory of Mind is that under times of stress, people often perceive a kind of conscious “presence” around them, somewhat analogous to the feeling of being watched. For example, the some of the members of Shackleton’s expedition independently experienced an invisible “felt presence” watching over them:

On 20 May 1916, Ernest Shackleton, Frank Worsley, and Tom Crean reached Stromness, a whaling station on the north coast of South Georgia. They had been walking for 36 hours, in life-threatening conditions, in an attempt to reach help for the rest of their party: three of their crew were stuck on the south side of the island, with the remainder stranded on Elephant Island. To reach the whaling station, the three men had to cross the island’s mountainous interior with just a rope and an axe, in a journey that few had attempted before or since. By reaching Stromness they managed to save all the men left from the ill-fated Imperial Transantarctic Expedition.

They did not talk about it at the time, but weeks later all three men reported an uncanny experience during their trek: a feeling that “often there were four, not three” men on their journey. The “fourth” that accompanied them had the silent presence of a real person, someone walking with them by their side, as far as the whaling station but no further. Shackleton was apparently deeply affected by the experience, but would say little about it in subsequent years, considering it something “which can never be spoken of”.

Encounters such as these are common in extreme survival situations: guardian angels, guides, or even Christ-like figures have often been reported. We know them now as “third man” experiences…

The strange world of felt presences (The Guardian)

3. Minimally Counterintuitive (MCI) Concepts.

Minimally Counterintuitve Concepts (MCI) ultimately stem from what some researchers have called non-reflective beliefs. There are beliefs which are so ingrained in our psyche that we don’t even think twice about them. Of course, these intuitive beliefs are not always correct. For example, before Galileo, people assumed that heavier objects would fall to earth faster than lighter ones. It turns out that they were wrong.

HADD (see above) is what [Justin] Barrett calls a non-reflective belief, which are always operating in our brains even without our awareness of them. Reflective beliefs, on the other hand, are ones we actively think about. Non-reflective beliefs come from various mental tools, which he terms “intuitive inference systems”.

In addition to agency detection, these mental tools include naive biology, naive physics, and intuitive morality. Naive physics, for example, is the reason children intuitively know that solid objects can’t pass through other solid objects, and that objects fall if they’re not held up. As for intuitive morality, recent research suggests that three-month old “infants’ evaluations of others’ prosocial and antisocial behaviours are consistent with adults’ moral judgments”.

Barrett claims that non-reflective beliefs are crucial in forming reflective beliefs. “The more non-reflective beliefs that converge the more likely a belief becomes reflectively held.” If we want to evaluate humans’ reflective beliefs about God, then we need to start with figuring out whether and how those beliefs are anchored in non-reflective beliefs.

But how do we go from non-reflective beliefs like HADD and Naive Biology to reflective ones like a God who rewards good people and punishes bad ones? It’s here that Barrett invokes the idea of minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts…

A Minimally Counterintutive Concept is one that is congruent with our non-reflective belief systems. It’s something that’s very similar to the things we encounter in everyday life, but just different enough to be more memorable. “MCI concepts are basically intuitive concepts with one or two minor tweaks.”

Barrett gives the example of a flying carpet, which “behaves” like a regular carpet in every way except one. “Such ideas combine the processing ease and efficiency of intuitive ideas with just enough novelty to command attention, and hence receive deeper processing.”
It’s not surprising, then, that cross-cultural studies have shown that MCI concepts are easily recalled and shared. There are two reasons for this, says Barrett. First, MCI concepts maintain their conceptual structure. Second, MCI concepts tend to stand out from among an array of ordinary concepts. “What captures your attention more,” he writes, “a potato that is brown, a potato that weighs two pounds, or an invisible potato?”

Religious beliefs are shared – and they’re shared by human animals with a shared neural anatomy. Our mental toolkit contains built-in biases, such as HADD, which is responsible for a number of false positives. (Most of the time it is just the wind!) For brains that seem wired to find agency and intention everywhere, religion comes very naturally.

Do humans have a religion instinct? (BBC)

A Maximally Counterintutive Concept, by contrast, is one which we have a hard time relating to, so we tend to dismiss it as false, instinctively, regardless of its actual veracity.

I think this explains a lot of the stubborn resistance surrounding Darwinian evolution, as well as a lot of other scientific concepts. The idea that slow, incremental change over time gave rise to the teeming multitude of life around us (including ourselves) seems impossible to believe, as even evolution’s staunchest defenders acknowledge. This is because we think on time scales of years, or maybe decades, based on our lifespans. We simply cannot understand—except at the most abstract, intellectual level—a thousand years, let alone a million years. (1 million is a thousand thousands).

Thus, I would call biological evolution a Maximally Counterintutive Concept.

By contrast, the idea of a creator god is minimally counterintuitive, since we humans intentionally create things all the time. Often, in ancient mythology, God creates the world and man the same way we might create, say, a clay pot or a loaf of bread. That’s not hard for us to understand at all, hence it’s a minimally counterintutive concept. And the concept of a “loving, caring” God is really just a step removed from our own parents.

Another way of putting this is that MCI’s are “viral” from a memetic standpoint; they are especially good at becoming memes. Minimally counterintutive concepts make excellent memes, and so they spread more rapidly and easily than their maximally counterintutive rivals. We’ll take a look at memetic theories of religion a bit later.

In fact, it turns out that a great many scientific concepts are maximally counterintutive. The earth is billions of years old? The universe is expanding? Time slows down with your velocity, or moves faster the higher up you go? Solid matter is mostly empty space? Invisible particles in the atmosphere are changing the climate? Really??? Even simple concepts—like the fact that the earth revolves around the sun and is a sphere—are the opposite of how we actually experience them in daily life.

Richard Dawkins may well be right when he describes the theory of natural selection as one of our species’ finest accomplishments; it is an intellectually satisfying and empirically supported account of our own existence. But almost nobody believes it. One poll found that more than a third of college undergraduates believe that the Garden of Eden was where the first human beings appeared. And even among those who claim to endorse Darwinian evolution, many distort it in one way or another, often seeing it as a mysterious internal force driving species toward perfection. (Dawkins writes that it appears almost as if “the human brain is specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism.”)…

What’s the problem with Darwin? His theory of evolution does clash with the religious beliefs that some people already hold. For Jews and Christians, God willed the world into being in six days, calling different things into existence. Other religions posit more physical processes on the part of the creator or creators, such as vomiting, procreation, masturbation, or the molding of clay. Not much room here for random variation and differential reproductive success.

But the real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum physics; we may intellectually grasp it, but it will never feel right to us. When we see a complex structure, we see it as the product of beliefs and goals and desires. Our social mode of understanding leaves it difficult for us to make sense of it any other way. Our gut feeling is that design requires a designer—a fact that is understandably exploited by those who argue against Darwin.

Is God an Accident? (The Atlantic)

It turns out that Dawkins is right, our brains are designed to misunderstand evolution. It’s much easier to attribute things like thunder and lightning to the “anger” of Zeus or Thor than to something like static electricity differentials, and so forth. It’s a lot easier for the average person to comprehend God’s wrath than plate tectonics. As Insane Clown Posse declared, “I don’t want to hear from no scientist; you fuckers are lyin’ and gettin’ me pissed!” For them, and many others like them, biological reproduction and magnets are simply “miracles”.

4. The Intentional Stance (IS):

This is similar to Theory of Mind: attributing deliberate intentions to other human beings and animals, but also to many things that do not have—and cannot have—intentions and beliefs of their own. This idea was developed by the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

According to Daniel Dennett, there are three different strategies that we might use when confronted with objects or systems: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance. Each of these strategies is predictive. We use them to predict and thereby to explain the behavior of the entity in question. (‘Behavior’ here is meant in a very broad sense, such that the movement of an inanimate object—e.g., the turning of a windmill—counts as behavior.)

The physical stance stems from the perspective of the physical sciences. To predict the behavior of a given entity according to the physical stance, we use information about its physical constitution in conjunction with information about the laws of physics…

When we make a prediction from the design stance, we assume that the entity in question has been designed in a certain way, and we predict that the entity will thus behave as designed…we often gain predictive power when moving from the physical stance to the design stance…

Often, we can improve our predictions yet further by adopting the intentional stance. When making predictions from this stance, we interpret the behavior of the entity in question by treating it as a rational agent whose behavior is governed by intentional states.

The intentional stance (Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind)

A good example might be crossing the street. You can predict from the physical stance how fast you can walk, or how quickly a car can stop taking inertia into account, and so on. You also know the basic mechanics of how a car operates by using the design stance—a car has an engine, brakes, a transmission, an ignition, rubber tires, and so forth. It was designed deliberately by human beings for their use. You know that stoplights are designed to change color to regulate traffic. But to really predict what’s going on, you need to understand what’s in the mind of the driver. For that, you adopt the intentional stance to ascribe beliefs, intentions, motivations, and limitations to the driver. This will ultimately tell you whether the car will stop or not, beyond just the physical and design considerations.

Dennett’s argument (as I understand it) is that the benefits of using the intentional stance cause us to apply it to all sort of things where it does not belong. For example, we tend to attribute intentions, characteristics, and deliberate behavior even to inanimate objects that we know are inanimate objects (like the geometric shapes in the movie, for example). Taken to its logical conclusion, you get things like animism and pantheism.

The sun wants us to have two scoops of raisins in the morning. No clue as to how the raisins feel about being eaten, though.

As Rupert Sheldrake points out, young children often draw the sun with a smiley face in it, like on the box of Raisin Bran. This indicates, according to Sheldrake, that children are “instinctive animists,” attributing human mental characteristics to all sorts of inanimate things in the world around them. Indeed, toddlers will often explain scenarios involving inanimate objects in terms of intentions—i.e. the box “wants” this, or the pencil “feels” that. Cloudy days are when the sun “doesn’t feel like” coming out, or “refuses to shine,” for example.

5. Full Access Agents (FAA):

We’ve previously talked about how we are “instinctive dualists,” dividing the world into one of bodies—subject to the laws of physics and physiology; and one of minds—subject to the laws of human psychology. But for some reason, we attribute superior knowledge to the invisible minds which surround us. These “invisible minds” can be in places we cannot, and can read the beliefs and intentions of others in a way we cannot.

These beings have been called “Full Access Agents”: “By full access agents I mean agents that have an unlimited access to other person’s minds: they are omniscient in the sense that they know all mental contents there are to be known.” [4] p. 31

Closely related to the idea of agency is what Dennett refers to as a cards-up phenomenon. Agency detection carries with it certain risks: do you know about that bad thing I did? How can I be sure you know, and how can I be sure about what you think about me because of it? These are complex questions and human beings aren’t good at managing all the options.

What’s needed for learning how to navigate these muddy waters is for everyone to be taught the rules of the game by placing all of our cards face up on the table. The teacher, then, is something of a full-access agent: they see everything and can instruct us accordingly.

The original full-access agents, says Dennett, were our dead ancestors. But eventually, the seeds of this idea became more formalised in various theologies…

Do humans have a religion instinct? (BBC)

Furthermore, such Full Access Agents have disproportionate access, in particular, to something called “socially strategic information.” Socially strategic information is “information that activates the mental systems used for social interaction. And, “Some theorists have argued that humans throughout history have committed themselves to “the gods” rather than countless other anthropomorphized and supernatural beings (e.g., dragons, trolls, and Mickey Mouse), precisely because the gods have access to socially strategic information.” [5]

Put another way, FAAs help resolve what are called “Multipolar Traps” where equilibrium depends on people not defecting from sort of collective social norm. A multipolar trap can be described as, “a situation where cooperating is in one’s interest only if doing so caused everyone (or almost everyone) else to cooperate.” However, there is always a risk of defection where the defector benefits at the cost of everyone else. Thus, to prevent the defector from winning, everyone needs to update their behavior, and the equilibrium falls apart: “If you cooperate in an environment where most people are defecting, you are only hurting yourself, both in the short-run and in the long-run. If you defect in an environment where most people are cooperating, you benefit yourself in the short and long runs, as well.” Full Access Agents, then, may have helped us escape from the consequences of this trap, allowing for greater cooperation:

“Humans are not very good at behaving just because you punish them for not behaving,” says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, “otherwise we would all be driving well under 70 on the motorway.” The real problem isn’t how bad the punishment is, but how risky it is to be caught.

If the risk is low, he says, we’re prepared for the punishment. This would have been a major issue in prehistory. As hunter-gatherer groups grow, they need to be able enforce a punishment mechanism – but the greater the size of the group, the less chance there is of being found out.

Enter full-access agents: “We don’t see what you do on Saturday night, but there is somebody who does, so beware,” as Dunbar puts it. This idea was consonant with the intuitive mental tools such as HADD and intuitive morality, so it was well-received by our ancestors’ evolved brains. Plus it had the added bonus of regulating behaviour from the bottom up. “You always get better behaviour from individual commitment,” says Dunbar, “not coercion.”

Do humans have a religion instinct? (BBC)

Full Access Agents (FAA), or later, the “Universal Mind” (see EToM, above) were the enforcers of proper behavior: they were the original “Big Brother” from George Orwell’s 1984 (and, in the case of ancestor worship at least, it might literally be your big brother!). While we are fully aware that flawed, flesh-and-blood human beings can be tricked, deceived, and possess false knowledge, for some reason these invisible spirits are not subject to the same deficits:

Across cultures, even children seem to think that gods know more than normal humans. This is borne out by experiments using what psychologists call the ‘false-belief task’, which tests whether individuals can detect that others have false beliefs.

In one version of the test, researchers put a bag of rocks into a box of crackers, showed children what’s inside, and then asked what various entities would think was in the box. If the children said: ‘Mom thinks rocks are in there’, then they haven’t passed the false-belief task. If they said: ‘Mom thinks crackers are in there, but there are really rocks’, they have a handle on the incorrect mental states of others.

What’s curious is that, with age, children come to know that Mom, dogs, and even trees will have incorrect thoughts, but they never extend that vulnerability to God. In fact, the quality of omniscience attributed to God appears to extend to any disembodied entity…Louisville Seminary researchers found that children think imaginary friends know more than flesh-and-blood humans. There appears to be a rule, then, deep in our mental programming that tells us: minds without bodies know more than those with bodies.

Furthermore, we also seem to instinctively believe that the Full Access Agents’ knowledge about moral intentions is superior to that of any other actor, and this belief is consistent across cultures:

Christian students from the University of Connecticut who claim that God knows everything will nonetheless rate His knowledge of moral information as better than His knowledge of non-moral information…As reported in a 2012 article in Cognitive Science, our lab at the University of Connecticut examined what might be called this ‘moralisation bias’ of omniscient beings…What these studies suggest is that we intuitively attach moral information to disembodied minds. And this subtle association can alter our behaviour in significant ways.

In one study, in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in 2011, the psychologist Jared Piazza of Lancaster University and colleagues told children a story about a ghostly princess living in their lab. Though these children never heard a peep from the ghost, they cheated less on a difficult game than a control group of children who were not told the story. This suggests that gods, ghosts and other incorporeal minds might just get us to behave – particularly if we assume that the gods know about our behaviour, and especially if we think they can interfere in our affairs.

From an evolutionary perspective, the gods facilitate social bonds required for survival by raising the stakes of misconduct. Having a cosmic Wyatt Earp on the beat aids survival and reproduction by curbing others’ banditry. If you’re tempted to steal from someone, but know that God cares and has the power to do something about it, you might think twice. If God knows your thoughts, perhaps you wouldn’t even think twice. The Abrahamic God appears to be a punitive, paranoia-inducing Big Brother always watching and concerned with our crimes…

Why God knows more about misbehavior than anything else (Aeon)

As the above essay points out, exactly what the full access agents are interested in tends to vary based on the cultural norms. Some are not particularly concerned with sexuality; others are quite judgemental. In either case, they are hitched to basic human feelings of guilt and shame to enforce pro-social norms. For example, in Tuva (a culturally Mongolian society in Russia), gods are tutelary deities rather than all-knowing patriarchal fathers. Nevertheless, they still enforce social norms concerned with environmental stewardship that cannot be enforced by any external living entity:

The [Tuvan] spirit-masters aren’t as vindictive or punishing as the God of Abraham. However, if you disrespect them or forget to make an offering, your luck can quickly change. They also aren’t omniscient. ‘Does the spirit-master of this area know what happens in another area?’ I would ask when in the field. Responses often consisted of: ‘No, but those spirits know what happens in that area.’

The local gods in Tuva aren’t concerned with morality in the Abrahamic or Western sense; instead, they care about rituals and protecting resources such as natural springs, lakes and hunted animals in their area of governance…through conversations, interviews and a variety of other questioning techniques, Tuvans communicated that their gods care about rituals and practices associated with resource conservation. But when asked, for example: ‘Does this God care about theft?’ they’re more inclined to give affirmative responses than to non‑moral questions ..

It looks as if gods can tap into our mental moral systems regardless of what our explicit beliefs tell us. Even though Tuvans might think that their spirit-masters are unconcerned with how they treat each other (or simply do not talk about their gods in this way), these gods might still contribute to co‑operation. If they trigger Tuvans’ moral cognition, the gods might curb ‘immoral’ behaviour especially when associated with territory.

Unlike the God-as-Big-Brother model of the Abrahamic faiths, spirit-masters follow more of a God-as-shy-but-watchful-landlord model…

Why God knows more about misbehavior than anything else (Aeon)

Once societies became to large for external enforcement agents, it is thought, these invisible spirits stepped in to enforce pro-social behavior: “representations of full-access agents have directly helped reciprocal altruism to evolve because they can help one view things from others’ point of view and can make systems of moralistic punishment possible.” [4] p. 32

…morality predates religion, which certainly makes sense given what we know about the very old origins of empathy and play. But the question remains as to why morality came to be explicitly connected with religion. [Pascal] Boyer grounds this connection in our intuitive morality and our belief that gods and our departed ancestors are interested parties in our moral choices.

“Moral intuitions suggest that if you could see the whole of a situation without any distortion you would immediately grasp whether it was right or wrong. Religious concepts are just concepts of persons with an immediate perspective on the whole of a situation.”
Say I do something that makes me feel guilty. That’s another way of saying that someone with strategic information about my act would consider it wrong. Religion tells me these Someones exist, and that goes a long way to explaining why I felt guilty in the first place. Boyer sums it up in this way: “Most of our moral intuitions are clear but their origin escapes us…Seeing these intuitions as someone’s viewpoint is a simpler way of understanding why we have these intuitions.” Thus, Boyer concludes, religious concepts are in some way “parasitic upon moral intuitions”.

Do humans have a religion instinct? (BBC)

Full access agents, thanks to their all-knowing nature, can also be consulted when big, important decisions need to be made and there is a large element of random chance:

Representation of full-access agents help in strategic decisions: as these are often difficult to make because people do not believe their strategic information is perfect or automatic, they consult full-access agents for advice. In addition, a decision is sometimes difficult to make because the issue at hand is relatively trivial or no alternative stands out as superior. Should I buy this or that gift from my wife? Your place or mine?
Finally, some decisions are difficult to make because too much is at stake. Should I go for the operation when the risk of paralysis is 50 percent? Should we try to bust the terrorists at the risk of losing the hostages lives? [4] p.32

The religion equation.

So, then, our “religion equation” ends up looking something like this: HADD + ToMM + FAA = Religion; or at least the basic form of it.

In Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods and Buddhas, Iikka Pyysiainen derives a slightly different, but similar, equation:

I distinguish three overlapping cognitive mechanisms that contribute to agentive reasoning. The first is hyperactive agent detection (HAD): the tendency to postulate animacy–this mechanism is triggered by cues that are so minimal that it often produced false positive, for example, we see faces in the clouds, mistake shadows for persons, and so forth. Second is hyperactive understanding of intentionality (HUI): the tendency to postulate mentality and to see events as intentionally caused even in the absence of a visible agent. Third is hyperactive teleofunctional reasoning (HTR): the tendency to see objects as existing for a purpose. [4] p. 13

When HADD, HUI, and/or HTR are triggered, giving a false positive, three alternative supernatural explanations are available: the triggering event was caused by (1) a natural agent acting from afar, (2) a present but invisible and intangible agent; or (3) some impersonal force or very abstract kind of agency. The first alternative is represented by beliefs in telepathy, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, and the like; as well as the example of a picture miraculously falling off from the wall. Examples of the second are beliefs about gods, spirits, and other supernatural agents. Third would be a “numinous” force or a very abstract agent such as “the ground of being”. [4] p. 30

These beliefs in noncorporeal beings (agentive reasoning), in whatever form they take—ancestors, nature spirits, or ‘the universal spirit’—who can see into our inner souls and car about our moral choices, is the scaffolding upon which all subsequent religion is erected. Of course, the forms that it takes will vary greatly across cultures and across time. But such universals which give us clues as to religion’s fundamental nature and origin, while looking past the myriad superficial forms it may take.

In the next part of this series, I would like to briefly discuss some other ideas that were not mentioned in the BBC article, but have also been posited as giving rise to religion. These are Terror Management Theory (TMT), Bicameral Mind Theory (BMT) and the Memetic theory of religion.

[1] The Human Brain Evolved to Believe in Gods (Discover Magazine)

[3] The Recursive Mind by Michael Corballis, pp. 137-138

[4] Supernatural Agents: Why We Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas by Iikka Pyysiainen

[5] What Does God Know? Supernatural Agents’ Access to Socially Strategic and Non‐Strategic Information (Cognitive Science)

The Evolution of Consciousness and The Soul


In our discussion of Julian Jaynes’s ideas, reader Speedbird recommended the book “Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry” by Owen Barfield. The above lecture covers that book and illustrates some remarkable overlap between his ideas and those of Jaynes. It’s well worth a listen.

And, related, here’s an essay that cites both:

What Barfield points out is that the distinction between mind and matter, or inside and outside, didn’t exist in early peoples. (This is also the basis of Julian Jaynes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, though being a materialist, Jaynes explains this with the dubious theory that our thinking was done unconsciously in one cranial hemisphere, which then “talked” to the other.) Thinking happened to the person, and was not felt as being produced by the person. In the beginning of the Iliad, Achilles is angry because Agamemnon has taken Achilles’ slave-girl away from him. Achilles naturally wants to kill Agamemnon, but if he does that would be the end of the Greeks’ siege of Troy, so he doesn’t. We would say that reason prevailed, but what Homer says is that Athena tells him not to. It is something outside of Achilles that controls his action. And of course, Homer credits his own work to the Muse. One may also note that it is only recently that “genius” came to mean a great thinker, and not some external source that inspires the thinker. There was innovation in ancient times, but such innovation was credited to divine kings and prophets, not to a common individual’s cleverness.

All this is to say that the growth of control in our thinking, feeling, and willing is a marker of the evolution of consciousness, which amounts to a change of common sense. This control moved from “outside” (belonging to the supernatural) to “inside.” Parallel with this change is a change in sense perception. Supernatural control was exercised equally on humans and nature, which means that humans were just as much “nature” as anything else, all pervaded by spiritual entities. And that was perceived. It was not an “animist belief system” that people made up to explain things. Rather it was, simply, experienced. But as our ability to think grew, the perception of spirit in nature declined, until in modern times it has disappeared. Hence modern common sense divides reality into two: our (more or less) controlled minds on the one hand, and on the other, a mindless physical system.

Idealism vs. Common Sense (Bernardo Kastrup)

And here’s an older article from Psychology Today describing the psychological transformations of the Axial Age. It feeds into our initial question: how was ancient consciousness different from that of contemporary industrial societies?

Before a certain time, some psychologists believe, ancient peoples also differed from us by exhibiting far less capacity to monitor their internal thoughts, feelings, and motives; they engaged in little or no self-reflection, and lacked a personal identity other than a name, parentage, and a recollection of a sequence of life events.

Before the Axial transformation, human beings told one another myths and other stories about how they came to be. The stories were not regarded as true or false; rather, their truth did not require questioning. Such was the state of human beings, Jaspers believed, because of a lack a self-reflective, fully conscious self-understanding. Under such conditions, abstract truths matter not.

During the Axial-age, however, some scholars argue that dramatic shifts took place in human thought across four geographically distinct regions of the world: India, China, the Middle East, and Greece.

New ways of thinking emerged that defined the world’s psychological culture for all time since. Jaspers wrote:

“What is new about this age…is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognising his limits he sets himself the highest goals.”

Big questions that were specifically psychological in nature emerged: “Who am I?” and “Why are people different…

The Significance of the Axial Age (the Great Transformation) (Psychology Today)

Since we’re on the subject of podcasts, this is from an interview with Professor Richard Seaford, whom we first met when we talked about where the ideas about money came from in Classical Greece, and what it’s effects were. Here, Seaford makes the case that the emergence of something like an individual spirit, soul, or essence, was paralleled in both Greek and Indian culture.

This is interesting because one of the consistent criticisms of Julian Jaynes’s work has been that he only looked at Greek culture and ignored other, particularly non-Western, civilizations. But Professor Seaford’s studies indicate parallel developments in the civilizations of Classical India at about the same time (6-5th centuries B.C.). The transition from the Rigveda to the Upanishads seems to follow roughly the same trajectory as that which Jaynes sketched out as taking place between the composition of the Iliad to that of the Odyssey with regards to human self-reflective consciousness (the following transcript not blockquoted for clarity):

[Begin 2:36] SHWEP: “…If there wasn’t a soul, what was a human being before [the Axial Age]?”

Richard Seaford: “Well, the two Axial civilizations that I know best, which are also, I think, the two which are best placed…to answer your question, are Greece and India.”

“Interestingly, you have—both in Greece, and in India—early texts which are roughly speaking pre-philosophical. I’m talking about Homer, in particular, in Greece, and the Rigveda in India; followed by—in both civilizations—something like the birth of philosophy, depending, of course, on how you define philosophy.”

“So that in Greece, you move from the world of Homer—which is, roughly speaking, the eighth century B.C.—to a new conception, a radically new conception, of the universe and man’s place in it, in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., known as pre-Socratic philosophy. And out of pre-Socratic philosophy you have Plato and Aristotle and the whole of ancient philosophy.”

“In India you have the Rigveda, which is (a bit like Homer but even more so) dated to very different periods…from at the earliest about the middle of the second millennium B.C., but clearly the Rigveda—particularly the tenth book—contains material which is much later. And, of course, Homer probably wasn’t written down until the sixth century B.C., but these early Indian texts were not written down until very much later. So the Rigveda was subject to centuries of oral transmission, and therefore very difficult to date.”

“However, what’s interesting, in answer to your question, is that in India from about eighth, seventh, sixth century BC (again dating is impossible with these early Indian texts), you have a new conception of the universe and the place of man in it. Just as in Greece you have a new conception [at] about the same time in the sixth century B.C.”

“And the transition from Homer to pre-Socratic philosophy has some striking similarities to the the transition from the Rigveda to these later texts, in particular the Brahmanas (which are mainly about ritual, but nevertheless contain some proto-philosophical speculation), and the Upanishads. The Upanishads [emerged] out of the need to interpret the sacrifice (which is what the Brahmanas are mainly concerned with), and as a result of the need to interpret the sacrifice, producing something that is legitimate to call philosophy, in which ritual has to a large extent been left behind. That, then, corresponds to pre-Socratic philosophy.”

“Now, what is it that’s similar between the Indian transition and the Greek transition?

Well, let’s take the idea of the ‘inner self,’ or soul. There are a lot of terms which are used for something like the inner self, the soul, the mind, the subject; and it can be quite confusing because they mean different things; they overlap. One is perhaps best advised to think of them in terms of their opposite: so the soul is the opposite to the body…the subject is opposite to the object, and the self is opposite to others. I like the term ‘inner self’ because it implies an individual, but just the ‘inner dimension’ of the individual. It’s quite close, therefore, to soul and mind.”

“Now, it’s striking—and this has been recognized for some time—that in Homer there’s no word for the inner self as a bounded, comprehensive entity of consciousness. That is to say, what we think of as the mind or the soul which constitutes the personality—the ‘real person’ of each individual.”

“I use the terms ‘comprehensive’ and ‘bounded.’ It’s ‘comprehensive’ in the sense that it contains emotions, perceptions, desires; it originates action, it contains the full range of consciousness. It’s ‘bounded’ in the sense that it has boundaries; it can’t be confused with what is outside it. My inner self is quite distinct from your inner self, and my inner self is quite distinct from that table, or my leg. It is a bounded entity.”

“In Homer there’s no word for that. What you have is a number of different words for the various organs of consciousness like thumos meaning ‘spirit,’ or menos meaning something like ‘might,’ and so on. Kradíē. You have a whole list of these Greek words, none of which refers to what later was referred to by the word psuchê (ψυχή), meaning ‘soul,’ which particularly from Plato onward meant precisely this bounded, comprehensive organ of consciousness.”

SHWEP: “We have psuchê in Homer, don’t we? But it means something very different.”

RS: “Yes, we do have psuchê in Homer, but it is has only one role, which is to leave the body on loss of consciousness—whether on death or on fainting. Now the psuchê, then, having left the body on death, goes down to the underworld, and the underworld then has psuchê in it.”

“The psuchê of Patroclus appears in a dream to Achilles late in the Iliad. Now the interesting thing about the psuchê of Patroclus—it’s the dead Patroclus—you can see him, you can hear him, he speaks, he is Patroclus. Except that, there’s a sense in which he doesn’t exist. He’s insubstantial. It’s not quite clear what’s involved here, but he not substantial. Were you to lean out and touch him, he would dissolve like a shadow.”

“However, the fact that he’s Patroclus for all eternity, and in most respects like Patroclus, meant that the psuchê was the word used later on by Plato—but also even before Plato—to refer to the most important part of you, which is the immortal part of you—the part of you which will survive after your death. So you have a development which, in Homer, there is no word for the comprehensive, bounded organ of consciousness. In Plato there is, but the word Plato uses, psuchê, has evolved from being simply the thing which leaves you when you die and plays no role in your life, to the thing which is the most important thing about your life, which is your inner self, which will indeed leave you when you when you die, and is immortal.”

“So, this is an enormous transition in which the psuchê becomes at the center of attention. It, for Plato, is enormously important for understanding the world, and above all for understanding how we should live.”

“Now, if you turn to the Indian material with this question in mind, and ask the same question of the Rigveda: ‘Is there a bounded, comprehensive organ of consciousness?’ The answer, insofar as I can see after some research, is ‘no.’ There are various words—manas, jiva, prana, atman, and so on—none of which refers to a comprehensive, bounded organ of consciousness. So it’s like Homer. And indeed, as in Homer, the words that do exist for organs of consciousness are not particularly important. They’re not at the center of attention. They’re not made into the subjects of sentences in the way that psuchê clearly in Plato is. So it’s rather like Homer.”

“Then you go into the Upanishads—sixth, fifth century B.C., and what you find is that one of the words that was used in the Rigveda as an organ of consciousness, though it sometimes seems to mean rather something like breath, Ātman, has become at the center of everything. The famous expression ‘Ātman is Brahman,’ which you find repeated several times in the early Upanishads, means effectively your Ātman—your inner self—is Brahman, meaning the whole of the universe. Your Ātman is everything. And in the discourse of the early Upanishads, Ātman is enormously important, just as psuchê in Plato is enormously important for understanding the world and how you should live.”

“Now, there are, of course, important differences between the Greek and the Indian material. But this is a respect—and there are others—this is a respect in which they’re strikingly similar. You have a movement from a world in which there is no bounded, comprehensive organ of consciousness, to one in which, not only is there a term for it, but it has become enormously important.” [12:15]

[14:15] RS: “Psuchê is, of course, still with us. We might call it the mind or the soul, but he notion of this bounded inner self is very much still with us…Interestingly, there has been, in the last fifteen years or so, a…debate in British analytic philosophy as to the question of whether the inner self exits.”

“Now, this goes back to David Hume…who said, actually, ‘No the inner self doesn’t exist,’ because if you examine your experience, your emotions, your perceptions, what’s going on in your mind; what you’re aware of is a constant flux of impressions, thoughts, motives, desires, and so on. And where is this ‘extra’ thing which is the inner self? It just isn’t there. We made it up! You don’t need to talk about it in order to describe your subjectivity.”

“Now this position was argued in great sophistication and detail by a man called Derek Parfit in the book called Reasons and Persons. And the counter-position was taken by Richard Sorabji in a subsequent book on the self in which he claims, ‘No, there is an inner self;’ the inner self is what owns our perceptions and emotions and so on.”

“One of the interesting features of [the debate] for me is the terminology used by Sorabji: owns, which must be a metaphor. I mean, ‘ownership’ is legally sanctioned possession. You don’t have legally sanctioned possession of your emotions, but he’s constantly using this word, owns. So the question is, what is it a metaphor for?”

“I don’t believe it’s a metaphor, ultimately. I think that ownership, historically, is crucial in constructing the idea of the inner self, in which I stand apart from my inner data—my desires and perceptions and all the rest of it—in the the way that an owner of goods stands apart from his goods, and yet he has exclusive rights to them in the way that he does to his own body, for example.”

“But another interesting thing, of course, is the fact that its happening at all. Because we just take it as a fact of nature that each of us has an inner self. We reify it. But neither of them—neither Parfit nor Sorabji—consider the question anthropologically. They talk about this issue as if they’re talking about whether Paris is the capital of France or not. It’s just a fact about the world, isn’t it, that you either have it or you don’t have it. But actually, if you look outside the tradition in which they’re operating; outside the Western tradition, particularly at Melanesia, you’ll find a wealth of anthropological writing which shows that these people don’t have a conception of the bounded, comprehensive inner self. They just don’t have it.

“So the question then arises: Have they just not noticed that they’ve got it? This is the question you might put to Sorabji. Are these people in error? Have they gone through their lives just not realizing that they’ve got this thing, they just never got around to noticing it or describing it?”

“And the answer, if you consider it in this light, is, of course, that the inner self is a construction. And, of course, the Buddhists who are cited by Parfitt take the view that we don’t have such a thing…” [End 18:08]

Episode 4: Richard Seaford on the Origins of the Soul (The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast)

The next section puts forward a fascinating thesis briefly touched on above. It is the idea that the notion of the the unique, individual ‘self’ is intrinsically linked with the emergence of inalienable private property rights in a culture! In other words, the idea that I am the absolute “owner” of something that is my own, personal “self,” corresponds to the  notion of “absolute ownership” over things like goods, land, livestock, and chattels, and hence more “modern” economic ideas:

[Begin 20:08] SHWEP: “…Obviously a priori reasoning has led in both directions—to a strong idea of the soul, and to a non-strong idea of the soul. But, you would argue, that this so-called a priori reasoning is always conditioned by the kind of society that a given reasoner finds himself in. That they reason a certain way depending on the kind of society they live in.”

Richard Seaford: “Yes, that’s right. The reason why the issue between Sorabji and Parfitt is undecidable is that the inner self, in my view, is a construction. That’s really pretty much all you can say when it comes to trying to resolve the dispute between them.”

“But then the interesting questions start, which is, why do you find this construction at all? Why do you find this in some societies but not in other societies? And if you look at the anthropological evidence, you can see how the arrival of Western economic models, in particular individual property, promotes the belief in the bounded, individual self.

SHWEP: “Can you talk about exactly what you’re talking about when you say, ‘the arrival of Western economic models?’ And when this is happening, what exactly we are talking about? Money has something to do with it, I believe.”

RS: “Money has something to do with it, but there’s a…for example, there’s a passage written by a Melanesian anthropologist who is describing the arrival of the trade store in a community. And he has experience of this…the arrival of the trade store makes a big difference, because it brings with it different ways of constructing the world in which you can’t just go and take your cousin’s things. If you do that you might get prosecuted. It’s illegal. And people don’t understand this.”

“But now, because of the trade store, what he says is—by looking the way the trade store operates, it does involve money; it does involve commercial relations rather than sharing and gift exchange. In commercial relations, there’s absolute ownership and absolute separation of goods and money from [the] possessor in the exchange, which never occurs in gift exchange. You are always, in some way, identified with what you’ve given, and that creates links between people.

The arrival of the trade store introduces a new model of the person, in which ownership is used to construct the new kind of individual. And if you go to a text which is no doubt somewhat out of date but nevertheless clearly contains some truth by [C.B.] Macpherson about seventeenth century England, you find something very similar. The new conception of the individual is created, he says, by reading back into it ownership of property. Because this is a period in which a new class is establishing itself through the individual ownership of property which is theirs absolutely—it’s not vulnerable to being taken away, in any form, by anybody else. So their freedom and their life potential is defined by the property that they own. And therefore, the notion of the individual is constructed, to some extent at least, out of the institution of individual property.

“If you go to Greece and India, there’s evidence—quite independent from everything I’ve been talking about—for the development of individual property at the expense of ownership by the kinship group.

SHWEP: “So, what is exchange like in the Homeric poems?”

RS: “Well, first of all, in the Homeric poems there’s no money. Second, there’s very little commerce, and its only at the margins and performed by disreputable people like Phoenicians. The main form of exchange is gift exchange, and it’s though gift exchange that you create relations.

“Now, what is exchanged in gift exchange? Well, in Homeric poems—because they’re only concerned with an elite group—it’s prestige objects like tripods and horses and so on. Fine textiles. And that creates links between aristocratic households in different places. And you have genre scenes in which it’s all beautifully described—it’s at the center of what’s going on, socially.”

“When it comes to the Iliad, you have a problem, because the Greeks stormed a city. Not necessarily Troy—they storm a number of other cities. And the issue arises of who has a right to distribute the plunder.”

“Now, it can be done by the Greeks in general, or by the king. The king does it in various versions, and he does it unfairly. So, what he should be doing, is taking this plunder and giving it to Achilles, or Odysseus, or whatever it is. That’s a gift—its not an income—it’s a gift, and by doing that he creates the links. There’s no other link that enables Agamemnon to hold the Greeks into a coherent body. It’s through distributing the goods, and they’re gifts.

“But things go wrong, and Achilles feels slighted, and he withdraws from the battle. So what does Agamemnon do? He offers gifts, lots of them, to bring Achilles back into the battle. But Achilles says, in effect, it’s too late. ‘I hate your gifts’—ekthrati moi tassadoura: ‘Your gifts are hateful to me.’ That is devastating, because it’s not just about Agamemnon and Achilles, it’s about a whole social system breaking down. He’s rejecting the principle of gifts. And there’s something similar that goes on in the Odyssey.”

“So the Iliad and the Odyssey are about what I call, ‘a crisis of reciprocity,’ in which the old economic system has broken down. And it’s precisely in the context, incidentally, of rejecting the gifts that Achilles talks about his own psuchê. And it’s the passage in Homer which becomes closest to the psuchê being what it is later, which is something infinitely valuable which he’s not going to give up in return for gifts.

“So it’s the isolation of Achilles as a result of the breakdown of this exchange system which gives you the first glimpse of what would be so important later, which is the valorization of the individual psuchê.” [End 27:08]

See also: Seaford on Soul, Ritual, and Money (The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast). This is a “members only” podcast, so if anyone would like to “donate” it to me (link, email, Dropbox, etc.), I’d love to have the chance to listen to it!

The Recursive Mind (Review) – 5

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

So far, in our review of The Recursive Mind, we’ve discovered that recursive thinking lay behind such uniquely human traits as grammatical spoken language, mental time travel, Theory of Mind, higher-order religion, and complex kinship groups.


In the final section of the book, Michael C. Corballis ponders when, how, and why we may have acquired these recursive characteristics.

Whether or not recursion holds the key to the human mind, the question remains how we came to be the way we are–at once so dominant over the other apes in terms of behavior and yet so similar in genetic terms…In modern-day science, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the human mind evolved through natural selection, although as we have seen, some recent authors, including Chomsky, still appeal to events that smack of the miraculous—a mutation, perhaps, that suddenly created the capacity for grammatical language…But of course we do have to deal with the seemingly vast psychological distance between ourselves and our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos. p. 167

What follows is a quick tour through the major milestones in becoming human:

1. Walking/Running

The first and most important change was our standing upright and unique walking gait. While bipedalism may seem in retrospect to offer many obvious advantages, it turns out that it may have been not all that advantageous at all:

Bipedalism became obligate rather than facilitative from around two million years ago, and as we shall see, it was from this point that the march to humanity probably began. That is, our forebears finally gained the capacity to walk freely, and perhaps run, in open terrain, losing much of the adaptation to climb trees and move about in the forest canopy.

Even so, it remains unclear just why bipedalism was retained. As a means of locomotion on open terrain, it offers no obvious advantages. Even the knuckle-walking chimpanzee can reach speeds of up to 48 km per hour, whereas a top athlete can run at about 30 km per hour. Other quadrupedal animals, such as horses, dogs, hyenas, or lions, can easily outstrip us, if not leave us for dead. One might even wonder, perhaps, why we didn’t hop rather than stride, emulating the bipedal kangaroo, which can also outstrip us humans…The impression is that the two-legged model, like the Ford Edsel, was launched before the market was ready for it. Or before it was ready for the market, perhaps. pp. 185-186

Of course, bipedalism left the hands free for tool use, but tool use came much later in the human repertoire, so we couldn’t have evolved walking specifically for that. Persistence hunting also seems to have been a later adaptation, so it was also not likely a primary cause. Another possibility is carrying things, perhaps food or infants. Another possibility is language, which, as Corballis argued earlier, may have originated with hand gestures long before verbal communication. If that’s true, then the capacity for language—as opposed to speech—goes back very far in the human repetoire.

One interesting thing I didn’t know is that even though chimpanzees are by far our closest genetic relatives among the great apes, anatomically we are closer to orangutans. This means that our transition to bipedalism may have developed not from knuckle-walking, as commonly presumed, but from hand-assisted bipedalism, where we walked upright along horizontal branches in the forest canopy, supported by our arms. The knuckle-walking gait of our chimp/bonobo cousins may not derive from our common ancestor, but may have developed after the split from the human lineage as an alternative method of crossing open territory.

The most arboreal of the great apes is the orangutan, which is more distantly related to us than either the chimpanzee or gorilla. Nevertheless its body morphology is closer to that of the human than is that of chimpanzee or gorilla.

In the forest canopy of Indonesia and Malaysia, orangutans typically adopt a posture known as hand-assisted bipedalism, supporting themselves upright on horizontal branches by holding on to other branches, usually above their heads. They stand and clamber along the branches with the legs extended, whereas chimpanzees and gorillas stand and move with flexed legs. Chimpanzees and gorillas may have adapted to climbing more vertically angled branches, involving flexed knees and a more crouched posture, leading eventually to knuckle-walking as the forested environment gave way to more open terrain. If this scenario is correct, our bipedal stance may derive from hand-assisted bipedalism, going back some 20 million years. Knuckle-walking, not bipedalism, was the true innovation. p. 184

In an earlier post we mentioned an updated version of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (AAH), today called by some the “Littoral Hypothesis.” The following is taken from another book by Corballis entitled “The Truth About Language”, where he goes into more detail:

Another view is that our forebears inhabited coastal areas rather than the savanna, foraging in water for shellfish and waterborne plants, and that this had a profound influence on our bodily characteristics and even our brain size. This aquatic phase may perhaps have preceded a later transition to the savanna. p. 48…Superficially, at least, it seems to explain a number of the characteristics that distinguish humans from other living apes. These include hairlessness, subcutaneous fat, bipedalism, our large brains, and even language…p. 95…The ability to breathe voluntarily…was an adaptation to diving, where you need to hyperventilate before plunging and then holding your breath during the dive. The fine-motor control over lips, tongue, velum, and throat necessary for producing consonants evolved for the swallowing of soft, slippery foods such as mollusks without biting or chewing. Think of oysters and white wine. p. 162

Philip Tobias once suggested that the term aquatic ape should be dropped, as it had acquired some notoriety over some of its more extravagant claims. [Mark] Verhaegen suggests that the aquatic theory should really be renamed “the littoral theory,” because early Homo was not so much immersed in water as foraging on the water’s edge, diving or searching in shallow water, and probably also roaming inland. p. 162…Tobias died in 2011, but in a chapter published in 2011 he wrote: “In contrast with the heavy, earth-bound view of hominin evolution, an appeal is made here for students of hominin evolution to body up, lighten and leaven their strategy by adopting a far great [sic] emphasis on the role of water and waterways in hominin phylogeny, diversification, and dispersal from one watergirt [sic] milieu to others…p. 95… Even in its modern form the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH) remains controversial. Verhaegen quotes Wikipedia as asserting that “there is no fossil evidence for the AAH”; he disagrees, citing evidence that “virtually all archaic Homo sites are associated with abundant edible shellfish…162

To me, one of the more convincing arguments for a water-related evolutionary path for humans is the idea of giving birth in water. This may have been the way we accommodated a larger skull size alongside a pelvis designed for upright walking. I got this idea when I read an article several years ago about a woman who gave birth in water. Her husband recorded the birth and put it on the internet. The clip went viral since the birth took place almost effortlessly, with none of the agonizing pain which normally accompanies hospital births. This would also explain why human babies alone among the primates know instinctively to hold their breath in water. Perhaps human females are ideally meant to give birth in water—a practice that is once again achieving popularity in some alternative circles. Here’s the story:

Mum’s water birth video stuns the internet (BBC)

At this time, human ancestors adopted a “dual-mode” existence, using facilitative bipedalism, to migrate across the rapidly expanding grasslands, but retaining the ability to take refuge in the tree canopy if needed. This is evident from the anatomy of the various species of  Australopithecus, who were able to walk upright, but retained hands, feet and arms that allowed them to climb trees and hang from branches. These chimp-sized animals may have adopted a scavenging mode of existence to get their daily protein; cracking bones with stones to get at marrow inside, and stealing eggs from nests, while retreating back into the forest canopy when faced with fiercer competition. The most famous Australopithecus, Lucy, appears to have died by falling out of a tree. They may have done this activity during the heat of the day, leading to the gradual loss of hair and addition of sweat glands, since many big predators are crepuscular or nocturnal. They were already fairly social animals, and when threatened, they may have responded by banding together and hurling stones at their predators and rivals when threatened, as explored further below.

2. Throwing

Humans are able to throw projectiles with much greater force and accuracy than any other primate, or really any other animal. Of course, other monkeys and chimps do hurl things (such as poo) when they are upset. But in humans, this ability evolved to its furthest extent.

We probably first began by throwing rocks and stones, a technique that is far more effective when done in groups, as William Von Hippel noted in The Social Leap. From there, we graduated to spears, javelins, and boomerangs, and then invented devices to further enhance our throwing capacity such as spear-throwers (woomeras) and slings. Slings continued to be devastating weapons on the battlefield well into historical times–during Roman times, the most famous and effective slingers came from the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean, and were widely employed as mercenaries.

Paul Bingham has argued that one of the characteristics that have reinforced social cohesion in humans is the ability to kill at a distance. Human societies can therefore be rid of dissenters in their midst, or threats from the outside, with relatively little threat of harm to the killer! Nevertheless the dissenters, or the rival band, may themselves resort to similar tactics, and so began an arms race that has continued to this day. It started, perhaps, with the throwing of rocks, followed in succession by axes, spears, boomerangs, bows and arrows, guns, rockets, bombs, and nuclear missiles, not to mention insults. Such are the marks of human progress…

Whether or not it was throwing that sustained bipedalism in an increasingly terrestrial existence, it does at least illustrate that bipedalism frees the hands for intentional potentially skilled action. It allows us to use our hands for much more than specifically chucking stuff about. Moreover, our primate heritage means that our arms are largely under intentional control, creating a new potential for operating on the world, instead of passively adapting to it. Once freed from locomotory duty, our hands and arms are also free to move in four-dimensional space, which makes them ideal signaling systems for creating and sending messages… p. 190

The idea that we evolved to throw also helps explain the mystery of the seeming perfection of the human hand, described by Jacob Bronowski as “the cutting edge of the mind.” Adding to the power and precision of throwing are the sensitivity of the fingers, the long opposable thumb, and the large area of the cortex involved in control of the hand. The shape of the hand evolved in ways consistent with holding and hurling rocks of about the size of modern baseballs or cricket balls, missile substitutes in modern pretend war. In real war, hand grenades are about the same size.

Our hands have also evolved to provide two kinds of grip, a precision grip and a power grip, and Richard W. Young suggests that these evolved for throwing and clubbing, respectively. Not only do we see young men throwing things about in sporting arenas, but we also see them wielding clubs, as in sports such as baseball, cricket, hockey, or curling. In various forms of racquet sports, the skills of clubbing and throwing seem to be combined. p. 188

3. Extended Social Groups

The last common ancestor of humans and chimps may have lived in the Pliocene Epoch which began some 5.333 million years ago. As it ended, it transitioned into the Pleistocene, which was characterized by a rapidly changing climate which featured a recurring series of crippling ice ages. The Pleistocene lasted from about 2.588 million years ago, to roughly 12,000 years ago, succeeded by the more stable climate of the Holocene. It was during the Pleistocene era that woodlands shrank and were replaced by open grasslands. During this time, the genus Homo emerged, and human ancestors permanently transitioned from an arboreal existence to becoming savanna-based hunter-gatherers, possibly beginning as scavengers.

Adaptability was key. Any species which relied solely on the slow pace of genetic evolution would have been at a severe disadvantage in the rapidly changing world of the Pleistocene. The newly-evolved Homo genus, with its omnivorous diet, free hands for tool use, upright gait, large brains, and gregarious social nature, was ideally suited for this epoch. During this time, walking went from facilitative to obligatory, and we left the tree canopy behind for good. Homo habilis was already using stone tools near the beginning of this era (although earlier Australopithecines may have used some tools as well). Then came a plethora of upright-walking, tool-using apes: Homo rudolfensis; Homo ergaster; and the always-popular with schoolchildren Homo erectus.

Humans have been using tools for 300,000 years longer than we thought (io9)

Coming from the forest and moving out onto the savanna, these apes could not compete on speed, strength or aggressiveness against the big predators. What did they do? The solution was to form larger and more tightly-knit social groups. It is these social groups that are thought to have been a primary driver behind increasing intelligence and brain expansion (about which, more below).

An especially dangerous feature of the savanna was the presence of large carnivorous animals, whose numbers peaked in the early Pleistocene. They included at least 12 species of saber-tooth cats and nine species of hyena. Our puny forebears had previously been able to seek cover from these dangerous predators in more forested areas, and perhaps by retreating into water, but such means of escape were relatively sparse on the savanna. Not only did the hominins have to avoid being hunted down by these professional killers, with sharp teeth and claws, and immense speed and strength, but they also had to compete with them for food resources. p. 192

It was human intelligence and sociability that allowed our ancestors to survive in this threatening environment—a combination of man’s “intellectual powers,” and “social qualities,” as Charles Darwin put it.

The hominins therefore built on their primate inheritance of intelligence and social structure rather than on physical attributes of strength or speed. This is what might be termed the third way, which was to evolve what has been termed the “cognitive niche,” a mode of living built on social cohesion, cooperation, and efficient planning. It was a question of survival of the smartest. p. 194

It was not only our social nature, but our unique social strategy which is different from all other primates. Simply put, we developed extended families. We also developed cooperative child-rearing and pair-bonding, which allowed us to evolve larger social groups that other primates, who remain largely in fixed-size groups throughout their lives and do not typically develop deep relationships outside of it.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was argued that social bonding evolved first in the context of child rearing, She points out that great apes are loathe to allow others to touch their infants during the first few months, whereas human mothers are very trusting in allowing others to carry and nurture their babies. This is evident not only in daycare centers, but in extended families units [sic] that characterize many peoples of the world. Among New Zealand Maori, for instance, initial teaching and socialization is based on a larger unit known as whanau, which is the extended family, including children, parents, grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts, and often beyond. The understanding of whanau is recursive, looping back many generations. p. 194

It takes a village indeed!

This puts paid to all seventeenth-century English Liberal notions of government that rely on “voluntary associations” or purposeful submission to a despot in exchange for protection and order. Governments did not form in order to secure “private property” as John Locke argued, nor were early societies a “war of all against all” as Hobbes thought—we would have gone extinct long ago if that were the case. It is private property, not social organization, which is novel in the human experience. Since extended families and kinship groups predate the genus Homo, the fact is that we humans have never had to make any sort of conscious, rational decision to form complex social groups—we are literally born into them! The question is, rather, how such groups evolved from the small tribal societies of the past into today’s large, impersonal, market-based nation-states.

4. Controlled use of Fire

At some point, humans harnessed fire, the only species (that we know of ) to do so. To get a bit more technical, we harnessed a source of extrasomatic energy, later supplemented by fossil fuels. Exactly when this occurred, however, is a matter of debate. Fire does not fossilize, and while the results of ancient combustion can be detected, it is often difficult to determine whether these were natural or artificially-controlled fires. Rather, arguments for a very archaic use of fire come primarily from human anatomy—humans are adapted to cooked food and cannot survive on strictly raw food diets, unlike chimps and gorillas. This leads to the conclusion that humans have been using fire long enough to evolve a dependency on it—certainly for hundreds of thousands of years, at least. Our small jaws, duller teeth, shorter intestines, and bulbous skulls all derive from anatomical changes due to cooking. Some recent evidence has suggested fire use over one million years ago. It indicates that that sitting around a campfire and telling stories has been part of social bonding since time immemorial.

Richard Wrangham has suggested that the secret of hominin evolution originated in the controlled use of fire, which supplied warmth and protection from hostile predators. From around two million years ago, he thinks, Homo erectus also began to cook tubers, greatly increasing their digestibility and nutritional value. Cooked potatoes, I’m sure you will agree, are more palatable than raw ones. Other species may have been handicapped because they lacked the tools to dig for tubers, or the means to cook them.

Cooked food is softer, leading to the small mouths, weak jaws, and short digestive system that distinguish Homo from earlier hominins and other apes. Cooking also led to division of labor the sexes, with women gathering tubers and cooking them while the men hunted game. At the same time, these complementary roles encouraged pair bonding, so that the man can be assured of something to eat if his hunting expedition fails to produce meat to go with the vegetables. p. 195

5. Rapid Brain Expansion

During the Pleistocene, the human brain underwent a remarkable and unprecedented expansion for reasons that are still debated. From Australopithecenes to archaic humans, the brain roughly tripled in size. The size of the brain is correlated roughly to an organism’s body size. This is known as the encephalization quotient. Given human’s relatively small body size, our brains are much larger than they “should” be. It’s also an energy hog, taking up some 20 percent of our metabolism to keep running.

Fossil evidence shows that brain size remained fairly static in the hominins for some four million years after the split from the apes. For example, Australopithecus Afarensis…had a brain size of about 433 cc, slightly over the chimpanzee size of about 393 cc, but less than that of the much larger gorilla at 465 cc. It was the emergence of the genus Homo that signaled the change. Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis were still clumsily bipedal but their brains ranged in size from around 500 CC to about 750 CC, a small increase over that of earlier hominins. Homo ergaster emerged a little over 1.8 million years ago, and by some 1.2 million years ago boasted a brain size a some 1,250 cc. Thus in a space of about 750,000 years, brain size more than doubled—that’s pretty quick on an evolutionary time scale.

Brain size continued to increase at a slower rate. It appears to have reached a peak, not with Homo sapiens, dating from about 170,000 years ago, but with Neanderthals…In some individual Neanderthals, brain capacity seems to have been as high as 1,800 cc, with an average of about 1,450 cc. Brain size in our own species, Homo sapiens, is a little lower, with a present-day average f about 1,350 cc, but still about three times the size expected of an ape with the same body size…this final increase in brain size—the dash for the summit as it were—seems to have coincided with an advance in technological innovation over that which had prevailed for the previous 1.5 million years. pp. 198-199

It’s not just the expansion of the brain that is remarkable, but the expansion of the neocortex, or “outer shell” of the brain where many of the “higher” cognitive functions reside. Here, too, we find that the human neocortex is much larger than expected given the size of the brain and body. The size of the neocortex is roughly correlated with intelligence and the size of the social group in mammals, giving us some indication of the intelligence and group size of early human ancestors. “Humans have the largest neocortical ratio, at 4.1, closely followed by the chimpanzee at 3.2. Gorillas lumber in at 2.65, orangutans at 2.99, and gibbons at 2.08. According to the equation relating group size to neocortical ratio, humans should belong to groups of 148, give or take about 50. This is reasonably consistent with the estimated sizes of early Neolithic villages.” (p. 198)

Robin Dunbar has suggested that even though Neanderthal brains were larger overall than Homo sapiens, more of their neocortex was devoted to visual processing—their skulls indicate eyes that were 20 percent larger than our own. This was an adaptation to the darkness of the northern climes. The running of this enlarged visual system, he argues, precluded parts of the brain from being harnessed for other uses—social uses in particular. Thus, Neanderthals were not able to develop larger groupings, or things such as higher-order religions and recursion, he argues. Homo sapiens, evolving in the more tropical regions of Africa, did not have this same handicap.

Perhaps the most extraordinary revelation from this chapter is that there appear to be significant genetic changes to the brain within recorded history!

We are beginning to learn something of the genetic changes that gave us our swollen heads. One gene known to be a specific regulator of brain size is the abnormal spindle-like microcephaly associated (ASPM) gene, and the evidence suggests strong positive selection of this gene in the lineage leading to Homo sapiens. Indeed, a selective sweep appears to have occurred as recently as 5,800 years ago, suggesting that the human brain is still undergoing rapid evolution. Another gene known as microcephalin (MCPH6) has also been shown to regulate brain size, and one variant in modern humans arose an estimated 37,000 years ago. Other genes involved in the control of brain size that have undergone accelerated rates of protein evolution at points in human lineage have also been identified. p. 199

What’s most extraordinary about this information, given our discussion of Julian Jaynes’s theories, is that the evidence above indicates a selective sweep of genes that affect brain development in exactly the time-frame specified by Jaynes—something that Jaynes’s critics have always claimed was patently impossible! Of course, this does not mean that these genes are what lay behind his hypothesized development of “consciousness”—only that it is possible that there were indeed changes to how the brain functions within recorded history.

Often it’s claimed that the breakdown of the bicameral mind was due to a massive change in the brain’s architecture. Critics mistakenly assert that Jaynes implied that the corpus callosum—the massive bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres—evolved during historical times. But Jaynes claims nothing of the sort! While he discusses split-brained patients (with a severed corpus callosum) in order to understand the separate functions of each hemisphere, nowhere does he imply any recent anatomical changes to the brain’s basic structure. And, besides, the fact that hearing voices is common in humans today, indicates that such a massive change is not needed in any case. Rather, only a slight change in perception was required. Jaynes suggests that it was an inhibition in communication between Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, which are connected by the anterior commisure, which might have contributed to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. There is also evidence that the amount of “white matter” in the brain (as contrasted with gray matter), changes brain function, and abnormalities in white matter have been associated with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. We have no idea whether the genes specified above had anything to do with this, of course. But preliminary data show that this gene does not affect IQ, so it was not raw intelligence which cause the selective sweep of the ASPM gene. Could this gene have altered some of the functioning of the brain much in the manner Jaynes described, and did this give rise to the recursive “self” developing and expanding sometime during the late Bronze Age? Here we can only speculate.

Here’s anthropologist John Hawks explaining the significance of this discovery:

Haplogroup D for Microcephalin apparently came under selection around 37,000 years ago (confidence limit from 14,000 to 60,000 years ago). This is very, very recent compared to the overall coalescence age of all the haplotypes at the locus (1.7 million years). Some populations have this allele at 100 percent, while many others are above 70 or 80 percent. Selection on the allele must therefore have been pretty strong to cause this rapid increase in frequency. If the effect of the allele is additive or dominant, this selective advantage would be on the order of 2 or 3 percent — an advantage in reproduction.

The story for ASPM is similar, but even more extreme. Here, the selected allele came under selection only 5800 years ago (!) (confidence between 500 and 14,100 years). Its proliferation has almost entirely occurred within the bounds of recorded history. And to come to its present high proportion in some populations of near 50 percent in such a short time, its selective advantage must have been very strong indeed — on the order of 5 to 8 percent. In other words, for every twenty children of people without the selected D haplogroup, people with a copy of the allele averaged twenty-one, or slightly more.

Recent human brain evolution and population differences (john hawks weblog)

In a bizarre Planet of the Apes scenario, Chinese scientists have recently inserted human genes related to brain growth and cognition into moneys in order to determine what role genes play in the evolution of intelligence:

Human intelligence is one of evolution’s most consequential inventions. It is the result of a sprint that started millions of years ago, leading to ever bigger brains and new abilities. Eventually, humans stood upright, took up the plow, and created civilization, while our primate cousins stayed in the trees.

Now scientists in southern China report that they’ve tried to narrow the evolutionary gap, creating several transgenic macaque monkeys with extra copies of a human gene suspected of playing a role in shaping human intelligence.

“This was the first attempt to understand the evolution of human cognition using a transgenic monkey model,” says Bing Su, the geneticist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology who led the effort…

…What we know is that our humanlike ancestors’ brains rapidly grew in size and power. To find the genes that caused the change, scientists have sought out differences between humans and chimpanzees, whose genes are about 98% similar to ours. The objective, says, Sikela, was to locate “the jewels of our genome”—that is, the DNA that makes us uniquely human.

For instance, one popular candidate gene called FOXP2—the “language gene” in press reports—became famous for its potential link to human speech. (A British family whose members inherited an abnormal version had trouble speaking.) Scientists from Tokyo to Berlin were soon mutating the gene in mice and listening with ultrasonic microphones to see if their squeaks changed.

Su was fascinated by a different gene: MCPH1, or microcephalin. Not only did the gene’s sequence differ between humans and apes, but babies with damage to microcephalin are born with tiny heads, providing a link to brain size. With his students, Su once used calipers and head spanners to the measure the heads of 867 Chinese men and women to see if the results could be explained by differences in the gene.

By 2010, though, Su saw a chance to carry out a potentially more definitive experiment—adding the human microcephalin gene to a monkey…

Chinese scientists have put human brain genes in monkeys—and yes, they may be smarter (MIT Technology Review)

One of the more remarkable theories behind brain growth argues that a virus, or perhaps even symbiotic bacteria, helped along human brain growth, and hence, intelligence. Robin Dunbar raises the intriguing possibility that brain expansion was fuelled by a symbiotic alliance with the tuberculosis bacterium!

The problem of supporting a large brain is so demanding that it may have resulted in the rather intriguing possibility that we used external help to do so in the form of the tuberculosis bacterium. Although TB is often seen as a terrible disease, in fact only 5 per cent of those who carry the bacterium are symptomatic, and only a proportion of those die (usually when the symptoms are exacerbated by poor living conditions). In fact, the TB bacterium behaves much more like a symbiont than a pathogen – even though, like many of our other symbionts, it can become pathogenic under extreme conditions. The important issue is that the bacterium excretes nicotinamide (vitamin B3), a vitamin that turns out to be crucial for normal brain development. Chronic shortage of B3 rapidly triggers degenerative brain conditions like pellagra. The crucial point here is that vitamin B3 is primarily available only from meat, and so a supplementary source of B3 might have become desirable once meat came to play a central role in our diet. Hunting, unlike gathering, is always a bit chancy, and meat supplies are invariably rather unpredictable. This may have become even more crucial during the Neolithic: cereals, in particular, are poor in vitamin B3 and a regular alternative supply might have become essential after the switch to settled agriculture.

Although it was once thought that humans caught TB from their cattle after domestication around 8,000 years ago, the genetic evidence now suggests that human and bovine TB are completely separate strains, and that the human form dates back at least 70,000 years. If so, its appearance is suspiciously close to the sudden upsurge in brain size in anatomically modern humans that started around 100,000 years ago. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior by Robin Dunbar; pp. 248-249

6. Childhood

It’s not just brain size. The human brain undergoes an unusually large amount of development after birth, unlike most other species, even other great apes. Other great apes don’t have things like extended childhoods and adolescence. It leads to the helplessness and utter dependency of our infants in the near term, but it has a big payoff in social adaptability in the long term. It means that humans’ intellectual capabilities can be—to a large extent—shaped by the environment they are born into, rather than just genes. The brain is “wired up” based on the needs of the environment it is born into. This affects things like language and sociability. This is key to what we saw above: adaptability and behavioral flexibility were the key to our species’ success.

Another critical difference between humans and other primates lies in the way in which the human brain develops from birth to adulthood. We humans appear to be unique among our fellow primates, and perhaps even among the hominins, in passing through four developmental stages–infancy, childhood, juvenality, and adolescence…During infancy, lasting from birth to age two and a half, infants proceed from babbling to the point that they know that words or gestures have meaning, and can string them together in two-word sentences. This is about the level that the bonobo Kanzi has reached…it is the next stage, childhood, that seems to be especially critical to the emergence of grammatical language and theory of mind…Childhood seems to be the language link that is missing in great apes and the early hominins, which may account for the fact that, so far at least, great apes have not acquired recursive grammar. But it is also during childhood that theory of mind, episodic memory, and understanding of the future emerge. Childhood may be the crucible of the recursive mind.

During the juvenile phase, from age 7 to around 10, children begin to appreciate the more pragmatic use of language, and how to use language to achieve social ends. The final stage is adolescence, which…is…unique to our own species, and sees the full flowering of pragmatic and social function, in such activities as storytelling, gossip, and sexual maneuvering. Adolescence also has a distinctive effect on male speech, since the surge of testosterone increases the length and mass of the vocal folds, and lowers the vibration frequency…

Locke and Bogin focus on language, but the staged manner in which the brain develops may account more generally for the recursive structure of the human mind. Recursive embedding implies hierarchical structure, involving metacontrol over what is embedded in what, and how many layers of embedding are constructed. Early development may establish basic routines that are later organized in recursive fashion.
pp. 201-203

I’ve always been struck by how children who are more intellectually precocious tend to take longer to mature—they are “late bloomers.” In contrast, there are those who mature very quickly and then hit a plateau. Of course, we lump them all together in prison-like schools according to chronological age , despite highly variable developmental speed and gender differences. This leads to all sorts of  bulling and abuse, as the faster-developing “jocks” torment the slower-developing “nerds”—a feature unique to modern industrial civilization. The emotional scarring resulting from this scenario causes incalculable amounts of suffering and misery, but I digress…

Human children are the most voracious learners planet Earth has ever seen, and they are that way because their brains are still rapidly developing after birth. Neoteny, and the childhood it spawned, not only extended the time during which we grow up but ensured that we spent it developing not inside the safety of the womb but outside in the wide, convoluted, and unpredictable world.

The same neuronal networks that in other animals are largely set before or shortly after birth remain open and flexible in us. Other primates also exhibit “sensitive periods” for learning as their brains develop, but they pass quickly, and their brain circuitry is mostly established by their first birthday, leaving them far less touched by the experiences of their youth.

Based on the current fossil evidence, this was true to a lesser extent of the 26 other savanna apes and humans. Homo habilis, H. ergaster, H. erectus, even H. heidelbergensis (which is likely the common ancestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and us), all had prolonged childhoods compared with chimpanzees and gorillas, but none as long as ours. In fact, Harvard paleoanthropologist Tanya Smith and her colleagues have found that Neanderthals reversed the trend. By the time they met their end around 30,000 years ago, they were reaching childbearing age at about the age of 11 or 12, which is three to five years earlier than their Homo sapiens cousins…

We are different. During those six critical years, our brains furiously wire and rewire themselves, capturing experience, encoding and applying it to the needs of our particular life. Our extended childhood essentially enables our brains to better match our experience and environment. It is the foundation of the thing we call our personalities, the attributes that make you you and me me. Without it, you would be far more similar to everyone else, far less quirky and creative and less, well … you. Our childhood also helps explain how chimpanzees, remarkable as they are, can have 99 percent of our DNA but nothing like the same level of diversity, complexity, or inventiveness.

The Evolution of childhood: Prolonged development helped Homo sapiens succeed (Slate)

7. Tool Use

Humans used tools largely in the context of hunting and butchering large prey. Humans probably also used tools to secure other resources, such as the digging up of tubers mentioned earlier. Gourds and eggshells are used by foragers to carry water. Slings may have been used for rocks from a long time ago. In the book The Artificial Ape, archaeologist Timothy Taylor argued that humans must have used baby slings—probably made from animal pelts—to carry their infants as far back as a million years ago. He makes this case since infants cannot walk effectively for the first few years of their life, and since early humans were constantly on the move, mothers must have had some way of efficiently carrying their offspring that left their hands free (other apes cling to mother’s hair—not an option for us). He argues that the sling is critical to allowing our infants to be born as helpless as they are, and thus facilitated the extended infancy described above. Fire may have also been a useful tool—many cultures around the world have used it to reshape the natural landscape and drive game.

When looking at the long arc of history, what stands out is not so much the rapidity of cultural change, but rather just how slow tool use and development was over millions of years. While today we are used to rapid, constant technological change, during the Pleistocene toolkits often remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years. So much for innovation!

Nevertheless advances in toolmaking were slow. There is little to suggest that the early hominins were any more adept at making or using tools than are present-day chimpanzees, despite being bipedal, and it was not really until the appearance of the genus Homo that toolmaking became more sophisticated.

The earliest such tools date from about 2.5 million years ago, and are tentatively associated with H, rudolfensis. These tools, relatively crude cutters and scrapers, make up what is known as the Oldowan industry. A somewhat more sophisticated tool industry, known as the Acheulian industry, dates from around 1.6 million years ago in Africa, with bifacial tools and hand-axes…The Acheulian industry remained fairly static for about 1.5 million years, and seems to have persisted in at least one human site dating from only 125,000 years ago. Nevertheless, there was an acceleration of technological invention from around 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, when the Acheulian industry gave way to the more versatile Levallois technology. Tools comprising combinations of elements began to appear, including axes, knives and scrapers mounted with hafts or handles, and stone-tipped spears. John F. Hoffecker sees the origins of recursion on these combinatorial tools, which were associated with our own forebears, as well as with the Neanderthals, who evolved separately from around 700,000 years ago. pp. 205-206

Corballis speculates that the rapid tool advancement seen in more recent Homo sapiens owes its origins more to our evolved social capabilities than to developments resulting from the primitive crude stone tools of our earlier ancestors: “My guess is that recursive thought probably evolved in social interaction and communication before it was evident in the material creations of our forebears. The recursiveiness and generativity of technology, and of such modern artifacts as mathematics, computers, machines, cities, art, and music, probably owe their origins to the complexities of social interaction and story telling, rather than to the crafting of tools…” (p. 206)

The full flowering of stone tool technology came during a period called the Upper Paleolithic, or Late Stone Age, also associated with such behaviorally modern artifacts as sculptural “Venus” figurines, cave paintings, and deliberate burials (indicating some rudimentary religious belief). The adoption of such “modern” behavioral traits, and the adoption of vastly more sophisticated tools is related, argues Corballis:

This second wave of innovation was most pronounced in Europe and western Asia, beginning roughly when Homo sapiens arrived there. The Upper Paleolithic marked nearly 30,000 years of almost constant change, culminating in a level of modernity equivalent to that of many present-day indigenous peoples. Technological advances included clothing, watercraft, heated shelters, refrigerated storage pits, and bows and arrows. Elegant flutes made from bone and ivory have been unearthed in southwest Germany, dated at some 40,000 years ago, suggesting early musical ensembles…Flax fibers dating from 30,000 years ago have been found in a cave in Georgia, and were probably used in hafting axes and spears, and perhaps to make textiles; and the presence of hair suggests also that they were used to sew clothes out of animal skins. The people of this period mixed chemical compounds, made kilns to fire ceramics, and domesticated other species.

Stone tools date from over two million years ago, but remained fairly static until the Upper Paleolithic, when they developed to include more sophisticated blade tools, as well as burins and tools for grinding. Tools were also fashioned from other materials, such as bone and ivory, and included needles, awls, drills, and fishhooks…p. 214

8. Migration

The general consensus today is that all modern humans are descended from groups that left Africa after 70,000 years ago, perhaps driven by climate change. These migrants eventually displaced all earlier species of archaic Homo. We also know that  some interbreeding between our ancestors and these other species took place. Humans carry DNA signatures from Neanderthals, Denisovans, and an as-yet-undiscovered human ancestor.

Evolutionary biologists have classified six major haplogroups of humans: L0, L1, L2, L3, M and N. A haplogroup is a large grouping of haplotypes, which are groups of alleles (variant forms of a gene) inherited from a single parent. In this case, geneticists used mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited exclusively from our mothers, to specify the haplogroups. Mitochondria—the “battery” of the cell, began its existence as symbiotic bacteria, and thus has a distinct genetic signature. Of the four “L” haplogroups, only L3 migrated out of Africa. The M and N haplogroups are a descendants of the L3 haplogroup. Haplogroup M has a more recent common ancestor than haplogroup N, and is found both inside and outside Africa. All indigenous lineages outside of Africa are derived from the M and N haplogroups, exclusively.

Why haplogroup L3 alone migrated out of Africa is a big question. Another related big question for evolutionary biologists is, how much of modern human behavior existed in Africa prior to this outmigration, and how much of human behavior arose after it? For example, did complex spoken language evolve before or after we left Africa? What about symbolic thought, art, religion, and sophisticated tool use? Did we use fire? Given that fact that sapiens displaced all the earlier hominins who had evolved outside of the continent (most likely from Homo heidelbergensis, and perhaps a few remote branches of erectus), we must have had some kind of innate advantage over the native inhabitants, the thinking goes. What exactly it was has proved harder to determine, but recursion might well be the answer.

The population of the earliest lineage, L0, is estimated to have expanded through the period 200,000 to 100,000 years ago. . . The L0 and L1 lineages exist at higher frequencies than the other lineages among present-day hunter-gatherers, who may therefore offer a window into the early history of Homo sapiens…The L3 lineage is of special interest, because it expanded rapidly m size from about 60,000 to 80,000 years ago, and seems to have been the launching pad for the migrations out of Africa that eventually populated the globe. Of the two non-African lineages that are the immediate descendants of L3, lineage M is estimated to have migrated out of Africa between 53,000 and 69,000 years ago, and lineage N between 50,000 and 64,000 years ago.

Why did L3 expand so rapidly, and migrate from Africa? One suggestion 1s that L3 gained some cultural advantage over the other lineages, perhaps through the invention of superior technologies, and that this gave them the means to migrate successfully. Paul Mellars suggests that the African exodus was predated by advances in toolmaking, including new stone-blade technologies, the working of animal skins, hafted implements, and ornaments. Some of the improvements in tool technology can be attributed to the use of fire to improve the flaking properties of stone, which dates from around 72,000 years ago in the south coast of Africa…

It need not follow that the L3 people were biologically more advanced than their African cousins, and it may well be that the exodus was driven by climate change rather than any technical superiority of L3 over the other haplogroups that remained in Africa. During the last ice age, there were a series of rapid climate swings known as Heinrich events. One of these events, known as H9, seems to have occurred at the time of the exodus from Africa, and was characterized by cooling and loss of vegetation, making large parts of North, West, and East Africa inhospitable for human occupation. It may also have been accompanied by a drop in sea levels, creating a land bridge into the Levant. So out of Africa they went, looking no doubt for greener pastures.

The exodus seems to have proceeded along the coast of the Red Sea, across the land bridge, and then round the southern coasts of Asia and southeast Asia, to reach New Guinea and Australia by at least 45,000 years ago. Mellars notes similarities in artifacts along that route as far as India, but remarks that technology seems to have declined east of India, especially in Australia and New Guinea. This may be attributable, he suggests, to the lack of suitable materials, adaptation to a more coastal environment requiring different technologies, and random fluctuations (cultural drift). A remarkable point of similarity, though, is the presence of red ochre in both Africa and in the earliest known human remains in Australia. Ochre was probably used in ritualistic body-painting, and perhaps in painting other surfaces. pp. 209-211

9. The Rise of Agriculture

Of course, the wild climate swings of the Pleistocene era eventually came to and end giving way to the more climatically stable (to date) Holocene epoch. As the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) came to a close, the earth underwent a massive de-glaciation, sending massive amounts of cold, fresh water into the world’s oceans. Sea levels rose, and many land areas became submerged, such as Berinigia (isolating the Americas), Doggerland (isolating Britain) and the Sahul Shelf (isolating Australasia). The melting glaciers caused the climate to undergo a rapid shift once again, killing off large numbers of the megafauna that earlier humans had relied on as their primary food source—animals such as the Wooly mammoth and ground sloth. The vast herds of reindeer that had provided sustenance for Paleolithic Europeans retreated northwards with the receding taiga, and southern Europe became heavily forested with larch and birch trees. In reaction, many human ancestors found themselves living in forests and grasslands once gain, relying more and more on smaller, more solitary prey animals, and plant foods such as fruits, seeds and nuts—a change sometimes referred to as the Broad Spectrum Revolution.

We know that the domestication of cereals dates from about 10-12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent—present-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Kuwait, Jordan, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran. What’s less clear, however, is just how long these plants were cultivated before we decided to grow them intensively enough to alter their DNA to the point where these plants became dependent upon us (and we upon them). Recent evidence keeps pushing this horticultural activity—”proto-farming”—further and further back into the past, suggesting that agriculture is less of an anomaly or innovation than formerly thought. It apparently coexisted for a long time along seasonal hunting and foraging in the Near East. In addition, it appears that other desirable plant foods like figs and legumes were cultivated long before cereal grains. In some cases, the Neolithic Revolution appears to have been actively resisted for as long as possible by many cultures.

After the colder, dryer Younger Dryas period ended about 12,000 years ago, humans began to settle down in various grassy foothills and river valleys around the world and more intensively cultivate plant foods—especially cereal crops—which began the long march toward civilization, for better or worse.

10. Final Conclusions

Corballis strongly argues here (as he has in several books) that language originated with gestures, possibly before human ancestors migrated from Africa. Verbal speech, by contrast, came about much later, and may originate sometime after the exodus from Africa—perhaps as recently as 50-60,000 years ago based on anatomical evidence.

He argues that second- or perhaps third-order recursion was sophisticated enough to account for many of the types of behaviors we see in archaic humans (such as cooperative hunting and rudimentary religious beliefs), but that higher levels of recursive thought were inaccessible to them. These, he says, are unique to Homo sapiens, and may have begun as recently as 30,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic era, but we don’t know for sure.

He argues that these recursive abilities were mainly the result of human social needs, which then exploded into other diverse areas such as art, music, religion, and—perhaps most significantly—grammatical language, which can combine recursively to form an infinite number of ideas and concepts. Much later, things like advanced technology, science and mathematics flowed from these same recursive abilities as human societies grew ever larger and more complex. Humans’ ability to plan for and anticipate alternative futures is far more sophisticated than in any other species.

These recursive abilities also gave us the ability to know what others are thinking, leading directly to cumulative memetic evolution—passing down ideas and concepts, and adding to and extending them over time. No other species can do this as we can. Recursive thought also gave birth to mental time travel, allowing human thought to roam both the past and the future, and imagine alternative futures, or even fictional ones—i.e. stories, which bind human societies together.  Stories gave rise to more complicated social groups which are recursively nested in expanding circles of kinship and affiliation.

By looking at simpler examples from around the animal kingdom, Corballis argues that the development of these abilities was not a sudden, random and inexplicable event as some have argued. Rather, he says, it was the natural outcome of the same evolutionary processes that led to all the other mental and physical abilities that make us unique in the animal kingdom:

In this book, I have tried to argue that recursion holds the key to that difference in mind, underlying such uniquely such uniquely human characteristics as language, theory of mind, and mental time travel. It was not so much a new faculty, though, as an extension of existing faculties…there is no reason to suppose that the recursive mind evolved in some single, miraculous step, or even that it was confined to our species. Instead, it was shaped by natural selection, probably largely during the last two million years. p. 226

Although recursion was critical to the evolution of the human mind…it is not a “module,” the name given to specific, innate functional units, many of which are said to have evolved during the Pleistocene. Nor did it depend on some specific mutation, or some special kind of neuron, or the sudden appearance of a new brain structure. Rather, recursion probably evolved through progressive increases in short-term memory and capacity for hierarchical organization. These in turn were probably dependent on brain size, which increased incrementally, albeit rapidly, during the Pleistocene. But incremental changes can lead to sudden more substantial jumps, as when water boils or a balloon pops. In mathematics, such sudden shifts are known as catastrophes, so we may perhaps conclude that emergence of the human mind was catastrophic. p. 222

I have argued…that the extension of recursive principles to manufacture and technology was made possible largely through changes in the way we communicate. Language evolved initially for the sharing of social and episodic information, and depended at first on mime, using bodily movements to convey meaning. Through conventionalization, communication became less mimetic and more abstract. In the course of time it retreated into the face and eventually into the mouth, as late Homo gained voluntary control over voicing and the vocal tract, and the recursive ability to create infinite meaning through combinations of articulate sounds. This was an exercise in miniaturization, releasing the rest of the body, as well as recursive principles, for manipulation of the physical environment.

The complexities of the modern world are not of course the product of individual minds. Rather, they are the cumulative products of culture. Most of us have no idea how a jet engine, or a computer, or even a lightbulb, actually works. We all stand on the shoulders of giants…pp. 223-224

This concludes my review of The Recursive Mind by Michael C. Corballis. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and learned something new along the way.

The Recursive Mind (Review) – 4


Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

3. Theory of Mind

Now, I know that you’re thinking. All this stuff about recursion and Julian Janes is a little bit tedious. I’m not interested at all. Why does he keep talking about this stuff, anyway? Jayne’s ideas are clearly preposterous–only an idiot would even consider them. I should quit reading, or maybe head over to Slate Star Codex or Ran Prieur, or maybe Reddit or Ecosophia or Cassandra’s Legacy or…

How do I know what you’re thinking (correctly or not)? It’s because I have a Theory of Mind (ToM), which allows me to imagine and anticipate what other people are thinking. So do you most likely, which is why you can detect a degree of self-deprecation in my statements above.

Theory of mind is the ability to infer the mental states of other people. It’s often referred to a a sort of “mind-reading.” Daniel Dennett called it the “intentional stance,” meaning that we understand that other people have intentions and motivations that are different from our own. It evolved because we have lived in complex societies that require cooperation and intelligence for millions of years. “According to the intentional stance, we interact with people according to what we think is going on in their minds, rather than in terms of their physical attributes…” (p 137)

The lack of understanding of other people’s perspectives is what Jean Piaget noticed most in children. Central to many of his notions is the idea that children are egocentric, where their own needs and desires are all that exists: “During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.” In other words, the child is unable to recognize that other people have thoughts or feeling different from (or even in conflict with) their own. They are also unaware that others cannot see the same thing that they do. One way to test theory of mind in children is called the Sally-Anne test:

Click to enlarge. Then hit “back”

Theory of mind is also something that helps teach and learn. In order for me to effectively teach you, I need to have some idea of what you’re thinking so I can present the material in a way you can understand it. And, or course, you need to have some idea of what’s going on in my mind to understand what I’m trying to teach you. Theory of mind, therefore, is related to cultural transmission (or, more precisely, memetics). Human culture plays such an outsize role in our behavior partly because of our theory of mind. Theory of mind is a also a recursive operation which involves embedding your consciousness into someone else’s conscious mind:

From the point of view of this book, the important aspect of theory of mind is that it is recursive. This is captured by the different orders of intentionality… Zero-order intentionality refers to actions or behaviors that imply no subjective state, as in reflex or automatic acts. First-order intentionality involves a single subjective term, as in Alice wants Fred to go away. Second-order intentionality would involve two such terms, as in Ted thinks Alice wants Fred to go away. It is at this level that theory of mind begins.

And so on to third order: Alice believes that Fred thinks she wants him to go away. Recursion kicks in once we get beyond the first order, and our social life is replete with such examples. There seems to be some reason to believe, though, that we lose track at about the fifth or sixth order, perhaps because of limited working memory capacity rather than any intrinsic limit on recursion itself. We can perhaps just wrap our minds around propositions like: Ted suspects that Alice believes that he does indeed suspect that Fred thinks that she wants him (Fred) to go away. That’s fifth order, as you can tell by counting the words in bold type. You could make it sixth order by adding ‘George imagines that…’ at the beginning. p. 137

Clearly, higher orders of intentionality have been driven by the demands of the social environment one finds oneself in. I will later argue that these higher-order intentionalities developed when we moved to environments where the challenges we faced were predominantly natural (finding food, escaping predators, etc.), to one where the challenges were primarily social (managing workers, finding mates, leading armies, long-distance trading, negotiating debts, etc.). This change resulted in a fundamental remodeling of the human brain after settled civilization which allowed us to function in such social environments, probably by affecting the action of our serotonin receptors. We’ll get to that later.

Do you see what she sees?

Its not only one’s mental perspective, but even one’s physical perspective that ToM can let us take:

Whether instinctive or learned, the human ability to infer the mental states of others goes well beyond the detection of emotion. To take another simple and seemingly obvious example, we can understand what another individual can see. This is again an example of recursion, since we can insert that individual’s experience into our own. It is by no means a trivial feat, since it requires the mental rotation and transformation of visual scenes to match what the other person can see, and the construction of visual scenes that are not immediately visible.

For example, if you are talking to someone face-to-face, you know that she can see what is behind you, though you can’t. Someone standing in a different location necessarily see the world from a different angle, and to understand that person’s view requires and act of mental rotation and translation. pp. 134-135

I suspect this ability has something to do with out-of-body experiences, where we “see” ourselves from the perspective of somewhere outside our bodies. Recall Jaynes’s point that the “self” is not truly located in anywhere in physical space–including behind the eyes. Thus our “self” can theoretically locate itself anywhere, including the ceiling of our hospital room when we are dying.

Not everyone has theory of mind, though, at least not to the same degree. One of the defining characteristics of the autism spectrum is difficulty with ToM. Autistic people tend to not be able to infer what others are thinking, and this leads to certain social handicaps. Corballis makes a common distinction between “people-people” (as in, I’m a “people-person”–avoid anyone who describes themselves this way), and “things-people”, exemplified by engineers, doctors, scientists, programmers, professors, and such-like. “People-people” typically have a highly-developed ToM, which facilitates their feral social cunning. Technically-minded people, by contrast, often (though not always) have a less-developed theory of mind, as exemplified by this quote from the fictional Alan Turing in The Imitation Game: “When people talk to each other, they never say what they mean. They say something else and you’re expected to just know what they mean.”

Research has found autistic people who ace intelligence tests may still have trouble navigating public transportation or preparing a meal. Scoring low on a measure of social ability predicts an incongruity between IQ and adaptive skills. (Reddit)

One fascinating theory of autism that Corballis describes is based on a conflict between the mother’s and the father’s genes imprinting on the developing fetus in the womb:

In mammalian species, the only obligatory contribution of the male to the offspring is the sperm, and the father relies primarily on his genes to influence the offspring to behave in ways that support his biological interest.

Paternal genes should therefore favor self-interested behavior in the offspring, drawing on the mother’s resources and preventing her from using resources on offspring that might have been sired by other fathers. The mother, on the other hand, has continuing investment in the child both before birth…and after birth…Maternal genes should therefore operate to conserve her resources, favoring sociability and educability—nice kids who go to school and do what they’re told.

Maternal genes are expressed most strongly in the cortex, representing theory of mind, language, and social competence, whereas paternal genes tend to be expressed more in the limbic system, which deals with resource-demanding basic drives, such as aggression, appetites, and emotion. Autism, then, can be regarded as the extreme expression of paternal genes, schizophrenia as the extreme expression of maternal genes.

Many of the characteristics linked to the autistic and psychotic spectra are physical, and can be readily understood in terms of the struggle for maternal resources. The autistic spectrum is associated with overgrowth of the placenta, larger brain size, higher levels of growth factors, and the psychotic spectrum with placental undergrowth, smaller brain size, and slow growth…

Imprinting may have played a major role in human evolution. One suggestion is that evolution of the human brain was driven by the progressive influence of maternal genes, leading to expansion of the neocortex and the emergence of recursive cognition, including language and theory of mind. The persisting influence of paternal genes, though, may have preserved the overall balance between people people and things people, while also permitting a degree of difference.

Simon Baron-Cohen has suggested that the dimension can also be understood along an axis of empathizers versus systemizers. People people tend to empathize with others, through adopting the intentional stance and the ability to take the perspective of others. Things people may excel at synthesizing, through obsessive attention to detail and compulsive extraction of rules… pp. 141-142

I think this partly explains the popularity of libertarian economics among a certain set of the population, especially in Silicon Valley where people high on the autism spectrum tend to congregate. They tend to treat people as objects for their money-making schemes. They are unable to understand that people are not rational robots, and thus completely buy into the myth of Homo economocus. Their systemizing brains tend to see the Market as a perfect, frictionless, clockwork operating system (if only government “interference” would get out of the way, that is). It also explains why they feel nothing toward the victims of their “creative destruction.” It’s notable that most self-described libertarians tend to be males (who are often more interested in “things” and have a less developed theory of mind in general). In addition, research has shown that people who elect to study economics professionally have lower levels of empathy than the general population (who then shape economic theory to conform to their beliefs). This should be somewhat concerning, since economics, unlike physics or chemistry or meteorology, concerns people.

This sort of calculating self-centered hyper-rationality also lays behind the capitalist ethos.

The dark side of theory of mind is, of course, the ability to manipulate others. This has been referred to as Machiavellian intelligence, after Niccolo Machiavelli, the Italian diplomat who wrote about how rulers can manipulate the ruled to keep them in awe and obedience. It is certain that Machiavelli had a well-developed theory of mind, because he wrote stuff like this: “Now, in order to execute a political commission well, it is necessary to know the character of the prince and those who sway his counsels; … but it is above all things necessary to make himself esteemed, which he will do if he so regulates his actions and conversation that he shall be thought a man of honour, liberal, and sincere…It is undoubtedly necessary for the ambassador occasionally to mask his game; but it should be done so as not to awaken suspicion and he ought also to be prepared with an answer in case of discovery.” (Wikiquote) . In fact, CEO’s and middle-managers tend to be consummate social manipulators—it’s been shown using psychological tests that successful CEO’s and politicians consistently score higher on traits of sociopathy than the general population.

There may be a dark side to social intelligence, though, since some unscrupulous individuals may take advantage of the cooperative efforts of others, without themselves contributing. These individuals are known as freeloaders. In order to counteract their behavior, we have evolved ways of detecting them. Evolutionary psychologists refer to a “cheater-detection module” in the brain that enables us to detect these imposters, but they in turn have developed more sophisticated techniques to escape detection.

This recursive sequence of cheater detection and cheater detection-detection has led to what has been called a “cognitive arms race,” perhaps first identified by the British evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, and later amplified by other evolutionary psychologists. The ability to take advantage of others through such recursive thinking has been termed Machiavellian intelligence, whereby we use social strategies not merely to cooperate with our fellows, but also to outwit and deceive them…p. 136

It’s been argued (by me, for instance) that a hyperactive “cheater detection module,” often allied with lower levels of empathy, is what lays behind politically conservative beliefs. I would posit, too, that it also underlies many of the misogynistic attitudes among the so-called “Alt-Right”, since their theory of mind is too poorly developed to understand women’s thinking well enough to have positive interactions with them (instead preferring submission and obedience). A tendency toward poor ToM, in my opinion, explains a lot of seemingly unrelated characteristics of the Alt-right (economic libertarianism, misogyny, racism, technophilia, narcissism, atheism, hyper-rationality, ultra-hereditarianism, “political incorrectness” etc.)

Theory of mind appears to be more developed among women than men, probably because of their childrearing role. Many men can relate to the hyperactive tendency of their wives or girlfriends to “mind read” (“What are you thinking right now?”) and claim that they are correct in their inferences (“I know you’re thinking about your ex..!”).

Theory of Mind has long been seen as fundamental to the neuroscience of religious belief. The ability to attribute mental states to other people leads to attributing human-like attributes and consciousness to other creatures, and even things. I’ve you’ve ever hit your computer for “misbehaving” or kicked your car for breaking down on you, then you know what I’m talking about. The tendency to anthropomorphize is behind the misattribution of human traits and behaviors to non-human animals, viz:

According to Robin Dunbar, it is through Theory of Mind that people may have come to know God, as it were. The notion of a God who is kind, who watches over is, who punishes, who admits us to Heaven if we are suitably virtuous, depends on the underlying understanding that other beings—in this case a supposedly supernatural one—can have human-like thoughts and emotions.

Indeed Dunbar argues that several orders of intentionality may be required, since religion is a social activity, dependent on shared beliefs. The recursive loops that are necessary run something like this: I suppose that you think that I believe there are gods who intend to influence our futures because they understand our desires. This is fifth-order intentionality. Dunbar himself must have achieved sixth-order intentionality if he supposes all of this, and if you suppose that he does then you have reached seventh-order…

If God depends on theory of mind, so too, perhaps, does the concept of the self. This returns us to the opening paragraph of this book, and Descartes famous syllogism “I think , therefore I am.” since he was appealing to his own thought about thinking, this is second-order intentionality. Of course, we also understand the self to continue through time, which requires the (recursive) understanding that our consciousness also transcends the present. pp. 137-138 (emphasis mine)

Thus, higher-order gods tend to emerge at a certain point of socio-political complexity, where higher-order states of mind are achieved by a majority of people. A recent paper attempted to determine whether so-called “Moralizing High Gods” (MHG) and “Broad Supernatural Punishers” (BSP) is what allowed larger societies to form, or were rather the result of larger societies and the need to hold them together. The authors concluded the latter:

Do “Big Societies” Need “Big Gods”? (Cliodynamica)

Moralizing Gods as Effect, Not Cause (Marmalade)


Here’s evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar explaining why humans appear to be the only primates with the higher-order intentionality necessary to form Moralizing High Gods and Broad Supernatural Punishers:

We know from neuroimaging experiments that mentalizing competencies correlate with the volume of the mentalizing network in the brain, and especially with the volume of the orbitofrontal cortex, and this provides important support for the claim that, across primates, mentalizing competencies correlate with frontal lobe volume. Given this, we can…estimate the mentalizing competencies of fossil hominins, since they must, by definition, be strung out between the great apes and modern humans…As a group, the australopithecenes cluster nicely around second-order intentionality, along with other great apes; early Homo populations all sit at third-order intentionality, while archaic humans and Neanderthals can just about manage fourth order; only fossil [Anatomically Modern Humans] (like their living descendants) achieve fifth order. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior by Robin Dunbar, p. 242

… The sophistication of one’s religion ultimately depends on the level of intentionality one is capable of. While one can certainly have religion of some kind with third or fourth order intentionality, there seems to be a real phase shift in the quality of religion that can be maintained once one achieves fifth order intentionality. Given that archaic humans, including Neanderthals, don’t appear to have been more than fourth order intentional, it seems unlikely that they would have had religions of very great complexity. Quite what that means remains to be determined, but the limited archaeological evidence for an active religious life among archaics suggests that, at best, it wasn’t very sophisticated. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior by Robin Dunbar, pp. 285-286

A hyperactive Theory of Mind has long been suspected as playing a role in religious belief, as well as in schizophrenia, in which intentionality has run amok, leading to paranoia and hallucinations (objects talking to you, etc.):

One of the most basic insights of the cognitive science of religion is that religions the world over and throughout human history have reliably evolved so as to involve representations that engage humans’ mental machinery for dealing with the social world. After all, such matters enthrall human minds. The gods and, even more fundamentally, the ancestors are social agents too! On the basis of knowing that the gods are social actors, religious participants know straightaway that they have beliefs, intentions, feelings, preferences, loyalties, motivations, and all of the other states of mind that we recognize in ourselves and others.

What this means is, first, that religious participants are instantly entitled to all of the inferences about social relations, which come as defaults with the development of theory of mind, and, second, that even the most naïve participants can reason about them effortlessly. Such knowledge need not be taught. We deploy the same folk psychology that we utilize in human commerce to understand, explain, and predict the gods’ states of mind and behaviors.

How Religions Captivate Human Minds (Psychology Today)

What Religion is Really All About (Psychology Today)

Most potently for our discussion of Julian Jaynes’s theories is the fact that fMRI scans have shown that auditory hallucinations—of the type the Jaynes described as the basis of ancient belief in gods—activate brain regions associated with Theory of Mind. Here’s psychologist Charles Fernyhough:

…When my colleagues and I scanned people’s brains while they were doing dialogic inner speech, we found activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus, a region typically implicated in inner speech. But we also found right hemisphere activation close to a region known as the temporoparietal junction (TPJ)…that’s an area that is associated with thinking about other people’ minds, and it wasn’t activated when people were thinking monologically…Two established networks are harnessed for the purpose of responding to the mind’s responses in an interaction that is neatly cost-effective in terms of processing resources. Instead of speaking endlessly without expectation of an answer, the brain’s work blooms into dialogue… The Voices Within by Charles Fernyhough; pp. 107-108 (emphasis mine)

Theory of mind is also involved with the brain’s Default mode network (DMN), a pattern of neural activity that takes place during mind-wandering, and seems to be largely responsible for the creation of the “unitary self.” It’s quite likely that the perception of the inner-voice as belonging to another being with it’s own personality traits, as Jaynes described, activates our inbuilt ToM module, as do feelings of an “invisible presence” also reported by non-clinical voice hearers. This is from Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelic research:

The default mode network stands in a kind of seesaw relationship with the attentional networks that wake up whenever the outside world demands our attention; when one is active, the other goes quiet, and vice versa. But as any person can tell you, quite a lot happens in the mind when nothing much is going on outside us. (In fact, the DMN consumes a disproportionate share of the brain’s energy.) Working at a remove from our sensory processing of the outside world, the default mode is most active when we are engaged in higher-level “metacognitive” processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions (such as the self or ego), moral reasoning, and “theory of mind”—the ability to attribute mental states to others, as when we try to imagine “what it is like” to be someone else. All these functions belong exclusively to humans, and specifically to adult humans, for the default mode network isn’t operational until late in a child’s development. How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan; pp. 301-303

Theory of mind is also critical for signed and spoken language. After all, I need to have some idea what’s going on in your mind in order to get my point across. The more I can insert myself into your worldview, the more effectively I can tailor my language to communicate with you, dear reader. Hopefully, I’ve done a decent job, (if you didn’t leave after the first paragraph, that is!) It also encourages language construction and development. In our earlier example, one would hope that the understanding of metaphor is sufficient that we implicitly understand that inosculation does not literally involve things kissing each other!

There is evidence to believe that the development of theory of mind is closely intertwined with language development in humans. One meta-analysis showed a moderate to strong correlation (r = 0.43) between performance on theory of mind and language tasks. One might argue that this relationship is due solely to the fact that both language and theory of mind seem to begin to develop substantially around the same time in children (between ages 2–5). However, many other abilities develop during this same time period as well, and do not produce such high correlations with one another nor with theory of mind. There must be something else going on to explain the relationship between theory of mind and language.

Pragmatic theories of communication assume that infants must possess an understanding of beliefs and mental states of others to infer the communicative content that proficient language users intend to convey. Since a verbal utterance is often underdetermined, and therefore, it can have different meanings depending on the actual context. Theory of mind abilities can play a crucial role in understanding the communicative and informative intentions of others and inferring the meaning of words. Some empirical results suggest that even 13-month-old infants have an early capacity for communicative mind-reading that enables them to infer what relevant information is transferred between communicative partners, which implies that human language relies at least partially on theory of mind skills….

Theory of Mind (Wikipedia)

Irony, metaphor, humor, and sarcasm are all examples of how language and theory of mind are related. Irony involves a knowing contrast between what is said and what is meant, meaning that you need to be able to infer what another person was thinking. “Irony depends on theory of mind, the secure knowledge that the listener understands one’s true intent. It is perhaps most commonly used among friends, who share common attitudes and threads of thought; indeed it has been estimated that irony is used in some 8 percent of conversational exchanges between friends.” (pp. 159-160) Sarcasm also relies on understanding the difference between what someone said and what they meant. I’m sure you’ve experienced an instance when someone writes some over-the-top comment on an online forum intended to sarcastically parody a spurious point of view, and some reader takes it at face value and loses their shit. It might be because we can’t hear the tone of voice or see the body language of the other person, but I suspect it also has something to do with the high percentage of high-spectrum individuals who frequent such message boards.

Metaphor, too relies on a non-literal understanding of language. If the captain calls for “all hands on deck,” it is understood that he wants more than just our hands, and that we aren’t supposed to place our hands down on the deck. If it’s “raining cats and dogs,” most of us know that animals are not falling out of the sky. And if I advise you to “watch your head,” you know to look out for low obstructions and not have an out-of-body experience. Which reminds me, humor also relies on ToM.

Theory of mind allows for normal individuals to use language in a loose way that tends not to be understood by those with autism. Most of us, if asked the question “Would you mind telling me the time?” would probably answer with the time, but an autistic individual would be more inclined to give a literal answer, which might be something like “No, I don’t mind.” Or if you ask someone whether she can reach a certain book, you might expect her to reach for the book and hand it to you, but an autistic person might simply respond yes or no. This reminds me that I once made the mistake of asking a philosopher, “Is it raining or snowing outside?”–wanting to know whether I should grab an umbrella or a warm coat. He said, “Yes.” Theory of mind allows is to use our language flexible and loosely precisely because we share unspoken thoughts, which serve to clarify or amplify the actual spoken message. pp. 160-161

If you do happen to be autistic, and all the stuff I just said goes over your head, don’t fret. I have enough theory of mind to sympathize with your plight. Although, if you are, you might more easily get this old programmer joke:

A programmer is at work when his wife calls and asks him to go to the store. She says she needs a gallon of milk, and if they have fresh eggs, buy a dozen. He comes home with 12 gallons of milk.

The relationship between creativity, mechanical aptitude, genius, and mental illness is complex and poorly understood, but has been a source of fascination for centuries. Often times creative people were thought to be “possessed” by something outside of their own normal consciousness or abilities:

Recent evidence suggests that a particular polymorphism on a gene known to be related to the risk of psychosis is also related to creativity in people with high intellectual achievement.

The tendency to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder may underlie creativity in the arts, as exemplified by musicans such as Bela Bartok, Ludwig van Beethoven, Maurice Ravel, or Peter Warlock, artists such as Amedeo Clemente Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo, or Vincent van Gogh, and writers such as Jack Kerouac, D. H. Lawrence, Eugene O’Neill, or Marcel Proust. The esteemed mathematician John Forbes Nash, subject of the Hollywood movie A Beautiful Mind, is another example. The late David Horrobin went so far as to argue that people with schizophrenia were regarded as the visionaries who shaped human destiny itself, and it was only with the Industrial Revolution, and a change m diet, that schizophrenics were seen as mentally ill. p. 143

Horrobin’s speculations are indeed fascinating, and only briefly alluded to in the text above:

Horrobin…argues that the changes which propelled humanity to its current global ascendancy were the same as those which have left us vulnerable to mental disease.

‘We became human because of small genetic changes in the chemistry of the fat in our skulls,’ he says. ‘These changes injected into our ancestors both the seeds of the illness of schizophrenia and the extraordinary minds which made us human.’

Horrobin’s theory also provides support for observations that have linked the most intelligent, imaginative members of our species with mental disease, in particular schizophrenia – an association supported by studies in Iceland, Finland, New York and London. These show that ‘families with schizophrenic members seem to have a greater variety of skills and abilities, and a greater likelihood of producing high achievers,’ he states. As examples, Horrobin points out that Einstein had a son who was schizophrenic, as was James Joyce’s daughter and Carl Jung’s mother.

In addition, Horrobin points to a long list of geniuses whose personalities and temperaments have be-trayed schizoid tendencies or signs of mental instability. These include Schumann, Strindberg, Poe, Kafka, Wittgenstein and Newton. Controversially, Horrobin also includes individuals such as Darwin and Faraday, generally thought to have displayed mental stability.

Nevertheless, psychologists agree that it is possible to make a link between mental illness and creativity. ‘Great minds are marked by their ability to make connections between unexpected events or trends,’ said Professor Til Wykes, of the Institute of Psychiatry, London. ‘By the same token, those suffering from mental illness often make unexpected or inappropriate connections between day-to-day events.’

According to Horrobin, schizophrenia and human genius began to manifest themselves as a result of evolutionary pressures that triggered genetic changes in our brain cells, allowing us to make unexpected links with different events, an ability that lifted our species to a new intellectual plane. Early manifestations of this creative change include the 30,000-year-old cave paintings found in France and Spain…

Schizophrenia ‘helped the ascent of man’ (The Guardian)

Writers May Be More Likely to Have Schizophrenia (PsychCentral)

The link between mental illness and diet is intriguing. For example, the popular ketogenic diet was originally developed not to lose weight, but to treat epilepsy! And, remarkably, a recent study has show that a ketogenic diet has caused remission of long-standing schizophrenia in certain patients. Recall that voice-hearing is a key symptom of schizophrenia (as well as some types of epilepsy). Was a change in diet partially responsible for what Jaynes referred to as bicameralism?

The medical version of the ketogenic diet is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate, moderate-protein diet proven to work for epilepsy. …While referred to as a “diet,” make no mistake: this is a powerful medical intervention. Studies show that over 50 percent of children with epilepsy who do not respond to medications experience significant reductions in the frequency and severity of their seizures, with some becoming completely seizure-free.

Using epilepsy treatments in psychiatry is nothing new. Anticonvulsant medications are often used to treat psychiatric disorders. Depakote, Lamictal, Tegretol, Neurontin, Topamax, and all of the benzodiazepines (medications like Valium and Ativan, commonly prescribed for anxiety) are all examples of anticonvulsant medications routinely prescribed in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. Therefore, it’s not unreasonable to think that a proven anticonvulsant dietary intervention might also help some people with psychiatric symptoms.

Interestingly, the effects of this diet on the brain have been studied for decades because neurologists have been trying to figure out how it works in epilepsy. This diet is known to produce ketones which are used as a fuel source in place of glucose. This may help to provide fuel to insulin resistant brain cells. This diet is also known to affect a number of neurotransmitters and ion channels in the brain, improve metabolism, and decrease inflammation. So there is existing science to support why this diet might help schizophrenia.

Chronic Schizophrenia Put Into Remission Without Medication (Psychology Today)

4. Kinship

The Sierpinski triangle provides a good model for human social organization

Although not discussed by Corballis, kinship structures are also inherently recursive. Given that kinship structures form the primordial organizational structure for humans, this is another important feature of human cognition that appears to derive from our recursive abilities. For a description of this, we’ll turn once again to Robin Dunbar’s book on Human Evolution. Dunbar (of Dunbar’s number fame) makes the case that the ability to supply names of kin members may be the very basis for spoken language itself!

There is one important aspect of language that some have argued constitutes the origin of language itself – the naming of kin.

There is no particular reason to assume that ability to name kin relationships was in any way ancestral, although it may well be the case that naming individuals appeared very early. One the other hand, labeling kinship categories (brother, sister, grandfather, aunt, cousin) is quite sophisticated: it requires us to make generalizations and create linguistic categories. And it probably requires us to be able to handle embeddedness, since kinship pedigrees are naturally embedded structures.

Kinship labels allow is to sum in a single word the exact relationship between two individuals. The consensus among anthropologists is that there are only about six major types of kinship naming systems – usually referred to as Hawaiian, Eskimo, Sudanese, Crow, Omaha and Iroquois after the eponymous tribes that have these different kinship naming systems. They differ mainly in terms of whether they distinguish parallel from cross cousins and whether descent is reconed unilaterally or bilaterally.

The reasons why these naming systems differ have yet to be explained satisfactorally. Nonetheless, given that one of their important functions is to specify who can marry whom, it is likley that they reflect local variations in mating and inheritance patterns. The Crow and Omaha kinship naming systems, for example, are mirror images of each and seem to be a consequence of differing levels of paternity certainty (as a result, one society is patrilineal, the other matrilineal). Some of these may be accidents of cultural history, while others may be due to the exigencies of the local ecology. Kinship naming systems are especially important, for example, when there are monpolizable resources like land that can be passed on from one generation to the next and it becomes crucial to know just who is entitled, by descent, to inherit. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior, by Robin Dunbar; pp. 272-273

Systems of kinship appear to be largely based around the means of subsistance and rules of inheritance. Herders, for example, tend to be patriarchal, and hence patrilineal. The same goes for agrarian societies where inheritance of arable land is important. Horticultural societies, by contrast, are often more matrilineal, reflecting women’s important role in food production. Hunter-gatherers, where passing down property is rare, are often bilateral. These are, of course, just rules of thumb. Sometimes tribes are divided into two groups, which anthropolgists call moieties (from the French for “half”), which are designed to prevent inbreeding (brides are exchanged exclusively across moieties).

Anthropologists have sometimes claimed that biology cannot explain human kinship naming systems because many societies classify biologically unrelated individuals as kin. This is a specious argument for two separate reasons. One is that the claim is based on a naive understanding of what biological kinship is all about.

This is well illustrated by how we treat in-laws. In English, we classify in-laws (who are biologically unrelated to us) using the same kin terms that we use for real biological relatives (father-in-law, sister-in-law, etc.). However…we actually treat them, in emotional terms, as though they were real biological kin, and we do so for a very good biological reason: they share with us a common genetic interest in the next generation.

We tend to think of genetic relatedness as reflecting past history (i.e. how two people are related in a pedigree that plots descent from some common ancestor back in time). But in fact, biologically speaking, this isn’t really the issue, although it is a convenient approximation for deciding who is related to whom. In an exceptionally insightful but rarely appreciated book (mainly because it is very heavy on maths), Austen Hughes showed that the real issue in kinship is not relatedness back in time but relatedness to future offspring. In-laws have just as much stake in the offspring of a marriage as any other relative, and hence should be treated as though they are biological relatives. Hughes showed that this more sophisticated interpretation of biological relatedness readily explains a large number of ethnographic examples of kinship naming and co-residence that anthropologists have viewed as biologically inexplicable. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior, by Robin Dunbar; pp. 273-277

As a sort of proof of this, many of the algorithms that have been developed to determine genetic relatedness between individuals (whether they carry the same genes) are recursive! It’s also notable that the Pirahã, whose language allegedly does not use recursion, also do not have extended kinship groups (or ancestor worship or higher-order gods for that matter. In fact, they are said to live entirely in the present, meaning no mental time travel either).

Piraha Indians, Recursion, Phonemic Inventory Size and the Evolutionary Significance of Simplicity (Anthropogenesis)

The second point is that in traditional small-scale societies everyone in the community is kin, whether by descent or by marriage; those fewwho aren’t soon become so by marrying someone or by being given some appropriate status as fictive or adoptive kin. The fact that some people are misclassified as kin or a few strangers are granted fictional kinship status is not evidence that kinship naming systems do not follow biological principles: a handful of exceptions won’t negate the underlying evolutionary processes associated with biological kinship, not least because everything in biology is statistical rather than absolute. One would need to show that a significant proportion of naming categories cross meaningful biological boundaries, but in fact they never do. Adopted children can come to see their adoptive parents as their real parents, but adoption itself is quite rare; moreover, when it does occur in traditional societies it typically involves adoption by relatives (as anthropological studies have demonstrated). A real sense of bonding usually happens only when the child is very young (and even then the effect is much stronger for the child than for the parents – who, after all, know the child is not theirs).

Given that kinship naming systems seem to broadly follow biological categories of relatedness, a natural assumption is that they arise from biological kin selection theory… It seems we have a gut response to help relatives preferentially, presumably as a consequence of kin selection…Some of the more distant categories of kin (second and third cousins, and cousins once removed, as well as great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents) attract almost as strong a response from us as close kin. Yet these distant relationships are purely linguistic categories that someone has labelled for us (‘Jack is your second cousin -you share a great-grandmother’). The moment you are told that somebody is related to you, albeit distantly, it seems to place them in a very different category from mere friends, even if you have never met them before…You only need to know one thing about kin- that they are related to us ( and maybe exactly how closely they are related) whereas with a friend we have to track back through all the past interactions to decide how they actually behaved on different occasions. Because less processing has to be done, decisions about kin should be done faster and at less cognitive cost than decisions about unrelated individuals. This would imply that, psychologically, kinship is an implicit process (i.e. it is automated), whereas friendship is an explicit process (we have to think about it)…

It may be no coincidence that 150 individuals is almost exactly the number of living descendants (i.e. members of the three currently living generations: grandparents, parents and children) of a single ancestral pair two generations back (i.e. the great-great-grandparents) in a society with exogamy (mates of one sex come from outside the community, while the other sex remains for life in the community into which it was born). This is about as far back as anyone in the community can have personal knowledge about who is whose offspring so as to be able to vouch for how everyone is related to each other. It is striking that no kinship naming system identifies kin beyond this extended pedigree with its natural boundary at the community of 150 individuals. It seems as though our kinship naming systems may be explicitly designed to keep track of and maintain knowledge about the members of natural human communities. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior, by Robin Dunbar; pp. 273-277

Corballis concludes:

Recursion, then, is not the exclusive preserve of social interaction. Our mechanical world is as recursively complex as is the social world. There are wheels within wheels, engines within engines, computers within computers. Cities are containers built of containers within containers, going right down, I suppose, to handbags and pockets within our clothing. Recursive routines are a commonplace in computer programming, and it is mathematics that gives us the clearest idea of what recursion is all about. But recursion may well have stemmed from runaway theory of mind, and been later released into the mechanical world. p. 144

In the final section of The Recursive Mind, Corballis takes a quick tour through human evolution to see when these abilities may have first emerged. That’s what we’ll take a look at in our last installment of this series.

The Recursive Mind (Review) – 3

Part 1

Part 2

2. Mental Time Travel

The word “remembering” is used loosely and imprecisely. There are actually multiple different types of memory; for example, episodic memory and semantic memory.

Episodic memory: The memory of actual events located in time and space, i.e “reminiscing.”

Semantic memory: The storehouse of knowledge that we possess, but which does not involve any kind of conscious recollection.

Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge that we have accumulated throughout our lives. This general knowledge (facts, ideas, meaning and concepts) is intertwined in experience and dependent on culture.

Semantic memory is distinct from episodic memory, which is our memory of experiences and specific events that occur during our lives, from which we can recreate at any given point. For instance, semantic memory might contain information about what a cat is, whereas episodic memory might contain a specific memory of petting a particular cat.

We can learn about new concepts by applying our knowledge learned from things in the past. The counterpart to declarative or explicit memory is nondeclarative memory or implicit memory.

Semantic memory (Wikipedia)

Episodic memory is essential for creating of the narrative self. Episodic memory takes various forms, for example:

Specific events: When you first set foot in the ocean.

General events: What it feels like stepping into the ocean in general. This is a memory of what a personal event is generally like. It might be based on the memories of having stepped in the ocean, many times during the years.

Flashbulb memories: Flashbulb memories are critical autobiographical memories about a major event.

Episodic Memory (Wikipedia)

For example, if you are taking a test for school, you are probably not reminiscing about the study session you had the previous evening, or where you need to be the next class period. You are probably not thinking about your childhood, or about the fabulous career prospects that are sure to result from passing this test. Those episodic memories—inserting yourself into past or future scenarios—would probably be a hindrance from the test you are presently trying to complete. Semantic memory would be what you are drawing upon to answer the questions (hopefully correctly).


It is often difficult to distinguish between one and the other. Autobiographical memories are often combinations of the two—lived experience combined with autobiographical stories and family folklore. Sometimes, we can even convince ourselves that things that didn’t happen actually did (false memories). Our autobiographical sense of self is determined by this process.

Endel Tulving has described remembering as autonoetic, or self-knowing, in that one has projected one’s self into the past to re-experience some earlier episode. Simply knowing something, like the boiling point of water, is noetic, and implies no shift of consciousness. Autoneotic awareness, then, is is recursive, in that one can insert previous personal experience into present awareness. This is analogous to the embedding of phrases within phrases, or sentences within sentences.

Deeper levels of embedding are also possible, as when I remember yesterday that I had remember yesterday that I had remembered an event that occurred at some earlier time. Chunks of episodic awareness can thus be inserted into each other in recursive fashion. Having coffee at a conference recently, I was reminded of an earlier conference where I managed to spill coffee on a distinguished philosopher. This is memory of a memory of an event. I shall suggest later that this kind of embedding may have set the state for the recursive structure of language itself (p. 85) [Coincidentally, as I was typing this paragraph, I spilled coffee on the book. Perhaps you will spill coffee on your keyboard while reading this. – CH]

Corballis mentions that case of English musician Clive Wearing, whose hippocampus was damaged leading to anteriograde and retrograde amnesia. At the other end of the spectrum is the Russian Solomon Shereshevsky.

The Abyss (Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker)

Long-term memory can further be subdivided into implicit memory and explicit (or declarative) memory.

“Implicit memories are elicited by the immediate environment, and do not involve consciousness or volition.” (p. 98) … Implicit memory…enables us to learn without any awareness that we are doing so. It is presumably more primitive in an evolutionary sense than is explicit memory, which is made up of semantic and episodic memory. Explicit memory is sometimes called declarative memory because it is the kind of memory we can talk about or declare.

Implicit memory does not depend on the hippocampus, so amnesia resulting from hippocampal damage does not entirely prevent adaptation to new environments or condition, but such adaptation does not enter consciousness. p. 88 (emphasis mine)
Explicit memories, by contrast, “provide yet more adaptive flexibility, because it does not depend on immediate evocation from the environment” p. 98 (emphasis mine)

The textbook case of implicit memory is riding a bicycle. You don’t think about, or ponder how to do it, you just do it. No amount of intellectual thought and pondering and thinking through your options will help you to swim or ride a bike or play the piano. When a line drive is hit to the shortstop, implicit memory, not explicit memory catches the ball (although the catch might provide a nice explicit memory for the shortstop later on). A daydreaming shortstop wold miss the ball completely.

Words are stored in semantic memory, and only rarely or transiently in episodic memory. I have very little memory of the occasions on which I learned the meanings of the some 50,000 words that I know–although I can remember occasionally looking up obscure words that I didn’t know, or that had escaped my semantic memory. The grammatical rules by which we string words together may be regarded as implicit rather than explicit memory, as automatic, perhaps, as riding a bicycle. Indeed, so automatic are the rules of grammar that linguists have still not been able to elaborate all of them explicitly. p. 126 (emphasis mine)

Operant conditioning (also called signal learning, solution learning, or instrumental learning) is another type of learning that does not require conscious, deliberative thought. It is a simple stimulus and response. You touch the stove, and you know the stove is hot. There was no thinking involved when Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell, for example. In a very unethical experiment, the behaviorist John B. Watson took a nine-month old orphan and conditioned him to be afraid of rats, rabbits, moneys, dogs and masks. He did this by making a loud, sharp noise (banging a metal bar with a hammer), which the child was afraid of, whenever the child was presented with those things. By associating the sound with the stimulus, he was able to induce a fear of those items. But there was no volition; no conscious thought was involved in this process. It works the same way on dogs, rabbits, humans or fruit flies. Behvariorism tells us next to nothing about human consciousness, or what makes us different.

These types of conditioning may be said to fall under the category of implicit memory. As we have seen, implicit memory may also include the learning of skills and even mental strategies to cope with environmental challenges. Implicit memories are elicited by the immediate environment, and do not involve consciousness or volition. Of course, one may remember the experience of learning to ride a bicycle, but that is distinct from the learning itself…These are episodic memories, independent of the process of actually learning (more or less) to ride the bike. p. 98 (emphasis mine, italics in original)

This important distinction is what is behind Jaynes’s declaration that learning and remembering do not require consciousness. Implicit memory and operant conditioning do not require the kind of deliberative self-consciousness or “analog I” that Jaynes described. Even explicit memory—the ability to recall facts and details, for example—does not, strictly speaking, require deliberative self-consciousness. Clive Wearing, referred to above, could still remember how to play the piano, despite living in an “eternal present.” Thus, it is entirely possible that things such as ruminative self-consciousness emerged quite late in human history. Jaynes himself described why consciousness (as distinct from simply being functional and awake) is not required for learning, and can even be detrimental to it.

In more everyday situations, the same simple associative learning can be shown to go on without any consciousness that it has occurred. If a distinct kind of music is played while you are eating a particularly delicious lunch, the next time you hear the music you will like its sounds slightly more and even have a little more saliva in your mouth. The music has become a signal for pleasure which mixes with your judgement. And the same is true for paintings. Subjects who have gone through this kind of test in the laboratory, when asked why they liked the music or paintings better after lunch, could not say. They were not conscious they had learned anything. But the really interesting thing here is that if you know about the phenomenon beforehand and are conscious of the contingency between food and the music or painting, the learning does not occur. Again, consciousness reduces our learning abilities of this type, let alone not being necessary for them…

The learning of complex skills is no different in this respect. Typewriting has been extensively studied, it generally being agreed in the worlds of one experimenter “that all adaptations and short cuts in methods were unconsciously made, that is, fallen into by the learners quite unintentionally.” The learners suddenly noticed that they were doing certain parts of the work in a new and better way.

Another simple experiment can demonstrate this. Ask someone to sit opposite you and to say words, as many words as he can think of, pausing two or three seconds after each of them for you to write them down. If after every plural noun (or adjective, or abstract word, whatever you choose) you say “good” or “right” as you write it down, or simply “mmm-hmm” or smile, or repeat the plural word pleasantly, the frequency of plural nouns (or whatever) will increase significantly as he goes on saying the words. The important thing here is that the subject is not aware that he is learning anything at all. He is not conscious that he is trying to find a way to make you increase your encouraging remarks, or even of his solution to that problem. Every day, in all our conversations, we are constantly training and being trained by each other in this manner, and yet we are never conscious of it. OoCitBotBM; pp. 33-35

But we not only use our memory to recall past experiences, we also think about future events as well, and this is based on the same ability to mentally time travel. It may seem paradoxical to think of memory as having anything to do with events that haven’t happened yet, but brain scans show that similar areas of the brain are activated when recalling past events and envisioning future ones—particularly the prefrontal cortex, but also parts of the medial temporal lobe. There is slightly more activity in imagining future events, probably due to the increased creativity required of this activity.


In this ability to mentally time travel we seem to be unique among animals, at least at to the extent that we do it and our abilities to do so:

So far, there is little convincing evidence that animals other than humans are capable of mental time travel—or if they are, their mental excursions into past or future have little of the extraordinary flexibility and broad provenance that we see in our own imaginative journeys. The limited evidence from nonhuman animals typically comes from behaviors that are fundamentally instinctive, such as food caching or mating, whereas in humans mental time travel seems to cover all aspects of our complex lives. p. 112

Animals Are ‘Stuck In Time’ With Little Idea Of Past Or Future, Study Suggests (Science Daily)

However, see: Mental time-travel in birds (Science Daily)

We are always imagining and anticipating, from thinking about events later the same day, or perhaps years from now. Even in a conversation, we are often planning what we are about to say, rather than focusing on the conversation itself. That is, we are often completely absent in the present moment, which is something that techniques like mindfulness meditation are designed to mitigate. We can even imagine events after we are dead, and it has been argued that this knowledge lays behind many unique human behaviors such as the notion of an afterlife and the idea of religion more generally. The way psychologists study this is to use implicit memory (as described above) to remind people of their own mortality. This is done through a technique called priming:

Priming is remarkably resilient. In one study, for example, fragments of pictures were used to prime recognition of whole pictures of objects. When the same fragments were shown 17 years later to people who had taken part in the original experiment, they were able to write the name of the object associated with each fragment much more accurately than a control group who had not previously seen the fragments. p. 88

When primed with notions of death and their own mortality, it has been shown that people in general are more authoritarian, more aggressive, more hostile to out-groups and simultaneously more loyal to in-groups. Here’s psychologist Sheldon Solomon describing the effect in a TED Talk:

“Studies show that when people are reminded of their mortality, for example, by completing a death anxiety questionnaire, or being interviewed in front of a funeral parlor, or even exposed to the word ‘death’ that’s flashed on a computer screen so fast—28 milliseconds—that you don’t know if you’ve even seen anything—When people are reminded of their own death, Christians, for example, become more derogatory towards Jews, and Jews become more hostile towards Muslims. Germans sit further away from Turkish people. Americans who are reminded of death become more physically aggressive to other Americans who don’t share their political beliefs. Iranians reminded of death are more supportive of suicide bombing, and they’re more willing to consider becoming martyrs themselves. Americans reminded of their mortality become more enthusiastic about preemptive nuclear, chemical and biological attacks against countries who pose no direct threat to us. So man’s inhumanity to man—our hostility and disdain toward people who are different—results then, I would argue, at least in part from our inability to tolerate others who do not share the beliefs that we rely on to shield ourselves from mortal terror.”

Humanity at the Crossroads (YouTube)

One important aspect of episodic memory is that it locates events in time. Although we are often not clear precisely when remembered events happened, we usually have at least a rough idea, and this is sufficient to give rise to the general understanding of time itself. It appears that locating events in time and in space are related.

Episodic memory allows us to travel back in time, and consciously relive previous experiences. Thomas Suddendorf called this mental time travel, and made the important suggestion that mental time travel allows us to imagine future events as well as remember past ones. It also adds to the recursive possibilities; I might remember, for example, that yesterday I had plans to go to the beach tomorrow.The true significance of episodic memory, then is that it provides a vocabulary from which to construct future events, and so fine-tune our lives.

What has been termed episodic future thinking, or the ability to imagine future events, emerges in children at around the same time as episodic memory itself, between the ages of three and four. Patients with amnesia are as unable to answer questions about past events as they are to say what might happen in the future… p. 100

Once again, the usefulness of this will be determined by the social environment. I will argue later that this ability to mentally time travel, as with the ability to “read minds” (which we’ll talk about next) became more and more adaptive over time as societies became more complex. For example, it would play little to no role among immediate return hunter gatherers (such as the Pirahã), who live mostly in the present and do not have large surpluses. Among delayed return hunter gatherers and horticulturalists, however, it would play a far larger role.

When we get to complex foragers and beyond, however, the ability to plan for the future becomes almost like a super-power. And here, we see a connection I will make between recursion and the Feasting Theory we’ve previously discussed. Simply put, an enhanced sense of future states allows one to more effectively ensnare people in webs of debt and obligation, which can then be leveraged to gain wealth and social advantage. I will argue that this is what allowed the primordial inequalities to form in various societies which could produce surpluses of wealth. It also demonstrates the evolutionary advantages of recursive thinking.

Corballis then ties together language and mental time travel. He posits that the recursive nature of language evolved specifically to allow us to share past and future experiences. It allows us to narratize our lives, and to tell that story to others, and perhaps more importantly, to ourselves.

Language allows us to construct things that don’t exist—shared fictions. It allows us to tell fictional stories of both the past and the future.

Episodic memories, along with combinatorial rules, allow us not only to create and communicate possible episodes in the future, but also to create fictional episodes. As a species, we are unique in telling stories. Indeed the dividing line between memory and fiction is blurred; every fictional story contains elements of memory, and memories contain elements of fiction…Stories are adaptive because they allow us to go beyond personal experience to what might have been, or to what might be in the future. They provide a way of stretching and sharing experiences so that we are better adapted to possible futures. Moreover, stories tend to become institutionalized, ensuring that shared information extends through large sections of the community, creating conformity and social cohesion. p. 124

The main argument … is that grammatical language evolved to enable us to communicate about events that do not take place in the here and now. We talk about episodes in the past, imagined or planned episodes in the future, or indeed purely imaginary episodes in the form of stories. Stories may extend beyond individual episodes, and involve multiple episodes that may switch back and forth in time. The unique properties of grammar, then, may have originated in the uniqueness of human mental time travel…Thus, although language may have evolved, initially at least, for the communication of episodic information, it is itself a robust system embedded in the more secure vaults of semantic and implicit memory. It has taken over large areas of our memory systems, and indeed our brains. p. 126


The mental faculties that allow us to locate, sort and retrieve events in time, are apparently use the same ones that we use to locate things in space. Languages have verb tenses that describe when things took place (although a few languages lack this ability). The ability to range at will over past, present and future gave rise to stories, which are often the glue that holds societies together, such as origin stories or tales of distant ancestors. Is the image above truly about moving forward in space, or is it about something else? What does it mean to say things like we “move forward” after a tragedy?

Different sets of grid cells form different grids: grids with larger or smaller hexagons, grids oriented in other directions, grids offset from one another. Together, the grid cells map every spatial position in an environment, and any particular location is represented by a unique combination of grid cells’ firing patterns. The single point where various grids overlap tells the brain where the body must be…Since the grid network is based on relative relations, it could, at least in theory, represent not only a lot of information but a lot of different types of information, too. “What the grid cell captures is the dynamic instantiation of the most stable solution of physics,” said György Buzsáki, a neuroscientist at New York University’s School of Medicine: “the hexagon.” Perhaps nature arrived at just such a solution to enable the brain to represent, using grid cells, any structured relationship, from maps of word meanings to maps of future plans.

The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces (Quanta)

It is likely that a dog, or even a bonobo, does not tell itself an ongoing “story” of it’s life. It simply “is”. If we accept narratization as an important feature of introspective self-consciousness, then we must accept the ability to tell ourselves these internal stories is key to the creation of that concept. But when did we acquire this ability? And is it universal? Clearly, it has something to do with the acquisition of language. And if we accept a late origin of language, it certainly cannot have arisen more than 70-50,000 years before present. To conclude, here is an excerpt from a paper Corballis wrote for the Royal Society:

the evolution of language itself is intimately connected with the evolution of mental time travel. Language is exquisitely designed to express ‘who did what to whom, what is true of what, where, when and why’…and these are precisely the qualities needed to recount episodic memories. The same applies to the expression of future events—who will do what to whom, or what will happen to what, where, when and why, and what are we going to do about it…To a large extent, then, the stuff of mental time travel is also the stuff of language.

Language allows personal episodes and plans to be shared, enhancing the ability to plan and construct viable futures. To do so, though, requires ways of representing the elements of episodes: people; objects; actions; qualities; times of occurrence; and so forth…The recounting of mental time travel places a considerable and, perhaps, uniquely human burden on communication, since there must be ways of referring to different points in time—past, present and future—and to locations other than that of the present. Different cultures have solved these problems in different ways. Many languages use tense as a way of modifying verbs to indicate the time of an episode, and to make other temporal distinctions, such as that between continuous action and completed action. Some languages, such as Chinese, have no tenses, but indicate time through other means, such as adverbs or aspect markers. The language spoken by the Pirahã, a tribe of some 200 people in Brazil, has only a very primitive way of talking about relative time, in the form of two tense-like morphemes, which seem to indicate simply whether an event is in the present or not, and Pirahã are said to live largely in the present.

Reference to space may have a basis in hippocampal function; as noted earlier, current theories suggest that the hippocampus provides the mechanism for the retrieval of memories based on spatial cues. It has also been suggested that, in humans, the hippocampus may encompass temporal coding, perhaps through analogy with space; thus, most prepositions referring to time are borrowed from those referring to space. In English, for example, words such as at, about, around, between, among, along, across, opposite, against, from, to and through are fundamentally spatial, but are also employed to refer to time, although a few, such as since or until, apply only to the time dimension. It has been suggested that the hippocampus may have undergone modification in human evolution, such that the right hippocampus is responsible for the retrieval of spatial information, and the left for temporal (episodic or autobiographical) information. It remains unclear whether the left hippocampal specialization is a consequence of left hemispheric specialization for language, or of the incorporation of time into human consciousness of past and future, but either way it reinforces the link between language and mental time travel.

The most striking parallel between language and mental time travel has to do with generativity. We generate episodes from basic vocabularies of events, just as we generate sentences to describe them. It is the properties of generativity and recursiveness that, perhaps, most clearly single out language as a uniquely human capacity. The rules governing the generation of sentences about episodes must depend partly on the way in which the episodes themselves are constructed, but added rules are required by the constraints of the communication medium itself. Speech, for example, requires that the account of an event that is structured in space–time be linearized, or reduced to a temporal sequence of events. Sign languages allow more freedom to incorporate spatial as well as temporal structure, but still require conventions. For example, in American sign language, the time at which an event occurred is indicated spatially, with the continuum of past to future running from behind the body to the front of the body.

Of course, language is not wholly dependent on mental time travel. We can talk freely about semantic knowledge without reference to events in time… However, it is mental time travel that forced communication to incorporate the time dimension, and to deal with reference to elements of the world, and combinations of those elements, that are not immediately available to the senses. It is these factors, we suggest, that were in large part responsible for the development of grammars. Given the variety of ways in which grammars are constructed, such as the different ways in which time is marked in different languages, we suspect that grammar is not so much a product of some innately determined universal grammar as it is a product of culture and human ingenuity, constrained by brain structure.

Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind (The Royal Society)

Next time, we’ll take a look at another unique recursive ability of the human mind: the ability to infer the thoughts and emotions of other people, a.k.a. the Theory of Mind.

The Recursive Mind (Review) – 2

Part 1

1. Language

We’ve already covered language a bit already. A good example of language recursion is given by children’s rhymes, such as This is the House That Jack Built:

It is a cumulative tale that does not tell the story of Jack’s house, or even of Jack who built the house, but instead shows how the house is indirectly linked to other things and people, and through this method tells the story of “The man all tattered and torn”, and the “Maiden all forlorn”, as well as other smaller events, showing how these are interlinked…(Wikipedia)

“The House That Jack Built” plays on the process of embedding in English noun phrases. The nursery rhyme is one sentence that continuously grows by embedding more and more relative clauses as postmodifiers in the noun phrase that ends the sentence…In theory, we could go on forever because language relies so heavily on embedding.

The Noun Phrase (Papyr.com)

In English, clauses can be embedded either in the center, or at the end:

In “The House That Jack Built” clauses are added to the right. This is called right-embedding. Much more psychologically taxing is so-called center-embedding, where clauses are inserted in the middle of clauses. We can cope with a single embedded clauses as in:

“The malt that the the rat ate lay in the house that Jack built.”

But it becomes progressively more difficult as we add further embedded clauses:

“The malt[that the rat (that the cat killed) ate] lay in the house that Jack built.”

Or worse:

“The malt [that the rat (that the cat {that the dog chased} killed) ate] lay in the house that Jack built.

I added brackets in the last two examples that may help you see the embeddings, but even so they’re increasingly difficult to unpack. Center-embedding is difficult because words to be linked are separated by the embedded clauses; in the last example above, it was the malt that lay in the house, but the words malt and lay are separated by twelve words. In holding the word malt in mind in order to hear what happened to it, one must also deal with separations between rat and ate and between cat and killed…Center embeddings are more common in written language than in spoken language, perhaps because when language is written you can keep it in front of you indefinitely while you try to figure out the meaning….The linguistic rules that underlie our language faculty can create utterances that are potentially, if not actually, unbounded in potential length and variety. These rules are as pure and beautiful as mathematics…

The Truth About Language pp. 13-14

Or a song you may have sung when you were a child: “There Was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly.”

The song tells the nonsensical story of an old woman who swallows increasingly large animals, each to catch the previously swallowed animal, but dies after swallowing a horse. The humour of the song stems from the absurdity that the woman is able to inexplicably and impossibly swallow animals of preposterous sizes without dying, suggesting that she is both superhuman and immortal; however, the addition of a horse is finally enough to kill her. Her inability to survive after swallowing the horse is an event that abruptly and unexpectedly applies real-world logic to the song, directly contradicting her formerly established logic-defying animal-swallowing capability. (Wikipedia)

The structure can be expressed this way:

cow [goat (dog {cat [bird (spider {fly})]})] – after which, she swallows the horse and expires. The resulting autopsy would no doubt unfold a chain of events resembling a Matryoshka doll (or a Turducken).

Or yet another chestnut from my childhood: “There’s a Hole in My Bucket,” which is less an example of recursion that a kind of strange loop:

The song describes a deadlock situation: Henry has a leaky bucket, and Liza tells him to repair it. To fix the leaky bucket, he needs straw. To cut the straw, he needs an axe. To sharpen the axe, he needs to wet the sharpening stone. To wet the stone, he needs water. But to fetch water, he needs the bucket, which has a hole in it. (Wikipedia)

Whether all human languages have a recursive structure by default, or are at least capable of it, is one of the most controversial topics in linguistics.

Bringing more data to language debate (MIT News)

The idea that language is not just based on external stimulus, but is in some way “hard-wired” into the human brain was first developed by Noam Chomsky. He argued that this meant that grammatical constructions were somehow based on the brain’s inner workings (i.e. how the brain formulates thoughts internally), and therefore all languages would exhibit similar underlying structures, something which he called the “Universal Grammar.”

Furthermore, he argued that language construction at its most fundamental level could be reduced to a single recursive operation he called Merge. This was part of his so-called “Minimalist Program” of language construction.

Merge is…when two syntactic objects are combined to form a new syntactic unit (a set).

Merge also has the property of recursion in that it may apply to its own output: the objects combined by Merge are either lexical items or sets that were themselves formed by Merge.

This recursive property of Merge has been claimed to be a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes language from other cognitive faculties. As Noam Chomsky (1999) puts it, Merge is “an indispensable operation of a recursive system … which takes two syntactic objects A and B and forms the new object G={A,B}” (Wikipedia)

The Merge applies to I-language, the thinking behind language, whereas the language spoken out loud is translated into what he calls E-Language (E for external). Corballis explains:

The Merge operation…strictly hold for what Chomsky calls I-language, which is the internal language of thought, and need not apply directly to E-language, which is external language as actually spoken or signed. In mapping I-language to E-language, various supplementary principles are needed. For instance…the merging of ‘Jane loves John’ with ‘Jane flies airplanes’ to get, ‘Jane, who flies airplanes, loves John’ requires extra rules to introduce the word who and delete one copy of the word Jane.

I-language will map onto different E-languages in different ways. Chomsky’s notion of unbounded Merge, recursively applied, is therefore essentially an idealization, inferred from the study of external languages, but is not in itself directly observable. pp. 23-24

It’s notable that whatever the other merits of the Merge, it does appear to be a good description of how language is extended via metaphor. I recently ran across a good example of this: the word inosculation, meaning to homogenize, make continuous or interjoin. It’s root is the verb “to kiss”, which itself is derived from the word for “mouth.” This word, like so many others, was created through recursion and metaphor.

From in- +‎ osculate, from Latin ōsculātus (“kiss”), from ōs + -culus (“little mouth”).

The sheer diversity of human languages that have been found and studied has put Chomsky’s Universal Grammar theory on the cooler. There does not seem to be any sort of universal grammar that we can find, nor a universal method of thought which underlies it. A few languages have been discovered that do not appear to use recursion, most famously the Pirahã language of the Amazon, but also the Iatmul language of New Guinea and some Australian languages spoken in West Arnhem land. For example, the phrase “They stood watching us fight” would be rendered as “They stood/they were watching us/we were fighting.” in Bininj Gun-Wok (p. 27)

Recursion and Human Thought: A Talk with Daniel Everett (Edge Magazine)

It continues to be debated whether animals have a capacity for recursive expression. A study on 2006 argued that starling calls exhibited a recursive quality, but this has been questioned. As I mentioned earlier, it is often difficult to tell if something which may appear recursive is actually generated recursively.

Starlings vs. Chomsky (Discover)

Corballis argues here (as he has in other books, which I will also refer to), that the human mental capacity for language evolved first via gesticulation (hand gestures), rather than verbal sounds (speech). Only much later, he argues, did communication switch from primarily hand gestures to speech. “I have argued…that the origins of language lie in manual gestures, and the most language-like behavior in nonhuman species is gestural.” (p. 161) Some reasons he gives for believing this are:

1.) We have had extensive control over our arms, hands and fingers (as demonstrated by tool use and manufacture, for example) for a millions of years, but the fine motor control over our lungs and vocal tract required to produce articulate speech is of far more recent vintage. It is also unique to our species—other apes don’t have the control over the lungs or mouth required for speech. In fact, the unique control that humans possess over their breathing leads Corballis to speculate that distant human ancestors must have spent considerable time diving in water, which requires extensive breath control. Human babies, for example, instinctively know to hold their breath in water in a way that other apes—including our closest relatives—cannot. This leads him to endorse an updated version of the Aquatic Ape theory called the Littoral hypothesis, or the Beachcomber theory.

In an extensive discussion of the aquatic ape hypothesis and the various controversies surrounding it, Mark Verhaegen suggests that our apelike ancestors led when he calls an aquarborial life, on the borders between forest and swamp lands. There they fed on shellfish and other waterbourne foods, as well as on plants and animals in the neighboring forested area…In this view, the environment that first shaped our evolution as humans was not so much the savanna as the beach. During the Ice ages the sea levels dropped, opening up territory rich in shellfish but largely devoid of trees. Our early Pleistocene forebears dispersed along the coasts, and fossils have been discovered not only in Africa but as far away as Indonesia, Georgia, and even England. Stone tools were first developed not so much for cutting carcasses of game killed on land as for opening and manipulating shells. Bipedalism too was an adaptation not so much for walking and running as for swimming and shallow diving.

Verhaegen lists a number of features that seem to have emerged only in Pleistocene fossils, some of which are present in other diving species but not in pre-Pleistocene hominins. These include loss of fur; an external nose; a large head; and head, body, and legs all in a straight line. The upright stance may have helped individuals stand tall and spot shellfish in the shallow water. Later, in the Pleistocene, different Homo populations ventured inland along rivers and perhaps then evolved characteristics more suited to hunting land-based animals. The ability to run, for instance, seems to have evolved later in the Pleistocene. But Verhaegen suggest that, in fact, we are poorly adapted to a dry, savannalike environment and retain many littoral adaptations (that is, adaptations to coastal regions): “We have a water- and sodium-wasting cooling system of abundant sweat glands, totally unfit for a dry environment. Our maximal urine concentration is much too low for a savanna-dwelling mammal. We need much more water than other primates and have to drink more often than savanna inhabitants, yet we cannot drink large quantities at a time.

Part of the reason for our swollen brains may derive from a diet of shellfish and other fish accessible the shallow-water foraging [sic]. Seafood supplies docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega 3 fatty acid, and some have suggested that it was this that drive the increase in brain size, reinforcing the emergence of language and social intelligence.

Michael A. Crawford and colleagues have long proposed that we still need to supplement our diets with DHA and other seafoods to maintain fitness. Echoing Crawford, Marcos Duarte issues a grim warning: “The sharp rise in brain disorders, which, in many developed countries, involves social costs exceeding those of heart disease and cancer combined, has been deemed the most worrying change in disease pattern in modern societies, calling for urgent consideration of seafood requirements to supply the omega 3 and DHA required for brain health.
The Truth About Language: What It Is and Where It Came From; pp. 95-97

2.) Chimpanzees appear to have little control over the types of sounds that they make. Vocalization in primates appears to be largely instinctual, and not under conscious control.

3.) Although apes such as chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas cannot learn spoken language, they can be taught to communicate with humans using sign language. Apes have learned vocabularies of several thousand signed words, most notably Koko the gorilla, and the bonobo Kanzi.

Manual activity in primates is intentional and subject to learning, whereas vocalizations appear to be largely involuntary and fixed. In teaching great apes to speak, much greater success has been achieved through gesture and the use of keyboards than through vocalization, and the bodily gestures of apes in the wild are less contained by context than are their vocalizations. These observations strongly suggest that language evolved from manual gestures. p. 57



4.)
Mirror neurons are neurons in our brain that fire not in response to an action, but in response to watching someone else perform that action. They were first discovered in monkeys (sometimes called “monkey-see, monkey-do” neurons), but are present in all apes. These are part of a larger network of regions called the mirror system. It has been proposed that language grew out of this mirror system. The underlying idea is that, “[W]e perceive speech not in terms of the acoustic patterns it creates, but in terms of how we ourselves would articulate it.” (p. 61) This called the motor theory of speech perception. If this theory is true, it would point to an origin of language in gestural imitation rather than calls, which do not recruit mirror neurons in other primates.

The mirror system, in contrast to the primate vocalization system, has to do with intentional action, and is clearly modifiable through experience. For example, mirror neurons in the monkey brain respond to the sounds of certain actions, such as the tearing of paper or the cracking of nuts, and these responses can only have been learned. The neurons were not activated, though, by money calls, suggesting that vocalization itself is not part of the mirror system in monkeys…

…in the monkey, mirror neurons responded to transitive acts, as in reaching for an actual object, but do not respond to intransitive acts, where a movement is mimed and involves no object. In humans, by contrast, the mirror system responds to both transitive and intransitive acts, and the incorporation of intransitive acts would have paved the way to the understanding of acts that are symbolic rather than object-related…functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans shows that the mirror-neuron region of the premotor cortex is activated not only when they watch movements of the foot, hand, and mouth, but also when they read phrases pertaining to these movements. Somewhere along the line, the mirror system became interested in language. p. 62

5.) The anatomical structures in the mouth and throat required to produce something like human vocal patterns (phonemes) also came fairly late in human evolution. There is no evidence that even archaic humans could do it properly:

One requirement for articulate speech was the lowering of the larynx, creating a right-angled vocal tract that allows us to produce the wide range of vowels that characterize speech. Philip Lieberman has argued that this modification was incomplete even in the Neanderthals…Daniel Lieberman…had shown that the structure of the cranium underwent changes after we split with the Neanderthals. One such change is the shortening of the sphenoid, the central bone of the cranial base form which the face grows forward, resulting in a flattened face. The flattening may have been part of the change that created the right-angled vocal tract, with horizontal and vertical components of equal length. This is the modification that allowed us the full range of vowel sounds, from ah to oo.

Other anatomical evidence suggests that the anatomical requirements for fully articulate speech were probably not complete until late in the evolution of Homo. For example, the hypoglossal nerve, which innervates the tongue, is also is much larger in humans, perhaps reflecting the importance of tongued gestures in speech. The evidence suggests that the size of the hypoglossal canal in early australopithecenes, and perhaps in Homo habilis, was within the range of that in modern great apes, while that of the Neanderthal and early H. sapiens skulls was contained will within the modern human range, although this has been disputed.

A further clue comes from the finding that the thoracic region of the spinal cord is relatively larger in humans than in nonhuman primates, probably because breathing during speech involves extra muscles of the thorax and abdomen. Fossil evidence indicates that this enlargement was not present in early hominins or even in Homo eragaster, dating from 1.6 million years ago, but was present in several Neanderthal fossils.

Emboldened by such evidence…Phillip Lieberman has recently made the radical claim that “fully human speech anatomy first appears in the fossil record in the Upper Paleolithic (about 50,000 years ago) and is absent in both Neanderthals and earlier humans.” This provocative statement suggests that articulate speech emerged even later than the arrival of Homo sapiens some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. While this may be an extreme conclusion, the bulk of evidence does suggest that autonomous speech emerged very late in the human repertoire…pp. 72-74

Primer: Acoustics and Physiology of Human Speech (The Scientist)

Interestingly, despite the anatomical evidence for a late development of language being fairly recent, Jaynes argued for a Pleistocene origin for speech in Homo sapiens (but not other archaic humans) back in 1976. He also implied that communication was unspoken, possibly through hand gestures much the way Corballis argues:

It is commonly thought that language is such an inherent part of the human constitution that it must go back somehow through the tribal ancestry of man to the very origin of the genus Homo, that is, for almost two million years. Most contemporary linguists of my acquaintance would like to persuade me that this is true. But with this view, I wish to totally and emphatically disagree. If early man, through these two million years, had even a primordial speech, why is there so little evidence of even simple culture or technology? For there is precious little archaeologically up to 40,000 B.C., other than the crudest of stone tools.

Sometimes the reaction to a denial that early man had speech is, how then did man function or communicate? The answer is very simple: just like all other primates with an abundance of visual and vocal signals which were very far removed from the syntactical language that we practice today. And when I even carry this speechlessness down through the Pleistocene Age, when man developed various kinds of primitive pebble choppers and hand axes, again my linguist friends lament my arrogant ignorance and swear oaths that in order to transmit even such rudimentary skills from one generation to another, there had to be language.

But consider that it is almost impossible to describe chipping flints into choppers in language. The art was transmitted solely by imitation, exactly the same way in which chimpanzees transmit the trick of inserting straws into ant hills to get ants. It is the same problem as the transmission of bicycle riding: does language assist at all?

Because language must make dramatic changes in man’s attention to things and persons, because it allows a transfer of information of enormous scope, it must have developed over a period that shows archaeologically that such changes occurred. Such a one is the late Pleistocene, roughly from 70,000 B.C. to 8000 B.C. This period was characterized climatically by wide variations in temperature, corresponding to the advance and retreat of glacial conditions, and biologically by huge migrations of animals and man caused by these changes in weather. The hominid population exploded out of the African heartland into the Eurasian subarctic and then into the Americas and Australia. The population around the Mediterranean reached a new high and took the lead in cultural innovation, transferring man’s cultural and biological focus from the tropics to the middle latitudes. His fires, caves and furs created for a man a kind of transportable microclimate that allowed these migrations to take place.

We are used to referring to these people as late Neanderthalers [sic]. At one time they were thought to be a separate species of man supplanted by Cor-Magnon man around 35,000 B.C. But the more recent view is that they were part of the general human line, which had great variation, a variation that allowed for an increasing pace of evolution, as man, taking his artificial climate with him, spread into these new ecological niches. More work needs to be done to establish the true patterns of settlement, but the most recent emphasis seems to be on its variation, some group continually moving, others making seasonal migrations, and others staying at a site all the year round.

I am emphasizing the climate changes during this last glacial age because I believe these changes were the basis of the selective pressures behind the development of language through several stages. OoCitBotBM; pp. 129-131

Thus, Jaynes falls into the camp that argues that language was the decisive factor in the transition to behavioral modernity as seen in the archaeological record (as do many others). This would also explain the relative stasis of cultures like that of Homo erectus, whose tools remained basically unchanged for thousands of years and had no signs of art, music, or any other kind of abstract thinking.

6.) People using sign language utilize the exact same areas of the brain (as shown by fMRI scans, for example) as people engaged in verbal speech.

Even in modern humans, mimed action activates the brain circuits normally thought of as dedicated to language…activities elicited activity in the left side of the brain in frontal and posterior areas–including Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas–that have been identified since the nineteenth century was the core of the language system…these areas have to do, not just with language, but with the more general linking of symbols to meaning, whether the symbols are words, gestures, images, sounds, or objects….We also know that the use of signed language in the profoundly deaf activates the same brain areas that are activated by speech…p. 64

7.) Hand gestures do not require linearalization. Corballis gives the example of an elephant and a woodshed. While some words do sound like what they describe (onomatopoeic words), most do not. In fact, they cannot. Thus, it would be difficult for sounds alone to distinguish between things such as elephants and woodsheds. Gestures, however, are much less limited in their descriptiveness.

Speech…requires that the information be linearalized, piped into a sequence of sounds that are necessarily limited in terms of how they can capture the spatial and physical natures of what they represent…Signed languages are clearly less constrained. The hands and arms can mimic the shape of real-world objects and actions, and to some extent lexical information can be delivered in parallel instead of being forced into a rigid temporal sequence. With the hands, it is almost certainly possible to distinguish an elephant from a woodshed, in purely visual terms. pp. 65-66

But see this: Linguistic study proves more than 6,000 languages use similar sounds for common words (ABC)

Over time, sounds may have supplemented hand gestures because they are not dependent on direct lines of sight. They can also transmit descriptive warning calls more effectively (“Look out, a bear is coming!”). Corballis speculates that facial gestures became increasingly incorporated with manual gestures over time, and that these facial gestures eventually also became combined with rudimentary sounds. This was the platform for the evolution of speech. Finally, freeing up the hands completely from the need for communication would have allowed for carrying objects and tool manufacture that was simultaneous with communication.

The switch, then, would have freed the hands for other activities, such as carrying and manufacture. It also allows people to speak and use tools at the same time. It might be regarded, in fact, as an early example of miniaturization, whereby gestures are squeezed from the upper body to the mouth. It also allows the development of pedagogy, enabling us to explain skilled actions while at the same time demonstrating them, as in a modern television cooking show. The freeing of the hands and the parallel use of speech may have led to significant advances in technology, and help explain why humans eventually predominated over the other large-brained hominins, including the Neanderthals, who died out some 30,000 years ago. p. 78

Incidentally, miniaturization, or at least the concept of it, also played a critical role in tool development for Homo sapiens: From Stone Age Chips to Microchips: How Tiny Tools Made Us Human (Emory University)

Eventually, speech supplanted gesture as the dominant method of communication, although hand gestures have never completely gone away, as exemplified by mimes, deaf people, and Italians. Gestures, such as pointing, mimicking, and picking things up, are all still used during the acquisition of language, as any teacher of young children will attest.

Why apes can’t talk: our study suggests they’ve got the voice but not the brains (The Conversation)