I get the desire to stay humble. This feels like splitting hairs though.
You would say it's not humans, but human culture that is causing global extinction event?
Well, okay.
In any case, you may find the book 'Sapiens' interesting. It argues that the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life is our ability to abstract and conceptualize.
Respectfully, it doesn't feel like splitting hairs to me... but quite a significant frame-shift. (Defensive credentializing: I'm a former biochemist and now technologist and event facilitator, with a fascination for the always-evolving fields of social physics & complexity science.)
This theory proposes that language is a separate strata of organism/information that co-evolved with the host biology of the human mind. i.e. We're unique not because we're simply "the smartest biology", but rather, we're more like a cyborg of two organisms, one biological and one semiotic. As a assemblage, we have vastly overrepresented dominance of the semiotic organism compared to other creatures who host very primitive semiotic organisms.
In this frame, humans can be conceptualized as individuals, but alternatively as simply hosts to the mind, which functions as the replication machinery of the larger social organism that takes shape between minds in the strata above (organizations, nations, culture).
I'm still chewing on all this stuff, mind you :) And thank you for the recommendation -- I really need to pick up that book!
It is debatable whether "the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life" i.e. "our ability to abstract and conceptualize" is unique to humans.
Cat's and dogs abstract and conceptualise. So do crows and whales. But more than that, before you get too carried away with the importance of this "fundamental change", consider the possibility that the ability to "abstract and conceptualise" doesn't yield a "fundamental change" at all.
How can that be?
Consider the ends to which all this abstract thought is being applied.
Why do humans spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours buying and applying makeup to their faces?
Why do humans spend thousands of hours in the studio creating the latest dance music hits?
Why do humans buy the biggest, fastest cars?
Why do humans spend weeks comparing and assessing home insulation materials from multiple vendors?
Why do humans spend thousands of years developing steel making traditions that result in the finest weaponry?
Why do humans use google maps navigation?
Are humans, with all their advanced skills at abstraction and conceptualisation, and vocabulary and communication sophistication, doing anything that birds and bees and whales and cows aren't already doing?
All us animals are just waking up every day, checking on the kids, going to work, getting hungry, fixing lunch, getting horny, feeling frustrated, lashing out, seeking to impress, preening our feathers, and, from time to time, thanking our lucky stars.
What else can we do? Technology doesn't change that. It just gives us different ways to do the same things we and other animals have been doing since the dawn of life on earth.
> It is debatable whether "the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life" i.e. "our ability to abstract and conceptualize" is unique to humans.
I like your questions.
I'm not disagreeing (unsure myself), but this talk of what "the fundamental" is, it makes me want to share about another hypothesis: that the mind's ability to operate via "recursion" is the feature from which a bunch of other things emerged. A good book that lays the case, still reading, but very thought-provoking: https://www.amazon.ca/Recursive-Mind-Origins-Language-Civili...
So if that's true, it's less about there being some fundamental core difference between us and animals. I think I agree that the same underlying drives motivate. I understand that the core drive of all life (below the particulars of our biological strata) are perhaps seeking the right alchemical mix of (1) entropy/micro-diversity and (2) cycles/periodicity and (3) compartmentalization [1]. These drive information-creation about the environment -- mapping information of the environment into the structures "trying" to buffer themselves from change in a chaotic environment. But "trying" is anthropomorphizing (and applying false agency), and in essence, this simply allows a structure of any scale or medium to "persist" better into the next tick of the engine ;) And a structure that persists tends to have information about the environment (and the environment's future) encoded within itself. This encoding in persistent structures is what we tend to read as free-will and agency.
But anyhow, in a round-about way, I'm just proposing that perhaps "recursion" was the "new innovation" that biology of human mind stumbled upon, that really expanded the capacity to persist. And language, which not a result of new drives, fell out of that new ability of minds :)
ps, sorry for rant, i get excited about this stuff! sorry if overload, and apologies for not citing the web of readings that led me here. Happy to linkshare, if you're interested, as I certainly have sources and go back to them often! e.g., [2] [3] :)
Thanks for that. It didn't sound ranty, particularly as you were careful to qualify your ideas with pointed references to information sources and information processing.
I agree about recursion. When I first heard about it in CS101 a lightbulb lit up. It's an elegant computational mechanism to resolve complexity, given enough stack space.
When I later heard the theory that the human neocortex is so large so as to accomodate data structures to manage social contexts of communities of 150 people, it made more sense.
Our social reckoning depends on knowing or anticipating or game theorising what other people are thinking, so as to be able to assess group dynamics. But these assessments are contingent. A might support us, but only if she doesn't know what happened with B, which only C knows about, and I trust C. But I'm not sure where D stands in all of this, and I haven't seen E for a while, but she has a connection to both C and A.
Your last paragraph describes exactly what motivates me to work on an open source platform called https://pol.is/home . Or rather, the loss of the ability to navigate those dynamics in high-volume, low-empathy digital spaces we've created, that's what motivates. The platform is big in Taiwan, and is being used to crowdsource national legislation. It allows the opinion landscape of thousands to be made legible in aggregate to all participants so that everyone can build the nuanced and deep stories around complex issues, instead of collapsing into emotional tribalism. We lose all that good stuff in online spaces, that our wetwares gives us for free in meatspace :)
> the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life
Are you sure that has happened?
Do humans dominate insects, fungi, and bacteria?
Do humans dominate the biomass of Earth?
If you limited the scope of your remark to mammals, fish, reptile and birds, I would understand what you are saying. Humans have excelled at habitat destruction. Still, I would point out that the "domination" of which you speak is less than 300 years in duration, with no certainty to last beyond 500 years.
Yes, we do.
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
"the total plant biomass (and, by proxy, the total biomass on Earth) has declined approximately twofold relative to its value before the start of human civilization. "
>Still, I would point out that the "domination" of which you speak is less than 300 years in duration, with no certainty to last beyond 500 years.
The Cambrian explosion happened 500 million years ago. Photosynthesis is projected to last another 600. We've used all easily available complex elements, and extracted much more. It will all oxidize once were are gone, and it will not regenerate in this time period. Even if we are gone, our impact and legacy will outlive us, likely ensuring we are the last advanced civilization this world will produce.
You would say it's not humans, but human culture that is causing global extinction event?
Well, okay.
In any case, you may find the book 'Sapiens' interesting. It argues that the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life is our ability to abstract and conceptualize.