Posted by Penny_Louise on Wed 6 May 09, 9:35 AM to Penny_Louise's blog.
I've explored in previous musings the concept that genetic evolution has ended, that we now use intelligence and sentience to develop and enforce a moral code and that any future evolution will be moral, rather than genetic.
I need to consider how we got from a genetic evolution to a moral one. It cannot have happened 'overnight'. No matter how intelligent, humans without a full range of instincts to get through every part of daily living could not have survived without their complex moral society and the development of resources. The transition must have taken time, and must have included a gradual change from one way of living to the other. And yet, the gulf between the sentient and non-sentient is so huge, it's hard to imagine that process.
I believe the key must have been language. Most species that live in society don't need language, they all have the right instincts to do what they need to do, and there's little interaction needed. The communication needed is mainly about conveying warnings of danger, of sexual desire or location of food: simple language tasks, although there is evidence of the use of syllables and sentence structure in some of the 'higher' species. Whether any of this constitutes 'language' is debatable: they are all non-adaptive instinctual forms of simple communication (even if we don't understand many of them!!). Certainly, this communication is just about the presentation of information: presence and location of danger, food and a good shag.
What makes our sentient specie different is that we are adaptive, we don't live by instinct, and to live without, we need knowledge, not simply information. Knowledge is the collected and processed information from past generations: how to build, make fire, cook, deal with people, maintain society.
Mammal brains maintain history by storing visual and auditory images within its cortex, and by providing access pathways to it in response to various external stimuli. The response the animal should have to these various stored images is held by the associated stored emotion: fear, lust, hunger, discomfort, joy. The animal can remember where to avoid to be safe, where to find food, can recognise relevant weather patterns, learns the relevance of various sounds and odours.
None of this information can be passed on genetically, therefore each non-sentient mammal must build up their own library of knowledge. They can only do this if there have enough instinctual response to survive long enough to learn for themselves, with a little parent-to-sibling and peer-to-peer education.
Humans don't have this luxury. We need knowledge, and to amass sufficient knowledge we need a way of passing knowledge through generations.
The mammalian brain's ability to record vision, sounds and smells along with emotional response is the basis on which sentience is formed, but with one crucial addition. We, the sentient specie, gained the ability to manipulate the stored images and emotions. We developed imagination, and with it, we mastered the story. We use language both to communicate the stories, and, crucially, I believe, to form them in our own minds. Thinking, at this high level, is done with language, and only with the presence of a high level adaptive language can we manipulate our imagination.
This is the difference between us and the rest of the living world. We can create stories in our mind, we can listen to other's stories and 'feel' them. We can attach emotion to scenes that are described to us rather than scenes we have experienced first hand. With this ability, early human species were able to pass knowledge through generations, by story telling, by folk lore, by legend. The means to live in a wide range of environments required knowledge of the particular environment each social group experienced, and this knowledge was encapsulated in and passed on through story telling. How to build to survive climatic conditions, how to cook to live on a wide range of food types, and to be able to store food, how to hunt, forage and farm, how to defend and offend to maintain or gain territory, how to take note of weather and season, how to survive famine, fire and earthquake, all essential knowledge for the intelligent species. Together, of course, with the Dummy's Guide to Living in Society!
Edited Fri 5 Jun 09, 6:36 PM by Penny_Louise
