The Distributed Cognition and Language Origin research cluster of the DLG (http://sls.hawaii.edu/DLG/?page_id=166) meets at the CILC conference on 11 September 2012 (Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark), where we are organizing the Cluster Workshop:
How Did Human Mind Emerge from the Animal Mind?
Cluster coordinator:
Nataliya Abieva
(Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, Saint Petersburg, RF)
1. The origin and evolution of the brain in living beings, with the focus on the origin of the interpretive mind. (Louis J. Goldberg, State University of New York at Buffalo, NY, USA; Liz Stillwaggon Swan, Longmont, CO, USA)
2. Non-human primates as thinking animals. How developed are the primates’ abstract thinking abilities? To what extent do they percept their conspecifics’ mental states and their intentional behavior? These points are very important as they can shed light on the possibility or impossibility of culture emergence in terms of the biological world. Culture as opposed to Umwelt – Umwelt as a semiotic construct of the existing environment of the species and Culture as a sum of deliberate changes introduced into the environment by the species. The latter demands creative and imitative abilities dependant on abstract thinking. (David Leavens, University of Sussex, UK)
3. Niche construction theory bridging Umwelt and Culture. The capacity of organisms to modify their environment and thereby create more favourable conditions for living. Such deliberate acts of artificial manufacturing of nests, burrows, dens, webs etc. can provide the missing links in the human evolution from biology to culture. The Upper-Paleolithic and especially Neolithic periods when humans left East Africa and quickly populated the rest of the world demonstrate humans’ increased ability to modify their environments to compensate for different climatic regimes and other challenges. So what are the differences between the animals’ and early humans’ niche construction that can be described as the earliest signs of human specificity? (Jeremy Kendal, Durham University, UK)
4. The shift from on-line to off-line communication made the increase in mental abstraction possible. Tools and other archeological artifacts promoted fossilization of socially relevant knowledge, and this ability to communicate over space and time laid foundation of human civilization. The shift from internal personal experience to externally observable and shared communal background became the marked sign in evolution. The storage and passing of that cumulative cultural heritage became possible only due the unprecedented semiotic capacity humans have developed. Having started with non-verbal communicative forms (Donald 1997, 2007) they acquired language capacity that could appear only after specifically human patterns of abstract thinking had been formed and proved to be successful in ensuring groups survival (Deacon 1997). (Nataliya Abieva, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, Saint-Petersburg, Russia)
5. Those changes introduced specific human mechanisms of mental processing: the transition of external to internal representations and the simultaneous switch from tacit to explicit knowledge. (Theresa S. S. Schilhab, University of Aarhus, Denmark).
6. The cardinal importance of the tool production in protohumans – design, choice of material and its processing mark a decisive turn towards abstract thinking and change in cognitive abilities. (Jaime F. Cárdenas-García, “Cárdenas & Associates”, USA).
This workshop will continue the discussion raised at the first meeting of interested parties in St Petersburg in October 2010 (http://inyaz.herzen.spb.ru/symposium.html). It would be nice to discuss a reliable scenario of mutual mind-and-language origin and evolution.
PROGRAMME
30 min per presentation + 10 min for discussion
10.00 – 10.40. Liz Stillwaggon Swan & Louis J. Goldberg. The Origin and Evolution of the Interpretive Mind.
10.40 – 11.20. David A. Leavens. Cognitive Foundations for Human Primates.
11.20 – 12.00. Jeremy R. Kendal. Niche Construction and the Evolution of Cultural Evolution in Humans.
12.00 – 13.30 – lunch
13.30 – 14.10. Nataliya Abieva. Off-line Thinking and Communication as a Marked Change in Evolution.
14.10 – 14.50. Theresa S. S. Schilhab. The Cognitive Switch from Implicit to Explicit Knowledge Formation.
14.50 – 15.30. Jaime F. Cárdenas-García. The Human Senses, Tool Technology and Cognitive Development.
15.30 – 16.30 – Round-table discussion
Abstracts
The Origin and Evolution of the Interpretive Mind
Liz Stillwaggon Swan, University of Colorado at Boulder, CO, USA
Louis J. Goldberg, State University of New York at Buffalo, NY, USA
Abstract: Our project in Biosemiotics has been to inform philosophical questions about the ontological continuity between life and mind with relevant insights from molecular biology and neurobiology. Our collaboration—which culminated in 3 publications in Biosemiotics in 2010 and 2011, plus a presentation at the 2011 Gatherings in Biosemiotics—is thoroughly interdisciplinary and, we believe, constitutes a useful niche in the biological and cognitive sciences that provides a progressive way forward in understanding the origin of the interpretive mind in humans that remains fully grounded in the relevant biology.
Effectively integrating the science and the philosophy in order to articulate our insights into the nature of mindedness has been the biggest challenge of our collaboration. Scientific accounts of life and mind phenomena are commonly presented as being independent of the related philosophical questions, whereas the contemporary analytic literature on the nature of mind is commonly divorced from the relevant underlying neurobiology. Our collaboration, in short, has served to carve out a conceptual space wherein the phenomena relevant to the science and the philosophy of mind are inextricable.
In Biosymbols: Symbols in Life and Mind, we argue that the symbolic nature of human mindedness does not make humans distinct from nature (as many philosophers have argued) because proto-symbolic communication is ubiquitous in the living world, even in single-celled organisms. In How is Meaning Grounded in the Organism?, we give an account of how features of the environment become represented in the rat somatosensory system—in what we call brain-objects—which then activate relevant behavioral responses. In, A Biosemiotic Analysis of Braille, we extend this model of organismic integration with the environment to the human context and explain how effective Braille reading happens in a somatosensory system that was not designed for that specific purpose. And finally in, On the Genetic and Epigenetic Bases of Primate Signal Processing, an analysis was made of the neurobiological structures and processes
that are necessary to support word recognition and the phenomenon of competitive speed texting.
We agree that human language—as well as the communicative abilities of cells—is constrained by biological, circumstantial (contextual) and social factors. Our work has stressed the fact that within the individual complex organism there is a cooperative community of cells whose integrated activities are enabled by a molecularly-based language.
When we examine the way in which mammals interact with their environment, we observe the fact that the cells are now organized in such a way that permits features of the environment to become represented in the organism’s brain. Those representations (brain-objects) then become the elements of a brain-language that allow the organism to detect, represent and interpret environmental events and to respond to those events in an adaptive manner.
In social communication among primates the features of the environment that the organism detects, interprets and responds to, are the actions of conspecifics. This enables social organisms to coordinate their actions and to create a shared world that is dependent upon internal cellular communication, organism-environment communication and organism-organism communication.
Cognitive Foundations for Human Primates
David A. Leavens
University of Sussex, UK
Abstract: Charles Darwin famously noted that “He who understands [the] baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Given the close evolutionary relationships between human beings and the other primates, it is reasonable to expect continuity in some aspects of their psychological processing. For example, at a perceptuo-motor level, relative to most other mammals, primates are particularly vision-oriented, with extraordinarily manipulative hands. I will discuss areas of apparent psychological continuity between humans and the other primates, in terms of sensorimotor cognition and social learning.
Consideration of the taxonomic distribution of cognitive abilities is relevant to our understanding of the capabilities of the hominid ancestor who invented speech. One of those abilities is a sense of self. Humans and their nearest living relatives, the great apes, recognize themselves in mirrors, whereas slightly more distant relatives, the monkeys, generally do not. Therefore, we might reasonably speculate that language emerged in a self-aware hominid. Humans and great apes also display non-verbal capacities to co-orient towards particular location (i.e., to establish joint attention). For example, pointing emerges in representatives of all great ape species, without explicit training, in some circumstances. Hence, some aspects of the intersubjective skills of capturing and re-directing the attention of other social agents would seem to have been present in early hominids.
In terms of sensorimotor cognition, our nearest living relatives, the chimpanzees, are famously tool-reliant, reflecting advanced means-ends reasoning capabilities. For example, extractive foraging – including the use of hammers and anvils to extract nuts from hard shells, the use of probes to extract termites and ants, and the use of spears to kill bushbabies in their burrows – reflect an ability to represent entities not immediately available to the senses. Recent evidence suggests some future planning abilities in great apes. Thus, our hominid ancestor was probably pre-adapted for representation of entities displaced in time and space. Some great apes have acquired productive vocabularies of several score to several hundred symbols, usually with much greater receptive vocabularies; hence we might attribute some facility with symbols to the last common ancestor of apes and humans, which lived in the early Miocene.
Niche Construction and the Evolution of Cultural Evolution in Humans
Jeremy R. Kendal
Centre for the Coevolution of Biology and Culture,
Department of Anthropology,
Durham University, UK
Abstract: Niche construction is the process by which organisms modify selective environments thereby influencing their own and other species’ evolution. The constructed environment can be either inceptive (initiating environmental change) or counteractive (reversing a prior environmental change), and orthogonally, the modification can occur either through perturbation of the environment or relocation of the organism to a different environment. Theoretical work has established that niche construction can have qualitative effects on evolutionary trajectories, altering the rate and direction of selection. These effects are typically exacerbated by cultural niche construction, where modifications are derived through socially learned practices.
There is considerable evidence for social learning across the animal kingdom, yet its effect on human evolution has been extraordinary. While Rogers’ paradox highlights that cultural transmission does not necessarily increase mean fitness in a population, cumulative cultural evolution of adaptive behaviour is commonly thought to be fundamental to the unique human evolutionary trajectory and accompanying population expansion. Thus the hunt is on to understand how explanatory variables relating to prosociality, technical intelligence, symbolic representation and demography combined to result in the cumulative, complex and diverse cultures evident today.
It is likely that humans’ uncommon capacity for cultural niche construction played an important role in their radical evolutionary trajectory. Gene-culture coevolution is a critical process resulting from the reciprocal niche construction of environments affecting genetic and cultural selection. For instance, traditional forms of subsistence, group living and migration patterns may have affected, and been affected by, genetic evolution relating to cognitive, physiological, morphological and disease-related characteristics.
Crucially, cultural niche construction can also promote further cultural change, as traditional pedagogical behaviours and ritual scaffold the learning environment, affecting the cumulative cultural evolution of skills, conceptual understanding, beliefs and public expectations, in the context of technology and social structure. Moreover, the ecological inheritance of material cultural, forms of symbolic representation, and concomitant patterns of distributed cognition may qualitatively affect the evolution of cultural evolution.
Off-line Thinking and Communication as a Marked Change in Evolution
Nataliya Abieva
Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, Saint Petersburg
Russia
Abstract: It is widely accepted that the issue of language emergence in humans is inseparable from the problem of human mind specificity. Humans demonstrate unequalled capacity for abstract mental processing that is coupled with unrivalled easiness they master and use different sign systems for information exchange in their communities. In the course of cultural evolution humans have accumulated huge masses of data in different material artifacts that have been stored across time and space. How could that capacity have been developed in the biological world?
Contemporary research shows that capacity for abstract interpretive thinking in a proto-form can be found not only in non-human primates (Froese et al., forthcoming) but lower living systems as well (Stillwaggon Swan & Goldberg 2010). The biosemiotic approach provides the necessary methodological basis for comparative studies of semiotic competence in different species. Of the three types of communicative interaction found in the biological world (Abieva 2008), interpersonal communication is definitely the most specific and explanatory of the human mind-language abstraction coupling. Interpersonal communication is basically social, its main purpose being to share the most urgent and relevant information among all members of the group. The survival of social animals heavily depends on the direct access to the data distributed among them, and their patterns of behavior accompanied by certain perceptual signals have evolutionized accordingly (Hoffmeyer, forthcoming). Though animal communicative interaction is intrinsically of on-line type (‘here and now’), there are evidences that many species rely on some form of off-line thinking and communication (independent of ‘now’) as well (e.g. spotting and dens, hills and burrows construction), thus linking individuals distanced in time and space. Interpersonal communication a priori had to emerge to service communal needs, but off-line interpersonal communication is fully dependant on depersonalized, externalized knowledge.
Abstraction in proto-humans increased greatly when they made a decisive shift from on-line to off-line communication (Abieva 2008). Tools and other archeological artifacts promoted fossilization of socially relevant knowledge and this ability to communicate across time and space laid foundation of purely human civilization. I propose that there are two most essential aspects that can explain how it became possible for early Homo to prefer the cultural way of evolution – sometimes even at the expense of the biological one:
1) Opposition between internal and external that correlates with the individual/social opposition. An individual’s internal knowledge is acquired, stored and used solely by himself. Every individual is an integral live organism that physiologically is a closed system – all processes securing his biological survival are governed by the central nervous system that is in charge of the data perception and interpretation. Social species besides individuals’ internal knowledge rely on information provided by their conspecifics in the external mode. An important point here is that externalized information is always semantically less rich than the internal but more abstract in character.
2) The described above raises the next question – the correlation between continuity and discreteness. Brain functioning is best conceptualized in those terms that are characteristic of cognition in principle: thinking is definitely continuous, dynamic and multifaceted while its results embodied in semiotic entities are discrete. The necessity to externalize knowledge in the off-line mode of communication inevitably had to reframe brain structures introducing more discreteness into mental processes.
Thus human capacity for mental abstraction and semiotic competence should be seen as the result of externalizing knowledge in sets of discrete units appropriate for off-line communication. The shift from internal personal experience to externally observable and shared communal background became the marked sign in evolution. The storage and passing of that cumulative cultural heritage became possible only due the unprecedented semiotic capacity humans have developed. Having started with non-verbal communicative forms (Donald 1997, 2007), they acquired language capacity that could appear only after specifically human patterns of abstract thinking had been formed and proved to be successful in ensuring groups survival (Deacon 1997).
The Cognitive Switch from Implicit to Explicit Knowledge Formation
Theresa S. S. Schilhab
Research Centre GNOSIS
University of Aarhus
Denmark
e-mail: tsc@dpu.dk
Abstract In ‘Kinds of minds’, Dennett (1996) compares the phylogenetic development of cognition to a building – a tower - named the ‘Tower of Generate and Test’. ‘Generating’ and ‘testing’ refers to the mechanism driving the evolution of cognitive systems. The Tower consists of four qualitatively different solutions to cognize emerged during the evolution of organisms. The conjecture of a four storey building naturally imputes the sense of progressing development, increased complexity and dependency on historicity in cognition. Consequently, the analogy of a tower entails that the top level depends on the lower levels, and individual cognitive apparatuses owe their sophistication partly to earlier editions (lower levels) by being constructed on top and stabilized by the storeys below.
The primary level on which later stages build is named ‘The Darwinian level’. Here, appropriate responses to environmental stimuli are entirely dependent on genetic predispositions in a ‘key-in-lock’ relationship. The ‘key-in-lock-relation’ prohibits learning at the level of the individual and ‘learning’ from mistakes is incorporated phylogenetically as preprogramming of species. Individual learning, however, is introduced at the next level, ‘The Skinnerian level’. Here, the behavioural repertoire directed at particular environmental conditions now includes a variety of responses the organism might ‘choose’ between. Multiple exposures teach the organism to ‘find’ the more appropriate response among the alternatives, hence it learns.
Obviously, at these basic levels, the actual exposure to environmental stimulations is crucial. Darwinians and Skinnerians are left to cognize exclusively in the presence of actual stimulations to which they can react. At the following levels, the Popperian and Gregorian (which applies only to humans because the span of representations is markedly expanded) levels, this changes. Besides cognitive abilities transferred from previous levels, Popperians and Gregorians are capable of representing the stimuli beyond their actual presence. They adapt to the environment on the basis of memories (retention of stimulations) about the surroundings. They construct representations of the environment to which they might respond irrespective of the stimulations present.
Based on framework of Tower of Generate and Test, I make two claims. In the first part I explain why the phylogenetic development from Skinnerians to Popperians entails a qualitative switch from external to internal representations, that is a change from so-called implicit (automatic) to explicit (conscious) knowledge formation. In the second part I suggest, that in human ontogenetic development, this same switch – from implicit to explicit knowledge formation - is repeated. To corroborate my claim I discuss features of language acquisition. I will point to our physical and psychological immaturity at birth as biological constraints that anchor language to the present. In early childhood, particular interest in the concrete furnishes our linguistic world and installs 'concrete' language as the principal constituent of competent language use. Only later, when we explicitly (consciously) apply concrete language, can we add abstract knowledge to the vocabulary.
The Human Senses, Tool Technology and Cognitive Development
Jaime F. Cárdenas-García
“Cárdenas & Associates”
Hanover, MD USA
Abstract The purpose of this presentation is to explore the links, both biological and cognitive, that allow human beings to move beyond the use of readily available materials as tools to the actual manufacture of said tools and what that means for the development of human cognitive capabilities. The details of the connectedness of the senses to brain development, hand-digit interconnectedness, and the relationship between Oldowan and Acheulean technologies and cognitive development are reviewed. Preliminary implications for language development are explored.
Extended Abstract A scientific approach to the study of consciousness needs to take into account the one characteristic shared by all organisms, including human beings, that we exist as entities which are interconnected with our surroundings by a limiting membrane, as homeostatic beings (Maturana & Varela, 1980). This limiting membrane not only interconnects our inner workings from our surroundings, but allows, using our sense organs: touch, sight, sound, smell and taste, for corresponding transformations of both our inner workings and the surrounding environment. Do our senses provide us with a view of reality? From a scientific perspective, i.e., an explicit and verifiable collective enterprise that takes place over space and time, this implicitly means that there are subjective/relative and objective/absolute elements. The term subjective/relative elements is used to mean that individual human beings are the providers of information to the scientific enterprise, which over time is subject to scrutiny and verification by countless other human beings to attempt an approximation to objective/absolute reality. As the scientific enterprise is a never ending historical process, reality thus described is both subjective/relative and objective/absolute in scope, at the same time. Reality is subjective/relative in the never ending short-term, and reality is also and simultaneously objective/absolute in the never ending long-term. This leads us to conclude that our senses when viewed from the viewpoint of humanity are capable of providing us with a view of and an approximation to reality.
This approach leads to the definition that consciousness is the ability of an organism to interact with its environment for the purpose of satisfying its most basic physiological (and spiritual) and social needs to survive and sustain itself.
This definition is by its very nature dynamic in scope. Organisms have their own internal organization as homeostatic beings; recursive interactions between the organism and the environment impact both the organism and the environment; and, the environment also changes independent of the organism. Since the organism has to change over time to account for all of these possibilities to promote its long-term and lifetime existence, it engages in a forever-changing synergetic relationship with its surrounding environment. Implying that the organism has to always be adapting to its always changing physiological (and spiritual) and social needs to survive and sustain itself. Further implying that the consciousness of the organism is always evolving in relation to the environment in which it exists.
The first step on the road to humankind “must have been a descent from the trees with subsequent evolution to upright posture by our ground-dwelling ancestors” (Gould, 1977). More recent studies have shown that indeed there was a period of time in which due to global warming our ancestors became ground dwellers and might have been motivated to an upright posture by the need to migrate over long distances to gain access to limited food resources, and to carry scarce food and early tools to safer grounds (Carvalho et al., 2012). The upright posture and associated gait also resulted in significant conservation of energy in their mobility (Sockol, Raichlen, & Pontzer, 2007). After this, one can well imagine the first time that a distant relative of ours felt compelled to throw a stone or wield a stick in an act of desperation to protect his well-being, or even for her to act to use a rock to break apart a hard-shelled edible plant or animal to get at the fruits of her labor. Crucial to these early experiences was the need to interact with their physical environment to satisfy their basic physiological needs. Given enough interactions of this kind and time, the lessons learned led to the development of tools. Though it is well recognized that other animals also use tools, tools are the instruments that differentiate us from the rest of the animal kingdom (Oakley, 1957). A tool in its most elementary phase may be a stick or rock that is picked-off the ground for use to satisfy an urgent need. Human tools evolved from this early incarnation to tools which are created by the expenditure of human effort, using raw materials which may be readily available; to produce instruments that facilitate subsequent human efforts. Further, these instruments are treasured and as a result are kept for additional and repeated use, and may be even carried about, if not unwieldy to carry. This recognizes the value of tools as valuable not only in terms of their use value but also as they encompasses human labor which, depending on circumstances, might not be readily available. This unavailability might be due to the time needed to manufacture such items, to the required knowledge and skill of the tool maker, or even to the scarcity of raw materials. The toolmaker becoming a valuable member of the group with which she lives. This is truly what initiates the differentiation between us and other animals.
One can well imagine that key to the development of tools is the requisite coordination of the senses in the body coupled to the ancillary extremities that allow the crafting of said tools. Even the identification of raw materials for crafting of said tools might require the cooperation of all of our senses: sight, touch, sound, taste and smell. In comparing the hands of the most anthropoid of apes with the human hand, it is clearly discernible that the human hand is greatly differentiated by the labor of hundreds of thousands of years (Engels, 1876; Gould, 1977; Trigger, 1967). The primate hand exhibits a small thumb combined with long, curved fingers, while the human hand has a “much larger, much muscular, mobile, and fully opposable thumb combined with fingers that have shortened and straightened” (Young, 2003). More recently it has been shown that bipedalism came first with its resulting change in the human foot and toes, which further influenced the proportions and shape of the hand (Rolian, Lieberman, & Hallgrimsson, 2010). Additionally, the “biomechanical parameters [of the hand] related directly to efficiency of use, may plausibly have been subject to selection in the earliest stone tool-using hominins” (Key & Lycett, 2011). Keeping in mind that the use of tools leads to recursive behavior vis-à-vis the environment, i.e., the use of tools influences the way that humans interact with their environment, which changes the environment, which further changes the tools. Notice that the last 50 years of human existence have seen more changes in the tools at our disposal than the rest of the human historical record.
Further, the development of tools led to new food sources with its consequent effect on the human body leading to newly acquired physical characteristics, including additional development and optimization of various human organs including the brain and its ancillary organs. It is also posited that the use of tools feeds an ever expanding realm of human development, social activity, organization and imagination. It leads to the need for specialized techniques in tool making (Faisal, Stout, Apel, & Bradley,2010; Stout & Chaminade, 2009), for planning when using tools for hunting, for communication in the form of language to advance the planning and execution of said plans, and for recording the planning and the activities that take place to conserve such records for posterity by promoting an oral tradition, writing and printing. It enhances the ability of human beings to plan their future based on oral and written recording of the past. Tools and tool making have revolutionized society so that it becomes difficult to discern how far humankind has changed from its humble beginnings.
The purpose of this presentation is to explore the links, both biological and cognitive, that allow human beings to move beyond the use of readily available materials as tools to the actual manufacture of said tools and what that meant for the development of human cognitive capabilities. The details of the connectedness of the senses to brain development (Field, 2001; Montagu, 1978; Robles-De-La-Torre, 2006), hand-digit interconnectedness (Lang & Schieber, 2004), and the relationship between Oldowan and Acheulean technologies and cognitive development (Faisal et al., 2010) are reviewed. Preliminary implications for language development are explored.