What human nature is has perplexed
philosophers for a very long time. When Plato supposedly suggested that it was
to be a featherless biped, Diogenes the Cynic plucked a chicken and said
‘Behold! I have brought you a man’. But the question itself is fundamentally
flawed. There is no such thing as human nature.
Most humans share certain
similarities, but this only describes what is normal for humans, not what the
essence of humanity is. Whether or not He exists, God did not design us and so
there isn’t a blueprint in a drawer somewhere in heaven which explains what
humans are meant to be like. Instead, each of us is given characteristics by
accident, some of which help us in life and some of which hinder us. I am the
way I am, not because I am close to or far from an ethereal standard, but
because I am the result of long, chaotic causal chains.
The closest thing to a definition of
human nature would be a biological one, i.e. if your DNA could be mixed with
the DNA of another human to produce fertile offspring, then you are a member of
the species homo sapiens. But generally when people invoke human nature, they
are merely summarising their experience of humans. Some will say ‘It is human
nature to be kind’ and others will say ‘It is human nature to be cruel’, and
both will have countless examples to back up their perspective. That’s because
humans are both kind and cruel. Evolution has implanted both kind and cruel
instincts in most people’s minds because sometimes it pays to be empathetic and
sometimes it pays to be murderous. Which instincts are actualised and utilised
depends on the circumstances.
The idea of human nature serves the
social function of separating us from them. Evolution taught us to be
suspicious of those outside our tribe, which helps to explain why the names
many hunter-gatherer tribes and even some modern nations give themselves simply
mean ‘the people’. Foreigners come from the slopes of the uncanny valley. Over
the millennia we have learnt to be more open and understanding, but the
xenophobic instinct remains. This was horrifically demonstrated by Nazi Germany,
who took away the rights of any who didn’t meet their standards of purity. It
still exists today, not just among racists but also among liberals. Somewhat
ironically racists are seen as lacking a
portion of their humanity, making them not fully human and therefore deserving
only hatred and revulsion. Perhaps we can look forward to the day when
humanity’s xenophobic instinct will be focused almost entirely on xenophobia
itself. But instead of dismissing other people as monsters, it is far more
rational to accept that they are as human as you are. If you don’t like
something that they believe or do, then you need to try to understand how they
came to be that kind of human.
Consciousness
Even if human nature is a fiction,
perhaps there is something special about our species, and a good place to start
looking is our minds. You could say we are conscious in two ways: firstly, we
are aware of the external world and its patterns; secondly, consciousness is
mental processes concerning other mental processes, and as such exists as a
kind of supervisor. Our senses generate a vast amount of information (the first
way in which we are conscious), of which only a part is looked at by the higher
mind (the second way in which we are conscious).
There are two ways in which something
comes to the attention of the higher mind: firstly, the higher mind seeks out
information (for example, you subconsciously know that this text is black, but
only become conscious of it now that I mention it); secondly, the subconscious
alerts the conscious to something (for example, an urge to look over your
shoulder).
Humans certainly excel at
understanding the world, particularly in the past 500 years. Science is the
first deliberate attempt to increase our awareness of the world as far as
possible, even to the point of discovering things such as quantum mechanics
which our minds simply didn’t evolve to understand (knowing that it is possible
for something to exist and not exist at the same time would not have helped our
ancestors on the African plains). But consciousness in this sense is hardly
unique to humans. Everything except the simplest of animals needs to have an
internal model of the external world if they are going to survive. Indeed,
because many animals have much better senses than us, you could argue they have
a much richer and more accurate model of reality than humans normally do.
Perhaps humans are unique in being
conscious in the second way, but even this is doubtful. A chimpanzee
in a Swedish zoo was known for carefully making piles
of stones which he would then later throw at visitors in fits of rage. In other
words, he knew he would be angry and want stones when the zoo opened, so he
made plans accordingly. This would have required having thoughts about his
emotions and desires, i.e. a higher mind reflecting on other mental processes.
He was not just reacting to external stimuli, but practicing self-reflection.
People far more intelligent than me
have written volumes about the nature of consciousness, so I’ll stop there and
move onto an aspect of humanity which is arguably more mysterious.
Sapience
Anatomically modern humans evolved
about 200,000 thousand years ago. We were conscious, intelligent, social,
tool-using animals. To a passing alien, we may have been an interesting
species, but not one which was likely to make much of an impact on the planet.
Then about 70 to 50,000 years ago, something changed in our minds. Anthropologists
call this the arrival of ‘behavioural modernity’, which is characterised by
symbolic thinking, among other things. Yuval Noah Harari calls it nothing short
of the ‘Cognitive Revolution’.
According to Harari, this is when we
stopped living solely in objective, physical reality and created a new layer of
reality on top of it. The world became alive with a myriad of spirits. This
allowed us to break down the barriers between tribes. We had probably lived in
groups of no more than 150 people, but anyone could potentially share in the same
inter-subjective reality. If two people from different tribes gave thanks to
the same spirits, they could trust each other and work together. The
cooperative capability of humanity expanded enormously. After we settled down
and started building civilisation, this new layer of reality became populated
with gods, nations and corporations, and our ability to work with large numbers
of strangers became more refined and powerful.
Harari calls these ‘inter-subjective
realities’, or simply ‘fictions’. For our purposes, let’s call the ability to
create and believe in these ‘sapience’. Whereas sentience (which literally
means the ability to feel) is often equated with consciousness, sapience
captures the uniquely human experience of living in both objective and
inter-subjective realities. We’ll see if sapience lives up to its literal meaning
of wisdom by the end of this essay.
In keeping with the assertion at the
beginning of this essay that there is no such thing as human nature, sapience
is a normal rather than essential characteristic of humans. A small minority of
humans only live in objective reality and struggle to see the entities everyone
else is familiar with. Fantasy and suspending disbelief, particularly for
protracted periods of time, are alien to them. This doesn’t necessarily make
them uncooperative or handicapped, but it does force them to play along or risk
being seen as mad. Alternatively, they could leave society, which from their
perspective has gone mad, and become sagacious hermits. Today, they are most
likely to simply admit they don’t understand the world and why people are so
passionate about imaginary things.
The big question which I want to try
and answer in this essay is: where did sapience come from? How did a species
rooted in objective reality come to believe in imaginary things, and in so
doing restrain its xenophobic instinct and build a global civilisation? If we
can find an answer, we can better understand the nature of sapience and what
that means for we 21st Century humans.
Language is a plausible candidate.
When a chimpanzee band splits into two, the new bands quickly lose familiarity
with each other and become rivals. Chimpanzee bands rely on close kinship and
friendship, so distant relatives are strangers. However when a human band
splits in two, they will continue to speak the same language. Although they may
eventually diverge into two languages, the evolution of language is usually a
slow process, so the two tribes could potentially understand each other for
centuries. Distant relatives don’t seem so strange, and there is little to
distinguish between the two tribes. Maybe they even consider themselves parts
of the same tribe. If they thrive and expand into other bands’ territories, a
single language with minor variations could be spoken across a wide area.
However this doesn’t explain the
creation of inter-subjective reality – conceivably a complex language could
only be concerned with objective and personal subjective realities, and not
invisible spirits. And more importantly, sharing the same language may not be
sufficient for trust and cooperation. Brits and Americans both speak English,
but Brits still find Americans baffling and at times quite scary. The two
countries cooperate where their values and interests overlap, not because of
sentimentality over the English language.
Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory
was that the human mind evolved thanks to our ancestors consuming
hallucinogens, in particular mushrooms. The theory has serious flaws, for
example McKenna argued that eating mushrooms had the evolutionary advantage of
making their vision sharper and libidos more aroused – things I doubt many
shroomers would recognise. But it is an interesting idea, not least because
mushrooms have been shown to stimulate the growth of new, stable connections
between neurons in the brain, meaning that the shroomer will come to believe
new things while high and continue to believe them long after. McKenna was
living proof of this, as he earnestly maintained that mushrooms were in fact
aliens trying to communicate with humanity through psychedelic experiences (he
was a very intelligent, knowledgeable and eloquent man, but also absolutely
nuts). It’s possible that through epigenetics the consumption of hallucinogens
slowly changed the structure of the human brain so that we became able to
believe in things we had never actually seen.
Another reason we may believe in
imaginary things is because it’s better safe than sorry. For much of our
history humans were prey, so we evolved to assume that an unexplained rustling
in the bushes was something that wanted to eat us. This is called hyperactive
agency detection. It’s easy to see how this instinct could have led our
ancestors to believe that the whole natural world was alive and conscious, with
whispering trees, sleeping mountains and angry storm clouds. Natural phenomena
came to be seen as the actions of invisible spirits, who may have been
benevolent or may need to be placated.
Death may have forced us to question
if the visible world was all there was. If humans struggle to accept that all
that waits for us is oblivion, especially when life is nasty, brutish and short,
then you need to construct a worldview that explains how a person can be alive
while being visibly dead. Despite what some atheists may think, I suspect
religious belief today is more closely connected to how strong worldviews given
to us as children can be, rather than existential angst. But perhaps trying to
deal with death forced our ancestors to create a reality separate from the
visible, objective one.
Harari doesn’t really talk about how
inter-subjective realities came to be. As a historian he is more interested in
their implications, and so perhaps he is happy to leave their mysterious
origins to anthropologists and opinionated bloggers. But in 21 Lessons for
the 21st Century he elaborates on how they work: “false stories
have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If
you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a
far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If a big chief says ‘the
sun rises in the east and sets in the west’, loyalty to the chief is not
required in order to applaud him. But if the chief says ‘the sun rises in the
west and sets in the east’, only true loyalists will clap their hands” (p.239).
Could domineering chiefs demanding
loyalty have created sapience? We have good evidence that hunter-gatherer
societies were quite egalitarian. If a chief started spouting absurdities,
they’d probably replace him with a more sensible one. Even if the chief was
able to convince/force his tribe to believe his absurdities, like a
Palaeolithic Big Brother, why would other tribes come to believe them too?
Authority
A flaw common to many of the ideas
above is that they may explain how an individual or a tribe might come to
believe in an invisible world, but they don’t explain how such beliefs would
spread beyond the tribe. The miraculous thing about sapience is that it breaks
down the xenophobic instinct and builds supra-tribes out of many small ones. If
beliefs weren’t able to spread beyond the tribe, then we’d probably live in a
world comprised of 150-member tribes, each with their own unique mythology. If
some tribes developed agriculture and other technologies, perhaps they could
spread their beliefs simply by multiplying and forcing other tribes off their
land, but without long distance trade technological progress would be even
slower than it was in our timeline. The city-state would probably be the
highest stage of civilisation we could reach – building an empire would be a
pipe dream.
In terms of the Fermi Paradox (the
question of why we seem to be the only civilisation in a vast and ancient
universe), sapience may be one of the biggest filters a species has to
overcome. Given that xenophobia is a natural and useful trait for most animals,
maybe it’s rare even for intelligent species to become cooperative.
Imagination is the foundation of
sapience. Pre-sapient humans were intelligent, and also usually had a lot of
free time (they may have only spent 5 hours per day hunting and gathering), so
they probably speculated about the world’s mysteries. What moves the sun, why
does it rain and what happens when we die? They probably came up with lots of imaginative
answers. But they couldn’t hope to know for certain. They could only imagine
possibilities. At most an individual might become convinced that one
possibility is the right answer, and if he is persuasive enough others might
come to believe too. But how did we leap from lots of maybes to unwavering
belief among thousands and millions of people?
How do you convince your tribe that
you know how the world works behind the scenes, but you only have weak evidence
or none at all? You have to convince them that you have special access to
knowledge that they don’t, in other words, that you are an authority – not in
the political sense, but in the wider, epistemological sense. These were the
first shamans, who claimed to be experts in entering, navigating and
communicating with the spirit world.
These shamans broke down barriers
between tribes, because other tribes would want to benefit from their
knowledge. Perhaps someone would hear about another tribe’s shaman and try to
imitate him to become their own tribe’s shaman, but if he didn’t know the
shaman’s secret techniques or simply wasn’t very convincing, his own tribe
would probably be willing to set aside their differences with the neighbouring
tribe (at least occasionally) in order to learn from their shaman how to placate
the nature spirits, talk with their ancestors and maybe even glimpse the
divine. Although they are not familiar with the members of the other tribe, the
fact that they trust the same shaman must mean that they are trustworthy. Slowly
but surely the two tribes would coalesce into one, united by their shared
mythology which was underpinned by their belief in the authority of their
shamans. If they thrived and spread into other territories, their belief in the
authority of their shamans would keep the tribe culturally united for a long
time.
The belief in authority became
fundamental to our organisations, worldviews and identities. Proof that Jesus
was the messiah can be found in the Holy Bible, which was written and compiled
by divinely inspired sages. We know for sure that Peugeot exists as company
because it is written in special documents created by those with the necessary
legal expertise. I have no direct experience of Australia, but I say I know it
exists because I trust the authority of map-makers, the media and people who
say they’ve been there. Without authority, we could still build organisations,
worldviews and identities, but not on a large scale.
Harari says that if we can identify
one trend in history, it is the gradual coming together of humanity into one
culture. Indeed, once we developed sapience, this was probably inevitable – it
will keep on breaking down barriers between tribes until there is only one
tribe left. Sapience is excellent in helping the diffusion of technologies, and
many technologies are excellent at keeping people connected, creating a
virtuous cycle. Of course this process is painful and even uses xenophobia –
usually it takes the form of an empire conquering what it considers to be
barbarians and then pressuring them to forget their former identity and adopt
the empire’s supposed civilisation, like a predator digesting its prey.
The trend towards unity has its ebbs
and flows, and we seem to be experiencing an ebb at the moment. But we’re very
close to achieving unity – every country in the world takes part in the same
economic system, uses the same science and will be impacted by climate change.
Politics just needs to catch up. Unity shouldn’t and can’t wipe away national
identities, just as national identities shouldn’t and can’t wipe away our
personal identities. Sapience allows people to trust multiple authorities,
which is why our identities usually have many layers.
In my previous
post, I called centralisation and fragmentation two of
the most important forces in human history. If a group can convince people that
it is an authority using a powerful enough idea, it can build and direct a
system that extends far beyond their local area. If a widely respected
authority is discredited, the systems built around it start to fragment. People
will then start looking to other authorities for guidance, often authorities who
had been centralising forces in the past. For example nations are some of the
most enduring ideas in history, created from the fusion of numerous tribes.
When a supranational idea such as communism or neoliberalism is discredited, people
often turn to authorities who paint a worldview with the nation at the centre,
with devastating consequences.
However it is only a matter of time
before an authority with a centralising idea more powerful than the nation
rises again, and it will probably be one that tries to unite the species. We
can probably look forward to the identity ‘human’ becoming a powerful force in
the 21st Century, although under whose authority it remains to be
seen.
Wisdom
How does sapience relate to
consciousness? You could argue that becoming sapient involved us becoming less
conscious and learning to ignore some realities. To be sapient is to feel
certain about things you cannot actually be certain about. The world used to be
full of mysteries, but instead of exploring or embracing those mysteries we plastered
over them with fictional certainties. Whereas a fully conscious human might
believe that the universe is indifferent to him so he can do what he wants, a
sapient human will insist that the universe has an objective (if invisible)
meaning which gives him a defined purpose. Only with philosophy and eventually
science did humanity learn to see and explore mysteries again. Harari goes even
further, claiming that even today humanity remains a ‘post-truth species’, hopelessly
allured by cosmic dramas in which humans play an important, if not leading,
role.
I take the opposite view: that it was
humanity’s desire for truth which made us sapient. The first shamans developed
their rituals to try to uncover the mysteries of the world, and people wanted
to learn about their discoveries and even see them for themselves. In this
sense the advent of sapience was the first scientific revolution. Even before
they became gatekeepers of the spirit world, shamans were probably highly
valued members of society because of their knowledge of plants – which ones
healed, which ones were fun, and which ones killed. Knowledge was important for
survival, especially in the strange lands beyond the Great Rift Valley where
humans had to adapt to environments they had not evolved in and you could not
always trust your instincts. It was natural for people to seek and value
knowledge, and it was only a matter of time before knowledge of the heavens and
the afterlife was sought.
Although the shamans and their
successors believed that they now knew how the world worked, modern science has
shown that the world works by natural processes without supernatural
intervention. The fact that people are still willing to believe in fictions today
(such as Christianity, nationalism and Peugeot) seems to have convinced Harari
that we are predisposed to believe in fictions. But I would say this is like
arguing that because the sun has always risen it will definitely rise tomorrow.
The shamans and their successors had to base sapience on very inaccurate
worldviews because they had very limited tools at their disposal. Some of these
inaccurate worldviews have persisted into the scientific age because they are
stubborn and/or useful – if Peugeot’s executives read Harari’s books and
realised that Peugeot was a figment of their imagination, they probably
wouldn’t shut the company down. But this does not mean that we can’t base
sapience on accurate worldviews.
Humans have been moulding the world
as we see fit for millennia, but we have only become acutely aware of our own
power in the past few centuries, leading to the evolution of ideologies such as
liberalism, socialism and fascism. These ideologies have often fallen into the
pitfalls of pseudoscience, and Harari predicts they will become less relevant
in the future as humanity loses control of its destiny. Nonetheless they are an
improvement on previous worldviews because they are based on the scientifically
attested fact that humanity is the most powerful species on the planet.
Inter-subjective realities are used
as tests of loyalty, but that is not their origin or primary function. We can
still use something like the reality of climate change as an inter-subjective
reality because we can cooperate around it. Like other inter-subjective
realities, we can use climate change as a test of loyalty – if you believe what
the scientists say then we can work together, if you don’t then shut up and
fuck off. The fact that this is happening disproves the idea that sapience must
be based on fictions.
As Harari himself notes, humans
usually seek to understand the world in order to control it better. Therefore,
contrary to being a ‘post-truth species’ as Harari claims, we have always been
interested in discovering truth. It is simply that for the vast majority of
history, like with many other things, we haven’t been very good at it. For
millennia we have cooperated around fictions because we didn’t have anything
else, but we don’t have to rely on them forever. Humanity is almost old enough
to stand up without their support.
Is it human nature to value truth?
No, a Daily Mail reader is no less human than a New Scientist reader. But we
are unique as a species which has the urge to push the boundaries of knowledge.
All life tries to spread as far as it can geographically, but this isn’t enough
for humans – we feel the need to explore in every dimension we can think of. 500
years ago a critical mass of knowledge was reached, accelerating
knowledge-creation to the point of giving us god-like powers. But for at least
50,000 years, we have known the value of knowledge, which shaped us into a
distinctively ultra-cooperative and slowly unifying species.
