drmstream[writing]

Being good at being a human is like get­ting cer­ti­fied to fly with instru­ments:  it takes hours of train­ing and we rarely get it right the first time.

In a blog post last fall, anthro­pol­o­gist Melvin Kon­ner wrote his excite­ment about the new sci­ence devel­op­ing that would influ­ence the study of the human condition.

He framed the dis­cus­sion with a ques­tion from a senior researcher about what she really meant when she said “myself.”

I said to Mon­ica, “Well, you prob­a­bly use the word ‘myself,’ what do you mean?” She said, “It’s the part of me that’s unique, that no one else has. It’s also my con­scious­ness, my pri­vate thoughts, my iden­tity.” I thought that was about as good a def­i­n­i­tion as I could offer, although I added that the self is what you alone see, a kind of par­al­lax shift from what oth­ers see and even mea­sure, but what sub­jec­tiv­ity allows only you to access.

I was reminded of Konner’s quick def­i­n­i­tion of self as I read a recent paper from Mark Turner, from the Depart­ment of Cog­ni­tive Sci­ence at Case West­ern Reserve Uni­ver­sity.

In Scope of Human Thought, Turner rumi­nates on a hypoth­e­sis of human con­scious­ness termed “double-scoped blending.”

Turner observes that humans are unique among liv­ing crea­tures in our abil­ity to per­ceive and com­bine two types of scale: human scale, which is marked by our abil­ity to project our own exis­tence into the past and the future; and net­work scale, which is marked by our abil­ity to exert the same pow­ers of pro­jec­tion onto other peo­ple and things. As Turner observes, we are con­stantly cre­at­ing hypo­thet­i­cal def­i­n­i­tions of the past and the future, encom­pass­ing seem­ingly infi­nite vari­ables, but we are able to com­pact this net­work scale into our human scale.

Double-scope blend­ing gives us the abil­ity to con­ceive fully of other minds and to grasp extended con­cep­tual net­works that would oth­er­wise lie beyond our cog­ni­tion. These extended con­cep­tual net­works have elab­o­rate “vital rela­tions” run­ning across the network—relations of time, space, cause-effect, rep­re­sen­ta­tion, anal­ogy and dis­anal­ogy, change, iden­tity, unique­ness, and so on.

The effect is a real­ity of the self that folds in on itself.

A self can feel such a sin­gu­lar fix­ture, hug­ging one’s here-and-now like a twenty-four-hour under­gar­ment, but actu­ally it’s a string, loop­ing back and for­wards in time to knit together our past and future moments.… A self is a Tardis, a time-machine: it can swal­low you up and spit you out some­where else.
Charles Fer­ney­hough The Baby in the Mir­ror: A Child’s World from Birth to Three.

The hypoth­e­sis intrigues me. Through my read­ing over the years, I’ve become more focused on the role of com­mu­ni­ca­tions in the devel­op­ment of human char­ac­ter­is­tics, iden­tity and cul­ture. Our dis­tinc­tive attribute is the devel­op­ment of highly sophis­ti­cated abstract com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems that allow for the rapid trans­fer of infor­ma­tion from per­son to per­son and group to group. If we are able to trans­fer crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion, we will sig­nif­i­cantly increase the like­li­hood of sur­vival for our­selves and the oth­ers around us.

The con­se­quence of the evolv­ing of com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems is that a large part of our focus was devoted to find­ing ways to com­mu­ni­cate things. As our prim­i­tive brains built those sys­tems, ben­e­fit­ing from genetic changes and the improve­ments inno­vated by gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion, our minds dis­cov­ered that these abstract skills could be lever­aged into more and more com­plex per­cep­tions and experiences.

Our human­ness gained dimen­sion at a com­pound­ing rate, across gen­er­a­tions and pop­u­la­tions. The con­cep­tual sys­tems for writ­ing, for instance, are just 8000 years old, Turner observes.

Kon­ner talks about the sci­ence of self with excite­ment; the sci­ence is chang­ing and the expe­ri­ence of self becom­ing more and more defined.

What I’m struck by, though, is that our self is a con­stantly chang­ing iden­tity engine. We are sus­cep­ti­ble to mis­fired and dis­con­ti­nu­ities in the self. Our only recourse is to go into the mind and find the dia­logue that re-calibrates the impact of our double-scoped blend­ing, dimin­ish­ing the risks of net­work scale per­cep­tion run­ning wild and over­whelm­ing our human scale.

We’re not born with a fixed tool kit, you see. We’re born with the skills to br human, but it’s not a sure thing that we’ll get to a human state.

Turner frames it neatly at the close of his paper:

The human con­di­tion is not sim­ple: evo­lu­tion did not so much make us human as pro­vide us with the men­tal abil­i­ties we need to make our­selves human, an on-going and dynamic process, with hope and uncer­tainty stretch­ing over the vast scope of human thought.

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