SUNDAY, OCT 4, 2020: NOTE TO FILE
Psychological Barrier of Mortality Salience?
A Theory that Can Explain Unusual Features of the Origin and Fate of Our Species
Ajit Varki
TOPICS: THEORY OF MIND , FROM THE WIRES, MIND OVER REALITY TRANSITION
Abstract: Comments on an article I was asked to give 'a careful hearing' to, so I did. I had previously, per endorcement of the one asking, read the Varki/Brower book: Denial: Self-deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind, 2013. My guess is that Varki is not systems science literate as no believing mind can be.
Coos Bay (A-P) — The abstract of Ajit Varki's 22 October 2019 article, Psychological Barrier of Mortality Salience? A Theory that Can Explain Unusual Features of the Origin and Fate of Our Species follows [with comments]. I was asked to consider it for inclusion on the Ecolate Message list.
Abstract [Annotated]:
Some aspects of human cognition and behavior appear unusual or exaggerated relative to those of other intelligent, warm-blooded, long-lived social species––including certain mammals (cetaceans, elephants, and great apes) and birds (corvids and passerines). ['Other intelligent' is a just-so story, not a given. Define 'intelligence' as the ability to discover truth, i.e. iterate towards telling better stories about or knowing (forming mental models) about the what-is, then cetaceans and corvids may be intelligent, but the only evidence humans have a grasp of 'reality' is that they can usually walk about without bumping into things. Perhaps Varki is asking the wrong question as Danny Brower initially suggested. To account for human pathology may not require any new concepts.]
One collection of such related features is our remarkable ability [pathology] for ignoring or denying reality [tellling stories with omissions] in the face of clear facts, a high capacity for self-deception and false beliefs, overarching optimism bias, and irrational risk-taking behavior (herein collectively called “reality denial”). ['Clear facts' is an illusion. Until some pre-socrates in the 5th century BCE thought otherwise (perhaps based on observations of a 7th century Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa), that Earth is flat (whether a disc, a square having four corners, or an illimitable plane) was an obvious fact. Humans are a storytelling animal having at best a fragile grasp of reality. That our concept forming minds function within a domain of conceptual error, ignorance, and illusion (a norm which we normalize) is one story.]
Such traits should be maladaptive for reproductive success when they first appear as consistent features in individuals of any species. [There are no true stories, but some are selected for by the complex system within which they arise. Houyhnhnms are unable to say a thing which is not, but humans may prosper by doing so (or rarely put to death), so lying is selected for as is the ability to detect lying. Humans differ from other terrestrial mammals in terms of the complexity of their verbal behavior. That we know truth is as much a story as that we deny truth, and whether we do or not does not determine what is adaptive/maladaptive. My family is caught in a blizzard. I'm going into a cave to evict the cave bear. Believing the Great Augo will protect me may be adaptive. Knowing that I could be killed and my family will die in the long dark night if I fail may be adaptive.]
Meanwhile, available data suggest that self-awareness (knowledge of one’s own personhood) and basic theory of mind (ToM, also termed mind-reading, intentionality etc.) have evolved independently several times, particularly in the same kinds of species mentioned above. [Or ToM is a just-so story, an explanatory fiction, an artifact of our concept mongering minds as is our claim to personhood, of which I have no knowledge.]
Despite a long-standing opportunity spanning tens of millions of years, only humans appear to have gone on to evolve an extended ToM (multilevel intentionality), a trait required for optimal expression of many other unusual cognitive attributes of our species, such as advanced linguistic communication and cumulative cooperative culture. [The 'only humans' story is a modern conceit to account for a doubious claim that humans are different 'in kind' from all other animals, i.e. we are not 'mere' animals. Or we are the only storytelling animal who believes our own stories. The concepts of 'self' and 'other' are enabling, necessary storytelling concepts as asserted. To tell stories, the storytelling mind tells of 'this' and 'that' differomg, but no concepts/models are out-there apart from concept forming minds. Is there an 'out-there' or is all we see or seem but a VR simulated dream within a dream? I don't know.]
The conventional view [of author] is that extended ToM emerged gradually in human ancestors, via stepwise positive selection of multiple traits that were each beneficial. [A search for "extended theory of mind" with quotes turned up no conventional views, while without the quotes most links are to a book, The Extended Mind and to EMT, or extended mind thesis, perhaps of interest to some philosophers, but not of science based interest .]
A counterintuitive alternate possibility is that establishment of extended ToM has been repeatedly obstructed in all other species with the potential to achieve it, due to a “psychological evolutionary barrier,” that would arise in isolated individuals of a given species that develop the genetic ability for extended ToM. Such individuals would observe deaths of conspecifics whose minds they fully understood, become aware of mortality, and translate that knowledge into mortality salience (understanding of personal mortality). The resulting conscious realization and exaggeration of an already existing intrinsic fear of death risk would have then reduced the reproductive fitness of such isolated individuals (by favoring personal survival over reproduction). [The possibility is as imagined.]
This “psychological evolutionary barrier” would have thus persisted until hominin ancestors broke through, via a rare and unlikely combination of cognitive changes, in which two intrinsically maladaptive traits (reality denial and extended ToM) evolved in the minds of the same individuals, allowing a “mind over reality transition” (MORT) over the proposed barrier. Once some individuals broke through in this manner, conventional natural selection could take over, with further evolution of beneficial aspects of the initial changes. This theory also provides a unifying evolutionary explanation for other unusual features of humans, including our recent emergence as the dominant species on the planet, and replacement of all other closely related evolutionary cousins, with limited interbreeding and no remaining hybrid species. [Complex systems need to be understood in so far as possible, but theories that apply to one species would be needed only if that one species was different in kind from all other species or other complex systems. Viewing humans as another subsystem is possible and more parsimonious starting point.]
While not directly falsifiable by experiment, the MORT theory fits with numerous facts about humans and human origins, and no known fact appears to strongly militate against it. [It is in the nature of just-so stories that they can not be falsified. That humans have a soul and are ensouled (whether at 'conception' or thereabouts is in question) explains everything (for some).]
It is also consistent with most other currently viable theories on related subjects, including terror management theory. Importantly, it has major implications for the human condition, as well as for many serious current issues, ranging all the way from lack of personal health responsibility to ignoring anthropogenic global climate disruption, which now threatens the very existence of our species. ['It is also...'. Concepts, ToM, MORT, are all interrelated in a complex system of memes, more complex than we know or can know. None are the thing itself, the what-is modeled. To mistake the model for what is modeled is a pathology, though all who do so deny that they do.]
