The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent

culture shapes values, and those values shape history.

it attempts to interpret historical phenomena such as the rise of agriculture, the Scientific Revolution, and our current world system from a cognitive perspective. In doing so, it recognizes the enormous complexity of human culture and draws from recent advances in systems thinking to develop an interpretative framework.

What this book is about

Each culture, they argued, develops its own version of reality that arises from its specific physical and environmental context. If you try to “essentialize” a culture's frame of reality and compare it with that of another culture, you risk decontextualizing it and therefore invalidating its unique attributes.

Wow

The postmodernists accused Westerners who had attempted to do so of engaging in a form of cultural imperialism, seeking to appropriate what seemed valuable in other cultures for their own use while ignoring its historical context.

The conext was ignored

the broad east-west axis of Eurasia meant that newly domesticated crops could easily spread across zones with similar climates, whereas the north-south axis of the Americas prevented it. Similarly, new infectious diseases that arose in humans from animal domestication spread in waves across Eurasia, leaving survivors with immunity. All this led to the Eurasian population developing the tools of civilization before the rest of the world, resulting in the guns, germs, and steel that permitted them to dominate other continents.

Interesting.the geo factor of cultural Becoming. The reason behind west hegemony

It's assumed there are no intrinsic behavioral differences between the people of various parts of the world, and, therefore, we need to look to environmental factors to explain how each developed in different ways.

Wow.people behave similarly so it must be environmental.not racial.however it creates its own cultual imperialism

when asking why Europe, not China, conquered the New World, it's generally assumed that if Chinese navigators had reached the Americas before the Europeans, they would have plundered the continents in the same way the Europeans did.

Reductionist. Reduced to material cause

This book takes an entirely different approach from historical reductionism. Instead, it offers a cognitive approach to history, arguing that the cognitive frames through which different cultures perceive reality have had a profound effect on their historical direction.

Not reductionist but cognitive approach

it reveals an underlying pattern to Western cognition that is responsible for its Scientific and Industrial Revolutions—as well as its devastating destruction of indigenous cultures around the world and our current global rush toward possible catastrophe.

Main

the book shares much with the postmodern critique of Western civilization, recognizing those capitalized universal abstractions such as Reason, Progress, and Truth to be culture-specific constructions. In fact, a significant portion of the book is devoted to tracing how these patterns of thought first arose and then infused themselves so deeply into the Western mind-set as to become virtually invisible to those who use them.

Main

cognitive frames, while deeply influencing the direction of a society, are not permanently fixed. When drastic change occurs to a given society, its cognitive structures—and, ultimately, its entire worldview—can change equally drastically within a generation or two.

Interesting

When the Western powers installed their empires throughout the globe, humiliating traditional leaders and undermining established hierarchies, they overwhelmed the old cognitive patterns with new values and measures of success, which people in the conquered societies aspired to achieve.

Wow

the relationship between cognition and history is not one-way but reciprocal. The cognitive patterns of humans living their day-to-day existence are continually affected by what goes on around them, and the consequent actions they take are continually affecting whatever is around them.

Cognition and history.reciprocal loop

a two-way flow going on, which they call “niche construction.” As organisms adapt to their environment, they are not just finding their niche but actively constructing it, and, by doing so, they are shaping the environment for themselves, their offspring, and the other organisms around them.

Two way loop

A recent study, for example, has found that Chinese provinces that rely on rice, which requires a great deal of mutual cooperation within the community, have a more holistic outlook than those provinces that rely on wheat, where farmers can manage more easily by themselves.

The community of rice and wheat. From the ability to cook. To ability to digest milk. To farm life style.to individuality

each society shapes the cognitive structure of individuals growing up in its culture through imprinting its own pattern of meaning on each infant's developing mind.

Wow.main

linguist George Lakoff, “metaphorical concepts…. structure our present reality. New metaphors have the power to create a new reality.”

Interesting

A system can be complicated but not complex, no matter how large, if each of its components and the way they relate to each other can be completely analyzed and given an exact description. A jumbo jet, an offshore oil rig, and a snowflake are all examples of complicated systems.

complicated system

A complex system, on the other hand, arises from a large number of nonlinear relationships between its components with feedback loops that can never be precisely described. Any living thing, or system comprising living things, is complex: a bacterium, a brain, an ecosystem, a financial market, a language, or a social system.

Complex system

Complex systems have some indicative characteristics. They have a large number of elements, each of which interacts with and influences other elements within the system through nonlinear feedback loops.

Complex

One important attribute of a complex system is a special type of reciprocal causality: each part of the system has an effect on the whole, while the system as a whole affects each part. Because of this, a complex system can never be fully understood by reducing it to its component parts.

Reciprocal. Complex

at a certain point, the cohesive set of reciprocal causal relationships that form the system can rapidly become unraveled, and when that happens, the system undergoes what's known as a critical transition, leading to a new stable state that can be either more or less complex than the previous one. When this happens, it's very difficult for the system to shift back to the state it was in previously, a characteristic known as hysteresis.

Hysteresis. when the complexity is changed it can never go back

Because of our unique cognitive capacity, human social systems need to be understood as a pair of two tightly interconnected, coexisting complex systems: a tangible system and a cognitive system.

Humans are tangible system plus cognitive system

There seems little doubt that we are currently in the midst of one of the great critical transitions of the human journey, and yet it is not at all clear where we will end up once our current system resolves into a newly stable state.

What is thes new stable state for human

The book is based on a simple but compelling theme: culture shapes values, and those values shape history.

Wow

lives. We form our worldview implicitly as we grow up, from our family, friends, and culture, and, once it's set, we're barely aware of it unless we're presented with a different worldview for comparison.

Worldview

In recent decades, cognitive scientists have made important discoveries into how we learn, as infants, to make sense of the reality around us. They've shown that our worldview is based on root metaphors we use to frame other aspects of meaning without even realizing we're doing so. These core metaphors, which arise from our embodied existence, structure how we conceptualize our world.

Worldview on root metaphor

One important way it does this is to detect patterns in what it receives: What's new? What's recurrent? What's important? What correlates with something else? Out of these patterns, as infants, we begin to make sense of our surroundings: recognizing family members, picking up on speech formations, and gradually learning to become members of our community. As we grow older, we continue to rely on our PFC to make meaning of all the different events we experience and to construct models for how to live our lives.

Patterning instinct

Somehow, though, this drive to make sense of the world around us, while it's given us so much we value, has also brought our civilization to the brink of collapse. How could this have happened? Is it an inevitable result of human nature, or is our present situation culturally driven: a product of particular structures of thought that could conceivably be repatterned?

Wow.how would this patterning instinct drive us to doomsday when it showed us enlightenment

The hierarchical structure of agrarian societies helped shape a new conception of the universe. In agrarian civilizations around the world, a HIERARCHY OF THE GODS emerged, stratified and distant from ordinary people, mediated by priests. People still viewed themselves as connected with the natural world, but now they believed their own active participation was required to keep the cosmos running.

The farming society breeds the hierarchy of gods

Old Testament, giving mankind dominion over the animals, was perceived in Europe as a clarion call for the scientific CONQUEST OF NATURE, framing the pattern of meaning that has encompassed the world through the present day.

Wow.old testament and the conquest of nature

The last common ancestor that humans shared with chimpanzees and bonobos is thought to have lived about six million years ago. In the evolutionary time scale, this is roughly the same time frame in which horses and zebras, lions and tigers, and rats and mice also shared their common ancestors.

Wow.evolutionary timescale

As the trees became sparser, the hominids who were able to get around more easily on the ground were better adapted to the new terrain, leaving offspring who gradually became bipedal. Walking on two legs freed up the hands for new possibilities, such as holding sticks or throwing stones to defend against predators. Losing bodily hair allowed them to sweat more easily and stay cool in the hot sun.

Body changes according to environment

the large canine teeth of the males, once so crucial for intergroup battles for dominance, became less important in the new social order.

during cooperative times

the rivalry between males for sexual access to females continued to be a source of conflict within the group, occasionally leading to a breakdown in social cohesion. This rivalry would get especially intense over females seen to be ovulating. In those groups where the females’ overt signs of ovulation were diminished, the intergroup rivalry was lessened, with improved results for the groups’ long-term survival.

Rivalry when ovulation was obvious

Perhaps the most important step in this understanding is the recognition that other people have minds like we do, and that, by thinking about how we ourselves respond to things, we can make predictions about how they might respond. This realization is known as “theory of mind,” and it forms the basis of much of our social existence.

Recognition of self then others

In the view of an influential thinker, Richard Alexander, as hominids became more dominant in their ecology, they no longer needed to evolve better capabilities to deal with the natural environment. Instead, they developed new cognitive skills to outcompete each other.

Dominant in ecology. So they compete with each other

Robert Trivers, was explaining how, from an evolutionary perspective, even altruism was really just a sophisticated form of selfishness, based on the principle of “I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine.” In a much-cited paper, he described what he called “reciprocal altruism” as an ancient evolutionary strategy that could be seen in the behavior of fish and birds, and he interpreted human altruism in the same way.

Reciprocal altruism.

Responders, in fact, frequently reject offers below thirty dollars, and the most popular amount offered by proposers is fifty.20 It seems we humans have evolved a powerful sense of fairness. So powerful, in fact, that we would rather walk away with nothing than permit someone else to take unfair advantage of us.

The game you split 100 dollar with stranger in another room

This intrinsic sense of fairness is, in the view of some researchers, the extra ingredient that led to the evolutionary success of our species and created the cognitive foundation for values in our modern world such as freedom, equality, and representative government.

Intrinsic sense of fairness and form of gov

Our understanding of human nature, Boehm suggests, is only complete when we recognize it as intrinsically ambivalent, with our primate competitive drive and more recent cooperative instinct pushing in opposite directions.

Competitive and coopertive

He discovered that, in virtually all hunter-gatherer societies, people join together to prevent powerful males from taking too much control, using collective behaviors such as ridicule, group disobedience, and, ultimately, extreme sanctions such as assassination. He names this kind of egalitarian society a “reverse dominance hierarchy” because “rather than being dominated, the rank and file itself manages to dominate.”

Interesting. Reverse dominance hierarchy

Around 2.5 million years ago, hominids began chipping away at stones to make tools that were sharper and more useful than ever before. These are known by archaeologists as Oldowan artifacts, after the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa where they were first found, and the species that produced them is called Homo habilis, or “handy man,” for their achievement.

Oldowan.handy man

These tools give archaeologists a good idea of how our ancestors might have procured their food. They would now have been able to dig up termite colonies or scavenge big game carcasses in the savannah, cutting through bones into the nutritious marrow. The extra calories available to them would have fueled the development of their larger brains, which demanded more metabolic energy. Their larger brains, in turn, gave them the social intelligence to thrive in their newly complex societies, creating a positive feedback cycle, leading to the evolution of even more powerful brains capable of developing more complex tools.26

Tool to better food to better nutrition to better brain to better social complexity to better tool

This entire sequence of steps would have required what is known in cognitive science as “mental time travel”: using one's imagination to create a vision of a hypothetical future—in this case, a future when it would be worthwhile to have a completed tool. With that future image beckoning, they developed a new capacity for self-control, suppressing other claims on their attention while focusing on the ultimate goal of constructing their tool.

Mental time travel.

The solution to this capacity constraint came in the form of a cognitive breakthrough that has allowed humans to think in a way that, most likely, no other creature on earth has ever achieved: symbolic thought. A symbol is something that has a purely arbitrary relationship to what it signifies, which can only be understood by someone who shares the same code.

Codes break constraints With symbols

perhaps the uniquely defining characteristic of humanity is the patterning instinct we evolved along the way, which allowed us to develop the capacity for symbolic thought, and which incessantly drives us to construct patterns of meaning in everything we experience. It's through these patterns that we're able to look back over our history and try to make sense out of it, to look forward to our future and try to direct where it will take us.

Main.patterning instinct. Symbol

When humans talk, on the other hand, we are constantly linking words together to create meanings that emerge in new and sometimes unexpected ways. This combinatory power, which can create an infinite array of meanings from a finite set of words, is an essential part of language that sets it apart from the vervet calls and is known as syntax.

Syntax

Based on the group sizes early humans probably lived in, they would have had to spend 30–45 percent of their day grooming to maintain social cohesion—probably an unsustainable amount of time. Gradually, mimetic forms of communication—gestures, grunts, and other vocalizations—would have become more significant, offering a more efficient form of social interaction than grooming, until finally developing into language.

Grooming. Mimetic form. Then Language

language is far too intricate and rapidly changing for any combination of genes to have evolved to control for it specifically. It seems to make more sense to look for the underlying capabilities that evolved to enable language than to view language itself as a natural product of evolution.

Capacity that evolve rather than instinct