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Even true believers began to see that there were multiple origin stories that said very different things. Some people responded with aggressive, even violent, defenses of their own religious, tribal, or national traditions. But many
simply lost faith and conviction, and along with them, they lost their bearings, their sense of their place in the universe. That loss of faith helps explain the pervasive anomie, the feeling of aimlessness, meaninglessness, and sometimes even despair that shaped so much literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship in the twentieth century.
So true, so true.
The preferences emotions create for particular outcomes and behaviors lie behind the human sense of meaning and ethics.
Sensations, emotions, and thought together create the inner, subjective world that all humans, and probably many other large-brained species, experience. The state that we describe as consciousness seems to be a mode of sharply focused attention summoned by the brain, as if to a court of law, when new, difficult, and important decisions have to be made.
Add memory to these decision-making systems, and we have the foundations for complex learning, the ability to record the results of earlier decisions and use those records to make better decisions in the future.
K/T event
sharing created what the Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky called a noösphere, a single global realm of mind, of culture, of shared thoughts and ideas. “There is,” writes Michael Tomasello, “only one known biological mechanism that could bring about these kinds of changes in behavior and cognition in so short a time.… This biological mechanism is social or cultural transmission, which works on time scales many orders of magnitude faster than those of organic evolution.” This process, which Tomasello calls “cumulative cultural evolution,” is unique to our species.14
corroborees.
noösphere.
human can deliver at most about 75 watts of energy, while a horse or ox can deliver up to ten times as much.
