2017 Maps of Meaning 08: Neuropsychology of Symbolic Representation

So one of the propositions that I set forth for you last week was that the most real things are the things that are most permanent across time, and that manifests themselves in the largest number of situations. Those are the things that you have to map successfully in order to survive—survival of individuals that survive as a species over a very long period of time.

So the question is—one question is, what are the constants of experience if you are a follower of the evolutionary psychologists and to some degree the evolutionary biologist? But I would say more the psychologists like to be in close contact. They have a very Afro-centric view of human evolution, and the idea basically is that after we diverged from the common ancestor between chimpanzees, bonobos, and human beings, we spent a tremendous amount of time in the African environment, mostly on the veldt.

Although we're not absolutely certain about that, we're also very good in water. Human beings have some of the features of aquatic mammals—so while hairlessness being one of them, women have a subcutaneously stored fat that is quite nicely adapted for swimming. Buckminster Fuller, who I wouldn't call a mainstream evolutionary psychologist, hypothesized back in the 70s that we spent some period of time in our evolutionary history living on beaches near the ocean.

That idea really echoes for me because we like beaches a lot, and it's a great place if you want to get easy food. We’re pretty damn good at swimming for terrestrial mammals, and we are hairless. We do cry salt tears, and there's a lot of evidence that we—and our feet, if you think about our feet—they're quite flipper-like. I know we are stand up and all that and walk, so that’s part of the adaptation, but we’re pretty good at swimming.

So anyways, the classical evolutionary psychology view is that we spent most of our time on the African veldt during the critical period of our evolutionary development, let’s say after we diverged from this common ancestor, and that we were adapted for that environment. And one of the consequences of that is the idea that things have changed so much around us that we're really not adapted to the environment that we're in anymore, and I really believe that.

Because I think that the idea that the primary forces that shaped our evolution shaped them during that period of time—call it a roughly seven million year period of time, something like that—and that that was somehow a special time for human evolution that set our nature. I don’t believe that. I mean, it's true to some degree, but it's more useful to view the evolution of human cognitive processes over the entire span of evolutionary history and not necessarily give preference to any particular epoch.

I certainly believe that the idea that we're no longer adapted to the environment because of our rapid technological transformations is simply not true. The reason I think that it's not true is because the fundamental constants of the environment, let’s say, or it's more of the fundamental constants—constituent elements of being—I think that's the right way to think about it. They're the same; they haven't changed a bit.

And there is no way of changing them, as far as I can tell, without us being radically and incomprehensibly different than we are. You know, with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and robotics and all of that, it's certainly possible that in five hundred years we will be so unlike the way we are now that we won’t even be the same creatures.

I don’t think that's a particularly great outcome, but it's certainly possible. So what are the fundamental constituent elements? Well, they're expressed in mythology, but they're not merely symbolic. I think it's the wrong way to think about it.

They're symbolic, but they reflect a very deep reality, and they actually reflect a reality that's not easily apprehensible directly by the senses. Now your senses are tuned for a particular duration; that's roughly—excuse me—that's roughly the duration that you live...