The first evidence of art has been found in seaside caves in southern Africa. Paleo-anthropologists have uncovered artifacts with geometric designs, as well as ochre for skin pigmentation, dating back to about 100,000 years ago.
Around that time and place a cognitive leap in human evolution took place. From that point on, paleo-anthropologists refer to these people and their descendants (everyone now on Earth) as “fully modern humans.”
In our age, Homo sapiens has reached the end of our reign as symbolic creatures on Earth. Which means that the viability and diversity of the Earth, and our prospects on it, don’t lie in replicating higher thought through artificial intelligence, but in awakening the latent capacity for insight in the human brain.
Are our brains exapted for a full awakening of insight in the same way they were exapted for a leap in cognitive development?
Exaptation is defined as “the utilization of a structure or feature for a function other than that for which it was developed through natural selection.” The quintessential example is feathers. They initially evolved in dinosaurs for warmth, and were later exapted for flight in the descendants of dinosaurs, birds.
For hundreds of thousands of years prior to the cognitive leap in Homo sapiens, technology and culture, as well as linguistic and conceptual capabilities, changed very little. The domestication of fire occurred about a million years ago, but it seems human evolution has come full circle, since due to man-made climate change fire is no longer “domesticated.”
Nevertheless, the use of fire had huge implications for the growth of the brain, since cooking meat enables the absorption of many more calories than eating it raw, and the social implications of early humans gathering around a fire cannot be overestimated.
If they still existed, we would view the various species of sub-humans that inhabited Africa, Asia and Europe before fully modern humans emerged as developmentally disabled. We might recognize them as people perhaps, but they would be cognitively incapable of learning beyond the level of a person of about 80 IQ.
Though human intellectual capability varies widely from individual to individual, it has nothing to do with race, and a great deal to do with nutrition, environment and education.
(Of course in this way too we’re regressing, since for example, the white Christian nationalists running the American government don’t recognize blacks or Muslims as fully human, and the POTUS, whatever his IQ, is a very stupid man.)
In any case, I’m not exploring human cognitive capabilities here, but the latent capacity for a deeper intelligence that the evolution of the human brain has given us.
At a time when man’s thought machines are are being imbued with selfhood, there’s real urgency to gain insight into an old philosophical question: What’s the next step in human evolution?
It doesn’t have anything to do with AI, or the projected holy grail of the merging of humans with our machines. Nor is it a function of evolution in the colloquial sense, the gradual improvement over time.
AI threatens to become a tremendous impediment to the awakening of the latent capacity for insight in the human brain. Why? Because as it’s presently being developed, AI is recapitulating symbolic thought, with far greater memory, speed and processing capability, and increasing a general inward and intellectual atrophying.
The paradox is that AI is also driving the transcendence of thought-based consciousness, by surpassing Homo sapiens’ vaunted cognitive dominance, and allowing space for spiritual development.
AI developers have already constructed computer “agents” that can not only think, but also think that they are thinking things. In other words, “I think, and therefore I am.”
As mistaken as Descartes was with that cornerstone of modern Western philosophy, most scientists and philosophers still buy into it at some level, and therefore would call such a computer sentient. Geoffrey Hinton, called the “Godfather of AI,” goes so far as to say they’ve created “a new kind of being.”
That’s inane to the point of insane. Like “Hal” in “2001, A Space Odyssey,” all it proves is that the self is a program, one that can be imbued with emotions, including the fear of death.
Emotions are being embedded in AI programs out of wrongheaded conceptions of sentience. In humans, our programming is permeated with emotions, and our emotions are permeated with programming. Neither is a mark of intelligence, but unintelligence.
Intelligence is the capacity for insight and understanding, which is always of the present. Insight can and does inform thought, but insight comes from a completely different source than thought, both in and beyond the brain. No computer can or will ever have insight, or do anything but mimic understanding and compassion.
AI will either dumb us down to sub-human levels, or we will discover and liberate a completely distinct capacity than thought — that of insight. Thus the re-creation in AI of the evolutionary gift/curse of symbolic thought has become both one of the main drivers of both our demise as a species, and potentially, the liberation of our latent capacity for insight.
So the human brain is exapted for insight, but it’s up to each person to consciously awaken this capacity to the fullest possible degree within her or himself.
Smarts and intelligence are two completely different things. No matter how smart AI becomes, we can, if we deeply understand the difference between artificially sentient machines and authentically sapient human beings, teach ourselves and our children to be attentive, self-knowing, and free.
There’s no such thing as a computer that isn’t based on memory and programs. And a person who no longer bases their being on memory, and is freeing herself and himself from programming, is growing as a human being.
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