The Origin of Minds

EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION
A Day in the Life

On any given day, 400,000 children are born. From the suburbs of Chicago to the shantytowns of Calcutta, from the deserts of Africa to the rain forests of South America, you can hear the first cries of these new players in the markets of life—each one the voice of a unique individual.

And on any given day, we encounter the consequences of this individuality. On June 30, 1905, an obscure clerk in the Swiss Patent Office publishes a paper about relativity that alters our understanding of the physical world. On December 1, 1955, a small black woman refuses to go to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and galvanizes a racial revolution. And on September 11, 2001, a Saudi Arabian exiled in Afghanistan ignites a terrorist attack that will change the life of every American.

On any given day, individuals make history. But how are individuals made? What mechanism explains the creation of six billion different minds—minds capable of thinking and behaving in radically different ways? Where could you find a scientifically rigorous theory that was at once universally applicable, yet generated the astonishing uniqueness—the individuality—that we know from everyday personal experience to be a fact of life?

Let's begin with The Origin of Species. Published in 1859, Charles Darwin's book was a scientific Genesis. In his theory of natural selection, Darwin explained how changing environmental circumstances acted as a kind of sieve, winnowing out some life forms and preserving others, which then went on to reproduce and create a niche for themselves. We owe our very existence to these unpredictable challenges to the temporary order of things. Strong evidence suggests that an asteroid impact 65 million years ago proved fatal to the dinosaur dynasty that had ruled for 140 million years. In a geologically brief moment of time, tiny mammals—until then bit players in the grand pageant of life—found themselves thrust onto center stage. And from so simple a beginning, we humans eventually evolved.

Darwin's story offers a compelling explanation for the different anatomical and physiological variations of life forms. Take one example—the beaks of birds. Birds evolved in a world of seeds to be broached, or insects to be caught on the wing, larvae to be drilled for in tree barks, mice to be swooped down upon, mollusks to be dashed on a rock, or fish to be scooped from the oceans. Birds have evolved the specialized tools—the adaptations—that have allowed them to solve the problem of surviving and reproducing in these different environments, and they have passed on the genetic recipe for making those tools to their offspring.

Look at the beak of a raptor such as a hawk, the pouch of a pelican, the pneumatic drill of a woodpecker, and you have an example of an adaptation. Specialized physical organs like livers dedicated to removing toxins, or hearts dedicated to pumping blood, are also adaptations. So is the opposable thumb that our primate ancestors found advantageous in grasping food, and that you may now find advantageous in turning the pages of this book.

You might argue that, if this evolutionary logic works for beaks and hearts, then perhaps it should work for brains and the minds they generate. This is the claim made by evolutionary psychologists who suggest that the mind is a collection of specialized and—here's the key point—heritable mental organs designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems, like finding food, or choosing a mate.

The assumption is that natural selection would have shaped an intelligence system in just the same way that it would shape a bodily organ. But the brain is not a beak; the intelligence system is not a liver or an opposable thumb. The evolutionary psychologists' leap of logic makes sense only if the environmental challenges remain static enough to sculpt an instinct over evolutionary time—to etch the instructions for its reliable development into your genome.

But what happens when the environment is dynamic—like the social world? What happens when the problem to be solved—like choosing a mate or deciding upon a coalition partner—becomes a moving target, changing not over evolutionary time, nor even within the life span of the individual—but moment by moment?

Ask yourself: What kind of mind could be responsive to real-time changes in the social world? What kind of mind can generate a Self—an internal agent that knows what behavior might be effective at any given time and can navigate you through the social landscape, altering in the moment, from situation to situation? What kind of mind can keep track of your past and present interactions in this changing human social market and generate possible futures—creative acts of imagination?

In September 1998, we published a blueprint for the human intelligence system—a new evolutionary model of the mind—in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We suggested that the mind arises from an evolved intelligence system that was designed to be responsive to any number of adaptive problems (including those yet to emerge in the evolutionary future). But the fundamental problem it was designed to solve—the problem that drove the elemental logic inherent in all intelligence systems on earth—was one imposed by the universe at large, by the physical laws of energy.

Here's the crux of the argument. To do anything—locate food, find a mate, reproduce, compose a sonata, solve an equation—you have to stay alive with enough surplus energy to perform the task at hand. Energy management drove the foundational adaptive design of all ancestral intelligence systems. And all subsequent design features evolved as integrated augmentations of this core system—including the part that ultimately gives rise to your mind. This remarkable adaptation is designed to deal with the problem of behavioral energy management in an ever-fluctuating environment by changing itself with every experience. And this design feature underlies all of our most impressive abilities as humans.

This book presents a novel framework for understanding the origin—and nature—of minds, and the genesis of all intelligence systems. It connects the intelligence systems of bacteria—the opening act in the four-billion-year drama of life on this planet—to the intelligence systems of human beings today. It validates individual uniqueness as an adaptive expression of human nature, while acknowledging the influence of the social world in the creation of our sense of self. And it makes a bold new claim: that we are—all of us—unique by design.

The key component of this framework is what we call an adaptive representational network (ARN). Think of it as a network of neurons that memorializes a brief scene in the ongoing movie of your life, linking together your physical and emotional state, the environment you are in, the be- havior or thought you generate, and the problem-solving outcome. We think of ARNs as the fundamental units of intelligence—rather like atoms of behavior. Here's a rough analogy. If you take two atoms of hydrogen and an atom of oxygen something quite extraordinary results. You can drink, or go swimming in, what emerges from the union. In similar fashion, the combinatorial properties of ARNs lead to a surprising range of human abilities—the creation of selves and personalities, the generation of unprecedented thoughts and metaphors, and the ability to make inferences about our world and the people with whom we share it—even the basis for our capacity to acquire and produce language.

The Origin Of Minds is a book about evolution, uniqueness, and this new scientific model of the self. It takes you on a journey from the physical laws of the universe to the making of your mind. A journey that begins in your own garden.