Becoming human: we woke up to rich mental lives and found no mechanisms for them!

First of all, our SENSORY world alone is extraordinary. 1000s of shades of color, textures, detailed environment we find ourselves in. we see millions of details around us. in one visual scene we can move our eyes focus our attention on ... i don't know what's the number of pixels? could one count the number of details in one visual scene? the number of leaves on all the trees? the number of edges, intersections, the number of culices in each cloud, the nmber of cracks in the sidewalk...

details of clouds, sunsets, bugs, birds, rocks, pebbles, shades of staining on a sidewalk...

there is music around us the howling of the wind, the light tinkle of leaves or ice against each other, the wealth of birds robin, crow, bluejay, english sparrow, cardinal, chickadee, mourning dove, catbird, mockingbird, chipping sparrow, song sparrow, white throated sparrow, downy woodpecker, tufted titmouse, seagull, red tailed hawk, starling, redwinged blackbird, wood thrush, scarlet tanager, bohemian waxwing,... and already there are musicians among them

and the crickets and grasshoppers and katydids, the nye nye nye bugs...

and the tones, we start making them ourselvese and we discover octaves, and 5ths and we sing songs ourselves and usually play them on what seem to be scales of from 5 to a dozen notes per octave, and rhythms...

and the smells of hyacinths, roses, fresh cut grass, cow patties, wormwood, dry grass, honeysuckle sea breaze and the tastes... tomato, strawberry, potato, carrot, turkey, oregano, cheese, cinnamon, mango, chocolate, blueberries, grapes, broccoli, oranges, greapfruits, apples, pears, cherries, almonds, peanuts, shrimp, eggyolk, salt, pepper, milk, caramel... 100s of plants and spices to eat.

and the stars at night, we can make patterns in 100s of stars and the patterns of the paths of the 7 planets and their resonances. we can count. the day repeats, teh seasons repeat the position of the sun repeats, the position of venus jupiter repeat, we count the resonances, complex, they drive us to count more and more detailed ratios.

and touch and athletics and sex

and the wealth of activities that human life explodes into: weaving, sailing, woodcarving, smelting, exploring, hunting, tracking, farming, digging, climbing, running, swimming, wrestling, throwing, bow hunting, racing, games of chance, board games, dancing, playing flutes, strings, drums, rhythms, sweating, kissing, eating, shitting, massaging, combing hair, birthing, being sick, vomiting, dying, crying, laughing, clinging, rubbing, breathing, orgasms both female and male, and nursing,

and the wealth of stories humans get into from these activities, growing up, pain, falling in love, jealosy, breaking up, making choices, journeys, learning, discovering, choosing, dilemmas, contests, hating, organizing, building, villages, families, feudes, disputes, arbitrating, sleuthing, policing, fighting, war, nations, organizing farmland, organizing roads, organizing irrigationworks, organizing postal systems, organizing men,

states of mind of fear, wonder, pleasure, puzzlement, confusion, ecstacy, awe, concentration,

and all the while, we experience, act while swimming in a swirling sea of strong emotions, desires, lusts, exuberances, fears.. our emotional lives, both private and communal can seem like forces that can twist steel, explode mountains, bring down cosmic floods upon mankind


this is an incredibly rich sensory world we woke up to. did it happen relatively suddenly? don't know.

and the amazing part of the story is that we could MATCH our sensory world. in detail, in intensity.

we could draw, paint, sculpt, weave.

but our greatest match in intensity was language/music.

we easily excelled all birds in melody and rhythm. and we gave a good shot at matching them in tonal texture with our bewildering variety of musical instruments. and in ecstatic states we could easily out sing dance drum any bird for longer than it could stay awake.

and the complexity of language, we were able to match thing for thing with words. given any thing in that complex visual environment we could match it. acute angle which nevertheless doesn't come to a point between the two spikes in that dark leathery green oak leaf with the embossed surface 4" long and thinner than a fingernail, supple but not drooping...

if anyone attempted to catalogue language, write a dictionary, we found that there were 1000s of words of dozens of parts of speach with complex particular rules of combination and we could combine them in an effectively countably infinite number of ways.

and with this language with which we could describe every visual thing...

and we attempted to describe feelings with language too, which was very hard. and to do it we invented song and poetry. human poetry is our attempt to map out feeling states...

and the stories... we wove long stories of individual's lives, of conflicts with familily, friends and enemies, longer stories of the lives of states and history and ultimately tackled the life of the cosmos itself. these narratives were longer than any birdsong, any whalesong if we were even listening then...

we could give a name for every different sounding bird, looking insect, tasting plant, and we could make order out of it, cataloguing these organisms finding order making patterns...

we mapped the stars, and named patterns in them. we timed the days and planets and found patterns in them deeper and deeper and we could predict them.

we classified legal disputes, kin relationships, and told stories.

eventually with our powers of imagination some of us were able to outsing any bird, out mathematize any planetary ratio, out count any number of real things, imagine more and more complicated stories between complicated lives...

a human storyteller could CREATE characters more compelling then real people. we DID bring dumb clay golems to life.


at some point in the ancient literate world our powers of imagination outstripped the sensory world we were paying attention to (not that we were capable of ever imagining that there WAS more to sense, 8 THOUSAND differnt birds? 16 MILLION square miles of earth to explore? SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND species of beetles?) but at some point our creativity outstripped our DESIRE to explore the sensory realm, and then the trouble began.

this happened because literate societies moved out of rich jungles onto desert flood plains and people moved into cities.

deserts, floodplains, cities are depaupered sensory worlds. and the density of population, the speciliztion in crafts over took the sensory world and all the complexity moved into human interactions and imagination under the dark night sky.

and there lay the trouble.

and once we begun to band in cities powered by floodplain agriculture, all hell broke loose. we began to amass wealth, we began to organize men, the minds and intentions and wills of men in 1000s in 100s of thousands. and we were able to transform landscapes within the time of historical memory of a place. we organized the flooding of the nile and the euphrates. we checkered the landscape for miles in irrigationworks and fields. we organized the lives of dozens of species of plants and animals to our wills. we built walls that went for 1000s of miles, we build small mountains in egypt, we built our own jungles of urban landscapes, we built large ships to travel oceans, we waged wars of 10s of thousands of organized fighters against each other.

human mind became powerful in the world.

we denuded hilsides in our quest for agriculture and earth finally rebelled. the floods began.

but they didn't stop us.

and now that the human mind was able to build walls and pyramids, organize irrigation works, cities and wars.. we begun to ask "where does this powerful complex deep mind come from?"

it made more songs than all the birds, it wasn't there. it made more words than all the insects, it wasn't there. it told more stories than the nuances of cooked fruit and vegatables, it wasn't there. look inside the split flesh of a freshly killed hero in battle where is the vitality? where is the keeness of his mind? where is the complexity to weave the stories he told at night?

we did not see it.

and so we invented spirits gods and demons. but they weren't really explanations.

in fact we were lost. we failed to discover, to understand who we were.


that discovery had to wait till the rise and fall of several more empires, civilizations, till a curious combination of semitic sacred storytelling about a one pointed power in the universe a one pointed historical sense joined up with a curious greek sense of universalism and logic spread across a rambunctious european puzzlework of nations.

and science was born out of the christian european trade economy. and once again we began to explore our sensory world. and it exploded. the decimal points (from india) of exact calculations of the movements of planets, the hacking out of algebraic laws of motion, the cataloguing of 2000 different minerals into 56 cryastal structures, 96 elements... the 1000s of man hours of grueling cooking experiments it took to fathom the chemistry of the elements, and then we found more than 1000s of differernt organic molecules.

then the sea explorations 1000s of plants and animals, 10s of thousands by lineas' time, 100s of thousands, 2million current count, but when one team of scientists REALLY tried looking they found hundreds of species of beetles just on one of a 100,000 different species of tropical trees. just HOW many can there be?

and the geological strata..

and pushing chemistry to the limits with microscopes and radiolabeling and cleverness and 1000s of 1000s of hours of experiments till we come to learn the confederation of a 100billion cities with all their moving parts that can make up the vitality and mind of a human.


but the story is barely evident. for the first chapter of this story has 30,000 years of records to back it up. and we've only been on the 2nd chapter of scientific journey for a mere 400 years, and only a small portion of humanity has been traveling it. It has hardly been told...

in in the meanwhile human life has exploded into another dense urban network, this time the whole globe in seatravel, air travel, world wide commerce and finally instantaneous electronic communication and the density of humans 6billion of us and we are realizeing that we are warping our whole world's climate and ecosystems...

the pace of change has outstripped the traditional generation time of human storytelling...

back in ancient times our brains became conscious of their own intellectual powers. but now this new global brain of instant world wide communication and invention has yet to come to consciousness.

we are lost again.

The Windweaving Of The Minds Of Crows

a walk one afternoon
of blustery snowy weather,
i found a dark quiet corner
on a country street
at Mercer and Ryckman
of tall spindly spruces.
a nook amongst houses.

clumped on snowy boughs,
a congregation of crows
facing this way and that
dozens of crows sat cackling

snowfulls of wind
burst down on us
moving tall trees to sway
proved strong wood to be woven
like supple cloth

crows leapt into wind
wove their way high
into complex wind curls
then,
suddenly,
pulling wings in
batmobiles
to plummet like rocks
perilously

miraculously, i thought
peeling out
again
twist against whirlwind
feathers splayed

to land just so
almost sighing
a feathery touch
beside their fellows
on a branch of snow

how?

amazingly skilled!
sky full of acrobats
and not a wing snapped
not a crow plummeted
to earth

their wings weigh nothing!
thin bird bones hold, how?
feathers?
interlocked feathers?
stronger than bone?

tense feathers like fingers?
THAT much control?
sense eddies of wind with
hundreds of feather tips?

what fine invention
woven exoskeleton!


and i yearned to know
do they play for wind?
do crows take pleasure
in mastery of wind?
or only mildly inconvenienced
to use pedestrian craft against wind
while merely adjusting
social arrangements on boughs?

even so,
when as crow kids
to learn such fine skills
they must have played these games


and i yearned to know
ignorant of crow speech
become a scientist?
spend grueling winter months
to huddle in bird blinds
fingers numb watching
clever experiment
after subtle experiment
to trick them to spill
their secrets?

winding crow flight
inspires me to thought weaving
how do brains grow?
more flexible weaving there!
never hardwired straight from the genes.
no, nerves play,
weave through each other
while crow kids play,
weave through windgames
mind and brain
weave each other

into dense but flexible nets
of thought and skill

worlds became woven
that fine wintry day

Thunderstorms Of Sperm Swim The Well Of Life

from the well of her mouth
to the burning bush which conceals a deeper well...
well of wombs.

to connect eye to eye like hovering eagle and dove
to connect tongue to tongue like entwining serpents
to delight nipple to nipple like the leaping gazelle
to fit my arm around her waist as climbing a tree
and hover rock back and forth like the waves over the beach birthing life
and sink the tree of life into the hot wet depths, the black smokers
rocking rocking with the moon
climbing climbing with the intensity of the building storm clouds
to burst like crack of thunder bursting rain into earth
and wait the passage of seasons
till spring springs forth a sprig of us
new child.

to wander in the desert of loneliness
to wander the moist summer nights in the alleys of cities hungry
to see a flash of flouncing dark curls
eyes to eyes flicker with recognition
forgotten depths in them
to find a long lost sister
sit in the car in the parking lot for hours telling our stories.
listening
the eyes the mouths hovering closer and closer together
wanting to kiss
wanting to kiss all
like the mouths of babies exploring a fresh world

spring meadow on a sunlit day
brewing to humid storm slowly
the dark clouds build
the static electricity in the air builds
to spark tongue to nipple lightning
amid the flashes to run for cover in the bushes

electricity of earth runs through us
the ancient sea tides of mating birth and death run through us
three billion generations of life giving to life
life dancing skillfully holding to balance
in the flow of sunlight to the cold dark void
in the face of the grim reaper of entropy
life passing on the flame of redox cycle from torch to torch
in a marathon 3.6billion years in the running breathing panting
still winning

and the tides of life the little ones
the seeking pseudopods of protoplasm reaching out from me
pods of me splitting from me on their own journey
seeking past me
past my time
wait by the sea for their journey

and the storm builds
the sea parts
the danger is imminent
and they pour out lives of me to live or die
and swim the storm current to another world
lives of me
tiny seed boats of my ancestors
packed with ancient tails of fibers woven nine by two
swim up the sea another world

she tastes different
it's a swim uphill the salmon take to spawn
to die
they race each other
help each other
like Beowulf and Brecca egging each other on in heroic exploits
her eggself is waiting with the torch of life to carry on
but she needs incitement
needs marriage to the community else she too will be expelled
the stillborn floating down the bloody nile

they arrive
come to rest on her yolky breast
release the hold on life beating protoplasm
just sing her my half of the song
and set her to splitting

songserpents of me entangling in her libraries
weaving another story in this life epic

How to Explore Whether the Universe Is a Loving God (Cosmological Anthropic Principle)

Wolfram, in his book "a new kind of science" (poorly written, full of himself, but FASCINATING DATA) shows how scores of different kinds of the complex cellular automata (one example here) can simulate each other, and in a sense, ANY cellular automata (or mathematical system, or machine) which is reasonably complex enough can do ANYTHING that we consider interesting. This leads me to the following kinds of questions:

is the kind of biological life we have (and brains and behavior and minds and experiences) a consequence of the particular kind of chemistry this universe gives us, or would ANY remotely interesting chemistry be able to produce critters like us? Wolfram's results HINT at a yes for the latter possibility.

This is interesting because we can extend it to the following dilemma:

There is a concept called the cosmological anthropic principle. (look it up) In it SOME physicists say that if the physical constants to the universe as we understand them now, where just .00000001% different, suns would not form, atoms would not be created in them, and no chemistry even would result, let alone life. These people and some christians too, use this argument to say that the universe was fine tuned to create us, and that means either a god who loves us created it, or the universe itself is some kind of god who loves us.


Their argument is faulty however! Yes, we can tell that if the universe where .0000001% different our kind of chemistry and suns and planets and life wouldn't exist, BUT we are NO WHERE near capable as physicists and mathematicians to predict what ELSE might happen. (We had quantum chemistry for 60 years or so and never even figured out Bucky Balls from scratch!) Things on space and time scales that we couldn't imagine might become interesting instead, and this might be interesting enough in the sense of Wolfram's results, to create systems that could create TOTALLY different critters, who can nevertheless become richly interesting, come to explore and 'know' the universe and be 'worthy of a god's love'.

So where does that leave us?

If in a 1000 more years of math and science we COULD show that this universe is the only kind that can produce interesting beings, well, that would be interesting. can't imagine how we could do that, but there are some mathematical results that might point the way.

the other result? say we can map out ALL possible physicses.. (ok, maybe 10,000 years from now...) and show that 99% of them end up with something interesting (this is like exploring the phase space of the parameters of a dynamical system...) THAT would be interesting too.

Loricifera, Cycliophora, Micrognathia: New Phyla Get Me Wondering About Twisty Metazoan Evolution

pic of loriciferan and life cycle

pic of cycliophora and life cycle

pic of micrognathia and phylogeny

from:

"An Introduction to Loricifera, Cycliophora, and Micrognathozoa" by Reinhardt Møbjerg Kristensen

get a look at that cycliophora life cycle. what insanity! where's the individual? these are whole new phyla, on the level of mollusks or segmented worms or arthropods, discovered within the past few decades.

after reading this article i woke this morning thinking about where these critters fit so i reviewed all these phyla...

loriciferans, cycliophorans, and micrognathozoa. So i review the phyla: priapulid, kinorhynch, loricifera, nematode, sipuncula, bryozoa, phoronida, brachiopoda, gastrotrich, rotifer, acanthocephala, entoproct, cycliophora, gnathostomulid...

in my invertebrate biology text. What chaos of lifestyles and phylogeny.

well actually the phylogeny is confused! we do not know when the phyla differentiated from each other, nor how long it took? 70million years int the precambrian? 10million years right at the beginning? faster?

a lot is going on. many levels of organizition are evolving in parallel with and against each other:

ecology
organismal anatomy
genes
genetic networks.


In each clade one can find instances of radical switches in ecology, which select for radical difference in morphology. lineages can go back and forth between these ecological strategies multiple times. see the chart of switches between planktotropy and lecithotrophy in annelid larvae quoted on page 491 of Valentine, from:

Rouse, G. W. 2000. "the epitome of hand waving? Larval feeeding and hypotheses of metazoan phylogeny". Evol. Dev. 2: 222-233

so it is hard to infer phylogeny from looking at aparent homologies in the anatomy/behavior.

the next level of messiness is in the genetics. the genes and the regulatory circuits guiding development can evolve independantly. the same gene can be coopted again and again for a different developmental task. and we know that genetics can be subject to recombination, so that whole level doesn't form a clean phylogenetic tree...

Sean Carroll on Evo Devo

I'm struck by what a rich fragrant MESS evolutionary biology is.

check out a nice summary in

James W. Valentine, "on the origins of phyla"

chapter 3 discussing the fragrant chaos of developmental genetic regulatory networks. the book has chaps describing the phyla, the molecular phylogenies, the fossil record and speculations about there mysterious evolution at the end.

one day i will get to read it.

Is the Evolution of Complex Eyes an Unlikely Contingent Event or the Inevitable Consequence of The Axioms Of Physics?

I was thinking about the evolution of eyes and such and whether they are odd contingent results of evolution on Earth or whether they are EASY for chemistry and biology to come up with...

It's a current question in evolutionary theory, for instance:

If you play the tape over again of evolution wold you get COMPLETELY different weird critters and morphologies as S. J. Gould posited in his Wonderful Life,

or would evolution converge on many similar structures, as Simon Conway Morris posits in his "Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe"

Here we find out that the two are having something of a feud, and Conway Morris is a theist, besides.

more ideas on this dilemma: Lewin's book "Complexity: Life At The Edge Of Chaos"



Take eyes. are they unexpectedly difficult things to evolve or are they nearly inevitable consequences of the way biology, chemistry and light interacts? or to take it to the extreme: as Conway Morris posits, is human intelligence ALSO an inevitable consequence of the laws of phyics?


Odd thoughts and the gut response is: of course not! but then i started thinking of the classification of finite simple groups.

You set up a simple set of axioms for what constitutes a mathematical group. then you go exploring the space of all possible groups by messing around, kind of like how evolution explores morphospace, except that we can possibly be more mathematially thorough! In fact can we find ALL the possible kinds of groups? is the morphospace infinitely complex, dirt simple or somewhere in between?

The surprise came a few decades ago when it appeared that we COULD map out all the possible kinds of groups (actually we found all the finite simple groups, kind of like the prime factors of groups)! And what we found was that there was moderate complexity: 18 different classes, plus... some chaos: 26 different sporadic groups that did not fall into any of classes.

The sporadic groups are odd, HUGE and complex. the largest has: 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000 elements!

How on earth did the simple definition of a group imply this interesting space of structures with just a LITTLE bit of chaos?

Description here (describes axioms for group, some examples you can work out, and pointers to the mathematical results):

finite simple groups

So i'm wondering... if you look at physics, chemistry and the basics of cell bio as the axioms for life, is the possible morphospace a huge infinte chaos, where anything is possible, or is it more manageable with just a little bit of chaos? And thus, maybe there is not a chaos of sensory organs possible, but a finite bunch of them with eyes, being one of the classes? Of course the corresponding classification of possible structures must be WAY HUGER than the classification of finite simple groups. And we also have to model how the historical process of evolution constrained by the specific conditions of a planet (which are in turn modified by the evolution of the organisms...) explores that morphospace!

Another process that might whittle down the regions of morphospace possible for evolution, is that only a very small fraction of it might be attractive orbits to the evolutionary dynamical system

Say, as Stuart Kaufmann finds in his random boolean networks

So, maybe eyes are not so surprising after all.

Stuart Kaufmann's Random Boolean Networks

take N nodes that can be on or off. hook 'em together into a network with various logical gates coming into each one with an average of k inputs from the others. look at the ensemble of all such possible systems.

let each cycle synchronously, the nodes turning each other on and off. there ought to be 2^N possible states to such a system. Kaufmann found that when K is around 2 most of the systems end up falling into one of a MERE sqrt(N) possible attractive cycles! the systems do not explore anywhere NEAR the 2^N possible states.