Hunter Gatherer’s Guide Notes

The Human Paradox

Unrivaled in our adaptability, ingenuity, and exploitative capacity, we have come to specialize in everything over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. We enjoy the competitive advantage of being specialists, without paying the usual costs of a lack of breadth. This is the paradox of the human niche.

Campfire

The campfire is a place to share ideas, to talk, laugh, cry, and deliberate over challenges. In nearly every case, when minds come together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If we are to survive the future, we need multitudes of people plugging in and parallel processing. Joining minds in this way exponentially increases the ability of humans to solve problems.

Consciousness and culture are in tension with each other, and humans need both. Conscious thoughts are those that can be communicated to others. We define consciousness, therefore, as “that fraction of cognition that is packaged for exchange.”

Our individual consciousness likely evolved in parallel with collective consciousness, and would become fully realized only later in our evolution. Understanding what is in the mind of another, known as theory of mind, is useful. We can accurately pass a complex abstraction from one mind to another by simply vibrating the air between us (speech/sound).

For theory of mind to function, one needs to run an emulation of the other person within one’s own head. For me to benefit from a comparison between what I think and what I understand you to think, I am all but required to have subjective experience of both you and me—to bring the two into a single currency. Shared consciousness is an emergent, intangible space between people, where concepts are lodged and co-cultivated. Each participant has a distinct perspective on the space, much as each witness to a physical event will have a somewhat different vantage point, but the space is a property of the collective.

Culture versus Consciousness

Consciousness is valuable for problem-solving, but not great at execution. To be in the flow of things, you need to have behaviors and habits ingrained in order to let the conscious mind out of the way. These can be understood as traditions or cultures that a tribe member carries out intuitively by not questioning or rebuilding. When we have issues that our current understanding can’t accomplish, that’s when the conscious mind comes into its own.

When times are good, people should be reluctant to change (comparatively conservative). When things aren’t so good, they should be more willing to confront the risks of change (comparatively progressive).

Humans Break:

• Niche boundaries by being both generalists and specialists.
• Interpersonal boundaries by oscillating between culture and consciousness.

The human niche is niche switching.

Adaptation and Lineage

Fitness is about reproduction and persistence. A successful population can ebb and flow but extinction is failure.

Whether cultural, genetic, or a mixture of the two, sex roles inherited from a long line of ancestors are biological solutions to evolutionary problems. They are, in short, adaptations that function to facilitate and ensure lineage persistence into the future.

Currently, some people, and even some scientists, are in denial of potential adaptations that may appear to be ugly. Refusing to investigate anything that might not be positive in the current cultural context.

The Omega Principle

Epigenetic means “above the genome.” Culture sits “above” the genome in the sense that it shapes the way the genome is expressed. Genes describe proteins and processes that construct a body. Culture has a powerful influence on where bodies go, and what they do. In this way, culture is a regulator of genome expression.

The term is now almost exclusively used to refer to mechanisms that molecularly regulate the expression of the genome, expressing some traits while suppressing others, creating the patterns of gene expression that give the body a coherent form and function. These regulatory mechanisms are the key to understanding multicellular life. Without these mechanisms, all cells with a given genome would be alike, and any large collection of cells could exist only as a colony of undifferentiated cells. It is only through the tight, epigenetic regulation of gene expression that we can have an animal or a plant composed of well-coordinated, distinct, multicellular tissues.

A single evolutionary rule governs both molecular and cultural regulators of gene expression. Cultural behavior may restrain the actions of a being, which in turn, has an effect on the gene expression.

The brain that picks up culture is big and energetically expensive to run; the process by which culture is transmitted is prone to error; and the content of human culture frequently blocks off fitness-enhancing opportunities—thou shalt not kill, steal, covet, lay with, etc. Culture appears to waste time, energy, and resources that would otherwise be at the genome’s disposal. One might get the impression that culture is effectively parasitizing the genome.

But the genome is in the driver’s seat. A capacity for culture is nearly universal in birds and mammals; it has been elaborated, enhanced, and extended by genomic evolution over time; and it is at its most extreme in humans. These facts tell us that whatever culture does, it is not coming at a cost to genetic fitness. Rather, it enhances fitness in dramatic ways. If culture was not paying its way, the genes whose expression it is modifying would either go extinct or evolve to be immune to culture.

Omega Principle:

• Epigenetic regulators, such as culture, are superior to genes in that they are more flexible and can adapt more rapidly.
• Epigenetic regulators, such as culture, evolve to serve the genome.

Any expensive and long-lasting cultural trait (such as traditions passed down within a lineage for thousands of years) should be presumed to be adaptive.

The Age of Information brings the promise of a collective (metaphorical) campfire, a decentralized thing where people who have never met in real life can be warmed by the presence of other minds, sharing ideas and reflections.

But the online world does not have the structures that made discussion around the hearth so valuable. An ancestral campfire places everyone’s reputation—earned over a lifetime—front and center. Around an ancestral campfire, each person would have some basis for elevating or discounting claims and proposals based on the individual’s known strengths and deficits, and taking the history of the discussion into account. The virtual campfire is, by contrast, a free-for-all. We don’t really know one another, our visible history is often misleading, many users are anonymous, and some participants have a hidden dog in the fight. 

Campfires both metaphorical and literal are a convergence point for culture and consciousness, where people come together in good faith to learn the old wisdom and to challenge it.

Culture we define as beliefs and practices that are shared and passed between members of a population. These beliefs are often literally false, metaphorically true, implying that they result in increased fitness if one acts as if they are true despite the fact that they are either inaccurate or unfalsifiable. Culture is a special mode of transmission because it can be passed horizontally, rendering cultural evolution immensely faster and more nimble than genetic evolution. This also renders culture noisy in the short term, before new ideas have endured the test of time. Long-standing features of culture, by contrast, constitute an efficient packaging of proven patterns. Culture can spread horizontally, but its consequential parts are ultimately passed vertically, from generation to generation. Culture is received wisdom, generally handed to you by ancestors, and efficiently transmitted.

Consciousness we define as that portion of cognition that is newly packaged for exchange, meaning that conscious thoughts are ones that could be delivered if someone asked what you were thinking about. It is emergent cognition, where innovation and rapid refinement occur. Conscious thoughts may never be conveyed, but they can be, and the most important ones are, as consciousness is most fundamentally a collective process in which many individuals pool insights and skills to discover what was previously not understood. The products of consciousness are, if they prove useful, ultimately packaged into (highly transmissible) culture.

As mentioned earlier the human niche is niche switching. They argue that the human niche is to move between the paired, inverse modes of culture and consciousness.

Through parallel processing of multiple human minds, our consciousness can become collective, and we can solve problems that neither we could solve as individuals nor our ancestors could have even imagined.

• In times of stability, when inherited wisdom allows individuals to prosper and spread across relatively homogeneous landscapes: Culture reigns.
• But in times of expansion into new frontiers, when innovation and interpretation, and communication of new ideas, are critical: Consciousness reigns.

That said, novel levels of novelty, such as we are experiencing now, are a special danger. This means that what’s needed today—and urgently—is a call to consciousness on a scale that we have not seen before.

Consciousness in Other Animals

Sociality involves recognition of individuals, the tracking of social fate, and iterated interactions that are, at least plausibly, continuing into the future.

Aggregation of animals like tree frogs and salmon are not conscious as they are not sociable in that way. Congregations of baboons in the other hand have very conscious culture.

Innovation at the Margins of the Ancestors’ Wisdom

As a people move across space, it is relatively easy to notice as the ancestors’ wisdom becomes less applicable. As a people move through time, however, as we all do, elders may not recognize their wisdom becoming out of date. The young see it. It is no accident that those who are coming of age in times of change and push boundaries, and that language and norms change somewhat with each generation. Throughout history, the ancestors’ wisdom has generally remained relevant long enough for new generations to get their footing, to know what needs to be pushed against. As a people move through time that is changing extremely rapidly, however, as our world is now, it is more difficult to know what to do with the increasing irrelevancy of the ancestors’ wisdom, and with what to replace it. The margins of the ancestors’ wisdom are rarely hard and fast. At those margins, wherever they are, it is time to niche switch.

Consider three broad contexts in which humans have learned and innovated in times past.

• The first is the utterly new idea: the idea that springs to mind often unbidden and without explanation. This was the territory that the first Mayan, Mesopotamian, and Chinese people were in when they innovated farming. Similarly, the innovation of the wheel, metallurgy, and pottery. Before those things existed, nobody knew they were possible.
• The second context in which innovation occurs is when you know that something is possible, on the basis that it’s been done before, but you have no idea how to make it happen. The Wright brothers saw flight in other organisms, and felt confident that it could be accomplished by machine.
• Third and finally, you might have instruction: you know what you’re shooting for, and have someone or some set of rules or instructions telling you how. Between school and YouTube, we often conflate this third kind of learning for the only kind of learning that is possible. The third type of learning is the most cultural; it is the learning of received wisdom. In contrast, humans are at our most conscious, and therefore our most innovative, in the first two contexts.

Conformity

Conformity has a time and a place—like most traits, it is not simply worse (or better) than not conforming.

There is a tension between conforming and disagreeing in the face of apparent inconsistency. This tension is a hidden strength of humans—the push and pull between wisdom and innovation, between culture and consciousness.

Historically, we have combined forces in social groups, such that in a single group, many people with distinct skills created an emergent whole, one in which generalist capabilities emerged even if all members of the group were specialists. Now, though, it is time to innovate, because change is accelerating, and the received cultural wisdom isn’t sufficient. Individuals themselves becoming more generalist—through learning skills across domains, for instance, rather than diving deep into only one—will help us in this endeavor.

It is important to know what the group thinks, but that is not the same as believing or reinforcing what the group thinks. In a time of rapid change in particular, then, it is important to be willing to be the lone voice. Be the person who never conforms to patently wrong statements in order to fit in with the crowd. Be Asch-Negative (in regards to Asch’s psychology experiment where people would change their answer to the length of a line based on the answers of their peers).

Literally False, Metaphorically True

It is easy to dismiss many myths and beliefs, precisely because they are literally false. Indeed, doing so is almost a sport among some hardheaded people. Take astrology. It is clearly beyond reason to imagine that the stars that we see, many of which are thousands of light-years away, are having a direct impact on human behavior. Similarly, it is beyond reason to believe that a passel of angry gods is the reason for tsunamis, yet among the Moken, those who believe in those gods survive at higher rates than those who don’t. And it is surely beyond reason to believe that a full moon is protective of crop health, yet among Guatemalan farmers, precisely that belief results in more productive farming.

This is how religion and other belief structures spread. Even if such things are not literally true, acting as if they are benefits people; sometimes it even benefits the biodiversity and sustainability of the land on which they live.

Distortions that help you survive and thrive are adaptive. Myths and taboos often make little sense to outsiders, and some of them are surely misguided, even counterproductive for those who honor them. Some surprisingly precise taboos are likely overgeneralizations from an actual event.

Beware Chesterton’s fadys—the old ideas may have hidden truths, and those truths may be difficult to recover once they have been dismissed.

Religion and Ritual

All cultures have ritual. Some rituals are rites of passage to celebrate new babies, coming of age, marriage. There are rituals—traditions, perhaps, given their reliably repeating nature—to celebrate the first planting of the year, and the harvest, and astronomical events like the solstices and the equinoxes. As we have come to live in larger and larger groups, surrounded by ever more anonymity in our daily life, regular holidays, with their attendant shared cultural norms, help to keep us in sync, to act as though we are in fact part of something larger than ourselves. Rituals, which are not inherently religious but have a strong tendency to be so, often include food, music, and dance.

Not only do most cultures spend a substantial fraction of their resources and time on structures and ceremonies intended to impress a cold and indifferent universe, but religions expend a great deal of social capital telling believers what they are not allowed to do. If anything dwarfs the cost of religion, it is the opportunity cost of religion. Were it true that religion was maladaptive, these huge costs would constitute a major vulnerability for faithful populations.

Atheists who behave just like these believers, except for the fact of skipping religiosity and reinvesting the massive dividend, should displace them as a regular feature of history. If religiosity had no adaptive benefit, great leaders in every population’s history would have said, “All you must do is work hard and ignore their mumbo jumbo and their lands will be yours.” But that’s not what we find. Instead, we find great leaders saying things about God and his quirks, his preferences and his plan for us.

Religiosity is adaptive, and moralizing gods, while not being a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, seem to help sustain multiethnic empires once they have become established. As moderns, we are often eager to throw off the spiritual and religious chains of the past, but beware Chesterton’s gods. Religion is an efficient encapsulation of past wisdom, wrapped in an intuitive, instructive, and difficult to escape package.

Sex Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: On the Sacred versus the Shamanistic

Culture is in tension with consciousness, much as the sacred is in tension with the shamanistic. The sacred is to culture as the shamanistic is to consciousness.

The sacred is the reification of received religious wisdom, the sine qua non of a particular religious tradition, that which has stood the test of time and proved valuable enough to the ancestors to be passed on as holy. That which is sacred has a low mutation rate—it changes infrequently—and is highly resistant to change; it is built for a static world. The sacred is protected from corruption (or at least, it’s supposed to be), and is often insulated from the corrupting influences of secular power, wealth, and reproduction. The orthodoxy of the sacred exists in persistent tension with the heterodoxy of the shamanistic.

The shamanistic is high risk, high creativity. It has a high mutation rate, and therefore a high error rate. It explores a huge number of new ideas, most of which are poor. It challenges orthodoxy—that which is sacred. The shamanistic is practically mandated to explore and play with cultural norms. It does this in a variety of ways, such as through altered states of consciousness, which include dreams, trances, and use of hallucinogens.

In nearly every known culture there is use of something, be it strictly hallucinogenic or not, that breaks a person out of the normal, everyday experience and allows for a different perspective to emerge. This is consciousness revolutionizing culture.

When the ancestral wisdom runs out, humans pool their dissimilar experiences and expertise to discover how to bootstrap some new way of being. Identifying when the ancestral wisdom has run out in a particular domain is tough, and there will always be tension between those who want to stay the course and those who are looking to break with tradition and try a new way. Functional systems need those advocating for both—for culture and for consciousness, for orthodoxy and heterodoxy, for the sacred and the shamanistic.

The Corrective Lens

• Sit around more campfires.
• Honor or create rituals that recur—annually, seasonally, weekly, or even daily. They might be ancient and religious in origin (e.g., honoring the Sabbath or Lent—a time for both selective privation and community), astronomical (e.g., recognizing and celebrating the solstices and equinoxes), or entirely new.
• Be Asch-Negative. Don’t conform to social pressure when it goes against your better judgement. 
• Teach children how to bootstrap their own program, so that they can be individually conscious. The tension that we have described between culture and consciousness has an analog during development. Trying to teach children precisely how to be adults, by inculcating them solely with the cultural rules that have come before, will fail. In a world of hyper-novelty, many aspects of culture are ever less relevant, and consciousness is imperative.
• Consider engaging with psychedelics, carefully, if there is anything in you that is curious. They are now legal in some places. But consider engaging them as the powerful cognitive tools that they are, not as a form of recreation. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun.