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Menschen-Gesellschaften haben sich in den vergangenen 10’000 Jahren in verschiedensten Formen überall verändert. Wie organisierten sich die Menschen seit sie sesshaft wurden? Welche Mittel (Medien) bestimmen unser heutiges Zusammenleben. Grundlegend für unser Verständnis sozialer Prozess ist die Geschichte der sozialen Intelligenz, der Veränderung unserer Kommunikationsmedien.
MATERIALIEN
Michael Tomasello
The Cultural Origins of HUMAN COGNITION
Harvard Univ. Press 2000 pg.1
Somewhere in Africa, sometime about 6 million years ago, in a routine evolutionary event, a population of great apes became reproductively isolated from its conspecifics. This new group evolved and split into still other groups, leading eventually to several different species of bipedal ape of the genus Australopithecus. All of these new species eventually died out except one that survived until about 2 million years ago, by which time it had changed so much that it needed not just a new species designation but a new genus designation, Homo. Compared with its australopithecine forebears-who were four feet tall with ape-sized brains and no stone tools - Homo was larger physically, had a larger brain, and made stone tools. Before long, Homo began to travel the globe widely, although none of its early forays out of Africa succeeded in establishing any populations that survived permanently.
Then, somewhere still in Africa, sometime about 200,000 years ago, one population of Homo began on a new and different evolutionary trajectory. It began living in new ways in Africa and then spread out across the world, outcompeting all other papulations of Homo and leaving descendants that are known today as Homo sapiens. The individuals of this new species had a number of new physical characteristics, including somewhat larger brains, but most striking were the new cognitive skills and products they created:
They began to produce a plethora of new stone tools adapted to specific ends, with each population of the species creating its own tool-use "industry" - resulting eventually in some populations creating such things as computerized manufacturing processes.
They began to use symbols to communicate and to structure their social lives, including not only linguistic symbols but also artistic symbols in the form of stone carvings and cave paintings—resulting eventually in some populations creating such things as written language, money, mathematical notation, and art.
They began to engage in new kinds of social practices and organizations, including everything from the burying of the dead ceremonially to the domestication of plants and animals-resulting eventually in some populations creating such things as formalized religious, governmental, educational, and commercial institutions.
Allan Campbell
http://www.uboeschenstein.ch/sal/campbell111.html
Getting to Know Waiwai
An Amazonian Ethnography
Routledge 1995
S. 111: Authority - power - hierarchy
How do human beings keep their society going? How fragile is it? While animal instincts are usually so accurate, human drives and motivations are a mess. To keep us right in the society we know here, we're held together by all sorts of economic and political institutional arrangements that we think are enormously sophisticated.
Immanuel Kant
Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht. 6. Satz.
Der Mensch ist ein Thier, das, wenn es unter andern seiner Gattung lebt, einen Herrn nöthig hat. Denn er missbraucht gewiss seine Freiheit in Ansehung anderer Seinesgleichen ; und ob er gleich als vernünftiges Geschöpf ein Gesetz wünscht, welches der Freiheit Aller Schranken setze: so verleitet ihn doch seine selbstsüchtige thierische Neigung, wo er darf, sich selbst auszunehmen. Er bedarf also einen Herrn, der ihm den eigenen Willen breche und ihn nöthige, einem allgemeinen Willen, dabei jeder frei sein kann, zu gehorchen. Wo nimmt er aber diesen Herrn her? Nirgends anders als aus der Menschengattung. Aber dieser ist eben so wohl ein Thier, das einen Herrn nöthig hat. Er mag es also anfangen wie er will; so ist nicht abzusehen, wie er sich ein Oberhaupt der öffentlichen Gerechigkeit verschaffen könne, das selbst gerecht sei; er mag nun in einer einzelnen Person, oder in einer Gesellschaft vieler dazu auserlesener Personen suchen. Denn jeder derselben wird immer seine Freiheit missbrauchen, wenn er keinen über sich hat, der nach Gesetzen über ihn Gewalt ausübt.
Pascal Boyer
RELIGION EXPLAINED
The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
Perseus Books 2001
...our systems for social interaction did not evolve in the context of vast groups and abstract institutions like states, corporations, unions and social classes. We evolved as small bands of foragers and that kind of existence is the context in which we developed the special features of our social mind. Sedentary settlements, large tribes, kingdoms and other such modern institutions are so recent in evolutionary time that we have not yet developed reliable intuitions about them
ADAM KUPER
Chosen Primate
Human Nature and Cultural Diversity
Harvard University 1996
Keywords: ORIGIN OF SOCIETY - Thomas Hobbes - Jean Jacques Rousseau - territoriality - Complex societies: constitutional theory - Ordered anarchy - Fission and fusion - Roots of sociality - style of inter-group aggression found among the chimpanzees is absent among the egalitarian hunter-gatherers. - Communities of foragers tend to live in remarkable harmony - The principle of reciprocity - Adam Smith - Marcel Mauss - Power and Authority -
Michael Tomasello
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
David Erdal /Andrew Whiten
EGALITARIAN AND MACHIAVELLIAN INTELLIGENCE IN HUMAN EVOLUTION
Keywords: egalitarianism - hunter-gatherer egalitarianism: food-sharing and by a virtually complete absence of hierarchy or dominance - evolution of counter-dominance - psychology ot egalitarianism - One key question which this analysis raises is why, given this evolved psychology, the development of herding and agriculture about 10,000 yearsago triggered the creation of big-men, of chiefs, ofclasses and ultimately of multilevel institutionalized hierarchies. As we have said, there was not time for significant biological evolution to take place: these developments must depend on the same psychology as hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. The answer must lie in the fit between the evolved psychological pre-dispositions and the new environment. Since this is no longer the environment in which humans evolved, the evolved predispositions need not in principle lead to behaviour which is functionally effective.The correlation between the proximate cause of the behaviour and the genetic function of the behaviour may be broken in a radically different environment.
Jessica C. Flack and Frans B.M. de Waal
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7, No. 1-2, 2000, pp. 1-29
Darwinian Building Blocks of Morality in Monkeys and Apes
Systemtheorie: Kybernetik - Systemtheorie
Fritjof Capra: Systemdenken in der Naturwissenschaft
Die Systemschau betrachtet die Welt in Hinblick auf Zusammenhänge und Integration. Systeme sind integrierte Ganzheiten, deren Eigenschaften sich nicht auf die kleinerer Teile reduzieren lassen. Als Wissenschaftler bin ich vor allem an der wissenschaftlichen Formulierung des ökologischen Weltbildes interessiert, und ich bin zur Überzeugung gekommen, daß die Theorie lebender Systeme, welche in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten aus der Kybernetik heraus entwickelt wurde, den idealen Rahmen zum ganzheitlich-ökologischen Denken in der Wissenschaft bietet.
Fritjof Capra
The Hidden Connections
HarperCollins 2002
pg 45
The Social Dimension of Consciousness
Keywords: Social Dimension of Consciousness - primary consciousness - reflective consciousness - The "inner world" of our reflective consciousness emerged in evolution together with language and social reality. This means that human consciousness is not only a biological, but also a social phenomenon - Language arises when the level of abstraction is reached at which there is communication about communication - words and objects are created through coordinations of coordinations of behaviour - We coordinate our behaviour in language, and together in language we bring forth our world. "The world everyone sees is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others". Maturana/Varela - complex choreography of behavioural coordination
Niclas Luhmann
http://www.uboeschenstein.ch/texte/luhmann_glossar63.html
S. 65
Gesellschaftsdifferenzierung
Unter der primären Differenzierung der Gesellschaft versteht man die Bildung von Teilsystemen und System/Umwelt-Beziehungen [siehe Ausdifferenzierung]. Die Form der primären Differenzierung bildet die Struktur [siehe Struktur] der Gesellschaft. Die Form der Differenzierung bestimmt die Art und Weise, wie im umfassenden System die Beziehungen zwischen den Teilsystemen realisiert werden: Sie betrifft die Differenz zwischen Systemen, die füreinander zur jeweiligen Umwelt gehören. Die Differenzierungsform bildet die Struktur der Gesellschaft, weil sie eine Ordnung in den Beziehungen zwischen den Teilsystemen bestimmt, die die Kommunikations-möglichkeiten vorselegiert. Dadurch bestimmt sie die Grenzen, die die Komplexität [sieheKomplexität] der Gesellschaft erreichen kann. Wenn die Komplexität diese Grenzen übersteigt, reproduziert sich die Gesellschaft nur dann weiter, wenn sich die Form ihrer Differenzierung ändert. Die Form der primären Differenzierung variiert also evolutiv unter dem Druck der Komplexitätszunahme und bestimmt jeweils neue Niveaus der erreichbaren Komplexität. Die Differenzierungsformen unterscheiden sich je nachdem, wie die Grenzen zwischen den Teilsystemen und ihren Umwelten innerhalb der Gesellschaft gezogen werden. Sie ergeben sich aus der Kombination zweier Differenzen: (a) der Differenz System/Umwelt; (b) der Differenz Gleichheit/Ungleichheit in bezug auf die Verhältnisse der Teilsysteme zueinander. Im Lauf der Evolution der Gesellschaft haben vier Differenzierungsformen als Strukturen gedient:
Differenzierung in gleiche Teilsysteme(Segmentation);
Differenzierung Zentrum/Peripherie;
hierarchische Differenzierung in Schichten;
funktionale Differenzierung.
Matthew Alper
The "God" Part of the Brain
A Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and God
...As time went on and life continued to diversify, an evolutionary trend began to occur in which individual organisms started to live among one another in groups. Within a group, each individual organism was more secure than if it lived on its own. Within a group, not only could individuals better defend themselves against predators, but they could more effectively hunt and forage. Because of the strength and stability that came with this social adaptation, the group dynamic became the "favored" evolutionary trend, particularly among vertebrates and most particularly among mammals.
Steven Johnson
EMERGENCE
The Connected Lives of Ants,Brains,Cities, and Software
Scribner 2004
pg 195
The group element may even explain the explosion in sheer cranial size: social complexity is a problem that scales well-build a module that can analyze one person's mind, and all you need to do is throw more resources at the problem, and you can analyze a dozen minds with the same tools. The brain didn't need to invent any complicated new routines once it figured out how to read a single mind—it just needed to devote more processing power. That power came in the form of brain mass. more neurons to model the behavior of other brains, which themselves contained more neurons, for the same reason. It's a classic case of positive feedback, only it seems to have run into a ceiling of 150 people, according to the latest anthropological studies. We have a natural gift for building theories of other minds, so long as there aren't too many of them.
Perhaps if human evolution had continued on for another million years or so, we'd all be mentally modeling the behavior of entire cities. But for whatever reason, we stopped short at 150, and that's where we remained—until the new technologies of urban living pushed our collectivities beyond the rnagic number. Those oversize communities appeared too quickly for our minds to adapt to them using the tools of natural selection, and so we hit upon another solution, one engineered by the community itself, and not by its genes. We started building neighborhoods, groups within groups. When our lived communities extended beyond the ceiling of human comprehension, we started building new floors.
Mirror neurons and mind reading have an immense amount to teach us about our talents and limitations as a species, and there's no doubt we'll be untangling the "theory of other minds" for years to come. Whatever the underlying mechanism turns out to be, the faculty of mind reading - and its close relation, self-awareness - is clearly an emergent property of the brain's neural networks. We don't know precisely how that higher-level behavior comes into being, but we do know that it is conjured up by the local, feedbackheavy interactions of unwining agents, by the complex adaptive system that we call the human mind. No individual neuron is sentient, and yet somehow the union of billions of neurons creates selfawareness. It may turn out that the brain gets to that self-awareness by first predicting the behavior of neurons residing in other brains - the way, for instance, our brains are hardwired to predict the behavior of light particles and sound waves. But whichever one came first—the extroverted chicken or the self-aware egg - those faculties are prime examples of emergence at work. You wouldn't be able to read these words, or speculate about the inner workings of your mind, were it not for the protean force of emergence.
Urs Boeschenstein Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
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