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Deacon 408
The key is the co-evolutionary perspective which recognises that the evolution of language took place neither inside nor outside brains, but at the interface where cultural evolutionary processes affect biological revolutionary processes.
The evolution of symbolic communication is special in this regard. It created a mode of extrabiological inheritance with a particularly powerful and complex character, and with a sort of autonomous life of its own.
It is for this reason that the co-evolutionary process has played such a major role in shaping human brains and minds. It is simply not possible to understand human anatomy, human biology, or human psychology without recognising that they have all been shaped by something that could best be described as an idea : the idea of symbolic reference.
Though symbolic thinking can be entirely personal and private, symbolic reference itself is intrinsically social. Not only do we individually gain access to this powerful mode of representation through interactions with other members of the society into which we are born, but symbols themselves can be traced to a social origin. Our uniquely human minds are, in a very concrete sense, the products of an unusual reproductive challenge that only a symbolic reference was able to address - a concrete internalisation of an ancient and persisting social evolutionary predicament that is uniquely human.
412
Other species’ failures at symbol learning do not result from the lack of some essential structure present only in human brains. Chimpanzees can come are under special circumstances be brought to understand symbolic communication, though at best on a comparatively modest scale. The difference between symbolic and non-symbolic communication may be a categorical difference in semiotic terms, but the neurological basis of our symbolic advantages are not due to a categorical differences in brain structure, only to a quantitative rearrangement of existing parts. Nevertheless, this shift in proportion to spans is a critical learning threshold that stands between indexical associations and symbolic reference.
423
Because of our symbolic abilities, we humans have access to a normal higher-order representation system that not only recodes experiences and guides the formation of skills and habits, but also provides a means of representing features of a world that no other creature experiences, the world of the abstract. We do not just live our lives in the physical world and our immediate social group, but also in a world of rules of conduct, beliefs about our histories, and hopes and fears about imagined futures.
425
If thought and experience are information processes, then the problem of representing other minds and representing our own minds ltimately becomes the same problem. Both forms of knowledge depend on a perwson's or animal's interpretive abilities.
427
As novelists and poets amply demonstrate, the range of personas and experiences that can be conveyed through symbolic media is unbounded. In a very real sense, this gives us the ability to share a virtual common mind. Because symbolic representation maintains reference irrespective of indexical attachment to any particular experiences, when an idea or a narrative of someone's experiences reconstructed by another, it can be regrounded, so to speak, by interpreting it in terms of the iconic and index equal representation is that constitutes the listener's memory. Symbolic reference is interpreter- independent, because each interpreter independently supplies the nonsymbolic ground for it.
Without symbolic representation at their disposal, it seems unlikely that other species could behave according to a theory of other's minds, much less share of representations of other's experiences. Sharing common intentions, interests, goals, and emotions is the most effective means for coordinating behaviour, and being able to imagine and anticipate another's mental and emotional responses is a powerful tool for social manipulation. The ability mentally to represent other minds is one of the primary functions of symbolisation.
435
Though the evolution of brains has been about systems for modelling and predicting events in the world, the evolution of symbolic abilities has not just amplified this ability far beyond that in other species, it has also introduced an insidiously inverted modelling tendency. The symbolic capacity seems to have brought with it a predisposition to project itself into what it models.
The savant, instead of seeing a field of wildflowers, sees 247 flowers. Similarly, we don't just see a world of physical processes, accidents reproducing organisms, and biological information processors churning out complex plans, desires, and needs. Instead, we see the handiwork of infinite wisdom, the working out of a divine plan, the children of a creator, and the conflict between those on the side of goods and those on the side of evil. We carry a nagging doubt about anything is really being accidental. Coincidence isn't just coincidence, it's a sign, and bad luck and diseases don't just happen, perhaps a sorcerer has wished harm on the village. Wherever we look, we expect to find purpose. All things can be seen as signs and symbols of an all knowing consciousness at work, all the marks of mythical events that occurred in a dream time, behind-the-scenes of the universe. We are not just applying symbolic interpretations to human words and events, all the universe has become a symbol.
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