Steven Mithen and the Origins of Cognitive Fluidity

The doors between the intelligences are closed.

At some state in our evolutionary past we became able to interrogate our own thoughts and feelings, asking ourselves how we would behave in some imagined situation. In other words, consciousness evolved as part of social intelligence (147).

Cognitive fluidity is characteristic of the modern mind–a capacity to integrate ways of thinking and stores of knowledge to generate creative ideas and which underlies the pervasive use of metaphor and analogy in human thought (Mithen 1996).

Cognitive Fluidity in our Bicameral Cultural Marxist Kingdom

The overwhelming impression from the descriptions of modern hunter-gatherers is that all domains of their lives are so intimately connected that the notion that they think about these with separate reasoning devices seems implausible" (49).

His explanation of metaphors was very insightful. I will return to this subject later. What's perplexing about Jaynes's historical account is that, while he correctly said that Greek literature after thebecame a literature of consciousness, starting with theitself, he used theas a prototypical example of a people with a bicameral mind, whereas I believe thewas a transitional work exhibiting the first clear signs of free deliberation and introspection, a work packed with some of the best metaphors in Western literature. If one reads carefully in between the lines one senses that Jaynes's examples of consciousness outside the Greek world, or prior to the Greek world, are not very strong, whereas his examples of consciousness after theare solid. Even in the case of the, actually, Jaynes acknowledged the presence of some passages in which the protagonists do make decisions as subjects with their own volition.I have defended this argument in a forthcoming introduction to theand will not elaborate further. Bruno's Snell's book,(1953), has been mentioned before at CEC as a work that explores the growing appreciation of the inner self in Greek literature and philosophy after 650 BC, but he too has difficulties denying volition in the. When all is said, it is hard to deny that a feeling of self, of the difference between the inner and outer, a capacity of the subject to achieve self-control over his emotional impulses, is an account that can only be made in reference to ancient Greek culture, and not in reference to any other culture outside European lands, even to this day. It is true that most classic scholars today are preoccupied with highly specialized subjects inside an academic world that sees ancient Greece as no more than a "Mediterranean culture" among numerous "intertwined" cultures from Africa and the Near East. But there is a recent work of close to 600 pages that travels the same intellectual path as Snell, detailing how the Greeks, from the Odyssey to Socrates, became conscious beings: Keld Zeruneith's(2007). I will write about this book another time.Now I want to go back in time by examining a very original work by archaeologist Steven Mithen,(1996), which synthesizes a vast literature to argue that humans become conscious, or, as he also puts it, achieved "cognitive fluidity," sometime between 60,000 and 30,000 years ago., the first modern humans, appeared 100,000 years ago, but only 40,000 years later did human consciousness arise. Mithen deduces that consciousness emerged in this period, the Upper Paleolithic era, because of the incredible cultural and technological efflorescence witnessed during this relatively short period after millions of years of stagnation.Between 2 and 1.5 million years ago,, and, managed to create stone hand choppers with a brain size between 500 and 800 cc. Between 1.8 and 400,000 years ago,s, with a brain ranging between 750 and 1250 cc, managed to create stone handaxes. This handaxe would remain the core technology until the Upper Paleolithic revolution. Between 400,000 and 100,000 years ago, archaic, with a larger brain size of about 1100-1400 cc, continued to create the same stone handaxes. By 150,000appears in Europe, and he, too, uses handaxes, though with a new 'Levallois' technique for removing flakes. He has a brain size of 1200-1750 cc. Thenappears around 100,000 years ago, with basically the same brain size, and he, too, uses them, though there are "hints of something new", the "very first tools of materials other than stone and wood". But, all in all,"continues making the same range of tools as his forebears" (22) until about 60,000 years ago.From this time on, starting about 60,000 years ago, "with no apparent change in brain size, shape or anatomy in general," there is a "cultural explosion". Blade production starts on a "systematic scale," with blades often chipped as projectile points and chisel-like engraving tools; bone is carved to make points and awls, harpoons and needles. Tools designed for specific purposes and multicomponent tools are made. The first objects of art also appear after 40,000 years ago, beads, necklaces and pendants are made from ivory, figurines are carved, and abstract and naturalistic images are painted and engraved on cave walls.Why this sudden explosion if brain size remained the same and human beings,were already around? Mithen draws on the research findings of cognitive psychologists to argue that the Upper Paleolithic "revolution" was the result of a change in the architecture of the mind, characterised by a new ability among humans to make connections between previously separate cognitive modules. You will recall from my article, " The Multiple Intelligences of Whites ," Gardner's seven intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and the two forms of personal intelligences. Mithen relies on Gardner's arguments, together with Jerry Fodor's(1983), Leda Cosmides and John Tooby's(1992), and other publications, to construct his own argument that, in the course of evolution, starting with the ancestral ape some 6 million-4.5 million years ago, through the firstdating to 4.5-1.8 million years ago, to the first members of thelineage 2 million years ago, all the way toa variety of intelligences evolved in complexity. Mithen first sees a "general intelligence, which includes modules for trial and error learning, and associative learning" (88), among ancestral apes (and contemporary chimpanzees). This is an all-purpose intelligence used for survival involving foraging decisions, tool use, and basic perception and awareness of the environment through the senses. What happens in the course of evolution is that new specialized modules of intelligence began to emerge over and above the all-purpose intelligence: social, linguistic, natural history, and technical intelligences.Mithen agrees with evolutionary psychologists Cosmides and Tooby that "we can only understand the nature of the modern mind by viewing it as a product of biological evolution." (42). He likes their metaphor of the human mind as a Swiss army knife "with a great many, highly specialized blades," each of which was "designed by natural selection to cope with one specific adaptive problem." He agrees that these blades or modules are "hard-wired into the mind at birth and universal among all people" (43), although he is sympathetic to Gardner's view that the cultural context in which children grow influences the intelligences. But he thinks the metaphor of a Swiss army knife can only take us so far in understanding themind that emerges during the Upper Paleolithic era. He likes Fodor's suggestion that cognition is inherently "holistic" or based "on the integration of information from all input systems". Mithen brings up a few lines from Fodor stating that cognition is a unified process, not encapsulated; "its creativity, its holism and its passion for the analogical" (Fodor's words) is what characterizes cognition. Mithen prefers how Gardner stresses the interaction between the intelligences from the start. He brings up some sentences from Gardner stating that "in normal human intercourse one typically encounters complexes of intelligences functioning together smoothly, even seamlessly, in order to execute intricate activities." Mithen takes up this idea about building up connections across the different intelligences, "as exemplified in the use of metaphors and analogies," to explain why humans become so creative during the Upper Paleolithic era. Basically, a mind with a new architecture evolved capable of making analogical connections between the linguistic, social, natural history, and technical intelligences.Starting with an all-purpose general intelligence, the first specialized intelligence Mithen detects among our ancestral apes is an emerging module for social intelligence. This intelligence (akin to Gardner's personal intelligences) is defined as the ability to predict the behavior of others in order to augment our reproductive success. Among primates, this module is already highly evolved as exemplified in the way primates actually use "deception and the construction of alliances and friendships" in the pursuit of reproductive success, exhibiting "extensive social knowledge about other individuals, in terms of knowing who allies and friends are, and the ability to infer the mental states of those individuals" (82-3). It is very revealing, though Mithen says this in passing without making the most of it — namely, that the one module that first emerges in a highly intelligent way among primates, social intelligence, is the one pointing towards the unification of all the other intelligences, and indeed the one that involves, as an intrinsic component of its nature, conscious awareness, because this intelligence is about reflecting how we feel and behave in a particular situation in order to reflect about how another individual will feel and behave in a similar situation. Mithen thinks that our ancestral apes and present-day chimpanzees, but not monkeys, already had a "conscious awareness of their own minds," and a concept of self.But later he correctly qualifies this assessment by adding that chimps had a low level of self-awareness. Full self-awareness comes withwhen all the other modules are fully evolved and the mind acquires an ability to make analogical connections between all the intelligences. There are signs of an incipient natural history intelligence among chimps. This intelligence is all about understanding the world in the struggle for life: perceiving the migratory movements and behavioural traits of other animals, range of environments, predicting resource locations and scavenging opportunities. Chimps have detailed knowledge of the spatial distribution of resources and the ripening cycles of many plants; however, they don't exhibit a "creative or insightful use of that knowledge". Their natural history intelligence appears to flow out of "rote memory". One can say it is instinctive, likely rooted in their all-purpose general intelligence. (This concept of natural history intelligence has traits similar to Gardner's spatial intelligence in so much as it is about geographical-spatial comprehension of resource locations. It is also close to another, eighth intelligence, Gardner added later, "naturalistic intelligence," which environmentalists, and even Gardner, interpreted in a progressive way).Mithen does not think that tool use by chimpanzees indicates their minds had started to evolve a specialized module of technical intelligence. Their tool use simply relied on trial and error, rooted in their all-purpose general intelligence. Technical intelligence is exhibited in the ability to manipulate and transform natural objects into manufactured tools, showing understanding of the physical properties of objects. This intelligence is akin to Gardner's logical-mathematical intelligence, but rather as it manifested itself, I would say, in the less intellectually developed, but basic survival reality, of hunting and gathering peoples.Mithen also does not buy the argument that chimpanzees had a linguistic capacity. A specialized module for technical intelligence really makes its appearance during thelineage when actual stone tools are constructed. What may seem like a simple chopper requires recognition of "acute angles on the nodules, to select so-called striking platforms and to employ good-hand-eye co-ordination to strike the nodule in the correct place, in the right direction,and with the appropriate force" (96). During this evolutionary lineage, the natural history intelligence grew in sophistication, and so did the social intelligence. Mithen says this intelligence was likely selected as the number of social relationships within and between groups grew, requiring more thinking about alliances. He agrees with research suggesting that a specialized intelligence for language likely evolved as a means for exchanging social information "within large and socially complex groups, initially as a supplement for grooming, and then as a replacement for it" (111). He thinks it was only with the appearance of archaicand the Neanderthals, between 400,000 and 100,000 years ago, that the expansion in brain size reflected the evolution of "a form of language with an extensive lexicon and a complex series of grammatical rules" (144).Once we get to the Neanderthals we have a mind with highly developed specialized modules for all the intelligences including a brain with the same size as contemporary humans. But there is a dilemma: Neanderthals remained extremely conservative in their technology. Why did they ignore bone, antler and ivory as raw materials? Why did they not make tools designed for specific purposes, and multicomponent tools? Why did they fail to develop any art? Why did they lack any beliefs in supernatural beings? Mithen's answer is very insightful. There was no "cognitive fluidity" between social, technical, linguistic, and natural intelligences. He uses the metaphorical illustration of a cathedral with four chapels of specialized intelligences, with a central part or a 'nave' of the building representing general intelligence. The weakness in the mind of Neanderthals was that the chapels were closed to each other, there were no doors or passages of communication; the walls of each chapel (except for the door between language and social intelligence) were thick and impenetrable to the insights of the other chapels. Only during the Upper Paleolithic era did the intelligences began to function seamlessly together. Only then the mind acquired a capacity for analogical and metaphorical thinking. Only then do we witness the emergence of a central processing system engaged (to use the words of Fodor) in "the transfer of information among cognitive domains" previously operating independently of each other. Thinking was no longer "encapsulated" (, 107).Neanderthals could not make tools from bone, antler or ivory because these materials came from animals which had always been thought about within the domain of natural history intelligence, whereas the stone physical objects that were transformed into handaxes had always been thought about within the domain of technical intelligence. Only when these two domains began to communicate with each other were humans able to conceptualize the idea that animal materials could be subjected to cognitive processes previously limited to the technical domain. Likewise, making specific tools for specific tasks — say, projectiles to kill deer — required not only technical intelligence but also natural history thinking about the deer's anatomy, migratory movements and hide thickness.The reason Neanderthals did not make artifacts used for body decoration, such as beads, pendants, and perforated animal teeth, is that there was no cognitive fluidity between the social and the technical/natural history modules., Neanderthals, and other Early Humans, in Mithen's estimation, were as socially intelligent, as Machiavellian in their tactics to gain social advantage, as Modern Humans. Making these objects required open doors between technical and natural history intelligence, and between these two chapels and social intelligence, since body decoration is all about communicating social status and group affiliation. Similarly, Mithen explains how anthropomorphism in art, and the totemic belief that humans have a mystical relationship with an animal, require fluidity between thinking about animals (natural history intelligence) as people (social intelligence), and thinking about people as animals. Art, that is, the creation of artifacts/images with symbolic meanings as a means of social communication, requires the integration of the natural history idea of hoofprints as a referent of a particular animal with the idea of intentional social communication and the idea of technically producing artifacts from mental templates.What about the integration of linguistic intelligence? While Mithen is not as explicit as he should be, this intelligence evolved as a specialized chapel but from the beginning the doors of this chapel were open to the social intelligence chapel since it evolved directly out of the domain of social intelligence. Strictly speaking, linguistic ability came late in evolution;only produced "a wide range of sounds in the context of social interaction" to communicate feelings of anger or desire. Only with Modern Humans can one say with certainty that language with grammatical rules proper began. It is not that linguistic intelligence cannot be differentiated from social intelligence; it is that this intelligence evolved within the context of social interactions. Mithen accepts the theory that language evolved as the size of hominid groups increased and as social interactions become more complicated. Individuals with better communication skills were selected for their advantage in developing better sounds of communication; that is, better ways to acquire social knowledge about other individuals, about allies and enemies, in the pursuit of sexual favours and status. Mithen's metaphorical illustrations of the mind as a cathedral (67) should have kept the doors between social and linguistic intelligence open from the beginning.There is something else that stands out about the chapel of social intelligence; it was the domain responsible for the development of consciousness, reasoning and reflection about one's cognitive processes and psychological states. Mithen follows Nicholas Humphrey's argument that "consciousness evolved as a cognitive trick to allow an individual to predict the social behaviour of other members of his or her group" (147). He writes:Mithen extends this idea from Humphrey to argue that in the degree to which the social intelligence module in the Neanderthal mind was closed off from toolmaking and the thinking associated with the natural world, "Neanderthals had no conscious awareness of the cognitive processes they used in the domains of technical and natural history intelligence" (147). But how could Neanderthals have gone about making handaxes, foraging plants, and hunting animals without being conscious? It was Jaynes who first argued that humans can perform all sorts of rationally ordered activities while being unconscious, and who made a distinction between reasoning or thinking and consciousness. Mithen provides examples of "unconscious thought" similar to ones provided by Jaynes, though there are no indications he has read Jaynes. However, Mithen illuminates well Jaynes line of reasoning, showing how "many complex cognitive processes go on in our minds about which we have no awareness...For example, we have no conscious awareness of those processes we use to comprehend and generate linguistic utterances." The Swiss-army-knife-like mind of Neanderthals went about making handaxes, foraging, and hunting without conscious awareness of the cognitive process they were employing. "There was no introspection" in the domains of technical and natural history intelligence. This explains "the monotony of industrial traditions, the absence of tools made from bone and ivory, the absence of art" (150). But once the chapels of technical and natural history intelligence were opened to the chapel of social intelligence with its consciousness, there was a "cultural explosion," a "frenzy of activity, with more innovation than in the previous 6 million years of human evolution" (152).How could Jaynes have said that the minds of such advanced peoples as the Mesopotamians and Egyptians was lacking in consciousness, populated by individuals without "an interior self"? Jaynes was looking at a different period in history, the ancient world of the first civilizations, and in this world he saw powerful divine authorities and powerful gods directing and controlling the thought processes of the population, existing as if they were voices inside their heads. The inhabitants of these civilizations had a "bicameral mind" because the cognitive functions were divided between the part of the brain that was controlled by external-mandates from divine authorities, which appears to be "speaking" inside their heads, and the part of the subdued self, which listens and obeys without thinking about the commands without questioning the voices inside his head. It is worth thinking about Jaynes's claim that in this bicameral era, "there were no private ambitions, no private grudges, no private frustrations, no private anything, since bicameral men had no internal 'space' in which to be private, and no analog 'I' to be private with. All initiative was in the voice of the gods" (205).I already questioned the reasons Jaynes offers for the breakdown of the bicameral mind in a forthcoming introduction for a translation of the. As much credit as Jaynes deserves for realizing that consciousness is not something produced ready-made through natural selection, but is a product of history, he took if for granted that once the bicameral mind broke-down the conscious mind emerged in complete form. He was not a historian but a psychologist, not well aware of the amazingly different history of Western individualism and cultural creativity. Mithen is an archaeologist who thinks that the attainment of cognitive fluidity bysome 60,000 years ago was a one time phenomenon; the doors of the chapels opened in one full swing, we are made to think, and once they did, humans became fully conscious.But one has to ask — and the more so in light of the far greater cultural explosion we would witness in ancient Greek times, and thereafter continuously among Europeans — if Mithen was willing to conceptualise the possibility that there are different "orders of consciousness" between chimpanzees, Neanderthals, andns, why not between men in vastly different historical periods and cultural settings? Even if we were to start with the self as it manifested itself in archaic Greece, we would still not have a fully developed self. Mithen is too absolutist in thinking that cognitive fluidity emerged in full bloom during the Upper Paleolithic; Jaynes is too absolutist in thinking the bicameral mind broke down during the first millennium BC, and so is Snell (and Zeruneith) in thinking that consciousness was completely "liberated" by the time we get to Socrates and Plato. Subjective consciousness, and degree of fluidity between the intelligences, develop very gradually, in a variety of ways, depending on the cognitive process one is considering.Mithen thinks the Upper Paleolithic "cultural explosion" was the major period of creativity in human history. He ends with an epilogue minimizing the significance of the origins of agriculture. He ignores the entire history of innovations thereafter, but takes it as a given that once cognitive fluidity was evident 60,000 years ago, the age of computers would be engendered by humans with equal cognitive fluidity across the world. His view of humans and history is framed by his evolutionary psychological view that the mind is a product of biological evolution and that the cognitive modules and the evolution of cognitive fluidity became hard wired into the mind and universal among all the peoples of the planet 60,000 to 30,000 years ago. Much like every other archaeologist of human evolution, he takes it as a given that the fundamental changes in the temporal existence of humans happened during their evolutionary history up until the Upper Paleolithic. (I should say parenthetically that Mithen accepts the mandated view of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin that biological change somehow ceased after this point in time).He also evinces an inclination to view hunting and gathering cultures as benevolent, as a time in which humans were somehow living communally without malice, simply surviving and evolving, occasionally fighting over status, but pretty loving creatures. He even suggests that these cultures, and "traditional, non-Western cultures," achieved a higher level of cognitive fluidity than the specialized cultures of the contemporary West. I am not exaggerating. He surmises a higher degree of fluidity from the fact that hunter-gatherers thought "of their natural world as if were a social being," and did not view the natural and the human as separate, rather viewing all the domains of life, persons, society and environment, as one world. Seeing the world as consisting of two separate entities, the material and the spiritual, is an indication that one is using a different blade, or cognitive module for each realm of reality. He writes:In a footnote he then refers approvingly to Ernest Gellner's view that this unified vision of hunter-gatherers, and of non-Western traditional cultures, "reflect a complex and sophisticated cognition which serves to accomplish many ends at once" (233). He then concludes that the separation of nature, society and technology "is a product of Western thought. Modern hunter-gatherers make no such distinctions and exhibit" (233).This is amazingly confounding statement can make sense only in light of the obligation academics in the West have to say very positive things about non-Western and primitive minds. How can any straight thinking person possibly suggest that hunter-gatherers, and non-Western peoples, have more cognitive fluidity simply because of their undifferentiated view of the world? It seems logical to me that increasing cognitive fluidity does not preclude further specialization of the intelligences but actually encourages it. The history of knowledge, which is almost entirely a history of European knowledge,, is proof of this. Metaphorical and analogical connections become the norm in European thinking at the same time that Europeans start to make clear distinctions between different orders of reality and to generate particular disciplines for the study of each part of reality, starting with the ancient Greeks. Differentiation is central to the incredible accomplishments of the West in multiple domains, and there can be no modernity without differentiation of functions, laws, offices, disciplines, etc. This differentiation was made possible by the greater cognitive fluidity of the Western mind, for knowing that there are separate faculties, separate worlds, requires a higher level of awareness within each of the domains of intelligence, of one's own reasoning within that domain, and of what particular methodologies are best to employ in one domain as contrasted to another domain.