THE FOURTH STAGE

Several academic thinkers recommended as a key book "A Mind So Rare" by Merlin Donald  (2001).  They sketched out the importance and content.  Now I see what they're talking about.  Donald is able to separate out three main stages in human development that are meaningful, an evolution of mind.  Forget the opposable thumbs and binocular vision.  This is more useful.

Stage One:  This is the basic beginning that comes out of the evolution from reptile to mammal, keeping some things as well as building on them.  Having fur, producing milk, and living in groups all promote "attachment" which is the beginning of wanting to keep and develop one's relationship to associates (babies and mates) as well as simply surviving as part of an ecosystem.  About 1.75 million years ago people began to speak words.  

All mammals teach in examples and actions.  My mother cats step between their kittens and danger and smack the disobedient.  They also call their babies and croon to them encouragingly.  If a kitten cries in its sleep, the mother will trill a reassurance.  She licks them constantly.  They suck constantly.  These vital signs of attachment are emotional.  If they are missing, death will come.  Emotion emerges from the development of what we recently found as the work of the 6th nerve, the vagus, that emerges from the brain and becomes the autonomic nervous system.  We thought it merely diverges into two, but now we know there are three, called "polyvagal."  Emotion is expressed by panting, heartbeat, that can come direct from thought, triggering weeping or laughing.  (For this you must look for the work of Porges.)

At the early point of departure, this is a smooth nerve, but that branch splits into two, one of which becomes myelinated (insulated) and controls the body from eyebrows to sternum: the pharynx, the throat and tongue, hearing, and the lung/heart complex.  Sucking and licking (oral), using the lungs as an air pump, and shaping the flow through the muscles of the larynx, throat and mouth, the hominid uses sound to communicate.  Hearing is another process that happens in roughly double fashion: the coded sounds are organized in the brain and interpreted into meaning. A person seeing emotion or hearing words, can "read" what is there. 

This is a very rough account, but it is a step in evolution one must be a mammal to take, eventually a primate and then a hominid.  In those early millennia, the tasks to learn were flint-knapping (tool making), fire kindling, shelter building, and sedentary living which always centered on the availability of food, for instance, along a coast with easily caught creatures.

At this point hominins are limited as to distance-- about as far as they could walk -- knew an ecosystem that stayed pretty much the same except for climate shifts, and thought of themselves as "axis mundi", the centerpoint for life.  But it is challenge, new circumstances, that evoke thinking.  "Leaders" developed, sometimes single strong persons, or sometimes a duty that could be shifted according to need, so one is a war leader and another is a migration leader, as needed.  Evolution was based on the attachment to the community, about a hundred people, we think.

This is Stage One in Donald's way of sorting.  Stage two begins when the hominins can travel on water (before the wheel) and meet people who are differently adapted.  Fire is not just for cooking food, but also hot enough for melting metal.  Agriculture develops only a dozen millennia ago and is enabled by settlement in one place.  Animals are domesticated.  Weapons are perfected.  Both suffering and love are felt by these new mammal hominins. They evoke thought.  We look around for what is ultimate, the Force.

Writing is invented.  "Writing – a system of graphic marks representing the units of a specific language – has been invented independently in the Near East, China and Mesoamerica. The cuneiform script, created in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, ca. 3200 BC, was first."  It appears to have developed spontaneously around the planet, at first only hash marks and symbolic depictions of hunting.  It is symbolism that developed out of speaking.  Once brains have gripped the idea of symbols in codes, knowledge and skill explode, "the mind so rare."  The Third Stage.  To the extent that we can translate, we can communicate with the world.  Our technologies expand into the Industrial Revolution and then into the cyberweb around the planet that lets us speak on the phone with a tribal person in deep jungle Africa, so long as we know the same language version of speaking.

We have kind of species fascination with the idea of direct brain-to-brain shared thinking.  On one hand it seems the ultimate intimacy and on the other hand the images are of insect swarms, termite hills and the Borg.  To communicate is to control, we think and we're ambivalent about it.  We love our secrecy, our ability to deceive.  So far optimists estimate that 75% of people are literate and half have access to the Internet.  I think those estimates are far too high.

Besides the myelinated half of the polyvagus being a connection direct between thought in the brain and expression in speaking and hearing, it is also part of our ability to empathize.  Journalists and English teachers never get it quite right, confusing it with sympathy, which is only a Theory of Thought outside guess of what someone is feeling and then reacting to that.  EMPATHY is being inside the other person's mind, feeling what they feel.  It can be elaborate, but at the simplest level, if you see someone throw a ball, the ball-throwing muscles will produce a faint echo of the same action.  At the ultimate level so far, two people able to abstract ideas will share a concept, thinking the same thing.

Not everyone has empathy or even sympathy.  Around this planet people are at different stages.  Not every individual can go from being a person in a remote place, thinking what needs to be thought to get along with work and others, to a modern conception that is beyond even many post-doc grads because it is so recently realized.  I mean, the extent of the universe, the workings of the genome, the existence of the Force of Time itself, exceed the capacity to symbolize and must be "felt" as emotion.  We've been so obsessed with rationality that we're not so good at felt thinking.

At this point I'm not thinking about religion, which is a human evolution of institutionalized thought.  I need a new word for what we know is a penetrating Force that we dwell in.  Rudolph Otto suggests the "mysterium tremendum."  "As mysterium, the numinous is "wholly other"-- entirely different from anything we experience in ordinary life. It evokes a reaction of silence. But the numinous is also a mysterium tremendum. It provokes terror because it presents itself as overwhelming power."  We are part of it.  We have the power to snuff life on this planet.  This is the Fourth Stage.