Birth of Reason / Death of the Individual

Noam Chomsky is best known for his tireless commentary on world affairs. However, once he goes to his reward and his "current affairs" become ancient history, it's possible that he will be best known as the father of Linguistics. Even here, his legacy may be in jeopardy, since, as I understand it, his fundamental theory is still somewhat controversial.

I think Chomsky should be remembered as a guy who asked a really good question, rather than a guy with all the answers. His question was, What happened in the human brain to make language possible? While traditional linguists are happy to study the elements of language, Chomsky asked what is going on in the brain of a person who utters a sound expecting somebody to hear that sound and "understand" it? And what do we mean by "understand" anyway?

I would say that what was born in the brain is something like what we would call "reason", or the ability to manipulate abstract objects - "ideas" - to produce new ideas, translate ideas into action, communicate ideas to others in order to share purposeful action in the world.

Evolutionary speaking, this is a feature relatively new, no older than 2 million years or so. It's hard to say what was actually going on in the minds of our ancient ancestors, but it seems clear that once they could start sharing the contents of those minds through speech or (more fundamentally) start thinking abstractly, the species stepped away from the evolutionary process that governed all life up to that point.

Evolution, as Darwin described it, is about survival of the individual and the passing on of traits that are favourable for individual survival and reproduction. However, once members of a species start to share their thoughts, strategies and knowledge about the environment, individual survival starts to depend on participation in a "meta world" or "culture". As Dawkins pointed out years ago, the story is as much about survival of ideas (memes) as much as survival of genes.

When a fundamentally new survival strategy appears on the evolutionary stage, there is no predicting what will happen down the road. For example, bipedalism has been re-invented many times in evolutionary history. It is energetically more efficient and gives a better lookout. But it freed the hands to carry things and ultimately favoured development of a larger brain to find things to do with those hands. In the long run, the big brain made more difference than upright posture.

What will be the long-term effects of a primitive "shared brain"? We can see hints of it in a bee hive. Individual bees teach what they know about the world to other members of the hive through a primitive but effective dance. Individual bees lose their significance - they are effectively assimilated into the hive, becoming like cells in the body or components in a machine. It is the hive as a whole that explores and exploits the environment and thrives according to its ability to do so well.

While human communication is vastly more complex and sophisticated, it has the same effect on humans as it does on bees: it makes us naturally susceptible to assimilation and erodes the sense in which human beings "make sense" on their own. As with bees, evolutionary "arithmetic" works on the hive as a unit, not the individual. There is no "queen bee" in human society. Evolution works on the human hive - the tribe. Individual survival depends on the ability of the individual to survive within the tribe. This is not equivalent to the usual (Darwinian) interaction with an individual with his environment. The "environment" of the tribe is a world of memes. Significant sacrifices (even to the point of giving up life itself) are required of the individual. For example, the tribe will put especially strong constraints on the reproductive success of the individual, overriding or even criminalizing individual reproductive urges in favour of cultural "norms".

The "shared mind" is evolutionarily speaking, recent. Like many of the evolutionary kludges we must live with (our curved spines, our sore knees, our inefficient eyes), our ability to share the contents of our minds comes with serious limitations and disadvantages. The strongest limitation is the pressure to think only ideas that can be shared: a constraint that effects the very power of thought itself. In fact, as the "shared brain" takes precedence over individual perception, we are lead to deny the direct evidence of our senses and believe what the tribal authorities tell us is "real". For example, contrast how hard it is to tell someone about the thrill of skiing (direct experience) versus how easy it is to communicate nonsense like "Everything happens for a reason" (socially acceptable noises referring to nothing).

Almost everything a modern human believes is accepted on the basis of authority, consensus or convention. The modern human will not take an idea seriously unless it can be expressed in words - words that are often disconnected from anything in the real environment. For most people, the experience of truly discovering the world is confined to a few years in early childhood - especially those years before the child learns to talk. The child quickly learns that what is real is what his parents say is real.