Emergence

I was thinking about coming up with a unifying theme for the history of mind and the history of computation and the term "emergence" seemed appropriate for both. However, my imagination took the wrong off ramp as it often does and I started visualizing the physical emergence of man as it would be seen by a Man from Mars. He would discover evidence of termites or algae not just by finding the "organism" but by discovering their impact, constructions and byproducts. Even if time had erased all direct evidence of human organisms, there would be no problem discovering Man, just as we discovered dinosaurs.

There is a link between this view and the problem we have fining boundaries for "mind". I think that "mind" cannot be seen as "emergent" in one organism but something that happens in a society of organisms, especially in their language or technology. Similarly, what an organism is - what counts as species for all other living things - is about the phenotype: the physical differences between organisms in form and behaviour. In man, the differences between cultures and over time is enormous, far exceeding that between related species. I have long summarized this viewpoint by saying that a man with an axe is, for all intents, a different species than a man who knows nothing about axes. The axe is part of the phenotype of homo-with-axe.

But we can go further. Our automobiles and the roads we build for them are part of "us". Coal and steel are part of our diet. Plastics, carbon dioxide and  PCB's are part of our excrement,  just as computers are part of us, like any other tool.

So the "emergence" of man turns out to be one big picture after all - possibly a bigger picture than I set out to capture. In the attempt to "simplify", I lost the focus and had to stand back all the way to Mars.

What "computer" evidence would the Martian archaeologist about Man? Perhaps it would be the remains of all those "things that count things". Maybe a clue that Man had a mind. Good question.