Questions I have about the evolution of consciousness

Questions I have about the evolution of consciousness

Context

These are questions I, Malcolm Ocean, have about this topic, expressed in whatever terms make sense to me. They’re based partly on my own experiences, but perhaps predominantly they’re attempts to inquire about the interfaces & intersections & implications of multiple models & myths I’ve come across.

Many of them may have answers that are known to other people who have studied more history or anthropology than I have.

Others may make little sense to other people, who don’t even know what theories I’m trying to mash up. Or perhaps are wrong questions to someone who understands those theories even better—or has additional puzzle pieces I’m yet missing!

For how I’m seeing this whole field, see Evolution of Consciousness one-pager. I’ve also written this blog post exploring some of the links between memetic operating system stuff and Andrew Cutler’s Snake Cult theory posts: The superegos have gone crazy

Sources

I’m not treating any of these as definitely-true, but they all seem plausible or seem to highlight something important with a better explanation than I’ve seen elsewhere. And I haven’t necessarily read the whole book/series of everything in this section. In some cases only a chapter or a single page. Also they are not in any particular order at the moment; maybe at some point I’ll sort them (by what? lol).

  1. me, Malcolm Ocean - Non Naive Trust Dance (makes sense to me to have this be one of the game pieces in play here)
  2. Kevin Simler - Music in Human Evolution
  3. David Chapman - Meaningness
    • What are plans for?
  4. David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity
  5. Joseph Henrich - The Secret of Our Success
  6. [Convo w Zach about the herders as semi-agri, book he read, seedcorn & planning ahead, letting children starve through the winter]
    • maybe Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World
  7. Iain McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary
  8. E. Richard Sorenson - Pre-conquest Consciousness
  9. Andrew Cutler - The Snake Cult of Consciousness
  10. John Vervaeke
    • Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
    • Relevance Realization paper
  11. Nick Sousanis - Unflattening
  12. C. Thi Nguyen - Trust As An Unquestioning Attitude
  13. Jordan Hall - meta-protocol
  14. Alexander Technique, Michael Ashcroft’s stuff on expanding awareness and aliveness
  15. Buddhism
    • Romeo Stevens’ (mis)Translating the Buddha
    • Various Vajrayana texts, many from Aro gTér but also other sources
    • Chögyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
    • Rob Burbea - Seeing that Frees
    • The Way of Effortless Mindfulness
  16. Michael Levin (convos with Vervaeke, Oshan Jarrow)
  17. Game A/B stuff
  18. Emotional Coherence Framework
  19. Perceptual Control Theory
    • (also predictive processing, tho I see it as ontologically inside-out even if more accurate)
  20. Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep (novel)
  21. N. Arthur Coulter - Synergetics
  22. a chapter in The Rough Patch which talks about play
    • Something from a Huberman podcast episode about play
  23. Virtual Bargaining - Simulated Negotiation
  24. Some twitter thread from 2022 that talks about humans as maybe the only perspective-taking animal (related to shamanism and persistence hunting by deeply imagining the prey)
    • I know I linked @Morphenius in comments. Maybe also under [[perspective-taking]] in roamblog
  25. Stuart Kauffman - Reinventing the Sacred
  26. Jean Robertson
    • The Circles Maps
    • “Humanity 1, Humanity 2, Humanity 3” as 3 cultural operating systems (H1, H2, H3)
      • (these map onto pre, GameA, GameB)
    • The Commitments & Assumptions
    • years of living with her
    • the Relationship Economics primer
    • others’ texts she used in a particular way
      • The “meaning is all we want, relationships are all we have, choices are all we make” quote (+ her addition of “all we own is our impact”)
  27. Systems Thinking stuff
  28. Joanna Macy - Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory
  29. A. H. Almaas - Facets of Unity
  30. Spiral Dynamics & Integral Theory
  31. Robert Gilman - Foundation Stones (Tribal Era, Empire Era, Planetary Era)
  32. Co-Intelligence Institute
  33. Donald Hoffman - Interface Theory of Perception
    • Jess > six skandas
      • see Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
  34. Scott Alexander - Meditations on Moloch
  35. Schmachtenberger - Upgrading Moloch from Sith to Jedi
  36. Michael Smith’s work
    • Awakening the Universe
    • Mythic Mode
    • Kenshō / Looking
    • < many 1-on-1 conversations >
  37. Heidiggerian stuff — @aphercotropist
  38. David Schnarch’s work on differentiation (in eg Passionate Marriage)
  39. (Not sure exactly what all the sources are here but something on neurodivergence)
    • I feel like maybe that Shamans piece by dschorno?
  40. Scale by Geoffrey West
  41. The Guru Papers
  42. Chasing Ourselves: How Persistence Hunting in Early Humans Explains the Origin of Consciousness and Spirituality (twitter thread)
  43. the article about Omega
  44. Stuff I haven’t engaged with that deeply (or don’t feel like I can name the main point) but it’s already affecting me

There’s also these sources, which seem relevant and they inform me although I have stronger critiques of them and/or they don’t directly form part of my current main model:

There are also these sources, which I’m aware of and they seem relevant but have barely engaged with

Reasons you might want to get into EvConch studies

  1. lots of low-hanging fruit since new field
  2. lots of data from your own life
  3. is made out of remixing so whatever you’re on about is probably secretly somehow relevant anyway
  4. literally is made out of paradigm-transcendence, so no way to get stuck

Reasons you might not want to

  1. you want to do something more legible

..?

Questions / Mashups

Snake Cult & Sorenson

What are the causal influences between:

? Is it the same shift?

What was going on in mesoamerica? Were some of the north american indigenous already going through that shift, but a millenium or two behind, such that they still got conquered wholesale by Europeans? But others still were in the pre-conquest mode? Who? The Mi’kmaq? The Iroquois? The Salish in BC? Or were they already transitioning?

We might learn some of this by checking for snakes in the stories of these peoples.

Seems like the Mayan & Aztec Empires were very conquesty. Had they just failed to take over everything by the time they got conquered by Europeans?

Another Snake Cult + Sorenson Q:
……. we’re well-aware of cultures having coming of age rituals… but was that the case of these pre-conquest ones? Seems answerable! And maybe all the coming of age rituals originated in the recursion thing!!

Snake Cult & McGilchrist

exchange with Michael Smith on May 7:
MS >
That snake cult article is blowing my mind. The author’s whole thing just makes a ton of sense! I dunno about snake venom as a psychedelic specifically, but the self as memetic psychotech that exploded around 12ky ago? Yeah. Fascinating.
I’m chewing on how to square this with McGilchrist. It makes me wonder if the “self” psychotech is an LH enhancement that allows it to build models of its interactions with RH. It’d be when we got an AGI in LH.
MO > I’ve also been chewing on how it squares with everything (also Deutsch)
I remember saying at one point that humanity 2 was an OS upgrade for the LH that had not been met with an equivalent RH upgrade yet
So this sorta answers that question!
Although it’s unclear to me whether what we need is a RH thing so much as a new LH thing
If that distinction is even meaningful here
MS >
Seems obvious to me it’s gotta be an LH thing (to the extent that the distinction makes sense). RH enhancements seem to happen through LH best as I can tell. What’s needed seems to be something like an LH upgrade that gets it to appreciate its role as a tool and to skillfully hand control back to RH rather than shut out RH forever in order to efficiently execute on the task LH thinks RH told LH to do.
But that’s admittedly because I have an easier time thinking about what LH enhancements look like. I have VERY little idea what an RH enhancement that doesn’t go through LH looks like.
MO > My thinking runs almost exactly the same
For LH to recognize the FACT that it can get way more of what it wants by collaborating with the RH
Faith won’t do
Naive trust won’t do
Faking it til you make it can sorta work, but making it requires grasping the fact

Interface Theory of Perception & Meaningness-or-something

realizing that we perceive meaning, and it’s made out of stories (sort of) & explanations
even semantic meaning — the ability to understand a word — is made out of shared symbolic context
eg knowing the meaning of “three” (or “3”) requires a kind of symbolic context
this is why etymology is true

What Are Plans For? & ???

From another Vectors of Mind article, furthering the Snake Cult theory:

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind posits that before humans were conscious, they had a “bicameral” mind: half the brain would produce action plans. These were communicated as auditory hallucinations to the other half, which would execute them. There was no interior space in which one could ruminate. Humans then were “noble automatons who knew not what they did.”

This seems in stark contrast to even simple animals’ capacity for relevance realization in an integrated way.

Snake Cult & Deutsch

Okay so I was a bit confused about how to square Deutsch with the idea of H1/preconquest etc

But I feel like Snake Cult offers an answer: prior to recursive egoic self-awareness, there was no need to use repression to keep people from innovating culture-tech beyond what the culture could handle, because there wasn’t a possibility of an experience of conflict between individual needs and the social expectations.

Michael Smith & Snake Cult & ????

How much fucking recursion / self-reference do people need to grok to complete the selfing process? Does H3 require geniuses/nerds? Seemingly somewhat, at the bootstrapping phase.

Jean Robertson → NNTD & ontological remodeling

What are the concepts that got remodeled in the course of my NNTD shift? and to what extent were they instances of each of these:

During ontological remodeling, a category may:

  1. Disappear completely
  2. Convert from formal to informal status
  3. Get a new formal meaning

Some concepts to which this probably applies:

  1. mindset
  2. (collaborative) mindset
  3. commitment
  4. choice
  5. trust
  6. judgment
  7. coercion
  8. blame

Let’s explore the potential numbering of each of them:

Blame I’m not sure changed that much, tbh!

I’m sure there are lots of other words, that I could potentially find by looking at … “truth”,

Reinventing the Sacred & Assembly Theory

ix - Kauffman quotes physicist Stephen Weinberg as saying: “All the explanatory arrows point downard, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics”

But Assembly Theory is basically saying “no, you can only explain this particular collection of molecules by reference to some environment that could have assembled it” which is at least outward and I think in practice usually upward (from molecules to life).

Seeing that Frees & NNTD’s Dream Mashups & Interface Theory of Perception

It seems to me that the way Dream Mashups highlights that people are always making mashups, it’s just that we call it projection when it doesn’t line up with something (some unfolding of events or someone else’s mashup) and this is the nature of perception….

…might be the same thing as the idea that everything is empty?

And this is maybe also the Interface Theory of Perception???

(James Baker’s take on) Founder’s Curse & Tyler Durden power

Girard & neurodivergence stuff

(Maybe Mike Johnson’s paper about dimensions)

…is there something about neurotypicality that is about norm-following? I think this less than I did a year or so ago actually, tho I’m not sure what shifted. Stuff here about Deutsch too. And something like, whence desire if not mimesis? How do we get better positive sum games via being very different? Relates to soulmaking Dharma too maybe and souls as RRs.

[probably various others from 2023-06-11 convo w Tom — check photos of whiteboards]

Snake Cult & The New Testament

okay so what the fuck was going on with Jesus?? seems like in some sense he maybe accessed H3 consciousness, specifically a sense of not-separateness from God while ALSO experiencing self-consciousness. some nondual shit??

Tom said something like… he’s an embodiment of the idea that God was tired of having tried the hierarchical thing and was prepared for something new. God as participant.

Snake Cult & Gnosis

What is the meaning of gnosis in the context of Snake Cult stuff? “I can tell for myself”

It’s related to the fact that the super-egos are out of control, I think.
(Huh, how does that-all relate to Kegan? The conflict between two “what is expected of me”s is classic 3-4 stuff…)

Snake Cult & McGilchrist

Seems like in some ways the first big LH OS upgrade was the Snake Cult thing… maybe there have been others in the time since… I think clearly yes.

Simulated Negotiation & Sorenson

The kind of collective agency here:

| > One day, deep within the forest, Agaso, then about 13 years of age, found himself with a rare good shot at a cuscus in a nearby tree. But he only had inferior arrows. Without the slightest comment or solicitation, the straightest, sharpest arrow of the group moved so swiftly and so stealthily straight into his hand, I could not see from whence it came. > At that same moment, Karako, seeing that the shot would be improved by pulling on a twig to gently move an obstructing branch, was without a word already doing so, in perfect synchrony with Agaso’s drawing of the bow, i.e., just fast enough to fully clear Agaso’s aim by millimeters at the moment his bow was fully drawn, just slow enough not to spook the cuscus. Agaso, knowing this would be the case made no effort to lean to side for an unobstructed shot, or to even slightly shift his stance. | | :—- |

…seems to me like it probably functions via the same mechanism described in the simulated negotiation paper.

Unflattening & Girard

somehow vaguely feeling like this is a good place to put a connection I’ve been sensing which is something like… people have the capacity to be profoundly bizarrely unique. this is souldom. Gen2 OS focuses on making everybody similar, which then leads to amplification of mimetic desire. a little mimetic desire is fine & fun, but when it’s the only/main thing people can steer by, shit gets fucked

I’m on team Become Who You Are. I have some particular aesthetic attachments, ideas about how it might be nice for society to be, but in the end I take pride in being able to see innumerable types of person and think “more!” - even if that would mean conflict with me and mine.
A genuinely ecological view of human flourishing. It takes all types in the most literal sense, the balancing interdependencies of virtue demand conflict, innocence, counterbalances in the shape of individuals overcorrecting, a whole dynamic range of conflict and cooperation
Human civilization and life itself has not made it this far because it has been “well managed” nor should we naively expect it would continue to thrive if it was. Management, however, is not the only way we can change and feed the world

— Prince Vogelfrei

David Deutsch & Michael Smith

What are the causal links between the anti-rational to rational meme transition, and the development of personal gnosis on a large scale?

In particular, it seems like gnosis is somehow key for being able to identify

Reinventing the Sacred & David Deutsch

Both of these (particularly The Beginning of Infinity) emphasize the centrality of unbounded creativity to what matters.

Buddhism & McGilchrist & AI/LLMs/etc

Ken Wilber points out in this vid around 45-50mins, that “You need a satori in order to realize that you never needed a satori in the first place”
(I noticed myself dismissing the true paradoxicalness of that somewhat. It’s very related to what I was grappling with last night though - Nov 25 - see doc. But in any case, clearly satori makes some sort of difference, so probably the paradox is showing up because of bad ontologies… and it might be the case that unawake cultures will always converge on bad ontologies here)

And it seems to me that something about this might be inherent to the universe, or to learning systems, or something. Something about how in this open-ended godful universe, you can’t actually get stuck, or something. “Just move around”

But meanwhile, another interpretation of this satori paradox is that in the context of a human or other bicameral being, the right hemisphere’s awake awareness is always there. I notice myself less satisfied with this interpretation if the whole thing is supposed to be beginningless.

Can you create an intelligence and/or a being that is not beginninglessly awake?