Читать книгу Mechanisms of cultural evolution - Victor Efremenko - Страница 4

The ancestral brains of Homo sapiens grew enormously over a relatively short period of evolutionary time. Three million years ago, the volume of the skull of an adult Australopithecus was 400—500 cubic meters. cm. Two million years later, his supposed descendant, Homo erectus, had a brain with a volume of about 1000 cubic meters. cm.

Over the next million years, it increased to 900—2000 cubic meters. cm. in modern Homo sapiens.

But the brain is not yet the mind. Brain architecture and environmental pressures work together to create intelligence.

The most important factor that made human cultural evolution extremely effective is the appearance of sufficient intelligence in Homo sapiens in the course of evolutionary development.

By reason, I, to talk about cultural evolution, I mean:

The ability to build in the brain such models of fragments of the surrounding world that allow predicting some events of reality without performing the experiment itself.

The ancestors of Homo sapiens already had intelligence, it is clearly manifested in the behavior of many species of animals, but its further growth stopped at a certain level, not allowing other species to further advance along the path of cultural evolution.

The ancestors of Homo sapiens already had intelligence, it is clearly manifested in the behavior of many species of animals, but its further growth stopped at a certain level, not allowing other species to further advance along the path of cultural evolution.

The new science – infodynamics – deals with the most general regularities in the processes of transmission, transformation, processing and storage of information.

One of the provisions of this science is that consciousness, thoughts, science itself and other results of human mental activity are secondary reality, i.e. approximate models of the real world.

The model cannot coincide with reality 100%, be the same with it from any point of view. It can only be adequate from a certain point of view.

Models describing the same group of phenomena can have different description accuracy and different range of applicability. For example, the laws of electrodynamics formulated by Maxwell are an example of a model that is remarkable and useful under certain conditions. These laws summarize all information about electrical phenomena, but they are interesting among qualified physicists. They will not be useful to a simple electrician, and even more so to the layman, since there are simpler local representations that are a consequence of Maxwell’s equations.

The human mind builds models by being attached to its own point of view, to its platform from which a person perceives the world. The point of view is formed by those principles and ways of thinking that a person learned at the initial stage of his life. Model representations that a person carries in himself depend on the motivation (orientation) of his mind.

If in childhood you were inspired with the idea of the divine creation of the world, then theological thinking forces you to look at the world from this point of view, where everything is arranged according to the will of the creator, where you cannot doubt the basic principles, you need to explain all phenomena so that they fit into the framework accepted dogmas. Then there is almost no freedom of choice for you. They have already chosen for you. Your mind is motivated in a certain way. Therefore, the religious fanatic and the scientist see the world differently.