I have been reading Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species at the recommendation of David Sloan Wilson, who has been one of the leading proponents of group selection (or more properly, multi-level selection) in evolutionary theory over the last few years. (These are people who took issue with the views of Richard Dawkins and many older evolutionary theorists that natural selection takes place only at the level of individuals and not groups–something that seems inherently implausible when you look at the complex embedded social behaviors of many species.) Deacon argues that it is symbolic representation that constitutes the biggest non-linearity in the evolution of human cognitive abilities, and that language and cognitive ability then co-evolved over time. Humans are the only species capable of symbolic reasoning; other forms of communication and social organization among non-human species may be highly complex, but do not involve symbolic representation. He spends several chapters explaining how complex and poorly understood this process is (e.g., what happens cognitively when you hear a word like “Republicans” or “Obama”), which I found completely fascinating.
The book shows how foolish “singularity” proponents like Ray Kurzweil are who believe that machines will take on human cognitive capabilities like consciousness when their circuits reach a certain magnitude and density. There is no reason to think that computational complexity in and of itself will produce non-linear outcomes. The real non-linearity was the transition to symbolic cognition which occurred at a fairly early stage of human development, when brains were considerably smaller and less complex than they are now. It was the product of humans’ interactions with a very specific environment, as well as with each other. Deacon does not purport to understand how this transition, or the transition to human consciousness more broadly, actually came about. And as far as I can tell, experts like Daniel Dennett who have tried to do so actually just define the problem away rather than explaining the phenomenon. As John Paul II once put it, there was an “ontological leap” involved in the evolutionary process that the scientists have not yet explained.
I wish I had known about this book while I was writing Volume I of The Origins of Political Order–it would have been very useful in bolstering the argument in Chapter 2 (the section “Specifically Human,” p. 34ff) on how human cognition differs from that of non-human primates.