The Historical Development of the Mind
Prof.
Steven Mithen, Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Reading (England),
says in the preface of his book The Prehistory of the Mind
(see reference in Bibliography) that: "to gain an understanding of the mind leads on to an appreciation
of what it means to be human .. It took millions of years for the human mind
to evolve. It is the product of a long, gradual process with no predestined
goal or direction. During the final 2.5 million years of this process, our
ancestors left traces of their behavior such as their stone tools, food debris
and paintings on cave walls. Only towards the very end of this period --
starting a mere 5000 years ago -- did they leave any written records.
Consequently, to understand the evolution of the mind we must look at our
prehistory, for it was during that time (before writing) that
distinguishing features of the human mind arose, features such as language
and an advanced intelligence."
Even though each of us is different, as members of the same species we share
substantial similarities in the architectural plans for the brains
that we inherit and the minds we develop. Since evolution does not have the
option of returning to the drawing board, the continuous changes in our brains
and minds have been "tinkered" with over many, many centuries, but no plan
for our brain was ever started over again from scratch.
Prof. Mithen likes
using the analogy of the mind as a cathedral, because he knows (as an
archaeologist) that the structural complexity of cathedrals developed over
a long time period. The first cathedrals were simple places. Likewise, in
the first phase of our prehistory (before 60,000 b.c.) minds of humans were
limited to a "nave" of general intelligence. This nave does not contain any
complex systems (which would develop later), and few traces of this type
of mind survive in the modern mind... except in very young children.
Mithen proposes
three phases for the evolutionary history of the mind. As each phase in the
early history of cathedrals evolved, parts of the older building would be
replaced by new walls, new floors, new openings, and a more elegant structural
system. The human mind passed through similar periods of reconstruction and
expansion.
We can think of the mind of each person as a new cathedral being built as
he or she develops from an infant to a mature adult. It is built according
to an architectural plan encoded in the genetic material of that individual,
as inherited from their parents, and continues to expand under the influence
of the particular environment in which they develop -- including the physical
settings in which the individual lives, works, learns, is cared for, and
so forth.
The "doors" into the nave of this Phase I mind
represent the passage of information from the senses. With such a limited
mind it was only possible to learn general purpose rules for guiding behavior
(much like an animal can do).
The Phase II period stretched from about 60,000 to 10,000 b.c. During this phase,
when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, some of the early architecture
of our minds was put in place. The four "chapels" of specialized intelligence
became a part of our genetic inheritance. Three of them were dominant: 1)
chapel of social intelligence used for interacting with other humans including
reading "intentions" and "moods"; 2) the chapel of natural history intelligence
was a bundle of modudules concerned with understanding the natural world
through intuitive biology; and 3) a chapel of technical intelligence provided
the intuitive physics needed for the manufacture of stone and wooden artifacts,
and the skills for throwing these artifacts. At present we are not able to
specify how the chapel of language related to the other specialized
intelligences, but we know it existed in crude form.
When we try to understand the character of the modern mind, it is impossible
to separate the effects of genes and the development of the environment.
No two cathedrals are exactly alike, even if they share similar plans, because
they have different types of stone, different topographic settings, and were
put together in different times and places. This pattern of differences is
also true of the human mind. No person has a mind exactly like another --
including identical twins. And yet, we have brains and minds which are based
on the same fundamental architecture. An architecture which took thousands
of years to evolve, and which is doubtless still evolving.
The various
models of specialized intelligence have different researchers advocating
slightly different structural designs. Each of these specialized modules
are hard-wired into our brains at birth, and provide our minds with problem
solving tools as well as much of the information we need to solve its specialized
problem area For example, Noam Chomsky at MIT once asked himself how it could be possible for children to acquire the many complex rules of grammar from the limited words they heard from their parents. The answer is that they could not. The mind, at birth, contains a genetically fixed 'language acquisition device' dedicated to learning a language. It comes with an information data base ready with a format for grammatical rules. Which vocabulary and grammar a child learns depends on the context of where it is born.
There are some research professionals who argue that we have a number of other domains of intelligence that are hard-wired at birth. For example, how to under- stand facial expressions, or how to understand the intentions of other people. They argue that a child could not learn these rules from simple exposure to their parents, but must have mental modules dedicated to these tasks.
I will argue later that our fundamental understanding of proportion, harmony, and symmetry as attributes of architecture are probably also acquired from hereditary genes.
