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About the guest: Andrew Cutler, PhD is a machine learning engineer who has studied natural language processing, psychometrics & personality using quantitative methods. He writes about the origins of consciousness on his Substack, "Vectors of Mind"
Episode summary: Nick and Dr. Cutler discuss: language & recursion; human evolution & the origins of "higher" consciousness; symbolic cognition, social intelligence & metacognition; creation myths & ritual cults throughout history; snake cults in human history; the intentional ingestion of snake venom in the present-day; the "Stone Ape Theory" of consciousness; the origins of civilization; and more.
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Episode transcript below.
Full AI-generated transcript below. Beware of typos & mistranslations!
Andrew Cutler 3:30
My background, I did a dissertation on predicting personality from how people act online. So I predicted Big Five personality satisfaction with life, IQ a bunch of psychometric traits from people's Facebook statuses. And then I also made a contribution by Re deriving the Big Five from word vectors. And so that's that's my academic background. And then I've worked for three years after graduating in the medical space. So predicting, I worked at a startup that was using VR to predict concussion and Alzheimer's, and so there's all sorts of VR games, and the way you move your eyes is actually extremely informative of if you're concussed, and also for dementia. So I was doing a lot of signal processing on highly multimodal data there. So I'm really, I'm a data scientist with an interest in language models as well as psychometrics. So you've
Nick Jikomes 4:39
got a background in psychology, quantitative psychometrics. I
Andrew Cutler 4:43
actually, I have a background in electrical engineering. Is always program was okay, but I did publish in jpsp, so that's like the flagship personality, yeah,
Nick Jikomes 4:54
okay, so you're more of an engineer and data scientist who was applying. Using the tools of the trade to some some aspects of psychology you weren't trained as a psychologist,
Andrew Cutler 5:05
yes, yes, yes. I mean, we don't have like from an engineer's point of view, any anything you're trying to predict is the same. So it could be, does this person want to buy shoes or not, or is this person extroverted or not? And then I got very interested in, what is this ground truth, label of personality like, how did we come up with that? And what are the characteristics? And so that was how I got into psychometrics. And the name of my blog, vectors of mind comes from a a 20th century electrical engineer who did the same. So he founded the journal psychometrica, and that's L ll the stone. And so there's a anyway, there's precedent for this, going from electrical engineering to psychometrics. Try it and true.
Nick Jikomes 5:51
Yeah. I mean, a lot of the most interesting ideas in in science, very broadly speaking. And in my opinion, they come from, you know, someone who sort of switches, who has one type of background that's not traditionally associated with another field. And, you know, the methods and ideas of one field get imported into another one where, you know, they sort of didn't live before. And there's a lot of fruitful cross fertilization that that comes from not having things, you know, all completely siloed. We don't need to get off on a tangent. But, you know, in many ways, the entire field of molecular biology was founded by physicists who then got interested in biology, and it led to this sort of blossoming of this new sub sub field. But what we're going to talk about today is what you write about on your sub stack, and that's what you call, I think, the the Eve theory of consciousness. And I'm just going to, sort of, if you don't mind, I'm going to summarize what I think sort of the thesis is here, and then, you know, you can correct me if I get it wrong, and it's broad strokes. And we'll sort of, well, then we'll sort of wander back to what this is after we give people some background and cover some some of the details that go into this. But in essence, my sort of read of the area of human evolution, paleoanthropology is, broadly speaking, how humans evolved is, again, roughly, roughly speaking, you've got anatomically modern humans. They evolved hundreds of 1000s of years ago, maybe 200 or so 1000 years ago, and anatomically modern to a paleoanthropologist just means their bones look like our bones. If you dig up people from a couple 100,000 years ago, their skeletons look like ours. They would have been as tall as us. They would have been within the range of human anatomy that you see today. If you gave them modern haircuts and modern clothes, not exactly
Andrew Cutler 7:38
so they like you could, like, if you train a machine learning model, it could tell you very quickly if, if somebody is from 200,000 years ago. So in particular, they didn't their brain case was not nearly as globular as ours is now. But they had, there's they had some traits that were not had before then. And so it's, it's kind of a loose, loose definition of anatomically modern but they wouldn't necessarily be confused with humans. Now. They're not. They're not like within the normal range.
Nick Jikomes 8:15
Yeah, I see. So, so I think what you're saying is, if you do something quantitatively precise, and you actually look at things in detail, you can tell differences between skeletons from that long ago and today. But if you were to just sort of transplant one of those humans today and give them clothes and you saw them on the subway or something, you wouldn't necessarily look twice.
Andrew Cutler 8:36
I mean, you'd say that's a race I haven't seen before, really. I mean, that's yeah. I mean, we, I haven't seen them, because they're 200,000 years
Nick Jikomes 8:45
ago, yeah. How do we what? How do we know that exactly the
Andrew Cutler 8:52
so there's a lot of difference, a lot of differences, and it's a fairly gradual change from archaic to anatomically modern, yeah. And so you just have to pick a point. And so certainly, the variation of modern humans now, like of extant modern humans, yeah, is it's not greater than the distance between now and 200,000 years ago. Like all humans have gotten a lot more rocile than than back
Nick Jikomes 9:21
then, and explain. What does that mean? Grasshole
Andrew Cutler 9:24
like slender wouldn't would be another, another way to say it.
Nick Jikomes 9:28
I see, so the skeletons are a little bit less robust, yes. So
Andrew Cutler 9:31
they up until, I mean, there were the robust, up until about 40,000 years ago, that most skeletons were robust.
Nick Jikomes 9:40
Okay, so, but there's, there's, you know, so there is this gradual change, but there's, there's this sort of notion of anatomically modern humans. And then, I don't know what would we call it like, culturally or cognitively modern humans, like some something happened after a couple 100,000 years ago, and behavior changed. How would you characterize sort of this difference between anatomical you. Modernity and behavioral modernity, modernity,
Andrew Cutler 10:02
I mean, so the most common model is that there's something related to symbolic thought from, like 100,000 to especially 50,000 years ago, and that is the biggest difference. So you get things like narrative art, or art at all. So even cross hatches in eggshells start about 100,000 years ago, and then by 50,000 years ago, you'll get scenes of, say, it's somewhere around Indonesia where there's a scene of a group of people hunting a pig. That's 51,000, years ago or so, yeah, and so it's but it's all over the world about at that time, where you get what we would call behavioral modernity, and that's so that's also highly, highly debated. When that starts, yep, there's a paper. We don't need to get to it right now. We'll go back to,
Nick Jikomes 10:58
we'll get into some of that. But, I mean, it's sort of the very coarse grained idea here, is that for some extended period of time, and we're talking in relative terms here, but for probably hundreds of 1000s of years, the human be the homo sapiens that were around, in theory, like they should have been able to do sort of the things that subsequent humans did in terms of their brain power, like they had, They had big, big cranial volumes. But at some point, you know, 10s of 1000s years ago, 50,000 years ago, whatever it is, at some point, there seems to be scare quotes, sudden shift, and suddenly, now you kind of see art and all of these cultural artifacts that you didn't really see before for a more extended period of time. Yeah,
Andrew Cutler 11:38
and also, to to complicate things, this is the exact moment where Homo sapiens take out, take over the world, right? And so before that, there were in our genus about five extant species. So the Neanderthals, Denisovans, Denisovans, homo Flores Florence, this homo longie. And these are just the ones that have been given names, right?
Nick Jikomes 12:01
Right? There's different subsea humans all over the world, several, at least, could be more. And basically, at some point, Homo sapiens, our subspecies, at some point, begins rating radiating out of Africa. And there's, you know, a little debate on the details there, but, but it happens, you know, 10s of 1000s of years ago quickly spreads over much of the globe, and more or less displaces all the other species. And so this sort of, roughly, at least, coincides with this eruption of what we might call cultural or behavioral modernity, where, quote, unquote, all of a sudden, like the humans seem to be doing and behaving in a very different way than they were before, even though their predecessors were phenotypically more or less the same.
Andrew Cutler 12:41
Yes, exactly. So, yeah, that's the this is basically the Standard Model. Okay,
Nick Jikomes 12:47
okay, so as I understand your idea, and I happened upon this some time ago, and you know, it's kind of a provocative idea. It's very interesting. It's going to sound maybe far fetched, but I don't actually think this, this type of thing, is as far fetched as it seems at first blush, and hopefully that's what we unpack for people. But I think your idea is the Eve theory of consciousness. It's that when this higher order consciousness evolved, so as opposed to primary consciousness, these are these are my terms, that this is how I use them. So we can discuss that people might have different ways they use terminology with this stuff. But we're not talking about primary consciousness here, the type of awareness that probably all animals have. But there's something we might call higher order consciousness, and that is basically the capacity for metacognitive self awareness. I'm aware that I am aware. I can talk about my awareness. I can talk about the evolution of our awareness in conversation with you. It's this kind of ability that is often pointed to as the thing in humans that sort of sets us apart from most other species. It's the special thing, and it may very well be connected to the thing that sort of erupted to initiate behavioral or cultural modernity, whatever we want to call it. And so your idea here that's a little bit different from other ideas that have been put out there, and there's been lots of different ideas that we'll probably discuss. Your idea is that this higher order form of consciousness arose first in females. So there was a sex difference. It came first in women, and it was not so much present in men. And also that it may have been precipitated by the ritual use of something like snake venom in sort of cult ritual behaviors. So people were using snake venom in rituals. Somehow this precipitated this emergence of meta cognitive awareness, or some new cognitive ability in women, and then the women taught it to the men, and that all of this stuff is perhaps even encoded in ancient myths which have persisted for long periods of time, such as the Garden of Eden myth,
Andrew Cutler 14:50
exactly, I, I mean, we're done here, right? That's, uh, okay,
Nick Jikomes 14:53
so that's, that's basically the idea that I want to talk to you about you're going to unpack for us, but I just wanted to put it out. At the beginning. So people sort of know where we're going, because it's, it's, it's pretty interesting stuff. But okay, let's get back to this idea of, you know, anatomically modern humans, behavioral modernity, and sort of, when this stuff happened. Can you give us? Just give us a little bit more on behavioral modernity, when it arose. And sort of, I don't know, give us some, some tent posts here what sort of major ideas are about when and how this may have happened,
Andrew Cutler 15:26
yeah. So the one of the earliest examples is Blombos cave, yeah. And so this, there's a famous cross hatched stone that was etched into and it's, it's a nice design, but it's not like, it's not of anything. So that was about 70,000 years ago. It's
Nick Jikomes 15:47
just across Africa, lines they intersect. It's abstract. It's not an icon of some animal or something,
Andrew Cutler 15:53
yeah. And at the same time in in the Near East, as well as among Neanderthals in Europe, you start getting burials, which are interpreted, usually as a sign of understanding that there's something more than the material world, like there's there's some spark that is in you that, yeah, is no longer when you die. So that's especially when it's ritual, right burial.
Nick Jikomes 16:21
And even if, I guess, you know, burials are a key thing, because most species don't do them, even if you know, it could mean that people had a concept of, they had concepts like abstract concepts in their in their mind, that they had maybe a concept of afterlife or whatever. But even if they weren't sort of there yet, it would at least mean that they understood, you know, I guess the sort of the tamest interpretation of early burials is, well, maybe they merely knew that the body could turn rancid and become infectious and make you sick or whatever and get nasty. So they wanted to get away from it. Even that would imply some level of knowledge that there's things there, unseen, that you need to separate yourself from or whatever,
Andrew Cutler 17:02
yeah, exactly, and I actually don't know, so you have a podcast on mind and matters, sir Shirley, you have some thoughts about the human special sauce.
Nick Jikomes 17:11
Yeah. I mean, you know, I think I probably presumably more or less align with you. I think if I understand you correctly, so I think, you know, I'm echoing different thinkers here. A lot of people have thought about this and talked about this. There's, you know, it's hard to credit individual people, but I think the metaphor of a software update is, you know, at least roughly accurate. You know, our brains were phenotypically powerful enough at some point to do all the things, probably, or most of the things we're capable of today, and yet, there's this period of time where there seems to be this gap. So we presumably have this brain power to do language and metacognitive awareness. I
Andrew Cutler 17:53
think the evidence that we had the brain power to do that is pretty weak, like I we can get into that. I first want to hear about the like the special sauce. But I think going back, I think that there must have been genetic changes. I
Nick Jikomes 18:09
think there probably were genetic changes that that helped support the development of this, probably early, earlier in life and and sort of help bootstrap things, but, but I think the sort of the key thing here, for me, at least, is that I think there's certain things that we now routinely train into our the minds of young children, that we just sort of think of as being automatically there, which aren't necessarily automatically there, right? So there's some pronouns, for example. So there's some, you know, there's if we think, if we use a machine learning example, the way that we're training young minds today may be very different from what it was, you know, 10s to hundreds of 1000s years ago. I don't, I don't know what the cutoff date is, but there could very well have been people that had some of the self reflective capabilities in principle, but that those things weren't actually expressed because the early mind wasn't trained in the ways that we take for granted now and and what you know, what that training is, I'm not exactly sure, but it's going to be bound up with, you know how we pay attention to and speak to young children and things like this, but, but You know, clearly, you know, if you think about the history of language evolution. So someone I draw on here a lot is Terence Deacon, who I've, um, I've spoken to in the podcast a couple times, but if you sort of just imagine running human history in reverse, we know that language is preferentially acquired in young minds, right, their brains are differently able to learn languages compared to the adult mind. If you just imagine going back further and further in time to this hypothetical origin of language, it must have first arose in older minds. I don't think it rose spontaneously in a child one day. But if something doesn't
Andrew Cutler 19:58
talk about that, does he? Oh? Yes, yeah. He thinks it arose in older minds.
Nick Jikomes 20:03
Yeah. So deacons, basic thesis, as I understand it, he did talk about this on, I think the second podcast I did with him is, I'm gonna greatly compress this right now, but it's probably the original quote, unquote language, or proto language, probably emerged in a subset of adults in, you know, bands of humans that were performing behavioral rituals. And, you know, at first these probably involved, you know, just making relatively simple, I don't know if I want to say grunts, but, but vocalizations. And so the earliest proto languages were probably bound up with an enacted ritual. You know, was it a marriage ritual? Was it, you know, a sacrificial food ritual, or so, who knows, but it would probably came from that, and it was much more limited in scope. And then over time, that becomes elaborated, and the adults slowly, gradually start, you know, teaching this to children. And, you know, over time, languages became adapted to the young mind, in the sense that the things that evolve in languages are things that things that are innovated in languages tend to be innovated by young minds. You can see that in the present day with like Creoles and things like this. So you mix these two language groups together somewhere, and sort of the next generation starts spontaneously elaborating new parts of the grammar and new words and things. So over time, the idea is this sort of like this proto language that would have first been in only some adults, in in human groups for which this evolved, you know. So we migrated earlier and earlier in development until it became, you know, what we would recognize today as a full fledged language,
Andrew Cutler 21:37
yeah, yeah. So my, my model is pretty similar to to deacons, just the time frame is very, very different. So Deacon, I believe, says that the the symbolic culture emerged 2 million years ago. And so he'll point to like a shoe lien, hand axes. He'll say, I believe he uses the argument that they're more beautiful than they necessarily have to be. They're more symmetric.
Nick Jikomes 22:09
There's potentially more there than just the raw functional need to have a hand AX,
Andrew Cutler 22:13
yes, yes. So he or he was, symbolic thought goes back all the way with tool use 2 million years ago. But if you actually look for symbols, like they're really not there to, like, 100,000 with, with burial, and then 50,000 with, with symbolic art. And this is oh
Nick Jikomes 22:35
so before, yeah. So I want to get your your take here in particular. But I think a key point for all this stuff is, like, there's a lot of disagreement and a lot of different interpretations as to, like, where you draw some of these lines. Like, when did symbolic cognition actually evolve? Evolve? How do we know that? Do we kind of infer it indirectly from these hand axes? Or do we need to see, like, a bona fide symbol painted on a cave? There's lots of there's a lot of diversity of opinion here, right? Yeah.
Andrew Cutler 23:01
And so I'll give my case for symbolic thought evolving from like, 100,000 years ago, and then a lot of it happening in the last 50,000 years ago as well. And then let's talk about the case for 2 million years, okay, as well, because I think that's the other most natural place to say it evolved. But the so the case for the last 100,000 is, well, that's the only time we see symbols. So that's, if you look for the rock art, it's it's there starting 50,000 years ago. And the symbol I'm most interested in is, I think that once you start getting some separation of subject and object, a symbol that naturally forms is i. And so I think that at the very beginning of this process, I was probably experienced in an extremely fragmented state. And I think that the people it became better formed in first that that tended to be women, and that they basically came up with methods to teach I am to like, to help people experience that,
Nick Jikomes 24:11
to train the mind to do this thing.
Andrew Cutler 24:15
Yes, and so you come up, I mean, it's a wild idea, but it makes a prediction. So you you should find some cultural not like secret knowledge or sacred knowledge, that was invented by women and is the foundation of society or of culture that involves some sort of ceremony that could reasonably teach I am, and so that's, that's what I write about a lot, is because that's, that's what I'm interested in searching for. So is there some example of that, and how old was it? When did it spread all of this? So we can. Get into the bull roar, but it looks like you have some questions. Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 25:02
so, I mean, just to cue people to where we're going, so we're going to need to talk about, like, ritual practices and how they're used historically in human beings. That ties into some of the things that you just said, creation myths and sort of secret societies and and, you know, mystery cults and things like this. A lot of this stuff ties together, I think, in interesting ways. But basically, you said there's roughly, you know, everything that we're going to say, we're going to have to say roughly speaking, or approximately or whatever, a lot, because there's a lot of diversity of thought here. But roughly speaking, there's people who think that symbolic cognition and the quote, unquote, special thoughts sauce is quite recent, meaning, 10s of 1000s of years old. It sounds like you're more in that camp. And then there are other people who think it could be think it could be, you know, maybe one or 2 million years old. Is that fair? You think, yeah, yeah, that's
Andrew Cutler 25:48
a fair summation. Okay,
Nick Jikomes 25:49
so give us the case. What? So unpack the case for it being older. Why do people sometimes argue that?
Andrew Cutler 25:59
So they, because it becomes quite problematic in that it's the so one of the reasons is there was this pretty simple story. So the model I suggested of the last 100,000 and then something big happening 50 ish, 1000 years ago. Yeah, that was the dominant model, up to like 2000 or so. However, then they started getting they started to DNA analysis, and it turns out that human groups have been separated. For if you look at the Y chromosome, or, if you look at the MT DNA or the mitochondrial DNA, yeah, it seems like that the last common ancestor is about 200,000 years old. And then also that that happens to line up with what had previously been established as kind of anatomical modern and so there's that. And then there's also looking at the autosomal DNA. There are some groups, like the Khoisan, who've been separated for about 300,000 and separated. I mean, we broke off for them, or they broke off from us, but just genetically, we've been apart for quite a long time. And I guess, go ahead,
Nick Jikomes 27:24
I guess the potential problem here, I think I know how you get around this. But the potential problem here is if all humans living today have common ancestor that's, you know, two to 300,000 years old, you know, going back that far or further. And we make the assumption that this special sauce is somehow, you know, if it's got a genetic basis or something, then it becomes difficult to explain how it's spread if we all literally inherited it from a common ancestor that goes back at least that far. And so therefore this thing must have evolved earlier than that. Is that, yes, yes.
Andrew Cutler 28:00
That's precisely Yeah. So there's so I really like the book the recursive mind by was it Michael corballis? So he's a linguist and a psychologist, and he says, like, I am certain that there's been no cognitive evolution in the last 200,000 years. Yeah, but all of the so he has the book is mostly great. So he outlines all of the things that recursion can can do for you the way it it allows you to speak a symbolic language. It allows for metacognition, all of this. He thinks it's a very tight package, but he just can't point to any examples of recursion in the last, like, two or 3000 years ago.
Nick Jikomes 28:46
So there's some deep need inside of him for needing to be old, but you're basically saying he can't quite point to anything concrete. It's just sort of this belief,
Andrew Cutler 28:56
yes, yes. And it's also, he's not an archeologist, so he's not gonna, like, go to war. He's just gonna, it's, he just kind of accepts the kind of standard timeline when he wrote the book, which was 2012 or so. Yeah, but he does include a paragraph. So he has the, I'm certain there's been no cognitive evolution, that if we had a time machine and got somebody from 200,000 years ago,
Nick Jikomes 29:17
well that's, I mean, I would say that's now demonstrably false, because even in just the past year, the last several years, there's so much now, population genetic evidence from these ancient DNA studies showing, not only has there been cognitive evolution in the last 200,000 years, but there's been cognitive evolution
Andrew Cutler 29:31
in less than 20,000 years, and extreme. So you're referring to the David Reich paper, we should say pre print. I don't think it's been published. Yes,
Nick Jikomes 29:41
it's hasn't been published quite yet. But that and other work in that realm is, you know, it's clearly showing that there's been significant adaptations since the advent of agriculture, basically, yeah, and
Andrew Cutler 29:51
so that work is, it's surprising because he showed the predicted, uh. Genetic potential of IQ being like 65 for people living just 10,000 years ago. So that was the average, yeah, yeah. It was. It was 2.3 standard deviations lower, which is people say, extreme difference, extreme difference, and so, like, how much do you Yeah, it's
Nick Jikomes 30:23
big enough that it's kind of hard to believe. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Cutler 30:27
But it's, I mean, it works well with my theory. So I'm not exactly saying it's not true, right, right? If stuff like that pans out, and that's so that's another thing I really am. An empiricist i So I'm glad that I've been writing on this for like, three years or so, and so when I wrote, I made a lot of claims, like, I think that there's been selection against schizophrenia, and that was one of the other traits that now we have evidence that there have been strong selection against schizophrenia. Yes, and that's so that was, I think that's a prediction that I got right.
Nick Jikomes 31:05
So, okay, I mean, let's, let's,
Andrew Cutler 31:09
so I want to where I want to go. I want to go back to kind of normalizing my model, and also about the transition between two behavioral modernity. Okay, so not that long ago, I happened upon the work of Tom frost, and he's a cognitive scientist at the University of Okinawa, and about a decade ago, he published the ritual, ritualized mind alteration hypothesis. And in that, he argues that the proliferation of cave art we see is the result of altered states. But not only that, it's us evolving metacognition, and so we're building up these recursive loops. And that's why you see all these recursive patterns, is one of the things, but it's also he articulates that we were just having subject object, separation, yeah. And then there were different rights in these temples which they would practice, that would, that would force subject, object operate, I see separation, yeah. And
Nick Jikomes 32:32
so this is this, like, I think, where you're going with this, what we've been talking about here, this is a very different way of thinking about the evolution of the special sauce, quote, unquote, yeah. It's very different from some something like the classic Chomskyan view, where Chomsky, I don't know if he still believes this, but the sort of classic Chomskyan view was there was a freak mutation one day in an individual, and this baby was born that could do recursion, and it was like this genetic thing that happened freakishly. The types of things you're talking about now is that, no, no. This stuff was sort of trained into the mind, and this required some kind of like ritual practice to to bake in to the minds that were already there.
Andrew Cutler 33:10
Yeah, so I, I like Chomsky on linguistics. So, like, I really, really like recursion. And so he did great work there. However, yeah, his model of evolution is, it's not within the bounds of science. I would say, yeah.
Nick Jikomes 33:27
It's basically, it's like saying there's a miracle. One day something happens.
Andrew Cutler 33:32
Yeah, and we have such strong evidence from twin studies, yes, IQ and all of personality is incredibly heritable. So your language ability is incredibly heritable, and there's no one gene for it. There's just, there's a bunch, right? Yeah, we that's proved. And so his model, like his model, is absolutely just false. I think we can say with high confidence his
Nick Jikomes 33:56
model of the classic evolution he has, of the evolution the classic model he has of the evolution of Yeah,
Andrew Cutler 34:01
and also another thing. So he really wasn't interested in the truth or understanding what happened. So he started out by saying 50,000 years was when this happened, yeah, because that's when there's evidence of recursion, like, if you just look at the archeological record. But then later he starts saying 100,000 I think towards the end, like 200,000 anyway, he slowly moved the date back as you get some sort of, basically as the scientific culture of when it would be convenient for the special sauce to have emerged. Changed. He just pushed that back and back and back. But, I mean, he never, like he never spoke that much about why it would be that moment, yeah, right. And so he it was just kind of
Nick Jikomes 34:51
a Yeah. He just had to declare, yeah. Okay. So, so, okay. So, going back to to these other ideas. Yeah.
Andrew Cutler 35:00
The, oh, yeah, so the ritualized mind and who was, who was that you
Nick Jikomes 35:06
were talking about, what was the name is Tom
Andrew Cutler 35:08
froze. So he's the editor in chief of adaptive behavior. Okay, so this is, this isn't like some, some random this is, and he, so I had him on my podcast, and, like, he still likes this, this idea that he proposed. And his idea was that, like, how can you teach somebody subject, object, separation? Yeah, well, you can bring them very close to death. It is one way. So there's kind of like a simulated death, and then you would be a death and rebirth sequence. This, this ritual. And along with that, so you can, you can do this by so a lot of initiation ceremonies do just physically. They bring your body close to death. And so there's going to be a lot of fasting, I see, and pain, and yeah, and sometimes even bloodletting, right? And we also,
Nick Jikomes 36:03
and we can probably all think of examples of it's very common in traditional societies to have pretty extreme rituals that have things like extreme fasting, extreme amounts of pain, initiation, rights, like, all like, that's a very common motif,
Andrew Cutler 36:16
yes. And he also suggests that that psychedelics, particularly psilocybin mushrooms, could have been involved. Yeah, and so he was involved. There's pretty rank, if you look at his papers, pretty rancorous back and forth between people who are like, no, no, there couldn't have been any evolution this this late, or basically saying you have no evidence that humans would have used psychedelics at that time. Yeah? That that also, anyways, I'm sure that you've seen a lot of it's just, yeah, well, let me very divisive, right? Yeah, that psychedelics could be involved. Yeah?
Nick Jikomes 36:56
But let's just so I want to sort of anticipate, you know, maybe a possible counter argument to some of the things we're discussing. So let's just, let's just suppose, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that some of this stuff is accurate. Okay, you needed to have some kind of fairly extreme ritual that brought you close to death, and some kind of ritual like that was how subject, object distinctions and the concept of I got trained into human minds. So that type of training was necessary for for us to have a sense of I and to have this subject object distinction. It's like, okay, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that's how things started and where they came from today, most of the people walking around that we our friends and family and peer people, our peers, they you know, I didn't go through some kind of ritual like this when I was a kid, but I developed subject object distinction just fine. Why don't we need that today?
Andrew Cutler 37:50
It so first, I think that our culture is just much more advanced, like the type of memes that we show children are very, very different now than then and before I brought up pronouns, but you can imagine basically trying to teach this before they had pronouns. And then once, once you get this part of language, it's, it's reinforcing this structure in in prices from a very, very young age. So,
Nick Jikomes 38:19
so So in a sense, what you're saying is it might happen now, quote, unquote, for free, because our language has all of these features that sort of, you know, it's sort of baked into the language now, but at some point there weren't pronouns, there weren't words that that had built into them, subject, object, distinctions, and somehow you would have had To bake this into minds without having that language scaffold sort of pre formed. Yes,
Andrew Cutler 38:45
exactly, and then. So the other thing is, yeah, I think that we've evolved since it so it used to be very hard to teach somebody I am, but now now it's much easier, and it's because those that could learn I am are the people who survived. And so you really for this model to work, you have to show strong selection on the ability to learn im. And so that's why I'm interested in the ancient DNA stuff I see,
Nick Jikomes 39:12
I see, and that fits a lot with, I think, what someone like Deakin would say, which is that, so on the one hand, this is like a cultural innovation that doesn't start with like a Chomsky and mutation. And yet, once this sort of process gets started, there would be selection to learn it better and earlier in life, because to the extent that this recursive ability was adaptive, obviously the more of it you have, faster, the earlier in life, the better it is going to be for your group. And so there would have been selection. There would have been a selective advantage on any individuals who had any type of brain mutation such that they were able to better and or more quickly learn this ability that was probably very strenuous to learn initially. Okay, so that's roughly. That's basically in line with what you're saying. Working with your ideas, yeah, and
Andrew Cutler 40:01
there's, so there's, there's a bunch of research on, okay, what genes have been selected for in the last 50,000 years? Or, Yeah, usually not quite 50,000 but it does cluster around cognitive which makes sense, because even if you don't believe that something like consciousness or I am emerged, certainly, there's more complex society. There's art, yeah, art is going to change the fitness landscape, yeah. And so I don't think you can really get around that. There's also our brains, or the shape of our skulls have changed, has changed quite a bit in the last 50,000 years.
Nick Jikomes 40:40
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is, like, you can even think about, like, like, even very, very short time scales. Like, if you go back, you know, if you what was that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, where it's like a dream within a dream within a dream inception. Yeah. I think if you showed that to someone who's born in like, 1900 they would be like, like, What the fuck are you showing me right now? I don't even know if they could, like, like, really, like, get it, but for us now, it's just like, yep, that's just like the movie this year. And it's because, like, our entire culture and the language and how we talk about stuff, it's, it's, it's changed in just that amount of time. And that provides a scaffolding that makes you know something that would otherwise be totally baffling, an enjoyable movie. In this case.
Andrew Cutler 41:21
Yeah, exactly.
Nick Jikomes 41:24
So one of the one of the ideas you have is that consciousness, this type of self reflective consciousness. So whenever we say consciousness, I think by default, that's what you and I are talking about in this this conversation. I'll let you put more beat on the bone there if you want. This kind of self reflective, self consciousness, that it came first in women rather than men. Unpack that a little bit. Why do you think that? Where does that come from? What is the support for that idea?
Andrew Cutler 41:54
Totally. This goes back to evolutionary psychology. There's a comparative advantage in that women have in theory of mind and language. So for example, because of differences in upper body strength, not going to win a fight with fists. And so put more stats into social cognition. So the pretty basic evolutionary psychology, actually. So was it? Robin Dunbar in his book gossip, grooming and language, he actually mentions this, that women would have invented language because it's more important for them,
Nick Jikomes 42:37
yeah, and because it needs to be, because they are physically at a disadvantage in many ways. Yeah. And
Andrew Cutler 42:44
also funny, funny enough. Terence McKenna, also, this is part. He mentions this in in with the food of the gods, really, yeah, yeah. He also says women were first, but it's so anyway, this is not like a fringe idea, and people who I think that it's almost a requirement of the social brain hypothesis. So if you think we became smart because of being social, yeah, I think that you like you must believe that women kind of became human first. I just think that's a requirement. Otherwise, it's
Nick Jikomes 43:18
very difficult to explain why they would consistently perform better on things like theory of mind, etc. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Cutler 43:24
So there's so I do have an interest in psychometrics, the so the the tool that they use to measure emotional intelligence. So it's just a survey like, do you grab the door to help people get out. Like, do you notice other people? Can you can you understand what they're thinking? And so in psychometrics, there's no real ground truth. And so they have to demonstrate, when they come up with a new survey, does this actually capture what we say? And so they gave it to a group of therapists and to a group of prisoners, and they show, hey, there's the average is different between these two groups. So, like, it's probably measuring emotional intelligence, and they also give it to men and women, and they're like, hey, women do better. Therefore this must be like, this is support that it's measuring emotional intelligence. So in in the in the actual tools, it's just considered like a thing, you know, a priori, that women are going to do better on emotional intelligence.
Nick Jikomes 44:26
And, okay, so, so keep going for us. So other than, other than the sort of general belief that it came first of women, because they tend to score higher in measures of what we can just call social intelligence. I mean, is there anything more to it than that?
Andrew Cutler 44:42
The so I had that belief, and then I was so I had a anonymous or a pseudo, an odd blog where I just blogged about machine learning and psychology, and I was really interested in their. Higher order back there's higher order structure to the Big Five, and above the Big Five and personality, there's sometimes something called the general factor of personality. However, for our purposes, it's just, you can think of it as kind of emotional intelligence or social self regulation. And I was trying to think like, what if, if personality is a cybernetic system or a like a fitness landscape, what would this main factor be causing to be selected for? And so I was just, it was just kind of a fun blog post I was just gonna write. I was describing what the GFP was some of the debates around it, and then say, okay, and what would, what would it have us evolve? And so I started thinking about it would have us evolve a conscience, because the it's about like your theory of mind and also doing right by other people,
Nick Jikomes 45:56
yeah, how you fit into the social group, yeah, how everyone's getting along. I mean, all these things would come along with that type of factor.
Andrew Cutler 46:02
And I started, I just was imagining back in evolutionary time, like, what would that like? Okay, you evolve a conscience, and then once, what's next? And I thought I what would it be like to identify with your conscience? What would that moment be like? Yeah, so, because I was trying to write an article, like, you want to come have some metaphor. And then I just It struck me, Genesis is an extremely good metaphor for the moment the so the fall of Adam and Eve is an extremely good metaphor for realizing that you are your conscience.
Nick Jikomes 46:34
Yeah, the idea of being that you're falling into that realization, yes,
Andrew Cutler 46:39
yes, they kind of, you are the man behind the curtain. It's so they, what they're where they went wrong was eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And so having some sort of metacognition on top of your agency, I think, would be extremely painful, painful in ways that only humans can understand. And I you can imagine that feeling like falling out of the garden of paradise. And one of the things that interests me is like Eve ate the apple. So it's an extremely patriarchal story. So why is it such a good metaphor for this? And then two, why does it agree with evolutionary psychology that Eve would have eaten the apple, right? And so I was just imagining, like, yeah, if somebody realized, like, I'm the man behind the curtain, and they taught other people, it seems like men would be kind of the last in on, on the on this knowledge, yeah. And so you can imagine as kind of a cultural memory of this moment. And so then there's the obvious question, okay, how long? How long can a myth last? And so I've done, I've done a bunch of research on that, and yeah. So there's overlap. There's overlap between how long a myth can last and when we started acting human, yeah.
Nick Jikomes 48:02
So, so where you're going with this is that when we think about creation myths, the Christian creation myth, the Garden of Eden will is one of the best known examples to all of us, because of, you know, the time in history and the places that we live, we're going to talk about other creation myths as well. But where you're going with this is that this is not an arbitrary fictitious story that was simply made up for entertainment or whatever it is actually an encoding of what you're I think what you're arguing are actual historical events, and it's symbolic, and there's fictional elements to it, but these things are pointing to something that was very real, and if, if that general notion is true, there are a few things that that have to be true if we're going to come to that conclusion. One is that, you know, these stories are not they are symbolic, but they're not totally fictitious and arbitrary. Two is that they are able to persist and retain that information for long periods of time, despite spreading all over the world. And I think maybe a third would be that, you know, we should see sort of the core essence of this story, conserved across creation myths that are different in their details. Is that fair?
Andrew Cutler 49:19
Yeah, all that is very fair. So what my like, my response, I had this, this kind of wild idea, and I just knew the Christian creation myth. And so a requirement of this model is that all creation myths also describe this moment of realization. So I just started reading creation myths, which is good to do, even if, like, it's just good to know, yeah. And so there's a surprising thing. So, for example, Egyptians, the world comes into being when atom, the god, the. Memorial, God says his own name, and so it is also, it's like, okay, there's the beginning of ours. Yeah, it all starts with the the word, like, in this case, would be, I am. He spoke his name at home, and then the first thing he does is fight a snake.
Nick Jikomes 50:17
Yeah? It's like, nobody knows this. If you study Egyptian mythology before, be like, wait a minute, I knew that Adam and Eve story with story with the snake and the atom and the apple. You're saying, Okay, this is strikingly similar in that way.
Andrew Cutler 50:27
Yes. And then you So China has Nuwa and Fauci. And so they, they are the so Nuwa is like Eve, and Fauci would be Adam, and they are always drawn with snakes as their as their torso wrapped around one another. So, so there's, once again, there's like a first couple with snakes, yeah, if you read the So, in North and South America, they have the creation myths tend to evolve an emergence. So there's different worlds, and they're progressively more human, like, okay? And in so I think we're in the fourth or fifth one, like the current world. But in the third one, spider grandma among the Hopi spider grandma teaches them morals. And so you can see, like, once again, there's like a woman and it changes animal morality, yeah. And also, venomous animal, venomous
Nick Jikomes 51:25
animal.
Andrew Cutler 51:27
And so,
Nick Jikomes 51:30
so I noticed, you noticed that motif was coming up all over the world in these creation this, yeah,
Andrew Cutler 51:34
and so, like, I knew, I didn't. I knew about the stone date hypothesis, yeah, yeah. And so I thought, hey, can you get high on snake venom? Yeah.
Nick Jikomes 51:45
So before we go, there, just for people who don't know, cover very briefly, what is that stone ape theory from Makena? What does it essentially say?
Andrew Cutler 51:52
So his theory is that we have been doing we've been eating mushrooms for a long time, like 200,000 years, and then it was a gene culture interaction that mushrooms somehow made us more amorous and open. And it was, it was a it was good for passing on genes.
Nick Jikomes 52:16
The idea was in psilocybin mushrooms, psychedelic ingestion precipitated this kind of cognitive shift,
Andrew Cutler 52:23
yes, yes. So not taken seriously. So it's a, it's a Joe Rogan. He's kind of the, the, we should say, steward of the theory at this point. Yeah, but, but there is some work among academics to also take it seriously, yeah,
Nick Jikomes 52:43
and then there's, like, you know, probably, you know, one of the things that hooks into this is, like, the the book that Brian muraresk wrote, I talked to him on the very first episode of the podcast, actually, basically, there's, there's, there's a field called archaeochemistry. And there is evidence to suggest that, you know, at least 1000s of years ago, people were drinking psychedelic concoctions, potentially with, you know, alkaloids, not too dissimilar to LSD and things and those were part of these sort of sacred secret rituals,
Andrew Cutler 53:12
yeah. So I definitely want to come back to his book and the Greek history, yeah. But yeah, where are we right now?
Nick Jikomes 53:22
So, so let's get back. So creation myth. You notice this motif is all over, Egyptian myths, Chinese myths, the Christian myth. And we're just talking about, like, how common it was, and it involved, it always involves a woman and saying, I am at the beginning, there is the word, and there's always this kind of venomous animal around, whether it's a snake or a spider, or what have you. So, so,
Andrew Cutler 53:44
yeah, not always, but it's enough to strike you. So especially the snake thing just hits you over the head. So what like you? I think that it like, I'm not a particularly nuanced reader of literature, and yet, like, here, it's just right there. It's in every one of them, there's snake
Nick Jikomes 53:59
and so, okay, so where did you go from there? You sort of noticed this. You had some of these ideas in your head,
Andrew Cutler 54:04
and so I just Googled, can you get high from snake venom? And you totally can. Like it. You totally can. There's a small literature on this, mostly in India, where it's they have, they have, instead of like they have snake dents. They call them, instead of, like an opium today, yeah, today there are clinics where people go for snake venom, or scorpion venom, like Addiction Rehab. What it's, yeah, it's a real thing. So there was, so this was people laughed at me when I, when I posted this on Reddit, it was people hated the snake venom shit. However, there was just this year, a famous YouTuber in India was arrested for selling Cobras and crates at a rave in India. What?
Nick Jikomes 54:56
Yeah. But. Just tell me, like, what do people actually do if, okay, if I, if I'm at the rave and I buy a cobra, what do I do with
Andrew Cutler 55:04
it? They take a bite on their tongue. What
Nick Jikomes 55:08
from the Cobra? Yeah. Like, they touch the Fang,
Andrew Cutler 55:12
yeah. So there's, like, I have seen footage of there was I look at one of my pieces, one of my later
Nick Jikomes 55:20
Indian kids at a rave do this on purpose. Yeah.
Andrew Cutler 55:23
And so you, I don't know, there are snake charmers that are, that's your dealer. Apparently, there's a thing. It's part of the snake charmers that meets the eye, yeah? So it's good. So a blog is great because you can just kind of write shit, yeah. And so I found a lot of the evidence for snake venom as a as an event agent. After I wrote it, I just found so you can Google it and it comes right up. But the So, for example, the arrest didn't happen. Um, anyway, I have much better evidence, because it's what I get the most pushback on a lot of time.
Nick Jikomes 55:57
Okay, so just go ahead. Pause here real quick. I want to make sure I fully understand this. There's people, to this day in places like India getting high on snake venom. They will buy a snake on purpose at, literally, at a rave in some cases, and they touch the Fang of the Cobra to their tongue. What happens? What do they report? Is it like a euphoria they get? Like, what happens?
Speaker 1 56:17
Yeah. So I actually don't know too well, why? So why aren't they dying, for example? So I don't know if there's a, like, a different diet they give to these snakes, or if they milk them so much. So I don't it could
Nick Jikomes 56:27
be a dose dependent thing. It could be swallowing it rather than having it injected into your veins. But what do they report as? Why are people wanting to
Speaker 1 56:35
do this? So I haven't seen any reports from the raves, and it's weird, so like I have looked for it, but they, the raves, don't report it there. There's in the literature, in from in the scientific literature, yeah, the people mention taking it and then so there's convulsions, there's sometimes even paralysis, there's feeling sleepy. There's a lot of them report bliss. There's hallucinations. There is there's some really interesting reports where somebody who had been a addicted to opiates and alcohol for a decade, they took this and then they just went cold turkey, off of off of the other substances, and then they just like, every couple months would go get a snake bite. Wow. So roughly, very, very strange,
Nick Jikomes 57:27
roughly, roughly speaking, it sounds like maybe something in the ballpark of ketamine or Ibogaine or something like that, like maybe a deliriant or a dissociative of some kind. And it's not, I mean, I'm not an expert on snake venom, but I do know that many of the venoms that have evolved are basically, they're often modified proteins that act, you know, on receptors and at synapses in the brain. And they do have neuro effects. They are that, you know, that is their evolved function in some cases. So it's certainly not I've, you know, I've had never heard this before, I read some of your stuff, but it's at least not a stretch to think that there could be some snake venoms that would have a psychoactive effect.
Speaker 1 58:05
Yeah. I mean, if I had said, like Toad venom, nobody would have a problem with this, right, right? But so there's, for example, there's a sad guru. Is a guru in India with a huge fall, like, millions and millions. And he at the dedication of some temple, um, he drank snake venom. And so he like, so there's, he drank it. And so his report, he talks about the disassociative effects of snake and he talks about, like, disassociating, and also the the death and rebirth. So he says, like snake venom killed, yeah, but it taught me something more valuable than some shit, yes, effect. And it's on my it's on my article, if you want to see the direct quote, yeah.
Nick Jikomes 58:48
I mean, what's sort of interesting here about, you know, it's the idea that to train I into the human mind required some kind of ritual that brought you to the precipice of death, so to speak. When you think about psychedelics and dissociatives, you know, anything from psilocybin to ketamine on a high enough dose. You know, the essence of the experience is just that you lose your sense of self, you dissociate from your normal, awakened consciousness, and then you come back to it, and the coming back to it and seeing that distinction really leaves an impression on people that never leaves them,
Speaker 1 59:19
yeah, and I think of it some like it. It's a it relaxes your prior Yes, is kind of the Bayesian way
Nick Jikomes 59:27
of talking about that. Yeah. Okay, so this is still like, this is still, it's not like, I disbelieve this, because it's like, okay, like, I guess people, even to this day, are doing this in India. Are there any more like but if this was a creation myth that was worldwide, or that you see in many places, and the snake motif shows up over and over again, people must have been doing this at other times and places, what do we know about how often snakes snake venom was being intentionally consumed anywhere else in the world or at any other period of time?
Speaker 1 59:59
Yes. So the Greek mystery cults, that's another good option. So there's going back the earliest citations that sounds 20 years ago or so. There have been arguments that snake venom was consumed by, say, the Oracle at Delphi and also in the licensing mysteries. So
Nick Jikomes 1:00:19
writings from that time say that, yes, so
Speaker 1 1:00:22
the the father of the father of tragedy, I'm blanking on the same it's like, it's not quite as sloppiest. It's anyway, something like that. So he, he, he has a play of the
Nick Jikomes 1:00:44
atialist, yeah. Atialist, yeah.
Speaker 1 1:00:50
So it's so there's an old play, I believe it's the Libation Bearers. And he talks about how the he calls the priestess a Dragoness of the lucinian mysteries, and she would, she would bite the initiates, and also that she, she was bit on her breast by some snake, and then would, would give the initiates milk. And so it was venom and milk mixed. And then he was put on trial for death, for profaning, because he gave away the secret, basically, yeah, because it's a mystery call, you're not supposed to know what they do, yeah, yeah. Or else, like, you're out of the cold, and the way you get out of the cold is they kill you, yeah?
Nick Jikomes 1:01:29
Nobody Fight Club. That's the first rule of fight club,
Speaker 1 1:01:31
yeah. And so the, anyway, there's a there's a guy, Ammon Hillman. He's a PhD in classics, and his dissertation was on this subject. And so he has a few articles where he he says explicitly, like, yes, he can actually. He says what they were killing him over was that he said it was snake venom. And then also, so you don't want to go off one person's work, right, right? The guy who coined the term entheogen, yeah, he cites that work. So it's Carl ruck. He says point blank, yes, they were throughout the Mediterranean, consuming snake Venus. What's interesting
Nick Jikomes 1:02:09
about this is a couple of things tied together here. One, I mean, the fact that there's a record someone said this and wrote this is interesting in itself. But two, the fact that these were mystery cults and sort of the whole point of these things is you're not allowed to talk about them outside this simultaneously gives an explanation for why. You know, we don't see more of a record of these things. Yes, and and that it does appear to have happened, at least according to the limited number of leaks we got,
Speaker 1 1:02:42
yeah? So, like, what we have so far is an extremely specific prediction. So basically, you need a snake cult that was invented by women that spread the entire world, yes, um, and you don't expect to find that. So that's, that's just, that's crazy. Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:03:01
that's, that's wild. It's like, yeah, should be pretty easy to disprove in theory, but unpack that. Unpack that for me. So let's assume that did happen. What is the evidence that such a thing spread throughout the entire world, other than the fact that there's these coincidences with the creation myths containing the same motifs?
Speaker 1 1:03:20
So there's First, there's the sapient paradox. So are you familiar with that? No, no. Unpack that. So the sapient paradox is you start to see behavioral modernity, let's say, 50,000 years ago. But it's not really widespread until 10,000 years ago.
Nick Jikomes 1:03:40
So somehow, it does spread quickly, yeah, so
Speaker 1 1:03:44
spread independently invented. Maybe it's just kind of a natural progression, yeah? But there's a weird thing. So why is it all at once? There
Nick Jikomes 1:03:53
seems to be a sudden eruption, you know, sudden evolutionary terms you're talking about, yeah?
Speaker 1 1:03:58
Why is it so late some places. So why? So, for example, one of the things I cite is this paper that argues against behavioral modernity. So it says behavioral modernity can't be real, because in Australia, like behavioral modernity is not exhibited until 7000 years ago. So it's kind of a gambit. It's essentially arguing like, Okay, if, if we think kind of the modern cognition is only 40,000 years old. It's only 40,000 years old in some places. There's a lot of places
Nick Jikomes 1:04:34
if it were those 40,000 years ago and spread, well, it obviously didn't spread to Australia. So yeah. So they're making the argument that that can't be the way it happened,
Speaker 1 1:04:43
yeah, or a more recent example. So think of, think of the Americas, yeah. So there is, there's evidence of that people were here, undisputed Evelyn evidence, 23,000 Years ago, but there's a lot of evidence that's disputed that goes back a long time. So a lot back to 40,000 some back to
Nick Jikomes 1:05:06
200,000 Yeah, that's an active area right now, right? If people are arguing over how old, how long people have been in the Americas, and it seems to be getting pushed
Speaker 1 1:05:14
back. But how old is art in the Americas? I have no idea, about 13,000 years old. So there's Why isn't there art? And so one thing that people, I don't like it when so there's the for a long time, there was Clovis, called Clovis first was kind of a dominant position, and that was that there were no people in the Americas. And then people came over the Bering Strait about 13,000 years ago, and they filled up the continents. And so the reason that people like that idea was that culture actually is quite similar. And so there was something that spread over both continents at that time. And if there were people before that, what happened to them, and also, why weren't they making art? So I, like, I would say, okay, there were people there, but maybe they just weren't conscious. Maybe it was the snake cult that that spread through, right? And so that's a so that's another kind of, another continent, where you can see something pretty similar happening, like, what we consider, yeah, fundamental to human life only seems to be there from third, like, around the Holocene. Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:06:27
it's like, I'm going to be it's a very loose analogy here, but, you know, it's like, you know, the mycelial network can spread far and wide, but then you get these eruptions of mushrooms in certain places. Basically, what you're saying is, according to the view that you and some some others hold, humans could have spread all over the place, but not, not gotten this new ability yet, and then suddenly, for whatever reason, the that thing erupts there, because they independently discover the precipitating ritual, or it spreads. No, I
Speaker 1 1:06:59
don't think it was. I think that somebody discovered it and it spread, would be my guess, because it's, for me, I think of in terms of once it's once it exists, it would tend to spread really fast. And so I just think it's, there's not a whole lot of time for it to get invented multiple times. Specifically, if there's a lot of similarities
Nick Jikomes 1:07:23
in between, it's versions. So if you had people in some location for a long time and some other people show up, they can quickly spread this, this aspect of culture to them, and then you get the sudden eruption in those people as
Speaker 1 1:07:39
well. Yeah, I mean, so I'm not really making claims about the degree to which humans would have just wiped like humans would have just wiped out other groups or mixed with them. I'm sure it was different in many different places. And also my Yeah, we'll just see where the genetic stuff leads us, like there's, that's an empirical question.
Nick Jikomes 1:08:02
Okay, let's like, so
Speaker 1 1:08:04
let's Yeah, let's go back to so we have kind of hinted at Bull roar. So we, I don't know the myths are similar. They have snakes all over the world. And so I went looking for the best evidence of global cultural diffusion, okay? And so what I think is the best evidence is bull roar, mystery cults.
Nick Jikomes 1:08:30
What? What is that? What does that word mean?
Speaker 1 1:08:32
So the bull Roar is an instrument you tie of a like a a bone or a piece of wood that's kind of a slat, and you there's a hole in one side, you tie a string to that, and then spin it around, and it makes this, this kind of roaring or whirling sound. And so it's, I mean, it's just an instrument, but it's used in mystery cults around the world. So already, that's kind of weird. Is that, why this particular instrument? Like, why aren't like, there's flutes and bells, there's all sorts of instruments you could use. Why is this so often at the center? It's often the secret thing at the center of a mystery cult and there's a couple other facts that make it strange. So in many places, so in a lot of places, the bull roar has been secularized. It's not really remembered as sacred. So in a lot of parts of Europe, although not everywhere, it's just a child's toy. However, when anthropologists started visiting the world, it's like, everywhere they went, there'd be mystery cults with at the center. There's this, this feared and respected object that was said to be given by God or created by the first, the first person in their tribe. And very often, it was said that it was invented by women. Right. So this is true in Africa and Australia and also in the Amazon so highly separated continents. And they say it's invented by women, but men now control the sacred object, the sake, as well as the political organization of the mystery goal, okay? And if women see the bull roar, they are put to death. So it's just a very strange fact pattern, yeah, that is extremely widely spread. So you can say like, of course the bull roar could be invented many times, yeah, but there's all of these other ways about it.
Nick Jikomes 1:10:42
Okay, so recurring motif, but what is, what is it actually used for? Ritualistically? What do they do with it? It's usually
Speaker 1 1:10:49
said to be the voice of God, okay? Or in many places, it's a like a thunder charm. So to bring rain so connected with rebirth in that way is part of the literature, yeah, but I'm really not interested. So the there's a there's a paper about the use of the bull roar by the among the Khoisan. And there's evidence of them using it. There's rock art of a group of them rolling the bull roar in a cave, and that's dated between five and 10,000 years ago, so it goes back a long ways. Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:11:27
but I guess, like, one of the themes that that you've been getting at here is that, okay, we're talking about culture, we're talking about ideas, we're talking about ritual. If we think about this like an evolutionary biologist, if I'm an evolutionary biologist, and I'm studying birds and lizards or whatever. When I look at phenotypic diversity, diversity in the forms of animals, you look for what's different between different lineage lineages, and you look for what's similar. And the things that are most highly conserved are usually the things seen in older last common ancestors. Right? Like all tetrapods have four limbs, because we all shared a last common ancestor that evolved that feature, you know, a really long time ago. And basically what it sounds like you're seeing the saying is that when you look at these creation myths and these mystery cults and all of this stuff these cultures around the world, there's this kind of common core that a lot of their rituals and their mythologies share, and it centers on women being sacred or special in some way, initially commanding or inventing the thing, the bull roar, or whatever you're talking about. And there is usually some kind of venomous animal, like a snake involved. And this realization, this connection to saying I am, or being born or reborn, like all of these things, seem to be conserved features that speak to a last common ancestor here. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 1:12:49
And the point I was going to make is that I, I'm interested in borrowers from the last common ancestor perspective, yeah, but it could, maybe it is an active ingredient of the ritual. So the the paper, along with the koi song, they talk about how it could be helpful for creating all alternate states of consciousness. Because it's a I don't know that the it doesn't it stays about 40 hertz. So they make some argument about brain waves, stuff like that. So, but I'm more interested in the last common ancestor, culturally speaking.
Nick Jikomes 1:13:22
And so when you look at all this evidence, you look at all these creation myths and all of this sort of anthropological cultural stuff, how far back is that last common ancestor go? What is? What is the date that you come to when you look at when the origin, with the inferred origin of this may have been,
Speaker 1 1:13:39
yeah. So another reason I love the bull Roar is that it's an artifact. So myths like you can't, myths don't leave, yeah, but there's bull roars that we can date back to 20,000 years ago in Ukraine. So that's, that's the oldest one. That's, that's not really controversial. And so I think so my model for what happened is that essentially symbolic thought is emerging, and especially among women, I is is emerging or forming in a more cohesive state, and that women made rituals where there were altered states of reality or consciousness, and then somebody gets bit by a snake. And it's like, hey, that is pretty similar to the like, the song and dance we were doing also produced that effect. And then, so you can imagine working in snake bites into the ritual. To give it a little bit more more punch,
Nick Jikomes 1:14:44
I see it's almost like, it's almost like how you know, there's certain states of consciousness you can get to by taking acid or psilocybin, or through fasting and food deprivation, through chanting and drumming, like people often report that you can get to. Similar states by different routes, Yep,
Speaker 1 1:15:03
yeah. So I think that they found, I think they found the snake, then
Nick Jikomes 1:15:06
found a catalyst,
Speaker 1 1:15:08
and so the there was some sort of cult centered around Venus statues. So there's a fair,
Nick Jikomes 1:15:21
that's what those are for people.
Speaker 1 1:15:23
So the right into the beginning of behavioral modernity, starting from about 40,000 years ago in Europe, there are these beautiful figurines of women, and that there are actually no, there are almost no depictions of men until, like, 15,000 years ago. It's all women, and that there are hundreds of them, distributed throughout from, I mean, from Spain to Siberia,
Nick Jikomes 1:15:51
yeah, yeah, and all over the world, similar culture, not
Speaker 1 1:15:55
all over the world. So just over, just from Spain to Siberia. So it's among the gravettian culture, or actually starts in the agnosian 40,000 years ago. And so I think that there's just these memes stewing, and that the earliest evidence of of that in relation to to snake worship would be about So 24,000 years ago. There's the Malta beret culture, and that's in Siberia, and so they there's a burials with many Venus figurines. But there's also, there's carved on on mammoth tusk. There's three snakes that look like cobras, and on the other side is this totally psychedelic spiral carved in this mammoth tusk. So very cool artifact interpreted as snake worship, because this is height of the Ice Age, 24,000 years ago in Siberia. So there, there probably weren't a lot of snakes, right? Yeah, I was gonna ask you, like, Well, why? Like, very strange to find this
Nick Jikomes 1:17:06
makes sense. If they already had that in their culture. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 1:17:11
So that's you have the so you have the Venus statues and perhaps state work snake worship back 24,000 years ago. Yeah, this group. So the the multi parade culture. Genetically, these people are called the ancient North Eurasians, a n, e, Mm, hmm. And they, so they are the people that populated the Americans, yeah.
Nick Jikomes 1:17:40
So this would basically they are a my understanding of of European population genetic history is basically that all European descended people alive today are basically each some mixture of three ancestral populations. And it sounds like this would be sort of like the population even before that. Maybe, yes, yes,
Speaker 1 1:17:58
yeah. So I forget what they went I think that Easter Eastern hunter gatherer is large, is in large part this Annie is their ancestor. And that makes, that makes
Nick Jikomes 1:18:10
intuitive sense. So eventually you get these eastern hunter gatherers. You get the yanaya pastoralists. You get the like,
Speaker 1 1:18:16
5000 years ago, though, and yeah, I'm talking about, yeah, 25,000
Nick Jikomes 1:18:22
and roughly, you know, I'm not, I'm not as big of a history guy as you. So around that time period, what is going on in the world at that time, this is before agriculture has really developed, yeah, so
Speaker 1 1:18:36
you see kind of exactly what you'd expect with metacognition. So what makes humans interesting is that we dominate the environment. That's that's also part of the fall, the of Adam and Eve. So they they go from living kind of at peace with nature, yeah, to as a consequence of the fall, they become agriculturalists. They like by the sweat of their brow, shall
Nick Jikomes 1:19:00
they start farming? They use animal hides to make clothes, etc, etc, yeah.
Speaker 1 1:19:05
And so you see the so the the multi break culture, this is on the short list for the people who domesticated dogs. So dogs are our first domesticate, yeah.
Nick Jikomes 1:19:18
And you can kind of, Oh, yeah. I was just reading about this. It does line up. It is thought to be maybe 20, 30,000 years old, something like
Speaker 1 1:19:24
that. Yeah, yeah. And so you can see maybe starting to have this metacognition, starting the process of domesticating other animals, including ourselves. Yeah, yeah. And one of the reasons I bring up the dog is it's completely uncontroversial to say the dog went from Eurasia 20,000 years ago to the rest of the world. Yes, yes. It's like, completely uncontroversial.
Nick Jikomes 1:19:51
That's a good point. The
Speaker 1 1:19:52
jingle get there, right? It's not like Australia has been hermetically sealed all this time, right? Oh, that's
Nick Jikomes 1:19:57
a good that's a good point.
Speaker 1 1:19:58
I never so I'm saying. I'm like, I'm saying the something else could spread from there. And it's interesting, because you start so there's in, I believe, in Brazil, like 11,000 years ago. So right at this transition in the Holocene, they find artwork. There's like a 40 meter cave art of a snake. And so like at this it's the kind of at this transition you suddenly get just enormous interest in snakes. It's the same thing. So there's a huge transition in the early to mid Holocene in in Australia, and like, How old do you think? What's the earliest depiction of the Rainbow Serpent? Do you think?
Nick Jikomes 1:20:47
I mean, I have no idea. But if you're talking, I mean, based on everything you're saying, this stuff could go back, yeah, multiple 10s of 1000s of years. It's just 7000 years ago. That's
Unknown Speaker 1:20:55
just, Oh, that's okay, because that fits
Nick Jikomes 1:20:57
with what you were saying before. With the Australians. You said someone was making the argument. Well, you don't see evidence of argument. Well, you don't see evidence of behavioral modernity in Australia until just a little bit. Yeah, yeah, okay, I see. So your idea is this originally arose 10s of 1000s of years ago, potentially somewhere in Eurasia, like you were saying, and then it spread eventually everywhere else. This doesn't get to Australia till 7000 years ago, even though people had already been there for way longer. Yes, yes, I actually okay. And
Speaker 1 1:21:23
I'm not that married to the 7000 day. Like, who knows, I could have been 15,000 I'm not claiming 7000 Yeah. Like,
Nick Jikomes 1:21:33
pretty shortly after we came out of Africa, was one of, actually the first places people went to before getting everywhere. Yeah.
Speaker 1 1:21:41
And also, I'm not so, so obviously, if you speak, you have to simplify things a lot. So it sounds like, I think, oh, there was just one explosion. No. I mean, the the human cultural phylogenetic tree is much more of a bush. And so there have been iterations on this, and yes, and schisms. It's, I don't think that there was just one thing, right? But I do think if, if we want to talk about the transition from animal to human, that I am and recursion, like, those are the two things that we should talk about, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nick Jikomes 1:22:15
Okay, so there's gonna be some repetition here, but that's good for people, and I want to make sure I'm following you completely. So lay it out for me, sort of again and elaborate a little bit more on this idea that some of this stuff could have origin. Originated, you know, you're saying pre agriculture, 20 something 1000 years ago, somewhere in Eurasia. So just lay out again for us. Why do you think that's the time of the place that might, might be key here.
Speaker 1 1:22:42
So it's because of the 20,000 years of the Venus statues. Yeah. And so you have a pretty good so if you you need to look women are have a sort of preeminence in the symbolic domain. Yep, that's, that's that's the best fit.
Nick Jikomes 1:23:01
Yeah, so Well, I guess maybe another, another way of, kind of asking what I'm trying to stew over right now is, okay, let's suppose that is true. You would have quickly imagined that. You would imagine that from that point in time and space, there would have been now quite a dramatic diffusion of new cultural stuff. Does anything show up that is very substantially different culturally shortly after that, like in that general area, like, is this when you start seeing more elaborate carvings and like, like, the do you think really seem to change in that area after this time,
Unknown Speaker 1:23:40
in which area, like when
Nick Jikomes 1:23:42
you were talking about, like in Eurasia, where you start seeing where you were sort of talking about 27,000 years ago, you think that could be the time of the last common ancestor of this?
Speaker 1 1:23:52
Yeah, yeah. So there's so some archeologists will even argue that, say abstract thought is almost non existent before, like 20,000 years ago and so on various that's I lead the my snake cult essay with, with a quote to that effect. And so there really is a dearth of of that before, before this time period. And so that's, that's another reason I'd say, like, I mean, we, that's the, that's the transition we have to explain. And so if we're, if we have a dual model of human nature, where we're, like, we're both memes and genes, that is kind of where you ex, you'd suppose that the memes spread.
Nick Jikomes 1:24:33
So what I mean, in agriculture, supposedly, what like? Maybe 12,000 years old, what like? So if, if some of these things were enabled by the concept of, I, you know, agriculture, larger scale societies, you know, what's the, what's the lag time we see between when you're supposing this cognitive emergence happened and some of these societal changes, like the invention of farming or or larger scale, more set and. Various societies, larger group, living things like that. Like, what's the lag time between those things? So like, why
Unknown Speaker 1:25:06
is there lag time? Well,
Nick Jikomes 1:25:07
why is there lag time, and what is the lag time? How much of a lag look at the archeological record? I'm
Speaker 1 1:25:12
not exactly sure. So I yeah, I go to things, things like domestication of dog, bull roar, symbolic thought, with the with the Venus statues. It's a very interesting question. In the end, I think it will be empirical. Just how, yeah, how long do we think it would take to evolve metacognition? It's a who knows exactly, yeah, a lot of people, so this is the argument from for 2 million years, is they say, Oh, I think it would have taken 2 million years to evolve medical issues.
Nick Jikomes 1:25:50
You're saying, you're saying it could have happened much faster. In that sense, this is sort of a Julian Jane's style idea, in the sense that you're saying, no, no, this stuff happened much more recently than we often suppose, and it happened relatively quickly.
Speaker 1 1:26:03
Yeah? So I actually hadn't read Julian Janes until I had this idea. And then, obviously, when I, when I started researching, I'm like, like, what is this business? I, I like his book a lot. His his timeline is pretty whack.
Nick Jikomes 1:26:16
Yeah, he's, he's saying, it's even sooner than you're saying, right, yeah, 3000
Unknown Speaker 1:26:20
years ago.
Nick Jikomes 1:26:21
Yeah, that's, that's, that's very, very soon. So what do you think are, I don't know what are, sort of the most key pieces of evidence that would bolster your theory that we could, in principle, that people could go looking for either in the archeological record or what have you. I
Speaker 1 1:26:40
so I think it's going to be the degree to which there's been selection for things like against schizophrenia, for intelligence, if we had a polygenic risk score for for age at which you pass the mirror test, I think that that would be extremely interesting. And so I think the genetics is going to be there. I think if archeology and anthropology become more interested in diffusion, I think there's a lot there. So one of the so if you think that, if you think that all these basic human parts of culture have been there for a long time, why are they so similar? So why? Why is the root of the phylogenetic tree so young and so that immediately becomes problematic. If so, for example, the the bull Roar is no longer really researched in anthropology and archeology, because if the most obvious explanation is diffusion, and it's pretty recent, and so it has to be like in the last 20,000 years, and that's just not very that's Not a very popular model in anthropology and archeology. Yeah, hmm. So you were asking the So, what's the strongest evidence? Yeah, I would say, No. I
Nick Jikomes 1:28:09
mean, like, like, why
Unknown Speaker 1:28:10
is it so? Why are all the myths so similar? Why are they
Nick Jikomes 1:28:13
said, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not asking you to recapitulate the evidence that you put forth already. I'm saying, let's just say you had uh, infinite, uh, resources, and you could deploy people to look for supporting evidence for your theory that we don't already have. What are some of the things? Where are some of the gaps here? Where are there missing pieces? Though, I
Speaker 1 1:28:31
would love archaeo botany, so I would love them to find snake venom at Gobekli Tepe. So that, I mean, obviously that would be a big win. I was going to
Nick Jikomes 1:28:41
ask you about that next, like when next. Like, when does it go black? Lee Tepe, excuse me, line up with this. Was it shortly? Like, was it sort of in this general time frame? Do you think something like that could be related?
Speaker 1 1:28:53
Yeah, so that's Gobekli. Tepe is Adam eating the fruit.
Nick Jikomes 1:28:59
So what do you mean it is that I don't know too, too much about
Speaker 1 1:29:01
it. So go back to the deputy. It's about 12,000 years ago, in 12 in Turkey. And so there's a number of interesting things. So I forget the exact numbers. It's, it's like 50% of the animals that are carved onto the megaliths, yeah, are snakes.
Nick Jikomes 1:29:20
Okay, so there's these huge, mega lists. There's lots of carvings. They are snakes, very impressive. And you're saying a lot of them are snakes. Yes,
Speaker 1 1:29:26
yes. So snakes are the primary symbol.
Nick Jikomes 1:29:31
So I guess if we're just riffing here, it could be a lot of people, you know, have speculated that place could be sort of like a hub, where people met to, do you know, whatever, big ritual, big ceremonies. It was an important place of some kind. I think where you're going with this is that maybe it was an important place where this type of ritual got mass produced and beamed out.
Speaker 1 1:29:50
Yeah, yeah. So what's Yeah, what's with the snake worship? And then particularly, I you. I really think that Genesis is a cultural memory of Gobekli Tepe. So there's a few. So first, this is right before agriculture. And
Nick Jikomes 1:30:15
when would so I'm not a Bible scholar. When do we think the oldest books of the Bible would have been written and composed about
Speaker 1 1:30:22
3000 years ago. Okay, so the Yeah, so it's a Bronze Age text, got
Nick Jikomes 1:30:26
it, got it. So 12,000 years ago is, is where we're talking about. This is right before the invention of of farming, basically, yeah,
Speaker 1 1:30:33
yeah. And so we would have to, so the myth would have to survive 8000 years. Yeah, we have so many examples of myths that have survived 8000 years. There's extremely strong evidence that that, that we have those just through, just through, like oral transmission. Yes, yes. So for example, in in Tasmania, they describe the geography before the rise of the oceans, and the oceans must the geography they're describing was covered up 13,000 years ago.
Nick Jikomes 1:31:00
So there's an example tradition that's accurately describing something that can't be, couldn't have been seen by anyone except those living back then.
Speaker 1 1:31:07
Yes. And so there's lots of examples about that. It's, it's sexy, if you're doing it, about people who aren't like the founders of Western civilization. So there's lots of, there's lots of there's lots of studies that show, hey, this, this flood myth, is true. It's not as sexy to say that about Noah, for example, that the story of Noah is a memory of the rise of the the flood waters at the end of the Ice Age. Yeah.
Nick Jikomes 1:31:37
So I think, okay, so, yeah, you think the Adam and Eve story could be an echo of what may have been happening at Gobekli Tepe,
Speaker 1 1:31:47
yes, and so other evidence about that so in it says that in Eden there are four rivers that flow out of it. So there's the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Pichon and the Gihon. We don't know what those last two are, but we do know the Tigress and the Euphrates. And if you look at the headwaters of those two rivers, there's mount Caracas DAG is in between two of them, very far up, and that is by genetic tests. That's where we domesticated the first wheat. And so it's just kind of this. So why is that detail right in the Bible? So it's saying there's Eden, and right after Eden, we get agriculture. And like we we did the genetic studies, and we found yes at karaka DAG, which is at the headwaters released two of the rivers mentioned, that is exactly where humans first domesticated wheat,
Nick Jikomes 1:32:46
huh? Yeah, it's just, I mean, one of the big themes here, with a lot of stuff, is like, it is just peculiar that these things line up, if they if it's all supposed to be arbitrary and made up,
Speaker 1 1:32:56
yes. And so also, this isn't some whack theory. So lots of people believe this, even even archeologists. So there's Jack is Calvin. He was a French archeologist who worked in the Near East for his entire career, for like, 30 years, and he wrote this book in early 90s, where he argued that there was that's the reason we got the agricultural revolution, was that there was a preceding spiritual revolution that had to do with our idea of self. So we became more self, like aware of ourselves as an individual, and then that produced a society which would then invent agriculture. And he argued in that that the stories of so the Greek creation myth, as well as the creation myth in Genesis, are memories of the transition
Nick Jikomes 1:33:52
to agriculture. What is the Greek creation myth remind us? So he
Speaker 1 1:33:56
there was particularly talking about how humans got the arts of civilization, which was from Prometheus, and so he was, he was connecting it to the fall that we did something wrong to get this, this power, that it was somehow ill begot, that we became like fully civilized humans, yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:34:20
Yeah. Yeah. And I guess, you know, the basic core idea to that is it's ill begot like something went wrong. And I guess that's maybe bound up with, well, on the one hand, we've got all these new abilities which are good, right? We can now do agriculture and invent stuff like we could before. But also, this is presumably exactly the trait that predisposes us to new kinds of mental illness. Yes, precisely, yeah, yeah. That's why humans write, like, no matter how, how well or how poorly, our mouse models of depression tell us about the human experience, like we all know, like mice don't get depressed in the way that a human can.
Speaker 1 1:34:54
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have, there's, there's a song I like about depression. Talked about storyline fever, and it's basically like you can get stuck in this recursive, illuminated these stories. Yeah, it's only because, it's only because we have an I Am, that we have that we have any of these problems. Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:35:13
yeah. And now can so everyone intuitively knows that we all have a we can understand subject, object distinctions. I have a concept of myself. You know, it's just all baked into our language. Our language. It's all very naturally intuitive to, you know, everyone's gonna be listening to this tie this concept of i to recursion, and really unpack for people from more of a computational perspective, what is recursion and why do you think that's key here?
Speaker 1 1:35:38
So, recursion is some process that takes itself as input, or so it's some process that does a computation, and then it's the output of that computation is fed back into this process.
Nick Jikomes 1:35:51
So there's a there's a loop. It's a loopy concept. Literally, there's an output that becomes its own input.
Speaker 1 1:35:58
And you might be referring to Douglas Hofstadter. I am a strange loop. Yeah, yeah. So that's a this, this idea that I requires recursion is really popular within philosophy, I see, and so you can so Douglas Hofstadter writes about how there's just some weird recursion where there's it's almost like there's a pointer at a different level than itself, and then that it's this kind of mystery that produces consciousness. So that that's what he thinks. It's actually pretty similar to Deacon. He talks about how symbolic thought is the result of recursion. If you have a pointer to some level of abstraction that is not itself, that that is required for symbolic thought, but you know,
Nick Jikomes 1:36:52
part of, like, part of what you're saying is okay, literal snake venom may have been involved at one point. It didn't necessarily need to always be there. There could have, you know, just like any other aspect of culture, you know, these things would have mutated and become elaborated and differentiated in, you know, different cultures around the world. But I think the the core of this, if I'm understanding your thesis, is that there is there, if this is true, there would have been some ritual which would have somewhere other, through meditation, through venom, through some combination of different stuff, fasting, what have you it was putting people into some kind of, probably dissociative altered state. This, this experience of death and rebirth some way, and in this ritual, this was important for people to develop this recursive ability that gave rise to the sense of, I
Speaker 1 1:37:38
Yes, and I think more than just giving them that ability, it for cultural reasons, became like, oh, you're a real person. After you experience this, there's also just a different social Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:37:50
you get a new you get status. And you know, what's interesting about that is, even to this day, even in our culture, that is what rituals often do. If you think about like a graduation ritual. It's like, you know, you put on the funny hat, you do your high school graduation, and now you're this new kind of person you can think about, you know, rituals all over the world, in all places, you often go through some arduous journey, in some sense, you know, you put on the glove filled with bullet ants or whatever you complete. You know you have four years of schooling, whatever it may be. But this idea is that after this ritual takes place, at the end of that you're now this new kind of person. And what you're saying is that this ritual, which may be sort of the ultimate ritual, it's not just that you're a new kind of person, it's like, now you're a real person, or something like that. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 1:38:37
And I, I kind of think that if, if there was some point where humans could learn I am, but didn't naturally, or it wasn't in part of culture in general, I kind of think once you discover I am and a way to teach it, there is no way that it wouldn't just spread over the entire world like it's it's such a powerful idea, and it does seem like we have it, and animals don't. And so that's really what I go back to, like there has? There should have been some moment like this, right? Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:39:10
well, is, is something that spring to mind to me here? Is it possible or plausible? If what you're saying is accurate the way you're laying it out here, at some point, shouldn't there have been, like, potentially, in very recent history, maybe some isolated tribes somewhere in some pocket of the world that didn't have this ability? Like, and if that was the case, like, how would we see it? Would we be able to tell like, what do you think about that? The
Speaker 1 1:39:38
so I like the the interpretation. There's this weird line in the Bible, like the sons of God came down to the the daughters of man. I kind of like that as a cultural memory of when men were more schizophrenic than than women. So I. That, that we are getting that from, I don't know, from 10,000 years ago. This, this, this kind of myth, because you can imagine, we haven't talked about sexual selection, but if women developed, I am more like, you can just imagine who they'd want to mate with, like, it would be maybe kind of a drag if somebody is not completely aware. Yeah, right. And so you can imagine some some sexual selection dynamics which,
Nick Jikomes 1:40:27
which would also, to the extent that's true, this would also explain why this type of change could happen on a very fast time. Of course, yes, yeah. So the strong selective, sexual selective pressure would would help take care of that. This, I mean, I mean, other thing that's sort of been implicit in some of the things you've said is this starts to make sense of why you see sex differences in things like rates of schizophrenia. Yeah,
Speaker 1 1:40:51
yeah. So men are more schizophrenic,
Nick Jikomes 1:40:55
yeah? Women, yeah, wow. What do you think? Let's like, I know that you like this idea because we were talking about your ideas here. What do you think, like, what are some of the biggest weaknesses or in this general model, and what are some of the strongest alternatives
Speaker 1 1:41:15
the so the other natural place is to say there was, like a very general evolution over the last 2 million years. And so that's because it does our genus seem, that you can argue we have a special relationship with tools. And then there's also Neanderthals were possibly producing symbolic art, even back maybe 150,000 years ago, they are arranging seats in caves and kind of strange ways and deep into caves, and at the transition, like, right when they're going extinct, there's also more like they're actually producing cave art, or that that's highly debated, but there could be some there,
Nick Jikomes 1:42:00
yeah. So I guess the more so I know that this is, you know, there's a lot of debate on this stuff, and the archeological record is, by its nature, sparse, but I guess over time, if more and more artifacts start showing up earlier and earlier that show Yes, clear evidence of symbolic cognition, that would become increasingly problematic for what you're saying.
Speaker 1 1:42:17
Yeah. So there was the thing recently about the hormone naledi, yes, very kind of So, yeah, if that were true. So if that would imply that this very divergent part of our genus, a long, long time ago, were burying their dead, yeah, that would definitely be a mark against the Eve theory of consciousness, because it has to happen so recently for myths to be informative. Yeah, yeah. There's also the so the genetic bottleneck starts actually, like 60, 70,000, years ago.
Nick Jikomes 1:42:56
Yeah, so, so, and I'm not fully up to date on this literature, but let's remind people what that is. Are you referring to? Sort of this basic there's a fairly long standing idea from population genetics and human anthropology evolution, that as we were coming out of Africa, more or less, we went through some huge population bottleneck, and we can see clear indications for that in the signatures of genetic diversity in living humans.
Speaker 1 1:43:19
Yeah, yeah, that. So everybody who isn't in Africa has a huge there's some bottleneck,
Nick Jikomes 1:43:27
and there's basically, we're much less diverse in our genome than you would otherwise think, yeah. And
Speaker 1 1:43:32
I mean, so I'm not a geneticist, it seems like that. Yeah. So definitely, that's being complicated that story, right? I see, but it also it's so how much if that there's these different lineages that go back even 300,000 years to what degree could that have? The culture of snake holder, whatever jumped? How much could that do in this time period? And so there's, that's, that's, that could be highly problematic for the theory.
Nick Jikomes 1:44:12
Interesting. What? I don't know what I mean. Have you talked to many people about this? Are there any like, has anyone independently come up with something kind of similar? Something kind of similar to this that's out there writing about it? So
Speaker 1 1:44:26
Tom, Tom first. That's why I had him on my podcast earlier. Yeah. He editor in chief of adaptive behavior, yeah, and had basically the same model. Is that it's cave art is the start of subject, object, separate, separation, and then some, some right spread. And that's why all of our rights are so similar, and also so violent, is that they share some violent ancestors. So there's like, I think that that's. I try and move people to see, like, hey, there's, there's this guy who has a lab studies this, and he still takes this idea seriously, even though, of course, everything in this space is highly, highly speculative. Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:45:11
yeah. How you know, in principle, how you know? I know there's no one answer to this, and you know, lots of different perspectives here, depending on the discipline people you know someone comes from. You know, we're talking about culture. We're talking about things that you know don't fall fossilized necessarily, even though there are some artifacts we might point to. I know how, how much evidence do you think could emerge to bolster an idea like this? Or, I mean, is it just always going to be mostly speculation and not very approval? I think
Speaker 1 1:45:47
that a lot. So one of the reasons I have devoted a lot of time and effort to this, yeah, but I think that it's empirically testable. And so I think if something like the sand shift about diffusion, people start studying diffusion more or all of the the genetic stuff. I say it's a whole new world, and so who knows what we're going to have access to in 10 years. But I I'm just, I'm happy that so SEC exists because you can kind of just put out ideas out there. And that's, that's the first step. I am also interested in more, like, serious writing, but at this stage, I think the most useful peer review I can get is from people like you who ask, like, good questions and put me on the spot.
Nick Jikomes 1:46:41
Wow. And then, so how does language tie into this? In your view, is it very intimately bound up with this? Or do you think language, or some kind of proto language, was pre existing prior to the emergence of of this recursive ability?
Speaker 1 1:46:56
So language, as far as communication must have existed for a long time. So there's animals have different calls for different types of predators, for example. And so we could have, 100,000 years ago, before recursion, we could have had just an encyclopedic set of words that we were learning.
Nick Jikomes 1:47:18
Actually, basically what you're saying is that we could have, for a very long time, had, say, a large number of vocalizations which which pointed to things concretely in the world, but it probably lacks some of the features of what we consider full fledged human language today. Yeah,
Speaker 1 1:47:31
so some, some sort of grammar and so that that could have come later. I mean, I'm not, there's not really any point of me making like of saying how self awareness is related to language, other than just pointing to the huge literature that exists, um, that tries to connect them to, like, I'm not going to write, I'm not going to say anything to cart and And Hegel didn't identify it,
Nick Jikomes 1:47:58
yeah, yeah, yeah. But wow, like it is, you know, as someone, right? I mean, I never like formally studied mythology or anything, but when you start reading about all these creation myths, which are, you know, they're always fun to read about, and it's sort of interesting from a cultural enrichment standpoint. But when you start noticing, when you do like this comparative thing, and you think about these stories and these memes and these elements of culture, the way that an evolutionary biologist would study phenotypes, physical traits of animals, and start thinking about it from, you know, a family tree perspective, it is striking that you see all of these otherwise, it is very bizarre that all these motifs come up in all of these cultures, in this throughout the entire world. And it's just it begs there must be some kind of explanation for that, because, if it can't just be coincidence, yeah,
Speaker 1 1:48:45
so there's actually a niche field of where they make phylogenetic trees of myths. So what they do is they they'll take a group of similar myths that they think are about the same thing. So it could be creation myths, and then or, or the Wild Hunt, and they come up with a set of facts about it. And so they might be 17 facts or 50 facts, and they just code this as yes, no, like the protagonist is a bear. Could, could be a question. And then they get so they get a vector, and then they do clustering on these different vectors, because they they'll have a dozens of examples of this all over the world. However, I think that that field is very bad, because whenever they're working with a global myth, they always just, from the get go, assume that this is before out of Africa, so that they just a priori make this assumption that there's no way that culture could have spread after, like, if it's universal, then it has to be before out of Africa. And so basically, they don't want to say that any. Thing in Australia is, is due to recent influence, like in the last 20,000 years. They don't want to say that. I see
Nick Jikomes 1:50:08
people are sensitive about certain cultural issues.
Speaker 1 1:50:11
Yes, yes. And so, so there. So, for example, there's a Harvard philologist with something Witzel. He wrote the on the origin of mythology. And so he makes this case that there's, there was a first creation myth told, and like, 100,000 to 160,000 years ago in Africa. And he specifically to get that date. He uses genetics. So he says, because we've been separated for this. But he's like, I don't know, what does he do? Now, there's evidence that people have been separated for 300,000 years ago. So does he now say, Oh, the root must be 300,000 years
Nick Jikomes 1:50:53
yeah, you're saying you're sort of the essence of what you're getting at here is, for all of these ideas, you either have to suppose something was inherited, and therefore goes back that far along, to our last common ancestor, hundreds of 1000s of years ago in Africa. Or your style of model, is that no, no, something arose later, but then diffused culturally to everyone, and so that that's the explanation for why it's universally around today, rather than being literally inherited from the last common ancestor?
Speaker 1 1:51:23
Yes, exactly. And so one of the I just think that their model makes no sense. So why? What evidence is there that that myths can last 100,000 years? It's just, to me, that's just silly, especially with like, so similarly. Like, why would it last? Like, it just flies in the face of all of
Nick Jikomes 1:51:47
the it would have diverged more substantially in that length of time. Is what you're saying, yes.
Speaker 1 1:51:51
And then the second thing is, there is so much human history in the last 100,000 years, and these people do not even take a stab of trying to explain why the Holocene transition, why did around the world, like five different groups of people invented agriculture all at kind of the same time? Yeah. And if you think that that myths can last 100,000 years, certainly there are going to be myths about the transition to agriculture, right? And then, so, okay, so then, why don't they interpret Genesis and and go back and start looking for a snake cult, or some religious idea that involves snakes about 12,000 years ago, like they just these people that say myths can last 100,000 years. They have no interest in that very, very basic, I guess, application of their belief.
Nick Jikomes 1:52:53
So, yeah, I want to go back to Gobekli tempi and stuff. So you mentioned that like half, I don't think it's fully excavated yet. I don't know too much about this stuff, but you're you said, I think you said, around half of the Megalis are snakes.
Speaker 1 1:53:06
The so half of the animals that are carved into the Megalis are snakes. And that's only true if you count each individual snake. So sometimes there are clusters of snakes, but there's a lot. So snakes are definitely the dominant creature, yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:53:23
yeah. And it's like, I guess, you know, other than your idea, it would be like, how would you, how would you explain the sort of the fixation of people all over the world on snakes that, I guess, the traditional way to think about that would be like, well, you snakes are dangerous, and we've always been yeah them. And so it's like, sort of this evolutionary argument about, like, being afraid of a deadly animal,
Speaker 1 1:53:47
yes, but in that case, why no evidence of snake worship before 7000 years ago in Australia, right? Like, why? Or, or in the Americas before 11,000 years ago? Yeah, it's like, gonna just point me to earlier. Point me to earlier snake worship, if you think it's just some deep seated thing in us.
Nick Jikomes 1:54:09
Yeah. And I know we already covered up on this, but it was so wild. I just want to know if there's more here. So we were talking about present day use and ingestion of snake venom. You gave the example of it being you Cobra is being used today in India. Are there any other examples? Is there anything else like that? I mean, that's a stop. I mean, I'm taking your word for this. It's not like, I just believe you, but it is so, yeah, yeah. Like, people are getting high on snake venom. Yeah, wow. Is it just in India today, or is it, like, more widespread?
Speaker 1 1:54:40
Well, as far as people recording it, it's mostly in India. There is so there is a death and rebirth ritual among the Hopi Indians. And so it involves the bull Roar is important, important to. Them, and it involves getting bit by a rattlesnake, and they so they drink a like an anti venom before they do this Snake Dance. And it's literally involves getting bit by rattlesnake. And then you look at rock art in the area dated back 1000s of years, and there's literally shamans with like eating snakes. Really, very, very strange. They also found some coprolite, which is the technical word for poop, dated about 2000 years ago in Texas, and they the person had eaten a rattlesnake hole. Wow, like fangs and everything and scales rattlesnake hole. And so anyway, the archeologists are like, this has got to be ritual, right? Like, why are they eating the fangs of a rattlesnake? Yeah. So anyway, lots, lots of weird, weird stuff all over the world. And so for over 100 years, people have written about the similarities of the Eleusinian mysteries and the Hopi Snake Dance. So they said, like, they're just so many. And when diffusion was popular, they it was like, oh, there must have been some. There must be some phylogenetic connection.
Nick Jikomes 1:56:12
How do you So, if the idea here is this ritual gave people the sense of I and, you know, that's sort of what we're talking about here. One thing that's a little bit confusing, although maybe I can think of how you, you're, you're going to answer this, but like, when, you know, people like Plato talked about doing the Eleusinian mysteries. This was something they did once their lifetime, but they did it as adults. So clearly, you know, clearly, Plato didn't need that ritual to to have his sense of self. Like, how do you, how do you square some of those details?
Speaker 1 1:56:45
I think after a while, if it is so extraordinarily painful, maybe people die sometimes, and you don't need it. Like, it seems like it would fall out of fashion. There's, maybe there's. So you can think of Abraham sacrifices, his son, Isaac, right? There's no snakes involved, but it, but it's an interesting thing where there's this, it's human sacrifice, and then it's like, actually, God will provide a RAM. And so could this be some memory of the transition from like human sacrifice to animal sacrifice? I actually know sure what we have evidence for, archeologically, first human or animal sex,
Nick Jikomes 1:57:22
interesting, interesting. So, I mean, we've already covered a lot, and this is this. I mean, this is interesting stuff, and it's like so diverse and too in terms of the knowledge it draws on. You have to understand creation myths and aspects of linguistics. You got to understand human evolution and paleoanthropology, stuff, archeological record. And obviously you have an interesting background as an electrical engineer and, like, a data science guy, how do you how do you, like, it's a really interdisciplinary area. It's probably really hard to kind of tie all these threads together, which is partly why, like, you know, there's only so many people in the world who are gonna learn enough about each of these domains to sort of come up with ideas like this. How are you how much time are you spending sort of just studying these different areas? So I was absolutely obsessed
Speaker 1 1:58:16
about it for a while. Yeah. Like going up to the Eve theory of conscious version three, and so, yeah, there's maybe a year or so where I just thought about it all the time. I'd wake up with ideas. I'd go running have more ideas. I was always trying to read more and more. Now it doesn't take up as much time because I've, I've kind of got it out of my system, got it there. I think that I articulated the model well enough that, like, if it's if it's right, people will come back to it and it'll, like, it'll gain more favor. Yeah. And so there's nothing more I really need to do, although, I mean, I, I really enjoy coming on podcasts like this. Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:59:02
you think the ideas are well fleshed out enough, as you've articulated them on your sub stack, that there's, there's fairly clear confirming, disconfirming evidence that could emerge with time. Yes, yes, yeah. And I guess, I guess the key piece of disconfirming evidence, or the type of disconfirming evidence, is what we mentioned before. So the more evidence that emerges that cognition, symbolic cognition, was clearly around much, much earlier, potentially even in diverse species of Homo the more that emerges, the more problematic it is for what you've articulated. Yes,
Speaker 1 1:59:33
although the just the stuff about a snake cult. So let's say the snake cult didn't give you I am, yeah, I think I've come up with pretty compelling evidence that there was some snake, like, there was something that spread worldwide. And I think that that, by itself, could be pretty interesting, although i i It would be disappointing to me personally, yeah, yeah, if that's all it is,
Nick Jikomes 1:59:56
yeah. So I don't know, do you want to tell people like we're like. Where can they read your stuff? Or what's the best article that summarizes this stuff that has all of like, the links and the resources to the research?
Speaker 1 2:00:08
Yeah. So just my, my sub stack, vectors of minds.com, I have pins E, theory of consciousness, version three. So that's that's the best place to start. And then I also haven't I did a recent episode of podcast monolog, where it's just overview of our articles to date. That would be the second place
Nick Jikomes 2:00:26
to go. Okay, great. Anything else you want to say, anything you want to reiterate or tie together from the conversation,
Speaker 1 2:00:35
maybe to talk a little bit more about the so 2 million years ago, I think there's some huge holes in that. So there's, let's say all, all of the species of Homo have symbolic thought. Okay, what was it about Homo sapiens that caused us to take over,
Nick Jikomes 2:00:55
right? So 2 million years ago, the genus Homo is now around, but you've also got these other species of Homo all over the world, the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, etc. And so the idea is, if we suppose they all had symbolic cognition, why is it that only Homo sapiens took over and basically ended up replacing all of those other ones? Yes,
Speaker 1 2:01:15
exactly. And then also, what about the Holocene transition? So why? Why was that all kind of, what did it all happen at the same time? Yeah, and the Yeah, the basically, the reasoning against evolving symbolic thought in the last 100,000 years is saying, Oh, something like that couldn't have evolved in that time period. However, that so that is what I think is the strongest it's
Nick Jikomes 2:01:46
such a complicated thing. It needed more time than that to bake
Speaker 1 2:01:50
Yes, however, the like ancient genetics is, I would say, disproving that, but it's certainly providing evidence against that. So I, I think that the 2 million position is getting is getting weaker because of that. And so in my mind, um, probably the pendulum will swing back to earlier or more recent explanations of human origins.
Nick Jikomes 2:02:17
Yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, my take on what you're saying, and some of the stuff you articulated is that, for a number of decades now, going back to, you know, into the 20th century, the sort of a dominant dogma in thinking about human evolution is that, well, not we basically haven't evolved in a substantial way in 50,000 years. And so all of the interesting stuff must have been baked in before that. And basically all of the genetic evidence, population genetic evidence we have, especially from ancient human genomes that's just consistently disagreed with that. Since then, there's been substantial changes that have taken place in the last few 10s of 1000s of years, even the last 10,000 years, and there probably was substantial changes in cognition that were selected for, you know, since Homo sapiens, since after Homo sapiens was radiating out of Africa.
Speaker 1 2:03:11
Yeah, so I 100% agree. Thanks for having me on. And I think of your listeners who are sympathetic to the stone date Python hypothesis, I think the primordial antigen must have been snake venom. Or did I say the stone The stone ape theory, right? Yeah, it must have been snake venom if you already believe that.
Nick Jikomes 2:03:30
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, in some ways you're this is a new riff on the stone ape theory. It's a it's very different in many of its details, but that piece of it is similar, at least, all right. Well. Andrew Cutler, thank you for your time. You know this, these are, you know, really fun ideas to talk about, and you've certainly tied together lots of cool stuff. I recommend, you know, people check out your sub stack. You're a good writer, and you, you know, you tie together a lot of references that people might be interested in, books, articles, studies, all that stuff. So, you know, check it out if you think this stuff is interesting. Yeah, thanks for having me.
