Words&Dirt

“I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?”

––East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, pg. 131

“Social cognition rests on what is sometimes called an exaptation. Adaptation led to an integrated body-model in the brain and to the phenomenal self-model. Then the existing neural circuitry was ‘exapted’ for another form of intelligence: It suddenly proved useful in tackling a different set of problems. This process began with low-order motor resonance; then, second- and third-order embodiment led to embodied simulation as a brand-new tool in developing social intelligence. Like everything else in evolution, this process was driven by chance. There was no purpose behind it, but it eventually led us where we are today––to the formation of intelligent, scientific communities peopled by conscious agents trying to understand this very process itself.

The new emerging general picture is inspiring: We are all constantly swimming in an unconscious sea of intercorporality, permanently mirroring one another with the aid of various unconscious components and precursors of the phenomenal Ego. Long before conscious, high-level social understanding arrived on the scene, and long before language evolved and philosophers developed complicated theories about what it takes for one human being to acknowledge another as a person and a rational individual, we were already bathed in the waters of implicit, bodily intersubjectivity. Few great social philosophers of the past would have thought that social understanding had anything to do with the premotor cortex, and that ‘motor ideas’ would play such a central role in the emergence of social understanding. Who could have expected that shared thought would depend upon shared ‘motor representations’? Or that the functional aspects of the human self-model that are necessary for the development of social consciousness are nonconceptual, prerational, and pretheoretical?”

––The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, by Thomas Metzinger, pg. 170-1