Emergence and Evolution of Complex Societies

Cocks, Doug

doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-6265-1_3

Emergence and Evolution of Complex Societies

Doug Cocks²

Chapter
First Online: 01 January 2013

569 Accesses

Abstract

Is there a sense in which the evolutionary process which has produced everything from elementary particles to the industrial age has always been the same process? And, if it is not just one process, how many processes is it?

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Notes

1.
Salthe, S.N., 2010, Development (and Evolution) of the Universe, Found. Sci., 15, pp. 357–367.
2.
Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R.B., and Bettinger, R.L., 2001, Was Agriculture Impossible During The Pleistocene but Mandatory During The Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis, American Antiquity, 66, pp. 387–411.
3.
Jaynes, J., 1976, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
4.
In several medium energy societies, the Aztecs in Mexico for example, a market-based system of distribution emerged rather than a socialist or state-controlled system. See White, L., 1959, ibid., p. 295.
5.
Peiser, B.J., 1998, Comparative Analysis of Late Holocene Environmental and Social Upheavals, In Peiser B.J., Palmer, T., and Bailey, M.E., (Eds.) Natural Catastrophes During Bronze Age Civilisations: Archaeological, Geological, Astronomical and Cultural Perspectives, BAR International Series, 728, pp. 117–139.
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Childe, V.G., 1942, What Happened in History, Penguin, London.
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9.
Cognition: Mental activities involved in acquiring, processing, organising and using knowledge.
10.
Edelman, G.M., 1989, The Remembered Past: A Biological Theory of Consciousness, Basic Books, New York; Torey, Z., 1999, The Crucible of Consciousness: A Personal Exploration of the Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
11.
Whitehead, A.N., 1933, Adventures of Ideas, Free Press, New York, p.270.
12.
In Jungian psychology the self includes the mind’s unconscious processes as well as that which experiences consciousness, namely, the ego. I am using the terms ‘self’ and ‘ego’ interchangeably here.
13.
Understanding something is commonly a matter of finding a suitable metaphor (A is B) or simile (A is like B) or analogue (A is like B in part) for the entity we wish to understand. Here, we will use metaphor as a catch-all term. See Richards, I.A., 1936, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
14.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M., 1980, Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p.15.
15.
Note that awareness of what your body is doing (i.e. proprioception) may or may not come to consciousness.
16.
Torey, Z., 1999, The Crucible of Consciousness: A Personal Exploration of the Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
17.
Calling the consciousness process the consciousness-generating process risks giving the impression that the only thing the consciousness process does is to generate consciousness. What I am calling the consciousness-generating process is similar, I think, to what Torey calls the mind system.
18.
The reticular activation system is a network of fibres and nuclei in the brainstem whose function is to activate portions of the cortex. The limbic area is an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain, concerned with emotions and instinctive behaviour.
19.
Obviously this ‘library’ is evolving, as when vocabulary increases. Also, the identification of percepts includes a ‘constancy mechanism’ which allows a changing input, e.g. a moving person, to continue to be associated with the same percept.
20.
Narrative: An account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them; a narration, a story, an account.
21.
It helps to understand this to recognise that the speech area of the left hemisphere developed, evolutionarily, from an area of the brain formerly used to control muscular activity.
22.
Jaynes, J., 1986, Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind, Canadian Psychology, 27(2), pp. 128–148. Jaynes makes the further point that before the emergence of modern self-awareness, people treated imagined words as though they were spoken words.
23.
Torey. Z., 1999, ibid., p.53.
24.
Torey. Z., 1999, ibid., p.155.
25.
Humphrey, N., 1987, The Uses of Consciousness, Fifteenth James Arthur Memorial Lecture, American Museum of Natural History, New York.
26.
In John Dewey’s terms, this is an instrumentalist perspective—thought exists as an instrument of adjustment to the environment. Specifically, terms of thought and meaning are relative to the function they perform and that their validity or truth is determined by their efficacy. See Dewey, J., 1922, Human Nature and Conduct, An Introduction to Social Psychology, Modern Library, New York.
27.
In logic, induction is the process of generalising over multiple examples, commonly by emphasising similarities and ignoring differences between them.
28.
Koestler, A., 1964, The Act of Creation, Hutchinson, London, p.35.
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Ong, W., 1982, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Methuen, London.
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Cohn, J., 2007, The Minds of the Bible: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Consciousness, http://www.julianjaynes.org/ (Accessed 1 Nov, 2007).
35.
Eliade, M., 1954, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, (Trans. W.Trask), Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
36.
Whitehead, A.N., 1933, ibid., p.120. Whitehead notes the difficulties of Plato, a metaphysician of genius, had in making language express anything beyond the familiarities of everyday life and goes on to say that it is misleading to study the history of ideas without constant remembrance of the struggle of novel thought with the obtuseness of language.
37.
Heylighen, F., 1991, Cognitive Levels of Evolution: From Pre-Rational to Meta-Rational, In F. Geyer (Ed.), The Cybernetics of Complex Systems-Self-organisation, Evolution and Social Change, Intersystems, Salinas, CA. pp. 75–79. Heylighen points out that ‘legitimate’ associations conform to (are controlled by) learned rules based on experience, e.g. syntactic rules, cultural rules, selection rules and historical rules.
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Broad, C.D., 1925, The Mind and its Place in Nature, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, p.24.
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Scaruffi, P., 2006, The Nature of Consciousness: The Structure of Life and the Meaning of Matter, http://www.scaruffi.com/cogn.html(Accessed 13 Jan 2011); Wilber, K., 1999, Up From Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution, Shambahla, Boston and London, p.31; Berman, M., 2000, Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality, SUNY Press, New York; Lévy-Bruhl, L., 1923, Primitive Mentality, Allen and Unwin, London; Laszlo, E., 2004, Cosmic Connectivity: Toward a Scientific Foundation for Transpersonal Consciousness, The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 23, pp. 21–31.
40.
The physiological basis for associative learning is that a synaptic connection which is used often will increase its strength such that the probability that it will be used again increases. Ultimately, associative learning is the only sort of learning there is.
41.
Relative to syntactic language, protolanguage is characterised by a form of expression in which words are merely grouped in short utterances, with no grammatical support. Its characteristics are: no grammatical words, no long-range dependency within the sentence, no inflection, no consistent order. Search engines use protolanguage.
42.
Wilber, K., 1999, ibid.
43.
Wilber, K., 1999, ibid., p.423.
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47.
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48.
Jaynes likens this experience to that of contemporary schizophrenics. Alexander Luria’s research on contemporary children posits that a child is at first instructed to do various tasks by an adult, then learns to give himself/herself linguistic commands. These self-instructions are at first uttered aloud and then gradually take the form of internal covert instructions. See Luria, A.R., 1930/2002 A Child’s Speech Responses and the Social Environment In Cole, M.,(Ed), The Selected Writings of A.R. Luria Sharpe, New York, pp. 45–77.
49.
Jaynes, J., 1976, ibid., pp. 427–430.
50.
Jaynes, J., 1976, ibid., p. 143.
51.
Jaynes, J., 1976, ibid., p.195.
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Tainter, J.A., 2000, Problem Solving, Complexity, History, Sustainability, Population and Environment, 22 (1), pp. 3–41.
54.
Gellner, E., 1995, Anthropology and Politics: Revolutions in the Sacred Grove, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, MA, p. 160.
55.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M., ibid.
56.
Stauffer, D., and Aharony. A.,1985, Introduction to Percolation Theory, Taylor and Francis, London.
57.
Heylighen, F. 1991, Cognitive levels of evolution: from pre-rational to meta-rational, In The Cybernetics of Complex systems-Self-organisation, Evolution and Social Change, (F. Geyer Ed.) Intersystems, Salinas, Ca. pp. 75–79. Heylighen points out that ‘legitimate’ associations conform to (are controlled by) learned rules based on experience, e.g. syntactic rules, cultural rules, selection rules, historical rules.
58.
Fox, R., 1994, The Challenge of Anthropology: Old Encounters and New Excursions, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, p.173. Metonymy is treating parts as wholes; e.g. counting ‘heads’, not people.
59.
Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M., 1980, ibid., p.117.
60.
Wittgenstein 1921/1974 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (Trans by Pears, D.F. and McGuinness, B.F.), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, Proposition 5.6.
61.
Snell, B., 1960, ibid., Ch. 1.
62.
North, D.C., 1991, Institutions, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5 (1), pp. 97–112.
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Koestler, A., 1970, The Ghost in the Machine, Pan, London, p. 277.
64.
Taylor, C., 1971, Interpretation and the Sciences of Man, Review of Metaphysics, 25 (1), pp. 3–51.
65.
Ames, R.T., 1983, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought, University of Hawaii Press, Hawaii.
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67.
Adams, R.N., 1975, Energy and Structure: A Theory of Social Power, University of Texas Press, Austin and London, p.281.
68.
Purpose: An end state that one plans to assist to eventuate (a) because it seems causally feasible and (b) which, for sufficient reasons, one wishes to see eventuate.
69.
Lloyd, C., 1993, The Structures of History, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, pp. 42–43; Giddens, A., 1979, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis, Macmillan, London.
70.
Le Blanc, S., with Register, K., 2003, ibid…
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73.
White, L., 1959, ibid., p.205.
74.
White, L., 1959, ibid., p.227.
75.
Cottrell, W.F., 1955, Energy and Society: The Relation Between Energy, Social Change and Economic Development, McGraw-Hill, New York, p.34.
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79.
Giddens, A., 1979, ibid.; Lloyd, C., 1993, ibid.
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Carneiro, R.L., 1973, A Reappraisal of the Roles of Technology and Organisation in the Origin of Civilization, American Antiquity, 39 (2), pp. 178–186.
81.
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Snooks, G.D., 1996, The Dynamic Society: Exploring the Sources of Global Change, Routledge, New York.
84.
McLuhan, M., 1962, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. 43–44.
85.
By viewing cultural evolution in terms of the co-evolution of material and social technologies one avoids bruising arguments as to which of these leads and which follows in the development of culture. See Carneiro, R.L., 1973, ibid.
86.
Abel, T., 1998, Complex Adaptive Systems, Evolutionism, and Ecology within Anthropology: Interdisciplinary Research for Understanding Cultural and Ecological Dynamics, Georgia Journal of Ecological Anthropology, 2, pp. 6–29.
87.
Cottrell, W.F., 1955, ibid.
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Dodgshon, R.A., 1998, ibid.
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Elwell, F.W., 1991, ibid., p.11.
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100.
Boyd, R., and Richerson, P.J., 1996, Why Culture is Common, but Cultural Evolution is Rare, Proceedings of the British Academy, 88, pp. 77–93; Le Blanc, S., with Register, K., 2003, ibid.
101.
Berger, P., and Luckmann, T.,1966, ibid.

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Cocks, D. (2013). Emergence and Evolution of Complex Societies. In: Global Overshoot. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6265-1_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6265-1_3
Published: 05 February 2013
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