The material difference in human cognition

Abstract

Humans leverage material forms for unique cognitive purposes: We recruit and incorporate them into our cognitive system, exploit them to accumulate and distribute cognitive effort, and use them to recreate phenotypic change in new individuals and generations. These purposes are exemplified by writing, a relatively recent tool that has become highly adept at eliciting specific psychological and behavioral responses in its users, capability it achieved by changing in ways that facilitated, accumulated, and distributed incremental behavioral and psychological change between individuals and generations. Writing is described here as a self-organizing system whose design features reflect points of maximal usefulness that emerged under sustained collective use of the tool. Such self-organization may hold insights applicable to human cognitive evolution and tool use more generally. Accordingly, this article examines the emergence of the ability to leverage material forms for cognitive purposes, using the tool-using behaviors and lithic technologies of ancestral species and contemporary non-human primates as proxies for matters like collective use, generational sustainment, and the non-teleological emergence of design features.

An introduction to papers from workshops on the evolution of cultural complexity

“…Although cases of decrease and loss of complexity have been recorded—perhaps the result of population decline to the point where skills are lost, particularly technological knowledge related to complex “tools that are hard to learn to make, and easy to screw up” (Henrich, 2006, p. 776)—in global terms complexity tends to increase with time. There is a caveat, however: A trend toward complexity in one sector of culture may be uncorrelated with what occurs in other sectors (Overmann, 2020). For example, the 40,000-year period of morphological similarity among Homo sapiens , from the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic through modern times, does not match the strong acceleration in complexity shown in material culture from the same period.…”