This chapter (12) in The Hunter Gatherer’s Guide discusses the relation and tension of culture and consciousness.
As Weinstein and Heying define them:
Culture is the set of beliefs and practices that are shared and passed between members of populations. Culture can be passed horizontally- making it a lot faster and more nimble than genetic evolution. It also renders it noisier in the short term since new ideas haven’t stood the test of time. Long standing features of culture, by contrast, constitute an efficient packaging of proven patterns
Consciousness is that portion of cognition that is packaged for exchange. Conscious thoughts could be delivered if someone asked what you were thinking about.
Dave’s comments:
I’ve heard them converse about this before- that would say it makes no sense to ask whether individual consciousness comes before collective consciousness since the point of consciousness is really communication between individuals. They therefore believe individual and collective consciousness arose at the same time.
When I first heard this I thought, no, of course individual consciousness would have had to have preceded collective consciousness. And it does seem counterintuitive to accept their point, but I do at least see it. If subconscious thoughts are what is going on beneath your conscious level… such that the brain is processing, but you’re unaware of it, then conscious thoughts are those that you’re aware of. And if you’re aware of them, then they can be shared with someone else.
One of the examples I’ve heard Bret Weinstein use to give an analog of the process from conscious to cultural is the process of learning ping pong. At first, there will be a lot of deliberate conscious effort put into training yourself to perform the actions. But if you are ever to really progress, then those things will need to be learned so well, that you no longer think about them, they are done automatically on a type of autopilot. This doesn’t mean that they’re no longer necessary, they’re absolutely necessary. But they move into a realm where they aren’t the products of conscious thought anymore- they’re taken for granted.
In my own life, I could think of playing the guitar in the same way. When I first learned chords I had to really think about playing them correctly. I’ve now gotten to the point where I not only know the chords, I know the relationships between them, such that I can play a song without even really having to think about the chords. My hands just move where they need to.
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The products of consciousness, if they prove useful, are ultimately packaged into highly transmissible culture.
The human niche is to move between the paired, inverse modes of culture and consciousness. When humans are exploiting well-understood opportunities, culture is king. But when novelty renders ancestral wisdom inadequate, we need to shift to consciousness. Through the parallel processing of multiple human minds, we can solve problems that neither we could solve as individuals nor our ancestors ever imagined.
Novel levels of novelty, such as we are experiencing now, call us to consciousness on a scale we have not seen before.
As people move across space, it’s relatively easy to notice when the ancestor’s wisdom becomes less applicable. As people move through time though, elders may not recognize their wisdom as outdated. The young see it. Moving through this time of extremely rapid change, it’s more difficult to know what to do with the increasing irrelevance of the ancestor’s wisdom, and what to replace it with.
There are three broad contexts in which humans have learned and innovated.
1) the utterly new idea
2) when you know something is possible, on the basis that it’s been done before, but you don’t know how to make it happen.
3) get instruction on something that you know is possible
The third is the most cultural- it is gained through the transmission of received wisdom. But one and two are through the most consciousness, and are therefore the most innovative. When the status quo is no longer sufficient, we must seek to innovate and push beyond how it’s always been done.
Conformity
Most of us will conform with what is around us. Conformity has a time and a place. But there is also a difference between conforming and disagreeing in the face of apparent inconsistency. This tension is a hidden strength of humans- the push and pull between wisdom and innovation, between culture and consciousness.
Humans are generalists at the species level, but specialists at the individual level. We combine forces to achieve this. But in a time of hyper-novelty when the received cultural wisdom isn’t sufficient, individuals must become more generalist- learning skills across domains, rather than diving deep into one area.
And while it is important to know what the group thinks, in a time of rapid change, it is important to be willing to be the lone voice.
Literally false, metaphorically true
Cultural beliefs can at times be literally false, but metaphorically true in that they enshrine values that are adaptive and useful. It is easy to dismiss them because they are literally false, but doing so may in fact tear down truths that are difficult to recover in other ways. “As an evolved creature you are built to succeed, and sometimes that involves telling yourself stories”
These rituals and beliefs are evolutionarily expensive. There is a cost to maintaining them, and adaptively, they wouldn’t have survived if the benefit didn’t outweigh the costs. The authors state that religion is adaptive, and moralizing gods, while not being prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, seem to help sustain multiethnic empires once they have become established. Religion is an efficient encapsulation of past wisdom, wrapped in an intuitive, instructive, and difficult to escape package.
When the ancestral wisdom runs out, humans pool their dissimilar experiences and expertise to discover how to bootstrap some new way of being. There will always be tension between those that want to stay the course and those looking to break from tradition. Functional systems need both culture and consciousness, orthodoxy and heterodoxy.