0336 Chapter four, on the era of collective intentionality, starts with the term, “a modern human society”.

But, what does the word, “modern”, indicate?

Does it indicate the Lebenswelt that we evolved in?

Or does it indicate our current Lebenswelt?

0337 Tomasello does not even imagine the possibility that our current Lebenswelt is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

The cultural transition from the latter to the former nominally begins 0.0078Myr years ago.

That is 7824 years ago, more or less.

0338 I like this particular year because scholars may covert from AD (Anno Domini) to U0′ (Ubaid Zero Prime) simply by adding 5800.

But, astrologers may have other suggestions.  So, the jury is out for year zero of Ubaid Zero Prime.

Say what?

If the heavens operate as a timepiece on the Celestial Earth, then maybe astrologers on the Mundane Earth can calculate out a conjunction, among planets known only to moderns, around 5800 B.C.  A significant conjunction would perhaps, correspond to the nominal birth of Adam and the mythic initiation of our current Lebenswelt.

The exercise may be viewed as a modern tribute to the three wise men who brought gifts to the Christ child.

0339 The hypothesis of the first singularity is initially proposed in two works, The First Singularity and Its Fairy Tale Trace (short and scientific) and An Archaeology of the Fall (longer and aesthetic).  Both are by Razie Mah.  Both are available for purchase at smashwords and other e-book venues.

The take-home message?

The evolution of talk is not the same as the evolution of language.

The evolution of talk plays a key role in the hypothesis of the first singularity.

Constrained social complexity is a hallmark of the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.  Before two-hundred thousand years ago, hominins practice hand-talk.  Then, with the evolution of our species, speech is added to hand-talk.  Humans practice a dual-mode way of talking, called “hand-speech talk”.  They do so for two hundred thousand years.  At first, speech is like a musical accompaniment to hand talk.  Over generations, speech takes more and more a life of its own.

Then, the first singularity starts with the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia.

Civilization is potentiated by speech-alone talk.  All civilized peoples practice speech-alone talk.  Civilization belongs to our current Lebenswelt.

0340 So, let me look at a more detailed timeline for the era of collective intentionality.

Before 0.2Myr, speech is added to hand talk at the start of our own species, Homo sapiens.

0341 Even though Tomasello does not know about Razie Mah, his arguments support the incredible scenarios on display in The Human Niche and An Archaeology of the Fall.

The era of joint intentionality lays the foundation.

The era of collective intentionality builds the edifice, a living world where the collaboration of teams (15) cultivates every social circle, from family (5), to intimate friends (5), to bands (50), to communities (150) and, in moments of gathering, mega-bands (500) and tribes (1500).  Every social circle adapts to its proximate niche.  Every social circle adapts to the ultimate niche of triadic relations.  Traditions favor harmony among social circles.  Every social circle encourages human flourishing.

0342 Is this what we evolved to be?

We work (for foods and) for objects that cannot be pictured or pointed to using hand-talk and hand-speech talk.  Yet, they are real, nonetheless.  We cannot analyze the objects that bring us together within each social circle, because hand-talk does not permit explicit abstraction.  Hand-talk facilitates implicit abstraction.  When these implicit abstractions are adaptive, they end up as adaptations.  They infuse the hominin body and brain.  They are the roots and the branches of our tree of life.

0343 Perhaps, to the civilized person, this harmony between social circles and human bodies and brains seems a little too… shall I say?… utopian.

Does it sound a little too similar to what Thomas Aquinas labels, “original justice”?

See Comments on Daniel Houck’s Book (2020) “Aquinas, Original Sin and The Challenge of Evolution”, by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues.

0344 All this ends with the first singularity.

Our current Lebenswelt is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

We are not who we evolved to be.

0345 My recommendation?

Place a dark line through the term, “modern human society”, whenever it appears in Tomasello’s text, and replace it with a label for a world, where we live as who we evolved to be.

At the center of the Lebenswelt that we evolved in stands the tree of life.

0346 During the era of collective intentionality, humans become who we evolved to be.

Tomasello taps into that long-forgotten world by reviewing research into the cognitive abilities of newborns and infants.  They start to pantomime and to point.  But, as they learn speech-alone talk, they pantomime less and less.  They continue to point.

This behavioral trend tells me that speech-alone talk usurps the pantomime (or iconic) aspect of hand talk. 

Also, it tells me that speech-alone talk can never deliver the pointing (or indexal) aspect of hand talk.

0347 Spoken words point to… what?.. the presence of a speaker?

And, the images that spoken words provide, what of these?

0348 Are they illusions of reference?

Spoken words are codes that trigger decodings of what we imagine the referent must be.  

With hand talk, the referent becomes obvious.  The referent is what the pantomime imitates.  A part stands for the whole.  Both the part and the whole are real.  We innately anticipate words to be pictures of something so real that it can be imaged and indicated.

With speech-alone talk, the referent of a word is not so obvious.  Yet, we innately anticipate that it is.  For this reason, civilizations fashion artifacts that validate the reference that we project into our spoken words.  The validation works, until, of course, it doesn’t.

0349 Language evolves in the milieu of hand-talk.  Technically, language consists of two related systems of differences,parole (talk) and langue (mental processing of talk).  Grammar consists of symbolic operations within a fixed and finite system of differences (also known as “a symbolic order”).  In terms of semiotics, in linguistic hand talk, the natural sign-qualities of symbol operate unnoticed below the surface of manual-brachial icons and indexes.

Hand-talk words picture and point to their referents.  Yet, once hand-talk becomes fully linguistic among all social circles, nonsensical statements, such as “The grass has eyes.”, open novel cognitive territories beyond the range of sensible construction.  Sensible construction is mandatory in teams. But, what about community?

A community demands larger cognitive spaces.

Nonsensical statements allow the social construction of evocative judgments that carry meaning beyond literal decoding.  “The grass has eyes.” may warn about snakes in the area.  It may also be a warning about a particular community member.

0350 What brings all of the above into play?

The domestication of fire does.

0351 With the domestication of fire, cooking provides calories and nutrients not available in raw food.  More foods become edible with cooking.  A huge expansion of teamwork is called for.  More teams mean larger brains and larger groups.

Prior to fire, hominins undoubtedly engaged in teamwork for culinary practices that are currently not imagined (and perhaps, may be unimaginable to our civilized minds).  There is a fine art to finding the right conditions for allowing food to rot and still be edible.  Rotten food may be more nutritious than raw.  After all, it is predigested… or… something like that… and maybe seething with protein-rich edible bugs.  Each new trick of food preparation calls for a new team to perfect the methods.  Each successful team increases the reproductive success of its team members and selects for physiology and temperament and cognitive capacities that make the methods more and more intuitively natural.

0352 Fire is more than icing on the cake of Acheulean food preparation.

Fire unlocks calories and vitamins by compromising the cellular integrity of raw foods.

No wonder fire-cooked food tastes delicious.

0353 Fire unlocks another opportunity.  Now, talk no longer belongs to each team (15).  Everyone sits around the fire after a big cooked meal.  Talk itself  becomes something like a team sport.  Talk becomes a communal activity.

Steven Mithen, in Prehistory of Mind (1996), discusses a transition from minds built like Romanesque cathedrals to minds built like Gothic cathedrals.   The Romanesque cathedral has a relatively small nave and is ringed by (almost) free-standing chapels.  This reminds me of hand-talk locked in teams during the era of joint attention.  The Gothic cathedral has a huge nave with small chapels on the sides.  This reminds me of hand-talk opening to all in the community, so that fully-linguistic hand-talk changes all the social circles, including teams.

0354 Tomasello does not dabble with such metaphors.  He notes that hominin society in the era of collective intentionality may be characterized by two dimensions.

The first dimension is synchronic.  To me, that means, at every now, the social circles of family (5), intimate friends (5), teams (15), bands (50), communities (150), along with the nascent mega-bands (500) and tribes (1500) appear, to any individual, something like the tree of life.  

The second dimension is diachronic.  To me, that means, at every passage, the social circles work in tandem to achieve coherence, resolution and harmony, not with some explicitly abstracted formulation of a necessary order, but with the lives of all present, past and future. The tree of life has always been there.  The tree of life will always be there.

0355 Oh, forget the metaphor.

Tomasello’s two dimensions concern the transmission of cultural practices.  The word, “conventionalization”, applies.

0356 How does conventionalization come to be?

Obligatory collaborative foraging is so productive that the era of joint intentionality saw the destabilization of two demographic factors.  First, as the number of teams increase and as teams become more and more productive (by selective breeding, so to speak), the size of the band (50) increases to the size of a community (150).  The hominin brain increases in size proportionately.

The second is that, as the number of communities increase, intergroup competition begins.  Intergroup competition becomes a proximate niche in hominin evolution.

0357 The era of joint intentionality overflows into the era of collective intentionality.

0358 Just as the Homo genus first appears during the course of the era of joint intentionality, our species, Homo sapiens,appears during the course of the era of collective intentionality.

Here is a list of Tomasello’s eras of intentionality.

0359 How does the evolution of talk match up with these eras?

0360 The era of individual intentionality starts with the last common ancestor.  The voice is not under voluntary control.  The arms and hands are, for the most part, under voluntary control.  They are used to request, inform and share.  But, there are moments when they are less communicative, such as when a big fight happens.  Then, the arms and hands become weapons.  So do the teeth.

In other words, communicative manual-brachial gestures are most likely to be shared among friends and family.  Pantomime and pointing are the primary modes.

0361 Once our lineage is fully bipedal (labeled by the term, “hominid), many species of “southern ape” evolve.  The one that leads to our lineage (labeled by the term, “hominin”) adapts to the environment and ecology of mixed forest and savannah by working in teams.  “We work for food.” is the motto.  The teams are as diverse as what hominins figure that they can eat, that is not already taken by the baboons, vultures, hyenas, and so forth.  The Oldowan stone-tool team is the only one to leave artifacts that evolutionary anthropologists study today.

Oldowan stone tools remain unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years.

0362 Hand talk is used in team work.  For this to happen, manual-brachial gestures rely on pantomime and pointing.  Gestures serve as natural signs, icons and indexes, based on the principles of similarity and indication.  Icons and indexes tend to be intuitively obvious.

As voluntary, purpose- and situation-driven hand signs are routinized, they become more and more linguistic.  According to Ferdinand de Saussure, language consists of two systems of differences, parole (talk) and langue (corresponding mental processing).  The parole aspect consists in routine manual-brachial iconic and indexal signs (gesture-words).  The langue aspect is a little more difficult to describe.

0363 Oddly enough, the schoolmen of the so-called “Middle Ages” formalize a portrayal of the way humans think.  Impressions are called, in Latin, species impressa.  Perceptions virtually situate impressions.  They are called species expressa. Then, a perception may or may not be judged.  A judgment puts sensation and perception into perspective.  A species intelligibilis virtually brings a universal aspect of the species impressa into relation with an intelligible aspect of the species expressa.  A species intelligibilis brings a species impressa intelligibilis into relation with a species expressa intelligibilis.

0364 Would Tomasello label this portrayal, “The process of intelligibilization.”?

I wonder.

Am I exhausted?

This is so intelligibilitating.

0365 Here is a picture.

0366 This diagram proves valuable in understanding langue, the mental processing that corresponds to parole (that is, hand talk).  A gesture-word gets decoded in the sign-vehicle of the specifying sign, which is located in the slot for species impressa_2a.  This is why the natural signs of icon and index are so crucial to hand talk.  The referent already exists.  All the talker needs to do is to pantomime or to point in order to tell another person on the team the potential of ‘something’ happening_1a in the normal context of teamwork happening_3a.

0367 What does it mean to “me”?

Well, what “you” are telling me must be obvious (each word is an icon or an index) and easy to guess (each word must be distinct enough that I don’t confuse it with another gesture-word).  Today, this is called, “sensible construction”.  See Razie Mah’s A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction, available at smashwords and other e-book venues.

0368 Sensible construction associates to the content and situation levels of the scholastic interscope.

Sensible construction associates to interventional and specifying signs, as shown in the following figure.

0369 During the era of joint intentionality, hominins get better and better at talking.  They get better and better at sensible construction.  The iconicity and indexality of hand talk is crucial.  Symbolic features operate under the surface of species impressa_2a.

Also, the exemplar sign, the bridge between the specifying and the interventional sign, becomes more and more embodied.  Tomasello’s “common cognitive ground”_3c operates on the potential of mutual intention_1c in the exemplar sign-interpretant.  Teamwork itself makes obvious the perspective-level normal context_3c and potential_1c.

Hominins get better and better at performing interventional signs.

The Homo genus appears in the archaeological record during the era of joint intentionality.

0370 The era of collective intentionality begins with the domestication of fire.

Fire changes the dynamics of the band (50) and community (150), hand-talk is no longer confined to team (15) activities.  A fully linguistic hand-talk adapts to the opportunity.  As noted in How To Define the Word “Religion” (by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues), a fully grammatical hand-talk allows nonsensible statements.  Each gesture-word in a statement may be an icon or an index.  However, the statement itself may be nonsensical.

0371 A nonsensible statement cannot be sensibly situated_1b.  No-one knows what it might mean to me_3b.  The specifying sign is thwarted and the exemplar sign, already adapted to the common cognitive ground_3c and shared intentionality_1c of team hand talk, must now figure out… or… “socially construct” meaning, presence and message.

This meaning, presence and message does not fit the slogan, “We work for food.”.

The meaning, presence and message must fit something else, such as “We work for an organizational objective.” or “We work for the object that brings us into… um… organization or… hmmm…. relation.”

But, remember, none of these terms, “meaning”, “presence”, “message”, “organization” or “relation” can be imaged or indicated using hand talk.  These explicit abstractions label implicit abstractions that become embodied, through natural selection, during the Lebenswelt that we evolved in.

0372 Social construction turns out to be very useful in the proximate niche of intergroup competition, as well as in the proximate niche of increasing number and diversity of successful teams (due to the advantages of cooking with fire).

One wonders about the diverse challenges and opportunities to using a fully linguistic hand-talk.  Well, for one, a fully grammatical hand-talk allows one to make metaphorical statements that have two constructions, one sensible and one social.  For two, a fully grammatical hand-talk allows one to make nonsensible statements, yielding social constructionsthat may bring members of the community into organization… and… relation.

0373 Not all nonsensible statements are born the same.

Some produce judgments that seal the marriage deal between a man and a woman.  

For example, today, many religious traditions place a ring on the finger of each bonded man and woman.

How nonsensical is that?

Some nonsensical statements produce judgments that assist in bringing social circles, such as “band” and “community”, into harmony.  When communities come together seasonally, for a mega-band (500) gatherings, or on great occasions, for tribal gatherings (1500), the voice is used for synchronization.  Eventually, the voice adapts.  Hominins learn to sing.  Sexual selection assists in what happens next.  The voice comes under voluntary neural control.  Generations later, hand-talk enjoys a vocal, musical accompaniment.

0374 Then, in an act of natural genius, musical vocalizations becomes spoken words.  At its conception, our species, Homo sapiens, practices hand-speech talk.  Two modes of talking, one foundational and one… well… an adornment.  One is based on icons and indexes.  One sounds out the tones of pure symbols.  Each sound-word is different.  Yet, not one can picture or point to its referent.

0375 The concept of two modes of talk in a single language may seem strange.

The art and culture of the so-called “Upper Paleolithic” period explores cognitive spaces opened by hand-speech talk.

I suspect that this claim best explains the so-called “Upper Paleolithic Revolution”.

The evolution of talk is not the same as the evolution of language.

0376 In the era of collective intentionality, a common ground_3c brings every social circle into harmony.  Collective intentionality_1c enters into every social circle.  Diverse social circles prove adaptive in the proximate niches of intergroup competition, migration and settlement into novel environments and ecologies, and surviving the chaotic and often harsh weather regimes of the Pleistocene.

In the time of Homo sapiens, in the Lebenswelt that we evolved in, hand-speech talk opens cognitive spaces that bring constrained social complexity to the verge of differentiating the social, the organizational and the individual.  But, the iconic and indexal nature of hand talk constrains differentiation, even as the symbolic nature of speech would release the Lebenswelt into unconstrained complexity.

0377 Indeed, the loss of the hand-talk component of hand-speech talk marks the end of the era of collective intentionalityand the start of the first singularity.

0378 Tomasello concludes his chapter on collective intentionality with a note on objectivity.  The objective view is the view from “nowhere”.  The objective viewpoint rises above both joint and collective intentionality.  At least, that is the promise.  Objectivity differentiates what joint and collective intentionality sense, but cannot articulate.

In our current Lebenswelt of speech-alone talk, a spoken word can become as objective as a surgeon’s blade.  A spoken word can become as objective as a machete. A spoken word can become as objective as a cutting remark.  Spoken wordsare purely symbolic beings.  They cannot picture or point to their referents.

So, the modern use of the word, “objective”, means cut off from any subjective point of view.

0379 In the late-modern civilizations of the West, a written law is considered objective.  It stands above and contains each and every one of us.  Similarly, scientific facts and theories are supposed to be objective, because they stand below each and every one of us.

0380 Tomasello give this reader the impression that “objectivity” is one of the benefits of our current Lebenswelt.

0381 But, I wonder.

If I place an “objective” written law_2c above my “subjective” perceptions_2b, and if I insist that my “subjective” perceptions_2b must be underwritten by scientific impressions_2a, then I arrive at a dystopian picture of the way humans think.

0382 Here is the interscope.

Is this the natural end of human thinking?