Humans are master meaning generators

A hashtag in the sky above a school at dusk in southern Rhode Island.  

Was it put there intentionally? What does it mean?

For as long as we’ve been writing about exquisite Paleolithic cave paintings and carefully crafted Stone Age tools we’ve been debating their meanings.  And the debate carries on because meaning is difficult to interpret and that’s largely because “what does it mean?” is a loaded question.

“Meaning” is a hallmark of humanity and, as the thinking often goes, it is a unique aspect of Homo sapiens. No other species is discussing meaning with us. We’re alone here. So we’re supposed to be at least mildly shocked when we learn that Neanderthals decorated their bodies with eagle talons. And it’s supposed to be even harder to fathom that Neanderthals marked symbolic thinking on cave walls. But such is the implication of lines marked by Neanderthals in the shape of a hashtag at Gibraltar. 

source: "The Gibraltar Museum says scratched patterns found in the Gorham’s Cave, in Gibraltar, are believed to be more than 39,000 years old, dating back to the times of the Neanderthals. Credit: EPA/Stewart Finlayson"

This sort of meaningful behavior, combined with the fact that many of us are harboring parts of the Neanderthal genome, encourages us to stop seeing Neanderthals as separate from us. But another interpretation of the hashtag is one of mere doodling; its maker was not permanently and intentionally scarring the rock with meaning. These opposing perspectives on meaning, whether it’s there or not, clash when it comes to chimpanzee behavior as well.  

We’ve grown comfortable with the ever-lengthening list of chimpanzee tool use and tool-making skills that researchers are reporting back to us. But a newly published chimpanzee behavior has humans scratching their heads. Chimpanzees in West Africa fling stones at trees and hollow tree trunks. The stones pile up in and around the trees, looking like a human-made cairn (intentional landmark) in some cases.  Males are most often the throwers, pant-hooting as they go, which is a well-knownscore to various interludes of chimpanzee social behavior. 

source: "Mysterious stone piles under trees are the work of chimpanzees.© MPI-EVA PanAf/Chimbo Foundation"

Until now, chimp behaviors that employ nature’s raw materials—stones, logs, branches, twigs, leaves—have been easy to peg as being “for” a reason. They’re for cracking open nutritious nuts, for stabbing tasty bushbabies (small nocturnal primates), or for termite fishing. But throwing stones at trees has nothing to do with food. If these chimps do it for a reason then it’s a little more esoteric. 

Maybe they do it for pleasure, to let off steam, or to display, or maybe they do it because someone else did it. It may be all of those things at once, and maybe so much more. Maybe you’d call that ritual. Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d say that they do it because that’s what chimps do in those groups: they walk on their knuckles; they eat certain foods; they make certain sounds; they sleep in certain terms in certain trees; and they do certain things with rocks, like fling them in certain places. Maybe we could just say that this behavior is the way of certain chimpanzees, hardly more mystifying than other behaviors that we’ve come to expect of them.

For comparison, I have certain ways. There are piles of books near my desk. They pile up on tables and shelves. I could fling books on the floor but I don’t. I’m not against flinging them on the floor; it’s just not how things are usually done. I share this behavior with many other, but not all, humans in the presence of books, tables, and shelves.  Until I wrote this paragraph, I never gave it much thought, it’s not something that factors even remotely into how I see the world or my place in it, and yet the piling of books on tables and shelves is quite a conspicuous and, therefore, large part of my daily life.

  

So, why isn’t someone setting up a camera trap in my office and writing up “human accumulative book piling” in Nature? Because this type of behavior, whatever it means, is quintessentially human. No one could claim to discover it in a prestigious publication unless they discovered it in a nonhuman. And they did.

Normally what we do when we learn something new about chimpanzee behavior is we end up crossing one more thing off our list of uniquely human traits. “Man the tool-maker” was nixed decades ago. What should we cross off the list now with this new chimp discovery? Would it be “ritual” and by extension “meaning,” or would it be “piling up stuff”? About that Neanderthal hashtag, do we cross off “art” or “symbolism” and by extension “meaning,” or would we just cross off “doodling,” which holds a quite different meaning? Rather than crossing anything off our list, do we welcome Neanderthals into our kind so we can keep our monopoly on hashtags? Whatever we decide, case by case, trait by trait, we usually interpret our shrinking list of uniquely human traits to be clear demonstration that other animals are becoming more human-like the more we learn about the world.

That’s certainly one way to see it.  But there’s another, more existential, and therefore, arguably, more human way to look at that shrinking list of uniquely human traits: Humans are becoming less human-like the more we learn about the world.

#WhatDoesThatEvenMean #PantHoot #Hashtag #ThisIsMyCaveWall 

Quantum spookiness is nothing compared to biology's mysteries!

The news is properly filled these days with reports of studies documenting various very mysterious aspects of the cosmos, on scales large and small.  News media feed on stories of outer space's inner secrets.  We have dark matter and dark energy that, if models of gravitational effects and other phenomena are correct, comprise the majority of the cosmos's contents. We have relativity, that shows that space and even time itself are curved.  We have ideas that there may be infinitely many universes (there are various versions of this, some called the multiverse).  We have quantum uncertainty by which a particle or wave or whatever can be everywhere at once and have multiple superposed states that are characterized in part only when we observe it.  We have space itself inflating (maybe faster than the speed of light).  And then there's entanglement, by which there seem to be instant correlated actions at unlimited distances.  And there is some idea that everything is just a manifestation of many-dimensional vibrations ('strings').

The general explanations are that these things make no 'sense' in terms of normal human experience, using just our built in sensory systems (eyes, ears, touch-sense, smell, etc.) but that mathematically observable data fit the above sorts of explanations to a huge degree of accuracy.  You cannot understand these phenomena in any real natural way but only by accustoming yourself to accept the mathematical results, the read-outs of instrumentation, and their interpretation.  Even the most thoughtful physicists routinely tell us this.

These kinds of ideas rightfully make the news, and biologists (perhaps not wanting to be left out, especially those in human-related areas) are thus led to concocting other-worldly ideas of their own, making promises of miracle precision and more or less health immortality, based on genes and the like.  There is a difference, however: unlike physicists, biologists reduce things to concepts like individual genes and their enumerable effects, treating them as basically simple, primary and independent causes.

In physics, if we could enumerate the properties of all the molecules in an object, like a baseball, comet, or a specified set of such objects, we (physicists, that is!) could write formal equations to describe their interactions with great precision.  Some of the factors might be probabilistic if we wanted to go beyond gravity and momentum and so on, to describe quantum-scale properties, but everything would follow the same set of rules for contributing to every interaction.  Physics is to a great, and perhaps ultimate extent, about replicable complexity.  A region of space or an object may be made of countless individual bits, but each bit is the same (in terms of things like gravity per unit mass and so on).  Each pair, say, of interactions of similar particles etc. follows the same rules. Every electron is alike as far as is known.  That is why physics can be expressed confidently as a manifestation of laws of nature, laws that seem to hold true everywhere in our detectable cosmos.

Of cats and Schroedinger's cat
Biology is very different.  We're clearly made of molecules and use energy just as inanimate objects do, and the laws of chemistry and physics apply 100% of the time at the molecular and physics levels. But the nature of life is essentially the product of non-replicable complexity, of uniquely interacting interactions.  Life is composed strictly of identifiable elements and forces etc at the molecular level. Yet the essence of life is descent with modification from a common origin, Darwin's key phrase, and this is all about differences.  Differences are essential when it comes to the adaptation of organisms, whether by natural selection, genetic drift, or whatever, because adaptation means change.  Without life's constituent units being different, there would be no evolution beyond purely mechanical changes like the formation of crystals.  Even if life is, in a sense the assembling of molecular structures, it is the difference in their makeups that makes us different from crystals.

Evolution and its genetic basis are often described in assertively simple terms, as if we understood them in a profound ultimate sense.  But that is a great exaggeration: the fact that some simple molecules interacted 4 billion years ago, in ways that captured energy and enabled the accretion of molecular complexity to generate today's magnificent biosphere, is every bit as mysterious, in the subjective sense of the term at least, as anything quantum mechanics or relativity can throw at us. Indeed, the essential nature of life itself is equally as non-intuitive. And that's just a start.

The evolution of complex organisms, like cats, built through developmental interactions of awe-inspiring complexity, leading to units made up of associated organ systems that communicate internally in some molecular ways (physiology) and externally in basically different (sensory) ways is as easy to say as "it's genetic!", but again as mysterious as quantum entanglement.  Organisms are the self-assembly of an assemblage of traits with interlocking function, that can be achieved in countless ways (because the genomes and environments of every individual are at least slightly different).  An important difference is that quantum entanglement may simply happen, but we--evolved bags of molecular reactions--can discover that it happens!

The poor cat in the box.  Source: "Schrödinger cat" by File:Kamee01.jpg: Martin Bahmann, Wilimedia Commons

This self-assembly is wondrous, even more so than the dual existence of Schroedinger's famous cat in a box.  That cat is alive and dead at the same time depending on whether a probilistic event has happened inside the box (see this interesting discussion), until you open the box, in which case the cat is alive or dead. This humorous illustration of quantum superposition garnered a lot of attention, though not that much by Schroedinger himself for which it was just a whimsical way to make the point about quantum strangeness.

But nobody seems to give a thought beyond sympathy for the poor cat!  That's too bad, because what's really amazing is the cat itself.  That feline construct makes most of physics pale by comparison.  A cat is not just a thing, but a massively well-organized entity, a phenomenon of interactions, thanks to the incredible dance of embryonic development.  Yet even development and the lives that plants and animals (and, indeed, single-celled organisms) live, impressively elaborate as they are, pale by comparison with various aspects these organisms have of awareness, self-awareness, and consciousness.

This is worth thinking about (so to speak) when inundated by the fully justified media blitz that weird physics evokes, but then you should ask whether anything in the incomprehensibly grand physics and cosmology worlds are even close to the elusiveness and amazing reality of these properties of life and how these properties could possibly come about, how they evolved and how they develop in each individual--as particular traits, not just the result of some generic evolutionary process.

And there's even more:  If flies or cats are not 'conscious' in the way that we are, then it is perhaps as amazing that their behavior, which so seems to have aspects of those traits, could be achieved without conscious awareness.  But if that be so, then the mystery of the nature of consciousness having evolved, and the nature of its nature, are only augmented many-fold, and even farther from our intuition than quantum entanglement.

Caveat emptor
Of course, we may have evolved to perceive the world just the way the world really is (extending our native senses with sensitive instruments to do so).  Maybe what seems strange or weird is just our own misunderstanding or willingness to jump on strangeness bandwagons.  Here from Aeon Magazine is a recent and thoughtful expression of reservations about such concepts as dark matter and energy.

If quantum entanglement and superposition, or relativity's time dilation and length contraction, are inscrutable, and stump our intuition, then surely consciousness trumps those stumps.  Will anyone reading this blog live to see even a comparable level of understanding in biology to what we have in physics?