Cognitive Evolution Quotes

From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.

...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world?

To learn is to change how you think.

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense.

The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars; it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.

People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.

Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.

Thinking is a physical process, the human brain is not exempt from evolution

Today evolution of human intelligence has advanced us to the stage where most of us are too smart to invent new gods but are reluctant to give up the old ones.

If the rewiring of the brain that yielded recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions took place in an individual, not a group (and there seems to be no coherent alternative), then interaction must have been a later phenomenon.

In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.

The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.

We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.

Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.

Language would have evolved first as an internal object, a kind of "language of thought" (LOT), with externalisation (hence communication) an ancillary process. I can't review here the strong and growing evidence to support this conclusion, but I have elsewhere. There are ample reasons why having a LOT would confer selectional advantage: the person so endowed could plan, interpret, reflect, etc., in ways denied to others.

In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark.

The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.

Every symbol, word, concept, discipline and field is only a temporary rest stop on the highway of discovery.

We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.

There is reason to believe that voluntary activity, more than highly developed intellect, distinguishes humans from the animals which stand closest to them.

When I was in high school and college, I thought everybody could think in pictures. And my first inkling to my thinking was even different was when I was in college and I read an article about, you know, some scientist said that the caveman could not have designed tools until they had language.

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?