This is, of course, a philosophical question, but it is one that I hope to undercut in this paper, by directing attention away from it to what I think is the more basic question, what are the conditions of order, whether the latter be something that arises in a mind by reason of its habits of analysis and synthesis, or whether it be something inherent in nature and discovered directly? It is, however, necessary to assume that order can be recognized, (...) whatever its origin, and while there is much evidence to suggest that men can be made more sensitive to order through training, I think it must be admitted that even the untrained can recognize order in many situations. I shall therefore make use of the phrases "intuitive order," and "the intuitive recognition of order," to apply to those cases in which order is recognized without the presence in consciousness of explicit principles of order. In other words, I assume that order reveals itself. If it did not, it would be difficult to understand how principles of order ever came to be recognized, for it is only on analysis of a given order that they come to consciousness. (shrink)

The thought of God as transcendent is central to theism. Although the expression ‘divine transcendence’ does not appear to have been used by theologians before the nineteenth century, 1 the idea itself is very deep-rooted. If we ask where it is ultimately grounded, I think the answer may well be: in the idea of the holy.

Presenting the cultural and neuronal forces that power our distinctively human modes of awareness, the author proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product of interweaving a super-complex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a cognitive network. Reprint. 11,500 first printing.

This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive apes to the era of artificial intelligence, and presents an original theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form. In the emergence of modern human culture, Donald proposes, there were three radical transitions. During the first, our (...) bipedal but still apelike ancestors acquired "mimetic" skill—the ability to represent knowledge through voluntary motor acts—which made Homo erectus successful for over a million years. The second transition—to "mythic" culture —coincided with the development of spoken language. Speech allowed the large-brained Homo sapiens to evolve a complex preliterate culture that survives in many parts of the world today. In the third transition, when humans constructed elaborate symbolic systems ranging from cuneiforms, hieroglyphics, and ideograms to alphabetic languages and mathematics, human biological memory became an inadequate vehicle for storing and processing our collective knowledge. The modern mind is thus a hybrid structure built from vestiges of earlier biological stages as well as new external symbolic memory devices that have radically altered its organization. According to Donald, we are symbol-using creatures, more complex than any that went before us, and we may have not yet witnessed the final modular arrangement of the human mind. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He is a central figure of modern philosophy, and set the terms by which all subsequent thinkers have had to grapple. He argued that human perception structures natural laws, and that reason is the source of morality. His thought continues to hold a major influence in contemporary thought, especially in fields such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.

This book proposes a theory of human cognitive evolution, drawing from paleontology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and especially neuropsychology. The properties of humankind's brain, culture, and cognition have coevolved in a tight iterative loop; the main event in human evolution has occurred at the cognitive level, however, mediating change at the anatomical and cultural levels. During the past two million years humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, each of which has left the human mind with a new way (...) of representing reality and a new form of culture. Modern humans consequently have three systems of memory representation that were not available to our closest primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These three systems are supported by new types of “hard” storage devices, two of which (mimetic and linguistic) are biological, one technological. Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with the external memory system. The independence of these three uniquely human ways of representing knowledge is suggested in the way the mind breaks down after brain injury and confirmed by various other lines of evidence. Each of the three systems is based on aninventivecapacity, and the products of those capacities – such as languages, symbols, gestures, social rituals, and images – continue to be invented and vetted in the social arena. Cognitive evolution is not yet complete: the externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think. This is changing the role of biological memory and the way in which the human brain deploys its resources; it is also changing the form of modern culture. (shrink)

Hominid-like morphology in habiline cranial endocasts does not necessarily imply the presence of language capacity. The cortical zone in question is not associated exclusively with language in humans, and its emergence in habilines might indicate the evolution of other cognitive functions special to humans that were preconditions for the later evolution of language.