Having a Human Mind
A Third Channel
All animals learn. They are able to handle situations more intelligently through the way their responses to events are shaped by their past experiences. But it is only within the past 10 million years that animals evolved — dolphins, apes, parrots, crows — that were able to imagine possible futures and use their thinking about those futures to act more intelligently than they otherwise could.1 2
All these animals, including our own ancestors, learnt to give the elements of their subjective experience a life of their own. What they saw and recognised could become a unit of cognition — an idea. The animals became able to hold their attention on those ideas, manipulate them, and have insights about them.
This creates a third channel of intelligence — a channel of idea where the animal is able to think in the abstract, solving problems and devising plans.
Brilliant, Flexible Minds
Human beings, perhaps through the pressure of living in complex communities, have taken the potential of the channel of idea further than any other species. We learnt to associate certain sounds with ideas. These discrete units of meaning — these words — have become cultural artefacts that are passed down through the generations. They provide evolving tools for thought.
Later on we invented writing and mathematical symbols. We have even built digital devices that can process information at a speed and scale far beyond the capacity of a human brain.
We are able to have insights about almost anything, as our brilliant, flexible minds can make almost anything the focus of their attention.
Background Concerns
Human beings have come to inhabit our ideas as much as we inhabit our senses.
Whenever our minds aren’t fully immersed in a practical task, our minds start tackling conceptual tasks. The areas of our life that we subconsciously sense to be in need of insight are always lodged at the backs of our minds, some as habitual worries, some as daydreams, and some as topics of obsession.
Strands of Interest
Anything that hooks our attention can create a strand of interest. A connection is made that we’d like to follow up. We want to know more. We want to think and discover.
If we’re hooked by the predicament of a character in a story, we want to follow the story through till it reaches a point of closure. If we’re hooked by the knowledge that something isn’t working, we get an urge to try one potential solution then another till it’s fixed.
Existential Anxiety
Sometimes what hooks a person’s attention and forms a background concern is questions about what would bring them happiness, or about whether pursuing their own happiness is even what should be driving their action. What about the happiness of others? What about other sentient beings? Or perhaps there are other considerations. Should they look to rules that define what makes for ethical action? Or to religions and revealed truth for guidance as to what living well means?
We all want the comfort of knowing that we’re good people. As children we’re taught to be good. We grow up identifying with the virtuous heroes in stories and looking down upon the villains who they struggle against. All our real life battles have their most profound justification in their ethical rightness. We want our lives to shine with the light of goodness and true value.
So waking up to uncertainty about whether we actually are living well can bring on a profound anxiety. Kierkegaard called it the “dizziness of freedom”.3
The Search for Reliable Answers
When questions of what it means to live well hook our minds, the quest for reliable answers becomes profoundly important. All purpose, all meaning and all self-worth become dependent on the answers we give. So we use our brilliant, flexible minds to place how we live in the conceptual frames that we hope will bring clarity.
We have the capacity to imagine wonderful futures, and to act skilfully and strategically to bring our imaginings to life. There is no end to what we can achieve when, as social animals, we work together. But without a clarity as to how we should be living and what we should be aiming for, little of that potential gets realised.
In today’s world, anxiety of all types has become the norm. It takes a properly rooted clarity as what living well means to liberate the potential that is locked up in that anxiety.
- “The most recently evolved genera of corvids (Corvus, Pyrrhocorax) and apes (Pan) appeared at approximately the same point in evolutionary time (5–10 Myr). The Late Miocene to Pliocene was a period of great environmental and climatic variability and instability. This variability would have had a significant effect on food availability. As such, extant corvids and apes may have had to adapt strategies to locate food dispersed in time and space, extract food hidden within cased substrates, exploit meat as a high source of energy, and thus become innovative, omnivorous, generalist foragers. Indeed, there is good evidence that corvids, parrots and apes are highly innovative in their feeding strategies, and that this correlates significantly with relative brain size.” Nathan Emery, The Evolution of Avian Intelligence, in Phil. Trans. R. Soc., 361, 2006, p. 37.
- Modern dolphins evolved approximately 5 million years ago [Kathleen Dudzinski and Toni Frohoff, Dolphin Mysteries: Unlocking the Secrets of Communication, New Haven: Yale, 2008, p. 18.] and they demonstrate a “generalised ability to create novel and appropriate behavioural plans when confronted with new problems” [Kuczaj, Stan & GORY, JOHN & Xitco, Mark. (2009). How intelligent are dolphins? in Japanese Journal of Animal Psychology. 59. 99-115.
- “Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.” Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 61.