Humor and self-awareness are uniquely human, and they are both hardly accessible to scientific investigations. They make us human. And yet the feeling of self-awareness is deeply magic and mysterious. Why? If consciousness of the self is beyond comprehension for many of the best researchers and philosophers, how can a four-year old acquire it ? Maybe the answer is that the question of consciousness and self-awareness is related to an equation that can’t be solved – only by imaginary units. In Mathematics, the square root of -1 can only be solved by postulating an imaginary number i. Similarly, the “That = me” equation of self-awareness can only be solved by postulating an imaginary entity named self. Consciousness and the illusion of the self emerge when universes meet and worlds collide.

Initial Position – The Problem

It all starts with language, the key tool of Philosophers. Although it may appear ordinary to us, language is the reason why humans are so different from all other animals. It allows us to understand the world. Language enables us to step back from the current experience of the world in which we are caught up, to turn ourselves from subjects into objects.

As soon as we are able to understand language, we start to wonder who we are, where we come from, etc. In this puzzle of consciousness, the moment of self-awareness is at the heart of the problem. Some philosophers say the core problem is the mind-body problem and the ghost in the machine. Is is right to ask how the mental arises from the physical? Or how the mental is connected to the physical? George Berkeley said it is important to ask the right questions

Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part,
if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and
blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we
have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see.
~George Berkeley

We ask how the mental is connected to the physical and material, although the brain consists of nothing but connections! It contains billions and billions of connections. It is nothing else but a connection machine. And we ask how the mental arises from the physical although each of us spends at least 18 years of perpetual learning, where we do nothing else but testing, forming and storing new mental structures.

Maybe it is more useful to ask where the perplexity during moments of self-awareness comes from in the first place, without postulating any abstract objects or substances. Each of us has experienced the perplexity and confusion during “That’s me” moments of self-awareness, when the internal first person point of view collides with the external third person point of view. In his book “The Problem of Consciousness” Colin McGinn says “there is something terminal about our perplexity”. During our development, the web of beliefs (or words) becomes so detailed and fine that we can recognize ourselves in it. Yet this insight will always be accompanied by confusion: if the brain could comprehend itself directly, wouldn’t it be like a fishing net which is somehow identified with one of the fishes it catches? Gilbert Ryle argues in “The concept of mind”:

“Should I, or should I not, put my knowing self down on my list of the sorts
of things that I can have knowledge of? If I say ‘no’, it seems to reduce my
knowing self to a theoretically infertile mystery, yet if I say ‘yes’, it seems
to reduce the fishing-net to one of the fishes which it itself catches”
~Gilbert Ryle

The Moment of Awareness

This insight in confusion is essential for the magic of self-awareness. It is the reason why the moment of self-awareness is so special. Insight and confusion seem to be coupled: the larger the insight, the larger the confusion. Maybe this is the reason why the smartest scientists and philosophers have difficulties to explain consciousness, while every four year old can acquire it. The moment of self-awareness is a moment

• of insight in confusion and awe in desparation. It is like noticing an equation – the “That = me” equation – that can’t be solved. The recognition of the equation leads to insight. The inability to solve it causes confusion.
• where a joint venture of nature and culture is formed. The mind is like a joint venture of nature and culture, body and soul, or genes and memes. The first moment of self-awareness is the most special. It is the moment where the joint venture begins and the mind emerges.
• where universes meet and worlds collide. Mitchel Resnick asked in his book “Turtles, termites and traffic jams” (The MIT Press, 1994) “How can a mind emerge from a collection of mindless parts” ? It can not. At least in humans, it emerges from countless mindful parts which meet countless biological parts in a wonderful collision of different worlds, when universes meet and worlds collide.
• where a person starts to exist. The existence is based on a permanent correlation or connection between different worlds. It is the point in time when the consciousness of the self emerges.

Self-awareness is the moment of the most important insight, where our minds start to emerge and where we recognize ourselves. Insights are astonishing and surprising, and the first insight about the own self is astonishing. And yet self-awareness is also a moment of ultimate confusion: everything seems to equal nothing, significance seems to equal insignificance, variety seems to equal unity.

Me or not me ?

During that’s me moments of self-awarness we combine external objects (an image, a name, etc.) with the world of internal thoughts. We setup an “That = me” equation which connects two different sides. One side is external and ojective world (“that”), the other side is internal and subjective world (“me”). The equation may appear in different varieties..

• The image in the mirror – That’s me
• The person on the picture – That’s me
• The (spoken|written) name – That’s me
• The person with this name – That’s me
• The actor in the story – That’s me
• The person who has done x,y,z – That’s me

..but the basic underlying “That = me” equation is always the same. It is becomes possible by using language: just like mathematics makes mathematical equations possible, language enables to understand all kind of statements and equations. Language allows subjects to view themselves from a distance – as actors in an external world. It allows us to make statements, equations, correlations, analogies, and metaphors.

The fundamental “That is me” correlation is special, it enables us to reason about ourselves, and it allows us to use the whole world of cultural objects to examine the own person. Paradoxically we are not able to solve the basic equation, although it gives us the greatest insight of all, the insight of our own existence. To solve it would mean to understand the nature of our own existence. We are not able to solve the basic equation, unless we are postulating an imaginary “Self”, similar to the physical self which characterizes the biological body. This imaginary self is supposed to be the center of all what is going on inside one person (Daniel Dennett’s “Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity”). Such a self isn’t real. It’s an imaginary object. If we add this additional dimension to the problem, then the gap between the different worlds can be bridged.

“That – Other/Foreign – Objective” – refers to external world of objects, real things, while “Me – Myself/Own Body – Subjective” – refers to internal world of thoughts, memories, and subjective experiences. Outside and inside world collide, objective and subjective experiences mix. The “Me/Not Me” category is one of the most fundamental cognitive structures. If something belongs to me or my own body directly or not is one of the first and most fundamental things we learn. And suddenly, both parts of the category seem to be connected, and the confusion starts.

This confusion starts with the first recognition of the own person and the own name. But it does not stop with more complicated thoughts about the self, for instance THE SELF IS A PERSON metaphors. We only get used to this confusion and contradictions. According to Sidney Shoemaker (1968), a certain subset of thoughts about oneself, which contains the self-aware thoughts about oneself, is immune to error through misidentification. Could it be that the immunity to error through misidentification comes from the attempt to tolerate inconsistencies from metaphors which involve the self? One feature about metaphors is that we gain insights from them by understanding one thing in terms of another. Another is that we must tolerate inconsistencies. Metaphors are associated with insights but also with confusions with arise from contradicting and constraining components. Some aspects of a metaphor are true, others are false. The immunity against errors which Shoemaker has observed may come from the attempt to ignore the false and confusing aspects.

This double aspect of insight in confusion which seems to be an essential part of self-awareness is partly responsible for the puzzling feeling caused by it.

Everything or Nothing ?

During every moment and every thought, our brain asks itself if it matters or not. We care only about those things which matter. The self makes a difference. It means everything and nothing. Self-awareness combines everything and nothing, variety and unity, significance and insignificance.

From the outer point of view, as a person, I am only one a single, unified entity, which is described by a single name, only one among many. This single object is unimportant and insignificant compared to others. In the objective world, the own name is not linked to any other thought at the beginning: it is just one name amony many others, and if we first think about it, there are not many experiences or impressions linked to it. I am nothing that matters.

From the inner point of view, I am very important and significant, I am everything that matters to me, and I have multiple attitudes, ideas, and thoughts. The inner world is characterized by a large variety and diversity of impressions and experiences. In the subjective world of inner thoughts, the thought of the own name is linked to every other thought: it represents the whole person, and the whole person includes every single thought. I am everything that matters.

The awareness of the own existence comes along with the awareness of the own non-existence by the pending end of life. The awareness of the own life comes along with the awareness of the own death. The own death is the worst thing that can happen to a biological organism. Once you start to recognize yourself, you begin to understand that one day you’ll be gone. “I’ll be dead” is an oddly exhilarating thought. Something unimaginable – eternal nothingness – awaits us all. How can everything turn into nothing? How can nothing turn into everything ?

Neural Correlate of a Supernova

Since the own self is linked to everything and nothing, it is impossible to find or locate the neural correlates of consciousness exactly when the object is the self, although consciousness itself is a correlate. Even for normal objects this correlate is difficult to find, since it is different and path dependent in each person and for every object. The only thing one could measure is the increase of activity during insights, and the decrease of activity during confusion. An insight in confusion must lead to a intricated and complex pattern. The patterns in the neural network of the brain during “That’s me” moments of self-awareness must be fascinating. It must be like a correlate of a supernova or a similar pattern which emerges from a collision of worlds.

A single object in the outside world – often linked to the spoken or written name – is recognized as the self. A basic contradiction follows: on the one hand the object is only represented by a few neurons. On the other hand the self means everything, every single of the 100 billion neurons. If n neurons span a phase space of dimension n, could it be that self-awareness is associated with a short-lived strange attractor of very high fractal dimension, let us say 1 billion? The emerging pattern must be like a short-lived lightning storm which takes place in a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. We know that the brain has 100 billion connected cells. Could it be that consciousness of the self is astonishing, because it is based on an astronomical number of cells which interact for a short time?

In his book “The Astonishing Hypothesis” the late Francis Crick argues that a person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of neurons. The “astonishing hypothesis” is ‘…that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ Maybe consciousness is indeed astonishing, more astonishing than Crick thought perhaps.

A popular way of trying to solve the mystery of consciousness is the hunt for the “neural correlates of consciousness”. Yet the interesting moments where we are really conscious of ourselves are rare, and they are short. The hunt for neural correlates of consciousness is like the hunt for the physical correlates of a giant fireworks. It is quite impressive, everywhere and nowhere, but only for a short time. You have to look exactly at the right moment, and the impressive patterns change constantly.

The Emergence of Consciousness

In my old paper about Types and Forms of Emergence I try to describe the different types of emergence which exist. It is not directly about emergence of consciousness, which is perhaps the most complex form of emergence. And certainly the most interesting. What type of emergence is it? The traditional forms of emergence can be found if agents interact. Agents can for instance interact to form a group, a swarm, a flock, etc. Consciousness emerges if whole systems interact with each other, when universes meet and worlds collide, when different systems cooperate in a conflicting way. The connection is like a wormhole between different universes: on the one end the biological universe, where the body of the organism is located, and on the other end the cultural universe, where the personality, the character, and the name are located. The emergence of (artificial) consciousness can be explained by a collision of worlds or connection between different universes. The moment we make the connection or “tunnel” is the “magic” moment of self-awareness. The precise location of the connection is associated with the position of the connection, which marks our individual “slice of the world”, and it is the root of our subjective experience.

The Magic of Self-Awareness

The mystery of consciousness and the hard problem of subjective experience arise because there are countless different ways to experience the same thing – which depend on the former personal experiences with similar things. Each of us has a personal, path-dependent, unique character.

As we have tried to describe it above, the magic of self-awareness arises from the unification of contrasting opposites, from the combination of insight and confusion, awe and desparation, joy and despair. The best way to describe it is perhaps to use a bit of poetry. Take a look at the first lines in Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”, which consist of a wonderful list of antithesis. The whole first paragraph is made up entirely of contrasting pairs:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way
~Chapter 1, The Period, of a “Tale of Two Cities”, Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

The mystery of subjective experience and the magic of self-awareness are the reasons why consciousness is so mysterious. The corresponding processes “operate” in different timespans. Subjective experience is caused by a long time of learning and adapation, self-awareness during a short moment of insight. Both would not emerge from an isolated brain alone. Consciousness emerges because the brain is adaptive, and because it is able to relate events in the outside world to some internal processes. Steven Rose says in his book “From Brains to Consciousness” that the ambiguous relationship from brain and mind is probably science’s last frontier. Maybe we can find there the things described in this article. Some things in it have been a bit speculative and philosophical, but to explore new worlds and uncharted areas you need to have the courage to leave the territory of solid ground, at least for a short time. Andre Gide said “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

Literature

– Steven Rose (Ed.), From Brains to Consciousness, Princeton Univ. Press, 1998
– Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, Scribner, 1994
– Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness, Blackwell, 1990
– Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2003
– Gilbert Ryle, The Concept Of Mind, University Of Chicago Press, 1949
– Sidney Shoemaker, “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness.” Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968) 555-567

All animals can share a common place, move in the same direction and form swarms, from slime molds to flocks of birds, but only humans can also share ideas, interests and beliefs. Only humans can form communities and organizations which are capable of complex behavior. What gives humans this capacity to get along together so well?

Nicholas Humphrey argues that the reason is a talent and a desire for sharing subjective experiences: “Humans alone know what it is like to be in someone else’s place and humans alone care” [1]. Humans can comprehend the world, which consists of a society of other selves. They are conscious of themselves and conscious of others, as Humphrey argues [1], they have deep..

• empathy (the sharing of feelings)
• sympathy (the sharing of goals/intentions)
• synchrony (the sharing of actions)

This is possible because humans have a common understanding through language, they possess imagination and consciousness. Consciousness allows us to comprehend other and ourselves, although it is deeply private:

“When it comes to consciousness, we are on our own [..] Everyone knows directly only of his or her own consciousness and not anyone else’s [..] Consciousness really is deeply, fascinatingly, peculiarly private.” [1]

Consciousness is indeed peculiarly private. The subjective, conscious experience is private, because it can not be shared directly, and “after all, there is only one of me and 4 billion of you” [2]. Consciousness of the self in the form of self-awareness is perhaps the ultimate subjective experience. And yet although it separates and isolates us through our subjective experience, it also connects us to other individuals, because it lights up the world for us, as Nicholas Humphrey says in his book “Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness” (Princeton University Press, 2011). Consciousness also allows us in combination with language to share our impressions with others. Therefore it connects and divides us at the same time. We cannot peer into the mental states of others directly, we can only imagine how they look like by trying to “stand in their shoes”, by asking “Where are you standing and what do you see?”

This is also what the “New Realism” movement in Psychology says (the “New Realism” represented by Edwin Holt and Nicholas Thompson, see [2]). According to Edwin B. Holt’s view, everyone is characterized by a consciousness based on a certain “slice of the world”. But if “each of us [..] is merely a place in the world from which the world is viewed” as Nicholas Thompson says [2], then we can understand each other if we are trying to stand in the shoes of the person in question. The ability to share our point of view allows us to get along with others, has Harper Lee observed in her bestselling novel “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

“If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view [..] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
-Harper Lee in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, spoken by the main character Atticus Finch

This means in our society and culture everyone has the right to have an own point of view, but also the obligation to share it.

“To me the New Realism concedes our right to a point of view while demanding our obligation to share it. Each of us is obligated to give clear instructions for how to stand where we are standing, so that others can see what we see.”
– Nicholas Thompson in [2]

Maybe humans get along together so well because they do not only share the same culture, they are “produced” partly by society itself. Humans live at the intersection of nature and culture. Merlin Donald argues that the human mind is a hybrid product, interweaving a complex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a “distributed” cognitive network. He says on page 157 of his book “A mind so rare” [4] that “humans bridge two worlds. We are hybrids, half analogizers, with direct experience of the world, and half symbolizers, embedded in a cultural web.”

While the natural part, the body, is produced by nature, the cultural part of humans is certainly influenced and produced by the society during years of learning and socialization. A society, i.e. social or religious group regulated by a set of memes, produces conscious members because it needs them to survive, just like genes produces a body to survive. Group members share a common interest in the group’s survival. Thus humans are a complex product of multiple worlds, who live in a complex social environment. Humphrey argues that consciousness has been (or still is) an adaptation to this complex environment. In one of his older papers, he claims that there is a positive correlation between ‘social complexity’ which arises from continuous interaction in complex social groups and ‘individual intelligence’.

“Like chess, a social interaction is typically a transaction between social partners. One animal may, for instance, wish by his own behaviour to change the behaviour of another; but since the second animal is himself reactive and intelligent the interaction soon becomes a two-way argument where each ‘player’ must be ready to change his tactics – and maybe his goals – as the game proceeds.” [3]

The human society is a society of individual I’s and unique selves, which interact in very complex ways. Each “self” has a separate identity and personality. The complicated behavior in such societies is much easier to understand if one is able to remember events and episodes like “x has done y to z”. Consciousness is based on language. Language and epsisodic memories are perfect to record social events and “agent interaction patterns” like “x has done y to z” or “x and y are doing z”. This includes the ability to reason about trust (agent x will not hurt or harm agent y) and friendship (agent x has groomed y, or agent x will support agent y) or hostility (agent x will try to harm agent y). Merlin Donald says in his book “A mind so rare” [4] on p.201 about episodic memory through the tertiary cortex: “‘fighting with x’ or ‘mating with y’ or ‘grooming with z’ will be effortlessly parsed and remembered’. He concludes on page 276

“Language is spectacularly good at performing its bread-and-butter functions, such as communicatin gossip and issuing simple imperatives.” [4]

It is certainly helpful to understand what is going on in your environment. Only humans have the remarkable powers of social foresight and understanding. The extended, tertiary cortex allows extended awareness, and Humphrey argues that this extended awareness makes living in complex social systems easier. Finally he comes to the conclusion that human consciousness is an adaptation to living in a society of selves.

“If intellectual prowess is correlated with social success, and if social success means high biological fitness, then any heritable trait which increases the ability of an individual to outwit his fellows will soon spread through the gene pool.” [3]

This means that the society of mind inside the agent has adapted itself to the external society of selves, where the agent lives in. Only a complex society of mind can understand a society of selves. This is quite similar to the closely related hypotheses of Steven Pinker that language is an adaptation to the cognitive niche. He argued that humans have adapted themselves to the cognitive niche, i.e they evolved to manipulate the environment through causal reasoning and social cooperation [5].

Summary

Humans get along together so well, because we can share subjective experiences, although consciousness is deeply private. This is in agreement with the findings of the “New Realism” movement (the “New Realism” represented by Edwin Holt and Nicholas Thompson). We are complex hybrid products of nature and culture. Consciousness is an adaptation to this complex environment we live in, because conscious representation of abstract events and episodic memory are the key to understand and control events in complex social groups. This is consistent with Pinker’s observation that early humans inhabited a “cognitive niche”. Can only a complex society of mind understand a society of selves?

[1] Nicholas Humphrey, The Society of Selves, 2007

[2] Interview with an old new realist. In Eric P. Charles (Ed.),
A New Look at New Realism: E. B. Holt Reconsidered, to be published in 2011

[3] Nicholas Humphrey, The Social Function of Intellect, (1976)

[4] Merlin Donald, A mind so rare, W.W. Norton & Company, 2002

[5] Steven Pinker, The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language. PNAS 107 (2010) 8893-8999

The Flickr photo of the primate group is from Flickr user “kibuyu“

Adaptation plays an important role in wars, combats and team sports like football or soccer. It is a basic defense mechanism. In a combat or fight, both sides are struggling to act faster than the opponent, because this increases their chance to act against the will of the opponent. Adaptation enables reaction, which is indispensable for good defense. A lack of information can prevent a successful adaptation, and is therefore a defense risk.

• Lack of Adaptation: bad defense, unpreparedness, inability to react swiftly enough
• Good Adaptation: good defense, preparedness, ability to react swiftly enough

Intelligence agencies like the CIA orginally were founded to prevent this lack of information. The CIA itself is a legacy of the war, because it is the successor of the Office of Strategic Services formed during World War II to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for the branches of the United States military.

Warfare and Combat

Good adaptation is the best defense strategy. Armor (inkl. helmets, body armor, and armored fighting vehicles) is a adaptation to piercing ammunition fired by the enemy, bunkers are an adaptation to exploding bombs dropped from above. Trenches and walls are an adaptation to sudden assaults of ground troops. Since ancient times, fortified locations are an adaptation to increased mobility of attacking forces in general.

The best attack strategies are tactics which prevent fast adaptation. Sneak and surprise attacks are very powerful strategies, because they prevent a fast response of the enemy. Unexpected, sudden attack can generate local superiority and lead to local victory, which in turn leads to even greater local superiority. Napolean and the Germans in WWII used this kind of Blitzkrieg. It is the opposite of static warfare, which was so common in WWI.

Immune System

The task of the immune system is defense: it is responsible for the protection against invaders. It has two layers, the innate immune system provides an immediate, but non-specific response, and the adaptive immune system provides an specific response adapted to the target. Adaptation seems to be the best and last weapon of the body against dangerous invaders.

Stress is an adaptive defense mechanism of the body, too, because it is an adaptation to terror (i.e. to uncertain and disruptive environments where large peaceful periods are sometimes disrupted by extremely dangerous threats which require immediate reaction).

Games and Goals

In games and wars alike, two parties confront each other, and both parties are trying to win, which means to act against the will of the opponents and to disrupt their defense. The line of equilibrium between the two parties is the front-line, the frontier between the territories of both parties. The attacking party tries to disrupt the front-line, and the defending party tries to restore the front-line by continuous adaptation of form and position. The goal is to disrupt the front-line. High degree of adaption to the ever changing front-line is a perfect defense, because it means being prepared for any attack along the front-line.

A retracting movement is obviously an adaptation to an advancing movement of the opponent. A defensive strategy uses this method to counter attacks, defence in depth (also known as deep or elastic defence) is a military strategy as well. It is apparently an adaptation of the own territory to the advancements of a strong opponent.

The Flickr photo is from Flickr user Jon Candy

What makes a creative person like Kafka, Einstein or Mozart? Anyone can be creative. Tortured souls are said to be especially creative. Franz Kafka for example is a perfect example.

Why? Tortured souls certainly need a solution for their problem, for example to find peace in life, a solution for their troubles or a meaning for their existence. They just want to be happy, like everyone else. Well, creativity can be a way out of desolate situations. It is a pleasant process itself, intrinsically rewarding, and it even can give your life a whole new meaning.

Creativity blossoms if there is a deep need to be creative, when there is a real problem and easy solutions for the problem are not available. Of course there is no solution if there is no problem, so there is no creativity where there is no problem, no challenge and no obstacle (maybe one reason for the “dumb-blonde” stereotype). Problems and obstacles can cause creativity. We become creative by solving problems if there are obstacles in our way, and serious problems to solve. John Dewey (1859-1952) said “We only think when we are confronted with problems.”

In this sense, creativity can be seen as adaptation to a crisis and unpleasant, hard times and hardship in general. A problem requires a creative solution to solve it, an obstacle requires a creative idea to find a way around it, and a crisis in general requires creativity and hard work to get over it. Every crisis is also a chance. John F. Kennedy observed that “when written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters – one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity” (although this may be a misperception, since the second character in the Chinese word for “crisis” does not necessarily mean opportunity).

Kafka was permanent in a personal crisis, and got a frustating job in a worker’s accident insurance company. Einstein got a frustrating position at the Swiss Patent Office after graduation. Both jobs were done only to pay the bills. And both of them did their groundbreaking creative work during times of greatest frustration. Some of Mozart’s string quartets and symphonies are good examples of masterpieces are born in a crisis as well.

Marvin Minky coined the term the society of mind. The metaphor of the mind as a society of interacting and debating agents is indeed a natural one, since the mind consists of billions of neurons which interact and “debate” with each other intensively.

But what happens when agents become aware of something? Can they develop somehow a collective consciousness? If the population of agents in such a society of mind is large and complex enough, can it represent and recognize itself? Can they become aware of themselves and develop some kind of self-awareness?

Difficult and interesting questions. What we call conscious and self aware certainly exists in some form in a society, too. If the whole society is conscious of something, then it has developed some form of collective consciousness. If this something is the society itself – for instance when a complex self-similar society contains elements which are similar to the whole – it has started to develop some form of collective self-awareness.

a)  Collective consciousness is simply what the majority of agents is thinking or doing right now. Traditionally, this is shaped and formed by the mass media in normal society. Today, this is captured perfectly by Google Zeitgiest, Twitter and Facebook.

b) Collective self-awareness happens when the majority of agents is thinking or discussing about themselves, which is possible during revolutions or revolutionary changes in a society, when the society is debating and changing itself. A society of agents which becomes aware of itself is a revolutionary society which is debating itself.

more about about the topic in our wiki page about collective consciousness

What are the origins of innovation and creativity? What is the mystery behind the emergence of new companies, new theories, new species, new masterpieces of art? Is it luck, or destiny, or both? Where do the good ideas come from?

Sometimes this is hard to say. The reasons why people become creative personalities differ. Some are forced and “trained” to be creative as a child (like Mozart the child prodigy). Some discover it early as a way to cope with reality, they become creative as a child because they want to escape reality or try to compensate a terrifying loss (like Goethe, see below (*)). Some become creative because they have to make a living, especially if they have left their secure former life and must start a new one (like Einstein or Shakespeare). Some become creative simply because it is fun.

We like to learn, and we like to play. All mammals like to play, and humans, the smartest mammals, are the most playful. Humans are curious and creative from the beginning. One could say that they are build to be curious: they are creative because they enjoy insights, they like to find things out, and they love to discover new things. Gaining insights and finding things out is fun. Comedy is popular because it contains insights.

But where do good ideas come from? John Cleese says his good ideas come from Mr Ken Levinshaw who lives in Swindon. He would get his ideas from Mr Levinshaw each Monday on a postcard. Well, there you have it. Mr Ken Levinshaw in turn gets them from Mildred Spong who lives on the Isle of Wight. And Mrs Spong refuses to say where she gets them from. In short sometimes we don’t know the origins of our ideas. Or comedians won’t like to tell us. What John Cleese wants to say is perhaps: good, creative ideas do not come from a specific source or particular point. Creativity occurs rather through diversity, by the combination of various sources and connection of different points, when completely different worlds collide, for example different cultures, ideas or frames of reference.

Scientists are very accurate when it comes to determine the sources of their idea. It belongs to the scientific culture to write down your references in your publications. Yet the public used to think great ideas come from great scientists. Only the very best, the scientific geniuses make it to top, and invent the groundbreaking theories. Unfortunately, this is not always the full truth. Even good scientists can not find out something new if there is nothing to find out. One can only discover America once. It is quite difficult for many modern scientists to be innovative because so much already has been found out. To be successful, you have to cheat or you have to be very lucky, i.e. you have to be at the right place and the right time in order to connect the right dots. The driving force for scientists is not always the pure pleasure of finding things out, as noble as it may sound.

In the economy, the driving force behind the emergence of new companies is money. This is no suprise. The sources of innovation are less public, but the origin of innovation are often small, new, agile firms which have a new idea. They are supported by independent and corporate venture capital firms, who are hoping to make big money by finding the the next big thing. Unfortunatley, most startups supported by venture capital fail.

In short we like to win, we like to find things out, and we like to be successful creators. Unfortunately, to find original or novel ideas is indeed difficult, just because they are orginal or novel. Something is novel if nobody has done it before. In nature, the origin of creativity is without doubt the constant recombination which takes place in evolution. Evolution is a creative process. This indicates that the origin is combinatorial.

As Simonton argues in his books, creativity is based on an evolutionary process of recombination, variation and selection. In his major books “Scientific Genius” (1988) and “Origins of Genius” (1999) he has examined the question if creativity can be reduced to a single psychological mechanism. He has found strong evidence for a Darwinian process behind creativity. Already Leonardo da Vinci said: “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is doing something else.”

Doing something else means to find a new idea, a new thought, or a new combination. Creativity arises in general from novel (re-)combinations. It means to take existing elements or ideas and combine them in novel ways, to realize new possibilities, and to transform the possible to the actual. The book “The Medici Effect” argues that real innovation happens when different cultures, ideas and disciplines come together to spark off new and unprecedented solutions. Interdisciplinary domains offer many possibilities for creativity and innovative ideas.

So what do you need to be creative? It is helpful to start early. Mozart, Goethe, Einstein, Shakespeare all started very young to become experts in their fields. They had a very good basic education when they were young. And they had their first big success when they were young. Goethe says himself how important it is to start early in a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt in his last year when he was 82:

“Je früher der Mensch gewahr wird, daß es ein Handwerk, daß es eine Kunst gibt, die ihm zur geregelten Steigerung seiner natürlichen Anlagen verhelfen, desto glücklicher ist er; was er auch von außen empfange, schadet seiner eingebornen Individualität nichts. Das beste Genie ist das, welches alles in sich aufnimmt, sich alles zuzueignen weiß, ohne daß es der eigentlichen Grundbestimmung, demjenigen was man Charakter nennt, im mindesten Eintrag tue, vielmehr solches noch erst recht erhebe und durchaus nach Möglichkeit befähige. Hier treten nun die mannigfaltigen Bezüge ein zwischen dem Bewußten und Unbewußten [..] Die Organe des Menschen durch Übung, Lehre, Nachdenken, Gelingen, Mißlingen, Fördernis und Widerstand und immer wieder Nachdenken verknüpfen ohne Bewußtsein in einer freien Tätigkeit das Erworbene mit dem Angebornen, so daß es eine Einheit hervorbringt welche die Welt in Erstaunen setzt.”

J.W. v. Goethe, Aus einem Brief an Wilhelm von Humboldt (17. März 1832)

He also says that it is important to collect information without bias, for example by being passionately curious. Yet even if all preparations and conditions are right, a bit of luck is necessary. You need the right opportunities and conditions, the right motivation or drive to succeed, and finally the freedom to do it. If luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, then maybe all a creative person needs is a bit of luck.

the right opportunities / preparations / conditions

• You need luck to be at the right time and the right place, where a real innovation or very creative act is possible. As Simonton writes in his book “Greatness” (1994), already Tolstoy recognized that great men are labels for historic events: “In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.” Simonton adds further that great persons “serve only as convenient tags for big events”. This is certainly true for many great politicians, historical leaders and ingenious statesmen. Edward O. Wilson said “Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued “The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he actualises his age” (in “Philosophy of Right”, p.295, English Translation from 1942). The ability of a person to have great influence depends on the right place and time, if he wants to represent a revolution and unleash pent-up forces or avalanches of new ideas. The world must be in some form of critical state with pent-up energy. It must be near a revolution or breakthrough, where large avalanches and cascades of consequences are possible.
• You need experience , which means hours and years or learning, training, practice and skill acquisition in your domain. Only when you are adapted to a domain you have access to the right raw material or the right skills. Subjective experience and creativity are two sides of a coin.
• Sources of inspiration are important. The conditions to be creative are especially good at the intersection of disciplines, fields, communities and cultures. Children require a father and a mother, original or novel ideas require more than one source. New possibilities arise for example in “melting pots”, if different cultures and cultural realms meet. Therefore you need distraction from time to time to view the world from a different point of view. Your melding pot must be filled with ideas. You need to be connected to make connections.
• You need to be able to ‘think out of the box’, which requires a little madness, insanity or simply unlimited curiosity

the right motivation / the drive to succeed

• You need motivation to do it. A threat to lose (in a competition) or a threat to existence are a strong motivation. Shakespeare and Mozart wrote their works to make a living. Tortured souls threatened by extinction and people in a crisis are said to be exceptionally creative. Somestimes the real masterpieces are born in a crisis. The best motivation is to have a passion for what you are doing. Mozart the musician, Goethe the poet, Einstein the scientist, Shakespeare the playwright, they all loved what they were doing: playing/composing (Mozart), writing/imagining (Goethe), calculating/studying (Einstein), play writing/acting (Shakespeare). They were passionate about their work, Mozart loved music and was very playful, Goethe loved poetry and was very imaginative, Einstein loved science, and Shakespeare loved the theater.
• You need courage and perseverance to do it. The courage to go further than anyone else before. You will probably meet obstacles, difficulties and hostility on the way. Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) said “Damit das Mögliche entsteht, muss immer wieder das Unmögliche versucht werden.” (“To realize the possible, we must try the impossible”). Sometimes you need to create whole new worlds to be innovative, which other people probably view as stupid in the beginning. Other people may consider you as weird, mad, stupid or insane. According to Ben Horowitz, Innovation is almost insane by definition: most people view any truly innovative idea as stupid, because if it was a good idea, somebodywould have already done it. So, the innovator is guaranteed to have more natural initial detractors than followers.
• You need concentration to formulate the new idea, to write it down, to work it out. You need to be isolated.

the right authorization / freedom

• You must be authorized to do it, that means you must have the freedom to do it. The right preparation and the right motivation are useless if it is not allowed to create something new. Existing systems and institutions may try to prevent new ideas. You need freedom to explore every possible connection and to draw novel conclusions.
• You need to be in the right mood or mode to do it. According to John Cleese, creativity is based on the ability to play freely with ideas. He distinguishes between two modes of operating for the mind: an open and a closed mode. In the open mode we are curious, spontaneous, and playful. In the closed mode, for example at work under pressure, we are serious, earnest, nervous, and anxious of making mistakes. He argues we can only be creative, i.e. turn problems into opportunities, in the open mode. We need to have enough freedom to be in the open mode when pondering on a problem.

Free markets encourage creativity, because they offer the right conditions for creative individuals: they offer a lot of opportunities and niches to be successful, they have usually high competition which leads to high motivation, and they grant the freedom to be creative.

In short, you need distraction (for the inspiration and accumulation phase) *and* concentration (for the incubation phase). You need to be connected (to fill the melting pot) *and* isolated (to cook with the melting pot). And most of all you neet the drive to succeed. If all conditions are fulfilled, you need still need the drive to be creative and innovative. And sometimes you just need a bit luck – or a letter from Mr Ken Levinshaw who lives in Swindon.
_____________________________________________

(*) for Goethe, creativity was a means to cope with problems in his personal life. He lost all six of his younger siblings when he was young, only his sister Cornelia and he survived. This was a terrifying experience for the familiy and the young poet. Creativity allowed him to compensate the loss by creating s.th. new. His early literary and poetic experiments were an attempt to escape in the world of fiction and fantasy, and he tried to create s.th. for the parents and his remaining sister to compensate the loss of his siblings, see
“Leidenschaft, Goethes Weg zur Kreativität”, Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2009

more links, literature and further reading:
– “Strange Brains and Genius – The secret lives of eccentric scientists and madmen”, Clifford A. Pickover, Penum Press, 1998.
– “Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness”, by David Joseph Weeks et al., Kodansha International, 1996.
– “Genius and the Mind”, Edited by Andrew Steptoe, Oxford University Press, 1998.
– “Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius”, Robert W. Weisberg, W.H. Freeman and Company, 1993
– “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996
– “Scientific genius: A psychology of science”, Dean Keith Simonton, Cambridge University Press, 1988
– “Greatness: Who makes history and why”, Dean Keith Simonton, The Guilford Press, 1994
– “Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity”, Dean Keith Simonton, Oxford University Press, 1999
– “The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures”, Frans Johansson, Harvard Business School Press, 2004

(Flickr Photo is from Flick User adebond1)

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imagin-ings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.” – Chapter 3, The Night Shadows of a “Tale of Two Cities” from Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

Already Charles Dickens pointed out in his “Tale of Two Cities” that human beings are a mystery to each other. Like every house which encloses a secret, every person “encloses” a secret: the personal universe of phenomenal consciousness and subjective experience. The hard problem of consciousness and self-awareness, which philosophers find difficult to explain, is similar to the problem that ordinary people face if they try to explain themselves and their conscious experience. In his book “The Conscious Mind”, David Chalmers calls the problem of subjective experience the hard problem, contrary to the easy problems which can be solved by standard methods of cognitive science. How can we bridge the gap between objective, physical reality and subjective experience? The philosophers ask how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. During “that’s me?” moments of self-awareness, people ask how a physical entity (that objective thing in the environment) can be identified with themselves (their entire subjective world of thoughts, emotions and feelings). In his book “The mystery of consciousness”, John Searle gives the following formulation of the problem:

“How is it possible for physical, objective, quantitatively describable neuron firings to cause qualitative, private, subjective experiences?”

The problem of phenomenal consciousness is not new, it has been discussed nearly a 100 years ago, and there are still written books about it today. Even poets write about it, in the poem “The Great Lover” Rupert Brooke says

“These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such”

All these things are certainly hard to explain, because they have a strong physical component. If someone wants to know what it is is like to touch a fur, he can try it himself. The answer why subjective experience is different to each of us is perhaps more interesting. It lies in the environment and the individual relationships in the society of mind. Each of us has a slightly different network of friends. Similarly, the agents in the society of mind for each person have slighty different friends, which depend on the particular encounters a person has made during the course of life. These friendship relations are different for each person. A thought is always associated with other thoughts, which are often related to things we have experienced at the same time or place in the past. If we want to understand the behavior and personality of a person, we must take a look at the curriculum vitae and the individual history of the person, i.e. we must consider the specific contexts and the various environments which lead to specific brain structures by continuous adaptation.

The question how subjective experiences arise from objective brain processes alone is wrong, because brain processes are not objective. Brain processes and neural connections are always unique, personal and individual, they are slightly different for each person. There are no two persons who have exactly the same neural connections or brain processes. Everyone has a uniqe “society of mind”. Someone who lives in Europe will have a brain that’s wired up differently from somebody who lives in Asia or America. Each of us has different roots, has learnt different languages, has seen different places, has travelled along different paths, and has done different things. Because already Aristotle knew that we are what we repeatedly do, we are all a bit different, because we have all done things which are a little bit different and result in different memories. If all members of a species would be identical in genotype and phenotype, they would experience things in the same way. If our reactions would be hard-wired, then our behavior and our reactions would be similar, and we would feel in the same way, depending only on the physical constraints (for example that colors and tones correspond to different wavelenghts, an “A” has 440 Hz, the color blue has 480 nm, etc.). But we are not hard-wired. Someone in China may associate the color red with good fortune, luck or joy (or simply with his country and his home). Someone in America may associate the color red with Heinz Ketchup and evil communists. Our behavior is based on a long process of socialization, assimilation, and adaptation. Adaptation is the answer how physical items can turn into subjective objects. Each of us is adapted to a slightly different world (or different “slice” of the same world, as Nicholas Thompson called it in a recent FRIAM discussion).

This is in agreement with what Sociologists and Psychologists say. For the sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982) the processes that cause subjective experience were clear, they were social, and they were associated with the own identity. Ego-identity is for Goffman “the subjective sense of his own situation and his own continuity and character that an individual comes to obtain as a result of his various social experience” (a quote from his book “Stigma”).

One of the latest book on the subject, “Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness” from Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey follows a similar line of thought. Phenomenal consciousness and personal, subjective experience is not something which only humans have. Every animal has a special subjective experience. Especially rich is the experience of course for intelligent and playful mammals like dolphins and the great apes. The subjective present of humans is particularly rich and deep, as Nicholas Humphrey argues in his book “Soul dust”. It is full of colors and flavors, but each people sees different colors and feels different flavours. For a cognitive animal, every mental representation of the current situation has a personal dimension, it is colored with particular emotions and linked to personal memories. The “colors” represent if the degree to which the events are perceived as pleasant and good or unpleasant and bad.

This solution to the hard question has already been found or anticipated by William James and his scholar Edwin Holt. William James argues his text “Does ’Consciousness’ Exist?” that subjectivity arises from the different contexts in which we experience things. The pure subjective experience of items in the present depends on the mixed experiences with these items in the past, which in turn depend on the various contexts in which the objects and items appeared. These different contexts shape the relations between the individual experiences for each person. He says about the problem:

“subjectivity and objectivity are [..] realized only when the experience is ‘taken,’ i. e., talked-of twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication forms the fresh content. The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience.[…] The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their ’conscious’ quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations – these relations themselves being experiences – to one another.”

His scholar Edwin Holt goes one step further and shows us where these particular relations come from. For Edwin B. Holt, consciousness or mind is “a cross-section of the universe, selected by the nervous system”. Edwin B. Holt (1873-1946) was a professor of philosophy and psychology at Harvard and Princeton. Together with Ralph Perry he belonged to the New Realists, a group of William James’ students and associates.

The New Realists were Edwin B. Holt (Harvard University), Walter T. Marvin (Rutgers College), William Pepperell Montague (Columbia University), Ralph Barton Perry (Harvard), Walter B. Pitkin (Columbia) and Edward Gleason Spaulding (Princeton University). Together they wrote a book named “The new realism” nearly 100 years ago in 1912. In this book from Edwin B. Holt et al. (see cover picture, which shows a version published in 1925 found in the University Library of the Humboldt Universität in Berlin), Holt says about the cross-section:

“It must not be forgotten that while the object itself, if a physical thing, is far from simple, we are always perceiving it in a complicated setting of (spatial, temporal, and logical) relations, which is a still more complicated thing. But the conscious cross-section is always a group of the integral (neutral) components of the object and of its innumerable relations. [..] it is seldom possible to say just where the object itself terminates and its relations to other entities commences”

He defined a cross-section in general as a definable part of a larger collection or manifold. Each of us experiences a specific cross-section during the course of life. In his book “Concept of Consciousness”, Edwin B. Holt says about this cross-section (on page 171)

“The sum total of all the whales living in certain given waters is a cross-section of the sea that is significant for the whalers who are trying to locate and gather them in. The various shafts and levels of a mine are a cross-section of the mountain, and of import to the shareholders: and it is the business of the engineer so to direkt the workings that this cross-section shall coincide with taht other cross-section that is made by the vein of ore.”

“Once again, a navigator exploring his course at night with the help of a searchlight, illuminates a considerable expanse of wave and cloud, occasionally the bow and forward mast of his ship, and the hither side of other ships and of buoys, lighthouses, and other objects that lie above the horizon. Now the sum total of all surfaces thus illuminated in the course, say, of an entire night, is a cross-section of the region in question that has rather interesting characteristics”

Similarly, the mind selects all “elements or parts of the universe” which “matter”, which are interesting or arise emotions, which cause the system to make a specific response. The mind is made up of all experiences the person has made during the course or path of his life. The experiences which form the mind are path-dependent. Positive experiences with a subject reinforce other positive experiences in the future. If we like someone or something then we may get rewards in form of positive feelings from it, and the more good feelings we have in turn about something, the more we like it. A positive feedback loop arises, which amplifies slight differences into large variations. Each mind corresponds to a specific, individual slice of the same world. It is this cross-section which defines our subjective experience and makes our experiences individual.

If we really want to understand subjective experience, we must examine the past of a person. Maybe one could call it “mind archaeology” – digging through the layers which record the past of the individual. Of course this is not new at all, it would be very similar to psychoanalysis. Already Freud’s patients lay on the couch during psychoanalysis, and told him their stories and dreams.

The idea that the mind is composed of layers which recorded the past of the individual goes back to the 19th century. Julian Jaynes observed in his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” that the metaphors used to understand consciousness changed over time, because they followed current trends in science. Today in the age of web 2.0 and social media, we tend to use social metaphors like the “society of mind” or the “social network of the mind”. In the 19th century, physical sciences like geology were very popular. Jaynes says in “The Origin of Consciousness”:

“The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth’s crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as the being in layers which recorded the past of the individual, there being deeper and deeper layers until the record could no longer be read”

Although all this explains the subjectivity of our experiences, or at least the origin of the subjectivity, it does not take away the perplexity and confusion during “That’s me” moments of self-awareness, when the internal first person point of view collides with the external third person point of view. The feeling of self-awareness will remain mysterious. In his book “The Problem of Consciousness” Colin McGinn says “there is something terminal about our perplexity”. During our development, the web of beliefs (or words) becomes so detailed and fine that we can recognize ourselves in it. Yet this insight will always be accompanied by confusion: if the brain could comprehend itself directly, wouldn’t it be like a fishing net which is somehow identified with one of the fishes it catches? Gilbert Ryle argues in “The concept of mind”:

“Should I, or should I not, put my knowing self down on my list of the sorts of things that I can have knowledge of? If I say ‘no’, it seems to reduce my knowing self to a theoretically infertile mystery, yet if I say ‘yes’, it seems to reduce the fishing-net to one of the fishes which it itself catches”

( The Flickr photo is from Flickr user bikehikedive )

Books mentioned:
* David Chalmer, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford University Press, 1996
* John R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, New York Review Books; 1997
* Edwin B. Holt et al., The new realism, The Macmillan Company 1925
* Edwin B. Holt, Concept of Consciousness, George Allen edition, 1914
* Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, University Of Chicago Press, 1949
* Julian Jayne, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976
* Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness, Blackwell, 1990
* Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness, Princeton University Press, 2011
* Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Prentice-Hall, 1963

Car companies and aircraft manufacturers produce cars and planes which pollute the environment with lots of toxic and carcinogenic substances like benzene, a natural constituent of crude oil. People get sick and the climate begins to change. Instead of producing cars and planes with zero emissions, the pharmaceutical industry produces drugs which treat the symptoms, for instance very expensive cancer drugs. And instead of tackling the root of climate change, scientists seriously try to develop technologies which block sunlight by polluting the atmosphere with dust. No kidding! This is just wrong. In the former case, you counter the effects of toxic substances by producing even more toxins (many cancer drugs are cytotoxins), and in the latter case you counter the effects of pollution by producing even more pollution.

The food industry produces stuff which tastes good and sells well, but which is not very healthy. Agriculture uses pesticides to increase production, and the food processing industry cares more about the sales volume than about the health of the customers. It is well-known that people get sick from fast food. A recent study found out again that sugary drinks increase the risk of diabetes dramatically. Advertising suggests that you will be surrounded by good looking healthy people if you drink Coca Cola, but it is more likely that these people have bad teeth, too much weight and type 2 diabetes.. If you consume Starbucks Coffee or Coca Cola regurlarly, you may be well on your way to diabetes, obesity, or both. If people realize it and consume less, companies will spend more for marketing to increase consumation again. And instead of producing healthy food, the industry finds out ways out to make money out of the sick people. The pharmaceutical industry produces drugs and devices that are used to treat the symptoms, for instance type 2 diabetes.

When it comes to social issues and the protection of the weak or to environmental issues and the protection of the environment, markets fail, and the intervention of governments is needed. Companies will exploit natural resources totally until they are completed depleted if they can make money out of it. And they don’t care about people if they can not make money out of them. Germany has a social market economy which tries to protect the citizens from market failure, but even here the power of large international corporations is too large to do anything about the points mentioned above.

(The traffic jam photo of the 405 in LA is from Flickr User Atwater Village)

Do “cultural stem cells” exist?

Lewis Thomas made this observation in his book The Lives of a Cell:

“Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind…are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later, analogous to the prokaryotic cells that drifted through shallow pools in the early days of biological evolution. Later, when the time is right, there may be fusion and symbiosis among the bits, and then we will see eukaryotic thought, metazoans of thought, huge interliving coral shoals of thought.”

If we can compare genes with memes and cells with thoughts, are there any “cultural stem cells”? Undifferentiated self-replicating entities based on abstract ideas? Stem cells are cells found in all multi-cellular organisms. They are characterized by the ability to renew and replicate themselves, they also can differentiate themselves into a diverse range of specialized cell type. Stem cells are the base of life, they can found at the beginning of every multi-cellular organism, but they are also very dangerous and can be a source of cancer. The cancer stem cell hypothesis says that cancer may be caused by stem cells gone bad. If “cultural stem cells” exist, then they could be source of cultural cancer, too.

Families and Dynasties

Now, is there such a thing as a cultural or social stem cell? A stem cell is an entity which can replicate itself. Therefore a cultural stem cell is a social group with certain ideas, beliefs and traditions which replicates itself. Is it the family which give rise to clans, tribes and dynasties or is it the small circle or group that meets regularly in a certain room or place, which leads to religions, ideologies and social movements? Well, both.

Families are the basic unit of all societies, modern and ancient ones. A family is a group of people which shares common genes. The purpose of a family is to replicate, maintain, and sustain itself. It is the family which give rise to clans, tribes and dynasties, examples are the tribes in Afghanistan or Scottish clans. These clans and tribes existed before any ancient culture. Families are the founders of corporations in economic systems, for instance the Porsche family – Ferdinand Porsche and its descendants – founded the Porsche automobile corporation. Since the dawn of culture, families are also the founders of royal dynasties, for instance the royal houses of Europe, the House of Windsor, the House of Hohenzollern, etc., or the “Kennedy Dynasty” in America (see “The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster”, John H. Davis, McGraw-Hill, 1984). Descendants of a family tend to glorify their ancestors, because it increases their own legitimation to rule.

In general, there is also a group of people which shares common memes. This can be small group of thoughtful, committed people which follow a certain ideology or try to achieve a common goal. As Margaret Mead said, a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can act like a stem cell for a political party, a large organization or a social movement. Both attributes seem to be critical, “thoughtful” means the group has some common idea or ideology (such as “Shawarma for everybody”, “A man should have a mustache”, ..), and “committed” means it follows it against all odds. A typical meeting place would be a temple, church or meeting room, where all members of the group meet regularly to realize their culture.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead

Culture and Social attrators

Culture here means a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. Cultural entities are always based on social systems, where ideas can manifest themselves, where they affect the behaviors of the members, and where they can be transmitted from one member to another. Religions and ideologies belong to the most fundamental ideas of social systems. According to David Sloan Wilson (and his book “Darwin’s cathedral”), religious groups are adaptive units subject to group selection. The most fundamental social entity is the small group.

Religious systems are long-lasting social movements, they act as a social attractor which is able to hold a group together: the ritual assemblies attract the members regularly to a certain location. A small social movement can turn into a huge religion if the society evolves toward a stable state, where all members of society share certain desired properties: freedom/justice/work/peace/love/happiness/etc. A group where all members act selfless and altruistic is certainly more stable than a group where members are selfish and egoistic.

Sometimes it is quite simple to start a social movement, as this video shows (see also here). A leader needs the courage to stand alone and look ridiculous. What he is doing and teaching is so simple, that it is easy to follow him. The first follower makes a leader out of the lunatic. If a few more followers join the group, then we already have a very simple social movement which follows some idea or ideology.

Blueprints for a soul

They are many ideologies and belief systems. Can they be considered as a blueprint? Can we construct minds from different parts or pieces ? Is there a blueprint for a soul? Everyone is born into a certain cultural context, a kid in Germany will learn German and German culture, and a kid in America will learn American and American lifestyle. A christian scholar will become a Christian, and an scholar of Buddhism will become a Buddhist. Yet in principle each of us has the freedom to choose his own blueprint. Someone who creates and invents his own blueprint is often a leader or a prophet. If the life of a leader or history of a nation is written down, it may become a blueprint for the minds of future generations. “Holy books” are often autobiographies of famous prophets or contain the history of the own country and culture. “Holy books” and belief systems in general which specify the right kind of behavior can be considered as “memetic blueprints” to build souls and social systems, because they specify the glue that keeps societies together. They are the scripts which contain the rules that direct our plays. They are taught in schools and temples.

Temples and Ideologies

Besides the house of the family, where the family meets regularly, temples and meeting rooms for small groups where simple and primitive ideologies are preached are perhaps the closest things to cultural stem cells, especially if the ideologies or religions which are taught have a strong missionary aspect. Ideologies are undifferentiated self-replicating entities based on abstract ideas: consistent bundles or “shoals” of thoughts. They can be applied to many areas, and taught in many buildings. A temple can be a palace for king, a school for a culture, a university for a science, a town hall for citizens, a meeting hall for a political party or a building for a company. In short it can be a house for a small group of people, which organizes themselves in many ways. Like cells which can appear in different cell types, social (sub-)systems can appear in different types, namely

• Cultural systems: Humans / Language
• Religious systems: Priests / Belief-System
• Scientific systems: Scientists / Science
• Military systems: Armies / Military
• Economic and banking systems: Companies / Economy
• Political systems: Parties / Ideology

At the beginning all cells are equal in the body of multicellular eukaryotes. There are only a few which replicate themselves rapidly. During the course of time, different types of cells develop and take over certain functions. For social systems it is similar, in the beginning there were only a few, and they were all similar. During the course of time, many different types of systems emerged. Let us take a short look at the history of these systems.

Cultural systems: since 10.000 BC

Language is the foundation of every culture. Without language, no sharing of knowledge would be possible. The first languages appeared together with the first humans around 100.000 BC, probably earlier, at least they were present when the Neolithic Revolution took place 10.000 BC, where gatherers became farmers and hunters cattle breeders. Cultural systems alone are mostly harmless, they become dangerous if religious or military aspects come into play, for example if other cultures are condemned or combated, or if the culture tries to replicate itself actively. Most religions involve some kind of missionary aspect, where members are forced to convert others to the religion, thereby spreading the religion.

Religious systems: since 3.000 BC

Ancient Egypt, Bronze Age: Religious systems are stem cells of culture. As the ancestors of political, systems, and economic systems they are the oldest and most ancient social systems. They are undifferentiated and have very different functions, they contain laws to regulate behavior and provide a framework for a legal system. They are at the same time a political system with a single party which offers an ideology or vision and is symbolized by certain signs. They are scientific systems which explain the world. They are cultural systems with a certain language and particular customs, which is determined by the holy book. They are biological and ethnic systems, if the religious leaders belong to a single family or dynasty. The earliest and most ancient cultures are a mixture of religious, political and cultural system: they were religious palace enonomies (without coined money). The king was the religious, political, military, economic and cultural leader, all at the same time. The palaces of the Minoan civilization were not only royal residences, they were religious, political, military, economic and cultural centers, similar to some ancient Egyptian temples, which were shrines, centers of government, administrative offices, and storage spaces, too. In the book “An Introduction to the Ancient World” from Lukas De Blois and R.J. van der Spek the authors argue that

“Throughout the whole history of the ancient Near East, agriculture formed the basis of the economy. [..] In the ancient Near East the temple and the palace were the chief landowners [..] The palace and the temple were never entirely independent of one another”

Scientific systems: since 800 BC

Ancient Greece, Bronze Age: Science at the beginning meant Philosophy, the most basic science besides Physics. In Ancient Egypt, science and religion was inseparable, the gods were also used as an explanation how the world works. The first independent scientific system appeared in Greece, together with the first Philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. The Greek started to realize that religious stories often crystallize hard-won wisdom about human nature – but some also thought that the stories are too limited to embrace what we now comprehend about the cosmos. Later in the Middle Ages, the first scientists were Philosophers, too, and they belonged to the Christian church, for example Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas. Early previews of other systems appeared for the first time, too, for example organized sports in form of the Olympic Games, and precursors of modern politics (democracy is Greek, demokratia means rule/kratos of the people/demos).

Military systems: 1st century

Ancient Rome, Iron Age: The first independent military system appeared perhaps in ancient Rome. Even in Ancient Rome there the political and the military system were still tightly coupled, and the social standing of a person impacted both his political and military roles. Humans have always been fighting wars, as long as they exist. It is hard to say where the first independent armies emerged, where the general is no longer the king, the president, or the chancellor. Even in the USA the president is still the commander-in-chief. The Roman army marks the transition between the conscription-based armies of the early states and the mainly volunteer, professional standing forces of the later eras.

Economic and banking systems: 14th century

Europe, Middle Ages: The slaves in Greece and Rome where precursors of modern workers, since no independent economy existed. Really independent economic systems appeared for the first time in the Middle Ages (at the time of the House of Hohenstaufen) together with the first banking dynasties. The first banking dynasties emerged in the 14th and 15th century: the Medici in Italy and the Fuggers in Germany. The first modern stock corporations appeared in medieval Europe, too.

Political systems: 18th century

The first precursors of independent political systems appeared in ancient forms in Greece and Rome, but in full form including political parties, political ideologies and voting systems after the French Revolution in the 18th century. Although finally all the systems mentioned above have appeared in independent forms, it took still two centuries and many wars (including two world wars) until they reached independence in most of the countries.

Fascism, Communism and Terrorism

During WWII, fascism and fanaticism spread like a cancer throughout the world. After WWII, communism began to dominate more and more countries. The corresponding ideologies affected all areas of culture and led to a system of poor differentiation (where religious, political, military and economic sub-systems were more or less equalized) and high aggression, just as it can be found in some malicious tumors. And they were all a failure. History has shown that such classless societies do not work. Marx argued that differentiation into different systems and classes is bad. The theories from Marx and Communism in general aim for a classless society without division. But equalizing revolutions lead to stagnation, deterioration and corruption of society.

Fascism is even more equalizing than communism. Are fascism and certain forms of religious fanaticism a kind of cultural cancer which can emerge from cultural stem cells? They emerge from small groups where an ideology is preached, i.e. they go all the way back to religious systems. The Nazi party began somewhere in Munich in a beer cellar (Hofbräukeller), where a radical form of fascism and antisemitism was preached in the meetings of the German Workers’ Party. The leading members of the later Nazi Party including Adolf Hitler, attended and met one another here. The beer cellar acted a bit like a cultural stem cell.

Consider another example, the Al-Quds Mosque Hamburg, a mosque in Hamburg, Germany, that preached a radical form of Sunni Islam. Al-Quds is where some of the September 11 attackers including Mohamed Atta, attended and met one another, forming the Hamburg cell. This little Mosque where a radical form of Islam was preached acted indeed a bit like a malicious stem cell. It produced more terror cells around the world. And it was located right within western culture, just like cancer cells originate within the body. The 9/11 attackers of the Hamburg cell were educated partly at German universities and flight schools in the USA. The planes they hijacked were American planes. In cancer it is similar: the cells which attack the body originate in the own body, probably in malicious stem cells.

For stem cells, the cellular environments are important. “Good” cells can turn “bad” in a bad neighborhood – leading to cancer. For cultural stem cells, the context and the environment are important too. They can prosper if the right idea is proposed at the right place and the right time. The Al-Quds Mosque was active at a time when Osama bin Laden was desperately looking for suitable suicide attackers to take revenge on the USA. In the beer cellar 1920 in Munich, Adolf Hitler found the right words at the right place and the right time to trigger a mass movement, which lead to the cancer of fascism, a crude mixture of militarism and imperialism. The old system was weak and broken, there were hostile tendencies in the society towards certain privileged groups, civil war or terror groups were a constant threat. Under these circumstances, cultural stem cells are especially dangerous and can have severe consequences.

Conclusion

There are two basic objects which can be considered as a cultural stem cell: the small group with common genes – the family – and the small group with common memes in general, i.e. the small group of thoughtful, committed people. Both are the basic unit of all societies, modern and ancient ones. They are powerful and dangerous, because they can be used to maintain, regenerate and recreate a society, but also to destroy it.

It looks like fascism and certain forms of religious fanaticism act indeed a bit like a kind of cultural cancer which emerges from cultural stem cells. Temples, mosques and meeting rooms for small groups where simple and primitive ideologies are preached are perhaps the closest things to cultural stem cells. They are simple and fundamental. Like religions and ideologies, they accompany humans since the dawn of history. And if we do not pay attention, they will remain a threat.

(Thanks to Robert Critchlow who pointed me to the quote of Margaret Mead).

Did you notice that most authors write more or less about themselves, even the giants of Russian literature, the Russian novelists Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky? Anton Chekhov was a physician and wrote many short stories about doctors and patients, Tolstoy was a soldier and wrote about “War and Piece”, Dostoevsky was an outsider and wrote about outsiders, for example people with epilepsy (“The Idiot”) or prisoners sentenced to death. He experienced both itself.

The classic German authors like Goethe are not much better, Goethe’s Faust contains his own quest for knowledge and beauty in form of beautiful young women. Shakespeare wrote about himself, too, not only in Hamlet. Modern authors are not different, take for instance the American authors Herman Melville or Michael Crichton. Their bestsellers mirror their experiences on their extended travels around the world (Michael Crichton documented his journeys around the world in a book named Travels).

Why is this so? Why do authors write about themselves over and over again? Is their imagination so limited? Yes, it is indeed hard to invent completely new worlds. It is hard to imagine something which you have never seen or experienced before. Anyone can create new words or stories which make no sense. It is much harder to find some who is able to invent new stories which are conceivable and consistent, new and logical.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
– George Bernard Shaw (Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist 1856-1950)

But there is another reason, people are also selfish and egoistic, and, like everyone else, authors spend a lot of time thinking about themselves. The own life is the thing which we know best. Personal experience is the best source of inspiration. People who have experienced strange or wonderful things can create a similar subjective experience in others simply by describing what they have seen accurately. Authors must describe the inner life of their actors, their motives, motions and emotions. And the best way to know how something feels like is to experience it yourself.

Before we create worlds, we experience worlds. Before we can connect the dots, we must collect some. Leonardo da Vinci said “All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions” and “Wisdom is the daughter of experience”. Experience and creativity belong together. Subjective experience is private, creativity is public. As Franz Kafka said, even if we stand in front of each other, we can not imagine what the other experiences:

Wenn Du vor mir stehst und mich ansiehst, was weißt Du von den Schmerzen, die in mir sind und was weiß ich von den Deinen. Und wenn ich mich vor Dir niederwerfen würde und weinen und erzählen, was wüsstest Du von mir mehr als von der Hölle, wenn Dir jemand erzählt, sie ist heiß und fürchterlich.

When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?
– Franz Kafka (Czech writer and German language author 1883 – 1924)

Creativity is a process where we turn private experiences into public objects. A creative process often involves merging different threads, ideas, systems or even complete worlds. Before we can merge them, we must split, isolate and understand them. We take worlds apart, throw away the uninteresting parts and reuse the rest by emphasizing certain features from this world and certain features from others. We must acquire worlds first to recombine them later. We must be adapted to the specific domain of the creative process, in the best case we are adapted to more than one domain. You must be immersed in a field, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi said in his book Creativity. When we create possible, conceivable worlds, we use and combine the impressions we have previously experienced. It is often hard to find a new combination which makes sense. The creative process itself is often a process of trial and error, of collecting and dropping ideas, of designing and abandoning objects.

The German singer and songwriter Herbert Grönemeyer combined in this video a
classical ballet dancer with modern music. It shows Polina Semionova, Prima ballerina at the “Berliner Staatsballett” in Berlin. Creativity does not mean that some kind of Muse comes along like a ballet dancer to give you the spark of inspiration. It means that you connect different dots and combine different worlds.

• a poet, author or a scientist reads a whole library to make one new book
• a composer or DJ listens to countless pieces of music to make one new composition
• an artist watches many paintings and landscapes before he paints a masterpiece

Thus when we are creative, we turn the objects of our subjective experience – the former objects of perception – in an active process into objective reality. Creativity turns subjective experience into objective reality. In a way, creativity is the counterpart and opposite of personal perception. Perception turns objective reality into subjective experience, while creativity turns subjective experience into objective reality. Description and combination of subjective experience leads to the creation and construction of stories, works of art, and virtual worlds.

“Der Künstler steht da zwischen dem Endlichen und Unendlichen; wo beide aneinanderstoßen, fängt er den Blick des Gewitters auf, hält ihn fest und gibt ihm ewige Dauer.”
Jacob Grimm, (1785-1863), deutscher Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftler

The translation of this quote is roughly “the artist stands where the finite meets the infinite, where both collide, he catches the view of the storm, holds it and gives it eternal duration.” In this quote, the German linguist Jacob Grimm says that the creative process involves a transition or transformation between one world and another (in one world the phenomenon may be occasional and non-permanent, in the other it may be lasting and permanent). The artists is the connection between both worlds, he is at the place where the finite meets the infinite, and the incidental the eternal.

One can distinguish between between mere perception of well-known ideas, i.e. “re”-cognition and remembrance, and perception of new ideas while we understand and comprehend new things. During the former cognitive process, external events are just turned into their neural correlates, an activation of some internal memories.

This is the opposite of acting, during acting and rehearsal, where internal memories are turned into external events. For creative processes, one can also distinguish between production and mere reproduction or restoration. Creation is the antithesis of restoration: a creative process needs novelty, new combinations, whereas a restorative process needs conservation, preservation of old combinations.

“For all their seeming kinship, a restorer is the antithesis of a painter: he is a conserver, not a creator. Like a mimic, he assumes another person’s style, at the expense of his own identity. He must resist any urge to improve, to experiment, to show off; otherwise, he becomes a forger. Yet, unlike a great actor, he receives no glory for his feats of mimicry. If he has succeeded, he has burnished another artist’s reputation, and vanished without the world ever knowing who he is, or what he has accomplished. The art historian Max J. Friedländer called the business of the restorer “the most thankless one imaginable.”
from a story of “The New Yorker”

Anton Chekhov also valued creation more than mere action, although he also observed that both are indistinguishable for the audience, while the actor is much more popular because he arises strong emotions. In his short story “A Dreary Story” he writes about actors:

“To my mind, if a play is good there is no need to trouble the actors in order that it may make the right impression; it is enough to read it. If the play is poor, no acting will make it good. […] No art nor science was capable of producing so strong and so certain an effect on the soul of man as the stage, and it was with good reason that an actor of medium quality enjoys greater popularity than the greatest savant or artist.”
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “A Dreary Story”