Name: The recursive mind
ISBN: 9780691160948

The recursive mind

The Recursive Mind challenges the commonly held notion that language is what makes us uniquely human. In this compelling book, Michael Corballis argues that what distinguishes us in the animal kingdom is our capacity for recursion: the ability to embed our thoughts within other thoughts. "I think, therefore I am," is an example of recursive thought, because the thinker has inserted himself into his thought. Recursion enables us to conceive of our own minds and the minds of others. It also gives us the power of mental "time travel"--the ability to insert past experiences, or imagined future ones, into present consciousness. Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, animal behavior, anthropology, and archaeology, Corballis demonstrates how these recursive structures led to the emergence of language and speech, which ultimately enabled us to share our thoughts, plan with others, and reshape our environment to better reflect our creative imaginations. He shows how the recursive mind was critical to survival in the harsh conditions of the Pleistocene epoch, and how it evolved to foster social cohesion. He traces how language itself adapted to recursive thinking, first through manual gestures, then later, with the emergence of Homo sapiens, vocally.

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patconJan 2021

> It is debatable whether "the fundamental change that caused sapiens to dominate all other life" i.e. "our ability to abstract and conceptualize" is unique to humans.

I like your questions.

I'm not disagreeing (unsure myself), but this talk of what "the fundamental" is, it makes me want to share about another hypothesis: that the mind's ability to operate via "recursion" is the feature from which a bunch of other things emerged. A good book that lays the case, still reading, but very thought-provoking: https://www.amazon.ca/Recursive-Mind-Origins-Language-Civili...

So if that's true, it's less about there being some fundamental core difference between us and animals. I think I agree that the same underlying drives motivate. I understand that the core drive of all life (below the particulars of our biological strata) are perhaps seeking the right alchemical mix of (1) entropy/micro-diversity and (2) cycles/periodicity and (3) compartmentalization [1]. These drive information-creation about the environment -- mapping information of the environment into the structures "trying" to buffer themselves from change in a chaotic environment. But "trying" is anthropomorphizing (and applying false agency), and in essence, this simply allows a structure of any scale or medium to "persist" better into the next tick of the engine ;) And a structure that persists tends to have information about the environment (and the environment's future) encoded within itself. This encoding in persistent structures is what we tend to read as free-will and agency.

But anyhow, in a round-about way, I'm just proposing that perhaps "recursion" was the "new innovation" that biology of human mind stumbled upon, that really expanded the capacity to persist. And language, which not a result of new drives, fell out of that new ability of minds :)

[1]: https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/j.cocis.2007.08.008

ps, sorry for rant, i get excited about this stuff! sorry if overload, and apologies for not citing the web of readings that led me here. Happy to linkshare, if you're interested, as I certainly have sources and go back to them often! e.g., [2] [3] :)

[2]: https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ [3]: https://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime

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yamrzouMar 2023

The Recursive Mind by Michael C. Corballis.

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