The Deep History of Ourselves

What Hacker News says

1. adolphApr 2025
   Proving a negative is a fools errand. The fossil record developed thus far doesn't support it. Additionally there is such intelligence as the Octopus which has an evolutionary split much earlier than mammals and birds.

     The last common ancestor of [humans] and octopuses is a flatworm that 
     trawled the sea floor 750 million years ago. This is the most recent 
     creature that we both have a direct line of descent from – it represents 
     the point at which we diverged down separate evolutionary pathways. To 
     illustrate just how early this was, this was 80 million years before any 
     animal showed bilateral symmetry – the familiar body plan with a defined 
     top and bottom, and right and left; 350 million years before tetrapods – 
     the first four legged creatures that gave rise to all birds, reptiles, 
     mammals and amphibians – came into existence; and 500 million years before 
     the emergence of dinosaurs. 
   

   https://eusci.org.uk/2020/06/22/an-alien-in-our-sea-a-look-a...

   Nice book about the topic is "The Deep History of Ourselves" by Joseph LeDoux.

   https://www.amazon.com/Deep-History-Ourselves-Microbes-Consc...

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2. ziggyzecatJul 2024
   If you have not read it, yet, I highly recommend it: The Deep History of Ourselves by Joseph LeDoux.

   I think that your entire thought process can be hypothesized all the way back to the first cellular colonies. Individualist needed the sustainable colony to get the chance to grow and thrive. The Colony needed Individualists to innovate and diversify, because with a growing population, new needs and wants are born from evolution, subconsciousness, experience and choice and the freaking environment changes so new sources need to be processed according to possibility and taste.

   The fun part is that the preserving part of the colony needs the kind of remembering and honor you are talking about to maintain the ground on which individualists can grow. At the same time individualists need to be strong enough to dessert the colony and establish a new one. And if they do, their only way to survive is to build a culture of remembering and honor that enables the growth of new individualists.

   Sometimes I find myself playing with the thought that Empires only fall if their conserving body fails to serve the diverse range of needs, desires & kinks of it's population, the breeding ground of and by individualists & for everybody. It's as if too many good men die in wars and the politicians and administrators back home just don't have what it takes to be grow strong enough people because they themselves can only survive and thrive in submissive, pseudo-dominant hierarchies that don't cherish innovation & individualism and tend to be predatory & oppressive, fostering cultures that are build on shame, guilt, fear and manipulation because these things are efficient enforcers of conformity, cooptation, and create adjustable competition, which is exactly what makes colonies weak and poisons the ground, air and food of both, the social body and the individualists.

   Consumer Culture might have been maximized as a hack around this, I believe, not necessarily as a conspiracy of men who tried to standardize the way of money, but of the social body itself, in order to create a clandestine womb for individualists, because mothers noticed what the fuck and how the head aligned their offspring after too many fathers died in wars & too many natural leaders withdrew from top level positions and went into the crafts and engineering because so that the mafia guys wouldn't gang up on them & their offspring. Too much corruption, even when they were only just tiny clumps of cells! ... and now we have "the age of consciousness" vs/or/and/not/nand "mass information flow"

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3. felizunoFeb 2025
   So many adjectives... and "radical" in the title is a doozy considering this article is essentially a stoner summary of LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves" with the science replaced with thesaurus suggestions.
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4. adolphFeb 2021
   The Deep History of Ourselves is a book that goes from single cell to consciousnesses. Here is a review:

   https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02475-x

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5. banjo_milkmanNov 2019
   My struggle book 6 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Good, though I think I preferred the earlier books. It's still very compelling, but a little too much Hitler in this one

   Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane. Poetic landscape history, reminiscent of Sebald. Good stuff.

   Click here to kill everybody by Bruce Schneier. Scary.

   Machines like me by Ian McEwan. First McEwan I read for a while but I liked it more than I expected. I thought the AI bits were quite good.

   The deep history of ourselves : the four-billion-year story of how we got conscious brains by Joseph LeDoux. Bit disappointed in this one, it seemed like there should have been a better story here.

   The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life: David Quammen.

   The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. Makes CS careers look less appealing.

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