Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  That is one view of culture and its symbiosis with dark matter. In the next chapter, I explore the ontogeny of culture and dark matter. How in particular does the child negotiate the transition from alien to insider?

  The Cultural vs. Natural Basis of Roles

  The roles that contribute to the formation of culture are not always obvious, nor do they always map well across cultures. For example, consider the kagi role among the Pirahãs. I first heard this word when a dog trotted into one part of the village from another with a small squirrel monkey holding on to its fur, riding it. The Pirahãs said that the monkey was “kagi apoo.” I knew that apoo meant “on” or “on top of,” but I wasn’t at all sure what kagi meant. I next heard this exact expression in a description of beans and rice, with the beans on top of the rice—the beans were kagi apoo. Then once when Pirahã men were talking about sex, they described the man on top of the woman as kagi apoo.

  This all seemed quite mysterious. I then learned that my family is my kagi. One brother with another brother is with his kagi. What could this possibly mean? Well, it turned out to mean “expected associate.” Rice is the expected associate of beans. Wife is the expected associate of husband or woman of man. One brother is the expected associate of the other. When a monkey mounts a dog for a ride, the dog has become its “expected associate.” Thus “expected associate” is contextually determined, and it refers to a specific relationship in a particular situation, not to a single entity. To understand this word, I needed to understand the relationships that the Pirahãs understood and to understand the expected partnerships as the Pirahãs understand them. Only in this way can one understand why the same expression is used for the act of coitus, a monkey on a dog, and beans on rice, or how kagi can refer to brother, rice, wife, dog, and so on.

  The upshot for our construction of a new approach to the nature of culture and its relationship to individual psychology is that social roles emerge from particular cultural relationships, perspectives, and knowledge structures. The Pirahã notion of “expected associate” is more abstract perhaps than the English word partner, though even the latter word can itself look quite abstract indeed to someone learning English for the first time (e.g., one who works with you, someone who lives with you, a casual acquaintance of a cowboy). Participant observation in a society and culture is indispensable to an understanding of social roles, as it is for values and knowledge structures.

  CONCEPTUAL TOOLS IN THE CREATION OF CULTURE

  Many anthropologists over the years, such as Levi-Strauss ([1949] 1969), Leslie White (1949), Chagnon (1984), Descola (2013), Marvin Harris (2006), among others, have attempted to develop theories of culture that go far beyond the notions of values, social roles, and hierarchical knowledge that I appeal to here. They have used organizing principles such as animism, totemism, universal mythology, and principles of analogy to suggest universal principles of culture. These principles might be universal, according to the hypothesis, because they are innate or because they are ancient, when there was only one or a few cultures. Or they could exist because of concepts shared in culture areas. Such principles are hypothesized to constrain our normal cognitive abilities, our reason, our emotions, and so on, such that we converge on these universals of culture.

  Descola (2013), for example, offers a lovely-to-read, erudite, and highly empirical tour of people groups of the Americas, Asia, Australia, and so on, to offer one such sweeping scheme of generalizations. I want to consider some of his ideas here, in order to explain what I like and what I do not like about them. By this point, I suspect that what follows will not be terribly surprising to anyone, since the theory of dark matter taking shape here is largely unsympathetic to notions of universality that range beyond basic physiology—that is, universal systems of knowledge, other than those that are learned via experience and which are functionally so useful as to lead to convergence as natural solutions.

  Descola’s work is an attempt at a grand synthesis in the Bastian tradition, so far as I can tell. He attempts to classify all peoples of the world in terms of the four-way ontological distinction between animism, totemism, analogy, and naturalism. In this system, animism represents relations based on differences in physical manifestation but similarities in “interiorities”—our “spirits” or mental life or “souls,” and so on. From this perspective, a tree and a man are very different on their exteriors, but both are inhabited by God or gods or souls. Their interiors are thus roughly the same. Totemism, on the other hand, is a way for addressing the world as similar in physical form and interior life, such that a wolf and a man are like each other internally and externally in some ways. Analogy, according to Descola (2013, 201ff), is “a mode of identification that divides up the whole collection of existing beings in to a multiplicity of essences, forms, and substances separated by small distinctions and sometimes arranged on a graduated scale so that it becomes possible to recompose the system of initial contrasts into a dense network of analogies that link together the intrinsic properties of the entities that are distinguished.” We say, for example, that “in this respect, John is like a leaf,” focusing on the comparison of specific traits in one creature and another.

  Finally, there is to Descola the important ontological category of naturalism. Westerners are naturalists, in the sense that we see nature in opposition, as a background to ourselves, in contradistinction to ourselves and nature as parts of a single world, in which we move, reside, exchange places, and appear as different manifestations of thought without really being distinct entities.

  From these four ontologies, Descola creates an interesting hermeneutics of the world, offering accounts of differences, similarities, behaviors, and mental lives across cultures. However, although Descola’s work is obviously important, innovative, and far-reaching, if the theory of this book is on the right track, grand unifying schemes like his—based upon human knowledge that is specific and shared among all peoples—are on the wrong track. What is needed is a different kind of unifying scheme, based on the idea that there are no universal ideas except those that can be arrived at via languaging, culturing, and having human bodies.

  Summary

  This chapter developed a theory of culture, inspired in part by linguistics research, drawing on optimality theory, tagmemics’ slot:filler concept, among others. A main question that the chapter attempted to answer was “Does each member of a culture, X, participate in a collective intention to ‘live according to the values of culture X’?” The answer was that it is unnecessary to characterize all culture as shared, group intentions, but as confluence of shared backgrounds—exposure to similar value rankings, knowledge hierarchies, and social roles. Thus we answer the question “How is culture even possible?” by imitation, language, and—most importantly—emicization, the formation of subjective gestalts, via apperception, from objective experiences. A society is therefore not like a football team nor like an orchestra. Rather, the cultural cohesiveness of a society arises from overlapping values, roles, and knowledge of individuals that live together, eat together, think together, language together, and culture together. The result is that culture is the epitome of e pluribus unum. Culture is an emic gestalt in individuals.

  The chapter developed a model of culture in which the individual is the bearer of culture and the repository of knowledge, rather than the society as a whole. It also presented a theory of values, which is epistemologically prior to a theory of culture.

  The discussion of the importance of the individual to the notion of culture led us to an understanding of culture as the core of cognition, leading simultaneously to the conclusion that machines are incapable of thinking. The argument offered was that without culture, there can be no semantic understanding, no background, no dark matter in which thought can occur.

  3

  The Ontogenesis and Construction of Dark Matter

  The repeated claims of cultural psychologists and anthropologists, as well as evolutionary biologists, for decades to
recognize contextual/cultural variation and systematically introduce it into attachment theory have been largely ignored.

  HEIDI KELLER, in Different Faces of Attachment: Cultural Variations on a Universal Human Need

  In the previous chapter we laid out a theory of culture in which groups of people share values, knowledge structures, beliefs, and understandings of and participation in social roles and experiences—“culturing.” As these various mind-body phenomena are incorporated into the apperceptions, memory, and muscle habits of individuals we can say that they “share a culture,” though we know that no two people will share exactly the same value rankings, beliefs, and so on.

  In this chapter, the goal is to understand how dark matter is acquired. Of course, cultural learning is a large area of study, and my own thinking has profited tremendously from work that has gone before.1 In related work, there is a vast psychological literature on child development, much of which necessarily engages societal learning. And Bruner’s body of work is pioneering, exemplary, and foundational.2 There is also the work of discourse and language in cultural learning, at least indirectly.3 And these works only scratch the surface of the literature.

  However, my goal here is to describe in detail my own field research on cultural learning and then to extrapolate from that lessons that I believe to be most relevant for understanding of how humans construct/acquire the dark matter of their minds.

  There are reasons why computers are unlikely to ever be able to think or talk, except in artificial ways. The main reason is the conglomeration of factors that make human thinking what it is: consciousness, emotions, apperceptions, dark matter, cognitive plasticity, culture, society, and physiology. Without these, there is no human thinking by robots.

  What makes humans unique from other animals and machines is not computational ability. Other animals have tremendous problem-solving, navigational, emotional, and other cognitive ranges, as well as consciousness. Studies of canine cognition, for example, reveal that (unsurprising for any dog owner) dogs can think and reason across a variety of tasks.4 In fact, one reason that humans and dogs have developed such a close relationship over the millennia is that each possesses mental and physical abilities that benefit and complement the other’s. Canines and humans are similar in some ways emotionally; their reactions, needs, and so on, are based on very similar subcortical emotional centers (Panksepp and Biven 2012), thus their mutual contributions to each other’s well-being produces strong attachment between them. Dogs can even become part of a culture in the sense of our discussion above and throughout this study, based on social roles, attachments, and their meanings (companion, ally, aid, etc.) to their associated humans. In fact, among the Pirahãs, dogs are referred to as kagí, the same word used for spouse or family. (This term actually means “partner” or “normally associated entity,” so it can even refer to rice with beans, as explained in chap. 2.) The Pirahã expression kagí apoó—“partner on top of”—can mean several things, including rice on beans, sexual intercourse, a pet monkey riding a pet dog, and so on. Here are what I consider to be the necessary requirements to develop dark matter:

  1. A body—for muscle memory, tastes, sights, sounds, and the like.

  2. “Culturing”—engaging in the normal array of practices of a community guided by similar dark matter. An enormous component of dark matter is knowledge derived from culturing, languaging, and otherwise behaving as a member of a particular community, engaged with other members of the community. Anything a dog knows, believes, tastes, values, and so on, is dark matter by definition, since it is in principle unspeakable for the dog (which is not to say always ineffable, because tail wagging, barking, and many other canine behaviors are forms of communication). Human dark matter, varying by culture, includes things they believe and that they don’t know they believe (at least until stimulated to discuss it)—for example, that the arch can support a bridge, that the capricious extra payment by an employer to one colleague but not another is unfair, that a person can travel a thousand miles an hour without protection (on a rotating earth), or that it is disgusting to reassimilate body fluids. Dark matter also includes reasons for the uniformity of behavior.

  3. A flexible brain—to make new associations, to innovate, to tie specific sets of experiences together, to be able to unify apperceptions, to learn by subception, to improvise, to find humor, to invent humor, and so on.

  4. An emotional brain—emotions are necessary conditions for culture/dark matter, though not sufficient conditions by any means. Mr. Spock’s Vulcan culture could not exist. Animals bond with humans and humans bond with other humans, animals, carpets, guitars, food types, and the like, because of the interaction of emotions, cognition, and physiology. Without such emotional attachments and motivations, culturing and dark matter would not emerge; nor would its by-products, such as semantics.

  5. Semantics—the study of the structures, qualia, and sources of meaning, which crucially distinguishes humans from machines in the use of language. But semantics is simply a by-product of dark matter, itself a by-product in part of acting and belonging in a community.

  6. Human intelligence—it is not clear that possession of a rich dark matter is quantitatively different from animals’ abilities, knowledge, and so on. In fact, I think that the Cartesian idea that only humans think or use tacit knowledge is a form of species-centrism, compounded by centuries of looking at cognition dualistically.

  Attachment Theory

  The creation of the individual-culture connection is known as attachment—the initial experience of relationship formation by infants. Years ago, a philosopher friend told me that he believed that you should give your children your undivided attention for the first two years of their lives. After that, their personalities and relationship to you are formed, and so the time you need to spend with them will diminish dramatically.

  I suspect that this isn’t far wrong. During their first couple of years of life, children, like other mammals, are forming crucial bonds with their primary caregivers and other humans and entities intruding into their senses—such as siblings, grandparents, pets, things around the house—as they construct their identities as individuals in a cultural network. Of course, although attachment happens in the first months or couple of years of life, interactions, observations, and so on, continue throughout one’s life. Some of these additional foundational pillars for the formation of dark matter are the following.

  While engaging with his or her community, a human learns both positive and negative lessons. Humans learn how to do things. We learn what unacceptable behavior is. We develop skill in tasks, including the use and source of their own bodies (in fishing, dancing, playing games, riding elevators, eating, sex, defecation, etc.). When a child transgresses an expectation, it may be scolded, slapped, or ostracized for a period, depending on the culture and other factors. When a child helps a fallen sibling, it may be complimented or given a candy or some other type of reward. Actions that conform to the values of the people we interact with will garner different responses than actions that violate those values.

  We learn as we interact with others that our bodies are perceived as ugly, plain, beautiful, fat, skinny, strong, nicely colored, and so on. We will learn that we are perhaps weaker, stronger, faster, slower, taller, shorter, poorer, richer, whiter, darker. Our self-image will be formed by the perceptions of others’ perceptions of us and our perceptions of others. This is the sociocultural influence on the psychology of the individual.

  In our actions, physiological reactions, and so forth, we learn our limitations relative to the environment (e.g., withstanding temperatures and their fluctuations, killing or eating animals, planting fields, the relative value of different crops). Through rituals, culturing, conventions, practices, and other categories of activities, people learn meanings, illocutions, perlocutionary expectations, how to think, what level of effort to invest in different types of tasks, the nature of concepts such as “duty,” “freedom,” and “sa
crifice.” We are not merely self-locomoting computers on legs. We are affected physiologically, emotionally, and mentally with every step we take through our environment. These steps build our concepts, from our self-image to our philosophy of science. No learning without doing; specifically, no learning without cultural doing.

  But once we have mastered a language, we also enter the world of language-based learning. Socialization and culturing pick up speed and enter a new dimension. We are socialized in school at all levels and encultured by fairy tales, discourses, television shows, music lyrics, textbooks, mathematics, and all else that comes our way. This process begins with the topics or themes of our stories. What do our stories presuppose? (The latter is the shared dark matter of the entire group.) How do they introduce new information? How do these stories highlight important information? What information is important? How do they structure arguments? Where and on what matters are arguments and argumentation appropriate or inappropriate? The myriad ways we interact with, interpret, and remember our physical, ecological, social, cultural, and linguistic environments produce our dark matter.

  It is unnecessary to assume prewired knowledge in a theory of attachment. (At least, I will not do so here.) There are certain abilities that are required, however, in order for an infant to construct its identity (learning its position in the social hierarchy, relevant roles of others in relation to itself, value learning and ranking, preliminary learning and hierarchical arrangement of knowledge, ability to interpret its own experiences, etc.). Childhood, as Alison Gopnik (2010, 4ff) observes, “is not even just something that all human beings share.” But it is, she argues, “what makes all human beings human.” Gopnik also accurately describes infants as “profoundly alien.” We do not know as much about the newborn as it knows about us. It has a several-months’ head start, since its learning begins in the womb (Paul 2011). The importance of childhood derives from the fact that human beings enjoy a great survival advantage via their ability to escape from the constraints of purely biological evolution. And “new research shows that babies and young children know and learn more about the world than we could ever have imagined” (Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl 2001, viii).