Computing Stages of Mental Evolution : ORIGINS OF THE MODERN MIND: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, <i> by Merlin Donald,</i> Harvard University Press, $27.95, 413 pages
“Don’t write anything down,” Socrates told his students. The philosopher issued this seemingly odd warning in the 5th Century, just as the Greeks were developing history’s first phonetic alphabet. They had begun writing just about everything down--even philosophical dialogues. Socrates feared the new invention would make his students mentally lazy.
Nowadays one hears, similarly, that hand-held calculators destroy young people’s motivation to learn arithmetic. But not to worry, says Merlin Donald, author of this revelatory but demanding history of human consciousness. He welcomes the computer, as well as other forms of electronic storage and manipulation of data and images, including TV, as the highest stage of mental development--and perhaps the final one.
Although Donald mutters worriedly about the effects of TV on children, he emphatically believes that it would be a great mistake to unplug the human mind from its electronic amplifier.
His thesis is that humans reached their present level of culture and thought after passing first through an animal, or “episodic,” state of awareness (along with other ancestral primates), then through two more enlightened, though primitive, human states. One of the surprise notions he offers is that we haven’t outgrown any of those earlier states.
We experience the animal state, for example, whenever we simply react to isolated events and things--feeling annoyed, say, and slamming on the brakes when a car pulls out in front of us.
We enter the primitive human state, according to Donald’s theory, when we pantomime an action--showing a toddler how to eat with a fork, for example, or demonstrating a special fingering on an instrument.
The most fully developed form of this early “mimetic” consciousness, Donald says, is the miming of an entire legend. Maori people in New Zealand, for example, still silently re-enactthe legend of their canoe journey across the South Pacific centuries ago to their present home.
Standing above mimetic consciousness in Donald’s hierarchy--and following it in evolutionary terms--is “mythic” consciousness and culture, based on storytelling. The evolution into this next-to-highest state of mind, Donald argues, was sparked by the advent of spoken language.
The highest form of consciousness, Donald claims, is the “analytic” or “theoretic,” ushered in by the invention of “external storage systems,” of which a contemporary example is the maligned but popular hand-held calculator. The original ESS (Donald likes acronyms) consisted of hieroglyphics and other non-phonetic symbols carved into clay tablets.
Today’s most advanced external storage systems are linked in a complex worldwide network of computers. The human mind, says Donald, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, is gradually being shoved aside by the global electronic brain it has created.
“Breakthroughs in logic and mathematics enabled the invention of digital computers and have already changed human life,” Donald writes. “But ultimately they have the power to transform it, since they represent a potentially irreversible shift in the cognitive balance of power toward complete ESS-based dominance of human cognitive structure.”
Although some readers may tire of the book’s seemingly endless procession of clinical cases of brain damage, they will appreciate the author’s effort to synthesize masses of research in biology, linguistics, artificial intelligence and archeology.
Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Millikan’s School: A History of the California Institute of Technology” (W. W. Norton) .
