This is a hypothesis that I wrote up ±15 years ago, that I did not publish as there is no appropriate venue (journal) for hypothetical ideas like this. I find that to be a pity, and there's a gap. I hope that you enjoy this idea.
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It has been proposed by <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02358" title="Stedman et Al, _Myosin gene mutation correlates with anatomical changes in the human lineage_, Nature, 2004">Stedman et al</a> that the loss of jaw muscle mass might have allowed for an increase in the cranial capacity of early humans.
How could this change have given this mutant group any sort of advantage? The weaker jaw muscles would no doubt lead to weaker, inefficient hunters. We argue that this increase in capacity might have allowed for some swift change in the cranial capacity of early humans, and, as such, a small cognitive advantage to these otherwise seemingly weaker apes. Therefore, a genetic change in brain size was not necessarily immediately required for the advantage of these early humans. In broader terms, we argue that socialisation coupled with the plasticity of the brain does away with the absolute requirement of a 'step' change in the evolutionary sense.
A number of people who dispute evolution argue that the step changes of the magnitude required to differentiate a modern human from an ape do not occur in nature. It is, of course, absurd to think that a step change occurred and that in one generation a line of apes became human. The genetic changes required to necessitate the modern thinking and communicating human are numerous and have been quantified, and the statistical probability of this occurring simultaneously in order to allow an advantage to the human seem fairly proposterous. However, a single change as proposed by <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02358" title="Stedman et Al, _Myosin gene mutation correlates with anatomical changes in the human lineage_, Nature, 2004">Stedman et al</a> could reveal the answer - and this is not only a bigger eventual brain in the physical sense. The answer lies in the idea that the brain can boostrap.
It is well known that the brain has high plasticity - it conforms and changes according to environmental stimuli. Free neurones independently begin to form independent functional networks based on the environment in which they are placed. Research into rat neurones in a petri dish interfaced with a flight simulator have shown that the neurones are capable of forming and learning based on these changes.
The very fact that individuals could create a wider range of sounds using their mouths may have lead to their own cognitive development. There may be positive feedback in the sense that making more complex sounds lead to stimulation of the brain's communication centres, and in turn stimulation of the brain lead to the ability to make more complex sounds.
Then, there is socialisation. The knowledge of the previous generation could be passed on, in more complex ways, via more complex communication. This does not require a genetic change, it relies entirely on the plasticity of the brain. The physical brain growth may have come later, and this may have been naturally selected for humans based on their increased problem solving capacity. The ability of individuals to communicate better, and the very fact that a wider variety of sounds through freedom in articulation may have shaped the young mind of the next generation. Immediately, this training through socialisation from a young age when the brain's plasticity is high would have lead to an increased sharing of thoughts and ideas. It is not just this sharing of thoughts and ideas that may have lead to increases in early humans' capacity, but the very process of training and speaking that caused through stimulation conformational changes in early human minds.
This theory is not easily testable. It might help, but is not necessarily sufficient, to splice the gene for weaker jaw muscles into a pygmy chimp and observe the changes. This, however, has to be coupled with the socialisation aspect of the development of the chimp.
It is not clear to what extent epigenetics may have impacted here - the rapid change induced by the cognitive change through socialisation and brain plasticity in early humans may have translated to a rapid depositing of epigentic factors. This might mean that the changes experienced did translate to rapid genetic change - thus speeding up the evolutionary process down the progeny line. As argued here, however, the rapid change in genetics is not required once more freedom in communication ripens. It is the plasticity of the brain, propagated through self-stimulation, socialisation and mutual group stimulation, that may have lead to early humans relative advantage in a climate in which fitness was essential.

The Bootstrapped Brain: Evolutionary Change Through Socialisation and Brain Plasticity

I saw an awe inspiring dancer at an event in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was unknown to me at the time. He danced in the company of other great dancers, but he was exceptional, with fierce purpose and intensity in his movements. He used a mechanical crutch which moved as a part of him. It did not appear to be a movement aid, but rather an integrated part of his dance movement over which he had full control. He had lost one leg, and this did not impede his ability for gravity defiance, but seemed to enable it. Seeing him dance was a very moving moment in my life. I had to find out more about him, and to learn how he became such a beautiful performer. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/musa_motha95">Musa Motha</a> went on to become a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qonkpkK018">global superstar</a>.
At the intersection of some of our unique dimensions as individuals lies a region of potential overlap with others. The building of a community allows the overlap to find others: to collide with minds with similar interests, afflictions, or purpose.
Community enables these collisions. While attending Singularity University Summits talking about some of my personal stories, I met some extraordinary people from a variety of walks of life, all of whom came together for a common purpose to use technology for the betterment of humanity.
Some of the people I had met had overcome substantial affliction and difficulty in their lives. I admired the remarkable people they are today. I saw some unique qualities and attributes in them. I started to notice that some of these people had become the version of themselves because of their unique circumstances, and the fact that they were able to rise to the occasion. They had forged themselves, through their adversity, into giants of our society.
I realise that we each have our own unique stories, challenges: the light incident on us in our lives is entirely unique. Our most unusual attributes are what make us most interesting. In society, there is some motivation to hide these. I was seeing people who had embraced unusual circumstances to create their present selves. I realise their biggest challenges had become their biggest advantages.
People became despondent about their futures as we moved into the difficult times brought about by the 2019 pandemic. I became motivated to showcase some of the stories of people who had been through extraordinarily difficult times, but had become the best version of themselves because of these. I wanted to tell people that even though times were difficult, they could be optimistic about their futures. Not just because it'd be alright, but because these difficult and challenging times could enable them to become better versions of themselves.
This idea that people could become the best versions of themselves through adversity was particularly motivating to and resonant with me, as I had my own substantial medical challenges while growing up, and this had directly resulted in my becoming my present self. I decided in the midst of the pandemic to build a collection of stories, a community, around the idea that we could forge ourselves extraordinarily through adversity. The <a href="https://shift.stream">shift.stream</a> interview series was born, and I began to seek out individuals who were doing unusual and incredible things from their potentially devastating stories. Phoenix stories.
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/godfreynazareth">Godfrey Nazareth</a> gives inspiring and moving keynote talks, through his technologically enabled assistive device which produces his powerful voice. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/tilly.lockey/?hl=en">Tilly Lockey</a> is an individual movement: she's augmented through her robotic arms, and is inspiring her generation. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/matteagles_parkylife/">Matt Eagles</a> leverages his brain implant which keeps his Parkinson's Disease under management to go out and advocate for the rights of other patients (and is a part time dare devil). <a href="https://www.benjaminrosman.com/">Benji Rosman</a> became a professor of computer science at 34, partially due to his exceptional aptitude, and partially due to the fact he had a stroke while being born which developed his capacity for this work. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivienne_Ming">Vivienne Ming</a> was suicidal, and had a turning point in her life, after which she went on to build and give away technological breakthroughs from her lab for the benefit of our species.
His name was unknown to me at the time, but through the dance company who performed that day, I was able to get in touch with Musa Motha. I interviewed him as the first shift.stream interview, and learned a great deal in the process. I went on to interview other wonderful human beings, and I am still doing so at present. I want this community to be inspiring, uplifting, and let people know that at some point, their darkest times may be their greatest moment to advance.

Building shift.stream

A recent exchange with Claude by Anthropic

In machine learning, we reduce multiple dimensions to something we can manageably visualise to interpret relationships. More than three are a challenge for us humans to visualise, as our visual experience of the world is in three physical dimensions, and it's tough to keep track of our experience as we move through the fourth. Yet, we have political ideological systems that, in the most advanced of countries, operates on a single axis with opposites (“left” and “right”; “republican” and “democrat”). All this multidimensional complexity is projected onto this single axis. In machine learning, we call this dimensionality reduction. Our ability to project all the complexity that we face in society onto a single dimension is a farce: We have to fix our political systems.
We cannot distil out the complexity of the modern world onto a single line. We lose too much information. We're running this experiment over and over again, and polarising the a complex world into something we can instantly consume, and it does us a disservice. So much is lost in the nuance.
We need to build resilience for ourselves to this changing world, so we can understand and grapple with complexity. And, we need leadership that can keep up. We need political systems that keep up with a multidimensional world.

Reducing complexity to nothing

Why do we expect much from one another? We are simple Great Apes of approximately 200 000 years vintage. There is no manual to our existence: we make it all up as we go along. Moreover, this moment in time is like all the moments before: it is the first time the world is in this current state. It is the first time it is all being done. Why are we hard on ourselves? There is no playbook, no guidance rules to navigate this frontier that marches us forward through each small action collectively cascading into this planetary forge.
We've been aware of our conscious selves for a moment of those 200 000 years, and reached a pinnacle for this in the era of the instantly connected world. We now observe ourselves and one another with remarkable precision in stories told instantaneously at great distance.
Consider that ethics is having an awareness that our thoughts and actions have consequences. These thoughts and actions are informed by individual values, but they have downstream impact on other conscious beings. Impact may be at great distance, in time and in space.
We humans arrange ourselves into interesting structures and organisations together. These are living organisms consisting of human brains and machines, which go out and perform actions in the world. As a corollary, we can, as individual actors, come up with a new concept, go out into the world, and act. We can build something from an idea that persists beyond the confines of us - art, a business model, words on a page, a piece of software. This becomes, in fact, an extension of us. It is born of our own neurological selves. It persists and exists outside us, free to disperse itself in the world, like electrical seeds that give rise to waves of intellectual stimulation. These propagate and influence other brains without our direct intervention or knowledge. The internet and globalisation have boosted this in orders of magnitude, and our present paradigm imbues us with vast neurological reach. Our nervous systems have become woven, connected, and will be more intertwined in our technological future.
This manifests from the reality that we are increasingly heading toward digitisation of ourselves: we are moving ourselves into digital spaces. This is obvious in terms of online meetings, emails, and the rest, however it is far more subtle and profound: our devices have become extensions of our consciousness. We are now delocalised and distributed into networks. Consider that when we have certain thoughts, we are compelled to capture them online (we may post them to social media) - these are outputs from us to the network. Similarly, when the state of the network changes (and we receive that red banner notification), we are compelled to deliver that information into our brains (these are inputs from the network to us). This flow is reciprocal: from the network's perspective, we create its inputs, and it delivers outputs to us. We are thus now cyborgs, and we have been for considerable time.
Thus, we have elements of our conscious mind (our neurology) entangled with a network. This entangled mind has far more reach than ever before. In an instant, we can influence the life of a stranger vastly disconnected from our propinquity, and without our knowledge, by posting an idea from one nervous system to another. This idea vector can spread again, without our knowledge. Our nervous systems, our neurology, has a profound extent.
As we move outward, we grow our neurology from our biology into digital spaces. Through existing and emergent technology, we continue extending ourselves into this digital frontier. Human computer interfaces improve and ease the friction between ourselves and machines. Brain computer interfaces promise the most intimate of connections between our minds and our builds.
As we grow into this world, let us consider briefly the existential layers of our world:
<ol>
<li>We have the physical and biological world from which we emerged (an example of this world is the Amazon rainforest) - this is the 'natural world';</li>
<li>Then, we have the constructed world which overlays nature, a world of concepts and ideas that exist in our collective knowledge/perceptions (an example of this world is the concept created in your mind when you hear the word "Stonehenge"). This exists partially in nature, but it abstracts in our collective consciousness and in our writing - this is the 'conceptual world'; and</li>
<li>Now we have this digital frontier into which we extend ourselves, which exists as a layer in nature (hardware). It embeds and it extends the conceptual world. This is the 'digital world'.</li>
</ol>
We have become de facto custodians of the natural world, having manipulated it to bring about the conceptual and digital worlds. Much of this creation is done while at work.
What is remarkable, is that we created these 'new worlds' from our neurological selves. Every single one of the creations in these worlds are concepts born of neurological thought, transmitted concept, observation, and neurological action. While we more closely couple ourselves to the digital world, it is itself now starting to decouple from us in its creation. We are in a time when we set up the initial conditions and parameters, and that world self-creates. Decoupled from the neurological systems of these Great Apes. This self-creating world is through robots ushering in the next generation of themselves, through code creating virtual worlds, through advanced machine learning making decisions on our behalf, and a variety of other tangible technological phenomena.
As we enter the digital world, we gain much more neurological reach. Paradoxically, we tend to feel more decoupled from ourselves, and this makes us lose touch with the consequences of our actions.
This is a complex domain, and it is growing more complex as we hurtle ourselves into our technological future. But underlying everything are us humans: technology must serve us. Used correctly it can be the biggest enabler of our species, and can be a socioeconomic panacea. We now have all the tools on hand to build the best future we can imagine - anything we envision can be made in a more affordable, accessible way than ever before. Catalysed by technological prowess, our species can reach frontiers unexplored in space and time. However, we impede ourselves.
Fermi's Paradox explains how a species faces extinction events at each point in their growth and development, as a species extends its reach, it finds a potential barrier which may filter the species out, if it is not able to conquer the demons of its former technological self (the one we face now is climate change). How can we battle the demons of our former technological selves, if we do not learn from our mistakes? If we ignore scientific progress and reason, we are dooming ourselves to a miserable species filter. One that we have seen coming for a hundred years or more. It is a chugging train and we stand staring at it like intoxicated koalas bewitched by the profits of the technologies that got us here. But we can choose to avoid it, to do better, and to be more. To allow ourselves to propagate forward, and for our ideas to persist another day. To do so, we need to stop favouring our constructs from which we gained in the past over the scientific reason of the present. This is how we impede ourselves.
It is frustrating to imagine that we have the ability to be better, and yet we bewilder ourselves in political quagmires and invisible complexities, instead of coming together to fight the species filter that we bring upon ourselves: it must be said of our species right now that Frankenstein is the monster here.
If indeed we accept that our individual choices have meaning and impact: the things that we do on a day-to-day basis genuinely do resonate at a planetary level, through the simple cause-and-effect cascade that scales to massive numbers, we must acknowledge that we, then, are directly accountable for that which happens at scale, even if we cannot directly observe it.
Chaos theory sets forth that there is great sensitivity to initial conditions. This is intuitive to understand: think about pointing a boat in a specific direction. If we point it differently by 1 degree, after a few days, we will find ourselves colossally off-course. Similarly, we build our future in time through the thoughts we produce, and the actions we perform now, in the world(s): our neurological selves build the future states. When we act, we create that world.
Entropy is the concept that a system tends toward a state of disorder. There is a window in which the future world we define can be what we collectively vision and hope. There are few states and configurations which result in us flourishing. We have to work at it to create these flourishing states. At this juncture in our species, we are about to bring forth astounding creations and technologies that will forge our futures. The clock grows later each moment for us not to let ourselves down with great splendour.
The world we create in our work is a direct manifestation of our neurological selves. We directly imprint ourselves onto this world. Our work is where we are impactful. Our professional lives are where we expend our effort, deciding how we will build the worlds around us, and construct our future selves in our self-made future world. Everything around us in the future manifests and is constructed by our present neurological selves. Everything in our present world was created by our former selves.
Ethics is personal, and it is grounded in the conceptual world. It does, however, greatly influence the other worlds we are jointly influencing and building, and sometimes destroying.
By imprinting something on another's neurology, or imparting to the world something destructive, the damage goes beyond the self, and what is done may resonate into time and space in the future.
The world is growing more complex, more multidimensional, and we may not even have the language to describe the future state of the world, let alone the abstract issues that emerge from it. Thus, having a framework of collective empathy is crucial. The time urgency we have with which to imbue our future is palpable right now, as we usher in the most substantial changes our species has ever seen. And each day brings even more significant change. It is an ever-growing tidal wave, and the longer we wait to construct that future, the more challenging it may become to deconstruct it - should we need to.
It therefore follows that if we do not hold ourselves to the highest standard and cultivate our framework of collective empathy, we soon may face our great filter.
<ol>
<li>When something is said or done, it is an extension of our neurology. It persists with greater stickiness than ever before into the digital world. Our neurological domain grows every day as a result of the conceptual and digital worlds. We thus must use our influence wisely, as we extend, create, and build the world. As we directly make choices to influence others, and to build these future worlds.</li>
<li>The Natural World is under great threat as a result of the inception of the other worlds, and they cannot continue independently of the natural world (with current science). Our existence depends on this, and every decision we make (in our work, and in our lives) needs to be underpinned by the cascade to world 1.</li>
<li>We need to forge a future world mindfully, as the initial conditions we set in our thoughts, set the parameters for our daily actions, which builds our collective future. We are bound by this in our reality.</li>
</ol>
Our species is forging worlds. How can we thus not hold ourselves to the highest standards imaginable? We are changing and creating worlds: ours for now, and if we get it right, even other worlds. It starts in our minds, at the point of choice: considering, or not considering, the downstream consequences.

Blog

The Bootstrapped Brain: Evolutionary Change Through Socialisation and Brain Plasticity

Building shift.stream

A recent exchange with Claude by Anthropic

Reducing complexity to nothing

With Great Apes Comes Great Responsibility