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Metamorphosis pt. 2: The Cognitive Evolutionary Avant-Garde

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Manage episode 363878222 series 2815818
Content provided by World Tree Center for Transformative Politics and Global Survival, World Tree Center for Transformative Politics, and Global Survival. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by World Tree Center for Transformative Politics and Global Survival, World Tree Center for Transformative Politics, and Global Survival or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

We assess the future of our evolutionary journey by asking what it was like, experientially, to be at the forefront of ancestral human cognition. We examine the role of choice in human evolutionary history, describing expression changes in synaptic genes of the prefrontal cortex as a key driver of our cognition, and see how such changes are driven by behavior, by our ancestors choosing to live at the limits of their cognitive abilities. We examine the embodied metaphors on which abstract thought is based, the original function of the brain region that was recruited for language, and the drawbacks to inhabiting a symbolic world. Does the experience of meditation parallel the greater self-control our ancestors found with an enlarging prefrontal cortex? Were those who saw beyond the confines of ancestral human abilities treated as outsiders, as deviants so often are? Finally, what would it be like to live at the limits of our abilities, and thus promote further evolution, today? What limits would we seek to transgress? We offer a tentative answer in the abandonment of worldviews based on psychological need, in favor of simply seeing the world as it is, confronting any horrors that emerge along the way.

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78 episodes

Artwork
iconShare
 
Manage episode 363878222 series 2815818
Content provided by World Tree Center for Transformative Politics and Global Survival, World Tree Center for Transformative Politics, and Global Survival. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by World Tree Center for Transformative Politics and Global Survival, World Tree Center for Transformative Politics, and Global Survival or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

We assess the future of our evolutionary journey by asking what it was like, experientially, to be at the forefront of ancestral human cognition. We examine the role of choice in human evolutionary history, describing expression changes in synaptic genes of the prefrontal cortex as a key driver of our cognition, and see how such changes are driven by behavior, by our ancestors choosing to live at the limits of their cognitive abilities. We examine the embodied metaphors on which abstract thought is based, the original function of the brain region that was recruited for language, and the drawbacks to inhabiting a symbolic world. Does the experience of meditation parallel the greater self-control our ancestors found with an enlarging prefrontal cortex? Were those who saw beyond the confines of ancestral human abilities treated as outsiders, as deviants so often are? Finally, what would it be like to live at the limits of our abilities, and thus promote further evolution, today? What limits would we seek to transgress? We offer a tentative answer in the abandonment of worldviews based on psychological need, in favor of simply seeing the world as it is, confronting any horrors that emerge along the way.

  continue reading

78 episodes

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