## Metadata - Author: [[Jeremy Lent]] - Full Title: The Patterning Instinct - Category: #books ## Highlights - The last common ancestor that humans shared with chimpanzees and bonobos is thought to have lived about six million years ago. In the evolutionary time scale, this is roughly the same time frame in which horses and zebras, lions and tigers, and rats and mice also shared their common ancestors. ([Location 525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=525)) - Researchers have identified three discrete regions in the modern human PFC, each of which is more activated by certain cognitive tasks: the ventromedial region is more involved in emotional and social processing; the dorsolateral region activates more strongly in abstract, logical processing; and the orbitofrontal is crucial to repressing instinctual drives for a future goal. ([Location 708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=708)) - The power of the patterning instinct, even in this early stage of history, was impressive. The PFC's unique connectivity was responsible for theory of mind, which allowed people to see others as independent agents; for creating hierarchies of thoughts, leading to complex tools and the recursion of language; and for crossing the metaphoric threshold that permitted humans to think and communicate abstract thoughts. ([Location 1103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1103)) - Twentieth-century anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski theorized that religion is the “affirmation that death is not real, that man has a soul and that this is immortal,” which has since inspired a school of thought called “terror management theory.” In this view, just as an infant gains comfort and security from the authority of her parents, so as she grows up and becomes aware of death, she is comforted by the notion of deities, who are frequently patriarchal or matriarchal figures. ([Location 1115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1115)) - The power of external symbolic storage to shape the human mind arises from its fixed and stable attributes: its nature is different from the meaning that arises solely within a human mind. The biological memory records created within the brain, Donald explains, “are impermanent, small, hard to refine, impossible to display in awareness for any length of time, and difficult to locate and recall…. In contrast, external symbols give us stable, permanent, virtually unlimited memory records.” ([Location 1225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1225)) - The symbolic universe has ensnared us in an inescapable web. Like a “mind virus,” the symbolic adaptation has infected us, and now by virtue of the irresistible urge it has instilled in us to turn everything we encounter and everyone we meet into symbols, we have become the means by which it unceremoniously propagates itself throughout the world. ([Location 1252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1252)) - Going back to the analogy of the brain's neural organization as a field of tall grass: even after the main thoroughfares have been laid down, it's still possible to find new ways through the bush. Finding a different pathway through the tall grass can be inconvenient, messy, and even scary, so it's something you'll do only if you discover the old paths no longer lead you to places you want to go. ([Location 1263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1263)) - Is there even a common hunter-gatherer worldview that can be described? How could a group of forest dwellers deep in the heart of the Amazon see the world in the same way as a community of Inuit up in the Arctic Circle? Their languages and the specific attributes of their environment differ drastically: one culture may be oriented around a river, another around the migration of a particular animal. But many decades of research have unearthed what anthropologist Bruce Trigger calls “cross-cultural uniformities in human behavior.” The uniformities tend to exist under the surface, leading to underlying patterns of thought that are remarkably similar across cultures, even while their manifestations in each culture's beliefs and practices are profusely variable. ([Location 1292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1292)) - Probably the most pervasive underlying pattern in the hunter-gatherer worldview is the belief that all aspects of the world—humans, animals, ancestors, spirits, trees, rocks, and rivers—are related parts of a dynamic, integrated whole. The natural environment is, for hunter-gatherers, fully alive. ([Location 1301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1301)) - Those aspects of life that we define as “religious” permeate all the daily activities of hunter-gatherers, who generally have no word for religion because their relationship to the spirit world pervades everything they do. ([Location 1310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1310)) - The first Westerners who observed shamanism were travelers in Central Asia, and the word comes from a Siberian tribe in which the central figure of the community was called the saman. Since then, extensive studies have shown similar practices occurring in virtually every forager community worldwide. The significance of shamanism goes beyond its hunter-gatherer origins: it influenced agrarian cultures around the world, and elements of it can be seen in Indian Yoga, certain practices of ancient Chinese culture, and in the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of Mesoamerica. ([Location 1377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1377)) - early hunter-gatherers enjoyed a life virtually free of infectious disease. Most diseases that became endemic, such as plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, or cholera, were originally acquired by humans from their farm animals, and the diseases only achieved critical mass on account of the high population densities of towns and cities that sprang up following the rise of agriculture. ([Location 1448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1448)) - A common principle that emerges from each aspect of the hunter-gatherer worldview is the blurring of boundaries between domains. Whether it's between the living and dead, the everyday and the spirit world, human and animal, owning and giving, or family and nonfamily, fluidity in relations is a universal feature of hunter-gatherer societies. ([Location 1501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1501)) - In many cultures of prehistory, the word for breath is the same as for wind and for the life force animating a living being. The ancient Indians used prana with each of these meanings; the Chinese used qi; for the Hebrews, the analogous words were ruah and nephesh; and the early Greeks used pneuma and psyche to capture the same ideas. ([Location 1781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=1781)) - The idea that language—and its corresponding cultural framework—affects the way we think is a key premise of this book. The reason it's important to investigate the root metaphors of ancient cultures such as Greece, India, and China is that they have framed the patterns of thought each of us inherits as we grow up, thus affecting how we construct meaning in our lives. ([Location 3320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=3320)) - Aristotle's ideas of the material soul, though stifled by mainstream thought, formed the basis of the modern moonlight tradition, which achieved its first magnificent flowering in the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was obsessed by the dynamic patterns of nature, viewing the earth as a living organism with a vegetative soul, constantly in a process of transformation. “We may therefore say,” he averred, “that the Earth has a vital force of growth, and that its flesh is the soil, its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the porous rock, its blood the veins of the waters.” ([Location 6268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6268)) - Note: Precursor of Gaia hypothesis? - Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch Jewish philosopher, was ostracized from his community for his pantheistic views. Spinoza, considered by some to be the spiritual grandfather of ecology, saw God as identical with nature and believed everything in the universe to be an expression of the thought of God. ([Location 6278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6278)) - By the late eighteenth century, a widespread revulsion to the predominant mechanistic view of the universe erupted throughout Europe in the form of the Romantic movement. For a brief period, it was as though the sun were eclipsed, and the moonlight tradition illuminated the intellectual landscape. “May God us keep from Single vision and Newton's sleep,” wrote visionary poet William Blake. Another poet, William Wordsworth, lamented, “Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things: We murder to dissect.” ([Location 6285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6285)) - This Romantic backlash to the Age of Reason, however, reinforced the conceptual split between reason and emotion that has since become a hallmark of modern thought. Rational philosophy, complained poet John Keats, will “clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line…Unweave a rainbow.” These attacks on science created intellectual battle lines that laid the groundwork for a counterattack by rationalists accusing the Romantics of indulging in sentimentality.14 On the Continent, poet and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe refused to go along with this division being formed between science and beauty. Goethe, who founded the science of morphology—the study of forms—instead saw beauty, like Leonardo centuries earlier did, as “a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.” Rather than trying to conquer nature, Goethe believed a scientist should approach nature as a participant and that scientific insight arises through not detached observation but an intuitive sense of connection with nature's dynamic flux. ([Location 6297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6297)) - While the European military-industrial juggernaut stormed through the nineteenth century in its frenzy to conquer both nature and other continents, a few philosophers further developed Goethe's unconventional ideas. Alfred North Whitehead saw continual transformation as a defining principle of the natural world and recognized the impossibility of a completely objective view of the universe. “There is no holding nature still and looking at it,” he wrote. “The real point is that the essential connectedness of things can never be safely omitted.” While Whitehead's was an isolated voice in the English-speaking world, a prominent European philosophical school known as phenomenology raised these ideas to a new level of sophistication. Its underlying basis was the rejection of the notion of scientific objectivity, replacing it with the recognition that humans are embodied in the physical world and that our understanding of the universe arises from how we are situated within it. Philosophers such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger explored the profound implications arising from this. Like the Neo-Confucians before them, they recognized that intellect alone did not suffice to comprehend the universe, but skillful use of one's intuition was required for a deeper understanding. ([Location 6308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6308)) - As physicists collaborated to develop quantum theory in the early twentieth century, they gave validation at the deepest level to the phenomenologists, who had rejected the existence of a fixed, objective reality discoverable by science. ([Location 6327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6327)) - By the middle of the twentieth century, leading thinkers were developing the holistic way of thinking into a formal science of its own, which they called systems theory. Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy was determined to place systems thinking on a firm mathematical foundation. His efforts were paralleled in the United States by Norbert Wiener and other researchers, who developed the science of cybernetics, an investigation of the dynamics of control and communication in both nature and machines. As he pursued this inquiry, Wiener became impressed by how patterns seemed to be a fundamental characteristic of reality. With words that reprise the insights of the Neo-Confucians a thousand years earlier, he observed: “We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.” ([Location 6332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6332)) - In pursuing their disciplines, scientists would often use the Latin phrase ceteribus paribus—“other things being equal”—to dismiss the random noise that didn't fit into the theory. ([Location 6346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6346)) - Schrödinger observed that while the universe as a whole undergoes entropy, life somehow manages to reverse this process. Living organisms, he noted, survive through sucking order out of the entropy around them and organizing it in a way beneficial to them. They do this through the process known in biology as metabolism. Schrödinger called this process negative entropy (or negentropy) and saw it as the defining characteristic of life. ([Location 6371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6371)) - Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela identified a unique attribute of living systems that differentiates them from other self-organized systems. A living system doesn't just self-organize—it actively generates itself, taking energy from the environment to modify itself and perpetuate its existence. They called this process autopoiesis, from the Greek words meaning “self-generation.” They described how every living system—as small as a single cell and as big as a redwood tree—has a sense of itself as an integrated entity and a basic understanding of what it is meant to do. ([Location 6412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6412)) - The reductionist view has become, for many, an article of faith, causing them to claim that every aspect of our world, no matter how awe-inspiring, is “nothing but” the mechanical motion of particles acting predictably on each other. This view is summed up by Nobel laureate Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the DNA molecule: You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. ([Location 6438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6438)) - Kuhn points out that the transfer of allegiance from one paradigm to the other is “a conversion experience that cannot be forced.” Scientists who have invested productive careers in the old paradigm are understandably loath to give up their preconceptions. The paradigm shift is therefore likely to occur only, he suggests, “when the first tradition is felt to have gone badly astray.” ([Location 6503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6503)) - The Western dualistic tradition has inexorably separated humanity from a sense of connection with the rest of the world, leaving an underlying sense of meaninglessness. The modern form of cognition has been called “the Cartesian mode” by Fritjof Capra, who reflects that people functioning exclusively in this mode “may be free from manifest symptoms but cannot be considered mentally healthy…. For people whose existence is dominated by this mode of experience no level of wealth, power, or fame will bring genuine satisfaction, and thus they become infused with a sense of meaninglessness, futility, and even absurdity that no amount of external success can dispel.” ([Location 6563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6563)) - The imperative for perpetual economic growth, incessantly fortified by the messages of our popular media, has been aptly described as a fetish: the worship of an inanimate object believed to have magical powers. ([Location 6569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6569)) - A leading force was Edward Bernays, known as the “father of public relations.” Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew and used his uncle's insights into the subconscious to develop his new methods. “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” declared Bernays's business partner, Paul Mazur. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man's desires must overshadow his needs.” ([Location 6621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6621)) - In the words of systems theorist Kenneth Boulding, “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” ([Location 6974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=6974)) - When researchers applied a measure known as the Genuine Progress Indicator to seventeen countries around the world, they discovered that although GDP has continually increased since 1950, worldwide GPI reached its peak in 1978 and has been declining ever since. ([Location 7004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=7004)) - In 1863, just four years after Darwin's Origin of Species was published, novelist Samuel Butler predicted that, one day, machines would evolve into a new form of life. “We are ourselves creating our own successors,” he wrote. “Man will become to the machine what the horse and dog are to man…. The time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants.” ([Location 7350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=7350)) - Kurzweil envisions the entire universe filled with an intelligence originally created by the human mind. While the scope of his vision is extraordinary, it is based on a value system as old as the ancient Greeks. What we see in Kurzweil's discourse is an ultramodern version of the deification of reason initiated by Plato, which became the foundation for our modern worldview. In Plato's cosmology, our conceptual consciousness, expressed through reason, linked us to the divine. The early Christians transformed this into the conception of an immortal soul existing, after the body's death, with God in heaven. Descartes reformulated this dualistic framework into the modern, scientifically acceptable mind-body split, identifying the human capacity for thought as the essence of our existence. Kurzweil's vision of pure intelligence carries this dualistic tradition into the future, fueled by the power of technology. ([Location 7432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01KE3VLXC&location=7432))