Do you believe in free will?

[Angrboda]

This is the conjecture. It occurred to me that perhaps we have the telescope the wrong way round. How important is it for an animal to have a theory of itself? My thought was that perhaps the cognitive framework in which intentionality and will arose was first applicable, not to the self, but to the other. Take the evolution of say, fish. If we're a fish looking for a smaller fish to eat, we don't require predictive abilities about our own behavior. But if we want to eat, we need to be able to make predictive guesses about what an unpredictable system — the other fish — might do. For that, we need a cognitive framework where our lack of information is a part of the framework — suggesting the fish may do anything, because our information about it isn't sufficiently rich to do otherwise. Wayne Gretzky said, "A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be." A great predator plays where the fish will be, just as a good fighter pilot shoots where his target will be.

Is it possible that the Intentional Stance (of the other) preceded applying that idea to the self? Anyway. No evidence whatsoever, just an interesting thought.

This seems entirely likely. Possibly the notion of ones own intentional stance may have arisen given the strategic advantage of anticipating how the other side is evaluating us. We could have used that information for the sake of projecting deceptive stance or merely to better anticipate their planning. I read recently that most of our brain's bulk and complexity arose not for the sake of getting enough to eat but rather for the sake of negotiating our own complex cultures. That seems likely to me.

(emphasis added)

Jesse Bearing makes a similar argument in The Belief Instinct, to the end that, with language came the social "infrastructure" of gossip, and that in order to successfully negotiate a social group in which news of one's bad deeds could spread like wildfire — thus one always had to act "as if" someone might be watching, as a mistake when someone actually is watching could be devastating for our reproductive prospects. I find that a little too far fetched for several reasons. First, it's not particular credible. Second, I doubt that social self-consciousness arose that dramatically. Two case examples. There is a species of monkey, which I'd have to look up, but this species regularly travels in groups up to 1,000. There is another set of about 6-8 monkey species which cohabitate — and while they don't form monolithic social groups, each species in the set understands the others' warning calls. I suspect that like other mental traits, social consciousness exists on a continuum. Third, this argument is adaptationism at its worst — its reasoning that a trait evolved because it was adaptive. But the most critical fault I find with it is the timeline. In the last 100,000 years, even the last 35,000 years, evolution has not been silent. There are recent changes in the genome. However, from what I understand, the most rapid expansion of the cranial vault occurred between 2 Mya and 6 Mya. This corresponds to a period of climactic instability on the African continent where the early hominids were evolving. It is hypothesized that the climactic changes exerted a strong selection bias in favor of brains for hominids, thus the resulting great intelligence. Does a "social explosion" fit in here (perhaps, but more likely after the 2 Mya, and likely around either the 100,000 year population bottleneck, or the later migrations out of Africa). In short, I think this rapid expansion in brain size, under severe environmental pressures, likely had more to do with these meta-cognitive features, than the possibility of severe selection pressures resulting from "social behaviors".





As you can see, brain volume doubled between 6 Mya and 2 Mya. This is not an appropriate comparison, however, because the strongest correlate with intelligence is the ratio of brain size to body mass, and this table has not been adjusted for that; later species of hominid had larger brains, but they also had larger bodies; the two offset in estimating intelligence.

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