An answer to Dr Zen

Dr Zen thinks I’m wrong (to madness close allied) and has substantial reasons for doing so. I’ll try to answer his main points. But before that, in a nutshell, what is it I’m saying? That in human beings, the processes of thinking, seeing, imagining, creating and a long list of like processes, are not the operations of the mind, which is not a thing or a place but a generic term for a whole jumble of concepts, (a bit like soul, really). Rather thinking &c refers to a process of interaction between the human brain and an enormous amount of stuff, as yet unspecified, that can have actual and material form, as in written or spoken language or a brick or anything at all which has been in and out of a human brain at least once; but as importantly has virtual existence (you can’t get an actual brick in and out of a human brain in any way useful to the brain, or the brick). This stuff, everything that has been through a human brain at least once, (this is the crucial bit) is an evolutionary system, analogous to biological life and like it in some ways (natural selection applies, for instance), but very different in other ways (like language, which is a substantial part of its environment, this stuff does not have a discrete and stable form - if all human beings died on this instant, there’d still be lot of language about, in all recorded media including writing, it would just be inert. Likewise the reifications of this stuff, for example two lipglosses, a hair band, an eye pencil, would go on existing, but they would no longer evolve).
Human culture is an evolutionary form. Two environments are necessary for its evolution; the human brain, and the external universe. That’s it, really.
OK, Dr Zen says I’m wrong because I confuse the achievements of physical culture with those of mental culture. We’ll put achievements aside as a complicating issue. Clearly there is such a thing as physical culture - everywhere you look, everything you touch. But mental culture, what is that? Certain concepts fade or mutate very slowly. Millions of people still think they have a soul, generally only one each nowadays, though there was a time when cutting edge theory suggested three. But nonetheless ideas and traditions (quite large galaxies of the stuff I’m talking about so vaguely) evolve; in the same way that something didn’t have wings, then it did. Something walked the earth, then it didn’t. So, the mind, and mental - what we speak of in natural language as “the mind” does not exist in its archaic sense, as an abstract or transcendent place where “I” and “my consciousness” hang out; and hasn’t, I don’t think, since Locke. What is left is the brain and its processes on one side and, discrete but totally dependent on the brain as a breeding environment, this stuff - culture, tradition, geometry, the art of love. Mental culture? Either a tautology or a res non entia.
So in that long period - at least tens of thousands of years - between when the homo sapiens brain had evolved into its modern form, and the sudden emergence of human culture at an ever accelerating rate, what was Woman (it was proably she. Hunting men tended to just click) thinking? A lot, according to Dr Zen. According to me, very little. Because the stuff, the complex traditions necessary to generate anything like what we call “thought”, had not yet evolved. But once it started, just as complex biological life, the stuff proliferated and mutated like the clappers.
Back a bit. If there was a mind, what would it be like? A museum? A library? An encyclopaedia? All these three dimensional places are inert and stable. A library contains the whole contents of that library in the right place in their shelves except the books people take out, scribble in or move. But the brain is not like that at all. Take a complex tradition, that of lipstick manufacture and use. How could you or I deal with that? We could perform it, write down all we know about it, discuss it. But we would never contain it, as a gallery contains pictures. We could rehearse it subjectively, that’s the nearest we can get. But the experience is fleeting, as if it were a ribbon which only has realisation as it moves through the workspace, fading into the dark behind, invisible beyond. A practical aspect of this is writing down ideas as they occur, otherwise they are gone.
You could say that abstract words, like virtue, are elements of “mental culture”. But I don’t find that so. To me virtue is empty without the generation of an analogue of material culture. I either see it as a written word, a rather garish logo in fact, or as a marble statue, Calpurnia probably. What an abstract word is is an address for a location which is partly process yet to be generated, cued with clues for other complex traditions. Cue virtue with Sade or Mother Theresa, Jerry Falwell or Arundathi Roy, and different things come up.
Finally, and rightly, Dr Zen asks me what evidence I have. None. The evidence for evolution is in the fossil record. The evidence for this is in the workings of the brain about which, though our knowledge is increasing at a huge rate, we still know little. So it is of necessity a hypothesis, to be tested against what else we know. I can see nothing which contradicts it at the moment. And - and here somebody can immediately show me wrong - I know of no other hypothesis for the emergence of the peculiar aspect of humanity that distinguishes us from all other animals, which even begins to make sense.