Anthony Campbell  wrote:

> On 2004-06-09, John Wilkins  wrote:
> > Anthony Campbell  wrote:
> >
> > ...> 
> >> The people who made the cave images were essentially modern humans,
> >> anatomically exactly like us. Until about 30,000 years ago, however,
> >> they shared their habitat with another species of human, the
> >> Neandertals. As far as we know the Neandertals, though their
brains were
> >> as large or even larger than ours, did not make any complex
form of art.
> >> Lewis-Williams believes that this indicates that they possessed a
> >> different form of consciousness and probably a less complex language,
> >> and he seems to think that, at least to start with, the modern humans
> >> developed their art (including body painting as well as cave art) in
> >> order to emphasize their distinctness from their "less
advanced"
> >> neighbours. Once started on this route they continued down it, long
> >> after the last Neandertals had disappeared.
> >
> > Oh dear. A different form of consciousness? Apart from the fact that
> > people not descended from the Altamira gene pool also seem to have the
> > "same form of consciousness" when inducted into the
culture that we
> > have, and they have identical linguistic abilities, conceptual skills,
> > and so forth, what, exactly, could be *meant* by "different forms of
> > consciousness"? We can't even specify what we *mean* by
"consciousness".
> >
> > About 30 years ago, Paul Feyerabend tried to run the line that Greeks in
> > the time of Homer had a different concept of bodies, based on the art
> > forms of the time. It was bunkum then, and it is bunkum now...
> >
> > [Not attacking Anthony, so much as Lewis-Williams as reported.]
> >
> > ...
> 
> Thanks for the disclaimer, duly noted. But given that the Neandertals
> were a different species within the genus Homo (as most, if not all,
> palaeontologists seem to accept), is it not likely that they would have
> perceived the world somewhat differently? All the accounts I have read
> of the Neandertals seem to indicate this; there is a particularly full
> discussion in Steven Mithen's "The Prehistory of the Mind" (also
> reviewed on my site). 
> 
> Of course, we have to infer the Neandertals' minds from their surviving
> artefacts and burials, and the relative lack of evidence of adaptability
> or artisitic ability/interest in that material. One could say that
> absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but in fact we do have
> a good deal of Neandertal material to judge from. I don't find it
> difficult to believe that there was a qualitative difference between the
> two species.
> 
> What is more contentious is whether Homo sapiens consciousness (however
> you define it) changed radically in the Uppper Palaeolithic, as some
> have inferred from the art and the technological innovations that
> occurred at that time. Nicholas Humphrey has remarked on the similarity
> between the art of autistic children, especially "Nadia", and the cave
> paintings; he suggests that it would be possible for such paintings to
> be produced by people without a sophisticated language. Even more
> controversially, Julian Jaynes held that modern consciousness is far
> more recent - post-Homeric, in fact. While few have followed him to that
> extreme, others have also suspected that modern consciousness is
> relatively new, citing Jaynes (Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett).
> Dennet's argument is that the hardware has remained the same for long
> periods but the software may have changed considerably in the quite
> recent past.
> 
> (Presumably the software needed for modern consciousness wouldn't run on
> Neandertal hardware ...)
> 
> 
> Anthony

Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that "If a lion could talk, we could not
understand him". Personally I think we could understand a lion to the
extent that it shared evolutionary past and present ecological needs.
Most of what passes for "consciousness" is just ordinary biological
necessity - mate, eat, protect self and progeny, avoid falling objects,
don't drown, etc. A lot of the rest is cultural. Given the evolutionary
distance between us and the talking apes of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and co.,
it seems highly likely that Neandertalsw oudl be able to evidence much
the same sort of consciousness as we have. The differences will have two
proximate sources - specific difference, and culture.

Allow that culture is capable of taking any human and turnign them into
quantum physicists or feng shui practitioners; what differences between
humans and neandertals must be accounted for from biology? Possibly
language, and possibly social networking capacities (they lived in
smaller groups than we do/did). But were their symbolic capacities of a
different kind? I rather doubt it. They shared most of our cognitive
needs and past.

The autism claimis interesting. We are only just beginning to see how
neurological processes affect cognition in a detailed manner. A single
point mutation can cause Williams Syndrome, while we suspect that autism
(a heterogenous group of conditions, IMO) has genetic foundations, or
perhaps developmental ones. In any case, I do not think autism is a
"different consciousness" to ours - it lies at the extreme end of a
distribution that is common to our species. I greatly expect that
neandertal cognition would mostly overlap our own. Maybe artists are
weird in any species...

And IMHO Jaynes is crap.
-- 
John S Wilkins PhD - www.wilkins.id.au
  a little emptier, a little spent
  as always by that quiver in the self,
  subjugated, yes, and obedient.  -- Seamus Heaney
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