Creative Cultures

    Instead of considering prehistory and history as a sequence of man-made events with special personalities driving these events, there is another way or context from which these events and people can be viewed. That is the subject of this chapter and the reason for the previous two chapters. One traditional approach treats history as a sequence of complicated, interrelated events impacted by significant individuals. An alternate way to view history is to consider knowledge as important as the individuals or the actual events that occurred. Obviously all three, the events, key individuals, and knowledge, are important and are needed to define a civilization. But the goal here is to emphasize the importance of knowledge in a culture over who did what and when. It will be shown that as knowledge in a society grows the culture is forever changed, regardless of the role people play in the events of the real-life drama that becomes a civilization.

    New knowledge can cause cultural evolution. New knowledge also changes how the human mind works and what distinctions the mind makes. Those cultures that value learning make many distinctions and comparisons about events and relationships. That is the essence of learning. Knowledge is then generated from those distinctions and comparisons when they are defined in a model. The more clearly and precisely the distinctions are defined the more useful the knowledge. This process then builds more useful and detailed knowledge based on previous knowledge. Cultures relying on dreams and meditation continue to find the same knowledge found thousands of years ago. This knowledge is static in nature compared to those that question, analyze, and modify past beliefs. Anyone who studies the growth and advances made by cultures is aware that major cultural changes cause the mind to have different abilities not found before in that civilization. The evolution of world civilization consists of more than just historical events and past discoveries that mark its progression from one phase into another. Understanding how world civilization came about recognizes that events and discoveries alter both cultures and the mind. New knowledge alters the consciousness. Before a discussion of the abilities of the conscious mind and how new knowledge can change the mind, it is necessary to focus on those events and discoveries that had major, worldwide effects on cultures. Once this framework has been established, this will be used to show how consciousness has co-evolved along with all the changes in the belief systems, technologies, and institutions. These changes have altered what and how the human mind comprehends.

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    A baby before they have enough time to understand the basic components to everyday reality, everything is a surprise to them since it is the first time their senses have observed many events. Have you ever seen the surprised look on a baby’s face when a hand passes in front of its face as if it had no idea that is was her own hand? This is the beginning of learning for a baby. It is a long way to building a complete model of the self. It requires interaction with the outside world especially with caregivers. But the very first caregivers (those of about 50,000 years ago) had only limited models from which to develop their model of the self. There was no one to teach them differently because their parents had no one to teach them otherwise. Therefore, the parents let the children believe as they themselves had believed. Humanity initially began with a learning process of the environment bounded by its perception that the environment is identical to that perceived by a baby. The basis for the interpretation that everything is like itself (a baby is the most anthropomorphic of all human beings) occurs because there are no experiences or people available to tell a baby otherwise. With no source of information to teach the baby differently (babies born before humanity developed a complete spoken language), it grows into an adult with the basic precept that everything is like himself or herself. For example, a baby initially perceives that all things are alive because they are alive. Or consider again the case of parents of Native American Indians. Today they teach their children that dreams occur in a real place describing real events that happen in the past, present, or future. These parents are clearly passing on cultural knowledge to their children exactly the way they were taught. Their culture stays locked into a very ancient way of believing and understanding their surroundings.

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    There is another class of unconscious thoughts that people can make conscious. It is the creative process. The knowledge for a new idea, invention, or interpretation is already present in the person’s mind before the discovery is made. During the creative process when the mind is focusing upon a specific problem, all of a sudden information from another subject inserts itself into the solution. It will seem the answer came as “a bolt out of the blue” to the person seeking a creative solution. But the person had consciously tapped into a reservoir of knowledge normally not reachable from the body of knowledge under study. (Could this be a trait retained in the present style of thinking from our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago? This process acts as if compartmentalization, as described by Mithen, still has some remnants in the brain. This would mean that removing the compartmentalization that Mithen documented was not removed by a single, almost instant change to the brain but it is an ongoing, slowly evolving adaptive change to the brain caused by humans continually pushing their minds to find new solutions to questions. The more we learn the more our mind changes how the brain functions.) During the creative act, a person uses a process in his waking hours that is very similar to what occurs in the dreaming process. It happens to people in all fields who have focused their entire problem-solving skills on seeking the answer to a single question.