Biologically, we resemble other animals, but mentally, we leave them in the dust. The scope of human thought is vast. Why are we so different?
Animals—including us—live, think, and feel in the here and now. Living, thinking, and feeling are biological events, existing only in the present. When we think about the past or the future, or anything distant or outside the situation we inhabit, the thinking and feeling are not distant—they are right here, right now, present, confined to our local, human-scale situation, conducted through here-and-now biological systems.
In this regard, we are like dogs, dolphins, corvids, chimpanzees. A human being may have been alive 10 years ago and may be alive 10 years hence, but our brain activity of 10 years ago or 10 years hence does not exist. The only systems for living, thinking, and feeling that human beings possess are run by their bodies here and now.
This picture was sketched by Sir Charles Sherrington, who described the brain as an “enchanted loom” where “millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one” (Sherrington,  1964, p. 178).
Dissolving, never abiding. Yet our thought ranges over time and space, over long-range causal chains and possibilities, over present and potential absences, over mental stories we populate, in imagination, with thousands, billions, of human agents whose minds we imagine to be like ours—full of beliefs, desires, plans, decisions, and judgments, all with vast scope. The contents of our thoughts do not seem to us to be dissolvingly evanescent.
Scientists have meditated upon the scope of human thought and tried to explain its origins. Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens (1999), offers a speculative theory of how neurobiological development could have made “extended consciousness” possible:
Extended consciousness still hinges on the same core “you,” but that “you” is now connected to the lived past and anticipated future that are part of your autobiographical record (page 196).
Endel Tulving (1985a and 1985b) emphasized our ability for mental time-travel, our capacity for episodic memory and autonoetic (“self-knowing”) consciousness. In autonoetic consciousness, we can recover the episode in which something occurred. “Autonoetic consciousness . . . allows an individual to become aware of his or her own identity and existence in subjective time that extends from the past through the present to the future” (1985b, page 388). Ulric Neisser drew attention to our remarkable capacities in his classic article, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge” (1988). Hundreds of other scientists have participated in the inquiry. Here is one of the most recent:
A self can feel such a singular fixture, hugging one’s here-and-now like a twenty-four-hour undergarment, but actually it’s a string, looping back and forwards in time to knit together our past and future moments. . . . A self is a Tardis, a time-machine: it can swallow you up and spit you out somewhere else. — Charles Fernyhough. 2008. A Thousand Days of Wonder: A scientist’s chronicle of his daughter’s developing mind. New York: Avery, p. 122.
Expressing astonishment at the vast scope of human thought invites objections.
Objection 1: What’s the big deal? How can it be so astonishing and difficult if everyone, even children, can do it?
This lay objection carries no weight within scientific communities. Cognitive science has shown repeatedly that seemingly simple human behaviors are far more complicated than we might have imagined and that our folk theories purporting to account for them are in many ways wrong from the start. The vast scope of human thought is a recognized major problem: it lies far beyond the abilities of other species and we have no scientific consensus on what makes it possible.
Objection 2: Doesn’t evolution build us so that our actions here-and-now have long-range consequences? Doesn’t instinct provide the connection between here-and-now and the rest of our lives?
It does: instinct makes the squirrel bury nuts and the human being lust after a member of the opposite sex without any need for thought about hunger or cute great-grandchildren. But that’s not the issue. The question is, how can a human being think about a network of such vast connections, including past and future states of their own minds and the minds of other human beings?
Objection 3: What about memory? Doesn’t memory solve the problem of continuity over time, at least? Doesn’t memory bring the past into the present?
Not so fast. Memory is of course only in the present, and a particular memory is only in the present, even though it seems as if the detailed memory comes winging in from long ago, carried to our present minds on winds from yesteryear. Both our memory as a system and any particular memory we experience are present biological events. The universe does not bend back upon itself when we remember, to make two different times intersect in one time. This sense of the intersection of past and present—one of the basic mainstays of life and art, from Homer to Proust, from the witches in Macbeth to Dr. Who, is an adaptive delusion.
Objection 4: Are we really so special? Don’t other animals show signs of thinking beyond the here-and-now?
This objection is very serious and important. The studies on this topic are fascinating: Hints that dogs have some human-like social skills (Hare & Tomasello 2005); that rats have some recollection-like memory retrieval (Fortin, Wright, & Eichenbaum 2004); that scrub jays have some episodic-like memory (Clayton & Dickinson 1998); that chimpanzees have some understanding of conspecifics as possessed of goals, intentions, perceptions, and knowledge (Call & Tomasello 2008; Tomasello, Call, & Hare 2003); that Santino, the Swedish zoo chimpanzee, stores rocks as part of a plan to throw them at human visitors later (Osvath 2009); and so on. There is considerable evidence for the weak form of this objection, and science will presumably inch significantly here and there to extend our conception of what other species can do mentally. But the strong form of this objection does not have a leg to stand on. The highly impressive performances by members of other species have severe limits that human beings everywhere indisputably blow right past, effortlessly, from an early age, without help from a more advanced species.
What makes the vast scope of human thought possible? Elsewhere (Fauconnier & Turner 2002, Turner 2003-2009), it has been argued that nonhuman animals possess impressive rudimentary abilities for conceptual integration, but that human beings have an advanced form, called “double-scope blending.” It has been argued (Turner 2008, Turner 2004, e.g.) that double-scope blending makes the vast scope of human thought possible. Double-scope blending gives us the ability to conceive fully of other minds and to grasp extended conceptual networks that would otherwise lie beyond our cognition. These extended conceptual networks have elaborate “vital relations” running across the network—relations of time, space, cause-effect, representation, analogy and disanalogy, change, identity, uniqueness, and so on.
What follows is the tiniest gist of this hypothesis.
A human being in the local, present moment has, like any mammal, a brain in a certain state of activation, with integrated systems for affect, perception, inference, and construal. Human brains are built to conceive of scenes that are at human scale. At human scale
- We operate within limited ranges of space and time.
- We partition our sensory fields into objects and events.
- We interact with objects locally.
- We recognize some of those objects as agents.
- We interact with a few agents in patterned activity: eating, moving, fighting, mating.
That is pretty much what we are built for. In one sense, it is what we are.
For other species, this scale, or a similar one, seems to be pretty much the entire story of existence. No nonhuman animal, for example, seems to be able to understand that other animals hold beliefs, or what those beliefs might be. No nonhuman animal seems to be able to wonder what its life might be like if it had done something different ten years ago. No nonhuman animal seems to be able to wonder what will become of its as yet non-existent offspring.
Human beings, by contrast, have
- a conception of self as possessed of a characteristic personal identity running through time;
- conceptions of other agents as similarly possessed of characteristic personal identities running through time;
- conceptions of other agents as possessed over time with the standard system of elements in folk psychology, that is, emotions, goals, and beliefs that drive actions and reactions;
- a conception of self that includes relationships with the psychology of others, and, conversely, conceptions of those others as themselves possessed of conceptions of self that contain relationships with the psychology of oneself, that is, the self doing the original considering of those others;
- a conception of self and one’s personal identity as richly inhabiting both the past and the future.
It is a spectacular scientific puzzle that human beings are the sole species that seems to be able to think and feel beyond the limits of the scale for their species. Human scale is fundamental for human thinking and feeling, but we go beyond our scale in ways so thoroughly different from members of other species as to place us in a different galaxy of thinking and feeling. We are like Dr. Who, the time lord of science fiction, who can use his Tardis to move across ranges of both time and space that go way beyond human scale. Human beings have a mental Tardis, an internal Tardis. Our mental Tardis is the subject here.
The hypothesis suggested here is that our ability for double-scope blending gives us the capacity to create vast conceptual networks with extended vital relations that are nonetheless anchored in scenes that are at human scale. Network scale can be vast even though human scale is not, because the network scale is anchored in the human scale. The human scale blend contained in the network provides us with a platform, a scaffold, a cognitively congenial basis from which to reach out, manage, manipulate, transform, develop, and handle the network. The human-scale anchor in the network can be achieved by blending conceptual elements of the network into a human-scale scene or by recruiting to the network some mental array that is already at human scale and blending the rest of the network with it. Importantly, once we have blended conceptual arrays to make a new blend that has human-scale properties, that blend is now, for us, at human scale, and can be used as an anchor for future networks. These new human-scale blends become second nature for us, and blending is recursive: packed, human-scale blends become inputs to new networks. What was once beyond human scale is now packed to human scale. What counts as human scale is repeatedly extended over the course of a lifetime. To give one example, the concept of writing is the result of repeated double-scope blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2002). Conceptual integration networks for writing seem to be at most 8,000 years old. It accordingly must have taken cultures tens of thousands of years to invent the networks necessary for writing, and today’s child, with elaborate cultural tutelage and support, must still spend considerable time and effort to build the relevant human-scale blend and its network. But once the network is acquired, it seems natural, inevitable, effortless. It becomes difficult if not impossible to look at appropriate marks and to see only marks, not words. The conceptual integration work required for understanding writing takes conceptual elements that are at network scale and creates a human-scale blend for the network, so we can hold onto that conceptual network.
The scope of human thought is network scale, even though we are built for human scale, because double-scope blending provides human-scale anchors for the vast conceptual integration networks.
Packing the Known Universe to Human Scale
Toward the end of the film version of his slide-show presentation on global warming, Al Gore posts a picture of Earth, the pale blue dot photographed from 4 billion miles out in space. He explains,
Everything that has ever happened in all of human history has happened on that dot. All the triumphs and tragedies, all the wars and all the famines, all the major advances. That is what is at stake—our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization.
Concluding, Gore states,
Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, “What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had the chance?” We have to hear that question from them now.
Gore prompts for vast conceptual integration networks that are at vast network scale: a distance of four billion miles, and all of human history plus the future. But, through double-scope blending, we can pack this network to human scale.
First, space is packed to human scale. We have a bodily notion of vision, at human scale, taken from our local visual experience, according to which, the farther we back up from an object, the smaller the angle it subtends in our field of vision. This is a human-scale conceptual array. Gore also prompts for the conceptual array of the universe, with the Earth somewhere in it. The incompatibility of these conceptual arrays is evident. Just for starters, human beings cannot walk backward four billion miles from Earth to have a look. But we can project our local visual intuitions to the packed blend, and in the blend, we can see the Earth from four billion miles the way we might see a bird in a tree. In the blend, Earth becomes one small, fragile thing, subject to our action, evoking local responsibility.
Second, time is packed to human scale. Unborn descendents—billions of them—are talking to us, and we hear them. There are reasons we could not hear them: they do not exist; there are far too many of them; they are distributed around the entire Earth; they stretch across many generations; they do not all speak English; they might not be speaking at all, but rather writing or thinking; and so on. But now, in the packed blend that anchors the network, all the individuals of future generations are packed into one human voice, the voice of our child. The emergent structure in the packed blend is amazing: now, in the blend, each of us can hear voices of our descendents, even if in fact some of us, in reality, have no children at all. And we hear their question now.
This conceptual miracle—anchoring vast network scale in human scale—is child’s play for human beings. This child’s play is what separates us from all other species. Every human child is born a genius.
- Call, J. & Tomasello, M. 2008. “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later.” Trends in Cognitive Science, 12, 187-192.
- Clayton, N. S., & Dickinson, A. 1998. “Episodic-like memory during cache recovery by scrub jays. Nature, 395, 272—272.
- Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt.
- Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexity. New York: Basic Books.
- Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner. 1998. “Conceptual Integration Networks”, Cognitive Science, vol. 22, no. 2 (April-June 1998), pp. 133–187. Expanded web version at Turner 2003-9
- Fernyhough, Charles. 2008. A Thousand Days of Wonder: A scientist’s chronicle of his daughter’s developing mind. New York: Avery, p. 122.
- Fortin, N. J., Wright, S. P., & Eichenbaum, H. 2004. “Recollection-like memory retrieval in rats is dependent upon the hippocampus.” Nature, 431, 188-191.
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- Osvath, Mathias. 2009. “Spontaneous planning for future stone throwing by a male chimpanzee.” ?Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 5, R190-R191, 10 March 2009. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.01.010
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- Tomasello, Michael, Joseph Call, & Brian Hare. (2003) “Chimpanzees understand psychological states – the question is which ones and to what extent.” Trends in Cognitive Science 7:4, 153-156.
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- Turner, Mark. 2004. “The origin of selkies.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, volume 11, numbers 5-6: pages 90-115.
- Turner, Mark. 2003-2009. The Blending website: http://blending.stanford.edu.
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