Continuous rationality or emotional continuum: the evolution of Life-Intelligence

 It seems that the development of a language like ours has been a long process of small steps that began in the animal world. It spanned from the first attempts at communicating the presence of predators, the mutual attractions and rejections, the social actions and hierarchies inside the group, and in general, all the relevant information for survival (so effectively encoded in the emotional protocols), to the first human protolanguages, crossing over the slow gradation of the hominid limbo. This postulate stands upon the theories of Neural Darwinism and affective neuroscience as well as upon Pinker’s proposal of language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche, i.e. as the result of a biological evolution.1 It is obvious that human syntax allows a precision in the transfer of information that we cannot find in any other mammal, but if we examine human mythology and history, it is also obvious that the content of our communications belongs basically to the emotional realm, and that such communications have relevance in relation to very specific survival scenarios. The thesis that I present here, of an emotional origin of human language, is but a variation of the basic assumptions of some contemporary theories of socio-biological and anthropological evolutionism whose roots can be traced back to Democritus -who sustained that human language was developed in a process of communication of emotions-, Epicenus, Lucretius, and later, in the modern world, to Vico and Rousseau in the 18th Century and Charles Darwin in the 19th Century.

The ability to use symbolic languages has been usually mistaken with rationality. Several difficulties appeared when trying to fit an ethical definition of rationality with the specific cultural developments of the turbulent human history, so a distinction between a rational language, which operates with concepts, and a fuzzier emotional one had to be made.1 Such a distinction does not take into account the outlined theory of the evolution of the neural systems, but it merely calls emotional the content of the communication of n-ary emotions, as expressed for instance in the arts, without considering their link to basic emotional systems. The fundamental content of our linguistic communications is emotionally n-ary, but this does not mean that our complex emotions are a mere chaos, for their origin and link to basic emotions give them not only a strict order but in a sense, an inexorable one. Living beings follow clear homeostatic principles of order, and the emotional organization that still leads our lives today, and will continue to do so as long as our human systems of survival and reproduction follow the general principles of life on Earth, can only be described as irrational only from the transcendentalist point of view of language.

There is a general agreement about the differences in rationality between humans and animals among practically all philosophical points of view. However, if we substitute the terms animal and human for vital action and symbolic action, we could clarify their difference without emphasizing their oppositions, which are basically metaphysical beliefs. Obviously, this distinction is grounded on symbolic action, it is a human linguistic difference, but we can talk about life because we are life, and the conceptual structures that we build are nothing but ways in which life organizes itself and not something alien to it. We started out from symbolization, from our humanity, and it is within the symbolization process that we have built our world view The question of what specific world view did the first homo sapiens have, can be nothing but an object of our speculation, although, if we observe the archaic myths that still have a social function today, we can notice that such narratives contain elements that are both near and far from our present conception of life and the universe. They are near in the sense that we can observe in them some of our own symbolic elements related to the basic emotions, sometimes using different objects, other times with the same old fears and anxieties about our lives and the welfare of our children and community, as it could not be otherwise. But they are also far away due to the huge cultural mediation of n-ary emotions and the sophisticated ways in which we process information today, the metasymbolization that unnoticeably leads our lives. The gap between cultures with and without writing is no longer just a matter of the objectification of memory, that great achievement of preserving the information about the group independently of individual abilities, but a process of axiological relativization that started only a century ago in which the memories of the species were metasymbolized from the point of view of the scientific hypertext and the mature monetary metaphysics developed after the second industrial revolution.

 Metasymbolization is as much a question of defining texts of order n for the treatment of texts of order n-1 (texts of order n used in the regulation of social activities of increasing complexity which integrate different mythological frames), as it is a question of the development of a metatheoretical rationality which could be used in such treatment of formal systems. The world of human symbolization is not homogeneous anymore. The homogeneity was first broken with the invention of writing, and the gap became wider with the development of metamathematics that ended up in the construction of symbolic machines which changed the information flux in social systems. Neither is homogeneous the animal world that we believe it lays at the other side of an imaginary abyss. Even though big apes, our present ancestors, do not communicate with the fluidity and complexity of human speech, they show intelligent behavior, they learn quickly from new situations and have a rather sophisticated social life compared to that of fishes and reptiles. Their emotional system, integrated around the group’s protocols and maternity, allows them a flexible behavior, anticipating or differing organic states and processes according to hierarchies of vital goals, id est, they have a kind of minimal buffer for the modulation of emotional protocols not present in animals without primary consciousness. We could outline seven nodes within the continuum of neuronal evolution based on certain semantic scenarios that, from our human point of view, are useful to the synthetic understanding of language evolution at life’s bosom. Besides the three nodes of neural categorization (initiated about 540 million years ago), primary consciousness (between 250-200 million years ago), and n-ary consciousness1 (about 30 million years ago), we find the scenarios of human symbolization and that, in a very general manner, can be divided into the proto-linguistic scenarios (200.000-50.000 B.C.), the oral (until the invention of writing, around 3200 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and 600 B.C. in Mesoamerica),2  the grammatologic (up until the 20th Century) and the metalogic or metasymbolic (since the beginning of the 20th Century).

An emotional origin of language implies that grammaticalization is a subsequent development to that of semantics, a modulatory tool that improved communication allowing social synergy and higher control of the environment, as well as the continuity of the animal world into the human, of the vital world into the symbolic. Our most abstract developments have their basis on specific vital processes of survival, and language thus understood is a tool that allows us to understand life, and think synthetically the different semantic scenarios of evolution. The development of grammar from semantics is the development of the narrative capability, the ability to transmit complex information about nonpresent space-time scenarios, something that allowed the development of cultural memory and the collective identity linked with it. In the same way, as proto-languages led the emotional integrated (n-ary) tapestry into a new degree of complexity, the narratives of identity or myths generated a new reality, specifically human, in which the old life’s valuations were configured into supernatural worlds. The later process of writing entailed a conscious and ordered symbolization that allowed, on the one hand, the development of previously unknown epistemological modulators, those of mathematics (by the control of magnitude) and logic (which allowed the formal control of language itself), and on the other, an objectification of memory without the limits of the capacity of an individual organism, which implied a new transformation of the collective identity.