5: The Social Brain

Lecture abstract

"Once the self emerges, look around. You are not alone; there are others—more than 6 billion of us now, up from 150 million in 200 BC.

When agriculture was invented in 10,000 BC, there were only 4 million humans. Our species evolved in a social landscape that required our ancestors to think about the other guy and to adopt strategies that facilitated success in this social setting. Naturally, this led to an explosion of social processes, everything from the domestications of plants and animals in order to enable sedentary societies, to specialization of skills, to simple exchange of goods. Suddenly rules and knowledge of others’ minds became necessary, even indispensable. Indeed, a moral framework for assuring fairness and trust began to emerge.

Recent research on primates reveals that our social structures find their roots in primates. Apparently, we like to be policed! We want a third-party arbiter to stabilize the niche we live in so there is accountability for our actions. Macaca mulatta monkeys have police for this purpose. It is an example of an emergent property of a social group that feeds back to control the elements in the group that produced the property.

As group size grew, rules developed, rules that existed and continue to exist in the ether of a social group. When others are part of the equation, ideas emerge like the notion of personal responsibility, a concept that has no meaning if you are the only self/person in the world. In this way, the glue of social life was quickly constructed: norms were established and cheaters were punished.

Relating to others in a fair way became selected for and what we now mistakenly attribute to religions and ideologies is actually built into our brains tens of thousands of years ago. Like the complexity that is built in for cognition, complexity for social process seems to emerge as well."

Lecture video