LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND

For those interested in archaeology and anthropology John Hoffecker's Landscape of the Mind is informative on the latest thinking and intriguing discoveries pertaining to the last two million years of human development. Equally interesting is Hoffecker's framing of the book, as the subtitle suggests, as an exposition on Human evolution and the archaeology of thought. This of course is not new, and perhaps Hoffecker is remiss in not quoting William Thompson's take on the study of our ancestry as an "archeological excavation of consciousness." Although Hoffecker, a researcher at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) in Boulder, Colorado, avoids or is perhaps unaware of such authors, he nevertheless veers away from purely materialistic and Darwinian explanations of evolution towards a psychological exposition. Tacitly, if not explicitly, he acknowledges that it is "mind", self-awareness and our creative ability to manipulate the environment that gives us our quintessential human characteristics. In many ways Hoffecker is caught between the materialistic scientism of much mainstream archaeology and various, new, alternative and unconventional consciousness paradigms. But, I hasten to add, this is not an unexpected place to find one's self. As we are at a juncture when all our intellectual mind creations in art and science are increasingly recognized as cultural artifacts, this book is highly representative of a paradigm shift away from viewing humans as material-biologic machines pushed around by selective pressures in the physical environment, to one where humans are seen as sentient beings who creatively redesign their environments (landscapes) through conscious mindscape-driven endeavors. As Hoffecker's exposition oscillates back and forth between these tangible and intangible realms one is reminded of the chicken and egg paradox, pointed out by Jung to the effect that it is just as much " an absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can be only physical" as to say that "physical existence is a mere inference" because we only know of matter through "psychic images mediated by the senses." Likewise Teilhard de Chardin suggested we might be spiritual beings having a human experience rather than vice versa. I was amused to read that the appearance, 1.6 million years ago, of bifacial stone "axes" is analogous to the origin of life which [Hoffecker oddly states] "has no function in the context of the natural world." Here again Hoffecker might simply have quoted Teilhard as recognizing that cosmogenesis has involved the emergence of the Physiosphere, Biosphere and Noosphere as its most significant evolutionary phase shifts. Whether we approach our ancestry from the bottom up scientistic analysis of material evidence, or from the top down perspective that all our scientific endeavor must begin with our own consciousness and mind stuff (intellectual /psychological assumptions and predispositions), it seems that both approaches now agree that mind and consciousness are central to an understanding of our cultural evolution. Moreover we seem to agree that our historic and prehistoric legacy reflects the dynamics of consciousness unfolding through both dark, stagnant and enlightened, creative epochs. Hoffecker confidently states that "humans…created a super-brain" (original italics)… "by externalizing information in symbolic form with language." This thesis basically says that human brains, which are very complex, communicate linguistically and by other means to become more complex super-brains. Hoffecker admits we don't know how and when language originated , (some 19th century publishers refused to publish endless speculations on the subject), but nevertheless he surmises that it might be an emergent property that arose some 300,000 years ago when "the cultural transformation from the protomind to the mind" took place. [Since he seems to imply protomind = brain and mind = super-brain, he is open to challenges about where such concepts as Peter Russell's "global brain" might fit]. One can only speculate, as Hoffecker does, on the significance of whether 300,000 year old stone tools (traditionally regarded as hand axes, or perhaps aesthetic symbols) represent protomind products. The claim that their replacement by composite tools heralds the emergence of the "modern" mind" makes for a neat, but unproven hypothesis, that assumes we understand much about the mind stuff of ancestral species that existed before the emergences of anatomically modern Homo sapiens. This is evidently one of the accepted archaeological definitions of modernity which holds that symbols in the form of composite artifacts represent the same type of "unlimited creativity" which is manifest in language. Thus archeologists select stone, bronze, iron, and eventually written symbols, to represent and create the framework of history and archeology. So, as R. G. Collingwood stated "all history is the history of thought," and not merely the inert artifacts we dig up. In fact Collingwood objected to the "tyranny of natural science" … "a special and autonomous form of thought" over history. Although Hoffecker doesn't say so, we are left facing the perennial dilemmas of modern science and the modern mind – the weighing of our own subjectivity and objectivity.

So archaeology is proving to itself that materialist and selectionist paradigms are deficient in explaining the complex evolution of culture, which is about more than economic and technological progress, and must include understanding art, language, ethics, spirituality and other intangibles. In short Hoffecker, like modern archaeology, has absorbed modern psychology thought, and now more clearly sees culture as a manifestation of the human psyche. Revisioning of archaeological epochs is "more than a matter of semantics" and rather reflects how our evolving consciousness reinterprets the past. Today "most of the global population now dwells largely within its own mind" with each political entity generating its own "body of thought" or ideology. With this comes the shadowy spectre of conformity and thought control which may turn the most revolutionary societies into the most conservative and repressed. As archeologists now sit back and judge ancient conservatives and progressives, one wonders how much they are influenced by the daily ideological disputes played out in the modern media! One may quibble with Hoffecker's sometimes ponderous jargon, and the notion that domesticated "dogs are the first biotechnology" (his italics) ... "the genetic modification of organisms." Wouldn't this make all evolution (genetic modification) biotechnology? Hoffecker oscillates between both mystical and scientistic postures. He holds out little hope for Artificial Intelligence (AI) or replicating the "mysterious" properties of the mind with technology. He wonders about the "impact on humanity of an entity … [?species] …with vastly superior…creative powers… [and whether]…the mind could be liberated from the biological process …[and]…biological time…" Thus he seems, on the final page, to envisage disincarnate, spiritual beings who would look back [time permitting!] on our primitive species "as simply the final…brief, transitional phase" of evolution, presumably into a new species and new mindscapes. Is this the new, and metaphysical, archaeological message driven by a new recognition of the primacy of mind? [In The End of Science John Horgan noted the tendency of science authors to drift into metaphysical realms in their final chapters. No matter, if Hoffecker believes humans are temporary vessels for the future evolution of higher consciousness, who would wish to dispute him!