Abstract
We propose that the ability of humans to identify and create patterns led to the unique aspects of human cognition and culture as a complex emergent dynamic system consisting of the following human traits: patterning, social organization beyond that of the nuclear family that emerged with the control of fire, rudimentary set theory or categorization and spoken language that co-emerged, the ability to deal with information overload, conceptualization, imagination, abductive reasoning, invention, art, religion, mathematics and science. These traits are interrelated as they all involve the ability to flexibly manipulate information from our environments via pattern restructuring. We argue that the human mind is the emergent product of a shift from external percept-based processing to a concept and language-based form of cognition based on patterning. In this article, we describe the evolution of human cognition and culture, describing the unique patterns of human thought and how we, humans, think in terms of patterns.
Highlights
Humans both deal with information and engage in creative thinking, while computers only process data according to the instructions of their human programmers
As hinted at by our title, we believe that the ability to recognize and create patterns is the key to understanding the nature of human cognition and culture as well, as uniquely human traits, namely the control of fire, the ability to deal with information overload, patterning, primitive set theory, verbal language, imagination, abductive reasoning, invention, art, religion, mathematics and science, are all interrelated
The environmental pressure of our proposed dynamic system is information overload, which drives us to continuously create technologies and media to be able to efficiently process patterns, and to reconfigure patterns in novel ways. What led to this huge cascade of complex ways of manipulating and restructuring patterns at the dawn of homo sapiens? We propose that these complex forms of pattern-structuring, namely mathematical, linguistic and creative thinking, bootstrapped themselves into existence via the human ability to simultaneously hold multiple parallel representations in both mind and memory, allowing us, with a greater representational sandbox, to continuously structure and restructure patterns in countless ways
Summary
Humans both deal with information and engage in creative thinking, while computers only process data according to the instructions of their human programmers. We believe that the environmental pressure of information overload is a key factor in our proposed dynamic cognitive system of human intelligence, which drives us to continuously create media and technologies to be able to efficiently process patterns, and to reconfigure patterns in novel ways. What led to this huge cascade of complex ways of manipulating and restructuring patterns at the dawn of homo sapiens? Language, artistic and scientific thinking and imagination/abductive reasoning, as tools by which we process and restructure information to best suit our goals
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