Reviews: "Journey of the Mind" and "Against the Grain"

Book reviews from my post Superminds, States, and the Domestication of Humans

1. Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos by: Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

2. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by: James C. Scott

This post represents a new feature (experiment?) I plan to occasionally write posts which take advantage of one or more books I read recently, but which aren’t actually reviews of those books. See, for example, my last post: Superminds, States, and the Domestication of Humans. 

Despite the fact that the books feature heavily in these posts, I assume my adoring fans still want actual reviews. But it doesn’t make sense to wait until the next book review collection for those reviews to appear, nor does it make sense to cram the reviews into the original essay which was about something else. And so I thought that instead I would have the reviews quickly follow the essay as sort of supplementary material. So that’s what this is. Let me know what you think. 

Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos

By: Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Published: 2022

432 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

An explanation of how “minds” work. Each chapter focuses on a different, more complex mind. The book starts with archaea and bacteria and ends with humans. 

What's the author's angle?

The authors are neuroscientists and it’s clear they think they have the answer to the “hard problem of consciousness”. 

Who should read this book?

If you’re interested at all in how brains work, or intelligence more broadly this is a great book with fantastic conceptual illustrations… for the first sixteen chapters. I have some issues with the final three chapters. (See below and also my last post Superminds, States, and the Domestication of Humans.)

Specific thoughts: Have they solved consciousness?

In this book Ogas and Gaddam basically claim that they have solved the “hard problem of consciousness”. I’m not an expert on the status of that particular problem, nevertheless this surprised me. I thought I would have heard if someone had definitely slain that particular dragon. But it’s certainly possible they had and I just missed it.

I decided to ask ChatGPT whether that was the case. It assured me that most people did not think that Ogas and Gaddam had solved the problem, so I hadn’t missed it. But neither had I misunderstood the book. ChatGPT agreed with me that Ogas and Gaddam are claiming that everyone can pack up their bags and go home, that they’ve taken care of it. Consider this excerpt:

You may have heard that mortal consciousness is the greatest locked-room mystery in science, an unsolved puzzle that may never be unriddled. The journey ahead suggests otherwise. By progressing through the sequence of innovations that led to sentience, step-by-step, this narrative offers an incremental account of why and how consciousness appeared in the universe.

This claim provides a perfect insight into both the greatest weakness, and the greatest strength of the book: It’s ambition. For the first sixteen chapters this ambition seems justified. They lay out the progression from the very most simple minds to the most complex minds with plenty of explanation for how each works and what additional modules have been added at each step. It’s clear they’ve spent a great deal of time assembling things into a coherent narrative. The illustrations are great and the explanations are lucid. 

However, once it gets into human minds and superminds its reach exceeds its grasp and it starts making claims that are far less well supported, far more speculative and frankly unforgivably dogmatic. An excerpt will help illustrate what I mean:

Any rational person knows that you cannot possibly harbor some spirit assigned to you by a divine being, some energy field that breathes sentience into your brain while you are alive and travels to some other plane when you die.

I have no problems with them being atheists, or coming down on the side of materialism vs. dualism, but to say that “Any rational person knows that you cannot” do X, almost regardless of what X is, seems like the height of arrogance. 

In my last post I delved into their idea of the superminds, and I think they have put forth an interesting theory, but once again it’s a very ambitious theory. I would say that they display far too much confidence that understanding biological minds will allow you to understand cultural minds. It provides a useful framework to think about such things, but they really run with it. Which is to say I think the framework they bring to the table is a great framework for asking questions, but a poor framework for generating answers.

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Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States 

By: James C. Scott

Published: 2017

312 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

The conventional view of agriculture and the early states is that humans invented agriculture. Agriculture allowed them to settle in one place. From there, they created a state. States provided the organization necessary to create surpluses. Surpluses created civilization. And civilization is good. In this book James uses archaeological evidence to dispute all of these claims, and the order in which they occurred. 

What's the author's angle?

Scott was a political scientist who specialized in studying non-state societies. This non-state perspective often shades into being an anti-state perspective. Or as he said “I am making a case for a sort of anarchist squint.”

Who should read this book?

If you’re familiar with Scott it’s probably from his book Seeing Like a State (see my review here). If you’re not familiar with that book, and what I say sounds interesting, I would read that book first. If you have read that book and want more, particularly more about how the oppressive nature of the state was formed, this is also a great book

Specific thoughts: Up until very recently the state improved fertility, what changed?

There were a lot of surprising and interesting things in this book, the most surprising was the close ties between the state and grain, which I detailed in my last post. Following very close behind was his revelation about the link between fertility, domestication, and sedentism. It turns out that settled farmers have much higher fertility than hunters and gatherers. It’s not immediately obvious why this should be so. Particularly given that settled populations, living close together with domesticated animals, have a much higher disease load because of zoonosis. Not only that, but their infant mortality rate is higher as well.

To counterbalance that, it is easier to raise kids if you’re not moving around a lot. And it’s also possible (though interestingly Scott doesn’t mention this) that the economics of children make more sense in an agricultural society. Perhaps it’s easier to get an eight year old to help in the fields than to get an eight year old to walk long distances in search of berries. And it’s especially difficult to get an eight year old to run down an antelope.

These potential reasons for the fertility differences occur to anyone who thinks about the problem for very long, but there’s another reason that’s less obvious: domestication increases fertility. And, as I mentioned in the last post, Scott argues that farmers have been domesticated by the states, as distinct from the wildness of hunter-gatherers. Consider this quote from the book, which is speaking about the domestication of animals, but seems to apply to humans as well.

The high rates of mortality for newborn domesticates would seem to defeat the purpose of human management, which is largely to maximize the reproduction of animal protein as one maximizes one’s crop of grain. It appears, however, that the rates of fertility may increase so dramatically as to more than offset the losses through mortality. The reasons are not entirely clear, but domesticated animals generally reach reproductive age earlier, ovulate and conceive more frequently, and have longer reproductive lives. Tame silver foxes in the Russian experiment came into heat twice a year compared with once a year for undomesticated foxes. The pattern for rats is more striking, although as commensals even in their wild state, they allow only speculative inferences to other domesticates. Captured wild rats have quite low rates of fertility, but after only eight (short!) generations of captivity, their rate of fertility was found to increase from 64 percent to 94 percent and by the twenty-fifth generation, the reproductive life of captive rats was twice as long as “noncaptives.” They were, overall, nearly three times as fecund. The paradox of relative ill health and high newborn mortality on the one hand, coupled with “more-than-compensating increases in fertility on the other, is one to which we shall return, as it bears directly on the demographic explosion of agricultural peoples at the expense of hunters and gatherers.

You might be able to see where I’m going with this. For thousands of years states had the effect of increasing the fertility of their citizens. This continued all the way down to the industrial revolution, when fertility started to decline among those countries who had experienced it. But since the mid 60’s it’s really dropped off the cliff. 

I was already worried about this decline in fertility. But knowing how fundamental increased fertility has been to the whole project of civilization—which I am a big fan of, despite its warts—makes the problem appear both more fundamental and more ominous. 

Fertility used to correlate to civilization, now it no longer does. And if this were the only change to the state then it would be easy to pass it off as a modern aberration. But Scott goes to great pains in both his books to discuss the state’s overarching interest in making its citizens legible, which is to say it’s constantly pushing to bring in more information about its citizens and by doing so have more access to their productive outputs. This mostly shows up in the form of taxes, but recently we saw it applied to things like vaccination status and even going outdoors. As these latter examples illustrate, it would be naive to claim that things have not dramatically changed on that front as well.

You might be able to argue that we’re even more “legible” to large internet companies, but it seems clear that there is less separation between the government and these companies than we would like. And in any case, even if we restrict ourselves just to companies, this obviously represents another worrying development in the evolution of society.

When you add these observations to the one’s I made in my last post about superminds and the state as its own entity, one starts to wonder if we might also be dealing with a new species of the state? And of course what does “species” even mean in this context? In the few days since I made that post I don’t know that I’ve developed any better ideas. But I find the decline in fertility to be an alarming wrinkle. One can imagine several possibilities:

1. Fertility is still important to the livelihood of the state, and the current decline is a temporary aberration that will eventually be corrected. Probably even through the mechanism of the state. (Certainly that’s where most people seem to be applying their efforts.)

2. The decline in fertility has nothing to do with the state, or domestication, and more importantly it doesn’t affect the ongoing health of the state one way or the other.

3. The interests of the state and of its citizens have diverged so completely that having fewer people is actually in the state’s interests for some reason. (If we really wanted to go down the rabbit hole we could toss in something about being replaced by AI here.)

At a minimum it’s yet one more thing that’s gone off the rails recently. I’ll add it to the list, the very, very long list.

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Let me know what you think of this supplementary book review idea. I mean, I think in general supplementing things is good. I know most of you would like me to supplement my intelligence. Certainly I’ve tried, but ChatGPT keeps telling me that if you multiply a number by zero it doesn’t matter how large the number is, it’s still zero.