This site has been wikified (http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Main_Page)
For the new and improved version see : 

8.1- http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Triune_Brain

8.2- http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Aperture_of_Perception

8.3-http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Truths_and_Facts 

8.4-http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Memetic_Evolution 

8.5-http://mbscientific.org/wiki/Sixth_Sense - conclusion

ch8- Evolution of knowledge- Evolutionary Psychology, The Triune Brain, Perception/Abstraction and Memetic Evolution

Lets take a closer look at the human brain morphology, from a functional, behavioral perspective.

The morphology of the human brain consists of the same fore, mid and hind brains that we covered in the last chapter, it has simply evolved to its present shape. The Triune Brain Model covers brain physiology from a functional, behavioral perspective. It is an evolutionary model that describes the human brain as the superposition of the reptilian brain, the early mammalian, emotional brain (limbic system) and the higher mammalian, cerebral brain. In that model our behavior, our psychology, is driven by the evolutionary physiology that makes up the brain itself. This discipline of study is called Evolutionary Psychology.

In detail:

1 - The primitive (reptile) brain evolved from the hind brain. It consists mainly of brain stem, medulla, pons, cerebellum, among others. Behaviorally, it corresponds to the reptile brain. It handles reflexive and basic internal body (regulatory) functions, e.g. glands, heart, intestines, etc. It also handles certain primitive behavioral traits, instinctive and reflex reactions, sexuality, aggression, territoriality, etc.

3 - The cerebral or rational (new mammalian) brain, consists of the neo-cortex and some sub-cortical neural groups. It corresponds to the brain of the superior mammals, including the primates and humans (lets not forget the cetaceans, that is whales and dolphins). It handles all of our associative memory functions that involve all of our 5 senses, and in us at least, we know it also accommodates abstraction, symbolic thinking and communication including language, reading, writing and mathematics.

There is an order to our behavioral aspects that this physiology engenders. The behavioral aspects of the reptile and emotional brains are by enlarge subconscious. We act reflexively, are turned on and off, we like and dislike, etc. without much deliberation. Our conscious, deliberative behavior is the domain the cerebral brain's neural networks. On that note, it is well established that the reptile, emotional and cerebral circuits of our brains evoke behavioral traits in that order, that is a reptile brain stimulus trumps the emotional and cerebral stimuli, an emotional brain stimuli trumps a cerebral brain stimuli (as a rule). This fact is regularly used by public relations operators to spin their messages covering diverse arenas from product advertising to political rhetoric. It is no accident that politicians hold arbitrary babies (emotional brain stimuli) and sports car ads render scantly clad women (reptile brain stimuli). As educated as we like to think we are, our behavior is greatly governed by our reptile and emotional brains, subconsciously.

Together, the integrated neural network that is the triune brain forms our concept of reality, the cumulative coalescence of perception. In the next section we will concentrate on the evolution of abstraction, and knowledge in particular, within the cerebral (conscious) domain of the triune brain.

As we saw in the last chapter biotic neural networks can form abstractions. The Inherent Reality, within which we exist, presents us with stimuli representing abstract entities and phenomenon. That stimuli that we discern is then affirmed and stored in our memories. That memory forms the kernel of abstraction. Having said that, a single memory by itself is of little use. But when strung together with other memories and actions and logic that turns out to be rewarding, then abstractions become tools for survival. Knowledge, simply put, is abstraction that is affirmed, confirmed, corroborated and incorporated in a functionality. In that sense knowledge is a subset of the abstractions that our neural networks form, particularly in the cerebral (conscious) domain of our triune brain. For example, I might form an abstraction involving a shape of a cloud, color of the sky, pleasantness of the day. And that may make me feel good, so it is of value but not applicable use. On the other hand if I have knowledge of the weather patterns for the day, I could put it to practical use, e.g. dress warmly so I wouldn't freeze. So knowledge implies functionality, i.e. knowledge of something.
Knowledge can be strung together to form larger kernels of rewarding knowledge, rewarding functionalities. In that sense, knowledge evolves in a hierarchy of complexity. Lets use the lesson of this exercise to demonstrate the point.

We started off with the elementary particles, a known class of abstractions. They coalesced to create atoms, another known class. Atoms coalesced to create molecules, another known class. They formed organic material, another known class. Some of them went on to form cells, another known class. Cells went on to form the tree of life, another known class. You get my point, lets stop there for now. As this example shows, knowledge coalesces with other similar known abstractions in what we can classify as a group, or a class. Then we might discover that that class is a subclass of another class, or a super-class of another class, or both. And that is how knowledge accumulates. Our brain classifies similar knowledge in related classes, and then is goes about defining the subclasses and the super-classes. If the knowledge is affirmed, so much for the better, if not, it makes up its own artifacts anyway (figments of imagination) just to create closure. If we string all of those classifications together we'll end up with a knowledge tree (of sorts), depicting the hierarchy of what we have learned (figure 1, right).   By the way, that is how we communicate symbolically. Take any story, any movie, any book You can break it down to a knowledge tree. Don't take my word for it, consider how they are made and then advertised, to get you to buy them, see them. They are first presented at the highest kernel of abstraction. And it is then unfolded, broken down to smaller subsets, plot points and flow lines (that would hopefully make sense, entice). And once you experience it, if it is any good, your brain should be able to integrate all of the sub-plots hierarchically, i.e. to make sense of the whole thing!

Fig 1 - Knowledge Tree

And that is how knowledge is taught. Take any course. It is presented at the highest order of abstraction (course title, abstract). Then it is broken down to chapters and sub-chapters (specific course topics). 

If you add up all of the stories, lessons, courses, etc. that coalesce in your mind, you end up with your personal knowledge tree. In time, as your personal knowledge tree accumulates via learning, your behavior evolves, your consciousness evolves, your aperture of perception evolves, you evolve.

In these tree like classifications our minds perform something akin to a dimensional jump. Since we are familiar with our dimensional space let me illustrate it with an old bar bet. Take six match sticks and lay it on a table. Take your favorite drinking buddy and ask him to arrange the match sticks so they make 4 triangles, without the sticks crossing each other, for a buck. He'll try moving and reshaping the sticks on the table and eventually give up. Then you'll move the sticks and form a pyramid, and win a buck! The point is, he used all of his knowledge of figures in 2 dimensions and there was no solution to the bar bet. You made that dimensional jump to 3 dimensions, formed a pyramid and won the bar bet.  The brain, given enough time, and trial and error, and luck, can make the dimensional jump to infer the super class from the subclasses (and vice versa), that is how it accumulates knowledge. So a dimensioned knowledge tree would look like figure 2 to the right. Anywhere along the tree branches, any knowledge entity can be deconstructed into subclasses, and super-classes may be constrcuted to contain it.

Fig 2- Dimensioned Knowledge Tree

Throughout our lives we internalize many knowledge trees which our minds amalgamate via finding corroborated or uncorroborated closures. The amalgam itself becomes a knowledge tree. And as we live on and learn on, the internalized knowledge tree expands.

So that is how knowledge coalesces. And that is no accident; as we find out once we understand morphological flows, that is how morphological flows coalesce! Morphological flows are apparently the demonstrable property of our surrounding Inherent Reality, the way of the coalescence of the abstract. It is no wonder that abstractions of the brain have to mimic the real thing to get it right. I'll take it a step further, how knowledge morphologies assembles in your brain must reflect how morphologies coalesce in Inherent Reality. That is the ONLY way your mental model can render the real thing. We can in fact visualize this:

To be technically accurate, a knowledge tree is really a knowledge GRAPH. A graph is a mathematical structure, like a tree, but where any element of the tree can connect up to any other element of the tree. So a knowledge element in a class can connect up with any other element in any other class in the tree. But, since hardly anyone knows about graphs, and if they do they think of a chart or a curve or some such thing, lets stick with the word knowledge tree. Though this is a technical distinction, the graph like connections of internalized knowledge trees are critical to the expansion of knowledge trees. Dreams, both day dreams and night dreams, use these graph connections regularly. I'll give you 2 examples. 
First, the visualization of the Benzene molecule; in 1865, Friedrich Kekulé visualized the structure of benzene in a dream as a regular hexagon with a hydrogen at each corner: "My mental eye..could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformations; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twisting and turning in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail...". His mind plugged in his chemistry knowledge tree with a new node extracted from circling snakes, from his animal knowledge tree: "...the form whirled mockingly before my eyes...", he wrote.
The second example is a personal one. In 1980, at Arizona State, I was working on interpolation problems, specifically building connected structures from measured data points, e.g. physical surfaces from elevation points (map of Monterey Bay from elevation points gathered from sonar soundings.. this one ended up in National Geographic many years later). I noticed that through my mind, my hand could draw a line curving from point to point to point, and at the time we had no formulaic mechanism to automate it. Then it came to me dreamlike. I saw in my mind's eye spaceships being pulled in by planetary gravities, and upon reaching one planet's orbit their engines would fire towards the next planet, and so one. And that is what I did, I made the data points gravitational attractor sets, my plot lines spaceships, and I let the formulas run and literally spin surfaces out of the data points. I plugged in my interpolation knowledge tree from known concepts in my planetary physics knowledge tree.
If you think about is, most of (night) dreams are nonsensical. That is, the mind attempts to connect up all of these separate knowledge trees. Most of those connections are not affirmed, they don't make sense. But, the connections that are affirmed, that do make sense, expand the knowledge tree. And it is the graph like connections of the knowledge trees that do the job.
That is the physiological basis for the evolutionary architecture of knowledge, of the mind, of consciousness.

Going back to a point we made in the last chapter, once knowledge is corroborated and applied repeatedly, it becomes instinctive, i.e. long term genes in its container neural networks switch on. That kernel of knowledge can then serve as input for the heuristic circuits trying to assemble any other knowledge that might use that kernel. By the same token, knowledge trees that are sufficiently affirmed become part of instinctive behavior. Much more on this later.

So we are born with our 5 senses, our initial affirmation inputs. Then through out our school years, class times and play times, work, and life in general, we mentally assemble our knowledge trees. In that process something interesting happens.
There is this Inherent Reality that surrounds us, within which things exist of their own volition, regardless of whether we perceive them or not. I sense what I call the physical, through my 5 senses: touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste. This is by enlarge the domain of the ancient hind, mid and fore brains and the neural physiology and the resultant behavior that it renders are pretty much pre-wired in me. For me that is the initial condition of my aperture of perception, I sense what is physical through that narrow keyhole.
Then I start learning, forming my knowledge trees. As these abstractions are corroborated, calculations are made and verified, devices built and used, then the results of these abstractions register on my 5 senses as well. Therefore my notion of what is physical expands, my sense of perceived reality expands, my aperture of perception expands. 

Given the extent of that inherent limitation of my, our, aperture of perception, I am nothing short of amazed that we have managed to accumulate this much knowledge, applied abstractions.

Knowledge trees grow in two specific manners, incrementally and transcendentally. Incremental abstractions draw from the known and expand upon it, perform associative logic. One sees a bike, sees a motor, plans how to put the motor on the bike and comes up with a motor bike. Transcendental abstractions don't reduce to anything previously known. That is when one strings together a knowledge tree and perceives a hole (a missing subset/superset), which he then proceeds to plug in by mentally deducing a heretofore unknown abstraction. The history of science is replete with transcendental abstractions, electro-magnetism, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, etc. are all transcendental abstractions. Transcendental abstractions are also the corner stones of religious thought (referred to as revelations). Abstractions then, are generally a combination of incremental and transcendental abstractions to various degrees. And once new abstractions are corroborated, they append the knowledge tree and it grows.

As stated, corroborated, better yet applied abstractions change the very notion of what is physical. Take an example from physics, our model of electron is an abstraction that gives it a spatial reach into infinity. So does our model of a star. We associate a force field with them. In the latter case we call it gravity, in the former case we call it the electric field. Now, there is nothing in our 5 physical senses that can detect them directly. But we indirectly experience them, like when something falls on your head or when you see the electric discharge of lightning. So is the electrical field physical or an abstraction? I suppose if you are an electrical engineer making motors, then it is as physical as it gets. But if you don't know anything about it, say you are a Kalahari bushman and somebody shows up one day and waves his hands trying to explain the electric field, then to you it must come out as an arbitrary abstraction that has nothing to do with you. The point is that as applied abstractions get corroborated and the person gets it, his very notion of the physical expands, his aperture of perception expands. Now the corroboration may take a physical form, like the electric motor. Or, the corroboration may be in terms of observation, like gravity expressed in Kepler's equations of planetary motion.
We have to be precise enough in our definition of perception to include both the bushman and the engineer. The definition has to account for the ever-varying apertures of perception. We can break perception down into direct physical, physical abstraction and pure abstraction. Direct physical perception is that which impresses upon our 5 senses directly. Physical abstractions come in corroborated and uncorroborated variety, though that may be subjective, one person's corroboration may be another person's bogus. And pure abstractions are as in pure mathematical or artistic varieties.

So far we have examined physical versus abstract from a personal perspective. Being social creatures, there is a social element that comes into play that must be examined as well. What is truth? Lets look at it in detail. I see a wall, everybody else sees the wall. We all agree that that is a wall. So that is a wall, and that's the truth. You see what happened? Not only I corroborated it, but everybody else did as well. So that is established as truth collectively. The social element is crucial in establishing truth. Lets look at another example. In medieval Europe, it was established truth that earth was at the center of the universe. It was God's decree. Not only everybody agreed, everybody had to agree, or else. When Copernicus came up with a model that said earth rotated around the sun, it was heresy. When Father Giordino Bruno said hey this Copernicus guy may have a point, they burned him alive at the stake. And when Galileo said I have a point on the subject, being Pope's life long buddy, they just put him under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Lets bring this argument to modern day. Say a plummer, I assume, would agree that planets revolve around the sun. That is the truth. But is that tangible to him, did he corroborate that Saturn rotates around the sun personally? No. But, given that everybody says it does, and he has some measure of confidence because we are actually launching spacecraft to these planets, so we must know where they are and how they move. So he is convinced of the truth by social consensus.
That is the point, there is an element of perceived reality by social consensus that has to be taken into account, even if the consensus is blatantly false. There are, believe it or not, people that take it as God's truth that God created earth in six days, created man (Adam) out of clay and woman (Eve) out of Adams Rib. That is God's truth by social decree, and no matter what anybody says, that is the truth to them! Ultimate corroboration must be directly physical, registering on our 5 senses, and everybody must agree for an abstraction to become fact (physical reality). So truth to a person is subjective to their social circumstances. Facts on the other hand must be socially invariant and subject to personal, physical corroboration.
Logical inference comes with a confidence factor. That confidence might per 100 percent, as in logical proof or statistical certainty. Or, an abstraction may be in strong logical or statistical correlation with something that is ultimately corroborated. 

So that is the anatomy of perception: physical perception which directly registers on all of our 5 senses, applied abstractions, some of which are corroborated and those becomes physical facts. Then there are uncorroborated abstractions that become part of the belief system. And there are pure abstractions of mathematical, artistic and musical variety.

Perception integrated over a person's life constitutes his perceived reality. Now that gets really fuzzy because of the differences in the aperture of perception in different people. One's personal reality may differ from another's significantly. But since it is the integration of perception over the span of a life, then it seems reasonable to similarly give it the components of direct physical, applied and pure abstractions. 

So, to sum up, there is an Inherent Reality within which we exist, which we may or may not perceive. The portion of this inherent reality that we perceive becomes what we then internalize as our reality. Therefore when we speak of reality, what we mean is our internalized sense of reality, the portion of  the inherent reality which we discern through our aperture of perception. Inherent reality, to us, is by definition abstract. The portion of it that registers on our minds becomes abstractions to us, the portion of it that registers on our 5 senses becomes physical to us. Further, abstractions that are corroborated, or better yet implemented, also become physical to us, in time expanding our aperture of perception. Truth is the amalgam of perceptions, corroborated or otherwise, that is highly subject to social consensus and belief systems. Facts must be physically corroborable and socially invariant (we often use the words "truth" and "fact" interchangeably, they are not). It must be noted that even facts are artifacts of us and by definition subject to our point of view. This is important because we often mistake our perceived reality, even though thoroughly corroborated and factual, with Inherent reality. Physicists are notorious for doing that. There once was the Newtonian model of the Universe. Then there was Einstein's model of the universe. Now there is talk of M theory and a multi-verse. The point is that all of these models, even if thoroughly corroborated, are just that, models. These facts, as we call them, are facts to us. I think that point can't be over-emphasized, our aperture of perception has by definition a limited view of the Inherent Reality. Any model we internalize as reality, though thoroughly corroborated and factual, is by definition subject to that point of view, to our aperture of perception.
So my perceived reality, at the highest level, is composed of abstractions. Subsets of these abstractions, which have functional values, form knowledge trees. Nodes of these trees form knowledge classes. Elements that comprise these classes are truths. A subset of these elements that are thoroughly corroborated form facts.

3- Memetic Evolution

So that's how ideas get created, through abstraction. The unstable (bad) ones eventually die off and the stable (good) ones perpetuate, just like everything else in the morphological flows. That perpetuation happens by the way of memetic evolution.
Once good ideas are corroborated and applied, they can be copied and improved upon. Say, you have a problem and you create an abstraction (a mental model) to solve it; then you construct a solution and you implement it. Now if the solution turns out to be a good one, it is adopted (mimicked) and somebody else improves on it, and someone else improves on the improvement, and pretty soon you have a whole genre of practice. That is Memetic Evolution. Take the case of moving about, for example:

So not only the morphological flow of a valid abstraction can lead a life of it's own (in the case of walking from sandals to shoes to boots to designer athletic shoes) it can spawn other flows with their own evolutionary lifelines, as in the case of riding, driving and flying.
Lets look at that in more detail. So you start with a problem, moving around. Everyone had do it, so having good footwear must have been a domain of substantial focus. And I imagine every tribe had a cottage industry of making footwear. So not only a person constructed the knowledge tree of making footwear, but the better footwear ideas got passed around from generation to generation. So in the end you have a footwear making knowledge tree that is an aggregate of all of the contributions from all of the people in all of the contributing generations. The knowledge tree of making footwear becomes part of the culture of the tribe. Part of the cultural costumes. Furthermore, as tribes traded goods, including footwear, the knowledge tree got transferred. In doing so the knowledge trees of making footwear among local tribes coalesce, creating regional cultural hallmarks. Part of regional cultural costumes. That means that the natural tendency for knowledge trees to coalesce to perform functions of necessity or desire becomes the impetus for cultural and social evolution. This point is the key to our social/cultural evolution. Via memetic evolution, knowledge trees accumulate within the society, forming the societal knowledge trees, which themselves expand over time as coming generations and outside influences contribute to it. That will segue into the next chapter, our social evolution.
But lets stay with our current example, the evolution of knowledge trees addressing the problem of moving about. Somewhere along the line, some 10,000 years ago or so, folks domesticated pack animals and started to use them for moving about. Horses became the riding animal of choice and the knowledge tree of using horses for moving about started to get assembled. First that knowledge tree grew among a tribe, then it was transferred and coalesced among local tribes, saddle styles and riding styles and various functions got invented and perfected. So that became the part of the local and regional cultures. The knowledge tree of riding horses became the impetus and hallmark for social and cultural evolution. But if you look at the knowledge tree of riding horses, it is not there in isolation. It amalgamates with the knowledge tree of animal husbandry, leather-wear craftsmanship, seasonal migration, herding and agriculture routines, militarism etc. So assembly of one knowledge tree, by the virtue of creating functionalities gives/gets impetus to other knowledge trees and they all co-evolve together, rendering social/cultural evolution.
Then sometime after the invention of the steam engines, the idea of horseless carriages started to percolate. And, in relatively short order the knowledge tree for engineering cars was assembled. If you consider the scope of the knowledge tree of car engineering and use, it is an amalgam of many knowledge trees that go into making all of the different parts of a car and deploying and operating  the car in large numbers and high speeds.  All of these knowledge trees coalesce to create the hallmarks of our current cultures of mobility, wealth and status.
Then the knowledge tree of flying was assembled. The scope of that effort was and is by definition global, just by the virtue of the range of flight. So that knowledge tree was and is the impetus and hallmark for national and global social/cultural evolution.

So the assembly of the knowledge trees for moving about gave impetus to social evolution as well as social expansion, that by now covers the globe. So it appears that societal knowledge trees and cultures are one and the same thing. Knowledge, specifically the functionalities that they establish, engenders behavioral aspects of the people of a society, i.e. the culture of the society. And as new knowledge is gained, corroborated and implemented, as new tools and devices are built, deployed and used, then the culture of the society evolves. That is the biological mechanism of our social/cultural evolution.

Remember how long term memory became instinctive, that is how societal knowledge trees, cultures become ingrained. After a culture is set in, generation after generation, the modes of behavior gain instinctive traction, a cultural momentum sets in. Cultural momentum, as we will see later when we cover sustainability issues, specifically social rifts, has insidious traction.

As interesting and important as solving the problem of moving about is in social/cultural evolution, in the next chapter we will cover the pillars of social evolution, i.e. the evolution of governance and religion, science and economics.

Conclusion: The abstract nature of Inherent Reality, the mind as the sixth sense, transcendental abstraction

Being physical creatures, we naturally perceive reality as physical, that which registers on our 5 senses. The abstract is typically considered as the domain of thought. And everything that we have covered so far tells us that we have it exactly backwards. Inherent reality, the universe itself is inherently abstract. The part of it which registers on our minds and forms corroborated abstractions is a subset of that inherent reality. And the subset of that, which registers on our 5 senses is what to us is physical reality. And as our domain of abstraction expands, as we perceive more of the inherent abstract reality in a corroborated manner, our aperture of perception expands, our very notion of what is physical expands. 

In a way perhaps the mind is the most powerful sensory organ of all. It integrates all of the inputs from the 5 sensory organs and models the abstract reality. It can construct new realities incrementally by assembling together what is known. It can also perceive holes in the realm of what is known. It constantly attempts to fill those holes in any which way it can, mostly by trial and error if it can, stuff of practical science, or by superstition or religion if all else fails. It needs closure. And the closure of those holes are the stuff of transcendental abstraction. Most of the attempts at closure may turn out to be bunk. But when on occasion the mind succeeds in finding a closure, and a new transcendental abstraction is corroborated and implemented, then entirely new realities are born. 

So maybe the mind is that sixth sense that the myths elude to, the organ that can perceive the patterns of the past, that can conceive the possibilities of the future. In an abstract universe the mind is the sensory organ that perceives and implements abstraction, thereby expanding the very notion of reality and in the bargain actualizing our social/cultural evolution, our morphological flows. 

Chapter Key: Morphological Flows, entities going through functional constructs thereby creating more complex entities with more complex functionalities:

fore,mid, hind brain == evolution ==> triune brain

Inherent Reality: Abstract == perception, affirmation, memorizing ==> abstraction (atomic knowledge element)

atomic knowledge elements == classification ==> super, subclasses comprising  knowledge trees (knowledge genres)

knowledge trees == personal and social corroboration ==> beliefs, truths and facts

knowledge trees == memetic evolution ==> societal and cultural absorption, advancement and expansion

Links:

Triune brain

Limbic system in some detail

Memetic evolution