TY - JOUR
AU1 - Consoli, Gianluca
AB - ABSTRACT On the basis of archaeological data and cognitive research, this article proposes an evolutionary story about aesthetic experience, arguing three intertwined theses. Aesthetic experience is adaptive; that is, it represents a specific implementation of the epistemic goal of knowing. It refunctionalizes antecedents and precursors: play and dreaming, technology and the ability to manipulate, and proto aesthetic elements and aesthetic preferences. Mind and aesthetic experience co evolve; that is, aesthetic experience requires mind reading and metacognition, and it helps them to reach their advanced metarepresentational architecture. I. AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE AND MENTATION Does the evolution of aesthetic experience contribute to the emergence of the modern human mind? Naturalistic (cognitive, evolutionary, neuro ) approaches to aesthetic experience very often forget that the question about the evolution of aesthetic experience is at the same time a question about the emergence of the mind as such. Even if these approaches consider aesthetic experience to be adaptive, they continue to see this selective advantage as an epiphenomenon without consequences for mentation.1 On the contrary, this article articulates a hypothesis structured on three levels as follows: Aesthetic experience is adaptive. The human mind is designed by evolution to be an “informavore”: it is an epistemically hungry seeker of information, in an endless effort to improve its knowledge.2 Therefore, the goal of knowing is fixed (it is constantly active) and terminal (it tends to count as an end in itself). Aesthetic experience represents a particular implementation of the epistemic goal. It provides, in a specific and proficient fashion, knowledge about the social world, that is, about the organization of personal experience and the understanding of others. Aesthetic experience refunctionalizes antecedents and precursors: play and dreaming; technology and the ability to manipulate materials, objects, and tools; and proto aesthetic elements and aesthetic preferences. Mind and aesthetic experience co evolve; that is, aesthetic experience is based on specific mental properties and contributes to their further bootstrapping. In particular, aesthetic experience requires mind reading and metacognition, and it helps the mind to reach its advanced metarepresentational architecture. Like every narrative about the evolution of mental processes, our story is inevitably speculative: contextual data are sparse, precise dating is impossible, and ancient DNA and hominin fossil records cannot be definitive clues to any reverse engineering hypothesis. However, our evolutionary story elaborates a consistent and organic theoretical frame, constituted by a set of well researched hypotheses that explain, in a plausible way, the main established sources of evidence: the ethnological reports about transcultural arts and the archaeological data about the earliest artistic behaviors and products. The first problem facing our story is that of the long lasting question concerning the identification and definition of the aesthetic experience and, a fortiori, of art. From this point of view, our story adopts an ethnological and anthropological approach—today the prevalent one. From this perspective, the first artistic behaviors and products are not modeled on the modern Western notion of fine art. They do not represent specialized practices with professionalized roles; they are not tied to the self expression of an isolated individual; they are not appreciated in dedicated places—such as in a museum—by static individuals; and they are not comprised of autonomous objects (that is, pictures, sculptures, and so on) or activities (that is, storytelling, dances, and so on) collected in a superordinate category. On the contrary, we take as enlightening case studies the ethnologists’ reports from premodern societies: all modern hunter gatherers have multimedia group scale ceremonies. On this basis, it is hypothesized that the earliest artistic behaviors and products were collective practices in which everyone participated and that were organized as multimodal and temporal coordinated experiences (that is, religious ceremonies replete with dance, music, song, narrative, and gestural symbolisms). Although this hypothesis is very plausible and generally accepted, we have to acknowledge that hitherto the universal agreement on this point was not based on direct evidence: while premodern societies often depict these common rituals, there is not a single cave painting of such ceremonies. Moreover, the subterranean art of the Upper Paleolithic is commonly judged to be one of the greatest archaeological enigmas. Still, today, anthropologists and archaeologists are no closer to knowing why the artists of the Upper Paleolithic penetrated the deep limestone caves in total darkness to depict images in inaccessible fissures. However, in spite of this lack of direct evidence and of a comprehensive explanation of the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, the ethnological and anthropological hypothesis of participatory art absolutely remains the only available option.3 This is confirmed by the fact that none argue the opposite thesis (that art was not participatory), not even the advocates of the display or self presentation theory of art.4 Above all, the opposite thesis seems to be an ideological projection from the eighteenth century system of fine arts. With regard to the available archaeological data, I take as a reference point the evidence concerning the Upper Paleolithic (lasting from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago), in particular the findings of Cro Magnon art in Europe. These findings constitute a complex, integrated set of behaviors and products commonly thought to be undoubtedly artistic: cave paintings, tridimensional sculptures, musical instruments, architectural disposition of building components, and rich ornamentation.5 There was probably also storytelling (there is a general agreement that language must have been in place).6 Moreover, I also pay close attention to recent research, particularly at African sites, where stones and bones with systematically engraved lines, perforated shells and animal teeth, and ochre crayons from 135,000 to 70,000 years ago can be found.7 So, our story aims to explain two main points: first, the general flourishing of artistic behaviors and products during the Upper Paleolithic and, second, the slow and gradual process of preparation in which the precursors and preconditions of aesthetic experience developed and the memetic story of aesthetic experience began. In this way, our story aims to reconcile into an integrated frame the two different lines of interpretation concerning the archaeological date. One line of interpretation affirms that 40,000 to 30,000 years ago marked a sudden creative explosion, whereas the other line of interpretation denies the idea of a cultural revolution and pushes back the date of psychological modernity and the behaviors that demonstrate it.8 To mediate between these two different conceptions, the first step is to identify the evolutionary trajectory of aesthetic experience. II. THE EVOLUTIONARY LOGIC OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE Proposals about aesthetic experience evolution often choose a single option between adaptation and incidental by product, or between biological predisposition and cultural technologies.9 In general, these one sided alternatives are not appropriate for explaining the evolution of cognitive processes. In large measure, the modern mind has emerged as an exaptation and through self engineering. First, in line with evolutionary pluralism, already available adaptations and spandrels are continuously refunctionalized.10 Second, according to the extended mind theory, culture, conceived as part of the extended human phenotype, offers external resources that integrate, restructure, and strengthen mental capacities in self reinforcing cycles.11 In particular, a unilateral option is not consistent with the archaeological data on aesthetic experience. A very long process of preparation, with a final, general flourishing, suggests a layered and plural evolutionary trajectory, which is constituted by cumulative and recursive processes. In our story, aesthetic experience does not exist from the beginning. Before the appearance of aesthetic experience, there was a heterogeneous set of preexisting mental properties (affective, perceptual, cognitive, and so on), none of which presents aesthetic experience features. New selective pressures modified these properties through a sequence of exaptation cycles. Brain plasticity, the capacity of the brain to undergo postnatal modifications, allows these changes to be implemented. In large measure, these new pressures are provoked directly by the mind itself: in the process of bootstrapping, the mind produces increasingly rich and complex cultural structures. As cultural and cognitive reorganizations, exaptations are assimilated in the genome through the combined action of the Baldwin effect and group selection. With the first of these mechanisms, intragroup competition favors subjects that are biologically predisposed to acquiring the new emerging traits through interaction with the cultural environment. With the second mechanism, intergroup competition favors the group in which the new emerging traits are more widespread.12 Because the relationship between biological predispositions and culture is context dependent, the adaptations involved in aesthetic experience evolution yield cultural differentiations: as archaeological and ethnological data suggest, different communities develop distinct forms of proto arts and realize distinct variants of the same proto arts. However, what is common is that each exaptation process produces chain reactions. In this long lasting dynamic of evolution, the material culture, realized by virtue of the new adaptations, promoted in turn the development of further adaptations. So, exaptations accumulated recursively by gradual degrees until they reached a critical level. When the critical point was exceeded, the hybrid system of mind and culture reorganized itself into a new biologic universal. Without a conscious project, the aesthetic experience emerged as an entirely new kind of experience. Obviously, this does not mean the evolution of populations of great artists. Rather, it means the emergence of subjects able to take part in the cultural practices of their group, in which aesthetic experience represents an indispensable adaptive tool. This evolutionary trajectory excludes by definition that the aesthetic experience relies on an “aesthetic faculty” conceived as a single, neural module, localized in a certain brain area, specialized in one task, and arising suddenly. On the contrary, in our story, aesthetic experience is supported by a multiple set of preexisting mental properties, evolved for other reasons, and then exapted to a new and original adaptive function. Similarly, the evolutionary trajectory does not involve a direct and specific anatomical change in the sapiens brain. Rather, once the brain had reached its modern anatomical form (200,000 to 150,000 years ago), the emergence of the aesthetic experience may be seen as a continuous process of reorganization concerning higher order neural relationships, that is, the relationships among the exapted mental systems. In line with the gene–culture evolutionary theory, these reorganizations were originally stimulated by cultural (extraneuronal and extragenetic) factors, and then they probably altered the human genome.13 From this perspective, the aesthetic experience is similar to a complex, emerging system of higher order relationships, culturally implemented and genetically scaffolded.14 Finally, when brains were definitively predisposed and the new adaptation was genetically widespread, the aesthetic experience was subject to the transition from the slow changes of the genetic story to the fast and ceaseless innovation of the memetic story. In line with the prevalent position among paleoanthropologists and cognitive archaeologists, our story holds that the Cro Magnon brain had configurations identical to ours and that the transition from genetics to memetics occurred earlier than the Upper Paleolithic.15 In analogy with the full development of other mental faculties, the genetic potential to build the rich artistic behaviors of the Upper Paleolithic art was already in place. However, the new adaptation took a long period of practice and experimentation to be fully expressed from a cultural point of view. The above mentioned new findings confirm that our ancestors started to explore the multiple possibilities afforded by the new adaptation long before 30,000 years ago. Therefore, the general flourishing that occured during the Upper Paleolithic did not involve any brain reorganization or any genetic changes: it was the product of a long lasting, cumulative, and recursive process of memetic stimulation. However, the archaeological data also show that cultural experimentation concerning aesthetic experience became increasingly extensive and uniform only during the Upper Paleolithic and that it reached a rate of creativity, change, and innovation equivalent to ours only during the Magdalenian (dating from around 17,000 to 11,000 years ago). Thus, we can plausibly hypothesize that during the Magdalenian, cultural stimulation of aesthetic experience led our ancestors to become inventors and the first users of art as a new cultural technology, governed by the principle of “aesthetic evolution.”16 The pressure for novelty became more and more constant; to elicit attention, interest, and appreciation and to contrast habituation, artistic products had to be increasingly original, surprising, and unpredictable. Hence, in our story, aesthetic experience is innately scaffolded as an adaptive disposition, whereas art constitutes a deliberate enhancement of this adaptation—a cultural extension that at the end of the Paleolithic tends to become progressively a transformational technology, continuously renewing and transforming itself. The persuasiveness of our story can be increased by describing more fully the emergence of aesthetic experience, that is, by specifying the distinctive adaptive advantage of aesthetic experience, the precursors of aesthetic experience, and the mental properties that aesthetic experience evolution contributes to our development. III. THE ADAPTIVE FUNCTION OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE Aesthetic experience and artistic behaviors and products show all the marks of adaptations. They are present in every culture. Each subject engages in them without particular pressures. Just as with the development of language, they develop up to a basic level without specific training, according to an endogenous ontogenetic sequence. At a proximal level, they are attractive and represent a source of pleasure. Above all, they are costly and require resources, in terms of time, physical and mental effort, skills, and practical instruments. Although the different evolutionary theories have reached no general consensus on the adaptive function of aesthetic experience, they clarify definitively that artistic behaviors and products are not the source of factual, empirical, practical, and utilitarian information, simply because these kinds of information can be conveyed more effectively by other means. However, this does not mean that aesthetic experience has, in principle, no cognitive value. Even when evolutionary theorists like Steven Pinker have denied the status of adaptation, they have recognized that aesthetic experience allows the exploration of possibilities in conceptual space on the basis of imagination.17 The uncontroversial (and reformulated) common core of the different evolutionary proposals regarding aesthetic imagination is as follows: Aesthetic experience enables imaginative simulations to occur that are decoupled from the actual state of the world. These simulations compress virtual models, maps, and templates that can be applied as mental reference points to all relevant real world scenarios. These models reenact simulative schemata previously entrenched in memory and work creatively on them in a way that defies habitual expectations and routinized processing. In this way, aesthetic experience provides modal knowledge about patterns of possibilities and affordances; practice with imaginative simulations allows the improvement of capacities such as anticipation, self regulation, mind reading, empathy, and so on; and this practice aids the development of mental flexibility in novel and complex circumstances. The evolutionary hypothesis that aesthetic experience represents an imaginative preparation for dealing with real world problems is pervasive in evolutionary psychology and literary Darwinism. Moreover, it has received strong empirical support from cognitive research. In particular, grounded cognition has shown that the process of categorization and generalization can be realized on the basis of an individual exemplar with a prototypical value, and the so called “science of fiction” has collected evidence showing how fictional representations can increase mental abilities and modify the self.18 However, all the current conceptions that attribute a cognitive function to aesthetic experience reveal a common deficit. These conceptions do not identify the intrinsic and distinctive selective advantage of aesthetic experience. In particular, the use of the aesthetic imagination that they describe is no different from the ordinary hypothesizing about non obtaining states of affairs found in daily simulating, predicting, and mind reading. This problem is not solved by theorists who claim that aesthetic simulations are emotionally imbued and saturated.19 Aesthetic or ordinary, simulations are multimodal by definition; they represent complex situations, and they reenact schemata distributed in all the relevant mental systems. So, it would be very surprising if aesthetic experience does not perform the task of arousing emotions and subjective experience. In our story, aesthetic experience represents a specific implementation of the general goal of knowing only if we recognize that the use of aesthetic imagination is grounded in and is not dissociable from an individual token. This token may be an aesthetic artifact or a temporal performance. However, unlike the ordinary use of imagination (but also unlike the use of imagination in science and philosophy), aesthetic experience always requires a direct acquaintance with a concrete and determined token. In its material presence, the token guides and prescribes the work of imagination in constructing the virtual model, continuously refreshes the attention and contrasts habituation, is attractive and produces pleasure per se, and is appreciated and valued for itself. For all these reasons, if subjects desire a genuine aesthetic experience, the token can never be completely replaced by a third person description, reduced to a verbal explanation of its contents, and eliminated through an exhaustive generalization. This basic condition of radical embodiment makes the cognitive function of aesthetic imagination irreducible and not satisfiable by any other use of the imagination.20 From the point of view of the norms of belief, assertion, and evaluation in aesthetics, this perspective clearly involves the so called “acquaintance principle.”21 Recent literature on aesthetic and artistic value has questioned the status of the acquaintance principle. A number of compelling counterexamples have shown that a strict adherence to the literal, strong version of the principle is untenable. We could not make any aesthetic judgment on the basis of an exact reproduction or photograph.22 Moreover, some artworks, in particular some works of conceptual art, do not seem to require a firsthand perceptual experience.23 At any rate, the opponents of the principle (the advocates of optimism about the legitimacy of forming aesthetic judgments purely on the basis of testimony) acknowledge that the acquaintance principle is widely accepted in aesthetics. Nevertheless, there is still no shared and satisfactory reformulation of the principle. (The idea that proper aesthetic evaluations are governed by a principle in the spirit of acquaintance has “something like the status of orthodoxy,” and it is usually conceived to be “something akin to a truism.”)24 Above all, opponents generally do not deny that there is a crucial difference between the cognitive states of the person who directly perceives the artwork and the person who derives his judgment from a secondhand description.25 On the other hand, the recent version of pessimism rejects the “unavailability option” (testimony does not make knowledge available at all) and embraces the “usability pessimism”: testimony alone cannot be the sole basis of the aesthetic judgment, but it may have an important role as signaling information in arriving at our aesthetic judgments.26 For obvious reasons of space, in this article it is impossible to articulate fully the theoretical consequences of our perspective on the functioning of the acquaintance principle. At any rate, in our view we have to distinguish a normative functioning from a descriptive one. The first has to do with the normative force of the acquaintance principle as the constitutive rule concerning the social domain of the aesthetic evaluation. According to John Searle, this kind of rule not only regulates an activity, but it also constitutes this activity, according to the basic formula “x (an individual token) counts as y (an artwork) in c (the context of a first hand—and positive—aesthetic evaluation).”27 On the basis of this shared rule, in a typical conversation the aesthetic judgment, “I never experienced x, but I really appreciate it because z (a reliable and well informed critic) says it is beautiful,” would be rejected as improper. However, in line with Amie L. Thomasson, risks of indeterminacies and vagueness arise whenever the criteria for applying a rule are determined by the collective human intentionality, and, therefore, the acquaintance principle is inevitably subject to a number of irresolvable counterexamples within the current, unspecified practices and concepts.28 The descriptive function of the acquaintance principle has to do with ordinary practices of common sense, in particular with the different ways social psychology has shown how subjects derive evaluations from others. According to dual system theories, a large part of our daily evaluations are derived tacitly and unconsciously from others, without any rational control.29 This general mechanism also inevitably characterizes aesthetic evaluation, representing the source of the epidemiological conformism in this domain.30 However, what matters in our present story is that the role of the acquaintance principle (at least of its spirit) in Upper Paleolithic art is not questioned by the above mentioned counterexamples. Moreover, it is important to stress that the principle had a very different realization from the modern and contemporary one. First, there was a different status of evaluation. The aesthetic dimension, as an integral part of religious rituals, was not so autonomous and self sufficient as to stimulate explicit judgments of art for art's sake. Second, there was a different status of testimony. The collective rituals, experienced by active participants, did not support specialized conversations among static and contemplative spectators, even less among reliable and well informed critics. Thus, we can plausibly hypothesize that in Paleolithic art, the acquaintance principle was, at the same time, less sophisticated in terms of reflexive consciousness but more radical in terms of subjective and direct engagement. Apart from the general question concerning the theoretical status of the acquaintance principle—precisely because our story is based on the condition of radical embodiment—it can gain a greater explicative power than evolutionary psychology and literary Darwinism in solving their typical problems concerning the adaptive function of art: The use of aesthetic imagination is tied to an individual token, but not to a single format of information and not, in particular, to the symbolic, linguistic, and propositional one. So, aesthetic imagination can work not only in fictional storytelling but also in sub symbolic meanings—like music and dance. For instance, empirical evidence suggests that music is a metaphorical experience of movement that produces emotional activation.31 For this reason, like music in premodern societies, early music was also probably accompanied by dance. In this way, aesthetic imagination enables explorations of affordances aiming at improving the coordination between the motor and affective experience of the individual, at synchronizing the members of the group, and at decreasing tensions among them in a way different from language. The use of aesthetic imagination is tied to the goal of knowing, but this goal is not exclusive. Undoubtedly, aesthetic experience has the further adaptive function of reinforcing sociality and promoting social bonding, empathy, cooperation, identification, and cultural cohesion. However, this prosocial function requires, in principle, a cognitive one. Only if aesthetic imagination is able to satisfy the members’ need for self knowledge can aesthetic experience transform private suggestions into coherent patterns of shared experience. Only if aesthetic imagination is collective play, embodied in a public, external, accessible token, can artistic behaviors and products configure a collective workspace dedicated to common, cultural processing. The use of aesthetic imagination is tied to a specific implementation of the goal of knowing, but this implementation can be multi realized. The goal of knowing through art explicitly achieved an autonomous and pure form centuries later, after the system of fine arts had developed and aesthetics had become a discipline. Probably, in earliest artistic behaviors and products, the specific goal of knowing did not arise as an independent activity, but operated under the overlay of other goals. For instance, many mythical narrations broadcast factual information about the surrounding environment.32 Above all, according to Ellen Dissanayake, it is likely that aesthetic experience accompanied magical religious ceremonies as an indispensable means of making these rituals special in order to convince ceremonial practitioners, attract their attention and interest, and provide emotional excitement and satisfaction.33 IV. AESTHETIC IMAGINATION The shamanistic interpretation of David Lewis Williams and his followers also explicitly ties together Upper Paleolithic art with collective and religious rituals.34 From their perspective, some of the rock art items of Upper Paleolithic caves represent geometric forms (such as zigzags, square grids, and converging engraved lines forming a tunnel) that are very similar to entoptic phenomena usually perceived in trance experiences. Drawing on ethnographic material, notably connected with premodern hunter gatherer communities of the far west of North America and especially on the San people of southern Africa, Lewis Williams hypothesizes that these items were associated with shamanistic practices.35 In particular, the development of higher order consciousness allowed our ancestors (in particular, shamans—people who were believed to have special skills and supernatural powers) to enter into altered states of consciousness, to perceive entoptic phenomena leading to hallucinatory visions in line with a three stage model, to construct on this basis a cosmological view of a tiered universe, and to translate these experiences into images. The shamanistic interpretation relies on very contentious assumptions and scant evidence. From the first point of view, the hypothesis runs the risk of neural determinism because it conceives shamanism as the rigid outgrowth of the hard wired structure of the anatomically modern human brain. Particularly, shamanistic activities are seen to be inherently grounded in the deep structure of the sapiens nervous system, so that the altered states of consciousness allow a universal access to a cross culturally similar universe divided into several tiered realms. From the second point of view, the vast majority of Upper Paleolithic rock art items are clearly “naturalistic”: they represent elements of ordinary experiences. In this regard, we can recall the accurate depictions of many animals’ anatomy.36 However, even if the shamanistic interpretation is partial or even inadequate for Upper Paleolithic art, this hypothesis does confirm the central points of our story about the adaptive function of aesthetic experience and the essential role of aesthetic imagination. Art did not emerge for its own sake, but as a part of collective religious rituals. The case study of the San shows that shamans entered a state of trance through intense dancing, audio driving, and hyperventilation, without ingestion of hallucinogens. Then they danced around the campfire while others sang, so they could be transported to the spirit world. These shamanistic dances and individual elements of them are largely depicted in San rock art. Their image making required a specific use of imagination as a simulation that reenacted the previous, significant trance experience. In fact, the production of images could not be realized by shamans during the trance state: this is simply physically impossible. It is even less likely that shamans could produce subterranean art in a trance state. On the contrary, the shamans relived the experience of the supernatural realm while they were in an ordinary state of consciousness. Moreover, the fine lines of San paintings make it unlikely that all shamans painted them. For this reason, it remains mostly unknown who, when, and under what circumstances images were painted. Nevertheless, it may be argued, San rock art is about recreation through the imagination of the shaman's experience of the spirit world. The function of the aesthetic experience is intimately connected with the general goal of knowing. The imaginative simulation (the act of creating the rock art) makes sense of the previous altered states of consciousness and provides two indispensable templates: first, a refined understanding of what visions were effectively perceived during the trance experience, in particular during the final third stage, when there are generally visions of people, animals, and monsters, and, second, a rationalization of the trance experience in order to understand the real world pattern of possibilities enabled by the spirit world so that, as Lewis Williams put it, the introcosmos of the shamans was projected onto the common, material world to create a cosmology.37 All of this process is based on the common and direct acquaintance with irreplaceable individual tokens, the performance of the trance dance, and the artifacts constituted by the paintings, which probably were in themselves sympathetic magic objects. So our story is not only free from the problematic assumptions of the shamanistic hypothesis and more plausibly supported by the available evidence, but also it can include the shamanistic interpretation contemplating it as a particular and determined case. In precise terms, this is a specific case that helps us to better understand how, in tribal art, the aesthetic imagination can be, at the same time, decoupled and engaged. It is decoupled because it is disconnected from the practical functionality of the immediate problem solving: in this sense, it promotes a “disinterested” and “purposeless” use of imagination in all the participants. However, it is engaged because it constitutes a performative, multimedia, collective ritual that each participant experiences as an integral part of his or her life, with crucial and indispensable real world implications. Therefore, in line with the premise of our story discussed so far, early art achieved the goal of knowing through an implementation of aesthetic imagination very different from the eighteenth century model of fine art. V. THE ANTECEDENTS OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE In our evolutionary story, the aesthetic experience does not depend on a single mutation. On the contrary, it realizes a functional reorganization of multiple mental systems, exapted to a new and original goal of knowing. For this reason, aesthetic experience requires a slow process of evolution. According to some interpretations, this process could have started with Homo erectus, more than 1.8 million years ago, who probably had a preverbal, mimetic culture characterized by gestures, vocalizations, visual analogies, dances, and rituals.38 Our story aims to define, from a theoretical point of view, the most relevant antecedents of aesthetic experience that arose during this long process. For this purpose, I make use of two combined principles. The first radicalizes the idea that natural selection reuses available components of the brain. The second is based on a definition of aesthetic experience and, in particular, on the paradox of providing a universalizable virtual model through direct acquaintance with an irreplaceable individual token. VI. PLAY AND DREAMING First and foremost, how could our ancestors have developed a special use of imagination? In our story, before the emergence of aesthetic experience there were two already accessible practices of “disinterested” and “purposeless” imagination that can be refunctionalized: play and dreaming. The general consensus is that play constitutes a direct precursor of aesthetic experience.39 As a variant of functional behavior, the following can be observed: play exists in all mammals where it has been looked for; evolutionary lineages in which play has arisen conserve it as they continue to evolve; the more complex and flexible the organism, the longer the period of immaturity and the time dedicated to play; it has costs in energy and caloric expenditure; it is self rewarding; and it is crucial to subsequent development because it improves the skills and performance necessary for survival and reproduction.40 Therefore, play has a layered evolutionary path. In particular, from a comparative point of view, symbolic (fantasy or pretend) play, in which the use of imagination is the closest to aesthetic imagination, is absent in the animal kingdom, even in chimpanzees—the closest existing species to Homo sapiens.41 They are able to deceive, but this behavior occurs in a functional context for instrumental purposes. Only linguistic and enculturated apes show simple instances of symbolic play. However, these manifestations are very far from the cooperative enterprise of children's symbolic play. Children understand each other as intentional actors, grasp others' pretend intentions, form and pursue joint stipulations, and are mutually responsive to each other's acts, often taking interchangeable and complementary roles. Chimpanzees, by contrast, are not able to engage in cooperative activities at all. Even if we grant that they develop a minimal sense of others as perceiving and acting agents, they never escape from an egocentric and individualistic perspective.42 So, this evidence suggests that symbolic play, and a fortiori aesthetic imagination, develops in a complete form only if imagination is supported not just by language but also by complex mind reading, allowing us to consider others as partners for shared intentionality. If play embodies a use of imagination decoupled from functional and instrumental purposes, dreaming afforded to our ancestors a model of the second, crucial decoupling of aesthetic imagination, precisely from routine and fixed processing. According to recent neuroscientific research, dreaming in REM sleep represents a proto conscious state in which a large part of the brain is active, with the suppression of external sensory inputs and the inhibition of the motor system.43 This kind of off line activation provides a vivid, emotional salience and multisensory integration similar to a virtual reality simulation of the world. The main property of the simulation is its incoherence, bizarreness, and hallucinatory features. Dreaming is a discontinuous sequence of organized narrative scenarios based on a loosely associated linkage of discordant images. By this perspective, precisely because these scripts tie together remotely connected elements, dreaming is self creative: it draws surprising relations between representations. From our point of view, it is not relevant that for a long period mankind has generally conceived dreams to be messages from some external force and not as the product of internal brain mechanisms. Whatever their conceived origin, dreams constitute a reference point that suggests the possibilities of refreshing habitual associations and stereotyped meaning. Creative processing sometimes occurs directly in dreaming. From August Kekulè to Henri Poincaré, many scientists have reported they have had insights during sleep. Obviously, these are unusual cases in which subjects have lucid dreams, with preservative, progressive, and thought like elaboration. By contrast, REM dreaming is very often illogical, fragmentary, discontinuous, and incongruous. So, in our view, it is exactly in this form that dreaming provided to our ancestors an example and a stimulus for the understanding of experience as an open domain of unpredictable and inexhaustible affordances. Therefore, in our story, dreaming is not useful because it may sometimes provide good intuitions: problem solving is a task that the reflective, critically conscious mind must perform. Nor is it useful just because it usually helps subsequent waking consciousness, enabling more accurate perception, more orderly thought, and more temperate emotions. On the contrary, it is useful because it always suggests to the waking consciousness a flexible, de constrained use of imagination. VII. TECHNOLOGY AND MANIPULATION How could our ancestors practically implement the decoupled use of imagination? In this regard, there is a broad consensus that technology and the ability to manipulate materials, objects, and tools are basic preconditions of aesthetic experience. In general, cultural changes referring to technologies, together with the brain's increase in size, are considered the most important markers of hominine evolution. Moreover, the archaeological data suggest that the first standardized tradition of tool making, the Acheulean industry, had already started with Homo erectus. In addition, the perspective of the so called “extended mind,” in which the mind is considered to be a hybrid system extended by extra cranial technologies, stresses that these are not only symbolic, like writing, but also constitute practical tools, since, along the evolutionary path, practical technologies have modified the information processing chain and become real manipulative prostheses, with transparent interfaces between users and instruments. Nevertheless, even if we are natural born cyborgs, it is important to avoid a typical misunderstanding: technology was not fully developed before the emergence of the earliest artistic behaviors and products. First, human technology emerged through a long dynamic of evolution. We can appreciate this process if we consider the astonishing technical abilities of chimpanzees. In nature, chimpanzees have a broad repertoire of tools to solve different problems. For instance, they use a wooden stick to make a hole in a mound, then they use a blade of grass to “fish” out termites for food. When they cannot find an appropriate blade by looking nearby, they make it by removing the bark from the stick. So chimpanzees can plan and produce a tool before its actual use; they can also use and combine tools in complex sequences. Moreover, different groups use different tools to solve the same problems: chimpanzees probably have a form of primitive culture, based on socially transmitted, innovative behaviors. However, the chimpanzee's technology is strongly constrained. Problematic situations and the means to solve them have to be physically nearby. This spatial contiguity suggests that the chimpanzee's ability to plan and manipulate is restricted to the immediate present and to the concrete sequence of events.44 So, technology and manipulation really become the extension of mind only when imagination, by virtue of language and symbolic memory, is freed from perceptual constraints. Second, technology shared with aesthetic manipulations a significant part of its slow process of evolution. This point is clearly suggested by the case of hand axes, the main Acheulean tool, produced in Africa and subsequently in Eurasia between about 1.5 million and 35,000 years ago. Many were made quickly and used to butcher animals and process plants. About 400,000 years ago, a proportion (1 in 50) of the billions of hand axes shows symmetry, regularity, and design beyond the practical need, and many of the finest hand axes show no signs of use. As an example of their craftsmanship and impracticality, these hand axes are commonly thought to be one of the earliest manifestations of an aesthetic sense: they were probably beautiful, attractive artifacts. According to Gregory Currie, it is significant to point out that the hominine making these objects had no articulated language, no symbols, and no narratives.45 This condition indicates that the impulse to practical manipulation and the urge for aesthetic activity could have developed within the same technological tradition, could have coexisted as complementary traits in the same prototypes of artifacts, and could have co emerged, at least to the extent that both impulses predated symbolic, linguistic, and verbal abilities.46 VIII. PROTO AESTHETIC PROCEDURES AND AESTHETIC PREFERENCES How could our ancestors differentiate aesthetic activity from technical manipulation? In our story, aesthetic experience is a special kind of manipulation, based on the decoupled use of the imagination. So it requires specific and original making procedures and success criteria. With regard to the first of these, in line with Dissanayake, we can hypothesize that our ancestors found a model for the formal procedures in the mother–infant interaction as a universal, adaptive behavior that evolved from about 1.7 million years ago. Coordinated interactions between mother and immature infant, crucial for the survival of the latter, are based on vocal, facial, and kinetic expressions of affiliation shown by the mother. These signals implement proto aesthetic operations in order to be salient, attention getting, and pleasurable by which ordinary expressions are altered, simplified, stereotyped, repeated, exaggerated, elaborated, and so on. When they invented the earliest artistic behaviors and products, the adult individuals recalled these proto aesthetic operations and relied on the deliberate use of them to make the ordinary extraordinary: to attract attention, sustain interest, and activate emotions in their audience and to reinforce the proposed meanings for ceremonial practitioners. With regard to the second point, by virtue of the refunctionalization principle, our story can also explain the success criteria that the earliest artists adopted. Some evolutionary psychologists and Darwinian aestheticians have affirmed that aesthetic preferences are processed by modules dedicated to solving specific problems, in particular mate and environment choice.47 On the basis of the handicap principle, properties such as a symmetrical face and prototypical aspect are reliable signals of fitness; that is, they function as indicators of health, immunity to disease, strength, fertility, and genetic quality.48 As regards natural environments, our ancestors were drawn to landscapes that offered prospects: shelter, refuges, water, and food.49 Even if this position presents many difficulties, it need not be reductive. According to the dual levels of evolutionary explanations, at the hidden level of the ultimate cause, aesthetic preferences are promises of survival and reproduction, whereas at the proximal and phenomenal level they are perceived and appreciated per se. Individuals take delight in aesthetic preferences immediately, without inferring in any rational way their survival utility as signals of fitness.50 Beyond the autonomy of the proximal level, our story hypothesizes that aesthetic experience involves a second range of independence. Aesthetic preferences were decoupled from practical problem solving: they ceased to be subjective criteria useful for determining actual functional behaviors. By contrast, they became aesthetic qualities that were useful for evaluating the disinterested and purposeless artistic behaviors and products. It is important to point out that this process of further decoupling is not a deliberate and consciously realized reuse. On the contrary, it is determined by the typical, automatic and unintentional, logic that characterizes the cultural extension of a module. This extension occurs when cultural information simulates the natural input conditions of a module (for instance, when masks activate the module for face recognition).51 In this case, the early artistic behaviors and products simulate the application conditions of aesthetic preferences, prompting their “as if” activation. Above all, this process of decoupling and cultural extension represents a dynamic of radical and deep transformation: aesthetic preferences came to be penetrable to the imagination, lost their sensory nature, became open to perceptual and conceptual processing, and were subject to cultural experimentation and differentiation.52 IX. SEXUAL SELECTION AND EMBODIED MEANING The last issue to be clarified is how could our ancestors have coordinated a decoupled use of the imagination, abilities to manipulate, aesthetic procedures, and evaluative criteria in an individual, concrete token? If we further articulate the relationship between aesthetic stance and natural selection, we can hypothesize the evolutionary sequence supporting the invention of the epistemic specificity of aesthetic experience. Again on the basis of the handicap principle, a problematic but common line of interpretation affirms that early artistic behaviors and products might represent costly and hence honest and reliable indicators of skills (physical strength, dexterity, hand–eye coordination, motor control, and planning), which enhanced the sexual attractiveness of the artists and contributed to their reproductive success. This perspective concerns both the making of aesthetic artifacts, like the exemplar case of the hand axes, and the performance of artistic behaviors, like the ethnological case of the Wodaabe's dance.53 At a more advanced cultural stage, the artistic behaviors and products might acquire the role of status indicators, contributing to the artists’ social prestige. We know that this hypothesis runs the risk of projecting onto the makers of the early artistic behaviors and products a condition of privilege tacitly derived from modern artists, whereas the first art was collective and participatory. However, in line with the plot of our story, we can outline a theoretical framework that integrates the different aspects at stake in a consistent evolutionary sequence. We can hypothesize that before aesthetic experience existed, sexual selection imposed only the intrinsic aesthetic properties of individuals as the exclusive object of attention and attraction, as “direct” indicators of their fitness. During the long process of aesthetic experience preparation, through interaction with cultural development, the first version of sexual selection was exapted. In this period, attention is also directed toward the aesthetic properties of behavior and artifacts, as “indirect” indicators of the fitness of their makers—obviously without conceptual mediation. Finally, the emergence of the first art during the creative explosion corresponds to the autonomization of the concrete exemplars as objects of independent attraction and interest. Artistic behaviors and products were no longer fitness signals for mating, concerning a single individual, her good genes, or social status. According to our proposal, they had achieved a new adaptive function: they constituted a collective means of knowing and social bonding. As evidenced by the fame of modern artists, the previous forms of sexual selection may still operate on the artistic behaviors and products, but only in a peripheral way. Precisely because at the ultimate level the aesthetic experience discharged a new cognitive and prosocial function, a further exaptation of artistic behaviors and products transformed them at the proximal level into autonomous sources of attention, interest, pleasure, and emotional investment—without any hidden reference to their authors. So, in their physical presence, they turned out to be irreplaceable individual tokens. In the first two stages, aesthetic pleasure represents an autonomous and operative criterion for evaluating and choosing. Subjects perceive and appreciate aesthetic properties per se and will go for the partner who has stimulated the most pleasure. The source of energy for this kind of aesthetic pleasure derives from sexual desire. With the complete emergence of art, by contrast, aesthetic pleasure comes to be decoupled from sexual drive and obtains its energy from the epistemic goal, of which artistic behaviors and products are a specific and irreducible realization. So, during its long period of preparation, human aesthetics is similar to that of animals, at least to the extent that aesthetic pleasure is a typical manifestation of sexual desire prompted by the direct perception of aesthetic properties. Fully developed, however, human aesthetics derives its energy neither from a sublimation of the sexual drive nor from an autonomous aesthetic source—mysterious and enigmatic from any evolutionary point of view. In our story, the energy source of aesthetic experience is the one that best represents the full evolution of humankind: the goal of knowing. Moreover, our story suggests that when we use ‘art’ in the full sense of the term, it always is an honorific title resulting from a more or less positive appreciation. Undoubtedly, this evaluation concerns the artist's craft. However, in our view, the aesthetic judgment is not exclusively based on virtuosity, as it is in Geoffrey Miller's display fitness theory.54 It is grounded in the crucial evaluation of whether and how dexterity serves the goal of knowing, whether and how higher skills are dedicated to discovering new meanings, and whether and how aesthetic qualities are integrated with intentional contents and contribute to cognition. Otherwise artistic behaviors and products remain at the level of mere ornamentation and decoration: just like the nests of male bowerbirds, they are useful only for directing the attention of others to oneself, or, in an advanced society, they merely represent mass art—what Pinker describes as popular, effect driven technologies designed to push our pleasure buttons, like desserts, alcohol, and pornography.55 X. THE EMPOWERMENT OF THE MIND THROUGH AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE With the emergence of aesthetic experience a new epistemic goal is realized in the brain, by virtue of which precursors and preconditions are refunctionalized. However, our narration can go beyond the direct antecedents of aesthetic experience in order to define the more general role that aesthetic experience performs in the mind's bootstrapping. In our perspective, in fact, aesthetic experience represents a self organizing process employed by the mind to increase the proficiency of some of its chief faculties and to improve their development to the standard of advanced cognition. In line with our story, the first faculty to which we can refer is mind reading. There is no doubt that one of the main traits that distinguish our social mind from the social ability of chimpanzees is recursive mind reading, so that what one agent thinks depends on what the other thinks. If we grant that chimpanzees are endowed with a primitive understanding of others’ goals and even of others’ perceptions concerning what the others see, they are in any case still constrained to rudimentary forms of second level intentionality: they have elementary (nonsymbolic) beliefs in the perceptual beliefs of others.56 In contrast, people are able to recursively read others’ minds far beyond these limits. For instance, when children engage in pretend play, they achieve without difficulty forms of intentionality at the fifth level, as when x wants y to pretend not to know what x wants y to believe. Furthermore, aesthetic experience relies on recursive mind reading. According to the so called “make believe” perspective, the author asks the interpreter to share his intention, by virtue of which the interpreter has to assume a specific mental attitude: without the attitude of pretending to believe, he or she cannot understand the author's product.57 Unlike the ordinary structure of a linguistic act, however, this request is not submitted directly by the author himself, through an explicit personal action. In contrast, it is embodied in the product itself. In this way, artistic products require a specific kind of recursive mind reading—to be more precise, a mediated one, in which the only public reference to communication is the concrete exemplar that conveys the aesthetic experience. This mediated practice of mind reading is absolutely original. Also, for tools, it is unnecessary to have a direct communication with the maker of their prototype; the maker's intentions are immediately manifest because they coincide with the practical usefulness of the tools. Now, it is essential to recall that the first artistic behaviors and products were participatory and collective: particularly during ceremonies, there was not the strong line of distinction between authors and interpreters that characterizes the modern system of fine art. However, the astonishing archaeological data show that on the surface of caves, artistic interventions integrate with each other even when previous interventions date back thousands of years before. This fact suggests that, by virtue of cultural transmission, the people of the Paleolithic were able to interact with concrete exemplars in the complete absence of their authors. This ability emerges for the first time. It is precisely because the new kind of recursive mind reading made available by aesthetic experience is not direct but is anchored to artistic behaviors and products that it enables a mediated workspace in which subjects can become reflexively conscious of mind reading itself and of the practices and the operations in execution. In this workspace, subjects are not limited to the automatic activation of ordinary procedures of low level mind reading, based on mirror systems, operating below consciousness, providing a fast and basic understanding of others’ goals, percepts, and beliefs. To the contrary, by following the cues and the prescriptions embodied in the concrete exemplars, subjects can be freed from practical concerns and can work creatively on high level mind reading. They can activate sophisticated structures of simulative imaginings that inhibit the egocentric map and allow the full understanding of the others’ complex mental states as integrated patterns of beliefs, desires, and intentions.58 In short, in self organizing aesthetic experience as an original domain of experimentation on mind reading, the mind is predisposed to a set of cultural practices that promote the development of mind reading and stimulate the transition from the low level to the high level version of it. In this way, the mind helps itself to satisfy the needs arising from increasingly complex social organizations. Our story can go further. Mind reading's bootstrapping involves a very similar effect on metacognition, which is commonly defined as higher order cognition and knowledge about one's first level cognition and knowledge. Mind reading and metacognition, in fact, represent a network of systems that largely overlap.59 They are characterized by a common metarepresentational structure, so that both mind reading and metacognition employ representations of representational states; they can be recursively organized into multiple layers; they deploy a model of the mind and concepts of mental state types; they can occur in the absence of awareness, as in tacit monitoring; and they share the same resources—simulative systems, inferential devices, folk psychology assumptions, and convictions. Obviously, they have distinct information channels and goals. Mind reading is guided by external perception and aims to attribute mental states to others. Metacognition is guided by self monitoring, and it aims to attribute mental states to oneself. The main point, however, is that the experimental evidence suggests that self attribution has nothing to do with introspection, traditionally conceived as direct access. On the contrary, self attribution is a process of belief formation that is largely based on different kinds of inferential routines. Precisely for this reason, the development of mind reading contributes at the same time to the improvement of metacognition: what is learned in the first domain can be reused in the second one. According to this perspective, the repeated practice of aesthetic imagination yields the acquisition of structures and procedures dedicated to representing and reading our own mind, and it has an evolution similar to that of mind reading: aesthetic experience supports the transition from automatism and immediate reactions to conscious reflection, from subsymbolic to symbolic information. This essential point of our story is clearly shown by the case of the aesthetic emotions aroused by the first artistic behaviors and products. It is commonly thought that art generally represents one of the primary ways in which emotions are educated and that the emotional knowledge required for social life is transmitted by examples portrayed in images, myths, and narratives. From this point of view, the early participatory arts may provoke an emotional contagion more powerful than that of subsequent forms of art that make a marked distinction between the audience and the performers. Everyone participates, singing and dancing, mirroring each other's behavior toward the same affective state. This strong and empathic investment facilitates the sharing of common feelings and attitudes, and it reinforces social bonding.60 So, early artistic behaviors and products not only organized the emotional life of participants in order to unify the social group; more radically, they invented emotions. During rituals, the raw affective experience of participants is made special as an extraordinary object of attention; it is explicitly focused and recognized and categorized on the basis of conceptualizations. Moreover, these categorizations are not induced via mimesis by a separated author. On the contrary, they are constructed collectively and on line, without previous prototypes. So, the first art not only educated, but it also contributed to the invention of the emotions, particularly the invention of the so called “secondary emotions,” in which pre reflective and immediate experience is re represented, described, and interpreted. In this way, the first art stimulated the transition from primary emotions (fixed reaction mechanisms) to the possibility of creatively modifying the emotional processes by micro changes to their components, both the propositional scripts and the phenomenal experience.61 To clarify this crucial point of our story, early art predisposed for the first time a common workspace in which individuals could exercise self reflection in a collective fashion. In this way, the first art performed the typical function of all the subsequent historical forms of art, that is, the metacognitive function of providing a crucial source of cultural identity. Through the early artistic behaviors and products, individuals could learn the deep cultural narratives that allowed them to understand themselves and others, to organize their own experience, and to make sense of the world. However, in our radical hypothesis, early artistic behaviors and products performed a more fundamental function: they contributed to the emergence of self consciousness as such, and to the achievement of its advanced version. This radical hypothesis means that early artistic behaviors and products had a decisive role not only in ordinary self constitution but also in original self invention. In particular, artistic behaviors and products contributed to the transition from the minimal self (the pre reflective point of origin for action, experience, and thought) to the narrative self (the more or less coherent self image arranged around the various stories that we and others tell about ourselves that are capable of satisfying our continuously changing need for self understanding).62 It is important to emphasize that early art helped this transition precisely in virtue of the main features we have noted: its multimedia, participatory, and dynamical nature. According to our premise, early art harmonized narratives, paintings, music, dancing, and singing. From our perspective, this multimodal experience tied together the linguistic dimension with the perceptual, affective, and somatic aspects in a new global compound. This compound was essentially achieved on the basis of two intertwined kinds of integration: first, the unity of linguistic narratives with visual paintings and, second, the unity of symbolic understanding with emotional control. From the first point of view, our ancestors constructed their extended selves through the collective stories and myths they learned together during communal rituals. These stories were visually illustrated and so reinforced and enriched by correspondence to the iconography of rock art and the symbolic gestures of rituals.63 From the second point of view, our ancestors constructed their extended selves through the control they exercised on the emotional contagion provoked by dancing together in a repetitive fashion to repetitive music.64 The first and the second operations were intimately connected: the construction of the self through the mediation of the narratives, the iconography, and the symbolism were, at the same time, the control of the personal emotional experiences according to the rules and the opportunities afforded by the communal stories, pictures, and gestures. Obviously, it was crucial to the whole dynamic that the ritual was collective. In virtue of promoting emotional contagion through music, singing, and dancing, the experience bound together the participants and facilitated the contagion of converging feelings, attitudes, evaluations, motivations, intentions, and ideas. In this way, from the pre reflexive unity of consciousness, due to the first person perspective, the self was embedded in larger communal meaning giving structures enabling a sense of personal continuity. Moreover, it was crucial that the ritual had a multi structured temporal organization. As is suggested by the above mentioned San art, the first stages (involving music, dancing, and singing) provoked an automatic and complete identification of all the participants in an ecstatic and intense experience, whereas the later stages (the time of deliberate image making) favored a reflexive detachment. In virtue of this multistage model, from the immediate unity of consciousness, due to the sense of agency and ownership (I am the one who is causing and undergoing the experience), the self was enlarged in an evolving self comprehension, decentered in multiple stories. In our story, all these processes were complementary: social cognitive neuroscience investigations fully corroborate this hypothesis. Understanding oneself, in the sense of self reflecting on current experiences, enduring psychological traits, and autobiographical memories in order to develop a personal self concept; self regulation, in the sense of intentional control concerning automatic reactions, bottom up generated emotions, and reflexive efforts of stimuli reappraisal; understanding others, in the sense of mentalizing, dispositional trait attribution, and experiencing empathy, all represent practices that recruit the same medial frontoparietal network of neural circuits.65 Thus, in our hypothesis, early art constituted a cultural device intentionally designed to stimulate the regions of the brain that support the internally focused processes of considering the contents of one's mind and of those of others. In this way, art improved two functions: First, it integrated subsymbolic (somatic, perceptual, and affective) with symbolic (linguistic, propositional, and conceptual) dimensions, bottom up and stimulus driven activation with top down and self generated regulation, automatic and tacit with controlled and deliberate processes in a new order of consciousness, emerging from a gestalt like synthesis of these several building blocks.66 Second, it contributed to the development, at the same time, of the making of the conceptual self, the development of the higher levels of intentionality, the invention of the secondary emotions, and the full understanding of others as partners for shared intentionality. In other words, art promoted the different aspects of metacognition as an entirely new level of consciousness. At this final step of our story, it is noteworthy that the metarepresentational structure also characterizes the faculty of language, which was already in place during the creative explosion. We know that linguistic apes can make an additive use of symbols: they can comprehend and produce short strings of notions, without recombining them to create new concepts. According to the last version of the universal grammar theory, the uniquely human component of the faculty of language is probably the computational mechanism for recursion. This mechanism produces internal representations and maps them onto the sensory motor interface and the conceptual system, providing the linguistic generativity, that is, the human capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements.67 Establishing the evolutionary priority among language, recursion, mind reading, and metacognition is a difficult problem. However, in the framework outlined by our story, and based on metarepresentation, we can better understand the specific adaptive advantage of aesthetic experience conceived as a decoupled and simulative experience, embodied in a public and concrete exemplar. With the invention of the aesthetic experience, the mind endowed itself with a collective domain of virtual experimentation through which new opportunities afforded by the emerging metarepresentational structure could be exploited. We can also better understand the general and uniform explosion of multiple artistic behaviors and products—the prolonged and repeated practice of aesthetic experience fulfills the new set of urgent and demanding needs induced by the mind itself and its innovative metarepresentational architecture. 1. “It is a grave oversight that such a crucial human activity has been inadequately recognized by those who are concerned with human abilities. To my knowledge no advocate of cognitive, evolutionary and neuro aesthetics has considered aesthetic cognition (as artification) to be foundational or even important in human mentation.” Ellen Dissanayake, “The Artification Hypothesis and Its Relevance to Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Neuroaesthetics,” The Journal of Cognitive Semiotics 5 (2009): 136–158, at p. 165. 2. This description is derived from Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 89–96. 3. The ethnological and anthropological approach, together with the hypothesis of the first art as a participatory practice, is defended, among others in aesthetics, by Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (University of Washington Press, 2000); Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004); Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2009); Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare's Sonnets (Harvard University Press, 2012); and among others outside the field of aesthetics, by Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (Harvard University Press, 1996); Robert Layton, “Shamanism, Totemism and Rock Art: Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire in the Context of Rock Art Research,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10 (2000): 169–186; David S. Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press, 2003); Steven Mithen, “The Prehistory of the Religious Mind,” in Theology, Evolution and the Mind, ed. Neil Spurway (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 10–41; Patricia S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton University Press, 2011); and Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright, 2012). All these authors commonly think that the deep association between participatory art and religious rituals offered to our ancestors the primary means to manage the increasingly complex social relationships within larger social groups. Moreover, they usually infer from the production of musical instruments the virtually inevitable presence of singing and dancing in communal rituals. 4. See Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 274; and Winfried Menninghaus, Das Versprechen der Schönheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), chap. 5. 5. “Cro Magnons spread rapidly across Europe around forty five thousand years ago. … Well before thirty thousand years ago, Cro Magnons were creating engravings and paintings on the walls of caves and rock shelters. They crafted subtle and beautiful carvings on bone and antler and kept records by incising intricate notations on bone plaques. We know that they used bone flutes at least thirty five thousand years ago, and if they did this, they surely sang and danced in deep caves by firelight on winter evenings and at summer gatherings. Cro Magnons ornamented their bodies and buried their dead with elaborate grave goods for use in afterlife.” Brian Fagan, Cro Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 10–11. 6. The development of language is very controversial. Many date language to 400,000 years ago. See the perspectives in Nicholas Bannan, ed., Music, Language, and Human Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2012). Moreover, it is widely thought that Neanderthals (200,000 years ago) were speakers—even if they appear to lack art to an appreciable degree. See Frederick Coolidge and Thomas Wynn, The Rise of Homo Sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2009). 7. Francesco d’Errico, Christopher Henshilwood, Graeme Lawson, Marian Vanhaeren, Ann Marie Tiller, Marie Soressi, Frédérique Bresson, Bruno Maureille, April Nowell, Joseba Lakarra, Lucinda Backwell, and Michéle Julien, “Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music—An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective,” Journal of World Prehistory 17 (2003): 1–70. 8. For information on the creative explosion, see John E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); and Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). For the countercultural revolution theory, see Sally Mcbrearty and Alison S. Brooks: “Because the earliest modern human fossils, Homo sapiens sensu stricto, are found in Africa and the adjacent region of the Levant at ˃100 ka, the ‘human revolution’ model creates the impression that the earliest modern Africans were behaviorally primitive. This view of events stems from a profound Eurocentric bias and a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African archaeological record. In fact, many of the components of the ‘human revolution’ claimed to appear 40–50 ka are found in the African Middle Stone Age tens of thousands of years earlier. These features include blade and microlithic technology, bone tools, increased geographic range, specialized hunting, the use of aquatic resources, long distance trade, systematic processing and use of pigment, and art and decoration. These items do not occur suddenly together as predicted by the ‘human revolution’ model, but at sites that are widely separated in space and time. This suggests a gradual assembling of the package of modern human behaviors in Africa, and its later export to other regions of the Old World.” Sally Mcbrearty and Alison S. Brooks, “The Revolution That Wasn't: A New Interpretation of the Origin of Modern Human Behavior,” Journal of Human Evolution 39 (2000): 453–563, at p. 453; see also Chris Stringer, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth (New York: Henry Holt, 2012), chap. 5. 9. This problem is explicitly discussed in Stephen Davies, The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2012), part 3. In particular, Davies argues that there is no cheaper, easier to establish unilateral option and that very general theories on this point run the risk of reducing the arts to denominators so common that the adaptive contribution is not characteristic of art as such. Our story tries to face both these challenges. 10. Stephen J. Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba, “Exaptation—A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” Paleobiology 8 (1982): 4–15. 11. Andy Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2003). 12. In the Baldwin effect, a trait which initially develops in the members of a population as a result of some interaction with the environment develops without that interaction in their descendants: acquiring the trait through interaction with the environment makes it more likely that later generations will evolve the ability to acquire the same trait without that interaction. See David Papineau, “Social Learning and the Baldwin Effect,” in Evolution, Rationality, and Cognition: A Cognitive Science for the Twenty First Century, ed. António Zilhão (London: Routledge, 2005); and Paul E. Griffiths, “The Baldwin Effect and Genetic Assimilation: Contrasting Explanatory Foci and Gene Concepts in Two Approaches to an Evolutionary Process,” in The Innate Mind II: Culture and Cognition, ed. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 91–101. The multilevel selection theory is very controversial. It was harshly criticized by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976). The theory was revised by David S. Wilson and Elliot Sober, “Reintroducing Group Selection to Human Behavioral Sciences,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1994): 585–654; today it is also defended by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Gene Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005). However, our story is not intimately connected with the Baldwin effect and multilevel selection. In the end, both theories may be proved false. According to Daniel Dennett, what matters in our story are only some mechanisms of genetic assimilation that allow the implementation of software reorganizations in the brain. See Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1991), chap. 7. Developing the analogy with Dennett as an example, our story proposes that the aesthetic experience is similar to a new software that exploits the affordances provided by the anatomically modern human brain conceived as plastic hardware. As we see in the final paragraph of the article, the aesthetic experience is part of a general reorganization that implements a new high level architecture in the already available hardware of the brain. 13. Kim Sterelny clarifies this aspect: “The human gene pool has undergone significant, selected change in the life of our species, though the specific phenotypic effects of these gene changes are as yet rarely known. Thus gene change may have played some role in the behavioral and cultural changes in the sapiens lineage between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. But if gene change was important to behavior change, it was through a genetic contribution to a gradual, gene culture co evolutionary process, not a genetically triggered cognitive breakthrough.” Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (Jean Nicod Lectures) (MIT Press, 2012), p. 201. 14. From this point of view, aesthetic experience evolution is analogous to the model of language evolution proposed by Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997); and Terrence W. Deacon, “Beyond the Symbolic Species,” in The Symbolic Species Evolved, ed. Theresa Schilhab, Frederik Stjernfelt, and Terrence Deacon (New York: Springer, 2012), pp. 9–38. 15. See Fagan, Cro Magnon, and Clive Finlayson, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived (Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 5. For a different interpretation, see Richard Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, 3rd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2009). According to Klein, the shift to a full modern anatomy and behavior about 40,000 years ago was the co product of a single process driven by a selective advantageous genetic mutation. 16. This principle was proposed by Colin Martindale, The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change (New York: Basic Books, 1990). The aesthetic evolution principle hypothesized by Martindale is consistent with our story. Martindale identifies an initial stage of the art development (primitive art and tribal art) that is characterized by a very low rate of innovation, due to a small population. See Colin Martindale, “Aesthetic Evolution,” Poetics 15 (1986): 439–473, at pp. 454–455. 17. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 538–543. The typical perspective on imagination's function is discussed in an exemplary way by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts,” Substance 94/95 (2001): 6–27. 18. For a discussion on this issue, see Gianluca Consoli, “A Cognitive Theory of the Aesthetic Experience,” Contemporary Aesthetics 10 (2012), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=657, accessed August 26, 2013. 19. For instance, Joseph Carroll, “The Adaptive Function of Literature,” in Evolutionary and Neurocognitive Approaches to Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, ed. Colin Martindale, Paul Locher, and V. M. Petrov (New York: Baywood, 2007), pp. 31–45. Out of the strictly Darwinist perspective: Terrence Deacon, “The Aesthetic Faculty,” in The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, ed. Mark Turner (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 21–53. 20. The condition is partially derived from Arthur Danto's definition of artwork as embodied meaning. Unlike Danto, my proposal emphasizes more strongly the irreplaceable nature of the individual token and the evaluative—not just interpretative—component of the embodied meaning. In the fourth paragraph of Section 2 of this article, I hypothesize how the condition emerges through sexual selection. 21. This principle was implicitly endorsed by Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000), §33, pp. 164–166, and overtly formulated by Richard Wollheim: “Judgment of aesthetic value … must be based on first hand experience of their objects and are not, except within very narrow limits, transmissible from one person to another.” Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 233. 22. Paisley Livingston, “On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 260–278; and Robert Hopkins, “How to Form Aesthetic Belief: Interpreting the Acquaintance Principle,” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 3 (2006): 85–99. 23. See James Shelley, “The Problem of Non perceptual Art,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 363–378; and Amir Konigsberg, “The Acquaintance Principle, Aesthetic Autonomy, and Aesthetic Appreciation,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2012): 153–168. 24. Jon Robson, “Aesthetic Testimony,” Philosophy Compass 7 (2012): 1–10. 25. Malcolm Budd, “The Acquaintance Principle,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 386–392, at p. 391. 26. See Robert Hopkins, “How to Be a Pessimist about Aesthetic Testimony,” The Journal of Philosophy 108 (2011): 138–157; and Keren Gorodeisky, “A New Look at Kant's View of Aesthetic Testimony,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (2010): 53–70. 27. John Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2010). 28. Amie L. Thomasson, “The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2001): 221–229. 29. See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 30. The epidemiologic contagion of memes is described in general by Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain (New York: Mariner, 2003). There is now explicit evidence that aesthetic evaluation is subject to the general processes studied by social psychology. See Aaron Meskin, Mark Phelan, Margaret Moore, and Matthew Kieran, “Mere Exposure to Bad Art,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2013): 139–164. 31. See Ian Cross and Iain Morley, “The Evolution of Music: Theories, Definitions and the Nature of the Evidence,” in Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship, ed. Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 61–82. 32. Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, “Narrative Theory and Function: Why Evolution Matters,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 403–425. 33. Dissanayake, “The Artification Hypothesis,” p. 157. 34. David Lewis Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). 35. San hunter gatherers populated southern Africa for many millennia. Very important: the oldest depictions we know, about 27,000 years old, share many elements similar to the most recent ones that are about 100 years old. 36. According to R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (University of Chicago Press, 2005), the realistic trait constitutes the common feature of the Upper Paleolithic art that distinguishes it from later Neolithic art. This point is important because the basic criterion of the shamanistic interpretation is that it is not possible to identify practically any geometric motif by itself as an entoptic in origin and therefore indicative of shamanism. For this reason, the shamanistic hypothesis represents a partial explanation of Upper Paleolithic art: only some cave art, and only in part, is associated with various shamanistic practices. From this perspective, it is more plausible that the shamanistic interpretation can be applied as a comprehensive explanation to the megalithic art of the Neolithic period, characterized by architectural designs reflecting the cosmological views of a tiered universe, a large number of features representing entoptic phenomena, and a more complex social structure that involves the possibility of using religion and imagery to define social relationships. See David Lewis Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005). 37. Lewis Williams, The Mind in the Cave, chap. 5. 38. Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution,” in The Artful Mind, ed. Mark Turner (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3–20. 39. For instance, Brian Boyd, On the Origins of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Harvard University Press, 2009). 40. Gordon M. Burghardt, The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (MIT Press, 2005). 41. Juan Carlos Gómez and Beatrix Martín Andrade, “Fantasy Play in Animals,” in The Nature of Play, ed. Anthony D. Pellegrini and Peter K. Smith (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), pp. 139–171. 42. Hannes Rakoczy, “Kinds of Selves: A Comparative View on the Development of Intentionality and Self Consciousness,” in Social Roots of Self Consciousness, ed. Wolfgang Mack and Gerson Reuter (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), pp. 13–34. This is the prevalent position among primatologists. However, for a different perspective, see Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch Achermann, The Chimpanzees of the Tai Forest: Behavioral Ecology and Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton University Press, 2006). 43. The concept of dream exposed here is derived from the work of Allan Hobson. The proposed role of dreaming in the evolution of aesthetic experience is an extension of the work of J. Allan Hobson and Hellmut Wohl, From Angels to Neurones: Art and the New Science of Dreaming (Fidenza, Italy: Mattioli, 2005). 44. Christophe Boesch, Wild Cultures: A Comparison between Chimpanzee and Human Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 2012). 45. Gregory Currie, “The Master of the Masek Beds: Handaxes, Art, and the Minds of Early Humans,” in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 9–31. 46. In any case, according to the perspective that dates language to 400,000 years ago, Currie may be wrong about the consideration that the hominine making the “beautiful” hand axes had no articulated language. This would mean for our story that the impulses to practical and aesthetic manipulation could have co emerged with symbolic development, in a complex, self sustaining process. 47. Randy Thornhill, “Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics,” in Evolutionary Aesthetics, ed. Eckart Voland and Karl Grammer (Berlin: Springer, 2001), pp. 9–38. Thornhill adheres strongly to the conception of modules, conceiving them as species specific neural circuits dedicated to solving specific problems. However, there are other conceptions of modules. In particular, many evolutionary psychologists conceive modules as specialized learning mechanisms or behavioral routines that might not be served by task specific brain structure. For a general introduction to this question, see Edouard Machery, “Massive Modularity and the Flexibility of Human Cognition,” Mind and Language 23 (2008): 263–272. Our story is not intrinsically connected with any specific conception of modules. As will become clear, my proposal is favored by the conceptions of modules as behavioral routines. 48. The handicap principle entails the “good genes” hypothesis: since secondary sexual characteristics are costly, only individuals in prime condition may be able to develop and carry such displays; so the honesty and reliability of such displays are maintained by their costs. See Amotz Zahavi and Ashivag Zahavi, The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle (Oxford University Press, 1997). 49. The so called “savannah hypothesis” (humans possess an innate preference for a savannah like setting, which then is modified through experience and enculturation) is based on limited empirical support. See John H. Falk and John D. Balling, “Evolutionary Influence on Human Landscape Preference,” Environment and Behavior 42 (2010): 479–493. Above all, counting against this kind of hypothesis (the idea of an adaptation to a specific habitat) are the climate instability and the habitat variability during the period of sapiens evolution. 50. Wolfgang Welsch, “Animal Aesthetics,” Contemporary Aesthetics 2 (2004), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=243, accessed August 26, 2013. 51. Dan Sperber and Lawrence Hirschfeld, “Culture and Modularity,” in The Innate Mind: Culture and Cognition, ed. Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 149–164. 52. On this point, my proposal echoes the thesis of Steven Mithen, who associates the appearance of the first art with the change from a domain specific to a cognitively fluid mentality. See Steven Mithen, “A Creative Explosion? Theory of Mind, Language and the Disembodied Mind of the Upper Palaeolithic,” in Creativity in Human Evolution and Prehistory, ed. Steven Mithen (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 121–140. 53. Miller, The Mating Mind, pp. 276–278. 54. Miller, The Mating Mind, pp. 280–286. 55. Pinker, How the Mind Works, pp. 524–525. 56. For the contrasting positions on chimpanzees’ mind reading, see Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Harvard University Press, 2000), and Derek Penn and Daniel Povinelli, “On Becoming Approximately Rational,” in Rational Animals, Irrational Humans, ed. Shigeru Watanabe, Aaron P. Blaisdell, Ludwig Huber, and Allan Young (Keio University Press, 2009), pp. 23–44. 57. Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford University Press, 2010). 58. For the distinction between low level and high level mind reading, see Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds (Oxford University Press, 2006). For the evidence on the capacity of fiction to modify mind reading, see Maja Djikic, Keith Oatley, Sara Zoeterman, and Jordan B. Peterson, “On Being Moved by Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self,” Creativity Research Journal 21 (2009): 24–29. 59. For the relationship between mind reading and metacognition, see Peter Carruthers, “How We Know Our Own Minds: The Relationship between Mindreading and Metacognition,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2009): 121–138. For the nature of introspection, see Asher Koriat, “Metacognition and Consciousness,” in Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, ed. Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 289–326. 60. This perspective is entirely derived from Noël Carroll's “Art and Human Nature,” The Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 95–107. 61. For the role of metacognition in the emotions, see Lisa Feldman Barrett, Batja Mesquita, Kevin N. Ochsner, and James J. Gross, “The Experience of Emotion,” Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 373–403. For the relationship between creativity and emotions, see James Averill, “Emotions as Mediators and as Products of Creativity,” in Creativity across Domains: Faces of the Muse, ed. James Kaufman and John Baer (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005), pp. 225–243. 62. For the role of metacognition in this transition, see Dan Zahavi, “The Time of the Self,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 84 (2012): 143–159. 63. This correspondence is explicitly stressed by archaeologists such as Lewis Williams, The Mind in the Cave, p. 236, and Fagan, Cro Magnon, p. 142. 64. Emotional contagion is more radical than empathy. The processes may be both automatic and unconscious, but in the contagion there is a complete identification among the subjects, whereas in the empathy the empathizers remain distinct from the targets. See Frederique de Vignemont and Tania Singer, “The Empathic Brain: How, Whenand Why?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (2006): 435–441, at p. 441. 65. Kevin Ochsner and James J. Gross, “The Cognitive Control of Emotion,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 242–249; and Matthew Lieberman, “Social Cognitive Neuroscience: A Review of Core Processes,” Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 259–289. 66. This point is an extension of Cristiano Castelfranchi and Maria Miceli, “The Cognitive Motivational Compound of Emotional Experience,” Emotion Review 1 (2009): 223–231. 67. Mark D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?” Science 298 (2002): 1569–1579. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - The Emergence of the Modern Mind: An Evolutionary Perspective on Aesthetic Experience
JF - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/jaac.12059
DA - 2014-02-06
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-emergence-of-the-modern-mind-an-evolutionary-perspective-on-d98FC13oNd
SP - 37
EP - 55
VL - 72
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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