“The emergence of new castes of beings is a common thread throughout the transformations. The process entails successive metamorphoses: primordial peoples traverse various modes of existence before reaching their current form. Along the way, bodies are built and unbuilt, with extreme permutations involving interspecific corporeal forms. These forms often incorporate artifacts and body parts that were once corporeal forms in their own right. The conversions involved therein imply technological acts on the part of demiurgical creators. “

- Pola Oloixarac, Dark Constellations

Human cognition is just as much a production of mind as it is physiology. Or, put better, they are indistinct. Our cognitive capacities have folded together symbolic inference systems into enactive gestures co-developing in a push-and-pull with opposable thumbs, tonotopic nerve response, or even the delicate geometry of the larynx that literally gives one voice.

The reciprocal nature of these developments makes an evolutionary perspective on the relationship between anatomy, cognition, and sense capacity even more evident. As anatomical affordances, social interaction, and material anchors collide, they have come to architect the human cognitive niche, broadly understood, over long trajectories of activities. These activities are cognitively and somatically entrained into the human body and its social formation, aiding in the predictive elimination of uncertainty that guides our cognition as we interact with the world through a long-form trial and error process of learning how and why casual interactions happen. It demonstrates that in the course of this elimination process (self-correction), senses which are perceived experientially by embodied capacities like nerve responses to haptic or auditory undulations require selection, framing, training. That this processing occurs through internal states is testament to the interrelation of material culture and its capacity for transmitting cognitive practices, and, furthermore, that these practices are somehow durable enough to offload ephemeral interpretations into co-present interaction over distances and generations.

As we experience affective responses, nerve firings, or other biochemical signals these impulses can only be made significant to us through accumulated prior correlations that have been hung together within a mental model of generalizable causation; an activity that is cognitively entrained over innumerable collective repetitions and eliminative processes. These mental models guide active inferences about reality while also providing predictive frameworks for humans to navigate their environment by operationalizing the vast accumulation of embodied knowledge within the species. What results is something of a recursive operation whereby accumulated experiences, hung together through the inferential webs of signification and denotation constructed by social practice, are realized through the interpretive interface of the model, thereby strengthening the practical efficacy of the model itself, guided by environmental learning.¹ In this way, models exert epicyclic pressures in niche construction which shift landscapes into epistemic landscapes, where cognitive representation meets reality.

THE OPERATIVE CHAIN

How and in which ways mental models are produced socially is accounted for by the enactive strategies of human culture as operational elements of cognition. Anthropologist and archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan first broached this problem in the mid-20th century by conceptualizing the chaîne opératoire; the operative sequence of step-by-step activities that ties together the development of tools, use, and eventual disposal of everyday artifacts in various cultures. The power of the idea came through describing technological development within social context, reframing everyday social activity as something intrinsic to the shared cognitive frame of the participants. Arriving at this idea meant Leroi-Gourhan and colleagues would merge their careful lithic analysis of sites at Pincevent to imbue evidential rigor into anthropological concepts such as the enchaînement organique developed by prominent anthropologist of the time, Marcel Mauss. Although the idea found many developments and iterations throughout the years (especially through the more methodological employment by archaeologist Jacqies Tixier), the idea has retained an ethnographic approach to prehistoric cultures and the psychosomatic correspondences between technology and behavior. Seen altogether these chains demonstrate their heuristic value in expressing deeper cultural tenants as they interact within environmental constraints.

Understood within these dimensions, the evidential record seems to index something more profound than originally thought: crucially, it shifts the focus of Anthropological research to be about the implied assumptions of different cognitive models articulated as tool-making processes. This is because, unlike former accounts, these chains described the problem of multi-step processes in the production of implements and other cultural artifacts, indicating that complex planning and sequencing was involved – a planning and sequencing that would itself imply a series of assumptions, values, and modes of practice that could be generalized within cultural habits. In more recent times, the anthropologist Timothy Ingold has built upon this idea with his concept of the taskscape where the activity of operative chains dwell within, coming to shape the landscape and environment innately. He delineates bounded sites where physical landscapes can be studied through the imposition of human activity and relationality over time in order to note how this comes to socially construct the landscape in a process of interaction and meaning making.

But unlike Ingold and some other contemporaries, evolutionary selection played an outsized role in this framing of Leroi-Gourhan’s approach, in that the development of sensory motor capacities and the gestural dimensions of this behavior were considered integral aspects of analysis. For Leroi-Gourhan, the more adept criteria for what makes modern humans so unique from other anthropoids is their “erect posture, short face, free hand during locomotion, and the possession of moveable implements'' (19); brain anatomy or volume being but one of many conveyances. His suggestion is that physiological capacities and postures, which had outsized impact on the ability to manipulate technical implements, demonstrate that neuropsychological development could not be explained through increase in brain volume or neural architecture alone. Important as they may be, localized brains and the nervous system played limited roles within a larger apparatus that met the challenge “to a biological problem as old as the vertebrates themselves, that of the relationship between the face as bearer of the organs of nourishment and the forelimb as an organ not only of locomotion but also of prehension” (19).

Leroi-Gourhan’s account of human cognitive development could be understood as holistic and systemically interwoven. Such a reciprocal but not corresponding relationship emerges from studies of mammalian anatomical development and environmental pressure. Through gesture, these two valences of selective pressure pose problems when drawing distinctions between the body and the nervous system that forms the brain, making the line between body and brain somewhat “arbitrary and superficial” (47).

Whether the brain is the organ or the instrument of thought makes no difference to the relationship between the body and the subtle network of fibres that animate it. Materially, evolution is reflected in a double set of facts: on one hand, the cumulative
improvement of cerebral structures and, on the other, the adaptation of the bodily structures in accordance with rules directly related to the physical constraints of this machine which is the living, moving organism. The relationship between the brain and body is one between the contained and the container. Every imaginable evolutionary interaction may occur between them, but contain and container cannot, by their very nature, be identified with each other. (47)

Dwelling on this a minute, this container framework does help describe the situation, but it also comes with its own ambiguous boundaries of what threshold constitutes a container at different scales. Perhaps this is why the “extended active inference hypothesis” could be so useful.² These extended interpretations account for the blurry boundaries between taskscapes, gesture, technology, culture, and internal cognitive states within the developmental continuum of evolution. One ends up with a set of Matryoshka dolls, all of which generate their own loops of active inference and, by consequence, selective developments that criss-cross and inform one another.

Socio-ecological niche construction being co-emergent with modern anatomical human development could be understood as something of a more corporeal chaîne opératoire, which have been painstakingly shaped through the long correspondence between physiology and cognitive practices over millions of years.

So when expressive capacities like speech and the typical human registers for hearing become particularly rich around the same frequency range (around 2 - 4 khz); or when the larynx evolves to be positioned comparatively high up the trachea alongside a smaller, more malleable tongue some 100,000 years ago, roughly the time language began forming syntactic complexity beyond mere signals and groans — these can be taken as are more than coincidental developments. Alongside a number of examples, they indicate a more vivid correspondence between physiology, gesture, and cognition that is registered in the construction of enactive properties through bodies as they are shaped by the manifolds of perception of expressive cognitive precepts.

Our corporeal capacities could be therefore understood as mechanisms that enable the form of shareable developments in active inference that have made hominids such a unique vehicle for intelligence. Yet they do so through a dialectical development which attenuates the linkages between expression and perception, literally forming the scaffolding that shapes the perceptual capacities of our species’ cognitive niche. Perhaps, to over-read Leroi-Gourhan, this may have informed his initial impulses around physiology in that he knew that these gestural interfaces were but consequences of physiological and ecological pressures. But then what if they are part of a feedforward part of niche construction? Or better yet, what kind of deliberations could be employed to pursue these trajectories that steer clade development?

IN THE BLOMBOS CA VE

In a 2015 conversation with Katherine McKittrick, philosopher Sylvia Wynter described what she called a “third event” in human evolution deep in the Blombos Cave (in today’s South Africa) where archaeologists in the 1990s found some of the earliest records (roughly 100 kya) of multi-step tool construction and decorative geometric drawing. This material evidence, recorded under the stewardship of archaeologist Chistopher Henshillwood and colleagues, indicated that the cave was most likely used on-and-off for millenia by different hominid groups. Their findings offered a rich record of emergent symbolic forms of behavior. This discovery of the geometric designs and representations in particular, according to Wynter, are testament to a radical change in human development, as it marked the moment where humans were no longer merely biological creatures like their hominid kin.

This “third event” is when ritual and abstract symbol making began to form the cognitive niche for humans, shifting evolutionary trajectories away from the confines of the biologically given into a “symbolic transformation of biological identity” (67). Not only was this significant because of the inventive nature of symbolic thought and communication, but also because it indicated a certain form of implicit intention which became a driving factor in human evolution going forward. Through their symbolic and ritual making systems, humans would go on to slightly steer their evolution collectively through culture, here understood as both symbolic and technical social pursuits. Our cognitive niche construction, in this sense, emerged through the formidable restraints of material life not as individuals, but as a “referent-we” produced by the cultural habits and collective cognition that helped to steer these webs of denotation and inference — of telling stories.

For Wynter, the event was a generalized moment in the history of the human understood as a practice of interacting through the world of myths, imbued with uniquely abstract forms of language and representation into what she has called homo narrans. For her, the significance of culture asserting some trajectory within evolution means that humans are now granted a unique freedom from biology making them outside the remit of “adaptive truths” or naturalized qualitative assertions about race, gender, and other conflations of particular understandings of the human organism projected as universal. Or, as philosopher Patricia Reed has suggested: “accounting for unactualized historical-discursive sites requires freedom from such adaptive truths that not only reinforce existing frames of reference, but participate in the perception of their immutability.” (Reed) and therefore pursue the risky possibilities of what human existence could be rather than recoil in what it merely is or has been. For Reed, this indicates a site of “epistemic enablement” where Wynter demonstrates the peculiar situation for humans, as a species, now free to pursue the realization of their fictions in excess of what is given.

Taken in tandem with the physiological speculations wrought by overreading Leroi-Gourhan’s operative chains, one gets the sense that the trajectories of evolution for the human cognitive niche are particular. Not only are they shaped by environmental pressures and heritability, but also through the very self-conception of mind that has epistemically enabled the realization of reason as an evolutionary factor, collectively steering the development of a collective “we” of human cognition that exceeds the species or even biology alone.

A DEVIANT CHAIN

Within the work Deviant Chain (2019) by composer Stefan Maier in collaboration with Alan Segal and Victor Shepardson we see an attempt to respond to these questions of cognitive niche construction in both physiology and in symbolic enablement. As “speculative phonemes” are continually uttered by WaveNet’s algorithms³, what emerges are a new set of loops for cognitive leverage and an invitation into a nonexclusive human community that is negotiated through collective communication between biological humans and the outputs from WaveNet’s algorithms.
Rather than experiment with language itself, its syntax and meaning, the language of Deviant Chain offers up a diagonalization of natural human language that could only be made possible by tinkering with the physiological scaffolding of the cognitive niche itself. To create the language framework, it begins from anatomy. Using 3D models, the typical anatomy of human larynx are moved slightly lower down the trachea. What results from this when similar hominid levels of air pressure are passed through in the model are a series of guttural sounds that are somewhat unusual to most human utterances. Enough so that the capacities it has to create phonemes or forms of utterance start from a different point than those of human natural language. Then, to mimic the evolutionary pathway of human cognitive evolution, the noises are slowly modelled into more and more complex strings of proto-language. Eventually a form of semantics emerges that could have speculatively emerged differently than that of humans as a result of the different types of sound combinations that are more likely. Using those semantics, the artists involved are able to generate a new language adapted to this different anatomical structure which is functionally distinct from human natural languages on the level of semantics.

In doing all of this, the experiment in symbolic production demonstrates a parallel scaffold for how language could emerge in a different physiological environment, even when fed with the semantic relationships of human cognitive artifacts such as language. By harnessing the architecture of a simulated physiology, the generative algorithm tinkers with the chain of these biological givens and thereby releases the algorithm from the confines of an anatomically suboptimal machine for spitting out rearranged human symbols. Deviant Chain as an experiment asks what these same human-like active inference patterns could do within a different expressive apparatus, and in doing so uncannily demonstrates how essential these physiological chains are in developing cognitive niches.

At the same time, such a novel experiment with symbol and simulated anatomy opens new pathways for how this niche has only been a holding pattern of sorts for cognitive forms that have come before humans, which will greatly exceed us in endlessly novel configurations and physiological forms as time passes. In this sense, it conscripts these other language-producing machines into a symbolic community of being human despite its biological dissimilarity, thus making the algorithms fellow travelers in the pursuit of freedom first begun amongst humans through symbolic development. Could this lead to totally novel hosts for the parasite we call cognition? Or could it just be an expanding field, one which incorporates more and more of the material environment as its negentropic allocations eliminate even more cognitive uncertainty through the conveyance of intelligence? Where could this pursuit of freedom from mere biology lead? We have nothing to lose but our chains...

Special thanks to Patricia Reed, Anil Bawa-Cavia, Lendl Barcelos, and Stefan Maier for their edits and insights on the essay.

See Constant et al 2019: “ formal symmetry yields a view of cognitive niche construction as a form of environmental “learning” about the organisms hosted by the environment. On this view, organisms effectively “teach” the environment what actions they should expect (i.e., construct externally realized causal models of the effects of action—where action, from the point of view of the environment now becomes a sensory datum).” For more see section 2.1 The Cognitive Niche which offers a more robust argument about environmental learning.
For a more detailed account at what this framework entails see: Constant, Axel, Andy Clark, Michael Kirchhoff, Karl J. Friston. “Extended Active Inference: Constructing Predictive Cognition Beyond Skulls.” Mind and Language (December 2020): 1-22.
WaveNet is a deep neural network for generating raw audio. For a more technical understanding of how it operations see: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio

Bibliography

Audouze, Françoise & Claudine Karlin. “La chaîne opératoire a 70 ans : qu’en ont fait les préhistoriens français.” Journal of Lithic Studies vol 4 no 2 (2017): 5-73.

Bawa-Cavia, Anil. “The Inclosure of Reason.” Technosphere Magazine, Human Dossier (April 2017). [online] https://technosphere-magazine.hkw.de/p/The-Inclosure-of-Reason-ecTsvnENeC1GXtmgRNaMH9

Constant, Axel, Andy Clark, Michael Kirchhoff, Karl J. Friston. “Extended Active Inference: Constructing Predictive Cognition Beyond Skulls.” Mind and Language (December 2020): 1-22.

Deacon, Terrence W. “On Human (Symbolic) Nature: How the Word Became Flesh.” In Embodiment in Evolution and Culture. Edited by T. Fuchs & C. Tewes. Mohr Siebeck GmbH and Co. KG, 2016: 129-149.

Dobres, Marcia-Anne. “Technology’s Links and Chaînes: The Processual Unfolding of Technique and Technician.” In The Social Dynamics of Technology: Practice, Politics, and World Views. Edited by M-A. Dobres and C. R. Hoffman. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999: 124-146

Henshilwood, Christopher S. & Curtis W. Marean. “The Origin of Modern Human Behavior: Critique of their Models and Test Implications.” Current Anthropology vol. 44 no. 5 (2003): 627-651.

Ingold, Timothy. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology vol. 25 no. 2 (2010): 152-174.

Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Trans. Anna Bostock Berger. October Books. (1993) 2018.

Olaxariac, Pola. Dark Constellations. Translated by Roy Kesey. Penguin, 2015.

Reed, Patricia. “Freedom and Fiction.” Glass Bead Journal Site 2: Dark Room, 2019. [online] https://www.glass-bead.org/article/freedom-and-fiction/?lang=enview

Sternly, Kim. “Minds: Extended or Scaffold?” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences vol 9 no. 4 (2010): 465-481.

Tomlinson, Gary. A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. Zone Books, 2018. –– “Semiotic Epicycles and Emergent Thresholds in Human Evolution.” Glass Bead Journal Site 1 Logic Gate: The Politics of the Artifactual Mind (2017). [online] https://www.glass-bead.org/article/semiotic-epicycles-emergent-thresholds-human-evolution/?lang=enview

Wynter, Sylvia and Katherine McKittrick. “Unparallelled Catastrophe For Our Species? Or, To Give Humannes a Different Future: A Conversation.” Sylvia Wynter. On Being Human As Praxis. Duke, 2015: 9-89.

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