York philosopher's new book explores controversial relationship between culture and consciousness. Theories offer clues about a new way of looking at the history of human thought, writes Olivia Ward

York University professor, David Martel Johnson in front of a painting by his daughter, Kirsten, explores the origin of human consciousness in How History Made the Mind. Kirsten, the eldest of Johnson's four daughters,
also illustrated the cover of the book.

The first humans had large well developed brains that catapulted them to the top of the evolutionary food chain 150,000 years ago.

But, says a York University philosopher, it took thousands more years until primitive man - and woman - learned to use them the way we do today.

"If we were thrown back to the era of the ancient Greeks, about 3,000 years ago, we'd be with people who thought exactly like us," says David Martel Johnson. "But earlier, even in ancient Egyptian times, that really wouldn't be true."

Johnson's newly published book. How History Made the Mind, goes to the heart of a scientific controversy between those who believe the physical brain is the most important factor in development of the mind, and those who believe culture is the determining factor.

It's a largely abstract debate, and evidence for either side is inconclusive. But Johnson's approach gives tantalizing clues to a new way of looking at human thought.

"This sounds complex, but it has a simple message" says the tall, silver-haired professor, -a former master of York's Vanier College. "The idea that the mind is identical with the brain leaves out something crucially important: the influence of culture."

Johnson's theory takes its place in the relatively new discipline of cognitive science, the study of the mind and how it works.

Launched only 50 years ago, the field is a catch-all for mathematicians, psychologists, linguistics specialists, anthropologists, biologists and artificial intelligence experts as well as philosophers.

Everyone, says Johnson, except the people who study the ancient and not-so-ancient past.

"What philosophers don't recognize and archeologist do, is that modern behaviour came very late to mankind", he says.

In Johnson's view, it took some 100,000 years or more before mankind first formed the kind of abstract thoughts that led to painting on cave walls, fashioning jewellery and designing complicated tools.

"Before that time people thought in very concrete terms, not in symbols," he says. 'They hunted prey, mastered survival and buried their dead, just as the Neanderthals did."

It's a theory opposed by strict followers of Charles Darwin, who believe that because of their large brains, the first humans were capable of the same thought processes we know today as soon as they evolved from apes.

Instead, says Johnson, the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, which occurred just 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, laid the foundations of the modern mind, and did it "almost overnight."

The Upper Paleolithic period arrived at the end of the last Ice Age, when major changes in the earth's climate and environment helped humans to flourish. The wide variety of intricately fashioned hunting and domestic equipment, as well as arts and crafts that the era's nomadic people left behind was evidence also of a worldwide transformation in human society.

"It was like a miracle, something that caught fire and spread unstoppable," Johnson says. "We know it happened, because the stones and bones tell us so. It's history, and we can't ignore it."

What happened to change our species so dramatically?

Some scientists say the end of the Ice Age's big chill released a firestorm of human creativity. Others suggest a genetic mutation was responsible.

But, says Johnson, this startling period was only the first stage in the evolution of human thought.

Thousands more years would go by before the next seismic shift in consciousness, the "Greek Revolution" that took place around 1,000 B.C., and fostered the poetry of Homer, and later the philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

"The crucial factor is objectivity," Johnson says. 'The ancient Egyptians, for instance, were a very cultured people. But their minds worked differently. In their view of themselves they were always right, and their enemies were always monsters."

However, he says, the Greeks of Homer's time, 800 B.C., saw even their enemies in "evenhanded terms," as humans like themselves, with similar strengths and flaws. The development of writing made it possible to read the thoughts of the great poet and his intellectual descendents as hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform gave clues to the to the minds of earlier civilizations.

"The Greeks looked at things as they were, and that is the beginning of what we call the Western Tradition. It's the mind as we now know it, capable of objective thinking," Johnson says.

His theory of history's influence on the modern mind was sparked by Princeton scientist Julian Jaynes, who wrote a much-disputed book titled The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Jaynes argued that the flicker of human consciousness and introspective thought was born in Greece, symbolized by Socrates' declaration, "the unexamined life isn't worth living."

According to Jaynes, a new kind of thought arose because all the accumulated experience of the past wasn't enough to help people cope with the increasingly sophisticated societies that were taking root at that time. A new kind of thinking was required, one that looked at the world objectively. The Greeks rose to the challenge and developed conscious thought."

However, says Johnson, "it's an exciting theory, but it's wrong. After all, a dog has consciousness. So did early man. He may have been different from us but he wasn't that different."

Johnson's historically based theories may be less popular than some of the prevailing ones - such as Noam Chomsky's "computationalism," that the brain is a kind of genetically determined computer. But they have been a long time in the making.

Born in Utah of a Mormon, but non-observant, family, (he later converted to his wife's religion, Lutheranism), young Johnson was encouraged as a teenager to attend a liberal arts college away from his conservative home state.

"It changed my life," he says of the four-year idyll at Kenyon College in Ohio, a then all-male institution that hosted only 500 students.
There Johnson studied classics and philosophy, won a scholarship and later went on to Yale, where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy with top honours.

After graduation, he rejected a job in Texas for Toronto's then little-known, and newly opened York University. And he was one of few, people to emigrate because of rather than in spite of, the local weather.

"I love the idea of distinct season, even if they're either too hot or too cold," he said, looking out of his High Park living room at mounds of snow blocking the walkway.

Arriving at York in 1965 was a challenge, he said: "At first it was a tiny college, and we were pioneers. Now, it's more like Berkeley - a huge institution."

During Johnson's nearly four decades at York, he has edited two volumes on philosophy and cognitive science. But How History Made the Mind is his first authored work, published in his 65th year, as he prepares to formally retire from the university. He will continue part-time teaching assignments next year.

"Nobody can say this book was hastily written," he says with a smile. "It's the sum of many ideas that have grown over the years, and they've finally come to fruition."

Nevertheless the book is likely to be challenged by a bevy of cognitive scientists, who are competing to make their mark in this rapidly developing area. New developments in neuroscience, for instance, have shown that feelings are produced by the brain, and in turn influence the way in which people think and behave, shaping the development of the human mind.

"The new knowledge broadens our view of human nature," says Antonio Damasio of University of Iowa Medical Center, and author of Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain.

"We cannot really know who we are if we do not understand the brain mechanisms behind emotion and feeling or what causes emotions, what leads to feelings, how they affect our decisions, social behaviour and creativity, and where they fit in evolution."

Johnson's book warns against looking too singlemindedly at nature as the prime mover of human thought.

In the distant past before objective thought, he says, man made decisions by relating to his environment in ways that were safe and tested, as animals do, rather than boldly searching for new solutions.

The Greeks kicked over the intellectual traces and grasped the risky strategy of objective thinking. But, Johnson says, in our uncertain and increasingly polarized world, there is a tendency to reject the rational approach and return to the "old certainties" of a world that is viewed in black and white.

"It's a very frightening development," he says. "There's a library in Paris that has a portrait of Attila the Hun running roughshod over civilization. Why is that? It's because you have to understand how fragile civilization is. It was lost before, during the Dark Ages, and I know how easy it would be to lost it again".

While we should look backward at history for a sense of our own identity as humans, Johnson says, there is no realistic possibility of regressing to the primitive certainties of the prerational world, whether through force or religion.

"Our only chance of solving the new series of problems we now face is by proceeding even farther down the path we already chose long ago," he writes. "The path that separates us more and more from undisturbed nature."

But in a world seeking simple solutions to complex dilemmas, should philosophers expect anyone to be listening to their views?

"New and groundbreaking thoughts have to come from people who sit in little rooms, trying to understand things as they are," Johnson says.

But, he admits, "philosophers were never popular. Typically, they're only important when they're dead."