Endeavour and Evolution

Evolution & the Mind

Simple organisms evolved to have a nervous system and then a central nervous system. These support fixed complex behaviours, both individual and social.

Mammals then evolved a neocortex that enabled individuals to learn new behaviours. Humans evolved and became utterly dominant because of their personal functioning—what is often called their mind.

Personal (mental) functioning must have evolved from sensori-motor reflexes, affective drives, and memory within the CNS to handle whole person (originally whole animal) interactions with the environment.

Through our functioning, we exert a degree of control over our physical, biological and mental worlds for our ends. It provides us with a competitive advantage through its primary rationale:

So: Personal functioning enables specific endeavours that improve the state of a person or group within its physical-social environment.

Other Views

A variety of distinguishing features of human beings have been identified e.g. language, manipulating abstractions, play, tears, viewing the self impersonally, inter-relating multiple experiences. It is proposed here that none of these alone provide humans with a competitive advantage. It is their contribution and integration within endeavours that was and is critical.

Endeavour is Personal & Affective

Endeavour has two dimensions:

A. Technical-material and intrinsically impersonal
i.e. substitution of persons or culture has no effect.

Scientific understanding of technical-material issues has progressed well over the millenia.

This scientific activity, should it reflect on itself, would recognize that it is a product of personal functioning.

B. Social-experiential and intrinsically personal
i.e. who is involved and what they feel matters greatly.

Understanding here is poor, and dependent on heuristics and past experience.

Individual uniqueness, group diversity, dominance of emotions, and experiential flux appear to have inhibited effective scientific work.

The personal-social aspect of an endeavour is primary, with impersonal aspects and technologies subsidiary and supportive. Failures of endeavours, even if seemingly technical, are commonly traceable to personal issues.

Endeavours are intrinsically emotional (or affective). They need a degree of positive interest and enthusiasm to get started. But enthusiasm alone is weak. Without some intentionality, expected enjoyment and a deeper emotional drive, endeavours cannot progress. If the emotional investment intrinsic to volition, i.e. will, ceases, any endeavour soon comes to a standstill.

Note that: •a simple task or bodily action, which is just a component of an endeavour, may be performed without emotional drive; •forced labour is inhumane and distasteful; •assembly-line arrangements, which remove feeling and judgement from work, are intensely disliked.

Definition

An endeavour is a goal-directed course of action that:

• depends on effort (will)
• requires relevant knowledge to succeed
• is owned and valued by at least one person
• affects other persons directly or indirectly
• alters a shared reality and reality-in-itself.

Examples of activities that are not endeavours:

• avoiding a spider because... reflex and does not entail value
• making a wish because... no physical activity
• playing solitaire because… no alteration of reality
• lifting a finger because… no effect on others
• driving to work because… no new knowledge
• recovering from the flu because… no effort required
• wandering in a park because…intrinsically aimless
• forming a traffic jam because… no purpose or knowledge

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The Taxonomy contains the elements relevant to endeavour. However, it is about something larger. Why do we have endeavours? How is evolution included?

• See the current conceptualization.

Originally posted: 1-Oct-2014