The Compilation of Previous Traditional Work:
An excellent way to approach any academic undertaking is to build upon existing bodies of work in a particular field. Unfortunately, since I had to invent my own field of study to find the answers I was looking for, there are no previously existing bodies of work in my field. Luckily for me, people have been searching for one objective truth to the world since the dawn of humanity as we know it in a lot of different ways. (For instance, the oldest archeological sites discovered in which people began treating the burying of their dead as an important event instead of simply as a disposal of bodies are older than the Homo sapiens species.) That gives me immense amounts of work to refer to, if only in the abstract.
I must begin by assuming that all existing work is flawed, so I can’t depend on any of it, but I can use it to study where other people have gone astray in their searches, and I can use it as a guide to places I can look and what questions I can ask.
My goal is to find an evolutionary origin of human thought—by which I mean, mental activity. People everywhere have always tried to figure out how to use the brains they have to get the things they need. People aren’t stupid, so presumably every group of people has found part of what I’m looking for, it’s just that no group has found all of it. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that over the course of, say, the past 50,000 years people have thought about everything their brains have been capable of thinking about. That simplifies my search immensely, because it makes the realm of human consciousness one gigantic algebraic equation in which I simply have to solve for variables.
To solve the equation, first I have to write it, and in order to do that, I have to accumulate all the ideas in the world into one place— in this case me, because I’m the one trying to solve the equation. All the ideas in the world means all the ideas ever had by anyone. Admittedly, at first glance that sounds absolutely impossible for any one person to do. However, as it turns out there are a number of tools that can be used to make it possible, or at least less impossible.
First, the universal formula only needs to be absolute in the scientific sense, which is to say “absolute for now”. Obviously, in order for any absolute truth to be absolute, it must account for all available empirical data, it must be able to be changed if new data is found to contradict the supposed truth, it must not limit or control the discovery of new data either to support or contradict it, and it must be able to be built upon as any of its component data or combinations of component data come to be understood more thoroughly. In other words, to discover the one universal truth, I must account for the inescapable facts that it can only be written to explain the things people understand about the world now, it can’t be written to explain things that nobody understands yet, and it can’t pretend to explain anything as absolute beyond humans’ ability to measure it. But that’s the whole reason science works—people keep studying science because they keep finding new things to investigate. All science in any field today can only explain the things people have figured out about that field so far, and can’t explain the things nobody knows about yet. Most importantly perhaps, science can only explain things based on the data available at the time any given theory was written, and if credible data is discovered later to disprove the theories, the theories must be changed or abandoned.
Second, I must limit my search to evolutionary human thought. Any further ideas derived from those evolutionary ideas will begin to diverge as they begin to involve more and more variables that the people having the further ideas didn’t account for. In other words, to find the one answer, I must isolate evolutionary human thought, eliminate all thought that occurred after that, and construct a new system of thought completely from scratch, this time making sure to account for all variables. That way, I can correct for the possibility (or likelihood) that the people who constructed any existing system of thought constructed it by interpreting evolutionary thought through their own subjectivity, and thereby reached conclusions they wrongly assume to be absolute. It would be difficult for most people to do this without corrupting the process with their own subjective interpretations, I’m sure, but unlike most people, I was raised to take a scientific approach to the world, and I’m better at learning about science than most people.
Third, because so many people have devoted so much thought to the search for answers over time, at least the majority of, if not all, evolutionary thoughts will appear in multiple places. Evolutionary thoughts, therefore, can be recognized by recurring patterns in supposedly unrelated systems of thought. Where similar patterns appear in unrelated systems, the existence of the evolutionary thought is supported. Where a pattern in one system of thought contradicts a pattern in another system of thought, at least one thought pattern must not be a pure evolutionary thought, because pure evolutionary human thought must be universal. For any premise that is contradicted, either the premise must be faulty, or the contradiction must be faulty (or both). Any faulty thought must be a post-evolutionary thought that has been led astray by unaccounted-for variables. If a premise is faulty, the evolutionary thought it is built upon can be discovered by correcting for the unaccounted-for variables. If a contradiction is faulty, the premise is unaffected.
Fourth, in learning about any system of thought, its basic ideas are usually the ones you learn about first, or at least its basic ideas are contained in any introduction to the system of thought, for reasons I’ll assume are fairly obvious. The basic ideas of any system of thought are that system of thought’s most direct links to evolutionary thought.
Fifth, because a lot of different people have had the same evolutionary ideas, that means that different systems of thought have a lot of commonalities, even if they don’t create immediately recognizable patterns. This makes the search a lot simpler than if all systems of thought were based on completely original ideas. For instance, all religions in the world give their followers some sense of purpose to their lives, some way to evade their inevitable deaths, and try to explain things about the world that no one truly understood when the religion first developed. So evidently all those things are pretty important to people, wouldn’t you say?
Sixth, because a lot of different people have had the same evolutionary ideas, that means I can use the differences in the systems of thought that arose out of the evolutionary ideas to illustrate the variables and the effects that the differences in unaccounted-for variables had on those systems of thought. For one example, nature-based religions arose from every culture in the world, because the same basic things affected the people who had those basic ideas. The divergences in the developments of those religions helps illustrate, and is illustrated by, the differences in the places those religions were practiced. Why did the Lakota tribes of the Great Plains see the buffalo as a sacred animal while the Aleuts of Alaska didn’t? Because the Lakota depended on the buffalo for their lives, and the Aleuts had never even seen a buffalo!
Seventh, sound evolutionary ideas must resonate within the human consciousness and thereby endure. Ideas that don’t work or don’t feel right to people are abandoned and forgotten. Ideas that do endure spread to many people, and help create recurring patterns among different systems of thought. (Like I said in the last chapter, good ideas are like viruses.) That means that the ideas that are easiest for people to learn and remember must be evolutionary thought because those ideas are the easiest for people’s brains to think about, even if those people didn’t think of those ideas on their own. Legends of old were written about heroes who displayed admirable human qualities, and they endured because those qualities were ones that many people aspired to—the heroes were role models. Successful movies of today become modern legends for the same reasons— they too are written about heroes with admirable qualities who become memorable role models as a result. Movies succeed in part because they have admirable heroes, and people have the opportunity to admire the heroes because the movies are successful.
Eighth, nature left all on its own always functions perfectly. If nature is left untouched by human behavior, it stays natural by definition. Nature creates contexts for human behavior, but without humans there is no human behavior. Therefore, the search for evolutionary human ideas can be confined to the realm of human experience because that’s where all evolutionary human ideas originate.