Episode 1: Introduction

So last time we were beginning our historical examination of the origin of this capacity for meaning making to try to get a clearer picture of what it is. Today I'd like to continue on with what we were talking about: the connections between meaning-making, enhancing cognition, altered states of consciousness, wisdom.

We were talking about that in connection with the upper Paleolithic transition, in which human beings seem to have gone through this radical change which was not so much a biological change but a change in how they were using their cognition. We talked about important ideas such as cognitive exaption and psychotechnology and we talked about how the upper paleolithic transition was probably driven by the way shamanism was a set of psychotechnologies for altering states of consciousness to cognitively exapt the enhanced abilities that trade rituals and initiation rituals and healing rituals had already been creating. 

We talked about the way the shaman engaged in various disruptive strategies to try and alter their framing of reality, because how we frame reality is both the source of our adaptability / our ability to find patterns but it as how we can get locked in / how we misframe reality and how we are in need of insight. When we talked about that in connection to the nine dot problem, that led us to realize that there's kinds of knowing that are independent from the knowing that we capture in our statements of our beliefs. There's knowings about knowing how to do something, what it's like to have a particular perspective, and what it's like to know something by identifying with it and participating in it. 

I was starting to show you how the shaman's altered state of consciousness was also enhancing and altering meaning-making, affording insight, and improving the ability of the shaman to help in hunting and health case, two things that would radically improve survival.