what confuses me though is that “is general reasoner” and “can support cultural evolution” properties seemed to emerge pretty much simultaneously in humans—a coincidence that requires its own explanation (or dissolution).
David Deutsch (in The Beginning of Infinity) argues, as I recall, that they’re basically the same faculty. In order to copy someone else / “carry on a tradition”, you need to model what they’re doing (so that you can copy it), and similarly for originators to tell whether students are correctly carrying on the tradition. The main thing that’s interesting about his explanation is how he explains the development of general reasoning capacity, which we now think of as a tradition-breaking faculty, in the midst of tradition-promoting selection.
If you buy that story, it ends up being another example of treacherous turn from human history (where individual thinkers, operating faster than cultural evolution, started pursuing their own values).
David Deutsch (in The Beginning of Infinity) argues, as I recall, that they’re basically the same faculty. In order to copy someone else / “carry on a tradition”, you need to model what they’re doing (so that you can copy it), and similarly for originators to tell whether students are correctly carrying on the tradition. The main thing that’s interesting about his explanation is how he explains the development of general reasoning capacity, which we now think of as a tradition-breaking faculty, in the midst of tradition-promoting selection.
If you buy that story, it ends up being another example of treacherous turn from human history (where individual thinkers, operating faster than cultural evolution, started pursuing their own values).