Tweak the bandwidth of information exchange and see what you get. With weaker communication powers, you get most nonhuman social animals on Earth, from ants to wolves to prairie dogs: able to exchange meaningful information (“food here”; “predator there”) but not to express abstractions. How about with higher-bandwidth or more powerful information exchange? Suppose that I could, in the space of a few seconds of speech, convey not merely a fact, but the equivalent of paragraphs of information as to how I knew that fact?
(Or, of course, I could lie. Is increased bandwidth really all that useful? If so, why don’t we have it?)
Alternately:
Some have suggested that a human mind is a sort of symbiote between genetic replicators (the human body including brain) and memetic replicators (culture, language, social behaviors, ideas). Certain aspects of human behavior are relatively constant across cultures, while others are highly variable. For instance, there are many different languages, but they all fit certain common patterns, because they have to be learned by a human brain.
Suppose that the relative strength of cultural-memetic replicators is increased: a species in which any given biological individual can be expected to participate not only in several different cultural milieux over the course of its life, but where a process somewhere between religious conversion and career-change takes the significance that reproduction has for humans. Converting other adults to follow your religion/worldview/profession/habits/hobbies/quirks strongly dominates reproduction and child-care as demands on organisms’ energy. Rather than a reproductively successful individual being one who has several children, and a “loser” being someone who cannot find a mate, a successful person of this species is expected to have several followers or students in different aspects of life, and a “loser” is someone who is not imitated by anyone in any regard.
Tweak the bandwidth of information exchange and see what you get. With weaker communication powers, you get most nonhuman social animals on Earth, from ants to wolves to prairie dogs: able to exchange meaningful information (“food here”; “predator there”) but not to express abstractions. How about with higher-bandwidth or more powerful information exchange? Suppose that I could, in the space of a few seconds of speech, convey not merely a fact, but the equivalent of paragraphs of information as to how I knew that fact?
(Or, of course, I could lie. Is increased bandwidth really all that useful? If so, why don’t we have it?)
Alternately:
Some have suggested that a human mind is a sort of symbiote between genetic replicators (the human body including brain) and memetic replicators (culture, language, social behaviors, ideas). Certain aspects of human behavior are relatively constant across cultures, while others are highly variable. For instance, there are many different languages, but they all fit certain common patterns, because they have to be learned by a human brain.
Suppose that the relative strength of cultural-memetic replicators is increased: a species in which any given biological individual can be expected to participate not only in several different cultural milieux over the course of its life, but where a process somewhere between religious conversion and career-change takes the significance that reproduction has for humans. Converting other adults to follow your religion/worldview/profession/habits/hobbies/quirks strongly dominates reproduction and child-care as demands on organisms’ energy. Rather than a reproductively successful individual being one who has several children, and a “loser” being someone who cannot find a mate, a successful person of this species is expected to have several followers or students in different aspects of life, and a “loser” is someone who is not imitated by anyone in any regard.