Tool evolution as a prerequisite for consciousness.

Tool evolution follows Darwinian principles: tools are phenotypes replicated through socially transmitted building instructions, modified by selection for human needs. The ostensive triangle—a pointer, an observer, and an object—enables social transmission of motor-act sequences that replicate tools for convenience or fitness rewards. Tools synchronize perceptions, create psychological understanding, and reshape social networks. Massive tool fabrication has accelerated prosociality and the development of a third-person perspective. This cumulative cultural evolution, entangled with biological evolution, selected traits that enhance social transmission, making tool evolution and individual instructional content prerequisites for higher cognition and consciousness.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Within the concept of the extended mind, the active modification of external objects, externalizations, is seen as an auxiliary means to adapt to the environment. Toolmaking and use are advanced stages of externalizations that evolve. All past or present tools can, theoretically, be precisely assigned a location in an evolutionary tree with predecessors and progeny. Tools are reliably replicated, modified, and selected by their ability to facilitate human needs. Tool evolution, therefore, fulfills Darwinian criteria where the material tool is the phenotype and the instruction to build it is the code. The ostensive triangle consisting of a pointing individual, an observing individual, and a pointed-at object or tool is the germ cell of social transmission of instructions. Tool-building instructions ultimately can be reduced to distinct sequences of motor acts that can be recombined and are socially transmitted. When executed, they replicate tools for the reward of convenience or improved fitness. Tools elicit affordances relating to their use that synchronize different individuals' perceptions, result in psychological "understanding," and thereby modify social networks. Massive tool fabrication as present today in the "tool-sphere" has, therefore, accelerated prosociality and over time led to the acquisition of an individual's third person perspective. The entangled biological evolution accelerated the ongoing cumulative cultural evolution by selecting traits facilitating social transmission. In this context, tool evolution and the corresponding acquired individual instructional content is a precondition to the emergence of higher cognition and "consciousness." A neuroscience investigating externalizations as the starting point of this process is urgently needed.