Consciousness studies is prone to colorful ideas and moments — think of the bizarre 2019 science conference, the dramatic 2023 wager between the panpsychist and the dualist, the sneaky effort to Cancel a top neuroscientist later that same year …

But for a really wild excursion, nothing beats efforts to explain the evolution of the human mind. The human mind has no history so everything offered on the topic is speculation. As long as that’s understood, it’s no real problem. That said, sometimes, a thesis about the origin of the human mind is so over the top that I look for clues that it is a spoof. In the case of the new Stoned Ape Theory, apparently not. 

At Big Think, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian argues that getting stoned shaped the modern human mind.

We are told that between about 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, human behavior increased in “abstract thinking, long-term planning, technological innovation, symbolic language, and artistic expression” but no one knows why:

It would not be an overstatement to say that this evolutionary transition represents the “birth of humanity.”

How these cognitive advances occurred so quickly has been a subject of debate and investigation in anthropology and evolutionary biology because our standard paradigms have struggled to account for them. 

“A new spin on the ‘“Stoned Ape Hypothesis,’” October 23, 2024

Actually, It’s Not So Clear an “Evolutionary Transition” Happened

We find evidence of the human mind where we find it. Technology evolves, of course. We can’t have a machine without metal, we can’t have metal without fire, and so on. Inventions multiply rapidly with each subsequent innovation.

Whether the minds that innovated these technologies evolved is a separate question. Roger Penrose knows more about the universe than Aristotle (384– 322 BC) did. But is he really smarter?

But Now, About the Mushrooms…

Back in 1992, Azarian tells us, ethnobotanist Terence McKenna (1946–2000) proposed the Stoned Ape Hypothesis, “which held that psilocybin mushrooms long ago helped spark rapid evolution in human cognition, consciousness, and culture.” His book Food of the Gods (Bantam 1992) was, predictably, a hit.

Azarian wants to update the idea as “New Stoned Ape Theory”, with some changes. He doesn’t think, for example, that psychedelics were a regular part of the Stone Age diet. He wants to introduce more neuroscience concepts to ground the theory:

The New Stoned Ape Theory is based on the Entropic Brain Hypothesis, which itself is rooted in a revolutionary paradigm in neuroscience known as the Bayesian Brain Hypothesis (also known as the Free Energy Principle, the Active Inference Paradigm, or the Predictive Coding framework). 

‘“Stoned Ape Hypothesis’”

He thinks that new cognition flowed from “trippin’” (his word choice):

According to the Entropic Brain Hypothesis, psychedelics affect cognition by increasing the entropy (disorder) in brain activity. Think of turning up a knob that adjusts the “chaos level” of the computational system — temporarily disrupting the established patterns of neural connectivity that underlie our normal conscious experience …

Once we understand this, it is easy to see how an entropy injection from a drug like psilocybin can temporarily dissolve a belief structure and catalyze a worldview shift. In the same sense that magic mushrooms can produce a visual hallucination (a type of prediction error), the psychedelic can also provide the “neural flexibility” for a more complex and sophisticated perspective to emerge and replace the older one.

‘“Stoned Ape Hypothesis’”

If our remote ancestors were in fact stoners, Azarian omits any evidence of that. He also uses a writing style that I have come to call evo psych (after evolutionary psychology). That is, he makes extensive use of “would have” (for example, “this would have been a not-too-infrequent experience for our foraging ancestors”), where a historian, working with evidence, can safely write was. In other words it is a style suited to free form speculation.

An Altar Call for Gaia!

With the gradual acceptance of panpsychism in science, the reader may not be altogether surprised to discover that the article ends like this:

With the widespread decriminalization of psilocybin (magic mushrooms), DMT (the psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca), and marijuana — which has subtle psychedelic properties — the New Stoned Ape Theory would predict that a global psychedelic era is coming, signaling a shift from a postmodern to “metamodern” worldview. This worldview, characterized by a shared meta-perspective and a systems-thinking style awareness, will unify cultures and align their interests while preserving their diversity, since a more complex and computationally powerful organization simultaneously requires greater diversity and greater integration, or human interconnectedness…

This leads me to a line of speculation that is perhaps more radical than McKenna’s theory, though it is maybe the same bigger picture he had in mind. If the biosphere is truly one interconnected organism, with human civilization forming something like “the brain of Gaia,” could psychedelics be what the global system feeds to its “brain” to make it self-aware? Could the next great leap in evolution be the emergence of a fully integrated “noosphere,” the mind of a planetary system that has “come to life” or “woken up” through a unified planetary-scale human cognition? 

‘“Stoned Ape Hypothesis’”

Promising to leave this sort of speculation out of the formal development of his theory, he adds,

…but something tells me that the apparent fact that the evolutionary process — a process of both planetary and human progress — has been driven by consciousness-elevating substances, is more than just a fortunate coincidence of our world. In light of our new perspective, it becomes a natural and sensible part of the story of a cosmos that is becoming increasingly conscious — a cosmic whole that, like a developing organism, is waking up. The most psychedelic part of this psychedelic story is that it seems to be doing so through us. 

‘“Stoned Ape Hypothesis’”

We have learned nothing specific about how our remote ancestors thought but we have learned one thing we should heed: Big Think sees this as cutting edge science.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.