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A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness

2001· book· en· 691 citations· W1579934207 on OpenAlex

Why is this work in the frame?

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

Canadian affiliationAn author listed a Canadian institution. This is the only route the usual frame has.

Full frame distilled prediction

Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

Candidate categories
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categories
none
Domain
Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
Study design
Candidate signal: Not applicableConsensus signal: none
Genre
Candidate signal: OtherConsensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score
0.392
Threshold uncertainty score
0.998
Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated · codex-gemma-dda1882f352a

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.261
Teacher spread
0.245 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Abstract

Merlin Donald refutes the arguments of certain scientists and philosophers who have dismissed consciousness as a superficial byproduct of evolution, or even an entirely irrelevant factor in human cognition. His thesis presents the forces, both cultural and neuronal, that power our distinctively human modes of awareness. Donald proposes that the human mind is a hybrid product of interweaving a super-complex form of matter (the brain) with an invisible symbolic web (culture) to form a "distributed" cognitive network. This hybrid mind allowed humanity as a species to break free of the limitations of the mammalian brain. Marshaling evidence from brain and behavioral studies of humans and animals, Donald explains how an expansion of conscious capacity was the key to this revolutionary development and insightfully projects how the human mind might adapt in the future, as we fall increasingly under the spell of symbolic technology.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

The record

Venue
Topic
Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
Field
Physics and Astronomy
Canadian institutions
Queen's University
Funders
not available
Keywords
ConsciousnessHumanityEvolutionary psychologyDarwinismCognitive scienceRebuttalEpistemologyPerspective (graphical)Power (physics)PsychologyPhilosophySociologyHistoryComputer scienceArtificial intelligence
Has abstract in OpenAlex
yes