Mental Activity as an Attractor of Evolutionary Development of Homo Sapiens

Abstract

We view the psyche of HS as an active distributed system, in which the emergence of new subsystem, creativity, about 50,000 years ago created conditions for a sharp jump-over to a new quality level of the system as a whole, into a new class of systems. As a result of the separation of IG from the "reactive behavior," the creation and projection of the creative product (CC) into the external environment, and the subsequent perception of CC as an objectively existing fragment of the world (with control functions relative to the subject), a new hominid need arose: to achieve parametric equilibrium with a virtual construction—a symbol. Satisfaction of this need created a primary frustration—the desire to achieve a symbolic goal that is beyond reach. We believe that the main factor in the evolutionary development (ED) of HS is the mechanism for satisfying this need by resolving frustration, accompanied by the development of technological support for the purposeful forms of HS behavior. The period of formation of the HS psyche, as a system at a new level, coincides in time and meaningful content with the 11th phase transition of the planetary evolution (Panov-Snooks), being the initial segment of the ascending part of the hyperbolic trajectory of ED. We believe that the psyche of this new representative of HS, which creates frustration constructs (virtual motivators), has become an attractor for ED. By an attractor, we mean the finite region of the inevitable convergence of phase trajectories of a complex system, the attraction of which draws into itself the set of possible trajectories of systems determined by different initial conditions. The actions of the attractor create conditions under which the future state of the system, represented by the final state of the system, has a determinative influence on the present system.

Keywords

• creativity
• symbol
• frustration
• evolutionary development
• mental activity