This post ideally should have been the prologue to yesterday’s post about the firmware upgrade to the human brain https://www.evomedindia.com/2021/06/29/a-firmware-upgrade-for-the-human-brain-part-1/ but it occurred to me to write about it only this morning, so the timeline switches non linearly in this series. Apologies.
Humans went from weak prey animals on the Savannah to apex ape ,inhabiting every nook and cranny of the planet, when they started hunting effectively.
Hunting requires pattern recognition to begin with. The hunter needs to be able to spot his quarry. The quarry is usually hidden well, or frozen in place, trying to escape attention.
The hunter needs to know the terrain he hunts in. He needs to know the pattern of an animal’s behaviour, the pattern of its footprints, the sound of its passage through the undergrowth. The pattern of light and how it affects his vision and his ability to pick out other patterns.
He needs to be hyper aware for situations when the pattern breaks. A small ripple in the long grass may be hiding a tiger. He had only a split second to decide on a course of action that will result in survival or death.
He has to then break free from that pattern and incorporate the pattern of the ripple in the long grass, so that he can survive the next tiger ambush, with a greater margin of safety.
The ones that ignored the small ripple in the long grass died.
Successful hunters see patterns. Successful hunters see patterns earlier. Successful hunters can see breaks in patterns earlier, respond to surprise quicker and incorporate the new patterns into their earlier frameworks faster and more seamlessly. Do you see a recurring pattern here?Successful hunters were the first scientists.
Humans are highly evolved pattern recognition experts. They pick up patterns, see breaks in them, are surprised, then incorporate the new patterns into their frameworks. Humans that can do that the best, are the most adaptable. They are the ones that learn the fastest.
Humans outran every other animal on the planet when they stopped relying on hardware upgrades. When humans started using software upgrades to optimise the use of their pathetic hardware, they outstripped the performance of every other animal on the planet.
The software updates happened due to hunting.
The overclocked, high energy consumption software update, was fuelled by the results of successful hunts. And the combination of the software update, optimised to the available hardware, led to us becoming apex predator.
What are your most successful patterns?
Do you get suprised when your patterns fail? What do you do to restructure your patterns of they fail? Do you stress test your patterns? Do you intentionally look for breaks in the pattern? Are you looking for glitches in the matrix, actively? What are those glitches hiding? Is it a predator? Or is it prey?