The Dual Response Hypothesis
Our mental response to a situation has two major components:
- An emotional response: how do we feel about the situation?
- A pragmatic response: what can we actually do about it?
Depending on the situation, we may be more concerned about our emotions, and sometimes we are more concerned about what we should actually do.
Sometimes there is nothing that can be done, or there is nothing that needs to be done.
Sometimes we already know that there are things that need to be done, and we need to think about what those things are that we need to do, and too much emotion is just a distraction.
My hypothesis about music is that music emphasizes the emotional response, and strongly de-emphasizes or suppresses the pragmatic response.
If indeed music is some kind of biological adaptation, it follows that it is an adaptation composed of (at least) two distinct (albeit related) features.
Evolutionary Logic
From an evolutionary point of view, if an adaptation consists of two distinct features, then most likely one of those features evolved before the other.
In this particular case, the suppression of pragmatic response is a secondary adaptation. Our emotional response to a situation is a large part of what motivates us to formulate a pragmatic response, and if there isn’t any emotion at all, then there is no motivation to formulate a pragmatic response, so there is nothing that needs suppressing.
So if one of those two features evolved first then it had to be the emphasis of the emotional response.
The implication is that music, or rather the ancestor of music – ie “protomusic” – had the effect of emphasizing or encouraging a strong emotional response to a situation, and it did not particularly prevent or suppress a pragmatic response.
If we consider how this might have worked within a social group of individuals, protomusic was a mechanism for sharing and emphasizing a strong emotional reaction to some situation, in such a manner that individuals in the group would also immediately take part in formulating practical responses to the situation.
This suggests that protomusic evolved in a human ancestor that lived in social groups where those social groups had a higher level of unconditional cooperation compared to anything that we see in modern human societies.
Then, at some point, our ancestors evolved to be less willing to unconditionally solve shared problems, but, they remained interested in the possibility of solving shared problems, subject perhaps to certain conditions.
So the function of protomusic to emphasize a shared emotional response to a situation continued to exist, but, a secondary adaptation appeared, and the effect of this secondary adaptation was to suppress any immediate tendency to join in with a practical response to the situation.
This did not preclude the possibility of eventually taking part in practical action, but it introduced a separation between the initial stage of deciding to experience the emotion that another individual experienced so that you could truly feel how much it mattered to that individual, and the second stage of actually deciding whether or not to take part in practical action (or even whether to bother making the effort to think about what such action might be).
The Unevolution of Unconditional Cooperation
If indeed our ancestors were much more unconditionally cooperative than ourselves, what happened that made them evolve to not be so unconditionally cooperative?
There could have been many aspects of changing lifestyle that changed the calculus of cooperation vs non-cooperation.
But I would suggest two major factors:
- Unconditional cooperation makes more sense in smaller social groups where all individuals are related to each other. At some point our ancestors changed their lifestyle and started living within larger social groups where not everyone was closely related to everyone else.
- Word-based spoken language evolved, and it evolved a level of sophistication that made it easier for individuals to propose extended forms of conditional cooperation. Thus the benefits of cooperation continued to occur, but it no longer made sense to cooperate unconditionally just because you happened to be listening to protomusic (or music).