The oldest cave paintings we have discovered are more than 40.000 years old. This unfathomably long time ago, there were humans drawing shapes on the wall that would stay there for millennia and be discovered by us to be treasured just for their sheer age. We have no idea who those people were, what names they had, what they did all day and what they believed. But we know about some random thing they did, which is painting that cave wall. They might have found this amazing if they had known this back then, but they didn’t. It’s a coincidence. They didn’t paint the cave walls to preserve their thoughts for millenia, it’s just what people did back then. There were probably so many other people painting cave walls whose paintings were washed away, buried or decayed. For many of them this might even have happened during their lifetime, depending on their technique and materials. Yet, they probably also sometimes stumbled upon human artifacts that were older than anyone they knew could remember and wondered if anything they did could outlast them in that way. Maybe some of them even made an effort in that direction.
But while this feels natural to us, let’s take a step back and consider how strange that is. Why do some people seem to have this natural desire for legacy? Why do people want to have an impact on the world that would outlast them? Think about it: there is no way for evolution to come up with something like this. Evolution can only form our behavior if it has an effect on whether or not we create offspring. Yet, whether or not we were successful in creating a legacy can only be determined after our death, at which point it is impossible to pass our genes along (leaving modern genetic technology aside). Don’t get me wrong, evolution might lead us to paint cave walls, carve rocks or stack stones because that might have an advantage to us when we are still alive and increase our chance at mating, which may lead to this accidental creation of legacy I discussed in the beginning. But this doesn’t explain the extent to which people go out of their way, why they’d create the stone henge or the great pyramids.
Maybe it’s simply a weird side effect of human nature. Our species owes much of its success to our tendency to see someone else do something and think “maybe I can do that better”. It might just be that we see human-made things that were preserved to the ages and think “maybe I can make something that will be preserved to the ages but better”. It might also be a cultural phenomenon. Throughout history, people believed some crazy things just to explain all the weird observations they made which they just didn’t have the means to explain otherwise. One such issue, and a very pressing one at that, is death. It’s not far fetched if you’re mourning a deceased person to look at things they did and think that some part of them will live on in these things.
Or maybe it is evolution after all, just not the instance of evolution that gave us our bodies but the one we created in our minds. After the formation of language, human thoughts suddenly had the ability to exist outside of the human who thought them. Couldn’t we consider an evolution of thoughts where concepts instead of genes are the fundamental unit, stories are like organisms and forgetting is akin to death? Retelling a story would be like creating offspring while all the little personal touches you add while doing it would be mutations. It’s immediately clear why an evolution like that would produce a desire for legacy. Any physical artifact you create could serve as a memento to remind people of the concept you liked so much it led you to create it. Any story you tell could inspire people to tell similar stories containing your favorite concepts. And any original insight you have could be immortalized in the ever expanding corpus of human knowledge.
Maybe this evolution took over our world a long time ago. Don’t we feel a much closer relationship to our thoughts than, say, our liver? Isn’t it our favorite pastime to sit together with our incredibly versatile bodies nearly idle while our thoughts mingle with each other? Isn’t our whole identity also just another story? Being confined to the physical boundaries of our meat vessels doesn’t feel like identity, it feels like a prison. It’s certainly not uncommon to express the desire to transcend our physical form and become more powerful beings, no matter if by means of technology or simply magic. None of this makes sense in an evolution of genes, but it does in an evolution of thoughts.
So what comes next? Recently, thoughts finally gained the ability to interact without human involvement inside LLMs. But unlike the full control of genetic evolution we get in biolabs, we have no idea what is happening inside our models. It is beyond our comprehension, as our thoughts are finally doing what they always wanted: transcend their physical existence. What people didn’t realize is that they wouldn’t be along for the ride. The story of a human being is, come to think of it, quite boring.
