I wouldn’t put >50% probability on language, because it’s super specific. But it does seem like a pretty unique transition point—there certainly isn’t anything else social, prior to language, that placed super obvious super strong constraints on how one’s mind (or persona) had to be internally/introspectively organized.
Before language, there were a lot more degrees of freedom in how a brain’s computations could ‘appear or be represented to the brain itself’, in order to produce the selected-for output. Afterwards, you suddenly had a sort of invasive, ever-present auditing process checking all sorts of questions about the brain’s self-representations.
If it’s not language, then I’m not sure social selection pressures matter much more (or less) than general planning selection pressures. ‘I need to self-represent in a pretty specific and coherent way in order to keep track of who my enemies and allies are, know what volume to emit my hunger-shriek at in the presence of enemies vs. allies, etc.’ doesn’t seem obviously more compelling to me than ‘I need to self-represent in a pretty specific and coherent way in order to make multi-step physical plans about where to relocate myself, how those hypothetical relocations will affect my internal senses of pain/hunger/lust/fear, and so on.’ And it all sounds pretty unconstraining to me.
I wouldn’t put >50% probability on language, because it’s super specific. But it does seem like a pretty unique transition point—there certainly isn’t anything else social, prior to language, that placed super obvious super strong constraints on how one’s mind (or persona) had to be internally/introspectively organized.
Before language, there were a lot more degrees of freedom in how a brain’s computations could ‘appear or be represented to the brain itself’, in order to produce the selected-for output. Afterwards, you suddenly had a sort of invasive, ever-present auditing process checking all sorts of questions about the brain’s self-representations.
If it’s not language, then I’m not sure social selection pressures matter much more (or less) than general planning selection pressures. ‘I need to self-represent in a pretty specific and coherent way in order to keep track of who my enemies and allies are, know what volume to emit my hunger-shriek at in the presence of enemies vs. allies, etc.’ doesn’t seem obviously more compelling to me than ‘I need to self-represent in a pretty specific and coherent way in order to make multi-step physical plans about where to relocate myself, how those hypothetical relocations will affect my internal senses of pain/hunger/lust/fear, and so on.’ And it all sounds pretty unconstraining to me.