Perception of things as entities with personality also occurs before perception
of things as things. This is particularly true of the action of others,^34 living
others, but we also see the non-living “objective world” as animated, with
purpose and intent. This is because of the operation of what psychologists
have called “the hyperactive agency detector” within us.^35 We evolved, over
millennia, within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most
significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not
things, objects or situations.
The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around, in
predictable form, and in typical, hierarchical configurations, forever, for all
intents and purposes. They have been male or female, for example, for a
billion years. That’s a long time. The division of life into its twin sexes
occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals. It was in a still-
respectable one-fifth of that time that mammals, who take extensive care of
their young, emerged. Thus, the category of “parent” and/or “child” has been
around for 200 million years. That’s longer than birds have existed. That’s
longer than flowers have grown. It’s not a billion years, but it’s still a very
long time. It’s plenty long enough for male and female and parent and child
to serve as vital and fundamental parts of the environment to which we have
adapted. This means that male and female and parent and child are categories,
for us—natural categories, deeply embedded in our perceptual, emotional and
motivational structures.
Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures (particularly, other humans)
were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those
creatures were literally our natural habitat—our environment. From a
Darwinian perspective, nature—reality itself; the environment, itself—is
what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any more fundamental
manner. It is not mere inert matter. Reality itself is whatever we contend with
when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A lot of that is other beings,
their opinions of us, and their communities. And that’s that.
Over the millennia, as our brain capacity increased and we developed
curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the
nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective
world—outside the personalities of family and troupe. And “outside” is not
merely unexplored physical territory. Outside is outside of what we currently