Cooking Made Us Human

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and
part of the invented Kevin Kelly
Kevin Kelly has a great line about humans and our symbiotic relationship with
technology. He says we are the creators and we are the created. Of course this
echoes this notion of ontological design that everything we design is designing us
back. We have been in a cybernetic feedback loop with our technologies since the
beginning of early hominids, playing with stone tools, and inscribing their interior
world onto clay tablets with little glyphs of meanings. The minute that we started to
extend our mindware out into the world, we have been turning the mind inside out.
Technology is our second skin, our exoskeletons. Literally we are exteriorizing our
nervous system, our mindware as McKenna likes to say.
And we have been doing this forever, this is the most natural thing in the world. It is
what it means to be human. Kevin Kellys beautiful example is: the moment we
discovered fire, and thus cooking, we all of a sudden created an external stomach
that can pre-digest our food so that we can absorb that many more nutrients from
every meal and not waste all this time eating raw food all day long just to basically
stay nourished. Instead we are freeing up cognitive real-estate, freeing the mind for
other endeavors so essentially externalizing our stomach through fire turned this
technology into a part of us beyond our skin tissue in whose feedback loop and
engagement with said technology opened up a whole new space for a Cambrian
explosion of mind. Fire and cooking essentially made us human. But again the larger
metaphor here, the larger message here is that a symbiotic relationship with these
tools actually is who we are. Our mind is distributed between brains, tools and
technologies and environments. This is who we are. We are, as Andy Clark says, the
natural born cyborg. We are the creators but we are the created. What we create is
creating us back. The feedback loop is a symbol of life, not the DNA molecule. The
feedback loop. The loop. Thats us.