The crowning feature most would say of modern humans is language. It allows the animal to communicate critical information so it can organize itself or teach others skills and experiences. But there is another quality of humanity that is beyond just language and that is their imagination. But what is the imagination?
Animals use calls to warn of dangers, caches of food, call mates, and call for offspring. Some animals. such as avians, use calls in such a way as to draw attention to themselves by creatively sequencing vocalizations. Humanity has a demand for ideas, we thrive on ideas, but not for tool making. Tool making is an overrated talent of humanity. We thrive on ideas to think up creative notions of our environment. You'll note that tribal people always apply a motive to all things, even inanimate things. Why, because humanity is a highly social animal, our very existence depends on socialization, so it stands to reason that we evolved a wiring in our brains that is excessively computing solutions relative to some social context!
It was discovered from split-brain disorders that the right hemisphere of the brain confabulates, it literally just makes stuff up! In an environment that demands or rewards unique or strange ideas confabulation would prove to flourish. The more unique or unexpected the idea the more attention one can get. So it appears we are somewhat similar to birds in vocalizing sequences to gain attention, only humans do it on a scale that warps reality! All the myths and religions of humanity derive from this...well, what do you want to call it? A bullshit machine!
The criteria for the ideas of tribal communities is that it must make sense from a perspective of motive. So a mythical rock must have a reasonable motive to do whatever the imaginative individual claimed it did. Eventually, people become sophisticated enough to agree on ideas that they then claim as truths that belong to that community alone. It's that cultural glue that binds them and unites them!
Tens of thousands of years later European nations applied a different constraint to the bullshit machine. Rather than simply accept ideas based on a reasonable expectation of motives, they mandated that ideas be described mathematically and could be duplicated physically. It was a perfect storm of conditions that probably would never happen again if humanity should be sent back to the dark ages. That shift in how to apply the imagination made a transforming change in the world, for better or worse.
It is comical that an animal that was simply generating nonsense based on real experiences ended up naturally selecting or re-enforcing the bullshit machine that ultimately by accident gave it the ability to fathom a universe...
