The Rise of the Metamind

Introduction: Every culture and epoch has had its ideas about the nature of mind and existence. We can reflect upon ourselves, upon others, and upon the world. Do animals do that too? Do they sit around and think that they are because they can think? Are they to be considered mindless if they do not reflect? How did our ability to think beyond the immediately present evolve? The self-awareness implied by 'cogito ergo sum', or 'I think, therefore I am', demands a reflective level of thinking that develops by about age four in children. Only then, recent research suggests, do children begin to reflect on their own mental states. It would be quite difficult, however, to convince people that younger children are mindless - mind can surely exist without being able to reflect upon its own existence. One can know, regardless of whether one knows that one knows. This means that the Cartesian assumption that the mind is necessarily transparent to the self is flawed (cf. Wimmer and Hartl 1991; Gopnik 1993). Instead, the reflective mind, or what I want to call the metamind, seems to depend on mental computations that gradually develop over the first four years of life and that have evolved over the last five million years of human evolution.