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Human beings can transcend their existence by communicating thoughts that will persist even after death. An individual's ideas may be communicated by oral tradition, as well as in writing, print, or electronic media. This chapter begins by discussing the nature of external thoughts or mental representations. Philosophers conceptualize the human mind as a material object operating within a unique set of properties. By externalizing information in symbolic form through language, modern humans created a super-brain; in which coded information can move from one brain to another through language. The chapter also tackles the philosophy of technology, as technology is one of the most consequential forms of external thought; and the origin of the mind as provided by the fossil record of thought.

This chapter focuses on the development of the modern mind. Early signs of modernity were limited to polished bone awls and simple geometric designs, and then gradually expanded into paintings, sculptures, and musical instruments. According to Noam Chomsky, what distinguishes the modern mind from the proto-mind is creativity—the ability to recombine elements of mental representations in hierarchical form, resulting to an alternative reality. Creativity is also referred to as the “core property” of language, and language is the primary means of integration of the human super-brain. The super-brain, or the mind, developed in its own way and transcends biological space and time. It accumulates knowledge about the external world through creating novel technologies and improving on them.

This chapter analyzes the development of the super-brain, which brought forth a new phenomenon that functions above the level of an individual organism's brain. The advancement of language and other forms of symbolic communication allowed for the integration of brains within a social group, essentially increasing the computational and recursive power of human thought. An increase in population and settlement size was a consequence of this redesigned human. The super-brain created an alternative ecological place for the human organism: a place subject to recurrent change that allows for potentially unlimited growth. With the emergence of large populations, humans began to redesign the landscape as well as themselves; these recreated landscapes reflected not the evolved patterns of organic life, but the peculiar forms of the mind.

This chapter looks at how humans have developed two features related to the coded information stored in neural networks that made them unique among all living organisms. First, humans have developed the ability to translate information into externalized mental representation. Second, they have developed creativity—the ability to combine and recombine that information with a sufficient number of elements. The subsequent formation of the super-brain among modern human organizations has spurred properties not previously observed in organic evolution, which brings up two questions: what would be the impact on humanity of an entity with vastly superior computational and creative powers than humans? What would be the role of humans in such a world, or of any life-forms for that matter?