ABSTRACT
The second chapter looks into deep history, when we meet with the first turn in experience. The biblical story of the tree of knowledge and a myth of Prometheus have already illustrated this turn. The first experiential turn occurred in the Old Stone Age. This was the epoch of stone-tool-making cultures before the advent of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. For the survival of living beings, information processing is vital: they react to sensory input according to a stimulus-response scheme that is biologically inherited and sometimes learned by imitation. When consciousness intervenes, this sequence is interrupted, that is, decoupled. Decoupling creates a pause that suspends the sequence of stimulus and response. With this new sequence, we go from perception via conscious awareness to a subsequent response. However, consciousness is also a kind of searchlight that enables subjects to direct their focus also to things outside the immediate stimulus situation. This marks the transition from biological to cultural evolution. This transition becomes evident when the deliberate practice of tool production precedes the use of tools.
