Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

Human kinds are categories, groups, and beliefs formed by mental codes combining real world signs and symbols with mental circuits to form perceptions. Human kinds allow people to infer from symbols, create shared culture, and exchange with large and disparate groups of strangers through shared culture. Humans are the only animal with this ability. Human kinds enable our dominance as a species; they also cause harmful beliefs like racism and prejudice.

Darwinism is the evolutionary theory of natural selection originated in Charles Darwin’s work, On the Origin of Species. Human kinds are a product of human evolution, so evolutionary details on genes, pluralism, and altruism are relevant to understanding human kinds and the mental codes that create them.

Mental codes, or neural codes, are the mental processes which translate information into perceptions, memories, meanings, emotions, intentions, and actions. Mental codes create human kinds by translating signs and symbols into perception, which humans use to extrapolate multitudes of nonobvious and nonvisual information. Mental codes exist within the mind and operate via complex circuits spanning the brain in mental maps.