Hybrid Consciousness and the Cultural Evolution of Leadership
Abstract
Ninety percent of human societies practise institutionalised alterations of consciousness. Across independent traditions, communities that develop governed protocols for sustained engagement with non-human organisms produce practitioners whose hybrid consciousness becomes the basis of social authority. Drawing on 27 months of apprenticeship-based fieldwork in the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon and comparative analysis of the 2,300-year Buddhist Bodhi tree tradition in Sri Lanka, I argue that inter-species contact protocols function as culturally evolved adaptive technologies that solve a recurrent problem in human social complexity: producing leaders whose authority is corruption-resistant and community-verifiable. The prestige these protocols generate is metabolically costly to acquire, continuously verified through public diagnostic performance, and resistant to capture because it depends on ongoing relationship maintenance with non-human agents rather than a one-time credential. Framed within cultural group selection, the convergence of this protocol structure across independent traditions suggests selective pressures on human sociality rather than local cultural production. The argument carries implications for cultural evolution theory, the study of religion and ritual, and contemporary encounters with non-human intelligence.
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BibTeX
@misc{senanayaka2026hybrid,
title = {{Hybrid Consciousness and the Cultural Evolution of Leadership}},
author = {Rebekah Sēnānāyaka},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/cqywj_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cqywj_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Hybrid Consciousness and the Cultural Evolution of Leadership
AU - Rebekah Sēnānāyaka
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/03
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/cqywj_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/cqywj_v1/
AB - Ninety percent of human societies practise institutionalised alterations of consciousness. Across independent traditions, communities that develop governed protocols for sustained engagement with non-human organisms produce practitioners whose hybrid consciousness becomes the basis of social authority. Drawing on 27 months of apprenticeship-based fieldwork in the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon and comparative analysis of the 2,300-year Buddhist Bodhi tree tradition in Sri Lanka, I argue that inter-species contact protocols function as culturally evolved adaptive technologies that solve a recurrent problem in human social complexity: producing leaders whose authority is corruption-resistant and community-verifiable. The prestige these protocols generate is metabolically costly to acquire, continuously verified through public diagnostic performance, and resistant to capture because it depends on ongoing relationship maintenance with non-human agents rather than a one-time credential. Framed within cultural group selection, the convergence of this protocol structure across independent traditions suggests selective pressures on human sociality rather than local cultural production. The argument carries implications for cultural evolution theory, the study of religion and ritual, and contemporary encounters with non-human intelligence.
ER -