I think you are talking about two different things. One is increasing size of houses during time and the other is various sizes within the same time, the latter being, according to Kohler, a proof for wealth disparities in early agricultural societies. It’s also worth to bear in mind that the family sizes depend on natality and longevity both of which also have to do with genetic makeup. Of course the amount of food and its surplus has equally substantial influence, but if this was the case here, you would also see it in unearthed material culture. And there’s nothing that would suggest that, quite to the contrary — as the person who made that popularization video about Çatalhöyük summed it up — there might have been some kind of social stratification, but it didn’t result in wealth and (visible) status disparities. Ergo, the societies were obviously egalitarian. So, Kohler’s paper, while there’s formally nothing wrong with it, makes my eyes roll.
Here you have another example of clearly egalitarian society at the Vinča-Belo Brdo settlement (a rural type site of Vinča culture dated c. 5200–4900 BC).
So, while it’s obvious that stratified society with wealth and status differences emerged somewhere at some point in time, the question still remains when, where, but especially how. I agree that the transition was almost certainly gradual, but the shift became visible in material culture only with emergence of centralized food storage and redistribution under the supervision of newly emerged class of priests as can be seen in Arslantepe, Uruk, or Eridu in 4th millennium BC (these were also the reasons for rapid development of writing systems as tools for bookkeeping). By that time (3900–3600 BC), warfare was also a common thing (with some hints going as far back as 4400–4200 BC, e.g. Tepe Gawra).
These developments in Levant, Anatolia, and Balkan (shift from egalitarian society toward a one with wealth and status disparities) also roughly correlate with hypothesized start of split in original Proto-Indo-European language (c. 4500 BC), obvious shift from animism to polytheism, and rise of metallurgy. As for climate change, as it seems, the opinions on this are inconclusive. While there are advocates of “a gradual trend toward increased aridity” in Levant, there’s only a single episode of stress (recorder in lake sediments, if I get it) dated more or less a millennium later (3200 BC). Still, an environmental “push” would seem plausible.
Just for comparison, Çatalhöyük was estimated to have a population of 5000–8000 people and people there lived quite fine even without centralized food storage and redistribution, and all other later “inventions”.
As for Kastrup — I guess he clearly specified that by “consciousness” he means “that-which-experiences”. But as I said, I would say some things differently, and I also don’t agree with him on what he calls “second-person perspective”. There’s no such thing. There’s only first person, aka subjective, point of view, thus also what we call “objectivity” is merely subjective, empiric, consensual reality.
I think, he makes himself even more clear in an article where he dismantles decades of Dennett’s snobbish hand-waving and condescending intellectual arrogance.
So, when you ask, “can there be consciousness without life? If the fundamental, cosmic consciousness isn’t alive (let alone personal) in any organic sense, what do we mean by that kind of consciousness?”, I would say that a more appropriate question would be, “What we mean by life?” or, “What means material?”
There’s only one kind of consciousness, it’s personal as it gets, and we are all quite familiar with it. That is, unless one is Daniel Dennett :D
