Language and the Development of Higher Consciousness
Evolution of Consciousness
As change in the cosmos goes, human culture has been an explosively rapid phenomenon. The cave paintings at Lascaux in southern France date from about 25,000 years ago (YA). The Great Pyramids of Egypt were built about 4500 YA, and the vast majority of what we would view as our own civilization has occurred since that time.
Our developed intellectual culture, which includes literature, history, philosophy and science has been intimately connected with, and to large extent dependent on writing. Once practical and efficient writing had been invented, culture exploded in all its dimensions. The poems of Homer, which had been preserved orally for generations, were written down. Among the Hebrews, the writings later gathered into the Bible were committed to paper or parchment. The Ionian philosophers, about 600 BCE, over a relatively short period of time raised a broad number of very general questions about nature and the human condition, and attempted to give a very broad range of very general answers. Science and philosophy were off and running. We are the direct beneficiaries of that legacy.
At the beginning of our vast mental adventure, seers and thinkers made bold conjectures about how the world came into existence. They puzzled over what the elements were that constituted the things they saw around them, whence emerged earth, air, fire and water. [i]
Early cultures tended to assume either that the human race had always existed, or that it was inserted in some marvelous or magical manner into a world which in turn was created in some marvelous or magical manner. With no understanding either of the duration of the ambient universe or its biological processes, our curious ancestors had to take things as they were, or at least as they appeared to be.
The creation myths of the Bible, according to which God created the world in stages, or days, with man and woman as the last products of his creative imagination, have been remarkably stable elements in our cultural heritage.[ii] Western spirituality has been permeated with the moral adventures of our first parents, with the occurrence of original sin, and the introduction into the world of strife, moral consciousness and death. Adam and Eve covered their nakedness in the presence of God; Cain slew Abel. A little less familiar has been the myth of Pandora, who, rather like Eve, yielded to her curiosity and was somehow responsible for letting pain, sorrow and struggle into the world.
A “discovery” of quite recent times is our evolution over slow time from the backdrop of biological proliferation on planet Earth. Prior to the last century or so, we had no real idea of our gradual emergence from a matrix much deeper and broader than ourselves. Much less did we have any insight into the processes by which this might have occurred. During the 19th Century, there was a growing suspicion that the life forms we see, including ourselves, had descended from animal ancestors which had lived eons previously, rather than having been created suddenly as recounted in Genesis. Although by no means was he alone, evolutionary theory was most clearly and strikingly advanced by Charles Darwin,[iii] the English naturalist. Darwin found himself at a crucial nexus in the history of human thought. In the long run, he proved to be a pioneer in areas the complexity of which he little appreciated, but he breached important veins which we continue to mine.
Even today there are many who, for one reason or another, resist the central insight. The clearest reason for this is because the evolutionary concept seems to be at crucial variance with our religious traditions, and with a sense of a uniquely special role in creation for man. Particularly among certain social groups, there is continuing difficulty in accepting evolution as the process of man’s origin. [iv] And it is not as though theories of evolution are without their problems. Central to our current investigation is a conviction that evolutionary theory is yet incomplete, although convincing in its general outlines. Many aspects of the evolutionary story continue to be wreathed in obscurity. There are critical areas in the evolutionary landscape, both philosophically and empirically, which beckon urgently to our curiosity and investigative effort. Specifically, I do not believe that natural selection as it is usually propounded is sufficient to explain the evolutionary development of what interests us most as humans: our own brains and the way we use them. [v]
Critical Path
Functionally, what sets us aside from the other creatures of field and forest is unquestionably our mind. Quarts of ink have been poured out in an effort to disabuse us of the thought that we are anything special in an infinitely more extensive universe, yet there is nothing quite like us in the world that we know.[vi] In individual perceptual areas there are other animals with sharper sensations than our own. Eagles see better at a distance. Dogs distinguish smells much more precisely than we can. And so forth. What sets us aside is our capacity to conceptualize, to think, and to express ourselves through adaptive communication. As Cicero said, “Mens cujusque, is est quisque.” [vii] Our minds make us to be who and what we are. Our minds, however, did not spring forth as did Athena, fully armed, from the head of Zeus.
The critical path taken by evolution from primeval awareness to the state of developed mental function, in all its wonderful reaches, was the physical enlargement and increase in functional capacity of the primate brain. The earliest proto-primates lived about 60,000,000 years ago, during the period after the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Monkeys appeared 10,000,000 years ago, and discernible hominids perhaps 5,000,000 years ago. Lucy, an Australopithecus and one of our earliest identified ancestors, roamed northeast Africa about 3 and a half million prior to this morning’s coffee.[viii]
There are many differences between us and our distant hominid ancestors. It is critical to realize that these changes occurred in close relationship to each other, and not as independent phenomena. These modifications of earlier systems include full bipedality and upright posture, a fully usable hand with opposable thumb, a skull riding on top of rather than in front of the spinal column, a smaller face, and, most importantly, a much larger and vastly remodeled brain. All the functions and structures of less highly developed animals are in some fashion preserved in the human brain, but there is a much more extensive development of the cerebral cortex, and specifically of the cortices of the frontal lobes. The human brain, though unmistakably mammalian, underwent profound restructuring and modification. [ix]
It is this specifically human brain that enables us to think and function in the way we do. It is the critical path of brain development, over millennia of evolution, which brought about our own emergence, and which enables us to display a vastly wider repertoire of actions and operations – up to and including standing here and talking about these very things: understanding evolution is an evolutionary phenomenon itself, and one that we are in an immeasurably better position to think and talk about than any of our species even a short generation or so ago.
The evolution of our brains set us forth on an immensely challenging adventure, one continuing even as we gather here and communicate.
Evolutionary Explosion
The evolution of the human brain happened with an incredible rapidity, by evolutionary standards. For comparison, birds may have taken 100,000,000 years or so to evolve from early forms into animals we can recognize as the ancestors of current avian populations. As a biological family, mammals developed at about the same time as the dinosaurs, although it looked for many, many millennia that the dinosaurs would be the dominant animals on the planet. That didn’t happen, or at least their dominance was passing. Whatever cataclysm it was that occurred, the little warmblooded critters scurrying around under the feet, so to speak, of the thunder lizards were to be the biological victors in earth’s drama – else history would have taken a far different turn. The great apes, our closest relatives in the mammalian radiation, developed over several millions of years.
We and chimpanzees shared a last common ancestor probably about 7 million years ago.
There is still much about our own evolution that is obscure, with misty edges, but we have already come a long way down the path of discovery, and the outlines of our ancestry have been fairly well identified, with respect both to morphological change, and also to the approximate duration of prehistoric periods.
The Australopithecus nicknamed “Lucy,” which was discovered in 1974, lived about 3,500,000 years ago in East Africa. What made Lucy such a smashing discovery was the near completeness of her skeletal remains. Her definitely hominid brain was not huge –approximately 350 cc in size, about the size of a grapefruit. In time, Homo erectus was a species of hominid that flourishedin Africa as long ago as 2 million years. Homo erectus probably was the first hominid to migrate out of Africa. He (she) had a brain 900 – 1200 cc in volume, verging sizewise into the lower range of brain development in homo sapiens (us). The remains and tools of homo erectus are found widely dispersed throughout Africa and Asia.
There doubtless were intermediate species of hominid of whom we do not have surviving relics – the fossil record is tantalizingly incomplete — but, making approximations which have to be order-of-magnitude correct, the developing hominid brain doubled in size between 2 million years ago and two hundred thousand years ago, which is about the time that the Neanderthals appeared. This is explosive, in evolutionary terms. Note that size is not the only important aspect of brain evolution. I focus here on size because that is an easily identifiable external parameter. Even more important is the internal organization and differentiation of the brain, but size is sufficient to consider for our purposes here. If the size of the brain increased over these centuries, as I’m sure it did, the functional capacity of the organ increased manifold over that. These creatures quite likely had highly developed communicational abilities.
The history of hominid development is a fascinating topic in itself, but what we are in pursuit of here is the mechanisms of this remarkable evolution, beyond the external historical fact. Our theories perforce are to an extent speculative. It is hard to imagine how we might put together critical experiments to “prove” critical points. However, to create an important focus, one principle of which I have become strongly convinced is that Darwinian natural selection is insufficient to explain the entire process.
Support of Language
The vast increase in functioning wetware in hominid populations clearly was not necessary for survival on the planet. All living animals have been able to survive with the equipment they had, and some of them quite handsomely, at that. What the insight of natural selection does confirm absolutely is that the parents and more remote ancestors of all living things had to survive at least until they were old enough to reproduce, otherwise they (the animals around us) wouldn’t have been active participants in life’s continuing saga. So there is a difference between survivability and resulting purpose. Of, if you don’t like the concept of purpose, usefulness. Let us say there is a difference between survivability and usefulness.
From 2,000,000 years ago on there was, on average, an incessant generation to generation increase in the size and complexity of the functioning wetware of our remote ancestors. That is the overwhelming summary fact through the course of those centuries of centuries of centuries. Indistinguishable on the short horizon, but absolutely necessary for what interests us most: our own evolution. If we can come to understand what the process was of this immensely complex summary phenomenon, then we will have unwrapped one of the most profound riddles of the universe. And I think we have come far enough down the highway of discovery to formulate reasonable new insights into this objectively murky process. We are, I believe, prying open that particular door, and are able to peek into the bright room beyond.[x]
The Importance of Language
The net result of the remarkable development of the hominid brain over the last million years was the support of symbolic communication via the marvelous vehicle of language. The emergence of homo linguisticus. What I surmise here is that the development of language was not simply a critical phenomenon, but also that it played an intrinsic etiologic role in evolutionary process. The development of language was not only the result of cerebral development, but also a dominant cause. Evolution is a matter of life’s lifting itself by its own bootstraps, though not haphazardly. This is true of life’s entire symphony, but, for our interests here, specifically so of the evolution of the human brain. If so, how might that be?
Woofs to Words
An important step towards the development of language was the development of a capacity among animals to make situation specific sounds.
There was already a very high degree of development in the biological machinery of mammals; no doubt about that, and I do not want to suggest otherwise. A lion roaring on the Serengeti plain is a wonder to behold, in all his strength and glory. Too bad, perhaps, that he cannot be reflexly aware of that. But, he’s king of the jungle, and that’s enough.
Fido, my faithful canine pal, has enough brain power to perceive and distinguish in his vocalizations a reasonably wide repertoire of specific sounds. A contented growl lying in front of the fire digesting dinner. An aggressive, threatening bark at a potential intruder. A cringing whine when yielding to an overpowering danger. A clearly hurting yelp when responding to an inflicted wound. Fido can’t write a book, but he can be exquisitely communicative.
The lion’s – or Fido’s – brain has developed an integrated system capable of perceiving complex sensory input, responding to that on a whole-animal level, and producing sound-specific response. This is already a remarkably developed system, and is understood to be moreso as we understand the neurological complexity it takes to produce it. It’s a long way from the chemotaxis of paramecium. But, in the other direction, it’s still a long way from real language.
As the brain developed in homo erectus, the networks available for complex experience likewise developed. What I hypothesize here – or perhaps better to say analogize here – is that the capacity to produce internal neuro-symbolizations increased. In the dog, there is an internal nerve network activation which represents symbolically the specificity of perception-integration-response. This capacity, analogously, increased greatly in the evolving hominid brain. There developed a much broader repertory of brain symbolization. The wetware overhead to accomplish this was not just considerable. It represented, in fact, the most outrageously complicated phenomenon in the known universe. No mean feat!
As the brain developed, so did the capacity of the organism to assign specific sounds to specific elements in experience. Fido’s bark at the approach of someone to the evening camp site became, mutatis mutandis, a much more specific sound, representing friend or foe. Over time, naturalistic sounds became words. The extra 1000 cc of evolving brain tissue did not occur so that modern man could wear a larger hat, but rather so that internal symbolism and language could be supported. Please note that the language of purpose is used as shorthand. It is not intended to imply conscious intentionality.
The essence of the evolutionary process was the availability of more complicated neural networks to allow for more flexible and more extensive symbolization. Doubtless there were intervening evolutionary steps between homo erectus and homo neanderthalis. Erectus disappears from the fossil record around 400,000 years ago; our earliest Neanderthal remains date from 200,000 years onward. If luck is with us, further discovery will continue to fill in the gaps in our family tree. The probability is high that intervening forms will be discovered and classified. The more complete the ancient record, the more complete can be our understanding.
Consciousness Complex
As we have mentioned, the complex of structures and functions necessary for higher consciousness developed in concert, rather than in isolation. The fossil record does not supply us with the data to demonstrate this directly, but by solid inference, there was co-development of the elements of reflex consciousness rather than sequential development. Our increased understanding of basic brain physiology combined with modern techniques of brain imaging and measurement strongly supports that there is high specificity in the relationship between patterns of brain activation and the phenomena of experience. Discovery points in this direction, and it is reasonable to conclude that continuing experimentation will only continue to fill in the details. The principle: brain activation patterns symbolize quanta and qualia of experience with a high degree of specificity.[xii]
At the woof-to-word stage, relying on increased functional brain capacity, our prehistoric ancestors invented more precise sounds to represent more precise aspects of experience.
An important point to make is that although the experience complex is a unified entity in itself, we need to identify component parts in order to be able to understand it. The pattern of brain activation is comprised of the neurons, tracts and nuclei which go to make it up. Brain science on daily basis is adding more and more to our knowledge of how these elements are structured and how they operate.
The use of more specific sounds created elements we call words. The physical production of these more specific sounds was made possible by development in the organs of speech: larynx, throat, teethe, tongue and lips. And, on the experience side of the phenomenal complex we can identify the idea of which the word stands as symbol.
What occurred, from Lucy, through homo erectus, and homo neanderthalis, to modern man, homo sapiens sapiens, was this: a progressive development of the consciousness complex, comprised of increase in brain size and power, more flexible brain activation patterns, words rather than woofs, and ideas (the experiential side of the complex).
That’s what happened. There’s more to understand about how it came about.
What’s Missing in Darwin
The overarching reason philosophers as well as religious thinkers throughout the ages tended to “get it wrong” about the origin and nature of man was because they had no foggiest idea of the antiquity of evolution or the complex specificity of the brain – consciousness matrix. And currently, although we have made truly great progress in this area, there is more we still need to know empirically, and there remains an even greater project of integrating this knowledge into our culture and philosophical and spiritual traditions.
Darwinian natural selection says two things: 1) that there is a certain amount variation which occurs naturally in species, and that 2) those variations which contribute to improved reproductive success are those carried into later generations.
A huge weakness of this formulation is that it gives no hint as to how variations occur. There is no suggestion, most particularly in human evolution, how it is that the striking increase in brain structure and function came about. Simply to say that variation (and in this case strikingly increased structural and functional complexity) just happens is critically lacking in explanatory power, and in fact begs the question. The mechanisms of increased complexity need to be elucidated.
The second major weakness is that an assumption has to be made that the functional increase which certainly occurred contributed to greater reproductive success. The overall evidence for the universality of this as a functional principle is in fact very weak.
The idea is an important one in the development of understanding of our origins, but it is in itself woefully incomplete. Darwin had very little concept of the complexity or mechanics of biological reproduction. He knew nothing of the cellular and informational aspects of generation. Darwin was a pioneer knocking at the door. Far too frequently, thinkers believe natural selection is enough. It isn’t. Believing that all you need is Darwin to explain evolution is like saying that all you need in astronomy is Galileo.
Human Evolution
Applying this thinking to our chief interest, our own evolution, there is no evidence that satisfies me that chance species variation could result in the persistent march made over the millennia towards the complex phenomenon of increased brain volume and functionality (throughout the consideration, keep in mind the concurrent changes in other organ systems). I suggest that this is a much greater leap of faith than the hypothesis we will develop here, and, in fact, ranks nicely with belief in the tooth-fairy. There is simply inadequate evidence for a claim that chance variation could produce significant cerebral development.
Secondly, it seems to me to be an equal begging of the question to claim that the mechanism of preserving changes which occurred was their contribution to the reproductive success of their owners. There is no evidence to support the thesis that smarter hominids were better reproducers.
Certainly we can say that, through a kind of mass effect, what has allowed the human species to dominate the world ecosystem is its intelligence overall considered, but that is quite a different matter. I conclude that ascribing the evolution of man to natural selection is an unfounded assertion, and, additionally, one that is unnecessary.
Reading the fossil record and considering the inadequacy of natural selection to produce the rapid brain development which we know indisputably to have occurred, we need to look to other aspects of the situation to explain how it was that we went from Lucy to Einstein in 3 million years (approx.). This marvelous development occurred while the human animal was grappling with his external and internal environment. It happened in the thick of experience itself. It seems to me inescapable that the essence of this struggle had a direct part to play in the process. What was going on was not simply that there was a certain amount of chance variation among individuals, but that the experience of individuals was in fact adding to, and to an extent guiding, the process.
The specificities of the human brain and its marvelous capacities were hammered out on the anvil of experience. What this implies is the truthfulness of what in many circles amounts to an evolutionary heresy. To wit, that acquired characteristics are inheritable. Hark! This means that Lamarck was right, after all! So be it.[xiii]
Molecular Informatics Hypothesis
The problem with Lamarckian theory is not that there is no external evidence for it, but that no one could see how it could possibly work. If something is to be passed to later generations, what has to occur is that its coding has to be encrypted in the gonadal genome. That is, it needs to be coded into the DNA of the primary sex organs. So, if we are to assert a belief in Lamarckian inheritance, we must assume the burden of a reasonable hypothesis how it might work.
The rough architecture of the brain is established under the direction and impetus of the DNA replicated in each cell of a developing embryo, which had been initially received from the DNA of parental egg and sperm. That is a whole chapter in embryonic science, and our knowledge is still evolving, but that’s the nub of it. However, it is equally clear that only the rough architecture of the brain is inherited from parents. The fine tuning and ultimate functioning of the brain depends to large extent on the actual experience of the individual. The formative response of brain tissue to experience represents another whole chapter in evolving neuroscience, but, again, the nub of it is that the end structural and functional state of the human brain emerges only in the cauldron of experience.
The question for us would be, at this point, how could this experiential development of the brain be messaged back from the end-organ (brain) to the gonadal DNA? My thesis at this point is that there is strong reason for the conviction that this occurs, otherwise the brain would not have evolved so rapidly. This wasn’t merely chance mutation preserved through increased reproductivity. It must have been an affirmative process, to borrow legalistic terminology.
The most likely mechanism, it seems to me, is that end-organ development is somehow recorded in the molecular informatics system and thence carried back in the serum protein fraction for transcription into the gonadal DNA. The more we learn about physiology, the more it becomes evident that the molecular informatics systems of the body are involved in most of the major functions of the organism. There is no reason to suppose that this same system is not be involved in the fashion described in the core processes of evolution. I think it is. At this level, I have no empirical data to support this theory. This hypothesis represents a “best fit” for the phenomena we are tasked to explain. But assuredly more basic research would be required to pass this thought from hypothesis to fact.
Extension of Words
Whether or not the Bible is in any sense revelatory is well outside the scope of our interests here. But, it seems to me, on a literary basis, that it unquestionably contains highly prescient and insightful descriptions of the human condition.
I find it intriguing to discover that the author of Genesis has the man (Adam) naming the other animals, “When the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, he brought them to the man to see what he would call them; for that which the man called each of them would be its name.” [xiv] Whatever was the conscious intent of the author, it seems to me that this contains a deep mythic truth. The processes of evolution having extended human brain capacity, names were given to the things in the environment. Naming things was not merely the result of, but a contributing cause of, evolving brain.
This is the woof-to-word phenomenon. Other primates swinging through the branches developed a repertory of calls representing different situations to their brothers and sisters. Men, via increased wetware, assigned words. Adam named the other animals.
The increase in brain volume and power brought about an increased capacity to symbolize. Words (extended naturalistic sounds) of their very nature “stood for” things. Words so understood were the beginnings and the raw material of language. Over time, the level of abstraction of language increased. Similarities were noticed, and terms were invented to refer to classes of things. The physical foundation of mental activity was, as we now know, the activation of highly specific brain circuitry, comprising neurons, nuclei and cells. Neuronal activation was in fact the biological symbol for whatever it was that might have been held in consciousness at the time.
The process itself of putting names to things – more specific woofs – caused the brain to proliferate in the individuals performing the operations, and if those processes could be reflected back to the gonadal genome, they could be transmitted to offspring, as, indeed, I believe they were. Once the system of brain symbolization became established, consciousness built on its own processes. A reflex sense of the unity and existence of the person was built, so that humans could report on their own experience and develop a sense of their own personality.
The speech system began with an ability to make sound responses to things or situations. With the vast increase in brain function, this ability was extended to a broader range of responses and a concomitant broader range of reality aspects that could be recognized. This almost certainly occurred to a significant extent during the ascendancy of homo erectus, paralleling the marvelous phenomenon of brain growth that occurred during that period. By the time modern man appeared on the scene, the processes of brain growth and the development of language had already occurred. Did the Neanderthals have well-developed language? I am strongly convinced they did, on physiological grounds. It is thoroughly clear that their brains and heads had evolved to a level where they were highly similar to those of Cro-Magnon (us). It makes no sense to me at all to suppose that the Neanderthals developed all the physical machinery of speech, and that actual speech was then developed on top of that, at a later date. It is instructive to note that all the aboriginal tribes we have run into in modern times have highly developed languages, with vast vocabularies and sophisticated grammars.
Writing
Five thousand years ago, starting most clearly with the Egyptians, humans made the discovery that their words could be represented by written symbols, and hieroglyphic writing was invented. There seems to be something magic about committing ideas to writing, and the written symbolic system of the Egyptians was largely the possession of rulers and the priestly cast, evident from the very name of the hieroglyphs: “holy scratches.”[xv]
This represented a great leap forward. Oral speech is very fleeting. It exists only as it is produced. It can have great effect when heard, but these insubstantial air vibrations disappear as soon as produced, and the memory of man has serious limitations. Oral traditions build and have a relative permanence among the peoples who harbor them, but they are imprecise and lop off detail. The past becomes “long ago” and exploits of ancestors come to be preserved in hero mythologies.
The marvel of written language is that events and ideas establish an external symbolic life of their own, capable of indefinite preservation and independent of the media on which they are recorded. As far as the total experience of the race is concerned, writing is a very recent phenomenon. Fully modern man was present throughout Europe and elsewhere from roughly 50,000 years ago onward. We have learned to write only during the last 5,000 of those years, and indeed human history and the history of writing have been intricately and essentially intertwined. One could not have happened without the other. The invention of a true alphabet was one of the most shaping projects in our history. Not the product of any single mind, the system arose in the Near East and Mediterranean basin during the second millennium BCE, with some proto-evidence during the millennium before that.
Letters have no conceptual significance in themselves: they stand for the elemental sounds that make up words. An easy enough concept, once it is invented, but it took us a long time to get around to it, and most, if not all, human alphabets spring from a common source. Alphabetic writing has not been invented many times in different places.
Two dozen or so completely arbitrary little squiggles, recorded on any number of physical substrates, come to represent with a high level of specificity the entire range of human thought and experience. There are nuances of individual experience which challenge an author to express, but the trade-off in terms of broader communication is well worth it. And, that aspect of it gives poets and creative artists something to do.
Once the writing system is created, it can be taught and learned with a certain measure of psychic pain, but with a very high level of reliability and reproduceability. Essential mastery can be imparted in the early years of grammar school to the vast majority of our children.
Phases of Evolution
Our picture of human evolution is now emerging much more completely before our eyes.
Our objective is to explain and understand the evolution of mind in the universe. What we do with that insight represents our future history on the planet, and indeed in the cosmos, but, we have to take things stepwise. The problem with our earlier efforts to limn the future of the race is that we tried to build the upper stories of the edifice without adequate empirical foundations, and without having adequately constructed the lower stories first.
Once mankind walked around on the planet, and once he and she developed language, writing and culture, the critical path of evolution ceased being physiological and verged rapidly into the psychological, the spiritual. As evolutionary process developed symbolic systems, the path of evolution commandeered those systems, and that’s where the future of evolution has occurred. This is a long way from natural selection. It’s not that natural selection doesn’t work in its proper area. It’s simply that natural selection is crashingly insufficient. As higher systems evolved, they were enlisted in the process of evolution itself, and became, in fact, the pathway for the continuation of the evolutionary process. Truth, and its pursuit, rather than biological survival, became a dominant mechanism of evolution. Later steps in evolution have not been randomly produced; further, they have not been retained because of their contribution to reproductive success. [xvi]
When our friend Galileo saw Jupiter’s planets through his primitive lenses, the death knell of geocentricity sounded not because the theory contributed to Galileo’s increased reproductivity, but because the race saw it to be true. This continuing process is, as a matter of fact, what we are about. We end up with the unanticipated but inescapable conclusion that curiosity and its satisfaction becomes a leading determinant in the evolutionary process. As more powerful symbolic systems were produced through cultural mechanics they have become the dominant vessels for continuation of the process. Perhaps curiosity kills cats. I do not know. I do know that curiosity has guided the later evolution of the race.
Ongoing Evolution
Here then is the vision. Natural selection played a critical role in the production of life, and is still operative in earth’s biosphere. As evolutionary process however ascended the ladder of increasing organization, other constructive feedback mechanisms inserted themselves in the evolutionary stream and have played increasingly substantive roles. At some phase, most significantly in the evolution of the hominid brain, experience became a necessary element, and evolution became increasingly self-inducing, most likely through molecular informatics. Over the last million years +/-, as language first, and then writing, were developed, we have produced an emergent secondary genome, the genome of our recorded intellectual and spiritual traditions. And that’s not carried in our DNA but in our literature, our science and our mathematics; in the libraries of the world, and more recently in the digitizing and networking of recorded information. The World Wide Web is not just a clever technology. It lies directly in the path of continuing evolutionary emergence. And from generation to generation of our race, the process is recreated in and added to the consciousness of individuals and organizations. The vital interaction between individuals and the cultural genome continues.[xvii]
There is an urgent forward vector in the process, and that is where the future of evolution lies, assuming we forebear from engineering our own destruction. The process has given us increasing power over the basic energy forces in the universe. The possibility emerges that political and self-interested forces could commandeer the technologies developed within the evolutionary stream in ways that could extinguish the evolutionary stream itself. That is a specter which, now that we are here, we will ever have hovering in the background.
Consciousness
Can we erase the murky margin between things in the external world, let’s just say “things,” and consciousness. Our project is not complete, to be sure, but we have come a long country mile down the road. There is first a need to define and describe fully elements in the process. And, beyond that, there is a much larger but even more important task of fitting these new insights into the matrix of our spiritual history and traditions.
One overarching conclusion that we can draw seems to be that consciousness and spirituality are not phenomena grafted suddenly or magically into our universe, but rather phenomena emergent from the backdrop of matter by very specific and now definable processes. The adventure can be envisioned as the story of the evolution of mind from the womb of the material universe. Mind not grafted onto, but emergent from matter.
A significant core focus is the mental sign produced in the living human brain (and in the brains of less highly developed species to some degree). Activation of neuronal circuits is the living experience of biological symbols. Understanding this is crucial to the understanding of consciousness. The critical insight is that brain activation is immediately and directly symbolic. There is no need, and it is only confusing, to identify “something else” making the brain symbol intelligible. The lived symbol is understanding. The brain symbol can “stand for” just about anything in either internal or external experience. Getting this straight is the core of comprehending comprehension.
Mind Events = Brain Events
If this is understood, it follows close behind that there is no distinction between brain events and mind events. Briefly, mind events are brain events. The phenomenon is unitary. But, there are two “sides” to it. The biological phenomenon is the pattern of activation of brain circuitry, which can be complex beyond description, but highly specific. The pattern of brain activation symbolizes some perceived aspect of reality (that is endlessly rich and variable). That is the content of cognitive experience. The “other side” of the process is the experience of the symbol by the knowing subject. This can be highly abstract or quite sensibly concrete. The critical point is that that’s all there is: there isn’t anything “else.” Cognition is the experience of the brain symbol, which can be representative of anything. The symbolizing character of the brain symbol can be noted to be “arbitrary” in the sense that “meaning” is assigned beyond any necessary naturalistic nexus.
In the passage from “woof” to “word,” the symbolization is conventional rather than naturalistically determined. Words assume meaning within the loom of language, but naturalistic determination has been left far in the wake of the process. Every language has its store of core words derived from imitation of sounds in sensory experience. We dub such words onomatopoietic. Bang! Slither. Strike. Hush! Crack! They are essential elements in the art of creative poetry. Most words, however, are pretty far from direct onomatopoeia. Down the road, with time and natural evolution of the system, language, poetry, philosophy, science, mathematics and theology develop. The symbols and words in which these are expressed develop their own meaning and grandeur, but they are extensions, nonetheless of Fido’s capacity to bark differently at an enemy and a friend.
Mind, therefore, is the perceived sequence of cognition. Mind involves two sides of the same phenomenon, the perceived and the perceiving. In a sense, we are disappointed to discover that the boundary between symbols and meaning is a false one. There is a residual urge to say that meaning is “something else,” beyond the experience of the symbol, but that’s a time to pull out the strop, and flick William of Occam’s razor back and forth. Entia non multiplicanda sine necessitate. Realities should not be multiplied without necessity. Did we imagine, for instance, that the complex brain symbol would not be experienced by the brain’s owner? Such a position would, I submit, be absurd.
Note: if correct, this analysis defines the locus and nature of consciousness. It says nothing about the outward bound implications of symbolic brain experience. The problems of soul, immortality or external mind in an ordered universe do not go away. They are merely placed in a different but more accurate perspective. We have been developing a better understanding of mind and its evolution from matter. As hinted above, it is far from immediately evident how this genuinely new knowledge needs to be grafted into the vine of racial culture and spirituality.
Retrospection
There are aspects of this analysis which are as old as philosophy itself. Anaxagoras, Plato and Aristotle, after some explanation, would feel comfortable in the conversation. But there are other aspects which are quite novel, and on the cutting edge of investigative neuroscience. Plato and friends had no discernible comprehension of the nature of the structure and physiology of the human brain. In fact, the entire history of man’s speculations about himself have been hampered by a dearth of information about the very organ that thinkers were using to do their thinking.
Even though as we look at history those developments are easily comprehensible, it is still true that in an overarching way it is odd that things had to develop in such a fashion. The key to it is that humans had to think about themselves in ways they had available to them. And it took centuries for us to develop the perspectives and the methodologies to approach the very complex problem of what the human brain is all about, how it evolved, and what are its structure and function. And, how its activation with all its complex specificity is symbolic of experience. And, how the nature of consciousness itself is intimately and intrinsically intertwined with how symbolism and information coding work in themselves.
The world turns out to be immensely complex and multi-dimensional. Too bad, in a way. We’d like it to be simpler. Mother Nature has tales to tell us far exceeding the mythologies and stories of childhood. But that’s the way it is, and our job is to understand it, not create it according to our whims. We need to sharpen our ears to listen to Mother Nature’s story hour. And, the bottom line is that here at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are on the verge of bringing new levels of understanding to the question of consciousness, at least in outline if not in complete detail. And we know where to look next.
Prospection
The mystery of consciousness evaporates with focus on the lived symbols of brain activation. And what did you expect? That we should not be aware of what our brains encode? Not for a minute. But, that is a beachhead, not a citadel stormed. We have new perspectives, but cannot see the entire picture. There is much to be done in diverse areas. The current research devoted to brain function will continue, as will philosophy and theology, whose work it is to fashion our ever broadening horizons.
The physiology of neurons represents an entire sub-section of biologic study in itself. We know that both on the molecular level and also the cellular level, the neuron is itself capable of near endless determination. We know that messaging functions are transacted through specific protein formation and transport. We know on a macro level that certain brain centers support certain highly specific functions in the cognitive matrix, and that they all must work together in a coordinated way for the subjective phenomenon of consciousness to occur. We understand how the connections of axons and foot-processes respond to stimulation, beyond the influence of genetic coding. We know that these processes occur and we know a lot about their specificity, but the operation of the living matrix so far has been too complicated for us to be able to describe exhaustively.
These and other aspects of the functioning brain are under intensive consideration and study in several investigational centers throughout the world.
The important thing here is that we know that brain activation supports consciousness in highly specific fashion, and that the relationship of mind to brain can be more and more tightly and more and more completely studied and defined. The inward directed study of brain physiology will continue. The outward implications of consciousness are still as mysterious as ever, at least in their further reaches.
Proximately, our knowledge of ourselves and the universe has enabled us to bring about wonderful things. Exploration of the atom and utilization of the atom’s boundless energy. Exploration of the Moon, the solar system and outer space. Buildings that push their heads into the clouds and bridges that successfully defy the forces of gravity. Medical interventions which invoke an understanding of nature’s closely held secrets. These interactions with nature on technological levels raise ethical questions which challenge our humanity and intelligence.
Politically, strong fundamentalist pressures strive to tell us not to worry about the detail, about exhaustion of natural resources, about the environment, about social justice, for the world is about to end in apocalyptic denouement. Whatever else is true, that isn’t.
More distantly, looking to our spiritual history and the convictions our society has harbored, sometimes with great tenacity, it is clear that there are truths in our cultural heritage which speak to the destiny of the race. As a generalization, the major value systems of our race have been carried not in scientific vessels, but religious ones. We have not by any means succeeded in integrating our spiritual heritage with our empirical discoveries. Work in this area must continue if we are to fulfill the challenges of our humanity. The solutions are not simple.
Our focus has been on the evolution and nature of consciousness. We have studied the topic more on a micro level than a macro level. But we need to place this in a more comprehensive frame, too. What we are talking about is not merely the appearance of consciousness on planet Earth, but the evolution of mind in the Universe, so stated. Unconsciously, we call on cosmic powers to create through biological process our minds. We strive by empirical and philosophical investigation to bring that same process to a level of founded consciousness. These are not merely armchair musings.
Whether we as a race survive, whether we guide the processes of emergent mind to positive conclusions may well depend not only on moral choice, but also on the extent to which we understand what really has been occurring.
Author: Louis C. Martin, MD
[i] Empedocles, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/
[ii] Genesis 1, 26 ff.
[iii] Website www.aboutdarwin.com.
[iv] Website www.talkorigins.org. This site contains helpful information on the evolution / creation controversy.
[v] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection. Note: there are other interpretations and variations on the mechanism of Natural Selection, which go well beyond a raw Darwinism. It is not our intention to investigate these here. Our interest here is a particular emphasis on cognition and language as instrumental in human evolution.
[vi] Becoming Human, by Ian Tattersall, Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, 1998.
[vii] Samuel Pepys motto: Cicero Re Publica
[viii] Ascent to Civilization, The Archeology of Early Man, by John Gowlett, Galley Press, W. H. Smith Ltd, Leicester, pp 26 – 27. See also Extinct Humans, by Ian Tattersall and Jeffery H. Schwartz, Nevraumont Publishing Company, New York, copyright 2000.
[ix] Ascent to Civilization, op. cit.
[x] Evolution of the Brain: From Behavior to Consciousness in 3.4 Billion Years, by John J. Oro, M.D., in Neurosurgery, Vol 54, No. 6, June 2004, pp. 1287-97.
[xi] Blackmore,SJ 2000 The power of memes. Scientific American, 283:4, 52-61
[xii] L. K. Tyler; E. A. Stamatakis; P. Bright; K. Acres; S. Abdallah; J. M. Rodd; H. E. Moss. Processing objects at different levels of specificity. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16(3):351-362, 2004. PMID: 15072671. DOI: 10.1162/089892904322926692. FMRIDCID: . WOBIB: 145.
[xiii] http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/lamarck.html. Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was a French naturalist of considerable achievement. He proposed that inherited characteristics could be heritable. Lamarckism is frequently opposed to Darwinism.
[xiv] Genesis 2, 18-23.
[xv] invention of writing — www
[xvi] culture – a new phase in evolution
[xvii] cultural genome