Conscious
Existence and the Fate of the Universe
Chris King PDF
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The
Ultimate Question of Meaning
The central question plaguing us all is why are
we here? Is there any meaning to life? What will happen to our conscious
existence when we die? And what if anything is the purpose of it all, if all
life on Earth can end up becoming snuffed out, as the sun turns into a red giant and
fries the Earth to a crisp, and later, if we escape the solar system, all life in the far-flung galaxies, when the
whole universe eventually blows apart into empty space in the heat death? Underlying
this are questions much closer to home. What is conscious existence, and can
conscious experiences have any real effect on the physical world, let alone extend beyond our demise?
We are told two very different kinds of
story about this predicament, the scientific story and religious ones. The
religious stories tell us that the universe was created as a moral test of
sentient beings. In the Western tradition, this is claimed to have taken place in
six day-long epochs by verbal command of God, that we were created to have dominion
over all the forms of life, with a living soul that will outlast us when we die,
and that we should fear the god that created us and obey him, so that we will
go to a heaven in the clouds and not be damned in hell fire. The scientific
story tells us that the universe emerged from a hot, dense singularity 12
billion years ago, spawning the forces of nature in a symmetry-broken mathematical
mandala, that it has since become full of galaxies supporting billions of stars,
many of which have planets. That life emerged on Earth shortly after the seas
condensed and has evolved over three billion years into the complex living
organisms we see today, so that we are biological organisms, evolved from
primates, whose conscious existence depends on our sappy electro-chemical
brains.
No matter how people try to paper over the
cracks, by claiming science and religion can coexist together, these two
descriptions fundamentally clash and lead to utterly different conclusions.
This leaves human culture in a schizophrenic state of divided consciousness,
with no clear direction as to what issues are paramount, when we try to deal
with the stark critical decisions we all have to address about the fate of the
planet and of life upon it, in a situation where human impact on the biosphere is
destabilizing Earth's climate and habitats, threatening to cause a mass
extinction of life, entirely detrimental to our own future viability as a
species, compounded by risks caused by misuse of weapons of nuclear, chemical and biological mass
destruction.
We need to examine both stories carefully to
see what the fallacies, or missing pieces may be in each, and find a way
through to a new world-view, which really does capture the essence of the reality
that lies before us all and gives us a unified understanding of what this is
all about. We are going to discover a radically different, highly challenging
point ofview about conscious existence in the universe that can transform our
lives and the future of humanity and of all life in the process.
Existential reality presents a complementary paradox. While we understand our subjective consciousness is somehow a product of our biological brain, which is a fragile product of physical forces on a cosmological scale, all our experiences of reality, including perceptions of the physical world, as well as dreams, memories and reflections, arise exclusively from our subjective consciousness. This suggests that existential cosmology is a complementarity between subjective consciousness and the physical universe, both being fundamental.
Subjective
Consciousness and the Objective Universe
The central nub of the problem of existence is
that our experience of the world comes through two apparently inconsistent yet
complementary processes, each of which appears to be incomplete without the
other – subjective consciousness and objective physical reality.
From birth to death, our knowledge of the world
comes exclusively through our first-hand subjective conscious experiences,
which include both the waking states we associate with the world at large and
other states, such as dreaming, which we can also experience intensely at first
hand in much the same way, but do not associate with actual physical phenomena.
This tells us that, despite believing the waking state is real, both are
actually a product of an internal model of reality constructed by the brain.
In turn we understand the physical world
through comparing our conscious experiences with others around us who act and
behave so much like the conscious beings we know ourselves to be that we
intuitively have faith in their conscious awareness too. There is a biological
basis for this. The brain has mirror neurons, which sense in others around us
the same sensations we experience consciously ourselves, for example when they
experience a graze or painful cut, we also wince.
Through our everyday experiences and by comparing
our experiences with others, we develop a consensual view of the physical
properties of the world around us. The objective physical world thus arises as
a consensual aspect of our subjective experiences as a whole. It is thus only
through our consensus experiences of the physical world that we indirectly come
to understand that we are biological organisms made of complex molecules dependent
on these physical properties to exist and that we may lose consciousness if
concussed by a blow to the head and may bleed to death if seriously injured.
Over time we build up a conscious model of the physical world and realize that,
although our access to it is subjective, the objective description is also fundamental
to our continued existence and that our objective life is founded on atomic and
molecular processes which drive our biological metabolism and define the
genetic makeup and neurodynamics that makes it
possible for us to coexist in the physical world as sentient beings.
In turn, many of us become so used to dealing
with the practicalities and predominance of the physical world that we drift
into assuming this is all there is to it. Although we imagine we are making
personal choices and feel we are autonomous beings determining our personal
destiny, it becomes easy to conclude we may be just chemical machines with no
free will, living out the consequences of the cause and effect of our chemical
brain states.
But is this really what science says, or is
there much more to it? The core of the difficulty is that, from the objective
point of view, subjective consciousness has no objective features at all. It is
a will of the wisp, a ghost in the machine of the brain. We can objectively
detect it in only two ways, by observing the behaviour
of conscious beings, or by exploring their brain states, but neither of these are exploring consciousness itself.
Unraveling
the Religious Account of Reality
In religious accounts, the universe exists or
is created by God or gods as a moral test. This means that the meaning and
significance of conscious existence is bound up with compliance with the moral
paradigm and our purpose in life is to adhere to this moral causality. Broadly
speaking, these fall into two kinds of cosmology. Eastern and Western.
Sabbatical
Creation and the Expulsion from Eden
(a) Western Monotheism
The Western tradition is centrally expressed by
Judeo-Christian and Islamic views of a universe created and commanded by God in
a linear cosmology running from a paradisiacal past to a judgmental future. God
creates the physical world out of tohu va vohu - formless chaos - by
verbal command: "Let here be light and there was light", in six days as a flat
Earth, with waters and firmaments, or great domes, above and below into which
the Sun, Moon and stars are set as great lamps. The forms of life with plants
paradoxically created before the sun and moon, and animals of the land sea and air are created as they now are de novo, with
humanity having dominion over them. Humanity is created male and female to go
forth and multiply in the likeness of the divine, implying the 'Elohim is a divine couple, just as the proverbs say Hochmah the feminine personification of Wisdom was set up
from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.
In this cosmology, the meaning of life and
consciousness is to obey God's laws and commandments, and for this to be
possible, it is necessary to have the capacity for free-will, to be able to choose
to err into sin and fail to heed God's word. This is immediately verified, when
in the second account in Eden, Eve heeds the serpent, and seduces Adam into
eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge of good and evil and they are cursed by
God and expunged from paradise by a flaming sword, lest they also eat of the
tree of life and become as the gods. The male set to rule over the female, as
God rules over them, for her to suffer the pain of childbirth and both to have
to eke a life out of the thorns and thistles of the wilderness, thus casting a
gender curse over the curse of all human kind, at the same time invoking
reproductive mortality, after Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves
because they had lost their sexual innocence.
These allegorical creation myths have more
primeval precedents. The San Bushmen, one of our oldest founding cultures, tell
a very similar story, again clearly allegorical in nature:
Gao!na, the !Kung Great God,
using one of his seven divine names, created himself. Then he created a Lesser
God who lives in the western sky where the sun sets; and after this two wives
for himself and for the Lesser God. Gao!na, tallest of the Bushmen,
was in his earthly existence a great magician and trickster with supernatural
powers, capable of assuming the form of an animal, a stone or anything else he
wished, and who changed people into animals and brought the dead back to life.
But as the Great God who lives beside a huge tree in the eastern sky, he is the
source and custodian of all things. He created the earth with holes in it where
water could collect and water, the sky and rain both
the gentle 'female' rain and the fierce 'male' rain thunder and lightning, the
sun, moon, stars and wind. He created all the plants that grow on the earth. He
created the animals and painted their individual colours
and markings, and gave them all names. Then came human beings, and he put life
into them; and gave to them all the weapons and implements they now have, and
he implanted in them the knowledge of how to take all these things for
themselves. Thus their hunting and gathering way of life was ordained from the
very beginning and Gao!na ordained that when they
died they should become spirits, //Gerais, who would
live in the sky with him and serve him. He set the pattern of life for all
things, each in accordance with its own rules.
But allegorical conviction is the last reason to take such creation myths literally as the word of God, however beautifully and meaningfully expressed. To do so becomes bibliolatry, a degeneracy of the process, just as idolatry - worshipping an object as divine- was deemed degenerate in the Hebrew tradition.
Much of the rest of Old Testament history becomes
an account of God, as a manifestly totem deity of a single people, the Hebrews,
cursing the Bride Israel for whoring with the gods of Canaan and Egypt.
However, much later, after the Babylonian exile and the ascendance of the
Persians, Zoroastrian ideas of a cosmic renovation at the end of days became
the apocalyptic tradition. Instead of an underworld sheol,
as in the older Hebrew accounts, we now have the day of judgment, or resurrection,
in which God will judge between the quick and the dead, allowing the former
into Heaven and consigning the rest to burn in the fires of Hell for eternity.
This eternal hell is a corruption of the scenario originally conceived by Zoroastrian
thinking, where Ahura Mazda (mighty intelligence, or
wisdom) invokes a very
fearsome hell, but rather than a terminal punishment, this had the redemptive purpose
of purification from the ignorance of the destrictive spirit Angra Mainyu.
This monotheistic cosmology has become a linear
moral trial, in which the meaning and purpose of conscious life is to realize that
the only option giving us immortal life in Heaven is to forgo the luxury of autonomous
will, and comply with God's commandments. The natural world has become a
debased realm of lust and bestiality, subject to triage in the day of judgment.
The description in Revelation consists of an
unmitigated triage of all natural life and of the universe itself:
The first angel sounded, and there followed
hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the
third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. And the
second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was
cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea,
and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed. And the
third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it
were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the
fountains of waters; And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the
sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the
stars (Rev 8).
Ultimately the dead throughout history are all
resurrected to be judged and those found wanting are thrown into the lake of
fire, whereupon the first heaven and the first earth passed away and we see a
new heaven and a new earth, strangely still with at least one plant, for we
find the tree of life with its twelve monthly fruit for the healing of the
nations. The end result is that the entire physical universe is destroyed and
recreated by God, simply to judge the sins of one species in the third rock
from the Sun - humankind.
The Quran describes this in more parochial
terms as an eclipse:
When will this Day of Resurrection be?"
Well, it will come when the sight shall be dazed,
the moon becomes dark, and
the sun and the moon are brought together
(75:6).
We also witness the splitting of the Moon,
although this has little enough effect on the Earth for the unbelievers to
think it a mere trick:
The hour drew nigh and the moon did rend
asunder.
And if they see a miracle they turn aside and
say: Transient magic.
And they call (it) a lie, and follow their low
desires; (54:1).
In the monotheist cosmology, conscious existence
has thus become a cosmological passion play, in which our ultimate destinies do
not occur in this world, but in the life hereafter, in eternal heaven,
endlessly praising God and the angels, or in Hell, cringing in the agonies of
fire and torment. Consciousness and the physical universe have, together become
one feature of an unreal magical realm, whose actual
meaning and purpose has become frozen in eternal time.
Christian Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist views of heaven all present conscious fantasy worlds.
Christian and Muslim views each turn into their
respective fantasies, with the Christian view full of sexless angels with large
bird-like wings to fly in the rarefied upper atmosphere:
For when they shall rise
from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage;
but are as the angels which are in heaven (Mark 12.23).
By contrast, the Muslim view is a hyper-sexual paradise
where men drink from fountains and up to 72 black-eyed virgins are recreated
anew every day for every man in an undefiled state, for unrelenting male erotic
pleasure:
They will be reclining on thrones lined up, and We will marry them to fair women with beautiful eyes (Quran 52.20).
And for him who fears to stand
before his Lord are two gardens. Having in them various kinds. In both of them
are two fountains flowing. In both of them are two pairs of every fruit.
Reclining on beds, the inner coverings of which are of silk brocade; and the
fruits of the two gardens shall be within reach. In them shall be those who
restrained their eyes [bashful virgins], whom neither any man nor jinn has
touched before. Which then of the bounties of your Lord will you deny? (55:46)
Houris are described as full-breasted pure virgin companions of paradise, with the most beautiful eyes. Sunni scholars claim they would not urinate, defecate or menstruate, are transparent to the marrow of their bones, eternally young, hairless except the head, pure and beautiful, and come with libidinous vaginas!
The Hindu Bhagavata Purana, speaks of Vaikuntha, adorable to all the worlds, as the highest realm where Vishnu resides with Lakshmi and other liberated souls that have gained moksha, falling somewhere in between the Christian and Muslim views in terms of sex, and a biodiverse paradise:
The Buddhist Tavatimsa heaven is a more prosaic mind-space where, in the image above, Buddha preaches the higher doctrine, or Abidammha, to his (former) mother Queen Maya, who is now, along with the others assembling in the clouds, a deva, rather than a human:
In Buddhism, the highest heaven is Arüpaloka the "Formless realm" which has no place in a physical cosmology, as none of the beings inhabiting it has shape or location and the realm has no location either. This realm belongs to those devas who attained and remained in the Four Formless Absorptions in a previous lifetime. Tavatimsa is the highest of the heavens that maintains a physical connection with the rest of the world, located on the peak of the central world mount Sumeru, with similarities to Mount Olympus of the Greeks. The inhabitants are each about 500m tall and live for 3.6 million years. Since it is physically connected to the world, the devas are unable to avoid being entangled in worldly egotistical affairs and still marry, for example with the asuras in the next realm below.
The only kind of redemption of the natural
world we find in the Bible impossibly violates nature in a moral imperative, by
requiring all the animals to become herbivores:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and
the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and
the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the
bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall
eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not
hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the
earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11.6).
Conflicting Eastern cosmologies of creation and of the role of sexuality. Left: The tantric origin begins with coital union of Shakti and Shiva and their retreat from union (inset) results in the fragmented phenomena of existence and illusion, however, although Yab-Yum is a sexual rite in Buddhism, in Buddhist cosmology sexuality arises as part of the cycle of degeneration into attachment. Right: Reality as a thought in the mind of God. Brahma, the phenomena of the universe, is a dream in the mind of Vishnu, overlooked by Lakshmi.
(b) Eastern Traditions
By contrast, in the Eastern traditions, encompassing
Hindu, Jain and Buddhist beliefs, the cosmology has become cyclic and pivotally
consciousness-based, in which time, space and the
material world exist as manifestations of conscious awareness. The universe is
caught in endless cycles of yugas, or ages, from creation,
through duration to dissolution, punctuated by formlessness and then rebirth.
Underlying this cosmology is the notion of a
reincarnating immortal soul, or self, submerged in an ocean of distracting
sensory and physical phenomena. Death destroys everything in the objective
world when its time comes, but the soul remains intact and escapes from the
body to take birth again. In the body, the soul is the subjective
consciousness, enveloped by the impurities of the mind and body. The soul's
reflection in the physical qualities is the ego, which assumes the soul's
identity and acts according to its predominant desires, becoming attached to
the objects of the world, experiencing attraction and aversion and ultimately
mortal suffering, in turn causing bad karma. The cumulative karma of
potentially endless past lives, at the same time shapes our circumstances as it
ripens, also leading to the world we find ourselves reborn into. This is a cosmology where the karma of
sentient consciousness is shaping and determining the physical events around us
and even our rebirth:
Those whose conduct was pleasant will attain
pleasant wombs; and those whose behavior was evil, will attain the wombs of the
evil and the impure ones (Chandogya
Upanishad 5.10.5-7).
Hindu mythology is replete with allegorical creation
accounts, taking a variety of perspectives. The story of Vishnu, the sustainer,
attended by Lakshmi, dreaming Brahman - the manifold phenomena of existence - out
of a lotus extending from Vishnu's navel, portrays the entire universe and all
conscious beings in it, as simply "a thought in the mind of god". The Tantric
creation casts the perspective more as a complementarity, in the form of the
deep sexual union of Shakti, as natural world, and Shiva as observing consciousness,
subsequently retreating into a fragmentation - all the phenomena of conscious
existence in the material world interacting with the separate egotistical conscious
experiences of every sentient being.
Buddhism, which gives a more structured view of
this cosmology, has no creator god to explain the origin of the universe.
Instead everything depends on everything else, in an overarching law of moral
karma:
"What is this world? It is the receptacles
of matter, feelings, thoughts, actions, and consciousness. The world is formed
when we fastened to these receptacles because of our desire. (Agama sutra).
Here the physical universe is clearly stated to
be nothing more, or less, than a set of receptacles for our sentient attachments.
The Agama sutra sees all sentient beings as primary, with the universe only
forming as a result of our fall from grace into attachment. It describes the
process of creation on a grand scale, as not just individuals, but whole worlds
becoming reincarnated as its inhabitants are reborn in
a new system:
To begin with they are spirits, levitating
happily in space, luminescent and without form, name or sex. The world in these
early stages is without light or land, only water. Eventually earth appears and
the spirits come to taste and enjoy it. Their greed causes their ethereal
bodies to become solid and coarse and differentiate into male and female,
good-looking and ugly. As they lose their luminescence the sun and moon come
into being. Gradually the beings fall into further wicked habits, causing
themselves - and the Earth itself - to become less pleasant.
Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Buddhist hells show all four religions are morally punitive cosmologies and demonstrate the unreal fantasy nature of these realms.
Muhammad is seen both on his night flight to Jerusalem upper left and lying prostrate on a rock upper right.
Naraka,
an underworld hell realm, appears in the Vedas (lower left), Buddhism (lower right),
Jainism and Malaysian Islam.
The physical world as we know it, with all its
imperfections and suffering, is described as the product of dependent
origination. Ignorance leads to willed action, conditioned consciousness, form
and existence (in a body), with sense organs, whose sense impressions blind us
to reality, causing craving, attachment, becoming, birth and ultimately death
and rebirth.
Over time, they acquire a taste for physical
nutriment, and as they consume it, their bodies become heavier and more like
human bodies; they lose their ability to shine, and begin to acquire
differences in their appearance, and their length of life decreases. They
differentiate into two sexes and begin to become sexually active. Then greed,
theft and violence arise among them, and they establish social distinctions and
government.
The Buddhist cosmology is thus cyclic and also
layered, with many world planes, from the highest heavenly realms of
formlessness, through demi-gods and Titans, to humans, animals, hungry ghosts lurking
in the deserts, and the lower hell realms of suffering. These worlds may be repeated
spatially, coexisting in their thousands, millions, or billions.
Each world corresponds to a mental state, or a
state of being, rather than being an actual physical realm:
A world is nothing more than the sentient
beings within it. It is sustained by their karma and if the beings in a world
all die or disappear, the world disappears too. Likewise, a world comes into
existence when the first being is born into it.
Humans and animals, though they partially share
the same physical environments, still belong to different worlds because their
minds perceive and react to those environments differently. Thus humans who
have bad attitudes and bad karma may be reborn as an animal. This viewpoint again
violates nature, by casting all animal organisms as degenerate reincarnations
of humans and higher beings through bad karma.
We thus have a cosmology in which subjective
consciousness is primary and the physical universe is a tragic entrapping illusion
of sentient beings. Just how far this overarching notion of consciously
generated karma becomes, is illustrated when we come to one of the lower worlds
in the slide to dissolution:
Lifespans will continue to decrease, and all
the evil tendencies of the past will reach their ultimate in destructiveness.
People will live no longer than ten years, and will marry at five; foods will
be poor and tasteless; no form of morality will be acknowledged. The most
contemptuous and hateful people will become the rulers. Incest will be rampant.
Even the advent of the Maitreya
provides only temporary respite:
After Maitreya's
time, the world will again worsen, and the lifespan will gradually decrease
from 80,000 years to 10 years again, each antarakalpa
being separated from the next by devastating war, with peaks of high civilization
and morality in the middle.
The ultimate end of the cycle comes when beings
cease being born, firstly in the lowest layers, proceeding upward – hungry
ghosts cease to be born, then animals, then humans, and so on up to the realms
of the deities. Ultimately a great fire consumes the entire physical world,
leading to a formless interval, after which the primordial wind begins to blow
and build the structure of the worlds up again.
Only by retreating from all sensual attachment
and seeking the inner pose of formless detachment from all conscious sensation
can one escape the wheel of birth and death. But what is this state of utter
detachment? What possible beneficial qualities does it have, apart from
becoming the still point of the turning world? Is it even a conscious condition,
devoid of all sensory experience and physical existence?
(c) Shamanic World Views
Many ethnic traditions involve shamanic beliefs,
which have no fixed doctrine but loosely follow an animistic, or pantheistic
world-view. The shaman's universe is three tiered, composed of an upper, a middle,
and lower world. The upper spirit-world and lower under-worlds exist experientially,
outside of time and space, while the middle world corresponds to everyday
reality. Shamans claim to traverse these worlds as a direct first-person
mystical experience, rather than a cosmological concept, or religious belief.
The central axis takes the form of the cosmic mountain at the center of the Earth,
the world pillar holding up the sky or the world tree, symbol of life,
fertility, and sacred regeneration, that the shaman climbs to other worlds.
Far left: Maria Sabina performing a sacred mushroom velada. Left: An example of a Mayan sacred mushroom stone with deity (1000 BC-600 AD).
These levels are more than interconnected -
every part affects every other part. Shamans believe that these interactions
can be perceived and affected and that the shaman can feel and influence
distant realms. All parts of this interconnected universe are alive and
conscious to some degree - imbued with life and invested with a mind or soul.
Shamanic views, coming from cultures in a more intimate relationship with the
natural elements, also incorporate more respect for the power of nature as the
nurturing 'mother' of all existence, whose forces and priorities need to be
respected. Species containing psychedelic entheogens have been respected as sacred portals by all cultures that have stumbled upon them.
The
Fallout from Moral Cosmologies
The common factor uniting these three
word-views, despite their stark differences, is that they are each subjective
descriptions seeking to explain and give meaning to the conscious existential
condition. They thus have a direct appeal to sentient individuals who are conscious
of their mortality and vulnerable to the affairs of the world around them.
The Western and Eastern traditions also share
two very problematic features.
Firstly they are manifestly inconsistent with everything we now know
about nature and the physical universe. Secondly they each assert an
overarching moral causality dominating the life and future of all conscious
beings and the universe as a whole. These two moralities are both inconsistent
with one another and manifestly violate everything we know about how nature
actually works.
Because monotheism is a revealed religion that
in all its forms claims the scripture is the actual word of God, supposedly
rational human beings are psychologically bound to accept its tenets and reject
evidence from the world around us, even when it has become blindingly obvious,
as evolution has now become, as the very foundation of our emergence as complex
conscious organisms.
The Sabbatical Creation is a captivating and
beautiful allegory, still as fresh as when it was first conceived as an
archetype of the Hebrew week and Shabbat the day of rest. It is conceived in a
flat-Earth cosmology, in which the heavens are firmaments or domes into which
the stars are set with the sun and moon as great lights or lamps. The plants
are created a full day before the sun and moon. Night and day happen before the
sun is placed in the heavens. The fishes and whales and the birds are created a
day before the land animals and long after the plants. Humanity is created male
and female in "their" likeness to have dominion over all life. This was never
conceived of, or intended to be an accurate description of nature, but lies in
the paradigm of creation myth making common to many societies and
cultures.
The second story in Eden entirely conflicts
with the first. God is now a lone figure, not creating the universe but just
dwelling in a garden to the East. There are two trees, one of life and the
other of binary knowedge. Adam is created first,
by breath, rather than a verbal command and Eve is manufactured later out of Adam's rib.
The story then becomes one of cursing woman to be ruled over by her husband and
suffer the pain of childbirth for heeding the serpent, and banishing them both
from paradise, for disobedience and the guilt of carnal knowledge. Again this
is a warning tale told as an allegory setting out primal concerns about moral
obedience and asserting patriarchal dominion.
We know several things about our current
situation in the world. We know we are utterly dependent of the other life
forms. We cannot eat without them and the breathable atmosphere wouldn't have
come about without plants to make it. So for the practical purposes of our own
survival we cannot afford to engage a creation story that ends with the Earth
and heavens destroyed and life along with it.
We also now know beyond a doubt that the Earth was not formed 4000 years ago, but at least 4 billion and that long before 4000 years ago there were people wandering this planet thinking very similar thoughts. The San Bushmen whose culture and genetic heritage goes back 150,000 years, have very similar creation myths and stories of a creator deity and afterlife, as we have noted, so there is nothing exclusive about the Biblical account.
Left: Our understanding of evolution began with examples of recent diversification of species such as Darwin’s finches on isolated islands in the Galapagos, where we can observe direct examples of phenotypic evolution to adapt to unique island habitats. This was complemented by fossil evidence such as the Cambrian Burgess Shale fossils showing extinct species with clear relatedness as precursors to existing branches of life. Centre: With the advent of genetic sequencing we have gained incontrovertible evidence from the sequence relationships of DNA in the genes of diverse species, such as the tree of life right spanning all branches of life, based on 31 families of core genes. Right: Evolution is a glorious creative process, shaped not just by natural selection, but by aesthetic sexual selection, through mutual mate choice, in which living conscious organisms shape the evolution of one another in beautiful and surprising ways.
Moreover the evidence that life has evolved and
that evolution is the foundation of complex life is now staring us in the face
in ways no fully rational intelligent being can validly pretend to deny. Not
only is there copious geological evidence and evidence from the phenotypic
distribution of existing life forms, but the genetic evidence is
incontrovertible. Since the Human Genome and related projects on other species,
we now know exactly how humans are related genetically to Neanderthals and to Chimps and we
know that all life bears the genetic fingerprints of the evolutionary process, not
a de novo creation, so the picture is as clear as a bell. To claim evolution is
just an unproven theory and that the creation story is true becomes premeditated
deceit. Evolution is a cosmological process of the universe coming to a consummation of its awareness, beauty and complexity and as such it is sacred and the most sacred process we can come to witness as conscious beings. It is thus our duty to protect the sanctity and continuity of life throughout the generations of conscious existence.
But the real core of the religious fallacy is that the
universe is not in any way a moral cosmology. Morality is an emergent evolutionary
property of human and animal societies, in which individuals forsake individual
advantages within their society to enable the society to become stronger and
more dominant over its competitors – inhibiting intra-social strife to
promote inter-social competition. Thou shalt not kill, for example, clearly did
not apply to the people of Hazor or Jericho whom God
said to commit genocide upon.
A fundamental feature of evolution is that it fills
up the available niches. Thus some organisms evolve to be plants while others
evolve to be animals that eat plants but may also fertilize their dispersal.
The animals diversify into herbivores, carnivores and others, and the
carnivores are predators that eat the herbivores, but also serve to avoid the
herbivores eating all the plants, and everyone dying out. Likewise some bacteria, viruses and protists become parasites, causing epidemic and other diseases.
But neither parasites nor predators are a manifestation of moral evil. They are
an integral part of the relationship.
So for Isaiah to say that spiritual concord
will involve the lion lying down with the lamb, and the lion eating straw like
the ox, while endearing, is an expression of an absolutely false belief, that,
under God's rule, the diverse species of animals would all become moral to one another
and predation would cease.
In the natural world, the ecological balance is
struck in a way that is inconsistent with an overarching morality, but
completely consistent with the climax diversity of life, through natural
selection. Morality is an emergent feature of evolution within animal societies.
Morality will and does occur as a form of social selection, heavily reinforced
in our case by cultural traditions and imperatives. To assert morality alone as
a cosmological imperative, rather than respecting natural selection, is inconsistent with the very principles
maintaining life on the planet, so to allow any form of moral imperative in our
cultural world-view is a long-term risk to human survival. Humans have now
become a global society, so our survival as a people, a culture, and a species
is now bound up in one another, so we need to be really clear about this and
respect and preserve the natural scheme of evolutionary life, while developing a truly compassionate society founded on social justice, to alleviate the vagaries of life in the natural world.
Of course Christian thinkers will try to cobble
together all manner of rationalizations to claim proper stewardship of the
Earth in God's name means caring for the biosphere, and that there may be some
truth in the creation account because God may be lurking beyond the universe,
invoking the "big bang", but these are attempts to try to rationalize a comforting
but inconsistent world view. There is simply no evidence in any natural, or
cosmological phenomenon that a third-party conscious actor is either necessary,
or sufficient, to explain the origin, or fate of the universe and life within
it.
When we turn to the Eastern traditions, we find
an equally glaring mismatch with reality. Yes the meditative condition is
conducive to gaining insights about our existential predicament, but there is
no evidence that we are inevitably drawn from luminous spirits to become grasping egos and if this were true, the entire edifice of meditative insight
about our existential condition and the higher calling that Buddhism and the
Eastern traditions aspire to would be null and void. The ego is not an enemy to
be crushed, but the emotional dynamic that ensures our survival as vulnerable
organisms in a world of tooth and claw. We need to nurture our instincts for survival
and treat our egos with the same compassion we show for any mortal being. Nor
is life a condition to be withdrawn from into formless repose, but our one sole
opportunity to contribute creatively to the good of the whole, in the flowering
of life and conscious existence.
Living organisms,
including plants, animals, fungi and single celled organisms are shaped by
their genes their environment, and their free
choices as autonomous beings, not just their grasping egos. Animals are not
simply sentient beings, who in a past life were
selfish in some way, but organisms adapted to fill the niches of life to climax.
A cat hunts to catch mice because its genes have become those for a carnivore
through evolutionary diversification, not because they were previously a
homicidal human, or titan from an imaginary realm. The natural world is not
simply a backdrop for psychological punishment of sentient beings. It is thus a
violation of and insult to nature to demote the status of natural organisms to
that of a decadent past life of some higher consciousness.
As mortal organisms, we can be selfish and
grasping, but the psychological antidote is simple. The lesson of mortal life
and death is more immediate and meaningful than the doctrine of Buddhism or any
religion. We can't take our selfish baggage when we pass on, so the only things
we can do are ultimately to seek the benefit of all sentient beings and the
living world as a whole. We can write poetry, make scientific discoveries, play
music, engage marital and family life and care for our offspring and others in
the world at large, all of which contribute to the ongoing fabric of life.
There is no way we can naturally perpetuate our individual identity, because
sexual reproduction endlessly mixes and dilutes the genes of the parents to
make new life forms as an essential part of the robustness and creativity of
the evolutionary process. Moreover, even if we did clone ourselves, identical
twins are still separate individuals. Hence no selfish grasping action will, in
the end, do us any good. The round of birth and death is the lifeline of all
life processes and life is immortal, so long as the Earth continues to support
it. It is this we need to nurture. To renounce the living condition and
withdraw into formlessness, except to better understand our inner self, as a
temporary undertaking, is a self-indulgent abandonment of our calling.
Finally we have the problem of the cosmology
itself. There is absolutely no basis for a cosmology that is endlessly doomed
to run down, from a creative state into moral degeneration and dissolution. Why
would luminous beings free of the bondages of material incarnation seek to
ground themselves in enslavement to their attachments as mortal beings? Yes we
know the physical realm includes the second law of thermodynamics, which means that
closed systems tend to a state of disorder, but this is not caused by moral
decay, and through incoming solar energy, life on the planet has gone in the
other direction of increasing complexity through endosymbiosis to form
multicellular organisms, the interdependence of photosynthetic and respiring
organisms, and the emergence of conscious animals and humans. Above all we need
to participate in this creative process while we are alive, not condemn the
whole universe to a degenerate fate.
Newtonian
mechanics came to be regarded as the ultimate explanatory science: phenomena of
any kind, it was believed, could and should be explained in terms of mechanical
conceptions. Newtonian physics was used to support the deistic view that God
had created the world as a perfect machine that then required no further
interference from Him, the Newtonian world machine or Clockwork Universe.
The
Trouble with Classical Science
Science takes its basis in the practical
exploration of the world around us. Since the dawn of human culture some
150,000 years ago, humans have been both telling one another mythical stories
of their origin to explain their existence in the world and also discovering
and devising practical ways of survival through better understanding of nature and
the physical world. Thus men have learned to use all manner of extremely toxic
poisons to tip their arrows and improve their success in hunting while women
have classified and explored the diverse species of food and medicinal plants
that made up 85% of the gatherer-hunter diet. In waves, we also learned how to
cook, to forge metals, and to make diverse machines from simple digging tools
and axes to catapults, wheeled vehicles, sailing boats and instruments of war,
from gunpowder and cannons, ultimately to nuclear missiles.
Dealing with the natural and physical world is
a lot less forgiving than devising creation myths. Miscalculations based on
false assumptions in real life can be lethal, so the scientific method has
evolved to check out whether our assumptions fit the test of actual
verification. This is called the skeptical principle, which proceeds in the
opposite direction to religious affirmative belief. The skeptical principle means we only
consider a proposition to be valid if every reasonable test we make that could
invalidate it fails in a way that tends to support its truth.
Religious beliefs tend to do the opposite
– we are told that unless we believe in the path of the saviour, we will have no faith and be lost. Religious
beliefs do this because they are social movements designed to bind large
populations of believers together into dominant and successful units, which is
precisely why they are also based on moral imperatives which have the same
effect, namely to reduce intra-social strife to increase inter-social
dominance, and why many religions also assert forms of female reproductive
control designed to enlarge the community of believers, none of which are any
less than worldly expedience.
However, dealing with the physical world is by
definition a material quest. We need to be able to compare processes and see
which ones actually work and which are useless, or even dangerous. Scientific
thinking has as long a history as religions, as evidenced by human flint tool
use predating our earliest religious artifacts, such as the Venus of Willendorf. The advent of ancient Greek philosophy became a
catalyst for scientific thought. Atomic theory was invented
by Democritus around 430 BC, and scientific medicine was extensively
documented and medical ethics established by Hippocrates around 460 BC.
Nevertheless religious cosmologies continued to
hold sway until Copernicus and later Galileo turned the flat-earth-centric
Christian cosmology upside down, under threat of excommunication. The Inquisition tried
Galileo in 1633 and found him "vehemently suspect of heresy",
sentencing him to indefinite imprisonment. He was forced to recant and kept under house arrest until his death in 1642. It took the Catholic Church 350 years, until 1992 to admit Galileo was right, although still claiming that the Inquisition acted in good faith, taking 13 years to do so after Pope John Paul set up a committee of the academy to look into it in 1979.
But the real turning point for predictive
science came with the genius of Isaac Newton in 1687, laying the foundations of
classical mechanics by defining the laws of motion and universal gravity,
clinching in one step the motions of all the astronomical bodies. Until then
people had observed that objects in motion always slowed down, but Newton's
first law states simply and succinctly that every object will remain at rest or
in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by
the action of an external force. This totally clears away the confusion and
gives us the clear basis for all energetic interactions.
By co-inventing the mathematical area of
calculus, Newton also provided the theoretical basis for scientific analysis of
all continuously varying interactive processes. This opened up a new predictive
perspective, in which, if we know the initial conditions and the laws of
motion, the future states of a classical system become deterministic and in
principle, predictable. This becomes the basis of the classical Newtonian
universe, of which Laplace in 1814 noted that an intellect knowing the defining
parameters in sufficient detail could predict the future state of the entire
universe. This approach to physical, rather than moral, causality,
has become the basis of all classical science, from physics, through to
molecular biology.
Because science is founded on careful analysis
and comparison of natural phenomena in the physical world, where we can agree
on the results of an experiment and determine the credibility of a hypothesis,
it is dealing with objective phenomena that others can replicate and confirm. Science
is thus objective in its basis. But it is misguided to accuse science of being
materialistic, by comparison with religious beliefs. Science is a method for
gaining accurate knowledge of the material world, not political, or religious
propaganda.
Newton, for one, was a highly religious person
who subscribed to the Arian heresy and spent long nights trying to predict the likely
time of the second coming. We are dependent for our survival on accurate
investigation of the natural and physical worlds and they are the material
world in which we exist. We have to understand the forces at work and the risks
and benefits they bring, particularly in a technological age, where our impacts
on the planet have become profound enough to create significant risks to our
own survival, by misadventure through war, accident, or our sheer impacts on
the environment and biosphere.
When we can deal with a physical process in
these terms, science becomes an incredibly powerful tool. For example,
molecular biology has been able to decode, in immense detail, how biological
organisms work. With the discovery of DNA and the capacity to sequence whole
genomes, this has reached levels we could barely have imagined, laying bare the
evolutionary relationships of all the branches of the evolutionary tree of life.
Likewise the capacity to fashion microcircuits on silicon chips has led to the
explosion of computing technology, the internet and
world-wide web. This is possible because these areas, at least to a reasonable
approximation, behave like classical mechanisms.
The explosion of scientific discovery has thus
swept through all fields of investigation, leaving only three root questions
not fully resolved. The first is the TOE, or theory of everything, uniting the
forces of nature with cosmological processes, the second is exactly how life
began on Earth and the third is how the brain generates subjective consciousness.
Although the first two of these are not fully resolved, we do already have a
good idea about both, with powerful theories and a good collection of
confirming evidence, but the third remains an enigma that challenges the
foundation of our description of the universe.
The trouble is that, in basing its approach on
the objective natural world and replicable phenomena that we can all agree on,
classical science has great difficulty dealing with the purely subjective
phenomena of sentient consciousness. We can experimentally investigate a brain
state, but how do we make a scientific description of a conscious state which you
claim to experience, but I can't see directly at all? Of course we are all
conscious, so some aspects of the subjective realm are familiar to all, but
others remain rare, controversial or enigmatic. And this leaves the thorny
question: How does the objective brain generate an entirely subjective
phenomenon? Philosopher Jerry Fodor famously complained that: "Nobody has
the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows
what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material
could be conscious".
Neuroscience has begun to try to explore this
problem in the form of "consciousness research". It isn't so hard to perform
careful brain scans of people and to learn what kinds of brain activity
correspond to different forms of conscious awareness, leading to ideas, such as
oscillations in certain key frequencies corresponding to the information
processing accompanying conscious experience and thought and the involvement of
whole brain states in the process. But a brain state is not a conscious
experience.
Digital computers also perform complex
calculations, and machine learning artificial intelligence algorithms now
outperform humans at games of strategy, from chess to go, but the idea that a
computer process will become consciously aware just by virtue of its mechanical
complexity, is the stuff of science fiction. However it does lead towards a
materialistic point of view held by some people that we are nothing more than
chemical machines governed by our genes, although modified by our environment, who do not possess free-will, but perhaps can make learned
moral decision in the social interest.
The philosopher David Chalmers calls problems
like mapping active conscious brain states or defining oscillations
corresponding to conscious thoughts the easy problem, while the so called "hard
problem in consciousness research" remains – how to compare a purely
subjective conscious experience with a purely objective brain state and thus
make a meaningful step in understanding exactly what consciousness is and how
it comes about.
But the era of classical deterministic science
strictly came to an end with the advent of quantum physics a century ago,
despite its assumptions lingering on in many fields from molecular biology and
genetics to artificial intelligence.
(a) Two-slit interference showing individual trajectories (left) are uncertain, but a statistical distribution over many particles (centre) begins to conform to the summed wave amplitudes (right). (b) In the Schrödinger cat paradox, the quantum reality says the cat is both alive and dead. (c) The delayed choice experiment appears to retrospectively alter the path the photon previously took depending on whether we sample interference or detect individual particles. (d) Quantum entanglement experiment samples photon pairs. When the two photons are sampled at differing angles, the correlations between their polarizations (blue) violate limits on classical information transfer at the speed of light (red). If you detect the polarization with respect to a given orientation, the other photon immediately has complementary polarization. If we design a further experiment to rapidly oscillate the choices faster than light can cross the apparatus, the effect remains. (e) Quantum field theories discovered by Richard Feynman (inset) successfully describe fields, such as electromagnetism, by the exchange of every possible network of virtual wave-particles. Einstein (inset), who discovered both the quantum law E=hv and relativity, found the idea of entanglement 'spooky'.
Enter
Spooky Quantum Reality
To appreciate how the scientific revolution to
quantum reality came about, we turn to Einstein and the photoelectric effect. When
you shine light on the negative plate in a vacuum chamber, thus kicking off a negatively-charged electron, and vary the voltage
required to stop a resulting current flow between the negative and positive
plates, you find the more light, the more current, but the voltage turns out to
depend only on the frequency of the light, as in red lower frequency longer
wavelength and blue higher frequency shorter wavelength. This means that light,
rather than being a continuous wave, consists of a bunch of discrete corpuscles
– particles, just like electrons are – whose energy is proportional to
their frequency, by Einstein's law E=hv. So both light and matter quanta come with both wave and
particle properties, depending on how we are measuring them and their energy is
defined precisely by the frequency v of their wave. Conversely electrons, which
we think of as particles, also have a wavelength and frequency and can also
behave as waves.
This means that quanta can't be tied down in a
precise predictable deterministic way. If you try to determine the exact time and
energy of a photon together, you find it is impossible. To estimate the energy,
e.g. by wave beats against another quantum, you would effectively have to count
some wave peaks to determine the frequency, but that takes a certain amount of
time to do to a given accuracy. This is the quantum uncertainty of energy and
time ΔEΔt > h/2π. Particles and anti-particles can and do appear out of the vacuum, as long as they disappear again within the time limits defined by their energy. These ‘virtual’ particles are the basis of the electromagnetic and otherforce fields, including gravity, that power all manner of phenomena, from electric motors, through radio waves to chemistry.
Each fundamental unit is both a particle and a
wave, but it can manifest only as one, or the other, in a given situation. For
example, a photon in a light bulb is emitted discretely as a particle from
an individual atom, then travels through space as a wave, until it is absorbed as
a particle again. You can see both properties if you pass it through a set of
two slits, when it travels through both slits as a wave, setting up patterns of
the wave interference bands on the other side as they are absorbed as particles
on the photographic plate. This shows another feature of quantum reality, which
is that the particle could appear anywhere the wave function reaches, with a
probability defined by the wave amplitude, which means that where it will end
up is unpredictable and determinism fails.
This leads to another paradox of quantum
predictability in the form of the Schršdinger cat paradox. The quantum
description says that when an event with two possible outcomes occurs, both
outcomes exist as probabilities determined by the intervening wave function,
which coexist within it. But our conscious experience of these situations is
that one outcome occurs and the other does not. If we put a cat in a box to be
poisoned with cyanide from a smashed flask if a Geiger counter registers a
scintillation, when we open the box, we find the cat is either alive or dead
but not both, but quantum mechanics says it is alive and dead in a
superposition of outcomes. Quantum computing attempts to use this superposition
of outcomes to process all the possible states in parallel thus solving intractable
problems such as decoding encrypted messages in real time, just as a conscious
organism does, dealing with open environment problems, to escape a predator in
real time.
The cat paradox has led to a continuing debate whether
consciousness plays a critical role in "collapsing" the wave function into one
of its possible discrete outcomes, just as the particle appears randomly out of
the wave function's amplitude. While some physicists claim hidden variables may
determine where the particle is, or that decoherence
with other quantum interactions reduces the quantum description to the
classical, the complementary wave-particle description appears to be
fundamental to nature. For example quantum electrodynamics, which describes
electromagnetic fields as an exchange of virtual
particles appearing and disappearing within the energy-time constraints of
uncertainty, is the most accurate physical theory ever devised, correctly
predicting the magnetic moment of the electron to six decimal places, but the
theory still implicitly uses the wave aspect in the propagator defining
particle transmission.
In addition, we come to the phenomenon of
quantum entanglement, demurred against by Einstein as "spooky action at a
distance". If we have two particles
in the same wave function, in the same way laser light consists of many coherent
photons in a single wave function, they become "in synch" in a way that means
that each seems to instantaneously detect any changes in the other. We are told
by relativity that no information can be conveyed faster than the speed of
light, but the wave function appears to be able to keep track of the particles
it contains even over intervals where light has no time to cross. For example,
we can produce two photons of complementary polarization and send them far
apart. We don't know the polarization of either, but if we measure one of them,
the other is found to be complementary, even when information had no time to
pass at the speed of light between them.
This doesn't mean we can use entanglement to
send classical information faster than the speed of light because, once one of the
particles is measured, their entanglement is destroyed, but it does mean that
quantum properties such as entanglement may enter into all sorts of situations
which we would have thought they wouldn't. Many processes in the world at large may be entangled in subtle ways we don't fully appreciate because all phenomena ultimately emerged from the wave function of the nascent universe.
Many biological processes involve quantum
phenomena. Protein folding into the active three-dimensional shape is a result
of quantum computation among its molecular wave orbitals. Enzymes catalyze
reactions partly by quantum tunneling, to bridge the energy gap between the
reactants and products. Photosynthesis is a form of spatial quantum computing
which enables the energy to travel the most efficient route from the photo-absorption center to the chemical reaction site. Such
processes may also underlie how the conscious brain integrates its point of
view in real time. The brain appears to use the same principles of phase
coherence that we see in the quantum world to distinguish meaningful signals
from the ground-swell of noise and unconscious pre-processing and this may be
more than a mere analogy. Thus signals that rise and fall together are selected
out of the randomly oscillating milieu to be focused on by attention and
consciously perceived.
This gives us one key to how the brain
generates consciousness. There is no particular centre
in the brain responsible for consciousness, but rather it is a global
manifestation of the most coherent wave excitations of the whole brain, focused
by attention into the stream of consciousness we experience.
Finally, the quantum wave function also extends
throughout space-time, so that it connects earlier and later points in a kind
of future-past handshaking transaction. We can see this in experiments where we
alter the way we detect particles at the end of their path and this appears to
alter what they must have done beforehand. For example we can choose to detect
a photon from the other side of the universe that traveled past a lensing
galaxy, using either a interference film or a
directional particle detector. Making the change determines whether the photon
went around both sides of the galaxy or just one, long before we made the
decision. This shows us that the future absorbing states of a particle are just
as important as the past emitting states, and that all quantum phenomena in
some sense detect their potential futures.
The
Brain's Ancient Butterfly-Hurricane
A second feature of brain dynamics arises from the
fact that its processing appears to be closer to that
of a dynamical system than the purely digital process that computer technology
involves. Although neurons sending signals any distance, such as the pyramidal neurons
connecting different parts of the brain use pulse-coded discrete 'action-potential'
spikes, other neurons have continuously graded potential changes, and the
overall excitations of the brain appear as broad-spectrum waveforms generated
by dynamic feedback between excitatory and inhibitory neurons, resulting in continuous
oscillations globally, as measured by an encephalogram..
The discovery of dynamical chaos in the
mid-twentieth century led to the notion of sensitive dependence on initial
conditions – the butterfly catastrophe – where the tiny eddies from
the flapping of a butterfly's wings could become amplified into a hurricane, if
the underlying weather pattern displayed this chaotic sensitivity. This is why
even medium term weather prediction can be impossible and it spelt another
fundamental change of perspective in physics.
Left:
(Above) The butterfly effect. Sensitive dependence on arbitrarily small changes
such as the eddies of a butterflies wing can grow into
a hurricane. (Below): Wavelet transform of the auditory cortex perceiving an out
of tune note shows broad spectrum excitation between 25 and 60 Hz consistent
with chaotic dynamics, rather than the precise resonant frequencies of an ordered
dynamical system. Centre: Chaotic strange attractor model of olfactory
perception with sample attractors.
Inhalation results in high-energy chaos which makes a transition to enter either an existing attractor if the smell is recognized, or if not, to modify the energy landscape with learning to form a new attractor. Patterns are dynamically chaotic but spatially stored as 'holographic' representations across the olfactory cortex. Right: Evidence for amplification of excitation
at the neuronal level amplified to whole neurosystems in a critically poised situation.
Above all, the brain has to be arbitrarily
sensitive as a dynamical system to subtle changes in its external conditions to
survive. Phases of brain excitation in perception and cognition appear to involve
transitions in and out of chaos, enabling the brain to use sensitive dependence
in its functioning. The chaotic phase avoids the dynamic getting stuck in a rut
and shakes it loose to explore all the possibilities, while the transition out
of chaos represents the ordered outcome. This raises the spectre
that, when the brain is critically poised, arbitrarily small changes, e.g. at a
neuronal, synaptic or even molecular level, can tip the balance during a
critical decision, resulting in a change in the global brain dynamic and an
immediate reaction from the subject, leading to a process linking quantum and
global processes.
A central role of subjective consciousness is
not computation per se, but being able to react very quickly in real time to
subtle clues that our survival is about to be threatened – a tiger is
about to pounce, or a snake is about to strike. The open environment problems
of survival tend to be computationally intractable like the travelling salesman
problem, because they super-exponentiate in
complexity, as the number of contributing factors increases. A living organism
needs to be able to make real-time decisions almost at reflex speed and this
seems to be precisely why the brain evolved this way. The central arena of
conscious attention appears to be a global dynamical system maintained by the
brain to ensure such sensitivity is maintained through ongoing attention. Critical
here is the idea that consciousness is an anticipatory organ for threats to
survival and strategic opportunities, which is maintaining an internal
space-time model of the environment at large.
This type of activity is very ancient. Membrane
excitability is a property of all live cells. Single celled amoebo-flagellates
display all the features of excitability, based on ion channels, and possess
the same receptor proteins and use the same neurotransmitters we find in our
own brains, utilized in single celled species as cell-to-cell social signaling
molecules. Chaotic cellular excitation constitutes a sense organ due to its
sensitive dependence on external conditions. It is clear that the founding
characteristics permitting edge of chaos excitation in the conscious brain
arose first as a means of single celled organisms sensing and anticipating
environmental changes around them. This both explains why the brain uses
dynamic chaos in its processing and how it became a basis for the emergence of
consciousness as an anticipatory sensory organ detecting threats to survival in
multi-celled animals.
(a,b) Dreaming REM sleep shows a
reduction in frontal activity and an increase in activity in visual areas. (c)
The EEG of REM sleep unlike the other sleep stages is very similar to the awake EEG. (d) The default circuit shows depression during a
task (above), but enhancement at rest (below). (e) Brain activity under LSD
(below) is highly enhanced over that of a placebo (above). (f) Persistence
homological scaffolds for placebo (above) and psilocybin (below), giving an
intriguing portrait of the experiential richness of the psychedelic state.
Meditation and contemplation also display changes, with a high degree of
volitional control enhancing specific regions in Carmelite nuns experiencing
oneness with God, suppression of the default network in Buddhist meditators
during emptiness meditation, and enhancement of emotional areas during
compassion meditation.
Exploring
Exotic Mind-Brain States
If we are going to come to a full understanding
of the nature of conscious existence, and solve the problem of complementing
science's basis in objective phenomena with a complementary investigation of
the subjective realm, we need to investigate the full repertoire of conscious
mental states, including those that do not simply correspond to real world
experiences.
The founders of major religions all laid claim
to forms of visionary experience. Gautama Buddha was renowned for his deep
meditation and the insights he received, Jesus made a reputation as a miracle
worker whose mental states seemed to influence the world and Muhammad claimed
to have visions of the angel Gabriel in a cave leading to many of his Quranic pronouncements. Likewise gurus, shamans and mystics
throughout history have laid claim to extraordinary prescient or visionary powers.
In a fundamental way, our religious notions of the universe are all derived
from visionary imagination, although traditional religions tend to repress
mystical insights, leaving the prophets lamenting in sack
cloth and ashes, or killed for their convictions, for fear they will
result in heresies that depart from the doctrinal party line.
We can summarize the dimensions of conscious
experience in several outstanding conscious states, extending beyond our
experiences of the real world. The first is the recently discovered activity of
the "default circuit" which becomes active, as a preparation for future crises,
as soon as we disengage from an active mental task, and is responsible for
relaxed recollection, day-dreaming and worried repetitive thought. We also have
states of shamanic trance, meditation and religious contemplation as focused
alert conscious states. Associated with sleep we have deep and dreaming sleep,
as well as hypnagogic and OBE, or out-of-body experiences associated with
semi-consciousness and sleep paralysis, and transient episodes of lucid
dreaming on the cusp between sleep and wakefulness. There are also a variety of
naturally or pharmacologically induced states, which result in profound changes
to subjective consciousness, including the states induced by psychedelics, such
as LSD and magic mushrooms, dissociative agents such as ketamine and salvinorin and deliriants, such
as the scopolamine in datura. Finally we have states
of psychosis and the NDEs, or near death experiences that many people claim to have
during a medical crisis, or accident affecting consciousness.
In exploring these states we have two options.
The first is the to study the brains of people in these various conscious states.
The second is the first-hand route – that is for each of us to experience
the mental state through engaging meditation, consuming psychedelics,
recounting our dreaming experiences, or recounting those during an accident, or
medical emergency. We will explore these as complementary approaches.
The "default circuit", so called because it was
activated during experiments when the subject was inactive, has become famous
as the signature of the resting brain state and involves a specific set of
neuronal pathways that are deactivated when we have to attend to a task at
hand, but become active as soon as our brain has nothing pressing to do,
leading to our internal dialogue of past recollection and rehearsal for future
situations. We can study this activity and know that it corresponds to those
wild thoughts that fly around when we are worried and gradually descend into
dream-like sequences as we go deeper into a relaxed trance.
Likewise there have been a number of studies
performed on meditative and contemplative states, from transcendental
meditation and formless and compassionate Buddhist meditation, through to
religious contemplation of Carmelite nuns. States of meditation tend to show
highly synchronous one-pointed focus of mind, in which the default circuit is
held in check, and there is high coherence in the active EEG's gamma band
associated with active mental states. Other states such as 'speaking in
tongues' tend to be more disordered.
We also know that sleep has two phases (a) of
deep slow-wave sleep and (b) the REM, or rapid eye movement, phases that are
associated with episodes of active dreaming. Paradoxically for a sleep state,
the brain waves of REM sleep show up on an EEG, or electroencephalogram, as
very similar to an active waking state. This is consistent with the mental
activities of dreaming, which are complex and vivid experientially and appear
to take place over the same time intervals as the dreamer perceives them. I have had many profound experiences of paradoxical realities in the dreaming condition, especially on the cusp of becoming lucid in the dreaming state, and through dreams whose content uncannily becomes manifest later and consider the dreamtime to be a key route to fathoming the conscious condition.
We
also have a detailed knowledge of the neuronal circuits involved in the cycles
of sleep and dreaming, from the flip-flop of orexin neurons to the ascending serotonin and nor-epinephrine pathways that rise from
the brain stem and fan out across the entire cortex in specific layers,
effectively enabling the entire dynamic mode of the brain to be activated and
deactivated. We can further make whole brain scans of the
activity of the dreaming brain and confirm that the perceptual areas of the
brain are highly activated, while the frontal areas associated with
decision-making are less active, again consistent with the lack of control
dreamers tend to experience over the flight of changing perspectives in an
active dream. The difficulty here is that dreams are very real experiences to
the subject, which can be terrifying, or sublime, and which can have all the
detailed sensory features of a waking state, albeit with testable differences
if we can summon enough lateral awareness to make an actual test of our dream
state. So the brain scan tells us absolutely nothing about how a brain state
like dreaming appears to the subject as a complete experiential universe, or
what the actual nature of this universe is. What it does tell us is that waking
experience is likewise an internal model of reality somehow constructed by
active brain states and that these states can become generated without any
actual sensory input from the objective physical world.
The same problem arises in studying the changes
of consciousness induced by psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD. Scientific
studies of the effects of psychedelics have only recently been again undertaken
after a period of almost total repression dating back to the 1970s when these
agents were given schedule 1 prohibited status after they became wildly popular
and caused a revolution against the material norms of Western consumer culture.
We are still thus only beginning to understand how they work.
The brain is a sappy organ that depends for its
electrical activity on a vast array of diverse chemical neurotransmitters
carrying modalities of information across the synapses between neurons. Some of
these directly excite target neurons via ion channel receptors, but others
modulate overall activity over longer periods via G-protein linked receptors.
Psychedelics affect the 5HT2a serotonin receptor. Serotonin plays a role in
mood, appetite and other functions, such as social hierarchy. SSRI antidepressants
boost serotonin levels by reducing its reuptake via transporters. Ecstasy, or
MDMA, acutely boosts serotonin by causing the transporters to dump excess back
into the synapse. But neither of these result in the full fledged psychedelic
state, which seems to result from super-agonists which bind to the 5HT2a receptor
and also cause it to initiate a second chain of events involving an associated activating
glutamate receptor, leading to an overall change in activity, with additional
excitations spreading across the cortex, in a conscious representation of the brain
processing itself, leading to kaleidoscopic visual patterns, mixed sensory
synesthesia, and heightened internal perceptions of scenes, which can develop
into complex visionary experiences. Like dreaming studies, brain scans of
subjects under psychedelics show differences of activation, some increased and
others diminished, consistent with heightened perception with somewhat
diminished prefrontal control and in particular, greater interactive connections
between diverse regions.
I have travelled to the sources of the world’s natural psychedelic sacraments and partaken sacred mushrooms, peyote and the Amazonian potion yage, or ayahuasca, with traditional practitioners. I have also explored a variety of synthetic agents, spanning LSD, Ketamine, salvinorin, cannabinoids and MDMA. I class the natural psychedelic sacraments, particularly sacred mushrooms, as key to the first person exploration of the mystical condition, and a sine qua non, far more trustworthy than the second and third-hand accounts of religious founders and others claiming the authority of higher consciousness. I have had all manner of peak experiences of meditative samadhi on entheogenic vigils and have navigated my life in terms of their insights. They continue to be classed as the safest of recreational psychotropic agents, despite their profound affects on consciousness. I see them as key to a democratic exploration of the foundations conscious experience, shrouded in mystification by religious traditions. It is an ironic tragedy of 20th century Western culture that, right in the middle of the scientific revolution, when we came upon natural sacraments inducing the very conscious states that lie at the centre of the cyclone of the whole question of what consciousness is in the scientific era, that despite a record of sacred use for millennia, these agents have been condemned to a draconian criminal taboo, more reflective of the dark days of the Catholic Inquisition and the witch hunts than a so-called age of enlightenment.
Studies have also been undertaken on their effects on mature subjects
who are not drug takers, resulting in experiences judged by the subjects to
have genuine spiritual significance, of lasting benefit in follow-up studies
up to two years later. Patients in terminal illnesses also report improvements
in their state of mind and better reconciliation with their mortal condition,
indicating these experiences are of fundamental value in coming to terms with
the very existential questions of life meaning, religions seek to resolve.
Psychedelic sacraments have been used ceremonially in this way for thousands of
years by every human culture that has stumbled upon them. They are central to shamanic
practices and clearly constitute a first-person route to forms of mystical
experience that remain to be investigated.
We can likewise explore more extreme states,
such as near death experience both anecdotally and through animal studies, which show for example that
brain activity with accentuated gamma power and coherence that could be
associated with the near death experiences of a heart attack, could be
experimentally detected in the brains of rats up to half a minute after induced
cardiac arrest.
Scientific investigation can thus tell us a lot
about the very subjective conscious states we associate with heightened
consciousness, and with the mystical and visionary states we might associate
with transcendental experiences. But the only way to make any sort of
evidential discovery of what is an exclusively subjective realm, is for as many
of us as possible to take each of these journeys in the first person, and then
come back together to take notes of our experiences and the salient features
along the way. Fully exploring this area requires each of us being able to make
the conscious journey ourselves and not trust our judgment and belief to
religious or scientific assumptions about their potential significance.
However this avenue is also fraught with
pitfalls. Individual experiences vary a great deal and subjective accounts
remain anecdotal and liable to extraordinary claims that cannot be objectively
verified and which skeptical people will find laughable and pretentious. Claims abound for being clairvoyant and
mediums who have contact with the dead, claim powers
of telepathy, or telekinesis, reaching into the paranormal. The only real affirmation
we can trust is whether such a claim can be verified in our own subjective
conscious experience. The criticism of such sporadic claims is that we pay
selective attention to the odd confirming events while ignoring the vast
majority of situations where nothing happened, biasing the statistics towards
significance. Indeed, any such statistically repeated test may converge to
chance, just as repeated quantum events converge to the probability
interpretation.
However sometimes these events do get recorded.
Having read a book on precognitive dreaming, I had a double nightmare that I
was being stung, woke to tell my wife when she got up early and an hour later
was stung wide awake after she had subsequently opened the bedroom window. A
couple of months before the 9-11 catastrophe, I wrote a song and published the
lyrics, including a number of prescient lines "can we fly so high we'll pass
right to the other side and never fall in flames". Then I watched in horror as
the events unfolded. I have had many sporadic precognitive experiences like
this especially dreaming, but the key of making the subjective empirical quest
is to fully accept only those accounts we can actually verify in our own personal
experiences.
Western society has made huge advances in objective
science, transforming our technological culture, but partly due to the taboo on
research and alternative mental states, has made little headway on the
exploration of the cosmology of subjective consciousness, leading to the
schizophrenic culture of the religious-science divide. The Eastern tradition
has always held this avenue to be absolutely central to discovering the cosmic
self through the meditative tradition, whose central pillar is confirming first
hand, through meditative insight, the nature of reality, rather than blind
faith in religious doctrines and leaders.
Several studies have also shown that religious
belief has an evolutionary basis, which complements the reinforcement of moral
imperatives, enabling religious societies to become dominant, with religiosity
having up to a 40% genetic component. The neuroscientist Ramachandran
proposed the idea of the "God spot" a nexus of adjacent regions in the cortex
linking extreme semantic significance with heightened emotional fulfillment. More
recently, researchers have found that the brain is inherently sensitive to
believing in a proposition if there are grounds for doing so, but when there is
a mystery about something, the same neural machinery is co-opted in the
formulation of religious belief. This means that we can all in principle have
genuine spiritual insights, rather than depending on third-hand religious
doctrine, but it also means we need to be wary of believing anything unless we
actually find some kind of real affirmation, either physically or
experientially.
Right in the centre
of this question is the internal cosmic self, or soul. The scientific
description tells us that, while subjective consciousness is a complementary phenomenon,
lying outside the framework of objective reality, it is generated in all of us by
the same integrated, focused processing of the electrochemical brain. In this
sense, it is a universal property of human and possibly all animal brains and
has an underlying basis in the quantum physics of the universe itself. Thus
when we descend into deep inner mental states, we are entering an archetypal
world, in which it becomes possible to witness the unfettered nature of
subjective consciousness untethered to our individual egotistical context. In
this process we are entering the realm of the conscious soul, or cosmic self,
that underlies the very process that makes consciousness possible in biological
organisms. In this sense, when we let the boundaries go, we are potentially
experiencing consciousness disembodied from outside the inside out, as universal
consciousness, extant in the universe as a whole, not subdivided into our
individual existential dilemmas. In a fundamental sense, this aspect of
consciousness is an endlessly 'reincarnating' process, arising whenever a biological
brain becomes resonant to the processes generating individual subjective
consciousness, which has been occurring and will continue to occur, throughout
the history of conscious beings, from alpha to omega in the universe at large.
So the scientific perspective remains entirely consistent with the transcendent
view.
But critical to this exploration is that,
whatever conclusions we come to experientially, these need to be given
constructive expression in the physical world to shape for the better, the future
of the world around us and the generations of life within it. It is not enough
to simply slide into a deep meditative Samadhi, renounce worldly desires and
retreat from our involvement with the living process that gave us life in the
first place. We need to give back to the ongoing passage of life our insights
and commitment to safeguarding the conscious life process as a whole.
Solving
the Consciousness - Free-Will Paradox
Virtually all sane
people act with an implicit belief that our conscious experiences and
decision-making can and do have objective consequences in the physical world.
This is central to our sense of autonomy as individuals, and to the
accountability of the legal and criminal process. Of course, we also know that
genetic and environmental factors, from incarceration to ill health, can limit
our ability to make choices. But very few people seriously believe that we are
simply chemical automations of our brain function, thus believing that our
subjective consciousness is conveniently deceiving us because in fact our
decisions are simply a product of our genetics, our brain state and a set of
circumstances leading up to the decision we pretend we are consciously making.
A number of scientifically educated people nevertheless take this position,
based on a Newtonian view of the universe as a deterministic mechanism.
Free-will is a harder proposition to prove than subjective consciousness,
which we know we possess from second to second as the portal through which we
perceive the world. But the evolutionary emergence of consciousness would never
have occurred unless it had a strong adaptive advantage. Our conscious brain is
very costly on our energy supply coopting around 40% of our glucose metabolism,
so if a purely computational brain without consciousness could do the job just
as well the conscious brain would have never have evolved, or would have simply
been discarded.
We have already seen the way dynamical chaos
can amplify arbitrarily small differences due to the butterfly effect, and the
fact that critical decision-making tends to correspond to a transition our of a
chaotic dynamic representing the configuration space of the problem entering
leading to the more ordered brain state representing a resolution. When this
decision-making is critically poised, such a dynamical system also becomes
capable of amplifying molecular perturbations driven by quantum uncertainty.
Thus a chaotically dynamical brain opens a quantum loophole, in which brain
dynamics can enter sates, which are neither predicable, nor deterministic.
We know that quantum transactions are a form of
handshaking between past and future, so this leaves open the possibility of the
quantum aspect being critical to a form of space time
anticipation complementary to computational deduction. Organisms also face a
chain of such uncertainty points whose circumstances lead to new outcomes in a
way that would never converge to the quantum probability interpretation, so our
decision-making lives become a chain reaction of uncertainties never to be
exactly repeated. Moreover many of these take the form of implicit cat
paradoxes, because chaotic instability and quantum uncertainty acting together
form the source of many of the accidental crises that plague our
decision-making on the fly, so there is a sense in which free-will is also
playing a role of determining the course of history, by collapsing the wave
superposition of the shadowy quantum probability outcomes.
This is not to claim that genetic, environmental and
other circumstances and logical reasoning do not play a critical part in many
of our decisions, but it does affirm the principle that when we believe we are
making a critically-poised uncertain decision, it is possible and likely that
the brain state reflects precisely this.
Various neuroscience experiments have attempted
to disprove this, by establishing a 'readiness potential' that might indicate
that the brain had already made a watershed decision before we became
consciously aware of making a subjective choice, but further studies have shown
that these kind of studies are either simply sampling a readiness to act but
not which action, or they are only giving a marginal probability weighting. The
actual situation appears to involve a brain activation that becomes unstable
and fluctuates in a way that reflects the
transitions in and out of chaos already described.
Left:
Evolution time-scale of the Universe and life on Earth. Right: Mandala of
Evolution detail (Dion Wright).
Facing
Life in the Physical Cosmos
This brings us full circle back to life in the
natural world we have discovered through science. The physical universe
presents us with a far more exciting and intriguing challenge that the quaint
creation stories of the Bible and San Bushmen. If taken without the inclusion
of consciousness and in a Newtonian paradigm, this can appear to have become an
unremitting nightmare, as starkly expressed by Bertrand Russell in the early 20th
century:
Such in outline, but even more purposeless, more devoid of meaning is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noon-day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. ... Brief and powerless is man's life, on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark …
But once we put consciousness and free-will
back into the equation and take into account quantum reality and the
relativistic view of space-time, and with it the manifold discoveries we have
also made about life in the universe and the natural and evolutionary process,
the scientific cosmology becomes a far more exciting participatory story than
any of the religious creation myths and one in which we have a critical role to
play and an ethical responsibility to do right by the opportunity we have been
given as incarnate living beings.
We know the universe is vastly older than
religious conceptions and contains forces and phenomena completely outside the
preconceived notions of religious creation. We now have very good theories
describing both how the universe came into being on a cosmological footing and
how the forces of nature, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak radioactive force
and the strong, or colour force binding atomic nuclei
together all fit into a mandala-like mathematical broken symmetry. Although
there are still some missing pieces in this description, as the energy tends to
infinity and time tends to zero, the theories we do have are very successful
and can very accurately describe phenomena to a very high accuracy in terms of
wave-particle exchange and the principle of cosmic symmetry-breaking. Although new more general
theories will no doubt be added to this over time, the existing theories hold
good in their own domains.
We also now know that our galaxy is littered
with planetary systems and that these assume a great variety just as the
planets in our solar system do, because many-particle gravity is a chaotic
process that tends to fully explore its space of possible configurations. This
means that planets pose a broad spectrum of environments, some of which will be
in the Goldilocks zone for life as we know it.
Moreover, the chemical elements produced by supernovae enter interactively into
fractal chain reactions prone to increasing complexity, which result in the
detection in comets and meteorites of organic molecules and components of
living systems such as the amino acids making up proteins and the nucleosides
making nucleic acids on which our genes depend. These have also been found
being continuously generated in the 'Lost City' chemical garden vents under the
sea, which have been active since Earth's oceans first condensed.
Evidence of cellular life exists from only a
few hundred million years after the liquid oceans condensed some 3.7 billion
years ago. Since then we now have incontrovertible evidence of genetic
evolution from decoding the genomes of diverse species and the remains of DNA
in fossils, so evolution has become a fact of life, rather than a dubious
theory contested by creationism and intelligent design. We know the diversity of
life has risen slowly over the last 500 million years to climaxes of diversity,
punctuated by mass extinctions caused by a combination of asteroid, supernova
and volcanic effects and that just such a mass extinction of life is now
occurring due to human impact of the habitats and climate of our biosphere.
Within this evolutionary process we have
documented the rise of animals with complex brains, leading to the brains of
vertebrates and mammals, with which we share an evolutionary origin. Because
the brains of all complex animals appear to work based on the same principles
of chaotic excitation, it is reasonable to conclude that subjective
consciousness has been evolving into higher integrated manifestations, since
the first single-celled amoebo-flagellate ancestors
of higher animals.
These developments are ultimately made possible
by the fractal nature of molecular interaction to form supramolecular
complexes, cell organelles and tissues as an interactive consequence of the
primal diversification of the fundamental forces of nature. In this sense, life
and the sentient brain is the most complete interactive product of all the four
forces acting together in a hierarchy, making the biota, and with it, conscious
life, the cosmological pinnacle of fundamental force interaction – the sigma
on the cosmic equator mid-way through the universe's lifetime, as significant
as the alpha of its origin and the omega of its eventual demise.
We thus need to come to terms with the fact
that life is a cosmological process in the physical universe and that we as
inheritors of a 13 billion year history of the universe and a 4.5 billion year
history of Earth need to learn to take responsibility for our cosmological
place in the universe and act with responsibility to ensure the continuity of
life on the planet and its diversity over evolutionary time.
We need to realize this is not just a passive
process of preserving life for future generations to solve the ultimate problems,
but a participatory process of the cumulative generations of life reaching
towards greater wisdom and enlightenment. This is not
the end of the road, provided we act decisively to make the planet safe and
resilient over evolutionary time. If we are intelligent in our reproductive
choices, humanity will continue to evolve and reach new peaks of insight and
understanding, but we already know we have been gifted with a paradisiacal
world and have already reached a point of inscrutable knowledge sufficient to
justify using our wisdom to preserve the generations of life as our primary
calling.
Natural life is a paradise of tooth and claw
because the evolutionary diversity of life fans out
predators and prey, parasites and hosts,
A
Paradise of Tooth and Claw
The Earth is a paradise more verdant and
abundant by far than the mythical Garden of Eden, that has facilitated the
evolution of intelligent life and enabled humans to enjoy a lifespan throughout
our emergence of up to 45 years in which the gatherer-hunter lifestyle provided
sufficient food for the people to live without serious stress or hunger, based
on only a few hours of gathering or hunting a day, with plenty of time for
social recreation and enjoyment. The diet was diverse and epidemic diseases
infrequent, due to the low overall population density.
But a real paradise contains within it natural
perils that are inevitable in any real world context of biological organisms
living in the vagaries of an entropic universe full of accident and misfortune
and in which there are predators and parasites and genetic and malignant
diseases, as an inevitable statistical consequence of the very processes by
which life's complexity must needs arise.
We are also mortal sexual individuals and again
this is an inevitable consequence of the fact that sexual recombination has
been a pivotal process in enabling the elaborate genetic regulation of complex
organisms to evolve. Sexual mortality is not a punishment by God for the deceit
of the first woman, but an inescapable part of the cosmological transaction.
Neither is our current lifespan of a little over 70 years a consequence of
grasping selfishness as the Buddhist doctrines would have us believe, and could
extend significantly by enlightened medical and scientific discovery..
We thus have to have a sanguine attitude to the
biological reality of paradise. We know there is natural injustice and that all
people are not born with equal endowments and opportunities. This does not mean
the natural world is tragically flawed, because this is the only way we can
come to witness this extraordinary universe as sentient beings. Indeed,
although individual organisms are mortal, the generations of life are immortal,
so long as the Earth remains hospitable to life as a whole.
Our primary objective is to protect the
biosphere for the future generations of life, not to enrich and indulge ourselves at others expense. This requires a compensating
attitude of social justice to generate a compassionate society in which
individual misfortune is alleviated as best we can achieve. This in turn
creates a climate of togetherness in which life gains true meaning for us all.
We urgently need to restore the habitats of
other living creatures, and correct the runaway climate change and set half the
Earth aside for the preservation of life as a whole. At the same time, in
closing the circle of coexistence, we need to eradicate military confrontation
and remove all the weapons of mass destruction that overshadow our viability as
a species. Missiles have one legitimate role and that is avoiding an asteroid
impact that could wipe us out. Once we have mastered a global society that can
protect the evolutionary future of life on Earth, we can then turn our eyes to
the wider universe beyond our solar system and the ultimate discoveries of the
nature of consciousness and the universe as a whole.
The cosmic background radiation (a) confirms
the universe had a sudden hot expansionary beginning some 13 billion years ago.
Whether it expands forever or rebounds in a big crunch (b), life in the
universe is a paradise on the cosmic equator in eternal space-time,
the
cumulative Sigma of the natural forces of nature, between
alpha and Omega.
The
Relativistic Reality
So what of the question the Bertrand Russell
posed about the ultimate fate of the universe? Is there any point to life if
the solar system will eventually be wiped out and much later, all life in the
universe extinguished in the big crunch, big rip, or heat death as the universe
flies apart?
The answer to this is twofold. Life is an
abundant lunch on the grass, which has incarnated us all as a freebie. Even if
the solar system expires, or we destroy ourselves in a holocaust, the processes
that generated life on Earth are capable of spawning life widely across the
universe. As to the ultimate annihilation, we can find the answer hidden in the
space-time view of relativity. From one point of view our existence is
temporal. Time elapses. Today I am writing. Tomorrow, or further down the track
I fear death and decay, and my early life of youthful vigor is now just a long
fading memory. We thus all strive to take the next breath and ultimately this
is the source of the malaise the Buddhists describe of the grasping ego.
But there is another perspective, and that is
the cumulative process of life as a whole. We have described life in the
universe as paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time. But the beginning and
end of the universe may be more like the latitude and longitude lines coming
together at the north and south poles, where space and time come together and
time stands still. In this sense the whole envelope of space-time exists in the
eternal extent of this space-time envelope. When we begin to invest in the
passage of the generations rather than our own mortal desires, as well as
investing in the immortality of life, we are investing in this eternal space-time
view. Our cultural record of creative expression and our cumulative discoveries
and insights transmitted from generation to generation also attest to this
perspective.
From this point of view, consciousness is a
complementary cosmological principle to the entire physical universe and in it,
the universe as a whole comes to know and understand itself in space-time. The
only way it can do this is to pull itself up by its bootstraps, interactively
generating the molecules of life in the great gas clouds around newly forming
solar systems, leading to biogenesis and eventually the emergence of conscious
organisms who, given a modicum of wisdom, come to successful enough terms of engagement
with their existential condition to safeguard the planetary habitats in which
they exist. Like the presence of diseases and accidents in the natural world, this
is the only way such a superlative cosmological happening can come about.
Written into this equation are laws of nature, which break symmetry from the
primal singularity, which we call the "big bang", and proceed
to an ultimate fate destined by these same laws. So the universe can have its
conscious cake but has to ultimately eat it too, because consciousness is
inevitably a transient ongoing property of complex organisms on the cosmic
equator in space-time, albeit reincarnated endlessly in the universe so long as
life lasts. The way the universe becomes transcendent is through the
transcendent consciousness of the biota, during the paradisiacal epoch of life on
the cosmic equator. That's the curse and this is the cosmic blessing that makes
and has made this all possible.