Br10 Evolution of the Mind
A Postconscious mind's Reasoned Account
Evolution of Mind is supplementary to The Silent Oracle.
Before life began Earth was composed of inanimate matter, material having no independent self-motivated activity. This matter was capable of some activity, and of reactivity in conjunction with other material, but was, and is, subject to certain laws of physics and chemistry. These laws contain no morality, being concerned only with that action which shall follow from certain combinations in certain conditions, not with any question of what should happen.
The specific energy involved in setting life in motion, life force, instead of being expressed as heat, light or indiscriminate movement, and leaving aside the emergence of bacteria and viruses, was expressed as a single cell and invested in a self whose reciprocal purpose was to sustain this spark of energy, defying the laws of physics by keeping itself alive for as long as possible until, before those laws could reassert themselves and cause it to die, the cell initiated a repeated and redoubled cycle by splitting into two replicas of itself - two new single cells - and regenerating the spark in each of them. The continuation of animal life has depended ever since on one means or another of reproducing this spark of life prior to death.
The self and life force absorbed each other until they became one single cell entity. Such single cells were nourished by the chemical soup in which they lived. Eventually their numbers increased to the point where all the soup was being used and many cells were dying from under-nourishment, prematurely, before they could split.
To accept this situation was to go against life force's basic aim - to live to the optimum. Instead of accepting their lot, which would have confined Earth-life forever to this simple unchanging cyclic activity with their numbers being determined by their chemical soup-supply, the single cells embarked upon a strange strategy which resulted in today's world and the human race. They sought to improve their survival prospects by eating each other.
Certain cells gravitated to the formation of a crude organism, still absorbing the chemical soup but also capable of consuming other single cells by becoming a kind of shared stomach. As other cells followed suit, the original organism enlarged itself in order also to consume smaller organisms which, in turn, developed ploys both to defend themselves and to attack. The result was no increase in the overall number of single cells (those remaining single and those helping to form organisms) because their numbers were still basically determined by the amount of chemical soup available. But it did result in the extreme elaboration and complication of life.
Single cells were no longer independent expressions of life force and self combined, but were called upon to join in performing the different functions of an organism, that organism its own genetic pattern and guide. This guidance took the form of instinct, a programme and set of instructions inbuilt by experience to which the organism's self became strictly bound and, eventually, strongly attached by way of a series of positive and negative emotions, all facilitated by an evolving brain.
After many millions of years, living creatures had proliferated in character and complexity, many of them migrating to dry land. Their situation on land was basically much the same as it had been in the seas. Although adapted to a methane-dominated, and then an oxygen-dominated atmosphere, they were still made up of single cells dependent upon the chemical soup, but now taken in separately as solid material, air and water, mixed and processed internally. Plants take the chemicals in directly; some animals eat the plants, and predators eat other animals.
The process of living became more complex, particularly at the upper end of the food-chain where instinct alone became insufficient as guide and instructor. More advanced creatures needed a new brain-function to make informed choices on occasion, overriding and changing the code of instinct in places. To answer this need the brain formed a rudimentary mind, named the conscious mind because it expanded awareness from a process of action and reaction to instinct into consciousness of self and its situation and growing ability to predict the likely consequences of voluntary action. As time passed the conscious capacity increased in step with other evolutionary developments and refinements, reaching a high level in a group of land animals, the primates.
The primates' consciousness, enhanced by the development of manual dexterity, gave them increased curiosity which, in turn, gave them the habit of rudimentary thought,ie of allowing and encouraging neurons in the brain cortex to seek new inter-connections, which produced new ideas, to be contemplated with fear and trepidation but also with exciting anticipation.
The primates' minds slowly developed, but their instinctive selves remained in command.
Certain apes, probably chimpanzees, acquired a new level of thought by which they were enabled to anticipate powerful advantages to be gained from changed survival strategies, going hand-in-hand with a new and relatively intelligently reasoned attitude.
These apes became hominids, precursors of the human race. Until the human species emerged and quickly advanced, the hominids prospered well and spread quite far and wide, their success possibly being due in some measure to the very fact of their superior intelligence, evident in their bearing and the look in their eyes.
The hominids, and of course their brains, slowly developed over a period of perhaps a million years. They began by raising themselves on two legs, learned the use of crude tools and weapons, and were familiar with using and maintaining, and perhaps eventually making, fire. They hunted in organised ways. They were first cave-dwellers, then went on to build permanent shelters and, when they reached Europe, to clothe themselves. They devised means of communication by signals, facial expressions and sounds,possibly going on to make use of a simple form of language. It is questionable that they ever took to water, or constructed artifacts such as traps.
That the hominids became extinct must have been because their conscious faculty of mind did not develop in efficiency beyond a certain point. It could not be a matter of brain-size, or skull dimensions (for the Neanderthals' brain was considerably larger than the human,) but a question of brain quality. They were the first creatures on Earth in whom the conscious mind dared seriously to contemplate a fundamental challenge to instinct, but this fact must have been the basic cause of their undoing because their conscious faculty proved unequal to the challenge.
TIt is my belief that the human species resulted from a dramatic hominid mutation which gave us a very much more complex and efficient conscious mind which was potentially quite equal to the challenge of instinct. While this new conscious mind set about exploring the endless hypothetical possibilities, the new human being was faced with the immediate practical problems of actually surviving in its reality.
By the exercise of self-will we commandeered a portion (level one) of the new conscious mind-extension and applied it to pursuit of the instinctive drives. This enlarged conscious mind gave us enormous thinking ability but limited reasoning capacity because limited to level 1. Nevertheless, it gave us language, and made us the most formidable competitor in nature.
We made the disastrous decision to close away from consciousness the large remaining part of the new extension, and our history describes our unending, fruitless struggles to answer and solve the consequent questions and problems. This closure gave us a separate, remote, independent new mind which I call the postconscious, but human being was now represented by our enhanced instinctive consciousness, whose sphere became our reality. By shutting off the new postconscious mind we prevented it from bringing to bear its much more powerful reasoning ability (up to level 6) and upsetting this new reality. But by the same token the postconscious could not be entered or interfered with by conscious self-will and the pressures of reality. So the postconscious became independent and reasoned truly (and deeply if encouraged and helped by the individual self's questioning) because the only possible function and objective of a pure reasoning-faculty is truth.
Humans became, and remain to this day, a species rededicated to the competitive drives of instinct, their affairs confined to the limited reasoning of the conscious mind, which is incapable of truth. They commonly possess, yet all but ignore, that much greater faculty - the postconscious - which is capable of truth and which has made a small access-channel by which its main true conclusions are offered to consciousness as the positive moral principles of conscience. One such moral principle is that one should not kill, because life is good, pain and untimely death bad. This is a basic truth of which the animal is not aware - the animal kills but has no concept of compassion - whereas intellect brings to us that awareness of another's hurt and distress. We value these moral principles because we inwardly know them to be postconsciously true. Were we supraconscious we would be bound by them, but consciously we reserve the right to flout them where they go contrary to our realistic interests and pressures, as they regularly do.
By the combination of instinctive drives with manipulated and applied conscious thought and self-will, humanity has allowed a framework and system of life to develop that I call the Machine, which now, with the support of self-will and the conscious mind, is the dominant force and controlling influence in our lives. While it includes all our human institutions, the Machine cannot be humanised - it is amoral, because it is founded on the amoral drives of instinct.
Individual conscious selves try to pay regard to their consciences but are frequently faced with moral dilemmas, one of the numerous examples of which is the Iraqi/USA confrontation in early 1998. It was a conflict between two leaders, neither of whom in his different way represents good moral behaviour yet one of whom, President Clinton - the world's supreme leader, standing for true human values - proposed to bomb the other, Saddam Hussein, a tyrant with a black record of inhumanity.
This bombing killed many people, so it is clearly an immoral act. But we are governed worldwide by an amoral system which accepts war. Yet in this communications age we are kept informed and we are asked our opinion. We are intelligent beings with fundamental moral values (coming from our postconscious by way of our conscience), values which our amoral system, our Machine reality, does not reflect. Of course a majority of us, judging by those values, vote against violent action which would involve death, injury and suffering. But, if we mean it, we should also vote insistently against this amoral society which allows fallible humans, including tyrants, to act as supremely responsible leaders, condones preparations for such action, and provokes it. If we want no violence, we need a gentle and true world society which nurtures and respects life, a world in which there could be no offensive weapons of any kind.
In the world as it is, faced with such moral issues we are required to make a realistic judgement, seeing the situation from the leaders' points of view. To do so is 'common sense', in the light of which true reason appears irresponsibly naive. It is on this basis that collective decisions are normally made. Things always go wrong because leaders are bound by false reality, misguided by their own limited thinking and isolated from common human morality. Things then continue to go wrong because false reality and limited thinking go hand-in-hand. It is incredible but true that instead of specific false thinking giving way to widespread true moral reason the opposite usually happens, though the wind of change is beginning to blow.
We have a society which brings the wayward competitive conscious minds of people to the fore, and puts a minority of similar but especially conditioned conscious minds in control, with predictably disastrous results. Politicians become too specialised and big to deal with 'small' matters, and can become, in extremis, like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein, indifferent to the affairs, fears, pains, hopes and concerns of people. In the sense that they come to believe themselves to be 'above' lesser beings, talents and skills, the same can be said of the administrators of such as education, science and media institutions. The control of human society needs to be exercised by the postconscious of each and every individual, supported by an agreed and sympathetic framework in which all occupy a similar position and take equal part.
There are no immediate moral solutions to such as the Iraq/USA problem because their logic and history belongs to this amoral Machine, and because all the players on the realistic stage are confined to various conflicting conditions of the conscious mind. Using the conscious mind in terms of our present false reality it is possible to contend, with conviction, that either one thing or its exact opposite is perfectly true. If we are to live by our true morality and rectify our wrong reality, which means abolishing the Machine, we must be guided, above all, by our postconscious minds.
It has to be acknowledged that our overall process of mental conditioning has not been led by truth but superimposed by the Machine. There is no human world constitution which lays down the human truth as a guide for us to follow. Politics tries to bridge the gap between personal morality and overall reality, but merely reaches compromise, laying down laws which are only partially and loosely related to moral truth. Religions seek to strengthen morality one way or another but make little or no attempt to admit true reason or to address the amoral bases of reality. All the many thousands of institutions have sold out to the Machine, to some degree, and are constitutionally resistent to any true appeal. It is one thing to discover human truth, quite another thing getting it recognised.
Why is there such an impenetrable fog surrounding the question of truth, or humantruth? In some sense it is a matter of understanding what is meant by truth. By truth I mean not only that which is true in fact, provable by evidence and conscious argument. Truth embraces all that exists, past or present, whether or not known; all possibility, as well as that which is unquestionably so. It means that which is level and plumb; straight as an arrow; perfectly honest; also that which is true in concept or spirit. Above all I take it to mean utterly complete reasoning of all that is knowable; a state of being that is dissatisfied with anything less than truth, that is devoted to pure reason and accepts responsibility for conducting its physical existence accordingly; the source of right, honest and good morality on which that state of being is founded.
Our difficulty with the concept of truth relates to the fact that the subject supposedly lies within a field represented by the academic discipline of Philosophy. The exponents of this discipline maintain that human reason shall always be fallible. Their opinion is rooted in the fact that they have always wrestled with conscious reason - have made a habit of using the available conscious mind. The Philosophers apply a maxim which states that for a proposition to be accepted as true it must be proven by evidence and argument. What they have so far failed to appreciate is that it is in the conscious mind's sphere that human reason shall be fallible. Plain fact can be proved in this sphere by evidence, and relative truths may be proven by arguments limited to their own preferred sections or versions of reality, but definitely not ultimate truth. There are two causes of this. One cause is that the conscious sphere is subject to interference from instinct, self-will, and the strong influence of a false Machine-reality. The other cause is that the conscious mind, having only one level of reason, is, again, incapable of discovering truth.
The discovery of truth requires a mind which is utterly independent and free from outside interference, and which has such a capacity and multi-level configuration that it is capable of total comprehension. Such a mind is the postconscious. If our intellect is to be fulfilled, we have not only to accept that the postconscious does exist in each and every human head but also that we, the conscious self, cannot penetrate it and therefore cannot subject its truth to Philosophy's criteria of proof by conscious evidence and argument. In the ideal human state of supraconsciousness, accepting that the postconscious' function is truth we would know its conclusions to be true.
In fact, present humanity already knows the fundamental conclusions of the postconscious as the simplified moral truths passed to us as conscience. We do not abide by these moral truths for the same cause which persuades us that human reason shall always be fallible - because we confine ourselves to the instinctive/conscious sphere of Machine-reality in which whole truth has no place, having long ago closed the door on our source of true fulfilment - the postconscious. We may recognise the basic moral truths of conscience but allow them to be obscured by the concepts and practices of Machine-reality.
To steer our mind-evolution towards true fulfilment, we must break down the barrier to our postconscious minds. At present the great bulk of our upbringing and education relates to and reinforces the conscious sphere of reality, but the prior field of study should be postconscious truth.
A good beginning would be to abandon the Machine-conditioning of children and to teach them supraconsciousness. They will thus acquire the vital habit of persistently raising questions and absorbing true answers. To distinguish this process from thinking (the conscious process of choosing incomplete and incompatible conclusions according to wilful prejudice or restrictive interests) I use the term INTELLATION, by which the supraconscious self opens to the guidance of the postconscious.
Intellation is a matter of doubting, questioning and criticising everything, including oneself, until no doubts, questions or criticisms remain. This entails the postconscious mind correlating everything with everything else, a gigantic task when it is considered that there are probably something like ten to the power of several million zeros potential inter-connections possible. In some cases it might take years to make a missing connection that puts the finishing touch to a long-sought truth.
The objective of intellation is to establish a humantrue world community. Once that objective is attained, this high level of mental exploration and self-examination shall be finished with, but we shall remain supraconscious, meeting any further challenges as they arise. Supraconsciousness is the state of mental fulfilment which all truly successful intellectual species, throughout the universe, must necessarily achieve.
Supraconscious intellation can be seen as the hope of future humanity because its objective, humantruth, is the inevitable end-product. Since all humans have a postconscious mind, humantruth is the common potential. Therefore the essential foundation of a peaceable and co-operative human society - common agreement, itself founded in the common acceptance of truth - is within our grasp.
It is a sobering thought that the continuing evolution of the mind illustrated in Stage 7 is the natural process for any intellectual species of life to follow, and that it is a process which the human race on Earth has, so far, failed or refused to follow. It is a disquieting fact that politicians, financiers and army generals, in making decisions and working out policies and strategies which seriously affect multi-millions of human individuals, do so by using minds that are incapable of grasping human truth (in part because they are subject to the influence of self-will.
One reason for this failure is that instead of being supraconscious we prefer a similar substitute practice. This might be called mind control whereby the self meditates, allowing the conscious mind quiet freedom to answer and solve our realistic questions and problems and bring them to our awareness. The answers and solutions we get are relative to us personally, and to our situation in the present reality, and can vary widely from person to person.
They vary according to the emotional results of upbringing and experience; to our position in the hierarchy from high and powerful to lowly and powerless; to the degree of our thinking and our regard for moral good; to the state of our health; and to whether we enjoy the love and support, or suffer the hate and opposition, of others.
What we really need is the one universal body of humantruth which the postconscious provides equally for the guidance of all. We presently prefer the conscious because it puts 'us' - the self-willed ego - in control and serves our personal realistic interests, whereas supraconsciousness seems abstract by comparison - remote from reality. Humantruth is remote from Machine reality, and needs to be because the Machine is an inhuman tyrant. If we are to break with the present insane reality we must first step well away from it in order clearly to see and judge it.
If, accepting that the postconscious mind does exist, the majority of thinkers, led by the Philosophers, still maintain that human reason is fallible, we should ponder the actual mechanics of thought or intellation. A fact is established in the conscious mind at the intersection of positive signals which, by way of observation, tactile experience or calculation, totally confirm that fact's existence. The fact is carried in the memory, together with all its associations and connections with all relevant facts. A fact may be viewed as a concentration of energy or a thickening of fibres at its inter-connection, but facts in the conscious sphere can be strictly confined to their own fields of reality and need not be concerned with truth other than that related to their field - relative 'truth' which is not truth at all but can be achieved by the conscious mind.
Reason is said to be fallible precisely because we restrict it to the conscious sphere in which, if we cannot identify it as fact, we might seek to establish it as true by argument. However, whilst one argument can be produced apparently proving a proposition true, in the conscious sphere a counter-argument can always be found which evidently proves it false.
I repeat, wholly true reason belongs to the postconscious, which reaches truth by the most exhaustive correlation. Eventually, at level 6 of its deliberations, the point shall be reached where everything is related to everything else - a state of absolute truth, where the whole postconscious is interconnected and aglow. It is the same thickening (or build-up of energy at points of interconnection) that establishes fact which also establishes steps towards whole truth. But steps to truth, whilst true as far as they go, are not wholly so until they form part of the total interconnection of the postconscious, ie part of the whole truth.
How, then, is the conscious self to accept truth? It's a matter of the self identifying its own essence as the postconscious and taking up position as close as possible to the postconscious. That the self cannot actually experience (and check on?) the postconscious processes of reason might appear unfortunate at first, but it is vital for two reasons - one that otherwise the self could then wilfully and falsely influence those processes, and the other that the conscious mind could not follow the vast complexity and coded language of the postconscious. The essence of our humanity is, or should be, the 'vestibule' between postconscious and conscious, where the former humantruly guides and instructs and the latter faithfully, but not slavishly, follows and complies. The diagram of the final stage in mind-evolution, Stage 8, shows the humantrue state, finally reached. The free and independent postconscious is in full charge, and only essential instinct, such as hunger, goes its own, automatic but reasonable way.
At this stage the postconscious mind is totally fulfilled and faithfully sustained. The framework of life is humantruly organised, stable, and willingly maintained. The conscious mind and self are vested in each other and give their first duty to the sides of themselves which are responsible to postconscious reason and the needs of the humantrue framework of life.
All these - the postconscious, the world community framework, and that part of the conscious which is responsible to them - form the established, secure and enduring human reality. Supraconscious humanity shall sustain it directly, voluntarily, willingly, as a matter of equal give and take, with the bare minimum of fuss and complete absence of artificial motives and processes such as our present financial economy.
Clearly, when this ideal has been achieved, our belonging to a working community shall bring a good measure of universal satisfaction by the fulfilment of reason and compassion. Beyond this, the combination of mental imagery, manual dexterity and emotional energy gives us creative potential that yearns for outlet and that can fill the measure of human satisfaction to overflowing. Humantrue society would freely facilitate that potential expression of our conscious selves, in harmless and uncompetitive ways.
This article is an adjunct of The Silent Oracle (Trunk 1-9) and is intended to be read in conjunction with the website as a whole. The foundation of the author's work is now also available on this website under the title The Wrong Reality (formerly the Book of Supraconsciousness, self-published in a very small way).
List of Branch articles. in no particular reading sequence:
PREVIOUS :1. The Nature and State of the Human Race: 2 : Truth - No-Go Area : 3. Facing Yourself: 4.Explaining the Mind : 5. Moral Mind : 6. Great Men: 7. Comment Pinker : 8. The Way We Think : 9. Sanity for Humanity :
CURRENT : 10. Evolution of the Mind:
REMAINING : 11. Free Thinker View : 12. Reality : 13. Understanding Consciousness : 14. Bottom Line: 15. Brain-Mind Relations: 16. Open Letter to Philosophers : 17. The Mind and Philosophy : 18. Self Twixt 2 Minds: 19. The Holographic Dimension:20. Transhumanism Transcended : 21. Mind, Will and Self
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