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Trunk/Chapter three
There exists this question - by what means was life on Earth, or anywhere else, actually begun? The answer that it was simply the fulfilment of an electro-chemical possibility seems good enough to me, considering that no more plausible explanation has been advanced. Alongside this is another question - why was life begun? Rejecting as far-fetched and pointless the idea that the electro-chemical reaction was deliberately engineered by some mysterious, intelligent, superior and powerful identity for experimental purposes of its own, I am content with another explanation. The one phenomenon which is greater than the whole universe is truth - greater because truth, honestly and without bias, stands outside the universe and not only describes it, forever, but also defines the qualities required for its perfection. Observance of it would, eventually, bring all to a state of true equilibrium. So, for me, the grand purpose of life is to discover and realise truth.
The concept of progress can be explained as awareness of a potential achievement and determination to achieve it. For example, by sensing light and the presence of other creatures outside and determining to put the two together to create, inside, the faculty of sight, the cells at the front end of a creature would co-operate and combine gradually to form eyes. In the same way the crudely conscious hominids, whilst having no concept of truth at that point, would sense the great potential possibilities of advanced intelligence and their brain-cells, thus encouraged, would dedicatedly prepare for, then suddenly build, a hugely enlarged conscious/postconscious faculty of mind.
This usage of the word truth is very likely to raise questions. My understanding of truth is difficult to explain at this point. Suffice it to say, for the present, that truth is the only suitable word that I can find to describe a concept which is multi-faceted and sometimes obscure but has only this one word to cover it. The reason is that the postconscious does not think in words and in such a case as this, rather than use a complexity of words to try and explain truth to your conscious mind, it is better that your conscious seeks that explanation from your own postconscious. You will then understand the meaning of truth even if you too find yourself as yet unable to explain it to others in terms understandable to their conscious minds alone.
I think the only way of bringing the whole universe to true equilibrium is by introducing into it its own faculty of intellect. The one way of developing intelligence and intellect is through life, and to me that is the reason for life occurring. The reason why life struggled to advance in complexity was that physical progress had to be accompanied by mental progress. This signifies that if there is any purpose behind the EVOLUTION OF LIFE it is that life began, and resolutely progressed, in order to necessitate the development of intellect.
Once life has appeared and has tumbled to a crude form and a simple means of self-survival, the first manifestation of constructive intelligence, and the first step towards intellect, is instinct. Whereas internal functions of a body are formed and set in motion by the genes, they are kept going, until death intervenes, by the body's external activities governed by instinct. Instincts are progressively modified according to experience by the process of natural selection where necessary for survival. Physical modifications occur when an advantageous random mutation is selected by the same process, and appropriate adjustments to instinct may follow.
In some sense it doesn't much matter how life began, compared with the problem of how to live it, but it helps our understanding of ourselves if we grasp the salient points of our development. Since this question is obscured by argument between theories of chance and intention as the generators of life, and between evolution and deliberate creation as the origination of species, I give my own explanation.
However it was done, there was an original generation of life. Having learned the trick, life then knew how to regenerate itself. Eventually, in order to regenerate itself in more complex patterns, it required sequential genetic instructions, or DNA. This DNA was never the creator of life but the template needed to reproduce life-forms in their own image. As life-forms advanced in this way their gene-sequence was continually added to, DNA-recorded and elongated, laying down progressive changes which the newly-conceived offspring follow through in that same sequence until they reach the latest adult form. This is a complex process which makes mistakes. These mistakes can sometimes be turned to advantage by producing a new and more successful species of the previous life-form, which then pre-dominates by natural selection. This is evolution which, together with voluntary or involuntary learning by trial and error, copying and, later, change by conscious intention, was and is life's means of advancement.
To the potentially intellectually responsible human race, the question of who or what generated or created the first element of life, and when, is hardly of importance. But it needs to be said that there is no likelihood of this generator or creator being a complete intelligence - a god - because the ordinary life-process of competitive creatures devouring each other, living and dying, is unintelligent - unreasonable and purposeless. Even the extraordinary life-process, which has led to formation of the faculty of intellect in humans, even this must be without reason or purpose to those who accept the theory of god-creation, because according to that theory supreme intelligence was there in the first place, in the creator, so that its laborious re-creation was unnecessary. For a god to have created life would have been a most unintelligent and unkind blunder. Surely a supremely intelligent creator would have made humanity fully intelligent in the first place, rather than condemn us to this long, painful, uncertain, misguided and so far fruitless struggle for intellect's fulfilment.
I have already suggested a grand purpose of life - to discover and realise truth. This purpose is backed up by the fact that life progresses, or evolves. In the beginning life on Earth consisted of single cells which fed themselves simply by absorbing the chemical soup in which they lived. The Earth itself changed, as it cooled down, and the same sorts of changes were going on throughout the universe, but these were logical physical and chemical changes, not progress. I use the word progress to mean having objectives and, by purposefully striving, achieving them.
Life on Earth could have remained in its single cell form, adjusting in numbers to the chemical soup available and continuing without need to progress, only to change, perhaps, by adapting to gradual physical and chemical changes in the environment. But life did progress. For millions of years it has evolved to its present state, and the one significant feature which evolution has produced, the single achievement to which it could be said to be dedicated, is the faculty of intellect, represented by the human postconscious mind, and the objective, the potential achievement of this mind - truth.
Cellular life evolved through single cells joining in groups, and groups joining to form organisms which divided into two kinds, plant and animal. The most dramatic advances in evolution took place on dry land. Plants evolved from static marine creatures, which anchored to rocks and fed on plankton, to the great variety which lived on nutrients in the soil in which they were rooted, also on rainwater and energy from the sun. Animals had evolved differently, also grouping, then forming into unattached organisms which fed on other cells, groups and organisms - a practice which is pointless in that it destroys as much life as it nurtures, but significant in that it required parallel evolution of intelligence.
Early organisms became ever more complex in response to demands of their composite cells for nutrition and co-ordination. Those internal cells no longer exposed to the chemical soup had to be served by internal channelling, the equivalent of our blood supply. In order to move about in search of prey, organisms developed means of locomotion facilitated by message ducts to trigger appropriate muscle contractions etc. - the origins of our nervous system.
The free-moving life-forms evolved into early animals on dry land, living off plants and other animals. It was these animals that presented the best chance of intelligence developing to the maximum. Although now seen as primitive they were very complex, having systems for digesting, breathing, seeing, sensing, reproducing and moving about, and a small brain as the centre of communication which coordinated these systems. But this small faculty fell far short of the human brain. It could not think, as the basis of decision-making. It could only react to events by arousing functions which seemed appropriate. It needed a set of instructions, covering all eventualities - and it got them, after a long process of trial and error, and natural selection - its instincts.
An animal's instinct is a pattern of behaviour, appropriate to its abilities and environment, which has been adopted, over a long period, because proven effective in ensuring survival. Instincts do not protect all individuals in all circumstances but are designed to secure the overall survival of the species. For example, it is normal to over-reproduce to compensate for losses to predators, accidents, inclement weather etc. The value of instinct is that it works if followed to the letter in reasonably unchanging circumstances. Extinctions occur as the result of rapid, drastic changes of environment to which instinct is unable to adapt quickly enough.
In the animal world, the original function of HAPPINESS was to be a tool of instinct. To be happy was not to be free to do whatever the creature chose but resulted from following the instructions of instinct exactly, partly because so doing was rewarded with pleasurable emotion and partly because the results were generally satisfactory. It was not so much a matter of following instinct rather than behave in some other way because, until the development of consciousness, primitive creatures knew of no other way. It was a matter of fulfilling instinct utterly, with positively energetic will, and therefore being wholly successful. A creature's alternative was to face life negatively and with hesitation, so that when times became hard that creature would be the first to suffer, then fail.
There is no obvious purpose in basic life, only an inbuilt compulsion to live. This becomes a compulsion to obey instinct, which doesn't always serve the individual - sometimes it serves one's enemy, for example when fear paralyses the rabbit and makes it easy prey for the stoat. It is said that life is the pursuit of happiness, but happiness is not a fixed quality. It can take various forms as the tool of different instincts. In present-day humans happiness can be unthinkingly attached by emotion to almost any activity we choose, from useful and benign to uselessly self-indulgent and destructive.
Animals' instinct changed and developed slowly by the process of natural selection - improvements in habit and performance resulting from mutations or accidents which happened to prove successful and were therefore preferred. The eternal pressure to progress then 'turned its attention', so to speak, to a quicker means of accomplishing change - by intention.
In animals, survival pressure long ago prompted a minor degree of consciousness. This was an awareness directed outwards from the will to live and along the fixed paths of instinct. Eventually a particular group of mutant neurons turned their axons and dendrites inwards, exploring their origins and gathering to form a 'self' - a focul-point of awareness which, combined with the will to live, could not only observe the outer world but also the creature's own person, and its actions in relation to its world. Self-will continued to serve the main objective of instinct - survival - but served it better by improving its methods.
This internal search for knowledge and understanding, as the basis of new strategies, founded and developed the conscious mind, with the self able to move from one construction of thought to another and sometimes in a sense to link them but only in the direct interest of instinct.
Consciousness seems to have been brought to the highest point yet achieved on Earth by chimpanzees. It was facilitated in the brain by dendrites searching ever further, thus increasing available capacity in which new neurons could grow. This expansion carried chimpanzee thinking to a higher level than that occupied by instinct - a change of emphasis from the cerebellum, with its gradually laid down patterns of fixed behaviour, to the cortex and its wider reasoning.
The rise in level of chimpanzee intelligence was accompanied by refinement in the usage of the hands and by complication of communal culture. Instead of fighting bloodily for dominance the leading males took part in harmless ritual displays and, expressing solidarity by mutual grooming etc., sought the support of as many other members of their group as possible. It seems to me that mind-development proceeded in two ways - experimentation and curiosity excited brain expansion, and at the same time advances in mind capacity enabled and triggered experimentation and curiosity. The result was further pressure on the chimpanzee conscious faculty dramatically to expand in capacity.
Of course, the basic impulsions and inhibitions of instinct must remain - hunger, the sexual urge, pain and fear for example. These are important influences which regenerate us and keep us nourished and safe. They work through emotion, not conscious decision. We eat because we are hungry, and mate because we feel amorous. To do these things without emotional prompting would be tedious, and were they a matter of conscious decision alone we might easily overlook them, there being no immediately obvious need for them. It is a different matter where two males confront each other in anger. In this case it is vital that neither of them should act recklessly, but that both should respond to cool, careful, communal consideration rather than heated emotion.
As instinctive consciousness evolved up to the chimpanzee stage, and certain ignorant and violent practices were dropped, the need for sensible, peaceable behaviours to replace them put yet more pressure on the conscious mind to expand. No doubt the conscious faculty itself was aware of its inadequacy and of a pressing need to be more effective. This would become an evolutionary pressure, for the less instinctively aggressive these chimpanzees were the more vulnerable to predators they could become, and they sensed that their potentially higher intelligence ought to make them clever enough to be invulnerable. Not only this, but the combined will of all individual cells forming the conscious mind's organism would exert life's will for optimum evolution, especially since this faculty was the spearhead of evolution's purpose - eventual intellectual true awareness.
1. OPENING
Last Chapter 2. EXPLAINING LIFE
Current Chapter 3. FROM UNCONSCIOUS TO CONSCIOUS INSTINCT
Next Chapter 4. MIND MUTATION ENDS IN DIVISION
5. CONSCIOUS RULES DESPITE CONSCIENCE
6. CONSCIOUS SUBMITS, POSTCONSCIOUS PREVAILS
7. SUPRACONSCIOUSNESS
8. COUNTERFEIT EXPLANATIONS AND PERSONAL EFFECTS
9. THE TRUTH ABOVE ALL
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