The Future of Consciousness

In my book, After Religion, I propose that our evolution as a species is still going on, but on the psychological, as well as, the biological level. And the essence of that psychological evolution is our enormous capacity for learning, so the rate of adaptation via learning is vastly accelerated relative to biological adaptation. Perhaps the most effective way of describing the transformational power of learning, which is driven by the adaptation of grammatical language, is to say that it has extended perception beyond the limits of our primate instincts. For our species, perception is dominated by learning, whereas for all others it is driven by biological instinct.

Symbolic cultures arose concurrently with, because they are a side effect of, our learning ability. Religion was original form of learned adaptation because it conditioned each new member of the reproductive community to perceive realty according to the vales and attitudes of that community. This perceptual adaptation greatly enhanced the individual’s chances for survival and genetic reproduction within the natural and social characteristics of that community.

Religion evolved because of its function as the primary enforcer of the reproductive community’s values and behaviors. Consequently, contrary to what every culture teaches its own members, neither culture nor religion emerged to serve the happiness and well being of individual members. Rather they were selected for by natural selection simply because they punished any member of the community who violated the collective adaptations, i.e., the traditional values and behaviors, of the majority within that particular reproductive community.

The Creation of Meaning

As a result of our linguistic CNS, perception is informed by learning such that past experience becomes intrinsic to present perception. This added dimension of perception results in a radically new form of  perception which we usually call the creation of meaning. We think of meaning as the source of motivation and thus of behavior. But it is now becoming clear that the creation of meaning is a behavior. In other words, meaning does not cause behavior. The fact is that the very same preconscious processes that create meaning also create behavior. This brings us to the logical conclusion that in order to utilize our minds fully we need to become aware of, and then take control of, those preconscious processes that determine both meaning and other behaviors.

I propose that this is the essence of what we have traditionally called religious mysticism. In fact, however, it is not religious at all. It is the next step in the evolution of consciousness, i.e.,  an evolutionary process that can only proceed by and through consciousness.

The primary block to achieving this next step is our own learned identity, which tradition refers to as the ego. The ego is imposed on children in early childhood along with symbolic language and evolution ‘intends’ the individual to live for the rest of one’s life according to the emotional perceptions and responses that are inherent in our egos. This ‘design’ worked for about 50,000 years; from the inception of grammatical language until the rise of civilization.

The basic problem now is that civilization has been so successful that it has produced an entirely new environment whose principle characteristic is continuous change. But instinctual consciousness, even in its self-conscious form, emerged as an adaptation to an environment that did not normally change within the normal lifespan, which was certainly less than 50 years.

Hence, the current human predicament.

Freud Got it Wrong, Nietzsche was Right

 It is the will to power that is the most fundamental instinct, not sex. As I explain in my book, I believe that our current stage in the evolution of consciousness is essentially instinctual, and religion, all religion, is the historical  source of our consciousness. My theory of the mind also proposes that fear is the very essence of instinctual consciousness and consequently the fear motive always generates unintended consequences over the long term. As a result, fear often is self defeating because it brings about exactly what it is intended to prevent, as may well happen in this case.

Gun rights fanatics are an excellent ex. of religious consciousness at work. Their primary need is the will-to-power, which becomes symbolized very easily in guns. This emotion al need drives their rational thinking to argue that it is only a matter of time before the government attempts to disarm all Americans as the first step toward becoming a dictatorship. Conscious, they absolutely believe that this rational reasoning is the primary motive for their emotional commitment to block any form of gun control. But in fact their ultimate motivation is instinctual, not rational.

As a result this irrational refusal to compromise, it may well be that the anti gun control lobby will bring about it own defeat. Once the majority of Americans realize how fanatical this lobby is, they will pressure Congress to take action and pass truly reasonable gun control.  

Thoughts on America's Political Deadlock

The facts the remain the same: the evolution of human consciousness is inherently defective. As a scholar and a believer in the democratic process, I consistently strive to examine the consequences of that fact in our daily lives. For example, these days one of the most dramatic examples of this problem is our government’s continuing inability to resolve our fiscal problems, so in this post I want to use this as an example of what I see as just such unconscious, defective thinking.

In light of the continuing dysfunction of our federal government, two thoughts have come to mind. First, I am old enough to remember when our mass media treated the reporting of national and international news quite differently than entertainment programing. Today the media often present politics as a blood sport, but in the era of Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite, political news was presented in an entirely different context. It seems to me that the radio and television networks held political reporting to be a public service, not driven by the profit motive. Today it is obvious that such reporting is treated as a form of entertainment, with a strong emphasis on enflaming the emotions of the audience by emphasizing conflicts and animosity between the two reams, Republicans and Democrats.

In other words, the media now treat news reporting as a profit center, used by the networks to increase their audience share and thereby increase their ad revenues. They understand very well that the human mind is hardwired to pay more attention to emotions than to concepts. Advertising has made a science of this evolutionary characteristic of our current form of consciousness, so it was only a matter of time before the media started to transition from careful analysis of political events to emotional exploitation of those events. Of course, it should be no surprise that the corporations that control our mass media are perfectly happy to segment our body politic and cultivate conflict, even hatred, between Americans simply in order to increase their profit margins. After all, is was our elected representatives that enabled the mass media industry to control and profit from this extremely influential dimension of our modern environment.

My other thought has to do with our major political parties. It seems to me that over the last decade, or even longer, both parties have been working together to ensure they would have complete control of how candidates for major political office are chosen. This overall strategy has manifested itself in the gradual expansion of the parties’ ability to controls the mechanics of our democratic process. For example, the increased use of such tricks as gerrymandering electoral districts along party lies, closed party primaries, the refusal to limit campaign spending and most recently the policy of unending campaigning are all changes both parties have supported. I can’t help but wonder if these practices are part of an unspoken agreement between both major parties.

Could such a development, perhaps, have begun with the dramatic increase in independent voters on the 1960s,, and/or as a result of H. Ross Perot’s relative success as a third party candidate in the 1992 presidential campaign? If anyone has any insights into such trends in contemporary American politics I would be delighted to hear them…