A lot of the writing that I’ve been sharing over here at CFI has held of big homework component - A much me still figuring to what there was to said about these issues that concern me. Prone to assumptions, leaps without clarification and such that readers couldn’t keep up with and a certain pissy attitude toward the world. I’m hoping this is a little different.
It’s a request, that includes a somewhat compete outline of a talk, not a quick elevator pitch, weights in at 1100ish. Background - This is the third year I’ve attended this philosophy club and I have shared a self-produced flier on occasion. It’s been suggested I offer to host a meeting, and I’m ready to try.
I hope the following reads well, if not, go ahead let me know, feedback is life.
thanks.
. . . Philosophy Club Board members,
… ,
To begin with, I’m hoping you can relate to my life long engagement with the deep questions of life, starting with, “Who are you?” Then followed by an associated cascade of related questions. I’m hoping you can appreciate my inner drive for better understanding through sharing, discussion, debate. I’m looking for serious constructive pushback.
Unlike you, when I finished high school (as it happens, 50 years ago this past May). Rather than college, circumstance had me joining the skilled laboring class, but that didn’t mean I stopped learning and thinking about the various “meaning of life” mysteries along with age old scientific questions that were giving way to modern human science.
I also worked on becoming familiar with religious thinking, (it lost its appeal early on) and philosophical thinkers and their ideas, (frustrating though they could be). But, most of all, and for me, endlessly fascinating was the full range of Earth sciences news, biology and astronomy. with understanding Earth’s evolution being of particular interest, (Attenborough & David S. Wilson would be proud).
You see, my grasp of the world is totally wrapped up in our scientific understanding. My lens of perception is formed by an evolutionary bottom up perspective. Speaking of perspective, I belong to the last generation to know our moon as that eternal untouchable mystery, and the first to witness human footprints being placed on the moon, which gets me to thinking about our human pageant and all I’ve been able to witness.
This is why I’m having an increasingly tough time with great philosophers of the past overload, which I’m hoping to share and discuss.
Much of modern thinking remains confined with humanity’s pre-biological, pre-evolutionary, pre-scientific understanding of how we and our world functions, paradigms. No doubt, they were great thinkers with astounding discipline.
Yet, they remain the products of their religious/economic worlds, permeated with many unrecognized biases, assumptions and priorities, and they lacked in the real facts needed for genuine understanding to develop.
For example, we still argue about God out there somewhere, while scientific insights all point at “God” being a product of our own human thoughts. God is real ! The thing is that God is a product of our own creation and tailoring.
It’s a key that unlocks many mysteries that have plagued humanity through the ages. But we all need to do our own homework or the words remain meaningless.
These ideas are driven by the dawning scientific appreciation for how our human mind is the product of our biological body/brain communicating with itself in realtime. The inside reflection of our body in action (See M.Solms, A.Damasio). Beyond that, human consciousness is part of a continuum (shared to some degree by all organisms) and it reaches back into the earliest reaches of biology. (See N.Shubin N.Lane, S.Carroll, etc.)
Who are you?
I am an evolved biological thinking machine, a product of Earth’s evolutionary processes. I am an element in Earth’s ongoing pageant of Evolution and my time is now, and it is good.
If someone asks me where my sense of “me” comes from, the answer is easy:
My consciousness is the inside reflection of my biological body getting on with the job of communicating with itself and reacting to circumstance.
The origins of consciousness are to be found, not in how I perceive the world, we need to look back to the earliest organisms. Even single cells are full of components that needed to be produced to exacting specifications, distributed (logistics), arrive on time, and serve specific functions, with astounding precision, or the organism fails.
If that doesn’t indicate awareness and drive, what does? Perhaps we should be looking for the origin of an evolving God down in this early Earth bound biological realm?
But, more down to Earth, it seems to me self-evident, that to understand our own human introspective consciousness, requires understanding the path taken to arrive at us.
One thing leads to another, once I absorbed the above, I was literally struck, epiphany moment, with enunciating the most fundamental duality of human existence, namely the:
Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide.
It’s no secret, been said in many different ways through the ages. It’s recognizing that all I know is processed by my own body, various neural networks, and ultimately mind, producing the conscious “me” that is interacting with the environment I’m in.
From my reading it seems that transition from matter, to living, to thinking has been a philosophical Gordian’s Knot since forever.
Through an Evolutionary Lens, that dissolves. I can easily appreciate my consciousness as a metaphorical cloak draped over my biological being in a life long choreography. For me, neural networks producing ephemeral thought, and “me” - isn’t any more astounding than moving iron through a magnet, producing ephemeral electricity that can be harnessed.
Scientists are even recording images of consciousness in action. (See Allen Institute, P. Keller & M. Ahrens at HHMI, K.Deisseroth, etc.)
It gets better. Think on this, your genes came from your parents, and their parents, and so forth. It goes well beyond genealogical records, back into deep-time and into iterations that become increasingly unrecognizable.
Imagine it, your specific parental heritage had to have survived uninterrupted all the way back to our oceanic origins, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, early on, millions of generations, a straight line to you today. Actually not a, “line,” more like a swarm of genetics, it’s mind boggling, a genetic continuity of some sort. Still, never missing a generation, or you wouldn’t be here. No second chances! At first bewildering, then clarifying. Metaphorically speaking, that is. Actually grasping the path way to us, the individual. ( any scientific tracking of my genealogy all the way back to the oceans, would require a team of mathematical scientific geniuses, and would lie beyond our normal mental abilities.)
That’s where to start the search for understanding our fantastical minds and this sense of consciousness we experience. It took a lot of time and effort for Earth to produce us.
Your body is the accumulated total of billions of years worth of Evolution.
Your mind is the accumulated total of all the days of your life.
Where do we go from here?
Perhaps gaining a little Love for Earth.
Striving to learn how to incorporate our biosphere, our global heat and moisture distribution engine, and other living creatures, into our hearts as family members to be honestly understood, cared for, and nurtured - as Mother Earth has done for humanity these countless generations.
This seems a good place to finish and invite questions and discussion.
