A Matured Society

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
21

Thanks for your candid answers, Tab
but alas
entirely predictable
I have argued with my brother over these questions
for the past fifty years
you and he could be pragmatic twins

let me answer my own central question as i see it

You said “No reason at all”
That is a pure cop out
How does that make sense
when the very definition of human consciousness is based on reason
for reason to exist
there has to be a reason
the whole point of both philosophy and theology
is to provide mankind with a reason for existence
we need not agree with the reasons provided
but each one, objected to or not
provides us with a working hypothesis
for formulating our own individual answers to life

Ultimately
the whole thrust of religion
and the whole thrust of science
is devoted to answering that same existential question

Science has rejected the old-fashioned answer theologians provided
You have given me the answer science has provided
I went to the same science school you did
so i know Darwin’s theory well enough
and fully agree with it

What is missing from our lessons on evolution
is consciousness itself

How did it come about
and what is its purpose
those two questions have to be answered

No matter how advanced our technological genius may get
Science cannot continue to ignore them
or the wars and arguments of mankind will never end
our weapons more lethal
and inevitably spell premature extinction

I am essentially a pragmatic man
my father was a civil engineer
and so am I
I am also a natural-born social engineer

I was born and raised in Africa
the five separate stages of evolutionary progressions of every social structure
from the Stone Age Bushman to the Nuclear Age ontologists
are resident within 300 miles of Johannesburg
I studied each and every one of them from infancy onwards

what emerged from my studies
was not the evolution of the physical form
the body and brain of the Bushmen is the same as ours
but the fact that human consciousness has undergone
an evolution of five radical shifts
in the past 2.5 million years

The state of a Bushman’s Stone Age consciousness
and their relative perspective of Time and Space
is naively different to that of the relativity of a Nuclear Age consciousness
in between these two states of perspective
are the gradual progressions of the Bronze, Iron and Steel Ages
on the nature of time and space consciousness

If you study the outline of the Psyche-Genetic theory i posted on this forum years ago
there can be no question that Consciousness is under-going a evolutionary cycle of development
that it has a naive beginning
]that it is an on-going phenomenon
and that it has a definable end

My theory correlates the evolution of the collective consciousness
with that of the individual consciousness
that each of us
between infancy and old age
replicate the conscious perspectives of time and space
in exactly the same sequencer of development
as does the collective

Let us take the teen age psyche for instance
and compare it with the current collective psyche

self-determinant
fiercely independent
religiously protestant
recklessly daring
playing dice with bombs and commodities
promiscuous
pseudo-intellectually argumentative
technological genius

The same comparisons can be made between the infant and the Stone Age psyche
the child and the Bronze Age psyche etc

for instance
an infant has very little consciousness of time and space
so too the Bushman

Now
just as our Stone Age ancestors had to let go of a hunter/gatherer existence
and mature into an agricultural life style
and then mature onwards to observe time and space in industrial terms
each one of those mass shifts of consciousness
encompassed enormous upheavals of war and death

today the scientific Protestant teen consciousness
must realize that independence is nonsense in an inter-dependent Universe
stop gambling with life
undergo mass upheaval of national values and traditions
and grow up to become a more globally responsible adult society

this is not idealism
this is the logical maturation sequence of an evolutionary imperative

IMHO
“Idealism”
is pragmatism brushed aside as an inconvenient truth
by self-centered teenagers

22

Interesting perspective. Give me a day or two.

23

Okay, let’s start by saying that consciousness was an emergent ‘surprise’ to the mundane evolution of flesh. Something new. (A conscious awareness however, being a ‘solution’ to a set of problems that lifeforms face, and possible - obviously - for a lifeform to generate, was always going to appear in any given universe supportive of life. Just a question of when - but still, a child’s first experience of Christmas day will still come as a surprise, even though the tradition of Christmas preceded the life of that child - if that makes sense).

The need for consciousness then still remains a fleshy one, despite its more ethereal properties, and its (original) purpose was the furtherence and preservation of the vehicle which sponsors it.

Let’s call it, just for the purpose of discussion, something separate, or at least, capable of holding itself to some extent aloof from the everyday clamour of bodily function and needs.

Let’s compare it to physical evolution as we normally know it by supposing that individual consciousness constitutes a base-pair, and the summed collective consciousness of a group creates a phenotype expressed as… What…?

Here I stumbled slightly. Torn between culture, society and concept of God/religion.

After a cigarette or two on the balcony, I plumped for religion. With God aspect representing the idealised example of consciousness.

In that case, imo, consciousness evolved from basic bodily needs - fertillity gods, gods of the harvest, gods of war etc - representing the animalistic drivers of reproduction, feeding, and violence - first to a more abstract conceptualisations - gods of society - the roman pantheon for example, and then perhaps to Indian case of ‘Gods for everything’ (but all aspects of the one/two) - finally collapsing the ‘many in one’ - to simply the ‘One’ of monotheistic doctrines.

Each religion representing the dominant demograph of consciousness within the members of the host societies.

Things I think were progressing well up until we went from BC to AD - With Bhudda expounding the need to free ourselves from the dictatorship of physical desires - and Jesus stressing the need for universal love/acceptance and forgiveness and a detachment from revenge. Then (sorry muslims) 600 years later, consciousness regressed back into a more old-testament warrior God. (Not however a big surprise considering that Islam was birthed in the desert, at a time of great crisis for its chief prophet, and his followers - and that any other, less demanding and violent belief set would have contributed to their deaths).

And with the regression of the one, the others also had to take a step back to preserve themselves. Universal love only works well if everyone is universally loving, and the expulsion of desire - the supression of our instincts to self-preserve, to expand beyond our needs, to dominate others etc. all first order behaviours - will only prosper among a similarly inclined global populace.

I think.

This timeline I think, with all due respect, is putting the cart before the horse. Each of those periods, and the technological advances involved, resulted not directly in an elevation of consciousness, but provided the societies involved with the leisure time to think about more abstract subjects by freeing them increasingly from the demands of the daily grind - allowing them to raise their consciousness.

It being hard to think straight on matters abstract when you are being chased by a sabre-tooth, or when your belly is empty.

24

Teilhard de Chardin
was a Jesuit priest
as well as a world-renowned paleontologist
partially responsible for the discover yand analysis of Peking man
He postulated the evolution of consciousness in his thesis “The Phenomenon of Man”
based on the following premise"

"We are not human beings in search of a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings immersed in a human experience.”

I wonder Tab
if you would return to the balcony for another smoke
and a further period of contemplation
and consider reversing your thought process
put on Tailhard’s and my thinking cap
and see where it leads you

On the contrary
it you who has the cart pushing the horse
Hunter/gatherers live day to day lives on the edge of starvation
every waking moment is devoted to survival
not only is there no time for leisurely philosophizing
nor is there any dysfunctional social imperative demanding that they do so
life is accepted precisely as lady luck deals the cards
with no further ambition than a full belly

So the question with the Stone Age
which lasted for 99.9% of the time human consciousness has spent evolving
is what precisely was consciousness engaged in?
what was it evolving towards?

The answer is two-fold
the right side of the brain was dreaming superstitiously about the luck of the hunt
the left brain was analyzing practical ways and means to make that luck a success

that vast foundational period of human development
when the right brain was meta-normally aware that Nature was a conscious force (Animism)
who punished trespass with cuts, poisonous bites, broken bones and bad luck during the hunt
the left brain was busy laying the foundation of all the future maths and physics
we would need to survive in the more complex technological Ages yet to come
In the Stone Age we learned about the torque of a snare
the tension of a bow string
the velocity, arc, and trajectory of arrows, spears and stones
and the chemistry of a poison brew

Would our search for the ultimate answer to the meaning of life
have not been more comprehensively intelligent and less contentious
if the Lodge of Science had retained trust in our original intuitive feelings about universal consciousness
and instead of opting to describe it as a random “surprise” resulting from chemical reactions
without a scrap of proof to see it this way
accepted consciousness instead as an essential creative attribute of atomic radiation
and the spark of intelligence that created life experiences in the first place
as a methodology for achieving ever higher states of self awareness
and then built on that base from the start?

Technology never suffered from that spiritual premise during the Stone Age
why should it suffer now?

Is it too late to ask ourselves
to revise science position?

If you read de Chardins’ work with an open mind
you will find it perfectly reasonable

25

Hey MM,

Clever chap, that Teilhard guy. I was reading a description of sensory deprivation experiments the other day - people isolated from their usual avenues of perception for a couple of days. You know what happened…? They all went temporarily insane. Hallucinations, obsessive thoughts which they could not consciously control or halt, the whole works. Our consciousness needs its body to give it a foundation from which to build its ivory towers and without a base the architecture becomes twisted and mis-shapen.

Without shape, without a fleshy shell, the spirit becomes diffuse, unfocussed.

Heaven’s a blur.

There is much evidence actually, for the emergence of stability from apparent chaos, everything from aquarium ecologies suddenly popping into stable sysytems to computer sims of coded life developing strategies and parasitisms that no human programmer could have hoped to match. That’s the thing about emergent systems - nothing… nothing… nothing… Then suddenly… Everything.

Another thing about complexity too, is that it has critical thresholds that must be reached before it suddenly transitions into new forms, and one of the chief thresholds is the number of nodes involved - and the degree of connectivity between them. Population, and the density of populations were drivers of change, both in culture and individual mind-sets. Sorry, I’m harping back to things already previously said.

Maybe I will. And maybe it will indeed seem so. What seems reasonable however, not always is.

I am not however, despite my empiricist leanings, adverse to this POV. We are used to our definitions of consciousness as being based solely around our own. Our processing speed. Nownownow. Ecologic systems are also aware to some extent though I believe, in a holistic sense - though their language, their flip-flop of perception/reaction, is slower by several orders of magnitude. Bacterial ecologies in particular, taken from a distance, resemble an enormous parallel processing devices, solving the problems we throw at them with our antibiotics and hygenic practices with aplomb.

Dunno where this leaves us really, plus I’m a bit drunk at the moment. Basically I agree our collective consciousness to some extent is evolving in response to the challenges posed by changing living conditions and technologic afvances, but I remain unconvinced that as a race, we can have any active part in the driving of such a process.

26

this is symptomatic of schizophrenia and hysteria
anciently experienced by psychic neophytes
mental states which can be brought under self control
and positively focused as advanced states of consciousness
by shaman training
while modern medicinemen remain confounded by the outbursts
and lock the poor buggers away in insane asylums

the other side of the coin sees it differently
It is conscientiousness that makes us take the effort to keeps our bodies fit and healthy
spiritless people could care less and abuse their bodies

it is the mind that gets sick
the spirit can only stand by and learn from it

Heaven is clearly present in each moment
once the 3rd eye is open

Not at all
you are right on point
population pressures impacting adversely on regional environments
is the precise mechanism that initiates mass changes of consciousness

4 such mass shifts of have occurred since our first hominid ancestor
saw him/herself as separate from the rest of Nature
became self reflective went on to confuse the spirit with a phantom ego

at 6 billion and resources failing
we are currently right in the cusp of a 5th mass shift
with a global consciousness emerging
in order to replace a the current nationalized sense of self

an entirely new and more sustainable paradigm is already in the works
helping us to recognize and make the change
we are in a race against time
before the global environment reacts even more violently
if we can get 10% of the specie to make the shift
the rest will follow automatically

this mass shift has been observed among macaque moneys in Japan
“the 100th monkey”

If an individual is capable of giving up a harmful addiction and sobering up
and thus affecting a significantly healthy change of consciousness
why can not the collective
currently addicted to gambling
and the compulsion to consume and own stuff?