- The Emergence of Life and Consciousness and the Place of Humans
The systemic ethics I have been describing supposes in the very concept of li that human beings are part of the entire patterned world of nature. But for the working out of ethics a more precise consideration of just how and where we fit in this overall pattern is a matter of great importance. In the world of pre-modern anthropocentric thought, it was sufficient for Neo-Confucians to simply presume the superiority of human beings and substantiate it by a metaphysical theory that endowed us with the finest ch’i, and hence with the most full participation in li. This wonderfully explains how humans seem to be flexibly and responsively engaged with virtually anything in existence (the whole pattern), compared to the more limited and specialized responsiveness of other creatures. But the meaning and implications of the emergence of these abilities in the broad evolving pattern of life must be carefully examined; the simple assumption that we are the crowning glory of evolution might carry a very misleading message about our real situation.
The question of the emergence of life is full of wonderful ambiguities. A review of theories on life/non-living makes one thing clear: no one can clearly draw a precise line between the two, though there is a wide acceptance of the intuitive feeling that there really is some difference. How one treats this question seems to depend to a large extent upon the conceptual resources one brings to it: it has no “scientific” answer.
In this context it is especially interesting that, if without knowing later philosophical developments, one were to seek a classical western counterpart for the East Asian concept of ch’i, in Greek it would be pneuma, in Latin, spiritus. Both pneuma and spiritus originally had to do with wind, hence air, breath, the breath of life, the force of vitality and power of feelings. Ch’i, from a base meaning having to do with steam or vapor, developed almost exactly the same set of associations. But the western terms eventuated in “spirit” as opposed to and contrasted with “matter,” while ch’i, as the concretizing and energizing component, became paired with li, a role thinkers East and West have intuitively equated with the “matter” side of western thought. In effect, much of what went into “spirit” in the West went into the physical in East Asia.
So it is that in traditional western thought physical stuff (matter) needed animation, an animus or “soul” to become alive, and accordingly the evolutionary question of the emergence of life from a presumably non-living material substrate has been a difficult one, the case of the “spiritual” soul of humans being the most difficult of all. By contrast, life is only to be expected in the case of ch’i, and the question rather becomes whether there is such a thing as non-living. One could easily think of the difference as more a matter of complexity than of kind, and somewhat arbitrarily specify a degree of organized behavior as the cut off line for practical purposes.
The emergence and evolution of life is an energetic (ch’i) thrust towards systemic complexity (li). The complex pattern of organism and ecosystem is emergent rather than pre-existing. The process starts with self-organizing systems at a relatively simple level and transforms as adaptive strategies within the system lead to continually increasing levels of complexity. In a sense li continually gives birth to itself, emergent pattern leading to yet further pattern.
As we mentioned above, the boundaries of the distinctive pattern called “life” are virtually impossible to fix clearly: in somewhat circular fashion, we recognize life when we see things somehow “making a living.” That is, things begin in an active way to maintain an existence in terms of something else: amino acids have no need for protozoa, but protozoa require amino acids. Life is thus distinguished by a qualitatively new level of relatedness.
This new form of relatedness is in some way a “presence” of one thing in another. Primitive life emerged in a soup of nutrients, amino acids, which were simply absorbed through semi-porous membranes. But as soon as this system emerged, the single-cell creatures by their very structure “expected” certain nutrients, which in that respect were present even when physically absent. I would suggest that this present-while-absent quality inherent in the advent of “needs,” even though it is only a matter of structure or pattern at this point, might be regarded as the seed of what we recognize at a far more complex level as consciousness.
To put it another way, the most elementary form of consciousness seems to emerge as creatures begin to live in terms of one another. The strategies for making a living which fit an organism into the emergent and ever-transforming community of life (“survival of the fittest”), become more complex as we move from plants to herbivores to carnivores. Structural consciousness, the selective taking in of nutrients, takes on new and more active dimensions as more elaborate strategies for sustenance and reproduction come into play. The emergence of controlled mobility, accompanied by the development of the various forms of sensation that make mobility meaningful, is a decisive step in the direction of more familiar forms of consciousness.
In this framework, consciousness in its more and more progressive forms might be best regarded as a particular strategy in an overall process which is most fundamentally a matter of adaptation, literally “fitting in.” As the range of consciousness increases, so do flexibility and the complexity of the fitting in. Mobility and sensation emerge as strategies that can detach the creature from strict dependence on immediate environment, but bring instead a new kind of dependence spread out over a much larger environment. A blade of grass grows in a few inches of soil, while a hawk soars over miles interacting with a wide range of creatures. The hawk interdepends more broadly and flexibly, but to describe this freedom as independence would be an illusion.
The meaning of consciousness as a particular evolutionary strategy is perhaps best considered in context with alternative strategies. If one thinks of intelligence as a matter of problem-solving, for example, one might broadly distinguish at least two basic forms: there is genetic intelligence and experiential intelligence. Some sentient, mobile life forms specialize in genetic, rather than experiential strategies for handling problems. Many insects, for example, are minimally individualized and flexible, live a short time, but reproduce massively. Instead of specializing in advancing along the consciousness and experiential learning line, their species have become in this way highly complex and diversified systems possessing a high ability to adaptively mutate around changed circumstances. This form of intelligence has at least held even and may be emerging victorious in the chemical warfare of pesticides and antibiotics waged against it by humans, who represent the crowning achievement of the alternative, experientially based line of evolved intelligence.
Lifeforms that put the greatest weight on experience and on immediate (vs insect-like genetic) flexibility typically live longer and produce proportionally fewer young. In this line of development a growth in the ability to accumulate and utilize experience is an important advantage: experience thus becomes learning. Herein we find the deep significance of increased brain size, which increases memory to store a broader and broader range of experience and enhances our flexible adaptability to make use of it. We humans have represented the foremost thrust of this development, getting such big heads for memory storage and experience processing that we have to be born early (about six to eight months prematurely from any ordinary mammalian development standard) so that our growing heads would not become a death warrant for our mothers. Thus our brains continue growing at fetal rates well after we are born, and they finally reach about quadruple the size they were at birth. Also, corresponding to our premature birth, we have a longer period after birth of intense dependency on our parents than any other creature, a factor that puts an especially heavy weight on sociability. When former Confucians noted social relationships, with a special emphasis on the qualities of the parent-child relationship, as primary human characteristics they were right on the evolutionary mark!
We humans have not only developed the biological capacity to accumulate personal experience, we also discovered language, a means by which experience is shared and accumulated in community over many generations rather than being quantized in single life units. Writing was another major step, allowing for a qualitatively new level of complexity and continuity in the transmission of accumulated information from generation to generation. And now the globe is electronically linked and computer memory banks put this whole process of information and learning accumulation into yet another mode. This is so much more powerful and rapid than anything that has gone before that we do not yet begin to understand its potentials and implications.
This process has taken place within human society, and at each stage human relationships have been transformed in important ways. There is much to be reflected upon and understood just in the human social dimension, but such reflection should also be extended to take in the larger picture. This whole process of maximizing experience began as one of a number of adaptive strategies in the complex evolution of life, and it is shared in to various degrees by many other creatures. We have thrust ahead on a vector entirely natural in its direction, yet somehow this process has also become self-enclosed and distinct from nature in a uniquely human way. Experience became deliberate learning, and language (including writing and computers) empowered the learning thrust in a way that transformed our adaptation to the world into a matter of adapting the world to our needs and desires: “nature” and “culture” have become different categories. Again, other creatures do this as well; we only represent an extreme development of this life strategy.
At the same time the naturalness of this process should not blind us to risk: evolutionary strategies are tries, probes, adaptive reachings that may not succeed or may even undercut themselves by their own success. In an anthropocentric world the relative permanence of our species could be simply assumed; in an evolutionary universe continued existence is an achievement that no creature can take for granted. When earlier Confucians observed that man, by possessing the fullness of li, is thus in a more universally responsive relationship with all things than any other creature, they were considering a very real consequence of this evolutionary pattern. But the anthropocentric habit of preferring human forms over all others foreshortened for them considerations that are now urgent. There is now, as never before, an awareness that the very capacities in which we most glory also are capacities that put us in peril. This also calls for interpretation and understanding.