01.25.11

Consciousness, self-consciousness, and the unknown complexity of man’s evolution

Posted in General at 5:22 pm by nemo

The question of the previous post as to the evolution of man: the complexity of the question, and Wallace’s realization that his ‘natural selection’ argument was inadequate, leave the whole issue in a kind of limbo. And the irony is that the people proposing design arguments couldn’t bring that to bear on the question, because they are stuck in Biblical literalism. ID people seem unaware of the danger of ID arguments: they don’t square with Christian myths.

But the question is very elusive. We have discussed J.G. Bennett a few times here, and over at The Gurdjieff Con we have gone over his arguments there. Since I don’t endorse them I will leave them there. Bennett is a shady trickster mostly, but he has moments of brilliant insight. Scientists are allergic to this kind of New Age junk, but Bennett was interesting because he attempted some degree of science, however fantastic.

But the point he made was that human consciousness and its evolution had a design aspect, and he even specified his designers, the ‘demiurgic powers’, who alone would have been able to assist in the emergence phase of man’s ultra complex psychic apparatus, with its language, soul factors, and creative self-consciousness. I can’t endorse that, but the evidence of ‘meta-consciousness’ induction by an active agent (gurus in their degenerated form) in early man is something that is ‘smart scifi’. Darn’d if I know but….
(The reason I said meta above is that ‘consciousness’ is virtually present in animals in a no doubt less organized form)

As noted many times here, design arguments are usually a sign you haven’t understood the question, but that aspect can be set aside to see the innovations that Bennett suggested.
I can imagine all sorts of in-place evolution generators of consciousness. How about the power of attention to escape predators? The egregious insertion of naturalistic powers of the demiurge is Bennett as his preposterous best. But, as always he makes a good point. Man at the stage of his early creative consciousness would have needed all the help he could get, help quite traditional in the Indic tradition, which goes back thousands of years. People can simply burn out in madness confronted by unrestricted self-consciousness.
But I think a point has been missed. The stage of self-consciousness is as appropriate for primitive man as the modern. He is our equal in that respect, sometimes quite beyond us (cf. the cases of genuine shaman types).

But reductionist scientism in this case is even worse.

I mention Bennett here because he seems to have gotten one thing right: the basic psychology of man present in many perspectives of yoga or buddhsim: the four states, sleep, consciousness, self-consciousness, and ‘state four’ (usually hyped as garbled pop buddhism with the term ‘enlightenment).
The point here is that this complexity is super enigmatic: we barely understand it, let alone know how it might have evolved. But Bennett actually does a unique thing, even for New Age whacko authors: he posits a model of the evolution of man from consciousness to potential self-consciousness and pegs that to the transition from homo erectus to homo sapiens. That’s typical Bennett science fiction, but he has at least upgraded the argument from Adam and Eve mythology. That’s an intriguing argument and fits a lot of facts.
The point is a daring one: the transition to ‘self-consciousnesss’ has precisely the side effects we see in emerging sapiens: soul beliefs in flagrant muddle yet vividly alive, intuitions of a spirit world, the creativity we see soon in the cave art, and much else. Here the issue of language also enters.
The problem with Bennett’s confused argument is its evidentiary void. But Darwinism is no better. Bennett’s book is a unique first in the attempt to explain how the proto-Buddha called man could have evolved. But for Buddhas the level of self-consciousness is already a new substrate, from which one must awaken still one more time.

I think that design agents are not needed here, but the question of how this evolved in a totally beyond current science.
WE DON’T KNOW!
Link at G-con, or try ‘Bennett evolution’ in the search box, for dozens of posts there.
http://www.gurdjieff-con.net/2010/04/01/bennetts-evolution-construction-perhaps-ruined-by-design-argument/

If you are confused by the distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness welcome to the club, but think of consciousness as the basic subtrate rendered self-conscious at a moment of attention. Consciousness fluctuates.

Another way to look at it is to see that sleep is to consciousness as consciousness is to self-consciousness. How ‘state four’ fits in here is unknown to me.

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