12.15.11
Four eras of astrobiology
From The Big Bang To Intelligent Life: The Four Eras Of Astrobiology
The ‘fourth’ era is problematical in that we normally associate mind with ‘life’, but it could be that ‘mind’ is beyond life, and that the discontinuity here is on a par with the emergence of life itself.
This view should remain controversial, but the status of consciousness is not the same as that of life.
We have discussed J. G. Bennett here on several occasions, along with this delination of the ‘consciousness of life’ as a vital energy, versus the larger dimension consciousness or ‘self-consciousness’ on a ‘cosmic’ level, that homos sapiens enters into in his confusion mix of psychological and ‘spiritual’ states.
The fourth era, which I call the cognitive era, is quite recent, at least as far as we know, starting here under one million years ago. Of course, it could have started elsewhere a billion or two billion years before it did here, but not much earlier than that. Life takes a long time to evolve from unicellular to multicellular to intelligent, if it does at all. The kinds of life a planet bears is contingent on its particular history. The life we find here exists only here. More crucially, if life is ubiquitous, intelligent life might not be.
The Gurdjieff Con » Mind as a (post-) evolutionary discontinuity said,
December 15, 2011 at 2:20 pm
[...] http://darwiniana.com/2011/12/15/four-eras-of-astrobiology/ We cite Bennett’s idea that ‘mind’ is a construct impinging on the ‘cosmic’ dimension of consciousness. [...]
nemo said,
December 15, 2011 at 2:21 pm
The point I was tryint to make here is that man might be stepping out of ‘evolution’ into a larger framework of consciousness