Thousands of years ago, humanity had little understanding
of nature, but we had a well-developed social fabric. Social creatures
like ourselves specialize in communicating with and reading members of our
own species. We have developed the neurological tools needed to identify
and monitor the behavior of any given group's ‘alpha’, that one superior
and by necessity independent individual most likely to survive the hazards
and challenges of the environment. When in doubt about a situation, we
trust our alphas, look to them for clues to our own survival, and submit
to their authority.
As primates, our reliance upon our alpha has been a
survival tactic for so long that we are hard-wired even as modern humans
to search our social environment for rescue and salvation in times of
stress. This has caused a problem for modern humans because we are smart
enough to know that our alphas, our religious, political and cultural
leaders, as smart and alert as they may be, are as human as we and as
prone to error. Some have led entire trusting nations to their destruction
and have crippled countless others.
We know of their flesh and blood limitations, and yet
our neurological yearning for that mystical, all-powerful alpha continues
to burn within us. We have no way to free ourselves of such deep emotional
drives. Knowing our alphas to have human limitations, we tend to elevate
the human alpha to supernatural status rather than live without it. At
this stage, alphas become figments of the human imagination, and there's
danger in succumbing to this temptation. Our imaginations can all too
easily run away with us when given the opportunity to do so.
Anthropomorphism is the neurological filter that
aids us in identifying a human presence in our surroundings. Infants
initiate and respond to smiles long before the particulars of their
surroundings make any sense to them. We see this bond between us at work
even as adults in our modern era in a car grill that seems to be smiling
at us, or another that scowls.
The car is not human, but the smile, or the scowl, is
eminently human. Furthermore, if it seems the car is smiling, a deep and
primitive part of the human mind will tell us that the car must therefore
be happy and benign. It likes us. Or, it is threatening and malevolent, if
scowling, and, therefore, perhaps powerful and very dangerous. It is,
after all, more than just human.
When car grills scowl and thunder growls at us, panic
kicks in at deep levels of the psyche. What unwitting offense have we
committed to elicit such anger? Guilt then engages, fear of disclosure of
social shortcomings, fear of retribution for having displeased others. We
fear we may be ostracized and expelled from the social group without which
we are not equipped to survive. Anger results if we feel we have been
victimized by injustice. If we cannot be good by 'their' standards, we
will show just how evil we can be.
This is not abstract reasoning at work. This is the
logic by which emotions operate, deep and primal and very ancient. Even a
scolded dog will turn away in shame, tail tucked between his legs in
unconscious protection of vulnerable genitalia, evidence of the fear of
retribution that accompanies shame.
Even as primitives we had social skills as finely tuned
as those we employ today, but we knew nothing of the nature of the
physical forces of our world. We had only conjecture and speculation to
explain nature and little more than our understanding of social behavior
as a resource for that conjecture and speculation.
How do stars cross the sky? Without an understanding of
physical forces, they must be pulled by super-human 'angels', because we
observed that only
living beings have the conscious will to make things happen and,
therefore, unseen beings are responsible for the dynamic forces of nature.
If we do not see these super-beings at work, then they are invisible, for
how else can we explain the wind and the tides and movements of lights in
the heaven? We formed our scientific hypotheses, the best we could do at
the time. We simply had no way to test them.
In the end, those who 'cheated' reason and chose to accept
stories of gods as fact took their beliefs another step and speculated
that if humans made and used tools, perhaps trees and even people are
‘artifacts’ of these greater beings. Gods became creators of the world and
of humanity. Gods then explained absolutely everything. Not a thought
needs to be given to any facet of human existence, and no fear nor worry is
necessary when a god is at the helm of human existence. The gods attend to
everything and have their own mysterious ways. Who who would even bother
to question the omniscient and omnipotent?
People are social, so gods must be social as well. Gods
would be expected to know our sins and react as any tribal or village
elder might react. They would reward us for our good deeds and punish us
for our sins. We would, in turn, garner their favor, barter for better
luck, health, weather, crops and livestock. Perhaps we would offer a
sacrifice to demonstrate how important these gods are to us, even more
important than our first-born child. We’d at least plead for mercy,
insight, and understanding in times of stress.
When cities developed, these imagined entities were
recast in the light of new social hierarchies. They became councils of
gods, or, to do away with the quibbling of councils, one god ruling over
all. Gods backed the state and its rulers in the minds of the populace.
Disbelief in one implied disrespect and disobedience of the other. Both
were capable of punishment, human authorities in the here and now, divine
authorities in the hereafter. Despots and clerics held one another's hand
and, as the Bible would put it, 'continue to do so to this day'.
The subject of mythology fills libraries. Mythology is
both story-telling and conjecture gone wild in the powerful human need to
give structure to the world. It was never unreasonable to want to know
where we come from, who and what we are, why we are here and what happens
to us when we die. Attempts to answer these questions have always been a
legitimate effort, but to establish gods as an explanation, or to achieve
any explanation at all, we’ve always needed a way to substantiate our
guesses, and in doing so differentiate fantasy from reality and belief
from fact. Along the way, we’ve badly failed that need.
Religious stories are far from the best stories men
have told, but they suffice for many when coupled with a meme, a strategy
implemented by social authorities with a vested interest in the public’s
belief and adherence to religious or political doctrine. A meme is a
so-called ‘mind virus’, a contagious idea that both terrorizes and deeply
seduces:
“Believe in a given god and your every wish will be
granted, your health assured, and your enemies vanquished and terribly
punished. Disbelieve and you and our loved ones will be horribly tortured
and burned alive, murdered by your faithful peers as infidels while you
still walk this Earth and then totally wasted by your loving god in an
eternal afterlife.”
Memes have a devastating impact because they cater to
the most emotionally reactive part of the human psyche that cannot
differentiate between sensory reality and imagined reality. Terrorist
chain letters feed upon the same phenomenon, which can be amusing when we
see it at work in our own minds. “Send ten copies of this letter to
friends and you will have sex with a god or goddess by midnight. Fail and
you will be tortured by a fiend and dismembered by dawn.” Even the most rational
among us can feel that dual tug of fear and greed from the most primal
levels of our emotional being that fear pain and seek pleasure.
Religious and superstitious memes that cater to
emotional reactivity are indeed terrorist tools. They do not appeal to
reason. They have no facts to offer. They are baseless threats and
promises that have effectively brought entire populations in line with
religious tyrants down through the ages. Their effects upon society have
been as lethal as plague and pestilence. They have isolated entire
cultures from the modern world and crippled the very mental health of
their populations. That ever-critical quest for the origin, nature, and
fate of human existence is both the strong and the weak link at the heart
of our social fabric. It drives the course of civilization.
These essential questions do have apparent,
common-sense answers, if are willing to live with what our senses tell us,
as many of us do. Death is failure and decomposition of the flesh. We are visibly like
the animals in that regard. We live to reproduce before we age and die.
Physical death is inevitable, for our selves, our loved ones, our species,
our biosphere, and our universe. We perceive consciousness as contained
within the flesh. Therefore, consciousness terminates with biological
death, just as it arose with the birth of the flesh. End of story.
Why isn't it enough for so many of us? An alpha accepts
the apparent as a working state of affairs. Alphas are invulnerable to the
hypnotic seduction of memes and harbor no debilitating fear of death. They
recognize their limitations and vulnerabilities and deal with the world as
it appears to the physical senses. They know in no uncertain terms that we
all stand or fall by virtue of our own personal resources. They avoid
emotional reactivity because emotional reactivity is automatic behavior
and automatic behavior is predictable behavior. Predators rely upon the
predictabilities of their prey to feed. Human predators do the same.
But levels of intelligence steadily increase in human
society as time passes. Reason begins to stand against blind emotional
reactivity, and we commonly visit our doctors rather than succumb to
emotional promises of divine healing. Religion is useful for getting
others to toe the line, although most of those who throw stones really live in
their proverbial glass houses.
Along with the rise of reason comes the urge to
validate the ‘facts’ we are expected to accept. We question what we are
told. Facts must show themselves to be true beyond a reasonable doubt.
Reason rules the land when our children drink clean water and survive
diseases that once decimated our nurseries. Democracy rules when we
question the dubious, even foolish and sometimes loathsome 'authority' of
kings, dictators, and clerics whose power is vested in the blind fear and
abyssal ignorance of their followers.
The process of scientific investigation, because of its
open-minded stance, has revealed much of the natural world. It has shown
us our place within it, but those primal questions about human
existence persist. They persist because the core of human existence,
consciousness, has yet to be defined, or even addressed in the physical
sciences.
Science cannot be blamed for this state of affairs.
Science can speculate and present conjecture, but it cannot so much as
hypothesize without supporting evidence. We have no true theories of
consciousness, only speculation and conjecture, because we have nothing
material or objective with which to work. Consciousness cannot be placed
beneath a microscope to be examined, and in the field of science, unknowns
remain unknowns until they are better understood.
More than just an understanding or definition of
consciousness is at stake. Animals don’t question their sensory reality.
The world of the senses is reality in itself for animals and for many
humans. Nothing about it needs to be explained, questioned, or
second-guessed. What is, is. They deal with it on those grounds. End of
discussion.
This, however, is only the stance for those who feel
as their primary reality. For those who think, we know something
about the nature of sensory perception. We question, not the perceptions,
the content of consciousness, but the perceiver and the nature of
perception itself. We push back the boundaries of our blind faith in a
what-you-see-is-what-you-get reality as we did
observing photons and patterns of light cast behind double slits cut in a
screen. There’s more to reality than meets the eye.
Notice, though, where these issues stand in our list of
priorities in life. Generally, they don’t even make the list. Priorities
are ordered by the degree of emotional reaction they evoke. At the top of
our list is our physical well-being in the immediate moment. We attend to
personal safety and security. If we are young and healthy, sexual activity
may take second place. The need for food, clothing and shelter follow.
We are emotional beings because of the immediate need to attend
to our physical survival. Emotions evolved long before
conscious presence had the option of second-guessing its field of
perception. The intellect, our self-referential information processing capacity, is a newcomer on planet
Earth. Emotion goads life to seek comfort and avoid pain in boilerplate
reactivity honed by evolutionary successes and failures. When conscious
presence is given the option of working with choices born of the intellect,
we begin the arduous task of asking ourselves: "What’s it all about?"
Without a set of values exceeding the simple
pain/pleasure principle that seems to suffice for the animals and fail for
humanity, our very lives can
quickly become forfeit. Somewhere along the line, given an excess of food
and comfort, we grow fat and weak. Given total comfort, we grow bored. We
see ourselves pacing our palaces like tigers pacing cages. Many of us
self-destruct along the way given a state of affairs in which our every
whim is granted. So we begin to study our own behavior, hoping to find the
secrets of self-motivation apart from our old, blind reactivity.
This experience is new territory for humanity. It
reveals to us a deeper self-referential quandary. Studying consciousness
with consciousness is like studying hammers by pounding away at hammers
with hammers, like trying to imagine the nature of a visual image
endlessly reflected between two mirrors placed face to face, like
searching a movie for a view of the camera man.
When the intellect begins to take the reigns of
personal existence, it is employing a newborn and unproven tactic, often
in defiance of ancient wisdom of emotional reactivity.
It has its work cut out for it.
