It has been said that consciousness evolved so that the Universe may know itself. We should understand that there was no intention behind this. There is no defined goal or endpoint that evolution, consciousness, or human consciousness is innately working towards. Consciousness came into being through chance happenings and evolutionary selection.
Like many things in evolution, human consciousness seems both magical in its capabilities, yet obviously flawed. The evolution of our consciousness has been a long and winding journey. Looking around at the uncountable species of our world, we see incredibly diverse types and levels of consciousness reflecting many stages and branches of this journey. At almost the midnight hour, modern humans, typified by their advanced consciousness, stepped upon the path. Among the members of the human branch of the primate family, and eventually the last surviving subspecies, was us: homo sapiens. At various points during our evolutionary journey, the ancestors of humanity would have shared levels of consciousness similar to many of the species we currently see around us. Human evolution took us through various phases such as microbes, worms, fish, fishapods, reptile-like creatures, shrews, monkeys, apes, homo habilis, homo erectus, and then our current form, homo sapiens. Many parts of this journey have left their mark in us.
Consciousness, as embodied in us, has not now arrived at some final end point. Evolution never sits completely still. Our minds and our consciousness will continue to change, even as we are learning about them, including how to tame them. However, in following the imperative to know ourselves, delving into the history of this part of ourselves is essential. Understanding our evolutionary journey can help us to understand ourselves, our strengths and our weaknesses.
There is no instruction manual that comes with existence. No meaning of life is written in flaming letters across the sky. All beings are thrown into existence and just have to work things out as they go along. The same can be said about groups and species, and the shared knowledge they possess is partly what we call culture. Many species have culture, and those with more advanced consciousness have more advanced culture. The collective knowledge of a species emerges from uncountable individuals going through the process of understanding life, and then sharing their understanding with others. This is never a perfect process; what gets learned and passed on is generally useful, often flawed, and sometimes blatantly wrong. Learning about anything of even fairly minimal complexity can involve errors and oversights. This is even more so when learning about something as complex as existence.
Cause and effect are part of the fabric of our existence. Understanding the relationship between causes and effects is vital to surviving and thriving. Successfully navigating this is the foundation for the process of learning. The human mastery of language has created the ability for us to encode knowledge in stories. Our brains find it easier to work with knowledge that has relationships between different parts of it rather than just linear, disconnected knowledge. We find it easier to remember a song rather than the same words randomly scrambled. Songs, poems, religions - they are all stories. Our love of story, something integral to much of our culture, is based on the evolutionary drive we have to recognise and remember the relationships between causes and effects.
Fact and Fiction
History is the accumulation of stories. History is also the main tool we have in navigating the future. We should then ask, how are the stories we have accumulated serving us? Given the fog of deep history from which we emerged, it's understandable and perhaps inevitable that we have picked up some errant ideas along the way. Humans have travelled far in our understanding. Still, there are many problems and errors in our collective intellectual landscape.
Many of our problems stem from the detritus of our intellectual history. Remnants of the fact that, for most of our history, large parts of the structure and nature of existence were completely unknown to us. We had no clear answers to why we were here, how the world was formed, what the nature of death is and so on. As pattern and meaning seeking creatures, this lack of knowledge sat uncomfortably within us. We hungered for a world that made some sort of sense, and that didn't leave us with lingering questions about the meaning of our lives and the things around us.
Solving our existential disorientation required that we believe something, but it did not require that what we believe is true. Many questions may be better answered by stories that are not limited to the truth. For example, we often prefer romantic visions of ourselves to accurate insights. A story unanchored to reality can use any tools in its construction that serve the purposes of its author. Storytellers can bend the logic of the physical universe; they can insert magic and magical beings that enable any problem to be created and any challenge to be overcome. They can tell us of a world where good always triumphs, evil is always punished, and clear lessons are learned. Or, if we preferred it, they could tell us the opposite. In a world of confusion and unpredictability, stories can comfort us with the mirage of a sensible world that conforms to almost any laws we wish. We don't even need to believe stories are true to find comfort in them, though believing stories makes them more powerful.
The thriving of our culture is partly based on how our collection of stories relates to reality. The stories that have persisted are the ones that have been seen as most useful, entertaining, memorable, or uplifting. Stories can have immense cultural power; indeed, they are a defining feature of human culture that interact with how we see and imagine ourselves.
The veracity of information is built as networks of trust. We build our picture of the world as a web of information, with many pieces relying on the veracity of others. An errant belief or a fabrication can destabilise large parts of this web. A piece of misinformation might be relatively harmless on its own, but it can become the foundation for a vast pyramid of misinformation. Thus, webs of information can be logically internally consistent, but if the foundational errant beliefs are false or biased, then the whole edifice is worth little. Many widely held belief systems in our history have eventually suffered collapse. The ideologies that whole societies were centred around have now been left by the wayside. The exalted leaders and Gods of such societies have become just anecdotes and artefacts in museums and history books. There are many similar belief systems, with no greater foundations in truth, lingering around us still. They teeter unstably, waiting to be consigned to their rightful place in history.
The religions of our world are such structures. Once their foundational stories become established and accepted, other stories can be built upon their authority, and thus ever wider mythologies grow. The more stories that a system of belief is composed of, the more flexibility it allows people in choosing a version of the mythology they find appealing. The most widely embraced belief systems of the world offer both simple and complex truths. Simple truths for those who are happy with something to cling to that they don't desire to question too much. Complex truths for those who require complex distractions.
The ancient animating stories of human cultures were often perpetuated not because they were foundationally true, but because they were useful. Indeed, many who defend religious ideas do so more from a basis of their usefulness, rather than their underlying rationality. Their magical stories were a balm for the ills of higher consciousness, while at the same time encoding cultural learning, providing social order and underpinning the authority of the hierarchy. Religions have always had to adapt to the realities of people's lives. In worlds where people lived close to nature, or who mostly farmed the land, their cultures encoded information useful for this purpose. In worlds where people did specialised tasks amid large hierarchies, their religions became more abstract and distant. Often, the more difficult people's lives were, the more powerless and irrelevant they felt and the more their religious stories had to transport them to a world beyond their lived reality. A rational person might look at religious stories and see them as defying the logic of our lived experience of the world, but that is often the entire point of such stories. Stories partly designed to disconnect us from reality, however, can lead us to arbitrary and strange places.
Memes
For good or ill, ideas and beliefs can be powerful. Lives can be ruined, families can be broken apart, nations torn by war, merely on the basis of ideas. Believing in this god or those gods, or no god at all, are thoughts which can profoundly affect our lives. Ideas are just ephemeral bits of information in the ether. Weightless, mysterious. An idea can infect our mind in the blink of an eye, or it can not. These things that seem so arbitrary can be so incredibly consequential. We can make choices in a moment, even choices we are uncertain about, that we might have easily gone another way on, and these choices can radically alter our lives.
Imagine the person who is in a situation where they are deciding whether to try a powerful and addictive drug. Or another person deciding if they should have unprotected sex with someone they don't know particularly well. Or a third person deciding whether to take an action that might upset or hurt another person, including a criminal action. What they will do in this situation is decided by their thoughts - which are the order and choice of words that happen to flash across their mind in the moment. We do not entirely construct our minds, of course. A whole lifetime's experiences, and the influence of others around us, influence that sequence of our thoughts. Still, people with similar backgrounds and life experiences will make very different decisions when confronted with the same choices.
Philosophers argue endlessly about free will, but ultimately it feels like we have the freedom to choose our own thoughts. We must use what freedom we do have in this respect wisely. We must regularly practise what we might call mental hygiene: to understand which parts of our mental landscape are working towards our higher goals, and which parts are keeping us in stasis or even dragging us down.
Bad ideas
It is not only true ideas that are powerful; so are incorrect or fabricated beliefs. Ideas have always been used as justifications for social control, to encode archaic social ideas, and continue to be a cause of division and intercommunal conflict. Importantly, even ideas that were relatively progressive in their day eventually become a barrier to progress.
There is much good to do in the world. We need collective action on many global problems. Our path forward must be based upon a collective vision. Instead, incredible amounts of time, resources, thought and energy are still wasted on perpetuating divisive, fanciful and totalitarian worldviews. People don't just believe in these bad ideas; they think they are the most important ideas in the world. People donate huge amounts of money to them, dismiss or persecute people who don't believe in them, and are even willing to kill for them.
Bad ideas don't only cause problems on their own basis. They take up space that should be held by good ideas. How many brilliant people spent their lives feverishly discussing religion, astrology, and other supernatural ideas? How much money is spent on churches, and how much time is wasted repeating supplications in them?
It is not only false ideas that are problematic, but also the lack of having many ideas at all. Holding an unexamined worldview, which is often the case with consumeristic nihilism, is also a major barrier to progress. The extent to which pre-existing ideas can be made compatible with the urgent and essential progress we must make will govern whether those ideas become something that we must accept or resist.
Deep in our programming is the bias to conform with those around us. Often this conformity is useful, but it has also left us susceptible to perpetuating bad ideas. We are also susceptible because truth is a complicated topic. Nobody has a clear way of discerning truth from falsehood, and even if we did, a lot of important information sits outside clear categorisations. It is incredibly easy to make incorrect decisions about what information to prioritise and what to discard. Thus, we all believe things that aren't true; rationality is merely about how tightly we cling to false beliefs. Bad ideas, the result of a simple incorrect turn of mind, can take over our lives and be a major barrier to our flourishing.
Ideas have a viral nature, which led to Dawkins coining the term meme. Many people spreading ideas are not interested in, or not capable of, ensuring their truth. Influencing what people believe is a source of power and wealth. Given how toxic bad ideas are, we must give people, especially the young, intellectual defences against them. People become more susceptible to bad ideas if they do not have a proper framework from which to judge the information they encounter in the world. Having a proper framework cannot be taken for granted.
This book is aimed at building a collective intellectual foundation for our progress into the future that we, and the other life on this planet, deserve. It is not the only book that has tried to do this task, but I write it in the hope that my particular way of writing about our cultural moment resonates with some people. Indeed, if a single person is positively influenced by the ideas in this book, it will be worth every effort taken in writing it.
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It is not making mistakes that we should fear, but rather clinging to them. Sometimes, we are simply not able to see the truth. In order to see some errors, we must first come to a higher level of understanding. Thus, nuance and doubt are vital to a deeper understanding. The deeper we become, the deeper we will see into existence.
Our intellect is defined not only by what we know, but also by how we hold that knowledge. What any one of us knows is of course a tiny percentage of what is known by us collectively. What is known by us collectively is a tiny portion of what there is to know. We are as much defined by what we know as we are by our attitude to the things we do not know and to uncertainty. Part of our maturation and flourishing is defined by our relationship to the totality of knowledge, that within us and that beyond us, in the light, dark and shadows. Maturation is neither inevitable for individuals nor for cultures, but it is something for which we should strive, for the consequences of immaturity can be immense.