It has been said that consciousness evolved so that the Universe may know itself. It is important to understand that there was no intention behind this. There is no defined goal or end point that evolution, consciousness, or human consciousness is innately working towards. Consciousness came into being through chance 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 human branch of the primate family, and eventually the last surviving member, 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 has not now arrived at some final end point, as embodied in us. Evolution never sits completely still. Our minds and our consciousness will continue to change, even as we are learning how to best use them and to tame our ceaseless questioning. Understanding our evolutionary journey, however, can help us to understand ourselves, our strengths and our weaknesses. 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.
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 species. Many species have culture, and beings with more advanced consciousness have more advanced culture. The collective consciousness of a species emerges from uncountable individuals going through the process of understanding life, and then sharing that understanding with others. This is never a perfect process; what gets learned and passed on is generally useful, but also flawed and often wrong. Learning about anything of even fairly minimal complexity inevitably involves errors and oversights. This is even more so when learning about something as complex as existence.
Stories
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. Many are remnants of the fact that, for most of our history, large parts of the structure and nature of existence were hidden from us. We had no 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.
We became a being of story. Solving our existential disorientation required that we believe something, but it did not require that what we believe is true. Indeed, our questions may be better answered by stories that are not limited to the truth. A story unanchored to reality can use any tools in its construction that it wishes. They can insert magic and magical beings to enable any problem to be created and any challenge to be overcome. They can create a world where good always triumphs, evil is always punished, and clear lessons are learned. In a world of confusion and unpredictability, stories can comfort us with the mirage of a sensible world that acts how we would wish it would. We find even greater comfort in stories if we believe them.
The informational foundation of our culture is a collection of stories. The stories that have persisted are the ones that people found most useful, entertaining, memorable, or uplifting. Stories can have immense cultural power, indeed they can largely define cultures. Once a story becomes established, other stories can be built upon its authority, and thus ever wider mythologies grew. 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 simple truths, but can also be intricate and demanding in their internal logic. Humans can be complex beings who sometimes require complex distractions.
The ancient animating stories of human cultures were often perpetuated not because they were completely true, but because they were useful. They were a balm for the ills of higher consciousness; they encoded cultural learning; they provided social order and hierarchy. The more difficult people's lives were, the more powerless and irrelevant they felt, the more they needed stories that transported 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.
Memes
For good or ill, beliefs can be powerful. Lives can be ruined, families can be broken apart, nations torn by war, merely on the basis of ideas. Yet ideas are just bits of information in the ether. Weightless, mysterious, in constant flux. An idea can infect our mind in the blink of an eye. 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 - the order and choice of words 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.
Bad ideas
The power of ideas is not restricted to true ideas, it includes incorrect or fabricated beliefs. They have always been used as justifications for social control, to encode archaic social ideas, and continue to be a cause of division and intercommunal onflict. 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, how much time 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.