"Reinventing God "
williamcalvin.com
another link down on the left from Bill Calvin's site :
some interesting stuff, actually some great observations structured into his ideas :
Up to an Intellect that can make ethical choices
A mere two-and-a-half million years ago, our ancestors were spun off from those upright apes with small brains and little toolmaking skill that had developed on the forest fringe as Africa became drier and drier. The spinoff had a somewhat larger brain and some toolmaking abilities.
Many of the behaviors we value – the reassuring touch and the arm around the shoulder, the hugging and kissing – turn out to be shared with our closest cousins among the great apes. That spinoff likely had them too. Sharing is generally found only between mother and offspring, but chimps also have a limited form of meat sharing. Reciprocal altruism, a fancy name for doing favors for friends, has an amazingly long growth curve – you can double your payoffs by sharing more things, with more people, over longer periods of time, onwards and upwards to today’s versions seen in third-party peacekeeping forces, which is real altruism indeed.
Those behaviors that we especially value, structured language and rationality, are not seen in the chimpanzees and bonobos. And they may not have played much of a role in that two-and-a-half million year long story, appearing only in the last one percent of the period, about 50,000 years ago in the midst of the most recent ice age, long after modern brain size had been achieved. This may have been when structured language, contingent planning, games with rules, or trains of logic finally took hold culturally.
With such structured thought, people can now pretend and lie, imitate, deceive, and simulate alternative courses of action. We pyramid levels of organization: from phonemes to words, words to sentences, sentences to narratives to ethics. We can fantasize about the future, and sometimes peer far enough into the future fog to keep from speeding past a better alternative. We now have an extraordinary ability to juggle abstractions, building a mental house of cards with enough stability to find a better metaphor, to compose a more compelling poem.
But structured thought does make possible the great cultural developments we associate with philosophy, science, and religion. With education, they take hold in a new generation and are often improved. Our ancestors developed altruism into disaster relief, welfare, and volunteer fire departments. They also came to reflect on what they saw, to develop a public conscience:
The disillusion and despair that characterize the political vision of Thucydides provide, paradoxically, evidence of the moral advance that had taken place in Eurasia in the first millennium B.C. Until then, people had lived in a world without a public conscience. Wars often had turned men into beasts in the past; what was new in fifth-century Greece was that Thucydides, Euripides, and others were shocked by it.
–David Fromkin, The Way of the World (Knopf 1998), p.63
Structured thought is what makes human consciousness so different from that of other animals (we may not be able to read their minds but we can see their behavior; if they could contemplate the way we can, they would be doing things to their advantage that we would see in their behaviors – but don’t). That big step up overlaps a lot with the concept of a soul.
Does it become independent of the body? Yes, in the sense of contributions to the culture and the examples we set for others, which live on after our deaths. But in Consciousness, the neurologist Adam Zeman writes [p.151], “It may be arrogant to deny that consciousness can ever slip its moorings in the brain – after all, much of the world’s population believes firmly that it can – but the evidence of this happening is tenuous at best.” And that tends to be the consensus among neuroscientists.
A great deal of our consciousness – indeed, our intelligence – involves guessing well, as we try to make a coherent story out of fragments. We search for coherence in our surroundings, ways in which things unexpectedly hang together – and the pleasure we get from finding hidden patterns is not just from jigsaw and crossword puzzles or listening to Bach. Coherence finding – the search for meaning – has spawned an enormous range of art and technology, pyramiding complexity while miniaturizing it all, allowing computers to expand what we can accomplish with a little thought. |
