Evolve, Please

“…nothing is more unfair or a greater waste of time than to protest and fight against the increasing leisure towards which the machine is inexorably leading us. Without the very automatic processes whose business it is to make our various bodily organs work “on their own”, none of us, it is obvious, would have any “leisure” to create, to love, to think: the necessity to look after our ”metabolism” would occupy us entirely (p104-105).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

The Noosphere – Ethnic Compression; Economic-Technical Organization; and the Simultaneous Increase of Consciousness, Science and Radius of Activity:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 8 of 8

Particularly since the Neolithic, the more mankind is compressed upon itself by the effects of growth, the more, if it is to find room for itself, is it vitally forced to find continually new ways of arranging elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space (p98).

[--Kevin Kelly, How Technology Evolves--

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kevin_kelly_on_how_technology_evolves.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Technology_Wants

Kelly suggests that technology is the seventh kingdom of life; it evolves, evidences 'genetic' lineage and is distinct from biology in that certain 'species' can be traced to 'parents' that have gone 'extinct'. He calls technology a cosmic force.]

On increased psychic temperature/mental interiority and inventive power, under the law of complexity consciousness: it “increases each human element’s radius of action and power of penetration in relation to all the others” (p98-99) and “today, thanks to the single discovery of electromagnetic waves any man can immediately and simultaneously make contact” (p99, note).

[note: written in 1949, pre-internet]

Towards the Future – The Convergent World and the Limits of Socialization:

On the Teilhard’s “wave” and the “passing of the equator”: “…in earlier days, man’s consciousness could be revolutionized simply by the discovery of a new continent…” (p103).

More brain: collectivized cerebralization, the grey matter of mankind [not man, but mankind] (p100)

Man, taxonomically, is not just a family or genus but represents another planetary biological layer (p112, note).

Everything comes about in the course of cosmic convolution as though the superstructure (the psyche) more gradually replaces the infrastructure (the physical) as the consistent portion of the vitalized particles (p121, final note).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

The Noosphere – Individuation:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 7 of 8

The Collective Co-Consciousness of Primitive Tribes in a natural way facilitates the cohesion and natural functioning of the group (p93).

[--Bicameral Mind Theory--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mind]

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

Civilization and the Noosphere – Effects of Differentiation and Orthogenesis:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 6 of 8

Differentiation:

In man, there occurred an unknown and peculiarly revolutionary type of mutation in the massive cross-fertilization of large ethnic groups (not the rearrangement of germinal particles within certain individuals) (p90).

Orthogenesis:

“Psychogenic” arrangement has replace cerebralization (the brain reaches its limit) (p91).

From one point of view, hominization seems to have slowed to a stop, but considering civilization a part of this evolution, we see only acceleration (p92).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

Civilization and the Noosphere as Zoological/Taxonomical Extension:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 5 of 8

After man, we get mankind (p102)

“Man, who appeared as no more than a species but who, through the operation of ethnico-social unification, has gradually been raised to the position of constituting a specifically new envelope to the earth…He is nothing less than a sphere – the noosphere… (p80).”

With the noosphere, evolution advances only by contracting and concentrating itself (p82), and as a wave starting at the south pole and rising up to the North, over its whole course, during the first half (the equator) it spreads outwards, and beyond that, it contracts (p81).

The third pulsation: the Neolithic Agricultural wave: a simultaneous maturation of the species into a more sedentary and grouped way of life from a diffuse to an organized society (p84).

Civilization is not a “fully realized state of social organization” but the “process that generates the organization”. Its “zoological ‘specialization’ extended to an animal group (man) in which one particular influence (the psychic) that had hitherto been negligible from the point of view of taxonomy suddenly begins to assume a predominant part in the ramification of the phylum (p87)”.

“Psychological species” of human “collective units” produced throughout history as a result of culture and race are just as natural as ‘carnivore’, for example (p87).

“The older chromosomal heredity is now partnered by an “educational”, extra-individual …the psychic suddenly plays a more important role than the physiological and morphological (p87).”

“The formation of tribes, nations, empires, and finally of the modern state, is simply a prolongation…of the mechanism which produced animal species (p87).”

As a result of the intensification of the psychic milieu, a phenomena hitherto unknown in nature has now become possible – the confluence of branches (as opposed to the divergent branches of the tree of life) (p89).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

The Appearance of Man – The Leading Shoot from the Tree of Life:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 4 of 8

A new parameter for evolution: coefficient of complexity and nervous system (p47)

-Cerebralization – complexity of the brain

-Cephalization – absolute manifestation/concentration of the nervous system

See p54 Eddinger’s Development of the Brain in Equidae (it gets bigger)

See p52 Romer’s stages in the cerebralization of vertebrates (from fish-reptile-dog-man, the cerebral hemisphere eventually overcrowds, with the cerebellum growing also)

“In the course of the last 700 million years we can see that countless things disappeared, but not a single new thing, apart from the hominians, has appeared in nature (p73).”

“Hominians upon reaching the sapiens stage change ceregrally more rapidly and profoundly than any other living thing during the same interval (p76).”

Mankind – the last of evolution (p82)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

The Biosphere:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 3 of 8

There must have been an astonishingly rapid invasion of the whole photochemically active surface of our planet. It is as though the surface had then been, in relation to life, in a state of almost super-saturation…” with all capable elements rapidly vitalized to create the biosphere (p39).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

Evolution as Complexification:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 2 of 8

The Curve of Life and Complexity:

On the chart (p22), Teilhard plots the size of things, from an electron to the universe, against complexity, by number of atoms.

The chart corresponds to a cosmic evolution where the movement does not slow down but accelerates into more advanced forms of arrangement (p22). There is “the vitality of a sap whose pressure seems to rise rather than drop with the passage of time” (p77).

[--Kurzweil’s exponential growth of technology--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change]

-Universal expansion from infinitesimal to immense

-Universal folding in and centering upon itself

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

On Teilhard’s Integrated Theory of Evolution and the Theory of Conscious Matter:

Teilhard and Cosmic Evolution Series, 1 of 8

-Life from dead matter

-Man from animal

-Matter is conscious but requires a high degree of organization to enable it to cross the threshold and manifest itself as consciousness

-Life as universal phenomenon of the complexification of matter

The Law of Complexity Consciousness:

-Besides entropy (energy dissipation)

-Besides expansion (universal unfolding and granulization)

-Besides electrical and gravitational forces of attraction

--There is a perennial current of “interiorizing complexification” that animates the whole mass of things (p33).

There may be a hidden relation between Newtonian gravity of condensation (stars) and the “gravity” of complexification (life) (p33, note).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Man’s Place in Nature: The Human Zoological Group

Written 1949, Harper’s 1956, English trans 1966

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: The General Bicameral Paradigm

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 8 of 8

Jaynes uses Hypnosis as an example for the paradigm:

Collective Cognitive Imperative:

-consensus reality [personal notes]

-cultural matrix (Haitian voodoo and nzombies) [personal notes]

-crowds strengthen the imperative (hypnosis works better with an audience)

-the imperative reinforces expectancy (of the hypnosis actually working)

-the isolation of the lab reduces the effect

Induction:

-ritual

-narrowing of consciousness

-Hypnosis: focusing on the stopwatch and then just the voice until all sensory input is blocked except the voice (of the original bicameral condition)

Trance:

-left and right sides of the brain can act, but cannot communicate

-Hammurabi: ‘The Code’ was written in trance (and any ‘writer’ of a bicameral mind did so while in a trance)

Archaic Authorization:

-by an accepted god (or the hypnotist)

Jaynes describes certain people as having greater ‘hypnotizability’

-left-handed (due to their right-brain dominance)

-religious (more likely to believe)

-imaginary childhood friends (that represent the bicameral god/voice within)

-prior experience with hypnosis (or other induction ritual)

-children (more susceptible to authority)

-the severely punished (also more susceptible to authority)

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: The Auguries of Science

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 7 of 8

Science started out as a religious endeavor to reveal hidden divinity (that once was there before the breakdown), (p436).

We must become our own authorization (p438).

It is only if we make generations our persons, or centuries hours that the pattern is clear (p445).

The very notion of truth is a culturally given direction, a part of the pervasive nostalgia for an earlier certainty (p446).

What was then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts (p446, last sentence of the book).

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: On Ancient Misinterpretation

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 6 of 8

There is a constant attempt on the part of scholars to impose modern categories of thought on those ancient cultures in order to make them more familiar…to modern readers (p201).

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: The Code of Hammurabi

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 5 of 8

The prologue/epilogue is written by Hammurabi, the text is about him and his relationship to his god, evident is the concept of ‘I’ or ‘self’.

The code itself is written by Marduk, his god, spoken to Hammurabi and channeled from him to a scribe.

Both sides are unconscious of each other. When the code is written, Hammurabi, in a trance, lets the unconscious take over.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: On Human Responsibility

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 4 of 8

The soldiers of the Trojan War were noble automatons who knew not what they did (p75).

Man and his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality than our own. They were not conscious, not responsible for their actions and cannot be given credit of blame. Instead, each person had a part of his nervous system [the right hemisphere of the brain] that was divine, by which he was ordered about like a slave (p201-202)

The debut of human responsibility: Solon (Greek, credited with “Know Thyself”) warns his fellow Athenians not to blame the gods, but themselves (p386).

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: Writing and the Erosion of the Bicameral Mind

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 3 of 8

Writing eroded the auditory authority of the bicameral mind [god’s orders were transmitted via ‘auditory hallucinations’ within mind of the bicameral man]. The input to the divine hallucinatory aspect of the bicameral mind was auditory. Once the word of god was silent, written on dumb clay tablets or incised into speechless stone, the god’s commands or the king’s directives could be turned to or avoided by one’s own efforts in a way that auditory hallucinations never could be. The word of god had a controllable location rather than an ubiquitous power with immediate obedience (p208).

“What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually” (p302).

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: The Disappearance of God

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 2 of 8

As the complexity of society increases, the bicameral mind becomes stressed, requiring elaborate rituals to maintain the voice within.

[end of 3^rd millennium B.C.] the tempo and complexity of social organization demand a far greater number of decisions in a far greater number of contexts, resulting in a proliferation of deities for any potential situation (p196).

As gods increased in complexity (in the Near East, 2^nd millennium B.C.) unsureness creates personal gods to intercede and reach the higher gods – “Who seem to be receding into the heavens where in one brief millennium they will have disappeared” (p202).

Inconsistency between people:

As people migrate, quickly due to major geological/climatological stressors, as refugees, they are thrust into ever-increasing new situations not dealt with before, either by themselves or their ancestors. The voices then say different things to different people. Hierarchical authority deconstructs and loses its validity.

– Social Disorganization and Bicameral Breakdown

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: General Notes

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 1 of 8

[The Iliad] There is no evidence of consciousness; instead, the gods take place of consciousness. Man doesn’t know he is conscious; he is not aware; his feelings and decisions come from god (p72).

[The Bible] Amos does not consciously think before he speaks, in fact, he does not think as we do at all; his thinking is done for him (p296).

The function of the gods was chiefly the guiding and planning of action in novel situations. The gods size up problems and organize action according to an ongoing pattern or purpose resulting in intricate bicameral civilizations, fitting all the disparate part together, planting times, harvest times, the sorting out of commodities, all the vast putting together of things in a grand design, and the giving of directions to the neurological man in his verbal and analytical sanctuary in the left hemisphere. We might thus predict that one residual function of the right hemisphere today would be an organizational one (p117-118)

Individuals do not respond to even basic physiological needs except within the whole pattern of the group’s activity. A thirsty baboon, for example, does not leave the group and go seeking water; it is the whole group that moves, or none. Thirst is satiated only within the patterned activity of the group (p127).

The gods were in no sense a ‘figment of the imagination’ of anyone. They were man’s volition. They occupied his nervous system and transmitted experience into articulated speech which then ‘told’ the man what to do (p202).

Bicameral Timeline

2000-1000 BC: man stops hearing voices

1000-0 BC: oracle and prophets die away

0-1000 AD: sayings and hearings preserved in sacred text

1000-2000 AD: sacred text loses its authority

Literary examples of Bicameralism Theory (vs. Subjective Consciousness)

Chinese-Confucious (SC)

India-Veda (bicam) / Upanishads (SC)

Hebrew-Bible: Amos (bicam) / Ecclesiastes (SC)

Greek-The Iliad (bicam) / The Odyssey (SC)

By 400 B.C. bicameral prophecy is dead (p312)

As the stag pants after the waterbrooks,

So pants my mind after you, O gods!

My mind thirsts for gods! Living Gods!

When shall I come face to face with gods?

-Psalm 42

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

The Social Network, Sharing, Privacy and Strategy

According to Carl Sagan, in his essay “The Quest for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence”, in 1974 the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, run by Cornell University for the National Science Foundation, in a ceremony marking the resurfacing of the largest radio/radar telescope on Earth, sent a message to the globular cluster M13; it is 24,000 light-years away. The message, Sagan goes on to say, wasn’t intended for interstellar communication, but as an indication of advances in terrestrial radio technology. Regardless, the decoded message goes something like this (in Sagan’s words):

Here is how we count to ten. Here are the atomic numbers of fine chemical elements – hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus – that we think are interesting or important. Here are some ways to put these atoms together: the molecules adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, and a chain composed of alternating sugars and phosphates. These molecular building blocks are in turn put together to form a long molecule of DNA comprising about four billion links in the chain. The molecule is a double helix. In some way the molecule is important from the clumsy-looking creature at the center of the message. That creature is about 14 radio wavelengths, or about 176n centimeters, high. There are about 4 billion of these creatures on the third planet from our star. There are 9 planets altogether – four little ones on the inside, four big ones toward the outside, and one little one at the extremity. This message is brought to you from a radio telescope 2,430 wavelengths, or 306 meters, in diameter. Yours truly.

Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan, 1974-1979, Ch.22, “The Quest for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence”, pp320-321

Years, perhaps centuries or millennia from now, these scientists may be considered traitors of Earth, communicating such information so freely.

In this current era where the very notion of privacy is eroding within a single generation, there should be no surprise. As the scientific body of Earth decided to transmit – to a far away somewhere out in the universe, with no intention of actual communication – crucial information regarding life on our planet, so we too, given the appropriate technology, would do the same. It is a natural human tendency to share information. How much? As much as possible, that’s how much. With whom? Whoever is listening.

Looking Back

written sometime in the future

I have always been interested in that wave of people washed over the earth prior to the advent of agriculture. They were propelled by their own revolution, a new capacity for the brain, for co-development with a changing environment. In fact, life by our definition is only that which starts with cells and organisms able to respond to their environment. But in the greater sense it is evidenced by the gathering of mass, or the creation of mass, as this is the farthest reach of the origin of our phase of universal expression to which we can make contact.

Life is like the fisherman’s net, casting open into the sea and bringing back only the good things the water offers, less the water. But as stalagmites seem to grow from the ground, so did our existence, a deposit left by the nebulousness after its evaporation in cycles of on/off, building upwards, pointing away from the two-dimensional earth into its own dimension.

And so agriculture collects humans and concentrates their energy. And industry further refines our purpose. The digital era, the ability to turn electricity into a language, to codify and communicate that human construction: reality. Further, the human ability to monitor and predict their world outpaced the human capacity for discriminating between universal expression, and expression anthrogenic. This, of course, marked the limits of our interaction with that universal expression. Until that point, our life exists dimensionally. That is to say, as matter, as organisms, as humans. Forces such as gravity dominate, but more importantly, concepts, such as concentration and dispersal. Information does not require transmission, as it is already in all places at all times. It is extra-dimensional, or non-dimensional.

Human existence is bound by the physical, the phase in which it developed this specific experiencing/connecting/mirroring apparatus. In order to advance beyond this point, it is not us, obviously, but our self replicate, our essence, that must separate and travel alone into that unknown. We will be left behind. And what to do? Will have not our purpose been then fulfilled? Not to worry, we will always be in control of our interpretation of the universe. And after all, in a world without space-time, we are always there, and we will always be together.

Belief is Submission

The true scientist never finds truth. He seeks it endlessly, as an exercise in thought, an exercise the benefits of which are utilized to the enhanced interaction of the human (both individual and collective) with the surrounding.

And only those wishing to collect power call certain benefits of these exercises ‘truth’. To believe in someone else’s truth is to submit one’s own personal power, and consequently to diminish the power of the collective.

Belief is submission.

There is only one truth, and for every human, there is a mirror of that truth, and it is different for every human, yet necessarily complementary for their reliance upon and utilization of the One Truth that is shared by all.

To believe the artificial truth of another man is to submit one’s own access to and control of the only practicable One Truth. We give up our freedom to believe the real truth, the truth that, albeit dangerous and unpredictable, provides the only solid foundation upon which we can base our personal existence.

To exist in another man’s world is to offer your dreams to the altar of progress.

Belief is submission.

Einstein and Individuation as Isolation

“My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years. Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions, and prejudices of others and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations”.

-Einstein, in Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan, 1974-1979, Ch. 3, “The World which Beckons like a Liberation”, p27 (possible references for this quote are found on p369, sorry for the ambiguity but the quote isn’t specifically referenced)

Einstein was obviously a “man who had learned to distinguish between what had been drummed into him and what he had acquired by his own experience and knowledge” .

The individual is a mountain whose peak becomes more isolated the higher it reaches.

-Jolande Jacobi, The Way of Individuation, 1965