Three Big Bangs Read online

  In discussing the evolution of human critical capacities, the overarching influence of symbolic activity (the means by which humans create meaning) is inescapable. Human cultural behavior involves not only the transmission of nongenetic information but also the coding of thoughts, sensations, and things, times, and places that are not visible. All the odd elaborations of human life, socially and individually, including the heights of imagination, the depths of depravity, moral abstraction, and a sense of God, depend on this symbolic coding of the nonvisible. (Potts 2004:263)

  Neuroscience makes it difficult to imagine disembodied mind. Life is embedded in matter-energy, a singularity within it. Mind is embodied in biology, a singularity within it. Culture is always embodied in incarnate persons. Still, there is an aspect of ideational culture that can seem somewhat loose from material embodiment, perhaps analogous to the way in which many mathematicians are platonic. Ideas do transcend any particular instantiation in bodies, even in minds (like the idea of a triangle transcending any particular world triangle). Although an idea must be embodied in some material platform, there can be multiple platforms for the same idea (in mind, in book, on audio tape, in computer). The U.S. legal tradition of separation of church and state, for example, is “embodied,” if you like, in Constitution and case law, but this is not exactly in anybody’s head, or even in all the heads of the living generation. It is an ongoing ideational complex, stored in books and public records, as well as in particular minds. Similarly with the Golden Rule. And both dramatically affect human behavior.

  Mind: Predictable or Surprising?

  Might the mind’s big bang have been anticipated? Again, biologists range across a spectrum. Despite finding other kinds of progress undeniable in the evolutionary record, Ernst Mayr reflects on the evolution of intelligence: “An evolutionist is impressed by the incredible improbability of intelligent life ever to have evolved” (1988:69). He elaborates this judgment:

  We know that the particular kind of life (system of macromolecules) that exists on Earth can produce intelligence…. We can now ask what was the probability of this system producing intelligence (remembering that the same system was able to produce eyes no less than 40 times). We have two large super-kingdoms of life on Earth, the prokaryote evolutionary lines each of which could lead theoretically to intelligence. In actual fact none of the thousands of lines among the prokaryotes came anywhere near it.

  There are 4 kingdoms among the eukaryotes, each again with thousands or ten thousands of evolutionary lineages. But in three of these kingdoms, the protists, fungi, and plants, no trace of intelligence evolved. This leaves the kingdom of Animalia to which we belong. It consists of about 25 major branches, the so-called phyla, indeed if we include extinct phyla, more than 30 of them. Again, only one of them developed real intelligence, the chordates. There are numerous Classes in the chordates, I would guess more than 50 of them, but only one of them (the mammals) developed real intelligence, as in Man. The mammals consist of 20-odd orders, only one of them, the primates, acquiring intelligence, and among the well over 100 species of primates only one, Man, has the kind of intelligence that would permit [the development of advanced culture]. Hence, in contrast to eyes, an evolution of intelligence is not probable. (Mayr, quoted in Barrow and Tipler 1986:132–133)

  Mind of the human kind is unusual even on this unusual Earth. Biology is not inevitably anthropic.

  If we move from Harvard to Cambridge, Simon Conway Morris takes an opposite view: “Something like ourselves is an evolutionary inevitability, and our existence also reaffirms our one-ness with the rest of Creation” (Conway Morris 2003:xv–xvi). “As all the principal properties that characterize humans are convergent, then sooner or later, and we still have a billion years of terrestrial viability in prospect, ‘we’ as a biological property will emerge” (96). He asks, and answers: whether,

  given time, evolution will inevitably lead not only to the emergence of such properties as intelligence, but also to other complexities, such as, say, agriculture and culture, that we tend to regard as the prerogative of the human? We may be unique, but paradoxically those properties that define our uniqueness can still be inherent in the evolutionary process. In other words, if we humans had not evolved then something more-or-less identical would have emerged sooner or later. (196)

  Conway Morris continues: “‘Hominization’ is not as unique a process as many may think” (274). “Rerun the tape of life as often as you like, and the end result will be much the same. On Earth it happens to be humans” (282). Biology is anthropic.

  Christian de Duve concludes that neural power, where it luckily arises, has such “decisive selective advantage” that there is high probability of its increase:

  The direction leading toward polyneuronal circuit formation is likely to be specially privileged in this respect, so great are the advantages linked with it. Let something like a neuron once emerge, and neuronal networks of increasing complexity are almost bound to arise. The drive toward larger brains and, therefore, toward more consciousness, intelligence, and communication ability dominates the animal limb of the tree of life on Earth. (de Duve 1995:297)

  There is only one line that leads to persons, but in that line at least the steady growth of cranial capacity makes it difficult to think that intelligence is not being selected. One can first think that in humans enlarging brains are to be expected, since intelligence conveys obvious survival advantage. But then again, that is not so obvious, since all the other five million or so presently existing species survive well enough without advanced intelligence, as did all the other billions of species that have come and gone over the millennia. Reptiles were small-brained past and present, limited perhaps by being cold-blooded. Big brains take more energy, longer gestation, and more time rearing young. Mammal brains do grow but in fits and starts; generally mammals are four to five times brainer than reptiles.

  In only one of these myriads of species has a brain capable of a transmissible culture developed, and in this one it has developed explosively. This does have survival advantage for humans, even if other species survive quite well without it. With only hunting and gathering technologies, humans became the most widespread mammal on Earth. The cumulation makes it possible for an individual to inherit the discoveries of thousands of others before him, discoveries that the individual could not make in a single lifetime.

  But human cultures continue, characterized as well by radical innovations in cognition that eventually have little or nothing to do with survival. Grigori Perelman sought and found a proof to the Poincaré conjecture in mathematics, transforming irregular spaces into uniform ones (Mackenzie 2006). Ed Wilson cares for the conservation of his ants, where “splendor awaits in minute proportions” (1984:139). Humans do have to reproduce themselves in a next generation; but much, even most of what goes on in contemporary culture is not primarily focused on leaving more of one’s genes in the next generation.

  Are these outcomes in the third big bang latent in, inherent in the second big bang? If we look to science, the answer seems to be that scientists have reached no consensus. Conway Morris finds that humans or something much like us is inevitable; de Duve finds a natural selection of more brain in animal life, conveying survival advantage; but Mayr could not find any of this at all. John Maynard Smith too, we recall from the previous chapter, tracing the unique transitions that produced evolutionary escalation and led to humans, found “no reason to regard the unique transitions as the inevitable result of some general law”; to the contrary, these events might not have happened at all (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995:3).

  Let us return again to the question whether possibilities emerge en route. Molecules, trillions of them, spin around in this astronomically complex webwork and generate the unified, centrally focused experience of mind. This is a process for which we can as yet scarcely imagine a theory. Can we nevertheless say that the potential for intentionality was there at the big bang? Was self-reflexive mind, a thirteen
-billion-years-later singularity, always lurking around from the startup? It was, earlier, quite a mental stretch to see the protons, electrons, and atoms waiting to string themselves together into DNA some nine or ten billion years later. Were they also waiting to form intentional mind? There is certainly nothing in contemporary physics that can address this problem; no “theory of everything” can explain artifacts of mind, such as a hammer or a cell phone, much less Perelman’s proof.

  Neither life nor mind is yet known elsewhere in the universe, but even if both were found elsewhere repeatedly, we would not know whether these repetitions were all front-loaded or whether new possibility spaces opened up in diverse places in the universe. Judgments in such cases might depend on how similar the extraterrestrial minds were, but of course we humans, even smart scientists, could only recognize minds with considerable similarity to our own. Life and mind elsewhere would not eliminate dimensions of unique particularity on Earth—elephants, humans, Israel, Einstein. The human mind seems to require an incredible opening up of new possibility space.

  Consider this self-transcendence in the sciences—and now it is revealing to look beyond genetics and neuroscience, beyond the sciences where we study ourselves. Physics and astronomy are within our scientific cultures, and yet with these disciplines we transcend our cultures. With our instrumented intelligences and constructed theories, we now know of phenomena at structural levels from quarks to quasars. We measure distances from picometers to the extent of the visible universe in light-years, across forty orders of magnitude. We measure the strengths of the four major binding forces in nature (gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces), again across forty orders of magnitude. We measure time at ranges across thirty-four orders of magnitude, from attoseconds to the billions-of-years age of the universe. Nature gave us our mind-sponsoring brains; nature gave us our hands. Nature did not give us radiotelescopes with which to “see” pulsars, or relativity theory with which to compute time dilation. These come from human genius, cumulated in our transmissible cultures (though we do not forget that nature supplies these marvelous processes analyzed by radiotelemetry and relativity theory).

  These extremes are beyond our embodied experience. No one experiences a light-year or a picosecond. But they are not beyond our comprehension entirely, else we could not use such concepts so effectively in science. The instrumentation is a construction (radiotelescopes and mathematics), a cultural invention, a “social construct,” if you must. But precisely this construction enables us dramatically to extend our native ranges of perception. The construction dis-embodies us. It distances us from our embodiment. No one has an everyday “picture” of a quark or a pulsar. But we have good theory why nothing can be “seen” at such ranges in ordinary senses of “see,” which requires light in the wavelength range of 400–700 nanometers, with the radiation from quarks and pulsars far outside that range. We can ask whether a molecule is too small to be colored, or whether an a electron, in its superposition states, is so radically different as to have no position, no “place” in the native range sense, only a probabilistic location.

  That transcends startpoint location, enabling us to reach a standpoint location greater than ourselves. No animal, humans included, knows everything going on at all levels, quarks to cosmos (“the God’s-eye view”). Some animals, sometimes humans, know little of what is going on at any level; they have only functional behaviors, genetically coded or behaviorally acquired, that work, more or less, for survival. They have, we might say, limited know-how and no know-that. But humans can sometimes enjoy an epistemic genius, transcending their own sector and take an overview (Earth seen from space, the planet’s hydrologic cycles) or take in particulars outside their embodiment (sonar in bats, low-frequency elephant communication). We can, as we are doing here, consider these three big bangs, billion of years apart and spanning immense levels of complexity. This genius is fact of the matter. If science could find that this result is latent in the system, that would be a great marvel. If science can only find this outcome a serendipitous surprise in the system, that makes it no less a marvel. Either because of or despite their evolutionary origins, humans are a radically new kind of species on Earth.

  Manfred Eigen concludes that there is transformation of the creative process:

  The process of creation is by no means at an end, although no-one can predict what is to come, even within intervals of time that are negligibly short in comparison with the phase of genetic evolution…. But evolutionary progress in the near future will hardly be on the genetic level. The activation of the human mind has greatly speeded up the roundabout of development. Almost everything that happens in the foreseeable future will proceed from mankind…. Man is still a relative newcomer to planet Earth, and the creation of humanity has only just begun. (Eigen 1992:49)

  Life starts up, and, as already recognized, on many of its trajectories, it smarts up. That is as startling in the supersmart human head start as anywhere else in the universe. Blaisé Pascal’s “thought” at the start of the Enlightenment is still true: “But, if a universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought” (Pascal [1670] 1958:# 347:97). As philosophers from ancient Greece onward have claimed, humans are “the rational animals.” Scientific research continues to confirm this ideational uniqueness. But deeper explanations require philosophy, metaphysics, theology. Ultimate explanations may require the dimension of “spirit.”

  Spirited Persons: The Ultimate Marvel

  Humans find themselves uniquely emplaced on a unique planet—in their world cognitively and critically as no other species is. Our bodily incarnation embeds us in this biospheric community; we are Earthlings. Our mental genius enables us to rise to transcending overview. We humans are at once “spirited selves,” enjoying our incarnation in flesh and blood, empowered for survival by our brain/minds, defending our personal selves, and yet transcending ourselves and our local concerns. Homo sapiens is the only part of the world free to orient itself with a view of the whole. We are not free from the worlds of either nature or culture, but free in those environments. That makes us, if you like, free spirits; it also makes us self-transcending spirits. That is the peculiar genius of the human “person” or “spirit.” We alone can wonder where we are, who we are, what we ought to do.

  A frequent way of reading the history of science displaces humans from central focus. Earth is a lonely planet, lost out there in the stars; humans are latecomers on Earth, arriving in the last few seconds of geological and astronomical time. We are cosmic dwarfs, trivial on the universe scale. Copernicus dealt a cosmological blow: humans do not live at the center of the universe. Darwin struck an evolutionary blow: humans are not divine but animals. Watson and Crick struck a molecular biology blow: humans are nothing but electronic molecules in motion on atomic scales. Freud struck a psychological blow, the most humiliating of all: we persons are not masters of our own minds.

  But with a gestalt switch, one can read the same natural history to find cosmic genius in humans. This tension between decentering ourselves and humans at the center of interest is a framework or paradigm issue. In this perspective, humans live at the center of complexity. In astronomical nature and micronature, at both ends of the spectrum of size, nature lacks the complexity that it demonstrates at the mesolevels, found in at our native ranges on Earth. Perhaps we humans are cosmic dwarfs; perhaps we are molecular giants. But there is no denying our mid-scale complexity. We do not live at the range of the infinitely small, nor at that of the infinitely large, but we may well live at the range of the infinitely complex. The last big explosion in the universe is in your head.

  Biologists anxious to displace any idea of direction or progress in evolutionary natural history may say that the tree of life is bushy, rather than treelike. Humans will be shown as one am
ong other small buds on the bush, not some apical bud on top. Certainly we do wish to celebrate the diversity of life on Earth: the bushy explosion. But what this overlooks is the mental explosion in that bud on the bush, the radical way in which in one species the searching genes outdo themselves. Elaborating the genetic cybernetic possibilities, in generating human brains their genes crossed a threshold into a cognitive realm with spectacular new powers and freedoms. The combinatorial cybernetic explosion is recompounded. Terrence Deacon catches this uniqueness:

  Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have produced hundreds of thousands of species with brains, and tens of thousands with complex behavioral, perceptual, and learning abilities. Only one of these has ever wondered about its place in the world, because only one evolved the ability to do so. (Deacon 1997:21)

  So we wonder where we are (cosmology, universe, Earth, creation), who we are (person, self, spirit, soul, made in the image of God), what we ought to do (ethics, justice, love, value choices). Let us begin with the latter, more immediately demanded in daily life, and move toward the former and more ultimate. The uniquely rational animal is equally the uniquely ethical animal. Ethics is distinctively a product of the human genius, a phenomenon in our social behavior. To be ethical is to reflect on considered principles of right and wrong and to act accordingly, in the face of temptation. This is a possibility in all and only human life, so that we expect and demand that persons behave morally and hold them so responsible. We approve and disapprove on principle and in practice. This is true even when, alas, some humans are tragically derelict or failing and we cannot presume to treat them as what they ought to have been, or perhaps once were, at least aspirationally. Such an emergence of ethics is as remarkable as any other event we know; in some form or other ethics is pervasively present in every human culture, whether honored in the observance or the breach.