Stephen Talbott on the Evolution of Consciousness
Source
This is a preliminary draft of one chapter (i.e. chapter 23) of a book-in-progress entitled, “Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life”. This material is part of the Biology Worthy of Life project of The Nature Institute. By Stephen L. Talbott.
URL = https://bwo.life/bk/evolconsc.htm
Summary
Stephen Talbott:
"* The ancients, who were incapable of anything like our own theoretical and causal speculation, directly perceived a world that seemed to possess a powerful interior aspect. They recognized what lived in the world as akin to what lived in their own interiors.
- Our ancestors’ thoughts were at first perceived more than actively thought. Their meanings and language were given in their immediate perceptions of the world around them. Eventually, an independent inner being and independent powers of speech arose as a further, inward development of what had initially been the world’s “speaking”.
- Historically, there has been a change in directionality. We humans who were, in a sense, first spoken into being by the world, now find ourselves bearing a responsibility to speak this world’s future into being — if only, to begin with, by accepting a responsibility to avoid destroying it.
- Our lately achieved independence from the world as self-aware individuals has given us the freedom to think and imagine the world with our own thoughts, even if in a highly distorted way. We are free to err. We are free to “forget” humanity’s origin and past, if only by ignoring the study of it. We can, if we wish, retreat into a comfortable materialism requiring no burden of responsibility on our part.
The chapter as a whole concerns human consciousness, but the picture certainly suggests that all organisms make their way through a larger, meaning-soaked surround that comprises the givenness of their lives and the givenness of the world. And it is this same meaning that, by contracting into a bright focus in human minds, has engendered our consciousness and self-awareness. In this common, if diverse, interior aspect lies the unity of life on earth.
Our discussion of the evolution of consciousness does not suggest that it makes any sense to imagine an origin of consciousness. More particularly, it is not clear how the idea of a “first” meaning arising from bedrock meaninglessness can make sense. We cannot grasp any meaning except against a contextual background full of already existing meaning. Make an experiment: take any single word (or invent one) and try to understand or define it other than in the terms of many other words. You will find that any specific meaning can shine forth only in the light of a meaning-soaked universe.
The background of meaning is simply a given of our lives as children of what we might call a logos-world. We cannot even legitimately imagine an origin for meaning, because the only contents available to our thought-world are meaningful contents. An imagined leap from unmeaning to meaning can occur only via circular reasoning, whereby elements of meaning are brought in through the back door.
In short, there can be no meaninglessness in the known universe — in a universe that submits itself to human perception and understanding. For a more explicit treatment of these matters, see Chapter 24.
We have learned to view just about everything through an evolutionary lens. The benefits to understanding have been many. The oddity is that these benefits have scarcely been extended to a knowledge of the evolution of consciousness — an evolution that includes the changing cognitive relation between the perceiver and what he perceives. There is a penalty to be paid for this: we lose the ability to understand the very different qualities of consciousness characteristic of earlier eras, and therefore we become trapped in modernity — in our own “moment” of evolution. And this at a time when we need to begin learning to carry responsibility, not just for one moment, but for the entire future course of evolution."