Humankind stands at an evolutionary crossroads. Homo sapiens cannot continue fragmenting the natural world without inducing a collapse of natural systems. We can still change course, though it will require the awakening of a latent potential within the human brain.
What is that latency, and why has it become essential to the survival of the human being and humanity?
To begin to address that question, we need to understand what made us human in the first place, and how our species came to leave an ecological niche like all other species and dominate the Earth. Then we’ll see how the human brain can awaken an embryonic capacity and develop in a new direction, in basic harmony with the Earth and each other.
Symbolic cognitive processes are the core element of the human adaptive pattern. Symbolic processes are defined as “our ability to abstract elements of our environment and represent them with discrete mental symbols.”
That means consciously removing “things” (they aren’t things until they are consciously removed from the environment) and generating names for and knowledge about them. That enables us to manipulate and reconfigure reified objects.
It also enabled us to fabricate the illusion of a separate self and vaunted ego, based on memories and images, which is the source of division, greed, war and fragmentation.
Everything we build as humans, from the most beautiful structures, like the Millau Viaduct in France to the most polluting industrial factory, like the Gavin Coal Power Plant in Ohio, is based on our separative and symbolic ability.
Fifty-four years after the last Apollo mission, humans are again going to the moon after a flawless launch involving the cooperative work of tens of thousands of people. But much more than when Nixon was president during the moon landing, a deranged president is engaged in a needless war. In his address to the nation, he again threatened to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, where they belong.” Don’t fool yourself, that isn’t just Trump’s evil, but America’s.
As a nation and as a species, we haven’t advanced at all psychologically and spiritually. Indeed, we’ve gone backwards. Must it continue to be so?
The human brain existed in its present form for many thousands of years before an unknown environmental and/or social stimulus ignited the explosive emergence of latent symbolic capabilities. Then humans made the transition from intuitive symbolic functioning to complex symbolic functioning.
By contrast, the Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) were a tremendously successful but distinct human species, which had achieved the zenith of a lifestyle based on essentially intuitive processes.
Then about 50,000 years ago, Cro Magnons migrated into lands Neanderthals had occupied for about 400,000 years! They were us, “fully modern humans” — Homo sapiens sapiens (a double misnomer, since that literally means “wise, wise humans.”
Though people are trying to prove otherwise, and equate Cro Magnons and Neanderthals, the evidence, historical experience and common sense strongly suggest that our species, with minor intermingling, displaced and drove our Neanderthal cousins into extinction.
Neanderthals obviously had rudimentary symbolic capabilities since they had fashioned stone tools, and hunted large mammals. But before 100 thousand years ago, there is no evidence of complex symbolic activity like Homo sapiens has displayed since our emergence as a new human species in Africa over 100 millennia ago.
In cave art (such as at Lascaux), in tool making (such as the Aurignacian industry), as well as in sculpture, engraving, musical instruments and elaborate burials of the dead, human culture as we know it suddenly appeared.
How did this happen? Two shibboleths have to be put to bed: the idea that evolution works through gradual progression toward a perfected form; and the idea that ready-made adaptations emerge through natural selection, making creatures more fit to compete.
In actuality, most innovations in nature arise through a process called “exaptation,” in which “a characteristic arises in one context before being exploited in another.” The classic example is birds’ feathers, which, millions of years before they were used for flight evolved for insulation in dinosaurs. (It’s amazing to realize that birds are living descendents of the dinosaurs.)
So the human brain arose for some other evolutionary purpose, and was later exapted for the uniquely powerful symbolic and cultural purposes that humans have been using for tens of thousands of years.
That means the human brain evolved for survival purposes in a goal-less, non-linear way, and only much later was exapted for symbolic thought. That exaptation enabled Homo sapiens to have complex languages, cultures, art, as well as high science and technology.
However the evolution of complex symbolic capabilities (that is, “higher thought”) carried with it a strong tendency to eventually fragment the earth to the point of ecological collapse. That’s the perilous juncture at which humankind now stands.
I propose a new principle — that wherever creatures possessing ‘higher thought’ (and thus capable of high science and technology) emerge in the universe, they tend to fragment their planet and themselves until they make the transition to authentically intelligent life. Obviously, this principle is testable only with contact, though that may be precluded until Homo sap makes the transition to Homo sapiens, something that’s in doubt at the moment. So far, we are an incorrigible species, and if we remain so, the universe will shed a tear and move on after we’ve gone out with a bang or a whimper.
So morphology precedes, not follows innovation in nature. In other words, nature can only produce innovations (like flight or symbolic thought) out of structures that already exist; it does not develop structures for a particular use. That’s the meaning of exaptation.
Any reasonably intelligent person understands that we humans were given the Promethean fire of symbolic thought, but we have been selfishly using this gift to plunder the planet and fragment the earth and ourselves to the breaking point.
The human brain, which is generating more and more fragmentation by using thought unwisely, contains the capacity for insight beyond knowledge creation. Awakening that potential will enable us to use thought, including AI thought machines, wisely.
An unconscious mutation occurred when the “punctuated equilibrium” of human evolution rapidly rewired the proto-human brain for cognitively complex symbolic processes. Though it has yet to be taken up, that evolutionary gift carried with it the responsibility to be self-knowing, because without self-knowing, humans cannot stop dividing and fragmenting the Earth and humanity.
It comes down to the question: Can there be, at perhaps “the last trumpet,” a conscious transmutation in the human brain exapted for silent states of insight?
Given the culminating ecological, psychological and socio-political crisis of humankind, the exaptation that’s ready to be released within the brain will enable us to meet the polycrisis.
Being self-knowing, and taking the time for solitude, ordinary human beings can awaken the brain’s latent capacity for states of insight. That’s not a movement, but a true revolution.
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