Chapter 5 from “After The Clockwork Universe”


The Mind of God, Many and One

Sally Goerner

The Universe is built on a plan, the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

Paul Valéry

Evolution did not stop with life per se. At the very least it built brains from which sprang minds from which sprang consciousness, the greatest of the world’s many mysteries. This chapter takes up the question of brains, minds and consciousness. The not-so-surprising implication here, is that these greatest of creation’s wonders are also part of the story. No longer in long, slow, cycles of blind self-organization, somehow the Great Ordering Oneness found a way to build a system which consciously shapes the world and itself as if by plan. More self-aware and more potentially powerful than anything that has ever existed, thinking beings are a world-transforming force in their own right.

There is, of course, a reason I haven’t mentioned much about mind. Mind is even more incomprehensible to clockwork thinkers than life. Early clockwork thinkers thought that we were merely separated, mind from body. Later ones described mind as an epiphenomenon, an illusion of a few lifeless chemicals. After all, when you break brains down, there is no mind to be found. Traditional evolutionary theory has essentially ignored mind, preferring genes instead. All of this is likely to end in the relatively foreseeable future.

Currents of change can already be seen. Once a taboo topic, consciousness is becoming an increasingly common subject in the popular press. Books such as The Celestine Prophecy, for instance, paint a picture of humanity reaching a new level of consciousness. People trapped in the cloying maze of modern reality, suddenly discover an invisible web of awareness growing within themselves and others. Individually and collectively, human beings are struggling precariously toward a new, more integral perception. The potential is high. So is the need. The birth of a new level of consciousness seems to be part and parcel of the project to save the world.

Now, I am not going to tell a romantic tale of New Age seers in the Andes. I think it is important to stay more grounded than this, lest the realists in the audience run for the hills. Yet, I also believe there is a valid intuition behind such works. Books like The Celestine Prophecy are part of the same instinctive reaction to clockwork omissions seen elsewhere. Clockwork bleakness strikes again. Millions of highly educated people the world over now read such books and harbor secret hopes that they are true.

Understanding the science behind this intuition, gives human hope a better foundation. Thus, brain researchers too are hoping that new understandings of consciousness will help bring about a global civilization which is less apt to destroy itself and the world. Their hope seems particularly reasonable since mind and consciousness are so central to the human condition. Indeed, I would make a stronger statement — one cannot understand our condition or our times without understanding the phenomenon of mind, including ways of looking at the world and patterns of collective knowing.

Today, powerful new views are building which will have a profound affect on our sense of ourselves. They quite literally redefine what the human project is about. Not a lumbering automaton or a ruthless beast, here human beings (one and many) become the ultimate learning system, the finest and foremost spark of a learning world. That is the story that will unfold here, it will simply be much more integrated into the larger story of evolution than most people imagine.

The theory of mind presented here is new in its fine points largely because I include the energy connection and other rarely-popularized points. Yet, the core image is again remarkably old. Mind is a natural, interwoven outcome of a much larger flow. What is interesting is its implications for our times.


The Enigma of Mind

I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes, and realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised in him.

Sir Julian Huxley

...if we expect to get anywhere with the mind-body problem at the brain level, then our concepts must at least be adequate...to explain the symbol-matter relation in single cells where it all started.

Howard Pattee

Figure 2. Growth Crises, From Clone Clusters to Nerve Cells

Nerves are particularly important because they allowed the organism’s mind-nature to grow more sophisticated. The quality of an organism’s response to the outside world depends almost entirely on internal collaboration which in turn depends heavily on information flow. Mind-body integration is crucial! Nerves improved intelligence by increasing information flow which in turn improved collaboration. More cellular specialties could develop and life became vastly more complex and sophisticated too.


Brains - The Pattern Repeats
Evolution was not through, however. In simple forms of life, such as the giant sea slug today, a single nerve cell often serves a whole organism. But as life became more complex, the same pattern of growth and crisis played out again. As bodies grew bigger, collaboration began to fail again. Pressure to stay connected grew.

At first, nerve cells multiplied forming multi-lane information highways as it were. Nerve highways brought signals from all over and spread information throughout. Where nerves overlapped, signals from many directions intermingled. At dense cross-roads, a new kind of cell began to emerge. We call this one a brain cell.

Brain cells had a unique view. Positioned atop a cross-roads with information pouring in from all over, the information they got was rich and multi-dimensional. As a result, brain cells began to respond to extremely subtle patterns in complex streams of energy (information). The horizons this opened up were truly vast.

Brain cells responding to rarefied patterns in massive amounts of information were actually beginning to respond to conglomerate pictures. Complex pictures helped organisms see contexts and make choices. The brain’s owner began to see how any bit of information fit in a larger whole. For example, an organism with a brain is able to see that food and a predator means something different than food alone. Unlike a planaria which responds to information in a knee-jerk way, life with a brain began to learn to decipher and choose. As brains learned to synthesize ever more complex pictures, questions of how bits fit got complex indeed.

Brains also allowed life to develop complex responses based on subtle nuances in the outside world. Sitting astride mixing centers allowed brains to coordinate incredibly complex response patterns involving all parts of the body. Like a keystone on top, brains solidified life’s ability to perceive and act as a truly coordinated whole. Thus, brains are what brought life out of the ooze and allowed multi-cellular organisms to locomote with legs and fins.

The irony of brains is that ‘staying connected’ produced a whole new stage of evolution. Brains and other mixing centers (like ganglia) helped an increasingly vast collective act like a truly coordinate whole. Mind-like behaviors also began to take the forms we associate with minds today — choices, contexts, significance, meaning. We are still deciphering like mad. Underneath, however, the same evolutionary principles applied. United they stood! Multicellular organisms became a multi-level society of mind because selection favored cells that 1) worked together for the common well-being and 2) stayed linked.


The Fractal Nature of Mind and Body
Note, however, that the brain did not become the sole arbiter of intelligence nor the controller of everything underneath. This is a machine image. Local cells don’t just send information to the brain and wait to be told what to do. Instead, most bodily responses are handled locally and a lot of processing is done at various stages from bottom to top. Processing information at lower levels increases the speed and often the appropriateness of the response. It is also one of the reasons one’s body can operate on auto-pilot while one’s thoughts spin off into space.

Nature thus built new levels of intelligence while keeping the old. Furthermore, everywhere you look, cells work in groups. A brain is a mind system which is still integrated into a larger mind system called the body which is organized into smaller working groups, like lungs and liver. The whole thing appears to work on a subsidiary principle reminiscent of one used by the medieval Catholic Church — decisions should be made at the lowest level possible.

This, of course, does not fit our usual picture of how a hierarchy works. It means instead that intelligence is distributed fractally, down to lower levels. This kind of organization is crucial. Without it, life would be too slow and stupid to live.

Social Learning in Higher Organisms
Nature also did not stop with brains. Organisms with brains became great sorters of information who chose paths based on subtle patterns. Freed from knee-jerk responses, animals with brains began to explore the world and to learn lots of new lessons. Most of these lessons were stored in the brain of the beholder, in circuits etched by experience. (They were not stored in genes.) Storing lessons in the brain allowed organisms to learn faster and to learn without having to die.

Still, there was a problem. Lessons stored in a brain were lost when the individual who owned the brain died. The next great evolutionary development was the ability to preserve lessons by passing them between different individuals and across generations. The two big agents here were modeling and signaling. They too started for understandable reasons.


Since cooperation enhances survival, animals began to congregate in families or herds. Communication between animals in a herd has the same benefit as communication between cells in your body. Whether a honey-bee dancing directions to a cache of nectar or a deer signaling the approach of a predator, communication between members is an old and honored way for individuals to survive better by working together.

Animal communication, no doubt, began in the usual haphazard way, with twitches that eventually became associated with a meaning. These eventually developed into clear signals. Active signaling also brought modeling. Young and old alike learned common signals and worthwhile patterns of behavior. These began to trickle down the generations. The herd was now working on patterns of perceiving and acting. Learning accumulated from many members was preserved over increasing periods of time. All of it enhanced survival.


The Social Nature of Mind and Learning

Brains consist of neurons, which in turn are composed of organelles, molecules and atoms. They are designed by biological evolution to work in pairs, families, tribes and, by cultural evolution, to work in cities, nations and empires...biologists have largely neglected those biological properties by which brains join together in social cooperation.

Walter Freeman, Neurophysiologist

Notice the parallels in the patterns discussed so far. In the web view, cooperation is the central path of evolution. Cooperative groups depend on communication between members to survive. Growth, however, pulls groups apart and makes collaboration break down. Hence, developmental leaps often come from an invention which helps keep the group integrated.

Perhaps the most unusual observation in the new science, therefore, is that each mind is a many-bodied society of mind. New levels of intelligent action always arise from the cooperative, intricately-ordered activity of smaller parts. The farther up the line one goes, the more clearly those smaller parts are seen to be individuals which once lived independent lives. A complex eucaryotic cell, for instance, is a society built out of previously-independent life forms. Its mind-like behaviors depend on collaboration among individuals. The idea holds all the way up to brains. As Margulis says:

Our nerve cells are the outcome of an ancient, nearly immortal marriage of two arch enemies who have managed to coexist: the former spirochetes and former archaebacteria that now comprise our brains...These former free-living bacteria are inextricably united. They probably have been united for more than one thousand million years. (Cited in Combs, 1995, p.40)

The idea that all minds are built of lower societies and into higher ones, fits nicely in a self-organizing world which builds macrocosms out of microcosms. It helps us come to grips with the fact that intelligence is distributed throughout our body and is not just limited to our brain. It is startling because it puts community at the center of mind as well as body. It is also important because it helps us rethink human societies.


The Cutting Edge of Collaborative Learning
In human beings, signaling evolved into language which made passing information extremely precise. Speaking allowed highly-structured information tapestries to be shot from one brain to another. When writing emerged, these tapestries could be stored outside human bodies and compared and contrasted over huge periods of time. People living today, for instance, can benefit from learning accrued by people who lived five thousand years ago.

Language and writing add tremendous survival value because they allow lessons from many individuals to be synthesized into extremely precise patterns of knowing and doing. Eventually, these highly synthesized systems of knowing and doing became what human beings call culture. Myths, paradigms, worldviews and scientific theories are all made of these.

In human beings, cooperative learning became unbelievably refined. Language allowed learning to accumulate at tremendous rates. Information tapestries became knowledge webs which grew over the ages. Where nature had once searched the realm of possibility by casting about blindly, human beings now search the realm of possibility with brains which process huge amounts of information from personal, group and historical experience in order to maximize the foresight, planning and prediction. These big brains eventually gave rise to self-awareness, which we call consciousness.

Evolution’s second side, increasing intelligence, was leading to more and more mass being moved by ever more subtle blips. As Swenson says:

In this way, the explosion in mass communication and globalization going on at present is but a new phase of...the same evolutionary order-building behavior started some 4 billion years ago.


The Learning Universe

That which created us, designed us to create back. - J.S. May

• Shaping change. In the beginning the universe found ways to organize shapes and networks which made energy flow faster.

• Life-forms pursuing information. In the second stage, the universe learned how to build systems that began to learn on their own. Life-forms followed information and moved about in hitherto unknown ways. The universe learned faster because living organisms learned faster and preserved more.

• Brains organizing information into tapestries. In the third stage, brains accelerated learning even more, and even amazing behaviors emerged. Individual learning was now preserved in brain circuits etched by experience. Modeling allowed individual learning to be passed to others and preserved in habit patterns passed from generation to generation. The universe began to learn as never before because brains began to learn more intentionally and to preserve exquisite details of experience.

• Communal learning via culture. The fourth great stage of learning came with the human brain and society. In fourth-order organizations, such as science and human culture, learning moves beyond the individualÕs lifetime and is turned back on the environment. What is learned is how to restructure the environment itself, now with tools. The ability to learn intentionally and cooperatively makes learning rates explode.

Table 1. Four Stages of the Learning Universe.

We are the epitome of the fourth stage. With humankind, the Great Ordering Oneness has produced an organism which can restructure the world more powerfully than anything that has ever existed. Yet, since our brains were created by the Oneness (as well as earned by us), chauvinism is not appropriate. We too are servants of a higher process. Our project is to endlessly strive to learn more.

This brings me to the final and most intriguing assertion of the Learning Universe story: a fifth stage is now waiting in the wings. Conscious beings should eventually evolve to the place where they begin to actively shape the world, not for selfish personal ends, but wisely, responsibly, and for the good of the whole. Books like the Celestine Prophecies are not so far off. Fully conscious beings become stewards of the world because they ‘know’ that they are part of something larger. They serve themselves, their fellows, the biosphere and the larger process because everything is intertwined. Fully conscious beings become the ultimate agents of the evolutionary process because four billion years of learning has taught them to see how pieces fit. The fifth great stage is Integral Consciousness and global learning aimed at the greater good of the planet.

We are the leading edge of a learning universe. We have the capacity and the need to help the world as ourselves. Still, apparently we aren’t there yet. Rather, at the moment, we seem to be more of a threat to the world, than a caretaker. Hence, right now, the Learning Universe view seems a bit hard to swallow. The pragmatist looks around at the current violent, dysfunctional state of the world and doubts that a vision this gentle could have much basis in fact. But to understand why we are such a strange blend of killer and angel requires we understand the specifics of our brain and its evolution. That is the story I take up next.

The Evolution of Humanity’s Society of Mind

The concept of societies of mind is extremely important because it allows us to rethink human societies as a collective struggling to act as an intelligent whole. There is already ample reason to believe the analogy holds. Hence, as Gaia’s James Lovelock says:

What is remarkable about man is not the size of his brain, no greater than that of a dolphin, nor his loose incomplete development as a social animal, nor even the faculty of speech or his ability to use tools. Man is remarkable because by the combination of all these things he has created an entirely new entity. When socially organized and equipped with a technology even as rudimentary as that of a Stone Age tribal group, man has the novel capacity to collect, store, and process information, and then use it to manipulate the environment in a purposeful and anticipatory fashion. (1979, p. 132)

...the brain has followed a now familiar formula. It has been a cooperative effort between separate and relatively autonomous subsystems...In this respect the brain follows the basic pattern for the entire human body, itself a cooperative venture between the living cells that make up its various organs...

Allan Combs

Human beings have not one, but three brains, each of which appears to have been the result of separate bursts of evolutionary activity. This fact is very important to the story of humanity’s society of mind because each of these brains comes with a personality. Hence, we are not the result of a unified brain, but of a society of three brains each with their own personality.

In the 1930’s Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung noted that people have a committee of personalities inside their head, a cast of differing voices which often pull in different directions. Brain research now suggests there is a physical basis for at least some of these voices. Thus, each of our three brains has a great deal of self-sufficiency. Each appears to have its own type of intelligence, its own motor, memory and other functions and even its own peculiar sense of subjective experience. Each new brain emerged on top of an earlier one, but underneath its predecessors still functioned and affected the whole.

Our three brain-personalities are particularly important because they affect our social relationships. Hence brains brought more than the ability to move legs and fins. They also brought complex interaction patterns between individuals, including nurturing, modeling, mating, self-defense and much more.

Our three brains are most important, however, because they represent three distinct survival strategies. Thus, each brain arose from pressures in particular evolutionary juncture and each personality reflects the strategy that successfully answered those pressures. We carry all three with us to this day.

Since these three brains and their personalities profoundly influence human society, one must understand them to understand it. So let us look more closely. The most famous description of our three brains comes from Paul MacLean’s 1969 book The Triune Brain. He calls the three, the reptilian brain, the paleomammalian brain and the neomammalian brain.[[1]] Their personalities are as follows:

Crude...
The reptilian, or the ‘lizard brain’ as it is sometimes called, is the core brain for all vertebrates from early reptiles on up to mammals. This brain is famous for routine, repetitive and instinctual behaviors. Stylized mating rituals, migratory behavior, imprinting, threat displays, fleeing and patterns of home-building are its forte. It is heavily involved with the autonomic nervous system including systems that regulate heart and respiratory rates, digestive functions, and bodily cycles such as sleep and sex.

What you should envision with this brain is a scurrying lizard, with flicking tongue, blinking eyes, and fixed patterns of behavior with little flexibility and no thought. Still, you should also realize that this brain is largely responsible for early vertebrates learning to live complex lives in complex environments, particularly dry land.

Warm...
The paleomammalian, affectionately known as the ‘furry mammal brain,’ comes next. It was literally plopped on top of the lizard brain during a later burst of evolutionary activity.
The difference here is mainly emotion and behavioral flexibility. The lizard brain has a crude type of emotional system shared by fish and salamanders, but with the paleomammalian brain, emotion becomes much richer. This richness has two great benefits: faster learning and richer social relations. As neuropsychologist Allan Combs puts it:

the unique quality of the mammal is its ability to experience emotion, and through it to benefit from personal experiences, retained as emotional reactions to predators, friendly members of the same species, and so on. It also allows close emotional bonding between mating partners, parents and infants, members of families and larger extended groups. (1995, p. 41)

Upright posture is the surprise, the difficult event, [it involves] the rapid and fundamental reconstruction of our anatomy. The subsequent enlargement of our brain is...secondary...an easy transformation. (1980, cited in Metzner, 1995)

The ratio of brain size to body size in early hominids had remained similar to the ratios for other primates. As a result of repeated climate and habitat shifts, however, hominid brains began to bulge...This discovery dovetails with preliminary evidence that stone-age groups responded to recurring crisis situations by pooling information and making effective collective decisions. (Science News, Vol. 148 Nov. 25, 1995 p. 359)

The Evolution of Human Consciousness

I do not propose to solve the enigma of the relationship of consciousness to the brain... My own view... however, places consciousness in a considerably larger context while at the same time not denying its involvement at the level of the brain.

Allan Combs

Hominids bring us to the beginning of complex minds and also to the glimmer of historical times. Cro-Magnon emerged 70,000 to 40,000 years ago and the great cave paintings about 20,000 years ago. Mesopotamian civilization and recorded history began about 6000 years ago (4000 BC). The gap between then and now is getting small. It is, therefore, time to leave the biological story and begin the journey to historical times and the kind of mind that experiences the world consciously. Consciousness researchers ask the delicate question: what kind of minds live inside big brains?

How did consciousness — defined in Webster’s as, “an inward sensibility of something” — come into being? Once multicellulars grew brains and sense organs like eyes, they could see their own bodies and the first crude awareness of self could have emerged. From this point of view even lizards have at least some form of consciousness. Still, most people skim past lizard-level consciousness in search of the more alluring question: what about our own?

The story of human consciousness too involves punctuation and cycles of co-evolution. Researchers base their theories of early stages on studies of cave paintings, burial practices, etc. and of later stages on writings, sculpture, philosophy. They also cross-check their theories by studying primitive peoples today who follow behavior patterns similar to ones seen long ago. For example, some remote tribes still have rituals similar to ones practiced by Cro-Magnon. Many insights into how consciousness changes come from studying peoples who act similarly today. The point is that, while the theories described here are clearly speculative, the sense that consciousness has evolved through stages is grounded in a lot of observation and evidence. It is not just New Age fantasy.

Gebser’s Stages of Consciousness

What are the stages of consciousness? There are many theories. I use Swiss philosopher, Jean Gebser’s theory of consciousness as described by complexity researcher Allan Combs in his book The Radiance of Being. The punctuated pattern should be familiar.

Gebser believed that consciousness evolved through stages. New forms emerged on top while underneath earlier forms still played a role. Each stage of consciousness has a distinctive perspective, personality and subjective experiences of the world. Each brings a different perception of time, space and of how individuals fit in the larger world. Finally, each stage also brings distinctive patterns of how people relate to each other. Hence, each implies a different kind of culture with a unique experience of the world.

Gebser described five major types of consciousness—archaic, magic, mythical, mental, and integral. Their history is as follows:

Archaic	Embedded in nature (little different from animals)
Magical	First symbols (greater separation from the world)
Mythical	First cities, first myths (also the Agrarian Revolution)
Mental	Individuation for richer contribution (also the Age of War)
Integral	Strong selves and strong bonds (not there yet...)

1. Archaic Consciousness. Archaic consciousness belongs to the time when our hominid ancestors were still at one with the natural world. Gebser often likened it to a state of deep, dreamless sleep. The self experiences itself as completely embedded in the world and is not aware of itself as separate. Humankind is said to live in perfect harmony with Nature and probably in complete identity with it.

Who had this type of consciousness? Perhaps all three-brained primates have this type of consciousness, certainly the very early hominids are candidates. Hence, the archaic state is meant for protohumans who did not exhibit a recognizably human culture (that is, with tools and language). Australopithecus, a vegetarian ape that foraged in Africa from five to one million years ago, for example, and Homo habilis who dates from about 4 to 1.5 million years ago probably had archaic consciousness. Homo erectus, “the Peking Man” who lived from 1.5 million to 75,000 years ago, may have represented a transitional case because hand axes found during their late period indicate that they were becoming adept tool makers.

2. Magical Consciousness. The next stage of consciousness, magical consciousness, brought language, adept tool use and also a new form of imagination seen in the beginnings of ceremony and symbolism.

Neanderthals, some 500,000 years ago, are thought to have had magic consciousness. They made a variety of tools and engaged in speech (albeit a crude speech, judging from throat development). More importantly Neanderthals were also the first to bury their dead ceremoniously as if to issue them into an afterlife. Bodies were often placed in sleeping postures, legs curled up and head cushioned on one arm, or in fetal postures, as if to suggest a sleep from which one might awaken or a hope of a rebirth. In some cases whole families have been found with a man and a woman placed heads together and children at the woman’s feet. Some Neanderthal finds even show evidence of religion in the form of bear worship.

These kinds of ceremonial practices mark a change from earlier times. Many scholars believe they signal a budding awareness of self as separate from nature, a form of individuation. This awareness brought a new concern with what happened to individuals even in death — hence new care with burials.

The new awareness also brought a new concern about how to influence an increasingly separate world. Magic consciousness thus also brings humankind’s first attempts to manipulate the world through symbols. Magical consciousness gets its name because the first symbols were used for magical substitution. For example, paintings of animals in the cave sanctuaries such as Lascaux and Les Trois Frères, have been repeatedly struck by stone projectiles, presumably spears used to kill the animal magically before the real event. In short, just as voodoo practitioners hope to kill people by sticking pins in symbolic substitutes (dolls), so early man apparently tried to influence the killing of real animals by jabbing painted one (symbols).

Gebser believed that all magic started with symbolic substitution of one object for another. Yet, we must go slowly here. People in earlier stages of consciousness experienced the world very differently than most modern people do today. To understand magic consciousness one must realize that, in this state, symbol and actual are experienced as equally real. Thus, when Pygmy tribes in the Congo kill pictorial animals and actual animals in exactly the same manner, they experience both hunts as being equally real. Whenever we insist on taking our beliefs and views as equal to reality, we too are harkening back to this time.

Gebser believed that magical consciousness reached its heights with Cro-Magnon and his cave paintings. Yet, this stage (and all the others) is still buried within us. This has both pros and cons. Magic conscious is crude by current standards, but it also has a richness of community which is still buried within us today. As Combs says:

[Magical consciousness brings] a deep sense of community...of belonging to a family or any other group of people. Music, with its ability to transport us out of the moment, is also a product of magic consciousness. On the negative side, there’s a tendency for the magic structure to hold too tightly to other persons, sometimes refusing to allow them space to breathe. There’s also a very dangerous tendency to follow the drumbeat of collective ideological movements, religious or politically totalitarian, as was experienced so widely before the Second World War and all too much today. The only remedy to these tendencies is to shift one’s attention to the more recent structures of consciousness. (1995, p. 102)

Ratio must not be interpreted...as ‘understanding’ or ‘common sense,’ ratio implies calculation and, in particular, division...This dividing aspect inherent in ratio and Rationalism...is consistently overlooked, although it is of decisive importance to an assessment of our epoch. (Cited in Combs, 1995, p. 110.)

• A hierarchical social structure dominated by strong-man elites
  
• Accumulation of wealth for status,
  
• Coercive social power,
  
• Private ownership of land and means of production,
  
• Slavery and human sacrifice
  
• The reduction of women and children to the property of men,
  
• A central focus on war and militarism.
  
  

...the coming decades will decide whether a fundamental transformation will occur during the next two generations or not for the next two millennia.

The Learning Universe Revisited

The story of the stars, that of life, of human beings, and of thought, are one and the same story.

Yves Coppens

We are back to our own time, now with a new sense of how our minds fit in evolution and history. Thanks to the Enlightenment, rational thought spread across the world along with public education. Human societies of mind now reach phenomenal levels, best seen in that most rapidly-learning society of mind, science. On the other hand, big egos and the idea that war is central to the world also leave us ever-floundering on the edge of extinction. How can we achieve a more viable way? The next section explores some of the obstacles to human learning in detail. Meanwhile, let me close with a review.

Clockwork thinkers were apt to argue that life was an anomaly going nowhere. Consciousness was merely the latest pin-stripe on the lumbering automaton that selfish genes call home. An alternative view is emerging, however.

Just how differently might our descendants view the world? Perhaps they will believe that humankind’s great strategy is a mind one. Our inquisitive, collaborative nature was forged in a cauldron of crisis. From this came our one defining task — ‘knowing and doing’ in ever better forms.

Then too, perhaps our descendants will believe that the Great Ordering Oneness gave us consciousness that we might consciously aid in the project of creating an ever-more harmonious, well-flowing world. After all, when mind is seen as a project of the world (and not just a human quirk), then one has to wonder whether the ability to see so far has some aim beyond, say, making money.

And so the noble thought. We were born of a universe which is driven to learn and this urge is implanted deeply in us. Following this urge is what makes us who we are. Following this urge together has made us the most remarkable creatures on the face of the earth. It is time we started using those big beautiful brains to envision something wiser and more loving than parochial self-interest and quality through war.

Humankind is not a finished product. Our ultimate place in history remains to be seen. Our existential question looms large. Yet, there is reason for hope. We can remake ourselves rapidly. That is what culture is for. We have done so many times before. So while our straits are dire, our potential is still great. If anything emerges from the ideas in this chapter, I hope it is that humankind’s strategy is learning, done in community and aimed at wellbeing—our own, our society’s and that of the world with which we are so tightly bound.