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In a manner similar to the way physical exploitation of the planet is leaving it crippled as a supporting environment, the exploitation of the human mind is rendering cultural thinking as a spiritual wilderness – both mechanisms leaving barren landscapes in which the odd bright artifact blinds us to the resulting rubble within which the potential for a new evolutionary paradigm is trampled underfoot. The cultural thrust of objectivity as the mindset of both our rapacious environmental destruction and the rather clandestine control of minds obscures the link between these two things – arguably fulfilling the political goal of distracting attention from multiple unprecedented existential threats right before our eyes.
Current human culture exhibits an inability or unwillingness to join the various dots and realize that the situation appears quite simple: the evolutionarily embryonic technology of abstract thought is cumulatively incredibly powerful in manners not yet generally acknowledged; it therefore acts somewhat against our better interests in the lack of any counterbalancing cultural critique.
Consequently, whilst minds tinker with philosophical, metaphysical, political or even financial ideas in vain hopes of resolving human dilemmas, there is no realization that such tinkering is itself integral to a more basic problem. Our unsubstantiated and unthinking conviction we can properly understand matters via abstraction and conceptualization leaves us fascinated with cognitive modeling, whilst we overlook the disconnect between the resultant models and the reality they seek to grasp. Any model may be impressively powerful for its ability to aid us in achieving certain ends, but we are only fools if we think no further – if we forget that any model is not the reality, and that reality might therefore exhibit unexpected characteristics as a result of unrecognized weaknesses within the modeling process.
So enthralled has modern man become with the raw power of objective thinking, science, and technology, that he has blinded himself to the dangers of what he is about. His newfound power fuels his folly as much as it does his supposed wisdom. For example, thanks in part to what is widely considered scientific progress, we now live in a world where an all-out nuclear war could render the entire planet uninhabitable.
Is it not obvious that whatever benefits our unique evolutionary trajectory has delivered, such benefits are not as yet optimized? More bluntly, it could be said the current situation is actually one in which the untamed power of human abstract thought is the number one threat to life on Earth. And this by no means only involves nuclear weapons; environmental devastation worsens daily for reasons not wholly unrelated.
Of course, such a position is not about any direct impacts of human thoughts themselves; it is about thoughts being connected to actions in the physical world. However, given that cognitive deconstruction and reconstruction of reality are implicit processes of abstract modeling, it is reasonable to consider those processes as somewhat instrumental in human problems, and to then examine exactly how the mind forms and processes its ideas about reality. A simple question arises: can the mind understand and allow for its own shortcomings when working with cognitive abstraction?
To address this question, there is no need to immerse oneself in the knots of traditional cognitive psychology; it appears obvious on a more general front that the mind has naturally come to model the world according to whatever proves immediately expedient. What else should be expected amidst a threatening world and the struggle for survival? Evolutionary persistence, a controversial subject as it may be, arguably all reduces to nothing other than expediency.
However, immediate expediency has no concern for long-term continuation, and this appears unfortunately evidenced by the dangers of the current human situation. It is unquestionable that our species has spread across the planet in an explosively successful manner – but explosions do damage. Whatever proves beneficial in specific circumstances is not necessarily beneficial over a longer period or on a larger scale. This seems to be a lesson not yet assimilated into human culture.
Before the technology of abstract thought evolved, the ability to do long-term damage to the environment, or to subtly exploit others via mind games simply did not exist – at least not in the forms humans increasingly demonstrate. All beings were essentially at the mercy of external circumstances inasmuch as their abilities to alter those circumstances were limited to rather instinctive behaviors targeting food, shelter, safety and reproduction.
Human abstract thought has proven a real game-changer in this respect, and the proof is all around us. As regards framing the resulting problems, abstract thought itself needs to be as flexible as possible – including circumspection about assuming anything within the mind to be a useful starting point, or to be somehow beyond question. One way of envisaging the origins of human problems is to consider that we may be foolishly habituated to overly simplistic ideas – to assumptions that most matters are relatively easy to understand and therefore relatively easy to resolve. A casual mistake is to see such common and well-accepted ideas as solid truths simply because they have never been properly interrogated. Culture is actually stupefying in this regard; social conformity readily discourages questioning whatever others fail to question.
But can ideas and forms of thought evolved for immediate expediency really be up to the job of understanding their own weaknesses as regards addressing longer-term problems? Given the unfathomable complexity of reality, it is arguable that we need to deconstruct thought itself before we can derive a more solid approach to an optimized but inevitably limited understanding. Merely examining our much-changed world, its superficial problems, and the mass of modern ideas that underpin its general direction, is surely not radical enough to do what apparently seems necessary for our continuation: to consciously steer our evolution off its current path and away from the potentially disastrous future we otherwise face.
If the idea that mind might play a serious evolutionary role appears odd, we should remember that so too do all the tangible results of human abstract thought when viewed in comparison to the rest of nature; like it or not, we already are in a very odd situation. But given evolutionary theories are so often based on the study of other species, whilst human formalized power has always suppressed real awareness regarding the true powers of the mind, it is actually quite natural to be surprised by the idea that mind might have real evolutionary significance. Standing things on their head – that is, realizing the human mind to be behind everything that makes humans so unique – leaves it rather ridiculous to imagine that the same mind would not influence our evolutionary trajectory. Has it not already done so to spectacular effect?
At this point, we are forced on heavy philosophical questions about possible manners in which the mind and its modes of thought could influence the longer-term future of the species; how this might happen, and in what sense we might be imagined to be somehow in control of the situation. But as ever with abstract thought, even the simplistic framing of these deep questions can hide unrecognized assumptions. For example, who or what is it that asks the questions and is postulated as able to answer them – and to subsequently act in light of any such answers? Any idea that we can do so as entities discrete from the surrounding world is surely just a habitual and rather casual reflex of cognition. Escaping lifelong mental habits and unthinking ideas is no easy task.
It should be remembered here that cognitive division is the inherent basis of all abstract thought. Synthesis is illogical if not impossible without prior analysis, just as construction or reconstruction is not possible without prior deconstruction or some other means of conceptualizing the world – even if such processes are all highly subliminal and embedded as yet more reflexive acts of the modern mind.
This observation illustrates through simple logic why abstract thought simply cannot understand the whole – not primarily because of the apparent complexity of the whole, but because abstract thought is a paradigm utterly constrained to parts and relationships between those parts. In contrast, the wholeness of reality logically knows no parts, descriptions of parts, or relationships between any such would-be parts. It simply has no parts. It just is. Or at the very least there is no solid reason to believe that any component parts it might have correspond to the parts the human mind imagines. The mind can in any case do no better than speculate over such matters, if indeed such speculation itself is not worthless – other than to demonstrate abstract thought’s futility in the face of an utterly intractable dilemma of its own making.
Even the idea that reality is complex is merely the mind indirectly acknowledging the impossibility of all its divisive thoughts ever grasping anything more than fleeting ideas regarding tiny snippets of reality. In truth, reality itself actually exhibits no demonstrable complexity outside of the mind’s idea that it is complex – a truth widely obscured, precisely because cultures to date have always valued analysis and abstraction, whilst remaining blind to the shortcomings of such an approach.
Thought only invents more problems when it fails to understand its own nature. For example, it appears illogical that a philosophical debate can meaningfully switch from ideas that reality is unfathomably complex to a contradictory idea that reality has no demonstrable complexity at all, but both ideas happily coexist once the mind understands itself as malleable in the face of changing circumstances. Conventional thinking struggles to grasp how seemingly incompatible and opposite statements could serve to clarify anything. But the situation is simple once such a perceived conundrum is seen as a direct result of abstract thought itself.
Furthermore, a mind constrained within logical abstraction will use its crude and somewhat illusory concepts to piece together a model of reality that will inevitably be intractably infinite in terms of each supposed answer only posing new questions. Causal thinking makes the point well: what is the original cause of everything – or who created the creator? By way of contrast, a mind disengaged from the process of abstract thought faces no such dilemma. Philosophically speaking, it could be said that the effective treatment of any question involves simply putting it aside, given that any apparent answering of it can only be a relative and circumstantial response; it can never be a final answer that does not indirectly ask subsequent questions.
The reaction to this sort of all-in-the-mind perspective might be to accept it in principle, but to nonetheless reject it as being of no use. Ironically, such a reaction proves useful in itself for reminding us that human evolution embraced abstract thought for pragmatic utilitarian goals – not for philosophical purity. But if this is truly the case, and if evolution is about survival as a minimum, the mature mind can reason that abstract thought is indeed simply a useful tool, rather than an inherently good means of deriving some absolute truth. Any workman knows that tools serve us badly or even break when we attempt to bend them to every conceivable problem.
The reflexive position that any valid idea – or physical object, for that matter – ought to have a use, reveals a natural impulse to exploit worldly situations amidst an equally natural lack of caution regarding wider consequences. In this respect we remain somewhat like any other species; we focus primarily on the immediate. Hence, despite our many highly developed technologies involving extensive planning, we pay little attention to the overall impact of those technologies; we generally concern ourselves only with whatever immediate goals we have in mind. However, in the case of humans, our instinctive and natural indifference to whatever seems to be of no concern is exaggerated by crude ideas of ourselves as something essentially separate from the surrounding world.
But of course, even a crude overview of biology indicates that physically separating ourselves from the world in the same way that we do cognitively would mean nothing less than immediate death. Hence there is the most profound incongruity between seeing ourselves as basically objects within a world we judge ourselves able to beneficially alter, and the utter dependence we actually have on that world – not to mention our vulnerability should we get things wrong. In seeing ourselves as distinct from the world, the mind adopts a massively one-sided view of the situation. And while it is far less conventional to take the opposing view – to state for example that we are the world – both views in their own ways only illustrate how inherently limited the simplicity of abstract thought really is. Even a third position that neither of these black-and-white positions is appropriate only further highlights the flaws of abstract thought; it is a negative stance that in no way clarifies any supposed true reality of the situation.
The dilemma all this creates is that, unlike other species, our use of abstract thought and developed technologies in the interests of immediate expediency combines partial ignorance with significant impact, and therefore has unknown but potentially deleterious ramifications on the long term. Hence, the underlying technology of human abstract thought demands a new form of responsibility if we are to rise above the hitherto reckless and unmanaged destructiveness typical of our evolutionary uniqueness. Without embracing such a broader and more responsible vision of our frightening capabilities, we will likely be snared in the evolutionary trap of being simply too clever for our own good.
Is there a fix?
If humans are to be successful in the challenges they currently face, they must find the courage to question their otherwise unquestionable faith in abstract knowledge. They must rise above their narrow visions of materialistic progress and socially corrosive forms of mind manipulation and master the lethal power with which evolution has endowed them. They must become as gods in the sense they properly recognize their formidable power, but they must stop pretending to really be almighty and omniscient. They must embrace the essential mystery of existence for the beautiful magic it truly is and forget their delusions that any amount of analytical or theoretical thinking is ever going to explain the inexplicable. They must realize that abstract thought and all its content is by nature divisive thinking, and therefore, in the absence of a complementary awareness of such a limitation, it can only distort a true understanding of reality.
The awkward reality for minds that have unchecked faith in abstract knowledge is that absolutely any idea can be undermined by argument once the pitfalls of abstract thought are understood. As a consequence, all ideas within academic pursuits, all the supposedly great theories of science, all the arguments of politics, all the frameworks for recounting history, and even all the seemingly axiomatic facts of our very existence, reduce to nothing greater than the cognitive products of a process with demonstrable flaws.
Of course, widespread and unchecked faith in abstract thought is such that it is generally not even recognized as a faith at all, being too subliminally ingrained to even be acknowledged as a distinctly human phenomenon – never mind having to answer troublesome philosophical questions. Hence, any idea that thinking the sky to be blue is ultimately just a figment of human imagination is likely to be seen as insane – imagination having been culturally separated off from knowledge, as if such knowledge was not simply accepted ideas or culturally endorsed imagination. Factual knowledge can in any case be seen as nothing more substantial than accepted tales of reality, with the religious pursuit of objectivity cementing it all in place by insisting on consensus – all as if true knowledge was something to be voted into existence.
For some, a supposed empirical basis for objective truth separates it off from for example, faith-based beliefs rooted only in metaphysical ideas and handed unquestioningly from one generation to the next. But what is the significance of the distinction between ideas that claim no tangible proof and those that do? Is empirical proof anything more than a consensus over how experience is to be interpreted and proof established? Can anyone prove beyond argument that a drop of falling water touching the surface of the sea is either rainfall or ocean? It can of course be seen as either, neither or both according to the mind’s volition, but this very observation illustrates how our ideas of reality are to some extent based on mental choices: hardly a sound basis for deriving supposedly objective truth.
That such a drop of rainfall even exists is only an idea born of a passing phase between – as our minds would conceive it – cloud-born humidity and its submersion in the sea. Notably, none of this has any substance at all once the mind turns its attention elsewhere: once it moves on to its next momentary fixation. In terms of some ultimate tale of reality that ideally would be more than just yet another tale, any and every idea and would-be objective truth reduces to little more than the fleeting activity of the mind.
The abiding problem abstract thought has never really had to face is that the labels, classifications, categorizations and interpretations of reality inherent to the substance of thought and its supposed provision of proof assume divisions within reality that even the deepest science has failed to establish. Not even at the level of the smallest particles has a truly independent state of anything been conclusively demonstrated – not to mention that the entire interpretation of matter as composed of particles is sometimes rejected in favor of an alternative fields-based approach. At the other extreme, our understanding of the cosmos meets essentially the same issues in that nothing we consider to be an entity appears to exist as a properly discrete one. The suggestion is again that reality is divided by the mind in manners that fail to accommodate even the level of apparent connectedness which the mind itself begins to conceive when closer inspection of matters forces a progressive realization that abstract divisions appear illusory.
Just as human history tells the story of our sun being once understood only in a very primitive manner but now being known in considerable scientific depth, so too the story of abstract knowledge itself is about adding more and more details to construct what humans generally consider as a complete picture of reality. However, there is an associated problem: within this process we have come to assume somewhat unwittingly that devoting our attention to a myriad of ever-finer details is preferable to devoting our attention to the whole.
Modern minds are generally so invested in objectivity that they fail to imagine other choices could exist as regards how to deploy thought. Even when philosophy can reduce the value of objective knowledge to nothing more than something of immediate expediency, and even when extensive hard evidence shows current human behavior to be a major problem threatening all life on this planet, nothing has yet shaken the general faith in the cultural bedrock that sustains all this. For now, it remains acceptable to simply mock the entire idea of philosophy whilst being swept along with all the exploitative madness destroying the biosphere on an ever-greater scale.
Such faith in idiocy is of no superior standing than religious faith; it can even be argued to be inferior for being more dangerous. Whatever empirical link to the physical world objectivity might claim as its justification, religious ideas can just as readily claim a link to the mental or spiritual world; it is only indoctrinated convention that would make anyone assume the one is inherently of more value than the other, or even that they constitute truly separate approaches. Very arguably, it is not the excesses of religion that represent our greatest threats; it is the accelerating obsession with technological manufacturing and consumption. Whatever anyone may make of the spiritual devotee spending decades in silent contemplation searching out some nebulous idea of enlightenment, or even of the zealot seeking to convert all others to his ideas with bullets and bombs, our most tangible problem is the generalized plundering of the natural world in which we evolved and upon which we remain wholly dependent.
Whatever fantastical tales of reality certain religions may embody, and however deviously some religious doctrines are concocted to exploit the mind, mere ideas do not of themselves destroy a planet’s natural functioning. Nonsense can always be refuted or rejected in a manner not possible for polluted and denuded environments. But there are of course parallels between these two situations inasmuch as humankind’s development – being rooted in the technology of abstract thought – can be seen acting behind the reckless exploitation of the physical and mental worlds alike, with toxic results for both the environment and human culture. However, many religions do at least call on the individual to be reflective and to value whatever is in his heart, as well as to commune with some god or ideal of a greater whole. But this is lamentably absent in the frenzy of materialistic acquisitiveness afflicting modern times.
A logical order can even be seen in the unfolding of all these things; if abstract thought is the common factor behind both mental and physical forms of exploitation, it seems only natural that aggressively exploiting the mind would basically predate the aggressive exploitation of the physical world. Individuals have always presented ready-made opportunities to whoever understood the art of psychological manipulation, whereas sophisticated forms of environmental exploitation had to develop step-by-step.
By the same process that abstract thought learned to frame what we now regard as life’s really big questions, it could also figure out how to gain power over others by pretending to answer them. Hence it could be said to this day that whilst true spirituality remains the original and honest quest by which the overall self might best understand what life is all about, formalized religions mostly represent a corruption of that quest. And it is in this same sense that today’s tacitly secular scientism is revealed as just a godless church: a belief that approaching tomorrow’s heavenly utopia requires a rather slavish and unquestioning commitment to the non-god of objective knowledge – complete with mass ceremonial worship of whatever material fruits are thereby produced.
This entire course of events can be seen as simply the increasing sophistication and effectiveness with which the human mind has learned to exploit whatever it turns its attention to. The fundamental divisiveness of abstract thought dictates that the species, nation, tribe, self, or anything else for that matter, is seen as something essentially independent of the surrounding world, and we become thereby prone to thinking in manners that fail to balance immediate expediency with a wider and non-analytical understanding.
From any holistic perspective, this is all inherently misguided thinking. It may be rooted in our evolutionary development and could even be called natural, but we might do well to remind ourselves that we have no reason to regard the evolutionary process as necessarily operating in our best interests. In evolutionary terms, homo sapiens currently looks like a prototype – a novel entity exhibiting the raw power of his newfound thinking abilities, but devoid of any developed wisdom to beneficially manage the dangers such power represents. Hence, we might want to consider that prototypes too often combine spectacular results with self-destructive flaws.
Our dilemma is highly understandable given that, like all other species, we evolved to deal primarily if not exclusively with the here-and-now. Never before has a species had to think that its formidable powers require it to be responsible in terms of learning and demonstrating reasoned respect for the natural order of things. Never before has a cumulative form of knowledge created a situation in which the powers of a species continued to increase from generation to generation over many thousands of years. Never before has a species had to consider that its very continuation might be threatened by its own powers – its unique evolution combining primal instincts and technological knowledge in manners that test its ability to mature before such a cocktail explodes in its face.
Mind as the real frontier
It is from these ideas that mind itself emerges as an evolutionary force. How the mind perceives the human condition influences how we behave, and how we behave will dictate whether or not we manage to transcend the problem of our hitherto unchecked technological capabilities.
Conventional ideas of our evolutionary trajectory focus heavily on the development of the human brain, even if the link between whatever is known about that particular organ and the many external changes resulting from the human mind is rather opaque. In any case, whereas the mind’s abstract cognition has added a cumulative aspect to the recording and communication of knowledge – perhaps constituting an entirely new form of knowledge – no such equivalent exists on the purely physical dimension. Being manifested externally, our physical technologies certainly exist on a dramatically expanded scale and often perform tasks impossible for any number of people alone, but none of that would be possible without many thousands of years spent little-by-little adding to the overall mass of abstract knowledge now shared across billions of minds.
From all such perspectives, it is reasonable to consider the unique powers of the human mind as the key driver behind our uniquely human evolution. By way of contrast, if we discount unique aspects of the human mind and brain, and also our accumulated wealth of abstract knowledge, we are physically not significantly different from cavemen or even more primitive hominids. And it is questionable if this does not remain the case even when the human brain is added back into the picture; our brain may be unique and seen as highly-evolved, but it is really the sum total of our recorded knowledge and accumulated technology that paints us as increasingly different from other species. The current technological age is only possible by learned social behaviors that organize knowledge, skills and societal roles to create results well beyond the creative powers of any one individual.
Given our instincts for control and dominion, it is perfectly natural that the evolutionary emergence of abstract thought would be used to explore each and every potentially beneficial avenue – exploitation of others included. Human history even illustrates that failure to maximize the empowering advantages of abstract t