Tag Archive for Consciousness

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

June 21, 2013 Consciousness, Evolution No comments

I attended a conference last weekend dedicated to the goal of creating an “immortal” version of a human being by transferring our “mind,” or possibly our brains as well, into an android by 2045. The conference was called GF2045. The GF stands for Global Future. The Russian who created the conference, Dmitry Itskov, did a good job of bringing together a lot of diverse people from the forefront of futurism, brain research, robotics and spirituality/religion, including Peter Diamandis, Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, Dr. Roger Penrose, and Dr. George Church, though some appeared via a canned video presentation.

It seems that there is still a wide variance of opinion about what constitutes the mind and what it means to be human? Age-old questions persist. Does consciousness arise from the biological mechanisms of the brain or does it simply reside there while the body is alive? Can we be human with a replacement body?

Some presented research showing that we should be able to repair damaged parts of the brain with replacement circuitry. Others thought that computers would soon be sophisticated enough to mimic human intelligence. Others saw it as a no-brainer (pun intended) that someday an individual’s consciousness could reside in something other than our original human birth bodies.

But nobody, in my opinion, got to the root of what it means to be human—what characteristics of consciousness we all share and what motivates us to make “progress.” Death was the problem that the conference was trying solve. The operative assumption was that we’d be better off if we could all live forever and that we had to take control over our own evolution to get there.

I’m not sure that should be our goal. Where we put our energy determines the results we will get. I’m of the opinion that we have much more pressing issues to solve than human mortality. How about we aspire to not killing each other before we try living forever.

Empathy and Compassion

April 20, 2010 Consciousness, Evolution, Politics, Values One comment

Based on what I’ve been reading lately, specifically The Empathetic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin, human beings have evolved into highly empathetic creatures. In fact, an individual’s well-being is highly dependent on the successful transmission of empathy from the mother, or other primary caregiver, to the child. The whole notion that people are driven solely by self-interest turns out not to be true.

I’m only a little way through the book but so far his over 600-page scholarly treatise seems to be providing an extremely well reasoned and well researched case to support what I call “species consciousness.” Rifkin calls it “biosphere consciousness.” The point is that we must identify ourselves with all of humanity on a planetary basis if we are to avoid global catastrophe.

From empathy to compassion is a short side trip. That’s where the Charter for Compassion [http://charterforcompassion.org/] comes in. This site/organization/movement bases its call for global togetherness on the Golden Rule, which it says is at the center of every great religion and spiritual practice.

Rifkin’s book and the Charter for Compassion are part of a growing global meme that we must become one humanity, that we must act as “HumansTogether.” To do this we must first scrape away the layers of cynicism and pessimism we have acquired through our lives and recognize that we and others are fundamentally not “just looking out for number one.”

We must examine the evidence and recognize that we are instead highly social creatures who at our core are much more about compassion and empathy than greed and selfishness. It may take a little digging, but the evidence is there. It just doesn’t get any press. But as Rifkin points out, the only reason our worst behaviors are featured on the news is that they are unusual. Most of the world is actually the opposite of the news, full of loving, concerned people who want to work together to help everyone.

Lost in the Flood

March 28, 2010 Communication, Evolution, Politics, Values No comments

I wear my iPod when I go for a walk. Today, when I heard Springsteen’s “Lost in the Flood” off his first album from way back in the 70’s, a new meaning occurred to me: Lost in the flood of thoughts.

All of us, unless we take great pains to step outside them, are lost in a flood of conscious thoughts that prevent us from connecting with our true selves. We’re focused on the things that are right in front of us, right off the front bumper of our awareness, instead of looking down the road and getting a more comprehensive view of what’s actually affecting all of us.

We get absorbed with our own self identities instead of the fact that we are all human beings on planet earth. We are all the same.

All of the hate and separation we feel from others is based on a belief that we are all different and that those differences are dangerous. They are dangerous because the others may want to hurt us, or because the others have ideas that if correct, would make us wrong, or cause us to question what we believe. And no humans are really in love with being wrong or having to change.

And that’s the point, under the superficial differences of appearance, culture, religion, class, gender and politics; we are a single species that is way more the same than different. We are all here together on this planet, an infinitesimal oasis in a cold and empty universe (so far as we know). After billions of years, we are the highest example of life-based, matter-connected consciousness that exists (so far as we know). And we’re in danger of destroying ourselves because we see our own personal survival and that of our group as being in competition with other humans who are exactly the same as us.

I believe the highest calling we have as humans, is to recognize that all of us are responsible for getting our species through to the next stage of evolution. This can be a world in which we cooperate together by acting from a set of beliefs based on we are all the same, we are all valuable, and we are all deserving.

The alternative is a set of beliefs based on I’ve got mine, good luck to you. That belief is not going to move humans forward. That belief will keep us divided and invested in fighting with each other, because it is based on a fundamental untruth—that I, my family and my group are better and more deserving than all the others. It is based on denying the truth that we humans are all the same underneath.

Toward a Species Consciousness

March 24, 2010 Evolution No comments

While in college in the mid 1970’s I read the book Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton. Written in 1937 as the forces that caused World War II were already brewing, Stapleton described a mind-only astral trip through the space-time of the universe. Along the way he encountered numerous highly evolved, highly self-aware species with a level of consciousness and technology analogous to our own.

I have always remembered the main point: the planetary civilizations that survived all evolved a collective “species consciousness” (my term) at a point when they were in a global crisis. A powerful meme of recognition took the form of “a widespread passion for a new social order which should be just and should embrace the whole planet.”1

“Tribal prestige, individual dominance, military glory, industrial triumphs lost their obsessive glamour, and instead the happy creatures delighted in civilized social intercourse, in cultural activities, and in the common enterprise of world-building.”2 In the book, civilizations that continued on this path eventually developed a “psychically unified community.”3

Flash forward to today where a new meme is beginning to propagate. This meme begins with a belief that through meditation we can still the machinery of the individual mind long enough to make contact with the universal mind—the vast void of infinite consciousness that animates our true, authentic selves and all life in the cosmos. The meme continues with the thought that this universal mind is the force that is driving evolution in the direction of higher and higher consciousness (i.e. single-celled organism to human).

Finally, the meme concludes with this thought expressed by Andrew Cohen, evolutionary scholar and editor of the magazine EnlightenNext: “The next evolutionary leap, as I see it, is the leap from the individual to higher collective, a ‘higher we.’”4

In other words, humans will not only begin to see themselves as one, they will literally be one through a common sense of immersion and experience of the cosmic mind. Who is to say if this is true? But it feels true. And it feels necessary if we are to avoid a future of planetary suffering, strife and death.

1-3 from Chapter 9, Part 1 of Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton, Busy Utopias.

4 from page 32 of EnlightenNext, Issue 46, Spring/Summer 2010.