An ongoing evolution of consciousness — I

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 03 November 2024

the evolution of matter, life and mind

This chapter may not be fully understandable if one has not read
the preceding chapter on consciousness and its role in reality:

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we had a look at three different concepts of consciousness and explained why we choose for the integral concept which holds that consciousness is part of the very stuff of absolutely everything in existence and not only awareness but also a power. One area where the integral understanding of consciousness offers a more satisfactory explanation of reality than the mainstream physicalist concept is the evolution of our own species. While many people still accept the simplified, mechanistic interpretation of Darwin's ideas on evolution which holds that chance mutations and survival of the fittest are sufficient to explain evolutionary progress, when it is used as an explanatory framework for psychology and the social sciences, something crucial is clearly missing. It is as if one discusses a temple or cathedral only in terms of its structural stability and the functioning of its sewer system, or as if one studies a painting by Leonardo da Vinci only in terms of the physical properties of the paint he used. However interesting such things may be by themselves, they are not commensurate to the beauty and meaning of the object being studied, or of the person studying them.1 Everything that makes our human lives worth living is absent in the physicalist view of reality, and given the role science plays in modern society, this is not a small, innocent mistake.

Interestingly, one can find in some of the most ancient Indian scriptures, variants of Darwin's theory that don't suffer from the one-sidedness of Darwin's account. It is true that these old stories are far less detailed than Darwin's, but they are remarkably comprehensive in their scope: they deal not only with biological structures and outer behaviour, they include consciousness; they deal not only with matter, life and mind, but discuss what happened before matter came into being; and — most interesting of all — they stretch out far into the future.2

In the first chapter of his main philosophical work, The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo looks at evolution from the consciousness-centred perspective that we find in the Indian tradition, and then wonders whether the biological evolution of which Darwin had found his indications in nature, is not actually a gradual manifestation of more and more sophisticated forms of consciousness.3

Seen from this perspective, the evolution begins with the deeply involved, seemingly unconscious state of inorganic matter, develops in that physical environment the half-consciousness of plant and animal life, and then gradually develops within certain animals the beginnings of the mental consciousness which we now see evolving further in humanity. We'll begin this chapter with a closer look at the evolutionary origin of our species. After that, we'll explore what light the meta-narrative of an ongoing evolution of consciousness can shed on more recent human history and what is happening with humanity at present. In the next chapter we'll have a look at some ancient Indian ideas on where this awe-inspiring universe might actually have come from, and see whether this gives us some guidance on where the evolution is heading.

Evolution as far as it has reached till now

At first sight, it seems pretty obvious that everything around us is physical. And yet, if we look more carefully, it is also clear that plants, animals and humans have something extra, something that is not just physical, or at least something that does not fit in the ordinary meaning of the word "physical". What is that extra? One of the oldest ways of describing the extra is making a distinction between the three basic principles of Matter, Life and Mind, three levels that are already mentioned in some of the earliest Upanishads where a distinction is made between annam (food), prana (vital energy) and manas (sense-mind). Traditionally, the differences between them were discussed in terms of their essential "qualities". Modern biology looks at these major stages in the evolution in terms of their functionality. Data-science adds a whole new perspective by focusing on complexity and the speed of change it enables. We will now have a quick look at what the biological evolution achieved on these different dimensions.

Matter

Inanimate material entities are relatively simple; they are just what they are, entirely ruled by the laws of physics, conservation of energy and momentum, and trending towards increasing entropy. In the Vedic terminology, we could say that inorganic matter is ruled by the guna (essential quality) of tamas, inertia. As such, inanimate things are engaged in the continuation of what they are and what they do, and they provide stability to all that follows. Linguistically, the consciousness in matter expresses itself in terms of "I am what I am, and I do what I do." It manifests as the habit of form and function: the electron knows how to be an electron; the rock how to be a rock; the river how to river; the ocean how to ocean. Their type of consciousness obviously does not include the verbal and visual understanding of reality we humans have, but still, in the ancient Vedic view of reality, it is consciousness that makes them what they are and that determines how they function.

We should not underestimate the consciousness in things. From our human level, the consciousness in simple physical entities may look like nothing and we may think that these things are unconscious or at best subconscious, but that doesn't do justice to the marvel of physical reality. The reason to think that there might be more to it, is that physical things never make mistakes, which means that in a strange, inverted way, even the smallest fundamental particles must "know" far more than we normally give them credit for.

We tend to think of matter as dumb and inert, but within its obvious limitations its intelligence is more perfect, complete and precise than our human thought. If an electron behaves differently than what a learned professor expects, it is the professor who has to change his mind. Matter makes no errors.

In fact, because purely physical things act exactly according to the laws of physics, they must know, in however implicit a manner, every aspect of the laws of nature that pertains to them. And that is not all: physical things must also be aware of everything that exerts any kind of physical power over them. In short, even the tiniest physical part of this world must know everything that has any relevance to its existence.

Of course fundamental particles and other simple physical objects do not know their stuff in the kind of explicit — but also limited and imperfect — manner we humans know things. The way of knowing in physical things comes perhaps closer to the kind of implicit knowledge we humans have embedded in our innate biological functions and in our learnt physical skills, but still, it is a kind of knowing, and it is both all-inclusive and perfect.

Many mystics have felt this intuitively, and they have taken it as a sign of the Divine's omnipresence. The aspect of the Divine that is perhaps most clearly present in inanimate nature, is then perhaps, besides the obvious ingenuity of its design, a very special kind of impersonal, abstract beauty and harmony.

Life

With Life something radically new enters into the picture. The physical structures supporting life are much more complex than anything in the inanimate world. In terms of design, even microscopic unicellular organisms are more complex than the sun. But the difference is not just a matter of compact complexity. When life appears, its dominant guna is rajas, energy, self-assertion, possession, adventure and drama. Linguistically, the living organism is a centre of dynamic interactions whose relations are expressed "horizontally" in terms of "I and Thou".

Life as a type of consciousness is not dependent on the appearance of physical support structures like genes. One could argue that the first time Life appeared as a type of consciousness, was in the play of clouds and waves. But still, for the full deployment of a physically embodied life, genes (and a host of other intracellular structures like mitochondria) seem to have developed over time as the "technology of choice".

There are many things that are pretty special about the way life manifests on our planet. One is that living beings are capable of physically rebuilding their own extremely complex form and function out of much simpler inorganic material. According to science, the exact manner in which plants and animals build their own complex structures out of the utterly simple elements that they find in their environment, is dictated by their genes. This means that the unique character of a living entity physically exists twice. It exists not only in their outer structure and functioning; it also exists symbolically as a special kind of plan or design for their unique way of being in the form of the long strings of digital information that are contained in their genes. Both are physical, but there is a big difference between them. The first is the real, living thing itself. It can easily and comfortably adjust the way it manifest, and so every specimen is different according to its circumstances. The second is a hyper-compact symbolic description — or rather prescription — which is relatively stable in the sense that it is identical in all the cells of the living thing and near-identical in all the members of a species, but, and this is the fascinating part, between generations, permanent changes can be made in the design at near-zero cost in terms of energy. In other words, the dual nature of this arrangement allows the additional freedom Life introduces to show at two different levels. On the one hand, within the life of each individual living entity, the complexity of living creatures allows for a whole new level of dynamic and creative adaptation and interaction with similar and different lifeforms. On the other hand, genetic procreation with its mixing of male and female strands of information, enables fast and almost energy free minor adjustments as well as major evolutionary changes between generations.

Think of the way a mango tree continuously maintains, rebuilds and expands itself out of the utterly simple molecules it absorbs from soil, water and air. And then, how it creates other trees of its own type, feeding in the process a huge and complex community of little creatures that happen to live in its neighbourhood.

One of the most fascinating aspects of physically embodied Life is, that while the consciousness of each living entity is still as fully embedded in its physical substrate as in much simpler inanimate objects, Life as the expression of a type of consciousness and principle of action introduces a beginning of freedom to interact and play that is not present in inanimate nature. It is as if Life obeys the letter of the law that determines the physical reality, but overrides its tamasic spirit and basic character. A rock will forever remain a rock or at most, slowly over thousands or even millions of years pulverize into dust. A plant builds itself up in a matter of hours or at most years, using ingredients from air, water and soil according to its own unique character and circumstances; when it perishes, equally fast, it rebuilds another quite different specimen of the same basic type. In inorganic nature, there really is nothing as complex, playful, and richly interactive.4

As with matter, we should not underestimate the miraculous nature of the emergence of Life. As Sri Aurobindo points out, if some outside intelligence would have looked at the inanimate, physical world before life came into being, it would never have been able to predict, on the basis of what it had seen, what would happen with the arrival of life. How do you jump from the utter simplicity of rocks, water and air, to flowers, trees, butterflies, birds of paradise, or much more amazing, to the love of mothers for their children? For indeed with the arrival of life, not only more complex forms appear but also feelings and attitudes. While the beauty in inanimate matter may feel impersonal, rule bound, mathematical, or, occasionally, majestic or severe, the beauty in living nature feels warm, full, embracing, and in a strange, almost shy, initial manner, personal. Flowers are sweet and touching in their innocent self-giving and aspiration for the light; a tree is someone to reckon with. Is this an anthropomorphic attribution error? Or are we denying something true, when we hold nature to be "just physical"? Is it wrong to recognise an abundance of love in the generosity of a mango tree?

Mind

If an animal has eaten an apple — digestion being a process of life — the end result is that there is no apple but a bit of energy and basic stuff that the eating animal can use to build and maintain its own animal body.

After an animal has seen an apple — seeing being a process of mind — the apple is still there, but something has been added to the way the animal's mind presents the world to itself.

The progression of miracles does not end here. With the arrival of Mind, we see again not only another dramatic increase in terms of complexity, but also another and entirely new functionality. The physical structure of the nervous system is many orders of magnitude more complex than that of plants and in fact more complex than anything else we know to exist. But in terms of consciousness, it is not only more complex but also essentially different from what came before it in trees and small flowering plants.

The trees and flowers are, as we have seen, far more complex and one could say more individualised than the rock: they are active, responsive, interactive, capable of expanding and rebuilding their own type; yet in the end they are still, like the rock, only themselves. But in the working brains of animals, this is not any longer the case. With the help of its complex physical structure, the nervous system does something that we find normal because we are so used to it, but that is actually radically new.

While pre-mental life is capable of physically recreating its own complex structures, embodied mind is capable of turning a bit of its own physical stuff into a hyper-complex model of the world in which it lives. And then, just as the tree is living within the structure of the tree it has built, we, mental beings, are living within the brain-based models we have built.

If all you knew were rocks and water, air, grasses, flowers and trees, a world were everything is simply itself, could you have thought of a piece of matter that is an ever-changing series of models of the rest of reality?

This new gift of making models of reality is far more remarkable than may be obvious at first sight. We don't know much about how animals experience the world and themselves, but we humans live only rarely and to a very limited extent directly in our bodies or even in our feelings. We live largely within this parallel, "virtual" reality of our own making. To be more precise, our consciousness, our self, our puruṣa, still identifies with one little portion of the material world, prakṛti, just as it does in the plant and the rock, but the bit of matter with which the thinking creature identifies itself is no longer simply itself as it is in the pebble and the tree: it is a nervous system busy modelling itself and the rest of the world.

In terms of the gunas, the mind is supposed to be sattvic, and, ideally, its nature should be truthful and harmonious. In practice, however, our human mind is hardly capable of truth; it is rather a first attempt at explicit knowledge within the conditions of a living, physical nervous system. Moreover, in animals, the mind is fully in service of the life-force which pursues survival and self-assertion rather than truth. And even in us humans, our attempts at knowing tend to suffer from atavistic immixtures that continue to rise up from the physical and vital stages of our biological evolution.

Three stages in the evolution of the model-making faculty of the mind

It is useful to distinguish three different stages in the model making activity of the nervous system. The first stage provides the capacity to create simple maps, models and images of reality which can be combined into a plan for action. This is what enables animals to move around in the world and one can see a fairly advanced stage of it at work when one watches a dog or a cat move — in a clearly determined manner — to a place where it knows that food, water, good company, or anything else it fancies may be available.

The next stage becomes possible when the "model-making" has not only become more complex, detailed, and reliable as a predictor of how real-life action will work out, but also faster. Since making a plan in one's mind is inherently far safer than trying things out in the real world, this enables animals to make a set of parallel plans from which the best one can be chosen for execution. With this, the first beginnings of something like our human mind come into existence, for it establishes the nervous system — or should we say the owner of the nervous system — as an, at least somewhat independent centre for taking decisions, choices, action, and with that as a centre for viewpoints, opinions and so on.5

The third stage is for us humans by far the most interesting. It arrives when the model-making becomes self-reflexive and we learn to adjust our models to reflect and express different viewpoints and attitudes. Given that we tend to identify with (parts of) our models, this makes it possible to change what we consider to be ourselves, and we will take it up in the next section which deals with the post-biological stage of the evolution of consciousness.

Transparency

In case of doubt about the degree to which our biology determines the way the world appears to us, try to imagine how different the world would have looked

  • if our eyes would not be sensitive to visible light, but to infrared or to electromagnetic waves;
  • if we were as directly aware of other people's thoughts as of our own (as some people are);
  • if we were neutrinos (which are so small that they almost never "bump" into anything).
     

One of the most intriguing aspects of the way the human nervous system is modelling the world is the degree to which it is transparent to itself. Just as we don't see the structures inside our own eyes, so we are ordinarily not aware of our own model-making activity. Most people are convinced that our senses help us to look directly and "objectively" at an independently existing outside reality, but this is true only in a very partial, and somewhat metaphorical sense. The way our consciousness and the world around us are related to each other is easiest to understand when we assume that in our ordinary waking state, our nervous system is simply, like every other material structure, aware of itself, while we as human beings tend to have a more complex, double awareness. Initially, we are on the one hand in a direct, but rather vague and almost content-free manner, aware of our own existence as well as of the existence of others and things to whom we are in some way or another related. On the other hand, we identify with the centre of the model we have created in our brain and it is this latter awareness that provides most of the detail of what we know. The result of this is then that when we feel that we know ourselves, others and the world, this is a half-truth, since the details of how we know ourselves, the others and the world are provided by our own, artificially created model. The models we make are fabulously complex and even beautiful in their own way, but in the end, they are never more than descriptions, they are copies. At his stage, our intrinsically perfect direct awareness of ourselves, others and the world gives the models we make an aura of authenticity, but the actual content of these models is derivative and of our own making. As we develop further, we become directly aware of ourselves, others and the world in more and more detail from within. This is possible only to the extent that we silence our model-making mind, which is one of the main reasons why silencing the mind plays such a central role in yoga. One interesting aspect of the ongoing evolution is that the end result is not an empty silence: it is that the direction of the force changes. During the first phase of the evolution, the vital, ego-centric energy pushes the biological development of the physical senses and the physical brain-based mind. In the middle the mind enjoys a deep inner silence. In the third phase this biologically created mental apparatus is used to express, while remaining aware of the infinite silence within, the vast inner and higher consciousness that is guiding the evolution from above.6

Dualism

The last aspect of the mind I want to mention in this section is its dualism. The strength and pervasiveness of this dualism is another rather remarkable characteristic of the human mind. In our ordinary waking state, there is always a split between the knower and the known, and between the self and the world. The dualism is there even implicitly in each individual knowledge statement, because each mental assertion denies its opposite. Mental dualism is so natural to us, that it is hardly ever doubted or questioned, but it is one of the main causes of human suffering and the endless conflicts that mar our human existence. Though our mind is through and through dualistic, there is no reason to think of dualism as an intrinsic or inevitable aspect either of the world or of awareness. The dualism simply belongs to mind, just as self-assertiveness is part of life.

Conclusion

Academics who strongly identify with their minds and medical practitioners who deal on a daily basis with the critical difference between conscious and unconscious patients tend to believe that consciousness is a product of a healthy, well-working nervous system. While this is to quite an extent true for the kind of consciousness most of us have most of the time, it is not the full story. Just as taking the earth as the centre of the physical universe stood in the way of understanding physics, taking the manner in which we humans happen to be conscious at present as the only possible way of being conscious, stands in the way of understanding what consciousness actually is, and, more important, what it can become in us.

What consciousness is and how it works begins to make more sense when we accept that consciousness is pervasive throughout the physical universe. While it is true that the kind of consciousness doctors witness in the emergency room is dependent on a working brain, it is not an incomprehensible freak phenomenon that suddenly "emerges" in an otherwise purely mechanical universe. It is the way it is because of the way it has gradually evolved together with the biological structures that support and manifest it.

If we look at the biological evolution as an evolution of consciousness, a new depth and deeper meaning gets added to the incredible beauty and harmony of the natural world as well as to the immense complexity of our own human nature. The best part of looking at the evolution as an ongoing emancipation of consciousness is that we not only begin to understand where our human consciousness must have come from, but that we also get a glimpse of where it must be heading. Before we get to that, however, we first need to have a more detailed look at where we have reached till now and what humanity is presently busy with from an evolutionary standpoint. This is what we will take up in the next section.

 

Endnotes

1Darwin, who was a good observer not only of nature but also of himself, laments later in life that "he has become like colour-blind" because, as he says, he has concentrated too much on mechanical explanations and neglected poetry.

2For those who are interested, here is the story as told in the Mundaka Upanishad.

3If the idea of different types of consciousness looks strange to you, you might like to read first the preceding chapter on concepts of consciousness.

4Those with an interest in the history of ideas might wonder whether this way of talking about "Life" is not an attempt at reintroducing "vitalism". In some sense it probably is, but that is no reason to conclude that it is wrong. Sri Aurobindo uses the word "vital" for the life-energy, but he does not mean by it a physical substance or energy whose existence can be proven or disproven by a physical or chemical experiment. He takes it as a type of consciousness, and from his standpoint, the entire debate about "vitalism" was vitiated by misunderstandings about the nature of consciousness and its relation to matter. When physicalist researchers could not show the existence of "élan vital", that did not disprove Bergson's theory; on the contrary, it showed he was right to think that life was something extra that could not be reduced to purely physical stuff and energy. That people like Julian Huxley thought élan vital had no meaning because it was not physical, was absurd, because if that had been true, then meaning (which is also not physical) would itself have been meaningless. The futility of the materialist's objections against "life" and "vitalism" can perhaps be illustrated most easily with the manmade things we introduced at the beginning of this chapter: if one studies, for example, the construction of a cathedral with the research methods that physicalist-reductionist science has at its disposal, one will find only material things and energies. No problem with that and no surprise: the cathedral is no doubt a physical object. And yet, without belief in God, ideas, plans, community support, land-owners, architects, engineers, contractors, craftsmen and labourers, nothing would have been built. To claim that all those things (and all those people!) were only physical misses the whole point of the cathedral's existence (and of those human lives). True, the cathedral is physical, but it is not only physical. To refuse to admit this betrays a common but still rather stunning example of voluntary blindness. A more detailed discussion of this issue can be found in the previous chapter, "Concepts of consciousness" and in the appendix on Classical Behaviourism.

5It is probably because of this, that in the Samkhya philosophy the ego-sense (ahankara) is always mentioned together with the sense-mind and the intellect (manas and buddhi).

6The fundamental difference between the constructed knowledge which science pursues and the direct "knowledge by identity" which is present in absolutely everything that exists, we have discussed in the first chapter on knowledge.