Theory on Self-Awareness (2120 hits)
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Submitted by <murphydog5.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2003-04-14 14:56:32 EDT
I ask myself this question: How in the hell did a single-celled organism evolve, given any amount of time, to a self-aware being?
It's amazing enough to think that a chunk of our star broke off in it's evolution to become a spinning rock orbiting it's gravity-- If we were one light minute closer to, or further away from, our sun we'd have an atmosphere too hot or too cold to support life. Considering space as an infinite... uh, vacuum, odds of landing at the correct distance away from our star and stabilizing orbit there are very slim.
Now let's take mass. The larger the mass, the higher the gravity, right? So, not only do we have a chunk of rock orbiting our star at precisely the right distance for heavier elements to form and the correct temperature to support life, but we've also got the correct gravitational balance. If our earth were too big, we'd be crushed by the gravity... too small and we'd float all over the place.
So, now we've got an orbiting rock that's just the right mass at just the right distance away from our sun to support life and the formation of heavy elements (oxygen, for example). Throughout the course of billions of years, somehow life began from some sort of soup and evolved, being shaped and re-shaped by natural selection, all the way up to the most complex form of life... we humans.
We beat the odds and now we sit here and question all of it. We're intelligent enough to realize our own mortality and ask questions of our universe. We ask why... what's the point?
I compare the mystery of consciousness along the same lines of awe. The ability to even ask questions and be self-aware is just as amazing as the circumstances that led to a nest for us to evolve and become who we are today. But what is the nature of consciousness? Are we humans the only life form on earth that are self-aware? How did we make that step from being some primitive unaware monkey to a completely self-aware and intelligent human?
I think, millions of years ago, monkeys started eating hallucinogenic mushrooms and eventually the circuitry in their brains allowed them to become self-aware. I have no proof of this, but it makes the most sense. If we humans trip on shrooms today and describe feelings of a 'higher awareness' than why does not the same feeling apply to the brains of monkeys? I think, throughout the course of natural selection, monkeys experienced this higher form of consciousness and altering of brain chemistry to allow for self-awareness in humans today.
I know it sounds crack-pot, but I'm curious to hear some feedback on this idea.
Murphy
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Submitted by Lemmywinks <aahalstead.at.hotmail.com> at 2004-02-13 21:31:15 EST (#)
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Out of the billions and billions of stars there actually is a pretty good chance that a chunk of rock would be able to support life under the circumstances that you noted.
Submitted by Partholon (user info) at 2003-04-14 17:01:33 EDT (#)
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Justin:
It's when animals reproduce, it's the DNA that gets passed, so the changes that cause evolution have to occur in the level of DNA.
Lamarck was an early biologist who thought that physical changes in the parents could get passed on to the children. He thought that giraffes got long necks from generations of giraffes stretching their necks to eat the leaves off trees. One giraffe stretched so far, its offspring stretched farther, etc.
Natural selection is the opposite. In each generation, a variety of slight mutations will occur in the way the DNA is copied and recombined. So, in each population, you'll get giraffes with slightly different lengths of neck. Then the influence of the environment comes into play: let's say the food sources of the species is up high enough in a tree so that only a few of the longest-necked giraffes can eat it. They will be stronger and better fed and able to reproduce more than shorter-necked ones who can't reach enough food or any at all. As the long-necks reproduce more than the short-necks, the proportion of long-neck giraffes relative to the population increases until all surving giraffes are long-neck, because those are the genes that survived.
Mushrooms, to my knowledge, don't affect DNA. However, if there were certain genes that causes certain traits that COMBINED with the mushrooms produced an effect that gave a few monkeys a reproductive advantage, then evolution would take place.
Submitted by JustinCredible (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:53:51 EDT (#)
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meeshy boy.. I'm not really understanding here. So, any changes that cause evolution/mutation in a species cannot be the result of things the parents have undergone in thier life? Explain how organisms evolve at all, in that case.
Submitted by Murphy1844 (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:51:42 EDT (#)
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Hahaha.
Murphy
Submitted by meeshki (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:38:12 EDT (#)
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Murphy, thanks for the idea, but I have studied evolution and yes mutation = evolution however the mutation must take place at the level of the genes not afterwards. That is during conception when the cells are splitting and new chromosome pairs are being made up. Alterations in this gene code are made. This is where the mutation must take place in order for it to have any possibility of it being passed on to the next generation. I was over simplifying when I used the amputation example. If a person who is brain injured has a kid the kid will not have the same difficulties. Since the brain injuries are not on the level of the gene. The only way that drugs could have a direct effect on the next generation would be if they affected your sperm or the egg. That is they would have to genetically alter them in some way.
I think it is you who needs to take some classes no I. Prehaps you could start out in intro Anthropology they tend to cover the basics
Meeshki
Submitted by JustinCredible (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:20:52 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Sorry for the double post.. gar. Partho - McKenna does go into that, actually mushrooms were on Africa or something, I forget the specifics. But the conditions were right, psylocibin mushrooms thrive on herbivore dung.
Submitted by JustinCredible (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:18:25 EDT (#)
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Razor, I do belive it, and that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Mushrooms in a way allow you to unlock, mabye, like the underlying structure of all language, removing the barriers of different culture's interpretations of languages, to get the meaning behind any of them. I've had the experence both on acid and on mushrooms, of starting sentances and arbitrarily stopping in the middle of a sentance, only to have my tripping friend pick up IMMEDIATELY after I stop and continue the sentance in the exact words I thought of it in, and it just seemed so natural.
Murph - Yeah, I got into McKenna a little bit after he had already died, or a little before. He was amazing, he's influenced my thinking a lot. I've read his books at least twice each, most of them need to be read more than once to get the deeper meaning, because he does use very complex language in his writing.
Submitted by JustinCredible (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:18:25 EDT (#)
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Razor, I do belive it, and that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Mushrooms in a way allow you to unlock, mabye, like the underlying structure of all language, removing the barriers of different culture's interpretations of languages, to get the meaning behind any of them. I've had the experence both on acid and on mushrooms, of starting sentances and arbitrarily stopping in the middle of a sentance, only to have my tripping friend pick up IMMEDIATELY after I stop and continue the sentance in the exact words I thought of it in, and it just seemed so natural.
Murph - Yeah, I got into McKenna a little bit after he had already died, or a little before. He was amazing, he's influenced my thinking a lot. I've read his books at least twice each, most of them need to be read more than once to get the deeper meaning, because he does use very complex language in his writing.
Submitted by Partholon (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:14:33 EDT (#)
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I've never heard of McKenna or the mushroom theory of evolution before, myself. That's interesting. I always though the hallucinogenic mushrooms were a New World species, and that Homo sapiens evolved in the savannahs of Africa.
Submitted by Murphy1844 (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:10:28 EDT (#)
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Razor:
Holy shit!! You've got to be kidding!! Did you actually hear words or do you think you picked up on what they were saying according to context?
That's fucked up, dude.
I'm too scared to try mushrooms. I flip out on weed as it is. I'll stick to Pabst Blue Ribbon and Hamms, thank you.
Murphy
Submitted by Murphy1844 (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:07:22 EDT (#)
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Hey Justin,
Thanks for sharing your post. I heard an interview with that guy. In fact, that's when I came up with this theory. He mostly talked about mushroom's significance and impact on our current traditions (i.e. presents under a Christmas tree). I was unaware of our condensed evolution. I'll check the books out.
Meeshki-- study evolution. Mutation = Evolution. Mutations are passed down through genes. I'm proposing that shrooms may cause something like that to happen in the brain.
Murphy
Submitted by Razor (user info) at 2003-04-14 16:05:42 EDT (#)
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Re: Higher understanding of language...
In 1995 I watched an anime movie called La Puta, about a lost city in the sky.
I had taken some mushrooms with my friends, the first time I ever took 'shrooms, and we sat down to watch it after they kicked in.
At the end of the movie, we were all roundly agreeing that it kicked ass, when someone chimed in with "Too bad it was in Japanese".
I said "What are you talking about? That movie was in English."
They all assured me it was in Japanese, but they had to put it back in to prove it to me. There were no subtitles, even.
The wierd bit was that I understood the entire film, and told them everything that happened. We got an English version later and I was right on point. It was fucking eerie and it is the one thing that has ever happened to me that was totally beyond explanation.
I seriously did not know the movie wasn't in English until they proved it to me... I know maybe ten words of Japanese, but I understood the entire thing, which doesn't even make sense in any way and you probably don't believe this story but it's true.
Submitted by meeshki (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:56:58 EDT (#)
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"That one percent that obtained a higher state of awareness due to the physical alterations in their brain from consuming mushrooms will pass this on to their babies and... natural selection takes over"
I may be miss interpreting this due to the copious amounts of cough syrup I'm on, but are you saying that the 'physical alterations' that occurred in the parent monkeys head gets genetically passed on to it's kids? Because if you are I think you have taken a few too many shroom's. That would be like saying a guy that loses a leg in an accident would pass that trait on to his kids. But if you are saying that the monkey passes along the characteristic of eating shroom's to alter their mind o.k. but I still fail to see how that leads to evolution of a species.
Imho
Meeshki
Submitted by Partholon (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:55:16 EDT (#)
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Razor:
"I'm a neo-Hegelian Marxian dualist.
??? What does Marx have to do with Hegel?"
Well, Marx was a Hegelian, in the sense that Jesus was a Jew. Hegel developed the dialectic and used it as his method for understanding reality: totality, internal relations, interpenetration of opposites, identity/difference, contradiction, etc. Marx perfected it. Hegel believed the material world was reflex of the ideational world, and what we perceived as the world around us was the Absolute Idea manifesting itself to understand itself. Marx countered that, saying that the ideational world is the reflex of the material world.
Hegel -- dialectical idealist
Marx -- dialectical materialist.
Me -- person who thinks they were both on the right track but in different arenas, therefore a dualist of sorts: I accept the existence of matter and spirit, but understand them as simply different aspects of the same substance. Hegel's investigations into the unfolding of consciousness and ideas and Marx's investigations into the evolution of history and material society are complementary rather than antagonistic.
Submitted by JustinCredible (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:50:46 EDT (#)
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Murphy - ever read stuff by Terrence McKenna? If not, you should, he goes into this exact same issue to a large extent. If I remember correctly, the theory he proposes goes something like this -
Okay, we have the humanoid primates before we pretty much exploded with intellegence and rapid evolution. On the scale of things, evolution in a species takes a very long time, i.e. millions of years to produce a noticable effect in how they behave and physical characteristics. With humans, this vast time was condensed to about fifty thousand years from being primates to being how we are today. A fraction of the time it takes for other species we've observed to evolve a fraction of the degree we have. McKenna thought ( he passed in April of 2000, I belive. ) that mushrooms jumpstarted our evolution not through simply higher awareness levels, but allowed the development of language. An aspect of the mushroom experence is expansion of vocabulary and higher understanding of language you wouldn't normally be attuned to ( or something to that effect ). Mushrooms also, in doses so small that you wouldn't feel the effects of the drug, increase visual acuity of fine lines and such. This has been confirmed through a study done in the 70's with college students given very small doses of psylocibin. So, by incorperating these mushrooms into thier diet, they got the adaptave advantage of better vision and more clear, descriptive language. This let them communicate with each other on levels previously unseen in any species, also allowing them to communicate new ideas and the like, speeding up the evolution of our species.
This probably has innacuracies and doesn't convey the theory as well as I'd like, but McKenna was very, very good at weaving a tapestry of words that draws you in. He goes into detail about this particular theory the most in 'Food of the Gods', a book pretty much devoted to the history of mushroom use and what impact it had on us as a species. His other books are The Arcahic Revival, a bunch of his speeches and writings and interviews condensed into a single book, tons of stuff to wade through, The Invisible Landscape, an extremely heavy book he did back in the late 70's with his brother, True Hallucinations, the 'journal' of the experences in the Amazon that led them to write Invisible Landscape, and I think they'res another one coming out soon, or already out, who's name eludes me at the moment. If you haven't, pick up his stuff, also look online. The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension ( deoxy.org ) is a good place to start, they have a bunch of stuff by McKenna there, also have good forums about hyperspace, free thought, etc. I've read those four of McKenna's books, and I have to say, they're all excellent. I wouldn't start off with Invisible Landscape, tho. Arcahic Revival or Food of the Gods would be a good place to start. Hope this helped.
Submitted by HotDog (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:39:33 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This is the REAL history of anything that ever happened.
http://www.ubersite.com/cgi-bin/message_get.cgi?message=105028505791419754
Submitted by Partholon (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:35:54 EDT (#)
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Razor:
"These days a small percentage of humanity carries the rest, and idiots can live in comfort, so I'm not sure the human species is actually getting noticeably more intelligent."
You're right that we no longer have any environmental impetus for further evolution, but I'm curious as to what you mean by the small percentage carrying the rest. Certainly, it is the labor of the vast majority of the human population that keeps our civilization afloat and supports the non-laboring minority.
The rigid structures of our society--especially our laws and most especially our laws of property--do not guarantee that the best and brightest will necessarily rise to the top. This is what leads to the decay of civilizations: the ossification of social structures in the face of reality. There is no direct correlation between social/political/economic power and intelligence. Those who get filltered up to the top tend to degenerate just as quickly as those at the bottom, because their luxury removes any need for them to advance.
For example, I'm certain that I'm more intelligent--and in better physical shape--than the President. Yet, our laws forbid me from calling him out in single combat in fight to the death for control of the tribe.
Submitted by Murphy1844 (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:35:39 EDT (#)
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No, Razor, I disagree.
Consider how intelligent monkeys really are. They can learn what humans teach them and survive. That's about it. They don't invent anything, they have no spoken language, they're not artistic. Everything we can do today is a result of our own intellegence... monkeys have contributed nothing.
Take a world with the most intelligent form of life being monkeys and compare that world to our own. The difference is pretty god damn significant. Or, take the least intelligent person on Ubersite and compary that person with the most intelligent monkey. The difference is still VERY considerable.
Furthermore, I'm not sure exactly what happens to the brain when we digest mushrooms but I can safely assume that it accelarates the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain (seratonine, dopamine, etc.) like many other drugs. If levels of neurotransmitters are altered for a period of time, this can have permanant impact on the brain. If we take 100 clusters of monkeys that regularly consume mushrooms and assume that 99% simply kill themselves off because their brain was damaged in a harmful way... we still have that one percent. That one percent that obtained a higher state of awareness due to the physical alterations in their brain from consuming mushrooms will pass this on to their babies and... natural selection takes over.
I don't think we can safely rule this out just yet.
Murphy
Submitted by loki (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:30:51 EDT (#)
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I like this. I was going to comment, but alas it is 3:30 and time for my post lunch diet vanilla coke.
Submitted by Razor (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:28:43 EDT (#)
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I'm a neo-Hegelian Marxian dualist.
??? What does Marx have to do with Hegel?
Submitted by Razor (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:23:07 EDT (#)
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Couple thoughts:
Realize that if the odds are astronomical against life occuring, but it is possible, everywhere that it does happen, that life will say "Hmmm... what were the chances of it happening HERE?" Everywhere else the life doesn't evolve to ask the question. So it's not as odd as it seems really.
I don't think monkeys are nearly as primitive as you think. Primates that learn sign language can form sentences using the word "I" and "me" so they are certainly self aware. I think dogs are self aware too, they know who they are. I'm not sure where you draw the line, I think it's fuzzy and likely any line you draw is arbitrary and is a matter of philosophy, with no grounding in Truth capital T.
As far as the evolution of our brains, there are many theories, but I think mushrooms can be safely discounted. The higher state of consciousness you feel while taking them is just a semantic similarity, trust me your IQ is not going up. It may make you more aware of different lines of thinking, but that's realizing more of your potential as opposed to creating more.
Intelligence was (and is) a survival characteristic. The most intelligent primates developed culture which lead to the need for more intelligence, and we killed off our nearest competitors. These days a small percentage of humanity carries the rest, and idiots can live in comfort, so I'm not sure the human species is actually getting noticeably more intelligent.
Submitted by Beer_bong (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:19:45 EDT (#)
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http://www.savageresearch.com/humor/historyOfTheUniverse.html
Good point though.
Submitted by Partholon (user info) at 2003-04-14 15:16:03 EDT (#)
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If you add to the theory that the monkeys got the hallucinogenic mushrooms from a giant alien monolith, then at least Arthur C. Clarke agrees with you!
I'm a neo-Hegelian Marxian dualist. I think we are both spirit (mind) and matter (body), and that the two are interrelated and have evolved together. As our bodies have evolved over the eon--in response to the "contradictions" of the natural world--we developed the ability to handle deeper and more complex thought (that is, in our niche, individual organisms who could think better survived to reproduce, passing that trait on to a greater proportion).
At the same time, our minds were evolving, also by contradiction, especially learning the differences between the self and other, the species and the world, the individual and the collective. Gradually, we became able to reason better and think better, and this those individuals (our ancestors) to survive better, reproduce, and evolve.
I've always interpreted the story of Eve and the fruit as symbolic of Homo sapiens passing out of the animal stage into full rational, self-conscious humanity. We're never told what the "fruit" was, so there's no reason to think it wasn't a mushroom!