So now we're examining three levels of evolutionary development In this ongoing struggle to survive in the face of environmental pressures that have the potential to destroy us as living beings – or stimulate us to thrive – it can go either way. Sentient animals at this point are evolving simultaneously in three separate environments – biological, social, and cognitive – each with its own set of environmental pressures, changes, and challenges.
Environmental challenges incite, goad, foster changes which activate latent attributes, potential capabilities. Consciousness increases in response to adaptations in the cognitive environments generated by the multiple diverse social environments created in sentient populations. The evolutionary process, functioning now in the cognitive environment begins to enhance the scope and range of consciousness at accelerating rates. And as noted earlier, adaptations in consciousness are transferrable across not only generations but across unrelated biological and social populations.
As we have discussed in another topic on this blog, we are not essentially a different kind of animal, but one which has taken the qualities and characteristics of the rest of the animal world and developed them to much more complex and intense levels.
So, we've seen that many animals and birds use tools, but we've got Black and Decker; many animals have proto-languages, even with syntax, vocabularies, and incipient grammar – but we've got poetry, novels, history books, and gossip columns. Many insects, animals, birds and fish develop and cultivate symbiotic relationships with other birds, animals and fish, each getting a beneficial service from the other. But we try to turn every other creature on earth into a pet, a movie actor, or a work partner, breeding them into hundreds of different varieties of themselves. And when we do consciousness we really do consciousness full out, full time.
In human populations we have become capable of complete consciousness. We have the capacity for awareness and knowledge of not only the immense extent of the external world, but of numerous internal states of being as well. In humans, consciousness has become a fourth level environment in which ideas replicate, populate and evolve.
Since the time of our most ancient societies, we’ve engaged in an exhaustive cataloguing of everything we can see, hear, taste, touch, think and feel. We must name everything, classify it, examine its functions and properties, theorize about it, reproduce it. We use our imaginative capacities to not only construct tools, structures, and modifications of the natural landscape, but to continually and incessantly re-design them. We apply our consciousness to tabulating every possible social relationship and “re-tool” those as well. We examine our emotions, our thoughts, our language and apply conscious awareness to those aspects of our selves.
At some point some humans began to become self-conscious – conscious that we are conscious. We stepped over another threshold and began to deliberately and intentionally create worlds of pure thought: mathematics, philosophy, metaphysics.
Is there something beyond the fourth level? Let’s see where this particular rabbit hole leads!
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