Homo Sapiens are biological beings; humans, on the other hand are beings of consciousness and thought. We are more than just our biology. In fact when other sentient animals evolved from the interactions of biological evolution, social evolution and cognitive evolution, they became more than their biology as well. We are all living and changing continually in multiple levels of evolutionary transformation in multiple environments.
The environments of mind are as numerous, varied and diverse as are the material environments of our earth, galaxy, and universe. Humans interacting with each other and with the biological, social, and cognitive ecosystems in which we live, have produced innumerable ways of being human in the universes of consciousness.
Rationality is one of the major components of our humanity. But so is the self-conscious engagement of imagination through art, music, poetry, math, science. Where rationality tends to use conceptual tools of linear thinking, precise construction of fixed mental categories, and logical arrangement of knowledge, imagination employs non-linear thinking, fluid categories, and variable arrangements of knowledge. Humanity happens where these two intersect and mutually engage the universes of consciousness.
Some scientists and philosophers have suggested that we actually became conscious beings long after we became human beings. Looking at the way evolution produces changes in response to environmental pressures, I tend to buy into that idea. I see Homo Sapiens as just the more obsessive compulsive end of the spectrum of the many sentient animals. We took on our capacities for cognition and consciousness as a 24-7 mania.
But when the evolution of consciousness produced self-conscious awareness of consciousness itself, we began becoming truly human. It is in the evolution of our consciousness that we are continually becoming human. And it is the dual modes of reason and creativity which are driving the ongoing evolution of our humanity.
Our human ancestors created art, music and poetry from primeval times but it was not self-conscious. They were creating but not thinking about the fact that they were creating, they were not thinking about attributing meaning to what they were creating.
At some point we became self-reflexively conscious of creating and began to create vehicles of art, music, dance, poetry, science, and mathematics for the sake of expressing truth, beauty, and greater awareness. The evolutionary processes functioning in the environment of consciousness continues to bring about myriad varying expressions of creativity in the universes of consciousness.
Just as the brain has evolved two hemispheres which observe, interpret and react to the world in different ways, so the rational and the imaginative both evolved to observe, interpret and react in the environments of consciousness. It is not just through the development and use of skills of reason that we move toward our human potential, but in also deliberately engaging and cultivating creativity that the full human experience is made possible.
So is that the limit of our evolving? Is there further to go? Where and how? Are there more dimensions in which to evolve?
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