The Questions

In a study such as this one, it’s necessary to define one’s objectives as clearly as possible. So these are the questions I want answers to. There is an element of incongruity in this, however. One of the premises of this book is that no human is capable of finding definitive answers to these questions or even of fully understanding them if he or she did.

But I have to ask anyway:

1. What is the reality in which humans find themselves, and what are its essential features? How does our perception of reality restrict our understanding of it?

2. How did consciousness come to be, what seem to be its main characteristics, and what have been the consequences of its emergence?

3. What is a human? How have humans interacted with each other? Why have humans interacted with each other in the ways that they have?

4.  How have humans attempted to understand the reality in which they find themselves, and how have they acted on what they believed to be their understanding?

5. What are the variables that have affected or are affecting human history, and in what ways do they seem to interact with each other?

6. Why has human history taken so many unexpected turns? Why have human affairs generally been in disarray? Why has it been impossible to predict the direction of human affairs? Why do humans so often find themselves overwhelmed by the world?

7.  What might the human prospect be, and what, ultimately, is our place in the Universe?

Propositions and Premises

1.    All of our propositions, including naturally all of the ones I am presently positing, are based on a point of view which is unalterably human. All of our definitions and our understanding are predicated on the anatomy and physiology  of the human nervous system and the way in which that system typically creates the experience of consciousness. (Even the term “nervous system” is in itself a  human mental construct.) Therefore, every attempt to use language to describe  our experience is inherently limited.

2.   The human frame of reference is inescapable and no examination of our condition can be anything except “subjective” (however that term may be defined). It is logically impossible for humans to stand outside human definitions, perceptions, interpretations of perceptions, or human mental constructs.The human perspective is the only one of which we are capable, and we cannot climb out of it in any way.

3.   This study, therefore, will inevitably be a victim of its own assumptions. Its  author cannot escape the limits of his own perspective, nor can any potential reader.

4.   Emergence is a fundamental quality of reality. Chaos resolves into a level of  order, which resolves into a higher level of order, and so on.

5.   Either mathematical probability or another in a series of periodic events triggered the beginning of the Universe. From the physical forces there emerged the particles out of which everything physical is composed. From physical reality chemical reality, biological reality, socio-cultural reality, and historical reality arose in turn.

6.  Humans are therefore an intrinsic part of the Universe. They are composed of the same materials out of  which other common physical bodies are composed. They are subject to all the fundamental rules of the Universe, and in fact reflect in themselves all of the Universe’s basic features.

7.   The human species evolved from the larger web of life, and all human traits ultimately have their origins in this fact.

8.  The human nervous system’s evolution, especially the evolution of the central  nervous system, is the key to understanding the way in which humans perceive the world around them.

9.  There is a free-standing “real” reality that exists outside of us and then there is the reality we perceive from our human standpoint. Humans do not perceive reality in and of itself. They perceive a version of reality through a nervous system that evolved in such a way that human survival chances were enhanced.

10.  The brain and “mind” in all probability evolved in a synergistic fashion, as  intelligence facilitated the survival of the brains that possessed it. Consciousness and all other aspects of  human perception exist only within the physical confines of the brain (although the brain may—may—be able to transmit signals to other brains by means as yet not understood).

11.  The human is a species of animal, not something apart from the broader web of living things. Humans are physical objects, subject to the laws and processes of biology, chemistry, and physics. Humans do not have bodies—they are bodies.

12.  Human reality is related to the “real” reality and, in ways perhaps forever beyond our understanding, reflects it in some way. Mathematics may be the closest we get to directly contacting this reality.

13.  Both solipsism (the idea that everything exists only in my own consciousness) and idealism (the idea that things don’t exist independently of our perception of them) are  fundamental errors, perhaps even definitions of insanity. We will assume that all humans are real and that the forest exists even when no one is watching it.

14.  Organic evolution did not have as its “goal” the creation of the human species. The evolution of humans was (from our standpoint) a fortuitous event but it was  not preordained. As Stephen Gould said, if we “rewound the tape” and started the process all over, there is no guarantee that anything like us would have come to exist.

15. Human history is the attempt to describe the story of our species, a species which has evolved in a particular way. This evolutionary process has brought  about beings with a distinct way of perceiving the universe around them. Human history is therefore the story of what humans have experienced and done within the framework of consciousness.

16.  We may therefore argue that the world the humans have made around them is nothing more or less than a reflection of the internal functions of their brains. Those functions in turn reflect the evolutionary history of the brain itself. Consciousness could therefore be thought of as an amalgam of instinctive, emotional,  and intellectual impulses and capacities, although distinct boundaries between these capacities may not exist.

17.   In relation to this, therefore, human behavior is a mixture of “primitive”   autonomic processes, need satisfaction, emotional expression, and intellectual processes, reflecting the long evolution of the animal, mammalian, primate, and hominid brains in succession, although not in a seamless or sharply  chronological manner.

18.  Human behavior is a synergetic interaction between genetic potential and life experience, an interaction that is relentless and ceaseless, in an infinitely complex shifting mosaic.

19. Human behavior, therefore, has exceedingly complex origins. The actions the human animal takes and the way the human animal perceives the world defy simple description (with the exception of instinctive self-defense or protective reactions, such as withdrawing one’s hand from a hot surface). The evolution of high-level consciousness in the human, therefore, makes him/her the most complicated thing on the planet. This complexity means that humans are capable of the widest range of possible actions and responses of any living thing, and are therefore the least predictable living thing.

20.   The human brain has not evolved to give humans complete understanding of the world around them. It has evolved, rather, to help them survive within it—a far different mission. Survival skills and knowledge are much more strongly developed than philosophical speculation.

21.  No one fully comprehends his own motives or impulses. No one completely understands why he is doing what he is doing. There are degrees of  understanding, ranging from reasonably good to totally absent.

22.  Humans enter the world at birth not only completely helpless physically but also completely without comprehension of what is happening to them, and probably  without any mental sense of being a self whatsoever. The process of growing up involves, therefore, not only physical maturation and an increasing ability to care for one’s self, but also an attempt, whether conscious or not, to make some kind of sense of the world in which the individual ego finds itself immersed.

23.   Human consciousness evolved in group settings, and it requires interaction with other humans in a culture to manifest itself. No child’s consciousness can develop  without some form of language-based interaction.

24.   Humans generally like to have an effect on the environment around them. Humans generally like the experience of having caused something to happen, at  least at first. Children quickly learn that doing certain things causes other things to occur. The adult impulse to change the world or affect history in some way may simply be an elaboration of our child-like delight in causing something to happen.

25. Human males and females evolved in order to reproduce and care for offspring. They did not evolve to understand each other’s complex and distinct way of  processing reality. The male and female outlook and perspective are equally valid   and equally part of the definition of   what it means to experience the world as a  human. There are degrees of maleness and femaleness in all humans, regardless of sex, and therefore even the terms male perspective and female perspective have to be qualified. Fundamental differences between the male and female brain that affect behavior and the general perception of the nature of the world cannot at this time be demonstrated. Cultural factors also deeply shape gender definitions.

26.  Every human who has ever lived has experienced the world in a unique way. No two human biographies are identical. We are able to relate to each other, at least  somewhat, because there are enough common experiences we share to permit a minimal level of understanding.

27.  Basic human sensations (such as the perception of red, the feeling of physical pleasure, and other somatic events) cannot be described in such a way as to be meaningful to someone who has never experienced them. They are irreducibly fundamental. I have to have actually seen a red object in order for me to understand what you say when you describe something as “red”.

28.  Language is inherently limited as a communication device. The idea of “perfect” communication is a hopeless ideal. What communication exists is based on the existence of enough experiential common ground to permit it. Language is an imprecise tool. No one means exactly the same thing by the use of a particular word as someone else, because the mental associations attached to that word in the brain of its user are unique.

29.  The awareness that death is inevitable has probably been the major driving force behind most of the world’s religions and philosophies, as well as a major force in human artistic expressions.

30.  The genus Homo has existed only for a brief period relative to the known universe’s existence—perhaps 2.5 million years out of a period of about 13,800,000,000 years, less than two-tenths of one percent of the Universe’s  existence. This was discovered only recently in the history of the genus.

31. The home of the human species is extraordinarily miniscule in the physical context of the universe, occupying a space so tiny that if the universe were reduced in size to an object the size of the earth, the earth itself in turn would be reduced to the size of a single atom. This is also a recent discovery.

32. Humans are therefore temporally and spatially insignificant. Outside of the human community, human history means absolutely nothing (so far) and has had no effect whatsoever on the larger universe. This could change as humans reach out and explore small areas of the universe (or perhaps seed the universe with self-  replicating devices).

33. Human philosophies and religions were basically all created before the   knowledge of humanity’s temporal and spatial insignificance was understood.  The fact of human insignificance is not yet widely comprehended, or even  accepted as true.

34.  There is no reliable scientific way of ascertaining whether there is a god of any  kind. There is no philosophically sound way of either conclusively proving or disproving god’s existence. Therefore, metaphysical explanations of human history will largely be absent from this study.

35.  Human memory is particularly unreliable because it did not evolve to provide a photographic account of reality. The development of information storage systems external to the human brain reflects an understanding of this limitation.

36. Human consciousness emerged before humans realized what it was (or even where it was located.) Only gradually have humans understood the significance of the anatomy and physiology of their own brains.

37. Human consciousness creates what we call human psychology, something we only dimly and incompletely understand. Humans therefore do not have a full understanding of why they do what they do or feel what they feel.

38.  The superior level of human intelligence relative to other animals accounts for the dominance of our species over all others and the spread of our species across the surface of the planet.

39. Humans have, up until relatively recently, been forced to make a living out of whatever the immediate environment provided them in ways of resources.

40. Because humans adapted to a wide variety of ecological niches, a correspondingly wide variety of ways of life emerged.

41.  Because language—the use and manipulation of symbols to represent ideas and convey descriptions of the world—emerged as a property of human consciousness (in a synergistic, self-reinforcing manner), human culture was able to emerge. Language is therefore the basis of culture. Culture may be thought of as a way of  life consisting of the material objects created by a group and the ideas, customs, traditions, beliefs, and methods of doing things the group passes from one biological generation to the next.

42.  Since many, many sounds can be used to represent the same kinds of objects and  ideas, many human languages emerged. The greater the physical isolation of  human groups from other human groups, and the less such groups linguistically interacted with others, the more unique the group’s language tended to be.

43.  Human society emerged out of the physical inadequacies of our ancestors in  relation to the environmental dangers surrounding them. The individual human was generally no match for the kind of predatory animals, harsh climatic fluctuations, challenging topographical conditions, and hard-to-extract resources of the areas in which the early humans evolved. Only by living in groups and cooperating in teams could humans make a go of it.

44.  Human morality emerged out of the need of humans to create rules by which the group could survive and flourish. There may also be some very deep biological   roots to such concepts as “fairness”. There is no need to infer a supernatural origin for moral behavior, although such an origin is not automatically ruled out.

45.  Human groups tended to develop, as a survival skill, “us versus them”  orientations to those outside of the group. The use of violence, something rooted deep in animal evolution, to ward off such outsiders or steal their means of  survival, is very ancient, very useful, and the root cause of interpersonal,  intragroup, and intergroup violence. Some violence appears to have no instrumental purpose at all, and is merely the expression of disturbed mentalities.

46.  The use of tools—objects from outside of the human body used to accomplish work—was absolutely essential to the survival and flourishing of human groups. Tool making encouraged, in a reciprocating manner, dexterity, eye-hand  coordination, abstract conceptualization, and other physical-mental skills. Those  who had the best brains made the best tools. Tool use facilitated survival, which in turn gave a genetic advantage to those who made them. Even better brains produced even better tools, and so on. Therefore, human tool making and human evolution affected each other in a synergistic way.

47.  Because humans, like all other animals, can physically suffer, the threat of such suffering has always been an effective tool of social control. No rational  individual wants to be injured or suffer physical pain, and the knowledge of just how bad such experiences really are allows those who control the means of       violence and social authority to rule over others. Fear is a very ancient tool of  human interaction, rooted in the very animal natures of humans themselves.

48.  Human sexuality has been a key variable in the unfolding of human history, as  has human violence. The distance between the two is not as great as many people might imagine. Human sexual expression has covered the entire range of physical possibility, and a human’s sexual nature is a key element of his or her basic self.

49.  Human beings as a group consistently overestimate their own understanding of the world and their understanding of themselves. The human brain is not evolved to either fully comprehend reality or to completely grasp the nature of the self and consciousness. This is because the human brain is a jerry-rigged, haphazardly  evolved structure that developed as it did because it was useful from a  survival/reproductive standpoint.

50.  The human world reflects our lack of understanding. Human history has careened  forward in totally unexpected ways. They are unexpected because the human  species, as a group, does not understand what is happening to it at any given moment. There are simply too many variables operating at any given time for  such an understanding to be even remotely possible. Human history is also affected by mathematical randomness and quantum uncertainty. It may not even be possible to predict anything about the future direction of human life.

51.  Human social interaction and social relationships are fraught with difficulties because of the inadequacies of human communication, the existential loneliness of the human being, and the fathomless vagaries of human psychology, itself the product of our haphazardly evolved brains.

52. Life and reality are ruled by a set of interrelated processes, most of which are  usually hidden to human perception.

53. As a result of our convoluted history and fundamental ignorance, the vast  majority of humans have lived lives that by contemporary standards in the Western world would be considered abysmal and miserable.

54.  The vast majority of human beings believe there is a supernatural plane of reality,  a belief which is deeply rooted in the evolutionary processes by which their brains evolved. These beliefs are massively shaped by cultural inheritances as well.

           

55.  As a result of variations in human brains and individual human life experiences,  there is no action, no matter how debased or atrocious, that has not been taken by at least someone, somewhere, at some time.

56.  The average life is spent in the carrying out of routine tasks.

57.  The average life is undramatic and ordinary. The day to day life of the human species has probably always been this way.

58.  Many humans are certain that they know the truth of any given matter, when in all probability this is not the case.

59. The arts are rooted in the human attempt to explain, interpret, react to, and/or express the reality humans perceive.

60. The sciences are rooted in the human attempt to explain the rules and nature of reality by use of methods which strive as much as possible to eliminate all elements of  “subjectivity”, even though the sciences still operate within the limits of human perspective.

61. The world probably does not exist for our benefit. But who knows?

How It Looks to Us: the Human Frame of Reference

I.

It has been fairly well established that humans do not perceive what has been called the “actual, free-standing reality.” It would appear that all non-deductive human knowledge of the world is mediated through the senses, which present to the brain a version of that reality, something perhaps linked to it, but not the essence of it.  Humans literally cannot directly experience this “real” reality, what Immanuel Kant called “The World in Itself”.  If a human were to be plunged into this “real” reality, we must suppose he or she would have no way of comprehending it or describing it to anyone else, since the human would have no basis whatsoever from which  to do so. Such a basis could only be grounded in what philosophers call absolute perspective, which can only be possessed by a fully transcendent being. This means that humans face a paradox from which they cannot escape. It is logically impossible for them to view reality from a non-human, transcendent vantage point. They cannot perceive as a human and a non-human simultaneously.

Humans can only perceive and describe reality within certain carefully bounded limits. There are, obviously, many physical limitations humans have, but here I am referring chiefly to how human consciousness processes the stimuli provided by the senses. The human nervous system seems to have evolved in such a way so as to sort out sensory input and arrange it in a form which facilitates our survival. The senses convert different kinds of energies coming into (or from within) the body into electrochemical signals that the brain uses to interpret these energies, converting them from raw sensation into the objects of conscious awareness, thus giving us a picture of reality that is comprehensible. (See Perception.) The brain which processes and reacts to these signals appears to have evolved in a slap-dash, haphazard fashion, with many ancient functions conserved across both time and species. Within its processes, there is plenty of room for error or breakdown, and the deep nature of its functioning is not yet fully understood.  

The brain’s higher functions—ratiocination, language processing, abstraction, imagination, memory—appear to be vulnerable to physical limitations inherent in the brain’s anatomy and physiology and subject to errors caused by physical deterioration due to illness, injury, or age. Further, the brain’s intellectual functions seem to be inextricably bound to its emotional functions and expressions, which can manifest themselves in a very great number of ways. Therefore, the brain cannot be thought of as an infallible recorder of the external world.

The human attempt to understand all of this takes place, of course, within the confines of the physical brain itself. There is no empirical support for the proposition that mind can exist outside of the brain, although it is not logically impossible that it might. The brain must use its own resources to understand its own functioning. A deep paradox exists here: the very complexity that gives rise to intelligence makes the analysis of that intelligence an almost insuperably difficult task. As one neurologist put it, if the brain were simple to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.

 There are many epistemological issues as well. How do we know what we know? How do we verify what we know? What is knowledge itself? Can humans have sufficient confirmatory evidence to support our contentions of validity? Perhaps we will have to settle for consistency as the chief test of our link to reality and surrender the quest for a certitude that may be unattainable.

So we must question the ability of humans to even engage in the kind of examination that I am proposing. In a sense, all such examinations of the human condition and the context in which human history has emerged are inherently, perhaps even fatally, limited and flawed. How can we put human history into the context of a reality that we cannot truly perceive? And in regard to what we believe we can perceive, we face other barriers, as well. Advanced types of communication (that is, those which rise above the level of mere gestures or simple signals) are dependent on language, which in turn is an imprecise tool (as I will stress repeatedly). So one can readily see the dilemma we face. Is language sufficient to discuss the limitations of language? If we perceive only a version of reality, how can we, with any coherence, discuss reality itself? We are trapped in the prison of human consciousness. We cannot imagine any other way of seeing the world because even the terms in which we try to imagine another viewpoint are grounded completely in our own frame of reference. It could be argued that even I don’t completely understand what I mean by what I am saying, and that you don’t either. It’s as if we are in an intellectual hall of mirrors, a world of psychological self-recursion, where we find ourselves looking at ourselves looking at ourselves. Even at the very moment that you are reading this you might realize that you are reading about reading about reading…

We read that our understanding is imperfect, and because of our imperfect understanding we cannot fully realize it, thus illustrating the very principle we fail to grasp. It’s as if the best we can do when trying to convey our thoughts and impressions is to achieve an approximation of communication, with the hope that there is enough of a coincidence between our views, our experiences, and our understanding of language that some sort of communication might be effected. (And as a matter of principle, it would appear that the more abstract our words, the more imprecision of communication there will be.)

II.

There are, naturally, perceptual similarities between humans and other animals, and these similarities are more pronounced in species which are evolutionarily closer to us. We may assume, for example, that other higher primates (such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans) have very similar sensory apparatuses. We share with them visual traits such as color perception, depth perception, and highly developed maculae. We share with them weak senses of smell. We tend to have highly sensitive hands. (This is why an understanding of the phylogenetic tree of life is so crucial—it is the basis for our assessment of our own capabilities, similarities, and dissimilarities relative to every other living thing.) Extending this, we may argue that we share many experiential similarities with all mammals. (At some point, of course, we may ask if the members of other classes have a sense of their own existence, and it seems likely to me that the simpler a thing’s brain is, the less that thing would be “aware” of its own existence, however the term aware might be defined.) Human consciousness, of course, provides us with a unique vantage point. Many other animals certainly have the capacity to learn and imitate complex behavioral patterns, use tools, teach their offspring vital skills, and even perhaps communicate in symbols (such as cetacean sounds). But it is not the uniqueness of our mental capacities, but rather the degree to which they have been developed that sets us apart. Natural selection operated with its typical ruthlessness to give our immediate ancestors brains more capable of assessing a situation and acting appropriately in it, and storing useful information in our working memory, than any other species we know of.

But we shouldn’t be fooled by our comparatively immense gifts. The human brain is both liberating and confining. Our experiences are the sum total of our sensory input and the way those inputs are interpreted, and the particular evolution of the human brain facilitates our survival and reproductive success; it does not give us infallible powers of assessment  and comprehension. Evolution has produced different capabilities in different animals, ones that we cannot truly imagine. Moreover, the different neural structures of other animals (even though many specific brain structures are conserved across species) probably create distinctive frames of reference.

For instance, no human can, by definition, know what it would be like to hear the high audio tones perceptible to dogs. Humans do not really understand the mental world created by the echolocation of bats, which may be as “real” as the visual world created by our eyes. (Some blind humans may have a version of this ability, however.) Humans cannot imagine what it would be like to experience the perception of infrared, as certain insect species can. Our perceptions and the neural structures that underlie them produce a frame of reference that is both unique and strictly limited. Humans can guess what it would be like to perceive the world as a dog, an ant, or a bat, but all of their guesses and suppositions could only be understood in human terms, an endless loop. (And if we have difficulty imagining the experience of being a dog, how much more difficult would it be for us to imagine the perspective of an omniscient being!)

III.

We are therefore confined to a limited, mediated, human-centered version of reality. We are linked to the “real” reality, but we do not apprehend that reality directly. Knowledge of the reality in which we find ourselves can be obtained in only two verifiable ways. The first is through the senses, the basis of empiricism.  Even in the empirical realm, however, we can not be certain that we perceive what others perceive. The knowledge our senses gather does not appear to be infallible in all cases, nor does it seem that the senses of all humans are identical. It would appear that there are differences in degree in all sense perceptions. Additionally, as I have noted, there seem to be energies that humans are not capable of perceiving directly, such as the ends of the light spectrum or the lowest or highest megacycles of sound. Since there appear to be realities humans cannot perceive or experience, it would therefore seem that human perception is subjective (that is to say, not absolute).

The second way we can obtain knowledge of our reality in a verifiable way is through deductive reasoning, the basis of mathematics. Mathematics may be something that is discovered by human reason, or it may be a construct and creation of human reason. By its very processes, it may be the closest we come to a direct connection with that which is ultimately real, but we will examine that question in more detail elsewhere. (See Is Mathematics the Real Reality?)

Knowledge claimed to exist through revelation, the basis of much of religious belief,  cannot be independently verified, but it still may be veridical.  By its very nature, revelation is not testable—it cannot be repeated and observed in the manner of a replicable experiment, nor can it be expressed as an equation. And as we move from the testable realm of physical objects and their interrelationships, or the realm of mathematical proofs, the degree of certainty we can have declines correspondingly. And it is the lack of certainty that governs the human world in many ways, however humans may wish to believe otherwise.

The human frame of reference is therefore a deeply confining one, filled with self-contradictions. Humans must use language to show that language is insufficient to the description of reality. They must imagine the existence and nature of an absolute perspective they cannot imagine. They must describe their own subjective perceptions using subjective perceptions. They must use their brains to figure out their brains. They must discuss their lack of certainty using uncertain means.

So in our examination of the world, we are confronted with an inescapable reality: everything that we look at can be explained only by such phrases as, “the way we see it” or, “according to human perception” or, “as it looks to us” or, “as it seems to us.”

There is no other way for us to proceed.

A Species Lost in Both Space and Time

I.

It’s difficult to find the exact boundary between the Australopithecines, the genus of upright animals thought to be ancestral to the genus Homo, and the first true humans. But if we assume something like Homo habilis is the first truly distinct member of our genus, we must try to picture the life of these earliest humans on the African savanna some 2 million to 2.5 million years ago. How dauntingly huge the world must have seemed to them! Probably moving in nomadic groups, the earliest of our kind gathered food from an environment over which protracted walking was required. Who knows the true range of their wanderings? They trudged across the surface of their apparently huge home at ordinary walking speed, perhaps 3-4 miles per hour. (Even running as fast as they could, were they able to reach anything like sapiens running speeds, perhaps 27-28 miles per hour in short bursts?) Their world must have appeared to be endless, if the exertion required to traverse its surface was any indication. (Of course, if they possessed any concept of the totality of the world, they probably saw the area of their own migration as its full extent.) A more advanced type of human (either a descendant of habilis, or an entirely independent offshoot from a common ancestor, depending on the hypothesis accepted) known as erectus, began the human diaspora out of Africa, perhaps as early as 1.5 million years ago. (It is now thought that erectus did not survive as a going concern in Asia, and that a later African sapiens group became the progenitors of modern humanity.) Their migration may simply have been a matter of moving base camp a few hundred or a few thousand feet a year, depending on the circumstances, or it may have been a migration punctuated by long journeys stimulated by desperation or unusual conditions. (See The Diaspora of Consciousness.) But whatever the actual timetable of a particular group’s journey, the expansion ultimately took on a truly epic nature. Think of what physical barriers these travelers must have encountered. We have no written record of their experiences, but their travels must have been characterized by long periods of dull, seemingly endless plodding punctuated by huge challenges and harrowing dangers. And these dangers were not being met by humans of great size and tremendous strength. The height of the average member of the genus Homo, as we will examine in greater detail elsewhere, has averaged somewhere around five feet (about 1.5 meters), with males generally taller than females. A small mountain of 300-400 meters in height would be formidable to such a being; a mountain in the Alps would be huge; and a mountain in the Himalayas would seem unspeakably gigantic. Our ancestors roaming the eastern hemisphere encountered such giants, and surely must have felt dwarfed by them.

In these encounters with the world, undoubtedly many travelers lost their lives along the way. And among the survivors, an idea was deeply impressed upon their consciousnesses: the world is enormous.

As Homo sapiens evolved, spread, and founded a wide variety of new cultures, each group undoubtedly had its own conception of the world’s extent, again, a conception generally limited to the area in which their tribal hunter-gatherer group roamed. Once  permanent settlements became more common than they had been in the pre-agricultural world, and literacy became commonplace, humans (or at least that minority which was educated) began to gain some understanding of the actual geography of the region where their group lived. Until recent centuries, such knowledge was sketchy and speculative at best. When humans began venturing out on epic sea journeys, from the Phoenicians in the early 12th century BCE to the Chinese and Western Europeans beginning in the fifteenth century CE, the sense of the Earth’s hugeness was reinforced, as was the impression of the difficulty in crossing the Earth’s surface. (It was not unusual, for example, for a pilgrimage from the German states to Jerusalem to take the better part of a year, owing to a variety of difficulties.)

Regarding the size of the Universe, the height of the heavens themselves, our ancestors had no real conception. In early Mesopotamia, those who stood at the top of ziggurats were thought to be appreciably closer to the stars. Archimedes, perhaps the most brilliant mind of the Greco-Roman Classical era, calculated that the Universe was, in our terms, about 12 trillion miles in diameter—what we would call 2 light years. And with the notable exception of Aristarchus of Samos, most educated people believed that the cosmos rotated around us. Aristotle built his cosmology on this assumption. The great astronomer Ptolemy deeply influenced both the Hellenistic Greek world and later the educated Arabic-speaking world through his epic work, and both official Christianity and Islam assumed its absolute accuracy.

But there were observations that troubled many adherents of geocentrism. The orbits of planets, particularly Mars, seemed “eccentric”. A weird, elaborate system of “epicycles” was invented to try to clear up the growing numbers of observations that could not be made to fit into an Earth-centered Universe.

Beginning with the work of Copernicus in the 16th century CE, the picture of a geocentric cosmos began to be superseded by a new conception of the heavens. As astronomers began to broaden the scope of their investigations in the centuries that followed, facilitated by new and more powerful technologies, the size of the physical Universe seemed to “grow”.

In the last century or so a revolution has taken place in the human understanding of our planet’s physical relationship to the Universe. Between 1917 and 1932 the most massive expansion of our conception of the Universe’s size that has yet taken place occurred. With the discovery during this period that the Universe was expanding, that it contained enormous numbers of other galaxies, and was very, very old (from the human perspective), all of our previous conceptions of the cosmic order were systematically overthrown. And with the overthrow of our conceptions of the Universe came another, unexpected result, one which many people have yet to confront: the overthrow of the centrality of the human race in physical reality. This development is momentous, perhaps as momentous as anything humans have ever discovered about the world, and yet its full impact has yet to be felt.

II.

Our small size in relation to the Earth turned out to be deceptive; it didn’t give us a picture of our world’s true place. In the larger context of the physical universe, the Earth is almost unimaginably miniscule.

We can begin by considering the Earth in relation to objects in our own solar system. The Earth, large as it is to us, is tiny compared to Jupiter, which has a volume more than 1,300 times that of our planet. (The perpetual storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere, the Great Red Spot, is in itself three times the surface area of the Earth.) The size of our neighborhood star, the Sun, is even more overwhelming. The Sun, some 864,000 miles in diameter could hold our entire planet over 1,300,000 times. A single arc of gas erupting from the Sun’s surface would utterly engulf our planet were it within range of us. The diameter of the planetary orbits in the Solar System our Sun rules over (counting the dwarf planet Pluto) is more than 7.5 billion miles as compared to around 7,900 miles for our little world—a ratio of more than 949,000:1.  But that’s just the start of the measure of our cosmic insignificance.

The Sun is merely a star of average size. There are, not terribly far from us in the Galaxy (relatively speaking), many stars of such immensity that they dwarf our Sun. Alnilam is 27,000,000 miles in diameter, capable of holding our Sun 30,500 times and the Earth almost 39.7 billion times. Menkar, a red giant, is 48,000,000 miles in diameter, more than 170,000 times the volume of our Sun and 221 billion times the volume of the Earth. Betelgeuse, a dying supergiant, is 433,000,000 miles in diameter, some 125 million times the volume of our Sun and more than 1.6 trillion times the volume of the Earth. And VY Canis Majoris, the largest star in the Milky Way, has a diameter that on the low end is estimated at 1,600,000,000 miles, making it more than 6.3 billion times more voluminous than the Sun and 8.3 quadrillion (8.3 x 10^15) times the volume of the Earth.

Astronomical distances and dimensions are so gigantic that they are usually measured in light years (or parsecs, which are about 3.26 light years). A light year is the distance light, the fastest known thing, travels in a vacuum in one Earth year—a distance of 5,878,499,810,000 miles. The Milky Way Galaxy, in which our Sun is so ordinary, measures anywhere from 100,000 to 120,000 light years in diameter. Therefore, the Milky Way is (to be on the low end of the estimate) 100,000 x 5.878499 trillion miles across—about 588 quadrillion miles. This is more than 74 trillion (7.4 x 10¹³) times the diameter of the Earth. The galaxy contains anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars, depending on the number of dwarf stars that may exist. (Incidentally, astronomers locate our solar system in a partial spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy known as the Orion Spur. We are 26,000-30,000 light years from the galaxy’s center). On such a scale, our planet’s size is already  negligible. But the picture gets worse.

It was not understood until the 1920s, through the brilliant work of Edwin Hubble, that the Milky Way Galaxy was far from being the only one in existence. Since Hubble’s time, we have vastly improved our observational tools, including the orbiting of space telescopes (the first one named in Hubble’s honor, fittingly enough). And the story they tell humbles us even more. There are whole clusters and walls of galaxies, all held together by gravity. NASA recently estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies, and emphasized that infrared cameras, radio telescopes, and x-ray cameras might greatly increase the estimate. Most estimates run from 100 billion to 200 billion total galaxies

The distances between us and the closest full-fledged galaxies are staggering. One of the nearest galaxies, the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, is 75,000 light years away. This means a beam of light that started traveling from our galaxy at a speed of 676,000,000 miles per hour 75,000 years ago, before any humans were in the Americas, is just arriving at Sagittarius now. The Small Magellanic Cloud, another “close” neighbor, is 210,000 light-years away. A beam of light that started from our galaxy to the SMC at about the time that modern Homo sapiens were first evolving is just arriving there now. And the nearest spiral galaxy to us, Andromeda, is so far away that a beam of light that left our galaxy when humans were no more than a handful of Homo habilis types living in eastern Africa 2,000,000 years ago, is just arriving there now.

Other galaxies are not just tremendously distant. Some of the galaxies in our Universe are mind-bogglingly huge as well. In 1990, Science News announced the following:

By carefully recording the faint light surrounding a bright galaxy at the center of a dense cluster, a team of astronomers has uncovered evidence for perhaps the largest and most luminous galaxy known. This gigantic agglomeration of stars, which sits at the center of a rich galaxy cluster called Abell 2029, extends 6 million light-years in diameter (more than 60 times the width of the Milky Way) and emits more than a quarter of all the light produced by the entire cluster.

Such an object has a diameter 4.7 billion times the diameter of our Solar System’s planetary orbits. This would be as if our solar system were eight one-hundredths of an inch across and the giant galaxy in question were roughly the diameter of North America from the Arctic Circle to Colombia. By my calculations, this enormous galaxy in Abell 2029, if seen as a circle, would be more than 22 quintillion (2.2 x 10^19) times the area of a circle represented by our solar system.

And when the Earth is finally compared to the entire physical Universe, the human species all but vanishes completely. The Earth’s diameter of about 7,900 miles must be compared to the estimated 156 billion light years diameter of the Universe. (We should recall that space can expand faster than the speed of light.) The number of miles represented by a light year, multiplied by 156,000,000,000 yields a staggering result: the estimated Universe is, compared to the Earth’s diameter of 7,900 miles, more than 116 quintillion, or to be precise, 116,071,898,734,177,215,190 (1.16071898734177215190 x 10^20) times larger in diameter.

Atoms range in size from 1 x 10^-10 to 5 x 10^-10 of a meter in diameter. The Earth is 1.2742 x 10^7 meters in diameter. Therefore, the Earth is about 127.42 quadrillion times (1.2742 x 10^17) the diameter of the smallest atom. In other words, the Earth is smaller in relationship to the Universe than the smallest atom is in relation to the Earth by a factor of about 1,000.


III.

The creation myth believed until recently by most humans in the Western world seemed to posit a Universe no more than a few thousand years old. Interpreters of the Book of Genesis, for example, have often come up with a figure of 6,000 years for the age of the cosmos, with humans appearing within the first week of the Universe’s existence. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists generally agree with this assessment.

In Tales from the Kojiki, the Japanese creation story, the age of the Universe is said to be at least “millions and millions” of years, although the ancient Japanese had nothing but supposition on which to rest this estimate. In Chinese mythology, one source puts the age of the Universe at 18,000 years. Hindu cosmologists speak in terms of enormous time periods. One Hindu belief asserts that the Universe is more than 314 trillion years old, for example. But all of the enormous time periods postulated in Hinduism are specifically linked to the age of the various manifestations of God, and in all Hindu hypotheses about the creation of the Universe, humans are present right from the start. We must assume, additionally, that the Hindu estimates, like those of the Japanese, are based on supposition and imagination, and not on any empirically-based observations.

All cultures have creation myths, but they seem to share one common theme: humans are of greater or lesser importance in them, but the act of creation by the gods or God or the infinite has as one of its central purposes, if not the central purpose, the creation of humans, and humans appear either immediately at the beginning of the Universe or not terribly long after it comes into being. All creation myths share another commonality, as well: they have all been shredded to pieces and superseded by the discoveries of modern science.

Recent findings from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) space project indicate a universe 13,700,000,000 years old. The earliest member of the genus Homo, Homo habilis, is thought to have emerged no earlier than 2,500,000 years ago. Even with the discovery of a find called Toumaï' (not a member of Homo) in Chad, we can say that the hominid line emerged no earlier than 7,000,000 years ago. Therefore, the genus Homo has occupied approximately less than two one-hundredths of one per cent of the total existence of the Universe (more precisely about .01825% of the Universe’s age). To use a slight variation on how Carl Sagan once put it, if the entire age of the Universe could be reduced to one year, the genus Homo did not emerge until around 10:30 pm on 31 December. (See the section of this work entitled, The Emergence of Human Consciousness: A Chronology.) In this scale, the oldest member of sapiens, perhaps 200,000 years old, emerged at about 11:52 pm on that fateful last day. The earliest agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, about 11,000 years before the present, began about 25 seconds ago, the earliest written records, about 5,000 years old, emerged about 11 seconds ago, and all of human history since the year 1500 has, in this Universe shrunken temporally to one year, taken place over the last 1.15 seconds. The life span of a centenarian on this scale is reduced, therefore, to about one-fifth of a second. The life span of a person of typical life expectancy in the advanced countries would be about one-seventh of a second.

Some people might prefer to think of these issues by picturing an enormous timeline. So let’s consider this. Let’s say you have a timeline that stretches out 1,000,000 meters in length—1000 kilometers, or about 621.3 miles. Each year since the Big Bang would be about 0.07299 millimeters on such a scale. On this scale, we would have to travel 664,293 meters—-almost two-thirds of the total length of the line—-to reach the beginning of the Earth. We would have to travel almost 999,818 meters on that timeline to reach the first member of the genus Homo. We would have to travel 999,985 meters to reach the first sapiens, 999,999.2 meters to reach the earliest civilization, and 999,999.6 meters to reach the earliest writing. The last 500 years of human history would take up about the last 36.495 millimeters of the timeline, more than 999,999.96 meters from the start, the lifetime of a centenarian would be 7.299 millimeters from the end of our one million meter line, and the lifespan of a typical human in the advanced nations (about 75 years) would take us less than 5.5 millimeters from the end of a line 1,000,000 meters in length.

We are an amazingly recent occurrence in this iteration of the Universe. Even in comparison to the Earth, a mere 4.6 billion years in age, we are insignificant. Imagine if the Earth were a sentient, conscious being. Further imagine that it had the powers of observation and evaluation. Can you imagine how fleeting the life of a seventy year old person would be to such a being, a being almost 66,000,000 times older? It would be as if our 70 year-old simply evanesced out of nowhere and disappeared almost instantaneously. The rhythms of the Earth are unimaginably slow in comparison to the frantic pace of our lives. The Earth’s memory would include geologic eras measured in tens or hundreds of millions of years. It would contain the earliest glimmerings of life, the upheavals and splitting apart of whole continents, the births, lives, and deaths of countless entire species. The recession of the last ice age, some 14,000 years ago, would be a recent memory, comparatively speaking, to such a being. It would be the equivalent of a memory our 70 year-old would have of something that happened 45 minutes ago!

We are newborns; we are very, very young children of space-time and energy-matter. We were not created at the start; we were not created near the start; we weren’t even created near the middle. We are the latecomers. It took eons of time to produce us, and our reign on this tiny world has been vanishingly brief. We have only just begun our journey, and there is no guarantee that it will last much longer than it already has.

IV.

So what does this all mean? It means that all human-centered views of the Universe are nonsense, utterly indefensible on every level. It means that our myths were simply quaint efforts to explain reality, based on the superstitions and limited observations of the ancient world. These myths perhaps possess some literary or historical value, but they possess no scientific value whatsoever. Our utter physical and temporal insignificance call into question all anthropocentric views of the Universe’s origin and various physical features. To contend that the Universe was created for the benefit of a set of beings who occupy a world as ludicrously small as ours, is to stretch credulity to the breaking point. We thought we were the center of creation. We’re not. We thought the object of the Universe’s existence was to produce us. In all probability, it wasn’t. Perhaps, in an unspoken way, we thought if our world disappeared it would matter to the Universe, or at least be noticed. It wouldn’t. Most humans, even though they know that the Earth is very small and that humanity is very young, still tend to embrace some variation of the view that everything was made for us. It is time, in my humble opinion, for us to disabuse ourselves of this notion. The individual human life is virtually nothing in the scale and age of the Universe in which it evolved. This is a hard truth from which we can no longer turn, and it carries implications that must be confronted if any kind of human dignity and worth are to be salvaged from the wreckage of our broken dreams and shattered mythologies.

The Search: The Existential Dilemma of the Human Being, Sections I.-III.

I.

In the face of reality’s complexity, especially the complexity represented by the existence of other people, there are certain essential questions which I believe that all humans confront (if they live long enough and are mentally lucid) whether they realize it or not. Taken together, the search for answers to these questions forms what I call the existential dilemma of the human being. These are the questions which must be answered if a human wants to make sense of the world and survive within it. This dilemma may not be consciously articulated, but I am convinced that it is at least felt, and is perhaps the source of the vague unease many humans feel at odd times in their lives. I am convinced that many humans embrace religious convictions because religion seems to end this search. Other humans seek resolution of these issues from sources outside of religion, chiefly philosophy. And many people come to believe that there are no definitive answers to any of these questions. (That lack of answers carries its own consequences, as we will see.)

In my opinion, the major existential questions humans want answers to are the following::

1.   What am I?
2.   Who am I?
3.   What is the world and how did it come to be?
4.   Why do humans exist?
5.   What is my place in the world?
6.   How should I live my life?
7.   Can I know myself?
8.   Can I know others?
9.   Can others know me?
10. Who can I trust, and to what degree?
11. How can I protect myself and my loved ones from the world?
12. Is there a larger purpose to life than mere survival, and if so, what is it?
13. What is right and what is wrong?
14. What is true and what is false?
15. Why is there suffering?
16. Why do evil and injustice exist?
17. Is life worth living?
18. Is there such a thing as meaning, and if so, is it discoverable?
19. What happens when people die?

Naturally, most people don’t consciously dwell on such matters very often, if at all. For the vast majority of us the demands of everyday life are such that there is very little mental or physical energy left for such “idle speculation”. And yet, I suspect that these are the questions, even if unspoken or not contemplated, around which humans build their lives and about which they are most concerned. In my view, whether they know it or not, I believe most humans both want and need answers to these questions, ones that will help them reject a conclusion that for most people is utterly intolerable, namely, that existence is absurd and nothing ultimately means anything—including our own lives.

II.

Upon birth, we must suppose that an infant faces a physical reality which is totally incomprehensible to him or her. Instinctive reactions, born of evolution’s long history, govern a baby’s behavior. As the neurons of the brain interweave themselves and make connections (while pruning back others), the earliest self-awareness an infant/toddler has begins to emerge. An “I” is beginning to take shape, the sense of being an object differentiated from other objects, a feeling of being connected by the senses to the outside world. So the initial existential question we face is, in my view, What am I? Children tend to quickly learn some variation of an answer to this question: I am a baby, I am baby boy or baby girl, I am something which belongs to mommy or daddy, I am someone who has needs. Young children just learning to speak are often excited to see other very young children, and will often exclaim, “Baby!”, upon seeing them. This recognition of others is a crucial part of personality formation and categorization. There are big people; there are little people. The earliest memories, usually from around the age of 3, indicate (in my view) a stage in the development of the self, and a new step toward defining the “What am I” question. All throughout life, as roles are acquired and membership in various groups is understood, and assimilated into a person’s consciousness, the answers to What am I grow increasingly elaborate and complex. All sorts of categories now seem applicable: member of a family, member of a neighborhood, member of a school, member of a town, member of a nation, and so on. The answers to the question “What am I” form crucial aspects of an individual’s identity. By identity, I mean the association of the “I”, the self, with various definitions which seem to be congruent with experience. “What am I” continues to be asked (either consciously or unconsciously) all through life. Answers can include, “a child”, “a teenager”, “an adult”, “an employee”, “an old person”, and, if there is sufficient lucidity near the end of one’s life, “a dying person”. In a sense, What am I is the ultimate, primal, permanent question of life, one that follows us from birth all the way to the moment of death.

Who am I? is a variation on What am I?. The various definitions associated with the self, combined with an individual’s unique experiences and genetic predispositions, form a biographical narrative in a human brain (assuming the person in question is of adequate intelligence). This narrative is strengthened by the possession of a name, a ready identifier which becomes indelibly linked to us. We say, in various ways, “I am [name]. I have a story that is mine alone. I have my own set of characteristics and ways of seeing the world. No one else is me. I live inside of myself, and I know my story better than anyone. Things have happened to me. I have done things. I have thought and felt things. I will be me for the rest of my life.” An individual human might change the definition of Who am I several times over a lifetime. And some people never quite get a handle on it. The answers to the question, Who am I can be vague, somewhat shapeless, indefinite, and malleable, as a human’s life unfolds and follows often unexpected paths. Answers to this fundamental existential question can change under the pressures of new circumstances, dramatic personal events (especially crises), and new, age-related perspectives.

As a person more and more coherently defines himself or herself as a kind of living being existing in a definite kind of world, questions tend to arise about the nature of that world and how humans came to be in it. The overwhelming majority of humans are taught answers to these questions by the adults in their culture, adults who have absorbed cultural traditions that are centuries or even millennia old. The dominant mythology of a given society is usually learned at a young age, and it can be remarkably difficult to dislodge from a person’s consciousness. The root of this difficulty, many times, is the fact that this mythology has been imparted by respected and beloved elders. Further, this mythology is generally learned when the brain is at or near its peak ability to learn. Mythology is also tenacious because of its strong emotional components, especially ones which exalt the group of which a child is a part. Cognitive dissonance can occur when cherished mythology is exposed to empirically-based scrutiny, and the mythology’s contradictions, illogical aspects, and general explanatory flaws are exposed.

The questions of what the world is, how it came to be, and how humans came to be form the core of a human’s mental picture of himself in relation to the Universe, and his relationship to a hypothesized Divine Creator (or creative force) who is ultimately believed to be responsible for bringing that Universe, and by extension the human himself, into existence. The answers embraced by a human to this set of questions tell us, in many ways, a person’s opinion of herself and the others with whom she lives. Many humans prefer answers to these questions that tend to reaffirm their sense of being important in the scheme of things. It is this comforting belief in human centrality that is most brutally challenged by the facts of our utter spatial and temporal insignificance.

III.

When a human asks, What is my place in the world?, he or she is quite possibly asking one of several things, or perhaps several things in combination. The person may be asking, “What is my rank or social standing compared to others?” This is a question of great importance, especially if a human comes to believe that his or her rank or social standing is unchangeable. A person born into a “low status” family may come to develop a fatalistic view of human life and human opportunity, seeing himself as doomed to a life of menial labor and hardship. A person born into a “high status” family may come to develop a sense of entitlement and a feeling of superiority over those who are “lesser” than she. In a sense, when we ask about our social rank we are asking, “How important and powerful am I compared to other people?” (In societies with some degree of social mobility, the desire of many to be more important and more powerful can have major consequences.) What is my place in the world, therefore, is in one way an inquiry into the possibilities of one’s life

Another answer to What is my place in the world ? can be a human’s belief about what he or she should do for a living or contribute generally to society. In other words, it’s really the question, “What should I do?” Some people come to see themselves as possessors of greatness, those tagged by “Fate” to do memorable things and accumulate great wealth. For others, “What should I do” is a question they never really answer completely, drifting through the years with no definite course. And for most, “What should I do” is answered by accepting the advice, norms, training, education, and sometimes compulsion offered or imposed by others. Many people are never given any choice at all, and do only that which others choose for them.

Finally, What is my place in the world? can be a more abstract question related to other existential questions about the meanings of life and existence. A person may also be asking, “Where do I fit in the history of the world? How did I come to be in this situation at this place and time?” The answers a person gives to these variations of the basic question are heavily dependent on his or her level of learning and the cultural narratives he or she has been raised with.

How should I live my life? involves not just questions of social standing, but also an individual’s value system and personal philosophy. The most fundamental answer is, “through right living”, but the definition of right living can vary greatly from person to person. Is right living the steady and monomaniacal accumulation of power over others, the constant seeking of advantage, and the immediate gratification of all desires, regardless of the consequences to others? Right living to other people means a code of behavior to be followed, a disciplined way life, one replete with rules of conduct toward others, a life of duties and obligations. To others right living implies an effort to experience all that can be experienced while respecting the rights of others to engage in the same pursuit. There are myriad ways right living can be understood, therefore. Moreover, the definitions of right living may not have clear-cut boundaries, can shift dramatically, and can be improvised throughout a person’s life in the absence of an elaborately thought-out value system. In many ways, human history has been affected by the clash of answers to the question, “How should I live?” Many are not content to decide this for themselves—they seek to impose their answers on others out of the conviction that they, and they alone, know the proper course.

The Search: The Existential Dilemma of the Human Being, Sections IV.-VI.

IV.      

In the face of our  isolation within the physical Universe, we take comfort, perhaps, in the idea that we on this tiny planet at least have each other. But as we struggle to make ourselves understood, as we wrestle with our own natures, and as we struggle to understand others, we may find ourselves increasingly unsure of the degree to which we actually do have each other. We therefore ask the following urgent questions: Can I know myself? Can I know others? Can others know me? The answers are ones we usually don’t want to accept.

It takes many years for the typical human to understand, both emotionally and intellectually, that he or she sees the world in a way unlike that of any other human. When we are children, we simply assume, I believe, that everyone sees what we see and feels what we feel. (It could be said that when we are very young children we are so absorbed in our own reaction to the world that we simply don’t care what anyone else feels.)  The different reactions of people to the events of life are puzzling when we are young, even disturbing to us. How can you feel that way? How can you not agree with me?

But as we get older, we usually find the nature of our interactions growing more complex. More and more subtle misunderstandings arise. Other people often confuse us or anger us with their seemingly inexplicable behaviors. A conclusion usually becomes more and more inescapable to us: no one can possibly know the interior mental world of another human being, and, by inference, no other human can really know ours. Of course, from our youngest moments, most of us have been spoken to and immersed in the ocean of a particular language. We have been taught to communicate with others using this medium in the hope that we could convey our internal experience to others. But the inadequacies of language—its ambiguity, its imprecision, its frequently abstract nature, its infinite shades of meaning—impede our ability to convey meaning to each other. Gradually, if we force ourselves to look at it honestly, we come to realize that no one will ever truly understand 100% of what we mean. We come to realize that even we don’t always know what we mean, as we so often try to find words for feelings that no words can express. This realization manifests itself sometimes as resentment, sometimes as sorrow, sometimes as amused resignation, sometimes as a sort of cosmic indifference. In many of us, it creates a sense of  existential loneliness, and an unbridgeable isolation from other people. And there is more.

When we are in quiet moments, we often cannot get a handle on what we are experiencing at the eternal present. When we fall into the infinity of mirrors that is the attempt by the brain to understand the brain, it often produces a sense of indescribable mystification. We are reduced to thinking, “What is all this? What is experience itself?” Our brains’ inherent inability to grasp the whole reality that surrounds us strikes us at these moments, even if we don’t put the sense of how  strange we feel into any words. We are simply swallowed up by our own minds, which are the product of a lifetime of sensations and interactions that have had effects on us that are simply too complicated for us to grasp. Not only are our reactions to experience too complex to sort out, these reactions are based on information about ourselves that oftentimes we just don’t have any more. We often don’t have any idea of what the root of a specific emotional response actually is. We have lost the thread of our lives, and it cannot be located again. 

It is at these moments that an even darker realization occurs to us: since we can not convey total, unfiltered meaning to each other, and since we cannot account for all the many conflicting and competing emotions within us, we not only will never understand others, we will never really understand ourselves. If we dwell on this, the absurdity of the situation in which we find ourselves crashes down on us. We will never know others; others will never know us; we will never know ourselves. And yet, here we all are, thrown together, having to live with each other and interact with each other. It is as if the entire human population is a set of inmates, each one a prisoner in his or her own skull, trying to grasp enough of the world to survive in it (or, hopefully, prosper), and trying to communicate with the other prisoners trapped inside of their skulls.  It is in communication that our only hope of lessening our sense of isolation, and hence our existential loneliness, lies.

Communication is the basis of human interaction and in a very real sense, of human survival. Humans must convey part of their internal experience to others, right from the start of life, and must in turn attempt to apprehend part of the internal experience of others. But as I said above, such communication will always be approximate. (The more abstract and less concrete the concepts used in communication, the more approximate this communication will be.) I will examine the significant impediments to communication in more detail elsewhere. (See The Nature and Continuing Evolution of Language.)

Our only hope of understanding anything about each other is in the possession of common ground. If  I refer to something as being red, only your visual experience of a red object will suffice for you to grasp my meaning. (The mathematical formulae describing red as a wavelength will not suffice if you have never seen a red object.) If I tell you something is hot, only your tactile experience of a hot object will stir any degree of understanding in you. (And your associations with the words red and hot may be very, very different from mine.) At a minimum, we need some sort of linguistic and/or gestural common ground to grasp part of each other’s meaning. We need a store of common experience and common points of reference, a certain amount of shared information and shared skills (which is why education of some form is indispensable to people). But we will have to accept the fact that since it is logically impossible to be another person, and to have the whole set of that person’s knowledge, experience, emotional state, and state of consciousness at our disposal at a given moment of communication, we will never entirely tear down the walls of isolation. We will perceive reality in a way which may be very similar to others, but it can never, by definition, be exactly the perception of any other person. (The upshot of all this is if I’m right, I can’t be 100% certain why I feel the need to express this to you. And you can’t be 100% certain you know what I mean.)

Are the ambiguous nature of communication, our resulting sense of existential loneliness, and the unanswered mysteries of our own personalities the real origins of our quest for certainty? Are they the sources of our desire to believe that we understand, and the illusion that we are understood? Do the huge questions most of us feel are so important about God, death, suffering, the meaning of existence, the nature of truth, and others like them have their root in our sense of isolation? Does this feeling of being isolated engender in us the desire, ultimately, to be connected with a reality where the self can be subsumed into a greater and more significant whole and language has a single, definite meaning? Can it even give us the desire to live in a reality where words no longer matter?

V.   

Many people find out about human cruelty and perversity far too early in life, and any hope these people have of being able to count on and be reassured by the behavior of others is critically damaged, often irreparably so, by trauma suffered in childhood. Most others are more fortunate, but sooner or later, everyone is exposed to the sins and weaknesses that our complex psychologies give rise to: corruption, lies, betrayal, and injuries in endless variety. Since humans must be able to predict and anticipate the behavior of others for their own safety (and indeed this is so crucial that some researchers believe consciousness itself arose out of this need), the question, Who can I trust, and to what degree? is of the utmost importance. It’s worth looking at what we mean by the word “trust”. (See also The Sinews of Trust in Section VII for a fuller discussion.)

Trust can be thought of as the willingness to let our defenses down—to be vulnerable, either physically or emotionally, or both—with another human or group of humans. This willingness to be vulnerable is based on an assessment of the predictability of other people’s behavior. If, in a particular setting, we feel that those who are present with us mean us no harm (at minimum), are positively inclined toward us (in a middle case), or would sacrifice important things to defend us (the maximum case), there is a feeling of trust. If I know that you are not going to try to hurt me, and will in fact be my ally, I can set aside my internal readiness to fight or flee, and relax emotionally.

There are, obviously degrees of trust between people, ranging from trust in a person in a limited setting for a limited duration all the way to people one can trust with one’s life. Knowing the difference between those we can trust with small things and those we can trust with the ultimate things is of obvious evolutionary importance. It is trust of an unspoken kind that regulates much of ordinary human behavior, and in situations where trust between people is low or completely absent, anarchy and “the war of all against all” tends to be the rule.

Is betrayal so sharply felt because the need for trust is so deeply embedded in our brains? There seems to be something fundamental about betrayal that causes humans to respond to it with deep anger and hurt. Is this an indication of how ancient the need for trust really is?

We see the suffering of others; we experience suffering, perhaps very severe, ourselves. We can imagine injury and pain from experience, and if we are rational (and not under the stress of life-or-death circumstances) we seek to avoid them at all costs. We especially seek to protect our children from them, very often at the price of our own well-being. We hear of or even witness horrors; dark fears insinuate themselves into our thinking, and one of the most elemental of all questions demands our attention: How can I protect myself and my loved ones from the world? I say “the world” in this formulation because many of our fears are centered in the generalized “others” who share the world with us, the strangers who may do us harm. (The issue of trust is at play here, of course.) We seek to give ourselves and those we love safe places in which to live, and we seek further to control as many of the potentially dangerous variables in our environment as we can. The inability to control these variables can lead to a feeling of helplessness, rage, frustration, despair, and chronic fear. People trapped in war zones or in generally lawless areas know the terrible urgency of finding safety, in many ways the prime objective of a living thing. The fear, caution, preparation, and alertness demanded by the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe has been one of the chief factors driving human history. Magnified over an entire population, the need to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe is at the heart of our defense efforts (although the individual soldier may be fighting under compulsion).

The issue of protecting one’s self and one’s loved ones is so significant that it is usually the priority consideration in a person’s life. The quest for security and the need to prepare for dangers which may emerge either from malicious strangers or unpredictable nature can lead to the sacrifice of all other values. Conversely, the failure to protect one’s loved ones (or the perceived failure) can lead a human down the most grievous abysses of despair. The protection of one’s kin, in particular, may have extremely ancient evolutionary roots; only the survival of the precious genes guarantees continuation of our line. The anguish we feel when those we love have been harmed may in part be rooted in this. Add in the depths of emotional attachment that people usually feel for those related to them, and the suffering of our loved ones becomes utterly intolerable, a fate to be avoided at any cost, including the abandonment of even the most deeply held moral beliefs. How can I protect myself and my loved ones from the world? For most people, the answer is, “Any way I have to.”

Survival may be a tremendous achievement for many people, and the minimal protection of themselves and their loved ones a true victory, given the often harsh realities of the world. But most people, at least in the more economically advanced areas of the Earth, seek something more once the basic minimums of life have been secured. Specifically, most people want to know the purpose of the human enterprise itself. They want to know, “Is there a larger purpose to life than mere survival, and if so, what is it?” This question is related to “How should I live my life?” but it is not identical to it. It contains the unspoken question, “Why do we live?” It also encompasses more than just one’s self, for it implies that humans as a group have some sort of mission to fulfill, and that this mission is both significant and discoverable. The answers people give to this question very often reveal deeply held personal beliefs or prejudices. A person might say that the purpose of life is to prepare for the establishment of the Kingdom of God, or that the purpose of life is to prepare for Eternity, or the purpose of life is to eradicate human suffering, or the purpose of life is to grab everything for yourself that you can before you die or the purpose of life is to have children and grandchildren and pass one’s family name down. Others might say in response to this question, “Purpose? There is no such thing. We just live and do the best we can, and then we die.” That statement very often also reveals deeply held beliefs, although most people might not readily perceive this. However it is answered, one thing is consistent: if a purpose is believed to exist, it is considered the main overall reason a person lives his or her life. It is the ultimate, overriding goal. It is, in essence, the root of a personal philosophy.

           

VI. 

At a young age, most people begin to be given what will turn out to be a long series of instructions on what to do and what not to do. They will have these rules impressed into them in any number of ways, many of them physically hurtful ones. Also at a young age people will begin to glean lessons from the culture with which they are surrounded about what constitutes “right conduct”.  As a person grows older, he or she will generally begin making judgments about the behavior of others, perhaps comparing it to the standards of behavior which they have absorbed (in their uniquely individual way) from their kinship group, neighbors, and community. Whether they realize it or not, when they do this, most people are applying a set of standards that govern a general system by which the behavior of others is regulated (and by which their own behavior is in turn regulated). They are forming answers to the question, “What is right and what is wrong?”

This question is, naturally, at the very heart of what humans call their moral or ethical systems, and it has been answered in any number of ways. Wrong conduct, being abnormal and disruptive, seems to be identified more readily than right conduct, which tends to become part of the human mental background, part of the definition of “normality”. Among the definitions of wrong conduct humans have given over the centuries, the following tend to be the most prominent:

·        Whatever violates the sacred teachings of the religion which is dominant in our culture.

·        Whatever disrupts the orderly conduct of business and social relationships in our society.

·        Whatever undermines the unity of our people.

·        Whatever shows disloyalty to the rulers of our society.

·        Whatever violates the prerogatives of parents over their children.

·        Whatever brings dishonor to and condemnation of a family.

·        Whatever violates the person or property of a human being who has committed no offense against anyone.

·        Whatever undermines the trust people in our society have to have in order to live with each other.

·        Whatever is, in general, contrary to the laws, norms, and traditions of our people.

·        Whatever actions those in power take that are corrupt or unjust.

·        Any combination of any of the above with varying degrees of emphasis on the individual guidelines.

Notice that only two or three of these statements could in any way be interpreted as emphasizing the primacy of the individual or the rights of a human against the power of those who govern him. In fact, throughout human history, questions of right and wrong have seldom been left to individual judgment, nor have they focused primarily on the rights of the person. Wrong conduct has generally been defined as conduct which undermines the collective well-being of a society, conduct which attacks the institutions on which the society is based. (Right conduct, naturally, is generally considered the exact inverse of each of the above statements.) Virtually every human who has ever lived, until the last few hundred years, has lived under definitions of right or wrong behavior similar to this. Respect for the individual’s privacy and personal conduct has, in the larger context, been an aberration in human history, not the norm.

But humans face moral and ethical dilemmas of a smaller scale every day, ones for which guidelines are not always clear. How should I treat those whom I don’t know? How friendly or unfriendly should I be to those I do know? Should I always be bluntly honest, or should I value tact above all? Should I help people I don’t know, or ignore all but the needs of my own family? Can I rightfully take advantage of the ignorance or gullibility of other people? It is this mass of billions of small moral decisions that often steer the day-to-day course of our world more than the broader and more formalized rules that govern societies.

Questions of right and wrong, can, of course, be given more ominous interpretations. What is right and what is wrong? Some answers are:

• Whatever benefits me is right; whatever doesn’t benefit me is wrong.
• Whatever promotes the power of my group is right; whatever lessens it is wrong.
• Whatever hurts the people I hate is right; whatever doesn’t hurt the people I hate is wrong.

The terrible simplicity of such answers has very often been the basis for the most obscene crimes and atrocities in human history. And, unfortunately, those who reduce all of life to a simple question of whether they’re getting their way or not prevail more than we would like to admit.

We are confronted on a daily basis with assertions of fact, statements which claim to be “true” in the sense that they are, presumably, empirically demonstrable. We are presented with claims of evidence, claims that such-and-such an event occurred in real time at a real place. We have to make decisions about what we believe to be truly real. We are faced with the existential question, therefore, “What is true and what is false?” Upon this question rest whole belief systems and ideologies, as well as the related issues of whether we can even reliably ascertain answers to such a question. We are forced to define what we mean by “true” and “false”. How have people gone about doing so?

Throughout human existence, people have generally thought that whatever they perceived with their own senses was true. “I saw it with my own eyes” is considered conclusive proof to most of us. As far as the truth of larger things is concerned, there have been other methods employed. In most societies of the past, for example, the test of whether something was true or not was simple: do those with the ability to contact the supernatural plane of existence say that it is? If those believed to have this power passed a judgment on such a question, it was generally considered authoritative. There are gods, there is a soul, there are gods that weigh the soul in the balance after death, there is a sacred river we cross only in death, there are sacrifices which must be made to placate the gods, things can come alive again after dying, and all manner of such beliefs have been accepted as true because those with specialized knowledge of the metaphysical said so. Until a few hundred years ago this was considered the most powerful standard of truth in the vast majority of human societies.

But there have been, for many centuries, those for whom religious authority was insufficient. Some 2,500 years ago, on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, a small group of thinkers began the attempt to ascertain the truth or falsity of things through argument and the employment of reason, rather than by recourse to spiritual or mythological explanations of the world. In Asia, various thinkers looked beyond traditional faiths and began the search for what they considered to be the “essence” of reality, employing meditation, observation, and their own reasoning to find this essence. In each region, thinkers influenced each other, challenged each other, blended their ideas together, and created syntheses of ideas and standards of judging truth or falsehood. It was a revolution in human thinking, and it was to have massive consequences. It helped spawn the massive intellectual enterprise of science, which eventually was to transform the world and provide a systematic way of analyzing (within the limits of human ability) the nature of the reality with which humans were indirectly connected. But for most people, their own experience, and the role of authority continue to be paramount in their understanding of truth and falsehood, and that situation is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. They may respect philosophy and science, but they aren’t necessarily ready to accept their findings as the last words on an issue which most of them feel is connected to their eternal fate.

And then, there is the question that has, perhaps, caused more anguish and despair than any other: Why is there suffering? Often it is in our darkest and lowest times that we tend to ask this, when the issue of suffering is confronting us in the most direct and harrowing way possible.

In the chapter entitled, “Rebellion” in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s immortal The Brothers Karamazov, one of the brothers, Ivan, a depressed intellectual, is discussing with his brother Alyosha, a gentle, Christ-like Russian Orthodox monk, the question of why God allows suffering. In particular, Ivan is tormented by the issue of the suffering of children, and he inundates his brother with horrible details of atrocities and abuses committed against children, which he has collected in the form of newspaper clippings and other documentation. One of the cases of abuse Ivan shares with Alyosha is a particularly hideous one involving the barbaric treatment of a five year old girl by her own parents. Ivan explains that the little girl, while locked in a stinking, freezing outhouse in the winter, was heard praying to God, asking Him what she had done to make her parents punish her so terribly. Then he adds:

“Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and  the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, Alyosha, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could  not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why,  the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to ‘dear, kind God!’ I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But those little ones!...I am making you suffer, Alyosha. I’ll stop if you like.”

“Never mind. I want to suffer too,” muttered Alyosha.

Ivan speaks for many of us—and so does Alyosha. (It is a measure of Dostoyevsky’s intellectual integrity, by the way, that he, a Christian, was willing to throw the strongest and most emotionally wrenching case at his own belief system.) Almost all of us wonder why those who have done nothing wrong so often suffer so deeply and horribly. It seems to offend some very deeply embedded notion of fairness in us. It literally doesn’t make sense in our way of thinking. There is no justice in it. There is no proportion. The effect seems utterly disconnected to the cause. And when the victims of suffering are helpless, innocent children, our minds can come close to the breaking point if we dwell on it too long. Our natural sense of empathy for children, and our evolutionarily-conditioned protective instincts, are outraged by the pain and fear of “those little ones”. More broadly, we often wonder how a just and righteous God can look on such things, apparently, and do nothing. It is the ultimate problem for many religious believers, as they see not just children but all kinds of unoffending humans going through unspeakable tortures and devastating sickness. As one grows older, and there continues to be no apparent, predictable pattern that this suffering follows, our faith can be tested to its limits. Paradoxically, it is just such testing that can cause many to cling to their faith even more fervently: it is their last defense against the idea of a world of random, senseless, chaotic horror. Such people must believe that God or the Universe or the Supreme Intelligence has its reasons, and that someday the believers will understand those reasons. No other psychological position is tolerable for them.

The issue of suffering can be thought of as part of a broader question, and can indeed cause it to be asked: Why do evil and injustice exist? So often in history the brutal, the merciless, the cruel, and the morally indifferent have triumphed. So often the most terrible humans have lived to a ripe old age and died peacefully in their sleep while their countless victims had met their ends writhing in agony. So often the lawless and violent seem to prosper in life today, and barbarism is the norm in many, many places. (This may be part of the reason so many people want to believe in hell; they need to believe that the evil will be punished somehow, even if they escape the judgment of this world.) If God (or the Universe, or the Supreme Intelligence) is really the author of everything, is it the author of evil as well? Why does a purportedly all-powerful being even permit such a thing to exist? There is, in fact, an entire branch of theology devoted to this question, called theodicy. Religious thinkers have wrestled for centuries with the problem of evil. The best they have been able to do is to argue that God is so powerful that He or It can wrest good even out of apparent evil, or to argue that what seems evil to humans is not necessarily evil to a Being who has a plan for the evolution of the whole Universe. To many humans, such explanations are cold comfort, at best. Again, for their own mental well-being, they must believe that what is apparently evil has some larger purpose, and that in the end everything will make sense.