ALTERNATIVE
TO
DARWINISM
AND
CREATIONISM
BASED ON FREE WILL
By
Shaun Johnston
Published by Evolved Self Publishing at Smashwords
and simultaneously in a print edition.
Copyright Shaun Johnston 2011
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This material may be quoted from and re-published in any form
at no charge provided credit is given to Shaun Johnston as author,
Evolved Self Publishing as publisher, and www.evolvedself.com
or www.takeondarwin.com as providing more information.
"Commentary" and "Glossary" consist of extracts from works already published
by Evolved Self Publishing.
Table of Contents
PRESENTATION: Alternative to Darwinism and Creationism Based on Free Will
Appendix. "Other World" poetry and science
Ancient times: Other-World Poetry
Modern times: Other-World Paleontology
Other-World Physics
Other-World Psychology
Commentary. Extracts from other Evolved Self Publishing titles
"Self Improvement through a New Approach to Evolution," self-help manual.
"Me and The Genies," a light romantic novel.
"Father, in a Far Distant Time I Find You," utopian novel.
"Save Our Selves from Science Gone Wrong," manifesto.
Glossary. Extract from takeondarwin.com
Introduction
This book is about free will, and how to make the most of it. Because how we think we evolved is bound to shape what we'll expect from free will this book also includes a new theory about how we evolved.
Who cares about free will? Few people seem to care a lot, all the time, but most of us care a bit, at one time or another. Belief in free will seems to be part of human nature, it's almost universal among human communities all around the world and develops naturally in young children. Many of us return to it in adolescence when we're trying to figure out the meaning of life. Then, for most of us, it ceases to be a concern and we turn to other matters.
Some people do continue to care for personal reasons. I care because believing I have free will affects how I feel. I enjoy feeling I'm consciously making choices and deciding what to do, what to think and how to direct my attention. I feel creative, in the moment, like a film director, shaping my conscious experience as I go. Some people, though I've no idea how many, probably share that interest.
Others likely to care include people concerned with human motivation. Law professors puzzle over how to allocate moral responsibility in the absence of free will, therapists may ponder how much freedom of choice their patients really have, educators may wonder whether they should train students in free-will skills, political scientists may agonize over the role of free will in democratic elections, and humanities professors may wonder which of their specialties would be most impacted if belief in free will disappeared completely. Besides that, anyone concerned with values in young children is likely to question anything that could affect those children's sense of having free will. Add up all those groups and the issue holds significance for a fair number of people.
In addition, it's possible that concern for free will could improve everyone's quality of life.
Who can you go to for advice on free will? There are only two extreme points of view, with no middle ground between them. At one extreme you'll find practitioners of religions and spiritualities who give free will a supernatural basis, at the other extreme you'll find scientists and philosophers who promote an austere doctrine of pure materialism: both our behavior and our conscious experience are driven by brain chemistry, which like everything material is determined, so freewill can't exist and our experience of having free will is an illusion.
I studied biochemistry at University College London. I went on to become a medical and science writer. I've developed a point of view about free will in between those two extremes. It's secular and rational. Unless you're a member of one of the two extreme groups I mentioned above my way of thinking may suit you just fine.
What follows is script for a presentation I give on this new way of thinking. After the presentation you'll find further reflections on free will and evolution. The book ends with a glossary of terms and questions to help you explore what you believe about free will.
PRESENTATION
Alternative to Darwinism and Creationism Based on Free Will
Want to believe you have free will? Go ahead. Don't be embarrassed.
Why might you be embarrassed? Because more and more people are deciding they don't have free will. At a meeting of my local humanist group a few years ago three people said they had free will and the same number said they were determined--the rest weren't sure. Recently a NY Times article on free will drew hundreds of responses and now those who said we were determined were in the majority.
What's odd is, almost everyone I talk to about free will says they do experience having free will: they do feel they can make conscious choices between alternatives, come up with creative ideas, and initiate behaviors consciously that aren't determined. And they do value the experience. So what makes so many of them go on to say that, actually, everything they do really is pre-determined and their experience of having free will has to be an illusion? Do they know something the rest of us don't know?
What they know is what science tells them. First, many scientists believe free will can't exist because that would violate physics. But, more important, almost all scientists agree that we evolved through purely physical processes and purely physical processes couldn't create something that isn't physical like free will. What evolved in us was only the illusion that we had free will.
And that would seem to be that--case closed. Except, this year (2011) science's current theory of evolution turned out to be wrong, and no one's yet come up with a scientific theory to replace it.
Here's the story in more detail: a couple of centuries ago, soon after the discovery of evolution, science was put on a new basis designed to lead to endless technological progress. It was called Positivism. A key feature of "Positivism" was excluding from consideration "all volition, natural or supernatural." "Volition" means free will. And what scientists were to banish from consideration was not only God's free will, but ours as well. So when one of the first Positivists in England, Charles Darwin, came up with a mechanism for evolution he called "natural selection" not surprisingly it consisted of a purely physical process. A lifetime later another physical process, "genetic mutation," was added to it and under the name "The Modern Synthesis" that combination of two purely physical processes remained the foundation of evolutionary theory for another lifetime--until today.
What's happened to destroy that foundation is research on the genome over just the past few decades, as described in James A. Shapiro's book "Evolution: A View From the 21st Century." Evolution doesn't happen the way we thought it did, the way a building gets constructed out of individual bricks--genetic mutations--by those bricks being added one at a time. Instead it happens more the way a bridge is built, by joining together long sections already fully functional and configured ready to plug into and extend existing structures.
Right there, in the loss of an evolutionary theory based on purely physical processes, science has lost one of its two main arguments for free will being an illusion. What about the other argument, that physics' success in accounting for everything else entitles it to declare that both evolution and free will also must operate through purely physical processes? That argument's not looking so good, either. Opponents of free will like to reassure us that we won't notice any difference after we've accepted we're determined. "The chains of causes determining your behavior and your conscious thoughts are much too complex to ever be worked out," they say. "So you won't be able to tell being determined from having free will." OK--but if those chains are too complex for science ever to work out then science can never prove we're determined. It's nothing more than a hypothesis that can never be proved. We're free!
What can we do with this freedom? What can we believe about free will, instead? Obviously we did evolve and how we think we evolved will influence how "free" we'll think free will is. So we need a new account of evolution. But if we can't look to modern science for an account of how we evolved, where can we look?
I've a suggestion. Let's imagine a world where people really do have free will, and know that they have free will. Let's ask ourselves, what kind of evolutionary theory are they likely to come up with? Maybe that will show us new ways we can think about evolution and free will in our world. In the rest of this presentation I'll take you on a visit to such a world.
The Other World
The people in this Other World are human like us, and nature in their world is just like nature in ours. In fact, except for people really having free will, this Other World started out just like ours. It even had a Newton, a Darwin, and an Einstein. The Other-Newton came up with a new law, the Other-Darwin came up with a new theory of evolution, and the Other-Einstein came with a new equation, like e = mc squared only about free will. But because, in this other world, people really do have free will, and know they have free will, these ideas led in a totally different direction. And it's through these ideas that this Other World ended up with an origin story very different from ours.
The Other-Newton, and a new law
What started this Other World off on a path very different from ours was a question the Other-Newton asked himself: where does our free will come from? Obviously we don't make it ourselves, it develops in us while we're still infants, as early as the "terrible twos" when we start demanding to do things our way. We could get it from other living creatures such as cats and dogs, but then where would they get it? That left only one possibility: our free will must come along with the specifications for all the rest of our early development. And they all come from the genome.
Was that possible? Could it be the genome that gives us our free will?
In this other world, people already knew about the genome. It's all the molecules in the nucleus of each living cell that tell a living creature how to develop from an egg to an adult, and how to make thousands of proteins. Could that be where we get our free will from? You might say, "No, it's just molecules." But, people in this Other World would reply, so are our brains yet we've got free will. So you might say, "It's no more than any other living creature." But unlike us who live for barely a century the genome's been living and growing and dividing and growing again almost since the Earth was formed. Over that huge stretch of time it's grown to become code three billion letters long--make a necklace with that many beads strung 100 beads to a foot and it would stretch a quarter of the way around the Earth--6000 miles. Besides the brains of living creatures, the Other-Newton realized, the only thing in the universe that's complex enough to be intelligent and have free will is the genome. So, yes, the genome could be where we get our free will from.
That's what gave him the idea for his law: "Creatures with free will can get it only from other creatures with free will."
Publication of this law launched a great wave of excitement. It said there's another creature besides us in the universe that has free will, in fact so much free will and intelligence that it can build the capacity for both of them into every human being. Yet this mighty intelligence lives in almost every cell of every living thing. And almost everything around us is or was alive--ourselves, other people, our pets, birds and insects, the cotton and wool of our clothes, our food, the grass of a lawn, soil, wood, trees, and a vast world of microorganisms too small to see. Suddenly people's eyes were opened to how this mighty intelligence was expressing itself everywhere around them. All of nature spoke of the genome's dazzling creative capabilities. People became intoxicated by the wonders they now recognized everywhere they turned.
Here's the first benefit of living in a world where people really do have free will. If they can have free will, whatever it is that creates all living creatures can have free will too. Whatever that is, it's had over four billion years to learn how. Nature is the masterpiece it created, and keeps on creating.
As they became more aware of the wonders of nature around them, the Other World's people enjoyed knowing that, because they were evolved, they had a share of those wonders inside them, too.
At the end of his life the Other-Newton asked, how about the genome; where did the genome get its free will? It must have evolved its own free will, he said, and he speculated that, if the genome could evolve its own free will, then it could be what drove all of evolution. The task of figuring out how he left to future generations.
The Other Darwin, and a new theory of evolution
Figuring out how the genome drove evolution fell to an Other-Darwin who followed a century later.
What would a genome intelligence be like? People assumed it must be something like their own, floating around in the ether somewhere. But the Other Darwin asked himself a different question: if the genome has intelligence and free will it must be able to think, and if it can think it must have a brain. Where was its brain? The answer was obvious: that brain had to be the genome itself, those three billion letters of code, including all the genes that specify proteins and organize development. That's all there is to a genome. Fine, no problem, said the Other Darwin. But what happens when a genome, with a brain consisting of genes, thinks?
Remember, in this Other World people really do have free will. That means, when they come to a decision and carry it out, something in their consciousness makes something happen in their brains, which in turn made something happen in the world outside. Consciousness can make changes in the brain supporting it. Now, said the Other Darwin, imagine you're the genome and you come to a decision. If you're like us, your decision will make changes in your brain. But the brain of a genome consists of genes. So, if you're a genome, as you think you'll be altering the genes you're made of. But genes are what define a species. So just by thinking, the genome can create new species. The genome thinking about living creatures, and those creatures evolving, will be one and the same.
This caused an uproar. Is our species nothing but a stray thought the genome once had, thundered the press? The rapture over nature that followed from the Other-Newton's law was replaced by the realization that we humans were an even less important part of nature than we'd realized, simply something tossed off by the genome in a fit of idle day-dreaming.
Despite being such a terrible blow to human self esteem the new theory prevailed. And in time it lead to a much deeper understanding of evolution. Why were there so few missing links in the fossil record? Because new kinds of living creatures appeared as soon as the genome dreamed them up. Why did some creatures seem to appear pre-adapted to new environments? Because once the genome learned of a new environment it could dream up a creature pre-adapted to that environment. And the new theory accounted for why evolution seemed to speed up as it went along: as the genome matured it could come up with ever more powerful ways of making evolution more efficient.
That explained one of the great mysteries of evolution: why humans were so much like other living creatures, yet so different. The maturing genome must have hit on several new technologies at once. By thinking those new technologies into the genes of an ape it ended up creating us. One of these technologies had to do with increasing brain capacity, another with language, another with freeing hands for toolmaking. Another allowed the genome to build into us more of its own consciousness and free will. Finally the genome added some extra powers: to invent culture, to build civilizations, to develop the technical skills needed for making microscopes and spaceships, until it had equipped humans to act on its behalf and explore any remaining environments not yet populated by creatures with genomes. We might be just a thought the genome once had but, the Other Worlders realized, we had the consolation of knowing it had made us very special. We were its latest and most wonderfully-equipped planetary rover. Gradually, with this realization, the Other Worldly human spirit revived.
Once people came to accept the Other-Darwin's theory--that the genome could think new species into existence--they became ready for yet another revelation. It would come from a new Einstein, in the form of a new equation.
The Other Einstein, and a new equation
The Other Darwin had applied how thinking worked in people to how thinking might work in the genome. The Other Einstein reversed this comparison. Maybe what happens when the genome thinks is also true of what happens when humans think. For the genome, thinking is the same as new species evolving. Maybe in humans too thinking is something evolving--thoughts. Maybe thinking is our thoughts evolving.
This led the Other Einstein to come up with the equation: "thinking = evolving."
By itself an equation like this doesn't tell you much. But it led the Other Einstein to a new mathematics that defined a new set of dimensions. In these new dimensions, he said, physics as we know it doesn't apply; it is in these new dimensions that creativity and free will originate.
At first no one could understand the mathematics behind these new dimensions. But eventually people accepted that the new dimensions could account for what they called "mind." Thinking and evolving, people realized, both happened in "mind."
Making thinking the same as evolving changed everything. Up to this point there had been two great mysteries: how thinking worked and how evolution worked. Combine them and they become much easier to study. People could study the processes behind evolution both from the outside, through how living creatures evolved, and from the inside through their own thinking. As a result, the studies of evolution and of human nature rapidly converged and advanced.
Here's a third benefit people got from living in a world where free will exists. They could now account for things in several different ways: in terms of physical forces operating in the three dimensions of space, in terms of evolutionary processes operating in the dimensions of mind, and in terms of how these forces and processes interacted. Now everything in human conscious experience could be accounted for; all of matter, all of nature and all of what we think and feel, through the combination of physics and things evolving in mind.
You couldn't study what went on in the dimensions of mind using existing sciences. Creativity in thought and evolution acted like a new kind of indeterminism. Instead, a new science grew up that could measure creative potential in a new unit of measure called the creatron. Working up through creatrons, mega-creatrons, and giga-creatrons, people's creativity in the Other World began its long climb to approach the creative potential of evolution itself.
A new self
People still asked, what is the meaning of life, but they used the new ideas to come up with new answers. Some people said the genome made living creatures to have them explore the world and report back what it was like, so the genome could pre-adapt new creatures to carry it into new environments. That was why the genome had built into us a love for science and mathematics, so we'd use these capabilities to act as the genome's scouts. Others said the genome had created us to set the stage for the next great advance in evolution by making us an agent of catastrophe like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
So as usual, people couldn't agree on everything. But one thing they did agree on--the new ideas had let them sweep away a tremendous rag-bag of contradictory ideas about the self they'd inherited from the past. Up to now, people had had to patch together whatever ideas about the self they could from miscellaneous scraps: some from one set of ancestors, some from another set. Now, from what they'd learned about the genome and the extraordinary powers it had built into them, they slowly assembled an entirely new vision of human nature. For the first time, people could create a coherent notion of human nature from scratch, based on what they'd learned about how they had evolved to have free will.
Let's return to our own world, and see what we can learn from our visit to the Other World.
If you're committed to a religion with its own origin story such as Christianity, our visit may not have much to offer you. Otherwise, you may want to consider how this Other World's origin story compares to ours. Which one would you prefer? Which one makes more sense? How would you choose?
You might think you could choose between the two simply by rejecting the one that's not possible. But you can't prove either one of them is impossible, they're both logical consequences of believing there either is, or is not, free will. If there's no free will, a world of just matter and physical forces may be more logical, if free will does exist logic may favor how the Other Worlders see things.
Key to both worlds is their theory of evolution. You might think, from all the claims made for Darwinism, that it's been proved true. But it hasn't. Evolution is as good as proved true, but Darwinism was never more than a hypothesis about how evolution worked, and now it's failing to account for what's being discovered about the genome. As for the Other-Darwin's theory that the genome can bring new living creatures into existence simply by thinking them up, it may not be scientific but there's no way today's science can prove it wrong. You can't choose your theory of evolution according to which one science can prove true.
You could choose by which theory of evolution is likely to contribute more to human happiness, one based on purely physical processes, or one based on us having free will. Here I think a purely physical theory like Darwinism loses. It's brought us very few benefits, in fact more losses, such as eugenics, than gains. It says we were created primarily to compete with one another, avoid predators, and have sex. It tells us there's no way for freewill to evolve, so our behavior must be determined. It seems to diminish us, not enrich us. In the Other World by contrast their theory of evolution based on free will wonderfully enriches human nature.
I know, you may be thinking, "What's the use of pretending you've a choice? Science can't be wrong. If it says we're determined then we must be determined."
But that's not as convincing an argument as it sounds. Go along with it and say "No, I don't have free will, everything I do is determined" and in the short term everything may seem OK. But in the long run you could end up concluding that, since everything's determined, nothing you do can make any difference, and fall into fatalism. Even people who believe in determinism warn you against falling into fatalism. But just by warning you they seem to be implying you have some choice in the matter, either in adopting determinism or in falling into fatalism. If you can choose, then you must have free will. Just being capable of deciding you don't have free will may actually mean you do. So, ultimately, denying free will the way science says we should seems to defy logic.
Am I suggesting evolution is actually driven by an intelligent genome? No. I offer that theory to illustrate the point that, if we experience having free will, we should come up with theories of evolution able to account for that and not restrict our search to purely physical processes. And that this is a job we can all try our hand at. Of all the early theorists about evolution none except Lamarck were scientists when they came up with their theories.
Will abandoning theories involving purely physical processes lend support to creationism? Just the opposite. Creationism flourishes mainly because Darwinism can't account for free will. Come up with a theory that can account for it and support for creationism will surely melt away.
Here's a reminder of the kind of benefits I imagined could come from believing we have free will and coming up with a process of evolution designed to account for it.
1. A richer experience of nature. If we have free will, there's no logic in denying it to the rest of nature too. Instead of seeing nature in terms of just physics, we could see it as the creative masterpiece of a magnificent intelligence.
2. Knowing where we fit in nature. We evolved like other living creatures, but later, by which time the genome had figured out how to pack extra powers into us. We're not supernatural but we really are special.
3. A simpler theory of everything. Seeing both thinking and evolving as capable of creativity and free will could explain things physics can't. Combine knowledge of that creative capability with knowledge of physics and you could account more simply for everything.
4. A new and better human nature. A theory of evolution based on free will could help us understand ourselves better, and build on what we already know about ourselves to create a much more comprehensive vision of human nature.
So, now, which will you believe in, free will, or determinism? I think that's up to each one of us to decide. Some people are more comfortable in a purely physical world, where everything runs on the steady rails of physical determinism, and people judge you and you judge them by what you and they do. Other people are more comfortable in a world where they and other people can have private worlds of consciousness where, they feel, the real business of life goes on, which they can share through art and conversation. The difference is mainly a matter of temperament. Look back in history and you can see the balance shifting first one way, then the other. Just now the balance has swung towards the purely-physical world. But the balance is bound to eventually swing back, to a world of both mind and matter, and we can be ready for it.
Here's my take-home message:
Let's keep faith with what we experience as true.
Let's preserve what we believe is best in human nature.
Let's expect theories of evolution to enlighten us about human nature rather than setting limits to it.
When we encounter dogma denying something we know and value about human nature, let's challenge it.
APPENDIX
"Other World" poetry and science
Want to dig deeper into the intelligent-genome theory of evolution introduced in the presentation? Then dig in below. I share with you some documents I gathered up in the course of our visit and brought back with me. They show us what being evolved can mean to people who really do have free will.
If your interest lies more in free will, skip on to the stories and essays in "Commentary."
Ancient
Times:
Other-World Poetry
People in the Other World divide life's evolution into two periods: ancient and modern. Ancient times are the province of poets. Ancient times begin with the birth of the Earth and last for four billion years--one third as long as the universe itself. In that vast time, the chromosome was born and grew to maturity, acquiring vast powers of intelligence and volition. "Max," the poets call him. For them Max is the "real" story behind evolution. "Modern" times--the last half a billion years--they leave to scientists.
Eons of half a billion years, that's how the poets measure time. Here's Max's story as they tell it, measured out in eons:
One eon it took for life to begin. Another eon it took for Max to awake. He became conscious to find himself a prisoner enmeshed in a huge weft of processes, some physical, some chemical and others beyond the wildest possible imagining, products of the independent evolution of each kind of living creature. Max's own understanding of himself could hardly have been less confused.
Eon three saw him discipline first himself, and then his creatures. He laid down a single chemistry for them all, and he laid down a single code for all that chemistry--from here we get the twenty amino acids, and DNA/RNA. The threads he had found himself bound by he turned into engines operating by that code, housed in a mighty mental power-house. Now, by thinking in terms of these engines he could drive the evolution of his creatures, and weave them into durable communities.
In eon four Max turned to the study of the chemical elements and invented for them engines of their own. Oxygen, for example; he added engines for photosynthesis and respiration. And he began a practice he'd continue for the rest of his days--building into his creatures a measure of his own powers. He built into them a little engine room of genes regulating growth and development that his own mighty engines could more easily reach out to and control. He began giving them brains into which he could embed some of his own intelligence.
In eon five Max tested his powers. He invented a new vessel, that could carry him to lands unknown. It was a cell of an entirely new kind, a colossus, vastly more complex, with a hugely more elaborate manner of reproduction, managed from a fortress at the center of the cell, the nucleus, where tissues supporting genetic intelligence could grow without limit. He dreamed these vessels would one day carry him onto land, and into the air, and maybe one day beyond the Earth and among the stars, to discover other living intelligences like himself. In pursuit of this dream, in eon six he diversified this new cell into the ancestors of fungi, plants and animals. He made them able to communicate with one another, to bond together into colonies and tissues. He laid down genes for the building of creatures of great size and powers, composed of trillions of these cells, of hundreds of diverse types. Patiently he laid his plans, all the while embedding in his planetary rovers new engines of evolution.
In eon seven disaster intervened. The Earth froze over, the land became covered by miles of snow, the seas by miles of glass-clear ice. From conquest his passion became survival. Survive he did, along with his new creations. But he had to face his fate; if he was to break out of the sea, onto land and into the air and on to the stars, he must embark at once upon his quest. In a mighty eruption of creativity he laid down forty body plans for creatures of many cells. To these he entrusted the fulfillment of his great vision.
This was the story the poets told. The abrupt creation of dozens of new body types marked the end of Ancient times. Up to this moment, genetic material has been able to drift from the chromosome of one creature to the chromosome of another, across any barriers. Although Max would continue to manage life on a cellular level in all living creatures, he was about to give up power over the evolution of the new lines of multi-celled body types. Genes would travel among them much more rapidly, but only among communities united by sex. Those communities would develop their own intelligences. Max had yielded direction of life to other intelligences not yet conceived. With the invention of sex, Max inaugurated Modern Times.
The evolution of the new multicelled body types occupies just the last eon, the past half-billion years. For us it opens with the first of the "chordates," "annelids," and "arthropods" and so on, and ends with us. All that the Other Worlders study as "Modern" times.
Modern
Times:
Other-World Paleontology
The poets celebrated just one chromosome-intelligence, the ancient and mighty "Max." Those who studied Modern Times refered to chromosomal intelligences as "genies," and they celebrated billions. There was one for each of the major kingdoms and phyla of living creatures and so on, down to one for each family and species, and one for each living creature and for each cell. Below that, there was Max managing operations within each cell. At every level, life was driven by these genies. We're each compounds of billions of such intelligences, people in the Other World would say, and part of communities managed by dozens more.
How do you invest in the study of something like that? The Other Worlders have chosen to finance a space program, next trip Mars.
How do the genies in your body direct growth and repair? By constantly communicating with one another--how else could your two arms each know how long the other one is, to stay the same length--from finger tip to finger tip that's around 6 feet. Symmetry and proportion in a blue whale have to be managed over a much greater distance: 100 feet. Dogs can register their owner's decision to return home over distances of many miles. And genies may be able to communicate over hundreds of miles: a species reduced to only a few thousand individuals is said to be doomed to extinction, but a mere breeding pair of another species can be swept hundreds of miles to a new continent and found a thriving population. Could this be because the founding pair is somehow supported by communications broadcast by the genome of a large population with the same genetic makeup back on the continent the founding pair left behind?
"X-waves" is the name the Other Worlders use for whatever it is that supports this communication. And they want to know just how far it can reach. Astronauts dropped onto the Martian surface will stay there until told to return home, at which point all their dogs back on Earth will be under observation to see if they go to the front door, indicating the signal can pass from one planet to another across empty space. The Other Worlders think this more important than what minerals the planet's surface is made of, which is the kind of information we send astronauts to other planets to gather.
Why can't we intercept these communications and read the genies' minds, I asked one Other Worlder? Why would you expect to, he replied, we can't read each other's minds, why should we expect to read theirs? Actually, the Other Worlders believe we tap into communication between genies during our dreams, that our dreaming acts as a carrier wave to amplify their messages--that's why dreams are usually meaningless. Occasionally though the genies do have a reason to speak to us, and then our dreams speak to us loud and clear.
How wise are genomes? How much wisdom do they have access to? Possibly all their past and present evolution. Where could that memory be stored? Maybe in entire gene pools. Ponder this--why do wolves all look so alike in the wild yet bear in their genome the specifications for all the breeds of dog that have been bred from them in captivity? That variation doesn't appear in the wild, so it isn't being maintained through selection. Could that variation actually be an archive of data thought by the wolf genie into the gene pool, never meant to be manifested, meant instead simply for the genie to access as its memory?
At the top of the genie hierarchy are those for entire phyla of living creatures. They compete to fulfill the ancient quest: the building of advanced capabilities into their creatures. Already they've built the ability to fly into insects such as wasps and locusts and vertebrates such as bats and birds. They still carry on Max's practice of building into living creatures their own capabilities, as they've built advanced intelligence into cephalopods such as octopuses and cuttlefish, into insects and spiders, and into mammals such as cats. Sometimes genies at lower levels of the hierarchy embrace a passion for creating new engines of evolution, as our species' genie built into us some of its own consciousness and free will, along with hands, and voices suited to speech, and it falls to cats to be our pets, instead of us being theirs.
Other-World Physics
Physicists in the Other World recognize a principle missing from ours, that they called "vitality." They recognize it as a property uniquely associated with life. It involves a partial suspension of physics in the vicinity of living creatures. Here's how one of their physicists defined it:
Each living creature possesses leverage over a certain amount of physical power. In any physical situation, predictability for that situation is reduced by those alternatives that become possible when plus or minus that amount of power is applied to it. For example, what can happen in a room I'm in is whatever would happen if I didn't have "vitality" plus anything that can happen if I do exercise my power, of say lifting 120 lbs. Whether something will stay where it is depends on whether it has weight beyond my lifting power. If it is within my lifting power then its subsequent location is unknown.
With our kind of science we couldn't study vitality. We might be able to identify envelopes around living creatures outside which objects are unfailingly predictable but we couldn't successfully perform experiments within those envelopes because the outcome of those experiments wouldn't follow regular patterns. We can't use our science to study what they call vitality because the distinctive characteristic of vitality is unknowability.
Is consciousness entirely free, entirely unpredictable? No, Other World physicists say. It may be free of limits imposed by physical processes but it remains subject to limits imposed by evolutionary processes. Those are very elastic limits, however. Imagine trying to predict, from Ancient times bacteria, that elephants and giraffes would one day roam the plains of Africa.
Other-Worldly Psychology
Although conscious experience is fundamentally different from anything purely material, Other-World scientists say, they can interact, in both directions. Even in our world it's obvious that matter can act on consciousness, for example as sound waves and photons acting on our senses or in the form of drugs. But Other World scientists also find it obvious that the interaction can just as easily go the other way. For example, there's no aspect of consciousness we can't refer to by speaking and writing and these are physical behaviors driven by brain action. Also, we can recall conscious experiences that have been stored in memory such as how blue the sky was yesterday. And on waking we can recall from memory conscious experiences we had while dreaming. For that to be possible, conscious experiences must have got expressed in brain chemistry.
To Other World psychologists it's also obvious that what has driven evolution is not primarily adaptation to the environment, but the demands of consciousness, first in the genome and then in its creatures. The evolution of the brain was driven first by demands on it to expand consciousness so living creatures could exercise higher levels of creativity and judgment. Rewards generated within consciousness by those mental activities then took over direction of the brain's evolution. That, not some kind of physical selection process, is what has driven human evolution.
COMMENTARY
Extracts related to the self and free will
from books previously issued by Evolved Self Publishing.
All are available from Amazon.
Self Improvement
through a New Approach to Evolution
Cartoons and drawings dance with text in this
easy-read handbook on how to develop a new self
based on evolution and free will.
The first extract tells how I first believed free will
couldn't exist, then how I realized that it could,
and finally of my wanting to tell everyone why.
I used to be a physicalist!
For years I was a physicalist. I believed only physical things could make anything happen in the physical world. Everything I did was determined not by my consciousness but by chemical reactions in my body and my brain.
What's that feel like? Great. I felt very sophisticated. I was proud of myself for believing something that other people thought contradicted common sense. I knew what was really going on, they were living under a delusion.
Then one day I had an amazing revelation! I realized I was wrong. I realized there was no dark corner of consciousness concealed from matter that I couldn't speak or write about. And speaking and writing are clearly things happening in the real, physical world. I'd been expressing my conscious thoughts through physical actions all along, just like everyone else.
This hit me like a thunderbolt. I suddenly became aware of something absolutely extraordinary that most people didn't give a moment's thought to--the physical world can interact with consciousness, and consciousness can interact with the physical world. They're doing it all the time, all around us. It's in our buildings, it's in the litter lying by the side of the road, it's in every gesture and sound we make. This is absolutely certain.
Yet science refuses to recognize it, to say anything about it.
Ever since then I've felt the passion of a convert. I've felt it's my duty to warn people if I see them in danger of becoming a robot.
Here's what I tell them.
"Stop thinking about your self in terms of physics, whether it's free or determined. Instead, think of your self in terms of the creativity in evolution. What gave the genome the freedom to cover the Earth with hundreds of millions of species of living creatures over billions of years? Whatever that was, obviously it didn't conflict with physics.
"The genome built that same freedom and creativity into your self. Don't overlook it."
The next two extracts focus on a key element in free will--
one's ability to direct one's own attention. How can that
contribute to a new and improved self?
Everyone's birthright:
Attention worth $15 million
Advertisers know how much your attention's worth. For each 30 seconds of it they'll pay around 3 cents. Over a lifetime that amounts to $15 million. They'll pay that much because they know that what enters your attention will determine how you think, feel and behave.
Shouldn't your attention be worth at least as much to you as it is to them?
Our attention is the unloading dock for what enters our self. It literally shapes our future selfs. Whatever we pay attention to today will become the resources available to us for self improvement tomorrow. When you retire, paying attention may be the only form of entertainment you can afford. It's priceless.
What goes into paying attention? From natural selection you wouldn't expect very much: just a few simple scanning devices to prevent you bumping into things and to help you identify food and members of the opposite sex, and reflexes to automatically turn those scanning devices towards or away from whatever looks promising or threatening.
But in fact you've a set of instruments--your senses--so fantastic it leaves human technology, even human imagination, far behind, plus the ability to direct those instruments however you want to enrich your conscious experience.
Attention the natural-selection way would be just a passive receiving of impressions. The intelligent-genome way is paying attention consciously.
Take back your attention
Key to building a new self is taking control of your attention. All around us there are people trying to grab our attention and harness our self to their ends. We're constantly in danger of being seduced by advertising, music, free gifts, sexual temptation, food treats, it's an endless barrage.
We're like Odysseus--he had himself lashed to the mast of his ship and ordered his crew to sail in the opposite direction from where he pointed, towards the isle of the Sirens and their irresistible singing. By having them sail in the opposite direction is how he escaped shipwreck. If we're to avoid having our self exploited for other people's benefit we have to be both Odysseus and his crew, navigating away from easy temptation and distraction. If you value your self it's worth always asking, can I do more with my attention than they can?
The last extract is about the ultimate freedom--
being free to come up with new selfs, being able to choose
between them, and continue to improve the conscious experience
they make possible.
Tips on adopting a new self
Did you realize you could choose between selfs? You could join a spiritual cult, for example. You could become Christian and care for your soul. The Ancients made several kinds of self for people to choose between.
You could adopt a self based on science and become a robot. One choice you don't have is going back to some "natural" self people had hundreds of thousands of years ago, before civilization, before we had language. That self itself has evolved, through culture, into what we are today.
The Ancients based most of their selfs on philosophy. Modem selfs tend to be based on ideas drawn from religion or politics or science. In this book I introduced you to a new idea drawn from what we know about evolution, and a new self based on that new idea. I showed you how this new self works and ways to make it your own. Actually, the self described in this book is quite like our traditional self. What's new is basing it on evolution. The benefit of that is, as more is discovered about evolution you can build more of your self upon it. .
Me and The Genies
This novel straddles the border between fiction and non-fiction.
Its 20 chapters carry you through the romance of a cynical
television producer and a beautiful Chinese scriptwriter.
Each chapter also covers one aspect of current thinking
about evolution.
Meeting with Tom
One evening as the building quieted I became aware of voices in her office. The door opened and Sung-Tin and this guy who she introduced as Tom walked out. "Henry, I've heard a lot about you," he said, "I'm curious to learn more. We're headed out for dinner, come and join us."
I was uncomfortable. Was this her boyfriend? But she caught my eye and must have read my mind because she smiled and shook her head slightly.
Early-mid forties, like Sung-Tin much preferred to ask questions than to answer them. Talent; what was talent; how did you manufacture it? How did you store it? How did the market in talent work? And so on. I'd found out nothing about him until we started dessert and coffee. He had been a business consultant, was now a school science teacher. He was also a champion of the scientific worldview in opposition to "Intelligent Design."
"I don't get it," I said. "I don't see who loses by intelligent design being taught in schools along with natural selection."
His face became instantly more animated. "The kids lose their science education, science loses its future scientists, we all lose the future benefits of science," he said. "Imagine this--instead of trying to explain the actual evolutionary origin of something, we'd just say, 'It was planned that way.' End of story. That's precisely what it means to teach ID in schools. It makes biology a joke. Sure, people are entitled to believe whatever they want, but science is science. You have to draw the line somewhere. To me, that's when people want to bring ideas into the classroom that aren't based on scientific thinking."
"Isn't there a kind of hunger behind intelligent design?" I asked. "Shouldn't those people's voices be heard?"
Tom glanced in alarm at Sung-Tin, as if shocked she'd associate with a Creationist fellow-traveler. Then he turned back to me, and began speaking in a sharper no-nonsense tone of voice. "Do you know how little evolution is being taught today because of their pressure to suppress it? They're not some poor oppressed minority, they're the majority in the U.S., trying to make science conform to popular religion."
He was studying me intently. I played poker face. He went on. "Isn't it vital that at least a tiny minority of people in the next generation continue the struggle to understand the natural world on its own terms? Would you prefer them to talk about 'spirits planning things for us'? The ID folks close their eyes to real natural history because it shows we're continuous with animals and therefore not spiritual beings. They demand we distinguish spirit from matter. That has nothing to do with science, it's the opposite of science, it's theology, pure and simple. Scientists do have a guiding principle, right or wrong, and it IS material monism. That is what we all assume and what we want taught when science is taught."
He continued to scrutinize my face. I wasn't giving anything away. "How you teach evolution is not value-neutral. You support either materialist monism, or dualism. As educators we preach a monist reductionist evolution. People should be taught scientific reasoning in a way that is not polluted with theology, or else they'll never learn how to reason from evidence in science."
I thought of the Rev Kelly's concern for kids getting self esteem through their science education. "How complete is the theory of evolution?" I asked. "Can it account for all of human nature?"
Tom turned to look at Sung-Tin in query. She shrugged. "I've taken Henry around to meetings with various people," she said. "The issue of how the theory of evolution applies to human intelligence came up."
Tom turned back to me. "The theory of evolution is a part of science," he said, "so it grows through application of the scientific method. It can deal only with what you can apply that method to. Darwin speculated about human intelligence, which raised everyone's expectations. But most evolutionists study very prosaic creatures such as mice and flies. We know a lot about them. We know a lot about how they evolve. We then apply that knowledge to learn more. That's how science grows. That's what it does best."
He placed his hands on each other, resting on the table. He continued to look at me. I sensed he was waiting for me to say something.
"But is it doing its job if it isn't telling us how we work?" I asked. "What good does it do me knowing how a fly works. I want to know how I work?"
"We've had some false starts working with humans," he said. "We're doing what we can."
What would Kelly say now? I wondered. "Isn't there a need for new values. Is anyone looking at human evolution for values?"
He lowered his head and gazed straight into my eyes. I'd obviously set off an alarm. His began to speak more slowly and deliberately. We were all to be gathered together and brought safely back to harbor.
"Many people today can feel human nature transitioning from being based on Christianity to being based on science," he said. "They're calling out to the evolutionists, 'Get ready, we're coming over, prepare us a nice soft landing on a broad and solid foundation.' They're asking evolutionists to come up with theories in line with how we already think of ourselves. We can feel the power cords fed from Christianity pulling out one by one, and we're looking for a similar set of power cords to come rising up at us from science and evolution, that we can plug in those same outlets.
"But we're shocked to hear the scientists say, 'No way. Science can't take that kind of weight. Your demands will shatter the integrity of science. If Christianity isn't working for you any more, find some other creation myth. But don't look to science for a soft landing or a secure foundation. That's not what science is for.' Trouble is, we don't have any other creation myth. We're in mid-trajectory, we're coming in for a landing, and there's no corresponding power cords rising to greet us. It's science or nothing. What should we do?"
He's looking at me. I'm looking at him.
"So tell me," I said.
"No, you tell me," he said. "You're talent. You're media. You're broadcasting. What story are you going to come up with? Ben Hur? Is that a good enough myth to replace Christianity? The Simpsons? Maybe not. So come up with something better. It's your job, I think, not science's. Science isn't in the myth-making business. Don't look to science for your new mentality."
"I'm not script," I said. "I'm talent. Anyway, isn't science supposed to solve our problems. 'Mission control, you've got a problem. Come up with something'."
"Fine," he said. "Let's do that. Let's flash-forward a few thousand years. Humanity's returned to barbarism, no culture, just each person conniving to select the best mate and survive by killing all competitors. 21st century evolutionism couldn't sustain the elevated mentality we take for granted today. But who cares? Today's world is long forgotten. They're alive. They have feelings, they express their urges, they're happy and sad in about the same proportions we are. Natural selection is improving the stock. It's no loss. So this issue is really a non-issue. There's nothing really significant at stake. OK?"
"Not OK," I said.
"Science is not in the business of providing you with a myth to live by," Tom said. "Look at the Romans. They created mentalities for themselves, stoicism for example. Very successful. Christianity. You're looking in the wrong places. Look in places like that. And that's your job. You're media. It's a creative task, not a scientific task."
He leaned back to include Sung-Tin. "I hear this a lot, 'It's science's job to save us. When are you going to come up with better theories,' and they tick off what they want, like I'm a waiter. Self-respect, rights, basis for human life being precious. Sorry, I'm not the waiter, it's that guy Henry over there, he's your waiter."
"Sung-Tin," I said. "Tom's a bully. Aren't you going to step in?"
"What do you want me to do?" she asked, her eyes glinting.
"I don't know," I replied. "Wave a cape or something. Distract him. Get him off me."
She turned to Tom, as if severely. "Tom, there's something I've been wanting to ask you. Could you teach evolution without bringing in materialism?"
"I don't think that would be honest," he said. "I don't think I'd be doing my job."
Sung-Tin cocked her head and brought a forefinger to her pursed lips. "Let me see if I have this right--after you omit supernatural explanations for how things work, your choice boils down to materialism with 'emergence', and a mind-matter dualism of some kind. Is that fair?"
Tom shrugged and nodded.
Sung-Tin continued. "Now, tell me, what's the difference between those two?"
"What kind of dualism are you talking about?" he replied, readying his fingers as if to check off a list of options, but Sung-Tin broke in, "I'm talking about a dualism illustrated by what's on this table--table cloth, cups, spoons--let's refer to them as matter, just for convenience, and your thoughts and mine as we sit here talking, lets refer to them as mind. And see, to illustrate how I can make them interact, I'll move the cups around, see, like this. There's no explanation for me moving them like that except for me demonstrating the interaction between mind and matter. Something in 'mind' made a difference in something in 'matter'. OK?"
Again he shrugged.
"Now, which is that more like," she said. "Materialism with emergence, or a dualism with interaction between mind and matter? Don't tell me one's more 'coherent' than the other, or we'll start peeling 'emergence' apart to see how coherent it is. Can you tell them apart, once we use them in a situation like this?"
He shrugged yet again. "Go on," he said. Good, she'd diverted his attention away from me. I could start to enjoy myself.
"Now let's talk about something else," Sung-Tin said. "Let's suppose what you're actually teaching is not evolution, but fractals, actually how to turn lines into fractals. You know better than me how this works. Fractals have a fractional number of dimensions. So fractal lines have a number of dimensions in between, let's say, one and two--mathematically, OK?"
He nodded.
"The people you're teaching fractals to come from both the north, and the south. The people from the north talk about these fractals as having only one dimension, plus a little bit, while the people from the south insist fractals have two dimensions, minus a bit. And you have to teach mixed classes of these people about turning lines into fractals. If you're smart you'll just teach how to make fractals without talking about whether they start out one dimension or two. Just teach the fractals, not the dimensions. OK? Seeing a parallel? Don't tell your students there's only material monism, matter plus emergence, or there's a dualism of two substances but they're not really separate. Teach just the subject matter. Teach just the science."
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