Little Golem#1 · Andres Villasante
7 Feb 2004
The strategy of the evolution of mind is toward an increasingly looser relationship to the axioms of organic existence. But this relative freedom has evolved only because it serves all the better the purposes of the organism in the game of survival. The effective general strategy for survival lies in the ability to transcend or override any particular algorithm. This freedom has its dangers. There is a price to pay, not only in the overhead of complexity, but in the very laxness which is its essence. With our relatively free will, and enormous capabilities for transforming the environment, we humans are free to play havoc with the natural support for our very existence. From an evolutionary point of view, this freedom to play God exists only for the purpose of serving the mandate of life on a higher level than we may already recognize. To transcend a truth is to find a larger truth, to open to a greater, more objective reality that is binding on a higher level. We could say that the evolutionary purpose of subjective consciousness is to liberate the subject from the object. This means creating a subject that is utterly free from the dictates of the projected system of cognitive behaviors that is usually taken to be the self. The core of this self-- whether considered as the subject's experience or his cognitive behavior-- is belief or thought mistaken as reality. Before subjective consciousness, there is only the world, which is the unconscious projection of such thought and belief. In subjective consciousness, there is both world and self at odds. After subjective consciousness, there is no more distinction between world and self. The evolution of complex adaptive systems proceeds through sensitivity to awareness to self-consciousness. If the organism has transcended its programs once in creating awareness, twice in creating subjective consciousness, perhaps a third movement toward objectivity lies in abandoning the subject/object duality of subjective consciousness. Having played its role, perhaps the separate self with its imagined freedoms will ultimately be discarded as an expedient that has outlived its usefulness in the evolutionary quest for objectivity.Of course, language, reflexive consciousness and (non-material) culture is possible without a technological orientation. Again, the cetaceans may be a case in point, with their elaborate communication skills. Yet, if signals are to be sent across space, some means of directing electromagnetic energy seems to be implied. If a species communicated using electromagnetic signals (rather than sound), perhaps some natural means of amplification could be evolve (without externally fabricated amplification devices).By definition, the subject stands always on the opposite side, of the arrow (or lens) of mind, from objects. The subject is not any object of consciousness, but is consciousness itself. Not itself a thing, it is a point of view, never what is seen from that point of view. We could think it is a person or agent pointing, but this begins to make the subject an object of thought, even a body, which it is not. Since awareness can always point to any pointer, the subject is always interior to what can be pointed to.