[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[Khoo Hock Aun]

Hi Mark and anyone else interested,

We are treading close to the Conscious Evolution of Barbara Max Hubbarb
http://www.evolve.org/pub/doc/evolve_what_is_ce.html when we assert that
mankind will now determine the next evolutionary step. I had a chance to
meet with Ms Hubbarb a long time ago in her Washington office twenty over
years ago, but an institution of this sort always raises suspicions of
whether they are actually premised on hard science. Too much speculation and
too little substantiation for me and of course her books have ended up in
the new age section of the book stores.. Dave (DT) in September of 1999 did
make a reference/enquiry to whether it was a tribute to Pirsig's
precognition. There is among others a reference to the Spirit ( and I dont
quite know what this means).

I preferred the approach of Eric Drexler who coined the term nanotechnology
and his projection in his book 'The Engines of Creation"
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=2420 that we are could ultimately be the
last generation of humans; as we get better at cell repair machines, we live
longer and my benefit from more medical technologies that allow us to live
even longer.  His work is formalised in the Foresight Institute
http://www.foresight.org/index.html  and the Institute for Molecular
Manufacturing where we can through nanotechnology now create new materials
atom by atom.

Nevertheless, what struck me about this "Conscious Evolution" movement was
the particular insight of Peter Russell author of the Global Brain,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_73aFQGLcgQ&feature=player_embedded who wrote
also on Transcendental Meditation and the Maharishi Yogi, more at
http://www.peterrussell.com/.  In the Global Brain he observed that carbon
based macro-molecules trancended into a stable living cell when they arrived
at the magical number of 10 billion or 10 to the power of 9. As life
evolved, animals developed brains, which when the number of neurons reached
a level of 10 billion or so, consciousness, or self-awareness emerged. Peter
Russell postulated that as the population of planet Earth appoaches 10
billion, human society would become more organised, complex, specialised for
a Global Brain to emerge. He then goes on to speculate what a global
consciousness would be.

For the moment I want to focus on the transitory points, between
non-life(mere macro-molecules) and life, life and consciouness, and
individual/self aware consciousness and global/directed consciousness. If
the transitory points are indeed the complexity, sophistication,
specialisation, organisation and connectedness that the 10 billion number
provides, its is indeed interesting if this is drawn out as a fact. The
amoeba is the largest single cell, the dog has the 1 billion neurons in its
brain and does any of the primates have something in between but not
reaching the magic 10 billion that humans have ? What about the molecular
and later neural systems in terms of the critical mass and their
organisations that lead them to move from inorganic to organic, from life to
consciousness and later reflective consciousness ?

Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields may have something to do with it
more at http://www.sheldrake.org/books/, which I first read in his New
Science of Life, and these all lead me to David Bohm's implicate orders,
more at http://www.david-bohm.net/, which really brings us to Synchronicity
http://www.fdavidpeat.com/ideas/synchronicity.htm. As we try to bridge
between inorganic and the organic, matter and mind, the biological and the
social, the evidence of implicate orders is found in synchronicity, the
co-incidence of events and happenings. Morphic resonnance, implicate orders
that may not be discernable are tracked down by their manifestations on our
biological and social planes. My favourite illustration of synchronicity and
the implicate order is the phenomenon of often running into people we know
at airports.

Macro-molecules, which are exactly stable patterns of protons and electrons
based on their valences, transcend to cells, and into multicellular
life-forms which are also exactly stable patterns of differentiated cells
within which are differentiated macro-molecules. As cells transcend into
neurons, stable patterns of differentiated neurons transform into brains. At
this point, the self-aware brain emerges, but but as biological functions
go. Concepts of individuality, roles within communities, family, clans,
tribes and nations emerge. The social value is collective existence,
survival and expansion. Aggregations of patterns have been generated and
have evolved from various competing series and iterations; and have remained
"stable".

The stabilty of patterns in a dynamic environment is illusory. They are only
held stable because they have been found in sufficient systems to emerge as
a phenomenon. One indicator is probability. The other is their acceptability
to a group. In the physical world it is easy to discern such patterns and
understand their proliferation. In the mental sphere, though, one has to go
back to the phenomenon of thought. What indeed is a thought ?

The Buddhist Abhidhamma describes 17 precise steps how a thought arises. In
a electrochemical context of a series of synapses firing across various
parts of our brains, a series of thoughts may of course arise. And stable
patterns of thought may emerge governing biological and social functions in
addition how a sentient being may interact with its environment.  There is a
category of thoughts which are responses based on sensory inputs. There is
another category generated by memory and independent of sensory inputs; the
ability to conceptualise, construct an entire world independent of a
physical world. Here a sense of self, ego, if you will, emerges with a
strong sense of individuality but is actually only a very very persistent
set of patterns.

All patterns, from inorganic, to organic, to thought have evolved to support
life on Earth. Yes the sun has had a lot to do with providing the energy for
it. No argument there. However nothing is of any significance if it has not
achieved "stability". That very "stability" allows transcendance to the
next level of life, so it seems. if none of the systems in a hierachical
structure is "stable", the whole structure is threatened. Life, in the form
of man, on the other hand have emerged to ask the hows and the whys; whether
morphological fields and implicate orders of which we know of thorugh
synchronicity also have equally or perhaps more important roles to play.

The stability of patterns are usually taken for granted, but they are
actually quite fragile, easily dispersed into their constituents once the
pre-conditions are not held. The human mind holds a large number of patterns
in place for existential reasons with respect to biological survival and
interaction with the environment and the bond is strong. A collective of
human minds also hold a large number of social patterns in place and the
value is the evolution of community.

As Barbara Hubbard would put it, humanity now stands on the brink of
fundamentally determining its own evolution, and Peter Russell's global
brain offers a vista of what the world would be like when humanity arrives
at a "stable" population of 10 billion sometime in 2050 with the population
of the Earth organised, connected and specialised in a critical mass that
would take us into the plane of global consciousness. This leap is about as
profound as the transition from organic to inorganic, and life to
consciousness. Written in the early 80s in the pre-internet, facebook and
iPhone era, it sounded an improbable future. Today with dominance of a
second brain in the global google and the increasingly globalised
communications infrastructure, the emergence of "stable" global patterns now
seem to predominate and at an accelerate pace.

As competing and evolving patterns go therefore, which are the "stable"
global patterns that will emerge ?

There has been much said about defining a Metaphysics of Quality, the
question of what is Quality itself and the definition of the intellectual
level.

Now, not every molecule finds its way into a cell, not every cell is a
neuron, and not every animal brain can be consciously aware. Similarly not
every human is an intellectual. Every civilisation, every society has a
number of people, its so-called intelligentsia, which are called
intellectuals. As a class, do they represent a "level" in Pirsigian terms?
Or by their influence, the organisation and sophistication of a society or
civilisation to support intellect.

That a subject-object logic based system emerged and a metaphysics based on
this logical system emerged; and to dominate the world through the
philosophy of the Greeks is but one pathway of an acknowledged enormously
successful and stable pattern. But every intellectual who is not a scientist
also engages in intelletual activity and cannot be excluded from the
intellectual level.

It would seem a number of other patterns are also competing to be a "stable
global pattern". There is a much maligned Islamic pattern which does not
seem to stand a chance against a technologically superior Western pattern.
Efforts, such as Dr Peter Hammond's  to make Islam a social pattern rather
than to explain its intellectual aspects only serves to colour popular
perception. For every jihadist, there is a lot more, tens of thousands more
moderate and tens more intellectual muslims who would argue rationally for
social justice and human rights. I say this in spite of the fact that I live
in a muslim majority country where social/political motivations now try to
appeal to the emotions and prejudices to stay in political power.

P R Sarkar,
http://www.metafuture.org/sarkar/sarkar-historiography-transcendance.htm
another
maligned individual who founded the Ananda Marga movement, expounded his
Theory of Social Cycles where he explained that society moved into four
different cycles of governance , the Age of the Labourer, the Age of the
Warrior, the Age of the Intellectuals, the Age of the Acquisitors. The
transition from one Age to another is precipitated by weakness in the ruling
structure. In the chaos of the Age of the Labourer, usually a strong
military personage will arise to herald the Age of the Warrior, and as
reliance on the priests and advisors become indispensable, the Age of the
Intellectual comes into being where ideas prevail. Eventually those with
ideas can be bought and the Age of the Acquisitors then begin to control
society. In the Age of the Acquisitors, their control of the economy is
absolute to the point where the masses revolt and in the aftermath, the
Labourers rule.

We find that the human attachments to certain patterns can be strong and
they rarely move beyond the social, falling back to it over and over again.

Best regards
Khoo Hock Aun






On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 2:03 PM, markhsmit <markhsmit at aol.com> wrote:

>
> On Jan 24, 2010, at 9:11:33 PM, "Khoo Hock Aun" <khoohockaun at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> This in no way detracts from the assertion, that I believe Pirsig makes, in
> that as societies evolve, an intellectual level emerges, irrrespective of
> the context and geographical location, whether in tandem with other
> civilisations or in isolation. The value in this is that intellect now
> leads
> evolutionary development, rather than social drivers. The ongoing debate in
> this list, is what constitutes the intellectual level; some assert it to be
> the subject-object divide, logic itself and some, Pirsig himself asserts,
> symbol manipulation, some assert it to be more, but the net effect,
> whichever is the same - the conception of ideas and acting to manifest
> those
> ideas in the world around us. India and China too had their versions of
> subject object logic within their respective philopsophies but this did
> not to drive and dominate the development of society as in the West.
> Perhaps, the emphasis of the community over the individual arrested this
> tendency and what you call the "ego" is not a central character in the
> play.
>
> Mark responded:
>
> Hi Khoo,
> I was struck by the phrase that the intellect leads evolutionary
> development, because
> this takes it away from its biological setting in the sense of adaptation
> to the environment
> through survival.  I am in agreement that evolution works in many ways.
>
> For personal reasons I have been studying autism for a number of years.
>  This is both
> from the biological and metaphysical side.  Recently, in corroboration of
> my "theories"
> an epidemiological study found clusters of autism (I don't have a reference
> because I
> heard it on NPR).  The only similarity in these clusters was the fact that
> they were in
> upscale neighborhoods and autistic children were born to educated parents
> more.
> The data was significant.  The explanation for this as presented on the
> radio was that
> upscale parents may seek help more and thus be counted more.  This may be
> true,
> but I have another idea.  Autism may be showing the signs of evolution as
> it is attempting
> to create the next level in intelligence.  Evolution is not pretty, and
> many mistakes
> are made before success is reached.  Based on my knowledge of autism, I can
> pick
> out all the positive features of autism and I deduce a high intellect that
> also has
> extreme empathy.  That is, autistics can sense what people are feeling in
> highly
> specific ways.  There are other traits which also indicate a higher brain
> power.
> Now, just like a child cannot survive and has to be taken care of,
> autistics are
> in the same position.  In some cultures autism is deemed extremely powerful
> and such people are elevated to witch doctors and such.  The sensory
> perception of autistics is indeed different which, at present makes the
> noisy way we live quite confusing.
>
> There is no doubt in the rise in autism.  The clusters described above
> cannot
> be explained though environmental factors, and any explanation for a
> chemical
> basis for autism has fallen short.  While it is difficult to see the forest
> for the
> trees, an evolutionary explanation may result sometime beyond my lifetime.
> It is interesting to speculate where man will go next, and how biology will
> play a part.
>
> Best regards,
> Mark
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khoohockaun at gmail.com
6016-301 4079