Still Thinking about Thinking
A SJHS Adventure
Today is my self-imposed deadline for finishing Part III - “Thinking” for the draft of my new book, The Spiritual Journey of Homo Sapiens. The whole manuscript is due in February, giving me about two months to write each Part. I do have a draft of the five chapters of Part III done, but I'm still wrestling with them, figuratively speaking. More literally (and more suitable for a title), I’m still thinking about thinking
The first three chapters actually flowed pretty well. “Building Brains” sets the stage with a look at our brains — including Colin’s and my trip to the Notre Dame neuroscience lab to hold some human brains and cut into sheep brains. I consider a bit of the evolution of mammalian brains.
Like each Part, I began “Thinking” with a claim about human uniqueness. This one isn’t as controversial as the last two have been, but it might seem like a non sequitur: humans are the only creatures that cook their food. The connection is that in our ancestral lineage, we traded digestive effort for brainpower. The second chapter of this Part is called “Food for Thought” and describes the difference for our diet and lifestyles that cooking made (I’m sure you’re hungry for the details). I speculate a little on the origin of mastering fire and how cooking not only gave us bigger brains but also sparked (another pun intended) deeper community bonds and storytelling traditions around the campfire.
The third chapter is “Cultural Evolution”, which explores how community bonds became the basis for our collective learning and knowledge-sharing, essentially building our collective brainpower over generations. Cultural evolution allowed us to to develop something like a “cloud storage” of wisdom and skills that a community can access.
But then came chapter four, “Consciousness,” and I’ve found myself bogged down. I’ve probably written about ten thousand words so far for this two thousand word chapter. What exactly do I want to say (or more importantly, not say) about consciousness in a book like this? The sub-discipline of philosophy of mind wades into deep metaphysical waters very quickly. The task was made even more complicated by my recent rediscovery of Teilhard de Chardin, whose fascinating, if slightly out-there, ideas about consciousness stretch beyond what’s academically fashionable these days. Add to that my recent trip to New Mexico, and let’s just say my ideas have become even more expansive (read: less finished!). I have a draft of the chapter, but whether it will survive into the final version is another question altogether.
The fifth and final chapter of this Part, “Collective Brains,” depends heavily on what comes before. Right now, it’s sitting there a bit awkwardly, like someone who arrived early at a party before the host had finished setting things up. It’s meant to transition from our advanced consciousness to the realm of spirituality and religion, and to give an alternative perspective on the origin of religion from what you typically get from popular books. I’m not trying to say their perspectives are factually incorrect, but just woefully incomplete. Something like that will survive in the final version, but until I know exactly how I want to frame consciousness, this chapter hangs a bit in limbo.
Stay tuned. Next up is Part IV - “Talking.” I’ll definitely have a lot to say about language (pun intended again), so I'd better get started.
Jim, I wrote a book called "The Way," which attempted to map the terrain of contemporary spirituality. I, too, wrote a chapter on Consciousness, and that chapter alone took me a year to write.
I wrote about what you call "Collective Brains" because I became fascinated by "mind beyond brain," which is sometimes described as the akashic record, the collective unconscious, the implicate order, or the sacred archive.
Have you ever read Julian Jaynes? He has a fascinating theory about the convergence of consciousness, culture, and language. He described how our gods became more remote as our self-awareness became more immediate. We walked with gods in the garden, then we consulted gods through oracles, then we read about gods in books, then we almost completely lost contact with gods.
Interesting stuff.