The more Homo sapiens accumulates knowledge and develops high technology, the less intelligent we are becoming as a species. Why are humans an inverse in the universe?
Though I’m sometimes accused of it, I’ve never understood why anyone would try to save this mad, dark world. It’s not about saving the world; it’s about inwardly saving oneself and humanity, which are basically the same thing.
Science cannot do so because knowledge, however accurate and extensive, requires application. And fitting application flows from intelligence, which is a completely distinct potential of the human brain than the accumulation of knowledge.
Also, scientists are human, with all the same confusions and conflicts all humans have. So when scientists try to explain subjective experience, as neuroscientists are trying to do, science goes wrong.
Science, rightly and necessarily, is an outward-oriented endeavor. It is not the inward exploration of human nature and behavior essential for self-understanding.
We assume humans are an intelligent species, but we are not. An intelligent species does not bring about the Sixth Mass Extinction in the history of life on its planet. The havoc that man, a sentient, potentially sapient species is wreaking on the biosphere cannot be compared and conflated with the five previous mass extinction events from asteroids or continent-wide volcanism.
An intelligent species is not one that accepts war as a given, much less reverts to trench warfare and lays the groundwork for AI-controlled war.
An intelligent species is not one that views the desperate migration and suffering of millions of people in nationalistic terms.
Finally, an intelligent species is not one that resigns to a world divided into the obscenely rich and the immiserated poor.
So what is intelligence?
Intelligence is self-awareness and right action in an individual, and a flourishing balance with nature by a sapient species. Thus intelligence transcends science and knowledge, much less technology and “artificial intelligence.”
With all due respect to science, it simply won’t work “to bring together experts across a broad range of scientific disciplines to help solve the greatest predicaments and puzzles that face our species,” as the proposed “School of Cosmic Future” at the University of Toronto intends to do.
Its underlying, unexamined premises are: 1. That science can save humanity; 2. That the different disciplines of science can be woven together to form whole solutions; and 3. That scientific experts, or experts of any kind, are primary, the authorities we should turn to for solutions.
What other recourse do we have except science for addressing, as Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, says, “the urgency of a situation where humanity has attained the ability to destroy itself along with the rest of the biosphere?”
The Enlightenment cornerstone of reason was essential to do science, but is woefully inadequate for our self-understanding. Though it sounds unassailable, the idea that “taking collective action based on evidence and reason” is the way ahead simply doesn’t hold up to the overwhelming evidence of man’s past and present.
The hard-won facts about the nature of reality since Galileo are not immutable truths, as every true scientist says, but prima facie evidence for prevailing paradigms and theories, painstakingly achieved and tentatively held.
Therefore insights that expand a field of knowledge are one thing, and the state of insight beyond knowledge and the known is totally another. Fully awakening the human brain’s capacity for insight beyond ideas and knowledge is what is urgently necessary to save humanity, the earth and ourselves.
Psychological revolution isn’t a mass movement. When people and human consciousness are ready, it will only take a few human beings, irrespective of culture and background, to ignite the only true revolution. As individuals we contain human consciousness as a whole in microcosm. So it’s our highest responsibility to make space for non-dualistic observation, inclusive attentiveness and transmutation.
Time is the great impediment to individual and communal transformation. When the psychological movement of time ends by undividedly attending to the movement of thought within oneself, a state of insight ensues in which one is silently and directly aware of the mystery of life and the harmony of the universe.
Is humankind in a state of transition from an increasingly destructive sentient species to an ever more intelligent sapient species? At best and with faith, yes.
So how many intelligent species are there in the Milky Way?
Frank Drake, a pioneering astronomer and astrophysicist who came up with the Drake Equation, estimated 10,000. But the number now ranges from thousands to millions in our galaxy alone, which is just one of 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.
Technological species that survive the type of collective polycrisis humankind is presently facing by bringing about an indispensable inner revolution, and thereby making the leap to a higher order of consciousness, would have transcended time inwardly, and perhaps be capable of exceeding space-time physically.
However a genuinely intelligent species wouldn’t and probably couldn’t communicate with a planetarily destructive species like Homo sapiens until we make the transition to an intelligent species. And it’s entirely up to each potentially intelligent species to make the transition. That falls to the individual, not to some fantasy of class or mass movements.
The evolution of ‘higher thought’ gave us the neural capacity not just for high science and technology, which we’ve been using to destroy the earth and humanity, but for conscious awareness of the inviolability and intelligence that imbues nature and the universe.
After a period of passive observation yielding a meditation next to the creek, I sat near the great oak at the entrance that anchors Lower Park. It has an ancient presence of stately grandeur and strength, with huge, gnarled branches stretching toward the sun and arching down and touching the high grass.
The numinous permeates nature and the cosmos, except for man. The beauty and strength of nature is not in man because our minds and brains are dominated and occluded by thought, continuously busy with knowledge, experience and self-concern. Take the space to sit still and be attentively aware in nature.
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Categories: Breaking News Opinion Tags: balance with nature critique of science human intelligence non-dual awareness psychological revolution self-awareness