Evolving Brain 1

Brain Evolution.

If we consider evolution in terms of ‘reactivity’ and define reactivity as the capacity of an entity to perceive and react to its environment we might draw up four distinct levels;-

1-     rocks react on a purely mechanical level

2-     plants additionally react on a cellular level

3-     animals additionally react on an instinctual level, and

4-     humans additionally react on a conscious level.

The last three constitute life and the last two constitute moving or ‘non-planted’ life.

Planted life takes in nutrients from the ground, rain and sun and only needs a cellular reactivity to its environment so as to bend with the wind or towards the light, grow and flower in response to the conditions it finds itself in.

Non-planted life, however it came about, had initially one serious problem to overcome, how to get sustenance. It may have achieved freedom to move but at the expense of a ready supply of nutrients from the ground. Early moving life probably ‘fed’ from its surroundings much like plants but more movement would need far greater reactivity with its environment to survive.

I imagine this would begin in the sea as movement will occur without having the capability to cause it. Following on an awareness of chemical and organic ‘smells’ coupled with some simple means of movement towards sustenance. As cells became more diverse their special properties would be used to further enhance survival. As the unique element of moving life is a capacity to travel it required spatial awareness to locate food. After smell, light sensitive cells would be useful, proliferate and become more specialised. After a trillion generations of variation each guided by the necessities of survival a combination of sensory organs and a means to ‘use’ them effectively was developed. I would imagine this was all done in parallel, an improvement here followed by an improvement there; in other words the sense/brain/bodily functions developed in tandem. Also as life is in a sense cellularly economic these developments would be based on the minimum of new cell types, i.e. ‘if a particular cell or structure evolves to have a useful property then it would reproduce until no further improvement is gained.’

In this context the brain together with its sensory inputs and nervous system developed in constant relationship with both its other body components and its environment under the influence of environmental demands. This cellular economics would suggest the brain, like other body organs, is made from repeats of the simplest capable ‘cellular unit’ with the resulting multiplicity of units structured to form the most elegant and efficient organ capable of what the overall organism finds necessary for survival. It seems likely the sensory cells came first as there would be no use for an organisational brain without them, and possibly the brain evolved out of modifications of these cells. As such the sensory organs might be seen as outposts of the brain seamlessly integrated with it yet on the outside of the body in order to collect information.

During this long process of evolution our sensory/ brain organ has been constantly developing to maintain our survival and is still evolving today.

It is important to recognise that the human brain is the result of this evolutionary process and its continuous longstanding relationship with the earth as its environment, and that our current capacity for cognition is the embedded summation of this process with a constant view to survival. I believe this explains many things, most of all that our cognition is not primarily concerned with what or who I think ‘I am’ as a discrete individual, a ‘constructed self’, but simply my, albeit personally unique, reactive cognitive mirror of my environment to aid my survival in it.

As our cognition exists behind an impenetrable ‘sensory wall’ it works unilaterally and in isolation, yet by having evolved in constant relationship with its environment it is predicated to act multilaterally with its environment to aid survival. It is in a sense half a circle that is coupled with, yet existing in a different isolated domain from, our environment which forms the other half circle; the two when put together,  (  ) forming a circle of interaction or reactivity; a sort of yin and yan whole.

I am struggling to get this idea across but I believe it is important to recognise that considering our cognition as ‘what I think’ suggests a separate entity in which a complete circle of interaction can occur totally internally. I am suggesting that though my cognition has evolved to the point where it can, this view of cognition ‘in isolation’ is fundamentally at odds with the evolved nature of our brain to work multilaterally with the environment. It’s not ‘wrong’ it simply takes us out of the flow of evolution, which is extremely perilous.

If we pursue this false view we will and are isolating ourselves from our environment. We will and are isolating ourselves in a non-existent cognitively constructed world. This is a severely practical problem for us. The environment is obviously suffering, the purely cognitive economic world is devastating human energies and even the process of art has ground to a halt in the cognitive world of modern, post-modern and now alter-modern, where the concept of ‘modern’ has taken the ‘now’ and placed it in respect to a raft of purely cognitive references. As suggested by Eckart Tolle this literally cancerous quality of misused cognition needs to be addressed.

Though we humans, being the most autonomously reactive of all animals, tend to see ourselves as separate entities we still have a long continuous history of being inseparable from the environment. In other words, though we can intellectually recognise that on a practical level we can’t live without an environment we find it extremely difficult to recognise we are far more deeply an inseparable reactive part of it. It’s not just that we would starve without an environment but that our brain and cognition would suffocate without the environmental stimulation that is the ‘air’ our reactivity requires to breath. It is only our increased capacity for cognitive reactivity that has offered us the unique possibility for our consciousness to construct a belief that we are separate, yet our supposedly unique internal cognition is as much a creation of our environment as sand is created from a stone by constant weathering.

When one perceives our current human condition in the context of our use of the reactivity of our cognitive organ I believe many things fall into place.

Of course human beings have many failings, but the vital addition of this approach is that our troubles are not the result of individual frailties but simply the state of evolution of our cognitive organ.

To construct an understanding of its current functionality and limitations could be a first step to understanding it and our best use of it.