It doesn’t seem to occur to most people that evolution is a process of life, so that so long as something is alive, it will evolve. Some animals evolved slowly compared to others, like the squid, because there has not been the sort of changes in the environment of the squid which caused the form of the squid to change. They lost their long spiral shell in some cases. We have no way to know what in their minds have evolved. Consider this: IF the mind is a product of the brain/body, AND the brain/body changes over time (evolves), THEN the mind will evolve over time. If there is more radiation coming through the layers of gas which encircle the globe, some animals may darken their skins to avoid cancers. Some may start to live in other environs. Some may simply die off. But dying off is a sort of change.
If, on the other hand, the mind is not a product of the brain/body, but is a separate field of energy connected with the body through the brain, then as the body changes over time, the connection will also be changed and so the mind will apparently change. A metaphor for this might be the communication systems we humans use. We could call to one another and in some cases we can make that call reach out fairly great distances. We cannot, however, pack much information into the sorts of calls which do this. So, we can use a telephone, and the old “licorice stick” enabled us to speak to another person to convey fairly complex ideas, although it would, from time to time, drop the call. Then we have the ubiquitous cell phone. Small enough to slip into a pocket or strap to your wrist, and powerful enough to have served nicely as the brains of a university of the 1960’s. This device allows you to speak to someone, and while speaking to them you might be showing them something, or sending them a document. As societal needs change the device has also changed, and previous versions do not always vanish but they might change their uses. A clunky old television might be the display for a modern fast moving video game. A blacksmith becomes a sword maker for people who like to wear costumes from the Middle Ages. Things change over time. People are things. Therefor people change over time.
Change is not linear by virtue of being different. A ball will roll east until the base changes and then it might roll west, but there is no reason that five changes down the line it will not be rolling east again. If a society changes from a monarchy to a democratic republic it might change into a personality cult evolving into a dictatorship, and from that to a socialist republic, a military dictatorship, or even a democracy is possible, all of which are determined not so much by what has been, but what is right now. There is no reason why a society based on intolerance and violence should abandon those virtues even if they are redefined into their opposites, as in “intolerance” becomes “protectionism, nationalism, patriotism” and “violence” becomes “defense”, so that the Department of War can be renamed the Department of Defense, even though it has never defended the nation, only attacked other nations. These attacks are always explained by changing the terms, evolving the message.
When we are told by our parent that we may not stay up late and watch a bloody monster movie, we ask “why?” and we are told, “Because...”, which begs the question to be repeated: “why?” and to which we are given the Final Answer: “Because I say so.” and the matter is closed, assuming we are smart enough. Some things are just Given. We are the way we are because, just because.
Having shed their mouths for beaks and increased the extent of their feathery covering, the animals who lived happily in the Jurassic Period continue to live here and now as happy as an animal can be whose domain is changing more rapidly than it can. Some of them have been changed by People, and we will likely continue to keep their forms until we can build a machine to produce something equivalent to their flesh to provide protein for our own bodies. We like fried chicken, and if we have to make the meat look like chicken when it comes out of the machine, then we will. Otherwise we will evolve to confess that we enjoy “fried chicken” and have no interest in it’s origins. In our own past we ate a great number of birds and fish and our floors were littered with these bones. Some of us learned to make whistles from bird bones and we would call out to the birds in their own language. When they came to investigate, we killed them and ate them. We learned a new way to lie. Calling in victims to kill them is very common nowadays, whistles are blowing constantly and people are leaping up and flying into the nets.
Squids kill whales. Whales have speech, size, experience, and still fall prey to 8 arms and a large beak. We find sores on whales showing how they fought back and won the battle against a squid. Some whales eat squid, and we empty their stomachs to find hundreds of 8 armed bodies. This relationship has been going on unchanged since before the meteor took out the last of the dinosaurs.
There is no reason to change that which works. There is no reason to retain that which no longer works. When a system no longer fits the situation, it must change in order to be retained. Lizards become snakes, large land animals become whales, and apes become human.
Change over time is what evolution means, and all living things change over time. To understand this, you need first to understand the limits of the time period involved. In the last one million years whales have been swimming along, singing and raising their young, but if we take in several million years we see that the animals on the shore who look like hippos are spending more time in the water to avoid predators than they spend out on land. To be able to swim better and faster they change over time the shape of their tail, they lose their arms and legs and develop a taste for plankton. The reason to change was to survive. When the meteor struck and the earth was shrouded in mist and smoke for months, the hippo-whales were under the waters eating plankton. They changed as the oceans changed, but for them the changes were minor. They got bigger, some grew longer teeth and began to eat bigger prey. On the surface of the earth small mammals become large mammals and little apes become larger, spear chucking predators. In time they throw their spears from boats to kill whales who dive to the bottom and come up when it is safe or their air is exhausted. The men wait in boats while the whales suddenly surge upwards from the waters, tossing men and boats into the air. As whales learned to eat squid, so whales have learned to attack men in boats. Meanwhile, on land, men in cars and trains are changing the living atmosphere of the planet to a form which will kill most of the life on the planet. Man is the only animal capable of such destruction. Take away man’s technology, leaving them with simple tools such as most animals use, and man becomes another ape, smaller than some and incapable of climbing trees using a tail. Monkeys have tails, apes have not.
Now apes in the form of man have traveled to the moon and left garbage and bags of feces. Those feces are riddled with life, bacteria and such. Left in the cold vacuum of the lunar landscape these life forms must either evolve or die. In time we may see the moon’s surface change color as bacteria adapt to almost no air, starkly cold and with no organic materials to consume. Our moon might change to red as the bacteria adapt to use silica rather than carbon, or some other unique adaptation. When we went to the moon and decided to leave our shit behind we assumed that nothing could live there, as we certainly could not. But one celled bacteria have different needs than humans, so there is really no logical reason to assume those bags of shit could not expand and populate the moon. It simply has not happened yet in our experiences, and that is because we did not have the capacity to travel to the moon. There is talk of firing our radioactive waste into the sun, because we assume such small amounts will have no impact. Yet history tells us how often we assume something to be true which is patently not. So we could cause the star which gives us life to change and that change could be unfriendly to our form of life, in which case things will change. Small additions can trigger large changes. A small spark can trigger a hydrogen bomb, which itself is a small spark when compared to the sun.
When man had hair all over its body and there were no cities or houses, as equals in a world of equals we changed very little over millions of years. We lost some hair and got slightly larger, probably from changing our diet to include more meat. Now as different apes we have little hair so we make clothes, we have no claws nor fangs, so we pick up sticks and throw stones. We build homes and live among groups of humans. We tell ourselves stories, like the whales, and lull ourselves into complacency in the quite mistaken belief that we are essentially different from the other apes and animals, somehow smarter, better and slated for success. This works in our present climate, but when the ice melts and the oceans rise we will have obvious evidence of our capacity for massive stupidity and a complete lack of understanding of the basic truths about life. What we have experienced in our own short lifetimes is believed to be the pattern from antiquity forwards into the foreseeable future. This is an error in logic. It assumes that which is not proven. Consider:
Bacteria are the dominant species on the planet. They have occupied the planet since the beginning of time and have evolved complex mechanisms to support their civilization. Over many generations the bacteria developed colonies containing billions of their kind, each adapted to their special duties. These colonies are mobile in order to seek more energy supplies and raw materials to maintain the colony. When two similar colonies meet they may briefly merge and one will develop a smaller colony which will grow in size until it must break away from the mother colony. Bacteria live in a state of conflict as other tribes of bacteria direct their colony to an assault on weaker colonies. The interesting thing to consider here is that these colonies have primitive self awareness and believe themselves to be sentient beings, not complex colonies of sentient beings. Since this mistaken understanding of the situation does no great harm normally to the bacteria, they allow it while they go about their business, growing and distributing chemicals and material around the colony. Occasionally the colony will “go bad” or become ill, and the bacteria may rampage the colony, destroying by changing the environment to that which is not conducive to bacterial life. Ambient conditions change and to this end bacteria must change or die. In most cases the colony will recover balance and the bacteria will continue, but eventually all colonies break up and disband, distributing the individual members throughout the immediate environment. Eventually some may find their way into a new colony and live there.
We, humans, like to think of ourselves as being unique and separate from the rest of the universe, as if there were an impenetrable barrier between ourselves and the universe. In actuality the best we have is a lacy substance which covers our colony: skin. Full of holes, pores and tears, our skin is not a barrier so much as a first stop. If we look deeper at the molecular level we see vast regions of empty space with the occasional flicker of substance in the form of atomic particles. Mostly we are fields of energy like much of what surrounds us. Life, therefore, is energy, and energy changes over time. The universe was once, we are told, a field of plasma and super charged electrons, quarks and bosons. It still is, but now it is colder and much of the energy has slowed down enough to quantum down into “matter”. We are some of this matter.
If I toss a rock into a pool of water a series of ripples will expand out in 3 dimensions, 4 dimensions and maybe even 5 or more. Actions have consequences. If I toss a piece of matter into a universe of energy small ripples of multi-dimensional energy move out into the universes. Existence has consequences. When waves of energy meet, they combine their amplitudes and energy begets energy. When matter meets matter in a full on impact some of the matter returns to energy and some of the matter changes form. When the energy that is a nation meets another nation’s energy, forms change and energy is converted. Consequences have consequences.
The whale was once a water rat big as a house. With few predators whales were able to swim out and around and tell their stories through thousands of miles of water. As it swam deeper the whales began to meet form unchanged through time: squid. The battle for supremacy of the deep waters has been going on for millions of years, and the squids have remained unchanged while the whales grew bigger, meaner or swam even further away. And while all this was going on, what were the plankton thinking?
For millions of years they have been taking in sunlight and exhaling oxygen, changing the atmosphere into something certain bacteria cannot abide. Now whales scoop them up by the billions, converting them into whale meat which attracts the squid and eventually mankind. The bones of the whales killed for their meat sit at the bottom of the deep waters and serve as housing and food for bacteria which moved to the bottom to avoid the deadly oxygen scourge.
On land the big mammals march along, led by a huge female and traveling to a place they cannot see but of which they have faith is still there and still has food and water. They follow their Great Mother in the way humanity did when it was traversing the savanna looking for water and food. When elephants walk past the bones of a dead elephant they stroke the bones lovingly with their trunks. They moan softly and perhaps remember better times. When a human walks past the bones of a dead human they become frightened and run away, terrified the bones might attack them, even the bones of their own mother, dead for years but there they are… Humans fear their dead and resent their young. Elephants revere their dead and adore their young. At no time will an elephant be tempted to kill a human and decorate their home with the body parts. At no time will humanity evolve the ability to swim to the deeper depths of the waters. The biggest squid have no fear of humanity and in spite of their opposable thumbs humans cannot match the squid for manipulation skills or deep thoughts. Squid have been pondering Life and the Universe since the whales were giant beavers and the elephants were tiny rodents. The fact that we do not speak their language is the result of our inability to understand very much about the universe. We know how to breed, we know how to kill, but we cannot speak to other beasts unless they learn to speak our language. Humanity resembles Americans in some ways. Only a tiny minority of Americans can speak more than one language. Change comes slowly to some.
When an octopus is captured great care must be taken to see that it does not escape. They can squeeze through tiny little holes since they have no bones, and then they seem to have the ability to know where to go, in which direction is the ocean. Leave the lid slightly tipped and suddenly you’re following a wet trail to the toilet and down the sewer. Put a human in a jar, even with the lid loose, and they tend to sit there and ponder their fate. Our bones hold us up and hold us back. As a result we grew better able to think ahead and plan things. Octopi may have already been down that road and made the choice to stay in the water and take life more easily. Squid try to keep a low profile since humanity learned they are tasty and there are millions of them down there. Like the whale hunters, fishermen never consider the concept that their prey may actually be more advanced intellectually than hunters. Like those who live near tigers and poisonous snakes, creatures in the sea have come to grips with the fact that there are predators and prey and sometimes one becomes the other. As any squid could tell you, nothing in this universe is forever, things always change over time. When giant monsters roamed the oceans the squid swam around inside long, hard shells shaped like cones. It was difficult to eat something inside a shell so that worked out. When the meteor knocked out much of the planet’s animal life the oceans down deep were the best place to hide while things returned. Near the black stacks there was heat and food. Once the big sea monsters were dead the squid dropped their shells and became the form with which we are familiar. Shrews on land grew up and out and larger, modifying forms and function over millions of years, eventually to become primates and humans. Meanwhile the squid and the whales continued to war and the world continued to change over time.
If we back up a little bit to get some distance between ourselves and the whole picture. We know that living things change over time, that species change over time, the planet changes over time, so everything we can witness is alive in some way and evolving. We are a part of this great change as living creatures and so we must somehow step aside from ourselves to be able to see the rest of the system. A metaphor might be the oceans: when you swim in the oceans you see the surface and a few cms beneath, but unless the light is right you don’t see too many of the creatures swimming beneath your feet. If you snorkel or scuba dive you see more, but the myriad of particles and diatoms and plankton simply block your view of what is beyond. You cannot see the sea for the sea creatures in the sea. It is exactly the same as our planet swimming through the galaxy: we see a portion of our system most of the time but when we look out too far we see very little but “empty space”, which is swarming with energy and mass and even Things that we cannot see. The squid live in the ocean and there they hunt their prey, but how do they see? They do that by evolving some of the best eyes we have ever seen. They grew the tools they needed. They also grew sensitive skin and other specialized means of sensing what is out there in the dark. The whales developed a form of speech that can be heard hundreds of miles away, or at least before humans invented submarines, sonar, and diesel engines. Now you can’t hear very much down there at all but a low hum. The Earth has developed tinnitus.
We think collectively of our Galaxy, our cosmic neighbors, as a Thing, but it is a mass, a region of space-time, a complex of energies swirling in a less dense sea of energies and we ride the tide on a tiny speck of slow moving energies thinking we know what we are doing. But we do not know what is being done to us by the rest of Existence because we cannot see half of it. Many years ago, perhaps, and maybe even now, some could see spirit, could see the non-substantial in living forms. Most evolved out of that skill set while we pounded rocks together to make axes and harpoons. We lost the skill to listen. The rest of Existence, however, never lost the skill of speaking. We have recently re-realized that trees communicate with each other, as do pretty much any living species we get around to examining. We simply cannot hear them. That is, of course, part of the problem: we are listening with our ears.
The colony of cells which grows today eventually will break apart and the cells will disband their alliances. Some of them will disband their corporal existence and return the parts to the Earth. The Earth, itself a giant entity, takes in the reformed beings, mulls them over and redeposits them back into life in some new form. Everything changes, nothing remains the same. This pattern must work in exactly the same manner when thinking about consciousness. Mind breaks down the same way matter does. As energy slows down it becomes matter, as matter speeds up it becomes energy. Throughout this dance we have consciousness weaving a complex pattern of growth, understanding, fading away… not unlike the patterns in swirling smoke lit by a shaft of sun. We see the beautiful swirling motes when they pass through the light, but all around is a great swarm of smoke that is not lit up. Since our eyes see only a tiny window, we see only a tiny fraction of the dance. Is it any wonder we misunderstand the whole picture? We hear the drum, but not the guitar. We see the dancer’s right arm every few seconds but the legs are in shadow. We can be forgiven for misunderstanding.
