I've been travelling the cyber-highways and by-ways discussing psychic phenomena and trying out various arguments and models and such for some time now and I felt it was time to give y'all my best go at a unified theory.
A friend on another board asked me the following question:
QUOTE
"What if the conceptual and cognitive faculty also came as part of a new kind of sense organ that is still in evolutionary development? That means that it would receive input from a part of reality that is not accessed by the traditional senses."
And I replied:A new kind of sense organ...hrm. Seems to me that in order for the body to reorganize itself so conclusively as to give rise to a whole new organ, it would require some kind of survival necessity to do so. There would have to be some revolutionary new factor in human survival to account for it. Perhaps, in your science fiction story human beings could colonize another planet and something there would change our needs so drastically that the body would have to overhaul its sensory make-up.
Let's play "what if" in the other direction, though. Thinking about what might be, always puts me in mind of how things begin. Let's think about the evolution of the fab five in the first place. What's so useful about any of the five senses in their most primitive incarnation that nature would select for enhancing and refining them to their present state of sophistication? What decisive advantage does the vaguely photosensitive creature have over the totally blind? How would the mere notion that there was "something over there somewhere, maybe" greatly improve the lot of the primitive organism? I'm thinking about "light," but this question applies to other senses as well--some utterly vague odor or something that might be some kind of sound, supposing the primitive brain were somehow able to conceptualize a meaningful difference between barely perceived sound and soundlessness. I mean, there's the problem right there: how do you evolve a sense of hearing, say, without first conceptualizing "sound" as something worth sensing?
Of course this line of reasoning traditionally takes us in the direction of (god help us) intelligent design, but let's not go there--please! Here's where I'd rather take this: what if awareness had a primal sensory capacity built in? Philosophically, what if awareness stands in need of something to be aware of? What if the fact of simply being alive implied that there is a world outside of the self? What if all perception began on this conceptual level and awareness was a kind of pull, like gravity (and just as mysterious), toward the sensible world? What if this innate "knowledge" that there was "something out there" drove the evolutionary process? In short, what if awareness were a drive, like sex or hunger?
Put another way, what if this connection between raw awareness and the sensible world were a force like gravity? As gravity pulls the physical body, so the sensible world would pull awareness. Just as the body creates complex structures of bones and muscles, peristalsis and blood pressure in reaction to gravity, so the primal organism would create complex structures to bring this raw awareness into sharper and sharper focus over millennia. What if awareness preceded its organization into five senses? What if the five senses were not the source of our awareness, but simply the way we manage it?
Touch of course would seem like a natural development of even the most primitive organism. From this a creature gains a sense of movement, of collision, of presence. But if awareness is a drive, the motive force behind the senses, then even our most primitive awareness would have important implications. What if the evolutionary process had, therefore, a predictive faculty? What if our selfish genes, could extrapolate mutation beyond a specific slight shift? In that case, the first photosensitive cell in a creature's body (or the first photosensitive organelle in a single celled creature) could be extrapolated to something that would give the organism greater awareness of its environment and the "awareness drive" would push (pull?) the organism in that direction.
Okay. Now, here we are several billion years later with five senses. But what of the awareness drive? What of the primitive predictive capacity of awareness itself? Well, if we look, we could say that examples are all around us in nature: the instantaneous schooling behavior of fish, the ability of migratory birds to travel thousands of miles unerringly without the benefit of sight or hearing easily could be accounted for by a highly sophisticated awareness drive.
Animals perform amazing feats so regularly and effortlessly we don't even think to question how. How do deer run at full gallop through thick forest, often in absolute terror for their lives without running into trees or even tripping, when even one such injury would be enough to cripple an animal? And how do they move so noiselessly without spending the whole time staring at the ground ahead of them? Is sight the best way to predict the solidness of the ground ahead, anyway? Of the five senses, sight is the only way to encounter contour at a distance, but woefully inadequate as a measure of thickness and solidity. Do deer echo locate? Squirrels judge distances all day long with similar accuracy. If this were merely inhuman athletic ability, wouldn't all aging squirrels eventually fail a jump? Wouldn't all squirrels die from falls, and the woodland floor be littered over the years with dead squirrels?
So okay, if there were such a cockamamie thing as an "awareness drive," what happened to this faculty in humans? Why don't we all have this capacity? Why isn't the awareness drive as strong in humans as our sex drive or our need for food?
Well, let's say that all these drives exist to improve our survival; so, what if our survival no longer depended upon awareness (Terry Schiavo comes immediately to mind)? What if humans had moved beyond normal evolution and so evolved beyond awareness as a need? A more primitive creature's awareness of the world around it is the key to its survival. What if modern man's ability to manipulate his environment were to replace awareness as the guarantor of survival?
The efficacy of and need for an awareness drive presupposes many and constant unknowns that directly and grossly affect the organism's viability. For most creatures on this earth, there are thousands of transactions with their environments which they must "get right" on the first try or parish. But we humans have created so many alternatives and back-up plans through agriculture, technology, and medicine, that there is very little in our existence that we have to get right the first time or even the tenth. Our bodies have obviously retreated from direct importance in our survival (hence our clawlessness and fanglessness; our relative physical ineptitude when compared even to the common house cat). What if our raw awareness, in the form of the "awareness drive" were similarly to have atrophied? Insulation from every form of weather, an utter absence of predators and the absolute assurance of finding sustenance at the local Safeway would render the awareness drive obsolete.
We can see the consequences of our evolutionarily weakened physical bodies easily enough, but what would be the consequences of an atrophied "awareness drive?"
The most technologically dependant societies might see a marked decrease in the pursuit of knowledge, many people putting their focus instead into acquiring wealth to better manipulate their environment; the great majority of people in a society might be grossly ignorant of how anything worked. Degenerative diseases of vision, hearing, smell and touch sensitivity would proliferate. We tend to think of "self esteem" as a function of our human minds alone, but what if a primitive form of "self esteem" was nascent in a creature's awareness that its actions have effect and that the animal itself therefore, is effective? Technologically advanced societies then would experience a profound crisis of self-esteem, leading to acts of criminal violence far surpassing the horrors of previous ages.
But how could self-esteem be connected to primitive awareness? We all know the story of the baby elephant that is tied to a post. The baby elephant learns from trial and error that it cannot free itself from the post and stops trying. Later, even when the elephant has grown large enough to uproot whole trees, it doesn't try to escape when tied to the meager post because it has already learned that it can't. "Learned helplessness," we call that. We also know that wild animals in captivity often simply die despite all our life support efforts, many displaying the outward signs of depression in the last months of life. So, by negative example at least, it would seem plausible that a sense of effectiveness, an awareness of being able to meet their needs through direct action exists and is a sign of health in animals.
But what if such an animal were able to devise technology, or were given technology that would prolong its life regardless of its personal effectiveness? What then would become of its "self-esteem?"
Which leads me (maybe not you, but it does me ) to a discussion of the subconscious. No one studies psychology for long without running across the provocative notion that much of what we do and feel happens subconsciously. Objectively speaking, animals are said not to be conscious. But are they then subconscious? Certainly they experience emotions; certainly these emotions are a reaction to some relation between themselves and the world, some awareness.
It is further interesting that something like my "awareness drive" could account for a great many "psi" phenomena. People with such abilities would simply be expressing an atavism, comparable to webbed feet. The vast majority of such "anomalous cognition" would take place entirely at the subconscious level (as it would have done in all animals before human consciousness existed) and would, therefore, resist observation and investigation by conventional laboratory study; as a survival mechanism, the awareness drive would tend not to work under controlled laboratory conditions at all, just as it would have shut down nearly completely in the environment created by modern western culture at large. It's likely that the membership of the western scientific establishment would be drawn from populations with the greatest technological advancement, and therefore the greatest remoteness from this awareness. If, as I’m suggesting, the major factor in the loss of this awareness were environmental, then very young children might be expected to experience some aspect of this awareness and lose it as they became more and more subject to their environment. Remnants of this awareness, though lost to modern man, would exist in literature and folklore from the remote past. It would stand to reason that populations having the least contact with modern technological convenience would have a much greater tendency to express atavistic awareness to the point that such cultures might take "psi" phenomena for granted.
Any thoughts?
