I am standing on the platform of the tram and I am entirely uncertain as to my place in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even approximately could I state what claims I might justifiably advance in any direction. I am quite unable to defend the fact that I am standing on this platform, holding this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, and that people are getting out of the tram’s way or walking along quietly or pausing in front of the shop windows. Not that anyone asks me to, but that is immaterial.

Kafka is experiencing an existential disconnect,  the acute realization that you are partaking in an event of which you don’t why or where it originated or where it is going in terms of its purpose or destination as well as your own role in all of this. My take on this is that we might encounter such a disconnect when we take a step back from the immediacy of our daily lives and try to place them within the larger reality of the world we live in.

What is the distinction, and how do we run into it? I think the distinction is a function of contrasting the comings and goings of our daily lives as defined by  our  present and our past against the cosmic spectacle we appear to be immersed in – given that we are an intricate part of it – but unable to articulate the significance of this in any meaningful way.

More specifically, when you look at all of  human history and the types of activities that have preoccupied our species since the beginning of time – including the trail of war and other forms of mindless savagery that has been left behind as we have proved and continue to prove to be our own worst enemy – you have to wonder what this human saga is all about, as when you think about this for a minute the entire human effort as a whole makes absolutely no sense at all.

Now something started all this, and our sciences have told us as much:  the cosmos exploded, the earth cooled, the slimy bottom spawned, life evolved and here we are. But, to what avail?  I think that is a reasonable question, and it should be staring us in the face all the time, yet we seem to go on as if  none of this is of any consequence even if we did know the answer.

I think that way down deep this is an issue for all of us, and is subsumed in the human psyche, but that only some of us are  willing to confront, or – for that matter – are able to experience as an existential issue at some level or another and that, yes, continues to stare us directly in the face all the time.

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. … “So says   renowned physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg  in his 1977 book “The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe)”

In general, we humans like to think that things happen for a reason, either accidentally or on purpose – whatever the case may be. At least, that is the way we usually think about the world based on our very experience of it.  Seeing the world in this manner allows us to understand the interaction between things and events while enabling us to manage our lives around them with some degree of predictability.

So what about the universe? Would it not be reasonable to expect there was some reason for it to be here as well? I’m kind of two minds about that.

First of all, it is quite a conceptual leap to jump from considering the status of some event or another in the world to considering the status of world itself. Is the world  just another event in the sense that we should be able to look at it from either end, i.e., consider the likely cause of it and the effect that it has on other things in the world? Can the world be seen as an event beyond all the things that take place in it? (look up: Gilbert Ryle’s category mistake)

Since the world is both logically and physically necessary for anything to take place, I don’t believe you can put it in the same category of events that take place in the world. As such it occupies a class or category all its own. (I think I’m running into a version of Russell’s set paradox here, but let’s not go there … )

For anything to happen, the world must have happened – that much seems clear. But – as far as we know – the world appears to have happened on its own account, i.e., it is simply here – full stop. It is the container that contains everything else, but itself it is not contained other than by itself.  Such is the mystery of the world.

Now one  could argue that we just don’t know that the world isn’t part or the result of another event that brought it about, i.e., the world is a transitory event that came into being as a result of “the big bang”  – which is the prevailing view at the moment, and so on, and end up in an infinite regress of events preceding events, and then only because we cannot accept that events can appear out of thin air or materialize from within a material empty vacuum for that matter,

Our language is the limiting factor here because it is the language of the living and breathing  mortals that we are.  We cannot get beyond the logic derived from our species’ experiential involvement  with the world and make sense of events that seem to go beyond that.

But what if the point of the universe being here is simply just that: to be here for what it is, i.e., to exist for its own sake?  That we may be able to make sense of this might depend on  what sense or meaning we are able to attach to  our lives, as by extension we would  then be valuing the point of universe being here as well.

If we think about our place in the world this way, well-known  20th century existentialists such as Sartre and Camus would be wrong  classifying life as essentially meaningless and  – among other things –  attributing the absurdity of our predicament to a cold and indifferent universe that remains silent on such things, given that only human beings are able to attach meaning or value to something.  The conclusion has to be that meaning comes from within life, from experiencing life as meaningful, and not from having it  derived from a source external to it.

It would follow that no feature of the universe will likely make sense unless it is viewed in the context of providing the ground for some aspect of meaningful human activity that could otherwise not have taken place.  The logic may sound counter-intuitive but I believe that this is the only way out of the absurdity paradox that Albert Camus entertained when considering the fact that human beings inevitably seek to understand life’s purpose:

“Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remain silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. Camus’ philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)”

The question remains then how the seemingly puny human could conceivably value the existence of the mighty universe simply by finding meaning in their everyday lives.  I think it boils down to the distinction between  quantity and quality, and between form and function in the context of an evolving universe.

As such it wouldn’t matter how old or how large and complex  the world is, given that the significance of that could only be expressed by how well we would be able to experience the quality and depth of  being at the receiving end of this  spectacularly creative effort,  and then solely with the sensibility and reasoning  that has been given to us as a result of merely being a part of it. Everything beyond it is more or less irrelevant, in the sense that -as spectacular as that may be – it is at most a set decoration, the backdrop against which we play out the destiny of our species and of which we have for the moment absolutely no clue.

Galaxies in the Milky Way

Given what we think we know about the age of the universe,  planet earth and the myriad of creatures that have and are continuing  to inhabit it since  life first appeared,  we have arrived only recently  as a species uniquely capable of reflective thought and reasoning. With it – I suggest – came the potential to make something of ourselves beyond being just another species for which  the need to survive  and ensure the continuation of its genus appear to be its main objectives..

On that premise we find  ourselves at the receiving end of the implicit obligation to go beyond  these basic needs, and  not only because we can envisage ourselves of being capable of accomplishing much more than that, but also, surely,  because we would not want to see ourselves being limited by them.

But given the state of the world today, for many the potential to distinguish ourselves beyond being just another creature on this planet appears to have been reduced to some self-aggrandizing exercise in unlimited exploitation, boundless consumption and mindless procreation, and that at great cost to ourselves and our future.  As a matter of fact, we seem to have taken the first steps towards our own extinction by continuing to undermine the very environment that spawned and nurtured us and allowed us to thrive as a species.

Alternatively – and yes, there is always an alternative, in particular to just being unimaginably shortsighted! – we  could use our collective brain-trust to decide what kinds of uniquely human qualities we ought to prioritize in order to truly benefit us all  and start acting accordingly.

I can think of a few: Imagine a world-wide society built on mutual trust and respect, featuring such things as a sustainable waste-free economy, free education, healthcare, equal opportunity regardless of race , age or gender, the pursuit of arts and sciences, and being free from famine, disease and crime. In other words, not much we are familiar with today, but something worth pursuing, don’t you think?

Easier said than done, without question;  in fact some will say that such an utopian state of affairs will be impossible to achieve given what history has shown us to date  about human nature.  True, is difficult to see any such potential reflected in the daily course of our lives. Not only  does  it seems near impossible to quantify them beyond being either mundane  – and  at any rate less than  profound – or positively evil, and that would include much of human kind’s murderous, bloodstained past and all of our  self-destructive activities such as our relentless attacks on the earth’s critical life-sustaining biosphere.

The problem of course is that we seem to be lost and absolutely hapless when it comes to understanding our place in the world. In the mid  1600’s the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote that people find themselves with needs and desires without understanding the reasons why they want and act as they do.  Lacking this knowledge about themselves and their place in the world creates the illusion that they can do as they please, and which is a source of much grief when they act against their own interest because they  don’t seem know any better.

Nevertheless, it is the implicit promise of our cosmic DNA, our origins,  that will continue to urge us along this uncertain path towards a future we might one day be able to imagine what that would look like if we develop the ambition, courage and intellectual wherewithal to  conceive the realization of it.  And why shouldn’t  we be able to: are we not the descendants of a  magnificent  cosmic event and all the spectacular creative energy that lies within and  is necessarily  represented within every particle of our being?

I say “necessarily” because how could it not be? We aren’t some accidental and aberrant event over and above the phenomenon of the universe: we ARE the universe, nothing more and nothing less. Now, if we only knew what that meant, but that is what life is all about, isn’t it? And clearly, this is the larger context we should be taking our cues from when we plan our future – as little as we are able to grasp of it at the moment.

For this we need to be able to turn ourselves inside out, by  prioritizing  the spiritual over the physical and embracing those values that are clearly larger than the largely material ones we appear to be pursuing today. Instead we ought to be pursuing empathy, compassion, trust and a respect for life in recognition of the incredible accomplishment that life represents as a cosmic effort to redefine itself for whatever purpose it has in mind – as much as we cannot even begin to think what that purpose may be although I suspect it might have something to do with establishing order over entropy and light over darkness  in pursuit of total harmony.

However – and as much as I hate to admit this – my greatest fear is that this kind of enlightened future is in fact not available to us as, when  we may not have moved  far enough up the evolutionary ladder to be able to visualize it – or event want it ! – and  to start changing our ways collectively to make it a reality.

As such, life is likely to continue to be the absolute tragedy it is, for our life-giving planet and for so many of our species today.

Somehow, our consciousness is the reason the universe is here. (Sir Roger Penrose)

So, what is consciousness?  Consciousness is a way of being in the world that appears to go beyond any known physical properties in the material universe, in the sense that it manifests itself as an enduring phenomenon that cannot be reduced or accounted for by  any physical law or properties other than through association.

While we might use the term  frequently and on a casual basis –  suggesting an implicit understanding of what consciousness is all  about – when we are pushed to elaborate exactly what it is that we are referring to,  we will likely run out of vocabulary when it comes to describing  its defining features.

Nevertheless, we keep trying to come up with some kind of explanatory account for it that goes beyond association  and accommodates it solidly within the  known laws of physics.

The philosopher David Chalmers has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental property of nature existing outside the known laws of physics, and one might be led to agree with that as to date science has not be able to account for it in any way as a function of a material law of the universe.

But while philosophers and scientists continue to  struggle to make sense of consciousness  and eminent physicists such as Sir Roger Penrose and Archibald Wheeler have begun linking it to the intricacies of Quantum Mechanics, and a concept I have been trying to get my head around in another post that can be found here.

What we can say about consciousness is that, in the first instance, it provides us with the realm or opportunity that we might refer to as sentience and awareness where we are able to  acknowledge the reality our own existence in the here and now, in the sense  that without it we would simply not be here – or anywhere else for that matter.  That is no more than saying ” I think, therefore I am”,  as the philosopher René Descartes once proclaimed  in his 1637 Discourse on Method.

As well, and a presumption no doubt implicit in the previous paragraph, one must be in the realm of the living as a necessary condition for consciousness to be present, as to date consciousness as a phenomenon has only been observed in association with life and the living, be it in man or beast or other forms of life that appear to be capable of exhibiting this phenomenon.

At least, this is how we understand consciousness to be present when making a determination whether someone  or something is conscious  and basing this  on the  ability to respond to  a stimulus of sorts. We should allow for the possibility that some creature, be it man or beast that is presumed to be conscious might be  entirely unable to respond to whatever stimulus because of some form of paralysis or other condition that prevents it from doing so.

What we do not know however is  that being a life form of sorts is also a sufficient condition for consciousness to occur or be present, as minimally as that might be the case.  For instance, trees and plants are alive, but we would typically not attribute  consciousness to them, if only because we have no way of detecting the presence of it. As well,  we do not know what exactly we would be  looking for when we try to detect the presence of it at the level of trees and plants.

Clearly, the absence or presence of consciousness cannot be a function of our ability to detect it, and for that reason it would be more reasonable to give it the benefit of the doubt and  assume that  consciousness is an intrinsic property of life regardless of the kind of life-form we might want to consider for this. I believe it is simpler to hold this view than to postulate  further conditions  that must be met by a  living entity before it can be said to have  consciousness, or to have at least  the capacity for it, e.g., that it must at least have a central nervous system to  be capable of it.

But  my task here is  less concerned about determining at what point living things such as  plants or more advanced organisms might be capable of  consciousness – or when we  might be able to detect it – and more about being able to determine what the nature of consciousness is beyond merely tagging it as an intrinsic function or attribute of life.

In this context  – and given a basic definition of life such as  “the condition that allows a given arrangement of organic matter to utilize its environment to sustain itself, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change until death” –  it would be reasonable to assume that, for any living organism,  none of these capacities would be particularly useful unless there was also an innate capacity to monitor, coordinate and maximize these functions successfully and in the interest of its sense of self-preservation as a living organism.

This leads me to say that  the nature or essence of consciousness is in fact life’s interest in self-preservation, and what I want to refer to as “the will to live”. It is an emergent property of organic matter  that  eventually manifest itself as what we have come to refer to as “consciousness” as it goes up the evolutionary ladder towards  ever more sophisticated ways of being in the world.

The  property’s main function might be to acquire  a growing awareness of itself and its environment, to the point of being able to interact and manipulate the latter directly in relation to itself and presumably in the interest of self-preservation but not necessarily limited to that. Here I like to think that life – as an emergent property of the material universe and by way of its evolutionary nature – has  further goals and objectives in mind (so to speak) that go beyond the need for mere survival and address what I see as the larger question about life: survival for what purpose, i.e., what are we here for, or – for that matter -why should there be any life at all?

As to the question how consciousness resides in life-forms is as much a mystery as to how life resides in matter, but in either case they appear to be emergent properties and – as I suggested earlier –  a function of the degree of organizational complexity of its material  constituents,  when they allow for the emergence of these  properties to the extent that they are able to exhibit them.

All this being said,  it would  perhaps be simpler to hold the view that – rather than seeing consciousness as an emergent property of matter – it is in fact the true nature of reality, i.e., there are no other realities,  and that what we refer to as the physical attributes of the world are merely a manifestation of its complexity and a means to evolve beyond its current status towards a future state the purpose of which we are clearly not able to apprehend.

The ability of AI systems to transform vast amounts of complex, ambiguous information into insight has the potential to reveal long-held secrets and help solve some of the world’s most enduring problems. AI systems can potentially be used to help discover insights to treat disease, predict the weather, and manage the global economy. It is an undeniably powerful tool. And like all powerful tools, great care must be taken in its development and deployment. However, to reap the societal benefits of AI systems, we will first need to trust it.

What kind of trust are we referring to here? This is a very complex question. The more we let AI into our lives, the more likely we are to develop a dependency on it, and the amount we are willing to trust it will be in direct relationship to the willingness to have our lives altered by its outcomes, as the rise of AI will have no doubt a bearing on them, regardless what aspect of life we might be talking about.

It remains an open question, however, if will we be willing  to trust AI when it pushes us into a direction that at first glance appears to be not in our best interest, if only because we might not fully understand the reasons for an AI derived conclusion. From an article in Bloomberg Businessweek titled Artificial Intelligence Has Some Explaining to Do by Jeremy Kahn:

This is what gives AI much of its power: It can discover connections in the data that would be more complicated or nuanced than a human would find. But this complexity also means that the reason the software reaches any particular conclusion is often largely opaque, even to its own creators.

Nevertheless, I believe AI will continue to gain our trust gradually and take an ever greater role in our daily lives. The technology will seduce us with the ability to seemingly give us everything we ask for, leading to our ever greater dependency on it, and leading us to believe that we can take its credibility for granted, and that would be a dangerous thing. At bottom, AI is a machine, and a calculator working with an algorithm (a set of rules governing a deductive process) and any data derived from it is subject to the age old dictum “garbage in – garbage out”.  To safeguard the integrity of a process is one thing, safeguarding the integrity of the data it is working on is a whole different matter.

In addition, we need to worry about that has been referred to as “machine learning”, the ability of an AI machine to “improve” on its own programming in order to overcome its deductive limitations, e.g., allow it to simulate an inductive or inferential process, to make the process seem more “human”, or as smart, if not smarter.   I’m thinking about situations where AI is faced with incompatible observations – or when there is just not enough data – in which case it might be allowed to arrive at some kind of “best guess” scenario by either modifying one of its procedural rules or by introducing some other random factor to settle the issue in order to arrive at a “reasoned” conclusion.

The fact remains that a mechanical analysis cannot find its way out of conflicting data by means of a “gut” feeling, i.e., the appeal to instinct or intuition, or the application of other unique human qualities such as empathy and compassion since they cannot be translated into machine language. At most, a machine might be able to simulate them to an extent based on what it has “learned” about these qualities from the observation of human behavior in a variety of scenarios. And if AI can only simulate human reasoning, that is not the same as replacing it, as for that it would have to plugged into the the very source of what makes us human.,

While this may be good enough for some,  such as the followers of the late  behaviourist psychologist B.F Skinner – who hypothesize that human behaviour is strictly a function of environmental factors, and not driven by thoughts or emotions – I think they are definitely out to lunch on that front.  There is a logical gap between what is as observed as human behaviour and that which motivates it from within, and what it means to be human is the only thing that fits in that space and is able to connect the two,  i.e., the difference between what is seen in the mirror and that which causes the reflection.

The upshot is that the essence of what it means to be human cannot be quantified and reduced to a set of rules governing machine language, and that AI can never be more than an augmentation to human intelligence.  This so we will continue to strive for efficacy over efficiency, to ensure we will choose quality over quantity, and that our continuing development as a species will always be a reflection of that,  uncertain as our future seems at the moment.

I think we can safely conclude that all the human induced problems in the world are related to the very latest features of our neuroanatomy, as no other species had its brain hijacked by what has been classified as “the human cortex”. While being an integral of our brains, the expansion of the cerebral cortex, the neocortex, and in particular that of its prefrontal region, is a major evolutionary landmark in the emergence of humans, the crowning achievement of evolution and the biological substrate of human mental prowess.

Yes, and so the trouble started, as much of the misery experienced by human beings is likely the result of the conflict within our minds between the inherited lower and newly acquired higher brain functions, i.e., between the animal, or instinctive self and the moral, or rational self, and the latter presumably courtesy of the evolutionary upgrade

The moral self is that part of our self-awareness (as opposed to mere awareness)  that is able to take responsibility for its actions in light of its consequences, whether they are intended or not. In doing so, it must be able to think and act rationally, and see itself as a causal agent with respect to its actions and its consequences.

It presupposes that all rational actions are preceded by a decision making process – essentially making all actions initially optional, as opposed to an automatic or learned response to a stimulus, which would be the case for any action initiated by instinct only.

After receiving a major upgrade in the grey matter department, quantitatively as well as a qualitatively it seems, the new human species saw the world and themselves in a different light from their genetic progenitors. On the assumption that our sensory organs have not changed all that much qualitatively from our immediate ancestors,  we can suppose that sensory data would show the world in many ways unchanged, yet different from the moment they started interacting with it. Instead, it became an environment capable of being changed based on how they interacted with it. No longer were they merely at the receiving end of the world; they were now in a position to alter, if not recreate certain aspects of it.

More importantly,  major substantive changes were introduced in how the new species is able to communicate among its members. Beyond the hitherto primitive primate cultures depending primarily on grunts and gestures for communication – but already including a degree of social structure – Homo sapiens developed something entire new under the sun. They were able to establish cultures capable of abstraction and conceptualization, in language, in the arts and above all, in the sciences

The result has been that, in spite of all the turmoil, upheaval and chaos our species has endured since the beginning of time, self-induced or not – and a subject not easily dismissed or glossed over if our recorded history of past and current civilizations has anything to say about it – our knowledge and understanding of the physical world has steadily increased, to the point that – after a long and initial period of linear growth – it is now growing exponentially, doubling on average every twelve months according to what has been referred to as the  Knowledge Doubling Curve.

This later fact should not surprise us, as we have this innate need to know; it is an essential if not “necessary” feature of our species to keep looking for more answers, about the world, the greater universe, and by extension about ourselves. And necessary, since we will not be able progress along the path – and in the direction  that evolution is pushing us –  unless we keep increasing our knowledge and understanding of the cosmic phenomenon that we find ourselves an intricate part of.  Evolution isn’t some process over and above ourselves – we are the very embodiment of it,  each of us being an instantiation of that process!

An essential step in that process will be the need to reconcile the instinctive self with the rational self, to establish some sense of a harmonious, symbiotic or constructive relationship between the two, such that we  will only undertake actions that are to the greater long-term benefit of our species. Will we ever be capable of this?  I don’t know, but time will tell, and as AI continues to edge forward in our lives, it may well decide the matter for us, one way or the other. More about that later.

Neuroscientists have described the human brain as the most complex biological structure in the known universe, containing hundreds of billions of cells, and trillions of connections controlling every thought, feeling, movement and function of our bodies.

If this proves anything, it would be the fact that – outside of explanations invoking religious mythology – the evolution of matter was able to bring something as intricate and organizationally complex as the human brain about through a teleological process that appears to be internal to it.

And when I say “internal” I mean this in the sense that the drive to evolve is a property of the material universe that will manifest itself in the presence of conditions that would allow for it.

As such evolution utilizes the seemingly randomness of cosmic events to arrive at ever higher levels of organizational complexity through a process of trial and error to find the required material stability  and biological survivability that would allow it to achieve its desired objective, whatever that might be.

In that context I see the arrival of the human species as the introduction of a critical transitional period and the next phase of cosmic evolution that pushes  life beyond the mere acts of  survival and propagation, and  allowing it to venture further into the realm of consciousness  and expanding its content in terms of knowledge and ideas.

Homo Sapiens straddles the Past and the Future. What I am referring to here is our species’ precarious status as a creature that has one leg still firmly in the animal kingdom – our past – while the other is in a future we know little or anything about. And so we are acting accordingly, with no clear idea of what is expected of us, making us inherently unpredictable if not an unstable life form at best, as evidenced by its self-destructive tendencies, including suicide, homicide,  genocide, and undermining  its own life-sustaining environment.

But there is one type of human activity where we have clearly gone beyond our animal traits and can claim some considerable accomplishments since our arrival as a brand new species:  the areas of science and technology.  Our successes on this front may well be proof that our relatively recent arrival on the cosmic scene constitutes the transition of matter’s evolutionary prowess from a strictly internal process to an external one as we apply our sciences and technologies to just about all aspects of our material existence.

We can point to the ingenuity of our species to manipulate and restructure  aspects of our material reality  into ever increasing levels of organizational complexity, such that – through us – the cosmos, nature, life – has achieved a quantum leap in  creative productivity and is now able to push its evolutionary objectives – whatever they may be – over significantly shorter time frames. In this sense, human beings function as nature’s evolutionary agents and enablers, pushing these objectives along an ever increasing pace for no other reason than that it seems to be the natural thing to do …

I know that sounds rather presumptuous, but given that each of us is just one of many – and, when it comes down to it, not all that different from each other when it comes to what we bring to the table to take on the challenges of everyday life. That is to say, how different can we be in our overall approach to life, when as members of one species we are primarily driven by our shared biology, and the differences between us are no more than varieties on a theme, i.e., they are differences of degree, and not of kind.

Beyond that, there are the circumstances of our birth such as the place and social-economic environment that we grow up in including our culture –  that help shape us into the individuals that we are today.  That this will leave each of us as distinct and unique individuals with needs and desires and expectations from life possibly as different between two people as day and night is undoubtedly true, yet at the same time the differences again are a matter of degree, and not of kind.

And if I can shed some light on the meaning and purpose of life for myself by sharing my thoughts about it, perhaps this might help someone else to start thinking about what life means to them, and add some definition or context or value to their outlook on life in a world that, in my humble opinion,  is going down the wrong path in terms of pursuing the best possible future for our species.  This is not to say that I think the human race is irrevocably going to hell in a handcart, although there are many among us who appear to be doing their best to make this happen.

I’m thinking of the massive environmental damage being inflicted on our precious planet on a daily basis, and beyond that: who can begin to enumerate the number and variety of social  economic and health issues ranging from poverty to homelessness to starvation across the globe? Just this week the NY Times in an article titled The U.S. Can No Longer Hide From Its Deep Poverty Problem showed a tally of those living on $4 a day or less in selected developed countries, and it included 5.3 million people living in the US.  I don’t necessarily want to pick on the US, but with the highest GDP in the world you wonder how this can even be the case when a country is deemed the wealthiest country in the world.

Then there is the disturbing statistic that half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1%, while the top 10% of adults hold 85%, and the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the world’s total wealth.  If you believe that these discrepancies  are simply a function of some folks working harder and smarter than others, and reaping the benefit of it, then bless you, but you may have to learn something about how some people, organizations and certain governments operate in order to produce the incredible wealth that they have accumulated.

So against these things  – and with the brazen assumption that there is a lot more going on in the world than meets the eye –  I am introducing “the larger context”,  which, I postulate, naively as it may be,  is the true meaning  or intent behind the world. It is the reason for it being there in the first place,  including our very own presence in it, and something I hope we will  be able to get a glimpse of once we look  beyond the nonsensical content of religious dogma  (of whatever flavor) and the unsupported and hence unintelligible notion that someone or something else is in charge of our world beyond ourselves.

Why do I think there is ” a larger context” or  “true intent” to life that we are currently not aware of?  Only because we are the offspring of the greater cosmos, and as such contain its “DNA” within every particle of our being.  We are in fact one entity! As a result, what motivates it likely motivates us, either directly or indirectly,  and then at  a level where we would be capable of initiating some course of inspired action commensurate with the evolutionary achievement that we currently represent. However, at the moment one might be hard pressed to think much of that,  given the aforementioned sorrowful status of the world today, and that would include the questionable quality of  leadership of some of the most powerful nations in the world at the moment..

But it is without question that our evolutionary path shows that the cosmos is on a mission, and to date we  appear to be that mission; it is just that we don’t yet know what that mission is about. But it would be unreasonable to think that this is a multi-billion year mission of self-annihilation, given the kludge that we are currently making of it, although I hate to think that we are  doomed to end up that way because we haven’t evolved enough in the grey matter department to be able to take care of it.

And so my hope is that by  gaining even an inkling of  understanding of the world’s greater purpose, on the assumption there is one  – oh, and what an assumption – we might eventually be able to abandon the current seemingly runaway path of self-destruction by rising to the occasion and take ownership of our destiny by determining as best we can what our role should be in this fantastic cosmic adventure that we have only  just woken up in.  Evolution is providing us with some pointers here, but we need to be able to understand a lot more of what has moved us along its path to the present moment  before we can start making more  sense of it.

In the end, much of this is about not being able to see the forest for the trees, or, for that matter,  the universe for the stars, when, usually, the whole is larger than the sum of its parts –  and so is the world; we’re just not seeing it at the moment, and my greatest fear is that we might never be able to.

Today I am revisiting the views held by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea (1818), and his rejection of naïve realism, or what has been called scientific materialism, that the things we observe in the world are what they appear to be, absolutely, and forever, and not in anyway all or part a function of human perception and experience in the sense that they can be modified based by the very act of perceiving or experiencing them

Thus,  scientific materialism would reject the distinction between how things are independently from human observation versus how they are perceived by our perceptual and conceptual processes.  At the same time,  a scientific materialist would have to accept the the distinction between subject and object, i.e., the distinction between the observer and the thing being observed.

But if we  have no other means of accessing the world other than perceiving or experiencing,  is it in fact a meaningful exercise to even refer to it as a matter of some significance? To all intents and purposes, if we never refer to it again, what would be lost in our discussions about the nature of the world?

To deal with this alleged problem the German philosopher Immanuel Kant  (1724-1804)  introduced the “thing-in-itself”, or “ding ansich” in German – to suggest that the true nature of  the world is fundamentally unknowable as we can only grasp the nature of things indirectly through perceiving them as objects in relation to ourselves – how we have experienced them.  I believe Prof. Kant may have gone too far, in the sense that is is contradictory to say that something is fundamentally unknowable as to make such an assertion implies some knowledge about  it. Existence is not an attribute that can be asserted independently of the qualities through which it is instantiated.   In other words, the distinction serves no useful purpose, when at most the existence of the “ding ansich” might be implied as an essential element in a theory of perception. And maybe that is all what Kant had in mind.

Moving on,  it is one thing to experience the world through one’s senses – it is another thing to experience it logically, e.g., to experience such things as cause and effect, time, space and the various ways in which objects relate to us and each other. If these relationships are permanent features of the physical universe, it wouldn’t matter in what form you encountered them in your experiences, your conclusions about them would be same. But in the end, it would be less important what the world looks like versus what can be abstracted from it simply from interacting with it. And this would lead me to say that the nature of the world is about function (a method that relates an objective to its instantiation) –  and not form (the manifestation of matter and energy), the latter being  incidental to the process, and a means to an end in terms of being the medium that allows the function to be enabled or expressed.

This is an important view for me and consistent with my argument that we should perhaps be less preoccupied with the makeup of the material  universe, by poking into the furthest and oldest region of the universe, looking for clues of sorts and so on. Instead, we should look look more closely at what the logical or functional nature of the various cosmic events appear to be about,  such as the manifestation of a directional and seemingly intrinsic teleological process leading to ever higher degrees of material complexity and organization and where this particular process would seem to want to take us to.

And so the question should be: What has been accomplished to date by the process of material evolution?  As such, the cosmos appears to be a  work in progress, and that is at least some concrete information we have about the nature of the world as we have encountered it.

The challenge here will be to translate these experiences into a language that allows the larger context to emerge so that it can be articulated and inspire us to create a destiny for ourselves that does justice to the effort that has gone into the making of us.

This effort is not easily understood – and if we even understood just the tiniest fraction of it I’m not so sure we would be much further ahead in gaining an insight into the larger picture.   No doubt I will be writing more  about that in a future piece …

For now we describe our arrival here on earth in terms of an evolutionary process over billions of years.  Nothing is explained in terms of why or how or where this process is heading for, and so we are left with a mystery. Being at the receiving end of this process, we can look back to some extent and infer that apparently this has been about the gradual enablement of what we call “consciousness”, and achieved by the development of ever more complex organizational structures within matter, reaching its current summit in the grey matter of our brains. Now what?

The one thing that this did bring about was the transition of life’s apparently intrinsic evolutionary pressures from a strictly internal process over billions of years to an external one, as evidenced by the ingenuity of our species to manipulate and restructure matter into ever increasing organizational complexity as reflected by the various aspects of technology that we are familiar with today. Through us, nature has achieved a quantum leap in the creativity department, now being able to push its evolutionary objectives over significantly shorter time frames. In this sense, human beings function as nature’s evolutionary agents, pushing these objectives along at a breakneck speed for no other reason than that it seems to be the natural thing to do …

Smart enough to move it along, yet not smart enough to know why, and that is probably a wise thing as far as nature is concerned, given our tendency to self-destruct, a function of being an intermediate, transitional and demonstratively unstable life-form, schizoid, capable of being both intellectually brilliant and emotionally brittle, or logical and illogical, and the latter most likely caused by that aspect of ourselves that is still very much the predatory, primitive beast in the field that we descent from.

So yes, where do we go from here?