Random Thoughts: Cooperation and Consciousness and Time

Competition vs. Cooperation: the biological imperative

In Darwin's formulation of his ideas about evolution and natural selection, what did he mean by the phrase 'survival of the fittest' and particularly, what is meant by 'fittest'? The phrase was first used by biologist Herbert Spencer who meant it to describe the way species are adaptive to their particular environments. This conception carried through to Darwin, who was trying to account for the implications of the variation in physical attributes in species of fauna and flora. Darwin's ideas have proven extremely durable and wide-ranging, and have been applied in both the physical and social sciences. 

We use the term 'Darwinian' coloquially to describe 'competitiveness' and relate it to an 'only the strongest survive' notion. The reality of evolution and natural selection is quite different. In fact,  physical strength, being fleet of foot, or ferociousness, tends to have little bearing on the prospects for survival. Dinosaurs were some of the biggest, strongest, most aggressive creatures that ever walked the Earth and we know what happened to them. The list of endangered species is a veritable Who's Who of large, powerful, fast, ferocious animals. In reality, the most successful creatures, in terms of adaptive capacity, hence the 'fittest', have been some of the least aggressive, and often the physically weakest, most fragile, but also most socially cooperative species. Here one can think of domesticated animals like cows, pigs and dogs (cats), insects such as ants, and of course, the apex species of them all homosapiens. The secret sauce of their fitness for survival is the ability to work together with their own species and other species, not to compete with them, but in cooperation. As Yuval Noah Harari has reminded us, it's the ability to organize in large groups that has been the most effective strategy for endurance. It stands to reason therefore that all the attributes and traits we possess that enhance our ability to cooperate, would win the day, in a Darwinian sense. We have evolved intellectually, biologically and genetically to be the most cooperative possible, not the most individually competitive.

Competition hinges on identifying and taking advantage of individual differences (physical, intellectual, emotional etc.) by enhancing our own strengths relative to our competitor's weaknesses. It's the basis of every sport ever played, and every war ever waged. It's also the basis of the Capitalist free-market system. Cooperation engenders the opposite. It depends on acknowledging similarities and optimizing those to achieve mutual benefit. The essence of cooperation is finding commonality in order to promote and solidify connection. Homosapien's are king because no other species compares to us in terms of our capacity to find common ground and mutual self-interest, and to work together. This involves our ability to conceptualize and theorize, to associate ideas and establish interpersonal connections by sharing ideas. We’ve developed mass economic and political systems based on agreed-upon rules, concepts and values. Related to this, no other species has anywhere near our capacity to communicate, which is the means to organize ourselves by sharing objectives, desires, values, ideas and narratives (meaning), to plan ahead and imagine a future. The implications and ramifications of these cooperation attributes are monumental in terms of being 'fit' to survive.

Competition vs. Cooperation : the historical dynamic of human relations toward cooperation

Of course, society engenders a combination of cooperative and competitive practices and interactions. We cooperate in organized groups with the expressed purpose to compete. But as the big picture of human history shows, we are increasingly moving away from competition and toward cooperation. When the world was dominated by tribes and clans, small groups competed for scarce resources to survive. The progress of civilization is a story about the formation of larger and larger social, political, and economic entities, which make resources more accessible and plentiful to more and more people. This has culminated in the modern nation-state, and in our times, a global system of economic cooperation and political order based on international law. Of course, nation states still compete, and sometimes descend into outright conflict both internally and externally (usually marked by a return to a type of tribalism). But the brutal struggle that characterized early societies has generally given way to modern institutions and the rule of law, which is the very essence of broad cooperation. Darwin's contemporary Karl Marx had a sense of this in his conception of history. His description of class warfare and the struggle over the means of production as the engine of history can be viewed as emphasizing the competitiveness in human beings, producing social alienation and economic disadvantage. Marx argued that inevitably there would be a reckoning in violent revolution that would result in the replacement of a political and economic order based on competitiveness and inequality (Capitalism) with one based on cooperation, absolute equality and a total absence of social conflict (Communism). One of the criticisms of Marx's theory is that he did not account for conflicts that inevitably arise within society given human nature. Nonetheless, his thinking illustrates an appreciation for the importance of understanding human history as essentially the movement away from competition and increasingly toward a society without conflict, in other words  'absolute' cooperation.          

Cooperation, The Properties of Consciousness, the Human Brain and its Relationship to Time

So what do Darwin, Marx and the dynamic between competition and cooperation have to do with an understanding of the nature of consciousness?

In an earlier post I talked about defining consciousness as the cognitive place where we generate meaning. I also posted a crude diagram attempting to show consciousness and its relationship to our perception of time. In both cases, consciousness is the cognitive domain where information and sensations are formed and connected to generate meaning. But the crucial element, the connective tissue as it were, is time. When I talk about time I mean the three distinct components from which it is composed, namely past-present-future. It is with the addition of time that we can begin to understand how the notion of consciousness is related to natural selection.

I will begin by making two observations about the nature consciousness: 

1. Consciousness is not uniform, it has levels, from lower to higher. The levels of consciousness are inwardly experienced and alterable, as well as outwardly demonstrable and observable.

2. The levels of consciousness are distinguishable by the way time is perceived. Consciousness and the capacity to perceive and connect past-present-future are inextricable.

It's a fundamental property of consciousness that it has levels. People experience different levels of consciousness, and different life forms have different levels of consciousness, from lower to higher. Consciousness can be impaired, by illness or infirmity. People who have fallen into a coma do not have the same level of conciousness as they had before, and when they come out of the coma report no sense of the passage of time. In colloquial terms we often talk of 'consciousness raising' experiences by which we typically mean an insight into the 'Big Picture' ie. awareness that all of nature is interdependent and interconnected, that human beings are part of nature and therefore connected to one another, that the universe is ‘one’ etc. The use of psychedelics are often described as 'consciousness-raising', because boundaries seem to vanish, and a state of egolessness experienced. All of this speaks to the nature of consciousness, the aspiration of unity/harmony and its psychological relationship to cooperativeness.

All living (metabolizing) creatures have some level of consciousness, but none as advanced as homosapiens. In the animal kingdom, we can observe that some creatures have consciousness, but they operate almost purely from instinct, like reptiles and fish, while other creatures, like mammals operate with a greater level of consciousness. Animals that are instinctive rely on individualistic fight or flight (reflex) mechanisms to survive. Animals that are higher up on the ladder of evolution, have more sophisticated survival approaches encorporating cooperative strategies. The reason for this is that they have a more developed consciousness with a greater capacity to make conceptual connections. And it's a feedback loop, the more successful we are at exercising our cooperativeness, the more developed our consciousness becomes. Furthermore, most animals operate almost completely with the limbic brain and exist exclusively in the present moment. They have very limited sense of the past (memory), which is why they have limited capacity to learn, and no sense at all of the future, because the future is purely speculative and abstract. For this reason animals do not have a sense of death, even when they witness it. 

Brain evolution is clearly associated with levels of consciousness as well as how time is perceived. Lower (reptilian) brain function can be understood as operating entirely in the present, while the Limbic (mammalian) brain possesses some capacity for memory and functions with a sense of the past. Only the human brain, the neocortex, operates with the capacity to conceptualize the future, and operates in a way that connects all three components of time. It's this unique three-level complexity, reptilian-mamalian-neocortex, present-past-future, lower-middle-higher consciousness that has allowed human beings to optimize cooperative strategies for survival. Commensurate with this tremendous cognitive advantage, this capacity has enabled humans to develop language. In this way language can be understood as simply the cognitive systematic modality by which we organize the observable and conceivable world into past-present-future.

A further brief word about language to illustrate the point about its importance as a cognitive modality that conveys a sense of time. Music is often described as a pure 'language' partly because of the 'stripped-down' way it marks the three facets of time (past-present-future) and connects them directly with our emotions. In this sense, music is a language that makes no reference to the physical world (except perhaps obliquely, metaphorically). It possesses no conceptual content, until words are added. This is what I mean by language as a 'cognitive modality'. Without time, there is no music, no language. 

3-Part Brain, 3 Components of Time, 3 Levels of Consciousness, and Moral-Religious Teachings and Metaphysics

Levels of consciousness and the three-part brain, are inextricably associated with the capacity to perceive past-present-future. As explained, only the homosapien brain comprises all three, and only the human mind possesses the higher level of consciousness associated with future-thinking. The argument is that this unique capacity evolved in a fashion described by Darwin. 

This notion of higher consciousness is consistent with western spiritual teachings and conceptions of spiritual unity, the oneness of God, and extends to moral teachings meant to promote cooperation, using terms like lovingkindness, compassion and personal modesty. It goes without saying that the ultimate moral teaching of the western tradition, the so-called Golden Rule that begins "Do unto others..." is associated with breaking down the moral and ethical boundaries between individuals. In this respect, there is nothing metaphysical about consciousness, it is simply our adaptive capacity to optimize our abilities to cooperate. It's Darwinian and utilitarian. It serves a purpose. Conversely, it's also consistent with religious teachings about the nature evil and the origin of sin, which is essentially a by-product of alienation and disconnection from humankind, and punishable by being cast-out from home and community, which, in ancient society was tantamount to a death sentence. The similarities to Eastern religious and mystical traditions and teachings related to the notions of achieving ego-death, are self-evident. Our emotions reflect the 'rightness' or 'goodness' of these teachings, including our need for individual validation, which is at base the acknowledgement from others that we are acceptable and accepted, and perhaps most significantly our sense of what 'love' is, the penultimate expression (idealization) of a sense of cooperation.    

None of this is metaphysical. Everything described above can be discerned empirically and understood as our evolving cognitive capacities to optimize cooperation with one another to ensure survival. Our feelings, our sense of meaning, our moral-religious teaching, and our consciousness are all moving in the same direction, towards optimizing cooperative strategies, in spiritual lingo 'unity and harmony' with nature, because survival in nature also means survival of nature. We do not live in nature, we are nature. Our survival is nature's survival, and the converse is also true. There is no separation between mind and nature (materiality). Consciousness is part and parcel of physical existence and operates in concert with it.