#24. Ontogenesis: Phases One & Two

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Whether we call our consciousness "neuro-gnosis," "psyche," "mind," "soul" or "spirit," as individuals we have been "gathered," in Teilhard words, "from all time and the four corners of space into a wondrous knot" so that each of us is an utterly unique expression of the cosmic process and called to contribute to it nothing less than the mystery of ourselves.

Those are scientific concepts, although the language obviously isn't. I see them as good examples of the convergence of contemporary science and the deepest core of humanity's religious insights.

When we recognize that those concepts are descriptions of our place in the scheme of things, they are, in themselves, sufficiently powerful to move us out of the dreary perspectives of religious dualism and scientific rationalism which have haunted the western world for many centuries.

They provide a strong sense of meaning and purpose because they allow us to see our personal existence as part of the evolution of the physical universe. They also help us to realize that, as persons, we are no more static than is the rest of the cosmos. In the language of the neuro-sciences, the conscious ego is an actively fluctuating process, internally self-regulated and self-organized.

As I spelled out in entry #14 (Person as Process), "neuro-gnosis" (our conscious awareness) is the "informational content" of the media of nerve cells and networks of neural structures in which the informational content is "coded" and by way of which it gets modified via our life experience. That awareness, the brain's structuring of the cognized environment, depends on a number of things, including our genes, our developmental history, our present level of structural development and our external environment.

In everyday language, all those words simply mean that we grow and develop just as do the stars, planets and the living things of the Earth, and that the context in which we're growing makes a difference. And because we are in state of continuous dynamic transformation, everything we perceive from the external world is conditioned by our state of structural organization and thus expressed in us as a transformation of that cognized world.

But we don't grow and develop as isolated individuals. Our development takes place within that specifically social and communal context which the human sciences call "culture." That's the main idea in posts #22 (The Other Half of Person) and #23 (Ontogenetic Development). This present post and the next are about Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of the three phases of our ontogenetic development within the cultural context.

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My emphasis on culture is a change in focus from the previous thoughts I've been sharing about the convergence of science and religion. It's a shift from neurological information about how the brain works to information from cultural anthropology about how we develop as conscious persons within the social-cultural context. It's an important transition in the perspectives I've been offering. Previously, those perspectives centered on how the human mind-brain got to be that way ("evolution" in the broadest cosmic sense); now the focus is on to the results of that emergence of conscious awareness (that is, on "culture" in the broadest cosmic sense).

My main point here is that our personal consciousness, which we can think of as "immaterial" or "mental" or "spiritual," is not only in continuity with the earlier levels of biological complexity, but also includes the development of the biological, behavioral, cognitive and emotional aspects of conscious awareness in a communal context. It's all the one same process.

In thinking about ourselves from this anthropological rather than neurological viewpoint, it's important to keep in mind that "culture" refers to whatever we do that's not controlled by our genes and instincts.

As I spelled out in the previous post, culture includes anything and everything that gets "passed on," for the sake of life's survival, from more experienced to younger and less experienced persons. It includes not only language and technology but all the learning, skills and information which need to be passed on precisely because they are not part of our instinctive or genetically-based behavior. And it's in this creative educational-cultural context that our "ontogenetic" development takes place.

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A problem in understanding culture as the context for our personal development is that the perspectives of cultural anthropology are unfamiliar to most of us. Our educational institutions and the media simply haven't caught up yet with this branch of scientific research. Cultural anthropology is probably the least familiar of all the contemporary sciences.

But it has much to contribute to a contemporary understanding of ourselves: it's nothing less than the scientific observation of how humans act in groups and the efforts of research scientists to understand our social-communal behavior. It's also the context in which the convergence of scientific and religious perspectives becomes especially clear.

As I've said, we're just not yet attuned to thinking in terms of culture, but it's what we need to do if we are to understand our place in the scheme of things. We need to see not only that the entire cosmic process takes place at three levels of increasing complexity (matter, life and mind) and that the development of human culture is in continuity with that process, but also and specifically that it's culture that is the context for our personal conscious development.

I've referred to this "long view" frequently. I spelled it out in posts #8 (Background to Biogenetic Structuralism) and #16 (Our Own Inner World), and I offered a quick review of it in the previous post (#23 Ontogenetic Development).

I'm emphasizing its importance because, while it's relatively easy to think of our individual selves as part of the cosmic process, it's not so easy to think in terms of our communal relationships within it. It's indeed challenging to see our ontogenetic development in terms of the one cosmic process which continues-- from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago and the evolution of galaxies, stars and planets to the emergence of life on Earth, the development of the primate brain and the emergence of conscious awareness several million years ago-- to our group behavior at this very moment.

But that's the context in which our personal ontogenetic development takes place.

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Thanks to its origin in the field of cultural anthropology, Biogenetic Structuralism sees that the three phases of our ontogenetic-cultural development all have to do with the same ultimate question: "What is our place in scheme of things?"

In cultural anthropology, this understanding of "our place in the scheme of things" is called a culture's cosmology. It's described as a culturally-conditioned, cognized view of reality, where reality is seen as an organized whole which offers an account of all the significant elements and relationships that go to make up the universe. What those technical words come down to is that a culture's cosmology defines the place of the individual and the group within the universe.

The "group" can be small as a nuclear family or as large as all humanity of together, and it's in this largest, what might be called "planetary" sense, that the phrase "New Cosmology" is used in both contemporary scientific and religious thought. The New Cosmology is the essentially dynamic rather than static understanding we have today, thanks to modern science, of the place of the individual and the group within the universe. It includes cosmic, biological and human evolution.

Because science is cross-cultural, the New Cosmology is the birthright of all humanity. This is a new situation in our understanding of the world and for this reason the New Cosmology is often referred to as the "New Story" or the "New Story of the Universe." Of course it really is the new story of ourselves. And as Thomas Berry observed many years ago, it's a story we can all agree with.

In New Cosmologist Brian Swimme's words, "For the first time in human existence we have a cosmic story that is not tied to one cultural tradition.... but instead gathers every human group into its meanings."

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With regard to our ontogenetic development, cultural anthropologists have observed that most world cultures (although not that of the modern West) recognize that we humans have an internal drive to experience reality at all three levels or phases, and that (at least in all pre-industrial cultures) there is an impetus to guide members through those three stages of ontogenetic development. In the Biogenetic Structuralist framework, both the personal internal drive and the social impetus to guide members are understood themselves to be aspects of the cosmic evolutionary process.

The issue of guidance is a big topic, too big to talk about here; so to keep this posting from becoming too long, I will describe my understanding of the first two phases in this entry and save the third phase, where the issue of guidance makes most sense, for the next post.

Easy tags for the three stages (or levels or phases) of the development of consciousness are belief, experience and participation.

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"Belief" sounds like a religious term, but in the anthropological perspective it simply means whatever we accept on the word of others about our place in the scheme of things. It is vicarious knowledge rather than knowledge based on personal experience. Biogenetic Structuralism calls it "received gnosis" to emphasize that while it is our own conscious understanding, it has been given to us by others.

"Belief" doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what we usually think of as religion, although religious beliefs obviously would be included in this first phase of conscious development since they are the gnosis we have about the way things are because we have been told that that's the way things are.

The scientific study of the processes by which we are told that "this is the way things are" is a principal focus of cultural anthropology. The process is called "enculturation" and while it definitely includes catechism-like instruction, it also includes things like the stories, legends, dramas and rituals which are a normal part of every culture.

A good example of a means of enculturation in a non-western culture would be the puppet plays presented in a temple I visited when I was in Singapore. In our culture, Christmas pageants would have a similar role.

But this first phase of ontogenetic development includes all the beliefs a culture offers. In our contemporary situation that means, for example, all the taken-for-granted views about reality presented in TV shows and newspaper ads and on the Web. But it includes whatever we accept to be so, without personal experience of it: whatever we think is true because somebody else has said, or in some other way indicated, that it is.

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Despite all that, it's important to be aware that "belief" is not necessarily a bad thing. We couldn't survive the earliest years of childhood without it. And we continue to need and make use of "received gnosis" throughout our lives.

But because it has come to have a bad name, especially as the result of its exploitation by the advertising media and by political and religious authorities, I feel the need to stress that it's not necessarily something negative.

For example, many of the findings of science constitute beliefs for all of us. A trivial example is the existence of Halley's Comet. Most of us have heard of it and we may know that it returns to the Earth approximately every seventy-five years, but few of us have ever seen it. The existence of Halley's Comet is a belief rather than a personal experience for most of us. So is the existence of DNA or chlorophyll. We are dependent on phase one belief for much of our knowledge of the physical world.

Of course, religious beliefs also are examples of this "received gnosis." My point is that whenever we take someone else's word for something we are operating at this first stage of the ontogenetic development of our consciousness.

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According to the noted University of Pennsylvania neuro-scientist Andrew Newberg, this first stage of ontogenetic development is wired into the human brain. We can't do without it.

In previous posts I've mentioned that it was media reports of Newberg's work involving brain scans of meditating Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns which originally lead me to the discovery of the earlier generation of researchers (the Biogenetic Structuralists) with which his work is in continuity. Much of Newberg's research focuses on an understanding of the first phase of ontogenetic development in a religious context.

His most recent book is Born to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs (2007). It's the paperback edition, with a preface and for some reason a different title, of his 2006 book, Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth. Obviously "belief" is a central interest for Newberg.

His earlier books have similar titles: Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (2002) and The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (1999).

None of these books is light reading. They are challenging both in terms of their content and of their often less-than-easy-to-understand style. Essentially, they are attempts to respond to the question of what's going on in the brain during the various phases of ontogenetic development.

I've mentioned Newberg's books to emphasize the importance of belief not just in our everyday lives but especially to emphasize its importance for an understanding of the convergence of science and religion.

Because of the exploitation and abuse of this "received gnosis" by church, government and business leaders, we can easily have a negative attitude toward "belief" and overlook the fact that it is a significant phase of our ontogenetic development. As a foremost pioneering research scientist, Newberg helps us to see that belief is something we should not overlook. We need a clear understanding of it from both an anthropological and a neurological point of view.

The anthropological perspective is easier to understand than the neurological. I've offered the beginnings of an anthropological understanding of belief in this post. And sometime I'd like to offer simple and clear descriptions of the neurological understanding of things like what's going on in the brain when we accept something to be true on the word of others. I'm not ready to do that yet, but I hope I'll be able to, eventually.

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Meanwhile, I need to say something about the second phase of ontogenesis. Luckily, this one doesn't need a lot of explanation. We know from personal experience what we mean by "personal experience."

This second phase of ontogenetic development is no less fascinating in terms of what's happening in the brain during it, and nowadays frequent reports of studies along these lines appear in the media. It's impossible to keep up with it.

The main thing I want to point out here is that, in terms of the convergence of scientific findings and religious perspectives, the acquired perspectives and attitudes of phase one may, or may not, be confirmed via our personal experience in phase two. Personal experience may verify the information we previously accepted to be true on the word of others; but it also may contradict that received gnosis. The result is, of course, that we often find ourselves at odds with our upbringing and with commonly accepted social views and attitudes.

Obviously, dysfunctional families as well as dysfunctional religious institutions and dysfunctional administrative governments do a great deal of damage. Much healing is required in our society. People talk nowadays more freely than in the past, for example, about their struggles to recover from an alcoholic parent or to get rid of their "religious baggage." And we can hardly go anywhere nowadays without hearing talk about our need to recover from the phase one acceptance of military and environmental information given out by American political leaders.

My point is that because the healing process is so urgently needed for so many in our society and for society as a whole, we can forget that there's a third stage of personal development.

And it's precisely that third stage to which we have to turn if we are to see the real convergence of the contemporary scientific worldview and the deeper values of humanity's religious traditions. The third stage is where healing is found.

It is precisely the wholistic worldview of the New Cosmology which provides us with the wholeness-making process that's so urgently needed in our damaged culture.

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Biogenetic Structuralism understands the third level of consciousness beyond personal experience as nothing less than our personal participation in the cosmic process. It's this scientific understanding of the third phase which involves those things which in the two previous posts I called "in-between" ideas.

I called symbol, myth and ritual "in-between" ideas because they're not only perennial aspects of humanity's global religious practice but also objects of study in the sciences of cultural anthropology and neuro-physiology. They bridge the gap, as odd as it may sound, between science and religion.

But they are also "in-between" concepts in a second sense. Much like what the noted Canadian professor Charles Taylor called our "yearning for eternity" (in his recent Commonweal article which I quoted in the previous post), symbol, myth and ritual tend to be dismissed as belonging to an earlier and more immature stage of human development.

Note that, however, that dismissal itself is a belief. Along with individualism, it's a major belief of the western culture's materialist-rationalist cosmology.

But in terms of what I've called in post #22 "the other half of person" (i.e., the communal and relational parts of our human nature), these "in-between" concepts are essential aspects of our self-understanding. In the scientific perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism, myths and symbolic rituals are understood to be nothing less than the tools by which we participate in the cosmic process.

As I've mentioned many times in these blog entries, I've been interested in both ritual and evolution all my life. So you can get some idea, I hope, of the delight I experienced when I first discovered, thanks to the work of Andrew Newberg, the scientific perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism which embraces both and attempts to integrate them into its over-all understanding of our human place in the scheme of things.

I don't have the skill to convey those feelings well, but from my forty years as a teacher I've got some ability to spell out the concepts involved. Which is why, of course, I started this blog for "sharing thoughts about the convergence of science and religion." I've had to do a lot of clearing and plowing the ground before I could share these thoughts about ritual and symbol with readers, so I'm glad to finally get the point where I can do that.

sam@macspeno.com

#20. Resurrection of the Dead

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I was especially delighted when I discovered the efforts of the Biogenetic Structuralists to understand our human condition in light of the scientific findings of cultural anthropology, neurophysiology and biological evolution because it brings together the two big interests in my life, science and religion. And it's a non-dualist perspective: it does not put humans in a unique category outside the rest of the natural world but sees us, rather, an integral part of the evolution of the universe. And it doesn't dismiss religion and ritual, as rationalist science does: it understands them to be a natural part of human life.

The Biogenetic Structuralist concept of cognized environment especially caught my attention because, among other things, it sounds much like what the Russian Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov, has to say about the relationship of personal consciousness to the external world.

Bulgakov was talking in the context of a theological understanding of the early Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, so it's an unlikely combination, to be sure. But I found it a remarkable convergence. In this blog post I want to share the two understandings. I'll just put them side by side, and you can see what you think.

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I've mentioned the Biogenetic Structuralism concept of cognized environment in many previous posts and it is the focus of entry #13. Unfortunately, these research scientists did not come up with better names for their ideas-- names which would be more clear-- and we have to deal with their scientific jargon.

The main idea of cognized environment is that personal consciousness, when understood in terms of the functions of the brain at the third level of the cosmic process, is seen to be nothing less than the matter of the Earth become alive and self-aware.

The great value of seeing the human spirit from this neurological perspective is that it doesn't separate us from the rest of the living world, as religious and rationalist dualism does, but helps us to see that the human spirit is rooted in the Earth and the cosmic process-- that the human mind and heart is, indeed, "the universe become conscious of itself."

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Here's a quick review of the main point. In trying to respond to the question, "What's going on in the brain?" the Biogenetic Structuralists distinguish between the operational environment and cognized environment. Operational environment is their jargon term for the external world outside ourselves: the physical universe as the environment (the world) in which we exist-- and within which, of course, our brain operates.

In contrast, they use the term cognized environment to refer to the inner world which is continually being created by the structural activities of the brain. That inner world is our personal awareness. These research scientists like to call it "neuro-gnosis", meaning personal awareness-- "knowledge" in a broad sense-- which arises from the activity of the brain's living cells.

We need to keep in mind that, as the most complex thing in the dynamic universe, our brain's neural cells and networks are a dynamic field of electro-chemical reactions, and that neuro-gnosis-- our personal consciousness-- is the result of that dynamic activity of the neuro-gnostic structures.

It also helps to remind ourselves that we're talking about the third level of complexity in the cosmic process.

Since we're not used to thinking in terms of levels of complexity, here's an easy example: At one level, the letters of the alphabet are only bits of colored ink on a piece of paper, or dark marks on a computer screen. When joined together in various combinations, however, meaning emerges even at a very simple level of complexity: the letters D, G and O, for example, can be put together to mean "dog" or "God." It's clear that meaning emerges via complexity. We can, of course, put those words together to make sentences and put the sentences together to make stories, so that at greater levels of complexity ever greater levels of meaning emerge.

Living things, including ourselves, work the same way. Chemical compounds make up cells, cells make up tissues, tissues make up organs, organs make up systems, and organ systems combine to make up a whale or a maple tree. At each level of complexity, something "more" emerges.

In our brain-- the greatest level of complexity known to us-- the "more" that emerges is what Biogenetic Structuralism calls "neuro-gnosis"-- and the rest of us call conscious awareness.

The rudimentary gnosis-structure we're born with results from natural selection and the cosmic evolutionary process, and as we grow and develop, our personal consciousness grows by corrections and modifications based on data coming in from the operational (i.e., external) environment.

It's an evolutionary survival mechanism. The main idea is that the brain's primary function is to construct an internal version of the external environment, which it does in order to moderate input from and response to that external world. It allows us to recognize what's potentially hurtful or helpful in the operational environment.

It provides an evolutionary advantage because the sense data is processed in terms of how it fits with previous information already stored in the brain and nervous system. From a biogenetic (evolutionary) perspective, neuro-gnosis is the "informational content" of the neurological structures, and the neuro-gnostic structures are the media of nerve cells and their networks in which this information is "coded" and by way of which it can be modified.

And as I've said before, all this wouldn't sound so strange if it wasn't ourselves that we're talking about. But the point of it all is that personal consciousness is the "environment, cognized." Our consciousness is the world, internalized. We are the cosmos become conscious of itself.

And ours is the first age in humanity's cultural development in which we can understand ourselves this way, based on objective data from scientific studies of brain and nervous system. The main thing I want to emphasize here is that the mystery which we are as persons is the result of the physical matter of the universe; at the third level of complexity in the cosmic process, we are the matter of the cosmos showing itself as persons, each of us utterly unique in the history of the world.

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In his discussion of the resurrection of the dead, Sergius Bulgakov says something that sounds very similar. A little background will help show why what he has to say is important.

Bulgakov was born in 1871 into what was still the medieval culture of Central Russia. He became an atheist in early adolescence, studied law at the University of Moscow and eventually became a noted Marxist economist. At the age of twenty-four he began a religious conversion. It's of great interest that his conversion was not occasioned by any church-related experience but by an experience of nature: his first sight of the Caucasus mountains while he was driving with friends in a sleigh across the southern steppes of Russia.

In his autobiography, The Unfading Light, he says, "Suddenly and joyfully in that evening hour my soul was stirred. O mountains of the Caucasus! I saw your ice sparkling from sea to sea, your snows reddening under the morning dawn, the peaks which pierced the sky, and my soul melted in ecstasy.... The first day of creation shone before my eyes. Everything was clear, everything was at peace and full of ringing joy. My heart was ready to break with bliss." He describes this was "my first encounter with Sophia-Wisdom." (The autobiography is not yet available in English, but quotes from it can be found in Christopher Bamford's forward to Bulgakov's Sophia, The Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology .

He eventually rejected Marxism for the idealist philosophy of the famous poet of the divine feminine, Vladimir Soloviev. After he was ordained he was exiled from his homeland by the Communists and he spent many years as dean of the Orthodox seminary in Paris. He was well aware of the scientific developments of his day, had a special interest in cosmology and anthropology, and was on good terms with religious thinkers in the English-speaking world, including the United States. He died in 1944. He is considered by many to be the greatest Orthodox thinker of the 20th century.

His most famous and comprehensive work is his book on the nature of the church, The Bride of the Lamb. Because of his educational background in law and economics, he wrote in a heavy Germanic philosophical style-- and originally in Russian-- so his work is not easy reading. Only in the last few years has it been published in English.

He helped to recover the sapiential religious thought of the first thousand years of Christian history. It differs from the static, dualistic and rationalist worldview familiar to western Christians in that is sees the universe as one dynamic process, moving from creation to fulfillment. This includes our personal development and the persistence of our relationships. If he were writing today, Bulgakov would say something like: We have to see that there is a fourth stage to the evolutionary process, the final completion and fulfillment of all things.

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What Bulgakov has to say about the resurrection of the dead is found in the Section III, Eschatology, in his book on the church, The Bride of the Lamb. Eschaton means "last" or "end" or "final things."

He begins by noting that there are no defined dogmas concerning the eschaton, although four statements concerning the Last Things are familiar from the ancient creeds: "He will come again in glory... Of his kingdom there will be no end... We believe in the resurrection of the dead ... and life in the world to come."

Much of what Bulgakov has to say is commentary on the many scriptural passages which deal with these four articles of the creed. His first point is basic and he makes it strongly: the “end of the world” does not mean that the universe will be annulled but that it will be renewed: it will be transformed and transfigured. “It will be, but in a new way.” Our world and the world to come are one and the same world, but it will be in a different state. This, he insists, is what scripture means by a “new heaven and a new earth.”

Bulgakov notes that our language is “helpless in trying to describe the reality” of the New Creation. He nevertheless has a good bit to say about it, and much of it is commentary on various eschatological passages in the New Testament, especially in the Book of Revelations. Of these, Bulgakov says clearly, “the images of this symbolic language are not to be taken literally.”

The resurrection of the dead and the presence of Christ at the Second Coming are one identical thing; Bulgakov emphasizes that “All rise in Christ.” Just as our one human nature shared by multiple persons was assumed in the Incarnation, so it is resurrected in the Universal Resurrection. Here, once again however, Bulgakov acknowledges that we can’t get any “real ideas about all this on this side of death and resurrection.”

At the same time, he reminds us that the essence of the Christian faith is that the body will be restored and the person will be changed. This is “the hope” without which, as St Paul says, “our faith is in vain.” This means, says Bulgakov, that the risen body “will be proper to each person.” It’s our body. At the same time, he says, it will also be “the one universal corporality which is the entire natural world.”

His heavy language can get in the way, but what he's saying is that each of us will have the entire transfigured cosmos as our own risen body, and that it will be held in a way that it is personal and unique to each of us.

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Both Bulgakov and the Biogenetic Structuralists are speaking from within an non-static and non-dualistic context. And while the scientists are talking about one thing (a neurological understanding of consciousness) and the theologian about another (the "new way we will be" at the eschaton of the world), they both share the same insights within that evolutionary and post-rationalist perspective: that human beings are the universe become aware of itself and that each of us is a unique manifestation of it.

Bulgakov says, "The risen body will be the entire natural world, held in a way that it is proper to each person." The Biogenetic Structuralists say, "Personal consciousness is the external world uniquely cognized by each of us."

I find the convergence of these insights remarkable.

However, considering that we're just coming out of several centuries of rationalist positivism, it's understandable that even many New Cosmologists are somewhat reluctant to deal with the idea of a "fourth level of the evolutionary process." But if I'm understanding the neurological data correctly, as I mentioned in blog #8 about the functioning of the brain's neocortical lobes resulting in our need for endings as well as beginnings: "it would seem that our hope for a final outcome to the cosmic process is generated by the cosmic process itself."

And in that context, the promised resurrection of the dead doesn't seem so unreasonable.

sam@macspeno.com

#13. Cognized Environment

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This is the second of three blog postings dealing with the Mystery of Person in light of the neurological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism.

In my previous post (#12) I noted that we have many different names to talk about the mystery of conscious awareness: words like mind, soul, spirit, person, psyche, self, inner self, consciousness, cognition, awareness, knowledge, understanding, gnosis and episteme.

This entry deals with a Biogenetic Structuralist term for the mystery of conscious awareness: "cognized environment."

I know that doesn't sound too promising. But-- like the phrase in post #12, "cognitive extension of prehension"-- it's quite helpful for our understanding of what it means to be a person.

As I described in that entry, the phrase "cognitive extension of prehension" offers significant insight into the fact that due to the cosmic evolutionary process, the matter of the Earth has become not only alive but self-aware. The main idea there was that, thanks to the structures and functions of the human brain, we are free to some extent of the affective or emotional ties our primate relatives have, via the brain's limbic system, to their immediate environment. And that this freedom--liberty, autonomy, independence-- as limited as it is, is precisely what was meant in earlier times by our spiritual nature.

The great value of seeing our human spirit from this neurological perspective is that it doesn't separate us from the rest of the living world, as religious dualism does; rather, it situates us within it. It marks "the End of Dualism," as I entitled entry #11, because it helps us to see that the human spirit is rooted in the Earth and the cosmic process.

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The topic of this posting, the term "cognized environment," is similar, but it looks at personal consciousness from a different slant. While the "cognition extension of prehension" deals with the fact that, as a result of the cosmic evolutionary process, "the matter of the Earth has become alive and self-aware," this second term, "cognized environment," helps us to understand what it means to say "That's us! That is what we are."

It really is a very good way to describe the mystery of ourselves. It helps us see not only that we are the matter of the world become conscious, but also that, as the matter of the world become conscious, we are active participants in the dynamic cosmic process. In terms of the convergence of science and religion, this neurological viewpoint opens the door to a contemporary spirituality of everyday life as participation in the evolution of the universe.

That spirituality will be the topic of a future posting. In this present entry I hope to spell out some details of just what neuro-scientists mean by "cognized environment."

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We're hardly comfortable thinking of plants and animals as the matter of the cosmos become self-transforming life-forms. So thinking of ourselves, not only as "the matter of the cosmos become alive" but also as self-aware, is even more challenging.

We know, however, from personal experience what we're talking about. And even though it's difficult to wrap our minds around this objective way of looking at ourselves, it is, as I've said repeatedly now, well-worth whatever time and energy we can give to it.

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One part of that effort is to note that if we begin by asking "How can matter become conscious?" we have already slipped back into the pre-20th century perspective about matter. What we're really asking-- in that older context-- is: "How can something inert and passive and dead become alive and aware?"

Thanks to the modern evolutionary perspective, we know that that's not a good way to think about matter, life and mind. It's called "thinking from the bottom up," and we need to look at cosmic evolution from the opposite direction, "from the top down." When we do, it's obvious that life, not death, is what the world is all about.

And not just "life" in an abstract sense. It's human life that's at the center of the entire cosmic process. In Teilhard's words, quoted back in entry #11, "We are the Terrestrial head of [the] Universe... the fruit of millions of years of psycho-genesis."

We need only think for a moment of human society, of culture and civilization and of our personal relationships, to see the validity of what Teilhard calls this "neo-anthropocentric" view. When seen from the top down, the story of the universe as it shows itself on Earth is centered on human consciousness. Personal self-awareness is the very apex of cosmic evolution.

That's what the neurological jargon term "cognized environment" helps us to understand.

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We need to keep in mind two things from the modern scientific worldview. One, from the evolutionary perspective, is that that universe isn't static but dynamic. The other, from neuro-physiology, is that the human brain and nervous system is the most complex thing we know of in the entire dynamic universe.

It's easy to see why Teilhard said our understanding of the world as dynamic rather than static is the most significant change in human consciousness since consciousness first appeared on Earth. In terms of neurological concepts, it means not only that our brain is the universe at its most complex stage of development but also that brain activity is nothing less than that "dynamic universe at its most complex stage of development" in action.

The obvious question then: "What's going on in the brain?"

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You might like to look back at blog entry #10 (Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism) to check out the section on Chapter V which deals with their distinction between the "operational environment" and "cognized environment."

The term "operational environment" is neurologists' jargon for the external world outside ourselves; it's their way of talking about the physical universe as the environment (the world) in which we exist-- and within which, of course, our brain operates. In contrast, they use the term "cognized environment" to refer to the inner world which is continually being created by the activity of the brain's structures.

As the most complex thing in the dynamic universe, the brain's neural cells and networks are themselves not something static but, rather, a dynamic field of electro-chemical reactions. And neuro-gnosis (the research scientists' name for personal consciousness) is the result of that dynamic activity of the neuro-gnostic structures.

It helps to keep aware that we're talking about the third level of the cosmic process. Not just the realm of matter studied by physics, nor the realm of living things studied by biology, but the realm of that inner mystery for which we have so many names-- mind, soul, spirit, person, psyche, self, inner self, consciousness, cognition, awareness, knowledge, understanding, gnosis and episteme-- the realm of the human sciences.

The main idea in the neurological perspective is that, at this third level of cosmic evolution, each individual is born with a rudimentary gnosis-structure: a genetically-based (in-born) potential for awareness resulting from natural selection and the cosmic evolutionary process, and out of which our personal consciousness grows by corrections and modifications based on data coming in from the operational (i.e., external) environment.

In terms of evolution and natural selection, the brain's primary function is to construct an internal version of the external environment-- which it does in order to moderate input from and response to that external world.

It is an evolutionary survival mechanism; it allows us to recognize what's potentially hurtful or helpful in the operational environment. If incoming data produces a negative affect (i.e., if something in the external environment appears threatening or in some other way unattractive), the object can be avoided; and if the affective response is positive (the object appears to be potential food, protection or a mate, for example), the object may be approached.

The basic idea here is that any sense data that enters the brain is immediately compared with already-there previously-stored sense data. This provides an evolutionary advantage because the sense data is processed in terms of how it fits with previous information already stored in the brain and nervous system. From a biogenetic (evolutionary) perspective, neuro-gnosis (consciousness) is the "informational content" of the neurological structures, and the neuro-gnostic structures are the media of nerve cells and their networks in which this information is "coded" and by way of which it can be modified.

All this wouldn't sound so strange if it wasn't ourselves that we're talking about.

But the point of it all is that personal consciousness is the "environment, cognized."

And what a perspective it is!

Conscious awareness is the dynamic universe, at its most complex level of development, doubled back on itself and raised to a new, third, level of complexity. That's us. We're not just part of the world, we are the world, internalized. As a result of thousand of millions of years of evolution, we are the universe become conscious of itself.

The religious implications of this scientific view of ourselves are immense.

Ours is the first age in humanity's cultural development when we can understand ourselves this way. I'm not saying that it's likely that we'll soon add "cognized environment" to the names we have to express "the mystery we are." But there's no question that everything looks different from this neo-anthropocentric perspective, including the meaning of words like mind, soul, spirit, psyche, self.

One of the most interesting things is the realization that human activities-- our personal relationships and the products of our creative imagination and technical know-how-- are not just private activities; they are nothing less than the creative universe in action. They are the cosmic process doing its thing through us.

So much to explore!

sam@macspeno.com

#12. The Cognitive Extension of Prehension

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This is the first of three blog postings dealing with the Mystery of Person in light of the neurological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism. It is intentionally being posted on Independence Day: it's about the neurological basis in the brain and nervous system for human freedom.In contrast to the static worldview of former times, the essence of the modern scientific perspective is that we live in a dynamic world, much bigger, older and more complicated than our ancestors ever dreamed.

The dynamic worldview of modern science allows us to see not only that the physical matter of the Earth has become alive in the form of self-transforming structural systems (plants and animals), but also that a portion of the living world has so increased in complexity, via the development of the vertebrate brain and nervous system, that it has become self-aware. Matter, life and mind are three distinct levels of development in the cosmic process.

Teilhard felt that this new scientific perspective was the biggest development in human history since humans first appeared on Earth; we can expect that anything this big will have a major impact on humanity's religious perspectives. Exploring those perspectives is what my efforts with this blog are all about.

I called the previous entry "The End of Dualism," for example, to make the point that we no longer need to think of ourselves as spirits trapped in bodies, as did Greek thought and those dualistic religious perspectives of western culture based on it. As I said in that posting, the modern evolutionary view "marks the end of philosophical and religious dualism which has influenced every aspect of human life for several thousand years." Thanks to contemporary science, we have a much better understanding of the relationship between mind and matter.

Although we know by personal experience what self-awareness means, we find it extremely difficult to put into words. We are indeed a mystery to ourselves. But contemporary neurological studies, set within a biogenetic (evolutionary) context, offer much help in our understanding of the "mystery which we are."

In this posting and the next I hope to share my understanding of the two closely related but distinct ideas about personal consciousness which in the jargon of Biogenetic Structuralism are referred to as the "cognitive extension of prehension" and the "cognized environment." Both have especially significant religious implications.

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To make sure we get off to a good start, we need to keep in mind that the word "matter" means far more today than it did in previous times. Our knowledge of the very small (summed up in Quantum Mechanics), of the very large (summed up in Relativity theory), and of the very old (summed up in Astronomy and Geology), allows us to see that the physical stuff of the universe is something very different from the dead, inert, passive material which for many centuries it was thought to be.

With our dynamic-evolutionary perspective, we can see that the three distinct stages of the material world's development are what is studied respectively by the physical sciences, the biological sciences and the human sciences. But the fact that the findings of the human sciences remain less well known than those of physics and biology, and indeed sometimes are hardly considered authentic science at all, indicates how much we have still to learn.

And of course it is in the "sciences of the mind," those which study the third level of the material world's development, that the implications for humanity's religious understanding are greatest.

But it is the unified perspective-- that matter, life and mind are three stages of the one same cosmic process-- which constitutes the modern scientific worldview.

From an anthropological point of view this unified view is called the "New Cosmology." It is, in fact, a New Story of the World, and one which-- despite religious, ethnic and cultural differences-- all humanity can eventually come to share based on the findings of objective science: plants and animals are the natural result of the evolution of cosmic matter, and human beings are the pinnacle of the development of life on Earth.

This is the new, modern context which we have for understanding the mystery of ourselves as conscious persons.

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One of the most interesting things about personal consciousness is that we have so many names for it. In different situations, we use a variety of words-- mind, soul, spirit, person, psyche, self, inner self, consciousness, cognition, awareness, knowledge, understanding, gnosis and episteme-- to name the inner experience of personal consciousness.

Because we see ourselves from so many different points of view, it's sometimes difficult to recognize that all those terms refer, in fact, to the one same thing. We really are a mystery to ourselves in the most profound sense: we can never exhaust understanding ourselves.

But modern science, especially that combination of neurology and cultural anthropology called Biogenetic Structuralism, offers much help along these lines; and this is one of the places where science and religion converge considerably.

As I said above, I see two big ideas especially worth exploring. The first is Biogenetic Structuralism's jargon phrase, "the cognitive extension of prehension." It deals with the fact that due to the cosmic evolutionary process, the matter of the Earth has become not only alive but self-aware.

The second is a closely related but distinct concept: the amazing fact that we human persons are "the matter of the Earth which has become not only alive but self-aware." "Cognized environment" is the jargon phrase for this concept. I'll try to spell out that idea in some detail in my next blog entry, and offer some thoughts about its religious implications in entry #14.

This present posting focuses on "the cognitive extension of prehension."

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When I first discovered that the field of Biogenetic Structuralism is what I've called "the parent generation" of research for contemporary neurological studies being done at the University of Pennsylvania by Andrew Newberg and associates, it took me a half-dozen readings of their original text Biogenetic Structuralism [Columbia University Press, 1974]) to make sense of their ideas about the cognitive extension of prehension.

So you might like to look back at posting #10 (Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism) where in the sections on Chapters III and IV I've tried to describe these challenging ideas. As I've said a number of times, they are not easy to understand, but they're not impossible either; they are well-worth whatever time and energy we can give them.

The main idea encapsulated in the phrase "cognitive extension of prehension" is that, thanks to the way the human brain works, we are to some extent free of the affective or emotional ties our primate relatives have to their immediate environment.

The structure and organization of the human brain is such that we have a real, if limited, independence of the brain's limbic system, the part of the brain we share with all vertebrate animals going back to our reptile ancestors. It is this relative freedom from instinctual action and response to things in our immediate surroundings which enables us to imagine possible causes of things not present in the external environment; it allows us to deal with things in their absence, to plan ahead and to make choices. This cognitive ability obviously had great survival value for our earliest human ancestors and accounts for contemporary humanity's predominance among the living things of the Earth.

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At first hearing, this idea of the "cognitive extension of prehension" doesn't sound too helpful as an understanding of the mystery of personal consciousness. But in fact it is.

"Prehension" comes from a Latin word which means to seize or grasp; we're familiar with its use in describing the prehensile tail of South American monkeys who use their tails as an additional appendage for wrapping around and holding on to tree branches.

But "prehension" also has a conceptual meaning, as when we say of something which we've previously had a difficult time understanding, "Oh, now I get it". We're saying that we have "grasped" the issue, that we have been able to "wrap our minds around" it. That's what's meant by the cognitive extension (at the human level) of primate prehension.

As I said above, the findings of the human sciences remain less well known than those of the physical and biological sciences, so these words sound strange. But in fact we know what they mean from personal experience.

The main point which the phrase "cognitive extension of prehension" conveys is that human behavior isn't just a matter of instinct, as it is with our primate cousins. We are less stimulus-bound and have a certain amount of autonomy because of the way the structures of our brain are organized. And, obviously, this behavioral freedom from "instinct," limited as it is, is what distinguishes us from our primate cousins and accounts for our characteristically human traits of speech, creativity, technical know-how and imagination.

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What's less obvious-- and this is my whole point in this post-- is that this partial independence of the human brain from the vertebrate limbic system is precisely what was meant in earlier times by our spiritual nature.

In the centuries before anything was known about neuro-physiology, it made good sense to say that "humans have a spiritual soul." In the context of the pre-scientific static worldview, talking about the spiritual nature of the soul was a good way of expressing the fact that what distinguishes homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom is our limited but real autonomy from the world around us. Liberty or freedom is the very essence of what we mean by the human spirit.

Thanks to 20th-century scientific studies of the brain, we can understand even better what the freedom of a human person means. And the great advantage of seeing our spiritual aspect from a neurological perspective is that it doesn't separate us from the rest of the living world but situates us within it. Today, we can see more clearly than other generations that personal consciousness doesn't exist apart from the Earth's biological evolution but, rather, that we are an integral part of the evolution of the universe.

And it's this neurological-evolutionary perspective-- that the human spirit is rooted in the Earth-- which I described in posting #11 as marking the end of religious and rationalist dualism.

When we see what the cognitive extension of prehension means, it becomes clear that we neither have to deny as do scientific rationalists that we have a spiritual soul, nor to claim as religious fundamentalists do that only our spiritual side has value.

And this New Cosmology, this New Story of our place in the living world, coming out of 20th century science, takes away nothing of the awe, wonder and astonishment we experience at the mystery of being a person. Indeed, it enhances it tremendously.

And it opens the door to a much more healthy religious understanding of ourselves not as aliens to, but as participants in, the cosmic process.

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In the dualistic religious perspectives of pre-scientific times, humanity's main task was to escape from the world. Today, thanks to the modern evolutionary perspective, we can see that we not only belong to the world but also that we have a role to play in it.

The modern scientific worldview doesn't take away human dignity, it restores the age-old religious insight of the value of the human person. It allows us to see that each of us has a cosmic vocation, called by our very existence to make a personal contribution to the evolution of the world.

This is one of the most significant places where religion and science at their best converge: in helping us recover the sense that our personal existence has meaning and purpose.

sam@macspeno.com

#11. The End of Dualism

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The first chapter of the "definitive" 1990 book on Biogenetic Structuralism, Brain, Symbol & Experience (Columbia University Press reprint, 1993) starts with a quote from Teilhard de Chardin's The Future of Man (Harper & Row, 1964).

Teilhard states what he calls a "neo-anthropo-centric" view: we humans "are the head (Terrestrial) of a Universe that is in the process of psychic transformation. We can rightfully considered ourselves," he says, "the fruit of millions of years of psycho-genesis."

This scientific view marks the end of philosophical and religious dualism which has influenced every aspect of human life for several thousand years.

"Dualism" refers to the division of reality into matter and spirit, and to the separation of human beings into body and soul. Many think it is the very essence of a religious view of the world to hold that we have a spiritual soul which lives forever and a material body which dies and decays into dust.

While no one would deny that mind and body are two distinct aspects of our reality, or at least two distinct ways of describing what we are, we need not hold to a dualistic view that one part has an independent and superior existence to the other.

Over the last few centuries it has been gradually recognized that the dualistic view is not only not the essence of religion but that it is an inadequate understanding of human nature and a disastrously harmful view of the world. It allows for exploitation of the Earth and the suppression of its peoples. Global warming, for example, as well as the patriarchal oppression of women and the glorification of war, are direct consequences of matter-spirit dualism.

Religious fundamentalists reject evolution precisely because they think it negates matter-spirit dualism and so denies both human dignity and the very existence of a creative source to the world. While the evolutionary perspective does indeed negate body-soul (or matter-spirit) dualism, its understanding of matter (or body) and spirit (or mind, soul, psyche) is different from the long-held views which western culture had inherited from the world of the Greeks and Romans. We've learned a lot since the time of Plato. Thanks to contemporary science, we don't need to depend anymore on the Greco-Roman understanding of mind and matter.

One of the great values of modern science is that, far from denying human dignity, it enhances it. It allows us to see ourselves as nothing less than "the universe become conscious of itself," and it allows for a much more integral understanding of the relationship between the physical world and its creative source.

The efforts of the Biogenetic Structuralists help greatly in our understanding of the human place in the physical universe. In this blog entry I hope to spell out my understanding of the neurological perspectives on the human person which Biogenetic Structuralism opens up for us.

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We know that the universe is billions of years old, that it is filled with millions of galaxies and stars, and that planets are made from the chemical elements produced in the hearts of stars. Chemical compounds, such as water, amino acids and proteins need the cooler temperatures of planets. Along with rocks, oceans and clouds, the Earth's living things-- from amoebas to primates-- are made of the same chemical compounds. We're made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, literally star dust; and one of the major chemicals in our bodies, the simplest of the elements, hydrogen, goes all the way back to the Big Bang.

A wonderful description of the human body as a manifestation of cosmic history can be found on page 40 of Mary Conrow Coelho's book, Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood (Wyndham Hall, 2002).

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Just as the atoms and molecules of chemical elements and compounds are made by the complex joining of subatomic particles, so living things are made by the complex joining of atoms and molecules. What makes a living thing different from the chemicals which compose it is that an animal or plant is a structural system: it is a self-regulating and self-transforming system that preserves its original identity while changing. 

That's what "structuralism" means. A tree in our backyard or a bird sitting in its branches are good examples: we are so used to such structural systems that we seldom recognize what a miraculous thing a living plant or animal is.

The idea of a structural system is Biogenetic Structuralism's basic starting point. What makes this scientific perspective "biogenetic," and thus different from the earlier form of structuralism in the field of anthropology, is its dynamic (evolutionary) emphasis and its application of that developmental view both to the human central nervous system and to human cultural systems.

Cosmic evolution, neurophysiology and culture! That's quite an all-inclusive picture. Biogenetic Structuralists want to maintain a non-dualistic vision in their scientific account of consciousness. And because, as Teilhard says, the human mind is "the fruit of millions of years of psycho-genesis," they want to "leave out nothing" in seeking to "understand understanding." They want to take into account the entire evolutionary history of the universe as well as what neurological science has learned about the human brain.

For this reason, neuro-physiological information about the structural arrangements and functions of the brain and nervous system, gathered by scientists over more than a century of research, has a central place in the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective. Little of this scientific knowledge has filtered down to the popular level, so it's unfamiliar and difficult for most of us. In my blog entry #10, Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism, I offered a brief introduction to it. Here's a quick review of the more relevant points:

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In the brains of mammals there are specific sites which connect with the senses. These brain sites provide the animal with incoming information about the external world. This information, which Biogenetic Structuralists like to call by its Greek name, gnosis (knowledge or awareness), has survival value for individuals and species.

In the more advanced mammals called "primates," these brain sites have more complex areas associated with them, but these "association areas," as they are called, function more or less separately from one another. They store gnosis, information about the external world, so it can be compared with further data coming in from the senses. Some of the gnosis stored in the association areas has a genetic basis, the animal's DNA inherited from its ancestors. This in-born awareness is the result of natural selection, the biological phase on Earth of the cosmic evolutionary process.

The survival value of a primate's stored gnosis results from the association areas being connected, via physical and electro-chemical linkages, to the brain's primitive limbic system, which is an inheritance in animals from the much earlier reptilian brain.

The point of this connection with the ancient limbic system is that when in-coming data is compared with gnosis already in the association areas (whether inborn or acquired via life-experience), the comparison process has an affective or emotional component. It is a feeling-response which allows the incoming data to be re-cognized as negative (life-threatening and to be avoided) or positive (life-enhancing and thus may be approached or pursued). This information processing, an obvious and significant survival mechanism, is referred to as "prehension."

Pre-human primate brains have four main association areas, each linked separately to one of the senses. The human brain has an additional association area and connections between the association areas. It is these "cross-modal" connections, as they're called, which allows human learning to be to some extent independent of the affect or emotion-bound limbic system inherited from our reptile ancestors.

It may not seem like much of a difference, but this relative independence of the feeling-response coming from the reptilian brain is the basis for our specifically human abilities such as cognition and conceptualization.

Prehension in primates involves seeing similarities and connections between things in their environment and recognizing them as belonging to specific groups (such as possible predators or potential mates).

The "cognitive extension of prehension" means that we humans can compare, classify and group things even when they are not present in our external environment. We can "prehend" things in their absence and so we can plan ahead. This unique ability obviously has high survival value and it is what accounts for our characteristically human traits such as speech, imagination, creativity and technology.

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The concept of the "cognitive extension of prehension" offers a non-dualistic and scientific account of consciousness. It is the essence of Biogenetic Structuralism's "understanding of understanding" and it helps us to understand how we humans can be, in Teilhard words, "the fruit of millions of years of psycho-genesis."

A main point in the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective is that our inborn neuro-gnostic structures are made up not of some non-material 'substance' but of the links and networks of the brain's matter, which are themselves based on genetically determined neural structures.

Whether we call it spirit, mind, knowledge, gnosis, understanding, psyche, cognition, consciousness, personal experience, or whatever, our specifically human cognitive ability-- the ability to imagine possible causes of things not present in the external environment-- accounts for the human experience of our having (or being) an inner "cognized" environment. That inner "cognized" environment is what we call our "person."

And understanding something of it in neurological terms takes away nothing of it as the mystery which we experience ourselves to be, any more than our understanding the processes of nutrition and digestion take away from the mystery of physical growth. I mean "mystery," of course, not in the sense of something we can not understand, but in the sense of an inner experience that is so rich and full that we can never exhaust our understanding of it. We experience the mystery of our inner self in awe and wonder and astonishment.

So it's easy enough to see why Plato and the early Greeks attributed our inner experience of cognition to a non-physical or "spiritual" substance; they lived in a static cultural world and knew nothing about biological evolution or neuro-physiology. It's also easy to see why the rationalism of early science would deny its reality. Both Greek thought and early science shared the same static worldview. They didn't know anything about neuro-physiology. For many centuries, it was thought that the "seat of the soul" was in the abdomen.

And they certainly knew nothing about the universe as an evolutionary process. Thanks to modern science we now can see that our minds no less than our bodies are the result of the cosmic evolutionary process; via the emergence of life on earth and the formation of the solar system and galaxy, we go back all the way to the Big Bang and the initial creation of the world.

This is why I call these perspectives "the end of dualism." We know so much more than Plato and the early Greeks and the early Church fathers who had to use Greek thought patterns to express their religious insights. Today, we don't need to use body-soul dualism to account for the mystery of personal consciousness.

And we don't need to explain away the value of matter by attributing consciousness to a non-material substance. Thanks to the evolutionary and neurological perspectives of contemporary science, we can see today that neither "mind" nor "matter" are what they had been considered to be for many centuries. The dualistic understanding of "matter" is no less outmoded than is the dualistic understanding of "spirit."

So the end of dualism opens the way for a far richer and more life-giving understanding of the meaning of mind and matter-- soul and body-- than was formerly available. Far more, not less than our ancestors of recent centuries, the contemporary understanding of ourselves as conscious persons in an evolutionary cosmos is a tremendous source of religious wonder, awe and astonishment.

sam@macspeno.com