#23. Ontogenetic Development

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I called my previous post (#22) "The Other Half of Person" to stress the point that there's more to the mystery of our selves than our individual consciousness.

The focus of many of my earlier postings has been the evolutionary and neurological perspectives of contemporary science which allow us to see that our individual consciousness is not something separate from, but an integral part of, the evolving universe-- and that each of us, as an utter unique expression of the cosmos process, is called to make a personal contribution to it.

In each entry I've also tried to show how I see these scientific findings about ourselves as individuals converging with some of humanity's core religious values.

Now I want to expand the context to include the social, communal and relational aspects of the mystery which we are, the "other half" of our reality as persons.

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Some readers may feel that seeing ourselves in a cosmic and evolutionary context is already a big enough challenge.

But that immense transition in human self-understanding, which began at the end of the 19th century and is essentially a shift from the static worldview of past centuries to the evolutionary perspectives of modern science, also includes the shift from a personal and private to a social and communal self-understanding.

Just as the words "science" and "religion" mean something more nowadays than they once meant, so does the word "person." So I want to look now at another area within the Biogenetic Structuralism perspective, one which especially helps us to understand the social and communal aspects of ourselves: cultural anthropology.

When we see person in the broadest possible scientific perspectives of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution, the resulting communal and social aspects of our self-understanding allow us an even richer sense of the convergence of contemporary scientific perspectives with the insights of humanity's core religious insights than we have if we are looking only at the individual aspects of the mystery of person.

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But the findings of cultural anthropology are even less familiar to the general public than those coming from contemporary brain and nervous system studies.

I'm often asked, for example, by persons who know of my interest in evolution whether I think evolution is still going on in human beings. When I answer, "Yes; it's called culture," I usually get blank stares. So the transition I'm making now in these blog entries, from an neurological to an anthropological focus, may not be clear to readers.

The problem is that we're just not attuned to thinking in terms of culture, let alone thinking of humanity's cultural development as a continuation of the cosmic evolutionary process that produced stars, galaxies, plants, animals and ourselves. It's tough enough for many to grasp the fact that human consciousness has emerged from the cosmic process; seeing cultural development as also part of the cosmic process is even more challenging.

But as I said in the previous post, it's only when we can see that the social-relational nature of personal consciousness is also a part of evolution of the universe-- from the Big Bang and the formation of galaxies and stars to the emergence of life on Earth and the development of the primate brain-- that it becomes clear why culture is such an important concept in the converging perspectives of science and religion.

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In moving from an neurological to an anthropological focus we need to keep in mind the distinction between the primal emergence of conscious awareness among our animal ancestors several million years ago and the growth and development of individual consciousness as it takes place in every human being today.

That first kind of conscious emergence is called "phylogenetic." It's what happened in that group ("phylum," in a broad sense) of mammals out of which primates and eventually humans arose. It's the transition from the second to the third stage of complexity in the cosmic process as it takes place on Earth.

To make sense of phylogenesis we need to think about primate brain structures in terms of things like the cognitive extension of prehension and cognized environment, and I have talked about those concepts in many previous blog entries. The key idea is an understanding of the neurological structures of the primate brain which allow for the adaptation of the individual and the species to the external environment.

Biogenetic Structuralist researchers use words like "assimilation" and "accommodation" to describe what's happening in the brain of individuals as they take in and/or adjust to what's encountered in their world. And they note that it's always for the sake of survival.

The second kind of conscious emergence, which the Biogenetic Structuralists refer to as "ontogenetic" development, has to do with the normal pattern in the development of self-awareness in individual human beings. ("On" and "ens" are Greek and Latin for "being.") It's this ontogenetic development-- ontogenesis-- that's a principal focus of cultural anthropology.

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While the findings of neuro-physiology help us to understand the phylogenetic emergence of human consciousness, the perspectives of cultural anthropology help us to understand the emergence and growth of self-awareness as it occurs in every human being.

That phylogenetic emergence was a transition from the second to the third level of complexity in the cosmic process, which first happened, probably in Northeast Africa, about two and half million years ago. In contrast, the ontogenetic development of human consciousness begins with the embryological development of every human child and continues throughout the life of each of us.

Biogenetic Structuralism sees three distinct stages to the ontogenetic development of consciousness. And, as I've said earlier, it's here-- in our perception of the growth and development of the "other half of person"-- that the convergence of understandings from the human sciences and from global humanity's religious insights begins to take on an even richer and fuller sense than previously.

So my focus in the next few blog posts will be on cultural anthropology, especially on how the Biogenetic Structuralist researchers see the development of human consciousness in terms of social and communal relationships taking place in three separate stages.

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To get a good sense of our communal and relational aspects we need to see something of how personal consciousness develops in each individual, of what ontogenesis is all about.

As I've said, the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective sees it taking place in three stages. And even from the brief descriptions of these stages which follow it becomes immediately apparent that they are of great significance in terms of global humanity's religious perspectives.

It might be better to call the stages "phases" since, while they are sequential, there's also a great deal of overlap.

And of course, as with everything connected with Biogenetic Structuralism-- or indeed with any specialized branch of science-- there's a lot of jargon to deal with. "Ontogenesis," as a term for the growth and development of personal consciousness, is a good example. And you may remember from earlier postings that these researchers like to use the Greek term, gnosis, for consciousness itself. They also use the term neuro-gnosis to emphasize that it's the structures and functions of the nerve cells in the brain which are the basis for our conscious gnosis.

So our topic here is ontogenetic neuro-gnosis-- or even neuro-gnostic ontogenesis. (It's no wonder these scientific findings haven't filtered down to the popular level!)

And even finding simple and clear names for the three stages seems to have been a problem.

Biogenetic Structuralists refer to the first phase of ontogenetic development as "received gnosis" but they also talk about it as "beliefs." The second stage of personal conscious development is simply called "experience" or "personal experience." And the third phase is referred to as "transpersonal" or "contemplative" experience.

Needless to say, that word "contemplative" will rings bells for anyone interested in religion and spirituality. I hope it can serve for now as a hint, at least, of the extent of the convergence of the perspectives which I think can be found in Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of cultural anthropology and humanity's religious traditions.

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I will describe those stages or phases in the ontogenetic development of our personal self-awareness within the cultural context in the next few posts.

Meanwhile, I want to step back a moment to emphasize that we need to keep in mind that we're trying to see that ontogenetic development of each human individual in the very largest context possible: nothing less than the entire cosmic process as it takes place at three levels of increasing complexity.

I spelled out that long view in post #8 (Background to Biogenetic Structuralism) and more specifically in post #16 (Our Own Inner World). Here's a quick review.

The first level is that of matter: from the Big Bang and the evolution of galaxies, stars and planets. The second level is that of life: the emergence of life on Earth several billion years ago and the development by way of fish, reptiles and mammals, of the primate brain. And the third level of complexity is that of mind: the emergence of personal self-awareness several million years ago.

As I've said above and stressed in the previous blog entry, we also have to take into account the fact that there's an "other half of person," what we call it "culture"-- our social, communal and relational side.

And we need to keep in mind that, from the anthropological perspective, "culture" means whatever humans do that's not controlled by our genes and instincts.

It includes anything and everything that needs to be "passed on" from more experienced persons to the younger and less experienced for the survival of life: all the learning, skills and information which need to be passed on precisely because they are not part of our instinctual or genetically-based behavior.

My purpose in reviewing this "largest possible context" for human cultural development is to make the point that it's only when we can see ourselves in this very large cultural context that we can understand our place in the scheme of things specifically in terms of dealing with our contemporary concerns. I have in mind things such as equality, peace and justice issues and environmental problems.

The issue is still life's survival, just as it was in the original phylogenetic emergence of consciousness several million years ago.

When Al Gore acknowledged the Nobel Peace Prize, he observed that the ecological crisis is a spiritual issue. "It is," as he said, "a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

I couldn't find a better example of the need for an understanding of the contemporary convergence of scientific findings and humanity's core religious insights.

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