A Summary of August’s Posts

For readers of this Blog who have joined us only recently and may have neither the time nor inclination to read all that has been posted thus far, the following is a summary of what has gone before. If it tempts you to check out some particular post(s) and perhaps respond with your own comments, you are most welcome.

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Each species has its own way of experiencing the world – its own way of extracting meaningful information in order to survive and play its part. Each, in other words, has its own worldview. As species and their awareness systems (their sensory receptors and nervous systems) evolved, so did their worldviews.

For humans, our worldview consists of a set of high-level, abstract mental categories into which we sort the raw data of our experience. Our meaning-system is not limited to identifying what something is or whether it is beneficial or toxic. We want to know what’s happening and why it’s happening – which can only be answered in a narrative, made possible by language. 

Fundamentally, our worldview answers three questions: (1) What game is the universe playing? (2) Who am I and where do I fit in the overall scheme of things? (3) How then should I live my life? Our answers comprise a largely unconscious set of beliefs and values that shape our experience and help us make sense of it. They orient us. They tell us who and where we are in the larger scheme of things, provide a map to guide our behaviour, and give us a satisfying sense of meaning and purpose.

These questions and our search for answers arise inevitably from our uniquely human level of self-awareness, our ability to symbolically objectify our world, and our consequent need to understand the role we play in the cosmic drama. This mode of consciousness is linked to the relative size and complexity of our brain, which is the product of evolution’s movement in the direction of ever greater complexity and heightened awareness. That movement over four billion years of life on this planet is marked by a spectrum of awareness – ranging from simple awareness (possessed by the simplest organisms) to consciousness or perceptual awareness (possessed in varying degrees by all animals with nervous systems), to self-awareness (possessed in varying degrees by a few animals, including us, with more elaborate nervous systems).  It is this self-awareness that requires us to make sense of our world by creating a meaningful worldview.

It also carries with it an insatiable curiosity and a very great sense of wonder. We are surrounded by mystery. The more we learn, and the more sophisticated our worldviews become, the deeper runs the mystery and the greater is our wonderment. It is, for me, part of the huge privilege of being human.

More than an individual requirement, however, worldviews are culturally created and essential for a society’s survival. They enable members of a society to share a similar experience of their world and a common sense of meaning and purpose. Only by agreeing with one another on what we and the world are about can we have human societies and cultures.

The narratives with which a culture’s worldview is presented – the stories about what’s happening in the universe and why – always have a mythic as well as a rational-scientific component. The mythic component, which should complement and never contradict the scientific, is required because the questions addressed cannot be answered by science alone. Science is a limited mode of inquiry that looks at repetitive aspects of the empirical world and is unable to say what the meaning or intention of anything may be. So we need as well a metaphysical or spiritual mode of inquiry, recognising that our answers to the BIG questions of our existence are always beliefs that can neither be proven nor refuted.

It is through the mythic component, often enshrined in religion and expressed in rites and rituals, that a worldview is imprinted on the psyche of children. By absorbing the cultural myths and participating in its rites, children internalise the worldview that qualifies them to become full-fledged members of their society.

Whatever worldview we adopt is never the final truth. It is always and only a construction of our minds. The test of its validity is not its truth but its usefulness as a perceptual and interpretive filter that generates adaptive behaviour and delivers a satisfying sense of meaning and purpose. So our worldviews themselves are continually evolving. Under pressure to adapt to changing circumstances, how we experience our world changes accordingly. In fact, it’s how we adapt. Human cultures adapt by changing their worldview – whether to mitigate some threat or to incorporate new knowledge that will make our worldview a more reliable map to the future we want.

This is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves today. Driven by evolution’s relentless movement towards greater diversity and more inclusive communities, humanity, with its huge diversity of cultures, is now being drawn together into a global community. And yet we remain deeply divided. It is a highly volatile situation in which our globalization heightens the danger arising from colliding worldviews. More than this, the dominant Western worldview continues to promote behaviour resulting in global crises of potentially catastrophic proportions.

So we find ourselves confronted with an urgent need to adapt. Our old worldviews no longer serve us well. Can we together create a shared worldview that can unite our global community while still leaving room for a rich diversity of cultural expressions? Can we reach consensus on at least the foundational pillars or core architecture of such a worldview? It is the adaptive imperative of our time.

Worldviews evolve and change

As species evolve, so do their awareness systems (i.e. their sensory receptors and nervous systems) and their consequent experience of their world. In other words, species and their worldviews evolve together.

The same is true of humans. Under pressure to adapt to changing circumstances, how we experience our world changes accordingly. In fact, it’s how we adapt. Human cultures adapt by changing their worldview. Ever since Homo sapiens emerged some 200,000 years ago, human cultures and their worldviews have evolved together. Changes in our mental representations of the world underlie all the major events in our evolutionary history. Every revolution begins with a new way of seeing the world. Every cultural transformation is born of a new understanding of how things are and what is possible.

Such changes, however, do not happen easily. Because our worldviews hold everything together and enable us to make sense of the world, we are understandably reluctant to change them. Over the course of history, worldviews have usually changed only when people with one worldview conquered and imposed their worldview on those with another. In some instances, such changes have occurred by persuasion, as when missionaries or scientists persuaded people to adopt a new worldview. In every case, however, the change can be seen as an adaptation – whether to mitigate the threat presented by a conquering and occupying power, or to incorporate new knowledge that will make our worldview a more reliable map to the future we want.

That cultures adapt by changing their worldview further underlines the fact that there is no one, true, and complete worldview. It is not a question of truth but of utility. Yes, our worldview should reflect our best knowledge of the world. But we always have only partial knowledge, and what we do have is continually changing. Our understanding of the universe and of our place within it has altered greatly over the millennia. So the final test of any worldview can only be how well it enables us to get along in the world when we use it as a map to guide our behaviour.

Even when we suspect that our worldview may be a less than useful or accurate map, we usually find it very hard to let it go or reconstruct it. We cling tenaciously to what has for so long provided a stable and meaningful understanding of our world, and even twist new information to fit it. It is usually only when the new and anomalous information is so overwhelming, or when we can no longer avoid seeing that our worldview is maladaptive, that we are prepared to consider something new. Indeed, we are usually so accustomed to assuming that our worldview is reality that we aren’t even conscious of it. Its fundamental precepts are so taken for granted that we remain quite oblivious to them until some cultural or individual life crisis forces us to see how maladaptive our behaviour has become. Only then is the worldview that has generated this behaviour likely to surface and become available to us for critical review.

We are precisely at this point in our history now. Our traditional religious worldviews seem so anachronistic, so out of synch with contemporary scientific views, that they have become quite untenable to a great many people who want cognitive consistency among their beliefs. The claims of these various worldviews to be the sole repository of divinely revealed truth,  moreover, has become dangerously divisive in an emerging global community. Nor is our scientific-secular worldview any less hazardous. With the universe stripped of purpose and our lives reduced to nothing more meaningful than the accidental collisions of atoms or mutations of genes, we try vainly to assuage our unease in an orgy of entertainment and consumerism – with only now some dawning awareness that, in the process, we are despoiling our planet and sabotaging the very systems on which our life depends. It seems often to require some measure of cultural decline before we can recognise and challenge the maladaptive nature of our dominant worldviews.

Only when a prevailing worldview is thrown into crisis are new ideas, or previously discarded ones, seriously considered. As a new worldview begins to emerge, an intellectual battle takes place between proponents of the new and defenders of the old. The worldview finally changes when a certain critical mass is reached. When it can no longer explain the nature of reality in a credible way, or enable us to adapt, or guide us toward goals that satisfy, it recedes and eventually becomes extinct. The transition can be painful, however, since we are often left, for a time at least, without shared values or a common sense of purpose.

When all is said and done, it may simply require time. What the great physicist Max Planck said about changing scientific paradigms applies equally to evolving worldviews: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

The Limitations of Science

In my most recent post I suggested that no worldview can be regarded as “the truth.” It is always and only a construction of our minds. The best we can do is fashion a tentative framework of meaning, acknowledge that it isn’t written in heaven, and bet our life on it nonetheless.

But what about a scientific worldview? Rather than speculate about questions that are fundamentally unanswerable or cook up explanations based on no firm evidence whatsoever, why not stick with what we know scientifically to be true. From such evidence-based truths could we not construct a worldview with which any reasonable person in our global community would agree? It seems an attractive option.

But before we hail science as the bearer of all truth, we should remember what science is. It is not a set of ideas, true or false. It is a method of inquiry – a hugely successful method that involves learning by experience, remaining ever open to new ideas, and striving to remain value-free so that we can see what is rather than what we want to see or think we should see. As such, it could not be more different from systems of belief based on speculation, wishful thinking, or some unchanging truth thought to be revealed from on High.

Science looks closely at the world, searches for the simplest possible description of what’s happening, proposes possible explanatory hypotheses or educated guesses, and then decides between them on the basis of careful measurement and controlled experiments. In essence, it asks nature to decide which is the better hypothesis. Those that can be confirmed by repeated experiments gain the status of theories and may be expressed as laws – i.e. concise statements that express a causal relationship between two or more elements. But even these are not regarded as “the truth.” Theories regularly change and laws are broken by new evidence for which they cannot account. So there is no absolute truth in science. The closest we get are facts that are regarded as indisputable observations – such as the date of my birth or the reality of the holocaust.

Despite the tentative nature of scientific findings, they are nonetheless widely accepted because of their utility. So long as they work, we’re inclined to think they are true – even though truth and utility are not the same thing. Newton’s theories have been superseded by Einstein but are still very useful when it comes to building skyscrapers. And though Einstein’s E = MC2 may itself one day be superseded, it was sufficiently useful to create a bomb that wiped two cities off the face of the planet. Scientific laws have in fact given us enormous power to control the phenomena which these laws describe.

Because of this, many believe that scientific theories, if not the final truth, are at least approximations to the truth. As our understanding advances, so the fit between theory and reality improves. And one day we will arrive at a set of equations that finally embody the “true laws” in their entirety. Not all scientists, however, subscribe to this. Physics, they say, is not about truth but about “models of nature” that are useful in relating one observation to another in a systematic way. The task of science is to construct models that are simplified representations of “real” phenomena. Such models are never right or wrong, but only more or less useful. Newton’s theory is not wrong; it merely has a limited range of validity. The special theory of relativity gives us a more useful account of high-speed systems. The idea of a final, perfect theory that cannot be improved is as meaningless as the idea of a perfect picture or a perfect symphony.

One such model that has been fundamental to science since its inception is the machine model - a model that likens the universe to a giant machine. It was a metaphor that made perfect sense in the early years of science when Western society became enamoured of machines. It was the early days of the Industrial Revolution and our success in creating ever more efficient machines was intoxicating. If the universe too is a machine, maybe we could discover the bits and pieces that comprise it and how they fit together. So that’s what we set out to do. And, lo and behold, that’s what we found. Our assumptions determined our findings. It was then only a short step from saying “The universe may be likened to a machine” to saying “The universe is a machine.” It’s so tempting to confuse our maps, models, and metaphors with the reality they are meant only to represent.

More than this, the entire scientific enterprise is built on assumptions about the nature of the universe that cannot themselves be proved. One of these stems from 17th century Christian theology when science was first being launched as a discipline – namely the concept of God beyond space and time, whose mind is full of changeless mathematical ideas that govern the universe.  The notion had originated in the much earlier neo- Platonic and Pythagorean mystery schools of ancient Greece. Since then, all that has really changed is that we no longer call it God, but the laws of nature.  Today’s leading physicists continue to believe that there’s a sort of timeless mind underlying the universe, essentially mathematical in nature.

We assume that we live in an ordered universe, that physical systems comply with simple mathematical laws, and that these laws are unchanging. Everything else in the universe may evolve and change, but the laws that govern it do not. The job of the scientist is to observe and catalog this orderliness and discover its laws. There is no empirical evidence whatsoever for this assumption, but science could not exist without it. So although our understanding of these supposedly unchanging laws has fluctuated wildly over the past century, we have no option but to dismiss such fluctuations as experimental errors. We are committed to discovering a kind of Platonic order in the universe and are compelled by our belief in the mathematical beauty and simplicity of nature. “All of these endeavours,” Einstein said, “are based on the belief that existence should have a completely harmonious structure.”

One more limitation deserves mention. Science confines itself to the empirical sphere – to the realm of things that can be observed and measured. If you can’t put a number to it, science can’t consider it. And that leaves vast areas of human experience outside the realm of scientific inquiry. Each of us, for example, lives according to certain values. All our choices are ultimately value choices. But since science deals with numbers, and because one number is not intrinsically better than any other, science can offer no guidance regarding values or the conduct of our lives.  For the same reason, science can say nothing about the purpose or intention of anything. Everything can be explained in physical terms and determined by natural laws.

There is nothing wrong with this so long as we acknowledge it as a limitation. It becomes a problem only when we claim, as some do, that if science cannot measure it, it doesn`t exist – that the material realm is the only reality because that`s the only realm for which there is scientific evidence – or that, because science cannot consider questions of purpose or intention, the universe must therefore be devoid of either. Certainly when it comes to the BIG questions regarding why the universe happens as it does, science must remain silent. That is not its business. But neither can it legitimately denigrate those who offer mythic answers to these questions simply because they are not evidence-based.

Once again, here’s Albert Einstein: “The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the language in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan to the arrangement of the books – a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.” (Words of Wisdom from Albert Einstein)

Do we ever have the truth?

When Jesus was on trial for his life before the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, Pilate reportedly asked him, “What is truth?” To which Jesus gave no answer. Perhaps he didn’t have the energy to explain such a weighty matter to a Roman bureaucrat. After all, it had been a difficult week. Or perhaps there isn’t any answer to be given. I prefer the latter option. Certainly I’m not about to stick my neck out very far on an issue that Jesus side-stepped and that centuries of philosophical debate have failed to settle. But I’ll stick it out just far enough to say that whatever worldview we adopt is not the final truth.

We humans have a dangerous tendency to assume that our particular culture’s worldview is more right than any other and that the whole world would be better off if everyone believed as we do. In fact we’ve proven only too willing to wage war and slaughter countless millions in an effort to persuade them that “I’m right and you’re wrong” – especially if our particular deity gives us any encouragement in that direction.

Worldviews with a strong religious component – (and that includes the vast majority of worldviews throughout history) – seem the most likely to generate such behaviour, born of the conviction that God Himself has ordained this particular set of beliefs and practices, revealed through His chosen prophet and subsequently inscribed in a Holy Book. Such worldviews do indeed claim to be “the truth”, however bizarre that truth may seem to non-believers. So Zionist Jews genuinely believe that the Creator of this universe has decreed that, for all eternity, the bit of ground on this planet known as Palestine belongs to His chosen people, regardless of who else may have occupied it for the past 2000 years. Conservative Christians actually pray for Armageddon – that final cataclysmic end-of-the-world battle when Jesus will return to destroy the forces of evil and take his faithful followers with him in a bodily ascension up through the clouds into heaven. And Muslim jihadists have no qualms about blowing up innocent men, women and children in the name of Allah. All these believers, whatever their tradition, have no doubt that their worldview is the absolute, final, and eternal truth.

I can only imagine that clinging to such a claim yields a measure of comfort in the face of life’s uncertainties and enables those who feel blessed with such truth to regard themselves as special and superior to those who adhere to a different truth. I’m not about to argue that their worldview is false – after all, who knows what the truth really is – but surely this claim is extremely dangerous in today’s global community. It seems to me that a core tenet of any emerging worldview must be the recognition that no one – not the prophets of old nor the scientists of today – has the truth wrapped up. Yes, we each need a worldview to frame our experience and give meaning to our lives. Can we embrace whatever worldview makes sense to us, acknowledge that it isn’t written in heaven, and bet our life on it nonetheless? Surely what is required in today’s world is a heaping does of humility, together with a deep respect for all those whose worldview is different than our own.

Can anything be regarded as the truth? There are those, quite the opposite of hard-core religious believers, who say that our experience of the world is shaped by our sensory equipment and the mental constructs into which we fit the data. Since we can never be sure that our perceptual constructs accurately represent any out-there reality, perception is all there is. The world that we experience is always our own construction. Who then can say what the truth is?

It’s a position that seems impractical to me. Trusting the evidence of our senses, we once believed that the world was flat and that the sun revolved around it. Now, thanks to telescopes, from Galileo to Hubble, we see the world as a sphere that revolves around the sun. Is that true? It’s certainly more true than what we used to believe. And its truth seems confirmed by the fact that we can make very accurate predictions based on it. Our mental construction of what exists is a sufficiently true and accurate representation of what really does exist out there that we can send men in rockets to the moon and back. For all practical purposes, we can say that our current picture of our solar system is absolutely true.

Lots of things can be said to be true based either on consensual validation or sufficient supporting evidence. Is it true that I was born in Montreal on 19 November 1934? Absolutely! Not simply because my parents said so but because there is ample documentary evidence to support it. Is it true that a Jewish holocaust took place in Europe in the 1940s? Absolutely! – despite the denials of Neo-Nazis for whom this fact does not sit comfortably with their agenda. Okay, how about the Big Bang? Well, the supporting evidence is looking pretty good, but we may be reluctant yet to proclaim it as the final truth. After all, only 50 years ago we had very good evidence to support the idea that the universe is eternal.

Deciding what’s true or not becomes much  more difficult regarding why something happened or is happening. Why, for example, is that apple falling from the tree? Newton called it gravity – a force between two objects that is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Pushing the why question further, he speculated that the Earth, like a sponge, drinks up a constant stream of fine aethereal matter that falls from the heavens and causes physical bodies located above the Earth to descend. Wow! But that was over 300 years ago. No one today is likely to accept that explanation as true. Einstein proposed a different explanation in which gravity is due to the effects of material bodies on the shape of four-dimensional space-time. And presently some physicists are proposing that gravity is caused by one-dimensional “strings” or filaments vibrating in an 11-dimensional universe. Double-Wow! So do we know the truth of why an apple falls from a tree? We’re not even close.

So too when it comes to our worldviews – those over-arching systems of belief that frame our lives in the context of the BIG questions – not questions about which we can decide the truth, such as when I was born or whether the holocaust really happened, or even about what causes apples to fall from trees, but the really BIG questions about why is there anything at all, and is the evolution of this universe going anywhere, and what if anything are the implications of this for what we human beings are doing here and what may be the purpose of our lives, etcetera?  Concerning such issues, we will never know “the truth”. The best we can hope for are working hypotheses that we can test in the course of our living, that will guide our behaviour in ways that are both creative and benign, and that will yield a satisfying sense of meaning.

Therefore be humble, ever curious, and always tolerant of those who see things differently than you.

The Privilege and Burden of Being Human

I am recurrently grateful for what I consider to be the huge privilege of living this life as a human being. Not that it’s any better than to live as some other creature. All creatures may in their own way be delighted to be living the life that is theirs – and, if they could reflect upon it, perhaps even more so not to be suffering the atrocities of warfare and starvation and other forms of madness that we humans regularly inflict upon ourselves and one another.  It may well be that humanity is a flawed species – a kind of cancer on this planet, or an evolutionary experiment gone terribly wrong. But for all that, when I consider the astonishing gifts and abilities that evolution has bestowed on us, I nonetheless feel hugely grateful to be human.

For one thing, I am grateful for the gift of wonder and insatiable curiosity to understand this most amazing universe in which we find ourselves. Because of our oversize brain with its infinitely extensible repertoire of symbols that we use to represent our world, we are hard-wired as meaning-seeking creatures – hell-bent on figuring out who and where we are in the larger scheme of things, unable to avoid a host of ultimately unanswerable questions, and destined always to wonder. 

Einstein spoke of this in his 1932 address to the German League of Human Rights: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger,  who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

We humans seem unique in this regard. Could dolphins or chimpanzees experience some limited version of wonderment? Maybe.  But I’m willing to bet that your pet Retriever is not pondering life’s meaning. We humans have evolved to a quite different level of consciousness. Standing apart from the ongoing stream of fleeting sensations, we represent in our minds an organised and stable universe that we can objectively consider. It’s as though we have been granted a measure of detachment and are now set free to contemplate our life, to ponder our existence, and to wonder.

Equipped with this capacity to objectify our world, and driven by our wonder and curiosity, we have accumulated a vast amount of knowledge. Not content with the sensory receptors given us by nature, we have created tools to expand the range of our perception to explore everything from the depths of space to the micro-world of bacteria. Were it not so, we would still believe the sun revolves around the earth and that disease is caused by demons, witchcraft, or the displeasure of a god. But as our empirical knowledge has expanded, so has our sense of wonder. We know now that our sun is just one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one among 100 billion galaxies in our universe. That makes a total of 10 trillion stars (give or take a few) – the same as the number of cells in our body and more than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world (though just how anyone figured that out is beyond me). To which all I can say is “Wow! That is so amazing! No, more than amazing, it is unimaginable. My mind boggles.”

What a huge privilege to be human! – to have access to all this knowledge, to be part of the ongoing quest for more, and always to wonder! Truly, anyone who no longer pauses to wonder or stands rapt in awe is as good as dead.

And speaking of death, this surely is part of the burden of being human. So far as we know, no other creature contemplates, let alone worries about, its eventual demise. Some, from apes to elephants to magpies, seem to grieve the loss of a family member. And cattle and sheep, on their way up the slaughter-house ramp, seem to show some nervous anticipation of what is to come.  But we alone, though still immersed in the ongoing stream of nature and history, are able to look behind us from whence we have come, as well as before us to what we imagine our future may be. And we know, with absolute certainty, that around some bend in the stream, death waits. Moreover, given our heightened awareness of self and the sense that there is some enduring “I” that indwells this changing body, it is very hard for us to imagine our own non-existence. Indeed, the prospect of it is so daunting that we will do almost anything to deny it – from building monumental pyramids, to investing in all manner of anti-aging potions, to creating elaborate systems of belief about our soul’s survival after death.  Clearly such anxiety, which is with us from about age 4 until they lay us to rest, is part of the downside of being human.

One other consideration is worth mentioning. Our greatly expanded awareness system has both blessed and cursed us with a measure of freedom unknown to any other animal. Without getting into the centuries-old debate about determinism versus free-will, let’s acknowledge that, although it may be illusory, our experience of free-will is absolutely real. It certainly feels like we have some choice in the decisions we make. And this experience of freedom seems to have evolved along with bigger brains and heightened awareness.

Most animals do most of what they do instinctively. Their behaviour happens, without any conscious decisions being made, as determined by their nervous system in response to their changing environments.  But as brains became more complex and their perceptual categories more extensive, behaviour became less and less driven by instincts and more and more shaped by what the animal had learned from its experience. By the time Homo sapiens emerged, very little was left to instinct. We still have basic needs that must be satisfied, but few inborn programs for doing the millions of things that we do. The vast majority of our behaviour is learned. And given our unique kind of consciousness – our reflective awareness of what we are doing, our memory of what we have done, our  imagining of what may be possible, and our consequent ability to predict the likely effects of our behaviour – we have no option but to plan and choose what we will do. 

That freedom comes at a huge price. Other species can do what they do, untroubled by whether it is right or wrong. And what they do is virtually guaranteed by evolution to be appropriate to the eco-niche to which they are adapted. We, on the other hand, are hung with minds that must decide what we will do, and our choices can be adaptive or catastrophic. We are the only creature that takes from our environment far more than we need, and does so not only by slaughtering vast numbers of our own kind but by endangering the very ecosystem on which we depend. Now as the dominant species, we can literally shape the future life of this planet for good or for ill. Whether we like it or not, we have become co-creators of its ongoing evolution.

What an enormous responsibility! It is the privilege and burden of being human.

The Big Brain Experiment

The awakening of consciousness on this planet, and especially of self awareness, coincides with the development of bigger brains. Compared with other mammals, primates such as chimpanzees and orang-utans have huge brains. And compared with our primate ancestors, the human brain is larger still. In the two million years since the Homo genus emerged, our brain has tripled in size over that of our hominid ancestors, and doubled in size over that of the first Homo species, Homo habilis.

Brain size is relative to body size and doesn’t necessarily reflect the creature’s level of intelligence. Whales and elephants have brains many times the size of ours, but don’t come close to us in terms of cognitive ability. So scientists calculate instead what they call the "encephalization quotient" (or EQ). It is the ratio of actual brain weight to the expected brain weight of a typical animal of that size. An EQ of 1 means that the ratio of the animal’s brain weight to body weight is typical for animals of comparable size. Here are some examples:

                    Homo sapiens            7.44
                    Dolphins                    5.31
                    Chimpanzees             2.49
                    Rhesus monkeys        2.09
                    Elephants                   1.87
                    Whales                      1.76
                    Dogs                         1.17
                    Cats                          1.00
                    Sheep                        0.81
                    Mice                          0.50
                    Rats & Rabbits          0.40

This means that our human brain is 7.44 times larger than the average for an animal of our size, while the brain of a mouse is just half the size of what would be the average for an animal of its size.

EQ is not the same as IQ, but it does seem to vary with the level of intelligence a species requires to survive in its particular niche. Leaf-eating creatures surrounded by food, for example, require less intelligence, and hence a relatively smaller brain, than insect eaters that need intelligent strategies to capture their prey. Predator species generally have higher EQs than prey species. Apparently, the more a species needs to think, the larger is its relative brain size.

Social animals, especially those who live in highly interactive groups, also tend to have higher EQs. A recent survey of 38 genera, including gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, showed that species living in larger groups have larger cerebral cortices. It seems that larger groups require greater cognitive capacity in order to maintain cohesion in their complex social networks.

The expansion of the brain’s relative size is due largely to the evolution of a cerebral cortex – that layer of grey matter that covers both hemispheres of the cerebellum. A distinguishing feature of mammals, it expanded by 7% every ten million years during the last 65 million years of the Cenozoic Era. Today, among living mammals, an average of 57% of the brain’s surface area is devoted to neo-cortex. The increase was most dramatic among primates. In living monkeys and living and fossil hominids, the ratio averages 75%, and in humans it rises to a staggering 80%.

The neo-cortex is the centralised processing system that integrates information supplied by a mammal’s senses to create a picture of its world. As more sophisticated sensory receptors and a more complex cerebral cortex evolved, so too did the brain’s power to symbolically represent the world. A more and more detailed mental picture of the world gradually emerged, until eventually there arose the very elaborate worldviews that frame our human perception of the world.

What triggered the invention of this neo-cortex? We don’t know for sure. But it evolved in tandem with endothermy – the ability of mammals to maintain a constant body temperature. While this had huge survival value, it was also very costly. A mammal requires 5-10 times more energy than a reptile of similar body size just to maintain its body temperature. And brains themselves are energy gluttons, consuming up to 20% of the available energy. Meeting these energy requirements demands much greater efficiency in food gathering, which in turn requires a more detailed mental picture of the environment. Enter the cerebral cortex with its talent for constructing mental maps! – the talent that has exploded virtually without limit in Homo sapiens.

Still another implication of large brains is the anatomical fact that the birth canal of females who walk upright is not large enough to deliver a baby with a full-grown brain. Although a wider birth canal had already developed in Homo erectus, there is still a limit to how large the head of a human foetus can be and still pass through the birth canal. The evolutionary solution was to delay the full development of the human brain until after birth. Only when a baby is a year old does its brain growth slow, and even then it doesn’t stop. The brains of teen-agers are still a work in progress. The frontal lobes – which contribute judgment, inhibition, and self-awareness – may not be fully connected until as late as age 25. No other primate has this pattern of brain growth and such a prolonged period of childhood dependency, requiring a massive investment of shared parental care. 

All of this provides the seedbed of human culture. Large brains, a burgeoning neo-cortex, heightened awareness, elaborate mental maps of the world, and a prolonged childhood during which we learn and absorb a shared worldview – all these come together to make human culture possible. All of these are correlated. But can we ever say what causes what? Correlation is not causation! The physical height and reading abilities of 5 year-olds and 10-year-olds correlate extremely well, but one has nothing to do with the other. So did endothermy trigger the development of larger and more complex brains? Or was it our coming together into more complex social networks? Was our greatly expanded neo-cortex the cause of human consciousness? And is human comnsciousness the cause of human culture with its shared worldviews? Perhaps. Or perhaps all of this, including the Big Brain Experiment itself, is simply the manifestation of evolution’s playful meandering towards greater complexity and heightened awareness.

Towards Greater Complexity and Heightened Awareness

Evolution proceeds not only in the direction of greater diversity and more inclusive communities but also in the direction of increasing complexity and heightened awareness. In general, the more complex an organism is, the greater is its awareness.

Awareness belongs to all life. It is the capacity of a system to respond to stimuli – to integrate sensations from the environment with the creature’s immediate goals in order to guide its behaviour. The more complex the system, the more numerous and varied are its responses. Biological evolution proceeds by creating more sophisticated awareness and response systems. Over billions of years, it has created ever more complex sensory receptors and nervous systems, capable of interacting with the world with greater awareness and responsiveness. So there is a spectrum of awareness, ranging from simple awareness (possessed by all life forms from bacteria, through protists, plants and fungi, to invertebrate animals), to consciousness or perceptual awareness (possessed in varying degrees by all animals with nervous systems and characterised by a degree of inner life or interiority), to self-awareness (possessed, again in varying degrees, by a few animals with more elaborate nervous systems, including chimpanzees, orang-utans, dolphins, a family of birds known as corvids despite their having no cortex, perhaps elephants, and of course humans).

So while plants may possess very sophisticated awareness systems, they are not conscious in the sense that even a lowly mosquito is. And your pet dog, though possessing a significant level of consciousness, has no self-awareness or sense of “I” in anything resembling the way humans do. As in the visual spectrum there are no sharp dividing lines between the colours, so in this spectrum of awareness it is impossible to draw neat dividing lines between one level and another. At what level of complexity awareness blossoms into consciousness, or consciousness into self-awareness, is impossible to say.

We have scarcely begun to understand the awareness systems of the simplest organisms. Though they possess no sensory receptors as such, bacteria can detect the presence of food and of other bacteria competing for that food. Only yesterday, BBC News reported research findings, published in Biotechnology Journal, that bacteria can “smell” ammonia that indicates the presence of a nearby nutrient source. We now know that bacteria possess their own primitive equivalents of sight, touch, taste, and smell. Of the five senses that we possess, they appear to lack only hearing.

The invention of the neuron – a cell specialized for awareness – made possible an expanded awareness called consciousness. It belongs to all animals with nervous systems, and bestows on them a measure of inner life or interiority – a sense of being present to their world. Sensory neurons, activated by physical stimuli, send signals to the central nervous system (CNS) that encode information about the organism’s external and internal environments. The CNS processes the information to determine an appropriate response and sends output signals to muscles and glands to activate that response.

Such consciousness depends on “perceptual categories” being stored in the brain. The brain is in part a representational system that develops symbols to represent patterns of incoming sensory data. By matching sensory input with these stored perceptual categories, the creature perceives and understands what that sensory input means. We can only guess at what categories may occupy the brain of a mosquito. They may be limited to “food”, “convenient place to land”, and “potential mate.” Your pet dog, on the other hand, will have a great many more such categories stored in its brain, such as “ball”, “car”, and “go walkies.” The more perceptual categories that can be stored in a brain, the greater is that creature’s consciousness.

At some point in our evolutionary history, when brains became sufficiently complex to store a very large repertoire of perceptual categories, there began to emerge a sense of self. Mosquitoes have practically no self at all (which is why we can swat them so easily), while your pet dog has at least a rudimentary self-model – an approximate sense of itself as a physical entity in a larger world. Near the upper end of the spectrum are chimpanzees, orang-utans, dolphins, and corvids who have a sufficient sense of self to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror. And finally we come to humans – a creature with an infinitely extensible repertoire of categories, including some that are clustered into a clear perception of “me” and a stable sense of “I” – a creature whose self-awareness is such that we are spectators to our own awareness. We can witness our own thoughts and feelings, represent them in symbolic form in our language and art, and reflect on who and where we are in the larger scheme of things.

Such is the spectrum of awareness that has evolved over four billion years of life on this planet. It may be a stretch to say that this is the “purpose” of evolution. But it seems clear to me that, whatever may be driving it, this is the direction in which evolution moves – towards ever greater complexity and heightened awareness.  And if we wanted to get mythic about it, we might even say that the planet is in process of awakening.