The journey to self-consciousness

Evolutionary pressures over millions of years established the human brain as we know it today. The discipline of evolutionary psychology has shown that evolution left us with neural mechanisms tailored to specific functions that work without us being aware of them. This has been called "the Swiss army knife" theory of inherent capacities.

For example, the brain contains mechanisms for facial recognition, language acquisition, fear of evolutionary old pests such as spiders and cockroaches, cheater detection, coalition formation and concerns about purity and contagion. These abilities are universal to humanity.

While evidence of the formation of these mechanisms may be speculated upon from a consideration of the circumstance of small hunter-gatherer troops, clear delineation relies on psychological assessment. For example, it could be speculated that the male human should be sensitive to the reproductive period of a woman's cycle by way of pheromones as has been demonstrated for other mammals. The absence of such mechanisms in humans stands as a warning that simple speculation from origins may be suggestive but not necessarily reliable.

Thus, attributing Human male proclivity towards multiple sexual partners may not necessarily be explained by an innate and unconscious sexual drive that spreads his genes to as many women as possible. "The selfish gene" may be a "just so" story lacking any empirical evidence.

The function of these mechanisms may be found in the world religions, especially those dealing with purity, coalition formation and anthropomorphic ideas about God as a person (as opposed to the triune identity). These proclivities are natural, in that every person inherits them. Notions of ritual purity, the notion of who belongs and who does not is automatically triggered by mechanisms that deal with coalition formation.

Ideals of righteousness are influenced by mechanisms that influence exchange that understand sacrifice as means of appeasement. It also influences how we understand salvation as in the substitutionary theory of atonement in which God gives his Son as a substitute for the sins of the whole world ie, atonement is understood as an exchange by which humanity is released from its sin. Without wilful intervention, these mechanisms automatically support aspects of religion such as purity and righteousness.

These mechanisms can be overridden by conscious thought as fear of spiders and cockroaches may be modified by habituation. Indeed, inherent disgust at faeces or vomit, for example, are regularly overcome by nurses and medical practitioners. However, for this to occur one must possess a higher form of consciousness that bypasses the natural response. This higher form of conscience is culturally acquired and modifies automatic thought and behaviour. It may be called "self-consciousness" in order to distinguish it from the usual understanding of consciousness as awareness.

A self-conscious person can make the decision to transcend natural impulses. This ability distinguishes us from animals that are conscious of their surroundings, are capable of complex behaviour that includes learning and strategy but, as far as we know, have no sense of self or the concept of their own death.

Learning can produce automatic mechanisms that are laid down along with those inherited. While language acquisition is inherent, writing is not. It is significant that preschoolers are well along the way to full fluency in language, however they must be trained to read and write that language. Once this training has been established, reading and writing becomes automatic as does playing a musical instrument, the golf swing and arithmetic tables.

Many of our mental functions are unconscious in the way, for example, crossword clues seem to just appear in the mind without ratiocination. Thus, unconscious mechanisms may be learnt and play out their role without awareness in a similar way that inherited mechanism do.

Julian Jaynes of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind fame proposes that the word "consciousness" should properly be restricted to the ability to understand one as a self. This is a more restrictive understanding of the word that ordinarily understands that awareness and consciousness are the same thing. In other words, consciousness is more properly "self-consciousness" that refers to introspective thought, thought that has the self as its object. This way of thought invokes others as also describable as an "I" which is the first step towards compassion.

If I feel threatened or desperate then we can imagine others feeling the same. We have "theory of mind" once compassion for others is learnt, it too becomes automatic since we do not necessarily analyse another person's situation before we feel compassion for them. For most of us, when we see a person down the sights of a rifle, we automatically know that this is a person like us whose life is precious to him. The gaining of such ability is one of the central hallmarks of being human.

Our history confirms that there is a continuum from early cruelty and heartlessness to our time in which many of our soldiers are haunted by those they killed. Our armed forces are confronted by the terrible psychological scaring produced by being in action as witnessed by the number of suicides that outnumber casualties in combat. As self-consciousness spreads throughout the world it may become impossible to wage war or murder.

It is apparent that self-consciousness can stifle inherited mechanisms that produce disgust or fear that have been adopted by the purity laws of, for example, Hinduism that divides society along lines to do with purity. We may understand prohibitions concerning the touching or corpses or faeces or bodily fluids or the sick on the basis of mechanisms that protect us from contamination. But where does the prohibition from, for example, the eating of pork or crustacea as well as other animals listed in Leviticus?

It can be concluded that these lists have nothing to do with inherited systems that evolved in order to avoid contagion but have cultural origins long lost to us or invented in order to trace a boundary between us and the infidel.

While the health sciences have rationally ordered the boundaries of contagion, the most powerful cultural phenomenon that extinguished the force of natural mechanisms concerning purity and the power of coalitions is found in early Christianity. Against all religious propriety, Jesus touched the lepers and the sick and ate with the outcast. There are many biblical verses that carry this understanding but one of the most forceful is the following.

He said to them, 'Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?' (Thus, he declared all foods clean.)And he said, 'It is what comes out of a person that defiles.For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder,adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.' (Mark 7:18ff)

This remarkable passage undercuts all of the purity laws of Israel and locates human brokenness within, in the self. Their cure can only come from self-consciousness and remorse. The individual arises from such understanding who stands free of inherited neural mechanism that would separate us from each other. This is the person who is free of natural religion. No wonder early Christians were seen as blasphemous and immoral!

The selfhood of God appears early in Old Testament texts, in his creation of the world by command in the first creation story (Let there be.. and it was) to the willed making of the garden of Eden and the creation of men and women who met God face to face in the Garden. The self-consciousness of Adam is seen in his exclamation when he is presented with the woman; "This, at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh…Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife" (Gen.2:23-24). Adam is a creature unlike the animals who knows his deepest needs. As the story unfolds, he also knows that he is bound to death to return to the dust from whence he came.

The identity of God as "I" is confirmed when Moses in Exodus 3:13ff asks the name of the one who speaks to him out of the burning bush and receives the answer "I am". He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites "I am" sent me to you." "I am" is translated from four Hebrew consonants (YHWH). This name is unpronounceable and when it is read; "The Lord" is substituted.

The name of God indicates an existing self. Jaynes would call this the analogical "I" that can only be known via the existence of a self that inhabits an analogical model of the world. We are reminded that God made humanity in His own image, ie as inhabiting this analogical world built with language. Self-consciousness is entirely built on language. As God is a self-conscious identity so too is his creature.

There are shadows of this in the gospel according to John in the many "I am" statements that are found there; "I am..the bread of life, the light of the world, from above, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the way the truth and the life, the true vine". As the only son of the Father Jesus personifies the divine self-consciousness that he shares with his disciples.

The main force of discipleship, as strongly expressed in the gospel, is the indwelling presence of Christ in the believer that makes that believer also an "I am", a self, free of inherited urges that distance us from other selves. We are all one in Christ against the forces that would separate us, whether that be sex, nationality, social position, ill or healthy. This is nonother than the healing of all humanity and the end of all evil and violence. As Jesus said "Be of good cheer, I have (proleptically) overcome the world."

This world longs for another country, it lives in prolepsis, we see it shimmering on the horizon and fragments of its presence in our time. Its completion in the eschaton is assured. So we do not live from the past, even though the events of the ministry, death and resurrection of Christ are in the past, we live by a vision of the future of a time when a kingdom of justice and truth will come into existence. Christians live by a future vision not a morality that we search for in the past.

The biggest self-serving lie perpetrated by the Church has been that if we are obedient believers we will, after death, reside in heaven as opposed to hell. While the reformation was a partial correction of this, many or most believers on both the Catholic and Protestant denominations still believe in a conscious life after death, although hell has become distinctly unpopular. I have witnessed two sermons in the Anglican church that promised that we will go to a better place.

The Church's original mistake was to take over mind-body dualism from Greek philosophy and hence to the idea of the immortality of the soul that makes this construction possible. I would argue first that this is not the primary message of the gospel and secondly, that the neurological sciences have pinned consciousness to the function of the brain. When the brain dies and becomes disorganised, consciousness is lost, permanently. This understanding has become so current in our day that many see the Church as being a vehicle of false hope.

However, the Church has something to say about future hope. The secular understanding of eternity is just more and more time until the heat death of the universe. It is no wonder that many understand their lives in terms of "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die". Death is approached with numerous "bucket lists" that make sure we have lived life to the full. This, of course, is a recipe for despair because we all know that we, rich and poor, famous and obscure march towards the day that we will die, our "deathday" as opposed to our "birthday". Any society that relies on these notions will be subject to nihilism, overconsumption, and rivalry.

On the other hand, the Church offers hope that is not seen, not created by us by our many achievements, is not formulated in terms of the immortality of the soul but in eternal truth about the substance of human living and dying. This has the power to assure us that despite our death and the death of our loved ones, death is not the final victor even though it seems that way. Human life is supported by the experience that the providence of God, to use an old and misused phrase, is that the chasm of death has been overcome by truth that is eternal. Equanimity is possible when we know that all is not for nothing.