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An Evolved self:
Upgrade for the post-Christendom self

By Shaun Johnston

How often do you hear this objection to humanism:

What you call humanist values are just values built up over centuries by Christianity. What you don't seem to realize is, if you get rid of Christianity you get rid of the basis for those values too. What's the point of humanism if you can't come up with your own basis for what you call "humanist" values?

Well, OK, I don't hear that objection much either, but I don't know why not. I think it's a justifiable criticism of humanism. Since I was a kid I've been keeping an eye out for an alternative to humanism, for someone with a new basis for ethics. Maybe I've been looking in the wrong place. Is what I'm looking for called something else? Skepticism? I don't know. Anyway, here in the mid-Hudson Valley, humanists are the only people I can find to talk to about this, so "humanism" it is.

Just in time for my 65th birthday I've completed a draft of my own alternative basis for values. It's a self based on evolution. I like to think of it as a "plug-in" for science, extending the discourse of science (taking evolution to be a part of science) to the rest of our experience, including ethics.

An evolved self
There must be many ways you could arrive at a conscious human self based on evolution. That's why I call mine "an" evolved self, not "the" evolved self. It's just my version.

I start by saying, if we're not made by God in God's image, what must the world be like? What must the world be like if we, complete with a conscious self, evolved in it? My first conclusion is, it must have a realm in it where consciousnesses can evolve. Consciousnesses aren't going to evolve in a realm of matter alone, because matter is infinitely predictable (check with Bob Zannelli about this), wheras consciousness is just the opposite--it's creative and unpredictable.

See, it's really very simple. Whatever's true about us must be true of the world as well, otherwise we drop out of it again. We have free will? Then the world can contain free will.

My "method" is evolution. Any problems come up, I use evolution to solve them.

Here's the starting point of this world-view:

1. The world consists of two "real" realms:
     -- A realm of matter, what science describes. What our bodies are made of.
     -- A realm of mind, like where we experience consciousness.

By "real" I mean these realms can't be combined into one. They're fundamentally different. There really are two entirely different realms.

2. Mind and matter can interact.
And these two realms can interact. See, I say, raise my arm and my arm goes up. And you, you're turning black marks on a computer screen into conscious thoughts. Mind and matter can interact, we're doing it all the time.

3. All creativity, everything we can't explain with science, we have to explain with evolution.
Whatever has to be true, evolution must be responsible, so I just stretch evolution to fit.

4. Almost all evolution takes place in the realm of mind.
We need that to account for thinking. But then it turns out to be useful for explaining how almost all evolution happens (all except the original evolution of life from non-living matter).

5. The primary criterion guiding us is, come up with the most plausible explanation we can to account for what we think is so.
Leave no gap big enough for a supernatural being to squeeze itself into. That is, if the implausibility of supernatural beings is, say, 100, then leave no gaps as big as that in our account. Once the gaps are that small, it's easy to imagine human ingenuity filling them sometime in the future. If I do come across something I can't easily account for, I just stretch evolution a bit further to cover it. So far that's worked.

It's only a story
That's my world. That's my method. My goal is to end up with a story, like what's called an "analytical narrative." That's a kind of story social scientists make up to explain something, such as what caused the Crusades. Once you've come up with a story, or an explanation, you apply it to everything you know about the Crusades. If it fits some of the Crusades but not others, then you adjust the story and try again. You go on doing this until your story fits everything you know about the Crusades. How do you know your story is correct? You don't. It's just the best you can do in fields science hasn't got to yet. Given that science doesn't cover consciousness, my story is bound not to be the "Truth"; the most I can hope for is a story that works like the "Truth." It aims to be the best approximation to the truth we can arrive at today, just a story made up to fit what we know and experience.

The first part of my story is an account of creation, from the big bang to our consciousness today. The full story consists of verses, with commentary. Here are the verses alone:

New creation story

At the very beginning of everything, whatever there was was evolving extremely fast. By the time things cooled and evolution slowed down, what was left behind --energy and the elements for example--had become supremely good at evolving.

In a star here, on a planet there, evolution took up the elements and make creatures out of them.

Any number of realms no doubt popped into existence along with the universe, some without place, some without time, some without matter and energy. But we know about only two: the realm of matter, and the realm of mind.

One-third of time ago, when the universe was nearly 10 billion years old, the Earth got thrown together, and evolution began making creatures out of it.

Evolution is creative. It creates new living creatures, for example. But that's not all--it also creates new ways of evolving--engines of evolution. As it creates new more powerful engines, evolution can create even more complicated creatures, that evolve more quickly.

After about a billion years, evolution created genes and chromosomes. Creatures with chromosomes became so successful they consumed all the earlier creatures. That left nothing on Earth except non-living matter, and the creatures made by this new engine of genes and genomes. It left nothing in between.

Having genomes led to another engine that drove evolution even more quickly--genomes began casting a small shadow into the realm of mind. At first this shadow had no effect. It was just impressions thrown off by the genes into the realm of mind, like smoke drifting from a chimney.

Evolution takes place much faster in the realm of mind than in the realm of matter. Those shadows began to evolve, acting back on creatures' bodies through their genomes, to shape them. From this point on, most engines of evolution grow in the realm of mind.

Within another billion or so years, engines of evolution created simple bacteria.

The shadows cast by the genome into the realm of mind reached out from the realm of mind back into the realm of matter, to grow, manage and mend increasingly complicated creatures' bodies.

They also set about making themselves a more efficient set of engines of evolution. First they gave genomes bigger and bigger memories, so there'd be no limit to how much they could recall from one generation to the next. Then they built into the genome engines such as self-repair and sexual reproduction. And then they used these engines to make more engines. In animals they created nervous systems, for example, and brains.

In brains an animal's self could create maps. First it created a smart map and diary for things like up and down, then and now. Connecting that to senses like hearing and taste, the self began building a model of its world. Into this model the self poured the wisdom it had acquired from millions of years of trial and error--what to do when. Now creatures could begin navigating around their world swiftly and confidently. Like fish.

Because the brain works much faster than genetics, the main thrust of evolution migrated from minds based on the genome to minds based on the brain. A lot more wisdom could be embedded in a brain. Into the brain the self built different states of readiness, for example, such as caution and passion, each with its own set of stories. Creatures driven by these states and these stories could cope with their surroundings much better than creatures simply wired for particular behaviors. In mammals, the self's model of the world grew to include recognizing mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, what to expect from them and what to do with them.

Competition among mammals leads to another engine of evolution, a new executive "I" self able to respond much faster to physical threats. To detect these threats the "I" is plugged into the senses. It's also plugged into new brain cortex for learning and memory capacity, so it can lay down responses to threats ahead of time.

To help the body's self and this new "I" self to communicate, the stories and global states that direct behavior get associated with feelings. Dreaming gets created as a channel for communication between the slower self of the body and the new rapid "I" self. Dreaming takes the form of a theater, with the body's self laying on performances within its model of the world, and the "I" a rapt audience responding by experiencing feelings.

The "I" end of the channel, the dreaming "I", is a docile and innocent spectator, eager to follow instructions and embed in the new brain the wisdom that will guide the day-time "I". The day-time "I", appearing only when danger threatens, is the opposite--willful and decisive. Throughout danger it remains alert and in charge of behavior. When danger fades, it too fades, and the body's slower but wiser self resumes control.

The new "I" self was successful, and in these creatures became in turn the main focus of further evolution. New engines of evolution got created for it. Its special kind of wisdom got built into the genes, so each new generation could inherit "I"-wisdom grown directly in the new brain. This is the self of social mammals.

Among the tools of this new "I" self was a set of signals it could use to tell other creatures about its feelings. The "I" could utter give warning cries, for example, or snarl or stamp the ground to display rage. And it could recognize these signals in others, turning them back from material to mental events. By expressing their feelings, creatures could tell each other what something "meant," what stories and global states those feelings corresponded to.

In humans this tool went further. Humans became able to make up new signals on the fly. They could imitate other animals' calls, or point or beckon. Putting signals like this together, they could make up new meanings.

By one human taking on the role of dream manager and another taking on the role of dreamer--the basis of hypnotism--humans could the dreaming-channel to teach each other whatever they discovered.

The demands of teaching and learning drove very rapid evolution, leading to speech and words you could use for teaching something as complicated as making a tool.
Speech led to chants, and chants evolved into libraries of worksongs passed down in families, and to communities of families with "worksong" skills grouped to form industries in districts within cities.

With the invention of alphabetical writing, the "I" created a powerful new engine for making further engines of evolution. Through writing, the separated worksong-skills of the ancient cities got gathered together and reduced to one body of wisdom that could be taught to children in school. This made people civilized. As civilized adults they could think with all these skills combined.

The "I" could start applying civilized wisdom to itself, and to how the realm it lived in differed from the realm of matter. It became conscious of itself--self-aware. Self-awareness set up shop in the brain separately from the original self. It began to build culture into the brain as another self.

This new self, created mainly by the ancient Greeks, revived two thousand years later when printing got invented and has become the form of consciousness most common today.

I've given you the full set of "assertions" because, as I said before, I think what's crucial for humanists is, is the implausibility between steps smaller than the implausibility of there being supernatural beings. I invite you to go down this list and see if you agree with me that any gaps I've left are indeed that small.

Humanist values?
That's the first part of my story. An evolution-based creation story. The second part is, what kind of a self gets created in this process. I suggest how an evolved self arrives at its meaning and values. I ask, what kind of ultimate meaning would satisfy an evolved self. And I come up with a proposal for a new kind of spirituality based on evolution, for people who need that sort of thing. So I figure out what ethics an evolved self would have, and see if they support the values humanists claim for themselves.

And the answer is, they don't. Or rather, they may, but they may not. They come about in a distinctive way that doesn't necessarily deliver just the virtues claimed by humanists.

Tools and techjniques of an evolved self
A third part is about tools and techniques you get to use once you see yourself as an evolved self. The Christendom self, I point out, comes to you from God as a complete package, without any instructions or breakdown of parts, so you're dependent on God for fixing it. But once you switch over to having an evolved self, you can learn what machinery it consists of and how it works so you can fix it yourself.

If you think I've ducked the hard issues in this brief account, you have to read the full version (120 pages so far) because most of the answers lie in the details. It's like saying, I'm going to give you complete instructions for replacing every part in your Chevrolet automobile with a corresponding part from a BMW, so you'll end up with a BMW. There's no shortcut, you have to say where every piece goes. A summary can't do it.

Anyway, if I'm right, it's possible to replace very part of a Christendom self with parts of an evolved self. What you end up with is a model that isn't limited in the highways it can travel on, and is easier than the old self to maintain inbetween church attendances, which for many of us are getting farther and farther apart. It also--and this I think is really exciting--provides us with multiple examples of mind-matter interaction, making mind-matter interaction more accessible to scientific study.

If you'd like to check out the full version, let me know and I'll get you a copy. I'd like to know what you think of it.

Shaun Johnston is the author of "Father, in a Far Distant Land I Find You" a utopian fiction tracing the impact of evolutionary ideas on human nature over the next few thousand years. It is available through the publisher.