Publisher's Synopsis
This book is the first in a new series devoted to exploring the latest developments in neuroscience, quantum theory, and evolutionary biology. Most of the essays here were first published in Europe on Frank Visser's Integral World. Our major interest is in understanding how consciousness evolved as a virtual simulator and why it is so important to human cognition and advancement. While there have been some remarkable developments in evolutionary psychology, a field previously known more controversially as sociobiology, there hasn't been the same attention given to philosophy. Historically, this may be due to the fact that Herbert Spencer, an early champion of fusing philosophy and evolution and a quite popular advocate of such during his lifetime, became something of anathema during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century because of some of his more controversial views, particularly Social Darwinism. As the entry on him in Wikipedia notes: "Posterity has not been kind to Spencer. Soon after his death his philosophical reputation went into a sharp and irrevocable decline. Half a century after his death his work was dismissed as a 'parody of philosophy' and the historian Richard Hofstadter called him the 'the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic.'" Combining philosophy with evolution can be fraught with peculiar dangers, not the least of which is a tendency towards what Dennett has called "cheap reductionism," explaining away complex phenomena instead of properly understanding it. Nevertheless, it is even more troublesome to ignore Darwinian evolution because it illuminates so many hitherto intractable problems ranging from medicine to ethics. The new field of evolutionary philosophy, unlike its aborted predecessors of the past, is primarily concerned with understanding why Homo sapiens are philosophical in the first place. It is not focused on advocating some specific future reform, but rather in uncovering why humans are predisposed to ask so many questions which, at least at the present stage, cannot be answered. In other words, if evolution is about living long enough to transmit one's genetic code, how does philosophy help in our global struggle for existence? To answer that question and others branched with it, one has to deal with the most complex physical structure in the universe-the human brain. Because it is from this wonder tissue, what Patricia Churchland has aptly called "three pounds of glorious meat," that all of human thought, including our deep and ponderous musings, is built upon. Take away the human brain and you take away all of philosophy. Therefore, if we are to understand why philosophy arose in the first place, we have to begin with delving into the mystery on why consciousness itself arose. And to answer that question we first have to come to grips with Darwin's major contribution to evolutionary theory-natural selection. Why would nature select for awareness, especially the kind of self-conscious awareness endemic to human beings, when survival for almost all species is predicated upon unconscious instincts? What kind of advantages does self-reflective consciousness confer that would allow it to emerge and develop over time?
