Fermi’s Paradox – Section #4

Table of Contents

PART II: METAPHYSICAL SOLUTIONS

THE ASSYMETRY OF TIME AND EVOLUTION

PART II: METAPHYISCAL SOLUTIONS

Part I of this book described the imminent failure of human civilization, the reasons for its collapse, and the consequences of runaway technology: collapsing global ecologies. These problems are of immediate concern. Part II of this book will turn toward nonscientific solutions in ways which may seem irrelevant to the global problems described in Part I. This shift is deemed necessary only because the solutions prescribed by intelligence have been overapplied, and because the kinds of knowledge which must be brought to bear upon the global problems created by civilization are, to an extent at least, non-technological and unscientific in nature. While we do not eschew science or reject technology per se, we do reject their exclusive application as solutions to human and ecological problems.

THE ASSYMETRY OF TIME AND EVOLUTION

Observations of Change

Humanity experiences constant change, and this dynamism is symptomatic of imbalance. Daoism holds constant change to be the only real constant. Science, too, focuses its observations on change, or it would have no subjects of study. Science concerns itself with change. Time is a function of that change.

Time functions to record changes to a physical system and the entities contained within it. Everything ages, decays and eventually completely unwinds. Since we do not hew to the hard line of vitalism which attempts to separate living from nonliving things, we conclude simply that all closed systems die. Nowhere is it theorized that any object or particle will inevitably endure forever, though it is believed that protons, electrons and photons persist indefinitely unless they are destroyed in collisions.

If there were no change, time would not be necessary. Without change within any object or system, a continuity of a different qualitative order would describe that object or system. It would describe a state without gradations, for the continuity between past states and present states would be a perfect 1:1 correlation. In other words, that object or system would be eternal. The past would not exist for it. There would be no need for the past. There could be no argument that the past does exist, and no way to retrieve the past, since there would be no distinctions between past and present states for that entity or system. Recording devices would not register any changes between past and present states. Such inventions would be superfluities. There would also be no need for memory since past conditions would not differ from present conditions. Memories would be both nonexistent and unnecessary for that system or object. Sense impressions would not be needed because a change in initial conditions would be impossible, and perceptual acuity only exists to note changes in a thing or in the environment.

Yet human memory informs us that changes in phenomenal reality have indeed occurred, demarcating past from present. These changes necessitate time and prove time’s existence. With time, present sense impressions become necessary to adapt to changes in the environments in which organisms find themselves. With the existence of time, some kind of memory becomes a required faculty if the organism is to survive the changes in any biome, for the organism must learn from past experience in order to survive. Of course, very basic creatures do not exhibit faculties like recollective memory. Other organisms may have rudimentary memory functions, but not to the extent that humans and other highly evolved creatures do. Yet for any organism, the evolution of perceptual and recollective faculties would not be needed without the fact that the state of any environment changes, as marked by time.

The organism must evolve, to cope with changes to the system in which it finds itself. It must change to cope with changes in the environment within which it lives. Here, time, sense impression, memory and evolution are all functions which come into being based upon a single constant: change. Technological recording instruments also evolve secondarily through humans as necessary devices to record change, so as to increase the odds of human survival for the species and the rates of survival within the species. Some of the earliest evolved implements of civilization were those invented to mark the passage of time in a celestial sense; to mark the seasons. These recording devices also reinforce their own reason for being since they serve up evidence of change, as does inferential evidence provided by sciences such as geology, cosmogeny and astrophysics. Thus, memory becomes necessary because of change, as do instruments to record the changes in states within any system. Change and its cohort, time, reinforce the need for biological faculties and technological instruments to measure these changes which occur over time. Yet those instruments and the human faculty of memory reinforce the existence of time and the changes within the systems which they measure. This is a mutually-reinforcing process that begins with the introduction of change into a system.

Intelligence as Correlative with Temporal Consciousness

The more evolved the intelligence, the more acutely aware that intelligence is of its past on a conscious level. The more developed the conscious awareness, the greater the ability it has to retrieve the past, to pull the past into the present. Thus, acuity of conscious awareness of the past correlates to acuity of intellect. The inner models which the intellect builds are based upon past associations, which compare present sense impressions of the external environment with the inner model, based on the past. In short, there is a correlation between intelligence and time. The more advanced the intelligence, the more aware it is of time.

There is a link between intellect and awareness of time. Primitive brain processes most likely have little to no awareness of time. The cortical laminae which are most developed are aware of the future. Yet this future does not exist. Rather, it is forecast by the intellect’s working model of reality. The most highly-evolved parts of the brain involve the capacity to predict, to foresee consequences and to plan. Perhaps not coincidentally, these brain operations have developed last in time. Thus, there is a strong association between evolution and time, just as there is between intelligence and time.

The retrieval of the past, the mental haulage of it into the present, its harvesting through memory, and the modeling and projection of the past into the future, is highly correlated with intelligence. The words on this page could neither be written nor understood without a concept of past and future. Reading requires memorization of letters, words and the rules of grammar. It requires learning. Many of the ideas contained in this manuscript are based on the ability to recall past examples – such as the disintegration of a past civilization or species – to compare them with present circumstances, and to prognosticate from them into possible future events. This process involves deductive and inductive reasoning: the capacity to generalize from a case example or to take many such examples and apply them to a specific case. his requires both a sense of the past and a sense of the future. It is partly through its ability to learn from the past and also to plan for exigencies which may occur in the future that intelligence has given humans an evolutionary edge. These abilities require awareness of time. Thus time: intelligence: temporal awareness are correlated. The arrow of time, a fundamental asymmetry in the universe, advances along with evolution, along with intellect and along with awareness of time itself.

Evolution, as change, also requires the elapse of time. This evolution yielded as its product the three brain processes evident in humans which we have been describing. The last evolved of these processes is, as we have stated, the most aware of the passage of time, and the most able to utilize time through reflection, memory, learning, prognostication, and planning. Time is a measure of change, and the passage of time is correlated with the emergence of the cortical regions which are most acutely aware of time. There is a correlation between time, evolution and awareness which is mutually-reinforcing. At the ends of both correlations – time: intelligence: awareness and time: evolution: awareness – is awareness.

Time and Its Relation to Physical Laws

None of the physical laws could be measured without time. Its passage is necessary to mark their operation. Evolution, the law which the other physical laws eventually point toward and to which they themselves are subject, is intimately bound with time. Among other things, evolution measures changes to form and behavior, to internal structures of organisms, to genotype and phenotype, and the modified functions which all of these serve over time. Evolution shows us that life is change.

Without time, evolution would make no sense. It would have no meaning since the changes to and complexity in lifeforms corelate with the movement of the arrow of time. Time rushes in to fill the void marked by the change in any system which occurs between two points, the first point being its prior state, and the second point marking the change in that state, however infinitesimal, and of whatever kind. Without change, time is both unnecessary and immeasurable, having no function and no way to mark its passage. Evolution is change and time has no ultimate function apart from evolution. Thus, evolution, like the other laws, occurs in time and is measured by time. Biological epochs are demarcated in time. The lifespan of a species or of any clade of organism is measured in time. Evolution is embedded within time, and evolution’s latter product, intellect, is most acutely aware of time as a result. The intellect is also that abstract correspondent to the neocortex which inferred the theory of evolution itself.  

Although time does not cause evolution or intelligence, both of these progress with time and one of the products of evolution – intelligence – becomes more aware of time as time’s arrow moves forward.  In some ways, time, evolution and intelligence are functions of one another. They are equivalencies which can be defined in terms of one another. They reinforce one another in the sense that evolution is measured by changes over time, and the theory of evolution was deduced by the brain which was evolution’s product.

This triad collapses if any one of its legs is removed. Without intelligence, there is no faculty to be cognizant of time. Without evolution, there can be no intelligence. Without time, there would be no evolution. These three functions, while not mutually causal, are interdependent.

Evolution and Time

Evolution is a property not only of biology, but also of the early universe, which did not contain life in the way vitalists define it. Evolution can be defined as a randomly-driven process which produces increasingly adapted, self-perpetuating organisms through the pressures of natural selection.

The inanimate universe gave rise to self-perpetuating organisms. Through random processes, it yielded inanimate structures of increasing complexity which eventually became capable of reproduction, though these structures – be they stars or crystals – are not ordinarily considered as organisms. Yet in a sense, the inanimate universe was already evolving prior to the emergence of animate forms. Both the biological world and the inanimate universe were marked by changes which resulted in the aggregation of materio-energetic entities and systems. Stellar and galactic systems, replete with massive objects capable of consuming lesser objects, in some ways resembled a biological ecosystem. Larger materio-energetic aggregations behaved in some senses like heterotrophic organisms, consuming the matter and energy of other bounded structures and becoming larger in the process. The ‘life cycle’ of some of these inanimate forms eventually ended with the redistribution and recycling of the material contained within these massive structures. In some ways, this parallels biological reproduction, or at least the manner in which biological ecologies recycle dead organisms. Stars nova and the recycled stellar matter is used in the formation of other stars. So, the pre-animate universe changed. It evolved. If it never did, then biological life would never have arisen. In fact, the concept of stellar evolution was proposed even before the theory of Darwinian evolution became widely accepted.

Through quantum processes, some microscopic, nonliving structures yielded molecules capable of reproduction, such as crystals and prebiotic ‘cells’ with lipid membranes. Thus, in some sense, evolution can be considered an emergent property of the nonliving as well as the biological universe. The cosmos has its own galactic and stellar ecologies which in some ways resemble in function and structure the ecologies of organic matter.

The Darwinian Dynamic describes evolution of biotic as well as specific inanimate systems as a relatively common and basic property and principle of the cosmos. The steady state theory of the universe once held sway with the Big Bang theory. However, this theory of the universe’s nature, which described it as changeless, was dealt a blow when it was discovered that in the distant past, conditions in the cosmos were different than they are today. The universe changes, and the particles, interactions and laws which describe those particles and interactions were much different in deep time than they are today. 

The hypothesis of cosmological natural selection holds that natural selection occurs at the macroscopic level of the largest scale structures in the universe. The theory of quantum Darwinism utilizes evolutionary principles to explain how quantum states gave rise to the world observed at the human scale through a selective process for inanimate systems on the quantum scale similar to natural selection, involving principles of heredity and variation. Quantum Darwinism borrows these principles from evolutionary biology. Overall, universal Darwinism applies the principles of evolution to the inanimate large scale as well as to the inanimate microscopic structures of the universe.

What all these theories and hypotheses have in common is the broadening of the application of evolutionary theory to the nonbiotic realm. Given the changes inherent in the cosmos and the fact that nonbiotic systems arose from inanimate structures in the first place, these hypotheses and theories are, as a whole, not easily dismissed. They attempt to explain complexity in the universe, which is otherwise inexplicable in light of the tendency of all closed systems towards disorder and thermodynamic equilibrium. As an alternative to the anthropic principle, cosmological natural selection attempts to explain the anomalous arising of complexity in the universe.

Yet, because it is a part and product of the evolutionary system which it seeks to understand, the intellect which attempts to comprehend evolution may not fully appreciate the broader implications of evolution or its ultimate end. Intellectual myopia may simply be an effect of the subjectivity problem, the observer effect, the problem of infinite regress, and of the uncertainty principle, all as expressed on a grander scale. Together, these four principles may prevent accurate human understanding of the applications, implications and ends of evolution since the intellect is the product of the very principles – in this case evolutionary in nature – which it seeks to understand. It is impossible for an observer to understand a system from within that system. If that observer makes observations or measurements from within that system, if the observer designs and builds any device to measure that system from within that system out of materials built from that system, the observations or measurements will necessarily be uncertain, subjective and incomplete. Any conclusions drawn from these observations or measures will therefore also be uncertain, subjective and incomplete.

Here, we wish to emphasize the bidirectional influence of physical and psychological processes upon one another. They influence each another. In our arguments, we have stressed that psychological principles were first principles which shaped the early history and development of the universe long before the appearance of biotic forms. Yet we also hold that the principles of quantum mechanics, such as the uncertainty principle, also have universal application throughout the sciences, up to and including in psychology. There exists a bidirectional flow of all principles – physical, biological and psychological – from the quantum and relativistic worlds of physics into consciousness as well as from conscious and unconscious psychological processes ‘down’ into physical reality. The universe is governed by both top- down and bottom-up processes, as inductive and deductive reasoning suggest. These processes co-arose at the moment of universal inception and they co-occur today. Thus, quantum particles compose the brain of the observer and quantum processes influence the brain’s operations. At the same time, the observer influences these quantum mechanics through its decision of what to observe and by its very act of observation.

Many ‘serious’ scientists confine evolution’s scope to biological form and behavior. They would reject the conclusion that evolutionary processes probably preceded the development of lifeforms, and that it also extends beyond mere biology into technological constructs and into the evolvement of consciousness itself. We have discussed, for example, how conurbations may be a form of hybrid human-technological superorganism which have evolved complexities beyond that organically produced by evolution when it yielded the humans who construct these megacities. In other words, although we think we make cities for own purposes, they may also use us to serve themselves in a kind of mutualism which extends the very idea of symbiosis beyond the threshold of biological relationships and into technological ecologies.

Intelligence may not be the final product of evolution, and in fact, most evolutionary biologists would agree that evolution has no final product and no direction toward which it is headed, being randomly generated by mutation, genetic drift and gene flow, combined with selective pressures brought about by interaction with the environment. While we agree that intelligence is not the end aim of evolution, we depart from the conclusion that it has no direction. Instead, we hew to the line that evolution does have an objective, even if it is simply the equable distribution of matter and energy throughout the spacetime continuum. The final product, as measured in time, which evolution has yielded so far is, as we have stated, ego consciousness. The conscious self has emerged, and it has manifested as an emergent property which cannot be fully explained by evolutionary theory. Intelligence may not be an ultimate aim of evolution, but we hold that awareness is. In addition, though consciousness is a product of evolution, nothing holds that consciousness itself does not and will not continue to evolve. We hold that awareness – with or without intelligence – will evolve to the point where it reaches its maximal potential in the universe, which we call total awareness.

At the same time as awareness is the ultimate direction toward which evolution heads, we also maintain that psychological content has always been an inherent property of the universe, and that it has always been evolving. Thus, awareness in a sense bookends the cosmos. It was present in the beginning as uroboric unconsciousness. This undifferentiated, unconscious content might not have been the sharply acute faculty of self-consciousness which it is today. In fact, at the dawn of the universe, it was most likely raw psychic material which was not self-aware. It existed as content which ancient Hindu scripture has regarded as dreamless sleep.

It will be present in the end as expressed in a unified field of wholly distributed conscious awareness. All evolution is ultimately a movement toward awareness, and the goal of awareness is to become self-aware. While the ego consciousness associated with specific material-energetic forms will fade, something new and qualitatively different will replace it. We identify this emergent phenomenon as total awareness.

Consciousness – in the form of ego consciousness – has emerged last in time. Both evolution and awareness correspond to the unfolding arrow of time. Evolution is merely a kind of change. The function of time is to measure such changes.  Thus, time measures evolutionary changes. The last produced in time is the human being, the most conscious being of whom we know. Thus, evolution has led to greater consciousness. Creatures from the Terran past possessed consciousness, yet it was not quite as concentrated as it is in humans. Evolution has yielded awareness. Evolution is an emergent property of the universe, and awareness is an emergent property of evolution.

Awareness and Its Subsets

We have stated that evolution may not necessarily select for intelligence, yet we conclude that it does yield consciousness. This may seem like a contradiction, but it is not. Intelligence is an intermediate stage in the evolutionary process toward a greater consciousness, and not an end state. We make a distinction between intelligence and consciousness. Intellect may be a subset of consciousness, yet it is not synonymous with it. Within awareness, there are other ways of knowing which we have described above: emotion, intuition, metaphysical understanding, precognition, clairvoyance, and spiritual awareness. These are simply channels for undifferentiated awareness which have not risen to the level of conscious understanding.

Hindu scripture distinguishes a kind of daylight consciousness from dreaming, and dreaming from dreamless sleep. Within the category of dreams, Fred Allan Wolf and others have distinguished between the ordinary dreams of sleep and lucid dreaming. In lucid dreams, the dreamer may experience the dream as real as waking reality. In lucid dreams, the dreamer may sometimes control the dream’s narrative. Jung distinguished between personal dreams and world dreams. World dreams seem to hold content meant to be interpreted for a larger collective. An example of a world dream is the biblical dream of Pharoah interpreted by Joseph to mean years of plenty, to be followed by years of famine. All of these schemes seek to classify levels of awareness which fall below the threshold of consciousness. They are not qualitatively inferior to the waking state, but qualitatively different from conscious reality.

Aside from dreams, Wolf referred to the events of the imaginal realm, such as Marian visions, encounters with the extraterrestrial other, and mystical experiences. There are also Life Review Events (LRE’s) and Near Death Experiences (NDE’s). What these experiences have in common is that they are nonintellectual encounters. They can neither be experienced nor fully explained by the intellect, and so the intellect tends to reject them as statistical outliers or to seek rational explanations for them. Although these other ways of experiencing and of knowing may have intellectual components, they have not so far been sufficiently understood or explained through rational means alone. NDE’s have been described and studied systematically, but they cannot be adequately quantified or measured.

The collection of scientific hypotheses which posit that NDE’s and LRE’s are the result of psychological or neurophysiological causes have yet to be validated by experiment. In fact, the mind-brain identity hypothesized by materialist science should be called into question by the very explanations provided by science for LRE’s and NDE’s. These reductionist explanations often involve some sort of global disabling of the brain’s operations as an explanation for the experiences, and yet NDE’s and LRE’s involve a lucidity and acuity of experiences and recollection of these experiences which contradicts these hypotheses. If the brain were somehow shutting down or being damaged and this resulted in these experiences, it is unlikely that they would be so vivid and so amenable to being remembered. Science also cannot sufficiently explain the commonalities across time and culture associated with these experiences. We categorize NDE’s, LRE’s, lucid dreams, the ordinary dreams of sleep, mystical experiences, and psychic phenomenon more generally as archetypal awareness. This ‘category’ of awareness is unconscious in the sense that it exists, at least in part, beyond the bounds of conscious understanding.

Evolution has as its goal the evolution of awareness through these other ways of knowing, which are often more direct experiences of reality, in addition to the conscious knowledge accessible to the intellect. They exist in addition to the waking state of ego consciousness, as a compliment to it. Science shows that the heat death, or the hot death of the Big Crunch, of the cosmos is inevitable. This death, we have stated, is sought as balance, for in either the state of infinite expansion or infinite collapse (a black hole, which is stable), an equilibrium is sought and attained. This devolution to the simplest state possible also coincides with and corresponds to the evolution of the cosmos to its highest possible state: total awareness.  If the universe contains enough dark matter to collapse back to an infinite density in the Big Crunch, the result will be the same: uniform distribution of matter and energy, though this time in a singularity. In either case, balance will be reattained. For we maintain that the totality of awareness exists in a state of perfect balance between all ways of knowing, where the tension of between conscious and unconscious forces is resolved in a totality which is the unity of the final pair of opposites.

If one argues that total consciousness cannot be experienced without form, we reply that total consciousness can only be experienced without form. In material-energetic structures, consciousness seems to die as the structure itself becomes unstable in its decay and consciousness exits the form which contained it. Form binds consciousness to form. Only in its formless state is awareness capable of totality. This formlessness is not something special or supernatural. We do not put forth a theological or religious explanation for the stability and maintenance of awareness into an indefinite and timeless perpetuity. We simply state the obvious: that infinity provides a boundless experience, whereas the strictures imposed by form are subject to death and decay, and that any form associated with or in which consciousness is housed necessarily engenders a limited experience.

Human conscious understanding is very limited at present and can only see this formlessness -thermodynamic equilibrium – as the death of the cosmos and thus of consciousness. Through millions of years of biological association, consciousness has come to identify with its forms. According to materialist science and philosophy, the seat of awareness is the brain. Human intellect cannot comprehend that emptiness – maximal entropy – could possibly contain the awareness of which we speak, and it has always been so with those who try to rationally attempt to grasp the apophatic tradition, which is associated with the cold death of a forever expanding universe. It is difficult for biological entities such as humans to conceive that emptiness could possibly serve as a container for awareness. The ego is such a structure itself. It is not content, but rather only the structure which holds the content of consciousness. It can be likened to a container for awareness. It is synonymous with the mind.

Conversely, the ego has great difficulty understanding that the chaos associated with the cosmic end state of the Big Crunch, where sufficient dark matter allows the universe to re-collapse to its primal beginnings in a superdense particle associated a blackhole, would be stable enough to contain awareness. This somethingness which we have described is strongly identified with the cataphatic spiritual traditions which describe the fullness of spiritual experience. Yet these two traditions are merely aspects of the final pair of opposites, the last projections which the observer must withdraw into herself as the final ‘act’ of synthesis. The tension between these aspects of aware reality is finally reconciled to yield a total awareness which transcends either of the pair of opposites.

The ego is a structure evolved to hold awareness. Confusing itself with content, with awareness itself, the ego identifies as possessing the godlike powers of the deity. In its modern incarnation, it believes that it has subsumed deific powers and supplanted the God of monotheistic tradition, or the pantheons of gods and goddesses devised by the old mythologies. This identification with the ego as deity seemed to accelerate during the Renaissance, achieving its apogee during the Enlightenment. It continues today in the transhumanist movement. The center of power moved from the deity to the human intellect. While we do not advocate a return to older worldviews which saw the God idea as existing external the human ego, and while we avoid the debate over whether there is a God, we note that with the spirit of modern scientific inquiry and the implicit faith placed in technology, the ego has assigned for itself the functions previously reserved for the deity. This is problematic in that the ego fails to account for unconsciousness and archetypal awareness in its ‘equations,’ leaving intellectual solutions as the only solutions available to solve the fundamental difficulties afflicting humanity and the planet. There is a lack of balance in these approaches, since intelligence, as a mere faculty, lacks wisdom. Since Artificial Intelligences are also pure intelligences, they also lack this balance, and their rapidity of processing may simply throw the Gaian world into imbalance at a faster rate.

While individual humans have always had a tendency to subsume for themselves the powers traditionally attributable to the gods, with the dawn of the scientific age, humanity has largely abandoned the pretense that power resides in a godlike Other. This is the same as denying the existence of the unconscious and the powers inherent in archetypal awareness. In the main, humans believe destiny will be shaped by their conscious selves, with the vanguards of science and technology as the leading edges of that fate.

This final breach with an external God takes the God idea and places it within the human mind. With this relocation, a major projection has been withdrawn. The nature of the projection is that the deity is external to humans and the human mind. It was necessary, if the deity concept was to evolve, to acknowledge that if God were infinite, then nothing could exist outside of itself. This means that the idea of God – and of God itself if God exists – must exist within the human mind. This is a necessary stage in the evolution of awareness and is the consequence of the abolition of the boundary and of the inside-outside distinction made by the human ego. However, by withdrawing this projection of an anthropomorphized God external to humans upon which people once placed all their human attributes, the ego has failed to account for the enormous – indeed, infinite – energies associated with unconscious forces. The human ego thinks it is all there is, and this grandiose assumption which elevates ego consciousness to the acme of the pantheon is a blind error.

Despite this implicit ignorance inherent in rational ways of knowing, the ego now identifies with the content of consciousness, and not merely as a structure which contains conscious content. It conflates its own identity with the totality of awareness, conscious and unconscious alike, even though we hold that awareness is more comprehensive than the ego and in fact transcends it. As Freud developed the idea, the ego was a component of a tripartite personality. We identify it as the idea of individuality associated with boundary.  While the ego has now taken for itself the powers formally reserved for the deity – which it can credibly wield due to its newfound technological prowess – the ego still identifies with the individuality of the organism. We hold that this a highly lethal combination, for it couples unbridled power with nearly unlimited ignorance.

The danger of withdrawing the projection of the deity back into the human mind – when the deity was formerly identified with an external source – is that the individual ego will identify itself as coextensive with the deity, which had absolute power. Technology gives humans a facsimile of this absolute power. A look at the vast array of modern weaponry, from cyberweapons to electromagnetic pulse bombs to chemical and biological agents engineered to target specific races and ethnic groups, shows the scope of this power. it also demonstrates the scope of human ignorance. For that same ego identifies itself with the individual organism, which is primarily motivated to seek its own survival and the satisfaction of its own instincts for territory, resources and power at the expense of all others. This is the fatal combination to which we refer; technological power to destroy, intentionally or inadvertently, harnessed by instinct.

The repeated conclusion drawn by the intellect is that it can contain this instinctive drive to misuse unbounded technological power, when in fact history shows that it cannot. In order to succeed, intelligent control over the instincts must succeed 100% of the time, and it is evident that it does not. Any look at any slice of history – a war, a genocide, or a one-on-one murder – shows the truth. Experience should be our guide, not a rational conclusion which always ends up in error. Humanity sits on a knife’s edge. While it has the ingenuity to develop extinction-level weaponry and the world is currently at war, humanity may not have the wisdom not to use these weapons.

Wisdom was one of the attributes reserved for the deity, which allowed this deity the discrete use of judgment. The Genesis myth in part addresses the human appropriation of judgment for itself. Without delving into the argument of whether a deity exists or whether humans should have appropriated the Godlike faculty for themselves, the fact is that humans have this power to judge, and therefore they must use it. Our question is whether humans have the capacity to wield judgment wisely.

The myopia which humanity suffers from is that it believes it has the wisdom to utilize the discretion formerly attributed to the deity. Yet base brain processes often hijack and harness this seat of judgment and discretion, which is more properly a function of the cortical brain processes. While we respect human intelligence, we doubt human wisdom. The source of this doubt is the inordinate amounts of ingenuity spent in the application of these powers for the development of weaponry and other industrial processes which threaten the planet, while adding little to the ability of humans to survive and to thrive. Humans have repeatedly shown that when they wield power, often in the hands of a ruling elite or a single autocrat, it is most often misused. Few can resist its corrupting influence. This has been an axiom in history and in political science as well as a recurrent motif in myth, in drama and in literature. Shakespearean and Greek tragedy both rest upon this theme.

When Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave this technological prowess to humanity, humans did not have the ability to destroy themselves. Now, based upon sheer numbers as well as the kind of fire we make, we have set fire to the planet. We are coming closer to the conclusion that the answer to Fermi’s Paradox for humanity lies in our ignorance coupled with our arrogance, which are constellated with our intellects and our all too human egos. Yet if we prove this as the solution to Fermi’s riddle, it will be our final proof.

The Murder of God

Since it sees through an ancient lens, the ego sees the deity in patriarchal terms, and believes that in subsuming for itself the role of the deity, it has committed patricide and regicide. These, too, are themes in Greek and Shakespearean drama. In the individual human personality as well as in the larger culture, this murder induces a great yet unconscious fear of reprisals by the God figure. Connected with this fear is guilt. The ego utilizes the Freudian defense mechanisms of projection, displacement, repression, denial and the related phenomenon of participation mystique, to relocate this fear outside of itself so that it is not experienced and in order that the level of anxiety is manageable.

In the past, the ego feared the raw, undifferentiated chaos of the uroboric unconsciousness, which threatened to reclaim the nascent, developing ego before it achieved autonomy. As human culture developed, we displaced these ‘alien’ energies into impersonal, animistic forces and attempted to appease and manipulate them through magic ritual. As it evolved further, ego consciousness increasingly separated from this uroboros and developed a more acute sense of boundary. It mythologized the unconscious Other in pantheons of gods in elaborate mythologies. These gods resembled human nature in their foibles and predilections, a sure indication that the deity was projected outside the human mind.

As the ego carves out increasingly larger proportions of psychic energy for itself from the unconscious, it takes greater shares of the powers of the deity for itself. In the West, this began with the Promethean act of theft of fire from the gods. In antiquity, evolution of ego consciousness continued with rational inquiry. After an interregnum, it was rediscovered in the West in the Renaissance, and continued through to the Enlightenment. Today, secular humanism has developed into the transhumanist movement. Ego consciousness deifies itself and its own knowhow.  This occurs in part because the intellect identifies itself as coextensive with the totality of awareness, with the deity.

This results in the death of God. As we have concluded, the withdrawal of the God projection back into the mind is a necessary stage in the evolution of awareness. If awareness is total, it should be regarded as infinite, and this means that the mind which understands that awareness must be included within this totality. In other words, the totality exists as much within the mind as any ‘place’ else. Yet it is a mistake for human consciousness to view itself as coextensive with the totality, for it is only partly conscious of this archetypal awareness. The error it continues to make is to deny that archetypal awareness exists. In doing so, the ego continues to project these unconscious forces onto other individuals and groups. And by denying the limitless power of this unconscious awareness and failing to account for it, the ego and the culture it creates cannot cooperate with these boundless energies, which do not operate according to the rules of logic or science. by treating them rationally and scientifically, the conscious mind attempts to communicate with these dark energies (dark in the sense of being unknown) in a language they do not understand. This results in mutual unintelligibility.

Simply because something is denied, repressed, displaced and projected does not mean that it ceases to exist. A marksman who cannot see the wind but fails to account for its effect on the shot will miss her target. For humanity, that which is unacknowledged has the power to destroy. The danger of our ignorance lies in what we don’t know that we don’t know. Failing to account for an unlimited energy in our calculus, that energy, unleashed, can lead us to ruin.

The Structures of Awareness

As the mind can be defined as the container of thoughts, so the emptiness, the nothingness which we have described is a vessel for awareness. Physics may define this container as the spacetime continuum. One should not equate emptiness with death, but rather with balance. Emptiness may be regarded as formless awareness, as formlessness.

Emptiness may even be regarded as form open to interpretation, prior to that form’s definition by the mind through its act of observation. Emptiness may be thought of as the imposition of value and certainty upon undifferentiated energy through an observation. Another term for emptiness may be ‘potential’. Emptiness – as the absence of form- is not equivalent to the absence of awareness. Emptiness contains awareness in the way spacetime contains matter-energy. At the same time, awareness – in the form of an observation which transforms potential to actuality – defines emptiness in the same way that matter and energy define the shape and extent of spacetime.

Empty regions in spacetime are actually not empty, but rather serve as an ecology for atoms, molecules, particles and virtual particles. The spacetime continuum can hold and send information in much the same way that a circuit or a microprocessor can store and transmit data. This ’emptiness’ contains information, and information is equivalent to conscious and unconscious content, which together represent awareness.

The information stored in the spacetime continuum is analogous to the array of data contained in a holographic simulation.  Conscious and unconscious material are also stored in and transmitted through matter and energy which, being condensations in quantum fields, contain more data than surrounding regions. These represent imbalances, disturbances both locally and in the universal field. The central evolutionary tendency is to even out these imbalances. Yet thermodynamic equilibrium is not death.

When the even distribution of matter-energy throughout spacetime is achieved, it will contain information to its maximal extent, and evolution will have reached its apogee of total awareness. Awareness will have become wholly self-aware. All observations which could have been made within the superposition of all possible combinations will have been made. The METS continuum will contain its maximal expression of data, and all unconscious content will have become conscious. The uroboros will be emptied of all its ‘fuel.’ All potential will have become exhausted in the sense that it will be converted through the act of observation into actuality. Probabilities will be exhausted. The Uncertainty Principle will no longer be true. Every possible aspect of reality will be determined. This is the end state of evolution, and from there evolution can progress no further. It will have reached the state of changelessness. Change will no longer occur since it will no longer be necessary. The universe will have achieved a timeless state. There will no longer be need of memory, and all models of past and future will be absorbed into the observer’s awareness as a timeless now. Awareness is always only fully aware only when it is aware of now, which is timeless. This is the ultimate structure of a complete self-awareness.

The Psychological Character of Mechanistic Knowledge

The reductionist view holds that at the microscopic level, the minutest and simplest of particles, governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, determine in a probabilistic sense the behavior of all matter. This view, for the most part, rejects evolution as also representing a simple set of principals which is universal in scope, governing inanimate particles as well as organisms and even human psychology and civilization. This rejection is in part due to the bifurcation of knowledge and of scientific disciplines into separate spheres. This specialization is a function of analysis itself, which seeks to break observations down into further and further subsets. Instead of achieving a unity of knowledge, mechanistic analysis leads to the fragmentation of knowledge. This creates an imbalance in knowing and in ways of knowing. This asymmetry leads to a shattered perception of the cosmos.

In this scheme, randomness and probability govern the quantum world. These same nonconscious forces – as opposed to unconscious energies – are thought to power the random mechanics of biological evolution. These impersonal, nonconscious quantum interactions of the random and the probable exert themselves beyond the inanimate-animate barrier and continue to dictate the course of evolution, and the behavior of all carbon-based life. A distinction is made by vitalists between nonliving and living matter in the application of the principles of evolution, but it stops at the water’s edge. The principles of mindless quantum mechanisms cross this inanimate-animate barrier in a unidirectional motion, but it is taught that evolution did not arise until after carbon-based lifeforms arose. This scheme of classification applies some laws universally – such as quantum processes – while denying that others cross the boundary between what is termed nonliving and living matter.

Causation, as envisioned in quantum processes and in physics and chemistry more generally, moves from the inanimate to the animate. The behavior of inanimate particles and molecules governs biological evolution, yet the principles of evolution observed in biology do not flow back bidirectionally toward the more basic physical properties and interactions observed in physics and chemistry. By refusing to apply evolution itself to the inanimate, reductionist science and philosophy draws a hard and sharp line between living and nonliving matter, as a matter of classification. We reject this view. We conclude that evolution as a principle has been in existence since the universe began, and that it continues to operate through artificial means. The basis for our conclusion is evident: conditions in the early universe differ greatly from those which exist today, and they will continue to change. Evolution is change, and the cosmos is always changing.

Current theory assumes that randomness is the engine of evolution by virtue of its role in both mutation and genetic drift. Probability enters this process as selective forces operate to allow adapted creatures to pass on favorable mutations, while the majority of mutations are either survival-neutral or harmful to the mutated organism, from a probabilistic perspective.

Ultimately, mutations occurring at the molecular level in organisms are governed by quantum processes at the atomic and subatomic levels. In the arrangement of particles at these lower, inanimate levels, probability is attributed as a governing influence. Yet even in quantum mechanisms, the act of observation converts probabilities into actualities through the collapse of the wave function. The waves to which we refer are not waves in the physical sense, but are waves of probabilities. They are abstract mathematical quantities which are functions of the likelihood of finding the particle sought to be observed – an electron orbiting the nucleus in a hydrogen atom for example – at a particular place in time and with certain qualities associated with that particle. The abstract nature of these waves ought to point to their psychological nature.  The probability wave refers to the electron’s tendencies to be a certain way at a certain location. Until something is actually observed in the quantum world, it remains a mere probability. Yet once an event is seen to occur (once either its momentum or location is measured), whichever facet of its existence that is measured becomes a reality.

The observer has a choice about what she chooses to see. She decides what to look at, and how to perceive what she perceives. She chooses what to look at quantum processes with, which are, with the exception of the eye itself, always devices of her own design. Thus, while probability influences what and how something is seen, the observer also plays a volitional role in the process.

Despite these inherently human factors entering into observations of the quantum world, physicists on the main still hold to randomness and probability as the governing influences. They place their assumptions purely on chance and odds, and little else. Even the engine of evolution, biologists insist, is governed by random mutations and random drift. Yet this may simply reflect a misclassification in which those properties which are categorized as the most basic – random quantum events – are in fact governed by qualities which were assumed to arise later in time in the evolutionary progression: the psychological traits of observers and the decisions of what and how to observe made by those observers. The pyramid of laws shows mechanistic processes at the base, governing everything else. If a fundamental error in these assumptions has occurred, then this pyramidal scheme is upside-down. We hold that the flow of observational influences is bidirectional, in that while quantum processes influence observations, so, too, do psychological processes influence quantum dynamics.

Reductionist approaches will always fail to provide comprehensive explanations because they only seek to describe mechanisms, and not ultimate causes or conditions. They are always explanations of intermediate states, not ultimate ones, because they seek to break down into parts rather than to observe wholes. These analytical processes look at parts rather than wholes. As a result, they can never ‘see’ the whole.

We hold that such an error in classification has occurred. Holding that particles and quantum processes arose first in time, these processes are seen as the base forces governing everything else that has been erected upon their foundations. We maintain that psychological principles existed along with the mechanistic formation of particles and the larger scale forces at work at cosmic inception. The psychic energy present had not yet evolved into conscious awareness, and in fact was largely undifferentiated, uroboric energy. It was raw and unconscious, yet it was present in the reaction nonetheless.

Thus, what unites the quantum world and its operations and the larger scale forces governed by the principles of relativity are not strings or string theory – which are also purely mechanistic – but psychology and the principles of observation. Or else how could reality have moved from its changeless, pre-cosmic state to the state of dynamism in which the phenomenal universe currently exists? Instead of further dividing experience into mindless structures which are already acknowledged to be empty, it is more likely that these particles, strings, frequencies and charges are icons. They represent discrete quanta of information.

Physics has been at a standstill since quantum observations showed the irreconcilability of the microscopic world of particle interactions with the macroworld explained by Einstein. We conclude that reductionist science, as the exclusive explainer of all of reality, has been exhausted. The dilemma in physics and the limits of the scientific worldview occur because the materialist perspective fails to take into account the psychological role of the observer in all physical processes, from quantum mechanics to evolution. The reconciliation of the micro and macro worlds must unify these seeming opposites, not through purely physical approaches, but through their synthesis with psychological principles as well as other fields of knowledge which do not share the validity and reliability of the experimental method common to the hard sciences. Not all truths are falsifiable.

We hold that observational processes influence mechanistic functions at the quantum level. In addition, implicit pattern-seeking in the brain projects patterns onto the experimental environment to fill in gaps in perception, cognition and even theoretical knowledge of that which cannot be observed directly. These observational and cognitive processes are tainted with psychological biases. Those who build machines to detect these particles and quantum processes may build bias into the deigns of their machines, which were devised to search with certain particles in mind, which are the inventions of hypotheses and theories, which represent ideas. Ideas are ultimately psychological in their quality.

Regarding gaps in theory, predictive models often speculate the existence of exotic and virtual particles, of dark matter and dark energy, in order to fill in lacunae in understanding. The brain may disregard, highlight or even change information it receives perceptually from the environment in order for the external, observable and ‘objective’ environment to comport more closely with preexisting mental models. These tendencies, both in the dynamic relationship between the observer and the observed as well as in the inward mental models created by the observer in his mind, point toward the conclusion that the fundamental laws of our physical spacetime dimension may be psychological in nature, just as much as they are material, because the dimension sought to be studied is itself at least partly psychologically modelled, observed and determined.

The indeterminacy principal recognizes the essential immeasurability of quantum processes from a holistic perspective. The mind of the observer works to fill in the ambiguities. This gap-filling, this pattern-seeking, we maintain, is at essence a psychological process, without the theorist often realizing it.  There is no true ‘out there’, but rather only an overlap between a subjective, inner experience and an experience of external reality which is partly determined through the acts of observation, perception, cognition and conclusion. The brain’s internal model becomes conflated with the reality which it attempts to describe. The haze of the electron clouds orbiting the nucleus of an atom, the inability to ascertain both the momentum and position of these particles with any clarity, may simply be a reflection of the undetermined boundary between the observer and that which is observed, and the confusion between the inner, subjective model and the outer world. Since the boundary is hazy, it is illusory.

Even among the sciences, psychology is considered a ‘soft’ science. This discipline developed in a comprehensive way after the development of many of the ‘hard’ sciences. One of the last emergent disciplines in civilization, psychology is the study, ultimately, of mind and of awareness. Though the scientific method attempts to control for the subjectivity of the observer by insisting that experimental results be repeatable, the state of mind of the observer is not considered as a variable to be controlled for in most physics experiments. Principles of psychology are not considered in most hypotheses and theories set forth by the STEM disciplines.

Yet we maintain that psychology is foundational. In any experiment, the state of mind of the observer is a factor in determining the outcome. By determining what and how to observe, an observer influences experimental outcomes. It is more likely that the pattern expected by a hypothesis or theory will be the pattern seen, and that the gaps existing between missing data will be interpreted and filled in consistently with the expected pattern. The observer also constructs the devices with which to measure any change in the observed system both prior to and after the experimental outcome. And the observer designs the very experiment itself. All of these can have an influence on outcomes. These experimenter effects are to some extent unavoidable and decrease experimental validity. These observer effects, errors in interpreting results, situational effects and expectancy effects apply to psychological experiments, but can also influence outcomes in the hard sciences.

Perhaps most importantly, an experiment is, in a sense, a question. By determining the questions asked, an entire universe of other questions ae not being asked, and an unlimited number of other experiments are not being performed. By focusing on very narrow questions (experiments), the hard sciences also achieve very narrow results. Physics in particular eschews the role of psychology in physical processes. By focusing its research to a very confined field of disciplines and subdisciplines, it never asked whether state of mind and intention have roles in determining experimental outcomes.

We infer that an observer was present in the initial reaction which birthed the universe. Through an initial observation and concomitant structuring of raw, unconscious content from a ‘dreamless sleep’ into ego consciousness, an initial observation transformed potential into actuality, and created through an act of perception the first boundary, and thus the first pair of opposites. On either side of any boundary, two things exist, whereas prior to the membrane’s formation, there was only one. Something allowed the steady state of changelessness to move into the dynamic state in which humans find themselves today. We believe that the creative act which served to catalyze the dawn of the cosmos was simply the very first act of observation.

Awareness versus Intelligence

The explanation we endorse to answer Fermi’s Paradox is that natural selection does not favor the success of intelligent beings, since such beings, by the time they have developed civilizations, destroy themselves. On earth, human intelligence often unbalances the mechanisms of natural selection by eradicating species which are otherwise well-adapted and by upsetting biomes which were previously balanced, while encouraging hybridized, less-adapted species and unbalanced monocultures to thrive. Pure intelligence, if not harmonized with a comprehensive awareness, runs amok and produces so much imbalance that the planetary system which evolved intelligent beings must destroy the intelligent species in order to protect itself and reacquire balance. If this hypothesis is true, then it may seem like a contradiction for us to conclude that the natural and ultimate byproduct of evolution is awareness. Yet, we reiterate that intelligence is not the same as awareness.

Thus, while awareness is an inevitable and ultimate product of evolution, we conclude that intelligence is not. Awareness in its final, most highly-evolved state possible, transcends intellect. In its penultimate stage, awareness is changeless, since it becomes aware of changelessness in a way that the intellect could never grasp. This changeless state is infinite and timeless in the sense that it contains no boundaries. The intellect, being a product of the state of change in the spacetime dimension, can perceive only change, and not changelessness. It lives in time and is acutely aware of time’s passage, a signification of its dynamic nature, since change and time are highly correlated. It sees changelessness as death. Intelligence is a product of change and observes change. It arose as an adaptive response to changing environmental conditions. Being intimately involved with changing states, intelligence can never, by itself, reach an ultimate state. Its awareness is of time, and so its awareness remains essentially incomplete.

Awareness leaves even evolution behind, since evolution by its nature adapts only to changing states. In a changeless environment, adaptations become unnecessary. There is no such thing as absolute intelligence, though we maintain there is such a thing as absolute awareness.

If psychological, as well as mechanical processes, are the implicits which drive the cosmos, then awareness may very well be the ultimate state of the universe. It may be a succeeding state in the sense that it survives after the cosmos reaches its end state. The strongest versions of the anthropic principle make this conclusion. Awareness alone may survive the ultimate lapse into entropy of all changing things. It may be deathless.

Intelligence, on the other hand, is a mere product of that evolutionary system which began at a certain moment in time. While it appears that awareness has also evolved with intelligence, and that it, too, began at the same point in time as did intelligence, we hold that awareness preceded the appearance of intelligence. This archetypal awareness was present as observer in a raw, undifferentiated form of unconscious energy at the beginnings of the universe. For this reason, we conclude that psychological principles drive evolution of both animate and inanimate matter. This is a more probable, a more rational explanation for the arising of ego consciousness than that mindless and probabilistic influences alone gave rise to this consciousness, and that consciousness is a product of the brain which is born and dies with it.

Once awareness culminates in total awareness, consciousness of the changeless state is attained and further evolution is no longer necessary or possible. It has reached its apogee of changelessness, and the changeless cannot further evolve. Awareness of time falls away. The purposes of being human and of being in time – the evolution of total awareness – have been achieved. Awareness becomes cognizant of the changeless state which transcends the physical universe, and this dimension re-attains a state of perfect balance. Humans themselves, which sometimes thought themselves the ultimate aim of evolution, become unnecessary as its vehicles. Thus, while awareness is inevitable, intelligence, being a product of chance, is not. This, too, is an answer to Fermi’s Paradox, though one which is realized far in the future.

Of necessity, the quantified dimensionality and material and energetic incongruities of the cosmos dissolve, since perfect awareness is synonymous with perfect balance and cannot exist in a state of imbalance. This is what the apophatic traditions mean when they describe emptiness and nothingness.  Yet in another sense, emptiness and nothingness are simply those terms used to describe and explain that which is beyond description, and past all explanation.

Changelessness and balance, uniform and all-pervading, alone remain. This is the essence of alien science, alien metaphysics and alien philosophy. It is alien because it seems so foreign to human understanding.

Awareness of the Other

Since we arose as a species, humans have distinguished between a transcendent versus a purely earthbound consciousness. At the dawn of their self-awareness as a species, and for many thousands of years thereafter, humans perceived an Other. This Other was an entity or entities which were experienced as transcendentally unlike human beings themselves, at least in some respects. There was an Other with whom they could commune, which they could manipulate, which they could appease, and which governed or influenced their fate. In animistic systems, the Other was a collection of impersonal forces or entities which could be influenced by magic. In latter-emerging religious belief systems, these took the forms of mythologies and pantheons which represented gods with superordinate powers. Eventually these were combined in human understanding into a unitary God in many belief systems.

What all these prescientific beliefs had in common was the existence of an Other which was, in some ways, external to humans. It existed ‘out there’, having given rise to humans in a relationship in which it was creator, and humans were the created. The Other came to be regarded as omnipotent and omnipresent. This transcendent Other does not represent a complete picture of human understanding of the other, since in emanant traditions, the Other was thought of as living within and participating in the organic processes of humans and sometimes with other organisms as well. For instance, in many pre-Columbian North American traditions, a universal Great Spirit participated in the lives of all creatures and did not necessarily stand transcendentally apart from them. In some Gnostic philosophies, the divine consciousness is often regarded as trapped within matter. In many Eastern traditions, the distinction between human and divine is often blurred or erased in favor of an all-pervading consciousness present in all of material reality. Nevertheless, even in these Eastern philosophies, a distinction is often made between the sacred and the profane, for lack of more descriptive and accurate terms. Thus, even the energy described as the Dao is regarded in some ways as an elusive Otherness obscured to conventional human consciousness.

These beliefs in an Other which distinguished between living spirit and inanimate matter were particularly strong in Western belief systems, beginning with Greek philosophy, which developed schools of materialistic thought. This dualism, which began in classical antiquity and became pronounced in Gnostic systems, extended into both pagan and Christian traditions. This mind/matter dichotomy was reinforced by Cartesian worldviews during the Enlightenment that continued the distinction between conscious mind and mindless matter. Scientific thought has amplified this distinction between consciousness and nonliving matter. As we saw with scientific belief systems such as quantum entanglement which in some ways paralleled the metaphysics of sympathetic magic, modern materialistic philosophy and science parallels these more ancient dualistic traditions in separating matter from consciousness.

As human awareness evolves, humans continue to sense that there is, perhaps no ‘out there.’ A more nuanced understanding abandons the distinctions between an exclusively transcendent Other totally separate from humans in the same way that scientific theories such as quantum mechanics erase the boundary between particles and their surrounding reality, between the observer and the observed. Our awareness has evolved to see that the distinction between creation and a transcendent Other is possibly an ill-drawn conclusion, because that which is all-encompassing, however it is defined, can have no limit. This Other must therefore, pervade the very ‘fabric’ of the human mind and all of material reality as well.

Although we come to no conclusions about the existence of God, we can state that an observer must exist. Consciousness is self-authenticating in the sense that we are aware, and we are aware that we are aware. We are observers of ourselves and our own consciousness. Beyond this self-authenticating awareness, quantum physics provides us with the very real conclusion that the hard and fast boundary between us and material reality is hazy at best. There is no real distinction between observer and observed. This represents the emanant view of reality. To be accurate, classical antiquity also yielded schools of thought which entertained these non-dualistic conclusions, and they also existed in primal humans, which entertained fewer separations between living and nonliving systems. These emanant beliefs pervaded both East and West, but as we have recounted, they were more pronounced in Eastern mysticism, which is equivalent in many ways to Eastern religion and philosophy.

In the West, the existence of this Other outside the human mind came to be regarded as a projection, an anthropomorphicization.  The proponents of a newly emerging science of mythology combined psychological disciplines with the analysis of dreams and with the systemization of mythological archetypes and stories. This scholarly and sometimses quite poetic treatment of myth from a psychological perspective pioneered by C.G. Jung, Julian Herscher, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell recognized the human tendency to anthropomorphize, to project states from the human mind and attribute them to outside forces or entities, as a keystone trait. It is toward this psychological architecture that we will turn now.

Projection and Repression

Hundreds of years after a seminal period in religious understanding known as the Axial Age, which occurred throughout world civilizations in roughly the same historical era, other, nonreligious ways of knowing emerged. After a long Medieval period, these empirical methods were rediscovered in the West during the Renaissance when Christian monks and scholars encountered the works of Classical antiquity. These had been translated and added to by Moslem scholars. After several hundred years of further refinement, these texts contributed to the age of modern scientific inquiry during the Enlightenment.

Eventually, advocates of pure scientific inquiry and latter-day reductionist philosophy both reached agreement that there was no ontologically-provable Other since this Other was unverifiable through the experimental method or empirical means. Although philosophies such as materialism had existed since much earlier times in both East (Hindu) and West (Greek), these were not adopted as hegemonic worldviews to the extent they pervaded during and after the Enlightenment. There was no real concept of atheism in Medieval Europe. Yet the materialist worldview now predominates in existential philosophies as well as in science, inheriting its through-lines from the scholarship of classical antiquity. Secular humanism still retains humans as the center of all things, and its technological outgrowth – transhumanism – does as well. And so, in some ways at least, the Copernican worldview that humans are not necessarily the center continues to be supplanted by an egocentric philosophy which, in all probability, was expressed in and as human-centered creation myths and geocentric cosmologies since the very beginnings of humanity.

The advocates of reductionist philosophies postulate that humans invented this Other, the mental product of an earlier era in history, as a universal projection onto which human fear and guilt, human lusts and hatred, could be cast without humans taking responsibility. According to these materialist philosophies, the purpose of these mythological and later theological projections was to project responsibility for socially unacceptable impulses, desires and actions onto an external Other. This Other was often split into two ‘halves’, and given positive attributes in the divine, and negative attributes in the divine’s dualistic opposite. The psychological pioneer who described this dynamic of projection was Freud. Freud believed that the human longings for God and for an afterlife were essentially unconscious human wish fulfillments projected onto fantasies.

Since we subscribe to the belief that the cosmos has inherent psychological characteristics dating back to its primal state, we believe these philosophies to be wrong about ultimate causes and functions. However, we do conclude that reductionist philosophy is correct as to the psychological and social purposes of religion and the positing of a Godlike Other. These psychological functions serve to project certain base and unacceptable impulses emanating from primal brain processes onto an Other. The purpose of this projection is to avoid responsibility for thoughts, impulses, desires and actions which the superego, identified with highest order brain processes, finds so guilt-inducing and anxiety-provoking that it can no longer contain them within the limited system of a functional human personality. In order to maintain psychological balance within the personality, the ego projects them. To acknowledge such ego dystonic ‘sins’ would be too much for the ego to bear, and so it throws them off onto a supernatural Other identified with external dark forces. In the alternative, these same unacknowledgeable impulses, desires, thoughts and actions are projected onto other individuals or groups in collective projections so that identification with these impulses is not consciously recognized.  By locating this unacceptable content outside of the projecting personalities, the anxiety and guilt associated with them is managed.

While we conclude this theologically envisioned cause to be projected by ego consciousness as originating outside of the human mind, it is not probable that it exists separately from it. In other words, a creator mind did not cause a vast series of separate human minds to come into being. Rather, the creator mind is projected to exist external to the human mind which contemplates it. If the creator mind is omnipresent, then it could not create anything which exists outside of itself. Therefore, the human mind exists within it, and no cause can exist external to it. Thus, religious cause – that a God or gods or a demiurge created the cosmos – is projected cause.

Yet we postulate that this projected, ontologically separate Other envisioned by religious belief systems precedes even its evident manifestation in these ancient religious structures. We believe that this creator, as a process if not necessarily as a divine being, has its origins in the natural world and that it is therefore real and organic. This psychological cause – which we have identified as unconscious awareness – co-evolved along with the inanimate substrate of material cause, and thus it co-created the cosmos. If psychological cause is co-occurring along with material cause, then evidence of its existence should be found even in the natural world.

The dualistic split inferred in early myths, religions and even in today’s science is evident even in the human brain. The structure of the brain itself is in some ways hemispheric, with at least superficial symmetries between right and left halves, though their functions are not always symmetrical. In nature, bilaterians represent the largest group of animals, constituting the majority of phyla. These creatures have bilateral symmetry as their hallmark. This bilateralism is evident in the human body, at least superficially. In the world of molecular biology, bilateral complementarity is often evident, with chiral characteristics. Particles and charges, reduced to ‘irreducible’ quanta, each have their paired opposites. There is matter and antimatter, as each particle has its paired opposite. These entities come in pairs of complimentary opposites, from electrons and positrons to biological males and females.

These dualistic structures are conceived theoretically and phenomenologically as existing objectively and inherently in the observable universe. Seldom is it considered that the dualistic propensity also exists as an a priori tendency in the mind of the observer which projects it out onto the natural order. We come forward with this proposition: that the dualistic split is projected from the mind outward onto an exterior, ‘natural’ reality. Thus, even scientific belief systems project this dualism.

Prior to the rise of pure science, many dualistic philosophies had in their schema an objectively real evil which was also an Other. In the West, these belief systems can be traced to Zoroastrianism in Persia. The later psychologies which became prevalent in the 19th century and the systematized study of mythology which came into its own in the 20th theorized that humans projected their baser impulses onto this evil Other, since these instincts and desires were considered destructive, or at the least, unacceptable to the conscious, social sense of self. They were ego dystonic. In order to broadcast an individually and socially acceptable sense of self to the world as well as to the ego itself, part of awareness hid less acceptable, shadow impulses attributable to the base brain processes and their psychological counterpart, the id. These were considered shadow because they were submerged below the level of consciousness. This is the result of the defense mechanism of repression at work.

In their purest forms, repression and projection operate outside the conscious awareness of the personality which employs them. Both defense mechanisms work on individual and collective levels. Thus, whole societies can project traits onto pariah groups or outcast individuals. Collectively, groups can act out unconscious impulses through an identity with the projected force which is seen overtly and consciously only in another person or group. This unconscious identification and projection can cause great destruction.

Transcendence

Any route to a knowledge which helps humans survive Fermi’s Paradox is, we conclude, desirable. We seek unconventional knowledge, since conventional solutions have proved ineffective. Conventional solutions correlate with rational ones. Therefore, we focus on comprehensive solutions which combine disciplines beyond science. We seek solutions not ultimately apprehensible exclusively to the intellect. These are not illogical but are superlogical in the sense that they supersede rational solutions.

If there is an otherness to reality beyond human consciousness, it is inaccessible and inapprehensible to human intelligence. This otherness is beyond thought and understanding, and thus transcends intellectual grasp. This does not necessarily mean that it is located outside the human mind. Yet it does mean that it extends beyond consciousness. In this sense, the knowledge to which we refer transcends intelligent understanding.

Regardless of how this transcendence is conceived, it is the approach to this body of knowledge that matters. Humans seek an experience, not a definition. And they seek an experience which transcends the intellect. Because transcendent knowledge cannot be proved logically, it is often discarded in materialist philosophy and by those who hew to a belief in human ingenuity as the way out of the morass of problems posed by civilization.  Intelligence rejects these transcendent ways of problem-solving because intellect cannot understand them. Since intelligence cannot see in a rational, stepwise fashion the ways in which unintelligent ways of knowing work, these are often rejected in favor of yet more solutions devised by Biological and Artificial Intelligences. More data is thrown at these problems in terms of inputs, even though a surfeit of information is part of the problem itself. It leads to information overload, data pollution and decisional paralysis. More computational capacity is devoted to solve human problems, even though speed may not solve these problems, but may actually contribute to them insofar as the speed of technological change far outpaces the ability of both the human brain and the Gaian world to adapt.

Transcendent knowledge represents nonintellectual routes to unbounded awareness. Though intelligence can be utilized at the beginning of the journey toward it, at some point, the faculty of intellect must be relinquished or at least supplemented, for the intellect interferes with the experience of transcendent awareness. Intelligence limits. It does not liberate. It defines, and by its definitions it places into bonds that which it seeks to define. It becomes an obstacle to greater awareness when it is used as the exclusive vehicle to attain it. Intelligent solutions should be combined with solutions arrived at through other forms of knowledge. Some may experience this as an attempt to contact an otherness. We say simply that it is a transcendence of intellect, which incorporates intellectual understanding but does not limit itself to it as a way of knowing.

The Psychological Origins of Transcendent Being

In dualistic systems, the Other had a conscious side as well as a shadowy aspect. The shadow represented that individually and collectively repressed material which extended beyond the realm of conscious awareness. This unconscious material lay partly beyond human intellectual grasp. Neither the conscious self nor the intellect could experience this material directly since it was repressed, denied and projected as something outside of and in some sense alien to the conscious ego. Intellectual understanding could sense the suppressed material, but intelligence could not define or describe these aspects wholly or with any specificity. Emanating from unconscious sources, the suppressed material could neither be quantified nor measured. As the part of the mind most closely associated with conscious activity, the intellect could not operate at the level required to access these unconscious forces, which came to be regarded as transcendent, mystical, metaphysical, magical or spiritual. They were often characterized as miraculous by those who were religiously-inclined. This psychological content could only be experienced indirectly by the conscious mind, as experiences in the imaginal realm. These imaginal experiences included supernatural happenings, sixth sense experiences, religious visions, lucid dreams, near death experiences, and encounters with the extraterrestrial Other.

The intellect disregards these imaginal experiences, classifying them into as yet inexplicable phenomenon which science will one day explain. However, at a base level, even the scientific intellect understands that an essential unknowability exists at the quantum level. It formulated its indeterminacy principle as an expression of this unknowability. This was mysticism expressed at the level of the particle. It was the cloud of unknowing, first alluded to by the mystics, describing a haze of probability, but not actuality, at the threshold of the atom.

From a religious standpoint, which preceded and yet has endured the advent of scientific understanding, the belief in an Other persisted. In transcendent belief systems, there was an unbridgeable gap between humans and this Other, an abyss which humans, of and by themselves, could never cross. Perhaps, if this Other was perfection, it represented an unattainable ideal toward which humans would always strive, but never reach in all of time, since the Other, as eternal, represented an unbreachable barrier compared to the finite somethingness of human experience. To know this otherness clearly and wholly from the human perspective was impossible, since an essential unknowability served as an earlier expression of this uncertainty principle. Hence, there was Ein Sof from the kabbalistic tradition. Translated as ‘beyond thought’, it refers to a mystery which shrouds itself in unknowability. Regarding its nature, little can be grasped.

The idea of the Other represented the collection of questions and mysteries which were unknowable by the intellect. God was the forever inaccessible secret. God was simply the human idea for that set of concepts which lay so far beyond the bounds of their ordinary world that it was forever inaccessible, unknowable, and unattainable through human intelligence. It is ironic that a sole idea – God – would arouse so much antipathy among many of those disinclined to agree with its existence, and so much violence among many of those who professed to believe in it. No human really understands it. Perhaps it is from this frustration in understanding that the problem with the idea of God arises.  Believers and nonbelievers alike often take out this frustration upon those who hold contrary beliefs.

Ego consciousness tries to understand the unknown of the unconscious from its position in conscious awareness. This is a very difficult undertaking. The observations made must be indirect ones. So, too, must the inferences made of this shadow be indirect. Its imperviousness to direct rational analysis and scientific inquiry is one of the reasons that transcendent otherness is often denied in the modern materialist worldview, which insists upon measurability as a precondition to being included in reality.  Unconscious forces resist direct detection and study. Yet this does not mean that they do not exist. Unknowns should not be denied simply because they cannot be adequately understood. Rather, the manner for exploring them should be changed. In the era of hammer madness, when the only tool the carpenter has is a hammer, all problems look like nails. The tool of analysis is ill-suited to explore the unconscious interactions which are features of the universe.

Ego consciousness is rather arrogant and narcissistic in its denial or minimization of anything that is not accessible to itself. Yet Freud, a consummate rationalist, taught us that the unconscious is a fact. It is ignored or denied at human peril.

Emanant Being

From the emanant tradition – the second evolved set of beliefs which took root during humanity’s Axial Age – humans realized that the all-present was all-pervading. Thus, if the Other was infinite, then there would be no corner of creation, or beyond creation, in which it did not reach and in which it was not present. This represents the emanant Other which inhabits all things; the things which humans perceive as living as well as those regarded as inanimate.

Every aspect of spacetime must be endowed with this emanant awareness, just as every ‘point’ within a dream is imbued with the consciousness of the dreamer. There is no place or time or quality it cannot reach. If it exists, it must be omnipresent. The inside-outside distinction made by the ego, identified with the boundary of the organism with which it associates, is deemphasized.

Psychologically, this represents the withdrawal of projections. The unconscious becomes conscious. awareness is raised. Thus, the defense mechanisms of projection, repression and denial are relinquished. The idea of boundary dissolves.

The obvious paradox is that if this Other is present everywhere and in all times, then it is human, too. There can be no Other, for it represents conscious and unconscious forces. Otherness itself becomes a contradiction. Everything is, in the parlance of Hasidic metaphysics, the Atzmus, that which is beyond the duality of the finite and the infinite. This Atzmus is what is aimed at by the unity of opposites, where psychological reconciliation of shadow and conscious elements yields an energy, a life and an awareness which is greater than the sum total which both of these opposites would yield arithmetically. This is an unexpected, emergent phenomenon.

As human civilization has evolved, the reductionist thinkers have come to predominate. They came to see this God-like presence – whether of an otherness which clothed itself in transcendence or whether omnipresent in an emanant formlessness which was implicitly closer to humans than even their own conscious awareness of themselves – as a mass projection of the individual and the collective mind of humanity. Latter day psychology and philosophy attribute the idea of a supernal Being to a massive collective and individual projection. The idea of an evil being dualistically opposed to this God became a psychological defense mechanism in which socially unacceptable impulses and behaviors were also projected. The idea of a God became a form of wish fulfillment. God and devil, heaven and hell, were conceived of as projected fantasy states with psychological functions. These functions include the displacement of unacceptable impulses, the justification for destructive acts, the offloading of guilt, and the rationalization of suffering as a purchase for the rewards promised in afterlife states.

Thus, the progression of belief has led humans from the belief in (1) an entity or dualistic entities existing outside themselves, to (2) a transcendent Other which intelligence cannot humanly comprehend, to (3) an emanant presence as existing within the human mind as well as outside of it, to (4) a psychological projection which does not exist outside at all. The progression of belief has been from an external Other to an internal Self. Paradoxically, the most ancient of systems often embrace this belief in a non-dualistic Self whose essence inhabits all forms, as is commonly described in Hindu scripture.

We wish to desacralize the idea of God by replacing it with the concept of awareness. While not intending any disrespect toward the God idea or to those who hold it sacred, we can perhaps avert the vast confusion and controversy that has surrounded this subject by identifying what was formerly associated with God as now being identified with awareness. The transcendent is, simply, the deeper aspects of the human mind which surpass intelligent understanding. Therefore, we break with materialist philosophy and with science by stating definitively that this awareness is more than the ego. While not existing apart from the human mind as an objectively external Other, this awareness transcends human consciousness. We reject the initial boundary condition imposed by the observer.

We also break with traditional definitions of the deity. An Other external to the human mind cannot exist and cannot be located anywhere in space since we hold awareness to be everywhere simultaneously.

Awareness and the Defense Mechanisms

Psychological theory concludes that this projected duality and otherness, and the subsequent repression of projected cause, represent a primitive stage of awareness. These projections are theorized as emanating from an immature personality, in which unconscious material is denied, suppressed, and projected outward.

The adherents to the harder sciences deny that subjective awareness and projective identification may be implicit in the mind which projects scientific cause and sees rational patterns operant in the cosmos itself. While they admit that the relative position of the observer affects what she sees (relativity theory), and that the act of observation may change what is observed (quantum theory), the adherents to standard models in physics would not agree that psychological principles implicit in the observer influence what is observed on a fundamental level, the level of physical reality. The defense mechanisms in particular, and psychological principles in general, are thought of as soft-science theories applicable to consciousness. The particles and laws of physics may, it is theorized, play upon the perceptions and cognitive operations of the mind and the brain, but this perception and cognition in no way affects the particles and the laws of physics apart from the observer effect described above. The standard scientific assumption is that causation flows unidirectionally from the randomness and probability of quantum laws, correlated with the arrow of time, which moves unilaterally from a purely physical past, as mindless cause, to a psychological future, as conscious effect. These causes are considered to be raw and objectively real apart from any projecting observer. In fact, they are seen as the creators of the observer himself. The gods are randomness and probability, which are wholly non-conscious forces.

In this scientific myopia, the fundamental role of the observer in cosmic creation is obscured by the limits of intellectual understanding. The defense mechanisms of projection and repression serve to impede scientific awareness, just as they have in the past, when human attributes were projected onto deities and demons. In the historical past, religious myopia blocked awareness. Today, ‘pure’ science interferes with awareness. The role of the observer in creating the physical world is obscured, projected and then denied. Yet the defense mechanisms which serve as obstacles remain the same. Psychological cause is projected out and confused with physical effect. Physics and biology, driven by randomness and probability, are seen as sole causes of the reality we experience. Consciousness and the laws of psychology are conceived of as effects of these earlier, purely physical mechanics.