Part 1.3  Clarification of what instincts and consciousness are

In order to explain how we humans acquired our cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts, and how we became fully conscious when other species haven’t, it first needs to be explained what instincts and consciousness actually are.

Firstly, to explain instincts. While animals largely depend on their nervous system to coordinate their movement and control how they react to their environment, other systems such as their hormonal, circulatory, digestive, immune and reproductive systems also influence how they behave. Obviously all these systems that affect how a species of animal moves and behaves have been honed over many generations by natural selection in the course of adapting that species to its environment. These naturally selected genetic traits that orientate an animal’s movements and behaviour are referred to as its instincts. Animals move about and behave in many different ways—they fight and ‘court’ each other, they build nests, they search for food, they migrate, etc—and natural selection has given them genetic programming, ‘instincts’, to control and orientate all this movement and behaviour.

In the case of consciousness, as is described in detail in chapter 7 of FREEDOM, and summarised in Freedom Essay 24 (both of these documents, and indeed all my presentations, are freely available at our World Transformation Movement website at www.humancondition.com), nerves were, as just mentioned, originally developed to coordinate movement in animals. Significantly, there is one aspect of nerves’ ability to control how animals react to their environment that has the potential to give rise to consciousness—and this is an aspect that is largely independent of any instinctive orientations of an animal’s nervous system that developed through natural selection. This aspect of the nervous system that gave rise to the potential to develop a conscious understanding of cause and effect is nerves’ ability to store impressions—what we refer to as ‘memory’. An electric current passed through a nerve leaves an imprint of its passage, which represents a memory of that piece of information. This ability to remember past events makes it possible to compare them with current events and identify regularly occurring experiences. This knowledge of, or insight into, what has commonly occurred in the past makes it possible to predict what is likely to happen in the future and to adjust behaviour accordingly. Once insights into the nature of change are put into effect, the self-modified behaviour starts to provide feedback, refining the insights further. Predictions are compared with outcomes and so on. Much developed—and such refinement occurred in the human brain—nerves can sufficiently associate information to reason how experiences are related, learn to understand and become CONSCIOUS of, or aware of, or intelligent about, the relationship between events that occur through time. Thus consciousness means being sufficiently aware of how experiences are related to attempt to manage change from a basis of understanding.

It should be pointed out that admitting the above obvious explanations for what instincts actually are and what consciousness actually is has been avoided by human-condition-avoiding Reductionist, Mechanistic science. As will become clear shortly when humans’ need to avoid the unbearably depressing issue of the human condition is explained, scientists, being extreme sufferers of the human condition like virtually every other human, have also had to live in determined denial of that unbearably depressing subject of the human condition. To do this they avoided the overarching big issue of the human condition and reduced their focus to only looking down at the mechanisms of the workings of our world. They have been ‘Reductionist’ and ‘Mechanistic’, not whole-view-confronting or ‘Holistic’. (I should mention that while terms like ‘Reductionist’, ‘Mechanistic’ and ‘Holistic’ will be more properly explained and be more easily understood as this presentation progresses, chapter 2:4 of FREEDOM, and my book Don’t Stand In the Way, For the Times Are A-Changin’, present a complete description of science’s practice of avoiding the issue of the human condition, and of the terms Reductionism, Mechanism and Holism.) So—and again this will all be made understandable shortly when humans’ need to avoid the unbearably depressing issue of the human condition is explained—Reductionist, Mechanistic scientists have had to avoid what instincts actually are and what consciousness actually is because without the redeeming explanation for why we, our conscious thinking self, corrupted our cooperative, selfless and loving ‘moral’ instincts that Darwin said ‘affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’, any admission that the human race once lived in a cooperative, selfless and loving moral instinctive state, and any admission that our conscious mind corrupted that pure, innocent state, was unbearable. And so to avoid any thought journey getting underway that might lead to those condemning realisations, the human-condition-avoiding, ‘keepers of the lie’, Reductionist, Mechanistic scientists realised it was best to stop that thought journey at the outset by claiming we just don’t know what instincts actually are and consciousness actually is. For example, when I tried to explain the ‘Instinct vs Intellect’ explanation of the human condition (which is shortly going to be presented) to the former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, Lord Robert May (note, ‘Lord’ is a higher ranking than ‘Sir’), at Oxford University in 2014, he said, ‘But Jeremy, we don’t know what instincts actually are, or how we actually got them’ (WTM records, 13 Nov. 2014). Certainly instincts are somewhat complicated, but, as the brief explanation and description of instincts that I have just given evidences, they are not nearly as bewildering as Lord May tried to make out. In the case of consciousness, chapter 7 of FREEDOM presents a detailed description of how consciousness has been deliberately left cloaked in mystery and confusion—again, because a clear and straight-forward and obvious description of it, as was just given, brought us too close to the unbearable truth that our conscious mind had committed the seeming terrible crime of corrupting our original cooperative, selfless and loving, innocent instinctive life—which all still has to be explained in this book. I should acknowledge here for the reader that unfortunately there are so many new ideas that finally can and have to be introduced now that the human condition is explained that it is impossible to introduce them all sequentially.

So while the ‘gene-based learning system’ does involve the genetic selection of nerve pathways and networks, what is meant by the ‘nerve-based learning system’ in the coming descriptions is the dimension or aspect of the nervous system that is to do with understanding cause and effect. This honest but not very explanatory dictionary definition of instincts makes this particular difference clear—instincts are ‘a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary; see www.wtmsources.com/144).

As is going to be explained shortly in Part 1.6, the immense significance of the nerve-based learning system becoming sufficiently developed in humans for us to become fully conscious and able to effectively manage events, was that our conscious intellect was then in a position to wrest control of our lives from our gene-based learning system’s instincts, which, up until then, had been in charge of our lives—the effects of which, as we will see, were catastrophic!