Part 1.6 The ‘Instinct vs Intellect’ explanation: how a clash between our cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts and the emergence of our fully conscious mind caused our psychologically distressed, angry, egocentric and alienated human condition — the explanation of which relieves and ends that condition forever!
What will now be explained is how an inevitable clash between our cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts and our fully conscious, self-managing mind caused our psychologically distressed, angry, egocentric and alienated human condition to emerge.
Firstly, as just mentioned, the development of a fully conscious mind in our forebears happened some 2 million years ago—that being the approximate time our large ‘association cortex’ (thinking) brain appears in the fossil record, which you can see some evidence of in this sequence of fossil skulls of our ancestors.
Humanity’s stages of maturation, see chapter 8 of FREEDOM.
(Note, our large brain appeared some 2 mya.)
As was explained in the previous section about consciousness, nerves were originally developed for the coordination of movement in animals. However, once developed, their capacity to store impressions—which is what we refer to as ‘memory’—led to the ability to 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.
What is so significant is that once our nerve-based learning system became sufficiently developed for us to become fully conscious some 2 million years ago and able to effectively manage events, that 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. Basically, once our self-adjusting intellect emerged it was capable of taking over the management of our lives from the instinctive orientations we had acquired through the natural selection of genetic traits that adapted us to our environment. HOWEVER, it was at this juncture, when our conscious intellect challenged our instincts for control, that a terrible battle broke out between our instincts and intellect, the effect of which was the emergence of our psychologically distressed, angry, egocentric and alienated, human condition.
So, when our conscious intellect emerged it was neither suitable nor sustainable for it to be orientated by instincts—it had to find understanding to operate effectively and fulfil its great potential to manage life. The obvious problem was that when our intellect began to exert itself and experiment in the management of life from a basis of understanding, it in effect challenged the role of our already established instinctual self, which naturally caused a battle to break out between our instinctive self and newer conscious self.
Our intellect began to experiment in understanding as the only means of discovering the correct and incorrect understandings for managing existence, but the instincts—being in effect ‘unaware’ or ‘ignorant’ of the intellect’s need to carry out these experiments—‘opposed’ any understanding-produced deviations from the established instinctive orientations: they ‘criticised’ and ‘tried to stop’ the conscious mind’s necessary search for knowledge. To illustrate the situation, imagine what would happen if we put a fully conscious mind on the head of a migrating bird. The bird is following an instinctive flight path acquired over thousands of generations of natural selection, but it now has a conscious mind that needs to understand how to behave, and the only way it can acquire that understanding is by experimenting in understanding—for example, thinking, ‘I’ll fly down and explore that island.’ But such a deviation from the migratory flight path would naturally result in the instincts resisting the deviation, leaving the conscious intellect in a serious dilemma: if it obeys its instincts it will not feel ‘criticised’ by its instincts but nor will it find knowledge. Obviously, the intellect could not afford to give in to the instincts, and unable to understand and thus explain why its experiments in self-adjustment were necessary, the conscious intellect had no way of refuting the implicit criticism from those rigid, fixed, inflexible, ‘dictatorial’ instincts, even though it felt that criticism wasn’t justified. In the case of humans, the species that had become fully conscious, until our conscious mind found the redeeming understanding of why it had to defy the instincts (namely the scientific understanding that is being presented here of this difference in the way genes and nerves process information, that genes are an orientating learning system while nerves, when much developed to the point of having become fully conscious, are an insightful learning system), our intellect was left having to endure what was in effect condemning criticism from our instincts, which understandably left us, our conscious thinking self, no choice but to defy that condemning opposition from our instincts. The only forms of defiance available to our conscious intellect were to attack our instincts’ unjust criticism, attempt to prove our instincts’ unjust criticism wrong, and try to deny or block from our mind the instincts’ unjust criticism.
Our mind became upset by that criticism that it felt was not justified but couldn’t explain why it wasn’t justified, and as a result it became defensively angry, egocentric and alienated. Our ‘conscious thinking self’, which is the Concise Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘ego’ (5th edn, 1964), became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself. We became ego-centric, self-centred—selfishly preoccupied trying to prove we are good and not bad, competing for opportunities to prove our worth, and feeling the need to attack any criticism. We unavoidably became selfish, competitive and aggressive.
