The Human Condition

f the great riddle of the human condition cannot be solved by recourse to the mythic foundations of religion, neither will it be solved by introspection. Unaided rational inquiry has no way to conceive its own process. Most of the activities of the brain are not even perceived by the conscious mind. The brain is a citadel, as Darwin once put it, that cannot be taken by direct assault.

Thinking about thinking is the core process of the creative arts, but it tells us very little about how we think the way we do, and nothing of why the creative arts originated in the first place. Consciousness, having evolved over million of years of life-and-death struggle, and moreover because of the struggle, was not designed for self-examination. It was designed for survival and reproduction. Conscious thought is driven by emotion; to the purpose of survival and reproduction, it is ultimately and wholly committed. The intricate distortions of the mind may be transmitted by the creative arts in fine detail, but they are constructed as though human nature never had an evolutionary history. Their powerful metaphors have brought us no closer to solving the riddle than did the dramas and literature of ancient Greece.

Scientists, scouting the perimeters of the citadel, search for potential breaches in its walls. Having broken through with technology designed for the purpose, they now read the codes and track the pathways of billion of nerve cells. Within a generation, we likely will have progressed enough to explain the physical basis of consciousness.

But – when the nature of consciousness is solved, will we than know what we are and where we came from? No, we will not. To understand the physical operations of the brain to their foundations brings us close to the grail. To find it, however, we need far more knowledge collected from both science and the humanities. We need to understand how the brain evolved the way it did, and why.

Moreover, we look in vain to philosophy for the answer to the great riddle. Despite its noble purpose and history, pure philosophy long ago abandoned the foundational question about human existence. The query itself is a reputation killer. It has become a Gorgon of philosophers, upon whose visage even the best thinkers fear to gaze. They have good reason for their aversion. Most of the history of philosophy consists of failed models of the mind. The field of discourse is strewn with the wreckage of the theories of consciousness. After the decline of logical positivism in the middle of the twentieth century, and the attempt of this movement to blend science and logic into a closed system, professional philosophers dispersed in an intellectual diaspora. They emigrated into the more tractable disciplines not yet colonized by science - intellectual history, semantics, logic, foundational mathematics, ethics, theology, and, most lucratively, problems of personal life adjustment

Philosophers flourish in these various endeavors, but for the time being at least, and by a process of elimination, the solution of riddle has been left to science. What science promises, and has already supplied in part, is the following. There is a real creation story of humanity, and one only, and it is not of myth. It is being worked out and tested, and enriched and strengthened, step by step.

I will propose that scientific advances, especially those made during the last two decades, are now sufficient for us to address in a coherent manner the questions of where we came from and what we are. To do so, however, we need answers to two even more fundamental questions the query has raised. The first is why advanced social life exists at all, and has occurred so rarely in history of life. The second is the identity of the driving force that brought it into existence.

These problems can be solved by bringing together information from multiple disciplines, ranging from molecular genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology to archaeology, ecology, social psychology, and history. (Chapter: Human Condition; “The Social Conquest Of The Earth” - Edward O. Wilson)