Steve Taylor, author of Making Time & The Fall

ESSAYS

DECONSTRUCTING DAWKINS

Richard Dawkins and the Fallacies of Mechanistic Science

(or : Why I'm fed up with Richard Dawkins)

I'm fed up with Richard Dawkins. I'm fed up with the icy glint of his eyes and his cold quivering voice, reminding us that nothing exists apart from what modern materialistic science tells us is 'reality' and that anybody who believes in phenomena which don't fit into his mechanistic soulless world is a deluded fool. I'm fed up with the absurd reductionism of his view that human beings are just 'throwaway survival machines' and the only motivating force behind everything I do - and the only reason for my existence - is the survival of my 30,000 or so 'selfish genes'.

Dawkins’ has become so dogmatic and bad-tempered in his quest to rid the world of irrationality that he’s almost an ogre who could be used to scare children. You can imagine him overhearing children talking to their teddy bears and snatching them away, shouting, 'Wake up to reality! Teddy bears do not have a consciousness! They are inanimate beings!' And any child who he overheard asking ‘What’s Father Christmas going to bring you?’ would be met with the stark rejoinder: 'Look, let's think about this rationally - do you really think it's possible for this rather fat man with a red costume and big white beard to travel through the air on a reindeer and climb down every chimney of every house in the whole western hemisphere during the course of one evening to deliver presents to children?'

Dawkins is the high priest of popular science, this country's unofficial scientist laureate. His theories have helped to form the generally accepted scientific 'rational' worldview of our culture, which most of our institutions, our media, and our respected intellectuals accept as 'reality'. The main tenets of this worldview can perhaps be summarised as follows:

- Life came into being by accident, through the interactions of certain chemicals. Once it had come into existence, it evolved from simple to more complex forms through randomly occurring genetic mutations acted on by natural selection.

- Living beings consist of 'selfish genes' whose mission is to replicate themselves. Human beings are merely vehicles for the propagation of our genetic material. The desire for genetic replication is the main motivation of everything we do.

- All of our instincts, emotions and behavioural traits are related to certain genes. These characteristics exist in us because they had survival value for our prehistoric ancestors. As a result the genes they are related to were 'selected'. For example, it was genetically beneficial for men to be polygamous, since this meant that their genetic material could be replicated more frequently, and so men have a natural tendency to be unfaithful. Rape also has a genetic basis; we can see it as a desperate to attempt to replicate their genes by men who cannot attract willing sexual partners. At least this the view of the contemporary 'science' of evolutionary psychology, which attempts to explain this genetic and evolutionary basis of our behaviour.

- Since living beings are nothing more than their physical or chemical components, there can be such thing as a 'soul' or 'lifeforce'. What we experience as 'consciousness' is produced by the working together of the billions of neurons in our brains. As a result there can't be any life after death. Our consciousness dies with our brains, and nothing survives our bodies.

- Paranormal, 'mystical' or 'spiritual' phenomena cannot be genuine because they break the fundamental laws of nature. For example, there is no known energy field which could link one mind to another and make telepathy possible, and no known force which could account for the ability to move objects by mental effort.

The Neo-Darwinist Dogma

If you read one of Dawkins' books, or read the Guardian or listen to Radio 4, you might assume that these are completely undisputed 'truths' with enormous evidence behind them, which all scientists accept. But if you dig a little deeper you find that this isn't the case at all. You find that these tenets are closer to beliefs or assumptions than actual truths, and that there are many scientists who dispute them. In fact, it’s interesting that most of the prominent supporters of Dawkins’ views are not biologists – Daniel Dennett is a philosopher, for example, while Steven Pinker is a psychologist. Amongst biologists themselves, there is a great deal more scepticism.

We also tend to forget that Neo-Darwinism is primarily an Anglo-American phenomenon. In general, continental scientists have been less impressed with it. One problem with Neo-Darwinism is that mutations only occur at a rate of about one per several million cells in every generation. Since only a tiny number create beneficial traits which give a survival advantage, some scientists have doubted that this frequency is enough to give rise to the amazing variety of life forms the world contains. And a further problem here, as the French anti-Darwinist scientist Andree Tetry pointed out, is that it's not just a question of mutations being beneficial, they also have to be cumulative. Each mutation has to 'adjust itself to the preceding mutation, and occur at precisely the right place and time.' Imagine the thousands of separate genetic mutations which would be needed to produce birds' wings, Tetry suggested. Each one would have to be exactly the right kind of mutation in terms of the previous one, to create the next step along the line of development to wings, and each time the odds against these occurring accidentally would increase massively.

There is also the problem that favourable mutations would soon be lost by interbreeding with non-mutated members of a species. Darwin himself saw this as the biggest problem of his theory, and Neo-Darwinists have never convincingly solved it. It's easy to see how this 'crossing' might be avoided with animals - they might just physically move away from the species, for instance - but not with the vegetable kingdom. As the eminent French zoologist Pierre Paul Grasse pointed out, mutations only cause trivial changes. There are, he stated, invisible boundaries between species which mutations cannot cross, so that they can cause variation but never true evolution.

Other arguments against Neo-Darwinism will be familiar to readers of this magazine. For example, biologists such Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have argued that the driving force of evolution is not competition but co-operation. Living beings do not survive by fighting against one another, but by interaction and mutual dependence. Strictly speaking, 'the survival of the fittest' does not mean the survival of the strongest or the most selfish, but the survival of those who interact most effectively. While systems theorists have shown that natural systems and organisms have an innate tendency to move towards complexity, creating a structures which are more than the sum of parts. Apparent order and complexity are not created by genetic mutations, but by the innate ‘emergent’ properties of matter.

In addition, the developing science of epigenetics suggests that genes may be switched on and off by environmental factors, and that once genes are ‘switched on’, they may continue to be active for descendents. For example, it seems that if someone experiences malnutrition or stress, this can cause changes which are passed down through future generations. In a 2006 study in Sweden, the scientists Marcus Pembrey and Lars Olav Bygren found that if a 19^th century person experienced famine in their life, it has an effect on the life expectancy of their 20^th century grandchildren. Research at Washington State University has shown that if rats are exposed to toxic substances like fungicides or pesticides, it causes biological changes which last for at least four generations, and possibly more. Similarly, after the 9/11 disaster, the psychologist Rachel Yehuda studied the effects of stress on pregnant women in or near the World Trade Center. Her results suggested that the effects were passed on to the women’s children. In other words, this suggests that the much maligned early French biologist Lamarck – who suggested that evolution proceeds through the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ – may not have been completely wrong.

Anthropological Evidence against the Selfish Gene

Dawkins' own most prominent contribution to the Neo-Darwinist paradigm, the concept of the selfish gene, leads to a host of pernicious assumptions about 'human nature.' If ultimately all that matters for us is the survival of our genes, then it's inevitable that human beings - and all other living beings - should be competitive, greedy, aggressive and war-like. It's inevitable that different human groups fight over territory and oil supplies, it's inevitable that societies consist of different classes and that the powerful oppress the weak, and it's inevitable that we all look after number one and keep all our millions of dollars in the bank instead of giving them to starving people on the other side of the world. As we saw earlier, some evolutionary psychologists see rape as an inevitable consequence of our selfish genes' desire for replication. Racism is also 'inevitable'. The evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer, for example, sees racism as 'a consequence of highly effective economic strategies’, enabling us to 'keep members of other groups in a lower-status position, with distinctly worse benefits.' In other words, we keep people from other groups away from our resources and treat them badly so that we can decrease their chance of genetic survival and increase our own. The 'selfish gene' theory denies the most noble of human characteristics - our capacity for self-sacrifice, compassion and altruism - or else ingeniously explains them away as 'mistakes' or 'disguised self-interest' or 'recipocral altruism'.

However, from an anthropological perspective, there are some serious objections to this view of human nature. It's completely wrong to assume that all human societies are - or have been - competitive and hierarchical. In fact anthropologists and archaeologists generally agree that the most ancient human societies were extremely egalitarian and democratic. Until about 10,000 years ago, all human beings lived as hunter-gatherers, in bands of up to 40, moving from site to site every few months when food supplies grew low. The contemporary hunter-gatherer societies which we know of usually do not have leader figures. They might have a nominal chief, but his power is very limited, and he can easily be deposed if the rest of the group aren't satisfied with his leadership. Decisions are usually arrived at by group discussion, and food is never hoarded individually but always shared amongst the group. There are no status or wealth differences. As the anthropologist Christopher Boehm summarises, ‘This egalitarian approach seems to be universal for foragers who live in small bands that remain nomadic, suggesting considerable antiquity for political egalitarianism’.

One possible argument here might be that these groups are effectively extended families, and so by being egalitarian they're effectively ensuring the survival of their common genetic material. As Dawkins explains the occasional altruistic behaviour of animals, 'altruism at the level of the individual organism can be a means by which the underlying genes maximise their self interest.’ However, we would still expect there to be some expression of selfishness and competitiveness, at times when the interest of their selfish genes is better served by individualistic and non-cooperative behaviour. But such behaviour does not occur.

Another argument might be that, although they may work co-operatively as individuals, as groups these peoples might be extremely competitive. All of their competitive instincts might go into fighting with other groups. After all, haven't all human groups always fought tooth and nail and done their best to exterminate each other? But this isn't true either. Hunter-gatherer groups are usually extremely peaceful, and when conflicts do occur they are often ritualised into less dangerous forms. For example, if Australian aborigine tribes had a potential conflict, one person from each tribe would be chosen, and, standing stationery around thirty metres apart, would throw spears at each other. When one of them was wounded the conflict would be over and the other tribe would be seen as the winner. One anthropologist, J.M.G. van der Dennen, has surveyed over 500 of the world's remaining native peoples, and found that the vast majority of them are 'highly unwar-like', with a small proportion who have 'mild, low-level, or ritualized warfare'.

And this doesn't just apply to hunter-gatherers. There are many sedentary tribal peoples who are egalitarian and peaceful. There are also examples of ancient towns and even whole civilisations which existed without social inequality and war. This is true of the ancient Turkish city of Catal Huyuk, for example, which existed for 2000 years with no evidence of damage through warfare, or the ancient civilisation of Crete. According to the archaeologist Nicolas Platon, the ancient Cretans were 'an exceptionally peace-loving people' who showed no evidence of warfare either at home or abroad for over 1,500 years. Their towns had no military fortifications, their villas were built facing the sea (showing that there was no danger of attack by pirates or invaders) and there is no sign that the islands' different city-states fought against each other. The Cretans also had, in the words of Riane Eisler, 'a rather equitable distribution of wealth', the result of which was an apparent lack of poverty and a high standard of living for peasants.

Neo-Darwinists and evolutionary psychologists don’t attempt to deal with these issues. In general, they display an almost complete ignorance of anthropology and archaeology. They speak of an ‘environment of evolutionary adaptation’(EEA), usually locating this on the African Savannah, but never attempt to investigate who these early humans were, or how they might have lived. And in fact, from their point of view this ignorance is advisable, since the evidence clearly contravenes their theories.

As mentioned above, Dawkins doesn't believe that altruism contradicts the 'genetic selfishness' of living beings. After all, it’s usually directed towards people who share the same genes as us, members of our own families or communities, so that when we sacrifice ourselves for them this may mean actually perpetuating our own genes. At the same time the benevolence we give out is usually returned to us at some point. By being altruistic to others when they need it, we help to ensure that people help us in our hour of need - another indirect way of looking after ourselves.

But this doesn't seem to go far enough. Many people behave altruistically to people who have no connection to them whatsoever, without any expectation or possibility of being helped back. What about a friend of mine who went to India for a holiday and was so affected by the poverty he saw that he decided to go back and spend a year working at Mother Teresa's hospital in Calcutta? His desire to help was so pure and unconditional that it's difficult to understand how - even on an unconscious or instinctive level - it might have been part of security policy to try to ensure that he was helped back if he ever fell into poverty himself, or even a way of increasing his status amongst his peers. And what about altruism towards members of different species? If I donate money to an animal charity, stop to pick up an injured bird on the road and go 10 miles out of my way to take it to the nearest vet, or pick up a spider from my bath, take it all the way downstairs and deposit it safely in my garden (which I often do myself) - am I really doing this because I expect members of these species to come to my aid in times of trouble? It’s unlikely that I’m doing it for genetic reasons, unless there’s a spider somewhere way back in my ancestry.

It's also worth remembering for a moment that genes are nothing more than chemicals. According to Neo-Darwinist ideology, these chemicals actually have control over me. I am completely subservient to them. Neo-Darwinism takes away all the autonomy, free will and intelligence which I thought I had and gives them to my genes.

Neo-Darwinism and the Higher Reaches of Human Nature

Some of the most absurd applications of Dawkins' Neo-Darwinism are its attempts to explain the 'higher reaches of human nature', such as human creativity, the appreciation of beauty, the urge for self-actualisation or for spiritual growth.

According to Neo-Darwinism, everything we do is motivated by a desire for survival and genetic replication, and all our characteristics and habits were developed because they helped us to survive in the past. Steven Pinker has suggested, for example, that our sense of beauty is always directed towards natural phenomena which represented survival to our ancestors. This is why scenes of streams, trees, lush fields, fruit trees and flowers appear beautiful to us. And this does seem to make some sense - after all, we do generally find sterile and barren environments unattractive. As with evolutionary psychology in general, there's definitely something in it. The problem is that that 'something' is taken too far, and meant to account for the whole spectrum of human behaviour, ignoring myriad other factors. And there are, of course, all kinds of natural phenomena which we find beautiful despite the fact that they could have had no survival value for our ancestors whatsoever. One of the sights which human beings find most beautiful is a clear sky at night, with the velvet blackness and the stars and the moon. But the night environment has no survival value for us whatsoever - in fact, darkness was extremely dangerous to our ancestors. Desert environments could hardly be more inimical to human survival prospects, but many of us find them beautiful too. The recently deceased explorer William Thesinger, for example, wrote of the Sahara Desert: 'I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand.'

In his book How the Mind Works Pinker also mulls over what he calls the 'puzzle' of human creativity. Why is it that so many people are driven to pursue artistic activities such as poetry, painting or composing music when these activities seem to have little survival value? The profound conclusion Pinker reaches is that creativity is linked to a desire for status. We write poems and novels and symphonies because we want to make a name for ourselves so that we can attract women and spread our genes as far and wide as possible. This might be true of a few rock musicians, but every creative person knows himself or herself that there's much more to it than that. If novelists and poets were really just after status then they would surely give up after their first year or so of rejection slips and become businessmen or drug dealers instead. And there are, of course, many artists who are completely unconcerned with recognition. A friend of mine has been writing poems profically for over 30 years and has never tried to get any of them published.

Paranormal Phenomena and the Quantum World

In Unweaving the Rainbow Dawkins shows a surprising willingness to accept that human understanding of the world might be limited, and that science cannot give us the answer to everything. He discusses the idea that time began with the Big Bang, and writes that this is impossible for us to understand due to 'the limitations of our minds, which were only every designed to cope with slow, rather large objects on the African savannah'. He makes a similar point in his recent collection of essays, A Devil's Chaplain, when discussing Quantum physics. He writes that 'modern physics teaches us that there is more to truth than meets the eye, and than meets the all too limited human mind.'

In the light of this, we might expect that Dawkins would have a similar open-minded attitude to paranormal phenomena. After all, isn't it possible that phenomena such as telepathy or pre-cognition - or even homeopathy or psychic healing - might work in ways which are beyond our understanding as well? But of course, completely hypocritically, Dawkins dismisses 'supernatural' phenomena with an almost hysterical vehemence. As he sees it, believe in the 'supernatural' phenomena is the result of a desire to regress to the comforting and colourful illusions of childhood. It's the result of a failure of nerve, a failure to develop a true, objective, rational vision of the world. This hypocrisy makes it clear that Dawkins’ antipathy towards paranormal phenomena is not rational, but is a dogmatic reaction to phenomena which threaten the foundations of his worldview.

Perhaps even stranger though, is the wilful blindness of mechanistic scientists towards certain areas of accepted modern science itself - in particular, towards quantum physics.

Although he accepts the 'irrationality' of quantum physics, Dawkins doesn't accept the full consequences of this irrationality. He has said - as many sceptics do - that if paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and psychokenesis exist, this would break the present laws of physics, and involve completely new forces and fields whose existence physics has found absolutely no evidence for. But quantum physics itself contravenes the laws of physics - that is, the laws of Newtonian physics. Quantum phenomena as particle/wave duality and action across a distance make it clear that the laws of physics are not complete as they are, that there is much more to reality than mechanistic science believes, including new forces and fields. In fact paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and psychokenesis are completely compatible with the interconnected, immaterial world of quantum particles. Sceptics like Dawkins often attempt to separate off the sub-atomic world from the macrocosmic world, try to convince themselves that the strangeness of the sub-atomic world doesn't affect their ordered Newtonian world. But this is nonsense, of course. The sub-atomic world is this world, in the same way that the tiny black dots with different shades are the photo. All the particles in the universe have interacted with one another at some stage, right back to the Big Bang. As the science writer John Gribbin notes, 'The particles that make up my body once jostled in close proximity and interacted with the particles with the particles which now make up your body.' We are all part of a single system. The fundamental reality of this universe is interconnectedness. And in the light of this, paranormal phenomena aren't just possible, but inevitable.

Anthropomorphic Arrogance

The idea that there might be much more to reality than we can conceive of breaks ones of the assumptions at the heart of mechanistic science: the assumption that the world as it appears to us is the world as it is, that the human mind - or human consciousness - has access to absolute truth.

It's this assumption which makes many scientists so sure that one day we will understand the universe completely, uncover all of its laws and explain all its phenomena. If we have access to absolute reality, then understanding the world is simply a question of investigating it in as much detail as we can. We just need to keep examining it, and eventually all our discoveries will add up into a 'theory of everything', and the great enterprise of science will be complete.

This assumption is also the basis of scientists' certainty that there are really no such things as ghosts, gods and spirits, an afterlife and out of body experiences. These phenomena lie beyond our normal awareness of the world; they are not a part of our normal, tangible everyday reality. And so to accept them would mean that there is more to the world than everyday reality. But for any human being to believe that they have access to absolute truth is monstrous anthropomorphic arrogance. We are not aware of reality through an objective, camera-like vision; we are aware of reality through our own personal consciousness. In fact, any undergraduate philosophy student would recognise the absurdity of this assumption. As the great German philosopher Kant argued, our awareness of reality is filtered through the structures with which we perceive it. Our minds do not just observe reality, they co-create it. We cannot know reality as it is.

To assume that we're aware of absolute reality is to assume that our consciousness is absolute. But human beings are part of a whole spectrum of consciousness, which begins with amoebae, and moves through bacteria, insects, birds, higher animals and apes. All creatures in the evolutionary chain have a different level - or a different intensity - of consciousness. The more physically complex a living being is, and the later it evolved, the more awareness of reality is has - i.e. the more consciousness it has. An insect is more conscious of reality than an amoeba; a bird is more conscious of reality than an insect; a cow has more consciousness than bird; a monkey as more consciousness than a cow, and a human being - with the biggest and most complex brain - has more consciousness than a monkey.

But evolution doesn't end with human beings, of course. At some point in the future other beings will come into existence, with more consciousness than us in the same way that we have more consciousness than apes. And with their more intense consciousness, they will perceive a different reality than us - a wider reality, including forces and fields and other phenomena which we can't conceive of, but which may explain some of the strange goings on in our world.

The Neo-Darwinist Ideology

The fact that, despite their shaky foundations, the tenets of mechanistic science are clung to so tightly and presented so aggressively as 'the truth' suggests that what we're really dealing with is not objective science so much as an ideology.

The mechanistic view of the world has an enormous appeal because it appears to explain everything. To possess a complete and coherent picture of the world, which explains where we came from, who we are and what the world is, is a deep-rooted human need. On the one hand it gives us a sense of orientation and order, of
knowing where we've come from and where we're going. And on the other hand it gives us a sense of power over the world. Knowledge is power, as Francis Bacon said, and to feel that you completely understand nature and the world provides a satisfying sense of control, a feeling of superiority and dominion. Not knowing means living in uncertainty and confusion, and being subordinate to the mysterious forces of nature.

This is part of the reason why religious sects such as Jehovah's Witnesses or the Church of Scientology are so appealing to many people. They offer a complete, watertight, self-sufficient view of the world which banishes any sense of existential confusion and doubt. As Erich Fromm pointed out, 'man's awareness of himself as being in a strange and overpowering world' creates an intense need for a 'cohesive frame of orientation' to explain the world. Until recent centuries religion provided this frame of orientation. The rise of science at the time of renaissance was so fiercely resisted partly because it blew apart the 'complete explanation of everything' which the Christian worldview provided, and therefore threatened people's sense of orientation and power over the world.

Ironically, in this respect Dawkins' worldview is little different to the Christian worldview of 500 years ago, or the present day Bible Belt of U.S. fundamentalism – precisely the religious worldview he attacks so vigorously in The God Delusion. Both perform the same function, and satisfy the same need. As another academic who is highly sceptical of the claims of neo-Darwinism, Dorothy Nelkin of New York University, points out, ‘Evolutionary psychology is a quasi-religious narrative, providing a simple and compelling answer to complex and enduring questions…While represented as a scientific theory, [it] is rooted in a religious impulse to explain the meaning of life.’ This makes is clear why the adherents of scientific materialism - the sceptics - react with such hostility to paranormal phenomena. They're reacting in exactly the same way as the popes and church leaders who tried Galileo and Giordano Bruno for heresy, trying to keep the 'frame of orientation' which gives meaning and purpose to their lives intact. The admission that telepathy or precognition might exist would send break it to pieces, and leave them bewildered and impotent in the face of the world.

Dawkins and 'Bad Faith'

This might seem strange after spending the last few thousand words criticising him, but it wouldn't seem fair to end this essay without mentioning the few things I admire about Richard Dawkins.

I admire his clear and fluent prose style and his 'no bullshit' approach to his subject matter. I admire his attempts to debunk religious beliefs and the vacuous intellectual posturings of post-modernist academics. And most of all, I admire his attempts to convince us that, in spite of the apparent bleakness of the mechanistic worldview, life is still full of meaning and worth living.

For him meaning comes from the very fact that we are alive at all, when the odds against any of us coming into being in the first place are so massive. As he writes stirringly, 'After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life.' His second source of meaning is the wonder of existence itself, the awe-inspiring complexity and intricacy of the world. Most of the time what he calls the 'anaesthetic of familiarity' dulls our minds to this, but if we could look at the world with 'first-time vision' we would be continually amazed by its richness and strangeness. Dawkins believes that the purpose of our lives should be to contemplate and to study this wonder, to spend our 'brief time in the sun' working towards 'understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it'.

In these passages Dawkins has a tone of stoic existentialism. He's like Sartre encouraging us to value our freedom even though life is meaningless, or Nietszche encouraging us to 'praise in spite of'. But even here his attitude is dubious. He's not facing up to the full consequences of his own view of the world; in fact he's guilty of what Sartre called 'bad faith'. If we are nothing more than 'throwaway survival machines', if our lives have no other consequence than the replication of our genes, if life is just a 'brief spotlight' and then we're nothing for the rest of eternity, if the universe is empty and cold and purposeless, if there's no other causal force in the universe except blind chance - if all this was true, then no amount of complexity and intricacy would compensate us for it. To tell us to 'count our blessings' and look at how intricate everything is would be like telling a prisoner in solitary confinement to feel grateful because his cell is painted with bright colours. The most honest reaction to Dawkins' view of the world - and to the worldview of materialistic science in general - would be not to bother getting out of bed in the morning, to commit suicide, or to escape from the bleak reality by taking drugs or chasing after ego-gratification and sensory thrills.

But fortunately we don't have to do any of these things, since this 'bleak reality' isn't the truth about the world anyway.

Beyond Mechanistic Science

Well alright, the sceptics might say, if evolution didn't happen by random mutations and natural selection, if life didn't come into being accidentally, if consciousness isn't just a product of the brain and so on - how else are you going to explain these things?

The most sensible way of looking at all of these problems is to accept that we don't have to know the answers to them, and that we may not even be capable of knowing the answers, because of the limitations of our consciousness. It may be that all we can do is to make pick up hints of an answer and make suggestions based on them.

Since random mutations and natural selection don't seem capable of explaining evolution, we have to conclude - as Pierre-Paul Grasse did - that evolution is not accidental, but is propelled by some kind of force within living beings which makes them evolve along pre-determined lines. In other words, evolution might proceed according to some pre-determined pattern, a process of unfolding, like the development of a human being from conception through to birth and then adult maturity. This may very well be close to the elan vital envisaged by the French philosopher Henri Bergson.

The key mistake of the mechanistic worldview is its assumption that 'life' and 'consciousness' are just products of the physical functioning of the body and brain. Partly as a result of neuroscientists' failure to explain consciousness in physical terms, many scientists and philosophers have suggested that consciousness may be something which is, in essence, outside the brain. As David Chalmers suggests, we should perhaps see consciousness as a fundamental force of the universe, like gravity. According to this view, consciousness is the ground of all reality, which pervades the whole universe and everything in it. It may be that, rather than actually producing consciousness, the human brain - or the brain of any living being - acts as a kind of receiver or transmitter of it. It translates the raw essence of universal consciousness into an individuated consciousness.

According to this view, evolution is the process of organisms becoming more and more physically complex and in the process becoming capable of receiving and transmitting more consciousness. In these terms, the origin of life was presumably when inanimate matter became complex enough to act as a transmitter for consciousness - i.e. when the first single-celled organisms began to 'receive' consciousness and as a result became capable of reacting to and interacting with their environment. And evolution might be caused by the interaction of consciousness with physical matter - consciousness might act on physical matter in such a way as to impel it to increase in complexity.

This could explain the puzzle of altruism too. If the essence of all living beings is the same universal consciousness then it's not surprising that we have the ability to empathise with each other's suffering and are prepared to sacrifice our own well-being for others'. Altruism is the consequence of our shared sense of being, the fact that in essence we are all one and the same and can therefore experience each other's suffering and joy as if they are our own. And all of this fits closely with what Quantum physics tells us, of course: that we are all part of a single system, that we are all interconnected.

But these are just speculations and suggestions, which will never be confirmed. Ultimately we have to accept that we can only know so much, and perhaps not very much at that. We have to remember that we are still in Plato's cave, looking at the shadows on the wall and mistaking them for reality.

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