The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation - Chapter 7: The Western Book of the Eco-apocalypse (Chapters 0|∞ to 2)
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0|∞
Nothing never was, and never will be. There was no beginning of things, and there will be no end. The Ground of all Being is not nothing, and not infinity. It neither exists nor doesn’t exist. It is indivisible and indestructible. It is the Ultimate Paradox.
1.Psychegenesis
1:1 The Big Bang
The only beginning we can speak of is the beginning of our own cosmos, and we call it the Big Bang.
1:2 The Primordial superposition
At first, and for most of its history, there were no conscious beings in the cosmos. We call it noumenal or potential: the cosmos as it is in itself. By definition the noumenal cosmos can only be instantiated upon 0/∞, though the question of whether there could be any additional structural levels between 0/∞ and the noumenal cosmos must remain unaddressed for now. Because there were no observers, we call this period the many worlds phase of cosmic evolution. All possible outcomes of quantum events were being realised across different branches of reality, but none of these branches were being “chosen” or “experienced” by a conscious observer. The remainder of this section describes only what happened in the branch that was eventually chosen.
1:3 Inflation – The First Great Mystery
In almost an instant, the very early universe expanded extra-ordinarily rapidly, the first ripple-like structures appeared, and gravity and the other three fundamental forces (the weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetic force) started to govern the cosmos. Without them there could be only uniformity or chaos.
1:4 Asymmetry – The Second Great Mystery
First a “soup” of subatomic particles formed, consisting almost, but not quite, equally of matter and anti-matter. This asymmetry is the second Great Mystery. Without it the cosmos would have ended before the end of the beginning.
1:5 The first atoms
The matter assembled itself, under the effects of the physical forces, into steadily larger and more complex particles. It started with neutrinos. Then came protons and neutrons, and they began fusing into deuterium, then into heavier atomic structures – mainly helium. After 20 minutes, the temperature decreased, the fusion stopped, and the universe consisted of a very hot form of matter called a plasma.
1:6 The lighting of the cosmos
For the next 100,000 years and more, the plasma continued to cool and expand, until the first simple molecules (helium hydride) appeared. By 370,000 years the first neutral hydrogen atoms had formed, along with some lithium, and they began to emit photons. The cosmos was lit, though there was still nothing to observe it.
1:7 Dark Matter – The Third Great Mystery
The clouds of the three lightest elements began to collapse in on themselves under the force of gravity, leading to the formation of the first stars and galaxies. These weren’t randomly distributed, but drawn into large-scale patterns by the gravity of filaments of dark matter. We don’t know what dark matter is. All we know is that it must be there.
1:8 The creation of the heavier elements
Most of the first generation of stars lived fast and died young, creating inside themselves by fusion all the elements up to the atomic weight of iron, until they exploded in supernovae, creating all of the heavier elements in the process. Gravity drew these stars together into galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, and superclusters. By the time it was one billion years old (12.7 billion years ago) the cosmos had started to look much like it does now, or at least it would have done, had there been anything to observe it.
1:9 The formation of the solar system
Around 4.5 billion years ago a cloud of material collapsed under its own gravity and became a spinning disc around a young star – our Sun. The planets then formed as gravity collapsed the remains of the disc. They weren’t in their current positions, but moved in and out, sometimes by a surprisingly long way. Very early in its history the Earth collided with another planet, destroying that other planet and nearly destroying the Earth. The heaviest material from the collision coalesced back into the Earth, while lighter material was thrown further away and became the moon. This event endowed the Earth with a relative abundance of heavier elements, and a strong magnetic field, shielding the surface from harmful solar radiation. Without the collision, the Earth would have been an unsuitable place for complex life to arise and survive. This is why the Earth remains so tectonically active – the heat of the Earth’s core is caused by the decay of heavy radioactive atoms. Earthquakes are a price we must pay for an inhabitable world.
1:10 Abiogenesis
Organic molecules started to form, probably around submarine volcanic vents or shallow pools at the edges of the ocean. As this “organic soup” became more concentrated, self-replicating molecules appeared. This is “abiogenesis” – the beginning of life – and however improbable it might seem, the scientific materialists of the Age of Disjunction assured themselves and everybody else that statistics was surely on its side. “There is nothing special about the Earth”, they said, for they wanted nothing in their cosmology to suggest that our precious living planet could be anything but an irrelevant speck. The precise conditions for abiogenesis might be very common or might be very rare, but since the cosmos is so unimaginably enormous, surely, they insisted, life must be out there somewhere, and probably quite a lot of it. For centuries they searched, and though not the remotest trace of evidence was ever found, the received scientific wisdom always remained that life must surely be abundant in the cosmos. Those who took the evidence at face value and tentatively concluded that the most appropriate explanation for our failure to detect extra-terrestrial life is that there isn’t any, were mocked for their naïve anthropocentric heresy. The silence from the cosmos remains deafening. We now know that though the cosmos is not anthropocentric, as taught by the religions of the Old West, it is biocentric, because it is consciousness-centric. Life had started, and the many-worlds phase of biological evolution began. Those structures best adapted to their environment – starting with molecules that caused a film or membrane to form around themselves – stood the best chance of replicating, so the ecosystem and the self-replicating structures started evolving together. Ecology and evolution went hand in hand right from the start. The self-replicating structures were adapting to the existing ecosystem, but at the same time they were also changing it. All life on Earth has been dynamically connected to all other life ever since. All of it is trying to grow or reproduce. Growth is the natural imperative of all life.
1:11 The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE)
This process of evolution changing ecosystems reached new heights between 2.5 and 2 billion years ago. A type of bacteria evolved which used the energy from sunlight to extract hydrogen from water. This released free oxygen into the oceans for the first time, where it reacted with dissolved iron to produce iron oxide, which precipitated out and fell to the ocean floor. When the iron was exhausted oxygen levels in the oceans started to rise, and it began to dissipate into the atmosphere above. Oxygen is a highly reactive element, so many new substances appeared in the atmosphere, and the methane disappeared. The rising oxygen level was a creeping death sentence for most of the existing life forms, adapted as they were to an oxygen-free world. This was the first mass-extinction. The cause of the first mass-extinction was life itself, rather than something astronomical or geological. Even without external interference, evolution does not always progress in small steps. Sometimes one apparently minor change – in this case a mutation or series of mutations that changed the chemistry of photosynthesis – overturns the entire ecological order. We call this“punctuated equilibrium”– most of the time ecosystems are in a state of relative equilibrium, and evolution progresses in small steps, but sometimes something (living or non-living) comes along and disrupts that equilibrium, resulting in much more rapid and revolutionary evolutionary change.
1:12 The first complex cells
The GOE created a new “blank page” for novel forms of life to emerge. The bacteria that had been the most advanced life forms are basically just a single strand of DNA surrounded by a membrane. Around the time of the GOE something revolutionary happened: groups of these cells got together to form permanent partnerships. The bag containing the DNA became the nucleus, and other primitive organisms became the organelles, including chloroplasts for photosynthesis, and mitochondria for producing energy via the oxidation of sugars. Plentiful oxygen was needed before these much larger and more complex cells could arise. Evolution is driven by co-operation as well as competition: the pre-eukaryotic organisms that became the first eukaryotic organelles could compete better as a motley team than they could as individuals. But in order to make this new arrangement work, the individuals had to stop growing.
1:13 The Ediacaran
Around 540 million years ago life increased in complexity again. The first multi-cellular organisms were simple – sponges and other immobile blobs, stalked fronds and floating jellyfish-like things. We call them the “Ediacaran fauna”, and we aren’t even sure which branch of life they belonged to – perhaps they were proto-animals, or perhaps they belonged to some other branch of life that subsequently died out. Either way, they didn’t do much –the Ediacaran oceans were a tranquil sort of place.
1:14 The Cambrian Explosion
Around 540 million years ago the equilibrium was punctuated once more. In a relatively short space of time, primitive forms of all of the branches of animal life we know today appeared, along with countless others that were destined to be failed evolutionary experiments. Disjunction Age scientists could reach no agreement about the cause of this unique event in evolutionary history.
Proposed explanations included:
- A steep rise in oxygen (another one)
- Anoxia (lack of oxygen) on the Ediacaran sea floor forcing life to move upwards and change
- The appearance of ozone in the upper atmosphere allowing life to move on to land
- The ending of “snowball Earth” conditions enabling new evolutionary pathways
- An increase in calcium content in seawater enabling new body designs
- Mass-extinction of the Ediacaran fauna leaving a blank canvas for new life to evolve
- An increase in size and diversity of planktonic animals
- A sudden increase in symbiotic relationships, allowing more complex organisms to thrive and diversify
- The movement of deep-sea vents changing ocean chemistry and driving life to diversify around new habitats
- Early forms of marine life developing defensive or offensive chemical secretions, triggering an evolutionary arms race
- A radical alteration in Earth’s magnetic field, causing increased radiation exposure, which accelerated mutation rates
- An intense surge in solar radiation from a series of solar flares, impacting Earth’s atmosphere and sparking mutations
- Starbursts in the Milky Way galaxy
- Aliens deliberately introducing new genetic material to kickstart complex life on Earth
- Earth’s position in the solar system briefly resonating with planetary and lunar orbits, causing unusual tides and environmental shifts
- Microbes developed collective intelligence or coordination, leading to novel ways of constructing multicellular organisms
- Intrinsic genomic re-organisation and developmental patterning (i.e. a new sort of “genetic technology”)
- A key evolutionary innovation like vision or better brainpower
- New forms of mobility and therefore a step change in predator-prey relationships
- A complexity threshold.
Disjunction Age scientists did not know what caused the Cambrian Explosion. Most of their guesses were completely wrong, and those that did tilt in the right direction were too vague and missed the key insight. Yes, there was a revolutionary evolutionary innovation, and though it involved both vision and better brainpower, neither of those quite nails it. Yes, it involved a new form of mobility and a major step change in predator-prey relationships, but that wasn’t the elephant in the room either.
The correct answer was staring them in the face all along, but they couldn’t see it, blinded as they were by materialistic groupthink. They already knew they were dealing with the first organisms to behave as conscious animals behave – the first to be animated. But there was no appropriate place for consciousness in their materialistic model of reality, so they had no scientific means of agreeing which sorts of organisms are conscious and which aren’t, or what the biological purpose of consciousness is, and therefore when, why or how it evolved. This was regardless of the fact that the majority of people, themselves included, had no difficulty inintuitively understanding that animals are conscious, and that the other forms of life we know of are not. We do not treat plants or fungi as if they are conscious, but we do treat animals as if they are. Or at least we should. Do we need science to tell us this? Can it tell us this?
The true cause of the Cambrian Explosion was a phase shift in the nature of reality as the primordial superposition collapsed and 0|∞ was embodied in our cosmos for the first time. Reality was now not just noumenal butphenomenal: the cosmos had appeared to the first embodied conscious beings. In just one of the immense array of potential worlds that existed at that time, the entire chain of events that led to the evolution of the first conscious animal was in place.
The entire cosmos had previously functioned as if it was a quantum computer tasked with designing an organism in an ecosystem fit for the initial embodiment of 0/∞. Now the brains of primitive animals began to function in a related way, although on a relatively infinitesimal scale. Not just a new sort of life but a new type of existence had appeared. The result was a great radiation of new forms of animal life, as natural selection got to work on psycho-physical processes that were, at that point, completely novel in our cosmos.
2. Consciousness
2:1 The biological purpose of consciousness
Consciousnessanimates animals. It bestows them with awareness and a will – a capacity to load the quantum dice, at least with respect to what is happening in their own nervous system. A conscious wormcan be simultaneously aware of multiple physically possible futures regarding its own body and its immediate surroundings. The zombie ancestors of the first conscious animals were aware of nothing, even though the teleology of psychegenesis had provided them with almost all of the necessary physical properties. TheQuantum Zeno Effect (QZE) enabled the worm to continuously monitor its environment in a way that earlier, non-conscious organisms could not. It was capable of a state of alertness or focus, “holding” certain perceptions or sensory inputs longer. This allowed it toreact in a new way, to both opportunities and threats. The ability to focus through QZE gave the worm a rudimentary will, enabling it to deliberately maintain attention on critical aspects of its environment so it could choose between different possible actions more effectively.
The worm’s nervous system involved a kind of quantum computation, greatly enhancing its processing power, and allowing the worm to anticipate probable future outcomes of its immediate environment. This gave it a kind of predictive awareness, allowing it to make more strategic decisions. The will associated with consciousness encouraged exploration of its environment, guided by a subjective sense of motivation or desire, driving it to survive in more sophisticated ways.
2:2 The division of the hemispheres
The first conscious animals were the first apex predators, for nothing else in that world was aware. To them, everything was food, and they were food for nothing. However, this situation was not stable. Once animals had this basic metaphysical capacity then many physically possible configurations became relevant in a new way, the most important of which involved the processing of information regarding sensory data, bodily motion, survival and reproduction. Very soon the situation changed, for those first conscious animals were also the most nutritious sort of food in the ocean. This was the starting pistol for an evolutionary arms race between different types of conscious animals. Survival was critically linked to two different types of cognition and awareness – two different ways of paying attention. The first was required to find food – foraging and hunting. This requires close attention to details, in a process largely driven by the animal itself. Think of a bird, scratching around on the forest floor, paying very close attention to anything that moves in the area it has just exposed. The second was to avoid being eaten themselves, and this requires a very different sort of attention – the opposite of close attention to details. It demands a general, de-focused awareness of the whole situation, always on the lookout for anything unusual, especially if it might be a threat or an opportunity. This is a more passive sort of awareness, always paying attention to what is outside itself. It requires an understanding of wholes and context.
These two different ways of attending can conflict. A brain that is good at one of these tasks may not be so good at the other. The tasks of finding food and avoiding being eaten require very different sorts of brain activity and attention, but in order to survive the Cambrian arms race it was necessary to be good at both of them at the same time. It’s no use being a first-class forager if this increases your chance of being eaten yourself. Those early animals were already laterally symmetrical: they had a head at one end, and a left side mirrored by a right side. Many developed laterally symmetrical brains – instead of just a single blob of brain tissue, they had two, with a very limited amount of cross-connection. This allowed one side – the left side – to attend to the details of foraging and hunting, while the other – the right side – attended to the big picture, always trying to avoid predation, and always on the lookout for whatever lies beyond. By the very nature of this arrangement, the left lobe was not interested in the activities of the right. It was only interested in – only aware of – whatever it was paying attention to at the present moment, and had no reason to care what the right lobe was up to. The reverse did not apply, for the right lobe was always interested in everything.
From that moment onwards, for the whole history of animal evolution, most animals retained this divided brain structure. Both ways of paying attention to the world – both ways of thinking and being – were always required, and always will be. There will always be a reason for them to be kept sufficiently separated so as not to impede each other’s optimal functioning. We must never forget what happened when the left hemisphere gained total control.
3. Time and retrocausality
Only the present is fully real. The future comes into focus. The past decays. The further away from the present, the less well-defined both of them are.
The future exists as a landscape of potentialities, some more probable than others, shaped by present intentions and past conditions. The past, meanwhile, fades into abstraction – its details lost, its substance surviving only in traces that influence the present and the future. Causality flows primarily from past to future, but the structure of future possibilities can exert a subtle retrocausal pull on the present, like a field of gravity from unrealised destinies. Consciousness, by attending and intending, can align itself with certain pathways through the sea of futures, collapsing probabilities in ways that may ripple backward as well as forward through time’s fabric. Thus, time is not a rigid arrow, but a dynamic equilibrium between memory, presence, and anticipation – an ongoing negotiation between what has been, what is, and what might yet be...