Mind Shadows Home      Tielhard de Chardin, Noogenesis, No-Self, & Implications For An Intelligent Universe

A Jesuit priest born the year before Darwin's death, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin sought the Vatican's approval for his manuscripts, but never got it. His superiors continually denied permission for their release, believing that his theories would not accord with Church doctrine. Published posthumously in 1955 as The Phenomenon of Man, the book assembles his ideas and is based on his work as both a philosopher and paleontologist. His ideas matured in the 1940s while he was in China studying the fossil remains of Peking Man.

In short time his book met with praise and detraction. Its detractors accused Tielhard of imposing teleology, some end goal, on biology and evolution. His phrase for it was the Omega Point. They claimed that he had imported his religious views into science. In his noogenesis, or the origin of human reflective thought, his supporters found evidence that human history cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.

Tielhard de Chardin premises his theory on discontinuity, which cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. He posits a few key transition points when radical changes occurred in evolution, and likens them to water, first luke warm, then brought to a boil. Its state undergoes a discrete alteration, from water, a liquid, to steam, a gas with properties wholly different.

Similarly, he finds major transitions on a grand scale, the appearance of matter, the formation of Earth, the origin of cells, and the rise of reflective thought. Central to his argument is that, with each emergence, the old rules became subsumed under the new. The new rules became preeminent in the evolutionary pattern.

De Chardin wrote of "an explosion pulverizing a primitive quasi-atom . . . then a swarming of elementary corpuscles." Matter thus moves to greater complexity. This is somewhat akin to the Big Bang Theory, which was not in vogue during the 1940s, although de Chardin provides a kind of preview.

After slow eons, life emerged as something wholly, cataclysmically, new. Among his scientific peers today, de Chardin would find few dissenters in this.

De Chardin posits another discontinuity. From the earliest unicellular organisms to mammals, he sees a direction, not random but pointed at the origin of man. With this creature comes noogenesis, reflective thought, a major departure.

If he is right, then sociobiologists are wrong. They maintain that human beings can be studied by finding parallels between people and animals. Animal societies can help explain human societies. Animal ethology and human ethology are not distinctly different for purposes of tracing behavior origins, say most sociobiologists.

But reflective thought is an emergent property and exhibits features unique to people, not chimpanzees. De Chardin would insist that a real discontinuity in programming exists between primates and humans.

The essential question here, then, bears upon Tielhard de Chardin's key concept of noogenesis (occurring in what he calls the noosphere).

Of those who have studied him, many see the central questions as these--Is reflective thought a discontinuity? Or does it evolve out of an earlier order? I see another question as more important, which nobody has addressed.

Rather, one must ask, Just what is reflection? Examination of consciousnesss reveals that any "self-reflected" thought is not generated by a self. It happens and a self arises to take ownership of the thought after the fact. Nobody reflects. Put it this way, if you want--reflecting reflects. There is only the illusion that somebody does so. Scotsman David Hume was one of the first Westerners to point this out, although a history of testimony begins in the East before Buddha. Hume and others have observed that no personal identity underlies perceptions that come and go. They are like images on a movie screen, a series of single pictures to which smoothness, a sense of continuity, is imparted. *

Reflective thought is a naturally occuring phenomenon. Just as the eye incessantly moves although it generates a sense of stability, so does the mind, and it fosters a sense of self. The idea of a self that reflects is an epiphenomenon to help explain understandings which come as a result of thought.

Reflective thought may or may not be a substantial discontinuity, but it does not bring man closer to the angels, as the good priest would like it to have done.

Tielhard de Chardin never considered self as without evidence. If he had, he would still have been faced with another question, one that can redeemed by mystery, although not of his orthodox kind. The question he could have posed, is this--Whence this understanding? How is it, for example, that so many people throughout history can recognize the absence of self? Clearly, understanding understands, if we must phrase the situation so that a process be operated upon.

However we phrase the issue, we must confront the view that the universe itself is intelligent and not the blind thing of the materialists. When the sense of self is seen through as an arising and falling away, understanding remains.

On this, the materialists will eventually have to cede to Tieldhard de Chardin--matter provides insufficient explanation for our world. Consciousness can only do so. Quantum physicists can no longer accept the materialist explanation, except as a handy way to communicate among colleagues. They know that the weirdness of their experiments can not be explained by a materialist perspective.

* (See various articles. As examples, for discussion of no-self, see Shakey, Beavers, & Cartesian Theater, 12 February 2004, Cartesian Anxiety: Francisco Varela & The Emergent Self, 6 January 2004 and Where Are You?, 8 March 2004. For sense of control, see Benjamin Libet and Free Won't, 15 March 2003, and Benjamin Libet's experiments in Looking For Self, 8 November 2003. For the question of consciousness itself, see Looking For Reality: John Bell & Alain Aspect, 10 November 2003, Borderland: Penrose & Brain Wave Function Collapse, 23 January 2004, John Wheeler & Delayed Choice, 11 January 2004. For suggestions of consciousness origins see Organic & Inorganic, 21 January 2004, as well as One Life & DNA, 10 January 2004. For time, see Déjà Vu & Physicist Julian Barbour, 13 January, and Peter Lynds & Time, 20 November 2003. John Wheeler & Delayed Choice, mentioned above, also addresses time.)

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Mind Shadows Home      Benjamin Libet & Free Won't

(An updated, clearer article can be found be clicking here.)

Hold out your arm. Look at it. Now bend your hand at the wrist. Do it whenever you want. Do it a few times.

How did this process begin? Was it you? Was it these words?

In 1985, neurosscientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment similar to this. (See Free Will & Benjamin Libet's Experiments, 8 November 2003.)

With electrodes connected to their wrists and scalps, his subjects had brain waves recorded as they watched a clock with a spot revolving faster than a second hand. Like you, they were told to flex their wrists spontaneously. They were also told to note the spot's position at the time they decided to do so. They stated where they saw it, and Libet correlated their observations with data recorded by electrodes at wrist and scalp.

Libet measured three factors: the action's beginning, the moment of decision, and the Readiness Potential, which began a certain brain wave pattern. This pattern involves the brain's plans to carry out an action.

Okay, so what did he find out? This. The action was recorded as taking place before the decision to act.

Libet was surprised. He expected a different sequence, this one: first, the decision to act, then the planning stage, otherwise known as Readiness Potential, followed by the action. Instead, the Readiness Potential preceded the decision. No decision caused the brain to get ready to act. The brain got ready, then gave the appearance that a decision was made.

The sense of decision was rather like a hood ornament over a truck engine, symbolic rather than instrumental. Libet found one, Readiness Potential, two, decision, three, action. The Readiness Potential led to the action, with the decision to act as an impression after the fact.

In other words, while his subjects thought they were deciding, they actually saw an internal replay of a decision that had already occurred. They did not initiate an action but thought they had. They thought their decision had caused the action.

Libet found that his subjects apparently didn't have free will, but instead, a kind of free won't. That is, he told them that they could veto an action. Instead of flexing a wrist, they could stop the movement. He discovered an action could be vetoed, but the subjects only had one tenth second (100 milliseconds) to do so. In short, they could not initiate an action and could only overrule any impulse if they were alert and acted instantly. This is reminiscent of Zen teachings about alertness as the road to freedom. (See the Zen parable, "Attention means attention," in Ramesh Balsekar's Inconsistencies, 10 March 2004.)

(Of this experiment, and its implications, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett* is reputed to have said "I want more freedom than that." *(Freedom Evolves, Elbow Room, Consciousness Explained, and other books.) In short, this does not mean he refuses to accept the facts but believes that they can be interpreted differently.)

Now a question. Where is the self that seems to make all the decisions?

Time is out of joint for us. Another Libet experiment, in 1981, revealed that brain stimulation induces conscious sensory impressions, but only one half second after steady stimulation. In other words, consciousness builds over time. It lags behind events and only later corrects the delay by making us think that awareness occurred before the stimulus. (Our brains are masters of deception. See Gorillas & Inattentional Blindness, 13 March 2004.)

During meditation or other introspection, one looks steadily into his experience and finds nothing that lasts, only ever-changing impressions, thoughts, sensations, without separation between observer and observed.

Scottish philosopher David Hume said that whenever he delved within he found only perceptions--heat, cold, pain, pleasure--and from this concluded that the self was nothing but a bundle of perceptions. True, but beyond them, a perceiver remains as distinct from the sense of self, and it cannot be explained by that which it perceives. (See Perception, 8 December 2003.)

So do you make decisions? How do you know? If you believe so, find your beliefs and the self who believes them.

(Also see Wheeler and Delayed Choice, 11 January 2004; Penrose & Brain Wave Function Collapse, 23 January 2004; Free Will: Goswami, Balsekar, Libet, 28 December 2003, Daniel Dennett & Compatibilist Volition, 15 December 2003, Daniel Wegner & Free Will, 12 December 2003, Two Sages & A Taoist, 9 January 2004, Losing Control, 9 December 2003; Thought Experiment: Where Are You?, 8 March 2004; Brain in A Vat, 20 November 2003.)

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Mind Shadows Home      Beyond Science

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water, and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes--how shall I negate this world whose power I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. . . . What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on the troubled heart teach me much more.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942

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Mind Shadows       A Thought Experiment: Where Are You?

Where are you? Most people say that they are behind the eyes. Blind people often feel themselves at their finger tips when reading Braille, or at the handle of their cane when walking. Sometimes people feel themselves at the edge of a car as they almost have an accident with a passing vehicle.

But where are you? Plausibly, scientifically, you reside in your central nervous system, your brain. Electrodes attached to its different areas can stimulate various memories, feelings, and movements.

The question remains, though.

As part of a thought experiment originally proposed by Daniel Dennett, assume that your brain has been removed from your skull and placed in a vat of chemicals that nurture it. Your body has total, unimpaired ability to move about, although minus your brain. Instead, in your cranium is a transmitter that sends sights, sounds, touches, and scents, back to the brain. While your body roams freely, your brain remains in the vat, experiencing whatever the body encounters.

Where would you locate yourself? Most people would say they would believe themselves not in the vat but wherever their body goes. They would still feel that they lived somewhere behind the eyes. Only a transmitter is located there.*

So where, then, is the self, this seemingly basic element that everybody senses as present, and discusses as if it is real? What about all the words referring to it--I, you, him, or her?

We feel that we are a central observer, but wherever we look we don't find him or her. We are the teller of our tale. We have a narrator, so we believe, and this narration shapes our lives. Where is the narrator?

If we cannot find the teller, then what about the tale? We have memories and hopes. We locate ourselves in space and time. Still, without a teller, where is the tale?

In quantum physics, evidence mounts to indicate that consciousness is non-local. This would not surprise a Ramana Maharshi or a Dogen Zenzi. (For an article on non-local consciousness, see John Bell's Inequality Theorem and Alain Aspect's experiments, in Looking For Reality, 10 November 2003.)

Even non-local consciousness does not fully explain the fact that whenever we look for the self we cannot find it.