The questions Alex asked were:
i. Is consciousness evolving?
ii. If it is, does Christianity have anything to do with it?
In a previous post in the four questions about the future of skeptiko thread, I posted this:
One point could be that there may be at least two kinds of consciousness: non-self-reflective consciousness (NSRC), and self-reflective consciousness (SRC). As many of us know, Bernardo Kastrup opines that M@L has NSRC, but not SRC. NSRC is posited to have always existed, and to be fundamental, whereas SRC could be emergent, could arise from what is pre-existent, due to "laws" or latent predispositions/potentials in M@L's NSRC.
It may not be so much that M@L is omnipotent, as that anything it is capable of creating comes to be if it "wants" (a word that belongs only in the realm of SRC, but it's the nearest I can get to the concept) it to be so. There may be things that it is incapable of creating; that it would never "occur to it" to create in the first place. "Creation" in this context is, again, a notion occurring only within SRC. I am always bound by the means available to me for expression of concepts, viz. language.
Necessarily, as SRCs ("souls"), we are limited, can only interact with that which we seem to perceive. If we can't perceive something either directly through our senses or indirectly through instrumentation, then for all practical purposes, it doesn't exist. Maybe sometimes we can change this; maybe sometimes it's not that it doesn't exist, but more that we haven't yet been able to perceive its existence, and as soon as we can, the sphere of our knowledge and potential influence increases somewhat. But we can never go outside this sphere, whatever its ultimate extent might be, because there resides the NSRC of M@L, to which we have no direct access.
We use words like "deception", "evil", and so on. Words arise within SRC, and have a range of meanings influenced by our perceived experiences within it. I posit that such words are insufficient to describe the NSRC of M@L. By our very use of language, we, in effect, unwittingly circumscribe our idea of what M@L might be. Put another way, we project onto M@L our own limitations. We get to very difficult problems about how a good God could have created evil, forgetting that "evil" is a concept within our SRC that might be totally inappropriate within the NSRC of M@L.
Did M@L create "evil"? Did it create "deception"? Or are these things that we have given names to, and which are characteristic only of SRCs?
Maybe more later...
So: is consciousness evolving? Well, first I think one needs to bear in mind the difference between non-self-reflective consciousness (NSRC), which may be what M@L has, and self-reflective consciousness (SRC), which human beings certainly have, and other organisms probably also have, albeit to lesser degrees.
I think that SRC is evolving, in the sense of changing over time, but not necessarily M@L's NSRC: which in turn doesn't necessarily mean that M@L isn't experiencing new things, vicariously, through alters like us. And, of course, it could be a mistake to think of SRC as some kind of advance over NSRC. For a start, M@L is presumably immeasurably more powerful and creative than us, with SRC coming at the expense of severe restriction of our own power and creativity. At the same time such restriction means that we are capable of evolving, or at least changing. In this sense, the universe we perceive, with its inanimate and animate entities, could be viewed as a kind of "thought experiment" that for whatever reason M@L is intensely "interested in" and/or "involved" with.
We can't really grasp the NSRC of M@L. It may have something analogous to will, i.e. an inchoate impulse to create things, among which are beings like us, with SRC. And, what M@L "wills", comes to be in the "physical" world, i.e. the world which is apparent to our perceptions, and is populated by other instances of animate beings with SRC as well as yet other, inanimate creations/thoughts such as stars, galaxies, and so on.
I'm acutely aware that I'm attempting to describe NSRC in ordinary human language, which perforce is how we SRCs have to express ourselves -- hence the scare quotes in the previous paragraphs. At best, any words I might use are mere approximations, and at worst, could be way off the mark, but they're all I've got.
At any rate, it might be true enough to say that in a sense we create the reality we perceive, and our perception is influenced by the particular cultural milieu we inhabit. In prior ages, we were confronted by a universe that must have seemed vast and both beautiful and threatening, but we didn't have as much of the understanding that SRC requires to come to terms with it. So we created our gods and our myths and our religions and eventually our science; and at any particular instant, we couldn't even conceive what would happen in the future, proceeding as if our present understandings and interpretations were the final word on the matter.
We're still proceeding in this manner. Materialists think they've cracked it all, when in fact all we "know" is just our current best guess, and there are doubtless still many surprises in store for us. But to be fair to materialists, plenty of non-materialists also think they've cracked it all. Just read some of the posts here by people who are convinced they know what's
really going on. Sometimes, there's quite wide agreement, but there's also quite a lot of disagreement, so it behoves us to remain sceptical in the best sense of that word, and to avoid expressing ourselves in overly confident terms.
We all have our
models of reality, without seeing reality as it actually is. Why do we prefer some models over others? Perhaps because whichever ones we prefer seem to make most sense to us, to satisfy our particular flavour of SRC. There may be elements of both hard-nosed empiricism and surreptitious (even to ourselves) emotionalism involved in the models we choose. But maybe we make a mistake if we commit ourselves too hard to preferred models. Can we rely on our own experience? Some might argue that we can hardly rely on anything else, but between a phenomenon and its explanation there's always
interpretation, which is heavily influenced by world views -- by preferred models of reality.
Has Christianity changed consciousness? To me, it seems self-evident that it has; I find it hard to see how anyone could argue otherwise. Did the sentiments expressed in the NT originate with Jesus? Quite possibly not, but I don't think that anyone could argue that the NT hasn't had an enormous effect on the consciousness of human beings, quite probably more since the time of Jesus than at any time previously. The Jesus narrative, even if partly mythical, disseminated to a wide audience the "golden rule" (shorthand for Jesus' overall message), even if prior to that the rule was known in some times, places and religions.
Does the widespread adoption of the golden rule constitute a noticeable change in consciousness, evidenced in morality and law? I think it probably does, and it's plain enough to see the effects on societies where it's poorly developed or was never an explicit theme, even today. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, they say. Was Jesus a special person come to bring a new message to humanity? Or was he a man who felt a certain way about the world and found himself in circumstances favourable to the propagation of his message, albeit that he may not have exclusively originated it?
It's interesting to speculate whether changes in collective human consciousness is something permanent and independent of cultural influences. Were some dire catastrophic event to occur that wiped most of us out, would the ethos of the golden rule still be "hard-wired" into some of us, so to speak? Once learned, would it ever be entirely forgotten, or like rats with mazes or sparrows with milk bottle tops, would its morphic field still be in operation in significant numbers of individuals even after generations?
Who can say, and it's not easy to test. Sure, there are riots and lootings in some localised circumstances, but do the majority in Westernised societies ever descend into complete chaos? Is this happening in, say, Venezuela at the moment? Or do the majority of ordinary citizens still employ the golden rule at the interpersonal level? Have individuals become completely self-centred and uncaring about others? Search for "life in Venezuela" on YouTube and make your own judgement. My sense is that many still attempt apply the golden rule. Without that, who can say how much worse things would be?