Emergence

How Did We Become so Unique?

The way most people understand humanity is that we evolved (the rat-like Purgatorius > Lucy > homo sapiens), we built cities, and here we are. What is commonly mis-understood is just how unbelieveably recent all of this is.

History of Earth

When I took freshman geology at university, we were given the following analogy (paraphrasing from memory here): if the history of earth is an entire calendar year, humanity only appeared the last second of the year. This was stunning to me, because it’s counter-intuitive. Everyone we’ve ever met, we think of as being like us. Everything we’ve read about in history books, must be somewhat like us. Common sense would say that if things move as slowly as geology and evolution suggests, humans like us must’ve been around for an extremely long time.

Later I came across some statistic saying something to the effect that modern humans have existed for 200,000 years. This made sense to me, as that is a huge number, and I could believe it that it took this long for humans in our current form to develop. This led to another question for me—if people have been around for 200,000 years, what were we doing all that time? Why all the hunting and gathering for so long? Why not build cities 200,000 years ago? The answer is that the climate stabilized about 12,000 years ago. So for 95% of modern humanity (taking those humans of 200,000 years ago to have fully developed brains similar to ours), we were hunting and gathering. No cities, because the climate didn’t allow for farming.

The next question I had—if the weather stabilized 12,000 years ago, why didn’t we just get right to building cities? Why don’t we have remnants of 12,000 year old cities? Why not 12,000 year old religions? Well, I guess we did have civilization around 10,000 years ago, it was just that the population was much smaller, and we were starting from nothing, so those early remnants just aren’t around anymore.

OK, so granted, there were civilizations around 10,000 years ago. What about religion though? Isn’t that even older than cities?

Religion as we know it is Not Old

There’s this concept floating around that religion was something that ignorant people did, who had no concept of why things happened, and since we were at the mercy of weather and disease, people invented religion as a way to cope with sickness, injury, starvation, and death. There are distinctly two types of religions: (1) the communal, ritual, land-centered religions of basically everyone on earth going back tens of thousands of years, and (2) the individualized religion. What we know today as “religion” is an indivualized form of religion developed around 2500 years ago: Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Jainism, Upanishadic Hinduism, Greek philosophy, Confucianism, Daoism. This was the Axial Age.

Indidivual Religion was Born out of and was a response to, Consciousness

When atheists dismiss “religion” out of hand, they are confusing the communal religion (which really is ancient and common amongst all people), and the individualized religion which is 2500 years old. Religion was born as a response to our newly found consciousness. Although humans today are biologically the same as humans 200,000 years ago, we only developed the modern form of consciousness we have 2500 years ago. Prior to that, humans were conscious (symbolic thought, language, planning, myth, ritual, social complexity), but they lacked the introspective selfhood that we have today.

That is very difficult to comprehend, at least for me. We assume that humans are old, because we think “the Egyptians and ancient cave paintings go way back, so humans are very old”, but those people were a very different type of people than we are today, in that they simply did not have the introspective view of the self. It simply didn’t exist among anyone 10,000 years ago, much less 200,000 years ago. These older humans did not have consciousness as what we think consciousness is.

Ultimately, the view must be that modern consciousness (introspective selfhood), liminality, and individual religion are 2500 years old. The religions and philosophies that developed weren’t part of some continuous process, but were a massive fundamental shift in how humans thought before (myth, language, trial focus) and into how we think today (individual personhood). All of the concepts of personal responsibility and individual rights, were created only 2500 years ago.

Jesus, the Hebrew prophets, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Socrates—all of them are expressions of a new cognitive capacity that had only recently emerged in the human species.

Forms & Liminality

All discussion on forms, consciousness, and liminality are only looking at this period of the last 2500 years ago. I don’t believe that anyone prior to this was experiencing the world that we experience today in the same way.