The dominant cultural influences of our times, Christianity, Science, and Capitalism, define a range of human identity that leaves us collectively with a vision of personhood as being separate from our deeper experience of spirituality in religious terms, being an objective material observer of experience in scientific terms, and being a private engine of material acquisition in an industrially powered social economy of monetized exchange. This leads to a sense of self as irreducibly disconnected and separate from the living natural world and the subjective world of deep experience out of which religious and spiritual systems emerge. Social and political change advocacy, and eastern spiritual thought, often focuses on opposition to the sense of self as hyper individual and argue for non-individual or collective definition and experience of self as an alternative. I do not see this competition as winnable by either side of the debate and thought it would be valuable to validate the reality of both ways of relating to self and world and integrate them in a framework of philosophical precepts.

In this exercise I will start with defining objects, later working back to awareness of objects, then to shared awareness and meaning in a field of interrelated objects, and finally to an exploration of the nature of human consciousness, in a way that provides a foundation for development of a way to bridge the gap between humanity and nature. 

It is imperative, now that high levels of extra-biological power are a persistent feature of human life, to move our social organization, and our systems that express our social organization, farther away from the primate (rigid, male centric, violence ordered, social hierarchy), and more toward the male/female pair bonding form of social organization created through our evolutionary split from the primate species.

As our collective and individual ability to generate and use extra-biological force has expanded far beyond our biological boundaries yet we still culturally conceive of the purpose of this boundary transcending force as serving primarily an exclusively private individual purpose. I propose that we must develop a purpose that matches our degree of extra-biological forcefulness, existence as part of the biological life of this planet, and the fact that we are conscious and that the boundaries forming our sense of individuality are semi-permeable. I propose a starting point for development of a human purpose as being to expand the scope of human consciousness and, to the degree that extra-biological force exceeds human biological bounds, apply that force for benefit of the entire body of life.

With the onset of freedom and power moral responsibility for the effects of choices arises.

Freedom, the awareness of alternatives, and power, the ability to choose among alternatives and act by consciously applying energy to the chosen course of action gives rise to moral responsibility. Another choice could have been made; a different amount of energy could have been applied to the choice taken. The effects of the action taken on the scope of consciousness of the acting individual and others affected by the individual’s action and the effect on the entire body of life, if extra-biological force is used, are the measure of how the action contributes or subtracts from the human purpose.

All behavior can be judged relative to the purpose of expanding the scope of consciousness in the service of life. Imagine a scale that has a zero as a neutral point where an action is neither positive or negative in it's effect, negative 10 is the most negative point on the scale, positive 10 is the most positive point on the scale. Individual actions that effect single individuals would occupy the middle range of the scale from 0 to 3.3 in either a negative or positive direction, group action would range out to the 6.6 range of the scale, and systems would range all the way out to 10 on either side of the scale.

With the advent and then the acceleration of extra-biological power availability to humans previous privacy dynamics should be revised. The dynamic of people, institutions, and systems being able to invade the privacy of others has been, and currently is, a feature of aggregation of social power. When extra-biological power is added to that social dynamic the inequities of the fact that the functional ability to achieve privacy, prevention of unwanted intrusion across a semi-permeable boundary from the outside of that boundary, has increased with the acquisition of power. Now that extra-biological power extends far beyond the scope of the individual privacy needs to be viewed as modifiable in inverse relationship to the possession of power. We should develop systems, political, legal, social, and economic, that implement this principal.

Extra-biological power exceeds the biological boundaries of a person. As extra-biological power increases it becomes less private because it extends further beyond the biological boundary of the originating source.

Consciousness, extra-biological power, and inseparable biological existence are the primary facts of modern human life. Identity and human systems need to adapt to the fact of extra-biological force and develop systems to manage the effects of extra-biological power that exceed the bounds of our biological self. The following will describe the rational, and some principals, for the development of a new governmental system that takes these three primary facts into account. I will refer to this new system as Bio-democracy.

Once a biological species achieves self-consciousness and is able to create power they can control and direct that exists outside their inherent biological capacities, they must develop an identity and organizing systems that enable them to use that power as a generative conscious trans-species force in nature. To the degree that the extra-biological force effects the living world, which includes humans, the concept of the governed and the constituents of a governing system must expand proportionally. If such conceptual and operational expansion does not occur extra-biological force will be used as if it is a private genetic based characteristic that is an adaptation to the environment, like faster reflexes or larger teeth, which can be passed through reproduction and used to compete for our species niche within our eco system. The error in this way if looking at the power we produce does not have a large environmental impact at low levels of extra-biological power but is magnified by increases in power as it accelerates. Human industrial activity induced Global climate change is one of the most obvious signs that our level of extra-biological power production and how we use it has become an environmental force and not a private biological possession.

Given that our current economic and political systems have been developed exclusively in response to human social needs a systematic reorientation to take human continuity with the ecosystem into account will seem to be a radical departure from the norm. In this case the norm is the problem because it has not adapted to the reality of our situation. In our public discourse about the issue one of the dominant themes is the absence of widespread serious discussion about changing our economic system. Herman Daly, the environmental economist, is considered far outside the mainstream of modern economic thought because he asserts that the economy functions within the environment while traditional economic thought sees the environment as a throughput of the economy.

Given all the problems we face environmentally and socially what do we want the future to look like? What is your vision of a positive future?

Let yourself imagine what we could be and share that vision in the comments section below.