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.
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Human consciousness, whether you take a materialist, idealist, spiritual, theistic, or transcendentalist, position on it?s the nature and origins, is obviously our species core capability. Without awareness of our own existence nothing can be said. The other primary component of individuality is the boundaries that make entities appear and function as a distinct living form of some kind. These boundaries are not solid and absolute, they are semi-permeable.
Without awareness and the intuitive knowledge that we are aware, the existence of any individual living entity is meaningless. The boundaries that form human individuality are semi-permeable allowing for the flow of shared substance into and out of the individual.
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Human beings are conscious individuals. Awareness of individuality gives rise to questions about the nature of human existence. How individual are we? If we examine our internal subjective experience of thoughts, feelings, and sensory perception we realize that we are aware of them but that others around us are not aware of our inner experience in the same way that we are. When we examine our actions we realize that we alone can initiate movement or speech even though we do not know exactly how we do it. When a person is born or when a person dies it appears as if that event is strictly personal, that individual alone is born and dies. On the level of our experience it is impossible to argue away the fact of our individuality.
 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.
Our evolutionary split from our predecessor species resulted in creatures that walked on two feet, had larger brains, and a different form of social organization, compared to primates. These changes hold the secret of our ability to develop extra-biological power and the type of social structures that have directed the use of that power as it has developed. Our heads and brains became larger in proportion to our bodies than our primate forebears and the average size difference between males and females declined from 50% to 15%. This changed our form of social organization to a male female pair bonding form as opposed to a the typical primate model of a primary male hierarchy, with little interaction between male and female except to mate, and a separate female hierarchy that is subjugated to the male hierarchy.
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Human consciousness, whether you take a materialist, idealist, spiritual, theistic, or transcendentalist, position on it?s nature and origins, is clearly our species core capability. Without awareness of our own existence nothing can be said. The other primary component of individuality is the boundaries that make entities appear and function as a distinct living form of some kind. These boundaries are not solid and absolute, they are semi-permeable. Without awareness and the intuitive knowledge that we are aware, the existence of any individual living entity, made real via semi permeable boundaries, is meaningless. As a self-aware entity I can speculate about the existence of individual life without awareness but my speculation is irrelevant to developing a description of human existence because human beings are self-aware. Consciousness, awareness that we are aware, is for us the key factor that makes meaningful individuality possible. Consciousness is the primary factor in all human behavior and is in fact so omnipresent that we frequently ignore it in favor of concentration on the objects of awareness. No experience can be separated from the basic condition that awareness of it is a precondition for its meaningful existence. Objectivity, in the sense of knowledge of a pure existence of the thing in its self entirely apart from consciousness, does not exist for human beings. All reality, from the human point of view, is subject / object reality. Science depends on observation, all relationships depend on awareness of self and other, business depends on choice and behavior which in turn depend on the existence of awareness as a precondition. Without awareness of our selves as individuals no human pursuit that has any meaning would exist, because without awareness knowledge of individuality can not arise.
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How individual or alone are we? One of the primary signals that we are separate and alone is the fact that we have physical boundaries like skin and cell walls. How alone is a cell? It has a boundary that separates it from every other cell in the body but cell membranes are permeable, they let some things into the cell from outside the cell, and they allow some things to leave the cell through the cell wall. There is water inside the cell membrane and water outside the cell membrane, the only differentiation relative to the water is the cell membrane. The structures that form on the inside of the cell wall also use and participate in the flow of the water across the semi-permeable membrane of the cell wall.
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The nerve cell body has extensions called axons and dendrites. This capability enables the cell to bring information to it from other cells and transmit information to the other cells with which it has made a connection. In the macro human sense we function in these two ways and we are conscious our own existence and functioning. We could call this ability the capability of the synapse, the tiny space between the end of a dendrite or axon and the other cell it is exchanging information with. It is the space between that allows consciousness which allows choice. The central nervous system uses the water in the cell and outside of the cell and its Semi-permeable membranes to generate an electrical charge. That charge travels along the axon to dendrite provide routes for intercommunication within the brain interconnecting with other cells. The spinal cord interconnects the entire body through the afferent and efferent nerves. The circulatory system also connects the entire body via water and cells of various types. Connective tissue connects the various individual parts of the body together.
On the external boundary of the individual defined by skin, lung, digestive, olfactory, and visual cells the mouth, gut and anus connect the individual to water and food that becomes the contents of the cells within their membranes. The lungs connect the individual to the environment through air and the process of respiration. Air connects to the whole individual via the transformation of air into oxygen at the alveoli and the marvelous transport of water in the blood through the cell wall of the red blood cell. Air continuously connects the individual to the environment, each other, and other life forms.
Each individual is then also interconnected physically with each every other individual through atmosphere, water, soil, sunlight, plant and animal life. So even on the physical level of our existence we are clearly separate independent entities and we are so interconnected with each other and everything around us that we are a whole process of life that is fully shared and not individual in the exclusive sense at all.
Even at the level of the smallest structures that make up our universe distinctions between objects don't imply separation in an absolute sense. In quantum mechanics the principal called the quantum mechanics of a proper open system states, ?There is no such thing as an isolated system, and all systems are open systems that experience varying degrees of interaction through their shared zero-flux surfaces.? This is also true of human beings at the macro level, there is no such thing as an isolated individual person, cell, or living entity of any kind.
Extra-biological force is wholly beyond the bounds of the biological individual and therefore can not be passed via sexual reproduction to offspring then becoming part of the process of evolution of our species. This makes extra-biological power a public good passed on through cultural means. Culturally we have related to extra-biological power as if it were privately held, like the large teeth and good reflexes of an alpha male in a troop of Chimpanzees, and passed to the offspring of the well endowed. Capitalism applies the reproductive impulse to our cultural systems that manage extra-biological power and that will have to change if we are to collectively survive our creation of extra-biological power.
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Wednesday, 24 December 2008 14:47 | 
Written by Bob Guyer | 