Oh Brain, From Whence Came Thee?

The human brain….

From whence came this magnificent fleshy processor and surveyor of itself, the earth, seas, skies, and outer space? What follows is the textbook origin narrative (in my own brusque form): First came a big bang where the universe expanded rapidly from a small but massive central point. Afterward, through various physical laws, still with us today, the sun and its planets in their orbits formed. As the Earth formed, various complex chemical reactions occurred (lightening might have played a part) with simple single-celled life resulting. Then, over millions of years, a formative force called natural selection took hold and shaped all the various forms of life currently upon the earth – including our own human form and its brain. That's it in a nutshell.

What is this “natural selection” that has accomplished so much – that has accomplished us? It is to a large degree an arbitrary process. With blind consistency it rewards or punishes certain biological traits based on how they function within a specific environment. Our human brain, according to its own calculations, has been formed by this quasi-arbitrary process over a slew of years: Our distant biological ancestors had small, less-developed brains. Our relatively recent -- more ape-like -- ancestors had larger, more complex brains, but even these were not as complex and developed as our current cranial endowment courtesy of natural selection.

So given this long chain of quasi-arbitrary biological events how should we view the reach and accuracy of our own thought processes? What of these biochemical emanations from the QUASAB (Quasi-arbitrary Super-ape Brain) we call thoughts?

The fact that the embodied quasab (pronounced like “quasar” but for the “b” sound at the end) has engineered such feats as landing spacecraft on comets and other planets is amazing given the putative blindness of natural selection. It is as though the seed of some kind of demigodhood was placed in our planet’s biological spawn. Yet this improbable quasab – despite its formidable achievements – would, by virtue of its accidental origins, be prone to a certain epistemological lopsidedness and any number of blind spots that could be augmented as well as mitigated by the use of technological enhancements. The purely agnostic reading of things, which has given us the incredible story of the quasab developing to the point where humans now speak confidently of their own biological origins (through analysis of the fossil record, comparative biology, DNA analysis, etc.) still leaves a great deal of room for respecting all that has not been perceived, known, and discovered by the empiricism of the quasab. After all, there is contradiction in humans speaking confidently of the origins of their quasab since the orderings, proofs, and reasons that form the basis of the origin story are only quasabic orderings, proofs, and reasons.

Given their own ideas of what the human brain is, devoted adherents to the Cult of ChuB (see definition in my previous post) show a surprising lack of sophistication when it comes to the simple skepticism they apply toward all that does not seem reasonable to the contemporary thought patterns of an organ in which they place an irrational degree of faith. Why so many of our learned minds never reach the second degree of skepticism -- where the arbitrary reach of contemporary doubt is itself placed in doubt and seen as an artificial limitation to the exploration of human existence -- is a sad mystery. When skepticism turns on itself, the mind and soul are free to open to the often wild and colorful range of possibility waiting on the other side of that vital threshold.