A Little Human's View: The Truth of Existence, True Values and The Necessity of Creating a Healthy Human Culture

A Little Human’s View

The Truth of Existence, True Values and The Necessity of Creating a Healthy Human Culture

Little Human

Copyright © 2017 Little Human

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This book is for all of us

Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Notes

Scientists and scholars

Dates

Italics

References

Origins

The universe and the earth

Life on earth

Human origin

Human prehistory

The Stone Age

The Bronze Age

The Iron Age

History

How We Know

Knowing

Perception and conception

Learning

Creativity

Imagination

Ignorance

Impediments to learning

Absolute

Religion

Spirit

Gods

Creation myths

Religion and human physiology

Religion, the natural environment and human skills

Religion and human psychology and behaviour

Religion and human society

Criticism of Religion

Prayer

Religious leaders

Religion and language

Revelation

Identifying with religion

Schisms in religions

Religion and imperialism

Religion endorsing cultural norms and imposing social hierarchy

The Absolute

Spirituality

Is religion valuable?

Where We Are Now

Damage to the ecology of the planet

The struggle for individual survival

Psychological stresses, psychological abuse, cruelty and violence between people

Injustice

Conflict

World-Views

Elements of a Healthy World-View

Being subject to change

Valuing truthfulness

Ethical behaviour

Valuing healthy and creative human behaviour and action

Time

Matter and mind

Ecology

Ecosystem

Trophic Level

Food Chain

Ecological pyramid of productivity

Cycles in nature

The carbon cycle

Carbon and climate change

Energy flow

Creating a Healthy Human Culture

Being subject to change

Valuing truthfulness

Ethical behaviour

Valuing healthy and creative human behaviour and action

Talking together

The earth and human security

Ending

Death

Epilogue

The truth of existence, true values and the necessity of creating a healthy human culture

Prologue

Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists!

This rhetorical question is what I was able to put into words following a profound experience that happened to me some years ago. I expect that many people alive now and throughout the ages have had similar experiences. In this prologue, I am inviting you, the reader of this book, to consider with me and to participate in an inquiry into the significance of this profound experience. You too – if you have not done so already – may also come to perceive that Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists!

The context – the things I had been thinking about – preceding my particular experience was the actuality and vastness of the universe. The observable universe has a diameter of about 880 trillion trillion kilometres (in scientific notation, 8.8 x 10²⁶ kilometres). Also, the universe is estimated to contain about 300 billion trillion stars (3 x 10²³ stars), the majority of which are in about 170 billion galaxies. And the age of the universe has been calculated to be about 13.798 billion years old. My thinking about the universe included all of the complex matter that exists, from the many chemical elements all the way to the complex living creatures and us, human beings. I was contemplating the whole of existence.

I had been aware of the vastness of the universe since my school days, but it was not until I had the experience in adulthood that I realised or perceived (saw with my mind, understood) that Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! This perception was in profound contrast with the possibility that existence could have not existed. To be very clear here, there is the extraordinariness of the countless particulars of existence, such as the amazing variety, complexity, ingenuity, beauty and activity of all plant and animal life on earth. However, my experience of Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! was not a perception concerning the particulars of existence – it was a perception that there is such a thing as existence at all.

This perception, it seems to me, goes beyond the questions and ideas that cosmologists (scientists who study the universe as a whole) think about. Questions such as: how was the observable universe created? Was there an initial Big Bang (the current best explanation for the beginning of the universe)? Are there multiple universes in existence simultaneously (another theory at present)? And can the universe be explained by string theory or by the causal fermion system? All these are ideas or theories, among many, that cosmologists have about the generation, structure and evolution of the universe, which may prove to be correct or not. Scientists are even likely to discover more subtle kinds of matter and energy in the future, but the statement I made goes beyond any of these or any future scientific explanations. I would venture to suggest that Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! can be perceived by most human beings now anywhere in the world and will be able to be perceived in the future for as long as human beings exist.

As well as Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! being a perception beyond scientific physical theories of the universe, it is also, I suggest, a perception beyond religious ideas and beliefs. The reason for this is that it is not a perception revealing the existence of spirits and deities (gods); it doesn’t indicate the origins of existence; it doesn’t directly suggest a guide to human behaviour; nor does it provide a narrative about the end of existence (a feature of some religions, technically known as eschatology). Even in the unlikely event, according to my understanding, that gods or a single god do exist, a person could still have the perception Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists!

Thus, it makes no difference whether the universe is infinitely vast and complex and whether there is a god or not, or whether the universe as we know it will cease to exist, a person can still wonder Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! Moreover, although my particular experience came about following my reflection on what I knew of the universe, it is likely that other people could have similar experiences without knowing how vast the universe actually is. This means that the perception Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! would have been available to human beings for many thousands of years through reflection on the world they could perceive.

Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! is a truly profound perception.

It is a deep understanding or insight about existence – it is about a human being, or for that matter any other kind of being, becoming conscious of existence as a whole.

In addition to Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! being a deep insight, it was also an emotional experience for me. This is not to say that I experienced some wild ecstasy, fainting episode, tearfulness or agitation. The only way I can think of describing it is that it was some sort of profound feeling unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I wouldn’t describe the feeling, as some might be tempted to, as awesome – this word is overused now, and the feeling had no element of fear, contrary to what the word originally implied. Nevertheless, it was an exceptionally strange, intense and unusual feeling.

I reason that this feeling was caused by the functioning of my brain in a similar way to how some experiences and thoughts we have produce feelings of happiness, while other experiences and thoughts can leave us feeling sad. In this case, the perception must have been deeply meaningful to me – hence the powerful feeling. Interestingly, although I still remember having the perception Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists!, I no longer experience the same feeling. I understand the significance of the perception, but the profound feeling does not reoccur. Again, I suppose, the loss of feeling is a consequence of how the human brain works: there was an intense feeling at first caused by a profound experience, but the feeling faded over time. To me, this suggests that it is probably necessary for the effective functioning of our brains, and thus necessary for the sanity of our minds, for us not to be experiencing such intense feelings all of the time – otherwise, we might not be able to attend to both the everyday and the exceptional tasks that we need to in order to be able to live.

What is the significance and relevance of the perception Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists!? I think there may be several significant points. First of all, I would say that the perception is undeniably true. Although we routinely perceive a multitude of things as we go about our daily lives, some of what we perceive and come to believe may be true, while other perceptions and beliefs may be false. Perhaps uniquely, the perception Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! is unambiguously, wholly and universally true – existence does exist and the fact that it does is remarkable (finding an adequate adjective to characterise existence as a whole is not easy!). Thus, if we are able to perceive the enormity of the fact that existence does indeed exist, we are perceiving truthfully.

Perceiving truthfully is a deeply valuable human ability.

As a second point, what are the consequences, if any, for a person who perceives that Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists!? Of course, it matters whether a person actually has this experience and has not just read or heard about it – a person needs to perceive the depth of this insight for themselves for it to have any significance. So, you may ask, did the experience affect me in any significant way? In all honesty, I don’t think it did, although it was consistent with my understanding at that time that I was a perceiving, thinking, feeling and active human being trying to live morally within a finite lifespan and sharing my life with other people, with other creatures and with the earth. Thus, despite this being a profound perception, I and everybody else are faced with living and making a living in the wide variety of circumstances we find ourselves in. Moreover, our brains/minds are under the influence of other perceptions, ideas, feelings, commitments, education, experiences and people – and, indeed, we are influenced by our own internal physiology, the workings of our bodies.

Nevertheless, many years after having this experience, it occurred to me – while writing this book – that perhaps I had missed something vital. Could the experience potentially be much more valuable than it first appeared to me? Could it be an illuminating, healthy and inspiring perception, in striking contrast to the disorder in human affairs, in contrast to our delusions and in contrast to human injustice, negligence, corruption, conflicts, cruelty and violence?

In the context of Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists!, it feels like it makes no sense for human beings to behave and to live in a disorderly way.

Indeed, contrary to what we may sometimes think, this cannot mean that existence is meaningless. Rather, in the context of the extraordinariness of existence, surely we should take care to value what is truly worthwhile, what is truly meaningful.

Therefore, a third and perhaps more important significance of the perception Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! is what it could do for human culture as a whole and what consequence it might have for life on earth. It seems to me that the value of the insight is that it can be perceived and experienced by any person regardless of their culture. It does not contradict any scientific theory, political ideology, cultural tradition or religious belief. Furthermore, Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! is not an esoteric experience only available to those of a mystical persuasion, but an experience potentially common to all human beings.

Could this perception, a profound levelling experience, be an overarching basis for a consensus for good relations between human beings and between our cultures?

I would say that potentially it could, but equally that it could not.

The reason why I suggest that it may not is that our brains/minds, as already mentioned, are often influenced by competing perceptions and beliefs. Moreover, there are many valuable ideas that can and do serve as a consensus for good human relations. For example, most cultures, past and present, had and have lists of virtues – ideals, supposedly, of good human qualities and behaviours. Later in this book, I will discuss the virtues that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle thought about, and most people will agree that virtues often refer to commendable human qualities. Also, parents, family members and teachers have, over the ages, tried to advise and encourage children to behave well.

As we know, however, having virtues and an education do not stop people, clans, tribes, companies, corporations or governments from behaving badly, because we are also driven by physical, psychological, social and cultural influences, including being driven by what are traditionally called vices (the opposite of virtues). This is not to say that we should not value and teach virtues, and see the problems that vices can cause. We need to recognise, however, that there are frequently contradictions between what are considered virtues and our actual behaviours. Thus, in a telling example, there is the widespread notion that to love one another is perhaps the highest human virtue, but it is not applied consistently among the people of the world and, in many instances, is completely disregarded.

Nevertheless, Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! may be the most profound perception that any human being or any other kind of being could ever have!

I hesitate writing this statement, even though it may be true, because I am seriously concerned that it could become part of an irrational, authoritarian and even bloodthirsty religion or political movement. The reason this could happen is due to our psychology. If we believe this is a profound perception, we may feel it is necessary to value it above all else, that it must have precedence over everything.

Indeed, the experience could be so meaningful to us that we could be inspired to create things and activities in order to sustain the perception. At first, the perception could evolve in our minds into further mental phenomena (mental things): ideas, images and beliefs. These, in turn, could lead us to create outward representations of those mental phenomena such as spoken, chanted and sung words, written texts, ritual body movements, graphic images and symbols, sculptures and objects, buildings, and even the structure of a society. What I have described may seem familiar to the reader – it looks like I have just described the features of a religion.

And I think it would be a mistake to let the perception Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! become part of a religion because it is not the mental phenomena or the representations of the perception that are valuable, but rather it is what the perception implies or means that may be truly valuable. I would suggest that this kind of mistake was what happened in the human mind and in human societies in the past, in that we came to value the things we created to represent perceptions rather than understanding the true meaning of our perceptions. Such mistaken thinking is still prevalent now. There is also the psychological tendency for us to identify with the things and even to identify with experiences themselves. I will consider the significance of identification for human life, including its dangers, in further chapters of this book.

So, not only could the perception Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! be conceived as a thing with which we identify, but somehow we could value it in a way that overwhelms our minds, rouses our emotions and propels our behaviours. We could view the experience as being deeply meaningful to us; we could view it as being sacred. And therefore to question or to challenge that experience could be felt as hurtful and insulting, not only to us individually, but to us collectively as a community or a culture. We know that this could happen because it has already happened in human history with many perceptions and ideas. These range from the insult felt if a revered person (the originator or transmitter of an idea or insight) is challenged or ridiculed, to the strong and sometimes violent reaction people have to the questioning of a statement, belief or ideology, or to a challenge of their religion. Human beings have behaved violently in the past and continue to do so now in order to try to annihilate opposition to or contradiction of particular beliefs.

We therefore need an appropriate perspective for any human perception and experience.

While we are genuinely able to understand some things in life and, indeed, are able to have profound insights, we create mental concepts and we create the subsequent symbolic and physical representations and behaviours derived from those concepts.

Furthermore, a perception and its associated representation may be true and faithful or it may not be – in most contexts, it is crucial to be able to see the difference.

We need to value truth.

We have many coherent representations of countless particulars about our lives on earth, which very usefully approximate true understanding, and we may continue to learn more about existence for as long as human beings exist. However, we also have many incoherent representations about life that are far from being true, which, if they are not recognised as such, are ultimately harmful to life.

Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! is a perception and an insight with an accompanying feeling, which may be experienced by most human beings. It could be a shared or a common experience.

Its true value may be that it is an expression of the unity of existence.

If that is so, it occurred to me that perhaps we should together consider the significance of Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! In contrast, an individual can try to understand the meaning of the statement, but in order to attend to the problems of humanity, I would say that we need to consider this and other perceptions and insights together. It may be that the very act of sincerely considering these and other statements as a group will affect both our minds and our behaviours. Could these insights inspire us to behave more kindly towards each other? To work cooperatively with all human beings? To be more sensitive to other living things and to our environment as a whole?

Extraordinary as existence is we need to recognise that, as a whole, it is ultimately unknown and unknowable – we will never completely understand it. Human beings now and future generations of human beings, or any other kind of beings, are never likely to understand why and how existence as a whole exists.

We can’t even understand any of the particulars of existence completely.

Curiously, I think that our sincere recognition of our ignorance about existence is also a source of unity for humanity because the recognition is true and it’s one we can share.

Thus, although Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! is a deep insight that all human beings could experience, it is not sufficient to create a healthy and harmonious society. This is because the activity of our own minds and other people’s ideas and behaviours can reinforce our false beliefs, and can distract, confuse, delude or undermine clear-sightedness, sound thinking and healthy behaviour.

A healthy and harmonious human culture and society can only come about if we collectively value what is true and ethical, and if we act in concert.

Furthermore, Isn’t it extraordinary that existence exists! is an insight that occurs at one moment in a person’s lifetime – although it might occur a few times too. Therefore, another insight vital for the well-being of people and for the welfare of the earth may be that everything we perceive, feel, think and do only occurs in the present – we only live in the present.

Everything happens in the present.

The past was created in its present and its products may or may not persist to the present moment.

The future is always created in the present.

The perception of meaning and value only happen in the present.

Truthful perception and true understanding only happen in the present.

Creativity only happens in the present.

Human delusion, injustice, negligence, corruption, conflict, cruelty and violence exist in the present and can only cease in the present.

Introduction

My motivation for writing this book arose from seeing, perceiving and being emotionally disturbed by the suffering of my fellow human beings. Suffering due to ignorance, deprivation, hardship, injustice, insecurity (both physical and emotional), neglect, cruelty and violence. It occurred to me that such suffering, as well as having local and immediate causes, was more generally a symptom of disorder in human life. In particular, it seemed to me that human suffering was due to a failure of human culture.

This is not to say that most people don’t work conscientiously and hard in their roles and jobs, and try to behave responsibly and kindly in many ways – but perhaps more often in relation to themselves, their family, friends and some colleagues. Indeed, most human beings have learnt to get along with each other in relatively superficial ways by participating in social norms of behaviour, such as politeness, common courtesies, and not challenging or threatening people. What’s more, not all human life is chaotic and, despite everything, many of us are able to create relatively ordered lives and experience moments of joy and affection.

However, we can be in no doubt that human suffering is widespread in the world – our own personal experiences and reading, hearing and watching news stories regularly presents us with evidence of human suffering. And the kind of evidence we see for ourselves is backed up by academic research, for instance, on the prevalence of poverty in human societies. For example, it has been estimated that there are 1.45 billion people in the world living in acute multidimensional poverty at present.* Multidimensional poverty is a measure of poverty concerning individual people’s health, their access to education and their standard of living. 1.45 billion people is 26.5 per cent of about 5.4 billion people surveyed in 103 developing countries.

* [Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative: Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2017]

Moreover, many hundreds of millions of people have lives of great physical hardship, suffer psychological stresses (such as fear, anxiety and depression), suffer emotional or physical abuse, or live in oppressive societies. And, on top of it all, there is criminal violence (and sometimes state violence) and/or armed conflict all over the world. This diverse catalogue of suffering, its worldwide prevalence and the reality of our inability to stop it or to ameliorate it is clearly indicative of collective disorder in human life, and therefore seriously suggests to me the poverty of human culture.

In this book, I will be examining some of the possible causes for the suffering and disorder in human lives. In the most general terms, it seems to me that the way we directly and indirectly behave towards each other is a major cause of human misery. Our direct behaviours are how we talk and act towards the people we meet in our everyday lives. Our indirect behaviours are those behaviours that have consequences for the people who live beyond our immediate surroundings. Examples of the former are: whether we listen and attend to people properly; whether we talk sensitively and rationally to people or not; whether we unfairly discriminate against people; whether we engage with and support people or not; and whether we care for people or not. Examples of the latter are: what kind of paid employment we work at; what kinds of food we eat (mostly meat, fish or plant foods) and more generally what we consume; what political party we vote for, if that is an option; finding clever ways to avoid paying taxes or other selfish behaviour; and what social and cultural institutions we participate in or support. Since we mostly live in relationship with each other, it is clearly in all our interests to care about the consequences of our behaviours. However, as a global species, I would say that we do not care enough about our behaviours, as can be seen by the amount of poverty, violence and psychological misery that people suffer all over the world. Why is that? Why don’t we care enough? I hope that by the end of this book the answer to this question may become clearer.

A deeper cause of human suffering and disorder concerns the functioning of our minds. As a starting point, I will propose that the human mind is a phenomenon of our functioning brains and bodies. I will go into more detail about the human mind and brain throughout the book and in particular in the chapter World-Views. For the moment, we can say that our minds/brains/bodies are responsible for our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Equally, however, we can also say that the physical world, other people’s behaviour and human culture all contribute to and influence our minds/brains/bodies – in turn, also affecting our thinking, feelings and behaviours. Ultimately, there is a continuity of causation in both directions between nature, our brains, our minds, our behaviours and human culture.

It seems to me that a possible reason why there is such suffering and disorder in human life is that we have not properly understood the functioning of our own minds.

Essentially, we routinely neglect to notice that, as well as being directly influenced by our bodies, our thoughts, emotions and behaviours are habitually driven by our beliefs and memories – beliefs that may not be true or ethical and memories that may have little relevance to current circumstances.

Crucially, this is why we think, feel and behave in disorderly ways, leading to our own suffering and causing others to suffer too.

Could it be that if we understood our minds better, we might behave in healthier ways towards each other? In this book, I will explore several aspects of the human mind as seen in the long history, and even longer prehistory, of humanity.

What also motivated me to write this book was seeing that there are many people in the world who have not had access to education or whose education is limited, biased, censored or untrue. I wanted to try to inform these people, particularly young people, about some of the basic knowledge human beings have learnt up to now: knowledge about the cosmos and nature, as well as knowledge about ancient human history, human psychology and human societies. The reason for wanting to do this is that while the quality of life of human beings is partly determined by the physical, social and cultural environments we live in, it is also determined by our ability to understand these environments, by our ability to understand the human mind and, significantly, by our ability to think and behave creatively in respect of them. Moreover, as we shall see, it is the behaviour of people collectively that affects all of our lives, which also affects the wider natural environment.

This book is a sincere cri de coeur – a cry from the heart! Many of the problems we face individually are problems common to all of humanity and are of our own making. If we can truly understand the causes of these problems, we may be able to create a better life for everyone.

The book starts with the chapter Origins giving an outline scientific account of what is known about the origins of the universe, the earth and life on earth, including human life. The next chapter, How We Know, is an inquiry into knowledge itself: how is human knowledge created; how is knowledge different from belief; and how do we know if knowledge is true? The possible psychological origins, history and beliefs of Religion are next explored as a specific kind of claimed human ‘knowledge’. Criticism of Religion points out some fundamental mistakes that human beings have made in relation to religious belief and highlights the consequences of those mistakes. In the chapter Where We Are Now, I survey some of the problems that human beings have had to face in our history and continue to face now. The concept of World-Views – how we mentally conceive existence – is introduced in the next chapter and the elements that would be necessary for a healthy world-view are proposed. The chapter Ecology explains some of the basic concepts and insights of the science and shows how human behaviour is integral to the welfare of life on earth and, vice versa, how human well-being is dependent on nature and on the earth as a whole. In a concluding chapter, I make some suggestions as to what would be appropriate criteria for Creating a Healthy Human Culture and what specific activities could help us. The book ends with a short chapter called Ending, in which we consider the significance of death in human life.

Notes

Scientists and scholars

The people who professionally study the subjects referred to in this book are called scientists or scholars. The word science comes from the Latin language (scientia) meaning knowledge. Scientists and scholars collectively study all of nature and the physical and cultural aspects of human life – and because there is so much to study and to know, they usually specialise. For instance, a scientist who studies the universe as a whole is a cosmologist and their subject is called cosmology; a scientist who studies the stars is an astronomer and their subject is astronomy; and a scientist who studies living things is a biologist and their subject is biology.

Scholars study subjects collectively called the humanities, which, as the name suggests, concern human creations such as language, the arts, ideas and human society itself. Scientists often work by testing their theories about nature with experiments; scholars usually cannot perform the same kinds of experiments, so their work is based on inquiring about past and current events, examining artefacts and ideas, and analysing what they have learnt.

Any person can study the world, nature and themselves, and, if they are able to, may become a professional scientist or scholar. Most people can read about the work of scientists and scholars, so throughout this book I have written the names of the scientific and academic specialities in bold type for the reader if they wish to learn more about a subject. We do not have to become professional scientists and scholars in order to understand or to benefit from their work – most human beings are able to appreciate the value of learning.

Dates

There are many dates given throughout this book and the convention I have used is the Gregorian calendar, which is the most widely used system in the world for naming dates. However, I have adopted the designation of CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era) in the place of the traditional AD (Anno Domini) and BC (Before Christ). So, for example, the date for the death of the classical Greek philosopher Socrates is traditionally written 399 BC, whereas I would write it as 399 BCE. For more modern dates, for instance, when the first human beings walked on the moon, the date would be written 1969 CE, but I will usually omit the CE, so the reader can assume that dates without a signifier are within the Common Era.

Italics

I have used an italic font throughout this book when introducing a new word or concept, and for emphasis; occasionally I have used bold italics for more emphasis. Italics are also used for the scientific names of living organisms, for non-English words (such as ancient Greek and Latin language words) and within the examples and commentaries which are partitioned by horizontal lines.

References

Mostly, I have deliberately not given references in this book as it is not intended as a scholarly work. My reasoning for this is that I would like the book to be widely accessible and be easier to read than many scholarly texts – references can hinder the flow of reading. Where I do give a reference, I have put it at the end of a paragraph for the ease of finding it in an e-book format.* Moreover, most of the information in the text is non-controversial and can be confirmed easily in many reference sources in books and in encyclopaedias, in libraries or on the internet (Wikipedia, for instance). If the reader would like to know more about a particular subject, they can type a keyword in an internet search engine to find out more.

*[Like this, for example.]

I have also tried to write in a fairly simple style and have explained or defined more complex terms and concepts for the sake of clarity and understanding.

Origins

For thousands of years, human beings have been curious and interested to know where they originated from and how living things and even existence itself came into being. People in ancient times created many different stories, which were attempts to try to explain our origins. These early attempts are now usually called creation myths or origin myths. The term ‘myth’ comes from a word in the ancient Greek language (mythos) meaning speech, narrative, fiction, myth or plot. It is clear from the meaning of the word that a myth is something created by human beings because it is