Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

As a good example that demonstrates the role of the environment in eliciting sensible and ingenious biological structures, think of the shape of dolphins and sharks. Each species has evolved a similarly sleek body shape along with musculature that affords swift movement underwater. Such creatures can move extremely efficiently in water. What their bodies, musculature, and behavioral patterns have done (through evolution) is to home in on, or gravitate toward, the lawful and sensible properties of water, these lawful and sensible properties acting as a sensible context. Because water is replete with various sensible properties, these can be made sense of, or be reflected. The sleek body shape of dolphins and sharks and their precise techniques of swimming therefore reflect the presence of a sensibly ordered environment. If we concede that dolphins and sharks embody impressive natural design, this is only because Nature itself, serving as a context that invokes the design, also embodies impressive natural design. Order and intelligence are everywhere, inherent in both the lawful behavior of the environment and in the organisms and biological behaviors that evolve therein.

Let’s return to the rapid evolution of the hominid brain from version 1.0 to version 7.0. Each incremental increase in size and capacity (presumably derived through mutation and variation) must have met with specific environmental circumstances with which to immediately highlight those improvements such that a reproductive advantage was achieved. Each mutation in hominid brain size was therefore nourished by a contextual set of environmental conditions to ensure that its new capacity had an edge over nonmutated hominid brains. In other words, Nature was able to make sense, or highlight the sensibility, of these mutational, variational changes in the hominid brain. If this were not so then it is difficult to imagine why so many small changes in brain size were so rapidly selected for by the environment.

One assumes that the cerebral capacity we humans have is a highly neat adaptation to living in the world. Indeed, if more and more refined methods of sense-making are the stock and trade of natural selection, consciousness and language are capacities that almost certainly had to evolve somewhere and somewhen, as they are capacities that enable good sense to be made of the environment on a moment-by-moment basis (consciousness and language allow us to “swim” well through the world just as a fusiform shape allows dolphins to swim well through water). And the only reason consciousness and language were able to evolve, the only way they manage to make sense of the world, is because Nature is already sensible and can be made sense of. This is most apparent when thinking of language. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs exist in Nature—old leaves fall gracefully to the ground, for example. Even before we had language to speak about old leaves falling to the ground, they still did. The language we possess merely reflects the language-like property of Nature itself. This means, in effect, that Nature is, and always has been, eminently sensible, and this is reflected within organisms through the “mirror” of bio-logic.

What I am really driving at is that Nature can be viewed as a single system of self-organizing intelligence . That’s the gist of it. Through the evolution of life, Nature feeds back on itself and generates an ever-more refined reflection of its inherent intelligence. In particular, this intelligence is reflected through the language of DNA, which Nature edits so as to express precisely those structures, organs, and behaviors that make good sense in the larger context in which they are embedded (think of eyes, ears, lungs, livers, fur, seasonal migration, bone structure, wing structure, light sensitivity, semipermeable membranes, metabolic pathways, hibernation, and so forth). Not only are genome variations and genetic mutations crucial for evolution, but the intelligent configuration of Nature must also play a key role—if not the main role—in highlighting and nourishing the advantageous potential of a tiny fraction of the mutants and variants whose altered genes are not deleterious. Eventually, nervous systems and brains endowed with consciousness were destined to emerge somewhere along the evolutionary line. This line happens to be the primate line and our species, Homo sapiens . Although this creative capacity of Nature is commonly considered to be a simple brute fact and not worth a second thought, it can also be interpreted as evidence for the presence of natural intelligence throughout the contextual fabric of the Universe.

That some form of highly organized carbon-based life was always poised to emerge out of the Universe is a remarkable fact that seems to be peculiarly downplayed by mainstream science. I once remarked on this immanent aspect of life to a university philosopher. “Look,” I said eagerly. “Here’s this nucleic acid stuff, which, when put together in precise digital strings, codes for precise strings of amino acids. And these cause precise proteins to form. And the proteins integrate to form fully functional organs more complex than computers. Why is that? From whence cometh this astonishingly inventive capacity of Nature, this remarkable computational precision? Why should Nature be endowed with such an inordinate amount of latent creative power?”

Well, this academic chap thought little of it, declaring that the things humans invent are just as much latent within “matter” as is life and that we do not marvel at that. At the time I was unable to come up with a rejoinder to his careless dismissal. Now, however, it seems clear that his university salary was undeserved in that moment, for most of our inventions are based on principles already expressed by natural intelligence. Airplanes were preceded by natural bird and insect flight. Our electrical telecommunication systems were preceded by the natural electrochemical communication occurring in nervous systems. Our solar energy technology was preceded by natural photosynthesis. Our sonar technology was preceded by natural echolocation in bats. Our nanotechnology mimics the nanotechnology first invented billions of years ago when life began. Our prototypical nuclear-fusion generators were preceded by natural stars. Our information-processing computers were preceded by natural information-processing systems of which the Universe is made. The list goes on. In fact, had Nature not provided us with the above examples, we might never have been prompted to develop our own technological equivalents (surely no one would ever have conceived of flying were it not for the tangible presence of birds or winged insects). Not only has natural intelligence in one form or another taught us all we know, but the evolutionary process is itself a manifestation of this intelligence at work. What we are witness to here on Earth is the unfolding genius of Nature. The evolution of life is no less than a wondrous promise woven into Nature and, over time, coordinated and delivered by Nature.

Despite the above reasoning, the notion that Nature represents a self-organizing intelligence working over immense time scales is an idea that, I am sure, many of us will probably find hard to swallow (unless swallowed with a dose of psilocybin mushrooms!). And yet to assert that evolution is not an intelligent process is to rate the process that allowed this assertion to arise to be less smart than we are. In other words, over the course of three and a half billion years the evolutionary process has managed to forge conscious human intelligence (the capacity of the human cortex) that is then able, if it so chooses, to deny that the evolutionary process is itself intelligent. Think about it. Can a nonintelligent process really yield profound intelligence? Can we expect a computer simulation of evolution to produce a smart virtual organism without first ensuring that the computer software is itself smartly designed? Or could one of Conway’s Life games have yielded a virtual computer able to exhibit artificial intelligence without having first been set up in an extremely intelligent way? Can we really explain all and everything without recourse to invoking intelligently configured contexts?