Intro Series III: Bigger-than-Self Reality and the Intellect-Embodiment Gap (Section A: Big History)
Bigger-than-Self Reality from Perspective of Big History: Contemporary Humanity as Part of Ongoing Evolutionary Process of Cosmos, Biosphere, and Culture
This is the third instalment in an Intro Series where I introduce the key concepts and lay out the intellectual grounding of the Bigger-than perspective I’m developing in this Substack. There are a number of interlocking pieces to the Bigger-than approach and I am fleshing out each piece individually in order to be able to then put the pieces together later on, and spell out how the overall picture adds up to a capacity to address bigger-than-self distress and the meta-crisis from this perspective. Here are the links to parts I, II, and IV in this series… This is also the first section of a three-part post on Bigger-than-Self Reality and the Intellect-Embodiment Gap.
In this post, I change tack a little from the previous two posts that have focused on the science, mechanisms, and arc of mindfulness practice and how it can help broaden and build our thought-action repertoires and capacity to process bigger-than-self distress as individuals. This post is still focused on building the foundations of the bigger-than-self perspective, from which we can build on in terms of having a shared understanding from which to approach the issues of metabolising the meta-crisis and corresponding bigger-than-self distress. But today’s post takes a much broader perspective than the individual self, and does so in order to situate the individual human self within a much larger conception of reality.
The reason for broadening our perspective here is that the prevailing worldview that is existent within our civilisation at this point locks us into a narrow conception of self that is located solely within the individual. This isn’t a necessary or only possible way of experiencing ourselves in relation to the world. A more dialectical, dialogical worldview is possible, and we can transform ourselves to experience the world as a much more integral part of the flow of things, of bigger-than-self reality, which itself can lead to large increases in meaning in life that are crucial to eudaimonic wellbeing. This transformation of our conception of ourselves as part of bigger flows and wholes is, in the approach I’m developing here, a crucially important piece of the puzzle in being able to transmute bigger-than-self distress and meaningfully address the biospheric-civilisational meta-crisis.
Broadening Our Conception of Bigger-than-Self Reality
This is tricky territory to navigate. Different cultures and religious and philosophical traditions have a lot to say about the nature of bigger-than-self reality and the place of humans within it. Until relatively recently, Western culture was dominated by a primarily Christian worldview, in which a creator God oversaw life and society and provided the grounding for society and individuals within society to locate themselves within bigger-than-self reality. The advent of the scientific worldview from the Enlightenment period on disrupted this narrative for many Westerners, leading famously to Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead”.
Since then, science has marched ever onwards and given us ever more detailed and nuanced understandings of the observable physical world and how it acts. Yet it arguably has not provided us a worldview within which to situate ourselves that doesn’t lead to a kind of existential nihilism that, again, Nietzsche grappled with and wrote extensively about. What I am working towards in this three-section post is to articulate a worldview of bigger-than-self reality that is consistent with our scientific knowledge about how the physical universe seems to behave and which grounds us in biological and cultural reality and how the three have evolved over time. This worldview highlights the nature of bigger-than-self reality as involving leaps and phase changes in evolutionary complexity. One of the natural consequences of this proposed worldview is to allow us to see ourselves as part of this history’s continual and ongoing unfolding, rather than as somehow apart from and at the end of the history of the natural world.
This conception of reality draws on the best available scientific evidence as to the nature of the physical universe and how it has evolved and changed since the dawn of time in ways that have led to the situation we find ourselves in today: as walking, talking, thinking, feeling hominids on a rocky planet with a culture that spans the globe. Taking this scientifically informed perspective gives us the most solid material, observable ground from which to build - this is not to discount possible spiritual, religious, or metaphysical interpretations of reality, but to at least put aside such questions for the time being, and start from the naturalistic understanding of the world built on centuries of careful observation, experimentation, analysis, and theorisation that has occurred within the scientific traditions.
In building out this scientific conception of reality, I draw mostly on two sources, namely David Christian’s Big History and Gregg Henriques’ Theory of Knowledge (ToK) system. (I’ll later integrate work from Capra and Luisi on the Systems View of Life, but that is for another post). I chose these two sources because they are, especially in Christian’s case, extensively well-researched and each provide a hopefully non-controversial scientific ground from which we can build on our understanding of bigger-than-self reality. Henriques, as a psychologist, created a model that, while fully reconcilable with Christian’s Big History project, is more psychologically focused and this will help to provide a bridge between the much broader scientific cosmology represented by Big History and the psychological and cognitive scientific perspectives explored in this Bigger-than Substack.
Where I’ll get to by the end of the next three posts is an intellectual sketch of bigger-than-self reality which will hopefully be a material, scientific story of bigger-than-self reality that will be broadly agreeable. This narrative will allow us to point to what I’ll term the “experience gap”, drawing inspiration from Merleau-Ponty (e.g., 1962) and Varela, Thompson, & Rosch (1991), which will point to the gap between our consensus intellectual scientific understanding of reality and our embodied experience of reality from moment to moment as we go about our day-to-day lives. But first, in this post, I’ll explore Christian’s Big History narrative.
Big History: A Scientific Cosmology and Origin Story
Big History (e.g., Benjamin et al., 2020; Christian, 1991, 2004; Hughes-Warrington, 2002; Nazaretyan, 2005; Spier, 2008) is a project that expands the scope of history beyond its traditional beginnings at the outset of civilisation and historical artefacts from the early civilisations. It is a discipline that has been championed by many people, within many disciplines, including astrophysics (e.g., Chaisson, 2005; Chaisson, 2013), economics (e.g., Grinin et al., 2011), futurology (e.g., Last, 2017; Voros, 2019), sociology (Patomäki, 2010), as well as history itself (e.g., Christian, 2018).
Proponents of the emerging field of Big History have been trying to re-contextualise the study of history within a larger cosmological context. In doing so, they have brought back the beginning of history to the beginning of time itself, with the Big Bang. This expansionary turn arose out of interdisciplinary perspectives on history from cosmology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and geology (Hughes-Warrington, 2002), and has involved continued contributions from multiple disciplines, as outlined above. A central thread linking together scholars of big history is in looking for patterns that help to organise our understanding of history in a deep, cosmological sense: for example that of the evolution of complexity from physical to biological to multicellular life, and to then human life and culture (e.g., Chaisson, 2005, 2013; Christian, 2005, 2018, Last, 2017).
Examining these big history narratives, especially the patterns of evolving complexity of the universe, can help to initiate us into a broader, more systemic view of life, humanity, and our place both within the cosmos and on this planet. In this post I will examine Christian’s (2018) narrative in the most detail, as Christian has arguably done more than anyone to initiate and popularise big history as a serious academic discipline (e.g., Christian, 1991, 2005, 2018).
Christian’s Thresholds 1-3
Christian broke the big history of the cosmos into nine distinct stages, separated by thresholds of organisational complexity that mark the junction between stages. The first stage began 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang, which the best available scientific evidence available to us today suggests was the beginning of the universe, starting from an infinitesimally small point to expand out to a size far beyond anything we are likely to see from our vantage point on Earth today, within a matter of tiny fragments of a second.
Within a few more tiny fragments of a second, energy had differentiated out into four different fundamental forces of gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Before the end of the first second, energy had differentiated itself sufficiently for the appearance of matter to emerge. Structures started to appear within the first seconds: protons, neutrons, and electrons, which within a few minutes had started to form the first atoms. With the Big Bang, the universe had been born (Christian, 2018).
Until the second threshold, however, the universe was extremely simple (Christian, 2018). The second threshold brought the emergence of galaxies and stars. Entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics, had the universe cooling, expanding, and breaking down from very early on. This force of entropy was countered by gravity, the electromagnetic force, and strong and weak nuclear forces, though, to lead to the emergence of more complex forms. Gravity brought energy and matter together even as it was expanding.
As more and more atoms gathered, their gravity attracted still more particles, and this process snowballed to lead to the formation of incredibly large, dense collections of particles, which became incredibly hot. These extremely high energy conditions allowed for protons to fuse together - with hydrogen molecules (essentially protons) fusing together to form helium atoms. These fusion events produced huge amounts of energy, and when enough of these reactions happened with sufficient density, the system crosses a critical threshold of about ten million degrees, when a self-organising gigantic furnace is initiated that produces enormous amounts of energy, and which continues for as long as there are enough hydrogen atoms for fusion to continue. This is how the self-organising structures we know as stars were formed.
The energetic threshold for initiation of a structure such as a star is extremely high, but once started, the star can temporarily (even if for several billion years) avert the effects of entropy that tend to move things towards dissolution and decreasing complexity. Such self-organising structures have thus temporarily increased the complexity of a universe that otherwise operated by laws of entropy – this is a pattern throughout Christian’s thresholds of emergent complexity. Similar self-organising dynamics drew stars into relationship with one another, and lead to the formation of galaxies, also occurring within Christian’s (2018) second threshold.
In the third threshold, the chemical complexity of the universe greatly increased (Christian, 2018). The vast majority of atoms created in the Big Bang were hydrogen and helium, with small amounts of lithium (with three protons) and beryllium (four protons) also created. The rest of the elements on the periodic table were not produced until this third threshold event, another event that required huge amounts of energy to initiate: the collapse of stars.
Once all the hydrogen atoms are used up, stars end up with huge densities of helium atoms at their core. Because helium atoms require much more energy to fuse than hydrogen atoms, the furnace stops, but gravity keeps working, and stars collapse under their own mass, causing it to then heat up again. These stars are known as red giants, as their outer layers greatly expand and cool to maintain balance. Meanwhile, in the core, temperatures are hot enough to fuse helium atoms to create still heavier atoms such as carbon (six atoms) and oxygen (eight atoms). This process can continue and escalate further in very large stars, producing heavier and heavier atoms up to iron (26 atoms), at which a limit occurs. Atoms heavier than iron are created in supernovae explosions and collisions between super heavy neutron stars. This enrichment of the chemical complexity of the universe created the conditions for the next threshold, without which it would not have been possible.
Christian’s Thresholds 4-6: From the Formation of Molecules to the Creation of Planets and the Emergence of Life
The fourth threshold began with the formation of molecules that were created from combinations of these newly formed heavier atoms, and led to the possibility of other kinds of structures that had not previously existed in the universe: planets, moons, and asteroids (Christian, 2018). These new structures were much cooler and more chemically rich than stars, and themselves provided the conditions for entirely new levels of complexity to arise, in the form of what we know as life, whose emergence marked the fifth threshold in Christian’s story.
This move, to the emergence of life could only happen on something like a planet, or possibly large moon, as it required the chemical complexity present only on these structures, and the existence of something like an atmosphere to protect from outside cosmic forces. This move constituted threshold five for Christian (2018), and with it a transition in Big History terms from the thresholds of the cosmos to the biosphere. Hopefully it is possible to see at this point how each of the preceding thresholds was necessary to lead to the emergence of a planet where a biosphere could emerge. It should be noted also that none of this implies a teleology: there is no necessity for any creator or intelligent design driving these systems inevitably towards complex life and the emergence of humans. In this way, the cosmological story of Big History differs from many pre-modern, religious, or indigenous creation narratives. It also differs from these earlier narratives in that it is a global creation story, rather than one that has arisen in a specific bioregion.
From the fifth threshold onwards, Christian’s (2018) Big History narrative unfolded on Planet Earth. Despite its cosmological origins, Big History is still a history of this planet, and of human civilisation, which obviously arose on Earth. From the emergence of life (threshold five), Christian recounts the journey of evolution over billions of years through prokaryotes to eukaryotes and then to multicellular life.
One characteristic that stands out as potentially relevant to the predicament we as humanity find ourselves in today is the notion that breakthrough or large changes in the complexity of life is a function of both long-term trends and highly disruptive events. Evolution has been proposed not to be a smooth, gradual process but instead one characterised by punctuated equilibria, where there are long periods of relative stability where there is relatively little change that are interrupted by drastic, often catastrophic events, which precipitate much more drastic changes in either the diversity or complexity of life, sometimes both (e.g., Eldredge & Gould, 1972).
Often these changes to the environment were themselves caused by feedback mechanisms that arose from the activity of life itself impacting on the biosphere (Christian, 2018). For example, when prokaryotes then cyanobacteria learned how to convert energy from sunlight through photosynthesis, a waste product of this process was oxygen, which over time transformed the chemistry of the whole biosphere in profound ways. Oxygen was highly toxic to most living organisms at the time, and broke down a lot of atmospheric methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Without this protective greenhouse gas to keep in heat, the Earth plunged into a period of glaciation that covered most of the Earth’s surface for a period of about 100 million years.
Out of this long glacial period, a combination of systemic factors in the Earth’s geology and biosphere eventually righted the balance. Earth’s tectonic activity played a part, as volcanoes broke through the ice and spewed carbon dioxide into the air. The ice covering the surface stopped almost all photosynthesis, causing oxygen levels to drop again. And eukaryotic life evolved, which had the feature of being able to respire, a kind of opposite process to photosynthesis, which took in oxygen and produced carbon dioxide - in effect, this gave the biosphere a new way of achieving homeostasis to balance out the runaway positive feedback loops created by the introduction of photosynthesis.
Another characteristic of life that is highlighted by Christian (2018) is the centrality of information processing to life from single-celled organisms upwards. Prokaryotes had thousands of sensors in their walls, which enabled them to detect environmental changes in light, acidity, the presence of nearby food, and whether they had collided with some solid object. From these sensory perceptions, they were able to change their behaviour. This represented something like elementary forms of cognition. From prokaryotes onwards, living organisms created basic sketches of their environment.
Eukaryotes added levels of complexity to their information processing, with membranes forming inside cells as well as around them and forming sense making units within the cells. They also were more skilful in movement through the environment in response to sensory inputs. Eukaryotes, having nuclei, reproduced differently than prokaryotes. Rather than sharing genetic material relatively freely and somewhat chaotically, their genetic material was locked up and only shared when specific conditions were met. The genetic material would combine with another organism’s DNA to create a situation where each new organism has two parents. Because of this, as well as the inherent imperfection of the copying of genetic material, the conditions were much riper for more variation in the eukaryotic world than the prokaryotic one. This increased variation and evolutionary potential created the conditions for, eventually, multicellular life to emerge (Christian, 2018).
Multicellular life required a lot of molecular architecture, which was developed in the evolution of eukaryotes over hundreds of millions of years (Christian, 2018). The era of multicellular life has born witness to many cycles of mass extinction events, followed by explosions of new species variation. The activity occurring during these periods of explosive new creation of species is known as adaptive radiation. The most recent mass extinction event, of 65 million years ago, famously led to the extinction of most dinosaur species, and paved the way for a new adaptive radiation.
In this most recent adaptive radiation mammals came to the fore. Previously mammals had occupied niches in the food chain that had them be much smaller, often rodent-size or similar. Now, they evolved to be much bigger, even occupying the spots of mega-fauna. One thing that distinguished mammals from dinosaurs and other classes of animal was a tendency toward increased information processing capacities. Good information and ability to act on it gave living organisms adaptive advantages.
Mammals (and birds) seemed to embody a trend towards greater capacity for information processing that had been observable throughout the evolutionary trajectory of multicellular life. This was literally embodied in the structure and size of their brains, which tended to devote more neuronal architecture to cortical areas which are involved in complex calculations and problem-solving. Large brains likely evolved in mammals because, being warm-blooded, they needed to pump a lot more blood than reptiles to keep their bodies warm, and so needed increased adaptive advantage to access these increased flows of energy, which they got from becoming better information processors. This led, eventually, to Christian’s (2018) sixth threshold of complexity, that of humans.
Christian’s Thresholds 6-8: The Emergence of Humans, Farming, and the Anthropocene
The Big History perspective grants us a broader narrative within which to view humans, and our broad and deep similarity with, but also differences from, the rest of the cosmos and living world. Christian (2018) argues that one of the defining differences in humans is how we process information: specifically, that we go beyond just gathering it to domesticate and actively cultivate it. This allows for cultural knowledge to be formed and passed down, and for the emergence of reasoning about how the world works that can be evaluated, passed down, and even improved upon.
It is from this capacity for information domestication and cultivation that cultural technological improvements developed: this could be seen as the emergence of cultural evolution, which happened on timescales several orders of magnitude quicker than biological evolution. Christian (2018) called the cultural ratchet afforded by the development of language “collective learning”.
Improved capacity to process information, among other factors, allowed humans to spread out around the planet to the point that by at least 40,000 years ago, populations existed in Africa, Europe, Asia, through Indonesia and Australia, joined at least 15,000 years ago by settlements throughout the Americas after humans crossed the Bering land bridge during the Last Glacial Maximum. Increasing density of population, increased stability of climate in the Holocene period since the end of the last ice age, and technological advancements from collective learning set the stage for the next and seventh threshold of complexity in Christian’s (2018) narrative: farming.
The emergence of farming was analogous to that of photosynthesis in the single-celled organism era: it created an energy boom (Christian, 2018). This energy boom allowed human societies to undergo a massive increase in both size and complexity. There was enough spare energy left over from farming for some humans in society to specialise - e.g., chiefs, priests, and craftspeople. As the climate continued to be stable, human population size and density increased to the point where the first cities emerged, followed by the first states.
These states represented, according to Christian, a new trophic level - they represent an organism that fed on the produce of farmers, similar to how animals feed on the produce of photosynthesising plants. The massive increase in size and complexity of states, fuelled by the energy boon from farming, both necessitated and precipitated a ratcheting up of collective learning. Contact between groups of humans, particularly in the Eurasian continent, through trade, and also competition, through war, meant that cultural and technological changes could be transmitted across local cultural groups and combined in ways that led to further innovations.
This cultural and technological ratcheting increased right through to the next period of breakthrough in complexity: that of the fossil fuel revolution and the advent of modernity, including modern states and a networking of human culture that stretched across the entire planet.
Threshold Eight, for Christian (2018) begins with the discovery of the fossil fuels coal, oil, and natural gas, and move through to the post-WWII period we are in now. It marks an era, known as the Anthropocene (e.g., Crutzen, 2002) where a single species of organism became the dominant force for change on the biosphere for the first time. This was unique in the history of the planet, with the possible exception of when the first prokaryotes and cyanobacteria learned to photosynthesise and there were no counteracting organisms to process the oxygen pumped out by this new biological innovation.
In the Anthropocene, for the first time in human history, quality of life improved for more than just a small proportion of the human population, interpersonal and inter-group relationships have become less violent overall, modern medicine has drastically decreased mortality from many diseases, and we have unparalleled technological capability and complexity compared with any other period in history.
However, many of the aspects of the Anthropocene period have produced less than ideal outcomes, too, for humans but arguably especially for ecosystems and non-human life forms. In terms of human life, the Anthropocene is not without struggles and injustices for many humans – in the forms of inequality, poverty, conflict, prejudice, lack of access to quality healthcare. As discussed elsewhere in this Substack, the developments of the Anthropocene have put existential stress on the biosphere’s ability to support a complex global human civilisation, let alone many other species of life. These “bad” aspects of the Anthropocene period are obviously worrying if not deeply disturbing, and bigger-than-self distress can be seen, from a systems lens, as information pointing us towards aspects of our ways of living that are in need of correction in some form.
The challenge humanity faces now, according to Christian (2018), is to see whether we can “preserve the best of the Good Anthropocene and avoid the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene”. Christian focuses on the pattern that had emerged again and again throughout his analysis of Big History, that of flows of energy, and whether we can learn to harness energy in ways that are gentler, and which do not shake the very foundations on which our complex civilisational architecture is built.
Christian posits that to do this some new and not-yet-known threshold will have to be crossed, a hypothetical Threshold Nine, which will enable us to achieve three goals: avoiding a crash, ensuring the biosphere can continue to thrive, and that the benefits of the Good Anthropocene are available to all humans. He argues that many of the systemic factors necessary for such a shift are already present or emerging: a huge amount of intellectual scholarship and scientific understanding of the world (huge complexity of information), a much better understanding of how the biosphere works, and a growing awareness that we all share one home and one fate, that of Planet Earth. Despite this, the picture he paints is one that is far from inevitable and hanging in the balance. What happens next is up to the current cohort of humans and, if we keep the quest alive for long enough, those immediately following us.
Note that Christian’s is just one of the perspectives on bigger-than-self reality that I’ll explore in this Substack, as it’s beneficial to examine the picture from different angles, such as a more in-depth exploration of civilisation from an energy and materials perspective, or from an existential risk perspective - but those are for later posts. For now, what I’m wanting to achieve is a broad-based understanding of history, how we got here, that offers both a taste of the wonder of it and the precariousness of the point in history we’re currently in, as well as a story which invites us to actively participate in continuing to shape it rather than be passive receivers at the end of it.
This is part III of an Intro Series that introduces the approach taken within the Bigger-than perspective. Parts I, II, and IV can be found here.
This is also Section A of a three-part post on Bigger-than-Self Reality and the Experience Gap. Section B will cover Henriques’ ToK model, while Section C will give an account of what I am calling the Intellect-Embodiment Gap, drawing on the tradition of Merleau-Ponty (e.g., 1962) and Varela et al. (1991).