Why free will is necessary and love is evolving

Tom Campbell writes: "Love is the result of successful consciousness evolution. Love is what grows within consciousness in the absence of fear. Love is your purpose; it defines the positive direction of your growth. Spirituality and love must be personal achievements of personal consciousness―they cannot be organizational achievements. A poor quality of life is the inevitable result of a poor quality of consciousness. Your ego makes your fears come true.

“You do not have the ability to improve anyone else. All you can do for others is to provide opportunity for them to do for themselves. What we do with the opportunity to evolve our consciousness is entirely up to us.

“Given that consciousness exists, it must be enabled by memory, information processing capability (intelligence), the interactive sharing of data, and free-will choice-making in the service of profitable evolution. Thus, the question of free will reduces to the question of are you conscious, and, if so, is your consciousness part of a complex interactive system of consciousness?

“If these are answered in the affirmative then your consciousness, and the system of which it is a part, must be evolving against some measure of value because that is a requirement of all self-modifying interactive systems. Such a system cannot evolve toward greater value without free will to make the required choices.

“Consciousness cannot exist without the ability to make self-determined, self-modifying choices. Without free will, there is no consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no free will. Consciousness and free will cannot be separated―they are simply different aspects of the same thing.

“A free will needs only to be free enough to make choices within its own local logical system and decision space. Functional free will, at whatever level of application, requires no more than the practical ability to make intent based choices where the intent is a function of the quality of the consciousness making the choice. If such a mechanism for making value choices at the local level (perhaps based on an evaluation of past choices) can be arranged, consciousness can provide the instrument for its own evolution.

“An evolving consciousness system like ours cannot be supported by either a wholly random or a wholly deterministic system because there can be no cumulative profitability in either. Our existence and human nature exhibit clear universal patterns that contain much more consistency and direction than randomness―a fact that must have a holistic, comprehensible explanation at its core. Because our existence is about us, about who, what, and why we are, surely the explanation lies accessible within us.

“Free will is simply the result of consciousness energy and evolutionary process slipping into bed together for a joyous moment of creation that has not yet ended. From that union, all reality and existence flows.”

Thomas Campbell, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything): A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics (Lightning Strikes, 2003), 311-423.

Consciousness, free will, intent

What is creating evolutionary pressure if we are no longer preoccupied with the traditional issues of survival and species propagation? We have become aware enough and capable enough that self-improvement is now our main goal. Most importantly, that means spiritual evolution, or equivalently, the improvement of the quality of our consciousness.

The central nervous system hosts our consciousness as a computer hosts an operating system and applications. It serves as a transducer, a data port and bi-directional translator between the virtual experience of the physical body and the individuated nonphysical consciousness that defines your existence and motivates your intent within the larger reality.

“Consciousness is The One, while the many, the great diversity of realities and the entities that populate those realities, are specialized subsets of consciousness within their own thought-space or dimension. Once a complex system is capable of directly programming itself (developing or modifying its original source code―which includes genetic engineering), the pace of evolution dramatically accelerates. Space-time, in this context, is a construct of consciousness. It is not a physical substance or a thing―it is not a physical construct―it is created by imposing a set of constraints upon a subset of the larger reality.

“In scientific terms, a lower entropy consciousness system has more power―more energy available to do work―a higher, more useful level of organization. In common terms, a lower entropy digital system commands more usable energy (more profitable organization) and, therefore, becomes capable of creating more profitable configurations of itself. Additionally, a lower entropy consciousness eventually develops the ability to use directed conscious intent to reduce its entropy further. Physical experience is generated when the perception of an individual consciousness (sentient being) is constrained to follow the space-time rule-set.

“The fundamental evolutionary process seems to work everywhere ―life or conscious awareness or individuated sub-systems of conscious-ness are merely the result of a purposeful, self-interacting complex system with memory, evolving its way through a large and diverse set of environmentally constrained possibilities.

“Clearly, growing up within a larger reality has much more to do with raising the quality of your consciousness than accumulating information. What matters most is the development of wisdom, understanding, and the capacity to love―which are not primarily intellectual achievements. The love I am referring to here is an attitude, a value, a way of interacting and being, and needs no specific object on which to focus. Love is the result of low entropy consciousness.

“As consciousness develops awareness, intelligence, values and personality, its entropy shrinks as its ability to organize itself effectively and profitably increases. Value based awareness, intelligence, and purpose are created, sustained, driven, animated, and motivated by the evolutionary imperative to improve the functionality of the system through better organization (entropy reduction). Absolute right and wrong (intents, motivations, choices, and actions) are defined and differentiated by the effect they have on the average entropy of the system.

“Because consciousness is an attribute of individuals, all conscious entities are vitally important in their own way: each has its own mission and purpose and is an important contributor to the whole. All are different, all have their own challenges, and none is fundamentally superior or inferior.”

“Free will requires that negative intent be a possibility, and without free will, there can be no experiment.

“Right motivation, intent, and action generally result in a decrease of entropy within your consciousness, whereas wrong motivation, intent, and action generally result in an increase of entropy within your consciousness. This is how absolute right and wrong are defined. The wrong intent or choice is evolutionarily wrong even it if temporarily results in what appears to be a constructive right action in physical-biological space. You do not evolve higher quality consciousness through right action or right result, but only through right motivation and right intent.

“Exercising free will interactions (with self or others) produces an internal result (always) and an external result (usually). The internal result immediately and most potently affects the quality of the consciousness according to the quality of the intent. The external result affects others as well as yourself and generates the appropriate feedback or reaction. Thus, it is not possible to achieve a right result if the intent is wrong. A wrong intent damages its creator despite what else happens.

“If our intent is right, we always derive some benefit, regardless of what we do as a result of that right intent. Right intent almost always drives a resultant right action. Wrong intent usually drives wrong action. For the typical being out there in the larger reality (continually choosing and doing, like you and me), intent lies primarily beneath the surface of one’s awareness. What motivates us is barely visible to our intellect. Motivations and intent are a complex mixture of many, sometimes inconsistent and incompatible, components. The choices you make (the motivations you have) are mostly not completely right or wrong.

“Every being is interested in, aware of, and cares about what it interacts with on its own local level, and in its immediate environment; everything else is invisible or inconsequential because it lies outside the being’s awareness, is hopelessly beyond its knowing (mystical), or appears to be irrelevant to its needs.

“Our local reality and everything in it is a product of consciousness evolution. We operate within our niche on the edge of an enormous consciousness ecosystem.

“Every critter, including you, has its point and its place; diversity is a natural artifact of evolution when there are few constraints. Each type of entity reflects unique potential, capacity, goals, purpose, and responsibility yet all spring from the same source and follow the same processes. One might say that they occupy different niches and habitats within the same consciousness-evolution fractal ecosystem."

Thomas Campbell, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything): A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics (Lightning Strikes, 2003), 223-310.

An evolving and spiritual consciousness

The About page of Thomas Campbell’s web site begins as follows: “Tom Campbell began researching altered states of consciousness with Bob Monroe (Journeys Out Of The Body, Far Journeys, and The Ultimate Journey) at Monroe Laboratories in the early 1970s where he and a few others were instrumental in getting Monroe’s laboratory for the study of consciousness up and running. These early drug-free consciousness pioneers helped design experiments, developed the technology for creating specific altered states, and were the main subjects of study (guinea pigs) all at the same time. Campbell has been experimenting with, and exploring the subjective and objective mind ever since.

Trained as a physicist, Campbell worked for twenty years on developing US missile defense systems before devoting his time to writing and speaking on consciousness. Campbell has not had an NDE, but his perspective on consciousness is based on his out-of-body experiences, which began as he worked with Bob Monroe. My Big TOE is an awesome book, which I found rich in compelling insights.

Campbell writes: “Any credible conception of reality must include subjective experience that can consistently and universally lead to a useful (measurable by anyone) functionality. The biggest picture must cover everything―everything objective, everything subjective, everything normal, and everything paranormal.

“The logic of causality can say nothing about the beginnings of its own system because those beginnings lie outside that system―beyond the reach of its own causal logic. Once we realize the causal logic that gives us science also limits our understanding of the larger reality (and its beginning), we are free to begin exploring the larger truth. Each dimension of reality has its own rules that define its objective science. Additionally, each dimension of reality experiences the next higher (less limited) dimension as subjective and mystical.

“You cannot access understanding and wisdom that is beyond what the quality of your consciousness can naturally support. Every individual unit of consciousness must develop in its own unique way, powered by the free will that drives its intent.

“The one thing most modern physicists agree on these days is that what we generally take for our local 3D time ordered causal reality is merely a perceptual illusion. Some sixty years after quantum physics destroyed the widely accepted material foundation of physical reality, what lies behind this persistent perceptual illusion remains as mysterious as ever to a traditional science trapped in the little picture by limiting beliefs.

“Real personal science requires real, verifiable, measurable, objective results. Here, the word ‘results,’ at the most basic level, refers to significant, continuing verifiable progress toward the improvement of the quality of your conscious being, the evolution of mind, the growing-up and maturing of spirit. Why? Because that is the nature of the reality we live in. You will see that the physical nature as well as the spiritual nature of our reality is straightforwardly derived from the natural process of consciousness evolution.

“Truth is absolute, but how to discover it, and express it within your being, must be personal. Spiritual growth, improving the quality of your consciousness, is about changing your attitude, expanding your awareness, outgrowing your fears, reducing your ego, and improving your capacity to love. To succeed, you must change your intent and modify your motivation.

“One method of accomplishing an assessment of subjective inner space is through meditation. Meditation lets us experience the invisible background of consciousness. Each individual will naturally extract from their meditation what they need for their next step.

“Individual consciousness is a subset of absolute consciousness. Pay careful attention to the choices you make throughout your day. Examine your motivations and intent relative to those choices. By an act of your will, modify your intents to be more giving, caring, loving, and to be less self-serving. Shift the focus from you, from what you want, need and desire, to what you can give to, and do for, others. In the same manner, change where and how you invest the energy that follows your intent in your relationships and interactions with other people.

“This is not about what I believe about reality. This is about a model of reality based upon my experience and research. If it makes you feel better, I don’t believe any of this stuff either. I either know it as fact (knowledge), or regard it as the most likely possibility or best hypothesis thus far (based on the scientific data available to me as of this writing).

“The actual differences between descriptions of the same absolute truth are―after differing language, cultural, and religious modes of expression are removed―much smaller than you would likely imagine. This is because all spiritual paths converge on the same absolute truths by means of reducing ego and fear, which are the primary generators of confusion and divisiveness.

“The most important question is: can these two assumptions (the existence of consciousness and the process of evolution) deliver the goods? Can they provide a logical foundation broad enough and solid enough to support a comprehensive model of reality?”

 

Thomas Campbell, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything): A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics (Lightning Strikes, 2003).

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Loved ones on the Other Side are with us

Medium Laura Lynne Jackson writes: “Each one of us comes into this life with unique gifts and unique contributions to make. Finding and honoring our true selves will always help us navigate our points of faith.

“We must learn to recognize our own light,” she affirms. “We must always let our truths and gifts and light guide our paths.”

“There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ paths—just different lessons we learn on different paths. There are, however, definitely higher and lower paths, and taking the higher one can make learning our lessons easier. If we honor our own truths, our unique gifts, and our own light, we create a very beautiful picture indeed. And if we consistently do this, we find ourselves on our true path.

“While we are choosing which path to take, our loved ones on the Other Side are hoping that we will make the best choice—and even at times exerting pull to help us find it. They want us to be the best versions of ourselves and achieve happiness and fulfillment.

“Spirit guides are souls who have lived on earth before (but not during our current lifetime) and are now continuing their journeys on the Other Side. As part of their journeys, they have jobs—just as we do here on earth. Those jobs are meant to help them learn the lessons they need to learn so that they, too, can move forward in their journeys. These souls become spirit guides, and being spirit guides helps them grow. They are our protectors, teachers, mentors, and cheerleaders. They put thoughts in our heads and send us nudges, signs, affirmations, creative impulses, brainstorms, instincts, gut feelings. When we talk about honoring our pull, they are the ones who are pulling. They always want us to find our best path.

“Ultimately, though, it is up to us to make the choices, and that is where free will comes in. Sometimes we make decisions that lead us down a path of fear rather than a path of love. When that happens, we can veer off course and become lost.

“But we must never forget that we all have the innate capacity to honor the pull and get back on the true path.

Jeff Tarrant, a psychologist teaching and doing research at the University of Missouri, performed an EEG study of Jackson while she was engaged in contacting a deceased child on the Other Side. An EEG measures electrical patterns at the surface of the scalp that reflect cortical activity (these are commonly known as ‘brainwaves.’ He then analyzed digitally the EEG, which produces what is called a gEEG.

Tarrant told Jackson: “there was a high degree of abnormal activity in the right rear portion of my brain where the parietal and temporal lobes meet. Instead of a steady series of small waves—normal, which suggests brainwave activity—Jeff recorded a series of bigger, intermittent waves, the kind usually seen in deep sleep or when a person is in a coma.”

“The voltage of brainwaves is measured in microvolts, and the normal range is from zero to 60,” he explained. “But your activity in some areas was as high as 150 microvolts! You were blowing out the scale!”

“You are not asleep or unconscious or meditating, yet parts of your brain appear to be offline,” he said. “It’s as if you’re consciously getting your brain out of the way so that other people and other messages can come through. When you perform as a psychic or a medium some parts of your brain are basically not functioning, even though there’s no event to explain why that’s so. Somehow your brain is capable of getting into this altered state on its own.”

“This made sense to me. When I do a reading, my ego dissolves, and I connect with something greater than myself, some thing beyond my individual persona. The portal that allows for that, the test results seems to suggest, was somewhere in my brain.”

Tarrant also told Jackson: “I ran your data through what is called a Traumatic Brain Injury discriminant analysis (TBI), and it produced a 97.5 percent probability index for you. That means your brainwave patterns are almost 100 percent consistent with those of someone who has had a traumatic brain injury.”

“Visually,” Jackson explains, “the Other Side has shown me a massive field of light energy, not unlike the sun. This field is unified, but it is also distinctly made up of billions and billions of smaller points of light, like a single image that, on close inspection, is made up of hundreds of smaller images. These billions of points of light are us.

“What I see is that we comprise the massive field of light—it cannot exist without us. But neither can we individually exist outside this field. Our existence is primarily defined by our place in this grand constellation of energy, not by who we are individually. We may appear to exist separately from anyone else, and we may perceive the boundaries that describe us and feel we are autonomous. But our energy, our consciousness, is inexorably entangled with the energy of others.

“To me, that is better evidence of our interconnected existence than any scientific experiment could ever provide. We are all connected. We are all entangled. We are all invested in each other’s fates and fortunes.

“To the world you may be one person. But to one person, you may be the world.”

 

Laura Lynne Jackson, The Light Between Us: Stories from Heaven (Spiegal & Grau, 2015).

We heal our grief by sharing our pain

For many years Laura Lynne Jackson led two separate lives. In one she was a graduate of Oxford University teaching English in high school. In another she was a medium providing readings to individuals who sought her out to help them communicate with a deceased loved one.

“Then, one day at the high school where I teach,” she writes, “while I was on hall duty, I felt a sudden immense download of information and insight from the universe. It felt like a lighting bolt that brought instant clarity. And the meaning was simple. You are meant to share your story.”

Jackson submitted to rigorous tests—first with the Forever Family Foundation, a nonprofit, science-based group that helps people in grief, and then with the Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential in Arizona. “At Windbridge,” she says, “I passed an eight-step, quintuple-blind screening administered by scientists to become one of only a small group of Certified Research Mediums.”

I find the model of free will that Jackson explains very convincing. Like Eben Alexander and James Hillman she affirms the important role of spirit guides.

“I am clairvoyant,” Jackson explains, “which means I have the ability to gather information about people and events through means other than my five senses. I’m also clairaudient—I can perceive sounds through means other than my ears—and clairsentient, which allows me to feel things through nonhuman means.”

Jackson began to participate in grief retreats sponsored by the Forever Family Foundation for families who have lost children to an early death. She found she could help families contact their lost children and experience a release from their grief, knowing their child was not suffering and was happy on the Other Side.

“There is a reason I gladly participate in grief retreats,” she explains. “I go in seeing how distraught people are, and I leave seeing how their burdens have been lifted by the act of sharing their grief with others. By sharing, we are acknowledging that, as spiritual beings, we are all connected.

“Grief brings us great pain, but the Other Side teaches us that this pain is not about the absence of love—it’s about the continuation of that love.

“The most powerful way we can honor someone who has crossed is to spread light and love in their name. Doing that work not only keeps that person present in our lives but also allows our loved one on the Other Side to still be a positive influence on our world.

“The Other Side wants us to live wide-open, vibrant lives. Live as fully and brightly as we can. They will be there with us. When we turn tragedy into hope, our loved ones on the Other Side don’t just see this, they celebrate it.

“The universe is designed for us to be there for each other—we are not meant to retreat into our pain and grief alone. We are meant to honor the vibrant cords of light and love that bind us, because the love of others is the most healing force of all. Why would we shut ourselves off from this powerful force? We are meant to be part of a vast, endless cycle of love, through which we receive the love of others and then pass that love on to someone else.

“Sharing our pain, and giving and receiving love, is how we heal our grief.”

“Why are we here?” she asks, and then answers. “To learn. To give and receive love. To be the agents of positive change in the world.

“What happens at death? We shed our bodies but our consciousness endures.

“What is our true purpose on this earth? To grow in love—and to help others do the same.

“Do we have free will to chart the course of our lives, or are our futures already mapped out? The Other Side has shown me a model of existence that is generous enough to encompass both free will—the ability to act at one’s own discretion—and predeterminism, which is the belief that all events and actions are decided in advance. It is a beautifully simple model I call ‘free will vs. points of fate.’

“Our existence is mapped out by a dazzling array of destination points that are in place before we are born. These are the points of fate—a continuum of all the crucial events, decisive moments, and significant people that constitute our time here.

“The Other Side has shown me that we create the actions that move us from one point of fate to the next. We are the ones who connect the dots. We make the decisions that move us from one point to another, and in the process we shape and create the picture of our lives.

Laura Lynne Jackson, The Light Between Us: Stories from Heaven (Spiegal & Grau, 2015).

Revising evolution with a naturalistic teleology

Thomas Nagel writes: “The teleology I want to consider would be an explanation not only of the appearance of physical organisms but of the development of consciousness and ultimately of reason in those organisms. But its form can be described even if we stay at the physical level. Natural teleology would require two things. First, that the nonteleological and timeless laws of physics—those governing the ultimate elements of the physical universe, whatever they are—are not fully deterministic. Given the physical state of the universe at any moment, the laws of physics would have to leave open a range of alternative successor states, presumably with a probability distribution over them. 

“Second, among those possible futures there will be some that are more eligible than others as possible steps on the way to the formation of more complex systems, and ultimately of the kinds of replicating systems characteristic of life. The existence of teleology requires that successor states in this subset have a significantly higher probability than is entailed by the laws of physics alone—simply because they are on the path toward a certain outcome. Teleological laws would assign higher probability to steps on paths in state space that have a higher ‘velocity’ toward certain outcomes. They would be laws of the self-organization of matter, essentially—or of whatever is more basic than matter.

“This is a frankly teleological hypothesis because the preferred transitions do not have a higher probability in virtue of their intrinsic immediate characteristics, but only in virtue of temporally extended developments of which they form a potential part. In other words, some laws of nature would apply directly to the relation between the present and the future, rather than specifying instantaneous functions that hold at all times. A naturalistic teleology would mean that organizational and developmental principles of this kind are an irreducible part of the natural order, and not the result of intentional or purposive influence by anyone. I am not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without intention makes sense, but I do not at the moment see why it doesn’t.”[1]

“According to the hypothesis of natural teleology, the natural world would have a propensity to give rise to beings of the kind that have a good—beings for which things can be good or bad. These are all the actual and possible forms of life. They have appeared through the historical process of evolution, but part of the explanation for the existence of that process and of the possibilities on which natural selection operates would be that they bring value into the world, in a great variety of forms.

“Since the emergence of value is the emergence of both good and evil, it is not a candidate for a purely benign teleological explanation: a tendency toward the good. In fact, no teleological principle tending toward the production of a single outcome seems suitable. Rather, it would have to be a tendency toward the proliferation of complex forms and the generation of multiple variations in the range of possible complex systems.

“We recognize that evolution has given rise to multiple organisms that have a good, so that things can go well or badly for them, and that in some of those organisms there has appeared the additional capacity to aim consciously at their own good, and ultimately at what is good in itself. From a realist perspective this cannot be merely an accidental side effect of natural selection, and a teleological explanation satisfies this condition. On a teleological account, the existence of value is not an accident, because that is part of the explanation of why there is such a thing as life with all its possibilities of development and variation. In brief, value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.”[2]

“This is a revision of the Darwinian picture rather than an outright denial of it. A teleological hypothesis will acknowledge that the details of that historical development are explained largely through natural selection among the available possibilities on the basis of reproductive fitness in changing environments. But even though natural selection partly determines the details of the forms of life and consciousness that exist, and the relations among them, the existence of the genetic material and the possible forms it makes available for selection have to be explained in some other way. The teleological hypothesis is that these things may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them.”[3]

Robert Traer adds: What Nagel calls a “cosmic predisposition” is a evolutionary direction that provides a naturalistic explanation for the extraordinarily unlikely development of conscious life. Because our consciousness transcends our physical experience, as it is not limited to an awareness of sensory experience, a cosmic direction might also help to explain near-death experiences that seem to verify a continuing consciousness after physical death.

1 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012), 92-104.

2 See Derek Parfit, On What Matters (Oxford University Press, 2011).

3 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, italics added, 105-123.

Explaining the evolution of reason and values

Philosopher Thomas Nagel writes: “Since we are evidently the products of evolution, and ultimately of a cosmic process that led to the development first of unicellular organisms and then of conscious agents before eventually producing intelligent beings capable of value judgments, the conception of the natural order that made this process possible must be expanded. An adequate conception of the cosmos must contain the resources to account for how it could have given rise to beings capable of thinking successfully about what is good and bad, right and wrong, and discovering moral and evaluative truths that do not depend on their own beliefs.

“If we leave the issue of determinism aside, the distinctive conception of human beings that is implied by value realism is that they can be motivated by their apprehension of values and reasons, whose existence is a basic type of truth, and that the explanation of action by such motives is a basic form of explanation not reducible to something of another form, either psychological or physical. I give you aspirin because I know it will relieve your headache, thereby manifesting my recognition that this fact counts in favor of the action. And this is not merely a superficial description of something else, which is the real, underlying explanation.

“Human action, in other words, is explained not only by physiology, or by desires, but by judgments. We are the subjects of judgment-sensitive attitudes, in Scanlon’s phrase,1 and those judgments have a subject matter beyond themselves. We exist in a world of values and respond to them through normative judgments that guide our actions. This, like our more general cognitive capacities, is a higher development of our nature as conscious creatures. Perhaps it includes the capacity to respond to aesthetic value as well—construed realistically as a judgment-independent domain that our experiences and judgments reveal to us.

“As with cognition in general, the response to value seems only to make sense as a function of the unified subject of consciousness, and not as a combination of the responses of its parts. In that respect it is different from those experiences of pleasure and pain that provide some of the most important raw material of value: they might be explained reductively through some form of psychophysical monism. But practical reasoning and its influence on action involve the unified conscious subject who sees what he should do—and that suggests an emergent answer to the constitutive question. On the other hand, the problem of how to reconcile the unity of the subject, such as it is, with a reductive account of the mental afflicts psychophysical monism at every level.

“The most important metaphysical aspect of a realist view of practical reason is that consciousness is not epiphenomenal and passive but that it plays an active role in the world. This is part of the ordinary view we have of ourselves, but it adds to the mere psychophysical irreducibility of experiential consciousness, a further respect in which the materialist form of naturalism fails to provide a complete account of the nature of human beings.2 Whether practical reason is emergent or reducible to activity at the micro level through some form of psychophysical monism, value realism requires consciousness to be active and rules out epiphenomenalism in human action. (A subjectivist view of value may also be incompatible with epiphenomenalism, but that is far from clear: subjectivism might be consistent with the possibility that our conscious value judgments are all side effects of the physiological causes of action.)

“Subjectivism interprets our value judgments as an outgrowth and elaboration, made possible by our linguistic and rational capacities, or our natural motivational dispositions, nothing more. Realism interprets them as the result of a process of discovery, starting from initial appearances of value that are comparable to perceptual beliefs and moving (we hope) toward a better understanding of how we should live. If realism is true, practical reason in this sense is one of our cognitive faculties.

“It is clear that unlike realism, subjectivism lends itself, at least speculatively, to a Darwinian account of how creatures capable of having values might have arisen. At least this question does not add anything to the difficulties for such an account already presented by the problem of consciousness and of reason in general. Value begins, on this view, from our desires and inclinations, which are natural facts of animal and human psychology, and higher-level value judgments are motivational elaborations from this base, generated by experience, refection, and culture.

“On a realist view, by contrast, the historical question is much more obscure, partly because the result is obscure. We want to know what has to be added to the standard Darwinian picture to account for the appearance through evolution of creatures like us, who can control their actions in response to reasons. While this capacity must be consistent with the influence of natural selection in that it is not inimical to reproductive fitness, and therefore not liable to be extinguished by natural selection, its appearance on the evolutionary menu would have to be explained by something else.

“Value realism must make sense of the fact that the biological evolutionary process and the physical and chemical history that preceded it have given rise to conscious creatures, to the real value that fills their lives and experiences, and ultimately to self-conscious beings capable to judgment-sensitive attitudes who can respond to and be rationally motivated by their awareness of those values. The story includes huge quantities of pain as well as pleasure, so it does not lend itself to an optimistic teleological interpretation. Nevertheless, the development of value and moral understanding, like the development of knowledge and reason and the development of consciousness that underlies both of those higher-order functions, forms part of what a general conception of the cosmos must explain.

“What is the actual history of value in the world so far as we are aware of it? Nothing in this domain can be regarded as obvious, but in the broadest sense, it seems to coincide with the history of life. First, with the appearance of life even in its earliest forms, there come into existence entities that have a good and for which things can go well or badly. Even a bacterium has a good in this sense, in virtue of its proper functioning, whereas a rock does not. Eventually in the course of evolutionary history there appear conscious beings, whose experimental lives can go well or badly in ways that are familiar.

“In looking for a historical explanation, a realist must suppose that the strongly motivational aspects of life and consciousness appear already freighted with value, even though they find their place in the world through their role in the lives of the organisms that are their subjects. The pleasures of sex, food, and drink are wonderful, in addition to being adaptive. Value enters the world with life, and the capacity to recognize and be influenced by value in its larger extension appears with higher forms of life. Therefore the historical explanation of life must include an explanation of value, just as it must include an explanation of consciousness.”3

1 See Thomas M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Belknap Press, 2000), 20.

 

2 See David Hodgson, Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2011).

 

3 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012), 105-120.

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