RW: Well, they are saying that natural selection is not adequate to account for the growth in complexity. And I'm saying it is.

WIE: Okay, you are saying that the mechanism of natural selection is enough to account for it all.

RW: Yes. Now, as I said, why life seems to be accompanied by sentience, by subjective experience, is a mystery in its own right. But once you grant that life does have that property, then I think natural selection can account for the rest. I'm not sure that I'm being clear.

WIE: Well, actually that's very interesting. You said, "Once you grant that life has sentience." In other words, if life itself has sentience, then natural selection makes sense, and then you can account for everything by natural selection.

RW: What I mean by that is, for example, animals ferociously attacking other animals is accompanied by feelings of hatred, animals affectionately caring for one another is accompanied by feelings of affection, putting your hand in an open flame is accompanied by pain, and so on. Once you accept all that, then natural selection can account for the evolution of human love, human hatred, and so on because it can account for the behaviors that are correlated with those things.

But, as I said earlier, why there is that initial correlation between certain kinds of behavior and certain kinds of sentience, or why sentience exists at all, remains a mystery. So when I say that natural selection can account for everything about being human, when I say it can account for love, and remorse, and compassion, and so on, what I actually mean is that it can account for the behaviors that are accompanied by those feelings. And the existence of feeling in and of itself, the existence of sentience, is a question that in my mind is beyond the scope of natural selection to explain.

But still, there is a clear-cut difference between me and the "intelligent design" people. They don't think you can even get the behaviors out of natural selection. They don't think you can have an organism smart enough to design a 747 produced by natural selection. Leaving aside the question of whether there has to be conscious experience associated with designing a 747, they just don't think you can get the brain cells.

Conscious Evolution

WIE: Do you know who Sri Aurobindo was?

RW: He was in India early in the twentieth century, right?

WIE: Yes, he was part of the independence movement in India. He was also a philosopher and a spiritual sage, and he was nominated for a Nobel prize in poetry—quite a remarkable human being.

RW: I know very little about him. I was just talking to Michael Murphy at Esalen, who is a devotee of his, I think.

WIE: Yes, Michael Murphy does respect Sri Aurobindo immensely. Both Aurobindo and the French Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, with whose work I know you're very familiar, brought an evolutionary dimension to spiritual life. So I wanted to read you a quote from Sri Aurobindo and get your response to it:

We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true, and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life. As there, so here, the impulse exists more or less obscurely in her different vessels with an ever-ascending series in the power of its will-to-be; as there, so here, it is gradually evolving and bound fully to evolve the necessary organs and faculties... The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the God. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realization of that which she secretly is.... If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.

RW: It is a lot to take in. It does sound very Teilhardian in places. It's the kind of speculation that I think scientists should be more open to and less threatened by. Again, if you think clearly about the limitations of science and the difficulty of the problem of consciousness and so on, you have more respect for those kinds of speculations than you would otherwise.

He says evolution doesn't explain why mind evolves, why mind comes out of matter. I think natural selection actually does explain why brains come out of matter and why brains look just as they do, but if, by "mind," you mean the subjective experience, then I think he's right. As for the speculation that the human species is—I don't know how exactly you would put it—the medium of the creation of something larger and in some sense better than us, something that might merit the term "Divine," I think that's the kind of speculation whose legitimacy you appreciate if you really step back and look at the big story that science is telling. If you step back and really look at the movement from the very origin of life to this giant interconnected world we have now, I think you see the kind of directionality that is consistent with that kind of spiritual scenario.

Now at the same time, science certainly can't confirm a scenario like that. But I do think that science is more spiritually suggestive than a lot of scientists acknowledge, and that what you just read is one very plausible line of suggestion.

WIE: At the end of both The Moral Animal and Nonzero, you speak of our responsibility as human beings to evolve consciously, to embrace the moral implications of what it means to be conscious beings on this planet at this time. You said earlier that if we could get the picture of what's actually happening now for us human beings on this planet, then something could happen. But if our brains have been created to respond to an environment that existed hundreds of thousands of years ago, then what even makes it possible for us to be able to do that—to comprehend such a vast picture?

RW: In a sense, it does call for transcendence, in the sense of going beyond your natural instincts, beyond basic self-interest. And this transcendence can be of a purely rational sort. In other words, you can just size the situation up and say, for example, "Oh, I get it. If millions of Muslims around the world are mired in poverty and hate America, that's bad for me. Maybe I should do something about it." That's a purely rational version of transcendence. But there is another type of transcendence. If you want to go further and exercise the kind of spiritual discipline that gives you a deeper, more heartfelt appreciation for the plight of people who are very different from you, then that would be a different kind of transcendence. I think both of them are to be commended. If you can manage both of them, then you are to be commended, too. I honestly don't know to what extent the second kind of transcendence is necessary. I certainly think that the sheerly rational kind is important. Policy makers, for example, need to understand the interconnectedness of the world and understand that the welfare of Americans is positively correlated with the welfare of people halfway around the world. That's important. But I don't know if just this rational transcendence is going to be enough. And so, although I think they're both good, of course, it's best when they're symmetrical. So, ideally, we would have both kinds of enlightenment.

WIE: Can you say more about that? What is our role as individuals in this evolutionary event that's happening right now?

RW: I guess at a mundane level, I'd like to see us all conscious of the need to, if nothing else, keep the experiment going. That is to say, to sustain the living world and give it a chance to evolve further. I think that doing that will require the insight that the fortunes of people around the planet are more and more interconnected, so that more and more people really can do well by doing good. Just keeping the experiment going, that is to say, sustaining a fairly harmonious existence on this planet for human beings, has this morally rich dimension in itself because it does involve more and more thinking about the welfare of others. Then beyond that, it may ultimately have the kind of spiritual/theological payoff that Sri Aurobindo is referring to. There may be something divine that's in the process of being created, but that we may not live to see. But still our descendants presumably will be part of it in some sense.

WIE: In Nonzero you hinted that the evolutionary future might involve something happening at a global level—perhaps a giant planetary brain—could you say more about that?

RW: What I mean is, who knows? Five hundred years from now, maybe the whole kind of techno-social organism on this planet will be sufficiently cohesive to have a unified field of subjective awareness. Maybe it will be like something to be Planet Earth, in a sense. But you know, fifty years ago, well before the Internet, when Teilhard de Chardin coined the term "noosphere," which he called the giant thinking envelope of the earth, he coined that term in conscious relation to the term "biosphere." The idea was very much that the biosphere is akin to the body of the planet and the noosphere the mind of the planet. Well, if he's right that, more and more, there is such a thing as the collective mind of the planet, and that human beings are kind of neurons in some giant global brain, then maybe someday the planet will, in some sense, have a unified consciousness.

WIE: But I think you are right that it will take a conscious effort to think about our interconnectedness for something truly to change.

RW: Yes, although some people would be alienated by that kind of scenario, by the idea of some kind of transcendent societal awareness slowly coming into existence.

WIE: We have no idea what that would be like.

RW: No, that's true. We don't. I think the concern that people would have is that it would involve a very mechanized, automatic life for individual human beings. Life could be very routinized, whether the mechanism of control was centralized, in a fascistic way, or decentralized. It could still be routinized for the individual humans. I mean, who knows? What scares people is a scenario where we'll be completely subordinate to technology and will slowly lose our freedom to it. I don't know—this is all kind of the twilight zone—but I do think that if we want to be living a nice life thirty years from now and we want our descendants to be living a nice life, fifty or seventy years from now we really have no choice but to increasingly acknowledge the interests and needs of people around the world, and increasingly recognize that we have common interests, common policy interests, and so on.

WIE: To come together in some greater way.

RW: Yes, as we are doing incrementally, without really realizing it.

WIE: What is your hopeful prognosis?

RW: My hopeful prognosis for the future, generally, of the species? It's that we'll become aware that the basic direction of history has been to make relations among people more nonzero sum, and among polities, more nonzero sum. And we'll become aware that we're entering a time when war is more and more a lose-lose game, and that increasingly, cooperation is the only alternative to a very dismal future.