Unnaturally Natural or Naturally Unnatural?

May 1, 2009

Our minds never tire of raising certain grandiose questions. How could consciousness ever be constructed out of unconscious materials? How could dead matter ever combine, on its own, to become living?

Some respond to the persistent mystery surrounding the answers to those questions as proof of their nonsensicality. Nature tends, by her impersonal machinations, to prefer individuals to survive and perpetuate their winning traits. At times, however, accidental traits pass-on and endure. These accidents are those attributes of individuals that do not secure their survival (initially) and there perpetuation (eventually). These superfluous mutations remain, so long as they do not hinder nature's ends. If the mutations are disadvantageous, then those individuals and the species they belong to become extinct. Humanity's great mutation, the peculiar extent of their consciousness, has been of the utmost benefit to them. Never before has adaptation been so swift and fluid. More than any other animal, humans exploit their surroundings, thereby securing their survival and perpetuation.

Aspects of consciousness are not of equal import. Some aspects of consciousness, like those questions posed in perennial philosophy, fail to meet either of the two basic needs for which nature selects. To the extent that consciousness does not benefit the species, it is accidental. That we can at once ponder and not benefit by pondering questions concerning consciousness and life demonstrates the accidental, mutated quality of philosophical thought. We can study those frustrating questions to offer hypotheses as to how they ever could have arisen, but we will always treat them as a sixth toe or second head: a grotesque curiosity.

Some respond to the persistent mystery surrounding the answers to those questions as proof of their necessity. Because of the precarious position consciousness and life have in the natural world, they are distinguished from it. Rather than calling them natural and supposing they do not belong, they are called supernatural and supposed to belong elsewhere.

If we were never perpetuated by wondering about certain truths, why can we not be rid of questions? How could something spring from nature that is so patently unnatural? Could it be that there is something unnatural in us?

Nature commands: live and then die! A human's interiority commands: live! Either humans are fundamentally deranged (at once mindful of part of what nature requires and resistant to the other) or they are in some way transcendent.