Here's an old relative of ours. Very old actually, but unlike in the usual run of events this little chap his his (or her) brain fossilised which makes it very interesting indeed. Given that we need a certain amount of icky gubbins between the ear in order to have conscious experience, we must also need a certain amount to have a spiritual experience.
What's interesting to me - but probably not high on the paleontologist's list of research priorities - is, at what stage of our development as animals did we first start having experiences that one might call "transcendental" or visions of some sort of god? Have we always been plagues by them? I doubt it, my dog never stares from her basket with more than boredom or restlessness and I can't imagine any fish getting all tripped out about a sudden glimpse of cosmic awareness. Even chimpanzees are overrated in the sophistication stakes, they've got a good store of learned behaviours to mix up and fool earnest researchers into thinking they are recording actual creative thought. But they aren't. So it's just us and we came from critters like this little guy on through fish and dogs and chimps, and then on to our not really understood and often unappreciated awesomeness as sentient beings.. How does that work? I always liked Julian Jaynes' idea that we developed consciousness [defined by him as our interior monologue and self-awareness and not our awareness of surroundings and instinctual responses] all of a sudden a mere few thousand years ago, and developed it out of our old gods because they were us and we hallucinated their voices. Sounds bizarre but when you compare old testament writing to new, and the Iliad to the Odyssey, you notice a switch from bossy old style gods playing with their hapless human charges to a kind of touchy feely "we can work it out" style of operation. But the old gods still haunt us and we (some of us anyway) are unable to think of our own ideas and still turn to them for inspiration. And think of all the people who report hearing voices, psychosis etc. Maybe spiritual experiences are a flashback to an earlier time when our brains didn't work in the same way as they do now? After all, if Jaynes is right and conscious thought is a new thing, but still dependent on its connection with deeper brain functions like feelings and desires, we could expect it to be patchy and prone to slipping out of gear (evolutionary throwbacks are common with new genetic variations) maybe this is the root of spiritual experience and we have no other language to explain it with apart from the one of our old stories. Gods and prophets and visions. But what has all this got to do with a fossilised arthropod? Well, somehow we got from there to here. There are really only two important questions, how we did we do that, and why is there a universe in the first place? Ancient arthropod brains surprise paleontologists http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/nov/09/ancient-arthropod-brains-surprise-paleontologists http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/nov/09/ancient-arthropod-brains-surprise-paleontologists Ancient arthropod brains surprise paleontologists http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/nov/09/ancient-arthropod-brains-surprise-paleontologists Exceptionally well preserved 520-million-year-old arthropod brains overturn the old idea that nervous tissue does not fossilize, and provide fresh insights into... View on www.theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/nov/09/ancient-arthropod-brains-surprise-paleontologists Preview by Yahoo
