The Philosopher, Ch. 2

So what then accounts for the human project to mesh with the divine?

The human brain is clearly more evolved than it had to be--for survival or even supremacy on the savannah.

To get the better of other animals, the competent hunter gatherer needed to only master fire and simple stone tools.

Such talents alone would have made humans kings of their domain.

So why did we keep evolving?

Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way.

Is evolutionary intelligence merely a matter of problem solving and tool-making, practical talents to which natural selection easily applies?  Or was Darwin's process of natural selection incomplete-- a product of 19th Century scientific empiricism? For if the mind is merely a problem solver--what accounts for the quantum leaps that have seemed to occur throughout human evolution?

Take a look at whales or dolphins.   They have no idea of the realm beyond their ocean.   Their problem solving brain has never transcended their limited aquatic place in the universe.  Nor can it if the brain is just a raw problem solving computational device.  Dolphins presumably know nothing other than what their senses can tell them--and its all wet.

 Humans are not similarly limited by our "ocean" or perception of the four dimensions of reality we can sense.  If string theory is has any basis, there are 11 dimensions (or circumstances) of reality in M-theory.  Other theories have 26 spacetime dimensions for the bosonic string and 10 for the superstring.  Humans can intuit dimensions beyond a "problem solving" mind.   Einstein came up with his general theory of relativity long before it was demonstrated in nature with the gravitational shift of red light.

The human brain has not only evolved to transcend its senses, but to transcend itself.    In mathematics, Godel's theorem of incompleteness states that the axioms of any formal system cannot be wholly proved from within the system itself:  Thus, no logical system can ever come full circle and bite its own tail. There will always be a gap that has to be filled from outside.  What that outside is is the great mystery.

This transcendence even stinks of Zen where the mind is a sword that cuts but cannot cut itself, an eye that sees but cannot see itself. 

What is the eye that sees, but cannot see itself?