and creative power in the first place? Moreover, how come the Universe has bits and parts conducive to creative manipulation? And how and why should the laws of Nature change? If the laws were to continually change, the Universe might surely run the risk of losing its existence completely at some stage due to destructive physical laws. And Hoyle did not convincingly show how microorganisms are able to mastermind the formation of stars and planets, nor was he able to deal a deathly blow to the big bang scenario currently accepted by most cosmologists.
As we have seen, it seems much more likely that all of the cosmic coincidences necessary for life and consciousness to arise are connected with the way the Universe was originally configured at the time of the big bang. If this is the case, we are again left with this one significant Universe fine-tuned from the start. Or, to put it another way, we are left with Nature, a system in which the capacity for ever-more-exquisite forms of self- organization reflects some kind of intelligence and intention.
Still, Hoyle’s intelligent Universe is certainly one of the most cogent scenarios I have yet come across that attempts to explain the mystery of reality in essentially scientific terms, even despite its failure to specifically address altered states of consciousness. I think it is possible to utilize some of Hoyle’s ideas and rework them. The prelude to the final option is over. Armed with the fantastic hypothesis outlined at the start of this chapter, we are now ready to focus on what I consider its most likely and most brilliant implications.
Recalling the Biospherical Mind
On a previous occasion I referred to the Other as a biospherical mind, a term that, although doubtless too far-fetched for some, nonetheless captures the planetary character of entheogenic flora and the rather spectacular organic visions they often induce. Sacred plants and fungi appear like carefully distributed “access codes” that create a different set of informational relations to converge within the brain/mind system, allowing one’s meaning in the context of the rest of Nature to shift up a notch. In this way, as if tuning in to the otherwise occluded “higher frequencies” of Nature, one can come to behold the numinous and intentional presence of the Other. Can we therefore locate the Other here upon the Earth, somehow woven into the evolving fabric of the biosphere?
Contemplating Evolution
The fine-tuning of the Universe really comes into effect through the evolutionary process that has dominated the Earth’s surface regardless of whether this process originally began on Earth or in space (we can concede that Hoyle may have been correct with his panspermia theory). Either way, organic evolution can be looked on as an
In its broadest sense, the evolutionary process is currently being channeled through human culture. The knowledge acquired by our predecessors can be stored in computer networks like the Internet, books, folklore, music, dance, spoken language, and so on, and this information accumulation—the growth in advantageous wisdom if you like—can be passed on directly to successive generations. In this way, accurate information about the world grows as uncertainty decreases, and this process of information accretion allows our species to dominate and understand the planet in next to no time compared with the otherwise slow rates of (biological) evolutionary development that preceded our species.
With computerized telecommunication swiftly evolving and connecting the Earth’s store of information, the biosphere looks to be wiring itself up into a bioelectronic superorganism. Our physical bodies may no longer be evolving, but our culture and our technology are, especially our digital-communications technology. Just as the neurons in our brains are able to transmit information to one another at astounding speed, so too are we now able to electronically synapse with one other across the globe.
This leads me to think that the assertion that the human brain is the most complex “device” we know of is in fact a fallacy and that the biospherical system in its interconnected totality is far and away more complex than a single human brain. It must be. A brain cannot be understood properly unless the context in which it exists is taken into account. This context is the environment, with its vast network of language-like relations. Nothing remains isolated within the environment. All organisms derive their meaning and their function according to the role they play and the relations they have within the entire biospherical system. The biosphere is thus unimaginably more complex than the parts of which it is composed.
Since the human brain is complex enough to embody intentional intelligence and since much of its firing activity can only be understood in the light of its intentional intelligence, I believe it tenable that, in an analogous way, evolution itself represents the ongoing intent of an intelligence somehow distributed throughout Nature, and brought into focus through the biosphere (or any biosphere for that matter). In other words, somewhat like Hoyle suggested, the evolutionary process that has dominated the surface of the Earth is the articulation of an intelligence of some kind.
Returning to purely biological evolution, the idea that this process represents an intelligence in action is not to deny the reality of natural selection. Far from it. After all, to argue against natural selection (the process whereby certain genetic variations and mutations are favored due to their ability to better replicate themselves) is to commit perhaps the cardinal sin against the life sciences. I would not dare embarrass myself like that. No, I am simply suggesting that evolution through lengthy sequential instances of natural selection represents a natural intelligence in action as opposed to, say, human intelligence in action.
If we selectively breed dogs or cats, then we are carrying out a process of artificial selection whereby we select those animal features that we would like to see strengthened. In the case of selective breeding, therefore, human intelligence governs the process. In the biosphere at large, natural selection governs the process of evolution over longer stretches of time than artificial selection. Biological evolution is slow—exceedingly slow. So slow in fact that we can’t really see evolution happening. Whereas this is taken to mean that Nature is essentially dumb and mindless, I believe that we can view Nature in its entirety as a form of active intelligence, though of an order of magnitude well above that displayed by our species. And by “Nature in its entirety,” I mean that we can view the biosphere as a continuum within which individual organisms are in fluidic connection with each other and their surroundings. Influences pass in all directions. There is but one interconnected system in which evolution occurs. Remember our River of Life metaphor, in which all forms of the water were part of a coherent, interconnected whole? This is how we can think of the biosphere, as representing a single sensible system in which information is continuously being churned and integrated into greater and greater patterns of coherence and complexity. Moreover, natural selection can be interpreted as natural intelligence at work, quite literally a response of Nature to its own significant contextual configuration. In other words, the environment, as a context, always serves to highlight the sensibleness of certain genetic variations and thence sustain them—rather like the way our minds will spot and highlight a word amongst a scattering of random letters. This being so, genetic changes that lead to some kind of sensible life-enhancing behavior will tend to persist and have the opportunity to further evolve within any gene pool. Because Nature represents a meaningful and ordered contextual system (in other words, it is intelligently configured), evolutionary events can unfold in
The Importance of Context
