The Psilocybin Solution

To get a firm handle on this highly salient notion concerning intelligent contexts, consider that well-worn story of the monkey at the typewriter. We are asked to imagine this monkey typing feverishly away at random for ages and ages, most of the time producing gibberish. Eventually we can see how, by pure chance, the monkey manages to type some words or even a short meaningful sentence (in which case any grinning on the monkey’s part becomes suddenly apt). Now, although this story is meant to show how meaning can be generated from a nonmeaningful system by pure chance (meaning coming out of nothing and for free), this is patently not true. Indeed, if one can grasp why such reasoning is false, one will simultaneously grasp the point I have been driving at—namely that Nature is an intelligently configured contextual system guaranteed to grow the tree of life by highlighting its sensibleness.

In the monkey yarn, we do not get meaning out of nonmeaning. Far from it. First, we have two meaningful systems from the outset: the monkey and the typewriter. Second, and more important, it is the context of the human psyche that gives meaning to the typed responses of the monkey. This means that one is not getting meaning out of thin air, but that there was a priori meaning present in the system of monkey, typewriter, and us-as-observer. It is precisely this a priori meaning—in the form of an intelligent and patient observer—that serves to highlight that tiny fraction of the monkey’s typed responses that make sense. If there is no meaningful context surrounding the monkey and its typed output (that is, no intelligent observer is present), then no meaning can be highlighted and thus nothing that the monkey types will ever make any sense.

The same holds true for evolution. If Nature were not already a sensibly configured system, if Nature were not highly organized in terms of its laws and its lawful logical relations, then organisms and DNA-writ structures would not make any sense. That they do make such good sense and that more and more sense can be made through organic evolution reveals the a priori intelligently configured context provided by Nature. As an all-surrounding context, Nature notices and minds, as it were, what happens within it, in the same way we would notice if a monkey typed something sensible. In this way, Nature selects sensible changes to genomes, those variations and modifications of DNA that yield life-affirming behavior. If the reader can grasp this, the notion of natural intelligence—the ultra-smart quality of Nature—becomes self- evident, and everything that we take for granted changes.

Environmental Awareness

It is apparent that Nature has an unfailing contextual capacity to continually select smarter and smarter biological forms. Look at the evolution of the hominid brain, for instance. The remarkable evolution from cortex version 1.0 to, say, cortex version 7.0 happened only because the environment continually and invariably selects genetic changes that enhance a brain’s ability to make sense of the intelligible information that the environment provides. Thus, environment and evolving organ (or evolving organism) are part of one interconnected fluidic system. This role of environmental context in cultivating the evolution of complex living things is unfortunately taken for granted by most evolutionary thinkers. In other words, it is not usually remarked upon just how much a role Nature, as an environment, plays in the evolutionary process. It surely did not have to be that way, for we can imagine a state of affairs in which Nature would not continually foster the evolution of complexity—in the same way that we can imagine a monkey typing away at a typewriter for eternity and never ever making written sense because there is no context available with which to highlight any sense.

It seems though that Nature is arranged in a way that literally demands that a real kind of self-stimulation occurs in which information—in the form of genotypes in this instance—continues to organize itself due to continual contextual feedback from the environment, that is, the combined system of organisms and the environment feeds back upon itself and provokes ever-more evolutionary progress. In this way organisms can continually evolve and become smarter, because the environment surrounding them acts as the context that highlights and sustains newly sensible structures and newly sensible behaviors. By making biological and behavioral sense within the larger context in which they are embedded, organisms can be selectively evolved. The point to bear in mind is that sense and meaning of one kind are clearly required in order to elicit further forms of sense and meaning. Only meaning can beget meaning; only intelligence can beget intelligence; only something smart can construct something else that is smart. The fabric of Nature is therefore smart throughout (some of these smart qualities were discussed in previous chapters and were referred to as the Universal Computation).

As a good example that demonstrates the role of the environment in eliciting sensible and ingenious biological structures, think of the shape of dolphins and sharks. Each species has evolved a similarly sleek body shape along with musculature that affords swift movement underwater. Such creatures can move extremely efficiently in water. What their bodies, musculature, and behavioral patterns have done (through evolution) is to home in on, or gravitate toward, the lawful and sensible properties of water, these lawful and sensible properties acting as a sensible context. Because water is replete with various sensible properties, these can be made sense of, or be reflected. The sleek body shape of dolphins and sharks and their precise techniques of swimming therefore reflect the presence of a sensibly ordered environment. If we concede that dolphins and sharks embody impressive natural design, this is only because Nature itself, serving as a context that invokes the design, also embodies impressive natural design. Order and intelligence are everywhere, inherent in both the lawful behavior of the environment and in the organisms and biological behaviors that evolve therein.

Let’s return to the rapid evolution of the hominid brain from version 1.0 to version 7.0. Each incremental increase in size and capacity (presumably derived through mutation and variation) must have met with specific environmental circumstances with which to immediately highlight those improvements such that a reproductive advantage was achieved. Each mutation in hominid brain size was therefore nourished by a contextual set of environmental conditions to ensure that its new capacity had an edge over nonmutated hominid brains. In other words, Nature was able to make sense, or highlight the sensibility, of these mutational, variational changes in the hominid brain. If this were not so then it is difficult to imagine why so many small changes in brain size were so rapidly selected for by the environment.

One assumes that the cerebral capacity we humans have is a highly neat adaptation to living in the world. Indeed, if more and more refined methods of sense-making are the stock and trade of natural selection, consciousness and language are capacities that almost certainly had to evolve somewhere and somewhen, as they are capacities that enable good sense to be made of the environment on a moment-by-moment basis (consciousness and language allow us to “swim” well through the world just as a fusiform shape allows dolphins to swim well through water). And the only reason consciousness and language were able to evolve, the only way they manage to make sense of the world, is because Nature is already sensible and can be made sense of. This is most apparent when thinking of language. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs exist in Nature—old leaves fall gracefully to the ground, for example. Even before we had language to speak about old leaves falling to the ground, they still did. The language we possess merely reflects the language-like property of Nature itself. This means, in effect, that Nature is, and always has been, eminently sensible, and this is reflected within organisms through the “mirror” of bio-logic.

What I am really driving at is that Nature can be viewed as a single system of self-organizing intelligence. That’s the gist of it. Through the evolution of life, Nature feeds back on itself and generates an ever-more refined reflection of its inherent intelligence. In particular, this intelligence is reflected through the language of DNA, which Nature edits so as to express precisely those structures, organs, and behaviors that make good sense in the larger context in which they are embedded (think of eyes, ears, lungs, livers, fur, seasonal migration, bone structure, wing structure, light sensitivity, semipermeable membranes, metabolic pathways, hibernation, and so forth). Not only are genome variations and genetic mutations crucial for evolution, but the intelligent configuration of Nature must also play a key role—if not the main role—in highlighting and nourishing the advantageous potential of a tiny fraction of the mutants and variants whose altered genes are not deleterious. Eventually, nervous systems and brains endowed with consciousness were destined to emerge somewhere along the evolutionary line. This line happens to be the primate line and our species, Homo sapiens. Although this creative capacity of Nature is commonly considered to be a simple brute fact and not worth a second thought, it can also be interpreted as evidence for the presence of