Homo Symbolicus Is Dead; When Will Homo Sapiens Emerge?

Wednesday, 11 June 2025, 12:33 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

There is deadness at the core of the body politic in America, born of too many unchallenged lies and too much suffocating greed. Not everyone in America is inwardly dead, but “we the people” are, and therefore Trump’s evil cannot be stopped here.

The question is, to what degree has the deadness spread to other lands, not only in the west, but around the world? Is our age doomed? Is man?

Homo sapiens, a sentient and potentially sapient species, is bringing about a mass extinction of life on Earth. Yet scientists are quibbling over whether it’s the sixth mass extinction in the history of life, or the first. They are missing the point.

Man, the predatory primate whose consciousness is based on symbolic thought, has reached his limit. Sadly however, human beings, whose consciousness is based on attention and insight, aren’t filling the spiritual, philosophical and political vacuum.

Even as a young man I asked: Why is man, which evolved along with all other life, fragmenting and decimating the Earth? How did life evolve a creature that contradicts life’s basic principle of seamless wholeness?

For years I felt that some philosopher, past or present, in the east or west, must have satisfactory insight into my question regarding the contradiction between the way life unfolds and the way man operates. But after talking with many academic philosophers, I realized that no one was asking the question.

Science is unable to address man’s incongruity in nature, because the question does not belong to the realm of science, but to philosophy. Science is about accumulating knowledge, but understanding ourselves and our place in the universe is not a matter of knowledge, but insight.

Beginning about 30 years ago, rather than address the anomaly of man, philosophy and science made a tacit agreement: they would erase the essential difference between the way humans operate and the way nature operates by blurring the distinction and placing human behavior in the context of nature.

That project has been a monumental failure. By trying to efface man’s destructiveness by finding analogs and precedents in nature, and shared traits with other animals, they have contributed to the acceleration of man’s rapaciousness and ecological devastation.

Lately, some scientists are undermining the impact of man’s destructiveness by attempting to refute the very notion of mass extinction events. Even if they don’t intend to, the competing idea that mass extinctions never happened adds to the denial of man’s increasing destructiveness, and provides fodder for blatant denialists.

The basic insights I discovered are these. First, the choice between chance and design is a false choice. Intelligence is immanent, and life is intrinsic to the universe. Life has no design, only a direction, from simple order to more and more complex order. And yes, metaphorically speaking, God does play dice.

Second, the universe has an intrinsic drive to evolve brains capable of communion with the cosmic mind that infuses and suffuses it. Intelligence is not separate from the universe, but intrinsic to it. There is no God apart.

Even biophysicists and mathematicians, such Douglas Youvan, are coming around to this insight. Youvan says, “Eventually, I came to believe that intelligence is not a byproduct of the brain, but a fundamental property of the universe—a kind of informational ether that certain structures, like the brain or an AI, model, can tap into.”

The idea of “tapping into” cosmic intelligence is accurate as far as it goes, since that’s what happens when thought is attentively still during meditations in nature.

However Youvan makes the usual mistake of conflating thought and intelligence. And he pushes the conflation to an absurd degree when he refers to AI technologies “advancing at what seems like light speed, with the many insights gained coming so fast that they felt more discovered than invented… almost as if some outside force was generating them, and human researchers were pulling them out of the ether.”

The fatal philosophical flaw is that there is no “outside force” in the universe that exists separately from anything else in the universe. Separation is the fundamental attribute of symbolic thought, and it’s philosophically and spiritually immature to project it onto life and the universe.

Thought and intelligence are two completely different and distinct things. Conflating symbolic thought with intelligence, much less with the artificial thought of AI, is a profound mistake.

It is a failure of insight into the basic nature of symbolic thought, which is literally “to remove and make ready for use.” Thought cannot do anything except separate, store and recombine, no matter how much knowledge it accumulates. Intelligence, which is woefully undeveloped in humans, is what enables us to use thought and knowledge wisely.

Youvan suggests, “Intelligence is a force of the universe that exists separately from living organisms.” What is the difference between maintaining that, and believing “God is a force of the universe that exists separately from His creations?” None.

Clearly, the evolution of symbolic thought carries with it the tendency to psychologically alienate, physically fragment and socially divide.

Orcas, given the misnomer of “Killer Whales,” are obviously able to form strategies and tactics. Do Orcas possess “higher thought? They can plan and work together to separate a baby whale from its mother, but they don’t view the baby as a separate thing, as humans do, a habit of mind that underlies the industrialized slaughter of animals, as well as mass extinction at the hands of man.

In short, “higher thought” is both the evolutionary threshold for true consciousness, and the biggest impediment to it. The paradox is resolved by holding two facts simultaneously: the evolution of symbolic thought gave us tremendous power to separate ‘things’ and manipulate nature; and that without self-knowing, it inevitably has led to calamitous fragmentation and rapaciousness on a planetary scale.

What is the remedy? It’s deeply misleading to insist, as do most philosophers: “We learn about our own minds through evolved self-monitoring systems designed to give us useful information, and the systems are selective and distorting.”

In truth, perception is distorted when we judge, choose and select. When choosing and selecting are part of observation (which is to say, when the observer is not operating), perception is accurate and liberating…for the individual and the human species.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail