This article, How Do Neurons in the Retina Encode What We ‘See’?, points to the great effort our nervous system puts into the effort to make sense of perceptual input. One surprise is that the eyes don’t pick up some of the more complex patterns which change over time even though complex spatial patterns, say, the details of a human face, are handled by the retina. Our human selves deal with spatial patterns and temporal patterns in radically different ways, the first being handled largely by the retina and the second being recreated in the brain from lower-level information.
The general lesson we should take to the bank is that the human being is an organism and we exist throughout the entirety of our bodies and even beyond that — we exist in our relationships with the world including our fellowmen. The eye doesn’t just transmit some sort of image to a brain which is the slave of a mind or soul or self-consciousness of another sort. There is no such mind or soul or other such center of self-consciousness which is a point-like, immaterial entity. The eye is as much a part of us as our brain and evolves and develops as much as the brain and not just to serve the needs of the brain. In abstract terms, both eye and brain serve the human organism.
One of the insights of modern evolutionary biology, though obscurely anticipated over the centuries, is that mortal organisms are accidental results of a complex evolutionary history. The functioning of the organism is what’s important given the form it took in evolutionary history and our human organisms as wholes seem to be made up of components, such as eye and brain, with tasks set and divided in a somewhat arbitrary manner. The brain could conceivably do more of the work in recognizing faces — though there might be practical reasons why that would have been less than ideal. Once we reach the brain, I’m sure that tasks are still divided in somewhat arbitrary ways. A human-like being could have existed, functioning on the outside in a way very similar to us but very different inside. This is similar to the strangeness of wolves. That is, placental wolves and (now extinct) marsupial wolves are very similar in their external looks and actions though the placental model is more closely related to the cow and the marsupial model to the kangaroo.
There is still another major lesson to be derived from the nature of the human being as a specific organism. To the extent that we have valid understandings of that organism from the outside as it were, the work of psychologists and poets and historians and novelists and politicians and retailers becomes possible. That is, work dependent upon holistic understandings of the human being as a particular organism becomes possible to the extent that those understandings are valid.
Since human beings shape themselves by response to their environments, they become different creatures when they are suddenly responding to different environments, such as the immensely complex modern societies with their increasingly exotic technologies and abstract means of social organization but also their vast and rapidly increasing stores of abstract knowledge in many domains. Our stores of practical knowledge have increased rapidly and so have our stores of abstract knowledge and this situation is starting to generate what might be called re-understandings of Creation — such as the one I’ve been developing. We’re going to endure more than a bit of pain and suffering caused by the disruptions and seeming chaos as we move forward to develop new human civilizations, new ways of living combined with new understandings of Creation.
In my way of speaking, God is moving the world forward as He shapes the Body of Christ in this mortal realm.
Perhaps we could avoid some of that pain and suffering if we were to respond more courageously and with greater faith to our problems and opportunities, but we humans are what we are and we remain surprised and hurt and insulted that the comfortable old ways are under assault. We refuse to see what this means.
We need to think about the changes in our environments and to think very hard about the possibilities and dangers these changes raise for human beings. We need to recognize we have lost what we may have thought to be rightfully ours and to also recognize we live in a time of transition. What the heck, we’re going to live through that disruption and pain and suffering anyway — why not pretend to be brave by living for the future we’ll never see in our mortal lives?