Sperm Count: The Origin of Consciousness in the Advent of Oral Sex

 

Julian Jaynes wrote a famous tome The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Essentially Jaynes was trying to shorten the time line and show that human consciousness is a relatively new phenomenon having first started to be evidenced only three or four thousand years ago. Jaynes might have benefited from using a simple litmus test which would have helped him to pinpoint the exact point in the evolutionary ladder where consciousness started to appear by examining the advent of fellatio. Giving or getting a blowjob is an act that has both physical and cultural significance, in that it has to do with tool using rather than tool making and reflects that stage in development where the ancestors of man began to demonstrate prehensile abilities. You can’t really give a blowjob, for instance, until you are able to hold a penis in your hand, which may explain the evolutionary significance of homo erectus. Experienced metrosexuals realize, of course, that a latter day hunter gatherer not only has to be able to stand up on his or her two feet, but most have good posture when he or she is out to hunt and gather in bars or parties. While cunnilingus can be accomplished without the prehensile ability, it similarly reflects a cultural transformation in which the palette is increased by the use of the palate. If you have ever gone to the ape house in a zoo you'll notice that  outside the lustily bonobo, there aren't too many primates male or female who show the ability or interest in going down on that part of the body that has the name of a baby cat. Jaynes should have capitalized on his success with The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by writing a sequel entitled The Origin of Consciousness in the Advent of Oral Sex.

Pornosophy: Coitus Interruptus

sperm fertilizing egg

There was a time when sex was about reproduction, but them days have passed. One of the villains is probably idealization, the vehicle by which instinct negotiates the shoals of consciousness. If you believe that consciousness is what separates man from animals than it is easy to get a clear view of this dichotomy between sex as a biological process whose pheromones and hormones produce pure and simply urge as it for instance expresses itself in the estrous of female mammals. A female human may dig someone and it may occur during her procreative years, hence camouflaging the wolf in sheep’s clothing, but the net is that her instincts remain at the service of her mind. Hence the simple mating season for animal becomes a whole Megillah once you in introduce thought. Sex is literally coitus interruptus where memory and anticipation, two major constituents of consciousness, are involved.  Is this really the meaning of the fall? Was Eden unthinking animal life? Was sex placed on the auction block in the post Adamic world, where it was  offered to the highest bidder on the Darwinian food chain, as the holy grail of that mixture of mind and body known as human pleasure?  In an essay entitled “The Divorce of Coitus from Reproduction,” (The New York Review of Books, 9/25/15), the chemist and novelist Carl Djerassi presents another product of consciousness—science—which has also served to remove sex from the burden of procreation. Djerassi remarks, “During the l960’s, with the introduction of the Pill, sex became separated from its reproductive consequences. In l977, the British scientists Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe successfully carried out an in vitro fertilization (IVF), the process by which an egg is fertilized outside the body—ex utero—and the embryo is transferred into a woman’s uterus several days later.” It’s a familiar scenario. Progress, in the forms of civilization and domestication, has created certain liberties—for which there has also been price to pay. The question is, have we arrived in heaven or inadvertently been condemned to hell?

Pornosophy: Have You Signed a Pre-Coital?

Illustration for Les Sonnetts Luxurieux of Pietro Aretino by Edouard-Henri Avril (1892)

How is our justice system supposed to deal with seduction in the age of "affirmative consent?" California has just passed a law requiring universities to enforce policies insuring that sex is consensual (“California Law on Consent Pleases Many but Leaves Some Doubters," NYT, 9/29/14). Don Juan would probably have been expelled from the University of California—or worse, depending on what stage of his seductions consent was measured. And how about passion and the notion of love as a form of madness? What about the role of idealization which is one of the ways that animal instinct mediates the shoals of consciousness? The notion of sex being a rational decision in which two parties act in a reasoned manner is in fact contrary to well…sex. It’s what philosophers call an aporia to the extent that it’s a supposition containing two mutually exclusive ideas. Perhaps the Harvard Law School faculty recognized the difficulty of adjudicating sexuality in recent protests about Harvard’s new policy on sexual misbehavior  (“Some Harvard Professors Oppose Policy on Assaults,” NYT, 10/15/14). The attempt to protect one person against violations and assaults can result in a violation of another individual’s human rights, particularly in an atmosphere of hysteria, where collective rather than individual emotion and a crowd mentality begin to inform the perception of reality. Even in the most morally relative universe, there's right and wrong. The notion that a woman who wears a revealing outfit invites rape has no more validity than the idea that a person who leaves their front door open should be robbed. But in matters of the heart and the crotch, intention can be exceedingly difficult to determine and with the increasing politicization and ideologization of sexuality by varying campus interest groups, who will render the Solomonic judgement? Affirmative consent is like having Big Brother involved in the sex act. While the safety and protection of students should be a major source of concern, do we want campus versions of the the Salem witch hunt or a situation where the equivalent of pre and post-coital agreements (modeled on prenuptial agreements and specifying exactly what sexual acts do and do not constitute consent) will have to be negotiated by high priced lawyers before a couple can make love?

Neuromorphic Processors and the Fall of Man

Photo: Peggy Greb

What will happen when a computer cannot only think, but can think better than a brain? In terms of executive function. if the brain, which heads the food chain, as far as both humans and animals are concerned, can be mass produced, with the concomitant economies of scale, warranties, and even planned obsolescence, then why depend on nature? Who needs it or her? In an article entitled "Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience” (NYT, 12/28/13), the Times’s John Markoff  describes how “new processors consist of electronic components that can be connected by wires that mimic biological synapses” and quotes Dharmendra Modha of I.B.M. who says, “Instead of bringing data to computation as we do today we can now bring computation to data.” Formerly computers were like dogs or other animals who you could teach to do tricks, but the new chips are producing computers that can “automate tasks that now require painstaking programming--for example moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently.” Google’s Sebastian Thrun has taken robotics so far as to produce a driverless car. The kind of “neuromorphic processors” that Markoff is referring to, of course, are just the tip of the iceberg. In The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Ray Kurzweil predicted that nanotechnology would produce immortality. But what is really as stake is the future of consciousness. It’s Darwin all over again. Computers will eventually become more naturally selective than brains and a more convenient receptacle for life as we know it--with computer generated consciousness in turn becoming more naturally selective than life itself. Well at least there won’t be the usual justifiable anxieties about work and love, which everyone tells you are all in your head. Now all of existence will be reduced to one big cyber soup.

World Without End. Amen

In a panel at The Philoctetes Center with the ambitious title “The Nature of Reality,” Deepak Chopra said that consciousness, at least the kind he was talking about, was not the product of evolution. What Chopra was referring to was a cosmic consciousness that might be tantamount to the G word. Biologists generally regard consciousness as the product of an evolution that went hand in hand with the advent of prehensile, tool-making creatures and the development of the cerebral cortex, that element of the so-called upper brain responsible for reasoning and intuition (depending on which side—right or left—we are talking about). “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.” Such were Rod Serling’s words of introduction to his classic weekly series. But isn’t there enough mystery in knowable things, in the elementary particles of matter (like the Higgs boson)—the coveted treasure that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are seeking to find as they reduplicate the conditions of the Big Bang? Why can’t we enjoy consciousness for what it is? A product of puny man, helpless and lost within a “world without end. Amen” (Ephesians 3:21).