World IThe search for human

awareness

In the year 2001 we will begin a new millennium. Its empty pages are written with two hands. One of them is hope; the other is fear”.

Carlos Fuentes

Prof. Francisco De Paula

Main Thesis

• The beginnings of the political phenomenon of authority and human subordination, are the starting point for:– widespread inequality, – concentration of power at every level, and of

course, – of the social injustice which presently prevails.

Insecurity and risk in man’s existence

• In the brain is where the true origin of human spirit and conduct resides.

• Man has an amazing autoreflexive capacity, fruit of millions of years of evolution of knowledge.

• Man is aware of his own life and his own death.

• From these, culture was born, based on INSECURITY.

• Insecurity is reflected in religious, political, social and economic manifestations of its historical development.

• This ancestral insecurity, seed of our culture, can be surpassed.

• We are the first generation that forms part of the world risk society.

• The Homo sapiens is conscious of his consciousness to reinvent himself as a new man derived from his own intelligence and knowledge,

• If he corrects his historical path through self-consciousness, will once and for all, eliminate the present possibilities for his own devastation.

Self consciousness = Human Awareness

• The evolution of self-consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the brain’s functions is now supported with a holistic multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary context from philosophy, linguistics, theology and humanities to neurobiology and quantum physics.

• Full understanding of man and his culture will only be achieved as we learn more about the origin of our intelligence.

Survival and Transcendence• The need of man to discover

himself in order to survive, makes him the object of his study and understanding.

• It grants him the solitary option of his own transcendence.

• The field of neurological science is in search of a theoretical unification regarding the parallel development of the evolution of human cerebral physiology, its intelligence, its self-consciousness and insecurity, and man’s general political conduct throughout history.

The promises of epistemology, the science of knowledge

• Epistemology stands out, among all the intellectual disciplines, as the science of science and is the basis on which ontology, axiology, and metaphysics are supported.

• Its subsequent development enriched the full scope of human knowledge, culminating with the bio-epistemological cognitive discipline –neurosciences.

• Epistemology offers the historical possibility of doing -at the edge of the new millennium and for the first time in history- a global auditorship of civilization.

• Its task is to preserve and recreate man’s life and the planet.

The Decade of the Brain

• In 1990, George Bush, the President of the United States, christened this decennium “the decade of the brain” on behalf of: – The increasing enthusiasm caused by the

extraordinary advances in research in neuroscience and,

– The conviction that understanding the cognitive processes, which underline human behavior, has an enormous transcendence for humanity.

Cognitive Development and Natural Selection

• The intellectual capacity we have developed to observe and understand the universe in which we were born was the result of millions of years of slow cognitive development that followed the intelligent compass of the immutable principle of natural selection.

• In the attempt to replace evolution for self-knowledge and intelligence, man unknowingly substituted the ancestral generic natural law of “natural selection” for “conscious selection”.

Human Evils• Drawn from the examination how man

has performed through time, we could eliminate the human evils which, paradoxically, originated together with the history of self consciousness.

• These evils -insecurity, fundamentalist affiliation, the sacredness conferred to authority and subordination and the irrational concentration of power- created the contemporary chaos that today are ingrained in the religious, political economic and social conflicts present nowadays.

World Risk Society

• Beck (2002) proposes the concept of World Risk Society to qualify the novelty of the decisions as civilization that we take give rise, for the first time in time, to global problems and dangers.

• World Risk Society is politically explosive: responsibility, the pretensions of rationality and legitimity explode in front of the severity of reality.

World Risk Society

• These are the risks that make us a World Risk Society, along with the insecurity they entail: – terroristic attacks - wrong use of genetic tecniques– financial crisis -nuclear weapons– climatic change – demographic explosion

- destruction of the fragile

layer of ozone

We are also faced with:• The amazing discovery of the

human genome which exceptionally increases now the possibilities for human health and life,

• The nearly inconceivable phenomenon of space exploration,

• The expansion of technology at all levels,

• The proliferation of instant communications.

Opportunities of the World Risk Society

This world-wide reality challenge us to consider these true principles:

• Man’s intelligence is committed to his survival• Man is in the search of a unified vision of

contemporary man• Man is against the fragmentation of knowledge• Society is moving forward to a Sustainable

development and a Universal Consciousness constructing a

• Civilization of self-awareness

Man’s intelligence is committed to his survival

• The process of the evolution of man’s intelligence has led him and the Earth to the uncanny confrontation of contradictory extremes: the shameful and alarming progressive deterioration of our habitat, the use of weapons of mass destruction and demographic explosion, which is of our own doing, and the miracle of a sudden universal consciousness.

• If he aspires to survive, man will have to make an extensive revision and reformulation of the validity of the complex structure of the civilization he has inherited.

In the search of a unified vision of contemporary man

• This bio-epistemological revision also contributed to the emergence of an unprecedented awareness in the international scientific community of the importance that this subject had in the conformation of a unified vision of contemporary man recognizing that heterogeneity (diversity) is a pre-condition for life’s order

• This generation is faced on one hand, with the proliferation of instant communications and a medical science that grows increasingly more efficient and, on the other, with weapons of mass destruction and demographic explosion.

Against the fragmentation of knowledge

• “Think globally, do not let yourselves be suffocated by an increasing information, reject the disenchament of the West and historical pessimism, for you are lucky to live in the end of the 20th century! Do not become victims of nothingness, intellectual terrorism, trends, money nor power. Always learn to differentiate between true and false.” Karl Popper

Sustainable Development

• Since the Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and Brundtland Inform to the UN in 1987 and the creation of the concept of sustainability proposed, Multiple World, International and Regional Agreements, Conventions, Protocols and Forum had taken place to stop and slow down the natural damage of human irrational development.

• This facts prove that there are a lot of leaders and organizations aware of the actual behavior and proclame the sustainable development.

Universal Consciousness

• This consciousness nearly witnessed its own devastation. We are witnesses of the contrast between the unfathomable movements for supranational, political and economic integrations and the resurgence of annihilating ethnic and religious wars.

• Its development is giving way to the peculiarly human capacity to foresee its own survival.

Sustainable Development

• Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 gather more than 100 countries to reach an international agreement “..for a common outlook and for common principles to inspire and guide the peoples of the world in the preservation and enhancement of the human environment”.

• The concept of sustainable development was defined by the Brundltand Commission (1987) as "that development which satisfies the present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to satisfy theirs".

Evolution, neuroscience and culture

• The cognitive and biological evolution of man’s intelligence, which one day made possible the emergence of the admirable faculty of self-consciousness and its historical conduct, did not originate from any reason other than the Darwinian principle.

• Man can no longer act as “a natural force of evolution”, he must assume his intellectual development as a human being, one who is individual, responsible and sympathetic to his own conscious acts.

Civilization of self-awareness• The individual emerging from this

new “civilization of self-awareness”, needs to reexamine the recurring cultural paradigms of organized societies, which now seem to be extemporaneous.

• Man should assume responsibility for his own survival, by changing his previous and actual behavior on earth since his self-consciousness has emancipated him from nature’s intelligence.

Evolution, neuroscience and culture

• The cognitive and biological evolution of man’s intelligence, which one day made possible the emergence of the admirable faculty of self-consciousness and its historical conduct, did not originate from any reason other than the Darwinian principle.

• Man can no longer act as “a natural force of evolution”, he must assume his intellectual development as a human being, one who is individual, responsible and sympathetic to his own conscious acts.