On Evolution of God-Seeking Mind--论文代写范文精选

早期聪明的人,大脑发达,自然好奇这个世界，自我意识的出现和意识死亡的思想肯定会导致神秘的想法。它也会导致一种新的生存问题。与特定的反应特定的威胁相比,这可能是一个适当的应对普遍威胁的方式。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Abstract
The earliest known products of human imagination appear to express a primordial concern and struggle with thoughts of dying and of death and mortality. I argue that the structures and processes of imagination evolved in that struggle, in response to debilitating anxieties and fearful states that would accompany an incipient awareness of mortality. Imagination evolved to find that which would make the nascent apprehension of death more bearable, to engage in a search for alternative perceptions of death: a search that was beyond the capability of the external senses. I argue that imagination evolved as flight and fight adaptations in response to debilitating fears that paralleled an emerging foreknowledge of death. Imagination, and symbolic language to express its perceptions, would eventually lead to religious behavior and the development of cultural supports. Although highly speculative, my argument draws on recent brain studies, and on anthropology, psychology, and linguistics. 
Key words;olution, imagination, mortality, self-awareness, fear, religious behavior, language. 

Introduction
Setting the Stage for Imagination and Religious Behavior “It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion” (EINSTEIN 1954, p11). For early Homo sapiens, big-brained and naturally curious, the emergence of self-awareness and a nascent awareness of mortality (perhaps as spandrels: as unavoidable consequences of increased brain size and intelligence) surely would lead to that experience of mystery. It also would lead to a new kind of survival problem. In contrast with specific responses to specific threats, what could be an appropriate response to awareness of a pervasive threat, an unavoidable danger that was not salient in the natural environment? How could such awareness benefit survival? Feeling the presence of such a predator, where there is no possible flight or fight, might more likely incapacitate or frighten one to death. Such awareness could hardly be reproductively beneficial unless it led to some adaptation that reduced the perceived danger. But what? Swifter legs? Keener sight? Sharper teeth? Stronger arms? None of these would do. What then? Since that “predator” lurks somewhere in the brain, so too, the adaptation—as some mental structure to counter or at least mitigate that awareness.

The unique and yet unexplained aspects of human evolution are common knowledge. Among the multitude of adaptations that evolved in species, there appears to be this one set for which there is no antecedence in other species: the adaptations that form the human mind (LORENZ 1977). There appears to be a discontinuity in evolution when it comes to the human mind (DONALD 1991). “Biologically, we are just another ape. Mentally, we are a new phylum of organisms” (DEACON 1997, p23). In considering the distinct form of life that is the human mind, some might consider it to be a new kingdom (LORENZ 1977). That such adaptations evolved and flourished only in Homo sapiens suggests the existence of a unique stimulus in the formation period of our species. This paper focuses on that stimulus, and on evolutionary and behavioral responses to it.

All animals behave to survive and reproduce, and all require sensory equipment in order to gain accurate information from the environment. Indeed, in this kind of behavior, we are just like other primates. However, there is also “and not by bread alone behavior” to account for: unique behavior and a unique problem. Humans have had an awareness of a non-specific threat to life, and humans have evolved with equipment and behavior in order to cope with that perceived threat. At some evolutionary stage, proto-humans began to be aware of self and other, of time past, and of approaching time beyond the given moment. 

As a consequence, they eventually became aware of their mortality (a still evolving awareness), and suffered the throes of that awareness as well as that of death itself (BECKER 1973; BROWN 1959; LANGS 1996; LANGER 1982, 1972, 1967; PYSZCZYNSKI/GREENBERG/SOLOMON 1997). Other animals, whose awareness is imprisoned in present time (BRONOWSKI 1977), merely suffer the throes of death. Animals have developed brains; humans have developed additional equipment and the ability to communicate symbolically (DEACON 1997; DONALD 1991). I argue that some part of that equipment and that linguistic behavior developed in response to the stimulus of potentially debilitating fear brought on by an evolving awareness of mortality. Rather than an adaptation (what reproductive benefit is there in this awareness?), it may have been an inevitable consequence of a certain level of brain complexity. Once in place it would lead to new human behavior. “The function of the brain is to produce behavior. The function of behavior is to promote the DARWINIAN fitness of the behaver” (STADDON/ZANUTTO 1998, p242). What is true for the animal brain should also be true for that additional equipment known as the human mind.

DENNETT, shifting the mind–brain problem by referring to “animal minds”, discusses the “huge difference between our minds and the minds of other species… We are also the only species with language” (DENNETT 1995, p371). Why only us? He answers by posing another question: “What varieties of thought require language?” (p371). One such variety of thought, I suggest, is religious in nature. DENNETT proposes a design structure for the ascendance of human mind which he calls “the Tower of Generateand-Test” (p373). Here again, why would only human minds climb to the top of such a structure? DENNETT suggests the advent of tool use, but does not address the question of why only humans so used tools. He speaks of a device for lifting the brain to human heights: “the crane to end all cranes: an explorer that does have foresight, that can see beyond the immediate neighborhood of options” (p379). 

Again, the question as to what need led only human brains to look “beyond the immediate neighborhood of options?” is unanswered. DENNETT disagrees with those who refer to human “mysteries” such as free will: human puzzlement that cannot be solved. My thesis suggests at least a partial answer to the question of human uniqueness and a solution to one of the mysteries: the development of religious behavior. Whether we call it mind or brain, the human intellect-imagination system evolved to engage in behavior that cannot simply be described in terms of physical survival. Part of this “and not by bread alone” behavior is religious in nature. “As every creature and even every living tissue responds to stress with heightened activity, so the mind meets the challenge its own evolution has created by a radical deepening of religious feeling and dawning of religious ideas” (LANGER 1982, p110).

My thesis does not address the complexity of needs served by organized religion, the moral aspects of religious activity, or other aspects of the ubiquitous mind. The focus is not on whether religious behavior is adaptive in the modern world. Rather, the focus is on imagination as a possible adaptive response for early Homo sapiens to that cardinal human fear: mortality (LEYHAUSEN 1973), and on the associated memory devices essential for storing the products of imagination (LANGER 1982, 1972). Apprehension of death developed as a free fear: the sensing of a danger that cannot be avoided or fled from (LEYHAUSEN 1973; LANGS 1996). 

Having such apprehension, “we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay for living a thousand lives” (BRONOWSKI 1977, p25). When and to what extent this apprehension became conscious (in the ordinary murky sense of the word) are questions beyond the scope of this paper. This apprehension might have developed as a consequence of that prereflective consciousness SARTRE and others consider as awareness of an object and awareness that it is not that object (MALHOTRA 1997). I avoid modern issues of authenticity of self and self awareness: issues of whether and to what extent such self and awareness exist and are known by the individual, apart from social content (WEIGERT 1988). It seems that at least some amount of self-awareness is required to enter the state of being a self (MARTIN 1985, p3). 

I intend awareness: of self and other, and of mortality, to mean some “knowing” of these things that leads to behavior, whether or not the knowing can be squeezed into thought and expressed. Thus, this sense of awareness encompasses various forms of knowing, some of which were (and still are) ineffable: anxiety, feelings of foreboding, dread, and individual moods that find expression in some form of human behavior, including inaction (out of fear) in a situation calling for action. There is FREUD’s controversial conception of a death instinct to consider, as well as other instinctual knowing that exists at the borderline of animal and human awareness (BROWN 1959). Considering these levels of the knowing of fear, I focus on that cardinal fear and on the potential loss of vitality that I suggest paralleled its development: “a number of factors, psychological as well as physiological in nature, at work in causing actual, concrete fears; the cardinal source (not the experienced but the essential one) of the phenomenon of fear as a whole, however, is man’s mortality” (LEYHAUSEN 1973, p248).（essay代写)

51Due网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文著作权归51Due所有；未经51Due官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯著作权现象，51Due保留一切法律追诉权。（essay代写)
更多essay代写范文欢迎访问我们主页 www.51due.com 当然有essay代写需求可以和我们24小时在线客服 QQ:800020041 联系交流。-X（essay代写)