This is a revised version of an old post I originally published in May 2008.

Raymond Tallis has a new book, entitled The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head, in which he examines the human head and it’s various functions; from pondering the universe to secreteing ear wax. He also reflects on the human head and it’s relation to our identity – “I am my head, sometimes I own it, sometimes I use it, sometimes it’s an object that other people are looking at”, for me it’s something that is actually so large it can be difficult to fit through doors etc.

Last year, I heard him discussing consciousness with Andrew Marr on Start the Week, in particular, what aspect of our evolution had separated us from the animal kingdom. The core of the debate was whether our consciousness emerged gradually from a thousand generations of bigger brained ancestors surviving for longer and hence passing on the necessary genetic material, or if there was a large leap at some point.

Prominent atheist Daniel Dennett argued that Darwinian theories could be used to explain the evolution of even the staggeringly complex neural machinery of the human brain. This reminded me of a passage in The Selfish Gene, in which Richard Dawkins suggests that consciousness is:

"[a] culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers […] Not only are brains in charge of the day-to-day running of survival machine affairs, they have also acquired the ability to predict the future and act accordingly.”

This ability to pre-empt events yields a distinct survival advantage, giving the holder a higher chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. This is where Dawkins points out that it is feasible that consciousness could emerge from purely Darwinian processes as successive generations improve on their ancestor's simulation capabilities until “the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.“ At this point, humans become self-aware and emerge from the animal kingdom as conscious beings.

With this ability, we gain the grim and unique privilege of being aware of our own inescapable mortality. Belief systems that offer the possibility of an afterlife are born out of this knowledge, although whether or not this belief is the result of a fundamental bias in the brain for replacing the unknown with the supernatural, or a social anxiety that was exploited by the pioneers of religion, I do not know.

Despite this bleak knowledge, the brains simulation capabilities allow us to simulate and compare experiences even if we can not, will not, or have not yet experienced them in reality. Philosopher Friedrich Schelling expressed this reflective disposition of human consciousness as being the culmination of evolution across all flora and fauna by claiming that  "in us, nature opens her eyes, and sees that she exists.” We are united with nature through five senses that interact with the physical forces and materials in the world. This physical awareness exists is in parallel with a metaphysical domain that our brain grants us a perception of. Every human head is a place where the unimaginable connection between the physical world and our thoughts is assembled, where the circuitry is sufficiently complex to see, render, record and contemplate our relationship with the people and objects around us.

Hello friend, welcome to my website. It’s a blog that will find direction with time but for now I can promise it will include my clumsy prose with a technical bias and a naïve political insight.

I’m currently spending most of my non-work-awake hours on a selection of websites that I run, so to keep development time down I quickly cobbled together bits of my other sites in a way that I hope works. The resulting website that you are viewing presently has been built with my bare hands almost exclusively between the hours of 2 and 4am, over one weekend, with excessive caffeine and moderate alcohol in-take.

My old blog was hosted on Wordpress but for various reasons I decided to build my own lightweight CMS and host the blog myself.  I’m planning on re-using the CMS and perhaps making it open-source as it offers something I have struggled to find so far (it’s built with Rails and is tuned to my desire for something easy to tweak at a code level but with all the easy-to-use features of a typical CMS).

Whilst pressing the reset button I’m also taking the opportunity to change the focus of my writing to more perennial subjects rather than ‘trending topics’ or those issues that are briefly ripe for newspaper circulation but ultimately ephemeral in significance. Whilst I don’t want to layout any sort of personal manifesto, I will say that the aim of my writing is almost purely to improve my understanding of whatever I write about, through research, argument and reflection.

Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to revise and republish some of the posts from my old blog (the comments will be republished too), but only the posts that are keeping with this new direction. There will also be new content whenever I find myself bored past midnight with a desklight and the means to write.

Thanks for reading.