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Over several years, I composed a series of essays about faith. The effort expanded to a study of consciousness, and resulted in the realization that consciousness is the system that operates the biosphere. The essays have now been published as a book by Bookbaby, https://store.bookbaby.com/…/human-faith-within-a… and is listed for sale both as a Kindle book and as a paperback at Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Human-Faith-Within…/dp/B09ZQ4HBXH/

The following are some of the key ideas developed in the book:

  • Consciousness caused the evolution of human ability to think. It did not evolve in the human brain, or in any other organism. It is the system that operates the biosphere, and induced evolution of the animals who participate in it.
  • The major step forward for humans was development of speech and language, about 100,000 years ago. Development of language required the effort of groups of humans. But individuals internalize language, and it forms the basis for conceptual thinking.
  • Language empowered humans to collect information and transfer it from person to person and from generation to generation. The book uses the term “consensus reality” to describe the ongoing, increasing collection of information.
  • Language involves abstraction. While Aristotle focuses on the physical things that are “abstracted,” Plato focused on the abstractions themselves—the nonphysical.
  • Faith is what individuals think they know. It is built from, and it builds consensus reality. Faith is the individual and collective human effort to understand the total environment—the biosphere.
  • The nonphysical parts of reality are just as important as the physical parts. Social systems like law, morality, economics and religion totally depend on nonphysical essences. Because the essences are not physical, and cannot be “measured” or “computed” science cannot deal with them.
  • Writing developed six or eight thousand years ago. It enabled humans to collect, transmit and store information outside the human mind, and this development explains what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. It laid the foundation for establishment of all the institutions on which civilization depends.
  • Consensus reality—collected knowledge—is the incomplete “reality” with which the human mind deals with the biosphere. It is imperfect, but it is the best that any culture can do to understand reality. There are multiple cultures, and multiple consensus realities.
  • The biosphere supplies the needs of individuals. Individuals differentiate themselves from everything else in the biosphere, in order to function as individuals. The differentiation establishes the “self,” and participation in consciousness enables individuals to satisfy needs in the biosphere. The human social environment is the most important part of the biosphere for the satisfaction of individual needs.
  • Human participation in consciousness includes both perception, in which the senses deal directly with the biosphere, and the conceptualization (that arises largely from language), that allows humans to assign meaning and interpret the things that they perceive.
  • We are now into a new “axial age,” the age of electronic participation in consciousness. That new form of participation in consciousness has already had, and will continue to have a tremendous impact on the way humans think.

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