2 results for (book:ur2 AND session:705 AND stemmed:rule)
Give us a moment … You identify a highly evolved self-consciousness with your own species development, and with your own kind of perceptive mechanisms. You apply these as rules or conditions whenever you examine any other kind of life. In your system of probabilities there are no reptilian men or women, yet in other probabilities they do indeed exist. I mention this only to show you that the evolutionary system you recognize is but one such system. (Intently:) The physical basis rests latently within your own cellular structure, however. You think that evolution is finished. Its impetus, however, comes from within the nature of consciousness itself. It always has. In some quarters it is fashionable these days to say that man’s consciousness is now an element in a new kind of evolution — but that “new consciousness” has always been inherent. You are only now beginning to recognize its existence. Every consciousness is aware of itself as itself.5 Each consciousness, then, is self-aware. It may not be self-aware in the same way that you are. It may not reflect upon its own condition. On the other hand, it may have no need to.
[...] But some time passed before I realized that our ruling intellectual establishments were advancing notions about evolution that were not proven in scientific terms — then teaching these “facts” to succeeding generations. [...]
It’s often been claimed that Darwin’s natural selection, while ruling out any question of design or a planner — God, say — behind living matter, leaves unexplained the same question relative to the structure of nonliving matter, which in those terms obviously preceded life. [...]