How amazing and great consciousness is, even if it is the sort of thing its enthusiasts think it is: an incomprehensible question. Well, hard to know from here, fellow mudlumps. Perhaps there are possible places to climb after consciousness that are to consciousness as consciousness is to a lump of mud. The kind of reasoning that surveys and values all of the universe in this way is rather problematic. First of all, we don’t know how incredible or distinctive consciousness is. Struggling up from the slime, evolution finally gives rise to language, etc. Indeed, this is also an informal or simply hackneyed way in which many of us pay tribute to ourselves: isn’t it astounding that evolution ends up producing a creature capable of understanding it? Or there are many variations: as a kind of climax, nature produces creatures capable of telling stories, or understanding nature itself through science, and so on. This is what grounds the possibility of freedom and of morality, for much of the tradition. Moralists of almost all stripes – certainly of the Korsgaard variety, for instance, or take Hegel – are extremely impressed with the distinctively human capacity for self-consciousness. I say we have no idea whether we are very impressive or not.

But now I would like to explore a series of thoughts that arise from the speculation that the miracle of the human is not necessarily very impressive. I would just like to point out that we do not know right now whether, for example, we will take life to the stars, or annihilate it entirely here on earth, and perhaps the ultimate end of evolution is universal extinction under our aegis that wouldn’t surprise me in the least: it’s just the sort of trick evolution has already pulled on most of the species that have ever existed. However, that a philosophical position makes you feel defensive is not a demonstration that it is false. We have a sort of species patriotism wherein to denigrate the human as not created in God’s image or not anomalous free agents in a deterministic order or not the crowning achievement by which evolution finally walked upright seems intolerable. Human beings may be nature’s most amazing production, but whether or no, we are certainly nature’s most self-congratulatory production.

Woh rehne waali mehlon ki episode 980