Will and Ariel Durant echo Machiavelli: “History repeats itself in the large because…man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex.”
Some animals adopt a form of ‘musilanguage’, using intonation, not just body language, to communicate with humans: look at the domestic dog. Amongst one another they communicate preferentially by scent, and body language. But they have achieved awareness of the fact that intonation is an important part of human communication.
If defense has a clear advantage over offense, and conquest is therefore difficult, great powers will have little incentive to use force to gain power and will concentrate instead on protecting what they have. When defense has the advantage, protecting what you have should be a relatively easy task. Alternatively, if offense is easier, states will be sorely tempted to try conquering each other, and there will be a lot of war in the system.
One of these [ideas about consciousness that are off the beaten scientific track]
is the evolution of consciousness, something we touched on in the last chapter. What I mean by the evolution of consciousness has nothing to do with Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’. I do not mean how consciousness evolved by chance out of ‘un’ or ‘non-consciousness’, or how our chance consciousness evolved, under a variety of environmental pressures, from some dim, vague awareness to our own acute sense of self and the world. As we’ve seen, in these and other mainstream ideas about consciousness, it is ultimately a chance outcome, an epiphenomenon, of some physical or material reality. The evolution of consciousness I am thinking of takes consciousness as fundamental and irreducible and not solely localised inside our heads. Consciousness from this perspective did not emerge out of matter at some time in the past. Consciousness was there to begin with, and it would be more correct from this perspective to say that matter emerged out of it, a point we will return to.
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