Newman Lecture: The Origin and Character of Human Consciousness by Paul Vitz

0:19Hello. My name is Craig Stephen Titus, and I'm a professor at Divine Mercy University. I I have a great pleasure of moderating this evening's event. To begin with, I would like to introduce father Charles Sikorsky, the president of Divine Mercy University. He will open our event with a prayer. Father Sikorsky. Thank you, doctor Titus. And first, just let me welcome everyone to this, Newman lecture this evening. We're looking forward to it. I think it's a really a fascinating topic that doctor Paul Vitz will be presenting on, human consciousness. And, for just, wanna welcome everyone. And here at Divine Mercy University, we we like to blend the best of Catholic thought about the human person with the best of science in the field of mental health.

1:08We feel it's essential these days to have a Christian presence in this field, and it raises so many interesting questions. And doctor Vitz, who's been a scholar, who's been with us since our very beginning, we're really blessed to have had him so long, and we're very blessed to have him tonight with with his, with his talk. And so, also, I'd like to wish everyone a happy feast of the immaculate conception. Mary, our mother, we celebrate, her Immaculate Conception as god prepared her to bring Jesus to the world. And a lot of what we like to do, in at as, in the work we do at DMU is to prepare people to receive the lord. And a lot of you could say counseling, psychology, spiritual direction, we're helpers.

1:57God's helpers, we try to imitate our blessed mother in, assisting others and helping others to receive, God's presence in their lives, to receive our Lord Jesus Christ. And so as we begin this evening, let's let's begin with a prayer. In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit. Amen. Heavenly father, we wanna thank you for this opportunity this evening to, hear this lecture and to have insights about really the mystery of the human person and what is it that makes us human. Help us to learn more about how you've created us, how you've made us you've made us so wonderfully, so beautifully. Help us as well, to prepare in this way for, Christmas here in this Advent season. Help us to open our hearts, examine our lives to see how we can better serve you.

2:56We can prepare our hearts, our souls to receive your son this Christmas. We ask for the grace, the strength to do that, to do that as you will. We wanna as well pray for all those who are suffering. Pray for all those for the poor, for those who are sick, those who are ill, those who are dying. In a special way, we pray for all those who who are suffering from mental illness, different, challenges, maybe in their marriage or family, different emotional issues they may be struggling with. Help our DM community, our our our our clinicians, our students, all those who are in contact with so many souls. Help us to better bring hope, to better bring healing to them and to their lives, and we pray for each each one of those who, are within our network of of, of love and of service to you.

3:52Special way, let's pray tonight for doctor Vitz and his family that he, tonight enlighten us, and and and and so that we can better cooperate with your will, and with your mission and better become who you made us to be. And we ask all these things in the name of your son, our lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Thank you father Charles for those inspiring words and that prayer that leads us, closer to our lord and our lady, in this fine this fine evening, this fine afternoon. Following the new Newman lecture today, there'll be a question and answer period. I know lots of people will love to ask questions, questions that spring from the lecture, questions that spring from their encounter with what, doctor Povits will be saying.

4:43Please feel free to write, the questions in either the chat box or the q and a box at the bottom of your panel, and there'll be, after the lecture, a short break as, Povitz prepares himself to respond to your questions. So good. So next, I'm happy to introduce the Newman series itself. The series is held under the sponsorship, of Divine Mercy University. It is in its twenty third year and it survived many challenges and I trust it will again with our Lord's protection and our Lady's guidance. In particular, the 02/2023 Newman Lecture Series celebrates the integration of a Catholic Christian vision of the person with mental health sciences through the life work of DMU's most influential scholar, Paul C.

5:37Vitz. His life has been that of tireless service through his teaching, mentoring, lecturing and writing at DMU where he served as where he is serving as a senior scholar. He is also professor emeritus of psychology at New York University where he taught for many years prior to joining the IPS at the DMU. Polwitz is one of the founding fathers of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences and of its becoming Divine Mercy University. He has assured the intellectual foundation of the university while also contributing to its public visibility, which also benefit benefited the growth of Divine Mercy University. Doctor. Vitz is an internationally recognized psychologist who has devoted his life to an integrated approach to psychology and the human person and family from a Catholic perspective.

6:36He has made an impact on contemporary psychology for over forty years, starting before the publication of his groundbreaking book Psychology as Religion, The Cult of Self Worship. His work is a sobering call to psychology to recognize its own limits and its needs to make a place in psychology for transcendence and truth instead of reductionism and relativism. With his congenial attitude and friendly nature, he has also been instrumental in focusing his energy and that of others on the creation and refining of a unique meta model. This model is expressed in a volume of which he is co editor and contributor. The book has been given two awards. First, the Expanded Reason Award of 2020 for research from the from the Vatican Foundation, Joseph Ratzinger and Benedict the sixteenth, and the University of Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid, Spain.

7:40And the second is the Catholic Media Award 2020 as well with honorable mention in faith and science from the Catholic Media Association. Doctor Vitz is a prolific writer and a much sought after speaker. His, contributions to the field are extensive and expansive. To comment more on his, on to comment further on his more than lengthy curriculum V Day would take all the time that we have at our disposal, and I did tell Paul that I wouldn't go over five minutes. So fortunately, the only thing better than hearing more about Paul Vitz is to hear from Paul Vitz himself. So let's proceed. Doctor Vitz. Thank you, Craig. Wow. That's something to live up to. Well, anyway, greetings everyone. Greetings to all of you.

8:37Not just here in front of me, but many of you are on Zoom all over the place. Some of you are students. Some of you have told me that you are interested in my work from some other perspective or from some other location. So greetings from Northern Virginia, and welcome to this evening. In presenting my ideas this evening, I will be doing a fair amount of reading from a paper that I wrote and published some years ago. The paper is titled The Origin of Consciousness in the integration of right hemisphere and left hemisphere, capacities. And you can find it, if you start looking for my name and that title, it's, was published in 2017. But I will read from it fairly often, stopping to talk about and discuss or emphasize certain points.

9:35So we begin. I will start with presenting a once familiar, but now rather forgotten figure and seen from the life of Helen Keller. Remember Helen? She was blind, deaf, and mute, and as a child was taught language by using words communicated to her by her teacher by touch on her hand. Others may have heard or read about the scene in which some of her most interesting experiences occurred, but others have not heard her or read these these descriptions. So I will read in some detail how she does about her life, about her situation, and then from her own words. Helen was born a normal, healthy child in 1880 in a small town in Alabama. However, at age 19, she had a serious fever for a few days. And after recovering, her parents discovered that Helen was blind, deaf, and mute.

10:57A little over five years later, her teacher, Annie Sullivan, came down from Boston where she'd been trained to teach the blind and the deaf. But someone as as harmed as you will as Helen, she had not been trying trained to teach. This was the first time anyone had met a blind and deaf, much less also mute person. At least it was the first time somebody who had been trained there in Boston had done that. I don't know what has happened with this kind of a situation since. At the time, Helen would often have temper tantrums. She's now about six something years old. I would have have temper tantrums. She had no eating manners and was in many respects wild and uncontrollable. She had no serious communication with anyone, even her parents.

12:03She was essentially an intelligent but wild, high level, nonhuman primate. More later. Her teacher took her to live in a small cottage behind behind the family's main house. Here, Annie physically forced Annie, her teacher, physically forced Helen to learn to eat with a spoon and a fork, to wear clothes correctly. And in other ways, she developed a relationship, a very tough love with Helen. She had to first, make clear that her authority had to be dealt with and that you had to pay attention to her. Because prior to that, she hadn't learned to pay attention to anyone, including her parents. After a short time, Helen quieted down, and the two became deep lifelong friends. Soon, Annie began to teach words to Helen.

13:06She did this by pairing patterns of touch patterns of touch from her hand, Helen's hand, which was her Helen's right hand onto the right hand. I mean, it was, Annie's right hand onto the right hand of Helen. Okay? For example, when given an object, she could reliably, give her teacher the correct code pack. But here's how it would go. Helen would put her left hand on an object. Let's say it was a pen. Annie, her teacher, would tap a kind of pattern of tactile cues on her right hand, on Helen's right hand. Annie would do this with her right hand on Helen's right hand. It's very important, these hands. The left hand, therefore, was always contacting an object, an experience, something, some sensory perceptual reality.

14:09And the right hand was always given a code that had nothing to do with it except it was an arbitrary association, which was, in quotes, the name of it. Now after a good number of months, Annie had developed a vocabulary of almost a thousand words in which if the code was put on her right hand, she could correctly pick what object was referred to out of a set of possible objects. So she had developed what I call paired associative learning. She didn't know the names, but she could pair a particular experience on her right hand with a particular experience in her left hand. This is rather like an animal. A dog can learn their name. It's a paired associate learning. But one day, something very important happened.

15:05One day, Annie took was it later in the morning around eleven or twelve? Took took Helen down to a pump, a water pump, you know, that kind of thing. And Helen put her hand under the pump, and the water came out on her hand. And while she the water was coming out on her hand, that cool liquid touch movement of the water, Annie put the word that is the code, the tactile code on on Helen's right hand for the word water. And this was after a long time of having a lot of these associations going on. But here's what Annie said in her own words. We walked down the path to the well house. Someone was drawing water, and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, First slowly, then rapidly, I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers.

16:17Suddenly, I felt a misty a misty consciousness in something. Somehow, the mystery of language was was revealed to me. I knew then that w a t e r on my right hand meant the wonderful cool sounding thing that was flowing over my left hand. She doesn't mention the hand which hand it was here. I had to find out. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. Something qualitatively enormously different occurred. Prior to that, she had protonames, word associations. But now suddenly, she transcended the two kinds of information she had. One was right hemisphere information that was, you know, that was coming in her left hand. That was the object, the water, the water, the the sensory perceptual experience.

17:18And then her other hand, which was in going to her left hemisphere, was the code. And suddenly, she transcended those two experiences and knew she was the namer. She knew everything had a name and that she could find out its name. That was what happened. I left the well house eager to learn. This is Annie I mean, this is Ellen saying, everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house, every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with a strange new sight that had come to me. On entering the door, I remembered even the doll I had broken. I had felt my way to the hearth to the hearth and picked up the pieces.

18:17I tried vainly to put them together again. Now the doll the doll had been broken before her inside, before she'd gone to the well house. I vainly tried to put the pieces together, then my eyes filled with tears before I realized what I had done. And for the first time, I felt repentance and sorrow. Totally new experience has occurred because of her transcending the two kinds of codes and knowing now the mean the basic insight of language, which is naming, and then language grows further from that. But one of the first experiences she had was a qualitatively new one, and it was remorse or guilt for what she had done. I learned a great many new words that day. I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them.

19:16Words were words that were to make the world blossom for me. It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib in this in the close of at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys that had brought me. And for the first time, long for a new day to come. She's also learning time. She learn she learned from the first time there's a tomorrow. There was a yesterday. Later, Helen wrote that it that the that in the prior years, prior to this insight, quote, she had no concepts whatsoever of nature or mind or of death or of God. I literally thought with my body. Without a single exception, my memories of that time are tactile. As she goes on, I know I was impelled like an animal to seek food and warmth.

20:21I remember crying, but not the grief that caused the tears. I kicked, and because I recall physically, I know that I was angry. I imitated those about me when I made signs for things I wanted to eat, But there's not one spark of emotion or rational thought in these distinct yet bodily memories. So there was a different total kind of existence prior to it. That prior kind of existence, I am going to call just being aware. It's a kind of animal existence. I call it awareness. I call it qualia one, and it's what she transcended when she came into human consciousness by discovering language first by discovering naming, and as later language would develop even further for her from that. I term this basic animal like awareness or also Qualia one.

21:22It's presumed that it is qualitatively different from the physical stimulus itself and the sensory neurological response which underlies it. It's an actual kind of very, very primitive, awareness, but it is different, I think, qualitatively from the the physical qual things that cause it and the neurological experience underneath it. So I call it Qualia one, but animal like experience. Helen turned out to be both intelligent and sensitive, indeed a remarkable woman. She graduated from Radcliffe College at Harvard, wrote several books, and became an important and positive public figure. However, our concern is with the meaning of her sudden qualitative change in consciousness from qualia one to what I call qualia two, human consciousness centered in the language insight and developed from that.

22:22Her sensory experience was of water, which is, of course, an analog code. It's a code that's experienced in the right hemisphere on one hand, and then the other tactile, the digital pattern or code for water. That is her right hand experienced the tactile code, but the tactile code has nothing physically like water to it. It's like a word that has no physical similarity to what its references. So that physical code on her right hand was, a digital code, had no similarity to its referent. Suddenly, she transcended the two separate but associated experiences and knew that water was the name of the sensory experience. This insight is not just a simple linking of a digital code with a sensory experience.

23:15She'd already done that with paired associate learning. Instead, she suddenly had a grand number of new words that she would ask for. She asked for, you know, the name of her mother, her father, her teacher's name, and so forth. She transcended both the codes of water and the strong analog and which had temperature and tactile movement and the right hand and a tactile pattern, which was in the left hemisphere and which was digital. Because that's clear. That's what brought her to to human consciousness. It also created these experiences, which we'll go into more later. Perhaps another way of call describing it is the sudden awareness of symbolic thought. The terms integration and mapping from one code to the other are also equivalent.

24:15However, for the insight resulting in integration or mapping to occur, she had to transcend the two codes of right and left hemisphere to a mental level above them. In short, transcendence and integration or mapping presumably happened at the same time and can be summarized as the language or naming insight. It represents the new experience in first occurrence of in the life of of Helen. Is presumed to be nonmaterial, And that means the experience you're having right now, which is Qualia two, as you're listening to me and watching me, that experience of human experience based on language, which is where you transcended the simpler basic awareness, I assume that's nonmaterial. Even though it may have some material basis, that doesn't mean that it is just what it may be related to in the brain.

25:24It can be a nonmaterial experience interacting with the brain. We'll get to that later. I had to check on the photographs. There were photographs of Annie Sullivan communicating with Helen Keller, and they always showed her with her teacher's right hand on Helen's right hand. And that meant that that's where the tactile code was always going from right hand to right hand, from left hemisphere of Helen, so does I mean, of, of Annie to left hemisphere of Helen. And the objects were always coming in through the through the left hand, which was going to the right hemisphere. So it's the integration of the two hemispheres and transcending above the experience of each. That is at the insight that creates language and creates the first thing that it creates is the naming insight, and then later other aspects of language occur.

26:31Now what were those later other aspects? Here are some of the things that didn't occur to her. She mentioned that death didn't occur to her until that after that insight. Now this means that the way we can understand death is that animals don't know there is death and that human beings don't know there is death until they have language. Now Helen didn't know it was what was death until she was about six years old when this insight occurred. That means a newborn infant doesn't know there's such a thing as death. Newborn infants don't have language yet. I'm assuming newborn infants have a life of quality of one. They focus on certain stimuli like the sounds of the mother's voice or her face and her eyes, but it takes time for language to develop in the in the infant.

27:42And what and all and only when the language insight has been integrated into the life of the infant does the infant know the meaning of things like right and wrong and morality and so forth. We'll talk more about this shortly. But that means that when death came into the world, as scripture tells us, it doesn't mean that animals didn't die before that. It means nobody knew the concept of death. Nobody knew that there was death. No mind, no existing animal knows there's death. And that means even a a newborn baby doesn't know there's death because I'm assuming the newborn baby is starting out in quality of one before language hasn't come to them yet. That does not mean they're not human, but it means they do not have have human consciousness yet.

28:38And I think most people would agree that the newborn baby doesn't they can't talk. They can look they can look and pay close attention, and they develop language rather naturally, but only by paying a lot of attention to the mother. Alright. I'm gonna summarize now the evidence for the qualitative change in consciousness in consciousness mentioned by Helen. One, there's the clear description of sudden illumination of light coming in as a previous very limited and dull kind of awareness. Something new she calls it light. I don't know what that would mean to her because she was blind, But some new kind of inner illumination took place, understanding. Two, she goes about learning lots of new names, especially of the people close by to her.

29:37Each new name gave her the delight of knowing something new and important. No doubt, she also learned learned shortly there afterwards that she could name things herself. Since she is engaged in conversation with her teacher, she has the ability to infer what another person is thinking. She asked questions of the you know, what is the name of? Look look what's involved in that. She's asking her teacher, what is the name of this? What is the name of that? That tendency to be to to talk to another person with an inference about another object doesn't develop in any of the great primates, only in humans, and it develops before language at about year one and a half. The idea that you can have something that you haven't you that you attend to something in common.

30:33It starts as the infant noticing the mother and child look at something in common and that that they have a a common link that there's something they're both looking at and they intend to be focused on. And that ability doesn't apparently occur in primates except the human. And, of course, that was immediately present once Helen starts asking her her teacher, what's the name of this? What's the name of that? You know, what's the name of this? Gives it to her. Oh, that's a cup. Or she can ask for the name of somebody she can imagine, like her mother or father. She discovers before she discovers that a doll that she had spoken broken earlier, and the first time she feels remorse, a guilty responsibility and sadness for what she has done, The moral life has now dawned on her, but only through language.

31:36After language has developed, I suppose, a certain level. And, also, as I said, five, she knows now that there is death. She claims in addition that just after the experience, for the first time, she knew that there was a past, a present, and a future. She had understood now the the human nature of time. So all of those point to a qualitatively new reality that has come into existence through the language insight that she hadn't had before when she was operating like a very smart primate. So that's qualia one going to qualia two. One of the reasons consciousness is so important as a topic now is there are is that lots of people are trying to understand consciousness, and scientists think that they can make a model of consciousness and and create a machine that has human consciousness.

32:43I don't think that's possible for three reasons. One, human consciousness occurs in our body, and our body is a wet lab. All the attempts to make consciousness occur outside in a nonhuman situation have tried to create it in a Silicon Valley type of system that's a machine, which is silicon. Nothing in other words, where water is in fact of of the system abhors water. Consciousness has only emerged in a watery wet lab situation. Awareness if it that quality of one even only has emerged there as far as I'm concerned. But we've had it our mind and everything about our consciousness is is rooted in watery substances. We are wet lab creatures. And all of these people trying to make consciousness are doing it in very, very dry lab with silicone, which is hardly found in the humans.

34:00Second or the second reason why I don't think they're gonna be able to do it. Whenever we have consciousness of something, I'm conscious of you out there. You're conscious of me here. You when you become conscious of something, like a like a mathematical proof or like a system that's logically connected, Alright? You are itself outside of that system. Your consciousness is outside of what it is conscious of. So how can you make something that's con has consciousness when you are you are always with your consciousness outside of the system in which you're trying to deal with, trying to develop consciousness. What you have is always outside of the system that you're conscious of. So every time they make a new computer program that's fancier in terms of solving chess problems, they're all outside of that program.

35:10Our consciousness seems therefore to be a a a nonmaterial experience outside of whatever it is conscious of. And a third reason, I'll get to that later, but now I'll mention it. We are not only do I say, not only is our own consciousness nonmaterial and therefore intrinsically of a spiritual kind, but we are conscious of something higher than our own consciousness. Today, we celebrate a woman who had that experience, our lady. Whatever the message of an angel was, it was to her a message from outside of this world, and she was aware of that. She knew it was from god, that it was. And we have all many human beings have an awareness of a of of an of a world that transcends our natural consciousness.

36:18How do we have this experience? I will mention it to you. Some of you have this experience as in in a truly mystical experience. Some of you may have had it in a near death experience. Some of you may just intuit it when you experience great beauty or great great goodness in something or great truth in something. These are the transcendent, concepts that we're all familiar with, and we sense when we come in contact with a really surprisingly deep form of truth or goodness or beauty, we sense that it points to something beyond it. And one sign of this is the people who have these experiences usually can't tell you what they're like. They say once they start using our words, our analog and digital words, our right and left hemisphere words that we'd use in our ordinary quality of two conscious experience, they say, you can't mention you know, it's it's a qualitatively different level.

37:29So we're aware not only of our normal consciousness. Often, we're not aware that that's qualitatively different from the world around us, but that's our own failure to notice carefully. But we're also aware we are most people are aware of something that trans ourselves consciousness, of a higher form of consciousness than we've ever actually lived in, except briefly when we were there with a near death experience, deeply in in a mystical experience or in a deep profound experience of truth, goodness, or beauty. And so that's another reason I can't imagine, and our anything that creates consciousness is gonna create an awareness of a still higher level of consciousness itself. Those are my there were three reasons why I think the attempt to make a material that is a physically material form of the human mind that will have consciousness will not be possible.

38:37They also all argue for a nonmaterial aspect to the human mind, something that is not to be accounted for in any way by matter. And by the way, we don't know what matter is. Ask a physicist. We don't even know what it really is. They're still squabbling over. You know? Have they found the smallest things of the quantum elements, the smallest ones? Or is it known that we recently that we're looking at anything what were they looking at? Protons or something like that and discovered they had a complicated insight. I mean, they thought they were very simple. They used to think that, you know, every so does this get more and more complicated and it goes further? There are sub protons, Sub, sub pro I don't know.

39:32Does it go on forever, or is there some point at which it stops? And they're trying to make sense out of it, and they can't even now make sense out of what they do know. And it all seems to be mostly space anyway. So although the materialists say it's all material, they don't the scientists who are most familiar with matter don't know what it is and are now even just thinking of talking about matter as having to do with who observes it or how it's observed. So let's it's more easily understood, I think, to think of consciousness itself as a fundamental property of reality, like matter, and it's not a reductionist understanding. Oh, Okay. Now I'm gonna make a a big jump. How you know, I'm gonna go we're not gonna be talking about Adam and Eve.

41:13Why are we doing that? Well, the the historical record now of of of human primates makes it clear that there's no evidence that human consciousness existed before about thirty to forty thousand years ago. Around that time, thirty to forty thousand years ago, there was something they called the creative explosion in which all of a sudden, they discovered that human beings, that is primates, were making first marks and patterns and then diagrams on of animals and human beings on caves. It took fifteen thousand years for the human representations of marks to go to a recognizable animal or human form. Just like children when they first learn, you know, they start with straight lines and scribbles, and eventually they go to making stick figures and so forth.

42:19But, anyway, prior to that, although there were lots of caves around, a million years ago, there were lots of caves. There were lots of funny primates around a million years ago. None of them marked on those caves. 500,000 years ago, same thing. A 100,000 years ago, they have not found any cave drawings that go back a 100,000 years. And if they do, they might find a few scratches here and there, which would be the most primitive. So what I'm proposing is that the first human being who had human consciousness came into existence about thirty thousand years forty thousand years ago These human beings seem to have come out of North Central Africa spread rapidly to other parts of the world from there That doesn't mean the first human being was then.

43:21It means the first human consciousness was then. Right? I would assume that roughly or let's say let's say 40 to 30,000 BC, the creative explosion occurs. By 20000 BC, you get villages. Okay? And probably you get by 20,000 BC, the starting of farming and, herding. By 12,000 BC, you get maybe the first cities. Okay? That's the historical record. Now let's go to child psychology. When the child is born, I think it's about like he was an 80,000 year old primate. He's got no language. But unlike the 80,000 year old primate, he's got somebody who he's got a mother who knows language and can start teaching them. And the infant learns language first. They they learn paired associate learning. Eventually, they may learn their name by association or the name of a dog.

44:37Even dogs can learn paired associate learning. They know their names sometimes. But then after about about about an age year, maybe a little earlier, a little later, they learn to focus on something in common. The common intention occurs, and that has to occur before you can go to the naming insight. And then when do they first learn to name things? Maybe two years old. You know, we we don't have to say exact every child at two. You know, it's a it's a two plus or minus some months and so forth. That start language language then the basic language insight has occurred. It then develops further and further and further until finally at an age maybe four or five, let's say five, maybe six, I don't know, around five or six, the moral life becomes plausible.

45:29The church is quite wise not to accuse a four year old of a sin. They have language. They can name things, but they're not morally developed yet. Okay? Takes a while. Language has to mature and grow in many ways. Alright. That's child psychology. Now I wanna go to another sequence. This is scriptural, all in Genesis. First, in in chapter in chapter one, God creates the man, the human beings, male and female from dust. That's the first description. We're created male and female. There's no reference further than that. So that would be when that's eighty thousand years ago. Okay? Now then we come to chapter two in in in scripture, so we're later in time. The first thing that Adam does now, he's given a name, although the name may be come from the Hebrew word for dirt or dust.

46:53The first thing he does is he names things. So the first so by then, we have an Adam who's maybe, you know, we're we're now not 80,000 ago. We're at the creative insight. Could have been thirty thousand years ago when the first Adam started to name things. Could have been an Adam. Could have been an Eve. It could have been the name of a small group or of a couple. We don't know. But at that time, the naming insight was the first thing. And so what Adam did, he named things. But, of course, he didn't have anyone to keep him company. That didn't mean there weren't female primates around that weren't implicitly human. But until his language developed, he couldn't understand that she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.

47:58So it was after the naming part slightly afterwards, and he could understand that. And, of course, there's the real Adam and Eve that's most discussed in scripture. It's not the Adam that might have been created eighty thousand years ago, and it's after Adam has already begun naming. So it's the atom that's maybe equivalent to the five year old. The moral life comes. Right? The moral life is described after the naming insight. So the sequence is the same as would make sense from our previous, rational, both historical and child psychological model. And what happens? And the the Adam and Eve well, it we know the story of being tempted by Eve being tempted by the snake or the Satan. We assume this snake is a symbol of of evil or Satan, and then Adam eats it, and they then know they're naked, and they had the moral life has come onto them.

49:09And at this time, where are we in history? Well, when we know we're already up to when we're past we're at least highly developed village life. Why? Because herding and farming had already developed because the first children of Adam and Eve were Cain and Abel. And Abel was, what was he? He was a farmer, I think, and Cain was a herder. And, of course, the moral life comes right away with Cain killing, you know, that you shall not kill. Cain kills Abel, and he's he's banned, but he has to be marked because the other people will kill him. So the sequence is about is there are no there are no dates on the sequence, but they come in the same order that you would expect from the ordering in historical time that we do have and the knowledge we do have of how these things develop in a child.

50:17So and then, of course, after, you can go much further after after Adam and Eve and Adam and Eve, and at the time of when they were learning the moral life. And that's of course what the whole insight was, wasn't it? We eat of the tree of good and evil. You know, what is, that's what you're learning, the moral life. You're learning what's right and wrong. You shall be as God when you do that. And that's what happens then. And so it's not only in when they become, shall we say, morally, in other words, human life that we have a record of exists before in a more primitive form that would not necessarily imply what the scriptures say. You might say, well, we should have had the moral life from the time of the of the first insight, the first language insight, say, thirty thousand years ago.

51:11No. Because we know when that first insight occurred, there was no farming and there was no, herding. It's still too primitive. So all of this then is beginning to fit as a general model of the origin of human consciousness as a truly nonmaterial phenomenon. And then as it goes on, and and even at the time of the of the Adam and Eve and the moral insight there, there's the interaction with the the quality of three with god, with a with something beyond actually human consciousness. And from then on, you have the series of interactions between human consciousness, Qualia two, and Qualia three, which is called Revelation. You have this Jonah, Abraham. Obviously, Abraham left a big city, so, you know, so the cities were there.

52:15So that's maybe when was Abraham? I don't know. May, 4000, something. I don't know. Moses, March. I don't know. 1500. I think Moses around fifteen hundred BC. But each one of these can now be thought of as on a timeline of increasing interaction between Kualia three, God as a form of, you know, as a form of divine insight given to the human beings, each of them developing the human being further. And it starts with 80,000 BC when we were biologically capable of becoming a human being like an infant who is, but isn't gonna be having it because they don't they're not yet up to language. And I expect it lasted forty thousand years or so before they developed the first language. And a number of scholars have already said that the proto language was parent associate learning.

53:18Some of them thought that was the same as naming, but it's not. But you would link. You might start off even by mimicry. You hear an elephant, So you go, and that becomes the name. And, eventually, you just degenerates into. Finally, you get tired of screeching and you go, finally, you just say l, something like that. And so that becomes an arbitrary sound by that time. But those are associated, and and you can see how help how helpful that would be for hunters and gatherers to be able to refer to things. But, of course, when the naming insight happened about thirty thousand years ago, forty thousand years ago, There was a huge extinction of other primates like Neanderthal man because it was so Homo sapiens that got the naming insight who was the first human.

54:21So there. That's his. That's what I'm trying to connect up with that Ellen kept oh, I forgot to mention something else. There was another young woman named Laura Bridgeman who was also, because of a fever, blind, deaf, dumb, and she'd even lost most smell and taste. But she had, tactile sensation. Keeping in touch, That's the most primitive and basic way. Keeping in touch. And she was taught also by by teachers at the Boston School who were taught was just starting at that time to develop ways to teach the blind and the deaf. And she was taught by two teachers up there in the same way, on the same I think the same two hands. I couldn't find the hand difference there. I mean, there was no reference to left and right hand.

55:27But she was taught a code, a tactile code, and given objects. It took much longer apparently with her, maybe for whatever reason. But suddenly, there came a time when all of a sudden, she get she can touch she asked for lot names of all kinds of of objects, a huge jump in in vocabularies in a spurt of about a month. That was more than all the previous months of of training. And she also said that she had no notion of God or of death or of time prior to that. And then her name was Laura Bridgeman. All the references are in that article that I mentioned. So if you wanna get them and look them up. Questions? Oh my gosh. Alright. Father Xu. How does that change How nonconsciousness to consciousness historically come about?

56:39Like, is there some explanation of that? I mean The the the the I assume that the that that there was a discrete change once you transcended the two codes and realized you could map between each of them, and that meant naming and all sorts of other things about the beginning of language. That was the the discrete moment at which there was a discrete new experience in in the world of human consciousness. There are plenty of examples in history of relatively discrete changes in qualities qualities of of evolution. They're not at once, but, you know, there may be suddenly in ten thousand years, things. But I'm saying this is a discrete change, and there are plenty of biological things that are discrete.

57:29When a sperm and egg cell come together and there's fertilization, that's a discrete sudden event in which a new DNA is created. There's also supposed to be a flash a little tiny flash of light when that happens. Amazing. But this is a sudden and qualitative change just like it suddenly you might if you were praying and then had a mystical experience. Suddenly, something new is there, and you're speechless now. Other questions? Tom? If our, language and learning is dependent on sensory input, how do we arrive at abstract concepts like infinity, eternity that aren't necessarily related to any kind of sensory input. Well, they begin they begin with a sensory input, but then they go into what's called they go into the left hemisphere.

58:32And in the left hemisphere, they are itself abstract concepts. The left hemisphere, like, you know, let's say the Social Security number or even your name, There's no relationship between Tom and you. I mean, the sound. I mean, Tom doesn't look like you know, there's no there's nothing about the sound of your name, your first name that has a physical connection at all with you. So you have there a code that would has no physical reality. And that and language has a series of ways of relating things to each other that allows the concept of infinity and nonphysical things to take nonphysical linguistic concepts to occur. Does that answer it well enough? I hope. Sister. Thank you very much, doctor Ritz.

59:27I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit into the importance of this, say, for up and coming psychologists like the students who are already practicing. I think what it means is we've got to recapture. It wasn't uncommon, say, five hundred years ago, but we've got to recapture the idea of looking at a person as containing the spiritual reality of their consciousness and actually of the soul. In other words, that the person you're looking at is not entirely a physical thing. That's the way doctors look at us. I'm not gonna argue for the soul itself here explicitly. I'll do that later in the next lecture. But I'm arguing here for three forms of consciousness. Qualia one, awareness, which is animal experience, qualia two, which is our human consciousness, which I've described how it comes into existence or what what happens when it comes into existence.

1:00:41And three, qualia, you know, qualia three, the the the trans that which the experience of something transcending our actual normal qualia two experience. And so we have to see the person as having those potentials. And above all, quality o three is what we're when in our model in the meta model, we talk about the vocation to human development. And at least for those who are believers, that vocation in implies movement from Qualia two to Qualia three, Movement toward toward the the realm in which the transcendent god exists. That's what's said when the our the lord's prayers said, our father who who art in heaven. There's the statement, who are in heaven. You know, that doesn't mean up there somewhere, you know, between here and the moon or something.

1:01:46No. It means who are above us in a transcendent sense, who exist beyond us, above us. And we are called to go to that toward that in the spiritual life. So we have to and that even everyone else is called in some way to that. But we have to be very careful we're not there to bring them into Christianity or Catholicism or anything like that. They have to find they have to have free will in their choices. They have to choose freely what they want. But we have to see this person as more realistically as having a property, a nonmaterial property of the transcendent experience of human consciousness plus the experience that there is even a consciousness above it. Makes everybody kind of weirdly important, doesn't it?

1:02:50Yes. Question. So the child starts off volume one, and the parent kinda facilitates the movement Yes. And so I was wondering for humanity, humanity's kinda like that child historically. What event events or experiences help facilitate that? What facilitated the movement to from one to two in their natural experience? My argument is two things. One, I I mentioned it probably too briefly. There's evidence there are anthropologists who've argued that there's evidence of prior to language, the development of signaling of a kind that would be interpreted as, I would call I called it paired associate learning. It's the kind of learning that, Helen Keller had prior to her insight that was prepping her.

1:03:50You know, it was proto like protonames, proto language. A dog may learn a few names like his, you know, like his own and maybe yours or a few other things. But Helen had learned apparently almost a thousand names so that if they put a cup in her hand, she could then do the signal on the right hand of of, Annie Sullivan, her teacher. But she was still behaving, you know, in that animal like way. She was getting to be much more controllable and much more, you know, less wild because she was she found the interaction with her teacher somehow or other gratifying and interesting and so forth. But, so that would be one of them that would prep you, and and you'd find that with the child as well. Mama, papa, learning lots of different associations until finally they got a yeah.

1:04:52And the other one was the the the the mutual have it finding mutual intent, attention with the with another person that is the mother and child could point to an object that they were both attending to, and we're interested in that. And that human primates can do, and children do it before they've learned language. And, of course, it's necessary for the mother. She wants to say, that's a cup. You know? Well, the child has to learn to focus on what the mother and the child are both supposed to be focusing on. And that relationship, which apparently doesn't occur with other primates, does occur prior to the full language insight around a year old, year and a half, or something like that with children.

1:05:44So it's the mutual intention that they have on something plus the pairing of things that will quick kick in, particularly since the mother has a language, which, you know so I found you know, no that that it took thousands of years for that to develop enough naturally for some. I mean, the other interpretation is that God came down and did it. Okay. So that makes sense of kind of just building up these experiences, the, the pairing and then that mutual attention then. So Adam, like, potentially this Adam, like, all of a sudden, it's one. We will say if you had this inside Yeah. One or a pair or who knows? Because language often involves a pair. For all you know, it was a mother-in-law, son, or, you know, you know, you don't know.

1:06:43We don't know. But once it happened, there was a creative explosion. All the rest of the human beings who didn't have it got it quickly, and it spread rapidly, and they became very efficient hunters. And lots of large game animals became extinct along with Neanderthal man and other high level primates. We were very much more effective at killing. Oh, your questions. Oh, do you think the creative explosion is around the time that humans first had rational souls? Perhaps it was the moment we transitioned from apes to humans. If not, how many thousand years ago did man get a soul? Here's my answer. I'll give more in my next lecture. But I assume that a child who's born and has no human consciousness yet does have a soul at birth.

1:08:00So I assume the first human beings had souls, but they had not yet become capable of being expressed rationally with language yet. Oh, yeah. This is the same one. Name question. Does that mean that if Helen Keller died before age six, she would not have had an eternal life that is not have had a soul? If so, does that same logic apply to all children before they experience quality of two? Well, remember, I think the soul, we call it a rational soul, but that's what it is when it's developed with language. The soul can exist in a nonrational way prior to that until the re it helps facilitate the development of reason in the human being. A newborn baby does not have reason. But when the soul is fully expressed, it is rational, but it starts out as a spiritual I call it a spiritual code.

1:09:12But I'll talk about more of that in my next lecture, what I think the soul is. But I think it's there from the beginning of the human being when the child is born. There's a soul for that child. And what happened to those human beings prior to their language insight? I don't know. It's sort of like limbo. Right? Isn't that what the church talks about? Infants that die and things like that. They don't know quite what happens to them. But I think they had a soul. I think you're born with when you're at conception, your soul is present. Is there a difference between consciousness and self awareness and awareness of awareness? Consciousness is the largest is the term for the largest quality of our qualia two.

1:10:27It could be called awareness of awareness, but since it's so different from awareness itself, I wouldn't like to use the word awareness of awareness, but it is consciousness does involve our being aware that there is awareness. Each of you has probably experienced some time or other awareness without having consciousness in it. I'm as besides the fact when you were a newborn infant, but you don't remember that. I don't think you do. But I'll give you an example. This was a report. Well, some people have had there are two experiences that people have reported that I believe are like suddenly regressing to just awareness, animal like. One was a person who was in an automobile in the front seat next to the driver, and suddenly the car was out of control and spinning.

1:11:38And the person said, I saw everything in front of me while it was happening. I wasn't frightened or scared or anything. I just saw it. I didn't know its meaning. I just saw things spinning and going around. It's as though under great stress, you might regress to just awareness and get let me give you another example that I wish I had marked and none could get as a reference. A man had been he had been in Africa with a group that was going through, Lion Country, and he got separated from the group. And while he was separated from the group, he was attacked by a small group of lions. And but the group could suddenly saw him. He screamed and ran around and yelled and everything. And so they came over and, he he he escaped from the lions back with the group.

1:12:34Okay? And they said, weren't you terrified? We were. The people who were watching were still in normal consciousness. But he said, no. I was aware that they were there, and I was running from them. And I knew I was shrieking and saying these things, but I did it didn't have any real meaning or emotion with it. Where did you hear language like that that I mentioned tonight? Helen Keller before she had the insight. And one of the things that this makes me think, which is it's a nice thing to think. Most huge numbers of animals live by eating other animals. It would be nice to know that when a lion jumps on a gazelle and the gazelle shrieks and runs around and shows all what we call the signs of fear and pain and all of that, that the animal had no sense of its meaning.

1:13:38That there was no meaning to it. It was just responding in a simple basic awareness. And that the that those of us who watch it by our human consciousness and our empathic identification, think of the animal as suffering. But it's quite point possibly they weren't suffering. Just like that man wasn't suffering when those lions were attacking you. You or when when Helen Keller was speaking about being angry, she she couldn't even remember what she was angry at. At the time, you know, she she was responding with these bodily emotions and so forth, but she didn't know the meaning of what she was that had no meaning for her. So that would take a lot of the edge off the notion of nature being red in blood and and, you know, in tooth and claw because they were suffering the way we empathically suffer.

1:14:33In fact, more watching these attacks than they made themselves suffer. Anyway, I'm not sure of that, but I propose it. Now what? Another one. Okay. This person says, is it possible babies are conscious of more than we understand? It is possible. I'm just proposing the newborn is mostly dealing with awareness. For example, the idea of we that is you and I between mother and child and awareness of relationality. That might become but I would have to ask whether the relationship between a child and its mother in the very earliest stages is any different from than the relationship between an animal mother and its offspring. They might be really quite similar. We do know that the baby will focus on the mother's voice and the mother's face, and they certainly like being held.

1:15:33Contact comfort. They like being in touch with mom. So can there be spiritual experiences that babies have that are unknown to us as babies cannot describe them? Well, that we couldn't know. Babies can't describe them, and, of course, they're unknown to us. We know that Saint John the Baptist slept in the womb of as Mary approached. That's true. But he that could have been caused by by God, Naturally enough, if god can create a baby, he could create that kind of intimate connection. So I don't know whether that's god's reaction or something natural to babies. I've not heard of it in other babies. Given that the right hand connects to the left hemisphere of the brain, Do you think that if Alan's teacher had switched the hands, the left hand touching the object and the right hand used to communicate, the results would have been different?

1:16:59I think the results would have been different. I think they might not have happened at all, or they would have taken much longer. Although this assumes that Helen was right handed. That's my answer. That's all. There are no more on here now. And this is another one down here. Oh, there's one. Oh. That you talked about, there were forty thousand years of perhaps being in quality of one. And I assume that there's that we're in a civilization that is in quality of three or capable of quality of three. Where do you see the future of consciousness? The future of what? Of human consciousness. Is this a progressive argument? It is. And do I think it's progressed to where it could the most? I guess I would say this.

1:18:07If I'm an optimist, the future of human consciousness is to become more and more intimately linked to qualia three. But if I'm a pessimist, I'd say the end times are gonna hit before then. The relationship of consciousness to the soul, I'll have to postpone to the next lecture. It is not clear to me how divine revelation introduces a new form of human consciousness. It seems to me that what you call quality a two experience would also include a natural awareness of god. At this level, there is a natural religion and the human capacity to recognize that some sort of god exists. Judeo Christian revelation lets human beings come to know what who god is, but is this distinct from human consciousness?

1:19:17There is something in human consciousness which naturally, I think, does tend to to posit the existence of god. Where does this come from? It comes from the the small experiences that all of us had, I propose, of qualia three in little bits. The wonder of the universe. Awe is one of the experiences. We have awe in front of many things, and that's an implicit awareness sometimes of something greater than anything we could call normal. I think all people understand everywhere people at least let's take religions that propose spirits, And all of them have some kind of spirits out there causing trouble usually, and they're they're transcendent. So there is a natural tendency, but I think it comes from the experience of transcendence in our own life.

1:20:20And one other thing, it comes from the fact that we know we have transcendent animal life. So we know there is something that can go above what was. And so that makes us even rationally recognize that there's gotta be a there could be a possible transcendence above our own consciousness, rationally, independent of experience of that realm in its in its truncated ways that we have. But even most primitives have some example, do have an experience of the transcendent in my judgment, and many of them have a transcendent experience that posits a uniform god. That is a a god, a a high god that is one and also a father god. Those are found in the most primitive cultures, not in the more advanced cultures, in the most primitive cultures.

1:21:26They're all found there. If you wanna read the evidence for that, read, the translation published long time ago by a German anthropologist and priest named Schmidt. But all cultures have some notion of divine, not necessarily of one God, but all of them have some notion of the transcendent, even the Greeks with their pantheon. I mean, you know, So we all have so that can come from the natural experiences of kinds of transcendence as well as from recognizing that we are qualitatively different from what we observe and think about the physical world, of course, but also of animals. And so, therefore, if we're that much different qualitatively from animals, something could be that different from us.

1:22:29That's the best I can do with that question. And I think I'm wait a minute. Jesus how could I explain Jesus' consciousness? I don't think I could. I mean, except that he's a human, and, you know, that we could say. Yes. Oh, another question. Two more. Is it believed that perhaps there is some kind of paired associate learning with spiritual practices, such as iteration of the blessed sacrament that could play a role in individuals moving from q two to q three through a kind of transcendence akin to the move from q one to q two. Very interesting possibility. I don't know. But it would be a very important thing to discover because it it may be already there in the in the lives of the mystics as to how to move more rapidly from q two to q three.

1:23:43That's somewhat analogous, of the way in which we've moved from q one to q two. Fascinating question. I don't know what the answer is. There might be Something like that. Regarding the advanced dementia, Alzheimer patient, does his human consciousness revert back to quality of one? What about one with severe mental illness? Severe mental illness might move back to quality of one when you're, in in in having an episode of severity. And, you know, most people who have severe mental illness are not having it all the time. They're gonna have a schizophrenic episode. I don't know. It might be they go back to quality o one. This also could be true to with Alzheimer's when you finally get past the place where the person can no longer even speak.

1:24:44There's no evidence that they know what you're saying when you speak to them. They may have regressed to Qualia one. Of course, they're still human because they were born a human and still are human just like a baby is a human before they reach Qualia two. So that's no argument for either abortion or for euthanasia. But it's quite possible that those two suggestions are correct. No more questions. Good evening, everybody. Good morning. Thank you. Thank you, doctor Vitz. What a wonderful evening you've made for us. There will, you will be speaking on the soul in two months' time in February. We're looking forward to getting to the heart of your soul and understanding more about the soul. But in the meantime, there'll be another, Newman lecture on the January 19 by Eric Johnson, and he'll speak to, different ways of understanding the whole person.

1:26:07And he's he calls his approach form psychology, and he's very close, to what we're working on here. So we're very happy to have, doctor Eric Johnson join us, in January. Once again, thank you, Paul. Wonderful evening. Adios. Adios.