Over the last few months a new idea has been taking form in my mind. The self-conscious, purposeful human mind is an evolutionary structure and process that is an innovative development of and facilitator in the overall evolutionary process of nature. Our individual streams of consciousness constitute a highly advanced evolutionary process that uniquely contributes to the ongoing evolution of nature and the earth, and potentially the cosmos.

People, of course, to various degrees, get stuck in their minds, stabilizing into relatively solidified perspectives or mindsets on life and themselves, but the various psychological capacities of the mind allow for a potentially open-ended process in our mental development. And of course we can also say that people run amuck and streams of consciousness go into dysfunctional, confused, and tormented tailspins, but such aberrations are part of the rich collective array of successes and failures in the evolution of human minds over individual lifetimes.

Another dimension of the evolution of evolution within conscious minds is that conscious minds, with self-identities, attempt to purposefully reproduce themselves. Of course, we could say that parents attempt to perpetuate their genes through nurturing and protecting their offspring, but this perspective is reductionistic and limiting. Parents consciously and purposefully attempt to perpetuate and further evolve their psychological identities, values, and belief systems through their children. Consciously we do not think in terms of genetic continuance and success; we think in terms of psychological and cultural continuance and success. Naturally, one could argue that human parents do not try to literally replicate their psychological identifies within their children, i.e., reproduce clones, but at best this is a half-truth. We aspire toward relatively autonomous (which we see ourselves as) improved versions of ourselves. Children continue our evolutionary process.

Of course, human minds also purposefully cooperate with each other, but this only adds to our evolutionary capacities and impact. Within the history of the cosmos we observe, as noted above, the hierarchical growth of complexity--of parts combining into more complex wholes--but with conscious human minds we find the thoughtful and purposeful integration of individual minds into groups of varying sizes to realize our various goals and values. We also can continually recombine into an ongoing variety of different groups. All told, we integrate with conscious purpose, rich emotionality, and deliberative, highly evolved, thought processes, a clear advance over earlier forms of concatenation and integration.