The issues in this website can be found more broadly written in a Finnish book Geenivirhe – Kuinka ihmisestä tuli ihminen? (Vahlsten 2015) which is, unfortunately, not available in English. The work is from 2015, but the texts are from a longer period of 2003-15. The book challenges established paradigms of human development by claiming that our culture is not the result of gradual evolution, but of one hereditary trait that can be called the revolution of consciousness.
The key concepts in the book are adulthood, adolescence, humanity, will, reason, mind, self, consciousness and the unconscious. The book is based on a reinterpretation of existing findings and views. They have been presented in such a way that scientific education is not required to understand them.
The book
Geenivirhe – Miten ihmisestä tuli ihminen? /(Genetic defect – How did we become human?)
ISBN 978-952-93-5883-0 (nid., 230 s.)
ISBN 978-952-93-5884-7 (EPUB)
Vahlsten, 2015
Author’s disclaimer
My name is Jukka Pennanen. I’m not an expert or a professional in the field I am writing about. I’m not trained in psychology, anthropology, paleontology, archeology nor the neurosciences field, I’m just a drop-out philosopher. As D.H. Lawerence once put it, “I am not a scientist. I am an amateur of amateurs.” I love that line!
I plunged into the middle of the issues of human emergence and consciousness purely accidentally. I just felt the distant human past called me and insisted me to listen to it. So I did. Theretofore I pondered for years the mystical experience through philosophical reflection. It was highly theoretical and pretty much useless, even though I learned a lot.
Then, unexpectedly, I saw the way out – in a random television documentary! The answer was so weird that there was no other choice but to study it by myself. I soon realised it was nothing new I had come across, it was ancient knowledge that had been known for ages, but then it had just disappeared, or deliberately hidden. My contribution to human understanding is quite modest, I’ve only given a different wording to this old comprehension.
My method
Rather than analysing, I’ve prefer philosophical syntheses. Synthesis for me refers mainly to two things. In the philosophical sense it means non-analytical methods. It is not dominated by logical reasoning as much as by association. Synthesis seeks to find the causes of problems from where analysis usually fails: in contradictions, paradoxes, and things that are taken for granted.
These usually reveal flaws and illogicalities in thinking and worldview. Second, synthesis attempts to understand human reality by combining phenomena that are difficult to approach with pure reason (eg religions). The lack of rational explanation is always sporadic and strongly dependent on who explains. Experiences that we locate outside the rational world are not necessarily false, but might just reflect our capacity to find proper expressions.
Problems may also arise when we interpret texts too literally, which is, unfortunately, widespread in the academic world. The synthetic approach is also holistic, meaning it is not possible always to understand a thing only as a sum of its parts. That’s why holism is often applied to mental states, language, and ecology. Human can only be understood as part of his or her environment and not just a phenomenon separate from the world.