Charles Darwin paid his own way as a natural historian and companion to the captain on the five year

circumnavigation of HMS Beagle, where he amassed a large collection of fossils, stones, and  plants, and wrote an

extensive journal of his findings.  Returning to England, he observed the behavior of orangutans at the London

zoo, studied Malthusian theories on the struggle for existence, and attended lectures on the emerging field of

natural law.   Putting all this disparate information together, he produced a book—On the Origin of Species—that

transformed our understanding of the world.

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He’d have a hard time doing that today, because by present criteria, Darwin was an amateur.  He could hardly

expect to pass off a travelogue of a five-year sailing vacation as serious scientific thought.  A book of random

observations, synthetic ideas, and common sense has nothing to add to the current debate in science, which has

traveled somewhere far away from Darwin’s place and time.  But why not? Gaged against the infinity of our

ignorance, the sum of our knowledge is about the same now as it was back then.  

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We know a lot, it’s true.  But there’s a lot we don’t know:  after four centuries of hegemony, for example,

science still cannot account for consciousness.  We don’t know what the mind is:  scientists call it ‘the hard

problem’ now.  It clearly is a problem; it’s even a crisis.  Because the mind is life itself.

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According to science the world is material, but according to our own experience the mind is not.  The world

is thus  either divided between mind and matter, as Descartes reluctantly left it, or matter is itself infused with

awareness, with consciousness, with mind.  By rejecting the duality of the first solution and the purported

mysticism of the second, we’ve left ourselves stumped with a hard problem.  We don’t know the source of

our own cogitations.  

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Maybe it’s time for the amateurs to weigh in again.  Why not approach the issue using Darwin’s method of

direct observation and analysis of the phenomena of consciousness itself?   

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My own life, like many others, has been marked by a number of psychic experiences which, while hardly comprehensive,

do suggest the breadth and variety of consciousness.  Why not describe these events, analyze them in the context of an ongoing

life, and see if their cumulative weight suggests any new ideas about the nature of the mind?  The professionals can always mop up afterwards.