Question Everything

Human Consciousness and Sapience

Second Order Consciousness, Sapience, and Wisdom

George Mobus

[Longish!]

On and off I have played around with the nature of human consciousness and its relationship with sapience as I have been developing it. Specifically in the working paper "The Components of Sapience", in a section titled "Consciousness and the Mind Architecture", I hint at the relationship but admit there that I could not give a more full accounting of what that relationship was, or how it might work.

In this post I want to share with you some of my further speculations on the matter and tell you what I think that relationship is, and, to some degree, how it works. This may seem obvious to my more sapient readers! But it is something of a breakthrough for me, so bear with me if you can.

Before I get to human/sapient consciousness I need to address the more, if you will, ordinary kind of consciousness, the kind we share with all mammals and possibly birds. This is just 'plain' consciousness or being aware of the world and ourselves in the here and now, the processing of 'images' in working memory and the role this form of consciousness plays in mammalian behavior. It may surprise you to learn that what you are basically conscious of (the world in front of you and your decisions for action in that world) are actually after the fact of perception and action selection! That is, ordinary consciousness, or what I will call First Order Consciousness (FOC) is just a reflection upon what the rest of your brain (intelligence + creativity + affect) decided to do before your phenomenal experience even became aware of it.

But it does serve a purpose.

First Order Consciousness — FOC

Is there anyone here who doubts that their pet dog or cat is conscious? Most mammalian pet owners have little doubts that their pets have memory encodings (representations encoded in neural circuits in association cortex, e.g. anterior parietal lobes) of them, their selves, and meaningful cues such as when the owner gets a can of food out to open - the cue that dinner is served. Most of the encoding is accomplished by basic Pavlovian and operant conditioning. But the owner also knows that the pet has desires and even intentions (as when your dog brings his favorite toy and begs you to play). That is, the pet is aware of the situation in the environment, has some inner desire, formulates a course of action, executes that action, and responds to what the environment (esp. the pet owner) does in response to that action. This is FOC.

Now it is true that we cannot literally experience any phenomenal percepts (mental experiences) that the animal has. We cannot say what it experiences directly, or has been popularly said, know what it is like to be another kind of animal. But few who have any experience with pets doubt that they are aware of and interact intelligently with their worlds in essentially the same way we do when were not thinking about being aware (like when you arrive at work and realize you can't recall thinking about driving as you did it). The latter invokes a notion of Second Order Consciousness (SOC) which is what I will be focusing on a bit later. But we cannot grasp what that means until we get a working view of FOC and what is going on in the brain to produce it.

In consciousness studies, everything from neuroscience to philosophy, a recurring question arises in the evolutionary-inspired form of "What is consciousness for?" Some thinkers have come to the conclusion that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, that is something like an accidental but meaningless result of brain functioning. In other words, in the extreme version of this, consciousness serves no real purpose, it is just a sign of what is going on under the hood. Now there is some justification for this when we think only about the real-time version of conscious awareness.

The reason some people come to this conclusion is that there is a growing body of evidence showing that conscious awareness of our own decisions comes some time after (maybe several milliseconds) our pre-motor and motor cortices have taken a decision and initiated motor outputs! In other words, our conscious processing parts of the brain had nothing to do with making a 'conscious' decision, but only acts to display that decision (for some inexplicable reason) in working memory. In yet other words, free will is an illusion.

Well, yes and no. The interpretation of the evidence of a delay between the actual initiation of action and the conscious awareness of it is still open. We know that when we repeat certain behaviors, particularly motor skills, we form habits or non-conscious responses to the appropriate situations. This is a means of developing a more efficient reaction to those situations. Rather than having to think through what needs to be done each time the situation arises, we simply learn to do the right thing and then it becomes automatic after sufficient reinforcement. This capability for learning new behaviors, practicing and then having them become automatic seems to be handled in the brain by the lateralization of the hemispheres. According to Elkhonon Goldberg's theory (The New Executive Brain, Oxford University Press, 2009), the right hemisphere is devoted to novel situation/action processing, where one has to be actively conscious of the situation and 'consciously' choose the right action (as well as consciously monitor and control the follow through making small adjustments as needed). After some number of times doing the same things the neural pathways and motor sequence programs are strengthened to a point where they can operate without 'conscious control'. What may be happening is that the right hemisphere is actively engaged in constructing and monitoring the progress of the new behavior while the left hemisphere is mirroring the results and doing the actual control output to the motor cortex. With repetition the left hemisphere strengthens the synaptic pathways that perform the 'correct' or successful (hence rewarded) actions. At some point the right hemisphere's guidance is no longer needed. The left hemisphere takes over and the memory patterns (engrams) are hardened to long-term memory traces. So, eventually, the pattern of situation-response or behavior becomes automatic and not under conscious control.

This is an intriguing theory and though it is not as thoroughly developed as it might be, it does help explain the results of the time delay between action selection and conscious awareness. If the behavior has become routine or a habit, then the left hemisphere has simply automatically done its job and the need for intervention is not there. However, the fact that the action took place might be useful information for another purpose and so the fact of the action is recorded in working memory and accessible to monitoring by the areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in executive control. The reason is that in real life things change and if all behaviors became permanently automatic this could have dire consequences for the organism. If the situation response were to fail to provide a good outcome then the response would have to be altered or even possibly abandoned. Thus, if needed, the right hemisphere would need to be called in again to reconstruct the appropriate behavior and start the cycle of learning and engraining over again.

Functionally it might look like Figure 1.

Figure 1. A functional view of conscious control over action selection mapping in the mammalian brain.

The perceptual system (the neocortical regions) and the limbic system (e.g. amygdala) receive information about the immediate world from the senses (time t₁). The limbic system also functions as an evaluator of the goodness or badness of the environment and can compare the old state with the new state (time t₂) to determine if the action taken made things better or worse (or, of course, neutral). Under normal conditions the perceptions of the situation in the immediate world result in activation of the action selection map, which then activates a motor output program as dictated by the situation; one that had been learned previously. The program should benefit the organism by putting it in a better situation, or preventing a worse situation from obtaining.

Figure 2 is a very simplified diagram of the concept of an action selection map. The 'map' refers to a large array of initiating points for motor programs. Each element in the array initiates a specific behavior sequence. During development the organism the map constructed the translation from a perceptual analysis, called a situation analysis, to an appropriate behavioral output. in vertebrates prior to mammals a great portion of this map was 'hard wired' under genetic control, with very little adaptability (learning). Evolution had been the determinant of what behaviors suited what situations for animals that had relatively simple and stable environments. Simple, means not much in the way of food choices and not many smart predators to worry about. Think of a frog sitting on a lily pad. Fly goes by and flash goes the tongue. Snake happens to be nearby then jump into the water and swim into the mud. Pretty simple and automata-like (more on instinctive behavior below). To be sure, some learning, in the form of short-term habituation or sensitization, or slightly longer-term behavioral shaping, were present in these animals, but by and large their behavioral repertoire was fixed.

For animals like mammals that were evolving to fit more complicated niches something new was needed. Food opportunities were more varied and shifted with seasons and longer-term climate shifts. Predators were other mammals and getting smarter. What was needed was and adaptable mapping system, one in which the appropriate response could be learned and nuances of behavioral sequences could be adjusted as needed. Enter the adaptive map.

 

Figure 2. The action-selection map is essentially an array of possible initiating points for a combinatorial set of motor programs. An analysis of the situation from the perceptual system activates the appropriate initialization point in the early motor cortex. Thereafter the activation chain follows a pre-learned sequence of specific muscle (group) stimulations that result in specific behavior. All of the arrows in this figure are assumed to have been learned from actual experience (as in Figure 1) over time. Note that the role of the lower brain and brain stem have been ignored in this diagram. Two, of many possible initiation points are shown in the map. The situation detected by the perceptual analysis system maps to the specific one (in gray) that sets off a learned or instinctive sequence of motor stimulations. The sequence determines which muscle groups are activated in sequence. Not shown is the role of the cerebellum or the motor relay nuclei in the lower brain stem. Motor sequence options run from left to right. The arrows show the flow of activation that produces the final behavior response. These kinds of circuits have been successfully demonstrated in more complex robots!

This same causal loop (perception, action selection, motor output or action taken, change in the world, new perception) was at work in instinctive behaviors in earlier animals (reptiles and amphibians). The difference is that instincts were hard wired action selection maps whereas with later animals, mammals in particular, the map is subject to modification with experience by virtue of learning capacity in a new cortical structure, the cerebellar neocortex. The role of the monitor circuits, shown in Fig. 1, the new prefrontal cortex, is to keep track of performance and activate learning (and also overriding previous learning) as needed to assure longer-term good decisions. Mammals gained adaptive control, or, in other words, adaptive behavior that could adjust complex behaviors over longer time scales as an individual's environment changed in unpredictable ways. This was quite an evolutionary innovation, even though it took advantage of previously evolved structural architectures and cellular/circuit functions (I will explain below how evolution of the brain has been a process of reusing old structures in new ways).

This higher-order function, of monitoring and adjusting to maximize long-term quality of the action-selection map function, is tactical control. It is monitoring the interactions of the organism with its environment and acting to assure that the animal learns (and re-learns when needed) the optimal set of actions to take in the array of situations the animal might find itself in. As animals evolved more elaborate and flexible circuits (another subject some day) this permitted them to adapt their behavior to a wider array of possible situations, i.e., a more complex environment.

Here we have a distinction between automatic reactions handled by the action-selection map when the synaptic links between perceptual inputs (situation analysis) and motor program outputs have been sufficiently strengthened. Until these links are strengthened it is up to the monitor to guide the process based on the evaluative feedback gained from actual experience.

There is, as you would guess, far more complexity to it than captured in these figures. For one thing there appears to be some kind of mechanism within the monitor that focuses attention on the particulars of the environmental situation and on the actions just taken. This is held in what is called working memory by means not yet understood. Possibly this is what allows the prefrontal cortex of the right hemisphere to 'play' around with options and then guide the formation of new synaptic connections as it attempts to better shape the situation-action selection mapping. This attention focusing mechanism is what gives rise to the phenomenological experience — being aware of the world and its effects on our organism.

This is purely speculative, of course, but there is one more piece to the story. It has to do with a very ancient part of the brain, in the brain stem, that seems to be involved in keeping track of what the world does to us versus what we do to our selves. You know that when you pinch yourself it doesn't seem to hurt, at least not as much as when someone else does it. That is because this very ancient neural circuit registers the difference between self and other. When you do something it recognizes this and inhibits any untoward response your body might have to a stimulus. Otherwise you would jump every time you inadvertently touched yourself. You would think something out there in the world had touched you and you would react. This same region of the brain seems to be involved in general stimulation of the prefrontal cortex (this is the bit that seems to be stimulated by caffeine), the wakefulness stimulus. I suspect that it is also the key in understanding the phenomenological experience of selfhood. This function (along with pain sensation) is tied up with the fact that an animal can't act as if it were just an observer of things happening to its body. It has to have a sense of things happening to its body. In other words, it has to have a sense of ownership, of personal integrity that must be maintained.

First order consciousness, then, is primarily responsible for the real-time tactical management of the body in its relationship with the environment. It is constantly monitoring the goodness of results from lower level action decisions (made subconsciously) and when the results were not as favorable as they should have been, it intervenes to modify the automatic response and learn a new situation-action selection mapping. This is the basic awareness all animals have. Of course in humans it is greatly elaborated by having much greater memory storage capacity, more novelty processing capabilities, etc. But essentially, humans share this basic consciousness with our mammalian cousins. This is not what makes humans different. Evolution, however, had learned a neat trick in pushing the brain into new territory. The development of a new circuit to handle this interesting tactical control, the neocortex and prefrontal areas in particular, was, as it turns out, just an elaboration on an already existing architecture. The monitor pictured in Fig. 1 is actually just another map process accreted onto the existing action selection map by virtue of some interesting mutations and selection.

One mechanism that seems to provide a lot of the raw material for natural selection to work on is to have an 'accidental' replication of an existing structure, like the paleocortex, in a redundant copy. At first the copy probably only serves as a backup and probably takes up resources without any immediate payback. But over time, if it doesn't prove outright handicapping it might start to diverge in function from the original structure and if the new functionality proves useful... voila, something new is born.

Imagine, roughly speaking, the action selection oval above being replicated in some kind of mutation event. At first it is just a redundant action selection processor with the same inputs and outputs. It doesn't actually add anything to the animal's capabilities. But then imagine that over some length of time other mutations start to creep in and instead of getting its inputs from the perceptual system directly it gets them from the original action selection processor. Instead of outputs to the motor system it sends its outputs back to the action selection processor. Over enough time it takes on a new ability to implement a new kind of action selection mapping, not from external stimuli, but from stimuli from the old action selection map. It then produces a 'motor' output that, instead of activating a motor program, activates a learning process in the action selection map. In time, the new piece of hardware (or actually wetware) evolves into the tactical controller because having adaptive tactical management proves to be highly successful and gives the possessing animals great advantages in terms of exploiting more complex environments.

This 'trick' might have come in handy a second time. As mammals gave rise to primates, and primates became ever more clever in their tactical living, especially in social groups, they gave rise to hominins who had a spark of something even more interesting than mere tactical control. Something new, but derived from something very old, had emerged. A new patch of tissue at the very tip end of the forebrain started to elaborate and expand. And the later hominids, especially Homo, started showing evidence of something like tactical control but with much larger time and space dimensions — strategic control for the management of self and group.

Second Order Consciousness

So if all mammals have some degree of FOC, is human consciousness really different or is it just more of the same only 'bigger'?

I believe it is actually both the same and different! We do share the basic FOC with our mammalian predecessors and co-inhabitants of the Ecos. But something new has been added on top of the FOC. A new level of consciousness that performs a new set of functions and produces all that is unique in human behavior, such as true symbolic language and, as I will argue, sapience.

Imagine that mutation pulled the same kind of trick used to generate the new tactical control function of FOC. Figure 3 shows a functional diagram after this trick was pulled and a long time for divergent evolution between the components had passed. The new component is an elaboration of the previous monitor processor, only now it monitors much, much more.

Figure 3. A functional view of second order conscious (strategic) control over the tactical control system (first order consciousness). The new upper layer of extended working and tacit memory and the new kind of 'monitor', form a strategic management function that is able to model the world from historical experience and project possible future worlds based on reasonable evolutions of the present world.

What has happened here is that the entire complex of the tactical controller (action selection monitor), working memory, and tacit knowledge data base memory (I have not shown explicit memory in these diagrams since it is part of the perceptual and action selection map systems) have been replicated and expanded. They took on expanded roles to handle complex social relations as well as temporally extended engrams. The hominid brain developed the ability to have memories based on longer histories but also memories of possible futures. The brain developed an ability to think about the future. This gave it a new capability in terms of monitoring and controlling the tactical level. It could formulate more elaborate plans that took on a strategic nature.

The brain did not just create a new cortex, as happened with the neocortex deriving from the paleocortex. The constraints of the skull overall volume might have negated this possibility. Or it might be that there simply was no more benefit to be gained from an entirely new cortex overlying the neocortex. Instead what seems to have happened is the frontal lobes, where the original action selection map was located, produced additional patches of neocortex that became what we now call the prefrontal cortex (indeed the precursors for PFC can be seen in some of the smarter mammal species like dogs and elephants). The neocortex had evolved to handle something like modular functionality in patches within a single planar structure. If you needed new functions you just replicate an existing patch that has a related function and then let it evolve divergently to perfect the new one. The prefrontal patches appear to have originated and evolved in this manner. The skull shape had to evolve to accommodate this but since simians and some apes had taken to arboreal lifestyles and needed eyes in front of the head for binocular vision, the availability of the space above the eye sockets became available. The forehead had room to protrude outward and forward without seriously risking birthing problems (until we get to humans who seem to have pushed the envelope).

The PFC in humans has exploded, in evolutionary terms. It now comprises about half of the area of the entire frontal lobes (merging into the pre-motor cortex in the latter). During hominid evolution we can see this structure rapidly growing relative to the rest of the brain even as the whole brain got larger. Then with the emergence of later species in the genus Homo we see it develop further still until in humans it occupies a significant fraction of the whole neocortex. And with its explosion, behaviors in the hominids started to change. Homo erectus may have been the first hominid to migrate out of Africa (apparently sapiens did so later in several waves). Clearly hominids had developed considerable capacity to learn new behaviors, but more importantly, they had started to think about the future and consider alternative futures and their consequences. Most animals that end up leaving their normal habitat are forced out by some calamity. Early humans appear to have been wondering what was on the other side of that next range of mountains.

They also started developing more complex tool making. This involved intentionally sharpening spear points and chipping rocks to create cutting tools. They intentionally took control of fire. All of these behaviors required some forethought about what the future uses would be rather than just breaking off a stick for immediate use when you saw a prey animal. Foresight is involved in yet a newer kind of thinking — strategic thinking. Strategic thinking involves thinking about the possible futures and setting plans to guide tactical actions intended to bring about the most desired future. Thus, the more elaborate PFC patches operated to perform executive functions that provided this facility.

FOC started out as a monitor, evaluator, and longer term adjustor for the operational control system of the action selection map. It guided the learning of appropriate tactical behaviors to benefit the organism in a dynamic, complex environment. It evolved into a system that maintains awareness of the environment through attention focus and a kind of decision processing, not unlike the action selection mapping process, that guided learning. This was the evolutionarily nascent prefrontal cortex. As it evolved in higher mammals and especially primates, it expanded its temporal and spatial scope with expanded memory systems to keep track of the immediate future and the immediate past. There was nothing like language, but if there had been it might have sentences like this: "I just ate. I'm tired. I'll take a nap." Upon waking: "I just slept. I'm hungry again. I'm going to get something to eat." Not much depth in space or time.

Then something marvelous happened. One little patch of the PFC, the one directly behind the eyebrows underwent a further development; in essence it provided a wholly new kind of map. It provided the ultimate in integration from all other functions of the brain. And it stimulated the growth and development of the brain as a whole, but particularly the neocortex. That patch is the frontopolar or Brodmann area 10 (BA10), which I have written about before. In that post I mentioned the diagrams which I've decided to post here.

Since I have described the relation between BA10 evolution and sapience I won't go into that here. Rather I would like to focus on BA10's role in second order consciousness which is the subject of this posting.

I have to admit I have been tempted to invoke the notion of third order consciousness to distinguish between early hominid mentation and that of sapiens'. But upon reflection I decided that that would be overkill. Perhaps the development of sapience and SOC should be called second and a half consciousness (S_½OC!) Strategic thinking is just one component of sapience and by itself isn't what full human consciousness is about. Nevertheless I have some reasons for thinking that the vast majority of modern people have very weak strategic thinking capacity, perhaps extending over only a small number of people in their social circle and a short period of time (like one week at best). It seems rare to encounter truly long-term, wide boundary strategic thinking in the population. Nevertheless what even a little bit of strategic capacity initiates is the need to communicate much more complex ideas between individuals in a social group. Lions, wolves, dolphins, and especially chimpanzees (social animals) can communicate tactical commands when conducting group hunts. The extent of their strategic thinking is laying plans to conduct the hunt itself. Humans, on the other hand, plan days or weeks in advance. Those plans can include more complex information about where the game will be at various times during a season. Such planning requires careful preparation which means the need for more elaborate communications.

Hence the advent of language. The FOC system developed a precursor to language when it developed the ability to construct sequences of actions in the action selection and motor output regions of the brain. Such a sequence might be thought of as a list of things to do next: Contract muscle A, then contract muscle B while relaxing A, etc. At a little more abstract level this could give rise to the initiation point in the map coming to represent the whole sequence and being given a representation as a 'move', stored in a separate memory area. Then a sequence: Move arm down; pick up object; move arm up... etc. would start to look like what we would call a narrative. Note that going from the details of each muscle contraction to the abstract sequence of moves requires the exact same sequential processing but with the added sequence control over the map itself. That means another, higher level, map! There are a lot of details I am glossing over here, but I am asking you to accept that the sequencing of abstractions is no different in principle from the sequencing of muscle motions. But it does require an additional form of memory related to working memory that allows the temporary work space for producing a construction of this type and holding the representations of the abstractions. The working memory is used to activate each representation in the sequence and keep smaller sequences (phrases) active for future back references.

With abstractions — names of things and actions — and with motor control of tongue and glottis, we come to that new capability of language. We can construct narratives of what we are doing in an abstract form — words and sentences — and convey these to our fellow human beings. The PFC gave us the machinery to represent and manipulate abstractions in narratives. These are available not only to others through speech, but to something else inside our heads; the 2_½ mechanism that arose from the workings of BA10. Just as the PFC monitored the longer-term performance of the tactical control system, FOC, and provided the beginnings of strategic thinking, so the BA10 patch stimulated the development in a number of other PFC patches to monitor the narrative production of the FOC system. We literally started to listen to our own sentences. And that is when it became necessary to exercise quality control over those sentences in the sense of thinking ahead and reflecting on our own pasts to make adjustments in our thinking. In other words we had to learn from our mistakes and successes by monitoring our own actions (as narratives), including our speech acts, and eventually our own thoughts (in the FOC sense). Second order consciousness now came into full being with the advent of an expanded BA10 patch as the ultimate convergence point for all activities in all other systems and the capacity to integrate those activities into an individually consistent on-going narrative over one's lifetime. Our sociality required integration of our moral sentiments along with our desires and other limbic responses. The system provided an ultimate action selection map in the form of directing thoughts and inhibiting improper actions in the other systems that were merely able to respond to the immediate situation.

We humans can ask ourselves questions like: Why did I do that?, Why did I say that? Or even more subtle kinds of questions like: Who am I?, Why am I here? Where do I fit into the scheme of things?

"I" as the actor is not really the real-time actor at all. It is my BA10 (and its integration with the rest of the PFC) in an on-going monitoring of my organism's decisions and action results over long time periods and using the information to make adjustments. I am my strategic thinking acting on my tactical thinking acting on my operational controls so that my organism might succeed and thrive over the course of my lifetime. Moreover, my success can translate into the success of my children and their children if what I have learned is worthy.

Our sapient brains have the ability to monitor our own actions and thoughts, and even our own plans, aspirations, and beliefs. We can do this because there is a higher-level action selection function that monitors our long-term being and is set to generate such (existential) questions as a prod back to FOC. The latter then acts on our behavior — for example we may be driven to seek answers or to learn more about the wider world. We humans are the product of evolution continuing to elaborate a simple theme: map situations to actions and then monitor the results for goodness or badness, first in real-time, then in short-period time (tactical) where the situation is the product of the real-time system, and then in longer-period time (strategic) where the situation is the long-term performance of the tactical system. The latter come in the form of narratives or sequences of abstract representations.

Many such narratives taken together form stories. And many stories accumulate over ones lifetime. More importantly all stories share some common attributes such as plots and themes. These latter considerations are yet higher level abstractions. And it is these abstractions that are tucked away in tacit knowledge, ready to be called upon to use for guidance in making decisions in real-life stories that unfold before us. We come at last to wisdom. All of the abstract story lines capture all of the essential elements of how to live, what happens when such-and-such takes place, who (what character type like protagonist) should do what and when. The wise (sapient) person has aggregated many of life's stories in their abstract form and has access to their internal logic as part of that tacit knowledge that builds up over a lifetime of experiencing the specific stories embroiling specific real people.

The wise person is forever evaluating their own thoughts, indeed their whole mind. Often this is done subconsciously (the FOC system can do what it has to do according to what is happening in the immediate environment but the SOC is free to wander). But just as often the sapient being is observing their own thoughts consciously and attempting to evaluate the goodness or badness as part of a life-long attempt to produce moral thinking for the biggest story of all.

Thus, I think sapience and second order consciousness go hand-in-hand. They are just different aspects of the same mental phenomenon. I would expect, too, that the level of sapience has a great deal to do with the 'level' of consciousness. Wiser people are more conscious of both the world and themselves. And people who have the mental competence to be more conscious of themselves and the world as they mature become wiser with age.

One day I shall have to write this all up in greater detail.

[EDIT: 6/29/2010. I thought I would add this diagram as sort of another view of the brain's architecture with respect to operational, tactical (and logistical), and strategic control. The "eye balls" (kind of hoaky I know) represent the monitoring function of the next layer in the hierarchy. Think of each higher layer as an "observer" of the one below. The strategic layer is the last one on the right. This is primarily the job of the prefrontal cortex with the BA10 patch acting to "organize" and integrate everything. The black thick arrows providing recurrent feedback to prior levels (motor program, sequences, and narrative) are the higher level abstractions mentioned above. The narrative is the language stream of what is happening and other "thoughts" that loops back through the strategic controller's observation of the tactical level to produce the stream of consciousness (phenomenological experience). The aggregate of narratives form abstract representations we call stories as part of tacit knowledge (strategic models).

George ]

Peak Energy - Peak Economy

What is Happening?

When you cut into an artery and can't stop the bleeding, you know what happens don't you? The victim dies.

These are dark days for the Ecos. Plagued by a chronic and progressive disease (CO₂ poisoning), she is now been wounded grievously. On the one hand one might look at the seemingly tiny wound to the Earth in the Gulf of Mexico and think that it is so small relative to the vastness of the oceans that surely this one small gusher (I refuse to use the word 'spill' since in English this has a very different meaning than the phenomenon we are witnessing) can't spell the death of the Ecos. In a sense I would agree it isn't the complete death of the planet. But it could be the death of the Ecos as we have known it, just as is likely the case with global warming. We humans are responsible for the demise of species and ecologies. It is impossible to tell how far this destruction will go before the Ecos establishes a new stability.

This is, of course, a completely anthropocentric point of view. The Ecos has undergone so many cycles of die-off and rebirth over its lifetime that this is probably just a replay of an ancient pattern. We don't like it because it affects us. Life, in its totality, probably doesn't care what we like or dislike.

As if the wound wasn't bad enough, now there are speculations of erosion of the casing and bore hole with the possibility of a collapse of the integrity of the sea floor around it. In the worst-case scenario we could see thirty years of oil gushing from the Gulf depths. The damage to the Ecos and humanity that this would cause is beyond the pale.

Obama put a six-month moratorium on deep water drilling. But now the oil folks are protesting and a Federal judge has put a block on that moratorium. The reason given by the plaintiff; the world is desperate for more oil and deep water may be the only additional sources we can find. What does that tell us? About ourselves?

What is About to Happen?

The monetary cost of extracting oil is about to skyrocket. The oil gusher in the Gulf is going to cost far more than the $20 billion that Obama got from BP. Cue the insurance companies. Just the cost of insurance for drilling is going to get a whole lot more expensive. These are real costs that have to eventually be accounted for in the cost of extraction in general. Then there will be the increased cost to society for developing and maintaining a regulatory system for the purpose of preventing these kinds of accidents. Those too are real costs even if they don't show up in the cost accounting of oil companies directly. Actually what will show up in their accounting will be the higher costs of prevention from new technology and especially redundancy needed to make drilling in deep water safer. In plain terms, the total cost of extraction is going up. That means the impact on energy return on energy invested (EROI) is going to be huge. The EROI of offshore oil is already quite low, around 15:1 according to Charles Hall and Jessica Lambert. It will decline much further still with these additional costs associated with deep water drilling. And that, in turn, means that the net energy we get will decline further and faster still (see: Economic Dynamics and the Real Danger).

Couple this fact with the fact that global oil extraction is already in decline (we have passed the peak according to people I truly believe know what they are talking about!) and we have a truly dangerous situation developing.

You've seen a version of the below graph several times before. This is from my computer model of the systems dynamics of energy flows from finite sources such as fossil fuels. I've marked this version with labels, A, B, and C to discuss what kinds of things are happening at each of these 'inflection' points. These are the points in the dynamic history of energy flow when things change.

 

Point A is what we call the 'knee' of an exponential growth. This is the point at which the slope of the tangent to the curve (from calculus) is exactly one. Prior to that point the slope had been less than one. Afterward it is greater than one. And it grows greater as the system growth accelerates at an accelerating pace. This is the period William Catton called the "Age of Exuberance" (Overshoot).

Along with the rise of energy flow during this period (roughly the late 1700's to about 1960, to put it into historical perspective), world population expanded exponentially as well (see the graph in the Wikipedia article). Some authors have felt that the two growth phenomena are linked causally. An overly simplistic version would have world population expanding because of the growing abundance of fossil fuel energy. But, while they are correlated phenomena, we have to be careful not to infer any form of one-way causality here. The fact is that the expansion of fossil fuel extraction was driven by demand, the combination of increasing numbers of people and their individual increasing demand for more energy. The latter was made possible because so many very clever people kept inventing new ways to consume high power energy to save people time and effort. Since people are highly motivated to save time and effort, both as individuals and in profit-making firms, they clamored for more machines to do their work and do it faster.

With the increasing ease (and safety) afforded by using machines to do our work for us life became more supportive of procreation! Infant mortality went down. Nutrition improved (at least in terms of calories). And old people lived longer with improved life extending medical procedures and medicines.

As long as EROI for oil (especially) remained relatively high (costs in the above graph staying relatively low), the energy extraction firms were highly motivated to produce more product, even though they were drawing down a fixed, finite resource in doing so. The growth of population, consumption per capita, and the supply of fossil fuel-based energy were mutually reinforcing through the human psyche and the money-measured economy. The exponential rise is explained by this form of circular causality or positive feedback loops. During the age of exuberance there seemed to be nothing but growth in sight.

Point B, however, represents a very subtle, unnoticed shift. All the while that positive feedbacks were driving growth higher and higher a number of socioeconomic and physical facts were at work to strengthen the negative feedback loops. Namely the combined effects of increasing complexity and depletion of resources both contributed to increasing energy costs for extracting gross energy (the raw fossil fuels). Since no one bothered to measure net energy (gross minus costs) in addition to net profit in monetary terms, no one detected the shift back to a tangent slope of less than one. Over the history of the age of exuberance economists had decided that the money system had no more relationship to physical reality and it was free to be whatever it could be. And people had decided they cared about money more than understanding physical reality.

Still physical reality would not be denied. Something was different and started to be felt in the developed economies of the world. Everything was costing more as time went on. This is because energy, not money, is the real currency of the economy. It is required for all economic activity and, thanks to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, once energy is used doing work it is gone and more must be added to do any kind of value added work. In other words, energy use (and loss) accumulates in supply chains. Monetary costs do too, but not quite in the way that energy does, since money circulates (and recirculates) whereas energy goes on a one-way trip through the economy. Thus money had already been decoupled from its real purpose, which was to inform us how much energy (work) we could command.

Over the whole history of economic growth we had gotten into the habit of borrowing money to finance new activities. At first this was borrowing from savings — previously earned income that was surplused. Initially these surpluses were our best form of insurance against future troubles. But with energy flow increasing and troubles largely mitigated by technology we slowly changed our attitude about keeping this money (representing work) aside for a rainy day. We started using it to finance current projects that would/should pay back larger profits in the future, thus allowing us to pay back the loan with interest plus still make a profit from the value of the work we would accomplish in that future time.

Then things changed. Energy flow started to decelerate. It was subtle and totally off the radar screen, so to speak. But less energy flow means less work can be accomplished. The rate of creation of assets began to decline ever so slightly. Along with this phenomenon came a condition for people in the OECD countries. They had grown used to using lots of energy for anything they wanted to do. They had been increasing the material wealth aspect of their standard of living. They had been demanding, and getting, increasing monetary incomes to pay for their high-energy lifestyles (Americans, on top of getting used to all the material goods became profligate wasters of energy). So costs for manufacturers and some service providers were going up due to wage inflation, but also because the accumulation of energy costs were starting to hurt. This was made explicit during the 1970s OPEC oil embargo, but quickly forgotten when the political emergency passed. But as fossil fuel extraction costs continued to climb, slowly but surely as the resources became harder and harder to find and get to, the pressure on energy price rises could not be denied.

The brilliant capitalists responded with two very rational but completely misguided responses. The first was to seek lower labor costs by moving production and some services off-shore from the major energy consuming labor force in the OECD countries. Globalization was ramped up to new levels as corporations sought labor pools that required lower wages since their lifestyles consumed far less energy. Corporations could substitute cheaply priced bunker fuel for expensive living OECD labor. Related to this was the tendency to look the other way as immigrants, some legal, seeking employment flooded into OECD countries. They too were willing to labor for less pay since they had lower consumption habits.

The second response was to keep up appearances through the use of creative financial products. Essentially it started with churning real estate to create the illusion of appreciating prices. Make loans to people who probably didn't have a hope of doing more and better work in the future and they would never earn the income necessary to service their mortgages. But it didn't matter. First you bundle the bad debts into a package and dice it up so that you give the appearance of spreading and hedging risk, thus creating a marketable piece of paper. You create wealth with a magic wand, when all else fails. Not only did this magic give an opportunity to bankers and Wall Street boys to make great commissions, it gave the politicians cover. When you added all the 'dollars' created by these transactions into the GDP it made it look like growth of the economy was on track. Of course, all the while the purchasing power of the middle and lower class was evaporating. Even two wage earners per family didn't do the trick of keeping up with the Joneses. Real wealth was already in contraction by the 1970s and what wealth was being produced was being increasingly absorbed by the top one percent of the population (in the US anyway).

After point B in the graph (~1970) things started to degrade at an increasing rate. The cost of energy, which represents the true cost to society to have an industrial system, rose inexorably. The curve of cost in the graph looks kind of linear, but in fact it is also exponential, just at a very slow rate of acceleration. In reality it probably took a sharp upturn after the advent of ocean drilling which required much more expensive equipment (platforms) and infrastructure (oil ports and ships).

Meanwhile the growth of population had gained considerable momentum, even as the live birth rate dropped in OECD countries; more mouths to feed on oil and natural gas powered agriculture. Developing countries were being subsidized by the OECD breadbaskets of the world and to many who lived there it must have seemed like the promise of development was finally turning their way. Birth rates in these countries continued to be high while death rates declined due to the support from OECD benefactors.

Now we are either approaching or already past point C. Peak oil may not be the same as the peak of total energy flow, but it is probably pretty close. The reason is that oil is the most usable of all the fuels we use. It takes a lot of diesel fuel, for example, to remove mountain tops and dig the coal seams as well as transport the coal to the power plants. So oil plays a role as a king pin energy source. When it reaches the peak of extraction rate, the costs of extraction of other fossil fuels will surely start to climb meaning that total net energy will decline.

One of the semi-surprising results of my physical model is the revelation that the peak of net energy precedes that of gross energy by some number of years, perhaps ~30. This makes sense on first principles and if we are near or approaching the peak of gross energy extraction then we have likely already passed the peak of net energy — the energy we absolutely need to maintain our civilization.

As disruptive and painful as the deceleration of energy flow has been and the various dislocations it has been causing for the last thirty to fifty years, imagine how bad it will be when there is zero growth of net energy flow. In point of fact, I assert that what we are witnessing now is the coming undone of the social, political, and economic fabric of our civilization as the energy truth of it has hit full force. Most of the population still has no clue as to what is causing all of the turmoil, on a global basis, and the seemingly endless string of calamities and incompetencies and ineffectivenesses that have become a hallmark of our time (If we could put a man on the moon, why can't we fix ...?). Just one decade into the 21^st century we are keenly aware that things are just not right and dimly aware that it might not get better anytime soon. More people today feel on the brink of catastrophe without actually understanding why. Yet the reason is so simple. We broke into the energy bank beneath our feet and spent the funds on as much junk as good investments and we did it at all possible breakneck speed. And now we are bankrupt.

What Happens After That?

Unless somebody comes up with an as yet unanticipated source of energy, a real source that doesn't violate the First or Second Laws, a source that provides the level of power that fossil fuels have done, there is only one possible conclusion. Oh, and if you think that the solution is in technology or so-called alternative (e.g. solar, wind, nuclear, etc.) you should read this. We have to face up to the hard fact that fossil fuels provided something quite extraordinary that enabled us to invent wonderful machines and consumables that simply hastened the drawdown of those fossil fuels. And now we are about to reach the point where it takes too much energy to extract the next unit of fossil fuel energy. And we simply cannot support the kind of life we have had with that power.

As the graph shows it is all downhill from point C. We have come fully to the end of the age of exuberance and the only remaining question is: How gracefully will we ride the decline?

There are, doubtless, some things we could do if we were wise enough to get started right now, that might ease the pain and suffering somewhat. There is a huge amount of wastage currently in the system that, if cut out, would extend and soften the slope of the downhill side of the curve. Even though alternatives are not currently a long-term solution (since they cannot produce enough excess power to replicate themselves before the end of their life cycles), taking a lot of the energy we currently spend on war and highway repairs might better serve by being invested in some combination of alternatives that will help keep the wheels coming off entirely while we are speeding along at breakneck pace.

But as readers know, I am very cynical about our capacity for wisdom. Ergo, the bottleneck approaches. The best bet for humanity is to prepare for the worst and invest in the kind of people we would hope could make it through the bottleneck. People who might seed some future species of humanity that would not make the same mistakes we have. Not just because they will not have the energy bank, but because in all matters they will be inherently far wiser than we have been. To put it, ironically, in somewhat faith-based terms, I believe that is our salvation.

Is It Time For Action?

A Cautionary Tale and an Intuition

There is a tale of a merchant who had just one objective and that was to maximize his profits taking his goods to market. He had a problem, a limitation. He only had one camel. So he piled heaps and heaps of the material wealth he hoped to sell in the market on that one camel. The poor camel withstood the weight as best it could. The merchant kept piling more on. The more he could take the more he could sell. The camel withstood it still. Then the merchant put the last thing on the camel that he would need for the long trip, straw fodder for the camel's food. While putting the bag of fodder on the camel's back one small straw fell out of the bag as he was lifting it up. Being a 'frugal' man, the merchant picked up the straw while failing to notice the camel's strain. He dropped the straw into the bag atop the camel's back. But it's weight was just enough to break the camel's back. The camel collapsed and died. The merchant not only didn't realize his goal, he was out of business. Without the camel he could not get his goods to market. And since he was so far away from any other human outpost, he was destined to die there in the desert, amid his precious wealth. The moral of the story, of course, is that had he not been so greedy as to overpack the camel, he would have made enough profit and lived. Greed will get you in the end.

Greed, the desire for more stuff that can only be produced by consuming ever larger amounts of energy, is weighing down the Ecos. And now, in an attempt to put one more hole in the Earth in order to extract more oil, the equivalent of one more straw, mankind has unleashed the force that will break the back of the Ecos. For nearly two months now, oil has been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, spoiling the deep waters, the surface waters and now the wetlands and beaches of the Gulf states. My intuition tells me this is the black swan event that will lead to the collapse of society that we have been considering. Unlike the breaking of the camel's back, a catastrophic and instantaneous collapse, this event will set off a chain of events, like a fan out of dominos, that will result in the ultimate financial collapse of civilization. The global financial system is still incredibly fragile, as the Greek economy and those of several other southern European countries (as well as Ireland) attest. The roaring Chinese economy is based on growth from a very low base, but as Chinese workers are now starting to demand higher wages and better working conditions (sure to raise the energy cost of doing business) that economy is also in a fragile state. Japan is in deep trouble. All of the economies of the world, including (or especially) the US's, are teetering on the brink. All it will take is a trigger event of just the right magnitude to set the collapse in motion.

We've already seen this in the financial collapse of 2008-09, seemingly caused by unduly risky financial instruments, and their bubbles, falling apart — the bubbles burst. There is now a growing consensus that it was the spike in the price of oil that triggered the whole collapse (see this graph, compliments of Wikipedia). The US government and other governments stepped in with bailouts and supports that were, themselves, based on debt — the governments had to borrow the money they then turned around and lent to the various financial institutions as well as many of the automobile companies. I doubt seriously that the governments' would be good for double or triple the amounts they have already borrowed.

The oil gusher, whose rate of flow is now estimated to be ten times greater than originally estimated, will prove to be the trigger of sufficient, indeed more than sufficient magnitude to set off the cascade of damaging events. It looks like a very rough ride to me.

President Obama's Speech

His speech was the straw on the back of my concerns about how the post-peak oil collapse of society will play out. It won't be due to a simple constriction of energy flows as I imagined. It will be a chaotic set of reactions set off by this accident. Certainly there will be effects that will provide a sense of proximate causes, for example the price of oil will very likely start trending higher which will have an obvious impact on the economy, as before. But there will be so many more subtle effects that will ensue from this tragedy, such as the substantial financial losses to businesses throughout the south, which will propagate northward with business and community failures coming in rapid succession.

Obama didn't really say anything. He probably can't say anything substantive because nobody knows what can be done, ether to stop the gusher or to clean up the oil impacts on the shores and the water column. The cost of this effort will so far exceed anything that anyone is now considering that it will simply not be done. The collapse of the Gulf state economies and the potential loss of off-shore sources of oil will spread throughout the whole nation, indeed the world. If we thought the impacts of Katrina were expensive (and have not actually resulted in completion of the cleanup), then this is going to blow our minds. BP will never be able to pay for a sufficient restoration to the region. Neither will the US government be able to pick up the tab. Look for refugees leaving the south in the next six months. If a hurricane hits the Gulf in the near term, the collapse and exodus of survivors may come even sooner.

Obama gave us nothing. BP putting aside $20b in escrow won't be enough. Indeed if this works out like any other government-associated administration of funds, it will not even come out in a timely fashion. I suppose I hoped he would take charge and provide some real leadership. He called this a war. Why then doesn't he mobilize military-level attacks on both the gusher and the clean-up? He could take a lesson from Louisiana governor Jindal's admittedly pathetic attempts (since he really has no resources) to protect the state's shores. At least Jindal is taking action as best he can. Obama talks and assembles a committee!

So don't look to the US government for action.

When Just Asking Questions Might Not Be Enough

For a while now, as I have been thinking more about the feasible living conditions for future humans, after the bottleneck, I've been considering the possibility of taking some actions now as a preparation for what is coming. Before this oil gusher in the Gulf I really thought that there would be time and I could remain focused on analysis of the situation and needs of the future, writing about my thoughts and findings, and letting the doing to someone else, some day in the future. At my age, this seemed like a logical approach.

But now, with the ongoing tragedy, seemingly without solution, and the president's weak jawboning, my gut tells me it is time to get moving. It is time to start preparing for collapse and how to not merely survive but live.

Lately many of you have provided really thoughtful and useful comments. I have received about three or four e-mails for every comment, from other readers. While a few of those are, hmm, how shall I put it - "critical" if not mildly hostile, the rest have the same level of quality as the comments that have been showing up on the blog. So I am wondering what some of you might think about the situation and whether you think it is time to take action. If so, what kind of action?

What I am considering is to find a way to set up a University of Noesis with the core curriculum based on permaculture. This would require finding the right land area and constructing a set of buildings that would provide laboratory, classroom and living quarters. The barn would be a laboratory! I've thought about the school as a resident co-operative. Essentially part of someone's tuition and living expenses would be offset by the work they provide as they learn how to provide food, clothing, shelter and other necessities of life. There would also be academic subjects and the arts in order to have a holistic living experience. Or, at least, that is the outline of the seed of an idea. I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Whatever the action that I decide to undertake, just thinking and writing about possibilities won't be sufficient given that the camel's back is about to be broken. As always, I hope the oil gusher gets stopped soon and that my intuition is wrong.

What Economists Believe

Left-Leaning Economists Say Spend-Baby-Spend

I think Robert Reich is one of the smartest and most articulate economists out there. He was the Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton's administration. As smart as he is, his advice to the president would be to increase the national debt to spur economic growth. He is in good company among the illuminati of economics. Paul Krugman has been calling for substantially more stimulus from the US government for quite a while now. Both of these brilliant men are hard-core Keynesians. John Maynard Keynes famously pointed out that government spending could be used as a policy instrument to spur economic growth. Republican president Richard Nixon adopted the notion that the US government would intervene in market conditions to keep the economy from tanking and ironically remarked, "We're all Keynesians now."

Today, on top of this, Ben Bernanke, head of the Fed, called for NO decline in government spending. That will keep the economy on track to recovery.

Well, if the government had the money to spend then that approach seemed to work. Even when the country had to go into temporary debt to pay the bill that was OK. That was then; this is now. The problem with Reich's and Krugman's calls for more stimulus now is that the only way the US can spend money on stimulus is to go much deeper in debt. And as I have pointed out on several occasions there is a real problem with any debt in these days. Paying off debt tomorrow (the plan) depends entirely on growth of the real economy (making stuff) and that depends on increased energy flows in the future to do that work. And this is where we run into the serious problem; energy flow is going to decline in the future. See: The Future of Capitalism, Profits, and Growth.

And what kind of economy are these left-leaning economists trying to stimulate back into growth? They want to create jobs so that consumers will have cash to go out and spend again. What will they spend on? It doesn't matter as long as they spend. The gross domestic product (GDP) is the benchmark measure of the health of the economy. As long as the GDP is growing month over month then all is well. And we have lived in a consumer-driven economy (> 70%!), which is the only kind of economy we could revive. So, what these economists want to have happen is the government take on more debt to give businesses monetary incentives to hire people so that those people will have incomes so they can go out and buy stuff and mostly services so that other people will have jobs and have income so they can buy stuff and... That is the formula for success.

Like all neoclassical economists these folks believe in the closed loop version of macroeconomics. Money begets money and as long as the money supply has a good velocity (indeed acceleration) without triggering inflation, then life is good. And that is all there is to the model.

They still haven't realized the vital role of energy in being the true currency of economic activity. They still don't realize that the decline of net energy that is underway even now is going to make it impossible to do MORE work in the future so as to pay back the debt we take on today. I don't really understand why they don't. They are smart enough. They have access to all the same data. But apparently they are true believers and only pay attention to the data and models they already believe in.

Once again I point out that cleverness (intelligence + creativity), which is the characteristic we so often admire and praise, is simply insufficient to understand the reality that rules the world. It is physical reality that we should be paying attention to. And we should drop ideological beliefs in favor of scientific knowledge about that reality (even if it is provisional it is better than simple beliefs). So what keeps brilliant men and women like these economists from grasping the bigger and more comprehensive picture of biophysical economics? It is lack of sapience, or at least adequate sapience to handle the complex problems they would hope to solve. And if they are our best, what does this say for the average?

I fully recognize that there are many people out there suffering. They have not had income for a long time in this economic situation. Believe me when I say that my heart goes out to them (have friends and family in this situation). I take no pleasure in the pains of others. I'm sure you don't either. But we have to face a very painful reality. Going into further debt today will only make matters far worse in the not-too-distant future if our plan is to revive a consumer-based economy. We're I in Obama's shoes I would be pushing not for a jobs bill but an education bill that (if we are to go further in debt) would be an investment in something that would actually help people. Namely I would fund all the unemployed going to permaculture school! That's right. The best thing that you can teach people now is how to raise their own food. For those who are underwater in their mortgages, I would push for a bank jubilee, forgiving all mortgage debt where people cannot pay. That would clearly hurt banks, so probably get me assassinated(!) but we have to understand that these debts will never be paid under any set of circumstances, so why not let the unemployed keep their homes and learn to take care of themselves. Why favor bankers over citizens?

Well political reality will, of course, prevent anything like a rational approach to minimizing pain. Ironically, the bankers will ultimately suffer even more even if they get a short-term break from our current political leaders. I guess we can take comfort in that. It is very simple. Debt cannot be repaid unless more work is accomplished in the future than is done when the debt is created. And that cannot happen because we have passed peak oil and peak net energy. And our brilliant economists just don't get it.

The Situation Now

What It Looks Like From Here

It might be a good time to pause and take stock of humanity's situation. Or, at least, what it seems to me the situation is from my perspective. I must confess the current fiasco going on in the Gulf of Mexico (the oil leak from a former deep water well) may be influencing my dour view. But I prefer to think that it just underscores what I have been claiming all along. It just provides more evidence that humanity is in dire straits and headed for a major global catastrophic decline in numbers — a bottleneck. Put simply I think humans are no longer fit for survival as they are currently genetically constituted and given the selective stresses that are being generated by the very environment that they created with their cleverness they must adapt through evolutionary means.

Here is a quick review of the concerns I have voiced in this blog over the past several years, along with some evidence showing those concerns to be well founded.

Population and Carrying Capacity

Humans living the OECD nations are living large. And many humans living in developing nations live modestly by comparison yet nevertheless far above the natural carrying capacity of their land. The combination of too many people living too far above the capacity of the Earth to supply human needs and those of the rest of the Ecos has placed us, and the Earth, in a precarious, indeed untenable, situation.

I very much like the way William R. Catton Jr. framed the problem in Overshoot (University of Illinois Press, Urbana). All animals depend ultimately upon the real-time or current solar influx over land and sea that drives primary production, photosynthesis in plants that produces chemically stored energy — food. Prior to man's capabilities to control fire and develop tools, especially agriculture, this real-time influx defined the carrying capacity of the human environment (taking into account other necessary elements like water, etc.) For most of human history mankind has begun expanding the carrying capacity through technology. First wood combustion (solar energy stored from years gone by) then agriculture (expanding the land area devoted to human food production) and then fossil fuels. He called the natural and agricultural, real-time solar, land needed to support a stable population the real acreage. He noted that because humans can trade for things that are in deficit locally, that they were able to increase the general carrying capacity of the combined lands by redistributing otherwise limiting resources across a broader area. Then he introduced the notion of 'ghost acreage'. This is the acreage that it took a long time ago produce fossil fuels. Those acres are long 'dead' but we have been reaping the solar energy inputs to those acres now.

Thus, with our high energy technological style of living we are completely dependent on acres of land that no longer exist and can therefore no longer capture solar energy for us. Once we have used up the reasonably accessible fuels from those ghost acres, the party is over. Humans will have only the real acreage to fall back on. Unfortunately no combination of technological magic can make more sunlight fall on real acreage than we have now. There is no way to harvest solar energy in such a way as to support our current numbers living their current life styles (or aspiring to do so). Merely appropriating more acres, as has been proposed by some who see sunlight as 'free', is neither feasible economically (due to inherently low EROI values for these technologies) nor desirable ecologically.

Fossil Fuel Depletion

And the fact is that fossil fuels are running out, in a manner of speaking. Recent work on EROI of deep water drilling to recover oil shows numbers approaching as little as 2 to 3! And that was before the accident at Deepwater Horizon. Essentially all of the older fields with EROIs above 20 are in rapid depletion — their production rates are going down every year. New oil finds cannot even come close to keeping up with these decline rates and where oil is being found is in the really hard to get at places, like deep water (1 to 2 miles to ocean floor and deeper for the drilling).

The data support the notion that over the last half decade we have been in what is called a bumpy plateau phase of peak oil. Rather than having a distinct peak we are witnessing a noisy fluctuation due to the feedback effects of temporary oil shortages, rising prices, then demand destruction that brings those prices back down. When prices are low, production activity declines leading eventually to another shortage right after demand climbed back up (due to lower prices). This phenomenon is likely extending the period over which peak oil due to geophysical facts plays itself out. It also makes the signal difficult to perceive in that noise. But some are now saying that by the end of 2011 the signal to noise ratio should be good enough to detect a distinct downward trend. As of now there is a general consensus among people who have been studying the phenomenon for many years that 'the' peak probably came between 2005 and 2008. Among those so-called 'experts' who were previously denying peak oil, they now, for the most part, at least acknowledge that the end is near, even if still denying that we have passed it.

Peak oil is a signature event in that it also represents a prelude to the peaking of all fossil fuels. Coal extraction and transport relies on diesel fuel from oil. It would take a long time to convert the coal infrastructure to run on gasified coal. It could be done but the net effect would be to use up the coal that much faster since the gasification process uses up so much energy to make the gas (low EROI). Natural gas will fare better for a while longer. But the problems with conversion of all of the processes that ran on oil products will take time and lots of energy. And as a side note, we should recognize that there is still many doubts about how much actually recoverable gas is in the gas shale formations.

Finally, do not look for relief from non-conventional sources such as the Canadian tar sands or the Colorado oil shales. While it is true that these formations contain unbelievable quantities of hydrocarbons it is also true that the extraction processes have inherently (meaning due to physical realities) low EROIs. Though I'm sure we will mount a valiant effort to mine these hydrocarbons to vainly attempt to maintain our life styles, before long the low EROI will catch up in the form of economic chaos. Prices will ultimately mirror the poor return on investment and that will bring that effort to a halt.

In these matters you cannot pay attention to monetary measurements such as price or costs measured in dollars. There has been such a horrendous decoupling of energy value (emergy) and monetary value in the world economy that dollars just don't tell you anything useful any more. The only meaningful measure of economic vitality is EROI. Numbers below 20 (say the average of all sources of energy) signal an economy that might allow about one quarter of current activity. If the actual numbers (once we take into account larger boundary conditions in the analysis) are much lower than that it will be unlikely that we can sustain any kind of industrial economy at all. Perhaps we can maintain a Jeffersonian-style agrarian economy but most adults and older children will be providing the labor.

Weak Sapience in the Majority of People

The reason that humanity finds itself in this predicament has become immanently clear to me over the last ten years. As long-time readers know, I had long been baffled by a glaring inconsistency between our claim, as a species, of being so smart, yet seemingly unable to actually learn anything from our repeated mistakes regarding in how we manage social organization (governments, corporations, even neighborhoods). In spite of two world wars that should have given us pause with regard to our tendencies toward militarism we still think the best solution to apparent problems is using a bigger stick. The election of George W. Bush to the presidency and his subsequent act of taking the US to war in Iraq stand out as the quintessential representations of man's utter foolishness in conducting his own affairs.

Meanwhile the strengthening adherence by many people to ideological principles even as the institutions based on those principles were falling apart right and left, left me completely befuddled and disgusted. Blind faith in so-called 'free' markets to solve all problems (by the more libertarian crowd) is an example of the human propensity to ignore evidence and just charge ahead in the belief that more freedom in markets was the solution. No number of Enrons or burst financial bubbles can dissuade blind faith. And then, when it came to the public's recognition of phenomena like global warming I realized that too many people were not operating on all cylinders.

When I finally got into academia, after years in the private sector, I got an even bigger let down. Here I was feeling privileged to work among the smartest people on the planet. Yet what I saw in terms of decision making and judgment was alarming. PhD's, it turns out, are incredibly smart and exercise great critical thinking as long as they are restricted to their domain of expertise — their so-called silos. But outside of that domain, their judgment abilities appear no better than the rest of humanity. This comes from observations of colleagues in academic administration, committee meetings, and issues surrounding their non-academic lives.

All of these observations prompted me to expand my studies of brain functions and psychology. I had already been engaged in efforts to emulate natural intelligence and learning capabilities for robots by simulating the properties of neurons in a computer. This required a far more detailed knowledge of neurons and their linkages than had been typical in so-called artificial neural networks. And I had a basic biology education (undergraduate degree in zoology). So I commenced on an exploration of why humans could be so intelligent (we put a man on the moon, didn't we?) and creative (the combination of which I like to call cleverness) and yet seem so lacking in wisdom when it came to the big questions of social organization.

You can read my research working papers and consequent reflections on what I learned. The short answer is that humans represent an emerging phenomenon in evolution that is not, by any means, sufficiently developed. Namely, humans possess a modicum of brain function that I have come to call Sapience. This is a complex set of functions that collectively give rise to intuitively-based judgment competence. Put simply it is what gives rise to wisdom in mature individuals. Unfortunately there appears to be a hitch. Given that the capability was newly emergent in our species it is only evolved to a level of fitness appropriate to our late Pleistocene origins. This capacity, along with expanded intelligence and creativity was the basis for our development of language, tool making, and culture. These took on an evolution of their own and at some point created a life style that actually de-selected for any more wisdom, putting all emphasis on cleverness (along with a higher level of aggressiveness to adopt a sedentary, territorial food production system called agriculture!) Humanity has been 'stunted' with regard to further evolution of sapience because our social orders do not require it.

We now face a conundrum. While our numbers were small and our impact on the environment little, the whole cleverness-dominating thing worked out pretty well. We were, by evolutionary standards, extraordinarily fit. And we prospered. But all good things come to an end. As smart as we were as a species, we were not wise enough to take lessons from the rest of nature regarding limiting our own growth. We did not learn how to settle into a stable population having a wonderful life support system in our technologies, but not overstepping our boundaries. Indeed there have been many 'seers' (such as Catton, mentioned above) who have understood what the problem was and tried to bring our attention to it many times. This is, perhaps, the greatest piece of evidence for the lack of wisdom for the species as a whole. These people, who represented the right tail end of a probability distribution for sapience, were completely ignored and even mocked by the merely clever but, as it turns out, wrong majority. The vast numbers of humans have been unable to grasp the situation because they were so enamored with their own cleverness as well as their wealth that they simply could not understand the nature of the situation. They have been exceedingly foolish.

The end is looking more and more like a population bottleneck (see further arguments below). We have exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the Earth by five or six times over. We did this by foolishly believing that fossil fuels would last forever. Or we foolishly believed (rationally knowing that was impossible) that a new technology would give us access to limitless energies and we would simply transition to rely on those new sources before the fossil fuels (in the ghost acres) gave out. Even our experiments with nuclear energy (which still has a relatively low EROI) and the problems we found could not dissuade us from believing. That is a classic example of foolishness, the opposite of wisdom.

Now that we have essentially, if not actually, passed the peak of oil production, it could be too late to find that magic energy bullet. Even if we could find some fantastic breakthrough (say in nuclear fusion) there is not likely to be time to ramp up production before the fossil fuel energy infrastructure falls apart. Minimally sapient humans spent their energy bank account without investing in new energy production and now it is probably too late. We have too little energy capital to work with.

Strong Dependence of Every Individual On High Energy Civilization

The reason a population bottleneck appears inevitable is that most humans on the planet, even those in pockets of indigenous life styles, rely too heavily on the use of high powered fossil fuels and the industrial economies of the world for sustenance. Specifically, food production has become almost fully dependent on fossil fuel inputs in the forms of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and fuels for tractors, combines, and transportation, plus energies put into food processing. There has been a world-wide concerted effort to increase food per farmer productivity by substituting machine work for human labor where possible. Even in developing nations that have arable land loans are advanced so that they can automate more and more of their food production under the theory that that is the path to wealth generation. Moreover, people all over the world aspire to lifestyles, such as the American version, that can only be produced by high energy flows. Even now, peoples from every part of the developing world are anticipating owning their own automobiles, for example, as a sign of increasing prosperity. The currently buy, whenever possible, goods and clothing styles that come from mechanized manufacturing. Even if their dependence on fossil fuels looks minimal by American standards, it is only because what does come to them is via a less obvious route. And, perhaps more importantly, they have developed a psychological dependence on modernity arriving, and that may make them just as vulnerable to the loss of the dream. It could result in social upheavals as much as the actual reduction in support from the developed world as resources deplete everywhere.

How will OECD citizens react to the situation as food production falls off due to diminishing availability of oil? No country today is self-sufficient in any meaningful way. The American miracle of abundant food production depends entirely on oil and natural gas. Without extensive pest control and fertilization American food production (indeed all OECD food production) would grind down to below the level at which even the American demand could not be met, let alone producing surpluses for other nations. Once the availability of fossil fuels declines our cornucopia will fail. Moreover, fossil fuels are needed to distribute whatever food is produced. When the flows of energy were growing due to expanding our oil exploration and extraction, when we could find ever more oil to pump, the relationship between the price of a tomato (for example) and the energy required to produce and deliver it to your table, was hidden from view. Dollars largely took on a life of their own and no one paid particular attention to the energetic costs involved. But now that energy flows are declining that relationship will be brought back into focus. As energy resources become scarce the role of the supply-demand and price mechanisms will again force us to grasp how foolish we have been. The cost of that tomato from Mexico, on the table of someone from Seattle, will be beyond what most people will be able to afford. The cost of energy will dominate all production.

Food will become expensive and scarce. Of course many people have already started attempts to grow their own, but the majority of people now live in urban or suburban settings where the available land (and water) is simply too little for effective self-sufficient food production for year-round sustenance. At best they will be able to augment their food shopping but never fully replace it. The far fewer numbers of people who have land may be able to come closer to self-sufficiency but unless they are saving seeds and practicing the best forms of permaculture their efforts might come to neigh.

As I think about this situation I have difficulty imagining the vast majority of people in urban areas being able (perhaps not even willing) to sustain themselves. People are going to die from starvation (or from winter cold or summer heat or thirst) in large numbers. That is the bottleneck event. There is no way to predict (at present anyway) how narrow this bottleneck will be. If, on top of mere starvation, you add diseases, conflicts, crimes, etc., the numbers succumbing may be greater still meaning that there will be fewer survivors and a narrow bottleneck. A lot depends on how the majority of humans react to what will be a completely new experience for humanity — the decline of energy flows available to sustain an industrial-style civilization on a global basis. And unlike in past collapses of civilizations due to temporary overreach, there can be no recovery from this decline. There is no other lands to which one might migrate. Since our economies are based on ghost acreage that will be gone forever there can be no eventual recovery. So, from an evolutionary standpoint, this is an entirely new set of selection conditions for humanity. What will be selected for and what against?

Inability of "Official" Leaders to Provide Wisdom

Back when Barrack Obama was inaugurated I still held out hope that things might change. The evidence available to me at that time did not preclude the possibility of a major shift in both our energy use and its production. He mentioned sacrifice in his address. Indeed, humans are going to have to sacrifice a great deal in terms of material (discretionary) wealth in the near future. It is hard to call the forced relinquishing of wealth a sacrifice (which implies voluntary response). A wiser course of action for humanity would have been to voluntarily give up most of what passes now for wealth in an attempt to conserve energy flows and invest a lot of that energy into constructing alternative energy sources that would be self-sustaining for the long haul (see the series: Steps Toward An Energy Solution in this index). The relinquishing of over consumption would prepare us to live with lower energy flows that would be inherent in alternative energy sources. We would simply never again have the power provided by fossil fuels when we converted to real-time solar energy (PV, thermal, wind, and hydro). We would have to reorganize our entire way of living, how we produced food, how we organized communities, etc. We would give up capitalism, profit motive, global markets, and so many of our current BIG institutions in favor of long-term survivability. That would be the sacrifice. And we would adapt.

But it didn't take long for me to realize that even this president was not wise enough to understand what needed to be done. As soon as he appointed his financial advisory team I knew cleverness was still in the driver seat. Wisdom was lost. The financial meltdown that started under the Bush administration needed an entirely new kind of response since it was actually caused (at a deeper level) by the beginning of decline in the flow of net energy to the economy. All of the financial bubbles were predicated on attempts to create monetary wealth even while the production of real physical wealth was in decline. Financial instruments no longer were based on the real wealth, as productive capital, but on speculation that one day real wealth would be in the ascendancy again and we would be able to service all debt and cash in on the bets. But, of course, because the problem was due to declining energy flow that future would never arrive. The steady increase in fuel costs over the prior decade followed by the severe spike in oil prices (and oil product prices) acted like a pin prick in bursting the sub-prime mortgage bubble. What followed was the domino effect on all financial institutions that had overextended their liabilities on their beliefs in something that could not ever happen — that happy days would come again when more energy was available (of course most people don't think in terms of energy, but they do understand that real work has to be done in order to produce real wealth; this was the model for the housing industry after all).

The president's response to the financial crises was exactly the wrong thing to do. Sacrifice and leading the world (by leading the country) toward a low-energy form of economics would have been the wise thing to do. I realize that is easy to say. And, in fact, I should acknowledge that such a course of action might have been completely impossible given the lack of general wisdom in the population. Perhaps not even the wisest philosopher king could have managed to get people to voluntarily give up their consumption and high living (or their aspirations for doing so). I have said that leadership requires followership and if the would-be followers are too foolish to see the wisdom of their leader, then all is lost.

But then one has to consider the moral obligation of the elected leader. If he truly understood that the world would be forever changed and that attempting business as usual recovery was a vain and wasteful endeavor, then didn't he have a moral duty to at least try to point this out, to at least try some course of action geared toward the right thing? Clearly not an easy moral dilemma. But I wonder if the president even recognizes the rock and hard place situation he is in. He certainly couldn't have guessed it when he decided to run for president. What fool would want the job under these circumstances?

Which leaves us where? If not even the President of the United States of America, even if he were wise enough, has the power to lead the country and the world in doing the right things that will minimize the pain and suffering in the coming bottleneck, then who might? I have no idea. But one scenario that comes to mind is that as the full force of the bottleneck descends on us, we will turn to anyone who appears to know how to save our butts. We will give up our individual rights to a strongman (in all likelihood a man unless Margaret Thatcher wants the job), a dictator, just as the Germans did with Hitler after the economic collapse post-World War I. In fact the pattern of rising dictators in times of crisis is an old one. But here is the catch. Such a dictatorship would rely on high energy flows that he could command in directions he thought best. That is, in order for a dictator to have any kind of success at all, he would need to commandeer energy for his purposes. But we will be living in a steadily declining energy world. Over time any such dictator would have less and less power (literally) to work his will. And that is as it should be.

'Official' leaders will never be able to provide wisdom and direction for the masses since, by definition, the masses can no longer exist. As energy flow falls below a certain minimum the only viable social response is local, generally isolated, communities of agrarians practicing high permaculture. So it is the unofficial leaders, the ones who will actually have followers wise enough to recognize the lead, who will provide the wisdom needed for the future world. Survivors will find themselves back in the social order of having tribal elders providing guidance and the practice of the only true democracy that has ever existed on this planet, that of the tribe.

The Way Forward

As soon as you accept the inevitability of the coming bottleneck you are then free to start thinking in whole new ways about the survival of humankind. Declining energy flow will trigger the bottleneck but climate change and general resource constraints will further shape it in terms of how wide and how long it will be. My conclusion (still open to revision when evidence is available) is that the hope for humanity is evolution. Humans must continue to evolve and my personal bias on the issue of what traits should be most useful leads me to hope for greater sapience. This is the path we were on when the genus first emerged and came to fruition in the species (possibly several species like neanderthals). But the fruit needs to ripen further. Sapience needs to catch up with cleverness and surpass it so that future humans will grasp the need for self-containment in the larger Ecos.

I think this is feasible if there is some kind of effort to assure that higher sapient individuals of today (the right tail of the sapience distribution curve) are among, and perhaps dominate in numbers, the survivors of the bottleneck. Thus my villages of 500. Organized, sited, and peopled before too much longer, these could be havens for sapience greater than exists in the general population today.

The new situation for humanity, the decline of energy flow, may put new selection pressures on human evolution. I would hope that such pressures would be selective for greater sapience. It was the continually growing availability of energy to our forebears and to us that in large measure selected for cleverness that succeeded in exploiting the potentials. Now if that is reversed, is it possible that the evolution of sapience would compensate for declining energy by keeping mankind cognizant of the need to live within boundaries? That is my surmise and hope.