Question Everything

Solution Scenarios - What counts as a solution?

Saving mankind from the looming global challenges: What is the solution?

The word solution implies that we obtain a desirable end state that is sustainable long into the future. Of course, what we each count as desirable may vary considerably from person to person. Remember my questions: what kind of world do we want? And, what kind of world can we have? The latter is based on feasible physical reality, not on wishes. The former question should be phrased more like: What kind of world do we want to have subject to the constraints of nature? This may seriously constrain the solution space we search in. We might not be able to get what we think we want simply because it is infeasible or even impossible.

Let's look at a few solution scenarios to get a sense of what we mean by a feasible solution space. The following are in order from "best" case to worst if our idea of a solution is that everything will look pretty much like it does now. They are also ordered in what might be a least likely to most likely (middle case) to least likely again. They can be grouped in the following way:

• Save everything just as it is (pretty much) — save our civilization and the population, business as usual (BAU)
• Save the species — make sure Homo sapiens doesn't go extinct
• Save the genus — make sure that sentient life on the planet gets another shot in the future.

Save the population and civilization - our way of life is non-negotiable

BAU-Extreme:

In this scenario we save the business as usual civilization we have now. Population will continue to rise to 9+ billion by mid century after which we believe the so-called demographic effect — raised standard of living causes reduction in birth rates — will stabilize the population size. Average per capita consumption increases as we believe developing nations start rising to the average US consumption rate. We can do this by discovering limitless energy and mineral resources and adopt global policies with respect to fair sharing of resources. Carbon dioxide, we believe, will be captured at the source of emissions and sequestered chemically or physically, but in addition we will have a technology that sucks CO₂ out of the air and sequesters it as well. Thus we will reverse the effects of greenhouse warming and maintain a stable climate. Maybe even the ice caps will come back to stay.

In this scenario we don't give an inch. We are the masters of nature and we will damn well get what we want.

BAU-Conservative:

Essentially the same as BAU-Extreme, except that we accept some physical realities and modify behaviors and expectations. Population growth is brought down so that the top number is under 7.5 billion by mid century. Per capita consumption in the developed world is held in check to allow people in developing countries to reach a minimum acceptable parity. We will have to live within our means insofar as natural stocks of energy and minerals permit, but will fund any development with subsidies from solar and other renewable energy sources. Recycling will be maximized to conserve raw materials. CO₂ emissions will also be controlled as in BAU-Extreme. More effort, however, will be put into conserving biodiversity and into sustainable practices in agriculture (e.g. permaculture). Re-localization will be emphasized so as to further reduce energy demands.

This is essentially the vision of many environmentalists. It is essentially the Plan B (e.g. espoused by Lester Brown). Civilization will go on pretty much as before but at a simpler, slower pace. The great hope is that these somewhat marginal changes in behavior will lead to a more socially centered civilization, a kind of small town feeling of the 1900's but still with modern high-tech conveniences (like fuel efficient personal transports).

This is the scenario that a good many people put in the most probable category.

Save the species even if you can't save modern civilization

Collapse and Regroup

In this scenario the rate of decline of natural stocks is more rapid than anticipated and the developed world simply collapses into primitive tribes/villages. This is an extreme form of re-localization (depicted in James Howard Kunstler's "World Made By Hand"). This is the Jared Diamond-like collapse scenario. All modern technology is lost and the only source of energy is wood and some remaining coal. Many, perhaps most, humans die from starvation (including dehydration), conflict, or epidemic disease. The survivors regroup and adapt to the new conditions. Life settles into a pace commensurate with the resources available. Climate change will play itself out and the world will settle into a new climate regime.

Salvation comes in the form of preparing for the collapse. Survivalists might have the right idea. But to save a larger proportion of the population, we will need to capture and disseminate knowledge of small farming practices with horses and plows. We will need to renew our interest in basic production techniques of cloth weaving, hand sewing, etc. Saving the greatest number of people means establishing centers of learning for those who believe this end is in sight. Perhaps one day, long in the future there will be a regrouping, a re-federation, as envisioned in David Brin's novel, "The Postman". A new form of low-energy civilization may emerge in a new world.

A growing number of people, particularly some scientists who, like me, look at rates of change as carrying more weight than just absolute values and conclude that this scenario is looking more probable as time passes. We look at the increasing rate of degradation in the environment compared to the rate of population growth and see extremely difficult challenges.

Collapse and fragment

It may not be possible to save very many, and those that do survive the collapse will revert to a primitive lifestyle and have no interest in regrouping. One version of this is the extreme form of "Olduvai Theory". The species, Homo sapiens survives but is potentially set on the path to devolution toward pre-sapient humans (e.g. Homo erectus-like). Not a very hopeful scenario.

Fewer see this as actually likely, but they want to consider contingency plans just in case. The few that do believe this is the most likely scenario are the radical survivalists. They are already heading for the hills.

Save the genus and seed a future civilization

This last category suggests that humans evolve into a new species better adapted to deal with the future. It deals in an affirmative, proactive way with a likely evolutionary bottleneck event - total collapse of civilization and the life support for even a moderate population size. Unlike the prior collapse this scenario suggests that humans prepare for survival in the inevitable collapse but with the intent that future generations of humans will be more sapient (wise) than the current species. They can resurrect the notion of civilization and even expansion by making wise choices in terms of population control, technology advances, and sustainable resource uses. To achieve this end, humans now must aggregate a sufficient, survivable accumulation of knowledge and access to adequate resources (e.g. solar energy conversion equipment and means to produce more). They must also understand their own evolution and shortcomings. They must grasp the nature of sapience and its distribution in the population, making preparations to help save those individuals on the high end of the sapience distribution curve.

At first glance this not only seems unlikely from most peoples' perspective — the end of humanity? — but is the least palpable from the standpoint of what it entails. Preparing for the end of our species is like preparing to die for an individual. It isn't easy to contemplate for most people. Yet that is exactly what this scenario suggests. If we are to preserve the human germ line it will need to be through a more adapted species of Homo. It implies conscious activities to pre-select the attributes we want to carry into the future. It raises deep and difficult moral and ethical conundrums.

Each person must consider where they are personally on this spectrum of "solutions". Each of us will choose actions over the next decade that will reflect our beliefs about what is likely to happen. I suspect many will subscribe to the BAU-Extreme solution, which effectively says don't do anything different. There is no problem and humanity is on the right course now. A lesser, but still significant number will choose BAU-Conservative because they firmly believe that progress means more of what we have now, but we just need to find better technology to fix the problems. In effect they won't have to do much. Maybe they will install solar panels on their roofs and think that takes care of it. Some will buy hybrid-drive automobiles and believe they have done their part. Still smaller numbers may find they believe in the collapse scenarios and set off to learn to farm or shoot a gun. But hardly anyone will seriously consider the last scenario. It will be exceedingly hard for any human being to believe our species will go extinct, and especially within the next hundred years or so. It is almost unthinkable. Or is it?

Does it feel like we're waiting for the hammer to fall?

You don't waste no time at all
Don't hear the bell but you answer the call
It comes to you as to us all
We're just waiting
For the hammer to fall

Hammer to fall, Queen

Imagine what could happen if...

The peak of oil production occurred in 2007. Oil production started to decline each year in 2008 by about 3% per year. Then in 2012 it accelerated to 8% per year. Meanwhile, in spite of concerted efforts to develop and deploy many different alternative energy production facilities, the scale of replacement of fossil fuels and the fact that oil is vital to transportation made it a daunting challenge that couldn't meet the demand. People turned to coal in spite of the CO₂ emissions problems with power generation. Coal to gas plants became increasingly expensive to build since much of the energy input to producing the materials and work needed to build them was based on oil. Furthermore the idea of CO₂ capture and sequestration did not work out as hoped. The energy needed to pump CO₂ into deep reservoirs proved too expensive. Thus the emissions of the greenhouse gas increased further aggrevating the global warming problem.

Oil- and coal-based power was needed for producing wind towers and solar cells. More importantly oil was the basis for building and operating oil drilling rigs and platforms. As oil became more scarce, the cost of building the infrastructure to get more oil became too expensive — people finally realized that energy is the basis of money after all. Diminishing energy meant diminishing currency value and costs inflated unbelievably.

Belief in the power of technology faded as people realized that just because something is technically possible doesn't mean it is economically feasible. The exotic elements, like cadmium and gallium, were used to make solar cells more efficient, true enough, but they were rare and grew rarer and more expensive as the energy needed to mine and process them got rarer too. People, grown so used to wowy-zowy technical advances, began to realize that belief in magic was equivalent to believing, without knowing, that technology would somehow come through with solutions. Neither would help. The scale of deployment was simply too great.

Natural gas too went through a peak in production, mainly because the oil that subsidized its infrastructure was similarly affected. Coal mining and delivery became increasingly expensive for exactly the same reason. The method of mountain removal depended heavily on oil inputs to the machinery that made it feasible. As net energy from oil diminished at an increasing rate everything became more expensive in dollar measures. Hence there was less of everything being accomplished.

Food production in modern agriculture depends on energy for three basic things: energy used to produce fertilizer (natural gas is a direct input, but mining potash is also dependent on oil) and insecticides, energy used to pump water, and energy to operate the farm and deliver produce to market. As these energy input costs rose, the volume of farm output declined at about the same rate as the energy declined. The cost of food skyrocketed.

The energy needed to maintain infrastructure became too costly. Necessary repairs let alone producing new facilities could not be afforded. But that was really nothing compared to the increasing impossibility of getting to one's job. Airlines were the first to succumb but all public transportation began to fall apart as fuel prices reached stratospheric levels.

Contraction began to squeeze civilization just at the time that massive climate events were beginning to take their toll. Droughts, storms, floods began to affect increasing numbers of people throughout the world. Desertification in China, India, and Africa dislocated millions of people. Starvation overtook millions more. No continent was unaffected.

And how did people generally react to the hammer falling?

If this scenario plays out: Will billions simply roll over and die for lack of food and water? I imagine many will. Will many rebel or invade other areas in an attempt to get the food and water they need to survive? I imagine very many will. Will civilization survive? Under this scenario, I imagine not, at least not in anything resembling what we are used to today.

Is this a realistic scenario? Unfortunately I think it is. Remembering that we live in a holistic system with multiple positive feedbacks it is not difficult to see a runaway process once energy starts to decline. The main unknown is how our species will react to the reality of contraction. Will, for example, the so-called rich be willing to give up their fortunes to subsidize (buy scarce oil) food for the poor? Bill Gates is giving away millions to conquer malaria and HIV in Africa. Would he be willing to give away billions to feed and transport people out of the worst climate change-affected areas? Would we use our military to do the job?

This scenario will sound implausible to many of you. And that is a lingering question about human nature as to why, given the evidence, we have trouble imagining the worst. Why?

How are we to take action if we don't understand what the consequences of not taking action would be?

Bear in mind that events of late suggest that the onslaught of global climate change impacts (melting of arctic ice and tundra) and peak oil (flat or negative production for the largest oil suppliers) coupled with the complete blindness of the candidates in the US presidential race (they're concerns seem so shallow and self-serving to me) suggests to me that the rate of the hammer falling is much greater than I thought, even a year ago. I must confess, I am in serious doubt about the long-term prospects of humanity in its current form.

I ask again, what is the strategic plan for Human 1.89? What should humanity be doing right now to assure there is a sentient tomorrow? Or are we even capable of thinking this way?

What will the world be like in twenty years (and beyond)?

This is the question I keep posing to my colleagues as we grapple with strategic planning for the university. I sometime get blank stares or statements about how no one has a crystal ball (implying it is a stupid question!) But a few colleagues do understand that we need to be attending to what the world might be like that far into the future. The reason is that higher education programmatic changes, not to mention deciding what buildings to build, take years to develop and then should be expected to operate for long time scales. Universities are not unlike giant oil tankers, which you have to start a turn long before the rudder starts to have an effect.

The problem for most people with such a question is that they think in terms of prediction, as in specifically what will be happening, what kinds of technology will exist, that sort of thing. But, of course, I don't mean prediction. For one thing prediction has a technical definition that says, in effect, something like: "Event X will occur with Y probability." Clearly anyone who tries to predict a future event, even if assigning a low probability value, is asking for a crow eating session.

That doesn't stop us from thinking about the future. As individuals and as organizations we are forever considering future possibilities. We anticipate what will happen in the future. This is a very different thing from prediction. Anticipation is oriented toward assessing possibilities of various scenarios based on our models of how the world (or our little corner of it anyway) works. We are literally running our mind models in fast forward mode to see what our understanding projects as possible outcomes. As often as not such anticipations can be based on what we want the future to be as much as what we think it might be. Anticipation of the future is our way of considering options out in time and then using judgment to guide the selection of behaviors we will employ to get the future we want.

This is really the same thing that organizations and governments do in deciding policies. They are seeking judgments on policy decisions that will produce a favorable future given anticipation of things that can happen, especially in the absence of a good policy. So sapient judgment and policy development are related at a deep level.

Anticipating the future really means considering several possible futures and constructing action plans for each such future. We can weight scenarios by something akin to a probability (called a likelihood) based on expectations for how the various scenarios are likely to play out. The future is full of uncertainties and ambiguities that defy computation as such. There is a lot we have to guess about. Intelligence alone will not suffice. Judgment is needed. But constructing a set of flexible plans prepares us to handle contingencies as they arise. The better our judgments the better and more flexible our plans. Then as the future unrolls we are ready to act according to the plan that best anticipated that realization.

In the next series of questions I want to explore anticipated scenarios for the future of the world. As alluded to in previous posts, there are looming challenges, possible catastrophes, that we need to prepare ourselves to meet. Where we can take action to get the kind of outcome we might desire, we should develop plans for doing so. Where it is not feasible for us to take any effective action, we should know not to waste time and effort trying to do something to no avail. What the future might look like may be very different from what we might have expected.

My approach to this is very different from that generally taken by others. Rather than take a single issue, e.g. climate change, and try to develop projections and possible mitigation actions, I will start with how these challenges interrelate with one another. I will take the systems approach in order to identify potential interactions that create non-linearities. It will be important to detect possible positive feedbacks that would defeat any attempts to mitigate on problem when another problem area will swamp those attempts. For example, efforts to mitigate CO₂ emissions to battle climate change will be hampered by the peak oil problem driving people to burn more coal to compensate.

What I will be striving for is a set of scenarios that anticipate what the world will be like in about twenty years. Each will have its own implications for how we should act now and what provisions will be needed to minimize disaster. Let's see where this goes.

What kind of tacit knowledge produces wisdom?

As audacious as that question might sound, I think there really is an answer, or at least a direction toward an answer. Actually there are three directions.

Before considering what these directions might be, we should ask another question, namely, what is tacit knowledge and how does it form?

Everyone knows what we mean by expertise. Experts make doing their job look easy. And if you were to ask an expert how s/he does her/his job they would actually have a great deal of difficulty answering you. This is very similar to the situation where someone asked you how you ride a bicycle. You would not be able to answer questions like: How do you balance yourself. You could offer tips, and make generalized observations: Well when I feel myself falling to one side I shift my center of gravity the other way! But in reality you do not actually know what you are doing and, when you do ride you never think about what you are doing. Yet, once, long ago, you learned how to ride. You actually did think about every move you made and you practiced until after a while your body just automatically did the right thing (most of the time). This is skill learning. We do it whenever we need to accomplish some physical task, play a sport, or other activities involving dexterity and motion control.

It turns out expertise is just like this. We generally think of expertise as a form of knowledge rather than a skill, but the two are closely related. We use our intelligence to focus on specific knowledge bits and decision processes needed to perform a knowledge-based task. We learn to read, we learn to write, we learn subjects in school (sometimes), and later we learn our jobs. We practice these learned capabilities until one day they are basically automatic. We don't need to think about what we are thinking. It just happens.

This is what we mean by tacit knowledge. Whatever we have become expert in doing/thinking is ineffable when we try to explain it to someone. We have lost contact with the HOW and only think about the WHY and WHAT. As with all expertise there are both levels of accomplishment and scope of problem domains in which expertise can be applied. Some people learn their expertise quickly and perform subsequently with great facility. Others are less competent. This, again, is a function of intelligence. Some people can learn a wider scope of expertise while others, indeed most people, are content with a more narrow range. This is also a function of intelligence along with a storage capacity.

There is one form of expertise that is not a common and that is expertise in matters of emotion and social life, what Dan Goleman calls 'Emotional Intelligence'. People require a high level of special attention to matters of social interactions and human affect, and be able to learn from their experiences. This is another kind of expertise. It can extend in scope to just the immediate family, friends, and associates, which is typical. Or it can extend in scope to a larger domain of inclusion — seeing many more strangers as part of one's own group vs. as 'others'. It can be limited by ideological influences or racial perceptions. Or it can extend to all of mankind and even to the whole biota, what is called biophilia. And a few individuals on this planet do achieve expertise in the area of affect over the whole of the planet.

So by tacit knowledge I mean all of that background knowledge that one gains over one's life that is stored in a form that is not directly accessible (though one can recall episodes that contributed to it), and, depending on their level of expertise, contributes through sapience processing to generate judgments. The greater the expertise, the better the judgment.

As it happens, there are some evolutionarily established 'guidelines' or templates for developing expertise in matters of life. These templates are essentially hardwired into our brains but they are extraordinarily malleable in terms of what specific knowledge gets chosen to represent the form.

Over several of the last months I have been touching on two main themes. One is systems science as a way to understand the world and tackle the finding solutions for many of our serious global challenges. The other is strategic thinking/management/planning as a necessary aspect of system governance. Clearly, as that last sentence indicates, these two themes are not independent of one another. But now I want to put these into this larger context of what kind of tacit knowledge goes into sapient thinking as the basis for wise decision making. But in addition to these two themes, there is another equally important template for human sapience and that is moral sentiment. Let me touch on this briefly first.

Moral sentiment

Much has been written of late about the evolution of moral sentiment or the moral mind (c.f. Mark Hauser's Moral Minds or Elliot Sober's & David Sloan Wilson's, Unto Others). The growing picture of human morality as developed by several lines of psychological (including economic psychology) research along with correlative evidence from brain research indicates that humans care about right and wrong behavior in others and themselves (c.f. "The Roots of Morality", Science 302:5877, 9 May, 2008, page 734). They care about caring for one another. Human altruism seems to be about as 'true', that is actually selfless, as it can be given the evolutionary history. But humans are still plagued by tribal urges as well. The US-THEM mentality is still prevalent in the human psyche. Nevertheless, it appears that humans earnestly and continually care what other humans think and feel (empathy). And this built-in moral sense drives much of what our learning system attends to in daily life. To the extent that a person can attend to the circumstances, context, emotions, and outcomes of social situations, and internalize those, that person can leverage and understanding of right and wrong behavior to a higher level of what is good for the group. And if that person has the capacity, in sapience, to extend the scope of that understanding to all of mankind and the world, then... But therein is our problem, no?

Still, built-in moral sentiments, not the dogmatic rules of, say, a religious belief system, are there to guide and condition our construction of tacit knowledge about social life. It is this natural tendency to organize our thoughts around moral poles (right/wrong, good/bad) that led to the development of explicit rules associated with religion (Thou shalt not...this and that); the latter being a consequence of, not a cause of moral sentiment.

Systems knowledge

I have made the argument that systems science is a fundamental framework for learning all other sciences and a guidance to understanding the way the world works. In future posts I plan to delve more deeply into what systems science is, but for now I will just point out that it is the formal version of systems thinking and systems knowledge. The latter two are what brains do automatically to a greater or lesser degree. That is, your brain already does an informal kind of systems science in the very way it works. Systems thinking is about seeing systemness in the world and being able to track the dynamics of interactions between systems. It is what the brain does when identifying objects, categorizing things and ideas, and building models of process. It is the basis for representing real things in abstract form (concepts) and manipulating the interrelationships between those represented forms to play 'what-if' games. It is what allows us to use metaphors and allegories to create maps between similarly patterned things in an attempt to understand the new in terms of the old and provide guidance to others who may follow.

Systems thinking guides our attention to how the world is constructed and how it works. We build systems in our minds as we learn. Systematization is why we categorize knowledge into disciplines and subjects. It is all a matter of understanding organization and dynamics, and hence, consequences (cause and effect) in the real world. And the models we construct allow us to anticipate the world of tomorrow.

Sapience is systems thinking to construct systems knowledge in order to think systemically! As I said, everyone does it. Only some do it much better than others. Some have achieved a kind of transcendence from the particulars of specific systems to see that systemness is inherent in all of nature. And using that transcendent level of understanding to be able to grasp nature as a system of systems. To be able to understand never before encountered systems by applying knowledge of systemness to the new. Wise people always seem to be able to grasp the essence of a problem even when it is something seemingly new to the ordinary mind. They can accomplish this feat because they think systemically with systemic knowledge. And this is part of the way in which sapience conditions and guides intelligent decision making.

Strategic knowledge

The other part of guidance of intelligence is from strategic thinking and strategic knowledge. Remember hierarchical control theory? Remember strategic level (planning) control in a hierarchical system? It now starts to come together. Strategic thinking is when you consider the world and what it will be like in the future, and you consider yourself, and what you will be like in the future (or at least what you want to be like). And then you plan for what you need to achieve to bring these scenarios into being. From strategic thinking the planning goes down the hierarchy to tactical (what resources do you need and how will you get them) and logistical (how should you spend your time and use your resources). Finally it gets down to day-to-day operations — the things you actually do in order to meet your strategically set goals.

Strategic thinking depends on strategic knowledge. Your planning (even if it is subconscious) depends on how well you understand the world (the system of systems) and how well you understand yourself (what are you good at, what should you avoid). That knowledge is systems knowledge that has strategic use.

Sapience is strategic in its operation. The more sapient a person is, the longer into the future s/he thinks. The more sapient a person is, the more people will be included in the strategic view.

So now, putting these three elements together we can start to understand what sapience is, operationally, and wisdom is as a form of knowledge in action. Moral (motivated for the good), systemic (seeing the connectedness of all the parts and the dynamics of the whole), and strategic (seeing the possibilities and consequences in pursuit of better life) knowledge/thinking is what supports the sapient individual. These three factors guide the acquisition of knowledge that becomes the expertise of the wise mind. A wise person doesn't need to be completely conscious of this knowledge or how s/he acquired it or even how s/he uses it. It is a natural process of the sapient brain.

Here is a simple diagram of the breakdown of sapience. As with the prior diagram where I showed sapience, intelligence, creativity, and affect as overlapping ovals, representing functional aspects, this diagram shows the three aspects of sapience in more detail, along with the storehouse of tacit knowledge. I've not shown flows out of sapience to intelligence, etc. in order to simplify the basic idea.

Now we can complete the picture of judgment. Judgment made from a strategic, holistic, and moral (including ethical) perspective is more likely to guide intelligent decision-making toward more comprehensive solutions to problems. Sometimes those judgments will not be recognized as wise by others who do not have that same perspective, a reason why wisdom is not often recognized or appreciated in this day and age. Most people have just enough sapience to deal with local, greedy-type problem solving, taking care of the immediate or short-term needs without recognizing the long-term consequences of their short-term solutions. You know, sort of like the modern version of capitalism! And the modern version of politics. The wise version of these institutions suggest long-term investment with modest profit put to development (not growth) or statesmanship and stewardship. But we don't see these practices today. Today's business and political leaders are largely seeking short-term, high gain solutions. But that is mostly because the majority of people also seek these solutions. No one is to blame, and everyone is to blame.

We have to find wisdom and wise solutions, I think, in order for humanity to have a successor species.

Why do smart, clever people sometimes do dumb things?

Back in January I asked a somewhat similar question: "If we're so smart, how come...?". There I introduced some of the notions about judgment and some of the psychological work that has been done on the subject. Robert Sternberg even edited a book on this very question (see the above link for a reference). Throughout the past few months I have raised the issue of poor judgment running rampant in education, leadership, and the general populace's inability leading to problems in the democratic political process. I want to re-raise this question and delve more deeply into what my own questioning has led me to suspect about judgment and wisdom.

Later in January I gave an introduction to the concept of sapience (What is sapience? in which I argued that judgment, one of the key functions of sapience, is the brain function that guides intelligent and creative decision processing from tacit knowledge — from learned experiences. Good judgments depend on two things: 1) the processing machinery inherent in the brain (the prefrontal cortex), and 2) the experience-based knowledge one has accumulated over one's lifetime. The better both of these factors, the better the judgment brought to bear on complex life and social decisions.

In "Should we be talking about an upgrade to Human 2.0?" I suggested that sapience, the brain's processing machinery for judgment, is still a fairly new, emergent, and therefore not strongly developed, capacity in Homo sapiens. Intelligence and creativity, on the other hand, are very highly developed in our species. The facility of language — the ability to manipulate symbolic representations — once it emerged in human evolution, accelerated the evolution of the human mind in terms of intelligence and creativity. And it was the basis for the emergence and start of expansion of sapience. But, if my conjecture is on the money, sapience became a retarded development, evolutionarily, because we simply got too clever, too fast, for our own good. I suspect that the invention of agriculture marked the beginning of decline in selective pressures in favor of greater sapience. Today the facility remains almost vestigial. Every human exercises some judgment capacity, of course. But nothing like what is needed to cope with the world we have created through our clever designs.

As for why smart people do dumb things: It should be clear that if intelligence and judgment are different cognitive processes, then it is entirely possible for people we judge to normally be very intelligent to do something we think is stupid from time to time. This is especially the case if my conjecture regarding the stunted quality of sapience is correct. Sternberg used examples of Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon as two people most others judged as very smart men, even if the judges didn't agree with their politics. Both men got caught in compromising acts that nearly undid one of them and did undo the other. The acts were foolish. Both men exercised exceedingly poor judgment, letting their affective selves influence their decisions. One from lust, the other paranoia.

But what is this thing called judgment? How does it work? How should it affect our lives if it were sufficiently developed?

In the "What is sapience?" posting I provided a diagram of the four main domains of mental life, sapience, intelligence, creativity, and affect. I showed them overlapping to emphasize that they all interact with each other, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes in competition. These are the main 'functions' of the brain. But they should not be confused with specific brain areas per se. The whole brain is engaged in supporting these four domains. This diagrammatic view is from the perspective of psychology, not neurology. That being said, it is true that various regions of the brain do have greater dedication of processing machinery to one or another of these domains. The limbic system, for example, is largely devoted to affect but also early sensory perception and routing motor outputs.

Below is another, more elaborate version of that diagram but with the ovals separated in order to expose some of the interconnections between domains. In this diagram arrows represent flows of information from one domain to another. Double headed arrows represent recurrent flows. Not all flows have been drawn in order to not clutter up the diagram. I want to focus on the overall inter-domain communications and how judgment plays in this view. [click on thumbnail to see image in another window]

Briefly, intelligence (as represented here) refers mostly to what the psychologists refer to as general intelligence. It includes things like learning efficiency, recall ability, working memory capacity, etc. This model does not (at this level) break down intelligence into more refined domains, e.g. multiple intelligences ala Howard Gardner. Intelligence is the engine that makes decisions. It accumulates perceptual information (what is going on in the world) and learned knowledge from past situations and results of past decisions and constructs a set of decision options for actions that will lead to new states of the world. Ideally the new world will be better for the decision maker.

From Antonio Damasio's work we know that a great deal of decision making is modulated by emotional inputs from the affective domain. It has to be so. The lower brain contains all of the accumulated wisdom of survival gained in the evolution of animals. The primitive parts of the brain, the parts of the limbic system inherited from reptiles, has proven their worth in influencing actions. In early mammals, the addition of more elaborate cerebral cortices and learned behavior did not change the fact that fast reactions to danger were beneficial to the species. Damasio went on to show that even more subtle affective influences, such as feelings and moods can have a substantial impact on the way decisions are made. The sheer complexity of life for higher mammals and humans makes it virtually impossible to consider all possible options when making even common decisions. Rather, the affective domain will tend to tag various options with a valence (positive or negative disposition toward) based on past emotional outcomes with similar situations. In other words, the affective system works to prune the decision tree, guiding the decision engine toward some options and away from others. Damasio argued this is what even makes it possible for humans to approximate rational decision making. Without emotional guidance we would be locked in analysis paralysis (as one of his patients demonstrated). Hence the arrow flowing from affect to intelligence represents this influence.

Most of the time we are not even aware that our decisions, the ones we make consciously, are so influenced by our emotions or feelings. So well integrated is the processing of our neural networks that it just happens without awareness. Occasionally, of course, we are aware. And that is the tip off that judgment is something different.

But before getting into the role of sapience and judgment, a few other quick comments about the diagram. The double headed arrow running between intelligence and creativity is labeled 'cleverness'. That is, the cooperative processing of concepts by intelligence (decision making) and creativity (trying new combinations or looking for analogies, metaphors and the like) I have called cleverness to emphasize that these two domains, in their extent in our species, truly differentiate us from other animals. I have, elsewhere, suggested that a better scientific name for our species would be Homo calidus, man the clever. Affect also influences creativity. Anyone who has had a passion to create something, a painting or an invention, knows this very well.

The box in the upper right represents the long-term memory. This is the accumulation of a lifetime of experience, the learned knowledge a person has. Knowledge comes in different forms. Some, like episodic or fact memory represents discrete events or ideas, such as names of things and people. This is the memory that you have to explicitly access when thinking. But much of our knowledge is not explicit. It is tacit in that there is no single event represented. Rather this is where we build general models of the world, other people, and ourselves. Some of this tacit knowledge is available in the form of intuitions and heuristics (rules of thumb). But a lot of it requires a special kind of accessing. Models can be run in a fast forward mode using various inputs to the 'variables' (concepts) in order to generate a possible future — a scenario of what might be in the future. Akin to daydreaming or rehearsal of future situations (what I will say to the boss to get a raise), this form of modeling is used to anticipate the results of various decisions. But, and this is the crucial thing to understand, just like we aren't aware of where our intuitions come from, we are not aware of this modeling process. It is subconscious.

And this is what sapience is doing! Using the tacit knowledge to run models of the possible future given decision options produced in the intelligence domain, sapience evaluates those scenarios and issues influence — judgment — over the decision process. Sapience, in other words, plays a very similar role to the influence on rational thinking that affect does but using learned, and therefore much more relevant, knowledge from one's experience. This is what you experience when you lose your temper but catch yourself as your higher executive functions evaluate the situation and override your anger (the simple version). Your sapience monitors and regulates aspects of the affective domain.

What counts is just how sapient one is in terms of how capable one is in developing models and then using them to generate scenarios. Finally, one needs to have competence in comparing these scenarios with desired outcomes. So in a sense, the 'size' of the sapience domain has a great deal to do with effective judgment.

But it is just a tad bit more complex than that. It turns out that judgment is recurrent. What this means is that sapience is needed to judge what will be learned in the first place! Sapience doesn't just guide intelligence in making real-time decisions. It also guides attention with respect to what will be the focus of learning. It takes some basic native sapience in order to make good decisions about what to learn in life. One who is sapience-challenged is more than likely going to ignore important social phenomena while developing and maturing. As an adult, this individual will be incapable of making wise choices in these social situations because they failed to learn the tacit knowledge needed to do so. Thus I argue that there is a fundamental, and genetically influenced, basis in the brain architecture that leads to different levels of sapience (just like intelligence) and ultimately its external expression in the form of wise choices.

Smart people, clever people, are those who we see solving problems, creating artifacts, and inventing things. But the problem domains or kinds of artifacts are highly circumscribed and local in nature. Even someone clever enough to run a multi-billion dollar international corporation is faced with a limited number of decisions in a way. It is, in fact when they are forced to enter a problem domain that they have no prior experience with that they start making very bad judgments. Sapience competency translates into a capacity to deal with scales of time and space as well as new domains of problems. Given the kinds of problems we have created from our very effective cleverness are global in scale, long-term in time, and involve problems never ever experienced by mankind the need for superior sapience and judgment is upon us. Yet, by definition, the average person will not be able to bring adequate judgment to the fore to even understand what they need to attend to, let alone know what decisions should be made. What we need now are very clever people with superior sapience and an adequate storehouse of tacit knowledge to tackle the threats to our planet.

Next up: What kind of tacit knowledge would best produce the kinds of models needed to deal with global issues?

Summarizing before going on

It might be helpful to connect some dots at this point. My central questions about how we (humanity) should proceed into the future revolve around a few critical points that I have covered in more or less helterskelter order. I've jumped around from subjects like what is wrong with the human mind that we keep making stupid mistakes (individually as well as collectively) to what might a completely evolved form of global governance look like based on clues from natural hierarchical control systems. 

I'd like to take a bit of time to draw these various threads together in order to show that there actually is some coherence to all of this. It turns out that my questioning of everything, especially the conventional wisdom, is propelled by an understanding of something I have come to believe is at the core of all knowledge, even that supposedly divinely revealed. This is a form of meta-knowledge that I have accumulated over a lifetime that has been at the base of my ability to change careers and disciplines multiple times in my life while enjoying a modicum of success in each [if you are interested you can take a look at my academic web site for a look at my CV, which includes my experience in the business world as well as academia, and research interests]. My ability to acquire domain expertise in each of these was not a function of superior intelligence, definitely (my wife and colleagues will attest to that!). Rather I have been able to use this meta-knowledge to quickly identify and understand the fundamentals of several fields because there are hidden universals that apply to all of human knowledge. I even found that skill learning can be facilitated to some degree by this meta-knowledge.

Back on December 11, 2007 I posted: "Is the Modern Version of Education Killing Us?" in which I suggested that there are serious problems in the way we go about teaching domain knowledge to children and even through college. In that post I introduced System Science as a subject that, if learned starting at an early age, would provide a unifying basis for all other subjects. It is that meta-knowledge that I mentioned above.

In my high school years I was tremendously attracted to biology and science in general. But in biology in particular we speak of organized structures, like cells, tissues, organs, individuals, and ecologies as systems. The pattern of organization, boundedness, and interactions with its environment seemed like universal organizing principles that applied to everything. As I took other sciences I could not help but visualize the knowledge in all of them in a systemic way. Biology had primed me for what I like to call systemness (not recognized as a valid word by Dictionary.com, but what do they know?) Once so primed I found myself naturally looking for systemness in many different places, in fact everywhere.

As my education continued (and here I don't necessarily mean my formal classroom education) I became intrigued by information theory and then by cybernetics. I've already mentioned some of what I learned while serving aboard a submarine during the Viet Nam era regarding rates of change. But I also learned a great deal about control theory - cybernetics from that experience. Indeed the term cybernetics was coined by Norbert Wiener from the Greek term kubernetes, meaning steersman. The steering of a boat is the paradigm example of control through feedback mechanisms. I mentioned cybernetics before in "How does Hierarchical Control Systems Theory help us?".

Sometime in my undergraduate years at the University of Washington, studying zoology, marine biology, chemistry, and even some economics(!) I came across the work of Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy and his General Systems Theory. This was the start of a love affair with knowledge and understanding. Unfortunately for Bertalanffy, at the time of his writing his wonderful insights, a lot about dynamic systems, particular non-linear systems, was not known or understood sufficiently to provide a more holistic vision of the power of systemness. Also, many researchers follow the dictum that if some theory explains everything then it explains nothing (a truism). But GST was not an attempt to explain everything. It was an attempt to find universals that would provide a unifying framework for exploring and finding the explanations.

Making a long (and terribly interesting!) life story short, suffice it to say that I have been able to be successful (judged by results and monetary rewards) in fields as diverse as software engineering (building biologically-inspired controls for solar energy systems) to managing a manufacturing and engineering consulting business (growing the company and making a profit in a tough competitive market) to being a professor of computer science who studies biological brains as systems. I am not an artist or musician, much to my great sorrow. But in most other fields of endeavor and study, such as evolutionary neuropsychology and ecological economics, that I have gotten interested in, I always find systemness and use system science principles to tease out the structure of the subject so that I can do something worthwhile (I hope) with it. I think I was extraordinarily lucky to have found these principles early in my life. They have served me very well.

What systems science provides one is a way to look at the world as an integrated whole and recognize that events in one sub-system will propagate outward affecting other sub-systems to a greater or lesser degree and that these effects (information flow) will reflect, in due time, back to the origin. The ancient Vedic notion of karma captures this phenomenon in some ways. With the addition of knowledge of non-linear systems added one can recognize that caution is warranted in assuming things about effects that may have hidden amplifications (positive feedback). Most of all, as you explore any new domain of knowledge, say the managerial accounting system, or brain functions, you have guidance by virtue of looking for the patterns that constitute systemness, things like boundaries (hard and fuzzy), information, energy, and mass fluxes through the boundaries (conceptual systems operate inside real brains in which there are real physical fluxes of atoms and energy as well as information), processes that do work to increase organization (evolution), and so on. Thus, as you see the world as an integrated whole you can also see the parts for their own selves (as sub-systems) and how they interact with others.

But this systems view of the world has brought me to a radical break with the common view of life and mankind's place in the universe. At first I saw the interactions between the human economic systems with the environment as problematic, and indeed they are. But that led me to wonder why humans are not good stewards (if indeed they were supposed to play that role at all). And taking the systems approach I focused on the nature of the human mind, its origins, and evolution to try to understand this species competence in making good judgments. What I believe I have found, of course, is the underdevelopment of the brain's processing capacity in the function I call sapience, the basis of developing wisdom.

Such a viewpoint might seem anti-human to many (probably most). It sounds like I have found a fundamental flaw that dooms humanity to extinction without hope. But, in fact, my personal feeling about this vision is one of even more transcendent hope. If you can say I have developed anything like faith (conviction) it would be that evolution will proceed and that while the species Homo sapiens will, indeed, go extinct, it will do so only after providing the basis for an incipient speciation to a more sapient species.

We have, in our foolishness, giving in to our biological basis for selfishness, and our hubris, disrupted the earth's systems and cycles. I believe that disruption was natural! As far as the earth is concerned it will not be the first time some major disrupting event has occurred. The old is dismantled, disrupted, to provide the basis for the new. Just as life itself is based on destruction and construction, the whole earth will find evolution in revolution. I'm not worried about Gaia.

But having said that, I don't think humanity will automatically give rise to a new form. I've given some clues to my thinking about this in commentaries and raising the whole idea of a Human 2.0, so I won't go any further with that idea here (later). But let me leave you with this thought. Assuming that our species will go extinct one day, do you want us to have successors who will be better than us?

What is the meaning of life?

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know 12-million miles-a-minute, and that's the fastest speed there is
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space 'cos there's bugger-all down here on Earth

The Galaxy Song
Eric Idle, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

OK, perhaps a better question is, does life have a purpose? Philosophically speaking, if it has a purpose, then we might yet find a meaning. As you may know, my only quibble with Mr. Idle would be that one hopes there is sapient (wise) life up in space. And then the rest of that sentence stands.

To a hardcore evolutionary biologist the answer to purpose is a resounding no. Purpose smacks of teleology, the idea that evolution has a preordained end point, guided by an omniscient being. Clearly this kind of purpose would put biology right in the realm of religion, a place no biologist wants to be. Biology has done quite well based on materialism (and energy, of course), thank you. And the mere hint that there might actually be an end purpose to evolution is, well, blasphemy!

I don't blame the biologists for holding this fear. We have seen so many instances throughout history of people misusing biology (or any science) for their own mischievous political or social purposes. Remember my screed on abductive reasoning being absconded for the use of rationalization. People can cherry pick from science to argue (and to the naive mind) prove anything they might wish. Social Darwinism is a standout example. Even the suggestion that evolution is somehow guided would most surely be confiscated by the religious right as proof of god or something like that. Clearly no biologist would want to endanger her career by committing the ultimate blasphemous act of suggesting life has a purpose, and hence evolution is guided.

So I want to think about the unthinkable. And since I do not earn a living as a working biologist I can speculate to my heart's content without fear of reprisal from my biologist colleagues. Of course I expect to have the brickbats hurled at me, nevertheless. But I have thick skin, so heave away.

Biology has a problem, like a drinking problem no one wants to acknowledge. The general claim about evolution is that it has no direction. Chance and necessity are all that are required to produce the diversity of life on this planet. Mutation and random variation in the genotype along with natural, sexual, and possibly group selections pare the crop to just those most fit to procreate the most. Darwinian (and so-called neo-Darwinian) evolution has served well to explain the big picture in so far as the main mechanisms for micro evolution and general speciation are concerned. Evolution in this sense is simply, in Dan Dennett's terms, an algorithm for producing new types. Stuart Kauffman likens the algorithm to a massive parallel, but undirected, search of the 'adjacent possible' states of nature. It is directionless in that types can revert if the conditions of their environment revert to favoring a previous type. In this view all variation is chance, or in other words, based on stochastic processes. But the problem is that there is an obvious fact of life on earth that this view fails to address. Over the history of evolution biological forms started out simple and have been generating increasingly complex forms ever since. It certainly seems like evolution has a direction!

By complex I mean the obvious fact that single celled organisms eventually gave rise to multi cellular forms. These eventually gave rise to multi-tissue forms, these to multi-system forms, etc. But more importantly, evolution has generated higher and higher forms of information processing — brains — over time. Brains have become hierarchical control systems (HCS and here) in order to better coordinate the entity with its environment and to regulate/coordinate the internal workings of ever more complex entity types. Certainly the lower complexity forms still exist in that they are well adapted to the environments they inhabit. Of course many more species have gone extinct than are alive today, but species are just like the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to biological form than meets the eye in species.

Evolution has had a direction in the sense that it has produced ever more intelligent (in the generic sense of information processing capacity) creatures, including Homo sapiens. Furthermore, if you rough out a time line for this emergent process you will see that it is essentially exponential. The last two million years (out of over two billion) has seen a veritable explosion in intelligence capacity.

Is it no wonder that Teilhard de Chardin, an evolutionist and a Jesuit priest, saw the hand of god playing in the sudden emergence of human intelligence? It can certainly look that way to one predisposed to believe it. But it isn't necessary to invoke the hand of god or any mystical yet causal factor to explain the evolutionary progress. The mechanics are easily handled by the Darwinian process, at least in terms of the transitions from simpler to complex. What is difficult to explain in Darwinian terms is the rate of change (if you've read some of my prior blogs you know that I am attuned to rate-of-change issues!). Simple mutation (and cross-over during meiosis) followed by selection suggests a more linear process. Indeed, Darwin argued for a slow, steady pace (later challenged by Stephen.J. Gould and Niles Eldredge) which would hardly have produced an exponential rate of change. Fortunately for biologists more recent discoveries in the genome chromatin chemistry, epigenetics, and co-evolutionary drives (e.g. the Baldwin effect) have provided new variation and inheritance mechanisms that provide a set of more accelerated means by which evolution can enter the intermediate time scale. It seems that evolution has, itself, evolved. One way to look at it is that as the environment got more complex, as Darwinian evolution created more species and econiches, animals (in particular) had to become more adept at processing information as an adaptive strategy to exploit these new opportunities. But Darwinian evolution could not keep up with itself. Fortunately, by Darwinian mechanics, new epigenetic mechanisms appeared that modified the regulation of gene expression, especially during early development, and that gave rise to whole new classes of opportunity for variation. These mechanisms do not involve mutations to the protein coding genes so much as external conditions that trigger turning on or off those genes involved in specific development. The main point is that evolution evolved a way to speed up future evolution! And in that happening, the explosion in intelligence was made possible.

Now back to purpose.

Why should intelligence increase? Why is there intelligence at all? The argument I offer is from what amounts to first principles. It is this: Intelligence helps to channel the flow of energy through the earth system to obtain maximum work. In a previous blog, What is useful work?, I explored the concept of energy flow as the driving agent in systems organizing themselves (look at the diagram). In that blog I claimed that useful work involved any transformation of the internal components of a system such that they stored usable energy better, over time. In other words, the system evolves to make use of energy flow. It increases in complexity as components rearrange themselves in new and more complex configurations. While that story was told from the perspective of an economy, the fact is that all systems evolve under the influence of energy flow. With the advent of higher levels of intelligence (here used mostly in terms of capacity to adapt behavior as needed) the system became the agent and its environment. Intelligence allows an agent to capture energy flow in things external to itself, but for its own use. In humans we see what seems like the culmination of this evolution. Humans have reached the epitome of constructing artifacts that use and store energy in external forms. Both beavers and humans construct dams that capture potential (gravitational) energy. Beavers do it to reorganize their immediate environment to their liking — creating ponds. Humans go the further step and extract mechanical and electrical energy from the water falling from the height created by the dam. The sun does all the work of evaporating water, which later falls as rain in the mountains and then returns to the seas under gravitational force. Humans heat homes and cook food, among many other forms of useful work, using that energy. That is what intelligence is for.

Unlike a teleological argument, this version of purpose and progress is a bottom-up argument. That is, I argue that the flow of energy through the earth system drives the evolution of life toward greater complexity. That complexity generates an opportunity for some sub-systems (some species) to exploit if they can process the increased information due to complexity (I will blog sometime about what information is and why this increase is a consequence of complexity) and thus are created the selection criteria for new, more intelligent creatures.

Of course, the potential for complexity was inherent in the starting material. Atoms have to be capable of forming molecules and some special kinds of molecules have to be capable of interacting to produce life. At the higher level of society, humans have to have the capacity to interact to produce families, tribe, villages, etc. This inherency might be argued to be a kind of teleological argument. In a very real sense, life and intelligence were inevitable from the start. And I adhere to this interpretation. But it is not an argument for a supernatural causal agent any more than is Darwinian natural selection. It is just observing what actually happens.

The meaning of life may simply be to offer a counter to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The entropy law says that as the sun burns its nuclear fuels and radiates energy to deep space the disorder in the universe is increased as the energy available diminishes. Life is an oasis of order in a vast sea of increasing entropy. Moreover, it is an oasis of increasing organization as time passes. Information and knowledge (subject of a future blog) have increased on earth, a system essentially closed to material inflow, but open to energy flow. Knowledge is that which increases the potential to capture more of the raw energy flow and make it available to do useful work. And what is useful work? That which results in greater knowledge! Circular? Yes and no. It is self-regenerating, self-reinforcing, a spiral rather than a simple circle. As long as there is raw energy not currently being used to increase the complexity of the system, the spiral will continue.

The historical search for a meaning in life, a purpose in our being, has been based on profound ignorance of how the world works. The ancients had to guess, and seeing no obvious signs relegated the mystery to the gods. We are still very ignorant, of course, but knowledgeable enough to work out the outline of how our existence fits into the unfolding of the universe. We don't need teleological arguments to position ourselves in the workings of the universe. We do need details. But the rough outline of human intelligence as the mechanism for embodying energy such that more energy is available to embody even more energy until the maximum of the raw energy is finally available is shimmering before us. The purpose of life, in this view, is to build and grow to the point at which a steady state flux is obtained. Then, I suspect, the purpose is to enjoy the result.

And where is Homo sapiens in this picture? Somewhere in the middle I suspect. As I have argued previously, humans have definitely not arrived at a point where we have adequate understanding of how to use knowledge for this purpose. We still do an awful lot of tearing down for no real good reason (sometimes there are good reasons but that is another story). We still waste incredible amounts of energy in our profligate consumption. And we have been incredibly foolish in emptying the bank of ancient raw energy in the form of fossil fuels. We haven't yet achieved the wisdom we need. We still don't have the knowledge of how to use knowledge for its purpose. But I do think that is coming.

How might we face economic contraction?

Suppose the peak oil predictions are even a little bit on target. The peak of oil production may have already been reached. We are most assuredly in some kind of world wide production plateau at very least. The issue is really even larger than oil, there will be a peak in all fossil fuel production in the not-too-distant future even while the aspirations of a growing population drive them to seek the same energy-intensive amenities enjoyed in the northern/western societies. But we can look at the peak in oil production as a harbinger of things to come. Oil is, after all, the most useful (say for transportation), dense energy sources ever discovered. Our entire economic infrastructure and most products produced within it, are directly tied to oil in one form or another. As production peaks, and then declines, the energy basis that drives our economy will diminish in quality and quantity, and therefore we will experience a contraction in real wealth production in the future.

Exacerbating this scenario will be the need to increasingly adapt to climate change. We are still trying to understand what climate change means in a warming world. Of late the variation in weather anomalies and extremes in temperature, storms, and the like, have given us reason to believe that much of our infrastructure will be put under tremendous stress as the climate system adjusts, or, conceivably, switches abruptly to a new dynamic attractor regime. Visions of having to relocate millions, possibly billions, of people from costal zones due to rising sea levels are starting to haunt even the most insistent deniers (though, of course they will deny it!) Imagine what it will take to move large portions of New York City, or what it would take to build dikes around it. If these scenarios play out, more and more energy will need to be diverted to accommodation of the climate and in a world of diminishing energy that means taking away even larger amounts of energy previously used for consumption.

It is now easy to picture the world situation in just a few years. Energy available to do useful work will begin to decline (many feel it is already in decline and we are just now begriming to realize it). As this happens we will see one of two possible scenarios play out depending on how we view the role and purpose of money. From my previous blogs on the alternative view of economics, based on the field called ecological economics, where money should be pegged to an energy standard, you might guess that I think there are serious consequences of not realizing this reality as we go forward.

The simple fact will be that as the amount of available energy per unit of time diminishes less real work can be done and the economy will contract. We will reverse our historical trend to grow in pseudo-measures such as the GDP and enter what is effectively a depression, by former definitions. How will we perceive this contraction? What will life be like in a permanent decline of real wealth (at least until we reach a level of population and energy input that can sustain a steady-state economy)?

As an aside, for those of you who still believe that the magic of technology will somehow rescue us from this notion of permanent decline, say by the discovery of some wonderful method of converting solar energy into electricity and fuel, try to remember the lessons learned from ethanol production. Sustainable energy sources will certainly be in the future of humanity, but the level of production of energy available to do useful work will never come close to what we have enjoyed with fossil fuels. I will try to get back to this subject in the future, but for now please try to recognize that the scale of the problem and the concentration difference between the energy in fossil fuels vs. what is available in real-time solar influx make it essentially physically impossible to replace fossil fuels with solar (PV, wind, hydro, etc. are all forms of solar energy). Even if fantastic breakthroughs in technology were to come about, the shear amount of time that it would take to deploy these technologies would mean they would not take effect for several decades. Then, on top of that, note that the manufacturing and bootstrapping of these technologies would most surely be leveraged on fossil fuels. These are just a few of the reasons that believing that technology will rescue us and keep our current lifestyle in play are simply delusional. Sorry.

Now consider scenario 1 — business as usual —, we do not tie money to available energy so that the amount of money in circulation, in all of its various forms (M1, M2,...), is independent of the work that can be accomplished and, by the standard definition of money, there will always be more actual paper and derivative monies than the available energy warrants. Under this scenario we get exactly what we have now, inflation. Since, according to my claim, the underlying value of money is energy, then each unit of money will have less and less value for representing useful work. Thus it will take more units of money to buy the same unit of work. That, by anyone's definition, is inflation.

Simultaneously, as things become more expensive, individuals will not be able to afford stuff they previously bought in the consumer-growth economy. As the aggregate spending of millions of former consumers diminishes, sales will go down. And the inflation affecting consumers will similarly be felt by businesses that are compelled to protect their bottom lines. We all know what happens when sales diminish and costs increase. People lose their jobs. But unlike previous business cycle downturns, this one is caused by reduction in energy for doing work. There is no recovery phase. Businesses close and no new jobs are ever created. Self-sufficiency will come in handy.

In the second scenario let's assume we find a way to peg money to energy. In this scenario as energy diminishes over time, so does the money supply (and there are no Mxs beyond M1). The costs and prices of the market are determined by the actual work accomplished so prices will tend to stay the same except that they may rise to reflect increasing scarcity while demand remains. In this scenario the economy is still impoverished because there is less work that can be done. The main difference is that prices more realistically reflect underlying value and hence individuals will be able to make much better decisions in how they use what cash they have. The markets will be providing much more meaningful information to buyers and sellers allowing them to make decisions on what to purchase and what to produce under the constraints of reality.

Of course in both scenarios people will have less because there is less to have. It takes energy to produce stuff and supply services and that energy will become increasingly costly in the real sense. Under scenario 1 everything price inflates, meaning no one will know what anything is worth. In scenario 2 only the price of energy will inflate precisely because it takes energy to get energy and as extraction becomes more difficult, takes more energy to accomplish, the net energy will reflect that increasing price. The monetary system will be giving good signals about the state of the economy.

Admittedly none of this is particularly promising. The decline in energy availability will hurt no matter which way we go. The main difference is that in scenario 2 we will be guided by true information rather than distorted signals. It would be much easier to make decisions about how best to spend what money you have than to guess what the price of something means. In the latter case we might find ourselves buying cheaper goods only to find that their long-term value is worthless.

But I suspect there is an even greater advantage to having an energy-based monetary system. Each of us will have to make decisions about how we apply our skills and knowledge, essentially what we will do for a living. Making such decisions now is a crap shoot. It is probably safe to say that most jobs in our modern 'service' economy do not actually create more useful energy or operate to make better use of what we have. Most people end up using energy without actually contributing to a net gain (or preventing a net loss) in future useful energy. But jobs like that will become more highly visible if money tells us about energy availability. Value would be placed on jobs that contribute to net energy. Historically discounted jobs like farming and teaching would, I suspect, gain greater caché with the unveiling of how this work actually makes us energy richer. Jobs in retailing consumer goods will almost surely disappear. With exposure to the energy flow economy and the value of increasing net energy (through either production or, more likely, conservation and efficiency) through certain kinds of work, people could have better information about what kinds of jobs would be most valued by society. In a contracting world I suspect the value of a game programmer will not get the support it has today.

I wish I had a more hopeful message to deliver. But the reality is that baring a virtual miracle we are heading into a contracting economy. Our capacity to adapt to conditions of such a contraction (only known in a few local economies historically, but now to be played out on a world-wide scale) depend heavily on an ability to see what is happening. We need accurate and truthful information in order to make rational decisions. Under the current regime of money = ?, how will this need be met? Under the scheme whereby money = energy, recognizing that all work can be better represented thus, we would have the information, even if it is distressing, that we would need to decide our actions. Which would you prefer?