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?
Your Human 2.0 I like to call Homo Sapiens Erectus (i.e. hominid who walks his brains upright). Your fine blog being yet another convincing hint, he's here already! The problem of the late (post bronze age dumbification) Homo S Spaiens is not lack of capability but of will to loose the straightjacket of egomania. Main use of his brains is to avoid sapience, for he thinks it hurts.
Main problem with my theory is, a just mentally evolved hominid might any time fall back to the destructiveness of late Homo S Sapiens. But then, methinks, the centuries or millenia ahead during which Homo Sapiens Erectus will have to work hard to heal the Gaia system from the damage done by S Sapiens infection might strengthen the learned lesson hard enough, so a new Sumer, Roman Empire or GWB will have a difficult time to arise again.
Posted by: Florifulgurator | May 15, 2008 at 04:44 AM