What is the Solution to All Problems?

Evolution

This is not a facetious question. Nor a vacuous answer.

I am quite serious when I say that I believe universal evolution is now and has always been the way the Universe solves problems. Let me lay out my arguments.

To begin I suppose I should say what characterizes the nature of a problem. There is what might be called a human-centric perspective and then what I would call the Universe's perspective. In the end, I will argue, they are actually one in the same. But let me start with the familiar perspective of what constitutes a problem for humans.

A problem can be said to exist when a human wants something in particular and there does not appear to be an immediate means for obtaining that something. If you are hungry and want to eat but there is no food around then you have a problem. If you want to travel a long distance to get from where you are, at point A, to get to where you want to be, at point B, and you have no conveyance available, then you have a problem. If you want a computer program that will provide you with information but the program doesn't exist, then you have a problem. In all cases we recognize that human wants and needs motivate the existence of problems. Human intentions to fulfill those wants and needs by “solving” the problem, and then applying our human intelligence to doing so, is what makes us the unique animals that we are. To be sure, other animals do run into problems and work out solutions of sorts. What makes humans unique is the much greater scope and variety of situations that constitute problems to be solved. And, our amazing capacity to invent and devise artifacts that help in producing solutions to problems does set us apart qualitatively as well as quantitatively from our animal predecessors and relatives.

A human-centric problem seems to arise from our human desires and intentions coming into seeming conflict with our environmental situation. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, for example, early humans wanted to eat while at the same time becoming very proficient at killing off the game in central Africa (with a nudge from changing climate to boot). What to do? Go looking for new game in distant areas (this happened not once but several times to different species in the human lineage). But there were physical barriers to overcome. Climate variations from the African homeland made it necessary to invent and wear clothing and tame fire. Problem solved. New game was found in Europe and Asia.

On the surface it might seem like human will and intelligence were put to the task of solving a problem (or many) and found the solution. But is this really the story, or the end of the story? The archeological evidence argues that humans didn't so much invent solutions as they discovered them. Various stone “technologies” evolved over long periods. They showed signs of remaining stable in form for long stretches and then when conditions changed, undergoing modifications followed by rapid spreading of the “improved” versions. The pattern of change over time in stone tools resembles the pattern of change in species of various genera over time, as demonstrated in the fossil record.

What about more modern kinds of problems? Take heavier-than-air flight as an example. Humans had been looking at and admiring the flight of birds and insects for who knows how long. Humans were driven by several synergistic desires. One was to gain a vantage point of the world from on high. It really is very clever of humans to imagine what it must be like to look down on their world from above — to see the world as the gods must have. It was also clear that birds could get from one place to another much faster because they need not deal with obstructions found on the surface of the Earth. Travel would obviously be much faster if one could fly. Our exploratory nature, our inquisitiveness, our desire to do something better and faster all combined to cause many men, over the centuries, to explore possible ways to achieve flight. Many took the obvious approach and attempted to emulate bird flight (see: Ornithopter). From centuries of crude to refined experiments humans discovered the principles of airfoils slowly and often painfully. The Wright brothers did not invent airfoils out of their own minds. The knowledge and experience they needed was already there. What they did was to put several pieces together in just the right formula. Others were doing similar work elsewhere and might have easily beat the Wrights to the punch.

What humans do, in solving problems, is to discover how to put things together such that the composite comes closer and closer to achieving a desired end. Invention is more a process of trial and error than most people realize. But what about the desires themselves? Surely that is a unique quality of the human mind. Human desires and the impediments to achieving them are the source of problems so why shouldn't we see problem existence in a human-centric way? Well, as it happens, humans have those desires because evolution (biological) created a creature that has a tremendous ability to see how things can fit together to gain an advantage, like a lever (affordance). Long-time readers may have an idea of where I stand on the notion that evolution has a trajectory in the sense of always driving systems toward higher complexity and organization as long as usable energy is available. Human, are just the Universe's way of solving the problem of raising to the next level of organization!

Auto-Organization and Emergence

The term “self-organization” is used a lot in the evolution and complex systems literature. I actually don't like it much. The ‘self’ part connotes intention of the cognitive sort, which I feel ends up putting a somewhat mysterious aura around the whole idea. In fact the idea that aggregates of components in an unformed system (one that is yet to evolve) can interact in ways that end up having structure and form is not mysterious at all. I prefer the term “auto-organization”; the sentiment is the same. When components are first brought together into an essentially bounded volume, if they have interaction capacities and there is energy available to drive those interactions they will naturally combine into various structures that are then tested for stability by interactions with other forming structures. The ones having the greatest stability of formation win the competition and dominate the internal organization.

Once a population of stable structures arise they then interact with one another more to form yet higher level structures, the properties of which (behavior as well as form) could not have been predicted just from taking an inventory of all of these structures and their individual properties. This is what we call emergence. A new level of order emerges from a lower level. Quarks auto-organize to produce subatomic particles. These, in turn interact to form atoms and they interact to produce chemistry! Under the right conditions with the right chemicals present (and, as always the flow of usable energy) from chemistry emerges life - cells. And from cells emerge organisms of greater complexity.

Universal evolution is the on-going process of auto-organizing entities interacting both competitively and cooperatively as the collection explores design space (I got my inspiration for this from Dan Dennett's treatment in, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, but Dennett was basically summarizing the views of a number of evolutionists). Some combinations and interactions are favored by environmental conditions (like selection). And from the mix emerges new relations and possibilities. What we see in this process is not only the relationships between cooperation and competition, but between exploration and exploitation. Every system that is undergoing energy flow is pushed to explore new possibilities. The stable, favored relations will seek to exploit their functions but with energy constantly pumped in, some of that exploitation will be sacrificed just to see if there are some as-yet unrealized combinations that could do a better job. Systems undergoing energy flux (as well as material flux) will never remain the same. Genetic mutations are just one of many examples of energetic disruptions of something that has already proven it can work providing an opportunity to explore new regions of design space.

The Universe may have come into being in a mighty explosion (the Big Bang). At first it was comprised of almost pure energy that condensed into particle-like objects (like quarks) as the expanding stuff cooled. More complex particles auto-organized into atoms. Meanwhile the force of gravity pulled great masses of these particle (primarily hydrogen and some helium) into denser clouds and eventually into hot globs that would become stars. Gravity provided the means for forming bounded component aggregates. The fusion of some of these particles was just the auto-organization that took place in the hearts of stars and what emerged were heavier particles (atoms of heavier elements). Those, in turn, interacted in new ways as they were blown out into space. Chemistry was born. Supernovae produced really heavy atoms that would, again under the influence of gravity, clump to form planets and planetary-star systems. The laws of thermodynamics, especially the Second Law, would ensure that energy would flow from the concentrations in stars around and through the planetary systems providing abundance of chemically-usable energy in the form of light. Eventually, from this configuration of nature, life arose, more than likely quite often in the Universe, and still newer levels of organization and complexity emerged; new properties and new possibilities to explore design space. Biological (i.e., neo-Darwinian) evolution became the focus of activity from that point on. Life evolved to eventually produce brains, and eventually brains emerged that could construct internal models of increasingly larger parts of the Universe. And those brains produced artifacts to help continue the process of exploring design space while still exploiting the energies already found.

Brains as a New Evolutionary Medium

The human brain is almost unbelievable! Within a rather small volume of space and time, neurons form complex associations that do a pretty good job of representing other objects and relations and dynamics from the environments of those brains. Those brains are bound to the biological imperative, of course. They still need to make the containing organism eat and eliminate wastes and these are powerfully compelling influences that had to be hard coded into the neural structures at a very basic level. The brain has to hold off the more negative aspects of the Second Law — entropy. Biological evolution ensures that those basic drives are conserved in every brain no matter how big and flexible it might be.

But biological evolution discovered a really great way to organize neural tissue so as to gain a maximum amount of flexibility in terms of what can be encoded into the neural structures. This is the cerebral cortex (actually cortical structures in general have highly flexible encoding capabilities). And evolution's newest layer of cortex, the neocortex in mammals, is possibly infinitely flexible in terms of combinatorial representations. Now, when the cortex is then organized as in the human brain, with a representation competency like no other, along with a hierarchical control structure (executive functions, planning, and judgment in the prefrontal lobes, action selection in the posterior-frontal, association formation and sensory processing in the mid and posterior cortex) the brains of humans has achieved the ability to form models of the world as it finds it that allow it to project into the future as well as remember the past.

But it may come as a surprise to most people who are unfamiliar with how neurons work and encode engrams in their synaptic connections that the way the brain forms these models is by evolution! Neurons are, perhaps, the greatest example of nearly infinitely auto-organizing components we know of. The majority of the wiring in the neocortex is driven by exploration and experience-based selection of stable connections. Those connections, and the engrams encoded, endure because the sensory experience of the world outside the head provides the selection criteria that favor veridical representations and disfavors (usually) non-veridical ones.

And what do you know(?), those representations of objects and relations and dynamics in the world outside the head interact with one another in unpredicted (and unpredictable) ways because the neural nets are so flexible and reconfigurable with minimum energy. So it is that humans continue to explore design space but now in their own brains. We have imagination. That imagination is part of what makes us so good at affordance. It allows us to visualize solutions to perceived problems. In us the Universe has found itself with one of the most efficient ways to continue to explore design space without moving a lot of mass around, expending a lot of energy doing so. What an invention the human brain has been!

Unfortunately, every gain also has a cost. The human brain may be a penultimate design space explorer, a virtual design space explorer of sorts, but that advantage doesn't come free of charge. Indeed the very capacity to imagine future possibilities also includes the capacity to imagine impossible pasts, presents, and futures. Its what we get from being so mentally flexible without some kind of constraint that regulates the way our imaginations produce fantasies. Or rather, without regulation on our conviction-holding system (our beliefs) that allows us to hold as true things which really couldn't be. The real problem here is that we have a tendency to act on our beliefs. We make decisions largely driven by our beliefs and their underlying intuitions and judgments. And those decisions and actions have gotten us into a lot of trouble. As our discovery of greater technologies have proceeded we have gained greater physical power and we have used that power based on our erroneous beliefs. The needed regulation mechanism was starting to emerge in Homo sapiens but got outrun by our emerging command over powerful energy sources. It never caught up. Today most humans have great imaginations, affordance, and a set of firmly held beliefs that don't necessarily correspond with reality. That is the price we are paying for having been the Universe's way of efficiently trying new possibilities.

This brings us back to the whole notion of problems and solutions. We humans have been happily exploring design space without much regard for the consequences. We now have marvelous means of transportation that are simultaneously eating up our reserves of fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere and oceans with excess carbon dioxide. We'll run out of energy and right when we are going to need all we can get to adapt to radical climate change. Now that is what I call a difficult problem (some people prefer to call seemingly unsolvable problems predicaments)! There are others, related in many ways. And no one seems to know how to solve them.

And that brings me back to evolution. It always has been and always will be the solver of problems. The problem is really how to continue exploring design space, how to increase organization and complexity in manageable ways so as to allow the emergence of yet new things with new properties. Human brains along with their artifactual products, and especially that mind augmenter, the computer, have formed the ultimate level of organization on the face of the Earth. They did it by exploiting the stored high-powered energy resources in fossil fuels. And, unfortunately, they did not use that resource to invest in finding sustainable alternatives that can be constructed in time to make a difference. Nor did they use their superior intellects to regulate their own numbers or how physical wealth got distributed around. And so, as a little piece of the Universe that reflects the Universe and recursively reflects upon the Universe, we are in a real predicament. Perhaps this set of problems cannot be solved in the sense that our species, Homo sapiens will survive into the future. But there is really nothing new about that option. Evolution will find a way for some new level of order to emerge. There is still lots of potential energy flowing from our star, Sol. There is no reason to believe that life will be completely wiped off of the planet even if there is a major decline in biodiversity as a side effect of humans exploring design space.

As I have written here many times, my money is on the further biological evolution of that little imagination/belief regulator mechanism I mentioned above. All of my investigations, including some very recent developments in neuroscience, point to the idea that our brains are poised for the next step by what may turn out to be very minor adjustments in some of the prefrontal cortex circuits, especially in the fronto-polar patch known as Brodmann Area 10. Ordinarily I am not a betting man. But I will bet that human evolution is not finished. Neither biological evolution nor mental evolution are stoppable as long as energy flows. Our genus may take a bit of a setback in the collapse of technological civilization and an evolutionary bottleneck, but so what? This is just part of how evolution works from time to time (on a cosmic scale!) Sentience will recover on Earth, one way or another. You can take that to the bank!

Comments

[Bruce]

"New Entropy Law and Economic Process" (2007).

"Self-Organization and Sustainability: Energetics of Evolution
and Implications for Ecological Economics" (2000).

"Complimentarity of Ecological Goal Functions" (2000).

"Non-Linear Relationship Between Energy Intensity and Economic Growth" (2003).

"Community Entropy Debt".

"Entrepreneurial Model of Economic and Environmental Co-Evolution".

"Genes and Human Brain Evolution".

Michio Kaku: There are no more gross evolutionary pressures on the human race.

[Robin Datta]

Taking it to the bank could be less than a prudent choice.

[Kaiken]

We don't want to be equal, we want to be superior. We don't want a certain amount of pleasure, we want more. These characteristics will outlast the energy and resource gradients we have to exploit. The desires of a single leader or political group to dominate and acquire others resources can create instant misery for hundreds of millions of people, and will. We have worldwide food reserves that would last less than two months in case of collapse. We are not going to become “peace and love” people on the downslopes of these gradients. Evolution has given us enough rope to hang ourselves and the noose is around our necks. Instead of cooperating to scuttle the ship in shallow water, we will fight to be the last rat in the water as the ship's mast disappears beneath the waves.

[AlT]

George,

excellent post again

i feel like you are getting better at posting or maybe i have read enough to tune into your language :) or maybe both

either way you are right on the money in terms of continuos evolution of homo genus and a sub-group of homo sapiens emerging and "auto-organizing" into a system that eventualy will take over and subplant homo sapiens organization in an evolutionary way

regardless whether we understand it or not this process is under way

those of us who has discerned the nature and course of human evolution can _consciously_ examine their beliefs and re-arrange them as to _include_ activities that would promote this speciation

to me one of the most important first steps is identification of such individuals who understand this process of evolution and the need to consciously manipulate beliefs and belief-forming mechanisms on a societal level

once enough individuals identify each other they can work as a group and think up next steps but most importantly they can test and practice the new form of organizartion within their group!

those next steps will be aiming at not dieing in the population bottleneck event and eventually appropriating energy flows diverting them from mindless maltiplication of homo sapiens into supporting higher-order orginization of the new homo species

your blog serve important role of being a beacon towards which this individuals can orient their intellectual gaze and eventually we can find each other, form the group and start planning and implementing

[AlT]

bruce,

you never fail to post some links :)

but why you do it?

to say science exist but we are not using it?

what is your take on it?

Michio Kaku may be right or wrong depending how one interpretes his words but the nature and course of human evolution is "predetermined" by the system properties: it is out there for us to discover; and it will unravel regardless of our opinions about it

i have followed your comments and see you have fine brain holding a lot of data - you can usually back up your opinions very well

but why you do it in the first place?

what is your goal?

do you have any?

are you just entertaining yourself showing to others your erudition and reasoning abilities?

i am just curious :)

ps. of course all of us post to express our opinions - that's a given - i am talking about practical goals beyond making ourselves feeling good about ourselves and of course there is nothing wrong with having no practical goals and doing things for the sake of doing)

[Tom]

It seems to me that we never learned from our mistakes. Example, the Industrial Revolution was a big mistake. Rampant population growth was another one. We've continued to compound our mistakes over centuries to the point where it's going to take a giant collapse to even POSSIBLY allow for the human species to exist in some small numbers somewhere undamaged by the still peaking climate change we've caused (a result of the aforementioned Industrial Revolution). Hopefully they'll get it right next time, but i kind of doubt it - we're too stupid to survive by the evidence of history. Uncooperative chaste systems are always created, someone (or some group) always wants more (or to be the boss, or to live better than everyone else, or to be worshipped, or to just be different) - we just don't get it. Our desires are our undoing, we're far better at destroying than creating, and we can't agree on much of anything.

This was a great essay however and i enjoyed reading it - hoping you're correct and that it's way beyond us. Here's to the future - without us.

[Selfgovus]

"The problem is really how to continue exploring design space, how to increase organization and complexity in manageable ways so as to allow the emergence of yet new things with new properties. Human brains along with their artifactual products, and especially that mind augmenter, the computer, have formed the ultimate level of organization on the face of the Earth."

The things we create in this world are a reflection of us.

I'd like to point out that our artifacts are hugely influenced by our genes.

Think about the design of your keyboard, for example. The size of the keys, the color of the symbols and the layout of the buttons is all the way it is because of our DNA.

To me, our artifacts seem very biological. They're definitely as natural as we are since they too, now exist in nature.

Our brains have a body which has evolved certain abilities which help the brain survive.

The body is the "biological" artifact of the brain.

Humanity, The Planet, Gaia, The Internet is the Newest Evolutionary Medium

That is hard to digest but please hear me out.

There is something emerging from humanity's use of the internet. People are starting to have the same thoughts and feelings at the same time. This is leading them to take action at the same time. People are having epiphanies all at the same time.

This is so profound it is easy to overlook.

Evolution loves a good juxtaposition and is the child of paradox. Consider the co-evolution of predator and prey or the necessary balances between cooperation and competition.

The latest paradox I've seen...

Right now the planet is facing so many looming crises it gave me writers' block trying to figure out which ones to list here.

VS...

Right now there is a global awakening taking place. It has many names and billions of faces but make no mistake...

...the world is thinking

In order to form the civilized societies that we have, humans have had to modify and often fight our internal "hierarchical control structure."

Well the world has woken up and realized that it's been pooping in its own playpen. It is now fighting its own "hierarchical control structure" which it blames for the mess it is now sitting in.

Most, when asked, also blame themselves.

The internet gives the world the ability to "project into the future as well as remember the past."

The path that a tweet takes through a network is also so profoundly neuronal that it too is easy to overlook.

If you've ever wanted to guide evolution now is your chance!

Just by reading this blog and participating we are a part of the global brain.

I am the universe thanking all of you for the wisdom you bring to the world.

But what about resource depletion?

Some part of the world has already realized that we are in dire straits. That is pretty much all of the good news right there.

The world will need to take action quick and even that won't prevent a massive amount of death from starvation and violence.

[Sari]

This is one of your best posts I have read so far. It's very refreshing to have someone examine the really big scheme of things.

Related to what Selfgovus wrote: is it possible (biologically\evolutionary\physically) for a greater "mind" to emerge from something like the internet, that it greater than the sum of its parts?

Could the internet even survive peak oil? I don't know much about how the internet functions, but it seems that while the content itself is diffused, the infrastructure is centralized, and therefore less likely to survive. On the other hand, the global network of optical cables has already been laid down, and it doesn't seem like it would take too much energy to maintain. Perhaps after the decline in net energy we could still use it to transfer data (sort of like how medieval travellers kept on using paved Roman highways after the decline of the Roman empire). I don't know how servers would survive, though. Maybe the energy decline would serve to prune the internet of all the junk out there - as internet services become more expensive, people who only use it for base entertainment won't be able to afford it. However, it would still be in use by those who can make a profit from it, or those who value wisdom and view the knowledge on the internet as a good exchange for their money. So at least in the beginning, the internet will probably shrink in size but grow in quality (hopefully, with lots of thoughtful blogs like this one).

[Tony]

Hi George, energy -> change(dynamics) -> life -> evolution, what do you think about culture (nurture)? What is its role in coming evolution event?

[George Mobus]

Bruce,

Thanks for the links and increasing my already heavy workload! Though I will say I think Kaku is smoking something called selective reasoning. He seems to be focused on gross anatomical features rather than the subtleties of behavioral evolution. The latter depends much more on subtle changes in brain structures that can make a big difference in how people think and relate to their environments. Also, it seems to me he left out a tremendously important issue - climate change. I'd call that a pretty gross factor in both behavioral and anatomical feature selection! Too bad none of us will be around to check on our prognostications!

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Robin,

OK. You are right. I should have said take it to the mattress (or credit union)!

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Kaiken,

The "we" you refer to is Homo sapiens as currently constituted. There is yet a chance, and a reasonably good one in my estimation, for a newer, more fit species to evolve which has the potential to be much wiser, and hence have much greater control over the baser aspects you mention. I assert that the progenitors of such a species are already members of the extant population. What has to happen is that they differentially succeed in surviving the coming evolutionary bottleneck event and are significantly more adaptable in the future climate changes so as to out-breed any other remnants of mere sapiens.

Your indictment may apply to the majority of our species, but it is not universally true for all humans alive today. In my opinion.

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AIT,

Thanks for the supportive words.

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Tom,

You have to have "faith" in the distribution of traits in a population. We are not a uniform species. It may prove to be true that the most potentially fit (mentally speaking) individuals are greatly in the minority (as my theoretical model suggests) but they must exist. I have difficulty imagining a future climate model that is so radically different that it completely destroys all human life. Even a major extinction event is not a one hundred percent wipe out of all life, or biomass. It differentially affects species. And those that do survive usually rapidly exploit the niches opened up. A lot depends on climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases. And as of right now there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty regarding the upper limits on that. I certainly cannot rule out the extinction of our species, which also means the extinction of our genus and sentience on Earth, but I think it really would take a radical environmental shift to accomplish that end. All we can do, then, is hope for a better outcome.

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Selfgovus,

Thank you for giving voice to the hope. And for realistically (in my opinion) recognizing that there will be a cost incurred to reach a new level. I strongly suspect that most of what we now think of as the artifacts of civilization (co-evolved into existence as you rightly point out) will decay to dust once the necessary civilization support is gone. But, what can remain, if we put our minds and efforts to it, is the knowledge of how things work (e.g. network theory is now recognized as indispensable to systems science). The preservation of knowledge in the face of the collapse of modern society should be one of our primary objectives. That preservation must take into account the length of time that may pass before the knowledge can be useful again, and that it must be encoded in a way that allows it to be interpreted in the future no matter how languages have evolved. This is a wonderful intellectual and moral challenge. I think of it as the last will and testament of Homo sapiens!

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Sari,

My comment to Selfgovus, above, is applicable here, I think.

Basically I do believe the ultimate fate of human civilization, globally, is to collapse and decay beyond recognition. I think future generations will be faced with survival in an unfriendly (climate and resource limited) world. And that far fewer people will survive than would be needed to maintain even a small fraction of technologically advanced societies.

But, as I said above, that doesn't mean we should abandon the hard-won knowledge that has emerged from the advances of civilization over the past millennia, and especially the last several hundred years. Here I mean the key knowledge (not every little fact or application), which means the principles of how the world works.

Your vision of the evolution of the internet may very well describe an intermediate phase in the decline of civilization as we know it. But in the long run I suspect the net energy available will just be that needed to maintain local communities in the face of probably severe climate disruptions. Growing and storing food will become the main knowledge activity for humans for a while to come. But one day in the distant future we (or rather our successor species) will find ways to use what energy there is (e.g. biomass) to develop an adequate form of technology that can work as long as the populations are kept in check and in balance with solar influx.

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Tony,

As mentioned by Selfgovus, co-evolution has come to be largely ruled by our relationship with our culture. While the latter changes rapidly it has been the source of most of the evolutionary pressures that have acted selectively on humans, especially since the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry.

Currently, however, its role is in producing the big "negative" selection pressures that will rule evolutionary directions in the future. Specifically climate change and resource depletion due to our materialistic/consumeristic cultures are going to produce the kinds of forces that will shape future humans, especially with respect to behaviors (and mental abilities). Humans will need to be increasingly adaptive, even beyond our abilities to occupy every climate on the planet to date (which largely rely on resource and energy availabilities). Personally I do not think mere cleverness will suffice. Group cooperation vs. between-group or between-individuals competition will come to dominate, I think. That is why I put so much stock in the idea that truer sapience will be favored. This may be merely wishful thinking on my part, however I continue to review the assumptions I have drawn (question everything!) and have yet to find a compelling reason to believe otherwise. In the end it is only a probabilistic argument, not a certainty. But I think the probability is higher for such a scenario than, say, one of individualistic brutality, which is the more favored version among the cynics.

Shorter answer: our evolved culture is going to cause the forces that will choose future fitness.

George

[Lyn Holland]

i feel as though i have stumbled upon a website that i truly think should be known to everyone. i'm only 20 years old and when i pose these questions to others and get into deep discussion i feel like there is something lacking in the communication process. this blog will surely be my daily reading, it makes me feel as though all hope is not lost and there are still some intelligent people on the planet. i thank you for your site, your words, and your time.

[George Mobus]

Lyn,

Thank you for your kind words and sentiments. Please feel free to pose your questions and thoughts here or e-mail me directly. By your interest I suspect the future is yours.

George