The Trouble with Complex Adaptive Systems
Complexity in the natural world has always emerged via the process of evolution which is a massive, parallel search process that explores “design space” through trial and error and, because of the massiveness of the search mechanisms can afford to make many mistakes without the whole enterprise coming apart. As I wrote back in June, 2011, evolution has a trajectory in the sense that as long as free energy flows through the Earth system new more complex organizations will emerge and be positively selected. Reduce the free energy flow and the process will go into stasis or possibly a steady state equilibrium where no novel structures will emerge. Cut it back enough and evolution becomes devolution. We've never really experienced either of those situations on Earth thus far so this prediction comes from computer modeling of dynamical systems.
Evolution has produced a wealth of complex adaptive systems, e.g. plants and animals with huge numbers of component cells, tissues, functions, behaviors, you name it. Ecosystems are extraordinarily complex and are constantly subject to fluctuations in structures and organization. Biological units, like species or populations are adaptive over a sufficient time scale by virtue of many levels of adaptive mechanism. Over the longest time scales species are adaptive evolutionarily. On much shorter time scales, individuals may be physiologically adaptive to short-term and small amplitude changes in local conditions. But all such systems are able to change their chemistry, form, and behaviors to some extend in response to changes in their environments. Back to the evolutionary scale, such adaptations may prove useful in terms of fitness maintenance, but as often the environmental stresses caused by change acts as a negative selection force.
In general, all adaptive mechanisms operate on what seems like a simple principle. When the environment changes it demands some kind of new response from the system. As often as not this requires an increase in the complexity of the system to meet new demands (or also take advantage of new opportunities in an altered econiche). In other words, systems adapt to change by increasing their systemic complexity, sometimes, as in the case of speciation, becoming wholly new kinds of systems. This pattern works quite well in the biological world where evolutionary process is the final arbiter of what works and is kept for further testing.
But evolutionary process works slightly differently in the human-built world, the world of artifacts and institutions where humans actively direct the nature of responses to the problems generated by a changed environment. What we mistakenly take to be a completely “intentional” process of “invention” and “design” is still really just a massively parallel search through what might be called the “artifactual” design space (see my previous essay: What is the solution to all problems in which I discuss design space and the evolution of the human-built world). The difference is in the way novelty gets generated from human brains rather than from genetic mutations. The time scale is vastly different and the scope of change can be too. Sometimes in a flash of insight a human inventor can create something truly unique (and complex) in a fashion reminiscent of the “hopeful monster” theory in biological evolution (technically called ‘saltation’). Humans are able to introduce novelty at such a rapid rate that it is sometimes not possible for the forces of social selection (e.g. market acceptance) to operate in the same time scale. Saltation in the human-built world can be overwhelming (take, for example, the case of financial derivatives invented in wild exuberance and foisted on the world with absolutely no kind of selective testing until they all went down in smoke taking the whole financial system with them — something which is still playing itself out.)
Complexity generated (by humans) to solve social problems is not always subject to the kinds of normal evolutionary testing that allows an orderly progression from simple systems to complex ones. The situation has been exacerbated by the advent of high technology, particularly in energy and information. The rate of change in our societies today is overwhelming creating greater complexity in shorter time frames than could ever be reasonably tested safely in pockets here and there (as is the case in biological evolution). Everything is connected to everything else so tightly today that the evolutionary tests of any complex arrangement is now all-or-none. If a complex solution arises and seems to solve the problems on a short time scale, it arises almost instantly everywhere. There is no safe sandbox to allow it to play in. It simply gets adopted everywhere on faith. And if it actually fails the evolutionary test of validity it will crash everywhere. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you modern capitalism as exhibit one, on this count.
So here is the problem. Natural biological evolution works because there are loose couplings between subsystems (e.g. populations and species) and long time scales over which selection pressures can work. The media for conducting the massive parallel search is relatively speaking cheap (think how many offspring the typical invertebrate animal produces at one time because only a very small percentage of them are going to survive!) But we don't exactly think of human life as cheap, although I have to argue that many of us act as if we really do subconsciously. The costs of mistakes in the human-built world are hard to bear. They are even more so and more damaging since our global society is so strongly interconnected. What this means is that the latent costs inherent in greater complexity are more easily hidden in the human-built world and so human created complexities end up accumulating defects and lead, eventually to failures (see comments later about complex societies and collapse).
In natural biological evolution (and other kinds of auto-organizing phenomena) adaptive systems deal with the problem of latent complexity-caused errors by literally restructuring their organization to accommodate new requirements for survival. The evolution of the animal brain and its culmination in the human brain is an excellent case in point. If we understood what transpired in the evolution of unbelievably complex brains, we might gain some insights that would be applicable to human-built structures, in particular to the governance of human society.
How Brains Got So Complex, and Dealt with It (And Why Societies of Brains Can't - Yet)
Arguably the human brain is the most complex subsystem on this planet, and as a result makes all super-systems in which it is embedded super complex. It is composed of trillions of components of thousands of types and functions. It is seemingly infinitely flexible in terms of what it can encode in the form of knowledge which can be used to make the human organism the most adaptable, as a single species, ever evolved. The success of the human brain, in evolutionary terms, is attested to by the success in procreation of the species to date (past performance is no guarantee of future performance!) From our studies of complex systems, especially those created by human endeavors, we know that as complexity increases in system there are diminishing returns with respect to functionality and reliability. In fact, at some point increasing complexity generates greater costs than benefits. When systems reach this level something has to happen. Either the system collapses (or is abandoned, like the space shuttle or the supersonic airliner), or the system undergoes a kind of phase transition or reorganization adopting a radically new architecture that preserves its best functionality while allowing yet newer forms of complexity to emerge.
This is what has been the case for the evolution of the brain. Over evolutionary history the brain increased in complexity not by simply adding on new circuits, but by inventing (so to speak) whole new kinds of circuits of neurons (as well as new kinds of neurons) that transformed the architecture. This happened at relatively distinct points in time after which brains having the newer structures were able to continue to add complexity in the form of better more elaborate functions until the next 'crises' of organization approached.
The earliest brains were just globs of neurons that processed simple sensory inputs and generated relatively simple motor outputs. These were clusters called ganglia which can still be found in animals like worms. Such a control structure is strictly operational in nature. There are no higher-level coordination functions needed since the environmental niche of a worm is relatively simple and only demands operational responses. Insects went a step further in developing something closer to a centralized brain at the head end of the animal. These brains provided an additional level of logistical coordination for the operational ganglia (still present in the nerve chords. They also provided a bit of tactical control for things like mating behaviors which were more elaborate due to the more complex environmental framework that insects live in. Of course the logistical and tactical controls were primitive and genetically determined. The amount of memory and learning in these animals was still limited to the basic neural plasticity in simple synapses.
Primitive chordates essentially inherited this very primitive brain architecture. As animals evolved into slightly more complex environments, the brains, say of fishes, simply complexified accordingly without any real architectural restructuring. But when animals had been well into invading terrestrial environments something had to give. Animals such as primitive reptiles and their predecessor amphibians needed to have more complex behaviors for more complex environments (which, by the way, included more other species to deal with and more niche opportunities to take into consideration). These animals could not merely further complexify the basic architecture (operational and primitive, that is merely instinctive, logistical/tactical controls). Something additional was needed. A new, more flexible computational platform was needed in order to provide more adaptive behavior. Patterns needed to be encoded in response to actual experience because the genome could not possibly contain enough information to control the wiring of the brain for these non-stationary patterns. Those patterns were more complex, themselves, and needed more refined pattern recognition and association (to action responses). A whole new kind of neural tissue was needed and that was the cortical sheets that provide a matrix for encoding spatio-temporal patterns. The new sheets (with some newly modified neuron types organized in new, modular substructures) provided not only a pattern learning and memory recall system but a control enhancement system for the logistical, but mostly for the tactical control of the animal. The old brain structures were not thrown out so much as modified to integrate the capacities of the new structures. Cortices provide the computational architecture for creating adaptive maps1. And these were, in evolutionary terms, an instant success. Reptiles rapidly dominated the terrestrial environment and some aquatic ones as well. They were highly successful at exploiting complex niches.
Of course early mammals inherited this same architecture. But latter mammals were able to take it a step further. What we call now the archicortex (or sometimes the paleocortex) emerged in mammals and gave them an edge as the age of dinosaurs ebbed. Using the same matrix-sheet adaptive map approach, but now extended to wrap around all of the more primitive structures, this platform not only extended the flexibility of (especially) the tactical control of behavior it introduced the opportunity for long-term memory encoding of far more complex patterns. It also added the capacity to not just encode patterns and provide for rapid recognition from sensory inputs, it also allowed some primitive model building in which mammals could consider more than a few options in choosing behavior. Mammals became able to “think” in a primitive way. Mental models of the components in one's environment allow one to consider possible futures with respect to how those components are going to behave. Animals with this architecture added the capacity to anticipate alternate behaviors to a small degree.
What we have been seeing in the evolution of these architectures is a movement toward greater hierarchical management of an individual's behavior in order to produce greater complexity in that behavior to address the greater complexity evolving (co-evolving) in the environment of those animals. At each stage, brain evolution involved increasing complexity in its structure to match the increasing complexity (or rather the opportunity to enter more complex niches where competition would be, for a while, less) of the environment. And this was accomplished not by just adding more of the same structure, but by reorganization and adjusting the control hierarchy to match.
The human brain represents the most recent restructuring. Actually the process began in the primates with the emergence of the neocortex (wrapped around the archicortex). This layer of newer cells and new substructure organization expanded and deepened the thinking capacity that the archicortex had bestowed on lower mammals. In addition another dimension of organizational structure, the role of the frontal cortex, had been taking on an increasing responsibility not only for organizing rational responses to the environmental situation but for planning further into the future based on using those mental models encoded in the rest of the cortex (and now made tremendously more elaborate and broader in scope by the advent of the neocortex). The prefrontal cortex added something that went beyond mere tactical decision making. It added the first real form of strategic control for behavior. By allowing humans to make more elaborate plans and organizing more tacit (experiential) knowledge to provide higher order judgment shaping of intelligent decision making, the human brain had become a wholly new kind of computational system providing seemingly infinite combinations of concepts and thoughts.
Of course, the brain's evolutionary restructuring to manage complexity was not a wholesale reorganization of every part. The older parts were retained and still performed their original duties. The brainstem nucleus (like a ganglion) responsible for controlling breathing still does so automatically. But the new brain can override parts of the older brain when circumstances warrant. One can hold one's breath if one wants. The reorganization has been by increasing the hierarchical control structures and improving as much as possible the top down coordination where needed.
There are other examples of restructuring architectures in biological evolution in response to increasing complexity. Indeed, most tissues and organs show this same pattern. Hierarchical restructuring can be found everywhere in nature and so it seems that we should consider it as something like a law of nature in this regard.
The law might be generally stated thus: As complexity emerges in a system (to respond to complexity in the larger embedding system) a point is reached wherein the system must restructure to enhance a hierarchical control network in order to improve coordination and avoid the diminishing costs of increasing complexity.
If Brains Could Do It, Why Can't Societies Do It?
As I have mentioned several times Joseph Tainter2, and other scholars, have begun to explain the collapse of societies in history as a phenomenon of increasing complexity (or what amounts to the same thing as demand for resources that require more work to obtain) leading to a situation of diminishing returns and eventual negative returns. Today we seem to be witnessing the collapse of the global society and a great deal of blame is being placed on the intricacies of subsystems like the financial markets. We know, of course that the problem is that we don't have enough usable net energy to continue growing our human built world (at the sacrifice of the natural resource world). It takes energy to run complex systems.
The question we should ask is: Why can't societies successfully restructure to a hierarchical system as the brain did in its evolution?
Well, they try to. The auto-organization of human institutions actually does follow the pattern shown in other natural systems' evolution. Current governments and economic management systems are quasi-hierarchical control systems. The problem is that the major operative components - human individuals - are not sufficiently empathetic to form strong cooperatives. Competition is still too much a factor in the relations of individuals. Rugged individualism sings praises to this fact. In short, unlike neurons that are highly cooperative with one another, humans are simply too autonomous and have wildly different perspectives from each other to be successful cooperators!
Loose coupling between components with competition is good for exploratory search of the design space. It offers an impetus to find better solutions or novel channels for energy dissipation. It is a natural and necessary stage of development of a complex system. But at some point, the need for efficient management of complex systems outweighs the need for exploration and the role of competition and novelty must be subjugated to that of cooperation and exploitation. If a complex dynamic system is to achieve stability the components must be able to form stronger linkages based on cooperation. The need for a hierarchical control structure overrides the need for self-interest.
“Freedom” is a luxury of non-complex systems in which the interactions between components are not so strong3. Individuals have more leeway in their choices of actions because the coupling strength between them is not so great that disturbances in any one relation will propagate destructively through the network of relations. As long as the component density is low and there is energy to use to redistribute component locations, the system can afford to have non-conforming activities among components without disrupting the whole system.
But when the density of components is high, when the interactions between components becomes sufficiently strong, the freedom of individual components with respect to their choices of action become more highly constrained if the system is to avoid disruption due to the propagation of disturbances due to one component behaving in a manner adverse to closely aligned other components4.
These principles apply to all complex systems. They especially apply to human societies. We humans, as interacting agents are still too autonomous (intellectually and emotionally) to form effective complex societies that actually provide for the well being of all members. Our governmental systems are hierarchical as we attempt to organize in the fashion nature has provided. But our capacity to form strong cooperative interactions under the population densities we now have is very limited. We are still very much driven by our animalistic limbic, self-interest-above-all brains and our cooperative higher-order regulatory (executive) functions are too easily overwhelmed by those drives. When push come to shove we will compete and seek to dominate rather than take time to find ways to win through cooperation. We are still motivated much more by personal profit than collective sharing. The latter is in our character. We had begun to evolve this aspect more strongly at the end of the Pleistocene era and we can see it in our ability to form groups, organizations, and attempts at collective actions. But we also see that it was only a partial evolution when we witness in-group fighting, personality conflicts that hurt the group, back-stabbing for personal gain, etc. As evolution goes, we were on the path to become angels, but we remain mostly self-interested animals on the whole.
We try. We achieve some really amazing organizations for mutual benefit. We have gained enough collective experience to see how to form truly large societies, states, countries, even international organizations and trade. But, we also had a great advantage in this development. We were always finding new sources of higher powered energy with which to create so much material wealth that push never really came to shove all that often. It did, of course, come every once in a while. And great civilizations rapidly collapsed when there were temporary resource limits that triggered the competition mode of behavior. Resource envy powered territorial grabs (imperialism and colonialism) that eventually became too complex to manage relative to the actual inflows of resources (particularly energy) as Tainter has related.
Now that resource limits are operating on a global scale the triggering of competition will not be a temporary decline followed by an overall upward complexification of global society. This time the drive to compete rather than cooperate will operate on a global scale for all of the future — of this species. And for that reason, the members of this species who are incapable of transcending the natural urge to self-interest even in the face of global civilization collapse, will kill one another off.
But recall, I said humans had been on the evolutionary path to greater empathy and tendency to cooperate? The genetic propensity for some people to have much greater capacity for empathetic and cooperative behavior is still incipient within Homo sapiens even if it is weak in most members of the species. The laws of probability distribution of traits guarantees that there are some members of the population who are capable of forming truly cooperative organizations in response to the stresses of resource depletion. And those who are capable will do so. They will be able to let the laws of complexity reorganization (through hierarchical management) operate on them so that they can succeed in surviving the future challenging environment by cohesion and adaptation at the group level rather than at the individual level.
Understand that the mind that is more empathetic and cooperative is not that of a mindless automaton (nor the colony mind of, say, an ant or a bee). We are still talking about human minds that are capable of being cooperative but also understanding the importance of being so. These are minds that can still generate independent thoughts and ideas but which will also subject those ideas to consideration by the larger group before adopting an attitude of being “right” simply because they originated the idea. In other words these are minds that can think for themselves, but also recognize the importance of consensus in arriving at conclusions.
Sapience is, in part, the capacity of a mind to both have independent perspective and motivation to find cooperative ways to meld perspectives. Sapience entails brain structures that help reduce the impacts of biases and heuristic thinking that plagues ordinary Homo sapiens5. Sapience improves the use of experience based models (in tacit knowledge) to override the limbic system influence over decision making (what Kahneman calls the System 1 decision maker — fast vs. slow or deliberative decision making. See: Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.) Strong sapience may be able to effectively eliminate or at least greatly reduce the effects of biases by “juicing” up the deliberative system (system 2 in Kahneman's jargon - call sapience system 2½ or even 3!)
Humans as currently constituted (mentally) are not really great observers. We are not unbiased or objective. Our perceptions are filtered and distorted by our already encoded beliefs, hence most of us form non-veridical models of the world to various degrees. Some are better than others, but we all suffer from misperceptions and misconceptions that cause our perspectives on things to not only be the result of seeing phenomena from different angles, but from different a priori beliefs. This is what we mean by ideologies causing us to have a distorted model of reality. Humans were clever enough to invent science precisely because we recognized our own failings. Empirical methods replaced simple observation. Repeatability replaced one-off conclusion drawing. Mathematical models replaced foggy mental images. We did this because the smarter ones among us understood that mere opinions were totally unreliable when it came to predicting future outcomes in nature. Each of us sees the world from a different point of view, but also from a different filter of assumptions and beliefs. Sapience helps to counter this effect by making the bearer more aware of his or her shortcomings as an observer and concluder. Because we, as individuals can never be certain that our ideas are right sapience pushes us to continually question everything. And it pushes us to try hard to grasp another's point of view when they differ from our own.
Empathy is stronger in more highly sapient people. And empathy isn't just a matter of feeling someone else's feelings. It is also putting yourself inside their head to see the world the way they see it. Communications is everything. The more sapient expositor will choose words and phrases with deep and shared semantics. The more sapient listener sill attend to every such word and phrase to maximize the transference of information. A collective of highly sapient people will be capable of a higher level of efficacious communication than a rabble of ordinary sapients. We have a remarkable example of the effects (and failures) of the latter when we watch our American congress in action. Even weakly sapient people will hang their heads and weep for what this supposedly deliberative body of decision makers has become in light of modern social complexities.
Which brings us to the reason that human governance institutions are failing in light of the complexities of modern society. Our institutions are only partially formed in the manner of nature's way to restructure as hierarchical control systems. They succeed only to the degree that humans are a little bit cooperative (and a little bit sapient). But they fail to the degree that we are still hampered by faulty decision making and poor perceptions and conceptions of reality. The complexities of the world that we have created are acting to accelerate the downward spiral of cooperation through effective communications. Today ideologies trump objectiveness and the capacity to continually question our basic assumptions. Opinions trump science. And the results are now seen to be catastrophic.
Human beings are neither like neurons nor like ants. They are not driven by mechanical programs to behave in a cooperative fashion. They are and will always be thinking beings with very complex models of how the world works, encoded in their heads. The ordinary human has very limited models to work with, and not very veridical ones at that. Even our so-called leaders, today, are plagued by these limitations. But more sapient beings have better, more comprehensive and veridical models to work from. The highly sapient brain includes the ability to guide learning through life, to attend to what is important and true, to note and question deviations from the expected (especially that expected based on what authorities tell us). This is how wise people end up with so much good tacit knowledge as they age. Even a young person with high sapience may be foolish in some respects, may make some foolish mistakes, but their sapient brains learn from those mistakes. Wisdom grows over time such that one makes fewer foolish mistakes later in life.
Now imagine a society comprised of humans whose average level of sapience is at what today is the rare high end of the spectrum. Imagine the wisest among them many orders of magnitude more sapient than even the wisest persons today. What kind of society would they have? Sapience and wisdom promote cooperative, empathetic attitudes even when perceptions or points of view differ. Sapience promotes effective communications as people attempt to work out the differences and come to a common understanding. Sapience in individuals permits sapience in governance through nature's organization of hierarchical decision making. People can still be individuals and appreciate individual differences and still work to cooperate for the good of the whole. This is the wonderful new framework for a society based on cooperation, not because everyone thinks alike or acts alike, or holds the same set of conceptions exactly. This is no society of automatons. Rather it is a society of people who are even more human than we are! Still autonomous in thinking, but capable of understanding one another and what is the good for society. This is the path that Homo sapiens was on before the advent of agriculture. We can only see it now, in retrospect, as the antithesis of competition and stubborn individualism is amplified by the overly complex society we have created.
Evolution is the solution. Our evolution as a genus is not yet over. As with other evolutionary events throughout the Earth's history we are in for a tumultuous, even brutal, selection event. But the potential for a new organization of human society (and a new kind of civilization) awaits. Will it be realized? Present humans cannot hope to succeed in becoming more sapient simply by learning. The brain has to further evolve. Perhaps with the active participation of those who understand, evolution will follow our desired trajectory. A future form of Homo will succeed.
Footnotes
1 The first recognizable cortical structures have been termed the archicortex. These structures appear to have evolved from sheet-like structures called mushroom bodies in more primitive animal brains. The story I am weaving here is very much a simplification of the evolution of brain structures, but follows the basic form. In general evolution finds ways to reuse older structures for new purposes through modifications. Hence legs and arms were once fins. The general pattern appears to involve something like a mutation that generates redundancy in certain kinds of structures. The two structures then start to diverge in form and function until whole new structures and functions emerge. That is a marvelous story in itself!
2 Tainter, Joseph A., The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
3 Or, as Janis Joplin said, “Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose...”
4 Oh can't you hear it now? Communism. Socialism. Screams of outrage. But actually I doubt that any right wing or libertarian reader would have made it this far. If you will allow me to be somewhat presumptuous, what proceeded to this point is too intellectually dense for the average ideologue to have been able to follow and they will have clicked away to a more mentally favorable site by now!
5 The study of intuitions and judgment has provided us with a truly eye-opening perspective on human cognition that exposes the fiction of humans as rational deciders! See: Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (eds.) Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Thank you, Dr. Mobus, for a perceptive and comprehensive analysis of humanity's current predicament, and its hope for the future.
Posted by: Robin Datta | December 06, 2011 at 01:37 AM
Two questions:
1) Is there any hope for sapient individuals who live in very non-sapient brainwashed societies, under totalitarian governments (such as the radical Muslim states today), where the government isn't just silly and bumbling like in the US, but actually makes an active (and I would say evil) effort to coerce everyone to its own stupidity?
2) Since your proposed solution to population control is very unlikely to happen, and assuming the approaching bottleneck will favor the survival of the most-cooperative, emphatic and wisest people alive (and assuming they won't be exterminated in gas chambers by some tyrant regime), should sapient individuals have more children than what is good for the rest of the population, to increase the chances of survival of at least some of their offspring?
Posted by: Sari | December 06, 2011 at 04:26 AM
@george
excellent post again
very consistent with everything else
and with the right balanced attitude towards the reality and inevitability of homo sapiens die-off
i am glad you are not tired to repeat yourself again and again - one never knows when the next young brain of future supspeciated homo species will stop by
@sari
re: question 1) i think you might want to review george's post on "hope" - i am lazy to put the link but you can go back - it is recent - that is the only sort of "hope" one can entertain
re: question 2) having more children is not sapient therefore if a person is sapient he/she will may consider to go childless
children are born in ignorance and since outr human condition is not sapient therefore becoming sapient is very much a chance occurence and really sapient person will always dout his own "sapience" - you therefore get the situation when "sapience" will never be declared but it will be selected for over the bottleneck event (die-off, peak everything, kill for food and water, and other miseries awaiting our children and grandchildren - and many parts of the world are already experiencing it)
Posted by: AlT | December 06, 2011 at 10:26 AM
@Sari
re question 1) in my opinion the best option is to immigrate to either Canada or Australia - those countries are "best": they are relatively less populated and therefore the rebalancing is expected to reach them later than other regions and countries
they are also still accepting immigrants - a situation that may change towards the mid century or end of century when the die-off becomes obvious the international trade collapses and everything reverts to local ecosystems and their ability to maintain the limited populations of humans
Posted by: AlT | December 06, 2011 at 10:34 AM
AlT: there's nowhere to run or hide from what's coming down on humanity due to the pollution of the entire biosphere.
George: great post as usual. i've given up hope on humanity getting its act together and doing the right thing by the environment (and restructuring society around that imperative) in time to ameliorate the catastrophe that's already begun and will only get worse as we go forward. Simply look at Durban and the resistance by the big three: China, India and the U.S. to any kind of climate-related curbing of our industrial pollution as an example of how the small mindedness of our "leaders" will doom everyone and many species we rely on for survival to the dustbin of history.
Of course we can't give up, but i think it's becoming all too clear that as a species we've failed on too many levels to exist much longer on this planet.
Posted by: Tom | December 07, 2011 at 05:18 AM
@Tom
yes there is nowhere to hid but countries that have population below that their land can support are expected to join the crash party later
"hope" or "depression" ios for those who do not know and do not understand the reality of life
there is no "good" or "bad" "right" or "wrong" in nature
those are artifacts of thus-far human intellectial development
the fact that homo sapiens has not learned yet only tells you that as a species it will be superceeded by genus that will incorporate learning and "sapience" in georges words into _human condition_
there is a lot of work to be done in terms of looking for, contacting and organizing the people who understand the nature and course of human evolution, the unsustainability of current socio-economic system, rebalancing, low-energy and so- on and so forth
there is no time for dispair or fear - it is the time to get better at thinking and working even harder to start a seed group of proper scientists and people of reason
whining gets us nowhere
Posted by: AlT | December 07, 2011 at 06:33 AM
Oh well, I suppose that since wisdom strongly correlates with age, a really sapient person would be too old to have children anyways. Sapience would have to develop through cultural rather than biological evolution. But how permanent would a cultural evolution be? You'd have to have some sort of religion (or something equally powerful) to keep things the way they are, and even then it's too easy for a religion to become heirarchical, stagnate or fanatic.
And you can't ignore external influences. I wonder how a sapient species could survive (and dominate) in a world populated by average humans, who still have a very strong tribal instincts, who do not recognize the importance of keeping their growth in check and are competing for new ecological niches, and are non too interested in seeking peaceful, cooperative solutions. Some of the wisest people I could think of have propounded the ideas of non-violence, turning the other cheek, walking away, etc, but eventually, if they want to defend themselves, they'll have to take up arms. They would have to make sure that the weapons are used in the wisest ways. A sapient society would have to be capable of exercising empathy and compassion for the "other", while at the same time avoiding the pitfall of moral relativism and recognizing when the "other" is a threat, which needs to be removed for the greater good of the tribe\race\humanity.
I know you've said before that if a community is sufficiently isolated, the "enemies" won't have the energy available to reach them, but throughout history isolated communities have been invaded and pillaged. It seems that throughout history, brute force (whether through greater numbers or more advanced technologies), and not wisdom, is what wins.
Posted by: Sari | December 07, 2011 at 06:47 AM
Robin,
Thank you for your continued interest and supporting words. And for the very funny bits you send me every once in a while. Humor is essential.
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Sari,
I tend to shy away from giving direct advice on such matters. To #1 I have to say I really have no experience to draw upon nor do I know much about what options might exist under those conditions. All I can suggest is be mindful and seek out others who seem to understand.
As for #2 the complexities are even more daunting than for #1. I suppose I could safely say that the truly sapient will know what is right to do. After all, sapience is about good moral judgment about complex social matters for one's own life. In the end this is exactly what is meant by survival of the fittest!
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AIT,
Thank you. From your last paragraph it seems to me you are implying that sapience is an acquired capacity. My research suggests this is not the case. One's level of sapience is more dependent on genetics than learning per se. It is not too different from IQ in the sense that its level may vary around a norm for a particular genotype due to environmental influences, but not by very much.
It is wisdom that is acquired and for which sapience is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Sufficiency comes with obtaining life experiences, and those do, to a degree, may be stochastic. Sapience may aid one in choosing directions to take that help provide good learning experiences so it is not exactly random. Perhaps you mean wisdom rather than sapience as I have been using that term.
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Tom,
I agree. Humanity as currently constituted genetically and behaviorally will not succeed and cause its own demise as a species. But there is hope for sentience, in my opinion.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | December 07, 2011 at 06:51 AM
@george
yes in your terms i should have used "wisdom" instead of sapience
but the outcome is the same
once the "wiser" and therefore more sapient will realize that they have no other choice but "infiltrate" the societal structures of homo sapiens and eventually "take over" the human condition we get the heuristic system that will allow for artificial selection of sapience - that is running genetic tests, enhancing them and eventually "breeding" sapience
sapient society starts with "wise old men"
@ tom
i rearranged the list of countries by ecolodical footprint at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint
by the ecological remainder
the countries that have the highest surplus are
Guyana-59.75, Gabon-27.88, Bolivia-16.27, Republic of the Congo-12.31, Mongolia-9.61, Paraguay-8.05, Canada-7.91, Australia-7.87
Posted by: AlT | December 07, 2011 at 07:05 AM
when i said sapient society starts with "wise old men" i of course included women as well
because life is such that an old wise man is not possible without an old wise woman
we can only realize ourselves when we are in a communal relationship with another human and it may be homo or heterosexual but the important quality of thee relationship is _communion_ - not an easy outcome and requires lots of efforts to maintain over time
Posted by: AlT | December 07, 2011 at 07:15 AM
to AlT:
"those countries are "best": they are relatively less populated and therefore the rebalancing is expected to reach them later than other regions and countries"
I think it was William Catton in his book "Overshoot" who pointed out that there is a difference between population density and population pressure (or some similar term). He meant that even if a region has less people than its carrying capacity, there are still cultural influences that will cause them to feel the effects of population growth earlier (for example - 100 drivers on a congested highway will feel the population is more dense than 1000 rickshaws will). So things could turn pretty nasty despite there being potential room for more people.
Posted by: Sari | December 07, 2011 at 02:46 PM
@sari
Re: importance of the "life-styles" for extimating when the ugliness reaches the country and "turn the other cheek"
good point
still Canada and Australia are "the best" in my opinion
if we use ecological footprint as the proxy for the population pressure then Canada and Australia are the only so called developped countries that have relative room for population growth
of course it is all relative
and it is only about the timing because homo sapiens will eventually corrupt his environment everywhere to such a degree that only a fraction of currrent pop[ulation of 7 billion will be able to continue
on your earlier note about whether wise people following ideas of non-vilence will have eventualy to give them up
my opinion is they will
when wise people realize that the only way to survive for them personally and for "their kind" going forward they will use their wisdom to take over the homo sapiens
for now the system can support ignorance on tope of the hierarchical structure
when the carrying capacity is diminished so much that only few can live there will be no room for ignorance to survive
this is how evolution works
the more advanced (wise and sapient) among us are already seeing what is ahead of us
they are spending time thinking what should be done about it
they understand that they need to organize and find the ways to take over the institutions of homo sapiens
yes, traditionally, the wise, would opt for a "nirvana" and "zen" and "tao" and "enlightment" escape route from human condition but that route is being shut down because dying when one can survive is against our biological genetic imperative to survive: our sapience and wisdom will always be its masters
those who think otherwise simply check out (suicide) and are irrelevant to those who stay behind
Posted by: AlT | December 08, 2011 at 06:53 AM
AIT,
What I imagined is not Homo sapiens eusapiens "infiltrating", but rather distancing themselves from the mainstream, Homo sapiens sapiens. I don't see a point in trying to "take over" what is doomed. Also I don't see how "wise old men" could effectively guide the "breeding" of eusapients. I think the best that can be done is for those of us who see the opportunity to produce mechanisms that enable those young people who, through their stronger sapience, see the need and respond to the challenge. It is more a self-selection process than a breeding program as such. In my view.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | December 10, 2011 at 01:44 PM
George,
I think it would be hard if not impossible to distance from Homo sapiens sapiens.
We know beyond the shadow of the doubt that the civilization of homo sapiens sapiens is not sustainable over the long run and the more it will continue the more impoverished and polluted biosphere
There will be a point in time when the only "wise" course of action will be "to dethrone" homo sapiens sapiens and restructure the whole system
I do not think "waking away" would be an option simply because homo sapiens sapiens will continue appropriate any and all resources for its own use with no regard to sustainability
If there will be more sapient offshoot of the homo genus it seems to me it would organize around understanding that for the viability of the species homo sapiens sapiens simply should not be allowed to continue any longer.
At the moment the balance is totally in favor of homo sapiens sapiens because there are very little if any homo sapiens eusapiens and they are all scatttered around the globe and are not united.
But once the civilization begins to fall apart and beliefs in democracy as the only form of government are questioned by more and more people there will be fertile ground for homo sapiens eusapience to restructure democracy into sustainable structure
The sooner it happens the more of uncorrupted carrying capacity is left for homo sapiens eusapiens.
Of course there may be a period when the wisest move would be to do nothing and allow homo sapiens sapiens to kill each other and diminish their numbers greatly.
But even that would be temporary because eventually the confrontation will have to happen simply because carrying capacity will shrink to such a point were two populations will not be able to survive
This is why I put more emphasis on "infiltration" and practicing surviving within homo sapins sapiens structures but as a completely separate group and community getting ready for a "take over"
Of course in no way I advocate any revolutionary activity
No ooverthrowing the government or any such nonsense
I am talking about _evolutionary_ horizon and evolution of beliefs which is happening anyways
Posted by: AlT | December 10, 2011 at 05:30 PM
AIT,
Exactly. I imagine any people who are more towards the eusapient end of the spectrum have already "embedded" themselves in the institutions that exist. They do need to find each other now. And then when TSHTF (and they will know it when they see it), that is the time to disassociate themselves from a crumbling civilization. I don't see anyone subverting anything. Civilization is killing itself from within so there is no need to do anything extra. Just be prepared.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | December 11, 2011 at 08:45 AM
George,
I agree that our individual efforts may be insignificant on the scale of the organism-whole when viewed in isolation.
But when we consider them as part of the eusapients seeking each other and organizing it is very important to go thru initial stages of identification and connection as soon as posssible.
the state of the matters is such as litteraly days count. The sooner self-organization of eusapients happen the earlie proper "hasbanding" of resources can begin and the trully sustainable system can emerge.
Anather aspect of importance to organize early is iterpretations of the signals coming from the civilization. The complexity is already at such a level that it is not possible to decide the begining of the end in isolation. Only as a group, comparing notes and even developing an entirely "new" set of indicators eusapients will _evolve_ required tacit knowledge to pinpoint the key moment when they will have to "make a move".
This is why I tend to think that mere understanding of the trends is not enough. One is to _actively_ to seek ourt others who also understand and are looking to connect.
To me this eagerness to connect, communicate and cooperate with the common goal to "watch" civilization and "prepare" is in itself an indication that an individual has made an important jump to the next level.
What bothers me a lot is the fact that many people see the inevitability of the civilizational collaps and they stop right there. They do not view it over evolutionary horizon. And many become "depressed" or "check out" into enjoyment of the moment.
As to being "embedded" in the institution that exist.
All of us are "embedded" in some sort of institution. Family, profession, class, gender, love of fishing, etc.
We need to find each other and kick start an _institution of survival_ that would be at the begining only manifesting in our connectedness to each other. An invisible journal so to speak. All while being functional under institution of dying civilization.
Only clearly understanding this aspect of institutionalization and the need to begin "institutiona of survival" that is completely foreign to all current institutions we can harness the power of institutionalization thru which cultural evolution unfolds.
I think this is an important aspect that many overlook.
Posted by: AlT | December 11, 2011 at 10:24 AM
Hello George,
I'm a bit late as I tend to slowly digest your posts...
This one made me think in terms of variety engineering and the need for the managing part of a system to develop enough variety to cope with its changing/problematic environment in line with cybernetics.
I also wondered about the ability for ICT to contribute something positive to the coordination of large numbers of people. I have recently come across a neat talk by Luis von Ahn, father of the annoying reCAPTCHA, where he shows how 900.000.000 individual users have contributed to decipher missed OCR readings from Google Book and other similar projects. Another fascinating example of massive task distribution was the DARPA challenge asking participating teams to locate as quickly as possible 18 hot air balloons across the continental US.
Ok, locating balloons and reading a few characters are not exactly the best examples when thinking of economic descent or other serious problems which affect our planet, but I am asking to what extent the research done in Internet-based coordination of massive workloads could help us reach collectively higher levels of variety to cope with the transition phases ahead of us.
Posted by: Jean-Paul de Vooght | December 16, 2011 at 02:21 AM
AIT,
From where I sit it seems to me that the finding and making connection process has already started - auto-organization in action. As to whether or not it will result in the construction of viable survival institutions is still very much up in the air. Relocalization, transition towns, permaculture academies, etc. are signs that wiser people are trying to grapple with what they now see as the inevitable. I talk with a number of people in these "institutions" and have great hopes that some of them will find a workable formula. They all have slightly different takes on what is going to happen and what they need to do to prepare. But that is exactly what you expect in the evolutionary process. Variation is essential so that there is a greater chance that some number of organizations will be found fit by whatever natural selection forces emerge in the future.
As for the timing, I agree that there needs to be more action now. What I will say is that I am doing things outside of this blog. The problem is that we don't really know what the rate of change or collapse might be and before many people get ready to withdraw they need to see the right signs. I practice, and recommend, vigilance and scenario planing. That can include taking practical (affordable) steps. I don't recommend total divorcement quite yet.
-----------------------------------
Jean-Paul,
Excellent question.
Years ago I got very active in the internet-enabled distributed collaboration literature and various groups that were attempting to find ways to allow large groups to work on global issues, like global warming. Some interesting work came out of that but I am not sure how effective it has been.
You can get a look at one of the more successful (in terms of participation) at: http://globalsensemaking.net/
David Price started this group and it is still active. I have not participated of late because I see the issues overwhelming any efforts to find solutions in time. But I still applaud their work in trying. They might be right and hopefully I am wrong!
I will say that as civilization tends toward collapse I personally hope the internet is the last to go! There may be ways to sustain some semblance of it as long as possible. And, indeed, it may yet play a role in coordination of efforts to find a sustainable future for humanity. We'll see.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | December 22, 2011 at 09:58 AM
@ Sari: In answer to your first question, then assuming migration is not an option, sapient beings in aggressively non-sapient societies such as Iran or Saudi Arabia should conserve their energies and where possible minimise their contacts with the dominant society. For example, by doing jobs that don't require too much intellectual work on their part but which pays enough to support themselves and their families.
In their free time, if possible, they can think and work out the kind of society they would want to live in. They should prepare for the day when the dominant society around them will collapse. Many oppressive societies like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain exist mainly because they have oil which the United States needs and it's in the US government's interests to curry favour with the ruling elites in those countries. If the US were to collapse, then these countries' governments are likely also to collapse.
Preparing for collapse may mean growing your own food, learning community organisation skills, brushing up on any teaching skills you may have because you're probably going to have to teach people survival skills in the event of a widespread social and political collapse.
Visit Dmitry Orlov's blog at http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/ to see articles on how Russians coped with collapse in the 1990s and on how the United States might cope, and how well the country is prepared, when collapse comes.
Posted by: Jen | January 15, 2012 at 05:44 PM