Too Smart for Our Own Good by Craig Dilworth
Reviewed by George Mobus
A Paradox
Many years ago I believed, as do most people today, that intelligence was the key to solving all of mankind's problems (read: innovation, assumed by technocornucopians to overcome all problems). I spent no small amount of my life pursuing understanding of what intelligence is, and how the brain produces the abilities to solve complex problems. My childhood was spent watching the unfolding explosion in science and technology that culminated in, for example, the landing of humans on the moon. I grew up knowing there were these wondrous electronic brains called computers. Later at a still impressionable age, once the size and prices of computers came down, I got my chance to play with them. I fell instantly in love with a machine that I could program to rapidly solve problems that would have taken me days to accomplish. And I came across the works of Alan Turing regarding the idea that a computing device might be able to emulate human intelligence, dubbed “Artificial Intelligence” (AI). The “Turing Test” posited that we should accord intelligence to machines if in a blind conversation with a real human, the latter could not detect that s/he was talking to a machine. I set out to see how such a wonder might be accomplished.
Many years later I managed to earn a PhD in computer science by programming a computer to emulate not human intelligence, but the intelligence of a neuron with its adaptive synaptic connections. These, I assembled into a computational model of a snail brain, an admittedly moronic one, and showed how such a brain could control behavior and, more importantly, emulate animal-like (biomimic) learning through Pavlovian-style conditioning. Putting this brain into a computer controlling a small Braitenberg robot, I could show how the brain learned features of its experienced environment and adjusted its behavior to conform to the stimuli of that environment (run from pain-causing stimuli and approach rewarding stimuli). That academic exercise started me digging deeper into how biological neural networks in real brains work. I read every book I could get ahold of and many journal articles on various aspects of neuroscience trying to understand how it worked. The obvious goal of AI was to produce human-like intelligence in a machine. The strong version of this program even contemplated producing a conscious machine (e.g. HAL 9000 in A Space Odyssey). The field of AI has evolved from the earliest days and it has produced some useful computational products. And even though Deep Blue (IBM) beat world chess master Garry Kasporov and Watson (also IBM) beat the all-time Jeopardy champs at that game, the fact is that computers still only simulate some aspects of intelligence, and then only in limited expertise domains.
Throughout the evolution of the field, the idea of a machine intelligence spawned considerable interest among psychologists, neurobiologists, and philosophers. Debates about just what intelligence was in the first place were generated each time AI seemed to make progress. Perhaps one of the most important contributions of the field was to show just how different real brains were from the way computers process data. And with each new accomplishment of computers, trying to master tasks that had previously been thought to require intelligence, it became clearer that the human kind of intelligence was far more complex and nuanced than our earlier models accounted for. My own claim that my robot emulated a “moronic” snail might have been valid for a very low level of intelligence, but it only served to underscore how far our computational approaches were from the real thing as far as human-level intelligence.
In any case my initial forays into AI via trying to simulate learning phenomena in neuron-like structures got me hooked on the notion of understanding the real deal. Both psychology and neurobiology had made such important strides toward grasping the nature of human intelligence and consciousness that I essentially ceased worrying about AI and turned my attentions more fully to the pursuit of real human intelligence as an object of study.
As much as has been elucidated, especially over the last few decades, about human intelligence, most of the world still holds that intelligence is our greatest mental achievement. Coupled with its twin mental capacity for creativity, intelligence is seen as the epitome of cognition; a genius is one who has ample portions of both compared with ordinary humans. The human brain is held to provide cleverness in solving complex problems. We often equate intelligence with rational thinking (e.g. deductive logic) and hold accomplishments in mathematics or science as evidence that we are an incredibly smart species. The mere fact of the existence of our technological prowes proves that we are smarter than any mere ape.
But there is a fly in the ointment of this palliative thought. If you try to objectively account for the state of the world today as the result of our being so smart you have to ask a very important question: If we are so smart, why do we humans find ourselves in such a terrible predicament today? Our species is facing a constellation of extraordinary and complex problems for which no one can suggest feasible solutions (see below). The irony is that these problems exist because our cleverness, our being so smart, created them. Our activities, clever as we have thought them to be, are the causes of the problems, which, collectively, threaten the very existence of humanity! This seems a paradox. We were smart enough to create the problems, but we're not smart enough to fix them. My own conclusion was that maybe smartness wasn't enough. Maybe something even more important to cognition had been missing that allowed this predicament to develop. That has been the thought that has been motivating my own search for an answer.
Craig Dilworth, Reader in Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University in Sweden, has asked this same question from a slightly different perspective, but comes to a similar conclusion regarding the role of intelligence in creating the predicament. In Too Smart for Our Own Good Dilworth masterfully pieces together the story of how humans, being so clever, but still motivated by our animal instincts and drives, have made a real mess of things. Put simply, he concludes that the evolutionary experiment called Homo sapiens is intrinsically unsustainable. He builds the evidence carefully and skillfully, though I have a few concerns regarding some possibly nitpicking details (to be discussed later). His arguments are both complete and consistent with observed reality. And he pulls no punches.
The Predicament and Proximal Causes
A good deal of Dilworth's book deals with the evolution of the current human species and, in particular, the residual components of human behavior inherited from our animal predecessors. In short, he elucidates the various instinctive drives that underlay all human activities and that demonstrate just how much of a biological creature humans really are. He carefully derives a set of principles from physics, chemistry, and biology that explain the evolutionary trajectory that leads quite naturally to clever apes. And then he claims that a threshold was passed. Along the line of genera Australopithecus and Homo cleverness produced behaviors that no previous animals had been able to perform, at least to the extent these clever apes were able to. In particular early humans (the term covering several species) learned to control fire, to become more efficient hunters and gatherers with tools that they manufactured, to protect themselves from the climate vagaries with manufactured shelters and clothing. That capability to invent and construct put them in a new biological relation with the rest of the biophysical world. It set them going on what Dilworth describes as the “vicious circle.” Humans can extract resources, both non-renewable and renewable, from the environment at a growing rate, both per capita and as the population grows, in absolute terms. We also consume these resources after turning them into usable forms, like clothing. Our consumption, plus the ravages of entropy, means that we are producing waste products at increasing rates in the same dynamical framework as the extraction rates. And we can't help ourselves. We are driven by biological mandates to consume as individuals and to procreate.
The part about us not being able to help ourselves is really the distal, root cause of all of our misdeeds and subsequent problems. More proximal to our current conundrum is a set of immediate causes and their consequences.
The global-scale threats are legion. Here is just a partial list of some of the more threatening problems, the human role in causing them, and their possible consequences. Any one of these could be incredibly troubling for mankind, but taken together, because they are all interrelated and feeding upon one another, I am convinced, as are a growing number of scientists, they spell certain disaster.
Population Overshoot
In all but a handful of cultures, and those are generally hunter-gatherer societies, and certainly among the so-called civilizations throughout history, the general sentiment of: “Be fruitful and multiply,” seems to have prevailed. Humans, like many animals, have a few, albeit weak, built-in mechanisms for checking the size of populations relative to the carrying capacity of the local environment. Many cultures have practiced various forms of population control and some still do today with varying degrees of success. These practices may be generally seen as part of the culture and have only more recently been seen as coming from some underlying biological drives. Some of these practices are considered barbaric and immoral to civilized sentiments. But, when they work they seem to work well.
Dilworth argues, however, that these internal checks are easily subverted by the more expansive driving biological instincts when the population perceives that 1) the environment can support more bodies, and 2) more bodies are needed to do the work needed to facilitate the extraction of resources. The turning point in human prehistory was probably the invention of agriculture. The latter, ironically, doesn't actually substantially increase the net energy per capita gain as compared with hunting and gathering, at least where the latter is done in environs that provide renewable abundance in game and food plants. Rather, it tends to decrease the uncertainty of food resource availability, which we humans seem to appreciate. Also ironically, agriculture takes more work per unit time to achieve reliable results, hence an actual reduction in net energy gain per unit of time spent in food production, per capita.
In other words, Dilworth appears to be arguing that the population increases that have been attributed to agriculture came not from an increased availability of food, per se, but from a diminishing of the strength of signals that would have triggered internal natural checks on population expansion enabled by the use of food production technologies. The working classes were allowed to just barely subsist and procreate sufficiently to assure a continuing or even expanding working class to support the higher classes. And, the taller the class hierarchy, the broader the base working class needed. But such expansion also included bringing more land into cultivation in order to support the growing population and still provide a steady flow of goods up to the higher reaches of the hierarchy. Growth of population and “economic” activity — originally farming — thus became a necessity and not just a consequence.
Diminishing Net Energy Per Capita
Of course, the problem is that there is just so much land that can be cultivated. We live on a finite world. Resources, including land, are finite. As growth consumes more and more of the area around the centers of the civilization hierarchies it eventually comes up against either competing hierarchies or marginal land that eventually cannot sustain a production quantity needed. There is an additional interesting phenomenon that occurs as expansion continues, even when the land might be productive. Under the conditions of travel by animal-drawn carts, it turns out that there is a natural distance from the center beyond which the net energy returns begin to diminish geometrically with linear (arithmetic) increase in distance. Horses and oxen need to be fed and can only carry so much weight. The strategy of growth as a way to keep the enterprise going may have seemed like a good idea to the overseers, but in fact there came a time when each unit of growth produced diminishing, and eventually negative benefits. This is related to the idea first advanced by Joseph Tainter regarding the collapse of civilizations due to increased complexity[1].
The phenomenon of a population exceeding its environment's carrying capacity, defined as the capacity of the environment to replenish levels of required resources at a rate that can sustain an average number of individuals (or more correctly the amount of biomass represented in a given species) and to absorb the waste products of that population without toxic overload, has been documented many times in ecological studies. The world works primarily on a steady but limited flow of energy from the sun. In the end, that flow of energy determines the rate of biological resource replenishment (all other factors being equal). All other animals are restricted to a relatively fixed carrying capacity, at least over normal life cycle times. But humans, in their ability to harness exosomatic (outside their own bodies) sources of energy, and their capacity for invention, found a workaround to this basic limit. They developed ways to appropriate more resources for themselves, leaving the sub-human species less for their needs. Agriculture, after all, requires taking over large tracts of land for the purpose of growing just a few crops of interest to humans, generally in mono culture. Too often this results in loss of habitat for many other species. Once humans discovered and started dipping into the bank account of fossil sunlight known as fossil fuels, the explosion of population was inevitable. For the last several centuries, thanks to the high energy content of hydrocarbon fuels, the net energy per capita used to extract other natural resources and support greater consumption has been increasing. The energy return on energy invested in extracting fossil fuels started out so high that human ingenuity for finding ways to consume more were seemingly released from any natural constraints. The modern technological society emerged as a result.
Unfortunately, fossil fuels are exactly the kind of finite non-renewable resource that constitutes an upper bound on the extent of the population. No, actually it is worse than that. Because we have reached a point in which those fuels are diminishing in toto, and what we are extracting now takes more energy to do it, we have the equivalent of what earlier civilizations faced when they reached the geographical limits for net energy gain. We are approaching the point of zero gains (if we haven't already passed it) and from here on out every human being on the planet will be facing a decline in net energy available to stay alive. Income inequities make the variances cause increasing starvation at the low ends while the higher classes keep trying to appropriate wealth for themselves.
The human species, like other species under similar conditions, has gone into overshoot. The very typical outcome of such a condition, primarily because the dynamics are nonlinear, is a crash, a wipe out of the majority of the population[2]. Dilworth, in his conclusion, is in agreement with a growing number of researchers that this is the most likely outcome for humanity. We are animals after all.
Derivative Problems
Overpopulation, i.e., overshoot, and diminishing net energy per capita lead to a large number of secondary problems that will also play a role in an unsustainable future for humanity. We are running out of potable water in many regions. This is in part because of overshoot but also in part due to climate changes that, in turn, are aggravated, if not directly caused by, the burning of fossil fuels adding carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere and oceans at unprecedented rates. The globe is warming and this leads to the climate chaos we are starting to witness. It also leads to ocean level rises that will inundate many inhabited regions of the globe in the not-too-distant future.
From the time of early agriculture and the reorganization of societies, humans needed some convenient method for abstractly representing wealth. At first they needed some way to account for stored grains and other commodities that would be traded. Later they needed a convenient way to carry around representations of the wealth they controlled and trade those representations rather than carry around the wealth itself. Money was invented to accomplish this task. Not long thereafter a form of lending was invented to act as investment in new enterprises. Derived most likely from the dispensing of saved grains as seed to be used by new young farmers to get started, the idea of lending wealth to generate more wealth in the future took hold. Today we have debt financing of everything from homes to bets (Wall Street). This idea of using debt-based money to invest in a future increase in wealth production was workable, even when abused as has become clear in recent years. As long as the supply of net energy was increasing there was always an expectation that the economy would expand and that would allow the pay down of debt. This was the case for the industrial revolution and well into the 1950s the expansion of oil and other fossil fuel supplies was supporting the capacity to do more physical work in the future. That meant there could be more wealth produced in the future, enough to pay back both principal and interest (the rental cost of the money for the risk taken) as well as make a profit. But now that the net energy supply is starting to diminish the strategy of growth and debt-based financing (as opposed to savings-based, as was the case in lending excess grain to a farmer for seed) is failing. And because society went so far into a debt buildup in expectation that growth would just go on forever, the resulting bubble burst that has ensued (and is still in progress) has had devastating effects on global economies. And it will only get worse.
We humans have been incredibly smart in devising machines, methodologies, and abstractions that have exploited the availability of natural resources and especially exosomatic energy sources. Too smart.
But not, it seems, smart enough to think ahead about the consequences of consumption of finite resources. We were and are extremely clever. But we are not wise.
What Does It Mean to Be Smart?
All of the above problems might have solutions if we can just invent the right technologies and apply them in time to avoid pain and suffering. We should be able to do this because we are smart apes, right?
This is precisely where the argument turns. We are smart. Smart enough to create technologies like agriculture and machinery that seem to solve certain immediate problems. We seek more certainty in our food supply so we plant and tend crops. We have to settle down in one place to do this but that, at first, seems a side benefit. We want to get places fast, and do harder work faster so we invent machine-based tools that require external sources of energy to run. We solve a problem, the problem of increasing demand for the products, by making those products more rapidly. At every turn, the smart ape has solved a problem of immediacy and done so with extraordinary results.
What this ape has also done is ignore a meta-problem. Every problem solution carries with it the seeds of another problem of greater scope. Dilworth sees the pattern clearly. It turns out that the entropy version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics explains this situation[3]. In the process of humans inventing ways to do what is to them useful work (and solve problems) they are effectively decreasing the local entropy in their vicinity. That is, they are increasing the order (e.g. building functional structures and equipment) for themselves. But the Second Law tells us that every gain in order in a system can come only at the expense of an even greater increase in disorder (entropy) of the larger, embedding system — the environment. So even as humans increased the “value” of their human-built world, they did so at the greater expense of the environment. Order and organization on the Earth have decreased overall (think, for example, about biodiversity - a measure of organization/complexity), as the Second Law demands, but at a rate accelerated by the activities of humanity. The Earth system had been operating close to a dynamic equilibrium (Dilworth's first chapter provides insights into the meaning of this) prior to the evolution of humans. This is because the solar influx of energy had stabilized and even though the Earth was experiencing cycles (e.g. the ice ages) of ups and downs, on the whole, the biosphere was adaptively able to maintain its activities precisely because the rate of fluctuation was matched by the rate of evolutionary change in species. After humans got started, that dynamic state was forever disrupted, with greater energy dissipation and rejiggering of many of the large scale, long time geochemical cycles such as the carbon and hydrological cycles. All of this is now witnessed at a global scale. And it is very much the proximal cause of all of our other problems.
So here is the crux of the matter. We are smart enough to have created this situation by virtue of our capacity to increase the rate of entropy increase for the whole Earth system. But we are not smart enough to fix it. That is because of a simple fact. Smartness is for invention and solving local problems. Intelligence and creativity are great for finding new ways to increase entropy. In a perverse twist, this is exactly what biological evolution was all about! And we smart humans were simply fulfilling our biological mandates. Unfortunately, from my own perspective, that also means the greatest natural check of all, a negative feedback control, whereby humans destroy the very life support systems they need to exist, will correct the situation. Any time any system gets out of control it breaks apart. Why should the human-built system be any different?
The Vicious Circle Principle
Thus we come to Dilworth's vicious circle principle (VCP). Man gets smart enough to become inventive. He invents things that allow him to survive and through increased fitness produce more offspring. But as often as not he creates something like a surplus and nature abhors both vacuums and concentrations, so man begets more men to work off the surplus. Or he invents some variation on a need fulfilling tool that produces something men might want, even though it isn't strictly speaking in support of survival. After a while, those wants being fulfilled, man gets used to having whatever it is and it effectively becomes a new need. But then population overshoot reduces the availability of the whatever and a new problem exists. So back to the drawing board, invent something else that will fulfill the new need. And around we go again. I have not done justice to Dilworth's explication here. I only wanted to give the reader a sense of the direction the author is taking. Of course you should read his work to fill in the details. And there are many more details that he covers superbly.
This VCP, according to Dilworth's thesis, is the penultimate root cause of all problems that we are experiencing. It is the process where intervention would be needed to stop and reverse the predicament. But therein lay the greatest problem of all. The VCP exists because of our human nature and nothing short of changing that is going to allow an intervention that could halt the vicious circle dynamic.
I think that Dilworth has truly put his finger on the central problem for human kind. We are caught on a circle of activity that is ‘vicious’ in terms of creating and worsening all of the problems we face. But I have reservations about this way of putting it.
‘Vicious’ is a value laden term. This circle, which increases the Earth's overall entropy, appears vicious precisely because we are the victims, and we cannot help having an anthropocentric perspective. But looked at from the perspective of evolution there is nothing vicious about it at all. In fact the term vicious has no meaning at all in evolution. Would we have thought of the comet that ploughed into Earth 65 million years ago and appears to have been instrumental in killing off the dinosaurs as vicious? Were the climate changes associated with ancient ice ages that appear to have been instrumental in the evolution of the genus Homo vicious because they also created the conditions that made other species of primitive humans go extinct?
I have preferred to think of the phenomenon of man's cleverness as the emergence of a new phenomenon in exactly the same way we now think of the emergence of life from pre biological chemistry. Of course, taking this perspective means that the destruction of civilization and the potential bottleneck event for humanity[4] are fundamentally necessary. And that is the hard part to swallow. As a human no one could ‘want’ the demise of our species, certainly. On the other hand, if we are really so smart as to understand the full implications of evolution itself, perhaps we could come to accept the inevitability of this outcome.
Conclusion
Overall, I think Dilworth's book has added an important perspective to understanding humanity's predicament. That is to say, once one has acknowledged that humans are facing a predicament that may not have any resolution but one of collapse and demise, then at least Dilworth provides an explanation for how it came about.
I have just one technical issue with the work, and one philosophical difference. The technical issue has to do with the author's heavy reliance on the concept of karyotypology to explain speciation. He uses the karyotype as if equating it to the singular marker of speciation, i.e., two different species within a single genus would have differing karyotypes. The evolutionists and geneticists I've spoken to about this express puzzlement at this usage. Karyotypes refer to the structural forms of chromosomes, especially as they appear in metaphase of mitotic cell division. It is the case that different species within a given genera may have different numbers and shapes of chromosomes that are thought to interfere with hybridization (at least viable) but this isn't always the case. Species differentiation is most generally thought to be genetic based. Some genetic differences could, of course, be the cause of differences in karyotypes, but that is a side effect of speciation, not the cause. Even with this possible misinterpretation of cause and effect in speciation, Dilworth's overall narrative of evolution is functionally correct, so the heavy reliance on karyotypology doesn't materially detract from the story.
I am with the author insofar as the pathway by which we reached this crossroads point. I agree we are too smart for our own good. But, my own take is that this is not an indictment of intelligence and creativity so much as a recognition of an inadequacy, to date, for the evolution of a mentality that might be more fit to manage its own smartness. We are smart, but not adequately wise. And we are not adequately wise because our brain structures that handle higher-order judgment have not yet evolved sufficiently to manage our smartness. You have heard the old saw: “Just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we should do that thing.” Just because we figured out how to split the atom to generate unimagined energies didn't necessarily mean that we should build atom bombs or nuclear reactors. We did it because we could and there was no higher-order judgment providing intuitions about the dangers of progressing down that road.
The brain basis for higher-order judgment and intuitive, unbiased guidance for decision making is what I have called sapience. It is the newest brain capacity in evolutionary terms and is deeply related to the capacity of humans to form abstract representations, especially language. It co-evolved with intelligence but started ‘later’ in evolutionary history, so is out of phase with the former. It has to catch up. My story ends a bit differently from Dilworth's. I see the impending impasse as the evolutionary opportunity for this to occur. In other words, rather than just writing off the genus Homo as failed because it was too smart, I prefer to imagine that the bottleneck is an opportunity for sapience to expand and come to provide an adequate management mental capacity for our cleverness. I have developed a scenario for the further evolution of the brain structures involved in sapience that require surprisingly little additional brain matter — more an issue of slight reorganization and wiring. Of course this is highly speculative. But it is based on known neuroscience and evolution theory. It is not idle speculation.
Whether Dilworth is right, that the end is upon us due to being too smart for our own good, or I am right that this is just a stepping stone toward an improved sentience on Earth, is something none of us will ever know. Where we deeply agree is what the near consequences for Homo sapiens sapiens will be. And the value in attending to the consequences is in anything we can conjure to lessen the pain and suffering — to be forewarned is to be prepared. The real value of Dilworth's work is to at least find some intellectually satisfying (even if disturbing) explanation for why we are where we are.
Footnotes
[1] Tainter, J. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press.
[2] Catton, William (1982). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press.
[3] See: Schneider, E. D. & Sagan, D. (2006). Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, University of Chicago Press.
[4] See: Catton, William (2009). Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris. Also see my review of this book: Question Everything: Humanity's Impending Impasse.
Great read George - thanks for recommending it. i'm not hopeful that humanity in its current evolution will survive at all once the collapse happens. Due to our baser instincts chaos (entropy personified, if you will) will destroy any semblance of survival or sustainability. The rich 1% of humanity that have been the "overlords" for many generations (and even the new rich) think they can buy security when people are starving all around them. They don't realize how vulnerable they are. The hordes will find a way to get what they need from where ever it's being stored because they have nothing to lose. Once the necessities are gone, they'll turn on each other until no one is left (nobody can do all the farming, maintenance, education, energy and resource extraction, medical needs and security etc by themself or in any small group). So, clever as we are, i think there is no place to hide and no preparation will get anyone through the collapse we face - since our ultra-complex civilization will be reduced to the stone age in a blink and scarce resources will curtail any long term survival.
i sincerely hope i'm wrong, but the way it looks is that the planet will kill us off (cancer that we are) and rebalance the chemistry we screwed up so badly in a few millenia and maybe the conditions will be right to re-boot the whole life cycle again. Hopefully some DNA rememberance of our short-term thinking mistake will survive to breed the kind of "wise" life-form that can peacefully co-exist with the planet (as stewards) and not overpopulate it.
Posted by: Tom | February 03, 2012 at 03:46 AM
George,
T
hanks for the book review. I will definitely read it to see if it does as good of a job accounting for our path to where we are now as you say it does.
Since I have also read your writings extensively I am curious to see if my comparison of your views and the book will be substantially the same as yours.
For now I wanted to make an observation and pose some questions.
First I should say that I am of the opinion that the bottleneck event is inevitable stepping stone on the evolutionary path. As such it is neither bad nor good. We just have to live thru it and that’s all. I of course would want to avoid as much suffering for myself and others as possible but I am clear that it cannot be done. So what will be will be, che sara, sara.
And here is my observations and questions.
It seems to me that many overlook the experiential nature of our learning. We are born knowing nothing. That is neonate ignorance. Collectively as species we accumulated vast amounts of knowledge but our institutions reflect evolution out of ignorance. I think this aspect of human condition is overlooked even by you. Ignorance is our default state as individuals and it is also our predicament as species. This of course is no surprise because organism-whole continuously gets fresh injections of ignorance (newborns) and the education is not about developing our brains but about conditioning the individual to conform to the norms of the society and make sure that new generations take over the status quo from their predecessors. And thus o on the level of organism-whole ignorance perpetuates itself.
Some individuals (like yourself, for example) due to specific circumstances of their upbringing and possibly because of some inborn variations in brain wiring (I don’t mind calling it “more sapience”) mature to be capable of understanding bigger picture and indeed end up doing exactly that.
And I think there should be a number of individuals like this among 7 billion walking the surface of the planet now.
Do you think my observation is valid? If yes then the population bottleneck event is merely a feedback loop. This is our first opportunity to experience the natural selection with some of us actually understanding how natural selection works. And we also can understand how we are organized and why . And we can figure out what needs to change to align ourselves with the large planetary system of which we are most dynamic part.
In my view understanding the institutional aspect of ignorance perpetuating itself is the key to minimizing the time it will take us as the species to “get it”. And from what I see in the academia and blogosphere there is next to nothing in terms of the inquiry into this aspect of human condition.
This is why I say that SCIENCE is merely serving IGNORANCE. This is why I say that until men and women of science recognize that they are the ONLY agency of the learning our species is forced to do we will not move towards sustainability but will continue the spiral of irreversible corruption of the environment; decreasing carrying capacity of the planet and die-off of drone/burden overpopulation.
The longer it takes us to learn as the organism-whole the smaller the number of individuals that could be ultimately supported by the planet even if we strip our consumption to the base-domain human requirements (basic food, shelter and conversation with another human) eliminating all pecking-order based consumption (wealth, gadgets, status telling asrtifacts , etc.)
This is why men and women of science bear unique responsibility to the species whether they recognize it or not. This is why I expect those who learn enough of science to understand this responsibility to come out of the woods and start searching for one another in order to create the seed group and start working on understanding of how our institutions could evolve from “democracy and capitalism” towards “heuristic hierarchy of heuristic hierarchies”.
And the key to this process is recognizing that our personal ideology and beliefs including morality and human rights do not enter the picture.
And this is not heartless but as humane as it can be because ultimately it will minimize the number of those who will be born only to die.
Posted by: Aboc Zed | February 03, 2012 at 07:29 AM
you believe we landed on the moon? yet my cell phone still does not make a call at 8K feet above the earth.
Posted by: roccman | February 03, 2012 at 07:42 AM
Tom,
I know there is this bleak outlook. But I have met people who give me reason to believe that there will be a shred of DNA left after the worst is over. All need not be lost.
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Aboc,
I am not really sure what you mean by 'ignorance'. Both evolution and learning are processes that build upon prior knowledge. We as individuals are not actually born as blank slates (see: Steven Pinker's book Blank Slate). There is a good mathematical argument that supports the idea that no learning process (and evolution is a learning process, understood correctly) can operate from scratch (see: the No Free Lunch Theorem). In essence all learning processes are built on prior knowledge or "bootstrapped". Thus I think you need to be careful to specify what you mean by ignorance. For example, all children are born with the innate ability to learn a language or a moral code, but which one they actually learn is dependent on their culture. Without that innate ability (gained as an evolutionary learning process) they would truly be ignorant of how to communicate and interact with others. It is true that we are all born with no explicit knowledge (e.g. the fact of the Great Wall of China) but we are built with the knowledge of how to acquire such explicit (and implicit) knowledge and do so quite naturally.
I think that what we observe in most people today, that relates to their seeming ignorance, is simply due to information overload and a shutdown of the intellect to protect the ego (as noted by a commentator in the previous thread). This is artificially induced ignorance rather than a manifestation of a priori ignorance per se.
Now, having said that, I recognize that we as a body of knowledge-encoding beings are ignorant of much in terms of how the Universe works. This includes knowledge of how we, ourselves, work. And science is an excellent process by which to go on learning what we need to learn. But I don't think science is going to solve the sociological problem caused by insufficient sapience. Even the most brilliant Nobel Laureate scientists can be only modestly wise (though there is a strong correlation between intelligence and wisdom!) Today, our universities are pumping out a commodity called PhDs in the sciences. These are people of above average intelligence but who think doing science is a kind of mechanical process for which they have been "trained". Science is in trouble every bit as much as are all of our human institutions. I don't think you will have much success telling scientists that they have a "unique responsibility". The ones who are highly sapient to begin with already know this and many are doing something about it. Howard Odum was an excellent example. Edward O. Wilson, David Pimentel and many others are contemporary examples. They do their best to dispel the ignorance but because of the phenomenon I mentioned above, it is like talking to a brick wall.
The effects we see are due to too many people, too much complexity in our culture, and too little sapience in the average brain.
BTW: I still do not know what you mean by a "heuristic hierarchy". That combination of terms does not invoke an image for me.
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roccman,
Sorry for your inconvenience, but yes I do believe we landed on the moon.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | February 04, 2012 at 02:41 PM
http://www.countercurrents.org/salmony270112.htm
Human Beings With Feet of Clay And Self-Proclaimed
Masters of the Universe
By Steven Earl Salmony
27 January, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Humankind could soon come face to face with an incredible and unprecedented situation. We are spectacularly successful at doing something potentially ruinous of all we claim to be protecting and preserving as we ever more rampantly increase our exploitation of natural resources and continually increase our food production and distribution capabilities. Stupidly we hold fast to a wicked idea that, if we do not do these things, a catastrophe will follow. This upside down, deluded thinking is leading us to risk the precipitation of a colossal disaster of some unimaginable sort. The continuous plunder of limited resources and conversion of biomass into human mass, including the continual increase of food production to feed a growing population, are precisely what is causing humanity to charge down a “primrose path’ toward an unfolding confrontation with a global, human-driven ecological wreckage.
Perhaps we need to invite one another to listen more, see farther on a clear day, and communicate better. Thanks to all in the Circle of Friends and the Royal Society’s People and the Planet Working Group for being now here just as you are. We are going to make a difference. Like all of you, I do not have answers, but not having answers cannot be used as a ‘justification’ by population professionals, demographers and economists on our watch for ceasing their explorations and denying extant scientific research. Scientists cannot consciously and deliberately deny evidence of what could somehow be real. All these unwitting experts must be called out. If foolhardy experts and their greedmongering benefactors are ultimately victorious in their elective mutism and willful denial of science, what is to keep silence from killing the world we inhabit? If ‘the ninety-nine percent’ are denying the human overpopulation of Earth, then 0.99% of the remaining 1% are in denial of the science of human population dynamics, I suppose. These circumstances are intolerable and cannot stand. As a growing number of scientists are making all of us aware, a way needs to be discovered and chosen that effectively communicates an adequate understanding of the profoundly dangerous situation in which the human community finds itself in our time. As Paul Ehrlich reported last year, “Everybody who understands the situation is scared witless.” That as it may be, experts need to gather their wits about them because they still have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform. After all, we live by our wits not witlessness; moral courage not fear; and by adapting to the requirements of reality rather than putting our heads in the sand. Somehow the vision, the honesty, the judgement, the pluck, the will and the means will be summoned by human beings with feet of clay to acknowledge, address and overcome the human-induced global challenges that are already dimly visible on the far horizon. Otherwise the greed of self-proclaimed masters of the universe and the witlessness of their minions, who together rule the world on our watch, will certainly bring about its ruin as a fit place for human habitation.
In all the seriousness and gravity of what could be true, never in a lifetime did I expect to see a situation like the global predicament looming ominously before humanity. Although my eyes were open during the first 50 years of life, I did not for a split second catch sight, even through a glass darkly, of the awesome big picture: the global predicament that is given its shape in the gigantic presence of seven billion, soon to become 9 billion human beings ravaging a finite planet with size, composition and frangible environs of Earth. The sight of something so awesome left me initially thunderstruck and later on incessantly compelled to speak out as I have for years. Perhaps speaking out about what is true to you as best it can be expressed and thereby raising awareness, is at least one distinctly human way to go forward.
Posted by: Steven Earl Salmony | February 05, 2012 at 10:31 AM
George,
Thank you for the review and continued sharing of your vision for the future. At my regular Saturday breakfast with my four grandchildren (ages 19 - 25), we discussed your review and your interest in sapience. Following are some of our conclusions. They may be a bit off topic but they flow from your post and may give you another view of how people, who are actively organizing a community, respond to your perspective.
We agree that the decreasing availability of net energy and our current overshoot will lead to a bottle neck (our term is die off). The bottle neck will filter out those who are unable to cope/compete in an environment of drastically reduced resources and general chaos. The question then becomes, What set of human characteristics will provide the greatest potential for survival? We are particularly interested because we are consciously planning and preparing for all or some portion of our family getting through the bottleneck. Your wisdom is of great value to us and I hope that this comment will elicit a response from you.
Today, because of the lack of sapience and one man/one vote we elect those who are the most persuasive liars. Once in power they use that power to enhance their position and over time create a ruling class that possesses a minimum of sapience. Because of the lack of sapients, it is impossible for those in authority to tell the truth. If the CEO of a major oil company called a press conference to tell the truth about peak oil, the company’s stock would fall precipitously and he would be fired and disgraced. If the Nobel economist stated the truth about the world economy he would never be invited back to Davos, Jackson Hole, or any other lucrative speaking gig. The truthful politician does not get elected. Therefore we are not likely to select people of significant sapience for leaders.
History indicates that when resources are in short supply, people turn to rape and pillage. There are those who are actively planning to take control by force (war lord) in less populated areas at some point in the anticipated collapse and ensuing chaos. Either the sapient will meet that force with equal force and superior tactics or they will eliminated or made subservient to the brutal war lords. In other words, become a superior war lord or be eliminated or enslaved.
In our discussion someone suggested the concept that the power of the second can be greater than the power of the first. Immediately, I recalled that my significant success in a large aerospace corporation flowed from taking the initiative to influence those above me who had the power to effect change to the system. I routinely wrote personal notes to those above me in the management hierarchy suggesting major improvements. Most often the changes were implemented and in my opinion resulted in significantly improved systems.
At the moment, I see that the sapient has the following options in influencing the system; 1) By force of arms, 2) By becoming a powerful second to a powerful first, or 3) By appealing to the innate human trait of seeking and adopting a religious faith (establish a religion led by sapients).
I fully expect a war lord to arise in my community. If I can influence him according to my Christian faith, I will cooperate and even support him. Supporting a war lord is not incompatible with my Christian faith. In fact on April 15, I will pay very tangible support to the most powerful ‘war lord’ that ever existed. If that war lord begins to damage my community and thus my family, I will strive to neuter or eliminate him.
T
Posted by: Baw Faw T | February 05, 2012 at 07:17 PM
Jorge, no hablo inglés y usé el traductor de google para intentar entender tu artículo, el cual no termine de leer porque me parece un error intentar separar al ser humano del resto de la naturaleza terrestre.
Mi idea es que no somos más que una herramienta de este complejo sistema llamado vida, y que nuestra función no es otra que llevar ese sistema a otro lugar antes de que se agoten los recursos aquí en la tierra. No importa si lo conseguimos con forma humana, con una bacteria que se adapte a otro medio alcanzaría, y quizás luego de unos millones de años puede que aparezca algo parecido a nosotros, pero eso no es lo importante.
Todo indica que vamos por el camino correcto.
Espero que a pesar de mi pésima redacción usted pueda entender algo de lo que intenté decir.
hasta la vista baby
Santiago Cravero
Posted by: santiago cravero | February 05, 2012 at 08:50 PM
T,
Many other readers have stated a belief that the historical pattern of human barbarism or overlording will re-emerge as a result of the impending bottleneck. Of course I expect something like this to occur, but I do not think it sustainable for very long. What we face is a very different situation from what we humans were in coming up the net energy per capita curve through history. It takes increasing net energy to sustain an overlord because maintaining power over the underlings is expensive - just ask the Saudi princes today! In a world of diminishing resources (and a lot of turmoil) future would-be overlords are going to find it difficult to maintain any kind of position over the masses, especially if the masses keep dying!
I think the period of reversion to feudalism or whatever interim economics is tried will be short lived. By definition a bottleneck eliminates all but a very small founding population. The last such event involving humans may have left no more than a few thousand individuals out of a population of several million. It is difficult for me to imagine the conditions under which a feudal-like society could exist in the future. This is especially the case in major agricultural regions where the soils have been so depleted and reliant on fertilizers, etc. that even feudal farming might not be very productive.
If you read any of the series on the Goal and the Path:
My idea of a "religion" has more to do with enlisting the aid of lower-sapient beings who, nevertheless, are sufficiently sapient to see that for humanity to have a distant future they will need to take actions today, before the worst of the collapse, to prepare the pathway for the higher sapients (sort of like John the Baptist's making the way ready for Jesus). The idea of a nomadic life is to remove the sapients from the population centers so as to minimize their contact with overlord types should they arise. The trails that they follow will need supplies in caches that are put there by those who wish to help them survive. Those caches need to be built today.
There can be no one group of nomads, but many, taking different paths in different parts of the world. There are no guarantees that any will survive for many reasons. But the more that set out, the more likely some of them will survive past the time of major social turmoil. At least, that is the strategy that seems most appropriate to me.
Your option to influence an overlord might work. But in my experience the old saw that power corrupts (when wielded by the less-than-sapient) should be taken seriously.
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Santiago,
My Spanish is very rusty. I submitted your text to an on-line translator that gave me the following:
Perhaps you can now run that through google's translator and see if it comes back with Spanish that reasonably represents what you've said. [Invitation to anyone out there who has much better Spanish than mine to offer a translation!]
If I understand this (and it is reasonably correct) you are operating under the impression that I have segregated humanity from the rest of nature. This is not the case. My view is that Homo sapiens represents the emergence of a new level of organization on the planet. As with prior emergences this one is highly dependent on the lower levels of organization and so is still a part of nature. Nevertheless, as a new level, humans and their societies provide new behaviors not predicted from the behaviors of their components. Therefore they do need to be analyzed and treated as a new phenomenon in its own right.
I hope that translates OK!
George
Posted by: George Mobus | February 06, 2012 at 12:29 PM
You all might like to take a look at this:
http://guymcpherson.com/2012/02/toward-an-economy-of-earth/
Posted by: Tom | February 06, 2012 at 01:56 PM
George-
I just reviewed a copy of the book. It has a similar theme to Nikolai Eberhardt's "From the Big Bang To The Human Predicament" and I have to say that I got more out of the Eberhardt book. Have you read "From the Big Bang..."?
Matt
Posted by: Matt Holbert | February 09, 2012 at 04:31 PM
George,
I completely support your point about the need to define “ignorance” and I was very happy to see that you elaborated with your comment. When we define “ignorance” we of course also define “knowledge”.
I liked your suggestion to look at evolution as a “learning process” and that resonates strongly with me saying that we as individuals are born in ignorance and as species we are ignorant too.
Especially when you talk about us as a body that constitutes of knowledge-encoding beings and how we have yet much to learn about how Universe works and especially how, we, work. And yes SCIENCE is an excellent process by which we go on learning what we need to learn. And I would add the _only_ process.
When I talk about us being ignorant as organism-whole I talk about our institutions being essentially primitive institutions. That is they reflect evolutionary “knowledge” accumulated long before “emergence of sapience” if you will.
And yes you are right about telling scientists that “they have responsibility to the organism-whole” is not going to work because nobody can tell anybody what to do or what to think or what they should or should not do. Not to mention that “scientists” are first and foremost “members of society” and therefore as individuals they have very little in terms of going against institutions. That is what you call “talking to the wall”.
Yes most sapient among scientists already doing “right thing” in terms of explaining SCIENCE to others and sharing their knowledge but what I am trying to draw attention to is the lack of proper effort to build an _institution_ that in its foundations would have SCIENCE as the never–ending process of accumulation of knowledge.
What I am talking about is the need to infuse the scientific process into institutions of mankind.
And this can only be done by starting from a small seed group and watching that seed group survive population bottleneck event and being the only viable way of societal organization eventually become the default human condition.
Heuristic hierarchy would be the type of organizational structure that dynamically reconstitutes itself in accordance with the knowledge it accumulates about the relationship of its structure to its viability (self-perpetuation) within some other “larger” environment.
Heuristic refers to the fact that this process does not have a pre-determined path but the attractor states of the system exist and given enough time the system will reach the attractor state because such event is “encoded” in the first-order properties of the system (physical or matter-and-energy characteristics of the building blocks from which the structure builds itself).
I am sure you know what I am talking about because your idea of human evolution having a trajectory is precisely the idea of attractor state for human condition.
Our brain is heuristic hierarchy with attractor states of feral child on one hand (a human raised without human language communicators “looses” its ability to operate in the language environment) and continuous refinement and co-evolution of our language definitions together with evolution of our configuration-space (design-space in your language) on the other end of the spectrum.
Our current socio-economic system of democracy and capitalism is not heuristic hierarchy because accumulation of knowledge about how its structure relates to its viability is not “built-in” into the system.
Science works on the side, and essentially, does not mix with governance and government.
This is natural outcome of evolutionary process.
Democracy and capitalism will have to run its course and the building up and unwinding of the bottleneck will continue for as long as it takes for us as organism-whole “to learn” or _evolve_ the next level of organization that will manifest in the emergeance of appropriate kind of institutions.
I refer to that next level of organizational level as “heuristic hierarchy of heuristic hierarchies". One can also call it to be at the same time “heuristic hierarchism and hierarchical heurism”. You say it will happen when more sapience is accumulated in the neo-cortex. I do not mind talking about it in that way but I prefer to focus on evolution of human institutions and “feeling out” the path of our species from unsustainable democracy and capitalism to sustainability (“sapient government” in your language).
Posted by: Aboc Zed | February 10, 2012 at 07:43 AM
Dear Commentators,
I've been receiving e-mails from some of you complaining about comments not showing up. It turns out that typepad has adopted a new policy (that I was unaware of) regarding the length of comments. Apparently they are filtered as spam if they are too long, or if the poster is already in the spam list. I have gone to the spam list and published some older comments that should now appear. This is to get them out of the spam list. Some may be repeats. Also, they do pick up content that sounds spammy, whatever that means, so don't use phrases that might show up in some kind of spam (like: "only 20 days left till this offer expires...")
I have not made a daily habit of going to the spam list to check to make sure there aren't any valid comments there. I would not like to have to do this because I really don't have time to do so. I guess until they come up with some better mechanism for keeping comments shorter, I'll have to ask you to break long comments up into several posts and try to let some time pass between. I have yet to find out what the max length is. Obviously the rule doesn't apply to the blog owner (yet), only to commentators.
So if you want to make sure your comment is posted, please keep each short (don't use my model of making several responses in a single comment) or it will end up in the spam folder and I may not get to see it for several days.
I apologize for inconveniences. Maybe some day they will figure things out (like giving the owner the right to specify comment lengths).
George
Posted by: George Mobus | February 10, 2012 at 01:15 PM
Tom,
Saw this. I've added Guy's blog to my blogroll. Thanks for the comment that prompted me to contact Guy.
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Matt,
I've put Eberhardt's book on my wishlist. Amazon doesn't stock it but has a number of sellers who do. Next book purchase I will get it. Thanks for the suggestion (it did have high recommendations on Amazon).
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Aboc,
This might get some kickback from many social scientists! Sounds awfully scientistic.
Well I think I understand a little better now what you mean by "heuristic", although the usage is very unusual and can be misleading. Why not just say that mentation is a dynamical process that appears to have chaotic attractors? In my experience the word heuristic means rules of thumb or guidelines which suggests intentionality, whereas a chaotic attractor basin is more stochastic and does not imply intentions.
But you still need to explicate what a "heuristic hierarchy" means. What would a "chaotic attractor hierarchy" be, if you actually do mean the latter concept?
George
Posted by: George Mobus | February 11, 2012 at 05:05 PM
George and esteemed commentators,
Yes I may sound “scientistic” but it does not bother me at all.
Science (in my opinion) has shown beyond a doubt that every replica of homo sapiens sapiens is substantially identical right before that moment around 20 weeks of gestation when the brain develops enough for chemical and electrical activity to begin.
Once neurons begin firing the “accumulated knowledge of evolution” expresses itself in deliberative capability. At this stage there is no “tacit knowledge” yet although you probably would say that level of sapience is already different. There is no language. The brain has not yet acquired any “ideas” or “beliefs”; there is no “knowledge stored in language” yet.
Instead there is brain as self-organized criticality and cogitation in relationals (properties of matter). The configuration-space (design-space) is limited to the space within the uterus and the depth and breadth of the relationals in which brain operates are only beginning to accumulate. No language yet, no communication except through kicking the mother from inside, but genetic property of anthropoids, which I call deliberative capability, is fully engaged and is already at work.
The “learning has” begun. The “happy smiling”, “the yelling of the argument”, “the worry about the future”, all are accompanied by mother’s hormones reaching the blood stream of the developing brain adding to the breadth and depth of experienced relationals. The developing brain, having the standard motherboard, follows the broad patterns, gets the substantially similar layout of circuits which nonetheless are not identical. The basic process of observing relationals, storing them, relating them, interconnecting them, makes continues to affect the connectivity. Language is nowhere in sight yet. Beliefs are nowhere near. Ideology does not yet exist. Brain plasticity is high, the urge to experience and explore is high. RELATIONALS ARE THE STUFF OF THOUGHT (yes I borrowed from Pinker).
Now let’s move to the time when a child is born. From the first moments of life most or all of physical discomforts experienced by a newborn are eventually alleviated by the actions of attending caregivers. These interactions allow the child to associate other humans as the guarantors of his/her viability and are his first experiences of hominid-being. As deliberative capability of the child is stimulated by these interactions the child learns to communicate his desires and his (human) condition through various vocalizations. It is important to note that at these early stages language is only complimentary to evolutionary old communication devices such as body language and non verbal vocalizations. Over time the child learns semantic conventions of the language thru observing the use of specific words in specific circumstances. As soon as the basic vocabulary reaches critical mass the child progresses to classify unknown words through the known words (synonyms - antonyms). This experience exposes language as representational system. Mastering use of language as representational system for all internal states of his organism as well as for all phenomena perceived outside of it the child develops concept of self. This event marks transition of classical persona and deliberative capability operating upon relationals directly observed (sensory inputs of touch, hunger, etc) to reificational persona and deliberative capability operating directly upon relationals of language which are, from this perspective, second-order relationals. In other words, language "transports" relationals from the physical world of brain into the self-contained world of mind and associated self.
Thus all we can ever know is the properties of matter which can only be observed in some sort of relationship to each other. To mark these properties of matter and the fundamental relationships that cannot be separated from these properties we call them “relationals”.
Back to “scientism” and science being the _ONLY_ way of KNOWING.
I trust my long introduction of “relationals” somewhat illuminates the fact that words are only names and when we use them to point to something we are merely connecting the phenomenon of “human condition” and the tag most of us agreed to use for this phenomenon.
When we talk about something that most of the people have not ever observed yet it is very difficult to convey our “meaning”. I am sure that you find yourself often in the situation when you feel that people think they understand what you mean by “sapience” but the way they use the word or talk about the concept later on betrays the fact that they are mixing it up with something which you would call a different name. For example I think I understand your concept of sapience but I may be wrong. The same does for the concept of “deliberative capability” and “heuristic hierarchy”. And the same goes about “scientism”.
To me that is not even a subject for discussion. Like existence or non-existence of God and spirituality is not a subject for discussion. What is the subject for discussion is: “What do we do with ourselves, the planet, the human condition, the way we indoctrinate children, the way we communicate, and so on and so forth TO INSURE OUR VIABILITY AS SPECIES beyond bottleneck event?” And to the extent that is the most important question one can ask himself when he has leisure time I keep coming back to it again and again. It bothers me. And I know it will continue to bother me until I die because this is the ultimate practical question of our time. Not the search of ultimate truth or TRUTH but “how do we go from unsustainable democracy and capitalism that depend on and promote overpopulation and overconsumption to sustainable socio-economic system that will operate under mantra least population with least environment/resource corruption.
Our language is intrinsically limited representational system subject to Godel incompleteness theorems. With that there is always countless quantity of ways to disagree and those ways do not need any effort on the part of communicants. One can always say that his definitions differ. To agree we need to invest time and effort into understanding our terms bridging the gap separating our idiosyncratic beliefs. To that we need to be motivated.
What would motivate us to do that? Can we find the people who care about what we leave to posterity and are willing to keep talking until we all agree what needs to be done next and how we will go about doing it? Can we agree on the course of action and follow it? Or we are stuck forever in talking mode just watching the system go through its evolutionary destiny and our personal lives merely subject to larger than life inevitabilities?
What is the role of an individual in history?
PS. I will elaborate on my understanding of “heuristic hierarchy” and how I feel it is related to “dynamic process with chaotic attractors” in a separate comment later.
Posted by: Aboc Zed | February 13, 2012 at 08:31 AM
George,
Before I attempt to relate “heuristic hierarchy” and “dynamic system with chaotic attractors” I want to ask you a question.
The entry for “chaos theory” in Wikipedia gives good overview of this field of study, applications, terminology used to describe chaotic dynamics including sensitivity to initial conditions, topological mixing and strange attractors. Fascinating.
Wikipedia article for “life” gives equally fascinating reading with 7 point descriptive definition of life as it is understood in biology and “alternative” one–line definitions trying to reflect minimum phenomena required.
Reading both articles back-to-back and tapping into “tacit knowledge” of lifetime what is your answer to the question:
Is life a dynamic system with chaotic attractors?
PS. I have an intuition for your answer that follows from your writings but I wanted to ask you this question for your most current views on the subject.
Posted by: Aboc Zed | February 13, 2012 at 11:50 AM
George,
I took Too Smart for Our Own Good by Craig Dilworth out of the library right after your review. Yesterday I finished it. I now can comment on the book and your review from a more informed perspective.
My general impression is the one of disappointment. After your review I must have had my expectations high enough for this to occur. I think you are overly generous when you say that Dilworth’s work is intellectually satisfying explanation of why we are where we are. In my opinion Dilworth work can be called “explanatory” only to the degree that any good description can be called explanatory.
I am completely behind your observation about the Dilworth’s choice of language. Calling the cycle of invention-population growth-more problems-invention to be “vicious” puts emotion and judgement of anthropocentric worldview where it does not belong. And this greatly devalues the whole work. It seems to me that the benefits of exposing the inevitability of upcoming collapse are completely negated by this paralyzing effect on our analytical abilities produced by the emotional language of “doom and gloom”. When our limbic brain is fully engaged our sapience has a lot more work to do to make sure our actions are not knee-jerk reactions.
Of course I would still give Dilworth a lot of credit for going out and reading all the works of others and meshing them all into his book. I am glad he did it because I now know “how not to write about it”.
We need a book presenting your view of the bottleneck being completely necessary from evolutionary perspective. It would help people see that we should stop wasting our energy on getting emotional about inevitable and simply start preparing for what is coming both on the level of individual and on the level of the society.
The sooner this message can be pushed into our collective consciousness the less human suffering happens over the time of transition from evolutionary past to evolutionary future.
Posted by: Aboc Zed | February 21, 2012 at 07:57 AM
Aboc,
RE: life and chaotic attractors. The problem with this question has to do with the mathematics of chaos. Life is an extremely complex process just from the numbers and kinds of molecular components and relations. Chaos is seen in extremely simple (low dimensional) systems where one can actually compute the trajectory of the phase space. Chaos in the weather system is seen in the climate models because they have abstracted so many factors in order to reduce the dimensionality.
There may very well be hidden attractors within life, but these would be hard to spot (with a few exceptions) directly. Rather, in our simplified models where non-linear relations are made explicit we see evidence of chaos. For the most part, living systems use a tremendous amount of negative feedback through redundant control loops to maintain internal consistency. If any thing this might be viewed as an anti-chaos approach!
RE: me writing a book? I have generally reject that idea because it would be a lot of work to do for what is probably a very small audience. The majority of people who would read such a book would probably not understand it, or would most likely reject it out of hand. My concepts are locally pessimistic though globally optimistic. Most people will not be able to get beyond the local pessimism part since we are talking about their personal lives at risk.
Of all the gloom-and-doom writers I know (not a small number at this point) they all are in it to try to convince the readers that they need to change their ways to prevent the worst. I have decided the worst is unavoidable, so there is no point in writing a book to suggest it is avoidable.
Rather I choose to continue in this vein, recording my thoughts and developing notions of applying systems science to the world condition to project likely scenarios and feasible actions in the face of unsolvable predicaments.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | February 25, 2012 at 11:07 AM
There is absolutely no way that computers substitute or surpass human brains. Computer gurus are just making the human brain as inspiration for their innovations, but it remains just that way. But we cannot deny the huge contribution of computers to humans.
This is a commendable discussion. I learned beautiful insights from this. Thanks!
Posted by: Escarcega Torrez | June 15, 2013 at 02:47 AM
I Have read this book and I think this is the most important one I have ever read. It is not impressively well written but its thesis is simple and striking. If such a simple view of history took such a long time to surface, it is mostly because we have self polluted ourselve with our own specificity which became an article of faith. We have fallen into a fascination toward our own history.
The genius of Dilworth is simplicity: he has the gut to look at facts casting aside morality and personal judgement.
There are points in his thesis that makes things more dire than in the above analysis of the book and that are not emphasized enough to my taste; one of them is irreversibility. Human history is ireversible meaning this transformation is fully adiabatical. As such we cannot go back smoothly but only crash fully. This is not a possibility but a predicament that is physically engraved in our history. Recent archeological history makes this past fully readable and this reading i the core of the book.
In concrete term, we now have strong indication that we have flourished on a progressive degradation of our environement, a long trend that contradicts the simple darwinistic approach: we never adapted to our environement like that would be the case in a reversible reaction with exchange of heat. We, like a fire, spreaded on progressive destruction. Our environement is largely depleted today and we would need to find another huge pocket to deplete to sustain our numbers. It is unlikely to hapen and even ifwe would, this would only postspone the crash and make it even more spectacular.
There are some omission in this book. Namely the role of society in selecting human genes, ie human self domestication. This is another aspect that would make thing even worse and prevent any further adaptation to a degraded post crash environement. Wisdom is an ndividual trait that is not relevant in a social context. A wise society, stable is a loosing configuration when confronted to an agressive destructive opportunistic society. This is one of the conclusion of american history for instance. Opportunistic, cynical behavior are selected by the fact that unsustanable way of production can sustain larger and powerfull society.
Another type of trait might emerge only if the fuel for such a society will deplete. My guess is that it is not for tomorrow and that unsustainable, aggressive and destructive societies will persist for a while, even after oil is gone.
Individual can be wise, but the wisdom tell them that they have to ponder their long term pessimism if they want to keep their income in an unsustainable society.
Posted by: kervennic | June 19, 2013 at 03:14 AM
@kervennic
Possibly. The one thing you can say about evolution is that you can't easily predict where it is going to go. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | June 19, 2013 at 12:53 PM