This morning I read an interesting piece in the Arts & Entertainment section of the Sunday New York Times by Terrence Rafferty titled “This is the Way the World Ends”. It was about a number of recent or to-be-released movies dealing with the psychological view of an end-of-the-world scenario. This is as opposed to the typical post apocalyptic (“Mad Max” or “The Road”) or the apocalyptic visions (“The Day After Tomorrow” and just about any movie made by Roland Emmerich). What I found interesting is that it highlighted a shift in the genre away from the violence aspects and toward a deeper psychological probe into how people might react to the impending destruction of the planet. Moreover, the author pointed out how there does seem to be a foreboding angst looming over humanity right now. I have posited that we humans have sensed that something is very different about the way the world is working as compared with our beliefs about how it does and should work. I do think people have sensed that something fundamental has changed, and not for the better.
This post is something I had been working on for a bit when I caught the NYT article.
Even Before a Real Bottleneck Event
The first truly major event that will unfold as we near the bottleneck event will be the collapse of global civilization with concomitant losses of socially provided services such as food and water deliveries. How people in general react to this collapse will largely provide the forces shaping the way in which the bottleneck will be experienced. At one extreme, the one most people seem inclined to envision, we have the horrors of massive fighting and slaughter between groups as aggressive bully-types (war lords) take over governance and organize gangs and even armies. We can look to East Africa for examples of this kind of response. At the other extreme we might imagine (though not take seriously) the vision of masses of people simply lying down on the ground and dying, perhaps having taken a lethal concoction similar to the Jonestown suicides.
In reality we can expect a wide array of reactions but what likely interests us is which kind of reaction will predominate. How will the average human react and what will they do as the significance of this predicament takes hold. One commonly referred model is that of Kübler- Ross' five stages of grief experienced by those who have terminal illnesses. One of the early stages corresponds to the war lord scenario, anger at being made a victim. The last stage is acceptance which might characterize the Jonestown scenario. Many people who have essentially passed through these stages and have come to accept the inevitability of the fate of humanity, but have not succumbed to total helplessness, often characterize the rest of our species as displaying the first stage, if they are at all aware of the significance of peak energy or catastrophic climate change, denial. It does seem that the current frenetic attempt by talking heads and politicians to proclaim the end of US dependence on foreign oil (thanks to shale oil and shale natural gas developments) is little more than a form of denial about the already occurring decline in net energy (from fossil fuels). The big question this model seems to pose is: will everyone pass through the stages, even if the rates of passage may vary, and end up in acceptance? One possible answer might be: Of course not — most won't survive long enough to get out of denial!
I will not attempt to provide a definitive answer to the question posed in the title of this post. The range of human reactions to stress and impending doom can already be seen to be extremely varied and not really predictable. Here I want to just explore some of the factors that might have some relevance to finding an answer to a more general question: How will the average (and hence the majority) person react as collapse precedes?
It might be useful (or at least perhaps intellectually satisfying) to consider some of the basic biological and mental factors that shape behaviors under the kinds of stresses that will ensue. If nothing else, understanding these factors and their possible effects might present a set of useful clues that all of those who are able to understand what is happening can use to motivate their own responses. In other words, being sensitive to possibilities and noting behaviors in the general population might help in planning your escape!
Instincts and Basic Drives
Let's start with some basic biology. We are, after all, animals. And as animals we have inherited the basic instincts and drives that motivate all animal life. Fundamental is the drive to persist, to survive at all costs. So deep in the nature of living systems is this drive that except under the most extreme cases of threat, what I have studied as extreme information overload (the definition of stress), the animal will take any action, some of which may actually be randomly selected, to avoid death. The mandate of life is in the very nature of the process of living. It is biochemical, homeostatic, in origin and, truthfully, is part of what differentiates living systems from non-living ones[1].
Every cell is programmed to continue with only one exception, as far as we know, that turns out to be an integral part of maintaining the integrity of the whole organism in the case of multicellular forms. And that exception is apoptosis or programmed cell death. Even this seeming deviation from the biological mandate turns out to be a necessary part of that mandate to make multicellular organisms possible. The overarching mandate for the multicellular forms is still survival at all costs.
The second mandate of living systems is actually an offshoot of the primary mandate. All living organisms must reproduce themselves. This is a natural consequence of the dueling aspects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics pitted against the drive toward increasing organization pushed by the flow of high potential energy through organized modules of matter. Entropy is constantly causing destruction (like the Vedic god Shiva in his destroyer role) and energy flow is constantly driving work to maintain and repair the decay (like Agni, god of fire, where Vishnu guides the drive toward organization). Forgive my little divergence toward Vedic lore. My point is that mankind has been observant of the nature of nature for a very long time. We grasp this essential character because we experience it directly. We have just had different names and interpretations over the ages. We are born small. We need food (energy and matter) to grow and develop. We reach maturity and we reproduce, thus expanding the biomass of our kind. At least until there is not enough energy to keep the process going.
It is ironic that these two related mandates, carried out in the extreme, create the very conditions that lead to the demise of living systems. Unfettered reproduction leads to depletion of physically constrained resources that, in turn, leads to destructive competition among living units following their individual mandate to survive. And, like yeast in a wine vat, is exactly where humanity finds itself on Earth today.
Modulation by Higher Brain Functions
Have you ever seen a common fly (or other insect) that finds itself trapped in a space that contains no food opportunities? The fly will zip back and forth in the room seeking an escape. It is doing this not because it realizes it is trapped but because its brain is wired to drive this kind of behavior as its internal energy stores are being drawn down. As its body uses up its energy reserves, its brain is programmed to search more frenetically for an escape. Eventually the energy level in stores can no longer supply the flying muscles with enough fuel to keep up that behavior. The fly lands somewhere and sits there until it expires. There aren't any other choices.
All biological (animal) systems have this same program. The difference between a fly and a human is that the latter has important, more newly evolved, brain structures that can override the instinctive drives and to find more nuanced solutions to problems like finding food. Our cerebral cortices, especially our prefrontal cortices, give us an ability to down-modulate the panic program under certain circumstances. We have the ability to use general knowledge of circumstances (as learned from experience with previous similar circumstances) that might allow us to find escape routes using signposts (general patterns signifying potential escape routes). As humans we would look for a door to open long before we just gave up.
Unfortunately, one such door to open might involve destroying anything that got in our way of finding the escape route. The door might include other people. Humans are no different from the fly in some regards. They are just smarter in terms of working out complex situations. They are smart enough to know how to blast their way out of difficult situations.
While our massive cortices provide us with the ability to modulate our basic drives (to keep us from entering a panic state) in complex threatening situations, in general all that means is we can find more “creatively” destructive ways to solve our own personal biological mandate problems. What we see in the advent of the cerebral cortex is not a substantive difference between all of pre-human biology. It is merely a complexification of how that biology is played out.
It isn't until we examine the nature of a uniquely human mental capability that we see a hint of a more transcendent approach to escaping the dictates of the biological mandates (one and two). Humans evolved a mental capability that, while biological in origin, goes far beyond the ordinary dictates of biology. It expands the spatial and temporal scales of ordinary survival of the individual to include many others over much longer scales of time. That competency is sapience. It is what defines us as biological creatures with a difference.
Sapience and a New Dimension to the Biological Mandate
We humans appear to be the first creatures on Earth to exhibit this new capability. And as evolution tends to be a process of incremental progress, our capabilities in this new dimension are merely emergent and not very well developed. We are a first, hesitant step into a new framework of evolution. We represent evolution becoming aware of itself, but only haltingly. Much more must surely be possible.
For example, sapience and its mental co-phenomenon, second order consciousness, might be found to add a new dimension to the biological mandate(s). Just as apoptosis makes it possible for multicellular organisms to meet the larger scale application of the biological mandate to more complex organisms, I think sapience provides a similar function with respect to sociality and the evolution of a stable social organization in humans (and sentient beings). Sapience may provide the capacity for certain individuals to forego their individual self-centeredness, essentially the ultimate in altruism, for the benefit of the whole society. We know that this is minimally operative when we see individuals sacrifice themselves for their country or their families. The latter is easier to explain from a purely biological perspective. The individual is maximizing his/her chances for their genes to enter the following generation if their children are protected. The former, however, requires something more than mere near-term biological benefit. Then there are stories about individuals who have sacrificed themselves for principles or beliefs. Memeticists might want to explain this as the meme analog of familial sacrifice, but that is highly conjectural. I think there is a biological basis, but one operating on a new level of organization provided by the emergence of sapience. The ability for a higher brain function to override the limbic drives is a signature of sapience. But it is merely nascent in form. How might this dimension further evolve?
I have argued incessantly that we humans are not sufficiently sapient for our own good. Put simply, we have evolved significant cleverness to figure out how to solve local problems of existence — what the biological mandates require. We are too clever. We have solved those problems such that now the inherent clash — overpopulation vs. resource availability — has finally caught up with us. But we are not wise enough to have either prevented this dilemma or to reorganize our behaviors now to compensate for our excesses. We, as a species, are merely nouveau sapient.
Sapience has a ways to go, evolutionarily speaking, to get the genus to a point of being able to deal with the kinds of scales of time and space that our species' cleverness has given us access to. We, meaning humanity, have to learn how to manage our affairs on this planet. We need to learn to live in harmony with the Ecos (Gaia) and not merely live on it and use it as if we owned it — as if it exists only for our good (more subtly it does exist for our good, to support the evolution of sapient sentience, but only so far as that sapience produces beings able to live in harmony with the rest). It will take more evolution of the human brain to get us there. It will take a further expansion of the brain regions responsible for sapience. The central region that seems to provide what sapience we possess, Brodmann area 10 of the prefrontal cortex, may need to undergo further evolution, perhaps in the form of additional expansion relative to the rest of the prefrontal cortex [2].
Evolution, however, proceeds when taxa are exposed to conditions for which they are, on average, poorly adapted. In this special case, there needs to be an environmental shift in conditions that would tend to favor (select for) higher sapience. I have considered the impending population bottleneck for which our own cleverness has set the stage as the principal event that will lead to such conditions. Of course we can't know for certain that this will be the case, but some evidence seems to point in the direction that it could be so. This includes the very fact that we can engage in a discourse about the subject and that we mere low sapients have discovered the fundamental mechanisms of inheritance that might make it possible to be active participants in nudging evolution along these lines. For me, this is my form of hope. Seeing no way to alter the trajectory that we humans have set ourselves on, I can only hope that the whole scenario precedes the unfolding of a new (and value-laden ‘better’) level of emergence.
Sapience comes in a range of levels distributed throughout the population just as other traits are. The majority of people have the barely visible level mentioned above. Most people acquire a rudimentary capacity for wisdom if they live a longish and full life. But it is wisdom that is generally circumscribed within a short distance from home and family. It is fairly local in time and space. And this accounts for why the majority of mature people still cannot comprehend what is going on in the world. The normal level of sapience in the world is just barely above threshold, so to speak. Those readers who are familiar with power-law distributions will have a better picture of how the general population looks relative to sapience levels. The vast majority of people, as I said, are low on the sapience measure. A few individuals fall in the middle and a vanishingly small percentage have truly high sapience. Or rather I should say that there should be some non-zero percentage that fit in this category. This is all conjecture on my part but power-law distributions are found quite commonly in nature and observations of the rarity of what one might easily consider as profound wisdom seem to bolster the notion that the distribution of sapience levels is of this sort [3].
This explanation sets the stage for a set of key questions. First we might ask if more sapient people will react substantially differently from the less sapient as civilization comes apart at the seams. To wit, will highly sapient people be more able to modulate their animal drives and fears in order to act in wiser ways vis-á-vis finding ways to escape the seemingly closed space? One answer, I have already suggested, is that they will do so by anticipating the closing of the space and avoid getting trapped in the first place. Not only can flies not do this, neither, it seems can the majority of humans!
Another question, with regard to the lesser sapient, is: will they succumb to their animal drives when things get obviously bad? Will we see the frenetic back and forth search for escape (war lords) followed by simply giving up (Jonestown)? Most of us will probably realize that the answer to this is yes. The biological mandate for survival will sooner or later kick in. But here is what I think is an interesting twist. Like the fly that buzzes around searching first for food, not understanding that it is trapped in a closed space, it will have used up a significant amount of its reserve energy before it can switch to the escape search mode. Right now you can see our civilization doing this exact same thing. We are blindly trying to keep the business as usual model going and failing to have noticed the switch from realizable growth mode to a contracting net energy mode. We will overshoot the consumption of resources before anybody realizes what has happened (excluding, of course, those few people who did recognize the situation and tried mightily to warn everyone else). Indeed I believe we have already passed that point. Our frenetic attempts to find usable oil in rocks and under the deep sea beds shows that we are starting to get desperate. Unlike the fly, that cannot experience an emotion like desperation, we have the mental capacity to be conscious of our plight.
Unfortunately that isn't really enough. Like the fly that allows itself to be trapped out of sheer incapacity to be aware, our species seems to be on the same track. The fly that does not succeed in escaping and go on to reproduce, is taking itself out of the gene pool unwittingly. We see individual humans that seem to do dumb things all the time that cause them to take themselves out of the gene pool. We even give those individuals special recognition, called the Darwin Awards. I trust the conferrers of that award will have about seven and a half billion certificates printed up soon, or maybe just one big one for the species as a whole.
In truth, I think the sense of something being fundamentally different has already started building in the general population. Not many can articulate what the problem is, let alone what might be the cause. Talking heads are still pointing fingers at whatever scapegoat their ideology calls for. Liberal-minded ideologues blame bankers and greedy CEOs and the growing disparity in incomes as THE cause of all the problems. Conservative-minded ones point to big government, too many regulations fettering free enterprise, and too much tax as THE cause. They are all convinced that they know what is wrong but the only thing they are both right about is that something IS wrong. Beyond that they haven't a clue.
Watch What People Do
To conclude, keep an eye on what the majority of people are doing. Don't just look at the surface symptoms. Occupy Wall Street was a symptomatic response. So was the Arab Spring. So is the financial debacle that is the Eurozone. So is the jobs situation and wealth loss (on paper) in the US. All of these are mere symptoms. The constellation of symptoms taken together are placing a heavy mental burden on everyone. And they are already reacting. Pay close attention to how this evolves. Cultural differences will tend to mask any similarities initially. Middle Easterners will react differently than Europeans and those from the Far East. Americans will likely start to act like cowboys!
Eventually, however, all people will converge toward the same self-centered mode of survival and life will be extremely dangerous for all. I fully expect that much of the dying that will ensue in the bottleneck will actually be from humans competing with other humans for scarce and diminishing resources. Starvation and slaughter will become the predominant modes, with epidemics taking out the rest as public health systems fail. It won't be pretty.
Each and every person will be responsible for their own decisions and actions. That includes decisions on when to try to avoid the trap, and how to go about it. The only cues you will have are the observations of how the majority of people are reacting. Be sensitive. Be alert. Be wise.
Footnotes
[1] In part this fact is what led James Lovelock to construct his Gaia Theory about the nature of planets that harbor life. In Gaia Theory it isn't just the living membrane (the biosphere) that defines the planet, but the combination of living systems and the geophysical, hydrophysical, and atmospheric megacycles that cooperate to form an environment conducive to life itself. Hence the whole planet must be considered as living even though the vast majority of mass does not fit into the cell theory paradigm of life.
[2] Brodmann area 10, the frontopolar patch of prefrontal cortex underwent a rapid expansion of area relative to the rest of the prefrontal regions coincident with the emergence of language and abstract thinking. This expansion is also correlated with the capacity of humans to think about the future (plan). The evidence for this comes from what are called endocasts of human skulls from about one to two hundred thousand years ago. See: Is Brodmann Area 10 the Key to Human Evolution.
[3] While a power-law distribution would seem to describe the way sapience is distributed it does not actually provide insights into what may be the case at the low end. The reason is that sapience doesn't start at zero! The actual distribution curve that might better fit would be something like a highly skewed (toward the low end) normal (Gaussian-like) or a Poisson (which is equivalent). It would be extremely interesting to put together a survey database of autopsied brains where Brodmann area 10 had been measured to see if size, density, and composition measures showed this kind of distribution. Consider this as a hypothesis if any neuroscientists are reading this and want to do some investigations!
George,
Good post as usual.
I liked how you took an overview of biology.
Indeed the bottleneck event is the selection event.
One dimension of response to think about is the ability to consciously to chose to trust people when the biological instincts dictate the opposite.
In other word those who will decide to _actively_ trust other fellow humans under the daily dangers of survival on the net energy downslope will exhibit the signs of highest sapience.
That would be an ultimate in modulating the immediate response.
Of course many of them will die as the result of that but some will be successful in spotting another sapient member of homo species.
So unions of those higher sapience will have higher chances to survive and little by little over long enough horizon a super sapient group will emerge.
That group will act as truly eusocial group with each member contributing to the survival of the group in a completely self-less manner because capacity to behave like that was what lead him/her into the group in the first place.
Since we cannot predict how the current system of pecking order will evolve under conditions of decreasing net energy it is hard to imagine in what part of the system such sapience group would emerge.
My theory is that such sapient group would emerge or clamp together towards the top of the structure.
But I may be wrong as demolition of the structure may be a pre-condition of recoalescence of higher sapients into an organized "super-family".
In the long run dynamic stability and sapient group leaving in harmony with Ecos is the attractor state, even if the total global population is in thousands and not millions and the biodiversity is not diversity at all.
Posted by: Aboc Zed | June 17, 2012 at 04:27 PM
George,
In my opinion this post goes far beyond your usual level of excellence. This is just plain brilliant - a quantum jump in insight. I feel like you just threw open a shuttered window I had never noticed, and let a piercing ray of pure sunshine into the room.
The idea of sapience as the significant fitness characteristic and the bottleneck as the selection event has never been this clear to me.
I'd always been convinced that this is some kind of evolutionary event (with such overwhelming species-level implications it could hardly be otherwise) but I hadn't been able to take it beyond Sahtouris' pupation metaphor until now. Your explanation has true genius-level simplicity, directness and accessibility. Wow! Thank you!
@Aboc Zed, your idea of active trust in the face of increasing adversity being a sign of sapience is something I've long believed as well.
On your other point, I think that the dissolution of the existing structure is an essential prerequisite for the change. Complete autolysis of the original organism is a fundamental aspect of the pupation metaphor. Though we all know that analogies are necessarily incomplete and misleading, it's hard to see how a total reorganization could occur so long as any of the original system's backbone remained. Its remnants would both impede and misdirect the unfoldment of the new structure.
Posted by: Bodhi Chefurka | June 18, 2012 at 09:06 AM
George, essays like this are why i not only return to this site, but link it to several others i visit regularly.
This one clearly maps humanitys' evolution of sapience as a possibility to our extinction while hoping it occurs within the timeframe of the collapse of civilization.
While i agree with your premises and appreciate Aboc Zed's insights, i think we've (again speaking as if "we" is the entire species) already unleashed (by our inaction) the very mechanisms that created the chaotic weather we'll come to realize is our undoing: the continued warming via CO2 pollution, and now methane geysers (because we failed to stop the CO2) and all the "collateral damage" that will proceed from them.
These would include sea-level rise, dust bowlification of the bread baskets of the planet, heat/cold ranges expanding beyond our ability to deal with them, long term droughts and "1000-year flooding" events, increased plant and animal diseases, warming oceans, more acidic oceans and the resultant death of many fish species, massive algal blooms, coral die-off, and finally the collapse of the oceans as providers of food.
If that's not bad enough, the 400 or so nuclear reactors on the planet need to be decommissioned and shut down as soon as possible to avoid Fukushima/Chernobyl that many times over (only worse, since there will be no energy to do this with if we don't hurry). We still have the original nuclear waste from the first reactors - none of it has been "gotten rid of" or "processed" and the half-life of plutonium and some of the other by-products of these reactors can run into the tens of thousands of years.
There are more problems than we can possibly handle not only physically but on any level - even if we made a concerted, global effort starting right now. We continue to do the exact same stupid behaviors (driving everywhere, relying on fossil fuels for everything and not even trying to change to a more local way of "doing business") because of the delayed effect of the collapse (it takes a while for a complex system to absorb and react to inputs of any kind).
So even if somehow a small group of say 10,000 super sapient and extra-sapient beings evolved, there would be nothing they could do to ameliorate the continuing destruction of their biosphere at that time (whatever they could have done would have to have occurred beforehand, as you pointed out).
This is why, when we start feeling the bite of the bottleneck, an already up and running community, with secured water, group food growing and distribution activities, shelter and lots of guns and ammunition (which will be futile) might last a while (by repelling the hordes of doomed beings trying to survive), in the end what would be the point? If we haven't already reached the tipping point (with respect to just the atmospheric composition, not to mention the many others that will impinge on our success at avoiding extinction) we certainly will before humanity as a whole decides to get off its collective ass and actually DO something about it all.
This i'm sure of - we're basically a failed experiment.
Posted by: Tom | June 18, 2012 at 12:50 PM
Tom, what comes out the far side of this event will look nothing like what went in. Is a caterpillar a failed experiment? He may think so, because self-digestion is pretty final from his point of view. But you really have to ask the butterfly.
Here's a different heretical thought:
Limiting our population growth right now could even be construed as a bad idea, since it would reduce the pool of selection candidates that might carry the fitness trait. Of course that comes with severe tradeoffs, but frankly, we've already made those tradeoffs. The damage is already done, and what remains is to see what the "reward" will be for the species.
Maybe all those soccer moms with their 3.5 kids are doing the species a favour...
Posted by: Bodhi Chefurka | June 18, 2012 at 03:19 PM
I've been following George Mobus' perfectly sound reasoning for some time now, and I wish I could keep hope alive that there is a chance of 'sapient evolution' prior to the eventual extinction of Homo sapiens. But I can't get beyond an observation that seems to hold true for the past, present and I imagine the future. And this is that for every Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr holding the banner for sapience, there are thousands of Blankfeins, Cheneys, Murdochs and Bloombergs forcefully hindering real progress and laying waste to the earth for self-centered personal gain.
No guessing required about who gets cut off in their prime and who gets to live a long life of power and glory fueled by over consumption of energy resources.
Higher sapients of the type we would want to advance our species post-bottleneck are less inclined to brutalize others for self gain/survival purposes, therefore I just can't see how they will continuously outmaneuver cunning but sapience-deficient alpha males when there is a collapse of food and water supplies - no matter how deep in the undergrowth the former establish their settlements.
I dearly wish survival of the fittest meant the fittest brain, rather than the fittest body/physical strength/proxy armed forces. Alas, natural selection is a bloody business from start to finish.
Posted by: Anywhere But Here Is Better | June 18, 2012 at 05:44 PM
"No guessing required about who gets cut off in their prime and who gets to live a long life of power and glory fueled by over consumption of energy resources."
The following might further illustrate your point. The US consumes 19 million bbl/day of crude oil and distillates, which is 7.1 billion bbl/year or ~23 bbl/year per capita.
Reported US consumer spending is around $11 trillion/year, of which 45-50% is attributable to the spending of the top 10% of US households.
If we take total spending and divide it by the bbl of crude we consume to illustrate a point, we get something like $1,665 in consumer spending to a bbl of oil or ~$19 of consumer spending to every $1 of oil and distillates.
Using the ratio of consumer spending to oil, the top 10% consume $268 billion/year or $22,000 per household per year in oil, whereas the bottom 80% consume $2,350 per household per year in equivalent consumer spending to oil.
Thus, in terms of the cost to US society for consumer spending to oil at the current highly concentrated income distribution to the top 10%, the top 10% consume/spend/require nearly 10 times more in oil as a share of consumption per household as do the bottom 80% of households.
Moreover, the largest consumer of crude oil and distillates in the US is the US gov't, which is primarily the result of maintaining the imperial military around the globe.
The top 10% of US households pay 70-75% of federal income taxes, with total military spending accounting for an equivalent of 10% of private US GDP or $3,200 per capita and $8,100 per household (17-18% of the median US household income). Sheer madness.
Combined, the typical US household pays over $10,000/year in equivalent spending for oil and imperial military costs, which is nearly 25% of the US median household income.
Inferences? The top 10% pay the taxes to support the imperial military, which in turn is used to secure the oil supplies and shipping lanes around the world. The flow of oil supports a global division of labor, tax code, and system of resource, wealth, and income allocation and distribution that is obscenely wasteful and costly to the bottom 80-90% of US households (but remarkably efficient at distributing gains to the top 0.1-1% to 10%), not to mention the rest of the planet's inhabitants and the global ecological system.
Throughout the developed world, the emphasis is shifting to "austerity" imposed by the top 0.1-1%, facilitated by the next 9%, and on the bottom 90%, even as the top 0.1-10% receive an absolutely obscene share of oil-based net energy flows to support their socioeconomic and political status, privilege, and power at the expense of the bottom 90%+ and the ecosystem.
Is it likely that a small minority sapient/super-sapient population could secure a sufficiently large share of the remaining oil-based net energy flows to sustain itself to reproduce successfully in large enough numbers without being part of the current top 0.1-1%?
What if the prospects for the species in whatever successfully adapted form it takes is thus dependent upon those among the top 0.1-1% who are sufficiently sapient or super-sapient and who today enjoy the luxury of net energy flows to necessary scale?
If this is generally the scenario that will maintain, what should the rest of us in the bottom 90-99% do today in preparation or response? What are those sapients among the bottom 90-99% to do with their prospects limited to nil among the non-sapients?
Posted by: Bruce | June 18, 2012 at 07:40 PM
Bruce, thanks for your factual analysis, it's devastatingly brilliant. And I'm glad to see words like obscene included - no point using kid gloves now that it's as clear as day what's going on among the 0.1% guzzlers.
The excellent questions you leave us with aren't immediately answerable as I see it, but they do illuminate the key issues that confront any individuals and groups planning to act on George's escape pod proposal. I'd be glad to facilitate others who choose to launch the lifeboat, but I'm so jaded with disappointment over this bestial world that I think I'll be one of the guys in the band playing slow jazz as the behemoth sinks.
Posted by: Anywhere But Here Is Better | June 19, 2012 at 03:01 AM
Bruce, you ask what those who are sapient might do to prepare. I'd say the overriding priority should be to find another sapient of the opposite sex and have children.
I think the future is too inherently unknowable for any specific physical planning beyond learning low-energy, low-resource techniques for daily living. All the sapients I know seem to be taking up permaculture, for instance.
Posted by: Bodhi Chefurka | June 19, 2012 at 08:22 AM
"I'd say the overriding priority should be to find another sapient of the opposite sex and have children."
I empathize with this as a possible (re)evolutionary strategy, but consider the following:
I have two children. Now what? $100,000-$500,000 each for a university "education" in the sciences and engineering? To do what? Compete with Chinese, Indians, and Vietnamese requiring incomes of 10% to 30% of what an American requires for self-support at a middle-income salary? Not likely.
An occupation in "health care" that is 17-18% of GDP and growing at twice the rate of GDP threatening to bankrupt the private and public sectors? I seriously doubt that this sector will avoid contraction with the rest of the economy.
Law? Financial services? I think we just might have enough parasites already who are already beginning to prey on one another on Wall St. and in DC.
Horticulture? Agriculture? Permaculture? Only if we can avoid private equity and hedge funds from becoming the modern-day latifundian feudal lords and buying up farmland by the tens of thousands of acres and turning them into armed agrarian fiefdoms; or such opportunities might emerge because of the creation of such holdings.
Martial occupations to defend the holdings and status, privilege, and power of the neo-feudal latifundian lords and competing warlord castes? I suspect this is more likely than the other choices.
Thus, by one of many possible inferences, having children today is effectively bringing human beings into the world to assign them to having to adapt to lives of agrarian peasant subsistence and/or martial discipline, loyalty, selflessness, violence, and risk of death on behalf of their fellows and their neo-feudal overlords.
Too pessimistic? Lacking imagination and sapience? Perhaps. But the history of civilizations is replete with such transitions from acquisitor- or merchant-dominated societies experiencing increasing wealth and income concentration and resource depletion succumbing to social, economic, and political disintegration and being supplanted by warrior/martial caste leaders who impose strict discipline and employ swift "justice" against opponents and out-groups.
Such periods are typically preceded by transitional phase during which merchant/acquisitors co-opt charismatic personalities among the emerging martial caste and confer power upon them only to be opposed by successive martial leaders who appeal to the masses in order to overthrow the acquisitors and banish them from power for generations thereafter.
Were such an epochal transition to be before us in the West, the Wall St. oligarchs would be expected to select current martial leaders to positions of power during a protracted period of worsening economic conditions and social unrest.
At some point, the scale of suffering and requirement by the acquisitors that martial leaders crack skulls en masse will be resisted by a growing minority or plurality of the martial caste, prompting the warriors to turn against the acquisitor oligarchs and dismantle their superstructure of power and control by various means, including violence and coups.
It can't happen here? Human nature and history suggests otherwise.
One can only imagine the scale of misery and discontent that would be required to displace the rentier-oligarchs on Wall St. and their surrogates in DC.
Even then, what sort of personality types would self-select to be so opportunistic, self-assured, and emboldened to presume to turn against the rentiers and rout them from the temples and citadels? I strongly suspect they will be the kind who would self-select for cooperation, self-sacrifice, loyalty, strict discipline, and violence to survive the bottleneck. Think tribal nomadic warriors, such as the Visigoths, Norse, Rus, Huns, and Mongols.
Therefore, if one does not intend to raise highly disciplined, loyal, self-sacrificing tribal nomadic warriors, one perhaps ought not to be having children.
Posted by: Bruce | June 19, 2012 at 10:23 AM
Bruce, I feel your pain, but that's much too short-term thinking. The goal is to get as many sapients into the evolutionary selection pool as possible. Your genes don't care what you do for a living. 20,000 years from now nobody will care what your children did either, only whether they reproduced sufficiently to augment the gene pool with more sapients.
Your concerns are those of an individual citizen, not those of a member of a species on an evolutionary quest. Lift your eyes to the far horizon, my son, and all these overweening latifundian concerns pale into insignificance...
Sorry to wax a bit flippant, but I'm burned out from a decade of solid worry and analysis of all the things that are going wrong today. There are too many problems in the predicament, they're simply not soluble, and the bottleneck now appears to be upon us.
Frankly, it's a huge relief to have a long-term hopeful ideas like the "The Evolution of Sapience by Means of Natural Selection" to think about. It takes my mind off the infinitude of intransigent day to day political, economic, cultural, psychological, energy, resource, climatic and ecological disasters that are starting to unfold, intersect and amplify around us.
Posted by: Bodhi Chefurka | June 19, 2012 at 12:11 PM
"I feel your pain, but that's much too short-term thinking. The goal is to get as many sapients into the evolutionary selection pool as possible. Your genes don't care what you do for a living. 20,000 years from now nobody will care what your children did either, only whether they reproduced sufficiently to augment the gene pool with more sapients."
". . . I'm burned out from a decade of solid worry and analysis of all the things that are going wrong today."
". . . It takes my mind off the infinitude of intransigent day to day . . . disasters . . ."
I empathize with your burnout. I confess to having reached a similar state.
Yet, the short term precedes the long term, and surviving before the onset of the bottleneck with access to sufficient net energy surplus is required to have a chance to adapt to the conditions of the bottleneck. Making a living is required to in the meantime, whereas a growing share of those under age 30 (and over age 50-55) are finding it impossible to find paying work. They might have to adapt to no paying work, which might mean helping themselves to whatever surplus you and I might have TODAY. They might even plunder your surplus with a flippant smile on their faces, wishing you a good day after they've adapted your surplus to their biological requirements, irrespective of whether or not sapience comes with the plundered loot.
Picture a band of hungry Mongolian horsemen riding at half-gallop toward your village. There won't be much time to think about whether or not they are foe or kindred sapients before they're pillaging your village, making off with your female relatives, and handing you your head as thanks.
I strongly suspect that in the decades ahead we will discover that evolutionary self-selection to plunder and merciless violence against "other" to survive, adapt, and reproduce are not mutually exclusive to human sapience.
Posted by: Bruce | June 19, 2012 at 02:27 PM
I wonder if the metaphor for survivers will be those creatures requiring a certain cool climate on mountain sides. They can only go up. And even if the mountain is high enough the habitable area will get smaller. Who will survive? Somehow I doubt it will be the sapient.
Posted by: RobLL | June 19, 2012 at 07:46 PM
@Bruce @Bodhi Chefurka
Those hungry horsemen all look like Blankfein (boy, is he prolific with his genes) and they've already pillaged most villages far and wide. Next stop: cannibalism.
My head on a stake is the latest decorative effect outside my ex-hut.
Posted by: Anywhere But Here Is Better | June 20, 2012 at 06:21 AM
Americans' confidence in institutions.
Warriors and small merchants/shopkeepers/traders are atop the list and large corporations, corporate mass media, and corrupt union and federal political leaders at the bottom, which is rather like Samurai society.
Posted by: Bruce | June 20, 2012 at 06:52 AM
"Those hungry horsemen all look like Blankfein (boy, is he prolific with his genes) and they've already pillaged most villages far and wide.
Mr. Blankfein's racial/ethnic ancestry is from the remarkably adaptive Turkic/Slavic/Caucasian gene pool, if you will, making up no more than 2% of the US population and barely 0.2% of the European population. If there are any capable warrior types among his gene pool, I would place a sizable wager that they will be among those surviving the bottleneck.
"Next stop: cannibalism."
Seriously, think about it. What "natural resource" is today NOT in constraint or experiencing depletion? Human apes consume and deplete virtually everything we encounter given the time and opportunity. Why not human flesh and bones in such abundance?
Wall St., Madison Ave., and the corporate mass media can socially construct beliefs, desires, dissatisfaction, and conspicuous status items for consumption, why not humans as food?
What better "green food" than people? The more we eat, the fewer there are of us, and the better for the planet's ecosystem and the remnant pink, brown, black, and yellow people eaters hereafter.
After all, Soylent Green is of, by, and for people.
Make Soylent Green, not war!
Super-sapients love people, which is why they love Soylent Green!
Posted by: Bruce | June 20, 2012 at 08:03 AM
Dear all,
I am horribly behind in replies to comments and in spite of it being summer I am increasingly strapped for time to respond to every one individually. I will try to cobble together a summary from the Hospice piece and this one re: some thoughts I've had regarding some issues raised in the comments. For what it is worth I have been trying to work on another post in which I try to pull together some loose threads that had origins in past posts and seem to be coming together subsequent to the last two posts. As you might have surmised I see humanity in the end game of survival, first the impending collapse of global civilization due to the energy situation, followed by spasms of contraction of local attempts at societies down to tribal levels, ultimately followed by the convergence of climate change and other environmental disasters resulting in the evolutionary bottleneck event.
As Bruce has repeatedly pointed out, and others have joined in, this whole process will involve substantial population demise, and that alone will trigger behaviors in the average human that we all would rather not bear witness to. Most of the dying will be traumatic. I can't see any other scenario for the masses at this point when you take all of the biophysical and psychological aspects into account. Woe be unto mankind - I agree.
However, a number of you have taken a more pessimistic viewpoint than me (and now I think Bodhi Chefurka has seen what I am trying to express). First I detect a tone of discounting of the potential for higher sapience to be of value in surviving the bottleneck. Many favor the warlord scenario as the most likely event, and some have asserted that it might just be the last act before extinction of the species. While I grant that there will be extensive war lording going on during the collapse phase, I must point out that none of us, myself included, can really predict what the outcomes are going to be for the species. There are no precedents for global collapse. A commentator on another blog that carried a link to this one attempted to compare what might be happening to us now to the collapses of previous civilizations. S/he could cite facts and figures, but apparently simply missed the scale factor in what we are facing. This time it really is different!
My projections are based on trying to understand much larger scale phenomena in the course of universal evolution than the petty squabbles of humans in their current form. I am more interested in the entire forest than the bark on some particular tree. And what I believe I see is that evolution (particularly biological evolution) is progressive as long as there is real-time energy flow. Having spent many years now studying the nature of knowledge and wisdom as well as the brain's mechanisms for producing these, and paying attention to the distribution of these capabilities in the populations I've looked at, I do conclude that sapience is a real and potentially powerful attribute that fits the progressive pattern of evolution of life on Earth. The loss of energy flow from fossil fuels that we are starting to feel has more to do with the retrograde evolution (devolution) of culture, not necessarily that of the human genus. In fact, I've argued that it was the evolution of culture that largely impeded the further development of our biological evolution with respect to sapience. I now view that, however, as a necessary evil; necessary in the sense that a high-energy culture was necessary in order to support science and the discovery of knowledge about how the Universe works. That knowledge is what we bought with our last ten thousand years of stasis (perhaps retrograde) in development of mental capacities.
Now comes the bottleneck event and a culling of the energy consuming artifacts of cultures as well as people. What can go on is a small population of survivors making it through the bottleneck. My thesis is, and has been, that some of us, those who can see this big picture, can actually play a role in helping that bottleneck event produce an evolutionarily progressive outcome. By assisting in the survival of high sapients (a sacrifice) and working toward a preservation of important knowledge that can be reconstituted by far future generations (something I will be writing more about in the future), human consciousness is simply fulfilling its purpose in the grander scheme of Universal evolution.
For many this is going to sound like a quasi-religious belief, and I won't deny that there are elements of faith, belief without scientific evidence obtained empirically, involved. My justification (after a lifetime spent demanding scientific evidence!) is that I've spent a good deal of time looking at the scientific evidence from our past, where we could actually practice science. Everything I have synthesized comes from that collection of evidence-based knowledge. My "faith" comes from the conviction that the patterns I've seen will continue into the future. We cannot do experiments. We can only build models (i.e. conceptual ones). And what I have been writing is my sharing with you the conceptual model that has developed in my awareness. In my next blog I hope to make this more explicit.
Some of you, perhaps most who read this, will still hold onto that pessimistic view. Some have even expressed a kind of joy that the human cancer (in their view) will get wiped out, saving the planet for other life forms. But a few will consider this model a little more and perhaps take heed and join the effort. I extend an invitation to those who will to participate however you can.
[SOME PARTICULAR NOTES]
In Hospice:
wunsacon,
I spent a lot of my career working in AI. Computers require energy. Where will it come from?
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In this post:
Aboc,
Nice referral to attractor basin - that is dynamical way to view the whole process. What are the attractor basins?
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Tom,
Cleverness + Sapience = Adaptability!
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Anywhere,
The "Blankfeins, Cheneys, Murdochs and Bloombergs" are committing suicide. They are taking out a whole lot of other people with them. The sapient need not be in the building when the suicide bombers pull the chord.
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Bruce,
Sometimes I think you make some unwarranted, though understandable assumptions re: preparing for the collapse and bottleneck. To whit:
It depends on what you mean by surviving, which, by your comments suggests surviving in the world of civilization as it devolves. My whole suggestion is to absolutely NOT try this. You will be caught in a trap. The second assumption has to do with "sufficient net energy". Again that requires understanding what you mean by sufficient.
It could be that you are misconstruing what sapience can do if sufficiently powerful enough. I sincerely doubt that there are many high sapients in the .1-1% you deride. Any children born into that class that have somehow gotten the right genes tend to forego the privileges of the class and find meaningful work to do. I know several such cases personally and they are quite dismayed with what their parents are doing.
Similarly high sapience in the general population seems to sort out of the class distinctions. They are able to see beyond the financial definition of worth. If they are clever they find ways to thrive in whatever environment they find themselves in but being motivated by strong moral sentiments also tend to be scrupulously honest. Try to not focus on the present state of things and what you imagine it will lead to so much as developing a deeper appreciation for what sapience means. Just a recommendation.
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RobLL,
I'm afraid your metaphor was a bit too dense for me to unpack.
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George
Posted by: George Mobus | June 20, 2012 at 11:25 AM
Guy thinks it's already too late (also):
http://guymcpherson.com/2012/06/were-done/
Posted by: Tom | June 20, 2012 at 01:54 PM
George, as always, you clearly prove or self-validate your own case by demonstrating your sapience.
Perhaps one of the principal inferences one should take away from what I am attempting to relate is that it might be perceived as sapient, even super-sapient, during the post-bottleneck decades hence that the wisest action to have been taken was to have proactively wiped out billions of human apes through the most efficient means possible to reset conditions for those who would survive and be best capable of adapting and reproducing.
Put another way, one or more self-selected groups proactively carrying out actions resulting in mass human die-off is not mutually exclusive to sapience and may be perceived to be super-sapient to the surviving successor generations who successfully pass through the bottleneck.
Consider the case of Europeans who migrated to the Americas to escape overpopulation and social, religious, and political oppression, as well as opportunists seeking material wealth. The result was a mass human die-off from disease, war, mistreatment, and starvation surpassed only (???) by the casualties resulting from WW I and II. Most of the deaths occurred as a result of diseases to which the native peoples had no immunity. But the event so reduced the populations as to render the remnant incapable of resisting what became a virtual invasion of Europeans in the centuries that followed.
Now, imagine a situation in which there was such an abiding threat to the small sapient, techno-scientific, net energy-rich population from overpopulation, famine, water and electricity shortages, economic collapse, and social unrest that it was decided that the mass of humans had to go by the most efficient means available. Apart from the clear moral aspects of such a decision, would not a sapient or super-sapient group be wise to consider dispatching the rest of the non-sapient population efficiently and perhaps as humanely as possible?
Not that there would necessarily only be the two choices at that point, but sapience would be challenged to weigh the risks of doing the deed or not and adapting one way or the other.
One can be understandably repulsed by such a notion that super-sapient humans would choose at some point to kill billions of their fellow human apes for the purpose of ensuring the survival and successful adaptation and reproduction of successor sapient generations. However, I contend that the scale of decline we face and the resulting misery experienced by the vast majority of human apes will force sapients at a minimum to consider seriously the unthinkable as a contingency for surviving and successfully adapting through and beyond the bottleneck.
The earlier reference to the martial mentality is instructive here. If the sapients do tend to self-select for martial traits, then it would be more likely that martial sapience would include mass violence as one (not necessarily "the") means to an end.
Therefore, what we might perceive as a moral constraint or permission by the conditioning of today's Oil Age affluence, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance might in the future be perceived as foolishly indulgent, misguided, and dangerous during a period of heightened competition, conflict, and acute resource constraints.
IOW, we are communicating via this forum under what are conditions informed and regulated, if you will, by educated bourgeois professional
middle-class decorum and sensibilities that I very much doubt will persist as we approach the bottleneck.
P.S. When I use terms such as "rentier-parasite" or "militarist-imperialist" (with or without the hyphen), my intention is descriptive, not derisive, even though I am aware that many will infer the latter.
Posted by: Bruce | June 20, 2012 at 03:47 PM
bruce,
your last comment is how i see it
in fact to me it is certain that as soon as critical mass of sapience percolates to the top 1 - 10% they will do exactly what you pictured
the fact that it did not happen yet only tells me that sapience percolates to the top slowly and the top is still as ignorand as the bottom
and i agree mith you that if one is sapient at the bottom he would not have children because he would know that chances of his progeny to survive the bottleneck are effectively zero
we all are born in ignorance both those who are from tp 1 -10% families and bottom 99% families
but the whole is getting more sapient - accumulation of science is the manifestation of that and the overpopulation is the cost we are paying for that
that is how evolutionary process works
the only way to decrease suffering is to enable percolation of sapience to the top: the faster it happens the less people will be in 99% by the time they will have to die
Posted by: Aboc Zed | June 21, 2012 at 10:49 AM
The following observation is by Adyashanti, one of America's top non-dualism teachers. It speaks to me in the same way as the Dark Mountain ethos and Charles Eisenstein's book "The Ascent of Humanity". I bring it up here because I feel that embracing a non-dualist philosophy is a marker of sapience.
"The hope for the environment does not lie in the hands of the environmentalists. They simply sit on the opposite side of the duality from those who destroy the environment. They are culprits in continuing a type of violence that is the very root of what causes us to destroy the environment.
"The hope for the environment lies in the realization that all beings and all things are yourself, including those who oppose you. Until your vision and compassion is big enough to include those who oppose you, you are simply contributing to the continuation of destructiveness. The end of separation is the salvation for all."
Posted by: Bodhi Chefurka | June 22, 2012 at 04:38 PM