Universe vs Sentience

I propose that fire made our evolution possible. While there’s no scientific evidence for that hypothesis, we know that our life isn’t possible for long without it. If combustion suddenly stopped happening, how long would we last? That’s become our species survival test.

 Consider an analogy to our situation. We hear a roar, but the river upon which we float is wide and smooth. It’s not like some malevolent entity is plotting to throw everyone on the raft over a cliff. We’re about to discover danger in the lay of this land.

The real precipice we face is the steep slope between how easily our planet’s chemistry and temperature can shift into escalating greenhouse effect to how difficult it is to shift back. It’s not as if some malevolent entity designed the universe so that advanced life tends to evolve on planets hovering between ice age and greenhouse conditions. Or built the universe so that physical and chemical processes favoring ice move at geologic speed, and those favoring greenhouse events can go a million times faster and self-reinforce. Carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere by processes in geologic time frames, weathering of rock and sequestration in sediments. Carbon dioxide is returned in fast processes such as wildfire, volcanic eruption, methane hydrate breakdown, and fossil fuel combustion.

We are now burning in one year the equivalent of one million years’-worth of plankton deposits as fossil fuel,... The Fabulous History of Phytoplankton and Why Our Species depends on it

It’s not as if some evil spirit designed animals so that a second source of energy, mastery of fire, was necessary for big brains and sentience to emerge.

That’s just the lay of this universe.

The odds have been stacked against us all along.

We co-evolved with fire. That second source of energy, beyond food, made Homo Sapiens a possibility. But plant fuel has limitations. Once a culture has denuded it’s continent for firewood, soil washes away, life gets too hard to support a developing civilization. Mastering fossil fuel solves that problem and makes globalization a possibility. But fossil fuel has catastrophic limitations.

Throwing carbon, which had been sequestered underground, back into the air a million times faster kickstarts positive feedbacks which can’t be turned off, changing albedo from melting snow and ice, burning forests in a drying climate, decreasing phytoplankton productivity and dissolving animal shells in hotter acidifying oceans (which slows sequestration), raising levels of water vapor (a greenhouse gas) in warmer air, and melting methane hydrate.

It’s not fair that processes which push planetary chemistry/temperature toward anoxic/hot conditions are both self-reinforcing and exponentially faster. Fairness is a social trait. Physical laws don’t answer to society.

It’s not fair that we need a second energy source, and none is an easy replacement for fire.

In short, planets which can support carbon-based advanced life forms which evolved using fire mastery are planets far from equilibrium. They can easily and rapidly transition into chemistry/temperature regimes hostile to that life.

We’ve been taking fire mastery for granted, failing to realize at the gut level both its significance to our evolution and the inherent danger that entails. Energy is not an externality for us, any more than food is.

Many have wondered why there’s no evidence of other advanced civilizations in the Milky Way. The Great Silence can now be seen as a warning. Given the planetary chemistry and physics we’re discovering here on Earth, our predecessors probably failed to grasp that very fleeting opportunity, at the height of their fossil fuel civilizations, to decarbonize. Once the feedbacks rev up, we sentients lose control. End of story.

Evolution's Inefficiency

Human survival depends upon recognizing inefficiencies as the root cause of Climate Destabilization and taking control of human evolution to avoid them.

Two genders evolved because it was more efficient than hermaphrodite competition, such as sea slug penis fencing. As soon as one gender had genetic programming to bear the heaviest investment in the next generation, the free-rider gender was freed to compete amongst themselves with their "extra" energy. Physical competition does weed out deficient males with genetic predispositions for weakness or disease, but it's a crude decision tool. It introduces overwhelming inefficiencies - males which are extra big, extra strong, extra risky, and extra aggressive also have the advantage. So males evolve into bullies, designed above all for fighting and taking.

This inefficiency includes males killing babies, and not just camels, cats, and bull elephants. It's inefficient for human females to be reduced to baby machines, so half the brains and talent of the population is squandered. It's inefficient for men to loose the ability to recognize sadness in female faces, and similar traits of the psychopathy spectrum, because rapists have more babies.

Taking control of our own evolution will mean deciding what traits humans need for us to prosper together while controlling a planet, and selecting for those traits, as well as keeping our population level sustainable. Humanity 1.0, which evolved for a seemingly unlimited environment, is obsolete. For men, the most frightening part of that obsolescence is not just that Dominator Culture drives our race to self-destruction, but the instincts which underlie it. Men will no longer collectively and individually decide who gets to make babies and how often. "You want to cut off my balls?!" No. We need to separate sexual bliss (good) from domination/control (not good on a planetary scale).

Imagine engaging every adult in these choices globally (perhaps with well-designed computer gaming techniques), rather than having a Global Authority force it on you. Limits there will have to be. Which would you prefer?

The dimension Alvin Toffler fails to see

Alvin Toffler's capacity to understand how culture was changing was impressive, till now. In this video, he speaks broadly of advanced cyber infrastructure and conflicts over a biological revolution and genetic engineering.




When Toffler mentions that "Any theory of social change that doesn't have a theory of conflict attached to it isn't worth the space on a computer that it may occupy", he pays attention only to economic and social upheaval, including changes in social roles.


Toffler's still entranced by the conquest of space as the blossom of human promise. "The fourth wave will be when we, having grappled with our own genetics and understood ourselves biologically far better than we do now, when we finally do go significantly and seriously into space." Toffler shows no awareness that primitive brain function, exploited by memeplexes, is the black hood blinding us to the prison of DNA programming.



Orson Scott Card's science fiction trilogy Homecoming:Harmony (1992-1994) evinces more insight than Toffler into the way human genetic programming holds us back and leads us to destroy our planet.



Janet L Factor describes our dilemma best in Of Two Minds, Part 2, The Secular Humanist Bulletin, Vol 26, No. 1, Spring 2010, p 12-13.



"... the faith meme could be summed up as the rule 'Steer only by your emotions.' ... In the end 'Trust your heart, ignore your head' reduces to 'Listen to your DNA'!


"This neatly explains why as religions become more extreme, more rejecting of the world and its knowledge, they all seem to follow the same downward path: women are subjugated, sexually exploited, denied birth control, then married at younger and younger ages; a single male rises to absolute power; he surrounds himself with a cadre of male allies whom he rewards with sexual access to women; ultimately their children are brainwashed and brutalized. It is the primate troop re-created! All in the guise of spirituality.


"... To hand oneself over entirely to feeling, intoxicating though it may be, is not to transcend but to devolve." [bold mine]


Alvin Toffler's failure of imagination is not simply an ignorance of memetics, but failure to look inward critically. His critical eye dissects economics, culture, and war from an emotionally safe distance. He fails to dissect himself the way talented authors of fiction and feminist skeptics routinely do.

Those mysterious forces beyond our control

How complicated problems and helplessness can lead to distorted reality

In How the Mountain of Climate Change Evidence Is Being Used to Undermine the Cause, Bill McKibben says the successful techniques of climate deniers resemble those of OJ Simpson's Dream Team of lawyers. When a mountain of evidence gets big enough, there will be a few cracks. Just "spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be." But, he says, the main reason for climate deniers success is, "They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control." [emphasis mine]



From Extreme fear: could you handle it? "The more control a person has over a threatening situation, the less anxiety it provokes. Numerous experiments have shown that being out of control of a negative situation leads to the release of the stress hormone cortisol."



Michael Bader says that paranoia arises as people try" to make sense of and mitigate feelings of helplessness and worthlessness." "People can't tolerate feeling helpless and self-hating for very long. It's too painful, too demoralizing and too frightening. They have to find an antidote. They have to make sense of it all in a way that restores their sense of meaning, their feeling of agency, their self-esteem, and their belief in the possibility of redemption. They have to. They have no choice. That's just the way the mind works."



"The paranoid strategy is to generate a narrative that finally "explains it all." A narrative -- a set of beliefs about the way the world is and is supposed to be -- helps make sense of chaos. It reduces guilt and self-blame by projecting it onto someone else. And it restores a sense of agency by offering up an enemy to fight. Finally, it offers hope that if "they" -- the enemy, the conspirators -- can be avoided or destroyed, the paranoid person's core feelings of helplessness and devaluation will go away."



Climate Destabilization and Corporate Control of Civilization generate this situation



Blaming the patronising liberal elite and intellectual snobs misses the point, and embeds a self-defeating hierarchy (they understand stuff that I don't, so I must be dumb). All of us humans, including the highly educated and those who claim various expertise, are out of our depth. The world has become far too complicated for our evolved perceptions and our innate responses to grasp and respond adequately. Even coroporate institutions with their vaster resources, designed to maximize short-term profit, fail to forsee economic and ecological catastrophies of their own making.



We need new institutional structures designed to cope with civilization-on-the-edge-of-self-destruction. We need new human identities, that do not demand the impossible in order to avoid intolerable cortisol levels.

In Why do People Vote against Their Own Interests? Political scientist Dr David Runciman says,

"If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.

They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing."

Basically, voters crave emotional stories, not explanations.

The thing is, we all crave emotional stories over explanations. Because fictional dramas mainly address the primitive brains they're easy and relaxing. Learning, especially complicated things with long names, taxes the higher brain. It's work, we get fatigued. This human design limitation will have to be addressed if humanity is to comprehend global climate destabilization.

Coping with Global Climate Destabilization, personally

Three things are needed for a person to act:
1. The action has to be effective
2. The actor has to be capable of performing the action
3. The actor has to feel worthy of the consequences of acting

Let’s examine how human beings will have to differ, in order to adjust to be Planetary Managers.

The first step to taking charge of our own evolution is admitting that our current evolutionary design is not optimized to manage our entire planet. Accepting emotionally that, as we are, we’ve failed and will continue to fail to cope with the challenges of keeping Earth livable, leads to depression and inability to act. To admit design failure seems to be admitting failure as human beings. It seems to mean that we don’t deserve a habitable planet because we can’t take care of one (as we are now). In the language of Eric Berne’s Games People Play it seems to be taking the stance “I’m not OK, You’re not OK” which is self-destructive and can’t be maintained.

To understand why this isn’t so, let’s begin with Riane Eisler’s Cultural Transformation Theory. A competitive basis for self-esteem, as in “I’m OK, You’re not OK” or “You’re OK, I’m not OK” or “I’m not OK, You’re not OK” arises from Dominator Culture. Dominator Culture evolved out of our primitive brain hierarchical social instincts. The reptile brain conducts dominance and submission behaviors. Partnership Culture, on the other hand, seems to be based in maternal behavior of the lymbic system, seat of cooperation and nurturance. Only by realizing we’ve been living entirely subsumed by Dominator Culture and grasping the “I’m OK, You’re OK” of Partnership Culture can we build a global society that transcends the limitations of reptile brain socialization.

Once we embrace “I’m OK, You’re OK” emotionally, we’re in a position to ask, with our higher brain, whether the criteria against which we’ve declared ourselves unworthy aren’t impossible. Are we not facing a dilemma that all sentient species that conquer their planets must face? Let’s not compare ourselves presupposing Darwinian competition amidst unlimited natural resources, but compare ourselves in the challenge to transcend our native evolved limits. We have outgrown that Darwinian-instinct-based environment, where predators and temporary localized resource shortages are the main challenges. Now that we’ve conquered our planet, we ourselves are our own worst enemy. Our instincts to overproduce and consume are the real threats.

So let’s feel ourselves on the threshold of every sentient species first great challenge, not as unworthy but as ready to step up to our first self-controlled transformation. It’s time for Humanity 2.0. We need now to work together to find work arounds for each of the evolved limitations that hold us back. We do have tools. We are inventive. Let’s reinvent ourselves.

The human evolved design isn't up to planetary civilization.

Climate Denial Normalcy Bias is ignoring signs of danger, like a gazelle who keeps munching grass while lions lurk and storms skirt the horizon. It includes keeping the danger as background while focusing on your immediate interests. It includes checking to see if others are reacting, before you decide there's really danger. Like a herd of gazelles, we stay calm and deny danger until it's really threatening life and limb, and then we all get scared together. We evolved only to respond to short-acting danger, not to large scale slowly unfolding dangers of planetary scale. Our evolved responses don't work when the threshold for response occurs early and later, when the danger is severe, feedbacks make it out-of-control.

Flight or Fight When we finally get scared, we're hardwired for either flight (become a refugee) or fight (run out of water and kill each other for it), or sometimes freezing (Climate Destabilization isn't a predator so easily fooled). We'd have to take a hand in our own evolution to rewire a "plan and execute plan" response to fear and panic. The response that might work is just missing.
Jaron's Paradox Technological innovation can't save us, because every time we make a process more efficient human beings exploit it even more. We're like a gas that expands to fill every volume. We just improve our lifestyle and make more people.

Neural Architecture Triune brain anatomy: each of us has three parallel processors, a reptile brain, a lymbic system, and a higher brain. The two primitive brains have no language or symbolic thought, but they make decisions such as what's true, what's important, reproduction, and response to danger. Our higher brain can think in language and make plans, but has no emotion. We just aren't wired to emotionally respond to statistics and computer models. We respond to pain and puppies, sex and food. Reading about projected global climate destabilization feels dry and intellectual, distant. We get no gut reaction, unlike WWF.

Civilization is a Heat Engine Climate Destabilization is much larger than CO2 rise. The flow of energy defines civilization. Constructal Theory is beginning to quantify this flow. If we organized miraculously to eliminate fossil fuel use, we'd still keep heating up the Earth. We'd have "cooling towers" from nuclear power plants dumping their excess heat into the air, or the rivers. We'd send microwaves from space, but that would still pump excess energy into the air/water/soil of Earth. We just don't know how to run an economy that doesn't keep using more and more energy.

Selfish Institutions We're so easy to manipulate by spin doctors and the media, by our entertainment, our corporations, and our religions. Every institution of the modern globalized world puts its own prosperity and growth above the commons, the ultimate commons of a sustainable planet. Primarily governed by short term profits, our institutional structure is fundamentally incompatible with the long view. Each one promotes its own truth, i.e. the view that serves its myopic self interest.

What hope do I see? First we have to admit our design failure. Then we have to reinvent ourselves, as Steven Hawking says, control our own evolution. This doesn't have to involve human/machine integration or breeding experiments. It could mean co-evolving with our information systems, involving the entire population of the planet in education... personalized visualizations about the future we're building or not for their town and region ... and in working together to create a plan we can all live with.