Reductionism rules!
Udhay Shankar N <mailto:[email protected]>
October 13, 2014 at 9:08 PM October 13, 2014
As far as it goes, absolutely true (IMO). I'm interested in
conflicting opinions, however.
Udhay
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2014/10/the-real-existential-threat.html
Monday, 13 October 2014
The Real Existential Threat
What is the biggest threat to the world as we know it?
The impermanence of existence itself. The world we know is already gone
and we are heading into a world we haven't yet experienced.
Answers range from climate change to peak energy to a pandemic...
None of those matter. They are all exogenous events. Challenges to
be overcome.
This will be a big comfort after whatever extinction event takes us out
of the picture, I am sure.
The only real threat is a corrupt decision making system.
And the evidence for this assertion would be what?
Simply, if our human built systems can't make good decisions, our
system will collapse.
Collapse is one possibility. Another possibility is that the systems
that make bad choices will be replaced by systems that make better
decisions. Still another possibility is that some human systems will
make good decisions in some areas and others will make good decisions in
other areas and the choice of system will be dependent on a great many
different factors. A fourth possibility is that our decision-making
systems will change the environment so that the fittest decision-making
system will be a continually moving target.
In general, collapses seem to be part of our human process. We are as
prone to boom-and-bust cycles as any other organism.
It's that simple.
I don't think so.
The reason is based on what makes humanity different than all other
forms of life. All other forms of life adapt through biological
information exchange.
Ah, human exceptionalism. My understanding of biological systems
indicates that this is false. We are subject to the same selective
pressures that all other organisms are subject to.
That means their improvement and future adaptation, as both
individuals and as groups, is limited to the number of changes made to
the DNA they pass on to future generations.
Humanity is different. We evolve socially rather than through
biological processes.
Other social animals also evolve socially. Any species where parents
pass information to offspring has this same characteristic.
Looked at from another perspective --> a human being without social
information derived from millenia of experiences and adapatation is
simply a smart animal.
We are simply animals.
The human built systems we build to pass on this information is what
makes us different.
It's also the key to out future survival.
It might instead be the key to our future extinction. Mother Nature bats
last.
Why?
These human built systems aren't just static information repositories.
They're not simply libraries where we store information for future
generations.
They are decision making systems.
Other animals make decisions as well. Single-cell organisms have
decision-making systems.
We tell stories and we write things down. Other animals might tell
stories (whale songs have the feel of stories about them, for example),
but writing does seem to be a human innovation.
Is this a good long-term strategy for our species or not? It's only been
8000 years or so, which is an evolutionary eye blink.
They are the systems that allow us to adapt to changing circumstance.
The success of these decision making systems are the reason we've been
able to populate every corner of this world and why we are still alive
today.
Evidence needed for these assertions. Why is it our decision-making
systems rather than, say, our complex social organization or our ability
to make tools that has allowed us to occupy all these ecological niches?
So far, we've been able to make the right decisions despite the odds
being stacked against our future survival.
The human race has made a great many bad decisions. It seems premature
to pat ourselves on the backs for our cleverness at surviving events
that have not yet occurred.
The best example of this is how we've found a way to avoid global
thermonuclear war for almost seventy years... despite the presence of
tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in US, Russian, and Chinese
bunkers as well as numerous provocations to use them.
Of course, it is the presence of the self-same systems that create the
potential for thermonuclear war in the first place!
The simple truth is, if our social decision making systems are sound,
we'll avoid catastrophe. If not, disaster.
Human beings face catastrophe and disaster all the time. I don't see an
end in sight. Our dispersal makes it likely that some of us will survive
almost any catastrophe, but we're getting much better at creating
catastrophes, so it's not clear whether the human race will win its own
arms race.
The big question we all should be asking: is our decision making
system corrupt and if so, can we fix it or not?
This implies that there's a single decision-making system that can be
debugged and/or replaced. Who would decide how to change our
decision-making system, top-down, and why would any other human being do
anything other than say “Yeah, whatever” and get back to doing whatever
they're doing?
It seems to me that humans have a great many decision-making systems in
place and that different human beings use different systems to arrive at
decisions. The variety of human strategies makes it more likely that
some humans will survive any given disaster. The survivors pass their
systems on, and thus (it is to be hoped) human beings will evolve better
systems over time.
Ultimately, though, we face extinction. Whether it's a supervolcano or a
supernova or our own hubris that does us in, our time as a species is
limited.
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