Words&Dirt

“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind––and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement.  The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”

––As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, pg. 43-4

“Evolution has three key steps: variation, selection, and replication.  The conscious mind is very good at the last two.  Actually, it tends to focus only on the last two.  But the availability of variation is equally important, and to consciously maintain and foster variation is just as critical as the fostering of selection and replication.  Maintaining high rates of variation requires sufficient freedom for innovation and novelty to take place, balanced with protocols that conserve new gains.

From about 2.5 million years ago until the extinction of Neanderthals about 28,000 years ago, there was always two or more hominid species.  Then Homo sapiens became the sole survivor.  During the ascent, it has had a strong hand in the termination of many other life forms, from its genocidal activities against competing races to its catastrophic impact on thousands of animal species that shared our habitat.  Today, global integration aided by communication and transportation technologies presents the danger of killing off even more diversity, both in human society and in nonhuman species.  When variation is stamped out in this way, it reduces the tolerance for failure and holds back risky experiments in evolution, since there is less room for error.

We should never forget the lesson of Ming China, when its centralized political system was able to shut off almost all oceanic activities with a single decree and cause the sudden death of an entire oceangoing enterprise.  Thus, in one fell swoop, a vast treasure trove of technical know-how––involving shipbuilding, equipping, navigating, trading, and financing the Chinese treasure fleet––largely disappeared, as did international commerce and trade.  In contrast with Europe, China was no longer open to variation in its development strategies.

The right approach of conscious evolution is suggested by the title of Freeman Dyson’s book Infinite in All Directions, which allows both innovation and conservation of life and intelligence to manifest in as many ways as possible.  Humanity’s destiny is not the expansion of a single nation or of a single species, but the spreading out of life in all its multifarious forms from its confinement on the surface of our small planet to the freedom of a boundless universe.

The lesson of freedom is not just political or ‘geographical.’  When people have tried to replace freedom and diversity with detailed planning, the results have always been disappointing, from command-and-control economies to top-down strategic planning in large corporations to the planned cities in Brasilia, Chandigarh, and Canberra.

The whole idea behind centralized planning is to eliminate waste and to avoid mistakes.  To that end, planning has been very successful.  But we must be realistic about the limitations of planning.  As Alan Turing observed, not making mistakes is not a requirement for intelligence: if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.  This is probably true for intelligence of any kind.”

––Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision for Our Future Evolution, by Ted Chu, pg. 240-1