on humanism and environmental crisis

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Danka’s Self

    This new essay is similar to the “Last Neanderthal” – it has a narrative, a story, and an explanation of the allegory. That is a philosophical and extremely controversial part. It is actually a continuation of the thought experiment, as it assumes that events from the previous essay- the story- actually had happened, and -again- assumes that my interpretation of them is correct.

 Let me remind you and summarize the story. 

The time is about 50, 000 years ago, somewhere in Europe. Neanderthals are on the brink of extinction, and we follow the fate of one of them. The cold and hunger killed the last two members of Adam’s family, his wife, and his son. They did not have modern language or the ability to start a fire, but otherwise, they were very smart and strong.

  Adam is rescued by Old Woman from the Homo Sapiens tribe and nursed to health by Eve the Beautiful. Adam saves the little girl from the lethal attack of a saber-tooth tiger. This little girl, Eve’s 5-year-old sister, Adam and Eve are creating a shared communication system that (my hypothesis) is growing into Language, Self, and Reality. ( “You called it apple”- it was the first hypothetical sentence understood by these 3 people, it contained: “you called” – the agent, the person, “it”- the thing-perception, sensory firing, a  piece of the old behavioral code, with its name:  “apple”.)

   To continue this thought experiment, we moved 10 years forward. The three people who started to use agents and simple objects in communication were bonded by a prototype of a social unit: the shared magic of childhood, love, and of desperate will to communicate. In ten years this group grew and their shared vocabulary rapidly expanded. Summers were warmer and there were a lot of fish in the river and berries in the forest and babies in the tribe. Adam and Eve had 3 children Mel 8, Fiona 6 and Sophie 4. The” little girl” is now 15 years old and has the name.

                                           ***

‘My name is Danka, but people call me Dancer. I love to dance. I play the flute, the horn, and drums. I made my instruments with my Uncle Adam’s help and I taught myself to play. 

I go fishing and pick fruit with others, but I am busier and busier with my music.  When I sing and dance the world around me changes. 

My family and others from the tribe come to listen to my stories and to dance with me. Mel, my 8-year-old nephew can play the drums well, but only I can play flute and horn well.

 The stories come to me, I do not know where from, they just come.

Sometimes they come from my dreams and memories of winter and fighting with tigers, and sometimes from flowers and jumping fish. I am teaching kids how to sing and dance and about flowers and animals and seasons.

   Lake Cave Summer Feast is coming up. 

Each year before the midsummer Full Moon young people go to the cave. It is a difficult trip, it takes three days of hiking through treacherous mountains and into the cave. You need to be brave and curious and strong to get there. Last year was my first year, but this year I will lead my people. 

Eve tells me:

“Danka, to make a strong drink we need special berries from the Western  Forest. Take my kids to help you, but be careful, other people live in the West.”

I run like a wind, light and happy and strong.”

 “Who needs the berries

   We need the berries

We find the berries 

    In jungle!

We pick the berries

Magical berries

The sweetest berries 

That dangle!.”

***

Eve’s three kids follow bellowed Auntie, trying to catch up with her, laughing and tumbling. Mel, Fiona, and little Sophia just 4 years old.

Danka runs and sings her song “who need the berries”. On the “jungle” and “dangle” she jumps very high, landing on both feet into a deep squat.

Other kids are tripping, trying to mimic her.

Then she skips, then she twirls, still running, three kids after her in the narrow path among giant acacias and prickly raspberry bushes.

Mel is the drummer. He beats the rhythm with his left hand hitting his leather bag. This is not easy because, on his right shoulder, he carries his weapon, a 5 feet long spear. He is also an expert thrower, ready to protect the girls against any danger.

“ But,” he laughs,” all the animals will run away scared from Danka’s singing and jumping”

As soon as he finished his thought he noticed a movement of a shadow among the trees.

Then there is a strange, terrible roar. He has never heard anything like that before.

“WWRAOOOW”

He is ready to kill it.

“ As soon as I see his chest- the beast is dead- whatever it is”- Mel killed a bear and hyena before.

He sees the huge hairy head in the bushes.

“It is mine”, his right arm takes back, and the hips and torso recoil like an enormous spring.

“Wait, wait”- whispers Danka-and he stops at the last moment.

The “beast” jumps out, under the big head there are blond curls and a boy’s laughing face with the funniest brown dots all over it, but most on the nose. 

“What’s your name?!” Danka yells.

But he runs away and he is fast, waving with his “beast” head.

Danka laughs “ Mel, make sure you do not kill silly boys, it was a close call”

She likes this boy. A trickster. She remembers him from the last year, in the cave, he was really small and skinny then. But she remembers the laughter, the freckles, and the funny shadows he made with his hands across the fire in the cave.

 “I hope to see him again next week- if he is not killed by somebody by mistake”- she sighs and smiles.

Next week she will lead her tribe’s youth to Cave Lake. They will eat mushrooms and drink magic foods and potions and then they will dance.

She will dance with them, but her dance is different.

Eve worries about her little sister. 

“ Danka, you’re too much, you just don’t care, you just sing and dance, how can I protect you? Elders are not happy.  Big Man’s older son wants you to be his woman. It is an honor to our family”.

Danka doesn’t care for Big Heavy Max.

Eve sighs and hugs her sister. “Be careful, but when you find the boy you like, go for him”

Danka laughs “ I will, sis”, she twirls with her, then runs away singing and skipping: “I will, Oo-oh, I will, Oo-oh , how I reeeeally will!”

Old women and Eve send them off. About two dozen of young people, boys and girls run away from the village. They run towards the Northern Forest and The Mountain. They carry food and drink and wood for fire and they run. They run for hours and hours, then they sleep for a few hours and they run again. Exhausted, and excited thy see The Mountain. And they find the small mountain lake and the cave on the shore. Danka leads her people into the sacred chamber. There are other young people from other villages. 

They are exhausted after a long run but they start a fire and then the drums call them to dance. Their dance is powerful, it sounds like a jungle, like a waterfall and thunder. It sounds like a buffalo stampede or the lion’s kill.

The drinks and food are served by girls, and boys do more dancing and showing off their skills, jumping over fire, and wrestling.

 Soon nobody remembers that they are tired and the dance, shouting and competition becomes more fierce.

 Then Danka jumps out, climbs the elevated flat stone, and blows her horn.

She sees the boy with freckles. And the boy sees her.

She wails and she signs. They understand some but not all words. 

But it is so different, so beautiful. They never heard anything like this: she sings the story.  She shows it, and dances and sings it. They know it, they see it. It is about the buffalo hunt. But also about one hunter- it’s a boy, or is it a buffalo? And he is pierced by the spear, and he falls. He is killed. 

The woman, yes, they see the woman who loved him, she runs and embraces the dead man. 

They scream and then stop and there is silence. The woman, The Dancer, shows how “she lifts the dead body”, and the bloody head mask stays on the ground.

They hold their breath, stunned.

She plays the flute: how beautiful the boy is now and how she loves him.

And then she carries his bloody body and begs and cries.

Wow, she is talking to Sun and Moon, she begs Them- “bring him back for me”.

And they see; that death is final and the only way to be together with her love is..

Is to die. She falls. There is silence. And then… she wakes up, she rubs her eyes- was all this but a dream??

The boy with freckles  runs to her and shakes her,  he wants to tell her: ”I understood, it was me, and it was not!”

Will she understand? He knows what to do.

Andy, ( he has a name now) takes her to his secret place in the cave.

He makes fire- he shows the same story with his hands and shadows on the cave’s wall. He takes her hands in his hands and makes her hands show the boy with a big beast head.

She understands! He says “AAN- DY” She repeats, laughs, and points to him “Andy”. Then he makes shadows of young women.  “She dances”. He looks at her and she says: “DAN-KA”, he repeats: “Danka”.

Their hands do not part, they stay together. They slowly quit wrestling and showing shadows, but start showing young bodies what they want. 

 After they made love, hands still together, they fall asleep, and the campfire’s red ashes glow slowly dying away.

Andy wakes up and a tiny ray of sun lits the stone wall where they played with shadows. Was it a dream? No. He sees a beautiful woman happily sleeping next to him. He gently frees himself from her embrace, gets up, and stretches.

Then he brings the paint they used to make hands prints-thousands of handprints, generations after generations- time signatures, nothing more.

In his head, he still has Danka’s story. In his disheveled, half-woken head.  He shakes his blond curls, curses quietly, and starts painting. 

The world disappears and the pictures come alive on the stone wall.

It is hours later when he looks behind his shoulders.

She is awake, sitting, looking at him and at the paintings, smiling.

She starts to sway into slow, dance-like moves. She sings sweetly and quietly. 

“Andy, Danka, Aaaandy,

Playing by the fire, 

We live and love and liiii-ve,

And then we die.

                                   ***

The real language i.e. the communication between people as a sine qua non for the experience. Shared (?”selfed”?) narrative, music, and visual art as the simple beginning of our reality.

What is an Agent or SELF? All words have human origins. It means that at some point in time, there was a social agreement (usually unconscious) between some humans about a word and its meaning. Because of these social and pragmatic origins, over time these agreements shifted and shifted. I expect that about the word and meaning of say “an apple,” there was no need for much shifting, but such concepts like self or consciousness or soul or ego the agreements shift and shift and for every discussion, it is very wise to renew the such agreement. 

How about attaching “participants, selves or agents” ( “self” as the common language equivalent of “I” and “you” and “he/she”,  while using “agent” to denote “action of an observer”) to the concept of experience? 

Self and experience. 

Self experiences an experience. To have experience is to have self. No self, no experience. Simple and elegant. Again, it harks to the origins: we use language for conversations. That’s what makes an experience. Each conversation has agents (selves), content, and context. But context can only be described by additional conversations. How about the events that look like experiences? Pre-linguistic music, images, emotions, dreams, animal behaviors? Remember the last Neanderthal from my story? He was hungry, dying, and grieving the death of his son. But, by the will of the omniscient author, he had no language yet, then no self, no experiences. (of course- the author and readers- did experience that). He was using his sophisticated instinctual system to survive. Later on, with the magic of love, childhood, and translation, he, the Beautiful and Little Girl acquired the socially shared first word- “apple’ with its meaning of red round fruit (the first thing!). So, later on, he could try to explain his past, using his budding language and self to describe past experiences. It is a dramatic fictional illustration of a hypothetical event. But we live with hybrid minds. Your anger is a mixture of primordial, instinctual sensations and all language/self-saturated memories and concepts. Also: Your awe, love, headache, and friendship. Any difference between conversation and experience? Not much: more emphasis on “from you to me” versus “me with me”- both are social and “selfed”- i.e. language-loaded.

This agreement would also help with understanding, among other mysteries of the universe, our hybrid mind. 

The old part makes almost all nervous system, similar to animals, octopuses, and all. Peripheral nerves, autonomic nerves, whole brain with all myriads of codes, and algorithms. This old mind led us to get more and more complicated through the perils and challenges of evolution, it contains all mechanisms to survive, to outwit others, all instincts and gut feelings, altruism and competition, and anger and love.

It creates a sophisticated world, with emotions and feelings but this world belongs only to this organism. It is not shared and it doesn’t have things. It is extremely difficult to imagine such a being. All feelings and drives but nobody to feel and be driven. All fear, trembling but without anybody to fear. 

And then Homo Sapiens invented language. I described possible scenarios. Most likely I am wrong, but it helps with imagining the process. It started with sharing simple sentences like “I called it apple”

Strange, it had an agent, “self”
But no emotions, no value. The “stone” or “buffalo” is not good or bad. Revolutionary, it had things. The incredible advantage of things over the old system ”behaviors” is that they can be easily controlled! They practically “ask” to be controlled. The “self” controlling “a thing”: the consciousness is born.

The new ( maybe 50.000 years old?) system propelled Homo Sapiens to where we are now. The shared material world was controlled. Greed was born and it challenged more and more evolutionary-developed altruism. This is the core and deep origin of our environmental and social disasters. 

It also points toward the only way we can reverse this.

Category:

climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, human nature, nature of reality, origin of self

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Eco-humanist’s agenda

What worldview gives humans the best chance to tackle the environmental crisis.

Does worldview matter?

Yes, people should think about their worldview, talk and write about it, keeping a variety of broad perspectives in society is crucial, without it civilization dies. Also, while everybody has a personal worldview, societies have a prevailing worldview. They are created by religions, science, art, and recently propaganda, politicians, and media.

Whether they named it or not, people always trying to be happy, and the common, prevailing worldviews dictate the ways people chase this elusive goal.

There are two distinct modes of happiness: the first is related to material possessions and power, (which is also dependent on material possessions). The new red tricycle you always wanted, the rise, the promotion in the company’s hierarchy, and that woman. The other type of happiness is listening to your favorite music, watching a sunset with a friend, and learning how to do mosaics. The first type is like sharing a pie, the more I get, somebody will get less of it. The other type is the opposite, the more I get the more others can get. The first is regulated by money, and the other depends on the quality of experience, the quality of relationships, and skills. The first inevitably requires using material resources, and the other is much more sustainable.

If we can change the proportions of those two types of happiness in society we could be really happier, freer, living with less violence and with less inequality.

The world is divided: the religious people on one side, the science on the other. Religions are older than humanity and they help to live for billions of people. But they were made to make people passive, resigned with their limitations and powerlessness (except in smothering heathens), awaiting a better afterlife. We need to fix the world now, be joyful, and teach nature new tricks.

The same with science: it teaches misanthropy, “ look around and sulk!”, “insignificant speck in gazillions of galaxies”,” maybe this or that colorful gadget makes you feel better, maybe this pill?” Determinism tells us that everything has already been decided, so what is the point? 

How about humanism?

Most of famous, dead philosophers can be called “humanists’, but who are the real, 21st century, living, blood and flesh, humanists?

They are hidden, let me explain why.

I am a second-generation humanist, my mom was a Catholic and my dad was an atheist, both were humanists. 

Amsterdam Declaration, Humanist Manifesto 2022 is such a concise and thoughtful document but so dry and heartless:

1. Humanists strive to be ethical

  • We accept that morality is inherent to the human condition, grounded in the ability of living things to suffer and flourish, motivated by the benefits of helping and not harming, enabled by reason and compassion, and needing no source outside of humanity.
  • We affirm the worth and dignity of the individual and the right of every human to the greatest possible freedom and fullest possible development compatible with the rights of others. To these ends, we support peace, democracy, the rule of law, and universal legal human rights.
  • We reject all forms of racism and prejudice and the injustices that arise from them. We seek instead to promote the flourishing and fellowship of humanity in all its diversity and individuality.
  • We hold that personal liberty must be combined with a responsibility to society. A free person has duties to others, and we feel a duty of care to all of humanity, including future generations, and beyond this to all sentient beings.
  • We recognize that we are part of nature and accept our responsibility for the impact we have on the rest of the natural world.

2. Humanists strive to be rational

  • We are convinced that the solutions to the world’s problems lie in human reason and action. We advocate the application of science and free inquiry to these problems, remembering that while science provides the means, human values must define the ends. We seek to use science and technology to enhance human well-being, and never callously or destructively.

3. Humanists strive for fulfillment in their lives

  • We value all sources of individual joy and fulfillment that harm no other, and we believe that personal development through the cultivation of creative and ethical living is a lifelong undertaking.
  • We, therefore, treasure artistic creativity and imagination and recognize the transforming power of literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. We cherish the beauty of the natural world and its potential to bring wonder, awe, and tranquility. We appreciate individual and communal exertion in physical activity, and the scope it offers for comradeship and achievement. We esteem the quest for knowledge, and the humility, wisdom, and insight it bestows.

4. Humanism meets the widespread demand for a source of meaning and purpose to stand as an alternative to dogmatic religion, authoritarian nationalism, tribal sectarianism, and selfish nihilism

  • Though we believe that a commitment to human well-being is ageless, our particular opinions are not based on revelations fixed for all time. Humanists recognize that no one is infallible or omniscient and that knowledge of the world and of humankind can be won only through a continuing process of observation, learning, and rethinking.
  • For these reasons, we seek neither to avoid scrutiny nor to impose our view on all humanity. On the contrary, we are committed to the unfettered expression and exchange of ideas, and seek to cooperate with people of different beliefs who share our values, all in the cause of building a better world.
  • We are confident that humanity has the potential to solve the problems that confront us, through free inquiry, science, sympathy, and imagination in the furtherance of peace and human flourishing.
  • We call upon all who share these convictions to join us in this inspiring endeavor.

The last, #4, statement is the weakest, most wishy-washy. And, no, by itself the humanistic worldview doesn’t provide the meaning of life- but is the excellent base to search for it!

For the first time, stringing the line of past manifestos, this one uses the term “worldview”. It is a relief: “I am not a humanist, or not only a humanist, I just have a humanistic worldview. I can be many things at once, including a disappointed Catholic boy, deep in my guts.”

With religion it is not enough – you need to be it!

While this manifesto is the rational, intellectual, and objective description of humanism, at the same time it brings its origins, and motivation to the primordial instinct, and is “grounded in the ability of living things to suffer and flourish”. Our morality, instead of divine scriptures, comes straight from human nature, where else?

Can you sacrifice, and fight to defend “human nature”?

This is the crux (pardon the pun) of the matter. How can you base all your philosophy on something so elusive and controversial as human nature? No surprise that there are fewer humanists in the US than snake-handling and tongues-speaking fundamentalists.

First, make humanistic morality and purpose not so elusive:

It is actually much easier to have a humanistic worldview than the Declaration suggests: you just like humans more than corporations, more than the government, and more than the religious authority.  You need to be a little bit like an anti-establishment hero- do great things for people, against the authorities, monsters, demons ( including those inside you), and even gods. Fun. This gives meaning and purpose. 

Humanism is very old, it is about values, emotions, and instincts. We are not lacking rituals, just our rituals are older than religions and scriptures. Our rituals are concepts of family and community, charity, and of medicine.

Also, the origins of human nature are not so elusive as neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and paleoanthropology converging over the last few decades. Cooperation and altruism was the hallmark of the evolutionary developmental success of our ancestors over the last 8 million of years (and then of Homo sapiens). New data on language and on hypersociality point out that we are more interdependent than we ever dreamt of.*

Second, think about environmental disasters, and here humanism, compared to other popular paradigms, really shines.

Humanists see the world as literally made by humans, messed up by humans, and with humans as the only resource and responsibility to fix it. It is how nature made us, we are curious, resourceful, cooperative, and funny. It is a gift, we need to use it and duck again at the last minute before extinction.

As humanists, we know that we are children of the past but have to think about the future globally and we do not worry about science and religion much- we invented both quite recently… 

To fix the world, the first couple of questions have to be: “what’s wrong?” and “how come?”

The Religion says: we lost love ( or we do not understand /know how it is done). 

The science says: ( as always – long on facts, short on whys)

”We are like overcrowded lab rats, exhausted our resources and fighting each other”

No exit. 

Well, remember we are Houdini -like humans. We have this trick in our sleeve: consciousness ( which is thinking, free will, memory, hopping from paradigm to paradigm, etc). This has already saved us once from the brink of extinction, 50, 000 years ago.

We fearlessly examine our past and boldly design the solution. 

We need utopian social engineering combined with knowledge of the ancient past and the wisdom of religion and science.

The good thing is that we cannot force this type of change- no Orwellian “happiness”.

Old people are difficult to change, but if we teach our children well change is possible. 

Actually, this type of change is underway. 

Young people all over the world try to fight consumerism and environmental destruction, but the philosophical depth of this movement is “ gadgets do not make us happy and nature does.” The program devised by French philosopher Frederic Lenoir and his team teaches children to be mindful and think critically. It is called “savoir etre, vivre ensemble( SEVE)”- learning how to be and how to live with others. The courses are offered in 6 francophone countries, the French Canadian version is closest to the US.

I don’t think, these programs are labeled as “humanism” but it looks non-materialistic and non-dogmatic. Let’s start something similar in the rest of the world.

UNESCO and pope Francis promote education for global citizenship and peace. It is not very popular in the United States because of political or religious overtones. Would SEVE be better accepted or “too much philosophy”? So, the worldview is important, our minds are important, and it is where the fight for species survival is getting some traction. Easy, breezy, idealistic humanism gives a chance to work on the new generations of humans, let’s call it experience society.

                                                     ***

More reading:

Eco-humanism, African cosmology, and ubuntu:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael-Eze-4/publication/321157259_Humanitati

Essays related to covid 19 and environmental crisis- opening for the new world?

Pope Francis’s “Laudato si” and the liberal agenda:

https://store.usccb.org/collections/new/products/moving-boldly?utm_source=usccb.org&utm_me

dium=store_panel&utm_campaign=moving_boldly

SEVE (savoir etre vivre ensemble)

https://www.helloasso.com/associations/seve-savoir-etre-et-vivre-ensemble

Category:

climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, Explicit and implicit worldview, human nature, Humanism, materialism, What will happen to the mankind

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Shared Reality

Our environmental and social crisis has many unexpected repercussions and consequences, not all of them negative. As we are running out of the Earth’s resources, it made us think about and research nonmaterialistic societies, the origins of altruism, and human nature. Our collective unconsciousness, as whole humanity assumed more of the undertone; “what’s wrong with us?” And because the niche crisis obviously plays itself in the broad dimensions of time and space, these questions force us to be more aware of our deep past and (unfortunately) not-so-distant future.

The new data from neuroscience, prehistory, and linguistics allowed us to rethink human origins.

The discovery is simple and (like the notion that we come from monkeys) startling. Our reality is created by the human mind. Without the human mind, there is no reality. While the construction of this reality started recently, about 50,000 years ago by our human hybrid mind, it is based on our brain’s ancient algorithms and perception systems millions of years old. 

Since this new reality’s construction started, in the Upper Paleolithic period, every infant repeats this feat and builds reality simultaneously with building language, and selfhood in the first year of life. Every animal has its own world, only one, but we have two- an ancient, instinctual world of algorithms and the new one, shared with the rest of humans, symbolic, linguistic, attached to consciousness. As I will explain later, it started from sharing and naming simple things- like the baby does- but it is the only reality we know! And the only reality there is. ( “is”, the concept of existence, is the intrinsic part of this new system, and is related to  the concept of “self”)

What does it mean for the everyday person? How do these instinctual and new systems work together in our brains? The ancient, instinctual system works all the time-breathing, feelings, and moods- but when we talk to others, write, and use the language, this new system seamlessly piggybacks on the old one.

The things are real, the stone when kicked- hurts.  But: as everything is invented by the nervous system of our ancestors, so all kinds of extraterrestrials and supernaturals are also invented. And all cosmos to add. And everything that exists. Existence as a concept is probably a very recent invention. 

But, how about evolution. This new thing couldn’t have sprouted out of our brain suddenly, out of blue. 

 That’s right, it couldn’t. This is the hypothesis explaining the possible origins and the mechanism of the generation of this strange hybrid system. 

This is the new sequence of events:

 Some of them will appear in boldface, denoting my hypothetical thinking, the rest is well known. I do not need to defend my hypotheses, it will be written soon in detail by some super-professors from MIT or Oxford. ( I am going to be like Alfred Russell Wallace of shared reality).

8 million years ago: split from bonobos: both branches “worked” on the social niche, possibly our ancestors benefited from some minor mutation making it easier to communicate by sound.

Bonobos stayed with social communications via grooming, pheromones, and sex. Homo was improving a variety of sound production and/or discerning. It might have forced parietal hearing and memory centers to grow, made brains even bigger and childhood even longer. The sound system was perfect for prelinguistic algorithms improving cooperation, band organization, and defense. We can imagine that these improved signs and sound utterances are short outwardly but in the brain, they were part of algorithms growing longer and clumsier, part of million years of building, and very difficult to teach, especially without the concept of self.

4 million years ago: another split- “Robustus” branches worked more on using the big brains to defend themself against changes in the environment, mostly glaciation periods. They culminated in producing the Neardenthal, extremely strong, practical, “street-smart”. The “Gracilis “ branches continued with prosocial communications with homo Erectus sporting some evidence of the concept of the unknown, awe, burials, curiosity, and altruism. The benefits were slowly increasing but liabilities and dangers were enormous. Without the concept of self and of names of objects, the algorithms can do only so much in the material world.

Still, some of them managed to escape the climate deterioration- “first diffusion” 1, 7 million years ago. 

500 000 years ago, the last split into “Robustus”- Neanderthal and “Gracilis” -homo sapiens. The sapiens were eusocial, emotional, and emphatic, but still prelinguistic.

( I realize, that for many it will be impossible to imagine such a sophisticated and mature culture without symbolic language).

This gave us, our ancestors, some advantage over other groups but changes in climate eventually killed everybody except a few thousand sapiens remaining, somehow overlapping (Southern Europe or North Africa) with the dying remnants of Neanderthals. They kept improving proto-language, cooperation, altruism, and friendship, but the progression of the material culture was very slow.

My hypothesis suggests that the advances of social intelligence, with big brains without selfhood and language reached its limits– like many of the other intelligent and social species. At least 26 branches of hominids died and the Sapiens population was reduced to several thousand. The formidable social skills couldn’t protect against their environment, especially considering periodical glaciations and the eruptions of the mega-volcanoes during the last 100 000 years. 

50,000 or 40,000 years ago: This small group of brightest, most altruistic, and eloquent homo sapiens survived, they are our ancestors. I imagine a combination of three major factors and a lot of luck. 

  1. Close-knit family, they are on the move,(escaping cold or drought or other animals) trying to survive, and a lot of talking.
  2. Extended childhood, toddlers practicing talking, adults listening. 
  3. Possible elements of translation, desperate contact with other groups or Neanderthals with a different language, and utilization of a child’s learning process.

This is the imagined sequence of events: Proto language communication with sound being a part of a complex algorithm is understood by a child or foreigner as the name of the simple thing. Repeated back as such it creates a circle of people sharing a reality. The name and its meaning are attached to the person who used it. 

( the woman says: “ apples need to be picked up”,  the child cries pointing: “apples, apples”, and a foreigner says: “you called it apples?” and the woman repeats: ”yes, apples”)

Enormous social advantages are immediate. 

My hypothesis is that symbolic language, shared reality, selfhood and consciousness are the same thing, started together, as recently as 50,000 years ago, and are responsible for our survival and success.

50000 to 10000 years ago: The event described above ushered us into the next 40,000 years of the “Golden Age”.

The climate was excellent and shared reality and linguistic skills spread with trade, social life, art, and religion. It was the world before the Big Flood.

It took many generations for the concepts of ownership have become connected to power and pleasure. Humans were non-materialistic, so inequality was different than we can imagine. It could be appearance, being “close to higher powers”, personal skills, the rhetorical skills.  The “power”, still without material wealth, could be more fluid, societies changed from season to season. Huge monuments and mounds were built and destroyed without hierarchy, bureaucracy, and much of inequality. New archeological discoveries in Turkey, Stonehenge, and Meso-America suggest that.

10.000 years ago to the present. Domestication of people, plants, and animals. The “primordial sin’- materialism, eventually caught up with us. Shared reality allowed for agriculture, technology, and inequality. A thin layer of greed spread over our bran new world of things, relationships and gods. Empires and Religions rose and fell until the circle seems to be closing up and we are facing… each other again.

This timetable, based on the development of a hybrid brain changes the evolutionary view of human nature.

Homo sapiens emerged with an almost suicidal drive towards sociality, empathy, altruism, and emotionality. We used primates’ big brains, and rich sensory worlds fueling curiosity, especially the curiosity of others. Then we “bet” on sound-mediated communication, which turned out to be the “winner” bringing us off the brink of extinction.

The sound-mediated communication culminated in the invention of the language-selfhood-shared reality complex. 

This new toy combined with the relatively good climate gave us the abundance of the “Golden Age” with gods, art, and technology. Humans flourished spreading all over the planet.

And then, just recently,10, 000 years ago, let me repeat it: a thin slimy layer of greed appeared. 

How, why not earlier? It seems that the domestication process and concentration of the huge amount of people created the all-pervading illusion of happiness based on ownership.

Materialism, then capitalism and now we have to tame it or die. 

But, evil is not in our nature, we know that the happiness and satisfaction it gives are not real. Can we teach the new generation to get high on experiences?

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climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, human nature, Inventions, materialism, nature of reality, What will happen to the mankind

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Rome conference or die

Part  1: The vision.

Part  2: The crisis of the human niche.

Part  3: The worldview and the crisis of the human niche.

Part  4: The role of evolution.

Part  5: The prehistory of mind and the crisis.

Part  6: The conference as a metaphor and the process.

Part  7: What we will teach – the vision of Experience Society.

Part 1: The Vision.

    When we observe the world, most events are circular in nature. The day and night, the seasons of the year, first marriage, second marriage, 

First coming, Second Coming, reincarnation.

     This is the natural source of popular and reassuring concepts;  “as it is worse, it will get better.. and worse again, after the drought there will be a flood, it is warmer, it will get cooler”.

Even in science, the cosmos is hugely circular and particle physics too. Glaciations, civilizations, and periods of war and peace come up and down. “ we are fine, we’ll be fine”.

    Not so fast, desafortunamente.

Evolution is one of the basic, and relatively newly discovered mechanisms in the universe that are not circular. 

Also thermodynamics II and expanding Universe.

Sure, Heraclitus pointed to the non-circular flow of the river, but then we’d found out about water circulating in the earth. Maybe you just need to find a bigger circle and “we’ll be fine”?.

What is “fine,” I ask, and I pick the smartest and best-informed people I can find. 

They would – uniformly, uniformly- say” I know it is bad, I do what I can locally, give money to charities, but it is going to be bad.” “ Not in our lifetime” they add sheepishly and walk away with just slightly bent shoulders, as if saying “I know, our children, hopefully, educated and with good jobs…”

There is a fierce battle to position ourselves to survive well forthcoming disasters, not unlike virtual reality video games. As in the game, the blood and corpses aren’t so disturbing if the people concerned were not even born yet, who will live ( and die) in far away countries (mostly imaginary) and even now dying in droves, poor and miserable and we learned to tolerate this fine.

The problem: the more we learn ( and we can not unlearn, and understanding is fun) the more realistic are these corpses. They soon acquire faces, maybe even names, and they start to stink, after they slowly die in front of our eyes. More charities? More steel bars in our windows?

I have a better solution and it comes from 50 years of working with children, studying worldviews, evolution, and the history of our minds.

   The only hope I see is creating a different type of people, actually, the type we use to be for the last 10 million years until the last 50 000 thousand years (0.5% or “December 31st “ of our species’ existence). 

The last surviving hominids, we almost got extinct before. We need again a Houdini trick, we need to shed the last 10 000 years of a thin slimy layer of greed and grabbing. We will retain symbolic thinking, and smart brains but avoid the destruction of the planet.

We are going to create Experience Society.

We are going to teach the new generation to live happily, peacefully, in partnership with other humans, other sentient beings, and the whole environment. 

How do teach them that?

It is what the Rome conference is all about.

We’ll start with infants, then expand to older and older children. 

Let me address some objections. 

  1. “You can not parent and teach something or some ways you are not. It is not what you say, but who you are.” Agree, it has to be bootstrapping and dealing with the chicken or egg ( literally) dilemma. But we can do, and all we can do is the best we can. Certainly, we can do better than we are doing now. And neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology have some good news for us.
  2. “How can you force others about such an intimate subject like parenting. Parents feel they know how to parent and will not listen to any ‘propaganda’”. Agree, that it will be difficult, but it is why we need a broad range of experts and authorities and wise men and women and maybe magicians. I am listening for solutions rather than for naysaying. But every year it became more and more clear that doing nothing will bring to our children unspeakable misery. We are talking about the happiness of your children, nothing less.
  3. “We’ll never agree on the curriculum”- different cultures and nations, different religions, different economies, different worldviews. Yes, I see it as an almost un-winning gambit, but, first, in the beginning, we are talking about parenting babies 0 to 12 months old! everybody wants babies to be happy. Second, psychologically, I see the possibility of some kind of “unity out of desperation”. ( covid-19 in Italy and the response to Putin’s aggression comes to mind.)

Immediately, I thought about Rome with: 

  1. Pope Francis being a good guy and the catholic church being, well, “catholic”, would be somewhere to start. Add Dalai Lama, some more religious leaders, spiritual leaders, maybe some presidents, and UN officials.
  2.  Media influencers, press, and activists for equality, global warming, for peace.
  3. Scientists: environmentalists of all kinds, philosophers, sociologists, economists, psychologists, developmental pediatricians, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and AI experts.
  4. Humanists: wise men and women from modern and ancient cultures, teachers, writers, poets, artists, and musicians.
  5. Pregnant mothers and their spouses, grandmothers, and grandfathers.
  6. Teenagers- possibly the primary target populations?

This is the vision, but there are still many elements we need to convince people about, not only convince, like “ ok, maybe, if you say so” but convince about urgency and gravity and famous “ so, what” or “so what, if no Rome conference?”

Parts 2-6. Convincing, before even starting. 

Part 2. We need to convince people that there is a crisis of the human niche. 

It is important to use the term niche instead of “environment”, “habitat” or, worse “ global warming” (a tiny part of the problem).  Modern and deep evolutionary understanding will be necessary. 

On a happier note, it will not be necessary to argue” whose fault”, is it “human-made” or “just a cycle”- because of the revolutionary and unusual nature of the solution.

Part 3. We need to convince people of a humanistic worldview. 

This has nothing to do with religious belief, spirituality is an important part of the conference. Neither is socialism in disguise (how we divide our material goods, according to capitalistic, socialistic, or communistic principles is still all about material goods). We need the humanistic worldview to know that we can die like died other hominids like Neanderthals died, and Sapiens almost died 50.000 years ago. We need to know that we made this civilization and on this base, on these shoulders, consciously, we can build a new one. And thrive and have fun.

Part 4. We need to convince people of the evolutionary mechanisms including strengthening niche, diversity, and complexity.

It is what species do to avoid extinction. Working to keep the niche strong and healthy. Examples are everywhere, even iconic Darwin’s finches. It is not circular! It is messed up because we messed it up, and until we won’t change our ways, it will get worse and worse. Remember what Einstein said about insanity? 

Part 5. We need to convince people about the hybrid nature of our minds. 

If we want to replicate the pre-linguistic value system with our modern, symbolic brains, we need to trust evolutionary realism and evolutionary neuroscience. The exciting research showing our brains mixing ancient algorithmic beings with language-powered symbolic thinking explained how we are the only hominid that survived. We manipulate this incredible system every day, more and more purposely, like with artificial intelligence, meditation, and psychopharmacology. So, we can stop killing the planet and ourselves.

Part 6. We need to convince people to embark on the project.

  Rome conference is perhaps just my armchair musing. It may be a metaphor for the project, a new conversation involving more people. Or it can end up being a real conference in Rome. 

This would involve an unheard amount of trust and goodwill, maybe desperation. We would need to trust developmental experts, parenting experts, our political leaders, holy men, trust people, and each other in general. ( Going to the moon was nothing compared to this request)

We would need to trust the process, the journey because we do not know the way it’d unfold, we’d have to learn from each other, and use imagination. 

We need to cross multiple barriers: east-west, religious-nonreligious, have-have not, truth -media.

Part  7: What we will teach – the vision of the Experience Society

This will be the subject of the conference. The whats and the hows.The curriculum for the starting but crucial segment- “parenting the infants” seems pretty easy to agree on. Lots of this is in Piaget, Spock, Montessori, and Waldorf programs. And a lot is common sense like the parents need to be present and mindful, the society needs to support the family. No media, no violence. The concept of blaming the materialism of the cavemen is new and startling. The conversation about the non-materialistic source of happiness is very new and very old at the same time.

***

The terrible and cruel truth is that if we fail to work on it now, we’ll be reduced to something similar, painful, fractured, 50 years from now. Possibly Neanderthals had a similar option: “change your lifestyle, your beliefs, your language, trust them”. And they are gone.  

Not all items of convincing are necessary to work for the conference, just this set of opinions makes everything fit together so well…

***

This is the overview of this concept. I am working on Parts 2-7 in the form of separate essays.

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climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, Explicit and implicit worldview, human nature, Humanism, materialism, What will happen to the mankind

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Origins of materialism (reading A.Hinton’s Understanding context)

Reading Andrew Hinton’s Understanding Context. ( version 7.11.21)

  1. Introduction: animals’ language, human language, and computer language: three languages, same principles. 
  2. Part I: A case against relativism and homo translensis. 
  3. Part II: The origin of things
  4. Conclusions: three languages linked to three events.

Introduction:

  Eve is a very, very smart 5 year old. She sits in front of the basket of apples, the knife in her hand. Her sister, Fiona, barely 18 months old, walking, talking, and asking questions, noticed that one apple fell from the basket. “What’s that?” she asks and points to the apple.

 Miraculously, Eve answers: “apple!”.

I will try to explain why this answer was really a miracle. 

 Now we have to add that they sit in front of a cave, the knife is made of stone, and it is all happened 50 thousand years ago. It means that in Eve’s brain there are many, many neural networks, useful for homo sapiens, that include different fruits. These algorithms help Eve “ find apples”, “tell apples from pears”, “chop apples for sauce”, “eating an apple” and so on. But in her brain- and this is a part of this essay’s hypothesis-there is no “apple” as an object. But, somehow, miraculously, breaking the algorithm, separating a piece of her reality, her environment, from its function, she answers “apple”! 

    This essay is about the nature of our surroundings. It might also, while discussing surroundings, give us some glimpses at our nature. 

    The surroundings of an animal are, from the point of view of this animal (sic!), determined by the activity and sophistication of its nervous system. From our, human, point of view, we can only muse: “What is it like to be a bat” and agree that we’ll never be sure. 

It doesn’t stop science from working on the nature of experience. Ecology, ethology, and semiotics are all about it. And philosophy- like phenomenology and natural philosophy.

    The animal’s senses and its brain create the animal’s world which Jacob von Uexkull called Umwelt. Again, depending on the point of view, the same thing, we can call a “habitat”, “niche”, “environment” or just “what’s outside”.

Depending on the point of view… or “context” ( we are going to abuse this term mercilessly). When scientists are talking about an animal’s surroundings some more shifts occur( I mean shifts in the conversation’s perspectives we usually do not notice because it is so ”normal” for us). In biology, like in modern physics, the results of investigations change with the actions of the observer, his or her attitude, purpose, method, and prevailing scientific paradigm. Think about the interpretation of prehistoric fossils or ancient artifacts. And using the term “context” emphasizes the fluidity of the thing or even its arbitrariness.

I have been working on people’s personal worldviews for the last 10 years. What is the worldview if not a point of view ( or context) from which we see the world? And what is understanding context if not transforming the implicit, unconscious, gut felt, and acted worldview into an explicit, spelled out, clarified set of rules and structures that help us navigate our life? 

When a postmodernist like Derrida or Foucault talks about their beloved context it becomes something very abstract, like a cloud of meanings surrounding a concept or a story.

“This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal” functioning”. (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy)

Yes, the philosophers and scientists tried to handle the question of context/surroundings (see above), but it was not until computer people explained this to us that we got some traction.  Computers help us to solve the problems of the real physical world. We need them for health, economy, research, communication, basically for everything we do. 

The computer people squeeze all our problems into the screen.  Then, they have to translate or shift the domain of the physical world into language and symbols, then translate these semantic elements into a digital world. Then, after they crunched the numbers they proceed to reverse the process back to the screen jargon, and voila, they are done. 

When computer guys (like Hinton) talk about context, this cloud of meaning, even if stuck inside a computer screen, becomes much more physical, more like a place or a map. This concreteness, physicality even if strange in the virtual world, feels natural for them. They are living there, working there, creating and designing the content and the contexts itself around it. They interchangeably use the terms for context like “environment” and for working with it – “architecture”. It is why Hinton uses Gibsonian ecology as the model for understanding context in this novel, rich and useful way. Following his lead in this essay, we will blend discussion on the computer environment with the physical human environment and cultural-semantic environment.

Part One: A case against relativism – introducing homo translensis and “domain hopping”.

 This introduction might suggest that the nature of our surroundings- which is nothing else than our reality, our solid, real Universe is not so solid. This talk about shifting domains, of the point of view, of the role of the observer in modifying reality; it all smells like relativism. And, how properly for our times when relativity rules. Gone are our basics, our standards, and our rocks.  God is dead (Nietsche ), the President lies (everybody knows)  the corporations cheat (they mean to do it) and the media is full of fake news.  But humans know better. Relativism doesn’t help, doesn’t solve any conflict, it is the queen of the stalemate.

The trick of relativism failed us with religious wars, with religion versus science dilemma, even with biology vs humanities squabble. Where did Cartesian duality take philosophy? Well, pretty close to its demise.

 The insight for the better way comes to me from Andrew Hinton’s Understanding Context. Hinton starts with a story- him, a computer geek, catching a plane. He leads the reader through a number of overlying contexts: his iPhone, with his calendar and schedule, his office computer, a colleague’s laptop, the airport’s computers-security, and the cashier’s – the main object of interest hops from screen to screen- his flight. He switches domains and environments- digital, physical, and linguistic – he walks (or runs) through the airport, the shuttle, and (at last) the plane. He has to understand and hop through all these meanings -symbols, icons, messages from outside and inside. Unlike Derrida’s contexts- his are very, very real.  I realized while reading his book that coping, conquering, and understanding different contexts and environments sits deep in human nature. Switching domains- actually holding them simultaneously in the mind for a moment- this what understanding is- it is like translating from language to language and comprehending- using them both. I also realized that these processes- these “domain hopping”- are everywhere.

Cartoon # 1

As a senior pediatrician, I talk to every new employee, a doctor, a nurse, or a front desk person. I always draw for them and explain these symbols: “The circle. This means empathy- we are one-we are equal- we embrace them with real or symbolic arms. The second is a square: we translate their square problems into something we can help him with, the third is “plugin” or action- or complete- do what you need to do and document it so you can have a clear mind ready for the next one”. 

Both, understanding and following these instructions – require constant shifting contexts or domains. The other examples are meditation and prayer- you shift between the transcendent and your mind.

So, the truth is there, real and important. It is not the truth that is relative, it is the context, the view, the way of looking, that shifts. I mentioned “domain hopping” and I will return to it, but I think it is how our curiosity and obsession with figuring things out, works. We are ” homo translensis”- we know one thing, then we stick the same thing in different domains or media, or modes. It is like translating from one language to another: for a precious moment, we have to hold both things or thoughts or truths in our minds. This is understanding and it is everywhere.

Our computerized world just made it so obvious.  

So, was it always like that?

Part II.  A hypothesis. “The origin of things”.

     No, it was not. In his recent book, Peter Godfrey-Smith explains how the mind works for very simple and very ancient animals- mollusks, cephalopods, or fish. Their simple brains connect perception with action and maybe “presence” in one experience of living. From “if”- perception, to “then”- action, like a procedure code in your desktop. 

It is extremely hard to imagine a world without things. In my hypothesis – this was the world until about 50,000 years ago. The forests were full of birds, monkeys, and hominids – full of life, intelligence, and communications, but none of these creatures had discrete objects in their worlds.

What was going on 50.000 years ago? 

This we know:

Like dinosaurs 260 million years ago, about the last 10 million years witnessed a phenomenal expansion of great apes. 

 These monkeys invented complexity unheard of before. They were, as great E.O Wilson tells us,  hypersocial or eusocial, rivaling only a few other genera like ants, bees, termites, etc. But unlike others they had huge brains, hands to manipulate objects, and communications based on vision and sound. Many bands and tribes evolved and were selected for cooperation, and altruism. They were spreading to more and more diverse habitats. They invented axes, spears, and fire. They developed cultures with burials, art, stories, and gods. And they were avid learners. We know of 27 major branches of hominids.

They all died out, except for one small group or tribe- 10,000 individuals or less- us.

 This part is pretty much accepted and non-controversial. 

But from now on- hold on to your seat.

Their communication or proto-language was based on procedure code. Just like very primitive animals’ communication.

The animal brain as we understand it contains only algorithms coding for evolutionary beneficial behaviors (traits), probably nothing more. Anything else would be energetically prohibited- impossible. And the more complex these neural networks are, the more “costly” they are and benefits have to be more striking for the new trait to survive and expand. It is the pressure to develop the brain versus the pressure to evolve muscles or fur. Example: the process of domestication of wolves to dogs-  dogs can “ handle” and “understand” humans better than wolves but they “pay” with weaker muscles and smaller teeth.

Over the eons of evolution, big brains become very costly- and still are.

The communication algorithms allow for social and cultural complexity-equivalent of our knowledge-were becoming more and more elaborate- say like bee dance or skill to become alpha male, or telling a story and false story and magic story. It is difficult to imagine that, but half of the algorithm, like in procedure code, has no sense. The algorithms have branches, maybe thousands of them but no modularity. So the learning slowed down, the evolutionary pressure and competition between muscle and intelligence became more fierce. !00 thousand years ago it might appear that robust, stronger hominids ( h. Neanderthalensis )prevail over “gracile” (sapiens). Over the last 6 million years the increase in complexity slowed down. Stone axes were still stone axes after millions of years!

Note: Everybody agrees with these simple biological facts… when we talk about bacteria, spiders, even fish. When we start to talk about more complex animals, magically they become more like us, especially pets or animals one spent all one’s life investigating ( chimpanzees, octopuses). Their behavior might look like ours, but their minds and learning work more like neural nets of modern AI than ours hybrid brains.

So, it is like the story of “primordial soup” to explain the creation of life with the abundance of all rare elements, warmth, sun, lightning storm, oxygen, and nucleotides swimming around and hoping for a stroke of luck…

Similarly, our ancestors, with super socially intelligent people, migrating under the pressure of stronger hominids had great language, and great parenting, and Eve and Fiona had a moment of genius.  Eve was in the “magic years” period, Fiona in the “joint attention” pointing phase, and humanity was in the “dream world” phase.

Thus, Eve, miraculously, shares the piece of the procedure code her sister pointed to. Preposterous! The pieces of codes have no meaning- well, they did not until now- from now on her and her sister share the concept and a piece of a new reality- an apple. This single event has to be combined with creating or just naming each other’s self (thanks for the close-knit family, talking constantly)- otherwise, it would have to be invented over and over-and this is impossible! The apple was Fiona’s and Eve’s first shared, independent from the procedure code, thing. I imagine that the next step was to share this with Mom and Dad.

     Animals do not do that, there are no objects in the Umwelten.*  With the object, like an apple, there is a cascade of benefits, there is no looking back. The things do not exist unless and until named. The name/thing duo can be easily shared with others, it has attributes, it has quantity. This brings abstract concepts floating around our apple. Most importantly with a thing, you can want it, own itand share it. Actually, the meaning of “apple” contains its origins. It is as if  Eve said, “I  call it apple”- pointing to the metaphoric and cultural nature of this thing. I imagine that for many, many generations the new world of things coexisted with an old world of procedure codes, of perception-action arc, where if is a primitive agent that does the action- then. Animals have in their brains plenty of procedure codes for actions, truly beneficial actions, but completely anonymous- benefiting the species which is- a concept- a nobody. The huge advantage of the you-me-object -attribute system was the gate for fast technological and social progress. And, to prove it, we survived.**

 Like in this essay: it is what we humans do: “hopping domains”. The existence of named objects enables shifting perspectives, it is like advancing from a two-dimensional world to three-dimensional space, when you get it, you’ll use it all the time.

Another Note: It is difficult to imagine life without things. It is, I guess, like all you know would be the type of knowing how to ride a bike, how to play piano, how to make out with other humans?

Part 3. Conclusions.

Look at these three parallel events. In each, the world of the procedure code breaks and develops into a different reality or domain or metaphor.

1.Rare or just a single event:

Ca 50,000 years ago, a small band of homo sapiens acquired modularity of language, the concept of objects which expanded to a shared reality.   All other brands and branches of hominids that did not get this died out.

 2. Very common:

 It happens to every baby 6  to 12 months old since event #1. Babies develop “object permanence”.  She now knows that the toy that is hidden will not disappear forever, it is still there!

Pre-linguistic communication shifts to language and shared reality. Now we can see that the term “acquiring object permanence” is an oxymoron- in our shared reality objects are permanent by definition, until then, in the infant’s world, there were no objects separated from functions.

3. Recently very common,

Computer programmers and object-oriented user experience people perform similar tricks. The anonymous, pre-linguistic concepts, tasks, and problems defined in the form of the procedure code are transformed and transferred into shared by users pseudo-reality or (nicer) computer reality.

   All three events describe the now-famous “domain hop”: from procedure language, shared object-oriented, user’s reality emerges. ( thank you, Fiona and Eve). The original event was so rare that it looks like a miracle. Then every human baby learned to repeat that. And recently humanity learned how to perform it, with computers, “on-demand”. 

Content creates context. The object creates an agent – self. Understanding, translating, domain shifting, domain hopping is at the core of our human nature. It is how we survived.                                    

                                                  * * *

                                              * * *

*  Wait, and how about Japanese monkeys who learned how to wash potatoes? It was not an object, it was socially sharing the behavior, an algorithm.  But without the object independent from function there is no breakthrough, another skill, that’s it. 

** This broad description of the hypothetical event skips linguistic jargon of “qualia” and “memes”, and skips evolutionary mechanism’s details of spreading of beneficial traits.

—

Tom Voychehovski

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climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, human nature, materialism, nature of reality, What will happen to the mankind

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Invention of things

So many puzzles, one key.

Here are some examples of puzzles:

  1. The anthropic dilemma or fine-tuning. 
  2. What happened before the Big Bang? Or how Entropy 0 can change to non-0?
  3. Why did we not find any evidence of aliens?
  4. Where is the center of the Universe?
  5. Why are homo sapiens so much more complex than other animals?
  6. What was crucial in the human evolutionary leap?
  7. What was the evolutionary origin of human language?
  8. What was an evolutionary origin of materialism?
  9. What is the solution to our niche crisis?

The key: the event which occurred over a relatively short evolutionary time- probably several thousands of years, about 50,000 years ago in Africa or the Middle East. It involved one or at the most a couple of groups of ancient humans. 

     To continue the explanation or the description of the hypothesis- the key- we need to stop and insert an explanation. An explanation for the explanation? Yes, this sentence might need to be moved to the beginning of the essay, definitely can not be postponed. The explanation involves bootstrapping. ( A la Baron Munchausen) Explaining the working of the human brain with the human brain. Explaining the nature of reality using the language created by this reality. Explaining the complexity of the system using tools created within this system. It is why our explanation doesn’t explain what really happened, but how we continue to improve our explaining it. The best and the only thing we can do- is bootstrapping. It is obvious then that the nature of things reflects (or follows) the nature of our probing system. Mainly our brains but also other experimenting or probing machines. The results of probing depend and reflect the structure of the probe. 

       Another metaphor can be helpful: You look and you realize that the fur gloves you have worn for a long time are actually inside out. So, you flip it, put it on and it obviously works much better. The cold hand’s problem is solved. No repair, no surgery, no expense, just a fresh look- so simple, and the result is incredible.

     Now, back to the cavemen.  Well, the event I am going to describe carries similarities to several older events. We see these events as a cluster of extremely unlikely circumstances that occurred only once (an event can not be rarer than that). Like: Big Bang, creating solar/’planetary/earth system, creating life from no life systems, creating a nervous system to support nonrandom behavior, creating big brain social mammals in post dinosaurs niche. 

We also see our lives similarly- the nodes of unlike events and circumstances. I hypothesize that our brain creates in developing neural networks an important (nodal) but uncommon structure (few axons or dendrites) reflecting the structure of these outside- (niche) events. Or, if you reverse this concept, outside events reflect neural structures. ( the “glove hypothesis”- the glove corresponds to perceived reality, the brain is the hand inside the glove).

     Now, really back to cavemen. The unlikely cluster of events occurred circa 50,000 years ago. The horde which became our ancestors was migrating north under the pressure of bigger and stronger hominids. 

They had to outsmart them: by the level of cooperation and sophistication of communication. In migration, the children in the band were few and exceptionally precious. Many members took care of them, communication, talking back and forth was more intense, more social, and prolonged. Toddlers who started to talk were still being talked to and nolens volens listened to. Toddlers naturally: 1 ask questions, 2. ask for names of things. 

      Until then the communication had a lot of characteristics of animal communication.  When I read about the evolutionary origins of language, invariably linguists make it extremely complicated and jargon -saturated and missing evolutionary mechanisms. Communication is what the nervous system does, it was created to enable organisms to develop nonrandom behavior. So information from outside the system can benefit the system. This actually defines and creates “outside and inside”. The cells have their internal communication system, then when cells become “social” and create multicellular organisms- it opens new “outside”, and at last, when organisms become social- the concept of outside moves up to another level. The information which does not benefit the system- does not survive, the things it describes – do not exist. So the content of information is always the same: the descriptions of beneficial behaviors. You manage to remember it, you live, you manage to inherit it- your species niche expands. In archaic bacteria, it would be “move towards higher sugar concentration”, In bees- a dance directing other bees to flowers- in chimps- the details of organizing a rebellion against an alpha male. These descriptions might contain communications full of actions, places, objects, and animals but it is not language. They might contain stories, memories, emotions, and logical decisions but it is not language. Or, you may call it proto-language. Because of the crucial difference between that and human communication is really not linguistic. It’s ontological. These animals and early humans have the concept of reality described by Jacob Uexkull as Umwelt.  Their brains are full of beneficial behaviors. Nothing else. And beneficial behavior expands the species’ niche- usually but not always improving organisms’ survival and reproduction. It is impossible to manipulate this type of reality, the more complicated behaviors the more unwieldy it is to use them in different situations. The learning is painfully slow. Hominids hit the evolutionary wall, over the last 5 or 10 millions of years, they all died.

      Then, the miracle happened. The cluster of unlikely circumstances and events occurred. 

       The 15-month-old cave girl said: “daaaa’’ and pointed at the apple. ( She meant “ what is that, sis”?) It’s called “joined attention” . Her older sister answered: “an apple”. The older sister pulled the apple from the description of behavior- about how we find apples, which are good to eat, etc, etc. Then she stuck this apple into a brand new thing – reality. It was very small, beginning, just between the toddler and big sister, but they could manipulate it easier- “two apples, big apples, red apples” the endless uses of the THING. ( Notice that she mixed domains-or dimensions- the trick very often used with inventions, like a steam engine, gravity or double helix ) Paradoxically the reality which was starting to be socially shared opened the door for individuality. Budding modularity made recursive speech possible. In the Umwelt world, it was only me with my niche. 

      But now, or with a generation or two, with the invention of things, it was so easy, soon the whole family used more and more names, not as a part of the description of behaviors, but as building blocks of intergroup reality. Now the same story could be told in so many ways. How many fish do we need? Well, how many are coming for dinner?  You could talk about the quality of things and the quantity of things- the birth of abstraction and mathematics. And, after you talked about things- next big step- you could own them. And lack them.

     It probably took generations to populate the budding joint reality of the group with things. But modularity, later known as grammar, and recursiveness were the keys.

Now, an easy part, the puzzles.

  1. The anthropic dilemma or fine-tuning. It is true that many facts in the history of the cosmos, origins of Earth, and life on Earth are incredibly rare and improbable. The same can be said about evolutionary facts leading to modern humans. But if you examine the events leading to the creation of Saturn rings, or penguins, or squirrels, these are also incredibly rare and improbable. The measuring and exploring and assigning of probability occur within the same system. Chinese medicine does not see any brain- the probing and the result operate within the same system.

       2. What happened before Big Bang? Or how Entropy 0 can change to non-0?

Again, the time concept and Big Bang belong to the same system. The Universe began with Big Bang – they are all human-made concepts and if something was before we would not call it the beginning. Entropy occurs in time, and when there is time, there is non 0 Entropy. The time is defined by change, with change the order has to be imperfect -sooner or later.

       3. Why did we not find any evidence of aliens?

Aliens with gods and unicorns belong to human stories, as does the rest of the Universe. So, they do exist, inside our culture, like forest, fear, and Finland. And there is nothing outside, they are real inside this mind-boggling reality.

       4. Where is the center of the Universe?

The reality and the Universe were built during the evolutionary development of the nervous system. Every living organism has its center of reality inside the organism (well, how about ants or bees, do they share it??). Humans are an exception. They developed, starting about 50,000 years ago, shared reality. Their stories, which by and by become myths and then split into religions and science contained the notions of the center of the Universe, but ultimately these concepts and constructs are related to human intelligence. As long as we stay here on Earth, even if our science or religion points into a special part of heaven, I would assign the center to the person who points there, wouldn’t you?

       5. Why are homo sapiens so much more complex than other animals?

We invented things, language, and the Universe and it makes learning exponentially easier.

        6. What was crucial in the human evolutionary leap?

The invention of things and abstract thinking ca. 50,000 years ago.

        7. What was the evolutionary origin of human language?

Intragroup reality switch- from social and emotional sharing to language sharing to reality sharing to language modularity.

       8. What was an evolutionary origin of materialism?

The events described above, it is what made us modern humans and now it can kill us.

       9. What is the solution to our niche crisis?

Use an understanding of the evolutionary past to expand our niche by building a society based on experiential happiness. If we continue to try to be happy with material things we’ll run out of them and die out ( see details in the previous posts- esp. “niche crisis II”).

   

       

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climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, Explicit and implicit worldview, Inventions, materialism, nature of reality, Pediatrics, What will happen to the mankind

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Be the best?

Be the best?

 

Because of the niche crisis, I am thinking and writing a lot about materialism, its origin, and its effect on humanity.

 

I am obsessed with the notion that shifting dimensions is something very important in our thinking. Nolens volens American democrats (and I as one of them) were forced to do just that. 

From climate and health care suddenly COVID pandemic was all-important: and now- race.

The ability to shift dimensions is crucial for wise judgment. It is an element of critical thinking, there is no creativity without shifting dimensions. To do it you use imagination, historical, and global perspective. 

 In racism a doctrine selects a group of people, declares them inferior and then other people can use it for brutal advantage, sometimes for generations and generations. And a systemic injustice can persist because the critical thinking, shifting dimension, and perspective are so rare. 

  It is also difficult, requiring effort and training. 

And here the materialism comes back like an old stew. Living and thinking in the world of things offer incredible advantages. Modern school with an emphasis on technology and science is famously one dimensional. Auto mechanics and computer technology don’t require fluency in classical Greek. Actually, it is difficult to think where would you use this skill- still standard in European high school 100 years ago.

One dimensional thinking gives quick and high profit while fosters consumerism and inequality and racism. And it is a hallmark of free-market capitalism- profit is everything.

Fortunately, it is not in our genes, it started only 50, 000 years ago. Like poor people are not stupid- only taught to be poor for several generations, the same – CEOs and financial sharks are not bad and greedy- only taught for several generations to be the best you can be- measured by one dimension- your account. Neither group is happy- so the reversal is possible but it would take one or two generations. If we start now.

What is an alternative to materialism?

Evolutionary, before the invention of material culture and the language of material things- whichever came first- the world of primitive hominids, like animals, was populated with the more or less sophisticated descriptions of behaviors. Now, with our prodigious brains, we call it experiences. We can not completely eliminate material culture, but we can create a world where experiences are valued high and they, not things define the richness and qualities of our lives.

If you share a pie the more you take, the less is left for others. It is where we are. But if you share a beautiful sunset, the more you share, the richer and more fantastic is the experience. It is where we need to be. The experience, unlike the gadget you owe, depends on your input, your relationship you are in, your mood, your knowledge, and your imagination. It makes it difficult but it makes you really happy, content and peaceful. Makes your life examined and your children smiling. It is when you are the best- the quality of experience determines it.

 

And one more thing. It is sustainable, the switch would give us a glimmer of a chance of survival as a species.

Because our share of the pie is dwindling and it will continue to.

I know, we need a whole new conversation, the measuring system, a new language, institutions, and industries…the parents teaching love and relationships, the schools teaching critical thinking and multidimensional thinking. Teaching art, poetry music, and literature.

And who will do it, where is this broad coalition of courageous and hopeful people?

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climate change, enviromnental crisis,, human nature, materialism

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Same horde of cavemen 2

The same horde of cavemen 2

 

This essay describes the origin of materialism.

This is interesting but to talk about it we need to make two pretty bold assumptions.

  1. In the evolutionary past, our ancestors were not materialistic- otherwise, we couldn’t talk about “the origin”. Even with the notions that “there is a jungle out there” and “survival of the fittest” the animals do not have the concept of ownership or greed. Their world is the world of behaviors not the world of things. The deeper back we look, this becomes more and more obvious. But it is also true for higher animals and true for early humans and for hunter-gatherers. We shared what we’d got, “feast or famine”, there was nothing to keep.

  2. We have to think about what type of event or change, in which domain, can be a candidate for the ‘trigger”. The brain scientists and paleontologists agree that there must have been a huge leap in development. Many agree that the language made the crucial difference. Other candidates are better tools, extra rich food, and the time to rest and chat, and walking on two feet (bipedality). To me, the history of humanity shows that we usually progress by the change in the mind and then the environment changes accordingly.

         Now, I have no evidence that my hypothesis is true, but it agrees with everything I know about linguistics, child development, early human history, and evolution.

         So, the time is about 50,000 years ago.

In Africa, the hominid experiment continues, over the last 2- 3 million years there were several subspecies of homo- some branches died out in  Africa, some migrated all over the world but eventually all of them (neanderthal and Denisovan will go soon) died out.

       A small group of survivors, the smartest and more fiercely cooperating than other groups are facing more challenges, after Mnt. Tuba eruption  (~66,000 years ago) it is dark, people are hungry and cold. But at the same time, their tools are getting better and they communicate better and better. They slowly migrate north pushed out by bigger and stronger and multiplying faster more primitive hominids. Their number is dwindling, will they reach salmon-rich Mediterranean rivers in time?

       Their babies are few, migration takes a toll on mothers and babies. The whole group takes care of them, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, even brothers, and uncles. Prosocial babies get the best care, they smile, bubble, and play. It is so much to learn now, even in the second year of life they require a lot of care, they spend a lot (comparing to the past and to other groups), a lot of time with adults.

       Their language, even being more rich and sophisticated than other groups, still has a lot of characteristics of animal communications. Remember- the animal brain is created for one sole purpose: to communicate- between sensory and muscles first ( lizard brain), then we add the neurotransmitters and old nuclei ( mammals), then here and there the social systems evolve -and the communications “spillover” to the other organisms of the community. But the content of these communications ( thus the content of the brains) is still the same back to the bacteria: helping organisms make nonrandom choices- that’s it. The brains are the “libraries” of THE DESCRIPTIONS OF USEFUL BEHAVIORS. Other fluff will not get inherited, the competition is tough, the brain tissue is a very, very costly luxury.

In the higher, so-called “eusocial” societies these descriptions can be amazing- bee dance, birds’ astral navigation, chimps coalition forming, elephant’s memories, parrots discussing future menus. But their nature is still the same – all brains have the same functional structure- even if the content is hugely different.

       This creates a “perfect storm scenario”. Suddenly, a little 18-month-old cave-girl comes up to her father, points to the apple, and asks: “What’s that, Daddy?” She asked for the NAME!. The apple’s link to the description of the behavior has been severed, carved out. Better than any deity, from nothing she created something- the thing. As a pediatrician I know little kids well, they are smart, they know emotions, family, their likes, and their needs. They play, they vie for adult attention and they name things. And if an adult listened- suddenly the apple exists separately from eating. (Actually “eating” doesn’t exist per se?). There is no looking back!  The advantages of things! Unlike “eating”-you can have 2 or 4 apples, bigger and smaller, more or less ripe- they do exist. Suddenly your mind manipulates the things around you with ease- like new toys or juggling new skills. From now- on.

The materialism or “The Universe of Things” over the next millennia opened the door for technology, economy, power, and violence. I guess our horde of cavemen made it to the Mediterranean…

Post scriptum: Over the time their language acquired also other important elements ( named much, much later):

     – the concept of reality- the things- what you touch, smell and kick- are steady, unchangeable, real,  while the rest – not so.

      – the concept of “I, you”, and people versus the rest of the Universe, (hence the grammar- my nemesis.)- future “self” or ”soul” or “consciousness”.

      – the concept of Unknown- “figuring things out“ will remain the human’s hallmark of his modus operandi, his pride, joy, awe, and fear. This will be future Religion, Philosophy, and Science.

Post post scriptum : How about “story”? The story is all it is. Much older than things, as old as art, as joy and pain. (also in human development- it is “older-” 4-month-old does peek-a-boo!)

 

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climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, human nature, materialism

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Same horde of cavemen

 Listen, friends,

I do not want to spoil your afternoon but if we don’t do something dramatic soon, our grandchildren will live in misery and many of them will die. We have 40 years or so to do it.

The ecological catastrophe is like a Monster with 100 heads and we are not even cutting these heads. We are nibbling on the tail and this is no good. 

I believe there is the chink in the Monster’s armor. A vulnerable place awaiting the arrow of the hero. 

         The trick is simple. We are almost 8 billion strong hurtling towards a disaster, but each of us is the same human. Same genes, instincts, pleasures, and pains. Same brain structures, same neurotransmitters, and hormones. Just 50, 000 years ago we were an almost extinct horde of cavemen. And now we KNOW THIS, we SEE THAT. we can imagine and understand that the proper action can save us again. It is just the same horde (or community)- so what if it looks like 8 billion strong mad crowds that are high on power, violent, reckless, and…stupid. The solution is inside each of us. Each of us wants to be happy. No exceptions. The way we try to get this happiness has been changing with cultures and civilizations but it seems that until quite recently it was stable, and lo and behold, safe for the planet. We were happy, embarrassingly, in the similar way the animals are, just a little bit fancier. It was all about a good experience- satiety, relationships, safety, awe, beauty, and art. Only just about 20 or 40 thousand years ago we slowly developed “the kingdom of things”. We dig out coal and oil and ore, we got energy, technology, and gadgets. Things are seemingly irresistible, they please all senses, they are reliable( your car will be there and ready tomorrow – your woman might not be)- easy, easy, so easy to get happy and powerful and safe, especially after all these thousands of years of fear, uncertainty, relying for happiness on OTHERS! Oh, the misery of relying on these tiny, fleeting moments of understanding, awe, and fun. 

         But we can make this pivot, we can make this second Renaissance smarter, more robust, the experiences with technology can be more “things-like”.

There is no other way anyway. 

And if we do it later when the resources are gone, we are overcrowded and fearful, then this “old happiness” practiced with the blade on our throats might look more like a caricature of the good stuff.

I think we need to create a broad coalition across professions, nations, and many other “huge” differences, and smarter people than me need to lead and design the details and actions.

I welcome brainstorming on my blog ecohumanistlab.com  and I will post more practical elements. of how to call it- a dream? plan? movement?  I think that the parenting of infants and toddlers would be easiest to address.

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climate change, enviromnental crisis,, human nature, What will happen to the mankind, Worldview Owner's Manual

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Niche crisis, Part 2, ” Materialists and Idealists”

 

Part 2

Materialists and Idealists

 

In the first part of this essay, I made some bold hypotheses and ended up with outrageous promises.

I will repeat then: The niche crisis is in itself not a problem, it is just an inevitable result. Therefore to handle it we have to find the cause. I think that the cause, broadly speaking, is the domination of things of our civilization. (The pollution-related to cars, trucks, and roads is not the problem, it’s the result, the problem is that we LOVE to drive, LOVE the power and feeling related to moving a big machine fast. The problem is not outside the culture but inside the culture) It started, I think, and I will talk about it later, from peculiar language development and now it is literally killing us. We can correct this, but in order to do that we need to start with the conversation, maybe even create a new language, a new set of metaphors and mythology. This is part 2. 

Part 3 will start the conversation about the promises of the new beautiful world.

I thought that this domination of things had to do with the eternal distinction between materialists and idealists. 

I checked a few philosophy texts, some psychology sources, and of course: Google. It all left me befuddled. Nothing fitted the bill. 

  1. The philosophy was as always useless; neither early materialists like Democritus and Thales, or late like Marx and Engels were really materialistic, nor idealists like Berkeley or Hegel had anything to do with the niche. The primordial sin of our civilization must be somewhere else. 
  2. If it was a sin, maybe the religions would do the trick? Oh, I don’t mean the trick they do with humanity for the last 50 000 years. I mean the elusive distinction of believers vs nonbelievers – often understood as idealists vs materialists. But, no, all of them, fundamentalists, mystics, atheists, humanists, all of them want to be good and all are greedy and all want their kids to be successful.
  3. Big psychology- Myer-Briggs tests and others- and folk psychology tell me: materialists are bad (that’s for sure) and unhappy.

-they give babies coca-cola instead of milk.

-they murder to steal money or a nice jacket or even sneakers.

-their science is wrong: Newtonian, solid brick and mortar, not relativity and “observer’s Universe”.

– they are responsible for technology, corporations, gadgets, and consumerism.

-among the believers, the materialists are the worst: young Earth, literal interpretation of scriptures,  seeing beliefs as real and factual, sacred rights, holy wars, and xenophobia.

So, idealists must be good: they live frugally, don’t eat meat, like theater and poetry, hiking, nature, meditation, praying, and dancing.

 

Mahatma Gandhi, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, Oprah and Albert Schweizer, etc, etc. We need to be like them, but we can’t.  Why? All of these famous idealists were driven, obsessed by humongous overwhelming ideas, usually not very happy, crazy overachievers, rather miserable “I will show them” people. 

We are all good normal people and we cannot be like them, well, do we actually want our children to be like them?

The research shows that typical materialists and famous rich materialists were not so happy and if they were happy it was the idealist part of them which did it.  Like philanthropy of Rockefeller and Gates. And making material achievements a priority in life actually make self-expression and good relationships more difficult. It looks that it is not switching from materialist to idealist that is necessary- it would be impossible anyway.

So, we want our children (and ourselves) to be happy first. Then we have to find a way to be happy without hurting the planet.

These distinctions require thinking. Thinking and discussions and role-modeling. What is necessary and doable is noticing how indoctrinated we are by generations of automatic concepts of success, the meaning of life, and happiness. Things: a well-paying job, a good house, a fast car, and a pretty woman. It is a very one-sided picture of the American Dream, which is actually a dream of most of the people in the world.

If we explain to people that this dream is untenable, that the planet can not support it, that we have to give it up, to sacrifice our dream for the planet, and for others …. We’ll go nowhere. Tell the leaders, CEOs, generals, and clergy to relinquish the power to save the planet… we’ll go nowhere. Tell economist that capitalism needs to pivot and production of things and energy has to shrink and …we’ll go nowhere. 

What can we do? Dealing with things is so easy, the numbers are on their side.

Dealing with ideas, relationships, Unknown, feelings, even art, and literature – all require and benefit from critical thinking, shifting dimensions, using imagination ( some people talk about transformational education). Dealing with things do not… Things are: cheaper or more expensive, hotter or cooler, slower or faster – so easy to deal with, so inviting for the categories, divisions and … ownership. And it is literally how the hell broke loose.

And how did we get like that?  The evolution of the nervous systems and ethology will help here. Animals are not materialists, their brains are full of behaviors ( in the notebook of the observer, like Jane Goodall watching her chimpanzees), for them (say, chimpanzees) they are the experiences. The trick is to avoid bad experiences like pain, hunger, or fear and maximize good experiences- satiation, control, safety even belonging. Not much different than early humans. Hominids, also hunter-gatherers, lived in more or less egalitarian societies, where the leader, usually male, possessed very little, except for mates. 

     In our search for the origins of this worldview dysfunction or of materialism, I’d like to point to the two moments that were pivotal.  50 to 10 thousand years ago communication became a language. Animals and hominid’s “language” followed their world of experiences. It described behaviors (experiences), even sometimes complex ones like bees dance, crows teaching their children about bad people and butterflies astral navigation, but they were still behaviors. And then, at the toddler stage of our civilization, something happened to humans. And to humans only: see the interesting hypothesis of Dr.Hrdy (among others). I said “toddler” because, as a pediatrician, I observed the same magic hundreds and hundreds of times in the office and you might have seen it in your home. A 15-month-old human infant is a pretty complex being. She can talk a little, but she understands a lot, she knows her surroundings, she even mastered the skill called “object permanence”. She knows pretty much how the world around works, what is anger and fear and sadness, hunger, and the bliss of cuddling with mom. But, your dog or even a crow in your yard can do all of these. And then, out of blue, your child will point to the pineapple on the table: “What’s that, Daddy?”

And an abyss opened, a huge difference between humanity and all known sentient and artificial beings. Only humans can ask for the name of an object not related to any function or behavior.

 

    What was first, naming objects or materialistic society? I don’t know, but what is important is that it happened recently, so materialism is not in our genes ( neither are things, really, and their objectivity is perfectly questionable!) 

It is also possible that the” invention of things “ timing is not mere coincidence. Because it is the time ( 50 to 20 000 years ago, when we almost got extinct- about 10 thousand people left, or less!) when our egalitarian society could have changed. Maybe it was the pressure of a shrinking niche related to climate change, after the Toba volcano eruption and ice age. We behaved (we actually were) like cornered animals, we tried to survive against each other. With the rule of violence, fear, and anxiety our worldviews changed. We tried to get happy with things, so we learned to get high on power, violence, and control.  Interestingly, more or less at the same time we developed societies with haves and have nots, (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China), and having was better, and the things to have to be on the top were, well, things.

Our primordial “personality” stays dormant, waiting to be awakened… We need another renaissance chapter in our civilization. With our technology and advances in knowledge of the human mind, we can make a better renaissance than the original Italian One. A mixture of materialism, idealism, humanism, and all that is needed to take care of this planet. We can do it, but it will take the new conversation on being authentic, working on one’s personal unique worldview and on creating unique, personal mythology. James P. Carse in the “The religious case against belief” argues for this conversation, for questioning. It is what the real religious people (read: happy, authentic, mature) do – question belief, use the paradigm and language of their religion just for one, but all-important purpose – to question the world, to embrace the Mystery. To find the meaning, the worldview, the happiness. Well, not to find, to journey on finding it.

It is going to be a renaissance – the rebirth of the type of mind which made us human. We have it inside: the excitement and awe of the Unknown, the curiosity, joy, and imagination. Loving, playing, arguing, making fun and derision, showing others, and ourselves’ foolishness.  We’ll thrive on experiences instead of gadgets- we’ll treat them as assets, cherish them, and make them richer and richer as our complexity and intelligence grow.

This optimistic story does not need to be true. It would be reassuring and promising.  And I am asking for so little. Just start talking, open your mind, and imagine. Well, we are not completely off the hook- this new plan includes role-modeling, right? Somebody has to change first or at least start changing.  This conversation, this work will lead to a new curriculum, more on that unknown black hole in Part 3.

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climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Explicit and implicit worldview, human nature, Humanism, What will happen to the mankind

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