The Coming Age of Post-Naturalism

Thursday

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In my Addendum on Naturalism Purged of Metaphysical Fallacies I proposed an analogy between the role of Scholasticism in the medieval work with the role of naturalism in the modern world:

“Naturalism stands in relationship to 21^st century philosophical thought as scholasticism stood in relation to 13th century philosophical thought: it is the background conceptual framework (usually itself imperfectly and incompletely articulated, but nevertheless pervasively present) that underlies most explicit philosophical formulations. In the same way that it would be difficult to identify the exact content of scholasticism in the 13^th century, it would be difficult to identify the exact content of naturalism today, and this is to be expected from a fundamental philosophical orientation in its ascendancy.”

One could argue that we are already seeing the beginnings of the breakdown of naturalism. In 2012, when Thomas Nagel published Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, the book came in for surprisingly harsh criticism, simply for Nagel being a philosopher of his stature questioning the now received presumption of physicalism. This controversy over Nagel’s book, however, is a conflict internal to naturalism — specifically, a conflict between a narrowly conceived physicalism (but still conceived within the framework of naturalism) and any alternative (but still naturalistic) explanatory framework. There are any number of naturalistic interpretations of mind (or consciousness, if you prefer), so that insisting upon an eliminationist account seems unnecessarily extreme, as though there were something more going on here than the mere formulation of a philosophical position. The eliminationists protest too much.

Just as logical positivism was a particularly narrow form of naturalism in the early twentieth century (similar in many respects to contemporary physicalism), physicalism is the particularly narrow form of naturalism prevalent today. Perhaps it is the character of naturalism to be repeatedly expressed in minimalist forms like this until their manifest inadequacy has been demonstrated to the current generation of philosophers. Minimalist forms of naturalism have the virtues of parsimony, both ontological and theoretical, and the kind of elegant argumentation often associated with parsimony, but there are limits beyond which minimalism passes from being merely austere to being downright perverse and no longer being parsimonious in terms of what it requires that one believe.

A conceptual framework as robust as naturalism can be expected to endure for many centuries, as indeed the Scholastic conceptual framework endured for many centuries. The efflorescence of the Scholastic synthesis (as it is sometimes called) is usually associated with the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas, with the work of William of Ockham marking the unraveling of the Scholastic synthesis. But while the Scholastic synthesis may have declined in the late middle ages, with its replacement with the rising scientific synthesis (part of the rise of naturalism) in the early modern period, the better part of the European conceptual framework remained essentially Scholastic for hundreds of years yet to come.

E. M. W. Tillyard’s classic study The Elizabethan World Picture emphasized the essentially medieval character of the Elizabethan world picture (“…it was still solidly theocentric, and that it was a simplified version of a much more complicated medieval picture…”), and Carl Becker’s equally famous lectures The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, extends the influence of the Scholastic conceptual framework into the Enlightenment: “…the underlying preconceptions of eighteenth-century thought are still, allowance made for certain important alterations in the bias, essentially the same as those of the thirteenth century.” (From the final paragraph of lecture 1.) If we are permissive in the range of dates we give for Scholasticism, this was a conceptual framework that endured for well over a thousand years, and fifteen hundred years by some measures.

The replacement of Scholasticism by naturalism begs the question as to what conceptual framework eventually will follow naturalism, when naturalism itself follows Scholasticism into the dustbin of history. Suppose after another several hundred years, when the naturalistic conceptual framework has run its course and has been exhausted, that some other conceptual framework begins to replace naturalism, a process as gradual and as piecemeal as the replacement of Scholasticism by naturalism. What might this post-naturalism conceptual framework look like? Can we even imagine such a thing, or are we too much the products of naturalism ourselves that we cannot free ourselves from it even if we try to do so?

Merely to ask the question is to build certain assumptions into our conception of history. There is, most obviously, the presupposition of the possibility of a sequence of co-equal conceptual frameworks, the later frameworks supplanting the earlier, but not being an improvement over the earlier (or a decline compared to the earlier framework). This is somewhat like the Thomas Kuhn idea of a paradigm, which has prompted an enormous commentary. There is also the related presupposition that there will be a sequence of conceptual frameworks like this, rather than a linear development in which the human conceptual framework comes to maturity, and, having come to maturity, can only decay and then disappear—but this decline and disappearance is part of an organic life-cycle of conceptual frameworks, and not an arbitrary sequence of conceptual frameworks in which the historical process of succession is essentially irrational.

If we make these presuppositions about one conceptual framework following another without rhyme or reason, why not go even further? Why not posit a cyclical development of conceptual frameworks, such that framework A is followed by framework B, framework B is followed by framework C, but human beings have run out of new ideas at this point, so that framework C is followed once again by framework A (or its functional equivalent), and so on, ad infinitum. One could even argue that the conceptual framework of classical antiquity was more-or-less naturalistic, so that the rise of naturalism with the scientific revolution was actually the recrudescence of naturalism. Thus when this current age of naturalism has exhausted itself, we are likely to see the recrudescence of non-naturalism, mysticism, and mythology. In fact, the sharp criticism of Nagel might be credited to a concern on the part of his critics that any non-reductive, non-physicalist theory of mind was the opening of a Pandora’s box of mystification, which lid needs to be kept firmly shut so as to avoid the return of a non-naturalistic conceptual framework (a slippery slope fallacy).

N.B. — Nagel’s critics may well be right: those who hope for a future of rationalist and Enlightenment values may have a legitimate reason to be concerned about the influence of such a book from a prominent philosopher. In the same way that A. J. Ayer was said to have had a deathbed conversion (the circumstances of which are insufficiently known to the public to make sense of the contradictory accounts that have been published—cf. “An Atheist Meets the Masters of the Universe” by Peter Foges and An Analysis of the Near-Death Experiences of Atheists), and in the same way that Bertrand Russell’s casual mention of “Christian love” was immediately taken as a sign that Russell himself now had a more charitable view of traditional systems of belief (what Russell said was, “The thing I mean — please forgive me for mentioning it — is love, Christian love or compassion. If you feel like this, you have a motive for existence, a guide in action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessary for intellectual honesty”; Russell briefly addressed the response to this passage in his essay, “What is an Agnostic?”), Nagel’s book is viewed by some as a means to worm their way into otherwise reasonable discussions in order to strike a blow for unreconstructed supernaturalism.

By definition, any conceptual framework that follows naturalism but which is not itself naturalism would be non-naturalistic, though it would not necessarily be non-naturalistic in the sense of being supernaturalistic. A post-naturalistic conceptual framework would be, by definition, non-naturalistic, but we are only limited to non-naturalistic supernaturalism if we believe that there are no further conceptual possibilities for human beings, i.e., if we are unable to conceive of any non-naturalism that is not supernaturalistic, which I will here assume posits the existence of a realm of reality inaccessible to empirical investigation. Whether or not we can conceive of a non-supernatural non-naturalism remains an open question at this time—not surprisingly, as comparatively little effort (to my knowledge) has been invested in the possibility.

I have myself benefited greatly from making the attempt, over many years, and going over the same ground time and again, to imagine forms of emergent complexity not realized on Earth, as well as forms of civilization not yet realized. At first, one is simply lost when questioning fundamental presuppositions, but, if persistent, one can begin to make very small changes in one’s presuppositions, like a hole in the dike of pervasive matters of fact with no countervailing experiences, and, once imagination begins flowing ever so slowly through these holes in the dike, the dike itself becomes unstable and one can begin to picture scenarios in which the dike is washed away and the landscape appears transformed.

Thus would it be in any attempt we could make today, with naturalism at the fullness of its power, waxing in its influence, to conceive of a non-naturalistic conceptual framework. This is not a project to be taken up lightly, but a kind of meditation to which one might return repeatedly over many years as a longitudinal thought experiment on the emergence of a radically new conceptual framework. However, the fact that a naturalistic conceptual framework likely would be gradually replaced by a future non-naturalistic conceptual framework, in a piecemeal fashion, could be our point of entry into another way of thinking about the world. If we could identify isolated non-naturalistic concepts with some future promise (I can offer no instances at this time, so my positing of such concepts must remain non-constructive for the time being), we could take these promising concepts and attempt to construct with them and around them a conceptual framework that extends, elaborates, and applies this promising non-naturalistic concept. Eventually, a conceptual framework begins to form, and, when sufficiently elaborated, some other concepts within that framework present themselves as those concepts whose initial adoption would form the basis of gradual adoption of the framework entire.

This thought experiment implies another thought experiment, to which it is related, but with which it is not identical, that that is the thought experiment of a radically novel form of emergent complexity appearing within the emergent complexities familiar to us on Earth. This is a distinct but overlapping thought experiment with that which seeks to project a future non-naturalistic conceptual framework because a conceptual framework could be a novel emergent, but it not necessarily a novel emergent complexity. And the most radical forms of novel emergent complexity would not be anything as predictable and projectable as a novel conceptual framework. Thus in attempting to imagine a new form of emergent complexity coming into being we might consider radically new conceptual frameworks, but we would also want to go beyond this and try to conceive of emergent complexities that would have nothing whatsoever to do with conceptual frameworks, that are already familiar to us in several distinct forms.

The obvious kinds of emergent complexity (i.e., those that are predictable and projectable) that may arise on Earth would be those that develop from the already elaborated emergent complexities of consciousness, intelligence, technology, and social organization. For example, a new and unprecedented form of civilization. Possible instances are not difficult to formulate. A human civilization off the surface of Earth, whether on another planet (or on a moon), or in an artificial environment maintained in outer space, would be absolutely unprecedented: there has never before been a human civilization in outer space. Nevertheless, the existence of human civilizations on Earth gives us a clear template for constructing human civilizations in outer space, no matter how unprecedented such a development may be. This would constitute a predictable and obvious form of emergent complexity not yet realized but potentially looming large in the human future, and so it is with many of the more imaginative futurist scenarios, such as the emergence of machine consciousness, and all that implies, or our contact with another civilization from elsewhere in the universe, and so on.

Now let us try to set aside these obvious extrapolations of emergent complexity as we know it on Earth today and attempt to conceive a novel emergent complexity that is not only unprecedented, but which would be completely unexpected and as close to being incomprehensible as human cognition will allow us to conceptualize—a thought experiment on a radical new emergent, as different from mind as mind is different from the organisms upon which mind supervenes.

Say, for example, that the ocean begins to turn poison, and ocean food webs begin to collapse. Imagine that an enormous red tide algal bloom, of a slightly different chemical composition than familiar algal blooms, is the culprit, but the poison, while deadly to life as we know it, is some other kind of emergent complexity, another kind of chemical complexity, which is arising on the basis of existing chemical complexity in the oceans, and by establishing itself as the new chemical regime on Earth, becomes the basis of further kinds of emergent complexity that supervene upon it. Human beings might stand helplessly by, or we might frantically but ineffectually attempt to intervene, even as the chemistry of the world’s oceans changed and rendered our biology archaic, as though we belonged to a bygone era of Earth’s history. The nature we know today would be replaced by the nature that will represent the Earth in future ages, and this, too, would be a kind of post-natural world, and understanding it might require a post-naturalistic conceptual framework, if any human beings remained to possess a conceptual framework.

A scenario not unlike this unfolded on Earth billions of years ago. The Great Oxygen Catastrophe was a kind of poisoning of the environment on a planetary scale, though it was the poisoning of the atmosphere for the anaerobic organisms that had dominated the biosphere up to this time. Later, with the atmosphere enriched with oxygen, other kinds of life evolved that employed oxygen in metabolic processes, turning this poison to their advantage. Now imagine an oceanic parallel to the Great Oxygen Catastrophe — the Great Oceanic Catastrophe — that would leave our Earth as unrecognizable as our reconstructions of the earliest stages of Earth’s history are unrecognizable to us today. I attach no particular importance to the scenario I have just briefly sketched; it is intended only as an example, since examples of counterintuitive counterfactuals are difficult to come by, and I wanted to offer something concrete, and not merely leave the reader hanging.

I am not expecting the foundations of a new conceptual framework to begin to take shape tomorrow, nor do I expect to wake up tomorrow and hear news of a mysterious and ominous new oceanic anomaly. Indeed, I do not expect these events, or events of a similar magnitude, to begin to unfold in hundreds or perhaps even in thousands of years. So in discussing “the coming age of post-naturalism” I mean only that post-naturalism is “coming” on geological and cosmological scales of time, and to think of phenomena on this scale in terms of a human scale of time is not merely misleading, but actually fallacious.

The Age of Post-Naturalism will not arrive for several centuries at earliest, even if the conceptual framework of our civilization is such as can be replaced at regular intervals. And if naturalism is the mature conceptual framework for beings such as ourselves, then naturalism will endure as long as a civilization endures that can maintain the level of development that allows for the mature expression of the human intellect to remain. If we maintain our developmental accomplishments at the current stage of civilization that we enjoy today, or better, then naturalism would be our final conceptual framework, and this would be true also if our civilization were abruptly cut short by some terrible catastrophe. If, on the contrary, our level of civilization declines, our conceptual framework would almost certainly decline along with civilization. However, it is possible that this decline could be found in parallel with another traditional of thought gaining historical momentum. E. M. W. Tillyard, as quoted above, characterized the Elizabethan world picture as constituting a simplified iteration of the medieval world picture, but we also know that, at the same time, the scientific and naturalistic world picture was just then coming into being, parallel with the declining medieval world picture.

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The Snapshot Effect

Monday

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Images will always be with us, but the age of the snapshot understood in its cultural and technological context, now belongs to the past. Or, if not to the past, it belongs to antiquarians and enthusiasts who will keep the technology of the snapshot alive even as it passes out of the popular mind. The snapshot inhabited that era that intervened between the age of cameras as large, bulky, specialized equipment that required a certain expertise to operate, and today’s universal presence of cameras and consequent universal availability of images — images often made available on the same electronic device that captured the image. The snapshot — presumably named for the onomatopoeic mechanical sound of the camera shutter that went “Snap!” as one took the “shot” — is, then, predicated upon a particular degree of finitude, of images more common and more spontaneous than a daguerreotype, but also less common and of more value than a smartphone selfie.

The most famous photographers of the snapshot era — for example, Henri Cartier-Bresson — become known for their candid and spontaneous images of ordinary life, sort of the still life version of cinéma vérité. Never before had so much of ordinary life been captured and preserved. Painters had always been interested in genre scenes, and the early photographers who lugged around their heavy and complex gear often followed the interest and example of these painters, but these images were relatively rare. In the age of the snapshot, images of ordinary people engaged in ordinary pursuits became as ordinary as the people and the pursuits themselves.

Part of what we mean, then, when we refer casually to a “snapshot,” is this sense of an image that spontaneously captures an ordinary moment of history, without formality or pretense, but with a documentarian’s fidelity. And once the moment is past, it remains only in the snapshot, almost a random moment fixed in time, while the persons and the events and the circumstances that once came together in the confluence of the snapshot, are now gone or changed beyond recognition.

It is partly this meaning that I want to tap into when I use the term “snapshot effect” to convey a particular idea about the human relationship to time and to history. Human life is long compared to the life of a mayfly, but it is quite short compared to the life of a redwood, and shorter still when measured against evolutionary, geological, or cosmological scales of time. What the individual human being experiences — what the individual sees, hears, feels, and so on — is as a snapshot in comparison to the world of which it is a fleeting image. A snapshot may or may not be representative of what it purports to represent; it may be a good likeness or a poor likeness. Because a snapshot is a moment snatched out of a continuum, we can only judge its fidelity if we compare it to a sufficient number of comparable moments taken from the same continuum. But the image often has the impact that it has precisely because it is a moment snatched out of time and stripped of all context. Often we resist a survey that would reveal the representativeness of the snapshot because to do so would be to deprive ourselves of the power of the isolated image.

I am going to use the term “snapshot effect,” then, to refer to the temporally narrow nature (and perhaps also the fragmentary nature) of human perception. We see not the world, but a snapshot of the world. We see not the object, but the side of the face that happens to be turned toward us when we glance in its direction. We hear not the narrative of a life, but a snippet of conversation that relates only a fragment of a single experience. We taste not the crop of strawberries, but the single strawberry that dissolves on our tongue, and judge the quality of the year’s produce by this experience. Even the grandest of grand views of the world are snapshots: to look into the night sky is to experience a snapshot of cosmology, and to recognize a geological formation is a snapshot of deep time. These snapshots reveal more than a casual glance, especially if they are attended by understanding, but they still exclude far more than they include.

Any rational individual, and any individual trained in the sciences, learns to control for the limited evidence available to us, but as carefully as we set our trap for limited evidence by rigorously controlling the conditions of our observations — observations that will count toward scientific knowledge, whereas our ordinary observations do not count because they are not so controlled — so too we also grant ourselves license to derive generalities from these observations. Ordinary experience is but a snapshot of the world; scientific experience derived from controlled conditions is an even more fragmentary snapshot of the world.

Because of the snapshot effect, we have recourse to principles that generalize the limited evidence to which we are privileged. The cosmological principle legitimizes our extrapolation from limited evidence to the universe entire. The principle of mediocrity legitimizes our extrapolation from a possibly exceptional moment to a range of ordinary cases and the most likely course of events. Conservation principles assure us that we can generalize from our limited experience of matter and energy to the behavior of the universe entire.

A recognition of the snapshot effect has long been with us, though called by other names. It has been a truism of philosophy, equally acknowledged by diverse (if not antagonistic) schools of thought, that our experiences constitute only a small slice of the actuality of the world. To cite two examples from the twentieth century, here, to start, is Bertrand Russell:

“…let us concentrate attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound. Any one else who sees and feels and hears the table will agree with this description, so that it might seem as if no difficulty would arise; but as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin. Although I believe that the table is ‘really’ of the same colour all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, and some parts look white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colours on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same distribution of colours, because no two can see it from exactly the same point of view, and any change in the point of view makes some change in the way the light is reflected.”

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Chap. I, “Appearance and Reality”

Russell represents the tradition that would become Anglo-American analytical philosophy, temperamentally and usually also theoretically disjoint from European continental philosophy, which might well be represented by Jean-Paul Sartre. Nevertheless, Sartre opens his enormous treatise Being and Nothingness with a passage that closely echoes that of Russell quoted above:

“…an object posits the series of its appearances as infinite. Thus the appearance, which is finite, indicates itself in its finitude, but at the same time in order to be grasped as an appearance-of-that-which-appears, it requires that it be surpassed toward infinity. This new opposition, the ‘finite and the infinite,’ or better, ‘the infinite in the finite,’ replaces the dualism of being and appearance. What appears in fact is only an aspect of the object, and the object is altogether in that aspect and altogether outside of it.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel Barnes, Introduction: The Pursuit of Being, “I. The Phenomenon,” p. xlvii

Both Russell and Sartre in the passages quoted above are wrestling with the ancient western metaphysical question of appearance and reality. Both recognize a multiplicity of appearances and a presumptive unity of the objects of which the appearances are a manifestation. Seen in this light, the snapshot effect is a recognition that we see only an appearance and not the reality, and this reflection in turn embeds this simple observation in a metaphysical context that has been with us since the Greeks created western philosophy.

The snapshot effect means that our experiences are appearances, but our appreciation of appearances has grown since the time of Parmenides and Plato, and we see Russell and Sartre alike struggling to make out exactly why we should attach an ontological import to appearances — snapshots, as it were — when we know that they do no exhaust reality, and sometimes they betray reality.

The ontology of time and of history ought to concern us as much as the ontology of objects implicitly schematized by Russell and Sartre. A snapshot of time is an appearance of time, and as an appearance it does not exhaust the reality of time. Nevertheless, we struggle to do justice to this appearance — just as we struggle to do justice to our intuitions, for, indeed, a snapshot of time is an instance of sensible intuition — because the moment abstracted from time is still an authentic manifestation of time.

The “snapshot effect,” then, will be the term I will use to refer to the fact that human perceptions are a mere snapshot, perhaps representative or perhaps not, but perceptions which we tend to treat as normative, though we rarely take the trouble even to attempt to understand the extent to which our snapshot views of the world are, in fact, normative. There is, then, not only a metaphysical aspect to the snapshot effect, but also an axiological aspect to the snapshot effect, as our valuations are likely to be tied to, if not derived from, a snapshot in this sense.

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Digging Up the Anthropocene

Wednesday

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Photograph by Ben Roberts.

A recent paper, The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of evidence and interim recommendations, by Jan Zalasiewicz and twenty-four additional authors, considers the case for the formalization of the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphic/geochronologic unit, i.e., a periodization of geological time. Since “Anthropocene” was proposed by Paul Crutzen in 2000 as a geological period marked by the impact of human beings upon the Earth, geologists have been attempting to determine if the geological record will someday bear the distinctive traces of human activity and whether (and this an interesting future contingent) geologists might someday be able to reliably locate and identify the Anthropocene boundary in the geological record. The emerging consensus is that there is, “…a clear synchronous signal of the transformative influence of humans on key physical, chemical, and biological processes at the planetary scale.” These synchronous signals are described as follows:

“A range of potential proxy signals emerged as potentially important during the analysis, for instance the spherical carbonaceous particles of fly ash (Rose, 2015; Swindles et al., 2015), plastics (Zalasiewicz et al., 2016), other ‘technofossils’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014a, 2016) and artificial radionuclides (Waters et al., 2015), changes to carbon and nitrogen isotope patterns (Waters et al., 2016) and a variety of fossilizable biological remains (Barnosky, 2014; Wilkinson et al., 2014). Many of these signals will leave a permanent record in the Earth’s strata.”

The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of evidence and interim recommendations, by Jan Zalasiewicz, et al., Anthropocene, Volume 19, September 2017, Pages 55-60.

Will paleontologists of the future someday dig up technofossils, and from these technofossils attempt to reconstruct an entire technological infrastructure, much as we today reconstruct an extinct species from a single preserved vertebra or rib, and around the resulting organism we seek to reconstruct the entire vanished ecosystem in which that extinct species made its home?

Recently I was prompted to think about the Anthropocene from a paleontological perspective by a Twitter post by Ben Roberts, which included images of automobiles being degraded by weathering (these photographs are included in this post). In response to these images I wrote that I would like to see what the fossils of these automobiles would look like in ten million years. This caused me to think about the possibility of the artifacts of human civilization that might be preserved over geological scales of time. The signals mentioned above in the paper quoted all constitute microfossils that would begin to appear in the geological record for the first time with the advent of the Anthropocene, but I also wonder if larger artifacts might be preserved in the geological record.

Photograph by Ben Roberts.

The tissues of organisms — sometimes even soft tissues — are preserved in the geological record through several different processes. While it is unlikely that human artifacts would be fossilized by replacement and recrystallization or by adpression, it seems possible that technological fossils could be formed through permineralization or through casts and molds. It is easy to imagine that the hulk of an automobile, a train, or even an entire industrial facility might fill with sediment, and though the steel would rust away, that rust would be preserved in situ more or less in its finished form by the sediment hardening into sedimentary rock around it. A careful paleontologist thus might be able to excavate an entire locomotive by means of rust encased in sedimentary rocks.

Of course, fossils are rare, and most artifacts will be eroded away rather than fossilized. Moreover, technofossils are likely to be even more rare than natural fossils. Given our interest in our own past, and our technological abilities to recover artifacts, human beings will continually recover our own remains from the historical period. The fossil record that remains to be discovered will depend upon whether civilization is merely transient or whether it will prove to be enduring. In the case of civilization being a transient historical phenomenon (note that civilization could endure for another 10, 20, or 30 thousand years or more and still be “transient” from the perspective of paleontology), the process of recovering artifacts that would otherwise be fossilized will come to be end. There likely will be a few cases at least of human artifacts in sedimentary basins that eventually are preserved by some process or another. Human artifacts will ultimately be preserved in ice, in snow, in a glaciers, covered in sand on beaches and deserts, covered by landslides on land, as well as being preserved in the oceans, in deep, cold anoxic waters, as well as underwater covered in mud. There is a good chance that many ancient ships lost at sea have been entirely covered over by sand, mud, and silt, and are not likely to be located within our own historical period, thereby saved for far future paleontologists specializing in the excavation of technofossils.

Photograph by Ben Roberts.

Human beings have been building structures and leaving artifacts for thousands of years, of course — sufficient time for many of these structures to be abandoned, covered over, forgotten, and subsequently revealed once again to the light of day by archaeology. The extensive remains of the Indus Valley civilization were forgotten in this way, only to be rediscovered in the twentieth century, and the knowledge of the Minoan civilization had been reduced to mere legend when its palaces were eventually excavated. These remains have been subject to weathering and degradation, but some are in a remarkable state of preservation, though they have not been buried for millions of years, or subjected to the temperatures and pressures that result from being contained in geological strata. An insufficient time has passed for there to be a fossil record of human civilization, even though there is an archaeological record of human civilization.

Up until the industrial revolution, human industry was mostly carried out on a modest scale and resulted in little impact on the environment. Most materials employed were biodegradable and have disappeared over scales of historical time. I have previously observed that traces of Roman lead production have been preserved in the ice of Antarctica, and I would not be surprised to learn that silver processing at Potosí in the early modern period also left detectable traces. One might understand these examples as very early anticipations of later industrial processes carried out on a far larger scale. With the advent of technologies made possible by the systematic application of science to industry, new and unprecedented materials were invented and employed in industrial-scale applications. Some of these are the materials cited in the paper quoted above as the distinctive signals of the Anthropocene. While the recent paper cited above singled out a spike of artificial radionuclides, an earlier paper specifically mentioned plastics:

“Plastics are already present in sufficient numbers to be considered as one of the most important types of ‘technofossil’ that will form a permanent record of human presence on Earth.”

“The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene,” by Jan Zalasiewicz, et al.

Contemporary industrial processes are sufficiently sophisticated to produce distinctively new technogenic materials (like Chernobylite) and on a scale to distribute the products of industry globally, and so to leave a planetary trace of human activity. It remains only for time, heat, and pressure to transform these distinctive traces into technofossils.

Photograph by Ben Roberts.

That the global deposition of a distinctive Anthropocene layer begins in earnest in the twentieth century (and specifically in the mid-twentieth century) is significant. The authors of the paper write:

“This mid-20th century level seems to serve best the prime requirement for a chronostratigraphic base of high-precision global synchroneity… Human activities only came to have an effect that was both large and synchronous, and thus leave a clear (chrono-) stratigraphic signal, in the mid-20th century. A wide range of evidence from this time indicates the rapid increase in scale and extent of global human impact on the planetary environment, also clearly recognizable from a wide range of synchronous stratigraphic indicators.”

The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of evidence and interim recommendations, by Jan Zalasiewicz, et al.

It is interesting to note how this mid-20^th century boundary (as geologists would call it; I might call it a “threshold”) corresponds to other boundaries (or thresholds) in human development. For example, in the Before Present (BP) time scale frequently employed in the sciences, the “present” for purposes of radiometric dating has been set as 01 January 1950, as radiometric dating became practical at about this time. A neat mid-century point of reference fit well with the actual date of the availability of the technologies of radiometric dating.

Recently in Radio Technology and Existential Risk I discussed what we may call “Sagan’s Thesis,” viz. that nuclear and radio technology are tightly-coupled, so that the invention of radio technology means both that the inventors of the technology can see and be seen in the cosmos, and that the inventors soon will be able to build nuclear weapons and so be enabled to destroy themselves. Radio, then, is both an existential risk and an existential opportunity, thus marking a threshold of technological maturity in the history of an intelligent species:

“Radio astronomy on Earth is a by-product of the Second World War, when there were strong military pressures for the development of radar. Serious radio astronomy emerged only in the 1950s, major radio telescopes only in the 1960s. If we define an advanced civilization as one able to engage in long-distance radio communication using large radio telescopes, there has been an advanced civilization on our planet for only about ten years. Therefore, any civilization ten years less advanced than we cannot talk to us at all.”

Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, Chap. 31

While radio astronomy sensu stricto is not likely to leave any trace in the fossil record (though the wreckage of radio telescopes might be found), it will leave a lasting mark on civilization, and may (under some circumstances) transform a civilization. A changed civilization that endures for geological scales of time will leave a transformed trace of itself in the geological record. And for humanity, this change began near the mid-20^th century boundary — about the same time as we began to use nuclear weapons, which is consistent both with Sagan’s Thesis and with a mid-20^th century boundary for the Anthropocene.

The consilience of these several factors — planetary-scale anthropogenic impacts, radio technology, and nuclear technology (which includes both nuclear weapons and radiometric dating) — distinctively manifesting themselves on a global scale in the middle of the twentieth century, constitute “synchronous signals” not only for stratigraphy, but also for civilization on historical scales of time. In other words, the Anthropocene marks not only a geological periodization, but also a new stage in the development of civilization.

Train cemetery, Uyuni, Bolivia

In his original 1964 paper that introduced the idea of “types” of civilization, “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” Kardashev defined a Type I civilization as a civilization at, “a technological level close to the level presently attained on the earth.” (Here I ask the reader to set aside imaginative characterizations of Type I civilizations that have been elaborated by individuals who have never bothered to read Kardashev’s paper.) As this paper was written in 1964, a mid-20^th century boundary for the Anthropocene corresponds nicely with the level of technological development close to that attained by civilization at this time. We could, then, identify a Type I civilization with a civilization that produces an Anthropocene-like boundary on its homeworld (i.e., the equivalent of the Anthropocene for some other intelligent species but defined in an non-anthropocentric way).

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How to Live on a Planet

Wednesday

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Humanity is learning, slowly, how to live on a planet. What does it mean to live on a planet? Why is this significant? How has our way of living on a planet changed over time? How exactly does an intelligent species capable of niche-construction on a planetary scale go about revising its approach to niche construction to make this process consistent with the natural history and biospheric evolution of its homeworld?

Once upon a time the Earth was unlimited and inexhaustible for human beings for all practical purposes. Obviously, Earth was was not actually unlimited and inexhaustible, but for a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of hunter-gatherers distributed across the planet in small bands, this was an ecosystem that they could not have exhausted even if they had sought to do so. Human influence over the planet at this time was imperceptible; our ancestors were simply one species among many species in the terrestrial biosphere. Even before civilization this began to change, as our ancestors have been implicated in the extinction of ice age megafauna. The evidence for this is still debated, but human populations had become sufficiently large and sufficiently organized by the upper Paleolithic that their hunting could plausibly have driven anthropogenic extinctions.

In this earliest (and longest) period of human history, we did not know that we lived on a planet. We did not know what a planet was, the relation of a planet to a star, and the place of stars in the galaxy. The Earth for us at this time was not a planet, but a world, and the world was effectively endless. Only with the advent of civilization and written language were we able to accumulate knowledge trans-generationally, slowly working out that we lived on a planet orbiting a star. This process required several thousand years, and for most of these thousands of years the size of our homeworld was so great that human efforts seemed to not even make a dent in the biosphere. It seemed the the forests could not be exhausted of trees or the oceans exhausted of fish. But all that has changed.

In the past few hundred years, the scope and scale of human activity, together with the size of the human population, has grown until we have found ourselves at the limits of Earth’s resources. We actively manage and limit the use of resources, because if we did not, the seven billion and growing human population would strip the planet clean and leave nothing. This process had already started in the Middle Ages, when many economies were forced to manage strategic resources like timber for shipbuilding, but the process has come to maturity in our time, as we are able to describe and explain scientifically the impact of the human population on our homeworld. We have, today, the conceptual framework necessary to understand that we live on a planet, so that we understand the limitations on our use of resources theoretically as well as practically. When earlier human activities resulted in localized extinctions and shortages, we could not put this in the context of the big picture; now we can.

Today we know what a planet is; we know what we are; we know the limitations dictated by a planet for the organisms constituting its ecosystems. This knowledge changes our relationship to our homeworld. Many definitions have been given for the Anthropocene. One way in which we could define the anthropocene in this context is that it is that period in terrestrial history when human beings learn to live on Earth as a planet. Generalized beyond this anthropocentric formulation, this becomes the period in the history of a life-bearing planet in which the dominant intelligent species (if there is one) learns to live on its planet as a planet.

In several posts I have written about the transition of the terrestrial energy grid from fossil fuels to renewable resources (cf. The Human Future in Space, The Conversion of the Terrestrial Power Grid, and Planetary Constraints 9). This process has already started, and it can be expected to play out over a period of time at least equal to the period of time we have been exploiting fossil fuels.

I recently happened upon the article How to Run the Economy on the Weather by Kris De Decker, which discusses in detail how economies and technologies prior to the industrial revolution were adapted to the intermittency of wind and water, and the adaptability of such habits to contemporary technologies. And I recall some years ago when I was in Greece, specially the island of Rhodes, every house had solar water heaters on the roof (and, of course, sunshine is plentiful in Greece), and everyone seemed to accept as a matter of course that you must shower while the sun is out. A combination of very basic behavioral changes supplemented by contemporary technology could facilitate the transition of the terrestrial power grid with little or no decline in standards of living. This is part of what it means to learn to live on a planet.

As we come to better understand biology, astrobiology, ecology, geology, and cosmology, and we thus come to better understand our homeworld and ourselves, we will learn more about how to live on a planet. But the expansion of our knowledge of exoplanets and astrobiology will be predicated upon our ability to travel to other worlds in order to study them, and if we are fortunate enough to endure for such a time and to achieve such things, then we will have to learn how to live in a universe.

The visible universe is finite. Though the visible universe may be part of an infinitistic cosmology (or even an infinitistic multiverse), the expansion of the universe has created a cosmological horizon beyond which we cannot see. I have previously quoted a passage from Leonard Susskind to this effect:

“In every direction that we look, galaxies are passing the point at which they are moving away from us faster than light can travel. Each of us is surrounded by a cosmic horizon — a sphere where things are receding with the speed of light — and no signal can reach us from beyond that horizon. When a star passes the point of no return, it is gone forever. Far out, at about fifteen billion light years, our cosmic horizon is swallowing galaxies, stars, and probably even life. It is as if we all live in our own private inside-out black hole.”

Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2008, pp. 437-438

We know, then, scientifically, that the universe is effectively finite as our homeworld is finite, but the universe is so large in comparison to the scale of human activity, indeed, so large even in comparison to the aspirational scale of human activity, that the universe is endless for all practical purposes. Though we are already learning how to live on a planet, in relation to the universe at large we are like our hunter-gather ancestors dwarfed by a world that was, for them, effectively endless.

Only at the greatest reach of the scale of supercivilizations will we — if we last that long and achieve that scale of development — run into the limits of our home galaxy, and then into the limits of the universe, at which time we will have to learn how to live in a universe. I implied as much in an illustration that I created for my Centauri Dreams post, Stagnant Supercivilizations and Interstellar Travel (reproduced below), in which I showed a schematic representation of the carrying capacity of the universe. At this scale of activity we would be engaging in cosmological niche construction in order to make a home for ourselves in the universe, as we are now engaging in planetary-scale niche construction as we learn how to live on a planet.

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On a Developmental Conception of the Sciences

Saturday

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The periodic table, color-coded by the source of the element in the solar system. By Jennifer Johnson.

Many years ago, reading a source I cannot now recall (and for which I searched unsuccessfully when I started writing this post), I came upon a passage that has stayed with me. The author was making the argument that no sciences were consistent except those that had been reduced to mere catalogs of facts, like geography and anatomy. I can’t recall the larger context in which this argument appeared, but the observation that sciences might only become fully consistent when they have matured to the point of being exhaustive but static and uninteresting catalogs of facts, implying that the field of research itself had been utterly exhausted, was something I remembered. This idea presents in miniature a developmental conception of the sciences, but I think that it is a developmental conception that is incomplete.

Thinking of this idea of an exhausted field of research, I am reminded of a discussion in Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes, in which mathematician Alain Connes distinguished between fully explored and as yet unexplored parts of mathematics:

“…the list of finite fields is relatively easy to grasp, and it’s a simple matter to prove that the list is complete. It is part of an almost completely explored mathematical reality, where few problems remain. Cultural and social circumstances clearly serve to indicate which directions need to be pursued on the fringe of current research — the conquest of the North Pole, to return again to my comparison, surely obeyed the same type of cultural and social motivations, at least for a certain time. But once exploration is finished, these cultural and social phenomena fade away, and all that’s left is a perfectly stable corpus, perfectly fitted to mathematical reality…”

Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes, Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 33-34

To illustrate a developmental conception of mathematics and the formal sciences would introduce additional complexities that follow from the not-yet-fully-understood relationship between the formal sciences and the empirical sciences, so I am going to focus on developmental conceptions of the empirical sciences, but I hope to return to the formal sciences in this connection.

The idea of the development of science as a two-stage process, with discovery followed by a consistent and exhaustive catalog, implies both that most sciences (and, if we decompose the individual special sciences into subdivisions, parts of most or all sciences) remain in the discovery phase, and that once the discovery phase has passed and we are in possession of an exhaustive and complete catalog of the facts discovered by a science, there is nothing more to be done in a given science. However, I can think of several historical examples in which a science seemed to be converging on a complete catalog, but this development was disrupted (one might say) by conceptual change within the field that forced the reorganization of the materials in a new way. My examples will not be perfect, and some additional scientific discovery always seems to have been involved, but I think that these examples will be at least suggestive.

Prior to the great discoveries of cosmology in the early twentieth century, after which astronomy became indissolubly connected to astrophysics, astronomy seemed to be converging slowly upon an exhaustive catalog of all stars, with the limitation on the research being simply the resolving power of the telescopes employed to view the stars. One could imagine a counterfactual world in which technological innovations in instrumentation supplied nothing more than new telescopes able to resolve more stars, and that the task of astronomy was merely to supply an exhaustive catalog of stars, listing their position in the sky, intrinsic brightness, and a few other facts about the points of light in the sky. But the cataloging of stars itself contributed to the revolution that would follow, particularly when the period-luminosity relationship in Cepheid variable stars was discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt (discovered in 1908 and published in 1912). The period-luminosity relationship provided a “standard candle” for astronomy, and this standard candle began the process of constructing the cosmological distance ladder, which in turn made it possible to identify Cepheid variables in the Andromeda galaxy and thus to prove that the Andromeda galaxy was two million light years away and not contained within the Milky Way.

Once astronomy became scientifically coupled to astrophysics, and the resources of physics (both relativistic and quantum) could be brought to bear upon understanding stars, a whole new cosmos opened up. Stars, galaxies, and the universe entire were transformed from something static that might be exhaustively cataloged, to a dynamic and changing reality with a natural history as well as a future. Astronomy went from being something that we might call a Platonic science, or even a Linnaean science, to being an historical science, like geology (after Hutton and Lyell), biology (after Darwin and Wallace), and Paleontology. This coupling of the study of the stars with the study of the matter that makes up the stars has since moved in both directions, with physics driving cosmology and cosmology driving physics. One result of this interaction between astronomy and physics is the illustration above (by Jennifer Johnson) of the periodic table of elements, which prominently exhibits the origins of the elements in cosmological processes. The periodic table once seemed, like a catalog of stars, to be something static to be memorized, and divorced from natural history. This conceptualization of matter in terms of its origins puts the periodic table in a dramatically different light.

As the cosmos was once conceived in Platonic terms as fixed and eternal, to be delineated in a Linnaean science of taxonomical classification, so too the Earth was conceived in Platonic terms as fixed and eternal, to be similarly delineated in a Linnaean science of classification. The first major disruption of this conception came with geology since Hutton and Lyell, followed by plate tectonics and geomorphology in the twentieth century. Now this process has been pushed further by the idea of mineral evolution. I have been listening through for the second time to Robert Hazen’s lectures The Origin and Evolution of Earth: From the Big Bang to the Future of Human Existence, which exposition closely follow the content of his book, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, in which Hazen wrote:

“The ancient discipline of mineralogy, though absolutely central to everything we know about Earth and its storied past, has been curiously static and detached from the conceptual vagaries of time. For more than two hundred years, measurements of chemical composition, density, hardness, optical properties, and crystal structure have been the meat and potatoes of the mineralogist’s livelihood. Visit any natural history museum, and you’ll see what I mean: gorgeous crustal specimens arrayed in case after glass-fronted case, with labels showing name, chemical formula, crystal system, and locality. These most treasured fragments of Earth are rich in historical context, but you will likely search in vain for any clue as to their birth ages or subsequent geological transformations. The old way all but divorces minerals from their compelling life stories.”

Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, Viking Penguin, 2012, Introduction

This illustrates, from the perspective of mineralogy, much of what I said above in relation to star charts and catalogs: mineralogy was once about cataloging minerals, and this may have been a finite undertaking once all minerals had been isolated, identified, and cataloged. Now, however, we can understand mineralogy in the context of cosmological history, and this is as revolutionary for our understanding of Earth as the periodic table understood in terms of cosmological history. It could be argued, in addition, that compiling the “particle zoo” of contemporary particle physics is also a task of cataloging the entities studied by physics, but the cataloging of particles has been attended throughout with a theory of how these particles are generated and how they fit into the larger cosmological story — what Aristotle would have called their coming to be and passing away.

The best contemporary example of a science still in its initial phases of discovery and cataloging is the relatively recent confirmation of exoplanets. On my Tumblr blog I recently posted On the Likely Existence of “Random” Planetary Systems, which tried to place our current Golden Age of Exoplanet Discovery in the context of a developing science. We find the planetary systems that we do in fact find partly as a consequence of observation selection effects, and it belongs to the later stages of the development of a science to attempt to correct for observation selection effects built into the original methods of discovery employed. The planetary science that is emerging from exoplanet discoveries, however, and like contemporary particle physics, is attended by theories of planet formation that take into account cosmological history. However, the discovery phase, in terms of exoplanets, is still underway and still very new, and we have a lot to learn. Moreover, once we learn more about the possibilities of planets in our universe, hopefully also we will learn about the varied possibilities of planetary biospheres, and given the continual interaction between biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere, which is a central motif of Hazen’s mineral evolution, we will be able to place planets and their biospheres into a large cosmological context (perhaps even reconstructing biosphere evolution). But first we must discover them, and then we must catalog them.

These observations, I think, have consequences not only for our understanding of the universe in which we find ourselves, but also for our understanding of science. Perhaps, instead of a two-stage process of discovery and taxonomy, science involves a three-stage process of discovery, taxonomy, and natural history, in which latter the objects and facts cataloged by one of the special sciences (earlier in their development) can take their place within cosmological history. If this is the case, then big history is the master category not only of history, but also of science, as big history is the ultimate framework for all knowledge that bears the lowly stamp of its origins. This conception of the task of science, once beyond the initial stages of discovery and classification, to integrate that which was discovered and classified into the framework of big history, suggests a concrete method by which to “cash out” in a meaningful way Wilfrid Sellars’ contention that, “…the specialist must have a sense of how not only his subject matter, but also the methods and principles of his thinking about it, fit into the intellectual landscape.” (cf. Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man) Big history is the intellectual landscape in which the sciences are located.

A developmental conception of science that recognized stages in the development of science beyond classification, taxonomy, and an exhaustive catalog (which is, in effect, the tombstone of what was a living and growing science), has consequences for the practice of science. Discovery may well be the paradigmatic form of scientific activity, but it is not the only form of scientific activity. The painstakingly detailed and disciplined work of cataloging stars or minerals is the kind of challenge that attracts a certain kind of mind with a particular interest, and the kind of individual who is attracted to this task of systematically cataloging entities and facts is distinct from the kind of individual who might be most attracted by scientific discovery, and also distinct from the kind of individual who might be attracted to fitting the discoveries of a special science into the overall story of the universe and its natural history. There may need to be a division of labor within the sciences, and this may entail an educational difference. Dividing sciences by discipline (and, now, by university departments), which involves inter-generational conflicts among sciences and the paradigm shifts that sometimes emerge as a result of these conflicts, may ultimately make less sense than dividing sciences according their stage of development. Perhaps universities, instead of having departments of chemistry, geology, and botany, should have departments of discovery, taxonomy, and epistemic integration.

Speaking from personal experience, I know that (long ago) when I was in school, I absolutely hated the cataloging approach to the sciences, and I was bored to tears by memorizing facts about minerals or stars. But the developmental science of evolution so intrigued me that I read extensively about evolution and anthropology outside and well beyond the school curriculum. If mineral evolution and the Earth sciences in their contemporary form had been known then, I might have had more of an interest in them.

What are the sciences developing into, or what are the sciences becoming? What is the end and aim of science? I previously touched on this question, a bit obliquely, in What is, or what ought to be, the relationship between science and society? though this line of inquiry is more like a thought experiment. It may be too early in the history of the sciences to say what they are becoming or what they will become. Perhaps an emergent complexity will arise out of knowledge itself, something that I first suggested in Scientific Historiography: Past, Present, and Future, in which I wrote in the final paragraph:

We cannot simply assume an unproblematic diachronic extrapolation of scientific knowledge — or, for that matter, historical knowledge — especially as big history places such great emphasis upon emergent complexity. The linear extrapolation of science eventually may trigger a qualitative change in knowledge. In other words, what will be the emergent form of scientific knowledge (the ninth threshold, perhaps?) and how will it shape our conception of scientific historiography as embodied in big history, not to mention the consequences for civilization itself? We may yet see a scientific historiography as different from big history as big history is different from Augustine’s City of God.

It is only a lack of imagination that would limit science to the three stages of development I have outlined above. There may be developments in science beyond those we can currently understand. Perhaps the qualitative emergent from the quantitative expansion of scientific knowledge will be a change in science itself — possibly a fourth stage in the development of science — that will open up to scientific knowledge aspects of experience and regions of nature currently inaccessible to science.

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Two Counterfactual Classes of Civilizations

Saturday

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Eusocial insect colonies achieve an impressive degree of social differentiation and specialization without the kind of intelligence found among mammals. Some scientists call this collective behavior ‘social intelligence.’

In a couple of blog posts, Is encephalization the great filter? and Of Filters, Great and Small, I argued that encephalization is the great filter — clearly implying that this is a single filter that is more significant than another filters, and that encephalization is the great filter. The “great filter” is an idea due to Robin Hanson, according to whom, “The Great Silence implies that one or more of these steps [to visible colonization] are very improbable; there is a ‘Great Filter’ along the path between simple dead stuff and explosive life. The vast vast majority of stuff that starts along this path never makes it. In fact, so far nothing among the billion trillion stars in our whole past universe has made it all the way along this path.”

In the second of the two blog posts noted above, Of Filters, Great and Small, I considered the different possible structures that filters might take, and this is a more nuanced view of the great filter that departs from the idea that a single element of the great filter is uniquely responsible for the great silence and the Fermi paradox. The journey to higher forms of emergent complexity seems to be robust, and therefore likely to have been repeated elsewhere, but it is also a long journey of later emergent complexities multiply supervening upon earlier emergent complexities. This structure of emergent complexities over time is itself a structure more complex than any one of the emergent complexities taken in isolation. In so far as we understand the great filter in this content, we understand a more nuanced view than the idea of one step among many steps along this journey being the unique hurdle to the aggressive expansion of life in the universe, and therefore its visible traces discoverable through cosmology.

Even given this more nuanced view of the great filter, later forms of emergent complexity will be less common than earlier forms, and within the structure of the great filter we can identify particular emergent complexities where the iterated structure falters. If we place this stalling point at exponential encephalization, we might find a universe filled with complex life, but with few or no other intelligent species capable of building a civilization. This is the sense in which I wish my claim that encephalization is the great filter to be understood.

Recently I have had reason to revisit the idea that encephalization is the great filter, and this is primarily due to having read The Social Conquest of Earth by E. O. Wilson, which emphasizes the role of eusociality in the construction of complex societies. I think that Wilson is right about this. Wilson notes that eusociality has emerged on Earth only a handful of times, making it a rare form of emergent complexity: “Eusociality arose in ants once, three times independently in wasps, and at least four times — probably more, but it is hard to tell — in bees.” (p. 136) We can compare this rarity of eusociality as an adaptation to the rarity of intelligence as an adaptation.

The insects that have achieved robust eusociality — perhaps I should say arthropods — are very different from mammals. We must go back more than 500 million years to the split between protostomes and dueterostomes to find the last common ancestor of the two. With the arthropods we share being bilaterally symmetrical, but the split between us — hence the split between our brains and central nervous systems (CNS) — is about as old as the split between mammals and molluscs: chordata, mollusca, and arthropoda are distinct phyla. On the one hand, we know from a recent fossil find something about the CNS of the earliest chordates, which we thus have in common with most other terrestrial animalia (cf. How early a mind?); on the other hand, we also know that neural structures have evolved independently on Earth (cf. The ctenophore genome and the evolutionary origins of neural systems), so that we might speak of neurodiversity among terrestrial animalia. Different brains, when sufficiently complex, are substrates for different forms of emergent consciousness, i.e., different forms of mind.

It is not only dramatically different kinds of minds that might give rise to dramatically different forms of encephalization, and thus intelligence and civilization. Part of the differentness of eusocial insects is their reproductive specialization, which goes along with a genetic structure of a colony in which the superorganism of the colony benefits overall from a majority of individuals not reproducing. This is also dramatically different from human societies. It has been objected to Wilson’s thesis of the eusociality of human beings that human beings are not eusocial, but rather prosocial, and that human cooperative societies cannot be compared to insect cooperative societies because there is no parallel to reproductive specialization among human beings. This, I think, is an unnecessarily narrow conception of eusociality. All we have to do is to recognize that eusociality can take multiple forms (as minds and intelligence can take multiple forms, supervening upon multiple distinct neural structures), some of which involve reproductive specialization and some of which do not, in order for us to recognize human cooperative societies as eusocial.

The most developed brain of the molluscs is that of the octopus, a solitary hunter. Octopi have been hunting in the depths of the sea for hundreds of millions of years, and, apparently, they have never experienced competition on the basis of intelligence, and, perhaps because of this, have never experienced an encephalization event. (Recently in How early a mind? I quoted E. O. Wilson to the effect that, “A Homo sapiens level of intelligence can arise only on land, whether here on Earth or on any other conceivable planet.” ) So octopi have a respectable level of intelligence, but are far from being eusocial. The eusocial insects have a much less powerful brain than octopi or mammals, but they did make the breakthrough to eusociality. Only human beings made the breakthrough to both eusociality and high individual intelligence.

Since reading Wilson on the eusociality of human societies, I can come to think that human civilization is what happens when eusociality coincides with intelligence. Termite mounds and bee hives are what happens when eusociality coincides with insect-level intelligence. And this observation of the interaction of eusociality and intelligence immediately suggests two possible counterfactuals to human civilzation, which I will sketch below. Understand that, in this context, when I use the term “human civilization” I am using this is in its most generic signification, covering all the many different human civilizations that have existed, i.e., the class of all human civilizations (which is the class of all known civilizations constructed by a biological being both eusocial and intelligent).

I noted above that we can employ a conception of eusociality less narrow than that restricted to eusocial insects with reproductive specialization. Similarly, the other element in civilization — intelligence — ought also to be construed broadly. Many different kinds of intelligence interacting with many different kinds of eusociality suggest many different possibilities for civilization distinct from the class of human civilizations. At the present time I am not going to consider kinds of eusociality and intelligence as much as degrees of eusociality and intelligence, and I will assume that the insect transition to reproductive specialization represents eusociality taken to a higher degree than eusociality has progressed in human beings. Similarly, I will assume that human intelligence represents a higher degree of intelligence than now-extinct branches of the genus homo, i.e., our ancestors with lower degrees of encephalization and lower intelligence.

From these assumptions about degrees of eusociality and intelligence, two counterfactual classes of civilization are suggested:

High Eusociality/Low Intelligence

A species might be less intelligent than human beings (i.e., possess a lower degree of encephalization) but more eusocial than human beings, and be able to build a civilization.

Low Eusociality/High Intelligence

A species might be more intelligent than human beings (i.e., possessing a higher degree of encephalization, or a thicker neocortex) but less eusocial than human beings, and be able to build a civilization.

This formulation has the virtue of existing human civilization embodying the principle of mediocrity: our eusociality and intelligence are balanced; we are not as eusocial or as individualistic as we might have been, and we are not as intelligence or as unintelligent as we might have been. We are in the “Goldilocks zone” of coinciding eusociality and intelligence, and this human “sweet spot” for civilization may account for the fact that civilization emerged independently in widely separated geographical regions, not as a result of idea diffusion, but rather as a consequence of independent invention.

In the High Eusociality/Low Intelligence class of civilizations, we would see somewhat individually intelligent beings capable of a high degree of cooperation through eusociality forming socieites (superorganisms) quite early in their history. We can see the degree to which bees and ants and termites can develop societies based on eusociality and an almost negligible individual intelligence; with a degree of eusociality approaching this, but in a species endowed with more cognitive capacity, cities might be built that look like something between a human city and a termite mound, and this might happen spontaneously. If this had happened with an earlier human ancestor — a counterfactual ancestor with greater eusociality than any actual human ancestor — it could have preempted the emergence of human civilization by occurring millions of years earlier.

In the Low Eusociality/High Intelligence class of civilizations, civilization may have come about at the level of scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, or, at least, human beings in small groups may have been able to develop science and technology without large social institutions such as governments, universities, and corporations, which discipline unruly human beings and make it possible for them to work cooperatively together. One can imagine that a more intelligent (counterfactual) species of the genus homo might have been sufficiently intelligent to pursue science at a much earlier period of its history, and one can imagine members of such a species coming together for scientific purposes much as our ancestors came together at Göbekli Tepe (which I first wrote about in The Birth of Agriculture from the Spirit of Religion) possibly for religious rituals, even before they gathered in settlements for agriculture.

Both counterfactual scenarios I have described above could have resulted in civilization on Earth emerging tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years earlier than it did in fact emerge. I suppose it would be equally possible to formulate counterfactuals in which different classes of civilization emerged much later.

Each of the three classes of civilizations considered here — moderate eusociality/moderate intelligence, high eusociality/low intelligence, and low eusociality/high intelligence — have distinct advantages and disadvantages, in terms of the viability of the civilization that results. However, cognitive capability begins to play a much greater role in civilization after industrialization when civilization becomes technological and scientific. If a given civilization can survive to make the breakthrough to science-driven technology, all other things being equal, the species with the greatest intelligence will have the greatest advantage in deploying science to further the ends of that species. I suspect that a high eusociality/low intelligence civilization would be stagnant, and possibly so stagnant that the breakthrough to industrialization never occurs. I also suspect that human beings were just smart enough to make that breakthrough, as indicated by the single point of origin of the industrial revolution. Short of that threshold, any civilization remains cosmologically invisible, exclusively bound to its homeworld, and incapable of long-term existential risk mitigation. This scenario is consistent with the great silence, and may constitute another approach to the Fermi paradox.

The research questions that follow from these considerations include: Are there intrinsic limits to eusociality among beings whose biology is not consistent with reproductive specialization? Are there intrinsic limits to intelligence for biological beings of known biochemistry? How do eusociality and intelligence interact biologically and ecologically? Does either constitute a check upon the other?

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Cooperation among human beings has its limits — as illustrated by the story of the Tower of Babel — and one limit to cooperation is our level of eusociality. With a higher or lower level of eusociality, civilization would have had a different structure.

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Addendum on the Technocentric Thesis

Wednesday

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Biocentrism in an extended sense

In my recent post The Technocentric Thesis I formulated the latter idea such that all technocentric civilizations begin as biocentric civilizations and are transformed into technocentric civilizations through the replacement of biological constituents with technological constituents. This technocentric thesis implicitly refers to the anterior biocentric thesis, such that all civilizations in our universe begin as biocentric civilizations originating on planetary surfaces (in its strong form) or all civilizations during the Stelliferous Era begin as biocentric civilizations originating on planetary surfaces (in its weak form).

The technocentric thesis may be considered a generalization from the biocentric thesis (or, at least, an extension of the biocentric thesis), in so far as I previously argued in Astrobiology is island biogeography writ large that “spaceflight is to astrobiology as flight is to biogeography” which entails, in regard to the continuity of civilization and natural history, that “technology is the pursuit of biology by other means.” Thus technocentric civilizations continue imperatives of biocentric civilization, but by means other than biocentric means, i.e., by technological rather than biological means. Throughout the process of the replacement of the biological constituents of civilization by technological constituents of civilization, the imperatives of civilization remain intact and continuous.

We can make other generalizations from (and extensions of) the biocentric thesis. I wrote about a generalization of biophilia to non-terrestrial life in The Scope of Biophilia: “[E.O.] Wilson has already anticipated the extrapolation of biophilia beyond terrestrial life. Though Wilson’s term biophilia has rapidly gained currency and has been widely discussed, his original vision embracing a biophilia not limited to Earth has not enjoyed the same level of interest.” Here is the passage in question of E. O. Wilson’s Biophilia:

“From infancy we concentrate happily on ourselves and other organisms. We learn to distinguish life from the inanimate and move toward it like moths to a porch light. Novelty and diversity are particularly esteemed; the mere mention of the word extraterrestrial evokes reveries about still unexplored life, displacing the old and once potent exotic that drew earlier generations to remote islands and jungled interiors.”

Human Biophilia in its initial sense is the affinity that human beings have for the terrestrial biosphere, and the obvious extension of human biophilia (suggested in the passage quoted above from Wilson) would be the affinity that human beings may have for any life whatsoever in the cosmos, terrestrial or extraterrestrial. Might this hold generally for all biological beings, such that we can posit the affinity that some non-terrestrial biological being might have for the life of its homeworld, and the affinity that some non-terrestrial biological being might have for all life, including life on Earth (the mirror image of human biophilia in an extended sense)? These are the exobiological senses of biophilia (exobiophilia, if you like, or xenobiophilia).

These mirror image formulations of human biophilia and biophilia on the part of other intelligent (biological) agents suggests a more comprehensive formulation yet, that of the affinity of any biological being for any biology to be found anywhere in the universe. The presumed affinity that each biological organism will have for the biota of its homeworld involves the existential necessity of an organism’s attachment to the biota of its homeworld on the one hand, while on the other hand there is biophilia as a moral phenomenon, i.e., a constituent in the moral psychology of any biological being, the cognitive expression (or cognitive bias) of biocentrism. Biophilia in this formal sense would be the affinity that any biological being would have for the biota of its homeworld, while this formal biophilia in a generalized sense would be the affinity that any biological being would have for any life whatsoever in the cosmos.

How comprehensive is the scope of biophilia, or how comprehensive can it be, or ought it to be? Can we meaningfully extrapolate the concept of biophilia to such comprehensive scope as to include life on other worlds? I have formulated several thought experiments — Terrestrial Bias, Astrobiology Thought Experiment, and The Book of Earth — to investigate our intuitions in regard to other life, both on Earth and elsewhere. It would be an interesting project to follow up on these thought experiments more systematically as a research program in experimental philosophy. For the moment, however, I remain confined to thought experiments.

There are at least two forces counterbalancing the possibility of an expansive biophilia, with a scope exceeding that of terrestrial biology:

1) biophobia, and…

2) in-group bias

Parallel to biophilia there is biophobia, which is as instinctual as the former. Just as human beings have an affinity for certain life forms, we also have an instinctive fear of certain life forms. Indeed, the biosphere could be divided up into forms of life for which we possess biophilia, forms of life for which we possess biophobia, and forms of life to which we are indifferent. Biophobia, like biophilia, can be extrapolated as above to extraterrestrial forms of life. If and when we do find life elsewhere in the universe, no doubt some of this life will inspire us with awe and wonder, while some of its will inspire us with fear, perhaps even with palpable terror. So the scope of biophilia is modified by the parallel scope of biophobia. Given that terrestrial life is going to be more like us, while alien life will be less like us, I would guess that any future alien life will, on balance, inspire greater biophobia, while terrestrial life will, on balance, inspire greater biophilia. If this turns out to be true, the extension of biophilia beyond life of the terrestrial biosphere will be severely limited.

There is a pervasive in-group bias that marks eusociality in complex life, i.e., life sufficiently complex to have evolved consciousness, and perhaps also among eusocial insects, which are not likely to possess the kind of consciousness possessed by large brained mammals. I am using “eusocial” here in E. O. Wilson’s sense, as I have been reading E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, in which Wilson contrasts the eusociality of insects and of human beings and a few other mammals. Wilson finds eusociality to be a relatively rare adaptive strategy, but also a very powerful one once it takes hold. Wilson credits human eusociality with the human dominance of the terrestrial biosphere today.

Wilson’s conception of eusociality among primates has been sharply rejected by many eminent biologists, among then Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker. The debate over eusociality in primates has focused on group selection (long a controversial topic in evolutionary biology) and the absence of reproductive division of labor in human beings. But the fact that one communication in criticism of Wilson and co-authors to the eminent scientific journal Nature (“Inclusive fitness theory and eusociality” Nature, 2011 March 24; 471, 7339: E1-4; author reply E9-10. doi: 10.1038/nature09831) had 134 signatures indicates that something more than the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge is involved in this debate. I am not going to attempt to summarize this debate here, but I will say only that I find value in Wilson’s conception of eusociality among human beings, and that the criticism of Wilson’s position has involved almost no attempt to understand Wilson’s point sympathetically.

Wilson had, of course, previously made himself controversial with his book on sociobiology, which discipline has subsequently been absorbed into and transformed into evolutionary psychology (one could say that sociobiology is evolutionary psychology in a nascent and inchoate stage of development), which continues to be controversial today, primarily because it says unflattering things about human nature. Wilson has continued to say unflattering things about human nature, and his treatment of human eusociality in The Social Conquest of Nature entails inherent human tribalism, which in turn entails warfare. This is not a popular claim to make, but it is a claim that resonates with my own ideas, as I have many times argued that civilization and war are coevolutionary; Wilson pushes this coevolutionary spiral of (in-group) sociality and (out-group) violence into the prehistoric, evolutionary past of humanity. With this I completely concur.

In-group bias and out-group hostility parallel each other in a way very much like biophilia and biophobia, and we could once again produce parallel formulations for extrapolating these human responses to worlds beyond our own — and perhaps also to other intelligent agents, so that these responses are not peculiarly human. How large can the scope of in-group bias become? It is a staple of many science fiction stories that human beings, divided against each other, unify to fight a common extraterrestrial enemy. I suspect that this would be true, and that in-group bias could be expanded even farther into the universe, but it would never be without the shadow of an out-group, however that out-group came to be defined, whether as other human beings who had abandoned Earth, or another species sufficiently different from us so as to arouse our suspicion and distrust.

There is a little known essay by Freeman Dyson that touches of themes of intrinsic human tribalism that are very much in the vein of Wilson’s argument, though Dyson’s article is many decades old, from the same year that human beings landed on the moon: “Human Consequences of the Exploration of Space” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept. 1969, Vol. XXV, No. 7; I was unable to find this article available on the internet, so I obtained a copy through interlibrary loan… many thanks to the Multnomah County Library System). In this article Dyson considers the problem of people in small groups, and in particular he describes how intrinsic human tribalism (i.e., in-group bias) might be exapted for a better future:

“…the real future of man in space lies far away from planets, in isolated city-states floating in the void, perhaps attached to an inconspicuous asteroid of perhaps to a comet… most important of all for man’s future, there will be groups of people setting out to find a place where they can be safe from prying eyes, free to experiment undisturbed with the creation of radically new types of human beings, surpassing us in mental capacities as we surpass the apes… So I foresee that the ultimate benefit of space travel to man will be to make it possible for him once again to live as he lived throughout prehistoric time, in isolated small units. Once again his human qualities of clannish loyalty and exclusiveness will serve a constructive role…”

Once again, I completely concur, though this is not the whole story. One of the greatest demographic trends of our time is urbanization, and we have seen millions upon millions move from rural areas and small towns into the always growing cities, both for their opportunities and their intrinsic interest. So human beings possess these tribal instincts that Dyson would harness for the good, but also eusocial instincts that flower in the world’s megacities, which are centers of both economic and intellectual innovation. Thus I find much of value in Dyson’s vision, but I would supplement it with the occasional conurbation, and I would assume that, over the course of an individual’s life, that there would be times that they would prefer the isolated community, times when they would prefer urban life, and times when they would want to leave all human society behind and immerse themselves in wilderness and wildness — perhaps even in the wilderness of an alien biosphere.

All of the things I have been describing here are essentially biological visions of the human future, which suggest that biocentric civilization still has many ways that it can grow and evolve, even if it does not converge on a form implied by the technocentric thesis, in which biology is displaced by technology. Technology can replace biology, and, when it does, the ends of biocentric civilization come to served by technological means, but that technology can replace biology does not mean that technology will replace biology.

Perhaps one of the sources of our technophilia is that we tend to think in technological terms because technology attains its ends over human scales of time, even over the scale of time of the individual human life and the individual human consciousness. But what technology can do quickly, biology can also do, more slowly, over biological and geological scales of time. If human civilization should be wiped away by any number of catastrophes that await us, the technological path of development will be foreclosed, but the biological path to development will still continue to be open as long as life exists, though it will operate over a scale of time that human beings do not perceive and mostly do not comprehend.

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Paul Klee, Bird Garden, 1924

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Planet of Zombies

Sunday

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The Fate of Mind in the Age of Turing

We are living today in the Age of Turing. Alan Turing was responsible for the theoretical work underlying contemporary computer science, but Turing’s work went far beyond the formal theory of the computer. Like Darwin, Turing’s thought ran ahead of the science he founded, and he openly speculated on the consequences of the future development of the computers that his theory made possible.

In his seminal paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (the paper in which he introduced the “Turing Test,” which he called the “imitation game”) Turing began with the question, “Can machines think?” and went on to assert:

I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10⁹, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

A. M. Turing, “Computing machinery and intelligence,” Mind, 1950, 59, 433-460.

Turing’s prediction hasn’t yet come to pass, but Turing was absolutely correct that one can speak of machines thinking without being contradicted. Indeed, Turing was more right than he could have guessed, as his idea that computers should be judged upon their performance — and even compared in the same way to human performance — rather than on a vague idea of thinking or consciousness, has become so commonplace that, if one maintains the contrary in public, one can expect to be contradicted.

Turing was, in respect to mind and consciousness, part of a larger intellectual movement that called into question “folk concepts,” which came to seem unacceptably vague and far too unwieldy in the light of the explanatory power of scientific concepts, the latter often constructed without reference to folk concepts, which came to be viewed as dispensable. Consciousness has been relegated to the status of a concept of “folk psychology” with no scientific basis.

While I am in sympathy with the need for rigorous scientific concepts, the eliminative approach to mind and consciousness has not resulted in greater explanatory power for scientific theories, but rather has reinforced an “explanatory gap” (a term made prominent by David Chalmers) that has resulted in a growing disconnect between the most rigorous sciences of human and animal behavior on the one hand, and on the other hand what we know to be true of our own experience, but which we cannot formulate or express in scientific terms. This is a problem. The perpetuation of this disconnect will only deepen our misunderstanding of ourselves and will continue to weaken the ability of science to explain anything that touches upon human experience. Moreover, this is not merely a human matter. We misunderstand the biosphere entire if we attempt to understand it while excluding the role of consciousness. More on this below.

Science has been misled in the study of consciousness by an analogy with the study of life. Life was once believed to be inexplicable in terms of pure science, and so there was a dispute between “mechanism” and “vitalism,” with the vitalists believing that there was some supernatural or other principle superadded to inanimate matter, and that possession of this distinctively vital element unaccountable in scientific terms distinguished the animate from the animate. Physics and chemistry alone could explain inanimate matter, but something more was needed, according to vitalism, to explain life. But with the progress of biology, vitalism was not so much refuted as made irrelevant. We now have a good grasp of biochemistry, and while a distinction is made between inorganic chemistry and biochemistry, it is all understood to be chemistry, and no vital spark is invoked to explain the chemistry distinctive of life.

Similarly, consciousness has been believed to be a “divine spark” within a human being that distinguishes a distinctively human perspective on the world, but consciousness “explained” in this way comes with considerable theological baggage, as explicitly theological terms like “soul” and “spirit” are typically used interchangeably with “consciousness” and “mind.” From a scientific perspective, this leaves much to be desired, and we could do much better. I agree with this. Turing’s imitation game seems to present us with an operational definition of consciousness that allows us to investigate mind and consciousness without reference to the theological baggage. There is much to gained by Turing’s approach, but the problem is that we have here no equivalent of chemistry — no underlying physical theory that could account for consciousness in the way that life is accounted for by biochemistry.

Part of the problem, and the problem that most interests me at present, is the anthropocentrism of both traditional theological formulations and contemporary scientific formulations. If we understand human consciousness not as an exception that definitively separates us from the rest of life on the planet, not as a naturalistic stand-in for a “divine spark” that would differentiate human beings from the “lower” animals, but as a distinctive development of consciousness already emergent in other forms preceding human beings, then we understand that human consciousness is continuous with other forms of consciousness in nature, and that, as conscious beings, we are part of something greater than ourselves, which is a biosphere in which consciousness is commonplace, like vision or flight.

There are naturalistic alternatives to an anthropocentric conception of consciousness, alternatives that place consciousness in the natural world, and which also have the virtue of avoiding the obvious problems of eliminativist of reductivist accounts of consciousness. I will consider the views of Antonio Damasio and John Searle. I do not fully agree with either of these authors, but I am in sympathy with these approaches, which seem to me to offer the possibility of further development, as fully scientific as Turing’s approach, but without the denial of consciousness as a distinctive constituent of the world.

Antonio R. Damasio in The Feeling of What Happens distinguished between core consciousness and extended consciousness. Core consciousness, he wrote:

“…provides the organism with a sense of self about one moment — now — and about one place — here. The scope of core consciousness is the here and now. Core consciousness does not illuminate the future, and the only past it vaguely lets us glimpse is that which occurred in the instant just before. There is no elsewhere, there is no before, there is no after.”

Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt, Inc., 1999, p. 16

…and…

“…core consciousness is a simple, biological phenomenon; it has one single level of organization; it is stable across the lifetime of the organism; it is not exclusively human; and it is not dependent on conventional memory, working memory, reasoning, or language.”

Loc. cit.

The simplicity of core consciousness gives it a generality across organisms, and across the life span of a given organism; at any one time, it is always more or less the same. Extended consciousness, on the other hand, is both more complex and less robust, dependent upon an underlying core consciousness, but constructing from core consciousness what Damasio calls the “autobiographical self” in contradistinction to the ephemeral “core self” of core consciousness. Extended consciousness, Damasio says:

“…provides the organism with an elaborate sense of self — an identity and a person, you or me, no less — and places that person at a point in individual historical time, richly aware of the lived past and of the anticipated future, and keenly cognizant of the world beside it.”

Loc. cit.

…and…

“…extended consciousness is a complex biological phenomenon; it has several levels of organization; and it evolves across the lifetime of the organism. Although I believe extended consciousness is also present in some nonhumans, at simple levels, it only attains its highest reaches in humans. It depends on conventional memory and working memory. When it attains its human peak, it is also enhanced by language.”

Loc. cit.

…but…

“…extended consciousness is not an independent variety of consciousness: on the contrary, it is built on the foundation of core consciousness.”

Op. cit., p. 17

One might add to this formulation by noting that, as extended consciousness is built on core consciousness, core consciousness is, in turn, built on the foundation of biological processes. I would probably describe consciousness in a somewhat different way, and would make different distinctions, but I find Damasio’s approach helpful, as he makes no attempt to explain away consciousness or to reduce it to something that it is not. Damasio seeks to describe and to explain consciousness as consciousness, and, moreover, sees consciousness as part of the natural world that is to be found embodied in many beings in addition to human beings, which latter constitutes, “…extended consciousness at its zenith.”

Damasio’s formulation of both core consciousness and extended consciousness as biological phenomena might be compared to what John Searle calls “biological naturalism.” What Searle, a philosopher, and Damasio, a neuroscientist, have in common is an interest in a naturalistic account of mind which is not eliminativist or reductivist. To this end, both emphasize the biological nature of consciousness. Searle has conveniently summarized his biological naturalism in six theses, as follows:

1. Consciousness consists of inner, qualitative, subjective states and processes. It has therefore a first-person ontology.

2. Because it has a first-person ontology, consciousness cannot be reduced to a third-person phenomena in the way that it is typical of other natural phenomena such as heat, liquidity, or solidity.

3. Consciousness is, above all, a biological phenomenon. Conscious processes are biological processes.

4. Conscious processes are caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the brain.

5. Consciousness consists of higher-level processes realized in the structure of the brain.

6. There is, as far as we know, no reason in principle why we could not build an artificial brain that also causes and realizes consciousness.

John R. Searle, Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World, New York: Basic Books, 1999, p. 53

Searle’s formulations — again, as with Damasio, I would probably formulate these ideas a bit differently, but, on the whole, I am sympathetic to Searle’s approach — are a reaction against a reaction, i.e., against a reactionary theory of mind, which is the materialist theory of mind formulated in consciousness contradistinction to Cartesian dualism. Searle devotes a considerable portion of several books to the problems with this latter philosophy. I think the most important lesson to take away from Searle’s critique is not the technical dispute, but the thematic motives that underlie this philosophy of mind:

“How is it that so many philosophers and cognitive scientists can say so many things that, to me at least, seem obviously false? Extreme views in philosophy are almost never unintelligent; there are generally very deep and powerful reasons why they are held. I believe one of the unstated assumptions behind the current batch of views is that they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the antiscientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives.”

John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, Chap. 1

The biologism of both Damasio and Searle make it possible not only to approach human consciousness scientifically, but also to place consciousness in nature — the alternatives being denying human consciousness or approaching it non-scientifically, and denying consciousness a place in nature. These alternatives have come to have a colorful representation in contemporary philosophy in the discussion of “philosophical zombies.” Philosophical zombies are beings like ourselves, but without consciousness. The question, then, is whether we can distinguish philosophical zombies from human beings in possession of consciousness. I hope that the reader will have noticed that, in the discussion of philosophical zombies we encounter another anthropocentric formulation. (I previously touched on some of the issues related to philosophical zombies in The Limitations of Human Consciousness, A Note on Soulless Zombies, and The Prodigal Philosopher Returns.)

The anthropocentrism of philosophical zombies can be amended by addressing philosophical zombies in a more comprehensive context, in which not only human beings have consciousness, but consciousness is common in the biosphere. Then the question becomes not, “can we distinguish between philosophical zombies and conscious human beings” but “can we distinguish between a biosphere in which consciousness plays a constitutive role and a biosphere in which consciousness is entirely absent”? This is potentially a very rich question, and I could unfold it over several volumes, rather than the several paragraphs that follow, which should be understood as only the barest sketch of the problem.

As I see it, reconstructing biosphere evolution should include the reconstruction, to the extent possible, of the evolution of consciousness as a component of the biosphere — when did it emerge? When did the structures upon which is supervenes emerge? How did consciousness evolve and adapt to changing selection pressures? How did consciousness radiate, and what forms has it taken? These questions are obviously entailed by biological naturalism. Presumably consciousness evolved gradually from earlier antecedents that were not consciousness. Damasio writes, “natural low-level attention precedes consciousness,” and, “consciousness and wakefulness, as well as consciousness and low-level attention, can be separated.” Again, I would formulate this a bit differently, but, in principle, states of a central nervous system prior to the emergence of consciousness would precede even rudimentary core consciousness. If these states of a central nervous system prior to consciousness include wakefulness and low-level attention, this would constitute a particular seriation of the evolution of consciousness.

Damasio calls human consciousness, “consciousness at its zenith,” and a naturalistic conception of consciousness recognizes this by placing this zenith of human consciousness at the far end of the continuum of consciousness, but still on a continuum that we share with other beings with which we share the biosphere. A human being is not only a being among beings, but also one biological being among other biological beings. Given Searle’s biological naturalism, our common biology — especially the common biology of our central nervous systems and brains — points to our being a conscious being among other conscious beings. This seems to be borne out in our ordinary experience, as we usually understand our experience. We interact with other conscious beings on the level of consciousness, but the quality of consciousness may differ among beings. Interacting with other beings on the level of awareness means that our relationships with other conscious beings are marked by mutual awareness: not only are we aware of the other, but the other is also aware of us.

Above and beyond mere consciousness is sentient consciousness, i.e., consciousness with an emotional element superadded. We interact with other sentient beings on the level of sentience, that is to say, on the level of feeling. Our relationships with other mammals, especially those we have made part of our civilization, like dogs and horses, are intimate, personal relationships, not mediated by intelligence, but mostly mediated by the emotional lives we share with our fellow mammals, endowed, like us, with a limbic system. We intuitively understand the interactions and group dynamics of other social species, because we are ourselves a social species, Even when the institutions of, for example, gorilla society or chimpanzee society, are radically different from the institutions of human society, we can recognize that these are societies, and we can sometimes recognize the different rules that govern these societies.

Even when human beings are absent from interactions in the biosphere, there are still interactions on the level of consciousness and sentience. When a bobcat chases a hare, both interact on the level of two core consciousnesses, and also, as mammals, they interact on a sentient level. The hare has that level of fear and panic possible for core consciousness, and the bobcat, no doubt, experiences the core consciousness equivalent of satisfaction if it catches the hare, and frustration if the hare escapes. Or when a herd of wild horses panics and stampedes, their common sentient response to some environmental stimulation provides the basis of their interaction as a herd species.

All of this can be denied, and we can study nature as though consciousness were no part of it. While I have assimilated the denial of consciousness in nature to anthropocentrism, many more assimilate the attribution of consciousness to other species as a form of anthropocentrism. Clearly, we need to better define anthropocentrism, where and how it misleads us, and where and how it better helps us to understand our fellow beings with which we share the biosphere. That position that identifies consciousness as peculiarly human and denies it to the rest of the biosphere is, in effect asserting that a biosphere of zombies is indistinguishable from a biosphere of consciousness beings; I can understand how this grows out of a legitimate concern to avoid anthropocentric extrapolations, but I can also recognize the violation of the Copernican principle in this position. The view that recognizes consciousness throughout the macroscopic biosphere can also be interpreted as consistent with avoiding anthropocentrism, but also is consonant with Copernicanism broadly construed.

To adopt an eliminativist or reductionist account of consciousness, i.e., to deny the reality of consciousness, is not only to deny consciousness to human beings (a denial that would be thoroughly anthropocentric), it is to deny consciousness to the whole of nature, to deny all consciousness of all kinds throughout nature. It is to assert that consciousness has no place in nature, and that a planet of zombies is indistinguishable from a planet of consciousness agents. Without consciousness, the world entire would be a planet of zombies.

To deny consciousness is to deny that there are any other species, or any other biospheres, in the universe in which consciousness plays a role. If we deny consciousness we also deny consciousness elsewhere in the universe, unless we insist that terrestrial life is the exception, and that, again, would be a non-Copernican position to take. To deny consciousness is to deny that consciousness will ever inhere in some non-biological substrate, i.e., it is to deny that machines will never become conscious, because there is no such thing as consciousness. To deny consciousness is to constitute in place of the biosphere we have, in which conscious interaction plays a prominent role in the lifeways of megafauna, a planet of zombies in which all of these apparent interactions are mere appearance, and the reality is non-conscious beings interacting mechanically and only mechanically. I am not presenting this as a moral horror, that we should avoid because it offends us, but as naturalistically — indeed, biologically — false. Our world is not a planet of zombies.

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Reconstructing Biosphere Evolution

Wednesday

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In Rational Reconstructions of Time I noted that stellar evolution takes place on a scale of time many orders of magnitude greater than the human scale of time, but that we are able to reconstruct stellar evolution by looking into the cosmos and, among the billions of stars we can see, picking out examples of stars in various stages of their evolution and sequencing these stages in a kind of astrophysical seriation. Similarly, the geology of Earth takes place on a scale of time many orders of magnitude removed from human scales of time, but we have been able to reconstruct the history of our planet through a careful study of those traces of evidence not wiped away by subsequent geological processes. Moreover, our growing knowledge of exoplanetary systems is providing a context in which the geological history of Earth can be understood. We are a long way from understanding planet formation and development, but we know much more than we did prior to exoplanet discoveries.

The evolution of a biosphere, like the evolution of stars, takes place at a scale of time many orders of magnitude beyond the human scale of time, and, as with stellar evolution, it is only relatively recently that human beings have been able to reconstruct the history of the biosphere of their homeworld. This began with the emergence of scientific geology in the eighteenth century with the work of James Hutton, and accelerated considerably with the nineteenth century work of Charles Lyell. Scientific paleontology, starting with Cuvier, also contributed significantly to understanding the natural history of the biosphere. A more detailed understanding of biosphere evolution has begun to emerge with the systematic application of the methods of scientific historiography. The use of varve chronology for dating annual glacial deposits, dendrochronology, and the Blytt–Sernander system for dating the layers in peat bogs, date to the late nineteenth century; carbon-14 dating, and other methods based on nuclear science, date to the middle of the twentieth century. The study of ice cores from Antarctica has proved to be especially valuable in reconstruction past climatology and atmosphere composition.

The only way to understand biospheric evolution is through the reconstruction of that evolution on the basis of evidence available to us in the present. This includes the reconstruction of past geology, climatology, oceanography, etc. — all Earth “systems,” as it were — which, together with life, constitute the biosphere. We have been able to reconstruct the history of life on Earth not from fossils alone, but from the structure of our genome, which carries within itself a history. This genetic historiography has pushed back the history of the origins of life through molecular phylogeny to the very earliest living organisms on Earth. For example, in July 2016 Nature Microbiology published “The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor” by Madeline C. Weiss, Filipa L. Sousa, Natalia Mrnjavac, Sinje Neukirchen, Mayo Roettger, Shijulal Nelson-Sathi, and William F. Martin (cf. the popular exposition “LUCA, the Ancestor of All Life on Earth: A new genetic analysis points to hydrothermal vents as the planet’s first habitat” by Dirk Schulze-Makuch; also We’ve been wrong about the origins of life for 90 years by Arunas L. Radzvilavicius) showing that recent work in molecular phylogeny points to ocean floor hydrothermal vents as the likely point of origin for life on Earth.

This earliest history of life on Earth — that terrestrial life that is the most different from life as we know it today — is of great interest to us in reconstructing the history of the biosphere. If life began on Earth from a single hydrothermal vent at the bottom of an ocean, life would have spread outward from that point, the biosphere spreading and also thickening as it worked its way down in the lithosphere and as it eventually floated free in the atmosphere. If, on the other hand, life originated in an Oparin ocean, or on the surface of the land, or in something like Darwin’s “warm little pond” (an idea which might be extended to tidepools and shallows), the process by which the biosphere spread to assume its present form of “planetary scale life” (a phrase employed by David Grinspoon) would be different in each case. If the evolution of planetary scale life is indeed different in each case, it is entirely possible that life on Earth is an outlier not because it is the only life in the universe (the rare Earth hypothesis), but because life of Earth may have arisen by a distinct process, or attained planetary scale by a distinct mechanism, not to be found among other living worlds in the cosmos. We simply do not know at present.

Once life originated at some particular point on Earth’s surface, or deep in the oceans, and it expanded to become planetary scale life, there seems to have been a period of time when life consisted primarily of horizontal gene transfer (a synchronic mechanism of life, as it were), before the mechanisms of species individuation with vertical gene transfer and descent with modification (a diachronic mechanism of life). It is now thought the the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) will only be able to be traced back to this moment of transition in the history of life, but this is an area of active research, and we simply do not yet know how it will play out. But if we could visit many different worlds in the earliest stages of the formation of their respective biospheres, we would be able to track this transition, which may occur differently in different biospheres. Or it may not occur at all, and a given biosphere might remain at the level of microbial life, experiencing little or no further development of emergent complexity, until it ceased to be habitable.

While we can be confident that later emergent complexities must wait for earlier emergent complexities to emerge first, no other biosphere is going to experience the same stages of development as Earth’s biosphere, because the development of the biosphere is a function of a confluence of contingent circumstances. The history of a biosphere is the unique fingerprint of life upon its homeworld. Any other planet will have different gravity, different albedo, different axial tilt, axial precession, orbital eccentricity, and orbital precession, and I have explained elsewhere how these cycles function as speciation pumps. The history of life on Earth has also been shaped by catastrophic events like extraterrestrial impacts and episodes of supervolcano eruptions. It was for reasons such as this that Stephen J. Gould said that life on Earth as we know it is, “…the result of a series of highly contingent events that would not happen again if we could rewind the tape.”

Understanding Earth’s biosphere — the particularities of its origins and the sequence of its development — is only the tip of the iceberg of reconstructing biospheres. Ultimately we will need to understand Earth’s biosphere in the context of any possible biosphere, and to do this we will need to understand the different possibilities for the origins of life and for possible sequences of development. There may be several classes of world constituted exclusively with life in the form of microbial mats. Suggestive of this, Abel Mendez wrote on Twitter, “A habitable planet for microbial life is not necessarily habitable too for complex life such as plants and animals.” I responded to this with, “Eventually we will have a taxonomy of biospheres that will distinguish exclusively microbial worlds from others…” And our taxonomy of biospheres will have to go far beyond this, mapping out typical sequences of development from the origins of life to the emergence of intelligence and civilization, when life begins to take control of its own destiny. On our planet, we call this transition the Anthropocene, but we can see from placing the idea in this astrobiological context that the Anthropocene is a kind of threshold event that could have its parallel in any biosphere productive of an intelligent species that becomes the progenitor of a civilization. Thus planetary scale life is, in the case of the Anthropocene, followed by planetary scale intelligence and planetary scale civilization.

Ultimately, our taxonomy of the biosphere must transcend the biosphere and consider circumstellar habitable zones (CHZ) and galactic habitable zones (GHZ). In present biological thought, the biosphere is the top level of biological organization; in astrobiological thought, we must become accustomed to yet higher levels of biological organization. We do not yet know if there has been an exchange of life between the bodies of our planetary system (this has been posited, but not yet proved), in the form of lithopanspermia, but whether or not it is instantiated here, it is likely instantiated in some planetary system somewhere in the cosmos, and in such planetary systems the top level of biological organization will be interplanetary. We can go beyond this as well, positing the possibility of an interstellar level of biological organization, whether by lithopanspermia or by some other mechanism (which could include the technological mechanism of a spacefaring civilization; starships may prove to be the ultimate sweepstakes dispersion vector). Given the possibility of multiple distinct interplanetary and interstellar levels of biological organization, we may be able to formulate taxonomies of CHZs for various planetary systems and GHZs for various galaxies.

One can imagine some future interstellar probe that, upon arrival at a planetary system, or at a planet known to possess a biosphere (something we would know long before we arrived), would immediately gather as many microorganisms as possible, perhaps simply by sampling the atmosphere or oceans, and then run the genetic code of these organisms through an onboard supercomputer, and, within hours, or at most days, of arrival, much of the history of the biosphere of that planet would be known through molecular phylogeny. A full understanding of the biospheric evolution (or CHZ evolution) would have to await coring samples from the lithosphere and cryosphere of the planet or planets, and, but the time we have the technology to organize such an endeavor, this may be possible as well. At an ever further future reach of technology, an intergalactic probe arriving at another galaxy might disperse further probes to scatter throughout the galaxy in order to determine if there is any galactic level biological organization.

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Folk Astrobiology

Saturday

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If some alien species had encountered Earth during one of its snowball periods, the planet would have resembled a biosphere with a single biome.

Can there be folk concepts in (and of) recent and sophisticated scientific thought, such as astrobiology? Astrobiology is a recent discipline, and as such is a beneficiary of a long history of the development of scientific disciplines; in other words, astrobiology stands on the shoulders of giants. In From an Astrobiological Point of View I characterized astrobiology as the fourth and latest of four revolutions in the life sciences, preceded by Darwinism, genetics, and evolutionary developmental biology (i.e., evo-devo). Can there be folk concepts that influence such a recent scientific discipline?

In Folk Concepts and Scientific Progress and Folk Concepts of Scientific Civilization I considered the possibility of folk concepts unique to a scientific civilization, and the folk concepts of recent sciences like astrobiology constitute paradigmatic examples of folk concepts unique to scientific civilization. The concepts of folk astrobiology, far being being rare, have proliferated as science fiction has proliferated and made a place for itself in contemporary culture, especially in film and television.

One idea of folk astrobiology that is familiar from countless science fiction films is that of planets the biosphere of which is dominated by a single biome. Both Frank Herbert’s planet Arrakis from the novel Dune and the planets Tatooine and Jakku from Star Wars are primarily desert planets, whereas the Star Wars planet Dagobah is primarily swamp, the planet Kamino is a global ocean, and the planet Hoth is primarily arctic. Two worlds that appear in the Alien films, Zeta Reticuli exomoon LV-426 in Alien and Aliens and LV-223 in Prometheus, are both desolate, rocky, and barren, like the landscapes we have come to expect from the robotic exploration of the other worlds in our own solar system.

The knowledge we have assembled of the long-term history of the biosphere of Earth, that our planet has passed through “hothouse” and “icehouse” stages, suggest it is reasonable to suppose that we will find similar conditions elsewhere in the universe, though Earth today has a wide variety of biomes that make up its biosphere. We should expect to find worlds both with diverse biospheres and with biospheres primarily constituted by a single biome. Perhaps this idea of folk astrobiology will someday be formalized, when we know more about the evolution of biospheres of multiple worlds, and we have the data to plot a bell curve of small, rocky, wet planets in the habitable zone of their star. This bell curve almost certainly exists, we just don’t know as yet where Earth falls on the curve and what kinds of worlds populate the remainder of the curve.

Biosphere diversity is thus a familiar concept of folk astrobiology. But let me backtrack a bit and try to formulate more clearly an explication of folk astrobiology.

In an earlier post I quoted the following definition of folk biology:

Folk biology is the cognitive study of how people classify and reason about the organic world. Humans everywhere classify animals and plants into species-like groups as obvious to a modern scientist as to a Maya Indian. Such groups are primary loci for thinking about biological causes and relations (Mayr 1969). Historically, they provided a transtheoretical base for scientific biology in that different theories — including evolutionary theory — have sought to account for the apparent constancy of “common species” and the organic processes centering on them. In addition, these preferred groups have “from the most remote period… been classed in groups under groups” (Darwin 1859: 431). This taxonomic array provides a natural framework for inference, and an inductive compendium of information, about organic categories and properties. It is not as conventional or arbitrary in structure and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the assembly of entities into cosmologies, materials, or social groups. From the vantage of EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, such natural systems are arguably routine “habits of mind,” in part a natural selection for grasping relevant and recurrent “habits of the world.”

Robert Andrew Wilson and Frank C. Keil, The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences

And here is a NASA definition of astrobiology that I have previously quoted:

“Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. This multidisciplinary field encompasses the search for habitable environments in our Solar System and habitable planets outside our Solar System, the search for evidence of prebiotic chemistry and life on Mars and other bodies in our Solar System, laboratory and field research into the origins and early evolution of life on Earth, and studies of the potential for life to adapt to challenges on Earth and in space.”

Drawing on both of these definitions — “Folk biology is the cognitive study of how people classify and reason about the organic world” and “Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe” — we can formulate a fairly succinct definition of folk astrobiology:

Folk astrobiology is the cognitive study of how people classify and reason about the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe.

I hope that the reader immediately sees how common this exercise is, both in scientific and non-scientific thought. On the scientific side, folk astrobiology is pervasively present in the background assumptions of SETI, while on the non-scientific side, as we have seen above in examples drawn from scientific fiction films, folk astrobiology informs our depiction of other worlds and their inhabitants. These concepts of folk astrobiology are underdetermined by astrobiology, but well grounded in common sense and scientific knowledge as far as it extends today. We will only be able to fully redeem these ideas for science when we have empirical data from many worlds. We will begin to accumulate this data when, in the near future, we are able to get spectroscopic readings from exoplanet atmospheres, but that is only the thin edge of the wedge. Robust data sets for the evolution of multiple independent biospheres will have to await interstellar travel. (This is one reason that I suggested that a starship would be the ultimate scientific instrument; cf. The Interstellar Imperative.)

Folk astrobiology remains “folk” until its concepts are fully formalized as part of a rigorous scientific discipline. As few disciplines ever attain complete rigor (logic and mathematics have come closest to converging on that goal), there is always a trace of folk thought that survives in, and is even propagated along with, scientific thought. Folk concepts and scientific concepts, then, are not mutually exclusive, but rather they overlap and intersect in a Wittgensteinian fashion. However, the legacy of positivism has often encouraged us to see folk concepts and scientific concepts as mutually exclusive, and if one adopts the principle that scientific concepts must be reductionist, therefore no non-reductionist concepts are not scientific, then it follows that most folk concepts are eliminated when a body of knowledge is made scientifically rigorous (I will not further develop this idea at present, but I hope to return to it when I can formulate it with greater precision).

We have a sophisticated contemporary biological science, and thus scientific biological concepts are ready to hand to employ in astrobiology, so that astrobiology has an early advantage in converging upon scientific rigor. But if a science aspires to transcend its origins and to establish itself as a new science co-equal with its progenitors, it must be prepared to go beyond familiar concepts, and in this case this means going beyond the sophisticated concepts of contemporary biology in order to establish truly astrobiological scientific concepts, i.e., uniquely astrobiological concepts, and these distinctive and novel concepts must then, in their turn, converge on scientific rigor. In the case of astrobiology, this may mean formulating a “natural history” where “nature” is construed as to include the whole of the universe, and this idea transcends the familiar idea of natural history, forcing the astrobiologist to account for cosmology as well as biology.

As an example of an uniquely astrobiology concept I above suggested the idea of biosphere diversity. Biosphere diversity, in turn, is related to ideas of biosphere evolution, developmental stages on planets with later emergent complexities, and so on. The several posts I have written to date on planetary endemism (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, and more to come) may be considered expositions of the folk astrobiological idea of planetary endemism. Similarly, the homeworld concept is both a folk concept of astrobiology and scientific civilization (cf. The Homeworld Effect and the Hunter-Gatherer Weltanschauung, Hunter-Gatherers in Outer Space, and The Martian Standpoint).

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The idea of a homeworld is a folk concept of astrobiology and scientific civilization.

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