Nobody knows where intentionality comes from, but it is likely an emergent property, not wholly manifested in any location within our cognitive apparatus but rather emerging from the pattern of interactions between the parts. Does the whole shifting, neurotic circus of consciousness arise from feedbacks between neuronal circuits constantly switching and firing? This mystery is related to our Anthropocene dilemma, because there are interesting parallels between our political and deliberative processes and those interior workings of a brain that seem to give rise to conscious behavior. These processes may even represent forms of cognitive activity. Our collective mechanisms for recognizing and responding to dangers, for coming to conclusions and choosing actions, may seem, from here on the ground, like a hopeless cacophony of competing voices, ideas, and values. But maybe this is just how our global brain operates, how it makes up its mind.
What if you could reduce yourself to the size of a neuron and descend into your own human brain to observe it while you were working something out. It might be disconcerting. Groups of neurons firing everywhere, some stimulating their neighbors, and some inhibiting others, perhaps holding different thoughts in different locales, all battling, trying to win the day. Even a coherent thought, if you could see the process up close, might seem to arise out of a mess of confusion—the chaos and conflict of an active mind making itself up. Perhaps consciousness is always some messy kind of a Darwinian or democratic process with a balance of competitive and collaborative forces winnowing patterns and ideas and weighing actions. You make up your mind, but you still harbor doubts. Any smart person pondering any complex situation always will. Consciousness need not be neat, orderly, and unanimous.
I suspect that markets and democracies, political discourses, competing and interacting institutions, and the Internet itself are all emerging and evolving forms of global-scale cognition, made up of components evaluating information and urging different actions, feeding back upon one another, and producing some sort of imperfect, weighted consensus to achieve thoughts and take actions. Collectively, these arguably have the properties of some kind of mind.
Who is to say that some such pattern of globally connected nodes cannot develop some sense of identity, a purpose, and an instinct for self-preservation? As this global mentation arises, we (individual human beings) may not be aware of it. Is a neuron in your brain aware of your thoughts? We may be participating in a form of large-scale consciousness, and intelligence, that we don’t individually perceive, and then observing the behavior of that emergent being, sometimes being surprised by its actions. In this view, with democracies, market regulation, environmental activism, international diplomacy, and other activities, this globally embodied mind is learning to exert some self control to avert its most self-destructive behaviors. With these activities we are helping it to perceive new threats and respond constructively. Through us, and our technology, the global biosphere is developing a mind. This way lies survival.
Can Earth really be said, through us, to have, or be gaining, consciousness? Suggesting that our planet is gaining the quality of intelligence or consciousness is not the same as some mystical notion that every rock, tree, and slug is humming with an aura of mind (although I kind of like that…). When you say that a person or a whale is intelligent, you probably don’t mean that its every cell, its big toe or dorsal fin, is full of thought and intention. Yet we say humans are smart, not just that brains are smart, because our brains are tightly wired to the rest of us, and the parts are closely coordinated through a dense mesh of signals, feedbacks, and physical connections. Whether or not our planet is in some way literally becoming intelligent, I think it can help us to think of our role as bringing consciousness and awareness into the cycles of the planet.
Just as the Gaia hypothesis redefined life as an inherently planetary-scale property, we can envision planetary intelligence as a global property that emerges from the interactions between our collective thoughts and actions and other global systems, and one that could become a long-term stabilizing influence on the planet. The rapidly coalescing, technologically interconnected global noösphere is developing some of the qualities of a mind, and may even already have some limited ability to act with intention. We don’t need some moment of singularity or sudden awakening of machine intelligence to manifest this increasingly effective global cognitive system. It’s already happening. In myriad accelerating ways, technology is profoundly changing our modes of interaction with others in distant places, and enabling the birth of a new global community. Now when I hear about something big happening in, say, Egypt or Zimbabwe, I can take a gizmo out of my pocket and directly ask a friend there on the ground, “What’s up?” This instant connectedness is new, powerful, and in its infancy. Machine-enhanced communication is drawing the world together, making us one people. Strangely, it is also pulling us apart, enabling disenfranchised and violent people to find one another and coordinate their actions. Global civilization breeds global resistance. In partnering with interconnected computers, we have unleashed powerful new tools for inclusion, democracy, and distributed community, as well as vectors for oppression and destruction.
The 2009 Green Movement in Iran, though it faltered and failed to bring down the theocracy, provided a glimpse of how social media and the Internet are making people, even in totalitarian regimes, less isolated and more hopeful of joining the modern world. The Arab Spring has also faltered. Yet it revealed a powerful new dynamic at work on the world stage. Especially in its earliest stages, the movement was largely begun and fostered on the Internet, on social media sites. At crucial times it became a battle for the hearts and minds of the world, fought by firing off tweets and posts. Unfortunately, these same tools became the loci for rumors, recriminations, and hate speech, helping to hasten the demise of that brief flowering of hope and democracy. This failed revolution revealed the promise and pitfalls of online community at this early stage.11 We have a lot to learn about how to use these tools wisely and productively, but change is in the air and, especially, online.
If our global-scale connections and interactions are forming some new kind of still-primitive brain, how does it measure up to an actual, biological brain made of neurons? Your brain is not simply composed of one hundred billion neurons (about one for every star in the Milky Way). Its most crucial physical property, the one that enables it to do what brains do (think, sense, feel, and act) is the huge number of “synapses,” or connections between neurons. These number about one hundred trillion, a thousand times as numerous as the neurons.
The human population of Earth will never approach the number of neurons in the human brain, and the number of connections among us will never approach that number of synapses. However these comparisons don’t tell us much. A human being is very different from a neuron, and its behavior is much more complex. When we consider that each of the billions of elements being connected in some fashion to construct this putative emergent brain is itself already a brain, then we realize that the quantitative analogy doesn’t tell us much about the potential for such a global brain. Even if we understood how brains worked, it wouldn’t tell us much. Still, it does make sense that the abilities of any emerging global intelligence will likely depend crucially on the number and speed of connections between the disparate nodes spread around the globe.
We hear different opinions on whether machines themselves will actually become conscious actors in our near future. Even without such a transformation, there may be a way in which interconnected and powerful processors, working in concert with human beings, radically change the role of intelligence on our planet by continuing to increase the speed and level of connectivity of our human networks. Perhaps there will not be machine intelligence as such—the rise of the sentient machines—but rather, much faster and more connected machines augmenting and acting in concert with much more widely connected humans.
Such a worldwide mind may already be on its way to attaining cognitive abilities equal to the survival chal
lenges before us. Compared to the pace of most geological change, this is all happening lightning fast, but compared to individual cognition, this global mind still seems pretty dumb and so damn slow to learn and respond. Can it get better?
Born of Climate Change
When we consider the challenges facing us, most obviously climate change, we are aware of serious new global problems caused by humanity. Yet if you look at our evolutionary story, the plot thickens. You could also regard this as something the planet has done to itself. Humanity is creating climate change, but it is also true that climate change created humanity. We were born of climate change.
One of my colleagues who has taken a great interest in the origins and implications of the Anthropocene is Dr. Rick Potts, a jovial and erudite paleontologist who directs the Center for the Study of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. Rick is also a member of our Washington Anthropocene Group, and we’ve had many enjoyable times shooting the breeze in conference rooms and bars, comparing perspectives on this infinitely interesting topic. For the last twenty years, Rick has spent his summers in East Africa, digging up clues to our origins. He has found that human evolution is surprisingly coupled to the ups and downs of climate. Indeed, Rick has concluded that many of the major evolutionary innovations that have most defined and differentiated humanity occurred during brief periods of tumultuous climate instability, separated by long periods of more stable climate during which our evolution was also more static. To me this is fascinating, and hopeful, as it suggests that in a real sense our unique brains and their powerful social capacities evolved as climate change survival machines.
African climate has always been strongly influenced by the Milankovič cycles I describe in chapter 4. The wobbling of Earth’s axis and the vibrating eccentricity of its orbit, forced by the gravitational pull of the other planets, leads to phases of high and low climate variability. At times, Africa has experienced extreme and rapid fluctuation between dry and wet conditions, forcing extinctions and rapid adaptations. What Rick and his colleagues have found is that all the major genera in our family tree, including Australopithecus (around 4 million years ago), Paranthropus (2.7 million years ago), and our own genus, Homo (about 2.8 million years ago), first appeared during these periods of erratic climate change.
Periods of intense climate havoc seem to have provoked the origin of the most important anatomical, behavioral, and technological transitions in human evolutionary history. The earliest-known appearance of bipedalism, about 6 million years ago, came during a time when Earth entered an extended period of climate change. Upright walking could have come in handy (so to speak) for surviving in diverse and changing habitats. The most extreme climate swings of the last 3 million years occurred between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago. During this phase, we experienced our most rapid increase in brain size, which enabled our ancestors to better survive in unpredictable surroundings. Near the beginning of this prolonged stage of crazy climate, we first controlled fire, a powerful new tool that provided warmth during icy periods and a gathering place fostering our accelerating social evolution. Fire also allowed for a diet richer in meat protein, which likely contributed to the development of larger brains. It also began our long relationship with combustion and carbon, which has recently become so fraught. In chapter 5, I describe the genetic bottleneck that occurred around two hundred thousand years ago as an ice age engulfed Africa, and how modern Homo sapiens may have been forged from the trials of survival during that period, developing symbolic language, new cognitive abilities, and sophisticated technology as means of coping with that harsh climate.
Later, during the most recent ice age, in the late Pleistocene, low sea level facilitated new global migrations, for example, opening up the Bering Strait land bridge that allowed the migration of Asians into Beringia, and later into North America. When the ice receded, we emerged from the caves as fully modern humans. Having completely domesticated fire, we began to clear land for agriculture and, without knowing it, started the process of remaking planet Earth. Around six thousand to seven thousand years ago, sea level stabilized after a multithousand-year period of rapid rise. The first large coastal settlements on several continents all date to this period. The high-protein fish diets made possible by stable sea level and consequent coastal settlement contributed to the rise of complex societies around the world.
In all these ways, climate change made us into humans. Now we’ve succeeded so well that we’ve blundered into causing the next episode of dangerous climate change, one that threatens to outstrip our ability to cope. These big heads of ours have, at least for the moment, got us in big trouble. Can they also, used appropriately, come to our rescue? We do have a history of evolutionary innovation in response to climate change. We’ve survived existential challenges by cooperating, communicating, and innovating, by becoming, in a sense, successively more human.
Becoming Fully Human
Maybe the source and the solution to our Anthropocene dilemma are one and the same. What makes us human, more than anything else, is our ability to work together to modify our environments in creative ways, powered by abstract thinking. When we examine our species in an evolutionary mirror, we discover that our best hope actually lies in enhancing those same qualities that got us into this mess. Our biggest obstacle is that we’re not particularly good at seeing ourselves as a global entity, or focusing on the long-term consequences of our activities. In other words, we must improve and enlarge the things that we’re supposedly already so good at: anticipating, cooperative planning, passing on collective memory, and acting on accumulated knowledge. Fortunately, we don’t need to invent new capabilities, just refine those that have been the secret to our success so far. When we look for the essential obstacle to surviving the Anthropocene, we see that we are just not equipped with quite enough of these human qualities.
Or not yet so equipped. Our capacities are, in fact, changing rapidly. As we have in the past when faced with extinction, we need to widen our frame, this time in such a way that a global, long-term identity becomes a reflexive part of how we see ourselves, and how we act.
In chapter 6, I propose a new, aspirational definition of technological intelligence, “true intelligence” or “planetary intelligence,” which can be said to have evolved on a planet only when it can pass the test that now faces us, to act with intention on a global scale. I mean, really, what good is all this so-called intelligence if we can’t get our act together to ensure our civilization’s survival against our own technical cleverness? If our kind of intelligence is ultimately self-destructive, well, that would seem pretty stupid. What kind of intelligence is that?
What is required of us shouldn’t be that hard. Cognitively it is on the level of a child becoming toilet trained. Just don’t shit on yourself: that’s the lesson humanity needs to learn. When we increased in numbers and built cities, we had to learn not to throw our waste in the streets. Sewage systems, a marvelous invention we usually take for granted, allowed us to live collectively in much larger numbers. Now we’ve again increased our numbers and energy use to the point where our waste is piling up in an unhealthy way. Only, this time it’s not city streets but the air itself that is getting dangerously soiled. This forces us to confront the fact that we didn’t evolve for global self-management. Fortunately, we’re not stuck with only the tools that biology gave us. We now must seek to cultivate in our world culture the powers of foresight and preemption we have as individuals. We don’t need some utopian, perfect world completely free of all conflict and inequality. Our new global energy system will be the sewage system of the twenty-first century. By the twenty-second century, people will take it for granted, and marvel that there was a time when we were so backward as to mess up our atmosphere driving around in clunky cars run on fossil fuels.
Although, as I’ve described, humans are wired for cooperation, today we are well aware of the difficulty we have in trying to extend this sense of coope
rative community to a global scale. There seems to be a limit to the size of groups within which we are equipped to play nicely together. Our current cognitive and social skills served us well through the challenges of the Pleistocene and the Holocene, but they may not be equal to the task of long-term survival on the Anthropocene Earth. However, within our evolving global culture, we can see the seeds of something else that might do the trick. The signs are everywhere that, along with our penchant for conflict, we have proclivities toward global cooperation. Trade is rapidly pulling the world together into a functional whole. Whatever we think of the social effects of globalization—and any astute assessment gives it mixed reviews—we should be encouraged by its inherent tendency to foster far-flung connection. Devastating all-out global conflict, and equally devastating lack of cooperation on global environmental issues, become less likely as we become more obviously interdependent and perhaps, as I’ve described, begin to develop a global cognitive apparatus, a worldwide mind.
Science itself is perhaps the best example of the inexorable march toward interconnected global mental activity. The Earth systems we study know no borders. Migrating birds, evolving weather systems, and globe-spanning ocean currents don’t stop at national boundaries. Scientists, while we are driven by all the petty and egocentric concerns of all people, also have a shared, universal value system that motivates a common, global, intergenerational project. We share a genuine desire to ferret out physical truth, and this leads us, perhaps in spite of ourselves sometimes, to a culture of global cooperation.
Earth in Human Hands Page 43
