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| Image Credit: György Soponyai |
Koert van Mensvoort's Letter to Humanity: "Nature always builds on existing levels of complexity: biology builds upon chemistry, cognition builds upon biology, calculation builds upon cognition. I can’t think of another species whose presence has sparked an entirely new evolutionary phase, just as DNA evolved from RNA, your actions have made possible a leap to non-genetic evolution. ...Although this wasn’t a conscious act, the consequences are no lesser for it. Your presence has transformed the face of the earth so fundamentally that the impact will still be visible millions of years from now. This is your doing, but as yet, you barely seem to realise that, much less have you been able to take a clear position toward it."
Eörs Szathmáry, in his paper "Toward Major Evolutioary Transitions Theory 2.0," wrote: "Human society with language has been, and it still is, the last item on the list. We see key elements that are highlighted in other transitions: cooperation (including reproductive leveling and food sharing), a form of eusociality, a powerful novel inheritance system, and living in groups. ...It is the cultural traditions, language, rules and laws that are the cohesiveness-maintaining mechanisms that integrate the ‘cultural individual.' ...Biology gives room to technological and communal cultural evolution. Can we predict, by looking at an evolving population, that a major transition is “imminent”? ...Transition theory strongly suggests that, if we see, even in rudimentary form, that originally independently reproducing units join, somehow use functional synergies among the units, and that there is some novelty in the inheritance system as well, then the population is definitely on its way to a “major transition.”
Kevin Kelly wrote: "Another way to view these transitions is as increased levels or varieties of cooperation. We can see where evolution is going by imagining a next phase which will increase the span of cooperation further. That of course, would be the ninth transition." Kelly sees a clear trend in the direction of evolution.
Gillings, Hilbert, and Kemp in their paper "Information in the Biosphere: Biological and Digital Worlds" write: "It seems inevitable that digital and biological information will become more integrated in the future. This scenario raises the question of how such an organic-digital fusion might become a symbiosis that co-evolves through natural and artificial selection. Both could contribute their functions to generate a higher unit of organization, similar in effect to previous evolutionary transitions. We argue that the carbon-based biosphere has generated a cognitive system (humans) capable of creating technology that is resulting in a major evolutionary transition that merges technology, biology, and society. Scholars of ecology and evolution should join the debate, and seriously and systematically think about the consequences of digital information for the trajectory of life.
Where will this "ninth transition" take us? Karl Schroeder has one idea: "I've lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke's Law (which originally said 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. ...If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained. ...Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter."
About this, Kevin Kelly writes: "His theory suggest that what technology wants is to be “natural,” not just biologically natural, but geologically natural, or like self-regulating Gaia, natural on a planetary scale. I didn’t quite reach that far in my book, so I am glad to have been pushed even further by Schroeder." Kelly did however extensively describe "convivial technology" which, as he wrote, "converges around the dozen or so dynamics (such as cooperation, transparency, decentralization, flexibility, redundancy, and efficiency) common to all exotropic systems including life itself.
Lynn Margulis is well known for her many contributions, including endosymbiosis theory and, with James Lovelock, the Gaia hypothesis. In her book "What is Life?" the ideas of Vernadsky are discussed, and these same ideas are brought up in Grinspoon's book "Earth in Human Hands." In particular, it is Vernadsky's conception of the noösphere. Vernadsky had developed the concept of the biosphere in the late 1920s, and was recognized by Lovelock and Margulis as a seminal contributor to the theory of Earth as a living system. As Grinspoon wrote, “In other words, fifty years before Lovelock and Margulis, Vernadsky largely described Gaia." Grinspoon goes on: "Furthermore, he hinted at a fundamentally new stage in the life of the biosphere that was being brought about by the actions of humanity. In his later life he became obsessed with the idea of the noösphere. …The lithosphere had given rise to the biosphere, and now the biosphere had birthed the noösphere. Earth had become alive and then developed a mind. ...the beginning of Earth’s fifth eon [Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, Phanerozoic, Sapiezoic].” Grinspoon suggested calling this eon the Sapiezoic: "I've argued that one way to approach the question "What is Life?" might be to think of it as a property that a planet sometimes takes on. Similarly, mind may be a phenomenon that sometimes can become a property of a planet. If planets can have Sapiezoic Eons, then there is a form of stable intelligence, manifested on some worlds, that has not quite yet appeared on Earth." This has resulted in dramatic changes to our planet, as we are coming to realize. "With the Copernican Revolution, we had to completely reevaluate our place in the scheme of things. Now we are awakening to our role as world shapers, and this will require another painful shift in worldview."
David Grinspoon: "The Anthropocene could mark the beginning of a transition [to a sapient planet]... If we make it past the next few centuries, it will be because we've honed our survival skills to make them work on a planetary scale. Once we achieve that, we have done much more than ensure our persistence against near-term self-induced challenges. We will have unleashed the power of reason and foresight in defense of Earth's biosphere - but first we have to get through a bottleneck." Foresight... but how do we apply it? Grinspoon asks "in analogy to our new understanding of human health, rather than assuming we're the disease, can we seek to play the balanced and mutually beneficial role that would make us part of the commensal microbiome of Gaia? ...We are a kind of organism that has never existed before, and we’ve gotten ourselves in a situation. Fortunately, we may be equipped to get ourselves out of it. A plague does not think. A cancer does not decide to change course. We could. So these images may describe our past, but they needn’t proscribe our future. People are in great need of some larger perspective. We need to have a long-term vision of where we want to go to help us through this time of alarming short-term threat. ...We have, unconsciously, been making a new planet. Our challenge now is to awaken to this role and grow into it, becoming conscious shapers of our world."
In the history of ideas, we have progressively eliminated discontinuities from our perception. Copernicus eliminated the discontinuity between the terrestrial world and the rest of the physical universe. Darwin eliminated the physical discontinuity between human beings and the rest of the organic world, and psychologists have shown the continuity between the human and animal mind. We are crossing another discontinuity as we explore the unified quality of nature and artifice. All things, biological, societal, and technological, adapt to and create each other, and at the same time weave into one whole system. Kelly went so far as to suggest a redefinition of life as self generated information systems, a theme echoed by Max Tegmark, both of whom have suggested including non-genetically evolved agents within the definition of life. A view that has been maintained since Sir Francis Bacon wrote "Advancement of Learning," in 1605: "The history of the arts should the rather make a species of natural history, because of the prevalent opinion, as if art were a different thing from nature, and things natural different from things artificial, [however] artificial things differ not from natural in form or essence. [1]"
Rachel Armstrong agrees that the duality of nature/artifice is insupportable: "The nature of humanity in the twenty-first century is, according to sociologist Steve Fuller, a ‘bipolar disorder’ beset with dualisms of identification such as divine/animal, mind/body, nature/artifice and individual/social. We currently view the world in dualistic terms where those that are ascribed the status of being ‘alive’ act and those that do not have this status remain quiet and do not participate. My ecological engagement with architecture aims to engage a spectrum of materials and ecologies that participate as a whole, even if some of their agencies are not bestowed with the status of ‘life’. The importance of each agent (living or non-living) participating in vital networks of interaction becomes shaped by the impact of the agent on the society. Living technologies provide a more Romantic kind of interaction in the syntheses of experience and bring new challenges to the design and engineering portfolios, as they possess agency, need sustenance, have a will of their own, and change with time. It is impossible to deduce all biological outcomes computationally, as the outputs are often unpredictable and surprising."
Armstrong: "We have the power to shape our own technological evolution – even if we use ‘soft’ control to direct the outcomes. One of the really interesting things about having many different practices, paradigms and different kinds of solving approaches through technology, is that we are increasing our ability to remain fluid and adaptive to change. We are definitely going to need resilience and adaptability as key drivers of human development in this century, if the predictions of an unstable earth and rapid increase in the number of people on the planet are correct. In facing these significant challenges we need to not just consider the amount of ‘life’ that we can support but invest in ensuring a good quality of life. A healthy relationship with technology may help us achieve this as I view technology as being the way that our minds are embodied in the process of problem solving. As this century unfolds, Nature will increasingly be the challenge that we need to address – so there will be an even tighter coupling between technology and the natural world than already exists." Instead of five- or even 10-year increments, Armstrong asks us to look up to 100 years into the future. She calls this "black sky thinking."
"What is most interesting about synthetic biology and living technologies is that politically they represent the fusion of nature and machine, which is an interesting eventuality for Marxism and socialism and the idea that humans perform best when working ‘in a state of nature’. And if the ideological left can embrace the potential of synthetic biology and living technology as allies in the means of production then perhaps a real strategy to counter capitalism and its exclusive, destructive hierarchies, is possible. In the built environment we have a clash of infrastructures between the rigid mechanical infrastructures of modern architecture and the flexible networks of the natural world. My research takes a bottom-up approach to how to best use materials to engage the intersections of these spaces. As such, the process itself is symbiotic not a totalitarian invasion or razing to the ground of what already exists but takes a strategic approach in which new structures are wrapped around old ones, rather like biological evolution itself."
Paraphrasing Armstrong again: "Resources that have taken geological timescales to accrue at the fertile interface between the earth’s molten iron core and its atmosphere — our seas and soils — are now being rapidly stripped through geological scale industrial practices such as mining, deforestation, over-fishing and ocean pollution. Working with nature means taking stewardship of an extended network of influence in our world, which needs to be maintained by reinforcement — through technologies, human interaction, and the participation of non-human agents such as bacteria and synthetic biologies. At the start of the twenty-first century a set of conditions facilitated through the complex networks embodied in the digital age is prompting the emergence of a new paradigm, The Age of Complexity, which more colloquially can be thought of as an Ecological Paradigm. Nanotechnology, Biology, Information Science and Cognitive Technologies are research fields that possess the kinds of qualities that could result in disruptive innovation. Human development is now enabled to synergistically evolve with the biosphere and help us coauthor an ecologically engaged future. Influence by engagement rather than through control. Nature will always be a potent force that can overwhelm us so our task in a living culture of materiality will be to remain engaged and ‘conversant’ with those agencies that we rely on."
Keywords: agency, biology, cooperation, duality, ecology, embodiment, engagement, evolution, foresight, life, stewardship, symbiosis, synthetic, technology
[1] The topic of dualisms was also brought up in the famous saying of Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin (Seigen Ishin):
老僧三十年前未參 禪時、見山是山、見水是水、及至後 夾 親見知識、有箇入處、見山不是山、見水不是水、而今得箇體歇處、依然見山 秪 是 山、見水 秪 是水
Translated: "Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters."
(Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, New York, Pantheon Books, 1951, p. 126, 220 k)
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