Dear Steve:
Your questions move from the cosmic (higher purpose) to the mundane (the Flintstones). I’ll take them in reverse order, as my book does: I’ll start with the Stone Age and build (on a foundation of, um, Bedrock) to higher purpose. I’ll even get around, finally, to taking a shot at your nettlesome questions about thermostats and giant global brains.
As for the much-improved technology of the late Stone Age: Yes, you’re right–one of my gripes about the standard view of human prehistory is that it attributes every epic technological advance (agriculture, etc.) to some sudden, external shock, rather than to the internal force of human ingenuity. And I guess my view could indeed be characterized as you characterize it: “as soon as our species appeared, it set to work at becoming the Flintstones–but Bedrock wasn’t built in a day.” But there’s one thing I’d add: There was a positive feedback loop that made technological change ever faster as Bedrock got built.
The reason is that technological innovation is a social enterprise. In the modern world, that’s obvious. But even back in the Stone Age, technological advance was mediated by what you could call a social brain. One caveman invents, say, stone flakes for cutting, the idea spreads slowly, gets improved here and there, and finally, in a distant cave, stimulates a new idea: stone knives–long, thin, great for gripping and stabbing! That getting from flake to knife took tens of thousands of years shouldn’t surprise us. There were only a few million neurons (that is, people) on the planet, and given the state-of-the-art long-distance communication technology (walking), they weren’t in frequent contact.
Still, the social brain, through positive feedback, was getting more impressive. With each advance in subsistence technology, survival became more secure, and the human population grew faster. As the “social brain” thus expanded, the advances came faster.
In this view, you should see accelerated innovation not just generally, as population grows, but at particular thresholds when sharp elevations in population density radically lower the cost of communicating. As I argue in the book, the advent of farming–traditionally considered an advance in “energy technology”–was perhaps more important as an advance in information technology: because farming could sustain large, densely peopled villages, it made local social brains much faster and more powerful.
This basic trend has continued to the present: more neurons (people) in closer contact, hence faster technological change. Only, increasingly, the means of facilitating contact involved not physical proximity but also things like the printing press and the Internet (two technologies that, I argue in the book, are more precisely parallel in their social effects than is commonly realized; even the much-ballyhooed “paradox” of “Jihad versus McWorld” had its counterpart in the early modern era).
Voila!--from Bedrock to Internet, the biggest brain ever. Now, I realize that you’re leery of this Net-as-brain business, and I certainly wouldn’t press the comparison too far. As you note, the brain “is organized to do something: to move the muscles in ways that allow the whole body to attain the goals set by the emotions.” And, granted, this description doesn’t apply to the Internet per se. But this description does apply to lots of organizations that are increasingly mediated by the Internet: corporations and non-governmental organizations, many of which are global in scope. General Motors processes information to coordinate the movement of materials in ways that realize corporate goals. (As I indicated in my last posting, whenever I refer loosely to the Internet as a brain, I mean to include the people–the “neurons”–that it links up.)
In questioning my analogy between human brains and global brains, you note that the human brain’s “goal-directed organization comes from an important property of organisms … their cells are in the same reproductive boat, and thus have no ‘incentive’ to act against the interests of the whole body.” Exactly! The cells, in the terminology of my book, have a non-zero-sum relationship; their fates are correlated; they can cooperate to yield win-win outcomes or not cooperate and get lose-lose outcomes. And the same is true of the people at General Motors. What’s good for GM is, generally speaking, good for them.
Of course, there is conflict of interest within GM (labor vs. management, etc.), and in general its employees’ relationships aren’t as non-zero-sum as relationships among entities within a human organism. Still, as I note in the book, there are conflicts of interest even among genes in a genome–so complete unity of interest can’t be a pre-requisite for using words like “organism” or “brain.”
This non-zero-sum business gets at the core of my view of history (hence the title of my book): over time, technological evolution allows, and sometimes impels, people to play more and more elaborate non-zero-sum games with more and more people over larger and larger distances. The concrete manifestation of this growing “non-zero-sumness” is an increase in the breadth and depth of social complexity–from Stone Age village to globalized economy. (Similarly, during biological evolution, as the genes on genomes came to “play”–not consciously, of course–more elaborate non-zero-sum games with more and more other genes on their genome, organic complexity grew.)
But here I want to be very clear about something, and this will bring us back around to the question of higher purpose. On the one hand, history’s increasingly elaborate non-zero-sum games do give large and increasingly global groups of people (GM’s workers, Greenpeace’s members) some commonality of purpose. But I am not necessarily saying that these purposes are the same as any “higher purpose” that the whole history of life on Earth may serve. (At times in your first posting, I got the sense that my book had left you unclear on my position on this point.)
By way of illustration, let me finally get back to your thermostat question. You say that the way to distinguish the “goal” of a feedback system from its mere “byproducts” is to see what variables the system does and does not attend to. And the only thing a thermostat attends to is changes in room temperature. True. But, actually, a thermostat’s ultimate purpose–the purpose of its design, the reason for its existence–isn’t to maintain room temperature per se, but to maintain the comfort of human beings. Thus we can’t always infer the ultimate purpose of a system by seeing what variables it adjusts to. (If someone has a rising fever, and has the chills, or is wearing heavy clothing, and thus is hot, the thermostat doesn’t make the adjustment needed to preserve the person’s comfort.) In short: If a thermostat were somehow made conscious of its entire motivational system (which would distinguish it from us!--that’s one thing Freud got right), it would still be unaware of its ultimate purpose.
You may have meant the thermostat analogy only in a more restricted way: to challenge my claim that an extraterrestrial scientist viewing a time-lapse history of organic life could plausibly conclude that one “goal” of evolution is to build and maintain a complex biosphere. But here, too, I find the “thermostat” analogy consistent with my view. Natural selection does seem “attentive” to the “richness of the biosphere” variable. If you wipe out particular categories of species–all flying creatures, all creatures in a particular area, all brainy creatures–natural selection “senses” these empty niches by a kind of feedback (the rapid proliferation of any new genes that steer species toward those niches) and thus begins to fill the niches. So the diversity of the biosphere is restored, much as the temperature of a room is restored by a thermostat. (I say all of this even while agreeing with you that natural selection’s “immediate effector is merely differential replication.”)
Uh oh. I’ve written 1,200 words and still haven’t revealed humanity’s higher purpose! Well, maybe tomorrow. Meanwhile, thanks for the questions and provocations. I’m truly sorry that we get to do this for only one more day.
Best wishes,
Bob
