Difference between revisions of "Why a Point Omega transition ?"

Revision as of 19:58, 17 January 2017

This article explains how the conclusion was reached that it is very likely that shortly humanity will go through a transition that will change the life of us humans more than anything before in human history, yes even more than anything in human evolution. If our deductions are correct, the coming transition will even be a novelty from the perspective of evolution itself. It will in fact be the emergence of "conscious evolution" which we can safely consider as the culmination of life on earth. What is more, if our deductions are right it should be considered as a basic law of nature that on any planet where life is possible, sooner or later "conscious evolution" will emerge. For our planet that moment in time is now, or rather, very soon. And we are the carriers of it.

The conclusion that we can expect a sudden rise in human potentials and in the quality of human functioning is based on the following findings.

- Self-actualization in humans is the exception, rather than the rule. That is very different than how it works in other species. How is that possible and how could that be an ESS ?

- Maslow, the author who launched that concept, could not be discarded as being mistaken. He appeared to have done his homework quite thoroughly, starting with his research on monkeys. Although going quite strongly against anything that an evolutionary biologist would expect, Homo sapiens emerged from his research as an anomaly, a evolutionary contradiction, in the sense that we apparently are a species in which the majority of the members are functioning way below their inborn potentials and not the other way around, as is customary in any other species. So, not being able to discard Maslow's work as mistaken, I was left with contradictory and seemingly impossible information about ourselves, about Homo sapiens.

- The development of the CEL model, the novel theory of learning, based on Apter and Smith's Reversal Theory, showed that the system of emotional and motivational reversals can be regarded as the behavioural engine that is needed to enable individuals to make optimum use of an open-ended capacity of learning. That implies that any species with the capacity to acquire a behavioural repertoire that is specifically geared to deal with different personal coincidental circumstances of living, does have such a reversal system in its behavioural organisation. Without such a reversal system, such a capacity for situational adaptation is not possible.

What is of importance here, is that this CEL model describes that learning and behavioural growth is highly contagious. In other words, badly processed experiences lead to emergency, rough and ready, behavioural avoidance responses, fear complexes and neuroticism, and such fear complexes diminish the likelihood of a proper processing of further experiences in the future. Reversely, well-processed experiences increase the likelihood of well processing further experiences and thus a further increase of skills and mastery. Basically the CEL harbours two types of so called positive reinforcement loops, one in the direction of gaining skills and mastery, and the other in the direction of culminating avoidance reflexes and neuroses. Within a person, well processing of experiences is contagious and badly processing of experiences also is contagious, but in the other direction. Besides, a similar contagiousness exists between individuals of the same group, living together. The more skilled the other members of the group, the better the chances of an individual to also end up in learning spirals in the desired direction, towards more mastery and skills. And the more neurotics around, the worse are the chances for an individual to learn optimally from his or her experiences.

• • • • • • • • hier de figuur met de 2 loops ****************

The CEL predicts that there are basically two optional outcomes of a sequence of experiences. The one option is the favorable one, leading to increasing skills and mastery and the other option is leading to increasing avoidance clusters and a truncated behavioural repertoire. In other species, the unfavorable option mainly occurs in a minority of the specimens, in the minority of individuals who don't make it and in that way are "weeded out" more efficiently and more quickly than what would be the case without such a behavioural provision. The open ended learning capacity that way is boosting processes of natural selection, favoring the specimens with the highest learning capacity.

- At first sight it does make absolutely no sense that in Homo sapiens, considering itself as the evolutionary pinnacle of intelligence, it seems to work the other way around. Just a minority of the population seems to be actualizing the full innate behavioural repertoire, while the majority gets stuck in truncated behaviour patterns, neuroses and other fear clusters. How strange ! If the available data are correct and interpreted in the right way, there must be something extraordinary going on in our own species.

- There is something peculiar going on in evolution as far as intelligence is concerned. In different phyla, in quite different eras of earthly evolution, species developed intelligence, which we define here as freely applicable information processing capacity. What strikes the observer, is that in all those different phyla, and in all those different evolutionary eras, the level of intelligence acquired ends at more or less the same level. That suggests that there exists a functional upper limit to freely applicable information processing capacity. Apparently, a too high level of intelligence in principle is not an ESS. Considering how behaviour evolves and is selected for in evolution, it is easily noticed that there is a certain, all-important relationship between the proximate causes of behaviour, the innate reflexes of liking and disliking, of approach and avoidance on the one hand and on the other hand the ultimate causes of behavioural reflexes, which are the ultimate procreational results. What is important to note, is that selection forces exert their influence on the ultimate effects of the behaviours, whereas only the proximate feelings and urges are present in the awareness of the actors. Proximate reflexes and urges are selected for through their ultimate effects on the reproductive level. But the latter in general is not a point of consideration of the actors, acting on the basis of the proximate urges. It can be argued that an intelligence that reaches the level where it can be applied to (re-)considering its own proximate urges and finds short-cuts to attain desired results in non-traditional ways, is likely to produce fulfillment of short term proximate urges, but without the customary non-conscious ultimate effects at the level of reproduction. Our hypothesis is therefore that in principle a too high intelligence will automatically weed itself out as soon as it enables the carrier of that intelligence to manipulate its own behaviour in order to fulfill proximate desires in novel and clever ways, different from the evolutionarily traditional ways.

• • • • • • • • • • • • hier de samenvatting van Self-Blindness opnemen ************************

Only by developing a special characteristic, a specific blindness for the own behaviour, blocking the utilization of intelligence for finding different options for satisfying urges concerning the own behaviour and social behaviour, could the intelligence of our early ancestors rise above the ordinary upper level of intelligence.

- Since the agricultural revolution a different type of evolution started off. That is the evolution of sets of "memes" that form power structures. Labeling the ordinary evolution, based on DNA, as "hardware"-evolution, that evolution of power structures can be labeled as a "software"-evolution. The point is that agriculture is technically impossible if there is not a military organization that secures the products of the agricultural efforts for the people who have made the investment in work. This development is very recent, just between 5.000 and 10.000 years old in most regions of the world.

- The evolution of power structures can proceed at a higher speed than the evolution of DNA. Software needs less time to change than does hardware. Humans beings are the carriers of genes as well as of memes. Humanity is therefore suffering from evolutionary "jet-lag" in that our primordial hardware is lagging behind as compared to the demands from the recently evolved software of the power structures. This evolutionary jet-lag produces mismatches between what we "really" want and what the power structures demand from us.