First People

Every now and again we must remind ourselves of the time that came before this time... and think also of the time that is to come... and when we stand with our eyes open on this long timeline, with all the other souls that have come and gone and come again, then we will best understand this story... the story of the First People and ourselves.

Here on the Great Sand Face of the Kalahari it feels like being at the centre of the earth. It is not the people who decide what sort of day it will be, it is the day who decides how the people shall be. Today they are gentle, like small soft clouds spread across the early African sky. They are the First People of Africa... the people of the healing dance. They are the story-painters of the rocks, who speak old words with a clicking tongue. 

They carry the memory of an earlier time when the earth had a different spirit form. They walk the tail end of a time when people were still one with the whole, and the voice of God was not strange. They come from the time of innocence, and they call themselves the Bushmen... living in the way that all humanity has lived on earth since the beginning, and they are the last of the first.

Indigenous Knowledge & AI

One of the things that humans are trying to do, currently, is create artificial intelligence (AI). In humans, we begin with a system with lots of local connection, and then we have a tipping point; which then turns into a system that has fewer connections but much stronger, more long-distance connections. So, we start out with a system that’s very flexible but not very efficient; and that turns into a system that’s very efficient and not very flexible.

 And therein lies the rub. Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate the modern mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates indigenous knowledge? The explosion of machine learning, as a basis for AI, has made people appreciate the fact that if you’re interested in systems that are going to learn about the external world, the system that we know of that does that better than anything else is indigenous knowledge.

This means taking a leaf from nature’s playbook. The strategy of producing just a few younger organisms, giving them a long period where they’re incapable of taking care of themselves, and then having a lot of resources dedicated to keeping them alive turns out to be a strategy that - over and over again - is associated with higher levels of intelligence. And that’s not just true for humans. It’s true for animals, insects and even plants.

It’s interesting that that isn’t an architecture that’s typically been used in AI. But it’s an architecture that life seems to use over and over again to implement intelligent systems. One of the questions we could ask is, how come? Why would we see this relationship? Why would we see this characteristic neural architecture, especially for highly intelligent species?

A good way of thinking about this may be that it’s a way of resolving the explore-exploit tradeoffs that we see in AI. One of the problems, characteristic to AI, is a greater range of solutions that seem to be moving in the direction of a system that’s more intelligent. A system that understands the world in more different ways, also produces a big expansion of the search problem.

One way to solve this problem, that comes out of computer science, is to start out with a very wide-ranging exploration of the space; and then gradually narrow in on solutions that are going to be more effective. The problem with such a high temperature search is that we could be spending a lot of time considering solutions that aren’t very effective; and if we’re considering solutions that aren’t effective, we aren’t going to be very good at acting in the world.

By contrast, indigenous knowledge produces a lot of random variability. Being impulsive and acting on the world are good ways of getting more feedback, but they’re not very good ways of planning effectively. This gives a different picture about the kinds of things we should be looking for in intelligence. It means that some of the things that have been difficult for AI to do - like creativity, being able to get to solutions that are genuinely new - are things that indigenous people are remarkably good at.

For example, one of the things that we know indigenous people do, is to get into everything. That's active learning, where they’re determining what will be the exact kind of information that will cause them to change the current view that they have of the world. It's a very unusual thing to be able to do, to go out into the world and spend energy in order to risk being wrong. That’s something that modern humans very characteristically don’t do.

Another aspect of what indigenous people do, that would be informative for thinking about intelligence in general, is that they are cultural learners. One of the effects is that it gives them this capacity for cultural ratcheting, a way of balancing innovation and imitation. They produce a constant tension between how much they’re going to be able to build on the things that the previous generation has done; and how much they’re producing something that’s new enough, so it would be worth having the next generation imitate.

The extraordinary affinity indigenous people have with nature keeps their brains in a state of plasticity. So, the effect is that it increases the local connections and breaks the long-distance network connections. What modern humans can learn from them is how to take a system that’s relatively rigid and inject variability; which shakes it out of its local optima and lets it settle into something new. Therefore, having computers that play and explore, might be a model for AI that’s different from the models of intelligence that we currently have in modern society.

Mourning the Land

Any reading of the ecological literature makes clear that ours is a time of significant ecological loss. Evidence accrues that the sixth mass extinction is well under way, that global ecosystem productivity is in steep decline, and that the biosphere as a whole is becoming irreparably damaged by human actions.

In addition to being the subject of intense scientific scrutiny, global environmental change and regional ecological decline are increasingly embedded within everyday experience, evoking strong mental and emotional responses across the population.

Although most people are generally aware that climate change is occurring, it continues to seem distant: something that will happen to others, in another place, at some unspecified future date. Psychologists refer to this idea as ‘psychological distance’. 

Terms such as ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ draw attention to the global scale, rather than the personal impacts. Additionally, the signal of climate change is obscured by the noise of daily and seasonal weather variation. All this makes the issue easier for people to push aside, particularly when faced with other pressing life issues.

Perhaps one of the best ways to characterize the impacts of climate change on perceptions, is the sense of loss. Loss of relationship to place is a substantial part of this. As climate change irrevocably changes people’s lived landscapes, large numbers are likely to experience a feeling that they are losing a place that is important to them - a phenomenon called solastalgia. 

This psychological phenomenon is characterized by a sense of desolation and loss, similar to that experienced by people forced to migrate from their home environment. Solastalgia may have a more gradual beginning due to the slow onset of changes in one’s local environment. 

Hence, we can argue that recognising ecological grief as a legitimate response to ecological loss, is an important first step for humanising climate change and its related impacts; and for expanding our understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. 

How to grieve ecological losses well - particularly when they are ambiguous, cumulative and ongoing - is a question currently without answer. However, it is a question that we expect will become more pressing as further impacts from climate change, including loss, are experienced.

The loss of local knowledge, or traditional ecological knowledge, may be a key trigger for ecological grief. Various groups have reported having lost confidence in the seasonal rhythms of the weather; and in their ability to ‘know it’. Such experiences are often associated with anxieties related to the long-term future.

Indigenous people, in particular, identify feeling deep sadness and distress that much of their environmental knowledge - gained from generations of sharing; with ‘on-the-land’ observation and learning - are suddenly shifting and eroding. 

Elders express worry about giving advice around travel routes and weather conditions, as parameters for prediction and risk, have shifted so much in recent years that they no longer have confidence in their knowledge. This causes grief at the loss of their own identity associated with ‘knowing the land’.

However, ecological grief should not be seen as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we should find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives.

Being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place. Indigenous populations have been, and continue to be, the tripwire for humanity. City dwellers, in an urbanizing world, are in denial if they think that the effects of climate change is a rural problem. 

Cities, as the highest concentrations of people, will be particularly vulnerable. Laboratory experiments have demonstrated a causal relationship between heat and aggression. As the temperature goes up, so does aggression; which also reduces the ability to resolve conflict without violence. 

Furthermore, research indicates that many individuals identified feeling anticipatory grief, for ecological changes that had not yet happened. In these cases, grief for anticipated future ecological losses is also tied to grief over future losses to culture, livelihoods and ways of life. 

Given that we are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss, and that these losses will not end any time soon, we can anticipate - along with a small, but growing, number of scholars - that ecological grief will become an increasingly common human response to the losses encountered in the Anthropocene. 

To bear witness to ecological losses personally, or to the suffering encountered by others as they bear their own losses, is to be reminded that climate change is not just an abstract scientific concept. Rather, it is the source of much hitherto unacknowledged emotional and psychological pain, particularly for people who remain deeply connected to, and observant of, the natural world.

History, Herstory, Ourstory

In modern science we've gotten used to the idea that science doesn't offer meaning in the way that institutional religions did in the past. This idea that modernity puts us in a world without meaning - philosophers have banged on about this for a century-and-a-half - may be completely wrong. We may be living on an intellectual building site, where a new story is being constructed. It's vastly more powerful than the previous stories because it's the first one that is global. It's not anchored in a particular culture or a particular society.

This is an origin story that works for all humans. Ourstory sums over vastly more information than any early origin story. This is very powerful stuff. It's full of meaning. We're now at the point where, across so many domains, the amount of information - of good, rigorous ideas - is so rich that we can tease out that story. We need such a history of humanity, because as long as we teach history as a story of competing tribes, wars of all kinds are going to repeat themselves.

What would it look like? Chronologically, most of human history was spent in the Stone Age. In Africa, the Stone Age survived until very recently. To talk about human evolution, we have to go beyond the borders of the history discipline and talk about how humans evolved. To do that seriously we have to talk about the origins of life, which means talking about how the planet was formed and getting into geology. And, to do that seriously, we have to look at astronomy; with the Big Bang.                

Can we tell Ourstory that begins with the origins of the universe? That would be the way to give a sense of humanity, as a single species facing shared problems in the modern world. We need to cross the divide between the sciences and the humanities. But, what happens at that borderline? The claims of science are powerful today, but also, they're not absolute. Most of us have a simple epistemology with two default positions: either science is right, and therefore everything before science is wrong, or they're all stories. The origin stories of the past are not completely wrong either. However, we need to manoeuvre into a more complex (and unstable) central position.                  

What is this cosmos we’re part of? What does it mean to be human? What is our place in the cosmos? Are we a large part of it? Are we central? Are we marginal? Is there anything distinctive about humans? What sort of story would emerge at the end of this? In the past, in all cultural traditions, we had unifying stories. Currently, we don't seem to have one in the modern world. As it turns out, there is a coherent story that’s possible though.

We can tell it across eight thresholds of increasing complexity. The first is the Big Bang itself, the creation of the universe. The second is the creation of stars. Once you have stars, already the universe has much more diversity. Stars have structure; galaxies have structure. You now have rich gradients of energy, of density, of gravity; so you've got flows of energy that can now build more complex things.                

Dying stars give you the next threshold, which is creating a universe with all of the elements of the periodic table, so it's now chemically richer. You can now make new materials. You can make the materials of planets, moons and asteroids. On some planets, particularly rocky planets, you get an astonishing chemical diversity. The reason is because most of the hydrogen and helium from the inner solar system was driven away by the solar wind. In the inner planets you're left with an environment that's remarkably chemically rich, and that's the environment that eventually gave birth to life on this planet. The odds are increasing that the universe is crawling with life.                

Life is a fifth threshold; planets are a fourth threshold. One of the wonderful things about this story is that, as we widen the lens, we’re increasingly convinced that all these very big questions that we're asking (that seem impossible) begin to look manageable from the large scale. Organic life itself, for example. With life, we get complex entities appearing in extremely unstable environments. They need to be able to manage energy flows to maintain their complexity. As their environments are constantly changing, they need some mechanism for detecting changes. That is the point at which information enters Ourstory.                

Something like choice happens, because no longer do living organisms make choices mechanically; they make choices in a more complex way. They can't always guarantee that they're going to make the same choice. That's where natural selection kicks in. There are billions of organisms making different choices, and natural selection allows the right choices to get preserved within the lineage. Making the right choices matters. That means, in a sense, that purpose has arrived at this point. That is why living organisms are so complex; and why they give the appearance of purpose.

Human beings (the 5^th threshold of increasing complexity) are the only organisms that can ask the question: what makes humans different? It's a question that the humanities have struggled with for centuries. Within this very broad narrative of Ourstory, there's a fairly clear answer to that. All living organisms use information to control and manage their energy flows. Biologists call it metabolism. When a new species appears, its numbers will increase until it's using the energy that its particular metabolic repertoire allows it to fill.

Yet, look at graphs of human population growth and something utterly different is going on. Here, you have a species that appears in the savannah lands of Africa, but it doesn't stay there. During the Stone Age - over perhaps 200,000 years - we can watch our species, certainly in the last 70,000 years, slowly spreading into new niches. By 10,000 years ago our species had spread around the world. This is utterly new behavior. This is a species that is acquiring more, and more and more information. That is the key to what makes us different.

We can ask what it is that allows us not to be locked within a limited, metabolic repertoire, but to keep expanding that repertoire. There may be a very simple answer. There's got to be one thing that, like a key, unlocks a door. I suspect it's linguistic. We know that information does not seem to accumulate generation by generation in other species. If it did, we would see evidence of it. We would see a species that was gradually widening its niche. Thus, humans have crossed a linguistic threshold. It's as if suddenly human language is more efficient; information accumulates faster than it's lost.

That means something profound. It means we're the first species in 4 billion years in which information accumulates across generations, through the cultural mechanism, not through the genetic mechanism. The cultural mechanism, of course, is orders of magnitude faster than the genetic mechanism. That is the foundation for explaining everything that makes us different. If we add in that more information for a living organism gives us more control over resources and energy flows, then what we're doing is watching a species whose control over the energy flowing through the biosphere increases, and increases at an exponential rate.

If such species exist on other planets, we can guarantee one thing: hang around for a few hundred thousand years, and there will be something like an Anthropocene. This species will dominate flows of energy on its planet. That's where we are right now. We're managing these colossal flows of energy; we're benefitting from them; they can make us staggeringly wealthy; they also give us a buffer against crude needs that is something utterly new, but they are on such a scale that they're beginning to disrupt old biospheric cycles - the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle - they're disrupting biodiversity.

So, can we maintain the good things, the things that make a good life for us as a result of our increasing control of energy, without undermining the Goldilocks conditions (not too hot, not too cold) that allow us humans to build this extraordinarily complex civilization? One of the reasons why this approach to Ourstory, this attempt to put everything together, is so important is partly because specialization, for all its achievements in the last century-and-a-half - and they've been staggering - is part of the reason why so many people struggle. One of the things that Ourstory can do, is help us see that there is a coherent narrative across the ages.

If I'm right, then telling Ourstory is about our place in space and time. In this sense, it's a mapping process. It tells us where we are. And that mapping process, which is present in all origin stories is powerful and meaningful because it tells us who we are. By doing that, it tells us what possibilities are open to us. It explains why communities are so various, because each community accumulates information in slightly different ways. It explains why, when communities meet, the synergies are so powerful. It's the source of civilization. It's what makes humanity.                

If that's right, to explain what makes us different, we need to distinguish between two problems. One is how our ancestors crossed that linguistic threshold. Explaining that is a fiendishly complex, technical problem that involves a vast range of evidence, some of it neurological, some of it archaeological, some of it anthropological. The second problem is much more manageable: defining the threshold itself, what it changed. That we can do, and we can do quite simply.

In summary, we can define the general nature of the threshold that makes humans different. We can say that it's a language so efficient that information accumulates across generations. We know exactly how that happened. When the first anatomically modern humans started their rock art 73,000 years ago, which is evidence of symbolic activity. In this way our Stone Age ancestors encoded a future past on stone; which our current spiritual teachers, linguists and neuroscientists may solve one day. As more and more people begin to take seriously the idea of an overview of all modern knowledge - Ourstory - it'll generate astonishing synergies with the power of a Big Bang cosmology. 

The future of the human narrative is anything but dark.