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.

Digitopia

Has your mobile phone turned you into a Pavlovian dog? George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral and Darwin Among the Machines, explains that nations, alliances of nations and national institutions are in decline; while a state perhaps best described as Oligarchia is on the ascent.

All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail. The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?

Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.

Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. 

Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. 

Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution has begun. None dare speak its name.

The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalogue or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. 

We imagine that individuals, or individual algorithms, are still behind the curtain somewhere, in control. We are fooling ourselves. The new gatekeepers, by controlling the flow of information, rule a growing sector of the world. What deserves our full attention is what is happening as these powers escape into the wild and consume the rest of the world.

The next revolution will be the ascent of analogue systems over which the dominion of digital programming comes to an end. Nature’s answer, to those who sought to control nature through programmable machines, is to allow us to build machines whose nature is beyond programmable control.