Making Sense of Work, Part Four, Prognosis

It occurs to me that in an ecological system, the behaviors of species (made entirely of the behaviors of the individuals of that species) are constructed in such a way that actions supporting the individual also support the species and also support the ecosystem in which all events occur.  A very special form of competition has to be occurring – in a far simpler form, not unlike the competition of a baseball game – where support of the commons, the rules and principles of order, is accomplished in the very acts of individual ascension. This is a design long in coming, many trials in random attempts with only the most stable lasting, until an arrangement emerges – a new system of order – that is so stable it cannot be dislodged except by the destruction of the more underlying system upon which it depends.

In the case of natural ecosystems this process was (is) mediated by the principles of interaction called, by (English speaking) humans, biological evolution.  There is nothing that requires those same evolutionary details to operate in other systems of order; it is only necessary that there be principles with the potential to form stable systems. If we are to understand work (and other large scale cognitive subsystems of consciousness order), we must begin to understand the principles that mediate the changes, the principles of adaptation, occurring within the system of order that includes imagination, wishes, models of events and maps of both physical and mental terrain; a system of order that is mediated by language and projects futures, tests options and measures a world that has not yet happened [1].

The simple fact is that the organizational structure of work, with its intermediary device of money as the way of providing basic needs, cannot continue.  We have come to the end of the effectiveness of that adaptation because work, in the present design, is only sustained by economic expansion, which is only sustained by greater and greater use of the earth’s limited productivity; and because of the destruction of the human condition that results from work’s present form.

Work has been cognitively separated from the people who do it; the activities are measured only by the products produced and not by the life-allowing needs the activities are ultimately intended to satisfy.  Measured in this way only those who make a profit from the work activities are seen as having value since it is they who accumulate the only positively considered work product – all the rest is lumped together as a cost [2].  For the species to continue on without damaging, beyond repair, the earth’s productive systems (in our species’ time frame) this paradigm must be exactly reversed: the value of work activities must be seen in the quality of the lives sustained, with all of the time expended, products and services created by work seen as the cost.

Those who profit from the present design easily take on the habit of thought that “the workers are trying to take my profits.” It is natural to see the wealth coming to you as right and proper, especially if it provides the impunity of power; natural to see attempts at equity as assault.  This result is inevitable when work activities are organized as they are now and have been for thousands of years.  And the consequences of inequity are equally inevitable: to put the case in graphic terms, the rich are always surprised when the rabble rise up with the natural intelligence and organizational strength of the species and remove heads as a somewhat excessive therapy for their delusion.

Profit:

We can say without much danger of error that the multiplication of human activities comes from imagining some new form of profit [3], a special form of the simpler imagining of ‘having more.’ The original (pre-Neolithic) model had the ‘desire for more’ moving people into direct interaction with an environment that “instructed” them on how human capacities functioned in the ecosystem; it was an immediate, all embracing cure for natural species’ arrogance and the special arrogance of consciousness.  We can also speculate with some confidence that, devoid of direct feedback systems attached to biophysical reality, the movement of changes created by the desire for more would be erratic and destructive of fine-tuned environmental relationships .

There seems to be two quite different ways of thinking about profit, economic and ecological. The present economic community is concerned with how profits are distributed by the various kinds of actions that businesses (entrepreneurs) take; that there should/could be a difference between the total costs and the total revenues doesn’t seem to be of major interest or is considered a non-question.  But, even the ingredients that contribute to there being a difference seem also to be classed as significant and insignificant more on ideological grounds than epistemologically sound principles.

Present economic “theory” seems interested in the business mechanisms by which profits are obtained and not the origin of profits per se; and so, the interest in entrepreneurship, entry barriers and monopoly, risk and uncertainty, equilibrium-disequilibrium and various other conditions that influence the ratio of supposed total costs to total revenues.  This is all very much “inside baseball” stuff and does not either realize or care that the motivations to create a game in the first place might be of underlying interest to both its existence and form and, at an even deeper level in the case of economics, that profits, as representatives of physical energies, must come from somewhere: that is, defining profits as the difference between costs and revenue tells us nothing about the origin of such differences [4].  What are the consequences for the various methods of reducing costs? What are the consequences for the various methods of increasing revenue?  What are the consequences for discovering/disclosing a new processes, product, service or coercion of labor?

“Free Market:”

The Market is supposed to be a natural system that mediates the relationships among resources, products (from those resources), patterns of consumption, labor and wealth accumulation all through the assignments of prices: if everything were but to have its “true price,” then the world would work as smoothly as it is possible to work.  This is, of course, one of the most broadly held and flagrant madnesses of the modern world.

What the Free Market does is impose a powerful incentive system on the weaker and deeper incentives of primary needs. It is as if you were to move a powerful magnet into the region of a gravitational field; the behaviors of objects in the sway of the magnetic are distorted. Some, like iron, realigned with great disproportion, but almost all realign to some extent.  It would be a great mistake to assume that the local magnetic field was the natural order of attractive and repulsive systems – even though certain mathematical relationships could be established and would be reliable with appropriate limiting conditions defined.  However, if one lived long enough in such an arrangement it would appear completely natural – and failures of the model utterly inexplicable when its logic had to incorporate information and realities beyond its narrow boundaries.

The failures of Market thinking and consequence have largely gone unnoticed or mis-explained.  The billions of people in the most excruciating poverty are seen as suffering from cumulative personal failings; the sufferings are not seen as the product of the Market, when, of course, they are.  Resource wars and wars of territory are presented as coming from the insanity of particular leaders or the inherent “evil” of a religion (never one’s own) and not from the incipience of war in Market thinking. The nature of work in such a distorting incentive system cannot be free of monumental distortion. 

The “Free Market” argument is, essentially, that the numbers of people needing employment, the skill requirements of the job, the number of job positions and the importance of the work to the maintenance of the economy will work out a “price” for the employment, i.e., a wage.  The hidden assumption for the proper functioning of this argument is that the economic system must be just exactly at full employment; that is, that everyone who wants a job can find one, and more, that each potential worker has some (though not complete) choice so that needs, interests and talents can find appropriate opportunity.  Part of this assumption is that employers must compete for the best employees.

However, employers don’t want to compete for the best employees; their interests, really short-term interests, are best served when there are a large number of people from which to select.  To actually compete (which can only happen when labor is correctly priced) wages must be raised, working conditions improved, incentives of various kinds offered; in general, the employee ‘costs’ the employer more.  The consequence is that employers want a consistently higher level of unemployment than is optimal for the society as a whole. 

Consumers of products and services, both market and socially delivered, want to get them for as little as possible; they therefore want low prices in the store and low taxes.  But, consumers, first and foremost, want the products and services – just as, in the end, employers must have employees. Now, with our attention sufficient distracted with these kinds of considerations, it is almost hopeless to think about whether a job is good for the world or not.

This state of affairs has created the driving forces and tensions that move the social structure and economic designs.  And what is missing is a consideration of the fundamental usefulness and consequences of the jobs that are being done.  Part of the present design forcefully ignores these questions by requiring that everyone who is capable have a job as the only way to get the means to remain alive, safe and reasonably comfortable [5].

Conclusion:

Humanity and the earth are suffering from the almost complete disconnection between the systems that generate human activity (work) and the structures and functions of the biosphere including the biological nature of our species.  Humans will perform those activities that allow them to eat, sleep warm, reject dangers, spend time with agreeable others and see their lives in some perspective (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – they are all there, though, combined or euphemistic).  If the activities offered also contribute to the destruction of the space in which we live, too bad.

There is really is no option; the thousands of activities that we call ‘jobs of work’ must be reduced and simplified.  This can only happen if human expectations are simplified and returned toward sustaining the biological nature of our existence.  I have no illusions about the difficulties associated with those few words.  Those with powerful vested interests in the elite/slave paradigm will not approve these ideas.  Those who have lost almost all touch with any options for safety, comfort and status other than in the present structures will not approve these ideas.  But this paradigm is finished; only the frantic whirlwind of summing up remains.

Each and every human contains the possibility for natural community engagement and for the generalized need meeting behaviors that have been the hallmark of hominid adaptation for millions of years – these things are there just beneath the surface.  There exists the small positive probability that ideas such as these will reach some critical mass and then spread rapidly as the evidence for the described realities becomes unavoidable.

There is a simple life affirming way to be, a way (Tao, The Way) that has been sought for thousands of years.  In every generation some people have discovered and followed it even as the Great Many were drawn along by the madness of the elites and the shiny objects of technology.  The answers to our problems are not more and better jobs in a growing economy, but are in the broad engagement of life by people in natural heterogeneous communities that are organized around the value of human activities as part of ecosystems. 

The earth’s rejection of the human enterprise, demonstrated through its failing biophysical cycles, is pushing us toward such a way of life, but with the terrible disinterest of evolutionary processes.  Human consciousness order can mitigate the most devastating part of these processes, as we have done so often in the past in smaller ways, but this time it will be an effort of solar-flare proportion if it is successfully made.

[1] I return to this argument again and again, not because I have a limited imagination (though that may be so), but because this idea is like gravity – every time I turn up a new thought, there is this one ‘pulling’ on it with a constant force.

[2] This is essential to understand: almost all of the life affirming things that the Great Many do are considered to be a cost to business.  Since wages and salaries are considered to be a cost to business and since it is these wages and salaries that supply the means for everything from the most basic biological needs to the various luxuries of middle class life, the design of our present economy has an incentive to reduce or eliminate non-work, life affirming activities – regardless of the rhetoric that may be wrapped around business actions.  Listen to the “speech” about the value of the ‘working man’ made by Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” for a guileless presentation of the attitude still seen today and still spoken with equal candor by today’s elite when in the appropriate company (some of the Enron ‘boys’ caught on tape talking about California elderly; Romney talking to millionaire/billionaire donors, nay, bribers).

[3] The gaining of a profit is ultimately tied to the uses of impressed or hired persons performing myriad activities of work.

[4]A physicist, when doing certain types of experiments, measures the energies going into an interaction (exchange) and the energies coming out of the interaction, and when the energies are different, the origin of additional energy or the destination of energy “lost” must be accounted for. Economics, seemingly taking to this model, rather acts more like the alchemist or the vitalist and makes up both destinations and sources to suit ideology while ignoring so-called “non-economic externalities” like biological systems.

[5] This has glossed over a vast and fecund literature.  It is essential to have some experience with Marxian economic and historical theory.  Reading Adam Smith, comparing to the present presentations of economic thinking, reveals just how much damage the perverse incentives of The Market have done in the last 240 years.

Most Things Must Be Explained Together:

It is a most basic principle of the epistemology of science, that scientific theories must explain all relevant data points with a integrated coherent set of ideas – ad hoc additions are seriously frowned upon.  This is done for two very good reasons: it just makes sense in a natural world, a world that seems to work by basic sets of rules, that the understanding of those rules should apply broadly to a very wide variety of processes.  And secondly, that this generalizing of processes as theory supplies the basic understandings that have actually worked to explain and, to some extent, control the behavior of the events of the world.

Devising theories about humans, as we function in our present societies, would be like trying to create Newtonian Mechanics with gnomes planting tiny black holes and high gauss magnets at random through out the measuring apparatus: a pattern might be suggested by the data, but pinning things down would be impossible.  Before anything serious could be done, the gnomes and their activities would have to be discovered and accounted for.

We humans are our own gnomes.  Our behavioral systems have gotten away from us and are functioning quite out of either the recognition or control of our “intelligent design:” for every apparently planned design, there are thousands of gnomic events that go unrealized or that we largely ignore.  But that does not mean that there is not some discoverable and orderly process afoot, only that we have been, as yet, unsuccessful in ‘pinning it down.’

I have been using a conceptual framework for many years that seems to bring much of the confusing and hazy behaviors of my fellows into apparently sharper focus.  The following uses that framework to look at the underlying principles that should be informing our understanding and actions around “regulating”, especially, our economic and political behavior.

* * * 

The Living System of Order (the LSO: we often just call it ‘life’, but it is a system of order) is really a biophysical platform for the storage and movement of particular categories of information.  Its corporal forms are tiny moments in that flow, each one representing and holding a vanishingly small fraction of that information – but the information, the total information, resides with the whole of the living world.  Communication of information is the very essence of the Living Order.  The central core communication is structured around the DNA/protein nexus, but every operation of life is a communication, especially the controlling communications that organize and limit the chemical and physical behaviors of the thousands upon thousands of different types of reactions that sum together into the living state.  The most basic organizing principle is called ‘negative feedback:’ a living state action produces some products that, as one of their effects, inhibit the reaction that created them.

There are basically two types of feedback, reaction products that influence the process that created them: positive feedback in which certain reaction products increase the rate or volume of the originating reaction and negative feedback in which certain reaction products decrease the rate or volume of the reaction that created them.  Left alone and with unlimited reactants a positive feedback system would grow ever bigger, ever faster; such a system could never be alive (without unlimited reactants it would use up the reactants without stint and suddenly end).  Negative feedback systems set into motion will rundown and stop even in the company of unlimited resources; such a system could not be alive.  It is the combination of motivating and inhibiting systems, properly arranged, that allows the chemistry and physics of life to function.

It would be the very essence of foolishness to argue that negative feedback systems are unduly inhibiting the production of this or that chemical product.  Too much sugar in the blood and the brain speeds to a dysfunctional oblivion; too little sugar and it slows to stop functioning altogether.  Keeping that critical condition just right is accomplished with multiple negative feedback systems attached to the basic self-generating chemical reactions.  Maintaining the appropriate concentration of sugar is just one example among thousands; In fact, negative feedback systems can be considered the most essential of all the essential chemical designs of life.

In other words, the LSO is dependent on negative feedback systems in very special ways.  Positive feedback systems tend to function on their own once started, like a fire.  Negative feedback systems must be constructed and attached at exactly the right point and with the appropriate rates of inhibition so that the necessary chemical reactions will take place at the right time and in the right amount.  It can be made as a general proposition that no system of order can sustain in a universe of limited resources (any universe that we know about) without negative feedback systems as a primary part of its design.

Humans live in the world of the Living System of Order but also in a new system of order that has been constructed evolutionarily and adaptively ‘on’ them: the Consciousness System of Order (CSO).  In brief, this is an information storing and moving system that did not exist before its formation and growth on the human substrate [1]. It collects and stores varieties of information never before collected and combines them in ways never before combined.  Humans have the capacity to manifest many of the possibilities so created and, thus, create processes, objects and powerful arrangements of order that could never before have existed.  This system of order must also function with negative feedback systems if it is to sustain (and if humans are to sustain).

As indicated above, negative feedback systems are complex and often special purpose devices, not easy to “design” or build.  In the living order trillions of trillions of trial and error events have gone into the evolution of the negative feedback controls of life’s many thousands of chemical and physical reactions.  Each species evolves its own special rates and set points from the basic pattern.

The Consciousness Order evolved and adapted under the influence of the Living Order and was ‘spared’ much of the need for negative feedback systems since a good bit of its behavior could piggyback on the Living Order.  But some negative feedback systems based entirely in the Consciousness Order were required, such things became social mores and the pantheistic religions.  However, even these had the physical environment and the Living Order as their informing source since this was the ‘world’ in which humans lived.

It is a mighty leap from that time to now, but it is one that must be made.  It is a leap from a real form and place; we did not spring forth from ‘no beginning.”  All the same rules apply, that is the way of science theory.  The rules apply until their predictions fail, and then the theory is revised or chucked and new theories that explain the data more completely, more elegantly, replace them.

Making the leap to now, we find the Consciousness Order disconnected from the substance of its origin, yet still operating on the same principles as it did when it was primarily a powerful support function for adapting to the natural world.  In essence, a wide variety of experiences (perceptions and memories) are collected from contact with the world, the members of a community of shared experience act out different behaviors in response to those experiences and through the process of action, observation and community ‘story telling’, more or less, standard behaviors are adapted to environmental conditions.  Certain behaviors are of truly survival importance and these get special stories attached to them, stories with a punch and often a consequence.  Such stories constitute important negative feedback systems. 

When associated with a constantly correcting natural environment to which the community is obligatorily attuned, the motivating forces and the inhibiting forces of the Consciousness order stayed in relative balance; the stories were tested in the domain of all relevant information, though often beyond the general awareness, just as we attempt to test our science theories today in the contest of ideas on paper.

But the vast majority of humans no longer live in a natural world that supplies the informational foundation for their behavior.  That world still exists and still is the ultimate reservoir of both information and consequence, but our daily experience is removed from it by several layers of the behaviors of other human beings.  The result is that we have been applying the tools of the CSO to the immediate experiences that surround us, experiences that have become more and more randomized and with very narrow and short-term with weakly related informational content. 

Such an environment offers very poor conditions for the development of negative feedback systems.  And so, human behavior spreads in form and space directed only by opportunity and the capacity of the CSO to imagine new options.  This is not a good thing for all the reasons discussed and suggested above.

The manifestation and expansion the products of the Consciousness Order without any inhibition from negative feedback systems is the basis of our present experience.  While an analysis like this one can’t make direct changes, it is important to have an understanding that fits into the larger theoretical frameworks supplied by sound physical, biological and psychological theories.  The negative feedback model must be incorporated into the incentive systems that we create in our economics and politics – up to now we have almost exclusively created designs that rewarded or punished.  Both reward and punishment have tended to be build on the simpler and more direct models of positive feedback – they tend to create more of themselves [2].

We are in the process of evolving, biologically, negative feedback systems into the Consciousness Order.  One of the steps in that evolution is looking like it will involve the failure of the current economic and political systems, the rapid reduction of human life and the variety of other life on the earth.  But the CSO has the potential to self generate its own adaptive processes and designs, that is the cusp we are approaching: will the human species discover the means to regulate its activities through Consciousness Order negative feedback systems or will the species rely on the Living Order processes that make “judgments” on survival of whole species as its blunt-instrument tool?

The regulation of political and economic action and power – as the country’s founding thinkers attempted – is a vital first step.  Such a step might both buy us the time and set the stage for the recognition of the need and the focus to reform those structures that can begin to create the larger range of negative feedback systems that a fully functioning system of order requires.

[1] This system of order might well be set into motion in some non-human context.  The dangers involved would be prodigious.  Similarly, Living Order processes can be abstracted and set to motion as with genetically modified bacteria or complex chemical reactions mediated by “artificial” enzymes and nano systems, both much more dangerous than seems to be currently realized.

[2] Competing positive feedback systems are not negative feedback and using resources to exhaustion is not negative feedback.

The Natural History of Deception

(Harmless snake pretending otherwise! This is a long essay.)

Daily events present us with a variety of situations that involve questions of honesty. An art dealer knows that a painting can be sold for $10,000, but he tells the person who owns the painting that it is worth $5000; also knowing that the owner paid $1000 for it and will think that $5000 is a very good price. What is honest here? Is it the responsibility of a person to share all the significant information that they possess as a condition of honesty? Is there some standard of honesty that will aid in answering the question?

Suppose the issue is not a painting being traded among ‘wealthy’ people, but is rather a chemical that gets applied to food. The manufacturer of the chemical, the farmer and distributor know, to varying degrees, that the chemical has negative health effects, but its use allows more production per acre to reach the store shelf in a more attractive condition. Is honesty the voluntary presentation of an unbiased summary of dangers associated with the chemical additive? It is clearly dishonest to claim that there is no harm associated with the additive, but at what point does honesty began and dishonesty end? To me an appropriate beginning is to look at the evolution of honesty, or put another way, the natural history of deception.

The underlying process to which honesty applies is exchange or transfer of information. An electron or proton or any other particle represents itself by the exchange of virtual particles of particular properties. An electron in a sodium atom cannot represent itself as a positron in an antimatter oxygen atom; this kind of thing just doesn't make any sense, so at the level of physical exchange the universe is uniformly honest.

Dishonesty begins, as deception, with the earliest life forms hiding what they are within chemical, typically protein, coverings. The evolution of such deception is simple to understand. Organism A consumes organism B, but not organism C. Since the outer covering of B and C contain some similar proteins, those B organisms with a more C-like outer covering are consumed less often than those with almost no C-like covering showing. Eventually organism B evolves to “look” more and more like C to organism A. The inside of B continues to be just as yummy and nutritious as before, unlike the noxious inside of C, but A now responds to many Bs as if they were Cs; it is deceived.

It can be correctly said that the simple deception of this sort is a consistent part of the evolution of viruses, bacteria to other pathogens and parasites. These organisms represent their chemical surface as either that of their host or some other thing that they are not. This form of deception continues on all the way to insects mimicking leaves and twigs, harmless snakes looking and acting like poisonous ones and the various ways that little animals have for looking big. The essence of all these devices by organism B is to get organism A to act in a way that benefits B. This is accomplished not by real toxicity, size, power, chemical constituents or lifecycle, but by the presentation of one triggering aspect of the organisms which actually have the toxicity, size, power, chemical constituents or particular lifecycle. A rattlesnake is avoided based on recognition of pattern and the sound from the rattling tail, not because nearby organisms look inside its head and find the poison glands and delivery system.

What is characteristic of almost all these deceptions is that they are among separate species and that they are integrated into the web of relationships based primarily around predator and prey. Predators hide or appear benign and prey hide or appear more dangerous than they are; which they can do because there are truly dangerous organisms.

This can be analyzed as competition, but the word has many unwanted and misleading associations within many spheres of human activity. I prefer to talk about process inevitability. Just as electrons arrange by the probabilities associated with energy levels, so a process inevitability occurs in the more fluidly constructed energy economics of living things: develop a true protection for 10,000 calories a copy and get a 30 percent survival advantage and this will soon be followed by some other organism developing a mimic protection for net 500 calories a copy and getting a 15 percent survival advantage. It is a matter of survivability; not so much a competition between or among species; it is a matter of the organization of body and behavior getting the greatest survivability per calorie. The environment in all its facets, including all other creatures and their characteristics, is one complete undivided “entity” from the point of view of an organism. Any individual whose body and behavior produces the greatest genetic survivability per calorie lives on as a genetic structure. Chemical, physical and behavioral deception are but natural aspects of that process.

But a dilemma forms in this increasingly complex structure of deceptions. An organism must have correct information from which to act. If, in an example given earlier, A consumes B but not C. Over time B evolves to appear to be C to the perception of A and thus deceives A. For this to work there are several continuing requirements. 1) A must continue to avoid C. 2) B must not be fooled into treating C as another B. 3) C must not be fooled into treating B as C.

Each organism must continue to produce predominantly correct action as response to environmental information. The deception of A by B must be a relatively minor matter for A even if it worked a relatively major effect on the survivability of B. The effect on C must also be very minor. If an organism's relationship with its total environment is such that much of its action is made in response to information arising from deception, then that organism must be under powerful selective pressure to reconnect with accurate information, i.e., those individuals whose action was less influenced by deceptive information and more influenced by veridical information would have increased genetic survivability. No matter how the relationships among the individual species form, the totality of the system must function through an unabridged accuracy of information producing appropriate and proportional responses.

An ecosystem is not 1000 species (or 200 or one million) vying for some dominant relationship. When seen from a larger perspective, primary energy input, conditions of material availability and climate set the limits within which all the species interweave their chemical and physical actions to maximize their adaptation to the total conditions which include all of the other adapting organisms. The evolved relationships are as complex or more complex than climate and weather, which we still cannot successfully model with computers. ‘Mess with a flea over here and find effect in a vulture over there.’ Like a wire-walker, ecosystems have to keep going on even as we mess with their balance: They tend not to wind down, but when pushed too hard they ‘fall off.’

Deception, at this level, is an adaptation integrated into the ecosystem as just another adaptation. Social displays and other more complex social phenomenon modify the effect that a species has on the ecosystem and are adjusted to throughout the system. If one species suddenly declines, the resulting change in energy availability, physical space and physiological product is responded to with growth, death and change, just as always. If one species suddenly becomes ascendant on the “wings” of a powerful new adaptation, that change in energy, space and product will also be adjusted to with growth, death and change among the other species.

An ecosystem is inherently a veridical system in which information is action to which web-like adjustments are made throughout. The model of deception is a special case in which one organism delivers inaccurate information of a limited nature to another and to a specific result. Such behaviors are completely contained within the larger ecosystem structure.

There are two important qualities to note: 1) any behavior including deception which cannot be accommodated within the adjustments in the ecosystem endangers the total ecosystem, and 2) these forms of deception are evolved in the same way as any other chemical, physical or behavioral response to any environmental conditions; they develop out of the consequences of the movements, responses and sensitivities of all the organisms functioning together in a common physical temporal space.

While there are many individual examples of these forms of deception that all function through genetically mediated structure and behavior (the result of nervous systems structure) and are thus evolved through the same processes and principles as a horse cannon bone or blue face of a baboon, this is only true until hominids. With the evolved adaptations of the hominids came a new form of deception as unrelated to the old as rice is to maggots.

The cardinal characteristic of this new adaptation was that events that were no longer occurring could be revisited. And there was no particular time limit on how recently an event had occurred for it to be available for replay.

This becomes difficult to talk about because it is the same adaptation that underlies the reading of these words and that constructs a picture of the world which is inherently a deception. I must construct a very careful language and the reader must avoid too quickly giving meaning to the words beyond the narrow uses I'm attempting here.

First, this adaptation is evolved through the same process as any other: it has conferred increased survivability to the genetics that produced its simplest beginnings as well as its more aggressive forms. It was tested in the living and dying of hominids interwoven in their ecosystems.

I'm calling this adaptation by its primary effect, “dilation of the moment.” All of its consequences to which we give various names are resulted from this physical phenomenon. The moment in which events occur is all that ever exists. All the rest is an illusion. It is an illusion which hominids evolved to exploit in the same way that wings evolved to exploit the air, except of course that the air is real. What is real is that the universe is lawful and this lawfulness applies to the effects of earthly gravity and to the hunger of large cats in a similar way. The moment arises out of the ongoing events structured in lawful order. This allows for the possibility of coding aspects of a complete moment so that they are retained as a coded expression of that moment, retained in a form that changes more slowly than the immediate flow of events. Such a process occurred with the design of the DNA/protein complex (creating the Living Order) and has occurred again with the storage of information in story, a design functioning beyond the individual hominid brain (creating the Consciousness Order).

This quickly gets so complex that we want to say, "okay, okay so we have a conscious mind -- now let's go get a coffee." But then there are some vital things that are missed. One is, as was mentioned, that what is retained of the moment is a very selective collection of perceptible energies that were part of a complete integrated flow of event. Two, the functioning of other retained moments is such that we make little distinction between what is going on in the moment and these retained pieces of moment that we call memory, experience, learning and other things defined by subtle differences in evolved designs for handling information outside of the moment. In other words the adaptation, “dilation of the moment,” is an evolved deception. As part of this adaptation hominids often treat events retained from the moment of existence, in a very partial and selected form, as fully occurring events from the larger universe.

"Okay, okay so memory is faulty, let's go get coffee." If it were this simple we could go get the coffee and be done with it. All of the philosophical difficulties were rendered inconsequential for almost all of hominid existence by a simple expedient: hominids lived in the environment within which the adaptation evolved so that the full subtleties of interaction within the moment included the “dilation of the moment” just as the toxicity of a fungus, the size of elephants and dehiscence of fall leaves were included.

With Homo sapiens, however, came an expansion of this adaptation -- the possibility of living almost completely in the retained moments; and a consequence: the projection of these retained moments into events which had not yet occurred. The boundaries between the full and deep interactive true moment with all of the properties of the real, the retained selected details of what now could be called previous moments (an illusion) and the projected events made up of combinations of selected details of previous moments and often details of the true moment, became almost totally blurred. The “dilation of the moment” was almost complete -- the actual, the true moment of existence, was spread by this genetically derived adaptation into an indeterminate past, to an indeterminate future, with the true moment often receiving only a passing interest.

The obligatory reality of moment was replaced by the possibility of a “broader reality” and the possibility of almost total illusion -- and even the possibility of mixing the two in ways that would make a disentangling of them extremely difficult. Just as assembling a complex machine without a plan is problematic, so making sense of reality and illusion without the plans has a poor prognosis. The plans are in the building: that is, our evolution and the environment within which that evolution took place.

Imagine a machine built into the very building, it supports the gears, the timing devices tied into the floor and walls and ceiling. Imagine that machine slowly then quickly disconnecting from that building and set to run in the open (ad hoc scaffolding thrown together for support). And it runs, but gets out of time, slips various cogs and generally runs ungoverned. Without the building to serve as a guide there would be little hope of setting the machine right. This is a very simplified metaphor for the present human dilemma; we are detachable from the environment, and we are not complete when detached.

In all this a deception of the new form has come to be part of the universe of possibilities. Previously A deceived B by mimicking C. In the hominid form, A deceives A by modifying the primary experience of existence so that A can propose events that have not yet occurred. A then can deceive B by modifying B’s experience of events which have not occurred at all so that B will support A’s proposed future; this can go on and on. This puts a premium on living and experiencing in, or as near as possible to sources of, the true moment if the species is to sustain in the universe of actual events.

It is clearly possible to get farther and farther away from the narrow reality of moment, until the functional pragmatic energies of the universe are violated beyond recovery, i.e., the realities of ecosystem order and interdependence are such that an organism that doesn't fit in can topple the whole structure, wiping out the order which sustains all of living things within the ecosystem. A fancy hominid is no more immune to that possibility than goats, introduced on an island, that eat everything insight and then dies of starvation along with everything else. And by virtue of the reach and depth of hominid adaptation, it is more likely.

Just as with the first form of deception, this new form is powerful, but far more dangerous. Remember that when B evolved to look like C to A, there were conditions of a veridicality that had to obtain for the species to continue: C must not confuse itself with B, B must not confuse itself with C and A needed to continue to correctly identified C. The deception must be limited; in this case A is deceived by B to some degree, but little else is affected.

The natural history of hominid’s new form of deception shows much of the same requirements for limitation. It is clear that accurate information is vital to every organism. In most cases the physical/chemical realities are immediate: temperature, pH, mineral content, all generate genetically mediated responses appropriate to the condition. As the nature of the information becomes more complex, the need for the organism to have well tuned perceptual equipment adapted to evolved algorithms in order to relate action to perception is no less great. The punishment for the failure to consistently function with veridicality is death, first of individuals and then, if appropriate evolution does not occur, of the species.

For hominids "dilation of the moment" was for vast amounts of time contained within the total expression and adaptation of the species within the ecosystem, that is, it did not distinguish itself as some feature of behavior out of step with the rest of the behavior of the organism. The adaptation let hominids function with greater accuracy by establishing a database from which to evaluate novel moments and to respond creatively and quickly to environmental cycles of long duration. While the past and future were illusion (self-deception), they were illusion in the service of greater accuracy and speed of response; there was still a strong attachment to the moment as a powerful primary information source. As human social structure became secure enough there was advantage in some individuals within the group pressing the limits of this adaptation by imagining to the full extent of their ability, so long as the group was fundamentally bound by the minute by minute reality of the environment. Such explorations into new ways of organizing experience passed the ability to change in response to the environment to a storage system of memory and group memory called culture -- no longer were the genes the sole repository of how an organism was to be and sole method for passing on that information. This was a fully functional new system of order that I am calling the Consciousness System of Order.

But there is a caution to be discovered in the genes. Great energy of process and genetic change in chemical architecture are spent on protecting the genetic code. Evolution is, regardless of the theories followed, very slow compared to cultural change: slow not only because environmental change is slow, but slow because the thrust of genetics is, in a paradoxical way, to avoid change while at the same time incorporating mechanisms that are based on, and even amplify, the unavoidable changes that take place.

Culture needs to be seen for what it is, a new and untried genetic adaptation based on an inherently risky design of using illusion to increase the speed and accuracy of adaptation. There is little analogous in this method to the complex multiplicity of DNA protections which guard the cell’s information. And without the environment as an informing and inhibiting substrate, the illusion aspect of the "dilation of the moment" seems to overwhelm the process of change, until today we live in a largely baseless world in which there is no -- not one – primary source of veridicality.

Cultural sources are the primary source of information today. We even appeal to cultural sources for information about the environment. In a most bizarre example we watch the weather Channel to see if it is cold outside. Just think of it; can you name one cultural information source that is uniformly believed by all humans in the manner of the following example: There is a certain squeak given by almost all little birds and mammals that results in all of their type diving for cover, we could say that this means “hawk” to them. Chipmunks don’t trick sparrows with it, sparrows don't trick bluebirds with it, it is uniformly “believed.” Humans are not incapable of belief -- uniform veridical belief -- it is just that we do not now live in the world that either produces or allows it, when once we did. And it is that world that we must, using all the tools at our disposal, recover essential aspects of.

Plato suggested, rather powerfully, that our perceptions are illusion. I am suggesting that our illusions are ultimately self-deceptions of which the intentional deceptions of others is only a minor form. It is of little use to ask for others to “tell the truth” when the substrate is illusion to begin with.

I believe that this form of deception needs to be recognized for what it is and that in this first little step we might re-appeal to our natures as a means of slowly rediscovering some sense of basis for our lives. What follows is a partial list of some things that people need to do. I don't see these things happening quickly, totally or even at all. All I know is that unless something like these happen we will carry present madness into extinction, or at least major catastrophe, for our species and millions of other species.

There are two categories of things that we must do: the first are primarily activities and the second have to do with a reconsideration of worldviews.

Group one:

1) travel by foot -- walk a real distance from point A to point B as part of a regular routine -- in all weather -- every day is best. (1/2 a mile as a minimum distance—depending, of course on physical factors)

2) spend quiet time -- listen to the wind and other sounds made by nature. As much as possible find a time and place free of airplanes, trains, cars etc. This also needs to be regular; once every three or four days minimum for 15 to 30 minutes. (carefully done this can be combined with number 1)

3) some form of meditation every day -- there are several forms of meditation that have been practiced by humans for thousands of years, a form related to Zen Buddhist practice is what I recommend. The thinking behind this is explained elsewhere.

4) explore some new place -- the cityscape if nothing else is available, but wildlands are best; irregular ground, new shapes and views, new sounds and smells. This also should be regular every 10 to 20 days with something dramatic occurring in the process every half-year or so, like getting lost, going hungry and thirsty, pushing to some limit; physical, mental.

5) some regular form of exercise -- to give the body and brain some regular experiences that are related to the environment in which we evolved. As you do them you can adjust amounts and circumstances to your increasing awareness of what you need.

6) spend time in conversation with others -- especially talking about daily events. This is tricky because of the pre-existing designs that use these occurrences for the support of cultural goals rather than personal ones.

Group two:

1) Begin to consider the effects of your actions on the world. Other species don't do this and don't need to: evolution functions to measure those effects and balances ecosystems using the ultimate consequences of life and death, speciation and extinction. Since humans are in the culture bubble and separated from primary evolutionary forces in the short frame of human generations (but not in the long time frame of ultimate consequences) we must create culture-based controls on environmental actions to avoid devastating ultimate consequences. The simplest of these is for each person to ask themselves what the effects of their actions are, and to follow the questions to their conclusion with courage and information acquisition.

2) We must consume less, not more with the obvious corollary: population must be reduced. Reduced consumption and reduced population fly in the face of present money economics and capitalist economics especially, which are only functional under conditions of economic expansion. All the underlying understandings of present economics need to be reconsidered. It would be nice if there were in-place some understanding of how, and an appropriate willingness, to reduce consumption without economic collapse, but the cart may have to lead the horse on this occasion. With all that is powerful vested in economic growth and therefore the ultimate destruction of ours and many other species of life, the people (individuals and small groups of humans who understand the ecological reality) need to begin now regardless of cultural consequences. It is as if we were on the sinking ship and bailing out the water was cultural anathema -- there will always be some clear sighted enough to see through the “social form” to the physical reality. In other words, there are people who have maintained their relationship with environmental information sufficiently that they are less deceived by the illusion of culture.

3) We must slow, then stop and then reverse the human domination of the landscape. We must not pave over the world. For most humans in the industrial countries, the world is paved and gridded already. This has created a great cultural lie: the non-industrial countries are second or third-rate for the very reason that they are not square grids and asphalt. Yet these countries are destroying themselves as fast as they can under the tutelage of the industrial West. Since the industrial world has a predator-prey relationship with the rest of the world, which increasingly supplies raw material and labor (true wealth -- material and labor -- is forcefully extracted from the non-industrial world by the industrial world which is less industrial these days and more power based, controlling [ultimately with its military] the machinery of trade and money), we can only do this individually by refusing as much as possible to be part of such domination and speaking our conviction to others.

4) We must begin with ourselves by creating personal conditions that allow us to see the physical reality and to sustain us in opposition to the dominating culture bubble and then act in personal ways to support a sustaining of life on earth as the final personal condition that sustains our specieshood. There can be no expectation that our individual actions will change the larger world, but we can change our own little world into one that honors our biological nature and those millions of hominids that did the evolutionary work to get us to us. We are a remarkable creature best recognized in the manifestation of our evolved design. Life in the culture bubble minimizes our biological power, so hard won in the humorlessness of evolution. In evolution a creature must be all, the most full expression of its evolved potentials, that it can be to survive. In present cultures the role is to be as little of your biological nature as you can get away with--a result of there being so many of us in such distorted relationships to power and survivability.

In these ways we can reconnect our adaptation, "the dilation of the moment," to some part of our environment and mitigate against the pure illusion of it all. We evolved these abilities and tools within a context and we must be in that context to function properly. In our present situation we're like a giraffe in a lettuce field or the beaver in the concrete pond.

The illusion and deception that we participate in and experience today has no solution in all of our attempts through philosophy, science, law, religion and "good old commonsense" to discover one. Without a steady contact with an environment that brings its ordering properties to structure the illusion which underlies our primary adaptation, that illusion, self-deception and deception of others is essentially boundless and structureless.

An organism that does not live in the reality of evolution's rules is doomed. Homo sapiens is the only organism that is testing that proposition in a big way. In my view we are riding the power of our adaptation to an end just as a “mindless” creature would. The human “world” may go the way of the many that failed in its ultimate adaptation to life. But I am not obliged to be what the present madness defines, I am in the business of discovering how to be a member of my own species in the fullest sense possible so that my life might account for something in the great biological playground the biosphere. And I am in the business of trying to make what little I've learned available to my tribe -- those who feel the same impulse. I, we, will not remake the world; the larger world is a shot from the cannon and headed to the target, an explosive shell unrecallable. But we can remake our lives to more closely resemble the creature evolved to life on earth. We will be following in the footsteps of the millions upon millions of our hominid forebears who were promised nothing by their births other than the chance to be a member of their own species in the struggle of life. It is this basic promise that is denied by our illusions and consequent deception, all resulting in far too many poor human-like shells filled with feelings of not being right in this body and world and, ultimately, very little else.

And to end, I return to what should be seen now as trivial, albeit the daily fair of examples of honesty. The questions of value of a painting and the knowing addition of dangerous chemicals to food are deceptions that disappear when the illusions created by acquisitiveness are dispelled, when the standard of adaptation to long term survival within the limitations of the biosphere are recognized as substantive and not utopian. The human generated world of illusion will not change, but each of us can make the decision to begin to act in ways that will support honesty in our own lives as a necessary precondition for being a member of the human species. Illusion and deception have a place in a fully functioning relationship with the environment as part of the hominid adaptation, but are destructive of the species when environmental relationships are lost.