Evolutionary Optimism
“These variables can all be a sigil of our triumph as much as, if not more than, a sign of our downfall.”
The pulsations of pessimism have been growing more powerful as of late.
Countless voices, from those engaged with news cycles to those largely disconnected from global affairs, have seemed to succumb to the increasingly forlorn outlook over a number of variables on the horizon: technology, medicine, nature, culture, media.
This goes beyond the usual suspects of a perpetually spiraling economic crisis and the ever-heightening appetite of war.
It seems that almost everything — from innovations in technology to endeavors of curiosity— has become saturated in a kind of sticky gloom, one that had always seemed cleansable until recently.
It seems that every good has a bad which almost precedes it, while the shadows just keep getting longer.
Don’t get me wrong — I think it’s certainly the case that AI is as dangerous as it is lucrative; that space is being seen as a place to arm rather than one to study and the medical field is ravaged from profiteering complexes; that our innate tendencies of greed have contaminated a lot of the organic soils from which good things should grow.
But despite a lot of my reservations regarding the current state of affairs on many domestic and international issues, I had largely held a baseline of optimism that I could usually maintain in spite of the constant erosion.
Then I interviewed an Albertan man named Mark McCormack, who put a pretty big crack in my rose-colored glasses.
When I had interviewed Mark, he had been on day 24 of a hunger strike that was to take him 28 days in total. Apart from water, there was no food for Mark, as he sought to protest the mounting ‘meta-crises’ of the world.
He’s since completed his protest.
And while I continue to transcribe many portions of the interview, which in itself touches on technology, AI, the deteriorating climate and the exploitation of the public work force — all under a context of their threatening dynamic to our well-being, I couldn’t help but try to match Mark’s pessimism with a challenge.
This culminated into one pivotal question that I had asked, emanating from a point I tend to make to many doomsday sayers: how can it be argued that today is any worse than yesterday?
While certainly a problem from an Orwellian perspective, increasing surveillance and the rise of the public security sector has undoubtedly suppressed a large amount of crime. Even the venerable streetlight has put a massive dent in common transgressions. Consider too the comparatively higher living standards of today; the knowledge we hold over harmful practices or materials; improved architecture, modern medicine, revelations in neurochemistry or genetic sequencing.
While undoubtedly true that variables like corruption or human trafficking remain rampant, are they more prolific than they had been any other day in history? The internet alone has brought a lot of what would previously been unknowable into the open; though far from anything substantively beneficial to our species, modern entertainment media has also worked to expose and teach of us many wrongs done by our kind.
In fact, I would wager that if I could actually send anyone back to any day in history, permanently, most of the days chosen would fall somewhere in the last decade or so.
But Mark had a pretty simple yet powerful answer: the mounting crises of today, as opposed to those of yesterday, affect the entire world, not just isolated pockets or tribes of populations as had previously been the case.
And so I found myself stumped; how could I account for the fact that the whole world does seem more vulnerable given the interconnectivity of politics, policies and peoples alike. AI, pandemics, nuclear war — there are more globally-spanning threats to our continuity than there have been before — this much is true.
Then it occurred to me —these threats in themselves are a direct result of our innovation. As Oppenheimer once said: “The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.”
These variables can all be a sigil of our triumph as much as, if not more than, a sign of our downfall.
To counteract Mark’s argument, I realized that our own evolutionary ambition — deeply encoded within us and prompting us to relentlessly pursue progress— contains any answer ever needed.
“Life as we know it is a dynamic system of all these different molecules playing together and reinforcing one another, keeping the entire system stable and able to resist perturbations, learning about its environment and being creative and curious.” — Michael Wong
Last fall, I had interviewed astrobiologist Michael Wong, author of a theory relating to, as his team terms it, increasing functional information.
Modestly titled On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems, the authors suggest: “that all evolving systems — including but not limited to life — are composed of diverse components that can combine into configurational states that are then selected for or against based on function.”
In essence, they’re proposing something of a fundamental explanation that underpins the evolution of, well, everything.
That everything from apples to moons experiences a progressing complexity and that, under a selective pressure of any kind, evolution is necessitated as a response amongst all constituent parts of any system.
In other words, because a system can sample new configurations in response to an external influence, that system will inevitably grow more complex and evolve.
Human kind is probably the best example of this theory, living true to the adages and truisms regarding those things which don’t kill us.
The takeaway is that everything is learning; every organism and every system is constantly cultivating information about its environment and about its own place within said environment. Cumulative knowledge is the golden variable that spells success throughout nature, and it’s the only thing that seems to undo or counteract the destructive nature of nature.
“Knowledge moves in an ever-expanding upwards spiral, which allows us to see from the higher turns of the spiral our previous knowledge in a broader perspective” — Itzhak Bentov
So yes, nature is constantly engaged in a process of decay — this is the reality of the physical world; and things get disproportionately dark pretty quickly if we overthink this premise.
But the nature of our species, very fortunately, it capable enough to navigate atop a discerning form of consciousness that not only counteracts the inevitable dissolution of all things but also reads between the lines of general happenstance in order to draw meaning from it all; it swims opposite to the natural laws, patterning the nonsense into order and, above all else, meaning.
This meaning in itself is the fertile soil from which optimism grows, even if to an ignorant degree. Ergo, if we begin to lose meaning, we begin to lose optimism.
A new home, a new romance, a new career — these aren’t necessarily adored because they offer us a practical solution to certain problems; they’re revered for what they mean, and whatever existential significance we can squeeze out of them.
Maybe optimism isn’t the right variable that should trickle out of catalyzing meaning, and maybe ignorance is really bliss. Regardless, our conscious agency affords us the privilege of not only seeing and sensing the silver linings but of also deducing them as we please.
That fact, in itself, is worthy of more consideration than it seems to receive.
To read the full interview with Mark (coming soon), visit www.borealism.ca
