Leaders Lagging Behind Realities
The “neural fossilization” of the cultural evolution constructs
Could you imagine Vladimir Putin and Theresa May, Benjamin Netanyahu and Hassan Rouhani, or Xi Jinping and Shinzō Abe calling each other frequently and meeting regularly to discuss projects of bilateral and regional cooperation?
Most probably not. It is the routine practice that hundreds of world’s high ranked politicians are keeping close friendly contacts and solving issues to the benefit of hundreds of millions of people, but the mentioned above seems to be political science fiction.
The reality is both sad and dangerous because any obstacles that prevent the above from taking place represent symptoms of a deep civilizational crisis and of obsolete principles on which the 21st century Human civilization functions.
Is our Human brain fit enough to efficiently operate in the Anthropocene?
The Human brain is a boutique hybrid (digital and analog) intelligence machine that has guided the survival of Homo sapiens into the current Anthropocene. It functions on relentless modeling its environment through recognition of images in space, and recognition of patterns of sound in time. If frequent enough, the images of all components present in our environment that are important to us in terms of survival and advantage, with time get conceptualized in the brain. Homo sapiens is equipped with the most advanced biological intelligence machine — the highest version of Neocortex which has practically unlimited capabilities in inventing new behavior. It does it through designing a very simplified but comprehensive model of our relevant environment, and suggesting a huge diversity of eventual behavior responses. The real-time life, however, is about choosing and materializing only one of them — we do it, and bear the consequences. We are going through this process every instance of our lives, and to make the best final decision for the action to immediately follow, we need accurately and comprehensively updated set of criteria that are in any point of time adequate to the live real-time changes in the environment we are operating within.
The point in time when Homo sapiens emerged — some 300 000 years ago, however, was the only moment in history when the human brain was fully adequate to accomplish its evolutionary mission. The capabilities of this biological organ composed of some 100 billion neurons, weighing 3.3 lbs. and running on 20 (!) W energy were more than enough to create high precision models of reality that was existentially relevant only in its immediate proximity — with no agency active in the space between the object and your eye retina. Ever since that point of time, the accuracy of the primary information about the relevant environment kept declining, causing distortions within the decision-making process and leading to wrong conclusions and responses, for one only reason: people do not respond to reality, but to what they perceive as reality.
First came language — the indispensable instrument of Homo sapiens group survival strategy, with its inherent noise due to every human being building her own interpretation of the words. Even today, if you run the same word through renowned dictionaries like Oxford, Cambridge, Meriam-Webster, Collins, etc., you may find perceptible semantic differences.
Natural languages soon combined with a brain’s feature called “Machiavellian Intelligence” to create a powerful arsenal of manipulation:
“News is politics, and any presence of truth in media news is accidental.” (advice I have been given while in the position of spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and deception:
“If someone tries to persuade you that the cobra in front of you is not a cobra, but a plastic toy, this is not disinformation; this is attempted murder.”
Moreover, with the advance of technology, internationalization and globalization, many events that are important to us and still belong to our relevant environment, became actually taking place thousands of kilometers away from where we physically are — the baseball match for my betting, or the laboratory where a new medicine for my mother’s condition has been recently discovered. Nowadays the nature of communications allows practically any informational contents to be changed before it reaches your retina: you never have enough resources to investigate what happened to your information on its way from the primary event until it reaches your retina — what part of it was changed, erased, supplemented or distorted; DeepFake and FakeNude are some of the latest achievements.
The above all is about individual perspective.
When it comes to our reality of billions of people making individually motivated decisions for how to behave in the shared physical dimensions of planet Earth, however, things become by far more complicated to manage. Life in a group exposes the decision-making process in the Homo sapiens brain to the pressure of two very powerful and usually controversial motivational fields — the very distinct individual self-interest, and the relatively abstract interest of the group which, at the same time, functions for the individual as its only vehicle for survival.
The Anthropogenic Risks of the Point of Midway Disadvantage
The fact that the design of the human brain was finalized before evolution decided that only humans who live in groups can continue the survival adventure, is highly consequential: even if the higher levels of the Neocortex hierarchy allow unlimited playfulness of creativity in art, music, science, and imagination, Homo sapiens lacks the sensory apparatus to detect and identify in unmediated way the features embodied in the constructs of cultural evolution that are relevant to survival and advantage: Unlike “apple” and “snake”, the concepts “democracy” and “dictatorship” do not project on our retina to be easily recognized by the brain as opportunities or dangers. That leaves all the vast field of social sciences densely populated with constructs of unverifiable conceptualization at the higher levels of abstract thinking where broken logical chains remain unnoticeable.
Incapable to design a comprehensive social model for optimizing the feeling of happiness to billions of human beings on the planet, the Human brain resorts to testing randomly generated social paradigms of how human individuals live together. Most of them did not prove viable and were therefore abandoned as unsuccessful experiments — slavery, feudalism, and communism, for example, failed because they neglected the meaning of incentive as fundamental energy resource for the advance of human civilization. Other equally non-productive paradigms, however, still persevere as a result of “neural fossilization” — a long-ago discovered routine that has so many times proved to be the best solution at a given situation. It exists in the brain neural network as a low-threshold configuration of neurons into which the brain is happy to easily slip once it has recognized the situation to be solved as familiar, because, so far, always in its past experience this particular solution has been consecutively assessed as a winning one. How very simple, easy and convenient! In the long run, however, certain deep and essential changes in the nature of the relevant environment evolve into a new reality in a way that the simplistic set of control points used by the brain to identify the problem preserve the visibility of the old situation. In this case the brain could apply automatically its favorite route response, which would lead to totally different and eventually disadvantageous consequences. A good illustration for the neural fossilization is the “Monkey syndrome”
The Point of Midway Disadvantage is the contemporary period in the development of the Human civilization where the achievements of our incessant advance on the technological vector have transformed the Homo sapiens operational environment to the extent where the hypertrophied rigidity of the cultural evolution constructs has turned many of the previously efficient products of the Neocortex into fossils that are no more adequate to the latest dynamic and extremely complex realities of the Anthropocene life.
That includes the mindsets and policies based on strong nationalistic, ethnic, ideological, racial, religious, gender, etc. bias. As a result, billions of brains clotted with outdated constructs of the cultural evolution function in the mode of tribal thinking mass hallucination, thus continuing to block the way towards radical global reforms with the potential to bring more security and sustainable prosperity for all.
