I’ve been dancing around some new themes that haven’t entirely come into focus (and might never), but I’ll try to pull some of it together in this post. I apologize for a pattern of putting out half-chewed perspectives, but that’s my meat-brain just doing its best.
I’ve written many lines admonishing human supremacy, bashing brains as limited organs, and cautioning against aggrandizing notions of transcendent consciousness. I’ve praised the genius of Life—all the way “down” to microbes. I’ve called modernity various unflattering things: a brain fart; a cancerous mode of living that has no long-term place on this planet; and most recently linked it to video-game style virtual reality. Let’s see if I can manage some synthesis.
Brain Obsession
First, why have I been fixated on brains lately? Besides obviously being a zombie—having cast off any claim to a soul (yet another brain-fabrication, after all)—consider these facts:
- Our brains endow us with uniquely powerful capabilities beyond those of other species—evidence abounds in the form of cities, spaceflight, and a host of other practices.
- It is easy to twist this undeniably-exceptional quality into one of superiority/supremacy.
- Brain worship pervades our culture; the entirely accurate term “meat-brain” is offensive to many; too few stress the limitations or downsides of brains.
- Brains are where mental models are made, and mental models are guaranteed to be incomplete accounts of the complex world.
- Modernity would not happen without exceptional brains, and since modernity operates like an ecological disease, turbo-brains bear significant responsibility—possibly for a sixth mass extinction.
Of course, I’m not the only one obsessed with brains. Modernity as a whole is too, but from a different, more fawning and self-flattering angle. Cultural teachings offer unwavering praise for our mental capacities, innovative potential, and transcendence above the “dumb” community of life.
The Escape
The almost-inevitable result is that we tend to retreat into the commodious brain. We live in our heads. We take refuge. We construct virtual worlds disconnected from ecological reality, then treat those temporary fictional constructs as the primary reality—including consciousness itself. We appear to be the only animal that does this—at least so fully. As a consequence, we’ve lost touch with 95% of who we are—to the point that we don’t actually know what we’re doing, or how we fit in this world. We’re overthinking it. The answers won’t be manufactured in our disconnected brains: we need to take cues from the (older and wiser) more-than-human world.
Our level of mental awareness itself becomes a problem. We mistake this awareness for “us,” even though it’s just a small component of the whole. We turn our gift of awareness—grossly incomplete as it is—into a soul. While more than negligible, brains do not represent most of our mass, metabolism, or genetic coding. One way to see this is that we share one-third of an amoeba’s genes, or 60% of a banana’s. The brain is not a dominant piece, even though it seems that way to our overwhelmingly-biased brain-dwelling selves.
Not only do we place extreme emphasis on the brain as our defining feature, we also go all-in on mental constructs as defining ourselves. We may identify strongly with a nation, a religion, a profession, and/or even a sports team. We spend enormous amounts of time working in modernity-serving jobs to make money. All these things—nations, religions, money—are fictional and transitory fabrications by and for brains. Yet we mistake these artifices for “the world.”
Our constructs are increasingly detached from ecological reality. But just because ecological connections have been banished from our brains doesn’t mean they’ve gone away. Douglas Adams describes the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast as being so stupid that all you have to do to foil its intent to eat you is cover your eyes. It figures that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Putting this flawed logic ahead of direct sensory input is not actually too far from our complete devotion to the flawed logic of modernity: if we can’t see the primacy of ecological relationships, then: poof!—they may as well not exist. If we’ve come this far in an ever-increasing state of ecological ignorance, clearly we’re doing something right and can extend the same approach into a fantastic technological future. What hasn’t failed yet becomes, by definition, fail-proof.
Meanwhile, mounting pressures are poised to bite back, patiently and dispassionately dealing with a species living beyond long-term sustainability. Remember: unsustainable translates to failure, whose judgment is dispensed in the court of ecology.
Other Ways of Knowing
We are so completely held captive by our own brains that the phrase “other ways of knowing” is alien and even nonsensical to us. The assumption is that knowing happens in brains, period. Any other form of “knowing” can’t be, you know, actual knowing, then, can it?
But brains are relative newcomers on the planet—especially the human model. For eons prior, lots of knowing was (and still is) going on. Electrons know they are attracted to protons. Two deuterium atoms fusing to helium at the sun’s center know that 2 + 2 = 4 (they get it right every single time, and it matters). But more to the point, Life knows how to operate, and perform feats that absolutely elude and baffle our brains. The community of life has other ways of knowing how to live that are time-tested and powerfully successful (i.e., sustainable). In fact, we’re the ones who are confused about how to live—because we have developed a staggering over-reliance on brains that are not constrained to run on an ecologically-wise operating system.
We dismiss other animals as dumb. Plants are even worse than dumb: mere vegetables! Because their ways of knowing aren’t cerebrally-based, our biased attitude is to discount them. A dumb moth is helplessly attracted to the porch light. A deer might stand transfixed in a road staring at an oncoming car’s headlights. While on lights, a sea turtle hatchling might mistake a streetlight for the moonlit ocean, and head the wrong way to its premature death. A bird might make its last flight straight into a window at full speed. A wide variety of animals fall victim to our traps: crabs, fish, mice, rabbits, and more. Not a single one is smart enough to use money or legally own property (though I’d call that genius). It’s easy to make fun when animals fail to “get with our program.”
Note that these examples introduce novel elements outside of an animal’s ecological (evolved) context. Within their context, they are absolute geniuses! Let’s try playing the reverse game: putting us outside our context and seeing how we like it.
To a bat, it’s hilarious that you could walk face-first into a brick wall in the dark. How utterly dumb! To a penguin, it’s inconceivable that you’d be too dense to pick out your own child among a wailing crowd of thousands simply by their cries. To a fish, not only are you capable of drowning in water of almost any depth, but you are oblivious to electrical impulses from the movements of predatory fish around you. To a dog, the fact that you can’t smell your way home makes you a total bonehead. Birds note that you’re so directionally-challenged that you are prone to walking in circles in woods or a fog—ignorant of the magnetic field that pervades their awareness. To an amoeba, your lack of ability to perceive chemical gradients is unthinkably insane. To a tree, it’s clear you don’t know the first thing about when its safe this year to put out leaf buds, or how to negotiate the delicacies of nutrient exchange with a mycorrhizal network. These plants and animals know a boatload of tricks, about which we haven’t the foggiest clue. The proof is in the pudding.
You see, brain-thought is only one of many ways to be clever and amazing. But it’s the one to which we assign primary—or even sole—value. Is it a coincidence that we elevate the feature at which we excel? We shamelessly toot our own horn, and then add insult to injury by using this feature that sets us a bit apart to amplify our apart-ness—unhelpfully. It’s the billionaire’s kid incapable of having a conversation without reminding you how much money they have and what that allows them to do. It’s no way to make the kind of friends that are worth having.
The examples above touch on “other ways of knowing.” Brains actually often get in the way of these more reliable, instinctual behaviors. But such instincts are not absent for us. We don’t learn to chew, swallow, walk, run, smile, laugh, or love by careful instruction. One window into this is when someone speaks of doing something “from the heart,” they’re really saying: “by means other than cerebral.” All life possesses deep wisdom in many forms, down to the molecular level—time-tested to survive as amazing beings.
Breaking Captivity
I think the secret to escaping our cerebral escapism is to appreciate that brains are just one imperfect tool, and just one aspect of who we are. We can be grateful to have impressively-versatile headpieces, but also be aware of their limitations and—more importantly—their collateral dangers.
Just as an animal with razor-sharp teeth knows to be careful not to harm itself in grooming, or a hummingbird knows not to get stuck like a dart, or well-armed predators know to hold back during play, we might recognize our brains as lethal weapons capable of inflicting harm to ourselves and to the whole community of life, unwittingly. Without a deliberate check, our brains can turn us into a rogue species (modernity as a case in point).
Rather than retreating into the world of brains and their fancy constructs—responsible for initiating a sixth mass extinction that would wipe us out, too—we ought to break free of their grip. We need to recognize the artificial elements they create that put us out of context. Do we prioritize nation, money, religion, and other constructs? Or do we prioritize Life itself, and the ecological whole of which we are a lucky minority member? What do we fight for? Futile preservation of fictions (nations, money) or the community of life (ultimately the winning team)? This is a present concern right now as the U.S. government reels from an auto-immune attack on its own body. Is preservation of a destructive fantasy justified?
Most are satisfied living in their virtual realities—fighting to maintain transitory and harmful fabrications. Those are the invisible bars of our cage, as Daniel Quinn put it. To break free, we have to realize that it’s a stunt; a sham; a fiction; a cancer that has no lasting place. It comes out of our brains, which can be very wrong about how the world works—initialized in ignorance for having missed billions of years of painstaking preparation. I’m not saying we can drop modernity overnight. It will take generations, but ours can start the journey and pass the baton to those who follow.
What’s real, lasting, and will cradle us into the future if we don’t thwart it are biophysical realities, ecological interrelationships vetted by evolution, and community at many levels—including family, locals, and the more-than-human world.
Postscript
Distrustful as I am of brain-products, I find myself internally reacting to ideas, concepts, proposals, or counter-arguments with something like “Oh yeah? Did that come out of your brain?” Aware of the “pot calling the kettle black” phenomenon, I might offer the following distinction or asymmetry. Yes, I also am availing myself of a brain, but—unusually—to advocate distrust of its products and looking beyond human mental constructions for guidance: physics, ecology, the community of life, etc. I find myself on familiar ground as a physicist: not fabricating the rules, but asking nature what rules it obeys, then being a powerless mouthpiece. This case is little different. It’s less about rank speculation and conjuring fancy feats of cognition than it is about listening carefully and downplaying mental constructs. Less mansplaining and more openness to the world beyond the brain—which turns out to be the vast majority of the universe. It’s about humility, and giving up the self-appointed title as masters of the planet.
The basic assumption presented here, that we need to use our brains differently, is wrong. The human brain has been roughly the same for 300,000 years and it's only recently that this brain has enabled modernity and its depredations. Prior to the last several hundred years, our brains allowed us to live on the earth without destroying it, so what has changed?
Fossil fuels. Modernity is not a product of the human brain alone, otherwise it would have appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is only the combination of brainpower and lots of surplus exogenous energy that allowed modern industrial cultures to exist. Take away the energy from fossil fuels and humans are relatively harmless on a global scale. Sure, they can muck up local areas, but so can most other species.
It's not the brain or the way we use it that's the problem, it's the scale of the power made available by abundant energy supplies. We don't need to change how our brains work, we just need to power down. Fortunately, that's coming fairly soon, whether we want it or not.
Fossil fuels have been present in the ground for all of human existence, but our patterns of thought and behavior made them essentially irrelevant until more recently. We didn't go from 300,000 years of hunter-gatherer lifestyle straight into 200 years of fossil fuel craze. Something big changed between 300,000 years ago and 200 years ago. As chance would have it, the geometric mean of those is about 8,000 years. As I see it, the dramatic transition was from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, which brought cities, market economies (money), and made lifestyles almost unrecognizably different from the far longer 290,000 years prior. Fossil fuels amplified this trend-in-progress tremendously, yes. But the pattern of thought (how we defined ourselves, our stories, our perceived destiny) had already shifted seismically.
The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture was significant, but "patterns of thought" can't destroy the entire natural world like we are doing today. That can only be accomplished with access to fantastic amounts of amplifying energy, which we still get mostly from fossil fuels.
I still contend that agriculture without fossil fuels would not have done enough damage over a large enough area to precipitate mass extinctions and extreme climate change. One key piece of evidence for this is the remarkable stability in atmospheric CO2 ppm over the last 10 thousand years. Ice cores show that it scarcely moved from 280 ppm until the last 200 years. This shows how remarkably stable the carbon cycle was, even as agricultural techniques swept over the earth.
It may even be that land use changes by humans kept CO2 concentrations from falling, as happened during other interglacials, preventing another glaciation, so I'm not saying that agriculture had no effect on the ecosphere, just not enough to be really damaging on a planet-wide basis. That is, unless you think that extending Holocene climate stability and preventing another ice age was really damaging.
I'm sure that staying with hunting and gathering would have been a safer choice, even if that had meant much of the planet's life would have been scraped away by ice sheets and glaciers. And maybe it was agriculture that enabled humans to develop the skills to use fossil fuels in the first place, but now that fossil fuels are almost gone, agriculture will soon be harmless again. I therefore think small scale agrarianism and pastoralism can work as either a bridge back to hunting and gathering or harmlessly stick around for as long as humanity does (or as long as the climate permits).
I don't have a choice to go back to hunting and gathering. Like many people living now, I'm dependent on products of civilization (like medicine) to survive. Selfish? Yes, that's because I'm the only one in this brain, and I happen to like it.
I am my pattern of thought. I am not ashamed of it. I don't think we can come to any 'safer choices' by rejecting the capabilities of what we can do with sustained, large scale, generation-long reason, observation and discussion combined with tradition, religion, and nature. I'm concerned that aiming for a life before agriculture does just that.
The other issue here isn't just convincing me, although I'm remarkably obtuse. There are more than eight billion people here, and all of the people make some sort of decision in this discussion. Eight billion people, who are intrinsically biased to selfishness by our senses alone. A large number of them appear to who think they have better or more pressing things to worry about than the future of the planet. I don't think any of them can consider returning to those patterns of though.
Me? No. Most of the people I know can't. Most of the others won't. In a moral argument for all of my selfish compadres, I have a hard time working towards that goal. That goal is capably argued here, however. I am grateful.
Thanks,
Steve
I see where you're coming from, but the problem I have with this view is that well before fossil fuel use became common we were on a road to overrunning and stripping the planet. The UK was denuded, and Europe largely so. Rainforests were beginning to be slashed for timber. Human population was growing at 0.4% per year around 1850 under non-fossil agriculture. At this rate, it would reach 8 billion 500 years later (2300). Slower without the accelerant of fossil fuels, but still a planetary threat. As population growth rate had a history of increasing to that point, and science new on the scene, it is likely the growth rate would continue to climb, shortening the fuse. Of course, this is precisely the set of conditions that led to the adoption of fossil fuels anyway.
Thinking patterns really do matter. The perceived separation from nature that accompanied agriculture ought not be brushed aside just because it's not obvious or discomforting. It was seismic, and had what I would call inevitable consequences. Wouldn't it be nice to have the counterfactual of what would have happened without this shift? Wait, maybe we do: people who did not follow the agricultural path (thinking differently) did not embark on planetary-scale ecocide (and have millions of years of proof, to our culture's 10,000 years of accumulating disaster).
Good points, but let's take a look at another "counterfactual": what would the earth be like if everyone remained an agrarian peasant, producing only a little more food than needed for the people who produce it?
We see examples of this in many places in the Global South, from sub-Saharan Africa to New Guinea. They are able to stay within regional carrying capacity and do it with minimal global consequence (net CO2 emissions per capita, for example, are negligible).
And 1850 is well into the process of global industrialization. Synthetic fertilizer may not have been available, but industrialization was key to the expansion of transportation, markets and farm implements that made agriculture so destructive.
The substitution of coking coal (developed in 1709) for wood-based charcoal was just as important as the invention of the heat engine for the development of industry. I think industrialism would have been self-limiting without either of those developments, the evidence for which is the denuding of the forests of the Old World you mention. Once you run out of wood, you run out of iron.
Note the chart of iron production below: iron and steel are the foundation of industry and fossil fuels allowed their exponential increase. Note the gradual decline of iron production in the 1600s until coke began substituting for charcoal in the early 1700s.
The rise in the production of iron around 1550 was due to the prior introduction of the blast furnace and the development of iron cannons. All this iron was produced using wood charcoal.
The introduction of the heat engine allowed the production of coal and iron to promote each other's increase in a dramatic positive feedback evidenced by the rapid increase in iron production beginning in the late 1700s. In the fifty years between 1775 and 1825, production went from 50,000 tons per year (enough for two cast iron skillets per person) to 500,000 tons, a ten-fold increase.
Iron and steel production would have been very much smaller without fossil fuels. Little enough would have been produced that many nascent industries would have been still-born. Without fossil fuels, England and Wales would likely have remained pre-industrial.
We'll know whether my surmise is correct after the end of the fossil fuel age. If another industrial age is able rise out of the ashes without any jump-start from fossil fuels, we'll know I am wrong. I don't think it will happen. And without industrialism, humans would have a very hard time effecting a global environmental catastrophe like we're in now, even if they still grow food.
I am not sure if escaping 'cerebral captivity' might mean imprisoning Nature in our flawed assumptions of assumed collective perfection. To cite examples, animals are known to have hurt each other in play, and hummingbirds frequently impale themselves on the spiked protection of plants. Bats use ultrasound to track down bugs.
What I think is a real problem, and a rather common one, is attempting to reconnect with nature by making it more human, rather than us more natural. Implying or assuming that they have a human style 'consciousness' seems kind of limiting, although it's an easy trope to fall into.
Human thought is pretty easy to find. I'd rather learn what the animals and plants are experiencing from their perspective. If they have the time, interest, and ability to let us know.
Excellent point. I do not imagine non-human animals to literally think in the way I suggested. It was more a device to highlight disconnects, written in a language human readers might understand. Neither could I write a faithful version of non-human reaction, nor could readers follow. Are humans more animals or non-human animals more human? The question rings false for me: we are all animals made of the same stuff and sharing enormous heritage. But human brains are limited to human language and human terms, inevitably putting a heavy bias into our expressions.