The State of Man

Cultural and technological evolution have accelerated at a phenomenal rate for humanity over the last ten thousand years or so. It is harder to quantify the cultural aspects however the technological ones seem to be somewhat exponential in the rate of their growth. Within this time frame biological evolution, as it is understood for other species, has all but stood still. In many ways the changes to our culture and technology are either negating biological evolution or directing its path with alternate conditions where the “fittest” no longer means the same thing. Humanity has been equipped by nature to live much like the stereotypical idea of a cave man. Certainly much of what made cave man an evolutionary success is the foundation of humanities flourishing. The ability to cooperate and coordinate in groups, complete with a good ability to problem solve. Equipped with these tools humanity began to create ecological niches for themselves rather than slowly evolving to suit those around them. Compare the present issues faced by people and the environments in which they live to those faced by the earliest humans. You may be able to find examples of humans which still live in similar ways to their distant ancestors but for the most part, certainly in urban areas there is little overlap in lifestyles. Certainly we still make exception use from our cooperative and reasoning skills however many of the tools nature equipped us with are no longer useful in the same way and some may even be to our detriment.

I do not refer to the physical formation of our bodies for they are a highly functional, well evolved versatile, vehicle for our minds. Our bodies are good all round in terms of physical attributes when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. Other than our brains, the only area in which we could be said to excel over any other species is in dexterity with our opposable thumbs however this is fairly questionable and too tangential to bother discussing. Our jack of all trades bodies suit us perfectly, particularly as we are in the habit of creating environments to suit us and not the other way round. It is our minds that I feel are becoming out dated technology no longer well suited to the environments we find ourselves in.

It is perhaps a little ambitious to call natures greatest accomplishment inadequate, especially given that we do not really understand the working of the brain. As such I cannot call upon any precise scientific data to suggest an inadequacy and will have to make do with observations and common sense. An obvious example to lead with is the ever increasing number of cases of mental illness and similar issues such as depression that afflict humanity. Many dismiss the lower counts of these issues found historically as undiagnosed rather than non existent, and assuredly non-diagnosis would be a factor but as to it being the only one I am less convinced. It may also seem absurd to try and compare the number of instances of mental difficulties in humans with those found in animals, both wild and domestic, but I would contend this is a highly relevant thing to look at. If you can show that humans minds are failing at a rate correlating with technological or cultural evolution and that other wild species have a consistently small (relative to humans) or non-existent rate of mental illness over time then you can be fairly confident in saying that our lifestyles and culture are detrimental to our minds.

To show that an animal's state of mind is comparable to a human with noticeable mental issues is scientifically very tricky. I have encountered domestic animals that act in unusual and atypical ways that could easily be interpreted as animal equivalents of human mental problems. Almost all of those for which I knew the history of had been treated poorly in some way however they would not be eligible to count against the non-human species in our attempt to show that technology and culture are in some way damaging. This is simply because they are domesticated and therefore suffer many of the advantages of our cultural and technological advances. The life of a pet dog is in many ways more removed from that of a wild dog than the life of a modern human is from a cave man. What these troubled domestic animals does give us is the ability to recognize what a mental issue might look like in other animals. Although I have had basically no opportunity to get to know any wild animals, from the many brief observations I have had of them I can say none have appeared to be at all disturbed or atypical in behaviour nor have any appeared alike to the neurotic domestic animals I have encountered. As you can see this is not the most scientific of results, my sample sizes are far too small to assert than humans are madder than wild animals and my methods or simple observation are not confirmable or repeatable. I however find it sufficiently compelling to explore the possible ways in which our lifestyles are detrimental to our minds.

In order to do this we need to pick apart the differences between life as a social hunter gather and life as a modern human. Even when language and tools were fairly well developed early man would have still lived lives almost identical to most other pack animals in the wild. Most of the hours of the day must be spend fulfilling the basic requirements of living. The amount we now need to eat and sleep hasn't changed much however the time taken to obtain suitable places to sleep, security and sufficient food has fallen from nearly all of the spare time to a fraction of the hours in a day. In advancing our technology and expanding our borders we have made surviving easier and more efficient which has given us lots of spare time to fill for which evolution has not prepared us.

Animals are purposive beings which are given impetus to act from this drive. The higher animals have increased awareness and move away from purely reflexive actions. After the purely reflexive life forms such as the single cell organisms and flora you have some instinctive animals such as fish and reptiles. Above this you get birds and mammals which are more considered, actions are based on experience, emotion/instinct, reflex and reason. Humans are of course in this last category and are the most refined example. We not only have the capacity to reason but can also imagine in many dimensions and use this like a pseudo-experience. We have the tool of language to consolidate and communicate meaning while conceptualizing unreal things that aid in imaginative problem solving. Despite all this we are not so far removed from the other birds and mammals and have much the same base motivations towards actions. We still exist to survive and reproduce and this is what still predominantly drives us. One of the big problems faced by man is that we have solved so many of our base drives so that they require very little time investment leaving us with much spare time that is entirely aimless.

We do several things to combat this severing from our natural drives. One is to use our imagination to create things to aim at and give us some meaning where there would naturally be none. Another is to pour all our drive into the few tasks we still have enough overlap with life as a cave man such as raising a family or sexual conquest. Sometimes people will transfer the instinct to hunt for food and provide and protect a family into economic terms and sink their drives into the earning prowess. Some people instead of finding new avenues for their drives or expanding existing ones simply give up and suffer a wide array of mental problems such as depression. The problems caused by our vast improvements to survival efficiency and our removed part in performing them range from boredom, to depression, to lunacy, to a lack of any emotional satisfaction in our day to day routine, to the more subtle effects of misplacing or incorrectly weighting an emotional outlet or source of gratification and purpose.

It would impossible to go into any specific detail regarding these effects as it would need an understanding of the interactions between consciousness, will and emotion to demonstrate any mechanisms in play. I can at least describe the various outcomes caused by our inadequate solutions to the broader problem of having derailed our evolved suitability for life with our improving living conditions. With an over investment, a misplaced one, a derived one or a purely imagined investment in an action to gain cohesion with our animal drives, our emotions and our consciousness we a creating a fragile mental framework that can very easily lead to the state mentioned where we give up on satisfying our drives and sink into apathy, depression or madness. If you gain all your satisfaction from your work and then lose your job you will also lose your purpose in life. If you have decided you exist to be beautiful then the trials of time will wither the soul as well as the body. These are two examples of how it is easy to put too much weight on something you have little control over and that are not in them selves reasons for being alive.

You may be lucky and create a fragile structure to keep you sane, satisfied and happy that is never struck by the events in your life and this will mean you are likely to avoid depression and the like however it does not mean you will be unaffected. By basing ones reason for living on a spurious notion you will be making choices using these false or exaggerated principles. When you make a choice with incomplete, or worse, false information you are liable to often make the wrong one. Defining the wrong choices for an individual is rather subjective but could be reasonably described as a choice that is not in the best interest of the individual making them. The difficulty here is that a life choice made on a false assumption is only wrong when you appreciate the inaccuracy of the assumption. While you still hold it to be true the choice will likely be the right one for you. It is not for me to say that any ones understanding of their purpose in life is wrong, this must be a relative thing. Each person must find their own self consistent framework to act upon. It is not so important to follow any way of life that is preached by others who have found their solution as it is to find a self consistent one that fits you well. A mental framework that is inconsistent in some way is the only way to get around the subjective nature and allow you to assert that it is provably wrong. By acting upon an inconsistent frame work you are effectively playing a game of Jenga with your mind. You reinforce certain ideas you have and put more weight onto the top of the increasingly fragile structure, this means that if it does collapse you will be faced with a much more cataclysmic breakdown. This reinforcement by use entrenches the framework and makes it more rigidly adhered too and harder to regress away from. You are not only making the potential breakdown more severe you are also making it more probable when you act on poor foundations.

To summarise, there are many possible mental frameworks we can build up to guide us in decision making and to give us purpose. These can be divided into two broad categories, those which are inconsistent and those which are consistent. Consistent to does not automatically mean good however, I am sure many of the more abhorrent characters have wholly consistent mental frameworks, they are just far removed from those of socially well adjusted people and are either devoid of morals or take a very odd stance on them. It would not come as a surprise to me to find out, if it were easily measurable, that criminals typically had higher consistency in their mental frameworks. This is in part due to the more primal nature of crime and in part because the life is in some ways less complex than that of socially integrated person. This is not to say that a life of crime is easier, far from it I imagine, just that it has less parameters and subtleties to it. To act on a socially unacceptable yet consistent mental framework has much the same reinforcing and stiffening effect as acting on an inconsistent one however this makes it less liable to collapse in addition to its already low chances due to being consistent. Society creates an environment that does not favour people adopting frameworks far from the norm. For those that do slip through the cracks society tries to force a change by punishing and ostracising certain behaviours. A rigid consistent mental framework can only be brought down by choice and so societies actions make it more in peoples self interest to try and adopt new values and ideals that fit the current social tone. I am digressing again as sociopaths might be a burden to society but it is likely they are less afflicted by the problems being highlighted in this essay.

If we create a hypothetical spectrum of consistent mental frameworks along just one axis and then perpendicular to that we create an overlayed spectrum from inconsistent mental frameworks that is a dimension greater. On these spectra we can say that proximity represents similarities in the frameworks. On this graph there would be most density for any given society around one point near or on the line of consistent frameworks. As this is a bit of a scatter graph to represent the density it would look like a bell dome rather than a bell curve. On the flat part of the bell curve I suspect there would be only a couple of percent at most of the rest of the population however I also suspect that they would fall closer to the line of consistency simply because they are not able to learn and copy from others about them so easily and will have to build the whole framework themselves. It strikes me that this method will lead to a higher rate of consistency. Regardless of this we are not concerned so much about the tiny minority found on the flat of the bell dome. We are concerned about those who fall in the parts of most volume yet who lie off the line of consistency. Normal people with normal values and morals who have not yet had to reconcile their whole belief system and will suffer to some extent if they do.

Presently the solutions to these problems lie in philosophy, theology and psychology as we know too little about the workings of the brain to attempt a medical, genetic or chemical solution. As we are each alone in our quest to find a way of living in a human world with our animalistic reasons for being our best hope is to educate people about this problem. By having the causes straight and the consequences forewarned people will be in the best position to be able to construct their own internal solutions. This does rather lead to the bigger question as to what the purpose of intelligent life is beyond simple survival. This question will be the subject of an upcoming essay “The End Game”and will be a macroscopic partner to the published individual scale article “The Meaning of Life”. When society has a specific purpose it creates an environment where more people can engineer that purpose into themselves and as a result will be happier, more grounded, more robust and saner people than those living in an aimless society. By educating people about how the mind works we can put them in good stead to make themselves sound minded individuals but if we lived in a purposive society we are set to have most people being sound minded from the outset. Purpose does not have to be found within but can also diffuse in from the outside making this an issue for society as well as the individual.

A lack of alignment of ones natural drive for life and ones lifestyle is not the only problem that is a result of the workings of the brain. Our imagination can be a great aid in problem solving, making choices and in the creation of things however it can also become a burden on us, like a tumour growing out of control and trying to dominate the whole being. This is manifest in our worrying about things or in obsessive compulsive tendencies where we try and control all things we have been able to imagine. It can make people into nervous wreaks unable to do anything for fear that their imaginings will become realities. The most afflicted people live a struggle where by they are perpetually trying to fight back the overwhelming tide of their imagination with the limited actions of the body or is some cases even reason. This however is not a social problem in the same way as it is not strictly caused by how we live. I could try and argue that it is inconsistent mental frameworks that lead to this kind of behaviour however I have no reason to think this other than it is a neat answer, I have no evidence to suggest this is the case of any kind and wouldn't even know where to start in trying to prove the theory either way. What this and other foibles of the human mind not directly onset by social changes show more than anything else is that we don't know very much about how the mind works. Consciousness, emotion and the brain itself should be one of the major avenues of medical and more general scientific research as it is so little understood and so important to our well being. I believe psychotherapy to be of great benefit to people and a worthy pursuit however in analogous terms it feels like having to perform an operation on yourself in a dark room while given only verbal pointers from a trained surgeon. Our other avenue of defence against mental issues are drugs however these do nothing to cure the causes and only help in suppressing symptoms.

With the internet and computing we are entering a new age of removal and isolation that seems likely to further many of the concerns discussed in this essay. As we continue to improve our environment we must work to keep our minds up to speed. Evolution has been left standing with its pot luck-by the numbers approach to our reason, language, cooperation and imagination. With our cultural and technological advances we have left evolution standing still in our wake, the price we must pay for this velocity of change is finding our own solutions for those that evolution used to do for us. Our approach thus far is to ignore the evolutionary aspect and focus on correcting individuals, be it with anti depressants, therapy, laser eye surgery fertility treatment and so forth. This is a good approach in terms of increasing quality of life within a society but used in isolation will make things worse in the long run as classic evolution if further bypassed. Ideally we want to find ways of not treading on the toes of evolution while still increasing the quality of life for individuals. Not too much further down the line of this tangent we reach eugenics which is not at all the intended scope of this essay. It does tie in again a little with my mention of the upcoming essay “The End Game” in that this problem if looked at from far enough out needs not one but two solutions. It is not just how is this problem caused and how do we solve it but also the very important question; to what end are we solving it? With the eye and reproduction it is fairly clear cut, we understand how they work and can easily identify why and how they aren't working. As such you are able to correct not only with glasses or surgery but also you are able to identify what genes affect eye sight giving the possibility of solutions for the long term too. With problems regarding consciousness we don't really know what the working model looks like and so find it much harder to realign problem cases, both for individuals and for the species. If it it our lifestyles in part causing many of the various mental issues it is imperative we get a better understanding of the mind so as to get longer term solutions. It would also inevitably help to get better immediate solutions for individuals at the same time. As it stands, with stab in the dark therapy, generic suppressing drugs and an ever more wonderful yet removed society we are set to become quite a lot more mentally unstable