The human species' greatest threat

Saturday, March 23, 2019


The human species faces a number of threats that could damage civilization or, in the worst case, lead to extinction. A major nuclear war would at least significantly damage civilization. At least hundreds of millions of people would die. Polluting human activity could initiate a chain reaction that leads to a toxic environment and possibly human extinction. Various climate change episodes that caused mass land animal extinctions are known, e.g., anoxic events and the Permian-Triassic extinction event or Great Dying of about 252 million years ago. Given incomplete human knowledge, it is possible that human activity could trigger such an event without human awareness until it is too late to save the species.

If humans do wind up damaging or destroying modern civilization or even annihilating the human species, the ultimate cause would necessarily come from some sort of human behavior that is at least theoretically avoidable. The question is, what is mankind's greatest survival threat?

This discussion excludes threats that humans simply cannot affect or prevent, e.g., a mass extinction caused by eruption of a supervolcano.

The human cognition threat: From a cognitive and social science point of view, the greatest threat lies in the nature of human cognition and the irrational politics it engenders. That directly reflects human biology. In turn, that directly reflects the intellectual firepower that evolution endowed the human species with. Whatever mental capacity humans have as individuals and when acting in groups or societies, it was undeniably sufficient to get humans to where we are today.

The unanswered question is whether what evolution resulted in is sufficient to survive our technology and ability to kill ourselves off.

Under the circumstances, humanity's greatest threat lies in the psychology of being human. The very nature of human sentience and the individual and group behavior that flow therefrom are the seeds of human self-annihilation. If, when and why the seeds might sprout are open questions. Nonetheless, the seeds are real and viable.

Within the last century, research from cognitive, social and other relevant branches of science proved that all humans are driven mostly by our unconscious minds, which are intuitive-emotional-moral. In terms of politics and religion, output from our unconscious minds are not mostly fact- and logic-based. Powerful unconscious biases heavily affect what little we wind up becoming consciously aware of. As a consequence, we are not primarily driven by objective fact or logic. Instead, (i) false perceptions of reality or facts, and (ii) conscious thinking (reason or common sense) that is heavily influenced by powerful unconscious biases drives thought, belief and behavior.

Although we are sentient and conscious, unconscious (intuitive-emotional-moral) mental bandwidth or thinking is 100 million to 100 billion times more powerful than conscious thought. For better or worse, the human mental constitution dominated by unconscious intuitive knowledge and thought was sufficient for modern humans to survive and dominate.

None of that is a criticism of humans or their intellectual makeup. Those are objective facts based on modern science.

That biology applies to politics and it always has. In other words, politics is mostly irrational and based on false information, conscious thinking (common sense) that is heavily biased by unconscious personal beliefs and morals and evolutionary biases that all humans share.

Misinformation is easy to acquire and very hard to reject, especially when it rejecting it undermines personal ideology, belief or morals. Often or usually, there is insufficient information or situations are too complex or opaque for true objectivity. The unconscious human mind nonetheless has to act in the face of that. In their 2016 book Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce responsive Governments, social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels summarized the human condition in politics like this:

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

All modern societies operate under some form of government and political system. What nations, societies, groups and individuals do and don't do is governed by human biology. That is mostly governed by our heavily biased, unconscious perceptions of reality (facts) and thinking. That irrationality, disconnection from reality and associated group behavior, including a lack of empathy toward outsiders, is where the greatest threat to the human species resides.

Questions: Is humanity's greatest threat the imperfect cognitive and social biology that underpins politics? If it is, can our weak, usually deceived and misinformed conscious minds do anything to change the status quo? Or, as some cognitive and social scientists at least imply, are humans destined to never rise much above their innate cognitive and social biology, leaving the fate of the human species up to irrational biology?

B&B orig: 8/16/16