Don't forget the main component = our individual will <evolution and the operations of markets are the twin invisible hands which guide our lives to an extent most of us scarcely comprehend. > Sure, we are stuck within evolution and markets too. But we can do a lot of choosing and thinking.
< Could there be an invisible evolutionary hand at work here? One which calculates that the loss of one life is better from an evolutionary perspective than the maiming or death of several soldiers in the prime of life?>
That's normal. There's a tendency to think in individual terms in non-tribal societies, but maximizing the gene success is where the action is, and altruism is part of that deal.
Us and we includes me. It's us versus them. Winner takes all.
That's how it has always been. Now the 'us' is becoming global with genetic limits no longer stopping at a mountain range, river, ocean or desert.
Markets have moved beyond borders. So have breeding programmes. It's increasingly a 6 billion person global village in the most fantastic real-time experiment in biological history with the next stage of sentience having already lifted off from the biological realm into cyberspace.
Evolution of consciousness has barely begun. Humans were just the end-state of the natural wet-chemistry realm of It's development.
In just a few decades, the cyberspace revolution has gathered steam and is a bigger deal than everything, not just compared with the industrial revolution, but bigger than everything ever invented, bigger than the invention of humans and on a par with the invention of DNA. Bigger than that really as DNA could only produce us - which isn't very impressive. And took a billion years to do it.
Quantum computing and cyberspace are a major punctuated equilibrium boot-strapping leap right out of the wet-chemistry process limited to temporal material ephemeral lives into an ethereal world of photons, electrons, sensors, transducers, and semiconductors.
Evolution has had its day.
What is strange is how everyone just goes about their business as though nothing is happening. A vast Frankenstein monster is being born. Ted Kaczynski could see it coming, sort of. I'm in favour of it as I don't see it as malevolent. It's also highly profitable and useful in a symbiotic way. Provided I don't annoy It.
It's funny to watch humans playing out their silly little national tribal alpha male territorial dominance hierarchy dramas. They are unaware of what I am busily producing.
Mqurice |
