Life is a journey that each being embarks upon but does not choose. There is a certain amount of compassion due to all beings as a result of this fact. This arbitrariness at the core of our existence means we are just getting by as best we can given the circumstances we find ourselves thrown into.
As placental mammals, we go from non-being to being inside our mother's body. If nothing intervenes, our maturation follows a common trajectory. From conception, we move on to infancy, childhood, adolescence and, when bodily growth is completed, adulthood. During this journey, whether we wish to or not, we accumulate thoughts and behaviours. We participate in the act of self-creation. We acquire a set of strategies that we think will help us to live in a way that seems best to us at any given time. We do not take this journey of self-creation alone. Around us swirl people, ideas, cultures, nations, fashions, animals, plants, ecosystems, planets, stars and a practically infinite universe. Many things around us will inform, constrain, and be affected by how we choose to live.
In coming into existence, we step into grand stories that flow all around us. The grandest of these are the cosmic and evolutionary stories, played out over billions of years. Among our more specific stories is the evolution of consciousness, of the Universe's ability to know itself, something that, as humans, we may be the highest expression of. We also step into the grand human story, and many other greater and lesser stories contained within our complex history. By entering these stories, we become a character within them, as these stories in turn become part of us.
Human culture has also been evolving, linked with the evolution of our consciousness, for millions of years. Over this time, significant cognitive shifts have happened, where our culture and thinking became noticeably more complex. Cognitive shifts were often related to cultural, technological or intellectual innovation. The pace of our cultural evolution appears to only increase over time, until the present day, when the pace of change seems exponential. The store of human knowledge becomes ever more vast, and our access to it ever easier. The evolution of humanity's collective consciousness has immense consequences for our world.
Each being steps into the grand story of life anew and becomes part of its unfolding. We begin as something of a blank slate on which a new character will be written. Each of us must take the same journey of emerging from nothingness to then learn about and understand our world. We do this through observation, imitation, and trial and error, which interact with our biological predispositions and constraints. Complex species also have communal knowledge systems, deliberate processes of teaching and learning. The accumulation of knowledge is a primary determinant of an individual's chances of surviving and thriving.
Humans have an advanced ability to collate, remember and process our informational landscape. This ability improves each individual's chance of survival, once they have matured enough to exhibit and use it. Humans are what is called an altricial being, one born helpless and dependent on others, usually their parents, for survival. For most of the human story, it was the fitness and intelligence of the family and group we were born into that heavily influenced our chances of surviving and thriving. Now the wider collective heavily influences that survival as well.
The idea of the individual standing alone against the world is even less true in the modern world than it ever was. The hard edge of evolutionary fitness has softened for humans. Many humans are born and survive today who would not have historically. Our society assists with most of the duties surrounding child-rearing, including trying to ensure a child's survival, health and learning. Our societies, composed of many highly specialised individuals, are able to provide children with opportunities to survive and thrive that their family social circles could not hope to achieve. The raising of children was always a collective endeavour, but in some ways it is now even more so.
Collective intelligence, the group sharing and application of knowledge, has enabled humans to become a kind of super being. We still tend to lionise individuals who invent ideas and technologies, but this is largely to mistake the trees for the forest. Technological innovation emerges from our collective consciousness more than any individual. Einstein is perhaps the archetype of a unique and revolutionary thinker. As impressive as Einstein was, it would not have been possible to conceive of his ideas had he lived even a hundred years earlier. His ideas required a human culture which had built the intellectual foundations on which Einstein could base his revolutionary ideas. It is also reasonably certain that if Einstein had decided to concentrate on being a patent clerk, the scientific community would have discovered his ideas in due course. Great thinkers may push human knowledge forward years, decades, perhaps even centuries, but few, if any, can transcend their cultural context. In some intellectual areas, to push the cultural envelope too far can even become a liability. Stray too far from the zeitgeist, and others might struggle to comprehend ideas too far beyond their usual paradigms of thought.
An example of how we have built our collective intelligence might be the barb on a fishing spear. We believe that humans, either homo sapiens or Neanderthals, started using spears at least four hundred thousand years ago. For hundreds of thousands of years, spears were used to hunt fish. It was only less than a hundred thousand years ago that we have strong evidence of spears regularly featuring barbs. The innovation of the barb meant that after a fish had been speared, it was less likely to slip off the end of the spear and escape. For hundreds of thousands of years, apparently the majority of people speared a fish, which then wriggled away, and the hunters just thought, "how unfortunate". Once the barb was discovered, however, it quickly spread and, sadly for the fish, remains in use to this day. The invention of the barb was helped by other inventions such as making composite tools out of multiple materials. Just as you couldn't be Einstein in the 13th century, you probably couldn't be Trogg the barb inventor three hundred thousand years ago. Invention is a combination of individual imagination and endeavour interacting with collective knowledge.
The interesting aspect of this for the evolution of knowledge, however, is not the barb itself, but the strategy of the barb. It is the accumulation of abstract strategies that underlie the power of human technology. The barb was a noticeable improvement, allowing less energy to be expended for greater reward. It might seem obvious to us, but beings with very similar mental and physical makeup to ours didn't think of it for hundreds of thousands of years. It might even have been invented by accident, when someone was too lazy to file a small notch off a spear, and then discovered it worked better for this task than a completely smooth spear. However it came to be, once the concept existed, it could be utilised and passed on; it became part of our culture. Perhaps even more importantly, humans could then use the barb as an abstract strategy, on its own or in combination with others. The barb strategy could be mixed with other concepts and used in many contexts far away from streams or hunting. The basic concept of the barb might be combined with other ideas and inventions so that it can help to keep a tent closed, fasten clothing, secure a door, turn a gear, or have countless other applications. It's possible that in our most advanced technologies, something exists based on the very ancient strategy of the barb. Many other animals have the intellectual ability to make and use tools, but humans combine this with a more complex inventive ability. Something in the area of our ability to pattern match, memorise, and think abstractly, as expressed in our tool use, seems to be a human superpower.
Our creation of technology follows an exponential curve. Each new strategy becomes another potentially multipurpose intellectual tool that can interact with all the other tools we have discovered over time. When a new effective technique is developed, people can apply it to other areas. A computer is an idea, but it is also the composite end result of thousands, even millions of ideas stretching back over time.
Human biology has not changed very much for a long time. We might have to go back many hundreds of thousands of years to find someone who, if born into our modern world, would not fit easily into our way of life. The informational and technological landscape our biology inhabits, however, is incredibly different. While human minds remain relatively static in their capabilities, the things that we can conceive of and build are in a constant state of flux. Our informational and technological landscape will no doubt continue to change at a rapid rate. Each person born, therefore, confronts an ever higher summit of human knowledge. Each person thrown into existence must take an ever more complex journey in comprehending the heights of our culture.
Returning to our grand stories, the collective flourishing of humanity is best achieved by ensuring the flourishing of the individuals within it. The process of acquiring and distributing human knowledge is fundamental to these goals. To enable individuals to participate in a lifelong engagement with and furtherance of our cultural landscape requires a robust educational system, one which distributes both information and the intellectual tools necessary to navigate that information. Education has slightly different aims according to the stage of life of each individual. Adults are more likely to need specialised education according to specific interests and goals. For children, education aims to provide a wider grounding of knowledge, including the tools with which to navigate the informational landscape. What children should be taught is highly controversial, and many see education as a means of control rather than liberation. We all have our biases as to whether art, technology, wealth, or philosophy leads to the good life, but we should not limit children too much by our biases. Giving people the freedom to be individuals means our purpose is not to install a specific path for them. Rather, we should instil in each person a broad cultural understanding, from which they can forge their own path, potentially a path better than we can conceive of.
Here, however, is where we come to a major problem that is hindering our collective flourishing. The process by which we have accumulated ideas over time has been imperfect, to say the least. It is not only worthwhile information or technological innovations that we have accumulated, but also outdated, imagined, or bad ideas. The grand pool of human culture has become somewhat polluted. This creates an unstable foundation from which to collectively think about the future. We need to, in some way, refresh many of those ideas that are limiting human progress. By doing so, the hope is to enhance our ability to think and act collectively, to create a more coherent shared vision of ourselves, our world and our goals.
Evolution
The foundation stone for a coherent path forward for humanity is the theory of evolution.
Before the advances in science uncovered by thinkers like Charles Darwin, a relatively coherent worldview wasn't really possible. The true stories of life, consciousness, our world and the universe were hidden from us, even as they flowed all around us. There have been many great thinkers and thoughts over human history, but a somewhat complete picture of the stories within which we were immersed was impossible. Yet, we exist in cultures where many of the primary motivating schools of thought are still ancient ideas. Many people's deepest motivating philosophies are based on schools of thought that emerged at a time when our wider understanding about many fundamental aspects of our existence was primitive, non-existent or wrong. Many of the people whose identities, incomes or social worlds are based on these ideas are, perhaps understandably, resistant to acknowledging the flaws in their informational foundations. We cannot continue to have our cultural progress limited by individuals who resist positive change, and who do not understand the sunk cost fallacy. This is not to say we should discard all human thought before a certain moment in history. Much should be remembered and even honoured because it has been a key part of the human story; it was a, perhaps essential, part of the path which got us to this place. Simply repeating history for its own sake, however, is not a sensible path forwards. It is worth keeping in mind the Santayana quote, "Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it".
Many things about our world and the human condition have not changed since ancient times, but our knowledge and understanding have evolved enough that clinging to ancient understanding is holding us back. A reckoning should have occurred at moments such as when Darwin published On the Origin of Species. That this didn't happen is largely due to sections of society being invested in the status quo and social order. Many people actively resisted advances in the general understanding because they threatened the foundations of existing power and authority. There are still those who resist these advances for the same reasons, and here we must call out the primary culprits of cultural conformity and religion.
Part of the reason Darwin's ideas were not universally applauded and recognised in his time was because of people's inability to conceive the world differently from how they were raised. The science-based worldview largely assembled during the Enlightenment was such a radical departure from the central tenets of our culture that it took time for even open-minded and intelligent people to properly integrate their ramifications. A change as radical as understanding the creation story of ourselves and all the beings around us, along with our place in the universe, is not something we could immediately integrate into our existing worldview. Indeed, it is doubtful the deeper knowledge we acquired during the scientific revolution could ever be integrated into the general worldview that preceded it. Some parts of that prior worldview have to be discarded, which has only ever been partially done. We have yet to properly integrate the revolutionary understandings of modern science, especially the theory of evolution, into our culture.
As our power and technology continue to increase, we stand at an evolutionary moment for our collective consciousness. As with all evolutionary moments, however, there is nothing inevitable about our survival and reproduction. Indeed, many highly intelligent people believe the most likely path for our species is to bring about its own extinction. The fact that this is even conceivably true is a call to re-examine our species and ourselves. This begins with comprehending the grand stories in which we all flow, and living as if they mattered just as much as our desires do.