Life, Knowledge and Natural Selection – How Life (Scientifically) Designs its Future – Bill Hall
Studies of the nature of life, evolutionary epistemology, anthropology and history of technology leads me reluctantly to the conclusion that Moore’s Law is taking us towards some kind of post-human singularity. The presentation explores fundamental aspects of life and knowledge, based on a fusion of Karl Popper’s (1972) evolutionary epistemology and Maturana and Varela’s (1980) autopoietic theory of life to show that knowledge and life must co-evolve, and that this co-evolution leads to exponential growth of knowledge and capabilities to control a planet (and the Universe???). The initial pace, based on changes to genetic heredity, is geologically slow. The addition of the capacity of living cognition for cultural heredity, changes the pace of significant change from millions of years, to millennia. Externalization of cultural knowledge to writing and printing increases the pace to centuries and decades. Networking virtual cultural knowledge at light speed via the internet, increases the pace to years or even months. In my lifetime I have seen the first generation digital computers evolve into the Global Brain.
As long as the requisites for live are available, competition for limiting resources inevitably leads to increasing complexity. Through most of the history of life, a species/individuals’ knowledge was embodied in its dynamic structure (e.g., of the nervous system) and genetic heritage that controls the development and regulation of structure. Some vertebrates evolved sufficient neural complexity to support the development of culture and cultural heredity. A few lineages, such as corvids (crows and their relatives), and two largely arboreal primate lineages (African apes and South American capuchin monkeys) independently evolved cultures able to transmit the knowledge to make and use increasingly complex tools from one generation to the next. Hominins, a lineage of tool-using apes forced by climate change around 4-5 million years ago to learn how to survive by extractive foraging and hunting on grassy savannas developed increasingly complex and sophisticated tool-kits for hunting and gathering, such that by around 2.5 million years ago our ancestors replaced most species of what was originally a substantial ecological guild of large carnivores.
What happens next is anyone’s guess.
Slides available here:
