I conjecture that our motivation to influence political direction is driven by what we individually value.  And our values are driven by our beliefs and what I will call subliminal goals and fears.  I have observed that we make value judgements based on goals and fears of which we may not be cognitively aware.  And the reason we see so much controversy in politics is because we do not share the same fears and goals.  By bringing those goals and fears out of the subliminal and stating them out right we can better understand ourselves and evaluate the legitimacy of our fears and goals.  And possibly (but not probably) make better decisions.

We humans spend an excessive amount of emotional capital debating morality and political direction.  But to what end?  Clearly there is an evolutionary advantage for humans to protect culture and cultural moral values.  We are social beings and our cultures have served us well.  Some of our cultures have helped us to develop moral values which have resulted in the successful propagation of our species.  However, some cultures fail and go extinct.  Cultures, like species must necessarily adapt and change to environmental conditions or risk extinction.  Ironically this leads us to the logical conclusion that it is not possible for one culture or cultural set of values to persist indefinitely.  Those that fail to adapt will die, and those that adapt have changed. Logically one might conclude, there is not one universal moral code to determine what is right and what is wrong.  Rather there are morals that benefit the successful propagation of the human species in particular environments at given times.

But there is something more sinister going on here.  While we humans are sufficiently preoccupied with the importance of our moral concerns and how these impact us as groups and individuals, none of our concerns matter.  Because evolutions is fundamentally about the propagation of genes not species.  In as much as a species can successfully propagate genes, the species will continue to survive.  If a species fails to serve the propagation of the genes, the genes will have no reason to serve the needs of the species.

The genetic machinery behind the game of evolution is only about the competition among genes.  Species are merely and ends  to these means.  As a species, humans are slaves to the need for our genes to propagate.  Our genes drive our sexual and social behavior.  Our successful genes serve us as an organism to protect us against pathogens and keep us fit an healthy so long as we are capable of reproduction.  As we age and stop reproducing there are no remaining selection pressures to keep us healthy.  And so our bodies begin to deteriorate.  It’s not pretty.  But it’s not about us, it’s about our genes.

We humans are unique as a species in that we are presumably the only species on the planet capable of understanding our own evolution.  Our technology is progressing to the point where we may one day be able to free ourselves from the slavery of our genes.  Through biotechnology, nanotechnology and cybernetic advance in machine intelligence it may one day be possible for humanity to evolve into an organism which is served by memes and genes rather than the current paradigm.

I suggest that future of humanity currently stands on the edge of a knife.  On one side we may reproduce and consume ourselves out of a viable planet and ecosystem.  Eventually going extinct like so many species before us and taking many other species with us.  On the other side, the technology of human civilization may create a new cybernetic arms race that will leave biological humans obsolete and lead to our eventual extinction.

If human civilization is to succeed into the distant future we will first have to understand the many complexities in the evolution of biological and cybernetic systems.  We will need to define and share common goals that are both sustainable and achievable.  And we will have to resist convergence and expand our habitation to more than one planet.  If we can navigate this delicate maze of complexity, it may just be possible for us to be the first species to transcend our own evolution.

Using similar arguments I will also conjecture that any alien species we would ever encounter will most likely be similarly cybernetic.  But that’s for another blog post.

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