Abstract
History is rich with examples of humans expecting future generations to deal with their mess (be it debts, environmental impacts, or whatever); this can include people taking from their own future selves. The larger problems of humanity are, I argue, but scaled up versions of this same curious, irrational behaviour. Humanity’s steering of the future must involve going beyond humanity in some sense. The solution I outline in this paper involves a modification of the everyday human stance towards future events and future selves. It involves a (practical, day-to-day) denial. Using a range of examples from physics, philosophy, neuroscience and psychology, ultimately advocates an intervention indicating how actions now are linked to future experiences and events, that agents themselves will have and influence by direct creation. This might seem blindingly obvious, yet the vast majority of humans act as if their lives are determined by the whims of the future. If humans fully realised how tightly bound they are to their future conscious life and experiences (and others’), and how that life and experience is a direct extension of their life and experience right now (so that actions can be seen to have direct consequences for their present selves: those that are experiencing right now), then they will be far more responsible in choosing their actions.
Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.
Oliver Hardy to Stan Laurel (Utopia [1951])
I would like to acknowledge the Australian Research Council for funding.
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Notes
- 1.
I share with David Bohm the belief that (1) most of our lived reality (money, airplanes, class, national boundaries, etc.) is the result of human thought and (2) a kind of ‘thought malfunction’ is behind many of humanity’s ills—see, e.g., [1]. I differ in that I find humanity to be very strongly characterised by such ‘malfunctions’ (Bohm was less cynical). Stuart Sutherland puts it well: “Pace Aristotle, it can be argued that irrational behaviour is the norm not the exception” ([15], p. ix). Hence, I believe that shifts in certain deep structures of human thought are required to resolve the problems we face.
- 2.
Take the simple act of drinking too much alcohol. Everyone ‘knows’ that a hangover will result in the future. Yet they proceed anyway, passing the bad experiences onto their future selves. They wouldn’t choose to give their present self a hangover, of course. But the difference between this ‘present self’ (what is being experienced right now) and a future self (what their present self will experience) is hardly anything at all. There will be a present self that will have the hangover, and this self is (philosophical conundrums aside) no different from the one that is now throwing back the alcohol: one’s future selves will be present selves soon enough! Why think it is OK to pass bad experiences onto a future self, given that you are essentially the same self (in the sense that you will be the one experiencing it)? There is no rational reason, and yet many of us do it, over and over again, passing the buck to our poor, suffering future selves. Whatever one makes of this scenario, I think it points to the fact that struggling with problems of the future of humanity (and local versions thereof, such as procrastination) demands that we think deeply about such philosophical issues as the nature of selves over time and our responsibilities to selves at other times.
- 3.
That is, in general, somebody in need of help within my personal space will command more urgent attention than one that is spatially distant, despite the fact that there exist spatially distant persons more in need. The issue boils down, in part, to what one feels able to influence. If one felt able to influence the spatially distant needy, one would be more likely to do so. Likewise with temporal distance (though, of course, only in a preferred direction in this case, due to the asymmetry of influence, in the absence of time machines!)—in fact, I think we should (and often do) have moral empathy in a temporally neutral way, as when we mourn the victims of Auschwitz or those killed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79, for example. Hence, one needs some way of linking people up more robustly with their future selves so that their feelings of responsibility towards them is increased. Of course, this temporal myopia is not true of all actions (savings, pensions, quitting smoking, and diets are straightforward counterexamples), but I think it is true of the majority, and even for those able to delay gratification it is hard to maintain a consistent standpoint according to which one’s future selves are equally as important as a (current) present self—I might add that the widespread prevalence of financial credit systems in human society is a strong indication that a temporal myopia (passing responsibility to future persons) is at our core.
- 4.
It isn’t all bad, of course. In, say, the last century: mortality rates have declined; education rates have increased; social justice and equality appear to have improved enormously; and overall quality of life appears to be much improved. However, even these silver linings still envelop dark clouds thanks to population calamities and financial/resource/environment decimation and pollution.
- 5.
Religious beliefs are certainly amongst the most rigid (since they are not evidence-based and therefore harder to update). I can’t help thinking that a belief system that preaches entitlement to the Earth and all its contents can’t be a good thing—as others have noted, religious belief appears to be correlated with a general neglect of the Earth and it’s non-human animals. Even more dangerous is the notion that this Earth might be little more than a ‘staging area’ for an afterlife: why would one care about its future state if one truly believed this?
- 6.
- 7.
It is, after all, often expressed as a transcending of “human nature”; but this latter expression, to my mind, denotes a moral aspect to that is missing from the majority of accounts of transhumanism which tend to focus on morphological freedom alone.
- 8.
Derek Parfit [9] has famously discussed the irrationality of this ‘near-future bias’ (which he describes by means of a character ‘Proximus,’ who has a lot in common with most humans), in favour of temporal neutrality, whereby location in time is irrelevant from a moral standpoint (using a similar comparison with spatial relations)—though I have framed things in terms of one’s personal future experience (which runs counter to Parfit’s principle of a more impersonal, outward-looking moral stance).
- 9.
Studies suggest a temporal bias whereby optimism about the future grows with the temporal distance from the present [6]. Economists model this phenomenon by the method of ‘hyperbolic discounting’ (which is known to be an inconsistent scheme, yet models human behaviour far better than any consistent model [17]).
- 10.
Whether there ‘really is’ a block universe or not does not matter from this point of view: all that matters is our stance. Even in a block view there is a role for local creation of one’s future experiences. Note that I am not seeking to defend QBism here either, but only using it as an example of how sense can be made of a participatory scheme in which we play a kind of co-creative role in making the Universe what it will become.
- 11.
See Joachim de Posada, “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow!”, for a review of this classic experiment: http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.
- 12.
Mischel argued that increased capacity for delaying correlated with decreased behavioural problems and increased intelligence in later years—this seems entirely unsurprising to me, but still highly relevant from the point of view of this essay competition. Note that Mischel’s book The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control was published shortly after this essay was submitted for the FQXi essay competition (Little, Brown and Company, 2014). This contains several strategies for countering self-gratification, some of which are suggested here.
- 13.
These connections are clearly testable by fMRI techniques which would reveal a similar pattern of oxygen utilisation in specific areas (e.g. activation in the orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, extended amygdala, and the ventral striatum). It is possible to locate (initially by gene knockout) specific genetic markers for susceptibility to instant-gratification type thinking, just as one might locate genetic markers responsible for addictive behaviours [2]. In addition, certain experiments performed on mice to knock out specific receptors believed to be implicated in addiction have led to a reduction in addictive, self-destructive behaviours.
- 14.
The existence of temporal biases are well known in psychology, and in most cases a good evolutionary reason can be found that would have benefitted our ancestors, but can backfire on us. We need to be transhuman in the sense of transcending these kinds of primitive instant reward (where’s the next meal coming from?) type processes. So much of the stupid behaviour in the world is caused by the same kinds of reactions that our distant ancestors employed which were useful for them, but are leading us to ruin. Merely explaining that and why we have these various mechanisms leading to such temporal biases does not justify them, and if we have the power to eliminate them to insure survival of the species, and hopefully make us better beings in the process, then we ought to do so.
- 15.
Whereas neurotypical subjects will have activation in the amygdala when, e.g., making inferences on the basis of facial expressions, someone with ASD will instead have activation in the frontotemporal regions. Similarly, one finds a failure to imitate, especially where imitation is not goal-oriented [4]. These are usually labeled ‘deficits’. However, again there is a sense in which an advantage is conferred. In a standard test, a therapist will perform an irrelevant ritual (say, tapping three times on a box) before removing an item from the box, before asking the subject to do the same. Neurotypicals perform the irrelevant moves, while those with ASD do not, instead completing the task in the most efficient way. It is true that such behaviours often lead to dysfunction in society (given the neurotypical dominance), however, it is also clear that the hyper-rationality such cases display could bestow advantages. The propensity for neurotypical humans to imitate also points towards a strategy for implementing new modes of living via a concerted shift in social norms, that will be widely adopted given the mirroring mechanism (cf. [10], p. 102).
- 16.
As posthumanists suggest, and as Roger Scruton objects to, for “[w]hy should we be working for a future in which creatures like us won’t exist?” ([14], p. 230).
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Rickles, D. (2016). A Participatory Future of Humanity. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) How Should Humanity Steer the Future?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20717-9_6
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