Dissipative adaptation - ‘spreading energy’ - may, in the long run, turn out to be an insight into the nature of matter on a par with quantum mechanics. If true, it closes once and for all the gaps in our understanding of our origins, and gives us a completely new perspective on how reality is constructed.
But what does it have to do with consciousness?
If organic matter was a dissipative adaptation that led to reproductive flora and fauna, as England’s work suggests, then life imbued with consciousness may be the next adaptation beyond that. That is, if we grant England’s argument that matter self-organized into reproducing life is more efficient in energy distribution than inorganic matter, then we can ask if conscious organisms represents an improvement on non-conscious organisms, when it comes to the spreading of energy.
Intuitively, it’s obvious that this is in fact the case: examples of human beings harnessing and distributing energy are all around us, and have been throughout the history of civilization, from the construction of buildings to the cultivation of plants; from the systematic herding and consumption of animals to the use of fire to handle metal; from the industrial burning of fossil fuels to the harnessing of solar and nuclear power. We are masters of efficient energy distribution.
On the other hand, we are also a species that is, through its collective, conscious activity, constructing energy traps – and one in particular, the modification of the planet’s atmosphere. Its radical imbalancing, a consequence of our industrial activity, is trapping more and more energy, increasing risk not just to ourselves but to the planet’s ecosystem as a whole. We, as a conscious, intelligent species, make a greater gross energy distribution contribution than any other – but as we work against the spreading of energy by trapping it, our net contribution is falling. We can then wonder if another adaptation must now present itself, to re-optimize the weakened equilibrium.
Brown doesn’t say it this way, but his follow-up to the presentation of England’s thesis in Origin may answer that question. We’ve already mentioned it in a previous chapter: Technium.
The hybridization of humankind and the technology we’ve produced into a new species may – almost certainly will – occur, and when it does, it will clearly play a role in whatever happens next with our tendency, as energy agents, to work against ourselves. There is no clear solution to the vast energy trap we’ve created, no clear path to reducing the threat to ourselves we’ve produced that can achieve the necessary scale. On the other hand, Augmented Intelligence will necessarily open doors we haven’t even yet imagined, let alone attempted to pass through; we can anticipate that our successor species will not only come up with solutions we don’t yet envision, but produce the new technologies needed to implement them.
Moreover, our hybrid descendants will have tools we didn’t have when we started creating this mess: systems that can watch over the natural world, learn more about it than we ever could, intervene and fine-tune it passively, and not only restore but improve upon the equilibria we’ve so ignorantly disrupted. The more conscious neohominins of kingdom Technium will easily surpass us as the most efficient energy distributors that have ever existed.
We shall see.
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