What actually shapes a personality?
For several centuries, both philosophers and scientists have debated which is more important - heredity or environment?
Exploring this can be a daunting exercise, at least if you imagine that we are all so incredibly unique as individuals. Imagine the two most different people alive today, in a global population of around 7 billion people. If we compare DNA, we will find that 99.9% are exactly the same, that is what all sapiens have in common. As in the case of other animal species, we are talking here about inherited patterns of action, instincts, which regulate the kind of behavior, habits that are typical for the species and ensure survival and reproduction.
Then surely it is the last 0.1 percent that makes us individuals? No. Estimates from long-term studies of identical twins and adoptees indicate that the genetically controlled (hereditary) part of the personality is between 30% and 60%. Surely the parents and surroundings will shape most of the personality of the 18-year-old? No, in fact the influence of the parents and the environment has the greatest influence in the earliest years, when we approach 18 this influence is close to zero.
This means that no matter how caring and follow-up parents are, this effort will not affect whether the offspring becomes a genius or world ski champion, but also not whether it becomes a criminal. Research is now being conducted into which other environmental factors contribute to the development of personality, it is obvious to point to the circle of friends and the school environment.
Are you beginning to understand why humans are creatures of habit?
The majority of our toolbox was thus developed a very long time ago, specifically in the Paleogene period approximately 20 million years ago. The so-called free thought has a genetic leeway of a maximum of 0.1 percent, but still much of this pot is genetic inheritance. Of what is left, the rest is a rather unconscious interaction between the individual's cognitive calculator and the environment. Consciousness about the self - who we really are has had no significance in evolution. So far.
In practice, this means that humans are intellectual sloths who excel at concrete perception, but are much less skilled at abstraction. We are quick to perceive the immediate and dramatic, but overlook most long-term trends and consequences. We are present-oriented and tend to neglect or devalue the future.
William Ophuls addresses this human anti-intellect in "Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations fail".https://www.amazon.co. uk/Immoderate-Greatness-Why-Civilizations-Fail/dp/1479243140
Human nature has no built-in module for civilization. Everything must be translated backwards in time into survival instincts in the tribe that hunts together. Progress is measured in how many prey animals are killed. No previous civilization has lasted more than about 700 years. All civilizations will collapse after a decadent period into a pile of building blocks which are then picked up by neighboring empires.
The term "civilization" is more difficult to define than ever, do we mean the whole world, parts of the world or a nation? It becomes like the term "ecosystem", it can be something very small (a village), or the entire globe.
Our own global civilization is clearly beginning to approach the edge of the cliff, but it is still difficult to define what was the starting point of our civilization. Personally, I believe that Martin Luther and the Enlightenment are the starting points for a revolutionary new society that for the first time no longer believes that illness is a punishment from God. These new thoughts provided the basis for science and development towards a global infrastructure.
Preventing the doom requires an enormous boost in human consciousness that must happen quickly. Mastering the analysis of complex historical processes requires enormous awareness. Many have said that if history is forgotten, it must be reviewed again. Reflecting on the course of history has never had any place within evolution. To free oneself from the instinctive autopilot, the individual must first become self-aware. Who is the real me and why do I do what I do? Most of what we do is habitual behavior based on primitive survival instincts that are a thousand times older than languages.
What is most difficult for sapiens to understand is exponential growth (note that the term usually also includes exponential decline). This means that the rate of growth is increasing, as you can see, for example, with the global population or what the world's 50 richest own of the earth's total resources. The downfall of civilizations is always linked to uncontrolled growth or decline within critical sustaining factors for the system's stability.
Since our economic system is based on predatory greed always paying off, collapses will always occur. These can be in parts of or in the whole system, there can be a collapse in access to resources or that shares suddenly change value due to incorrect assessments. A new world economy must be more universal, it must be in line with the basic laws of nature, such as the laws of thermodynamics.
Nature is very efficient in thermodynamic terms. The steady flow of solar energy is not simply consumed, but instead used to build a rich and diverse capital stock. To put it more technically, nature internalizes thermodynamic costs, using the same matter and energy over and over again to wring maximum life out of minimum energy. While it might be theoretically possible for the human economy to mimic the natural economy, it would involve a radical transformation of civilization as we know it. The national economies had to be strictly coordinated, so that they became part of the same ecosystem. Individuals would have to tolerate strict controls on human will and desire—that is, receiving powerful negative feedback where choices were not sustainable.
This is how natural ecosystems work. But even if such a hive-like existence were somehow acceptable, one would have to question whether humans have the self-management ability to sustain it. We face hugely complex challenges in many areas at once. Just maintaining the current level of complexity, in for example infrastructure, regulation and expertise (national or regional), actually begins to consume more and more resources – human resources, capital resources, material resources – which means society has to run harder and harder just to stay in the same place.
Exponential growth will inexorably lead to fundamental changes in systems. A state of chaos is reached, which means that the system is characterized by many feedback loops operating and inter-reacting in a non-linear way. The overall condition thus becomes more and more impenetrable and unpredictable. The situation becomes less and less manageable, because neither the timing nor the severity of specific events is predictable for humans. To keep up with developments, we must therefore enter into symbiosis with AI.
Extreme complexity thus characterizes many of our current systems. Robots sell and buy most stocks today (globally), based on learned algorithms. In many contexts, AI makes choices that are unpredictable and incomprehensible to humans. The choices go over our heads and are no longer controllable. Our very science, from quantum theory to chaos mathematics, leads us into uncertainty.
We need new AI tools to steer our course forward in many fields. Paradoxically, we also need these tools to better understand something as fundamental as human system behaviour. No one is currently able to control system behavior. Donella Meadows has done a lot of research in this field. She points out that our minds and languages are linear and sequential, but in complex systems everything happens at once and completely overwhelms us intellectually. Our mind likes to think of single causes producing single effects. We like to think about one or at most a few things at a time. But we live in a world where countless causes regularly come together to produce many effects.
Therefore, it is not really the case that empires emerge, enter a phase of growth, reign, decline and fall as in a recurring and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively construct these phases. Instead, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for an unknown period of time. And then, quite suddenly, they collapse. The system as a whole is unpredictable, even if you have good knowledge of how individual factors work.
Ancient writers such as Hesiod and Plato were well aware of the decline and fall of civilizations. They linked the decline to the weathering of a moral core or a guiding ideal. Sir John Bagot Glubb has addressed this topic. An overmature civilization may still appear prosperous on the surface. But in deeper waters, greed and selfishness supersede the ideals of duty and service. In addition, success breeds hubris in the form of complacency, arrogance, self-righteousness and overconfidence. A spoiled society begins to rot from within. There may be a profusion of discussions, debates and arguments that may testify to flourishing intellectuality, but an incessant cacophony of arguments will eventually destroy the power of action.
Intellectual arguments rarely lead to agreement, but on the contrary to polarization and more internal rivalry, immediately recognizable from political debate. The population has less and less in common, but each lives in its own bubble. Political and economic expansion implies an increase in hierarchical inequality. A society can find itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority who, for various reasons, have never been interested in participating in debates around aesthetics and art. As this majority continues to grow, it seems as if the minority rejects "fine culture" and indulges instead in mass culture. The elite are exposed to hatred, it is enough to look at the situation in today's USA.
The most important reason why civilizations go from high morality and strong consensus to pessimism and division is moral entropy. This means that you lose interest in the whole, everyone is most interested in securing their own privileges. Those who rule an overripe civilization are engaged in a war against reality that they cannot win. A series of insidious transformations have made society dysfunctional and ungovernable. The ecological, social, economic and intellectual capital required to solve the problems has eroded. Only a race of superiorly intelligent, rational and wise beings could constrain their behavior to avoid this outcome. It's not us. We must therefore be willing to take AI into the decision-making processes.
Civilizations are like the Titanic, they can never sink. The iceberg we want to collide with is out there in an unknown place. Our collapse may already be predetermined, but the course and timing are unpredictable. Even a widespread awareness of this danger only leads to paralysis of action. A collapse can happen suddenly or gradually, sooner or later, so why act now? One does not want to save on today's consumption of resources at a time when the same resources are becoming scarcer and more expensive. In short, we deny that the iceberg exists out there. Global warming has fixed that problem. We think the iceberg has melted.
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