Human biological evolution vs societal evolution
āļø The Sovereign Mind
We created a reality that is so alien to the one our bodies and brains evolved to deal with that we find ourselves endlessly clashing against it with frustration and pain. Our instincts are telling us to do one thing, our environment another, and our external incentives pull towards another still. Yet none of those make us happy on their own.
The conflict comes from the mismatch between the thing we are built to interface with and the reality we are then dealt, which for the first time in millions of years, differ in such a fundamental way that would by most accounts make the two incompatible.
We are going to talk about a few things here. One is what the conflict looks like now, what we can do about it. We are going to dive deeper into definitions and then dissect why things are as they are, although hopefully by that point that will become clear on it's own.
Right now the situation is a bit funny, there are many things that our brains tell us we should do that from a young age we know to be bad for us, things we know we should push aside, suppress and ignore, but also we find that sort of thing very hard to achieve. At the same time there are many things that seem like they should be simple, obvious even, there are ways of living that present themselves as bing easy, beautiful, fun, free. And yet even when we tap into them we find a sort of disconnect that we cannot always explain, we find we are not actually happy, satisfied, fulfilled.
As we touched on a little earlier, this makes sense because we were not built for the things we then built for ourselves. For those of you who pay attention this may seem earlily familiar, similar to something we talked about in the past, to Alignment of Interest it makes sense we are frustrated with our bodies and our brains, it makes sense they are frustrated with us, we don't want the same things, they are trying to optimise for a game that no longer exists, and we are trying to fit them by force into a new modern one that's nothing like it. Like
Definitions
Initial Definition of evolution
The definition for evolution in Wikipedia
EvolutionĀ is change in theĀ heritableĀ characteristicsĀ of biologicalĀ populationsĀ over successive generations.
Which is a pretty good initial definition, aside from one element, the biological element, I see evolution as the concept of successive changes in traits towards an array of problems over iterations, the problems, ie requirements, may not stay the same between iterations and iterations may not be rigidly defined.
Distilled definition of evolution
I may define evolution in an even more distilled manor, evolution is trial and error with persistent memory. Simple, yet sufficient for this thought experiment
In Depth Personal Definition of evolution
Evolution as a concept is a conglomeration of two simple concepts, trial and error and keeping knowledge.
As long as something has those two traits, and the two relay on each-other, I would say it is evolution
If you just know things, that's not evolution. If you just try many things until one works, that's not evolution. Instead, if you do both, try things until one works, then store that information and continue to the next layer, then that would be evolution.
The two concepts can be joint without being evolution, for example, a brute force approach to crack a password. The computer knows about the possible solutions theoretically, then it attempts (trial and error) each one in turn.
Two parts that touch us every day
Now, in the development of Humanity, there are a few elements that relay on evolution, the simplest one would be genetic evolution, where each iteration is a "trial" for a set of genes based on the last with slight changes. Then there is social evolution, an evolution of ideas that are meant to better humanity
It's important for us to understand the distinction between the evolution of the human species in terms of genes and the evolution of human society.