In his 2002 book “The Future of Life,” Willson has a chapter entitled “The Bottleneck,” in which he takes issue with economics and in particular a type of economist, cornucopia economists, who believe that everything is getting better and we can innovate out of any problem. For example, if we have a climate crisis and a recession then we can fix both with more investment in carbon neutral green technology. “The question of the century is: How best can we shift to a culture of permanence, both for ourselves and for the biosphere that sustains us? The bottom line is different from that generally assumed by our leading economists and public philosophers. They have mostly ignored the numbers that count.”
The first bottle neck and the first number that counts is the “ecological footprint – the average amount of productive land and shallow sea appropriated by each person in bits and pieces from around the world for food, water, housing, energy, transportation, commerce, and waste absorption – is about one hectare in developing nations but about 9.6 hectares in the U.S.” The average around the world is 2.1 hectares in 2002. “For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths.” The only way that we in the developed world can keep our standard of living is to make sure everyone else stays poor. The maximum production level that is sustainable at 2002 levels of technology means that we have to reduce world production to ¼ of what it was in 2002. That includes your income and assets.
A second bottle neck is the dependence of the economy on the free gifts of the environment which are showing signs of being unable to replenish themselves. One example is the collapse of the cod industry in Atlantic Canada due to overfishing in the grand banks. “By 2002, after a 10-year moratorium on fishing, the cod had still not returned. The local ecosystem seemed to have changed, with forage fish, such as capelin, which used to provide food for the cod, increase in numbers, and eat the juvenile cod. The waters appeared to be dominated by crab and shrimp rather than fish.”[1] We need to get an accurate measure of the true cost of economic activity. One that takes into account the cost of destroying the natural environment. What we would likely see is that many small scale industries would be viable but large scale industries will likely hit a huge cost wall when they threaten to keep nature from replenishing herself. “This new breed of analysts argues that we can no longer afford to ignore the dependency of the economy and social progress on the environmental resources base. It is the content of economic growth, with natural resources factored in, that counts in the long term, not just the yield in products and currency. A country that levels its forests, drains its aquifers, and washes its topsoil downriver without measuring the cost is a country traveling blind.” imagine if the economy grew by a factor of 3 in real terms in the next 10 or 20 years – we would all be rich, and our standard of living would be greatly improved – right? “What is the flaw in the argument? It is the environment crumbling beneath us. If natural resources, particularly freshwater and arable land, continue to diminish at their present per capita rate, the economic boom will lose steam”. Wilson recommends that the genuine progress indicator (GPI) be used instead of GDP to better measure economic progress.
A third bottle neck is population growth. “If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land would support about 10 billion people. If humans utilized as food all of the energy captured by plant photosynthesis on land and sea, some 40 trillion watts, the planet could support about 16 billion people. But long before that ultimate limit was approached, the planet would surely have become a hellish place to exist.” There are only a few ways to avoid reaching these hard limits, war, famine, varying combinations and forms of population control ranging from forced sterilization, abortion, MAiD, to the higher education of women.
Our lives depend on a hospitable environment. We evolved in an environment that we are changing rapidly. Every ecosystem we destroy reduces the free gifts nature bestows and increases our risk of destroying what we need to live. We are the first species to achieve geophysical force capabilities. We are like the boy siting in a tree sawing of the branch he is sitting on. We are destroying our living foundations.
In his book “The Meaning of Human Existence,” Willson has an excerpt on the notion of free will. Free will is often thought of as a subject for philosophy or religion but not for science. Science, it is often suggested, would at best be interested in consciousness and in particular its material basis in the brain not free will. However, it is in the notion of consciousness that science may yet have something to say about free will. It is hard to deny that the notion of what is popularly called free will would need consciousness or need to be a part of consciousness. “The physical basis of consciousness won’t be an easy phenomenon to grasp. The human brain is the most complex system, either organic or inorganic, known in the universe. Each of the billions of nerve cells (neurons) composing its functional part forms synapses and communicates with an average of ten thousand others; each launches messages along its own axon pathway using an individual digital code of membrane-firing patterns. The brain is organized into regions, nuclei, and staging centers that divide functions among them. These regions respond in different ways to hormones and sensory stimuli originating from outside the brain, while sensory and motor neurons all over the body communicate so intimately with the brain as to be virtually a part of it.”
Anyone who tries to explain consciousness without firmly understanding the brain’s biology is going nowhere. “the history of philosophy when boiled down consists mainly of failed models of the brain.” Wilson praises the Obama administration for setting up the Brain Activity Map Project (BAM) in 2013 with “the goal of generating a map of the activity of every neuron in real time….The basic goal of activity mapping is to connect all of the processes of thought – rational and emotional; conscious, preconscious, and unconscious; held still and moving through time – to a physical base.” This project, even if it cannot be done completely, will early on solve the free will riddle definitively. He gives three reasons for his optimism. First, “consciousness evolved in steps, similar to the way other complex biological systems developed…It should then be possible to track the steps leading to human consciousness through studies of animal species that have come partway to the human level…The comparison would reveal which neural circuits and activities were attained by non-human species, when they attained them, and in what sequence. That data could help us determine which neurobiological traits are uniquely human.” A second reason is that BAM will allow the study and “identification of emergent phenomena – entities and processes that come into existence only with the joining of preexisting entities and processes.” Free will if it exists is likely to be an emergent phenomenon. The third is “the human necessity for confabulation, which offers more evidence of a material basis to consciousness.” As we live our lives we tell stories that raise our various emotions and physical markers and that lead to choices. “A choice is made in the unconscious centers of the brain, recent studies tell us, several seconds before the decision arrives in the conscious part” of the brain. In this sense we have a rudimentary understanding of consciousness as linked to various regions of the brain that make choices. Often a choice is thought to be freely willed. What is left is to nail down in more specificity and precision individual acts of consciousness in the brain tissue. One act of consciousness that Wilson believes we are about to nail down is free will.
“What, if anything, in the manifold activities of the brain could possibly pull away from the brain’s machinery to create scenarios and make decisions of its own? The answer is, of course, the self…The self does not exist as a paranormal being living on its own within the brain. It is instead, the central dramatic character of the confabulated scenarios. In these stories, it is always on center stage – if not as a participant, then as observer and commentator – because that is where all of the sensory information arrives and is integrated. The stories that compose the conscious mind cannot be taken away from the mind’s physical neurobiological system, which serves as script writer, director, and cast combined. The self despite the illusion of its independence created in the scenarios, is part of the anatomy and physiology of the body.” Think of when you talk to yourself or deliberate with yourself, we can trace the electo-chemical signals with increasing precision and no evidence of something being there that is not brain tissue. Because the brain is constantly changing because of an immense number of factors such as microsecond changes in temperature, pressure, signals from senses, nutrient fuel supply, etc. we all have a different brain every second. For this reason, “the self – celebrated star player in the scenarios of consciousness – can go on passionately believing in its independence and free will. And that is a very fortunate Darwinian circumstance. Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive….So, does free will exist? Yes, if not in ultimate reality, then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species.” In other words, the delusional belief in free will is a survival adaptation, probably unique to humans, that makes us go out and do things we would not otherwise have bothered to do. Believing in free will opens up the possibility of doing all the things that are more than meeting our physiological needs. The conscience or unconscious or even just the feeling of a belief in free will made homo-sapiens more likely to survive and reproduce. Consider a pet cat, once its physiological needs are satisfied it goes to sleep; we on the other hand become ready for any adventure. The result has been things like literature, art, philosophy, religion, technology, culture etc.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_. cod_fishery#:~:text=In%20the%20early%2D1990s%2C%20the,a%20moratorium%20on%20cod%20fishing.