Belief and Reality

Belief is ultimately based on reality: the believers’ experiences, how they explain those experiences, and how much they trust their explanations. The experiences can be direct or shared by someone else. Explanations can be created by the believer or provided by others. Trust is based on how well explanations match with experience, and how well other explanations from the sources have matched with experience.

Explanations are used to craft expectations of what exists and what is likely to exist as a result of certain actions by oneself and others. Treating those expectations as reality is a fundamental outcome of belief, enabling action unhindered by doubt that could trigger diversion of resources into investigating the validity of the reasons for it. Belief thus increases the efficiency of attaining goals that depend on actions, with a maximum that is limited by how closely its basis matches reality.

Another outcome of belief is reduction of stress triggered by uncertainty, especially about what affects one’s survival. Belief masks the unknown with a fictional alternative that feels known, or at least knowable, often with a narrative that provides prescriptions for interpreting and dealing with its experiential manifestations. People have different tolerances for this kind of stress, and so will prefer to rely on belief to varying degrees and in different ways. 

Social pressure, partly due to dependence on others for surviving and thriving, can enforce a set of beliefs that supersedes personal preference in order to maintain group coherence that sustains that dependence, experienced by its members as part of a shared identity. In an increasingly unpredictable environment, where explanations underlying current beliefs cease to match current experience to an extent necessary for survival (and maintain tolerable stress), trust in the beliefs will necessarily erode; and for a group whose identity is strongly tied to its beliefs, that environment will be perceived as a threat to its existence.

Threats can be tolerated, escaped, or confronted. Changing beliefs is an approach to toleration. Changing location is a way to escape with beliefs intact. Confronting a threat might be successful with current beliefs; but if it isn’t, then developing new understanding of the threat is a critical first step that might require changing beliefs, especially if actions taken based on those beliefs are found to have contributed to the threat or could in the future.

Constant development and test of explanations based on growing collection of experience is an alternative to belief that attacks uncertainty directly and reduces stress by providing a realistic basis for identifying and managing both opportunities and threats. The consequences of actions can be better understood and predicted, increasing their efficiency in pursuit of goals that themselves can be better chosen in the pursuit of surviving and thriving, if that is what people want to do. This approach, in its most organized form known as science, treats alternate descriptions and explanations as means toward ultimately achieving a common set that accounts for all of experience: past, present, and future. Identity based on favored descriptions and explanations is considered counterproductive except to the extent that it promotes competition that can help in the process.

Interactions of Value

Interactions between groups can be used as a measure of people’s values. We can use changes in the amounts of people, habitat, and waste resulting from an interaction as measures of how much they are valued by the people involved in the interaction. 

Globally over history, the amounts of people and waste have grown at the expense of habitat such that the amount of waste exceeded the amount of people, and then waste exceeded the amount of habitat. Humanity will become effectively extinct soon after the amount of people exceeds the amount of habitat. 

In simulated world called “Green” that is based on historical data, waste exceeded people by 1940. Waste began exceeding habitat in 2015. By 2018, some members of the world population needed more resources for survival than there was habitat in their accessible environment. By 2025 as many people will be dying as are being born (the population will peak) and half the world’s total resources will be waste, after which there will be net death as increasing waste replaces more habitat. Overall, people will exceed habitat by 2037; and extinction will occur by 2041.

ABOVE: Amounts of resources over time.

People, habitat, and waste are not distributed equally within the world’s population. If they were, then there would be effectively one group of people cooperating to live the same way. In the simulation, a simplified version of reality based on measurable behavior such as economic activity, resources are moved and stored by people throughout the population based on available habitat and produced waste. The world is divided into thousands of environments, each a group with its total resources (“capacity” or size) composed of people (represented by the habitat they consume for survival), habitat (other species and what they produce and can consume), and waste (resources not consumable by people or other species). Changes in the distributions of resources within these environments are indicative of the interactions between them.

If we look at the world’s resources as environments with their capacities adding up (accumulating) based on increasing ratio of people to habitat (habitat ratio), we can see how their distributions compare with each other as a function of their size. This order is chosen because groups with close habitat ratios are similar enough to naturally interact with each other, as found in statistical analysis of economic activity (which, by definition, involves movement of resources) and correlations of life satisfaction. 

Environments with the most waste as a fraction of their capacity have the fewest people as a fraction of their capacity. As the total amount of waste increases, waste occupies more environments, and those environments have larger fractions of people in them. Another way of looking at this is that the groups with fewer people are at war with the groups that have more people (who are consuming), forcing them to move and grow into other environments by flooding them with waste and thereby depriving them of habitat until the habitat can’t support them (domination). Continuing growth of waste (exploitation) results in collapse, with the entire population having too little habitat to survive in environments that are essentially the same (except for one in the simulation, where one person has no waste and too little habitat to survive).

ABOVE: Stacked fractions of resources in each environment as a function of cumulative capacity shown for each decade since 1900 and projected through 2040 in simulated world Green.

In terms of value, interactions tend to favor waste more than people, and habitat only to the extent that it contributes to increasing people and waste by decreasing until it becomes critically low, which is too late to salvage it.

 

Interactions

 The people in two groups can avoid interacting with each other, remaining in isolation. They each have an amount of habitat (resources that meet the needs of people and other species), and waste (resources that displace habitat).

People in each group can interact with each other, with several results based on the rates of change of people, habitat, and waste. 

COMPETITION: 

Domination – One group dominates the other by killing its members.

War – The groups fight each other, replacing people with waste. 

COOPERATION:

Sum – The groups live together, meeting their basic needs and not changing the amount of people or waste.

Restoration – The groups live together, increasing habitat by having less people and less waste. 

Cleanup – The groups live together, increasing habitat and reducing waste. 

EXPLOITATION:

Consumption – The groups reduce habitat by converting it into people and waste.

Collapse – Habitat is reduced to less than what is needed for people to survive, resulting in mass die-off.

If one group is the global population and the other is the next year’s global population, then mostly consumption has occurred, with very few years of cleanup. Collapse is likely soon.

ABOVE: Example of two groups and results of interaction. Area is proportional to the amount of resources. The amount of people is equal to the needs they consume.

Termination

In early 2014, people in the simulated worlds I call "Green" and "Hikeyay" began entering the Termination phase, and external impacts started to drive available resources down. Green is what I consider the best match to our real world, and Hikeyay is the world portrayed in my fictional Simulated News blog. Termination is marked statistically by high age and no life expectancy, ending in the Death phase a few years later. 

By early 2020, half of Green's population will be in the Termination phase, and people will be in the Death phase by 2026. I chose a different path for Hikeyay by essentially reversing the drivers of extinction: stopping population growth; reducing per-capita consumption; and using technology to eliminate both waste and the external impacts. The timing of Hikeyay's global strategy (especially the new version that was recently "approved") is determined by the simulations, which are based on correlations between variables and trends identified in the historical record, and is consistent with recommendations from people who have studied the range of possibilities in far greater depth than I have.

I have been attempting to add higher resolution to the simulations that could ideally guide actions by groups and individuals to reduce the number of people in the Termination phase (from whatever that number might actually be). The results are being presented in all my venues – especially this blog, the Simulated News blog, Twitter posts, and Patreon posts. 

For example, since my last post here I have identified two major groups within the global population whose constant merging may help to explain political preferences within the actual population: one of them embodies the past and the other embodies the future; and their relative population sizes tantalizingly correspond in percentage to those of U.S. conservatives and liberals. I have also derived population-level phases and how many people might be supported in each nation if the world has a healthy overall phase distribution determined by total consumption. 

Just recently, I had an insight into the interactions between people in different phases that prompted a new way of visualizing their relative amounts of population and consumption. It is based on the trading of resources from high to low phases that best matches historical data, and accounts for the counterintuitive observation that those people who consume the most have the highest ratio of natural resources to resources used for basic needs (are at the lowest phase). Essentially: the majority in settled territory is converting raw resources to processed resources, and trading them with "colonizers" who are exploring and preparing new territory and its resources that are becoming so scarce that they will become processors right after people begin entering the Death phase at the population peak (five years from now in simulated world Green).

Declaration of War

Yesterday, the president of the United States issued what was, in effect, a formal declaration of war against life on Earth. In a speech based more on ideology than reality, he firmly placed the economic growth of the United States based on fossil fuels as a higher priority than trying to limit the high risk of extinction imposed by one of the most destructive consequences of using those fuels: global climate change.

Substantively, it wasn't a surprise. By word and deed, economic dominance over the world has been the primary goal of the president and his supporters, as a natural consequence of placing one group as "first" and insisting on increase of exponential growth by that group. The main topic of debate has been more around who is really in the group than what its goals are.

Dominance of one group over one or more others without their consent falls within any reasonable definition of "war." Humans have been waging war on other species for millennia, and by now have essentially won. Those who prefer domination over other people have been waging the more familiar kind of war for just as long, but on average have been kept from lowering the overall population by accessing more resources; but now that critical resources are becoming scarce on a global basis, that is about to change.

Those of us preferring coexistence tend to value life over personal power, and have attempted to delay that change for as long as possible. This has been done through development of agreements like the Paris accord and the development of new technologies to get more utility out of remaining resources without causing more damage in the process. Climate change has achieved its current priority due its potential, now actualizing, to reduce resources faster than we are consuming them, taking control out of our hands and forcing competition into primacy – with inevitable, deadly effect.

For several years I have had a creeping feeling of dread, like others whose opinions I have read and discussed personally. This has come from study, analysis, and experience in my own environment as the evidence of growing damage to the world has become pervasive. For some reason I can't yet fathom, the president's decision to openly step away from global cooperation to deal with climate change, even in a largely symbolic way, has amplified that feeling to the point of alternating depression and rage. Dealing with that remains the focus of my creative writing, and is fueling my personal drive to resist in every way that matches my values as the environmental and social crap storm that is now defining our lives continues to grow in intensity.

Respect and a Healthy World

Based on my research, there have always been two groups of people: those who respect other species enough to let them share the world, and those who see them as resources to be consumed and competitors for dominance of the world. These groups each have two subgroups: those who want maximum happiness for themselves; and those who want to have the most descendants.

Most people have always been in the second group, consuming and competing with the rest of the Nature, and in the subgroup adding more people. Until the beginning of the oil age, one in six people were in the first group, respecting other species; after that, those who were leaving more descendants moved to the second group rather than die. All that was left of the first group was the few hundred who were maximizing their happiness while sharing parts of the world that could still support them and other species, and even that small population began to dwindle.

The number and populations of other species have continued to fall under the onslaught of those who don't respect them, and now more rapidly as we pass the point where there are not enough of them to support their lives or ours. Arguably this places us in a dying world, as opposed to a heathy world like that which existed when a substantial part of our population was still in the respectful group. If even a tiny fraction of us are to survive the great extinction we have unleashed, we must try to make parts of the world healthier and ensure that they stay that way.

Changing even part of the world begins with changing what causes us to continue doing damage. One way to start is to all agree that the respectful group was right and the majority group was wrong.

This is unlikely since the majority seems to be under the impression that the same approach which enabled them to conquer the world can somehow help them escape the consequences of it, perhaps to the point of moving to another world that can be conquered. This is encouraged by the prospect of super-intelligent quantum computers, lifesaving biotechnology, and cheap energy from fusion. Timing is the biggest problem, since global warming is threatening to reduce our ability to survive before any of these technologies could make a significant difference (assuming they wouldn't cause more problems than they fix).

Agreement about the cause might reawaken respect for other species in more of us, enabling us to explore how we could still meet our basic needs while empowering other species (who employ Nature's own biotechnology) to improve their own chances of survival by repairing some of the damage we have done. Transitioning to a respectful approach toward those other species would also prepare the survivors of our efforts with the basic values they need to continue surviving.

Healthy Is Now Ideal

Two years ago, I laid out a set of requirements for what I called an "ideal world," which in retrospect I could have called a "healthy world." Much of my writing since then has dealt with many of the same ideas, teasing out details, exploring the implications of my evolving model of global variables in the past and future, and sharing personal experiences and expectations that appear to be echoes of each other.

Built into all of it was the hope that some significant part of the population would seize on those or similar ideas and, in the presence of obvious danger, use them as the basis of a way to diminish or escape that danger. The political climate at the time was cautiously reasonable, inching toward awareness and agreement that something major needed to be done to avoid global economic and ecological collapse that was becoming perilously imminent. There remained a chance that the world might succeed in at least delaying that collapse by a few years.

I spent a fair amount of creative energy trying to assess the probability of success. As a trigger for some of that creativity, I simulated people and environments in fictional writing – a tactic that had coincided with previous bursts of insight (most notably in the development of my first novel). My most recent attempt followed a thought experiment in one of my books, and yielded a model of interaction between groups that made some interesting predictions that could be tested; chief among them: that interaction between groups is always destructive to the identity of at least one of the groups through either assimilation or death.

The last election here in the U.S. appears to have rejected global collaboration for mutual survival, and in light of my research suggests that the group most effectively in control of our politics and economy has felt enough of a threat to its identity that it is willing to threaten the survival of everyone in order to ensure its dominance. Use of the word "dominance" is deliberate: my group interaction model defines it as the total control of all resources by one group. Though I haven't as closely studied it, there appears to be a similar dynamic at work in much of the rest of the world. In previous years, this threat might have been dealt with by acquiring more resources and moving people away from each other in order to safely establish group identity ("isolation"); but the world is running out of basic resources, and we don't yet have the ability to settle other habitable worlds – if there are any. Competition will therefore be the driving activity of our future, and competition is the key to dominance.

I brought up the "ideal world" concept again because since the election I have come to a number of realizations, among them that the ideal world I envisioned is in fact what a healthy world would look like, as opposed to the dying world we live in now; and that even if we are beginning the collapse I've forecast and feared, the best we can do is to create pockets of healthy community and environments wherever we can. In future Idea Explorer posts I will dive into what systems engineers might call "derived requirements" for specific situations, and in my other writing (such as Twitter and the Land of Conscience blog) I will explore what implementation looks like.

Generations of Interaction

A new model of group interaction draws from lessons learned in reproducing global population and natural resource consumption by proposing that the result of two groups interacting depends on potential changes in three variables: available resources, population, and the available resources per person.

People in each group attempt to maximize those variables by choosing among three possible interactions: remaining isolated, taking over the other group's resources (domination), or combining the two groups and sharing all resources. Whether resources are appropriated or shared, people can choose to maintain the same resources per person by changing the group's population, or to divide the resources equally among them. Each group's success in pursuing these options depends on its population: the more people it has, the more successful it will be.

The net result is the generation of a new, integrated group that is a mix of all the possibilities based on their probabilities (likelihood of success) and another group of "lost" people and resources. Just as some energy becomes useless when two gases mix, the losses are the equivalent of "waste" as far as the original two groups are concerned. The integrated group still has some differentiation into subgroups, with five subgroups (corresponding to interactions) for each of the original groups. These subgroups can now interact to generate another version of the integrated group; this second generation also results in losses of people and resources to join the waste from the first generation.

Barring interaction between the integrated group and one or more new groups, further generations will change the integrated group until there is no one left (every person has been converted into waste). If a new group is encountered, then the new group's people and resources will interact with the integrated group to generate a larger integrated group, while also expelling more waste.

This model needs to be tested, a process that should yield some interesting insights. For example, a first attempt at using it to describe humanity's relationship with the rest of the biosphere has shown that our population and the equivalent population of other species will be equal at 7.9 billion members, which is also the peak value of population before per-capita ecological resource consumption is forced to drop in the backcast model of population and consumption (with no global warming). Unless we find a new biosphere, keeping humanity's population constant will require reducing the biosphere's population and resources over several more generations which each take much less actual time than the many millennia in the first generation.

Group Interaction

Based upon a simple model of interactions between two groups, the people in those groups will choose among six options depending on their relative populations, resources, and how much they value people, happiness, longevity (how long the population can survive), and the carrying capacity of their environment (the maximum number of people that can consume a given amount of resources per person).

The first option (isolation) has each group and its resources effectively isolated from the other group and its resources, and the other five involve one or both groups having access to all of the resources. Both groups can share their resources (sharing), which averages their consumption patterns (amount per person and how fast it grows). Group 1 can kill off Group 2, keeping all resources for itself (extermination 1), or Group 2 can do the same to Group 1 (extermination 2). The last two options involve the groups living together, with one dominating the other by imposing its consumption pattern on the other (dominance 1 or dominance 2).

If the two groups and their resources are roughly the same size and at or near their carrying capacity, then extermination 1 and extermination 2 each have roughly a 50% chance of being chosen, with practically no chance of any other option. If they each have more resources than people to consume them, then isolation, sharing, extermination 1, and extermination 2 will each have a 20% chance of being chosen; and dominance 1 and dominance 2 will each have a 10% chance of being chosen.

Where one group is much larger than the other group, isolation has the same chance (25%) of being chosen as sharing, extermination of the smaller group by the larger group, and dominance of the smaller group by the larger group. This is mostly due to the larger group having overwhelming power compared to the smaller group, and is independent of how close each group is to its carrying capacity.

The probabilities I've quoted are approximate averages of simulated groups, with each group "member" and each simulation varying from the average such that at any given time one option may dominate the others. In reality, I expect that all options will be attempted, perhaps simultaneously. I introduced this model in part 3 of my BIOME novel, and will explore its implications in the remaining books as a critical aspect of the plot. Here and in my other writing, I intend to use it as a tool for exploring real-world events, and to test it in the process.

Two predictions of the model are particularly relevant to current events, particularly those involving conflict and the potential for conflict between a large group and a small group, such as we've seen recently in terrorist attacks. Viewed from the perspective of the smaller group, there is a 25% chance of being physically destroyed by the larger group, and a 75% chance of losing cultural purity (total control over happiness and longevity as determined by consumption). To eliminate these threats, isolation can be re-established (accompanied by adequate resources), or full control over the larger group can be achieved by domination or by killing its members. Each alternative requires a huge increase in power, ideally in excess of the power available to the larger group, and we can realistically expect the acquisition of such power to be an early step in the process of pursuing one or more of these courses of action. Interestingly, the same actions that deal with these threats from the larger group may also be used to pose a threat to the larger group (and would be perceived as such by that group, regardless of the smaller group's motivation, thus making more likely the extermination option being taken by the larger group).

Of the two threats perceived by the smaller group, loss of cultural purity is the largest (by a factor of three). If this wasn't an issue, then the extermination threat might be addressed by improving the chances of sharing or domination. Where it is non-negotiable, then isolation is the most humane option. Isolation has been crudely implemented in the past through establishment of penal colonies; but, since the world is currently close to its resource limits, it is practically impossible. Note that space travel would be an option for isolation if habitable planets were already available and reachable, but any settlements in the foreseeable future would be operating dangerously close to their carrying capacities with additional risks to life that would require new consumption patterns and associated cultural adjustments. Incarceration, an extreme form of domination, is commonly used as an alternative to extermination, but of course it is the embodiment of cultural loss for a group that is markedly different from the dominant group.

As our planet changes its requirements for survival with the ecological disruptions of climate change, raw resource depletion, and species extinctions, I expect we will all perceive ourselves as parts of small groups struggling to adapt while avoiding extermination. We will also need to see other species as something other than other groups that can be exterminated, since they and the services they provide embody the "resources" that we need to survive. Our consumption patterns, which are major components of our cultures, will need to be more flexible than ever in light of these conditions; and above all else, we must adjust our values so that our preferred options are more aligned with extending longevity and minimizing death.

Getting Unstuck

A growing number of us are stuck trying to maintain what we have while laying the groundwork for a new lifestyle that is more sustainable.  Maintaining what we have typically involves supporting an economy that has become dependent on perpetual and inherently unhealthy growth.  The lifestyle we seek would allow us to thrive without such an economy.  Given this dichotomy, it’s no wonder we’re stuck.

Perpetual growth demands unlimited resources, unlimited efficiencies, or both.  If these conditions cannot be met, the number of people must decrease; but with the theoretical (but totally unrealizable) limit of one person having everything.  If we value life, and appreciate the fact that natural law prohibits both access to unlimited resources and unbounded efficiency, then we must reject the goal of perpetual growth.

The economy’s perpetual growth requirement stems from its built-in rewards for increasing the amount and configurations of resources available to its population.  As the number of “pioneers” seeking these rewards has become large in proportion to the total population, acquiring and consuming more has become the norm rather than the exception.  To reverse this trend (or create an alternative), most pioneers must become settlers – learning to live with a fixed amount of resources that, by necessity, are replenished at a fixed rate.  Given these facts, the goal of “maintaining what we have” must be changed to “maintaining what our environment can afford for us to have.”

Unfortunately, many of us – including our governments, and by extension their citizens -- have already promised to pursue more growth as a condition for basic survival.  This takes the form of debt, which increases exponentially until it is paid off by the rewards of being a pioneer.  A  trivial, and therefore least likely, solution to this dilemma is for creditors to forgive all debt and for everyone to commit to the creation of a more sane economics. The least acceptable solution is for debtors to simply leave the economy, which has already started due to deprivation of alternatives for earning the money they need, and the predations of creditors who value property more than people.  Perhaps the most doable and generally acceptable solution is to make money less usable for consumption or spoiling of physical resources.

The implementation of this last solution would need to be done carefully to avoid some very negative consequences, such as slavery.  For example, society could encourage investment of the money in businesses that are more efficient, or use more renewable resources, or clean up pollution.  This is already being done, but still with the implicit goal of unlimited growth.  To keep from merely delaying our demise, we must choose a limit to how far we will go along this path, and a good place to start is to incur no more debt. 

At the same time, we can join groups (“social units”) where some members focus on keeping the creditors happy while an increasing fraction develop the ability to freely and voluntarily meet each other’s needs with a fixed, environmentally sustainable amount of resources.  Instead of everyone trading with everyone else, groups would interact – peacefully, and with minimal exchange of resources.  Such interaction will ultimately be critical to the process of converting to a fully sustainable world by helping to relocate the world’s population to regions where people can meet their basic needs.