روانشناسی تکاملی، نظریه پیچیدگی، و معرفت شناسی اجتماعی کمی

The human brain is the instrument by which we observe the external world (correspondence), and by which we communicate our interpretations of it to each other (coherence). Only a small part of the brain's behaviour is amenable to introspection, and subsequent linguistic articulation to other people. The vast majority of our perception and behaviour is shaped by subconscious compartmentalised functions which are the result of 2 million years of human evolution prior to the last 10,000 years of ‘civilisation.’ Both individually and collectively this behaviour is complex—full of non-linearities, feedback, and emergent effects. There is thus an overlap between evolutionary psychology and complexity theory. However, it may be that our ideas about complexity are not an independent tool with which to appraise evolutionary psychology, because they are instead the products of it. This evolved subconscious brain, about which we know so little, has the greatest channel capacity for both correspondence and coherence. It has evolved as a survival strategy to match our long generational deadtime, but may not be appropriate for new challenges to survival. It is suggested that we need to re-instate mankind and his brain as the central element of study, so that we can learn who we are that threaten our own existence.

A recent Special Edition of Futures[1] was dedicated to an exploration of the relationship between knowledge and complexity theory. What complexity theory has shown conclusively is that there are limits to our knowledge, because complex non-linear systems cannot be modelled exactly, and more importantly, we can never know whether we have even modelled them approximately. “In building representations of open systems, we are forced to leave things out, and since the effects of these omissions are non-linear, we cannot predict their magnitude.” (Cilliers [2, p. 608]). If there are limits to knowledge, then what does that say about our ability for ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’? (Allen and Torrens [1]). The different papers in the issue put many aspects of dynamical system analysis under the microscope—so that the ideas of adaptive and evolving systems, closed and open systems, memories and history (path dependence) get their full measure. But nearly every paper could have been written by a theorist from planet Zog or planet Beetlejuice, rather than planet Earth. There is virtually nothing that is said about what is distinctive about human beings from planet Earth, yet we are the only agents we know of, capable of writing and editing such an issue. And, in this case, the papers were all written in just one of many human languages (English), in one serial dimension, even if elaborated occasionally by two-dimensional diagrams. I too wish to relate complexity theory to knowledge. But in this paper, but I ask other questions about the human nature of human knowledge, and relate complexity theory to that. I wish to augment rather than supplant the ‘limits’ to knowledge arguments of the Special Edition. Indeed, I wish to complexify them.

Homo sapiens must have been having a joke when (s)he named him/herself Sapiens. It would have been better to have said Ignorans. We stand at the dawn of self-conscious life on Earth, so early that we have no idea how self-consciousness is possible and how it works. It is not far from the truth to say that we know little more than that the human brain is the organ that makes this possible. We know little about how that organ is functionally organised, apart from having identified some capacities, that have allowed groups of hunter–gatherers to survive. Current research has begun to hint at the extent to which our thinking and behaviour is shaped by the evolved compartmentalised (or semi-compartmentalised) ways in which we think. If we can only think in the ways dictated by the mental structures that have resulted from evolution, then it is difficult to see how we can find an independent way of describing and assessing these structures. If there are indeed ways in which we think and behave ‘Beyond Evolution,’ then there may be ways to some kind of independent assessment of our evolved mental structures. Complexity theorists have not spent much time debating whether the new insights into non-linear data processing are independent of our evolved mental structures. It seems to me that they have assumed that the approaches do have the kind of privileged independence taken for granted by ‘normal’ scientists. On the other hand I have suggested that this ‘independence’ may be more bogus than real. One of my conclusions is that a debate between the two fields could prove fruitful. A second conclusion is that we need to know much more about the channel capacities of our different perceptual functions, and of the channel capacities within and between different societies. All of this has to be seen against the backdrop of rates of change. In essence this means understanding the capacities to track change successfully (or otherwise). One of the frontiers here is a better understanding of cross-cultural communication, and the extent to which culture is ‘bottom’ rather than ‘top.’ Another is to work out what is doing the adaptive tracking: the small consciousness or the much larger subconsciousness, and whether the two are at variance. These two conclusions jointly lead to a third. In pre-Renaissance times, man was at the centre of the world, and the world at the centre of the universe. But then came the fall. Since the Copernican revolution, man has found himself increasingly reduced to infinitesimal insignificance in the universe. However, both of these are but self-images, reflexive self-characterisations. The human beings that saw themselves as the centre of God's world are exactly the same as those that see themselves as mere specs of nothingness. We have to re-instate mankind as the central element of study: not on the old basis that we are God's chosen, but on the basis that it is only by doing so, that we can learn who we are that threaten our own existence.