Humanity: hedgehog or fox?

Isaiah Berlin discusses an interesting paradigm for understanding different kinds of thinkers, the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog operates under a single vision while the fox incorporates many ideas into a worldview. Philip Tetlock applies this framework to an analysis of political predictors and finds that while all expert predictors are bad, foxes are not as bad as hedgehogs. The success of the fox is perhaps partly due to Bayesian updates, adjusting the synthesis-oriented worldview per new information, as opposed to the hedgehog being stuck trying to fit all new developments into the same model.

Humanity: hedgehog or fox?
It could be argued that so far all of human history has been organized around certain grand hedgehog visions such as mastery over matter, immortality or evolution, to name a few.

Mastery over Matter
Over time, humans have been continually demonstrating increasing mastery over matter. The current focus is on improving control of biology and indeed reengineering it with genomics and synthetic biology, matter with 3D printing and eventually molecular nanotechnology, the brain with fMRI technology and smart-drugs and space with a next-generation understanding of physics. Perhaps the most intense version of mastery over matter is the present focus on the biomolecular interface, the integration of organic and inorganic matter. However mastery over matter may not persist as a paradigm, a future redefinition could include mastery over information.

Immortality
Immortality is another grand vision, persisting from the time of the Pharaohs and earlier to long-established religious beliefs to the contemporary notions of life extension, uploading and cryonics. In some sense, immortality is just another kind of mastery over matter.

Evolution
Evolution is a strong paradigm, explaining many things, and connotes a higher order than just mastery over matter since not everything is matter. Evolution can examine more phenomena, including the progression of intelligence, possibly across substrates as is contemplated with artificial intelligence. However, despite myriad application attempts, it is not clear yet whether evolution can explain everything, for example the laws of physics and how the universe developed.

Conclusion
Since even in a simple analysis, no one model can explain everything and there are multiple ideas relating to a composite explanation of human activity, the conclusion would be that humanity bears more resemblance to the fox model than the hedgehog model. Tetlock’s finding that the multi-viewed more adaptable foxes are better could likely hold true for societies and humanity in general as well as for individuals.

End of religion

The positive aspect of religion seems to encompass three things: 1. Offering an explanation for the unknown, the as yet scientifically unproven, 2. (most impactfully) Providing comfort in uncomfortable matters such as death, one's own and the deaths of others and in other unpleasantries; war, pestilence, disease, misfortune, etc. and 3. Providing a moral code of behavioral conduct.

It is easy to see many ways in which religion could become evolutionarily outcompeted, eventually disappearing. First, as science's accelerating advances continue, the unexplained territory shrinks to asymptotically small proportions. Second, if death becomes obsolescent through life extension, there is no longer a need to postulate anything that might occur after death and no need to comfort the non-dying. Third, there are many appropriate moral behavioral norms, particularly those which do not involve religious models or the introduction of artificiality (for example, sinning exonerated by confessing).

It will become increasing difficult for religion to persist in the face of radical life extension and eventual immortality. Everyone is their own Jesus in this new empowered age of agency. Implicit shifts away from religion are codified in the recent publication of books bringing scrutiny and analysis to religion: "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris, "God is not Great" by Christopher Hitchens, "Breaking the Spell" by Daniel Dennett and others.

Radical Life Extension and Population Growth

The world population just passed 6.6 billion in mid-June and is estimated to reach 7 billion in 2012.

The Conventional Thinking
The conventional thinking is that the world population will continue to grow to a peak of about 9 billion in 2050 before starting to decline. The chart below shows the number of years it took for each billion to be added to the population.

Source: Wikipedia

Another Approach
In reality, many factors could change how population growth will actually occur. The basic inputs to population growth estimates are fertility rates and mortality rates.

Fertility rates have dramatically dropped since 1960 (push play at this Gapminder link to watch the global decline in fertility rates and increase in longevity 1960-2005). The accelerating informationalization of the developing world and increasing literacy and participation by women in the economy could trigger even greater drops in fertility rates than have been included in the UN and other projections.

Mortality rates could see even more change than fertility rates. Disease treatment and prevention, personal genomics and radical life extension technologies could all trigger hugely discontinuous increases in longevity.

What would the world be like with huge populations of baby boomers and others living healthily into their 100s, 120s, and beyond? Six-seven generation families could be alive simultaneously.

Immortality
At some point in the next few or several years, longevity will likely start to edge up in fast spurts and plateaus until immortality is ultimately achieved, probably synergistically with digital options such as uploading mindfiles (for backup at minimum!) and downloading into any variety of human and other corporeal forms (Hack your Body!).