Consciousness is a natural disaster - lets work with it

This article on ice core evidence for how radically we are increasing carbon percentage in the atmosphere must be pretty depressing, even for our most optimistic advocates of reduced carbon production. Tim Flannery and Jared Diamond try hard in their writings to avoid filling their audience with a sense of hopelessness, but it difficult not to notice that often they seem to feel hopeless as well. This further evidence of the danger we are in cannot be helping!

What I feel should be separated a little from the issue is our personal and collective emotions about the developments. Yes we are the cause of carbon increase and thus global warming, and yes we could hypothetically have acted earlier to avert potential disaster, but we are also a product of the environment ourselves, and just because we are conscious beings does not mean we are instantly capable of transcending our instincts as an evolved species.

Humans have dominated via the development of a unique social system - we are tightly networked groups of highly intelligent individuals. This model has allowed us to overwhelm all other life forms with our collective powers. But it does not mean we are perfectly suited to scaling to a global level.

In the past humans competed amongst groups, and our network architecture is finely tuned to an Us versus Them way of thinking. This persists to this day - we see it everywhere in the form of sport. But at global level there can be no "them" and without "them" we struggle to see an Us we can identify with.

In this way consciousness is a natural product of an evolving environment and can be compared to any other discontinuity, or natural disaster, which might befall such a system. Whatever the organism that evolves social consciousness in this model, and whatever the environment in which it evolves, it is inevitable that some resource will be identified and utilized by that organism to a point of collapse.

We should not fall prey to guilt about this eventuality - guilt (like the Us vs Them mentality) is an emotion evolved to benefit survival of small social groups, and has no value in the face of global calamity.

What we should do is view the situation as the most glorious intellectual challenge humanity has ever faced, and as an opportunity for a next step in human evolution to occur. This framing helps us to use our emotional baggage as tools rather than impediments. Rather than being paralyzed by guilt we can use pride to drive us to solve this problem.