The Eric Smith Take on Anthropocentrism, Preservation, and Expansion

ByDan

It isn’t whether humans should try to survive. They will, and there may be great reasons for them to do so.

It’s whether human persistence can legitimately be treated as a nonnegotiable condition of a “good” cosmic future.

We cannot honestly assume or demand “yes” into eternity (or even into the next few decade).

Below is a clip and direct quote from my Trajectory interview with Eric Smith:

“You’re participating in a life cycle. The whole point of things of your kind is that life cycles are the dynamical other side of the coin from individuation. So, if you did not work to preserve your own life within the life cycle, then you wouldn’t be a very good individual.

So you’re constantly pushing for that, and part of that is trying to avoid change, trying to homogenize your environment so that the future you have to deal with is similar to the past you learned from, so you’ll be good at dealing with what comes up. So, one doesn’t want to call that a sin to do as an individual what individuals need to do.

On the other hand, to act as if that were an existential and absolute requirement stands in flat contradiction to the fact that you’re embedded in a life cycle and that that’s architectural to the kind of thing you are.

And so then we can see this done, you know, extant by metaphor and by induction to all sorts of other things, trying to extend the condition of day-to-day social life and techno-industrial societal life, as the circumstances that that life has generated are changing to the point where they no longer support the things you have been doing.

So you understand why people try to try to improve, which becomes optimization and thereby homogenize and lose diversity and try to hold on to a status quo at the same time as the status quo undermines the foundation on which the status quo depends, and so recognize the practice, recognize the collision with the structural features, and then shift attention to that collision and say, okay, clearly this does not stand. If there is a resolution, what does a resolution have to look like?” – Eric Smith (Santa Fe Institute) on Anthropocentrism

He mentions that in all areas of life, we see this dynamic balance between preservation / homeostasis, and the expanding evolutionary process that makes preservation / homeostasis possible.

There is nothing wrong with a human wanting to survive, prosper, protect loved ones, or shape the future to accommodate human flourishing.

The contradiction emerges when we elevate these understandable preferences into absolute requirements for the future of life itself.

We go from:

“I am an individual, and therefore I must struggle to preserve my existence.”

To:

“The process of life must forever accommodate the preservation of individuals like me.”

It seems to me that we need to make room for a moral paradigm that values the flourishing and robustness of the entire unfolding process-of-life of which we are part, not merely that flourishing of the present human phenotype – see Moral Paradigms of Torch vs Flame:

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