Humanity: A New Religion (Part 1)
I hope to convince you by the end of this series that your purpose is to (1) survive, (2) reproduce, and (3) increase order.
In High School, I was the head of my Presbyterian youth group. To officially join my church, I had to write a "confirmation letter." The synopsis of my letter was "I am not sure what I believe, but I enjoy the community."
I've always been curious about the nature of reality. I've always liked to question the world. I have great respect for the physicists of the world, but I am no physicist. I do not subscribe to their code that you should never extend what it is that you know. I take truths of the world and then try to logically stretch them into beliefs. This writing is my worldview.
I hope you enjoy the 6 years of laborious thinking and 2 months of writing I've poured into figuring out and articulating what my world view is.
I am here today for a reason
I believe that my purpose is to survive, reproduce, and increase order.
I am here today because of events that happened before I was born. What were those events?
- My parents conceiving me
- My grandparents conceiving my parents
- My great grandparents conceiving my grandparents
- First Homo sapiens (300,000 years ago)
- First human lineage (7 million years ago)
- First apes (25 million years ago)
- First primates (55 million years ago)
- First mammals (230 million years ago)
- First vertebrates (500 million years ago)
- Single cells merge into multicellular organisms (600 million years ago)
- Life emerged: Complex molecules (RNA) start to self replicate (3.8B years ago)
- Simple atoms combined into complex molecules (~380,000 years after the Big Bang)
- Atoms emerged: the Big Bang (13.8B years ago)
The point is that events stretched back since the beginning of time and beginning of life to cause why I am sitting here today writing. At one point, I started as just a simple self replicating RNA some 3.8B years ago. However, it was really easy for me to die because my genes, my life code, could simply get hit by a ray of UV light and it would damage or destroy my code and subsequently ability to self-replicate.
I know evolution doesn't work through conscious choice, but humor me.
I quickly learned to create a cell to protect myself from the outside world, increasing my odds for survival. Over time, I realized the best way to ensure continued survival was to work together with other cells, as a cohesive group, rather than as an individual trying to fend for myself in harsh reality. When cells paired together, I was able to evolve into a cohesive unit. This is what kicked off the Cambrian explosion, the creation of all types of multi-cellular organisms, otherwise known as animals, 540 million years ago.
Fast forward and around 2-3 million years ago, I was living on the savannah in Africa in the middle of the food chain. I would wait for lions to kill large predators. After they had their share, I would scavenge. My hands and brain worked as a unit to create simple stone tools that enabled me to smash open bones of these carcasses and get at the nutrient-rich marrow inside that other animals couldn't reach.
I like to think we were a combination of vulture and woodpecker living on the ground.
Humans are Lucky
Today, it is taken for granted that our brain is a good thing. It's also taken for granted that having hands is a good thing. But both actually come with real tradeoffs, and both need to evolve at the same time in a vertebrate in order for it to evolutionarily work.
The cost of having a brain is the energy it consumes at rest. The human brain consumes 20% of the body's total energy despite being just 2% of its weight. The average for other mammals ranges from 2-8% of total metabolic rate. This means we needed to spend more time focused on surviving (finding and eating food). But if you can't find and eat more food as a result of greater intelligence, then the marginal increase in intelligence comes at too great a cost. When we were in the middle of the food chain creating simple tools to be a combination of vulture and woodpecker, the jury was very much out on whether the positives of a big brain outweighed the negatives.
Now imagine having hands with no brain. Hands wouldn't be very useful to you because you would have no idea what to do with them. You would just stare at them and continually ask yourself, "What are the point of these?"
The cost of hands is bearing your offspring prematurely. Humans standing upright means the birth canal has to be smaller than our ancestors who walked on all fours. Humans are born completely incapable and vulnerable. The only way to survive is complete reliance on your mother and father to protect you. In nature, most animals are born already mostly able to fend for itself.
You don't get a smart animal without dexterous hands, and you don't get dexterous hands without a smart animal.
Humans are very lucky to have evolved both at the same time, where one could reinforce the other, thereby making the costs associated with bigger brains and dexterous hands bearable.
Survive and Reproduce
At each step in the journey, my genes have survived and continued to proliferate some 3.8 billion years later. From a biological perspective, every animal's genes have been shaped by selection to survive and reproduce. Classic Darwinian evolution. NASA's definition of life is literally "a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution." It is genetically imprinted into us to do the same.
Biology doesn't hand us a duty. But when I look at the unbroken chain of life that produced me, I choose to see continuation as sacred. 18% of 18-34 year olds without children say they do not want children at all. 30% of 18-34 year olds without kids are unsure whether they want children. I think that is a shame and more should try to reproduce or adopt if you can't reproduce yourself. We have built civilization and all the comforts of life around us, and in doing so, many of us have lost touch with the thing that made all of it possible in the first place.
My duty is to survive and reproduce. Reproducing is the most divine thing I can do. I am literally creating life. As such, I plan to have as many kids as I can, on the condition they are set up for success. What I mean by success here is supporting them through college and devoting the requisite love and attention. Enabling this requires a degree of financial success and time. I would consider myself a failure with less than 3 kids. 5 kids would be great. While unlikely, 10 kids is the goal.
On Increasing Order
The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that the world moves from order to disorder. This is entropy. Life works against this current. Every living organism takes energy from its environment and uses it to build and maintain structure, to create local pockets of order in a universe that trends toward chaos. Humans are divine because we are the best at it.
Picture a river in your mind. There are several ways to create order in the system of a river. One way is to place a rock. A rock creates a pocket of order. But the way to create complete order and harness that order is to create a dam. Humans are the only life form that is capable of creating and harnessing the complete order of a river. 14.3% of the world's energy comes from our ability to harness the order we create from a dam.
Harnessing order is the true measure of progress in the world. Progress is being able to create and harness order. Humans today have harnessed about 1% of Earth's potential energy. We've harnessed a tiny fraction of our solar system's potential energy and an even smaller fraction of our galaxy's potential energy. This is what the Kardashev scale describes, a framework for measuring civilization's progress by how much energy it can capture and use. We are barely a Type I civilization. The scale goes to Type III: harnessing the energy of an entire galaxy. Now you see the scale that I think.
Humans are different than all other animals. We are divine because we have the superpower of dexterous hands combined with a brain, enabling us to build tools.
Without tools, humans are one of the more energy inefficient animals because of the energy consumption of our brain at rest. But if you give us a bike, we become the most energy efficient animal. Tools multiply our output far beyond the energy efficiency of what our biology alone could produce. Steve Jobs truly built the bicycle for the mind.
A tool is a type of system that leverages the human to create more with less. A tool is a leverager, but humans build all types of systems that increase order in the world. I think of increasing order as building systems that your species can derive utility from.
Life by any objective criteria is amazing today because of all the systems we have built for ourselves. We've engineered clean water and sanitation systems that eliminated the diseases which used to kill us by the millions. We've harnessed cold, refrigeration and air conditioning, that lets us preserve food and live comfortably in places that would otherwise be uninhabitable. We've mastered light, turning darkness from a hard boundary on human activity into a non-issue.
All of these systems humans have built are why the standard of living today is so much higher than any other previous time in history. It is why I can say with complete truth that "today is the best time to be alive." My third purpose, increasing order, is to continue to build a world so that my kids and my kid's kids have ability to say with equal truth that "today is the best time to be alive."
TLDR: My purpose is to have 10 kids and add my brick, or a few, to the progress of life.