Evolution, Psychology and Culture

Understanding ourselves: a precondition for shaping the future

The transhumanist project — to extend life, increase intelligence, and reduce suffering — cannot succeed without a clear-eyed understanding of what we are. We are evolved organisms, shaped by hundreds of millions of years of natural selection for ends that often have little to do with truth, justice, or long-term flourishing. We are creatures whose minds are crowded with cognitive biases, whose cultures replicate ideas through mechanisms similar to those of biological evolution, and whose moral intuitions evolved for small kin-based groups rather than for a global civilisation of billions interacting with planetary-scale technologies.

To improve the human condition, we must first understand the human condition. The reading list below covers seven interrelated areas: memetics (the study of how ideas replicate and evolve), consciousness (the deepest open problem of contemporary science), cognitive biases (the systematic errors that distort our reasoning), religion (a major cultural and psychological phenomenon that any serious political project must understand), education (the most powerful long-term lever for cultural change), ethics (especially the moral consideration of non-human animals, the dominant ethical frontier of our time), and food (the rapid transition towards cultivated meat and plant-based diets, with profound implications for animal welfare, climate, and public health).

These fields are connected. A society’s beliefs about the mind shape its moral choices about who deserves consideration. Its understanding of cognitive biases shapes its political institutions. Its educational system determines whether the next generation will be able to navigate the technological transitions ahead. Alianza Futurista believes that a serious political project must engage with these questions at the level of the best contemporary thought.