Sustainable development: general issues on controlled human psychogenesis
Introduction
The idea of the sustainable development that appeared after the Rio Conference was a new stage of a human development. Its main task, according to V. Zakharov`s definition, «is to include constantly increasing human needs in his habitat opportunities». Nevertheless, the estimated steps on political, economical, legal and other levels of social organization are directed to saving the habitat but not saving the mankind as a biosocial species. The modern tendency to consider primeval an ideal that needs to be protected from human technogeniс masher is based primarily on environmental protection concept and is inherently wrong. For a short period of time such an approach can provide an ecological safety of the society, but it`s hard to solve the problem of the sustainable development from such positions, because it`s multidimensional and needs another approach than the ecological safety problem.
The first reason is that the “sustainable development” concept still isn`t identified and that`s why there isn`t any concrete aim – the sustainable development of which system – ecological and economical or populational and specific - one would like to see ultimately.
Without detracting some ecological safety priorities (i.e. environmental protection) , one should remind that the survival of any species is a general result of complex homeostasis mechanisms in each of four phases of it`s adaptation genesis. According to that, the sustainable development concept should have a complex of steps that considers the development features in every of this phases and provides the preservation of a natural course and the control over this process. It may seem that such a task is impossible at the moment, but the “experiment” of inhibition of public conscience development in Russia lasting 75 years during the attempts to build the so-called socialism in a separate country had demonstrated the controlled evolution possibility. In fact during the third phase for Europe the general tendency of industrial potential development (the spatial factor of a functional development in time) was being preserved. Whereas the public conscience in the country ( the functional development in space) repeated the development stages similar to principles that are typical to prehistoric ( form 1917 to 1922) and patriarchal (from 1933 to 1991) phases of human consciousness development.
The second reason why the sustainable development concept isn`t correct is that the problem of a sustainable development cannot be solved without the clear understanding of the core of a general paradox of human existence as a biosocial and rational animal. Due to it it`s worthy to define the reasons that determined the historical development course of the biological and social part. Otherwise there`s a huge risk to be like a doctor who cures the patient without determining the cause of a disease. From the correct answer on this question depends the accordance of decisions we make and the natural development course of human development and its success in survival for the nearest 20-50 years. That`s to say that different political, juridical, economical and social decisions that are made in governmental structures should contribute to the elimination of contradictions between social and biological essence of a Homo sapiens as between people within the human society and also between the society and nature, but not create new ones.
There are no doubts that the social. Economical and other relations we perceive in the society are only the mechanisms that determine the tactics of human population survival in each of the four development phases. According to that, the stability concept ideally should present the complex of steps that allow to control not only the speed of adaptation genesis but the functional evolution of Homo Sapiens.
1. Methodological principles, ore some words for using the analog method
Before going straight to the main subject we need to determine several methodological principles that are used in further analysis.
To a large degree the modern society value system and the world outlook were formed under the influence of a late Christian religion. Unlike the Hellenic culture , Christianity was perhaps the first religion that , from thу one hand, had diverted the human conscience from the Space, and, from the other hand, maintained in his consciousness the right to consider himself the greatest creation of the Nature. It made the humanity believe in the finality of a material world at the same time with the fear of death. In virtue of further development of protestant market model the culture evolution to a large degree accentuated the social mentality on the values of Descartes` discrete philosophy. In the same way as the other spheres of human activity the science was subjected to a division of general philosophic knowledge into separate directions where the main attention was paid not to correlations with the environment and the Space but also to the practical usage of natural essences for the benefit of one`s survival (and that is preserved in general philosophic sustainable development concept). In the other words, a leitmotif in the development of social conscience became the desire to answer the questions, "What?", "Where?" "When?". The answer to the question "Why?" Or "What for?" was considered of a secondary importance, since it didn`t satisfy the conditions of utilitarian outlook. However, these and other peculiarities in the mentality development of the industrial age (or the over-consumer conscience of society age) should be regarded as a necessary, logical and natural step human consciousness adaptation genesis. Nowadays the society intuitively or consciously needs to change the structure and the control mechanisms of social economic life, that`s a change of the paradigm and outlook and development priorities. This implies that the last has reached its critical point, and science that is hoped to create a new paradigm for understanding the world and the human place in it. At the moment a wide range of general scientific and pseudo-scientific knowledge has been accumulated. Nevertheless, with rare exceptions all this basis can be rated no higher than the horses prance on the circus arena. The knowledge amount is growing but the forecast quality is fluctuating near the zero mark. In addition, a differentiation of general human knowledge in certain areas of scientific knowledge that was useful for some time now has turned the science into the tower of Babel. The differentiation of instruments and approaches of studying our world events and phenomena made the scientists to invent lots of terms for their description. And, figuratively speaking , nowadays they miss the wood for the trees. No wonder that Kozma Prutkov said that a narrow specialist is like a flux, for his development is always unilateral. Let us try to understand what could be the methods, or at least the principles that will properly carry out the synthesis of phenomena and events that at a first glance seem inconsistent by the shape.
In the second half of the XX century there appeared a concept of the non-equilibrium dynamics that can claim to be the completion of the next stage in the philosophy of knowledge of the Time. To a certain extent we can say that it has created conditions for the return of our consciousness to the Hellenic cosmological concepts of the primacy of Chaos, the concept of the Upanishads Absolute and the determining meaning of the system structure in all the diversity of its changes in time. And even the orthodox science at the end of XX century isn`t trying to conceal the need to “pass from specialization, specification and analysis - to compile and synthesize, to the ability to think of lots as of a one, to the methods of selecting the most interesting and important issues from the ocean of our Ignorance”1.
Nevertheless, all the variety of research, as a rule, comes to the description of the system behavior in its own continuum of space and time. That`s why for the adequacy of the further analysis the analog method is the most suitable one. It allows to find and compare events and objects that differ by shape but similar by functions in all the variety of religious, scientific and other forms of human knowledge. In fact the space and time of the Universe, the energy and information of material systems, the heredity and variability of biological species, mathematical expectation, the variance of the general sample and so on in case of the maximum formalization are all manifestations of the same phenomenon that is called Trimurti in Hinduism (where Brahma is an unifying principle, Shiva – a destructive and Vishnu – a creating one), or Yin and Yang in Tao philosophy. In the other words, the material systems (at least in the so-called “light matter”) have a dual nature of functional correlations in general and partial continuum of space and time.
When studying material objects and phenomena in obvious or hidden condition there`s always a “trimurti” that might have its own analogs in all the spheres of knowledge that is accumulated by humanity for a long time of its evolution.
Using this principle one can finnd parallels between events and phenomena that seem to be incomparable. For example, between the gravitational collapse in astrophysics and the aromorphic evolution of biological systems, to use the logic of coordinate operators noncommutativity and impulse for explaining the differences of macro- and microevolutional processes.
From the point of orthodox science such an approach isn`t correct enough because in its basis the quality of hypothetical schemes depends on the author`s capabilities to the intuitive thinking. This makes the achieved results closer to the art than to the science. Nevertheless, in the process of studying the functional unity and the integrity of the world it`s hard to determine where the intuition ends and the logic begins, nearly the same as it`s hard to draw the line between the main spheres of human knowledge : the science, art and religion in the case that all the world`s variety is perceived as the Platonic space but not as the Descartes` discreteness. No wonder that Albert Einstein said that the main thing in science is not knowledge but the imagination.
2. About the used principles` logic in the analysis of human development
If one follows the logic of the bifurcation hypothesis of I. Prigogine and I. Stengers , under the functional evolution one can understand the system development under the influence of one or a limited number of ?-factors that play the leading role in changing the whole system in the process of its historical evolution.
In the following analysis the historical enhancement of the conscience is an ?-function of Homo sapiens species evolution and allows to consider its development at all as a private case of a functional evolution (F-evolution) of the Universe matter in the five-dimensional continuum of space and time of biologocal systems. The creation of both models (F-evolution of the Universe matter and the humanity) was made by the author in 1991 as an attempt to formalize general human knowledge in all the variety of its manifestations (scientific, philosophic and religious). During the creation were used the logiс of the principles of mathematical description of the linear space, Fibonacci sequence, the geometry of a point motion in a multidimensional space, Tao philosophy principles, Karl Marx`s system of commodity-money relations and other directions of general human knowledge. In the case of maximum formalization there is no essential difference between the studied objects in anysphere of generalized scientific knowledge. Always and everywhere we would see the “Trimurti” or the “Yin-Yang” system. After the differentiation of a scientific knowledge on its discrete satellites one of its areas solved the definite tasks earlier than the others. For example, the research of chemical reactions by B.P. Belousov and his disciple A.M.Zhabotinsky in physics were later expressed in the principles of non-equilibrium dynamics of I. Prigogine. But the most paradoxical is the fact that they were described in L.N. Gumilev`s “ Ethnogenesis» in 1939. In fiction this idea was called “The Jurassic Park” authored by M.Crichton. Formally the same idea was expressed in different forms of the human knowledge.
3. The general principles of human survival
A man as one of biological species needs a healthy habitat, but it differs from other animals because of an ability to provide its survival with the help of different usage of environmental resources. Such a tactics permits a relatively arbitrary change of the resources used (the change of environmental capacity). A mining and processing of non-renewable lithosphere resources is inevitably followed by the destruction of nature and reducing the quantity of species` biological connections with the environment. As a result this leads to the deterioration of humans` living conditions. Such a simplified scheme of a species homeostasis forces Homo sapiens to compensate the loss of biological correlations with its environment, like cancer cells by means of a constant growth of their own population, i.e. to bear additional energy consumption on a reproduction process by narrowing the information relations channel with the external environment. That`s why there`s always a threat that the violation of the demographic processes natural course can have the same disastrous consequences for the human evolution as the destruction of his habitat.
The growth of Homo sapiens needs in mining of minerals led to the need for more deep changes in the environment. According to that, the role oа a human as a habitat-forming factor in biosphere was growing. Sо, the Paleolithic age hunters burnt out the large tracts of primary forests, that, from the one hand, made it easier to hunt on big animals, but, from the other hand, that was the reason of changing the primary forests to secondary. The most of the world`s deserts are our heritage as an evidence of local ecological disasters in the centers of civilization of farmers and herdsmen of the Neogene. The modern cumulative effect of local anthropogenic disturbances already has a planetary character, that is expressed in irreversible changes in the biota and in the planet's climate.
With the habitat destruction and the loss of biocenotic ties human adaptation genesis was becoming more and more independent from the environment and the constant growth of number and density of a human population has become an essential element of maintaining the homeostasis of the species.
The increasing of the processes` autonomy in providing relatively comfortable conditions for human became the reason of his non-coevolutional development. We are speaking about the increasing of his own isolation from the rest of biotic environment. It is this tendency that allows us to consider the human development from the positions of pure physics and functional evolution.
4. The mechanisms of human species homeostasis
The reason for such an unusual for biological systems isolated human development is the abstract and logical way of thinking, that other higher vertebrates with figurative and objective mindset do not have. The physiological nature of these mechanisms is likely to be mediated by the differences in promoting and implementing the principle of dominant asymmetry in the cortex to a specific act of behavior, that was suggested by A.A. Ukhtomsky. Studies that were held both in nature and the laboratory show that stimulation of the cerebral cortex even of the pongids (apes),happens in conditions or as a result of a direct contact with the object-irritant (meeting with an apiary - a"rod" production) or when one reaches a certain physiological state (eg, fatigue - the construction of the nest). Whereas Homo habilis even 2.6 million years ago brought the material for making tools to the camp, where they were processed and only then applied to his activities.
In other words, the ability of the excitation rise of the human cerebral cortex centers to a certain type of behavior, even in the early stages of development was stimulated by autoregulatory responses out of contact with objects-stimuli. It is this quality of human biological organization that had offset the number of morphological deformities of the ancestors in the early stages of evolution, as well as determined the main directions of development and, what is more important, the nature of the species homeostasis of a modern human. Demographic processes in human populations are the result of a complex mechanism of regulation of the stability of the species in relation to external and internal factors. It this populations, like all the animals`, an increase in population density is accompanied by an aggressiveness increase of its members. At the same time, a substantial difference is that when the aggressiveness in animal populations reaches its critical values, it "turns on" complex physiological and behavioral mechanisms (called a "stress reaction" by the environmentalists), that restricts the growth of their population, prevents overcrowding, excessive resource depletion and thereby reduces the risk of environmental disasters. In human populations the life expectancy and a generational change take place in longer than in longer periods than in animals`, an aggressiveness reduction is not achieved by reducing the number of population but by means of the consciousness development (the functional complexity of thinking). One can say that the individual consciousness of man "gets used" to exist in the high population density conditions, that gradually leads to a decrease in aggression in superdense populations. In these periods happens "the extension" of thinking capabilities that allows us to find new sources of energy, improve the tools and thus provide the necessary amount of resources for increasing population of the Earth. In other words, as for all types of biota energy sources, as a rule, are fixed and linked to the type of food, population mechanisms of animal homeostasis provide the survival of the species by means of the reduction of populations in accordance with the amount of renewable resources of their habitat. Figuratively-substantive type of mental organization limits their ability to change the quality of used (mainly renewable) resources, only the amount of their consumption changes. As a part of the ecosystem, the population of any species co-evolve with the other elements of biological systems with that they eventually form a single historically developing complex. In the course of this joint biogenic development happens the expansion of a channel of the information received by the species about the environment and the reduction of energy consumption on the reproduction processes (for example, the so-called stenobiontic species).
The homeostasis mechanisms that are mediated by abstract logical thinking of a human, otherwise, make it possible to expand the range of resources used (both renewable and non-renewable), through the enlargement of the individual and collective thinking capabilities (psychogenesis), and thus ensure the growing needs of a constantly growing world population. In other words, the psychogenesis is a mechanism of species homeostasis, that is attributable to human populations, that allows to provide a growing number of populations by means of the functional development of thinking, and thus provide a qualitative and quantitative expansion of the resources consumed.
Thus, the main cause of the "vicious circle" of psychogenesis is the following: the increase of the number and density of the population is accompanied by the increase of aggressiveness that determines the speed and the character of the functional thinking development in human populations. The level of thinking development allows expanding the quality and quantity of resources usage (non-renewable and renewable) needed for the constantly growing population.
In its turn, the growth of human population is directly dependent on the intensity and efficiency of mineral resources use, production of that involves the destruction of the environment, narrowing the channel of biological information and, consequently, decreases the species chances for the survival in the environment.
The Epoch of the Great Migration, the change of socio-economic formations, qualitative and quantitative changes in the use of resources, in the final analysis, are the key stages of psychogenic human development. As a first approximation, one should note that in these crucial moments one of the fundamental correlation of biological interactions (genomic, morphogenetic, ergontic and communicative), ceased to perform any significant role in the regulation of species homeostasis and was replaced by one of the social principles. It is no accident that in the contemporary socio-economic analysis it is customary to distinguish four stages of human society development.
5. The four stages of psychogenesis, or changes of socio-economic formations from the psychogenesis` point of view
In the first prehistoric stage of the species development (100 -. 10 thousand years ago) the tactics of gatherers` and hunters` survival in Homo sapiens populations was provided by potential capabilities of all the complex of their biological organization.
During the patriarchal stage(10 thousand years ago - 1650 in case of number of 10 million people) the change of tactics of hunters and gatherers to the tactics of farmers and herdsmen, first of all, helped to increase the quality and quantity of resources consumed by means of the efficient use of physical labor. Reducing produced resources area, sedentary and other "preferences" can be seen as a consequence of the transition from a "purely" biological mechanisms regulating homeostasis to the bio-social ones. The more detailed system of a social relations analysis of the two phases was developed in the works of Karl Marx and his suggested formula of commodity-money relations reflect the result of a complex mechanism of replacement biological mechanisms with social relationships and, ultimately, the commodity-money ones. So, at the end of the first and in the second phase money (M) as the equivalent of labor invested by an intermediary in the production of goods (G) with the extensive use of nature (G - M - G). Despite the increase of the proportion of use of minerals, the mentality of a rational consumer of natural resources continued to dominate in the human mind that was characteristic for the prehistoric stage. That is that one can not borrow from the nature more than he needs for life during this season.
In the industrial phase (1650 - 1978), when the world population has reached 500 million (theoretical amount of the population, which is not contrary to the principle of thermodynamic equilibrium of Le Chatelier), demographic and social processes taking place in the West European society in the XIII - XVII centuries were determining to the species development. There development of over-consumer`s consciousness was the basis of the market model, which was formed in Western Europe by the middle of the XIX century and determined the basic directions of human development in the third phase of psychogenesis. Its characteristic features were the intense and systemless use of mineral resources based on the development and improvement of mechanisms of effective use of engineering and technical intelligence in the economy. The growth of intensive forms of production changed the structure of commodity-money relations, which acquired the kind of money - the goods - money (M - G - M). It is important to note that at this stage, according to George Soros, the money acquired an independent entity. Their number (or the abolition of the 10th commandment of Christ on the prohibition of loan interest ) has become the equivalent of the well-being, political influence, the acquisition of various goods and other things both for the individual and for the society. At the same time, thanks to the development of technical capacity in the past 40 years, the information (I) has also become a commodity. It has made its own adjustments to the modern structure of the commodity-money relations. In the modern interpretation this could be reflected by the formula M- I - M.
Thus the growth of the technical capacity and the development of the media provided a switch to the last post-industrial phase of the adaptive evolution of man. It is worth noting the appearance and improvement of computer technologies that provided fundamental knowledge with necessary technical means and thus simplified its use in human activities.
Therefore, the main task in the fourth phase of psychogenesis is the development and improvement of information management tools as of the physical state of the substance. This problem puts development sustainability at the mercy of the perfection of the system of nature management mechanisms on the basis of fundamental knowledge in the economy in the form of computer models forecasting the stability of human populations development. Replacing the lost biocenotic information links with the artificial ones may possibly create the conditions for a transition to a form of commodity-money relations and the form I- M-I, and that, of course, will provide the stability and survival of human populations.
6. The main task at the fourth stage of psychogenesis
In the context of the above, the solution of problems related to overcoming another environmental crisis, comes to restoring the rational consumer mentality at the contemporary level of technological development that was typical for the patriarchal culture.
Relatively sedentary way of life in the patriarchal phase provided a close relationship of the population with biological and climatic conditions of a particular natural area. This relative dependence on the environment even in the seventeenth century determined the principle characteristic for peasant psychology of "not withdrawing from the environment the resources over the subsistence level."
Therefore, one of nature management reorganization methods in a sustainable development is the creation of Human Survival Environment Architecture (HSEA) at the regional, national, state and interstate levels. In general HSEA must represent a complex of zones, correlated on the basis of common ethnic, cultural, economic and other mechanisms that ideally should provide optimal conditions for the development of human mental capabilities at the minimum rate of degradation of natural systems. In other words, the unbridled accumulation of money supply should be minimized and put in dependence on the development of individual and social consciousness. But not vice versa!
As a first approximation to the solution of the problem it is necessary to conduct the zoning of an administrative district, for example on a technological, agricultural, urbanized, protected and other areas. It is worth to emphasize that the location and the area of the preserved or restored natural systems should be designed in accordance with the forms of production that dominate in the area, general infrastructure, as well as the nature of the impact of climatic and anthropogenic factors to provide the greatest stability of the landscape and geographic systems. As well the aesthetic, recreational and other values of protected areas (PAs) should be of secondary importance in relation to their role in maintaining the ecological balance in the region. The development of the regional monitoring center on their base, and later - computer modeling and forecast centers will provide the development of a man with the necessary information, and in the future going to the management of biosocial processes in the region by means of dynamically changing funding priorities of different areas of the region. The main purpose of HSEA concept is to create peculiar reserves providing not the wildlife conservation but the survival and development of the humans in these climatic conditions with historically formed structure of production.
A prerequisite in this task is the development of international legislation that should provide the legal guarantees of local communities in the implementation of the free realization of the products on the world market while maintaining their priority on the production and processing of their own resources.
1 - New in Synergetics. The digest of articles. Moscow, «Nauka», 1996.