Summary of essays Average human wellbeing can get better or worse. Worst case it can collapse back toward subsistence or even extinction. On the best case it can continue to attain even higher levels of wellbeing. If we follow, "niche-filling-biological-processes," moderated by doctrine of our existing social organizations and each individual's interest in living ever higher above subsistence (with varying levels of personal success,) the collapse path looks more probable. However, if our cognitive abilities can snatch the determination of our procreative behavior from the grasp of our genes and culture, the human experiment can have the "ever-improving-wellbeing" future we want for our children. Extremely low birthrates, even with all these other process fully engaged, can facilitate ever improving wellbeing. I have found no other change in human behaviors that can succeed or succeed in time to avoid collapse. Our challenge is to help billions of people adopt this view of reality and as a result implement very low birth numbers. This conclusion is based on 4 concepts which are briefly summarized in the following pages. 1) the physical world is governed by causal mechanisms, which when integrated into models, can produce accurate scenarios. 2) solutions that don't produce desired results in this model probably don't work in reality either. 3) Only one variable can be maximized in a causal system and that variable is the trend in the human experiment's wellbeing. 4) behaviors that drive this variable in the upward direction. “How things work” image of the human predicament (text) |