The View from Oregon – 383

Re: Natural Disasters and the Human Condition   

Friday 06 March 2026

  

Dear Friends,

In newsletter 367 (“On the Suffering of the Biosphere”) I discussed some Schopenhauerian aspects of the biosphere, specifically, the role of pain and suffering in consciousness. I returned to this, but from another angle, in newsletter 376 (“Man-Made Horrors beyond Your Comprehension”), and then revisited the Schopenhauerian suffering of the biosphere again in newsletter 380 (“Intrinsic Limits on Biological Intelligence”). As noted previously, I’ve been elaborating on this theme for some time now.

Pain and fear help to keep a living organism alive a little longer by making dangers unmistakable, but the real work of the biosphere takes place through death. Natural selection does its work through death, so we could say that every successful adaptation retained by natural selection is an achievement raised on a pile of corpses. And it doesn’t end there, because it’s not only natural selection at work. Sexual selection (which, I think, was probably crucial in the evolution of intelligence, and so very much to the point here) raises its achievements on a pile of broken dreams and ruined lives. This happens with every sexually reproducing species, but with mammals it comes with an emotional overlay, and with intelligence it comes with an intellectual overlay. Every achievement of consciousness, as consciousness becomes more complex and capable of new forms of learning, is a new opportunity for pain and fear to work their magic, pushing us toward better outcomes for the species. And what’s better for the species can be unspeakably cruel for the individual of the species who is selected against. Our survivorship bias allows us to go on our merry way as though none of this cruelty ever happened, and it’s probably this that keeps us sane.  

Human history is, in a sense, that emotional and intellectual overlay on perennial biological realities that every biological species experiences, which is one reason why often emphasize that human beings are first and foremost biological beings. But the emotional and intellectual overlay isn’t merely epiphenomenal; something new is added to the world with them, and one of the many new things added to the world with the intellectual overlay is technology. Frederick Ferré’s sententious definition of technology is “practical implementations of intelligence.” Thus technology flows from intelligence, though we can point out the obvious limitations of a definition of technology that presupposes intelligence, since we then need to know what intelligence means if we really want to know what technology means. But Ferré’s definition is a nice compromise, which is why I often make use of it. For many purposes it is adequate.

Augmenting human biological abilities with technologies has sped up human activity to being something that departs from a strictly biological history—a natural history of Homo sapiens, as it were—and so goes by a different name. Biological time mediated by emotion and intelligence becomes historical time, and with historical time a new form of history emerges, and this is what historians consider to be history simpliciter, differentiated from natural history, which traditional historians don’t consider to be history sensu stricto. (I often emphasize this in my episodes of Today in Philosophy of history, as well as emphasizing that naturalism obliges us to see human history as nested within a larger natural history.)

In natural history, or, more narrowly, biological history, change happens at the pace of natural selection, and that means that not only must an individual die, but an entire generation must die for a new generation with a new adaptation to take its place and demonstrate the superiority of that adaptation for survival and reproduction. One of the reasons that the pace of biological history has the developmental timeline that it has is due to how long it takes for an organism to mature to the point at which it can enter into the struggle for existence. Microorganisms do this rapidly—so rapidly, in fact, we should set them aside and focus on more complex organism. The range in time between short-lived organisms and the long-lived organisms defines the parameters of a history in which natural selection is driving the outcomes. How much change can occur in each generation, i.e., how much of a mutation can alter an organism and improve its ability to survive and reproduce, is a limit on the rate at which biological history can develop. And when animals become more complex, they often have longer lifespans, and a proportionately longer period of time is required as the parental investment in the next generation (especially for K-selected species in comparison to r-selected species). When generations of a long-lived species has to die off before a new adaptation can take their place, this is a process that takes a lot of time.

With the advent of intelligence, and of technology predicated upon intelligence, the pace of history speeds up significantly, because it is no longer necessary for generations to die off before a new modus vivendi can emerge. I’ve been thinking about this also in relation to human history, which takes place on a different, and shorter, timeline than biological history, just as biological history takes place on a shorter timeline than geological history, and geological history takes place on a shorter timeline than cosmological history. Events in human history take place at the rate at which human beings can meaningfully interact. Here “meaningfully” carries a lot of weight, and it’s this weight that makes all the difference. Human history is about the conscious and intentional actions of human beings and the responses of other human beings to this with their own conscious and intentional actions. (That is, this is true of human history unless you’re a determinist, in which case it’s pointless to discuss, but it’s also pointless even to note that it’s pointless to discuss, because nothing you say or do is going to make any difference.) It takes a certain amount of time for a human being to take some action or to articulate a thought, and then it takes time for another human being or beings to respond to this with their own words or actions. The extremes of action set the parameters for shortest and longest action, as well as for the periodicity of the performance of an average action, whatever that may be. The length of time for the average action is then iterated through the length of an average human life, and that tells you the parameters of the effective action of an individual; iterated throughout a population, this tells you the parameters for historical time.

None of these things would be particularly difficult to estimate, meaning that we could put numbers to the temporal duration of average actions, and with a little creativity we could show how and why just as much change takes place in a generation as does. With a little more effort, we could constrain the rate at which societies change over the longue durée, though this would start getting more complicated because it would have to account for interactions with other societies and the background rate of change of climate and topography (e.g., harbors silting up). We might not be able to exhaustively account for every relevant factor, but we could certainly tick off the major items, and from that we would have a much better grasp of history than what we have now. The events in the life of a typical human being, the events of human history, the events of the biosphere, the events of the geosphere, and the events of the cosmos all tick away according to their own rhythm, and the rhythm is different in each case, though these processes overlap with the neighboring processes at the low and the high end of each timescale.

The nesting of the shorter processes of technological change within the longer processes of biological change, biological change within geological change, and geological change within cosmological change is a partial compartmentalization of these events from each other, but while most of these processes of increasingly longer temporal duration can be partially compartmentalized from each other, there are rapid biological, geophysical, and cosmological processes that can act on the time scale of human history, changing outcomes, as with earthquakes and volcanoes, the effects of which unfold over seconds, minutes, and hours and so occur at a rate that human beings are forced to respond to them. Mostly, these are disasters; at the moment I can’t think of any rapid processes in nature that constitute a sudden benefit to humanity. Thus we not only suffer from the torments we inflict on each other, we also suffer from catastrophic natural events that impose themselves on human history as natural disasters. That we’re subject to natural disasters is intrinsic to the human condition, and we suffer on account of it.

In last week’s newsletter I suggested the thought experiment of a conscious intelligence that chooses to surrender its consciousness and to become nonconscious intelligence. One reason it might choose to do so would be the suffering that is entailed by being a conscious being participating in history. A “successful” species, by which I mean a species that survives to increase its range and to improve its position in the trophic pyramid (and therefore to effectively draw on more resources), will suffer in proportion to its success. The most successful species will arguably suffer the most, as they will be exposed to the vicissitudes of history to the greatest extent. They must weather the storms of survival and reproduction. Thus when we ask that hackneyed question, “Why is the human condition so terrible?” one answer to this is that we suffer because we are successful. There are more of us to suffer, and our capacities for suffering increase as we add faculties and capabilities. New capacities mean new capacities for suffering.

A potentially galaxy-spanning lifeform could come to this sorry realization and decide that, if it is going to establish itself on a cosmological scale, that this scale would entail a cosmological scale of suffering, therefore the species would be better off without consciousness, so that it could grow into a cosmos-spanning phenomenon without the attendant suffering from this cosmological exposure. Further, if the being expanding into the universe has raised itself to the status of superintelligence in order to accomplish this feat, there is the question not only of the possibility of unprecedented mental illnesses (superpsychopathology, to give it a name, which I previously suggested in newsletter 380, in which I wrote, “A superintelligence would be capable of forms of madness that do not afflict and cannot afflict mere pedestrian human intelligence”), but also the superintelligent equivalents of fear, pain, and suffering, which would presumably outstrip the fear, pain, and suffering of ordinary intelligence. A nonconscious intelligence would spare itself this suffering, and might well be more resilient as a result. So that at least constitutes a plausible argument for a chosen transition to nonconscious intelligence, which argument I was lacking when I proposed the thought experiment. Moreover, the Schopenhauerian suffering of the biosphere could be used as an argument for replacing the biological complexity regime with a post-biological complexity regime. However, although a conscious intelligence could consent to the elimination of its own consciousness, the greater part of the biosphere could not consent, so that its replacement by a post-biological regime would be involuntary. And this poses an interesting moral question on a very large scale: do we have the right to eliminate the suffering that characterizes the biosphere?

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to the audiobook edition of The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World by Shelley Emling. This is a book about Mary Anning. I’m not sure whether it ought to be called a biography or a work of popular science, since it’s definitely an account of the life of Mary Anning, but it also has the vibe of a popular science work on eighteenth century paleontology. I enjoyed the book—it made me want to visit Lyme-Regis and the Jurassic Coast—and I was glad that it stuck to the actual story of Mary Anning’s life. There was a film that purports to be about the life of Mary Anning, Ammonite (2020), which includes a graphic lesbian sex scene involving the protagonist. There isn’t a shred of historical evidence that Mary Anning was a homosexual, or that even suggests this. Some of Anning’s notebooks survive, and they reveal her as a deeply pious and provincial 18^(th) century woman. It makes me cringe to know how many people get their “history” from films, which are inaccurate when they aren’t being intentionally misleading. I guess, as the contemporaneous saying has it, we live in a society…

Newsletter links 

https://mailchi.mp/f899e2ca1294/the-view-from-oregon-383

https://youtu.be/XRIWCm1Fglg

https://www.instagram.com/p/DV2mU9wjVdD/

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Natural-Disasters-and-the-Human-Condition:d

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ST7EvjLWeI8e6EQWTHaOn?si=0yC1yf_mQpGelG7r5kli9Q