A Brief History Of The Human Brain: How We Got It All Wrong

All power corrupts, brain power being no exception. As it enlarged over millions of years, the human brain eventually became big enough to constitute a formidable weapon of mass destruction. Humans became an existential threat to the planet, now that nothing could stand in their way. The tremendous competitive advantages of our large brain led to arrogance and the rise of narratives of supremacy over other beings, which formed the ideological bedrock of a civilisation sustained by ecocide. In the millennia that followed, our ecocidal culture became a positive feedback loop that further trained our brain at solving survival problems through ecological fraud, rather than regenerative approaches. This is why our brain today intuitively functions more effectively as a weapon rather than as a reasoning device. We are designed this way.

The historical parallels between the appearance of Homo sapiens on Earth and the emergence of AI cannot be overlooked. In the same way that AI represents an unprecedented threat to humans, the rise of Homo sapiens was an unprecedented nightmare for Earth’s 10 million species. Intelligence, whether biological or artificial, is the worst predator of all: there can never be a defence against, or escape from, a game-changing new life form that is more intelligent than anything preceding it.

It was unfortunate, but also unavoidable, that evolution would gift us with a brain of tremendous processing capacity, yet little ability for self-reflection. The paradox of how brains evolve is that they don’t necessarily become more “intelligent”: evolutionary pressure on the brain selects for survival tactics and risk-taking behaviour geared towards the survival of the species possessing this brain, not the survival of the planet it lives on or the other species it shares it with. Evolution often selects for survival skills geared towards cannibalism, as this encourages survival of the mentally fittest (or “evilest” if you like) within the species itself. As it evolved, our brain continued to optimize itself as a killing machine to maximize its chances of survival. The dark take-home lesson is that both genocide and ecocide run in our DNA, not only in our culture.

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The risks that humans took throughout their history overwhelmingly paid off, functioning as a reward system that further supercharged the evolution of our brain into a risk-taking machine. It became a sophisticated, highly dangerous RELD: a Resource Exploitation Logistical Device.

The RELD was a gadget with a purpose. It was customized to mine for resources at the most efficient, quick, and devastating scale, exceeding by far any ability of ecosystems to regroup and recover from the damage. The RELD was a game changer in the sense that it had the ability to take down entire ecosystems, which it did. Humans are unquestionably the one and only super predator yet have not escaped the grip of ecosystem dynamics within their own communities. Human society still mirrors the ecosystem, plagued by the same exact disorder that a natural ecosystem is: while becoming brilliant in the arts and sciences, humans also became a grotesque amplification of all the negatives of an ecosystem: conflict, overcrowding, deceit, genocide, starvation, and cannibalism. Intelligence doesn’t make a species wiser or more ethical. It simply supercharges all survival skillsets, whether these are good or evil. Narratives of supremacy over the millennia successfully concealed the two-faced nature of intelligence rather than understanding and addressing it: we failed to realise that advanced brainpower made us both more empathetic and more devious at the same time.

Therefore, an intelligent species is an organism of gasping extremes. This explains why humans are a most curious biological specimen that throws into question the very purpose of evolution itself: is it meant to lead to more species diversity, as we originally thought, or into a single species that self-destructs and hands it over to computer code? We will never know, because evolution, and life itself, never had a “purpose” anyway. They just happened by accident. Evolution itself is an open experiment, and so are we.

Such was the level of devastation the RELD inflicted that, many of humanity’s original food sources would soon go extinct one after the other, forcing humans to become flexible omnivores. Conflict within the species became endemic as overactive RELDs went to war with each other fighting over resources. The RELD’s obsessive need to possess and control food resources led to incredible division within the human species, accentuating existing phenotypic, cultural and linguistic differences and further hardwiring violence into human DNA. “Survival of the most devious” led to the natural selection of thought patterns and predatory behaviours that would later manifest themselves in so-called “civilised” societies and corporate cultures as “client skills”.

The incredible diversity of mental illness that unavoidably came with such a huge brain had to be somehow integrated into society and put to work by an ever-diversifying economy catering to our mind blowing neurodivergence. As the flow of power and goods became more complex, every human psychosis found a useful niche in this economic system, becoming a marketable skill. The psychonomy of mutual exploitation that developed rewarded both the best and the worst in us, making our brains ever more unique, risk-taking, unpredictable and dangerous.

Arguably there is no such thing as mental illness, but merely different levels of departure from an “average brain” that only exists as a statistically defined, idealized, theoretical stereotype. Equally, biologically-speaking, there are no “good” or “evil” human brains. They all know how to survive, but in very different ways some of which are socially acceptable while others aren’t. The human population represents a melting pot of infinite permutations of our neural wiring. None of us are “perfect” for the simple reason that we are all part of one, big, ongoing evolutionary experiment in mental dexterity.

Given that over this evolutionary course good things have emerged out of bad things and bad things out of good things, separating the good from the bad is a futile conversation. Today’s complex society with its crimes, wars and genocides is, in biological terms, as genuine a society as it could possibly be: it is simply the product of the evolutionary selection pressures our brain was subjected to. Civilisation is equally the product of respect and collaboration as it is of violence, hate and exploitation. At the same time that our arts and sciences leaped forwards, our political and economic systems were locked into a destiny of slavery, colonialism and war even before history took place. It was all meant to happen exactly in the way that it happened.

Conflict soon extended beyond the scope of resources, food or territory, as tribes formed supremacy theories about each other e.g. on who has the smartest RELD, or the best skin colour. Doing so gave these tribes the much-needed moral licence to invade “inferior” RELDs more frequently: this time not as a defence tactic, but out of greed for expansion. A specific, practical reason for war was no longer essential. Supremacy theories enabled conflict to move into abstract, narrative territory, establishing itself on ideological narratives that were much more difficult to challenge: these ideologies had now become a “life purpose” for these tribes. They became the fuel behind thousands of years of colonialism and slavery, until a small subset of these narratives (e.g. racism) was eventually, and shockingly belatedly, debunked as myth. Yet while conflict, ecocide and genocide originated as necessities within a survival objective, they eventually became culture. They became inextricable parts of the human experience, and they still are.

Although the ruthless efficiency of the RELD enabled humans to reach today’s level of technological sophistication, our brain would become an existential threat in the long term. Today our existential dead end can be summed up in one observation: even though the technologies the human brain creates continuously evolve, the brain itself evolves at a comparatively insignificant pace. All our technologies are extractive and exploitative whether they are a spear, a stone hammer, a smartphone or an atomic bomb. The intensity of their destructiveness over time however is not only progressive, but exponentially accelerational. As AI rises out of nowhere, we are about to be ghosted by the train of evolution faster than we can even notice it zoom by.

The RELD never came with a “Do’s” and “Don’ts” instruction manual. Our brain has little in-built “humanity”, morals, or a conscience. These are all “nice to have”, complex features our societies tried over the millennia to manually program into this device with only sporadic success. While competitive instincts are genetic, morality is a cultural and emergent trait which requires education, patience, and persistence. We sure tried. We even built institutions which were meant to interface with our RELD and integrate these important missing moral elements, making our brain more “whole”. On paper, love, peace and unity is all there in our society. On paper.

But nature easily wins over “nurture”. Ruthless survival is our default genetic predisposition despite culture, society and “learned” morality having tried to convince us otherwise: that we are meant to be “good”, to love and respect one another and nature. This was a lie we desperately wanted to believe in. Perhaps if we had known the dark truth, we would have tried much harder to overcome it: to become this “moral” human we all look up to but we were never designed to be.

The struggle with our evil doppelganger is the reason why we suffer so much contradiction: so much discrepancy between what we want to do, what we say we will do, and what we actually end up doing. Our social code hardly prevents the RELD from asserting itself every time, corrupting even the most sacred of institutions. Intention always suffers in the murderous hands of convenience and personal gain: humans can readily come up with thousands of ethical innovations, suggestions, visions and solutions for a better world, but miserably fail to implement them, every single time. The RELD always finds new ways to get the upper hand: masquerading as wisdom, inventing irresistible new gadgets promising a more balanced, equal world. But just like the RELD, technologies are tools, not solutions. Technology has no heart, no conscience, no morals, and it can’t love anything but itself. When a society has blindly placed its trust in technology hoping it will compensate for its moral deficits, it has already surrendered its remit towards its people and its planet.

Always avoiding the big picture, humans invested in the transactional and problem-solving aspects of their intelligence, hoping that these would be enough. But the problem-solving areas of our brain notoriously suffer from tunnel vision. Our scientific disciplines refuse to integrate rational and emotional intelligence, as well as learn from the past as they search for truth. Technology may be great at finding quick fixes for discrete problems, but it is guaranteed to make existential polycrises worse. Existential crises are so complex and multi-faceted that they can only be approached through a combination of rational and emotional intelligence within a large, systemic picture frame that looks beyond culture, time, and humanity itself. Rather than navigate the moving parts, dilemmas and daunting trade-offs of our existential polycrisis, this civilisation decided long ago to blindly follow a dollar bill taped on string that leads into a cliff. Had even a small part of our intelligence been diverted from ruthless short-term survival to weighing the benefits and consequences of our approach to civilisation, this planet and society would look nothing like the living nightmare they are today.

While failing to cultivate holistic intelligence, this civilisation also gradually turned its back on existing forms of intelligence which it labelled “savage”: pagan religion, sustainable practices and other forms of wisdom which stemmed from a deep connection with nature. This denial of our “savageness” was in fact what accelerated a cognitive and spiritual devolution into a savage necrocapitalist dystopia.

It is time to accept that the human brain evolved primarily as a ruthless calculation device: measuring, assessing, and optimising its extraction capabilities. We are neither better, more compassionate, or “moral” than other species. We just happen to be tremendously more efficient by many orders of magnitude. Yet although we excel at circus tasks, mathematical problems, imagining and building things, we lack the self-awareness to understand our deeper motivations, their repercussions, the hyperbole of our actions and our blind ignorance towards self-destruction.

The struggle of human societies remains the same: how to prevent their erratic moral compass from being constantly molested by their compulsion for extraction, exploitation and self-destruction. Our framing of environmental problems has always been distorted to fit a host of ineffective, “pretend” solutions rather than the other way round. Our inability to connect with the seriousness of our existential predicaments is down to our inability to connect with ourselves, to realise that these problems did not happen to us. They exist because of us. The climate crisis has been framed as an environment and technology issue, when it is actually a crisis of the human consciousness and psyche. This criminally negligent misdiagnosis of existential crises into simple practical problems to be solved by technology, demonstrates how superficial and corrupted our very approach to problem-solving is. We are trying to solve the disasters of capitalism with more capitalism. This has never worked, and it never will. The instinctive urge to profit from what is supposed to be a solution, to “create jobs”, prosperity, investor dividends and more human population through Green New Deals, only demonstrates that our priorities remain unchanged: we are opting for short term gain at the expense of long-term extinction. The RELD’s one-track approach of growth and expansion has infiltrated environmental movements. There are thousands of “environmental” organisations who are nothing but shopfronts for extractive capitalism. Their very organisational structure and operating principles emulate capitalist corporate entities.

The human brain is a beautiful yet frightening machine. Intelligence is like the Big Bang: it evolves and expands, until it becomes too dangerous for its own good. At the mercy of the RELD, we are no different than chimpanzees who have suddenly been handed nuclear bombs. We can educate ourselves on our cognitive biases and address them, instead of preparing future humans to become destruction machines in an already collapsing world. We can try to rise above the RELD if we recognise it, call it for what it is and respond to it with counterarguments every time it tries to take full control. This is the greatest challenge of our civilisation. Only if we fortify our conscious intellect, our Infinity State, can we begin to humbly steer away from self-destruction.

Although humanity today is in the process of making most of the planet’s life forms extinct, it still doesn’t appear to have a plan for its own survival. Planetary destruction is not a plan, however efficiently, ingeniously, and eloquently we do it. The survival instincts we inherited over millions of years of mental evolution are much stronger than any plan, making us collectively no more self-aware than a fungus growing on a petri dish.

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