Human optimization

The human, arguably the most destructive life form on Earth, has been riding downhill from inception. They rape, kill and pillage to satisfy their highly localized objective functions. The modern variety appears the most potent, devising a plethora of segmentation schemes based on surface features like the color of skin and hair, demographic characteristics such as age and gender, wealth, religions, countries, cultures, languages and even sport to fight against one another. These are hard constraints imposed on humanity by those on the right side of the dividing line. Those proud of evolution may need to think again, as human evolution has resulted in the segmentation and the destruction of public goods such as the environment, both destroying the fragile greenhouse they are afforded. What is rational for the individual is not rational for the system.

It appears a dead end. The human brain, albeit powerful in some ways, appears incapable of thinking about global optimization. From an economic perspective, this appears rational. Given a harsh timing constraint that appears final, the rational response is tactical optimization without any consideration of anything beyond the self. Any action that does not maximize the localized utility of the self can be shown to be irrational and thus the status-quo micro-fragmented system can be shown to be the only mathematical outcome. The arrival of the human on the blue planet easily portended the destruction of the fragile system built up by the cyanobacteria over a billion years.

What is most troubling is the fact that the human, on average, appears to lack empathy, a characteristic shared by most biological systems. Complexity of the brain, thus, seems to have resulted in high localized optimization at the cost of global considerations. Most animals, except the human, appear to consider the community at the cost of themselves. Even animals step back and think in the midst of a fight, but not the mighty human. Evolution and associated complexity of the brain unambiguously lead to the destruction of the system.

I propose a corollary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Evolution increases complexity and this leads to accelerated system-wide destruction. This means that the universal objective is destruction on a grand scale. It is not that entropy increases with time, but rather it increases exponentially with complexity.