“The first fist fight on Mars”

Why we need cognitive rather than interplanetary explorers

Photo by RDNE Stock project

I was recently listening to Sam Harris interviewing Jack Kornfield, one of the pioneers in teaching mindfulness and meditation practices in the West. The title of today’s post came up in the conversation as a humorous example. It’s an example of human limitations in the sense that regardless of how technologically advanced we become — such as inhabiting Mars (let’s ignore for a moment how unfeasible that is) — our inner development is struggling to match with that. Hence, the inevitability of fist fights shortly after the first colony on Mars.

Kornfield’s point was that our ‘outer’ developments — science, technology, innovation — have surpassed our inner developments, and we need to match the inner ones to the outer ones. Although, I see a problem with this thinking. The issue is that in implying that there is progress to be made within ourselves, such a juxtaposition can appear to devalue the inner strengths we always and already have, even if they can be hidden by layers of ego. I suggest that rather (and I believe Kornfield would agree) we have lost sight of what is already there and inherently more valuable — such as connectedness, equanimity, and selflessness.

This loss is a problem, not least because I strongly believe that our inner mental states get reflected in the technologies we build and how we use them. On one hand, such projection can find positive expressions in creative outputs or life-saving and planet-preserving innovations. Yet, having worked extensively with, e.g., engineers, I propose that typically those inner states are ones purely directed at the concern at hand and solving it, without much heed for the bigger picture or self-awareness of the worldview that informs how the attention is directed. This is a result of how technology disciplines are taught — to condition students to how the left hemisphere pays attention to the world. Unfortunately, too often leaning towards technology as a solution leads to extractive and manipulative ends, ends that serve the markets that encourage such dynamics.

Colonising Mars as catnip for the mechanistic mind

The inner-outer dichotomy also posits inherent value to achievement, such as colonising Mars, that, at least in its current incarnation, is driven by egoistic desires rather than the more immanent qualities.

Someone might argue that reaching for Mars is a sign of admirable ambition and human ingenuity, but again, often such lofty aspirations remain mere faint memories when one is punched in the face. I suggest that colonising Mars represents a perfect object of desire for the techno-solutionist hubris: here we have a planet without an ecosystem to speak of, ready to be replaced with technology and to be endlessly mined for resources. The seeming disarray of Mars’ ecology presents a challenge that the rational and mechanistic mind relishes — to produce order to it by exerting control. After raping the Earth to death, it’s time to move on, to continue on the path that Carolyn Merchant has described as a historical transition from an organically oriented mentality to a mechanically oriented one:

The metaphor of the earth as a nurturing mother was gradually to vanish as a dominant image as the Scientific Revolution proceeded to mechanize and to rationalize the world view. The second image, nature as disorder, called forth an important modern idea, that of power over nature. Two new ideas, those of mechanism and of the domination and mastery of nature, became core concepts of the modern world. An organically oriented mentality in which female principles played an important role was undermined and replaced by a mechanically oriented mentality that either eliminated or used female principles in an exploitative manner. As Western culture became increasingly mechanized in the 1600s, the female earth and virgin earth spirit were subdued by the machine. — Carolyn Merchant: The Death of Nature (p. 2).

How our desire for outer accomplishments keeps our inner development in check

There is something about the nature of technology, and the contexts it gets operated in, that intentions, and values at the root of them, get lost or corrupted in the translation process from intention to output. Perhaps this is due to the forward-facing attention that drives the technologically orientated, techno-solutionist mind.

Emerging technologies, like any innovation, are future-facing. Their innovators have identified a problem in the present and building towards a future solution. In the current world, newness is a source of value. Again, sometimes, such endeavours have produced life-saving innovations. Other times, they have been about building technology for its own and innovation’s sake, or for financial profit’s sake (as happens in the majority of the entertainment industry today). Too often, the innovations’ long-term repercussions have not been properly thought of.

Even our use of everyday technologies is intentional and functional; we use them to get a thing done, we use the technology to manipulate a present state for a preferred future state. Like when we put the washing machine on. Every so often we engage with a technological device out of habit, without a goal other than to distract ourselves to get from the present moment to the next.

I am, as many times before in this publication, talking about flipping the script of how we pay attention to the goals of developing technology. Accepting such a flip can be traumatic because it means shifting the epistemological ground under one’s feet; shifting the ways of knowing we have become used to. By minimum, it requires mental flexibility — perhaps recourse to the right hemisphere as the primary way to attend to the world; to attend as an embodied, transient being that is open to the unknown, infallible, and metaphorical, rather than the certain, prescriptive, and literal.

From planetary to cognitive exploration

An underlying theme in several of my posts has been the shift to an inward gaze to find what is true, good, and beautiful. However, the world does not change with mere contemplation. It has to be followed by agency. To re-negotiate our attachment to outer accomplishments and to bring about a shift where the inner qualities become more powerful drivers for the technologies we build, we need creative techniques: turning existing states of things upside down, or radically transforming their scale, or walking back their premises to something new or something rediscovered and evolved from the past.

In his book Transcend, psychologist and maslowian scholar Scott Barry Kaufman talks about cognitive exploration: “a general curiosity about information and a tendency toward complexity and flexibility in information processing”. Engaging in cognitive exploration, via curiosity and openness to new experiences, helps in turning adversity into advantage. It “enables us to be curious about confusing situations, increasing the likelihood that we will find new meaning in the seemingly incomprehensible” (p. 104).

I wanted to quote the passage because living in the awareness of the polycrisis (climate, geopolitics, cost of living, pandemics, etc.) can be overwhelming and give rise to anxiety. The convergence of the crises can also appear incomprehensible in its complexity. The incomprehensibility becomes acute when contemplating, e.g., how are we supposed to even begin to find ways to untangle the multiple interconnected predicaments and to what extent might be addressing one have an impact on the others, if any?

We need cognitive exploration, to say the least. Cognitive exploration finds its expression in creative acts, but for ‘cognitive explorers’ (as Kaufman calls them) creativity is more than the isolated acts. Importantly, “creativity is a way of being, expressed spontaneously and voluntarily, emanating from the core of their being” (Transcend, p. 108).

Ultimately, cognitive exploration allows one to ‘self-actualise’, something associated with the essence of living a good life in the maslowian paradigm:

Creative self-actualizers are capable of transcending the ordinary dichotomy between the intelligence of the mind and the wisdom of the heart. They are able to throw their whole selves into their work, flexibly switching between seemingly contradictory modes of being—the rational and the irrational, the emotional and the logical, the deliberate and the intuitive, and the imaginative and the abstract—without prejudging the value of any of these processes. Creative self-actualizers are true cognitive explorers. (Transcend, p. 117.)

While cognitive and interplanetary exploration do not exclude each other, it seems that cognitive exploration would be more conducive to triggering a ‘metanoia’, a change in how we live our lives; a change in what we prioritise in the everyday, right here and right now, instead of reaching for the stars. Especially given that we are in the process of making this star, the only one we have, inhabitable as if it were something disposable. Like fist fights are.

Thank you for reading.

With love and kindness,

Aki