The Future Evolution of the Ecology of Mind

Abstract

In this paper I describe an evolutionary and ecological perspective on human psychology, applying this theoretical framework to understanding human nature and the human mind, and demonstrate its implications regarding the future evolution of humanity. My central arguments are: This perspective provides an informative, thought provoking, and valid framework for explaining human psychology; it provides a set of general principles for predicting or anticipating future psychological evolution; and it suggests a preferable vision for the future of the human mind and for guiding our psychological evolution. There is a set of central concepts within this evolutionary ecological perspective: Ecological reciprocity, which applied to human psychology, entails that humans and the environment are open and interpenetrating systems and form an interdependent whole. Within a framework of ecological reciprocity there is no absolute boundary between humans and the environment and neither can be defined independently of the other. Mind, intelligence, personal self-identity, and even consciousness are ecological emergent realities realized in a supporting environment. The idea of ecological reciprocity applied to human psychology derives from J. J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. Gibson’s ecological psychology is antidualistic – neither mind and matter, nor conscious subject and world, are ontologically distinct realities. Within Gibson’s psychology there is a reciprocal connection between self-awareness and other-awareness, a reciprocal connection between awareness of persistence and change, and a reciprocal or interdependent awareness of the spatial arrangement of objects, including the perceiver’s body, and the temporal arrangement of events in the world, including the perceivers’ life – psychological space and psychological time are relative and ecological.1 A second key idea, building off of the first concept, is an ontology and logic of reciprocity as a basic theoretical construct in understanding natural reality. Based on the Taoist Yin-Yang view that existence is a set of complementary opposites, the idea of reciprocity treats all basic ontological distinctions as interdependent, mutually supportive realities. Instead of an either/or logic, reciprocity argues for a both/and logic of existence, subsuming an either/or logic. Reciprocity rejects and subsumes all forms of dualism; that is, the classic philosophical dichotomies are all interdependencies. Reality is both a one/whole and a many/plurality; reality is both stability (being) and change (becoming and