网范文：“Future psychological evolution” 人类能够构建心理表征和模型，英语论文范文，可能存在于交互环境。他们可以使用这些心理模型来确定行动，将使他们能够实现自适应目标。这篇心理范文讲述了人类的心理进化。人类如果不使用这种能力来确定和实施行动，将最有助于人类的进化。一般来说,人类没有发现动机和满意度,无论多么有效的行为。从进化角度来看,这是一个很大的限制，在人类的心理适应性。
本文提出了确定新的心理能力,需要克服这个限制,如何获得新的能力。适用人类发展这种能力，在任何方面将成为能够适应必要的进化成功。下面的范文进行详述。
ABSTRACT
Humans are able to construct mental representations and models of possible interactions with their environment. They can use these mental models to identify actions that will enable them to achieve their adaptive goals. But humans do not use this capacity to identify and implement the actions that would contribute most to the evolutionary success of humanity. In general, humans do not find motivation or satisfaction in doing so, no matter how effective such actions might be in evolutionary terms. From an evolutionary perspective, this is a significant limitation in the psychological adaptability of humans. This sets out to identify the new psychological capacity that would be needed to overcome this limitation and how the new capacity might be acquired. Humans that develop this capacity will become self-evolving organisms - organisms that are able to adapt in whatever ways are necessary for future evolutionary success, largely unfettered by their biological and social past.
INTRODUCTION
Is the psychological evolution of humanity at an endpoint? Or are there limitations and deficiencies in our psychological capacities that could drive further evolution? Are there, for example, new forms of psychological software that humans could acquire to improve our ability to adapt to whatever challenges face us in the future?One way we can begin to answer this question is to ask whether there are blind spots in our current psychological capacities. Are our existing abilities to discover and implement useful adaptive behaviours seriously limited? Are we unable to explore areas of the space of adaptive possibilities?
If we discover that there are limitations in our current psychological capacities, we can then ask whether these can be overcome by changes to our psychological software. Can our psychological adaptability be improved by, for example, the acquisition of new psychological skills and capacities? Can these be developed through learning and appropriate experiences?If we find that there are limitations, and if these can only be overcome by changes to our psychological software, we can then ask whether humans are likely to make these changes. Will we do what is required to develop the software? Will we be motivated to make whatever effort is necessary to evolve our psychology? Or are humans caught in an evolutionary predicament are we unable to make these psychological improvements because of the limitations in our psychological adaptability?
We begin in section 2 by identifying significant limitations in our current psychological capacities. Section 3 of the examines how these could be overcome by the acquisition of new psychological abilities, and section 4 assesses the likelihood that humans will develop these capacities.
CURRENT PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS
What are the strengths and weaknesses of our current psychological adaptive capacities?Our main strength compared with other organisms is our ability to use mental models to discover and implement useful adaptations (see, for example, Popper, 1972 and Dennett, 1995). Instead of having to try out alternative actions in practice, humans can use mental models to predict the effects of the alternatives. Using representations of ourselves and of our environment, we can try out possible adaptations mentally. This significantly reduces the need for costly trial and error, and enables us to take account of the (predicted) future consequences of our actions.
Our ability to test alternative behaviours mentally is the basis of our capacity to plan ahead, imagine alternatives, invent and adapt technology, build structures such as houses and roads, radically modify our external environment for our adaptive goals, establish long-term objectives, imagine how we might change the world, develop strategic plans, design projects and undertake activities that pay off only in the future, such as plant crops and feed animals.
The acquisition of language greatly enhanced our capacity for mental modelling. Language and associated forms of communication enabled humans to share the knowledge that is used to construct useful models of reality. All members of a society could eventually acquire and use the knowledge discovered by any individual. This enabled knowledge to be accumulated across the generations. The progressive accumulation of knowledge has enabled humans to model more accurately a greater range of interactions with our environment, and to predict the consequences of our actions over wider scales of space and time (Stewart, 1995). This has enabled us to discover more effective ways of achieving our adaptive goals.
Our ability to construct and manipulate models has also improved as we have learnt to augment our mental abilities with external artefacts such as pen and , books, recording devices, computers and other forms of artificial intelligence.
Our mental adaptability can be expected to continue to improve as humanity accumulates more knowledge about how the external world responds to our interventions and as artificial intelligence is developed further.In principle, we could use mental modelling to greatly enhance our evolutionary adaptability. We could use mental modelling to discover and implement adaptations that are best for humanity in evolutionary terms. We could do this by using modelling to identify the future consequences of alternative actions, including their evolutionary effects. This would enable us to determine which actions would contribute best to the evolutionary success of humanity. We would be as effective at discovering the best adaptations as our models allowed. As our modelling capacity improved, humanity would be able to adapt successfully to a wider range of evolutionary challenges.
The use of mental modelling for evolutionary adaptation would easily outperform gene-based natural selection. Genetic evolution is largely blind and operates by trial and error. It has no capacity to predict the future effects of alternative adaptations and to use these predictions to identify the best adaptation. Furthermore, genetic evolution cannot learn and accumulate knowledge throughout the life of the individual. And it is unable to establish adaptations that benefit only future generations and not the organism itself [and its genes] (see for example, Stewart, 1997a). Once a species has accumulated sufficient knowledge, the use of mental modelling for evolutionary adaptation would enable it to adapt to a much wider range of events than a similar species that evolves genetically.
However we do not use our mental modelling in this way. We do not use it to discover and implement the adaptations that will deliver evolutionary success to humanity. Most humans are unconcerned about the evolutionary consequences of their actions. Instead we use the enormous power of mental modelling to see how we can act on the world to produce desirable psychological states and avoid unpleasant ones. For most this means using modelling to pursue sex, wealth, satisfying relationships, social status, fame and so on.
An evolutionary perspective helps explain this state of affairs. As we have seen, evolution would favour species that use mental modelling for evolutionary adaptation. Once such a species emerged, it would flourish. But evolution was not able to produce this capacity immediately in the evolution of life on Earth. A brain that is capable of mental modelling took a very long time to evolve by the blind trial-and-error of genetic evolution.
Until mental modelling evolved, gene-based natural selection had to find simpler arrangements to adapt organisms during their life. The simplest way to achieve this was to fit out the organism with arrangements that discovered adaptations by trial and error. These arrangements would make changes in the organism until a change is made that is found to be adaptive in evolutionary terms. But what arrangements within the organism could know whether a particular change is adaptive? The answer is easy to see when the event to which the organism must adapt disrupts the effective functioning of the organism changes can be tested on the basis of their ability to restore effective functioning (Ashby, 1960). For example, an organism trying to outrun a predator might deplete the oxygen in its leg muscles below the level needed for peak performance. Increases in the organisms heart rate could be tried out until oxygen levels are restored and the leg muscles are able to perform effectively again. But this method will not work when an adaptive change produces only future benefits to the organism, and does not produce any immediate improvement within the organism (Beer, 1972). Examples include actions that organize sexual reproduction, and much of the behaviour that protects social status within a group. Neither of these generates any immediate benefits to the organism that could be used as indicators of the usefulness of the behaviour.
How could gene-based natural selection organise an organism so that changes that produce no immediate benefit to the organism, but produce evolutionary benefits in the longer term, would be selected as adaptations? How could possible adaptations be tested within the organism to identify those that produced benefits only in the longer term? The simplest way is to test them against proxies for future evolutionary success. Natural selection could fit out organisms with a system of internal goals and rewards whose satisfaction is correlated with evolutionary success. Possible adaptations would be tested within the organism against their ability to achieve the internal goals or rewards (Frank, 1988. See also Stewart, 1997b).
Such an organism would spend its life pursuing these internal rewards and goals. This would be experienced by the organism as responding to motivations and to emotional states and impulses. The genetic evolutionary mechanism would tune these so that when the organism pursued its internal rewards, it would act in a way consistent with evolutionary success. For example, actions that organise sexual reproduction could be rewarded with pleasurable feelings, and behaviour that could destroy an individuals reputation within its social group could be deterred by unpleasant feelings of guilt.
Until they acquire a capacity for mental modelling, organisms have to be organised in this way to pursue proxies for evolutionary success. But even when mental modelling finally emerges, organisms would still have to be organised to pursue the goals established by their internal reward system. This is because mental modelling will be grafted on to an organism whose adaptation is already organised by an internal motivation and reward system. Gene-based natural selection can only build on whatever is already available. Furthermore, mental modelling will not have the capability to immediately take over the adaptation of the organism. The organisms would not have accumulated the detailed knowledge and information needed for their models to be able to predict the future consequences of a wide range of alternative actions modelling will be less effective than the pre-existing motivation and reward systems at discovering the best adaptations (Stewart, 2017).
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