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Will humans make the transition to become self-evolving beings? Will we develop the capacity to consciously modify our pre-existing adaptive processes so that we can take whatever actions are best for future evolutionary success? The key impediment to making this transition it that it is not easy. In the present circumstances with current techniques and practices, significant personal effort, commitment and perseverance is necessary if an individual is to make the transition. For many, the prospect of being able to make a greater contribution to the evolutionary success of humanity is unlikely to provide sufficient motivation for the considerable investment required. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of individuals are likely to develop the ability to manage their pre-existing adaptive processes, although not initially for evolutionary purposes. This is because the acquisition of this ability can provide immediate benefits to individuals. Individuals will be far more effective at achieving their key goals if they have the ability to align their pre-existing adaptive processes with those goals. They will be able to find satisfaction and motivation in all the actions needed to achieve their goals. In contrast, individuals who do not develop this psychological capacity are far less effective at pursing their goals. They are not able to implement actions that are not motivated and rewarded by their pre-existing processes, even though the actions may be essential for achieving their goals. They are not be able to revise personality traits or habits of thought that stand in the way of achieving their goals. The advantages accruing to individuals who can manage their pre-existing processes will increase progressively as humans get better at using mental models to foresee the consequences of their actions. As knowledge accumulates, humans will increasingly see situations in which the actions motivated by their internal reward system are inconsistent with their goals. Increasingly their mental modelling will be superior to their pre-existing adaptive systems at identifying the best actions for achieving their goals. The advantages of self-management will manifest most clearly where humans strongly compete with each other, such as in economic markets. Competition creates winners and losers. Individuals who can use self-management to achieve their competitive goals will have a significant competitive advantage. They will tend to out-compete those who are unable to do so. And the gap will widen as knowledge accumulates and modelling improves. The incentives for the development of self-management will increase. This is exactly what is occurring in market-based economies. Economic success is increasingly going to those who have some ability to self-manage. It is no accident there is a rapidly growing demand from business for personal development training and literature. Many corporations now train their executives in practices such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming, meditation, techniques designed to improve emotional intelligence and other self-development practices. The spread of self-management skills is self-reinforcing. As well as the demonstration effect, the higher the proportion of individuals who are able to self-manage, the more those without the skills will be disadvantaged. Furthermore, as self-management spreads, individuals will increasingly encounter situations in which they will be called upon to behave as if they are self-managers. This effect can be expected to be particularly strong within families. Children brought up by self-managers will be continually subject to different demands and expectations to those who are not. Increasingly humans will grow up and operate in a social environment that demands and encourages a capacity for self-management. Eventually, a psychological transformation that once required enormous personal effort will occur routinely to many as they grow up amongst others who have already undergone the transformation. Once an individual has undergone the psychological MST that enables self-management, it is a very small step to use self-management for evolutionary objectives. The individual will be able to adopt the aim of pursuing evolutionary success for humanity without having to be a psychological altruist. This is because she will be able to use the capacity for self-management to find psychological satisfaction and motivation in whatever it takes to pursue evolutionary success. An individual will be more likely to adopt evolutionary objectives once she can mentally model (and therefore understand) the past psychological evolution of humanity, and the future possibilities. This understanding will tend to undermine the possibility that the individual could continue to find meaning in a life spent pursuing only the satisfactions provided by their pre-existing internal reward and motivation systems. The individual will see that these have no absolute validity or value. They are past evolutions best attempt to get us to behave in ways that will bring evolutionary success. But they are a flawed attempt that is inferior to what can be achieved when we supplement our adaptive ability with mental modelling. The individual will see that she does not have a choice about whether to pursue evolutionary objectives. The only choice is whether to do so guided by incompetent and outdated means, or to do so consciously, using the superior capacity of mental modelling. The individual will see that humans who continue to be guided only by their pre-existing reward and motivation systems are as absurd as a wind-up toy soldier that has run into a wall and fallen onto its back, but continues to march, on and on. In summary, there are a number of factors and processes that can be expected to encourage the emergence of a new psychological MST amongst humans. But whether these influences will be sufficient to establish the transition widely amongst humanity is not yet clear. 网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文作品权归所有；未经官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯作品权现象，英语论文，保留一切法学追诉权。()，英语论文题目 |
