We Can Reach Fitness by Returning to the Optimum Condition: NDP 182

Have you ever sat down and thought about your values? 

Values are important, motivating, and provide guidance.

I’ve done a lot of values work in therapy and find it challenging. I value many things, but prioritizing the top five to ten is difficult and dynamic.

One thing I have learned during over a decade of values work is that many human values suck. 

I think a lot about universal or ‘optimum’ values

Are there ‘optimum’ human values? For my purposes, optimum is an adjective meaning most favorable or desirable. The best. In biological systems, we can think of optimum in terms of homeostasis or balance. Please see here for more on that. 

An example of optimum is transportation. Can we identify an optimum mode of human transportation? Many suggest it is the bicycle: 

Science of Cycling: Human Power | Exploratorium
© The bicycle is a tremendously efficient means of transportation. In fact cycling is more efficient than any other…annex.exploratorium.edu

In the case of transportation, we skipped past ‘optimum’ in pursuit of ‘better’. Now we burn jet fuel to fly around the planet. This uses more fossil fuels and creates more problems associated with that industry. 

We also change our values

Change is inevitable. Everything is impermanent and evolves. Sometimes, we change toward improvement. Sometimes our pursuit of ‘better’ leads us astray. Words like improve, better, and success, are extremely subjective. 

Modernity induced a key shift away from optimum values and toward money, status, and power. Currently, artificial intelligence is exacerbating this transformation.

With each technological advancement, we need to revisit our values. We are mistaken to believe that each step along the evolutionary ladder is an improvement. Rather, organisms experience increases in efficiency that facilitate new abilities. But these advancements are not always the optima.

Consider, briefly, biological respiration. An amphibian requires minimal energetic investments to oxygenate cells across moist skin. Humans, on the other hand, must breathe. While humans can be more active and grow larger and more complex, are we ‘better’?

So with evolution, knowing what is optimum is key

Humans evolved the ability to choose, which itself becomes a selection pressure. We can influence our evolution. If we want to remain extant we need to make better choices.

Valuing money, status, and power leads to our demise. To enhance evolutionary fitness we must revisit our past. In our past, we may find more optimum values to guide our future.

I will be assisting with delivering my future floating home for the next few weeks but will post when I can. Please check out my back catalog here and on The Neurodivergent Professor podcast and YouTube channel. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hey guys, welcome back. I'm Chris Bercher. This is the Neurodivergent Professor. I write articles on a website called Medium. I do this podcast, this is this YouTube video, depending on whether you're listening or watching, about ideas I don't think we talk enough about. Ideas that aren't necessarily mine originally. I stand on the shoulders of giants, I read a lot of stuff, I read about the Toltecs, I read about the Buddhists, you know, I read about mindfulness, meditation, I put all these things together and I kind of ask myself the question of are we doing this human thing right? How can I do better? How can I wake up in the morning and feel better about the kinds of things that I spend my time and energy on? How can I love my family more? How can I broaden my family to include all of the members of all of the species of the universe on the earth? I literally mean that as woo-woo and dumb and and silly as all that sounds. I am motivated to try to get my thoughts out to maybe reach someone who doesn't feel like they can talk about this stuff with other people. I think we all should be talking about this. I think I think shifting our value system from money, status, and power to things like cooperation and love are going to make a difference in the change in the world that is necessary for us to successfully navigate the future. Yeah. This is episode 182. We can reach fitness by returning to the optimum condition. I chose that title because it's got a higher SEO score, but really what I'm talking about here, well, a couple of key words. We can reach fitness by returning to the optimum condition. I think we must make the mistake that all choices we make as humans are additive toward improvement. Maybe that's not even the best way to say it. I think somewhere in the last 10,000 years, we shifted our value systems in a way that seemed like a good idea, but like I talked about in the last episode, but that promoted and preferred and prejudiced toward the individual human, typically male, rather than promoting unity and connectedness, you know, and this idea of duality. Um, we tend to worship men who are powerful and successful and drive fast cars and have a lot of money, which is weird. It's weird. Now that's okay if it's like a hobby thing or it's like this side project, but it pretty much fundamentally is the filter through which we make all of our decisions. Who's gonna be president? Who's gonna be the ruler? Who are you gonna vote for? Who do you like better? Who are you gonna marry? Who are you gonna hire? All of these things go straight toward that very, very narrow, immature, childlike, early stage set of values that work well in the short term, but don't have a lot of power in the long term. And I get it. We gotta eat. In the short term, I want a sandwich. I'm not necessarily willing to spend a year starving so that my neighborhood can improve, right? I get it. That's just the kind of the human nature that we have to deal with. But there's people like me, and there's people like you, and all kinds of other people in this world that are talking about how we can make a shift toward more unifying, cooperative, loving values in the hopes that that helps us find solutions to problems of humanity and improves our chances of success in the future. And it's funny, and I I wish I was a better uh documentarian, uh, I would say researcher, because I am a good researcher, but I just don't document myself well. And I do remember very vividly, and I've heard this more than one time in my life, that the this is a funny analogy, but bear with me here. I'm trying to make an analogy on this optimum condition thing. I would I'll ask you the question, because it was sort of posed to me this way. What is the best form of transportation that has ever existed, now or before, and that we know of? And that better is is confusing, right? And so you might say, like a jet or a rocket ship or a really fast car, and then you start thinking, well, a lot of those things waste a lot of fuel. So that's probably not better. If you've got to like burn through gazillion gallons of fossil fuels that are limited, that's probably not gonna win the race. So maybe some alternative fueled vehicle is better. Uh, and then you start doing the math, like, well, a skateboard, you're pushing that, like walking, is that maybe the best one? Boats, sailboats, all this stuff. Well, it turns out it's the bicycle. And it has something to do with if you kind of come up with an equivalent power source, like the kilocalorie, right? Or something like that, or carbon, a human being and the gearing of a motor of a bicycle, and the frictional forces and all that stuff put together, and the speed with which you go, it turns out the bicycle is quote unquote the best vehicle, the best mode of transportation that we have ever come up with. Now, think about this. Where would you place the bicycle in the evolutionary lineage, right, of least sophisticated to most derived, or oldest to newest, or something like that? You'd probably put it, you know, not at the end. Like I think at the end, you're gonna get all those things I mentioned first, like the Model T, you know, anything once we discovered fossil fuels, right? It's certainly not gonna be a human-powered vehicle, you know. And then before that, you know, somewhere along the line you're gonna get like walking. And I guess walking isn't as good as biking because you can't travel as far on the same amount of calories, right? With biking, right, uh, you know, think about it. I tell my daughter this all the time, now that she's finally learned to ride a bike without training wheels, I can't keep up with her anymore. And she's not tired. Like I'm running to try to keep up with her, and I'm breathing and panting, and she's just like, what? And I'm like, look, you're expending way less energy than me. You're going a lot faster and a lot farther. You know, your your mode of transportation is superior to mine. And yes, there's all the materials and all that, all that went into the equation, I'm sure, that determined the bicycle was the best one. My point there is that even though we discovered the optimum means of transportation on land that humans could have, we kept going. And are are people riding bikes everywhere? You know, even like in Egypt and some of the other countries I've been to where there's not a lot of cars, they're mostly on mopeds. They're still on the old the best place I've ever been that represents this is Amsterdam. And you get out of the airport at Amsterdam, you come outside, and there's a freaking parking garage full of thousand tens of thousands of bicycles. They figured it out, they realized it. They're they've they're capitalizing on the idea that bicycles are the best form of transportation. And of course, they're not perfect because they require materials and and you know all that stuff, but they can be serviced. You know, it's it's just okay, enough of that. The point I'm trying to make is that we don't really use the optimum. We we we think we're doing better by improving elements of transportation, like speed. Like we're getting ready to fly to go look at a boat, and we're going to burn ridiculous amounts of fossil fuels to travel, you know. Well, let's put it this way it's gonna take me two weeks to sail the boat the same distance we're gonna travel in half a day, right? So you say, well, flying is a superior mode of transportation. Well, it depends on your value system. Do you value efficiency? Do you value waste? Do you do do you value, you know, not relying or minimizing extractive resource use? You know, how how are we talking about this? But that's where we continue to go. We look at us. I'm in America. Like families, we have more than one car per person, it seems like. It's crazy. And yeah, that's all because it's hard to go back. I use the analogy of air conditioning a lot. Once you live, especially in the deep south here in the United States, where it's humid in the summer and muggy, air conditioning helps de, you know, dehumidify your house as well as cool it. Once you live in air conditioning, it's hard to go back to living without air conditioning. And in fact, not many humans do it unless they have to. And this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as the earth gets warmer and more humid. Um, but but that's beside the point. The idea is that once you've flown in a jet, it would be hard to sail that same distance. It'd be hard to say, I think I want to make a take a vacation to Iceland, which my wife and I have done, and we flew to Iceland. The alternative of taking a sailboat is not very appealing because that's a cold, uncomfortable, and long trip. You know, we were able to fly to Iceland and spend a week and fly back, and we had five or six days, you know, in the country on the island. If you were going to do that on a boat, number one, it would probably take you a a couple of almost pushing a couple of months to have the same five or six days, right? Because so it's it's it's hard. It's hard to go back once you've seen, you know, the beauty of the potential. But the idea holds. Now the question is how many other times have we done that? In what other ways have we bypassed the optimum condition in a race toward the next best thing, which is something humans do? Both from well, I would argue, primarily from a financial motivation, right? Oh, I can do better, and if I do better, people will buy my thing and not this thing, right? So it's this like financially motivated. Now, of course, there's always going to be the desire to improve. Like, I can imagine that's how agriculturals agriculture started, right? You're like, God, I'm so we spend so much time gathering berries and moving with the seasons and and hunting, and you know, what if we just like planted the stuff we eat right here and just like grew it? That would be easier, right? I mean, so this idea of minimizing the effort required to meet your basic needs is critical. And it's been part of our evolutionary lineage, and it's a motivation we're never gonna get, we're never gonna lose, and we shouldn't. What we don't have is like a governor or like a throttle where we can go back and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. In the past, I've called this adaptive management, where we can sort of stop, look at what we're doing, instead of just barreling ahead in the sake of progress, kind of go, okay, hold up. It's kind of like AI right now. All we're doing is barreling ahead. I do not see any, and they probably exist, but they're probably very ineffective and nobody really cares what they have to say. Groups that sit around and kind of weigh the pros and cons and consider maybe the deleterious aspects of this new technology. Like what might what problems might this come up with? Like when we started burning fossil fuels, did anybody ever go, what happens like uh with all the waste products? Like, what's going into the atmosphere? Is this affecting the air? How about the water? You know, that that all came much later, you know, because we're just rushing ahead so fast. Uh, and maybe nothing would ever get done if we did that, but I think an appreciation for uh the byproducts, you know, is and and just that pause of thinking, is this really better? And I think about this in the evolutionary context all the time. I mentioned this in the last episode. Is the way an amphibian breathes, they have a very rudimentary respiratory system. They basically absorb oxygen through the process of diffusion across their moist skin, which requires them to be wet. If they dry out, they're dead. And it means their metabolism is directly proportional to the rate of diffusion, which is pretty much maxed out at pretty low. So an amphibian can never really be that active and it can never really be that big, but they seem to you know meet their needs. And there's lots of organisms that have this cutaneous respiration versus a human or you know, more derived organisms that have lungs and a diaphragm and spend energy all day sort of and have a nervous system that is able to be parasympathetic, so we don't have to think about it, it just automatically does all this stuff. That's very calorically demanding. It's cool. We can get bigger, we can live in the desert, you know. Uh, we we we have a lot of advantages over amphibians, but is it really a better system? I I don't know. I mean, the only way you can really answer that question is to compare them to us, and then you could look at all the benefits and you're like, well, hell, we're way better than an amphibian. I'm way better than a frog, man. Um, but whether it's actually better depends on the value systems that you use to define the word better, right? And so, what other things have we sort of bypassed? Like, for example, living in small villages. We think cities are amazing. In fact, everybody lives in them, like over 80% of the people live in a in a big city. And people like me that live in a county of fewer than 50,000 people, are just like slack jaw yokel red yokel rednecks that don't know shit about shit. Uh, and there's lots of lot to be said for that, I suppose. Uh, but cities are like worshipped as being these pillars of of human um evolution and prowess, and again, money, status, and power. But each city, like say a city has maybe, I don't, I'm totally throwing some numbers out here, like a 50 square mile size. Well, the footprint of that city to get all those goods in to feed and process the waste of all those people is way bigger than that. So is it, you know, when you look at the whole thing, is a city a quote unquote better way to house humans than a village of a hundred? Like, what if we took the 8 billion people on the earth and spread them out sort of equivalently around the world so that they all lived in manageable-sized villages? Is would that be better? We don't know. And again, if you define better, immature and inefficiently with things like money, status, and power, I mean, what's the point? Right? We gotta shift that. Like, what is better in any of these things? Um, so the evolutionary model is a good one. Pick any system, you know, look at the way a single cell did it back in the day when all animals were single-cell organisms. You know, the story of evolution is the increased sophistication of each one of those systems that meets all of our needs, like respiration, digestion, reproduction, and growth, gets more and more sophisticated, which allows us to be more and more sophisticated. It's more kind of, well, I'm not sure efficient is the right word, but we can process more energy, we can get bigger, we can get stronger, we can get faster, you know, we can reproduce better, we can increase, we can decrease our, you know, infant mortality, we can all of these things are products of that pattern. But I always think it'd be fun to kind of go back in time. Well, take a shark and pick an organism that just sort of peaked and stopped evolving and has been around for a long time, and then go, what do they do? How do they eat? What's their story with respiration? Because apparently they've been doing this for millions of years and it still works. Like, and a shark is a great example. Sharks have not really evolved for millions of years. They reach sort of uh for their niche, for where they live and what they do and how they make their living, their systems kind of peaked. And and natural selection was like, you're good. Right? That's kind of interesting, and that's the kind of thing I'm talking about here. Can we look at these things and sort of can we go back through the evolutionary record and find an organism that's better than humans? I think we can. Depends on how you define better, you know, and I would define better by things like how cooperative are you versus competitive? How how much, and you can't really use words like kindness and value judgment words, but how much social interaction uh and sophistication is there in sort of the community? How much support is there? How many individuals assist with the rearing of the offspring of the young, right? Is it just one parent, just two parents, or does everybody participate? All of these things to me would go into the equation that defines better. And that would get us toward optimum, right? Because those same values are what's going to define optimum, because that's the that's the whole thing. What makes something better? Well, what's the best? What's the optimum? Money, status, and power aren't it. They don't they don't feature in the evolutionary record for the first 3.99 billion years. You know, that's a recent thing. And you can't hijack evolution. You can't, well, I but we can. I argue that's what we're trying to do. For the first, you know, humans might be the the masters of manipulating natural selection. With things like technology, you know, as an application of our sensory prowess, we we're trying to basically hijack natural solution to suit what we want. And what we want is based on those values that we use to describe better, that we used to describe optimum. And so we think about everything in that context. And that's why people will use terms like advanced. Humans are more advanced than a mole. Well, no, that's a value judgment. You don't really know. If you use your human-created values of money, size, and power, yeah, you got a bigger bank account than a mole. You win. But if you look at things like persistence through time, we might go, hey, moles have been around for like 500,000 years, and we've only been around for maybe two to three. I think they're winning. Moles don't evolve nearly as fast as we do. Uh, they don't have wars. You know, it's again, it depends on how you look at it. And so, isn't that a fun exercise? Did we bypass some optimum, whatever it is? The work week. Uh, how much we work, right? That changed a lot. We used to work like 80 hours a week, and then they they imposed the 40-hour work week, and we said, this is the best. And then COVID hit, and lots of people were like, you know what? I can actually get my job done from home and I'm working working 10 hours a week. And then everybody went, ah, we got to go back to the 40-hour work week. It's like, wait a minute, didn't we, maybe we found a new optimum here? And that's the same line of thinking. Um, the rugged individualism, the valuing of money, status, and power, and the not modifying and the insistence that we have reached, you know, that we must push forward and advance toward better. That optimum is always just a little bit more. That's all erroneous thinking, right? Can we just open the door a little bit to sort of look back and ask ourselves and do some comparative analysis? Isn't that shouldn't we shouldn't we have figured that out by now? Learn from our mistakes, don't repeat history, all that stuff. It's all in there, right? But we insist on these old this outdated, antiquated, useless value system that values the individual over the the whole. We insist that we can't change, it's too hard, and so it's just not gonna work. But it would be so easy. I mean, I've just illustrated a couple of ways you can do it in the evolutionary record that are fun. Sort of say, hey, did this used to be better for this? And and really, again, God, I sound like a broken record. It all comes down to what we value. And why do we think we could rewrite 3.999 billion years of evolution in just a couple hundred years to determine that the measures of success, optim optimality, optimumness, uh are human created values that really don't exist in the animal world. Right? I mean that's how absurd is that? Did anybody ever stop and think about that? Surely I'm not the first. Uh but I won't be the last either. And that's really all I wanted to say on this particular Episode, but you know, I think we can reach fitness by returning to an optimum condition, which requires a shift in our idea of what is better and what is success. And that comes down to values. I would love to hear your thoughts about that. I would love to participate uh in conversations and a discourse around that and uh change my mind. I'm Chris Bercher, the Neurodivergent Professor. This has been episode 182. We can reach fitness by returning to an optimum condition or the optimum condition. I appreciate your attention. I'll see you next week. Take it easy.