KEN RUEGG
VICTIMIZED BY MILLIONS
future evolution of mind: what we can see from here
                                                                                                                                                                  HUMAN SKULL FEATURES began to appear on apes 3.1 million years ago.* Mankind has lived in Civilization for a mere 6 thousand years.** That's a factor of 517/1 (the 517 represents how long Man has existed in some form, the 1 how long he has been in Civilization). The requirement to get along with others, in a substantially peaceful way, has only existed since Civilization, and is a mental selection pressure.                         Humans are in the beginning of a transition from learning violence toward and victimization of others, to learning peaceful cooperation with them. This transition is in its earliest beginnings, in terms of the amount of time necessary for the change. The progressive attainment of "civilized" mind, over the previous stage of "ape", "violent", "criminal", or "dysfunctional" mind, is now in progress, with both types of mental species being present in the human population.                                Civilized mind uses aggression to build, achieve, or defend, as is evidenced by its behavior. Mind always does something. I am working on this website with my mind presently. You cannot cease to think while alive unless brain-dead. I am channeling aggressive mental energy into this, and learning to do this by doing it.                             There will be species of mind beyond those existing now, provided most humans remain in Civilization, but these cannot be known at present. I do know that evolution of mind will continue to accelerate, due primarily to the increasing rate of development of Civilization caused mostly by population growth.*** Mind grows partly through technology (such as the internet), and the pace of technology continues to increase. The pace of Civilization itself may slow or quicken in the short-term, but there will be long-term progress at an increasing rate, in terms of evolutionary time, barring some unlikely disaster. And that means continued evolution of higher species of mind by the Human Race, at an overall accelerating pace, until extinction.                                                                                                                                                                                  *these 3.1 million years provide a timespan, by which to gauge Man's past biological and mental evolution, just as Charles Lyell's "Principles of Geology", gave Charles Darwin the length of time needed for his Theory of Evolution, as postulated in Darwin's "On The Origin of Species".                 Man's past mental evolution depended, in part, on a progression of different biological species of Man. His continuing mental evolution is presently limited to one biological species, Homo sapiens sapiens, and is accelerating. Man's 3.1 million year history, is unreliable as a means by which to estimate either the nature, or the pace, of that acceleration.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         **Although archaeologists have unearthed a settlement dating back 10,000 years, all but a very few humans were still living in The State of Nature at that time.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ***the "Dark Ages" were primarily caused by Bubonic Plague, which killed half of Europe's population, making the maintenance of Civilization impossible without the necessary manpower.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 See "ON THE NATURE AND ACCELERATION OF MENTAL EVOLUTION", under "about".