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The qualities which motivate the this writing are therefore the following : if it’s true that the human species evolution occurs in periods of alternation in time spans which according to various schools of thought can vary from 40 to 200 years, (in practise from the appearance of the so-called Eva mitocondrale) can one hypothesise an imminent evolutionary jump? Or is it already underway? And what kind of species development can involve present humanity? And further: in what measure do the technological, cultural, and informative environments, (one on top of the other on the ‘natural’ environment, but tending to modify it and retro-actively), intervene in a new and certainly more complex example of species development? The Nobel Prize winner for medicine Christian De Duve in one of his noteworthy books lists 6 fundamental conditions of evolution, divided into 4 “internal” conditions, endogene, biochemical, a ‘historic’ factor, “hierachical”. De Duva records that : “At every level of complexity a different type of genetic mutation acquires importance”. (5) And furthermore: “To these numerous internal conditions one must add the crucial importance of the environment. Certain genetic mutations can be beneficial, and, therefore, be conserved by natural selection only under certain conditions. Often enough it is an environmental mutation which makes the difference. [É] A pertinent example of our story could be a walk from the forest to the Savannah, which could have played the key role in the hominization. (6) But a more fitting example is the passage in progress for many centuries, but in an exponential way only for a century and a half, from a cultural environment substantially static, not very dynamic, suffering from poverty of information, to an ultra dynamic global environment, always getting richer in information, characterized by complex interaction and technologies of many kinds which modify the consolidated equilibrium of the genetic code of the species. Therefore, it’s important to rate the psychosensorial input of the cultural elaboration of information, or of the training aimed to elaborate the flow of input getting always more complex and always more interactive. But still more important is to consider the active role that the human species, thanks also to the technology of communication, will carry out in the next century. Genetic engineering will supply the key to transform all of this complex process. Therefore, it really is an evolutionary jump, a real and true species development, measured also in relation to artificial environmental conditions never before existing, to the point that one can correctly speak of a new habitat. But if one deals with mutations, they start life in the first place in the projections adapted to the human brain, and the relation that will take place among the these and the technocratic environment of the near future isn’t reflected even by a long way the present schemes. A neo-species will create specific environments.

According to this vision the growing interaction between experience, codes, information and communication structures is the result of a logical sum of experience of a new type, and not a logical product that forms a meta-system. Seen in this light the debate on the so-called “collective mind” is revealed for what it is: nothing more than a political discourse behind which is hidden the usual old spectre of the end of history, given new impetus thanks to the resources of the net.

The theme of hierachy

Andy Clark, celebrated neuro-scientist and theoretician of the emergent model, has observed that every environment (natural and artificial) offers conflictual and confused input, incomplete, inadequate, contradictory information, but nevertheless, every organism, from the simplest to the most complex, reacts by siphoning environmental solicitations inventing strategies of survival of a conjectural type. Analyzing incomplete data, partial, incoherent, if not in part wrong, and adopting suitable solicitations or evolving in the short term, adequate and urgent, and therefore partial and flexible, every organism tends to reach a balance favourable to its survival, but always inside the rules of the game; every organism takes advantage as much as possible of the characteristics of the environment in which it’s immersed. Clark defines all this as “The principle of 007”. Here’s how Clark describes it. “In general, the creature evolves neither memorizing nor elaborating information in a costly way when it’s possible to use the structure of the environment and its elaborations on itself to find substitute advantages. In other words you know the only that which is necessary to do your work.” (7)

As Clark notes, the cognitive ethologists have been the first to recognize that the animal species have evolved and have increased their own intellectual capacity taking advantage as if the environmental structure was the resources which it didn’t itself have. (Without saying that maybe the idea of an intrinsic evolution, which is the product of an information exchange at various levels of hierarchy of bodies, of elementary particles of cellular membranes, and, rising still, of the neuronal structure until the symbiotic configuration named “culture”, one can extend not only to all living species, but for certain aspects also to so-called non living things). All the same, Clark reports that [...] we can’t permit ourselves to ignore that which happens inside our head, but at the same time we would do well to not ignore that which happens outside of us.” (8) Observation, notes Clark, is much more correct if it’s connected to the progressive emergence of ability studied by psychologists of the evolutionary age.

The emerging theory of the mind, shared with differing shades and emphasis by Walter Elsasser, Murray Gell-Mann, Erich Harth, Alwyn Scott and others, finds agreement on the fact that the mental universe, psychological and cultural man can’t be explained by turning to arbitary jumps from an ordered hierarchy to another, for example, deriving the conscience, whatever it is, from the interaction between the particular elements.

Now the archetype of a new structure of the human mind (and of the personality that would express it) is on the way to being formed thanks to the connection between genetic engineering and the communicative environment, which could perhaps be able to expand its own cerebral functions towards an continuously bigger memory of work, perhaps remaining the in the functional memory for a long time According to the definition of Patricia Goldman-Rakic, the memory of work is “the combination of knowledge, instant by instant, and the immediate recovery of archived information.” Without this fundamental faculty the reasoning and appreciation would be much less, as would linguistic comprehension.”

Towards a noesis aesthetic

An indication of the type of pressure exercised by the integral communication system and in expansion could come from studies of the growing interface between heterogeneous signals. (9) For example, the sum of visio-spatial solicitations could exercise a selective pressure favouring those individuals who demonstrated ability to elaborate, memorize, and select in a short time complex visual or special formations avoiding phenomenon of reduction or delayed elaboration of such data. This process could also favour the formation of specialized and incapsulated neural structures, and could perhaps also be genetically transmittable. But in order that an effect of this type is manifested on a large scale, that is by the sexual route, one must allow again for a species change in action., but controlled by the genetic engineer of the future. Everything after is the result of an action, not a retro-action.

And still, a further evolution could happen under the environmental pressure that tends to concentrate verbal, visual, spatial and pre perceptive stimuli. The phenomenon of interference, and of delayed functioning in the presence of contrasting input, could perhaps favour selectively those characters which show that they possess resources able to lower the critical threshold under which the single input can’t be elaborated significantly to any greater degree. But also in this case the desirability of such a specific difference will be taken into consideration, and the future manipulators of genetic engineering won’t be guarantors either.

There exists then an aesthetic aspect is not to be neglected. The neuroscientist Jean Pierre Changeux has noted that the objects of natural beauty as much as paintings, sculpture, architectural elements etc, are selected and impressed on the long term memory more quickly and with more efficiency than other elements dealt with by the same heterogeneous preceptors. Why does this happen?

Those who have experience of this evocative sensation know well that, apparently, it is outside any rationalization. It is precisely a certain refined perception, not dissimilar to that sensibility which guides the doctor to make an exact diagnosis given very few faint symptoms. In this mechanism of recognition, it’s plausible to recognize an evolved form of modular species development of telencephalon, an one doesn’t see for which reason this faculty is dissimilar to those which underlie the criteria of perceptive selection. When one must recognize and cope with a natural environment, I don’t see the reason for which he criteria of distinction to be carried out for cultural objects must be of a different nature to those other retro-active systems present in the anatomy of the brain.

The uniqueness of the “style” demands however that the object of perception belongs to the real world, since only in the real world can specific differences always exist. Nature abhors homogeneity and conformity. The virtual environment contradicts at least in part this principle. But on the other hand the protocols of a more or less structured, almost virtual environment, feel the effects of a kind of Platonism of numbers. I maintain therefore that abstract property, numbers, the virtual world favour a minor hold on the individual memory. In this line of thought the reflections of some notable aesthetic designers can be inserted, attracted by the growing abstractions of the perceptive experience. The virtual environment of video games is one example of such experience. (10)

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