As I am a tutor and a copywriter on psychology, the question which interests me is "How do we make the most of humanity from psychological and physical perspective so as to implement changes needed, at least not to resist them?".

In "Introduction to Comparative Planetology" Lukas Likavcan gives an exciting potential end goal: Maria Garces conditio posthuma — an ability to live and act "with the truth of extinction".

"Reckoning with extinction is the condition of environmental hope in environmental mourning" — he writes, "only after we fully embrace the extreme probability of our own collective non-existence in this world we can truly hope for things being profoundly otherwise".




But how do we get where?



While Lukas himself says that some of us are able to grasp inevitability of humanity extinction already, it is quite obvious that most of humanity isn't. Neither most of political decisions imply geological-time perspective, nor technocratic corporations strategies include 10 000 planning for Earth-without-Us. The question, then, is pretty straightforward — why can't we embrace the truth of extinction and can we enforce the opposite process?

Although humanity-scale inability to cope with awareness of extinction requires observation through the lenses of historical, sociological, and other contexts, since my interest lays predominantly in pedagogical and psychological realm, the following research would focus on these parts of the question.




First, let's define what stops us from reckoning psychologically.

Researches show that awareness of human species mortality arose around !!!: in that extremely short span of evolutionary time, humans have fashioned a main basic mechanism through which they deal with the extinction-related worries — denial. Denial, effected through a wide range of mental mechanisms and physical actions, many of which go unrecognised, usually results in such diverse actions as breaking rules, violating frames and boundaries, manic celebrations, attempting to gain extraordinary wealth and power — and more. Even though actions predicated by denial may appear as constructive responses, more often than not, they are damaging to self and others.

What is more, denial mechanism, nonetheless being a time-tested desensitiser, sometimes glitches — and more active reactions show up — fear of dying, Death anxiety, Freud's Thanatophobia — psychology came up with a few names for death-related concerns. Although all the names given help individuals in identifying their feelings and at some level coping with them, psychologists haven't circled humanity's emotions around its extinction on species level yet. Considering the scale of the the situation at place, what could it be?

My stake is what similar to Freud's hypothesise around individual's fear of death: since we haven't gone through the experience of death (we've never died before), we can't actually fear death itself, we fear something else — abandonment, various unresolved conflicts, etc. So it may be not the extinction itself humanity fears, but "something else". Since "planetary history is deeply contingent, and thus underdetermined — i. e. that one cannot find a sufficient reason for things being that way or another", this "something else" may also not need additional clarification — remaining something unidentified, unknown, uncertain.

Hence, what stops predominant human-species group from reckoning with extinction and embracing the extreme probability of its own collective non-existence may be a limited ability to cope with Uncertainty, which the idea of the extinction brings.

"If complexity presently outstrips humanity's capacities to think and control, there are two options: one is to reduce complexity down to a human scale; the other is to expand humanity's capacities. We endorse the latter position ." — Nick Srnicek writes — we also endorse the latter position and propose the research of more advanced methods to cope with uncertainty the idea of extinction evokes.


But what is Uncertainty?

The easiest way to define it from psychological perspective is to distinguish from other terminology researchers use — what brings the notion of unpredictability and uncontrollability.
Unpredictability and uncertainty are highly similar and are often used interchangeably, but have slightly different connotations. Unpredictability is often used to describe aspects of the environment or features of a particular stimulus, such as its probability of occurring, when or where it may occur, or how intense it will be. A rich body of research has shown that organisms consistently prefer predictable shocks and associated contexts, and that predictability ameliorates the negative effects of stress.

The second term relevant to uncertainty is uncontrollability. According to one definition, uncontrollability is present when the probability or nature of a given event remains unchanged irrespective of any actions an individual may take. Controllability over future events generally implies certainty about their occurrence, whereas the opposite need not be true. Control can also be thought of as "the belief that one has at one's disposal a response that can influence the aversiveness of an event", while uncontrollability strip this possibility out.

Uncertainty is a broader and more diverse construct than both unpredictability and uncontrollability and better captures subjective aspects of one's internal state in the domain of decision-making. While we discuss all the terms mentioned, our primary focus is on uncertainty, which is inextricably linked to the phenomenological experience of anxiety arising from unpredictable future events, especially in case of the notion of humanity extinction.


How do humans react to uncertainty?

Increased certainty about future events is an antecedent to control, not necessarily of the occurrence of events, but of adaptive anticipatory responses that can mitigate these events' negative impact. Uncertainty, on the other hand, precludes one from exercising this form of control, and leads to preparations that are "diffuse, psychologically expensive, and of questionable effectiveness".

The reason behind these maladaptive reactions is the human brain being an 'anticipation machine' with 'making future' being the most important thing it does'. Its ability to use past experiences and information about the current state and environment to predict the future allows us to increase the odds of desired outcomes, while bracing for future adversity. Uncertainty diminishes how efficiently we can prepare for the future, provoking anxiety.

Although this relationship between uncertainty about future negative events and anxiety makes intuitive sense, there has been a dispute on whether uncertainty bring fear or anxious response. Researchers agree that feelings towards uncertainty are closer to anxiety: while environmental cues indicating the unambiguous presence of immediate threat give rise to intense "fearful" defensive behaviours (that is, "fight or flight"), more diffuse, distal, or unpredictable threat cues produce "anxious" risk assessment behaviour that is likely to persist until such uncertainty is resolved.

When it comes to humanity extinction, uncertainty can never be resolved per se — sentencing humanity to everlasting anxiety. Moreover, emotions uncertainty brings disrupt human ability to make "cold, cognitive" decisions, bringing possible demise closer, enforcing anxiety — introducing a vicious circle.


Why is uncertainty so disruptive in cognitive activity?

Researchers propose five processes involved in maladaptive responses to such conditions:

1. Inflated estimates of threat cost and probability:

Adaptive responses to uncertainty about potential future threats rely on accurate estimates of the probability and cost of such events. Individuals, when presented with hypothetical scenarios about negative events, frequently show "judgment bias" – that is, elevated estimates of the cost or probability of such events. In the context of extinction, these inflated estimates interfere the ability to foresight, plan and act, increasing the risk of extinction itself.

2. Increased threat attention and hyper-vigilance:

Individuals are biased to interpret conditions of uncertainty as threatening – this tendency is called "interpretation bias". Biased threat attention implicate amygdala hyperactivity, resulting in inefficient deployment of attentional resources toward the most relevant features of the environment, and impaired learning of stimulus-outcome associations. In relation to existential risk, threat attention hinders perception of reality, taking human species further and further away from the ability to mitigate its conditions.

3. Deficient safety learning:

Environmental safety signals are reliable indicators that threat will not occur, and thus relieve individuals from a state of anticipatory anxiety. Under conditions of uncertainty, weak or non-existent contingencies between cues and negative outcomes make it difficult to identify safety signals, particularly for highly anxious individuals whose biased attention toward threat impedes fine-grained discriminative analysis of environmental cues. As to extinction risk,

— behavioural and cognitive avoidance;
— heightened reactivity to threat uncertainty.



Even though all of them hinder decision-making, each process can serve an adaptive role in responding to and reducing uncertainty about threat.