I’ve been toying with this idea of “object constancy” for a couple of days. I may be torturing the definition a bit but here goes.
ob·ject con·stan·cy
1. the tendency for objects to be perceived as unchanging despite variations in the positions in and conditions under which the objects are observed; for example, a book's shape is always perceived as a rectangle regardless of the visual angle from which it is viewed.
2. in psychoanalysis, the relatively enduring emotional investment in another person.
For a long time we said the difference between men and animals is the ability to make tools. But we now know several species can make tools; chimps and even some corvids (crows). But none of them keep the tool, they make it and throw it away. For them it exists only in the moment.
Humans have some (very limited) ability to form “object constancy” to know that if the tool is useful now it may well be useful again later. They form a more lasting relationship with the tool. Object constancy.
Now that you have a tool you keep and reuse you may discover a modification that works better. Or a mod that works better if different circumstances. So you develop a tool box. If you are good at making tools you can trade tools for food or sex or.... well what else is there really? Tools give you status. And your kids watch you make tools and may grow up to be tool makers. And so it goes.
Just a simple modification in how we view the world, being able to extrapolate into the future, even just a day, can make a significant impact. Opposable thumbs and some other stuff helps as well but let’s not muck up a good story with extraneous facts.
So here is the question. How much have we evolved over our chimp breathen? Sure we have SOME object constancy, but how much? Surely we individually can look into the future for SOME issues. But do we really understand a 6 year car loan or 30 year mortgage or is it just something we agree to because it makes the monthly cash flow work?
I propose that for vast quantity of normal events our object constancy lasts minutes. At best. Think about most movies or TV shows or even the news, 15 second sound bites because it’s what we are comfortable with.
One would think and hope that our leaders have a more measured approach. I don’t see much evidence if it. Business seems to work to a quarterly return at best.
Sure there are exceptions; we build damns and power plants and the electrical grid, but those are really phenomenal exceptions and how many are really involved with that thinking and planning? How many Americans have adequately planned for retirement? Damn few.
So I’m considering that humanities failure, in addition to failing exponentials, is a failure of object constantancy, a failure to hear something today and accurately project it into the future. We hear the Earth is warming but fail to project that into actual future physical events. Even if we are told of 6’ SLR and it’s consequences we are, statistically, unable to process that information. That future occurs in a distant galexy far away.
The threat to humanity is not climate change, it is our inability to accurately project the truth sufficiently into the future, our object constancy is statistically very, very limited.