Dear Sabine,
I found several of the ideas expressed in your text quite interesting and original.
We humans are smart in changing the rules of adaptation: we quickly adapt the environment to ourselves, rather than waiting for darwinian evolution to slowly adapt us to the environment, as it did with the rest of the biosphere. But now our adaptation as a species has fallen behind the changes we have induced ourselves.
So your solution to this problem concentrates on the way the scattered, distant, costly information about the consequences of individual actions (or, more generally, information about how to solve big societal problems) should be turned into close, easily grasped, intuitive, possibly visual messages, thus wiring back into the circuits that our brain is used to work with.
But packing that information in an effective, intuitive way, and moving it close to the individual, or to the initiators of change, is only half of the problem: before converting that information, one has to build it, i.e., to find or compute a correct solution to the addressed problem.
There are certainly cases (e.g. that of a person throwing an empty plastic bottle in a river) in which it is quite simple to figure out what is the information to be made available to the guy (e.g., showing him a big island of plastic bottles in the ocean). But in many cases the correct action to be taken for solving a societal problem is not knowable, because we are dealing with a complex, layered system, in which emergent phenomena occur.
You write:
We reached this gridlock because the human brain did not evolve to understand the consequences of individual actions in networks of billions of people.
Your reaction to this correct observation is essentially: let us reformulate the information about those consequences so that the human brain can better grasp them.
My reaction would rather be: in general, the human brain cannot understand those consequences because we are talking about two distinct levels in an architecture of emergence. Networks of billions of people create emergent phenomena that follow their own dynamics, and cannot be under the control of individuals, by the very definition of emergent phenomenon.
The political, economic, social systems that govern our present day world represent the emergent entities at the next level above that of individual humans. Metaphorically, we are the ants, they are the upper level functions of the anthill. What is the effective power that an individual ant has to steer those upper level functions? Can there be effective interaction and mutual influence between the consciousness and creativity of the super-organism at the upper level, and the supposedly smaller consciousness and creativity of the lower level entities (us)?
If we believe in the beauty and strong explicative power of the notion of emergence (I certainly do), and we rule out the idea of an anthropocentric universe, then shouldn t we conclude that something is happening above our heads that does not care too much about us as individuals?
For example, when you write that these political, economic and social systems are too slow to adapt to our needs as individuals, I occurred to me that one can reverse the reasoning and take the point of view, and time scales, of these upper level entities: maybe the problem (our problem, not their problem) is that we humans are too fast in appearing and passing away.
I would be curious to know whether you share some healthy and moderate skepticism about the possibility for us to take the elevator and go talk to the super-organisms at the upper floor.
Best regards
Tommaso