This is a followup to Ben’s post on Human Cultural Transformation Triggered by Dense Populations. Too many links for this to be accepted into the comments directly…
In thinking about these questions, it helps me to remind myself of the difference between evolution and emergence. Evolution happens whenever you have a population of agents with heritable variation and differential reproduction rates. There are at least two types of emergence, both of which can create new types of agents. Various self-reinforcing mechanisms lead to stronger and more stable agency. We may not even recognize the emergence of nascent agents for what they are until said agency (or coherence) becomes strong enough. For instance, many people have a hard time wrapping their head around cultural agency of any form.
Obviously none of us on here have a problem with the concept of non-human agency, but as Alex and Ben collectively point out, cultural agents depend on human agents for their very existence. Yet as they become more coherent they inevitably come into conflict with human agency (i.e. what’s good for the organization diverges from what’s good for its constituents). This is the fundamental yin-yang dynamic of the creation of new levels of organization and complexity.
It is worthwhile asking what the future holds for humanity. This is what Kevin and I were on about in this whole superorganism and singularity thread:
• Superorganism and Singularity
• Superorganism Considered Harmful
• Response to Superorganism Considered Harmful
• Superorganism as Terminology
• Superfoo
• Focusing on Autonomy
• Going Meta on Autonomy
Summary is:
- we disagree on whether there will be a single overarching Gaia-esque Super-agent on earth or whether there will just be a rich ecology of many interacting “small s” super-agents with no strong “big S” Super-agent
- we disagree on how to measure “autonomy” so we can’t come to a consensus on what life will be like for humans
- we didn’t really dive too deeply into the extent and nature of interaction between human agents and super-agents
This last point is interesting to me since it appears from the evidence that as each new level emerges, several things happen:
- communicative interactions between higher level and lower level agents increases
- level boundaries become less strict so that levels “overlap”
- the amount of co-evolution between the lower-level population and higher-level population — i.e. multilevel evolution — also increases
To make this claim more concrete, compare for instance the difference (in the above regards) between these three dyadic systems:
A) atom –> molecule
B) cellular organism –> multicellular organism
C) human –> corporation
All thoughts, disagreements, questions welcome…
