Sketch - Autonomous social systems
This is the v2
This is a v2 of my original sketch from this previous post. This is still a sketch, and not a rigorous academic artifact. Therefore, I won’t provide detailed references here. Although as an introduction, I’d recommend that readers dive into the resources below. You’ll find them to be deep influences for the sketch below.
Professor John Vervaeke and his excellent lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
Professor Evan Thompson and his excellent book Mind in Life. I’d highly recommend grabbing a copy and working through it. John and Evan’s work has been deeply influential on me. It’s provided a bridge between naturalism (i.e. “science”) and the phenomenological experiences disclosed by my spiritual practice. It’s helped me create more meaning in my life, by affording a more cohesive map of the world.
David Chapman’s https://vividness.live/ and https://meaningness.com/. Both have helped me better grapple with the concept of nebulosity. They’ve introduced me to ideas and practices from Dzogchen which have been incredibly helpful for navigating this space.
The argument below is kind of complicated, and pretty abstract. Honestly, I’m still sorting through it. There will likely be many more iterations to this sketch. Although it’s certainly starting to take shape, I suspect it will grow clearer over time. To make it easier to read and understand, I’ve decided to lay it all out as a series of bullet points. Each statement in each bullet point should be largely entailed by the one prior.
Humans are autonomous systems, as described by Thomson, Varela, etc.
A key feature of self-organizing systems (of which autonomous systems are a type), is that their internal processes engage in cyclic causation. That is, the state of process A is a function of the state of process B. And the state of process B is a function of the state of process A. Such systems can’t be captured by linear chains of causation. In fact, merely observing (i.e. interacting) with such a system influences its dynamics as well as the dynamics of the observer. Rigorously describing the unities that emerge from such can’t be done within a brutally reductionist worldview.
When two humans engage in a stable interaction across time (i.e. having a conversation over coffee, working together on a team, etc), the instantiation of a self-organizing system that couples them is inevitable. In this context, “coupling” refers to the dynamical systems sense of the word. That is, I’m referencing the cyclic causality described above.
Participating in this newly instantiated dynamical system reciprocally constrains the participants. For example, what one might say at a coffee chat is enabled or selected by both the other person as well as the dialogical system that they’re both participating in. Likewise, the broader system (and the other person via the system) are reciprocally affected by the constraints that one imposes on the system. These social dynamical systems influence the milieu (in the Merleau-Ponty sense) of the underlying systems (i.e. individuals) and directly shape their perceptions.
In this way, there’s a continuity between autonomous systems within the body of an individual, the individual, and systems composed of the individual. The notion of an “autonomous system” is heuristical and is an aid for analysis. Whether we consider a system autonomous (self-governed) or heteronomous (externally-governed) also depends on the frame of our analysis. For example, our nervous system is embedded within a larger organism. Whether we consider the nervous system autonomous in its own right, or heteronomous to some other larger system depends on the framing of our analysis.
If the social interaction is stable across time, and creates the conditions to keep itself going, then the instantiated system becomes autonomous. The “boundary” of this system encompasses the participants of the system, and any heteronomous systems wielded by its participants.
Autonomous systems find themselves in a constant dance of attempting to cope with their environments. Unless they are as large as the environment itself, they have no hope of tracking its full dynamics. In the limit, the environment can be defined as our infinitely scoped universe. So what they find relevant is a function of what aspects of the environment they’re able to cope with. Darwinism doesn’t really present objective “problems” for systems to find “solutions” to. But rather, systems formulate problems based on what they find relevant, and attempt to realize solutions to these problems.
This provides an account for how biological systems can grow in complexity. Depending on a confluence of internal and external conditions, a system might expand its ability to cope with the environment by successfully realizing a solution to a previous problem. This expanded scope of coping also expands the scope of what the system is able to find relevant. This in turn affords a new set of problems to which the system can attempt to realize solutions. This cycle spins in a process of complexification until it is ecologically constrained. In the limit, all autonomous systems tend towards complexification unless they become constrained by the broader ecology that they’re embedded in.
As social autonomous systems grow in population, they are able to expand the scope of what they’re able to cope with. They engage in a process of complexification described above until they too become ecologically constrained.
Such systems that come into contact with each other either compete or cooperate.
In the case of cooperation, the systems might instantiate a higher-order self-organizing system that eventually becomes autonomous in a similar pattern as what we might expect from groups of individuals. As one would expect, these higher-order systems reciprocally constrain their parts, which in turn recursively constrain the parts below them.
In the case of competition, the parts of the loser are salvaged by any survivors. This tension between competition and cooperation is an ecological dance.
All autonomous systems instantiate an internal set of norms that keep the system running. At the base is a normative stance oriented towards the system’s survival. The better a system is at wisely realizing relevance, the more adaptive it has the potential to be.
“Healthy” systems are minimally those that:
Are committed to overcoming their own self-deception.
Believing that their actions have real consequences on the broader ecology and its constitutive parts.
This provides an account of why various cultures seem to convergently evolve an orientation towards analogues of the virtues of the True, Good and Beautiful. However, these virtues are enacted based on the unique context of each system. This provides an account of how various societies can have radically different norms in relation to these virtues.
As systems engaging in cooperation integrate together, that necessarily implies an integration of their own internal norms. This provides an account for why our notion of the divine or transcendent has grown more complex as societies have grown larger. These systems necessarily have to instantiate a more abstract and nebulous set of norms to capture and transcend what came before.
More broadly, the complexification of these social systems necessarily implies the emergence of more complex internal norms. There’s another interesting chain of cyclic causality here. Because the norms enacted by the parts reciprocally constrain the system that bounds the parts.
The complexification of these internal norms places ever greater burdens on the constituent parts with the nebulosity that it necessarily implies.
An autonomous system’s map (i.e. “small world”) of the “environment” is necessarily incomplete and contains errors, since they’re limited in space and time. As the map grows more complex, the errors necessarily tend to grow more sophisticated. Again, this places an increased burden on the level of nebulosity that these internal norms need to grapple with.
Therefore, the internal norms instantiated by a system have a threshold of complexity and nebulosity beyond which they cease to function. When this threshold is exceeded, the system begins to break down.
Currently, we find ourselves beset by the influence of many large and old autonomous systems. They seem to be in decay, and in the process of a much larger arc of integration. Like two galaxies colliding with each other, I have a felt sense that we’re witnessing many systems colliding with each other. My lived experience at this moment in time is that I’m not sure which norms to follow. It feels like I’m constantly being pulled in a million different directions, and it’s not always clear which way is “up”. At the same time, it’s difficult to conclude that my actions don’t matter. All of these forces seem to constantly be vying to shape my perceptions.
Our culture seems to have largely lost the language and faculties of reasoning through chains of cyclic causation. Globalization seems to have spread this issue to almost every corner of the modern world. Due to Descartes’ dualism and the brute reductionism that we’re swimming in, our culture seems to privilege the objective over the subjective. We seem to privilege linear accounts of causation over cyclic accounts of causation. Both in society and in our own lives.
I suspect that this privileging of the objective over the subjective, also contributes to the privileging of more global problems over local ones. For example, many people in the US seem fascinated by federal politics at the cost of local politics. While it’s true that the trajectory of federal politics can have a profound impact on the trajectory of their lives, most people have very little agency or sovereignty to affect that overall trajectory. Nor do they seem to possess tools and practices to intentionally expand the scope of their agency. This mismatch between their felt agency and what they find relevant can exacerbate feelings of absurdity and horror.
It’s difficult to conceptually and linguistically reason about cyclic causation in very complex systems. It’s related to Mind in Life’s discussion on the difference between linguistic and dynamic descriptions of complex systems (see Howard Pattee’s work).
Religious practice, tradition, ritual, etc. were tools to better track the evolution of such social autonomous systems. But again, our culture has privileged tools that operate linguistically/propositionally at the cost of more enactive and dynamic tools. John Vervaeke calls this a “propositional tyranny”. The average individual is born in a context without a clear path to inheriting such enactive practices. So they lead their lives with a handicapped ability to participate in the map afforded by these systems, or any ability to reciprocally constrain the evolution of the map. Yet at the same time, they find themselves subject to currents they can’t track, for reasons they can’t comprehend, with a poor casual model of their agency and changes in their world. This can lead to absurdity and horror.
At this moment in time, the broader systems that we’re nested in are so complex that our institutions and the norms that they seek to propagate simply can’t keep up. It’s almost as if there is absurdity and horror at an institutional level, at various levels of abstraction. Since every layer of abstraction is currently being beset with a complexity and nebulosity that exceeds their grasp.
This accounts for why there’s been an uptick in interest in various forms of spiritual practices, across various geographic and cultural contexts.
Spiritual practices naturally afford a much more relational view of the world that is neither subjective/objective, but what John Vervakee and Christopher Mastropietro call transjective. They afford individuals the ability to make/break frames and therefore gain insight into the dynamics impacting their lives.
However, most spiritual practices were created within a specific social and cultural context. Or more concretely, our inherited spiritual practices were created transjectively by that broader system’s interaction with its milieu. However, things have grown far more complex.
The following roughly describes my own trajectory through spiritual practice. I’ve found that it resonates with a lot of other seekers:
In the absence of any sort of spiritual practice, it was life-changing to pick something up. In my case, it was Theravada Buddhism. But I suspect that anything that would have been viable at the time which included embodied practices would have helped. I diligently practiced along this path and participated in many profound spiritual experiences. It largely changed my life for the better.
However, it stopped “working” for me at some point. I found the practices insufficient to deal with the nebulosity of the world. And was dissatisfied with its answers to my worldly problems. I eventually found my way to Mahayana Buddhism.
Mahanaya practices again substantially transformed my life, largely for the better. I was able to feel like I was closer to reality than I was before. However, I found myself stuck yet again. The reasons were superficially different, but were roughly the same. I was dissatisfied with its answers to my worldly problems. I eventually found my way to Vajrayana Buddhism.
Vajrayana Buddhism has many powerful practices, but its presentation seemed largely unsuitable for life in the West. I’m not sure that it even “works” for the Tibetans living in India. In the sense that the homogenous context of pre-1959 Tibet doesn’t really exist anywhere on the planet anymore. Those practices were developed within a broader autonomous system that engaged with a fairly static milieu for about a thousand years. Translators like Ken McLeod have talked about how difficult it is for Westerners to appreciate this profound depth of permanence. He says it’s easier for him to read Tibetan from 500 years ago than to read English from 300 years ago. The practices themselves seem extraordinarily potent for helping an individual make and break frames to gain insight. But their presentation and broader embedding would likely need to undergo substantial change to be palatable for the broader world.
It’s around this time that I found my way to Evolving Ground, and the path of Dzogchen.
I’m quite early in my exploration of Dzogchen. But even it seems insufficient to entirely meet the moment. Out of all the systems I’ve studied in depth, it seems the most able to meet the complexity and nebulosity of my current moment. And it has a number of extremely helpful practices to notice the dynamics within my own perceptions. However, I suspect that it will not be enough for me to feel an adequate grip with the world.
I suspect that I will need to become adept at something like Dzogchen, that is, one of the most abstract/complex practices from the East. And then attempt to integrate that with something comparable from the West.