Re: ROYAL ROAD to complexity

Responding to Pedro Marijuan, Morris Villarroel, Gottfried Stockinger, Andreas Goppols, Werner Ebeling, and Jerry Chandler regarding the Royal Road to complexity, social stuff, and FITNESS:

For a long time I have wanted to find the vehicle for getting from biologically to socially stored information, and it looks to me as if the issues raised by Morris and Pedro may do that for us. To begin with, we respect Morris*s call to parsimony. But
we need, I think, to equally recognize the point Jacob made in his notion of evolution by briccolage*whatever is in the biology will be used for new purposes and thus take on new *meaning* when it is used serendipitously in social evolution. There is som
e work by Thomas Spence Smith which has always seemed promising to me in this regard. He builds on an addiction model, relating various electro-chemical flows in the brain to responses to behaviors. I think you can get from the pleasure-pain processing
of information on the organic level to the VEM guidance of actions and choices on the social level by substituting a symbolically stored piece of information for past experience. Performing behaviors in accordance with the sc!
ript in VEMs is rewarded and a social role is played more or less as an addiction.

It looks to me as if Pedro is offering a more generalized view of the process, and that is what is badly needed. To follow very far, however, people like me need a course in biology from him. If Pedro would push into a little more detail about what the
biological analogies/homologies might be, however, it would be very helpful. I suspect there are qualitatively different things going on but that the processes follow similar patterns. If, e.g., we could try to track some parallel between how experience
 is recorded and stored in social structures and biological organisms we might be able to trace the qualitative changes arising from membership in social systems.

But I would still want to concentrate on SOCIAL SYSTEMS and be able to discriminate between social systems of various kinds. Looking at things historically, at changes in time independent of extra-natural forces, I must postulate that some human actions
affect the world in ways that feedback on the human actors and change them. Raids introducing structure into neighboring bands which then must be mapped by the raiders because that structure is part of their environment is an example of how initiatives g
enerated at some primal (?) level can feedback to transform the originating actors. The introduction of agriculture is a more subtle and complicated example showing the same thing: Societies constitute themselves in the act of constituting their worlds.

In these examples, a group of people acting collectively makes themselves aware of their world and then of their collective identity. (Cosmogenic myths always precede Origin myths, I am told.) These awarenesses would not involve any change in the biolog
ical people involved but would take their evolved brains, connect them together through symbolic language, and give them an attribute they did not possess biologically: consciousness in a fully human sense, for instance. I would think that primate brains
 were not developed enough to experience fully human consciousness, while I believe there is ample evidence from the earliest records in the West, at least, to support the idea that the first historically visible people displayed no awareness of this full
y human sort. (I know: we need a definition of fully human consciousness.)
We could work out more precisely how this happens from better understood biological etc models. You guys need to do that. But the point would be to look for ways to understand how Pedro*s *translation or ... reverberation of biological fitness* works.
I would expect there to be a rather large, symmetry-breaking discontinuity between propensities generated biologically and actions chosen morally. Early Roman legends, e.g., tell of how sons were killed by fathers for violating tribal interests. If that
 is so, the symbols mapping the tribal interests*VEMs*would capture more than information about families, relatives, etc. Although there might be some selective advantage for those genetically better equipped to cooperate, I would bet you cannot find any
 way to deduce VEMs from genetic concerns. That is because what VEMs map is not just what individuals do but what individual choices and actions MEAN.

That is, VEMs are mapping the enlarged environment created by collective action in which a society is now embedded. This is a new KIND of world, and new KINDS of information describe it. VEMs perform tasks in this realm comparable to DNA in biology*they
 enable societies to replicate by catalyzing the behaviors characteristic of Social Roles, which are the non-material elements constituting social organizations. VEMs catalyze actions by symbolize meaning. Playing social Roles, people internalize meanin
g and acquire agency, along with self-awareness a corner-stone of fully human consciousness. (I am happy Andreas confesses difficulty seeing how behaviors are stuff*I wanted people to make the effort to bend their minds around the implication that social
systems would, again, be new kinds of reality. To us material components, the relationships constituting societies would be intangible*but that is because we are talking about the reality of an ORGANIZATION. We cannot confus!
e our physical bodies with the substance of societies.)

To be sure, biological givens play a part in ratcheting the potential for cooperative action upward. But I suspect that there is an even more dramatic change once a social system self-organizes than Pedro suggests. It looks to me, as if there is a new c
riteria introduced for fitness, as he says. *Social* selection--like sexual selection?*may operate on criteria that are not particularly fit from a natural environmental point of view. But if females like some male attribute*male peacock feathers are th
e obvious example*then this trait will be selected for procreating before its value for *natural selection* is tested. Similarly, behaviors that are socially desirable may be quite radically different from what is naturally fit. I.e., the biologically g
iven propensities which make possible the self-organization of social systems change in their new context through briccolage,.

There must be orderings at relatively low levels to permit any sort of social system to emerge. Then the nonlinear growth possible once relatively simple societies self-organize would indeed be the Royal Road to complexity. People might have found ways
to represent some inherited attribute symbolically, think about it, and then rapidly accelerate either the attribute*s direction or strength. Each of these developments would have fluctuated relations with others and obliged them to similarly examine and
 develop themselves. On rare occasions, individual behaviors correlated so tightly that, in effect, a new level of reality emerged*societies, which in turn were able to evolve. But these more complex social systems would take time to evolve, and their f
irst systems for storing ordering information would probably not be VEMs. I think the anthropologists are right*it was rituals and rites which first stored information about successful collective efforts. Thus, it was simply!
 by replicating behaviors that social organization was copied. Ritualized storage was limited, however, and VEM symbols proved better able to map the increasing number of states societies could access. In this process societies became increasingly compl
ex, and, I suspect, the symbols describing the society and recording reduced uncertainty about its environment similarly evolved.

Suggesting that some societies are more complex than others will, I know, open the door to accusations of Political Incorrectness and complaints that Comtean positivism is being restored. But unless everything is the same and nothing happens in history,
I think we need to recognize that degrees of complexity exist between societies. I also think that as the complexity of social systems increases the information storage capacity of its symbol systems must increase, as well. The shift in symbols to VEMs
and later between early and more recent VEMs would then seem to offer a way to talk about fitness*qualitatively, to be sure, but Werner Ebeling is right-- qualitatively IS the way to talk about VEMs. We then find, I think, that VEMs encouraging the prope
nsity for people to be more self-conscious, autonomous, expressive, and active give social systems a competitive advantage in competition with OTHER SOCIAL SYSTEMS. There is then a reason why the fit survive, and the old saw !
that Darwinism is merely tautology is finessed.

In any case, once the system is there, it would be correct to shift our focus to information about IT. We should not want to reduce social information to biology but we do want to test the value of analogies/homologies in social applications. Can those
better equipped to lay out some of the biology do that, allowing the rest of us to then flounder foolishly about reaching and straining for parallels? This way we could get an interdisciplinary attack on the fundamentals of information science because we
 can trace parallels between fields.

Once again apologizing for lengthy communications, I remain your Humble and Obedient Servant,
Bob Artigiani
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
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Received on Fri Oct 23 15:53:55 1998