Royal Road...

(The initial receipt of this message lacked carrage returns and was
difficult to read. Bob asked me to forward this (readable) copy to FIS)

(Can I ask you to forward this to the mailer if it arrived in one
piece?)

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
briccolagewhatever 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 some 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 script 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 generated 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 biological 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 fully 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
interestsVEMswould 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 biologythey 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
meaning and acquire agency, along with self-awareness a corner-stone of
fully human consciousness. (I am happy Andreas confesses difficulty
seeing
how behaviors are stuffI 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 intangiblebut that is because we are
talking about the reality of an ORGANIZATION. We cannot confuse 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 criteria 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 attributemale peacock feathers
are
the obvious examplethen 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 given 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
emergedsocieties, which in turn were able to evolve. But these more
complex social systems would take time to evolve, and their first
systems
for storing ordering information would probably not be VEMs. I think
the
anthropologists are rightit 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 complex, 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 fitnessqualitatively, 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 propensity 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
Received on Fri Oct 23 19:30:02 1998