Ramblings #05 – Strange order of things Damasio

Thoughts on The strange order of things Damasio

related to scale (See in French the article about “La notion d’Echelle“)

The mind / conscious thoughts is a by-product / emergent feature of organisms through the evolution of nervous system with a centralized brain (not the only possible design, see Octopods).

The mind is the latest evolution strategy to promote homeostasis. But, where other strategies to promote homeostasis were rooted in biology, the mind products are of cultural nature.

When homeostatic principle regulation works through biological mechanism, then toxic variations are automatically eliminated through reproduction / selection / competition process.

Reproduction / selection / competition processes don’t work as well in the cultural sphere, and cultural strategies can be maintained locally, even though they are toxic for the species / ecosystem as a whole.

Homeostasis principle governs the individual, it extends easily to families and close circle. But it breaks down at larger level.

Why?

Homeostasis is based on constant monitoring and balancing of a system. Our brains are master of doing just that for our body (most of the time) and in ways we would never suspect, unless we know something about medicine and neurobiology.

Our brain can extend its monitoring capacity to a number of other elements in the environment: people, house, garden, neighborhood. But. contrary to the body:

• This monitoring requires conscious efforts, and consequently at least in appearance, more energy (as all the energy required by unconscious monitoring process is largely invisible for us – even though the brain consumes a disproportionate part of the energy, compared to its size)
• This monitoring is imperfect (information is not complete)
• The brain doesn’t have any direct way to intervene to re-establish balance in case of perturbation. It needs to devise a course of actions, and quite often collaborate with others to implement it. Chances of success decrease sharply as soon as actions are more complex and remote.

Moreover, the brain has trouble extending the monitoring to larger environment (smaller geographic scale), like a country or the planet. However, the human species and the planet fate are now intimately linked, considering the extension of homo sapiens on all continents and the consecutive modifications of the environment (from the disappearance of large mammals and other human species to industrialization-era pollution and current destruction of ecosystems).

Unless we develop a global conscience, matching the scale of the problems we created by developing new strategies to promote homeostasis, then humans will only focus on local optimum, and doom the species and the planet in their efforts to maximize their chances of survival at the local level (State-nation, ideology or religion).

How to develop such a global conscience?

See also the article in French on “Obsolescence de l’Etat-nation“.

We already ruled out individual human brain. They don’t have the required capacity to monitor and regulate the terrestrial ecosystem. Even though, through education, we can hope to improve their global awareness and understanding.

Next possibility is a form of collective consciousness, incarnated in regulatory body, such UN institutions for example. However imperfect, it’s currently the only operating model that we have. (see Thomas Hobbes, nation as body, head as government)

Further away (but maybe not so far) might be data-driven, intelligence augmented, humans / institutions.

Why institutions and not so-called market forces?

Market principle is reducing a complex system to basically 2 dimensions (prices and quantity), with 2 users (providers and buyers). All other indicators and externalities are ignored. Granted, there are now more complex models, but they all still failed to accurately predict the economy. If physics models were half as bad, we wouldn’t have gone to the moon, nor invented GPS systems.

Economy theory only considers a very limited set of indicators, chief-among them the GDP, growth rate, inflation, investment. This is like a doctor who wants to make a diagnosis based only on pulse, blood pressure and sugar level: it’d not going to give you an accurate picture, nor any way to know what is wrong and what you should do about it.

One field has for years tried to come up with better indicators, such as human development index, or happiness index. These aim to reduce any number of data into one dimension, that can be easily digested by humans. But if we want this to work, we shouldn’t try to reduce the world to the level of our limited understanding.

We should raise human (collective) intelligence to the scale of the problem we’re facing.

We have started to develop the tools that can allow us to do just that: machine learning powered by big data. This is still in its infancy, capable to solve chess or go. But we can already use AI efficiently to automatize the monitoring of large quantity of data sets.

I don’t think we should make decision-level AI yet, they are not operational, riddled with bias and ethical concerns. (More research is necessary of course, but they shouldn’t be implemented in organizations without proper safeguards)

But we can and should make AI augmented observational / analytical tools: better understand economies, societies, people at all levels. These would be the research tools of choice for the next generation of academics, and would hopefully solve the monitoring component of designing an efficient homeostatic system at a global level.

Then, we can progressively try to design global but function-oriented, specialized but interdependent mechanisms to balance the system.

A common thread I saw in anthropology studies is that successful societies (prior to industrialization) had designed good systems for wealth circulation (see Kula ring) or to destroy excess wealth (see Potlatch), so inequalities were contained. These societies had inequalities of course, but these were more of status and honor, economic inequalities existed too, but were minimal compared to the scale of inequality today.

We see industrialized Western society as the successful society by excellence, because we live in it, but this model of society is fairly recent, hasn’t run its course yet, and I’m not sure it won’t run the planet into the ground or lead humanity to self-destruction. One sign this might be the case is that it is in good course to consider / make a large part of the population irrelevant according to its proclaimed values of productivity and competition.