I don't see why the superorganism would lack such an embodiment with
selective consequences. The superorganism's "organs" (cities, factories,
etc.) and "circuits" (roads, railways, communication channels) do exist in
a physical environment with which they interact. If a city or building is
erected on swampy terrain and because of that it becomes ininhabitable, it
will be abandoned and rebuilt somewhere else. If a communication channel
uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum in which there is much
interference (e.g. because of sun spots), that part of the spectrum will be
abandoned and a new range chosen.
There is feedback from the actions of the superorganism through the
environment (the planet and the solar system at large) back to the
superorganism, and this will reinforce certain actions or developments and
inhibit others. Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect are the most
talked about of these negative reactions of the environment, which will
force the superorganism to change its course of action. In the case of
carbon dioxide production the effect hasn't been much yet, but with ozone
depletion the measures have already been taken to phase out all the CFC
gases thought to be responsible for the depletion. This is clearly a
selective action of the environment, eliminating certain "unfit" features
of the superorganism, such as CFC production.
>[...] you still need to identify in the society mechanisms for
>expression, developement, and selection. In living organisms different
>genes are expressed into different cells leading to specialization. Yes
>in society we do have specialization, but now try to identify what is
>the equivalent chain to genetic expression in living organisms. Can you
>backtrack from specialization and define the universal mechanism that
>develops social individuals into some specialization, through a
>developmental chain FROM some pool of encoded memory tokens whose
>variation is the engine of selection? What is the genotype, what is the
>phenotype, and what is the process that produces one from the other?
>
>I am not saying that you cannot do this, I am saying that these things
>must be defined for the super-organism metaphor to be sustained. For
>instance, I can see education as a process of development leading to
>individual differentiation, but this process is hardly as directed as
>genetic controlled development (thank god!). If a kid is to be educated
>(developed) into being an engineer, is the engineer the phenotype? Is
>the kid the genotype, or is it the "meme" for engineer? If it is the
>"meme", then how do you decode (and subsequently develop) a kid from the
>engineer "meme"?
These are all very interesting questions to which I have only very partial
answers. Let me begin by stating that cellular differentiation does not
seem to be such a rigid deterministic process as people usually assume. A
biologist like Mario could probably tell us more, but what I understand is
that cells differentiate in the embryo according to some self-organizing
process in which the place where a cell happens to be (its adjacencies with
other cells) catalyses the development of a particular configuration.
Stuart Kauffman has been exploring Boolean networks as models of how
randomly linked "genes" would determine a regime of attractors
corresponding to stable "roles" in which certain genes are expressed and
others not.
In the beginning of embryological development, the "type" of a cell is not
very clearly determined yet, and a cell taken from one neighbourhood
("tissue") and moved to another one can still take over the characteristics
of the second type of tissue. This seems analogous to your example of the
child starting to prepare for engineer, but who in the early stages can
still change his or her mind and become a biologist or a mathematician
(though perhaps not longer a professional football player).
On to the cultural level then. The shared knowledge of humanity, which is
publically accessible through libraries, universities, the Web, etc.,
determines a potential for individual development, like the genome provides
a potential devlopment for a cell. Somehow, an individual will "choose" a
part of the knowledge to become specialised in, while ignoring the rest,
like a cell in which certain genes are activated while others remain
"dormant".
The mechanism by which different individuals choose different specialities
is a self-organizing process related to the "invisible hand" of market
processes. If a particular specialization is "in demand" ( popular,
well-paid, high in prestige, ...), individuals whose background or talent
make it easier for them to develop that specialization will tend specialize
in that direction. If the demand diminishes, less people will specialize in
that direction, and some of the existing specialists may switch to a
related, more popular specialization. Demand will diminish either if the
need for such a specialization decreases (less engineering jobs need to be
carried out), or if supply increases (more people have engineering
diplomas).
>[...] how tightly interrelated and orchestrated are all
>these processes? A liver cell cannot (even at an earlier stage of
>development) "decide" to become a pleasure neuron. In most societies,
>people can actually choose to become art historians instead of
>engineers. Is a superorganism less of an organism because of that?
In that way, society will continuously adjust the distribution of
individuals over the different specialities, without any centralized
control organ that takes the responsibility. There are clear "selective
pressures" into the specialities that are in demand, but the system is not
deterministic: people can always choose between several different
specialities that are in demand. (I suspect that similar "bifurcations"
occur in the early stages of embryological development.) Even then, there
still are plenty of people who study art history, even though the supply of
art historians is much larger than the demand.
Paulo:
>>>WHO is that one which eventually recognizes him/her/itself as
>>having a
>>>brain made up of interactions and processing of the human brains?
Francis:
>>The "superorganism"! Of course, this is a very abstract and not very
>>satisfying answer, but it seems difficult for us as as mere subsystems
>>to
>>say anything more concrete. How do you think would a cell imagine the
>>organism it belongs to?
Luis:
>It is not satisfying at all! It reminds me of the response I would get
>from nuns in sunday school when I would ask "how can I be sure that god
>exists, why doesn't he show himself to me?", to which they would reply,
>"do you think ants could ever imagine you, even if you try hard to
>explain yourself to them?" The concept of superorganism can only be of
>(scientific) utility if "mere subsystems" can identify and test its
>nature, otherwise it is just another sort of deity.
I think you are confusing two issues here. If someone asks "WHO has created
life?", and I answer "The processes of variation and natural selection",
the answer will not be very satisfactory, but that is because the question
is badly posed to begin with, not because the answer does not lead to
testable predictions. I do believe that the superorganism hypothesis should
lead to testable predictions, which would allow us to "identify" certain
objective characteristics of the superorganism. But that does not mean that
we will understand that superorganism as a conscious agent, a "who" with a
clear will that *we* can comprehend.
The existence of God is not testable or falsifiable. I hope we will find a
way to develop falsifiable hypotheses about the existence of the
superorganism. But first we must understand more clearly how the
superorganism model differs from rival models. At present it is more like a
different way to conceptualize the same facts, like the Ptolemaic and
Copernican views of the solar systems, which both made the same
predictions, but where the Copernican one did that which much less
presuppositions.
At first sight, the superorganism model may be simpler that the confusion
of models and theories used in sociology, and may be superior to them
because of Ockham's Razor. But like the Einsteinian and Newtonian theories
of gravity, there may be special circumstances in which the predictions
diverge. I would very much like someone to suggest possible circumstance in
which a superorganism model would produce clearly different predictions
from the more traditional models of society as aggregate of individuals.
________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Francis Heylighen, Systems Researcher fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be
PESP, Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
Tel +32-2-6292525; Fax +32-2-6292489; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html