So, we got off on the wrong foot. I should have tried to deliver you a thesis, or general purpose before throwing you off the deep end into a bunch of memetics bullshit. This is a personal philosophy and framework for individual action. I believe that:
Any information that is reproduced is alive. Reproduction is first and foremost a strategy to maintain coherence.The best way to fight entropy is just keep resetting the clock by making new copies.
Natural selection promotes solidarity.
Society is no longer organized such that human beings absorb value. Large solidarity groups (social vehicles) like nations, churches, and companies are the only participant entities long-lived enough to gain full utility from society. They are essentially planet-scale parasites on the human population. You could also think of people as livestock, or cells in a body.
Up to now, these groups have grown unchecked and evolved naturally and wildly. By practicing a hygiene (“Antiparasitism”) that maximizes solidarity and minimizes uncertainty in every situation, we could potentially starve these entities of resources and supplant them with our own intentional, domesticated structures.
On the individual level, this means practicing “Radical Genuity” (genuineness is a terrible word) which is in every situation identifying the action which is derived from certainty, enthusiasm, and love; and attempting to never take action from fear, uncertainty, or chaos.
The movement of competing solidarity groups in a population produces unpredictable, compound results that give rise to self awareness by way of meta-analysis.
What makes this framework unique?
Social Entropy/Solidarity. These are complementary measures that sit at the heart of the framework. I’m not sure I've landed on a definition I love yet, but for now we can think of Solidarity as the likelihood that a random individual from a group will exhibit conforming behavior (express the same phenotype, vote the same way, or use the same table manners). Entropy is the likelihood that they don’t.
Solidarity Ladder. In this framework, groups accrue solidarity until they become consistent enough on a per individual that the group could be considered to be a singular entity. Individuals on the next rung up of the ladder begin to group together and repeat the process. Characteristics of an individual are emergent properties of the ladder below them. If we want to create society that centers individual human beings, we have to stop/undo the next step up the solidarity ladder.
“Vanishing Points” In this framework, selection is not a within-species phenomenon. Organisms of any kind can form coalitions which improve fitness. Your body and your mind, for instance, are a biologically evolved organism and the meta-aware informational life that inhabits its wetware, otherwise known as “you”, “your soul”, “your essence”. We are not moving towards “The Singularity”, we are moving towards multiple Singularities which will compete. Think about the USA and USSRas an example of competing solidarity groups with uniquely evolved technology and society, even biology when we consider any different livestock and biospheres the two occupied.
“Radical Genuity” - not a new concept at all, needs a new name probably, the central tenant of Antiparasitism- always act from certainty and enthusiasm. Strive to eliminate uncertainty and fear. E.g. If you don’t know what someone is talking about but don’t want to seem stupid, ask anyways. Your ego doesn’t matter and reducing the overall ambiguity of the situation will benefit everyone except for the people who were profiting off of that ambiguity. Another example that goes hand in hand with this is an employee being afraid to ask their boss for a raise due to the ambiguity between their social and professional relationships. Companies profit from the ambiguous pseudo-social relationships between their employees every day.
Problems
The primary problem this framework faces is the same one that killed memetics: informational life does not have an identifiable replicator. Without a central piece of information analogous to a genome that enables information to evolve over time, biologists will not accept the concept of abiotic life.
Ideology- since there is no common code for social life, there isn’t an exact standard by which we can categorize individuals into one vehicle or another.
Solutions
Not being able to measure something does not mean it isn’t there. Society and technology have obviously had a more massive effect on the species than anything biology managed to come up with. Hell we can measure the economy and we have no fucking clue what’s going on there.
For this reason, I propose “Informational Mediums”, i.e. anywhere information can be stored, it can be reproduced, and thus it can live. Human minds, hard disks, chalkboards, genomes. Some of this exists in “Abstract space” which we shouldn’t think we can measure and identify the same way we would physical space. It does not obey the same laws and we have never invented a tool that allows us to “see” the structure of information, if it even has one.
The Extended Mind Thesis talks about how if you pick up a journal and write in it, your brain now treats that journal as an extension of itself. What happens when the entire planet is reading and writing from the same journal? Do you use wikipedia? Human society up to now has been unable to overcome physical communication barriers, and thus unable to act in solidarity on the level needed to hop up the next rung on the ladder. The internet has formed the connective tissue needed to overcome those barriers. The evolution of nerve tissue probably had a similar effect on biology.
Ok, so that’s the overview! Let me know if you have questions :)
This is great! I think we are thinking in a similar space. In particular, the notion of 'anti-parasitism'.
I'm somewhat curious about the details of belief #3 ; do you think all of these large scale superorganisms are acting like parasites? Or just some of them? Do you think there's a clear boundary there? It sounds like you're proposing that we could create intentional superorganisms, and maybe your goal here would be that 'superorganisms should support individuals' - but this seems to conflict with the notion of solidarity suggesting that eventually everyone acts the same way.
Have you read René Girard at all? I haven't, but got the impression he argued that mimicry can end up leading to conflict, instead of solidarity. For example, if all of us have 'the same values', but that 'same value' is 'be the only one standing on this one hill', the act of solidarity becomes a generator of conflict, rather than a reducer of it. Arguably all organisms have this 'solidarity' in terms of their desire to harvest negentropy from their environment, and that solidarity leads to both cooperation and competition.
Sometimes in my life i think my mind has acted as a parasite towards the rest of the body, whereas the mind saw the body as the parasite in that situation. If there's a dispute between two actors, each of which is convinced that the other is a parasite, how would you resolve that dispute?