for: Major Evolutionary Transitions in individuality, MET, MET in Individuality

• Abstract
  • The evolution of life on earth has been driven by a small number of major evolutionary transitions.
  • These transitions have been characterized by individuals that could previously replicate independently, cooperating to form a new, more complex life form.
  • For example,
    • archaea and eubacteria formed eukaryotic cells, and
    • cells formed multicellular organisms.
  • However, not all cooperative groups are en route to major transitions.
  • How can we explain why major evolutionary transitions have or haven’t taken place on different branches of the tree of life?
    • We break down major transitions into two steps:
      • the formation of a cooperative group and
      • the transformation of that group into an integrated entity.
    • We show how these steps require
      • cooperation,
      • division of labor,
      • communication,
      • mutual dependence, and
      • negligible within-group conflict.
  • We find that certain ecological conditions and the ways in which groups form have played recurrent roles in driving multiple transitions.
  • In contrast, we find that other factors have played relatively minor roles at many key points, such as
    • within-group kin discrimination and
    • mechanisms to actively repress competition.
  • More generally, by identifying the small number of factors that have driven major transitions, we provide a simpler and more unified description of how life on earth has evolved.

• It’s not an exaggeration to say that
  • science has transformed our understanding of time.
• But as well in conjunction with this
  • it has transformed- the concept of who we are.
• From biology we have learned that
  • there is no such thing as race,
  • we are all fundamentally one species
    • (with contributions from a few other sister species, Denisovans and Neanderthals).
• And from physics we can say that
  • we are literally the space dust of the cosmos
    • experiencing itself in human form.

for - language - primacy of - symbolosphere - adjacency - language - science - multi-scale competency architecture - Michael Levin - complexity - social superorganism - major evolutionary transition - worldviews - scientific vs religious - Michael Levin - multi-scale competency architecture

adjacency - between - deep time - multi-scale competency architecture - Michael Levin - social superorganism - complexity - major evolutionary transition - complexity - adjacency statement - Deep time narrative has potential for unifying polarised worldviews - but citing purely scientific evidence risks excluding and alienating large percentage of people who have a predominantly religious worldview - Language, the symbolosphere is the foundation that has made discourse in both religion and science possible - Due to its fundamental role, starting with language could be even more unifying than beginning with science, - as there are large cultural groups that - do not prioritize the scientific worldview and narrative, but - prefer a religious one.<br /> - Having said that, multi-scale competency architecture, - a concept introduced by Michael Levin - encapsulates the deep time approach in each human being, - which withing Deep Humanity praxis we call "human INTERbeCOMing" to represent our fundamental nature as a process, not a static entity - Each human INTERbeCOMing encapsulates deep time, and is - an embodiment of multiple stages of major evolutionary transitions in deep time - both an individual and multiple collectives - what we can in Deep Humanity praxis the individual / collective gestalt

for - quote - Sarah Stein Lubrano - quote - self as cultural construction in WEIRD culture - sense of self

quote - (immediately below)

• It's just a weird fascination of our weird culture that
  • we think the self is there and
  • it's the best and most likely explanation for human behavior
• Other people in other cultures do not think this
• and that suggests that our sense of self is largely culturally constructed

discussion - sense of self is complex. See the work of - Michael Levin and - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=michael+levin - Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=major+evolutionary+transition+in+individuality

for - multi scale competency architecture - Michael Levin - evolutionary biology - rapid whole system change - adjacency - multi scale competency architecture - rapid whole system change - stop reset go - Deep Humanity - Indyweb - Indranet - major evolutionary transition in individuality - MET - superorganism - cumulative cultural evolution of individuality

adjacency - between - multi scale competency architecture - rapid whole system change - progress trap - stop reset go - Deep Humanity - Indyweb - Indranet - major evolutionary transition in individuality - MET - superorganism - cumulative cultural evolution of individuality - adjacency statement - The idea of multi scale competency architecture can be extended to apply to the cultural level. - in the context of humanity's current existential poly /meta/ perma crisis, - rapid whole system change - (a cultural behavioural paradigm shift) - is required within a few short years - to avoid the worst impacts of - catastrophic, - anthropogenic - climate change, which is entangled with a host of other earth system boundary violations including - biodiversity loss - fresh water scarcity - - the driver of evolution through major evolutionary transitions in individuality has given rise to the level of cultural superorganisms that include all previous levels - progress and its intended consequences of progress traps play a major role in determining the future evolutionary trajectory of our and many other species - our species is faced with a few choice permutations in this regard: - individually regulate behaviour aligned with a future within earth system boundaries - collectively regulate behaviour aligned with a future within earth system boundaries - pursue sluggish green growth / carbon transition that is effectively tinkering at the margins of rapid whole system change - BAU - currently, there doesn't appear to be any feasible permutation of any of the above choices - There is insufficient worldview alignment to create the unity at scale for report whole system change - individual incumbent state and corporate actors still cling too tightly to the old, destructive regime, - creating friction that keeps the actual rate of change below the required - Stop Reset Go, couched within the Deep Humanity praxis and operationalized through the Indyweb / Indranet individual / collective open learning system provides a multi-dimensional tool for a deep educational paradigm shift that can accelerate both individual and collective upregulation of system change

• for: major cultural paradigms, modernity - leaving, cultural transition, cultural evolution, MET, Major Evolutionary Transition, kiey insight - 4 major cultural paradigms

• comment

• key insight: 4 major cultural paradigms

  • This matrix doesn't quite capture what Ruben is proposing because he later talks about neo-indigenous, which means taking elements of modernity but within an overall indigenous framework, so a hybrid
  • It would be worth exploring implications for an evolutionary framework of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET)

• for: social superorganism - vs human multicellular being, social superorganism, Homni, major evolutionary transition, MET, MET in Individuality, Indyweb, Indranet, Indyweb/Indranet, CCE cumulative cultural evolution, symmathesy, Gyuri Lajos, individual/collective gestalt, interwingled sensemaking, Deep Humanity, DH, meta crisis, meaning crisis, polycrisis

• comment

  • True, there is no physical cohesion that binds human beings together into a larger organism, but there is another dimension - informational cohesion.
  • This informational cohesion expresses itself in cumulative cultural evolution. Even this very discussion they are having is an example of that
  • The social superorganism is therefore composed of an informational body and not a physical one and one can think of its major mentations as collective, consensual ideas such as popular memes, movements, governmental or business actions and policies
  • I slept on this and this morning, realized how salient Adam's question was to my own work
    • The comments here build and expand upon what I thought yesterday (my original annotations)
    • The main connections to my own sense-making work are:
      • Within our specific human species, the deep entanglement between self and other (the terminology that our Deep Humanity praxis terms the "individual / collective gestalt")
      • The Deep Humanity / SRG claim that the concurrent meaning / meta / poly crisis may be an evolutionary test foreshadowing the next possible Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality.<br /> - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=MET+in+Individuality
        • As Adam notes, collective consciousness may be more a metaphorical rather than a literal so a social superorganism, (one reference refers to it as Homni
          • https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140701-the-superorganism-engulfing-earth
        • may be metaphorical only as this higher order individual lacks the physical signaling system to create a biological coherence that, for instance, an animal body possesses.
        • Nevertheless, the informational connections do exist that bind individual humans together and it is not trivial.
        • Indeed, this is exactly what has catapulted our species into modernity where our cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has defined the concurrent successes and failures of our species. Modernity's meaning / meta / polycrisis and progress traps are a direct result of CCE.
        • Humanity's intentions and its consequences, both intended and unintended are what has come to shape the entire trajectory of the biosphere. So the impacts of human CCE are not trivial at all. Indeed, a paper has been written proposing that human information systems could be the next Major System Transition (MST) that could lead to another future MET that melds biotic and abiotic
          • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=MST+-+information
          • or https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556&group=world
        • This circles back to Adam's question and what has just emerged for me is this question:
          • Is it possible that we could evolve in some kind of hybrid direction where we are biologically still separate individuals BUT deeply intertwingled informationally through CCE and something like the theoretical Indyweb/Indranet which is an explicit articulation of our theoretical informational connectivity?
          • In other words, could "collective consciousness be explicitly defined in terms of an explicit, externalized information system reflecting intertwingled individual/collective learning?
      • The Indyweb / Indranet informational laminin protein / connective tissue that informationally binds individuals to others in an explicit, externalized means of connecting the individual informational nodes of the social superorganism, giving it "collective consciousness" (whereas prior to Indyweb / Indranet, this informational laminin/connective tissue was not systematically developed so all informational connection, for example of the existing internet, is incomplete and adhoc)
      • The major trajectory paths that global or localized cultural populations take can become an indication of the behavior of collective consciousness.
        • Voting, both formal and informal is an expression of consensus leading to consensual behavior and the consensual behavior could be a reflection of Homni's collective consciousness

• insight

  • While socially annotating this video, a few insights occurred after last night's sleep:
    • Hypothes.is lacks timebound sequence granularity. Indyweb / Indranet has this feature built in and we need it for social annotation. Why? All the information within this particular annotation cannot be machine sorted into a time series. As the social annotator, I actually have to point out which information came first, second, etc. This entire comment, for instance was written AFTER the original very short annotation. Extra tags were updated to reflect the large comment.
    • I gained a new realization of the relationship and intertwingularity of individual / collective learning while writing and reflecting on this social annotation. I think it's because of Adam's question that really revolves around MET of Individuality and the 3 conversant's questioning of the fluid and fuzzy boundary between "self" and "other"
      • Namely, within Indyweb / Indranet there are two learning pillars that make up the entirety of external sensemaking:
        • the first is social annotation of the work of others
        • the second is our own synthesis of what we learned from others (ie. our social annotations)
      • It is the integration of these two pillars that is the sum of our sensemaking parts. Social annotations allow us to sample the edge of the sensemaking work of others. After all, when we ingest one specific information source of others, it is only one of possibly many. Social annotations reflect how our whole interacts with their part. However, we may then integrate that peripheral information of the other more deeply into our own sensemaking work, and that's where we must have our own central synthesizing Indyweb / Indranet space to do that work.
      • It is this interplay between different poles that constitute CCE and symmathesy, mutual learning.
      • adjacency between
        • Indyweb / Indranet name space
        • Indranet
        • automatic vs manual references / citations
      • adjacency statement
        • Oh man, it's so painful to have to insert all these references and citations when Indranet is designed to do all this! A valuable new meme just emerged to express this:
          • Pain between the existing present situation and the imagined future of the same si the fuel that drives innovation.

• quote: Gien

  • Pain between an existing present situation and an imagined, improved future is the fuel that drives innovation.
• date: 2023, Nov 8

• for: social superorganism, MET, major evolutionary transition, MET of individuality, Michael Levin, Roy Baumeister, Adam Omary

• insight

  • this talk inspired an insight:
    • The contrast occurred to me with this talk especially, due to the respective areas of the two guests and Michael Levin's own interest of whether the signaling and policies within the collectives within a physiological body generalize in any way to larger social collectives that are outside of those physiological bodies. Rob Baumeister, being a social scientist is the perfect person to have such a conversation with.
  • In this case, those policies are composed of informational signals and it would seem the signals currently have nowhere near the cohesion that millions of years of evolution have resulted in within the biological body of a multicelllular organism

• for: MET, MST, MCT, FET, MET - information, MST - information, Amanda N. Robin, major evolutionary transition, major system transition, facilitating evolutionary transition

• Title:Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations

• Author: Robin et al.

• Date: 2021

• Abstract

  • A small number of extraordinary “Major Evolutionary Transitions” (METs) have attracted attention among biologists.
  • They comprise novel forms of
    • individuality and
    • information,

  • and are defined in relation to organismal complexity, irrespective of broader ecosystem-level effects.

  • This divorce between

    • evolutionary and
    • ecological consequences

  • qualifies unicellular eukaryotes, for example, as a MET although they alone failed to significantly alter ecosystems.

  • Additionally, this definition excludes revolutionary innovations not fitting into either MET type

    • (e.g., photosynthesis).
  • We recombine
    • evolution with
    • ecology
  • to explore how and why entire ecosystems were
    • newly created or
    • radically altered

  • as Major System Transitions (MSTs).

  • In doing so, we highlight important morphological adaptations that spread through populations because of

    • their immediate, direct-fitness advantages for individuals.

  • These are Major Competitive Transitions, or MCTs.

  • We argue that often
    • multiple
      • METs and
      • MCTs

  • must be present to produce MSTs.

  • For example, sexually-reproducing, multicellular eukaryotes (METs) with

    • anisogamy and
    • exoskeletons (MCTs)

  • significantly altered ecosystems during the Cambrian.

  • Therefore, we introduce the concepts of Facilitating Evolutionary Transitions (FETs) and Catalysts as

    • key events or agents that are insufficient themselves to set a MST into motion,
    • but are essential parts of synergies that do.

  • We further elucidate the role of information in MSTs as transitions across five levels:

    • (I) Encoded (Genetic);
    • (II) Epigenomic;
    • (III) Learned;
    • (IV) Inscribed; and
    • (V) Dark Information.

  • The latter is ‘authored’ by abiotic entities rather than biological organisms.

  • Level

    • IV has arguably allowed humans to produce a MST, and
    • V perhaps makes us a FET for a future transition that melds
      • biotic and
      • abiotic life
    • into one entity.
  • Understanding the interactive processes involved in past major transitions will illuminate both
    • current events and
    • the surprising possibilities that abiotically-created information may produce.

Indyweb / Indranet citations - Michael Levin, Roy Baumeister, Adam Omary youtube conversation - specifically, the question about whether a social superorganism of global human civilization / society / culture constitutes a new Major Evolutionary Transition of Individuality - https://hyp.is/rQgvZn2hEe6-TF8HFSS9mg/docdrop.org/video/UfoVTA0ilsY/

• for: social tipping point, multi-scale competency architecture, MET, major evolutionary transition of individuality

• Title: Using emergence to take social innovation to scale

• Author: Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze
• publisher: The Berkana Institute

• for: multi-scale competency architecture, MET, major evolutionary transition of individuality

• for: key question, key question - multi-scale competency architecture, MET, major evolutionary transition

• for: definition, definition - multiscale competency architecture of life, multiscale competency architecture of life, superorganism, MET, major evolutionary transition, question, question - multiscale competency architecture
• definition: multiscale competency architecture of life

• paraphrase

  • The multiscale competency architecture of life is a hypothesis about the scaling of cognition, seeing complex system-level behaviors in any space as the
    • within-level and
    • across-level
  • competition and
  • cooperation
  • among the various
    • subunits and
    • partitions
  • of composite agents (i.e., all agents).
  • The generalization of problem spaces beyond the traditional 3D space of “behavior” into other, virtual problem spaces is essential for understanding evolution of basal cognition.
  • Living things
    • first solved problems in metabolic space, and evolution then pivoted the same kinds of strategies to
    • solve problems in
      • physiological,
      • transcriptional, and
      • anatomical space,
    • before speed-optimizing these dynamics to enable rapid behavior in 3D space.
  • Since every cognitive agent is made of parts, it is essential to have a theory about how
    • numerous goal-seeking agents link together into
    • a new, larger cognitive system that is novel and not present in any of the subunits.

• comment

• adjacency between:
  • multiscale competency architecture
  • superorganism

• adjacency statement

  • The concept of multiscale competency architecture is a useful one for considering and organizing the effects of Major Evolutionary Transitions (METs) over evolutionary timescales.
  • It links and locates the normative scale in which human consciousness exists to the lower scales of cells and subcellular life below, and to society as a social superorganism above.
  • it shows that each human INTERbeing / INTERbeCOMing is not isolated, but is part of a multiscale nexus / gestalt
  • I've incorporated this into my SRG presentation.

• question

  • is there research on signaling mechanisms exist between different levels?
    • in another part of the paper, there is discussion of gap junctions as a way to cohere individual cells into group functionality
    • in particular, is there a way for humans consciousness to communicate with lower levels of its body? ie. to tissues, cells or subcellular structures?
  • Could the Bodhisattva vow be extended not only at the level of the social superorganism of groups of individual multicellular beings, but also downwards in the multiscale competency architecture to all the trillions of cells and microbes that inhabit each multicellular planetary body?
    • if it can, it can be interpreted as taking care of your body through
      • healthy exercise
      • healthy sleep
      • healthy diet
      • healthy thoughts and emotions
      • no self-harm
      • self love but not conceit
  • what are the exact biological and evolutionary mechanisms that allow for coherence of individual organisms at the various levels of the multiscale competency architecture and can they be extended to apply to the scale of humans within a social superorganism scale?
  • could love be another word for care drive that applies to all the different scales of the multiscale competency architecture?
  • do feelings of love and compassion propagate downwards through the multiscale competency architecture and find analogous expression in the appropriate spaces?
• reference
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8988303/

• for: individual / collective gestalt, Deep Humanity, superorganism, multi-level superorganism, major evolutionary transition, MET, cognitive light cone, umwelt

• paraphrase

  • a human being certainly has a light cone that does not belong to any of its pieces (ie cells)
  • at the conscious level of a human being, we have
    • goals
    • preferences
    • hopes
    • dreams
    • narratives
  • humans occupy spaces that do not belong to our individual cells, tissues or organs
    • those smaller parts work in
      • physiological space
      • transcriptional space
      • biomolecular space
  • When we were an embryo we worked in morphogenetic space

• comment

  • Since MET implies that these smaller structures of which we are constituted like
    • cells and
    • sub-cellular structures like mitochondria
  • were descended from individual organisms long ago in deep history, those contemporary proxies are occupying their own umwelt

• for: quote, quote - intelligence, major evolutionary transition, MET, quote - collective inteillgence, quote - Michael Levin
• quote
  • all intelligence is collective intelligence

• author: Michael Levin

• comment

  • Major evolutionary transition (MET) are milestones in evolution in which collections of distinct individual life forms unite into one cohesive collection due to improved fitness and begin to replicate as a new individual unit
  • hence the Deep Humanity term individual / collective gestalt, developed to deal with the level of human organisms and the societies and groups they belong to, applies to evolutionary biology as well through the MET where a new higher level individual is formed out of a collective of lower level indivdiuals

• for: self, constructing reality, constructed self, constructed reality, constructing the sense of self, self and other, nonduality, duality, insecurable, comment, question

• paraphrase

  • sense of self is a construct
  • a psychological and social construct
  • it's not something that infants are born with
    • it's actually something that develops as we grow up
  • our caregivers look into our eyes
    • give us a name that we learned to identify with and
    • also basically we learn to see ourselves as they see us
      • we internalize that which is why we are so preoccupied with what other people think about
    • we learned to use language in certain ways
      • mine
      • you
      • yours
      • his
      • hers and so forth
    • that's all very essential to it
  • so we could say that the sense of self is being a construct
  • it's composed of mostly habitual ways of
    • thinking
    • feeling
    • acting
    • reacting
    • remembering
    • planning and
    • tending
  • it's the way that these mostly habitual processes work together re-enforce each other
  • but does that give us insight into what the fundamental problem is?
• I think it does and here's what it is as I understand it
  • because the sense of self is a construct
    • because it doesn't refer it
    • doesn't depend on it
    • doesn't point back to a real self that has any self-reality or or self-identity

• this sense of self by virtue of its lack of essence is inherently uncomfortable

  • we can say it's basically inherently insecure
  • in fact it's not only insecure but it's insecurable

• comment

• question
  • I agree with David's analysis but also have a question for him:
    • what about the biological, evolutionary definition of the self of a living organism. Is there a contradiction here?
    • reference
      • Major Evolutionary Transitions occur when a group of individuated living organisms achieve greater fitness by mutualism and begin to reproduce together as a new unit
        • How do we harmonize the claim of a psychologically constructed self with this evolutionary formation of new biological SELF units through MET?

• for: human impacts, MET, major evolutionary transition, progress trap, human responsibility to life, CCE, cumulative cultural evolution, playing God
• comment
  • Very true, in fact our species is in the unprecedented position that
  • human activity, and specifically our cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) now determines the biological / genetic evolutionary future not only of our own species, but of all life on earth.
  • In other words, of evolution itself! -This is an awkward position as we have nowhere near the wisdom to play God and determine the future direction of evolution!
• References
  • Cumulative Cultural Evolution
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=cumulative%2Bcultural%2Bevolution

• Julian Huxley's biology work was to lay the seed of
  • how one individual organism transforms over many generations
    • into a new higher-level individual organism
  • he called this the "movement of individuality"
  • It has also come to be known as
    • major transitions
    • major evolutionary transition (MET)
    • evolutionary transitions in individuality
  • grandson of Thomas Huxley
  • brother of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
  • wrote The Individual in the Animal Kingdom (1912)
  • advocated for closed, independent systems with harmonious parts
  • endorsed gradients of individuality
  • "closure is never complete, the independence never absolute, the harmony never perfect"

It has been suggested that - the human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI).

there is disagreement about - how to apply the ETI framework to our species - and whether culture is implicated - as either cause or consequence.

Long-term gene–culture coevolution (GCC) i- s - also poorly understood.

argued that - culture steers human evolution,

Others proposed - genes hold culture on a leash.

After review of the literature and evidence on long-term GCC in humans - emerge a set of common themes. - First, culture appears to hold greater adaptive potential than genetic inheritance - and is probably driving human evolution. - The evolutionary impact of culture occurs - mainly through culturally organized groups, - which have come to dominate human affairs in recent millennia. - Second, the role of culture appears to be growing, - increasingly bypassing genetic evolution and weakening genetic adaptive potential. -Taken together, these findings suggest that human long-term GCC is characterized by - an evolutionary transition in inheritance - from genes to culture - which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group). Research on GCC should focus on the possibility of - an ongoing transition in the human inheritance system.

• key observation
  • human culture may represent a key evolutionary milestone
  • culture may be the next evolutionary transition state
    • pre-single self organisms like mitochondria increased fitness by sharing the environment with other life forms and formed the single cell
    • then multi-cellular organisms set the stage for the next big evolutionary paradigm
    • splitting into plants and animals
    • sexual reproduction
    • transition to land
  • we are possibly undergoing the next major evolutionary transition
  • in which we will still evolve genetically,
  • but genetics may not determine human survival as much as culture does

• Quote

• The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

• Comment

• One critique of this statement is that it wasn't only European cultures that created written language. It has a rich non European history.

• also, from an evolutionary perspective, written language use a major variable Facilitating Evolutionary Transition (FET) for a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET) of our species.

• https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Major+Evolutionary+Transition

• See references on = John Boik's evidence-based approach to build a social superorganism and Peter Nonacs, Amanda Robin and Kayla Denton's research on = Major System Transition and especially the variables that play the support role of = Facilitating Evolutionary Transition (FET), which include = Major Evolutionary Transition (MET) and = Major Competitive Transition (MCT)

https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=major%2Bevolutionary%2Btransition

Other references for METs: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=major%2Bevolutionary%2Btransition

• Each = MET is a transition from many to a unified individual
• or from one superorganism level to a higher order superorganism level

• = adding additional layers to the levels of Blanca et al.
• 5 different levels of information:
  • level 1:- information stored in genome: DNA
  • level 3 - information stored in brains or biological ways
  • level 4:- inscribed
    • iconic information - for example wofl's scent maark
    • instructional information - symbolic representation of information in written language - abiotic setting
  • level 5 - dark information - abiotic computer programs using neural networks - we don't actually know exactly how they calculate the solution

!- references : evolutionary biology * Evolutionary biologists have developed similar ideas to explain how throughout history, groups of individual organisms that clustered together and discovered better fitness as a result of symbiotic relationships began to reproduce as a whole new entity. Hence the collective became the new individual * Robin et al. paper: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world * Robin et al. video presentation: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world * Stuart West video: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FVUfNEHl44hc%2F&group=world

• Title: What caused life's Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET)?
• Author: Stuart West
• Date:

What is an individual? This is a very fundamental question that John asks, especially from the evolutionary biological perspective as life has evolved over billions of years and what were once separate individuals, came together in Major Evolution Transitions (MET) to form a NEW grouping of what were former individuals to form a new cohesive, higher order individual. Life is therefore COMPOSITIONAL. When these groups of individuals increase fitness by clustering together and mutually benefit from each other, they then reproduce together as a cluster.

Watch this informative video by Oxford researcher explaining MET: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FVUfNEHl44hc%2F&group=world and watch Amanda Robbin's video on research on the same question from an information systems perspective: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world based on her paper: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world

Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity praxis adopts the same view that the individual human being is a process, a nexus of many different flows of the natural world....and consciousness is part of the that - 4E - Embedded, Enacted, Embodied and Extended. We are more appropriately called a human INTERbeing, and even more appropriately a human INTERbeCOMing (since we are more process than static thing) both from material and information flow perspective.

Our consciousness is at a specific level, associated with a body with sensory bubble that constrains it to this particular scale of experience - not microscopic and not planetary. It gives us a unique lens into the other scales of the individual that are purely cognitive, and only indirectly sensed via instrumentation that extends our naked senses. That siuatedness and perspectival knowing gives us a uniquely, distorted view of reality.

Second Transition: Columbian Exchange

In evolutionary biology, there are also another type of transition, Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET). Robin et. al propose that the introduction of writing (inscribed language) was a major information improvement that played an important role leading to a major system transition (MST).

Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world

This can be interpreted as an instantiation of the hero's journey, in the context of research that combines evolution with ecology as in the research paper: Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations (Robin et al., 2021).From this lens, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) was first made possible through spoken language, then accelerated through written language. The authors claim that another Major System Transition (MST).is emerging, which they posit to be abiotic in nature involving Artificial Intelligence.

Faced with a self-induced civilization-scale threat, we may ask whether a major cultural evolution may be necessary to avoid catastrophe and whether it may constitute another MST. Could a rapid higher level global understanding of the epistemological dualism of self and other which undergirds normative alienation, othering and conflict, both with others of our own species, of other species and with the planetary system itself play a major role in the transition?

Refuting Descartes and Enlightenment myths. Lakoff justifies how neuroscience findings of the processing of the unconscious mind leads him to the statement that 98% of our thoughts are unconscious.

What emerges into conscious knowing then is a small percentage of what the rest of the processing brain "knows".

The conscious mind therefore has no direct access to that 98% of what is going on to surface the 2% it is aware of. If we extend knowledge into processes that are beyond simply neural processes, however, this knowledge gap becomes even more pronounced.

Since human physiology of modern hominins is the evolutionary terminus point of billions of years of evolution, with at least 3 different prior Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) embedded within our various body structures, our "conscious mind" is the governor over a thriving, cohesive planetary population of billions of cells and trillions of microbes of whose ongoing metabolic processes we are completely ignorant of.

Witness the development of disease within our bodies. The con-specific is unaware of it often until late stage symptoms appear and warrants a doctor's visit..

Within this human body, we embed 4 different stages of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET).

Our human body is the product of billions of years of evolution, embodying various outputs from each major stage of a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET). We are a multi-cellular being, a colony. Yet,at the same time, we have living elements that at one time in history, were independent living beings which were NOT part of a multi-cellular colony!

In the deep history of the evolution of the human body, genes, mitochondria, eukaryotes were all once autonomous living entities, each a biological self with its own boundary separating inner from outer. Virus's helped to catalyze their mutualism over deep time.

Now, over billions of years of evolution, they are all integrated together by the extra-cellular matrix and laminin protein into our multi-cellular human body, replicating as one super, super, super organism.

Finally, inscribed language has allowed us to undergo another kind of transition, a major system transition (MST) where human beings now dominate the entire biosphere, for better and for worse.

Fascinating experiments that support MET.

This is the key to Major Evolutionary Transition - a population of free living individual creatures discover that in teaming up, there is a greater resultant evolutionary fitness, mutualism symbiotic relationship emerges. It becomes so strong over time that the many become a self-replicating one.

The biological self is always defined by a boundary between inner and outer, but in this act of mutualism, the many biological selves join to form a new higher order biological self.

In this way, a multi-cellular species like ours is somewhat like one of those nested Russian dolls.

Indeed, Amanda Robins hypothesizes

https://hyp.is/NyrixELGEeyYWN_d76UNMg/docdrop.org/video/6J-J72GoqhY/

that our species has undergone what she and Peter Nonacs calls Major System Transition (MST). The cultural artifact of inscribed language has made possible a superorganism / supraorganism that has spread across the globe.

This is a great vid for showing how we are a multi-level being. Within this human body, we embed 4 different stages of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET).

Our human body is the product of billions of years of evolution, embodying various outputs from each major stage of a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET). We are a multi-cellular being, a colony. Yet,at the same time, we have living elements that at one time in history, were independent living beings which were NOT part of a multi-cellular colony!

We have genes, that were once autonomous living entities, mitochondria within cells, which at one time were autonomous entities, and cells, which were also once autonomously existent eukaryotes. All three exist in transmuted form that is now integrated into our body.

Viruses have played a key role in a number of different METs. This is an important insight that can contextualize the covid-19 pandemic.

The transition from competing individuals to a coherent unity is a fascinating journey.

Applied to human society at a time of the Anthropocene, these principles of evolutionary biology may be salient to apply to the superorganism/supra-organism of humanity undergoing a process of rapid whole system change.

The shift from individual to unified group due to evolutionary fitness bestowed by fitness emerges a new stable replicable unit and marks a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET).

The Palette of Being is a very useful idea that is related to Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) and autopoiesis. From CCE, humans are able to pass on new ideas from one generation to the next, made possible by the tool of inscribed language.

Peter Nonacs group at UCLA as well as Stuart West at Oxford research Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) West elucidates that modern hominids integrate the remnants of four major stages of MET that have occurred over deep time. Amanda Robins, a researcher in Nonacs group posits the idea that our species of modern hominids are undergoing a Major Systems Transition (MST), due specifically to our development of inscribed language.

CCE emerges new technologies that shape our human environments in time frames far faster than biological evolutionary timeframes. New human experiences are created which have never been exposed to human brains before, which feedback to affect our biological evolution as well in the process of gene-culture coevolution (GCC), also known as Dual Inheritance theory. In this way, CCE and GCC are entangled. "Gene–culture coevolution is the application of niche-construction reasoning to the human species, recognizing that both genes and culture are subject to similar dynamics, and human society is a cultural construction that provides the environment for fitness-enhancing genetic changes in individuals. The resulting social system is a complex dynamic nonlinear system. " (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/)

This metaphor of experiences constituting different colors on a Palette of Being is a powerful one that can contextualize human experiences from a deep time framework. One could argue that language usage automatically forces us into an anthropomorphic lens, for sophisticated language usage at the level of humans appears to be unique amongst our species. Within that constraint, the Palette of Being still provides us with a less myopic, less immediate and arguably less anthropomorphic view of human experience. It is philosophically problematic, however, in the sense that we can speculate about nonhuman modalities of being but never truly experience them. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his classic paper "What it's like to be a bat" to illustrate this problem of experiencing the other. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf)

We can also leverage the Palette of Being in education. Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journeys are a new kind of experiential, participatory contemplative practice and teaching tool designed to deepen our appreciation of what it is to be human. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene, especially the self-induced climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have precipitated the erosion of stable social norms and reference frames, inducing another crisis, a meaning crisis. In this context, a re-education of embodied philosophy is seen as urgent to make sense of a radically shifting human reality.

Different human experiences presented as different colors of the Palette of Being situate our crisis in a larger context. One important Deep Humanity BEing journey that can help contextualize and make sense of our experiences is language. Once upon a time, language did not exist. As it gradually emerged, this color came to be added to our Palette of Being, and shaped the normative experiences of humanity in profound ways. It is the case that such profound shifts, lost over deep time come to be taken for granted by modern conspecifics. When such particular colors of the Palette of Being are not situated in deep time, and crisis ensues, that loss of contextualizing and situatedness can be quite disruptive, de-centering, confusing and alienating.

Being aware of the colors in the Palette can help us shed light on the amazing aspects that culture has invisibly transmitted to us, helping us not take them for granted, and re-establish a sense of awe about our lives as human beings.