we we are made of of a kind of nesting doll architecture not just structurally I mean that part's obvious that each thing is made of smaller things but in fact 00:01:58 that each of these layers has their own problem-solving capacity uh in many cases various kinds of ability to learn from experience and and uh the the 00:02:10 competencies of various kinds and this turns out to be very important

these are the seven main thrusts of the series

i make the distinction between reform and trends and transformation

what our work is showing is very soon it can't. And so it's going to go through a death throws and any organism it will fight to survive. And so yes, there will be pushback and resistance. And so what I'm proposing is a plan, whether that plan gets carried out or whether it's 00:37:22 allowed to be carried out, that's a different matter.

what would the super organism be within the four categories of... Would it be old school? Would it be a Viking? 00:36:32 Would it be a realist or an Arcadian? What would the super organism be? Nate Hagens: Well, certainly wouldn't be an Arcadian because the super organism cares about right now, just getting enough profits to keep the financial system going. And the profits are tethered to energy. So the super organism would be a blend of category one and category two, the cornucopia and the Vikings.

so society is an individual and we are part of society and we're talking about societal systems and so at that level that seems to be our level of focus here at that level we can talk about society as an organism as a cognitive organism 01:18:02 that is propagating information from the past into the future and from an active inference standpoint we can say uh under the you know under the fitness score 01:18:15 whatever word you might want to use for that of reducing uncertainty so we act to reduce uncertainty

anticipations is key to 01:08:38 everything and attention is key to everything so every organism does that plants and everything else and it doesn't require a central nervous system 01:08:51 and and you i might add to this that not only is every organism cognitive but essentially every organism organism is cooperative to those cooperation and cognition 01:09:03 go hand in hand because any intelligent organism any organism that can act to better its you know viability is going to cooperate in 01:09:17 meaningful ways with other organisms and you know other species and things like that nice point because um there's cost to communication whether it's exactly whether it's the cost of making the pheromone 01:09:30 or just the time which is super finite or attention fundamentally and so costly interactions through time the game theory are either to exploit and stabilize which is fragile 01:09:42 or to succeed together yeah exactly and and and succeeding together cooperation is is is like everywhere once you once you understand what you're looking 01:09:54 for it's in the biologic world it's like everywhere so this idea that we're you know one one one person against all or you know we're a dog eat dog universe i mean it's you 01:10:08 know in a certain sense it's true obviously tigers eat you know whatever they eat zebras or whatever i mean that happens yes of course but in the larger picture 01:10:19 over and over multiple time scales not just uh you know in five minutes but over evolutionary time scales and uh you know developmental time scales and everything the cooperation is really the rule 01:10:33 for the most part and if you need if any listener needs proof of that just think of who you think of your body i mean there's about a trillion some trillion some cells 01:10:45 that are enormously harmonious like your blood pumps every day or you know this is a this is like a miracle i don't want to use the word miracle because i want to get into 01:10:59 whatever that might imply but uh it is amazing aw inspiring the the depth of cooperation just in our own bodies is like that's that's like 01:11:12 evolution must prefer cooperation or else there would never be such a complex uh pattern of cooperation as we see just in one human body 01:11:26 just to give one example from the bees so from a species i study it's almost like a sparring type of cooperation because when it was discovered that there were some workers with developed ovaries 01:11:38 there was a whole story about cheating and policing and about altruism and this equation says this and that equation says that and then when you take a step back it's like the colony having a distribution of over-reactivation 01:11:51 may be more ecologically resilient so um i as an evolutionary biologist never think well my interpretation of what would be lovey-dovey in this system must be how it works because that's so 01:12:05 clearly not true it's just to say that there are interesting dynamics within and between levels and in the long run cooperation and stable cooperation and like learning to adapt 01:12:17 to your niche is a winning strategy in a way that locking down just isn't but unfortunately under high um stress and 01:12:29 uh high uncertainty conditions simple strategies can become rife so that's sort of a failure mode of the population

the six 00:48:41 six big systems i've mentioned can be viewed as a cognitive architecture it's the it's the means by which the society learns decides adapts and 00:48:54 and this society's efforts this is the third underlying position the society's efforts to learn decide and adapt and be viewed as being driven by an intrinsic purpose and that's really key also 00:49:08 because it's not just that we're learning deciding and adapting willy-nilly i mean i mean maybe it seems that way in the world you know in the sense we're so dysfunctional it kind of is billy nilly but 00:49:20 but what really matters is that we learn decide and adapt in relation to whatever intrinsic purpose we actually have as as a society as individuals in a 00:49:34 society it's that it's it's it's it's as i will use the the term uh maybe several times today it's solving problems that matter that really that really 00:49:45 matter that's what we're after

first is that uh a society of any scale and and i don't mean society is in bill millions or billions of people i mean society as in a thousand people you know like a sub 00:47:23 sub city a community that is not even a whole city just a a group of like-minded people uh who are willing to give this a give this you know 00:47:35 a field trial ago a society of any scale can be viewed as a super organism so that's kind of fundamental everything really really works from there we are together we 00:47:49 are not just individuals connected we are a whole society is a whole and it's a and it's a whole with the environment and it's wider you know 00:48:03 sphere so as we'll talk about today you know this even the idea of an individual is it's okay to talk about individuals it's fine but it's kind of like an arbitrary thing an 00:48:15 individual could be an individual cell or an individual person or an individual uh species or an individual ecosystem but it's all with all deeply embedded and enmeshed 00:48:28 entwined with the whole so uh uh a society can be viewed as a super organism

we're going to talk in this series 00:01:10 about a series of papers that i just published in the in the journal sustainability that that series is titled science driven societal transformation

This hyper-response is a six-phase operation that will extend until the year 2100. It is civilian-led and involves a whole-of-society layered mobilization.