• 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 - key insight - multicellularity - memory wiping

• key insight
  • individuals have information in their memories about survival
  • when they merge and join, they pool their information and you can't tell whose memories came from whom initially
  • this memory wiping is a key aspect of multcellularity

investigate - salience of memory wiping for multicellularity - This is a very important biological behavior. - Perform a literature review to understand examples of this

question - biological memory wiping - can it be extrapolated to social superorganism?

for - individual or collective behavior - slime mold - prisoner's dilemma and slime molds - slime molds - me vs we - me vs we - slime molds - adjacency - slime molds - me vs we - multicellular organisms

• quote
  • You have the slime mold and you put a piece of oat which the Slime wants to eat and
  • it starts to crawl towards that oat and then
  • What you can do is you can take a razor blade and just cut off that leading edge
    • the little piece of it that's moving towards the oat
  • Now as soon as you've done that
  • that little piece is a new individual and
  • it has a decision to make
    • it can go in and get the oat and exploit that resource and not have to share it with this giant mass of faizaram that's back here or
    • it can first merge back and connect back to the original mass
      • because they can reconnect quite easily and then they go get the oat
  • Now the thing is that the the payoff Matrix looks quite different because
  • when it's by itself it can do this calculus of "well, it's better for me to go get the food instead of and not share it with this other thing"
  • but as soon as you connect, that payoff Matrix changes because there is no me and you
    • there's just we and at that point it doesn't make any sense to the fact that
    • you can't defect against yourself so that payoff table of actions and consequences looks quite different
    • because some of the actions change the number of players and
    • that's really weird

adjacency between - slime molds - me vs we -multicellular organisms - social superorganism and societal breakdown - adjacency statement - A simple slime mold experiment could make an excellent BEing journey - to demonstrate how multicellular beings operate through higher order organizational principle of collaboration that - keeps cells aligned with a common purpose, - but that each cellular unit also comes equipped with - an evolutionarily inherited legacy of individual control system - normally, the evolutionarily later and higher order collaborative signaling that keeps the multi-cellular being unified overrides the lower order, evolutionarily more primitive autonomous cellular control system - however, pathological conditions can occur that disrupt the collaborative signaling, causing an override condition, and individual cells to revert back to their more primitive legacy survival system - The same principles happen at a societal level. - In a healthy, well-functioning society, the collaborative signaling keeps the society together - but if it is severely disrupted, social order breakdown ensues and - individual human beings and small groups resort to individual survival behavior

• 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: superorganism, social superorganism, bottom-up movement,

• comment

  • this model of nested structures and the major evolutionary transition of individuality suggests a metaphor for the great transition of civilization:
    • apply SIMPOL to fragmented change agents around the globe and apply leverage points, idling resources and social tipping points to organize individuals at one scale to create a MET of individuality at another higher scale
    • this becomes the construction / evolution of a new individual
      • the social superorganism for rapid whole sysem change

• 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: Michael Levine, developmental biology, human superorganism, multi-scale competency architecture, eukaryote multi-cellular superorganism - interlevel communication, interoception

• definition: multi-scale competency architecture

  • a complex living organism is not simply nested structurally in terms of cells which comprise tissues, comprising organs, and bodies, and then ultimately societies. Each of these layers has certain problem-solving competencies.

• comment

  • The HUMAN interBEcomING is a multi-level system.
  • It would be insightful to learn if there are ways our human consciousness level can communicate to each level, including the social level
• future work
  • literature review of research on specific areas related to the level of human consciousness communicating with other levels of the superorganism
    • perhaps called "interlevel communication of multi-level superorganism
    • interoception signals?

• for: societal design, designing societies, societal architecture, transforming society, whole system change, SSO, social superorganism, John Boik

The seven main ideas for societal design: 1. societal transformation - is necessary to avoid catastrophe 2. the specific type of transformation is science-based transformation based on entirely new systems - de novo design - 3. A practical way to implement the transformation in the real world - it must be economical, and doable within the short time window for system change before us. - Considering a time period of 50 years for total change, with some types of change at a much higher priority than others. - The change would be exponential so starting out slower, and accelerating - Those communities that are the first to participate would make the most rapid improvements. 4. Promoting a worldview of society as a social superorganism, a cognitive organism, and its societal systems as a cognitive architecture. 5. Knowing the intrinsic purpose of a society - each subsystem must be explained in terms of the overall intrinsic purpose. 6. The reason for transformation - Transformation that improves cognition reduces the uncertainty that our society's intrinsic purpose is fulfilled. 7. Forming a partnership between the global science community and all the local communities of the world.

• for: Social Superorganism, SSO, reform vs transformation
• comment
  • John distinguishes between
    • reform and
    • transformation.
  • In the simplest terms,
    • reform deals with changes to an existing paradigm whilst
    • transformation deals with fundamental structural changes of an existing paradigm - a paradigm shift.
  • John views societal systems as
    • a social superorganism (SSO) and the major cognitive architectures as SSO systems such as
      • legal,
      • economic,
      • social,
      • governance,
      • education, etc
  • as cognitive architectures of the SSO. -The theoretical question being asked is:
    • There is an optimization problem. Of all possible variations, which one has the best fitness to the function of a society that operates within earth system boundaries?

!- Social Superorganism : Biological Survival metaphor - the current social superorganism is fighting to survive as it's life is threatened by the transformation - the metamorphosis will transform it to group 4, if successful

!- current social superorganism : four groups description - Michaux and Hagens agree that the current pathological social superorganism is a combination of group 1 and group 2, Old school / Viking

Using the above concept of an individual as something that can exist at many different scales, John next looks at society as an individual superorganism

The human, or ANY multicellular animal or plant body is a prime example of cooperation....billions of cells in cooperation with each other to regulate the body system.

The body of any multi-cellular organism, whether flora or fauna is an example of exquisite cellular and microbial cooperation. A multi-cellular organism is itself a superorganism in this sense. And social organisms then constitute an additional layer of superorganismic behavior.

Second Proposition: The six thrusts or prmary societal systems are the cognitive architecture of the superorganism which it uses to sense the world

First Proposition: Society (at every scale, and even the community scale) can be seen as a superorganism and the individual and society are entangled. This is analogous to the SRG adoption of the human INTERbeing concept, treating the individual as a gestalt of both individual and enmeshed cell of a larger social organ.

In fact, the human organism can be seen from three different perspectives and levels of being:

1. an aggregation of billions of cells and trillions of microbes, wherein consciousness can be regarded as an emergent property of a complex system of a population of microorganisms
2. the 4E (Embodied, Enacted, Embedded, Extended) lived experience of consciousness
3. as a cell in a larger social superorganism (SSO).

Title: Science-driven Societal Transformation, Part 1, 2 and 3 John Boik, Oregon State University John's Website: https://principledsocietiesproject.org/

Intro: A society can be viewed as a superorganism that expresses an intrinsic purpose of achieving and maintaining vitality. The systems of a society can be viewed as a societal cognitive architecture. The goal of the R&D program is to develop new, integrated systems that better facilitate societal cognition (i.e., learning, decision making, and adaptation). Our major unsolved problems, like climate change and biodiversity loss, can be viewed as symptoms of dysfunctional or maladaptive societal cognition. To better solve these problems, and to flourish far into the future, we can implement systems that are designed from the ground up to facilitate healthy societal cognition.

The proposed R&D project represents a partnership between the global science community, interested local communities, and other interested parties. In concept, new systems are field tested and implemented in local communities via a special kind of civic club. Participation in a club is voluntary, and only a small number of individuals (roughly, 1,000) is needed to start a club. No legislative approval is required in most democratic nations. Clubs are designed to grow in size and replicate to new locations exponentially fast. The R&D project is conceptual and not yet funded. If it moves forward, transformation on a near-global scale could occur within a reasonable length of time. The R&D program spans a 50 year period, and early adopting communities could see benefits relatively fast.

Aligned to Stop Reset Go, global bottom-up, social superorganism approach and the "awaken the sleeping giant" campaign, to awaken the sleeping social superorganism giant composed of the ordinary citizens of the globe.