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.

for - potential disagreement - with - Bernardo Kastrup claim of unnaturality of normative self perspective - with - individual/collective gestalt - Major Evolutionary Transitions towards individuality

This advice also generally applies to one's one personal zettelkasten, much less a group version.

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 evolutionary transitions in individuality - MET in individuality - https://hyp.is/3CqphlpHEe6yUmfDjm_p5A/www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1421402112

• for: microbiome, gut health, MET in Individuality - microbiome, complexity - human microbiome, fermentation - health

• for: adjacency - consciousness - multiscale context

• adjacency between

  • Michael's example
  • my idea of how consciousness fits into a multiscale system
• adjacency statement
  • from a Major Evolutionary Transition of Individuality perspective, consciousness might be seen as a high level governance system of a multicellular organism
  • this begs the question: consciousness is fundamentally related to individual cells that compose the body that the consciousness appears to be tethered to
  • question: Is there some way for consciousness to directly access the lower and more primitive MET levels of its own being?

• for: quote - Michael Levin, quote - MET of individuality, quote - memory wipe, quote - cancer therapy - MET of individuality

• quote: Michael Levin

  • this is a cancer approach that we work on which is to not to kill those cells but to force them to re reconnect to their neighbors and when they reconnect to the neighbors they once again become part of the collective that's working on making nice skin nice muscle they stop being metastatic and they they go back

• comment

  • Michael refers to cancer as a "memory wipe" where they have forgotten the normative programmed narrative of bodily / collective / multicellular unity

• for: MET of individuality - examples of breakdown - cancer

• paraphrase

  • cancer is an example of when some part of the evolutionary program that coheres multicellularity into a cohesive whole goes faulty
    • then some subset of cells lose their coherence programming / story / narrative, the unity is lost and that cellular subset no longer identifies as part of the higher order collective individual, but return to a much more evolutionarily primitive state of pre-MET of individuality
  • this means that the MET individuality coherence program has weaknesses that can cause groups of cells to lose sight of the unifying logic and return to the primitive state
  • cancer demonstrates that these primitive programs still exist in all cells in our bodies and when the regulating coherence program is faulty, they can return to these more primitive states

• 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: 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

• 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"

Definition : Evolutionary Transition in Individuality - This is a very good definition of ETI - A new individual is a new level of biological organization - The new individual emerges out of an integration of subsiduary units as competitive individuals synergize and form well-integrated functional groups

I tend to agree with this.

!- distinction : between individuality and individualism

Goutor indicates that "a certain amount of individual in methods is commendable, and indeed necessary." but that "it soon becomes apparent that there are some ways of doing things more efficient and ultimately more productive than others". But he goes on to bemoan that how to manuals offer little help.

(p3, Introduction)

!- for : Cultural Evolution - the findings of this paper point to culture is displacing genetic adaptive potential as the main driver of evolution. This is a very profound finding!

The "individual" is therefore scale and dimension dependent. There are so many ways to define an individual depending on the scale you are looking at and your perspective.

Information theory of individuality addresses this aspect.

The mechanisms of our compliance with the dominant system are designed into the system:

• Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
• Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
• Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)

Once again we see themes of neglect, and of becoming ones own person. The ambiguity of Mansfield's stories, leave us to our own subjective interpretations. This is the kind of writing that I love, because it challenges our own sensibilities, forcing the reader into making up their own minds, without anymore meaningful a measure for right or wrong, than the readers own life experience. In this way her stories successfully imitate real life. We go around imperfect machines, interpreting life through a murky lens, with feelings that are complicated, dull, sharp, definite... I know this story is a sad one. I feel sad for William, but I'm not sure I should.

• 14:20 Pan's Labyrinth
  • Moral parable with "think for yourself; don't just blindly obey" as its message.

Time and space were created for individuality to occur, for creature to have a consciousness that it is separate from its Creator....