The Meaning Crisis and intermediate levels

As we mentioned in a previous post, there is a reason why the US or EU, or IBM are not just a soup of organelles. The reason is a cost/benefit analysis: The (long term) cost of managing parts goes up quadratically, whereas the benefits of synergizing parts goes up less quickly than quadratically, with the number of parts (short term costs can be almost anything and don't need to follow these scaling laws). At some point, more organelles will be a losing proposition even if they can synergize. What the level of the cell does, is reset the extra cost to zero. Now, with more cells the cost increases quadratically again, but as a function of the number of cells, not of organelles. This obviously generalizes to organs, organisms, etc. Here is a cartoon graph showing this scaling behavior, with x being level number (units of cost or benefit, i.e. fitness, arbitrary, and in real cases there will be a "level-dependent Dunbar number" here shown as 10 for all levels, a simplification):

This cartoon graph does not show that the scaling behavior of the benefit can sometimes actually increase with more levels (here shown as linear for simplicity), and therefore so can the net benefit. Instead of being more cost-driven (as in above graph), the emergence of a new level can be more benefit-driven as in the graph below, where the net benefit keeps increasing at each new level:

We’ll now discuss something which seems unrelated, but bear with me, it is needed to explain something related. It is important to realize that not all symbiotic partnerships are organismal/evolutionary and hence do not require membranes (and coordination) when they are not. For example, bees and flowers, or hummingbirds and flowers do not form an organism. They have no membrane and require no coordination, though sometimes there is coordination, but there is also intense competition between different birds for same flower, or different flowers for same bird (bees have a hive level, which makes competition between individual bees in a hive rare), and possibly even the birds can compete with the flowers sometimes, taking more nectar by the birds than is good for the flowers, or deceiving the birds with little nectar in order to get their seeds propagated at a lower cost to the flowers. Same with many other symbiotes. Organismality requires keeping some material resources inside the organism at each level, though some sharing across levels is beneficial. Moreover, organismality of individuals requires new generation organisms to get resources only from their parent organisms, (so no cuckolding) and to keep resources internal without giving much to the parents during childhood. However, if a higher level exists than the individual parents (e.g. a family or tribe), then resources could be gotten from other parents within that level.

The symbiotic relationship between consumers and producers in capitalism is also non-organismal (in contrast to the symbiotic relationship of workers in a company, which is much more organismal), for the same reason the symbiosis between hummingbirds and flowers is non-organismal. It's a "fellow traveler" relationship. But the problem with capitalism is not just that it is non-organismal, but that it seems to (unlike organisms) dissolve functional organismal levels above the individual and below the nation-state or large corporation. The attention economy, the latest capitalist manifestation, may even dissolve the level of the psychological individual into its psychological parts, at least for consumers. This dissolution of intermediate levels is the root cause (generating function in Schmactenberger-speak) of the chaos attractor--the costs of managing parts becomes larger than the benefits of having the parts without the intermediate levels. And if this is true, it is not sufficient to take approaches which only tackle consciousness or meaning (for example Iain McGilChrist, Jill Nephew or John Vervaeke) in order to deal with the chaos attractor. We need to rebuild all these levels (not just the human cognition level) within capitalism while simultaneously coming up with an economic alternative. This will also require us to deal with the level of human cognition, mostly to free ourselves from the mind shackles* that make us think capitalism, communism, socialism or anarchism are the only games in town. I doubt this would require a mystical, pantheistic religion, or a capitalist app that makes people more curious, or able to see context. Most humans are still using both focused and diffuse attention heuristics to function, even though science might use more focused attention in its analysis phases, and diffuse attention in their hypothesis-generation phase.

So far we’ve looked at costs and benefits to a higher level from managing its parts. But there are also costs and benefits to parts from accurately modeling the higher level, which serves as an environment. Presumably, these costs and benefits don’t scale with the number of parts: the costs remain low since the higher level is predictable and benefits if its parts have a good model of its needs, and the benefits remain high since the higher level “tries to” (quotes because agentic concepts like trying may not always apply) to benefit its parts. However this breaks down at the highest level where the environment is unpredictable and does not care (except in trying to outcompete them) about these highest level entities, which are no longer technically parts. One would expect a higher investment in modeling this external environment if the highest level is an evolutionary one, not just a functional one. As we’ve discussed both above and in a previous post, capitalism is not an evolutionary level, and furthermore has the property of dissolving lower levels, all the way down to individual humans (and sometimes even further to their psychological modules/parts). But the levels of UN, nations, companies and families have not been completely dissolved, and so still offer humans a cognitive buffer from other nations, companies, families and non-human species. It is in this buffer zone that BS can thrive, in other words there is no strong selection for individual humans’ model of their external environment to be accurate, compared with no buffer, or with a buffer that involves strong intermediate levels (with at least one of them being evolutionary).

With this view, the "meaning crisis" is just a part of a bigger problem of restoring levels that have been outcompeted by capitalism. Meaning comes from FEELING like one is part of a higher level, even if one isn't. But these other problems won't go away just because of how we feel. We have to start needing each other in our immediate circles and the nature around for real, not just feeling part of a global village, or a pantheistic universe. These might emerge at some point for real, but we can't skip the lower levels.

There are also two ironies that need to be mentioned. The first is with regards to the McGilchrist hypothesis that our ails are caused by privileging our focused attention ("The Emissary") over our diffuse, context-dependent attention ("The Master"). By focusing on this level of organization of human cognition (instead of the bigger levels of family, community, federations of communities and nation states), we have gotten trapped in our focused attention, and are not only failing to integrate it with the diffuse attention (to rebuild the individual level), but also are failing to spend time and energy on rebuilding these higher levels of human organization.

The second irony is that the same strategy that will address the generator functions of our existential risks, namely rebuilding intermediate levels, might also be the key to an actual AGI, and that all the worry about an AGI taking over is unjustified because it can't happen without having a bunch of evolvable levels itself. And if that ever gets built, we need to figure out how we can form a symbiosis with it, and follow other "proper nesting" rules so what emerges is a third attractor, instead of chaos or totalitarianism.

* Mind shackles are reflexes such as whenever we hear a critique of capitalism, we think it is a Marxist critique. The current critique is almost the opposite of the “private property” critique, because it sees resources and privacy as a continuous variable (not private vs public), and is optimal within a “proper nesting” arrangement, where the lowest levels have the most sharing/privacy. Of course there are complications because the nature of resources vary, especially with regard to information: it might be beneficial to spend more energy on modeling an external hostile environment than a predictable internal environment.