Introduction, part 4. Go back to previous part
Ontological demarcations
The general things so far stated, should be regarded as fully accountable. The same goes for what is claimed under the subheadings “Integrating science – integrating society,” “Social conceptualization,” and “The meaning of life,” below in this introduction.
Determination of human nature as cooperative, should be accepted as general first order approximation within social sciences. It should no longer be possible to object to a description of successive self-organization, as a levelling up of humanity’s association. That should be adopted as second order approximation. The possible advanced reintegration of humanity in the earth system is the problem on everybody’s lips, among those treating the Anthropocene crisis seriously. Neither this approximation of the third order to human nature should be possible to dismiss. These three approximations should be fully possible to use for humanity as independent variable, in transcending into an anthropically dependent earth system.
What is said below, however, concerning problems of ontological demarcation, impeding inter-scientific integration, must be taken with more than one grain of salt. Even the section “Some problems of integrating science,” towards the end of this introduction, should be taken with a similar reservation. We really lack the resources and competence for seriously treating these crucial subjects, in some specific ways touched upon under the rest of this subheading, and the one on scientific integration. But such an approach cannot be avoided. The extremely dangerous urban myth of ‘artificial intelligence’ seems to be commonly embraced, within the very social circles occupied with developing the leading-edge technology denominated as AI. This understanding must be fundamentally challenged. It is misleading. It is serving destructive forces. And it is paralysing.
Exactly such technology will be critical, for realizing the globally collective human intelligence needed to solve the Anthropocene crisis. But so-called AI had been originally developed for weapons of mass destruction. It has been perpetuated in destructive capital abstraction. And it is today invading human mass communication, as a cognitive zombie of class society’s undead social relations. These means of cooperation have been distorted into destructive forces.
Precisely for that reason, this introduction needs to venture into the shaky ground of ontological reasoning, epistemological problematization, and some interdisciplinary cross references. The intentions are good, even if the at times sharp tone might give another impression. Hopefully not too much embarrassing misconceptions will be produced. And hopefully some questions raised will prove relevant.
The human mind
Describing the problem of integrated science, might proceed from its critical interface, the science of the human mind. Neurological science gets better every day at measuring, describing, and interpreting its physical, chemical, and biological manifestations within the individual human brain, as well as correlating these observations to input stimuli and output behaviour.
Social science, however, is severely lagging, by its incapacity for comprehensively describing and interpreting the processing nature of the human survival fitness – cooperation. Therefore, the question of the human mind can – and must – remain suspended in an antiquated space, between metaphysical science and metaphysical philosophy.
Natural science, meanwhile, seems happy with restricting its research horizon, to treating the individual human brain as a substrate for experimentation. This tendency extends itself, to the extreme extent that information technology and human epistemology may be jumbled up into one complete mess. By such procedure, the independent variable in solving the Anthropocene crisis – completing the collectivisation of human intelligence – remains an unexplored region.
By stubbornly restricting its search for a human mind, to its individual biological manifestation, an individual and isolated human brain, the ‘AI’ myth is granted safe conduct. And natural science on human consciousness gets stuck in a ‘flogiston’-like trap, where otherwise highly qualified individual scientists might be enticed into dematerialized philosophical speculation now and again. Maybe we should resume the quest for ‘orgone,’ if we include the emotional level? Seriously: Pass the ball of interesting neurological discoveries to social science, summoning ‘Stop fiddling and start playing!’
We can no longer afford to stumble on elementary errors. The fundamental postulate, of neuroscientific contributions to psychology, is firmly established: ‘There can be no change in the mental states of a person, without a change in brain states.’ This does not, of course, imply that changes in humanity’s mental states, and associated changes of habits, could be reduced to physical, chemical or biological processes in the individual brain. No such reduction to some part, to reversed causality, or to any one-way causation at all, as it comes to complex systems, is compatible with modern science. Yet, such primitive reasoning seems to keep on infesting professional discourse.
It has often been stated that today we have better understanding of the universe, than of our own means of approaching this universal reality – the human mind. In fact, the general bias affecting science of humans and humanity, is that it may continue disregarding the fundamental quality of its object, its cooperative nature. Thereby it allows for general research in human consciousness to start and end in studying humans as isolated substrates. Applied science often narrows down to treating special cases, or specialising in restricted aspects, never aiming at generalization. And it is in such primitively confined instrumentalism, that the human mind might continuously be treated as a simulacrum of a computer (the pitfall of natural science) – or as an unapproachable mystery (the cave of the humanities).
Such ways of posing the problem, could be compared to trying to understand the earth system exclusively by looking into a pond, or trying to understand the universe from the misunderstanding of the earth as flat, or searching for answers to problems of natural evolution in the Bible. All science on human existence must be based in the level, extension, and social quality of human association historically achieved. The second order approximation of human nature is an absolute minimum. You deviate from that on the pain of ending up in quasi-science.
‘Body and soul’
The ‘body-mind problem’ has been discussed for thousands of years: Are the two identical? Can one be reduced to the other? Are they separable? Which way does the causation between the individual body and its isolated mind act, if at all? Is there some degree of autonomy between them? Or do they exist in parallel? Even in dual realities? Is one of them only imaginary? Or are they both? Can the human mind know anything about the material world? Can study of the material world discover anything about the human mind?
Stop being sarcastic! Of course, base level modern research has advanced far beyond such things! Really? Let us see: Maybe, we could de describe the workings of the human mind, by a simple analogy to the way genes work in physical reproduction? Could we denominate such ‘findings’ as ‘memes’? Or maybe we should look for the ‘ether’ or ‘phlogiston’ of the human mind – a substance called, say, ‘qualia’? And so on. If natural science had stayed in an analogously corrupted dead-end of speculative alchemy or electro-magnetic spiritism, we would never have experienced its golden age of technical and social modernization.
Nor has it been helpful stranding enquiry into the human condition, by general ‘phenomenological’ speculations on relations between an inner exclusively experienced individual ‘self’ and an essentially unapproachable external reality. Such methods of inquiry only constitute a misty dead-end of theoretically and practically outdated dualism. Enlightenment’s dualist solution should be abandoned, together with its post-Kantian entanglements.
Self-organization is a human property. It is by nature collective. Searching for specific components and measurable proofs of an isolated ‘self,’ within research in the human mind, is thereby proceeding from a contradiction in terms. Since starting out from such primitive metaphysics, it gets stuck there, looking for humanity in a virtual no man’s land.
Synapses, indicative of a certain type of human reaction, seem to fire well before cognition. This is becoming massively well-documented. OK. Does that make us bio-chemo-electric zombies? In 2017 the John Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute granted 7 million dollars to an international network of neurologists, philosophers, and computer scientists, for a four-year research project – ‘Consciousness and free will: a joint neuroscientific-philosophical investigation.’ To put it bluntly, they were assigned to finally find out if you are possessing a ‘free will,’ or if you are a bio-chemo-electric zombie. Watch out in 2021! Look for an expensive and confusing disappointment, since their $7 million research question had been flawed.
Free will
Do you as human individual govern your own thoughts, or do pre-conscious impulses enslave your thoughts? Can the human being freely choose and act according to individual caprice? Or is personal will a mere illusion, while outfalls of bio-chemo-physical impulses in the human brain, in reaction to external stimuli, carries the entire scientific explanation for paths of action apparently chosen? Since the millennium, recent pathbreaking findings have demonstrated that there is an organ of the body firing more synapses reaching the brain, than those that go in the other direction, namely the bowels. Maybe should these be included as the main agent of personal free will? Sorry, only joking!
As results from such neurological measurements seem irrefutable, though, they only accentuate how unreal it would be imagining human consciousness separated from the individual body, in any other meaning than the most decisive and obvious one – that the human mind is collective by nature.
However spooky it might sound, the design of these mysterious brainwaves, pre-consciously measurable, partially originated outside you, before they were triggered inside you, since they were accumulated results of cooperation. It was the ‘self’ residing in the self-organization of human relations, that played the ghost in your brain. Does that make you a zombie, remote-controlled by other zombies? You would probably have to be ‘artificially intelligent,’ to get such a weird idea.
It is very telling, of the sorry state within the humanities, and of natural science attempting generalization from individual bio-chemo-physical expressions of the individual human brain, while disregarding human nature, that primitive questions like those on the ‘body-mind problem’ might continue to be treated seriously.
The same goes for the current stupidities concerning ‘free will.’ As long as two extremely unrealistic options might still be placed in opposition, as if they were the only ones – either ‘free will’ as personal caprice, or as a personal illusion – we remain stuck in a fictitious dead-end.
By the way, hello again old Freud! They are going to start searching in earnest for your ‘superego,’ or your ‘subconscious.’ Which one of them will be detected first? Which one will prove ruling human thoughts? Now, brain scanning, computer processing mathematics, together with experts in philosophy and religion, will lay their heads together. The genie will be captured in the bottle and put to lab test in a flask.
Personal will, as the exertion of human will in general, is the relation in thought and/or action, emerging from some human need. A need, that has been awoken by co-evolving human cooperation and surrounding nature. A need, directed towards results from this combined evolution. ‘Free will’ can merely be free in exactly the sense, that such a human need is not necessarily denied, and that it might be pursued. Obstacles might be posed, either by natural or social conditions, not realistically permitting this gratification of needs, or by the immediate will of other persons, relationally more powerful prescribing it. The woman, trapped in an abusive relationship, is not really free to choose, until she eventually conquers the option, by actively regaining cooperative agency, which regularly requires cooperative assistance.
As can be seen, personal will, as an isolated matter, does not exist. It never has. It never will. It should be a no-brainer, that desire produced within and executed by an isolated brain, is a pure abstraction from reality.
The human brain is a biological organ, firmly entrenched behind a thick skull within the individual body. It is stimulated through five bodily senses, capable of filtering into it a quite restricted range of external impressions. The human mind develops through this organ. But it is extraordinarily impotent, taken in isolation, being the prime cooperative organ of the body. It evolves human consciousness only within the socially progressing relations of the cooperative species. Posing the so-called body-mind problem, or the question of free will, on any other footing than this elementary one, is absolute nonsense and produces nothing else. ‘Garbage in – garbage out!’
Real-life desire
The radius of action and the effective power of human will are subjectively limited by the degree, to which the mindset has grasped the objective conditions of achieving that which is generally desired. This power, in turn, comes with life’s experiences. At the personal level, choice presents itself consciously as a dilemma. The person is confronted with a differentiated consideration, without self-evident options. This because of possibly complex repercussions within cooperation. Consequences of either choice are rendered unpredictable. Repeated similar choices, leading to regrets in comparable situations, might eventually produce a somewhat freer will. Especially when amplified by positive feedback from cooperation. It is not private exertion of personal will, however, that should interest us here since we are dealing with the collective and historical dimension.
Collective exertion of will is generally more powerful than the personal one, expressing a wider range of cooperation. To serve the ends desired, it needs to be guided by realistic principles. That means it should correspond to, understand, describe, appeal to, activate, and concentrate massive development features in cooperation, already underway through human self-organization, to possibly get success. Otherwise it will, if eventually reaching aggregate impact at all, ultimately serve someone else’s purpose, or produce some unintended result.
Adolf Hitler had celebrated ‘triumph of the will’ and gotten far, quite horribly too far. But the will of Nazism would soon fall harder, than the drop from the magnitude it had inflated itself into. The reason had been that humanity in its entirety had proven already averagely leaving behind its capacity for voluntarily enslaving or getting enslaved. And the real reason, for the barbaric radicalization of its self-organizing discipline, had resided in exactly this historical unsustainability (treating its root causes here would be a digression). Human will, sustainably altering the course of history, can only be asserted at the level of association historically achieved or achievable within human self-organization.
The question of will is not academic. Will we succeed as species, to take care of the critical result produced by our unprecedented success? Will we achieve an earth system managed and enhanced by us, and tolerating our overwhelming presence? This is the framework, in which the problem of human will is posed today. Not by being formulated thus by some research team, but by reality itself.
Unrealistically delving in reasonings around the possibility of ‘free will’ as personal caprice will vanish, together with dissolving effective incapacitation of the individual, in social mutiny collectively conquering generalized right of association. The naïveté in studying the human brain and computers as mechanical, comparable, and equal entities will vanish, together with the destructive and obstructive monopolization in controlling computerization’s powerful virtual means of cooperation. Human needs have reached a capacity, strong enough to influence development of the earth system. And the means for this are historically ripe for true human interactivity.
Natural history has reached a point, where the question of human will might and must be posed seriously as a scientific problem. It cannot be posed as a simple research question, but rather as a problem-complex-hypothesis. Our species has reached global impact, of a magnitude that trumps earth system balances. This result is produced through abundantly developing means of cooperation. The design and use of these means are biased and distorted, fitting the unsustainable and destructive social interests of a small human minority, threatening to end in global catastrophe. So far, an overwhelming human majority remains socially paralysed. In short, class society still obstructs a solution to the Anthropocene crisis. Tough insight to reach, orient within, and decide upon! But such has become the conditions of free will.
Although the reasoning above refers to and reflects a multitiered and complex reality, it does not take rocket science to understand and test the relevance of it. To put it more succinctly: Human agency is just like human intelligence – essentially collective in nature. And the presently contradictory status of this nature is transforming into a global razors edge, in need of cutting-edge science catching up.
The questions are: Do we want to use this power for constructive ends, solving the Anthropocene crisis in saving biodiversity at Planet Earth and reaching cooperative abundance within humanity? Are we ready to face the real preconditions for doing so, by commonly taking the challenge of the third phase transition? Has our understanding become mature, that this is incompatible with class society and perpetuation of its linear metabolism? It is into this human-planetary level that the possibility of exerting free will has moved. It is there that it is evolving. That fact is not random. And it is testable. The choice is not easy to exert in practice. But it is essentially free. What is required is that the options, and their concrete conditions, start to clarify themselves to all and sundry.
Scientific integration requires correct ontological separation
Which are the fundamental problems, rendering possible the myth of ‘artificial intelligence’? That issue might go as deep as to ontology. Mixing up entirely different levels of reality, false notions are created. Thereby scientifically validated methods of approximation and reduction could be interfering with levels where they are not applicable. Such conceptual corruption might then produce the very opposite of scientific integration – dis-uniting contamination.
This turns out to have some connection to the pluralism and fragmentation, produced in the wake of compromised or failed scientific integration efforts. And the impression is that information theory has found itself at the centre of such ‘interdisciplinary’ confusion.
Fragmentation of the knowledge process appears to have been critically aggravated by post-modernist constructivism. It seems like any given academic discipline might produce a ‘specific ontology’ of its own – like ‘parallel universes’ in academia.
Reduction is indispensable in science. It is the very method, by which the human mind detects regularities in nature, and encodes them in an optimally simplified and condensed manner in the abstract, by symbolic representation. The crucial test of such simplifying reproduction, through formulas produced by collectively accumulated human intelligence, is whether such modelling results in either predictability or prognostication. Which one of these becomes possible, is depending on the degree of complexity involved. Thus, human cooperation empowers itself to act distinctively upon its environment, ending up in the expected results desired. If complexity prohibits outright predictability, the aim might be working for successively approximating the ends intended, theoretically and practically. It is precisely here, that the need for scientific integration becomes unconditionally necessary. Permanent feedback between the system and its scientific modelling gets imperative. This is the case of human scientific practice in the Anthropocene crisis.
For scientific integration to succeed, however, approximative methods for separate levels of reality cannot be mixed up. Reduction to a level not applicable to the object studied becomes obstructive. Research based in overly mechanistic simplifications of complex systems typically produces false resemblance, instead of scientific approximation. Falsification of such dead ends of enquiry has been and remains an integral part of the scientific process.
Approaching human nature as a scientific object, departing from humanity’s current condition, requires all due respect to its fundamental character. It is self-organizing in expanding cooperation of increasing profundity, at rising levels of association. This approximation cannot be easy, partly due to the political corruption of social sciences, necessarily produced by the class societies, through which human civilization has developed. Civilization’s right of association has been effectively monopolized. This also implies conditions of scientific consensus, particularly in studying humanity itself.
In principle, however, it should not be more impossible to penetrate this obstacle, than it has been for example for physics to explore the counterintuitive qualities of space-time and quantum mechanics. On the contrary, the basic qualities of cooperative self-organization, at the basis of which scientific integration can start out, requires much less theoretical power of abstraction, than for example the mathematics of theoretical physics. It would be more accessible, due to its non-mathematic way of approximation. And it could be quantitatively measurable and self-validating, at the interface of humanity and nature, in their phase transition into globally advanced circular metabolism. The Anthropocene crisis has provided a unique opportunity of approximating, describing, forecasting, and acting towards human nature’s reintegration within itself and within surrounding nature, as the decisive independent variable in integrated science.
Three ontological levels
Taking the liberty of formulating the object of physics in an intentionally semantic way, might serve as a provocative starting point. Scientifically it would be anything but optimal. Being completely devoid of mathematics, and thereby deprived of any understanding of all the discoveries which have produced our modern technology, and our hotly disputed cosmological understanding, it might illustrate the peril of methodological displacement.
If the level of coordinating energy, constituting matter, and of dissipating matter performing physical work, should be confused with the exceptional level of life’s energetically organizing matter, no distinct scientific formulas could be maintained in biology. Approaching humanity, in a similar scientific corruption by inappropriate reduction, would produce even worse results. Confusing the physical and biological levels of material reality, with the exceptional level of life self-organizing in cooperative progression, the whole representation of reality must be blurred. Distinction of these three ontological levels – cosmos, life, and humanity – cannot be considered arbitrary. The heterogeneous regularities, occasioning such dissimilar kinds of approximation and reduction, had been produced by natural history itself.
Two pioneers of information processing
We live in the ‘information age.’ We may start approaching its ontological troubles, by sketching the fates of two pioneers, Norbert Wiener, a prodigy of abstract mathematics, and Claude Shannon, a cross disciplinary engineer-inventor at Bell Labs. The two of them were highly skilled in applied mathematics. Both had contributed in solving technological problems of the US military during the Second World War. After the war, their respective findings would become instrumental in development of electronics, computerization, automatic control engineering, telecom, and IT. Each of them had published seminal works in 1948, Shannon’s A mathematical theory of information and Wiener’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
As suggested by the titles, Shannon had aimed at the purely mathematical side of accurately transmitting and processing information, disregarding its content. He would stick to that path. Wiener, on the other hand, had opted for scientific integration and its ontological implications. The US military industrial complex, and its civil technological spin-offs, were to immediately and continuously benefit from Shannon’s formulas.
Biologists and social scientists, aiming at scientific rigour, advancement, and prestige, were to flock at Wiener’s Cybernetics seminars, struggling to feed their data into its mathematical feedback formulas. Weiner’s hypothesis of a synchronised carrier wave, governing the brain functions, was eventually to prove a dead-end. But the problem with Cybernetics had been more far-reaching than that. It had been based in ontological corruption, drawing too far-reaching and false conclusions, from the fact that mathematics, similar to those that had proven applicable to physics, even might seem to be applicable, in certain respects and with varying success, to animals, humans, and society.
Cybernetics was to fade in the polluted air of mechanistic simplifications of animals, humans, and society. Its Siamese twin had been an animistic understanding of high-tech, promising/warning of a future fabrication of brains. If interpreted as a general warning against detrimental social application of automation, which had certainly been an aspect, troubling Weiner and the cybernetic subculture, it might possibly be regarded as farsighted. But what concerns us here, is its ontological confusion. Against that backdrop, it should not be hard to understand why we speak of an ‘information age’ and not a ‘cyber age,’ although ‘cyber’ would stick as a prefix in common sense, describing the interface of society and high-tech, and linger on as a sci-fi fad. All well? Hardly.
Shannon’s theory, and the engineering industry applying it, had basically stuck to the technical-mathematical side of information, without making any ontological claims. This also meant, however, that it had not denied the possibility, of its mathematics being fundamental. It had proceeded from the entropy law, the dissipating regularities fundamentally governing the dialectics of energy and matter. It had not only borrowed and transferred its term, into a proper concept for treating the problem of noise in energy transmission. It had also successfully profited by the mathematics, previously implied in investigating this physical law. It should therefore not be surprising that proponents would pop up, of the idea that information should be regarded a fundamental property of reality. Even the fundamental property. A property beyond the elementary particles/waves of quantum mechanics. A more fundamental property, than those of the contested string theory, or of other propositions for ‘new physics,’ all aiming at a unifying Theory of Everything, integrating quantum mechanics and Einsteinian relativity. Does such a claim, on mathematical information as ontologically fundamental, really matter? Energetically, yes!
Information’s proper place in universe
Information pertains to the human level of self-organizing life. It is there that abstract encoding and symbolic representation of reality creates pattern recognition. It is there that this skill is guiding perpetually progressing self-orientation. It is there that it originates increasingly collective laborious interaction, within the regularities of nature. Humans are cooperating, in their self-evolving right of association. Cooperation is emotional interaction by information. That is an evolutionary emergent property of natural history. So far it has only been discovered, as far as human science is concerned, at Planet Earth. Here, it is uniquely species-specific.
It is not information, which has been found to be indestructible, according to the first law of thermodynamics. It is the regular properties, of interchangeable energy and matter. It is those that had been discovered by theoretical physics. It has described them, with ever greater precision by mathematical symbols, formulas, and systematic abstraction from the concrete world, accessible to human senses.
Ascribing information as such, to entire reality as a fundamental quality, corrupting the first thermodynamic law into ‘indestructible information,’ implies a teleological worldview of mechanistic determinism – a semi-religious and untestable dead end. Information theory had been inspiring and informing a host of other disciplines, within both natural and social sciences. Within this scientific diffusion, a confused reductionism to a corrupted entropy concept has been spreading. Entropy – increasing disorder – in production, transmission, and processing of information, and in physics respectively, are not the same thing. Of course, the former is conditioned by the latter. In physics, entropy describes the second law of thermodynamics. The concept entropy, transferred to information theory, is the calculation of IT effects from this law.
By dissipating an interpretation of the human artefact of information as the ontological quality of reality itself, a strand of information theory has been contributing to animistic mystification of its own devices, and to metaphysic reification of the human mind. In turn, this has grown into an unintended diversion, from critical scrutiny of the social sources, contents, and implications of contemporary IT design. The myth of ‘artificial intelligence’ has been thriving in these contaminated waters.
The very techniques, emerging out of information theory and gaining great scientific success within a broad variety of fields, has nothing to lose in cleaning out such ontological pollution. On the contrary. Human responsibility in the Anthropocene crisis conditions craves such a step.
Our species is the producer of information. We are its interpreters. We should freely share its produce. We should collectively bear the unique responsibility for these capacities. We might only control sustainably the fruits of them in common. The present power of information technology, to artificially produce, collect, mine, auto-improve upon, and interpret data, far surpassing the capabilities in speed, mass and aggregate association, possessed by individual or group exhibits of human intelligence itself, is already under exponential development. Such technological power must be disciplined to the requirements of optimal human interaction, within life’s circular metabolism at The Blue Planet. That is imperative, for transforming it from a destructive force to a constructive one. We should understand, take, and develop that human right in equal association. Otherwise, information that we have evolved, would go extinct with us.
An important contribution by skilled delusion
One of the more important features of scientific enquiry, is attempting to test a hypothesis to its ultimate consequences. Getting it all wrong is more fruitful and contributing, than being pragmatic or eclectic. We might take renown physicist Max Tegmark of MIT, and his Our Mathematical Universe as an illustrative example of where mathematicism (monotheistic worship of math) tends to end up. Tegmark is a self-proclaimed idealist of ‘radical Platonism.’ By practically idolising Schrödinger’s wave function equation (‘The wavefunction never collapses. Ever’.), one of quantum mechanics’ apparently absurd effects seemed to be avoided: The expression of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at the human interface, the yet unsolved ‘observer effect,’ famously illustrated in the thought experiment of ‘Schrödinger’s cat.’ But that advance had come at a price!
Entire reality was boundlessly expanded into an infinite number of parallel universes, at that existing at four different levels, by eleven dimensions. This limitless manifold would exist in a completely static and deterministic condition, where time and motion were reduced to simple illusions, together with everything that exists through them. All there was and ever will be was a perfectly abstract and perfectly working mathematical structure, the reasoning went. The human mind – a mere illusion, produced within the individual brain. The events of life – fragmented ‘observer moments,’ their uncountable and identic apparent agents instantly tossed in and out of different universes in all possible scenarios, un-knowable to each other, creating the illusion that something really happened and that something concrete would exist. Consciousness and self-consciousness? ‘The way information feels like.’ To whom? To… ‘nothing.’ Or more precisely: to the mathematical structure! Reality – a feeling ‘googolplexic’ computer? As could be expected, nothing would prevent this endless world of static parallel universes from being an enormous computer simulation, a hotly debated issue among physicists, cosmologists, and philosophers of this strand.
However, we should honestly thank people like ‘Mad Max’ Tegmark, for optimally pressing the mechanistic argument to its ontological conclusions, making it easier to evaluate it, in the prospect of uniting science. By virtually boxing the human condition into a corner, infinitely more claustrophobic than the concrete and real one that Stephen Hawking heroically had to achieve his pathbreaking science in, things might be contrasted. We should realize that the combined intelligence of Hawking and those closely related to him socially and professionally, as to human cooperation, seems to have been even greater than Hawking’s individual brilliance, as to mathematics and physics. (The movie The Theory of Everything might have succeeded in picturing exactly that.)
By stripping the human condition of all cooperativity, implicitly denouncing it as ‘redundant baggage’ of no ‘scientific’ consequence, in being non-mathematic, the mechanistic notion of ‘artificial intelligence’ started to make some kind of sense. More precisely nonsense, since the very premises had been one-sidedly dis-approximating reality. Be that as it may with the four-story infinite number of multiverses in eleven dimensions. It will be an open question and should so be, until further notice. One thing is clear, though. These kinds of sophisticated cosmological speculations are of no consequence to the urgent need of integrating science. In the ultimate-mathematicist version, briefly related here, they are immediately useless since they contradict the first and second order approximations to human nature and its evolution. In consequence, they also contradict the critical third order approximation.
Another thing is also clear. As such distorted conceptions of reality are influential in the network of ‘futurologist’ establishments (among others Future of Life Institute of Chita-Tegmark, and Future of Humanity Institute of Nick Bostrom), this mathematicist ontology lays claim to ethically guiding humanity, into the brave new world of ‘artificial intelligence.’ Do not try this at home, Planet Earth!
Artificial ontological division
Acknowledging the separate levels of complexity, and their respectively different conditions of scientific reduction applicable, is essential for successive approximation – the general concept of scientific progression.
When inserting an artificial division, however, in studying one and the same object, severe problems are created. Treating human self-organization, split up through such duplicity, engenders dis-approximation. Separating an allegedly distinct psychological level of ontology from the social one, as has mostly been done, generates obstacles to approximating human nature. On the contrary, such artificial ontological division guarantees confusion. The fundamental species-specific cooperative quality of humanity tends to fall between the chairs. Or it might be placed unilaterally at one level of association, or the other. Most typically, the individual nuclear family at the psychological level, respectively the state at the social level, are represented as the exclusive domain of cooperation.
Complexity and Chaos theories and ‘self-organization’
Another ontological pitfall: Possibly denying the historical success of the reductionist method in science, by standing this method on its head, ascribing to these acrobatics a constitutionally general property of reality itself, tends to blur necessary ontological boundaries. Boundlessly throwing concepts like ‘emergence’ and ‘self-organization’ about, while not explicitly discriminating and re-conceptualizing according to ontological level, contributes to confusion. For exemplification, phenomena like the sudden emergence of complex scalable symmetric patterns out of dynamic chaotic systems – fractals – produced by small variations in simple initial conditions, does not prove that matter is intentional, as ‘Chaos’ or ‘Complexity theory’ sometimes give the impression of suggesting.
Life, as organically semi-enclosing beneficiary of intensifying external entropy, has benefitted vastly from such auto-coordinating properties of matter. And humanity has greatly benefitted from life’s organizing properties, in its progression of social self-organization. But that evolutionary movie cannot be winded backwards, any more than time. Then you would end up advocating teleology, which is not scientific standard, but philosophical speculation. Matter is not ‘self-organizing.’ Nor plants or animals (not even ants or chimpanzees). Only humans are – at least as yet cosmologically discovered.
The distinctive significances of things like auto-assembly or spontaneous symmetry breaking in physics, chemical molecular formation or reaction mechanisms, biological auto-catalysation within cells, instinctual auto-synchronization of animal populations’ lives or flock-synchronized movements, digitized simulation of complex systems, et cetera, get lost by lumping them all together under the false heading of ‘self-organization.’
There might be a lesson to take home to humanity, which has been plagued by the antiquated centralizing dominance particular to class society, and continues to be so by its presently disintegrating remnants, from observations that decentralized elements seem capable of forming order at all ontological levels. That ought to mean we are free to search for such order within human self-organization. And such a quest is already gaining a great variety of dispersed successes. However, that does not mean that self-organization can be ascribed to material or biological spontaneous synchronization. Chaos theory and Complexity theory seem to have a similar fixation on the term ‘self-organization,’ as Cybernetics had had.
The globally existential conditions are presently being produced by our species in front of its own common visual field. Only general awareness is lacking, for starting to put into effect its cooperative potential as association. Releasing this unique force, from the destructive remnants of class society, is the key waiting to be turned. Self-organization has got a vast costume to fill, by associating at a level corresponding to the means of cooperation evolved. It is not wise throwing such a tool about, by proclaiming alleged ‘self-organization’ everywhere. Neither is it particularly sage forming ‘trans-humanist’ sects at the heart of Silicon Valley, lobbying for civil rights to allegedly ‘self-organizing’ computers, and even proclaiming ‘All power to the computers!
Emergence emergency
As to the ‘emergence’ concept, abusing it tends to drain it of useful scientific meaning. By indiscriminately referring to anything instantly and unpredictably changing shape, in a way none-reducible to combination of initial components, ‘emergence’ possibly becomes too unspecific. Such a wide application of ‘emergence’ seems to correlate to the unbounded use of ‘self-organization,’ ‘emergence’ allegedly describing, but hardly explaining, its implied teleological ascension.
Comparing everything from patterns in CERN printouts of particle collisions, or shoals of fish forming, to the behaviour of financial markets, might seem suggestive, but could hardly benefit purposes of serious research.
Maybe we cannot do without designating as ‘emergence,’ everything appearing suddenly in none-reducible ways. In that case, tentatively, ‘general’ or ‘fundamental emergence’ should be reserved for qualitative evolutionary changes in universal natural history, producing forms of existence requiring separate ontological determinations – origin of known universe, origin of life, origin of humanity.
‘Evolutionary emergence,’ could maybe be applied to succeeding eras within life’s evolution. As applied to life’s evolution on Earth, its origin out of terrestrial chemistry would then be ‘fundamental emergence,’ while its evolution into nucleus-bearing protozoa, sexually reproducing organisms, sentient animals, et cetera, would be considered ‘evolutionary emergence.’ But evolution into sentient-cogitative species – humans – socially evolving by cooperation, should be determined as ‘fundamental emergence.’
The last surviving one of these species, could possibly be re-integrating itself into the planetary biogeochemical life system. In that case this would constitute an epochal transition of the present era, an Anthropocene perpetuating human fundamental emergence, by a third phase transition in human metabolism. Anthropy, as an earth system socio-naturally co-evolving by collective human intelligence, might then be considered an ‘evolutionary emergence,’ or if you prefer, a non-extinction of the third level of fundamental emergence. ‘Emergence’ is not an idea to toy with, in times like ours.
Real rationality on Artificial Madness
A concluding ontological comment on Artificial Madness: In fact, ontological errors, confusion, and prophecies of a coming ‘great singularity’ of ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ bear great resemblance to the animism of the first human phase. Although, with one decisive difference. Back then it was cutting edge knowledge. Today it signifies ignorantly projecting the human characteristics of intelligence, on the verge of completing its collectivisation, into dead matter manipulated by it. This time it is animism barbarically accrediting life to sophisticated high-tech. By so doing, it is inadvertently contributing to a semi-religious cover up, for the presently destructive use of this powerful technology. This is the gravest mistake.
Continue reading: Go to Introduction, part 5, Integrating science.
Back to part 1, Metabolic phases of socio-natural co-evolution. Back to part 2, Cooperative species.
Back to part 3, Collective intelligence.