for - Deep Humanity - individual / collective gestalt - adjacency - Deep Humanity individual / collective gestalt - Somewheres, Nowheres and Everywheres - from P2P Foudation Wiki - Somewheres, Nowheres and Everywheres - Michel Bauwens, 2022

adjacency - between - somewheres, nowheres and everywheres - Deep Humanity individual / collective gestalt - new relationship - Michel begins the essay by doing away with simple, absolute assumptions about society. - We are each and collectively a mixture of - cooperative and - competitive tendencies - This echoes the evolutionary description of an individual as a distinct living system that is demarcated from its environment so is - in competition with other individuals for resources in order to survive as an individual organism - at the same time that it cooperates with other types of individuals that can enhance its individual and collective (species) survival - In other words - competition and collaboration are often intertwingled phenotypes necessary for evolutionary fitness - The irony of the individual (human being) is that (s)he is - a multi-cellular organism - so is biologically simultaneously both an individual AND a collective. - furthermore, since the individual - eats a diverse variety and number of once living organisms and - inputs and integrates a very large number of ideas from other individuals - is the biological and psychological assimilation of artefacts from a large number of other living and once living organisms.

for - A Transcender Manifesto - validation for - Indyweb - individual / collective gestalt - evolutionary learning

for - validation - for Indyweb

validation - for Indyweb - The Indyweb is designed for the individual / collective getalt - for individual evolutionary learning intertwingled with - collective evolutionary learning

for - evolutionary biology - Weissman barrier - refuted by modern research - Denis Noble

for - evolutionary biology - Denis Noble - journey from reductionist to non-reductionist - ion channel and cell membrane work - connects to bioelectricity in the entire body

for - evolutionary biology - human culture - why it is dominant - openendedness

summary - the claim of this paper is that culture is not something unique to humans, but what is is - our open-ended understanding of the world that allows us to fractally nest many different subtasks.

for - example - evolutionary biology - openendedness - making breakfast

for - adjacency - pure altruism - selflessness - self / other dualism - individual / collective gestalt - Deep Humanity - biological limitations - evolutionary limitations

adjacency - between - pure altruism - selflessness - self / other dualism - individual / collective gestalt - Deep Humanity - biological limitations - evolutionary limitations - adjacency relationship - From an evolutionary and biological perspective, - the individual organism is district from other organisms and the environment - The individual is defined by a separating boundary and it must exchange energy and materials with it's environment as a necessary condition of survival. It must - receive and input nutrients inputs and - transmit, output and eliminate waste byproducts - The word 'selfless' is a polar abstraction. No individual can be 100% selfless or it would be an act of self-annihilation, a self-destructive act of denying 100% of all inputs necessary for its own survival - Existing as a living, individual organism requires some degree of individual self care - At the same time, the process of sexual reproduction, - in contrast to asexual reproduction - involves two organisms with sperm and egg, and is inherently social - In multi cellular organisms with highly complex social behaviours - such as our species - there is a strong learned component of concern for other as well - Pure selflessness is as rare as pure selfishness - Most of us have degrees of self care and degrees of care for others - Self and other are intertwingled, hence the Deep Humanity terms: - individual / collective gestalt - self / other gestalt

for - example - individual's evolutionary learning journey - new self revisiting old self and gaining new insight - universal compassion of Buddhism and the individual / collective gestalt - adjacency - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER

adjacency - between - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER - adjacency relationship - When I heard John Churchill explain the second turning, - the Mahayana approach, - I was already familiar with it from my many decades of Buddhist teaching but with - those teachings in the rear view mirror of my life and - developing an open source, non-denominational spirituality (Deep Humanity) - Hearing these old teachings again, mixed with the new ideas of the individual / collective gestalt - This becomes an example of Indyweb idea of recording our individual evolutionary learning journey and - the present self meeting the old self - When this happens, new adjacencies can often surface - In this case, due to my own situatedness in life, the universal compassion of the bodhisattva can be articulated from a Deep Humanity perspective: - The Freudian, Klinian, Winnicott and Becker perspective of the individual as being constructed out of the early childhood social interactions with the mOTHER, - a Deep Humanity re-interpretation of "mother" to "mOTHER" to mean "the Most significant OTHER" of the newly born neonate. - A deep realization that OUR OWN SELF IDENTITY WAS CONSTRUCTED out of a SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP with mOTHER demonstrates our intertwingled individual/collective and self/other - The Deep Humanity "Common Human Denominators" (CHD) are a way to deeply APPRECIATE those qualities human beings have in common with each other - Later on, Churchill talks about how the sacred is lost in western modernity - A first step in that direction is treating other humans as sacred, then after that, to treat ALL life as sacred - Using tools like the CHD help us to find fundamental similarities while divisive differences might be polarizing and driving us apart - A universal compassion is only possible if we vividly see how we are constructed of the other - Another way to say this is that we see others not from an individual level, but from a species level

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.

I have been shown in medicine that extinction is an act of Divine Love. Unstable, destable and degenertaive are all aspects of death and new life Can we find a way to position instability as an evolutionary process?

for - article - The End of Scarcity? From ‘Polycrisis’ to Planetary Phase Shift - Nafeez Ahmed - gene-culture coevolution - adjacency - indyweb dev - individual / collective evolutionary learning - provenance - tracing the evolution of ideas - gene-culture coevolution

adjacency - between - indyweb dev - individual / collective evolutionary learning - provenance - tracing the evolution of ideas - gene-culture coevolution - adjacency relationship - As DNA and epigenetics plays the role of transmitting biological adaptations, language and symmathesy play the role of transmitting cultural adaptations

for - Deep Humanity - intertwingled individual / collective learning - evolutionary learning journey - symmathesy - mutual learning - Nora Bateson

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

for - caterpillar butterfly story - Michael Levin - adjacency caterpillar story - Michael Levin - Indyweb dev - conversations with old self - evolutionary learning

adjacency - between - caterpillar butterfly story - Michael Levin - Indyweb dev - conversations with old self - evolutionary learning - adjacency relationship - In relating the caterpillar / butterfly story, Levin is using an extreme example of transformation, that happens to all living beings, including human beings - Levin talks about how the particulars of the old caterpillar engram are meaningless to its new form, the butterfly - The experiments he cites demonstrate that the old engram is re-interpreted from the new butterfly perspective - In a similar but less dramatic way, all of us learn new things every day, and we are constantly rehashing old memories - The Indyweb informational ecosystem that is being developed is based on a framework of evolutionary learning, that is - Our network of meaning is constantly in flux and our associative network of ideas is continuously changing and evolving - The Indyweb is designed to record our evolutionary learning journey and to serve as an external record of salient private ideas that emerge from it. The present interpretation of old engrams is referred to as "having conversations with our old selves"

for - human learning - key feature - evolutionary nature - indyweb - key feature - evolutionary nature of learning

for - paradigm shift - evolutionary biology - epigenetic's critical role in inheritance - experimental proof - C. Elegan - Oded Rechavi

for - explanation - evolutionary biology - neo-darwinian mistake - view of epigenetic inheritance

explanation - evolutionary biology - neo-darwinian mistake - view of epigenetic inheritance - Neo-darwinians believe that epigenetic inheritance is only short lived. - However, the Noble brothers contend that if the changes in the environment last for many generations, - the epigenetic change can exceed a threshold and become permanently assimilated into the genome - Such a threshold is plausible because without it, a permanent change encoded into the genome would be maladaptive if the environmental change reverted back to the previous state

for - quote - 70 years of evolutionary biology has to be undone

for - evolutionary biology - purpose in nature Denis Noble - Ray Noble

for - physiology rescues evolutionary biology - Denis Noble

from - youtube - IAI interview - Why Dawkins is Wrong - Denis Noble

for - paper - Physiology restores purpose to evolutionary biology - Denis Noble - Raymond Noble - year - 2023

from - youtube - IAI interview - Why Dawkins is wrong - Denis Noble - https://hyp.is/eqKOYhVVEe-XVKuwMtOTTg/docdrop.org/video/dCLRKP9NW8I/

for - adjacency - appendix - evolutionary mystery - possible explanation - metaphor - dead projects

adjacency - between - appendix - evolutionary mystery - possible explanation - metaphor - dead projects - adjacency relationship - Scientists have no good explanation for the function of the appendix - Perhaps it is evolution has bodily artefacts - that are remnants of evolutionary deadends - which once served a purpose for a particular environmental context - but the context changed and the body part remained, not being harmful nor advantagous - much like when we work on projects that don't reach their conclusion and stop - and have many artefacts that still exist such as documents, files, images, mp4, meeting notes, patent filings, built prototypes, etc but are frozen in time

• 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

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for - litigation terrorism - ISDS - corporate tribunal system - Michael Levin - multi-scale competency architecture - example - adjacency - evolutionary biology - corporate law - climate crisis

adjacency - between - corporate law - climate crisis - evolutionary biology - cultural evolution - adjacency statement - Biologist Michael Levin's multi-scale competency architecture of evolutionary biology seems to apply here - in the field of corporate law - Corporations can be viewed as one level of a social superorganism in a cultural evolution process - Governments can be viewed similiarly, but at a higher level - The ISDS is being weaponized by the same corporations destroying the global environment to combat the enactment of government laws that pose a threat to their livelihood - Hence, the ISDS has been reconfigured to protect the destroyers of the environment so that they can avoid dealing with their unacceptable externalizations - The individual existing at the lower level of the multi-scale competency architecture(the corporation) is battling to survive against the wishes of the higher level individual (the government) in the same multi-scale competency architecture

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 - healthy eating - Dr. William Li - nutrition - healthy food - inflammation - angiogenesis

summary - A good interview about human health and healthy diet. William Li begins by talking about angiogenesis as a key aspect of human health - and how pathology of angiogenesis is at the root of many major diseases. - The interviewer then asks Dr. Li about the connection between another keystone disease, and angiogenesis. - Dr. Li then describes some healthy foods and good dietary practices including extra virgin olive oil.

adjacency - between - angiogenesis - inflammation - Micheal Levine's work - evolutionary biology - adjacency statement - they all seem related, as evolutionary biology has created legacy subsystems within the human body

for - book - Aims of Education

Followup - book - Aims of Education - author: Alfred North Whitehead - a collection of papers and thoughts on the critical role of education in determining the future course of civilization

epiphany - adjacency between - Lifework and evolutionary nature of the individual - - people-centered Indyweb -- Alfred North Whitehead's ideas and life history - adjacency statement - Listening to the narrator speaking about Whitehead's work from a historical perspective brought up the association with the Indyweb's people-centered design - This is especially salient given that Whitehead felt education played such a critical role in determining the future course of humanity - If Whitehead were alive, he would likely appreciate the Indyweb design because it is based on the human being as a process rather than a static entity, - hence renaming human being to human INTERbeCOMing, a noun replaced by a verb - Indyweb's people-centered design and default temporal, time-date recording of ideas as they occur provides inherent traceability to the evolution of an individual's consciousness - Furthermore, since it is not only people-centered but also INTERPERSONAL, we can trace the evolution of ideas within a social network. - Since individual and collective intelligence are both evolutionary and intertwingled, they are both foundational in Indyweb's design ethos. - In particular, Indyweb frames the important evolutionary process of - having a conversation with your old self - as a key aspect of the evolutionary growth of the individual's consciousness

for - Michael Levin - Developmental biology - evolutionary biology

for - Micheal Levin - developmental biology - evolutionary biology - cellular intelligence

for - key insight - adjacency between - dzogchen training - trekcho - cutting through training - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekch%C3%B6 - togal - https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php? title=T%C3%B6gal - cognitive science - evolutionary biology - adjacency statement - It is very interesting that we find parallels between - Dzogchen practice and - our consciousness's attempt to overcome the limits of its own perceptions of reality

• annotate

• for: evolutionary biology, big history, DH, Deep Humanity, theories of consciousness, ESP project, Earth Species Project, Michael Levin, animal communication, symbiocene

• title: The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

• author: Joseph LeDoux
• date: Jan. 2023

• doi: 0.1080/09515089.2022.2160311

• ABSTRACT

  • The essence of who we are depends on our brains.
  • They enable us to think, to
    • feel joy and sorrow,
    • communicate through speech,
    • reflect on the moments of our lives, and to
      • anticipate,
      • plan for, and
      • worry about our imagined futures.
  • Although some of our abilities are comparatively new, key features of our behavior have deep roots that can be traced to the beginning of life.
  • By following the story of behavior, step-by-step, over its roughly four-billion-year trajectory,
    • we come to understand both
      • how similar we are to all organisms that have ever lived, and
      • how different we are from even our closest animal relatives.
  • We care about our differences because they are ours. But differences do not make us superior; they simply make us different.

• comment

  • good article to contribute to a narrative of the symbiocene and a shift of humanity to belonging to nature as one species, instead of dominating nature as the apex species
• question
  • @Gyuri, Could indranet search algorithm have made the connection between this article and the symbiocene artilces in my mindplex had I not explicitly made the associations manually through my tags? It needs to be able to do this
• Also interesting to see how this materialistic outlook of consciousness
  • which is similiar to the Earth Species Project work and Michael Levin's work on synthesizing new laboratory life forms to answer evolutionary questions about intelligence
• relates to nonmaterial ideas about consciousness

• for: quote - deep inheritance of evolutionary adaptations

• quote

  • we need to understand the deep inheritance within us in order to understand our emotions, our fears and our behaviors in the 21st century.
• author: Yval Noah Harari

• for: stone age code, similar to - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor, evolutionary psychology - examples, evolutionary paradox of modernity, evolution - last mile link, major evolutionary transition - full spectrum in modern humans, example - MET - full spectrum embedded in modern humans

• comment

• insights

  • evolutionary paradox of modernity
    • modern humans , like all the living species we share the world with, are the last mile link of the evolution of life we've made it to the present, so all species of the present are, in an evolutionary sense, winners of their respective evolutionary game
    • this means that all our present behaviors contain the full spectrum of the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life
    • the modern human embodies all major evolutionary transitions of the past
    • so our behavior, at all levels of our being is a complex and heterogenous mixture of evolutionary adaptations from different time periods of the 4 billion years that life has taken to evolve.
    • Some behaviors may have originated billions of years ago, and others hundred thousand years ago.

• Examples: humans embody full spectrum of METs in our evolutionary past

  • fight and flight response
    • early hominids on African Savannah hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago when hominids were predated upon by wild predators
  • cancer
    • normative intercell communication breaks down and reverts to individual cell behavior from billions of years ago
      • see Michael Levin's research on how to make metastatic cancer cells return to normative collective, cooperative behavior
  • children afraid to sleep in the dark
    • evolutionary adaptation against dangerous animals that might have hid in the dark - dangerous insiects, snakes, etc, which in the past may have resulted in human fatalities
  • obesity
    • hunter gatherer hominid attraction to rich sources of fruit. Eating as much of it as we can and maybe harvesting as much as we can and carrying that with us.
      • like squirrels storing away for the winter.

• for: major cultural paradigms, modernity - leaving, cultural transition, cultural evolution, MET, Major Evolutionary Transition, kiey insight - 4 major cultural paradigms

• comment

• key insight: 4 major cultural paradigms

  • This matrix doesn't quite capture what Ruben is proposing because he later talks about neo-indigenous, which means taking elements of modernity but within an overall indigenous framework, so a hybrid
  • It would be worth exploring implications for an evolutionary framework of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET)

• 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: 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: 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: MET, MST, MCT, FET, MET - information, MST - information, Amanda N. Robin, major evolutionary transition, major system transition, facilitating evolutionary transition

• Title:Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations

• Author: Robin et al.

• Date: 2021

• Abstract

  • A small number of extraordinary “Major Evolutionary Transitions” (METs) have attracted attention among biologists.
  • They comprise novel forms of
    • individuality and
    • information,

  • and are defined in relation to organismal complexity, irrespective of broader ecosystem-level effects.

  • This divorce between

    • evolutionary and
    • ecological consequences

  • qualifies unicellular eukaryotes, for example, as a MET although they alone failed to significantly alter ecosystems.

  • Additionally, this definition excludes revolutionary innovations not fitting into either MET type

    • (e.g., photosynthesis).
  • We recombine
    • evolution with
    • ecology
  • to explore how and why entire ecosystems were
    • newly created or
    • radically altered

  • as Major System Transitions (MSTs).

  • In doing so, we highlight important morphological adaptations that spread through populations because of

    • their immediate, direct-fitness advantages for individuals.

  • These are Major Competitive Transitions, or MCTs.

  • We argue that often
    • multiple
      • METs and
      • MCTs

  • must be present to produce MSTs.

  • For example, sexually-reproducing, multicellular eukaryotes (METs) with

    • anisogamy and
    • exoskeletons (MCTs)

  • significantly altered ecosystems during the Cambrian.

  • Therefore, we introduce the concepts of Facilitating Evolutionary Transitions (FETs) and Catalysts as

    • key events or agents that are insufficient themselves to set a MST into motion,
    • but are essential parts of synergies that do.

  • We further elucidate the role of information in MSTs as transitions across five levels:

    • (I) Encoded (Genetic);
    • (II) Epigenomic;
    • (III) Learned;
    • (IV) Inscribed; and
    • (V) Dark Information.

  • The latter is ‘authored’ by abiotic entities rather than biological organisms.

  • Level

    • IV has arguably allowed humans to produce a MST, and
    • V perhaps makes us a FET for a future transition that melds
      • biotic and
      • abiotic life
    • into one entity.
  • Understanding the interactive processes involved in past major transitions will illuminate both
    • current events and
    • the surprising possibilities that abiotically-created information may produce.

Indyweb / Indranet citations - Michael Levin, Roy Baumeister, Adam Omary youtube conversation - specifically, the question about whether a social superorganism of global human civilization / society / culture constitutes a new Major Evolutionary Transition of Individuality - https://hyp.is/rQgvZn2hEe6-TF8HFSS9mg/docdrop.org/video/UfoVTA0ilsY/

• annotate

• for: example, example - evolutionary convergence, evolutionary convergence - arms of different species

• for: example, example - evolutionary convergence, evolutionary convergence - neuron. Oliver Sachs

• example: evolutionary convergence
  • during Cambrian explosion, over a period of 40 million years, a diverse range of species developed with the ability to see

• for: definition, definition - evolutionary convergence, evolutionary convergence

• definition: evolutionary convergence

  • similar environmental conditions can give rise to similar biological adaptations
• example: evolutionary convergence
  • during Cambrian explosion, over a period of 40 million years, a diverse range of species developed with the ability to see
  • a number of species have the same arm appendages:
    • human
    • bird
    • bat

• 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

• for: key question, key question - multi-scale competency architecture, MET, major evolutionary transition

• for: definition, definition - multiscale competency architecture of life, multiscale competency architecture of life, superorganism, MET, major evolutionary transition, question, question - multiscale competency architecture
• definition: multiscale competency architecture of life

• paraphrase

  • The multiscale competency architecture of life is a hypothesis about the scaling of cognition, seeing complex system-level behaviors in any space as the
    • within-level and
    • across-level
  • competition and
  • cooperation
  • among the various
    • subunits and
    • partitions
  • of composite agents (i.e., all agents).
  • The generalization of problem spaces beyond the traditional 3D space of “behavior” into other, virtual problem spaces is essential for understanding evolution of basal cognition.
  • Living things
    • first solved problems in metabolic space, and evolution then pivoted the same kinds of strategies to
    • solve problems in
      • physiological,
      • transcriptional, and
      • anatomical space,
    • before speed-optimizing these dynamics to enable rapid behavior in 3D space.
  • Since every cognitive agent is made of parts, it is essential to have a theory about how
    • numerous goal-seeking agents link together into
    • a new, larger cognitive system that is novel and not present in any of the subunits.

• comment

• adjacency between:
  • multiscale competency architecture
  • superorganism

• adjacency statement

  • The concept of multiscale competency architecture is a useful one for considering and organizing the effects of Major Evolutionary Transitions (METs) over evolutionary timescales.
  • It links and locates the normative scale in which human consciousness exists to the lower scales of cells and subcellular life below, and to society as a social superorganism above.
  • it shows that each human INTERbeing / INTERbeCOMing is not isolated, but is part of a multiscale nexus / gestalt
  • I've incorporated this into my SRG presentation.

• question

  • is there research on signaling mechanisms exist between different levels?
    • in another part of the paper, there is discussion of gap junctions as a way to cohere individual cells into group functionality
    • in particular, is there a way for humans consciousness to communicate with lower levels of its body? ie. to tissues, cells or subcellular structures?
  • Could the Bodhisattva vow be extended not only at the level of the social superorganism of groups of individual multicellular beings, but also downwards in the multiscale competency architecture to all the trillions of cells and microbes that inhabit each multicellular planetary body?
    • if it can, it can be interpreted as taking care of your body through
      • healthy exercise
      • healthy sleep
      • healthy diet
      • healthy thoughts and emotions
      • no self-harm
      • self love but not conceit
  • what are the exact biological and evolutionary mechanisms that allow for coherence of individual organisms at the various levels of the multiscale competency architecture and can they be extended to apply to the scale of humans within a social superorganism scale?
  • could love be another word for care drive that applies to all the different scales of the multiscale competency architecture?
  • do feelings of love and compassion propagate downwards through the multiscale competency architecture and find analogous expression in the appropriate spaces?
• reference
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8988303/

• for: gap junctions, multicellular cohesion, multicellular unity, MET, major evolutionary transition, group to individual, group glue

• comment

  • gap junctions play a critical role in cohering a group of cells together
  • hence they might be considered a kind of "cellular glue" which fosters evolutionary fitness by incentifying individual organisms to beneficially socially interact with other individual organisms

• question

  • do gap junctions play a role in major evolutionary transition (MET)?

• adjacency between

  • gap junction
  • cancer
  • MET
  • individual to group
• adjacency statement
  • gap junctions may play a role in major evolutionary transition, enabling individual cells to unite into a group, leading to the evolution of multicellular organisms. Investigate and do literature review to see if this is the case.

• for: individual / collective gestalt, Deep Humanity, superorganism, multi-level superorganism, major evolutionary transition, MET, cognitive light cone, umwelt

• paraphrase

  • a human being certainly has a light cone that does not belong to any of its pieces (ie cells)
  • at the conscious level of a human being, we have
    • goals
    • preferences
    • hopes
    • dreams
    • narratives
  • humans occupy spaces that do not belong to our individual cells, tissues or organs
    • those smaller parts work in
      • physiological space
      • transcriptional space
      • biomolecular space
  • When we were an embryo we worked in morphogenetic space

• comment

  • Since MET implies that these smaller structures of which we are constituted like
    • cells and
    • sub-cellular structures like mitochondria
  • were descended from individual organisms long ago in deep history, those contemporary proxies are occupying their own umwelt

• for: quote, quote - intelligence, major evolutionary transition, MET, quote - collective inteillgence, quote - Michael Levin
• quote
  • all intelligence is collective intelligence

• author: Michael Levin

• comment

  • Major evolutionary transition (MET) are milestones in evolution in which collections of distinct individual life forms unite into one cohesive collection due to improved fitness and begin to replicate as a new individual unit
  • hence the Deep Humanity term individual / collective gestalt, developed to deal with the level of human organisms and the societies and groups they belong to, applies to evolutionary biology as well through the MET where a new higher level individual is formed out of a collective of lower level indivdiuals

The data of the past is congruent with the current psychological trends that face the education system of today. Developmentalists have charted how children construct and revise intuitive theories. In turn, a variety of theories have developed because of the greater use of statistical information that supports probabilistic contingencies that help to better inform us of causal models and their distinctive cognitive functions. These studies investigate the physical, psychological, and social domains. In the case of intuitive psychology, or "theory of mind," developmentalism has traced a progression from an early understanding of emotion and action to an understanding of intentions and simple aspects of perception, to an understanding of knowledge vs. ignorance, and finally to a representational and then an interpretive theory of mind.

The mechanisms by which life evolved—from chemical beginnings to cognizing human beings—are central to understanding the psychological basis of learning. We are the product of an evolutionary process and it is the mechanisms inherent in this process that offer the most probable explanations to how we think and learn.

Bada, & Olusegun, S. (2015). Constructivism Learning Theory : A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning.

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• for: climate change - evolutionary causes, cultural evolution - unsustainability, unsustainability
• definition: Anthroecological theory (AET)
  • This theory proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering

• for: social organization - evolutionary purpose,
• paraphrase
  • human social organization exists to maximize
    • the extraction of energy from the environment to the group and individual (X), and
    • the efficiency of the conversion of extracted energy into offspring (E). -This is identical to the claim that
    • social organization exists to maximize the fitness of the group (Wilson and Sober 1994) and/or the individuals which compose the group (Nowak et al. 2010),
  • given an energetic definition of fitness.

• for: polycrisis, adapt or die, evolutionary pressure, maladaptive
• paraphrase
  • the fact that we could be in the early stages of extinction is evidence that there is something deeply dysfunctional about the systems we have designed
• comment
  • from evolutionary biology perspective, also could argue that
    • we have become maladaptive due to the huge mismatch between
      • rate of genetic biological evolution and
      • rate of human cultural evolution
    • in other words,
      • human (cultural) progress,
      • cumulative cultural evolution,
      • gene-culture coevolution
      • has resulted in progress traps
    • Progress traps leading to our progress traps may be evolutions milestone / marker / indicator to us that
    • we must now evolve to our next stage if we are to even survive
    • in other words, the polycrisis itself may be contextualized as an evolutionary pressure to adapt or die

• 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: whole system approach, system approach, systems thinking, systems thinking - societal design, societal design, John Boik, societal design - evolutionary approach, designing societies - evolutionary approach -paraphrase
  • currently, all societal systems function as silos
  • how does the total system change and achieve new stable states?
  • advocating for designing societal systems so that the cognitive architectures of the different component systems can all serve the same purpose
  • design a fitness evaluation score Rather than tackling problems in individual silos, John is promoting an integrated approach.

This is wholly consistent with the underpinnings of SRG Deep Humanity praxis that stresses the same need for multi-disciplinary study and synthesis of all the various parts of the SSO.into one unified Gestalt to mitigate progress traps. https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FAnalysis%2F2019%2F09%2F20%2FRonald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FCulture%2F2018%2F10%2F12%2FHumanity-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world

• for: self, constructing reality, constructed self, constructed reality, constructing the sense of self, self and other, nonduality, duality, insecurable, comment, question

• paraphrase

  • sense of self is a construct
  • a psychological and social construct
  • it's not something that infants are born with
    • it's actually something that develops as we grow up
  • our caregivers look into our eyes
    • give us a name that we learned to identify with and
    • also basically we learn to see ourselves as they see us
      • we internalize that which is why we are so preoccupied with what other people think about
    • we learned to use language in certain ways
      • mine
      • you
      • yours
      • his
      • hers and so forth
    • that's all very essential to it
  • so we could say that the sense of self is being a construct
  • it's composed of mostly habitual ways of
    • thinking
    • feeling
    • acting
    • reacting
    • remembering
    • planning and
    • tending
  • it's the way that these mostly habitual processes work together re-enforce each other
  • but does that give us insight into what the fundamental problem is?
• I think it does and here's what it is as I understand it
  • because the sense of self is a construct
    • because it doesn't refer it
    • doesn't depend on it
    • doesn't point back to a real self that has any self-reality or or self-identity

• this sense of self by virtue of its lack of essence is inherently uncomfortable

  • we can say it's basically inherently insecure
  • in fact it's not only insecure but it's insecurable

• comment

• question
  • I agree with David's analysis but also have a question for him:
    • what about the biological, evolutionary definition of the self of a living organism. Is there a contradiction here?
    • reference
      • Major Evolutionary Transitions occur when a group of individuated living organisms achieve greater fitness by mutualism and begin to reproduce together as a new unit
        • How do we harmonize the claim of a psychologically constructed self with this evolutionary formation of new biological SELF units through MET?

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• for: human impacts, MET, major evolutionary transition, progress trap, human responsibility to life, CCE, cumulative cultural evolution, playing God
• comment
  • Very true, in fact our species is in the unprecedented position that
  • human activity, and specifically our cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) now determines the biological / genetic evolutionary future not only of our own species, but of all life on earth.
  • In other words, of evolution itself! -This is an awkward position as we have nowhere near the wisdom to play God and determine the future direction of evolution!
• References
  • Cumulative Cultural Evolution
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=cumulative%2Bcultural%2Bevolution

• 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"

It has been suggested that - the human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI).

there is disagreement about - how to apply the ETI framework to our species - and whether culture is implicated - as either cause or consequence.

Long-term gene–culture coevolution (GCC) i- s - also poorly understood.

argued that - culture steers human evolution,

Others proposed - genes hold culture on a leash.

After review of the literature and evidence on long-term GCC in humans - emerge a set of common themes. - First, culture appears to hold greater adaptive potential than genetic inheritance - and is probably driving human evolution. - The evolutionary impact of culture occurs - mainly through culturally organized groups, - which have come to dominate human affairs in recent millennia. - Second, the role of culture appears to be growing, - increasingly bypassing genetic evolution and weakening genetic adaptive potential. -Taken together, these findings suggest that human long-term GCC is characterized by - an evolutionary transition in inheritance - from genes to culture - which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group). Research on GCC should focus on the possibility of - an ongoing transition in the human inheritance system.

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

• key observation
  • human culture may represent a key evolutionary milestone
  • culture may be the next evolutionary transition state
    • pre-single self organisms like mitochondria increased fitness by sharing the environment with other life forms and formed the single cell
    • then multi-cellular organisms set the stage for the next big evolutionary paradigm
    • splitting into plants and animals
    • sexual reproduction
    • transition to land
  • we are possibly undergoing the next major evolutionary transition
  • in which we will still evolve genetically,
  • but genetics may not determine human survival as much as culture does

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• Quote

• The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

• Comment

• One critique of this statement is that it wasn't only European cultures that created written language. It has a rich non European history.

• also, from an evolutionary perspective, written language use a major variable Facilitating Evolutionary Transition (FET) for a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET) of our species.

• https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Major+Evolutionary+Transition

• example
  • people’s desire for sweet and fatty tasting foods
  • In ancestral times,
    • sugar and fat typically signaled positive nutritional value (Ramirez, 1990).
    • Consequently, people’s sensory systems are designed
    • to detect the presence of sugar or fat in food,
    • and the brain’s gustatory centers produce desirable taste sensations
    • when those foods are consumed.
    • This would have served our ancestors well,
    • facilitating the choice of beneficial and nutritious foods.
  • in modern times
    • Many foods found in post-industrialized societies
    • contain processed sugars, hydrogenated oils, and other additives that enhance the taste of the food
    • without adding any nutritional benefits.
    • Foods laden with corn syrup, for example,
    • typically contain high numbers of calories
    • and their regular consumption can result in obesity, diabetes, and other problems.
  • Thus, the mismatch between
  • the features of ancestral versus modern foodstuffs
  • can lead adaptive sensory mechanisms
  • to produce maladaptive physiological consequences.
  • The desire for sweet and fat foods
  • promotes health problems,
  • even when this desire operates in a perfectly normal manner
  • and would produce health benefits
  • in the environment for which it was designed

• Some of the challenges people face today,
• diverge quite a bit from those
• faced by their ancestors.
• Such divergences can ,- lead adaptive psychological mechanisms to “misfire”
• to respond in ways that might have been adaptive in the past,
• but that no longer produce adaptive consequences today.

• Psychological adaptations have been designed over thousands of generations of human evolution.
• The adaptations humans possess today, then,
• were designed to operate in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness,
• a composite of the social and physical challenges as they have existed for hundreds of thousands of years (Bowlby, 1969; Cosmides & Tooby, 1992).
• As such, they may or may not be well-adapted
• for life in contemporary society

• Each of these 4 problems
  • anxiety disorder
  • domestic violence
  • racial prejudice
  • obesity
• reflects the operation of psychological mechanisms
• that were designed through evolution
• to serve important adaptive functions, - but that nevertheless can produce harmful consequences.

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• = human being's = altricial nature - is an = evolutionary adaptation
• resulting in exceptional = complex social learning
• tradeoff of helplessness at birth
• is complex social learning
• that enables cumulative cultural evolution

• See references on = John Boik's evidence-based approach to build a social superorganism and Peter Nonacs, Amanda Robin and Kayla Denton's research on = Major System Transition and especially the variables that play the support role of = Facilitating Evolutionary Transition (FET), which include = Major Evolutionary Transition (MET) and = Major Competitive Transition (MCT)

https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=major%2Bevolutionary%2Btransition

Other references for METs: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=major%2Bevolutionary%2Btransition

• Each = MET is a transition from many to a unified individual
• or from one superorganism level to a higher order superorganism level

• = adding additional layers to the levels of Blanca et al.
• 5 different levels of information:
  • level 1:- information stored in genome: DNA
  • level 3 - information stored in brains or biological ways
  • level 4:- inscribed
    • iconic information - for example wofl's scent maark
    • instructional information - symbolic representation of information in written language - abiotic setting
  • level 5 - dark information - abiotic computer programs using neural networks - we don't actually know exactly how they calculate the solution

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!- When paleontological evidence shows that certain species or phenotypes recur over and over in evolutionary history (like crabs, slime or wings), it suggests they are adaptive to recurring environments.

!- impact : human cultural evolution - is of global evolutionary significance

!- 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!

Yates, C., & Feil, E. (2021, February 1). Will coronavirus really evolve to become less deadly? The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/will-coronavirus-really-evolve-to-become-less-deadly-153817

!- references : evolutionary biology * Evolutionary biologists have developed similar ideas to explain how throughout history, groups of individual organisms that clustered together and discovered better fitness as a result of symbiotic relationships began to reproduce as a whole new entity. Hence the collective became the new individual * Robin et al. paper: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world * Robin et al. video presentation: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world * Stuart West video: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FVUfNEHl44hc%2F&group=world

• Title: What caused life's Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET)?
• Author: Stuart West
• Date:

What is an individual? This is a very fundamental question that John asks, especially from the evolutionary biological perspective as life has evolved over billions of years and what were once separate individuals, came together in Major Evolution Transitions (MET) to form a NEW grouping of what were former individuals to form a new cohesive, higher order individual. Life is therefore COMPOSITIONAL. When these groups of individuals increase fitness by clustering together and mutually benefit from each other, they then reproduce together as a cluster.

Watch this informative video by Oxford researcher explaining MET: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FVUfNEHl44hc%2F&group=world and watch Amanda Robbin's video on research on the same question from an information systems perspective: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world based on her paper: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world

Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity praxis adopts the same view that the individual human being is a process, a nexus of many different flows of the natural world....and consciousness is part of the that - 4E - Embedded, Enacted, Embodied and Extended. We are more appropriately called a human INTERbeing, and even more appropriately a human INTERbeCOMing (since we are more process than static thing) both from material and information flow perspective.

Our consciousness is at a specific level, associated with a body with sensory bubble that constrains it to this particular scale of experience - not microscopic and not planetary. It gives us a unique lens into the other scales of the individual that are purely cognitive, and only indirectly sensed via instrumentation that extends our naked senses. That siuatedness and perspectival knowing gives us a uniquely, distorted view of reality.

Second Transition: Columbian Exchange

In evolutionary biology, there are also another type of transition, Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET). Robin et. al propose that the introduction of writing (inscribed language) was a major information improvement that played an important role leading to a major system transition (MST).

Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffevo.2021.711556%2Ffull&group=world https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6J-J72GoqhY%2F&group=world

remapping patterns normally experienced in on sensory modality to other sensory modality. This work is like that of Neuroscientist David Eagleman, ie. his vest that translates sound patterns into tactile patterns on a vest and allowing deaf person to "hear" words through feeling corresponding tactile signals.

Donald Hoffman also advocates for evolutionary fitness as what gives meaning to our perceptions of the world.

This is a profound statement that needs to be fully explored. This touches upon the theory of Charles Saunders Peirce and his Semiotics, as well as Jakob Von Uexkull and his Umwelt theory. Information becomes meaningful within an evolutionary framing of fitness.

This can be interpreted as an instantiation of the hero's journey, in the context of research that combines evolution with ecology as in the research paper: Major Evolutionary Transitions and the Roles of Facilitation and Information in Ecosystem Transformations (Robin et al., 2021).From this lens, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) was first made possible through spoken language, then accelerated through written language. The authors claim that another Major System Transition (MST).is emerging, which they posit to be abiotic in nature involving Artificial Intelligence.

Faced with a self-induced civilization-scale threat, we may ask whether a major cultural evolution may be necessary to avoid catastrophe and whether it may constitute another MST. Could a rapid higher level global understanding of the epistemological dualism of self and other which undergirds normative alienation, othering and conflict, both with others of our own species, of other species and with the planetary system itself play a major role in the transition?

ReconfigBehSci [@SciBeh]. ‘RT @firefoxx66: The @nextstrain Http://CoVariants.Org Focal Build for 21K (B.1.1.529) Is Now Live. Http://Nextstrain.Org/Groups/Neherlab/Ncov/21K As Previously…’. Tweet. Twitter, 26 November 2021. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1464265981220560901.

Refuting Descartes and Enlightenment myths. Lakoff justifies how neuroscience findings of the processing of the unconscious mind leads him to the statement that 98% of our thoughts are unconscious.

What emerges into conscious knowing then is a small percentage of what the rest of the processing brain "knows".

The conscious mind therefore has no direct access to that 98% of what is going on to surface the 2% it is aware of. If we extend knowledge into processes that are beyond simply neural processes, however, this knowledge gap becomes even more pronounced.

Since human physiology of modern hominins is the evolutionary terminus point of billions of years of evolution, with at least 3 different prior Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) embedded within our various body structures, our "conscious mind" is the governor over a thriving, cohesive planetary population of billions of cells and trillions of microbes of whose ongoing metabolic processes we are completely ignorant of.

Witness the development of disease within our bodies. The con-specific is unaware of it often until late stage symptoms appear and warrants a doctor's visit..

Within this human body, we embed 4 different stages of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET).

Our human body is the product of billions of years of evolution, embodying various outputs from each major stage of a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET). We are a multi-cellular being, a colony. Yet,at the same time, we have living elements that at one time in history, were independent living beings which were NOT part of a multi-cellular colony!

In the deep history of the evolution of the human body, genes, mitochondria, eukaryotes were all once autonomous living entities, each a biological self with its own boundary separating inner from outer. Virus's helped to catalyze their mutualism over deep time.

Now, over billions of years of evolution, they are all integrated together by the extra-cellular matrix and laminin protein into our multi-cellular human body, replicating as one super, super, super organism.

Finally, inscribed language has allowed us to undergo another kind of transition, a major system transition (MST) where human beings now dominate the entire biosphere, for better and for worse.

Fascinating experiments that support MET.

This is the key to Major Evolutionary Transition - a population of free living individual creatures discover that in teaming up, there is a greater resultant evolutionary fitness, mutualism symbiotic relationship emerges. It becomes so strong over time that the many become a self-replicating one.

The biological self is always defined by a boundary between inner and outer, but in this act of mutualism, the many biological selves join to form a new higher order biological self.

In this way, a multi-cellular species like ours is somewhat like one of those nested Russian dolls.

Indeed, Amanda Robins hypothesizes

https://hyp.is/NyrixELGEeyYWN_d76UNMg/docdrop.org/video/6J-J72GoqhY/

that our species has undergone what she and Peter Nonacs calls Major System Transition (MST). The cultural artifact of inscribed language has made possible a superorganism / supraorganism that has spread across the globe.

This is a great vid for showing how we are a multi-level being. Within this human body, we embed 4 different stages of Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET).

Our human body is the product of billions of years of evolution, embodying various outputs from each major stage of a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET). We are a multi-cellular being, a colony. Yet,at the same time, we have living elements that at one time in history, were independent living beings which were NOT part of a multi-cellular colony!

We have genes, that were once autonomous living entities, mitochondria within cells, which at one time were autonomous entities, and cells, which were also once autonomously existent eukaryotes. All three exist in transmuted form that is now integrated into our body.

Viruses have played a key role in a number of different METs. This is an important insight that can contextualize the covid-19 pandemic.

The transition from competing individuals to a coherent unity is a fascinating journey.

Applied to human society at a time of the Anthropocene, these principles of evolutionary biology may be salient to apply to the superorganism/supra-organism of humanity undergoing a process of rapid whole system change.

The shift from individual to unified group due to evolutionary fitness bestowed by fitness emerges a new stable replicable unit and marks a Major Evolutionary Transition (MET).

The Palette of Being is a very useful idea that is related to Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE) and autopoiesis. From CCE, humans are able to pass on new ideas from one generation to the next, made possible by the tool of inscribed language.

Peter Nonacs group at UCLA as well as Stuart West at Oxford research Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) West elucidates that modern hominids integrate the remnants of four major stages of MET that have occurred over deep time. Amanda Robins, a researcher in Nonacs group posits the idea that our species of modern hominids are undergoing a Major Systems Transition (MST), due specifically to our development of inscribed language.

CCE emerges new technologies that shape our human environments in time frames far faster than biological evolutionary timeframes. New human experiences are created which have never been exposed to human brains before, which feedback to affect our biological evolution as well in the process of gene-culture coevolution (GCC), also known as Dual Inheritance theory. In this way, CCE and GCC are entangled. "Gene–culture coevolution is the application of niche-construction reasoning to the human species, recognizing that both genes and culture are subject to similar dynamics, and human society is a cultural construction that provides the environment for fitness-enhancing genetic changes in individuals. The resulting social system is a complex dynamic nonlinear system. " (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048999/)

This metaphor of experiences constituting different colors on a Palette of Being is a powerful one that can contextualize human experiences from a deep time framework. One could argue that language usage automatically forces us into an anthropomorphic lens, for sophisticated language usage at the level of humans appears to be unique amongst our species. Within that constraint, the Palette of Being still provides us with a less myopic, less immediate and arguably less anthropomorphic view of human experience. It is philosophically problematic, however, in the sense that we can speculate about nonhuman modalities of being but never truly experience them. Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote his classic paper "What it's like to be a bat" to illustrate this problem of experiencing the other. (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf)

We can also leverage the Palette of Being in education. Deep Humanity (DH) BEing Journeys are a new kind of experiential, participatory contemplative practice and teaching tool designed to deepen our appreciation of what it is to be human. The polycrisis of the Anthropocene, especially the self-induced climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have precipitated the erosion of stable social norms and reference frames, inducing another crisis, a meaning crisis. In this context, a re-education of embodied philosophy is seen as urgent to make sense of a radically shifting human reality.

Different human experiences presented as different colors of the Palette of Being situate our crisis in a larger context. One important Deep Humanity BEing journey that can help contextualize and make sense of our experiences is language. Once upon a time, language did not exist. As it gradually emerged, this color came to be added to our Palette of Being, and shaped the normative experiences of humanity in profound ways. It is the case that such profound shifts, lost over deep time come to be taken for granted by modern conspecifics. When such particular colors of the Palette of Being are not situated in deep time, and crisis ensues, that loss of contextualizing and situatedness can be quite disruptive, de-centering, confusing and alienating.

Being aware of the colors in the Palette can help us shed light on the amazing aspects that culture has invisibly transmitted to us, helping us not take them for granted, and re-establish a sense of awe about our lives as human beings.

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Clark, C. (2021). The Blame Efficiency Hypothesis: An Evolutionary Framework to Resolve Rationalist and Intuitionist Theories of Moral Condemnation.

Saad-Roy, C. M., Morris, S. E., Metcalf, C. J. E., Mina, M. J., Baker, R. E., Farrar, J., Holmes, E. C., Pybus, O. G., Graham, A. L., Levin, S. A., Grenfell, B. T., & Wagner, C. E. (2021). Epidemiological and evolutionary considerations of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dosing regimes. Science, 372(6540), 363–370. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg8663

Transparent Peer Review

Download the complete Review Process [PDF] including:

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Transparent Peer Review

Download the complete Review Process [PDF] including:

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