Cooperation

As we face new existential challenges, successfully making the next evolutionary transition will depend on our ability to increase cooperation in the pursuit of long term goals (new challenges require novel cooperative arrangements).

Cooperation in the world today:

"I believe that we humans, who know so much about cosmology and immunology, lack a framework for thinking about why and how humans cooperate... By necessity, useful new understandings of how humans cooperate and fail to cooperate is an interdisciplinary task. I don't believe that the obvious importance of such an effort guarantees that it will be successfully accomplished. Problems and challenges in everyday life in the home, office, factory, public places and global behavior such as conflict, pollution, resource sustainability are all being addressed with very little comprehensive knowledge about cooperation. In regard to cooperation theory, fragmentary and specialized knowledge is advancing in a dozen or more different fields, but in terms of putting this fragmented knowledge together into a systemic whole, we’re still in the pre-microscope era."
 - Howard Rheingold

"Martin Nowak of Harvard University has identified at least five basic mechanisms of cooperation. He shows the way that we human beings collaborate is as clearly described by mathematics as the descent of the apple that once fell in Newton's garden."
- Roger Highfield

"We are coming very close to an understanding of human cooperation that can generalize to society as a whole. I am hopeful that these breakthroughs may eventually lead us to form a science of human peace and harmony."
- John Gottman, "The Trust Metric"

"For many human reciprocal altruists the anticipated repayment is not necessarily for the person who makes the initial sacrifice or even for their family members. The expectation is that sufficient others will engage in altruistic acts as needed to ensure the well being of those within the boundaries of the given community. The return to such long-sighted reciprocal altruists is the establishment of norms of cooperation that endure beyond the lifetime of any particular altruist."
- Margaret Levi, Reciprocal Altruism

"There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state." [We can blame China for their trade policies, and we can despise the rising dictatorship of Xi Jinping, but by doing that we may risk ignoring this high level of cooperation that exists in their society. More than anything else this could lead to China's ascendance as the United States sees its role in global politics decline. We in the West look at China and tend to focus on their state controlled media and politics, but the Chinese may be looking at the lack of cooperation in our government and wonder how we can be so backwards.]
- Geoffrey Miller

"We are descended solely from those better equipped with coalitional instincts. In this new world, power shifted from solitary alphas to the effectively coordinated down-alphabet, giving rise to a new, larger landscape of political threat and opportunity: rival groups or factions expanding at your expense or shrinking as a result of your dominance. And so a daunting new augmented reality was neurally kindled, overlying the older individual one. It is important to realize that this reality is constructed by and runs on our coalitional programs and has no independent existence. You are a member of a coalition only if someone (such as you) interprets you as being one, and you are not if no one does."
- John Tooby, Coalition Instincts

"For a social species like us, the benefits of cooperation (and the opportunity costs of its absence) can hardly be overstated."
- Oliver Scott Curry

The evolutionary basis:

"The two fundamental principles of evolution are mutation and natural selection. But evolution is constructive because of cooperation. New levels of organization evolve when the competing units on the lower level begin to cooperate. Cooperation allows specialization and thereby promotes biological diversity. Cooperation is the secret behind the open endedness of the evolutionary process. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world."
- Martin Nowak, "Five rules for the evolution of cooperation"

“A positive-sum game is a scenario in which agents have choices that can improve the lots of both of them at the same time. A classic positive-sum game in everyday life is the exchange of favors, where each person can confer a large benefit to another at a small cost to himself or herself. Examples include primates who remove ticks from each other's backs, hunters who share meat whenever one of them has felled an animal that is too big for him to consume on the spot, and parents who take turns keeping each other's children out of trouble. A key insight of evolutionary psychology is that human cooperation and the social emotions that support it, such as sympathy, trust, gratitude, guilt, and anger, were selected because they allow people to flourish in positive-sum games.” [In Pinker's earlier response to Wright's book Nonzero, he pointed out that "humans do not directly seek wider cooperation and more complex societal organization; they care only about comfort, sex, family, friendship, knowledge, pride, being entertained, and so on. An increase in social complexity is just one way of getting more of these..."]
- Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of Our Nature"

"The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry have argued that an evolutionary dynamic which creates positive-sum games drove the major transitions in the history of life: the emergence of genes, chromosomes, bacteria, cells with nuclei, organisms, sexually reproducing organisms, and animal societies. In each transition, biological agents entered into larger wholes in which they specialized, exchanged benefits, and developed safeguards to prevent one from exploiting the rest to the detriment of the whole." [Nonzero sum cooperative relationships lead to emergent qualities; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.]
- Steven Pinker, "Positive-Sum Games"

"The evolution of cooperation and helping behaviour is a beautiful and simple explanation of how nature got complex, diverse and wonderful. It's not restricted to the charismatic meerkats, or fluffy bumble-bees. It is a general phenomenon which generates the biological hierarchies that characterise the natural world. Groups of individuals (genes, prokaryotes, single-celled and multicellular organisms) that could previously replicate independently, form a new, collective individual that can only replicate as a whole."
- Seirian Sumner

"It is the selective advantages arising from various synergistic effects that constitute the underlying cause of the apparently orthogenetic (or directional) aspect of evolutionary history, that is, the progressive emergence of complex, hierarchically organized systems."
- Peter Corning, "The Synergism Hypothesis," 1983

Cooperative interactions of various kinds, however they may occur, can produce novel combined effects - synergies - that in turn become causes of differential selection. In effect, the parts (genes, genomes, individuals, groups, or even species) that are responsible for producing the synergies may become interdependent “units” of evolutionary change. It applies both to biological and socio-economic evolution, most notably in humankind. This functional synergy is the underlying cause of cooperation, and complexity, in living systems.
- Peter Corning and Eörs Szathmáry, "Synergistic Selection": A Darwinian frame for the evolution of complexity. 2015

The next major transition in evolution must sustain and enhance our interdependent “collective survival enterprise.” In the final reckoning, if our species fails to meet this great survival challenge, we will squander our evolutionary inheritance and betray what untold generations of our ancestors struggled to achieve over millions of years.
- Peter Corning, Synergistic Selection

"Many neural sub-systems cooperate to maintain a unified and coherent field of conscious experience, sustaining the experiences we typically have as humans."
- Barry C. Smith

"Cancer is widespread among multicellular organisms, afflicting mammals, birds, fish and reptiles. It clearly has deep evolutionary roots, probably stretching back over a billion years to the dawn of multicellularity. Indeed, it represents a breakdown of multi-celled cooperation."
- Paul Davies, "Somatic Mutation Theory of Cancer"

"A cell can work only with standardized building blocks (amino acids, carbohydrates, DNA, RNA, etc.). Could something as complex as a cell ever work outside of standards? Further up the chain, in biology, the question is how to get huge numbers of unrelated individuals to cooperate flexibly. I suggest that standardization is at least part of the solution. People can cooperate in ample numbers without standards though all the known mechanisms. But, eventually, groups that use standards, for example of language (writing), value (money), and weights, outpace groups that do not." [That the US has refused the metric system may be more consequential than generally appreciated.]
- Rolf Dobelli, "General Standardization Theory"

"One struggles to think of a greater contribution to world cooperation than progress to universal communication. But automated, near-universal translation is coming. And it will change everything."
- Daniel L. Everett

"Humans were different. They didn’t just forage for information; they domesticated it, just as early farmers domesticated the land, rivers, plants and animals that surrounded them. Like farming, domesticating information was a collective project."
- David Christian, "The Noösphere"

"The metadiscipline of synoetics studies the cooperative interaction of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system whose mental power is greater than that of its components. It presents a picture of the integrated way in which many currently separate disciplines should be developed and taught to do justice to their mutual roles."
- Louis Fein, "The Computer-Related Science (Synnoetics) at a University in the Year 1975," unpublished paper (December 1960)

"I coined the term synoesis, parallel to symbiosis, and synoetic system, parallel to symbiotic system. I then decided that what we are really dealing with, typically nowadays, is not computer science - we do that as a branch of a much broader science which deals not only with individual entities having mental capabilities like a person or a computer but also deals with synoetic relationships between them." [This sounds similar to what Rachel Armstrong and others are researching today.]
- Louis Fein interview, 1979

Reasons for concern:

"Global human cooperation now teeters on a threshold. The accelerating wealth and industry of Earth's increasing inhabitants - itself a triumph of cooperation - is exhausting the ability of our home planet to support us all. Many problems that challenge us today can be traced back to a profound tension between what is good and desirable for society as a whole and what is good and desirable for an individual. That conflict can be found in global problems such as climate change, pollution, resource depletion, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation." [Collusion and corruption are another type of cooperation - a secret or illegal cooperation - to gain additional profit at other's expense. So one can see that cooperation is itself a part of competition, and where there are competing interests, those who are best able to form "countervailing powers," to use Kenneth Galbraith's term, will have a better chance at success.]
- Roger Highfield

"If we can create institutions and infrastructure to support truthful communication without costly signalling, the world will become a much more efficient place."
- Steve Omohundro, Costly Signalling

"In the artificial lulls when atavism is forced into abeyance we are happy to forget Hobbes’s admonition that it is only through the careful cultivation of institutions that stable peace is at least possible."
- Timothy Taylor

"Deception commends itself, perhaps even above violence, as the principal enemy of human cooperation."
- Sam Harris

"Perhaps our core problem today is that, though we are well evolved to cooperate in groups the size of hunter-gatherer clans (dozens or hundreds of people), we struggle to organize ourselves well at larger scales."
- David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands

"We don’t know how cooperation works when you go from small groups of people to a planetary level. We lack the knowledge for successful intervention. We come to this problem at crunch time with empty hands. We should worry about that."
- Daniel Haun

"Cooperation in societies is not always for the good: you can find cartels of anti-social people who don’t care at all for the common good and prefer to cooperate for keeping a status quo that suits them even if the collective outcome is a mediocre result."
- Gloria Origgi, "How To Be Bad Together: Antisocial Punishment of Pro-social Cooperators"

"Homophily lies at the root of many social and economic problems, and understanding it can help us better address the many issues that societies around the globe face, from inequality and immobility, to political polarization."
- Matthew O. Jackson, Homophily

"If we are trying to build an enduring and encompassing ethical society, tight boundaries around deserving beneficiaries of altruistic acts becomes problematic. If we accept such boundaries, we are quickly in the realm of wars and terrorism in which some populations are considered non-deserving of beneficence."
- Margaret Levi, Reciprocal Altruism

Case study among the Pirahã:

"What is there to learn? Let me give some examples from my own field research among Amazonian peoples.

Cooperation: I once thought it might be fun to teach the Pirahã people about Western games. So I organized a 'field day', with a tug of war, a foot race, and a sack race, among other things. In the foot race, one Pirahã fellow got out in front of everyone else. He then stopped and waited for all the others to catch up so they could cross together. The idea of winning was not only novel but unappealing. We cross the line together or I don't cross it. And the same went for the sack race. The tug of war contest was a joke — just guys keeping the slack out of the rope talking. The people loved it all, laughing and conversing all day and told me they had a good time. They taught me more than I ever taught them: you can have a great time and have everyone win. That is not a bad lesson. That is a fine lesson.

Pluralism: The Pirahãs, like the Narragansett and other American Indians, believe that you use your knowledge to serve yourself and to serve others in your community. There is no over-arching concept of Truth to which all members of society must conform.

Communalism: The Pirahãs seem to accept only knowledge that helps, not knowledge that coerces. Think of our English expression 'knowledge is power'. The concept as practiced in most industrial societies is really that 'knowledge is power for me so long as I have it and you don't'. But to many peoples like the Pirahãs, knowledge is something for us all to share. It is power to the people, not power to a person. The Pirahãs don't allow top secret conversations. Every member of their society knows what every other member is doing and how they are doing it. There is a communal mind. There is freedom and security in group knowledge.

Toleration: In Western society we associate tolerance with education — the more you learn, the more you tolerate. But there is little evidence for this thesis when we look at our society as a whole (where education is even compatible with religious fundamentalism, one of the worst dangers for the future of our species). Yet among some hunter-gatherer societies, toleration of physical, mental, and religious diversity can be much greater than our so-called pluralistic Western societies. Not everyone has to look alike, act alike, behave alike, or believe alike. In fact, they don't even have to pretend to do so.

I am optimistic that we will learn the simple and useful truths of cooperation, pluralism, communalism, and toleration and that no one Idea or Truth should be the ring to bind us all."
- Daniel L. Everett

Future prospects for cooperative engagement:

"Non-zero-sum games have always been part of life. You have them in hunter-gatherer societies, but then through technological evolution, new forms of technology arise that facilitate or encourage the playing of non-zero-sum games, involving more people over larger territory. Social structure adapts to accommodate this possibility and to harness this productive potential. ...I think we're going to have to have a major round of moral progress in the world. I think you're just going to have to see less hatred among groups, less bigotry, and, you know, racial groups, religious groups, whatever. There's going to have to be moral progress. There's going to have to be a lessening of the amount of hatred in the world, given how dangerous it's becoming. ...Now, social organization has reached the global level ...we've come too far to screw it up now."

- Robert Wright

"We can apply the modern AI technique of deep multi-agent reinforcement learning to age-old questions in social science such as the mystery of the emergence of cooperation. As a consequence, we may be able to better understand complex multi-agent systems such as the economy, traffic systems, or the ecological health of our planet - all of which depend on our continued cooperation." [Game theory is described as “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.” The use of AI to study cooperation is an ideal application.]
- DeepMind

"Are there long-term trends we could feel optimistic about? Thirty years of work on the evolutionary trajectory of cooperative strategies suggest long-term trends (under a broad range of conditions) toward greater cooperation, contingent on ever more sophisticated discrimination. It seems likely that when similar models are produced for varying degrees of deceit and self-deception, long-term trends toward honesty to others and self will (at least under some conditions) be favored. Is there any reason to believe that we will survive long enough to enjoy any of these long-term trends? This is far less certain. Evolution does not plan for contingencies that have not yet occurred and the vast majority of species go extinct. There is no reason to expect humans are exempt from these rules."
- Robert Trivers

"Given the history of human society in cooperatively plundering the resources of a meager but beautiful planet with currently abundant resources, who can possibly be optimistic about the long-term future of humanity?"
- George Smoot

"Remember this if you are ever tempted to write off all humanity as a lost cause. We have our flaws, without a doubt, but we can also lay claim to being the species shaped by evolution to possess the most open hearts and the most abundant capacity for care on earth."
- Abigail Marsh


Keywords: cooperation, emergence, evolution, game theory, interdependence, nonzero, reciprocity, symbiosis

Additional resources:
Corning, Peter. 2018. Synergistic Selection. (more by this author)
Moss, Gordon. 2011. The Dawning Age of Cooperation. 
Nowak, Martin. 2011. The Evolution of Cooperation.
Wright, Robert. 2000. Nonzero.

 Additional quotes (uncategorized):

"The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation."
- Bertrand Russell, "Human Society in Ethics and Politics" (1954) p212

"My argument, stated generally and briefly, is that the driving force in nature, on this kind of planet with this sort of biosphere, is cooperation."
- Lewis Thomas, The Fragile Species

"Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand."
- Matthew 12:25

"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
- Benjamin Franklin

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
- Aristotle

"Knowledge comes by taking things apart: analysis. But wisdom comes by putting things together."
- John A. Morrison

"When spiderwebs unite, they can tie up a lion."
- African Proverb

In a world increasingly connected not just by trade in goods but also by the exchange of violence, information, viruses, and emissions, the importance of social preferences [such as a concern for the well-being of others and for fair procedures] in underwriting human cooperation, even survival, may now be greater...
- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and It's Evolution

Although relentless competitive natural selection is widely assumed to be the primary mover of evolutionary change, life more generally works on the basis of cooperation. The focus on competition and cooperation is largely an artifact of the compression of time ― a distortion that dissolves when the nature and origins of adapted life are viewed primarily from developmental and evolutionary time scales.
- Kenneth Weiss and Anne Buchanan, The Mermaid's Tale

John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry in "The Major Transitions in Evolution" wrote that the inculcation of proper behavior is often achieved by ritual and myth. (272) So that "throughout their lives, in speech, story, and song, all people sing the same tune" (Plato, Laws). To see an example of this, John Miller in his book, "A Crude Look at the Whole" writes that on the island of Bali, the need for coordinated cropping by farmers opened up "a niche for an elaborate religious institution with various shrines and temples tied to the irrigation systems." Balinese rice farming is an example of system wide cooperation leading to centuries of sustainable agriculture.

Our evolving planet

Image Credit: György Soponyai

In "The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution," Richard Dawkins wrote “Evolution, or its driving engine natural selection, has no foresight... Survival in future centuries doesn’t enter into the calculation.” While it may be true that genetic evolution doesn't anticipate changes that may occur in future centuries, it has succeeded in creating minds that can do this very thing. Humans are capable of using foresight to look centuries ahead, and if we are concerned about the future of humanity and our planet, we have to think in the long term.

Koert van Mensvoort's Letter to Humanity: "Nature always builds on existing levels of complexity: biology builds upon chemistry, cognition builds upon biology, calculation builds upon cognition. I can’t think of another species whose presence has sparked an entirely new evolutionary phase, just as DNA evolved from RNA, your actions have made possible a leap to non-genetic evolution. ...Although this wasn’t a conscious act, the consequences are no lesser for it. Your presence has transformed the face of the earth so fundamentally that the impact will still be visible millions of years from now. This is your doing, but as yet, you barely seem to realise that, much less have you been able to take a clear position toward it."

Eörs Szathmáry, in his paper "Toward Major Evolutioary Transitions Theory 2.0," wrote: "Human society with language has been, and it still is, the last item on the list. We see key elements that are highlighted in other transitions: cooperation (including reproductive leveling and food sharing), a form of eusociality, a powerful novel inheritance system, and living in groups. ...It is the cultural traditions, language, rules and laws that are the cohesiveness-maintaining mechanisms that integrate the ‘cultural individual.' ...Biology gives room to technological and communal cultural evolution. Can we predict, by looking at an evolving population, that a major transition is “imminent”? ...Transition theory strongly suggests that, if we see, even in rudimentary form, that originally independently reproducing units join, somehow use functional synergies among the units, and that there is some novelty in the inheritance system as well, then the population is definitely on its way to a “major transition.”

Kevin Kelly wrote: "Another way to view these transitions is as increased levels or varieties of cooperation. We can see where evolution is going by imagining a next phase which will increase the span of cooperation further. That of course, would be the ninth transition." Kelly sees a clear trend in the direction of evolution.

Gillings, Hilbert, and Kemp in their paper "Information in the Biosphere: Biological and Digital Worlds" write: "It seems inevitable that digital and biological information will become more integrated in the future. This scenario raises the question of  how such an organic-digital fusion might become a symbiosis that co-evolves through natural and artificial selection. Both could contribute their functions to generate a higher unit of organization, similar in effect to previous evolutionary transitions. We argue that the carbon-based biosphere has generated a cognitive system (humans) capable of creating technology that is resulting in a major evolutionary transition that merges technology, biology, and society. Scholars of ecology and evolution should join the debate, and seriously and systematically think about the consequences of digital information for the trajectory of life. 

Where will this "ninth transition" take us? Karl Schroeder has one idea: "I've lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke's Law (which originally said 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. ...If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained. ...Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter."

About this, Kevin Kelly writes: "His theory suggest that what technology wants is to be “natural,” not just biologically natural, but geologically natural, or like self-regulating Gaia, natural on a planetary scale. I didn’t quite reach that far in my book, so I am glad to have been pushed even further by Schroeder." Kelly did however extensively describe "convivial technology" which, as he wrote, "converges around the dozen or so dynamics (such as cooperation, transparency, decentralization, flexibility, redundancy, and efficiency) common to all exotropic systems including life itself.

Lynn Margulis is well known for her many contributions, including endosymbiosis theory and, with James Lovelock, the Gaia hypothesis. In her book "What is Life?" the ideas of Vernadsky are discussed, and these same ideas are brought up in Grinspoon's book "Earth in Human Hands." In particular, it is Vernadsky's conception of the noösphere. Vernadsky had developed the concept of the biosphere in the late 1920s, and was recognized by Lovelock and Margulis as a seminal contributor to the theory of Earth as a living system. As Grinspoon wrote, “In other words, fifty years before Lovelock and Margulis, Vernadsky largely described Gaia." Grinspoon goes on: "Furthermore, he hinted at a fundamentally new stage in the life of the biosphere that was being brought about by the actions of humanity. In his later life he became obsessed with the idea of the noösphere. …The lithosphere had given rise to the biosphere, and now the biosphere had birthed the noösphere. Earth had become alive and then developed a mind. ...the beginning of Earth’s fifth eon [Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, Phanerozoic, Sapiezoic].” Grinspoon suggested calling this eon the Sapiezoic: "I've argued that one way to approach the question "What is Life?" might be to think of it as a property that a planet sometimes takes on. Similarly, mind may be a phenomenon that sometimes can become a property of a planet. If planets can have Sapiezoic Eons, then there is a form of stable intelligence, manifested on some worlds, that has not quite yet appeared on Earth." This has resulted in dramatic changes to our planet, as we are coming to realize. "With the Copernican Revolution, we had to completely reevaluate our place in the scheme of things. Now we are awakening to our role as world shapers, and this will require another painful shift in worldview."

David Grinspoon: "The Anthropocene could mark the beginning of a transition [to a sapient planet]... If we make it past the next few centuries, it will be because we've honed our survival skills to make them work on a planetary scale. Once we achieve that, we have done much more than ensure our persistence against near-term self-induced challenges. We will have unleashed the power of reason and foresight in defense of Earth's biosphere - but first we have to get through a bottleneck." Foresight... but how do we apply it? Grinspoon asks "in analogy to our new understanding of human health, rather than assuming we're the disease, can we seek to play the balanced and mutually beneficial role that would make us part of the commensal microbiome of Gaia? ...We are a kind of organism that has never existed before, and we’ve gotten ourselves in a situation. Fortunately, we may be equipped to get ourselves out of it. A plague does not think. A cancer does not decide to change course. We could. So these images may describe our past, but they needn’t proscribe our future. People are in great need of some larger perspective. We need to have a long-term vision of where we want to go to help us through this time of alarming short-term threat. ...We have, unconsciously, been making a new planet. Our challenge now is to awaken to this role and grow into it, becoming conscious shapers of our world."

In the history of ideas, we have progressively eliminated discontinuities from our perception. Copernicus eliminated the discontinuity between the terrestrial world and the rest of the physical universe. Darwin eliminated the physical discontinuity between human beings and the rest of the organic world, and psychologists have shown the continuity between the human and animal mind. We are crossing another discontinuity as we explore the unified quality of nature and artifice. All things, biological, societal, and technological, adapt to and create each other, and at the same time weave into one whole system. Kelly went so far as to suggest a redefinition of life as self generated information systems, a theme echoed by Max Tegmark, both of whom have suggested including non-genetically evolved agents within the definition of life. A view that has been maintained since Sir Francis Bacon wrote "Advancement of Learning," in 1605: "The history of the arts should the rather make a species of natural history, because of the prevalent opinion, as if art were a different thing from nature, and things natural different from things artificial, [however] artificial things differ not from natural in form or essence. [1]"

Rachel Armstrong agrees that the duality of nature/artifice is insupportable: "The nature of humanity in the twenty-first century is, according to sociologist Steve Fuller, a ‘bipolar disorder’ beset with dualisms of identification such as divine/animal, mind/body, nature/artifice and individual/social. We currently view the world in dualistic terms where those that are ascribed the status of being ‘alive’ act and those that do not have this status remain quiet and do not participate. My ecological engagement with architecture aims to engage a spectrum of materials and ecologies that participate as a whole, even if some of their agencies are not bestowed with the status of ‘life’. The importance of each agent (living or non-living) participating in vital networks of interaction becomes shaped by the impact of the agent on the society. Living technologies provide a more Romantic kind of interaction in the syntheses of experience and bring new challenges to the design and engineering portfolios, as they possess agency, need sustenance, have a will of their own, and change with time. It is impossible to deduce all biological outcomes computationally, as the outputs are often unpredictable and surprising."

Armstrong: "We have the power to shape our own technological evolution – even if we use ‘soft’ control to direct the outcomes. One of the really interesting things about having many different practices, paradigms and different kinds of solving approaches through technology, is that we are increasing our ability to remain fluid and adaptive to change. We are definitely going to need resilience and adaptability as key drivers of human development in this century, if the predictions of an unstable earth and rapid increase in the number of people on the planet are correct. In facing these significant challenges we need to not just consider the amount of ‘life’ that we can support but invest in ensuring a good quality of life. A healthy relationship with technology may help us achieve this as I view technology as being the way that our minds are embodied in the process of problem solving. As this century unfolds, Nature will increasingly be the challenge that we need to address – so there will be an even tighter coupling between technology and the natural world than already exists." Instead of five- or even 10-year increments, Armstrong asks us to look up to 100 years into the future. She calls this "black sky thinking." 

"What is most interesting about synthetic biology and living technologies is that politically they represent the fusion of nature and machine, which is an interesting eventuality for Marxism and socialism and the idea that humans perform best when working ‘in a state of nature’. And if the ideological left can embrace the potential of synthetic biology and living technology as allies in the means of production then perhaps a real strategy to counter capitalism and its exclusive, destructive hierarchies, is possible. In the built environment we have a clash of infrastructures between the rigid mechanical infrastructures of modern architecture and the flexible networks of the natural world. My research takes a bottom-up approach to how to best use materials to engage the intersections of these spaces. As such, the process itself is symbiotic not a totalitarian invasion or razing to the ground of what already exists but takes a strategic approach in which new structures are wrapped around old ones, rather like biological evolution itself."

Paraphrasing Armstrong again: "Resources that have taken geological timescales to accrue at the fertile interface between the earth’s molten iron core and its atmosphere — our seas and soils — are now being rapidly stripped through geological scale industrial practices such as mining, deforestation, over-fishing and ocean pollution. Working with nature means taking stewardship of an extended network of influence in our world, which needs to be maintained by reinforcement — through technologies, human interaction, and the participation of non-human agents such as bacteria and synthetic biologies. At the start of the twenty-first century a set of conditions facilitated through the complex networks embodied in the digital age is prompting the emergence of a new paradigm, The Age of Complexity, which more colloquially can be thought of as an Ecological Paradigm. Nanotechnology, Biology, Information Science and Cognitive Technologies are research fields that possess the kinds of qualities that could result in disruptive innovation. Human development is now enabled to synergistically evolve with the biosphere and help us coauthor an ecologically engaged future. Influence by engagement rather than through control. Nature will always be a potent force that can overwhelm us so our task in a living culture of materiality will be to remain engaged and ‘conversant’ with those agencies that we rely on."


Keywords: agency, biology, cooperation, duality, ecology, embodiment, engagement, evolution, foresight, life, stewardship, symbiosis, synthetic, technology

[1] The topic of dualisms was also brought up in the famous saying of Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin (Seigen Ishin): 
老僧三十年前未參 禪時、見山是山、見水是水、及至後 夾 親見知識、有箇入處、見山不是山、見水不是水、而今得箇體歇處、依然見山 秪 是 山、見水 秪 是水
Translated: "Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters."
(Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, New York, Pantheon Books, 1951, p. 126, 220 k)