Network Ecology

Globally networked risks

"You could know all about a crow flying but you wouldn't know a flock.” - Amy Hodler (2019)

"The dots are very seldom connected in the media." - Al Gore (2017)

“I think the next century will be the century of complexity.” - Stephen Hawking (2000)

"We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." - Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank..." - Charles Darwin (1859)

Every once in a while I forget something and then get frustrated trying to remember what it was. But at the same time I should remember that there are entire worlds of knowledge that I have never known yet are far more important when it comes to my life. So why am I upset in the first case and blissfully unperturbed in the second? It makes no rational sense. What is the best way to view our original state of ignorance, loss, and revision when it comes to information? Cathy Legg recently wrote “The Solution to Poor Opinions is More Opinions”. Recall the old saw "I've forgotten more than you'll ever know", we might as well say that the solution to forgetting is more remembering. None of this might make any sense, until it is viewed from the perspective of networks. Legg wrote: “Peirce [known for his logical graphs and diagrammatic reasoning] defines the community of inquiry as containing indefinitely many inquirers and stretching across indefinite time... It is worth noting how the infinite framework elegantly allows that no matter how wide a consensus exists on a given belief, it is always possible that another inquirer will come along, at a later time, and manage to overturn it."

 

Lately I’ve been learning about data structure on the advice of a few people. This is a central concern for making accurate models and understanding how they function and change, how they communicate meaning and enable useful predictions to be made. It appears that graphs, formed with numerous nodes and vertices, like the structure of neural networks in biology, are best able to capture structural data. It is a systematic way to represent the complex relationships among things. “In the graph world, connected data is equally (or more) important than individual data points.” Artist Anne Jess has used her background in systems thinking and analysis, process mapping, and database design to help facilitate organizational and individual change through her graphic recordings (see examples 1, 2) at events like the Alaska Forum on the Environment. Her skills clearly highlight some of the network dynamics operating in the subjects she tries to capture. We can go further than this. So where to begin? Spreadsheets alone are inadequate. But we can experiment with creating a small scale 'knowledge graph'. Software such as Roam has made this easier for generating personal and organizational knowledge graphs. Regarding the current version of Roam software, Nate Eliason wrote “Each note has relationships to other notes, but no note lives inside another note or notebook. All of the information is fluid in the sense that you flow between notes based on their relationships, not because they’re all in the same folder or hierarchy... Roam has removed almost all the barriers to creating new relationships between the information you’re collecting.” Next, we can write down a 'target data distribution' (a goal) to align individual and collective interests, then intervene on the current state of the system by using a process theory, such as the Active Inference formalism, to generate a path-of-least-resistance for reaching that target. Daniel Friedman noted, "the relational stance is shared with Active Inference. The key areas are geometry, topology, graph theory, and network science. Also vectors, dynamic systems, as well as structural modeling." The bottom line: We need to be able to connect disparate data elements in a better way if we are going to tell a convincing story where each person has a stake in the outcome of the system.

 

Early attempts to utilize a graphical or network approach to improve efficiency include the use of a 'zettelkasten'. Niklas Luhmann wrote an article outlining the design and function of paper-based zettelkasten in his article “Communication with slip-boxes”. David Clear described how using this approach, individual notes become knitted into a growing web of ideas. More notes means more ideas and more connections, and the more ideas and connections you have, the “smarter” your Zettelkasten becomes. Richard Meadows noted that this latticework with a large surface area helps new ideas stick and creates more opportunities to combine knowledge in original ways. Interestingly, Al Khan describes yet another benefit, and this has to do with the distinction between hierarchical and associative knowledge. "Because of specialization, the rate of scientific progress increased by a large extent. The trouble is, as the number of specializations increased, the gap between disciplines also grew. Every discipline got split up into many disciplines, and as soon as you know, there were a lot of them to choose from. (How undisciplined!) The increasing gap would then make it difficult to keep up with knowledge - let alone make use of them. This is exactly the problem with category-first approaches to knowledge management. Once you predetermine the categories, it gets difficult to connect ideas from one category to another - let alone multiple. Each idea becomes a rigid part of its category." The zettelkasten grows organically instead; and rather than arborescent and hierarchical, they are rhizomatic and associative. 

In many of the earlier blog posts I explored related ideas, such as the capabilities of machine learning and "human computation", the nature of semiotics, the importance of generalized synchrony, and workforce modeling. Here I will attempt to explain why network science is a prerequisite for aligning individual and group interests using the process theory of Active Inference. Many commentators have observed the potential power of combining graph theory with machine learning, but these still require the addition of a process theory for goal pursuit (evolution, for example, is a process theory). That's why with Active Inference, network science can become more than just a novel academic exercise or marketing tool, it can become a descriptive tool for illuminating complex global dynamics. Similarly, the power of algorithms derive not from their programming code, but from how they relate and connect, as seen from a process orientation. The 'quantified self' movement describes the state space for healthy functioning, but it lacks a process approach. A script is a graph of relations, but A Variational Approach to Scripts is able to see how these can and do change in an adaptive fashion. I'll return to the powerful combination of network science and process theory frequently.

 

Kim Stanley Robinson was recently interviewed and shed light on a few of the reasons why network science is important. "My son works in a grocery store and is therefore categorized as an essential worker. He gets a bit of hazard pay because he’s exposed. All of the people who are doing the jobs that keep us going, that are treated as cogs in a machine at minimum wage, our perspective on them has changed. The people doing essential work don’t even get paid enough to live properly; the discrepancy is so stark... When you regard nature as our extended bodies, the first biosphere is the human being. For either to thrive, both have to thrive. Certainly for humans to thrive, the biosphere has to thrive." As I noted in my earlier post on workforce models, essential workers occupy 'bottleneck points' in the economy which can be located on a graph of society. And if the first biosphere is the human being and the second is nature, then we could generalize that it is possible to arbitrarily define endosemiosis (the 'internal states' of Active Inference) and exosemiosis (the 'external states') within an encompassing semiotic web. Lauren Holt notes that this web "represents a relatively whole and billion-year stress-tested form of adaptive complexity". That's why the safest and most effective path for ensuring our survival in the Anthropocene is simply protecting the ecological networks we already have. Kim Stanley Robinson again: “We are individuals first, yes, just as bees are, but even as an individual, you are a biome, an ecosystem, much like a forest or a swamp or a coral reef. Your skin holds inside it all kinds of unlikely coöperations, and to survive you depend on any number of interspecies operations going on within you all at once. We are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies. This is shocking news—it demands a whole new world view.”

 

Zettelkasten (David Clear, CC) or hypergraph?

Annette Baier said that trust, a basic relation between particular persons, is the fundamental concept of morality. And the first experience we have as babies is trusting that our mothers will care for us and respond to our needs in a loving way. Our fragile bodies soon die if neglected long. Trust is rooted in reciprocity. Without that dependability, trust evaporates. This is the "ethics of care." Without trust one might conclude that cooperation, and indeed society itself, is impossible. Care for our common home is rooted in our mutual trust and expectation that the Earth, simultaneously the mother and cradle of life, will always be able to provide our needs. This sense of 'relatedness' is among the three basic needs identified by Self-Determination Theory in its description of psychological well-being. People need to have a sense of connectedness; each of us needs others to some degree and to understand the relevant relationships and networks we can depend upon. This is also why a primary goal of education is to create learning situations in which youth learn through working along with more expert peers or adults.

 

Judea Pearl used 'causal diagrams', which casts network science in a pivotal role for ushering in a 'causal revolution', as he poetically describes his research efforts. In his book Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, he wrote "Graphs are the most common metaphor for communicating and reasoning about conceptual dependencies (relations) such as causation, association, and relevance. Graph concepts are so entrenched in our language (e.g. "threads of thoughts", "lines of reasoning", "connected ideas", "far-fetched arguments") that one wonders if people can reason any other way except by tracing links and arrows and paths in some mental representation of concepts and relations." (p81) "Most reasoning systems encode relevancies using intricate systems of pointers, i.e., networks of indices that group facts into structures, such as frames, scripts, causal chains, and inheritance hierarchies. These structures, though shunned by pure logicians [with the possible exception of Peirce], have proved to be indispensable in practice, because they place the information required to perform an inference task close to the propositions involved in the task. Indeed, many patterns of human reasoning can be explained only by people's tendency to follow the pathways laid out by such networks." (p13) Arran Gare noted the importance of ecosemiotics in his book The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization, which also seems to be the basic idea behind what has been called 'network ecology'. More prosaically, network science can be applied in many common everyday situations, for generating 'family networks' that expand the notion of genealogy beyond lines of descent to include social and cultural interactions of any kind (the sort of 'social physics' Alex Pentland calls 'Promethean fire'). It can be used to model not just employee relations, but the individual actions and job responsibilities of each employee, a possibility rife for abuse under current market system dynamics. And network science could shed more light on curricular activities like foreign language learning, memorization techniques like the method of loci, the biology of slime molds, and extracurricular interests like the small world systems within aquaria. 

 

For a contemporary application, translation from theory to action begins when we "characterize the system organization". Identify the networks involved, the various adaptive strategies, and how each strategy can be divided into still smaller components. Diagrammatically link all of these. For example, pumped energy storage might influence fisheries, wetlands, and riparian ecosystems. Due to these network connections, resources and information (components) should be shared among these strategies, improving organizational efficiency. This same method can be used to identify and communicate with stakeholders whose interests are aligned (directly or indirectly) with the success of any given strategy, and which of these stakeholders may be best positioned to assist. As system characterization progresses, it may later become possible to make predictions about the system that are not readily obvious, and explore alternative action paths with greater detail. Later, combining network science with a process theory provides a foundation for decision making by allowing you to demonstrate that you've leveraged the information contained in the network to find an optimal 'path of least resistance' for reaching your stated goal. So the more information you have, the greater the chance that your path was optimized, and therefore most likely to succeed. Of course, by simply using knowledge of the network, many people can find an acceptable path just by comparing two or more options, so strictly speaking a process theory isn't needed at first. However, when the network becomes too complex, the use of a formal process theory like Active Inference might become very useful.

 

The vast majority of Internet users rely on the Google search engine, and Google is expanding the use of it's 'knowledge graph' (you have likely seen this already whether you realize it or not). Other companies, such as Neo4j, are also developing graph databases to assist machine learning and other artificial intelligence approaches. Hopefully some of these approaches will utilize process theories, like Active Inference, to increase generalized synchrony among numerous agents within a global milieu. The row and column structure of a relational database, with its "join" operations and the like, are not likely to rise to this challenge. George Anadiotis writes: “Leveraging the connections in data is a prominent way of getting value out of it, and graphs are the best way of leveraging connections. Graphs give you an edge.” So why don’t we see a more concerted effort and prominent use of network science in other fields, besides those of business (tech companies, marketing, fintech, etc)? Anadiotis goes on, “Knowledge graphs are a rebranding of a technology that goes back 20 years. Started out as Semantic Web, rebranded as Linked Data, now going by the knowledge graph moniker, this technology enables a number of things... Regulation should force Facebook to give users all the information it has on them at the push of a button... data sovereignty for user data... This could be the key to 'social networking minus the dictator' in the middle.” Here he has described the future of social networking. But we can also explore the darker side of network science (everything has its shadow) such as the 'pattern problem', or even more speculatively, perhaps Google's knowledge  graph is Lovecraft's 'information hazard' (see Nick Bostrom), the piecing together of dissociated knowledge, correlating all its contents, to open new vistas of reality. Depending on how you look at it, this is a wondrous or terrifying prospect. 

As David Kelnar put it "The first industrial revolution used steam power to mechanise production in the 1780s. The second used electricity to drive mass production in the 1870s. The third used electronics and software to automate production and communication from the 1970s. Today, as software eats the world, our primary source of value creation is the processing of information." This points to network science and process theories. These are capable of expanding the dimensions of what Stuart Kauffman has called the "adjacent possible" in almost unlimited ways. (As Gerald Ostdiek put the matter, "Accessing the adjacent possible is necessary for biology because we have to see the future state of having a full belly. We have to see a possible future, a full stomach. This becomes a game in a technical sense that is played by all living things.”) According to Ahmed Banafa, in information technology, a neural network is composed of tangled layers of interconnected nodes that learn by rearranging connections between nodes after each new experience." If this all sounds very organic to you, then you are getting the picture. Fritjof Capra wrote “Living networks continually create, or recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. In this way they undergo continual structural changes while preserving their web-like patterns of organization.” Of course, many things can still go wrong. All living networks, from the scale of individuals to planets, can die. The less we understand about how these networks function, the less likely we are to understand our impacts, and consequently the less able we are able to intelligently intervene to maintain them. A properly functioning network captures both direct and indirect relationships. This has the benefit of facilitating a distributed (even stigmergic) work structure where multiple projects and experiments can be coordinated concurrently with relative ease. Moreover, by simply making the indirect network connections clearer, it is possible to make them more salient and promote public engagement. This is immensely helpful from a narrative, storytelling perspective (recall how this can also lead to conspiratorial and manipulative thinking when those indirect relationships are inaccurate). And most importantly, understanding network dynamics (including tipping points, leverage points, bottlenecks, etc.) can make the pursuit of complex goals involving many steps more efficient.

 

Live graphic recording by Anne Jess

Donella Meadows founded the Balaton Group as an international “network of networkers” for leading researchers on resource use, environmental conservation, systems modeling, and sustainability. In her essay on leverage points, Meadows wrote "Leverage points are not intuitive. Or if they are, we intuitively use them backward." This is an excellent point. Some policies, such as a market wide revenue neutral carbon fee and dividend approach, have notably been criticized for being structurally problematic. Now intuitively, a tax on carbon is an obvious leverage point. But in practice, it is only effective under certain conditions, and many economic models have not adequately accounted for significant sources of resistance. When we let intuition drive policy, we sometimes end up taking the path of greatest resistance, instead of finding a path of least resistance. Meadows' insights have also been used when examining global risks. She wrote: "How do you change paradigms? In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You model a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole." To 'think outside the box', we have to first model what was inside it and point out its failures. That requires knowledge of the box, or the particular paradigm under investigation. This reminds me of an illustration from Robert Kegan's book "In Over Our Heads" that depicts network growth from individual to collective. As a network grows in complexity (or spatiotemporal depth) it also contextualizes localized regions of smaller scope. Thinking outside the box is like the process of growing a network; it should add context to existing knowledge, providing a new vantage point from which it can be viewed. Otherwise we haven't gained anything. Modeling complex system interactions highlights the importance of having a really good plan for information management and accessibility. In a bottom up decentralized organizational structure information flows in multiple directions simultaneously, informing planning and implementation strategies for various network members and their projects. Meadows understood the importance of these information flows and feedback loops, but the tools available to her for modeling them were likely more limited than they are today. 

 

Conspiracy Theories

 

Cathy Legg's view (described above) that more opinions contribute to a community of inquiry, should bring to mind a growing network with multiple connections (fitting given the connectionist perspective of semiotics). Consider another recent line of research on opinions, this time on the structure of conspiracies, as described by Timothy Tangherlini: "While the popular image of the conspiracy theorist is of a lone wolf piecing together puzzling connections with photographs and red string, that image no longer applies in the age of social media. Conspiracy theorizing has moved online and is now the end product of collective storytelling. The participants work out the parameters of a narrative framework: the people, places and things of a story and their relationships.” What he's describing is simply the weaponization of storytelling. A critical reader will not accept all information or claims to authority at face value. Sometimes such claims are more explicitly stated, as is the case with fact checking websites, but more often they are merely implied, as is the case with the majority of news sites and aggregators (social media has become a primary source of information for many people). It is the responsibility of each of us to use critical thinking skills. And when we are not an expert on a subject (which is most often the case), we should seek a second opinion, the evaluation of a third party, look for additional context, and listen to multiple perspectives. All these methods can be used for controlling the influence of personal bias, weighing the available evidence, and establishing truth to the best of our ability. This is, in other words, a dynamic network. 

 

Jon Ronson writes that it is not uncommon for a public figure who has been "monsterised" by the majority opinion to be deemed a "magnificent hero" by a minority clique. As a consequence of this, upon observing such situations, many people who feel excluded by the majority are likely to feel aligned with the clique who deems such a person a magnificent hero. This seems to be the story of polarized politics in America today. It's also a dynamic has been characterized in social network analysis using "balance theory". According to Anatol Rapoport: "The hypothesis implies roughly that attitudes of the group members will tend to change in such a way that one's friends' friends will tend to become one's friends and one's enemies' enemies also one's friends, and one's enemies' friends and one's friends' enemies will tend to become one's enemies, and moreover, that these changes tend to operate even across several removes (one's friends' friends' enemies' enemies tend to become friends by an iterative process)." But note, although "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" may be a balanced network, it is not true, for example, in a graph of three mutual enemies. This much is apparent to anyone who has attempted to map the key players and notable relationships in the Middle East (see David McCandless' graph). Aside from this, we must consider the additional complication that both friends and enemies take numerous, and sometimes contradictory, positions on various matters of consequence, making a simple "balanced network" assessment problematic.

As Lois Beckett notes, it's important to understand how facts are part of narratives that are supported by a network of social connections, and how sometimes these can be very deceptive. Alexander Hurst wrote: “Those caught in the web of Trumpism do not see the deception that surrounds them.” So how do we make that visible and bring contrast without retrenchment? Consider a building on the verge of collapse. There is a process to saving it. You need to first examine the existing structural network (assess the situation), stabilize and reinforce whatever tenuous supports it currently has (affirm the existing synchronous relationships with reality), then build upon these (introduce new connections to healthy concepts and relationships), and following sufficient improvement one can later replace original elements that could lead to failure later (review and reform any remaining maladaptive network structures). Membership in service organizations like Lions, Rotary, and fraternal organizations like Freemasonry, has declined, as has many religious groups. And of course labor unions as well. How do we grow healthy networks? I think it begins by asking what purposes networks serve, why do they exist in the first place? Originally social networks helped people to meet their basic needs for survival and essential services. It's why we formed families, tribes, and developed culture - the original networks. If older social institutions are in decline, it may be that these needs are being met elsewhere (social media?), or they no longer meet that need (disaffection with religious dogma), or the needs are simply going unmet (declining enrollment in post-secondary education). Trumpism has taken advantage of the vacuum left by eroded social institutions and unmet needs, as well as the changing cultural and technological landscape. It is aided by the increased ease of spreading disinformation. Far-right populism provides a psychologically seductive home for people who feel abandoned, and actively seeks to recruit them to forward it's own aims. Changing this situation won't be easy, but it includes a whole slate of public policy reforms to reduce inequality and strengthen democratic institutions, restore a stronger safety net or 'basic needs guarantee', and maybe a 'data bill of rights' (social networking minus the dictator in the middle). Improving trust in social institutions and cultivating participation in healthy networks goes hand in hand.

Interventions, no Deus ex Machina

 

I think it is an important visioning exercise to imagine what form a local regenerative food system might take. My former teacher in sustainable agriculture, Craig Gerlach, bemoaned the lack of support for more ambitious work in agriculture within Alaska's university system, despite the capacity for it. As temperatures rise globally, northern regions are likely to produce a higher percentage of agroecological products. The need exists, and the potential to meet that need is real. We should elevate this sort of conversation to the state level. But a word of caution. There are two things people tend to consistently underestimate: anthropogenic impacts, and anthropogenic innovations. The 'doomer caucus' understands the anthropogenic impacts of "neoliberal economics, hyperindividualism, and atomistic approaches", and based on these they have predicted "inevitable near term social collapse". It's a very tempting narrative. The problem is that this has become a 'fait accompli' and a 'deus ex machina' for all sorts of ideas. We know that global risks are very serious, and our ability to sufficiently control conditions necessary to sustain ourselves is far from assured. But we habitually struggle to understand, and consequently tend to underestimate, anthropogenic innovation. Bendell himself warned against "implicative denial" in his paper, but I think he and others may be in denial regarding innovation. This is tragic, as it would be just as dangerous to fail to see how the effects of anthropogenic innovations may be only too successful. If "near term collapse" doesn’t occur and offer the deus ex machina to save us from ourselves, and "far term collapse" is unrecoverable, then what will save us? 

 

We must learn how save ourselves from ourselves by means of voluntary, strategic interventions. It's a gross oversimplification, but "Step one: societal collapse, Step two: local food production" is a common enough narrative that it deserves mention. Our visioning exercises cannot only assume this or variations of it. Instead we must rather assume that some sort of voluntary change to our social institutions will be required, and from this starting point consider what would foster a locally sustainable food system. No deus ex machina will provide the necessary conditions for us. This is why focusing on mediating complex networks of relationships, between local efforts at food production and storage, and the perverse incentives that operate within the larger global economy, will remain a significant obstacle to sustainability. That is, until they are addressed, and I am confident that there is more than one workable solution capable of addressing them. As we invest a percentage of surplus money, time, and energy toward creating the conditions for the healthy patterns of a regenerative culture, we will have to devise ways to mitigate disruptive social and economic forces, to make our state less fragile and more robust. Framing these efforts within the context of preserving our values and beliefs is essential. Today we live in the context of a market economy with accelerating social and economic inequality. Given such constraining social structures, many people feel trapped and unable to change their habits. We do value health, and want a healthier life, but as another saying goes, "How do we get there from here?"

Since there are multiple values and beliefs that can be described in various arrangements, there will always be some that we want to preserve and others that we want to change. We can distinguish between these. For example, if our congressional representatives share the value of food security and critical services, this alignment is a productive place from which to try to build consensus. Typically, the differences between political parties are less about the importance of basic needs or primary values, and more about the particular methods by which they are met. So in this example, while we all value food as a basic need, we might disagree on whether ensuring an uninterrupted supply of it should be achieved through market mechanisms or government planning (individual or collective), and so on. If we frame the discussion at the level where we agree - the primary concern of ensuring access to food at all times - and focus on this place of value alignment, it's more likely we can make progress toward that goal. In the course of negotiation one or both sides might change beliefs about the relative merits of an individual or collective solution, as that is a secondary concern. (In all likelihood we'll find that distinction somewhat arbitrary.) In best case scenarios, some values and beliefs are preserved, others are changed. 

 

Food security and physical activity are among the top concerns of public health advocates, along with access to basic services. Many people do not have a healthy diet that includes cooked whole grains, vegetables, herbs and spices (and raw fruits). Instead they are eating overly processed foods with high amounts of simple sugars, trans fatty acids, emulsifiers, and low amounts of complex phytochemicals and insoluble fiber. This has consequences for the health of the human microbiome, and the digestive and metabolic health of the holobiont. Much of what is sold as food, and that we store in our pantries and refrigerators, should not be called "food", but rather hyperpalatable "pseudofood", per David Kessler (The End of Overeating). These products are often more readily available, heavily advertised, nonperishable, involve very little preparation to make, and provide a quick hit of dopamine when they hit the tongue. In short, we've made eating pseudofood as frictionless as possible, and as a result (and in combination with other disruptive factors) Americans suffer from some of the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. How do we return to healthier food choices and consumption habits? A nation, not agribusiness, must shoulder the social cost of high rates of people living with chronic health conditions, and so the National Fruit & Vegetable Program recommended the public to eat "five a day". This has been replicated elsewhere. A recent study in the Lancet suggests developing effective package labeling, marketing controls, and creating a "mutually reinforcing set of policies". Because food consumption is highly contextual this could be referring to the links between increasing public awareness regarding health and food security, improving affordability and accessibility, structuring environments that support individual behavioral changes, food industry regulatory changes, and possible co-benefits.

Developing an integrated, regenerative society will require several abilities: to examine our principle ethical beliefs, to connect them to our immediate "lived experience", to identify and pursue longer term objectives in their service, and to evaluate whether the methods used to pursue those objectives are truly effective. This is a network with mutually causal processes and feedbacks; entering at any point will allow us to visit the other questions in almost any order. Exploitation most often occurs when this flow of information is somehow disrupted, when the consequences of our actions are either not known, willfully ignored, or kept hidden. Today it is becoming increasingly hard to do any of those, especially as we make these connections more salient and obvious. But of course it does still happen. The failure of Americans to wear a face mask during a pandemic was primarily a product of politicization, mistrust in social institutions, and online conspiracy theorizing. In cultures where these were less prevalent the public health response was far more swift and effective. But we shouldn't forget that overall there were as many successes as failures in our pandemic response. Not the least of which was the rapid development of an mRNA vaccine. The question remains: Why have these problems been so prevalent in America? One of the biggest reasons is that we have failed to put in place necessary public policy reforms to address growing inequality, strengthen our democratic institutions, and provide a stronger safety net or 'basic needs guarantee'. These have also been undermined in Brazil, and it's not a coincidence that they too have suffered greatly from the pandemic. Here again we see the dynamic interactions of a mutually causal network - without healthy social institutions, we will continue to struggle to achieve good outcomes, whether responding to a pandemic or create a regenerative culture.

While it is not uncommon to try to frame our solution options as being either primarily 'technical' or 'behavioral', there's a dynamic between these that sometimes makes a clean separation impossible. Of the two, I am more on the behavioral side, though more accurately 'relational'; we are trying to transform our relationships - to each other and the environment - so that these are shifted into a more sustainable, life affirming direction. There will always be a mixture of technical and behavioral elements. For example, we can develop the best vaccine in the world, but it will be useless if people don't take it. Is there an optimal mix between the two? It's context specific. Generally we'll choose whatever mix is most aligned with our values and beliefs, and this will be a moving target. The perennial lament of environmentalists is "we have sufficient technology to live sustainably today if we could only change our behavior patterns and social institutions". But these have proven to be frustratingly resistant to the sort of rapid transformative change that is required to meet GHG emission targets. I think one of the key bottlenecks to enabling greater behavioral change, and producing a rapid transformation is not insufficient technology, but simply insufficient information flow - between values, beliefs, goals, methods, and experience - and that this is what is primarily limiting the transformation of relationships we seek. So my main question is: What will increase that flow? (Though see the discussion on the aesthetics of convenience and friction below for more nuance on this topic.) These aspects seem to always be present to greater or lesser degrees: self-reliance and adaptation, collaboration and accountability, cultural understanding and awareness. The blind "who's on first" feel of things, despite attempts to build rapport and interaction, has characterized the policy response to current and projected disruption in Alaska. There's a tendency to compartmentalize and dissociate the impacted components, however we know they form an inherently networked system. I think we are "all in it together", but we haven't figured out the "diversity in unity" aspect that acknowledges how a truly efficacious group will likely emerge from heterogeneity and specialization within a more integrated whole, as this relates to communication in particular.

Cosmic Web, as modeled by IllustrisTNG

"The Rise of Network Ecology" by Borrett et al.

"Network Ecology is defined by the use of a general model – a network – and an analysis that resembles an instance of a general systems approach. It is a large and rapidly growing subfield of ecology. As such, it represents one approach in a broadly defined systems ecology, which has many types of specific ecological instantiations. Scientists broadly use network concepts, techniques, and tools to (1) characterize the system organization, (2) investigate the consequences of the network organization, and (3) identify the processes or mechanisms that might generate the observed patterns. Fundamentally, network models map a relationship(s) among a set of objects or actors. As such, they are a way of describing how objects are arranged with respect to each other that accounts for mutual dependencies and higher order characteristics in the resulting pattern. As a relational science, the central questions of ecology are about the relationships among species and their physical, chemical, biological, and social environments and how this ultimately creates and constrains the empirically observed patterns of species distribution, abundance, and evolution. Because network concepts, data representations, and analytical tools are broadly useful to address these relational questions, they have also become important within ecology forming Network Ecology as a subfield.

"A potential factor driving the rise of Network Ecology relates to the synthetic nature of constructing network models and their analysis. There appears to be a long-period cycle in science that swings between favoring more reductive scientific methods to favoring more synthetic or holistic approaches. Barabási (2012) argues that the rise of network science is in part because we are in a period of science in which we have reached the current limits of reductionism in many domains. Despite their typical presentation as a mutually exclusive dichotomous choice, it seems that science requires both reductionist and holistic approaches to be successful. As synthetic tools, network models provide a way to generate a more holistic understanding of a system by synthesizing data that might have been collected through more reductive methods. [Note: Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) arrived at many of these insights well before the advent of Western science; the attempt to uncover and understand observable relationships is as old as humanity (or life itself). In a sense, this paper identifies a research trend toward a more holistic approach and the methods by which that is occurring, a return, if you will, to TEK.]

"We see several areas where Network Ecology might develop further. One is the application of existing Network Ecology to address applied questions, such as assessing the effectiveness of management and restoration, or the potential impact of climate change. A second area is the application of network concepts, techniques and tools to new areas. Several scientists have begun to use ecosystem network analysis to investigate the sustainability of urban metabolisms and industrial networks [aka circular economies]. Future directions that Network Ecology can grow into include tackling the quantitative challenges of making inferences with networks and visualizing the structural complexity that network approaches can capture."

Down the networked rabbit hole, or "relations without relata"

In a recent interview with Robin Ince about his new book Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli [33:40] said: "In my reading, quantum physics is the discovery that we understand the world better in terms of relations rather than in terms of objects. Or more precisely, we can think about objects, but not objects that have all their properties by themselves, not as objects independent of the rest, but rather as objects whose properties are always relative to something else, how the object relates to something else. Since we describe objects by their properties, quantum physics is telling us that we should look at objects in terms of how they affect the rest. Which means that if there wasn't the rest then we couldn't say anything about anything. This, I think, is a core discovery of quantum mechanics, which was already an early intuition, but in my opinion has been becoming clear slowly with the decades, and in fact with the century of successes of quantum mechanics. This has an immense implication, because it tells us that, even at the fundamental level, it's better to think about reality in terms of relations. And this gives us better tools for thinking about things. Namely, think about the structure, not the individual, not the single thing. Think about the network of the way things affect one another, rather than in terms of the individual things. That I think is the main message of quantum mechanics, and obviously, in my opinion, it has an effect which goes much farther than just how atoms behave."

Carlo Rovelli is the champion of the “relational” interpretation of quantum theory. He can be challenging to understand because what he's saying is that the way most of us view the world is inaccurate. Let's contrast two possible views. On one hand, there's the view that objects are the fundamental components of reality, things like atoms and such. This is the view of classical mechanics, where physical objects are assumed to have values which are non-relational and exist at every time. According to this view, if we know the values of atoms then we know how they will interact with each other. On the other hand, there's the view that processes and interactions are the fundamental components of reality. "Relational Quantum Mechanics" (RQM) is one such view. According to this perspective, objects take value only at interactions. If you maintain the perspective of classical mechanics, then yes, only atoms and what make up atoms are all there is. Rovelli is saying that this perspective isn't accurate, and that the viewpoint of RQM, that interactions define things rather than vice versa, is more consistent with the observed evidence. "The idea that relational properties are more basic than the independent properties of a quantum system is profound", as Jianhao Yang summed up. Laudisa and Rovelli wrote: "The physical world must be described as a net of interacting components, where there is no meaning to ‘the state of an isolated system’, or the value of the variables of an isolated system. The state of a physical system is the net of the relations it entertains with the surrounding systems. The physical structure of the world is identified as this net of relationships. The notion of substance that plays a major role in western philosophy might be inappropriate to account for this science; perhaps the idea of a “mutual dependency” (Nāgārjuna) may offer a relevant philosophical cadre." For Laura Candiotto, RQM is a realistic theory that assumes "objects emerge as relational “nodes” or intersections of the relevant relations. Those nodes emerge from the web of relations, not the opposite." This requires a figure-ground shift in perspective, as Fritjof Capra noted in his book "The Web of Life". 

Manu-o-Kū, by Randy Bartlett (Kant's 'doves')

Quentin Ruyant writes that Rovelli's RQM is "an ontology of observers”, not necessarily human observers, but any physical object, such as a measuring apparatus, would qualify. It is relations “all the way down” - from particles to systems to human observers to experimental setups. Through the lens of Peircean biosemiotics, which is also relational, this might also be called "an ontology of interpretants or signs". It's a version of 'ontic structural realism' (OSR), per Laura Candiotto and Paul Austin Murphy. This 'thing-eliminativism' perspective has also been called "the most fashionable ontological framework for modern physics". As David Mermin succinctly describes the new Weltanschauung, "correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not". Another notable physicist, Lee Smolin, expands upon this view. He remarked: "When I work on the theory of spacetime and quantum space I draw pictures which are networks of relations and how they change in time, and they look just like pictures of ecological networks. Or the Internet. Or networks of people in interaction, in social interaction. Why do our pictures look the same as these pictures from biology and social theory and the Internet and so forth? I think the reason is that there is a deep relation between Einstein's notion that everything is just a network of relations and Darwin's notion, because what is an ecological community but a network of individuals and species in relationship which evolve?" Smolin elaborated: "It could be the most profound scientific generalisation of all time, in which everything in the universe emerges from a simple network of relationships, with no fundamental building blocks at all." As Carlo Rovelli sums up, there are no things at all. Instead, the universe is made of "only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it is possible to calculate possibilities and relations". 

 

In 2018 Rovelli said, "The variables of a quantum field acquire definiteness only in interactions between subsystems". This echoes Heisenberg’s 1925 milestone paper on quantum theory: “The aim of this work is to set the basis for a theory of quantum mechanics based exclusively on relations between quantities that are in principle observable.” Jim Baggott writes "Rovelli rejects the notion that a quantum system exists in an absolute, observer-independent state. Because our mathematical equations refer to information about the quantum system derived from our experience of it, we can say nothing meaningful about a quantum system with two measurement possibilities until it establishes a relation with a measuring device, at which point we see one outcome." As mentioned, RQM is about relationalism (an explicit form of OSR). There's another interpretation of quantum mechanincs called "QBism" that addresses the relationship between subjectivity and probability, which is somewhat orthogonal to the present topic the paradigmatic shift of decentering individuality so as to highlight relationality, but not entirely, so a brief description of QBism can be provided here. Christopher Fuchs, inspired by his mentor John Archibald Wheeler (famous for "it from bit" and "law without law") described a version of Wheeler's "participatory realism" by noting that probability doesn’t exist as something out in the world without a gambling agent. David Mermin is a fan; he recalls how Schrödinger wrote that quantum mechanics “deals only with the object–subject relation”. What does QBism stand for? Either "Quantum Bayesianism" or "Quantum Bettabilitarianism", which was adopted from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., paraphrasing, "I describe myself as a bettabilitarian: I believe we have 'bet ability' in regard to the behavior of the universe in its contact with us, but we don't know whether anything is necessary or not." In short, for QBism probabilities are subjective, not objective states, and reality is more than any third-person perspective can capture. On that last point, RQM and QBism are in full agreement. 

 

“Physics makes no reference to some passive underlying material substance; rather, all is now accounted for in terms of formal relations of relations," as Matthew Segall wrote. The original presentation of OSR was given by James Ladyman, per Massimo Pigliucci, “One very strong reason to adopt process- rather than object-based metaphysics is because that’s the way science has been leaning for a while. James Ladyman and Don Ross make the most compelling empirically based case for process metaphysics in their masterpiece, Every Thing Must Go. Let’s finally do away with an ontology of universal substances and static objects, embracing instead the Heraclitean dictum: panta rhei, everything changes." But one need not go all New Agey or Buddhist. "Ladyman and Ross derive their metaphysics from the best physics available. Essentially their claim is that all currently viable theories in fundamental physics - including quantum mechanics, string theory, M-theory and their rivals - have in common principles like non-locality, entanglement and such, which point toward the surprising conclusion that “at bottom” there are no “things,” only structure. But physicalist reductionism - the idea that all the special sciences and their objects of study will eventually reduce to physics and its objects of study - is out of the question. “Things” (and causality) must go at the fundamental level, but these notions need to be retained at the level(s) of analysis of the special sciences."

Geoffrey West describes a few network principles: "You have 10^14 cells. You've got to sustain them, roughly speaking, democratically and efficiently. Natural selection solved it by evolving hierarchical networks. What are the principles that are governing these networks that are independent of design? First, they have to be space filling. They have to go everywhere. They have to feed every cell, every piece of the organism. Secondly, they have things like invariant units. That is when you evolve from a human being to a whale (to make it a simple story) you do not change the basic units. The cells of the whale or the capillaries of whale, which are the kind of fundamental units, are pretty much indistinguishable from yours and mine. There is this invariance. When you evolve to a new species, you use the same units but you change the network. And the last one is of the infinitude of networks that have these properties - space filling and invariant total units - the ones that have actually evolved by the process of continuous feedback implicit in natural selection are those that have in some way optimized the system." Describing his paper "Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?" coauthored with Max Tegmark and David Rolnick, Henry Lin said “You can think of a neural network as a key, and a generic machine learning problem (say image classification) as a lock. The big mystery is that neural networks seem to unlock almost every lock that we’ve tried. This is very odd, because there are so many ways of arranging crooks and hooks in a lock that one might expect any given key to fail epically. Give me a multivariate polynomial, and I can approximate it using a fixed, finite-sized neural network arbitrarily well. If you let me use weights that are arbitrarily small/large, then I can do it precisely. I think this is pretty surprising if you think about it. So what are we to do when confronted with this mystery? One thing you might try is to study the magic key. You might try to prove theorems and so forth about what the key can do. But while this work is very important and interesting, in order to solve the puzzle, you have to also study the locks!” Kevin Hartnett wrote: "Jesse Johnson proved that at a certain point, no amount of depth can compensate for a lack of width. A neural network will fail when the width of the layers is less than or equal to the number of inputs. But Rolnick and Tegmark proved that by increasing depth and decreasing width, you can perform the same functions with exponentially fewer neurons. They showed that if the situation you’re modeling has 100 input variables, you can get the same reliability using either 2^100 neurons in one layer or just 2^10 neurons spread over two layers. There is power in taking small pieces and combining them at greater levels of abstraction instead of attempting to capture all levels of abstraction at once."

 

Kevin Hartnett also described how schools are reframing science education in terms of a small number of basic concepts that inform the scientific perspective. These include “structure and function,” “patterns,” “cause and effect,” “stability and change,” and “systems and systems models.” The building and analysis of models is a perfect way for students to learn how to bring together multiple forms of evidence in the service of a larger scientific argument. After defining relationships between variables, they run the models and refine their work to better approximate real-world data. "It forces students to make connections between many pieces of science in a coherent way.” Today researchers are using networks to model the heredity of complex (highly polyphyletic) units of selection (such as holobionts, ecosystems, and Gaia) and account for mutual dependencies and higher order characteristics. Modeling these networks of relationships has the potential to help students develop a more holistic understanding and answer the “When are we ever going to use this?” question. Richard Prum wrote: "Network science is an exploding field of study. Network analysis can be used to trace neural processes in the brain, uncover terrorist groups from cellphone metadata, or understand the social consequences of cigarette smoking and vaping among cliques of high school students. Biology is a network science. Ecology investigates the food web, while genetics explores the genealogy of variations in DNA sequences. Few understand that evolutionary biology is also a network science." Albert-Lâszlô Barabási notes that while physicists have traditionally been involved in finding new sources of energy or discovering new materials, the focus is slowly shifting towards increasingly interdisciplinary problems at the boundary of physics, social sciences, biology and engineering. Sheizaf Rafaeli lamented, "The general public does not yet "speak networks." And as we've seen, the opposite of networking is not working."

 

Terminology incorporates notions of combinatorial depth and scale invariance

The terms 'system' and 'network' are often used interchangeably, leading to confusion over which is more appropriate in any given context. But contrasting obligate versus facultative (determinate vs. indeterminate) characteristics might be one possible way to distinguish them. For example, obligate symbiotic relationships are often characterized by a high level of functional integration and mutual dependence. But as we move more in the direction of facultative symbiosis, cooperation becomes more voluntary and speculative. Here the potential for a variety of optional synergistic interactions is open and often not fully explored. This is the difference between necessity and choice, between brittleness and flexibility. Necessary relationships simultaneously allow and restrict our exploration of the adjacent possible (which isn't always a bad thing). But the relationships we can choose provide affordances for completely novel forms of adaptive action. And through symbiogenesis we can expand our former boundaries in qualitatively new ways. Another way to state this is that networks (or the concepts under discussion here, by any other name) exhibit high combinatorial possibilities and are scale invariant. This feature, as Henry Lin pointed out, makes them ideal 'keys' to unlock virtually any problem. If you split a system into components, you get sub-systems. Put two together and you get a super-system. Do the same to a network and you just get a smaller or larger network. This suggests that the network concept is highly fractal, or scale invariant. There are many other less commonly used terms we could compare and contrast: web, net, scaffold, lattice, mosaic, collective, swarm, mesh, entanglement, confederation, or assemblage. In fields like neuroscience, biosemiotics, and ecology, the most useful approaches will likely allow the greatest combinatorial possibilities, in the most diverse ways, across all scales. As Steven Strogatz said "Both of these are common network themes, the small-world theme [combinatorial complexity], and the scale-free. There are a lot of other things going on. We’ve learned a lot more about networks in the past 20 years."

Myxobacteria - individual to multicellular aggregation

Life is Network

David George Haskell wrote: “Fifty years ago, Lynn Margulis showed that plant cells are miniature networks. We now know that the same is true of the leaf and indeed the whole plant. When we gaze at a maple leaf, we see not an individual made of plant cells, but a thrumming conversation, an embodied network. A maple tree is a plurality, its individuality a temporary manifestation of relationships. Biologists talk not of the ecology and evolution of individual plants, but of "holobionts," entities made of many species, all inseparably linked. The fundamental unit of biology is therefore not the "self," but the network.” Elsewhere he echoes, “The fundamental nature of life may be not atomistic but relational. Life is not just networked; it is network.” And he's not alone here, as John Rennie wrote, "Each passing year brings to light new varieties of interconnections and relationships among the ever-widening diversity of organisms, cells, genes and biomolecules known to science.” Ed Yong writes: "Genes don’t work in isolation. They influence each other in large networks, so that if a variant changes any one gene, it could change an entire gene network. These networks are so thoroughly interconnected that every gene is just a few degrees of separation away from every other. This is called the omnigenic model. Most genes matter for most things." Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone note some of the ethical and epistemic implications of these perspectives: “Connected consciousness stems from a widening of our self-interest, where we are guided by the intention to act for the well-being of all life. Within Buddhism, that intention is known as bodhichitta. Bodhichitta moves our focus from personal well-being to collective well-being, here the intelligence of the whole emerges through the actions and interactions of its parts. No one part has to have the whole answer.” In support, it has been noted that reconnection is the root etymology of the word religion.

In regard to how biological networks give rise to consciousness, Matthew Cobb wrote “The nervous system alters its working by changes in the patterns of activation in networks of cells composed of large numbers of units; it is these networks that channel, shift and shunt activity. Unlike any device we have yet envisaged, the nodes of these networks are not stable points like transistors or valves, but sets of neurons – hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands strong – that can respond consistently as a network over time, even if the component cells show inconsistent behaviour... Understanding even the simplest of such networks is currently beyond our grasp. Eve Marder, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University, has spent much of her career trying to understand how a few dozen neurons in the lobster’s stomach produce a rhythmic grinding. Despite vast amounts of effort and ingenuity, we still cannot predict the effect of changing one component in this tiny network that is not even a simple brain.” As Kerri Smith noted “Neuroscientists want to understand how tangles of neurons produce complex behaviours, but even the simplest networks defy understanding.” According to Ted Chiang, scientists have mapped every connection between the 302 neurons in C. elegans, but still don’t completely understand its behavior. And so we are left with a paradoxical sounding observation, which the network perspective might shed some light on. As Chris Anderson put it: “I can't think of any sense that a bird has that a drone doesn't also have (plus a lot more). The difference is all in processing and controls. Not only does a bird use an end-to-end neural network fusing all its sensors, but it also has many more degrees of actuation.” There is an analogy that can be drawn here. Our society is more like the drone, and less like the bird. Our network is too loosely integrated with numerous fragments and detached nodes. Or in other words, the link:node ratio is off - there are not enough links relative to the number of nodes. 

 

Only a few short generations ago Margaret Thatcher said "there is no such thing as society". We might just as well say that there is no such thing as individuals either, though she claimed otherwise. What was the point of that? This was a political statement, not a factual one. The denial of network effects in society has led to the poisons of responsibilization, privatised risk, performative masculinity, and numerous other public health problems. It's an infection that has influenced our scientific endeavors as well; we know that the computational metaphor is sheer hubris, and yet it has gained some traction. Replicating even the most basic biological processes is a far off dream, and ambitious projects to map the connectome to shed light on functional complexity have not met expectations. This is not to say that such efforts haven't produced some very interesting results, but these tend to illuminate how far we still have to go. There's more to neurology and cognition than our abstract models are currently capable of representing. Improving them will require a further shift in the direction of understanding networked interactions.

Is life characterized by "emergent" network dynamics? Natalie Wolchover writes: "Erik Hoel’s theory, called “causal emergence,” lays out his explanation of how consciousness and agency arise. Using information theory, Hoel and his collaborators claim to show that new causes can emerge at macroscopic scales. These scales gain causal power in the same way that error-correcting codes increase the amount of information that can be sent over information channels." But, are they emergent? According to Scott Aaronson, not necessarily. “It was hard for me to find anything that the world’s most orthodox reductionist would disagree with." But Hoel says his arguments go further: “Higher scales have provably more information and causal influence than their underlying ones. It’s the ‘provably’ part that’s directly opposite to most reductionist thinking.” This relates causal emergence to Chalmers hard problem of consciousness. Hoel aims to show how higher-level causes — as well as agents and other macroscopic things — ontologically exist. He's worked primarily with Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness, which makes me think it would be interesting to consider if some combination of Tononi's "Effective Information", Rosen's "Anticipatory Systems", and Friston's "Active Inference" could lead to more fruitful biosemiotic discussions concerning agency. Versions of this have already been suggested.

 

We are all cousins

The network science perspective might not be a universal solvent (through the recursive application of its own principles it cannot be), but it is capable of characterizing certain important features of events, incorporating both proximal and distal causes. This makes it a uniquely powerful tool for understanding cultural events that defy a simple analysis. That’s not to say such analyses are necessarily wrong, just incomplete, as there are important things to note from both granular and aggregate levels. How do we place all these within a complete and factual narrative? From an earlier article by Brandon Ogbunu: “Network science’s ability to connect disciplines might be its greatest attribute. With this comes the ability to adapt and respond to the state of the world, and deliver tangible insights, even solutions. In a modern social order that runs on bonds between people and is undermined by corrosive ideologies that drive wedges between them, the science of how we are connected has become a natural language for the world.”

In 1998 Brin and Page moved Google from their dorm rooms into offices. Also in 1998 Watts and Strogatz published their manuscript “Collective dynamics of small world networks”. And as James Gleick wrote, "The defining quality of a small-world network is the one unforgettably captured by John Guare in his 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation. The canonical explanation is this: "I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names." This, as we are all acutely aware, is how global pandemics spread. But it is also why in 2004 Chang, Rohde, and Olson discovered that "anyone who was alive 2,000-3,000 years ago is either the ancestor of everyone who’s now alive, or no one at all. Think about that: If a person alive in 1,000 BCE has any descendants alive today, they have all of us — even people from different continents and isolated populations." Six degrees of separation? Who knows. But definitely a consequence of small world networks. Christopher Vitale cautions that this terminology has limits: "As some theorists have argued, a node is ‘where a network intersects itself’, or ‘a node is a shortened link, a link an extended node.’ Ultimately, networks are perspectival diagrams whereby relation can be understood." We see that the relations of the human family are like a braided stream. Patterns of cultural and genetic exchange occur where the rivulets meet; some of the strongest currents also have the most diverse multicultural past. In our modern world, would we begin to lose genetic diversity if there are no longer physical barriers to prevent relatively isolated populations from interbreeding? Dawkins uses the metaphor of shuffling and reshuffling cards in a pack to demonstrate the combination of parental genes in offspring, and that therefore “there is no such intrinsic tendency for variation to decrease in a population” when different gene sources combine. “Genes don't blend, they shuffle.”  So even if all the people in the world are equally as likely to interbreed with any other person, no genetic diversity will be lost as a result.
 

Herbivore or carnivore?

If you can get past the intentionally provocative headline, after the first few minutes it's clear that in his video "Why I eat dog meat" Alex O'Connor is making a simple point in the satirical manner of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". If we can't determine how pets are intrinsically unique when compared to other farm animals, then we should see eating pets or pigs (dogs or hogs?) as roughly equivalent choices. The counterargument, not put forward here, is that the difference between pets and farm animals isn't about the animals themselves at all. The difference is that we choose to form a special relationship with some animals and not others (for various reasons). So why are relational rather than intrinsic considerations so convincing? On a personal note, like most kids I know, I was born an omnivore. Not out of any principled reasoning of course but simply due to the naivete of childhood. I later became a vegetarian for a few years as a teenager after considering the broad biological similarities shared among animals and attempting to uphold an equal application of ethics. But then in my 20s I developed a better relational understanding, and saw that ethics wasn't just about the individuality of living things. We live in a highly contextual network of interactions, and it is the nature of these interactions that determine the health (or lack thereof) of the larger system. Such a relational perspective implies that it's not about what you eat per se, but how what you eat is a consequence of this network of relationships, and that at larger scales these relationships feed back into the system of which you are a part. Long story short, there are situations where eating more or less meat may (or may not) be the most defensible choice to make. It is always contextual. 

Survival of the Largest Networks

Kensy Cooperrider interviewed Brian Hare, author of "Survival of the Friendliest", providing a brief introduction, "According to Brian and Vanessa’s account, self-domestication was in fact the force that allowed ancient humans to develop larger social networks and, in turn, more sophisticated technologies. So it may hold the answer to why we’re still around while other hominin species — like the Neanderthals — aren’t." Hare first provided some background, "There are many biologists that emphasize mutualism as an incredibly powerful evolutionary driver, all the way back to Darwin trying to explain how organisms cooperate. It’s been a major theme in evolutionary biology." Then he added, "I think the problem is that “survival of the fittest” in the public mind means competition, the big, the strong are the ones that win, and that groups of people who can claim to be fit are more valuable, and they deserve more as a result of their fitness. That’s the misconstrual. That’s not what “survival of the fittest” means in science and in biology. What it means is you’re able to reproduce and effectively pass on your genes. Really, one of the, if not the most successful strategy, is through friendliness that leads to new forms of cooperation."

 

Hare summed up, "When you take a step back and you actually look at nature, and you ask the question, “What organisms or classes of organisms have had huge evolutionary jumps where they went from being rare or not even really in existence and then they became dominant,” it’s almost always a story of a new type of tolerance that then leads to a new form of cooperation. Cooperation depends on tolerance. You can have all the sophisticated hardware you want to solve all sorts of computational problems, but if you can't share the goods that come from joint effort, you're not gonna keep cooperating. You have to have tolerance. If we're gonna work together on whatever problem it is, we have to benefit from that joint effort. Selection starts giving an advantage to those that are most tolerant." I recall how Sven Severing also compared the relative impact of sophistication versus cooperation, noting that it is really new forms of organization, not advances in technologies alone, that drives change. (See also “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Being Domesticated” by Colin Groves.)

Toward the end of the interview Hare provided some practical advice. "I’ve had people ask me, “Okay, well what would be the most high-impact thing you could do in the least amount of time and the least amount of resources?” There's beautiful evidence that even among groups that have a hard time getting along, if you have cross-group friendships, across different groups in the political spectrum, they act as bridges between those groups, and it really increases the level of tolerance in a cascading way and prevents the worst of human nature. But if there’s a chronic drumbeat of dehumanizing the other group, then that plasticity starts to wear thin even in the most normal of people. The other bad news is, based on the best experimental evidence to date, the number one way to have a group dehumanize another group is to tell them that the other group is dehumanizing you."

 

It takes a village to raise a child (or at least a grandma)

In 1997 Kristen Hawkes proposed the “grandmother hypothesis,” a theory that explains menopause by citing the evolutionary value of grandmothering. In addition to providing supplemental caregiving, grandparents foster the intergenerational transfer of ecological knowledge, maintain extended social networks, and (at least in humans) may have been a driving force behind the explosion of new tool types, art forms, and other cultural developments. Ben Mirin writes that, at least from a narrow perspective on evolutionary processes, "menopause should not exist; if the purpose of survival is reproduction, then there is no reason for an animal to stay alive when it can no longer have offspring". In short, the fact that nonreproductive grandparents exist contributes to a growing body of evidence for the critical role of agency in evolution. Investing our skill and abilities in the health and survival of our descendants has direct impacts on survival outcomes for the entire group. It would be interesting to see which conditions are most closely correlated, and how these are operating in society today as we move into a future that, in some significant ways, is more networked than at any time in the past. As Michaeleen Doucleff describes, "If you look around the world, you'll see that in many cultures besides Western culture, and definitely in hunter-gatherer communities, there’s an enormous amount of alloparenting. People tend to think of the nuclear family as traditional or ideal, but looking at the past 200,000 or so years of human history, what’s traditional is this communal model of working together to take care of a child. Americans do way more alloparenting than we give credit for, but often, we don't value the alloparents as much as we should: Nannies, day-care providers, teachers — those are all alloparents. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist, has done some amazing research where she shows that young children are basically designed to be raised by a group of people. And a lot of alloparenting is actually done by children who are two, three, four, five years older than the child. I think we underestimate what children can do — there are children I met who were, like, 12 years old, making meals and taking care of younger children. It’s because they’re given opportunities all along to learn those skills."

Over the long term, this increase in social networking, cooperative behaviors, and increasingly indirect links to improved member survival via alloparenting (or other means) has resulted in extended lifespans that are decoupled from a directly reproductive role. (Consider the highly eusocial insect species, for another example.) It would be interesting to see which conditions are most closely correlated, and how these are operating in society today as we move into a future that, in some significant ways, is more networked than at any time in the past. Kevin Kelly noted "network technology behaves more like an organism than like a machine, biological metaphors are far more useful than mechanical ones". This echoes Jaron Lanier's "Connection Test": Does a technology in question connect people together? He suggested we judge a technology by how well it facilitates an increase in relational activity. A. N. Whitehead said that "The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty." If that's the case, then how might networks underwrite the production of beauty? In what ways might competing 'attractors' within network dynamics sabotage and undermine this telos over shorter timeframes (here I'm thinking about the semiotics of deception, such as advertising, propaganda, misinformation, and instant gratification that have infiltrated and subverted the development of traditional social interactions within contemporary society).

 

A highly speculative representation

Cooperation Redux, or Why Networks?

When is the network metaphor useful, and when is it less useful? Whenever discussing generalized synchrony, harmonious interactions, and cooperation (or the absence of these) the network metaphor is the appropriate tool. It is also useful when characterizing living processes. Robert Rosen said “Life is the manifestation of a certain kind of (relational) model. A particular material system is living if it realizes this model.” Models map relationships among a set of objects or actors, and we see active inference (Friston) and inferential entailment (Rosen) as a few examples in this vein of thinking. Rosen believed that the computationalist perspective of the Church-Turing thesis was inadequate. (See also note on "degeneracy".) Likewise, Howard Pattee described the relevance of category theory, the measurement problem, and the epistemic cut (semantic closure). Computationalism describes very complex physical processes, which are features of many networks, but this perspective alone is insufficient to characterize living processes. It is 'necessary but not sufficient'. Purely computationalist approaches are detailed and seductive (like those of Akhlaghpour) but appear to be philosophically problematic. Robert Epstein has noted that this is the mainstream view, "that we, like computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental representations of it, but Anthony Chemero and others describe another way of understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world." Chemero's recent paper was critical of Active Inference for this reason, as he sees it emerging from the same computer metaphor.

In a letter to John Lilly on his dolphin research (cited in “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson's World of Difference” By Peter Harries-Jones) Gregory Bateson used an analogy which I believe can illuminate an important aspect of networks: “If a pattern is that which, when it meets another pattern, creates a third – a sexual characteristic exemplified by moiré patterns, interference fringes and so on – then it should be possible to talk about patterns in the brain whereby patterns in the sensed world can be recognized.” Let's examine this closely. If each separate pattern is a node in a network, and by linking them something new appears, what has just occurred? A synergy leading to a new affordance. The ability to harness this sort of potential is the power of cooperation, which is needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization. The emergence of genomes, cells, multi-cellular organisms, social insects and human society are all based on cooperation. To answer the original question, we need to use both instrumentalist approaches (reductive mechanistic processes) that describe the patterns, and realist approaches (synergetic network relations) to describe the moiré patterns and interference fringes. Borrett et al. in "Network Ecology" would likely concur, "Despite their typical presentation as a mutually exclusive dichotomous choice, it seems that science requires both reductionist and holistic approaches to be successful." My principal concern continues to be the existential challenges of environmental change and the altered habitability of certain regions of the world. But more broadly, this is just one symptom of a tendency that Christopher Alexander described: “In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction. In a society, dissociation is anarchy. In a person, dissociation is the mark of schizophrenia and impending suicide.” This was also echoed by Brian Kemple, “It is not an unreasonable conjecture that the seeming proliferation of mental ailments in the contemporary West is a creeping encroachment of unresolved cultural (and therefore psychological) fragmentation.” In "Honeybees, Communicative Order, and the Collapse of Ecosystems" Peter Harris-Jones wrote "Gregory Bateson argued that any condition of ecosystem collapse would be characterized first by a collapse in its communicative order... The ‘pattern which connects’, Bateson’s phrase, is vital to our understanding of mutual causality. ...research on global climate change tends to concentrate on the possible damaging effects of changes in the network of energy relations in an ecosystem, while communicative interactions in a systemic context is largely ignored." E.O. Wilson realized the importance of communication in the workings of the ant colony. Roger Lewin, in "Complexity" (p175): "In fire ants, for example, the nutritional needs of the colony are "known" by the whole colony, because the workers constantly exchange samples of their stomach contents, effectively creating a single stomach for the colony. Workers on the front lines of foraging therefore know what is going into the mouths of the young deep within the colony."

Social media problems and promise

Regarding an increase in targeted advertising for tactical gear to Facebook users, Igor Vamos writes "Better than banning more things would be to revisit how the algorithm makes its suggestions, and come up with a solution that provides more avenues out of the rabbit hole than in. Tweaking algorithms so that they still serve up variety and diversity is just one idea. If they are going to monopolize people’s media consumption, they should have to serve up some common ground. But maybe we can be more ambitious and try to create tech that builds society. Can our algorithms privilege love over hate? Can we make equations that appeal to our humanity rather than preying on our fears?"

Advertising is designed to reify a lie, to bring a fantasy to life, and normalize an industry that would otherwise only exist on the margins. The greater portion of advertising today seizes upon our emotional vulnerabilities and exacerbates them instead of relieving them. The trap, of course, is to get the customer to pay to relieve their anxiety, while the hidden truth is that usually the only way to relieve that anxiety is to realize it was all premised on a lie to begin with. Since the source of anxiety never really existed, no amount of purchased product will relieve it. (Hence the impressive stockpiles some have acquired while under it's influence.) So to address Vamos' question: "Can our algorithms privilege love over hate? Can we make equations that appeal to our humanity rather than preying on our fears?" This might be impossible without coming to terms with the fact that advertising depends on generating false anxiety, manufacturing desire, and perturbing agent-environment synchrony. In other words, advertisers seek to push us out of balance. The result is that one portion of a network extracts value from another portion of that same network. And unless the value is somehow replaced, this parasite-host dynamic will eventually lead to destruction. The parasite may not survive the death of the host.

Currently, countervailing forces to advertising are grossly insufficient. The pull of extracting value and concentrating it has been overwhelming. The only saving grace might be a growing understanding that these network dynamics extend across space and time and must be brought into synchrony to preserve their processes. Become too effective at isolating, manipulating, and functionally atrophying one portion of the network here and now, and we risk undermining the entire enterprise permanently. So if we are going to use social media to increase health and synchrony, then the algorithms would need to reflect a much more comprehensive understanding of network dynamics than they currently do. Facebook's current business model is still based on an insatiable parasitic model when instead it needs to reflect a symbiotic relationship. It must replace ever more targeted and persuasive lies to help companies sell stuff with a mission to suggest possible strategies for generating greater network wide symbiosis. How will it be able to do this? Sven Severing had some insight into that question. He wrote about the rise of humane, purpose driven organizations that focus on the needs of people and protection from other network participants. These organizations "embed humanity in their modus operandi, technology, and network rules". Today David Hogg, who has become a very polarizing figure, is trying to capture the pillow market from Mike Lindell. Does this suggest that Severing's "shift from today’s individual-based society (including social systems that are largely based on maximizing gains to individual actors) to a relational-based society (creating social systems that are largely based on maximizing gains for society at large)" is occurring? And if it is part of a larger trend, as Severing suggests, what can we predict for future market changes? I hope companies are taking notice of the growing trend of impactful media shared on Tiktok and other online communities reflecting this.

Cortical hierarchy and connectivity

The speed of transitions (in culture, energy, evolution, etc.)

One of the truly remarkable things about the time we live in is the understanding that large scale collective social changes have been occurring at an accelerating rate, affecting not only all of us (witness the spread and adoption of new technologies) but indeed the entire planet (compare Earth 200 years ago with Earth today - too bad we didn't have the same sensors and satellite software back then, the visuals would be very startling!). So we know that radical change over a variety of scales is possible. There's also growing evidence that energy transitions are happening faster than in the past (contra the more orthodox position adopted by Vaclav Smil and his acolyte Bill Gates). ...But I don't want to rehash the standard techno-optimist arguments (according to Yuval Noah Harari biotech augmentation is only the beginning), or reevaluate the doomer position, as each of these has its limitations.

The factors that cause change in society are complex, parallel, proximate, and distal, and furthermore they are physical, social, and philosophical (among other things). Understanding how these interact is essential to making any intelligent changes, so it's easiest to capture this using a network approach. We are getting better at this, and as a consequence we are also seeing where and how historical contingencies might've been intervened upon, at numerous junctures in the past, to produce alternate future scenarios or paths. This depth of counterfactual analysis is possible due to our increasingly networked minds. But the potential for understanding, intervention, and change is only available where it is culturally encouraged and supported. In too many cases our imaginations have become impoverished, and our habits restricted by social structures that instead encourage hyper-individualism. This prevents us from seeing the wealth of possible routes we can embark upon because most (if not all) of them depend on a multiscale approach. 

If hyper-individualism is harmful over the long term, then why would many of our contemporary cultural and social structures encourage it? I suspect a form of social cancer has metastasized and spread to many portions of society. It's an analogy that many people have used. Paul Davies, in "Somatic Mutation Theory of Cancer" wrote: "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." In effect, cancerous cells value their individual health and fecundity over the health of the multicellular network of which they form an integral part. David Korten elaborated, "Cancer occurs when damage causes a cell to forget that it is part of a large body, the healthy function of which is essential to its own survival. The cell begins to seek its own growth without regard to the consequences for the whole, and ultimately destroys the body that feeds it." Now apply this basic understanding regarding the importance of cooperative network interactions to the future of society, and it should be clear that if some portions of society seek their own growth without regard to the consequences for the whole, then why should we assume our fate would be any different? In cancer (both the physiological disease and the social disease) one portion of the network is extracting value from another portion of that same network, and unless the asymmetry is recognized and the value is somehow replaced (unless the dynamics somehow change), this parasite-host relationship will eventually lead to destruction for both.

 

But, as David Grinspoon pointed out "A cancer does not decide to change course. We could." Not only could we, we have before and in many places we are right now. It is likely simply a consequence of human psychology and the cognitive limitations of our minds (bounded rationality) that we instead assign greater salience to the perception of danger rather than signs of success, which tend to be overshadowed and discounted by the former. But they exist. The challenge we face now is to harness, leverage, and expand these successes while uprooting the factors that lead to the power imbalances of social cancer. But if we prematurely abrogate any multiscale network approaches before they are attempted, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. The good news is that these appear to be expanding rapidly.  

"Belief-based Intervention: perception (causal structure), interpretation (belief formation), action (intervention)" - Or - 

"Coupled Systems that exhibit agent-environment synchrony (telos-network alignment)" - Or -

Why to shape the relational dynamics of networks

Let's talk about why our ethical beliefs are important. Specifically, how they shape the networks of relationships we live in. More specifically, how beliefs and networks are brought into alignment. To begin with, we know that networks contain large amounts of descriptive information - the causal structure of the world. But how do agents process this information and interpret it in a way that allows them to discriminate among options and make choices? What should agents do in life (what is their telos)? To answer these questions we need a normative process theory that employs network concepts. Sebeok's semiotic web (Hoffmeyer's semiosophere) is a network approach for describing phenomena such as causal emergence, but lacks explicitly normative criteria. Paraphrasing Terrence Deacon from “Incomplete Nature,” (p392, 397): “Interpretation involves a distinctive kind of causal organization: some favored consequence must be promoted, or some unwanted consequence must be impeded. This is why an interpretive process is more than a mere causal process. It organizes work with respect to some normative consequence - a general type of consequence that is in some way valued over others. This allows causal linkages between phenomena, that otherwise would be astronomically unlikely to occur spontaneously, to be brought into existence. This is why information has so radically altered the causal fabric of the world we live in. It expands the dimensions of what Stuart Kauffman has called the “adjacent possible” in almost unlimited ways, making almost any conceivable causal linkage possible." Daniel Dennett concurs, agents have the capacity to anticipate causal processes and control their actions in light of some desired outcome. They are more than merely deterministic systems. But what sort of consequences are valued over others?

 

Darwin's theory of evolution is a selectionist process theory, but the normative criteria are often expressed as rough hueristics for survival. Building upon Darwin, Friston's Active Inference framework is a purely belief-based scheme that adds rigor to these heuristics by using the Free Energy Principle (FEP) to make a normative claim concerning the mismatch between organism and environment. Additionally, the scheme employs a network approach to relational dynamics. In short, agents adopt the normative policy "always minimize the mismatch". Synchronizing these organism-environment dynamics (which are circularly causal) is most effective when an agent is able to represent and interpret counterfactual possibilities, and has sufficient planning depth (or planning horizon) to avoid local minima and plan and execute the shortest path to their ultimate goal. This is necessary because such paths often involve excursions through state (and belief) space that point away from the goal. Also, an agent must also be able to update its beliefs if they are insufficiently supported by evidence within the available network (state space). But above all, successful interventions capable of bringing otherwise unlikely causal relationships (network structures) into existence, that thereby improve agent-environment alignment (generalized synchrony), depend upon the motive force (telos) of the agent's normative beliefs, policies (beliefs about action sequences), and narratives (networks of beliefs) concerning said relationships, as understood in the context of Active Inference. Hipolito et al. state: "In a nutshell, active inference says that action and perception are in the service of maximizing not a value function of states, but a functional of beliefs about states (known as variational or expected free energy)."

Let's see how these beliefs about network states operate in practice. Paraphrasing Ramstead et al., "Biological systems encode a model of their environment (including the states of their body) that can be viewed as a ‘map’ of the relational or causal structure that is then optimized (through action, perception, and learning) as the organism navigates and maintains itself in its environment." One of the prevailing metaphors for environmental optimization is niche construction. Paraphrasing Veissière et al., "Niche construction occurs when the agent’s action creates a symmetry between internal and external states; when agents try to make their niche conform to their expectations (Deacon's "unlikely causal linkages"). Qualitatively speaking, our prior beliefs (expectations) distinguish us from the external environment, though per Erik Hoel, technically these are "causally emergent" beliefs, as there is a general sense in which an environment might in turn have expectations of agents as well. Over time, the world ‘learns’ agents’ beliefs, through the manner in which it encodes regularities that relate to those beliefs, and as this occurs the mutually predictive information contained in such tightly coupled agent-environment systems increases. These normative beliefs, whose valence is most visible during periods of high arousal (the emotional intensity of a "fierce mental determination", a "resolute will"), are the result of interpretive processes that assign significantly preferential weights to certain causal relationships over others, and they can only be realized through our ability to predict and act. This is what gives rise to the apparently purposeful and autopoietic behavior of life. The practical applications might include leveraging agent capabilities for specific targeted network interventions, understanding individual psychology, translating cultural dynamics, or elucidating any other agent-environment interactions within and across multiple scales.

How to shape the relational dynamics of networks (supervenience and hierarchy in relational ontologies)

In 2011 Gregory Mone wrote "This Man Could Rule the World" about the early work of Albert-László Barabási. It's been almost a decade since then, so it's tempting to wonder what new algorithms are being used to analyze the massive amounts of data available to network researchers. Here he describes one powerful approach with a simple analogy:

"A car is made of 5,000 components," Barabási says, "yet you as a driver have access to only three to five nodes" — the steering wheel, the gas pedal, the brake, and maybe the clutch and shifter. "With those three to five knobs, you can make this system go anywhere a car can go." What he wanted to know was if he could look at any network, not just engineered ones, and find those control nodes. Among the thousands of proteins operating within a cell, could he find the steering wheel, the gas pedal and the brake? Barabási's team borrowed an algorithm, developed by Erdös and Rényi five decades prior, that acts as a signal moving through the network. It starts at one node and follows a random edge to another node, at which point it "erases" every other edge but the one it came in on and the one it will go out on. The algorithm runs through the entire network over and over until it finds the minimum set of starting points needed to reach every node in the system. Control these starting points, and you control the entire network.

"They tested the algorithm on 37 different networks, including a constellation of alliances within a prison population, the metabolic pathways in yeast, and several Internet communities. They found that denser, more interconnected networks tended to have fewer control nodes per capita. The more data they feed into the model, the better they can map connections in the network and the fewer control nodes they might need to operate the system. "We know these maps are incomplete," Barabási says. "But they're getting richer every day." As with most of Barabási's work, it will take time to make it useful. Finding the points of control is one thing. Actually exerting influence over a given network, be it Facebook or the human immune system, is an entirely different challenge. Control can be used for ill as well as good, of course. Marketers could learn how to better manipulate consumers, and governments could develop new techniques to cow citizens. It's up to us, Barabási says, to define how control should be applied and how it shouldn't be."

This should remind readers of my earlier article "Governance through Milieu" which began by quoting Eglė Rindzevičiūtė: "Michel Foucault tried to capture those forms of steering and control which did not seek to influence individuals as units, but rather focused on their “environment.” Here the environment referred to systems of relations, which these individuals were embedded in and functionally dependent upon." This is similar to the 'Promethean fire' of Alex Pentland's social physics. Pentland said "The challenge is to figure out how to analyze the connections and come to a new way of building systems based on understanding these connections, the causality of connections in the real world." But he added an important caveat concerning the difficulty of finding the relevant patterns in, for example, epidemiological data or social networks: "The most important limitation is that we are attempting to infer causal processes from observational data in which many mechanisms are likely at play. If we find that behaviors between two individuals are correlated, it could be due to influence, but it could also be due to selection or to contextual factors. These mechanisms are generically confounded. However the ability to use time data to test causal ordering, as well as asymmetries in network relationships to test the direction of effects, provides greater confidence when inferring causality" (Social Physics, 249). So Pentland has suggested there are workable solutions, just as Barabasi noted that even incomplete network maps are still useful.

The new tools for data analysis being developed should give us some hope that it is possible, at least in principle, to determine with a high probability which relationships will be most influential for shaping the future development of a system. This is good. At the time I drew the following analogy: "When behavioral therapists attempt to change individual habits, one of the most effective strategies (among others) is to prevent the problematic situation from occurring to begin with by taking steps to separate the individual from the triggering conditions and replace those conditions with healthier alternatives. The direct route of appealing to reason may not succeed so long as the wider milieu, the environment, in which these appeals are made isn't addressed. We must shift the focus to our environment, the systems of relations (both physical and social) which we are embedded in and functionally dependent upon." In other words, the most promising routes for system improvement will continue to depend upon our ability to identify and intervene upon the relevant relationships. Consider Sir Dave Brailsford, who applied a "marginal gains approach" to interventions (he was intrigued with "kaizen", the Japanese concept of continuous improvement). He believed that if we identify everything we can think of that goes into achieving a goal, and then improve each of the critical elements by as little as one percent, we can make a significant overall advancement.

Voronoi cell structure on a tensegrity gyroid

Percolation theory, phase transitions, and language learning

Consider tipping points in the climate system, the process of acquiring a new capability or skill composed of many individual parts (such as language comprehension and fluency), or theories of consciousness such as Erik Hoel's "causal emergence". As the world becomes ever more connected, the necessity of understanding these crucial transitions becomes ever more urgent. In her article "The Mathematics of How Connections Become Global", Kelsey Houston-Edwards describes how "percolation theory" provides insight into all these transitions: "Percolation networks are unified by one surprising feature: they all have a sharp pivot point where just a few new connections tie the network together. As links form in a new network, isolated pockets of connected nodes slowly emerge. But full communication appears all of a sudden as the density of nodes passes a critical and sharp threshold. Scientists describe such a rapid change in a network's connectivity as a phase transition — the same concept used to explain abrupt changes in the state of a material such as the melting of ice or the boiling of water. The question that scientists struggle to answer is: When? What is the equivalent, for any given network, of the zero degrees Celsius at which ice melts or the 100 degrees C at which water boils? At what point does a meme go viral, a product dominate a market, an earthquake begin, a network of cell phones achieve full connectivity or a disease become a pandemic? The answer depends on the exact shape of the network and is far from easy to find."

In "Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind", Anna Ivanova wrote: "Many great thinkers have drawn a strong connection between language and the mind. Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” Pick a mind that is still developing, and you will find that removing language will alter it for life. However, pick a mind that is fully formed and take all words away, and you will discover that the rest of cognition remains mostly intact. Therefore, language is a scaffold for our minds: indispensable during construction but not necessary for the building to remain in place." Percolation theory may be able to tell us when the fluency threshold is reached and the conceptual scaffolding network of language snaps from zero to one. Language corresponds with Peirce's category of "Thirdness" (semiosis and meaning), whereas music, for example, which plays with our perception, might be more closely associated with the category of "Firstness". Many people are capable of appreciating music upon first encountering it, without any prior exposure or instruction. But to grasp the meaning in a sentence, one must first have become encultured to the ways in which various phonemes are combined to produce specific meanings. The threshold of semiosis for language therefore may represent a phase transition that is more challenging to reach due to its inherent complexity. 

We can compare this 'phase transition' concept with the 'criticality hypothesis', which states that living systems will self-organize to operate near a critical point at the edge of chaos between order and disorder, robustness and innovation, where adaptability is optimized. Operating "at the edge" allows rapid reorganization in response to a stimuli. How does this work? If we assume that a specific web of links enables certain functions, then reorganizing those links into different patterns enables different functions. This supports flexible learning (and communication). That said, before an organism is able to learn with minimal effort the suitably complex patterns needed for survival, it must have met any number of preconditions for learning to take place to begin with. And that itself would involve phase transitions of a more fundamental (developmental) type. Bob Gross describes a balance between "preserving the key developmental processes" and allowing for some DNA alterations to create "variations among individuals". As Roli et al. point out, "Selection favours networks that are able to both (a) maintain the current phenotypes (i.e. attractors) and (b) generate new ones." Gross used the example of two different species of slime molds. In effect, self-organized criticality (SOC) in respect to phenotypic attractors supports evolution, where the adaptive features of degeneracy and redundancy play a large role. Returning to the example of language, one must first pass through the phase transition of language fluency before maintaining a critical state in regard to the specific semantic contents of language. For instance, the words themselves and their pronunciation and definitions are relatively stable (ordered), whereas the potential ways in which they can be combined and produce meaning is very open, potentially chaotic, and flexible (criticality). 

The telos of organisms is to seek out these phase transitions, passing through some - those networks that are species wide developmental preconditions - and maintaining them in relatively robust form, while holding others - those networks that enable them to maximize adaptive utility - in a mostly critical state. In evolutionary biology, 'punctuated equilibrium' (in contrast with gradualism) built upon developmental and genetic homeostasis, and stated that species tend to little or no morphological change (stasis) over most of their history. Perhaps the punctuations, periods of rapid morphological change, separate evolutionary phases in a manner that can be predicted using percolation theory. By means of imaginal cells, a caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis, a radical transition to a butterfly, whose ability to fly expands the adjacent possible and its affordances for action. An "ugly duckling" transitions into the beauty of a swan, lending apparent support to Whitehead's assertion that "The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty". Numerous spiritualists (like Ken Wilber) have proposed various hierarchical schemes and levels of transcendence toward enlightenment. Abraham Maslow described his theory of self-actualization, which mirrors other multi-scale perspectives on development. For Szathmáry, several phase transitions fueled by synergistic processes have occurred throughout evolutionary history, from chromosomes and multicellularity to society and culture. Futurists have attempted to project these trends, predicting revolutions in science and technology leading to cleaner forms of energy and the transition to an ecological civiliation that places human needs over market demands. Much of this is premised upon advances in network science, when applied to physics, biology, and ecology. This in turn has promoted a figure-ground shift in the predominant expression of thought in Western philosophy (see Candiotto and Capra, and more examples with Deacon and Escher), shifting the focus from objects back to relationships and contextual interactions, which many Eastern and Indigenous philosophies traditionally emphasized (heterodox figures in Western philosophy who have championed these are now being reappraised, see Lamarck, Peirce, etc). We develop our web of relations, making modest incremental gains in well being, in the hope that one day they will lead to the sudden emergence, perhaps of a new form of sublime beauty, or a thrilling experience, that we can only anticipate at present. It's a recognizably familiar story, enshrined within our culture as the ascetic archetype, the religious pilgrim on a spiritual journey, but it's also recapitulated in our daily mundane existence. Freud famously said "much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness", a rather modest sounding phase transition, but whose results were nonetheless very consequential for the quality of life of his patients.

Network neuroscience and self regulation

In her book "Sign Studies and Semioethics", Susan Petrilli notes that the origin of semiotics was in “medical sem(e)iotics” or “symptomatology”. Medical symptoms form a specific, identifiable constellation, the signs regularly associated with specific diseases, and if we recognize them we can intervene in the early stages of the etiology of disease. Jessica Gimeno said, "You need to know two things: your symptoms of depression and the strategies [protective factors] that work for you.” Being able to navigate through a network of symptoms and strategies is a skill we can develop through practice. As Jacqueline Sinfield noted, "Classic ADHD traits like hyperfocus, distractibility, indecision and procrastination all make transitions hard." The age of acceleration and instant gratification challenges our executive functioning and self regulation skills (especially for those who may already have attention deficits). The challenge is greater still given the rough shape of the networks within society today. In some cases, this situation contributes to performance levels far below what an individual is capable of. And when the asynchrony between performance and (perception of) capability is persistent, it increases one's risk for depression and anxiety. We should then ask: How can we improve external networks (in the social and physical milieu)? And how can we improve internal networks (for self regulation skills). Both need to work together and rise to the challenge presented by the modern information ecosystem. What sort of cognitive network is able to optimize functioning in the face of our current information onslaught? 

Therapeutically, producing a sense of efficacy is a very powerful tool. It is the relational evidence that an agent seeks to maximize, the evidence that their relational network has passed a phase threshold in respect to their telos. (Recall Karl Friston's claim that "valuable behavior is the accumulation of evidence for our beliefs about the world".) And like a falling domino, passing one threshold can begin a cascade of action that leads to reaching further relational thresholds. Although the appearance each threshold may seem sudden, it is essential to understand how the necessary network percolation that allowed it to occur built up relatively slowly over time. Of course, a cascade can proceed in either the direction of success or failure. But what about the speed of percolation? There's a quote attributed to Carl Jung: "The only way out is through" (cf. Zen saying "The obstacle is the path"). Keeping this in mind, a possible intervention strategy might be to find ways to accelerate phase transitions, without ignoring the necessary processes they fulfill within an agent's larger perception-action cycle, by altering select network processes that don't compromise value/beliefs. Sufficient spatiotemporal depth and combinatorial complexity within an interconnected field (process-relational network) allows us to anticipate and accelerate phase transitions within that field. A lack of these leads to brittle, inflexible, impulsive, and immediate gratification behaviors that frustrate our agency, self-efficacy, and telos. We can, in other words, find a shortcut through one phase and to the next, or where not available, see the route that will get us there without continually hitting the wall. 

But if we ask which network elements are meaningful to ourselves alone, but go no further, the real value and potential is lost. The question is, which are most meaningful to others? Which are most critical to our larger associations? Where do our networks coincide and where do they diverge? Only by carefully studying and learning these things, only by viewing networks through the eyes of another, by viewing the world as those who have cared for us and whom we care for in return, will we discover what is truly meaningful. Identify the networks we use, what they consist of, the locations of intersection and divergence, and how they influence our relationships. Do points of intersection take priority? Is it possible to invest more attention on points of intersection by means of changing our evaluative decision criteria? Social intersections are volatile sites, where radical phase changes are most likely to occur. By comparison, change is less likely to occur internal to an agent. That makes these peripheral, highly unstable sites less comfortable for avoidant personality types to occupy than the internal, highly controllable conditions. Consequently they are discounted. How does addressing this look, in practice? It will likely involve extending conscious awareness of the temporal horizon, and improving predictive capacity, to increase the salience of the harmful effects of asynchronous network dynamics at these volatile locations. This is the idea behind "free energy minimization", as conceived by Karl Friston. (Rediet Abebe displayed significant ability here, anticipating years ahead.) Compared to many alternatives, this has the potential to radically increase self-efficacy. As sites of volatility become more salient, those which are effectively less consequential in terms of their potential for creating instability (surprisal) must now be discounted (despite their former attractiveness). This is due to the fixed attentional budget available to an agent. Since belief is the foundation of action, values and beliefs must accommodate attentional shifts, or reversion will occur. So which value makes this possible? The value of controlled phase durations, punctuated by swift transitions, all selected and ordered in the context of a distant temporal horizon. As the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven." (One would think 'seasonal management' tools can improve performance.) Notably, this value can form a 'meta-layer' over existing preferences and dispositions. It does not displace them, but provides behavior with greater form and structure to increase an individual's overall efficacy. Beliefs and values are not developed in isolation, but are broadly defined by the larger culture and the intimate kinds of associations we form with other people and groups. Role models, social scripts, and narratives are influential. For Paul Condon the key is "experiencing oneself as part of a larger, interconnected field".

Jenny Anderson writes, "ADHD is a chronic neurobiological disorder which affects the brain structurally and chemically, as well as the ways in which various parts of the brain communicate with one another. ...Girls with ADHD are significantly more likely to experience major depression and anxiety, have few friendships, and choose unhealthy relationships in which they may accept punitive criticism and or abuse.” This, along with feeling “constantly in a state of being overwhelmed and frantic about coping with day-to-day basic things" is truly tragic. Anderson continued, "We have a long way to go in addressing the immense stigma and gross misunderstanding that surrounds this diagnosis." What defines a mental disorder is "a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning". It is the distress and impairment that are the primary diagnostic features of the disorder, structural or chemical changes alone do not a disorder make. It is important to avoid pathologizing these forms of neurodiversity. Some of them, when understood and managed, can offer an advantage. Royce Flippin wrote: “There’s nothing inherently harmful about hyperfocus. In fact, it can be an asset. Some people with ADD or ADHD, for example, are able to channel their focus on something productive, such as a school or work related activity. But unrestrained intense focus is most often a liability. Left unchecked, it can lead to failure in school, lost productivity on the job, and strained relationships with friends and at home. Ultimately, the best way to deal with hyperfocus is not to fight it but to harness it. If school or work can be made stimulating, it will grab focus in the same way. Once you learn to turn hyperfocus to your favor, it can be a built-in advantage. Stories abound about individuals with ADHD who can concentrate intently for long stretches of time on complex projects.” One of the strategies for living with hyperfocus means making boring tasks more compelling, and that depends on taking a step back, widening our focus, to see how they are all united in a larger interconnected field of circular causality. As Greta Thunberg recently said, “Under the right circumstances autism [another form of neurodiversity] can truly be a gift and turn into something you - and society - can benefit from. Sadly, today the level of awareness is so low. Many go undiagnosed and will therefore not receive the help they need and may go their whole life believing something is wrong with them.” Therapy helps, medication management is another tool, and the available options are expanding in the future. One could say that all therapeutic interventions are trying to produce changes in habitual responses to stressors we encounter. That's the feedback, closing the circular loop of causality, that we need to look to when evaluating their appropriateness. Is CBT producing a measurable change in habits and feeling/affect? How might it be altered toward that end? We've got all these different things in life. And like strings on a guitar, periodically each one of them needs to be re-attuned or altered to produce a pleasing sound. 

Instant gratification involves delaying one activity until later so that we can engage in another, perhaps more attractive, activity now. But under further analysis this rationalization is not convincing. Given the assumption that delaying the former does not diminish our ability to enjoy it, one could just as easily delay the latter as well until we have completed the former. This provides the logical support for delayed gratification. Why isn't it readily apparent or convincing? As experience has shown, there is in fact a cost associated specifically with delaying functionally important activities, this is the loss of actual development that can only be acquired through time and attention. An evaluation of the relative opportunity cost of delaying either activity must be conducted. So instant gratification, when it becomes problematic, often involves at least two steps: the self deception of false equivalence, or an otherwise misleading evaluation of opportunity costs, which then results in delayed growth and development toward long term goals. Joscha Bach sees ADHD at a societal level: "The difficulty to establish behaviors that integrate over long time spans is mostly attention deficit. What distinguishes power between individuals and groups is whether you're able to model the world deeply, identify with the 'highest eye' in the nested hierarchy, and act on long-term plans." His advice to escape the trap of instant gratification: "You can get aesthetic and sensory pleasure from a task, or you can get sensory horrors from it and aesthetic displeasure from the same task, depending on the different aspects you focus on. Focus on those aspects of the task that contain sensory, aesthetic pleasure. I suspect evolution would have given us the ability to reframe our experiences fundamentally in this way if that would have been useful. But the fact that it hasn't suggests that if you trick yourself into experiencing whatever you do as pleasant too early it might make you very happy, but also dysfunctional (in the sense of being stuck at a local optima)." This delegates responsibility to conscious perception in choosing to attend to some frictions and ignoring others, which is of course easier said than done! So the next crucial step is one of actively modifying the structure of the environment to enhance and support those attentional choices and implementation intentions by strategically employing friction. The result is the development and support of healthy habits. 

Wendy Wood (more on her below) suggests that the solution to common problems for executive functioning and self regulation is to utilize spatiotemporal friction. If the temptation for instant gratification is great, we can restructure tempting environmental cues so that we are no longer in close proximity to them and restructure our schedule so that we identify specific times for engaging in the multitude of diverse activities (including immediately gratifying ones) that compete for our attention. This results in a meticulously curated choreography of frictions (or behavioral script). As Karl Friston said, "It's a dance, a dialogue. The environment is acting upon you and you are acting upon the environment." By rearranging the spatiotemporal structure of our tribosystems, we bring them into better alignment with long term goals and values without eliminating any of their components in an absolutist fashion that would trigger existential anxiety. It is important to note how the arrangement of tribosystems is a fundamentally dynamic process. Agents supervene upon tribosystems, which are extremely plastic and responsive to feedback. Restructuring them with the goal of shifting habits and inducing behavior change requires routine attention and support, from both agents and others within the larger milieu, to prevent drift and maintain focus. How do we do this? For everyone who has considered it, that's the big question whose answer remains unknown. But it has lead to new research into AI and other intelligent systems, prompted by the suppostion that dramatic improvements in these areas will lead to better methods for choreographing frictions.

Collective psychology and sense of embeddedness

Jung wrote “Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, which moves according to laws entirely different from those of our [individual] consciousness.” This "collective unconscious", as he often called it, refers to structures of the unconscious mind which are shared among members of the same population. “It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences... continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths.” Although he wasn't specifically referring to this idea, Paul Condon wrote that a "relational starting point promotes resilience and connectivity, and bolsters the psychological and social resources we need today to confront systemic injustice." Relationality is the starting point for life, and here one experiences oneself as part of a larger, interconnected field. Our later 'individuation' extends from this 'field of care' in which we are held. Together these provide autonomy within relatedness, and the support to explore and navigate the world on one’s own with the confidence that, if one becomes distressed, there is a secure base to return to and a sense of basic safety. (The terminology used by Condon here, that of a relational interconnected field, has striking similarities to the physics described by Rovelli.) According to attachment theory, young children are dependent on attachment figures, and gradually, responsive and sensitive caregivers encourage the children’s autonomy. But even so called “secure” adults can have traces of insecurity from diverse relationship contexts, and thus are never fully and always secure. They will always continue to depend on support from others. In this way, people are able to comfortably navigate back and forth between autonomy and relatedness. Esther Sternberg noted these links we share with others. She and other social psychologists have described this sense of embeddedness with terms like cradled, rooted, or connected. Sternberg wrote, "The emotions they evoke are among the greatest forces that affect our hormonal, our nerve chemical, and our immune responses." We need to be aware of how the "old paths" of the collective unconscious, that is the matrix from which our conscious thoughts emerge, can both provide a foundation for security and connectivity while simultaneously, through exposing a route by which our individual personal psychologies can be hacked, place us in grave jeopardy. 

 

Source: Tao te Ching chapter 52

Relationship advice from Eastern philosophy (Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi)

 

Zhuangzi told several short parables about the use of being useless (Carpenter Shih, Crippled Shu) "All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!” “As for me, I’ve been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I’ve finally got it." Those words were put into the mouth of a tree that managed to live a long life by virtue of being useless for a carpenter. In a purely utilitarian sense, if an object is of no significance it is typically left alone and ignored (isolated on a graph of relationships), however if it can be of significant use, then it may be taken and put to some other end (reducing its chance of living to maturity). If we look around the natural world, there are many examples of the most useful things being exploited until they are gone. Zhuangzi is providing relationship advice. A lot of things are connected, and thus useful. And when we look beyond the useful/useless binary we find an entire taxonomy of relationship types to consider. Another binary is expansion/contraction. From a growth-oriented economic perspective, the assumption "more is better" is scarcely given a second thought, but a discerning analysis quickly shows this is not always the case. Scale and balance are important factors. In regard to the minimum wage, for example, research has consistently shown that raising the standard of living increases health and happiness, but only to a point. Beyond the quality-of-life threshold, higher income levels follow the ruthless law of diminishing returns, particularly in regard to emotional health (in fact, the social inequalities resulting from extreme wealth disparity actually decreases a number of measures of social health). From a holistic perspective, there is a "sweet spot" to find and maintain the majority of variation (see Kate Raworth). This is also a factor for the information economy and individual media consumption (social media's professed ignorance on this topic notwithstanding). Below a certain threshold of quality engagement we are uninformed, and above it we stress our bodies (for example, via sleep deprivation) and struggle with knowledge integration. It is best to limit consumption to the most relevant content. This common sense is captured in popular aphorisms ("money can't buy happiness", "too much of a good thing"). These perspectives on achieving harmonious relationships, which are woven throughout Zhuangzi's parables, were derived from the Tao Te Ching. "It is by knowing when to stop that one can be free from danger." (TTC 32) We must use discernment to temper integration with isolation, expansion with contraction, and effort with ease. 

 

The fractal nature of reality, where there are networks of networks (Capra) and relations of relations (Peirce) suggests that contraction is as powerful as expansion. As Laozi wrote "Reversion is the action of Tao. Weakness is the function of Tao". (TTC 40) Retreating is equivalent to advancing, insofar as there are times that favor one of these tactics over the other. Magnanimity is equivalent to humility, insofar as there are occasions that favor one strategy over the other. And whether such-and-such is fundamental or whether it is derivative depends on one’s position. Xunzi was a naturalistic Confucian. He wrote that we "must be capable of embracing all changes, a single corner will not suffice." Such a person capable of doing so "may sit in their room and view the entire area within the four seas, may dwell in the present and yet discourse on distant ages". (Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings) In the fractal nature of reality, there is no privileged position. In all things, and no less with physical and emotional health, privation or abundance are defined relationally. Zhaungzi warned, "Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger." When we understand that abundance is relative, it ceases to be as appealing a goal to pursue for its own sake. In his book "The Darwin Economy", Robert Frank lays out his case that Darwin, not Adam Smith, will one day be regarded as the father of economics. As David Sloan Wilson notes, "Life is about relative advantage, and yet economic theory has not framed it that way. Economists posit the 'rational actor', Homo economicus, the utility maximizer, who only wants to maximize its absolute utility, not in reference to anyone else. As if we only want to be wealthy in some absolute sense, not in comparison to anyone (or anything) else. An appeal to 'enlightened self-interest' is a nice aspirational message, but the human mind privileges positional advantage. Evolution is based on relative fitness. It does not matter how well you survive and reproduce in absolute terms, only compared to others in your vicinity." Economics needs to better account for how privation and abundance are defined relationally. The power of comparison is also why the decoy effect works, for example.

 

Yet we cannot be content to simply "eat, drink, and be merry" (Ecclesiastes) or "return to plainness" (Zhuangzi's Lieh Tzu) in all personal and cultural affairs. On occasion people do need to be able to efficiently navigate across scalar levels in order to interact effectively with qualitatively different social structures. In order to address global risks, for example, we must periodically ascend another few levels in scale and complexity to productively engage with these issues, if only for a time. One cannot reliably pontificate on matters pertaining to one level while inhabiting another where these are unknown. But then we should "withdraw as soon as our work is done" (TTC 9). As Laozi wrote: "He who has found the mother (Tao) and thereby understands her children (things), and having understood the children, still keeps to their mother, will be free from danger throughout his lifetime." (TTC 52) Relational designations, like mother and child, or ancestor and descendant, reveal a prolifically fractal nature. Today's descendants will be ancestral, from the point of view of someone living in the future, just as all ancestors are themselves the descendants of still earlier ancestors. Regarding the complexification of this manifestly fractal-relational world (pratītyasamutpāda) that lacks any absolute "base reality" for reference (Musk), Zhuangzi wrote, "If we go on like this, then even the cleverest mathematician can't tell where we'll end." And yet, we find that traveling is unavoidable, and indeed we do uncover revelations we are not always prepared to deal with. But if we must travel, do we have any reason to assume that either descent or ascent is inherently preferable to the other?

Designing against efficiency [1] and for implementation intentions

If our answer is "no", then how do we maintain the mind in a state that is, per Xunzi, "empty, unified, and still"? Or in Laozi's words, how do we "revert to enlightenment"? (TTC 52) Thaler and Sunstein's book "Nudge" described choice architecture, encompassing policies and objects. Hassenzahl and Laschke primarily focused on object design through what they called an "aesthetic of friction". More generally, this is a "structural fix" approach (related ideas include persuasive technology and behavioral design). As Hassenzahl and Laschke said, "With an aesthetic of convenience, you will never instill change. What you need rather, is an aesthetic of friction." This sort of aesthetic sounds very Taoist indeed, as though it might've come straight from the hand of Laozi himself. Things that are least conducive to health should be, generally speaking, less accessible than those which are more conducive to health. (Look around and ask if this is so today.) So how do we calibrate choice architecture and the relative amount of ease or effort that characterizes our relationships? In "Pleasurable Troublemakers" Hassenzahl and Laschke write: "Objects as change agents do not adapt to their users, but demand adaption. They embody (materialize) an 'implementation intention', an alternative behavior in line with a potential goal intention of the idealized self. Restriction of freedom is likely to result in reactance. However research shows that reactance is reduced when the communicator is liked and appears similar. Thus, a pleasurable troublemaker needs to be liked, it needs to build a relationship. We need principles for the design of what we call transformational objects. A pleasurable troublemaker becomes a part of its user’s extended willpower - object and person form a "motivational system". These troublemakers do not merely serve data for the person to act upon (aka self-quantification). Quite conversely, person and object are performing the "task" together, with the object shouldering a significant part of the responsibility to shape the system. When designing a “motivational system,” the distribution of aspects among the person and the object is crucial. We assume that an object can suggest, lend a hand, offer criticism, be understanding - but it is the person who must choose and understand." 

 

As Evgeny Morozov wrote: "Technologies don’t have to be just trivial problem-solvers: they can also be subversive troublemakers, making us question our habits and received ideas." Describing the agency of devices and technological objects should recall Douglas Rushkoff's point that technologies have biases, and Rosi Braidotti's point that "the conventional Humanities suffer from a lack of adequate concepts to position subjectivity in a continuum with the totality of things”. It also echoes Jennifer Gabrys, who wrote about “governance through milieu”, where milieu refers to relationality itself, or even Amotz Zahavi’s "Handicap Principle", which is about how evolution inserted friction (costly, reliable signals) into biological systems to facilitate honest communication. According to sexual selection, the females of many species show a distinct preference for males who prove their fitness via displaying such frictional relationships that in any other context would be deemed a wasteful extravagance. There are additional links to David Chalmers' concept of the extended mind and "externally realized cognitive functions", Dawkins' extended phenotype, Latour's ANT theory, and to a lesser extent the vital materialism of Bennett and Haraway, where "new materialism” or “vital materialism” reworks received notions of matter as a uniform, inert substance and instead foregrounds novel accounts of its agentic thrust, processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities, whereby matter, as an active force, is co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and human life and experience. Among the more developed treatments in this crowded field is Hayles notion of "cognitive assemblages". She attempted to formulate the idea of a "planetary cognitive ecology" that includes both human and technical actors. As she wrote, "We live in an era when the planetary cognitive ecology is undergoing rapid transformation, urgently requiring us to rethink cognition and reenvision its consequences on a global scale. My hope is that these ideas will help move us toward more sustainable, enduring, and flourishing environments for all living beings and nonhuman others. Then the question becomes, how will networks of non-conscious cognitions between and among the planet’s cognizers transform the conditions of life, as human complex adaptive systems become increasingly interdependent upon and entwined with intelligent technologies in cognitive assemblages?"

Marshall McLuhan famously said “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." What would a conscious decision look like if we were to selectively employ friction (by intervening in an 'ecology of cues') among the web of relationships between objects, consciously shaping our relations with our tools in an intentional way, all in the service of avoiding danger and promoting well being (the implicit goal of most behavioral scripts)? More broadly than objects alone, creating friction with "disruptive regulation" is also possible, per Yogi Hendlin. In “Good Habits, Bad Habits” Wendy Wood agrees that the central force for eliminating bad habits is friction - if we can make bad habits more inconvenient by generating friction, thereby making it harder to indulge in, then inertia can carry us in the direction of virtue, without ever requiring us to "be strong". She recommends coming up with new rewarding habits as substitutes for old ones. For example, replace a phone with the car radio, or instead of scrolling through tweets and e-mails, seek out new authors, etc. In their paper about Design Frictions, Cox et al. confirm Wood's statement, "Just one step in a procedure that takes slightly longer than necessary can provide an opportunity to guide the user towards a particular course of desired action without having to rely on willpower alone." Another psychologist, Timothy Pychyl, has described some of the mechanics of implementation intentions as well, and his delightful phrase "free won't" seems to capture an aesthetic of friction. In sum, there are a few key ideas here. Technology (and objects and policies more generally) comes with biases and valences. Agents can choose to relate to these in a way that supports their intentions and shifts behavior patterns toward greater adaptation/ synchrony. This places more emphasis on the importance of creating strategically frictional relationships, and less on increasing convenience indiscriminately.

Yves Jeanson (an image of Indra's net)

The modern day futurist/ oracle, Kevin Kelly, remarked on how tools shape how we think. "What embedded assumptions does a new tool make? Does it assume right-handedness, or literacy, or a password, or a place to throw it away? Where the defaults are set can reflect a tool’s bias." In a longer essay he elaborated: "The idea that we choose the valence of technology’s charge is very appealing to our egos, but technology comes with biases and autonomy. As Jerry Mander argued, television is an effective propaganda device. It is structured to produce couch potatoes by inducing a bias of physiological passivity - there is nothing to do but sit back and receive. Abbe Mowshowitz said that “tools insist on being used in particular ways.” Neil Postman wrote “the uses made of technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself.”  He declared that “Many technologies determine their own use, their own effects, and even the kind of people who control them. We have not yet learned to think of technology as having ideology built into its very form.” As with the Internet today, when the electrical grid emerged a century ago it was seen as a vehicle for ideology. Charles Steinmetz, the leading scientist at General Electric in its first decades, expected socialism to emerge along with a national electrical grid. Steinmetz claimed: “The electric power is probably today the most powerful force tending toward coordination, that is cooperation [socialism].” Lenin famously declared that only when the Soviet Union had been completely electrified could it attain full socialism. Die-hard environmentalist Dennis Hayes takes this one step further: Because nuclear power relies on many layers of fail-safe security, and heavy doses of police and soldiers to guard it from terrorism, he believed that “the increased deployment of nuclear power facilities must lead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe reliance upon nuclear power as the principal source of energy may be possible only in a totalitarian state.” In a famous example, the legendary New York urban planner Robert Moses restricted the public — that is the poor, lower class public — from new city parks and beaches by a clever and subtle technological discrimination. According to his biographer, Moses lowered the clearance on the 200 overpasses he built on the Long Island Parkway so that public buses (the untidy poor) were unable to use this highway to get to Jones beach, but (middle class) cars could. If intentional bias can be inserted so effortlessly, couldn’t inadvertent bias emerge just as easily?"

Kevin Roose writes, "Of all the buzzwords in tech, perhaps none has been deployed with as much philosophical conviction as “frictionless.” Over the past decade or so, eliminating “friction” — the name given to any quality that makes a product more difficult or time-consuming to use — has become an obsession of the tech industry, accepted as gospel. Bobby Goodlatte points out that a culture of optimization “presumes that reducing friction is virtuous unto itself. It leads us to ask, ‘Can we?’ — never ‘Should we?’”. Not only have we failed to ask ethical questions like this, we have also failed to follow through with our "implementation intentions" once we have answered them. (We do things we know we shouldn’t.) Part of the reason for this failure is the hyper-individualistic perspective of Western society. We are predisposed to favor certain kinds of solutions, specifically those that affirm the value of self reliance (which remove friction), and we preemptively disqualify from serious consideration those solutions that rely on social or relational processes (that add friction). This is why little progress has been made. Peter Corning wrote: "To paraphrase the great journalist and peace advocate Norman Cousins, our security will ultimately be found only through the mutual control of force, not the use of force – no small challenge." (Synergistic Selection 232) How can the Western mind understand this? Understanding the value of "positive friction" from transformational objects, and contrasting this against the blind pursuit of the frictionless, can assist us in following through with implementation intentions. Stanley Salthe wrote that the "institution of frictions is the major physical effect of evolutionary (historical)-semiosic (meaningful) processes." In his 2016 article, Tristan Harris wrote: "Instead of viewing the world in terms of availability of choices, we should view the world in terms of friction required to enact choices. Imagine a world where choices were labeled with how difficult they were to fulfill (like coefficients of friction) and there was an independent entity - an industry consortium or non-profit - that labeled these difficulties and set standards for how easy navigation should be." Harris, the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology who was featured prominently in "The Social Dilemna", spearheaded the Time Well Spent movement (vague similarities to the Slow movement and Degrowth movement). He has remained near the fore of an active, pro-friction cohort within the tech industry. As many recall, The Social Dilemna was, in some ways, a response to the biopic "The Social Network" several years earlier. In the intervening years we witnessed the dangers of frictionless networks, and how they contributed to our current epistemic crisis. This emerged on the heels of an ongoing ecological crisis created by an ideology of unlimited economic growth, the religious veneration of GDP upon whose alter we, knowingly or not, sacrifice our futures and erode our mental health. Kevin Roose concludes, "I don’t want to romanticize the slow, often frustrating processes of the past. The tech industry could still do a lot of good by reducing friction in systems like health care, education and financial services. But “friction” is just another word for “effort,” and it’s what makes us capable of critical thought and self-reflection. Without it, we would be the blob people from “Wall-E,” sucking down Soylent while watching Netflix on our self-driving recliners." Brad Stulberg wrote, "One of the main reasons people pursue education, financial security, and solid employment is to create comfortable lives. But for some, this can begin to feel like too much of a good thing." According to Dave Proctor, one of the participants in "Big Dog's Backyard Ultra", one of the toughest endurance races around: "We live in a perfect world where you can go to a grocery store with 20,000 food items. And we're going to complain about what's hard? I want to go to a place where I strip everything away. That's the moment when you find out most about yourself." Iain McGilchrist said "Without some degree of resistance, without some degree of opposition, nothing comes into being. Motion is only made possible because of friction, which is also the thing that brings motion to a standstill. What comes into being is shaped. You have to exclude, you have to limit, and that is the process of resistance. Things are not isolated by resistance, but actually strengthened by and come into being by resistance. People were puzzled why trees in biospheres kept falling over before maturity. It turned out that in order to grow properly trees need wind, they need wind to blow them and challenge them and they produce a core of strength in the wood and in their roots which enables them to thrive."

Consider the opposing aesthetic values of efficiency or 'path of least resistance', and an aesthetic of friction or 'path of strategic resistance'. We could find new intervention strategies that follow the path of least resistance (the "friction negative" approach), or we can make the intervention strategies that are already available to us the path of least resistance (the "friction positive", or "strategic friction" approach). All processes (whether mediated by attraction or repulsion, whether generating acceleration or deceleration) depend upon interaction, relation, and broadly speaking, friction of some sort. Efficiency is popularly conceived to be the lack of any intervention that might disrupt a process or frustrate an intention once it has been set into motion. The trajectory from point A to point B is uninterrupted by any outside interference and troublesome relations. If there must be some relation, then it is of the kind that smooths over obstacles, imparts greater momentum, and reduces both physical and conscious effort. The aesthetic of friction doesn't directly contradict this, but instead of focusing on removing resistance as the primary means for increasing system efficacy, an aesthetic of friction focuses on understanding how, as Rachel Armstrong put it, "a complex set of networked relationships edit and shape interactions that entwine us with our environment and our ecological communities. We push nature, not control it, and nature pushes back." Hassenzahl and Laschke want to understand that second part: How do things push back? And even more, how do things suggest, lend a hand, offer criticism, and even be understanding? If we think we are fundamentally alone and everything else is either an obstacle or something from which we can extract value, then an aesthetic of friction makes no sense at all. Just as Laozi created a figure-ground shift in emphasizing the useless over the useful, Hassenzahl and Laschke are creating a figure-ground shift in emphasizing the value of friction over the blind pursuit of the frictionless. N. Katherine Hayles appears to have intuited this aesthetic of friction when she wrote: "Networks are typically considered to consist of edges and nodes analyzed through graph theory, conveying a sense of sparse, clean materiality. Assemblages, by contrast, allow for contiguity in a fleshly sense, touching, incorporating, repelling, mutating." In short, she's describing the complexity and nuance of friction; she's describing cognitive tribosystems. Enrico Ciulli described a key concept of 'Industry 4.0', the 'smart factory' where people, machines, and resources communicate with each other as in a social network to achieve high performance and ecological sustainability, all while allowing reconfigurability and product customization. Smart tribological systems that collect live data (related particularly to wear, friction, vibrations and temperatures) can use actuation mechanisms to self-adjust and modify the geometry of tribological components, thus improving the overall performance of the cyber-physical system, increasing efficiency and reliability, and somewhat blurring the animate/inanimate (or natural/artificial) distinction.

Sebastian Deterding

"An extended network of influence": Wendy Wood and David Roberts on friction

Following the publication of her book Wendy Wood participated in a number of interviews: "Much of our economy is based on the idea of eliminating friction. Two clicks is too much to get people to buy stuff. You have to reduce it to a single click, or even just face-recognition on your phone. Anything you can do to make something easier and reduce the friction will make it more likely that people do it. Anything that increases the friction will make it less likely. (Not impossible, but much less likely.) We need to make the consequences of behavior part of our experience in order to factor them into the economy. Doing that for the environment, considering the externalities of all of these things that we take for granted, is clearly what we need to be doing." In her interviews Wood provides numerous examples: anti-smoking campaigns, developing a fitness habit, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, and eating healthy food. In her book, Good Habits, Bad Habits (154), she wrote: "If you leave this book with one word and one idea, I hope it's friction." The generality of this idea makes it very useful for framing intervention strategies. Friction encompasses proximity, time delay, Pigouvian taxation, and many other contextual cues that exist within a larger relational network. David Roberts also addresses the connection between the ecological crisis and friction. "Environmentalists are fond of saying that we have all the technology we need to address climate change - all we lack is political will", he wrote. That seems true enough. Technology isn't the problem. Roberts concluded willpower isn't the problem either, so much as that the available willpower "is evenly divided against itself" and therefore inert. But in a separate article he points to a somewhat different conclusion, the problem is fundamentally one of friction. As he put it, the economy is "a path-dependent accretion of past decisions and sunk costs", with status quo interests, monopoly control, barriers to entry, and asymmetrical information, among many factors that exert a strong influence. As Don Norman says in the foreword to Chris Nodder's book Evil by Design, “the more the tactics are understood, the more readily they can be identified and resisted, fought against, and defeated.” Generally, all institutions are exposed to these potentially compromising effects. But we are now only beginning to think about how we might consciously replace them with what Cristina Viganò called "positive friction". In her interview, Wendy Wood goes on to describe how these operate at the individual level:

"Anti-smoking campaigns in the US were one of the most absolutely successful health interventions ever. They achieved what knowledge of cancer was unable to do. We knew long before these campaigns that smoking caused cancer, but people kept smoking because they had the habit. It was cued by everything around them. So one of the things to control an unwanted behavior is to put friction on it, to make it more difficult. They started taxing smoking, they took cigarettes off store shelves so you actually have to ask someone in order to get to buy a cigarette. The government banned smoking in many public places. It's just much more difficult. We can't light up in the office anymore. We used to be able to smoke in airplanes, believe it or not, but you can't do that anymore. Another way of putting friction on something is proximity. Make it further away. And one of the studies I love has to do with going to a paid fitness center or gym. A data analytics company tracked thousands of cellphones for several months to see how far people (who owned the cell phones) were willing to travel to go to their local gym. What they found is that if you are going about three and a half miles to your local gym you'll go five times a month on average, but if you go five miles you only go once a month. So that small distance, it's a little over a mile, is the distance between having a fitness habit and not. There was an experiment where one group of people had a bowl of apple slices in front of them and a bowl of popcorn way at the end of the table. They could see it, they could smell it, and they could reach it if they just sort of lunged slightly. Another group had the popcorn right in front of them and the apples at a slight distance. If you have the apples in front of you, you eat a third of the calories as if you have the popcorn in front of you. You can see them both, you can reach them both, but that simple proximity meant you were eating three times more if the popcorn is close by. These are things that seem really simple to our conscious minds and we think "Well, if I'm on a diet I'm eating healthfully, I'm gonna eat the apples no matter where they are." But it doesn't work that way because proximity is friction, and our habitual behaviors are very responsive to proximity."

In a separate interview: "My favorite study right now is a study on elevator use. What these researchers were interested in is they were trying to get people to quit taking the elevator and instead take the stairs. So they did what most of us would think will probably work, which is they put up big signs that read "It's good for your health, climb the stairs. Save energy, climb the stairs." This had no effect. What they did then is they thought, well maybe there's some way we can change this environment somehow. So they slowed how fast the elevator closed the door by 16 seconds, and that got a third of the people to start taking the stairs instead of riding the elevator, because that small delay was friction. And what was so wonderful is that four weeks later, when the experimenters put the elevator back to its normal speed, they found that they continued taking the stairs because they formed a habit to do it. It was easier, they practiced it, and they just did it without thinking. They weren't going to fuss with that inconsistent elevator. So that gives you an idea of time. Things that take a lot of time, that's friction. ...Seemingly trivial amounts of friction can have large impacts on people's behaviors because we just hate to be inconvenienced in the smallest of ways." Shankar Vedantam summed it up: "When things are difficult to do, they have high friction. When doing something is effortless, there's low friction. Friction is incredibly important to understand how habits work. You can decrease friction to build good habits, and increase friction to dismantle bad habits. You can make healthy behaviors automatic and mindless, and make unhealthy behaviors conscious and effortful."

 

'Reward and punishment', 'carrot and stick', 'incentive and disincentive', these are very useful ways of framing a range of behavioral change strategies, but they depend on features intrinsic to individuals, who can be very idiosyncratic, and they rely on the concept of 'willpower'. (Though there may not be any qualitative difference between intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, as all behavior is a product of incentives mediated by the social environment.) By comparison, friction tends to align with a different binary, that of 'ease and effort', which is much more contextual than reward based approaches, and seeks to reduce the need for 'willpower' in order to be effective. Taking the elevator example given by Wood, can we say that a fast elevator is rewarding, that it is a 'carrot'? That depends. If an individual only values the easiest solution for traveling from point A to point B, then yes, the fast elevator is a carrot. But if an individual values exercise over speed of transport, then a fast elevator may not be a carrot. Now this is where the concept of friction is very useful. Friction shifts the locus of agency from the individual to the environment, asking us to give our trust and attention to these supportive agencies/ relationships/ processes, and learn to rely on and work with their capabilities. That might mean giving up a little of the illusory control we thought we had. Whereas the 'carrot and stick' binary keeps us looking for better carrots and bigger sticks (and more willpower), friction provides an easy method for how to transform a carrot into a stick! This is what the experimenters demonstrated. And of course, if we can do that, we can then turn sticks into carrots too. Friction views these as relative to one another in a quantitative sense, and not just in the qualitatively absolutist, mutually exclusive dichotomy of carrot/stick. The generality of this concept has profound implications for the sort of strategies we can pursue when promoting behavioral change. The contextual features of our environment can influence us in more ways than to just make individual healthy options relatively easier, they open a wider space for designing "motivational systems" (Hassenzahl and Lashke) and "networks of influence" (Rachel Armstrong). 

 

Landscape pathway to basin of attraction. (Steffen et al.)

Topology of relations and map of affordances

 

A person who is able to maintain a change of diet undergoes an interesting process whereby they conceptually re-define what food is. That is, they re-define what can and cannot be used for energy. In general, people display remarkable plasticity in their ability to conceptually redefine whether anything is or isn’t an affordance. This can do a considerable amount of the work when it comes to imposing psychological friction. It isn’t willpower that enables goal achievement, it's the physical and conceptual restructuring of environmental affordances, what should be attended to and what should be ignored. In a world of virtually unlimited affordances, where many may be misleading and only a narrow set may lead to generalized synchrony, “successful self-control,” Wendy Wood wrote (describing the infamous marshmallow test) “came from essentially covering up the marshmallow”. Psychologist Kurt Lewin had affordances in mind when he wrote "Even when from the standpoint of the physicist the environment is identical or nearly identical for a child and or an adult, the psychological situation can be fundamentally different." Lewin argued that where you are, who’s around you, the time of day, and your recent actions can form a constellation of forces, illuminating possible affordances that influence our behavior. We achieve situational control and sustain good behaviors not through willpower, but by finding ways to take willpower out of the equation by restructuring our environment, editing/shaping a complex network of psychological (agent) and physical (environment) frictions and affordances. Psychological field theories may consider a relational “field of affordances” whose composition provides a kind of formative impetus, or even agentic thrust, that can “suggest, lend a hand, offer criticism, and be understanding". The use of gradient descent can help us understand their interaction in fields with many local minima. Relational perspectives are also present in process-relational theories in physics (see Rovelli’s Helgoland, for example). 

Following work by Lewin and contemporary ecological psychologists, Kaaronen and Strelkovskii modeled leverage points for tipping the collective behavioral patterns of a social system from one state to another. This was done by altering how the composition of the landscape of affordances affects the emergence of collective behavioral patterns. Tipping points, or phase transitions, were reliably produced when the proportion of pro-environmental affordances rose to 50% of the affordance landscape. It would be possible to further develop their model with other forms of empirical data, use it for educational purposes, or augment it to include interactive elements such as "policy buttons" to trigger changes in the landscape of affordances. They point out that such "general ecological information", or the information in our everyday environments that specify the affordances within our niche, must of course be instantiated in easily accessible action opportunities or affordances before old habits can give way to system wide behavior change. If we step back we can see a thread running though this theoretical space from Rovelli's RQM, to Lewin's psychological field theory, to this direct application for behavioral change in light of environmental conditions. We can recall what Laozi wrote: "He who has found the mother (Tao) and thereby understands her children (things), and having understood the children, still keeps to their mother, will be free from danger throughout his lifetime." (TTC 52) In other words, we must apply the ideas, but always remember the deep insights from which they emerge. 

Tribosystems, or literary perspectives on network tribology

Is there any role for fate and determinism? Freud, for example, said "anatomy is destiny". Adam Smith believed in Divine Providence, that is, he saw the "invisible hand" of God at work in all affairs. In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre considered such things as well. In a famous passage he wrote "I am on a narrow path - without a guardrail - which goes along a precipice. The precipice presents itself to me as to be avoided; it represents a danger of death. At the same time I conceive of a certain number of causes, originating in universal determinism, which can transform that threat of death into reality; I can slip on a stone and fall into the abyss; the crumbling earth of the path can give way under my steps. I am passive in relation to these possibilities; they come to me from without; insofar as I am also an object in the world... No external cause will remove them." Even Sartre's "instinct of self-preservation, prior fear, etc." is "not sufficiently effective" to make him "reject the situation envisaged". So instead he seeks to apprehend his "relationship with these possibilities" as one of a "strict psychological determinism". He explains: "one may claim that anguish is consciousness of being ignorant of the real causes of our acts... we should suddenly appear to ourselves as things-in-the-world; we should be to ourselves our own transcendent situation. Then anguish would disappear to give way to fear, for fear is... fear of beings-in-the-world whereas anguish is anguish before myself. A situation provokes fear if there is a possibility of my life being changed from without; my being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation." Sartre leaped out of the frying pan of existential angst, but we have not escaped the fire of beings-in-the-world. If existentialism "emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will", then Sartre is right that it is a state of ignorance. Why, despite this, many persist in inhabiting it is an altogether different question. It is an artifact of Western culture that we still think in terms of individual free will. Individualism may sound appealing, but the actual degree to which we are functionally independent is slight; Clark and Chalmer's 'extended mind' thesis further suggests that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world. So wherefore art thou individual? Free will (liberum arbitrium) was introduced by Christian philosophy (4th century CE) as the ability to choose between good or evil. Today compatibilists argue that free will and determinism are mutually compatible. Furthermore, the notion of 'will power' has also been criticized. Sartre appears to accede to most if not all of these points. Those who believe in individual free will are "ignorant of the real causes of acts" and this ignorance is the source of their anguish. His advice is that we apprehend ourselves as (compatibilist) things-in-the-world. Yes, but with the full advantage of the externally realized cognitive functions implied by the extended mind thesis and further explored by Hayles' notion of cognitive assemblages. A sufficiently relational perspective might even reframe these as what I would term cognitive tribosystems (biotribology, ecotribology, tribosphere). 

 

Stanley Salthe wrote "The material world imposes friction, delay upon messages, ageing - in short, material embodiment is the reason why nothing can be obtained, constructed or cognized instantaneously, or preserved forever." Paraphrased from The Natural Philosophy of Entropy, "The material world is characterized by friction and delay, and life is a way of generating a kind of friction." Again, "all efforts of any kind in the material world meet resistance (which generates friction)." He concluded in his paper Energy and Semiotics, "This institution of frictions is the major physical effect of evolutionary (historical)-semiosic (meaningful) processes." The constituent frictions of all systems, whether natural or artificial, tend to determine which components are psychologically most salient, steering the course of behavioral events. Returning to Sartre's conclusion, having addressed existential angst, are we now predominantly left with a state of fear? Are beings-in-the-world, understood as tribosystems, threatening? They can indeed present either enormous risk or mitigation potential, especially at global scales. It all depends on their structure. The "possibility of my life being changed from without" can imply both the fear of negative outcomes and the anticipation of positive results. Kant waxed poetic on these positive effects in The Critique of Pure Reason: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance – meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in motion."

Have you seen this 2018 meme? Japan is part of the "cyberpunk future". They're not wrong. The reason is cultural. The West has been fascinated by the East for centuries, with an enduring dialogue between the two. To understand the contemporary fascination better I may need to read more within the genre of "Japanese magical realism". One article put Murakami's Kafka on the Shore on a list of 35 must read books; it was called a "metaphysical mind bender" filled with pathos. Another review says that it "demonstrates Murakami's typical blend of popular culture, mundane detail, magical realism, suspense, humor, an involved plot, and potent sexuality." Anyone acquainted with Japanese culture can attest that these elements are pervasive, whether the medium is art, film, or literature. David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, also wrote a review (which is very good). He suggested that readers who are new to Murakami might want to start with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle instead. So it is. Angus Fletcher, author of Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, has the view that literature is a pragmatic technology. "A technology is any human-made thing that solves a problem. Most of our technology exists to master our world. Literature tackles how to master ourselves. By working in concert with our brain to accelerate human imagination, it was invented to deal with the psychological problems inside us like grief, lack of meaning, and loneliness." Now if Fletcher, and others like McGilchrist, are right about the power of storytelling, then Murakami and other novelists are shedding light on how the human mind wrestles with problems. There is certainly no shortage of these problems. Stanley Salthe wrote "The material world imposes friction, delay upon messages, ageing - in short, material embodiment is the reason why nothing can be obtained, constructed or cognized instantaneously, or preserved forever." I can think of few descriptions of the human condition more distilled than that. This is the underlying context for people both East and West. It could be argued that what has sustained the conversation between cultures over the centuries is a desire to learn from new perspectives on how to resolve this mutual problem. So I'm curious: which perspectives are given voice in Murakami's novels? How does he address this? Akira Kurosawa's film Ikiru is an indictment of Japanese bureaucracy, with paperwork in the film symbolizing pointless friction. Kenji Watanabe, the film's protagonist, spent his life in what David Graeber would call a "bullshit job". In their podcast review of the movie, Pizarro and Sommers describe the sort of psychologically destructive dynamic that this creates in the workplace, and analyzes how this work culture is sustained (an historical anomaly per Juliet Schor). The film makes several important points: Watanabe's life is short, unhealthy friction robbed him of the very things he valued in life, changing his life and habits was hard and came at a cost (only a terminal diagnosis could motivate him), but in the final analysis, not changing his life would rob him of the possibility to recover any meaning. Watanabe realizes all these things in the brief time he has left, reduces the sort of unhealthy friction that had characterized his life and relationships for so many years, and is able to find the peace that had eluded him.

Energy and Resource Networks move toward Net-Zero

Today the International Energy Agency (IEA) released "A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector" detailing a Net‐Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario (NZE). Among the less startling statements, it says that "more efficient use of energy, resource efficiency, and behavioural changes combine to offset increases in demand for energy services." This is common sense. Massive amounts of energy and materials are currently wasted, so industrial ecology and gains in efficiency can and should be significant. The third component, behavioural changes, defined as "change in energy service demand from user decisions" is less intuitive, but the report describes the important role it will play: "Behavioural changes made by citizens and companies play a roughly equal role in reducing emissions in the NZE... Just under 40% of emissions reductions in the NZE result from the adoption of low‐carbon technologies that require massive policy support and investment but little direct engagement from citizens or consumers, e.g. technologies in electricity generation or steel production. A further 55% of emissions reductions require a mixture of the deployment of low‐carbon technologies and the active involvement or engagement of citizens and consumers, e.g. installing a solar water heater or buying an EV. A final 8% of emissions reductions stem from behavioural changes and materials efficiency gains that reduce energy demand, e.g. flying less for business purposes."

Aldo Leopold famously lamented that "our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do... But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” He may have been describing the need for smart policy, or perhaps Jevons paradox: when efficiency increases, demand also tends to increase (in other words, availability influences demand). That may be a trivial point. More importantly, technology alters our behavior in other ways that are usually more subtle and capable of undermining our intentions. As Kevin Kelly put it, "technology comes with biases and autonomy". So understanding how technological changes that reduce friction and increase efficiency will also influence behavior, in ways that may be either good or bad, will help to shed further light on these dynamics. The report also emphasizes many network co-benefits. There exists the real potential to indirectly address other systemic problems, such as access to basic needs, security and resilience, and exposure to other global risks. These follow from pursuing an integrated approach: "Devising cost-effective national and regional net zero roadmaps demands cooperation among all parts of government that breaks down silos and integrates energy into every country’s policy making." (See page 87 and 88 of the report for examples of these recommendations). I might've liked to have see more radical solutions, such as reducing the work week from five to four days, as this has been noted to result in efficiency gains as well, but the scope of the intervention strategies provided as examples in the report appears to be limited to those that are more directly targeted.

Further applications of network science

H.T. Odum's "Maximum Power Principle" states that “in the competition among self-organizing processes, network designs that maximize empower will prevail” (Odum, 1996). “Because designs with greater performance prevail, self-organization selects network connections that feed back transformed energy to increase inflow of resources or to use them more efficiently” (Odum, 2000). "Processes of energy transformation throughout the biosphere build order, degrade energy in the process, and cycle materials and information in networks of hierarchically organized systems of ever increasing spatial and temporal scales" (Odum, 2001, p. 4). This Energy Systems Language was designed to be both an approach for ordering a wealth of scientific understanding and an implement for the “design of human society with its natural environment for the benefit of both”. Interestingly, he recommended this principle as a guideline for selecting policy. In many ways Odum's systems ecology and science of energy quality has been waiting for network science to catch up and develop tools of analysis. 

Simulating systems involves graphing the flows in the network. As Ulises Ali Mejias wrote in Networked Proximity, "A network, defined minimally, is a system of interconnected elements or nodes, where each node represents an intersection of flows." Looking at the subject from the perspective of Critical Theory, he wrote "The network is a script for socializing subjects according to certain rules." Mejias proposed a notion of the "paranodal", the space between nodes. As networks and graphs are mathematical concepts, his probing questions into the limits of network science suggests that there are corresponding limits to the tools of mathematics. It is important to recognize that all approaches to knowledge are inherently limited, fallible, and prone to unintentionally excluding anything they are not capable of recognizing. For example, an idealized network model of the brain may fail to account for the the paranodal material between the neural junctions, which arguably has at least some influence upon the function of the organ as a whole. Systemic issues are notoriously hard to capture and many aspects are easy to overlook, resulting in some misleading studies that do not reflect reality; imagine trying to understand the network dynamics involved in permaculture practices. Alexander Galloway, coauthor of "The Exploit: A Theory of Networks" wrote, “it’s important to contextualize confrontations within a larger ideological structure, one that inoculates the network form and recasts it as the site of liberation, deviation, political maturation, complex thinking, and indeed the very living of life itself.”

 

It's useful to compare Mejias and Galloway with Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and Anna Marmodoro. Haraway said "We are all lichens now", suggesting that rather than enhancing individuation, network ecology may serve to highlight intersections and shared qualities. Jane Bennett wrote in Vibrant Matter, "all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a  dense network of relations... an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity; today this mingling has become harder to ignore." And Marmodoro noted that for Anaxagoras (and the Stoics), reality was unlimitedly divisible. "No smallest or largest" was one of his three metaphysical principles, which has clear implications for the conceptual understanding of change and causation. Indeed, if networks are fractal rather than atomistic this has important implications for Mejias' notion of paranodal space as well, since unlimitedly divisible nodes tend to evaporate under analysis. In her chapter titled "Cognitive Assemblages", N. Katherine Hayles reflects on subtle nuances of language: "Why choose assemblages rather than networks, the obvious alternative? The question is especially pertinent, since “network” is usually favored by Latour (witness ANT), although he tends at times to use “assemblage” as a synonym. Networks are typically considered to consist of edges and nodes analyzed through graph theory, conveying a sense of sparse, clean materiality. Assemblages, by contrast, allow for contiguity in a fleshly sense, touching, incorporating, repelling, mutating. When analyzed as dynamic systems, networks are like assemblages in that they function as sites of exchange, transformation, and dissemination, but they lack the sense of those interactions occurring across complex three-dimensional topologies, whereas assemblages include information transactions across convoluted and involuted surfaces, with multiple volumetric entities interacting with many conspecifics simultaneously." 

There are many connotations. Assemblage might suggest unity and close proximity (locality), while network implies distribution and decentralization across space (non-local dependencies, indirect causality). Which construct more easily accommodates the idea of infinite recursion? A node may be mathematically more tractable and comparable to a variable or datum in information theory. Is network or assemblage the more useful (or abstract) term? Neither is entirely sufficient. But a hypergraph my elide these differences. Having greater dimensionality they are similar to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of assemblage, and their hyperedges provide a rough simulation of Bateson's "interference fringes" (noted above). Hayles would certainly appreciate Fritjof Capra's description of the shift from objects to relationships, from nodes to edges, and from isolation to integration, that occurs in network science as a figure-ground shift. This is a very powerful explanation that was also used by Terrence Deacon in his book Incomplete Nature and often illustrated by MC Escher in his art. The shift from objects to relationships dissolves the distinction between object boundaries and relationship links into a dynamic cellular ‘assemblage’ or ‘mosaic’ that is reminiscent of a Voronoi tesselation. Such 'holistic thinking', which prioritizes context and relationships, has actually been found to improve memory recall. We should always return to the phenomena our terminology is trying to approximate. In most cases these involve organic structures such as microbial communities or synaptic junctions. These too elide the node-edge distinction. There are many advantages to perspectives such as these, and I hope this discussion has suggested a few ways network science may represent an improvement over existing methods. 

 

As a result, some environmental organizations are currently interested in developing a network (of stakeholders, tools, scripts, information, and other resources) to address the interlinked effects of climate change. Such a network approach can be used to highlight important processes and relationships, and suggest possible path-of-least-resistance intervention strategies (or a variety of alternate scenarios) that allow individual and collective interests to be brought into greater alignment. However many details regarding exactly how such an approach can be conceptualized and deployed at scale remain to be discovered. How should we characterize the target cultural and environmental structures? How do we bring an appropriate level of structure to data to illuminate the relevant dynamics? Can we employ novel approaches, such as Active Inference? Do we understand how to effectively intervene, modify, and adapt as needed via these methods? These are all topics for further exploration. 

Connecting Distant Dots (2009) Lang & Chaves

Bruno Latour

First a note on Bruno Latour's critics, which include Noam Chomsky and Alan Sokal (author of "Fashionable Nonsense" and "Beyond the Hoax"). What Latour is accused of could just as easily be broadly leveled against a wide range of thinkers including Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and many others who routinely stretch terms and concepts past their original use. Latour's more insightful critics, including Peter Critchley, point out other, potentially more problematic ontological implications. Despite this, many of his critics still recognize and value his starting point in the relational perspective. Where this is taken and how it gets developed is the question. So it's worth understanding where Latour's appeal comes from. Stephen Muecke wrote, “Latour’s is a highly pragmatic philosophy, borrowing from William James and Alfred North Whitehead. In the philosopher Graham Harman’s phrase, he is the “Prince of Networks”. He loves talking about the intimacy of things, humans, concepts, and passions in all their heterogeneous arrangements. Condoms, for instance, can be sins against human fertility or AIDS-inhibiting devices, as they sit at the crossroads of (at least) two equally real networks. Consequently, a psychological explanation for religious obedience is hardly going to make faith go away when the ancient institutions continue to thrive in their massive global networks. This is why Latour bills his investigation as an anthropology of modernity. The Moderns might say, for instance, that their vaunted objectivity comes from “sober reflection” or a “broad perspective on things,” but what Latour actually observes scientists doing is getting totally, passionately involved with microscopes, spreadsheets, test tubes, peer reports, internecine disputes, and applications to funding bodies.

“The Latourian adventure starts in the middle of our daily lives, in immanent constructions, mediations, and repetitions that are “paid for” by efforts of translation and displacement. In his proliferating mobile networks, nothing ever goes straight from cause to effect, or from subject to object; the course of existence never does run smooth. Transparency is an illusion, because various mediations get in the way, not the least of which are the technologies that continue to remake institutions, “nature,” and even living things. Our economies are founded on a strange ideal of turning someone close into a stranger, of wanting to close deals as if getting away from one another were the aim. But in fact nobody lives according to the principles of this idealized Economy, where equivalent values are precisely and coldly calculated. In economics as in everything, it turns out, we are attached to each other. To underscore this crucial point, Latour borrows a distinction from his sociological ancestor Gabriel Tarde: the verb to have is much more important than the verb to be. For what defines us is what we are attached to, what we don’t want to give up (goods, concepts, passions), more than any essence or identity. Latour would like to revise Descartes’s dictum “I think, therefore I am” to “I am what I am attached to.” (Compare with David Mitchell's "Our lives are not our own, we are bound to others." in Cloud Atlas.) This attachment is to both material things and values at the same time. Thus, pragmatics and morality are always intertwined.”

Ava Kofman wrote, “According to Latour, facts are “networked”; they stand or fall not on the strength of their inherent veracity, but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produce them and make them intelligible. If this network broke down, the facts would go with them. We are becoming conscious of the role that networks play in producing and sustaining knowledge only now that those networks are under assault. “Now we have people who no longer share the idea that there is a common world. And that of course changes everything.” As the assaults on their expertise have increased, some scientists, Latour told me, have begun to realize that the classical view of science — the assumption that the facts speak for themselves and will therefore be interpreted by all citizens in the same way — “doesn’t give them back their old authority.” In the 1980s, Latour helped to develop an approach to sociological research called Actor-Network Theory, which has been adopted as a methodological tool in sociology, urban design, and public health. From his studies of laboratories, Latour had seen how an apparently weak and isolated item — a scientific instrument, a scrap of paper, a photograph, a bacterial culture — could acquire enormous power because of the complicated network of other items, known as actors, that were mobilized around it. The more socially “networked” a fact was (the more people and things involved in its production), the more effectively it could refute its less-plausible alternatives. The medical revolution commonly attributed to the genius of Pasteur, he argued, should instead be seen as a result of an association between not just doctors, nurses and hygienists but also worms, milk, sputum, parasites, cows and farms. Science was “social,” then, not merely because it was performed by people; rather, science was social because it brought together a multitude of human and nonhuman entities and harnessed their collective power to act on and transform the world.

"At a meeting between French industrialists and a climatologist a few years ago, Latour was struck when he heard one scientist defend his results not on the basis of the unimpeachable authority of science but by laying out to his audience his manufacturing secrets: “the large number of researchers involved in climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data, the articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites and computers that ensure the flow of information.” The climate denialists, by contrast, the scientist said, had none of this institutional architecture. Latour realized he was witnessing the beginnings a seismic rhetorical shift: from scientists appealing to transcendent, capital-T Truth to touting the robust networks through which truth is, and has always been, established. These are the conditions by which knowledge comes to be known, the only way it could be seen. It was made visible by the labor and expertise of scientists, the government funding that paid for their education, the electricity that powered up the scientific equipment, and so on. Without this network, it would remain lost to our senses."  

Ecological Civilization

Jeremy Lent is a prolific writer. His forthcoming book is titled “The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe”. Paraphrasing from a recent article, "What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?": “When Lakota communities invoke Mitakuye Oyasin (“We are all related”), they are referring not just to themselves but to all sentient beings, reflected in the miracle of symbiosis and the interdependence of each living system on the vitality of all the other systems. Likewise, in an ecological civilization relationships between workers and employers, producers and consumers, humans and animals, are based on each party gaining in value rather than one group exploiting the other. Instead of extracting resources and accumulating waste, they comprise a circular economy. Instead of manipulating users to maximize advertising dollars, networks become a vehicle for celebrating diversity between cultures while recognizing the deep interdependence that binds all people into a single moral community with a shared destiny.

"In 2015, Pope Francis issued his encyclical Laudato Si’, a masterpiece of ecological philosophy that demonstrates the deep interconnectedness of all life, and calls for a rejection of the individualist, neoliberal ethic. From Chapter Four: Integral Ecology (paragraph 138): "Ecology studies the relationship between living organisms and the environment in which they develop. It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected. Just as the different aspects of the planet – physical, chemical and biological – are interrelated, so too living species are part of a network which we will never fully explore and understand. A good part of our genetic code is shared by many living beings. It follows that the fragmentation of knowledge and the isolation of bits of information can actually become a form of ignorance, unless they are integrated into a broader vision of reality." ...Of course, the Pope can't take credit for developing this view of life. As Lent pointed out above, it has many precedents in traditional wisdom. 

Arran Gare described how humans developed complex forms of semiosis that "in no way served the ecosystems they invaded", primarily only augmenting our destructive potential. As Aldo Leopold famously described "the standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” Why is this so? As Kevin Kelly wrote, "The idea that we choose the valence of technology’s charge is very appealing to our egos, but technology comes with biases and autonomy." We must understand what these are if we are going to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; if we are going to live on a piece of land without spoiling it. Similarly, Donald Favareau wrote that "It is the very placing of boundary conditions and constraints that, paradoxically, call forth new strategies, behaviors, interactions and relationships within the semiosphere.” Complex, highly contextual relationships between all ecosystem parts - people, wildlife, and the environment in which they live, rooted in cultural structures and habits - are also the starting point of Elinor Ostrum's general principles of commons management. These perspectives, and others like them, could be the beginning of a semiotic/ stigmergic/ relational understanding of friction, an understanding of how a network of "enabling constraints" might help us reach a possible future scenario where we can flourish for centuries to come.

Keywords: graph theory, information theory, semantic graph, semantic web, knowledge graph (Google), knowledge grid (Hai Zhuge), ontology, ontic structural realism (OSR), links, control nodes, percolation threshold, correlation, causation, spatiotemporal depth, Markov blanket, Bayesian network, pathways, gates, cues, role, logistics, combinatorial optimization, attractor, affordance, adjacent possible, alignment/synchrony, dynamics, connectomics, connectionist/relational, network science, complex network, network ecology, systems ecology, ecosemiotics, nodocentrism, paranodal space (Mejias), critical network theory, holographic network, mosaicism, fractal, gunk (Anaxagoras), collective, superorganism, stigmergy, suprasubjectivity, synechism, swarm, system, mesh, matrix, web, scaffold, lattice, entanglement, confederation, conglomerate, concrescence, constellation, assemblage, actor-network theory, actant, structured data, structuralism, tribosystems (tribology), Parliament of Things (Latour), structural fix, "aesthetic of friction", alterity (otherness), Eywa/Yggdrasil, rhizosphere, rhizomorphous, hyphae/mycelium, microbial network, neural network, neuromorphic computing, synapse, connectome, microbiome, holobiont, rhizome (philosophy), Physarum (slime mold), zettelkasten

 

Some thinkers: Baruch Spinoza, C.S. Peirce, A.N. Whitehead, Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhmann, Robert Rosen, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Fritjof Capra, Antonio Negri, Bruno Latour, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Albert-László Barabasi, Manuel Lima, Donella Meadows, N. Katherine Hayles, Denis Noble, Jeremy Lent, Carlo Rovelli, Lee Smolin, Jane Bennett, Lisa Feldman Barret, Eduardo Kohn, Suzanne Simard, David George Haskell

 

Notes:

[1] Regarding Peirce, it should be mentioned that Jesper Hoffmeyer, with his concept of "semiotic scaffolds" was, like Pierce, also a diagrammatic thinker with a connectionist perspective who saw beyond the initial triadic metaphors that currently dominate a lot of reductive biosemiotics. Both were, in other words, network thinkers who moved in the direction of larger linkages and assemblages. For Hoffmeyer this culminated in the semiosphere. It bears mentioning that Friston is a network thinker as well, though without some of the conceptual developments of semiotics (however see "Is the Free-Energy Principle a Formal Theory of Semantics?" for Friston's "nuanced form of realism").  

[2] Degeneracy. In her book "7 1/2 Lessons about the Brain", Lisa Feldman Barret described the network structure of the brain, and wrote (p43): “A brain doesn’t store memories like files in a computer — it reconstructs them on demand... Each time you have the same memory, your brain may have assembled it with a different collection of neurons. (That's degeneracy.)” 

[3] An autopoietic system is organized (defined as unity) as a network of processes of production (synthesis and destruction) of components such that these components: (i) continuously regenerate and realize the network that produces them, and (ii) constitute the system as a distinguishable unity in the domain in which they exist. Source: Varela, F.J. Patterns of life: Intertwining identity and cognition. (1997)

[4] The distributed cognition solution to the "Chinese room" puzzle is that it is the entire Chinese room, the system itself, that knows Chinese. And as we construct ever more sophisticated environments in which to live and work, our cognition becomes more sophisticated as well. ("Umwelt: Ecosystem of Posthuman Distributed Cognition", Kang Mijung)

Source: Denis Noble

See also:
Borrett et al., The Rise of Network Ecology (2013)

Timothée Poisot, Describe, understand and predict: why do we need networks in ecology? (2016) 

Aaron Ellison, Foundation Species, Non-trophic Interactions, and the Value of Being Common (2019) "The increasing awareness of the importance of ecological interaction networks has led to rapid advancement in understanding the processes and dynamics of ecological systems, and taken on more immediacy."

Albert-László Barabasi and Oltvai, Network biology: understanding the cell’s functional organization (2004)

Dirk Helbing, Globally networked risks and how to respond (2013)

Bascompte and Jordano, Plant-Animal Mutualistic Networks: The Architecture of Biodiversity (2007)

Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese Life is Physics: Evolution as a Collective Phenomenon (2011) See article. "More of a community than simply the sum of a collection of individuals, life could only have evolved as rapidly and optimally as it did if we assume early collective network effects."

James Ladyman, Every Thing Must Go (2007)

Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland (2020)

Fritjof Capra, "Networks as a unifying pattern of life", interview (2006) 

Fritjof Capra, "Ecology and Community" (2009) 

Fritjof Capra, "On Ecological Economics: The Economy as Servant, Rather Than Master, of Nature" (2017)

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life (1996)

Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections (2002) Capra’s “Principles of Ecology”, include: networks, cycles, solar energy, partnership, diversity, and dynamic balance. (p202)

Rocco Gangle, Diagrammatic Immanence (2015) Discusses Spinoza, Peirce, Deleuze, and category theory.

Barry Schwartz, "Economics Made Easy: Think Friction" (2012)
Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (2016) 

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980) See “Introduction: Rhizome”

Papale et al., Networks Consolidate the Core Concepts of Evolution by Natural Selection (2019) "Networks may become the next tools of choice in evolutionary biology, precisely because they provide an analytically tractable framework to handle a much more inclusive (and complex) ontology of entities and processes. How can we use networks to model the heredity of complex (highly polyphyletic) units of selection, such as holobionts and multispecies biofilms? Or the evolution of entities such as ecosystems and Gaia? Can we generate novel network tools depicting their transmission channels and classify these entities based on the resulting topologies?"
Marian Bantjes' organic narrative diagram of the various potential communities to which we all belong.

Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity (2011) The illustration "Connecting Distant Dots" is p194.
Manuel Lima, "The Power of Networks" (one of many presentations he has given on 'networkism').
Sven Severing, "A Manifesto for the Philosophy of the Future — Networkism" (2016) Network decay and inefficiencies (information asymmetry, power asymmetry, misalignment of interests, harmful competition, structural instability). Divided history of humankind into three stages: "God ordains, to the Individual rules, to now, the Network directs".

Warren Weaver, Science and Complexity (1948) Divided history of science into three categories: simplicity, disorganized complexity, and orgainized complexity.
Macrina Busato, The Fascinating Social Network of Trees: The Wood Wide Web (2020)
Battaglia et al., Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks (2018) A common vocabulary to express different kinds of networks. Carlos Perez notes "Douglas Hofstadter argues that the knowledge structuring mechanism known as categorization (or classification) is the same as analogies, since analogies are relationships between concepts." Robert Rosen makes a similiar point.
Carlos Perez, "Self is the Process of Identity" and "Wittgenstein, AI, and the Emergence of Empathy" (2020) includes an illustration from p314 of Robert Kegan's "In Over Our Heads" (1994) depicting network growth from individual to collective. Perez writes, "The problem of today’s society that is grossly ignorant of frameworks of complexity is that they inhabit one of the three bottom layers."
Albert-László Barabasi, Network Science (2018)
Adrian Bejan and J. Peder Zane, Design in Nature (2015) Bejan describes networks as "flows", as does Hai Zhuge.
Roger Lewin, Complexity (2000) Also uses the "flow metaphor" for networks.
James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, Connected (2011)

Judea Pearl, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems (1988)

Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (1998) Strategies for a connected world. 

Christopher Vitale, Networkologies (2014)

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (2013) Anthropology beyond the human.
David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees (2017) "The Darwinian war has created a furnace that burns away the individual, melting barriers and welding networks as strong as they are diverse." (14) Compare with "Everything is burning" from Gotama's Fire Sermon (5th century BCE)
Charlotte Nassim, Lessons from the Lobster (2018) Eve Marder's work in neuroscience.

Patricia Goldstone, Interlock (2015) About conceptual artist Mark Lombardi's network drawings tracing the connections of a global clandestine economy. 

Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire  What connection exists among sex, fire, and electricity? The primary one indicated by Gaston may be called rubbing, or more accurately, friction- the natural method used to produce the virtues of each. “Everything that rubs, that burns, or that electrifies is immediately considered capable of explaining the act of generation.” (p27)

Denis Noble, "Harnessing stochasticity: How do organisms make choices?" (2018) Noble describes how organisms could be harnessing stochasticity to actively influence the direction of their development and evolution by activating (or "spinning") stochastic processes to generate possible solutions, comparing these with a "problem template", and then implementing the discovered solution. Might the ability to harness stochasticity through this sort of feedback mechanism also provide other dynamic systems, such as neural networks, with a way to avoid the potential pitfalls of structural instability? (This was a concern Akhlaghpour identified).

Denis Noble, Dance to the Tune of Life (2017) The "Roche Metabolic Pathways Chart", is simply a "two-dimensional static map of what is in fact a dynamic multi-scale four-dimensional process".

Denis Noble, "Neo‐Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis and selfish genes: are they of use in physiology?" (2011) Contains diagram representing the complexity of interactions mediated by biological networks.

Rachel Armstrong, "Into the age of the ecological human" (2016) "A complex set of networked relationships edit and shape interactions that entwine us with our environment and our ecological communities. We push nature, not control it, and nature pushes back. The strangeness of material networks and their connections. 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 or the participation of non-human agents. Nature is a cultural and phenomenological construct that changes along with us."

Schaetzle and Hendlin, "Between Teleophilia and Teleophobia" (2021)
Alex Pentland, Social Physics (2014): "The main point is that the propagation of human action habits by means of social learning can be accurately modeled from easily observable behavior using heterogenous, dynamic, stochastic networks. This capability is transformative for increasing our understanding of the dynamics of human society, and hence our ability to plan for the future." (264)

Adrian Ivakhiv, "On a Few Matters of Concern" (2017) Chapter 10 in "The Variety of Integral Ecologies" Ivakhiv defends a process-relational ontology against the speculative realist movement of object-oriented ontology; elaborates on the ecological implications of the work of Latour and others associated with speculative realism. Links Latour with Whitehead, Peirce and biosemiotics.
Ryan Smith et al. note: "In many papers in the active inference literature, partially observable Markov decision processes are represented using graphical models. Graphical models are a useful method for visually depicting how variables in a model depend on one another... These types of probabilistic graphical models are particularly useful in the context of active inference because they provide a clear visual summary of the computational architecture of the models... Here we consider two types of graphical models – Bayesian networks (or ‘Bayes nets’) and Forney-style (normal) factor graphs."
Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology (2006, as quoted by Justin Clemens) “An object is but the marking of a network of actions, a cluster of connections. Relation precedes Being.” 
Susan Schuppli, "Of Moths and Machines" (2008) "A networked ecology of relational processes in which culture has become inseparable from nature and techne from the social." 
Magdalena Hoły-Łuczaj, "Shapeability: Revisiting Heidegger's concept of being in the Anthropocene" (2019) “It is false to think we can isolate any being from its network of relations.” 
Watts, D., Strogatz, S., "Collective dynamics of small-world networks" (1998)
Barabási, A.-L., Albert, R., "Emergence of scaling in random networks" (1999)
Duncan Watts, Six Degrees (2003) "The crux of the matter is that in the past, networks have been viewed as objects of pure structure whose properties are fixed in time. Neither of these assumptions could be further from the truth." (p28)
Steven Strogatz, Sync (2003)
Manuel Castells, The Information Age, Volumes 1-3 (1999) Castells describes the shift from an industrial society to an informational society. This "Network Society" is structured around networks instead of individual actors; the 'network' is the defining feature that marks our current epoch.
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)

Albert, R., Jeong, H., Barabási, A.-L., "Internet: Diameter of the world-wide web" (1999)
Ulises A. Mejias, "The limits of networks as models for organizing the social" (2010)
Ulises A. Mejias, "Networked Proximity" (2007)

José Luís Garcia, Pierre Musso and the Network Society (2016)
Jennifer Ouellette, "Study: Folklore structure reveals how conspiracy theories emerge, fall apart" (2021)
Charlie Campbell, "The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Derail Xi Jinping’s Dreams of a Chinese Century" (2020) The downside of top-down centralized control is nobody acts until they get word from the top, making society more brittle and prone to error.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2009) This book makes a distinction between 'materialism', a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental aspects and consciousness, are results of material interactions, and 'new (or vital) materialism', which reworks received notions of matter as a uniform, inert substance and instead foregrounds novel accounts of its agentic thrust, processual nature, formative impetus, and self-organizing capacities, whereby matter, as an active force, is not only sculpted by, but also co-productive in conditioning and enabling social worlds and expression, human life and experience.
Sapien Journal, COVID-19 conspiracy theories thrive on social media platforms, EXCEPT Twitter (2021) This article illuminates the central role of technological "affordances" (conceptually related to that of "friction", see Wendy Wood): “Twitter’s environment offers quicker and sharper public scrutiny, leading to faster fact-checking and publicly debunking of misperceptions than on other platforms." Things are different in larger, open, one-directional, and asymmetrical networks like Twitter where conspiratorial content — when it appears — can be debunked faster or possibly “drowned out” with better quality information. Compare with Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, where content is: shared within more dense social networks, more likely to come from homogenous sources, and is less likely to be debunked when conspiratorial, since people tend to want to avoid the scorn of friends and family. Read the source article: "Does the platform matter? Social media and COVID-19 conspiracy theory beliefs in 17 countries".

 

Source: Fritjof Capra (see also intercalating cells)

Additional quotes
Imre Hamar, Reflecting Mirrors: Perspectives on Huayan Buddhism (2007) (also Alan Fox, "The Practice of Huayan Buddhism") "In Mahayana thought, particularly Huayan, interdependent causality is understood as an all-embracing web of causal relations defining reality: to say that something is real is to say that it participates in causal relations with everything else that can be said to be real. As opposed to a linear conception of causality, this is a "holographic" model in which at every moment, everything is, in some sense, simultaneously the cause and effect of everything else. This approach acknowledges reality, but not fundamental reality, and acknowledges causality, but not first cause, thus avoiding the kind of ontological commitment which Buddhism generally takes to be the most proximate cause of suffering. A key doctrine of Huayan is the mutual containment and interpenetration of all phenomena or "perfect interfusion." This includes the views that "practicing one teaching is practicing all teachings." This is not only an effective slogan to encourage people to practice, but more importantly a kind of pragmatic value of perfect interfusion. [See also Thich Nhat Hanh’s “interbeing”.]
Guatama Buddha, “As a net is made up of a series of ties, so everything in this world is connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks that the mesh of a net is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken. It is called a net because it is made up of a series of a interconnected meshes, and each mesh has its place and responsibility in relation to other meshes.”
Murray Gell-Mann (1997), "Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behaviour of the whole." 

Fritjof Capra, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (2014) "All the variables we can observe in an ecosystem always fluctuate. This is how ecosystems maintain themselves in a flexible state, ready to adapt to changing conditions. The web of life is a flexible, ever-fluctuating network... All living systems are networks of smaller components, and the web of life as a whole is a multilayered structure of living systems nesting within other living systems - networks within networks... Deep ecology does not separate humans from the natural environment. It sees the world not as a collection of isolated objects, but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life."

 

Section Headings: 

Introduction
Conspiracy Theories
Interventions, no Deus ex Machina
"The Rise of Network Ecology" by Borrett et al.
Down the networked rabbit hole, or "relations without relata"
Terminology incorporates notions of combinatorial depth and scale invariance
Life is Network
We are all cousins
Herbivore or carnivore?
Survival of the Largest Networks
It takes a village to raise a child (or at least a grandma)
Cooperation Redux, or Why Networks?
Social media problems and promise
The speed of transitions (in culture, energy, evolution, etc.)
Why to shape the relational dynamics of networks
How to shape the relational dynamics of networks
Percolation theory, phase transitions, and language learning
Network neuroscience and self regulation
Collective psychology and sense of embeddedness
Relationship advice from Eastern philosophy (Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi)
Designing against efficiency and for implementation intentions

"An extended network of influence": Wendy Wood and David Roberts on friction

Topology of relations and map of affordances

Tribosystems, or literary perspectives on network tribology

Energy and Resource Networks move toward Net-Zero
Further applications of network science
Bruno Latour
Ecological Civilization