The Social Landscape

“The mind may be compared to a pan of water. If you place the pan on a level and do not jar it, then the heavy sediment will settle to the bottom and the clear water will collect on top, so that you can see your beard and eyebrows in it and examine the lines of your face.“ - Xunxi

In Freud's letter to Einstein in 1932, he said that human instincts are of two kinds: those that conserve and unify, and those that destroy and kill. The well known Love and Hate, attraction and repulsion. But he was quick to add that they are not good and evil, as "each is as indispensable as its opposite, and all the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition." He went on: "If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we have always its counter-agent... All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote... All that brings out the significant resemblances between men calls into play this feeling of community, identification, whereon is founded, in large measure, the whole edifice of human society." 

I'm reflecting on these polar tendencies in the context of computational social science, the result of the work of people like Alan Turing, Judea Pearl, Alex Pentland, Molly Crocket, and Radhika Nagpal (to name but a few). Pentland, for example, focused on social networks in his paper on promoting cooperation. One might say that these researchers are trying to map out the "social landscape" (to contrast with Harris' book The Moral Landscape). In our society today, despite the current social media services available, there are many people with few meaningful connections to others, people who replace social ties with unhealthy addictions, and those who find the thrill of tearing down more appealing than the work of building up. 

In a society with many broken parts, we need to chart a clearer course toward healthy relationships. Freud made contributions in this direction (arguably some better than others). And researchers like Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that it takes a LOT of documentation from history and ethnography, not just formal models. Now, combining detailed data with new analytic tools has created the potential today to extend that effort still further. For example, Iyad Rahwan described an algorithmic social contract. 

In "Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History" author Thomas Rid devotes a chapter to one of the interesting and less well known results of the social upheaval that occurred in the '60s and '70s. The psychedelic counterculture incorporated cybernetic ideas, which profoundly affected people like Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand (of the Whole Earth Catalog) and influenced many who later became Silicon Valley innovators. Is there any similarity between John Lennon's idealistic lyrics in "Imagine" and a hypothetical algorithm for world peace, or as Freud said in his letter, "a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war?" They all draw their influences from the same cultural trends.

Cultural Genesis and Evolution

Melvin Kranzberg's first law of technology states: "Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." I propose a parallel law: "Culture is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." There isn't perfect symmetry here though, since culture includes all of technology but technology doesn't include all of culture. The relationship between the two is very strong nonetheless, and will only increase. Technology has a growing influence on society, some aspects of which are obvious, others are nearly imperceptible, but all contribute to shaping our choices and actions. This much is generally well recognized. The implication is that if you control these influences, you can steer the future course of events in the direction of your choosing. This fact isn't as well appreciated, but the potential for direct and often invisible influence at the level of entire societies isn't new. Religious and political propaganda has been around for a very long time, directing cultural evolution into new directions. It was new technology that enabled the first revolution in agriculture about 12,500 years ago, directly precipitating large demographic and cultural shifts. What cultural changes will our new cognitive tools precipitate?

We need to reopen the conversation about what it means to create our culture. Who shapes it? Who benefits from it? Why? How could this change? As Noah Yuval Harari identified in his book Homo Deus, our accelerating ability to shape our environment, ourselves, and our societies brings with it a responsibility to do so intelligently. We are cultural engineers, whether we like it or not. We debate this today in the religious and political arenas, but there's more to it.

Cultural evolution is open-ended. Where could it go? If we wanted to take it somewhere, how would we do that? We know there are many wrong ways to intervene. The more interesting question is then: Is there a right way to intervene, to take our culture in the direction that leads toward human flourishing? It would have to be transparent, democratic, and meet the ethical standards society agrees upon. If such intervention is possible, what forms might it take? This is the exercise in generating scenarios. We've done that. The things we haven't done: 1) generate all the possible scenarios, 2) generate any single scenario in the fine-grained detail needed to show how it would impact the daily activities of any given individual. For example, if I wanted to ask "How would your scenario for a sustainable future impact my life?" Would I get a broad brush response, or would I get the details I'm most interested in? Would it reflect a new culture, and would I be receptive to making any changes if I knew what they were? For example, what are the socially sanctioned "default behaviors" when confronted by stress? What options does our culture first suggest? Find a distraction, consume food or entertainment, or respond constructively? A change in default behavior patterns that reflects a more constructive approach to stress and problem solving would require a society configured around supporting and encouraging these changes, not just in it's media and public discourse, but the social and material culture as well.

While it is true that many possible scenarios may lead to further entrenchment of bad policies, there remain open avenues to a more prosperous future. A lot of this comes down to communication and information availability, and so far, persuasion tactics based on the truth haven't been nearly as successful as those based on fictions. People need information that communicates the reality of their situation, and we haven't always succeeded there. From a social epidemiologist's point of view, many people are living in unhealthy conditions, in the broadest sense of that term. We need to move beyond the standard measurements of social outcomes and into measuring individual outcomes. The first question any voter asks is "How will this affect me?" That being the case, we should be able to tell them, and in as much detail as they want. If we can do that, then maybe we can also tell them how it will affect their community, region, state, international relations, and planetary health (within certain confidence levels). That's the direction in which we are headed. This is the potential of fine-grained data paired with counterfactual thinking to connect the dots in a new way, to reveal a more attractive future than the current local policies, operating procedures, and cultural context is able to permit.

A Beautiful Landscape: "taking no action contrary to nature," or "why wu wei?" (life, culture, aesthetics)

“Broad ways are extremely even, but people are fond of bypaths.” - TTC 53

Peter Corning said that "life is a process with a purpose" (teleonomy), and that purpose is our collective survival enterprise. Does our aesthetic sense mediate our relationship to that purpose? If Barry Lord was right that the kind of art you make and value reflects your culture, then will our culture reflect the kind of art we make and value? Seigen Ishin implied there are two kinds of people who see "mountains as mountains, and waters as waters," the naïve and the wise. And Karl Schroeder said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature." All of this, taken together, would seem to reinforce the view that we should take nature as our inspiration.

It is interesting to note that, in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nagarjuna uses the theory of "dependent arising" (pratitya-samutpada) to demonstrate the futility of metaphysical speculations, that things are neither empty nor not empty. Contrast this with the concept of non-action (wu wei), which is used to demonstrate that one should act without undue effort and let nature take it's course. This illustrates the characteristic difference in emphasis between early philosophical thought in India and China, the first focusing on the nature of reality and knowledge, and the second concerning the nature of embodied processes and subjective awareness. As we consider our unfolding cultural evolution, indirectly influencing factors such as these will play a role. The aesthetic qualities rooted in our early past can help guide our future course toward a culture that prioritizes health and adaptability.

Natural, Artifactual, Coevolutionary: Algorithmic art, a narrow application of natural aesthetics to factors influencing our social landscape and evolution

“Die jetzt aufgezeigte Handlung ist thetisch, antithetisch und synthetisch zugleich." - Johann Fichte

Architecture is considered a form of art. Why? After all, a building needs to provide some kind of shelter from the elements, but it doesn't need to be especially beautiful. Yet we all admit that some buildings are better looking than others. In like manner, I want to suggest we should view the coding for computer algorithms like architecture. In their basic design, they are just a functional scaffolding, but because of the social settings in which they perform their function, and the end result, there are several examples of algorithms that I believe can be considered genuinely beautiful.

The first example is Origamizer, an algorithm created by Erik Demaine and Tomohiro Tachi that can tell you how to fold a 2 dimensional sheet of paper into any 3 dimensional origami polyhedron. You read that right, ANY polyhedron. Want a paper rabbit? No problem. And now this algorithm is freely available as computer software.

The second example is Impartial Automatic Redistricting, an algorithm created by Brian Olson, a software engineer in Massachusetts, that can create "optimally compact" congressional districts in each state. Algorithm-based districts make so much intuitive sense that there are now many ways to generate them, like Wendy Cho's algorithm, which can do more or less the same thing.

Both of these examples may not be as iconic as the Taj Mahal in India or Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, but I think they qualify as the computer code equivalent of beautiful architecture. And they deserve wider recognition. Perhaps some day we'll have a phylogeny of algorithms, which will be displayed in museum collections or the equivalent of zoological gardens. Or maybe, in some sense (per Noah Harari) we already do.

Digital alter egos and the interpersonal utility comparison problem

"Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A digital alter ego exists for each one of us, and these are engaged in countless virtual evaluations, product pairings, and scenarios to optimize our engagement with other people, service providers, etc. These digital models can also aid in confronting global issues. Here's how they can help us realize our values and aesthetic sense. Also referred to as a "digital double," they explore many "what if" scenarios that we are prevented from investigating in full due to limited time and resources. Often only one of these scenarios can ever become real. The overwhelming majority of them are destined to become unrealized counterfactual possibilities. Think of them as the latent potential that we only have fleeting glimpses of in the normal course of our lives. Some of this potential is the ability to realize, more fully than we do today, an environmentally and ethically responsible way of life that conforms to our aesthetic aspirations.

At this point I hear several objections. "Since we already have an understanding of our goals for social and environmental health, why do we need a digital alter ego to suggest scenarios we already want? And furthermore, if our so-called "leader/decision-makers" can't hear the smartest among us (scientists) why would they listen to digital doubles?" Because, as Pedro Domingos and other AI researchers suggest, a digital double would know you better than anyone else. At the upper limit, it would know you better than you know yourself. Consequently, if it can’t persuade you, nobody can. By comparison, a scientist is hardly persuasive to those who are opposed, on ideological or tribalistic grounds, to the basic assumptions or conclusions offered. This is the big obstacle to effective science communication: bridging the empathy gap, solving the interpersonal utility comparison problem. A digital double could be the perfect device for finding a common language to unite groups at opposing ends of the political divide. By exploring all counterfactual possibilities, a better consensus can be reached, and in less time. With further iterations, these benefits become multiplicative. Here's Domingos describing this future trend that we are already witnessing:

"The next decade is going to be one of accelerating change. Today each company has a little model of you based on just the sliver of your data that it has access to. Netflix has a model to predict your movie tastes based on your movie ratings. Amazon has a model to predict what you're going to buy based on what you've done on their site and so on. But all these little models are quickly coalescing into bigger and bigger ones and soon you'll have a complete 360 degree model of you that learns from all your data and assists you with everything that you're doing in your life, from buying things and making appointments to finding a job or a mate. Our "digital alter egos" will be even more indispensable to us than our smartphones, and the world economy will revolve around them. 

"Our society will become a society of models. Everyone's models will be continually collaborating, competing, and negotiating in cyberspace to determine what happens in the real world. You click on the "find me a job" button on LinkedIn and your model instantly interviews for all the open positions that match your specs at the same time. Another copy of your model can be looking for a car for you, exhaustively researching all the options and haggling with the car dealer so you don't have to. If you're looking for a date your model will go on millions of dates with thousands of other people's models and select the most promising ones to try out in the real world. 

"But your data, and your model, have to be under your control, not owned by some third party that may have a conflict of interest. Sergey Brin says that Google wants to be the third half of your brain, but do you really want part of your brain constantly trying to show you ads? Probably not. We need something different, maybe something like data banks that store your data and use it on your behalf in the same way that regular banks store and invest your money, or maybe we need data unions to even the balance of power between us and large companies in the same way that labor unions even the balance of power between workers and their bosses. And you need to be able to interact with your model, setting its goals, asking it to justify suggestions, telling it where it went wrong and why. All very different from the black boxes that we have today. And finally, as a society we're going to have to decide what kind of society of models we want to have. What's allowed, what's not, how do we make sure that everyone benefits, how do we smooth the transition? There is lots to figure out. If we do there's a bright future where our lives will be happier and more productive. If we don't it'll be a huge missed opportunity. It's in our hands."

Our digital models, imitating our individual lives as they do, will reflect both the good and less desirable aspects of our human nature. But just as when we see our faces in a mirror we have the ability to style our appearance to our liking, when we see our behaviors reflected in these computational models, we will have the ability to reinforce those behaviors that promote our common good, and exert greater restraint over those that detract from it.

Partial list of terms:  
無常 (Japanese: mujō, Pali: anicca) meaning: transience, impermanence.
物の哀れ (Japanese: mononoaware) meaning: the pathos of things, an awareness of ephemerality. (Compare with lacrimae rerum, weltschmerz)
侘寂 (Japanese: wabisabi) meaning: traditional Japanese aesthetics - beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete."
無為 (Chinese: wúwéi, Japanese: mui) meaning: non-action
無為而無不為 or 无为而无不为 (Chinese: wúwéi ér wúbù wéi) meaning: "No action is undertaken, and yet nothing is left undone." Tao Te Ching, chapter 37 and 48.
無用の用 (Japanese: muyonoyo) meaning: “without use's use." Zhuangzi's short parables about the use of the useless (Carpenter Shih, Crippled Shu)
もったいない (Japanese: mottainai) meaning: "Do not destroy (or lay waste to) that which is worthy."
道 (Chinese: tao) meaning: As a way of life, it denotes simplicity, spontaneity, tranquility, weakness, and non-action (wúwéi). “Reversion is the action of Tao.”

Additional reading:
Semi-artificial Photosynthesis
Get Ready for your Digital Model by Pedro Domingos

Causality, Counterfactuals, and Possible Worlds

Source: xkcd

“A Causal Revolution has spread like a chain of firecrackers from one discipline to the next: epidemiology, psychology, genetics, ecology, climate science, and so on... With every passing year I see a greater and greater willingness among scientists to speak and write about causes and effects, not with apologies and downcast eyes but with confidence and assertiveness.”
- Judea Pearl, "The Book of Why" (2018)

"Philosophy begins in wonder."
- Socrates

The pursuit of a better future for ourselves and our children begins with asking "Can we do better?" and furthermore, "Could we have done better, had we acted differently?" To both these questions, we must answer in the affirmative. That being the case, I believe we cannot avoid following up with "Why?" According to Judea Pearl, the prototypical "Why?" question is actually a counterfactual question in disguise.

People often imagine how things might have turned out differently "if only." But can counterfactual claims be true? Neil Sinhababu said this question about "possible worlds" is one of the hardest problems in philosophy. Nonetheless, "counterfacutal history," not to be confused with "alternative history" or "historical revisionism" (which has separate popular and academic meanings) can yeild important insights. For example, consider that following the election of President Trump, a lot of people who were disappointed in this outcome were asking "Why?" If Bernie Sanders had won the 2016 presidential primary, would Trump have been elected? If James Comey had not announced his investigation into Hillary's emails just 11 days before the election, would Trump still have won? Of course, we all know that such counterfactual scenarios did not occur, but it's hard not to wonder how things might have turned out differently.

Or consider that in the course of WWII, Alan Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements. Counterfactual history is difficult with respect to the effect Ultra intelligence had on the length of the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over fourteen million lives.

A useful analogy is that counterfactual research in history is like chess. Each new move opens up the possibility for roughly thirty-eight times as many positions in the branching tree of analysis. We can ask: What are the most promising "moves?" How might the interaction of these counterfactuals and existing context play out? What is the logic connecting antecedent and consequent and the assumptions on which chains of causation are based? Supercomputers are routinely used to conduct counterfactual simulations in the sciences, where there can be multiple interactions at every move, and the chains set in motion interact with one another simultaneously and continually. (Richard Ned Lebow, "Counterfactual thought experiments: A necessary teaching tool")

Isaiah Berlin (Virtual History by Niall Ferguson)

Another great opportunity to ask some important "what if?" questions is suggested by Hanna Rosin, the author of "The End of Men: And The Rise of Women," where she chronicles the economic and cultural shifts that are upending male dominance. In a recent interview she said "Every time you have forward motion economically, any kind of progress for women, it's accompanied by a giant tidal wave of cultural backlash. And that's exactly the moment we're in right now." So let's ask: What if male dominance is upended? Ensuring women can enjoy the same rights and privileges as men is essential to our future. And yes, that will affect many cultural institutions, including marriage and child-rearing practices. Can we find a healthier response to this forward motion than the socially damaging cultural backlash we see now?

Would a better understanding of social physics and especially cause-and-effect relationships lead to the development of a Fair Society (as outlined in Peter Corning's book of the same name)? Consequentialist ethical theories posit that the consequences of actions should be the primary focus, so it would seem obvious that a clearer view of how cause and effect operates, at both very small and very large scales of space and time, could have significant ethical implications. If Judea Pearl is right when he claims a "causal revolution" has begun, this knowledge may force us to choose whether we will squarely face the ethical dilemmas that confront us, or renege on our responsibility to act given what we know. If we choose the later, our inaction will be rationalized away using the psychological acrobatics of self deception. But if we choose confrontation, it will be because our cumulative cultural evolution is open-ended and able to advance in spite of our individual limitations.

Visions of a better future, whether utopian or merely incremental, always address social problems, and, after the start of the Industrial Revolution these invariably include environmental problems as well. In so doing, we assume the ability to diagnosis our problems and prescribe an appropriate course of treatment. This descriptive/prescriptive dynamic is either explicit or implied. In this light, the fear of an apocalyptic dystopia is just as often the fear of human incompetence in diagnosis and treatment, as often as it is the fear of truly malign forces at work. This should serve to underscore the importance of understanding causal processes.

Our ability to gather information about the world around us, inquire how causal relationships change, and to intervene so we can change our behavior patterns, is critical. None of the answers to a question contain the possibility of asking the question in the first place, as my former philosophy professor, Dr. Benesch, was fond of saying. Scenarios that consider "what if?" questions are useful for both the possibilities and the insights they suggest, but they cannot simply suggest themselves. This is why the ability to ask the "what if?" and "why?" questions is so important. We need more counterfactual thinking today more than at any time in our past. The causal revolution hasn't arrived a moment too late.

Postscript:

Sewall Wright

The possibility of asking questions seems to assume subjective awareness, which seems to assume time asymmetry and therefore causality. If our subjective experience of time was symmetrical (no arrow of time) then the explanatory tool of causation, and the concepts of free will, agency, and intervention would likely be incomprehensible. But because we cannot see the future, the concept of causation is our primary tool to help bring it into focus. Causality is therefore the means, and understanding is the goal. Hence, if some procedure other than causality were discovered that could provide a greater means for understanding the interaction among variable factors across spatial and temporal scales, then that would be used in its place. As Newtonian physics is to general relativity, perhaps causation is to this as yet undiscovered means.

A few unresolved problems remain for me: 1) in the presence of synergistic effects, it may be impossible to perform meaningful causal analysis, and 2) depending on deterministic factors, we may need to reconceptualize our notion of how change occurs - intervention may only be described completely as a property of an entire system, not any single agent within that system.

"Causal inference may be superfluous in some idealised, superhuman version of physics, but if you actually want to find out how the Universe works, it is vital. ...But this doesn’t mean we must believe in a richly metaphysical idea of causal powers, ‘producing’ or ‘bringing about’ causal regularities like muscular enforcers of the laws of nature. We still see only the patterns, the constant conjunctions of different sorts of event."
- Mathias Frisch

But I can't neglect to mention the relationship between causality and feedback (cybernetics), and how that in turn relates to social networks and Alex Pentland's hope to have a transformative impact on our understanding of the dynamics of human society and our ability to plan for the future. And after all, causality and teleonomy may both be inherent biological qualities:

"Cognition is heavily grounded in space. As animals that move in space, we travel both physically and mentally in space and time, reliving past events, imagining future ones, and even constructing imaginary scenarios that play out in stories. Mental exploration of space is extraordinarily flexible, allowing us to zoom, adopt different vantage points, mentally rotate, and attach objects and sense impressions to create events, whether remembered, planned, or simply invented."
- Michael Corballis, "Space, time, and language"

My former history professor, Dr. Cole, identified the importance of looking to the future without being held in the past, a specific reference to The Pattern Problem. “In one sense, I feel sorry for younger people today because they’re trapped by the inability to reinvent themselves, free of the burdens of the past. People who know the past are stuck in it because they love repeating it,” Cole said. “This may sound odd to you, coming from a history professor, but I think history is a trap for many people.” ...You can escape that trap with counterfactual thinking.

Sourced quotes: 

"The ability to reflect on one's past actions and envision alternative scenarios is the basis of free will and social responsibility. Counterfactuals are at the core of the cognitive advances that made us human and the imaginative abilities that have made science possible. ...The rewards of having a causal model that can answer counterfactual questions are immense. Finding out why a blunder occurred allows us to take the right corrective measures in the future. ...The advantage we gained from imagining counterfactuals was the same then as it is today: flexibility, the ability to reflect on and improve upon past actions and, perhaps even more significant, our willingness to take responsibility for past and current actions."
- Judea Pearl, "The Book of Why" (2018)

"The survival of the fittest is a slow method for measuring advantages. The experimenter, by the exercise of intelligence, should be able to speed it up. ...If he can trace a cause for some weakness he can probably think of the kind of mutation which will improve it."
- Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”(1950)

"We may define a cause to be... if the first object had not been, the second never had existed."
- David Hume (1748)

"Evolutionary events weren't destined to occur in the way that they did..."
- Stephen Jay Gould (1989)

Algorithmic Society

A better understanding of our actions within the context of their proximal and distal causes will enable us to improve health by selectively enhancing factors that promote it and intervening, when appropriate, for those that detract from it. The accompanying view of individuals and collectives at higher levels of temporal and spatial scale this encourages will tend toward an antireductive dissolution of dualisms, like mind/body, nature/artifice, and individual/social. These are a few of the results we can anticipate to see from the relatively new field of computational social science, which is becoming a principle paradigm through which society and culture, and even social contracts, are being viewed.

In "The Rise of the Social Algorithm" David Lazer writes "Humanity is in the early stages of the rise of social algorithms: programs that size us up, evaluate what we want, and provide a customized experience. This quiet but epic paradigm shift is fraught with social and policy implications. ...The fact that human lives are regulated by code is hardly a new phenomenon. Organizations run on their own algorithms, called standard operating procedures. And anyone who has been told that “it’s a rule” knows that social rules can be as automatic and thoughtless as any algorithm. Our friends generally are a lot like us and news media have always had to choose to pay attention to some stories and not others, in part based on financial and cultural imperatives. Social and organizational codes have always resulted in filter bubbles. However, every system of rules and every filtering process has potentially quite different dynamics and normative implications. Therein lies the most important lesson of Bakshy et al.’s report: the need to create a new field around the social algorithm, which examines the interplay of social and computational code."

It's been well established that our early capacities for learning from others enabled culture-driven genetic evolution. To paraphrase Joseph Henrich, genetic evolution is shaping us to be cultural learners, and cultural evolution shapes our genetic evolution. But Pablo Reyes Arellano digs deeper when he states: "The process of cultural evolution occurs through an algorithm." Culture-driven genetic evolution can be described as social "algorithm-driven" genetic evolution. Our many algorithmic innovations (such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons) drove our genetic evolution, altering our physiology, and psychology. These shared algorithms were the earliest sort of intelligence outside our own minds that we created. On a daily basis we interact with them, are affected by them, and can even be destroyed by them. Algorithms have been with us long before our recognition of contemporary artificial intelligence. 

Yuval Harari famously claimed "organisms are algorithms.” He was close. What he probably should've said was "cultures are algorithms," which is a far more consequential statement anyway. The embodiment problem (substrate dependence) makes algorithmic biology very difficult, but algorithmic descriptions of behavior and certain taxonomic characters (insofar as they are superorganic) are common. The field of physics is based on this premise. Animal behaviorists can describe the behavior of single-celled organisms algorithmically. Can we do the same with a mouse? Or how about a human within the sociocultural context? Regardless of our actual ability or stated beliefs, this is the operating assumption within society, where algorithm-driven evolution is happening today. Consider that algorithms mediate many of our relationships with each other. They used for social media, online dating, college admissions, credit scores, and stock trading, to name just a few examples. Over time, these experiences create a social, cultural, and ontological shift.

"Every reform deliberately instituted in the structure of society changes both history and the selective forces that affect evolution - though evolutionary change may be the farthest thing from our minds as reformers. We are not free to avoid producing evolution: we are only free to close our eyes to what we are doing." - Garrett Hardin, 1971

Arellano asks: "Are the systems with which we have approached the management of problems in the past enough to deal with the complex environments we find ourselves in today?" An algorithmic society wouldn't need to be comprehensive, in any sense of the word, to have a profound influence. Ted Striphas echoed this in an article about "algorithmic culture" noting that "Today, culture may only be as good as its algorithms." There is both potential and danger. Jack Balkin writes: "We are moving beyond the Information Age to the Algorithmic Society, where new technologies permit both public and private organizations to govern large populations. This could lead to asymmetries of information, monitoring capacity, and computational power."

When ideas can rapidly recombine with other ideas, algorithmic evolution moves faster and we produce more innovations, and potentially better adaptive bodies of knowledge. Hence, larger and more interconnected societies tend to produce faster algorithmic evolution. Harari again: "Computer scientists have been learning how to create better and better electronic algorithms. [This] will create a tsunami that will wash everything in its way. But technology’s not deterministic. There is no determinism about where this idea would lead us in the coming decades, so we should aim not just to regulate but to somehow guide this tsunami in a better and wiser direction." Merged with Joseph Henrich's expansive description of the significance of culture, the question is: what do social algorithms mean for ethics, healthcare, energy, transportation, heavy industry, agriculture, and materials? What do they mean for environmental and sustainability problems, and our cultural evolution? Who is helping to guide the direction of our coevolutionary process to ensure our Algorithmic Society is responsive to the biological health of the planet? It takes visionaries, like Rachel Armstrong who can see a beneficial fusion of nature and machine, and Lewis, Arista, Pechawis and Kite, who bring Indigenous epistemologies and open new lines of discussion.

There are of course numerous caveats. Some of which have been raised by Ian Bogost and George Zarkadakis. What are the limits to our ability to understand ourselves and our society through the lens of algorithms? To what extent can intuition be said to be algorithmic? And a real human society is so complex that, even assuming we can describe it algorithmically, things may be interconnected in a different way than we think they are. But that said, some rough contours are apparent, and there are many other very real features and behaviors that we can effectively describe as the product of individual and collective algorithmic minds and cultures, with useful results. If we can predict which policies will produce the best outcomes, for example, maybe we’ll end up with a healthier and happier world.

Consider that algorithmic modeling has shown that people tend to secularize when four factors are present: existential security, personal freedom, pluralism, and education. If even one is absent, the whole secularization process slows down. (Incidentally, this likely explains why the U.S. is secularizing at a slower rate than Western and Northern Europe.) This introduces the potential for social engineering, which hasn't escaped the attention of various groups like Cambridge Analytica. Bad actors will do this kind of computational work without transparency or public accountability. LeRon Shults points out “It’s going to be done. So not doing it is not the answer.” Instead, he believes the answer is to do the work with transparency and simultaneously speak out about the ethical danger inherent in it.

There is likely a collection of algorithms that would be able to describe my behavior to an arbitrary level of accuracy (a valuable commodity that is bought and traded by organizations that sell our data). The question is whether, and in what ways, this data can benefit us. Social algorithms should be studied. To reinterpret a well known quote from Jung: "We need more understanding of human algorithms. Our psyche should be studied..." It begins with knowing your personal data and algorithms, and those you share collectively with others. Who is doing this sort of work today? Iyad Rahwan leads the Scalable Cooperation group at the MIT Media Lab. His recent work has been on the topic of algorithmic social contracts. This dovetails into the research neuroscientist Molly Crockett has done on bridging the empathy gap, which is also partially motivated with the goal of creating better social contracts, and the research Peter Corning has done into the topics of society, synergy, and evolutionary transitions. As Rahwan writes: "We need to build new tools to enable society to program, debug, and monitor the algorithmic social contract between humans and governance algorithms."

Elinor Ostrom described how people can manage common-pool resources for centuries with little or no over exploitation. Notably, the answer could not be provided by formal models, but required detailed documentation from history and ethnography. J. D. Trout, in his book The Empathy Gap, wrote that our efforts to improve well-being must be more deliberate, surgical, and fully informed by the subtleties of scientific findings. In case it's not clear, "policy by intuition and and impressionistic judgment has had its run." Alex Pentland said theorists like Adam Smith and Karl Marx only had half the answers. His study of social physics, which he calls "Promethean fire," marks a qualitative change that is taking place in our understanding of human interaction. Managing the commons, bridging the empathy gap, and leveraging social networks are all fundamentally complex global challenges that only become tractable once we begin to look at the details, and get a fine grain understanding of individual interactions. As Vyacheslav Polonski writes, "Computational social scientists can truly make a difference, particularly by engaging with other actors from public policy and strategy in collaborative work, integrating analysis, intervention and implementation."

Key terms: algorithmic society, computational social science, social physics, ethical calculus, ethical algorithm, felicific calculus, stigmergic algorithm, empathy gap, cultural evolution, collective brain, complex systems, memetics

Additional sourced information:
"What potential value might a computational social science, based in an open academic environment, offer society, through an enhanced understanding of individuals and collectives?"
        - Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science (2009)

"Social science is about how people think (psychology), handle wealth (economics), relate to each other (sociology), govern themselves (political science), and create culture (anthropology)... The complex triadic nexus among social, artefactual, and natural systems requires computational investigation within an overall science of complexity."
"Computational social scientists strongly believe that a new era has started in the understanding of the structure and function of our society at different levels. ...characterized by new data at higher levels of temporal and spatial scale, and by new principles and concepts."
"Computational social science is aimed to pay attention to the entities the social world consists primarily of, i.e., people, ideas, human-made artefacts, and their relations within ecosystems. These entities are modelled as computational objects that encapsulate attributes and dynamics ...to both explain phenomena of interest and predict their evolution."
"The role of computational social science is a leading one in addressing the Big Problems of society, avoiding crises and threats to its stability and healthy development... According to the results of the Harvard Symposium on hard social problems in 2010, one of the top-ten problems is how to achieve good collective behaviour... Many bad environmental practices arise when citizens do not coordinate in order to attain a global optimal usage of collective resources, but rather pursue their own profit selfishly – resulting in an even worse long term individual performance."
"The development of Computational Social Science will make it possible to model and simulate social processes on a global scale, allowing us to take full account of the long distance interdependencies that characterise today’s heavily interconnected world. The output of these simulations will be used to support policy makers in their decision making, to enable them to efficiently and effectively identify optimal paths for our society. Similarly, open access to these large scale simulations will support individuals in their evaluation of different policy options in the light of their personal needs and goals, greatly enhancing citizen participation in this decision process. These developments together open the doors to a much safer, more sustainable and fairer global society."
         - Manifesto of computational social science (2012)

"This is the first time in human history that we have the ability to see enough about ourselves that we can hope to actually build social systems that work qualitatively better than the systems we've always had. That's a remarkable change. It's like the phase transition that happened when writing was developed."
"We can potentially design companies, organizations, and societies that are more fair, stable and efficient as we get to really understand human physics at this fine-grain scale. This new computational social science offers incredible possibilities."
        - Alex Pentland (2012)

"Human behavior is determined as much by the patterns of our culture as by rational, individual thinking. These patterns can be described mathematically, and used to make accurate predictions. The new science of “social physics” can build a predictive, computational theory of human behavior, a data-driven operating system for humanity.
"This is the first time in human history that we have the ability to see enough about ourselves that we can hope to actually build social systems that work qualitatively better, more fair, stable and efficient, than the systems we've always had. That's a remarkable change. It's like the phase transition that happened when writing was developed or when education became ubiquitous, or perhaps when people began being tied together via the Internet. This new computational social science offers incredible possibilities.
"A nation with poor measures of justice or inequality normally also has higher levels of corruption, and a nation with a poor record in poverty or sustainability normally also has a poor record of economic stability. Never again should it be possible to say “we didn’t know.” No one should be invisible. This is the world we want—a world that counts.
"If we're going to reinvent what it means to have a human society, one of the questions is: who is this new world going to be for, and what is it going to look like? There's a real focus on building a sustainable future, which means one in which there aren't large chunks of the population left out in the cold.
"You can begin to build a world where infectious pandemics cease to be as much of a threat. Similarly, if you're worried about global warming, you can design cities that are far more efficient, far more human, and burn an awful lot less energy. You could engineer transportation, energy, and health systems that would be dramatically better. We can get down and design things that really work for us on a personal level, rather than just being treated as another consumer.
"But you need to be able to see the people moving around in order to be able to get these results. If you could see everybody in the world all the time, where they were, what they were doing, then you could create an entirely different world. It's everybody contributing his or her data that's going to make a greener world. We need to stop pandemics. We need to make a greener world. We need to make a fairer world.
"There are some elements of this new data driven world that are really promising. For instance, the most efficient and robust architectures tend to be ones that have no central points. It means that there's no single place for a dictator to grab control. Also there is inherent in a society built on data sharing a certain level of transparency and choice for individuals that I believe will tend to mitigate against central control. It tends to dissolve the power of the state and big organizations because you can build things that are far more efficient and robust if they're distributed.
"Today societies' systems are built on big averages and indices, and the ideas of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, but these theorists only had half the answers. They talked about markets and classes, but those are only averages. Social phenomena are really made up of millions of small transactions between individuals. We're at a phase transition, moving from the reasoning of the enlightenment about classes and about markets to a fine grain understanding of individual interactions and systems built on fine grain data sharing. The patterns in those individual transactions are not just averages, but things that are responsible for the flash crash and the Arab spring. You need to get down into these new patterns, these micro-patterns, because they don't just average out to the classical way of understanding society. We're entering a new era of social physics, where it's the details of all the particles — the you and me — that actually determine the outcome. This new capability of looking at the details, and getting to really understand human physics at a fine-grain scale will give us the other half of the story.
"It is the connections between people that are at the core of making systems work well. 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.
"George Orwell was not nearly creative enough when he wrote 1984. We can use our understanding of the way things work to screw ourselves up really badly, or we can use it to build a better society. This is Promethean fire.
        - Alex Pentland, Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data

"Just as the goal of traditional physics is to understand how the flow of energy translates into changes in motion, social physics seeks to understand how the flow of ideas and information translates into changes in behavior... how people cooperate to discover, select, and learn strategies and coordinate their actions." (5, 16)
"Sustaining a healthy, safe, and efficient society is a scientific and engineering challenge that goes back to the 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution spurred rapid urban growth and created huge social and environmental problems... We have cities jammed with traffic, worldwide outbreaks of diseases, and political institutions that are deadlocked and unable to act. In addition, we face the challenges of global warming; uncertain energy, water, and food supplies... But it doesn't have to be this way. We can have cities that are energy efficient, have secure food and water supplies, and much better government. To reach these goals, however, we need to radically rethink our approaches. Rather than static systems that are separated by function - water, food, waste, transport, education, energy, and so on - we must consider them as dynamic and holistic systems." (138)
"I believe there are three design criteria for our emerging hypernetworked societies: social efficiency, operational efficiency, and resilience. Let us look at each of these in turn and then ask how they might apply to governments and society more generally." (203)
"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..." (249)
"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)
        - Alex Pentland, "Social Physics" (2014)

"Social Persuasion to influence the actions, beliefs and behaviors of individuals, embedded in a social network, has been widely studied. It has been applied to marketing, healthcare, sustainability, political campaigns and public policy. Traditionally, there has been a separation between physical (offline) and cyber (online) worlds. While persuasion methods in the physical world focused on strong interpersonal trust and design principles, persuasion methods in the online world were rich on data-driven analysis and algorithms. Recent trends including internet of things, `Big data', and smart phone adoption point to the blurring divide between the cyber and the physical worlds in the following ways. Fine grained data about each individual's location, situation, social ties, and actions are collected and merged from different sources. The messages for persuasion can be transmitted through both worlds at suitable times and places. The impact of persuasion on each individual is measurable. Hence, we posit that social persuasion will soon be able to span seamlessly across these worlds and will be able to employ computationally and empirically rigorous methods to understand and intervene in both cyber and physical worlds. Several early examples indicate that this will impact the fundamental facets of persuasion including who, how, where and when, and pave the way for multiple opportunities as well as research challenges."
        - Vivek Singh, Ankur Mani, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland, "Social Persuasion in Online and Physical Networks"

Postscript 1: In my earlier article about algorithms, I explored them primarily through the lens of the physical sciences. In this article, I wanted to take a closer look at them through the humanities and social sciences, to employ the simple but useful division within academia.

Postscript 2: A common misconception is that algorithms are just math. The word does vaguely sound like algebra or logarithm, doesn't it? But it's more useful to think of them as a set of rules that describe how to perform a task, or a flowchart that helps you arrive at a decision. Peter Kassan wrote a very nice article (not available online) titled: "I’ve Got Algorithm. Who Could Ask for Anything More?" He finds today's algorithms wanting in their ability to find causal relationships. The first part of his article provides several useful examples:

"Examples of early classical algorithms include Euclid’s Algorithm, which finds the greatest common divisor of two whole numbers; The Sieve of Eratosthenes, which finds prime numbers; and Binary Search, which finds an item in a sorted list. More prosaic examples are the procedures you learned in elementary school to do arithmetic — the ways you do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division (if you still do them yourself) are all algorithms."

But as we tend to use the word today, "computer program" is in many cases a more appropriate term to algorithm. Whereas an algorithm (or heuristic) has an actual idea behind it, a computer program may or may not. However a bigger problem, and one which hasn't escaped the attention of researchers like Judea Pearl, is that most computer programs primarily look for correlations within data. If you haven't identified and gathered the metric that's actually causal, no amount of data will help. The fundamental goal of science is to find causal relationships — and this often involves inventing new instruments, tools, and materials to make new observations and measurements guided by new insights and new ideas." 

Source: "I’ve Got Algorithm. Who Could Ask for Anything More?" by Peter Kassan

Skeptical Inquirer, Sept/Oct 2018

Evolution and Culture

Source: Joseph Henrich

There is an area of research in biology called niche construction theory that is focused on how evolution has been shaped by the way living organisms manipulate their environments. For example, consider how beavers and earthworms engineer the ecosystems in which they live. Through a process of reciprocal causation, over time these changes in turn re-shape the selective contexts and the course of evolution itself. In the same way, human nature and human cultures have co-evolved. Our shared objectives facilitated the evolution of cooperative problem solving and cooperative behaviors which enabled our ancestors to prosper and ultimately colonize new environments. Steven Pinker called this the "cognitive niche." Peter Corning returned to the subject of culture-gene coevolution, or culture-driven genetic evolution (also called dual inheritance theory) several times within his book Synergistic Selection and referenced two others on that subject: The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich (2015), and Self-Made Man: Human Evolution From Eden to Extinction? by Jonathan Kingdon (1993). Corning writes:

Henrich's book shows that the secret of our success lies in our collective brains--on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations. He demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.

In Self-Made Man, Kingdon offers a radical new interpretation of the role that new tools and technologies played in driving human evolution. "Modern humans are truly self-made" argues Kingdon, because even the most strictly biological of adaptations was profoundly influenced by technological innovations, distinguishing our evolutionary path from that of all other animals. "All animals adapt to circumstances, and for humans, by definition tool-making animals, circumstances have become more and more self-made."

Source: Joseph Henrich

Our cultural evolution has had one major unintended side effect: it has created opportunities for exploitative hierarchical systems which have led to greater social inequality, political conflict, and today, the emerging environmental crisis, by undermining the more egalitarian social contract which had sustained our ancestors for millions of years. We have not yet developed the means for dealing with with these consequences. So it is now possible to see how these three things are connected at a deep level: (1) the existential threat posed by an unsustainable economic system, (2) the role of countervailing political powers within a functioning reverse dominance hierarchy, and (3) culture-gene coevolution, which is ultimately foundational to understanding the parts of these systems and provides a toolkit for reconfiguring them as needed.

Lest it be forgotten, the biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry have argued that the evolutionary dynamic which drove the major transitions in the history of life developed safeguards to prevent one from exploiting the rest to the detriment of the whole. From which Corning deduced, "the next major transition in evolution must sustain and enhance our interdependent collective survival enterprise.” Speculating on the next major transition, Szathmáry writes: "It was language, with its unlimited hereditary potential, that opened up the possibility of open-ended cumulative cultural evolution... The biology of humans has become gradually de-Darwinized. It is culture where the main action is going on [my emphasis]."

There is no sharp line to be drawn between human and animal behavior except that evolution operates in humans overwhelmingly as a cultural process, through the accumulation, organization, and application of experience in a system of shared material, mental, and social constructions. This has allowed us to become the principle agent of the evolutionary process on this planet, and the instrument for realizing new possibilities for its future, at once an inspiring and a sobering conception. In the partnership between humans and nature, a joint enterprise, our futures are interlocked.
Source: Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine (1957)

We get by with less fixed programming because we have added a new twist to the traditional Darwinian machinery of self-replication: a symbiotic relationship with culture that has liberated us from cognitive isolationism.
Source: Merlin Donald, "The central role of culture in cognitive evolution: a reflection on the myth of the isolated mind"

There is a chapter in The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment titled "History as Cultural Evolution" (p158). In a separate article titled "Why History and Cultural Evolution Are Natural Allies," Peter Turchin writes "what most people don’t realize is that cultural evolution allied to history has the potential of yielding immense practical benefits." Broadly speaking, this has always been the implicit understanding of historians, but the wider perspective of culture-gene coevolution adds more depth and the possibility of drawing a longer arc with greater explanatory, and possibly, predictive power (as was the hope of E.O. Wilson [1], not to mention a source of creative speculation for Asimov in his Foundation series). Insofar as we are evolving with our planet, it will be increasingly important to understand the dynamic by which this occurs. Joseph Henrich outlines the field of action:

Humans are very dependent on culture and cultural learning for very basic things — like how to find food, how to organise our societies, how to make the tools which allow us to survive. Human invention has always been a product of the interaction of minds. So if you want to energize innovation, you should create larger "collective brains" — in other words, interconnect more minds and allow information to flow more freely among people with diverse areas of knowledge and expertise.

We can think about culture as a genetically evolved cognitive adaptation for learning from other people. Natural selection is operating over generations to make people better at learning from the other members of their social milieu — figuring out who in their environment they should tune in to, what kinds of ideas they should pay attention to, and how they should integrate information across diverse people. Genetic evolution is shaping us to be cultural learners, but then the interesting part is that that turns around, and cultural evolution begins to shape our genetic evolution.

After reading Peter Corning, Maynard-Smith and Szathmáry, and now especially Joseph Henrich, I can't help but think that most of what I typically associate with "me," my personal identity, I owe to numerous other people. Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success really spells out in detail how, as individuals, we are virtually helpless. Our strength comes from our association with countless others, both formerly and now. A month ago when I asked Corning about how the individual parts of the human superorganism relate to one another, I had in mind some sort of theory of mind incorporating elements of enactivism or externalism. Now with Henrich, the extent of our "collective brain," as he calls it, is spelled out. Corning would caution against reifying these notions, emphasizing the synergistic effects as opposed to the means by which they are achieved, but nonetheless the picture that emerges is clear.



7/5/2018:

I believe women will guide our cultural evolution to become more responsive to the biological health of the planet. Carlos Perez recently wrote: "Women have a natural inclination to focus on the important things that make us human. To maximize the benefit of technology we must focus on how it improves our humanity and therefore we need to understand, at the very least, what makes us human and not what makes us machines." I've got some influential people in mind: Molly Crockett, Manuela Veloso, Margaret Boden, Rachel Armstrong, Radhika Nagpal, and Heather Marsh. But before I describe why I agree with Perez, we need to see the symbiotic relationship between culture and biology in the same way that they do. 

As Nicholas Christakis put it, culture is the earliest sort of intelligence outside our own minds that we humans created. We create culture, interact with it, are affected by it, and can even be destroyed by it. Culture applies its own logic, has a memory, endures after its makers are gone, can be repurposed in supple ways, and can induce action. These are also attributes of artificial intelligence, so after a manner of speaking, culture is a kind of "natural artificial intelligence." And seen in this way, culture-gene coevolution can provide a model for AI-gene coevolution. ...Now take a deep breath, because these women are helping to guide the direction of this coevolutionary process into the future, and they see good reasons to believe it will be a very human process. Here's just a few of the reasons they've provided.  

Margaret Boden believes that once we understand how it is possible for a representational system to be embodied, and how representations can be constructed, stored, accessed, compared, and transformed, we will have greater freedom and greater incentive to concentrate on what is most fully human. Manuela Veloso echoes this, "In some sense, the humanism of AI will eventually be what brings us together. ...focus on education, people knowing each other, caring for each other." I believe this is the direction in which our cultural evolution is headed. 

Rachel Armstrong sees a beneficial fusion of nature and machine in synthetic biology and living technologies. She believes that "technology is the way the mind becomes embodied in the process of problem solving. ...Human development is now enabled to synergistically evolve with the biosphere and help us coauthor an ecologically engaged future. Our task in a living culture of materiality will be to remain engaged and 'conversant' with those agencies that we rely on." ...I hope you are asking yourself right now, as I am asking myself: Is our culture engaged and conversant?

Molly Crockett describes some of the possible benefits that this synergy will allow: "Human brains are incapable of solving the interpersonal utility comparison problem. ...Bridging the empathy gap would require a way to quantify preferences and translate them into a common currency that is comparable across individuals [and] could be used to create better social contracts. Machines that can bridge the empathy gap could also help us with self-control. In addition to the empathy gap that resides between self and others, there exists a similar gap between our present and future selves. Self-control problems stem from the never-ending tug-of-war between current and future desires. Perhaps AI will one day end this stalemate by learning the preferences of our present and future selves, comparing and integrating them, and making behavioral recommendations on the basis of these integrated utilities. Think of a diet that is healthy enough to foster weight loss, but just tasty enough so you're not tempted to cheat, or an exercise plan that is challenging enough to improve your fitness, but just easy enough that you can stick with it." 

This reminds me of John Rawls "veil of ignorance" thought experiment, but it combines an objective approach to intimately subjective preferences in a unique way. It also includes elements of proactive (predictive) AI in that it provides "actionable intelligence." If we can predict the three factors of culture, genes, and environment, we will have fulfilled E. O. Wilson's hope of turning ecology into a predictive science.

Marshall McLuhan wrote “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” …And then we repurpose our tools, and share them, and others reconfigure them, and they reshape our sociocultural fabric. And all along, we evaluate their impact for good or ill. But our tools for bridging the empathy gap are still inadequate. We need to be better empathizers. Neuroscientist Molly Crockett knows all about this and how critical it may be for our collective survival enterprise – a term frequently used by Peter Corning. 

If we could bridge the empathy gap, then achieving the level of cooperative relations required for pursuing the great human projects of our time is not out of reach. Philosopher J. D. Trout wrote a book called “The Empathy Gap,” that describes some of these tools and approaches. Crockett could write the sequel. As she says, “We've already built computers that can see, hear, and calculate better than we can, [but] creating machines that are better empathizers is a knottier problem.” Maybe not. We don't necessarily need empathizing machines. The process has already begun with us, aided by the prosthetic devices everyone carries in their pockets. It's still too early to tell, but I think we've already started down the path toward narrowing the empathy gap. The quest to create an interpersonal-intertemporal lingua franca capable of making explicable utility comparisons (an empathic bridge) is a long journey, and an immense project of human culture.

Further Reading:
Robert Boyd 
Nicholas Christakis

[1] In his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand recounts that E.O. Wilson once told him "Ecology needs to be a predictive science." (p267)

The Teleonomic Perspective

All good science writers can trace a clear path in the development of ideas. David Grinspoon saw a connection to Vernadsky while exploring his concept of the "Sapiezoic." [1] Peter Corning traces a path from Lamarck with "teleonomic selection," an evolutionary concept that is illuminating some of the most exciting ideas today. Teleonomy is closely related to concepts of emergence, complexity theory, and self-organizing systems. Contemporary evolutionary theorists often distinguish between evolved, internal purposiveness (“teleonomy”) and an externally imposed purpose, or “teleology,” which is an idea often associated with religious thought. Natural selection, however, does not have a purpose. Nonetheless, living systems evolved their own goals/purposes, and the outcomes of choices that are made based upon their goals/purposes expose living systems to natural selection pressures. David Hull joked about the use of teleology and teleonomy by biologists:

"In the 1930s the biologist J. B. S. Haldane remarked that ‘Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.’ Today the mistress has become a lawfully wedded wife. Biologists no longer feel obligated to apologize for their use of teleological language; they flaunt it. The only concession which they make to its disreputable past is to rename it ‘teleonomy’."

Perhaps it is the associations with subjectivity and agency, even mind and consciousness, that have made teleonomy a difficult topic to approach, making reductive explanations easier to formulate and test. But as Hull noted, that has changed. Norbert Wiener coined the term 'cybernetics' to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms." And evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr had much to say on the topic, from a recorded interview:

"The term 'teleological' has been used for five entirely different sets of phenomena... The fourth one is something I long, in my earlier papers, ignored because it bothered me, and that is purposive activities, and I thought it was something strictly human. But, in the meantime, the studies of the animal behavior people have shown that purposive behavior is widespread in higher organisms, particularly the mammals and birds, and is connected with the existence of a considerable amount of intelligence that permits planning. If a pride of lions, for instance, splits into two parts in order to surround a victim, then it is a… a purposive action based on planning, and that's the fourth of the teleological process."

In his paper Evolution 'on purpose': how behavior has shaped the evolutionary process, Peter Corning describes one of the main themes in the evolutionary story of how we got to where we are today: 

"Many things, at many different levels, may be responsible for bringing about changes in an organism–environment relationship, and differential survival. It could be a functionally-significant mutation, a chromosomal transposition, a change in the physical environment that affects development, a change in one species that affects another species, or it could be a change in behaviour that results in a new organism-environment relationship. ...Indeed, one of the important themes in evolution, culminating in humankind, has been the ‘progressive’ evolution of self-determination (intelligence) and its ever-expanding potency. I call this agency ‘Teleonomic Selection’."

In Corning's earlier book, "The Synergism Hypothesis," the combined effect of teleonomic selection and synergistic selection is explored. The resulting explanatory power goes deeper than accounts of the philosophy of mind, in my view, as it is capable of illuminating how superorganisms composed of numerous individual parts could have evolved (in fact are evolving) over time:

"My theory ...applies the principle of natural selection to a central aspect of the evolutionary process while introducing and adding the concepts of functional synergism and teleonomic selection, the latter being a modernized and Darwinized version of an evolutionary principle advanced by one of Darwin's most important predecessors, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. ...the process has been deeply interactional but the leading edge has been "downward causation" - teleonomic selection at the behavioral level, involving novel forms of functional synergism (both technological and social) that have served to canalize our biological and sociocultural evolution."

Source: Jared Diamond, "Collapse" (2005)

Living systems, like the classic "choose your own adventure" stories, in effect chose their own evolutionary path. As Ernst Mayr put it, new behaviors may appear first and genetic changes may follow, or as Lloyd Morgan said "plastic modification leads, and germinal variation follows." How does this occur? Patrick Bateson identified four distinct ways in which behaviour can affect evolution: (1) when animals make active choices among alternatives; (2) when their behaviour changes their physical and social environment (the context of selection); (3) when animals respond to changing conditions; and (4) when animals take the initiative and expose themselves to novel conditions.

James Shapiro was clear about this causal agency: "The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable." Or as Theodosius Dobzhansky characterized it, evolution is an open-ended challenge, an adventure with an ultimate outcome that cannot be foretold. I find it fascinating how behavioral influences contribute to the ongoing evolutionary process. The implication is that we are the authors of our destiny, and capable of writing any future we want. Like all life before us, we influence the next chapter by our daily choices and actions. It's a radically free idea, and it should inform our current situation - we need to be very conscious about the decisions we make (as individuals and as collectives), because they in turn make us. I'll venture to suggest that the "teleonomic perspective," which maintains that living systems evolved internal purposiveness, necessarily prompts one simple question: Which behaviors best achieve our desired ends, such as continued survival? If we ask this question, a whole myriad of new questions will be raised, but it is the necessary starting point from which the next chapter in our adventure begins.

"It is not the organs ...of an animal's body that have given rise to its special habits and faculties; but it is, on the contrary, its habits, mode of life and environment that have in the course of time controlled the shape of its body, the number and state of its organs and, lastly, the faculties which it possesses."
- Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, "Zoological Philosophy," 1809

"Every reform deliberately instituted in the structure of society changes both history and the selective forces that affect evolution — though evolutionary change may be the farthest thing from our minds as reformers. We are not free to avoid producing evolution: we are only free to close our eyes to what we are doing."
- Garrett Hardin, 1971

"The game of chess illustrates precisely why any laws or rules of emergence and evolution are insufficient. Even in a chess game, you cannot use the rules to predict “history” — i.e., the course of any given game. Indeed, you cannot even reliably predict the next move in a chess game. Why? Because the “system” involves more than the rules of the game. It also includes the players and their unfolding, moment-by-moment decisions among a very large number of available options at each choice point. The game of chess is inescapably historical, even though it is also constrained and shaped by a set of rules, not to mention the laws of physics. Moreover, and this is a key point, the game of chess is also shaped by teleonomic, cybernetic, feedback-driven influences. It is not simply a self-ordered process; it involves an organized, “purposeful” activity."
- Peter Corning, "The Re-emergence of “Emergence”: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory"

"Perhaps the most distinctive property of life, what distinguishes living systems from all of the other kinds of agglomerations in the natural world, is its dynamic goal-directedness.  For life is a process with a purpose. Living systems have a vocation.  They actively pursue survival and reproduction, and they do so by deploying an immense variety of different survival strategies in an immense number of different environments.  This internal teleonomy, which humans have in common with all other living organisms (though our cultural cocoons sometimes insulate us from this reality), remains something of a “black box” for evolutionary biology."
- Peter Corning, "What is Life? Among Other Things, It’s a Synergistic Effect"

To address the notion that this is a meaningless, or purposeless, existence, you have to consider teleonomy. And that is very different from Robert Wright's teleological arguments in his article. Why is this overlooked? We are under the impression of a false dichotomy and an entrenched dualism. The dichotomy we are presented with is that there is either a grand purpose to life or there is no purpose at all. The third option is that organisms evolved their own purposes. And though not as often discussed, that is established canon within evolutionary biology.

Source: Peter Corning, "Synergistic Selection" (2018)

I've heard it said that evolution "programs" matter to survive and replicate, and hence, it is in the idea of evolution that discrimination is firmly rooted. Noah Sussman generalizes this somewhat: "The principle of teleonomy shows that systems have goals which can be inferred from system behavior. Consciousness and intent are orthogonal." The decisions we make in turn make us, in a very real and demonstrable way. Evolution programs matter programs evolution. Choice informs behavior informs biology informs behavior informs choice. These are deep layers of agent-environment interaction we should be engaging with. Peter Corning describes where the arc of evolution has taken us, and where it may yet lead, in his most recent book, Synergistic Selection:

The very factors that contributed to our economic progress as a species also created opportunities for economic exploitation, social inequality, and political conflict (and regression). The egalitarian social contract that had sustained our hominin ancestors for millions of years was undermined, and this resulted in a deep structural defect that has plagued modern human societies down to the present day. (189) What is most troubling about our current predicament is that we do not have the cybernetic/political machinery to deal with the emerging environmental crisis. There is a deep and ominous structual flaw in modern societies that did not exist among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The traditional reverse dominance hierarchy in humankind has devolved into various forms of exploitative hierarchical systems, for the most part. (202)

The collective survival strategy that our remote ancestors evolved over the past five million years or so remains at the core of our modus operandi as a species down to the present day. Most of us live in deeply interdependent "tribes" that are organized to pursue our basic survival and reproductive needs cooperatively. Whatever may be our perceptions, or our illusions, a complex modern society is, in essence, a collective survival enterprise. We depend for the satisfaction of our basic needs on an elaborate division (combination) of labor supported by an awesome and ever-growing repertoire of tools and technologies, some of which we owe to the inventiveness of long-ago ancestors. Although the course of human history has been far from smooth, the dominant trend has been an expanding and thickening web of economic and cultural synergies - and synergistic selection. ...In the final reckoning, if our species fails to meet this great survival challenge, we will squander our evolutionary inheritance and betray what untold generations of our ancestors struggled to achieve over millions of years." (187, 233)

Anthropologist Joseph Heinrich points to the rise of what he calls the "collective brain," our shared cultural capacities. He notes: "Our collective brains arise from the synergies created by the sharing of information among individuals." He also describes our cultural evolution as "a broad and synergistic process." (159)

Perhaps, if we are to gain the cybernetic/political machinery to address the structural flaw in modern society that Corning (as well as Grinspoon and others point out) it will be through some sort of "cognitive niche construction theory." A purpose-driven behavioral innovation, a putting together of things, for the first time or in new ways, that had formerly been separate or misaligned.

Some insights on teleonomy from Stephen Talbott in his article "Evolution and the Purposes of Life," The New Atlantis, Number 51, Winter 2017, pp. 63–91:

The idea of teleological behavior within a world of meaning is rather uncomfortable for scientists committed — as contemporary biologists overwhelmingly are — to materialism or naturalism. The discomfort has to do with the apparent inward aspect of goal-directed behavior. But as the Chilean neuroscientist and philosopher of biology Francisco Varela wrote: “The answer to the question of what status teleology should have in biology decides about the character of our whole theory of animate nature.”

Biologists’ discomfiture with inwardness in any form is presumably why, in 1958, Colin Pittendrigh proposed “teleonomy” as a kind of de-psychologized substitute for “teleology.” The new word was intended to capture the physically lawful character of end-directed biological activity (nomos meaning “law”), while avoiding any “spooky” suggestion of familiar intention, purpose, or intelligence — any suggestion, that is, of reasoned and meaningful behavior analogous to conscious human activity. [...]

Paul Weiss writes that in a machine the operation of the parts determines the outcome of the whole. While in a biological system, the structure of the whole coordinates the play of the parts. Exactly the opposite of a machine. He reminds us that, for organisms, the end is more constant than the means. We habitually want parts, as mere physical causes, to explain wholes.

When we truly recognize biological wholes, we are mentally participating in reasons and meanings, which alone can establish a contextual unity, and which can never be explained by the constituent physical events through which they achieve their expression. The purposive end is more constant than the physical means.

How, then, can we conceive the organism as a center of activity? What is meant by its agency? One way to answer this question is by beginning with the fact that every organism is narrating what we might refer to as its life story. So when I speak of the organism’s wise agency and its purposive striving, I refer to its capacity to weave, out of the resources of its own life, the kind of biological narrative we observe, with its orchestration of physical events in the service of the organism’s own meanings. I make no hypotheses to explain this intentional agency and story construction. I only note that the fact of story construction is immediately demonstrable in every organism. The narrative of tasks undertaken and accomplished is there to be seen. [...]

...the question about the organism’s purposeful activity has disappeared in favor of the question about whether the design of the artifactual organism was purposeful or not.

Dawkins’s own strong predilection runs toward purposeless design by natural selection, a “blind watchmaker” who gives us an apparent purpose that — not to worry! — isn’t quite the real thing. On the other hand, the opponents Dawkins seems usually to have in mind prefer an intelligent designer. What seems to have fallen out of the argument on both sides are the living powers of the organism itself, which have vanished into the automatisms of engineered machinery. For many intelligent design advocates, those powers have been transferred to a mysterious designer who, having messed around with everyone’s ancestors, remains conveniently obscure for current scientific investigation. [...]

Everyone agrees that natural selection cannot work unless the organisms available to it are capable of carrying out all the activities necessary to their life and survival, while also reproducing and preparing an inheritance for their offspring. But these are the very activities that presented us with the problem of teleology in the first place. If natural selection must assume them in order to do its work, then to say it solves the problem of teleological origins looks very much like question-begging.

This becomes clearer when we realize that purposiveness is not merely a feature of this or that particular trait. It is inseparable from life as such — you could almost say it defines those self-organizing, self-maintaining, and self-expressive activities we call “living.” Whatever role we imagine natural selection to play in generating functional adaptations such as hands and eyes, it does not account for the fact of end-directed behavior, which is inseparable from the fact of life itself.

This truth has not been entirely missed. In 1962, the philosopher Grace de Laguna wrote a paper on “The Role of Teleonomy in Evolution” in which she said of natural selection that it is only on organisms “as teleonomic systems that it can operate.” And, she explained, “only when we think in teleonomic terms, and regard the structure as end-directed, does it make sense to speak of ‘selection’ at all.” [...]

The concern about effective mental intentions alien to the material world is, I am convinced, produced by the entrenched dualism that has given us a long-running “mind-body problem,” and it shows every promise of disappearing when we manage to let go of that dualism. But, having inherited mind and matter as the incommensurable products of Descartes’s cleaving stroke, rather than going back and undoing that fateful stroke in order to find a different way forward, the scientist meekly accepts both mind and matter from Descartes’s hand, and then decides he can be rid of the contradiction between them only by throwing away one of them.

And so not only is the world badly riven, but essential aspects of its nature are discarded. Form as a causal principle disappears from view, and any attempt at acknowledging it is likely to be condemned as an appeal to vital forces or to discredited ancient philosophy. At the same time, attempts to explain form mechanistically end up being circular, since the form one is trying to explain also appears in the explanation. The attempt to sustain the materialistic view based on a single half of the crudely dichotomized Cartesian world is a sickness from which contemporary thought cannot seem to free itself.

I think the idea of teleonomy is uncomfortable due to the subjective nature of goal-directed behavior, and a long habit of excising agency from scientific explanations. But dynamic goal-directedness is the most distinctive property of life. Hence, it serves no benefit to erase the subject-object dichotomy, or rid ourselves of the mind-body dualism, by throwing half of either away. Instead we must conceive of an integrated agent-environment system that entails the properties of both, and which should inform the causal relationships and explanatory mechanisms we employ. Teleonomy is already one such mechanism rooted in an integrated agent-environment world view.

"The current crisis that seems to be gripping the modern world is in large part a reaction to a vision of reality that has no place for subjectivity or value." 
- Terrence Deacon, "Incomplete Nature" p544

It's easy to see that all life is a dynamic goal-directed process. Our lives are part of a symphony of such small purposes as live around us. We're just part of the gang. So (if living systems have goals that can be inferred from system behavior) then when I look out upon a landscape filled with plants and animals engaged in all manner of activities, I am seeing a plurality of implicitly goal-directed behaviors, each of which requires the fulfillment of various basic needs in order to be pursued. People seem much the same, with several purposes to reach, and always striving to see clearly what each of them are. A fair number of the posts on social media is just a record of goals achieved or failed, things desired or avoided, and various states in between.

Source: Joseph Henrich (2015)

Ernst Mayer's paper "Behavior and Systematics" describes how there is a close correlation between behavior patterns and systematics. In other words, behavior traits may be specific characters in a taxonomic sense. As biologists have constructed phylogenetic trees on the basis of morphological characters, it should not be surprising that ethologists have similarly attempted behavioral phylogenies. ...If new behaviors precede new morphologies (and by extension new genetic combinations), such attempts gain greater significance. To wit, how do the behaviors expressed by a specific population tend to expose it to unique selective pressures that further shape it's continued evolution? This is the question behavioral phylogeny is in a good position to help bring into focus. 

I am tempted to extend this to the subject of comparative civilizations, or revisit the work of Gregory S. Paul on "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health..." Or even ask what impact developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies (aka eugenics) are having in this context. (Insofar as eugenics presupposes an external ideal, it is teleological, and has caused historical abuses in the pursuit of nationalistic ideology.) Thankfully however, we are capable of more than enough behavioral plasticity to address contemporary problems by means of adapting our social institutions.

“Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” There are short term goals (usually to meet basic needs), and long term goals (taking years or sometimes decades to reach). Then there are also very long term, intergenerational goals. What changes will occur over generations? Carl Sagan once said we are a transitional species... (So live for today, but make your plans with a full understanding of evolutionary selection.)

A teleonomic biography (of an individual, community, species, or superorganism):

All kinds of biographies have been written. I'd like to read a biography of dreams and aspirations, both those fulfilled and those that were never fully realized. There could be a few simple rules for inclusion in the book. The aspiration would have to be recognized by the individual, articulated in sufficient detail, and at least have preliminary steps towards its realization pursued. And in fact, those dreams left incomplete are some of the most interesting. I've known people who thought of moving to another place to live, visited said place, maybe even bought land there, but never moved and eventually decided to not act on that particular thought for a variety of other reasons, many of which were unrelated. The formation and pursuit of dreams is like watching a pack of wolves on the hunt. It's been said that for every 10 pursuits of prey only one chase ends in a successful kill. The same may be true of dreams and goals. But we don't always abandon them due to failure, sometimes a better future path opens up, and we take that one instead. So looking back at life, whether yours or that of someone you know, how many goals were set, how many reached?

The other half of life includes those things we benefit from that have little or nothing to do with our personal agency - the happy accidents, and sometimes unfortunate events, that we have no control over. Meeting your husband or wife, in the way it actually unfolded, is more often a chance event than the result of careful calculation - that kind of happy accident rarely happens the way we planned. Being diagnosed with a debilitating medical condition is also not something one can easily anticipate and can have a devastating impact upon our future dreams. So I'm not suggesting that an exploration of personal aspirations offers a full account of life, but it offers an account of the role of one's personal agency, motivations, and how those change under shifting circumstances. As we grow older, they also change in characteristic ways that say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves.

Over 15 years ago, when we hit a moose while driving 60 miles an hour, my wife and I walked away from the accident with a few new scars but our bodies intact. After seeing our totaled vehicle, some of those close to us said it seemed to be a miracle. At times like that one wonders about whether there was some greater purpose, as yet unrealized, that our lives should be spared. But even without death defying survival, children will casually wonder why, out of the entire world, that they find themselves living the particular life they have and not the life of someone else. "Why am I me?" Is it chance or design? The most familiar design perspective is provided by religion. A chance perspective is provided by the notion of the anthropic principle and survivor bias (and more controversially Hugh Everett's MWI). But the grasp of teleological purpose in life upon the human perspective is all the more firm when our own agency is threatened or frustrated.

To provide an example, when a person struggles with creating and achieving their own goals, but continually fails as a result of roadblocks set up by others, by circumstance, or by self sabotage, it is tempting to wonder if there are principles of fate and destiny operating in the world, as personal agency has not produced the results they had hoped for. Maybe there is simply a "misalignment" between individual and eternal/universal values and purposes. There is no better example of this perspective than the verse "And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose."

The agency of every individual has definite limits, but as the extent of human agency and understanding has grown, and as formerly inexplicable phenomena can be predicted, understood, or even harnessed, the role of teleology has changed, and the existential question of teleonomy asserts itself. People will always ask and seek teleological questions and explanations, that will never change, but the teleonomic process of purpose creation is increasing in step with growing human agency.

Returning to the question of why we walked away from our collision, there is a teleonomic explanation. We survived because improvements in automotive design and testing led to the creation of new vehicles that allow their occupants to survive collisions at much higher speeds. We were the direct beneficiaries of this research to reduce fatalities, a goal that was purposefully embarked upon at the urging of consumer groups and political bodies concerned by the issue. So in a sense, it was a greater purpose that saved our lives, but not as most people imagine it.

It is a story, a narrative that we author. It is enactive, performed, embodied. It is living, not static. Always changing. Within certain limits, we are capable of directing the course. Behavioral goals are like species - they display convergent evolution, occupy ecological niches, sometimes go extinct. They follow "evolutionary transitions" that show a general trend toward synergism. And like the branches on a tree, when one falls off another may grow to fill the void it left. Purpose driven goal directed behavior is the most distinctive characteristic of life.

5/30/2018:
In the continued pursuit of survival, goal directed behaviors evolve like species (or taxonomic characters), and as these goals are responsible for coordinating the parts of a system, those parts get reappropriated to serve new functions whenever goals change. One of my favorite examples of reappropriation in biology is the evolution of the jaw from the gill arch. So how does this reappropriation/reconfiguration occur within our lives? As our goals change, the effects can ripple outward through all aspects of life. This disruptive influence may be underappreciated. 

Source: Steven Pinker, "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (2011)

6/1/2018:

A changing environment, leads to changing behavioral goals, leads to system reconfiguration, leads to a changing environment (and so on). ...But the system reconfiguration step is the hardest part. Steven Pinker doesn't say teleonomy, but that's arguably what he's talking about in the preface to his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature." Whether this has actually occurred, and in the way he later describes, is debatable, but it is certainly possible.

"The objects of biological analysis are organizations (organisms) and, as such, are end-directed. Organization is more that mere order; order lacks end-directedness; organization is end-directed... The most general of all biological 'ends', or 'purposes' is of course perpetuation by reproduction. That end [and all its subsidiary 'ends' of feeding, defense and survival generally] is in some sense effective in causing natural selection; in causing evolutionary change; but not in causing itself. In brief, we have failed in the past to unconfound causation in the historical origins of a system and causation in the contemporary working of the system..."

- Teleological and Teleonomic: A New Analysis, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume XIV, pages 91-117 (1974)

"There is a teleonomic character to the nested chemical systems that interact to comprise what we call life and connect the inanimate->living system continuum. Before we have clearly understood the less complex transition from inanimate to living systems, it may be premature to think we can create conscious AI by reduction to computation and elimination of the importance of the chemical substrate as part of the process that links systems." 

- The computational theory of mind

See also: "Social Evolution: State of the Field," by Kathryn Denning, 2009. (in "Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context")

[1] Grinspoon was clear about the teleological aspect of the noosphere. There may be a connection between the noosphere and teleonomy, but that is a different story.