I’ve just published the first of a sequence of posts that will drill down into the themes I discussed at my last research call.
In this first one, I get deeper into the interpretation of Scott Alexander’s original article, and show why I think Evolutionary Game Theory is really there right from the start of recent discussions, and has been obscured by the focus on collective action problems.
Just to open the aperture a bit - Natural Selection and Multilevel Selection as Causal Theories
I’m currently waiving the “prosocial “flag, because I’m 4 Kevin Bacon degrees from one of the co-authors, 3 degrees from his daughter the mayor elect of Seattle, 2 degrees from her director of economic development, and on contract but a single degree from him. Cue the Phoenician god of nepotistic social influence networks!
Apart from the very intuitive-relational sociology of it all, my interest in prosocial is over determined by a rational consideration as well. Namely, all the prisoner’s dilemma, etc. interpretations of Moloch or multipolar traps strike me as generally two dimensional projections in an n-dimensional space. Like I mentioned in the research call yesterday, 500 years of emotional bubble wrap in Western culture around the precious “individual” don’t necessarily make it so! IMO, every human “individual” is more of a poly-system embedded in an infinite cascade of ever more encompassing poly-systems. The “prisoner” in the prisoner’s dilemma mostly a prisoner of spiritual constriction.
My local spiritual discussion group is facilitated by the Bahá’í community. In last week’s session, I did not say anything at all, but just sat there the whole time doing something along the lines of an Ignatian exercise, except instead of visualizing Jesus, I was picturing Bahá’u’lláh receiving his revelation in chains in a dungeon in Tehran. My empathetic stretch was to penetrate a conscious so aligned with the divine that intimacy with reality itself could be achieved in an iron collar in a prison nicknamed “the black hole”. That points to a journey beyond dilemma. The topic about which I had no comment to make was “what is the nature of true friendship?” It struck me that Bahá’u’lláh was often alone, but never really alone. True friendship may be something like friendship with the True, a relationship extending beyond the merely corporeal. In that dimension, there is no “multipolar” and there is no “trap”.
Thanks for this - given the focus on cultural evolution, Prosocial seems like a really important ally/resource for Second Renaissance thinking which I’ll definitely be diving into further - and I note they also have resources on spirituality.
Funnily enough, on looking up the mayor elect of Seattle, I see she was at the same Oxford college, doing the same course as me in the early 2000s, though one year apart - I vaguely remember the name, but sadly that’s all!
Totally agree on the limited dimensionality by the way, that’s why my post needs to be the first part of a sequence - the usefulness of reading Moloch in the way that I do, is that it becomes clearer to see how to defeat Moloch using higher-dimensional models, as the article you link to suggests:
Why is it important to recognize the simplicity and generality of MLS theory? Because it shows beyond doubt that the lower-level pursuit of self-interest often disrupts rather than benefitting the common good. In economic terms, this means that the metaphor of the invisible hand is profoundly untrue. All cooperative endeavors are vulnerable to what the ecologist Garrett Hardin dubbed “the tragedy of the commons” for the overexploitation of natural resources.
MLS theory tells us that we can evolve systems that function for the common good, but only by selecting at the scale of the whole system and suppressing the potential for disruptive lower-level selection within the system. Those three simple facts and their consequences can inform nearly every positive change effort, from small groups to the entire planet.
While I really appreciate the Ignatian exercise you mention - and I myself practice Metta meditation which I think serves a similar purpose - I do think it’s important to retain a theoretical consciousness of potential traps - even if they only exist in a certain dimension of analysis - that could prevent communities like the Bahá’í community from reaching the impact they aim for.
By any rational standard, the Bahá’í faith should not exist. Vervaeke has his Philosophical Silk Road; I celebrate Naw Ruz potlucks in the second floor of a private home over a luthier shop. Same inter-faith pilgrimage, AFAICT. Who needs Hagia Sophia when you’ve got discussion circles in branches of the Tacoma Public Library? The thought of the original Bahá’í prophet, Siyyid Ali-Muhammad, aka the Bab, is completely impenetrable to me. It’s so steeped in Sufism, Twelver Shiism, the nuances of Persian and Arabic, and whatever social forces played upon the early 19th century Persian Empire that it’s arguably the most exotic teaching I’ve ever encountered. It makes Tantric Buddhism seem positively suburban by comparison. And yet, in its ripple effects, this flaming madness of the proclaimed overthrow of all prior religion settled into something along lines of a faith-based model of what idealized human collective governance - and dare I say - metamodern spirituality - should look like in practice. It’s also the most prosocial thing I’ve ever encountered - without any awareness at all of theory like “prosocial”.
Spinning rational theory around a movement so palpably transrational in its origins is a squaring of the circle to be sure. But the full Vervaekean pilgrimage comes into view upon the further reflection that figures like Jesus and Mohammad and Moses and Zoroaster must have traversed similar dimensions, far beyond the ken of Game A (i.e. “Goliath”) calculations.
A more attainable sort of mystical vision is that of Jean Gebser. When I say “n-dimensional”, feel free to read that through the lens of Gebser’s “aperspectival”. Gebser wrote before systems theory, chaos theory, complexity theory, and MLS has gotten much social traction. What Gebser said in poetry can now be reframed in prose. N-dimensional is how LLMs do their business. To be an effective human-in-the-loop requires at least that much consciousness. Attaining the Gebserian integral seems like a basic prerequisite for computer science now, along with statistics, calculus, data processing, and Python.
To get really down to earth with all this, Peter Pogany wrote about the inevitable collapse of geopolitical systems due to entropic hard limits on population and production. Any yet, he also hypothesized a future, more stabilized world system, to follow the current chaotic transition. In Pogany’s analysis, the new system - like any prior system - needs its own way of thinking. For Pogany, that new way of thinking is the Gebserian integral. In my view, the Gebserian integral is just one way-station on a much wider and deeper philosophical silk road. Some version of moksha resolves the prisoners dilemma in a definitive way. But can moksha meet the mass market? That is the question of the moment.
Scratch me and I bleed systems theory, so let’s give that a go. It boils down to “islands of coherence”. Geology tells us continental cratons emerged from the ocean floor a bit of granite at a time. The granite could only form in magma far deeper, far hotter, far more fluid. The cooling of the cratons occurred around their seed crystals. Upon that mighty rock we all now stand, (Iceland and Hawaii excepted) but before the rock, came the fluid crystalline matrix. What is the analogous matrix of a coherent global social future? We will not constitute that future by rearranging surface features of the present. Solid answers can only be found in the depths, in places that themselves are the very opposite of solid.