Ramble at the beginning of August 2021: We’re lost, looking for meaning, alas inequality [the Tractatus]

The inequality that sends billionaires into space is not an independent and isolated feature of the contemporary world. But let’s not start there. Let’s start with something ‘easy,’ Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, then we can think about the meaning of life, and then we can take a look at inequality – kith and kin to those billionaires. I end with a somewhat whimsical suggestion for a Twitter tax for the rich.

This is something of a grab bag and a parking lot. I’ve been thinking of these things and put them here so I know where they are. In time I’ll attempt to make sense of them. Maybe.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

I recently read a post by Rohit (The Architecture of Knowledge) that reminded me of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I asked him about it and he replied that, yes, he was familiar with it and that it was “an inspiration forever in its scope and ambition.”

I understand where he’s coming from. I read it early in my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins and it had a strong effect on me. Yes, for its logical structure, but also for its last proposition: “7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” I’d almost say its appeal was evenly split by that proposition and by the rest of it.

Looking back, it is a peculiar work. I went on to study computational semantics in my graduate years at SUNY Buffalo where I studied computational semantics with David Hays (while working on a degree in English literature). There I certainly was interested in something one might as well call “the architecture of knowledge,” that is, the structure of human knowledge. For the most part we – members of Hays’s research group – were interested in general principle, on the one hand, and small scale structures on the other. Yet my first major piece of work, an analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, certainly implied large scale structure, as did my dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory” (1978). That work certainly looks very different from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

Wittgenstein was much taken with symbolic logic, which was relatively new at the time. He took its propositions to represent, that is, to be capable of representing, facts about the world. The world itself? Is that what he was chasing? Or did he think of those propositions as representing what Noam Chomsky came to call mentalese, the conceptual language of the human mind? Perhaps he did, but if so, he later came to rather different views on such subjects. In any event it certainly doesn’t look the work I did with David Hays or, for that, matter any of the roughly similar work others were doing at the time (see, e.g., John Sowa’s comprehensive website on knowledge representation).

Of course representing how we think about the world is very different from representing the world as it really is. That’s something fraught with metaphysical difficulties. And yet that’s something I’ve given some attention to in recent years, I’m thinking particularly about my work on pluralism, but also my more recent work, What economic growth and statistical semantics tell us about the structure of the world. This work, however, is quite different from, has a very different texture than, the earlier work on conceptual structures.

That there is a clear difference between these two bodies of work suggests that we’ve learned something in the decades that have passed since Wittgenstein wrote his Tractatus. That work, it seems to me in retrospect, is neither about the world nor about our representations of the world. Or it is indifferently about both. It is an undifferentiated metaphysical ether.

To live a meaningful life

Meanwhile, our visions of the future are vapid, a theme I’ve been exploring in a recent series of posts on billionaires-in-space and in a post on our visions of the future. I think this is linked to various posts I’ve made about living a meaningful life:

• Scott Sumner, Meaning in Life,
  
• Our Rage for Order and Coherence,
  
• Personality, understanding, and anxiety as the driver of cultural evolution [Tech Evol],
  
• Fear of death as a driving force in human (cultural) life

Our visions of the future are not coupled with, do not emerge from, a belief in living a meaningful life. Absent such a belief, billionaires going into space collapses into self-regarding joy-riding. These seem to be people unconnected with the world, holding themselves above and outside the world. They are hollow men.

But how does the human mind, the human spirit, find itself at home in the world? For that’s what’s at stake. In a post about Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm I made some observations about identity that are relevant to the question of meaning:

The argument that needs to be made is that our nervous system affords us open-ended awareness of the world. I suspect that’s a joint product of the active nature of the nervous system and the emergence of language. On that active nature, the nervous system doesn’t passively take the world in, but rather actively probes the world through continuously projecting expectations – think, for example, of the model William Powers developed almost a half century ago in Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973). Thus perception is a process of verifying those projections (or, to use a more current language, updating Baysian priors).

The emergence of language leads to an endless curiosity about everything: What’s that? How does it work? Where’d it come from? Living becomes thus becomes a dialog with the world. And the question, Where did WE come from? will arise in that process. The answer initially takes the form of myth, of stories about origins. And those stories, in effect, establish the link between a society and world. That too is a matter of identity.

Those same myths and stories direct our search for meaning in life. Where do stories of billionaires joy-riding in space direct that search for meaning?

Inequality, executive pay, and stagnation

Back in 2019 Tyler Cowen published a short article in Time, Why CEOs Actually Deserve Their Gazillion-Dollar Salaries, which was excerpted from his recent book, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. After acknowledging that that top CEOs make 300 times as much as the average worker, Cowen argues:

While individual cases of overpayment definitely exist, in general, the determinants of CEO pay are not so mysterious and not so mired in corruption. In fact, overall CEO compensation for the top companies rises pretty much in lockstep with the value of those companies on the stock market.

The best model for understanding the growth of CEO pay, though, is that of limited CEO talent in a world where business opportunities for the top firms are growing rapidly. The efforts of America’s highest-earning 1% have been one of the more dynamic elements of the global economy. It’s not popular to say, but one reason their pay has gone up so much is that CEOs really have upped their game relative to many other workers in the U.S. economy.

Today’s CEO, at least for major American firms, must have many more skills than simply being able to “run the company.” CEOs must have a good sense of financial markets and maybe even how the company should trade in them. They also need better public relations skills than their predecessors, as the costs of even a minor slipup can be significant.

And so forth and so on, “yada yada,” to quote various characters from Seinfeld. I’m willing to grant that these highly compensated executives get their jobs through honest labor, rather than some form of corruption, and that, on the whole, they are more competent than the next lower tier of executive talent.

What I question is that ratio between CEO pay and the pay of the average worker, 300-to-1. Is that necessary? Wouldn’t a 30-to-1 compensation ratio leave plenty of room for these (mostly) guys to play “mine is bigger than yours”? Where did that ratio come from?

We know roughly when it arose, after the 1960s. In August of 2020 the Economic Policy Institute reported:

In 2019, a CEO at one of the top 350 firms in the U.S. was paid $21.3 million on average (using a “realized” measure of CEO pay that counts stock awards when vested and stock options when cashed in rather than when granted). This 14% increase from 2018 occurred because of rapid growth in vested stock awards and exercised stock options tied to stock market growth. Using a different “granted” measure of CEO pay, average top CEO compensation was $14.5 million in 2019. In 2019, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 320-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 293-to-1 in 2018 and a big increase from 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989. CEOs are even making a lot more—about six times as much—as other very high earners (wage earners in the top 0.1%). From 1978 to 2019, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,167%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (741%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (which was 337% between 1978 and 2018, the latest data year available). In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 13.7% from 1978 to 2019.

Cowen has also written about something he calls The Great Stagnation (2011), when America’s productivity started slumping. As I recall he sees stagnation as beginning in the 1970s. So CEO pay starting galloping upward at roughly the same time economic productivity started slowing down. Is there a connection there?

I’m not suggesting that one caused the other, though I must admit the correlation is tempting. However, the CEO compensation system is not a system that is isolated from and thus independent of the overall economy. They are two aspects of the same economic system.

Large-scale cooperation in ancient fission-fusion societies

Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richardson, Large-scale cooperation in small-scale foraging societies, preprint:

Abstract: We present evidence that people in small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer societies cooperated in large numbers to produce collective goods. Foragers engaged in large-scale communal hunts, constructed shared capital facilities; they made shared investments in improving the local environment; and they participated in warfare, alliance, and trade. Large-scale collective action often played a crucial role in subsistence. The provision of public goods involved the cooperation of many individuals, so each person made only a small contribution. This evidence suggests that large-scale cooperation occurred in the Pleistocene societies that encompass most of human evolutionary history, and therefore it is unlikely that large-scale cooperation in Holocene food producing societies results from an evolved psychology shaped only in small group interactions. Instead, large scale human cooperation needs to be explained as an adaptation, likely rooted in the distinctive features of human biology, grammatical language, increased cognitive ability, and cumulative cultural adaptation.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

I've written several posts that speak to this:

Sedentary hunter-gatherers built complex societies, August 11, 2020.

Reading The Human Swarm 1: Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap, October 1, 2019.

Reading The Human Swarm 2: The importance of scale in social structure, October 6, 2019.

Two of those are based on my reading of Mark Moffett's The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall, Basic Books, 2019. Of particular interest is his discussion of fission-fusion societies, societies that temporarily band together (for a hunt, for a season) to accomplish big(er) things, and then disperse into smaller bands. Moffett, who studied under E.O. Wilson, takes a cross-species look at cooperation. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the limits of society. I've collected my thoughts about the book in this working paper:  

Reading Mark Moffett's The Human Swarm, https://www.academia.edu/41576252/Reading_Mark_Moffett_s_The_Human_Swarm.

Reading The Human Swarm 8: What about the USA? [and in view of 1/6]

This is the 8th post in my extended consideration of Mark Moffett's The Human Swarm (2019). In it I consider the current polarized political situation in the USA. The events in Washington, D.C., of 1/6 make Moffett's thoughts on group identity and coherence more urgent.

Having finished chapter 24, “The Rise of Ethnicities”, I am within two chapters and a conclusion (which I’ve already read) of finishing Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm and am feeling the need to step back and reflect a bit. My primary reason for reading the book is, of course, that I’m interested in the material. But I’m also interested in what’s happening in the world around me, in particular, in American politics, which has become highly polarized over the last decade or two. What might The Human Swarm have to say about that?

Consider the following pair of tweets:

I totally agree. I can't make common cause with liars, cheats, people who glorify superstition and bigotry, and whose idea of morality is micromanaging other people's genitals. I have no intention in living in a country with a larcenous mad dictator. There can be no unity.

— Lyn Gerry (@LynGerry1) December 14, 2019

There’s a lot of that going around and it seems to be getting worse.

Identity is one theme in the book, one I’ve not addressed directly in these notes. Moffett notes that in even the simplest small-scale social bands, identity is an issue; individuals have to balance their need for a unique identity within the group with the group’s need for overall cultural coherence among its members. In larger societies different groups work to maintain their identities in the context of the overall identity of the group. And when a group’s need to maintain its own identity begins to infringe on the requirements of society-wide coherence pressures may bring about a split within the group.

Moffett discusses that dynamic within various animal societies and in human society. The question I’ve been thinking about is this: Is that where America is now, at the brink of dissolution? I don’t know.

Here’s a quick and crude look at the American state. It’s short, but nonetheless I think it’s at the right scale to outline the process. We’re talking about a long-term society-wide historical process. At this scale all the complexities of events fall away or, perhaps a better formulation, are absorbed in the global dynamics of the process.

Let’s call the nation’s founding set of circumstances the Originating Dispensation (OD). The OD consists, on the one hand, of a set of documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution chief among them, but they’re surrounded by various supporting documents, for example, the Federalist Papers. On the other hand, the OD also consists of a multiplicity of facts on the ground, chief among which are the specific groups of people who participated in the process. While the founding documents may have aspired to universal principles, the facts on the ground privileged males of means among all others, males over females, and whites over everyone else.

The OD was mightily stressed by the Civil War, but managed to pull things together and lasted for another century, reaching its high point in the 1950s. By that time a bunch of amendments had been made to the constitution, among others: slavery was eliminated and discriminated outlawed, incomes were taxed, and women were granted the right to vote. Through it all white men, mostly Protestant, ran the country, more or less. They formed the dominant culture. Then things began to unravel in the 60s, the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war movement, feminism, hippies and so forth.

The OD is still unraveling and I don't see how it can be put back together. Humpty Dumpty has fallen. Everyone genuflects to the Constitution, but the will to make it hold seems terribly weak.

Now let’s add just a bit of detail, just a bit.

During the fifties the country was still coasting on the national unity that had formed during World War II, the most extensive war that world had seen, one fought across all the continents of the Old World. That solidarity was, in effect, the founding crucible of the Civil Rights Movement, as though the nation was at last strong enough and secure enough to grant, in fact, the rights which had been extended to African American in law almost a century ago.

Let’s look at the last paragraph of chapter 25, “Divided We Stand” (yes, I’ve glanced ahead, p. 343):

Societies contain ethnicities and races that stick together despite the members’ prejudices about each other. The usual view, voiced by William Sumner more than a century ago, is that friction with outsiders draws a society together. Clearly that’s not always true. The external forces that promote civil peace primarily galvanize the dominant people while often straining their ties to a society’s other ethnicities when those groups are regarded as part of the problem. This tension among the members can cause a kind of social autoimmune disease, turning a society against itself.

In passing civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s did the dominant group overreach? Of course its dominance was weakened as well by pursuing war in Vietnam and thereby alienating the young, the sons and daughters of the men and women who’d waged the Second World War. I note in passing, as Moffett did, that Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps at the beginning of The Second World War (p. 338). The heirs of the OD weren’t fully confidence of their dominance.

The turmoil of the 60s and 70s gave way to the so-called culture wars of the 80s and 90s. The force of the nation’s founding documents, symbols, and myths was no longer strong enough to define a superordinate identity with which all citizens could identify. And so forth and so on through a parade of events, the Clinton impeachment, the Supreme Court decision that allowed George Bush to become President, the attack of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, fought to no end by an all volunteer military, Obama’s quixotic victory, and then the astonishing victory of Donald Trump, social media virtuoso and friend to Russian oligarchs. What would the 50s think of that? After all, the political atmosphere of the 50s was dominated by the Cold War against the predecessors of those oligarchs. But, in the world of identities and nations, is that really any stranger that the country’s ‘special relationship’ – to borrow a phrase from a different geopolitical context – with Japan?

I have no idea how that story will work out. The forces of cultural identity and economic interest are far more involved than those involved in the climate. At least we have half an idea about how to model the climate, we understand the underlying physical principles even if we can’t get enough data or computing power to run a really high quality simulation.

What are the basic principles underlying the international geopolitics of cultural identity? Moffet is telling us where to look.

Addendum 12.16.19: From Today's NYTimes,  Max Fisher, In Era of Hardening Identities, Trump Order on Jews Kindles Questions Old and New:

President Trump’s executive order targeting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel speech on campuses might be framed as a narrow legal matter, but it has touched on a defining issue of our time: Who belongs, and who decides?

The order is ambiguous as to whether it sees Jews as a distinct nationality or a minority race, but either interpretation aligns with Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with defining, and policing, the boundaries of identity.

And the order’s creation of special status for Jews, but not other religious minorities, follows Mr. Trump’s habit of welcoming some demographic groups into the rights and protections of American identity and excluding others. Tellingly, the singling out of Jews for special protection in the order left some feeling still more exposed.

Such preoccupations with identity have animated not just the Trump administration but much of the global populist backlash. Leaders and movements across the democratic world are increasingly focused on enforcing narrow national identities of the sort that defined the late 19th and early 20th centuries. [...]

What is National Identity?

The concept, scarcely 200 years old, holds that humanity is divided among fixed communities, each defined by a common language, ethnicity and homeland. Those communities are nations; membership is one’s national identity. The core tenet of nationalism so pervades today’s world that it feels almost self-evident: Any nation of people should have a country, and any country should consist of a nation.

The concept of an overarching identity tied to one’s country was invented not by ancient poets or warriors but by 19th-century European governments. As monarchies teetered and the church declined, governments saw engineering common languages and ethnic heritages as a way to justify their rule over polyglot empires, as well as an opportunity to marshal their populations for collective pursuits like industry or war. [...]

The world, unable to unwind a global order built on national identity, sought to manage its worst tendencies by promoting cultural pluralism, international integration and protections for minorities and migrants. These values did not so much replace national identity as sit uneasily alongside it, eventually leading to a backlash.

Sedentary hunter-gatherers built complex societies – "Recognizing this... has big implications for how we narrate history"

When the Spanish chronicled them in the 1550s, the Calusa consisted of 50-60 politically consolidated villages overseen by a king (a hereditary sovereign who held authority for life). Their capital was on the island of Mound Key & had a structure said to fit at least 2000 people. pic.twitter.com/dkxPVtmryV

— manvir singh (@mnvrsngh) August 11, 2020

Calusa infrastructure was incredible. They built a 4-km-long canal on Pine Island, probably for transportation, fishing, exchange, & tribute payment. The construction project was a grand, collaborative project, involving the movement of at least 30,000 cubic meters of earth. pic.twitter.com/QUlpPQUjR6

— manvir singh (@mnvrsngh) August 11, 2020

Why were the Calusa capable of building such societies? A big part of the answer seems to their environment: The Calusa lived in a coastal environment overflowing with aquatic resources (fish, shellfish, etc.). This allowed them to settle, intensify, & accumulate. pic.twitter.com/4ODnkcKMz0

— manvir singh (@mnvrsngh) August 11, 2020

Anthropologists, especially evolutionary ones, focus on hunter-gatherers that lived in harsh, marginal habitats. But complex, sedentary HGs were common in the past—probably deep into the Pleistocene. Recognizing this, I'm convinced, has big implications for how we narrate history

— manvir singh (@mnvrsngh) August 11, 2020

Mark Moffett discusses similar societies in The Human Swarm. See my post: Reading The Human Swarm 1: Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap.

Reading Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm

Another working paper. Title above, abstract, contents, and introduction below. Download at: Academica.edu: https://www.academia.edu/41576252/Reading_Mark_Moffett_s_The_Human_Swarm

Abstract: Moffett surveys a wide literature on human and non-human society and produces a useful synthesis of the literature. While written for general readers, this book will repay academic specialists of various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Moffett is interested in what constitutes society: how do we differentiate between insiders and outsiders? He surveys the animal world and the follows the insider/outsider distinction in the evolution of human societies from hunter-gatherer groups to the current day.

Contents

I could go on and on about The Human Swarm, but I won’t. Time to move on. 3

Of ants and humans: Some principles of social organization 5

Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap 10

The importance of scale in social structure 16

A digression about an image with an application to human cultural evolution 21

Summer camp and beyond – another digression [F2F group & society] 24

Night-time action and brain-to-brain coupling [Shazam!!] 26

The Great Chain of Being 28

The book so far – Nine things that are important 30

What about the USA? 33

Some notes about neural foundations 36

 

I could go on and on about The Human Swarm, but I won’t. Time to move on.

In review:

Mark W. Moffett. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books 2019.

Back in the days when I was an undergraduate, when I was first learning how to think with some rigor, I sometimes found that it was only after I had finished a term paper that I realized what I was after. That is, I treated my initial idea, not as a conclusion to be justified by the paper, but as the starting point of an exploration. And so things have gone ever since.

Yes, it is nice to put things in order in the course of writing a paper. But you also want to go somewhere And so it is.

When I had originally planned this series of notes about Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm I intended to conclude the exercise with a formal review of the book in 3 Quarks Daily. I could then wrap the posts and review into a single document and post it as a working paper.

The review is done and posted, but shortly after I had posted the review I was struck by after thoughts: Kaboom! I made plans to write one more post – after the review – and then wrap it up. Monday, then Tuesday, and Wednesday passed and I’d still not written that post. It’s now Thursday and I’ve decided not to write it after all. Could I write one? Sure. But then if one, why not a second, and a third? The book IS that rich. I could continue posting about to for awhile.

No, it’s time to move on. I’ve got other interests, other projects, I must nurture. For the record, the impulse that prompted this delay is simple: What of economics? That is, in my review I had listed ten principles operative in, ten propositions about, social organization, but none of them said anything about economics. That seemed a bit bothersome. But only a bit. Biology is inherently about economics and economic issues are central to society. But that wasn’t Moffett’s topic, though you can see in on the page if you look for it – especially in discussions of fission-fusion societies. Rather, he was interested in the issue of identity, how that defines our social structures. So let’s leave things there.

What’s in the rest of this document? First comes my review and then we have the nine blog posts I wrote during the two months it took me to read the book. Looking over them I realize that a number of these posts serve as bridges from Moffett’s book to other things:

Of ants and humans: Some principles of social organization: This is the formal review. It reprises some material from the posts, especially the “nine things” post, but frames things a bit differently.

Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap: I started the book at the very end and then moved to the middle, as I often do. I use many short quote here. If you’re looking for economics, this is the place to find it.

The importance of scale in social structure: We start with ants, bonobos, and chimps to introduce the notion of scale. Ants live in societies numbering millions of individuals. Humans have come to do so as well. Bonobos and chimps, our close biological relatives, never have and never will life in such societies. And then I reprise some material about the size of musical groups that I’d developed in Beethoven’s Anvil (2001).

A digression about an image with an application to human cultural evolution: And here we take an excursion into the evolution of 19th century Anglophone literary culture with a diagram that could be a map of the nest of a large ant colony...but isn’t.

Summer camp and beyond – another digression [F2F group & society]: In which I suggest that the practice of sending children away to summer camp is a way of helping them live in a society that is necessarily much larger than any face-to-face group they live with.

Night-time action and brain-to-brain coupling [Shazam!!]: I ride a pair current hobby horses, one is about sleep habits the other is about intersubjectivity and patterns of neural activity.

The Great Chain of Being: Another hobby horse, this one is about conceptual organization, which, Moffett shows, maps on to social structure.

The book so far – Nine things that are important: By this time I’d read most, but not all, of the book. I realized that certain themes kept coming up time and again. So I listed them here, with a bit of commentary. I added one to the list and made at the central section of my review.

What about the USA? Using concepts from the book I take a quick look at the evolution of social structure and identity in the United States. Is the nation falling apart?

Some notes about neural foundations: Here I derive some of Moffett’s core observations and assertions from some basic properties of the brain.

The Human Swarm @3QD [Mark Moffett @ New Savanna]

I’ve just posted my review of The Human Swarm at 3 Quarks Daily: Of Ants And Humans: Some Principles Of Social Organization.

I’ve also written some posts about his previous book, Adventures Among Ants, which is filled with his marvelous photos of ants:

• Moffett & the Ants: Mode, Embedding & Emergent Complexity
• Moffett on Ants 2: Photography as thinking and Conceptual calibration

Here’s a post on a major article Moffett wrote about ant supercolonies, an article which is certainly one of the sources of The Human Swarm:

• Supercolonies, or, What’s a society?

And this is an post I wrote in anticipation of Adventures Among Ants:

• The Busy Bee Brain

You might want to think of that in conjunction with an earlier post on The Human Swarm:

• Reading The Human Swarm 3: A digression about an image with an application to human cultural evolution [#DH]

Reading the Human Swarm 9: What about the brain?

There is at least one place where Moffett mentions the brain, in the beginning of Chapter 12, “Sensing Others”, where he mentions the work of Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist who investigates neural activity of people intereacting with one another through conversation; in this case, they were watching a film and chatting together. When that happens their brain activity becomes synchronized.

I’d like to introduce some comments on the brain on a different theme: The brain is built from the inside? By thinking that through we can appreciate the (conjectural) neural underpinnings of some findings Moffett has introduced: societies are more likely to form through fission rather than merger; the development of factions; and the distinction between group and society.

Brains are built from the inside

First, what does that mean: the brain is built from the “inside”? Automobiles, for example, aren’t built from the inside. They are designed by engineers and then constructed, to design, by teams of workers, from the “outside”. The same is true of computers. We design them and then build them. Software is like that as well. In these cases, and many more, what is being designed and constructed is one thing, over there, if you will, while the team doing the designing and constructing is another thing, over here.

Brains aren’t like that. Brains and nervous systems are embedded in animals and the process through which an animal comes into being is a biological process of development and growth that starts with a single fertilized cell. There is no separation between a design-build team and the thing being constructed. They are one and the same. It is in that sense that I am asserting the brains are built from the inside. There is no external agent doing the constructing.

While it is common to use computing as a source of metaphors for mind and brain (brain as wetware, mind as software), much of that usage doesn’t hold beyond casual conversation. It is easy to give a computer new capacities by loading a new software package, but nothing like that is possible for humans. We can learn new skills, but that takes time, hours, months, years, depending on the skill. In contrast, a software upload takes whatever time is required for the installation, seconds, minutes, maybe hours; but once the software is installed, the new capacity if fully there and ready to use. Conversely, software can be quickly uninstalled, or simply erased, without damage to the computer itself; but no such thing is possible for knowledge and skills a person has learned. Once the knowledge or skill has been acquired it is more or less permanent, though it may degrade over time if not used.

Implications

Let’s begin with the observation that new societies rarely arise from the merger of existing ones (pp. 283-285). Rather, they arise from the fissioning of existing societies. Thus the members of the societies that result after the split already know one another. They’d grown up together and lived with one another for years. When any one of them was maturing, and thus their brain was developing, the other members of the society where automatically incorporated into their neural representation of the world.

Similarly, as societies become larger, the scope of individual contacts relative to membership in the society as a whole becomes smaller, making internal cohesion more difficult. We can conjecture that this is a function of the capacity of single brains to maintain highly detailed individualized (“face-to-face”) representations of others. Factions develop, Moffett argues (243 ff.). At first they’re amicable, in time, though, that frays. The society must then split in order to maintain peace, peace in two new societies.

Then we have the distinction Moffett makes between a group and a society. Members of groups recognize one another as individuals and interact with one another in individualized ways. Societies do not. Societies divide between the world into US (members of a society) and THEM (non-members). Ants do not recognized one another as individuals, but they do recognize other members of their society (coloney); they do so by scent. Humans typically live in societies consisting of multiple (face-to-face) grounds and use markers of various kinds – hair styles, body markings, clothing, language – to recognize and interact with society members who are not in their local group. They interact with non-group society members through stereotyped social roles. The neural requirements (again, my conjecture) of interaction governed by markers and roles are lower than those governed by detailed individual knowledge. The existence of markers and roles thus allows people to form societies that are larger than face-to-face groups without making burdensome neural requirements.

A concluding note on identity is a different sense

Identity is an important theme in the book where it is about an individual’s link to their group and society. There’s another aspect of identity which Moffett doesn’t deal with and which I’d like to link to the brain, but that would require more of an argument than I can undertake here.

The argument that needs to be made is that our nervous system affords us open-ended awareness of the world. I suspect that’s a joint product of the active nature of the nervous system and the emergence of language. On that active nature, the nervous system doesn’t passively take the world in, but rather actively probes the world through continuously projecting expectations – think, for example, of the model William Powers developed almost a half century ago in Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973). Thus perception is a process of verifying those projections (or, to use a more current language, updating Baysian priors).

The emergence of language leads to an endless curiosity about everything: What’s that? How does it work? Where’d it come from? Living becomes thus becomes a dialog with the world. And the question, Where did WE come from? will arise in that process. The answer initially takes the form of myth, of stories about origins. And those stories, in effect, establish the link between a society and world. That too is a matter of identity.

Reading The Human Swarm 7: The book so far – Nine things that are important

Frankly, I’d hoped to have a full review written by this time, or was that a month ago? But...things...you know. I’ve got a lot on my plate, on the one hand, and, on the other, this is an interesting book, very interesting. So I can’t just read it though and get on with a review. I find myself take notes as I go along, some of which have made it into these posts, and transcribing bits and pieces of the book into these notes. And thinking about it.

Anyhow, I thought I’d write a “where I’m at now” post. Most concretely I’m on page 296 in a book with 362 pages of text, plus pile of endnotes and bibliography. That’s a couple pages into chapter 23, “Building and Breaking of Nations” out of a total of 26 chapter. I’ve also read the conclusion, “Identities Shift and Societies Shatter (pp. 355-362); in fact that’s where I started reading. After all, this isn’t a mystery novel where figuring out how it ends is 3/4s of the fun. In sweeping nonfiction books like The Human Swarm I find it useful to know where the argument leads before I begin; that helps me sift and weigh things as I read through the text.

I’ve got one thing in mind for this post: a list of propositions or ideas I’ve ‘extracted’ from the text as I’ve read through it. At the moment the list has nine items on it, as follows.

* * * * *

The list is subject to revision, of course. I’m likely to add an item or two before I finish the book and perhaps revise the items currently on the list.

1. Scale: Taken one by one, handful by handful, humans and ants are very different. Taken by the million, we are alike. Moffett, as you know, is an expert on insects, ants in particular. They’re so very different from us that one can reasonably wonder what they have to teach us. Moffet’s point is that, yes, individual humans are very different from individual ants, but when the numbers grow, to thousands, tens of thousands or millions or more, large groups of humans face problems similar to those faced by large groups of ants, and arrive at similar solutions: specialization and division of labor, even the use of slaves.

When I put my philosopher’s hat on – and when you read this book, you’re a philosopher willy-nilly – I’d think about the structure of the world at large. Whatever the spatial spread of an ant society, which can be miles and miles, their world is limited in scope, thus, for example, the proximal sense of smell is HUGE. The world of even the smallest hunter gatherer band is, by contrast, much wider and more differentiated, with the distance senses of sight and hearing being very important.

And so on.

Scale will come into play as human societies become larger and larger, necessitating social invention of various kinds.

2. Group vs. Society: Group members recognize one another as individuals. Mammals live in such groups; ants do not. But ants do recognize society, which divides the world in to US and THEM, as do all animals and humans. Ants demark social boundaries by scent: do you smell like us or not? Humans develop various ways of distinguishing between us and them. As societies grow in size, the variety of markers (see below) increases.

3. Fission/fusion: This is a big one. Many animal societies, including humans societies, are of a fission fusion type. Individuals spend most of their time living in groups where each individual recognizes each other individual. The groups in a society, in both animals and humans, will however gather together on a occasion for whatever reason – hang out, find makes, a collective hunt. There is relatively little aggression between members of different groups within the same society. Where individuals are in different societies, that’s a different and more dangerous matter.

Moffett has various remarks indicating that fission/fusion dynamics are likely very important in the emergence of societies of proto humans from societies of very clever apes. We know that apes, and other animals as well, have some form of culture. The idea is that fission/fusion dynamics pushes cultural invention over a tipping point so that apes become human, more or less. What’s being invented are markers.

4. Markers delimit societies: Markers delimit societies. Each society has it own marker or set of markers. Markers are almost exclusively human, though Moffet argues that certain pant-hoot cries among chimpanzees seem to serve this sort of function, as does some bird song. Humans, on the other hand, develop a wide variety of markers, not the least of which is language. Tattoos, hair styles, clothing, all can assume marker status. Among hunter gatherers the markers may be society-wide. In larger and more complex human societies one set of markers delimit sub-societies and groups within the larger society while another set of markers delimits the larger society from other such societies.

5. Drift: As societies become larger, the relative scope of individual contacts becomes smaller and smaller. This makes cohesion among groups within a society more and more difficult. Factions develop. At first they’re amicable, but as the society grows...

6. Othering: At some point in the growth of a society factions drift too far apart. Conflicts multiply and factions will no longer consider one another as part of the same society. They have become Othered. At this point the society will fission into two (or more) separate societies. This can be a violent process.

Perhaps 5 and 6 should be subordinated to a more comprehensive concept. Later.

7. No merging of societies: In both animals and humans it is not at all unusual for growing societies to splinter, giving birth to new societies (in the sense of the term that Moffett had developed). But it is very rare for separate societies in the same species to merge into a larger society. For the most part we’re concerned with human societies here.

On the one hand, this seems obvious. For separate societies to merge on equal terms they have to negotiate a common language and a common set of values, attitudes, etc. That’s very very difficult. It’s much easier for a more powerful society to annex a less powerful one (conquest) in a subordinate role. Thus empires are born. Etc.

This needs to be explicated at the neural level. This is not the place for me to even sketch it out. I note that Beethoven’s Anvil, my book on music, has conceptual equipment that would be useful here, and that his matter is closely related to the evolution of humans that I alluded to in my remarks about fission/fusion societies in 3 above.

8. Chiefdoms and conquest: We’re now exclusively focused on human societies. The issue concerns the governance of ever larger societies. The emergence of chiefdoms, where particularly powerful individuals have influence over several villages within a society, allows for conquest. It’s one thing to engage in war with another society which you then obliterate. It’s another thing to conquer a society and assimilate it’s people into your own society. The emergence of chiefdoms allows for this.

9. Delegation: For a society to expand beyond the scope afforded by chiefdoms requires means of delegating authority. In a chiefdom the paramount chief has direct authority over the chiefs that rule other villages. It is very difficult to extend that authority beyond the distance one can travel in a day or so. To do so requires means of delegation: laws, hierarchy, taxes, bureaucracy, long distance communication, and so forth.

I’m thinking that perhaps eight and nine should be subordinate to more comprehensive concept, following from it as specific theorems in a mathematical system.

More later.

* * * * *

But, you know, I probably need some explicit statement about identity at this level of conceptualization. And it probably needs to be stated in neural terms.

Next time.

Reading The Human Swarm 6: The Great Chain of Being

In his fourteenth chapter Moffett covers one of my hobby horses, though I’m sure that’s not why he did it: The Great Chain of Being. What’s that:

We see our society and those of other people as falling into a hierarchy along with other living things, a notion codified in the Middle Ages as the Great Chain of Being. Typically the royal We surmounts the chain (surpassed only by God and the angels). Other humans follow in a descending order, some of them, Aristotle announced, “as much inferior to their fellows...as beasts are to men.” This hierarchy continues its plumet through the natural world, with “some animals,” as Orwell wryly wrote in Animal Farm, “more equal than others.”

The scale wasn’t fashioned in an ancient Greek ivory tower; people intuited the universe this way before words were scratched on parchment. More than likely it’s a basic feature of our psychology. Researcher shows that children think of people as superior to animals, and of outsiders as closer than their own group to animals. Furthermore the proneness of hunter-gatherers and tribal peoples to describe themselves as human suggests this type of thinking is typical even among societies that are small and have much in common with their neighbors (far more in common than you, with your wider knowledge of the world, likely share with a Tibetan yak herder today). Their use of epithets meaning nonhuman or animal also suggests those people felt entitled to treat at least some outsiders categorically as other species, an outlook that would naturally affect their relationships. [pp. 185-186]

Moffett is correct, the Great Chain IS fundamental to our way of conceptualizing the world and there is a significant literature on the subject [1].

What’s important here, and it seems obvious now that Moffett has pointed it out, is that the Great Chain is linked to the psychological systems that organize social behavior. We think of the social Other as some kind of creature lower on the chain than we are, something Moffett discusses on the following pages. Earlier Moffett had observed it only takes a tenth of a second for us assess a person’s face in terms of “emotional state, sex, race, and ... ethnicity and society, too” (p. 170. Psychologists have recently shown that people make a determination about whether or not something is animate or inanimate – a basic ‘break point’ on the Great chain – in only 250 milliseconds [2]. So, we use the Great Chain to make a quick and dirty assessment of other beings and we use it, at greater leisure, as a way of organizing the world.

Moffett goes on to observe, “Male macaques readily associate troop members with fruit and foreign monkeys with spiders in a simian version of the Implicit Association Test”, thus suggesting: “our ranking of societies and ethnic groups in the Great Chain emerged out of the dominance hierarchy that organizes the relationships of individuals within the societies of many animals” (p. 191). I can offer some suggestively similar examples from the behavior of chimpanzees raised among humans.

Consider Vicki, perhaps the first chimpanzee to be raised among humans. As a youngster she was given the task of sorting photographs into two piles, “human” and “animal.” She placed her own photograph in the human pile while she put her chimpanzee father’s picture went into the animal pile (Eugene Linden, Apes, Men, and Language, 1974, p. 50). Was she expressing aggression against her father? Possibly, but not likely. Her father was a chimpanzee and so she placed his picture in the pile for animals, where it belonged. He looked like other animals, more or less. But why did she think her picture belonged in the pile with humans? After all, she didn’t look like humans, and least not as humans judge these things.

Lucy is another chimpanzee who was raised among humans (Temerlin, “My Daughter Lucy”, Psychology Today 9, 1975: 103). When she reached puberty she made sexual advances toward traveling salesmen and masturbated while looking at pictures of nude men in Playgirl, showing particular interest in their penises. Washoe, raised by Allen and Beatrice Gardner and taught the rudiments of Ameslan (American Sign Language), referred to other chimpanzees as “black bugs” when she first came in contact with conspecifics after years of life among humans (Linden, p. 10).

These chimpanzees, in a sense, “thought” of themselves as people. They were used to social interaction with human beings, not with other chimpanzees. Thus we might interpret Vicki’s two piles of photographs as “appropriate social other” and “inappropriate social other” rather than as “human” and “animal.” The fact that the physical resemblance between chimpanzee and chimpanzee is greater than that between human and chimpanzee is overridden by the fact that, for these apes, there is no social resemblance between themselves and other chimpanzees while such social resemblance does hold with humans. Social structure trumps physical appearances as a way of organizing the world.

More later.

References

[1] I’ve got a post that lays this out, The Great Chain of Being as Conceptual Structure (August 10, 2011), with references: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/08/great-chain-of-being-as-conceptual.html.

I’ve got a good many posts on the general topic of ontological cognition: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ontological%20cognition.

I’ve collected a number of those into a working paper, Ontological Cognition, a Working Paper, November 12, 39 pp.: https://www.academia.edu/7931749/Ontological_Cognition.

[2] See my post, Quick takes: detect animate vs. inanimate in 250 msec, November 29, 2019, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2016/11/quick-takes-detect-animate-vs-inanimate.html.

* * * * *

Reading the Human Swarm, a sporadic series about Mark W. Moffett. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books 2019.

Reading The Human Swarm 5: Night-time action and brain-to-brain coupling [Shazam!!]

Ch12 of The Human Swarm, “Sensing Others” starts off with two dynamite paragraphs. I say they’re dynamite because they speak to two of my hobby horses, a relatively recent one, and one that goes back to my graduate school days. Let’s dig in (p. 161):

Spend time among hunter-gatherers and you realize sleeping through the night is a modern idea. On my trip to Namibia, I listened as Bushmen conversed under a chiseled Milky Way in voices elaborate as birds, full of clicks, twang, and twitter. Their huts were barely visible in the flicker of family fires as they shared both traditional tales and evens of the day with gusto and moments of dramatic acting. When the sun was up their conversations centered on daily business. Nighttime was story time, with tales conveying the big picture of a proper social life and affirming people’s connections with the greater society.

That’s my recent hobby horse, and it is grounded in my own behavior. While I’m basically an “early to bed, early to rise” guy, in recent years I’ve noticed that in creative phases I may get up once or twice in the night and work (creatively) for an hour or two. Some posts:

• Sleep, NOT, an 8-hour block (9.27.12)
• Sleeping Habits (mine – 11.15.12)
• Sleep Ain’t What It used to Be (1.12.13)
• Sleep: 8 continuous hours is a cultural convention, not a natural need (5.14.14)

Moffett’s second paragraph is about brain-to-brain communication:

Years later their animated storytelling came vividly to mind as I stood behind Uri Hasson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, while he hunched over a computer displaying a series of brain scans. Hassonhad been observing the cerebral activity of people watching a movie. The snippets he played were open to interpretation: some viewers might suspect the husband in the film was unfaithful while others might conclude the wife was a liar. When Hasson looked at scans of the viewers’ brains, he found they differed accordingly. If, however, audience members talked to each other as they watched a video, their cerebral cortexes synchronized: the same portions of their brains lit up when they began to follow the story line with a unified point of view. Hasson calls this mind-to-mind coupling “a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world.” The pleasure the Bushmen expressed that starry night must have come from such a melding of minds.

Moffett sites an article I’d posted here at New Savanna in 2013, Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world. I’ve posted a number of articles by Hasson. More generally, I’ve got a good many posts on the topics of coupling and synchrony (you’ll find there’s a fair amount of overlap between those two topics). There is now a large and growing literature on the neural activity of people interacting with one another.

My interest in this topic goes back to my graduate school days, when David Hays got me interested in the work of William Condon, who’d taken high-speed video of people intereacting with one another and observed that their movments where synchronized on a scale of 10s of milliseconds. This then became the central conception of my 2001 book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, where I devoted the second and third chapters to developing the dual notions that, 1) tighly coupled synchronzed movement is central to music-making, and 2) and music-making is central to human society. I developed these ideas in the context of Walter Freeman’s conception of the nervous system as a complex dynamical system.

Now I’ve got to get back to reading Moffett’s book. More later.

How do we define success for humans [and progress?]

Robert Pollack, evolutionary biologist at Columbia, at Edge: "Rethinking our Vision of Success".

From Darwin:

Inherited novelty may be a sufficient source of novelty over time, so that in enough time, new species emerge from old, and maybe we are all descended from the same living thing initially. And that's true. [...] Darwin gave 150 years ago a clear explanation for how the living world in nature is. His wonderful book On the Origin of Species has the metaphor of a tangled bank. When you look at the tangled bank of a river, you see plants and animals and bugs and worms, and they're all in dynamic tension with each other. That is the source of our notion of ecology.

I've lived as a biologist in the world of Darwin, trying to understand Darwinian pre-adaptive mutation in terms of cancer as distinct from normal cells. I fully think I understand it. Then, as I'm teaching my undergraduates, I discover that we as a single species are wholly out of that tangled bank. We are 100,000-fold in excess of our natural numbers, and we threaten the planet by our success. What I'm thinking about is, what is the language that says our problem is our success, not our failure? I am not one of the people who say, "Woe is us. We failed." My concern is how do I redefine success so that success is at equilibrium with the rest of the living world, and that we do not destroy the planet?

Are we a cancer on the face of the earth?

How do we understand that our 100,000-fold excess of numbers on this planet, plus what we do to feed ourselves, makes us a tumor on the body of the planet? I don't want the future that involves some end to us, which is a kind of surgery of the planet. That's not anybody's wish. How do we revert ourselves to normal while we can? How do we re-enter the world of natural selection, not by punishing each other, but by volunteering to take success as meaning success and survival of the future, not success in stuff now? How do we do that? We don't have a language for that.

We do have structures that value the future over current success. I'm at an institution that has one of those structures. Columbia University is one of the most well-endowed universities in the world. That endowment, which is permanent, according to the economic structure of the country, is stable, it produces wealth without taxation, and that wealth is, by government regulation, required to be spent in the public interest. My job is in the public interest, my teaching is in the public interest, my salary comes that way, my sabbatical, which allows me to find the time to talk to you now. The idea of an endowment is perhaps an expandable idea.

That question, of structures valuing the future over the present, is kinda' what's behind Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments, which "makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth and delivers a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities." I suspect that (growth) growth is not exactly what Pollack has in mind. He continues on the theme of endowment:

The more you have, the more you can set aside in a de facto endowment to stabilize the present so that the future doesn't collapse on us.

That's not a taxation. That's not a redistribution. It's a withholding. It's an agreement to do with less now for the sake of the future. I don't see economic structures that do that. I don't see politics that does that. But I see kids, like those in the street this week, knowing if we don't do something like that, they don't have a world.

Medicine:

Well, what is the medicine of a real whole life? What is the medicine of accepting mortality but still being alive? What is the social responsibility we have to each other as we help each other through that transition? Show me the taxation that's spent on that. Show me the infrastructure that goes to that. It's unspeakable, like we can't talk about it. But if we don't talk about it, either at the scale of individual mortality, or the scale of species mortality, or the scale of planetary mortality, we will have participated in the cooperation with nature to end ourselves.

* * * * *

How do we recover or perhaps invent species self-awareness? How do we invent the recognition of each of us as one of 7 billion people, not as one of 300 million Americans, not as one of ten people in our immediate family, not as you name how many different categories we are part of?

* * * * *

Let's repeat: What is the medicine of accepting mortality but still being alive? I'm reminded of a passage from Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966, 178-179):

Another example of death being softened by welcome, if we can put it that way, is the ritual murder by which the Dinka put to death their aged spearmasters. This is the central rite in Dinka religion. All their other rites and bloodily expressive sacrifices pale in significance besides this one which is not a sacrifice. The spearmasters are a hereditary clan of priests. Their divinity, Flesh, is a symbol of life, light and truth. Spearmasters may be possessed by the divinity; the sacrifices they perform and blessings they give are more efficacious than other men’s. They mediate between their tribe and divinity. The doctrine underlying the ritual of their death is that the spearmaster’s life should not be allowed to escape with his last breath from his dying body. By keeping his life in his body his life is preserved; and the spirit of the spearmaster is thus transmitted to his successor for the good of the community. The community can live on as a rational order because of the unafraid self-sacrifice of its priest.

By reputation among foreign travellers this rite was a brutal suffocation of a helpless old man. An intimate study of Dinka religious ideas reveals the central theme to be the old man’s voluntary choosing of the time, manner and place of his death. The old man himself asks for the death to be prepared for him, he asks for it from his people and on their behalf. He is reverently carried to his grave, and lying in it says his last words to his grieving sons before his natural death is anticipated. By his free, deliberate decision he robs death of the uncertainty of its time and place of coming. His own willing death, ritually framed by the grave itself, is a communal victory for all his people (Lienhardt). By confronting death and grasping it firmly he has said something to his people about the nature of life. [...]

The old spearmaster giving the sign for his own slaying makes a stiffly ritual act. It has none of the exuberance of St. Francis of Assisi rolling naked in the filth and welcoming his Sister Death. But his act touches the same mystery. If anyone held the idea that death and suffering are not an integral part of nature, the delusion is corrected. If there was a temptation to treat ritual as a magic lamp to be rubbed for gaining unlimited riches and power, ritual shows its other side. If the hierarchy of values was crudely material, it is dramatically undermined by paradox and contradiction. In painting such dark themes, pollution symbols are as necessary as the use of black in any depiction whatsoever. Therefore we find corruption enshrined in sacred places and times.

Reading The Human Swarm 4: Summer camp and beyond – another digression [F2F group & society]

I went camping with some friends over the weekend, and got thinking about summer camp, which is not quite the same thing as camping. By summer camp I mean children and teenagers going to some place, traditionally rural, where then sleep in relatively simple quarters and engage in various outdoor activities for a week, two weeks, or more at a time. According to the Google Ngram chart below, phrase “summer camp” started an upswing in the first decade of the 20th century and really shot up in the second decade.

I’ll take that as an index of when the practice took hold in America.

But what, you’re asking, does that have to do with The Human Swarm? A lot. For Moffett makes a crucial distinction between a face-to-face band or group and a society. Everyone knows everyone else in the band. But that’s not the case with a society, which typically includes several to many bands. Societies divide the world into those who are in the group and those who are not, insiders and outsiders. You don’t need to have a personal relationship with everyone in your society, indeed, you cannot, for the society is too large for that. All that’s necessary is that you have some way of recognizing that a person IS in your society.

So what’s that have to do with summer camp?

Simple, when a kid goes to summer camp they have to leave their everyday face-to-face group and (figure out how to) live with a bunch of strangers for the duration. Those strangers, of course, are members of the kid’s society. That’s what makes summer camp possible. But, and here’s the point, it’s all well and good that you share the same stories and symbols with others in your society, but that’s a little abstract. When you go to summer camp you have to interact with these fellow citizens in a way that’s different from living at home. At home your have your familiars, family and friend, but all those casual acquaintances and strangers you deal with, the owner of the candy store, the cop on the corner, and so forth. That’s all gone at camp.

At camp you have to reconstitute your life, at least for a couple of weeks, without benefit of your familiars. You’re on your own, kid. And you survive, have fun, and even thrive. In this way society takes on a deep lived and livable reality that those symbols do not have.

Let’s push further. I have had to uproot myself and reconstitute my life four times: First when I left home (in Johnstown, PA) and went to college (in Baltimore, MD), second when I went to graduate school (in Buffalo, NY), third when I took a faculty job at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (in Troy, NYO, and then fourth when I moved to Jersey City, NJ, to work in a start-up company (which failed, but I stayed in the area). This is a fairly common experience among my friends and family.

I would really like to know just how common it is in America in general. How many people are born, live, and die in the same place? How many have had to uproot themselves once, twice, and so forth? I don’t know, but I’d like to.

This article in The Atlantic in 2016 indicates that “the average person in the United States moves residences more than 11 times in his or her lifetime.” I’m nowhere near that. But I’m not sure just what “moves residences” means. I moved to Jersey City in 1999. I then moved to Hoboken in 2010, I believe, back to Jersey City in 2012, and then back to Hoboken in 2015. So I’ve switched residences three times since moving to this area (Hoboken and Jersey City are next to one another, across the Hudson River from Manhattan). As far as I’m concerned that’s all one area, one set of friends and so forth. But it might be counted as four separate residences by the Census Bureau, which is the source of the information in the article. Still, that doesn’t had up to 11.

But you get my point. We move around a lot, and that bears on the distinction Moffett makes between group and society. The mobility is made possible by society while the actual moving around gives weight and heft to being a member of the society.

Reading The Human Swarm 3: A digression about an image with an application to human cultural evolution [#DH]

What’s this image represent?

I supposed I’ve you’ve been reading New Savanna for awhile you know what it represents. But imagine you didn’t know. What would you think it is?

Since this is a post about recent book by Mark Moffett, and Moffett’s an expert on ants, you might think it’s a nest, one with 3300 chambers, each represented by a node in the graph. From The Human Swarm, pp. 57-58:

The size of leafcutter settlements can be gargantuan: in the French Guiana jungles I came upon a nest the square footage of a tennis court. A drawback of such a metropolis is the same face by a human city: pulling in enough resources means a lot of communiting. From the far corners of that large nest spring a half-dozen speedways along with the workers doubtless hauled hundreds of pounds of fresh foliage over the course of each year. To unearth just a part of another colony I once hired six men with pickaxes and shovelss near São Paulo. The bloody bites I sustained that week didn’t stop me from feeling like an archaeologist eshuming a citadel. Hundreds of gardens grew in chambers arrayed along meters upon meters of superbly arranged tunnels, some at least six meters below the surface. Scaled to human dimensions, their subway systems would be kilometers deep.

Pretty impressive, no?

If this were Tom Sawyer you might think it’s a map of the cave where Becky Thatcher got lost with Injun Joe.

If this were a post about the brain, you might think it’s a map of some neural system.

And so on.

Of course, it’s none of those things. Each of those nodes represents the text of a 19th century novel, British, Irish, or American. It’s from Matt Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (2013), a book I’ve written quite a bit about. Matt “measured” each text on each of roughly 600 features – just what I mean by measure and how Matt did it is secondary at this point, but if you dig around in those posts, you’ll find out – and then placed a point for each text in 600 dimensional space (one dimension for each feature). Why’d he do that? Because he wanted to identify books that are similar to one another. If the books are similar, then they will be close together in this 600-dimensional space.

So, he’s got these points (representing texts) in 600D space. Now he calculates the distance between each pair; with 3300 points, that’s a lot of pairs. How’d he do that? The principle’s the same as measuring the distance between, say, two cities, or two windows on a wall. We can treat the earth’s surface as a plane (two dimensions) and, of course, the surface of a wall IS a plane. Since these books have 600 features, we’ve got to embed them in a space of 600 dimensions. Tricky, but the principle’s the same.

Now Jockers made the graph by 1) connecting all the points together and then, 2) pruning away all the links that are longer than some appropriately low value. He then projected the resulting graph onto two dimensions and produced that image. All with the help of a computer, of course.

Easy as pie.

Imagine if ants could dig nests in 600 dimensional space. Yikes!

So what? you ask.

I’m getting there, I’m getting there.

Of course each of those texts have been read by many people, a few of them by millions of people. That graph thus implies the existence of millions of readers over the course of time. Now we’re getting to ant colony numbers, millions and millions.

Now we’re talking about a human swarm. And THAT’s how we have to think about human cultural evolution. That’s why I’m interested in that graph. Because it implies an ant colony we HAVE to think about it in evolutionary thinking. Evolutionary thinking is population thinking. That graph implies a population of people reading a population of texts yielding a population of readings. It boggles the mind.

Imagine millions of ants gathered together moving over the ground in a swath I don’t know how many meters wide – Moffett has described such things, but I can’t put my finger on one of those descriptions at the moment. There it is, a band of red-brown-blackish particles speckled by the sun, moving in a single mass. Well that's how, with the aid of Jockers’ graph, I think about cultural evolution. Millions of humans, their minds linked, moving through history like the Mississippi River over the flood plane of human events.

The human swarm indeed. And it’s culture that makes us a swarm. Without it we’d just be small bands of very clever apes, using twigs to fish for termites. Instead, we’ve stood on the moon.

Reading The Human Swarm 2: The importance of scale in social structure

I’ve now gone back to the beginning of The Human Swarm and have been reading chapters in order, from the Introduction up to chapter 5, “Ants and Humans, Apples and Oranges”. I’ve made notes (mostly excerpts) on it all, but I want to concentrate on Ch5. By that time Moffett has established two things to keep in mind:

• Animal life can be organized on two scales, 1) the small band, which is based on recognizing individuals, and 2) what he calls a society, where one only recognizes whether or not an individual is a member. Societies will (may?) consist of a number of small individual-recognition bands.
• One form of social organization is the fission-fusion society, where bands will spend part of their time on their own, but will also conjoin with other bands in the society for joint activities.

Ch5: Ants and Humans, Apples and Oranges

Let’s list some excerpts:

p. 57

We modern humans may be genetically close to the chimp and bonobo, yet ants are the animals we resemble most. The similarities between our species and theirs tell us a lot about complex societies and how they emerge.

p. 58-59

In so much as chimpanzees and bonobos think as we do, the parallels often extend to other animals, too. Both are like us in recognizing themselves in a mirror; then again so do dolphins, elephants, and magpies, and there’s a claim, widely doubted, that ants do, too.

p. 59 Among both bonobos and chimpanzees...

relationships are dictated by strict hierarchies of power, which are tyrannical in the chimp–especially in the males. On maturing, females of both species abandon childhood kith and kin for another community, never to return. The females are sexually receptive only on occasion,...

Here’s the big one, the one this post is about, p. 60:

Scientists investigating animal behavior have too often been narrowly devoted to the evolutionary relationships between species, when many features of societies have more to do with scaling – sheer numbers – rather than pedigree. The societies we have looked at among the nonhuman vertebrates, including the nonhuman apes, contain at most a few dozen individuals. A large leafcutter nest harbors a workforce in the low millions. [He opens the chapter discussing these.]

Once a population grows that large, all types of complexity can emerge – in fact often have to emerge to get jobs done. The coordination seen among hunting groups in a chimp or painted dog society is mercurial enough to amount to wishful thinking compared to the elaborate way some predatory ants organize hunts, with some workers stopping the quarry in its tracks, others applying the death blow, and others dismantling the corpse into slabs of flesh carried off in coordinated teams. Most vertebrates lack the labor force to take on such specific roles; nor must they operate in this way for the members to get the food they need.

The same is true for housing and infrastructure. The burrows of prairie dogs can be intricate; they connect underground with hibernation chambers and dead ends that thwart predators. Yet, contrasted with the monumental architecture of a leafcutter nest or a honeybee hive, the dwellings of these rodents seem a relic of the Animal Stone Age.

YES!

It’s one thing to organize a society with, say, a dozen to 30 or 40 members, the individual-recognition band. This doesn’t require much if any occupational and thus role specialization. It’s another thing when you’re dealing with 10s of thousands or millions or even billions of members in one society. Now specialization is essential. That’s what makes ants so interesting. And that’s why it is important to understand how their societies work.

Group size among humans, some quick observations

From my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001), Ch9: Musicking the World, 200-201:

In a recent synthesis and review of work on human groups Linnda Caporael argues that the band, which she calls a deme, and the group of bands, which she calls a macrodeme, are basic units of organization that appear in all human societies. We see demes and macrodemes in their most basic configuration in hunter-gatherer societies, but they persist even in the most sophisticated. Thus, drawing on David Hull’s work on the social organization of science, Caporael suggests that scientific “in-groups” devoted to certain ideas are demes, while somewhat larger “invisible colleges” are macrodemes that meet with one another at yearly meetings of scientific societies.

Caporael’s analysis extends to smaller groups as well. Many tasks typically fall to groups that are smaller than bands. Courtship, mating, and child-rearing involve intense interaction between pairs—technically referred to as dyads. One obvious characteristic of dyads is that they permit a very high level of coordination between people; consider an infant interacting with her mother, or a courting couple. Other activities require “handfuls,” work groups of a half-dozen or so individuals. Here, coupling is generally looser than in dyads. Thus when a handful of men go out hunting they may agree on the type of game and the general direction of the hunt but otherwise function fairly autonomously, at least until game has been spotted.

Caporael treats these core configurations—dyads, “handfuls,” demes, and macrodemes—as basic units of social organization. I will assume her framework for the rest of this book. For the past ten or fifteen millennia, however, humans have been living in societies larger than thousands of individuals. How do we construct societies larger than the largest core configuration, a macrodeme of some hundreds of indivduals? We need a new mechanism—permanent leadership—and as we will see later on, that mechanism requires musicking for its social construction and maintenance.

Along those lines I can also mention Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard 1965, p. 54), where discusses an organization in which “the average size of the ‘action taking’ subgroups was 6.5 members, whereas the average size of the ‘non-action taking’ subgroups was 14 members.” Olson goes on to cite similar numbers for other organizations, including committees in the US Congress. And that makes sense. Taking action, e.g. reporting out a bill for consideration before Congress, requires a higher degree of coordination and assent than simply examining something to, say, issue a report. The smaller group facilities the necessary degree of interaction.

Interaction in musical groups

This is obvious in the structure of musical groups. Small group jazz, which I know very well, gives each musician a great deal of freedom. Such groups typically have between three six or seven members; quartets and quintets are particularly common. Typically, though not always, at any given moment one musician will have the “floor” as a soloist and, as such, is free to play whatever they wish. But the accompanying musicians do not play set parts. Rather, they are expected to vary their accompaniment in response to the soloist.

Larger jazz groups are organized differently, say nine to perhaps twenty or so piece. Now fixed arrangements become necessary. You can’t have a dozen people making it up all the time. Typical arrangements will have sections that feature a soloist, who is free to do as they wish, just like in a small combo. And, like a combo, the rhythm section is some latitude in how they accompany the soloist. But the arrangement may well include set backing figures played by other musicians.