Master Key First Draft
I have as of today finished the first draft of an essay elaborating my vision for a new social scientific paradigm. Obviously I will be going back to edit, a number of citations and references need to be tracked down and incorporated, and the appendix remains to be written, but these should all be much easier with all the ideas written down. I’ve decided to paste a few selections from my text, in case I might pique some people’s interest.
The problem of the social utility of beliefs
“If civilization is not a miracle, we must say it is natural. While this does not enumerate its organizing principles, it does give us a place to begin. Civilization organizes itself according to laws of nature that transcend human will, and more often conforms human will to it than the other way around. Our selves as such must be conformed to natural regularities that transcend our personal reality, otherwise there should be no way for all the variety of human behavior to have organized itself into such a fantastic expression. We return to much the same epistemic problem as before, in that our personal probing depends on principles that result in circularity. We are likely, as individuals, to approach an expression of social reality that is socially functional over true, in the sense that any articulated proposition – no matter its material truth – will have been motivated, consciously and subconsciously, to represent a proposition found amenable to others so as to improve one's status.”
Mathematics is only further expression of reality
“Mathematics vesting itself fully on the material plane of reality yet retaining its transcendental character certainly seems arcane as a starting point for politics, but it is necessary for unifying the sciences through a basic principle that unites everything falling under the category of language and knowledge. What seems the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics is in fact fundamentally because it is literally but a species of “unreasonable effectiveness” of causality intrinsic to nature. Math and science and everything linguistically articulated exists within the domain of physics, never specifying something outside of itself but in fact specifying itself. In specifying itself, it interacts with itself, a formula which inevitably realizes a fractal pattern, and this may be the most apt picture for describing the relation of math and the rest of reality as such. Reality is a fractal, and its spandrels – peninsulae of self-similarity – are capable of analogizing each other across scale because they are derived of precisely the same set of principles underlying all of reality as such.”
Society is a living being as the central insight to all social science
“The master key which this entire essay comes down to this very simple conclusion: society is a living being. It has been in front of us this whole time yet we did not see it. But once you see it, it all comes together in such an elegant way. Society is alive, and organizes itself according to the same principles by which living things organize themselves. We should be able to sweep away the whole of sociology and all other such sciences that seek to understanding society as a unique form unlike all others and put it under the discipline of biology. But it is not so simple as that. In fact, many insights of the social sciences are true, and could be equitably imported back into biology on this principle. The result is not a reduction of the social sciences, but the integration of disparate domains into an elegant order.”
The application of biological concepts to societal evolution
“These two concepts, common inheritance and convergent evolution can be equally applied to societies. Where we observe a commonality of traits between cultures, their explanation may be one or the other. Either cultures share these traits because they spring from a common ancestor, or else they represent the same traits due to an intrinsic fit they have with their environment that is necessary for optimum performance. In the case of the latter, a trait may form up to a point that it fulfills some local maxima/minima calculation for the whole of which it is a part, and then tend to remain in place over generations because deviation from that trait – once it has been established – brings too great a selective pressure. Thus some traits of societies may tend to remain the optimal expression of their function for periods of time longer than the human lifespan, and thus become “traditional” entrenchments. Coordinating the energy to destroy or alter such traits may only result in a deviation from the local maximinima which disrupts the organization of energy to that end, resulting in that part re-forming itself as an element of its society. (One has in mind various attempts throughout history to destroy a certain element of society only for that same organization of the form to reconstitute itself against the wishes of those who set such motion in effect. An example could be the practice of communism in China eventually undermining its own capacity for self-organization and thus capitalist structures such as businesses and private ownership returning “by default” in some form.)”
The tendency to centralize in society akin to ‘cephalization’ observed in biological evolution
The utility of information realizes itself in both the organization of multicellular organisms and human social structures. Primitive multicellular organisms organize themselves by nerve nets, which themselves give way to more centralized organization of nervous cells to realize the central nervous system and eventually brains in a process that is termed 'cephalization.' This 'cephalization' can be likewise observed in the emergence of complex human social systems. Early tribes organized themselves by language with little specialization, very akin to nerve nets. In somewhat more sophisticated social systems, we can observe a tendency to centralization emerging. That tendency is observed not only in tribes instituting the social role of chiefs, but in the emergence of rulers and ruling elites more directly associated with the ruler, who depend on organizing immediately between each other using information gained about and from others about the circumstances of their territory. Eventually this tendency to centralization emerges in a formal elite, who coordinate and execute decisions on behalf of their entire social body – just as a brain does for the body. The necessity of information, and its trend in history to centralize – as seen in the institution of writing – makes the analogy more plain. In fact, we might be able to go beyond analogy, to argue that the elite of a society really do operate just as a brain does.