p. 50: universal Darwinism, universal Bayesianism, and evolutionary epistemology…

 

Universal Darwinism entails the application of Darwinian-like evolutionary mechanisms beyond biological contexts. It generalizes from the basic “descent with modification” a broader pattern of “variation and selective retention” that can be applied in any number of domains. “Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest,’” writes Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, “is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable.”

 

Universal Bayesianism refers to a process by which a given probability space (say, of an environment) is explored by countless iterations of slightly modified trials in order to yield the optimal solution to a design challenge. Each slightly modified approach yields the chance of an improved solution. Over numerous iterations, the trials converge upon the optimal result.

 

Evolutionary epistemology is a framing of mechanisms like those above in terms of learning and knowledge accumulation. Everything from dissipative structures to the advance of technology and culture can be understood as adaptive learning. As Azarian puts it, “A functional equivalence between the mechanisms driving evolution, learning, and science suggests that adaptation and scientific knowledge are actually the same thing” (p. 94).

 

 

p. 51: “You could say that energy organizes matter into life…”

 

Azarian, The Romance of Reality, p. 18.

 

 

p. 51: “As cosmologist and science educator Carl Sagan famously put it…”

 

Azarian, The Romance of Reality, p. 5.

 

 

p. 52-53: “The assumption that our world is gradually drifting toward…”

 

Azarian, The Romance of Reality, p. 5.

 

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p. 54: The Tree of Knowledge

 

Henriques, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, p. 154.

 

 

p. 54: “The most novel aspect about the ToK System…”

 

Henriques, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, p.14.

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p. 55: “The “Matter” cone at the bottom…”

 

Henriques, Gregg, et al. (2019) The Tree of Knowledge system: a new map for big history. Journal of Big History 3(4):2.

 

 

p. 56: “directly overlaps”

 

Henriques, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, p. 173.

 

 

p. 58: “[T]here is nothing in physics that predicts…”

 

Rolston III, Holmes (2010) Three Big Bangs: Matter-Energy, Life, Mind (Columbia University Press, New York), p. 12.

 

 

p. 59: “If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang…”

 

Quoted in Rolston, Three Big Bangs, p. 17.

 

 

p. 59: “The charges on the light electron…”

 

Rolston, Three Big Bangs, p. 18.

 

 

p. 59-60: “it could better have been named ‘the biogenic principle’…

 

Rolston, Three Big Bangs, p. 14.

 

 

p. 61: “The ‘computational universe’ is programmed…”

 

Rolston, Three Big Bangs, p. 9.

 

 

p. 61: ““[L]ife is the inevitable product of an evolving, self-organizing universe…”

 

Azarian, The Romance of Reality, p. 56-57.

 

 

p. 61: “the Universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends)…”

 

Carter, Brandon (1974) Large number coincidences and the anthropic principle in cosmology. IAU Symposium 63: Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, Vol. 63. (Reidel: Dordrecht), p. 274.

 

 

p. 63: “A statistical correlation between the configuration of the organism…”

 

Azarian, The Romance of Reality, p. 102.

 

 

p. 63: “In a completely literal sense, a dolphin’s streamlined design…”

 

Azarian, The Romance of Reality, p. 96.

 

 

p. 63: “Life seeks to represent the world in which it lives…”

 

Quoted in Azarian, The Romance of Reality, p. 107.

 

 

p. 65: integrated information theory

 

IIT was pioneered by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi and has becoming one of the leading contenders for a comprehensive theory of consciousness. A complete explanation would require rather extensive mathematical exposition beyond the scope of this book, but a few works written for the layman offer a decent overview.

 

In The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread But Can’t Be Computed, Christof Koch explains some of the fundamental assumption of IIT this way:

 

“According to integrated information theory (IIT), consciousness is determined by the causal properties of any physical system acting upon itself. That is, consciousness is a fundamental property of any mechanism that has cause-effect power upon itself. Intrinsic causal power is the extent to which the current state of, say, an electronic circuit or a neural network, causally constrains its past and future states. The more the system’s elements constrain one another, the more causal power. …The causal powers can be represented as a constellation of points (distinctions) linked by lines (relations). According to IIT, these causal powers are identical to conscious experience, with every aspect of any possible conscious experience mapping one-to-one onto aspects of this causal structure” (p. 79).

 

The existence of parts with causal power with regard to the whole mean one can speak of an “irreducible” whole—or, as Koch puts it, “If partitioning some entity makes no difference to its cause-effect structure, then it is fully reducible to those parts, without losing anything” (p. 85). If something is lost, then the whole is genuinely irreducible to the parts. “The Whole is the most irreducible part of any system, the one that makes the most difference to itself. Per IIT, only the Whole has experience” (p. 87).

 

All of this is to say that consciousness is defined by irreducible complexity, where complexity is understood as the integrated relationship of parts in a whole. With this insight, one can then measure the complexity of the system—in this case, the neuronal/brain network—by an approximate measure known as “algorithmic complexity,” which reveal how irreducible something is.

 

Such measures are actually quite familiar to us. Any time you “zip” a file or folder on your computer, you have used algorithmic complexity to “compress” data to its irreducible form. This function essentially identifies those parts of the whole that can be removed without losing any essential information. A file with binary code can be compressed by finding the patterns in it, and reducing the length of the information needing to be conveyed to a shorter algorithm. Hence, the binary code

000000011111110000000011111111000000000111111111 is long (48 characters long, to be precise), but easily compressible into a much shorter expression, since it is just seven 0s, seven 1s, eight 0s, eight 1s, nine 0s, nine 1s, etc. By contrast, a truly random number of the same length, 011011111010111010001100011010111010100101011000, is irreducibly complex, since there is no algorithm that can compress the expression into a simpler form.

 

Between pattern and randomness, total order and total chaos, lies the domain of the sort of complexity which leads to the dynamic living structures we see around us. This is because maximal information is found not in total regularity, nor in total incoherence, but somewhere in-between.

 

IIT researchers use approximations like algorithmic complexity to measure the degree of integration in the brain/nervous system. This is what Φ is. Conscious complexity (Φ) drops when we enter sleep or are put under through anesthesia; it rises when we awaken.

 

Consciousness, in short, is a whole-part relationship, one maximally integrated; the degree of complexity and the degree of consciousness are directly correlated. Complexity is the exterior, structural aspect of the interior, subjective experience. Or, as Koch puts it: “IIT posits two sides to every Whole: an exterior aspect, known to the world and interacting with other objects, including other Wholes; and an interior aspect, what it feels like, its experience” (p. 166).

 

More than that, consciousness is emergent. As Anil Seth puts it in Being You: The New Science of Consciousness, “The easiest way to think about Φ is that it measures how much a system is ‘more than the sum’ of its parts, in terms of information. …In IIT, Φ measures the amount of information a system generated ‘as a whole,’ over and above the amount of information generated by its parts independently. This underpins the main claim of the theory, which is that a system is conscious to the extent that its whole generates more information than its parts” (p. 64). This, we have seen, is the very definition of emergence. IIT is a mathematically-grounded theory showing how the whole of experiential consciousness emerges from its merely material parts.

 

 

p. 66: “How does brain size affect consciousness?...”

 

Koch, Christof (2019) The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread But Can’t Be Computed (MIT Press, Cambridge), p. 126.

 

​

p. 66: “As adaptation increases, so do…”

 

Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself, p. 124.

 

 

p. 67: [figure]

 

Adapted from Figure 11.2 in Koch, The Feeling of Life Itself, p. 127.

 

 

p. 67: “In turn on up the complexity continuum…”

 

Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution, p. 138.

 

 

p. 68: according to the same metric, the energy rate density for…

 

See Table 2 in Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution, p. 139.

​

 

p. 69: “That is,” writes Henriques, “like nutritious food, social influence reflects…”

 

Henriques, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, p. 84.

 

 

p. 70: “What is the self-consciousness system?...”

 

Henriques, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, p. 115.

 

 

p. 70: “The point of the Justification Hypothesis is that…”

 

Henriques, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, p. 136.

 

 

p. 71: “Justifications are a great example of what Dawkins (1989) called a meme…”

 

Henriques, A New Unified Theory of Psychology, p. 148.

 

 

p. 71: metamemes

 

Hanzi Freinacht writes in his book The Listening Society:  “Each of these metamemes operates as a set of thousands of propositions and assumptions about the world which interlock into a self-supporting whole, a kind of ecosystem or equilibrium. Each of them is a kind of underlying structure of the symbolic universes that constitute our lived and shared realities. So each of them roughly have an ontology (theory of reality and what is “really real”), an ideology (“theory of what is right and good”) and an identity, an idea of who or what the self is. …They each create a blueprint for the creation of narratives: So the language tools are not only metamemes, but also meta-narratives. There is always a rough, underlying story (narrative) about reality from which humans operate, from which they create new ‘code’, new knowledge” (p. 215).

 

 

p. 72: Emergent Cyclical Levels of Existence Theory (ECLET)

 

Graves developed his theory of eight levels after synthesizing years of empirical research from countless prompts and tests he’d administered to his students. The prompt for essayistic responses was: “What does a psychologically mature adult look like?” After collecting the responses, a group of independent judges reviewed the responses each year and were asked to categorize them without further guidance. Again and again, the judges tended to categorize them according to a specific schema. This schema formed the basis of the eight levels Graves identified from the data.

 

 

p. 72: “The psychology of the adult human being…”

 

Graves, Clare (2005) The Never Ending Quest (ECLET Publishing, Santa Barbara), p. 29.

 

 

p. 73: eight such extant levels…

 

According to Graves’s ECLET model, a stage sequence of specific material life conditions (symbolized by the first 8 letters of the alphabet) were met by the individual with an accompanying set of neurophysiological response systems (symbolized by the 8 letters from N to U). Thus, A conditions engender the individual’s N adaptive response, B conditions engender the O adaptive response, and so forth. Thus we get the 8 “levels of existence”: A-N, B-O, C-P, D-Q, E-R, F-S, G-T, and H-U.

 

The first two of these levels were not evidenced in Graves’s data, but extrapolated from anthropological data: A-N is a hypothetical “archaic” level of pure survival needs; B-O is the “Animistic” level of tribal societies. The remainder were deduced from empirical responses to Graves’s survey question.

 

According to Graves, the levels alternate, one to the next, between an instinct to “express the self” or to “sacrifice the self,” to be individualistically assertive or communally submissive. These are the two poles the individual oscillates between as they develop through the levels. Development is conceived as a spiral, wherein the individual returns to self- assertion or submission again and again from higher and higher vantages.

 

To provide some concrete examples of what this looks like, here are some of the actual data provided by his subjects that Graves cites as instances of the different levels:

 

C-P: Self-Assertive

“Life is a jungle - one goddamned great big jungle. It is survival of the fittest and that is all. Anybody who does not recognize this is not or will never be a grown up person. Life is competition, it is fight and struggle and get and take and hang on. Some they have got it to fight there way through it

and some they just don’t have it. The grownup he survives, or he go down big in trying he’s got it. He is the guy who fights to get what he needs and he keeps after it till he gest it. If he wants some chick he don’t take no. He wears her down. One thing about him is he don’t chicken, he don’t let fear stand in his way. … There ain’t no reason for him to feel guilty cause a man’s got to live ain’t he? This aint no picnik world in which he live. It better he do what have to be done cause he can’t hold his head up if he ain’t a man.”

 

D-Q: Self-Submitting

#1

“Right is right and wrong is wrong and if you are going to be mature you better learn it, the sooner the better. It always has been this way and it will always be because that is the way it is. My old man learned it from his and his old man learned it from his father, and my kids are going to learn it from me because that is the law of the land. …God is vengeful, he is to be feared. …God says there are laws we must live by or He will see to it we pay for it in the future.”

 

#2

"It is my honest belief that what is a mature personality is determined by that power which determines good and evil in the world. God created man and God has indicated in His Ten Commandments the principles by which the human should live. It is not for me to decide what God pretended [I believe this is a Freudian slip and she meant ‘intended’]. If God had wanted man to decide he would have indicated that. He would not have “commanded”. … have decided the only way I can fulfill the assignment is to decry [I believe she meant ‘describe’] what I think God meant by each of his commandments.” (The respondent then proceeds to list the Ten Commandments and consider psychological maturity with regard to each.)"

 

E-R: Self-Assertive

“After giving rational thought to what is the mature personality I have come to the following list of characteristics which add up to what it is.

1. The major characteristic of the mature person is that he is an independently operating individual.

2. The mature does what has to be done. He is not held back in his actions or judgments by that which other people do or believe.

3. The mature does not accept without questions existing data, theories or practices.

4. He is energetic, outspoken and expressive of what he believes regardless of where others stand.

5. The mature does for himself and thinks for himself. He does not look to others for their guidance or support and he does not need their acceptance or acclaim.

6. The mature person is absolutely objective. He does not let his emotions interfere with what has to be done. He is an acting person who keeps feelings out of his actions.

…10. The mature person does not feel guilty or ashamed for doing what rationally has to be done.

…16. He is not satisfied with yesterday’s ways unless he has found them to work and he holds to them only so long as he sees them to work.”

 

F-S: Self-Submitting

#1

“Since the self can only be a derivative of what is outside the self, since man’s self consciousness, his “selfhood”, seems necessarily to be socially founded, an obsession with individuality and autonomy appears a bit unrealistic… …Rationality is valued as a means of growth, though owing to man’s nature, by no means an exclusive means. …The concept of God as a moral force is virtually dismissed… …As a final note, maturity also engenders a sort of overview of what such a paper as this has an object - i.e. something of a self-reflexive awareness of the relative nature of opinion; a

recognition that although I can and must (because of my humanness) argue out of my own position, argumentation and opinion from other positions is equally valid in the sense of being understandable and defensible.”

 

#2

“The mature personality is a participating, creative personality which in its operation does justice to every type of personality, every mode of culture, every human potential without forming anyone into typological molds. …He or she believes in an absolutely open society …He or she behaves so as to demonstrate that every person may be freely heard.…He or she seeks to widen the ties of fellowship without respect to birth, caste or property, and disavows claims to special privilege or the exclusivity of leadership. He or she replaces Godly authority with the temporal authority of the time and the place. …To the mature technology is for human needs, not power, productivity, profit or prestige and scientific endeavour is not for ruthless exploitation or desecration. …He or she believes one should know both the objective and the subjective and show the ability to face one’s whole self…”

 

 

p. 73: Constructive Developmental Theory (CDT)

 

Like Graves, Kegan sees the individual as constructing their evolving self in a “truce” with their environment (i.e., living conditions). But if Graves’s research provides a rich treasury of empirical data on the levels, CDT provides a robust and elegant theory for how the self develops from one level to the next.

 

In his book The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, Kegan writes: “The guiding principle of such a truce – the point that is always at issue and is renegotiated in the transition to each new balance – is what, from the point of view of the organism, is composed as ‘object’ and what is ‘subject.’ The question always is: To what extent does the organism differentiate itself from (and so relate itself to) the world?” (p. 44)

 

Essentially, the self is always emerging from its embedding in the world. As it gains more awareness of its self, it is able to see its own self as an object of consideration. The subject thus becomes an object to a higher-order subject. What had been immediate experience becomes mediated by reflection, and so had been the subject (i.e., the immediately experiencing self) becomes an object of awareness (i.e., a mediated reflection). Through this process, the self develops. In fact, you could even say it complexifies, since the old self becomes a part in a higher-level whole.

 

Summarizing the developmental literature on this complexification of the self, Kegan writes:

 

“It has been called a process of decentration (Piaget, 1937), emergence from embeddedness (Schachtel, 1959), the recurring triumph over egocentrism (Elkind, 1974); it has been referred to as a process in which the whole becomes a part to a new whole (Perry, 1970); in which what was structure becomes content on behalf of a new structure (Piaget, 1968); in which what was ultimate becomes preliminary on behalf of a new ultimacy (Kegan, 1980); in which what was immediate gets mediated by a new immediacy (Kegan, 1981). All these descriptions speak to the same process, which is essentially that of adaptation, a differentiation from that which was the very subject of my personal organization and which becomes thereby the object of a new organization on behalf of a new subjectivity that coordinates it” (p. 85).

 

By this recurring process, the self emerges; “the whole becomes a part to a new whole; the subject differentiates the object of awareness and then integrates it into a new relationship." In this way, the self witnesses “a history of transformations, each of which is a better guarantee to the world of its distinct integrity, a history of successive emergence from it (differentiation) in order to relate to it (integration)” (p. 31). In the course of this series of transformations, it passes through distinct stages. As in Graves’s model, these stages oscillate back and forth from self-assertive to self-submissive, “a continual moving back and forth between resolving the tension slightly in favor of autonomy, at one stage, in the favor of inclusion, at the next” (p. 108).

 

Kegan identifies six such stages, which he calls (0) Incorporative, (1) Impulsive, (2) Imperial, (3) Interpersonal, (4) Institutional, and (5) Interindividual. Like Graves, he maps these unfolding along a spiral, showing how “we revisit old issues but at a whole new level of complexity” (p. 109).

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