368. A theory of everything

The totality of things: humans, nature, physical objects, and ideas, folds into itself, churns and changes. It would be nice to have a model that explains the whole. Such as in physics Boyle’s law that explains the relation between temperature, volume and pressure of a gas in a tank, without having to take into account the underlying chaotic collisions between molecules with each other and the wall of the tank.

Economics offered the law of supply and demand, where equilibrium arises from the workings of an ‘invisible hand’, without having to go into choice behaviour of individual producers and consumers. It offers principles of economies of scale, diminishing returns, and equilibria in game theory. Sociology offered law-like effects of networks, such as those of density, centrality, and strength of

ties. Psychology offers the principle of parochial altruism, used earlier in this blog.  

Is there a wider, more encompassing model? In earlier items in this blog I discussed ontologies. I used an ‘Object-Oriented Ontology (3O)’ with a wide range, ‘flat’ ontology including objects such as people, plants, and parrots, sticks and stones, but also dreams, drama, and devils. An object is characterized as having inside elements that cohere in a more or less stable structure, and an outside of other objects that affect the internal structure of this object, and are affected by it, and thus change also, including the human phenomenology of intentions, use, experience, and knowledge.

An object then is seen as the difference between what comes in and what goes out. Attractive here, in this perspective, is that it includes science as the analysis of the inside as well as phenomenology on the outside, the subject of scholarship of Man and society. They are both indispensable and part of a whole. Each separately is reductive.  

I tried to add a general account of change in terms of a circular process. That was originally presented as a theory of discovery[i], but it applies more widely, including natural evolution, and it can also, I now find, be positioned in philosophy. The more general formulation now is as follows. In realizing their inner potential, in interaction with their environment (E), objects (Ob) can disappear or survive, in affecting that environment or adapting to it, by developing a new inner structure (I) with a new potential that can be transmitted and can proliferate. The universal principles are: more or less random or guided variation of the inside from interaction with the outside, which in turn changes, with survival of the object or not, and expansion or duplication of success.

The challenge, faced but not solved by Hegel, was how in the realization of potential new potential can be created. My answer was that in moving from one environment to another, one encounters novel challenges of survival that require adaptation and provide insight into opportunities for it. A novel environment offers new variety to interact with, producing novel objects.

This general process includes natural evolution as a special case, except that there the novel environment is not deliberately sought but imposed, and adaptation is random, not guided by inference. In human discovery, there is choice of novel environments, less randomness, with some imaginative insight in potential new directions, based on experience and learning, more co-evolution with the environment, in market making and lobbying, artificial selection in laboratories and trial markets, and imitation of success, with variations.

For a general causality driving this process, I proposed Aristotelian multiple causality,  with the object being the efficient cause, goals the final cause, outside resources the material cause, inside potential the formal cause, environmental conditions, including institutions, the conditional cause, and established models of conduct the exemplary cause.

For natural evolution, the efficient cause is cells, the final cause is the drive to life and survival (Spinoza’s ‘conatus’), the material cause is foods, the formal cause is instinct and DNA, the conditional cause is environmental conditions (climate, rival creatures, availability of foods), and the exemplary cause can be role models (as with chimpansees and bankers).

For humans the causal factors are more complex: with a variety of final causes (profit, entrepreneurship, independence, adventure), a variety of material causes in the form of resources (economic capital), a variety of formal causes in different forms (intellectual, cultural capital), conditional causes in the position an object has in different networks (social capital), institutions (the law, symbolic capital), climate, and geography.

An object can be the efficient cause (a virus, a volcano, an entrepreneur), but also a material cause (tool), formal cause (technology), conditional cause (climate, market, institution), exemplary cause (iconic role model).

The connection between this causality and the circle of discovery is as follows. The efficient cause is a firm, scientist, artist, or politician, the final cause is profit, innovation, power, adventure, the material cause is local practices met in the novel environment, the formal cause is the ability to cross cognitive and cultural distance, imagination, and daring, the conditional cause is local institutions and markets, and the exemplary cause is an iconic pioneer who succeeded.  

What connects all cases and all objects is the constitution, failure and change of what is inside the object, in the dynamic of interaction with its outside and the change of that change.

All this together, I propose, covers much of nature as well as human conduct. Is it a theory of everything? Getting there, perhaps.

A challenge now is to see how, if at all, this may connect with the new wonderworld of quantum physics. I have been studying interaction between people and organizations most of my life, and now, to my delight, I find from the work of Carlo Rovelli[ii] that at the lowest possible level in physics, quanta manifest themselves from one discrete state to another due to interaction with others. Interaction is everywhere. Could I develop my theory further by looking at that? That is the subject for a later item in this blog.    
         

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[i] Bart Nooteboom, 2000, Learning and innovation in organizations and economies, Oxford University Press. 

[ii] Carlo Rovelli, 2016, Reality is not what it seems, Penguin.  

367. From tribes to systems and back again

One form of collaboration is based on mutual dependence, with a shared fate, in long-lasting, highly personalized relationships, with a shared ethic of mutual support and altruism. It can only exist on a small scale.

This functioned in nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers during much of human evolution, until the settlement in sedentary, growing agricultural communities, some 10,000 years ago.

Such tribes are vulnerable in three ways. One is the risk of infiltration of egotistic opportunists who prey on indigenous altruism, getting the upper hand in evolutionary competition. As a remedy for this, humanity developed ‘parochial altruism’, as discussed earlier in this blog, with altruism within the group and mistrust and discrimination with regard to outsiders coming in.

A second risk is lack of internal variety, of genes, which yields inbreeding, and of skills and cognition needed to yield division of labour and to breed innovation. However, there is evidence that tribes managed to exchange ideas and occasionally people (brides) with other, different tribes, in trade relations, carefully conducted, at arms length.

A third risk is inside domination of the population by a dictator or a small ruling elite that exploits a population that has no opportunity for escape. However, that happens also in larger groups. But, apparently, often in small communities there was a highly democratic political system, with rotation of leadership between members of the community.

Conditions changed in the emergence of large agricultural communities. Relations became less direct and more impersonal, in the emergence of legal systems and hierarchies, with a divergence between those levels, and between socio-economic groups, and the emergence of classes, which brought inter-group rivalry into society.

However, it also brought scale advantages of specialization and shared resources, more internal diversity, and more mobility between inside groups than had been the case between outside groups.

The personalized tribal order eroded. I quote from Stoelhorst & Richerson (2013)[i]: ‘Modern organizations are cultural work-arounds that build on tribal instincts that originally evolved to sustain cooperation on a much smaller scale’.

Perhaps present populism can, in part, be seen as a revolt from such tribal instincts, against depersonalized, elite-governed, centralized bureaucratic societies that yield what before, in this blog, I called ‘system tragedy’.

The challenge is to find a middle between the two: between small, closed, inward turned tribes, and large, anonymized systems.

One solution is what in network theory is called ‘small worlds’. There, small scale communities with strong internal ties, in combination with weak ties with other such communities. This allows for tribal-like coherence as well as variety from exchange ad contacts. As I indicated above, there is evidence that ancient tribes engaged in such structures.

For advantages of collaboration between groups that are diverse in competence they need not integrate into larger wholes. In fact, staying apart, in more or less durable alliances, is more productive, more flexible, and better at reserving and feeding diversity. It also gives more opportunity for smaller scale communities that fit better with our tribal genes.

However, wave after wave of mergers and acquisitions between firms have overruled that potential, with the urge to profit from economies and politics of scale to meet challenges and opportunities from wider markets, in globalization. Economies of scale are a familiar phenomenon. By politics of scale I mean the opportunities for global firms to press governments for advantages, under the threat of taking their employment and investment elsewhere. For the ‘platform’ organizations, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., a new advantage of large scale is that information on choices made in consumption, voting and contacts yields more combinative value, for selling the data for targeted advertising, with the number and range of data, to the point that these organizations build monopolies.    

In the process, the advantages of large scale are paraded and the disadvantages are downplayed or hidden.

Now, the clamour of populism demands more influence of citizens on government. That may be achieved by decentralization of decision making to local communities, such as municipalities, which is now under way. People are also gradually forming small communities to share housing, a windmill, a bank of solar cells and a vegetable garden. Also, increasingly young people are surrendering employment opportunities to offer their own services of many kinds independently. Some large firms offer far-going independence to divisions.  

So, in the long run, society seems to have been moving first from tribes to centralized systems, and then, via system tragedy, back to tribal forms again.         

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[i] J.W, Stoelhorst & P.J. Richerson, ‘A naturalistic theory of economic organization’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2012, p. 554.

366. How to extend the boundaries of trust

In item 205 of this blog I discussed the phenomenon of ‘parochial altruism’ and in 208 its implication for the integration of refugees. To recall: there is altruism within the group at the cost of suspicion and distrust regarding outsiders. That may explain the problems concerning refugees. For their integration, then, the boundaries of the group need to be extended to include them in trust.

What determines the boundaries? Here I adopt an idea from Carsten de Dreu that the boundaries of a group are determined by proximity, similarity (in appearance, conduct, habit, religion, political views. ideology, …), and a sense of a shared fate.

Immigration yields proximity in space. Similarity is slow to develop, in cultural assimilation. And then there is a vicious circle of immigrants being discriminated against, then sticking together and maintaining their dissimilarity. How, then, to speed up the growth of similarity, and to achieve a sense of a shared fate?

The practice of crowding immigrants together in large centres then is counterproductive, in settling a fate that is shared only between them, secluded from the host society.

It is better to get them into jobs or shared projects with indigenous people, where they become mutually dependent and need to share ideas, practices, goals, understanding.

Rather than waiting until they are sufficiently integrated and trained before entering jobs, it should be turned around: jobs provide the platform and the incentive to integrate.

In practical action, in  projects, ideologies fade, do not help, and people find out, often to their surprise, that they are much more similar, with similar needs and imperfections, than they were aware of.

The principle applies more widely, to overcome the segregation of a population into different, rival social, cultural groups, in what is sometimes called a new ‘tribalism’. That is enhanced by the ‘filter bubbles’ that emerge in the use of internet: people are fed and choose information congruent with views they already have, in social media and advertising tailored to their previous conduct and choices.

This tendency is especially pernicious with people seeing their identity in terms of the group they belong to and the stands that they take concerning current issues, such as climate, gender, economics, democracy, public debate, freedom, …. Then disagreement is not just a difference of view but is felt to constitute an attack on one’s identity, which enhances culture wars and separation of populists and elites.

Part of this correlates with differences in education levels, employment and prosperity. People of different social groups segregate in different neighbourhoods with different price levels of housing, amenities and the furnishings of public space with coffee shops, bistro’s, delicatessen, etc. Here the group determinants of proximity and similarity diverge further rather than converge.

To counter this, citizens should be involved more in joint work, recreational activities, and political involvement in local development and execution of public policies.

This connects with my earlier plea , in item 283, to move away from a politics of positioning, voting for a political party with a pre-arranged set of policy proposals, every four or five years, to a politics of process where people are involved in the making and execution of policy.

There is an additional argument for this, mentioned also in the foregoing item in this blog. Democracy is by its nature imperfect and messy in its process, never satisfying everybody. Being excluded from the process, citizens seem to increasingly see this at best as incompetence and at its worst as a conspiracy against the people by an elite. By involving citizens in the process they become complicit in the mess of democracy, more understanding of it, and learn to live with it, rather than seeking recourse in the illusory efficiency and coherence of a totalitarian regime.

365. System tragedy, populism and conspiracy of the elite

In this blog, in items 109, 159, 187, I discussed what I called ‘system tragedy’. In many areas of society, such as banking, education, housing corporations, health care, defence, policy makers get entangled in Gordian knots, sticky spaghetti, of partly shared, partly rival interests, roles and positions, interests, self-interest, ideologies, personal ethics, diffusion of responsibilities. As a result, people are compelled to compromise themselves with policies that are against their ethics and sense of justice.

They may like to change the system, or rebel, or quit, but cannot afford to do so until others do so as well. This constitutes prisoners’ dilemmas that lock people into what they know is not right. The obvious case is that of banks.

In my discussion of trust I distinguished between trust in competence and trust in intentions. I see system tragedy mostly as a matter of system incompetence rather than bad personal intentions.

In the emerging populism, however, system tragedy is framed as a matter of  bad intentions: conspiracy against the people by the ruling elite. Thus it becomes a matter of high political urgency to somehow mitigate system tragedy. How is this to be done?

People should have more character and courage to follow their ethical sense and rebel against the system. But that is easy to say, if the price is being ostracized, isolated, or expelled from the system.

It is known from system theory that strong coupling of disparate parts decreases the adaptability of the system. Therefore, perhaps the system should be decoupled for the sake of ability to change, in dynamic efficiency, even if that yields some loss of static efficiency of scale or complementarity, and an increased need for negotiation between uncoupled parts. Internal, invisible haggling then becomes more visible and subject to public scrutiny.

In the case of the banks: separate the saving and loans activity from the investment and trade in shares.

Many systems, in business and public services, have become entangled out of a perverse drive towards integration, in an excess of mergers and acquisitions while staying apart and collaborating in alliances would yield more flexibility and adaptability.

That is due, in part, to misguided, exaggerated expectations of efficiencies from a large scale, with neglect of its inefficiencies.

But it is due more, I think, to an established mental frame of hierarchy.

Another aspect of system tragedy lies in a separation, a distancing between management and work. That is due, in part, to the need, in a large scale organization, for intermediate layers of hierarchy between the top and the ‘front line’ of the work floor. Here again, a break-up into smaller, more autonomous units is required.

But perhaps most important is he need for a shift towards a mental frame of virtue ethics, also pleaded for elsewhere in this blog, with the classical virtues of reasonableness, courage, moderation, and justice. Reasonableness in seeing the merit of other views. Courage not to become complicit in system failure. Moderation, in not being obsessed with one’s own interest and reward. And justice in maintaining equity, rights, and inclusiveness.            

364. Dynamic ontology

In this last item of the present series on ontology, I summarize the ontology that I propose. For this I use a few formulas.

Ont. (Ontology) = Ob (Objects) + C (Change)

Ob = I (inside) x O (outside)

As noted by Harman[i], science is the analysis of the inside (I), the coherent structure of components, while phenomenology lies in the much less coherent outside (O), of use, experience. An object cannot be reduced to either.

The inside (I) is a coherent structure of components, connected in some way, in some architecture, e.g. in a network. The connections can be spatial, causal, material, associative, sequential, legal, organizational, employing a shared resource, grammar, syntax, sense, morality, rules, … An example of sequential coherence is that of the sequence of neurons in a string of DNA. Another is that of a restaurant, with a sequence of nodes of component activities, discussed before.  

The whole as well as the components may be dynamic and yet stable, as in a standing wave that arises from the superimposition of component waves. Also, the composition may remain the same while the components change. Examples are a body with changing cells, or a restaurant with changing modes of payment. But the composition may change, as in genetic engineering, where genes may be taken out or added, forming new objects of life, or the transformation of a service restaurant into a self-service one, as discussed before.

To qualify as an object, this coherence must be stable relative to the time perspective (T) taken. An object can be stable in the short term but not in the longer term (e.g. due to decay).

Objects are nested, one object being a component of another, as genes on a chromosome. This is modelled with the concept of a script, discussed before.

Objects can be misapprehended as compact, as Garcia[ii] called it, where the outside is folded into the inside, to become a ‘thing in itself’, autonomous. An example is the Platonic idea, independent from its particulars. Another is the Cartesian idea that thought is autonomous, not dependent on reality, and corresponding with reality due to divine intermediation. And the notion of essences, also independent from the outside.

The opposite can also happen, where the object diffuses into its outside. An example is perhaps wave dynamics, as in quantum-dynamics, where location and momentum are ‘adjoint’, not simultaneously determinable, and the strange phenomenon arises of ‘entanglement’, where two objects change their state simultaneously, acting as a single object, while no causality or other connection can be found. This is speculative and requires further thought.

The outside consists of other objects, which may include the focal object as a component, or may affect the structure of its components, or may be affected by it, in processes of change.

C (change) = T (Time) x O (outside) x I (Inside) x S (scale)

Events of change arise from the interaction between the inside (I) and the outside (O), typically but not necessarily in networks of connections, in some form or other of causality. For example: In physics fields of force; in chemistry chemical bonds of molecules; in biology composition and decomposition of cells, and recombination of genes, even artificially, in genetic engineering; in language sensemaking by means of connotations; in the brain synaptic adaptation of neurons, in the modification and generation of neuronal networks.

Change takes time (T), but is relative to the time frame taken: what is an object in one time frame, with a stable composition of elements, may be a process of change in another, where the composition changes.

Change is also relative to scale. I define the change of an object as a change of the structure of its components, but while that is stable, the components may change. The example I used, in terms of scripts, was the change of payment in a restaurant while that remains a restaurant.

In sum, every object in some time perspective and at some scale, is subject to change.

Change arises from interaction between objects, in some form of causality, such as Aristotelian causality. There is also an apparently universal drive, in nature, to carry what survives, and in that sense is successful, into a different environment, where the need and the means are found to adapt to the new circumstances, which through trial and error yields a novel object, according to what I called a ‘cycle of discovery’.

In philosophy, this drive has variously been called: thymos (Plato), conatus (Spinoza), absolute Spirit
(Hegel), and will to power (Nietzsche).

This is found in child’s play, imperialism, missionary work, art, science, and capitalism. It solves a puzzle from Hegel’s (and Schelling’s) philosophy of how from the realization of potential, in the actual, one can go on to a new potential, a new possible.

Where does this come from? My hunch is: evolution, because this path to discovery contributes to survival and adaption.  

Puzzles remain, such as the mysterious phenomena in quantum mechanics that are incomprehensible when put in ordinary language. I suspect that here we may run into what I have called ‘object bias’, where we see things according to metaphors from material objects moving in time and space and affecting each other, which is embedded in the very structure of language with objects (nouns) doing things (verbs). To avoid the bias we may have to escape from ordinary language into the different languages of mathematics. The question is what this does to the ontology that I propose. 

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[i] Graham Harman, 2018, Object-oriented ontology, Penguin.

[ii] Tristan Garcia, 2014, Form and object, Edinburgh University Press.