A sketch of autopoietic social systems

As I’ve grown deeper into my spiritual practice, I’ve become more interested in the nature of agency. Specifically the agency of groups. I’d like to reconcile my felt intuitions about the world with the scientific worldview. Fortunately, recent developments in philosophy and biology seem to provide some affordances for this. Two key ideas are hyper-objects introduced by Timothy Merton, and autopoiesis introduced by the biologists Maturana and Varela. Tying these all together is cognitive scientist John Vervaeke’s work on Relevance Realization.

Hyperobjects are things that are non-local in scope but have local effects. For example, climate change could be considered a hyperobject. It has local effects around the planet, but it’s very difficult to pin down the “thing” that is climate change. Ditto for “all the gold on the planet”. This “thing” has local instantiations, but is non-local in scope.

Autopoiesis is an account of self-organizing systems that are capable of continuing to make themselves, including their own parts. That is, it’s a non-reductionist account of the emergent unity of “living” systems. For example, living things like unicellular organisms or humans are autopoietic systems. Not all self-organizing systems are autopoietic. For example, cyclones are self-organizing, but they don’t seem to actively preserve themselves.

There’s a lot more that can be said about each of these topics. If you’re interested, drop a comment and I can provide links to the relevant papers and textbooks.

Each human is a hierarchical constellation of self-organizing systems that are bound together in unity. For example, a liver cell can be said to have agency within its local environment. Ditto for various tissues and organ systems. I’m fascinated by this deep continuity of agency towards the bottom, until one arrives at inert matter. If it goes towards the bottom, could it perhaps also extend towards the top beyond the unity of an individual? I’d argue that self-organizing structures composed of humans aren’t necessarily autopoietic. That doesn’t make them any less complex or consequential to the affairs of an individual. We routinely interact with material structures like cyclones that are self-organizing, but not autopoietic that are indeed quite consequential to our survival.

Gazing through history, a fascinating pattern emerges of people’s relationship towards the spiritual. As populations grow larger and more materially prosperous, they seem to grow more abstract notions of spirituality. For example, gods localized to a given space and time give way to a God that is available at all places and times. Yet this God is non-competitive with the world. This pattern seems to hold in both the East and the West. Relationships with this uniting force also seem to evolve from a dualistic framing where we are distinct from this uniting force, towards some sort of non-dual framing where reality is being co-created together.

So here’s my argument. The moment two or more individuals assemble into some sort of social construct, the instantiation of a hierarchical self-organizing system is inevitable. Their relationships with each other and reality is mediated via participation in this hyperobject. An individual has a certain united “identity” that is temporally stable. This unity reciprocally places both enabling and limiting constraints on the autopoietic systems within them. That is, an individual’s specific state and relationship with the world places certain constraints on specific muscle systems and cells within the body. But these in turn place constraints on the overall individual, and both evolve in a dynamical relationship across time. Similarly, I’d argue that the self-organizing social system instantiated by two or more people reciprocally places constraints on the participants of a system. These constraints play an important role in the individual's cognition and relationship with reality, and are a part of the individual’s process in turning an “environment” full of potential into a smaller “world” filled with valence and meaning. For example, consider how your social relationships might place constraints on what sorts of co-identification you might find relevant in a given situation.

These social dynamical systems are necessarily more complex than the individuals participating in them. They’re not necessarily autopoietic. But nevertheless, they are consequential to all individuals in their proximity. Effectively tracking these systems provides more affordances for the individual to cope with their environment.

Tracking these systems via systems of belief (i.e. propositions) is woefully insufficient. I’m not a philosopher and I won’t attempt to construct an ontology of the different sorts of knowledge that are available to an individual. I like John Vervaeke’s ontology of the propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory. Although, I imagine there are a number of edge cases that this ontology doesn’t capture. In any case, the knowledge of tracking these systems is certainly both embodied and unconscious in various ways.

I’d argue that the role of ritual, embodied practices, systems of normativity and justification, etc. are to create affordances for an individual (or groups of individuals) to track the evolution of these objects. And to perhaps influence their evolution via their participation, to better cope with the environment.

As these larger systems become more autopoietic, become invested in overcoming their self-deception, and “care” about the world, they start seeming akin to “individuals” but of a much larger and more complex scope. I suspect it’s no coincidence that human literature has recurring archetypes of the Hero, the Sage, the Villain, etc. It’s yet another way to identify and track such patterns in the world via dramatic representation.

Biological systems increase their complexity via a process of integration and differentiation. They don’t seek to solve any “objective” problems from reality. But rather, their drive is to cope with reality. Based on their ability to cope, they subjectively identify “problems” that are relevant, to which they attempt to produce “solutions”. For example, many organisms without nervous systems move via various taxes like chemical, thermal, etc gradients. The emergence and integration of a nervous system affords the ability to generate movement endogenously. That suddenly affords the organism a much richer ability to cope with the environment, and therefore find relevant a much larger range of problems. This naturally leads to the differentiation of various organisms that are better fitted to each of their niches.

It’s interesting to think about what the process of integration and differentiation might look like for these distributed autopoietic social systems. As human tribes came into contact with each other, these systems started to interact and complexity. On the surface, what might have seemed like a war, or trade routes, or the dissemination of religious and cultural beliefs might have been the process of complexification via unity. Each integration of a set of systems afforded technological development (of both mind and matter) that led to further complexification. Each increase in the scope of their capabilities increased the scope of what they found relevant.

Let’s fast-forward to today. I suspect that we’re witnessing another major cycle of integration and subsequent differentiation. Modern telecommunication systems have put the major social distributed autopoietic systems into very close contact with each other. I suspect we’re witnessing an attempt by these systems to integrate with each other. Furthermore, I suspect what will emerge is a “religion” that can simultaneously hold and vitalize all the major religions that came before, but also arrange them into a hierarchical unity pointing up. If this is actually true, I have no idea how long it’ll take. Perhaps decades or hundreds of years? Where is the “up” that it might be pointing towards? I suspect it’s some notion of Life, Abundance and Triumph.

I have this imagery of swimming in a potentially infinitely deep and infinitely wide ocean. The currents are complex, unpredictable and sometimes unyielding. The depth of the ocean floor and the currents above seem to change erratically and incomprehensibly. Yet they clearly have some underlying logic. The dynamics and richness of this ocean is far more than I could possibly understand in their totality. But the more I open up my awareness and participation with the ocean, the more of its local dynamics are disclosed to me. My very existence seems to influence it, at least locally. 

I’m not alone in this ocean. There are many others in a similar condition as me. The sky is a perpetual darkness, and it’s hard to make out any local features unless I’m extremely close. I have to learn to communicate and cooperate with the people near me over the cacophony of the broader ocean. But together, we’ve a better chance of coping against its currents.

If there are enough of us, we can sometimes make large local changes to the currents around us. Eventually, we use our bodies and minds to map out our local currents. As more people join us, we’re better able to map our part of the ocean. At some point, there are enough of us swimming in unity that it starts to take on a life of its own. For those born within this unity, it’s easy to mistake the map afforded by the unity for the actual thing itself. But no one is free from the realities of the ocean. Existence is a constant dance of seeking balance.

New knowledge from new people needs to somehow be integrated into the unity of the existing structure. But often this new knowledge contradicts existing knowledge, and these differences need to be resolved. The resolution affords a new unity that can potentially have a radically new perspective of what it means to cope in the ocean. This opens up a vast new range of possibilities that seem relevant to the unity as a whole, that just weren’t viable before.

Today, we’re born into a world filled with lots of very large and very old unities attempting to integrate with each other. But in the last ~200 years, we’ve lost many practices for tracking such complex systems. Yet we’re not immune from the underlying dynamics of the ocean, nor the choppy waters induced by the unities themselves. This engenders symptoms of absurdity and meaninglessness. We have a felt sense that there is something shifting our lives underneath us. But we don’t know how or why, nor do we have any way to meaningfully enter into a relationship with these patterns.

It’s not clear to me that there’s a neat prescription that offers a “way home”. Especially One True Prescription that could easily apply to everyone. We’re all born in such radically different conditions, in potentially very different corners of the ocean. But our very existence and participation in the world necessarily shapes it. Merely existing in the world creates ripples in the water that we might not appreciate. In such a disorienting condition, it can be challenging to know which way is “up”. I suspect that we must each become the stewards of our own personal transformation, and seek our own viable path of aligning towards what is true, good and beautiful.