An analogy for our body politic

More great stuff as I read my way through The Multitude has inspired this seed of an analogy I'd like to share. I'll make it short and sweet because I have lots to do...

We, society, are one system. Some now regard its borders as having disappeared, but most of us are still partitioned politically according largely to centuries old borders. Either way, the analogy can work at any level due to the self-similar nature of complex systems.

Imagine our system, the political body, as a literal body. Society is broken-down into parts according to people's skills and specialisations, forming the bodies organs and tissue and limbs (armies for its, well, armies). I think it would be fairly bi-partisan of me to say that money is now the lifeblood of society, hence blood for me represents its place in the body.

Unfortunately, in this particular body, the blood seems to be ganging up on the rest, subjugating the brain (politicians) into creating ever more blood that then stubbornly refuses to go anywhere except around and around the main arteries and to two highly-pumped arms whose job it is to beat up on its own legs (the exploited masses). Meanwhile, the rest of the body is suffering, unable to do anything against a brain gone rogue and poisonous blood.

If you are rich, tell me, is this rational? You are part of this body. If we get sick, trust me, you'll get sick too.

So what would be rational? Well, it wouldn't be too radical to suggest that the blood needs to circulate to all parts of the body, in sufficient amounts, to ensure that the whole body can work in unity. The brain needs to attend to those areas that require it, and not to just one organ or function. The arms need to be told to stop beating itself up, and perhaps reach for some painkillers, or else try a bit of massage to ease the pain its been causing. This is a minimum standard, sufficiently rational to be understood by everyone; an idea whose time has come now.

But we can do better than that.

Our collective endeavour in accumulating knowledge is delivering to us an escape, a hand up from the gutter of having to be a rectal muscle your entire life. Every one of us has a brain of our own. We are all qualified to be part of the brain, indeed, a brain only works because of the sheer number of neurons in the system.  Soon, if we can just stop the blood from killing us through our currently tiny brain, we will have the chance to all be part of the brain, infinitely malleable, pure subjectivity giving rise to optimised emergent properties, a global consciousness that does not seek to destroy what has become itself.  The body can be mechanized, automated, intimately controlled by the multitude of the brain for the rational end of optimised sustainability and quality of life. This is what the Venus Project envisions.  People take the piss, but philosophically, historically, sociologically, cognitively, physically... I can see no reason why it cannot come to pass... indeed the opposite: I see it as an inevitability that only the rulers of the top-down identities stand in the way of.

Better that than dying in a puddle of blood, no?

Dan Carlin smacks it once again.

If you haven't already discovered Dan Carlin, I suggest you check him out.  Be it his Common Sense political podcast or his Hardcore History podcast, both are excellent.  I have just gotten around to watching the short video introduction to the website and I was struck once again by what he said.

He talks about the relevance of social, digital media to our future descendants by reflecting on how different our historical knowledge of Alexandra the Great's times would be if they all had blogs and podcasts.  Our future selves will be able to look back on our own time and garner a three-dimensional image of our society, rather than a culture that is rigidly controlled by power structures that monopolised cultural creation (the 'Gatekeepers', as he calls them).

As ever with Dan (he can be rather downhearted and pessimistic at times, not that I can blame him for that), I can't help but feel he doesn't follow through with his clearly excellent grasp of History and apply those rules to the present time.  Just as Historians could only ever work with history written by the winners, so too has society only ever been able to form identities written by the winners.  Historians work with culture to construct identity.. precisely what we all do in the creation of our selves everyday of our lives.  Therefore, what is revolutionary to future historians is, ipso facto, revolutionary to us, today.

We too can now construct a three dimensional view of our world, bypassing the biases and interests of the Gatekeepers.  Indeed, with digital technology this revolution will be visualised, a 3D epic to end them all.  Our global shared identity is being born, spreading through wires and through the air, attracted to that which is most rational; our reality whose perceived order betrays our shared existence within it.

There are walls to be overcome, fundamentalists of religion, state and commerce, but we must remember that for all but the few with everything to lose, everyone will be exposed to attractor of the most rational in a time of global communication: our global, universal commonalities.

A Sociocultural Evolutionary View of Skepticism; Its Origin and Function.

I am going to give a talk on my theory of sociocultural evolution and how it applies to skepticism at our next Skeptics in the Pub meeting. As preparation I thought I would write a blog on the topic to try to flesh out my ideas.  Bare in mind, I have to take it right back to the beginning of civilisation and back again, but skepticism does appear eventually...


In the beginning there was instinct ;), and the abstract had yet to exist. Foresight and memory evolved alongside social living and created the first shared abstract notion of identity emerging from our knowledge of the world and our place within it.  Imagined communities did not exist beyond what was immediate, the 'other' incorporating everybody not of ones own nomadic tribal group.  Shared experience was limited to geographical space since communication was limited to speech, story and song.  As I see it, a few simple evolutionary maxims, once the domain of instinctive genetics but now rationalised by early humans through newly developed cognitive abilities into a cultural form, ensured the emergence of human civilisation:

1) Fear the unknown - The new and different is potentially a threat.  When applied to humans this would include cultural factors since such a difference would suggest genetic difference i.e from a  rival nomadic group, due to the limited extent of communication networks.

2) Do not waste energy fearing the known - The familiar can only become familiar if it hasn't already killed you. This is seen in various forms of habitualisation, and when applied to other humans would also include cultural familiarity since this would highly correspond to genetic similarity.

3) Defer to authority - Whether it is something akin to Blackmores imitate the best imitators, or simply an evolution from animalistic strength hierarchies, Authority has since the dawn of power structures been synonymous with exclusive knowledge/cultural production

4) Just as the brain constantly strives to rationalise our physical world, so too the brain strives to rationalise our cultural world.  Really, there is no clear distinction since both combine to make up our environment.

Then technology started.  Agriculture brought with it geographical stability and the concept of belonging to a certain area.  Power dynamics, once limited to shamans and the like within individual groups, began to grow along with the resources now available: overabundance of food, increased leisure time and specialisation leading to new weapons.  Instead of ruling a nomadic group, those first individuals to claim superiority now found it possible to rule over more than one group within a geographical locale.  The imposition of abstract knowledge (initially religion, understandable rationalisations given the lack of knowledge) from the exclusive few could now find form in art, artifacts, story, song etc which means, according to the above maxims, that enough common culture was produced and consumed by the different peoples to ensure a stable group identity (pretty much the definition of a group) under a common hierarchy. 

All over the world these cultural units formed.  Written language arrived, and with it came exclusive literacy and ability to construct and record abstract concepts.  Culture was either created by or influenced from a monopoly of the few creating the identity of the many, utterly saturating all of society.  Yet technological advance ensured the status-quo could not last.  Ships, mathematics and all manner of advances came from the opening up of these largely closed systems through trade (primarily around the Mediterranean and along land trade routes) creating cultural mixing (and bringing about the end of the Bronze Age).  Now huge empires were possible, encompassing a number of different religious identities. This did not produce for stable times, and as humanity tried to rationalise this state of affairs memes such as secular citizenship flourished. It was in effect the large scale adoption, a scaling-up, of old memes from Classical Greece and other localities that, due to their diversity, had found ways to accommodate such differences.  A new form of imagined community was created, that of the state, and it managed this not by replacing religion but by capturing a niche and constructing for itself a role separate from that of religion: politics.  Religion was relegated merely to matters of the esoteric (and even this was not free from the manipulating intrusion of political memes) and the rest of culture was monopolised by the state.  Once again, this monopolisation led to a permanent suffusion of state-memes within culture, becoming a part of all that came after.  Expanding empires made various degrees of attempts at imposing 'home' culture on plundered lands but in Europe, the close proximity of closed systems of 'others' meant the continual war of states, just as nomadic and religious closed systems fought before that.

This type of transition has happened once more since the emergence of the State.  Once again, technology was the driver.  As science led to revolutions in navigation, weapons, bureaucracy and the like, individuals began to escape the closed system of state's common vernaculars (derived from market forces after the invention of the printing press) and trade internationally.  This fresh autonomy, directly analogous to the Mediterranean traders, led once more to increased dissonance as people saw the actions of the state as counter to their desire to maintain peaceful trade. Multinational imagined communities arose such as traders and academics, the increased mixing leading to massive innovation, something the state needed to tap in order to achieve it's own aims.  Yet the memes of Commerce, those of individual freedom, were more rational than the status-quo of war, propaganda and fear espoused by the State.  Slowly, the States role was sidelined (just as Religion before it) as Commerce became the new producer of cultural, and therefore identity, production.  They had their monopoly, granted in recognition by the State (and fetishised in corporate personhood laws) in its new role as protector of Commerce, as well as in the large, inhibitive cost of production.  In this age of mass-production, imagined identity is formed by the wealthy few who censor and produce according to the narrow interests of state and commerce.  Commerce has become a fundamental identity, the democratic state now restricted to Public Service campaigns and press statements, funnelled to us through the corporate sphere.

Religion is what we believe.  The State is where we live.  Commerce is what we do.  These three monopolies, allowed to suffuse culture with their memes, have between them constructed our cultural environment and our identities.  Yet now we face a technological revolution to put all the others in the shade.  With each previous transition, cultural production has passed to more and more hands, from the Demi-God to Multinational CEO..  Yet it has always remained the foundation of the power dynamic, the exclusive domain of the few who rule over the multitude that are cast in their image.  These past transitions of imagined community have been quantitative revolutions only.  The Internet (presaged by universal education) has democratised cultural production and made it global; A truly qualitative revolution in the creation of imagined communities  Dissonance is once more rising as the communication network outstrips the reach of either religion, state or commerce.  Their 'official' imagined community narrative, based upon a now false notion of exclusivity and exploitation of the 'other', is now at odds with what we have come to understand for ourselves.  Yet this is misleading as I will come to soon... a better description would be to say that our selves are now produced by, and so now morally includes, the multitude itself: horizontally derived, global, democratising, open system (there is no one else that can be the closed-out 'other')  A new global identity is being formed based upon information, a basis which includes everybody regardless of belief, habitat or profession.  In the words of this Syrian journalist, "A real revolution is nothing like what we were taught about in our school books. No military coups, no revenge, no political bloodshed in the name of the revolution. Tunis first, then Egypt. I watched how young men and women declared their refusal of the reality that had been forced on them (my italics)

This is where skepticism comes in (finally).  The reason that we can form a universal imagined community is because we have universal commonalities.  Not only are we physically similar but we also share familiar real communities; we are all mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, we all need to eat and we all need to rationalise our existence.  This last point is key.  Because we all share the same reality, the scientific method reaches the same conclusions for everyone, creating a universal commonality based upon legitimate, agreed consensus (including agreed upon provisos, distinguishing it from dogma).  This creates an attractor, truth if you will, that objectivises creation of shared identity and thus insulates it from manipulation of the few, the powerful.  Updated: It's kind of analogous to Entropy in regard to time, in that the same false beliefs are far less likely to spontaneously appear the world over than an the ever more rational interpretation that is the scientific consensus, based as it is on a reality independent of subjectivity.  In terms of individual rationalisation, false beliefs demand a complex, specific, amalgamation of different memes in just the right order, with defense against dissonance, for the overall belief to hold up.  There are many different false possibilities, but only one consensus that attempts to describe reality objectively.  There is an asymetric drive towards belief in the rational, determined by our inate need to reason and our acumulating knowledge of the world; eventually objective reasoning will replace superstition.  I like the idea of skeptical thinking being analogous to high entropy, fits with the notion of broad, disparate knowledge as opposed to localised, low entropy dogma. The attractor chips away at this structure leaving only that which requires no dogma whatsoever, the ever-changing world of science.  

Up until now, science has retained, due to a need for trust, an exclusive network within which it works.  So long as cultural production via the scientific method remained exclusive, it remained alien and unknown to many of the multitude, resulting in the state and commerces ability to ring fence it for their own use.  This has limited the ability of science to influence the social sphere, since it was still produced by exclusive culture (even exclusive language), for exclusive groups. The Internet and open information memes are chipping at this closed structure, trying to open it up, something that I think is central to the aims of skepticism.

Skepticism can be to the social what the scientific method is to the physical.  Both seek to objectify thinking and behaviour by attempting to identify and work around our human limitations, both biological and psychological (or cultural, i.e. accumulated knowledge. The terms are to me largely interchangeable though psychological would also account for the effect of genetics too).  Objective knowledge of our world has reached a point whereby different people, applying skepticism, can come to universal conclusions of abstract notions (morality, ethics etc) in the social sphere (as the scientific method does for the physical world).  Previous forms of meta-subjectivity created for us by the few, the foundations of exclusive imagined identities, are mere constructs designed to maintain the status-quo; institutionalised culture rationalised (communicated down) in such terms as paternal (religion), duty (state, social contract) or theories of economics-as-freedom (commerce).  We must reject these dogmas, for that is what they are, and objectivize the subjective through the objectification of thought (applying skeptical rules).

This is what skepticism does.  It facilitates the emergence of a common identity through the universal acceptance (within the group) of agreed upon rules that are designed, from our objective knowledge of science, to recognise and mitigate our own mental flaws and biases.  These rules demand that we all recognise and mitigate those parts of our identity that are exclusive, that have come from an undemocratic sphere of cultural production, and instead accept the evidence of our shared reality.

This attractor of truth that is independent of humanity is a revolutionary concept when you consider its correlation with technology.  Hegel always imagined History as the story of mankind coming to know itself, but I think he underestimated the next step, getting to know each other.  So long as capitalism continues to connect people the dissonance will grow.  Yet the powerful, those purveyors of ideology, have come to believe their own dogma... how else do you rationalise greed so one is able to sleep soundly and be a good family man?  This makes them dangerous.  They have created a global gated community, inoculating themselves from the darker externalities their wealth accumulation demands.  Yet even they inhabit the self same world as the multitude and it remains to be seen how high the pull of the attractor can reach.  Each transition of imagined identity has brought with it increased reliance on the cooperation of the people and as the latter of the three, commerce can, reluctantly, change when forced to by the expanding moral spheres/communication structures of its consumers.  That those with the most to lose and of the most immoral nature (oil, weapons, finance) are the ones to have used their wealth to subvert the state, the supposed representatives of the very people that now exceed them in moral capacity, is not a coincidence.  They will be the last bastions of imposed identity, the most fundamentalist of opponents against the emerging global identity.

Everyone will always have reality in common.  This fact must not be allowed to be taken from us by the extreme post-modernists who represent the social equivalent to pseudo-scientists.  To endow validity to individual 'realities' is to erect walls where there need not be any.  Celebrating subjectivity is not the exclusive domain of those who deny a shared objective truth.  If it were so, we would be doomed to the constant threat of manipulation as we continue to allow belief to be a valid criteria for defining authority to which we are subservient.  We have tried that, indeed we have tried nothing else.  While it may have been moral according to the limited definition granted by limited communication technology in the past, it was still the cause of much pain and suffering as dissonance, caused by the attractor, began to contradict those belief systems.  The only way for us to reach a globally just and fair society is to base that society on universal commonalities of reality as it really is.  The public realm must be free from the ideologies of religion, state and commerce and be replaced with institutions that emerge from the complex network of independent minds.  The multitude must be allowed to communicate, to create global culture that eliminates the 'other' and renders the identities of the oppressors obsolete.

No longer will we be defined by what we believe, where we live or what we do.  We will be recognised for our unique set of knowledge and the social value that contributes.  In short, we will go from objectified subjectivity of the soul, to the subjectivised objectivity of a complex network.  We are a system, and a system is defined by the number of links, by relationships, more than by individual nodes. Ironically, we once knew that, as indigenous people do, but we didn't understand it.  That's why it all got a bit crazy for a few thousand years.  Now we are beginning to understand it, we are replicating that understanding in culture because it seems the most rational interpretation and eventually people will be able to grow in an environment where there is enough understanding that we can once again come to know what it is to be part of a system, both human and, inseparably, ecological. We can only know such things when we are allowed to live it, understanding clearly isn't enough.  As such, I predict that skepticism will grow to become a fundamental part of this new, information based, global identity and will eventually lead to the eradication of enforced, indoctrinated, false subjectivity to a true subjectivity whereby an individual is free to express themselves as they truly feel themselves to be, not as a call-centre worker from Hull who wishes she had the time and money to learn violin.

Thanks to @Mikeharris100 for his input!

Is this the worst definition of meme ever?

This "definition" of a meme was in the 'about' section in a Facebook quiz about how many of the top 100 literary books you may or may not have read.  It has to rank as the worst attempts at defining a meme I have yet come across.

A “meme” is a little chain-letter-like game that people send around the internet.

Is it?  I couldn't resist... here was my reply.

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Oh man that definition up top of 'meme' makes me bristle.  In one hundred years time cultural evolution, through memetics (or whatever the fuck you petty academics want to call it), will be recognised as equally significant as genetic evolution; it is what makes us, us.

Without memes there would be no identity.  We would be animals of pure instinct. Memes are all human-made products, all language, all artifacts, all culture. They are the basis for our morality, the vehicle of our progression, the network from which History emerges.  When shared, they are what give us our humanity; when not, our inhumanity.

Dawkins name will go down with Darwin's as the two most influential individuals to avow and propogate evolutionary ideas.  Once humanity comes to understand the power of the meme, we will understand the conceptual darkness humanity has suffered under, the false notions of the self as soul and external, interpretable moral codes born of a time of memetic infancy, where the 'other' prowls relentlessly and power was held by the few over all civilisation.

We are now coming out of that darkness, the illusion of 'other' dissapating before our now global eyes. We will soon recognise our true responsibilities and our true sense of self within a complex network of equal individuals.

A Defense of Capitalism, not that they might see it that way...

Capitalism is shit.  That I feel is the consensus of the majority of the world from my limited viewpoint from on lucky street.  It is also, I would argue, closer to what the majority of the capitalist world itself would proffer compared to its glittering opposite as the contemptuously titled ‘End of History’.   The growing inequality; complete ignorance of what it is to be happy, nay, the frightened denial inherent in wealth’s desire to buy what cannot be bought.  It has the potential to tear us apart as a species, this walling off of homes and minds.  But this article isn’t really about that.  It is about perspective, about how we got where we are and why we can have optimism about where we may be going.  It is also about picking the right target, so that we may endeavour not to marginalise those that might otherwise adept to the zeitgeist.

Humanity has progressed to varying degrees through three main types of imagined identities (as in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities), created by those who monopolised cultural production.  Religion, the State and Commerce emerged one from the other to accommodate the ever-greater complexity that derived from the accumulation of knowledge and technology.  Larger empires, multiple faiths and disparate people... they could only be bound by common memes to the extent communication technology allowed.  This is why a common vernacular in Europe, as brought about through the printing press (commerce), facilitated such fervent nationalism.

Throughout history, power has devolved; and that is reflected in the level of brutality.  Just a few hundred years ago, heads were left on spikes in city streets as warnings. Genocide was commonplace, the wholesale rape, pillage and hand-made destruction of entire cities… who could imagine that in the developed world? From Emperor and Demi-God, King and Aristocracy, CEO and Marketing… Those who create culture, create identity.  That power is now democratising further, toward an information-based identity.  If we identify with the ‘other’ through shared culture then we have done the complete opposite to the dehumanising process that enabled the Holocaust.   Even simple communication is enough, since our shared humanity brings with it common desires, familiar fears, more than enough to make that connection.

This is what capitalism has given us.   It got here through some pretty noble ideas, ideas that the right are loudest to (often blindly) shout but which, compared to what came before (and sometimes now to be fair) are pretty radical.  Individual Freedom?  A lot of the headway with that was from merchants and business.  Free-Markets and movement of capital and labour are very much post-nationalist ideals that resulted in a changed dynamic by the mid-20^th Century.   The consumerism it produced enabled TV’s to be in almost every house, something many would regard as negative when it fact it’s merely primitive.  By the standards of the age however it was a miracle and no one can deny the effect film has had on the global consciousness. In the book Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri sum up this transormational aspect of caiptalism by saying:

"Capital has always been oriented towards the production, reproduction and control of social life... [however], the production of Capital is, ever more clearly and driectly today, the production of social life."

In other words, now that the fuits of capital have enabled the multitude itslef to partake in social production, capital has gone from creating and maintaining virtical social identities (when the form was monopolised by the state) to being the medium of expression of the multitude itself.  Truly this represents the biggest shift in tendency since Marx himself recognised the coming hegenomy that capital represented at a time when agriculture was still hugely dominent.  Now we are tending toward true emancipation of the individual, a reawakening of the notion of network, not centralised discipline.

We have to be careful to remember what Capitalism actually consists of.  We are quick to picture the fat cat corporate exec, lighting his cigar with a fifty-pound note.  Yet the majority of capitalism feeds from the same meme-pool as you or I (assuming you aren’t an actual corporate exec reading this which, if so, please change).  Sure, as you get to the top, the memetic influence becomes restricted to high-powered, institutionalised jargon and dogmatic priorities, an identity that has outsourced its own responsibility to humanity for the sake of shareholders.  But they do not live in a vacuum.  Not like Kings, not even like the four-yearly terms for politicians.  They have customers and they have staff and more so than religion or the state they have more incentive to keep us happy. They know about evolve or die.

In the last hundred and fifty years capitalism has shown considerable amounts of adaptation in the west when it comes to western populations. It’s because we aren’t the ‘other’ anymore, no longer the proles.  We’ve had that outsourced now too.  For decades, multi-nationals have polluted, killed, bribed, betrayed and pillaged their way across the world, every bit the fundamentalist with their own holy book with it’s own commitments.  Number 1, Make money for shareholders. Number 2, Make money for shareholders… I’ve no doubt many are great family people that sincerely believe they do good.  We are relativistic beings, and if you are unknowingly trapped in a wealth induced meme-bubble consisting primarily of positive reinforcement how can you think otherwise?

The co-opting of the political class by corporations combines the two most potent cultural identity producers in the world since the demise of religion in the west.  Listen to a politician.  Now listen to a high-level manager.  They speak the same language.  There is a pretty obvious reason why: it is because of the intricate web of links between business and government, a back-slapping, champagne swilling orgy of congratulatory arse-licking; a web that forms a cocoon. It is this meme-bubble that the global consciousness should seek to expose, using the infrastructure capitalism lays, (as they must to compete) to counter this push from corporations (unlimited funding of politicians in the U.S., the concentration of media conglomerates, the institutionalisation of mainstream media) in an info-war that will grow ever larger as technology continues to explode exponentially. 

But this will take time.  Evolution has to happen in steps.  There are no sky-hooks in biological evolution and there aren’t any here.  Violence can clear a blockage, but it must be an act of last resort on behalf of the majority else, like suicide bombings, they will appear illegitimate to the global consciousness.  It must be rational, targeted violence and only when the right to speak and to listen to contributions to the creation of imagined identity have been fully denied.  Too much, and without rational limits and objectives both stated and kept to, and the chaos produced can have the opposite to the desired effect in the short-medium term leading to greater suffering.

Cultural evolutionary function of Twitter and Wikileaks and how it applies to Tunisia

Did wikileaks cause a revolution? Did Twitter? Did rain in LA a couple of weeks back cause a mild spell in the UK today? Probably not, but it is impossible to tell anyway.  They all aspects of non-linear complex systems sitting on the edge of chaos, a googol of tiny threads interacting in ways that produce unpredictable and sometimes emergent outcomes.

Complex systems have emergent properties, new phenomena that arise as a result of interactions in networks of enough nodes.  When humans began to settle, the network was at such a scale as to generate emergent properties; there were enough threads to create a tapestry.  Story, myth, nature… those that could decipher them to the level of believable knowledge of the time could command prominence in the system, conflating the religious authority with authority over humankind and monopolising the memetic content of the system.  Religious empires were the result of millions of nodes acting from, I would argue, a few simple axioms (1), an emergence that evolved along with communication technology into the state and then commerce, though all remain to varying degrees of power throughout the world.  Our culture represents a tapestry of countless links that interact in unpredictable, chaotic ways.

Wikileaks function is to introduce new material that can be woven into the tapestry.  It so happened that it’s colour didn’t match the colour that those with the most potential to weave were describing to us.  How much?  I couldn’t possibly claim to know what the picture is in reality, too much content I’m exposed to is manufactured, be it for power or profit or spin.  Some content is easier to trace, such as the blinding significance of Mohamed Bouazizi.  It shows that from what we each know as individuals we can only make subjective, if as well-informed as is possible, claims on the subject.  Besides, without prior prediction the claim leads to criticism of post-hoc reasoning, a rationalisation for western minds who, as is our curse, demand to see cause-and-effect according to our personal, wiki-saturated, schema.

Our societal system has an infrastructure that connects us.  It is our speech. It is our culture, our reality, accessible through sight and sound.  It is us.  And now we are intimately connected to Moore’s law.  Computer-based technology, whether in manufacturing or the final product, is accelerating at an exponential rate.  That means that an already significant proportion of our systems links are also increasing exponentially.  More than that, they are going global, pitting growth against the established order of the state, whose nodes are indoctrinated into a nationalistic mind-set as institutionally demanded by the democratic concept of the social-contract. 

That could all be about to change, and for me personally this is the most exciting prospect I have the optimism to believe in. 

Twitters function is to weave this new content via commenicating information in as close to real-time as possible in an auto-correcting, crowd-sourced system.  Try to see where this is going: imagine Twitter 2.0, as part of an advanced semantic web, when everyone’s connected most of the time, multi-sensory, multi-media communication controlled by speech and thought, mashable with any other function on the web (i.e. google earth).  What you could well see is its own emergent property, it's own artists and culture yet so diverse that the picture it weaves encompasses all humanity, a realised tapestry-within-a-tapestry, a fractal self-similarity that we will all be able to see free from the perverting conduit of self-interested, narrow-minded, nationalistic, corporate ‘protectors’. 

Wikileaks is a node.  Twitter is a network of links.  Yet they are but parts of a larger whole, the internet. This is itself but a part of a larger network, one that encompasses all of the culture and civilisation that each node experiences.  To give credit to one or the other for people taking to account the previously unaccountable would be glib to the extreme.  It would ignore the decades of suffering for a society who for the most part didn’t even have the internet. 

As long as technology continues to progress and the number of people who have access to it continues to increase, we will see the creation of a global scale memetic Hamilton’s rule that will finally eliminate the ‘other’ that for so long has been used against us.  Evolution is inevitable.  For that reason the onus for allowing this progression for humanity falls upon the politicians.  Yet it is the state, with their subjugated media, and corporations with their subjugated states, those hegemonic meme-producers, that have the most to lose. In these globally connected times, our collective sense of morality is raising the bar to a point that states and multi-nationals aren’t happy with. It’s not profitable and it makes no sense to them because they are simply doing their job as they should, as nationalists and profiteers. That reality is beginning to become untenable to todays youth due to their ability to sync with technology and the resulting dissonance.  Exposure to dissonance, be it wikileaks or the sight of a Palace, equals conclusions contrary to that which we are told by those in authority. It is the state’s resistance to this moral change which turns evolution into a revolution. 

So there you have it.  Ultimately it was the Tunisian government that was responsible for the revolution..

1. Axioms of human behaviour: All that is needed for this thesis is three axioms which I think you'll agree make both evolutionary and intuitive sense.

· Fear the unknown
· Do not waste energy fearing the known
· Defer to percieved authority

Some predictions for humanities continued progress

 Extrapolating from the Historical Progress of Identity

After reading the inspirational predictions for the next 25 years on the Guardian website, I felt inspired to expand on my theories of the correlation between identity and communication technology and attempt to extrapolate my own predictions from the historical progress of identity and humanities study of the complex system that is society.

Here is the chart I drew up giving a rough outline of the cycles and progression of memetic production (identity), as accelerating advances in communication technology take our complex system to greater scales of connectivity: http://tinyurl.com/2ub9khm

Nb. For the sake of identifying key features, simplification and generalisation are to some extent necessary. Exceptions will always be found since the spread of communication technology (the framework of the complex system) is not universally even.  Indeed, accross the world all stages of identity may be present at any one time until we converge together.

The following identities are based upon the catagorisation of what Anderson termed 'imagined communities', those identities that transcend the local and which bind humans together into large enough groups to constitute emergent properties we know as History.  Emergent properties of complex systems are self-similar, and so we see at each definition of scale self-similar processes and cycles regardless of the actual content of these imagined identities...



Fundamental Imagined Identities

Three fundamental identities have arisen on Earth: Religion, State and Commerce. These identities have found homes within each of us to varying degrees of dominance in what we believe, where we live and what we do, respectively.  Each arose in times of expanded communication technology (language, mathematics, transport, media, digital etc) and became seemingly permanent by attaining a monopoly of memetic production which then suffused cultures with language, symbolism and memes which persisted beyond the control of the monopoly itself, continuing to influence future individuals identities.

As each new identity emerges it goes through a cycle.  Firstly, it identifies itself in relation to the older identity, by definition a necessity since this is the memetic monopoly one has to play with.  Thus States began as theocracies, corporations evolved from National enterprises and individualism is the progeny of the corporately defined 'individual as consumer'.  There have been three fundamental identities thus far, but a fourth is now emerging, that of the autonomous individual. 

Each progression is the result of an increase in knowledge facilitated by a more detailed, diverse and extensive complex system (society).  Each progression of identity represents a new level of emancipation, with greater sharing of power, more feedback, more freedom and importantly greater democratisation of memetic production.  This last point is crucial.  Since identity is produced from culture, the less monopolised memetic-production is the more emancipated individual identity can be.  It represents the opposite of dogma, of ideology.  Democratised memetic production means the elimination of whole-scale identity creation of the many by the few and the exposure of that manipulation through contact with the demonised, mythologised 'other' of which they speak.

Driving this emancipation is rationality and cognitive dissonance.  Each new identity succeeds the last because it's embracing amalgamation of more diverse memes results in a closer approximation of reality.  As the anachronisms of prior identities become visible through the advance of knowledge, cognitive dissonance increases also, leading to new generations to come to predominantly new conclusions contrary to the dogma of the established order.  It is precisely because we grow old and die, together with the rebellious, adaptive, open-mindedness of youth, that society is able to progress politically as our technologically driven shifts in identity occur.




The cycle of each fundamental identity

Emergence
As dogma becomes exposed through increased communication, ideas begin to form from the emerging cognitive dissonance.  These ideas are presented as rationalisations within the context and under the regulation of the existing memetic monopoly (as cause-and-effect demands).  As knowledge advances and more of the unknown becomes known (diluting the power of the mythological other), these sporadic rationalisations become untenable and cognitive dissonance spreads with more veracity for it, eventually leading to a paradigm shift in political governance and identity creation.

Co-opted Monopoly
Emerging from the language and culture of the previous fundamental identity comes a new monopoly on memetic production.  Religion is divorced from the state, corporations go from state enterprises to multi-national to supranational.  And yet, despite gaining absolute power, they still feel the need to dress themselves in rationalisations of memetic identities past, co-opting the power of reminiscence .  Hitler draped his genocide in divine garb, corporations practice with 'national interest' and individualism defines itself according, for now, to the corporate plan.  Each subverts the last to saturate our culture with their identity-creating memes common interests: power, wealth and the wilful ignorance of dissonance that may shake their self-serving, manufactured, yet no less sincere rationalisations for maintaining their brief turn at benefiting from inequality.

Peak identity
Our innate nature insists we continue to communicate, the obvious benefits that result maintaining a drive at increasing our communication networks.  Whilst political structures may come about through a domino-like paradigm shift, communication technology keeps accelerating exponentially, telescoping the rate of change dramatically as we get to ever finer definitions of this networked complex system we call society.  As such, there comes a point where dissonance becomes too great for the rationalisations of the ruling elites to make sense any longer. Take the Democratic system.  Founded on the inherently nationalistic doctrine of the social contract, it's usefulness is drastically outdated and unsuited to a globalised world.  It represent a broken network, with nodes that shut themselves off from one another, polluting the system. When communication structures available to the public exceed what is directly manageable by the ruling class, reality will begin to contrast with the official line, creating dissonance and the desire for change.

Decline
As our newly emerging identity (more complex network) forms, it's greater scope and scale of identity emancipation produces far more rational memes than those that came before.  This exposing of anachronisms is most keenly felt in the young, those who have yet to be infected with the dogmatic ideology they have had forced into their brain.  Dogma dies, to be replaced with better dogma, more inclusive dogma, until finally we break the cycle altogether.....


So what happens next?

I think Hegel will be happy to hear that his notion of History being mankind coming to know itself is truer than most gave him credit for.  As communication technology spreads to the masses one step at a time, political structures follow suit by slowly adjusting, sometimes piecemeal, sometimes radical and violent, much as an earthquake does depending on how much tension has arisen.  The Internet is a radical technological invention and its effect on that tension cannot be over-estimated.  The corporate meme-machine as been busy telling us we are individuals, the by-product of which (lets not forget it's central aim is to flatter us into buying stuff) has resulted in a radical notion of the self as an autonomous unit, a self-contained bundle of rights and privileges.

This information age, where the democratisation of memetic production has exploded in a noisy, ill-defined sea of identity bits and bytes, isn't the utopia people make it out to be however.  It's message is better for sure, we are sovereign citizens of our own mass-manufactured castles, walled off mentally and physically in order to capture that essence of individuality, that false veneer of material possession hiding us from ourselves.  This hyper relative individualism, combined with the concept of competition that previous rulers deemed a virtue, plays havoc with peoples minds! The dissonance between the religious, state and corporate  models of perfected form and the reality we as individual live with is vast, resulting in depression, mental health problems and growing neurosis.

These problems, together with the Wests emerging relationship with those that have until now silently shouldered the burden of manufacturing our continued opulence, will expose the anachronisms of the corporate subversion of the state.  The supranational manifestation of wealth production will lose it's facade of greater good once the publics idea of what 'greater' constitutes exceeds that of their former creators.  Religious identities will continue to decline in-line with access to communication technology, with only those shunning the technolgoy itself left to ever-more radical ratioanlisations of their own actions.  The state will follow a similar course, with direct-democracy coming to those who recognise and escape the crip of corporate co-opting. 

The advantages of this progression are vast.  The information age will at last recognise humanity as one complex system, eliminating much of the discrimination and prejudice the exploitation of the 'other' has caused.  The corporate co-opting of the state will be exposed mainstream, with a separation similar to that of church and state (already a publicly stated ideal, it is never-the-less another lie rationalised from above) and the autonomous individual will demand greater power and control over their political lives through the co-opting of corporate ideals of individual freedom from outside forces.  The availability of information will need to adjust to the finer definition of network connections, recognising that democratised memetic production invalidates the rationalisation for such extensive centralised power and access to knowledge.


And beyond that...

Religion will become an ever decreasing force though still visible as memetic echoes of a former age.  States will be udner ever greater pressure to stampt out corruption, open itself to accountablility and allowing the public to govern itslef to ever greater degrees.  Corporations will be under similar pressure, perhaps basing themselves within those states that are most stubborn in embracing progress (since those conditions best for profit also appear to be worst for the public as a whole).  Free from national obligation, they could become even more explicitly dangerous, even to powerful states slow to change, before subsiding themselves into a rather different legacy than they currently envisage in their assumed noble ideals.

I am reminded at this point of an interview in the film Waking Life.  Aklilu Gebrewold talks about humans coming to understand themselves, how our minds work, what and who we waking up to in this new age of hypersubjectivity.  Only when our individual minds fully understand themselves in relation to reality can we then look outside of ourselves anew with a radical objectivity.  The ideas in this essay are in a similar vein, having come from an attempt to work my knowledge of philosophy and cognitive science to the world of the emergent properties of complex human systems (what we call History).  And so it goes with identity.  Once we understand ourselves as part of a complex system, it is a small step to recognise that that system is not closed, the sole dmoain of monosapien. No, we are but one part of a greater system, that of Nature, which in turn is but one insiginficant part of even greater, galactic, universal systems.

This will become the next source of conflict, the recognition of Nature and the environments place within our network.  Although communication structures will encompass all of humanity, we will still need to hear from Nature itself in order to understand our effect on it.  Dwindling resources and growing destruction of habitats and wildlife cannot continue if we are to exist peeacefully.  As such, practices and beliefs that run contrary to this will in turn produce enough dissonance to ensure that after the age of the individual comes the age of Earth itself: An identification with and recognition of this global biosystem and our place in it.  Once we are there, there is no other to be exploited and we will finally be able to live in harmony before amking the jump of understanding our place not simply on this planet, but within our galaxy, our universe.  We are still only at the beginning of that journey.

A theory of cultural evolutions relationship with Identity.

A theory of cultural evolutions 
relationship with identity.

Confession: I had, for whatever reason, persisted to write dissidence instead of dissonance when describing the conflict of contradictory ideas for the last week or so!  Thanks for not noticing Chris!  Ironically it means much the same thing, though dissonance, referring as it does to a feeling, is the necessary pre-cursor to what could be called 'cognitive dissidence', or the conscious rationalisation of memetic input to a conclusion that is counter to the 'official' doctrine resulting in the creation and transmission of further dissonance.  For that reason I quite like the term 'cognitive dissidence' as meaning the actions of a politically aware member of the fourth identity transcending the now weakening (at least in developed nations) memetic-monopoly of the ruling elites.

I don't like the idea of a final product.. especially intellectual products. It's only purpose is to monetise it, though at the expense of limiting memetic evolution. In this vain I am committed to both constantly evolving my work and acknowledging the origin of such evolution.  Here is a list of contributors, both those who gave feedback on the piece in its entirety and those who contributed expert knowledge on a specific aspect they wished to comment on.  On my google sites page I highlight the latest changes and additions with each piece of feedback in red.  Thanks for helping!

1. Chris Menning, co-curator of www.knowyourmeme.com and also involved in the online zine www.rocketboom.com.

2. Nathanial white, owner of the co-op Sociocratic Ecological and Economic Development (SEED)

3. Professor Marion Blute, University of Toronto.  Her research interest is in theory, in particular evolutionary epistemology,universal Darwinism or multi-process selection theory.

Before I start, I'd like to talk about terminology. Having read Marion Blutes excellent chapter on memes in her latest book (and seen it for myself in forums), I've come to see that memetics is a bit of a dirty word to some people, with different disciplines using different terminology: information exchange, cultural evolution etc.   I don't mind what you replace it with in your mind (after all, I read Levy's 'signs' as 'memes'), the important aspect is that it represents a second evolutionary process.  Having co-evolved, cultural evolution has taken an ever more dominant part of our identity, something that Dawkins referred to as freeing us from our selfish gene.

I don't know if it is Dawkins himself that triggers such a backlash, or whether it is simply the relative newness of the concept, but people seem to be stuck on such arguments as defining the unit of meme.  Yet the same problems exist for gene, as Blute points out.  I use the terminology of memetics as a general terminology common, according to Blute, in people in a multi-disciplinary environment.   The key is that cultural evolution takes place within the complex system that is human society and that the cultural environment is key in the formation of identity.  If you want to critique memetics, fine.  But do it by critiquing the italicised sentence (the one without the word meme in it).

Introduction

I came to this idea of History through the study of the philosophy of cognitive science. My thoughts on the stream of consciousness turned first into an account of the self, then an understanding of creativity and subjectivity before applying this knowledge on the larger scale of a systems based society. It is this new possibility, for reverse engineering a theory of history from the mind up, rather than the other way around, that has given me these insights.

Major thanks to Kant, Hegel, Dennett, Dawkins, Blackmore, Anderson, Levy et al for either inspiring or confirming (at least, allowing me to fully internalise it/be convinced of it's accuracy) this thesis.

This essay is essentially derived from what I called coined in a previous essay Heterohistoriography, after Dennetts heterophenomonology (a method of studying the self using both phenomenology and objective, measurable, scientific data). It is a combination of both regular notions of historiography and a scientific understanding of the human mind as an individual node of a complex network. Complexity theory, Chaos theory, Memetics... these things apply to us as thermodynamics applies to physics; we simply cannot ignore them when studying the humanities (or anything for that matter). One of the nice things about having internalised this following thesis is that in the end it all boils down to physics: mere cause and effect. Heterohistoriography takes as its starting point the human mind, extrapolating upwards and outwards from simple evolutionary axioms to a theory of all-encompassing simplicity and applicability.

The Formation of the Self: This theory of the self is derived from reading books such as Richard Dawkins “Selfish Gene’, Susan Blackmore’s ‘Meme Machine’ and Daniel Dennetts ‘Consiousness Explained’. It is, in my view, entirely compatible within these frameworks…

At some point in our past, we were animals: pure instinct and emotion.  Then came communication, eating meat, cooking, communal living and cooperation with adequate memory, foresight, theory of mind (awareness of other minds), imitation and creativity to pass a tipping point.  From co-evolving, the two evolutionary processes once again became unbalanced, with cultural evolution taking the fore (Blute).  Memes began to accumulate, being passed and mimicked from mind to mind both down generations (as with genetics) but also horizontally.

Replication and mutation of memes equal a whole new type of evolution: the only known force able to swim against the tide of entropy and create ever more complex structures; something that must apply to culture therefore, as well as life. Whilst some animals are known to also exhibit cultural transmission, such as the use of tools and birdsong, it is only with humans that this exponential growth of memetic

We, as body and mind, are now the product of the interplay between two evolutionary forces: Genetics and Memetics. Broadly speaking, genes and our environment determine our potential and capability, whilst memes determine our conscious identity and are cumulatively built into a dynamic, physiological neural network we know as the self. What we see is the but the surface, a simplified user-interface for the most complex machine in nature and one that can function instinctively in a dynamic environment.  As Professor Marion Blute said via email, "we are a product of the interplay between two evolutionary processes, the biological (genetics) and the sociocultural (what some like to call and I have no objection to calling memetics)".  

The interplay of emotion and reason, gene and meme, creates an emergent 'self' from a complex, chaotic system (giving rise to creativity). Each persons exposure to memes is unique, defined by the continuity of existence in space and time, and held within the memory and subconscious of the individual. This means that each person's data-set for use in the analysis of any new input is unique to that person (creating subjectivity). This model of the individual mind scales-up to the complex, chaotic, systems-based network with emergent properties that we know as society. This scaling up is a crucial feature of natural complex structures, offering different appearances at each level. Until recently, we had been privy to just the emergent phenomena of society that we call History... yet trying to determine the rules of History merely from the narrative is like determining the nature of a bird merely from the overall patterns of the flock. As with any complex system with hard to explain emergent properties, the local nodes (us, in this case) work upon surprisingly simple axioms...

Axioms of human behaviour:

All that is needed for this thesis is three axioms which I think you'll agree make both evolutionary and intuitive sense.

· Fear the unknown

· Do not waste energy fearing the known

· Defer to authority

As with the Hamilton effect (innate favouring of genetic kin), so to do our shared memes create a bond through this acceptance of the known. Just as familiar, every-day surroundings do not generate a flee response, neither should familiarity of mind, it being a mere extension of our environment. Thus, the more memes you share, the more you can relate and empathise with each other and the less there is to fear. The cumulative total of experienced memes within a lifetime is our identity, memes that are both new and very, very old.

Blute, together with my first forays into the basics of this discipline I didn't know existed (Sociocultural evolution), has made me realise an important distinction I need to make here.  Our identity isn't a single entity, it is about as impossibly complex as it can get.  But there are some aspects that are, for the most part, universal through time and space by virtue of our being the same species.  The supposedly 'primitive' cultures described during the enlightenment were shown by early 20th century anthropologists to be just as complex and rich as anyone else, a level of social identity common to us all.  Then, however, there is what Benedict Anderson called the imagined community.  It is this imagined community that I wish to talk about, since it is this element of our identity that has grown together with communication technologies and that exhibits the kind of large scale, historical, phenomena that we learn about today in our classrooms.

When memetic production is held as a monopoly by ruling elites, be it through exclusive literacy and use of force, class-division, censorship and self-censorship etc, then the meme-pool through which individuals travel and construct their identity on is solely the minorities view imposed on the many, a la the Nazi's.  

This vertical transmission of memetic-production from the few at the top to the masses below has been a constant throughout history thus far.

That then is all there is; there is no intrinsic or independent 'good' with which to defend ourselves against such a situation. We are what we think we know (I say 'think, since much of the memetic input remains in the sub-conscious and remains hidden). That which we are conscious of, that which we rationalise our identity with, is both limited and likely-as-not ontologically inaccurate.  The meme producers produce identities: a simple method of creating social bonds in the mold of the most successful memetic producers, our modern day equivalent of the strongest, or fastest, or biggest animal being at the top of the hierarchy.

Those people who do not share memetic similarities, or who are unknown to, represent the 'other' whom those meme-producers in power use to scare people, maintaining the social hierarchy. I am not suggesting a conscious effort to use unfounded fear, not until the arrivals of real-politick anyhow, merely that it would have been the most successful tactic to gain power and so the one most likely to succeed time after time (that’s evolution for you). They do this through degrees of memetic production monopoly which at various points in history created identities which saturated all future cultures to come:

The Three Spheres of Identity: This theory of Identity is beautifully espoused by Pierre Levy in his book ‘Collective Intelligence' in which he presents a model of the historical progress of identity much as I had envisioned it. Combined with the above theory of the self, I here describe how and why such identities arose, expanding Llevy’s idea from observation to universal theory…

Levy observed that there have been three classes of identity through the progress of homosapiens: Cosmos, Territory and Commodity. Each have, at some time, dominated human life to the point of saturating culture, securing an unbroken lineage of existence within language and artifacts which contributed to future generations identities. This was only possible once language evolved and was secured independently to human memory (thankfully for us, thanks Greece) when memes were written down and formed as art. Rather than starting afresh each time, memes could be passed on meaning that identity did not die with the original proponents. Instead it was successively built upon by future generations exposed to the cultural artifacts and replicating them further. This is the basis for what Benedict Anderson describes in ‘imagined communities’, something I read after telling someone about this idea and being pointed in the right direction. The best way to explain this fully is through a historical narrative of identity.

A historical look at the formation of the three spheres of identity In the appendix I have included a matrix of identities with the historical structures associated with each combination. Since I only started to construct it this week and is still pretty speculative, I have put it in the appendix as something I think is interest.

N.b Since I wrote this essay, I have expanded upon the process of historical progression.  See this blogpost for a more in depth look and a table showing our one identity transplants another as a populations dominant imagined identity: http://grimeandreason.blogspot.com/2011/01/some-predictions-for-humanities.html

In the beginning, the bond we feel to the known, and the fear inherent in the unknown, created power structures through the search for, and the proclamation of, divine knowledge (and the fear and respect that such a claim would provide). The world needed explaining to minds that had evolved to rationalise ones own environment, and explaining it derives the authority that we evolved to defer to. Imagine the questions and answers that would arise to explain natural phenomenon such as eclipses or extreme weather events! Thus started the cosmic identity, where preacher and leaders would monopolise 'spiritual' (unknown/unknowable?) knowledge and transmit an identity which, with high fecundity, would infect the many. This would create immense shared memetic structure and an immense bond. This, together with climate fluctuations of 7 degrees Celsius every 100 or so years in Northern Europe, could explain the reason why it is us who survived and not the Neanderthals (bar the trace genes many of us have through interbreeding).

Cosmos (proto-religion) based identity became territorially based when disparate cosmic beliefs were bound together by expanding, conquering states. Through myth and legend, man replaced or served Gods borrowed and reformed from numerous belief systems. Strict authoritarian rule defined this age, as did stagnation of knowledge since doctrine defined identity and so creativity and subjectivity were limited to an extreme. Territory beget commodity as urban areas encouraged specialisation and trade, with individuals traveling through numerous meme-pools collecting data-sets and cognitive dissonance that allowed for independent thinking, hence the Greeks bringing us out of the Bronze age.

At this moment commodity was still a fragile basis of identity and was almost wiped out, were it not for the knowledge it produced being kept alive by the Muslim world. The Dark Ages represented a throw back to that pre-Greek time of cosmos/territory rule (divine kings) until that seed was replanted in Europe through Moorish Spain and the Renaissance. The printing press was invented, we gained common vernaculars and memetic evolution went nuts. This generated enough cognitive dissonance from both the religious (reformation) and the commodity (science) spheres of identity that Church and State split to be replaced by the seeds of a new tyranny, that of the marriage between territory and commodity. Today we call it capitalism, and it's increasingly nearing a similar fate to that of the divine Kings...

Breaking Memetic Monopolies: Reason and Cognitive Dissonance: This section was influenced by a TED talk I watched very recently as it happens, all about 'patternicity'.

What is reason? I suggest it is the conscious rationalization of the memetic world, directly akin to how genetic created a brain to rationalize our sensory environment. Our brain is a pattern-finding machine of awesome power. The input that our brain is constantly dealing with is roughly equivalent to the entire global Internet network of today. All the while, it is confabulating what we perceive to be a seamless reality when the truth is that much of it is inferred (we only actually ‘see’ a 3 degree arc, we are unaware that our eyes constantly flicker around, retaining information into a collage-like whole). I see no reason to think that we do otherwise with memes.


Our memetic world is highly subjective however. Whereas everyone basically shares the same systems for ‘rationalising’ vision, audio etc (yes, I know about the philosophical zombie argument but for the sake of sanity we will take our universal physiology as proof enough), everyones' memetic make-up is entirely unique. This results in greater and lesser data-sets being used in the rationalization of the memetic world. I use the term data-sets because, as with any inference or rationalization of inputs, the greater the data-set, the more accurate the final synthesis of information will be. Someone may have encyclopedic knowledge of all things divine and be a grand-master of religious rationalizing, but that would represent but one, tightly defined area of the greatest possible data-set. This would screw up the results of any experiment, be it in your head or in the lab.


We have evolved to see danger, to be able to infer cause and effect and to see patterns. Yet memetically we can only make judgments and find patterns using our own sum of knowledge, our own memetic make-up. If monopolies gain control of memetic production then they shape the very identity of those subjected to it, so that the only memes available are those that directly favour the meme-producers. This, as with any bias data-set, can only be rationalized toward a false conclusion.


However, due to the nature of humanity’s spread across this planet, no one monopoly was ever large enough to dominate all of mankind. For this reason, memes were always able to eventually seep into areas of memetic monopoly. What happens when you get a data-point outside of your usual area? Well, one meme (or data point) might be rationalized away by a brain intent on patterns and accustomed to the known.. maybe even a few. After a while however the rationalizations have to become ever more stretched, ever more unlikely in the face of this new, emerging set of data until there comes a time when the conclusions have to shift in order to seem rational. Evidence of this is seen in the generational divides apparent the world over where the young, not as invested and indoctrinated as their parents generation, allow these new data points to form a part of their identity as well.


Interestingly, recent research has shown that we are better pattern recognisers when we feel more in control and inversely are much worse (leading to conspiracy theories, pseudo-sciences etc) when we feel we have no control. It has also been linked to dopamine, explaining the creativity found in a lot of dopamine enhancing drugs. It also, I propose, explains why identities shifted from cosmos to territory to commodity at all. Imagine, the cumulative build-up of knowledge derived from the onset of language, writing etc would have slowly increased humanity’s capacity to rationalize for themselves. This would have created a feedback loop whereby our increasing knowledge led us to more ontologically true rationalizations, which would have made us feel more in control whilst also increasing our knowledge. It makes sense when you think of the villager in Medieval England resigned to the fates of the Gods… why even look for patterns when people are explaining for you why the crops failed, or why the plague swept through. How does one see patterns and make connections memetically when your data-set consists of nothing but evil spirits and witches? The difference in the sense of control of our world between us and that peasant is, I think, one of the greatest difference between humans of our age and that.


Globalisation has taken communication and made it global, beyond borders or geographical cultures. It is democratising memetic production and in doing so democratising our identities. As individuals, particularly in the west, we now have the opportunity to develop with global memetic influence, not simply from the few to the many. As this sea of memes begins to grow, it comes up against the nationalistic nature of 'official' memes, as traditionally espoused the state, and the profit driven nature of the memes produced by the commodity sphere. Yet, despite the power and influence both of these meme-producers wield (now increasingly of the same voice as illustrated by the shared, ever-shallower sounding vocabulary they each use), their monopoly is breaking.


The broader our collective knowledge, the better we become at perceiving patterns, the greater the cognitive dissonance between the ‘truth’ and the doctrine of the ruling elite. Thus we get Hegel’s thesis/antithesis/synthesis, a self-fuelling cycle propelled along by the cumulative and untamable nature of memetic transmission. Now that our identities consist of global memetic influence, our moral sphere is growing: as we come to know the previous 'other' better, the unkown becoming the known, we come to empathise with it. 

Capitalism, the marriage of territory and commodity into one minority memetic monopoly, is killing itself as it seeks to connect the world for increased profit. Since the only reason it managed to keep going and avoid Marx's predictions was by outsourcing the exploitation and thus staving off cognitive dissonance, it required the kind of memetic control (through education systems and official media) that is necessary for any such unjust system to continue. As global identities begin to form, the exploitation becomes known and so becomes unsustainable through ever increasing cognitive dissonance. Now that the monopoly has broken, cognitive dissonance will increase as the actions of the few become to seem ever more egregious in the now visible light of the impact it has on our now fellow humans.


The New Fourth Identity and Linked Data: This is derived largely through Levy and Ray Kurzweil.  Linked data was introduced to me by Tim Berners-Lee's TED talk (a man who, in my opinion, will one day be celebrated as the giver of the greatest gift to humanity).  It was also my own inevitable conclusions from what has come before.


The answer? Religion represents one hope (at least in giving us time to progress), in that it can wield its’ still influential assets in identity to act as a balance toward the other, merging, two. At best I feel, it may mitigate any further damage by leading a call for the separation of business and state, much as they themselves were subjected to and give time for the new hope: the emergence of a new form of identity formed not by what we believe, where we live or what we do, but by what we know. It's important to note here that I am not advocating a Freidman wet-dream of unregulated capitalism. Quite the opposite. With capitalisms vested interest in communication technology, such a situation would lead naturally to the complete monopoly of memetic production by the commodity identity, a fate far worse than the current status-quo (especially for us in the west, since the exploitation is already apparent in the developing world through our simply buying the leaders). No, what I mean is that the three identities must keep each other at bay in a system of moral and regulatory checks and balances between church, state and business. Whilst the few of each identity still hold the majority of memetic production in their grasp (priest, politician, CEO), the fact that they have to compromise denies them the self-fuelling, destructive cycle of being able to dictate the terms of discourse and their own identity. The Bush administration showed the danger of that in the vocabulary of the War on Terror during the grab for memetic monopoly by the military-industrial complex. Look at that phrase... it might as well read territory-commodity identity complex. By providing balance, it gives the greatest possible freedom for synthesis and new knowledge to occur since ideology, that bastion of close-mindedness, is held at bay.  We need more of this.


The information identity is the ultimate in universal identities since it does not purport to be based on the subjective, but the objective. It does not impose imagined communities vertically, from the few to the many, but horizontally, just as with our real communities. It recognizes the multitude of other people with whom they are intimately connected through the shared creation of memes, the shared creation of each others’ very identity. When peoples identities form through the collective influence of global proportions, then our empathy and moral sphere will encompass all humans, possibly all life, as our identities are democratised and made for the people, by the people. This is crucial, since this idea of identity answers the question post-modernism asked: is objectivity possible if it is relative? The answer? If, through technology, identities came to be composed of equal and democratic influences, directly from people the world over (note that does not mean the same, quite the opposite: it means the greatest possible diversity), then the large average spread of data-points would create a world of people for whom their imagined identity is not Christian, not British, not shop-keeper but human. Once we identify ourselves first and foremost as that common denominator we all share, we will all have a subjectivity relative to humanity as a whole, resulting in a practical objectivity derived through a complete understanding of and concern for all others. I know it's hard to envisage such a utopia. It's been a fundamental task of the democratic system to ridicule such notions or to fear them. Does it not seem the strangest thing to be scared of, someone speaking of peace and understanding? Yet that is the status-quo, and it is the jobs of our politicians to maintain it.


Instead, choose to merely look at the trend. For Millennia, our leaders have used us against each other in order to scare us and control us. Now they just do it to get your vote. That in itself is progress of sorts, but it is still capable of annihilating this planet (and nearly did). How many people could today be fooled that 500'000 'communists' deserve to be killed by a vicious dictator in Indonesia using U.S and U.K weaponry and support? Communication technology allows us now to both explicitly, and unconsciously implicitly, come to know that these 'communists' are simply repressed poor people in thw way and that it is real-politick that is the true enemy. We are on the right trend, and what's more that shit was only in the 1960's. Our moral sphere is growing exponentially alongside the exponential growth of technology. This is only going to continue with the new emergence of 'temes' (technological memes independent of humans: Blackmore) and is going to radically change our world.


The imagined community of the fourth identity will be qualitatively different to any before.  Rather than vertically imposed identities maintaining the status-quo of the ruling elite, we have to ability to forge our own on a scale that outstrips even the most dominant of power structures.  The infrastructure this identity is built on, the web of communication technology, is about to get hectic.  An example of this is the concept of a semantic web, web 3.0.  Tim Berners-Lee spoke about 'linked data' in a TED talk a couple of years back.  He envisions a semantic web capable of answering questions never before answered, through the large scale linking of online data.  From a memetic point of view, this is a massive revolution in the creation of new knowledge.  In the past, we have had to rely on fate imparting knowledge of A, B, and C into the hands of one individual, be it directly or indirectly.  With the semantic web, this reliance on fate is disposed of: if different people individually know A, B, and C, then AI will be able to link and present them together, at once.  All we will need to do is think the question and if the knowledge is out there we will get the answer.  Heaven knows what the consequences will be in terms of cognitive dissonance, or the attempts at control our former memetic masters might try to employ.  This is just one example, though a significant one, of the ways in which technology will change humanity utterly.


The struggle between Corporations and the New Fourth Identity.  This section is the subject of the latest revision.  Having decided to start reading into the history of corporations (only fair since I'm hardly their greatest fan in this essay), I came across the excellent book by Joel Bakan called 'The Corporation'...


Here I want to make a distinction. The villains in our story thus far are those ruling meme-producers that shape the identity of the masses. When it comes to the ruling commodity elite, I want to make clear that I mean those elements of capitalism that have co-opted or simply corrupted the authority of the state and the mainstream media: the corporation. As for the rest of capitalism, well that’s just us if we think about it. We are all, in the west, a part of this system. It’s in our memes. That’s why capitalism has a chance to change, indeed has changed dramatically in the west in the last 200 years though only through the outsourcing of the worst of the exploitation to the 'other'.  We were lucky, as early recipients of technologies power, in that we could grow and bond and fight for our rights visibly, waves of dissonance recorded and replayed, creating lasting changes.  For those at the top however, they have not changed at all.  They take on fully the identity of the corporation and whilst they occupy that role they are duty bound to act on behalf of this psychopathic 'person', legally bound to abide by nothing but the bottom line.  They are still in the monopoly of their own making, and all the more crazy sounding and dangerous because of it.


Joel Bakan clearly gets it.  Here are a couple of quotes I found that I could have written myself...


From Page 1 (!)...


Talking about corporations... "They determine what we eat, what we watch, what we wear, where we work and what we do.  We are inescapably surrounded by their culture, iconography and ideology. And, like the Church and Monarchy in other times, they posture as infallible and omnipotent, glorifying themselves in imposing buildings and elaborate displays.  Increasingly, corporations dictate the decisions of their supposed overseers in government and control domains of society once firmly embedded within the public sphere"


From Page 134...


"The corporation has essentially replaced the Church in terms of who you are," says Edison Schools financier Michael Moe.  It wants the same thing as the Church, he says: "obedient constituents that... pay [their] dues and follow the rules."  Human nature is neither static nor universal.  It tends to reflect the social orders people inhabit.  Throughout history, dominant institutions have established roles and identities for their subjects that meshed with their own institutional natures, needs and interests: God-fearing subjects for the Church, lords and serfs for feudal orders, citizens for democratic governments.


And now passive consumers who don't care about sweatshop workers in India, or even New York City where over half of all clothing factories are sweatshops, many employing children on a $1 or 2 an hour.  Bakan is simply the latest to have identified corporations as the continuation of religious and political identity creators, a triptych of manipulative wealth hoarders we now have the chance to break free from. 


However misguided the ideology, I still believe that some of the rationalizations for capitalism are correct, namely that it is better than it was before (for us), it is freer, and through the empowerment of the majority of the population has greatly advanced knowledge. There is nothing inherently bad about the notions of free markets and personal choice, it's just that we are coming to realize that that isn’t actually what we have got. Imagined communities have battled over these utopian ideals of free-markets and it's supposed alternatives without ever realising that it has to be gradual, that’s the nature of evolution. It is a bit like a chicken and egg scenario whereby you need sufficient contradictory memes to create cognitive dissonance whilst needing cognitive dissonance to create contradictory memes. Hence why it happens slowly, over generations. Revolutions are like earthquakes that erupt into violence when the tension builds too high which, given that such a chicken-egg like scenario would lend itself to exponential growth, makes perfect sense when you consider the containment measures imposed by authorities in order to maintain their power. 


It is the ownership structure of capitalism, the emergence of amoral corporations and the memetic production it monopolises with wealth that is the problem. Capitalism, more so than religion or state,  has the capacity to change since it is infused with the notion of individuality and is free from a centralised power base and dogma.  Through breaking the assymytries between consumer and producer by giving people meaningful political and moral controls in an integrated and symmetric feed-back loop, there is no reason why just commerce and trade within a monetary system should be impossible.  It would however mean trusting in the view that humanity as a whole, equal, can be a force for good... something those at the top are indoctrinated firmly against.  Their  resulting arrogance in rejecting this view will place them firmly in the firing line.


Imagine if you were to split up every chain into business of not more than 3 stores. The pyramid structure of power and wealth would be flattened and broadened immeasurably, the wealth gap between rich and poor would be vastly reduced, our relative happiness greatly increased. Make everything a sociocratic co-op overnight and you create a much better world without changing the monetary system itself. There are too many myths about capitalism, be it about the need for competition, growth and the ludicrous trickle-down effect. We need to remember it is ownership that is at issue here. We need to be in the game together and not at the mercy of the big-kids who own the game and can tell you to go home if you don't like the arbitrary rule-changes only they get to make.


Memetic 'Apps'


One of the important things inherent within the fourth identity is an emphasis on personal experience and evidence.  When we identify ourselves according to information, we are eschewing the ideologies and doctrines of the previous memetic monopolies.  The involves coming to understand our own selves as social constructs and, from there, learning to take control of that construction.  An important way of doing this is through the use of what I call 'memetic apps'.  As with an app on a smart phone, memetic apps are tools which, once 'downloaded', can be used to process incoming data (memes) in order to make best use of it.


For example,  logical fallacies have been known about for some time.  A good working knowledge of all the logical fallacies represents something more than your average meme.  Once learned, they can then be used to evaluate all future memetic input, with emphasis on treating all input to the same critical criteria.  Because it attempts to objectify ones judgement through the use of logic, it gives two advantages.  One, the conclusions you draw from memetic input will be less effected by ideology and subjectivity.  Two, it means that one can listen to arguments from both sides of a debate with equal logical objectivity by catagorising logical errors.  These 'apps' result in a far more rational synthesis of arguments, with consensus at least possible due to the recourse to shared reality and evidence.


Philosophical Implications


Hegel was right when he said that History is the narrative of mankind becoming aware of himself. Where he and other enlightenment thinkers went wrong was in assuming that their own insight was a glimpse of some pure reason that was attainable by anyone. Rather, they were fortunate to have a life not dissimilar to what is possible today, lots of study from wide range of memetic influences. Rather than a concept of pure reason, we are heading toward a universal reason, the reason of the many influencing the many, creating wide-ranging data-sets in each individual for interpreting new data. This means a more objective, universally inclusive reason that holds as it's judge universal values, not the doctrinal subjective view of the few.


Marx was also right in saying capitalism was unsustainable. What he didn't appreciate was the link between memetic production and the formation of identity and the lack of cognitive dissonance due to the outsourcing of exploitation through colonialisation and then globalisation. He will have the last laugh however, as we come to know that which has been presented as the fearsome unknown. When we are all connected, when technology allows the whole world to seemlessly communicate... who will those in power be left with to present as the unknown? That's simple.. the new information generation. They represent the threat to the status-quo, those who do not identify themselves in the language of the meme-producers, that of socio-economic status or what car you drive. These people identify themselves with people, all people, and since capitalism in it's current form works upon the exploitation of people, it can either tighten it's grip until the dissonance explodes or it can evolve alongside it.


To my mind, the most significant conclusion is what this essay says about the age we are currently entering.  For tens of thousand of years, humanity as been culturally evolving.  As technology developed, imagined communities grew ever larger, enabling the kind of historical events we are lucky enough to study.  Yet for all the revolutions, for all the 'progress' that we have apparently made, the mode of memetic transmission in creating an imagined community as been vertical, from the one or few to the many.  This imposed identity has been abused by those in power, with the quietly growing 'unofficial imagined community' providing enough dissonance to create Hegel's thesis/antithesis/synthesis progress of the imagined community.  I like the thought that this is analogous to a non-linear equation, with the result being fed back into the beginning of an equation, leading to complexity and chaotic, unpredictable consequences, rather like history itself. 

Recent update:

I have just read Mark Ward's book Universality, 2001. It is a great book, the title of which does not purport to encomapass everything, merely that within certain complex systems this feature of universal connectiveness emerges, extending to the system as a whole.  It is a feature that can give rise to chaos if too much input is fed into the system and one that can dissapate, along with it's potentials, if input is decreased.  It is apparant in the myriad of fractal patterns and beats that nature has discovered in order to reach complexity from the greatest simplicity. It shows how we as a species may have benefited from evolving to the edge of order, reaping the emergent benefits of collective intelligence, a historical dialectic of push and pull, power and curiosity, maintaining the complex system of cultural evolution as the safety net of communication infrastrusture drove spikes of recorded, cumulative knowledge into the high-water marks of the historical swash.

This book came at a good time for me.  Since the death of Mandelbrot last week, I have been pondering fractals often, sure that they, along with other phenomena such as chaos and synchronicity, were fundamental to the very fabric of reality.  Not simply on an arbitrary scale such as the plank length of the diameter of the universe, but on all scales at once, a Metaphysical Theory of Everything.  This book is a call to arms not just to the scientific community but also a clarion call for arm-chair philosophers like me.  It gives motivation in the thought that the aacademic world, though filled with great minds, is driven to speciality and expertise in narrow fields.  Universality shows that in studying small pieces of the canvas, many people are unable to see the big picture staring them in the face.  The internet is driving like-minded individuals in all disciplines to act on the very simple premise that maximised communication, larger conceptual data-sets, are the key to success. Whilst they are still realising that, you and I are free to use this wonderful invention to wallow in a multitude of specialities, see connections the experts cannot; all from the comfort of your sitting room, or on a bus, or walking in the countryside. It really is an exciting time, this whole new digital generation soon to be snapping at the heals of the established ways.

But I digress. The reason that it can help explain, at least philosophically for the time being, reality at any scale is because complex systems exist at all scales and complex systems share the same emergent characteristics.  By focusing on this emergent dynamic, instead of the particulars of any one scale, we can gain a very complete picture of the forces directing us both as individuals, as societies and as a tiny speck of dust in the cosmic carpet.  It is part and parcel of coming to understand ourselves as human beings, as Hegel said.  Many of the worlds ills: organised religion, fundamentalism, nationalism, racism, all sorts of 'isms', they all share  what seems to be a group-think inspired gross ignorance of their own flaws or how humans actually function.  It is apparant every time some Republican tells us that bombing them is the only way to stop them bombing us.

Now we face a revolution like no other before it.  Until recently, horizontal memetic transmission had only been possible at a local level, the result being the kind of community identity common the all of mankind.  Our imagined community has always been vertically derived, one-way and passive.  Now, with the internet and the democratisation of memetic production (which will stand alone in history as the most significant democratisation in all of history), we are witnessing the emergence of what Seth Godin on TED calls 'Tribes': Autonomously derived, horizontally transmitted imagined communities which are interactive rather than passive.  This is an entirely new development, an inflationary event for 'unofficial' memetic production which will, if allowed to continue, undermine the role of religion, state and commerce in creating our imagined community.  At some point, the imagined community they espouse will come to seem anachronistic and morally wrong since it will represent the view of the few, trapped in a wealthy meme-bubble, desperate to maintain the status-quo.  This was highly evident in Mubaraks seemingly complete disconnect with the Egyptian protestors. The rest of us will be busy democratising our identities and getting to know each other, only to realise that we are much the same if only we are allowed to realise it for ourselves.

N.b For a more complete description of the power of horizontal networks in creating new identities, see this blog post on the role of wikileaks and twitter in the recent Arab uprisings: http://grimeandreason.blogspot.com/2011/01/cultural-evolutionary-function-of.html


It also seems the Buddhists have had it largely right all this time. We are individual parts of a greater whole, that of the memosphere. The self is an illusion, a surface, emergent trick that evolution found useful. Old measures of cosmic identity have secured in the West a deep notion of a separate soul and this has caused untold cognitive dissonance. We use it to cling to free will in order to apply responsibility onto the individual. Yet this is both immoral and wrong! It ignores our part in creating other minds and societies role in producing the opportunity for criminal and scarred minds to come to pass. If society were to function according to these principles, it would look a hell of a lot different. Our prison system is the utter opposite of what this theory says is needed. Education from textbooks is completely anathema to the reality of our evolution. The sooner we can come to realise our responsibility to each other, the sooner the injustice of the selfish individual as a self-sustained being can be relinquished, to the betterment of all.


Having started to watch Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy, I was immediately struck by how their culture has instituionalised and habitualised a system of democratic memetic production.  In monestries, all of the monks partake in creative arts and debate equally, submersing themselves in a culture of extreme memetic evolution.  OK, so it's just men but it is fully democratic within the closed structure of the monestry.  Rather than enduring thousands of years of top-down, few-to-many memetic doctrine, Buddhism has experienced thousands of years of many-to-many memetic transmission aided by a recognition of it's purpose.   By this I mean that Buddhism does not reject the fourth identity, that of objective knowledge, the natural product of many-to-many memetic transmission as value and validity become both important and relevant.


The combination of western science and eastern philosohpy is, I feel, on the verge of a fruitful synthesis. Both have come to a consensus that the self is an illusion. Understanding who and what we are took a great leap with post-modernism, but I really feel that it had to wait for science to catch up and start to tell us what we could only previously speculate. This thesis represents such a radical shift from the status-quo of pandering to false intuition, such a universal theory that I believe that it can shed light on any human-centered subject, from any angle. It is an immensely powerful tool that, I believe, represents the next great multi-disciplinary revolution. Not only that, through internalising it I have found the kind of contentment that Buddhists speak of. I believe it to be one and the same.


I've thought about this everyday for three years, analysed all incoming data according to this framework and everything fits. All the time I hear common-sense sayings, contemporary research, exciting hints that other people are getting it. Everything seems to either expand or confirm what I think. This lack of cognitive dissonance and the contentment I feel is, I think, qualitatively similar to the buddhist concept of enlightenment... though kudos to them, they do it primarily through introspection. How can we deny their long held belief of the illusory self.. when we in the west spend no time actually introspecting on our experience?!


As an appendix, I have tried to map the different identities memetic power structures to determine the links between the emergent, large-scale behaviours of human civilisaiton. I haven't included it here as yet since it's still fresh in my mind and may need adjusting and amending. Comments are of course encouraged!

Appendix

Matrix of identities of minority rule
This matrix shows the emergent properties of the various imagined identities when they combine or assume dominion other the others.  Obviously this is a mere simplification and created as an illustrative guide.  Takehome lesson?  Any one identity gaining dominion is terrible, two together, either explicitly or co-optingly, pretty bad.  The ideal scenario is checks and balances between all three. 

Evolution of power structure's identity, correlate with communication technolgy (i.e exponentially evolving)   
This is a table showing the progression of the dominant power structures as they move through time, and therefore through the evolution of the three historical imagined identities.  It also attempts to extrapolate into the future to predict humanities progress.  The essay it was written to accompany can be found here.