Twenty years ago, on this day—26 November 2005—I posted the first essay on this blog. Today's post is the 647th essay (and the first one not posted on a Friday).
Jayarava's Raves amounts to some millions of words. If you had told me twenty years ago that I would go on to write
well over 600 essays, I would not have found that plausible. And yet, here we are.
These essays reflect my self-education not only in Buddhism, but in all the allied disciplines and fields that are required to understand religion, religieux, and religious phenomena, including: history, philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, axiology), general linguistics, socio-linguistics, translation theory, sociology, and social psychology (none of which were included in my formal education). I've also maintained an interest in science and written about that from time to time. I've been trying to make sense of Buddhism in rational terms.
Perhaps the most profound thought I have come across in the last 20 years is that we are not only social animals, but each individual is also a community of cells. And our surfaces—inside and out—are coated with numerous symbiotic microorganisms that make a significant contribution to processes such as digestion and immunity to pathogens. Moreover, our eukaryote cells are themselves symbiotic communities of what used to be separate organisms.
Whether we know it or not, every one of us is a community of communities. And if we go up the taxonomic hierarchy, we find humans in dependent relationships within ecosystems at every turn. Ultimately, all ecosystems contribute collectively to Gaia, the Earth's biosphere conceived of as a single (if complex) self-organising and self-regulating system.
Everywhere we look in nature, at whatever scale we choose, we see communities, cooperation, symbiosis, interdependence, and co-evolution. I find this thought both profound and beautiful. Yes, there is some conflict and competition, but Darwinian approaches to evolution massively over-emphasise conflict and almost completely ignore cooperation.
In this essay, I want to dwell on togetherness. It is, ironically, something I have seldom experienced for myself, and less and less as years go by. Nonetheless, I recognise it as the acme of human existence.
Social Animals are Moral Animals
What do you think of this slogan? Does this sound evil to you? Is this a recipe for tyranny?
All for one, and one for all;
United we stand, divided we fall.
What about these?
- There's no 'I' in team.
- A problem shared is a problem halved.
- It takes a village to raise a child.
- No one gets left behind.—US Military
- Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.—Helen Keller
- Even the weak become strong when they are united.—Friedrich von Schiller
- We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.—Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.—Henry Ford
- "Monks," said the Bhagavan, "you have no mother and no father to care for you. If you don't care for each other, then who will care for you? If you would care for me, then tend to the sick."—Vin I 301
In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Friedrich Hayek argued that all forms of collectivism inevitably lead to tyranny. Only robust individualism, especially in commerce, can save us from tyranny and deliver us to an individualist liberal utopia. If Hayek was right, then these collectivist slogans that emphasise cooperation, community, and togetherness ought to be seen as a threat.
To me, this attitude is almost incomprehensible, but Hayek is probably the most influential intellectual of the last century. Along with other prominent neoliberals—like Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman—Hayek's views have shaped every capitalist society on the planet. Virtually all modern politicians and businessmen are neoliberals. Revolutions around the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s aimed to implement Hayek's utopian (neo)liberal view of a society of self-sufficient individuals engaged in commerce. While these men were promoting self-interest to intellectuals and economists, mad old Ayn Rand became the patron saint of self-interest amongst technologists (thus validating the neurodivergence that made them somewhat alienated from society). Alan Greenspan, who was a central figure in US monetary policy ca. 1974 to 2006, was a personal disciple of Rand. Making Rand one of the most influential intellectuals of all time.
Of course, the anti-collectivists were helped by the horrific excesses carried out in the name of Karl Marx in the USSR and China. Stalin and Mao were undoubtedly brutal tyrants. But in terms of socialism, Hayek and company seem to ignore all of the democratic socialist nations and the very high standard of living and freedom they attained. Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, and even post-War Britain all had democratic socialist governments and free people.
The fact is that humans are social; we live in societies. Our sociology determines our psychology, not the other way around (sociology is more fundamental than psychology). And ideological individualism is a pathology for a social animal.
Some birds and most mammals have adopted a social lifestyle. I won't comment here on social insects since they work on different principles. The social lifestyle is one of the most successful evolutionary strategies in the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth. Certainly, the success of humans as a species is directly related to our ability to work together in large numbers for a common cause. We actually enjoy working together.
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| Amish men raising a barn together. |
By the way, I don't cite animal examples to drag us down: "we're no better than animals". I cite animal examples to emphasise the universality of these observations about morality and togetherness. I also want to emphasise that no supernatural explanation of morality is needed.
As the late, great, Frans de Waal pointed out, a social lifestyle minimally requires two capacities: empathy and reciprocity.
Empathy is the capacity to use physical cues to internally model how other people are feeling. Which means we don't just know what others feel, we also feel it in our own bodies. This is why emotions are contagious. As social animals, we monitor how the group is disposed, i.e. who is feeling what towards whom. This allows us to accurately judge the potential and actual impacts of our actions on others, and to moderate our behaviour accordingly. This is morality in a nutshell. But we don't just respond in the moment. We also keep track of and respond to how people have acted towards us, which requires the capacity for reciprocity.
Reciprocity is the capacity to form relationships of mutual obligation. It is keeping track of these obligations that creates a limit on the size of groups. The famous "Dunbar Number"—150—was derived by comparing primate group sizes with the volume of their neocortex. Robin Dunbar showed there is a strong correlation between these. Humans can keep track of the history of how members of the group interact in groups up to around 150, though there is considerable individual variation. Beyond 150, we can still form groups, but the sense of mutual obligation is more tenuous as the group size increases. With strangers, we typically do not feel a sense of obligation, except where it is imposed on us by nature: for example, the culture of hospitality common to many desert-dwelling societies.
However, reciprocity only holds a group together if there is some tendency for generosity. Someone has to start sharing, or no one would share. Social animals have to be prosocial, or sociality per se doesn't work. At the very least, mammalian mothers have to be willing to care for newborn infants, or they don't survive.
Anyone who reneges on the obligations of reciprocity has created an unfair situation. De Waal and other animal ethologists showed that social mammals are keenly aware of fairness (see especially his TED Talk). We intuitively understand that unequal rewards are unfair. We know it, and we also feel it deeply. Since the survival of the group relies on maintaining the integrity of the network of mutual obligations, we are highly motivated to be fair and to re-establish fairness when it breaks down. We call the latter "justice".
So our concepts of morality, fairness, and justice all emerge naturally from our having evolved social lifestyles and large brains. The rudiments are all visible, at least to some extent, in all social animals, suggesting universality. What may be unusual in humans is ethics, understood as abstract principles on which more concrete moral rules can be based. It is abstract ethics that allows us to adapt moral rules to new situations, for example (note that Buddhism lacks any ethical discourse, so Buddhists generally take a conservative view—no new rules—or they draw on the ethics of the surrounding culture for making ad hoc rules).
Being a member of a social species is not the only form of biological interconnection that we participate in. Let's now look at some others.
Evolution and Exosymbiosis
I have long been a fan of Lynn Margulis (1938 – 2011). Margulis got a few things spectacularly wrong, especially later in life (notably her views on HIV were badly wrong). But her overall contribution to biology was pivotal for modern science and for my own views.
Notably, Margulis discovered endosymbiosis in 1966, which I will deal with in the next section. Margulis also advocated, in scientific and popular publications, for much greater awareness of the role of symbiosis in biology and evolution.
Margulis, Lynn. (1998). The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Basic Books.
When I first studied biology, over 40 years ago, symbiosis was presented as something rather rare and unusual. Some organisms, such as lichens, enter into very close relationships in which two or more species rely on each other to survive. Lichens are the classic example. Lichens are a distinctive form of organism, but they are actually made of at least one fungus and one bacterium. Some species of lichens include both a filamentous (or hyphae-forming) fungus and a single-celled fungus (or yeast).
From quite early on, Margulis argued that symbiosis was much more common than allowed by traditional biology. Indeed, Margulis was critical of Darwin's (and the Darwinian) focus on competition and violence amongst animals (a view that Frans de Waal also rebelled against early in his academic career).
According to Margulis, this jaundiced view was heavily influenced by the preoccupations of Victorian ruling-class men, i.e. patriarchy and imperialism. That is to say, representing nature as "red in tooth and claw" suited the ruling class men of Europe—of which Darwin was a member—because they were busy trying to conquer, appropriate, and exploit the entire world. Darwin was able to spend 20 years developing his ideas on natural selection because he was never burdened by having to work for a living. Nor did he have to accept patronage. Having inherited enough wealth to live on, he could simply focus on his gentlemanly pursuit of science and volunteer work for learned societies. And this was the norm at the time. There were no working-class scientists.
Nor was this the end of the trend. Richard Dawkins, arguably the most prominent biologist of the twentieth century, applied Hayek's neoliberal worldview to biology to come up with the "selfish gene". Cooperation, communities, symbiosis and all that were simply explained away as being "motivated by self-interest". The conclusion is too obviously ideological rather than objective. Later in life, Dawkins is famous for two things: (1) apologetics for his own unreasonable views and (2) unreasonably picking fights with religious people using arguments that are guaranteed not to change anyone's mind. Dawkins, the biologist, never even tried to understand the phenomenon of "belief".
From the time of Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), liberals have seen humans not as prosocial, empathetic, and reciprocating but as vicious loners, forced by circumstances to live together, creating endless conflict and violence. Note that Hayek is clearly Hobbesian in outlook, and it is no coincidence that both of these ruling-class men lived through periods of all-out war and political chaos in Europe. They both attributed the violence of their own class and gender to the common people and argued that their own class provided stability. In psychological projection, a person projects alienated aspects of their own personality out into the world, in order to try to come into relationship with themselves.
Liberals see competition as the great winnower of species and individuals (social Darwinism has always been part of the liberal schtick). Competition takes on a moral character in which succeeding in competition equates to moral goodness. Hence, liberals expect "winners" in any competition to be moral role models.
According to liberalism, the apotheosis of competition means that we naturally adopt a kill-or-be-killed attitude. However, liberals also believe in Hobbes' Leviathan. This is linked to the Christian idea that God placed the ruling class in a superior position to other people, i.e. that of gamekeeper or farmer. The ruling class are the only ones who can impose order on the common people, who are otherwise nasty, brutish, and violent, but also lazy.
These views are all too obviously ideas that the ruling class of imperial Britain used to justify imperialist brutality towards societies, including their own. When a society routinely commits genocide in order to steal resources, it has to have some discourse that legitimises this. And liberalism was one of these.
In fact, symbiosis turns out to be ubiquitous in nature, with humans themselves providing one of the most striking examples.
The "human gut microbiome" is now a household concept. We all know that many beneficial bacteria, fungi, and protists live in our gut. They very obviously contribute to digestion, for example, by breaking down cellulose, which we cannot do without them.
We now know, for example, that when a baby mammal suckles milk from its mother, it is also swallowing bacteria that will become its gut microflora. And that this is vital for the normal development of the gut and the immune system.
I suspect that part of the reason that so many modern people have "allergies" and "sensitivities" is the trend since the 1960s to bottle-feed newborns. Of course, sometimes there is no choice, so demonising bottle-feeding is counterproductive. But there must be a way to introduce bottle-fed newborns to "good bacteria", some other way, rather than leaving it to chance. I suspect that the massive rise in morbid obesity may be related to aberrant gut microflora as well, although eating to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system (and thus reduce physiological arousal) is a huge factor. That is to say, we eat to calm down because we are hyperstimulated most of the time and have not learned any better ways.
So beneficial are our gut symbionts that one can now receive a "faecal transplant" in which faecal matter from a healthy person—said to contain "good bacteria"—is introduced to the bowel of an unhealthy person, with a view to restoring their health. Apparently, this can work. Various foods with "good bacteria" are also popular, though whether these survive passing through the stomach is moot. Stomach acids kill the vast majority of microorganisms.
Another very striking example of ubiquitous symbiosis is the mycorrhizal fungi that grow in and around tree roots. The fungal filaments (hyphae) live partly in the tree roots and partly in the soil. They break down the soil and transport nutrients into the roots, thus nourishing the tree.
There is some suggestion that mycorrhizal fungi form underground networks in forests that link trees together and allow them to share resources. From what I've read, the full-on clickbait version of this story is to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, we can say that symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi are very important to the thriving of many plants.
All animals have extensive symbiotic relations with gut bacteria. But our outer surfaces are also an ecosystem. Not only are we constantly covered in microorganisms, but we also play host to organisms such as eyebrow mites that live in hair follicles. We are an ecosystem for such critters.
Margulis also notes that bacteria evolve rapidly. They have generations of about 20 minutes. Every bacterial cell can, at least in principle, share genetic material with any other bacteria, regardless of species. Indeed, Margulis sometimes argued that one can take this to mean that bacteria are all one species. In any case, bacteria are highly promiscuous and routinely swap genes. This is how a trait like antibiotic resistance can spread rapidly in a population of bacteria.
Another feature of evolution that the Darwinists downplay is hybridisation. Again, when I was studying biology, hybridisation was presented as an exception. Fast forward 50 years, and it turns out that all humans are the result of the hybridisation of more than one human species. Most Homo sapiens carry some genes from one or more of Homo neanderthalensis, Homo naledi, Homo longi (aka Denisovans), and/or Homo floresiensis. Possibly others as well.
Margulis pointed out that where organisms fertilise eggs externally, hybridisation is very common. Some 20% of plants and 10% of fish routinely hybridise.
Finally, we can point to many examples of coevolution in which two species evolve a dependence on each other. The most obvious examples are plants and their pollinators. Some of these relationships are so specific that only one species of insect is capable of fertilising a particular flower. The plant puts considerable resources into attracting appropriate pollinators, and pollinators expend considerable resources collecting and distributing pollen. Each benefits more or less equally from the relationship, and they come to rely on each other to survive. This is surely the very opposite of competition. If the dynamic here were competitive, one of the partners would lose out. It would become a form of commensalism or parasitism.
Even parasitism is considerably more complex than it seems. For example, there is a widespread belief, backed up by robust evidence, that eradicating common human parasites in the modern world has led to the immune system being poorly calibrated, which contributes to the rise in autoimmune diseases and "allergies" in modern times. This is sometimes called the "hygiene hypothesis". We evolved to deal with common parasites and, ironically, not having them, which would intuitively be seen as wholly good, is actually a disruption of the normal order of things and leaves us maladapted. Just as faecal transplants are a thing, some doctors have tried infecting patients with relatively harmless roundworm parasites as a way of correcting an immune system imbalance. The jury is still out, but the idea is not completely mad.
While competition is certainly a factor in evolution, it is far from being the only one. Lynn Margulis convinced me that cooperation, communities, symbiosis, hybridisation, and co-evolutionary dependencies are every bit as important to evolution. Species not only diverge, but they also converge, creating evolutionary leaps. Margulis also alerted me to the ideological nature of some scientific conclusions regarding nature and evolution, especially the influence of patriarchy and neoliberalism. The story of how important symbiosis is to evolution is brought into focus by Margulis's 1967 breakthrough article.
Endosymbiosis
In the mid-1960s (around the time I was born), an early career scientist, then known as Lynn Sagan (married to celebrity scientist Carl Sagan), sent a novel paper to a series of science journals. After many rejections, the paper was eventually published as
Sagan. L. (1967). "On the origin of mitosing cells." Journal of Theoretical Biology. 14(3):255-74. Available online in numerous places.
Part of the abstract reads:
By hypothesis, three fundamental organelles: the mitochondria, the photosynthetic plastids and the (9+2) basal bodies of flagella were themselves once free-living (prokaryotic) cells. The evolution of photosynthesis under the anaerobic conditions of the early atmosphere to form anaerobic bacteria, photosynthetic bacteria and eventually blue-green algae (and protoplastids) is described. The subsequent evolution of aerobic metabolism in prokaryotes to form aerobic bacteria (protoflagella and protomitochondria) presumably occurred during the transition to the oxidizing atmosphere.
This hypothesis was subsequently tested and found to be accurate. This process, in which one single-celled organism ends up permanently and dependently living inside another, is now called endosymbiosis. In the meantime, Sagan remarried and changed her name again to Lynn Margulis, which is how I refer to her throughout.
In 1967, endosymbiosis was a radical theory, though some precedents in Russian microbiology were largely ignored in greater Europe because it was the height of the Cold War. Sixty years later, and this idea that organelles within eukaryote cells were once "free-living" is normative. This radical discovery is now such a commonplace that many modern discussions of endosymbiosis do not even mention Margulis or her role in it. Nick Lane, for example, who is at the forefront of abiogenesis research, has repeatedly downplayed the contributions of Margulis.
It's fair to say that Margulis thought radically differently from most other people and that she was outspoken about her views. For a woman in the 1960s and 1970s, being outspoken (especially towards men) was seen as a serious character flaw. Many men were (and are) intimidated by a strong, intelligent woman. And, unfortunately, Margulis wasn't always right. However, she was right about endosymbiosis, and this is one of the most profound discoveries in the history of science. It is every bit as important as discovering DNA in terms of understanding how life and evolution work.
The prokaryotes are largely represented by bacteria and archaea (previously known as "extremophile bacteria"). Prokaryote cells have no nucleus and little internal structure. Their nuclear material is in a loop rather than a linear chromosome.
The eukaryotes are fungi, plants, and animals. Eukaryote cells have a nucleus, with chromosomes, and many other internal structures, such as mitochondria.
Prokaryote organisms are far more numerous in biomass and variety. Animals are relatively unimportant to life on Earth; if we all disappeared, the prokaryotes would hardly notice, except those that specialise in living in/on us. Some plants rely on animals for reproduction. But not all, by any means.
We can diagram the process by which combinations of prokaryotes led to the various eukaryote "kingdoms".
In the standard, neoDarwinian account of evolution, separated populations of a species subjected to differing environmental pressures will slowly diverge over time and become two distinct species. This has now been observed both in the lab and in nature. Evolution, per se, is a fact. Evolutionary theory is our explanation of this fact. Evolutionary theory is taught as a monoculture, at least up to undergraduate level.
Darwin himself diagrammed the process of evolution as a branching tree, i.e. as a series of splits. This is still by far the most common way of representing evolution. I wrote a critique of this view in an essay titled: Evolution: Trees and Braids (27 December 2013). My suggestion that that we needed to represent evolution as a braided stream, since this allows for convergence and recombination.
I've already commented above on the ubiquity of exosymbiosis and hybridisation in nature. What I want to emphasise here is that endosymbiosis doesn't fit the neoDarwinian view of evolution at all because it is evolution by addition and recombination, rather than an accumulation of mutations. This alone tells us that the Darwinian view is incomplete.
In terms of my view of the world, the fact that our very cells began as small communities of cells within cells is a profound confirmation of the importance of communities and cooperation in nature at every level.
Similarly, our genome can be seen as a community of cooperating genes. The idea of individual genes, let alone "selfish" individual genes, makes little sense. Genes are always part of a genome. Even when bacteria swap genes, they incorporate new genes into their genome. We can talk theoretically and abstractly about individual genes, and we methodologically identify the corresponding function of the gene. But this is an abstract concept. In reality, genes only occur in genomes. A gene simply cannot function outside of a genome and the associated infrastructure.
The concept of the "selfish gene" is nonsensical, even as a metaphor.
So far, I've been delving down the taxonomic hierarchy into the microscopic. This is all too familiar in a reductionist environment and might have passed without comment. However, I am very critical of ideological reductionism. I believe that structure is also real and that structure anti-reductionism is a necessary counterpart to substance reductionism.
In the last section of this essay, therefore, I want to look up.
Gaia
I've already noted that social animals almost invariably live in family-oriented communities (with occasional solitary outliers). But we can also observe that each extended family exists in a network of inter-familial relations, often linked by intermarriage.
Every human community is part of a network of communities embedded in an environment. We are also part of the local ecosystem. And the local ecosystem is part of the global ecosystem, also called the biosphere or more poetically, Gaia.
The Gaia hypothesis was first proposed by chemist James Lovelock (1919 – 2022) in 1975, with help from none other than Lynn Margulis. The classic statement of the idea appeared in book form in 1979.
Lovelock J (1979). Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press.
The Gaia hypothesis says that the biosphere as a whole is a complex feedback mechanism that "works" to keep the surface of the earth suitable for life, i.e. at maintaining homeostasis. Lovelock introduced the idea of "daisy world" as a simple cybernetic model of how life might achieve homeostasis on a planetary scale.
Interestingly, the Gaia hypothesis emerged after Lovelock was commissioned by NASA to help them figure out how to detect extraterrestrial life. Gaia maintains surface conditions that definitely could not occur in the absence of life. For example, high levels of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere require constant replenishment by living things. So any planet with high oxygen is a candidate for harbouring life.
Life causes our planet to exist in a state that is very far from the (chemical) equilibrium that we see on planets with no life, like Mars or Venus.
In order to understand life, we have to take a holistic view. Rather than reducing everything to its base substance and calling that "reality", we have to see that reality includes structure. Everything we can see with human eyes is a complex object with numerous layers of structure, lending it many structural properties (sometimes vaguely referred to as "emergent properties"). To say that complex objects are "not real" or "just illusions" is not helpful (or true).
When it comes to life, every structure is embedded in larger structures, up to Gaia, which is the ultimate living structure for life on Earth. Reality is substantial, but it's also structural and systematic.
From the lowest level of description to the highest, life is structures made of structures and systems within systems. Nothing living ever exists as a standalone or independent entity. Everything is dependent on everything else. The Hobbesian, lone-wolf version of humanity really only applies to sociopaths and psychopaths (who seem to be over-represented in the ruling/commercial class).
Biologists are generally in a better position to see this than physicists. A biologist may well dissect (or even vivisect) an organism to see what it's made of. They may well quantify what elements are found in an organism. We're mainly carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. But clearly, elements like iron and magnesium play essential roles in our metabolism, as well as being potential toxins. I grew up in a region that was low in cobalt, and this meant that farmed animals would not thrive on our pastures without cobalt supplements.
However, if a biologist wants to really understand some organism, they have to observe how it interacts with its physical and social environment. That is to say, how an organism reacts to physical stimulus, how it relates to others of its own species, and how it interacts with other species. And since the local environment is a product of the bulk environment, in the long run, we have to see all life on Earth in terms of its contribution to Gaia.
A common misconception about life is that it breaks the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that in a closed system, physical entropy always increases. The misconception stems from ignoring the words "closed system". A cell is not a closed system, since molecules are constantly entering and leaving. An organism is not a closed system. Gaia is not a closed system.
However, even if we stipulate that the second law might apply, the overall effect of Earth having a biosphere is a local increase in entropy. Visible and UV photons from the sun impact the Earth, where they are absorbed by rocks, water, and living things. Eventually, the incoming energy is radiated back out into space as infrared photons. And for every visible-UV photon arriving on Earth, twenty infrared photons are radiated back into space, with a net increase in entropy for Earth and its environment. So, if the second law applies (doubtful), then it is not broken by life.
However, simple cybernetic feedback does not give us a complete explanation of life. For this, we have to change up a gear.
The Free Energy Principle
It's apparent, for example, that if the brain operated purely on homeostatic feedback, it would not be able to respond at the speed that it does. For this, we need to introduce the idea of allostasis. And allostasis leads us into the final big idea that is essential for understanding life: the Free Energy Principle.
The idea of allostasis is that the brain constantly predicts what will happen next based on the present inputs and past experience. And if the expected input does not match the actual input, then the brain has two options: (1) change the prediction, i.e. update the expectation based on the new input; or (2) change the input, i.e. make some change in the world. And this enables a faster, more adaptable response.
Anyone familiar with the concept of Bayesian statistics should already recognise this paradigm. Bayesian statistics is a mathematical formalism that allows a statistician to quantify how their expectations change as new information comes in, as part of an iterative process. And this, in turn, has strong connections to information theory.
Enter Karl Friston, who primarily works on making information gleaned from medical scans into meaningful images. This involves expertise in statistical analysis and information theory.
Making these connections led Friston to propose the free energy principle. There is, as yet, no popular account of the free energy principle and the explanations that are available all rely on background knowledge of statistics and information theory that I don't have.
See, for example:
Friston, K., et al. (2023) "The free energy principle made simpler but not too simple." Physics Reports 1024: Pages 1-29.
It is not "simple" at all unless you have the appropriate background knowledge.
This is something I'm still trying to understand, and I'm hoping to write an essay on it in the near future. But my intuition tells me that this idea is hugely important. Listening to Friston talk about it, I feel that I glimpse something significant. It's important enough to try to offer some impressionistic notes and encourage readers to follow up.
The free energy principle says that any self-organising system—living or non-living—that has a permeable boundary separating it from the general environment and that persists over time, will appear to take actions that can be mathematically described in terms of Bayesian statistics or in terms of "free energy" (a concept from information theory). Friston has shown these to be mathematically equivalent.
Where a prediction fails to match an input, Friston calls this "surprise". This is mathematically related to the informational property "free energy". Hence, "the free energy principle". It turns out that minimising surprise with respect to predictions is mathematically equivalent to minimising free energy (I suppose we might also relate this to the idea of the "path of least action" from classical physics, but I need to look into this).
Rather than describing life as simply reacting to the environment, we can now describe all living things as iteratively predicting the future and testing predictions and optimising their responses to minimise surprise, resulting in changing predictions or changing inputs (external actions). Living systems involve both homeostasis and allostasis.
In a sense, all the brain does is receive millions of input signals, process them in ways that are not fully understood, and generate millions of output signals, most of which are internal and only affect expectations. In her book How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman-Barrett notes that 90% of the incoming connections to the visual cortex are from other parts of the brain, rather than from the eyes.
This principle turns out to be an incredibly useful way of modelling and thus understanding living systems. It can be used to explain how even simple bacterial cells are apparently able to act intelligently (i.e. move towards food, move away from waste, or join up to form a colony). Whether there is some abstract "intelligence" behind this intelligent action is moot, but it's not an obvious conclusion, and it's not required by the free energy principle.
I have never been a fan of panpsychism, which says that all matter is "conscious" (by degrees). It's such obvious nonsense that I find it hard to imagine why anyone takes it seriously. The free energy principle makes some broad claims, but it doesn't commit to metaphysical nonsense. The fact is that all living organisms do have a range of behaviours that they employ intelligently, without any evidence of being "conscious" or "intelligent". Intelligent behaviour is universal in living things. Being conscious of the world or self (or both) is rare. And, prior to the advent of the free energy principle, we were at a loss to explain this. This left huge gaps for "gods-of-the-gaps" style arguments for the supernatural. The free energy principle appears to plug those holes.
I believe that, in the long run, the free energy principle will stand alongside the concepts of natural selection, symbiosis, and Gaia in terms of the history of understanding life. It offers a powerful, but also deflationary, account of the mechanisms that underpin life and mind.
Conclusion
The idea that "there is no society, there are only individuals and families" is arse-about-face. Rather, there are no individuals; there are only societies (and a family is a microcosm of a society). The individual is a mythological figure. We can talk about them in theory, but we rarely meet them in person. As Oscar Wilde said,
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Me too, for the most part, but I do at least try to give credit where it is due.
We are social animals. We evolved to live in social groups. Which means we evolved the capacity for empathy and the capacity for reciprocity. We evolved to be prosocial and moral. We evolved a sense of fairness and justice. Assuming we have not completely suppressed these capacities, we don't need anyone to tell us how to be moral.
Competition is certainly a feature of life, but we have massively over-emphasised it for ideological reasons (patriarchy and imperialism). Consider the case of collectively making music. Music-making is not a competition, and turning it into one does not enhance it in any way. Making music actually requires selfless cooperation and is at its best when the egos of the players are not evident at all. And playing music, in an appropriate non-competitive context, brings out the best in people. It is no surprise, then, that in capitalist societies, the collective elements of music get reduced to passive consumption. And competition is enforced on musicians in ways that only detract from the music.
Sociology is more fundamental than psychology, in the sense that we may be born with an individual temperament and/or personality that is relatively unchanging, but we develop in response to the environment we find ourselves in. We learn to be a member of the local social group in more or less the same way that we learn the language of the group we find ourselves in.
Looking down the taxonomic hierarchy, our cells—our very genomes—are tiny, symbiotic, cooperative communities in which every component member prospers together. Looking up, we always live in families embedded within communities, embedded in societies, embedded in ecosystems, embedded in the biosphere as a whole, or Gaia.
At every level, living things are generally collectivist. And, left to their own devices, humans are naturally collectivist. Nothing could be more normal than socialism. Every group of friends I've ever been part of was leaderless. We just organised ourselves without much effort.
I do not deny that individuals and species compete with each other, sometimes violently. However, I emphatically believe that the incidence and importance of competition has been grossly overstated by scientists with ideological—reductive, patriarchal, and imperialist—views.
We might even say the togetherness is what gives human lives meaning and purpose. The many modern people who say that they lack meaning and purpose are inevitably disconnected or alienated from society. What we all need (except for psychopaths) is a sense of connection. And it is precisely this connectedness that modern political discourse—neoliberalism and capitalism—seeks to replace with the ideas of ownership, control, and competition. This is aberrant and abhorrent in a social species.
We are social.
We are social.
We are social.
