These are questions that the Consilience Project thought would be useful to contemplate for helping our civilization get out of the hole it’s in. They are meant for discussion, and hopefully these tentative answers will generate some. I might be guilty of what some have called the Omnicause, attributing the cause of all these problems to the dissolution of certain levels of organization from the past, or the failure to materialize certain higher levels of organization which were absent in the past and are still absent now. I am probably wrong about this, so please suggest other possible causes.

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An Omnicause might lead to an Omnisolution, or omni-answer (in this case it would be to reform previously dissolved intermediate levels and form previously non-existent higher levels), but there are usually multiple ways to implement this solution. Also, there are plenty of problems that are NOT addressed by these questions and they will probably have different solutions. Please suggest other possible answers/solutions.

● How can we adequately address multi-polar traps, particularly those that drive catastrophic risks? 

We have hypotheses that multipolar traps exist for 2 reasons. Both have to do with levels of organization. One of them has to do with either a lack of intermediate levels of organization, or a lack of a higher level. The other has to do with psychology at the individual human level of organization (which is itself a collective of psychological parts). 

1. When there are no intermediate levels, entities like people or tribes experience insufficiently regulated (by higher levels like nations or corporations) competition between them that can lead to behaviors which are beneficial to the winners in the short run but possibly harmful to everyone in the long run. We have seen in previous posts that this is a consequence of having too many parts for a higher level to manage.

When there are no higher levels (for example above nations or corporations) there is no level to regulate the competition. When there are higher levels to regulate lower levels, multipolar trap behavior (called free riding, or cheating, or cancer in biology) is addressed by the following strategies:

a. punishment for cheating, 

b. reward for not cheating, 

c. withholding of reward for cheating, 

d. redirecting/incentivizing cheaters for special tasks that help the higher level (such as warriors against other groups, or sperm/eggs in biological sexually reproducing systems being tasked with reproduction while most of the time they are free loading), and 

e. aligning the interest of the higher level with the lower level–this latter has several sub-strategies including :

e1. reducing difference in fitness and fungibility of lower-level parts.  

e2. finding synergies between specialized parts.

The answer may not be to reduce all competition, but only certain kinds of competition that are harming the group.

2. The second reason multipolar traps exist is if people are not getting their basic needs for transcendence and belonging met, they might instead turn to trying to have power over others (psychopathy). If this is not handled at the lower levels of human organization (such as individual human, family and local community), it is harder to handle at the higher levels because of too many individuals. Psychopathy is also harder to handle at higher levels because it is harder to monitor, easier to evade regulation by the higher levels, and easier to hide behind one’s nation or company than just oneself or one’s family.

So the obvious solution to 1 above is to have intact evolutionary levels above any level where cheating or blind-to-future-costs competition occurs. This has to happen all the way up to a level which includes the whole earth (and if we ever find extra-terran civilizations, there will have to be higher levels still). What we don’t want are totalitarian solutions (extreme versions of a, c, and e1) at any levels. I’m not sure how to insure that, perhaps some friendly competition between lower levels (there is also a mathematical reason for this which we won’t get into here), occasional segregation of levels which are parts of yet higher levels, and education towards prosociality and the inter-dependence of life would help. The ability of lower levels to maintain some autonomy has been termed subsidiarity by some (e.g. Schumacher and other catholic scholars) and fits in with the integral idea of “include and transcend”, but that doesn’t tell us how to achieve it. Being conscious of not overstepping (by a higher level) the responsibilities of a lower level might also help (conservatives often mention this with respect to the federal government vis a vis states and individuals in the US).

But also (2), if the lower levels are doing their job of keeping (generalized) psychopathy at bay and preventing psychopaths from rising to higher levels, there is less fuel for either totalitarianism or multipolar “cheating” that leads to bad outcomes for all in the long run. Instead, the people who percolate to the higher levels have wisdom.

To summarize, individual psychopathy has to be handled at lower levels of individual, family and community, and cheating at higher levels has to be handled by even higher levels with one of the strategies a-e. At the highest level of the whole earth (a functional UN) there is no incentive to cheat, it does not gain that level a competitive advantage, unless extra-terrestrial civilizations are involved (in which case we need a functional United Planets…).

● How can we systematically identify and resolve perverse incentives? 

This is related to multipolar traps (can there be multipolar traps without perverse incentives? And why would perverse incentives be a problem unless they led to multipolar traps? Higher levels have to make sure incentives for their lower levels are not perverse. There is currently no higher level than multinational corporations (which only care about themselves and their lower departmental levels), the UN (it can’t function as a free rider-preventative if hegemonic free-riding nations have veto power) and WEF (not sure about their effectiveness in preventing perverse incentives at lower levels) to do this.

● How can we systematically identify and internalize externalities? 

These also seem like a special case of the multipolar trap generator. And the solution is the same: higher levels monitor the lower levels to reduce their externalizations, and this is easiest done at the levels of family and community. But also when a community is land based, some externalizations are harder to do because one is constrained to one’s land. It is still possible to spew out smoke into the air, or dump toxics into rivers, but exploiting one’s neighbors or poisoning their land are harder, due to fast consequences. Also, some externalization of costs is intrinsic to the nature of life. Things work best when one is able to coordinate, instead of just competing parts. And this is related to 2 traits in humans that have to be integrated at all levels of organization to reduce their inherent conflict, that superficially we call liberal and conservative. We are trying to improve our understanding of these parts (the conflict between which we believe to be a generator function of much human conflict).

● How can we create a sense-making commons adequate to the needs and challenges of 21st-century democracies? 

Tristan Harris and Gil Ben Moshe (another collaborator, see his website: MEDIA NUDGE – Home (weebly.com)) are on this. Better algorithms to prevent bubbles and encourage information exchange. But also make sure that people have their basic needs for belonging and transcendence (not to mention ability to concretely contribute to real people in family and community, food, warmth and shelter) met so they don’t have to project unmet needs and unresolved traumas onto imaginary enemies on the internet, or worse, in real life.

● How can we create modern cultures that reliably develop wisdom in people at scale?

Besides needs for belonging, contribution and transcendence, make sure people are getting their needs for surmountable challenge and flow met. Do not coddle people, as in the present system which seems to design for insulating people from the consequences of their actions. Connect people to costs, not just benefits. And connect people to higher levels, so they see the costs to others in those levels and are incentivized against free riding by those higher levels. Learn from the Amish, and scale to higher levels. Perhaps some assistance from AI at higher scales.

● What is the future of education, economics, and work in a post-technological automation world? 

The problem of automation is coupled to both over-population (see the mouse experiments of John Calhoun as to what happens when there are too many mice and not enough social roles for them) and the availability of concentrated energy resources–the costs of automation might not be able to be borne by a post-petroleum world. Perhaps we (meaning higher levels of organization, above companies) should be cautious about which things to automate and which to not automate in order to make sure that everyone has a role to play and can feel contributive. Also, as petroleum reserves dwindle and become more expensive to extract, our population will decline and some of our existential problems will diminish, perhaps with some initial new problems of too much supply and not enough demand of some previously mass-produced goods. Perhaps this would necessitate a move away from mass production to more localizable tech. I don’t see an educational problem if local communities are allowed to choose what they want to educate their children about, as long as there are networks between these communities and some competition that selects for better education. Evolution usually selects for more accurate models of the world, though there are other factors, which may be stronger in our post-truth internet world and need to be made weaker (see above with Gil and Tristan) if we want truth to win out.

● What are the necessary and sufficient design requirements for a global technosphere and social sphere that are in lasting harmony with the biosphere? 

Some social, technological and economic localization, rehabilitation of psychological individuals, families and communities, along with functional higher levels which respect the lower levels and the principle of subsidiarity. Higher levels overstepping their responsibilities is easier when there is not enough subsidiarity. Lower levels need to segregate according to their interests, skills, gifts and phenotypes, otherwise there are too many competing interests and needs at the lower levels. The competition at higher levels is going to be reduced by modularity (smaller numbers) and at lower levels by common needs and interests. Extreme scoring Conservatives and liberals should have their own schools, cities and states, with higher levels of organization to regulate trade and resource sharing/competition between them. And we should encourage people who are more balanced among their liberal and conservative parts (how?).

● How do we prevent catastrophes arising from decentralized exponential technologies while ensuring the solution is not dystopic or susceptible to capture? 

See my answer to the multipolar trap question. I am personally not convinced that exponential technology is any different than a biological population that is growing in a way proportional to its own number (or density) initially, when there is not much resource competition. Once there is enough competition (from other technologies), or when there are resource limits, the growth slows and the population number goes to an S curve, equilibrating, though it can also crash. Equilibration can also happen with sanctions or incentives imposed by higher levels (but they have to have all the properties of evolutionary levels, which global capitalism or socialism do not), without outcompeting other technologies, or living populations of humans or other species. I recommend reading Atlas Hugged, though DS Wilson does not understand the constraints necessary for bona fide non-trivial groups to emerge and thinks that competition at higher levels evolves those higher levels, which is logically impossible (chicken and egg)*.

● How would we design an ideal open society from scratch today? 

The degree of openness has to be monitored so as to allow lower levels (at least the individual human level) some autonomy. A soup of free individuals who are part of multinational corporations and nation-states, without families, communities, villages, and perhaps other intermediate levels, will be either a dystopian or chaotic self-terminating society, even if open. 

Also, we must understand better the differences between liberal and conservative phenotypes. Liberals want more openness and higher levels, conservatives want less openness and lower levels. Each has its selective advantages under different conditions, for example low competition and high resource abundance encourages the liberal phenotype (and vice versa), with obvious policy consequences. The phenotypic differences also have implications for the kinds of education they prefer.

For levels such as family and community to function well, people also need to understand how constraints are important for them to function. Capitalism (and even Scandinavian socialism) encourage individualism (or more precisely sub-individual dopamine seeking parts) and destroy the constitutive constraints (usually membranes) of psychological individuals, families and communities. Agreements about how resources are shared and produced (prioritizing these levels before exchanging with higher levels) are essential. This is all part of the Deacon view of emergence, that it happens because of constitutive constraints. The challenge is to figure out which constraints are necessary to maintain these intermediate levels. This is part of the research of CARE. Also, practically we need to outcompete the current economy by getting together well-integrated individuals into families, then into communities, then into federations or these and perhaps into nation states if these federations are challenged by existing nation states. Hopefully the competition will play out on economic and well-being fronts, not military ones.

● What are the design requirements for the future of the materials economy? 

circular materials processing (we are missing some plastic recycling tech), 7th generation lifetimes of products, no displacing of human labor by machines when there are people who want to do a task, localized production (some new tech is required for this, and some relearning of pre-industrial tech) and consumption for smaller, less noisy feedback loops (at least for basic needs), and the precautionary principle. There will be companies which don’t want to do these things, and we need to form a network of companies that do these things, with stiff penalties for defection, and independence from the rest of the economy, that can outcompete the others.

● What would be required for an enactable plan to prevent all of the major irreversible ecological catastrophes in time?

What if there is no way to prevent them (without totalitarian measures) and we are too late? It does not mean the extinction of humanity. What if by putting resources into this possibly unsolvable problem, we are taking resources away from doing things that could help us in the long run, such as rebuilding families, communities and rehabilitating land that is open to communities but (mostly) closed to outside agents without the permission of the communities?

*Competition at higher levels can help those levels evolve better internal cooperation, but can’t be responsible for the emergence of those levels in the first place.