JordanGreenhall

There are a number of nomenclature issues here (I'm reminded of the challenges faced by Pierce and Whitehead), so bear with me as I struggle through language that will undoubtedly repurpose perfectly good words and force them into shapes that will be confusing and confounding to those who know more than I do.

Our fundamental units are the Event and the Meme.  An Event is a dynamic relation of dynamic relations.  In principle, every relationship is an Event, but in practice only those Events that endure or repeat, which I will call "coherent" Events, are of interest.  Thus, if two strangers pass in the night, that is an Event, but an incoherent one and of relatively little interest.  But if we discover that these two strangers pass in exactly the same way every night - then we have a coherent event that is of interest.  Coherence is what provides the "thingness" or "causal efficacy" of the Event as an Event.  This is important: a coherent Event can (and will) effect the world around it.  

A Meme is the most abstract understanding of an Event.  It is the Event as information, as description, as diagram.  I am aware that this is both highly abstract (by definition) and an unusual use of the term "Meme", but I think this is the right place to play that card and the right way - so bear with me.  In its abstraction, the Meme is indifferent to a very large number of specifics in the Event and this is precisely its importance.

We said that coherent Event is one that endures or repeats.  But since every Event, by implication, is a state of the entire Universe, we can see that no Event understood in its absolute totality, is ever coherent.  Thus, it is only an abstraction of the Event, the "important" or "relevant" parts that can be said to repeat.  This is the Meme.  When two strangers pass the same way every night, what me mean by the "same" of the strangers and the way as understood by the sample size of "every night" is the strong reduction of information that makes it possible for the Event to repeat.  

And in just the same way that an Event can be extended to the Universe, we can see that a Meme can "select" an infinite number of aspects of any Event.  There is for any Event, an infinite number of Memes - and this is OK, because it is only that which repeats (which is coherent) that matters.  The sheer act of repetition cleaves off these infinities into increasingly tractable finitudes.

Events do repeat - they do have coherence and causal efficacy.  In fact, coherent Events is all that we observe and all that we mean by causation.  I will waive my hands wildly at the lowest causal level of Events (the domain of quantum physics) only pausing to anchor the fundamentals of this most foundational domain.  

An Event is coherent when it repeats.  I know that time is hopelessly problematic, but for now I'm going to take it relatively conventionally.  As you walk down the domain of Events to the lowest level, I think that it is precisely the issue of "repetition" that is of interest.  Repetition is interesting because it can take two forms  whose distinctions and conflations are interesting:

1. An event can "repeat" because it "endures" - that is, the "same" phenomenon in T0 is present in Tn.   Thus if we look at a given star and trace its development through time, we can identify it as an Event/Meme that endures.

2. An event can "repeat" because it consistently manifests the same Meme.  Thus, if we look at the concept of "star" and note that we see them forming over and over again in largely the same way, we see a coherent Event/Meme.   

The differences between 1 and 2 speak only to the slices of the Event that the Meme captures.  In the first case, the Meme captures specifics of spatial location and organization in time while the second is more general.  This distinction might seem trivial at this point, but it is interesting because it plays a key role in the balance of power between Event and Meme.  In the first case, the Event seems to dominate and the Meme seems at best to simply be along for the ride (as a meaningless abstract description of what is being driven by causal forces).  In the second case, it is the Meme that dominates and the Event is a purely probabilistic happenstance.  Stellar physics commands that if you have the right conditions in the Universe, stars will occur.   

What is intriguing is where these two modes interact:

3. Where a Meme is so constituted that its instantiation into an Event changes the space of probability such that the Event is more likely to become instantiated.  This can happen both because the Event can modulate its environment to endure longer (and therefore have more causal impact on the Universe) and/or because the Event can modulate its environment to increase the likelihood of instantiations of its Meme.  

In the first two cases, the relationship between Event and Meme is somewhat distant.  I call this relationship "instantiation" and "abstraction" respectively.  A given physical star is the instantiation of the Meme "star".  The Meme "star" is the abstraction of the event.  Again, obviously one can identify an infinite amount of information that is in a given star that is not in the Meme but it is precisely this that makes the third case interesting.  In the third case, the relationship is called "mediation".  The mediation relationship is most important when an Event uses its causal efficacy on other Events to increase the probability of instantiations of its Meme.  This, of course, a sort of restatement of evolution.

We can say that all forms of causal efficacy are mediation, but generally at very, very low fidelity.  A falling rock impresses itself on clay.  A lightning blot causes a thunder-clap.   In these, the signal of the Event (the trace of the Meme) is lost in the noise of the Universe.  But where the fidelity of the mediation is high enough, where the causal efficacy of the Event leads to an increase in the endurance of that event or the instantiations of the Meme, a whole new criticality is reached.  There is a lot of interesting work to be done linking the lowest causal levels up through chemistry, but I want to skip quickly to the levels that interest me most.  

Obviously, biological evolution fits nicely in this framework.  The introduction of the Meme at this level I think adds nuance to the standard evolutionary story.  Both the gene (a physical event of nucleotides and other molecules) and the organism (a physical event of cells, organs and tissues) are instantiations of the same Meme.  There is a ton of information that is contained in the gene event that is not transmitted to the organism event (and there is a ton of information that is contained in the organism event that was not contained in or specified by the gene event) but what makes them powerful is that the genes are capable of very high fidelity mediation of their Meme from one medium (nucleotides) into another medium (proteins).  All of this takes place, of course, in a completely probabilistic environment.  So what the genes do is precisely to modulate the probability landscape of the egg environment to dramatically increase the likelihood of instantiations of its Meme.  Of course probability doesn't stop at the egg.  Those Memes whose instantiations are more capable of modulating the probability landscape to increase their instantiation are more common (more "successful").  In a biological environment, the biggest constraints on instantiation are biomass, so successful competition for biomass is the crucial variable.  Thus, biological evolution is simply the rapidly discovered consequence of the basic rules of Event/Meme in a high fidelity environment.  

As it turns out (there might be good reasons for this but that is way beyond scope), those Memes that describe the kinds of events that we would call "nervous systems" seem to be pretty successful at efficient competition for biomass (the discovery of modeling and memory).  And this leads to the next big qualitative change.  Driven by evolution (probability enhancement) it was quickly discovered that recognizing regularities in probability space (Memes) was an exceptionally effective way to enhance probability of competitive success by being able to convert high-energy low probability strategies (physical trial and error) to low-energy high-probability strategies (neurally simulated trial and error and simulated heuristics).  Thus arises the entire apparatus of "mediation-sensitive" systems and "Meme detection and recognition" systems.    This, of course, is hyper-critical because rule #3 doesn't care about the nature of the medium.  A Meme that is mediated with high fidelity into the neural system is just as present and replicated as a Meme that is replicated into DNA.  This is an important point.  From the perspective of a Meme, being "instantiated" into a neural medium is generically equivalent to being "instantiated" into a complete organism.  The priority is not on mechanism but on statistics.  If being instantiated into a neural medium is more conducive to repeating, then this is a "more successful" #3 strategy.

Initially, of course, the process of being mediated into the neural medium is relatively low-repitition for the Meme.  A cat observing a bird generates a "copy" of "the bird" in its neural system.  There is definitely Meme mediation going-on here.  The Meme obviously isn't the same Meme that is contained in the birds genes, but there is a Meme that is instantiated in the physical form of the bird and instantiated in the neural medium of the cat.  These are two instantiations of the same Meme - one of which is mediated from the other.  But this is a short-lived and temporary Meme.  The bird flies away and the memory fades.  In the grand scheme of things, this isn't much of a repeat.  But once this system exists we get the very important mediation variant: learning/teaching.  Our cat is hunting a mouse.  It is being watched by its litter-mates.  The cat tries various different techniques and eventually succeeds.  The other cats (after a bit of practice) learn how to replicated this successful strategy.  More Meme mediation, but this time with a twist.   The Meme "how to successfully hunt mice" is reproducible *and* will lead to competitive success.  Rule #3.  The advantages are obvious.  Individual learning and heuristics can be transmitted to the larger population - vastly increasing competitive efficiency.  Quickly those cats who can't learn are selected out.  And those Memes that can effectively be learned and taught suddenly find a vast new space (population neurology) for successful repetition.

For a while, this partnership was a pretty small niche in the Meme scheme of things.  Learning and teaching afforded Memes (at best) a copy or so per organic neural system.  But as things proceeded and the competitive advantages of learning/teaching continued to provide an edge, it was discovered that these "learnable" Memes could be mediated outside of the neural medium.  "Throwing a rock" is a Meme.  This Meme can be learned by personal practice.  It can be learned by watching someone throw a rock.  It can be learned by reading about how to throw a rock.  In first case, there is one instantiation (the learner).  In the second, there are two instantiations (the learner and the teacher).  In the third case there are three enduring instantiations (the learner, the writer, the writing).  

Start running copies of the lesson and the shape of the Meme fitness landscape changes dramatically.  Rule #3 still applies, but the variables are novel.  There are two factors that constrain the fitness landscape of "learnable Memes" in a high mediation environment.

1.  The absolute size of the mediation environment.
2. The share of the mediation environment that the Meme occupies.

Both of which must be understood in time.  Thus, a Meme that is highly copied into a small medium pool, which pool quickly disappears is much less successful than a Meme that is thinly populated into a large medium pool that endures for a long time.  

It remains to be seen at this point what the next step in this dynamic looks like, but I think that we can be afforded some hand-holds as we think about the increasing independence of the Meme space from biological neural systems for their instantiation and/or endurance.  We certainly can start to draw lines to explain how and why certain trends of human cultural evolution have maintained over time (e.g., the relationship between the "nerd" and "technology" and their quite apparent co-evolutionary relationship).

Part I - The Problem

Lets start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).  When we design an economy, we have a few specific problems to solve:

* To identify the best ideas and experiences
* To identify the most capable individuals and groups
* To motivate the most capable individuals to form the most effective groups to deliver the best ideas and experiences
* To allocate resources to the most capable individuals and groups to most effectively deliver the best ideas and experiences

In addition, and crucially importantly, in an environment where some resources are scarce (i.e., there is not enough to go around) also

* To allocate those scarce resources such that the most deserving get at least what they need and only the least deserving are deprived.  

Now, of course, different social/economic systems have done a better or worse job at one or more of these objectives.  Different approaches perform differently in different actual conditions.  Our current system (which might be called 'capitalism' but that would raise too many issues so I will simply call it 'our current system') has been effective enough to have out-competed almost all other systems over the past half a millenium or so and has come at some very clever ways of elegantly solving these problems largely as a result of private property, money and price.  

We identify the best ideas and experiences simply by observing those that command the highest price (or, more specifically, generate the highest profits).  If a toyota sells more successfully than a chevy, we conclude that the toyota is 'better' than the chevy.  If Bob's pizza consistently commands a higher price than Sally's pizza, we conclude that Bob's is better.  (A given product or service may not be worth the average price to every given potential customer, but that is a different part of the story).

We identify the most capable individuals and groups by virtue of their ability to generate profits (i.e., to make money).  If we see that Apple is generating more profits than Dell, we conclude that Apple is more capable than Dell.  If we see that Bob is making more profit than Sally, we conclude that Bob is better at making pizza.

We motivate the most capable precisely by virtue of the reward associated with their profitable behaviour: Steve Jobs was able to do more of what he wanted and have more of what he desired than most precisely because his stewardship of Apple was capable and delivered high quality experiences - resulting in him making a lot of money.  Importantly, and this will be a major point later, we also motivate using the stick to the degree that *failure* to generate profits leads to lack of scarce resources (i.e., going hungry).  This is conventionally thought of as the "who is going to pick up the garbage and sweep the floors" piece of the economy.  The carrot is used to motivate the most capable to constantly refine their efforts towards the best ideas and experiences.  The stick is used to motivate everyone to contribute somewhere (including the dirty jobs that they would otherwise prefer not to do), lest they be left out in the cold.

And we allocate resources both directly (through market transactions and the generation of profit) and indirectly (through investment) to those most capable individuals and groups so that they have what they need to continue to deliver the best ideas and experiences.   

Its a clever system.  The circulation of money simultaneously evaluates quality and competence, rewards excellence, motivates behaviour and allocates resources.  When it works, it works.  It is, of course, riddled with holes, but over the past 500 years or so, it has generated impressive results.  However, all things pass and recent changes in conditions are beginning to indicate to a growing population of observers that our present system might be due for a replacement.

The first thread goes back to this problem of allocating scarce resources - determining who is affluent and who is impoverished.  For the long history of our current system - really up until the middle of the 20th Century, this was a (very) necessary evil.   The simple fact was that we didn't consistently have enough (food, houses, cars, etc.) to go around and so we needed some way to decide who got and who went without.  But by the turn of the 20th Century in the Western world and the middle of the 20th Century in the world at large, this started to shift.  Many (although never all) scarce resources began to become abundant.  By the early part of the 1900's, the United States produced more than enough food for every American to have enough to eat.  By the late 1960's, the world produced enough food for everyone on the world to have enough to eat.  Hunger was no longer a simple function of lack - it had become a function of our operating system.  This change gave rise to the (continuing) debate between two groups.  Those who began to see unfairness in some going hungry when we had more than enough to feed them (the progressives) and argued for a reform of our system so as to provide resources outside of the private property, money price system (the rise of the welfare state).  And those who argued that removing the signal of price and the motivation (both stick and carrot) of resource allocation based on profit would fatally undermine the functioning of our system - leading to deprivation for everyone.  This debate has waggled back and forth over the past century and a half and the answer is, of course, that both sides are correct.  Our current system does result in substantial inequity.  And removing the profit signal and the carrot/stick motivation will break the machine that has enabled (and supported) the rise of the human population from 1 to 7 billion in 200 years.  

As it goes, this first thread is something we can deal with.  We can pull back and forth between fairness and effectiveness twiddling the dial as conditions change as we have done for the past century.  We might do well, we might do poorly, but we will muddle through.  But this first thread is now being joined by several others - the result being that we need to (reasonably quickly) invent a quite new system that is simultaneously more effective and more just than the current system.  

Let us return to the problems that we want to solve:

* To identify the best ideas and experiences.  The current system is fundamentally tone deaf in three deep ways.  The first is that price (and profit) are rather dull instruments.  That restaurant A charges more money than restaurant B actually tells me very little about the quality of the experience I can get at either.  Hence the rise of curation and recommendation engines.  Yelp provides an entirely different currency than money to help us identify the best ideas and experiences.  Amazon does the same for books.  Rotten Tomatoes for movies, etc.  Of course, as these new information currencies flow and help us better identify the best ideas and experiences, price and profit start to provide a better signal as well - after Yelp, better restaurants get more business.  But we can see that price and profit are more of a result or a residuum than a cause or a driver.  The second (and equally important) problem is that having money does not necessary relate at all to being able to identify good ideas and experiences.  Just because the Walton family was able to figure out a better way to profit from delivering retail goods, does not mean that they have any particular insight into restaurants or art.  But, in our current system, because they have more money, they have more "votes" in the economy and their opinions will carry more weight. The final problem is related to the first - the low fidelity of the "profit" signal.  In this case relating to the many negative values that can get lost as some activity is resolved down to price and profit.  If shoe company A uses low cost child labor and shoe company B does not, the former might very well show a higher profit than the latter.  This does not reflect the notion that using low cost child labor is a better idea - only that the price/profit function loses a lot of important information and can, therefore, give us very poor results.

* To identify the most capable individuals and groups.  Here, again, the current system fails because of the low fidelity of money.  If I encounter two people with one million dollars, I can tell very little, really, about their virtues or merits.  "Gold hath no smell".  Person A might have made her money doing innovative and valuable work.  Person B might have made his stealing it.  Without access to the higher order information, the simple fact of their wealth tells me very, very little about their capability as individuals or groups.  This might sound like a frivolous problem, but it has played a great role in the (ongoing) financial crisis - if the rule of virtue is 'the activity that nets the most profit (including potential fines or penalties associated with law and regulation) is the best activity', then, well, the kinds of behaviors that we have seen (and continue to see) will happen.  Is group A capable and innovative?  Or are they just good at gaming the system?   This is a question that the current system cannot well address.

That the 'gaming of the system' has reached terminal levels should be evident to anyone who participates in the system.  Whether it is the by now unabashed use of manipulation and dissimilitude that is used in marketing and promotion to cause the price/profit signal to have little to no relation to quality of experience;  or the equally unabashed notion that one is almost obliged to work every loophole, angle and obfuscation that one can in order to 'appear' excellent (i.e., profitable) regardless of the real cost or value of your activity, our current system now does an inadequate job of accurately identifying the best ideas and experiences or the most capable individuals.   Any future system must solve these two problems better.  And it can - using higher dimensional currencies, reputation networks, etc. to layer in much richer signals about the true merit and the true costs of different activities, individuals and groups.    

The next two functions are more fun.  

* To motivate the most capable individuals to form the most effective groups to deliver the best ideas and experiences. Obviously, to the degree that our current system does a poor job identifying the best ideas and the most capable people, then out motivational architecture will be exacerbating the problem - by rewarding the wrong behaviours and the wrong people.   (This, by the way, is more or less the center of the fiscal conservative critique of the welfare state and the Austrian critique of Keynesian economics).  Of course, we can fix this problem to some extent using higher dimensional currencies as described above to better identify the best ideas and individuals.  However, the problems of our current motivational system run deeper: the system was designed to (and is effective at) motivating a class of behaviours that is becoming less and less important; and it quite ill suits the classes of behaviours that are becoming more and more important.  It turns out that carrot and stick (reward and punish) motivation works quite well for low creativity tasks - like harvesting crops or doing repetitive jobs on an assembly line.  Until the 1960's when these sorts of tasks dominated the economy, the current motivational system was reasonable.  However, technology changes everything and the story of the 20th Century has precisely been the story of the continuing replacement of human with machine labor in precisely these low creativity functions.  This is one of the great open secrets of the jobs debate circulating these days.  The manufacturing jobs that fled the industrial midwest for Asia (and the textile jobs that fled New England for the South for Asia) are not coming back.  Automation is proceeding apace and even as I type these words, Foxconn (the biggest private-sector employer in China) is working to replace their human workers with robot workers.  Artificial Intelligence, 3D printing, nano-fabrication, etc. - all of these major themes of the 21st Century speak to the continuing obsolescence of precisely the kind of work that our current motivational system is designed to motivate.  

By contrast, behavioural economists have been able to establish that our carrot/stick motivational system works quite poorly for creative and innovative tasks. Rather than the promise of reward and the threat of punishment, it turns out that the creative individual seeks autonomy (control over her own direction), mastery (the ability to become great at what you do), and a sense of meaning (emotional, spiritual and community connected value).  This is a whole different ball-game and one that the current economic system is poorly designed to deliver.  What's more, the necessity of shifting our motivational structure follows not only from the obsolescence of non-creative labor - but also from the recognition that creativity and invention is where all the value really comes from.  When we begin to realize how much the productivity increases of the 19th and 20th Century were the simple consequence of core innovations *and* how poorly our current system promotes and cultivates real creativity and innovation (Tesla anyone?) we realize how much has been left on the table - and how easily a new system could surpass our current system simply by unleashing the creativity that is being stifled in the current system.  Roomba and its descendants neatly and forever solve the problem of who is going to sweep the floor.  The real problem now becomes - how do we optimize for creativity?

This, of course, links to the final problem - resource allocation.  If we come to understand that our task is no longer to motivate non-creative activity, but to unleash creative activity, then we also are able to (and forced to) rethink how we allocate resources.  And one of the first rocks we stub our toe on is the (as yet) largely unheard-of problem of "rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods".  As it turns out, the world is made up of two fundamentally different kinds of things.  There are those things that are rivalrous - things like food, water and oil that if you have it, I don't have it and once consumed cease to exist for everyone.  And then there are things that are non-rivalrous - things like ideas and networks where not only can you and I have them simultaneously, their value for both of us increases as more people have them.   Traditionally, virtually all economic systems (from Sumeria to Neo-Liberalism) focus on and are built around rivalrous goods.  For the very good reason that food and water are important.  In the context of rivalrous systems, non-rivalrous goods have to be 'converted' to rivalrous through legal means: the invention of intellectual property.  If I can make my song or my work of art or my innovation something that I can exclude everyone in the world from (by copyright or patent) then I can treat it as if it is any other rivalrous good like corn or oil and slot it into the rivalrous economy.  And by participating in the rivalrous economy, I am able to benefit from the price/money/profit signal - identifying me as a capable creator of good ideas and experiences and then providing me with the resources I need to live and continue doing what I do.  

But, just as this approach to motivation is sub-optimal, so also is this approach to resource allocation sub-optimal.  The value of non-rivalrous goods increases (exponentially) the *more* people who have them.  The current system motivates me to keep my creative ideas scarce - when in fact it is (much) better for me and for everyone else if I spread them as far and wide as I can.  At this moment now, as you read this, there are hundreds of thousands of incredibly innovative and beautiful ideas that are lying fallow just because the right people haven't been connected to the right ideas.  If I write a song that could provide an enriching experience to ten million people, the world is a poorer place until all ten million have had that experience - many of whom will be inspired  to then go on and create richer experiences for everyone else, etc.  The only problem, of course, is that of resource allocation.  In the current system, I get the food I need and the things I want as a result of my delivering rivalrous goods into the rivalrous system.  The new system must be able 'to (better) allocate resources to the most capable individuals and groups to most effectively deliver the best ideas and experiences'.  This means crafting an economy that (for the first time in history) is *centered* on non-rivalrous goods, on creativity and innovation, on the motivational mechanisms that maximize creativity and on the resource allocation mechanisms that optimize for creativity.  While at the same time, providing for the production and the allocation of the scarce rivalrous goods (food, water, energy, ferraris) that will always be a minimum requirement of any effective economic system.

Morality and Ethics.

1. Definitions

I will be appropriating the terms morality and ethics in this document.  I have selected these terms because they are close to the concepts that I want to address, but because of their long, complex and often contradictory histories, it is worth taking some time to refine what I mean by "morality" and "ethics" to ensure precision.

Morality is the effort to articulate rules for behaviour that are objective and external – they come from the outside.  Morality is characterized by rules and principles.  "Thou shall not kill."  Rules that apply regardless of the individual involved and rules that should be able to be acted on by anyone (in principle).  In a moral system, the rules have been defined and the challenge is to identify through interpretation which moral box a particular action fits into.  "Killing a human being is wrong" is a rule.  "Is abortion killing a human being?" would be a typical moral question.  Here the discussion would be around the notion of what it means to be a human being: at what point does an emerging person become a Person?  Morality is universal in scope and generic in application.  Morality is given to you – your job is to know the rules and to be able to apply them.  

Ethics, on the other hand, tries to evaluate actions "from the inside".  Ethics does not proceed from an already-established "table of values" but from a rule that is at once simple and unbounded: ethical is what a wise, capable, well-informed individual who is in psychological and physical equilibrium would do in good faith.  There are thus no specific rules that would enable anyone to determine how to act ethically – each decision is entirely particular.  This would seem to rob ethics of its power and ability to drive behaviour.  Moreover, one might imagine a complaint that this definition of ethics is entirely subjective – wouldn't this mean that anyone could chose what they want to do and call it "ethical"?  

But, in fact, the situation is quite the opposite.  It is morality that disempowers us: by making us subject to rules that we must simply follow (whether we understand them or not).  Morality is a force imposed from the outside that compels obedience.  Ethics has a very powerful mandate – one that can guide behaviour at the personal, interpersonal and social level: become wise, become capable, become well-informed, learn how to maintain physical and psychological equilibrium.  The ethical mandate is that of a program of production.  It implies tremendous risks: everything depends on the actual capabilities of the individuals within the society.  The advantage of morality is that it can organize even the least capable of individuals.  This is its advantage, its seduction and its perniciousness: morality tends to always make us less capable.  Rather than exposing us to the challenge of becoming capable of making wise decisions, it protects us from that challenge and gives us the answers.

Now, there are several rules that can be produced out of the ethical mandate, and these rules can give ethics a "moraline" feel.  First are the logical rules: always act with good faith; always act wisely; seek to be well informed; avoid making decisions when in a condition of physical or psychological distress, etc.  These rules are simply logical extensions of the definition of an ethical judgement.  They formally resemble the structure of moral principles, but are only secondary.  

More important and more dangerous are the myriad "rules of thumb" that any ethical individual will apply to help her make sound judgments.  The building of a capacity to be ethical, the building of wisdom and capability, involves life experience and the creation of innumerable heuristics against which any judgment will be made.  At this individual level, ethics closely resembles morality.  An ethical decision-maker will almost certainly carry the heuristic "it is wrong to kill".  But the important thing to remember is that these are rules of thumb.  They are short-cuts that are deeply embedded in an entire context.  Separating them from that context to make them generic and universal is precisely the move of morality.    

2. Contra Morality

Morality is dangerous.  It is often useful and sometimes necessary, but, like a powerful chemical, should be used only with extreme care.  The problems with morality are twofold: first, that morality infantilizes.  Morality reduces the decision-maker to a hermeneutic machine.  The challenge is not to understand how the world works and how to make wise decisions, the challenge is to understand the rules and how to apply them.  This removes a tremendous capacity – a capacity that is difficult and time-consuming to build.  One can imagine a society of the future that is served by highly sophisticated machines.  The moral man knows that in order to be fed, he must push the red button and state his request.  But he knows nothing of the underlying technology.  He can survive, indeed, he can perhaps thrive, but he is not a master of his own destiny. For lack of a better term, he is a slave.  This example highlights the second danger of morality: it is frozen.  Precisely because morality comes from the outside, it is not responsive to the changing demands of reality.  Our hypothetical moral man is extremely vulnerable to his sophisticated machinery breaking-down.  Our real moral man is equally vulnerable to any change in the world that undermines the unspoken (and often unthought) premises of his table of rules.  One imagines the priests in the temple who were shocked that the invading barbarians failed to remove their shoes - before those barbarians killed the priests and destroyed the temple.  

The primary value of morality is in the phases of human development where the capacity to act ethically is, simply, lacking.  One does not expect a small child to be able to make wise decisions: one simply tells them "don't touch things that are hot."  When a child hears that edict from her mother and does not touch something that is hot she is not acting wisely, she is acting morally.  When she does touch something that is hot (by accident or, immorally in violation of the edict) and learns the consequences, she begins to become capable of acting wisely and, by extension, ethically.  

Thus the ethical mandate on morality: morality should be used as little as possible, it should be used only to give us the best opportunity to become ethical.  If morality is dangerous, ethics is also dangerous.  Indeed, ethics rides directly on the border of danger.  You cannot become wise without taking risks.  You cannot become ethical without failure and the wisdom that it brings.  This is an irreducible, vital necessity of the ethical existence.  The question, then becomes one of practice: how does one become ethical?

3. How to become Ethical

The first rule of ethics is that there is no rule of ethics.  We must apply our wisdom the best that we can and, with luck, get better and better over the generations at becoming capable of acting ethically.  Thus the practice of ethics is like learning an art. There will be a very good and definitive body of knowledge and a well understood practice, but and the end of the day it is highly particular and experimental.  

That said, it appears that the practice of becoming ethical follows three different paths that run, roughly, in parallel.  Each starts with the earliest possible experiences and progresses until death (and, possibly, afterwards).  The first path is the path of the self.  This is the path of being healthy.  It has to do with physical and psychological well-being.  It takes on the dual character of the actual status of your self (are you healthy?) as well as your capacity to take control-of and ensure (maximize) that health.  Thus, on the one hand, do you eat nutritious foods; on the other hand, do you understand your personal nutritional needs?  On the one hand, are you happy; on the other hand, do understand what makes you happy and how to achieve happiness (when and if you choose to)?  

From the perspective of the first path, the way that we treat children in elementary school is criminal.  Not only do we increasingly fail to ensure that they are healthy (with exercise and good nutrition), we increasingly fail to teach them how to be healthy.  Because the care of the self begins well before actual birth, this path might be considered the first and foundational path.  Certainly having a stable and healthy foundation from which to explore the world around you is critical.  The greater your wisdom of the self, the greater risks you can take without undue exposure to deep harm.  At the same time, the self becomes a microcosm of all of the other paths.  As you come to understand yourself and how to explore and expand the capacities of yourself, you come to understand how to apply these capacities more broadly.  

The second path has to do with relationships.  Dealing with other people and your immediate environment (the world around you).  This path involves expression and connection and, of course, health (healthy relationships).  It also involves creation and the ability to influence the world around you.  This can be as simple as gardening: building the capacity to create your own food.  There is a feedback-loop here.  By being able to control your environment, you become more capable of developing yourself.  Simultaneously, the more capable you are of developing yourself, the more capable you are of interacting with your environment.  This can also be much more complex – including the complexity of connecting with other people.  

4. Ethical Rules of Thumb

Nutrition is paramount.
Once you have nutrition in place, you can begin to experiment aesthetically with experiences that extend or stimulate life in creative ways.

Take risks – wisely.  Accept the consequences.

Always maintain a territory.  It is from here that you can launch your explorations.

Avoid ideas and concepts that narrow you and your thinking.

Avoid playing roles.  

Recognize pain, but never become sad.

Try to remain cheerful, unless some other condition is called for.

Remain well-rounded.  Do not overly bias the body or the mind or the self or the other or the world.

Be aware of where you are.  

Create connections.

Become capable of recognizing beauty.

Create beauty when you can.

Recognize fear, but never be afraid.

Always act in good faith.

Give others as much as they can handle.

Avoid bullshit when possible, but recognize its usefulness.

There is no need to be offensive, unless there is a need to be offensive.

Eat green vegetables.

Believe in the future.

Culture Evolution

The evolution of culture flows through a number of different dynamics.  I want to look into each one of these dynamics as they behave individually and interact with each other to generate large-scale cultural evolution.  The primary activity of every human being is the formation of "meaning architectures".  A meaning architecture is a system for predicting and controlling ones circumstance to achieve a satisfactory condition.  The content of "satisfactory condition" and the strategies for prediction and control are highly variable and their movement is both one of the primary consequences of and drivers of cultural evolution.  This is because our actions are all always determined by our "meaning architectures" (in combination with our capabilities and actual circumstances).  

I.  The bio/developmental individual

Every meaning architecture starts on our specific and general biological inheritance.   Taking the lead from Antonio Damasio, I break this into three sections: the Emotions, Feelings and Neuro-Cognitive structures.  Emotions are fully autonomic physical responses to physical stimuli - fight or flight, pain, etc.  Feelings are what you are aware of when you are aware of an Emotional state - they are a kind of "short-hand" or "compression" of a highly complex whole-body neuro-chemical event into a relatively simple typology.  Which can then be linked with the neuro-cognitive complex of memory, signal processing, and attention to generate the fundamentals of a "meaning architecture".  We are able to assess our "state" according to roughly granular "feelings" that can be evaluated into more or less satisfactory - based entirely on the emotional mix that is associated with those feelings and the connection of that emotional mix to action.  All of this, of course, is bio-evolutionary.  Our internal signaling mechanisms around the need for food (feeling "hungry") are adequate to move us to acquire food with increasing urgency as we approach starvation.  The same for all of our basic biological functions (sleep, mating, waste disposal, etc.).  And when we adequately deal with the "problem" we feel "happy", or at least "sated" or "satisfied".  We have a set of patterns that we are able to identify, a set of heuristics that link those patterns to our internal states, a set of action-strategies that can predictably lead to changes in our state to a more satisfactory position.  If we feel the need to urinate, we urinate and we feel better.  Done and done.  At least until you need your diaper changed.

It all begins here, but of course, it all begins with a human infant who, among many things, is notably undeveloped and for whom the world is a "bloomin, buzzin, confusion".  And as any parent knows, while all kids are human beings with the same basic needs, they all also are hard wired with an amazing amount of particularity.  A loud sound that would send one infant screaming might put another to sleep.  One kid might hate the taste of lukewarm water, another might require water warmed to room temperature.  Therefore there is an enormous amount of trial and error involved in forming even the most rudimentary "meaning architecture".  Cry, scream,  whine, coo.  Feel bad, then feel hungry or tired, or with a soiled diaper.  The biological inheritance provides us with the basic machinery necessary to build effective meaning architectures, but for the first three months or so, it is a lot of more or less random searching across a highly particular set of cause-effect dynamics before some basic models and strategies can be put in-place.  But they do get put in place - already with a wide variety of individual variance both in terms of content (what kinds of behaviours lead to what kids of results) and in terms of efficacy (predict and control)  Touch a hot stove once and you can be sure that something was learned, but it might take two touches to really learn the lesson and it would be a unique kid who touched the same hot stove three times.  

To be sure, this first-person trial-and-error modality is operating throughout life as a means of feedback into the meaning architecture, but usually by the 3rd month or so, it begins to be supplemented by another key mechanism: modeling based on other peoples perceived experiences.  If mommy screams and holds her hand when she touches the hot stove, my meaning architecture is going to be working overtime trying to ascribe a cause to the feelings of alarm that are generated in me by that experience.  What happens is that the events and objects in your meaning architecture begin to be able to transfer their valence to other events and objects in your experience based on their relationship with them.  We may never have experienced using a razor to shave, but watching daddy use it every day invests the object (and the act) with a certain potency and value that plays two roles.  On the one hand, it teaches us how to shave - a strategy of use when we have the need to use it.  But on the other hand, it links that object (the razor) with the whole complex of feelings associated to the experience of "father" and to "father shaving" that has a surplus value all its own.  In the end it all comes down to emotions and feelings and if daddys razor, mommys voice or the smell of grandmas cookies can generate a "satisfactory condition" then we have yet another strategy in our portfolio of "predict and control".  

The power of this mode of learning should never be underestimated.  An enormous amount of our meaning architectures are influenced by this mode, particularly as it ramifies and develops throughout life.  Everything that is more "important" in your meaning architecture commands more of your attention and is, therefore, more capable of influencing your actual experience out of your potential experience.  If for some reason, yellow is your favorite color (maybe your moms favorite dress was yellow, or some stuffed animal, or a favorite cup, or just the color itself just worked for you) then for the rest of your life, yellow things are going to get just that little spin - a little bit more attention in the field of view, a little bit more mind-share when trying to puzzle them out, etc.  If that girl you lust after gives you a Velvet Underground album, you will spend hours trying to figure out just what the hell is going on with these people that they are so interesting to her that she selects them out of the universe of all possible things to give to you.  Pass by it on the shelf, and maybe the yellow bananna jumps out and you happen to buy it.  Or maybe you like blue and you end up somewhere else entirely.  

We should also layer into this mode the entire strategy of "fitting in" and "being part of something".  Its one thing to look to someone's reaction to something to get a hint of how you should react to that same thing.  But in addition, you might look to their reaction because you want to curry their favor (or at least avoid their displeasure).  If daddy breaks the belt out every time you put on mommys shoes, your meaning architecture is going to ascribe some intense (although certainly noisy) attention and value to *that*.  

Wrapped, warped, twisted and turned we carve our meaning architectures out of the fabric of experience always seeking to be able to predict and control our circumstances to achieve a satisfactory condition.  There is a reason why many people look back with fondness on the last years of childhood - by ten or so, a kid in a relatively healthy and static environment has their game wired.  They understand how to achieve satisfaction in their environment.  And then puberty kicks-in and the whole game changes.

The third mode is "drama": the deliberate effort to use artfully crafted experience to generate meaning architecture consequences.  This runs the gamut from the "after school special" to the "bible reading" to the "fairy tale" to the "story on grandpa's knee about courage on the battlefield" and even lessons taught in the classroom.  A good teacher uses both the second and the first modes to maximize the attention and valence of the drama he is presenting - be it math or economics or literature.  The story of how to catch a fish told by the beloved wise grandfather around a roaring fire in the mysterious dark will carve deeply into the meaning architecture where the same drama droned in a 50's education film voice might be entirely un-noticed.  But mileage may vary and usually some variation on the message gets through.  If mom preaches politeness but is in fact quite rude, you can be sure that some lesson will be imprinted on the meaning architecture.  

This is where media becomes interesting.  The deliberate intentions of The Dukes of Hazard drama on your meaning architecture are quite simple: pay attention for 30 minutes every week.  But while they might not have intended to do anything more than that, they couldn't help it.  First off, meaning architectures are zero sum - if you are paying attention to Daisy Duke, you aren't paying attention to something else (say your math homework, or playing baseball).  Plus, by tapping into the internal mechanisms of your meaning architecture in order to ensure that you do, in fact, pay attention they are triggering the very mechanisms of your feelings and neuro-chemical system that identify what is "important" and, as a consequence, any patterns, lessons or value structures that are in that drama will tend to get more credit than they ordinarily would.  This is why a generation of kids know with a resolute certainty that when you have just escaped a madman and his dead body is lying on the floor a gun inches from his untwitching fingers, you don't walk away, you don't collapse into relieved sobbing, you shoot the fucker a couple more times "just in case."  

You live your life, from birth to death, absorbing experiences and continually adjusting your meaning architecture to achieve prediction and control of your circumstances to deliver a satisfactory condition.  As you experience more and as your circumstances change, everything is complexified.  At first just being able to urinate was satisfactory.  But pretty quickly you realized that urination into a dirty diaper wasn't going to cut it for long - so both your definition of "satisfactory condition" and your strategies for accomplishing your goals will change.  First you cry, then you learn how to discretely signal the need for a diaper change.  Then (holy grail) you learn how to use the potty and a whole new level of prediction and control has been achieved.

I should note that while my story has been entirely focused on the level of the discrete human being, the concept of prediction and control tied to satisfactory condition is the driver for *any* enduring system (e.g. a genotype) - albeit through different mechanisms - and the human piece of that larger story is only a piece.  This helps to ameliorate the recognition that (as a biological human being) at the end of the day, you will never be better off than when you were nursing at your mothers breast as an infant.   

II.  Cohorts and Generations.

So far, the primary carrier of "culture" is the individual human being who is "enculturated" through his mode 1, 2 and 3 experiences as he lives his life within a given culture.  Indeed, Carrol Quigley defines a "culture" entirely by reference to the fact that individuals within the culture have more experiences with the culture than they do without it.  Thus, by design or by simple statistics, the fundamental thumbprint of the culture is left on the individual - who then by interacting with other individuals imprints the culture on those other individuals.  

This is of course a matter of "more and less".  Texas culture is different from Massachusetts culture and a member of each participates in a larger "American" culture precisely and only to the extent that they share certain experiences in common *that lead to comparable "meaning architectures."*  So there is certainly a spatial dimension to culture.  But there is also, and more profoundly, a temporal dimension.  I don't think that I go out on a limb to say that the percentage of experiences that were in common between Texan and Bostonian teenagers in 1970 was much higher than that in 1870.  Thus, when we talk about "culture" we have to be careful to look at the temporal dimension of its evolution - and when we do we discover that there are interesting large-scale patterns.  And in the 1980's when Neil Howe and William Strauss did this, they noticed some very interesting patterns in Anglo-American culture.  Specifically, they noticed three things of progressively more profundity (albeit also of progressively more speculative character).

First, they recognized that if we think of culture as a coherent thing that is able to engender consistent meaning experiences on a population over space and time, then it isn't much of a stretch to note that "cohorts" of individuals who were born and went through the same bio-developmental stages at roughly the same time, will share a common sub-culture within the larger culture.  Something like the spatial differences between Texas and Boston, but possibly with much more impact.  If you were born between 1961 and 1984, you shared an entire complex of "meaning" experiences with your cohort that separate you significantly from those who came before and after you.  Although mileage will vary based on geography and personal specifics, GenXers don't really know what a Hippie is - but know *exactly* what a Punk is.  We remember before cable but not before TV.  We have very strong memories of Reagan but not of Johnson and none at all about Kennedy and his assassination (compared to the folks born earlier who remember exactly what they were doing when Kennedy was shot).  We emulate Dr J or Magic or Larry or maybe Michael Jordan, but not Pete Maravich or Bill Bradley or Bill Russell.  We remember riding bikes without helmets and driving in cars without seatbelts, but not hitch-hiking across the country (safely) or hanging out at the soda shop (or whatever the heck kids in the 50's really did).  The differences between cohorts are deep and the similarities are striking.

Second, they began to notice a typology - that cohort (generational) differences weren't just a random sample of whatever the culture happened to have to give.  Taking a card from Jung (or perhaps from non-linear dynamics) they identified certain cultural attractors that seemed to appear in the cycles between generations.  Specifically, they identified Heroes, Artists, Prophets and Nomads.  Each of whom is most fundamentally characterized by the kind of cultural thumbprint that dominated their formative years.

Artists are the children of cultures in crisis.  With wars raging and economies collapsing, the children of crisis suffer a typical set of meaning experiences: intense connection to family combined with sharp divides between adults who huddle and whisper about Important and Momentous events and the children they try to protect from the chaos raging around them; they see the next older cohort (their brothers, uncles and family friends) making stark personal sacrifices for the collective benefit; they see the community eliminate almost all difference and dissension as it comes together to survive the crisis (or falls apart altogether).   They become sensitive, inclusive, managers of complexity and defenders of fair play who champion pluralism and are known for their skills and creativity.

Prophets are the children of a cultures "golden age".  The crisis overcome, the culture turns to rewarding itself for its sacrifices and tries to make sure that its children "have it better than we had it".  Lavished with attention, autonomy and a culture made safe and placid, they become the individualists and defenders of principle.  They didn't live through the crisis, but they lived among the real-life Heroes who did and they form unrealistic expectations of the color and shape of real people and real life.  They tend to see things as clear-cut and to value personal expression.  As they move out of childhood and begin to rub directly against the gray and black of the real world, they become passionate crusaders and revivalists of values (frequently in passionate conflict with one-another).  

Nomads are the children of a culture going through an "awakening".  When a culture turns inward and begins to critique its own institutions and to pit its values (and sub-cultures) against one-another.  Parenting is at its low ebb as are all the institutions of consistency and order - leaving Nomad children to fend for themselves.  As the culture tears into itself around them (and as adults focus more and more on their own self expression and personal fulfillment) Nomads learn that there are winners and losers in life - and that virtue has little to do with the distinction.  They learn that if you don't take care of yourself, no one else will and they have the lowest respect for institutions or grand values of any of the types.

Heroes are the children of a culture in decline (an "unraveling").  As the passion of an awakening passes and the culture reacts against the low state of "childhood" that resulted from the decades of awakening, Heroes are subjected to a new rigor.  New efforts are made to give them structure and new rules are put in place to ensure that they live up to their "potential".  Having experienced the negative consequences of weak institutions, they tend to have maximum faith in the necessity of institutions for a well governed society.  Tightly monitored and measured as kids - but performing much better than the cohorts that preceeded them, they are exceptional performers, but lack creativity outside the box.  Being born in the aftermath of an awakening, they tend to be the first generation to fully incorporate the new values constructed in the awakening - and also tend to have a technical virtuosity with the wave of technology that came out of the awakening.

Third, they noticed that the feedback loop between "culture" and "people" implied that a typology of cohorts, combined with the steady constancy of human developmental patterns to form a simple cycle of "cultural" types:  A crisis gives birth to Artists and is followed by a golden age (if it is survived at all) which gives birth to Prophets (with Artists aging into the Young Adult category).  As the Prophets age, they begin to criticize their culture's deep values and foment an awakening - into which are born a generation of Nomads.  As strong (even hubristic) civic-minded Heroes die off and are replaced by conciliatory (and largely bureaucratic) Artists who are pushed hard by the Prophets below them who are surging into positions of power and authority in the culture, the culture begins its long unraveling into increasingly divided and competing "values" camps and a generation of Heroes are born.  The rise of the Prophets to the highest levels of power in the culture, combined with the rise of Nomads into the implementer role and Heroes into the young adult category presents fertile ground for a deep crisis - as contradictions and problems that arose out of the unraveling (or were left unaddressed during the unraveling) finally can no longer be plastered-over and "rock bottom" is finally hit.   If the culture survives and solves the underlying challenges of the crisis, a new Artist generation will be born and the culture will return to a golden age.  

Such is their narrative and they have traced the specifics of their cycle of "turnings" from the 1300's in England through to the present day with enough actual prediction and predictive power to convince me to take the overall architecture seriously.  But, even if you take the large-scale cycles with a bag of salt, the underlying concept of "cohort" cultural coherence and the implied cycling of culture through successive waves of such cohorts makes an enormous amount of sense and resonates closely with lived empirical experience.  

What they fail to do, however, is to have any theory of enculturation.  They lack the first part of my narrative - simply waiving their hands at the specifics of "what" culture is and how "cultural values" are encoded into the individuals that carry and express them in the recursive function that is "culture".  In the context of "meaning architectures" the theory becomes more robust and interesting.  Strauss and Howe point out that if you look at the media of different turnings you see that golden ages are characterized by things like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best while Awakenings see their fair share of Exorcists and Taxi Drivers.  At a surface level, this connects the dots.  But think about meaning architectures and think about the differences between the "moral lessons" implicit in the A-Team, Knight Rider, Dallas and Happy Days and something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, Lost and The Office.  You can trace the actual evolution.   The former are all created by Boomers and reflect their "meaning architectures" (by design or unconsciously).  Notably, the characters lack depth or backstory, the form is simple and unreflective and the roles that are available and actions that lead to success and failure are (more or less) of a kind.  Comparatively, the more contemporary media is universally characterized by much deeper characters and intuitive backstory, substantially more complex role modeling and action-success formulas and an almost cheeky playing-with the form itself.  This is not to compare apples and oranges but to *diagnose* at a much more sensitive level the specific content of the "experience field" of the 1960s - 1980s that generically crafted meaning architectures in both creatives and audience to enable this kind of media.  

There is a cyclicality here, but it is a de-centered one that is more of a spiral and quite possibly an off-kilter one.  While it certainly seems that we have faced a crisis every 80 years or so for the past six centuries, no crisis has really resembled the others except in the most abstract (mathematical) form.  

III.  Technology
  
Overlaid on the developmental paths of individuals and the generational cycles are larger scale forces that either cycle at much longer intervals or have an entirely different shape.  There certainly seem to be "technology waves" which are characterized by a period of intense innovation across a number of domains (including massive cross fertilization of ideas from different domains), followed by a period scaling and entrepreneurship, followed by a period of consolidation and "oligopoly" followed by a period of "scale expansion" and then decay that gives rise to another period of innovation.  Riding alongside these movements are frequently *enormous* changes in the conditions and shape of the material social field (population flows, demographics, architecture and materials).  Compare the cycle of "industrialization" that cut through the victorian age and then the cycle of "mass production" that cut through the 20th century.  Notably, except for newspapers, virtually *all* truly mass media occurred in the 20th century and, most of that was back-loaded.  I'd make a strong assertion that the "meaning" of that kind of dislocation can't be truly digested by a culture until after a major crisis.  Which is to say that in part the nature of the crisis of the 20th Century was the internalization and capitulation of the basic functions of mass media and the crisis opening the 21st century is about the mastering of mass media and the internalization and capitulation of the basic functions of distributed interactive media.  

But all of this is part of the continuing dynamic of technological evolution.  Whether it proceeds by fits and starts or a relatively smooth curve or whatever, it seems manifest that technology has been proceeding from a less complex and potent to a more complex and potent position "since the beginning" and that this movement drags cultural evolution with it.  The steam engine gives rise to the rail road.  The rail road completely changes the dynamic of space which rips the rural asunder and hypertrophies the urban.  The culture can't help but get carried away on this torque.  The fact of generational dividing lines just increases the pull of technological change: one generation is relatively dumbfounded and powerless, the next generation is already fully in the grips of a post railroad dynamic and the 3rd generation is almost entirely unaware that there was anything different.  I've long been a big believer that most "human" decisions take place as an optimization scheme within a milieu.  Technology, more than most anything else, can optimize within a milieu, but it can also (and frequently does) change that milieu itself - dramatically altering the context in which meaning architectures operate and playing a key role in the tectonic plate fractures that facilitate a crisis.

There are a lot of theories of "progress" in evolution - Tielhard de Jardin's being the most honest and compelling - but in the area of technology, the vector seems pretty straightforward.   I think this is largely due to the double push of massive economies of scale (once you have invented the steam engine the cost of invention for the next version drops close to zero) and to the fact that technology is closely tied to energy acceleration (it is a beast that knows well how to feed itself).  We've gone from human power to animal power to wood steam to coal steam to diesel steam to diesel electric and unless we fall off a cliff (entirely possible) you can imagine fusion electric (either solar or local) as the next logical step.  Each increasing wave of potential energy pushes through the technological system driving ever more complexity and power (in the sense of prediction and control) and warping the field of play for cultural evolution.  A meaning architecture that stays caught in the turbulence will become increasingly incapable of prediction and control or of achieving a satisfactory condition.

  

IV. Culture Conflict

One of the reasons why it is hard if not impossible to get off of the technology curve mouse wheel is the basic rule that "any society that more effectively incorporates knowledge and creativity to predict and control their environment will out compete its less effective neighbors".  Its all well and good to develop a long-term stable society wherein people can build effective meaning architectures and have a stable sense of meaning and control - but when your less happy neighbor invents the machine gun, your own placidity will be shattered quite quickly.  This doesn't even have to require any form of direct violence - the US has done as much to jack-up other cultures through export of object and affect as Britain did through military empire.  Like it or not, the rule "evolve or die" seems to apply at the cultural level as much as at any other level.  

In the end, its all about meaning - the ability to predict and control your circumstance to achieve a satisfactory condition.  The key recognition comes when you allow the mouth to swallow the tail and realize that a "satisfactory condition" has to be recursive: the ability to predict and control your circumstance to achieve the ability to predict and control your circumstance to achieve a satisfactory condition.  The only plausible strategy is to elevate - in much the same way that media has begun to elevate and become aware of is terms - and to capture the entire dynamic as part of your meaning architecture.  To make cultural evolution (and as it turns out "evolution itself") the circumstances that you predict and control.  Thus, rather than evolving within culture - reactively adopting to the changing landscape - evolving a culture that makes cultural evolution its primary object.  A culture that is aware of itself as a culture and with a technology that is adequate to the problem of prediction and control of cultural evolution itself.  

This then becomes a very quick process: first the culture that is most best able to achieve that objective can out-compete its less self aware rivals in the same way that homo sapiens out competed neanderthal; second the result of this competitive winnowing (which by no means has to end up with one "winner") comes up against the ultimate wall: entropy itself.  The biggest risks to a self-aware culture are ennui, malaise and suicide.  

As a side note, my gut tells me that the right architecture is based on fractal self-similarity: a successful meta meaning architecture is composed of smaller scale successful meaning architectures that are constructed in the same way.  That is, a successful self-aware culture is composed of successful individuals.  Success here defined the way it always have been - they are able to construct a meaning architecture that enables them to predict and control their circumstances to achieve a satisfactory condition.

I want to assert that maximization of Ethics is both a conceivable and achievable objective.  To get there I'm going to have to take evolutionary thinking out of the world of "just genes" and apply it generically across a much broader field.


1. The strategy of all entities is to predict and control their circumstances so as to achieve a satisfactory condition.  As a baseline, this satisfactory condition is "reproductive success", that is, an increase in the population of the entity over the long term.  While I want to include the totality of traditional evolutionary theory in this concept, I also want to extend it to include a large number of entities and strategies that flow from and link to this bio-genetic foundation.  When appropriate, I'll use four quite different domains as examples as we work through the discussion.
a) Take a species, say "rabbits".  When it changes the balance of its genotype (expressed in a diversity of individuals) through selective pressures in order to be more fit within a given fitness landscape, it is predicting and controlling its circumstances to achieve a satisfactory condition.
b) Take a plant.  When it turns towards the sun so as to maximize its photosynthetic performance, its is predicting and controlling its circumstances to achieve a satisfactory condition.
c) Take a particular animal say a fox.  When it uses its sensory apparatus to identify food or to avoid a predator it is predicting and controlling its circumstances to achieve a satisfactory condition.
d) Take a human being in a culture.  When it uses its cultural machinery to craft a machine that successfully achieves a result, e.g., using Newtonian physics to craft a rocket that goes to the Moon, it is predicting and controlling its circumstances to achieve a satisfactory condition.

2. Decomposing prediction and control, there seem to be four core features: the abilities to identify signal from noise, to extract consistent patterns, to formulate effective heuristics for action and to execute them.  Collectively this is "intelligence".  Intelligence need not be cognitive, it need not even be neural.
a) Species intelligence lies at the level of genetics and epigenetics.  Mechanisms for preventing mutation and ensuring fidelity of transcription.  Mechanisms for storing latent morphologies (old mutations) and activation of those morphologies in response to environmental conditions. The entire movement of evolution, selective pressures and mutation driving change, is about the progressive collection of species-genetic level intelligence.
b) Plant intelligence plays out its genetic portfolio on response to its particular environment. Roots discovering nutrition and water gradients.  Stems discovering light gradients.  Activation of drought or predator chemistries based on environmental   feedback.
c) Animal intelligence seems to encompass plant intelligence but adds more or less ability to code abstract patterns and to generate flexible responses.  Thus, even a pigeon can learn to recognize a visual symbol as a means to satisfying hunger.
d) Human intelligence takes this animal capability and externalizes it into an abstraction: culture.  Thus, entire populations generate intelligence that collects over many individual human experiences: mushrooms can make you sick, amanita can make you sick, amanita contains Muscimol and Muscimol's primary action is at GABA receptor sites as a potent GABA-A agonist, etc.

3.  All entities refine intelligence through positive and negative feedback.  Positive feedback reinforces success, where our intelligence in fact enables prediction and/or control to achieve a satisfactory condition.  Negative feedback indicates failure, where our intelligence does not  in fact enable prediction and/or control to achieve a satisfactory condition.  Over the long-term, entities fail when they lose sensitivity to feedback and, therefore, become unable to refine their intelligence.  
a)  When a species achieves dominance within its niche, it begins to lose negative feedback.  Local competition is no longer strong enough to force innovation and the species will begin to lock into "more and more of the same".  Because it works.  At least until some new species from another niche manages to break into the happy equation.  Particularly if that new species had been locked into a highly competitive environment with lots and lots of negative feedback driving its intelligence forward.  Prediction and control drops to zero and the species is extinct.
b) A plant's roots seek water.  If they find water they thicken then branch and grow.  If they fail to find water they stop growing and flow that energy in other directions.  A vine grows on a trellis it slowly twists and lengthens until it finds a sold purchase and then it twists and branches.  Or perhaps it finds something that is too hot and it burns and flows its energy elsewhere.
c) A mouse runs across a grassy meadow.  It can move fast and finds lots of food.  The grass is high and shields it from predators.  Positive feedback.  The snow falls.  Running on the surface of the snow allows it to run faster than burrowing through it.  But suddenly it stands out against the background and is easy prey.  Negative feedback. Then a mutation happens where it turns white in the winter and it is able to blend in with the snow in the winter and the grass in the summer.  Intelligence increased.
d) A business invents a new technology within a highly competitive field.  It learns the hard way what works and what doesn't work and struggles to the top.  An intelligent competitor it begins to consolidate its gains and starts to shape the market to its advantage.  First it locks in suppliers and distributors.  The competitors slowly die or are bought.  Then it begins to capture the regulators and sees laws and regulations slowly reinforce its position and strengths.  New competitors are few and far between.  For decades it is successful, perhaps becoming the biggest business in the world.  But it isn't learning anything - its intelligence is staying static, perhaps even going retrograde.  It is losing its technology edge - but rather than innovate (and run the risks of innovation) it entrenches - pushing the niche to keep its old technology viable.  Increasingly its internal bureaucracy becomes entrenched - challenging the status-quo becomes a bad thing.  Innovation goes away and eventually innovators go away.  It begins to lose its ability to create new intelligence.

4.  When an entities' ability to acquire intelligence becomes inadequate to the risks posed by its environment, it becomes extinct.  
a) If a fitness landscape changes more abruptly than the genetic portfolio and mutation rate of a species can handle, it will simply be unable to compete and will go extinct.
b) A plant exudes a toxin that keeps predators at bay.  A new predator comes into the environment that is immune to the toxin.  If the plant is unable to adapt, it will go extinct.
c) A white rabbit is able to avoid the local fox.  The fox learns how to find rabbit warrens.  If the rabbits don't learn how to disguise or avoid, they will go extinct.
d) A business has lost its ability to create new intelligence.  The market moves on and new technologies are invented.  Consumer behavior changes.  Suddenly its revenues begin to decline.  At first it can keep profits up by cutting costs.  But this reduces its ability to create new intelligence and makes the problem worse.  Eventually it collapses.

5.  A general arc of intelligence increase is to become more sensitive to (and more predictive of) positive and negative feedback and, therefore, are more capable of acquiring intelligence.
a) At the genetic level, the only negative feedback is reproductive failure and the only positive feedback is reproductive success.  
b) At a plant level, even basic feedback like more or less light or more or less nutrition make all the difference between flourishing and declining.
c) The development of the neural system allows progressively more nuanced intelligence.  The fight or flight response of the reptile brain is an encoding of the deep negative feedback associated with an inability to effectively survive a threat encounter (i.e. death) and the association of various probabilistically related patterns with those threat encounters is a heuristic for action that enables a higher level of predication and control than, say, random blundering through a threat field.  The reward systems of the brain (serotonin, etc) act as pre-emptive simulators for positive and negative feedback.  Thus, we "feel good" when we engage in an activity that has been probabilistically selected for - allowing us to intelligently seek that activity.
d) But we can become aware of the fact that our pleasure system is only relatively effective and granular - and we can break the linkage between pleasure and nutrition, more discretely identifying what a "satisfactory condition" is and more effectively shaping its result. The increasing sophistication of mechanisms for acquiring intelligence has been the dominant theme of our human evolutionary vector.  All of the various layers of our neuro-cognitive system are oriented towards an effort to identify signal from noise, extract consistent patterns and formulate effective heuristics for action.  Our "feeling system" linking our most basic (largely autonomous) nervous system and endocrine system is just this sort of instrument: burning sensation in hand ==> move hand ==> "feel" pain ==> identify source of sensation as "hot stove" ==> encode avoidance of that pattern.  

* Each progressive layer of our neuro-cognitive system increases the spatial, temporal and complexity scope of our intelligence.  All attempts to optimize intelligence (prediction and control) use the mechanisms that they have available and are within the accuracy and consistency that those mechanisms enable.  Thus, the basic "fish" nervous system has a very short memory and is essentially minor-adjustment reactive (if "hot" then "move arm"). The more complex "reptile" system has the ability to fire off systemic "fight or flight" responses that change significant fractions of our internal dynamic and can link "similar" events to these responses (if "tiger" then "run away"; but if "cat" then ignore).  The mammal brain can model other intelligences and construct relatively complex strategies against a relatively large set of remembered patterns and heuristics.  

6. Imagination is the generation of new mechanisms for prediction and control, the identification of new signals, new patterns, new heuristics.  Imagination is the mechanism of formation of intelligence.  Imagination does not guarantee acquisition of intelligence - it simply enables it by producing new possibilities.   Imagination that results in intelligence is Creativity.  Imagination that destroys intelligence is Error.  
a) Mutation is a form of imagination.  Mutation generates new possibilities to predict or control.  A successful mutation is imagination that resulted in intelligence - i.e. enhanced reproductive success.  A successful mutation is creative.  An unsuccessful mutation is error.  
b) A plant is growing and runs into a barrier.  It branches and "tries out" a different direction.  This leads to a dead-end - error.  It branches again - this leads to a new avenue for growth - creativity.
c) A rabbit encounters a fox and flees, it identifies the pattern associating the smell of the fox with the overall sensation of flight (fear, etc.).  It then imagines the linkage: the smell of fox equals danger therefore flight.  If this linkage proves to be effective, it is intelligence: creativity.  If this linkage proves to be ineffective, it destroys intelligence: error.  Our minds are constantly grasping at these signals, patterns and heuristics in the effort to discover more intelligence.
d) The sumerians invent cuneiform.  This innovation allows for unprecedented creativity and error.  

* If intelligence is position, imagination is velocity.

* Imagination is risky.  At a minimum imagination costs energy.  Worse, imagination can lead to error and destroy intelligence.   

* The neo-cortex layers on-top of the other layers of the neuro-cogntive system to dramatically increase our ability to abstract intelligence (thereby rendering its storage much less costly)and to generate intelligence through purely mental actions (thereby rendering its acquisition much less costly), and to build machines (thereby rendering implementation much less costly).  The principle advantages of these innovations are that they allow the benefits of imagination at very little cost.  Thus, rather than evolving a large furry coat which, if in error is hard to correct, we imagine clothes and fabricate them.  Rather than grow four legs, we domesticate horses.  Rather than fight a tiger and lose, we imagine fighting a tiger and realize it is a bad idea, etc.

7.  Ethics is a machine for predicting and controlling creativity.  It is a system for optimizing/maximizing our ability to discriminate signal from noise, extract consistent patterns and formulate effective rules for action.  Ethics includes logic, mathematics, empiricism, simulation, modeling, collective learning and all other techniques that increase the velocity of our acquisition of intelligence.  Science as it is typically practiced is a sub-set of Ethics.  That is ethical which increases our ability to acquire intelligence.  That is unethical which decreases our ability to acquire intelligence.  

* If intelligence is position and imagination is velocity, ethics is acceleration.   
* The implication of Ethics is that we can get better at (predict and control) our ability to generate creativity, which is to say that we can deliberately increase our imagination', the percentage of our imagination that is intelligence, or both.

8.  The primary cause of all unethical activity can be found in a relatively small set of roots:
     - Failure of the imagination.  No imagination means no creativity which is unethical.  Any action that decreases creativity is unethical.
     - Failure of feedback.  If you cannot discriminate between error and creativity, imagination becomes so much noise.  Any action that reduces the efficacy of feedback (particularly negative feedback) is unethical.
     - Failure of scope.  It is possible to find local maxima that are far from global maxima.  In fact there is no reason to believe that there is any global maximum of creativity.  Any action that assumes that current intelligence is optimal is unethical.  

9.  These roots can combine and hybridize into many particular forms that are all closely related:
- Fear (of failure / risk).  An inappropriate prioritization of error-avoidance over creativity-discovery will lead to a closure of imagination.  This might result from a failure of feedback where, for example, positive feedback is not received for creativity or too much negative feedback is received for error.  
- Substitution of means and ends.  Where an sign of feedback is mistaken for feedback.  For example, our neuro-cognitive system ultimately seeks intelligence, not pleasure.  Pleasure is a part of our reward system which exists as a mechanism to attempt to simplify complex or subtle feedback in order to refine our intelligence.  Thus, the taste "sweet" generates the sensation of pleasure because - within the capabilities of the system that interprets those signals - seeking things that are sweet (i.e., simple carbohydrates) is a statistically optimal heuristic for action. However if we mistake "sweetness" for "intelligence" we can find ourselves increasingly failing to generate a satisfactory condition.
- Short term thinking.  Where a local maximum of positive feedback is prioritized over a longer-term maximum of creativity.  
- Delusion.  An extreme form of substitution of means and ends and short-term thinking - where we prioritize the sensation of positive feedback over true knowledge.  In human beings, the substitution of "happiness" or "pleasure" for intelligence or creativity by believing errors as a result of a failure of feedback is common.
- Dogmatism.  Where we prefer the short term comfort of believing that we have perfect knowledge in exchange for the reduction of imagination.    
- Leadership by fear.  Disrupting feedback by simultaneously providing false negative feedback and by removing true negative feedback.  
- Leadership by efficiency.  By prioritizing wealth (the perception of intelligence) over intelligence, we can achieve a temporary state of perceived success.  This is a form of delusion and at best is a failure of scope.

10.  Maximization of ethics means maximization of creativity which means maximization of intelligence which means maximization of ability to predict and control circumstances to achieve satisfactory conditions.   This formulation is consistent and scalable over an indefinitely long term.  Maximization of ethics will also maximize happiness over the long term, although this is and must always be a surplus value.  No other strategy is consistent and scalable over the indefinitely long term.     

* In particular, maximization of happiness is a delusional strategy.  Happiness is a signpost, much in the same way that pleasure is a signpost.  You are supposed to be happy when you have achieved satisfaction.  When it works, that is fine and happiness can be an effective measure of intelligence.  But happiness is not the same thing as actually achieving a satisfactory condition - it is possible to mistake the end for the means (the sign for the signal).  When you do this you will very quickly lose negative feedback (which of course always reduces happiness) and lose your ability to discriminate creativity from error or intelligence from ignorance.   

11. In general there are two meta-strategies: efficiency and innovation.  An efficiency strategy is focused on extracting the maximum of useful energy from a closed-system: maximizing the amount of time before the system reduces to equilibrium and entropy.  An innovation strategy is focused on opening closed systems - finding new sources of useful energy and "climbing up" the entropy ladder.  Both of these strategies play against the shape of the "long tail" event curve.  Efficiency strategies maximize benefit during the "normal" behavior of the curve and are brittle to the "black swan" events - that can lead to complete extinction.  Innovation strategies play precisely on the low-probability, large consequence breakthroughs.  A pure efficiency strategy is guaranteed to fail over the long term because a closed system will always reach equilibrium.  It is only by innovating and opening the system that long term success can be achieved.  
a) A species that occupies a given fitness landscape for a long enough time will tend to lose its flexibility and become highly efficient (the less efficient forms can't successfully compete). In so doing it becomes brittle to increasingly small changes in the fitness landscape and becomes increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic failure (extinction).    The longer a fitness landscape is static and the "steeper" its fitness slope, the more risk it generates - in the form of forcing efficiency and losing innovation.  
b) Taking it from the micro perspective, we might be tempted to contrast the hot house flower and the weed.  But, in fact, both strategies might be examples of efficiency and both might be examples of innovation.  The weed might be highly efficient at rapid growth in multiple different environments.  The hot house flower might be an example of very tight fit with each given environment.  The real example is punctuated equilibrium - what appears to be a tendency of entities to dramatically increase innovation during a time of crisis.  Thus it is less a question of specific strategy within a fitness landscape than how your strategy tends over time: is your strategy "pro" or "anti" innovation?  Does your strategy over time begin to slide downhill into an increasingly efficient mode (getting better and better at doing the same thing) or does it promote innovation?  In plants this seems to happen more at the level of genetic evolution, but in animals . . .
c) The question of efficiency and innovation becomes much more interesting at the animal level due to the innovation of the relatively complex nervous system and its powers of signal identification, pattern recognition and heuristic formation.  A rabbit that over-identifies a threat situation will waste its energy constantly running away from non-threats. But one that under-generalizes will find itself dinner for a threat that it failed to recognize.  It seems that there is a constant tendency for the vector of development to go towards efficiency over innovation - this is due to the short term benefits of efficiency and the short term risks (costs) of innovation.  If you compare neural architecture, the "mammal brain" must have been a risky innovation back in the day.  Costly to develop and maintain and not particularly useful until other pieces of the puzzle filled-in.  Memory, complex stimulus-response, cognition, these things hang-together.  If you keep them in-play until the whole system is put together you get a take off innovation that pays off big time.  If you pass and allow one of the pieces to specialize you lose out on the entire capability.  A modern lizard might be able to become a really great lizard, but its a long way back to the cynodonts if it wants to start climbing the path that leads to hominid.
d) The cultural layer is rife with these competing strategies.  For now lets look at the traditional economic domain.  Do you climb into the law of economies of scale and get locked into fixed highly efficient processes and products?  Or do you run along as an innovator, getting clobbered in well-understood markets by your more efficient competitors but jumping out on the cutting edge?  It seems that in the story of business, every great business starts innovative and is able to continue its arc of greatness so long as it is able to maintain its innovation and flexibility - even as it scales and becomes more efficient.  But once the tipping-point is crossed and efficiency overcomes innovation two things happen: it expands rapidly (bloating on past victories) and is fundamentally dead in the water (once those past innovations are fully mined it has nowhere new to go).

12.  Science has increased our ability to predict and control our external environment, but for a number of reasons it has failed to apply its methodologies consistently and rigorously to our complete condition (including ourselves).  Thus, economics reduces its scope only to maximization of wealth, rather than maximization of ethics.  Psychology strives to make us happy rather than to make us creative or ethical.  Economics 3.0, indeed perhaps Science 3.0, requires closing this loop.