#22. The Cogs of Armageddon [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

1-27-2017

This is a "just-so story" about how I believe everyday human behavior eventually accomplishes the all-important biological function of dispersal for the human race. A future post will attempt to explain how the "just-so story" got written in terms of natural selection and possible faster-acting proxies thereof needed by organisms with long generation times.

Dispersal is things like dandelions shedding airborne seeds, slime molds developing into spore cases on stalks and releasing the spores into the wind, territorial systems of birds and mammals forcing the unlanded young to seek widely for their own territories, and humans going into space because our science fiction writers keep scaring us about the possibility of meteor crashes wiping out life on Earth. To paraphrase the latter, a way to avoid extinction, long-term, is not putting all your eggs in one basket, geographically speaking.

The slime mold dictyostelium is triggered into its dispersal program by the food supply running short; I will adopt the assumption that the human dispersal program is also triggered by the end of the good times, that is, the price of bread rising relative to wages.

I conjecture that human neural pathways potentiate aggression when the hard times come, but of an elaborate kind adapted for ensuring efficient dispersal (i.e., with minimal loss of life). It begins with a two-person feud of the sort illustrated in cultural references too numerous to mention. In Canada, where I live, a cough accompanied by an angry expression plays the role of the instigation. The arbitrary stimulus, made offensive by some piece of Pavlovian conditioning, is traded back and forth with rapidly increasing energy. The process is remarkably like flirting, not surprising since the ultimate purpose has commonalities with reproduction--but of an entire society. 

However, the emotional component is strongly threatening rather than rewarding, because the participants must be induced to seek allies, which people do when threatened, until all of society is eventually polarized. The acts of provocation being traded back and forth become progressively more outrageous, as they must, to keep the polarization process going. Eventually, one side gets the upper hand and forces the other to flee.

The result is a diaspora, i.e., dispersal. Because of the long polarization process, an entire group is expelled, not single individuals one at a time. Thus, members of such a group can assist each other to survive and relocate, thereby reducing the mortality associated with dispersal, thereby making the dispersal event more efficient in terms of number of people relocated. The group who flees is then seen by the international community as the blameless victim, and the group who stays is seen as the unprincipled aggressor. This tends to elicit a sheltering of the refugees and an intimidation of the "aggressor," who is deterred from pressing his advantage, that is, pursuing the refugees and slaughtering them to the last man, which is what each side would dearly like to do to the other by this point. This, again, is an efficiency from the point of view of producing dispersal.

However, if each side is continually threatening the other, why don't they flee each other's presence during the very early stages? The answer seems to be that humans have a reflex that converts feeling threatened into a wish to injure the threatening party, possibly a behavioral leftover from some earlier adaptation, such as an anti-predation defense; to injure, you have to stick around. (Leftovers such as these form the building blocks of future just-so plots.)

Finally, settled refugees usually do not integrate completely into the host society, instead forming ethnic neighborhoods. This increases the resemblance to an entire society reproducing itself. However, the growth phase following reproduction in individuals seems to be lacking at the society level. However, being seen as ethnic by the host society, due to slow integration, could improve individual-level reproductive success of refugees because of disassortative mate-choice effects evolved to favor genes that produce dispersal.

2-24-2017

The dispersal-producing dynamic just outlined is fantastically powerful, as it must be to overcome all the reasons you would not leave your homeland forever at some arbitrary time: expense, risk of mortality in transit, opportunity costs, temporary loss of livelihood, need to learn a new language and customs, vulnerability to exploitation in the new country, etc., etc.

This dynamic is basically what theologians call evil, for which I propose the less judgmental, substitute term "dispersalism." If this is truly an insight, it should have a liberating effect on your life, even if you just remember that one word, but with the price of always being population-conscious: always trying to see what is happening at the population/zeitgeist level, and reading the paper every day at the very least.

At least one "just-so story" could probably be written for each of the pillars of the human species-specific objective function mentioned in previous posts, these being as follows: dispersal, genetic diversity, memetic diversity, and altruism. (The latter has not been mentioned until now.) Each of these must be optimized, not blindly maximized, for each comes at a cost. In terms of neurobiology, each pillar is probably a family of functionally related likes and dislikes wired up in the hypothalamus, but not obviously related to individual-level survival or reproduction.

#21. Is Higher Math Really Undiscovered Physics? [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact.

This post was inspired by the realization that to progress in physics, we need to accept the Newtonian position that absolute space exists. Not only that, but that it is complicated, like a network, crystal, or condensate. Too many fundamental constants of nature (20, according to Lee Smolin) are required to explain the behaviour of supposedly elementary particles with no internal structures to which such constants could refer.

Thus, the constants must refer to the vacuum between the particles, now more readily understood as a complex medium. Looking at the pattern set by the rest of physics and cosmology, such a medium is more readily understood as a condensate of myriad "space-forming entities." Matter would be flaws in this condensate, entropy left over from its rapid formation. Energy may have the same relation to time: irregularities in its rate of progression.

To theorize about how space formed and what came before it, we have to give up visualization, obviously. I suspect this will be a big deal for most physicists. However, the abstractions of higher math may be an island of understanding already existing on the far side of the spatial thought barrier.

In other words, sets, integers, categories, mappings, etc., may be concrete things, and not abstractions at all. Presumably, our spatial and temporal reality still bears the properties it had from the very earliest stages of the universe, co-existing with later-developed properties, which have enabled mathematicians throughout history to access the deepest levels of description of reality, deeper than space time itself.

Consider set theory. Can the familiar concepts of set, union, intersection, and complement be placed into correspondence with physical processes and objects in today's space time to make a case that set theory is pre-spatial physics, so primordial as to be literally unimaginable if thought of as the rules of a real universe? To get started, we have to begin with Leibniz's monads, the "empty set," now considered a real thing. (If you must visualize these, visualize something ridiculous like Cheereos™ floating in milk, when the bowl has reached the single-layer stage.)

The physical process of binding is prefigured by the set-theoretical operation of union. In the simplest case, two monads combine to form a second-order set.

The physical process of pattern recognition, which is, in essence, energy release, is prefigured by intersection. Note that with intersection, the internal subset structure of the set is important, suggesting that the "operating system" of the universe at this stage must keep track of such structures.

We can associate a size measure with a set, namely the total of all the monads inside it once all subsets have been accounted for. The usefulness of numbers in dealing with the world is explained if this size measure is the basis of laws governing what sets may combine as unions and in what frequency (i.e., fraction of all sets extant.)

The fact that most of physics seems to be governed by differential equations may be prefigured by a tendency of these combining laws to depend on the difference of two sizes. The set-theoretical operation of complementation may prefigure the existence of positive and negative charge and the Pauli exclusion principle of fermions, on which molecular complementarity interactions depend.