The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society
ABSTRACT. The organismic view of society is updated by incorporating concepts
from cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and complex adaptive systems. Global
society can be seen as an autopoietic network of self-producing components, and
therefore as a living system or "superorganism". Miller's living systems theory
suggests a list of functional components for society's metabolism and nervous
system. Powers' perceptual control theory suggests a model for a distributed control
system implemented through the market mechanism. An analysis of the evolution of
complex, networked systems points to the general trends of increasing efficiency,
differentiation and integration. In society these trends are realized as increasing
productivity, decreasing friction, increasing division of labor and outsourcing, and
increasing cooperativity, transnational mergers and global institutions. This is
accompanied by increasing functional autonomy of individuals and organizations
and the decline of hierarchies. The increasing complexity of interactions and
instability of certain processes caused by reduced friction necessitate a strengthening
of society's capacity for information processing and control, i.e. its nervous system.
This is realized by the creation of an intelligent global computer network, capable of
sensing, interpreting, learning, thinking, deciding and initiating actions: the
"global brain". Individuals are being integrated ever more tightly into this
collective intelligence. Although this image may raise worries about a totalitarian
system that restricts individual initiative, the superorganism model points in the
opposite direction, towards increasing freedom and diversity. The model further
suggests some specific futurological predictions for the coming decades, such as the
emergence of an automated distribution network, a computer immune system, and a
global consensus about values and standards.
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 18:10:29 -0500 To: Francis Heylighen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: John Earls <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: The Global Superorganism
Dear Francis,
Your paper on the Global Organism (Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems) is probably the clearest setting out of the whole reasoning on this concept -- some how I missed it when it came out but would now like to look a bit at the whole model.
Roughly speaking the paper is in two parts: a first part setting up and specifying an isomorphism between a multi celled organism and human society. A second part exploring the path of emergence of the Global Brain and looking at aspects of the accompanying political process. While the 2nd part does lead from the first in certain ways they are different enough to address separately. Here I want to look at the first part because if the biological system
While you say that the nature of the organism to which human society must be compared would be more like the "pioneer" systems which can survive individually or collectively you use the Miller and Walker animal to draw your isomorphism to the social organism. The point here is that the global superorganism is an emerging system as were these pioneering organisms in the process of multicellular evolution (as Maturana and Varela point out). Consistency requires the isomorphism to be drawn between two comparable entities. The same point can be made with respect to organismic and societal reproduction. You make the good point that social reproduction is more like reproduction of vines and grasses, but these are also quite removed from the animal reproductive system. However if one conceptually isolates "society" from "culture" the reproduction of cultural subsystems (whether rock music or the Internet) from one place to another can be seen as more like the root spreading reproduction.
All the strongly debated arguments against the idea of societal autopoiesis disappear when, as you mention, the globally emergent system is referred to. It's boundaries are well fixed and its reproduction in other planets will be constrained by the laws of physics. As an emergent entity it is qualitatively different to all component societal systems. But the evolutionary properties of these component systems and the interactions between them set constraints on the emergent global properties. While the characteristic properties of the capitalist industrial system are providing the scientific where-with-all for the rapid growth of the system as you trace it in part 2, the capitalist system itself is the outcome of thousands of years of independent multi cultural development (as described by many anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber and Ralph Linton). In its difusion, reproduction or imposition in other sociocultural processes it has often not been able to replace or displace these. Here the easiest examples are Japan, China and SE Asia in general ("Science" is always coming up with cases of innovations in these countries which are embedded in their own traditions). The same is the case for most of the third world, and as such assure a longer time period for the growth of complexity (by the mechanisms you describe) than would be possible if it were able to replace these cultural traditions. In other words the long-term consolidation of the Superorganism is conditioned on the continued viability of these non-western cultural systems. For this reason the conservation of the viability of "relic" peoples must not be seen in zoological garden terms but in terms of the global organism's conservation of requisite variety. These peoples need the support of the outside at the moment to maintain themselves but as the global process goes on they will participate in the growth of complexity.
Nevertheless I don't think any particular organisms that we know of are suitable for isomorphisms into the social dynamic. For many reasons better mappings can be drawn from ecosystems. The problem of autopoiesis for ecosystems is equal or bigger than it is for social systems, in part because many ecosystems seem to be even more loosely interconnected than are social systems. However, you can extend the "more or less" autopoietic property to ecosystems. Mature (climax) ecosystems are largely organizationally closed as are human systems. The problem of boundaries has been got around in Landscape Ecology by subsuming it into wider modelling processes of patches and percolation. I think these models and processes could equally well serve for human systems and as such specify a lot of valid isomorphisms.
But the big problem becomes the same. The biosphere (or global ecosphere) is the only ecosystemically defined system that is truly autopoietic in all senses of the idea. Its sensitivity to perturbation is seen in its many responses to global warming. In the Andes we are seeing individuals and species literally racing up the mountain slopes. Now as you point out, the global social system not only includes all the humans but all their artifacts as well (material culture as the archaeologists define it). Yes we must include agricultural plants as part of that material culture, but that seems pretty arbitrary. To get a better hold on the distinction system/environment (society/ecosystem) we must go far back in time and look at the long term pattern of human social evolution.
Take the Homo Sapiens "out-of Africa" scenario as the "right" one (it doesn't matter if it isn't exactly right - the same arguments would equally apply to any pre-sapiens dispersion). The point is that at some 140 Ka there was a metasystemic transition that gave rise to humans in a comparatively small area of tropical Africa. This transition saw the emergence of symbolic language and social organisation. It is very probable (following Levi-Strauss) the human social organisation from its inception was corner stoned on marriage. Marriage is a symbolically expressed union between two social units and is not just an extension of monogamy, polygeny or polyandry. It is a way of consolidating social union in such a way as complexity is generated by the processes you mention in the paper (as sexual reproduction generated the Cambrian biological diversity) . The earliest humans, as most primate groups, had to be scattered over a fairly wide territory with a diversity of local ecosystems. The institution of marriage promoted the articulation and coordination of these groups, and it is reasonable to suppose that in a reasonably short time all the humans in the region were integrated into a coherent social system. This system would have been characterised by scale-invariant properties based in the extension of the ordering principles of marriage to wider groupings; it surely fed back into the human genetic process. The marriage based scale invariance allowed groups in Australia to extend cooperative patterns across the whole continent -- the "in-group" was replicated at wider and wider scales and not limited to locally defined groups. This wide scale invariant cooperation also characterised Andean society. What happened with the colonization was that the large scale coordination was the first to be broken up, and that is the burden of the 3rd world countries today.
The point is that the human species would have been "globalised" socially at its very emergence. The growth of complexity can be seen in terms of Heinz von Foerster's rule of the growth and incorporation of maximum entropy. The environment was the source of Hmax and was constantly being incorporated into the system. Game animals and food seed sources passed in to the system -- yes, they weren't as yet domesticated but as they were "mapped in" their associated uncertainty was reduced and manageable and allowed dH to increase.
The process as slow, Hansen calculates an economic doubling time of 25,000 years for hunting and gathering systems, but still very much faster than for any primate group. This gave rise to increased territorial occupation and so to the rest of Africa, Europe and Asia. The expansion would also have lead to the loss of most of the pan human organisation coordination. However the institution of marriage remained the nexus for intergrupal coordination. In the process of expansion and segmentation new environments were explored and managed, and incorporated into the social systems (or subsystems). This cultural knowledge was "stored" into the environment (totems and the like). The inevitable increase in populations resulted in marriage-managed associations and coordinations between previously isolated groups. Such fusions accelerated the growth of complexity.
The "Western tradition", capitalism, industrialism, and finally the global supersystem emerged as a result of these uncountable fissions and fusions. This is not to put aside the self-organising dynamics taking place within every group, but that the pre-Celtic "beaker maker" tradition in Britain would never have increased its complexity sufficiently to have made an industrial revolution if it had been left to itself.
My general point is that human social sociocultural evolution has to be treated as a unity. We cannot just focus on recent developments in capitalist society to get an idea of how the Superorganism might be. Capitalism is like the early pioneer stage of ecosystem dynamics. Strongly competitive, very little recycling, wasteful of energy and generating high entropy but it is not sustainable. The consolidation of the global brain will surely give rise to a sustainable mature superorganism that is very different to anything in today's world.
********
I wanted to write this somehow into the Princyb web site, but couldn't decide on where it would be appropriate -- PCP is getting rather complicated these days. If you think it is worth it you could put it in somewhere. I aim to go on working these ideas into a global statement. Perhaps later I will write something on the 2nd part of your paper.
The best
John
John Earls
Web site: http://macareo.pucp.edu.pe/~jearls/index.html
--
Francis Heylighen Center "Leo Apostel" Free University of Brussels http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
