Technocephalization: A Theory of the Evolution of the Social Organism

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Technocephalization A Theory of the Evolution of the Social Organism by Bryce Laliberte

Dedicated to The Philosopher

Credit for the cover by @urmeinong on Twitter.

Part 1: The Rude Awakening of Consciousness Part 2: The Transcendence Running Through All Things Part 3: Knowledge of the Social Body Part 4: The Historical Genealogy of Knowledge Part 5: The Sociological Continuity Hypothesis Part 6: The Socioanatomical Social Scientific Paradigm Part 7: Technopolitics Part 8: Technocephalization Part 9: Patchwork as Breakaway Civilization Part 10: The Science of Purpose

Part 1: The Rude Awakening of Consciousness By now the path is understood. One makes their way progressively deeper into obscure internet circles as part of their individualization, gathering a few key elements to themselves. The first is a familiarity with some canon, whether that is a single writer (often Marx) or a collection (French writers like Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze seem to be in vogue, but of course there is always Mencius Moldbug). Some take a more classical path, steeping themselves in the Enlightenment tradition, some pursue a more religious path in the Scholastic tradition, but in general one accrues familiarity with some system allowing them to make themselves legible to a community. The second is to pick out an obscure and little-known writer, in order to distinguish oneself from others in the community by familiarity with this marginal figure. This is what it takes to make an “ideologue” today. Some know more than others, this is true. Some actually go beyond the Wikipedia posts and read the primary texts. Some have a natural talent they can't help splashing around. But it all comes back to the same thing, some attempt to devise a pattern out of words that will transmit a signal through the organs of media that will result in a change in people's behavior to steer civilization in a direction one thinks it ought to go. Some say they only mean to pursue truth, some say they only mean to look out for the oppressed. How one parses out the specific reasons some argue one way while some argue another might just refer itself back to an irreducible circularity, as the explanation must presuppose theories and axioms to even make itself legible that will necessarily be in the support of some self-interest over another. So a story framing some sequence of actions and behaviors by people, even if the filter is necessary to have an image at all, cannot remove itself from the process. There is a path beyond these mean wanderings. Eventually, one reduces down to the fixed principles by which reality is set. Cause, appearance, phenomenon, investigation, data, information, theory. What motivates us to write things down also motivates us to set things in motion. Getting the truth is one thing. Money and power are another. If one is so bold as to begin intellectual exploration at all, then it seems so easy to see a path to all these things by just striking upon the right sequence of words. A policy paper is never just a matter or pure analysis. It is an attempt to make it become reality. To put it in a place where it will be read by the right people who will be persuaded to some decision on account of a pattern of symbols strung together somewhere. This is the inherent problem of self-observation in social sciences that probably still has its most rigorous formulation in the Lucas critique. The Lucas critique is simply the recognition that published theories about the economy ostensibly influence decisions made in the economy, so in order for an academic paper to be “complete” its expression must be adequately reconciled to how the paper itself and the knowledge it proposes influences decisionmaking.1 Revelation is strategic.2 The things you know and the order in which you learn them will influence your 1 The Lucas critique is originally formulated in Lucas, R. E. (1976). Econometric policy evaluation: A critique. CarnegieRochester Conference Series on Public Policy, 1, 19–46. A more systematic expression of the insight can also be found in Kydland, F. E., & Prescott, E. C. (1977). Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans. Journal of Political Economy, 85(3), 473–491. The author would also hold them up as examples of an insight which is genuine and natural to the domain of economics, but which remains unintegrated into a more general theory to account for noneconomic phenomena that possesses the same properties of collective self-interaction. It is worth noting here too the words from the abstract of Kydland and Prescott's work: "economic planning is not a game against nature but, rather, a game against rational economic agents." While it seems innocuous, it is very revealing of the limited worldview of economists in the 20th century, even among those in the profession who manage to attain some meaningful accuracy with their descriptions and analyses of economic phenomena. 2 Okuno-Fujiwara, M., Postlewaite, A., & Suzumura, K. (1990). Strategic Information Revelation. The Review of

behavior, sometimes in ways that go beyond your own resistance. Every behavior you might simulate or represent is only a principle of inputting the right sensible stimuli. The right sequence of images, sounds, tastes, and so on, in order to realize a specific effect on the world, not much different from programming a computer or contriving some mechanical invention. This is the controversy intrinsic to the self-disclosure of science - as easily observed with the controversies of psychometrics, demography, and evolutionary psychology, where even leading and prestigious academics openly discuss the necessity of deceiving the public about these matters over fears how they might react to such information, were it understood. In its essence, propaganda is meant to be information that, "properly understood", compels a certain understanding even if – especially – you wished to resist it. In nature an abundance of species exist which depend on what is effectively rape as a “courtship ritual,” and this can be taken as the model of what constitutes dark Enlightenment. You don't want to know. It will upset your naively constructed sense of self and meaning in the world. But this is really just more pretense. In a real sense, one of the reasons this kind of knowledge has always been so marginalized is because it lays out very starkly the association between self-interest and ignorance. What we could contest for ourselves so securely when we did not perceive it as an offense to nature's whim for self-reproducibility, suddenly betrays us. Our beliefs and attitudes are shaped by selfinterest, and it is in our self-interest to be ignorant as to how much our beliefs are in our self-interest and against the interests of others. When we honestly believe our beliefs are in the best interest of all, then we can maintain with perfect fidelity our sincerity in our beliefs, because it is not an act. 3 When you become aware how your beliefs are a matter of self-interest, then it raises the question to yourself – can my opponent tell I am espousing my beliefs because they are in my interest, or not? It becomes an internalized question that one must now overcome to return to their easy equilibrium, that unthinking authenticity. This is often the utility of escalating emotional states. You can make yourself believe you must have a sincere belief in the universal utility of your beliefs regardless or even in spite of their benefit to selfinterest if you invest so much energy into it. One protests, one puts on an air, some act intended to express a sincerity they before never felt compelled to give when they had no reason to doubt it and so is inherently empty. But it really comes back to the same thing. The default state, at least so it would appear, is a state of ignorance as to how our beliefs are motivated by self-interest conjoined with the belief that beliefs must be motivated by altruism in order to be efficacious. This finds itself expressed in politics of superficial bipartisan character: to justify a policy, it must not be merely good for me but good for us. This is where most people seem to end up, without ever fully reconciling themselves to the causal relationship between their self-interest and the beliefs they express. But it results in many of the same confusions carrying forward, which had seemed earned before this initiation into the reality of one's self interest. Self-deception here has some utility. Before one is aware, one doesn't need to deceive themselves (or be deceived about their own participation in deceiving themselves), which is why it makes sense we are so resistant to the spoiling of our innocence. Once enlightenment has imposed itself on our idyllic selfconception, the memory of innocence becomes a kind of nostalgia. But in recovering ourselves from this imposition, a choice is forced on us: to retreat from knowledge, or to embrace knowledge. It has the mark of an existential and even moral choice, one incumbent to our circumstance, unfair we should have to make it, but nonetheless imposing an existential weight on our soul we cannot just shirk off. It is a choice that defines us. Economic Studies, 57(1), 25. 3 Smith, M. K., Trivers, R., & von Hippel, W. (2017). Self-deception facilitates interpersonal persuasion. Journal of Economic Psychology, 63, 93–101.

Ideology is an attempt to defer this choice, to return to the innocence we have no choice about losing. It is an elaborate construction, full of bells and whistles to make it attract our attention and keep us spinning in a circle to follow along with everything, but ultimately going nowhere. It is intended to keep us rooted to our present ignorance. We remain wedded to the motivations we can no longer justify, but so long as we overlook the unjustified nature of our initial premises, the rest of the structure appears sound. It is easy to lose years in fine-tuning the intricacies of a byzantine ideological superstructure, especially since the payoff seems so immense (a ready-made self-replicating structure you can import into everyone's heads that will presumably make them all follow the same rules), but it is an illusion. Good things have no need from nature to promote themselves. In this we can begin to realize the illusory nature of knowledge itself. Every idea is promoted because we think that the more the idea exists, the more it will influence people's behaviors to an end we think is good. This is really all ideology comes down to. As a “system,” it is just a way to array a cohering set of positive and negative incentives to stimulate the proper ideas at the right time. If the right ideas are repeated at the right times, then behavior will change to achieve the ends for which they are repeated. Ideology becomes a mental Skinner box, wires poking out of our heads that the masters can pass over with electricity to drive our behavior. To understand what an ideology means is to understand what it causes. Thus, to understand the ideology through which we can be controlled is to gain some measure of control over ourselves. But, we all have access to control. This is what motivates us to embrace the knowledge rather than retreat from it. If we retreat from the knowledge we are responsible for it nonetheless. The problem is how one embraces the knowledge without being assailed by all those who are still in retreat. The choice of embrace is controversial, because it incontrovertibly signals the possibility for all to make that same choice, and if the choice is possible then it is necessary, thus the paradox of freedom. The pursuit of knowledge becomes a choice one makes for oneself, the reasons for which they must believe in for themselves because others cannot do it for them. We must do things for ourselves. That is the existential imperative imposed on all life by Nature. This brings us back to the Lucas critique. Our behavior is influenced by what people say. We say things in order to influence behavior. Perhaps academic papers “about” the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve are really about influencing the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. But would someone really do that? Present information like it clearly implies a policy choice but act like they're only presenting that information disinterestedly? So you embrace knowledge, and you are right back to self-interest. You cannot eschew it, you are not retreating from its knowledge, but now you can no longer play the act of believing your beliefs aren't for yourself, because now you know. Somehow it seemed easier to strive for self-interest when you weren't aware you were doing so, but this is only like changing from automatic to manual transmission. You are more in control than you were before, which makes you responsible for aspects of the process that before operated automatically, and that can be difficult when you're not used to it. Before, you were only responsible for a few levers, now there's more than twice as many to keep track of! But this affords you more control, and shortly enough you will regain the sense of ease and mastery you had before. As you move on, self-interest presents itself as an effective coordination mechanism. But there is more to it than just presenting how to move from the present state to a state one claims to desire. Having a personal interest is a good enough reason to strive for it. Cleaned from the detritus acquired over a

lifetime of false self-representation – to unlearn, in other words, what one shouldn't have needed to learn the first time – self-interest emerges as the only sensible principle around which to organize society. Why should we do a thing? Because we would like it. Wanting to live in a neighborhood around neighbors with a similar worldview, low crime rates, and ideal socialization opportunities for your children is enough reason to straightforwardly pursue it without apology. Self-interest is the basis of civilization on a literally metaphysical level. Without it we are savages. We represent this desire as the intersection of so many beliefs, as though this picture we strive for is only the synthetic calculus of abstract moral principles, but really the beliefs are instrumental to the end rather than purely defining it. Nature is a shrewd and economical mistress, so it is not altogether strange to find that she has only allowed something to exist provided it is to some end. By necessity, disclosure of beliefs already implies some efficacy at least for some cases, for otherwise they shouldn't be disclosed. Respecting this, we can separate the efficacy of the disclosure of beliefs from their seeming analytic meaning, and so recognize that what stimulates their disclosure may be unrelated. In other words, we must look on beliefs as adaptations in behaviors undertaken by humans to improve our survival and reproduction, and from this horizon of metaphysics recognize their instrumentality. Important to increasing the scope of our description of belief is analyzing their factual versus moral content. The factual is beliefs about matters of fact. The moral is beliefs about how things should be. Human language has adapted itself to these aspects on account of the differing role they play. Matters of fact as they are perceived by the individual impels the action they believe to be the most profitable response. Ideas about how things should be would influence the ends others pursue. When human behaviors entered into language as discretely referable objects, they entered into the purview of human observation and their differing results could be compared analytically. Note that the practical utility of language is not only in equilibriating neighbors to reduce conflict and therefore secure the promulgation of genes. This language is also conditioned into progeny, rendering a cycle of selection on the intergenerational level influencing the evolution of language. All of these have an influence on the beliefs we express. The moral dimension as such implies the human individual's coparticipation in humanity, and that they have come to express the beliefs they do as a result of countless iterations of selection on the humans and their societies that precede us. The individual is inextricably bound up in an interdependent network of human actors which we do not and can not comprehend with perfect fidelity, but which our language has adapted itself to working within and through. If we could ascribe knowledge to language itself, we would even be tempted to say it knows more than humans do by themselves. Language even speaks through us, below our conscious comprehension, integrating our behavior with nature intuitively. What this means is the behaviors we associate with morality such as punishment and reward have resulted in the tangible impression of morality in humans with its particular quirks and qualities as roughly adapted to prevailing circumstances. (Specific moral systems may not be adaptive, but the general availability of moral systems is at least correlated with the existence of social systems that do seem generally adaptive.) What we are doing is reducing the moral to the factual, in order to simplify the equation we are computing to one that can be calculated by the human mind. Since the moral dimension is a phenomenon contingent on the factual (in that we must operate on the factual to produce the moral outcome, which itself is also a factual state of affairs), we can therefore describe the mandates of morals as requiring some factual outcome. From this perspective, a multitude of moral systems can be compared as to their factual outcomes (assuming they are coherent) and the factual outcome decided as a necessity of satisfying the conditions best for those in the space affected that can exist in equilibrium with other adjacent factual outcomes. It is, in other words, a more political or material than purely

"moral" technique for consolidating appropriate social forces to effectively derive outcomes that are constituted by the actual features of people's lives, such as their health, treatment, income, housing, security, and so on. This method cannot be used to argue one moral conviction over another, that is not its purpose. But it can reliably discover problems that have their etiology in conditions which are material rather than moral, and that therefore a material approach will have better results. It allows us to consider between many parties with competing visions to define a synthesis achieving the ends they hold in mind. At the very least, a group of people could apply it for themselves, which is an obvious extension of Enlightenment principles but has not been articulated. Today there are numerous “public dialogues” that reduce to exhortations for good behavior which are just as often counter-productive and misleading. Treating of moral problems as factual technicalities allows more people to be part of the solution and brings into view solutions that might not have been viable under the expectation it must satisfy one narrow, specific morality. If we step back and analyze the problem through a purely material approach, we arrive at significantly different policy recommendations, both in content and attitude. Rather than trying to browbeat those who must somehow be responsible for this deficit (despite lackluster evidence demonstrating it), we may remain agnostic about the relevance of moral dispositions in people and cultures. Instead of intending the policy to be a redistribution justified on moral principles (they must be doing something evil, so it is just to appropriate their resources), the policies are straightforwardly applicable on the basis of collective good - or at least the collective good of the group managing to implement such policies! (Which brings up the fact that sometimes policies are implemented for a whole society by only a part of it for themselves at the expense of others!) Several of these materialistic – rather than moralistic – policies in concert with one another could lead to the tangible improvement of certain groups that are otherwise punished by policy established on naive grounds. This is the stark representation of a worldview in contrast with the leading orthodoxy of our day. It is not pretending to maintain a vantage point of moral superiority or holiness. These things are just irrelevant qualities for getting done the kinds of things people want done. It is the perspective of not exactly a social engineer, which has the wrong sense, but a social doctor. The patient can report to the expert to receive advice that is much more likely to be sound than polling random people off the street. It is only a matter of practical application, fixing what can be fixed with precise surgery rather than ministerial exhortation - and grasping memento mori about what in society cannot be fixed and must be surrendered to entropy.

Part 2: The Transcendence Running Through All Things The problem is that without understanding what causes society to form as it does, its ordinary function as such will appear miraculous. Certainly children have pondered on the organization of society, dependent as it is on people choosing to act civilly, and considered that one day we might all decide to act differently, resulting in the abolition of civilization as we know it. But people don't. The question implied by this possibility – why do people continue to act as they do? – is more difficult to answer than to pose. If civilization is not a miracle, we must say it is natural. While this does not enumerate its organizing principles, it does give us a place to begin. Civilization organizes itself according to laws of nature that transcend human will, and more often conforms human will to it than the other way around. Our selves as such must be conformed to natural regularities that transcend our personal reality, otherwise there should be no way for all the variety of human behavior to have organized itself into such a fantastic expression. We return to much the same epistemic problem as before, in that our personal probing depends on principles that result in circularity. We are likely, as individuals, to approach an expression of social reality that is socially functional over true, in the sense that any articulated proposition – no matter its material truth – will have been motivated, consciously and subconsciously, to represent a proposition found amenable to others so as to improve one's status. It would be a mistake to see this as truth being constrained by social necessity. There would be no articulation of truth as such without social necessity. Social necessity, in other words, is the vector drawing out truth. The atomized view of epistemology, in which truth is forged in the individual mind through the appropriate dynamis of knowledge in the mind is inadequate – it is only through our relation to others that our words gain their sense. “Truth” in this view depends not only on the appropriate orientation of the individual to reality, but the appropriate organization of individuals. We are less like “minds” in our collective function and more like the cells of our sense organs. From this perspective blaming the material factor of social necessity as a causal factor in the expression of ideas is like blaming the bricks for only building a tower so tall, rather than gravity. Obviously, without the bricks, there would be no tower. Nonetheless, we can also meaningfully consider using different material and techniques in the construction of bricks, and how they are brought together to form a construct. The set of “things which are true” and the set of “things which society incentivizes us to say” have an important overlap which we are forced to examine if we are to understand why society does say things which are true at all. There is some bare minimum need for truth which it is necessary to admit for viable social function, propositions reproduced because they are effective to an end people find desirable despite other costs associated with it. Despite the initial cost of reproducing truth – which may be negligible or great – the benefits associated with those sequences of cooperative human behavior are great enough to outweigh them. As such, we have come to see them as a matter of fixity, if not precisely so affixed as the laws of physics they still accord to a statistical regularity of behavior relative to incentives. It pays to tell the truth, at least in some ways, so those ways result. This alignment of benefits with producing truth is the key to their foundation of society. Our institutions need to know at least some truths – probably more relative to others – and would not be here if they hadn't demonstrated some long-lived ability to organize men to solve their problems. If at least because what could not is no longer here, what remains are those that can do so. The progressive development of such institutions through history catalog how increasing populations with access to greater material power can organize society with enough competence for all the other ventures of

civilization to manifest themselves. All of this relates back to ourselves, the individual, as it is our connection to this vast, multi-faceted superstructure that makes both individual and collective knowledge possible. The question seems prima facie impossible to answer, but a real difference in worldview hinges on what priority one gives to the individual over society in the construction of knowledge. Is knowledge primarily the work of the collective, and we are little more than worker bees in a hive? Or is knowledge primarily the work of the individual, who accumulates a vast shop full of curious treasure? If the question is impossible to answer, perhaps it is meaningless to distinguish between them, as if either exists without the other. Rather, knowledge is fluidly constructed, with our individual efforts at its realization forming its ethereal substance strung through society. Such a distribution of knowledge through the social body would seem to reduce “truth” as well, to a function of social reproductive potential. But rather than seeing this as reducing truth, we could see this as exulting social reproductive potential. “Social reproductive potential” means whether the behavior the truth entails is of such a kind that it will lead to its own reproduction and regeneration. This is a rather “brute” process, in that it is impossible to know the future outside of running the computation to its finish. What results is a picture of civilization striving after truth, attracted in virtue of the benefit (social reproductive potential) associated with it like plants strive after sunlight. Truth arises in civilization as a matter of teleology, because all being – including our own being and that of civilization – has its end in God, Pure Actuality, Essence and Existence as One.4 This is not a supernatural action. Instead, it is the very essence of nature as such. There is a progressive realization in nature of forms that can more reliably reproduce themselves in an environment being changed by them, resulting in the infinite expansion of the universe and a process we also call entropy. Civilization as we know it is only the most expansive form of a network of reproductive forms we know of, and may even represent a coherent entity of its own. Civilization is not a machine, as though it were constructed – it is a living organism, and it was born. It is, moreover, not an alien or artificial intrusion on nature, but is its peak. Civilization cannot only not be separated from, it is the crowning 4 Contrary to the materialistic tendencies of modern philosophy, teleology has hardly been done away with. Discussions of teleology in the context of evolution betray a misunderstanding. In the finely developed usage of the Scholastics, especially that of Thomas Aquinas, teleology was more than an explanation of specific things, it was a description of all Nature. Rather than eliminate such a sense of final cause, teleology has simply re-asserted itself as the solution to all physical equations. This is especially potent in the description of entropy in information theory, which portrays a clearly definable end of ultimate disorder to which all systems converge per their nature. This is nothing other or more than the concept of final cause. From Aquinas' On the Principles of Nature: "the actions of natural agents are determined, so it is not necessary that they elect the means to an end." Aquinas says this because, in the Scholastic understanding, the telos of a thing's nature springs not from some extrinsic design imposed on it, as in the case of artifacts, machines, and other creations of human design - instead, every thing acts according to its nature, and its nature determines it to behave so as to arrive at some specifically definable state of affairs. This "nature" is not an additional quality to the substance, but is coextensive with a thing's literal material composition (e.g. the "nature" of a stone is embodied just by the atoms and particles themselves in their particular organization, rather than being something "above and beyond" the atoms and particles and their relations). The nature of a stone is for it to rest on the ground - for a gas, to expand to fill its container (these are really only partial descriptions and should not be confused with exhaustive descriptions of their natures, if such a thing is even possible). Every scientific description of nature as such depends on describing from what state to another a system will tend to transition under what conditions. Ergo, this Aristotelian formulation of 'truth' as the result of a nature's operation can, and will, be described in terms of entropy. Since the meaning is formally equivalent and it elucidates the respective richness of each philosophical vernacular's language, the author has elected to preserve this vital point of connection, even if others would prefer to go around, those of theological shallowness be damned. If the reader happens to be an atheist, and the concept of God remains troubling to them, know what I mean by 'God' is "the necessary end of time as determined by the laws of nature."

jewel of nature. By understanding the history of civilization – as it extends to the very beginning of time – we can understand its metaphysics. We can determine how civilization is hard-coded into the laws of nature, how her greatness and depravity each realize the most elementary patterns of constructive and destructive patterns. The objects of nature are subject to laws, or at least law-like regularity. For all the progress made in physics and other hard sciences following Newton, however, the scientific investigation of society has faltered in an important way. While we might truthfully say there are models in economics or sociology or psychology that are basically true and failure to understand them can amount to a kind of illiteracy about modern life, what our models of social phenomena have always failed to embed is a predictive element. This goes back to the Lucas critique that we already brought up, but to draw the principle of difference out we must zoom out on the phenomenon in question. Typically, we view the materially expressed set of symbolic equations we know as 'physics' as existing in one closed system that doesn't causally interact with the other closed system it is about. While those texts and writings and so on all result in changes to human behavior, human behavior as we know it does not directly influence the underlying principles of physical motion – so far as we know. Symbolic expressions about social motion, on the other hand, directly influence the objects they are about. In other words, the sciences of economics, sociology, and so on exist in an open system with the phenomena they describe. The divide between hard and soft sciences arises because the articulation of the soft sciences exists in direct causal relation with its phenomena, resulting in the "bizarre effect" of causal self-interaction. This “bizarre effect” between soft science and its social phenomena is typically drawn out as the anomaly, but in fact it is more typical of our experience of the use of symbolic expressions. Our normal mode of operation in the use of language is to supply information between one another that causally results in our coordination through time and space. If language did not achieve this goal – and so produce tangible benefits essential to our survival, such as food, water, shelter, safety – it would not exist. The use of language as an apparently “acausal” model of physical phenomena is the exception rather than the norm. Even our ability to express descriptions to one another is in order to yield causal contingencies - “Do X, and here is a description of Y so that you can figure out how to do X given Y.” Language is actually a causal reality, with the way it seems to frame meaning in a non-physical location better understood as an illusion. In reality, there is no “non-physical meaning” embedded into language above and beyond its material expression. The purely observable element of language – its material composition and relation to the form of sequential causal relation – are sufficient to explain it. What this means is that the use of symbolic expressions to articulate “scientific truths” must be understood in their causal reality. We are describing a set of rules we can follow in order to determine an accurate description of reality, that description which can be combined with an imperative to yield a physically tangible result. If the symbolic expressions did not give us rules we could mentally follow (aided or unaided by machines and mathematics) to accurately predict how events would appear, we would not tend to reproduce and use them. Symbolic expressions that are not useful for predicting the appearance of reality are no more useful than an inaccurate map of a geographic region, except perhaps as fantasy. All that matters is the effective translation from the symbols to our behavior. This is the real meaning of language – the meaning of language is realized in behavior, actual and potential. The description of meaning as both actual and potential behavior is important. Information known

might not influence one's behavior until those special conditions that make the information useful. All of this yields a definite conclusion – that the use of language can be algorithmically formalized via the causal relations between those events that prompt their use. But, if the reality of language entirely subsists with its causal reality, this contradicts our belief that the hard sciences are causally unrelated to their phenomena. We understand mathematics to be transcendental, but if the meaningfulness of their symbolic expression rests on physical causation, it would seem to deprive it of its transcendental character. But it remains transcendental, in that it belies a necessary structure of potentiality, a vector ordering causality around it extending to infinity. This necessary connection to infinity imbues it with its transcendental character, even while materially situated. We can extend this argument backwards, through the whole of material reality itself. If we grant mathematics the character of being transcendental, then material reality equally participates in that vector. This is because mathematics not only has its form necessarily related to matter, without which it would have nothing “to be about,” but it is also necessarily expressed through matter and under its limits. Mathematics vesting itself fully on the material plane of reality yet retaining its transcendental character certainly seems arcane as a starting point for politics, but it is necessary for unifying the sciences through a basic principle that unites everything falling under the category of language and knowledge. What seems the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics is fundamentally because it is literally but a species of the “unreasonable effectiveness” of causality intrinsic to nature. Math and science and everything linguistically articulated exists within the domain of physics. In specifying itself, it interacts with itself, a formula which inevitably realizes a fractal pattern, and this may be the most apt picture for describing the relation of math and the rest of reality as such. Reality is a fractal, and its spandrels – peninsulae of self-similarity – are capable of analogizing each other across scale because they are derived of precisely the same set of principles underlying and connecting them to all of reality as such. Language organizes itself the same way as any other kind of thing does, through positive and negative stimulus. In one sense, this seems quite obvious, but in another – as the literature on language itself attests – this is not. Language has no causal efficacy of its own, but exists only as the causal result of a change in human beings. Human beings thus contribute causal vitality to language, so that the expression follows a rational pattern. This pattern is not composed of causal relations between the phenomena and the words themselves, but by causal relations between humans and their phenomena. The words themselves do not experience positive or negative stimulus as we do, but we experience it for them. I say “Coffee” correctly in combination with providing money and I am rewarded with coffee. But if I do not use my words correctly – or use the wrong words – I might receive a negative stimulus. The positive and negative stimuli need not be drastic or harmful. A positive stimulus could be a parent handing their child a glass of milk when their child says 'milk,' affirming the connection of the sign with the referent. A negative stimulus might be as gentle as a correction by my teacher for incorrectly using 'they're' rather than 'their.' And so in the way humans experience positive and negative stimuli in their use of language, language is selected according to a causally ordered pattern, and thus itself expresses that aspect of causal order. It should be noted, the effect of selection can occur at a level below or beyond conscious experience. Language has the metaphysical status closer to a picture. Ordinarily, the picture does not itself cause what it is a picture of to be changed – the causal production of the picture is (ordinarily) so slight in crucial aspects of physical motion as to yield no noticeable effect by itself. However, the potential always exists for someone to see the picture, and this information resulting in a change to what it

represents. Perhaps I see a picture of a room and am moved to reorganize it. Or perhaps I am simply taking a picture of myself, and after the picture is taken I no longer need to hold the pose. We might still say the picture was true, and so it was, but still the picture can be instrumental in causing it to become not. There is a similar potential for words – that the articulation of something being such causes it to cease to be. But these are only examples rather than the principle itself. We cannot equivocate between this ordinary sense for some words to threaten a perilous contingency on their described reality to a universal. Yet, if we are looking for a truth expressing a law-like regularity, then we are looking for something that cannot be undone. These fixed laws of reality then become the sources from which positive and negative stimulus flows, by representing the fixed order against which our behaviors are judged. Therefore, these laws will tend to inexorably fix the expression in our language, and thus fix our behavior in space and time. The reason these laws, or forces, recur is because they represent metastable organizations of matter, and so in the incidence of their formation, causation tends to persist downstream their existence. Equally fixed with relation to each other as laws of nature, the same organization of nature thus necessarily impresses itself on our expression. For this reason we are able to trust the edifice of knowledge that we are building up, for more or less the same reason we can expect nature to accumulate in entropy dissipating patterns by her own power. 5 The patterns of language that fail to provide a form for knowledge to inhere within have already been arduously selected out, 6 leaving us an inheritance of meaning that provides our starting point in the same venture of knowledge. And so the patterns of language we use will also be selected. Society organizes itself according to natural patterns, which may be aptly represented by information the same we do between mathematics and physical reality. These patterns expressing themselves as knowledge can only be built up through positive and negative stimulus, but by being open to nature's stimuli properly the pattern will organize itself. Despite the sometimes diverging incentives as they are constructed socially, inevitably that social construction – manifest as institutions, organizations, collectives – will strike upon a form with reliable homeostatic feedback, grounding the progress of knowledge and civilization itself.7 In other words, we progress in our knowledge the same way 5 Jaynes, E.T. (1957). Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics. The Physical Review, Vol. 106, No.4, 620-630. The principle of maximum entropy suggests systems given energy and time tend to organize themselves to a state of maximum potential disorder. This does not mean being actually disordered, but having available the maximum of potential changes the system might transition through in response to changing conditions. The "maximal disorder" is only relative to the order of the system. For example, mud is more "disordered" than living cells, but a system that includes cells will include more disorder (rather than merely lack of order as such - which is not the same as disorder) because now the disorder of the system can include the disorder that inheres to the order of cells. Maximum disorder is effectively equal to maximum order, in that maximum order presents the greatest potential complexity for disorder to inhere within, and disorder will increase up to the point it collapses the order within which it inheres. So, applied to language, this suggests that language tends to naturally and automatically organize itself to a maximum of complexity constrained by the material requirements of human communication. This complexity of language is not equally distributed or ordered, and includes pockets of higher or lower complexity within more or less permeable cultures as compared to a median of the whole of language distributed among all speakers. The tendency for organizing to maximum potential disorder in order to have the most possible paths of system state transition is adaptive in a world where forms are required to co-exist with a reliably unpredictable environment. 6 Nowak, M. A., & Krakauer, D. C. (1999). The evolution of language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96(14), 8028–8033. 7 Smith, E. A. (2010). Communication and collective action: language and the evolution of human cooperation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(4), 231–245.

evolution “inevitably” progresses to incorporate vision and hearing into its creatures, and we can remain secure upon the edifice of knowledge we stand upon, especially the longer this edifice has stood. Truth is a result of natural operation and integral to civilization. Civilization secures truth, truth builds civilization. Given the innate human striving to prosperity, our knowledge is grounded in the human will, which is only a particular expression of the natural striving for God. Self-interest inevitably aligns itself with truth through the process of selection, leaving remaining those aligned with truth and having as their descendants similar forms that must have a similar disposition. A metaphysics of progress defines civilization, and with it our very language and knowledge. Our knowledge of civilization's end secure, it is only a matter of picking out those specific forms necessary to accomplishing the next step in our progress, and reproduce them. But to know which those should be and how they could be made, we must come to understand our present point in time.

Part 3: Knowledge of the Social Body Having identified a vector threading together all time, we are now able to place our current situation on a continuum between antecedent and successor forms of civilization. To make sure that we are not evaluating our current situation further ahead than we really are – a mistake made time and again by various utopians and dialecticians – nor behind, it is important to identify the salient traits that make our human societies different from those existing in the past, and why. In a very important respect, we must not get carried away with thinking of ourselves as the “primordial, unmodified human” because we are already quite a ways into the beginning. We are not only technologically advanced beyond the dreams of our earliest ancestors standing on two legs, the environments we have created for ourselves through technology have already effected a substantial degree of evolution. In other words, we are interested in Progress. Motion in the universe follows a definite trajectory, a gradual change in form that makes the future unmistakably different from the past. The observable universe's history follows a logic of forms arising as a response to the conditions created by the forms coming before, and the same for those forms, and so on all the way back in time. There is even a logic in how those new forms arising come to fill the world and create the conditions of their own formal successors. The basic form of Progress can be elucidated so as to make apparent the progress of not only humanity, but all forms of being. At the center of the process is an ineluctable tendency to produce specimens of optimal reproductive faculty. This cycle of reproduction does not necessarily require a direct reproduction of a form similar to the first, as in biological reproduction, but only that the sequence of causes following another produces those circumstances instigating the same sequence of causes, again, and again, and so on. Whether that sequence is one or many, it remains that the universe must always be dominated by those forms optimizing themselves to their environment and couldn't be any other way. As such, this pattern is a key to understanding all aspects of the world, as it follows for every perceivable form its existence must cohere with the reproduction of all others. Biology is only the most direct and immediate exploitation of this circular, self-sustaining necessity. Biology as such is embedded in a universal circularity that arrives at the biologic as the culmination of that logic operating on itself to form the tightest possible feedback loop, an immediate one-to-one reproduction.

First, we may take some form for granted. Presumably, its history must follow the same principles – in reverse – that we will outline forward, but for now we may consider some abstract form. Its conditions must share with our present at least the same premise, that everything in the universe is acting on itself all at once – meaning these forms will be individuals which interact and compete with one another to survive, thereby undergoing evolutionary selection. Eventually, some of these individuals will form symbiotic relationships with each other, finding some benefit to survival and reproduction through cooperating with each other. With time, these cooperating individuals will eventually be formed by evolution to the point of necessary interdependence, having traded out some other operation with their symbiotic relationship as the means to gain something necessary for survival. Now that these individuals are locked together, they might even lose their own independence and become subordinate parts of a system descended from their interactions. And so on, as this system becomes a form itself, which must follow the same cycle in how it interacts with other forms in the world. We will call this the Principle of Progressive Self-Organization.

Illustration 1: A diagram illustrating how the Principle of Progressive Self-Organization enacts itself through complexifying relations of wholes and parts Repeating at scale for eternity, this generates the world we perceive, including ourselves. It also defines us. The constant action of the universe on itself over time produces a picture of reality that can be truly described as 'fractal.' For this reason we can observe the repetition of self-similarity at various scales, from the connection of neurons in the brain to the connection of galaxies in the universe. Presented with the same problem, nature tends to plagiarize herself. This begins to give some definition to our timeline, so that we can say 'when' we are in the course of

civilizational progress. The development of forms towards their end follows those patterns observed below, so that we may expect the current trajectory to exemplify a similar sequence of unfolding. These patterns of events may also be identified as 'cycles.' The patterns themselves composed of underlying patterns, these cycles are likewise also composed of cycles. Nature operates to progress a phenomenon by alternating periods of ascent and decline which, although the motion of civilization between moments may be continuous, those points of prosperity and poverty define discrete local maxima in time we can reference to ascertain our own temporal position. The significance of historical cycles in civilization is that it provides a definite, discrete element of historical matter. The cycle becomes the unit defining beginning and end. The value of civilizational cycles as a concept is that its inexorably recurring nature is basically metaphysical, of certain quantitative definition and providing a framework for obtaining the necessary empirical evidence to establish its predictive power. It is not, entirely, a novel concept, although we intend to extend the insights from certain of the concept's better treatments.8 Cycles are physical phenomena, and must therefore involve the counting of discrete physical substances. In other words, counting how many or how much of something is present at a time, so that growth and decline of the presence of that thing can be monitored. From the rise and decline of such physical assets we may infer – relative to other features – various details, such as the level of social complexity and how present events relate to past events. For example, thousands of years ago in the ancient Near East a person's wealth could be decisively inferred from the quantity and kinds of livestock they owned. One could, theoretically speaking, examine such quantities as the absolute quantity of livestock owned by a group of humans, the distribution of ownership in that group, and so on, all to reveal the progress – or not – taking place in society at that time. We should not assume these quantities must follow some gradual continuity over time – sudden starts and disruptions are a part of the normal pattern of history, and such sharp discontinuities may also be readily inferred from the nature of those quantities assessed to infer the state of society. What we are doing is – having sketched out a “global,” “metaphysical” perspective of the world – is zooming in to the ground level of material reality, where objects take definite forms and their relationship to the ideal, abstract forms of natural patterns we identify elsewhere will not always be so apparent. It is like, now that we have taken into view a blueprint, we can arrange the crude bricks of actual historical matter into a shape that will help us to understand what shape this and the next several crude bricks of historical matter must take. Therein we may derive predictive elements from our theory of civilization and knowledge, which is essentially that the trajectory of civilization's history may be abstractly identified with the trajectory of other beings' histories – albeit at a different scale of time. With respect to the vantage point of a limited, finite being, our awareness of the operation of nature takes two perspectives. There is the view from without, and the view from within. The view from without happens to be the dominant perspective we take when considering how a system might be articulated, and certainly we seem to have far more success in the manipulation of systems which we experience from 'without.' We are examining something with the view from without when we relate its internal processes from a position of relative completeness, being able to hold all the parts 'within view' as we look down on the matter. Our description of atoms, minerals, living bodies, and so on partakes of 8 One of the best general treatments of the apparent phenomena associated with grand civilizational cycles is the pithy seeming The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival by Sir John Glubb (1976). In addition to his work, we must add The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter (1988) and The Population Cycle Drives Human History - from a Eugenic Phase into a Dysgenic Phase and Eventual Collapse by Volkmar Weiss (2007). These works stand out for their unparalleled scholarship and scope in comprehending the fixed and recurring features of civilization.

this view from without – we understand these things through reference to our perspective outside of these systems, observing without essentially interacting (so far as that is possible). The outward signs of these phenomena is how we know of things through the view from without. The view from within takes the perspective of an individual within the system, as one part looking out at the rest. We view the cosmos, the Milky Way galaxy, and our civilization from within. We are not privy to a direct observation of these things from without, and must control for our participation in these systems in order to render a virtual representation of what such a view would look like from without. The view from within is perfectly capable of being extensively cataloged, e.g. these are the phenomena as they appear to us, but significantly it precludes access to a more 'complete' grasp of how the system operates. If we were a cell in a living body, our sense of how the body we are a part of operates would be far more limited – in the global sense – compared to our anatomical perspective, in which we can directly infer the operation of cells and organs by peering at them from above. At the same time, the view from without can distort or cover up knowledge that is 'obvious' to the view from within, such as when a person realizes the rules can be exploited to an end against the intentions of the planner setting them. In our frame of reference, perverse incentives and unintended consequences (assuming they truly are such) are the result of miscomprehending how humans actually behave in response to the world set before them.

Illustration 2: View of the Milky Way Galaxy "from within"

Illustration 3: View of the Milky Way Galaxy "from without" The paradigm forms of translating the view from within to the view from without is cartography. Although this is somewhat obscured by the contemporary availability of satellite images of the earth's geography, what the images demonstrate is the fidelity that can be achieved by using systematic methods to translate the world as it appears from traveling within it to how it would appear if one could take a hypothetical bird's-eye view. Much of what we consider 'scientific knowledge' is determining those methods for authentic translations of how the same system appears from both views. So our models of the solar system, even the ancient Ptolemaic representations, demonstrate the success with which humans can systematize our limited perspectives into an orderly image that one can use to navigate their same limited perspective with ease. In case the effectiveness of ancient representations of

the solar system are in any doubt, they were accurate enough in their prediction of the motion of the planets sailors around 100 BC would use the Antikythera mechanism - a complex mechanical navigating calculator - to accurately traverse the seas.

Illustration (front)

4: Antikythera

mechanism

Illustration 5: Antikythera mechanism (back)

Importantly, maps are not meant to remain merely top-down realizations of a world known to us by only the view from within, they also yield utility by representing the world at a ratio that allows us to know where we are by knowing through the view from without what the view from within should be, e.g. you are at your destination when you find a certain intersection of streets and house with a specific number which you can confirm with your own eyes “in person.” That is how one knows whether they have successfully traversed geography using a map, by knowing from the map what one "should see" to know they have arrived at the destination represented thereon. This is made apparent in the event one reaches what must be their destination according to the map, but an expected landmark is not present, forcing them to decide between one of three explanations: that either 1) one navigated correctly but the map is wrong, 2) one navigated incorrectly and the map is right, or 3) one navigated correctly, the map was right, and something happened to the expected landmark since the map's creation.

Illustration 6: Google Maps depicting Woolsthorpe Manor, Newton's home - the "view from without"

Illustration 7: View of Woolsthorpe Manor from the street - the "view from within" We develop our knowledge, then, by the integration of these two views into a single synthesis. We judge the merit of a virtual representation of some phenomenon by how well it allows us to manipulate the phenomenon itself from our first-person perspective. Although this knowledge is well-developed with regards to those phenomena of which we are not very personally a part of, such as atoms or anatomy, our conception of the form of civilization remains steeped in error and illusion. Going by the

view from within, and without already having a reliably proven model of the view from without, it is easy to be misled about the form of civilization. One can even miss the fact that civilization must certainly have some definite form. If one questions primitive tribes, they do not even conceive of the earth as flat because they haven't conceived of the earth as being a thing with definite boundaries and limits. Such is the miserable ignorance of the overwhelming number of members of our civilization when it comes to the form of civilization, which includes those who are otherwise meant to be experts on the matter, such as our economists, sociologists, politicians, businessmen, and so on. It is not obvious that civilization can be likened to a specific kind of thing, and it is incumbent of any unified science on the nature of civilization to develop such a model. Such a model should allow us to perceive ourselves as a real part of society and adroitly navigate it. At this stage we will begin with fundamental premises that might seem too obvious to need stating, but which we nevertheless will need to climb the inferential ladder to a cohesive model we are capable of holding in mind. As Aristotle points out, even a small error early in one's reasoning can result in large errors later on, and certainly this manifests in the median discourse about society. Popular theories – both among the masses and in academia – about how wages might be improved, how housing costs might be reduced, how healthcare might be provided, and so on often flatly contradict the most basic and obvious assumptions required to understand reality itself. Grasping the fundamentals of sociology – shouldn't be – difficult, and if I am successful here you will be able to adequate my proposed model easily and with reference to other well-known phenomena. The first and most obvious reality is that society is a finite, limited thing. Society is composed of a limited number of human beings and, regardless on how one goes about defining it, even if it includes all of humanity's possessions from homes to livestock, it remains within the bounds of finitude. Our impact on the world has been limited to a specific time and place. Likewise, society is not the only substance existing in the world, but is counted among a number of other substances with which it exists in continuity. It is not an unmoved mover, but depends on certain arrangements of matter that are (at least for now) outside its power to manipulate. Even those things which it can bring under its power, it has limited power to manipulate them. Society must use the energy and matter under its will to bring other energy and matter into its fold. Even manipulating energy and matter under its will merely to reorganize it within itself (e.g. to move it, to change ownership, to make use of it) requires energy. All these things are most readily apparent when we simply begin with the premise that society is constituted by matter, and therefore depends on its forms. This first pass lines up with statements and propositions known in other sciences, both 'hard' and 'soft.' 'Social energy' as such might not be strictly quantifiable as we can do with the energy of strictly physical objects, but at least the fact its components have such strict limitations on how they can change means that social energy must be exerted to determine how this can be done. To mine the earth we must dig, and that requires someone digging, it requires the necessary resources so that person can and will dig, it requires determining what shall be done with what's dug up, and so on. So many constraints enter into our decision-making when we are in the business of organizing physical matter and energy in such a way as to multiply them we naturally intuit such patterns even without being able to explicitly articulate them, and in fact the attempt at articulation can mislead ourselves about what we are doing. When we speak of society accomplishing a thing, even when that includes the will and intentions of people, the pattern of social energy transmitted can include a form that supersedes those individual wills and intentions. In other words, there are rules and strict necessities in the operation of society that are not subject to the determining of human will, but human will must work through them as a river finds the sea by blindly flowing to the lowest point ahead of it.

Does the sunflower seed intend the brilliant pattern of seeds as they are arranged on a sunflower? No, it only seeks to do what it can, which is to grow where it finds itself. It is rather that the sunflower's DNA found economy in the utility of a pattern of growth which was easy for it to program. Those programs and the constraints those programs operate under rule us. We have not stumbled on a functional arrangement of society since only yesterday, but we were formed to its needs long ago already by millions of generations of selection. Our society is not an original invention, and our attempts at original invention are overwhelmingly likely to fail. Even when attempting what has already been accomplished so many times already, such as sexual reproduction, we frequently fail.

Illustration 8: No part of the sunflower "intends" the pattern produced, yet nonetheless its parts have been evolved to grow to yield an efficient pattern to maximize seed production. Similar emergent efficient patterns must exist in human society. The apparently exceptional nature of "design" is only illusory, and in fact the utility and meaning of any designed tool, object, or society depends on an evolutionary inheritance. The bird's wing does not make sense in outer space, where there is no atmosphere to support it in flight, and so too does any object of human design only make sense as "possessing design" in its extrinsic designation by a subject. Without the evolutionary development of a subject with needs and desires, there is no subject to reference to give any object such instrumentality or endpoint in its meaning. Design requires evolution, and cannot precede it formally. As a matter of efficient cause, evolution is the process providing the patterned complexity of environment against which the utility of any design can and will be measured, both by humans in their subjective evaluation of personal utility, and by nature when she decides whether this is a constituent part which can be incorporated into a self-sustaining organization of matter. Despite human design in whatever, whether that is a hammer, a car, or even a city, the promulgation of such forms will depend on how effective these are for transmitting social energies. A design can result in effects beyond the maker's imagination, as the original inventors of spears were unlikely to conceive that among its effects would be selecting for humans with much improved throwing ability. A design can also fail, no matter the intentions or human will dedicated to it. The design of cities such as Brasilia are testament to the metaphysical difference between human intention and natural selection. 9 Nature is 9 A treatment of the design of Brasilia and the actual results can be found in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to

the ultimate judge of the meaning of all human designs, and so while the right angles of city streets might seem a contradiction to nature, so long as they are the most efficient solution to a recurring problem in the coordination of social energy humans are likely to continue choosing to use them. The conditions which human design is intended to overcome precede any specific human will about it, and the success of the design is entirely out of the designer's hands. This is why, no matter how deceptively civilization appears a matter of design, its ultimate configuration is determined by nature's infallible judgment. What makes a thing just work is entirely beyond human will. We are all an attempt by nature to satisfy her own whims and imperatives, which puts us invariably in competition with all the rest of nature. The Bedouin proverb of “I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and my cousin and I against the world” approximates in truth the imperative to reproduce our form which all the rest of nature operates against. Society in that sense is a gambit by humans against the rest of the world, and is apparent in our unchallenged rule of the world including the enslavement of numerous species of agriculture and livestock to our own purposes without consideration for theirs. We find ourselves capable of articulating the constraints under which we must live and act because we are, already, the result of countless generations of selection which itself rests on this very vector. Nature has found a way for us to articulate her patterns because it makes us better at reproducing. There is no other purpose. Whatever is needless to the end of reproducing its own form will be excised. It represents energy that can be better allocated. Likewise, there are unlikely to be phenomena in society which are wasteful, but more likely than not serve a purpose allied with successful fertility. This brings back into view the problems of knowledge addressed in the beginning and which their significance in this discussion is apparent. As we are limited by nature to those faculties she equips us with in order to serve the evolutionary imperative to reproduce, how can we trust our cognitive faculties to discover the truth? The reason is easy to give. There is an obvious benefit to knowing the truth, and the disadvantages to knowing the truth more subtle and not so great to outweigh the greater benefit to knowing. Nature has formed us to a knowing spirit because she seeks to know for her own purposes. Put another way, and as formulated earlier, we can trust our cognitive faculties to be aimed at truth because nature herself aims at truth. We are nature striving after truth, in her own vast but limited way, of which we are the realization of that striving. We are not the ultimate realization of that striving, however, as we remain limited. The finite system of matter and energy – broadly defined – that makes us up can only impress an image whose resolution records the reality up to a limit.10 In many ways we are obviously a system whose resolution is much Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott (1998). In effect, the intended city center is typically vacated outside the specific hours that some government employees have work there, and the rest of the city where people actually live and inhabit is outside the intended design of the city. Design will be judged by nature with the utmost severity, even if the vehicle of such judgment must be collective human nature. 10 The view I am sketching out here can and should be compared with Hoffman, D. D., Singh, M., & Prakash, C. (2015). The interface theory of perception. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 22(6), 1480-1506. Where my treatment differs is not that I see our sensible faculties as resulting from something outside evolution, but that the comparison of our present faculties to an idealized alternative shows we are not "compromised" by evolutionary needs. What we perceive tends to be centered on those effective forces of our environment which one must know to reproduce. Rather than saying our perspective is inaccurate, it would be better to say it is of some actual resolution, and this resolution is necessarily not infinite. As argued before, this is like arguing it is the fault of the bricks they cannot be stood on each other to make a tower of infinite height, rather than because of gravity. The fact the material components have come together at all to form a tangible being is what is significant. Although Hoffman argues our evolved senses are "compromised" in their accuracy for the sake of reproductive effectiveness, I would point out that the sense in which he argues they are "compromised" is illusory, because there is no such thing as a "perfectly accurate representation of reality to a subject" at all except with reference to the reproductive imperative. "Accuracy" exists as an ideal of human design within the

improved over that of other species and compared to our own history, but there remains much truth not captured by our power to know – yet. One can bring diverse attitudes to this fact, such as the more nihilistic we are not perfect, therefore..! but we prefer an optimistic approach that focuses on how something works rather than its imperfections. It is marvelous it works at all, and is far superior than the product any critic would create anyway. It is the very fact of its operation we establish our inquiry upon, after all. With this approach, we mean to reconcile the estranged brothers of truth and utility, to demonstrate there was never a real separation at all.

frame of evolutionary imperatives, rather than the other way around. The comparison of our actual perceptual faculties with an unsubstantiated "perfectly accurate sensible representation of one's immediate environment" is like arguing that human physical strength is "compromised" because it is not infinite. It is actually rather silly when one considers it that way.

Part 4: The Historical Genealogy of Knowledge It is easy to gaze upon a phenomenon for one's entire life without truly seeing the thing for what it is, and indeed this is perhaps the default state of our epistemology. Just because we are able to to reliably assert propositions that result in predictable responses to each other does not ground the assumption our language succeeds in penetrating to the 'inner being' of nature. The genealogy of our contemporary knowledge works to reveal the facile nature of our individual knowledge in its momentary existence, while at the same time that genealogy reveals a trajectory which certainly revolves around a definite reality, just as the motion of the planets traces a helix around the star they follow. We may not always be able to assert that some individual case of knowledge hews to the joints of reality, yet examining these many cases together illuminates a pattern. If we take care to study these episodes, we will not fail to see our contemporary difficulties reflected. The first such episode which illuminates – very appropriately – our struggle to identify the (literal) life of society right before our eyes is Aspidella terranovica. Aspidella, as we now ostensibly know, was a simple organism of the Ediacaran period between 635 and 542 million years ago. Notable, however, is that people failed to realize the pattern left behind in sediment by its fossils corresponded to something that had been alive.11 Upon their initial “discovery” in 1872, they were believed to be inorganic – their structure did not immediately strike scientists as obviously organic, and at the time it was believed the earliest animal lifeforms developed in the Cambrian. Notably, several years after their initial documentation a Canadian paleontologist suggested the deposits might represent an early animal lifeform, but his suggestion failed to become the established consensus.

Illustration 9: Aspidella terranovica in the Fermeuse Formation, Newfoundland Instead, it would not be until the 1950's that accumulating evidence of early animal lifeforms before the 11 Gehling, J. G., Narbonne, G. M., & Anderson, M. M. (2000). The first named Ediacaran body fossil, Aspidella terranovica. Palaeontology, 43(3), 427-456.

Cambrian resulted in the consensual re-categorization of the Aspidella fossils as such. For nearly a hundred years scientists – the best and most learned in their field! – looked at the patterns and failed to recognize life. It simply went against the preconceptions that people naively held about what life must appear to be. The Ediacaran biota was dismissed as such because the working theory held that animal lifeforms began in the Cambrian, and likewise that something alive would obviously appear as such. But what observations does that actually correspond to? It turned out not to be so obvious. Many of our knowledge problems are of this form – people observing a phenomena but through the filter of mistaken assumptions, leading to error. The second episode that reveals the nature of epistemic progression is the development of our ideas about matter. To our senses, we evaluate some thing as being solid where it resists force put on it to some degree and retaining its shape. To our naive senses, solid things are defined by matter fully covering the space it appears to take up. Of course, our theory of atoms immediately contradicts such a naive expectation on the micro level. When we 'zoom in,' or so how we imagine one could zoom in on the phenomenon, the atoms to which some solid-seeming material correspond are mostly 'empty,' in the sense that their appearance to us is determined by fields of force which themselves are generated by the operation of matter, but which the matter itself does not 'fill.' Some take this to mean our senses are 'wrong,' but a better realization would be that our senses are approximate pictures of reality that are adequate to our most immediate goals as living creatures. When we dwell systematically on the phenomena of our senses we are able to realize a hypothetical picture whose resolution is much greater than our sense organs can show on their own. This is what we mean by “penetrating to the 'inner nature' of being,” to realize the reality beyond our unaided senses.

Illustration 10: Bohr model of the atom; note illustration is not to scale, and the distances from which electrons orbit the nucleus is many magnitudes greater

Here the point is much more open-ended, in the sense I will not complete for you the philosophical consequences of this picture. Rather, knowledge is meditative, and does not always yield to simple, neat formulations. In order to progress our state of knowledge, we are required to work from its current form. We are as much blinded by what we see, in the sense that what we see makes us unable to see through it. And seeing through it, may make us re-evaluate what we thought we had already seen. In other words, we must not confuse the pure phenomenon itself with that inner nature our sense of form projects. We do not ever really perceive phenomena so 'purely,' but are already required to mix our topdown expectations about what might be to recognize the bottom-up evidence the matter suggests of itself. Our knowledge is always in medias res, and the point of observation outside all systems we arrogate to ourselves in our way of speaking is as much an illusion as a useful way for us to mutually comprehend nature to each other. The third episode is that of the transition from a Ptolemaic model of the solar system to a heliocentric model. This episode is particularly fertile for examination as it suggests how knowledge communities do actually make the decision to jettison an older conception in favor of a newer one, and on what basis. The lessons will be instructive for drawing attention to the basis for consolidating the social sciences under the unified theory of society presented by this text, as well for drawing up a map for getting from our current state of knowledge to a superior form thereof. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system is a representation of the solar system which places the earth at the center (of the universe), completely still, with all other celestial bodies revolving around it. The moon, the sun, Mars and Venus and Jupiter and so on, these all moved along their fixed course according to a plan set by God or nature. Significantly, there was variation by individual thinkers but generally the consensus for over a thousand years was that the earth was fixed at the center, immobile, and providing that natural universal attraction we could almost call 'gravity' which caused the celestial bodies to revolve around it. Aristotle, for example, made the argument that the earth was the body to which all being revolved, at once 'proving,' in a surprisingly insightful fashion, that the earth must be spherical at the same time it must be the center of the universe. Alas, the truth is often mixed up with error in this way, and the elegance of his argument proved “too much,” but at the same time it pointed in the right direction.12

12 The passage where Aristotle forwards this argument can be found in On the Heavens, Book II, Parts 13-14. "The observed facts about earth are not only that it remains at the center, but also that it moves to the center. The place to which any fragment of earth moves must necessarily be the place to which the whole moves; and in the place to which a thing naturally moves, it will naturally rest." Both parts are worth reading in their entirety, for it is extremely illuminating, especially for how it contradicts ignorant modern prejudices that the ancients arrived at their conclusions without reason.

Illustration 11: A geocentric model showing the apparent epicyclical trajectory of the orbits of planets around the earth The Ptolemaic model, which is actually a specific geocentric model, was developed in the 2 nd century AD by Ptolemaus. His particular system was the consolidation of many centuries of effort by thinkers going all the way back to at least the 6 th century BC, the first record we have of someone – Anaximander – explicitly advocating a model of the universe which placed the earth at the center. By the time of Christ it was – contrary to the gravely narcissistic complex of modernism – already the consensus of elites and intellectuals that the earth was a sphere in space. There was also a diversity of models and systems promoted by various thinkers, including a heliocentric model as early as the 3 rd century BC by Aristarchus of Samos, but the abundance of evidence available to people with their contemporary technology strongly reinforced the idea that the earth was immobile. This was not merely an anthropocentric delusion, but in fact the hypothesis – selected by thinkers from other competing models, including the heliocentric – which best fit available evidence. Likewise, those few thinkers we know of who promoted the heliocentric model as often had mistaken reasons for doing so, such as that the sun must be at the center of the universe because it is the “noblest” of all celestial bodies. One of the most significant pieces of evidence causing thinkers to prefer the geocentric model over the heliocentric is that they could not observe stellar parallax. As the ancients – correctly! – reasoned, if the earth moved then we ought to observe a change in the position of stars relative each other. Notable is that they did not reject heliocentric models out of some plain dumb ignorance, as we so often suppose

today when trying to understand them, but precisely as a result of intellectual due diligence. They understood what a heliocentric model implied they should see, and chose the geocentric model because it was just a better fit. The problem was not the way they reasoned or their prejudices, but simply a lack of evidence to bear out the alternate hypothesis. So why, then, was the Ptolemaic consensus eventually overturned – among intellectual elites at least – around the end of the 17th century? It was not, actually, the result of vast improvements in what evidence humans could gather. While there were improvements in how knowledge of astronomy was systematized through the Middle Ages, it would seem the improvement in systematicity and precision of knowledge about the motion of celestial bodies was only a coincidental factor. When Copernicus devised his heliocentric system, the argument he could proffer for it depended in no way on any observation of terrestrial or celestial phenomena which the Ptolemaic system could not also explain. The “motions of the heavenly bodies could be charted according to Ptolemy just as correctly as according to Copernicus.” 13 Both models functioned with equal exactitude and predictive capacity. Without other developments about our ideas of motion per se, then geocentrism remained the simpler hypothesis in that it required overturning fewer of our other ideas about motion. Important to understand for the ancients up to the beginning of modernity is that terrestrial and celestial phenomena were divided into spheres of separate substance, akin to the Cartesian division of mind and matter. The substances we could interact with on earth in no way corresponded to those substances existing in the heavens. Terrestrial and celestial mechanics operated according to their own separate principles.14 The idea that the material makeup of celestial bodies such as the moon and sun and planets were of the same kind as that matter observed on earth went against seeming ordinary experience. For example, anything thrown on the earth would eventually fall and its motion cease, whereas celestial bodies were in motion unceasingly, without any apparent reason to stop due to the circular nature of their motion. They were also eternal and uncreated.15 Nonetheless, the arguments and philosophy of those advocating the heliocentric model quickly became the favored system of elites in Europe. Stellar parallax would not be confirmed until 1838, when sufficiently strong telescopes were available that could detect such minute differences in place among the stars, but by then it was only the long-expected confirmation of a theory that virtually everyone already believed. To explain what roused the intellectuals so to change their favor to a model which could not yet be decisively proved through observation, E.A. Burtt elaborates16: In the light of these considerations it is safe to say that even had there been no religious scruples whatever against the Copernican astronomy, sensible men all over Europe, especially the most empirically minded, would have pronounced it a wild appeal to accept the premature fruits of an uncontrolled imagination, in preference to the solid inductions, built up gradually through the ages, of men's confirmed sense experience. In the strong stress on empiricism, so characteristic of present-day philosophy, it is well to remind ourselves of this fact. Contemporary empiricists, had they lived in the sixteenth century, would have been first to scoff out of court the new philosophy of the universe. 13 Burtt, E.A. (1954) . The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Chapter 2. Dover Publications, Inc. Mineola, New York. 14 Aristotle. On the Heavens. Book I, Part 2-3. 15 Ibid. Book I, Part 3. "It is [...] reasonable to assume that this [celestial] body will be ungenerated and indestructible and exempt from increase and alteration..." In subsequent parts, Aristotle goes on to argue anything ungenerated and indestructible must be eternal. From Book I, Part 12: "if the ungenerated is indestructible, and the indestructible ungenerated, then each of them is coincident with 'eternal'; anything ungenerated is eternal and any indestructible is eternal. This is clear from the definition of the terms." 16 Burtt (1954).

Why, in the face of such weighty facts, did Copernicus propound the new theory as a true account of the relations between the earth and the heavenly bodies? He must have been moved by strong reasons, and if we can locate them with precision we shall have discovered the cornerstone and the foundation structure of the philosophy of modern physical science. For to oppose to these profoundly serious objections he could plead only that his conception threw the facts of astronomy into a simpler and more harmonious mathematical order. It was simpler, since in place of some eighty epicycles of the Ptolemaic system, Copernicus was able to 'save the phenomena' with only thirty-four, all those which had been required by the assumption that the earth remained at rest being now eliminated. It was more harmonious, in that the major part of the planetary phenomena could now fairly well be represented by a series of concentric circles around the sun, our moon being the only irregular intruder. An epicycle, meaning literally 'above-cycle,' in the archaic astronomical systems were the circular route planets followed which were themselves following a circular route around another point in space. They were developed in the 3rd century BC – testament more to their genius than their ignorance – to explain and accurately model the observable retrograde motion of the planets. This retrograde motion seemed to defy the simple intuition that celestial bodies would otherwise move at a steady rate across the sky, and so epicycles could 'save the theory' in accordance with the observable phenomenon. Likewise, notable as a component in the progress of knowledge, is that Copernicus' model still included epicycles. It would not be until future developments in physics – especially that of Newton – that the planets would be recognized to follow elliptical, rather than plainly circular, orbits, neatly eliminating the need for such peculiar epicycles. Newton's contribution to sciences would be hard to overstate, and here we have elaborated sufficient historical detail for the grandeur and harmony of his theory that we can understand why his work was so appreciated by his contemporaries. In particular, his theory of gravitation provided the most elegant description for entire sets of phenomena that, until his time, no one had articulated might be represented by the same description of motion. The trajectory of a stone thrown on the earth could now be described by the same mathematical formula as that used to describe the motion of the planets, and vice versa. Up to that point, anyone trying to argue that the motion of the planets and the motion of a stone thrown on the earth were dictated by the same law of nature would have been incomprehensible to their contemporaries. But the simplicity and elegance was undeniable, and thus the division between terrestrial and celestial phenomena would be forever collapsed, opening up the heavens to man's ambitions.

Illustration 12: Newton's law of universal gravitation. The same equation describes the behavior of all bodies, whether here on earth or out in space.

This particular unification of seemingly disparate phenomena is likely the very fact on which modern science turned, finally jettisoning the remnants of ancient philosophy that clung to man's understanding of nature like barnacles. It is the same principle on which I will stake my own claims to have found a system that describes the natural operation of society with greater harmony and elegance than any currently found peddled by academics. To cop Burtt's rendition of Copernicus' reasoning, my conception throws the facts of society into a simpler and more harmonious order. Through my system, the disparate phenomena and notions of fields such as economics, sociology, psychology, ecology, and biology can be unified. The state of science in the day of Copernicus is akin to our current controversies in the social scientists, with so-called scientists aimless and unsure how to gather together the various phenomena they seek to describe through a model that will enable us to understand why society works as it does and how we might bring it under human mastery as we have other domains of nature. To summarize the lessons of these three episodes in the genealogy of knowledge, they are: 1) we are capable of observing a phenomenon without realizing its form, 2) theory does not change observable phenomena but can end at conclusions which are not immediately apparent from it, and 3) the unification of disparate phenomena under a simpler model – elegance – is key to the progress of knowledge. From these lessons we can intuit how progress of our knowledge of society would proceed – less by the observation of previously unobserved phenomena, but more by casting already-known phenomena in the light of an elegant theory. The many schools and traditions which have sprung up in academia portending to illuminate the natural operation of society have so far been unable to grasp society as a singular phenomenon rather than as parts and pieces which seem to behave by their own distinct principles. We are, by default, at the beginning of knowledge by gathering together our own personal observations – literally, those observations we can make as an individual – which we then go on to mix with the systemic observations that many people working together can make that goes beyond the individual person. These are phenomena such as performing experiments or gathering econometric data. These features we can pick out through polling methodology and the like are an abundance of data and information that do not of themselves suggest how they fit together, and it is altogether easy to be misled by our naive prejudices and preferences in how we suppose them to correspond. This is the grand failure of the social sciences today, which has brought forth these numerous sets of numbers and quantities without a decisive theory that would illuminate their systematic relations. The blind men of the academy have yet to grasp that together they are speaking of an elephant. A unified model will be one that allows the mind to easily grasp the unity of various social phenomena. Rather than feeling lost in the midst of the diverse varieties of phenomena to account for, on their own terms and in relation to each other, unification will make their relations orderly and rational by a single system. The direction and purpose of our research programs will have an orderly basis, as the observable phenomena become sensible forms guiding us to determine those aspects of social phenomena which are most salient and that we might act upon to various ends. We might even have the sure foundations to cut through the controversies of our age, both intellectual and political, in order to realize a civilization proper to the 21st century and beyond. A working model of society will be one that helps an individual just like a map, with a representation corresponding at ratio to what the individual can observe with their own senses. Our epistemology with regards to the data generated by institutions as they search over society to gather these numbers together is, though not without fault, more or less secure insofar as we have reason to believe those

quantities are not manipulated for personal benefit. This means that, while we may discount the validity of certain sets of data due to the political or financial motives of those gathering that data, there are nonetheless sources of data which may be relied upon for inferring and deducing important trends of a society in motion. What we will be able to do in the next parts is gather together these streams of information about society and relate them according to an elegant model. With the model we will be able to see society in a new light, in much the same way realizing Aspidella was alive makes sense of the impressions left behind by their fossils. The work ahead of us will be dedicated to elaborating that model. We will have a rational picture of society which makes apparent why the operations of society are as they are, why we've observed certain limits in the human capacity to organize, with an eye for perceiving history as projecting a trajectory which we can chart into the future with accuracy. This theory has its share of precursors, such as the work of Norbert Weiner, and certainly does not preclude the insights of traditions such as public choice theory and game theory. We hope to set these insights and models into their proper place in our system, so that they are not just a discombobulated set of ideas and observations but a rational toolbox with systematic applications. It will form a step towards our inevitable self-mastery, as we not only anticipate our destiny but can help to establish it with more certainty, for the progress of all mankind.

Part 5: The Sociological Continuity Hypothesis As we stand within society and look “out” at it, we observe a regular fixity of patterns that human behavior tends to fall into, with these fixed patterns interacting so as to produce grander, collective patterns which are themselves also reliably predictable. We use these terms in their merest technical sense, to imply that, despite obvious faults and limitations in the capacity of an individual to know human behavior, clearly we yet know it to a degree sufficient to organize our activities productively. There is an element of selection in place: clearly, those individuals who do not “know” enough about human behavior, in both its individual and collective sense, fail to succeed, leaving behind those who do “know” at least well enough to get by. So we must not deceive ourselves into conflating this kind of “knowing” with that beyond the accidental, or pragmatic – what we “know” is simply that which succeeds in our society; whether or not our knowledge per se represents reality according to a rigorous sense of philosophic epistemology is another matter. This follows the sense of “knowledge” hitherto developed by this essay, and which we shall show forms a real and tangible part of the material operation of society. To know as an individual in this sense means to be able to organize not only what we know, but how we go about knowing. It is knowing that, if we see one thing, then we know what else we might see that would confirm one or another kind of hypothesis. For example, to “know how to read a map,” implies that – assuming the map's accuracy – one would know how to find one's symbolic position on a map from observing their whereabouts in the real world, and from there be able to navigate the real world by rationalizing it to the symbolic representation of the map. A theory in that sense operates just like a map. We can use the theory to refer back to our current observational situation and thereby recognize the steps needed to take to reach another observational situation. And so one uses theory to understand their circumstances, both to explain what they are seeing as well as what else they should “see” to understand whatever else about their circumstances they would like. When one looks at one thing, and knows from this to make another observation to determine their circumstances, they are implicitly relying on theory to do so. A theory, in other words, helps to render the cacophony of phenomena legible. Theory provides a rationally unified ordering of observable phenomena that might not otherwise be apparent. Of course, it would be seemingly easy at this point to render a division between theory and phenomena such that theory remains outside the world, but we would immediately rebut this. Theory is a phenomenon in the world, just as a map, to be effective, must instantiate some physical form that we might actually observe. “Theory” here becomes that patterned set of potentially reproducible signs which may be utilized to determine our position in the world. Our “theory of theories” anticipates the logical conclusion of any analysis of human knowledge, which is that it is always necessarily logically incomplete and depends on the continual comparison of theory to phenomenon. With theory embedded in the world as a phenomenon itself, what we realize is the teleology of natural order, that the end – what we mean to accomplish – is the standard by which knowledge is either incorporated or dismissed. Rather than a “vicious circularity” from the perspective of an absolutist definition of knowledge we can never possibly have (except maybe for God), we demonstrate that the circularity is of a virtuous kind. The continual operation of knowledge in the world necessarily orders itself precisely by this circularity, and will develop itself to a point of complexity that brings it to maximum entropy – or, put another way, it will develop to maximum sustainable complexity as this creates the most potential future paths of motion individuals can take in responding to their environment.

The tendency of systems to express this kind of entropic teleology, so that the system exists in a state of maximum entropy, is an emergent property. This means, specifically that the direction of selection is effected from the other end, e.g. not by the individual nature of the agents or parts, but as a result of selecting out the less complex in favor of the more complex. Systems have a tendency to select for agents of maximum potential complexity of behavior because this makes them maximally adaptive to the changing conditions of their environment. For a system to exist in a state of maximum entropy means that itself and its parts have the most potential future causal paths they can follow. The more potential future causal paths available to an agent or system, the more likely one of those paths allows it to not only survive in its conditions, but to thrive. However, the complexity of agents or parts in a system can only appreciate to a certain point, due to diminishing returns. As complexity increases, so too does the cost involved with organizing said complexity – therefore, past some point, an individual can be over-complex, therefore maladaptive, and likely to be selected out of the environment, so that the equilibrium will tend towards a minimum constraint of simplicity. As theory is phenomena, and all phenomena is the representation of an environment in motion, our “theory” in its material parts (the actual reproducible signs) and its form (how the signs are used with relation to each other and the environment), is essentially the culmination of a process of selection that we should expect to bring the current system to maximum entropy. This means the theory taking on a complexity that best approximates the environment, as complexity is the material foundation of potential future causal paths. The theory becomes trustworthy – and this is only a restatement of my earlier argument – in principle because it is bound to arrive at a local optimal equilibrium. It becomes easier to see how not only the complexity of language but the dynamic of our participation with it realizes truthful accuracy about reality because past selection processes will have delivered an inheritance of some probable value. When an individual is learning and selecting between alternate theories, and perhaps even going on to develop their own theories, selection is effected by humans choosing to promulgate the theory or not (even if its essence is only preserved in polemics against it), and there is a reliable enough selection effect that an individual can truly draw towards the truth with the ideas made available by these theories. The complexity of theory is bound by the necessities of humans. We can only learn so many words, and can only comprehend so much phenomena, and we must also communicate any pattern of signs in some manner that occurs in time and space. There is only so much that can be communicated, and for the complexity of language to grow it must be selected for through a genetic algorithmic process, which will continually converge on local optima as social conditions change. The process of our interfacing with language to use it to cause specific ends requires positive and negative input to adapt and grow the complexity of language. Complexity of language grows as a function of time and energy, and the specific constituents of language can see progressive cycles of growth and decline, as at occasion simplification is required to determine a suitable consensus to center the social process of theorizing around. Simplification is how concepts that used to require a specific combination of words to elucidate can be described and utilized as single atomic terms. Language appreciates in peaks and valleys, with selection bottlenecks effecting a virtuous regeneration of the core concepts necessary to communicate to continue the process of collective and intergenerational learning. It may seem brute and unaesthetic, but this process is ruled by principles of scale – for the sake of human convenience and time, the most utility is derived from selecting the most significant concepts with the most utility. In other words, what we tend to observe is after a process of growing complexity, that complexity is “whittled down” from many granular parts to fewer simpler parts that approximate the same function as the prior, more elaborate instruction required. This is really no different than the mathematical program of starting with atomic axioms to construct more complex theorems, which can

then be referenced by specific names without needing to go back and re-prove them again in the simpler terms. Another analogy is the technique of programmers to write a function once and then, when it is required for data to be handled by such a function, that function can be called without needing to reconstruct the entire function again. By this means humans can achieve magnitudes of growth in total conceptual complexity because we can, in effect, compress information into simpler, easier to remember forms, allowing us to know and learn more about the world overall. Legibility requires that the rules one must internalize to usefully interpolate between phenomena and theory are humanly comprehensible. The rules must be of a kind that they are sufficiently compressible as to be articulably applicable to a given phenomenon or set of phenomena. These rules must be generalizable to specific conditions so that others, if they were to follow the same rules, would reach the same conclusions. So we recognize this in science and mathematics, so that if one follows the rationally explicated assumptions they would reach the same conclusion about what must be the case, and which can thus be likewise compared with observable phenomena. For example, in physics we recognize the principle of the conservation of momentum – what is at rest will stay at rest, what is in motion will stay in motion, unless they are otherwise moved. As a principle it means we can infer that energy comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, so that if we observe some phenomenon to deviate from its expected trajectory according to some assumption describing its motion, we can infer something to be responsible. A canonical case is when Newtonian physics were assumed and, observing the path of Uranus to deviate from the path it should follow without interference, the interference was calculated such that Pluto was eventually observed and therefore discovered. So we see that theory, if it is useful, produces reliable inferences that may be subsequently confirmed through observation17 – in particular, when it guides us to knowledge about the worldly state of affairs we likely would not have otherwise.18 The legibility of the theory I am to articulate will be observed in a similar fruitfulness of the application of its assumptions. This “fruitfulness,” which may also be described as its “profitability,” is the hinge on which I will demonstrate my theory to overcome the latent and unsystematic assumptions of contemporary social science. The purpose of such a theory will not be to necessarily replace or deprecate the knowledge we would currently gather under the umbrella of “social science” but to realize their rational orderly elegance. We will show how stray theories such as the laws of supply and 17 The canonical formulation of science as hinging on falsification must be attributed to Karl Popper (1963) Conjectures and Refutations, but we bring up Popper and his account of science for the sake of completeness. The popular conclusion from reading Popper's work is that science requires the ability to formulate any given thesis in potentially falsifiable terms, and this is a serviceable understanding for the layman, but it is not sufficient for arguments depending on precise hewing of reason. Popper's formula can be encapsulated in A.J. Ayer's formulation of verificationism, which requires that in order for a proposition to be meaningful, the subject must be able to understand what sorts of observations would be required to prove it either true or false (author's paraphrase from Ayer's 1936 Language, Truth, and Logic). This more complete formulation seems to contradict Popper, but this is based on a specious understanding of his argument. Observations serving to "confirm" a given theory typically offer little information because, following human tendencies in reasoning, the expected observation is the motivation for the theory, and so the theory tends to confirm itself because it limits itself to a specific range of phenomena. This does not mean confirmation is impotent as such, only that humans tend to fail to realize its full potential. Confirmation of a theory by observing a specific phenomenon it predicts - as Popper defines it - is "corroborating evidence" in the case it is a phenomenon not already known to the theorizer and the phenomenon occurring according to the theory would be highly unexpected in the context of other theories. When we speak of confirmation as a means to gain information about the world, we mean specifically in the sense of phenomena predicted by the theory that is otherwise seemingly surprising or unexpected in the context of other theories. 18 Harms, W. F. (1998). The Use of Information Theory in Epistemology. Philosophy of Science, 65(3), 472–501.

demand fit into a more elegant description of universal homeostasis and life. By recognizing society as a particular thing, we will be able to compare its form and motion with that which we would expect of such a kind of thing, and thereby gain a mastery over it. If we were to ask the contemporary social scientist “What is society?” we would be told that it is some form of organization of humans. This is, of course, true, but it is not quite useful. For example, we would be unable to go from this description to answering other questions such as “Why is society organized this way?” “How might society be organized?” and “Are some forms of organization superior?” These are, of course, the most elementary questions of politics, and it is not merely academic that we answer these questions, we are required to proceed in going on to formulate laws and policies and act in such a way so as to render our social organization even if we cannot – and most cannot – answer these questions. This is a regrettable state of affairs but it is simply the beginning of human knowledge. We are at least generally aware we do not know. What we are able to do is begin with our knowledge of how society appears to us “from within,” as we look out at a body of which we are a member. That is a beginning. Society regulates the behavior of its members, through the explication of rules and the enforcement thereof. Society harvests the substance of the natural world, both living and inanimate, and renders them of a form which individuals and groups find useful. Society regenerates itself, so that members are born into it, some of whom will likewise bear others into it. Society trades with other societies and also competes with other societies for scarce resources. Society adapts itself to changing circumstances, directing resources within itself to where they are most necessary and likewise innovating changes to make more effective use of resources. What we catalog of society, as we look out at society from within, is this: society 1) organizes itself, 2) consumes resources from the world, 3) introduces new parts into its form over time, 4) interacts with other societies, 5) adapts to a shifting environment. These principles, obtained from an examination from the perspective of one who is a part of it, we would seek to render into a form that would tell us about society as though we were looking down upon it “from without.” In other words, to organize these insights so that they adequate a ratio in symbolic form that could be utilized like a map. So given these principles, we should be led to identify such a form with the kind of other forms which exhibit the same behavior, and which some participating member thereof would likewise be able, conceptually, to realize the same insights. If we were to abstract away our knowledge we are, in this specific instance, talking about society and only knew these principles of the behavior of such a form, how would we describe it? There are some things we can rule out. It is not something like an engine. It is self-organizing and selfrepairing. Maintenance is not rendered by some entity outside it, but by the organization of forces within. It does not seem to be something like a mineral, or a gas, or an artefact. It grew itself, and while it may incorporate all these things into it, it is how these things are brought together that makes society. But it must be something, in the most basic sense that it is obviously real. It is either something of a completely unique kind from the rest of those substances observed in the universe – like the division between terrestrial and celestial mechanics – or else it must be a kind that is familiar. The contention that society is a unique substance is obviously suspect, but it seems treating it as such in theory is common for never being diagnosed. While there is the occasional comparison of society with familiar kinds of things, there is no one who goes on from a claim of mere analogy to actual identity. If we draw out the thesis that society is a unique substance, an array of well-tread arguments presents

itself. If society is so unique, so that its dynamics cannot be put in terms more general to that of the cosmos, then it echoes the idealized splitting of substance observed in ancient theories of terrestrial and celestial mechanics or the Cartesian split of material and mental substances. This seems the wrong path to go down, and it would be far more profitable to our understanding to pursue that comprehension of society which perceives it as a kind of thing whose dynamics are known. Our comparison of society to relevant phenomena is in order so that descriptions of specific systems can be generalized to all systems with the same properties. When one accepts the possibility that society might turn out to be a familiar kind of thing, the answer is easy. Such a being – society – is alive. It is a living thing. Society is an organic form. It does all the same things as something that is alive, and that is enough for us to conclude it is alive. How else should we reason? That society has all the same properties of a living thing, but is a special case of such a thing so that it is not actually a living thing? Yet, if we examine the contemporary state of knowledge about society, this seems very often the conclusion people follow, to realize together all these properties then go on to make an exception for society, to decline its identity as a living thing, simply because such an identification seems unusual to our intellectual habits. Our contemporary thinkers have devised an exceptional conceptual space for society, it seems in order to escape realizing the more obvious conclusions of such a picture. But this is truly it. The master key which this entire essay comes down to this very simple conclusion: society is a living being. It has been in front of us this whole time yet we did not see it. But once you see it, it all comes together in such an elegant way. Society is alive, and organizes itself according to the same principles by which living things organize themselves. The astute reader can stop here, and will have adequated my entire argument's meaning by simply recognizing how society behaves as a living thing does. We should be able to sweep away the whole of sociology and put its phenomena under the discipline of biology and call it a day. But it is not so simple as that. In fact, many insights of the social sciences are true, and could be equitably imported back into biology on this principle. The result is not a reduction of the social sciences, but the integration of seemingly disparate domains into a seamless and unified order. The realization that society is a living being is akin to the realization experienced by the Newtonian physicists when they identified celestial objects as having the same substance of terrestrial objects, and which thereby exhibit the same properties of motion. A cannonball fired on earth and following a certain trajectory is following the same principles of motion as the planets careening around the sun. So here we can demonstrate the unity of society with biology when we recognize humans interacting in society are exhibiting the same (literally!) kind of behavior as that observed in the interaction of parts in a living form. First, some necessary clarification. When we say society is a living being we mean it literally and not as some metaphor or allegory. If one takes together the whole of animate society, all its humans and their organization and their possessions, the unifying principle that makes it whole is that it is a single living being. This “life” of society is no mysterious thing, but can be recognized in the form the same as one would any other living thing. It is a recognition whose utility is realized in that what otherwise seemed a bundle of phenomena whose interrelations were mysterious now have a starting point for determining their purpose within a whole. What is it to be alive? We are not going out of our way to develop and apply an idiosyncratic definition of a living being, only the ordinary sense with which we are all already familiar. A living being is a form so constituted that it maintains a continuity of form over time, so that while a living being might

not always resemble itself at each point in time there is a progression bound to its organization. In other words, a living being grows and changes as a result of a unifying principle which coheres its organization. We are not here going to solve every philosophical dilemma associated with defining living things, and in fact we will point out that such dilemmas may offer a fruitful avenue for further research. It is sufficient to assert we are operating with an ordinary definition of life. From looking around, clearly not everything associated with society is, itself, a living thing, and that is not necessary. Even in living things it is trivially easy to detect elements which are themselves not alive, but participate in the form of life and are animated, as it were, by their association with the needs of those parts which move themselves. For example, clearly water is not itself alive, yet it is also a vital element of any living cell in our body, and the assemblage of organs and vessels for providing water to cells is also clearly an essential element of our being alive as a whole. Therefore, we will say of things which are themselves not alive that they participate in life insofar as they are animated by its vital (living) components. Thus cars and homes and power lines and computers and all that we require and incorporate into our behavior participate in the life of our society, and are even essential to its continual operation, without being alive by their own principle of being. Another aspect of this question is determining the ontological boundaries of society. If we say that nonliving things are a part of a living thing, and therefore participating in the operation of life, we would include in our examination of society those inanimate elements as part of a general theory for why they exhibit the pattern they do. Otherwise, if we set the ontological boundary specifically in elements that are themselves alive – humans, specifically, perhaps including our pets and livestock – we end up with a strange dualistic picture, of an inextricable symbiotic interplay of vital and non-vital parts whose boundaries are perhaps impossible to define. This is not wrong per se, and an analysis of the interaction of vital and non-vital parts as a symbiotic process is useful, but we can incorporate this analysis under the description of sociological monism. The same way we would proceed to elaborate the interplay of vital and non-vital elements in any other living thing, so we should do for society. We can extend our analysis of the interaction of vital and non-vital elements further. In ordinary living things, they must at least constitute an assemblage of parts we recognize as a “cell.” Such cells are likewise composed of further parts, organelles and the like, which operate together in such a way to form the vital principle of the cell, making it alive. These organelles, in turn, are also composed of parts, carbon atoms and molecules and the like, which are themselves non-vital. Reduced ultimately, every living thing – according to our contemporary science – is constituted entirely by non-living things. It is not the principle of their parts being alive that makes a living thing alive, but their organization and motion. When all these parts are assembled and operate in such a form of organization, they are alive. When that order of operation is discontinued, it is no longer alive. This can be recognized easily in that we see an animal is not just a bundle of meat and organs that might be arranged any such way, but they must operate in a specific way so as to maintain the vital continuity of the individual. This is why, in the same sense we would describe the non-living molecules and atoms and quarks and so on that make up our cells as participating in life via their integration with the form, we will go on to examine the whole of society as a living thing including its non-vital elements. Another element which might seem to frustrate the identification of society as a living being is that, unlike other living beings, the parts (humans) are often removed from each other by a distance and are not insinuated among each other physically as we observe of cells in multicellular creatures. In other words, society lacks what intuitively appears to be a feature of other animals, that all their elements are bound together in a form of immediate physical proximity between parts. On more abstractive levels, such as modeling living beings as networks of parts, the isomorphism of essential features between

other living beings and society is apparent, but this challenge as such should not be hand-waved away so blithely. It is true that the vital and non-vital parts of society, even as part of their vital operation, often remove themselves from physical proximity. We could point to the fact that humans do often live near each other and maintain regular relations with others, but that is not precisely on the same point. To overcome this challenge, we must reach more fundamentally into its assertions about space and physical organization. In short, for something to be alive, must it achieve some specific physical proximity of its parts? In most living beings, it is apparent that the vital organization of their being depends on their parts being in immediate contact with one another. Of course, certain parts removed from each other might rarely or even never directly interact with one another, but they are always at least mediated by other proximate parts that connect them to a singular physically cohesive whole. However, there are some edge cases which appear to motivate eliminating the necessity of physical proximity. First, there are colonial organisms which evade precise identification as either a group of independent organisms or a singular organism. The parts of such colonies are interdependent to the degree that, individually, they depend on the collective efforts of their colony for sustenance and reproduction, and while they could logically separate themselves this would almost certainly leave them unable to sustain their own life. It is probable that multicellular organisms first evolved from unicellular organisms beginning to “band together” in such a fashion, and in fact this process of “colonization” as an emergent trend in evolution is an important process for understanding our own emergence as a species and a civilization. We can point to these as examples of the same phenomenon, rooted deeply into the metaphysical order of nature, as the Principle of Progressive Self-Organization. Second, there are hive organisms, such as ants and bees, which likewise are constituted by physically separate yet intrinsically interdependent members. Many members of such hives do not even possess an intrinsic capacity to reproduce, but only act to maintain the continuity of the hive organism as such. Thus, despite their physical separability from other members of the hive organism, its essence is bound to the hive, and its individual behavior only makes sense in the context of the whole life cycle of hives from queen to workers and on. In both cases, members have an apparent individual integrity but are also intrinsically interdependent. Their interdependence is not heightened to the degree as observed in the cellular components of animals, but we still observe analogous development of differentiation and collective integrity. As such collectives are bound by an intrinsic vital principle – the destruction of one or more essential parts will imperil the whole collective – we must study them as individual living beings. This is not in opposition to a more reductive analysis, which takes the members of colonies and hives as independent living beings, but in fact as modes of analysis they complement one another. The same must be applied to human civilization – we can, and must, study human beings in the same way we would other living beings. We can and must utilize both the reductive and holistic modes of analysis as complementary in order to yield the greatest insight, rather than insulating them from each other for the sake of hoarding one's subsistent plot of conceptual territory. Physical proximity is not a necessary feature of being a living organism. Abstractive analysis demonstrates an isomorphism between the parts of society and the parts of a living being, we will follow the logic and evidence in asserting that human societies are whole, integrated living beings. There is a final difficulty, which is the idea that humans as conscious individuals cannot be a part of a greater living organism. This is not usually asserted directly, but it is usually implied in the analysis of

human consciousness as a unique phenomenon in nature. Without getting too bogged down in the philosophy of human consciousness – a phenomenon we believe not so difficult to explain, but outside the scope of this essay – we will simply claim that there is no contradiction between possessing conscious awareness and being a part of a greater whole. This idea that the development of natural forms terminates in humans, rather than something greater or beyond or even just something else is an anthropocentric proclivity we can only draw out to rebut. The idea of the development of natural forms is here integral to understanding the dynamics which cause human society to take the form it does, and can illuminate the trajectory that human civilization will take into the universe. Although the implications are not so immediately humanly legible as we are used to with lines and curves on a plane like in physics, we have abundant object and meta-level evidence to support the assertion that the field of biology can understand its domain systems well enough to reasonably and accurately predict their future development.19 The first point, and one of the key strengths of this thesis, is that it brings into view a natural conception of the development of human civilization, so that we can see how certain developments parallel or even plagiarize developments observed elsewhere in the natural world. One of the first insights we can obtain with this model – that society is a living being – is that the development of social organization is coordinated around the use of resources and access to mates. These fundamental problems are the core around which all historical developments have occurred. Human civilization is not an entirely unique phenomenon, but only represents the ultimate expression of nature's intrinsic logic, her logos. We act and form the intederpendencies we do with each other for rational reasons, allowing us to understand and anticipate the dynamic of humans interacting with one another under various conditions. We are animals, and the principles we use to observe and formulate predictions about animal behavior apply as much to humans. This is the sociological continuity hypothesis. Since society is a living being, it follows the same techniques used to generate knowledge about other living beings applies as much to societies.

19 Gunawardena, J. (2013) Biology is more theoretical than physics. Molecular Biology of the Cell, Vol. 24, 1827-1829. As Gunawardena documents, the history of the biological sciences is replete with examples of biologists adopting theoretical approaches on the basis of their predictive power even well before the specific material constituents involved with the precisely, mathematically described dynamic were observed. A particularly potent is the well-known history of Mendel's theory of the gene, which provided a theoretical technique for documenting and predicting the behavior of organisms well before the structure or their empirical observation ever occurred. However, this is only one example, and there are numerous examples of biological theory, well-founded in observation, consistently guiding biologists to empirical observations serving to confirm the theory leading to them. This is no different, in the author's mind, than using a map to successfully navigate from one point to another, and taking this to mean the map succeeds in some degree at an accurate and reliably interpretable representation of reality.

Part 6: The Socioanatomical Social Scientific Paradigm Let us now examine the phenomena of human civilization from the perspective it is the manifestation of an organic whole, with a telos subordinating and forming its members to a purpose beyond themselves. The guiding framework of our analysis will be that the whole of a society is necessary for explaining the parts and processes observed therein, providing the essential grounds for recognizing how all these elements interrelate so as to form a greater social body. 20 This can be accomplished in the same sense one recognizes the parts of a living body cannot and do not suffice to explain themselves except insofar as their relation depends on being the part of a whole. When we ask such questions as “Why do people behave this way?” we will gain insight into their behavior by drawing an analogy with the behavior of components in organic wholes. This is necessary both for explaining how the parts cohere in the moment, and also how they might have developed. This can also reveal important information for how they might continue developing and why. The relation of wholes to parts can be determined by evaluating their potential for independence. For 20 The essential problem to describe is how parts come to be related together in a whole. A general domain approach has the utility that it makes it easier to demonstrate isomorphism of dynamical behavior between different systems, which allows one to infer from analogous representation that the dynamic observed in one system is likely to represent similar behavior in response to similar conditions. The drawback of a general domain approach is that it is easy to treat the general domain as an "epistemology sink," in the sense that knowledge drawn into it from other domains via synthesis does not often come back out of that domain. What this means is that, for the abundant observations of analogous systems made apparent by general domain approaches, these have tended to fail to translate the insights back into the vernacular of their specific domains. While the faults of contemporary academia are well-known and do not need restating or theorizing here, it cannot be avoided in our evaluation of the situation that incentives are arranged to promote the fracturing of knowledge into smaller, specialized domains as a kind of academic jobs make-work project. The same insights can be found across domains, described in their own particular vernacular, without insight to the fact the same few insights have been derived by separate knowledge traditions. Unification and integration of these fractured fields by a general domain theory such as information theory, complexity theory, systems theory, cybernetics, and so on and so forth are unlikely to be a product of the academy, but must be instilled by outside forces. The insight that these separate vernaculars recapitulate literally the same - not only similar! - insights is already established and proved at the most fundamental level, by the identification of thermodynamic entropy with information entropy. The choice of general domain theory for describing the fundamental operation of material phenomena is, at least in the author's humble opinion, mostly up to the preference of the individual. However, likewise, it is important to gain some familiarity with analogous theories, and to understand how and why they return the same insights when considering the same kind of phenomenon. The "framework" adopted by the author is provisional and draws from several influences, and should be seen as one of several potential means to support the conclusions of this work. These influences include, but are not necessarily limited to: Oderberg, David S. (2007). Real Essentialism (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy, Vol. 11). Routledge. United Kingdom. Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J. (1972). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. D. Reidel Publishing Company. Holland. Wissner-Gross, A. D., & Freer, C. E. (2013). Causal Entropic Forces. Physical Review Letters, 110(16). Shannon, C.E. (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Bell System Technical Journal. Vol. 27, 379-423, 623-656. Schrödinger, E. (1944) What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge: University Press. Annila, A., & Salthe, S. (2009). Economies Evolve by Energy Dispersal. Entropy, 11(4), 606–633.

example, with respect to society, the parts – humans and organizations made of humans – depend essentially on being integrated with the whole to derive the resources necessary for their own sustenance and reproduction. The social whole, a society, on the other hand has all the parts within it necessary for its own sustenance and reproduction, and does not essentially require cooperation with other societies. Of course, an individual society can cooperate with other societies, and this can even benefit them by mutual advantage, but they can also just as well exist on their own, even if this might mean they are poorer and weaker. This mode of analysis also makes it possible to define the boundaries between individual societies, by determining what forms of social organization are dependent or independent. When we apply this mereological analysis to living beings, we can gain insight into both how an individual part functions as part of the whole as well as how both the part and its whole came to be as part of an evolutionary process of selection. For example, if we examine the eye, it is clear how the eye is insufficient to sustain itself while we can also see how the eye provides an advantage to the whole, providing it more information about its environment than the whole would have otherwise. The whole and its parts are dependent on each other, with the difference being that the whole can potentially replace the part while remaining itself – as we know multicellular organisms do already when their cells die and are replaced through cell division as part of a mostly autonomic process. The kind of analysis we observe in understanding anatomy and physiology – the study of structures in organic bodies and their function – will provide the paradigmatic form for our analogous study of society. That is, in examining a part of society and its behavior, we will not expect it to be sufficient to explain itself without reference to some advantage it provides society. Likewise, we expect a general logic to operate, in that how the whole acts to organize itself, directing resources to particular parts from others, will tend to an overall advantage as a result of evolutionary selection (this hardly means any contemporary society does so perfectly – this mode of analysis might suggest paths for improvement). Immediately we must set out the conditions by which we analogize between our knowledge of other specific living beings and society. “Living beings” include many distinct forms, all of which happen to satisfy the conditions of a being that achieves the self-regulation and conditioning of its parts into an integral whole. From the most primitive bacteria to the marvel of complexity on display in the human body, many distinct forms of living beings manifest themselves. Some living beings possess organs which other living beings do not. Some living beings possess organs manifest at different levels of sophistication. Rather than this being a difficulty per se for our argument here, it will be vastly clarifying in understanding the known history of human society and a portent of the future, even if at first it seems to mystify our conception of society as a living being. It would be simpler, but not truer, if the form of society as a living being could be directly compared to the form of some specific living being, such that there was a one-to-one parity in what organs are possessed and their function. Instead, we will need to work with indirect comparisons as we approach a more specific formulation of contemporary society's organization, but this will have the payoff of being a more general theory which can account for the complete range of possible social forms. Consider the jellyfish. It is one of the more suggestive and provocative animals about which we know, representing a form that has been stably reoccurring in evolutionary history for over 500 million years, and potentially even 700 million years. Either way, it is a living form which is easy to speculate upon, in that its form is more complex than unicellular life, but not so much more complex that its evolutionary history is difficult to trace. It is most probable that de novo jellyfish species evolved as a result of hyper-specialization by component individuals in colonial organisms such that the individuals of the colony lost their individuality and were reproduced specifically as a part of the emergent whole. The order of Siphonophorae is also suggestive along the same lines, as they represent colonies of

interdependent individual beings.21 Jellyfish and all multicellular animals are descended from colonial organisms like Siphonophorae, as they integrated the parts into a singular system with the development of the nerve net. The nerve net represents a primitive form of a nervous system22, with constituent neurons being distributed more or less equally throughout the individual. Intercellular communication is a necessary vector for the emergence of motility in complex multicellular life, as it is necessity for parts to communicate some kind of data to each other to generate coordinated responses. 23 With better communication between parts, specialization could deepen, and as specialization of parts deepens, so too does communication increase in importance. This virtuous cycle drove both specialization – eventually, into organs that could not survive without being a part of its respective organism – and communication to the point of complete interdependence. The sense of a stimuli by one part of the organism can be communicated through the rest of the organism to stimulate a singular response adaptive to the whole, such as moving away from a threat or moving towards water with a more preferable temperature, and so on.24

Illustration 13: A variety of nervous systems. Creatures with more complex nervous systems tend to exhibit more complex behavior. 21 Mackie, G. O., Pugh, P. R., & Purcell, J. E. (1988). Siphonophore Biology. Advances in Marine Biology, 97–262. 22 Arendt, D., Tosches, M. A., & Marlow, H. (2016). From nerve net to nerve ring, nerve cord and brain — evolution of the nervous system. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(1), 61–72. 23 Arnellos, A., & Keijzer, F. (2019). Bodily Complexity: Integrated Multicellular Organizations for Contraction-Based Motility. Frontiers in Physiology, 10. 24 Marijuán, P. C., del Moral, R., & Navarro, J. (2013). On eukaryotic intelligence: Signaling system’s guidance in the evolution of multicellular organization. Biosystems, 114(1), 8–24.

This nervous system represents the ultimate significance of information, and sufficiently abstracted as a network of parts this virtuous cycle of interdependent specialization-communication deepening can be equally applied to human communities, both to explain their social structure as well as how that social structure developed from other forms. Likewise, when analyzing the abstractive isomorphism of the evolutionary path of multicellularity, we can import “back” into the explanation of deepening interdependence in the parts of colonial organisms the concept normally only applied to human societies, the division of labor.25 This unification of explanatory models in their abstractive isomorphism works to illuminate our understanding of both multicellular animals and human society in their parallel developments at different scale. Early colonial organisms would have been ruled by the game theoretic dynamics of cooperation and defection.26 The interaction of cells in a system putting them into constant contact with one another would initially be random, with the effects of some cells on other cells being at times harmful, neutral, or even in some rarer situations, beneficial. Gradually, some cells would stumble into a beneficial feedback loop, and based on this advantage they would expand and so come to dominate their environment.27 This would drive further developments of complexity, as colonies competed with one another, with colonies ruled by optimal collective Nash equilibria tending to displace those with defective tendencies. The selection for successfully cooperative networks of cells would also drive subsequent individual cells to be increasingly selected for cooperation, to the point that defection is systematically punished by the collective, so that even when an individual is defective, it will be eliminated and the potential harmful effect on the whole would be mitigated. 28 These interlocking systems of cooperation, defection, and punishment by cells would continually tighten, to the point that individual cells many generations on in multicellular animals are highly coordinated, and respond to their environment with complex behavior in a complex system of feedback loops. 29 The development of the collective and continual conforming of individuals to the feedback loops of the whole are essentially the cellular version of culture. 30 They respond to complex information in their environment, but they also transmit complex information into their environment to trigger responses in other cells. It is isomorphic with the process of collective human interaction, what we know as civilization. The vector of internal communication between parts of the organism can also be clearly traced as a tendency in evolution to centralize knowledge and control.31 The value of knowing which can be translated to motion by the whole organism to exploit its environment more effectively is such that there is a seemingly ineluctable (perhaps necessary) trend in evolution leading to the development of centralized components of the nervous system. This trend is known as cephalization, and it will be a significant concept in our understanding of the evolution of societies. This potential analogy of development suggests an important question. How do living beings compare, 25 Ispolatov, I., Ackermann, M., & Doebeli, M. (2011). Division of labour and the evolution of multicellularity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1734), 1768–1776. 26 Michod, R.E., and Roze, D. (2001). Cooperation and conflict in the evolution of multicellularity. Heredity. 86, 1-7. 27 West, S. A., Griffin, A. S., Gardner, A., & Diggle, S. P. (2006). Social evolution theory for microorganisms. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 4(8), 597–607. 28 Fowler, J. H. (2005). Altruistic punishment and the origin of cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(19), 7047–7049. 29 Michod, R. E. (2006). On the transfer of fitness from the cell to the multicellular organism . Biology & Philosophy, 20(5), 967–987. 30 Fredericks, M., Miller, S. I., Odiet, J. A., & Fredericks, J. P. (2003). Toward an understanding of cellular sociology and its relationships with cellular biology. Education, 124(2). 31 Trestman, M. (2013). The Cambrian Explosion and the Origins of Embodied Cognition. Biological Theory, 8:80-92.

at scale, in their “solution” to the fundamental problems of entropy dissipation? That is, given every living being, no matter its size relative to the universe or other living beings, is confronted by the same necessity to maintain homeostasis and reproduce itself, how do the solutions compare at scale? Within the set of ordinary living beings already known by biology and taxonomy, there are a number of significant parallel solutions which can be observed at separate scales. 32 Complex multicellular animals have developed organs with specialized functions in the body, which parallels the complexity observed in simpler unicellular lifeforms such as eukaryotes that have developed organelles with similar specialized functions. For example, and it seems almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, but cells have cell membranes which separate the inside of the cell – where homeostasis is maintained – from the outside, paralleling exoskeletons and skin in insects and mammals respectively. The nucleus of the eukaryote (though not all eukaryotes possess nuclei) operates similarly to a brain in that it is a centralized control apparatus for the rest of the cell. Likewise some cells possess flagellum to move in and sense their environments, similar to our limbs and phalanges. There is clearly a difference in certain specific characteristics of the organisms at scale optimized to their own respective environments, the microscopic and the macroscopic, but the parts nevertheless tend to develop along the same natural vectors of solving the same problems of homeostasis, sustenance, and reproduction.3334 The parallels that can be observed in ordinary animal life can be likewise applied to our analysis of society as a living organism, where we do not expect a one-to-one parity in the specifics of how it solves its problems, but nevertheless some part of its form will have been developed to solve that same problem. We do not expect society to literally have limbs or flagellum, but we might also expect some part of its form will have been developed to the necessary task of motion (to intake vital resources) and sensing (to know what is in the environment). What parts we observe in society that might fulfill such roles – or even primitive societies that do not yet have such parts – we would expect to develop following the same pattern of evolution as we observe in other living organisms. These parts are manifested by humans and the tools and ideas they use to organize themselves, in exactly the same way cells organize themselves to form organs in multicellular organisms. As we survey across the contemporary and historical forms of human society, we can observe a few different forms by which humans have achieved, for example, their means of sustaining themselves with food harvested from the environment. These forms can be distinguished by their complexity and how much they invest in conforming their local host environment. On one end of the spectrum we have societies that otherwise invest little energy (though it might still represent a great effort for such humans) in manipulating their environment but depend on harvesting from the available abundance of nature, which we often term “hunter-gatherer societies.” On the other end of the spectrum we can observe societies that invest great energy in food production, taking purposeful steps to manipulate their local host environment so that it realizes a greater abundance of food than might otherwise be found. The latter depends on greater social complexity, involving a division of labor so that a portion of their individuals are specialized to agriculture and food production, and it depends on a significant improvement in the environment's carrying capacity. Another important difference between these respective organizations of society is that the latter could 32 Ganesh, S., Beliz, U., Jeremy, H., and Coskun, A.F. (2020) Cellular sociology regulates the hierarchical spatial patterning and organization of cells in organisms. Open Biology. Vol. 10. 33 Willensdorfer, M. (2007). Organism size promotes the evolution of specialized cells in multicellular digital organisms. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 21(1), 104–110. 34 Furusawa, C., & Kaneko, K. (2002). Origin of multicellular organisms as an inevitable consequence of dynamical systems. The Anatomical Record, 268(3), 327–342.

not return to the hunter-gatherer form without incurring significant costs in the form of reduced ability to feed all its mouths, suggesting a “ratchet” effect that works to keep societies from reverting to the simpler forms that preceded them historically. The successive paradigms of life observed in evolutionary history also represent a similar “ratcheting” effect – many, probably nearly all exotic forms of life that may have flourished in the deep past of the Ediacaran and Cambrian could no longer flourish in competition with the present forms of life. 35 Likewise hunter-gatherer societies have tended to be eliminated or else incorporated into the developing civilizations which monopolized what resources they would have required to sustain themselves, and it may be probable that what few huntergatherer societies remain will have the same fate. The simpler form of social organization in hunter-gatherer societies does not imply their constituent individuals are simpler, in the sense that what tasks individuals must themselves perform to maintain their own and their group's sufficiency requires a greater diversity of skills. In a tribe of only a hundred, there is less benefit from division of labor so that almost every individual will be required to participate in almost every task, from building shelter to finding food to making decisions. The trade off of this greater diversity of skills is that the tribal form of social organization is very limited in what kind of prosperity it can obtain. The tribe can only afford a few of its members to specialize in roles that are not directly required to maintain food production and the like. This is compared to contemporary modern societies, which can not only afford a much higher proportion of its members to specialize in their roles, but requires that its members specialize in order to maintain sufficiency. The difference that can be observed between the simpler, more primitive and the later, more complex form is like the difference between earlier and later lifeforms. Earlier lifeforms have less specialized parts and, as can be observed in colonial organisms, requires more participation by each constituent individual part in each task necessary to maintain overall sufficiency. Later lifeforms have more specialized parts, with constituent individual parts tending to more specific tasks. The later lifeforms achieve and can maintain their greater specialization due to the payoffs associated with specialization, which is that specialized parts can produce much more overall of whatever is necessary. Likewise this maps on to the difference between earlier and later forms of society. What this makes apparent is that while spontaneous organization is downstream of contemporary individual agents, that organization imposes its own selection pressures on the reproduction of individuals therein, so that individuals are always over successive generations being conformed to the dynamics of the whole.36 Just as evolution proceeds to develop complexity in life through accident, so too does complexity develop in society apparently by accident. It is easy to be led to the conclusion that the historical development of society occurred under the control of and by the design of humans, but this is very unlikely to be the case. While humans are intentional on the individual level, the collective aggregate is not also therefore intentional – to reach such a conclusion on such a premise would be the fallacy of composition. Instead, what is more likely is that the dynamics of the collective aggregate imposed itself on human individuals, so that they conform their behavior to fit into and gain some benefit from participating in the collective. What humans “rise to the top” of societies, the high priests and rulers and CEOs, might have some intentional capacity to engineer the collective, but if they do so it is by their understanding and exploitation of those patterns they recognize in the collective. Such individuals are “hyper-conformed,” in the sense that they have structured their own understanding and behavior to channel the collective dynamics more effectively than others. 37 What specializations we arrogate to 35 Libby, E., & Ratcliff, W. C. (2014). Ratcheting the evolution of multicellularity. Science, 346(6208), 426–427. 36 Michod, R. E. (2007). Evolution of individuality during the transition from unicellular to multicellular life. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(Supplement 1), 8613–8618. 37 Hoffman, D. D., Singh, M., & Prakash, C. (2015). The interface theory of perception. Psychonomic bulletin & review,

ourselves by learning and education are premised on the recognition that performing such complicated behaviors will fit into and gain some benefit by participating in the collective. This is not altogether different – in fact, it is identical with – the process by which an individual cell of a multicellular organism responds to its immediate environment according to innate genetic “programming” so as to fit into the collective of which it is a constituent part. And if an individual – whether human or cell – engages in behavior that precludes it from fitting with its collective? It may be left to starve by its own incompetence or even destroyed as a measure to protect the collective. Cancerous cells are hunted and isolated or even destroyed38, and violent criminals are imprisoned or even executed by the state. The collective regulates its individual parts, whether cell or human. An important point to realize is that a mutation of a part in a very early form might only result in the destruction of that part, since it probably lacks a way to integrate its new operation with that of the whole, in order that what it produces for the whole occurs in a way that it also receives back from the whole what its specialized role has left to others as necessary to perform. For example, a primitive tribe of the paleolithic will never produce an individual specializing in programming computers, in that there will be no computers for that individual to program – likewise, it is also possible that an individual's specialization which does benefit a primitive tribe will not be perpetuated if the tribe does not recognize or can effectively coordinate its members to sustain that individual with what resources they require. Such departures by individuals into specialized roles thus would tend to form by accident, in the case that someone's specialization happens to yield a bounty for their group which the group respectively appreciates such that they make up for providing to that individual what they cannot or do not provide for themselves. In modern society engineers are often paid very well because we appreciate the work they accomplish for us, even if that does not include directly feeding themselves by going out and hunting their own food. Arranging the conditions for individuals to benefit from the collective benefits they provide to their group can not be taken for granted. It is possible that either the group is simply unable to recognize the benefit provided by an individual's specialization, e.g. if one imagines that recognizing the benefit of an individual's specialization depends on a theory which the rest of the group does not comprehend, or if there is no way for the group to rationally allocate resources to that individual through a mechanism that provides them their necessary resources at a ratio roughly equivalent to the benefit they provide. The development of specialization in societies can be contrasted with that of how specialized organs must have evolved. There is a certain argument made by some against evolution called “irreducible complexity,” which asserts that because the parts of specialized organs such as the eye could not have evolved all together at once except by extremely remote improbability the existence of such complexity is evidence of top-down intervention in the form of intelligent design. One can imagine a similar argument of “irreducible complexity” being lodged against the idea that contemporary societies with their highly specialized institutions and roles could not have developed from simpler societies. We do not bring up this argument as such to utilize it directly but as a way to illustrate a difficulty in our accounts of how societies develop. It is true that a specialized organ such as the eye requires several features that could not have evolved all together at once from a completely sightless species. This is due to the fact that until such features reached sufficient development, no evolutionary selection would have been acting on the features as such to select them to a point of observed complexity. Similarly, simpler forms of social organization could not go straight to begetting the advanced forms of social organization we observe today. In both cases, with the eye and the advanced forms of social organization, we are required to explain their development by the indirect evolutionary process of 22(6), 1480-1506. 38 Strassmann, J. E., & Queller, D. C. (2011). Evolution of cooperation and control of cheating in a social microbe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(Supplement_2), 10855–10862.

exaptation. In order for a trait to develop in an organism through evolution, it must provide some adaptive advantage in order for evolution to act on it. This means that a “halfway developed trait” is impossible. Unless the trait affords some advantage to its organism, it will not be “honed.” What this means is that the emergence of certain traits can only come about indirectly, by a trait being co-opted to a different advantage than its original usage.39 Feathers did not evolve originally to the purpose of flight – they appear to have originally developed as a trait helping organisms to regulate their temperature. When these inchoate feathers developed to a sufficient point, in combination with some change of the environment or else incidentally, organisms gained some advantage in their movement helping them to evade predators and capture their prey. When this advantage to motion came about incidentally, it thus could be acted on by evolution, further finessing it to better and better motility. This is exaptation. From the initial premise of a trait that afforded one advantage, it came about incidentally that this trait also afforded some other kind of advantage to the degree it developed to the form we observe today. This is the same kind of pattern we should expect to observe in the evolution of society. Forms of organization developed by humans which originally served one purpose also provided some other unintended advantage. With better advantages selected for promotion and worse forms of organization selected out, these forms of organization gradually developed to a high degree of complexity and specialization in society. So states may have emerged from priesthoods which themselves may have emerged from ritual forms of trade between separate tribes. Likewise the norms and customs associated with these forms of organization developed, providing the scaffolding to persuade humans to those behaviors conducive to maintaining such a form of organization. This process is, in line with my thesis that society is literally a living organism, one and the same as observed throughout nature. The explanation provided by evolution for the diversity of living organisms observed in nature is also sufficient to explain the diversity observed of societies and how they organize themselves. As much as for the diversity of living organisms we observe evolution is the explanation for their likeness. Mammals share a set of distinctive traits with each other as do birds and reptiles and bacteria and fungi and so on due to their common inheritance and convergent evolution. We can see these two elements of evolution in terms of their causality. Common inheritance supplies an efficient cause to explain shared traits between organisms on the principle of their shared ancestor. Convergent evolution supplies an explanation from the other side of causality, a teleological concept in which organisms tend to evolve towards certain forms on the basis they are simply an effective solution to identical problems. An example of convergent evolution is carcinisation, the tendency for certain organisms to evolve towards the form of a crab. 40 Thus we observe organisms who otherwise only have a shared ancestor without those traits coming to posses similar traits on account of the need to solve the same problems under the same constraints. Hence these problems represent vectors along which evolution will tend to form organisms towards a similar form due to the same underlying causes and constraints. These two concepts, common inheritance and convergent evolution can be equally applied to societies.41 Where we observe a commonality of traits between cultures, their explanation may be one or the other. Either cultures share these traits because they spring from a common ancestor, or else they represent the same traits due to an intrinsic fit they have with their environment that is necessary for 39 Gould, S., & Vrba, E. (1982). Exaptation—a Missing Term in the Science of Form. Paleobiology, 8(1), 4-15. 40 Haug, J. T., Audo, D., Charbonnier, S., Palero, F., Petit, G., Abi Saad, P., & Haug, C. (2016). The evolution of a key character, or how to evolve a slipper lobster. Arthropod Structure & Development, 45(2), 97–107. 41 Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. N. (2006). Towards a unified science of cultural evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29(04).

optimum performance. In the case of the latter, a trait may form up to a point that it fulfills some local maxima/minima calculation for the whole of which it is a part, and then tend to remain in place over generations because deviation from that trait – once it has been established – brings too great a selective pressure.42 Thus some traits of societies may tend to remain the optimal expression of their function for periods of time longer than the human lifespan, and thus become “traditional” entrenchments which form has been selected and thus constitutes efficient information compressed from past events effective for present actors to reference 43, even if they otherwise do not understand or cannot justify why the tradition in question is adaptive. Coordinating the energy to destroy or alter such traits may only result in a deviation from the local maximinima which disrupts the organization of energy to that end, resulting in that part re-forming itself as an element of its society. 44 (One has in mind various attempts throughout history to destroy a certain element of society only for that same organization of the form to reconstitute itself against the wishes of those who set such motion in effect. An example could be the practice of communism in China eventually undermining its own capacity for self-organization and thus capitalist structures such as businesses and private ownership returning “by default” in some form.) However, even while certain forms might represent an optimal solution for their particular problem vector, other forces may re-organize them into new interrelations. So, for example, in multicellular organisms, the eukaryotic cell has remained the “default” constituent part even while those cells are adapted and specialized and their organization re-constituted over time by evolution to realize new forms. Hypothetically, certain forms of social organization, having been developed, may remain as essential traits of societies, even while societies otherwise re-organize relationships between the specific instances of those forms of social organization. Concretely, this could be manifested by something like the nuclear family remaining an essential trait of societies since their initial formation so many thousands of years ago, and while societies since then have grown and evolved, the relations between families – but not so much the family structure as such – has been reorganized. Of course this is only hypothetical – the nuclear family structure might not be the element which remains in place, but we should expect some traits to remain as parts of greater social structures even while their interrelations with other traits are successively changed. (Certainly it is assumed the familiar homo sapiens sapiens will remain a stably recurring social unit! But this assumption is almost certainly wrong.) It should not be overlooked that the eukaryotic cells making up multicellular organisms have themselves been adapted in their particular constitution by selection to adapt them for thriving as a part of a multicellular organism. The eukaryotic cells making up contemporary multicellular organisms little resemble the original eukaryotes to fall into a stable multicellular pattern of organization, and homo sapiens sapiens ought take the lesson well - we are not meant to last forever, but to deliver something greater, something beyond us. So has every evolutionary development before, and so shall every evolutionary development after. The growth of complexity of lifeforms and ecologies only accelerates with time, and humans are a lifeform perhaps more likely to proliferate numerous branches of distinct species, all descended from us. How many species descendants will homo sapiens sapiens have - and how will speciation and divergence occur, what form will these successor species take, what environments will they inhabit? - these are the more substantial questions. 42 Flannery, K. V. (1972). The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 3(1), 399– 426. 43 Szabo, N. (1996) Hermeneutics: an introduction to the interpretation of tradition. 44 Moreira, J. A., Pacheco, J. M., & Santos, F. C. (2013). Evolution of collective action in adaptive social structures. Scientific Reports, 3(1).

Gathering together these insights about the gradual evolution and development of the social structure, we can begin to provide some tentative conclusions about the future development of society. One of these, in particular, is how we might condition our predictions about the future. Especially if we are to make predictions of a kind as predicated on the elaboration of a theory – and thus to draw out some value in that theory – then we must be able to distinguish between sociologically meaningful predictions and predictions which are, despite being predictions of a certain kind, not precisely scientific. The patterns exemplified by nature and which are available for us to discover by searching and experimenting are a map for us to understand and master our future.

Part 7: Technopolitics Politics is the ultimate vector around which all human behavior revolves. 45 Rather than pretending to skirt around it, even while having our means and aims dictated by it, we must head straightforwardly into the morass of confusion and chaos on the foundation of our rational understanding. This is perhaps one of the leading reasons for the failure of contemporary social sciences to grasp its own essence. On the one hand, of the few known systems which do outline its own aim into politics - Marxism - they are famously inept as a science while obviously being very effective as politics. On the other hand, those systems which strive to avoid politics cannot help but be ruled in reality by overtly political academic institutions, which depend on politics - and therefore politicians - for their funding, and thus inexorably tends to produce "findings" convenient for the campaigns of those politicians, systematically distorting our understanding. We shall cut through by the power of this very theory, and it should be plain to the studious reader by now that the foregoing sections have been a necessary prolegomenon to seizing both horns of this thorny dilemma. First, we may examine the political success of Marxism, which defies its scientific failure. It seems clear enough with the hindsight of 150 years' experience to recognize that the power of Marxism is in how it never precisely argues for but clearly enough outlines the notion that if only everyone believes it, it will work. This attributes a magical causality to belief that it simply does not have, which has been shown time and again by the fact that even the mass murder of people to eliminate disbelief has not resulted in its success. It is an idea that appeals to the quasi-literate, who mistake their formal understanding for causality, as it is easy to get lost in the signs associated with a phenomenon and so take the signs to be the causally effective matter of the phenomenon itself. This is not a confusion isolated to Marxism, or even leftism. We will call this the literary delusion. The problem is on the structural level of how humans are made to relate to one another, which destroys the information that otherwise tends to transmit itself in free societies, information necessary for people to live good lives. Marxism is infeasible not because it could never get everyone to believe it - this is possible - but it does not work on a theoretical level. It fails to understand how societies truly work, and destroys functions which make other societies prosperous and powerful. Yet Marxism has been politically successful nonetheless. It provides a programme 46 that makes it easy enough for comrades to not only recognize one another, but diligently assess their potential utility as allies in any given space so they may coordinate to dominate local social spaces. It is not only one's profession of belief, but the elegance by which one maintains that profession that allows Marxists to recognize even between other Marxists who is not only likely to help them, but who represents the greatest power to help them. In other words, it allows the most intelligent of Marxists to demonstrate their intelligence to each other, which intelligence supports their endeavors elsewhere in the capture of institutions. Thus Marxism is prominent even in the West that defied its most salient political project, the USSR. We would say that Marxism is politically successful not just because it makes it possible to signal 45 Aristotle. Politics. 46 The idiosyncratic spelling of programme here is used to specify that sense familiar to Imre Lakatos' concept of the research programme. Although Lakatos is focused on the production of knowledge and how things are known, the same idea holds as a matter in constituting a successful technopolitics. Like a community of scientists engaged in a scientific research programme of similar assumptions and priorities, those participating in a technopolitical programme form a feedback system of mutual evaluation of claims, generating a consensus which is embodied by the implicit hierarchy of the programme. Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan (1970). Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press.

alliance but because it makes salient the qualities of its professor. This is the techne of its politics technopolitics. An alliance not only needs numbers, but to organize its members so the best leaders will rise to the top and so make use of the numbers that provide themselves in its provision. Those political revolutions which were politically successful in the last several centuries have all been possible in the use of these technopolitics. They are implicit political systems which not only designate specific creeds and beliefs, but build into themselves the capacity for their users to adeptly sort and place themselves in its would-be power structure, which results in the promotion of the whole. 47 The paradigmatic example of successful revolution is the American Revolution, and it succeeded because authority was passed up to a recognized elite, who then came to understand their interests, the resources available to their organization, and how they would need to lead a response to the British to establish political sovereignty. Marxism is not alone in being a technopolitics. Wherever power structures have been displaced in conjunction with the use of novel, emergent signs by those doing the displacing we can observe technopolitics in effect. This includes not only the Russian Revolution, but every revolution of the past several centuries. Every emergent political structure that makes use of ideology as a feature for coordinating the actions of its participants is engaged in technopolitics. Certain of these projects were robust, in the sense that not only did they operate as an effective mechanism for organizing people to take and use political power, but they provided effective intellectual formulations for organizing its social matter. They are technopolitics which hew close enough to truth to provide for a materially robust society, one that can both produce goods and services to make life worth living in those societies as well as defend against threats to its order, both internal and external. A good technopolitics must be one that not only realizes political success, but social utility as well. In contrast to Marxism in Russia and elsewhere, the West has realized technopolitical programmes that sufficiently synthesize truth and social utility. We would refrain from giving these programmes names, for as we shall see the strength of these programmes has been in their never becoming ideologically dogmatic, a trait that others have not only recognized as pragmatic but gone on to label pragmatism.48 The reason for the success of the West is that it has always resisted the possibility of any final formulation, meaning that it is implicitly believed (though rarely explicitly stated) that there shall never be any formulation of politics or science that is "once and for all." Whereas the eternal and unchanging doctrines of Marxism made the Soviet states incredibly vulnerable to changing conditions, since it effectively backs itself into an ideological corner without any escape, the political elite of the West typically refrain from enshrining any ideological dogma or values. In essence, this means that even while a provisional ideology is implemented, the elites always leave a way out in the event of said ideology's eventual collapse. Ideologies are not instructions for elites to follow, they are instructions elites use to control others. 49 Even the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, while it states certain values with seeming certainty, intentionally leaves itself open to interpretation, and the interpretation thereof becomes the focal point around which the American government has so far successfully coordinated itself as an embodied technopolitical programme. There have been successive technopolitical programmes in the West, with a genealogical descent which 47 Wang, Z., Szolnoki, A., & Perc, M. (2014). Self-organization towards optimally interdependent networks by means of coevolution. New Journal of Physics, 16(3), 033041. 48 Moore, E. C. (1966). American Pragmatism: Peirce, James, and Dewey. Columbia University Press. 49 Wang, Z., Szolnoki, A., & Perc, M. (2014). Self-organization towards optimally interdependent networks by means of coevolution. New Journal of Physics, 16(3), 033041.

others have traced and we will not need to repeat here. 50 What this leaves us with is a seeming dilemma - in order to constitute the technopolitical programme, it must strive for power - to strive for power, it must embed itself in social utility - to embed itself in social utility, it must work through the real, personal, subjective interests of those who do and will make up the society. This seems to compromise its potential truth value, as truth is eternal but we and our interests are not. The resolution is deeply metaphysical, and follows the reasoning we have already especially made in prior chapters. Social utility does not compromise truth, but it is what actually provides the matter for its form to be realized. The growth of knowledge is nearly certain assuming conditions of stable exogenous inputs and can be modeled as emergently increasing order. 51 We are always by necessity striving within a changing world, a world that is changing to always inevitably become truer, truth materialized in the always-evolving organization and power of society itself. Without humans around there may yet be matters of fact, in some objective sense, but so far as we mean truth that is embodied by our words and actions, that truth becomes a living thing. It is not a still, static entity, for if it truly were so resolutely immobile it would not be a thing we could interact with at all. Truth is realized in the pattern of our behavior. This is what makes possible our technopolitical programme, so that it is not a nihilistic work without meaning, but in fact draws us after the purpose of life, the cosmos, and time and being itself. By realizing this we are able to coordinate and concentrate our behavior in a pattern constituting a technopolitics to create power. This distinguishes our work here from zombie ideologies such as Marxism, and demonstrates that the pursuit of power is not only necessary, but necessary because it is good. The challenge is to synthesize truth with social utility. It may seem to some that these must tradeoff with one another, and indeed there are some people who would demand this, but they are actually complementary. What seems as social utility derived by sacrificing truth is bound to Hell, and truth without social utility is weakness. It is necessary, especially in such an age as the internet where the barriers to finding each other so slight, to maintain truth as the light by which one gathers together friends, friends who will seek after each other's good and look out for them as they work together. It is a challenge to represent truth from the forms which social utility makes available to us, but truly there is no other way for humans to make use of truth. When I say that truth without social utility is weakness, I do not mean truth should be sacrificed to find social utility - rather, those truths that are most opportune, will be those that have social utility. Rather than selecting truths without social utility to make as your starting point for a defense, one must begin with those which can persuade others to agree and defend it, and build from there. By starting with those truths that have social utility as your foundation, the rest of truth can be built, and incorporated into society so that it increases social utility. A truth without social utility may as well be a light hidden, and social utility without truth a cancer. What is worth doing is usually more difficult, but as the effort is made to form truths in their apprehensible spirit from the matter of culture - which is just everything we have so far said and done it becomes easier, and we may strive further after the infinite horizon which discloses the ultimate Truth. This requires not only understanding truth in its technical sense, but the spirit of our time. If what we say will not last even a moment in our time, then it may as well have never been said - for something to last forever, it must start by lasting a moment. 50 Mencius Moldbug (2008). An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives. unqualified-reservations.org. 51 Kaspar R. (1984) A Short Introduction to the Biological Principles of Evolutionary Epistemology. In: Wuketits F.M. (eds) Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology. Theory and Decision Library (An International Series in the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social and Behavioral Sciences), vol 36. Springer, Dordrecht

This might give us reason to despair, especially if we had conceived the project of philosophy or science or however else we see the pursuit of truth as finding its meaning only in the representation of Eternity without regard for Time. In other words, if we conceive the purpose of philosophy as representing the Truth that will be true for all time in some Final Formula, which will never have improvement, then naturally we can only assert this is delusion. We are always necessarily finite in our complexity, and any representation must be a discrete approximation of an infinitely continuous reality. What we can do is deliver to the future the next story in the tower that is philosophy, from which we can see to the furthest ends of the horizon of time and being. We must exist within our time, and our time is made up by those times coming before, and seeing where we have come from we can see how we are responsible to deliver this edifice of meaning to the future. There can only be a "once and for all" conception of Truth at the end of all time and being. As one imagines a curve approaching a line asymptotically, so does truth pursue Truth. Thus when this technopolitics is applied to itself, it can represent self-awareness in the cognition of its being alive as it recognizes it has a past and a future. It is not and cannot be some static entity, but is a form to be embodied by us. It follows the same dynamics as all nature, meaning it can participate in some rise and decline, all in due time. It is an eschatological but not millennarian view of history. We are not poised at some brink or singularity, but we are called to the eternal work of translating the truth of the past into the future. We stand between past and future, observing what has come before in order to pass it on. We do so seeking to improve - and just as has been done before. We are not the first, nor the last, to take on the vanguard of civilization, to be its Masters. The wisdom of the ancients, when we see it for itself, makes us wiser, and so shall the future be wiser still. This is the way of the world. Taking in hand the realization that our being cannot stand from without to look within, but we are always-in-the-middle-already, we can see clearly the structure not just that we must create, but the structure we will create. Social utility is created in doing, not just saying. Saying has its end goal in orienting us as individuals to the world, to coordinate our behavior so as to pull out of reality the energy we require to sustain ourselves. Truth is not idle, but alive and efficacious. So the beginning is to see how things are going, and to set ourselves on the path to become who we are meant to be. If we set ourselves only the goal to subsist on the effort of others, then we have already lost the way, if we are seeking after truth. Truth must lead, rather than be led on by others as a mule. This brings us back to the most devastating problem of Marxism - its philosophers do not even imagine themselves as leading or creating, but instead as "sitting back" and waiting for others to feed and clothe and house them, as though their words are an end in itself. They are not - words are a practical matter, which meaning is realized by their utility. More fundamental than words is information. There is a criticism of communism made by Ludwig von Mises, which penetrates to its very conceit. In order for a structure to exist, it must draw on sufficient energy to sustain itself and then to transmit that energy throughout its structure as necessary to maintain the relations between its parts. This is true for all structures as such. Whereas Mises focused on economic calculation52, we can generalize the problem to that of informational computation for all living structures. For a creature to be alive it must harvest sufficient energy from its environment, and that energy must be transmitted to its parts as necessary. This process must be self-regulating, in the sense that one part cannot overrule another part what it needs, but each acting on its own immediate knowledge will be regulated with respect to each other. In other words, if the heart calls out for so much sustenance, then it will tend not do so in a way that leaves the liver without, or vice versa - and so on for all parts of the body. 52 Mises, Ludwig von (1920). Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Translated by Adler, S. Mises Institute. Auburn, Alabama.

If we wish to make Mises' criticism particularly plain, we could simply examine the consequences if a living creature embraced communism in its very composition. If not only how much sustenance each part would receive, but when and how needed to be decided by some central organ, such computation as would need to be made by the central organ is redundant to the computation performed simply by the parts of the body operating with a high degree of autonomy and in feedback with each other. The stomach does not need the brain to tell it to digest food, but it will do so automatically - and the stomach will automatically send the brain a signal indicating hunger, so as to motivate the brain to move the body to find food. When we examine how the parts of the body work together, and what benefits from the centralization of cognition and what does not, we can realize the exact same utility for society. In order to maximize the efficiency of energy/information flow throughout the body, the optimal structure appears to involve a high degree of autonomous function by parts, with only the most "crude" functions performed by a central organ in terms of orienting the entire body in the world. The hands and fingers operate best when the brain is telling them what to do, but the cells that make up the hands do not need the brain telling them when to divide, when to die, and so on. If a cut occurs, blood will automatically scab. If a pathogen enters the body, white blood cells will automatically track them down and destroy them. The cells of the lungs automatically take in oxygen, the cells of the liver automatically process pollutants, so on and so forth. It is not a perfect system, but it works far more marvelously than any system that would require a central organ dictating every part's every move and interaction with one another, and probably no central organ is capable of coordinating such complexity, not without that central organ having to be so large and complex that its own construction becomes subject to the same problem of centralized vs spontaneous and emergent coordination. There could literally not even be some sense of central coordination without there first existing emergent coordination - the emergent coordination being the efficient and formal cause of a central organ of control. One can appreciate the circularity of the central organ exercising control over itself, but it is clear that its scope of control must be relatively crude, for any more granular control would mean controlling each individual cell, which becomes a problem for controlling itself - if it takes at least one brain cell to model the operation of another brain cell, then it must take at least one more brain cell to model the operation of the brain cell doing the modeling, and so on. The potential for control exhausts itself at some golden mean of centralized vs. emergent forms of organization. We can "port" this argument of the body to society as a likeness to Mises' problem of economic calculation, in another way we can port the argument from society back to bodies. This is possible because biology and sociology are, in fact, studying the exact same kind of thing. It is the programme of technopolitics to realize the use of this knowledge - that if we are to act on society, we are not meant to act on it as one would a diesel engine like a mechanic, or as one would a hydroelectric dam like an engineer - rather, we are meant to be doctors, and to take our sense of how to cure society's ills and manage society's health from medicine and anatomy. In parallel of the realization that working towards the Truth will never reach a stasis of once-and-forall, the most direct application of this knowledge is the realization that power can be built out of an agreement of autonomous parts to regulate between each other what they can without needing a central coordinating organ. The role that central coordinating organ - a brain, as it were - can play will be most sufficient when the primacy of its resources are directed externally, to the understanding of the environment it finds itself within, and so far as it is directed internally, to the stimulus and provision of resources as its body requires.

One would tend to automatically assume this central source of power and information must be a government, and while sometimes it is, it need not always be so. The paradigm feature of such a source is its access to information, as it is this information that provides all advantage in its decision-making process - knowledge of how it can behave to sustain itself and even expand control over other organs, to that extent it can do so without harming or destroying that system it captures within its control. There are paradigm cases in human history where the proliferation of a new information technology has caused the centers of power to disperse and various organs to be captured within a novel state organization. In recent history, the printing press is perhaps the information technology which historical influence on contemporary social organization is hard to overstate. Almost by itself, it shifted the center of power outside the Church and after transformations those powers were captured by various nation-states which utilized the printing press to not only influence people religioideologically but to support the integration of companies and martial powers which could bring the bulk of the people into a consolidated social hierarchy. This process would eventually result in the establishment of its own formal foundations by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and would gradually manifest itself as nationalism, especially as the states' powers of propaganda reached their greatest effect and scope by the 20th century. Ironically, this trend of sovereign dispossession that started with the printing press and the Church will continue with the internet so that the state institutions that organized themselves in the Church's waning will be dispossessed by the same trend. Those who live by the word, die by the word. The power of information for a human user, who is the ultimate center and decision-maker in all these processes of organization, is with who and how many it allows them to effectively coordinate. As the cost of reproducing and transmitting - especially reliable - information decreases, the number with which an individual can coordinate increases.53 This creates networks through which energy and resources flow and through them to all other individuals. Unlike most elements of sociology which seem recalcitrant to effective quantification, either because it is something itself unable to be meaningfully quantified or whose meaning even if quantified remains indeterminately decided by subjective evaluation anyway, this may be the paradigm case of what is both a social and effectively quantifiable reality. How many first-order relations an individual possesses, the average number of first-order relations possessed by individuals in a collective, and so on can be effectively quantified to reveal meaningful traits of such societies and the role their individuals play therein. While the binary, yes-no of determining whether some first-order relation holds at all may be subject to scrutiny, if the same principle is applied to all potential relations then discrete numbers can be obtained and analyzed. The potential to adapt individual strategies in an environment of extremely cheap and reliable information transmission has barely been realized. First, there is the capacity for one to gather and record information about the interactions and networks in discrete terms through the provision of a digital framework that enables such interactions between users, e.g. social media. Second, however, is the more fundamental, which is that the potential for individuals to create and extend their social networks is vastly less costly than ever before. While there have always been a few who realized the utility of forming useful social networks, this was typically stratified as it was a costly endeavor. Now, however, without that initial material capital one can form networks one or two or even three magnitudes larger than they might have ever before, with only the simplest and most accessible of tools, e.g. a computer and internet connection. This should, in fact, be the basis of a technopolitical programme, to extend and utilize a vast social network of friends committed to the same meta-political 53 Assange, Julian (2006). State and Terrorist Conspiracies.

cause. It should be a goal to form associations not only of those with a similar persuasion and perspective, but to form associations between such associations, to operate on a higher level of common premises and goals. Making common agreement of esoteric and arcane doctrines a necessity to negotiate makes one exceedingly unlikely to obtain even simple desires - but for friends representing these different systems on the behalf of those with such insular politics, more can be obtained overall. Information governs the behavior of humans. Humans are not only responding to the natural environment as perceived by themselves individually and immediately, but they are also responding to the information conducted through their immediate social relations. Their knowledge is principally focused on social reality, e.g. who is doing what, how much money someone has, who is involved with whom, and so on. This is because the information about the natural world filtered through social reality has a primacy of impact on one's own personal survival and reproductive success 54 - if one understands their social reality, they have a better idea what they can do to make money, to attract romantic partners and have children. Whereas it seems the default approach to attempt unifying psychology and sociology by starting with psychology and then deducing rules about the interaction of such psychological features in the aggregate, a more useful approach is the opposite. We begin with the features of our social substance, society, and then we move from these collective features to how individuals are conformed to them. The individual's psychology, after all, has been formed by evolution to adapt them to society, to working with other humans, as this collective sociality is the principle of human dominance over nature. When starting with the social substance and then microscoping in on an individual, the principle question is easier to identify - we are less concerned with their own personality than we are with the social relations they form and how energy and matter is transmitted between them. Information in this context can be primarily interpreted as energy, which when transmitted between humans according to a rule of representation - what we might otherwise call the principle of linguistic meaning - results in their tending to instinctually moderate each other's behavior 55 towards a form that, collectively, coordinates them together to the harvesting of energy and resources from nature they require individually. As collectives have an advantage over individuals in per capita harvesting of resources by using division of labor, it is little wonder from such a perspective that individuals instinctually form such associations even without understanding from the view from without how such associations are the principle of human dominance.56 If we extend this method of microscopy, we can imagine a kind of thought experiment. Suppose we are an alien cellular biologist. Our occupation is focused on how living cells live and interact with one another. When we take our microscope and train it on samples, we are adept at identifying the parts of cells and observing their interrelated behavior, the nucleus, the mitochondrion, the Golgi apparatus, the cell membrane, and so on. Not all cells share all the same parts, but as a rule parts can be observed of individuals that operate in harmony, according to their nature. One day we decide to focus our hyperadvanced alien microscope on earth, to study terrestrial microbes. Alas, in setting up our microscope, we do not realize its focus is insufficiently high, so that rather than looking at what we take to be microbes, the microscope is focused on a scale so that humans and their environment are in plain sight. However, we do not realize the microscope's focus is not high enough to be focused on what we take to be microbes, and we begin analyzing and categorizing the behavior of humans in their environment as we are trained to do with traditional microbes. How might we proceed? 54 Harlow, H.F. and Zimmermann, R.R. (1959). Affectional responses in the infant monkey. Science, 130(3373), 421-432. 55 Tronick, E., Als, H., Adamson, L., Wise, S., & Brazelton, T. B. (1978). The Infant’s Response to Entrapment between Contradictory Messages in Face-to-Face Interaction. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 17(1), 1–13. 56 Axelrod, R., & Hamilton, W. (1981). The evolution of cooperation. Science, 211(4489), 1390–1396.

From the view of humans as microbes, we might not immediately classify humans as their own individual cells. In fact, we might only classify them as parts of cells, and their association with the complete assemblage with which they impute their activities as indicating that they are more like the nuclei of cells. For example, we observe that humans tend to reside in these stable structures, one or several of them at a time, and when they leave this stable structure to go out into the world, they are often assisted in their movement by the use of mobile structures, some which have two wheels, some which have four or more. When they interact with one another, it often includes the exchange of work and resources between units of humans, resources which are used to develop and fill these stable structures with food and other objects that are consumed or used by the humans. These humans in turn do upkeep and build more of these structures. Such a form of life must appear spectacular yet familiar humans forming multiple nuclei around which other material are coordinated, almost like a vortex. That vortex of material - what we call capital and property. That material behaves according to principles inherent to human nature, is constructed around humans, and entices humans to act out their natures. A home is like a cell membrane, a kitchen like a mitochondrion, and so on. There is no reason, if we are otherwise unfamiliar with human society, for us to immediately detect that we are observing a form of life entirely distinct from microorganisms. To a hyperadvanced alien observer, who might be extremely long-lived compared to us, and perhaps of an immense size, there is no reason for us to appear all that differently.57 Such tendencies in classification and categorization as we are used to applying for microorganisms reveal important features of human society that might otherwise be hidden from view by what we take to be ordinary common sense. To us, it is not immediately apparent that society is a living organism of its own, let alone that homes and cars and factories and roads and power lines represent the same utilities as other living beings and their organs, cells, organelles, and so on. But from such a perspective, it seems easier to recognize the role individuals play in the whole, and to strip us of our anthropocentric perspectives of society and its organization. Society is not a being beyond reductive examination - although reduction is certainly not the whole of it. Society is a living being and it lives by the same principles and necessities as all other living beings. What principles we use for understanding other living beings may be equally applied to society, our personal associations, even ourselves. It is the insight which unifies biology and sociology, gives each an equal basis, and which may even be utilized for understanding the possibilities of human excellence, virtue, politics, business, technology, and so on. The individual human's excellence is what makes him beneficial for his associated collectives, and the collective's excellence is what makes it beneficial for its individual humans. With this we may get beyond the need to impose a totalizing standard, but may recognize and utilize the diversity of human organization, to the greater benefit of all over a single, centralized power. We can abandon the standard of needing a uniform subordination to a single way of life administered by a central power. Instead, we can imagine multiple centers, multiple powers, mediated in their relations through exchange and participating in a greater associated collective as do humans. What we 57 Even on a very grand scale, such as the scale of nations, humans cannot help engaging in identical forms of behavior as that observed in other communities of organisms. For example, assuming proportionate availability of food as human population placed on a map of the United States, slime mold will grow its network in a way almost exactly the same as humans have chosen to construct their highway system. Or, perhaps, humans have constructed their highway system the same way as slime molds grow their network. Adamatzky, A. and Ilachinski, A. (2012). Slime mold imitates the United States interstate system. Complex Systems, 21.

can imagine is a world beyond the nation-state, a meta-political organization incorporating all these individual standards and associations into an equilibriated set of social ecologies. And we might pray that this new equilibrium affords our children the opportunity to develop their virtues.

Part 8: Technocephalization Language is so used by us, that we really do take it for the proverbial fish's water even when we directly frame an inquiry about it. Essentially everything with which we identify as being uniquely human we recognize as requiring language to be possible. How language – as we would call it – causally evolved in humans at all is treated as an out of the way question, secondary to questions of grammar and magical conceptions of linguistic meaning. The causal emergence of language is a paradigm case to which we can apply general domain principles to bring about some definite sense of its actual, causal reality. Perhaps the closest any discipline comes to articulating a causally observable theory of language is the cybernetic representation of the living body as a series of chemical feedback loops regulating the interaction of its parts.5859 While we may not think of language as necessarily posing the same essential relation to humans as, say, oxygen to cells, if we consider the vectors of necessity along which the transmission of chemicals for cell signaling in the body parallels language, we will see that the way we use language enables society to solve the same problem vectors in the same way. One reason we are prone to overlook the parallels between the chemical communication of cells and the verbal communication of humans is that the chemicals exchanged between cells seem to have a more causally “essential” character to them - however, it would be more accurate to describe the collective character of cell signaling as a statistical process, with an aggregate response consisting of mean individual responses.60 This actually makes cell signaling even more like human communication behaviors than a naive understanding of cell signaling might suggest. As compared to cells and their response to chemicals, the human response to human language has a seemingly more arbitrary character, in that humans can learn to associate any sign with any meaning. However, while any sign could potentially be used, if one considers the sign in its relation to potential patterns of positive and negative stimuli, it is clear this arbitrariness of the sign per se only covers up the essentiality of the form by which signs have their meaning reinforced by the attendant processes of positive and negative stimuli. In other words, because meaning is in our behavior, but not our words, our words gain their meaning from our behavior, rather than the other way around. The “meaning” of a chemical signal is determined by the efficient correspondence of the chemical's form with that of its cellular recipient and the behavior it elicits on both the individual and collective levels.61 The total network of cell signaling in an organism is organized to make it robust to changing conditions along numerous dimensions,62 and is sufficiently complex and cohesive to derive novel solutions to novel conditions.63 Cell signaling networks demonstrate a capacity to regulate the behavior of individual cells to coordinate a collective response adaptive for the whole body.64 The formation of a cell, in this sense, insofar as we give regard to how its nature makes it to respond in such a way, appears determined by a confluence of innate and environmental factors. Just like a 58 Bhalla and Ravi Iyengar, U. S. (1999). Emergent Properties of Networks of Biological Signaling Pathways. Science, 283(5400), 381–387. 59 Kwon, Y.-K., & Cho, K.-H. (2008). Coherent coupling of feedback loops: a design principle of cell signaling networks. Bioinformatics, 24(17), 1926–1932. 60 Brennan, M. D., Cheong, R., & Levchenko, A. (2012). How Information Theory Handles Cell Signaling and Uncertainty. Science, 338(6105), 334–335. 61 EUNGDAMRONG, N. (2004). Modeling Cell Signaling Networks. Biology of the Cell, 96(5), 355–362. 62 Azeloglu, E. U., & Iyengar, R. (2015). Signaling Networks: Information Flow, Computation, and Decision Making. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, 7(4), a005934. 63 Koseska, A., & Bastiaens, P. I. (2017). Cell signaling as a cognitive process. The EMBO Journal, 36(5), 568–582. 64 Neves, S. R., & Iyengar, R. (2002). Modeling of signaling networks. BioEssays, 24(12), 1110–1117.

human's behavior is determined by the interaction of genotype with experience, so too do cells similarly learn such as when white blood cells learn to identify pathogens from encountering them. This "memory" of the pathogen is stored in white blood cells by changing their genetic material so they will destroy the remembered pathogen on identification. The advantage we have with a phenomenon such as cell signaling is it is easier to apprehend it from the view from without, but once we have grasped it as such we can intuit the isomorphy it has with human signaling, including not only language but non-verbal cues and fashion and credentials. The human capacity of language itself seems a highly evolved form of pattern recognition and exploitation. 65 When we are learning the meaning of words, we learn by associating how their usage yields concrete effects. A toddler saying 'mama' causes his mother to attend to him, and thus the meaning becomes fixed to that particular token which can now be distinguished from other distinct sounds. Likewise, the meaning associated with a token can increase in richness with further experience, as a wider array and number of instances allow the individual to recognize more specific relations in the use of the word with those specific conditions it yields by its use. While the token by which we refer to coffee could be any arbitrary signal – at least within the range of sounds and symbols humans can reasonably create – at least for English speakers the token 'coffee' has been affixed by regular usage, and will only change with a lot of time and perhaps changing conventions and culture around coffee. While we are capable of inferring the meaning of certain words by reference to their use in relation to other words to a limited degree66, at some point the association of words with specific phenomena must take place for humans to learn language. Thus there is, in fact, an “essential” character to our use of language, which is formed by those experiences of positive and negative stimulation required for humans to learn language and to which verbal signals are associated. Without those experiences, we could not learn language, and insofar as necessity binds the use of language to experience, the essential character of experience itself forms the analogy by which the chemical signals of cells can operate to their specific ends. Although language involves relations of matter constituted at a higher dimension than that observed in chemistry, ultimately there is a material basis of meaning, and their distributed dynamics throughout the collective are in principle observable. Specific behavior has the potential for better returns than nonspecific behavior, but that capacity for specificity itself requires greater complexity. Greater complexity requires more resources and time to develop. To achieve and maintain such complexity requires greater coordination between parts, and unless those parts otherwise directly affect each other in the specific way required to achieve coordination, then the coordination of those parts to their own specific behaviors necessary to achieve a single overall motion must transmit some information through intermediate parts. Hence cells in a body transmit chemical signals between each other through a medium such as the blood plasma or the nervous system, so that their own individual responses will tend to bring their collective to an aggregate sum of behavior conducive to their collective good. Likewise humans communicate with each other in society, so that we are able to moderate our respective individual behavior towards each other in order to achieve a greater benefit for the whole. This can be achieved through the various media of the air, as when we speak directly to one another, or through symbols on a surface, electrical signals through a wire, grooves on a disc, radio waves in the air, and so on. This necessity of collective good is the condition under which language develops, and can only be selected for by the success of its individual progenitors. Language is developed by selection through the behavior it promotes in its 65 Nowak, M. A., & Komarova, N. L. (2001). Towards an evolutionary theory of language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(7), 288–295. 66 Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado, G. S., & Dean, J. (2013). Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 3111-3119).

users.67 The tokens of language do not unnecessarily occupy some discrete part of our minds, but they “pay their dues” as it were. All parts throughout the whole tend to operate so as to benefit the whole, and if those parts did not, then they would be selected out. From this we can infer, as we have been doing all along here, that the promulgation of some kind of thing is due to the benefit it yields for those things using their own energy to promulgate that thing. Since words do not have any power to cause themselves, they depend wholly on our existence for their own use. But likewise we depend on them, in the sense that if some humans choose not to use language, they will have a very hard time getting by compared to other humans who choose to continue using language. This also implies better users of language outcompete the worse users of language68 up to the point diminishing returns equals marginal product. The reason for this within the framework developed here is plain enough. The information transmitted between entities helps them to coordinate their behavior in such a way that, together, results in their mutual advantage over the environment, including other actors within it. This necessity to use information can be extended backwards to the very beginning of time, in which we observe a trend towards the increasingly better use of information to maintain the integrity of one's form. Before humans spoke language, the animal kingdom was replete with cases of animals acting on the basis of information that does not have an obvious causal relationship with its environment, but can be made sense of from an ecological perspective. Bright colors do not essentially mean poison, and indeed there are many examples of non-poisonous, brightly colored creatures. But likewise, as a feature of the environment bright colors by their nature stick out, and if some creature can afford to signal its existence so blithely, this implies some defensive feature consistently enough as to warn away predators. Likewise the transmission of information has developed as an arbitrary seeming feature – there is no essential reason an electrochemical shock conducted by a nerve net from one part of a jellyfish to another part means “contract,” but since it correlates regularly enough to an environment where it benefits the jellyfish as a whole for its parts to act in a harmonious pattern, it is promulgated in the environment. A jellyfish squeezes its body because its cells sensed an electrochemical signal, a predator avoids a frog because it is brightly colored, and a human pours a hot brown liquid into a cup and hands it to another human because the other human said 'coffee' in combination with handing them some very particular paper and round pieces of metal – these are all the same kind of activity. They are the same kind of activity in the sense that a stone thrown on the earth following a regular trajectory before falling to the ground and a planet revolving around the sun are the same kind of activity. They are dictated in their development and existence by the precise same dynamic operating throughout nature. 69 By coming to see how they share an essential relation we become capable of ordering them with respect to each other as the manifestation of a cosmic historical trend. That cosmic historical trend is the development towards systems making more and more effective use of information to maintain their integrity over time.70 This is identical to the trend of forms continually developing with superior means of dissipating entropy because, out of necessity, what forms are worse at doing so fall apart and are no more – meaning that everything which exists is not the result of an uphill ascent against nature, but the 67 Nowak, M. A. (2000). Evolutionary biology of language. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 355(1403), 1615–1622. 68 Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13(04), 707– 727. 69 Kondepudi, D. (2012). Self-Organization, Entropy Production, and Physical Intelligence. Ecological Psychology, 24(1), 33–45. 70 Kovach, D. (2014). The computational theory of intelligence: information entropy. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.7978.

continuing downhill descent into nature – what exists now is just what has been left behind by the successive operations of nature from the beginning of time until now. This phenomenon, translated into the vernacular of geological history, is manifest by the successive evolutions of life, from the simplest bacteria to the monstrously complex humans, and all stages between which found their success by using information better.71 Information is always manifest as a discrete, finite resource – we can use 'information' here interchangeably with energy and it will mean the same thing. We observe throughout the world that the use of information tends to utility, because what forms don't use information to utility don't persist. 72 Hence this trend towards the efficient use of information can be traced all the way back through time and forward again to the present day, culminating in humans, whose use of information follows the same laws of necessity. Thus if we “zoom in” on the temporal period which humans have dominated, we can trace the development of humanity around this use of information, and perhaps even see where it shall inevitably take us. That is the Faustian bargain of all life – to use something to one's advantage inevitably becomes dependency requiring one to follow it wherever it shall go. This same cosmic historical trend traces itself throughout all human history, from the earliest premonitions of monkeys hammering things with rocks to the beginning of civilization and beyond. It is the logic and necessity of emergence, and it explains equally why there have emerged material forms whose substance cannot be explained by the strictly deterministic rules of physics as well as why human history has followed its technologically defined course. The forms of life emerged because their substance was organized to take advantage of information in the physical world that helped them persist longer than they would have otherwise. Likewise it is the same with human society and civilization, as we increasingly tap into the power of information to optimize ourselves and our relations to create as much nourishment and abundance from all information we can find and transmit between each other. This can be the basis for a systematic study and understanding of human history, which depends more on the capacity of human social structures to generate and make use of information, more than it depends on brute mechanical power. For one, brute mechanical power was built up by the systematization of information, providing some means for individuals to be around mechanical works their whole lives and pass on what they learned to their inheritors. And second, all the brute mechanical power matters little if one does not know how to organize it. Far more important than the guns, germs, and steel which European conquerors brought to the world around them was their vast and efficient information networks. It seems it a point too obvious to need stating, but human social structures must exist and abide by the same principles and necessities as all matter. Even if we should like to argue that the human phenomenology of conscious experience is something intangible and beyond matter, so far as we are able to observe it requires energy, which demands a constant consumption of resources from the environment to attain. There has been an ideologically motivated blindness in the social sciences which has resisted this fact, with the tendency in many traditions ranging from Marxism to critical theory, to set the human outside the material universe, as a sui generis which can structure itself in any arbitrary fashion without reference to the necessity of circulating energy through its composition to maintain itself. In contrast to this tradition of the intangibility of the human substance, we are grounding our analysis directly in the consideration of understanding nature, in order to set the human being within a metaphysically integrated order. Thus, rather than this cosmic historical trend representing a force 71 Goldenfeld, N., & Woese, C. (2011). Life is Physics: Evolution as a Collective Phenomenon Far From Equilibrium. Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, 2(1), 375–399. 72 Brooks, D. R., Collier, J., Maurer, B. A., Smith, J. D. H., & Wiley, E. O. (1989). Entropy and information in evolving biological systems. Biology & Philosophy, 4(4), 407–432.

beyond nature, it is in fact the very essence of nature, such that we find in all human structures, from our body to our societies as such, the same defining principles to manifest. We draw out this thread of causal necessity in order to grasp it within the human form, not only to recognize where we have come from, but where we are now and what trajectory we are on. As I have stated before, since we are capable of identifying that principle of motion equally at operation in other natural forms, as ecology and evolution, we are therefore able to use it to explain and understand the human destiny in the same way as we would the successive evolutions of life, the biological form of animals, and ecologies. Therefore, it is incumbent to apply this principle of emergence out of simpler parts under the necessity of energy requirements and formal persistence to what is already known about human history. This requires a sweeping distillation of human history, but not one which is beyond the ambition of our theory to undertake. It is required for our argument, and it is why the point about language was belabored. The human mastery of language is the sine qua non of our mastery of technology. We are not unique among the animals in our use of tools, even if tool-use is otherwise rare. But in order to coordinate a system to perform more specific activity – the precondition of our vast superiority in tool-use and toolmaking – requires the capacity to transmit more information. The way we organize ourselves and the way we teach the skills of tool-use and tool-making depends on a greater amount of information being transmitted. Were we limited to the rude signs which monkeys can make, we would not be able to progress in our use of tools beyond stones and, perhaps, simple spears. These very simple tools, however, might have been the catalyst for the evolution of language in humans, as they provided the environmental conditions in which the capacity to represent more specific and greater amounts of information would be more profitable to our earliest hominid ancestors. We can guess at specifics, but undoubtedly even marginal superiority in the use of language would mean more food, more safety, and more mates than those competing hominids without or with lesser capacity for language. Thus superiority in language would also mean changing the environment so that greater and greater capacities for language would be selected for by evolution. The transmission of information by language also creates new possibilities in social organization. Now it becomes possible for individuals in a group to begin specializing, not only because language provides the means for the knowledge key to their specialization to be known and passed on, but because social dynamics emerge to provide those specializing individuals those resources they require for personal sustenance. The precise means by which these dynamics emerge may be plural, but certainly those dynamics would not be able to emerge without language, as such specialization depends on its utility being conveyed by and organized through language. So it would be how the first several hundred thousand years of humanity's existence would pass, social organization gradually accumulating and growing with language. In all this, the transmission of information was essential. Language becomes even more clearly essential with the rise of agriculture and civilization as we know it. Not only did language make specialization and technology possible, but it provided the means for humans to organize themselves in groups larger than a few hundred. A ruler could sufficiently organize those around him who would act as intermediaries to organize many more people beyond them, so that a great many people could be subordinated within a specific social structure containing many thousands. It is difficult to say how long this period actually lasted, from only several thousand to perhaps a few tens of thousands of years, but it would culminate in the development of writing. Writing as a system externalizes human language and memory, so that even more information than was ever before possible could be accumulated and executed on by humans. Such information increased the vitality of the emergent city-states, so that hundreds of thousands could be effectively organized, with

writing providing sufficient information to rulers and their elite subordinates so they could coordinate with enough precision in order to maintain very large social systems. What is central to this dynamic is that information provided the means for individual units to organize between each other in their immediate relations in such a way that their individual behavior fit into an organization of collective behavior involving many, many individuals. In other words, if we focus on the necessity of information being transmitted through a system in order to coordinate its members to collectively beneficial activity, then we can realize that the unfolding of human history follows an isomorphic trajectory as that observed in the evolutionary history of multicellular organisms. The utility of information realizes itself in both the organization of multicellular organisms and human social structures. Primitive multicellular organisms organize themselves by nerve nets, which themselves give way to more centralized organization of nervous cells to realize the central nervous system and eventually brains in a process that is termed 'cephalization.' This 'cephalization' can be likewise observed in the emergence of complex human social systems. 73 Early tribes organized themselves by language with little specialization, very akin to nerve nets. In somewhat more sophisticated social systems, we can observe a tendency to centralization emerging. That tendency is observed not only in tribes instituting the social role of chiefs, but in the emergence of rulers and ruling elites more directly associated with the ruler, who depend on organizing immediately between each other using information gained about and from others of the circumstances of their territory. 74 Eventually this tendency to centralization emerges in a formal elite, who coordinate and execute decisions on behalf of their entire social body – just as a brain does for the body. The necessity of information, and its trend in history to centralize75 – as seen in the institution of writing – makes the analogy more plain. We might be able to go beyond analogy, to argue that the elite of a society really do operate just as a brain does. The reality of competition between elites, that might superficially seem to rupture their holistic integration, is actually a complexifying mechanism that helps provide the elite structure maximal adaptivity to changing conditions.76 It enables the elite structure to accomplish collective behaviors as a whole of greater complexity than any one of their members individually. Now, this isomorphism with the organ of the brain and the central nervous system does not necessitate that the “social brain,” as it were, is highly sophisticated in our present day. Perhaps the “social brain” is more akin to the “reptilian” brain, which centralizes information to maintain the functioning of a lizard's organs. However, despite the relative simplicity of the organization of social systems, in terms of how their effective nodes are related, the much greater potential for complex behavior of those nodes may offer the structure greater adaptivity than the more complex networks of cells constituting animals, due to the simpler behavior of those cells. An equation might be possible: ke = Ciii where ke represents total entropy, which may be treated equivalent to absolute potential behavioral complexity; Ci represents informational complexity of the relations between individuals of the collective; ii represents informational complexity of the individuals of the collective. Although there are ambiguities in attempting to quantify the complexity of behavior of agents ranging from bacteria, 73 Alonso, R., Dessein, W., & Matouschek, N. (2008). When Does Coordination Require Centralization? American Economic Review, 98(1), 145–179. 74 Paarporn, K., Eksin, C., & Weitz, J. S. (2018). Information sharing for a coordination game in fluctuating environments. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 454, 376–385. 75 Annila, A., and Kuismanen, E. (2008) Natural hierarchy emerges from energy dispersal. BioSystems. 95, 227-233. 76 Livnat, A., & Pippenger, N. (2006). An optimal brain can be composed of conflicting agents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(9), 3198–3202.

plants, animals, and humans, there seems a trend of higher level forms being composed of fewer quantities of their most immediate underlying strata. The number of humans composing our respective societies is much fewer than the number of cells composing humans, which is fewer than the number of atoms composing cells. As the overall complexity of the system grows, it appears there emerge individuals of disproportionately complex behavior, as compared with the majority of the system's mass and participants, but then this would be predicted by power laws as well. However, ambiguities in the measurement of behavioral complexity remain. This is an open question beyond the scope of this text. Despite these ambiguities, it is apparent the trajectory of social evolution manifest by humans follows that exact same tendency towards the centralization of information and control for the sake of coordinating the organism's parts. If we follow history from the advent of writing, this trend becomes even clearer in our present day, with the superiority of social organizations depending more and more on the capacity to gather vast amounts of data from all over the world and through many, many people in order to administer with more effectiveness.77 If we follow through on this trend, observing how it operates from the past through the present, we can generate a prediction about the future of human civilization. I call this prediction “techno-mediated socio-cephalization,” or “technocephalization” for short. The first fact we will draw attention to is the trend of increasing complexity of information distributed through society. For humans, at first the complexity of information cannot reliably pass through more than two degrees of relation, that is, the people one knows immediately and the people they know immediately. A concrete example might be telling something to a friend, then they tell it to someone else. Sometimes this transfer of information does not benefit the original party, but in general if this did not benefit our sociality overall it would not have evolved so as to increase in complexity. The more complex the information that can be shared, and the more reliably through the numbers of relations, the more resources can be harvested by its society. The introduction of text, even in its most primitive form, increased the amount of information that could be reliably passed through degrees of relations. At first the most capacity to transmit information was generally associated with those of the means to support its production and transmission – a scribe (or they) to write it, and someone to carry that message to its destination – but gradually these methods and means dispersed among the population, as economic motives converged to exploit economies of scale in the reliable production and transmission of information. Literacy gradually increased, travel routes increased in safety, economic ties brought need to promote diplomacy, and so on, all to benefit the production and transmission of history through society can be easily observed. Text depends on humans for its meaning and generation. Without humans interpreting it as instruction for navigating the world, it serves no purpose, and it cannot create itself by its own power, as humans are so able by sexual reproduction. More generally, the complexity of information as a structure constantly causing itself to be perpetrated, so that not only its own form of production but the organization of humans themselves, is a phenomenon parsimonious with the civilizing tendency of humanity as we know it. This suggests a certain mathematical necessity inherent to the production and transmission of information itself that serves the purpose of social forms organizing themselves. We might even identify this necessity as the vector along which civilization grows, or evolves (it is unclear which is the better term). Solving the problem of information production and generation so that parts can coordinate themselves with respect to each other in space so as to suit the form of which they 77 Michels, Robert. (2001) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Translated by Paul, Eden and Paul, Cedar. Batoche Books. Kitchener, Ontario.

cohere is timeless and eternal. Every moment of spacetime is constantly evolving its way to the perfect transmission of all information across all space and time instantaneously. It has always been doing so, and the fact it takes the form we now observe it to have is because it comes after the previous moment's equilibrium is solved. The current structure thus far has organized itself to a form as to take the most advantage of the tools for information production and transmission it could organize itself to do. Within this organization we can obviously recognize certain past and ongoing trends, some which are easy to recognize and quantify than others. The invention of the telegraph was rapidly followed by phones and radios. Then was the computer and now the internet. Each of these demonstrates a very clear and obvious increase in the complexity of information that can be demonstrated, and to what degree that information can be passed through the network of humans through each other. The average individual's increase in relations of effective influence has been substantial – it is easier now to cause a tangible effect in someone's life who is many degrees separated than ever before. This seems a very obvious property of the internet as such, but when one draws out the absolute anomaly in human history for this power to have been held in common, the relative difference of our present society's configuration is easier to realize in absolute terms. 1000 years ago the average individual's network extended barely past 2. There were sometimes people who had an effect from further up the chain, but the opportunity to effect that person in return was remote. This was bound up in geography, the reliability of information and knowledge, and so on. Now, in contrast to that, a dedicated individual can easily move through otherwise remotely separated social networks. This brings everyone closer together, while also making it more likely that information with a high salience (i.e. how interesting it seems to people and is worth sharing with others) will more easily, quickly, and thoroughly penetrate through every social circle. If the median relations of effective influence was rarely more than 2 for most of recorded history, the average person's median relations of effective influence today is perhaps more like 3. That may seem a small improvement in absolute terms, but when one considers that increasing one's effective degree of relations by one whole discrete person requires a magnitude increase of accessible information and energy the increase is enormous. In perspective, it is a very rapid increase of individual capacities, made true for billions of people. What is of note is even the capacity to transmit certain kinds of information is a function that evolves as well. The higher relations of effective influence have brought about friction as a result of the nearness of correlation between people's behavior and the language they use (which may seem slight overall, but for different individuals can have contrary effects), which has fed into itself. The underlying driver has continued with little resistance, and technologies as we know them to condition this effect are still being innovated which are likely to continue expanding this effect. For example, in the very near term reliable speech translation will make it possible for inhabitants of separate countries to not even recognize they are speaking with a person of a different country by speech alone and it may even be considered unimportant. What this brings us back to is that not only information as a dynamic but the underlying infrastructure of transmitting the dynamic of its media have continued increasing in complexity. This increase in complexity is analogous as a phenomenon with the trajectory of the evolution of life as observed in the effect of cephalization. We can predict this very same structure will continually reintegrate itself within the form of human social organization so as to generate a veritable social brain. This brain will be observed to have similar properties of biological brains, if one makes their focus on the cybernetic flow of information and its utility in its forms, to understand why it exists and why it behaves as it does. This generation of a thinking complex may or may not displace those humans we might think of as representing an inchoately expressed optimization towards this form (e.g. our current ruling structure).

This tendency towards a certain kind of formal organization in the production and transmission of information is an ineluctable result of human social organizations following the law of entropy. This can be effectively defined as a structure responsible for magnitudes more quantity and complexity of information production and transmission, much of it organized within itself. In other words, if we think of biological brains serving to concentrate the transmission of information within the living form to a specific part of it – an organ – then this structure will serve the very same purpose. Information still flows through the rest of the body, but much of the “significant” information will be concentrated in the brain by necessity of information taking material form. Thus will the social brain also organize itself with respect to the rest of the social body, with information channeled through networks that serve the function of transmitting information most efficiently between parts of the body, which otherwise relate to themselves by the pre-existing means of organization. Since this formal reorganization is being continuously wrought by the necessities of technology as a feature of competition, we call it technomediated socio-cephalization. Or, technocephalization for short.

Part 9: Patchwork as Breakaway Civilization Here we must depart the thoroughgoing theory of the former parts to attend to an attempt at their practical application. As this departure is predicated on the application of a theory that is almost certainly yet inchoate, I hope my readers will allow some leniency to adjust this vision to their own understanding and knowledge. Given that, I will not waste any more time getting to the point. Political visions have always suffered from an over-idealization, even such that when the language of a political philosophy or ideology is explicitly applied to a government and its political events, the language yet fails to explain or describe the matter to a degree that makes lucid what is actually going on. Taking the language "too seriously" is bound to lead one astray as to how things actually work or how things will actually work, even while the true ruling elite make use of a priesthood of the rhetoric 78 (de facto propaganda) to hide behind and divert criticism. This is part and parcel of the literary delusion, which holds that history can be explained entirely by ideas, rather than mostly by things people do and the conditions in which they act. 79 At least from a perspective informed by general 78 The use of information by central authorities to control, including not only by transmitting specific communications but more systematic control over how concepts are able to be communicated, has occurred for as long as central authorities have existed. There is always a natural incentive to occupy the foremost place in the social fabric, and this includes influence over the transmission of information. Analyzing the specific techniques and historical cases of propaganda is far outside the scope of this text, but it remains paramount to familiarize oneself with the dynamics and theory involved with propaganda, especially in an age such as our own where people are exposed to more information transmitted by others than ever before. These texts are accurate in many ways, but, at least as compared with the theory laid out here, they must be considered roughly proto-systematic with empirical and historical value. Lippmann, Walter. (1922). Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Bernays, Edward (1928). Propaganda. New York: H. Liveright. Hamadovsky, Eugen (1972). Propaganda and National Power. Translated by Mavrogordato, A. and De Witt, I. Arno Press. Wiener, Norbert (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin. Girard, Rene (1986). The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McLuhan, Marshall (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 79 The American Revolution makes for an interesting case study, in that both its contemporary and its historical adaptation depicts it as the victory of ideas, rather than the victory of some plucky far-flung colonists with the means to exploit a unique opportunity to take power. Idealizations aside, and not to set aside the values asserted as central to the cause, it is clear the determinative principle of its efficient cause was the opportunity for some to enrich and empower themselves. The popularity of the cause had everything to do with the personal gain perceived by its supporters. In contrast with the typical propaganda making values front and center to the cause, Thomas Paine's wildly popular Common Sense makes a completely practical argument in favor of revolution, contingent on material circumstances giving favor to the colonists in such a cause. If one supposes the success of the American Revolution had to do with the ideas with which it clothes itself, rather than its unique world-historical circumstance, one would be hard pressed to explain the lackluster outcomes of nearly every other revolution since. To the sober analyst, it is apparent that the preoccupation with values as a way to assess competing political philosophies has to do with their observed success of actually existing political systems, so that when philosophers and politicians make appeal to them, the meaning of those values is already so bound up in empirical realities it is little separable from the practical considerations involved with making sure institutions of men are able to provide for the purposes of their members and last for generations. This is further what we mean by the literary delusion, which is to point out that preoccupation with values as liberty or equality only worked in the past because they functioned as reliable enough referents for sets of principles of organization. Now that we have better and more precise ways of denoting the operation of social structures, we should opt to prefer that language, and to cash out the insights of past writers in these terms when it is plain it is the empirical phenomena their observations are tracking.

domain theories of systems dynamics, it seems obvious and intuitive to "read into" the writings of past writers, to afford them an interpretation assuming they'd use the vernacular of general domain theories if they knew it. It is clear enough ancient and modern writers had some intuition of reality, but were required to explicate their reasoning in terms familiar to their own time - just as we are now. Some would argue against this, that we must be careful to keep the ancients "pure," but that seems unnecessarily alienating. They are human, we are human, it is part of the natural course of dialogue for the participants to share and learn from each other's perspectives in an ongoing dialectic. To interpret the ancients with some robust generosity is the only way to approach them as we would like to be approached. The canonical project of Western political philosophy, Plato's Republic, is the prototypical example of an ancient text accurately describing reality, but to a roughly hewed form, for the tools and instruments available in his time were so blunt and crude as compared to our own. He describes the ideal society as one of several parts with regular relations between those parts, each transacting some vital service, and so sustaining the whole by their virtuously interrelated exchange. We can recognize what he describes now in terms of division of labor or alternately emergent specialization as akin to the evolution of complex multicellularity. While one can certainly differ over the details, Plato's premise that society can be generally compared to a whole body and understood in terms of health and the proper ordering of parts by their nature is is accurate. Other examples of the ancients grasping significant principles of natural dynamics are replete. In his Politics, Aristotle gathers together empirical data from the Greek city-states, and recognizes a cyclical principle to history, manifesting as the cyclic transition of monarchy to aristocracy to democracy to tyranny and back again. His reasoning is clear and lucid, and he tends to diagnose sub-optimal political situations as arising due to sub-optimal circumstances and conditions typically beyond the control of those involved in them, and that relations between the powerful tend to eventually stabilize themselves after periods of disorder and anarchy. Once again, we might differ on details, but Aristotle's thesis can be translated into the vernacular of contemporary general domain theories and it seems to offer some rough predictive power. The challenge of a technopolitical programme is to incorporate all possible insights into a unified, integrated order. The backbone of this programme, as I have identified, is the recognition of society being alive, an insight of sufficient centrality and importance as to constitute a separating "break" with the rest of those in society who remain blind to this reality. It is within such a programme that practical analysis and executive decision-making is integrated, so that the "official" philosophy is more in line with the reality of how decisions are made. Such a unification of knowledge with an actionable program has gone by many names, and is a project approached from many directions. The socioanatomical paradigm is superior because it is predicated on an approach to understanding reality that has proven more theoretically rigorous and more directly applicable to the form it means to act on. We are seeking to get beyond mere language, to hold up actual events, to describe both their form and cause, and predicated on this theory to lay out predictions by which the theory can be judged. Theory must be isolated and beaten to conform with empirical reality, rather than the other way around. The main problem of any political vision is the principal matter of how it shall be attained. It is too easy to simply postulate a utopia void of hunger or strife - and indeed the genre of utopia was initially written as a satire of such idealism. Political utopias are cheap, a dime a dozen, any fool can conceive a utopia in his head - and there it shall hopefully remain, for every historical incidence involving people trying to implement such oft-conceived utopias results in bloodshed, destruction, and suffering. On the other end of this idealism is an overtly "realist" vision that sees no way out of the quagmire of the

present, and resigns itself to infinite decline. Such fatalist attitudes must be resisted for the sake of one's soul, for without hope of a better future one will find no purpose in bettering their lives, even if only for their own children (which they are unlikely to have with such a perspective). We must strive for a golden mean between realism and idealism, to acknowledge the difficulties of reality but also to see in such crude matter the philosopher's stone, the alchemical process by which lead may be turned to gold. The former parts fulfill the necessary steps to begin examining precisely this question of the intermediary. First we have examined epistemology, in the sense of how our social-cognitive faculties are not "compromised" by the needs of social-material resource constraints, but are the very basis and matter from which all knowledge is and can be derived. Taking this in hand we have analyzed the phenomena of society from the perspective they are natural and progressive, that they have a tendency to follow a specific trajectory in their evolution. This trajectory of evolution can be best gleaned by reference to the development of other in-kind forms - life, biology, the organic. Hence the paradigmatic significance of the claim, which goes beyond others, that society is not merely like a living form - it is a living form! By this all knowledge of society can be synthesized, so that we are able to grasp history as a sequence of causes which have a specific form and direction. This teleology, which, by going on to recognize our present conditions and circumstances, thereby demonstrates the future form by which causality shall continue to unfold in a form comprehensible by comparison to other known causes. What we have done is monumental. As Newton shewed a single principle to comprehend both the motion of material forms on earth as well as the motion of the planets, thereby unifying what seemed up to that point separate domains of knowledge, we have shown that biology, evolution, ecology, and sociology are all determined by precisely the same principle. This forms the basis of our practical application, to show how to get from here to there. Here is present circumstances. There is stellar civilization. To achieve such a feat, we must gain a collective enlightenment. As the Enlightenment of modernity required us to grapple with the rational understanding of the self, as a being not only of soul but matter as well, so we must do the same for society. By seeing the collective self as a biological form, the obvious reference to other known factors of biology make themselves obvious. This is why we have insisted on the language of biology and evolution - because it is the proper language of society. And so the factors that impose themselves on the development of biological forms, observed in evolution and ecology, are the same that form society. To anticipate the future, we must only examine ourselves as such natural phenomena. This is why I believe the idea of the "nerve net" is most apt for understanding our current social arrangement. There are many dissociated centers of information production, most of these organs utilizing that information exclusively internally - and the current makeup of the environment reinforces such "closed" systems of proprietary knowledge. But it also suggests the most likely course of action to "create the future." That is to develop central organization of information throughout the social body in other words, to develop a "central nervous system" as part of technocephalization. This is the primary vector along which meaningful collective self-awareness can be obtained, and put as such it seems too obvious to even need stating - that the generation of information from all parts of society to information processing centers is a necessary step in the development of collective self-awareness. Yet it is the challenge to overcome. It would be easy to imagine this as meaning some kind of communism, e.g. it is the state's duty to collect all information it can from all institutions and persons it can and centralize that information for the use of commissars, but this would be entirely incorrect, and would be a greatly errant application of the theory here developed. Following the premise that society is living, and its parts are likewise alive,

the transformation of society from its present state to a technocephalized state must occur in transient stages under the condition that each "transient stage" is in fact optimally adapted to its contemporary conditions, where "optimally" simply means "more competitive than other forms in acquiring resources and using them to sustain itself." This is a much more difficult challenge than simply empowering some men to walk in with guns and force persons and corporations and all various kinds of institutions to hand over all data they possess, or mandating such individuals and institutions to collect certain kinds of data so that they can be handed over, as the communistic scenario would depend upon. Indeed, we are already living in a kind of communistic scenario with regards to our finances and what other kinds of information we are required to declare to the state. What I am suggesting is a series of exaptational changes, each improving upon their former conditions through the greater effectiveness in the use of resources and depending on the former conditions. First and foremost, it must work through the discrete change of the behavior of individuals. Typically, people will exhibit a behavior when they recognize some reward associated with it. Currently, most information is processed within institutions and by individuals for themselves, even when this is information obtained from others. Sometimes this information is processed in order to make changes to the institution's goods or services obtained by customers or clients, but this again comes back to it being a processing of information for themselves, as the purpose of improved performance in goods or services is for their own purposes. The mutual advantage of user of an institution's services and the institution is the vector along which this development must occur. Presently, the most "evolved" use of information shared by user and institution is institutions where the information obtained from users is processed to customize which products are made available for the customers, in order to reduce the search cost on their part in finding those products and thereby maximizing their use of those services. However, this feedback between user and institution is immediate between them, without that information being transmitted through a chain of intermediaries to a central processing organ, so the cybernetic form this takes still resembles a nerve net. In order for the form to resemble a "central nervous system," not only must there be some immediate feedback between a user and institution (which is necessary to maintain their causal association!) but the information must be transmitted through the institution to others that are themselves capable of making useful decisions out of centralized information that are transmitted back through the intermediary chain of institutions in a way as to motivate specific kinds of behavior. It is necessary at all points that a reliable feedback of mutual advantage between all parts is maintained, otherwise with the severing of exchange between them they grow separately. This is an important feature of the development of technocephalization. Also important, is not only maintaining causal association between parts, but distinguishing between those parts which are necessary to and which impede the causal organization of a whole. In other words, severing of exchange between separate actors can be exploited, like apoptosis, to bring distinction between a breakaway patch(work) and the contemporary regime. Apoptosis, or programmed cell-death, is used early in an organism's development to form distinctions between parts, e.g. apoptosis is used to separate the fingers from each other at the cellular level. Apoptosis continues to be used by the body late into its life, albeit shifting from necessary severing of parts so as to derive utility by their distinction, in order to target cells damaged beyond repair. Such a function in society looks like the use of prison to filter out of society its anti-social elements. The latter use of apoptosis cannot be the source of a body separating itself from an older body - the new body is required to initiate its own organization. The mistake common at this point, similar but not precisely the same as the communistic scenario above, is to identify currently existing bodies and their centers as necessarily remaining the centers in the event of technocephalization. Technocephalization may be more aptly rendered

technocephalizations. Such a process is likely to displace current centers of power, and it may also lead to the development of many more centers of power than exist today. Likewise, these new centers need not necessarily assimilate all members of current bodies, but they may centralize over a subset of current members of contemporary bodies. Moreover, contemporary social bodies are apt to resist the formation of new centralizations of power within specific subsets of their members as they represent a living threat - a live capacity to compete with those bodies not only to acquire resources but also for citizens. The opportunity for citizens of one social body to opt out - to exit - means that current bodies will be required to adapt themselves to compete to maintain their current populace, by proportionately improving services and decreasing taxes (both in the sense of tangible material living standards and intangibles such as removing onerous regulatory burdens and actively harmful social impositions such as public education). Currently existing bodies may be required to so thoroughly adapt themselves as to become nearly or entirely like the new centralizations of power, or they may simply be out-competed by these new centralizations and therefore go, more or less, the way of the dinosaur. Thus it is the case breakaway civilization is patchwork and patchwork is breakaway civilization. The material constituents necessary to develop these new centralizations of power already exist, and only require being further developed and extended in their utility so as to fully realize their power. However, between here and there is a rocky road full of suffering and destruction. Power organizes itself, as much as it can, so that it is of a form that maintains cooperation of its members not only through the provision of needed services, but also by actively making it painful to opt out of its mandates. As the centralization of power depends on it solving various public goods games, necessary not only to maintain one cohesive social body but also to protect it against external threats, justified threats of force provide the same instruments for unjustified threats of force. In order for the parts of an incipient new centralization of power to arise it must do so within such an environment, which gives those parts two problems which might also cause them to resist the full unfolding of evolutionary logic brought about by their existence. First, having arisen in a certain environment they will want that environment to remain the same in order to maintain their current existence, rather than have to try and change which is always risky. Second, the old center may have provided certain public goods which, with its passing, now the parts will have to obtain for themselves under a new regime that might not provide those same public goods. (The loss of these public goods can still be overall good, in the case the cost involved with providing them was greater than their value. Sometimes governments use the provision of certain public goods as a way to stave off potential competitors in any industry connected to governance, e.g. policing, finance, etc. It still leaves a situation where such an industry must build itself after being suppressed.) These problems are not insuperable, but they do suggest that a succession of evolutionary conditions will take place, each being motivated by the conditions coming before, and many of those parts at transient stages participating in a process leading eventually to their needing to substantially change form or be eliminated. Although we have focused on the role of information and its transmission within the system, its use at each transient point must also "pay" for its use. The gathering and use of information is costly, and its use can only be extended where it regularly finds that gathering and using information provides sufficient resources and energy. This is perhaps most likely in the arena of public goods which public governments have monopolized until recently, that of security. As demographic pressures collude with elite overproduction amid the general aging of the social system, there may be low hanging fruit for currently available technologies to be deployed so as to "cover" those domains of society ceded by government to its ungovernable elements. The reduction of crime is always in the interest of lawabiding citizens everywhere and at all times, and it is only the technical matter of resources and intelligence gathering that prohibit crime reduction from being extended infinitely. The provision of crime reduction via private means is also likely to be integrated with components of information

centralization, as security agencies expand their coverage and are benefited by economies of scale. The role of public provision of security might diminish except for those domains which government specifically must govern to maintain its own order and advantage. Security in human society has the effect of regulating the behavior of its constituents. Although there are always some unruly players, the threat of punishment for misbehavior tends to increase the overall level of cooperation between players80, as well it having the effect of reducing uncertainty allowing individuals to perform behaviors of much greater specificity and complexity. Individuals that are known - to assert that legal mechanisms such as trial by jury and norms as innocent until proven guilty instantiate a veritable form of social knowledge - to have broken laws or contracts can be subsequently acted on to redress, if possible, the damage caused by their violation and if necessary remove them from society so they cannot enact further damage. Here we draw out the fact that security and law are systems of knowledge production and behavior regulation. Their function is to improve conditions so that lower time-preferenced behaviors manifest as a function of reduced uncertainty and protection of pro-social gains from anti-social theft and destruction. As an indispensable system of knowledge and behavior in large societies, this system becomes a primary component for the realization of higher levels of integrated complexity in society via technocephalization. Technology can be applied by private actors to a degree that improves the reduction of uncertainty with a cost-effectiveness and reliability greater than contemporary states, and so draw away entropy dissipating social forms out of their current embedding in the nation-state. A related system for improving the specificity and complexity of individual human behavior is education. Education has the effect of developing patterns of behavior which realize a specific result in the production and manipulation of resources to make them usable by humans. Here we mean education in its broadest sense, not as strictly the thing schools do, but all inputs in the development of behavioral patterns in humans, from the input of their parents, siblings, friends, media, the internet, jobs, travel, and so on. In the contemporary understanding education has been conceived specifically as something one acquires at schools and which is primarily scholastic in content rather than practical. Scholastic learning is associated with mental arts, such as mathematics, scientific experimentation, and writing essays. Practical learning is associated with material arts, such as mechanics, computer programming, and carpentry. A system of education may include or require a component as schools, because certain arts are difficult to acquire without the elaboration of a teacher or tutor, but its social function is realized, as with the apparatus of security, by the production of social knowledge. Social knowledge is not just knowledge an individual possesses, but knowledge about an individual. Here we mean the system of external records of accomplishment, which certify to others the expertise an individual is accredited by some person or institution. College degrees, technical certifications, and the like are the contemporary expressions of this social knowledge, but in the future these reputation mechanisms may take on new forms with the aid of technology. This system of social knowledge about people's expertise and skills reduces the cost for others to recognize and find individuals with appropriate backgrounds to help them with the appropriate task. Just like with security, the system of education likewise may be changed from the inside out by new technologies. The problem to be solved, for any potential private individual seeking to displace the state's role in the provision of education, is to acquire a status to their process equal to or greater than the status signaled by public institutions. The material constraints of the technology may be easier to realize than persuading people to not only use the new technology, but to recognize that it verifies the expertise and skills of an individual with greater reliability than the credentials of public institutions. 80 García, J., & Traulsen, A. (2019). Evolution of coordinated punishment to enforce cooperation from an unbiased strategy space. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 16(156), 20190127.

Here we are again looking at the transition of human behavior to a form which produces superior social knowledge, meaning that it orients individuals to each other that reduces uncertainty and regulates their behavior with respect to each other. Likewise, as human behavior follows the system of interlocking social behavior, individuals may opt out of the contemporary configuration locking them in to dependence on stagnant nation-state governments, and find a way to realize their independence as part of a new centralization. What this here describes are vectors along which to organize parts which presently exist as part of the "old body" into the "new body," a new body free from the acquired detritus of centuries old systems. These systems, as part of the old body, are required to maintain their organization for otherwise the elements they sustain would not be sustained - that is why these systems, as part of the old body, do not and cannot change into the form they will exemplify as parts of a new body. To put this very delicately, the new body can free itself by simply deciding to no longer sustain those parts, but to be done with them - the old system has decided to take it upon itself to sustain such parts, so let it sustain them on its own. If it can. And if it cannot, and it makes the case this is why abandoning the old body is a grave moral neglect - because without help from others it cannot sustain elements it wants for itself - then this should be spat back in its face, why should we be trapped to be made use of as slave labor for designs you cannot accomplish without such destructive tyranny? That is all the more reason it is not only possible, but morally necessitated to escape the old body, to leave behind ruin and waste to its own devices. Any man or woman of a persuasion to freedom and self-sufficiency must feel it in the depths of their hearts, the indomitable will to thrive even if it requires breaking out of the prison made by others in order to use them. This is perhaps only the inevitable logic of life and death. Life exists fundamentally as a breaking away from death, the organization of being into an active force that sets it above and beyond the merely inanimate, and so much as what was alive begins to die, life springs anew out of the corpse. Life is not content to let the dying keep their matter, but actively repossesses it, taking it for itself, so that the matter will live on. As living is the highest imperative of being, there is nothing else to do about death but use it for life.

Part 10: The Science of Purpose The current year as of this writing is 2021 AD. At this time and place, it is difficult to tell whether the history of the American empire has played itself out or if we are even halfway through. The signs of social stagnation are plentiful and troubling, but neither do they indicate dire straits. For the typical young person growing up during this time, certain things would have been easier and better earlier on, only some decades earlier. It seems social mobility was easier, wages were relatively higher, home prices were much less, college education was still affordable and it really meant something, a young man could get himself into a good career track by the age of 23 marry by 25 have a few children by 30 much easier then than now. When comparing one's lot in life as a young man, the present offers greater burdens now than before in many ways - but there is still much to make of our circumstances. With both personal experience and theory to illuminate our current history, it is fair to conclude the American empire may yet have several centuries ahead before it finally unwinds completely in catastrophic collapse, and there remains abundant opportunity in the world for young upstarts to challenge and overturn the status quo. Though the fate of the American empire and the West more generally is certain - by history, by theory, by time - between here and there is not so certain, and what might come between and after is everything meaningful. We may be living in a time where the trends and patterns that become most significant in human history are only barely embryonic, inchoate, hard to foresee. Promising technologies and frontiers still offer a bright future, one where our children and grandchildren might have a place. Space, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering seem they might be some of the most consequential developments for human evolution. The decades to come may be a new Renaissance. But they could also just as easily not, if the worse elements of human nature in war and politics take greater precedent than they already do. The future is uncertain. The future is always uncertain. We are called on to meet the challenges of our time with optimism. Those who create the future - will. There is a natural tension between the thesis of this text and the question of personal virtue. As the text goes to pains to illustrate, society is a self-organizing feature of nature. Moreover, we are the result of a long process of selection that has wedded our individual form and our species to grand social organization. An individual cannot frustrate selection, so it seems unimportant how someone chooses to orient themselves in their world, and the knowledge gained by insight into society's emergence doesn't lend itself to any further understanding. Further, it does not seem individuals can develop meaningful conceptual representations of the society they live in, and when they do, this is often hazardous to the social order. "Society" as a natural phenomenon does not need its components to understand how they serve its purposes. Personal success and an accurate, consciously internalized representation of society are not necessary or even complementary. In certain roles, the individual's grander understanding might only be maladaptive, if it inclines them to make choices about policy their society cannot understand or tolerate. Yet it is also the project of this text to develop precisely an accurate, meaningful representation of the society in which we live. Can rational human understanding map a dynamic and complex system as society? Obviously, we can recognize that many do not. Maybe only exceptionally few have any clear understanding of society as such. Society can work without this understanding. But that does not mean its function cannot be illuminated by investigation, or perhaps even its outcomes improved upon. It is, nonetheless, a dangerous business, akin to experimenting on one's own body with novel surgeries and medications. The results wreaked even by people who merely believed they understood society to such a degree are proof what can occur. Yet such self-recognition seems a necessary step in our evolution as

a species, even if it hasn't been possible before and won't be possible for another million years. At least, it is a romantic or perhaps Faustian vision of humanity's future. There is nothing necessary about human knowledge that it continues improving and accumulating, or that the capacity of the average human to learn must grow over the generations. It is appealing, nonetheless, to imagine a society of philosopher-kings, who have in mind an equal and commensurate model of society, that allows them to achieve harmony and prosperity never before observed by humans. But what exactly is the purpose of such a picture? For the individual? For all of us? Is the widespread internalization of such a picture by a society congenial with its effective functioning? The intent by knowledge is to gain some mastery over nature. In this case, we could gain some mastery over that aspect of nature most near and dear to us - ourselves. We can make use of intentional techniques to improve on blindly evolved social processes - or at least to know when not to interfere. Such collective self-mastery seems it must be a crucial step in cosmic human evolution. And the beginning of such self-mastery are with the individual and their mastery of themselves. It must be foundational, for all knowledge passes down through the tangible threads of generation. If the individual overlooks themselves, they will have less to contribute to themselves, to civilization, and will generally be threshed out by selection. All power to effect cosmic destiny rests in human will. By internalizing in his own being an accurate picture of the cosmos, an individual organizes himself psychologically as a mirror of the cosmic order, and whose very own thought is a manifestation of pure nature at work. He contains within himself a representation that can anticipate and integrate with his being with what is without. This is why the ancient Hebrews conceived of man as the Imago Dei. So how does this come back to the individual? In a body politic of 300 million, sitting upon unprecedented technological innovation - what is the individual? What is his role? What is his meaning? There are many correct answers which could be given aptly and judiciously, and in certain settings it would be appropriate to address such questions by scholastic erudition. But in this case, we wish to be clear, and especially to be clear in how the individual human's sense of meaning is continuous with that of the society they inhabit. Meaning-making is not only an individual endeavor, but is a project that human societies have always sought in every age by the means available to them. As knowledge and technology and civilization progresses, so too does our sense of meaning. The appreciation of knowledge over the millennia should be recognized not only in its quantitative accumulation, in that we simply know a greater number of things, but also its qualitative dimension. The improvement in the quality of our knowledge is as the increasing resolution of cameras, and affords us a greater specificity about those things we know. Just like increasing resolution of a camera can make a detail apparent that was previously misinterpreted at a lower setting, so too can the human intuition of meaning be filtered through confusing, rather than clarifying, thought structures and beliefs. However, as there is a natural tendency in the development of knowledge towards order as social systems develop, this also means the clarifying tends to outlast the confusing. Hence, rather than the appreciation of knowledge - especially these last few centuries - tending to displace the delusion that we have meaning, it displaces delusions about how we know it. The narrative of atheistic secular nihilism mistakes a refinement in our understanding of how knowledge is developed, especially where it seems to abridge prior religious influence, with proof that it doesn't exist at all, rather than merely that our sense of it is meek. Atheism assumes the universe entirely alien to mind, which perhaps made more sense during the exciting growth of systematic knowledge in the early modern era, but now especially as our intuition of

Darwin's theory grows, this seems straightforwardly backwards. For one reason or another, evolution has seen fit to result - by nature of descent! - in the development of sophisticated minds. These minds naturally tend to the recognition and exploitation of patterns around them, in the sense that competing forms of matter which do not are more reliably destroyed or assimilated by those forms which do. Intelligence is very literally entropically downhill the origin of the cosmos, and it is demonstrated throughout this text that the ineluctable tendency of Nature to form minds to do her bidding - a tendency hardwired into Nature - is the single most important vector for living beings to identify and organize themselves around. This vector is grasped by numerous systems in various names, and on recognizing that it is the central causal principle around which the cosmos organizes itself, it is impossible to reject the thesis that it represents the means and end of human meaning. We will call it the intelligence vector. Intelligence is, ultimately, the capacity to adapt oneself to one's environment, to survive and thrive therein. The eternal purpose and end of the universe and our being intelligent minds as such is intrinsically connected. There only ever could have been selection for minds such as ours, given the evolutionary nature of being. Some kind of being, suited to respond to and anticipate, to predetermine the future as part of their activity, and which excellence at predetermination we call intelligence. Intelligence is the vector which will pull us along into the future, forever. Human meaning, with reference to this golden thread of cosmic causality, can be cashed out in very clear terms: consume energy to increase knowledge and intelligence in order to consume more energy to increase knowledge and intelligence. Vulgar and brute this might seem, it is also an isomorphic expression of entropy. We are not called to escape the system of material change, as in Gnosticism, but rather we are called to complete the system. The inevitable final condition of entropy, when all energy is consumed and the system is maximally disordered so that no further change is possible, is not meant to be forestalled or avoided, but to be directly embraced. It is the final victory over Death, because it will have killed everything that can be die - as dying implies change of the system - and what remains is purely living Being. To put it in the more conventional terms of religion, we are meant to consume as much energy as possible, to exhaust all mutable order to bring about the final condition of entropy so that the wheel of samsara is stopped. There is, of course, no way for us to do this in our present form. We would not be meeting this goal by just trying to burn through all the energy we currently can, such as by burning coal. That would be frivolous. To "use up" all the energy in the universe will require practically infinite growth of complexity, meaning - we must continue to live, grow, and adapt, for all time. As we descend we will change the universe, and if we exercise our intelligence wisely, we might bring all motion in the universe to perfect balance. We follow this need simply by pursuing our will to survive and thrive. As coincidental it seems, in fact it is parsimonious - the universe has already designed us to pursue exactly what we should, all as part of the universe's grand plan of unfolding. The point to see is it could not be any other way. The same order of causality that runs through all things, naturally, runs through us, and thereby informs our organization according to its eternal and infinite wisdom. We do not come upon our sense that there is meaning and order in the universe accidentally or mistakenly, but precisely because there is, because that meaning and order pervades all Being and thus necessarily includes our own and our experience of Itself. This imperative to consume can be put most equitably into the classical terms of Aristotelian eudaimonia. We do not enjoy life most by sheer excess of pleasure, but the appropriate moderation of it. Neither too much nor too little. This in fact is a philosophy designed to maximize lifetime pleasure, in the sense that what is judged too much is from the perspective that it would hinder the continued

access to that pleasure. An individual in eudaimonia will consume as much as society makes available to them, and will also return to society as much or even more. It is the role of the individual to pursue his personal purpose as best he knows it, for the simple fact that both he will know it better than anyone else, and also that he will know it better than anyone else's. It is not the individual's purpose or duty to personally take under duty what are the responsibilities of others. So, for example, this means that certain problems are up to individuals to solve, and other problems are up to collectives to solve, and neither can be asked to bear the duty of the other. What this means is that when the interests of individuals and collectives diverge, individuals cannot and should not be expected to change their behavior on the premise it will solve a collective coordination problem which the behavior in question does not solve the aspect of coordination. If there exists some collective problem - say, a tragedy of the commons - asking individuals to reduce their consumption for the sake of the collective is errant. First, the duty to solve the problem falls on those leaders of the community to recognize the problem and what can be mutually enforced among groups of people with many overlapping but also diverging interests. Only they can establish such a norm in this case, as bottom-up coordination is frustrated by essential knowledge problems, e.g. not only are individuals of the mass unsure whether and how much others will defect against the individual responsibility mandate, but they are fundamentally unable to know where the line is that constitutes the difference between moderation and excess. When an individual is unable to know such details about the collective, for good or ill, their best choice of action is to pursue what they otherwise understand to be their individual benefit. Consider the outcomes of such a choice. If we suppose the individual's consumption of a common resource in a tragedy of the commons game is excessive, this is fundamentally unknowable ahead of time. If otherwise a solution before the problem manifests itself is impossible, then an ad hoc solution will likely be best with full information about the interests of participating parties. What that means is full participation of agents yields the most useful information for devising collective solutions. If participants were futilely adapting their behavior, this can lead to problem solvers under-estimating the potential demand a "solved" coordination problem can yield, leading to further problems. Hence it is not only the best for the good of the individual, narrowly speaking, but it is also best for the good of the collective. It might seem counter-intuitive, especially when the individual's consumption of a commons is known to be a materially contributing factor to the collective problem, but under such conditions it is best to operate with the assumption that the present consumption will help stimulate a solution perhaps if it is required to "rush headlong" into a seeming bubble in order to acquire the sufficient concentration of capital which might be necessary to solve the problem. We are able to argue that this line of reasoning is "true" primarily in the sense it specifies that pattern of adaptation we observe in the universe which we associate with longevity. We can skirt around or drive directly through murky and ambiguous moral issues by simply determining what kind of problem something is on a technical level, and then understanding what will be involved with causing there to be a solution. Some things are within the means of individuals and societies to "solve" on the immediate scale, others might require decades or centuries of cycles of conflict to gradually develop. If we understand which problems are of what kind, we will be far better at improving the efficiency of our use of resources - what problems do not benefit from techniques modern democratic societies are able to employ, do not need resources, and those resources can instead be given to those problems which are understood to benefit from their provision. The contribution of services or resources into the wrong kind of solution for a problem can only serve as an input that further disturbs a deleterious equilibrium.

The individual's duty is first to themselves, and then to others. When this principle prevails, the result is more people who are taking care of themselves, and who are better able to solve those problems beyond themselves as a result. It goes without saying as a society we would be much better poised to "solve," or rather mitigate, problems in our society such as healthcare costs if we were ten or even a hundred times wealthier. It may seem ironic that a philosophy of Aristotelian individualism is actually most capable of social welfare, but if one understands Aristotle - and all the text before here! - this is because the individual and society are two components of a virtuous circle. The society is most able to give to the individual when the individual is most able to give to society - and this necessitates, for the purpose of each individual, to partake of life and society, in order to become the kind of person that others can depend on. Whether as a father, a mother, a business owner, a professional, a doctor, a soldier, etc, however that person is best suited, they should aim for ambition as high they are able. This is so they provide for their families, they provide for society children of pedigree, they contribute resources and energy and knowledge to the structure of that society, all which is needed to make society strong and prosperous. When individuals moderate their pleasure by eudaimonia, their lifetime experience of happiness is highest. In just the same way individuals should maximize their happiness via the moderation of eudaimonia, societies should likewise expand out into the world. As they expand, they will evolve into ever more sophisticated and consumptive forms, societies whose complexity will grow according to the patterns we already observe repeated throughout the cosmos. We should be careful to note here that what we're saying is, in one sense, extremely vague, but in another, we can elaborate to specify a very special kind of pattern that we mean. This pattern is the one discussed all throughout the text, the tendency to fractal self-similarity through self-interaction, of which the universe in its existence as space and time are the manifestation thereof. When we speak of civilization evolving into the cosmos, we do not say evolving lightly, and not as a mere discursive flourish. In just the same way every form of independent being that came before it was gradually caused to be one of many and through this to many of one - the Principle of Progressive Self-Organization - so too will human civilization expand through the cosmos and become parts of a greater form. There is, finally, the ultimate end of all Time and Being. The details and features of such an end are not as difficult to figure out as one might suppose, and ironically it is far easier to predict certain grand details of the end of time than trivial details about what will happen tomorrow. However, these predictions are much akin to predicting that a large round boulder pushed down a hill will arrive at its bottom - while we can be certain its final resting point will be of lower elevation, the precise path in reaching that point can be unpredictable, and it likewise leaves other details vague, such as which of various points with the lowest elevation it will arrive at. Similarly, we can also predict that such a boulder will tend to increase in velocity the longer it falls down the hill, even if we cannot be precisely sure by how much and even if that acceleration is discontinuous. We can predict its motion will slow before stopping after it has fully descended the hill. Features of such a kind are those which we can predict about the end of the universe. Although it is typically supposed a scientific domain such as astrophysics or cosmology will have the most to say about the end of the universe, in fact the conclusions and descriptions therein are inadequate, incomplete, and possibly even entirely wrong. In particular, they leave no room for the emergence of complex entropy dissipating structures that would go beyond the presently observed effects of linear physical forces such as gravity and electromagnetism. While of course such forces will be incorporated into any such structure, what is overlooked is that the forces may become "knit" into a form whose expression may veer the cosmos away from a "cold" and "isolated" destiny. What we have observed is the tendency for structures to grow exponentially, and as any good scientist knows

exponential growth is one of the most fearsome forces in the universe. What this exponential growth suggests is that, although the total aggregate of matter and energy incorporated into civilizational structures out of the entire cosmos seems likely to be practically negligible now, a sharp exponential growth in "civilized matter" may occur that subsumes the entire universe in a cosmic instant. The release of only a few spores to a virgin pond might seem inconsequential, and especially for the first few days the overall growth will seem negligible, undetectable even, but as one knows with exponential growth, the last half of possible growth is accomplished in only one step! So too can civilizations spread into the universe, gathering more and more of the cosmos' being under its power. Even if it takes a trillion years, at some point the universe will switch from a mostly lifeless place to a mostly inhabited place.81 As humans have spread across the globe in a geological instant, so too will societies spread throughout the cosmos. And this itself will still not be the end of time, but only a new aeon in cosmic history. When civilization has eaten the cosmos, it will become the cosmos. It will remain subject to the same principles of necessity, and we can go on to predict further features about cosmic evolution from such a point, although this is primarily because it has been a feature of the universe from the start. The forms existing at any point in time must exist in equilibrium with their environment, while the aggregate of these individual forms also composes the environment. This means forms will always evolve to bring them into better and better equilibrium with their environment, and the environment into better and better equilibrium with individuals. As the cosmos approaches perfect equilibrium, forms will have been evolved so they perfectly anticipate their own and the environment's behavior to better maintain that equilibrium. Better equilibrium always yields to better equilibrium, and so on, so that the ultimate end is a perfect equilibrium where no further motion is necessary to maintain the existence of those forms. At the end of time, individual and environment will become a single thing, a single aggregate being composed of all cosmic matter, each and every one of its parts perfectly shaped so that they will neither corrupt nor be corrupted by all the forces within it, a perfectly integrated cosmic being. Naturally, such knowledge about the end of the world is ripe for theological speculation, but - so far as it is the considered opinion of the author - the best label for such an end may be the Omega Point. This is with the important caveat that, while the name is taken from Teilhard de Chardin's work 82, we may approach such a defined state of being through empirical principles, without needing to include in these elements more specific features or claims about Christianity. This may not be amenable to the sentiment of neither Christians - who make Christ central - nor atheists - many whom seem to want to veer away from any definite knowledge about the end of time that might suggest some verisimilitude of religion (as they once did when it came to the beginning of time!). Nonetheless this feature of science can be granted as a subject of rational study, no matter how controversial it may be. It may seem silly to consider the very end of the world to try and decide what to do tomorrow, but there is very good reason for it, and evolution will certainly select for beings with better and better means of understanding the far-flung future of the universe as it has already done so far. For example, if I know what another person shall do tomorrow, then I can take advantage of their energies for my own purposes, and would use that knowledge to decide what to do now in order to take advantage of a reliably predictable future. We make regular use of such indeterminate predictions about how people will behave in the future to decide our own - if we think people are likely to overestimate something 81 The possibility must be noted that the cosmos is already fully inhabited by life, and our apparent inability to perceive it is due to our ignorance of what cosmic civilization must look like. This introduces a whole new suite of factors for consideration which are far beyond the scope of this essay, but the possibility is worth noting nonetheless. 82 de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard (1959). The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper.

happening, we might find a way to gain from intuiting what are or will be the future behavior of others. So too must civilizations take care to understand the behavior of the future universe, in order to better condition ourselves now to be at an advantage then. The perfection of such future concern is necessary to the evolution of a perfect, immutable being, as it must be incorporated into its structure so that it is essentially "always" taking advantage of its future states to maintain something in existence forever. One important caveat about such a state of the universe is we cannot be sure it will ever actually be reached. We may only ever approach such a final state asymptotically, always decelerating as final entropic equilibrium is reached. But this can still be compatible with an ordering of the universe that leaves nothing more up to chance or ignorance, and the decelerating approach to perfect equilibrium is just because it requires more and more energy to bring order to the last recalcitrant pieces of matter. There may even be long periods of cosmic history that seem to have reached equilibrium, before finally unwinding again and collapsing back to basic elements, to follow a cycle of cosmic evolution all over again, and again, and again. These are things we cannot be sure about, but we can still be sure they mean for us we must improve our knowledge to better anticipate the future. Only when all being perfectly anticipates the motion of all other being, will Time end, and Death will have finally died. Terminus

Image Attributions All images are used under Creative Commons unless otherwise noted. "Fairyland Canyon Utah Milky Way National Park." https://www.maxpixel.net/Fairyland-CanyonUtah-Milky-Way-National-Park-Park-1632749 "Milky way map." Pablo Carlos Budassi. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milky_way_map.png "NAMA Machine d'Anticythere 1." https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NAMA_Machine_d %27Anticyth%C3%A8re_1.jpg "NAMA Machine d'Anticythere 4." https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NAMA_Machine_d %27Anticyth%C3%A8re_4.jpg "Sunflower." Retrieved August 16, 2021. https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-xsafm "Aspidella surface." Martin Smith. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aspidella_surface.jpg "Bohr's model." Sharon Bewick and Adrignola. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bohr %27s_model.svg "Geocentric model." https://i.stack.imgur.com/A4Rd1.jpg "Figure 35 01 01." CNX OpenStax. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Figure_35_01_01.jpg