Perspectives in the Resource-Patterns Model of Life: A Search for Externalities and Who Can See Them

People commonly “talk past each other”. Each person represents a different perspective. But we often fail to see this difference in perspective as we struggle to be civil.

The Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) calls our attention to the need for specific perspectives and shows limitations under which living things must somehow develop perspective. By focusing our attention on the development of perspective, I would hope that RPM would make us more aware how our perspectives serve our specific interests.

My discussion here of perspective was stimulated as a side effect of another question. I suppose it may be helpful to compare RPM with older, well established models in physical and social science. In this vein I have started to compare RPM with models familiar in mainstream economics. I have looked in RPM for the some of the objects with which we are familiar in economics, objects such as “commodity”, “price” and “market”. Recently I came across “externality”, another object familiar in mainstream economics, and realized I had not identified externalities in RPM. Uncomfortable with my ignorance I explored the question. Most of what I found, it turns out, is about the development of perspective, so that became the main subject in this post.

Let me offer a definition of “externality” for those readers who have not learned how economists use this term. An externality is a side effect of economic activity, an effect upon parties not part of the economic exchange, parties that is who are external to the activity. For example the smoke which comes out the stack of an electric power plant is an externality if we assume that neither the producers nor the buyers of the electricity are motivated to care about the smoke. Normally we think of externalities as being negative. But externalities can also be beneficial, if for example your neighbors have a loud band playing in their back yard for a party – and you like the music. Wikipedia offers a longer definition of externality.

The first two perspectives

As we search for externalities in RPM we will use the model of tabletop critters. The critters, as you may understand if you’ve been following development of this blog, start out as dirt-poor hunter-gatherers. Then the critters gain prosperity as they gain new ways of cooperating among themselves, cooperating to exploit resource patterns in their environment.

Figure 1. A community of critters prospering without knowledge of either their relative prosperity or the causes of this prosperity.

Figure 1 shows such a prospering organization of critters, organized in a line of exchange between the model’s two essential resources, water and sugar. For review, the water and sugar constitute a single resource pattern (RP).

Externalities have not yet been mentioned in the development of this model, but when we ask if there are externalities which result from the cooperation among the critters in that line, we easily imagine that externalities could result from such enterprise. An externality could be added to the model if we wanted to experiment with its effects. The externality could be added in either of the two classes of models we might employ: (1) thought experiments or (2) computerized agent-based models. The externality might be smoke or trashing of the environment surrounding the line of exchange. It would impact other critters not in the line of exchange, or other living things also added to the model. Let us add such an externality. I have not attempted to show the externality in the Figures in this post, but please assume it is there.

Let us notice who is noticing this externality. We human modelers who have created this thought experiment can see the impact of the enterprise in the line of trade upon other life, i.e. the externality. Or at least we humans who have learned the meaning of “externality” can see the externality.

But the critters in the line of cooperation cannot see the externality. We can assert that the critters cannot see the externality because we created those critters as we created this model. We gave them a list of capabilities and those capabilities do not include capacity to sense the welfare of another critter, at least not in this early and not-much-extended application of the model.

My confidence that these critters can not sense or think some things grows from my computerized modeling. I have written computer programs which are the “brains” of such agents, thereby I can know what the critters can “sense” or “think” or “remember”. For more about the psychological capabilities of the critters see the draft chapter on psychology.

The need for a new perspective

The critters in that circumstance described above benefited from a RP because of a good fortune which lay outside of their control: the RP was there in their environment and we modelers gave them the rules of cooperation which would empower them to exploit that RP even if they could not perceive the RP.

But the critters would enjoy a still brighter future if they could:

1. perceive the RP which feeds them,
2. start to act in ways which constitute a search for the locations of other RPs like the one that feeds them.

Those two abilities suggest what I will define as “perspective” for our purpose here: Perspective is the ability of a living thing (LT) (or an organization of living things, see life in levels) to adapt its actions in response to some feature in its environment. The actions of the LT to which I refer may be either internal (thoughts or decisions) or external (physical movement).

Let us suppose that the critters of Figure 1 live in only a small part of a larger universe. Near the center of Figure 2 we see that same prospering community of critters from Figure 1, but now the scale is reduced to about one-third of the former size to show the larger surroundings. Now we can see that the universe of the critters contains many pairs of water and sugar, many RPs that is. In fact we see a larger pattern, a pattern of RPs. But, while our critters have happily colonized the RP from which they derive their sustenance, we humans can see that the critters could do much better if they could perceive what it is that makes their success possible (the RP and the rules we gave them) and start a search for other similar RPs.

Figure 2. The same thriving but unperceptive community of critters from Figure 1, but seen in the larger universe of their surroundings, a universe with many opportunities for extension of critter-life.

With a new perspective the critters may go on to occupy their corner of the universe. Figure 3 shows what this little world might look like with all the RPs being exploited, a consequence of the critters succeeding in developing the perspective we have suggested.

Remember that our goal as human modelers is to gain insights from RPM, insights about ourselves and our society. So we will proceed by extending the model, giving the critters new sensual and computational powers, trying to understand which additions are necessary to empower the critters in the model to take this next step toward mimicking our human experience.

Recall also that life exists in levels. In RPM a living thing can appear singular, as a single critter or single human. But an organization of living things can also be conceived as a single living thing, a LT on a higher level. Conversely, rather than look up in the order to larger living things, we can look down in the order to smaller living things: Any single living thing, such as a critter or human, can probably be dissected and discovered to be an organization of smaller living things, LTs on a lower level. The development of perspective, the ability of an organization to recognize and act upon an RP, is a key component of level-to-level advance.

Figure 3. The critters, having learned a perspective of their larger environment, have populated their larger environment.

How a new perspective might be developed

While I cannot predict how our critters (aided by much human tweaking) might eventually gain ability to develop the new, needed perspective, here I will briefly describe two broad avenues of development.

Avenue 1: Diversity in population along with specialization

Some of the LTs in an organization may have or develop special abilities. For example we might extend our model of tabletop critters such that some fraction of the critters are born with a rudimentary sense of sight, so they can detect a concentration of particular colors of light coming from certain directions, and we might also give distinct colors to the sugar and water.  So these critters gifted with rudimentary sight can directly sense the resource pattern which enables the prosperity of their community of critters. This new ability within the set of critters may constitute one step in development of the needed perspective. Other needed steps may include rudimentary signaling, or language, and induction or the ability to propose the existence of additional RPs.

Avenue 2: Systematic organization, spontaneous order, moral codes

This second possible avenue for development of perspective grows from spontaneous order, or the relatively new science of chaos theory and its kin. An entire population of constituent agents, when viewed as a single combined agent, may often exhibit behaviors which we humans could not have predicted from our knowledge of only the abilities of the constituent agents. A set of LTs within RPM may act in a way that enables it to discover and exploit neighboring as-yet-unused RPs, although we observing humans may not be able to explain how this happened.

In this avenue of development we may consider an analogy with our own human nervous systems. The psychology of a human being derives somehow from the interactions of millions of nerve cells. We could not predict the behavior of a human even if we could perfectly understand the behavior of the human’s constituent nerve cells, or so it is commonly asserted and I probably agree.

Reflections on development of perspective

Here are a few reflections on the development of perspective in RPM.

• We human modelers face a challenge to give the critters enough powers (senses, physical actions, and calculating or “thinking” power) so that they can develop the needed perspective. This challenge is large and difficult. It is probably more than I can accomplish. It may require the careers of a score of modelers.
• I find it difficult to write about this topic because I want to write clearly and concretely. But I am groping into a dark, unknown region. The words at my disposal serve poorly to convey either what I am finding or what my findings may mean. But then I suppose that this is the experience of any new science, of anyone who hopes to describe new concepts, which have not yet spawned their own terminology, with our existing set of words.
• In spite of the difficulty which clearly lies ahead for RPM, I claim that the structure provided by RPM is a big step forward. RPM narrows the problem of development of perspective, providing a resource-constrained framework within which to work.
• As noted above, we humans struggle to invent new language so we can discuss what we see in RPM. But we also notice that the critters in our model could use some ability to communicate. They could, we may imagine, discover the RP which empowers their present level of success if they could give signals to each other. A vocabulary with only a few meaningful symbols may add considerably to their ability to organize. I hope to learn more with subsequent research.
• Recall that this discussion about the development of perspective was stimulated by an observation about economic externalities: Educated humans can perceive an externality in RPM, but the low-level critters at the start of our thought experiment could not perceive the externality. Now, after we have discussed development of a higher-level perspective for our critters, in which perspective the critters can perceive the RP that sustains them, we may wonder if this higher-level critter can perceive the externality. No. We still have not given them anything like general overview of affairs in which an externality may be perceived.
• Wealth spawns philosophy and exploration, or at least that is an assumption I make about societies. The golden age of Greece would provide a first example among humans. Second, present American civilization has wealth which spawns both space exploration and my development of RPM. A third example is provided by the critters in Figure 1. They can obtain all the resources they need to survive with only a small fraction of their time-effort. As such they have resources which they may apply to the challenge of learning about their universe, and that exploration may yield discoveries which increase the probability of the long term survival of their descendants.
• One human speaker sometimes challenges another to explain what the other means by the word “we”. We humans often shift our base as we speak, sometimes speaking only for ourselves, sometimes speaking as representative of an already-extant group, sometimes hoping that the group suggested by the “we” will come together at some future time. I am trying to hone my skills in recognizing when I shift base while speaking, or when I hear another speaker shift base. I believe I have a long way to go in gaining this skill and I sense that I am not alone. But RPM may help us with this education, help us to see that “we” represents a specific interest. Critters which specialize, using abilities often helpful for the larger community, will probably signal with an implied “we”. Each perspective may have its own “we”.

Correlation between perspective and interest

RPM reveals a strong correlation between perspective and interest. A given perspective, if it either aids or promises to aid the expansion of a population, will probably be valued by agents in the population. Those agents have an interest in the perspective as I will argue here.

But let us start with our initial population. Recall the condition in Figure 1. This population of critters enjoyed a comfortable standard of living but at that stage no critter could perceive the RP which fed them, so no effort to find neighboring, similar RPs could have started. There were none among them whose wellbeing relied upon the perspective which developed later in our story. So obviously, at this preliminary stage, there were not any critters whom we might characterize as having an interest in the perspective not yet developed.

But after that perspective of the resource pattern was developed and used (as illustrated in Figure 3), then a much larger population was made possible by use of that perspective. It follows that the lives of most of that larger population depend upon that new perspective. Without the perspective their lives would not exist. We humans looking into the model from our perspective can reasonably conclude that those critters have an interest in the perspective. The perspective, having been developed and used to advantage, correlates with an interest among the critters.

A nuance may catch our attention. Consider the specialization paradigm which we described above (the first of the two avenues for development of a new perspective). Under specialization some critters may come to have or to control large amounts of saved resources, and those powerful critters might be expected to risk some of their savings in research which might yield a profitable new perspective. Research may be funded that is. So we may expect funding to give rise to another specialty, being researchers, critters willing and able to perform research for compensation. Thus researchers naturally have an interest in the search for new perspectives which provides their livelihood. So, in exploring this nuance we discover the effect of a new and not-yet-described RP. The funding of research, overseen by some powerful critters, becomes an RP for other critters, and this creates a distinctive inner niche where life – if following appropriate rules – may thrive.

Conclusion

Stimulated by “externality”, a concept familiar in economics, and by the question of whether externalities can be spotted in RPM, we have been sidetracked into a discussion of perspective. It has become clear, I hope, that an externality in RPM can be spotted by a human modeler educated in economics. But there is no way the primitive critters of the tabletop model can hope to “see” or “know about” an externality. We modelers know what calculating powers we have given to the critters, so we can know with considerable confidence what the critters cannot know.

We have lingered over the challenge presented by development of perspective. RPM lays this problem open to us, on a workbench as it were. In the example presented, we see how a population of critters could grow if the critters can develop a broader perspective. We see programs of research through which we may seek a deeper understanding of our own individual and group psychology, and these programs are given greater, realistic focus by RPM.

We humans often seem to blame other humans for being wrong on some point; we wish we could shout some truth into our opposites. But what we do not always see is that our opposites have a different perspective, a different interest. They are seeing a different RP or opportunity for organization.

RPM makes obvious what some earlier writers have overlooked.

This post is stimulated by my reading of "The new entropy law and the economic process", by Alan Raine, John Foster, and Jason Potts, Ecological Complexity 3 (2006) 354-360. I refer to this as Raine's paper.

Raine's paper overlaps in significant ways with the Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) which is the subject of this blog. But RPM adds important ideas which I do not see in the scope of Raine's paper. Here I copy from Raine's paper (page 355):

A basic puzzle remains: why do biological and socioeconomic systems expand their structure (and populations) with the result that they use increasing amounts of free energy (and associated materials)? Generally, they expand to whatever energetic limits exist and, as Malthus failed to perceive, economic self-organization can keep on extending these limits. The notions that biological populations will expand if they can, and that economic ‘progress’ will continue are taken for granted, but on reflection, it is not entirely obvious why. [emphasis added]

My response: RPM makes it entirely obvious.

Biological and socioeconomic systems can expand to use increasing amounts of resources where those resources exist in large patterns in the environment. These patterns are:

• larger than can be exploited by individual organisms (or organizations) at an earlier-and-smaller level of development, but 
• not too large to be exploited by groups of organisms (or organizations) when those groups discover and employ rules of behavior which produce beneficial cooperation among the individual organisms (or organizations).

The above statements refer to resources distributed in large three-dimensional patterns. But the same can be said about resources which are difficult to exploit because specialization is needed. Much of our human flourishing has been made possible because specialization has enabled exploitation of resources which, although nearby in three-dimensional space (fossil fuels, silicon), can be exploited only by individuals who can focus their attention on technical details.

Please do not consider this to be criticism of Raine's paper. That paper has contributed to my knowledge. I write to call attention to the additional contribution of RPM. I thank Jason Potts for calling my attention to Raine's (and Jason's) paper.

Platform for Development of Language

The Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) provides a delimiting framework within which many questions of social science may be pursued. This morning I came across a paragraph telling about tension in the field of linguistics. This tension would be eased, it seems to me, among linguists who had embraced RPM, because RPM shows perhaps the principal problem which evolving lifeforms need to overcome through language.

Now here is that paragraph, by John Searle (1972).

The most spectacular conclusion about the nature of the human mind that Chomsky derives from his work in linguistics is that his results vindicate the claims of the seventeenth-century rationalist philosophers, Descartes, Leibniz, and others, that there are innate ideas in the mind. The rationalists claim that human beings have knowledge that is not derived from experience but is prior to all experience and determines the form of the knowledge that can be gained from experience. The empiricist tradition by contrast, from Locke down to contemporary behaviorist learning theorists, has tended to treat the mind as tabula rasa, containing no knowledge prior to experience and placing no constraints on the forms of possible knowledge, except that they must be derived from experience by such mechanisms as the association of ideas or the habitual connection of stimulus and response. For empiricists all knowledge comes from experience, for rationalists some knowledge is implanted innately and prior to experience. In his bluntest moods, Chomsky claims to have refuted the empiricists and vindicated the rationalists.*

Recall the initial condition on the tabletop after a large resource pattern has become available to critters. Heretofore the critters have been barely surviving as hunter-gatherers by searching everywhere incessantly.

The population of critters can multiply if the critters find rules of cooperation.

Now these critters can live comfortably and reproduce a lot more, if and when they can learn some simple rules and conform their behavior, during working hours at least, to those rules. These critters need a crude language. What will it be?

In one of my first exercises with computerized agent-based learning, I modeled two agents who needed language. It went like this. The first agent learned of some condition in the world (a condition set randomly from a small positive number of conditions), but had no power of physical action. The first agent could only display a symbol visible to the second agent (a symbol selected from among a small positive number of symbols). The second agent could not sense the condition experienced by the first agent, and had no way of knowing (at first) what the first agent's symbol might mean. The second agent could act effectively in the agents' world, and each act available to the second agent would produce a result which was either positive or negative for both agents — depending upon whether the act of the second agent correlated correctly with the condition observed by the first agent. Both agents had memory of prior conditions, that is memory of what they had sensed and done and whether their acts had succeeded or failed. In each cycle of the model the agents got a new chance to try again.

Obviously, my agents eventually stumbled upon a correlation between a symbol and a desirable action. They learned a language. Thereafter they did naught but thrive. I thought I had shown something important. Although I allow it is obvious that the agents' linguistic success had to happen; I had designed it to happen.

So I have this experience with modeling primitive language formation, and I see the situation of the critters who need a language which is much more advanced than the first language just described, but which is still much simpler than our human natural language. I hope to proceed with attempting to model that groping for language among the critters, some day. In my eager thinking, this modeling relates to the tension in linguistics described above by John Searle.

If we imagine some Darwinian evolution acting in our model, the critters may be descended from ancestors who had lived in environments which rewarded signaling between cooperating agents. The signaling pertains to finding and harvesting from patterns of resources in the environment. Does not that begin to frame an answer to the question of what capacities of language may be inborn in a critter?


*"Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics" by John Searle,  © 1972 The New York Review of Books, found in On Noam Chomsky: Critical Essays, edited by Gilbert Harman, 1982, U. Mass. Press, ISBN 0870233556, page 19.

"Entropy" has different meanings

I share the following quote because it expresses something I hope to get my head around.

The measure of the amount of information which communication theory provides … is called entropy. If we want to understand this entropy of communication theory, it is best first to clear our minds of any ideas associated with the entropy of physics. Once we understand entropy as it is used in communication theory thoroughly, there is no harm in trying to relate it to the entropy of physics, but the literature indicates that some workers have never recovered from the confusion engendered by an early admixture of ideas concerning the entropies of physics and communication theory. [Italics in the original.]

from: John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise, 2^nd revised edition, 1980, Dover Publications, page 80.

Answers to the questions posted on March 12

Here I will give answers to the two questions asked in my preceding post, dated March 12, 2015.

Question 1: Why do people form firms?

Quick Answer: To exploit a resource pattern.

Discussion: 
A “firm”, if you are not familiar with this usage, means a business firm. This term is used by economists to describe a business organized under a single ownership or control.

Our question “Why do people form firms?” is an important question for economists because the main models of neoclassical economics can not explain why people form firms. We see firms all around us. But neoclassical models of supply and demand in markets rest upon assumptions which seem to eliminate any possible need for firms.

This inadequacy of neoclassical models motivated Ronald Coase’s 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm”. Coase called attention to transactions costs and suggested that people form firms to reduce transactions costs. His great work spawned a new sub-discipline in economics. Wikipedia tells more.

The Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) offers another answer to our question “Why do people form firms?” People form a firm to exploit a resource pattern (RP). Figure 1 recalls our first example in which a population of critters exploits a RP which none of the critters acting alone could have exploited. We might call this population, which thrives by following a simple set of rules, a firm. The concepts which I am trying to build, at this stage in our development of RPM, overlap somewhat but not perfectly with the meanings we impute to our common terms "organization" and "firm".

Figure 1: A thriving community (exploiting a RP by following rules).

Let us consider two ways that critters might have formed this firm.

1. Spontaneously
When we think about it, it seems evident that a population of critters living in the vicinity of a resource pattern will eventually discover and exploit the pattern. Just random movement can explain the discovery, if we allow enough time. Furthermore, critters may be endowed with properties such as curiosity and civility which increase the speed with which they could be expected to discover the RP.

2. With forethought
First, remember two of our assumptions:

• There are resource patterns in the universe.
• Living Things survive by finding and imbibing resources.

In our thought experiments we will endow our critters with increasing abilities of calculation and perception. At the outset our critters do not know that the resources upon which they rely are distributed in patterns around them in their environment. But, given certain levels of intelligence and experience, our critters will recognize such patterns and they will focus their activities in order to minimize the effort they expend to gather their necessary resources from these patterns.

Later on, given more intelligence and experience, our critters might guess that there exist other RPs in the universe out beyond their community, as yet undiscovered by critters. That is, they will guess that there are patterns of RPs in the universe. Some fortunate critters in an established community may lend their surplus resources to a party of explorers. The explorers, upon traveling to a location that seems to promise viability, may succeed in establishing a new community. Such a community, we could claim, had been established with forethought, and not from time-consuming spontaneous discovery.

Question 2: When does planning for a new firm succeed?

Quick Answer: When the plan connects with a resource pattern.


Discussion:

Figure 2: A thriving population (center) ready to attempt colonization.

Consider Figure 2. We see an established population of critters exploiting a resource pattern in the center of this area. We also see an available resource pattern to the right of that established population. Recall that the dotted line around the RP means that we human modelers know about the RP, but the critters do not know about it yet.

We imagine, as we have just sketched above, some colonists are sent out from the established community, following hopeful plans to settle new RPs. In Figure 3, we see the results of two such plans, one plan being to establish a new colony to the right of the parent, the other being to establish a new colony to the left of the parent.

Figure 3: One plan destined to fail; another plan likely to succeed.

I hope it is obvious to my reader that one of these plans (to the right) has a good chance of succeeding, while the other plan (to the left) has no chance at all. Will you join me in supposing that, in order for a plan to form a new firm or organization to succeed, it is necessary that the plan connects with a RP?

Test Your Understanding of RPM

Here are two questions which I hope a reader of this blog will find easy. Remember, try to answer in the framework of the Resource-Patterns Model of Life, and not in terms of other models you may have learned.

Question 1: Why do people form firms?

Question 2: When does planning for a new firm succeed?

If you need to review, look at earlier entries on this blog. The paper from last week should be enough.

Answers will be given in the next post.

Life in Levels

This is a draft of Chapter 4, in the book outline

Life Grows From Level to Level

Introduction

The Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) suggests that life grows in levels. This chapter develops this Life-in-Levels (LiL) concept.

Note about the term “level”
In this writing I adopt the term “level” for a central concept. Previously I have used “generation” for the same concept – while apologizing that I was stretching the meaning of “generation”. I could not think of a better term. But now I have learned of a paper by Herbert Simon (1962) in which he uses “level” for an analogous concept. I follow his lead.

Look at our biological past: Life has grown in levels

We have evidence that life on Earth has grown in levels. We know that our human bodies are made of many cells, that is we are multicellular organisms. But other living things on earth, such as amoeba and paramecia, have just one cell, and, as we learn from biology, our multicellular type of body is a newcomer in the history of evolution. Perhaps a billion years ago there were no multicellular organisms; single-cellular organisms were the fanciest creatures on Earth. Somehow, through a historical process which we are only beginning to understand, it seems that single cellular organisms discovered ways to live together, to create gradually more complex multicellular organisms.

Even though this seems like fantastic progress, from single- to multi-cellular organisms, I have read that some biologists are even more impressed by the progress made in an earlier step of evolution. The single cells which I have mentioned, and the “cells” of which we usually speak, are called eukaryotic cells by biologists. These eukaryotic cells, when examined under a powerful modern microscope, are seen to be incredibly complex. Like a human city, eukaryotic cells contain a large number of specialized structures. And many of the specialized structures in eukaryotic cells look to biologists like close cousins of even smaller and simpler life-forms known as prokaryotic cells. Biologists are impressed by that evident feat of organization, from single prokaryotic cells to municipalities of prokaryotic cells (to eukaryotic cells).

Prokaryotic cells, a class which includes simple bacteria, were once, in their turn, the masters of the Universe. Or at least they were the largest and most advanced form of life on Earth, and that for a few billion years! According to the fossil record, it seems that prokaryotic cells first appeared perhaps three billion years ago, and stood atop life’s kingdom until the development of eukaryotic cells about one billion years ago.

To summarize, we can pretty clearly see three levels.

1. prokaryotes,
2. eukaryotes,
3. multi-cellular present-day organisms, like us.

Notice that each visible organism in the higher levels (2 and 3), which at first appears to our senses to be a single entity, turns out, when we look more carefully, to be composed of many smaller living components. I suppose the same may turn out to be true of prokaryotes, the level to which I have assigned number 1. But these three levels are enough for this introductory discussion. The challenge for us humans, as I suggest next, concerns the possibility of level 4.

A new level of life now grows as we organize our lives

I propose that this growing process continues. As we people go about organizing our affairs we are in process of building a next-higher-level of life. Think about all the kinds of organizations that we form: families, partnerships, business companies, churches, governments, the United Nations. These organizations are able, because of their internal order, to accomplish things which would not be accomplished by a disorganized but otherwise equal set of constituent individuals.

A contrast with methodological individualism

This proposition, that we are engaged in building new super-organisms, may seem incredible to some readers. Some of my friends staunchly defend methodological individualism, which asserts that analysis of human affairs must focus on the choices of individual humans, and which denies that useful analysis can be performed while viewing organizations or aggregates of human individuals. But I would like to ask methodological individualists to consider the idea that a human organization can have a voice. I choose “voice” as an activity to consider, since its expression includes both thought and physical action.

Voice of an organization
It seems clear to me that a representative of an organization, while speaking on behalf of the organization, speaks with a power which is lacked by an individual while acting alone. Barak Obama, while speaking as President of the United States, gets much more respect and attention from other heads of state than he got while speaking as a member of the state Senate in Illinois, because as President he is in fact speaking as the executive officer of the United States government. The United States government has a voice, I assert, and even though it comes from an individual human, it differs in significant respects from the voice of an unaffiliated human.

Voice of a human
To continue my argument, consider the voice of a human. One of us proud humans will probably assert with confidence that he, as an individual human, speaks with a voice which he possess and controls. But think about the biological production of a voice, about the nerve cells and the muscle cells. Any one of those cells could discredit the idea that the human has a voice, using logic parallel to that used by methodological individualists to discredit the idea that an organization made of humans has a voice. Each cell can accurately assert that the human did nothing which was not actually the work of individual cells. To the cells it probably seems that they are making all the decisions, they are doing all the work.

So, on the question of whether you might perceive that an organization has a voice, it may depend upon whether you, the observer, represent an organization yourself in your communications.  If you do then you may be especially interested in the communications of your organization’s peers; you may be interested in the voices expressed by other organizations.

Emphasizing the growth between levels

So far I have tried to establish a view of levels in the growth of life. But obviously what is interesting and important to us humans now is what goes on between levels, on the process of organizing. How does life advance from one level to another? How do the constituent organisms accomplish their reproduction, organization, and survival within a larger “skin”?

The process of growth in levels which we have discussed so far may be represented like this:

1 → 2 → 3 → 4

Here I am saying that the most interesting part is not the numbered stages which we can recognize, but rather the arrows between stages. We humans, organisms living in level 3, grapple every day with frustrations and tensions in the organizations of which we are members. We try to improve the organizations. In this way we are thrusting toward level 4, I suggest.

Aspects of LiL

Here we will clarify a few aspects of growth from level to level.

Outsiders remain on the scene
When a new level of organisms takes shape and comes into view, some organisms from the earlier level remain living independently in the environment. That is, not all members of that earlier level joined in the new order. After eukaryotic cells formed, for example, there still remained many prokaryotic elements living in the environment. These prokaryotes were cousins of the others which had joined into the new order, and their descendants still live independently in our environment today. This suggests that the environment which could support the earlier level can still support the earlier level, even though many members of that earlier level have become subsumed, in our view, in larger organizations. The earlier level was, and remains, a viable way for a race of organisms to survive.

Organizations are heterogeneous
My discussion so far has suggested the possibility of similar or related organisms on one level joining together to form the higher level. But actually the larger organization probably includes many dissimilar constituents, including some lifeless raw materials which are manipulated by the living elements. For example, consider the prototype of a family farm of the early 20th century. We envision the farm containing its family of humans, its cows, chickens, hay and corn fields, fences, barns, and machines. This gathering of diverse elements into a productive farm organization may represent a stage in the development of a single, new, and larger organism.

A way to separate organizations into eight classes

As we focus upon the growth of organizations we naturally notice that organizations differ. There is a bewildering array of organizations. To clarify our thinking we will find it helpful to subdivide what we mean by “organization”, by noticing characteristics which are possessed by some organizations but not by others. I suggest three characteristics with which we may accomplish such a division:

1. Member-Aware. In some organizations the members are aware of the existence of the larger organizations. In other organizations this is not the case.
2. Self-Aware. Some organizations possess a self-awareness, by which I mean these organizations have headquarters which can make conscious decisions on behalf of the organizations. Other organizations lack this trait. 
3. Encoded. Some organizations have an ability to reproduce themselves. I call this "encoded" because I suppose that ability to reproduce requires that the constitution (or the set of decision rules) of the organization be codified somehow. Other organizations lack this trait.

These three yes-or-no (boolean) characteristics create a taxonomy with eight categories of organizations (because 2x2x2 = 8). In my 1999 paper I have written more about this taxonomy and given examples of each of these eight types.

The relationship between organizations and resource patterns

Some of the types of organizations which we humans form, such as families, business firms, religious orders, and states, can be seen frequently whenever we look at a human society. This frequent appearance of a type of organization suggests there is a resource pattern in the environment. It suggests we humans are suited to exploit the resource pattern when we cooperate appropriately, accepting rules conforming to the resource pattern. The business practice of franchising suggests, where it succeeds, a planned order, a mastery of some of the necessary factors that hold a specific style of organization together.

The importance of this thesis to the Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM)

This idea, that life grows in levels as outlined above, mixes with other ideas in RPM. I think it is part of RPM, but not the most important part. Most of RPM can stand independently of this life-in-levels idea. So RPM may offer valuable insights to you even if you reject LiL. But I have to admit that I want to take more time to explore the interdependence of the several ideas that mingle with RPM.

The possibility of inter-level learning

You might reasonably doubt that this grand idea of LiL could be of any use. So consider this. We might take what we have learned about organization on one level and see if it might help us understand organization on another level. For example, our successes and failures as humans, as we try to build businesses and other super-human organizations, may give hints to biologists who are trying to understand how single-cellular organisms managed to overcome the organizational difficulties entailed in establishing multi-cellular organisms.

The tantalizing "Origin of Death" thesis of George Wald

A poster caught my eye on the campus of SUNY at Buffalo when I was an undergraduate. Probably this was in fall 1969. The poster announced a guest lecture titled “The Origin of Death”. The thesis, presented by George Wald of Harvard, struck me and has lingered in the background of my thoughts ever since. Now I see that it may promise inter-level learning.

We should notice, Wald told, two facts about most primitive forms of life such as most single cellular organisms:

1. they reproduce by dividing in two. They divide their bodies while giving each offspring a copy of the parent’s DNA; 
2. they do not necessarily die of old age.

So an amoeba that we see today could arguably be a billion years old. Throughout all that time it never grew old and died, although obviously it has divided many, many times along the way. We, on the other hand are not so lucky. We necessarily die of old age, as do all other higher forms of life.

Wald examined the advance of the complexity of organisms, an advance parallel with the progress of evolution, looking for the origin of death. He discovered that death appeared on the scene at the same time as sexual reproduction. Apparently, at this stage in the history of evolution, organisms discovered the way to create an embryo which would grow its own new body, after mixing DNA with a partner. At this stage is was no longer necessary for the body of the parent to survive. The genes had found a way to continue their existence, while each body would live only for a time as a temporary carrier. Death as we know it originated at the same time as sex as we know it.

For me this suggests a possibility of inter-level learning, which I will describe by using anthropomorphism. Imagine if you will that you can identify with genes. The genes faced an organizational problem. They had discovered a design, an organization plan that worked except for one flaw. The managers, whom the genes hired and placed in charge of the organization, always expressed their own selfish interests by diverting the aim of the organization to serve their (the managers’) interests, rather than the interests of the founders and owners (the genes). Try as they might, the genes never discovered any way to manage the self-interests of the managers. The genes knew how to start an organization with rules which enabled it to thrive and succeed for a time in that given environment, but every single time the managers, in whose hands the genes entrusted the organization, steered the organization onto a different and ultimately self-destructive path.

To recap, the genes knew a good organizational plan and knew how to write it down, but the genes could not learn how to entrust this plan for any prolonged period of time to a management team. The genes found a solution in sexual reproduction. In that solution, the managers empowered by the genes were given motivation to reproduce and thereby to pass on copies of the genes’ management plan – copies which had not been edited in any way by the current managers. Thus the genes discovered, in sexual reproduction, how to give prolonged life to their good organizational plan.

Conclusion

Leading up to this chapter, we have learned that when we observe many organisms of a similar size surviving in an environment, it should suggest to us that the environment contains resource patterns appropriately scaled to exploitation by those organisms. Otherwise those organisms could not survive.

In this chapter we have learned to suspect that our universe contains resource patterns on a large range of scales, and living things growing into those scales. We probably assume that life started on a tiny scale, sustained by tiny resource patterns. But the universe also has resource patterns on medium and large scales. We living things seem to be building ourselves level by level so that we can reach, one day, the astronomical scales.

References:

Alchian, Armen, "Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory", Journal of Political Economy, 58:211-21, 1950.

Hammer, Richard, “The State Is a Form of Life, a Legitimate Peer in the Family of Organizations”, Formulations, Vol. 6, No. 3, 1999. Available on Internet.

Kabnick, Karen and Debra Peattie, “Giardia: A Missing Link between Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes”, American Scientist, January-February 1991, pg 34-43. Available on Internet.

Kelly, Kevin, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, 1994.

Simon, Herbert, “The Architecture of Complexity”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 106, No. 6. (Dec. 12, 1962), pp. 467-482.

Wald, George, “The Origin of Death”, 1970, a lecture given apparently many times (once attended by this author in Buffalo, NY), and published by Wald’s son on Internet.

Wikipedia pages on: Eukaryote, Prokaryote, Symbiogenesis.

Wilson, David Sloan, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, 2007.