Imaginary Constraints.

The vitalizing, if slightly ironic, bounty of boundaries. From cell walls, to character, to income. How constraints, both real and imaginary, turned the tide of cosmic chaos into earthly wisdom.

Constraints are an essential concept that spans from the evolution of cells to civic institutions. They make possible the distinctive identities fundamental to the cascading order of life. Along the way these protective shields granted one wily primate species a moral constitution and a proclivity to adhere to and enforce behavioral norms. Setting it down a path of culturally induced cognitive development, ecological dominion and material success.

The constraints that gave hominids their namesake wisdom took the form of values. Abstract restrictions on behavior that embody social expectations. The key to this practice and a window into our past and present is resolving how these expectations came about. They form beneath the protective shield of abstract identities. Our codes of conduct follow the partitioning of our conspecifics with uniforms, tattoos and accents. From fellow nationalists, to officers of the law, to management consultants and c-suite officers. However, the original and foundational partition is between the good and evil. Adherents or deviants of an encompassing social identity. We reify the identities of our minds eye that endure in reality and over time through our moral sentiments and finger wagging.

A fundamental question for any social science is how the human experience fits into to the tradition of life in a way that is at once contiguous with all organic life, and yet distinctive in understanding our cognitive and material take off. Perhaps precision will never (Kahneman 2003) be obtained despite economists’ best efforts yet it is worth exploring better frameworks. The concept of a Markovian Blanket (Kirchhoff et al. 2018), an element within the Free Energy (FE) principle (Friston 2010), provides a convincing one, or at least the beginnings of one. I believe that FE, combined with a constructionist understanding of morality (Schein and Gray 2018), and finally an anthropological view of how we expanded our social primate blankets with symbols (Moffett 2019) warrants a pull back of normatively driven behavioral restrictions in the causal models of human evolutionary development. This view offers a more intuitive way of understanding our material achievements and pitfalls.

FE frames organic life as a statistical machine. Each organism, after all, is an ensemble of subunits awash in sensory data and in constant search of signals to guide its preservation and replication. The drives of self-preservation and replication are framed specifically in terms of the creation and maintenance of a self-fulfilling predictive model. An organic agent’s commitment to a simulation of the world that includes its own identity. Life exists by learning to paint its environment with a self portrait in the foreground. Actions, and behavior generally, are carried out by first forming a picture of our world that includes ourselves. A first person narration of a target state we maintain with a certitude and then proceed to reduce conflicts between the present reality and this self-fulfilling prophetic vision.

Likewise, hominoids practice and experience morality by first envisioning an imagined identity, and then authoring a comic strip that buckets deviants, adherents, and victims of behavior as it relates to this harmonious vision. Villians, heroes, and distressed damsels are cliched archetypes, and often play a stupefyingly simple story that nonetheless reverberate across cultures and may echo from early in our species’ development. Morality, for all its complexity follows from the characters we create in our minds. The use of imagined talisman played a crucial role in our cognitive development. One that unites the social (Dunbar 2009) and cultural brain hypothesis.

We first expanded our social units beyond our intimates using symbols (Moffett 2013), and gained assurance of our conspecific symbolic allegiance by observing their behavior. Coarse graining groups and individual by reputations gave way to the codification of behavior. Providing the links that bound our culture beyond our intimates, kin and contemporaneous conspecifics. We began by squinting at foreign bands and seeing a memetic labels, that then gave way to labeling individuals, even intimates with reputational tags. We created character. The lodestar of our social realm, a predictive signal of the behavior of intimates, acquaintances and strangers. Generating an institutional framework that rewarded prosocial, cooperative labels with prestige and better access to material gains and at least the avoidance of loss through reprimand.

These labels extended to both individual bespoken and overarching identities of our extensively ordered civilization. The intensive interest in gossiping about our tribal members along with the gods and spirits of our mythology, an interest that adds a dimension of cognitive complexity beyond quantity. All together encouraged a cerebral, yet emotional species with a heightened interest in discovering identity of others and ourselves, and the associated behavioral codes. A proclivity it extends beyond its own earthly plane.

Constraints as an Information Signal

Constraints were fundamental to the origins and advancement of life. Life may owe (Segré et al. 2001) an existential debt to chemical property that gives water and oil their notoriously distinct and contentious identities. Organelles began as molecular free folk that domesticated as workmen beneath the membranes of their protein production factories. Organisms evolved from bacteria with another protective barrier, an envelope for a resident nucleus. What we generally view as distinct organisms themselves are beholden to greater constraints that bind them to conspecifics. Ant colonies are bound by pheromones’ and elephants and wolves are tied together by mutual recognition of one another (Moffett 2019, Loc 1340). The imaginary constraints around our nation states allow us to identify as fellow nationalists.

To draw a line between cell walls and citizens is to travel through information theory. Information can be usefully defined as merely structure. The correlations of atoms beyond the statistical prediction of thermodynamic legislation. A statistical correlation of molecules that occurs even apart from life, e.g. whirlpools (Hidalgo 29). Information can also be symbolic. Variables that signals the particular structure or state of its source. Smoke signals the possibility of fire. Life can be understood as an information processing devices that map one physical structure into another (Gleick 2011, p 283). The most important piece of information, the foundational element of life’s ability to persist and proliferate against the tide of entropy are constraints. Information’s information signal. Constraints signal and make possible identity.

Humanity is likewise bound by the ironical bounty of constraints. Boundaries that enable the expansion of boundaries. Our distinct and foundational fencing exists within the sentiments of virtue and our recognition of convention. Moral practices constrain individual and otherwise parochial behavior to favor the aggregate interests of a larger identity. This finds expression in the sympathy we feel for another’s weal and woe, another person with whom we identify. The compassion we express for another’s suffering, the tendency we express to share food as infants, even when we, our tiny selves, are hungry (Barragan 2020).

Morality is possible due largely to the sympathy we feel for another’s harm, the anger we feel towards the perpetrator of that harm, and finally the abstraction of behavior that causes harm into norms and rules that come to serve as a proxy for actual harm. Our morality is a set of cultural practices that have evolved under the constraining scaffolding of a shared, imagined identity. Moral sentiments were a response to devious violations and conspicuous affirmations of constituents beneath this tenuous constraint. Basic affect that we came to tag with labels of character. Tagging that grew from our moral constitution into bespoken, subordinate identities that further sustain our extended order, even without a price system.

Character Constraints

We hominids distinguished ourselves from our Pan relations largely to the symbolic scaffolding of our anonymous societies. We labelled strangers using audio and visual cues that signaled their social allegiance. This ecological cognitive hack (Moffett 2013) was profitable, yet on its own not enough. It is too tenuous. Other markovian identities are more easily enforced. Our skin is physical, a vertebrate society is typically constituted of individual intimates, ants and bees use chemical pheromones. Sometimes the chemical signal breaks with ants and they do annihilate social members, but of course it works well enough to proliferate its constituents. For us autonomous primates, ones that were reared in egalitarian bands, this new shibboleth broadcast intended to tell us whether a group of foreigners adhered to the symbolic boundary it signaled. Behavior discordant with these expectations would involve uncomfortable surprise. Surprise that may have, and many times in the likely fits and starts that constitute any evolutionary pathway likely did, prevent its use.

To resolve this discontinuity and permit the endurance of symbolic identities we discovered, or maybe invented, reputations. In order to maintain a symbolic identity we needed a subordinate, nested identity. Initially signaling whether a foreign group of people, for we were at the time well acquainted with our band of intimates, not only ostensibly member of our broader social unit but they adhered to the social identity. The key is that it did not require an elaborate value set, nor did it require, initially, elaborate dress and ritual, it simply required a marking to denote social membership, and secondly behavior that indicates whether a anonymous social band shared the imagined identity.

According to the Free Energy, or Bayesian brain hypothesis, we are not only effectively simulated models of our environment, we are driven to reduce the errors between our simulated predictions and the world our sensory data suggests currently exists. Given we are now simulating an imaginary thread around strangers we needed away to resolve the uncomfortable surprise we feel when witnessing the uncertainty of behavior that discords with our predicted harmony. What’s the use in a blanket if it can’t account for the deviant behavior before our eyes? Had we not been able to provide an explanation, come up with an alternative modeling of what lay before us, our anonymous societies would crumble. Yet they did not. The way we resolved this apparent this discord was to invent another social label, another dichotomy.

This would be plenty to supersede the problem of cooperation (Eriksson and Strimling 2012) and initiate the game theoretical games of the Pliocene. Given that we were already well acquainted with our 50 person bands, a number of names, faces and personalities well within our cognitive capacity to maintain, we likely first used reputation as a binary partition of foreign bands into adherents of our shared symbolic identity versus deviants. Non Cooperators versus cooperators. Good versus evil.

The Social brain hypothesis

The Machiavellian or gossipy-social brain hypothesis contends that it was our complex, competitive social environs that drove our intelligence. this covers a decent amount of ground, but the elements that drove our intelligence, accordingly this SBH can be traced to the number of social relationships. These relationships collectively drove the complexity of our relationships and keeping tabs on this complexity is what encouraged larger and larger brains. Out competing one another in social understanding.

The trouble with this though is two fold. The prediction that number of social relationships does not predict brain size in other primates. Greater social relationships is handled in meerkats, are not handled by a proportional increase in cognitive load. Moreover, and more relevant to you and your conspecific author, is that we are not ourselves bound to the number of individuals that this theory predicts. Dunbar’s 150 number, while much social activity takes place within our intimates, our world expands beyond them.

Not only do we seem to have a greater number of social relationships, our ability to interact with anonymous conspecifics is unlike any other primate. We behave more like ants and bees than a cuddly bear or wolf. We engage in Ricardian task specialisation that mirrors the niche specialization seen in hymenoptera. It seems at the surface an explanation of how we associate with so many, so many strangers, should be at the heart of any explanation of our cognitive and other distinctions.

Another theory of the brain, the cultural brain hypothesis (Muthukrishna 2018), takes an altnerative view that it was not our intimates, but a greater number of individuals that drove our cognitive capacity. Cultural evolution and its cerebral implication states that we are able to aggregate knowledge across time and space. We learn from old people and peers and share information with even unrelated children.

The question remains though is what dynamic initiated these cognitive externalities. One way is in a categorical distinction lurking in the social brain hypothesis. It is not just that we interact in complex social environments of a certain number, but the way we do. We gossip. Other species do not, not in our manner.

Heroic Heady Hypothesis

The Free Energy Principle (Friston 2010) and similar brian and life theories (Barrett 2017) provide a framework for understanding how all organisms, and in particular how the brain, processes the deluge of potential sensory noise into meaningful information signals. The translation and processing of information characterises comes to characterize, according to this view, organisms themselves. Organic life can be viewed as a statistical model of its environment. Partitioned within nested blankets, each constrained identity aggregates to a set of phenotypes that pursues evidence of its constitution. Although the laws of thermodynamics predict a flux towards an unstructured equilibrium, these organic models soak up the information from the environment to resist this flux.

Organic stat models are masters at forming expectation and iteratively reducing the errors between a surprising reality that does not conform to those expectation (Carroll 2020). We follow a version of a gradient descent algorithm. Whether it is finding water to minimize feelings of thirst, and thereby increasing the expectation of biological continuity. Or whether avoiding large bodies of water for periods of time if we are not fish. Or whether avoiding land if we are in fact, fish (Friston 2010)

Great expectations of Theseus’ ship

Expectations are set in accordance with constraints. Just as the good economists have been saying for quite some time. Despite the annihilation of the initial planks and sails, the Ship of Theseus is still the ship of theseus simply because onlookers have identified it as such. Nor was their perception of it a passive manner, it drove the behavior of laborers whose actions were guided by the shared perception of its identity. Identity is not the sum of its parts but how the flux of new and old parts organizes their behavior.

The challenge of an invisible superordinate identity is of persuading and convincing members to share in a belief of the imaginary. To establish trust. This makes room for a great deal of uncomfortable uncertainty, a situation we need to minimize as uncertainty reducing machines. We need to build and maintain a distributed peer model. And we needed to do so way before blockchain was a thing. Ultimately we are all better off in an social unit that extends beyond our intimates but in the near term it’s a difficult sell. Prisoners are likely to turn state witness. We might resolve this social uncertainty by annihilating those members who do not adhere to the imaginary identity. Sometimes we did, and continue to do so. This is moral and legal punishment. We first resolved the failed expectations of a cohesive identity with a villian label, and latter slapped similar labels onto intimates.

The partitioning of bands into into deviants and adherents allowed us progression in our imagination. Our ability to invent our own identities, and with them constraints. My claim is simply our ability to imagine identities and codified the behavior that constitute those partitioned portraits is what led to our advancement as a species. The pathway is drawn from our egalitarian primate past, took strides in our symbolic identities now bound only by our imagination. Our moral emotions are foundational expressions of observed behavior that failed to meet expectations. Morality keeps the peace. It also prompts us to behavior prosocially above what would otherwise be our individualistic self interest.

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