The Evolution of Mind Games

In biological evolution, natural selection is agnostic about what succeeds or fails. But being agnostic isn’t an option in human evolution.

Human evolution is about you and me — part of a uniquely conscious, self-aware species. A species with an unparalleled language communication system that increased our odds of staying ahead of natural selection by sharing scenarios.

So, it’s ironic how little we appreciate that what most of us are doing most of the time —

imagining, speculating, anticipation, fear, guilt, ideas, creativity, strategies, lying, problem-solving, romance, planning, concerns with health, creating a business, investing, storytelling, competing in sports, preparing for conflict, making laws and policies, negotiating and so on

– ultimately boils down to conjuring up scenarios.

But, it’s the shared scenarios that led to civilization and what makes human evolution different. In particular, it’s the use of an iterative dialectical process— scenario thesis, scenario antithesis, and scenario synthesis — aimed at the willful pursuit of directed evolution and enabled us to evolve faster than natural selection. That is, to not merely prosper in a Darwinian — survival of the ecologically fittest — way, but to transcend it.

So, it’s not what’s in your head, but what your head is into that matters.

What’s important to note, however, is that natural selection is always shadowing us, poised to reassert itself. Thus, as with the 99% of all species that failed to adapt to their changing milieu and went extinct, natural selection is always the odds-on favorite to win in the end.

Acknowledging these odds is important. Because, despite human hubris, the overlap of basic biological characteristics in the development of civilization is far greater than recognized.

Moreover, it’s precisely this failure to recognize the full extent of this biological overhang — how it clouds our judgment and influences our behavior — that makes us surprisingly vulnerable to natural selection reasserting itself. So much so, that civilization is probably at greater risk now than at any previous time in human history.

Scenario thesis — a place in the sun

All biological systems develop mechanisms to regulate their response to change. The type and appropriateness of the mechanisms developed determines whether a system can adapt and survive in response to a changing milieu.

The primary regulatory mechanism in our human evolutionary experiment is governance systems. Tacitly, we create these systems to act as our collective mind in the offering and assessing of shared scenarios to act upon.

Thus, the real, bottom-line purpose of governance systems is to advance our directed evolution by pursuing the wisest possible scenarios.

Natural selection — let there be light

Natural selection is the process whereby the organisms that are better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.

As if unconsciously mirroring biological natural selection, governance systems have always reflected a scenario about how we assumed the human brain-mind system operates.

• Nervous system — Collecting sensory information about the host’s well-being for the brain
• Brain — Aggregating sensory information and offering updated novel scenarios to the mind
• Mind — Assessing whether new scenarios are important enough to act upon and set priorities

Viewing governance systems in the context of this brain-mind framework gives us a starting point for understanding how civilization has evolved.

For example, while the sensory information oral societies had about their community and environment was intimate, little was reliable. Nevertheless, information was communicated horizontally to everyone in the group for aggregation.

However, since these societies believed the mind of god(s) — nature and supernatural — constituted their governance system, they also believed all scenarios, good and bad, were externally determined and controlled.

Selfish gene — my way or the highway

A selfish gene is one that exploits the organism in which it occurs as a vehicle for its self-perpetuation

10,000 years ago writing marginally improved the collection of sensory information. But it did so by introducing vertical, hierarchical communication and aggregation processes. Changes that initiated asymmetries in knowledge and power between those governing and the governed and remain today.

While it’s unclear how governing elite initially emerged (e.g., cunning, force, bravery, vision, deference, default), invariably the result was a selfish gene. A gene that manifested itself in the grandiose claim of being able to channel the mind of god(s), and thus the only ones authorized to offer and assess the scenarios to be acted upon.

800 years ago the English Magna Charta highlighted the issue of the selfish gene. It made clear for all subsequent governing elites that increased participation in scenario processes negatively impacted their control of the scenarios pursued.

Nevertheless, elite governance systems — dynasties — persisted and continued to claim the exclusive — divine right — to offer and assess scenarios received from the mind of god.

500 years ago printing added new vertical and horizontal communication flows. Gradually, this improved the quantity and quality of sensory information collected and aggregated, and marginally reduced knowledge asymmetries.

Eventually printing led to advances in the scientific method and with it a new emphasis on rationality.

This, in turn, helped precipitate a demand for more rational scenario processes in governance systems.

Finally, some 300 years ago, governance systems began to evolve from an absolute divine right to channel the mind of god to claiming an elected right to channel the mind of society as its earthly representatives.

Genetic mutation — rise of the demigods

A genetic mutation is a permanent alteration in the DNA sequence that makes up a gene, such that the sequence differs from what is found in most members of species.

100 years ago, with the start of broadcast communication, the collection and aggregation of sensory information improved around the edges. But, as with writing, broadcasting significantly amplified vertical communication and information flows.

As a result, early broadcasting reinvigorated the selfish gene, but in a mutated form (e.g., fascism and communism). As such, governing elites not only claimed to be representatives channeling the mind of society, but were implicitly granted unilateral control over scenario processes (i.e., demagogues).

To advance their preferred scenarios, these governing elites simultaneously polluted communication flows and overtly severed the connection between the sensory network and the mind of society. In the end, of course, the scenarios pursued by these mutated selfish genes ravaged their host societies and led to a collapse with natural selection reasserting itself.

Extended phenotype — spaceship earth

The Extended Phenotype means all the effects a gene has on the outside world that may influence its chances of being replicated. These can be effects on the organism in which the gene resides, the environment, or other organisms.

25 years ago — with the Cold War ended, the first commercial internet server turned on and global capitalism accelerating — our extended phenotype blossomed dramatically.

The hallmark of this new era was online communication, which enabled information to flow in all directions simultaneously.

As such, it initially seemed obvious that online communication had the potential to dramatically improve

• sensory information — greater quantity and quality (e.g., external internet of things and internal social physics)
• shared knowledge — reducing asymmetries (e.g., better access and curated information)
• scenarios — more diverse offerings and superior assessment (e.g., distributed collective intelligence)

Unfortunately, the selfish gene is a biological constant. In our case, the history of civilization is one of governing elites — whether kings and queens, feudal lords, rich industrialists, military dictators, or elected representative — invariably

• claiming supernumerary knowledge of what’s best for the rest of us
• limiting participation in scenario processes
• preempting challenges to their control of scenario processes
• employing the prevailing communication system as a propaganda machine

So it should come as no surprise that today’s representatives have a skewed view of the value of online communication.

• Potential for undermining control of scenario processes (e.g., Magna Charta and rationality)
• Useful for mass surveillance (e.g., selective collection and aggregation of sensory information)
• Useful for disorienting communications (e.g., noise to marginalize alternative scenarios)

So, to date, instead of pursuing the wisest possible scenarios for our directed evolution, civilization has actually experienced something quite different. Namely, the selfish genes of governing elites using governance systems as hosts for a purely biological exercise — survival of the ecologically fittest — with natural selection writ large.

Scenario antithesis — revanchist pause

To be sure, the evolution of governance systems from a focus on the mind of god(s) to the mind of society — dynastic to representative — reflects a concession to rationality. Yet, one would need to be blind or naïve not to conclude that, in the end, this concession was an exceedingly modest, mostly superficial one.

Inasmuch human evolution lacked a real competitor and didn’t experience a cataclysmic nonlinear event (e.g., dinosaur extinction), governing elites had few constraints on the scenarios pursued.

That’s fortunate because history is primarily one of societies where governing elites were pursuing bad or erroneous scenarios, only to realize the mistake when it was too late to adequately remedy (e.g., Greeks, Romans, Incas, Mayans, aristocracies, fascists, communists).

In the end, the scenarios these elites pursued reflected a selfish gene, which undermined their society’s ability to adapt to a changing milieu. Thus, in each instance, natural selection reasserted itself.

Today, given the scale of civilization and how tightly interwoven it’s become, the consequences of pursuing bad or erroneous scenarios has increased disproportionately. Yet, increasingly, when the question is whether governing representative are pursuing the wisest possible scenarios, there’s a widely shared consensus that they’re not.

Epigenetics — mind games on steroids

Epigenetics is about changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself.

While the history of governance systems is one dominated by this elite selfish gene, there’s a growing agreement that the current expression of this gene is particularly weird. Weird in the sense that the most valued skill is mind games.

It’s a cultivated skill in self-serving ambiguity. A skill to generate scenarios with a mere sliver of plausibility or deniability, however absurd, arbitrary and relative, so as to preclude accountability. A skill exceedingly useful in deflecting attention away from the actual scenarios pursued in —

• Politics where campaigns and careers are contrived mind game performances aimed at base emotions
• Legislative and legal systems where partisan and ideological verbiage is the penultimate mind game
• Public relations where spin mind games consciously play fast and loose with facts and reality

Thus, unlike the Enlightenment ideal, the way governing representatives now express themselves is the antithesis of rationality. Rather, it’s the dark, pathological side of the mind of society. A mind obsessively amplifying the selfish gene — self-preservation and self-interested ends of governing elites — uber alles.

In effect, the mind games employed by today’s governing elites are akin to those used with broadcasting to advance preferred scenarios. The primary difference is that online communication is now used to covertly sever the connection to the sensory network. As a result, online communications are increasingly used to:

• Expand post-truth rhetoric (e.g., fake news, alternative facts, conspiracy theories)
• Maximize surveillance under the nebulous guise of security (e.g., surveillance state)
• Manipulate voting behavior (e.g., data tracking for micro-targeting of propaganda)
• Constrain real feedback (e.g., gaslighting and total reliance on malleable legacy voting systems)

This covert approach to severing the connection to the sensory network is a distinctly sinister, yet exceedingly sophisticated mind game. One that seeks to create the image of an inoffensive governance system as the mind of society.

But, it’s only an image.

The reality is that, like highway robbers or pirates of old, today’s governing representatives are blatantly hijacking our collective well-being. This, of course, seriously undermines our collective ability to adapt to a rapidly changing milieu. And, that means the door for agnostic natural selection to reassert itself has been swung wide open.

Pathogens — environmental hazards

A pathogen is a bacterium, virus, or other microorganism that can cause disease in its host.

Individually or in combination, all three parts of governance systems — communication, sensory and assessment networks — are always vulnerable to pathogens. More to the point, once infected these pathogens can, at a minimum, retard an adaptive response to a rapidly changing milieu.

Communication network –The prevailing global communication network is an extraordinary, tightly interconnected and interactive hardwired system with a ferociously robust, high-velocity feedback loop. But, like fish living in water, the environment this network provides is taken for granted until it becomes polluted or toxic.

Today, the situation is like a disease pathogen that’s rapidly spreading throughout the communication environment. A situation where the quantity and ferocity of unexplored scenarios ricocheting and echoing throughout the network are so polluting that it’s increasing difficult to separate healthy from unhealthy sensory information.

Sensory network — Historically, the collection and aggregation of sensory information has been done through a loose social system that’s heavily suffused with biases. As a result, the form, quantity and quality of information has always been exceedingly porous and unreliable. For example,

• Words — Once assumed to possess unequivocal meaning, it’s now clear words are inherently relative to how they’re framed to advance a position, argument, viewpoint, bias or ideology (i.e., mind games).
• Statistics — There’s a long history of distorting, misrepresenting and misusing statistics to advance a position, argument, point of view, bias or ideology (i.e., mind games).
• Media — Much of the media, especially social media, has become an endless stream of unfiltered pollutants (e.g., erroneous information, disinformation, PR spin, half-truths, misrepresentations, factual inaccuracies, propaganda, lies, and self-serving ideological and partisan rhetoric and images)

Consequently, most of the sensory information used in governance systems is unreliable. As a result, the speed at which pathogens can proliferate in this network is increasingly dangerous.

Assessment network — Inasmuch as governing representatives effectively operate as a closed social system, socially transmitted pathogens are ever present and spread incestuously.

Thus, by ignoring the diversity of unexplored scenarios circumnavigating the communication network, and relying on polluted sensory information network, all scenario processes have become infected. This predisposes the assessment process toward arbitrary, relative and or biased results.

But, add mind games to these results and it becomes easy to obscure how diseased scenarios are magically transformed into claims of vigorous facts or truths, regardless of their infirmity or merit.

Nevertheless, while the variety and number of pathogens grows and spreads, the accelerating pace of change is illuminating the bad and erroneous scenarios being pursued. Slowly the realization is settling in that the representative mind of society is ill-suited to adapt for what’s —

• Ahead in a rapidly changing social, economic, technological and environmental milieu
• Needed to continue our directed evolution and keep agnostic natural selection at bay

Of course, inasmuch as these pathogens are not being treated effectively they’re metastasizing. The result is a proliferation of palpably anxious and foreboding scenarios that are reinvigorating both —

• atavistic, fundamentalist and ideological ambitions and malevolent behaviors (e.g., Paul Kennedy)
• authoritarian personalities claiming exclusive, supernumerary knowledge of the mind of society (e.g., Adorno)

Protestations to the contrary, there’s now ample evidence to conclude the response to these spreading pathogens has been to further sever the mind of society from the sensory network. Of course, this only accelerates the emergence of an existential crisis and further enables natural selection to reassert itself.

Dementia — dazed and confused

Dementia is chronic or persistent disorder of the mental processes caused by disease or injury and marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning.

Like you, me and all other evolving systems, governance systems age and become increasingly vulnerable to senility.

While historical stories, nostalgia and blind patriotism often generate denial, the signs governance senility –- from erratic to irrational to dysfunctional behaviors and actions — have been visibly exacerbating societal problems for decades. For example:

• Inequitable economic policies (e.g., inequality gap continues to expand
• Discriminatory legal system (e.g., race, gender and wealth continue to influence outcomes)
• Unnecessary geopolitical conflicts (e.g., waste of blood and treasure continues unabated)
• Orwellian double-speak (e.g., alternative facts, post-truth ideas, fake news continues to grow)
• Absence of any believable vision for a better future in a rapidly changing milieu (e.g., fear continues to spread in all domains)

What should be clear — but oddly enough isn’t — is that what’s claimed to be responsible representative governance leadership is anything but that.

Rather, it’s generally pompous, self-righteous, messianic egos in search of a cult following. All cloaked, of course, in a blatant, albeit sophisticated, emotional package — i.e., good ‘ole mind games — to promote an updated version of zero-sum tribalism for the gullible and naïve. It’s senile cynicism in full bloom.

[Political systems] are not human, though they are made of humans….[Historically, they] move from one semiautonomous, inhuman system to another…. [W]e must not confuse states that wear a human face with states that have humane institutions. [Drexler]

Cognizant that the senility in governance systems is increasingly visible, governing elites are becoming increasingly fearful about the implications. So, in subtle, yet outrageous ways there are efforts to mitigate these fears. In particular, there’s an expanding miasma of Panopticism — a highly toxic, bitter brew of covert repression, gaslighting and surveillance — descending on civilization.

Panopticism is about the systematic ordering and controlling of the [population]…[and] proliferation of ‘dataveillance’… [Thus] discursive mechanisms can…control and/or modify the body of discussion within a particular space…[so] there is no longer any need for an ‘active agent’ to display a more overtly coercive power (i.e., the threat of violence).

Despite the negative consequences to the well-being of individual societies, civilization and humanity’s overall directed evolution, the intent of panopticism is simple and straightforward:

• Reinforce attitudes to be more favorably disposed toward senile representative systems
• Maintain the structure of power and privilege in senile representative systems
• Preempt exploration of alternative scenario processes and unwanted changes to senile representative systems

Still, given a contemporary, lived experience with senile representative governance, our instincts are telling us — in no uncertain terms — that this situation is undermining our future. Indeed, if you strip away the aggrieved denial about our current situation by both the populace (e.g., “mad as hell”) and governing elites (e.g., “make _____ great, again”), there’s already a clear sense the human evolutionary experiment is fraying and sputtering.

A sense that the future we’re racing into simply won’t work the way we want, expect or need. That our evolutionary situation can easily grow worse. That the odds of natural selection reasserting itself have increased dramatically.

Scenario synthesis — now or never

Beyond the deficiencies underlying the sensory network and how blatantly governing elites display their selfish genes, the root problem with governance systems today is that they were passed on to us by default, not the result of any deliberative choice.

Worse, as with the painfully protracted death of dynastic systems, representative elites have been playing mind games for so long that the deficiencies in our governance systems are accepted as dogma. And, dogma works to censor questions about a system’s design, which perpetuates these systems regardless of merit, flaws, obsolescence, senility or potential dangers.

The fact is, despite our contemporary high-tech existence, today’s representative mind of society is a senile medieval design in rapid decline. Moreover, faced with a rapidly changing milieu on a civilizational scale, this medieval design is plagued with —

• rampant toxic communication flows (e.g., fake news, hacked elections, alternative facts)
• consistently bad or erroneous sensory information (e.g., 9/11 attack, Saddam Hussein’s WMD, immigration problems)
• incredibly biased scenario offering and assessment processes (e.g., Iraq War, unrestrained surveillance, economic nationalism)

In the end, all this makes for a volatile mix. One that can easily explode into an existential crisis before any of our problems can be considered properly, let alone remedied.

Of course, change is the only constant. So the failure to evolve governance systems better able to adapt to the rapidly changing milieu makes it easy for natural selection to reassert itself.

DNA sequence — missing the forest for the trees

A DNA sequence is the relative order of base pairs in a fragment of DNA, a gene, a chromosome, or an entire genome.

As its DNA, all governance systems have a sequential unfolding of operational rules. For example, the U.S. Constitution precedes rules for congressional operations, which precedes congressional legislation, which precedes departmental and agency rules and regulations.

Yet, with respect to scenario processes specifically, there’s a major gap in the reading of this DNA rule sequence. One that anyone who’s ever played a schoolyard pick-up game will instantly recognize.

Whoever makes the rules of the game is virtually guaranteed to win.

In the U.S. system, for example, the Constitution grants representatives the exclusive power to decide the rules governing their own behavior and processes. So, while it’s easy to presume the operation of representative systems is more rational than other types of governance, this conspicuously ignores the obvious.

Namely, that all representative demigods are at least as selfish, self-interested, emotional and irrational as the rest of us mere mortals. Moreover, that power is intoxicating. That control of scenario processes is the ultimate power in governing.

In the context of a 21st century civilization, the idea that the rules for scenario processes are solely at the discretion of the same representatives who establish their own rules of behavior is mind-boggling. An obvious, classic case of the fox guarding the chicken coop.

Clearly, such absolute and unaccountable discretion is fraught with inherent conflict of interests.

As Lord Acton’s dictum on power states, and common sense tells you, absolute control over the operational rules for scenario processes provides an incentive for selfish genes to exercise self-interested behavior. An enticing, effortless opportunity to play mind games in pursuit of preferred scenarios that’s simply too seductive for anyone to resist indefinitely.

Thus, in the end, it’s irrelevant whether individual representatives in today’s governance systems are viewed as well-meaning, but ignorant of the consequences of their actions, or Machiavellian acolytes. The systemic consequences are the same — the diversity of scenarios offered and the merit of their assessment are significantly limited to what representative self-interest and biases prefer. Period.

Again, the only requisite to perpetuating this absolute power is skillful mind games. So, it should come as no surprise that, despite regularly claiming to be the smartest people on the planet, governing elites invariably have an endless list of lame excuses for not altering and improving scenario processes.

As a result, these senile medieval systems have become an enabling infrastructure for the staging of bizarre events aimed at disorienting the populace (e.g., elections). Of course, the idea that these ever so quaint, contrived episodic circuses will somehow, eventually, deliver us a new messiah or miraculously remedy our situation was long ago rendered patently absurd.

The simple fact is that representative governance systems, designed to thrive in the celebratory heyday of print, not only don’t work well anymore, they’re actively placing our evolutionary experiment at risk.

Directed evolution — heard it through the grapevine

Directed evolution is a method used in protein engineering that mimics the process of natural selection to evolve proteins or nucleic acids toward a user-defined goal

Without any fanfare our evolutionary experiment finds itself deeply mired in an epic dilemma. A dilemma about how to continue our directed evolution yet avoid placing our collective well-being and future at greater risk of natural selection reasserting itself.

The saving grace is that, intuitively, we’re all smart enough to grasp what’s needed. That is, to

• fuse together our minds and 21st century technology appropriately
• create scenario processes more responsive in adapting to the rapidly changing milieu

But, pursuit of this intuition first requires a reexamination of the brain-mind system framework tacitly employed in the design of governance systems.

As it turns out, biology long ago forged two types of systems for collective governance and action:

• Hardwired — genetic sociobiological systems (e.g., ants)
• Social — plastic social-biological systems (e.g., primates)

While both systems are facilitated by a hardwired nervous system (i.e., communication system) the operational differences are profound. Thus, part of what makes our self-awareness so remarkable is how natural selection integrated both the hardwired and social systems into a single system.

But, as Kahneman and other have noted, operationally this design carries an important legacy biological caveat.

Specifically, the mind’s scenario assessment process is dominated by emotions (i.e., limbic system). So, regardless of how rational any scenario offered by the brain might be, emotions can easily override it.

Obviously, as with education, professional athletes and performing artists, the mind can be trained to give rationality greater influence (e.g., Moneyball, Outliers, Super-forecasting). Nevertheless, the emotional social mind generally controls which scenarios are pursued and their priority.

In the context of governance systems, this seems to explain a lot about where we find ourselves today.

For example, since the dawn of hierarchical governance systems, the scenarios processes have been dominated by an exceedingly small number of individuals. Not only do such small groups tend to be an unrepresentative sample of the larger population, they’re easily swayed by small group dynamics, in particular, status, power and emotional factors.

Consequently, despite assumptions that representative systems reflected a rational mind of society, given small group dynamics, selfish gene behavior, and absolute control of operational rules, emotionally they were always incredibly unrepresentative of society.

Said differently, if emotions often dominate scenario processes, and we know conflicts of interest are built into the design and operation of scenario processes, there’s an exceedingly high probability that the emotions driving these processes are often going to be skewed away from pursuing the wisest possible scenarios. Thus, the best interests of society at large are, at best, secondary considerations.

So, it’s eminently reasonable to suggest that what’s needed is to evolve beyond today’s antiquated and senile representative mind of society to a representative society of mind — a more diverse, robust, resilient and agile collective mind. One that better

• reflects us all — both emotionally and rationally
• suited to adapt to the rapidly changing milieu ahead
• able to advance directed evolution by pursuing the wisest possible scenarios

Society of mind — use it or lose it

The society of mind is a cognitive system as a vast society of individually simple thinking entities that together produce the many abilities we attribute to minds. The great power in viewing a mind as a society of agents, as opposed to some simple formal system, is that different agents can be based on different types of processes with different purposes, ways of representing knowledge, and methods for producing results.

As any med student or fitness trainer will tell you, in biology one fundamental, operative rule is use it or lose it. Or, paraphrasing,

A society that isn’t able to develop and use its mind is bound to be the slave of the other men who uses their mind.

Fortunately, pattern recognition is a hallmark of our species. As such the most common, robust and resilient structural pattern in the cosmos is a network.

For example, biological systems are networks. Complex environments are networks. Epidemics are networks. Thought, reasoning and scenarios occur within neural networks.

Yet, since writing began, all governance systems are elite, social, top-down hierarchical structures. While hierarchical structures have some value in a command and control context, they’re incredibly poor designs for collecting sensory information and deliberation in scenarios processes.

Given the ubiquity and speed of our prevailing communication network, and contemporary scientific analytical capabilities, the failure of governing elites to actively explore and develop such networks for sensory information and scenarios processes is both absurd and reflective of a conflict of interest.

Synthetic biology — be all that we can be

Synthetic biology refers to the design and fabrication of biological components and systems that do not already exist in the natural world and the re-design and fabrication of existing biological systems.

There’s an old, familiar, simple, terse, yet important scenario that perfectly reflects what the development of a representative society of mind is all about.

Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach them to fish and you feed them for life.

Indeed, more than governing leaders, societal scale learning is what’s extended civilization’s reach and made us a planet-changing, space-faring species. Given the situation we now find ourselves in — a rapidly changing environmental milieu in all domains but with governance systems ill-suit to respond and adapt — demands that we collectively learn faster and better.

Today’s technological capabilities and accumulated knowledge can advance this collective learning challenge. Doing so starts with the development of a trustworthy, independent institutional “platform.” One that integrates both hardwired and social systems to improve the capabilities of all three part of governance systems:

• Communication network — facilitating access to and the sharing of knowledge and learning
• Sensory network — filtering out pollutants and the fine-tuning of hardwired systems
• Scenario assessment network — more and diverse participation in their offering, assessing and prioritizing

Communication network — Like electricity, the Internet is being invisibly integrated into every corner of our environment and lives. Unlike the physical tasks aided by electricity, the Internet excels in aiding mental and collaborative tasks.

Thus, the Internet is ideal for faster access to more detailed and shared knowledge and learning. But only if there’s concerted effort to remedy the pollution problems in the sensory network.

Sensory network — Oral societies had to randomly forage for sensory information. But, with writing this began to change. That is, just as early farmers domesticated the plants, animals and waterways surrounding them, since the start of writing civilization has been domesticating sensory information.

In effect, the collecting, aggregating, ordering and refining of information has been a collective civilizational project — e.g., libraries, classification schemes, indexing, citations, satellites, databases and search engines. As a result, the quantity and quality of environmental sensory information and knowledge generally has progressively increased and become more cogent.

Still, there are three important areas of our sensory network that are in serious need of improvement:

• Collection and aggregation of information on our societal well-being and aspirations
• Significant reduction of information pollutants
• Provision of fast, easy identification of reliable content

In terms of our societal well-being and aspirations, we need to aggressively develop a dynamic, hardwired Social Physics system.

Adequately developing such a system requires the secure incorporation of participant’s multidimensional characteristics and psychographics in their entirety, not just simplistic traditional demographics.

This Social Physics system also needs to aggregate results in an easily comprehensible form. This is especially critical to developing a widespread understanding of the fluid, real-time, social dynamics essential to assessing the relevance, impact, selection and prioritization of scenarios.

But take note. It’s imperative that such Social Physics systems be instituted in new governance systems immediately. That’s because governing elites are already deploying such systems, not to improve our collective well-being, but as propaganda machines aimed at advancing selfish genes.

Since all technology represents a double-edged sword, there should be no illusions about this development. As employed by governing elites these propaganda machines will further covertly manipulate us all on an unprecedented scale. If successful, this is exceedingly unlikely to end well.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that such sophisticated propaganda machines represent as much of an existential threat to civilization as artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI) does. That’s because absent a representative society of mind, the existing mind of society, with its self-interested panoptic obsession, lacks sufficient diversity and circumspection to safely develop AGI or ASI.

In any case, a new governance system also need a resolution of the twin problems of information pollutants and fast, easy identification of reliable content. While accomplishing these tasks in a relatively new online medium is challenging, the specific problems aren’t new and have been satisfactorily resolved before.

For example, fake news existed in abundance with yellow journalism and supermarket tabloids. Similarly, reading a book a week for life only amounts to only 3,000 books out of some 143 million unique titles in the world today. Read the right books and opportunities in life expand. But, the reverse is equally true.

Historically, educators and professional societies helped resolve both of these problems by separating reliable content from the unreliable. In effect, they curated databases of the most reliable and trustworthy content resources. A representative society of mind needs an online analog to reduce knowledge asymmetries easily.

In other words, what’s needed is a curated and dynamically updated database for use with knowledge discovery platforms (e.g., source content version of Wikipedia’s encyclopedia). This would enable anyone to instantly find a diversity of resources previously vetted to ensure access to the most reliable content. (Full disclosure, this is what my company seeks to provide).

Inevitably, such databases are requisite for ambient knowledge systems — conversational search engines, virtual assistants (e.g., Amazon’s Echo/Alexa, Google’s Home, Apple’s Siri, Samsung’s Viv/Bixby) and augmented reality systems — to become ubiquitous.

Said differently, when it’s important to find reliable content resource, no one can afford to converse with a machine that gives unreliable — bad, erroneous, or out of date — content. Eventually, as this technology does go mainstream, it’s effectively establishing a system for augmented knowledge on-demand.

Scenario assessment network — The development of on-demand augmented knowledge is relatively imminent. So, beyond the urgent task of developing a social physics system, there’s a pressing need to establish a highly visible, independent virtual organization. One with a nonpartisan, non-ideological service aimed at a large-scale

• Offering of diverse scenarios for
  — goals (i.e., directed evolution)
  — issue resolution options
• Mechanisms for assessing the merits of scenarios
• Voting system for selecting preferred scenarios to act upon and prioritize

Done well over time such an entity can establish a sufficient track record of trust and confidence that a genuine representative society of mind can self-organize and emerge.

Complex adaptive system — we are the world

A complex adaptive system is a “complex macroscopic collection” of relatively “similar and partially connected micro-structures” formed in order to adapt to the changing environment and increase its survivability as a macro-structure.

The famed comparative religious scholar, Joseph Campbell, once noted that humanity need a new mythology. A new scenario that both contextualizes who we are as an evolving species and civilization, and connects us to an understanding of what we can become.

As I see it, that scenario is about how a representative society of mind can more efficaciously engage us all in our directed evolution.

In this context, recall that the origin of governance systems was language — a communication system. That every time the prevailing communication system changed, the structure and operation of the prevailing governance systems changed.

Fortunately for us, the Internet is more than just a communication system. It’s also a large-scale, omnidirectional, knowledge sharing and feedback system. Unlike any prior communication system, it provides the ideal environment to fuse together a large-scale hardwired sensory network and social assessment network so we can learn faster and better collectively.

In the end, if the promise of the Internet can be realized, the emergence of a virtual representative society of mind is simply a large-scale manifestation of a self-organizing complex adaptive system.

In effect, it’s a system that augments human intelligence, both individually and collectively. A system that’s adroit, robust and agile enough to fine-tune our adaption to a rapidly changing environmental milieu as a self-regulating, self-modifying and self-reliant society of mind.

That said, we’re on our own to explore, identify and amplify a new robust governance system — a representative society of mind. In this respect, the selfish gene and natural selection are not our friends.

Still, if done properly, sufficient trust can be established so people actively seek to participate in these new scenario processes.

Done properly this enables us to become a society of mind.

Done properly we will be able to pursue the wisest scenarios for our preferred futures in a directed evolution.

So, again,

it’s not what’s in your head, but what your head is into that matters.

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Doc Huston