How to Save the World

He calls this a 'second generation network', but there should be a name for a combination of a system and a network, integrated together. Since there isn't one, I'm coining one: a setwork. This is what millions of years of evolution has produced in our bodies, and it makes sense for the same reasons that we have both a system that acts without thinking (instinct) and a network that learns what to pay attention to (intelligence) in our brains -- our mental setwork. The two work better than either would work alone.

Now, as Stewart & Cohen explain in Figments of Reality, we are "a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit i.e. we are an organism. And our brains, our intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise these creatures' actions for their mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not 'ours'."

I think it is enormously helpful, in order to 'get outside yourself' and see the purpose of setworks, to appreciate that you're not 'you', but merely a reflection of their (the organs in a bag of water that you call your body) evolving survival setworks.

If the purpose of these setworks (mental and immunological) is to protect 'you' (in the interests of 'their' survival) the next question is: from what? Valera's and his colleagues' answer would appear to be, 'others', 'not-them', based on an evolving collective understanding of who 'they' are. This is heavy stuff, but it follows logically from an understanding that setworks, by their nature, have intelligence, and therefore are capable of such understanding (recent studies suggest the immunological setwork is at least as intricate and complex as the mental one). That understanding of 'other-ness' informs them, as Varela says "what to pay attention to". In a very real sense, then, our bodies, through the immunological setwork, have evolved a culture -- a code of behaviours that are, and are not, acceptable, the contravention of which is dealt with harshly. This is a culture that we are not even conscious of (because consciousness is part of the other, mental setwork).

Darwinian principles would suggest that this body culture's 'reasoning' (these are strange words to use in this context, eh?) is driven by interests of survival -- if it weren't, it wouldn't have survived and we (and 'they') wouldn't be around to debate the issue. So then we have to ask: Whose survival? Is it the survival of each individual organ (driven by selfishness), or the survival of the whole organism that is 'their' body (altruistic survival)? The answer to this, intuitively, is the same as it is in the culture we are more familiar with (our social culture) -- there is a constant tension between both. The interests of both must be balanced, because they are co-dependent. When there is a strong conflict between these interests, it will ultimately be resolved in favour of the survival of the whole. I suspect that the immunological setwork has 'learned' and 'knows' this and acts accordingly (again, because if it didn't we'd be extinct).

This got me thinking about Gaia (as organism of all-life-on-Earth). "Nature always bats last", so just as in 'our' bodies, serious conflicts between the culture/interests of the whole organism and the culture/interests of its component 'organs' will ultimately be resolved in favour of the greater whole. Is Gaia, then, the immunological setwork of Earth?

So what happens when there is a breakdown in these self-regulatory setworks, when selfish behaviour of constituent organs overpowers the interests of the collective organism? We see this in cancers, in immune system failures, and (I would argue) in civilizations.

The answer to this is obvious and exciting: Such breakdowns are inherently self-defeating and unsustainable. They will ultimately fail. So why do they occur at all? Why after millions of years of painstaking evolution would these costly errors still occur? The answer: They occur deliberately. Setworks learn by trying lots of slightly different experiments to see what works a bit better, and what doesn't work. This is what evolution is all about. Cancers, immune diseases and civilizations are all learning experiments reacting to stresses that must either be adapted to (if possible) or defeated (if not). What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

These diseases are our setworks' fire drills, practices in seeing 'what if' the organism adapted this way, or this way, or maybe this way. The types of stresses our bodies are used to adapting to are things like being chased by cougars. We developed 'fight or flight' responses to such stresses because they worked. Those without them got eaten. Those with them survived and passed them on. Our bodies, I would suggest, are furiously trying things out to see what adaptation might cope with these new environmental stresses: the massive, ubiquitous antibiotics and industrial chemicals we ingest constantly. They're trying to evolve our bodies so that, no matter how much of these poisons we ingest, our setworks will have a way of dealing with them that will keep the organism healthy.

The problem, of course, is timing. We had millions of years to learn to cope with the stresses of hungry predators (and we have adapted wonderfully to them). But we've only had a few hundred, at most a few thousand, years to learn to cope with the modern stresses. The cancers and immune diseases (and perhaps mental illnesses) we get are clearly not the best adaptations, though we won't know whether they're on the right track or not until we've had a few million years to let them, and other experiments, evolve. That is the natural pace of things. Unfortunately, we don't have a few million years. These changes are happening way too fast. And when environmental changes occur faster than setworks' ability to adapt to them, the result is called Extinction.

Perhaps Gaia will learn from the mistake of "letting the apes run the laboratory for awhile". Perhaps the next evolution, after our extinction, will be a creature with a smaller brain, or at least without an opposable thumb, one that will evolve 'culturally' at a pace that its physical evolution can keep pace with. Almost assuredly, this next invention will have a much greater tolerance for chemicals and antibiotics than our maladjusted bodies. Perhaps, before we disappear, we will start to see some signs of what that next invention will be.

Or perhaps it's already here, flying or buzzing around us, and we're just too preoccupied with current stresses to recognize it.

Image: Clonal selection, the mechanistic, system component of immunity, from Wikipedia

Categories: Health, and Complexity