X-Message-Number: 3927
From: (David Stodolsky)
Subject: Locating the Mind
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 95 19:10:19 +0100 (CET)
There has been repeated discussion about how certain individuals refuse
to consider suspension because of "irrational" social reasons. One
example discussed recently is very wealthy persons who could easily
be suspended, but do not do so because they would probably be just
ordinary persons in the future. Perhaps a more correct analysis is that
the social framework within which they have been successful might not
even exist in the future. For example, what would be the meaning of great
physical wealth in the future when nanomachines could generate physical
objects on command?
Another case is the person who refuses to consider suspension,
because their family or friends would not be present when they are
resuscitated.
These concerns may not be irrational. One implication of this article
on sociality is that the mind's natural environment is a series
of organizational structures. The social environments mentioned above
and others may be necessary for the survival of the mind as a
functional unit. This may sound far fetched, but consider the ant
or termite alone, outside of its social unit, which many consider
a single organism. What would be its chance of survival or even being
able to function effectively in its traditional environment? While
humans are not "hard wired" in the same way as these simple organisms,
the learning process may program us into similar patterns of interdependence.
In this case, the mind is located at the intersection of multiple
organizational units, without which it loses much of its ability to
function or even to exist in the traditional sense.
There have been proposals that the mind is diffuse and not totally
dependent on the preservation of brain structure. Perhaps this article
offers a way to integrate these "far out" views into a more comprehensive
picture of individual survival. In any case, the suggestion here is
that biological preservation alone, no matter how perfect, may not
be enough to avoid the destruction of the mind and one's identity.
dss
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psycoloquy.95.6.01.group-selection.1.caporael Monday 20 February 1995
ISSN 1055-0143 (51 pars, 1 table, 1 note, 44 refs, 999 lines)
PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)
Copyright 1995 Linnda R. Caporael
SOCIALITY: COORDINATING BODIES, MINDS AND GROUPS
Linnda R. Caporael
Department of Science and Technology Studies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY 12180
ABSTRACT: Human interaction, as opposed to aggregation, occurs in
face-to-face groups. "Sociality theory" proposes that such groups
have a nested, hierarchical structure, consisting of a few basic
variations, or "core configurations." These function in the
coordination of human behavior, and are repeatedly assembled,
generation to generation, in human ontogeny, and in daily life. If
face-to-face groups are "the mind's natural environment," then we
should expect human mental systems to correlate with core
configurations. Features of groups that recur across generations
could provide a descriptive paradigm for testable and non-intuitive
evolutionary hypotheses about social and cognitive processes. This
target article sketches three major topics in sociality theory,
roughly corresponding to the interests of biologists,
psychologists, and social scientists. These are (1) a multiple
levels-of-selection view of Darwinism, part group selectionism,
part developmental systems theory; (2) structural and psychological
features of repeatedly assembled, concretely situated face-to-face
coordination; and (3) superordinate, "unsituated" coordination at
the level of large-scale societies. Sociality theory predicts a
tension, perhaps unresolvable, between the social construction of
knowledge, which facilitates coordination within groups, and the
negotiation of the habitat, which requires some correspondence with
contingencies in specific situations. This tension is relevant to
ongoing debates about scientific realism, constructivism, and
relativism in the philosophy and sociology of knowledge.
KEYWORDS: developmental systems theory, group coordination, group
selection, hierarchy, human evolution, social cognition, social
identity, teleofunctionalism
I. INTRODUCTION
1. Most behavioral and social sciences assume human sociality is a
by-product of individualism. Briefly put, individuals are fundamentally
self-interested; "social" refers to the exchange of costs and benefits
in the pursuit of outcomes of purely personal value, and "society" is
the aggregate of individuals in pursuit of their respective
self-interests. To this view of "economic man," which long pre-dated
Darwin, sociobiology added the idea that individual advantage could be
measured in the currency of genes. In theories stressing the importance
of group living, conspecifics are viewed largely as a class of objects,
more unpredictable than others, but requiring substantial intelligence
on the part of the actor to use these "social objects" to achieve
genetic ends through alliances, manipulation, or exploitation (Byrne &
Whiten, 1988). In contrast, by "social," I refer to a structural
continuum of obligate interdependence, without which individual
prospects for reproduction and survival to reproductive age are
reduced.
2. Humans are obligately interdependent, not only for acquiring their
daily bread, but also for the daily operation of their minds. When Adam
Smith proposed the "invisible hand" of self-interest, he took for
granted that the butcher, the brewer, the baker -- and their families
who worked in the business -- were organized in workshops, which were
in guilds, which were in villages, which were in districts, which had
seasonal fairs and religious celebrations. In the 18th century, the
skills for butchering, brewing, and baking were accumulated through
generations, passed from adult to child, and repeated in daily, weekly
and seasonal cycles of activity. Butchering, brewing and baking
demanded finely tuned sensory and motor coordination; familiarity with
variable materials, tools and methods; a marketplace, of course; and
coordination among these physical, mental and social components.
Today, telecommunications and transportation technologies expose the
significance of this coordination. People still organize themselves in
groups, but some of these no longer need to be face-to-face groups,
constrained by space and time in a nested hierarchy of guild, village,
district, etc.
3. Hull (1988) described a nested hierarchical organization in science
similar to the one in village life; a "demic structure" composed of
small research groups, "conceptual demes," and seasonal society
meetings. This description accords very well with psychological
research on the nested, hierarchical structure of social identity
(Turner, 1987). I propose that the demic structure of science described
by Hull is more general, and it is paralleled by a "demic structure" of
mind. AE1 AA The parallelism suggests that the "mind's natural
environment" can be more adequately specified in terms of functional
organizational structure than it can be by invoking inclusive fitness
theory and "life in the Pleistocene" (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Given a
descriptive paradigm of the human evolutionary environment, it should
be possible to derive testable, nonobvious hypotheses about human
mental systems.
4. Before we can consider the "invisible hand" of demic structure,
however, we need an evolutionary framework that relieves us of the
individualistic assumptions built into the gene-centered view. The
traditional single-level, gene-centered evolutionary analysis, based on
genetic self-sacrifice, inclusive fitness, or number of offspring, does
not lend itself to discussions of hierarchical organization for social
structure or mental systems.
=====================================
David S. Stodolsky, PhD * Social * Internet:
Tornskadestien 2, st. th. * Research * Tel.: + 45 38 33 03 30
DK-2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark * Methods * Fax: + 45 38 33 88 80
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