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The Illusion Of Control - (very wide net)
all systems are “organisms”.
all systems participate in super systems up to a functionally infinite scale, from the observable universe as unity to plank radius.
I am an element of various “tech” adjacent systems. I work at a tech company. My social life is a tech discord. I’m active in the twitter tech community. I am invested in several tech companies. there are a variety of technologies I engage with.
earlier this evening, I saw a Daily Show clip on youtube where Jon Stewart was expressing a lot of negativity towards Amazon specifically and the tech industry broadly. I own Amazon stock. I used to work at a Amazon. It’s kinda likely some of the code I wrote is still part of the production system. I order stuff from Amazon all the time. I am part of the Amazon “system”. If Amazon is an organism, I am roughly analogous to one of its cells. It’s likely that every single person who watches that video is in some way a part of the Amazon system.
This system’s boundaries I think are divided by which parts of the system are specifically impacted by the super-organisms success or injury. To be contrasted with cells that are members of external systems.
under this definition, a parasite in effect literally becomes a “part of” its host. If the host does well, the parasite does well, and vice versa. If my arm goes septic, my body is totally entitled to vote that component of the system “off the island”. If I am infected by a parasite, the parts of the system that were in harmony before its arrival are totally justified to kick out the new arrival.
It’s not even utilitarian so much as it is democratic. We are trying to balance/maximize the satisfied “interests” of all components of the system, so they’re not in tension with each other and can settle into a stable “low energy” state.
This plurality of interests is effectively what determines “morality” (ethics?) within the system. Morality qua “what’s allowed”. “Allowed” meaning, the space of behaviors a given component can exhibit that are within some given radius of “frustration” with respect to the system. Maybe the system broadly isn’t very sensitive to frustration from that cell, maybe the local neighborhood has a low tolerance for frustration local to that cell.
something something interpretation of morality that carries a lot of utilitarian features, but “utility” is contextual within sub-systems that are competing to have their respective interests disproportionately satisfied.
wow, ok, back to the tech thing.
I am part of the Amazon “system”. If Amazon is an organism, I am roughly analogous to one of its cells. It’s likely that every single person who watches that video is in some way a part of the Amazon system.
Jon Stewart was expressing a lot of negativity towards Amazon specifically and the tech industry broadly. If I were in Amazon’s POV, I’d feel threatened. As an Amazon investor, I felt threatened. As someone who uses Amazon for a variety of conveniences, I felt threatened.
I think it’s fair to say that a reasonable portion of the Amazon “system” is aware of Jon Stewarts comments. I am part of the Amazon organism. Some of the parts of me that are part of that system felt threatened. The part of me that is an Amazon investor. etc.
There are lots of people who are part of the Amazon system for varieties of reasons. Individually, these people may have felt threatened in varieties of ways on behalf of their connection to the broader Amazon organism in whatever ways.
Even while agreeing with Jon.
The part of me that remembers small book stores agrees with Jon. The part of me that is angry about the weakness of anti-monopoly regulations in the US and how underfunded the FTC clearly is — agrees with Jon.
In a variety of ways, I am infected by it. Amazon is a part of me, and I am a part of it.
I am just one such cell. Amazon has many such cells. People like me who use it or worked for it or engage with it in ways that if Amazon is threatened, they are tangibly threatened.
In so far as Amazon is made up of components like these, a lot of the components that comprise the system was aware of Jon Stewarts comments. Imagining whatever the “footprint” of the Amazon organism comprises, it’s reasonable to imagine that a sizable fraction of that footprint was “aware” of Jon’s Comments. The system felt threatened.
Systems can behave extremely aggressively when threatened, even make decisions out of panic that are counter-productive to the continued stability of the system.
That’s the “free energy principle” right there. “Bodily preservation” is just about staying in the current stable basin. To do otherwise would “frustrate” the system.
this meditation was primarily a philosophical exercise to crystallize certain ideas around the nature of self, identity, consciousness, and subjective experience.
fundamentally, Amazon literally is an “organism”, and that anything that satisfies the definition of a system of sufficient complexity also satisfies that definition. When I am driving in my car, the car and I comprise a system together and it is perfectly reasonable for you to reason about how my car on the road behaves differently than how you might reason about me or my car alone, and for it to be meaningful that there is something it feels like to be me driving my car. If I put my hand on a stove, that subsystem of “me” sustains injury. it communicates this to the rest of my body through pain, which is fundamentally just one subsystem communicating with another.
I am being completely literal in how I am discussing systems as organisms. the functional structures that form in emergent collective behavior are in response to minimizing an energy surface, which could be parameterized with respect to the phases of its constituent parts. Phases are given by attractor basins, so you can kind of think of the “interests” of a component as being represented by a particular attractor in state space. As a system, they subcomponents are interacting with each other in a variety of ways, simultaneously operating as parts of a whole, but also competing with each other for common resources. Within this context, every system is accompanied by a set of thresholds that govern when components of the system will respond to inter-component frustrations of their own equilibrium orbits.