Society as an Alignment of the Self-Generated Models of the World of its Members

September 11. A good day to you. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about what would constitutes a fair society. After all, we need to define a goal before we can target it.

Before we can start on the fair stuff, we need to understand what a society is. In sociological terms, society refers to a group of people who live in a definable community and share the same cultural components. On a broader scale, society consists of the people and institutions around us, our shared beliefs, and our cultural ideas. Typically, many societies also share a political authority. So, a society is any group of people – friends, family, a village or town etc. – who support each other and collaborate toward common goals.

So far so good. But there’s one big problem: While our bodies are all part of the same physical universe, even part of the same universal wave function, each human being self-generates and constantly updates a model of the universe in their minds which every single one of them – us – regards as reality – the world as it really exists. This model has as good as no resemblance with the actual physical universe because

a) our brain doesn’t have the capacity to process the data that would be necessary to create a complete model, and

b) generating a complete model is not necessary to fulfill the task our mind has developed for – spotting and selecting the most promising energy pattern to engage with so that the material things that make us up can make progress towards their dual goals: getting into the lowest energy state and being in equilibrium with their surroundings. It is based on a few datapoints, collected by our senses, hypotheses, drawing on existing knowledge, and a lot of creativity. This mix makes sure that not two of us live in the same reality. We don’t even have proof that anyone or anything else around us is conscious. Projecting consciousness on others is one of the hypotheses we use in the creation of our model of the world.

So, how can we even start to think about supporting each other and collaborating to common goals when we don’t share the same reality? In other words, what’s the most basic precondition to create any version of society?

We must at least somewhat align our world generation process. We don’t know how to change the way a person experiences things with their senses. Neither do we know how to interfere with the creative process. What we can do is influence what information goes into our hypotheses – of what we expect to normally happen in certain situations. Expectations that go beyond natural laws like on earth an apple will drop from the tree to the ground. One such fundamental expectation is the question about the nature of humans. Should I expect a welcome and support from a stranger or should I expect violence. But these expectations – social and cultural norms – can get far more detailed in the dictate how one should generate ones world.

We know from early interactions with First Nation communities in North America e.g. that they were proud that they could turn even a beast from their most fierce enemy into a human being they’d award membership in their community. It was a lengthy process in which the person was reduced to the state of an infant before they were taught in the same way the community would teach their children. Basically, they changed what existing information became the basis of the hypotheses going into the person’s world generation process, substituted it with the information contained in their way of doing thing.

So, to create any society, the future members must align their world generation process and they do it by aligning the existing knowledge that becomes the basis of the hypotheses that guide the world generation process. This leaves for now two questions: How much knowledge must be aligned? And what would the nature of the information be that all members of a group would agree to use?

Regarding the former, the smaller and tighter a group is, the broader will be the amount of information be that is collectively used in the individual world generation process. The more details of the generated world will be pre-defined. As groups, networks, societies get bigger, the more outside information will enter the world generation process, making the resulting models of the members more diverse. What’s a good thing, as the ability to form societies has developed to offset the high risks for the individual of conducting random searches, the kind of search that offers the biggest reward. The more randomly diverse the self-generated worlds, the more randomly diverse the searches conducted in them. Forming society thus is a balancing act between aligning the self-generated world to such a degree that common goals can be defined and keeping the same self-generated worlds of the members diverse enough that the high rewards of random searches can still be expected.

Regarding the latter: There’s more than one way to achieve alignment. One is the use of force or the threat thereof. That’s the way that e.g. the Catholic Church went in the Middle Ages and beyond when it threatened each person not abiding by its world view with death. For this to bring about the desired alignment in the members one of the information you must force on them is the belief that reality isn’t something self-generated but a shared reality exists that has been created by an outside source for all. Hence, Catholicism in the Middle Ages taught people that God created them to fill the position they are in and striving to go beyond this station would not only be futile but a crime against God.

The other way is to find a consensus between all the members that allows all of them unequivocally to not just accept or tolerate but support the use of a certain set of data for world generation by all members alike. Because only then they will actually do it and thus create the conditions required for a society to work.

What happens when we have no consensus about what information can be accepted by all while the entity with the monopoly on force isn’t using it to force a set of data on people as it once did because it’s not right to force the will of a few on everyone, is what we can see right now. Large groups dissolve. That’s why we need to find a complete package that we agree upon in good faith to support all. The concept of the fair society. And that’s what I want to discuss with you here from now on.

So, talk to me. Comment. Share your thoughts, share from the perspective of the model of the world you live in.

To watch this post as a video, go here.

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