Evolutionary Philosophy

EPC Generation 3 — Mental Immunity

11/2/2023

The Evolutionary Philosophy Circle I’ve started with David Sloan Wilson’s ProSocial World is just about to start our fourth “generation” of activity (which is sort of like a semester), so I wanted to finish recapping what we’ve done so far. As I said in the last two posts, we first took a whirlwind tour of the different branches of philosophy in generation 1 to see how the theory of evolution affects them all. Then, in generation 2, we took a look at another holistic worldview (Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy) to see how it differs from the worldview we are building with evolutionary philosophy. For generation 3, we dove deeper into one branch of philosophy to further develop our thinking there. We looked at the philosopher Andy Norman’s new theory of mental immunity, which attempts to improve epistemology (the norms around what should count as good knowledge production) by arguing for a new way of looking at ideas and our mental processes that deal with them.

Back in January of 2022, I reviewed Andy’s book that introduced this idea — Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. I found it so interesting that I devoted two long blog posts to covering it. (See here and here.) I wasn’t alone in this interest either. Andy had many, many discussions about his book during the publicity tours he did for it, and he also organized a symposium in the online magazine This View of Life (now a part of ProSocial World) to gather thoughts about his book from a variety of philosophers and scientists. Andy and I agreed to invite all of these essay writers to discuss their thoughts with our Evolutionary Philosophy Circle, and that constituted our third generation of activity. After 14 weeks of deep readings and discussions, I put together a list of links and summaries for all of the essays we considered, which you can see below.

Please note that if you are interested in watching the recorded discussions that we had about these essays, you can find links for those by joining our Circle. Our fourth generation of activity will follow this format of organized essays and discussions around a general topic (this time featuring evolutionary ethics) so now’s a great time to join in for that! Anyway, on to the summaries for generation three:

Week 1

Speaker — Andy Norman
Article — The Science of Mental Immunity Has Arrived
Summary — Minds have immune systems. Mounting evidence and novel arguments suggest this claim is quite literally true. Evolved systems have to defend themselves against internal and external threats. The body’s immune system is an evolved solution to this problem. Evolutionary theory predicts that comparable systems will be found at many diﬀerent levels of selection. Look for such systems and you can ﬁnd them at work protecting cells, organs, and bodies, nations, cultures, ideologies, religions, and minds. These entities have “immune systems” too. The mind’s immune system—its capacity to ward oﬀ problematic information—is implemented somehow in the brain. We can all beneﬁt from “cognitive immunotherapies”: evidence-based interventions designed to boost and modulate mental immune response.

Week 2

Speaker — David Sloan Wilson
Article — Cultural Immune Systems as Parts of Cultural Superorganisms
Summary — The concept of ‘organism’ must be expanded to include groups as organisms. When we do this, the concepts of both ‘mental’ and ‘immunity’ can be seen in a new light. Two key concepts for the purposes of this essay are multilevel selection (MLS) and major evolutionary transitions (MET). Today, every entity that biologists call an organism is regarded as a MET. From a multilevel perspective, the word “mental” cannot be restricted to individual cognition. Human moral systems make great sense from this perspective. Deviant behaviors are defined as cheating—a form of cancer—and punished. Foreign beliefs are tagged and removed, like infectious diseases. This does not distinguish fact from fiction. Instead, all beliefs and practices with fitness value (the survival and reproduction of the group) are distinguished from all beliefs and practices that pose a threat to fitness. Regardless of the past and present, there is an urgent need for a moral system that defines “us” as the whole earth, including the biosphere in addition to humans.

Week 3

Speaker — David Samson
Article — A Tribalism Vaccine
Summary — In my book Our Tribal Future, I offer an operational definition of a tribe, which is: a meta-group – an intersubjective belief network – that uses symbols as tokens of identity signaling membership in a coalition. The ‘Tribe Drive’ leverages our species' capacity to create and transmit memes in a way that allows individuals, with no prior interaction, to see strangers as trustworthy. Religion, language, music, ritual, consumer behavior, clothing, and food can all emit such signals. Humanity had a new way to bootstrap cooperation, but the feature contained a bug. All humans today have inherited identity protective cognition — the tendency to unconsciously dismiss evidence that does not reflect the beliefs that predominate in our own groups. Tribalism is the belief that different identity-based coalitions possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another. To vaccinate the world from the tribalism virus, we need herd immunity of people who hold metabelief as their sacred value pegged to a single “community of inquiry” tribal identity. This is what I call a Metatribe. The syringe delivery system for the tribalism vaccine needs to leverage humanity's penchant for social norm creation and regulation to facilitate its spread. Historically, tribal creeds have served this purpose. What then, is an effective Metatribal creed for the long-awaited tribalism vaccine?

I am a member of Team Human.
Our creed is that beliefs can change in light of evidence.
We are a community of inquiry where beliefs are deemed reasonable if they can withstand reasonable challenges to their veracity.
We are the Metatribe.

Week 4

Speaker — Ian Robertson
Article — Mental Immunity, The Group Mind, and Existential Fear
Summary — As a highly social species, humans have an evolved tendency to favor the ‘in-group.’ This trait significantly impacts our immunity, or lack of it, to false or harmful information. The emerging science of cognitive immunology must take full account of this fact. 'Minimal groups' have no purpose, past, or future. Real groups have a purpose – family protection, soccer team victory, religious dominance, or national prestige — they have long histories, rationales that usually involve trying to get a competitive advantage over other groups, and they have a strong sense of continuity into the future. Even in ‘minimal groups’ people allocate rewards to their ingroup and impose sanctions on the outgroup, even when the overall costs and benefits of their group-favoring choices are to everyone’s detriment! There appears to be a primitive drive in the human mind to define oneself in a group instantly and then automatically favor that group at the expense of an outgroup. Feeling bad about oneself makes people more tribal. It’s as if in compensation, the collective ego of the ingroup offers some protection. The fear of our extinction seems especially potent. One theory to explain this goes by the rather forbidding name of Terror Management Theory. The core idea of terror management theory is that we work hard to gain self-esteem and support for our worldview so as to ward off existential anxiety and that work pays off. It can be hard for millions of people to feel part of a group, but one surefire way of making that happen is to remind them of their mortality through fear and threat.

Week 5

Speaker — Barry Mauer
Article — Bad Ideas Recruit the Mind’s Immune System to Protect Themselves
Summary — Some bad ideas get past a mind’s defenses and then hijack the mind’s immune system. This process is similar to what happens with metastatic cancer, which spreads from one location in the body to a distant one. Metastatic cancer “flips” elements of the body’s immune system, recruiting them to defend tumors and attack the body. When bad ideas hijack the mind’s immune system, these bad ideas become resistant to correction and the mind becomes susceptible to more bad ideas. Bad ideas spread in the mind and can eventually take it over. A pathological belief is one that “is likely to be false, to produce unnecessary harm, and to be held with conviction and tenacity in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is likely false and will produce unnecessary harm.” A group with a hijacked mental immune system is a cult; in a cult, the group’s mental immune system is altered to protect the group’s bad ideas at the expense of the group’s wellbeing, the wellbeing of its members, and of those around it. Institutions such as schools and journalism play outsized roles in enhancing or corrupting the mental immune systems of individual people and of groups.

Week 6

Speaker — Steije Hofhuis
Article — Witch-Hunting: A Lethal Cultural “Virus”?
Summary — Historians are traditionally dismissive of comparisons between the evolution of living nature and history. History is thought to be far too complex and capricious to be captured in general principles. But what if we take the aforementioned comparisons seriously? Viruses are known to be extremely well adapted to reproduce within their environment. They make people cough and sneeze, for example, which enables them to infect others through the air. It appears like an intelligent design, but in fact, it was only a blind Darwinian process that did the manufacturing: variants that were accidentally adapted were cumulatively preserved in repeated rounds of selection. Biologists call this “design without a designer.” “The implementation of witchcraft persecutions spread contagiously, but any politically coordinated effort with that direct intent was conspicuously lacking.” It was a cultural design without a designer. The question of what function ideas such as the witches’ sabbath, flying witches, or child witches had for the people involved, or for their communities, does not necessarily bring us any further. For them, it was often harmful. But when we look at it from the reproductive angle of the witch-hunting phenomenon itself, all of it makes perfect functional sense. These cultural variants were ingeniously adapted to make this cultural “virus” spread.

Week 7

Speaker — Ed Gibney
Article — Evolving My View on Mental Immunity
Summary — The actions of the so-called mental immune system may just be part of a larger, more generalizable function of the brain. When our minds swarm with doubts, it may be easier to think of this as problem-solving for our predictive worldview, rather than the actions of some kind of neuronal version of white blood cells. That way, the swarming of reinforcements that I personally experienced can also be explained by the same mechanism. This seems more parsimonious. Inoculation theorists have shown that exposure to weakened information threats will tend to “inoculate” a mind against more formidable versions of those same threats. But perhaps this isn’t inoculating a mind against bad ideas so much as scaffolding a worldview in another rigid direction. If I’m right, then mind inoculation will only work if it is received from a trusted source. Even if the weakened idea is a “bad” one, whenever we perceive the inoculation as coming from “them” then the inoculation should not work as intended. In fact, don’t we see this all the time with the sharing, belief, and disbelief of ideas among friends, foes, and relatives? Andy’s definition of mental immunology is, “The mind’s wherewithal for warding off bad ideas.” That’s just a very broad description of a wide-ranging function. We could easily adopt this and still say that the brain can perform this function using general mechanisms, even if there isn’t a specifically evolved mental immune system, like there is for bodily immune systems. If so, how can we highlight this metaphor’s similarities without brushing over the differences and leading people astray? Perhaps making a clear list of the differences between bodily immunity and cognitive immunity may actually help with getting past some resistance to this project.

Week 8

Speaker — Steve Gilbert
Article — Changing A Belief Means Changing How You Feel: The Role of Emotions in Cognitive Immunology
Summary — Psychotherapists have long known, and science has now confirmed, that there is no thought without feeling. All thought is affect-laden and important personal beliefs very much so. Changing your mind does indeed mean changing how you feel, especially so for beliefs, which are more emotion-sensitive than knowledge. Thus, changing a salient belief, toxic or otherwise, is often too heavy a lift for reason alone. Feelings “may be experienced as internal evidence for beliefs which rivals the power of external evidence from the environment” and may be given more weight than reason and evidence. Feelings also guide attention. Donovan Schaefer discusses this in the context of cogency theory: “To say an argument is cogent doesn’t mean, exactly, that it’s true. It means it appeals, or it’s compelling.” So, what might this look like in practice? Client-centered therapy centers on active (i.e., reflective) listening, empathy, and clarification of content and affect. Cognitive therapy focuses on how thoughts and beliefs cause feelings and how modifying thoughts can change feeling-states. My subsequent career as a psychotherapist taught me that both approaches are more powerful when combined than either alone. This review of the role of emotion in belief suggests that debunking may be more effective if intervention begins with a relaxation exercise, followed by an empathic conversation centered on the person’s feelings about their beliefs, next an elicitation of commitment to the values of open-mindedness and evidentiary belief, and lastly a presentation of disconfirming evidence and reasoned argument. All too often, the cart is put before the horse.

Week 9

Speaker — Melanie Trecek-King
Article — Teach Skills, Not Facts
Summary — Why are nearly all undergraduate students, regardless of major, required to take science? The obvious answer seemed to be to foster science literacy and critical thinking … but what does that mean? Science is so much more than a bunch of facts to memorize. It’s a process. It’s a way of learning about the world, of trying to get closer to the truth by subjecting explanations to testing and critically scrutinizing the evidence. It’s not just what we know; it’s how we know. Basically, science is good thinking. To equip students with the skills necessary to evaluate claims, I provide them with a toolkit, appropriately summarized by the acronym FLOATERS. This stands for Falsifiability, Logic, Objectivity, Alternative explanations, Tentative conclusions, Evidence, and Replicability. Another of the most important lessons for students is about the limits of perception and memory. We often fail to recognize that our perceptions are subjective and highly biased and that our memories are flawed and unreliable. After students have a better appreciation of how flawed their thinking can be and the importance of skepticism, we turn to information literacy. It’s important that students recognize the limits of their knowledge and learn how to be good consumers of information more broadly. Science literacy is about more than memorizing facts. Instead of teaching students what to think, a good science education teaches them how to think.

Week 10 — RESCHEDULED DUE TO ILLNESS

Week 11

Speaker — Zafir Ivanov
Article — Reframing Mental Immunity
Summary — I think with a slight reframing of this idea we will have a more accurate diagnosis of susceptibility to infodemics, which can lead to better treatment outcomes. The immune system is a layered system of defence. The innate immune system includes physical barriers such as the skin and mucous membranes lining the digestive and respiratory tracts as well as an immediate nonspecific smothering response by defensive cells. Beyond the innate defences comes the adaptive or acquired immune system where antibodies are custom made to the invader. Mark Sheller proposed the behavioural immune system, in which aspects of our behaviour aids in the prevention of infection to the point where it makes sense to think of these behaviours as a first line of defence of the immune system. Karen Shanker and her colleagues realized that behaviours associated with avoiding and combating infection affects not just the individual but also the group. They suggested broadening the behavioural immune system to the inclusive behavioural immune system. I think this is what our response to threatening ideas is built on. I propose that we stop referring to the mind having an immune system of its own and instead reframe this as the mind's contribution to our overall immune system. With this slight reframing we can avoid talk of metaphor and focus on more accurately understanding our various responses to harmful information. I also have many concerns about inoculation theory and think this needs to be reframed as well. My main concern is that inoculation theory requires no modification to be weaponized. Instead, generalizable tools that work with almost all ideas are not custom-made vaccines to specific viral ideas, they are much more like broad-spectrum antivirals. I think our efforts are best focused on developing new and refining existing tools with reduced weaponizability as a design criterion. Tools that are simple with obvious benefits that are likely to gain wide acceptance. Tools such as the New Socratic Method, Reason’s Fulcrum, Scout Mindset, the Pro-Truth Pledge, and Intuitive Bayesian Reasoning all have an antiviral effect.

Week 12

Speaker — Luke Johnson
Article — Paradigms in the Cognitive Sciences
Summary — In his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn developed a philosophy of science that has since influenced many an intellectual through the idiomatization of the phrase “paradigm shift.” In Chapter 2 of Structure, Kuhn introduces the criteria for something to serve as a paradigm: it must be “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity… [and] sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.” Counterinstances to existing paradigms are viewed as anomalies until sufficient evidence and “extraordinary research” lead to paradigm shifts as a result of new theories that account for these “anomalies.” Essentially invented by Andy Norman, PhD, a philosopher of science, Cognitive Immunology is most extensively articulated in his book, Mental Immunity. But is Cognitive Immunology a distinct field of science, and if so, how? Or is it a pre-paradigm school of thought? What crisis is cognitive immunology addressing and what paradigm or paradigms it is challenging? Science communicators, public health officials, and educators have struggled to address the crisis of misinformation with the application of existing science. Cognitive Immunology seems to be addressing the failure of other cognitive sciences to provide solutions to the ideological polarization, extremism, and culture war of our time. Only time will tell if cognitive immunology spurs a scientific revolution, to what degree it influences human progress, and how it fits into the history of science.

Week 13

Speaker — Maarten Boudry
Article — Are Some False Beliefs Good For You?
Summary — We all entertain some false beliefs about the world and about ourselves. Being totally deluded about reality is probably a bad idea, but who could object against some “little follies”, a few judicious falsehoods to sugar-coat the harshness of reality? To phrase the discussion in cognitive immunology terms, we have to look for misbeliefs that are mutualists – a relationship in which the host benefits from the “intruder” – rather than parasites, which only harm their host. Once you’ve done the hard work and weighed the costs and benefits of different follies, it’s time to embrace the most salubrious ones. But of course, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just flip a switch in your brain and decide to believe something. In order to find out which misbeliefs are beneficial and which are harmful, you have to investigate the attendant benefits and downsides. But once you’ve done that, you are no longer in a position to embrace your favorite misbelief, which means that you’re also unable to reap its advantages. Is there any way out of this paradox? For my part, I’m not so sure. Even if you don’t have any objections against untruthfulness per se, how can you foresee all of the consequences and ramifications of your false belief? Reality, as the writer Philip K. Dick argued, is that which, after you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. At the end of the day, would you not prefer to know the truth, warts and all?

Week 14

Speaker — Andy Norman
Article — Do Minds Have Immune Systems?
Summary — Do minds have immune systems? In this paper, we remove several obstacles to deciding this question in a rigorously scientific way. First, we show why the scientific community needs to take up the question. Then, we give the hypothesis a name: the Mental Immune Systems Thesis (or MIST) is the claim that minds do in fact have immune systems. It’s tempting to dismiss this claim as “mere metaphor” – and many do – but that stance turns out to be indefensible. It is at best a well-intentioned stopgap: one that postpones a pivotal reckoning. So how to settle the question? Above all, we need clarity about the meaning of “immune system.” To that end, we examine candidate definitions, nominate one, and show why it makes sense to embrace that definition. We then consider an evolutionary argument for MIST: mental immune systems, so defined, didn’t just evolve, they had to evolve – to protect minded creatures from informational threats. We then detail some of MIST’s testable implications and summarize the extant empirical evidence. Finally, we discuss the prospects of cognitive immunology, a research program that (1) posits mental immune systems and (2) proceeds to examine and explain how they work. MIST, we conclude, is a hypothesis that deserves serious scientific development.

Other Essays in the Mental Immunity Series on This View of Life

The Analogy of/and Inoculation Theory to Mental Immunity by Josh Compton and Sander van der Linden
The Many Faces of Cognitive Immunology by Stephan Lewandowsky
Building Mental Immunity by Nele Strynckx

Post-Generation Comments and Questions

Questions for the MIST by Ed Gibney
Do minds have immune systems? The title question from Andy’s latest paper cannot be answered without more clarification of the MIST. In particular, a definition of the general abstract label “immune systems” needs to be settled upon, a definition of the particular abstract label of a “mental immune system” needs to be agreed upon, and definitions of the component parts of this system such as “mental inoculation”, “mental parasite”, and “mental vaccines” all need to be developed and confirmed. Until the clarification of each of these terms occurs, the answer remains “no” for each and every one of them because new scientific theories remain guilty until proven innocent. Once this philosophical work of defining terms is complete, there are still two options going forward. The first may be to say yes, all of these philosophical definitions are logically consistent and by definition it is obvious or demonstrable that they all exist. This would create a philosophical argument for looking at the world in a particular way using a particular set of words. The second and more difficult option is to define all of these terms in such a way that they create falsifiable and empirically verifiable predictions. This would create a scientific argument that only remains to be tested in order to either be accepted into consensus, refined, or rejected.

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EPC Generation 2 — Evaluating Ken Wilber's Worldview

10/17/2023

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Is there a reason why academic philosophers don't take Ken Wilber seriously?

In my last post, I described the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle I've been running at ProSocial World and I shared a summary of the first generation of activity we undertook. For those first steps, we conducted a brief survey showing how a deep consideration of evolution affects every branch of philosophy. And since I have argued elsewhere that one way to define a worldview is as the sum of one's beliefs across all the branches of philosophy, it follows from this that adopting an evolutionary philosophy will deeply affect one’s worldview.

Our group is still in the midst of considering different aspects of evolutionary philosophy, so our worldview could still be described as unsettled, but for our second generation we decided to look at another fully formed worldview to see how we might analyze, critique, and learn from it. In particular, we decided to look at Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy since several members and leaders within ProSocial World have been involved with that movement and often endorse Wilber’s ideas. I had never heard of Wilber before joining ProSocial and my early explorations into his work did not appeal to me (to say the least). But it is often just as helpful for the formation of groups to say “that is NOT us” as it is to say “THIS is us” so we decided to give Wilber a try.

We had 10 weekly meetings to consider him in the Fall of 2022, but Wilber’s Wikipedia entry lists 30 paperback books where he is the sole author, which altogether have a total of nearly 10,000 pages. So, there was far too much primary source material for our task. As such, and based on recommendations from members of the Integral community, we focused our efforts on a 71-page summary of Ken Wilber that was written by Paul Helfrich called “Ken Wilber’s AQAL Metatheory: An Overview.” At the end of our explorations, we produced 46 pages of research, which are attached below. The research consists of a 9-page report of our findings, a 10-page appendix citing direct quotes to support our findings, and a 27-page appendix quoting other relevant material that we felt was helpful for completing our understanding of Wilber.

I have copied the abstract of our main report below. Please download the full report to read it in its entirety.

What do you think? Have you heard of Ken Wilber before? What do you think of him, either before or after having read our report?

Wilber Report by the EPC.docx
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ABSTRACT

The purpose of this report is to examine the very well documented worldview of Ken Wilber, which has been developing over the last several decades in the many volumes that he has written about his Integral Philosophy. We started our analysis using a framework for worldviews that looks at a person’s positions in the six main branches of philosophy. These positions can also be tied together by a unifying narrative that can be either explicit or implicit. Once we documented all of these elements of Wilber’s worldview, we attempted to analyze it using the three criteria that David Sloan Wilson listed in his essay titled “Evaluating Narratives of Conscious Evolution.” 1. Is the narrative psychologically and emotionally motivating? 2. What does the narrative cause people to do? 3. How well does the narrative comport with current scientific knowledge? In the end, there were serious and substantial points of agreement with Wilber’s worldview that have made our overall efforts worthwhile. However, we believe there are several points in Wilber’s worldview that make our shared goals difficult to reach together. The vision of ProSocial World (PW) is: “To unleash the power of science and inquiry to help us notice what’s within us and between us, to create a more harmonious world for everyone around us.” Some vocal critics in the Integral movement have asked Ken Wilber to update his views based on the latest in evolutionary science. We can only add to that request since Integral Spirituality’s stated goals of understanding life and creating a world that works for all are laudable indeed and deserve as accurate and motivating a worldview as possible.

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Generation 1 in the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle

10/6/2023

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Generation 1 — How Evolution Impacts Different Branches of Philosophy

I’ve mentioned in quite a few different posts now that I’ve been working to create an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle (EPC) on a platform that has been built by ProSocial World. PW is an NGO that was co-founded by the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson who is famous for championing the idea of group selection, so in keeping with that, this PW platform gives tools to groups to help them cooperate better and make meaningful change in the world. One of the common ways these groups act is via 12-week “sprint sessions” that are modelled after Robert Shaffer’s 100-day Rapid Results programs. This also aligns with the length of a semester at a university, but we speak of them in evolutionary terms so we call them “generations” in order to emphasize that they are something that can be varied, selected, and retained as they hopefully improve over the lifetime of the group.

For our generation 1, we spent several weeks going over ProSocial methods (which I discussed previously in theory, and in practice) and we also had an amazing talk from David Edmonds (author of a recent book about the Vienna Circle) about why Vienna and why discussion circles work so well. After that, we had 7 events over 6 weeks, which gave us a brief survey of how evolution impacts different branches of philosophy. We recorded videos of these events and hosted online chats about them on our members-only platform. And while anyone who joins ProSocial can see these recordings in full and engage in the online conversation with our members (currently about 50 people), I also wanted to share a summary of these talks here. That will help old members to remember what we’ve done, new members to catch up, and prospective members to decide whether or not to join. We’ve completed three such generations on very different topics (and are about to start a fourth), so I’ll share similar summaries for other generations in future posts.

The seven talks we hosted were:

“Evolutionary Metaphysics — How This View of Life Can Deeply Alter Other Branches of Philosophy” by Ed Gibney
“Art, Evolution, & Action” by David Sloan Wilson
“Evolution and Art” by Nathalie Gontier
“Mind Germs: Cultural Replicators and the Future of Epistemology” by Andy Norman
“Morality, Religion, and Spirituality from an Evolutionary Perspective” by David Sloan Wilson
An “Examined Lives” Conversation about Evolution and Philosophy
“Evolution and the Social Sciences: Understanding Organizations and Institutions as Major Transitions” by JW Stoelhorst

These were a really wonderful way to kick off this group. They built a lot of momentum for the group and I’m excited to share their main ideas with you now. Enjoy!

1. “Evolutionary Metaphysics” by Ed Gibney
This talk was the first in a series organized by the EPC about how evolution can affect all branches of philosophy. For metaphysics, Ed began by arguing that after examining the most famous philosophical thought experiments in history, he felt that, “The hypothesis of a physical universe survives.” This position of physicalism/naturalism was recently supported by the stoic philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci in his essay “Metaphysics dissolved. Because who needs it?” In that essay, Massimo claims that the job of philosophers should be to synthesize all of the natural knowledge we have, rather than spend time speculating about what else might be out there.

Within this school of thought, Ed shared a favorite paper of his from Dan Dennett which shows how evolution ought to shape this synthesis of what exists. The paper was drawn from the book How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations For Naturalism, which was published in 2017. Dan's paper—“Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism”—was the first entry in this edited collection. Ed shared 9 key passages from this paper, including these 3 quotes:

“Ever since Socrates…the idea of clear sharp boundaries has been one of the founding principles of philosophy [but] Darwin showed us that the sets of living things were not eternal, hard-edged, in-or-out classes.”
“In particular, the demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.”
“There are other philosophical puzzles that can benefit, I suspect, from exploring the no-longer-forbidden territory opened up by Darwin's critique of essentialism. … We can perhaps begin to reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts from more modest ingredients.”

These quotes clearly show how the naturalist view within metaphysics ought to be mindful of the gradual emergence of phenomena in nature. But this, of course, has not been the case in the long history of philosophy. And so, there is much work now to be done in many areas.

Ed then gave several examples from his own work that show how “this view of life” has impacted the philosophy he writes. These included essays about the meaning of life, what good is (ethics), what harm is (politics), how consciousness and free will evolved, and how knowledge (epistemology) is evolving as well.These examples all show how important the evolutionary view of the world is and how it can continue to help us make significant changes to the way philosophy is done.

2. “Art, Evolution, & Action” by David Sloan Wilson
David began by noting how the arts include what we traditionally think of in this sphere—music, dance, painting, sculpture, storytelling—but they should also include rituals and religion as a collection of inspiring activities organized around the sacred. What’s important to consider here is Durkheim’s definition of religion: “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things…which unite in one single moral community, called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

Arts like these have long been considered puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Why are they fitness enhancing? Do these traits exist because of mismatch, spandrels, drift, or as by-products? Or as a sexual display? David has weighed in on this debate by writing about art (including religion) as a group-level cultural adaptation.

To David, multilevel cultural evolution provides a new theoretical foundation for group-level functionalism. The study of the arts as group-level cultural adaptations is more general than just the study of religion, though.Other good examples include works from: Ellen Dissanayake, Kathryn Coe, William McNeill, Steven Brown, Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, and Joseph Carroll. Far from “cheesecake of the mind”, the arts are “vital organs” in the “anatomy and physiology” of cultures that act as “superorganisms”. David finished his brief talk by sharing some good examples of how people are acting on this: the Science to Narrative Chain, StoryAction, New Stories, Story Commons, and InsightShare.

3. “Evolution and Art” by Nathalie Gontier
Natalie’s talk took a look at how art has helped advance human thinking in general and about evolution in particular. She did this be examining how art has helped to depict aspects of the evolution of life and how then these depictions have evolved over time. These depictions are part of the cosmologies of an evolutionary philosophy, where Natalie defined cosmologies as the parts of worldviews concerning the nature of matter, space, and time, and what has happened over the course of natural history.

Nathalie shared four major western cosmologies. The first one was from the Ancient Greeks, which has roots all the way back to the neolithic and the origin of agricultural societies. Typical diagrams from this worldview include wheels of time and chains of being. An example of that is the zodiac. A second cosmology is that of the Romans and the Judeo-Christians. These relied on scales of nature, presenting concepts of chronologies and different categories of pedigrees. But later, with the rise of classical physics, natural history, and the origin of scientific thinking, we see the third cosmology where linear diagrams are changed into more precise timelines and phylogenetic trees. Finally, today, in the fourth cosmology, these views are being changed into networks.

Nathalie presented more details on all of these, looking into the different kinds of artwork that have been introduced and from the three elements that define a cosmology: matter, space, and time. Wheels of time, for example, adhere to a circular notion of time The Romans and the Judeo-Christians introduced a linear notion of time. Classical physics saw the introduction of evolutionary trees which introduce a multi-linear notion of time. And modern physics in evolutionary biology today questions the very existence of time or whether it is multi-dimensional.

In conclusion, Nathalie said that art enables us to depict worldviews, and there is a back and forth where art influences science and science influences art. And therefore, it's very important to choose the right images to convey the right messages, especially when you look into scientific illustrations of evolution.

4. “Mind Germs: Cultural Replicators and the Future of Epistemology” by Andy Norman
Andy began by noting how the roots of philosophy started 2500 years ago with the intentional search for wisdom. Since then, there have been notable successes but we've largely failed to create a human population that is significantly wiser. And the discipline of philosophy has mostly lost sight of its original objective. However, a new form of epistemology that draws from the biological sciences might help. A colloquial way of talking about epistemology is “how do we sort bad ideas from good ideas”. This simple description shows the relevance of this project to what's going on in the world today since there are a lot of people who are learning fake facts online and who are really having trouble distinguishing between sense and nonsense.

Andy described some current cultural assumptions that are causing this “epistemological crisis”. For example, our view that we “have” ideas, as if they were separable from us and we alone have agency over choosing which ones we believe. This discounts the view of ideas as something like bugs or germs that (without intention) can replicate and multiply all on their own. We also tend to regard ourselves as “entitled to our opinions”. This stresses our cognitive rights to the exclusion of our cognitive responsibilities. And since a right is something that you're not supposed to interfere with, and critical thinking does in fact interfere with belief, there's a very short path to seeing critical thinking as trampling on one’s rights. This kind of culture excuses closed-mindedness and ideological rigidity, making us even more vulnerable to infectious nonsense.

Andy then laid out what an alternative might look like, which he called his mental immunity framework. On this view, minds are actually infection-prone colonies of ideas. Mind infections are common. Cognitive contagion is real. But the good news is that our minds actually have immune systems that work to ward off mistaken information. It’s an observable fact that some minds ward off bad ideas better than others, so we need to scientifically understand why some minds are relatively immune to such things and other minds are more susceptible.

Some research about this has emerged from the last 70 years of studying “inoculation theory”. Just as white blood cells swarm an injury, something similar happens when information that people feel is threatening comes along. Their minds generate antibodies and the antibodies of the mind are doubts. When doubts swarm to the scene of a new piece of information that you find distressing, dangerous, challenging, or upsetting, that's your mind's immune system in action. And Andy envisions a world where we develop cognitive immunotherapies to protect vulnerable minds and make humanity substantially wiser and more prone to engage in things that promote our collective flourishing.

5. “Morality, Religion, and Spirituality from an Evolutionary Perspective” by David Sloan Wilson
David began by sharing a memorable quote from the British philosopher Simon Blackburn. David had asked him to define morality as you would in an introductory philosophy course and Simon said, “I think at its simplest, it's a system whereby we put pressure on ourselves and others to conform to certain kinds of behaviors.” So, David noted, there are two sides to morality—one more coercive (pressure on others) and the second more gentle and humane (pressure on ourselves). And this is exactly what you would expect from an evolutionary perspective. Moral systems are somehow designed for the good of the group (defined as within the moral circle). There's a compulsory component and there's a voluntary component.

From a multi-level perspective, this social control has the effect of suppressing within-group selection where cheaters and free-riders can prosper. Instead, between-group selection becomes the dominant evolutionary force. That's the definition of a major transition and it explains just about everything that's distinctively human (for example how violence is 100 times more likely in chimp societies compared to human ones). And these two dimensions of morality must go together—the compulsory dimension makes it safe to express the voluntary dimension. Without the compulsory dimension, the voluntary dimension would be too easily exploited. That accounts for the two faces of morality.

Turning to religion, David noted two major definitions. One is from Durkheim, which is all about moral communities. He called religion, “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, which unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them.” The second definition, of course, is a central belief in supernatural agents. But these definitions are orthogonal to each other. It's possible to imagine evolutionary pluses or minuses for each of them. David then went through several examples of examining religions through this evolutionary lens, all of which showed how religions have adapted to function in their particular ecologies. And in the same way that different cells of our body have the same genes but are differentially expressed, David has produced research that shows how different congregations within the same broad religion can exhibit very different behaviors by means of differential activation of different passages in the Bible.

David finished his sketch of morality by noting the “universal elements of spirituality” that were named by a Catholic and Hindu contemplative named Wayne Teasdale. These are key to a subgroup of ProSocial World called ProSocial Spirituality and they may show how a vital part of spirituality comes from both recognizing the individual as part of something larger than itself and also a willingness to subordinate one's self-interest to a higher good. This straightforwardly makes sense as the psychology of an individual within a group organism and it may just be how we are programmed to think in situations where we are functioning in the context of a highly cooperative group.

6. An “Examined Lives” Conversation about Evolution and Philosophy
"Examined Lives" sessions are conversational and meant to produce "mosaics" of individual viewpoints, so that when viewed collectively they yield a greater understanding. These sessions usually start off with a brief five-minute introduction on a topic followed by a few thought-provoking open-ended questions just to kind of get the ball rolling. Then a few follow-up questions can be inserted from time to time just to help refocus, redirect, or re-energize the discussion.

The topic for this session was broadly about the science of evolution, but the conversation mostly revolved around the ideas of what "biophilosophy" or "evolutionary philosophy" are as opposed to the "philosophy of biology" or the "philosophy of evolution". The latter (Philosophy of X) brings philosophical tools to a field to help clarify thinking there. The general consensus in this meeting, however, was that this group brings learning from the science of evolution to classic philosophical questions. This fits the format of X Philosophy, which in this case is Evolutionary Philosophy.

Many other points were raised about the implications of this. By tying ourselves to the science of evolution, we seem to tie ourselves to a metaphysics of naturalism which considers evidence received by the senses. Just like evolutionary psychology, this can be thought of as a lens or approach. Noting “Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning”—where absolute ignorance replaces absolute wisdom as the starting point for the universe—has all sorts of philosophical implications. Being aware of the proximate vs. ultimate distinction from evolution can help clear up confusion in other fields. The universal mechanisms in evolution of variation, selection, and retention can be fruitfully applied to many problems. This is different than mere “change” which is sometimes implied by casual usage of the word evolution. Tinbergen’s four questions (function, mechanism, phylogeny, and ontogeny), which is a standard tool in evolution to understand the entirety of a biological phenomenon, also provides a comprehensive framework for many issues in philosophy. The field of evolution is the properly large umbrella under which other sciences and philosophical subdisciplines can fit. In fact, the concept of evolution can even be applied beyond the realm of biology, which only considers living organisms. The gradualist view of life that comes from considering evolution is something very different than the essentialist view of life that came from the Vienna Circle studying physics. It helps cross the fuzzy boundary between life and non-life. Understanding the “major evolutionary transitions” that life has gone through sheds a lot of light on why the world is the way it is, where it might go next, and how it might do so.

7. “Evolution and the Social Sciences: Understanding Organizations and Institutions as Major Transitions” by JW Stoelhorst
JW sketched the contours of an understanding of organizations and institutions as “major evolutionary transitions.” And at the same time he tried to give an idea of how this might improve social science theory. He noted that one famous question in economics is simply “Why do firms exist?” In fact, Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on this topic. But it was largely in contrast to markets. Markets are efficient, so why then would firms exist? Oliver Williamson won another Nobel Prize in economics for this topic, also framing the question of why firms exist as an alternative to the market. So, this runs very deep in the field.

However, where might we go if we ask this question from an evolutionary explanation? We can start with Tinbergen's four questions. There are both proximate and ultimate explanations. And within the ultimate explanations there's a functional explanation and a phylogenetic explanation. So, “Why do firms exist?” This calls for us to develop a functional explanation complemented by a phylogenetic historical evolutionary explanation. (Perhaps a Nobel Prize is waiting for this.)

Another question to consider is how could or should we think of firms? Firms are in some sense higher-level collective entities so if you start with individuals that are competing, then something like a firm is an organized unit of individuals. In this sense, it is a collective entity, a higher level of organization. That quickly brings one to the so-called major evolutionary transitions (MET) and for JW there is a very close resemblance between these METs as discussed by Smith and Szathmary and our understanding of firms. This, then, also brings in the topics of multi-level selection as well as social dilemmas and collective action problems. So, the evolutionary lens brings a rich set of questions to consider.

JW went into further detail about each of these questions and concepts. And for social scientists this involves a new quote-unquote language. The participants in this session may be familiar with this language, but for JW, there is much work to be done in his field to spread this kind of thinking. And this brings in even broader topics such as moral psychology (studying how individuals react in collective action problems), and politics (how governance is accomplished both within firms and also across firms within societies).

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Back to Work

9/20/2023

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Hi all — it's been a while since I've been able to regularly post to this blog, but it's time to get back into the swing of things. I've missed it!

Back in March of 2022, I announced that I was going to be starting an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with David Sloan Wilson's non-profit group called Prosocial World. Then, in August of 2022, I mentioned that I was moving to Vienna with my wife who had received a job with the United Nations. Those have both gone very well and I'm settling into a good groove now but these things sure have kept me super busy. Especially since we've had over 20 visitors to Vienna since we moved here who were excited to see this amazing city. Und, mein Deutsch ist jetzt nicht sehr gut, aber ein bisschen besser jeden Tag!

What I didn't mention before is that I have also been redoing my entire house in England, essentially taking everything out of it in order to reconstruct it as a modern, environmentally friendly home that should be a great place for writing and relaxing some day. I've got a long way to go on the house (it basically still looks like the pictures above on the inside), but I realize now that this is a good metaphor for doing philosophy. Clearing out the old to make room for a new, logically-constructed layout using the best information we've got now. All in the hopes of creating an even better place for thinking. I've been fortunate to do this both figuratively and now literally.

I have several things to post about what I've been doing with the online philosophy group. I have a couple of new writing projects to share. And it's looking more and more like I'll have a major publishing announcement to make soon. But for now, I just wanted to get back in the swing of things and get these website muscles working again. Thanks for reading along and I look forward to reconnecting with you all soon. Please take the opportunity to tell me what you've been up to in the comments below. I'd love to hear!

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Evolving My View on Mental Immunity

1/13/2023

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Hi all, and Happy New Year! It's been several months since I've managed to post anything on my website, but that's only because I've been far too busy with life and other outlets for my writing. I mentioned in my last post about the Vienna Circle that my wife and I were planning to move to Vienna and that has gone off without a hitch. After 10 weeks here, we're fairly settled and I can hopefully get back to regular writing activities again soon. I've been doing a lot with my Evolutionary Philosophy Circle that's being run in David Sloan Wilson's Prosocial World, and I'll have a lot more to say about that very soon. But in the meantime, I've just published an article about "mental immunity" and I wanted to share it here along with some background.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a two-part review of Andy Norman's new book Mental Immunity. (See here for part one and part two.) Andy and I have been acquaintances for years and we had lots of other conversations about this review before and after I wrote it, and then he and I joined forces to help run the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with David Sloan Wilson. In addition to that, Andy has been doing TONS of speaking, organizing, and promoting for his work on mental immunity (see his website for just a hint), which has included coordinating a series of essays about the topic being published in the online magazine This View of Life (TVOL for short). I'm not sure exactly how many essays are going to be part of this symposium (they're still gathering them), but so far six have been published and mine is the latest one.

These rest of the essays will be published about once a week over the next few months, so be sure to sign up to the TVOL newsletter if you want to catch them all. If there's something you'd particularly like to say about this issue, send me an email and we can discuss getting you published in this series as well. I'm also working on getting a discussion group going about this series, so be sure to follow along for more on that. In the meantime, here are the links to all the essays. They are all standalone pieces so no need to read all of them in any kind of order, but Andy's introduction is useful and then be sure to let me know what you think of mine in the comments below. Enjoy!

The Science of Mental Immunity Has Arrived by Andy Norman
Cultural Immune Systems as Parts of Cultural Superorganisms by David Sloan Wilson
The Analogy of/and Inoculation Theory to Mental Immunity by Josh Compton and Sander van der Linden
Bad Ideas Recruit the Mind’s Immune System to Protect Themselves by Barry Mauer
Changing a Belief Means Changing How You Feel: The Role of Emotions in Cognitive Immunology by Steven P. Gilbert
Evolving My View on Mental Immunity by Ed Gibney

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Vienna, Circles, and 5 Reasons Why Groups Thrive

8/3/2022

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Over the last few blog posts, I introduced a new Evolutionary Philosophy Circle that I have been co-founding, which was built using the theory of the Prosocial method. I wrote about how that project was going in practice, and then shared the first talk I gave to that group, which showed how evolutionary metaphysics can deeply alter all other branches of philosophy. The organisation of this new group was deeply influenced by the fact that just before I was recruited to work on it I happened to have read David Edmond's fantastic book The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle. Why was I reading that book? I'll tell you more about that at the end of this post.

Since the Vienna Circle made for such an inspiring example of what a philosophy group could do, I thought I'd invite David Edmonds to speak to our new group about them. Not only did he accept, but he also ditched the usual talk that he gives about philosophy for this book, and instead, he shared with us a new theory he had for why Vienna was so unusually successful. The Vienna Circle may be rather famous among philosophers, but it was actually just one element of an extraordinary profusion of cultural and intellectual projects that occurred in Vienna during the first few decades of the 20th Century. Edmonds likened this to Edinburgh in the 18th century, Florence in the 14th & 15th centuries, and Athens in 400 BC.

After first acknowledging that the Vienna Circle members themselves would only consider a theory meaningful if it could be tested, David shared his hypothesis for what made Vienna special, which included five key ingredients.

Money — Perhaps the most prominent member of the Vienna Circle was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who happened to also be one of the richest men in Austria. He didn't exactly fund the Vienna Circle, but he and his family were emblematic of the kind of wealth that had circulated around Vienna for centuries, giving patronage to so many cultural and intellectual pursuits. This long history of empire gave Vienna a lot of assets to work with.
Politics — The Vienna Circle met regularly between 1924 and 1936 and it's no accident that this was during the interwar years between the fall of the Hapsburg Empire and the rise of National Socialism. Massive inflation wiped out much of Austria's wealth. The loss of the Great War had been a great humiliation. And these are the kinds of circumstances that bring out extremes. Nobody could be politically apathetic at a time like this.
Ethnicities — Over half of the Vienna Circle were Jews who, as a people, were only a few generations removed from ghettos. This had unleashed a tidal wave of energy and enthusiasm in people who were desperate to assimilate into a vibrant society. But it wasn't only Jews. As the center of a centuries-old empire, Vienna was a true melting pot filled with Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Slovenes, Serbs, and native Austrians, all of whom brought a wide variety of ideas together.
Circles — None of these assets, fervour, or diversity would create something new, however, if there wasn't an intermingling of communities. Ideas remain stuck in place if they only persist in monocultural ghettos (along any variable of culture you can imagine). So, where did this intermingling occur in Vienna? This is worth an extended quotation from David Edmonds' lecture:

"You might expect that a key institution in the spread of ideas in Vienna would be the University of Vienna — the pre-eminent university in Austria, and before that, the pre-eminent university in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But in fact, the University of Vienna was a bastion of conservativism and operated using rigid racial quotas. Professors were unapproachable and did not encourage interaction with students. So, no, the transmissibility of ideas took place elsewhere and there were two main routes. The first one is illustrated [in the picture at the top of this post]: circles! The Vienna Circle actually met around a long table; it really should have been called the Vienna rectangle. But a “circle” was a more or less formal group of people who met to discuss a particular topic. The Vienna Circle was only one of many such circles. And these circles flourished in Vienna precisely because the official lectures in the university did not lend themselves to free discussion. So, crucially, many people were members of more than one circle. Carnap, for example, went to a circle run by the philosopher Gomperz, which covered economics, politics, and psychoanalysis, as well as philosophy. That was held on a Saturday. He went to another one on a Wednesday night, a circle that was run by the psychologists Karl and Charlotte Bühler. And many members of the Vienna Circle also went to Karl Menges mathematical circle. Circles had very different ways of operating. Some were more formal than others. Some were right-wing, others were left-wing. Some were more welcoming than others. Some did not include women. As for the Vienna Circle, this was effectively run by the German-born Moritz Schlick and Schlick chose whom to invite. And if he took a dislike to you, you would be excluded, as Karl Popper was to find out to his cost."
Coffee — In addition to the formal and informal circles, the second mode of transmission for ideas was via the famous coffee houses of Vienna. Here you could play chess, read newspapers, eat pastries and strudel, or drink a cup of coffee all day long. The coffee houses acted as a sort of democratic club with an extremely cheap price of admittance. And there were heaps of them! There were possibly more than 1,000 in Vienna during the 1920’s and 30’s. This is not a sprawling city, either, so people were continually bumping into others they knew as they floated from cafe to cafe where different groups usually met. Many coffee houses even had the practice of reserving a “stammtisch” or "regular's table" for these welcoming discussions. And unlike in a university or other formal setting, the coffee shops offered a more relaxed environment where tentative views could be floated and wild theories could be exchanged.

These elements make a lot of sense to me. They remind me of the stories I often read about San Francisco and the unique success of Silicon Valley when I lived there in the 1990s. Could this theory be tested, however, as the Vienna Circle might insist? Well, David Edmonds cited the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines who have been studying the success of cities, and they have broadly reached the same conclusion: what is required for ideas and economies to flourish is interaction, interactivity. That’s clearly something that Vienna had in abundance, and something others would do well to copy.

For those of us that want to bring about a more Prosocial World, the question then becomes whether we can recreate this online. With an ability to draw people from all over the world, we can clearly meet the first three criteria in David Edmonds' hypothesis. There are a wealth of ideas out there from a diverse group of people who are all highly motivated to change the failing politics we see everywhere. The difficulty, then, is getting a profusion of circles going where people can intermingle in a relaxed and productive manner. How do you best encourage that?

I've mentioned before that the philosophy circle I'm leading is just one of many such groups establishing themselves on the Prosocial Commons. We've all just taken a slight break at the end of our first 12-week generation of activity (kind of like a semester break in between courses at a university), and a few of us have joined a "steering committee" to review what we have learned and help take the next steps ahead. David Edmonds' presentation — which you can watch in full below — will surely give us something to think about.

This is an enormously exciting opportunity to me, and one that's about to be informed by much more in-depth research on Vienna. I mentioned at the top of this post that I would say why I had been reading David Edmonds' book in the first place, and that is because my wife and I were considering a move to Vienna. Well, I'm very happy to report now that my wife was recently offered a job there with the United Nations, which she has accepted. So, we'll be heading to Vienna in early November. If any of you want to come for a visit, I'll do my best to get a stammtisch set up where we can have a great long chat about all of this. Prost!

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Evolutionary Metaphysics: How This View of Life Can Deeply Alter Other Branches of Philosophy

7/3/2022

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This is the talk I gave to the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle on May 24, 2022. The EPC was a new group at this time, modeling itself after the accomplishments of the famous Vienna Circle. But rather than being inspired by revolutions in physics, as the Vienna Circle was in the 1920s, the EPC is inspired by the latest developments in the science of evolution. This talk was the first in a series organized by the EPC about how evolution can affect all branches of philosophy.

Hi all. I’m going to be talking about evolutionary metaphysics today. A few days ago, I sent out an article from Dan Dennett that will be the center of this talk. But before I get to that, I have a little prologue to give about the topic of metaphysics in general. And then afterwards, I'll dive more into some applications we can derive from Dan Dennett's paper, based on some of the work that I've been doing in philosophy over the last several years.

So, when the Vienna Circle first started meeting, David Edmonds said in his book about them that they spent months going line-by-line through this book by Ludwig Wittgenstein known as the Tractatus. One of our group members shared a really interesting New Yorker piece about Wittgenstein last week that really drove home how kind of mysterious and up and down this book was. Wittgenstein himself disowned many of the ideas in it by the end of his life, and he wrote another book that was published after his death that refuted much of the Tractatus. But the most famous line in the Tractatus is the very last one in the book, which is this: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”

This sentence probably best represents the attempts that the Vienna Circle made for metaphysics, knowledge, and epistemology in general. And what they meant by this sort of either obvious or cryptic sentence is that they were aiming to create a perfect language and a perfect knowledge that was based in reality just as much as the physics of their time was. (Or so they thought.) And if you couldn't speak about something that perfectly, well then don’t talk about it at all. It must be passed over in silence. Of course, they ended up failing in that pursuit. And philosophers often talk about all kinds of things that don't meet this criteria of perfect knowledge. You can see several of them here.

This leads me to one of my favorite anecdotes from David Edmonds’ book, which was that this member of the group — Otto Neurath — was really insistent on keeping to this rigorous idea of never discussing things we couldn't see, touch, or taste, or what have you. And any time the group wandered into that territory, he would bang his fist on the table and shout “Metaphysics! Metaphysics!” He would apparently do this so often that they sometimes joked he would be better off shouting when they were not talking about metaphysics. Now, he was kind of a big, loud, and sometimes obnoxious guy who, David Edmonds wrote, wouldn't get invited to others’ houses or out for dinner. So, I'm not planning to do any banging on tables like that. But I have thought about maybe making a sign or something and just kind of holding it up in front of the camera if we ever go down that path. I don't actually think that's going to happen too much in our meetings, but it’s something to think about.

But, of course, you can't just shout down philosophical arguments about metaphysics. You have to argue against them. And there have been loads of attacks on this sort of physicalist metaphysics over the centuries. A couple of years ago, I worked through this book from Julian Baggini which listed 100 philosophical thought experiments. It's called The Pig That Wants to be Eaten, and 19 out of the 100 entries were about metaphysics. These presented lots of different attacks on physicalism or attempts to prove the existence of gods, souls, minds, zombies, what have you — anything kind of immaterial that would show that the universe isn't just a natural, physical place. But going through all of these thought experiments from an evolutionary perspective, I found that none of them were persuasive.

So that led me to the current position that I show on my website, which is: “The hypothesis of a physical universe survives.” This is just a kind of “one-sentence summary” of my position on metaphysics. And the wording using “hypothesis” and “survives” has something to do with my thoughts about epistemology. But we can get into those at some other point.

I'm far from alone in this position, however. The stoic philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci had a really interesting post about this recently trying to sum up his own thoughts about metaphysics. His post was called “Metaphysics dissolved. Because who needs it?” He wrote that piece mostly recounting and affirming what he had read in this book from James Ladyman and Don Ross called Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. I haven't read that book yet but basically what they're claiming, according to Massimo, is that the job of philosophers should be to synthesize all of the natural knowledge we have, rather than spend time speculating about what else might be out there. And since Massimo is not one to pull punches, he wrote this phrase that I've quoted here about how David Chalmers and all of his speculations are, quote, “not even wrong.” In other words, they don't even exist in a plane where we could ever test them. So, that article and book are additional arguments for this naturalized metaphysics, which I think of as an important part of evolutionary philosophy.

When I talked about this to a local group a couple of years ago, I presented it this way — that you could just drop the meta from metaphysics. I thought that was maybe just a simple way to get past some of the jargon for the laypeople in the audience that I was speaking to. But, of course, physicalism (or naturalism as it's also known) is still actually a metaphysical position. It’s not as if metaphysics is gone. We don't want to try to to say that. And I also don't mean to say that physics is all that matters either. We’re influenced by much more than just physics. There’s chemistry, and biology, and (germane to this group) evolution.

And that brings me to the paper from Dan Dennett that I shared, which was drawn from this book: How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations For Naturalism, which was published in 2017. Dan's paper — “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism” — was the first entry in this edited collection from a variety of philosophers, and I thought it was just perfect for setting up evolutionary philosophy. I didn't ask ahead of time how many people have read this, but it doesn't matter if you haven't since I'm going to share nine quotes from it now that help summarize the paper and drive home some of the key parts in it.

First, right at the very beginning of the article, Dan makes the point that ever since Socrates, the idea of clear sharp boundaries has been one of the founding principles of philosophy. But Darwin showed us that the sets of living things were not eternal, hard-edged, in-or-out classes.

Still, Dan notes that philosophers have tried to impose their classical logic on the world as if Darwin never existed.

Now, Dan would acknowledge that this may be a methodological rather than a metaphysical prejudice. He's not claiming that philosophers don't believe in evolution. It's just that they tend to think, “We can go back to business as usual, tolerating Darwinian population thinking among those with a taste for such practices but denying its application to our chosen topics.”

But then Dan pushes back on that and says these undeniable borderline cases that exist in nature are not just a nuisance. They typically disable the arguments altogether.

In another passage, he ropes in the biologist Richard Dawkins to back him up on this. He says Dawkins notes there are good reasons for having tidy, discreet names in our taxonomies but we mustn't mistake our convenient agreements for discoveries. There just aren't real, objective joints in nature, as opposed to what Plato said all those years ago.

And that led to a passage in the middle of the essay that was, for me, a real clarion call for what evolutionary philosophy is and can fight against. This sentence said, “In particular, the demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.” So, there's a list of the types of things we can look at as gradualist theories of complex phenomena. And I'll have more to say about some of those topics later.

Next, it’s not just the fact that there are gradualist theories, but this anti-essentialist view gives us the place where we have to start thinking about these things too. In Darwin’s “bubble-up theory of creation,” you have to start at the bottom. Dan has this fantastic quote from a critic of Darwin in the 1800s who said, “Mr. Darwin…by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom.” And as Dan makes clear, this is actually a perfect description of what is going on with evolution in nature. It does start with absolute ignorance, and we should be thinking about philosophy in the same way, starting there, rather than with a priori, perfect concepts from some imaginary higher plane in the universe.

In addition to those two points about gradualism and starting from the bottom, Dan also gives us a kind of operator for how to think non-essentially with this passage on the word ‘sorta’. He asks, why indulge in this sorta talk? Well, the sorta operator is, in cognitive science, the parallel of Darwin's gradualism in evolutionary processes. What he's getting at here is that any time we say something “is” or “was” or “will be”, it becomes much easier to become prone to thinking about things in terms of strong definitions, which are naturally hard edged, in or out things. On the other hand, if you say you know something is sorta intelligent, or sorta conscious, or an idea is sorta knowledge, then you already start to put in a little bit of fuzziness around the edges to help keep that in mind when you're starting to make arguments about these things. Now, obviously, we're not going to talk about sorta all the time, but it's a very helpful label to use occasionally as necessary.

Finally, on the last page of the article, there was this passage that was another real clarion call to me for evolutionary philosophy and what we're doing here. Dan said in the very last paragraph, “There are other philosophical puzzles that can benefit, I suspect, from exploring the no-longer-forbidden territory opened up by Darwin's critique of essentialism. … We can perhaps begin to reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts from more modest ingredients.” I think this is really key for us. When I first read this, I was like “Yes!”, this is what I've been trying to do all this time. But now it was clearer to me how we could explore this no-longer-forbidden territory and reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts into something better.

With that, I want to turn now to how I have worked on applying some of these ideas in the past. Hopefully this will help drive these points home and make this all a little more real and tangible.

I thought I'd start with something simple like the meaning of life. There's a BBC radio program called the Moral Maze where they usually have a panel of people discussing moral issues of the times. Generally, it's infuriating and I'm constantly shouting at the radio when I hear them discuss these things. But back at Christmastime, just this last year, they had a special panel to discuss the meaning of life. Amongst the panel members was the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, if you don’t know, is like the Pope for the Church of England), and they had the president of Humanists UK, Alice Roberts. They also had a writer who was a nihilist, and I believe a Muslim scholar as well.

As they all went through this topic, they had the typical kinds of dogmatic, nihilistic, or relativistic presentations of what they thought the meaning of life was. Alice, in particular, speaking for Humanists UK, presented the view that everyone has their own meaning for life and we’re not against any of them. That can sound fine and non-threatening to outsiders, so I get why she speaks this way, but it spurred me to write something for our local humanist group in our monthly newsletter. I started with the idea from Dan Dennett's paper about Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning, and I said, “In exactly the same way, there is no singular, top-down ‘Meaning of Life’ that comes booming down to us from on high.” As much as we joke about 42 being the answer, something specific like that is just not going to be the solution. Instead, meanings are built up through trials and errors. But only some of these meanings lead towards more survival and flourishing for life on this planet.

So, that's one simple way of looking at a concept in a gradualist manner and coming to a different kind of answer for how you might approach it rather than what is typically presented. And that last sentence in my approach is a reference to the evolutionary ethics that I've worked on, which is the next topic I'll talk about.

So, there's a picture of my very first academic paper, which was about ethics and where I tried to use an evolutionary lens to bridge David Hume’s famous is-ought divide. We can talk about that when we talk about ethics some other time, so I won't go into any details on that, but the conclusion of the paper was that life ought to act to remain alive, that our morals ought to be driving us towards survival. If not, well then the group that's acting on those morals won't survive, and then neither will the morals. That's just a cold hard fact of evolution.

I got a lot of pushback on this article, as you would expect, but one of the common threads that is relevant for today was that a lot of people looked at this bottom line and said morals can't just be about remaining alive. That's too simple. It's got to be about much more than that. It's about well-being, and eudaimonia, and other highfalutin things. And to me, this was a classic example of having an essentialist concept of the word surviving.

This cartoon sort of captures that perfectly. It shows thinking of surviving as considering only the most basic things — eat, survive, reproduce; eat, survive, reproduce. And all of the the lower, non-human animals only ever think this way until suddenly humans stand up and say, “Oh what's it all about?” There must be so much more above that. Well, that’s a clear example of having an essentialist concept of what surviving is all about. You're thinking it's not changing at all throughout the entire history of evolution. And that, of course, isn't true. Non-human animals also have an emerging, gradualist view of all of their needs and what gives them well-being in their own conception. Not that they have words for this or think about it that way, but it's much more than just the most basic things. And that really takes off with humans and culture and what we've developed over the last few hundred-thousand years or so.

So, if that was an essentialist concept of surviving, what I really wanted to illustrate was some kind of gradualist concept of surviving. I wanted to be able to display the slowly growing list of needs that we all have. And so I wrote this paper called “Replacing Maslow with an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs.” It was originally published on patheos.com with the help of two professors of evolutionary psychology, but patheos has since taken down all of the work on their atheist channel so I've had to recreate it on my own website if you want to read the paper in full.

I started with the classic gradual presentation of well-being, which is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. That starts at the bottom with physiological needs, and then goes up through the different levels of safety and security, love and belonging, and self-esteem, before arriving at self-actualization at the top. And just as I said before about morals, if these levels at the top aren’t also driving towards survival, then they're probably not the right needs to be fulfilling. And eventually, they will be deselected.

Now, Maslow never actually presented his hierarchy as a pyramid. And if you read his work, or if you've ever had these moments of self-actualization where you feel alive with meaning and purpose, this is what it actually feels like. The top kind of takes over and the physiological needs at the bottom sort of fall away.

But upside-down pyramids aren’t very stable, so I worked on finding a new, better image. I eventually settled on the typical tree that evolutionary thinkers like to use, where the bottom is a strong trunk that's bringing up nutrients from the bottom. The next level of ‘safety and security’ provides a kind of canopy under which people could be protected. In the two ‘love and belonging’ and ‘self-esteem’ levels in the middle of the tree are the tangled and interwoven branches. And the ‘self-actualization’ at the top pulls us towards something bigger than ourselves, in a way that is similar to the way that the top of a tree is being pulled towards sunlight, gaining energy and strength from the things that are above it.

So, that is a nice way of looking at the gradualist view of survival. But it’s still only one slice of what we want to concern ourselves with. It's only considering the needs of individuals. And only human individuals at that too.

What we really want to concern ourselves with is not just human individuals, but with all of life. And in E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience, he gave us these seven concentric circles that he put together to try to unite all of the fields of biology using the concepts of space and time to grow outwards as you go through the different sub-disciplines. What he ended up doing was presenting a picture of all of biology, which is also essentially a picture of all of life — all of the life that has ever been or ever will be. And so, if we want to concern ourselves with the well-being of life, we should try to work on some kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs for all of these circles.

So, that's what I worked on for the rest of my article. The first thing I had to do was generalize Maslow's levels to make them less about human things and more universal so that they can apply to any form of life.

And, to make a long story short, I sketched out a set of Maslow's hierarchies for all of the different levels of biology. What emerges from this view, is a picture of just how fragile survival would look if you only really focus on the basic needs of individuals, which is kind of the case we are in now with many governments, for example, just looking at GDP and a couple of health indicators and not much else.

Whereas you can imagine a world, instead, where there's robust survival, where we’re trying to fill in and meet the needs of all of life as much as possible. We're starting to see inklings of this with things like the UN Sustainability Goals, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, or the Planetary Boundaries, but those are all kind of just pieces and parts of what I consider to be this comprehensive map of how we could look at the welfare all of life.

So, back to the question at hand from my evolutionary ethics that ended with “Life ought to act to remain alive.” If you take a simplistic, essentialist view of ‘survival’ and ‘acting to remain alive’, as I laid out in that cartoon, then this is a problem. But hopefully, once you have this greater concept of how survival, and meaning, and well-being can grow and grow and continue to expand across all of life, then I think you can have a much bigger notion of what it is for life to act to remain alive. And then my ethics conclusion maybe becomes more acceptable.

Next, once I had something done for evolutionary ethics, I turned to evolutionary politics for my next paper. I wrote this one with my wife, Tanya Wyatt, who is a criminologist. In that discipline, she spends a lot of time reading, writing, and thinking about justice, and how justice systems in liberal democracies are based largely on the work of the utilitarians and John Stuart Mill’s harm principle. This idea of the harm principle originally sounded great. It says you can do whatever you want in society as long as you don't harm others. But without a really good definition of harm, you're not actually helping all that much. Pretty much everyone can claim to be harmed by most actions in one way or another. Even donating to charity might be considered money taken away from someone else in need. And this is how the harm principle has eroded over the next hundred years or so, as more and more people tried to build democracies around this far too simple of an idea. In the late 1990s, a legal scholar named Bernard Harcourt published a seminal paper about this called “The Collapse of the Harm Principle” that noted how, without a good definition of harm, you have no way of trading off one harm for another, or understanding which harm is more important than another one. And so, in the end, you just end up going back to might makes right. Whoever is in power at the time gets to decide which harms matter more than others.

So, my wife and I wrote this paper to try and address this problem. The paper is called “Rebuilding the Harm Principle: Using an Evolutionary Perspective to Provide a New Foundation for Justice.” We took the definition of good that I had written in my previous paper, where good was about making the survival of life more and more robust, and we argued that harm is just going to be the opposite of that. Harm is that which makes the survival of life more fragile. Again, this is a topic for another day to get into all the details here. But once again this is another kind of gradualist view — in this case for harm — that helps us understand the problems that are involved in politics much better than some kind of essentialist definition of harm could ever hope to to provide.

So far, I've only been talking about gradualism in one dimension for these theoretical concepts of good, harm, survival, and the meaning of life. But there's another tool in the evolutionary toolkit that I find really useful for metaphysics. And this helps make gradualism multi-dimensional. That tool is Tinbergen’s four questions. Tinbergen was an ethologist who put these together to help really understand the biological world in depth. His claim is that to understand anything in biology you have to understand these four different parts of the thing being considered. This is a classic two-by-two matrix where one axis maps the difference between ultimate and proximate causes, and the other axis looks at things in a current time frame versus an historic time frame.

So, you end up with these four questions around ‘mechanisms’ (what are the underlying bits and bobs that are chugging away inside of the organism to cause something to happen); what is the evolutionary ‘function’ (what is the long-term purpose that will lead some things to happen); or you can look at the personal development of an entity (that's the ‘ontogeny’) so you know its singular life history; or you can look at the ‘phylogeny’, the evolutionary history that led up to that individual item. Again, to really understand anything in the biological world, you need to look at all four of these pieces. For any of you who have read or listened to David Sloan Wilson at length, this concept comes up pretty quickly. But there are very few philosophers that I've heard who ever talk about Tinbergen, even though philosophers talk about biological phenomena all the time!

As an example of how this can help, I tried to use Tinbergen’s four questions to look at consciousness and free will — two concepts that have long bedeviled philosophers and which are patently biological phenomena. I did this during lockdown over the last year and a half as I was looking for something to do since I couldn't travel anymore. I thought this wouldn’t take me too long, but it ended up being a huge project. This was really fruitful for me, though, as I didn't find anybody else doing anything like this, and there was just so much research to be done. I ended up putting together about 260 pages worth of material, which I collected into this little pdf booklet. This whole project is still in its early stages as only a handful of good readers on my blog have reviewed it, but I'd eventually like to push this out some more and try to get pieces of it published in academic, peer-reviewed journals to see if it continues to hold up.

But regardless of whether my own theories turn out to be useful, this subject is still a good example of using Tinbergen for philosophy questions. So, that's what I wanted to to share here. One of the chapters that I wrote looked at the history of definitions of consciousness and you can see the Dennett operator in the title. The sorta was obviously a nod to Dan, but it's also there because this was not actually a brief history at all. It ended up being 5600 words, which is about ten pages of just definitions. It had 28 different entries from philosophers, 25 entries from scientists, and six entries from different dictionary definitions.

Almost all of these definitions were incompatible or disagreed with one another in some way. As the Wikipedia entry on consciousness notes, this level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people, or else it encompasses a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common. Now, considering what we've been talking about today, it's clear that most of these definitions of consciousness have been looking for an essentialist, in-or-out box that just isn't going to be there. Consciousness is clearly another one of these complex phenomena in the biological world that is much better handled with a gradualist perspective on it (especially one that Tinbergen can give us).

So, to make a very long story short, I tried to work through all of that. I went through the steps of a Tinbergen analysis and came up with a hierarchy of consciousness as it emerges from the origins of life and gradually builds up to the highest levels that are currently attainable in nature. I developed this hierarchy using each of the four questions and that proved to be one of the beauties of using Tinbergen. This four-pronged process ends up providing independent lines of research that you can check against one another. So, if you have a theory of how consciousness emerges according to the mechanisms or the functions, but that doesn't map with how it emerges in the life of a single human or over the evolutionary history of life, then you have to tinker and play around with your theory.

And that's what I was able to do until all of these hierarchies aligned and ended up describing the emergence of all of the different properties that are generally considered within the various definitions of consciousness. Taken altogether, I believe they end up merging and presenting a multifaceted view of a gradualist approach to this extremely complex phenomenon.

The same thing applies for free will as well, since the two concepts are very tightly related. Many others have said you really can't deal with one without dealing with the other. And so I ended up putting together a chart for the emergence of free will through the same gradualist hierarchy.

I don't have much time left so let me just say very quickly that while I was doing all this research, I got the opportunity to publish a book review of Dan Dennett's book with Greg Caruso on free will called Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. That’s ‘deserts’ as in determining whether we deserve to be blamed or punished. This isn’t a book about strawberry shortcake or other types of lovely desserts. Dan and Gregg went back and forth a lot in this book with over 100 exchanges between them. Gregg is one of these classic essentialists. He draws beautiful boxes around all of his very precise definitions and he comes to the conclusion that there is no free will, there is no moral responsibility, you have to get rid of all prisons, and we have to use a public quarantine health model for our justice system. Dan looks at this and says, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's way too much to throw out for this kind of essentialist approach. That's not the way we should be thinking about free will. Dan has his gradualist approach that he defines as achieving a ‘free will worth wanting’. To him, we don't have perfect free will. But we do have something here. Some sorta free will.

Now, Dan holds his own very well against Gregg in my view. But he has never once referenced Tinbergen as far as I know. So, I used my review as an opportunity to introduce that concept into the discussion, which ended with that rhetorical question you can see at the end of this paragraph — is free will more like a geometry proof or a frog? To me, it's pretty obvious that it's more of a complex biological phenomenon like a frog, and it should therefore be treated as such like we've done with other Tinbergen analyses.

I have one last slide here, and this is a work in progress so don't look at this too closely. I'm currently working on a paper on evolutionary epistemology where I’m writing about the evolution of knowledge. This is another classic philosophical problem of essentialism where Plato tried to define it two thousand years ago as “justified, true, beliefs”. Philosophers have been trying for thousands of years to find ideas and beliefs that are able to fit that bill and meet all those essential qualities, but they have ultimately failed to do so and we're still stuck dealing with this problem.

My contention in this paper will be that once again we need to start with Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning and start at the bottom where we have absolute ignorance. Then, I’ll trace the evolutionary history of knowledge mechanisms as we have learned to learn, and developed new ways to learn, until we gradually built more and more robust knowledge. Even after all this evolution, we never quite reach the level of certain truths and falsehoods. We know this from some classic skeptical arguments, which show that we can't ever claim to know truth (so far) because we just can't know the future. Since we can't know what the future will bring, maybe the ideas we have today will some day be overturned. But that's okay! This sort of gradual, evolutionary understanding would give us a much clearer way to talk about knowledge and how strong it is or how fragile it is and why. And I think that conversation could do a lot to overturn all the nonsense we see about fake news and truthiness and the like. At least, that's my hope.

So, that’s the end of my talk. I tried to present why I think evolutionary metaphysics is really inspiring to me, and why it can be really useful for this group in particular. It opens up so many different places that we can take this evolutionary worldview that we've been given, and we can really try to make significant changes to the way philosophy works because of this. I’ll be happy to take your questions now.

What do you think? One of the philosophers in this meeting said immediately after I was done that this could be a clear manifesto for what could be done in evolutionary philosophy. Let me know if you agree or disagree in the comments below.

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Prosocial (In Practice)

6/11/2022

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In my last post, I shared some summary highlights of the process that has been developed by Paul Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, and Steven Hayes for Prosocial World. This process has a lot of scientific rigour (and a Nobel Prize!) behind it, and it has been proven to help groups be more successful. But how does it feel to use it?

As I announced back in March, I was invited to create a new group of philosophers to go through this process, and be part of what David Sloan Wilson has called "a bold new experiment in cultural evolution." Well, we're over halfway through that experiment now, which means we've completed our first run through the Prosocial process and I thought I should report on how it is going.

Eleven different groups have formed on the Prosocial Commons platform and are currently making their way through all this. Recently, I was asked to present to everyone what our philosophy group has done, in order to provide a kind of "case study" for what has gone well or poorly, and what can be shared, discarded, or improved upon. My presentation was given during one of the weekly "Cafe" meetings that provide an opportunity to share general information and ask questions that any group can learn from. The 27-minute recording of my talk can be seen below, and it was described as follows:

The Prosocial process leads groups to understand: 1) the Core Design Principles for successful groups; 2) the ACT matrix for psychological flexibility; and 3) goal setting for focused action. In the first generation of activities on the Prosocial Commons platform, groups were given 4 weeks to get through this process using just a handful of tools. In this video, the case study of how this went for the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle is presented by co-leader of that group Ed Gibney. This presentation was given during a general Prosocial Cafe meeting on Friday May 20, 2022.

As you can see on that splash screen for the video, I mapped the Prosocial process into 8 steps going from project design through to the end of goal setting for the group. (Once the goals are set, you're off on your own group's journey.) Each of those 8 Prosocial steps required lots of management on my part and the use of several new online tools — some provided, many more created from scratch. Overall, it has been quite a lot more effort than I expected to lead a group through these 8 steps. And I don't think it was feasible to expect just anyone to be able to do all this. But I managed! And I'm not alone.

After sharing the details of all that management work, I also gave a few thoughts on how I tried to drive engagement throughout the whole process. I had to do that engagement work because it turns out that this experiment is probably a lot like a gym membership. It sounds great. Maybe your best self *wants* to do it. But it's still really hard to change habits and begin doing something new that's a bit difficult. Although people all self-selected to volunteer to go through this, and they all had to donate some money to join in, and they were asked up front to promise 2 hours of work per week on these projects, a majority of participants across the site have not lived up to that.

But that's okay! Enough people have joined in. And the people that have made it through have been almost universally spectacular to meet and work with. The Prosocial process has unearthed deeply held values and fears that it turns out we all share. And that has provided an opportunity to form strong, purposeful bonds even though we've only just met, and we are only meeting impersonally via Zoom and online chats. The tools and instructions have, quite frankly, been both lacking and overwhelming at times. We've all lost valuable members at each new hurdle. But in general there is a real feeling of excitement and enthusiasm at doing something new, which excuses many of the bumps in the road because we all know the intention is to continuously improve things using the tried and true evolutionary method of variation, selection, and retention. In a few generations, successful steps will be surviving and thriving.

Having been through this just one time now, I can already see how much easier we can make this for future groups. And the power these groups can have is only limited by their imagination. Think about the good intentions of every group you have ever worked with, and how most of them have failed because of one typical problem with group dynamics or another. Now imagine a way to get rid of all those self-destruct buttons that kept you from realising your goals. It doesn't mean the work to change the world will be easy. But it does mean it will be much clearer to manage.

Having the Prosocial process in hand, and developing all the tools to use it, feels like the start of something really big. It was specifically designed to start small, and radiate out, group-by-collaborative-group, until it spreads success throughout populations across the globe. That was the theory. And I can see it now in practice.

If you have a group (or even just an idea for a group!) that you'd like to experience this process with, don't hesitate to ask me how you can do so. It's open to anyone, and it will only get easier.

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Prosocial (In Theory)

6/3/2022

6 Comments

In my last post, I made the announcement that I was going to be starting an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with Andy Norman and David Sloan Wilson. I shared lots of links to learn about the non-profit organization Prosocial World, which would be hosting this project (along with many others) on its new online platform called the Prosocial Commons.

Projects on the Commons are intended to last 12 weeks to mimic the 100 Day Challenge model that was developed by the Rapid Results Institute. And since we started on April 25th, that means we're about half way through our first "generation" of work. (Note that the 12-week sessions are called generations in order to mimic evolution, and to give people the chance to vary, select, and retain what works after a sizeable but manageable chunk of effort.) So far, our group has gone exceedingly well and I'm really looking forward to sharing much more about that in future blog posts.

Before I get to all that, however, I wanted to share something more about the theories behind all of this work because they are really significant and incredibly useful. Many of the links I shared in my last post had quick summaries of this, but for the full treatment, you really need to read the book-length manual called Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups.

In preparation for leading a group through this process, I hoovered up everything I could about Prosocial. To start, here are a few quotes from a great book review of Prosocial that was written by Kathleen Walsh. She is one of the 650 group facilitators who have been trained on this method, and she has been wonderful to work with!

“Prosocial” is, at the broadest level, an umbrella term that describes an emerging global movement to elevate the functioning of groups at all levels and scale so that individual members can achieve their mutual goals in cooperative, efficient processes and groups can more effectively collaborate within networks, or nested hierarchies.
The conceptual framework developed by Atkins, Wilson and Hayes builds upon the research conclusions of Elinor Ostrom, the only woman awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, which refute the conventional assumptions derived from Garrett Hardin’s “the tragedy of the commons” formulation.
Ostrom’s work identified the qualities of effective, cooperative groups that self-organize at the local level to protect collective resources and achieve outcomes they value. Atkins et al have enlarged Ostrom’s findings to define the essential qualities of effective, self- organized groups at multiple levels and scales. Based on her work, the Core Design Principles they have developed are:

Shared identity and purpose
Equitable distribution of contributions and benefits
Fair and inclusive decision-making
Monitoring agreed-upon behaviors
Graduated responding to helpful and unhelpful behaviors
Fast and fair conflict resolution
Authority to self-govern
Collaborative relations with other groups

Wilson immediately recognized how Ostrom’s design principle approach dovetailed with multilevel selection theory as an aspect of evolutionary transitions, which posits that members of groups can become so cooperative that the group itself becomes a higher-level organism in its own right.
The application of the scientific verification of the evolutionary advantage of more cooperative groups to economic and social system design has exciting implications for envisioning and achieving a positive future for humanity.
Prosocial builds upon a “power with”, not “power over” relationship model by integrating the importance of enhancing individual “psychological flexibility” skills honed by the use of vital “noticing” tools derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which they term “ACT Matrices”.
Use of the Prosocial ACT matrices offers deeper understanding of members’ experiences of themselves, their group relationships and common goals. ... This awareness leads, in turn, to the recognition of specific action steps that can strengthen their group’s overall functioning and the quality of their relationships with one another.
The potential of the Prosocial ARC to inform the quickening of insight and skill demanded by the current survival challenges humanity faces is linked to the degree to which it actually practiced. ... These are exciting ideas, indeed.

That covers the basics pretty well, other than I would add that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has been very rigorously studied with several hundred radomized control trials now showing that it is an effective psychological intervention method. For just a little bit more, Kathleen's entire 3-page review makes for a quick summary of the book for people in a hurry to learn about it. If you are only interested in these theories for theoretical interests, you can definitely stop reading this post now. (Seriously, just stop.)

If you have applied (or are about to apply) these theories, however, either formally with Prosocial or informally on your own, here are several key passages from the book that bring many more details about the process into focus. I recommend reading these regularly for reminders on how to improve group behaviour.

p.21 Evolutionary theory offers a novel perspective on virtually all efforts to accomplish positive change at all scales, from that of the individual to that of the planet. One key insight with this theory is that there is something special about small groups, which were the only human social environment for most of our evolutionary history, and, like the cells of a multicellular organism, they need to remain the building blocks of modern large-scale societies.
p.28 By applying the first seven core design principles at ever higher levels of organisation, small groups could be the bedrock of much larger polycentric (that is, many centred) systems of governance. Polycentric governance respects the localised needs, knowledge, and autonomy of small groups, as well as the need for modern societies to organise at a regional, national, or even global scale. It takes into consideration that life consists of many spheres of activity, that each sphere has an optimum scale, and that good governance requires identifying the optimal scale for each sphere and appropriate coordination among the spheres.
p.53 If we want to build a science of intentional change, it makes sense to use the power of associative, social, and contingency learning to affect behaviour. We cannot stop there, however, because these tools do not yet fully give us the means to foster key elements of prosocial relations to others, such as trust, awareness of shared purpose, and more prosocially oriented values. For that purpose, we need also to delve into the world of narratives and rules, cognitive heuristics and problem solving, and sense of self and perspective taking.

p.59 Our purposes grow largely from our capacity to tell stories about the future (and the past). When we say “purpose”, we generally mean either values or goals. Values are our chosen qualities of being and doing. They express how we want to be as people, and the desired qualities we would like our actions to reflect. Think of them as the adverbs of our lives. When we act in service of values, we are acting lovingly, compassionately, kindly, consciously, and so on. Values are different than goals. Concrete goals can be achieved; you can make a million dollars, or get a degree, but once a goal is achieved it will likely lose its power as a source of further motivation. That is not true of values, and this difference is a major reason why values are so important. Values are only displayed or instantiated, not obtained or possessed, so while we may use them, they are never used up.
p.64 The six flexibility processes that make up psychological flexibility: values, emotional flexibility, cognitive flexibility, committed action, flexible attention, and perspective taking. Together these comprise an integrated skill set. Both individuals and groups can be psychologically flexible. It is a skill set that supports prosocial behaviour change and the deployment of the core design principles. However, it also has implications for building some key elements that social psychologists have found underpinning prosocial behaviour: trust, a focus on longer-term rather than immediate outcomes, and social value orientation.
p.74 The matrix is a process for thinking about two key dimensions of experience: “toward/away”, which reflects the way all animals move toward aspects of experience they want more of and away from experiences they want less of, and “outside/inside”, which represents what is actually happening in the physical world—what people can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell—versus the internal experience of our mind, including our thoughts, emotions, imagery, memories, and the like.
p.74 Generally speaking, the more frequently our behaviour is guided by moving toward what we want, rather than away from what we don’t want, the happier and more fulfilled we’ll be. Moving toward what we care about creates energy and vitality, as well as expands the flexibility and range of our behaviours. … B.F. Skinner defined freedom as being under the control of appetitive stimuli as opposed to aversive stimuli—living in a toward mode rather than an away one.
pp78-83 Completing the matrix. … Start with what we might call the “values” quadrant. [Inside—Toward. “What matters most to you about your group?”] … Move to the quadrant about the inner stuff you would rather not have. [Inside—Away. “What difficult internal experiences show up and get in the way of moving toward what is most important to you?”] … Moving to the Outside—Away quadrant, answer this question: “What can people see you do to avoid or control those difficult experiences?” This quadrant is all about what you do overtly to try and minimise the occurrence or impact of the difficult experiences you just mapped in the Inside—Away quadrant. … For the final quadrant [Outside—Toward], consider this: “What might you do to move toward who or what is most important to you (even in the presence of difficult experiences)?” What are some small or large steps that you might actually take to increase the frequency or presence of what you most care about in your life?
p.95 We designed the Prosocial process to be modular. It contains six interlocking modules, which groups can use separately or in combination: 1. Measurements for assessment and diagnosis. 2. The individual matrix. 3. The core design principles. 4. The collective matrix. 5. Goal setting. 6. Measurements for evaluating change.
p.100 One group we worked with had a leader who did not appreciate the value of what he saw as “soft skills”, and so he refused to do the individual matrix with his group. Although using the collective matrix alone worked up to a point, the Prosocial process never quite took hold. In the end, the group limped along relatively ineffectively because organisational inflexibility flowed from the failure to work on psychological flexibility.
p.101 Even though the individual matrix is an excellent icebreaker in its own right, sometimes groups need to first engage in other trust-building exercises, such as shared projects and social events, before they can even begin to work with the individual matrix.
pp.104-7 In general, like trust, cohesion is slow to build and easy to fracture. But there are definitely things you can do. Here are a few ideas that might be helpful for your context. Use the individual matrix before the rest of the Prosocial process. … Utilise the power of small groups. … Clarify membership. … Make space for the personal. … Improve communication skills. … Share reflections. … Use “onboarding” processes. … Create similarity in the context of diversity. … Create a strong sense of shared purpose.
pp.107-9 There are many practical benefits for groups to have a shared sense of purpose. … Shared purpose creates a sense of group identity and belonging. … Shared purpose guides individual actions, empowering individuals at all levels of the group. … Shared purpose creates motivation. … Shared purpose facilitates cooperation with other groups. … Shared purpose creates personal benefits. … Shared purpose makes collective interests more salient and highly valued.
p.109-10 The collective matrix is a superb tool for clarifying and deepening a sense of shared purpose in most groups. Not only can it help establish values and goals, but the process of discussing the fears and concerns that surface and might get in the way can often help with the process of integrating individual and collective interests while building a sense of trust and safety in the group. Instead of beginning the process with “What matters most to me about the group?” you can begin with questions like “What is our shared purpose? Who or what matters to us?” You can then follow up with questions similar to those we outlined with the individual matrix exercise, but framed as a collective.
pp.120-1 Consider this example: Three employees of a medical goods company, Alison, John, and Margaret, are arguing about who should be given the perk of an overseas sales-training program. Alison argues that she made the largest number of sales this year and deserves to be rewarded. John argues that Alison previously received a similar trip and that it’s his turn. Margaret argues that she really needs the training as the lack of it has been holding her back from making as many sales as Alison. … Alison’s approach, an equity approach, takes merit and contribution into account when deciding on the distribution of resources. By contrast, John’s approach, the equality approach, provides equal benefits irrespective of contribution. Margaret’s approach, allocation according to need, is a third normative principle that strives to achieve equal final outcomes for all, so that those who are more disadvantaged to begin with receive more irrespective of contribution. When group goals focus on high performance, groups tend to value a norm of equity. But when they are focused on social harmony and care, they tend to value norms of equality or need. Each approach has costs and benefits. Equity motivates highly skilled individuals to contribute as much as possible to the group, but if handled poorly it can create competition and comparison between individuals, thereby reducing overall group cohesion. Equality emphasises the equal worth of all but can create situations in which people free-ride on the efforts of others. Need emphasises a principle of care for all but can create feelings of resentment when those who contribute little are sometimes carried by those who contribute a great deal.
pp.142-3 Models of decision making you may find helpful. … We organised the following options along a spectrum, from least to most inclusive. … Autocratic decision making. … Consultative leadership. … Facilitative leadership. … The advice process. … Consent-based decision making. [Similar to the advice process, it differs in that authority to decide is distributed across the group. The group votes on proposals with these typical response options: agree, abstain, disagree, block.] … Consensus decision making.
p.145 Once you’ve conducted a collective matrix focused on core design principle 1, shared identity and purpose, encourage each group member to develop a personal mission, outlining the value they wish to provide to better serve the group’s collective goals. Members can share and discuss these personal missions to increase coordination, self-determination, and accountability.
p.148 Ultimately, with the Prosocial process we’ve built all our ideas around the guiding principle of including people in decisions that affect them. From that core idea you can tack on two other principles that are often helpful: 1. Enable those who have the urgency to take the initiative to make proposals to actually make them. 2. Move authority to whomever has the best information, provided they are willing to take the authority.
p.151-2 When we use “monitoring”, we really just mean transparency of behaviour—all members being able to see or notice what others are doing in the group. … In our own Prosocial development team, which must interact largely online, we noticed that simply instituting a shared to-do list using online tools such as Notion, Trello, and Slack made our behaviour much more transparent.
p.153 There are many benefits of monitoring. … Increased prosociality. … Decreased cheating. … Increased motivation and shared identity. … Improved coordination.
p.162 Ostrom’s fifth design principle was “graduated sanctions” for violations of rules and agreements. While we recognise that reducing uncooperative behaviours is essential for groups, it is at least as important in most contexts to also pay attention to increasing the frequency of helpful behaviours. Few groups will survive for very long without social support when people act cooperatively.
p.163 People are more cooperative when opportunities to punish uncooperative behaviour are present than when they're absent, and the threat of sanctions for "bad apples" decreases antisocial behaviour. If you're in a group, it's good to know that "bad" behaviour will not be tolerated and may even lead to expulsion from the group; otherwise, group members will lose faith in the capacity of the group to avoid being undermined by self-interest.
p.163-5 Initial sanctions for rule violations were often very light. Gossip is an example. … Sanctions that start small are far less likely to elicit strong emotional responses, counterattacks, or withdrawal from the group. By giving violators an easy way out, the sanctions also are likely to seem fairer and less indiscriminate. … Poorly designed systems of sanctioning can have serious long-term side effects, such as the following: counterproductive behaviours, diminished well-being and engagement, diminished trust, inefficiency, negative effects on the one administering sanctions.
p.174 Participants were asked to play the role of a team leader giving feedback to a team member (Frank) who had interrupted them twice and joked three times during a meeting. Paul played the role of Frank, and the people in his classes role-played giving him feedback. … The classic management advice for this sort of situation is to simply describe the situation as factually as possible, describe how it affected you, and then ask for the other’s perspective. … But almost nobody spontaneously approached the situation in this open, learning-oriented way. Almost everybody assumed they were in the right and Frank was in the wrong.
p.177 Conflict is maintained in our heads, in the judgments of right and wrong, good and bad, and justified and unjustified, and stepping into the perspective of another, seeing things from their point of view and drawing a circle that takes them in, is one of the hardest things in the world to do. If a group is to find a way through conflicts, it needs to ensure it has effective capability at three levels: 1. Interpersonal skills such as listening well and speaking assertively, not aggressively. 2. Personal skills such as emotion regulation and perspective taking. 3. Group-level agreements and processes for managing conflict efficiently and effectively. … When you are working with a group to explore its values and overarching goals in relation to conflict, it can be helpful to make a distinction between task conflict, which is often helpful for groups, and relationship conflict, which is almost always unhelpful in groups.
p.190 Core design principle 7, the authority to self-govern, is about the group, not the individuals within the group. Specifically, it’s about the group’s capacity to manage its own affairs without excessive interference from outside. “Authority” can mean the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. But it can also mean the capacity and power to author one’s own experience. We mean it in this latter way. … The concept of subsidiarity arose within the Catholic Church as “the principle” that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.” The political concept of federalism follows the same principle, according a degree of authority to smaller units nested within larger units.
p.191 The core design principles are so sensitive to context that nearly every group will need to continuously monitor how its implementation is working, and change it as problems are encountered.
p.201 How can core design principle 8 be implemented in a practical sense? We will outline three answers to this question. First, when a single group grows in size, it must differentiate its members as groups of groups in order to function well. … Second, if your group or multigroup organisation has become prosocial enough to function as a corporate unit, then you can work with like-minded groups to form prosocial consortia that thrive in competition with less-organised groups. … Third, groups often fail to implement the core design principles and polycentric governance because of competing narratives.
p.209 You’ll need a process for compiling and prioritising the goals of the group over the short and medium term. You will need an action plan. … Goals are important for groups because they help them coordinate action in a shared direction, and because they motivate people to initiate and sustain effort, even when the going gets tough.
p.210 Learning goals can help increase the psychological flexibility of groups. Learning goals help the group members hold goals more lightly, recognising the need to try things out (variation) and retain only that which is helpful (selection and retention). Learning goals help group members be more willing to make mistakes and less likely to seek to blame others if things go wrong.
p.224 Contacting our hopes for a better world necessarily means contacting our pain over what has happened, what is happening, and what might happen in the future. It is easy to let our hearts harden over and let ourselves become cynical, as though to hope, wish, or act to create a more cooperative and harmonious world is the height of foolish naivety. Faced with all that pain, it is so easy to stop imagining the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
p.224 Martin Luther King Jr. expressed this idea this way: “And all I’m saying is simply this: that all life is interrelated. We are tied in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And what affects one directly affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich, even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the Mayo Clinic. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way the world is made."

How beautiful! In theory.

Next time, I'll report on how this is actually going....

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Joining a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers

3/26/2022

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Big news folks!

Over the last couple of months, I've been working with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and philosopher Andy Norman to create a sort of "Vienna Circle" for evolutionary philosophers. The time has finally come to take these ideas to the big leagues.

This is going to be part of an amazing community called Prosocial World, which you'll have to join to take part. So, in this post, I'll share some information about Prosocial in general, and then you can read the specific call to action for my project.

I'll continue to write on this website, of course. But for far more interaction with a growing group of other evolutionary thinkers, please do consider joining us. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me. We plan to start our first activities in April, so do act now!

Summary

Prosocial World is an independent non-profit organization whose aim is to promote positive change around the world. Based on the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom and grounded in contextual behavioral science, evolutionary science, and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), Prosocial uses a practical, step-by-step approach to help energize and strengthen groups.

These methods can help any group become more cooperative and adaptable at achieving its valued goals and entering into prosocial relations with other groups. Since its formation two years ago, they have trained over 650 group facilitators from more than 30 nations and are creating “field sites” for stewarding cultural evolution around the world.

In February 2022, Prosocial World launched an online platform called Prosocial Commons where groups of all sizes can come together to communicate with one another as they use the prosocial methods to reach their goals. To join the Prosocial Commons, please begin by making a financial donation using the link at the bottom of this page. This can be anything within your means and exemptions can be made for anyone who truly can't pay anything.

The Movie

Award-winning filmmaker Alan Honick has produced this great 7-minute video summary.

The Book

A book about these ideas was published in 2019 by Paul W.B. Atkins PhD, David Sloan Wilson PhD, and Steven C. Hayes PhD.

Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups

"A groundbreaking, comprehensive program for designing effective and socially equitable groups of all sizes—from businesses and social justice groups to global organizations."

David's Long Introduction

Written on Charles Darwin's 212th birthday, this essay by David Sloan Wilson gives a history of the formation of Prosocial World and the other organizations that directly preceded it. This essay also traces the intellectual history of PW all the way back to Darwin himself.

Paul's Short Introduction

Prosocial co-author, and organizational psychologist Paul Atkins wrote "A Short Introduction to the Ideas and Process Behind Prosocial" which gives you just what the title says in a 12-minute read.

Steven's 7-minute Introduction

Prosocial co-author, psychologist, and the developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Steven Hayes features in a 7-minute video about the prosocial process called Linking individual behavior change to social transformation.

Introducing the Prosocial Commons

Introducing the Prosocial Commons contains an announcement from David Sloan Wilson about the creation in February 2022 of a new online platform for bringing Prosocial members together. There is also a link here for the 2-hour webinar that was held to launch this platform. The highpoint of the webinar is a series of short introductions by people who are part of the PW community, giving a vivid impression of the diversity and sense of meaning about what they are building together.

In just a couple of weeks, six projects were already proposed for this platform:

Global Online EvoS with campus chapters
Feeding our Future
Creating a volunteer workforce
Art, Evolution, and Action
Toward a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers
Local community chapters

This is a good start, but more can still be accommodated. If there is a new project that you would like to propose, join now and do so on the project section. A project need not be large. For example, a group for organizing a monthly book club could consist of just a few people.

A Note About the Platform

The digital platform we'll be using for Prosocial Commons is run by hylo. This is "the Community Platform for People on a Mission. Hylo helps groups and networks build community and a better world, together. Free. Open Source. No Ads. Own Your Data."

As if that wasn't good enough, hylo can also be used to create homes for each group that forms within Prosocial, in addition to the "mother" Prosocial group. Hylo is exceptionally well suited for communication among all these groups.

A Note About Making Contributions

Think about the mindsets that are often used to persuade people to donate to good causes.

Sometimes there is an appeal to self-interest—what’s in it for the donor—such as exclusive access to content, merchandise, a burnished reputation. Let's call this a “Me” mindset.

Sometimes there is an appeal to the common good, such as alleviating the suffering of children, mitigating climate change, or reducing inequities. Let’s call this a “We” mindset.

What mindset should we cultivate for the Prosocial Commons? Perhaps we can authentically cultivate a “We & Me” mindset, in which we work for a common good that includes our own welfare. Helping others need not be sacrificial. We can be part of something larger than ourselves, sharing in all of its benefits.

if we really want to support Prosocial World’s mission to “consciously evolve a world that works for all”, then we want to grow as fast as possible. It seems reasonable to expect everyone to make a financial donation within their means, as a signal of their more general intent to contribute to the group. This literally builds a Prosocial World by being prosocial.

Sounds amazing! I can report that the first few weeks have been great.

And now, here is my project:

Towards a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers

The Vienna Circle began meeting in 1924, partially inspired by Einstein’s revolution in the field of physics. The group sought to create a similar revolution in philosophy, determined to ground truth in empirical findings using logical positivism. Their ultimate failure in this quest became an important historical example for the limitations of knowledge, but the Vienna Circle still serves as a shining example of the power of small groups acting with purpose towards a goal. (Other than the tragic murder of one of their founders!)

Now, inspired by recent revolutions in evolutionary biology, the time is right for another group of philosophers to come together and focus on the implications for their field. Early philosophers after Darwin may have once poisoned the well for such endeavours with their abhorrent and tragic beliefs such as eugenics and Social Darwinism, but they were digging in the wrong place based on naïve and poorly understood versions of evolution. With the advent of the modern synthesis, the extended evolutionary synthesis, multilevel selection theory, and a host of other findings about the major transitions in the evolution of cooperation among living organisms, a much more mature evolutionary philosophy can now be developed.

This is already happening in isolated pockets around the world. Just a handful of prominent examples illustrate this clearly:

Dan Dennett has been writing about Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and the metaphysical implications for consciousness and free will for decades.
Michael Ruse has written dozens of books on evolution and philosophy and edited The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics.
The term evolutionary epistemology was first coined in 1974 by the psychologist Donald Campbell and has had notable developments from philosophers including Michael Bradie, Nathalie Gontier, and Andy Norman.
David Livingston Smith edited a superb collection of essays in 2016 titled How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism.
The philosopher Denis Dutton published numerous books and essays on aesthetics and his TED Talk “A Darwinian Theory of Beauty” has been viewed over 2.6 million times.
During the 10 years he’s written Evolutionary Philosophy, Ed Gibney has published peer-reviewed papers on evolutionary ethics and evolutionary politics, which propose ways that evolutionary perspectives can help us bridge David Hume’s is-ought divide and rebuild the collapsed harm principle from John Stuart Mill which underlies theories of justice in liberal societies.
Even the field of classical logic has been built on three laws of thought that only hold for static views of the universe, which, of course, have been completely undermined by Darwin.

From this brief list, we can see that all of the major branches of philosophy have been affected by evolutionary thinking. Dan Dennett’s “universal acid” has reached every one of them. Yet these exciting developments are seldom seen together by specialized philosophers or their students. This is because university departments necessarily contain diverse perspectives and are often still dominated by Continental or Analytic philosophers who sometimes ignore or are downright hostile to evolutionary and other scientific studies.

This project contends that there is now a huge opportunity to bring all of these evolutionary perspectives on philosophy together. Such a collaboration could provide great benefits to the field of philosophy, to the intellectual underpinnings of the activities of Prosocial World, and to the study of the survival and flourishing of life in general.

Prosocial World (PW) is a nonprofit dedicated to “consciously evolving a world that works for all.” It was co-founded in 2020 by David Sloan Wilson as an amicable spinoff from his previous nonprofit, the Evolution Institute. With its online magazine This View of Life, over 15 full and part-time staff, and a new major grant from the John Templeton Foundation, PW is in an excellent position to serve as the online hub of a circle of evolutionary philosophers.

Elsewhere on PW, EvoS programs have demonstrated the benefit of bringing a cross-disciplinary group of scientists together from all backgrounds (both physical and social) in order to view their subjects through the lens of the latest findings of evolution. Movements are also sprouting to bring such evolutionary views to the study of topics in the humanities like art and religion.

What is to be done here? In the development of this circle of evolutionary philosophers, we can follow much of what the Vienna Circle did. Their group included academic and non-academic philosophers, as well as scientists and thinkers from a variety of other disciplines. They included teachers as well as students. They met regularly to discuss important papers and ideas. Some members wrote a manifesto for the group (which others vehemently disagreed with—a sign they weren’t using the prosocial process!). They organized conferences. They started a peer-reviewed journal. And numerous influential books were produced from this intellectual environment.

Now, with advances in technology, we can do all this and more, drawing from a worldwide audience of interested participants. Anyone eager to learn about and apply “this view of life” could join in. Altogether, this would eventually construct an independent and virtual philosophy department within the broader “Evolution University” of Prosocial World. If such a department did form, it would be unique in the world, and likely impossible to replicate in any existing universities.

The information above lays out a long-term vision for this circle of evolutionary philosophers. We can only get there through many iterations of projects and growth. And we must start from square one not knowing who will take part in this circle or how fast it will spread. As such, this particular initial project will embark upon a co-created “learning journey” to begin to explore this vast territory with practical applications in mind. The steps accomplished will very much depend on who is taking them, but a firmer plan for the future will be one of the main goals we seek.

This exploratory process will take place as part of the Prosocial Commons (PC), a new support-and-engagement group that has been formed within PW for implementing new initiatives such as this one. The initiatives will take place as part of a 12-week ‘generation’ of activity that will begin in April. The minimal commitment for becoming involved includes:

Attend a single one-hour online meeting per week.
One hour of preparation for each meeting.
Notification if this commitment cannot be met on any given week.

This is a very modest commitment per capita that can result in a very large public good. Working in appropriately structured groups with meaningful objectives and a minimal commitment by each member is usually a highly rewarding experience.

Joining the Prosocial Commons requires making a financial donation to PW that can be anything within one’s means, with exemptions for those who truly can’t afford to pay anything. This creates a common pool of financial resources for the PC without imposing any financial barriers to entry. Members of the PC are free to join other initiatives or to nominate initiatives of their own. In general, we expect a high degree of synergy between initiatives, which will be in communication with each other during the 12-week cycles of activity.

To join in this exciting new collaboration, begin by taking just these two steps:

1) Go here to make your donation to PW to become a member of the Prosocial Commons.

2) Go here to register for this project and provide some basic information about yourself and your interests.

Thank you for becoming part of this bold experiment in cultural evolution! We look forward to varying it, selecting it, and replicating it with you.

Ed Gibney
Evolutionary Philosopher
www.evphil.com

Andy Norman
Author of Mental Immunity
Executive Director, CIRCE

David Sloan Wilson
President, Prosocial World
SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus

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Generation 1 in the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle

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Vienna, Circles, and 5 Reasons Why Groups Thrive

Evolutionary Metaphysics: How This View of Life Can Deeply Alter Other Branches of Philosophy

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