My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of 19th century philosophical idealists that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas. We pull away but are anchored against drifting too far. Force is entangled with mass and acceleration, with gravity and charge separation. I suppose those are influences. But “Being” may never resolve and remain a huddling specter in our conceptual architecture. The pier is itself adrift.

When we meet an invented word (now getting middle-aged) like planetarity we have a task at hand. We must unravel the history of its usage. We need to entangle our immediate impression with the goals of the neologist, then realign it. We must speculate about contrasts and motivations, for a new word must have a distinct meaning. One word, one meaning. There are no analytic similes; it was a dogma imported from mathematical idealization. Everything is distinct, differentiated, with braids of associations trailing along.

Planetarity combines planet with the suffix -arity, a suffix that conveys an attachment of sorts to the planet. Curvilinearity is a noun for things that are formed of curved lines. Planetarity must be a noun about things that are planet-ish, per a substitution game:

Cosine is characterized by curvilinearity.
Planex is characterized by planetarity.

OK, we are making progress (don’t worry, the mysterious “planex” will be defined). Now we must triangulate on the meaning, using a form of Donald Davidson’s approach to unraveling what other people are thinking. In this concept of radical interpretation, finding out what goes on in other people’s heads is a puzzle. We probe by looking at the word in question and correlate the invariants of usage and contexts. But we must be charitable in assuming the word’s creator is much like us, and that they use words similarly and in good faith. It’s language games all the way down, and we need to parse out the grammar and the meta-grammars that pull the meanings up. We need to put the word to work and see it in action.

We know also that a language game in cultural criticism is to inject neologisms to rebase the metaphorical frames we use for interpretation, and that politics is an axis through our languages, as Don Me Choi colorfully dissects in her paper, “Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode.” Gayatri Spivak’s concept of planetarity is an alternative to globalization and the semantic fog of economic colonization and cultural drab that has grown around the older term. Where globalization might force an extinction of difference in language and culture, planetarity preserves and illuminates distinctions among people and in their interactions with the planetary whole, the zoosphere, and the sheltering environments. In contemporary politics, globalist has become both a pejorative and antisemitic dog whistle. In planetarity we have a candidate distinctive in its emerging meaning, shed of this imposed tangle of cross associations.

We add in Blake and Gilman’s recent Children of a Modest Star and revise our understanding again. Systems of planetary sensors create a metaphorical nervous system for the planet. Devising governance that overcomes the tribal fixations on resource exploitation is how planetarity starts to transcend the reductively critical and provides further bumpers to this expansive neologism. We ladle on subsidiarity (another -arity!) and functional levels of governance to build up a layer cake of control mechanisms for our planet.

Disentangle, rebuild, reinforce, triangulate further: we confront terms by hypotheses, then refine those theories with variations. Does alterity lead to conclusions in favor of a greater inflow of diversity? Does a negative assertion about Richard Dawkins’s memetics cleave out any implication about global information technologies increasing our planetarity? Is the threat of an artificial intelligence revolution also an opportunity for new modes of cooperation? The position in the network shifts, pulled at by contending conjectures, and then resettles until pushed again by semantic and pragmatic subtleties. At our best we can apply epistemic humility—that charity again—as a normative overlay to hold any conclusions at bay. Try to be generous with meaning, for it is never complete.

Implementing meaning

What if we try to create a machine that simulates this collection of interrogatory methods? How can we implement something to explain radical interpretation? It looks like we guess a bit and then we hone the guesses with deductive cleavers that eliminate spurious associations. Planetarity is not just an economic concept the way globalization is often used. It is something distinct. It has a different ethics. It is being built up as we analyze it.

In the mathematics of information there is this beautiful little idea that for any string of bits, 0s and 1s, there are an infinite number of computing machines that could have generated that string. But among the shorter computing machines—their logic also expressed in bits—the machines must have compressed their target and contain internal models about the redundancies and repetitions in the string. The shortest, most compact machine is not just a generator for the sequence, but also becomes the optimal prediction device for the string pattern or variants of it. As a colleague once pithily opined, compression is truth, an Occam’s razor that is maximally charitable to the data in its elimination of excessive representational states. The machine becomes a theory and explanation.

But here’s the rub: finding the shortest machine is itself uncomputable. We have no algorithmic pathway to optimality. We do have heuristics, though, and one is to pattern the search on evolution. Generate random machines and take the best generators and again vary them. Try new combinations in a wasteful but computable traversal through the space of options. Through multitudes and diversity solutions coalesce and emerge.

Thus, we have a candidate, a well-defined logical process that can discover models of any kind of signal or language but does so without any kind of goal in mind. There is a honing of the models as the selection process peels off the overly specific and the too general. They become part of the search history left behind in the asymptotic pursuit of perfect fit that never quite arrives, like chasing the Red Queen. We get tentative solutions: local optima in the language of these algorithms.

Applied to language games, it has much of what we need except the details of our intellectual histories, all the cultural context, and that we do have a goal in mind: understand this new concept. Having a goal is something we say of people, but the reason we say it about people is because in this game we are expressing a side effect of our personal development embedded in social systems, in politics, all derived from our evolution as living beings. Being again. Just mystifying. And goal, telos to Aristotle, needs to be reconsidered in this light as well.

What’s it like to be a teleonomaton?

We can substitute another neologism for goal-directed in this grammar. Teleonomy was invented by the biologist Colin Pittendrigh, then amplified by Ernst Mayr, as a downgrade to teleology. Instead of all this biological complexity sprouting out into the manifold representations, swimming, then crawling, socializing and acculturating, as if towards a goal, as if there is a purpose to it all, we just have the algorithm of evolution that creates things that look like purposes as it chugs along. They are not illusory. They are the real thing just arising in a manner that feels different from how we think about human goals. Call them purposes* if you are concerned. The replacement of -logy with -nomy converts our conceptual picture from Teilhard de Chardin’s purposeful divine endgame for planetisation into a humbler ensemble of teeming purposes*.

Peter Hacker thinks the mystifying concepts of our personal experience of consciousness like qualia are perfectly explainable by one necessary condition: we evolved. There’s little to say beyond that and much philosophy of mind has been chasing will-o’-the-wisps. In this new telonomic process theology we can reconsider Hacker’s dismay. Panpsychism is weirdly true. Matter has intrinsic purposes* as the symbols of the teleonomic algorithm, though it doesn’t combine into much beyond stable configurations most of the time. But when that matter configures into replicators (we don’t know how yet), the emergent purposes* expand and intensify. We solve mind by replacing it with this emergence automaticity and become teleonomatons. I’m one and so are Nagel’s bats. What it is like being anything is what it is like being a teleonomaton. Oh my, “being” again. So imposingly inert, like a dead car in an intersection.

The motif of emergence is a pillar of naturalism. A generative mechanism replaces the animating dances of spirits and divinities, urges and wills. Novelty generation and asymptotic optimality is a pervasive property of collections of components subject to combining forces, with acceleration via mechanisms like replication and selective retention, and boosted further with advanced sharing and mixing programs like sexual reproduction, jumping genes, modularization in systems, and the transmission of knowledge. This idea has recently been proposed as a fundamental law of the universe by an interdisciplinary team assembled by the Carnegie Institution for Science, with implications for how to think about exoplanets and examine their planetarity.

There, I finally put it to work.

Emergence is intrinsic to understanding meaning and creativity. While ingenuity has sometimes been seen as akin to variation-and-selection for competing ideas, newer models view it as both a generative process and one that applies extensive contextualization, refinement, and reflection, each a part of cognitive machinery that has emerged as part of our evolutionary history. There is neuronal group selection in individual brain development and clonal selection theory in immunology.

The recent success of large language models in artificial intelligence has shown a similar pattern where “skill systems” for irony, metaphor, and arithmetic appear to self-organize—emerge—from a simple system of training randomly weighted networks to replicate strings of natural language. A key requirement of these network architectures is bottlenecking, a form of structural compression that catalyzes inference in the language model. While we are conditioned by experience to not expect quantitative scaling to result in qualitative new behaviors, in the motif of emergence this novelty should be recognized as not just possible but perhaps inevitable.

Implementing planetarity

So, we can implement emergence for meaning, at least conceptually, and with a growing understanding of how to do it for real: evolve interpretation machines that assemble predictive models about meaning. Or coalesce meaning networks out of random matrixes. All these methods show that words can at least partially be known by the company they keep when subject to teleonomic exploration and the charity intrinsic in compression. We may be missing a few things like our embodied physicality—our contingency—but that is a matter for many more essays.

Can we do the same for this emergent ethics of planetarity? Can we reify it?

I propose that the continued growth of human societies and their reflexive impact on planet Earth can best be managed by applying aspects of this conceptual framework of emergence. I also believe that emergence has very human consequences like the preservation of individual freedom in play with social constructs, though it requires overcoming several countering impulses that, to borrow from Sir Karl Popper, are enemies to this emergent planetarity.

Note that emergence using large-scale systems of interacting entities involves extinction. In biology, one estimate puts the number of extinct species at 95% of all species that have ever thrived. In creativity ideas die on the vine of consideration. In neurology and artificial neural networks, pathways senesce and in so doing they are a reflection of those that continue to function. In market-based capitalism companies come and go as they fall out of fashion or demand. In technological change, revolutions displace old technologies with improvements that redraw our daily engagements with one another and with governance, economic systems, and war. This has very real consequences for people and our nonhuman cohorts. One of our goals for emergent systems at scale must be to prevent or reduce the negative effects of such reinvention. But if we can manage the downsides, our collective ability to expand and find coexistence among ourselves and with the natural world can be enhanced by the flexibility of emergence as a protocol.

What does an emergent approach to planetarity entail? Following the motifs that we see in other systems we experiment and amplify diversity in our connections. The former can be realized by greater investment in science, the arts, and even experimental economic systems that try to innovate in varied and perhaps radical new ways. The latter involves enhancing our cosmopolitan engagements with connectivity and sharing as a primary goal. More trade, not less, but also fairer trade. International cooperation on immigration rather than reactive policies that cease the flow of populations who bring varied and rich experiences to their new countries. Better knowledge distribution systems with immune systems to fight against falsehoods erected for financial and political gain.

Cooperation and knowledge exchange trump competition as proximate tools for our ultimate game of planetary engagement. They are the better angels of our nature.

Extending this to the natural world means enhancing our understanding of the planetary ecosystem through continued knowledge gathering and targeted policymaking that incentivizes coexistence and sustainability of the three domains of living things and their reflexive engagements with one another and our entanglements with Earth’s geochemistry.

But this must do more than merely reform globalization with its tatters of imposition and exploitation. The micro-experiments are distinct in sharing an ethics of planetarity; that is, they center on a goal of exploration and understanding. They are the hypotheses for unraveling the radical implications of others, whether they are people, animals, plants, microbes, or sensitive environmental machinery. They triangulate on the meaning of well-being and flourishing, sustainability, and considered innovation.

There are efforts underway. The National Science Foundation has the Confronting Hazards, Impacts and Risks for a Resilient Planet (CHIRRP) program that strongly invokes community-driven research with risk mitigation to develop novel insights into Earth systems. In Europe, the Climate-ADAPT system is a clearinghouse for knowledge networks related to climate change. This sketch for planetarity is already becoming a tangible part of our culture. The World Health Organization and other multilateral organizations work to induce action at a level higher than that of sovereign states.

Planex

But we can accelerate change. In the aftermath of World War II, the chief of US military science, Vannevar Bush, envisioned a new technology that presaged the world wide web. The memex he dreamed of was an extended-memory machine for scientists to help them cope with the information explosion in the postwar era. Researchers connected microfilms of research papers together in associative trails using circuit pathways. Text-to-speech systems read documents aloud that had been transmitted over telephone lines using new digitization technologies.

The internet has fulfilled the promise of the memex in the rapid distribution of information and radically changed our relationships with one another. It is now essential to governance and decision making. But how can this be improved? What if we, the people, could propose experimental policy ideas and they are weighted and vetted into “stories” curated by experts in a prediction marketplace? Stakeholders weigh and refine the proposals. With individuals, groups, organizations, and officials participating, the broadest range of interests would find collective voice. The claims and counterclaims then receive consideration on the platform and are supplemented by operational plans of how to implement the policy, legal analysis, environmental assessments, and economic scrutiny.

Cross-fertilize this with artificial intelligence. The dreamscapes of deep learning models generate novel solutions and interactions. While a prediction marketplace overcomes the limits of individual experts to fully grok complex systems, the addition of new intelligences enhances the ability to both explore alternatives and represent nonhuman interests. By training AIs on animal communication patterns and life cycles, they become proxy representatives for broader planetary awareness in the decision system. This work is already underway by the Earth Species Project (ESP). AIs trained to understand the flows of information and energy in environmental systems become a voice for biomes and the planet itself. These subalterns to our global domination are unmuted and promoted.

There are additional opportunities that arise from increasingly massive computing power. Complexity economics enhances the old logics of utility and labor concepts, as well as the newer mathematics of economic theory, with emergent methods for testing hypotheses. Simple models of multispecies interactions build towards explanations of planetary-scale phenomena. The same approach has applicability in gaming-out the potential upsides and consequences of experimental changes, showing rather than telling how the system will perform if implemented on a planetary scale.

The planex, or planetarity extension system, emerges from this modest collection of existing and speculative technologies. We can guess that it will be very different than the internet of today and have a sobering effect on political action related to planetarity by revealing pathways for change and the dimensions of group interests. The trade-offs between resource exploitation, environmental impacts, jobs, and life satisfaction become matrixes tweaked by AIs exploring the space of hyper-parameters that govern sustainability and success. When experiments succeed, they become training inputs for a forest of AIs that can then modulate to new opportunities.

Planex doesn’t require iron-fisted planetary authorities or even a thoroughly impassioned population to work because it relies on trickle-up consensus—emergent agreement. In the best deployments, the almost overwhelming complexities of planetary systems are simultaneously analyzed into manageable chunks and their systemic layerings are preserved against reductive minimization. The machinery becomes a mirror of the planetary organs in their vital interactions.

But there are enemies to planetarity. They are both ancient and familiar. Darwin, in formulating evolution, was influenced by Adam Smith’s notion of an invisible hand guiding markets towards emergent patterns of order without the need for excessive dirigisme. Though the economic concept now has hundreds of years of discussion, argumentation, and widespread implementation, it, unlike evolution, has been implicated in crimes against society, as have the ideological opponents of free markets in their quest to optimize the wasteful freedom of this messy process. And the exploitative culture of consumerism is one of those globalization nits that needs to be pushed away from our developing theory of planetarity, as do ideological demands for equality enforced by violence.

These counterforces—the enemies—are rigid in their preference for cultural uniformity, unrelenting exploitation of natural resources, infolding, and historicism as the bedrock for utopianism. They are suspicious. All engagements are zero sum and warrant aggression. A current of human interaction since Athenian democracy faced Sparta and the oligarchs with their regressive tribal preservation of caste, class, and power, it arises time and again in totalitarian control of individual behavior and racial and religious purity. What is superior—as shown through measurable improvements in human lives and planet-scale change—is versatility, freedom, and advances in science and technology. What is superior is experimentally determining the limits of systems and their unintended consequences and building empirically on what works while discarding what fails. What is best is when we can generate novelty while sensibly controlling for the consequences of change.

For planex, these enemies will try chaos and self-interested disruption of the work at hand. Prediction markets have been shown to be fairly robust when gamed; there are just too many stabilizing inputs. And with AIs working in ensembles the resilience is increased, as it is with any population-based problem-solving algorithm. There will nevertheless be a need for an immune system to stop disinformation from overtaking and overwhelming the system. The signals must rise above the noise floor. Still, there is good reason to believe that planex can thrive against these threats. Our existing information technologies, for all their foibles, have shown themselves to be resilient in struggles against spam, hackers, censorship, and disruption.

Optimize, not immanentize

I mentioned earlier the radical Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin and his concept of planetisation. He dreamed of a singular idea, something like a planetary brain but also infected with a religious finality, as if heaven can be immanentized by expanding our populations until we inevitably converge together and then, with the universe, become a final unity. But I am happier with the idea that we can optimize tangibles and asymptotically approach this spectral medley of planetarity while maximizing freedom and flourishing for all, from lush wetland carpets to urban dwellers dreaming of Mars. This is more radical than all these clumsy utopias that require spiritual uniformity or fealty to buffoonish dictators who somehow know best.

We can emerge into planetarity in my scheme, or some betterment at least, and it will arise from a billion efforts, individual and collective, and with the resilient but unfinished glow that comes when teleonomy creates meaning.

Rise, teleonomatons. Invent planex and become the planetariat.

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Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

Implementing meaning

What’s it like to be a teleonomaton?

Implementing planetarity

Planex

Optimize, not immanentize

Further reading and referenced ideas

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