An emergence from greater studies into cooperative network ecologies in connection to the Pluriverse effort
One day I was laying in the grass with a book and listening to psychedelic pop songs, as one does on an improbably sunny spring day in the Pacific North West. A song came on that I had heard many times before, each time imagining these hidden feelings between individuals, prospective lovers. Certainly because I was reading The Evolution of Cooperation (Axelrod, 1984) and daydreaming about Great Filters at the time, I imagined this unseen love existing between all individuals, a love lost across the entire human population, turning a sad song into an epic tragedy of Molochian discoordination.
The Great Filter refers to these required filters, or barriers to development, that biological organisms must pass through as they exist over time, in order to survive and/or become more complex. Life needs the right star system, single cell assemblages before it can go multicellular, all the way to tools, technology, and who knows what other filters may emerge in the future. The Great Filter being the one that stops civilizations from becoming interplanetary/stellar/galactic. Sociobiologically, for us here and now, I began thinking that the endless zero-sum competition represents the nearest barrior to our development as a species, the highest probability catalyst to not surviving past the Great Filter. To me, learning how to cooperate better would seem the foundational next step required for humans to survive beyond these circumstances. My proposition would not be that we need to eliminate competition, competition is indeed necessary. Rather I propose that we need to greatly modulate and incentivize toward more cooperation if we are indeed all gonna make it.
The song was "The Way I Feel Inside"
Written by Rod Argent, 1964
Performed by The Zombies
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