Institutional code and human behavior (1)

The things that make us most uniquely human are social.  Language, art, music, architecture, economy, religion.  These all have an audience... They're all about producing something that is meant to be interpreted or used by others.

I would suggest that this isn't just because humans are social animals, but because the specific thing that makes us human is that we are hosts for institutions.  This idea has been derided as "bug people," and that's understandable.  I believe there's a constant battle between the institutions which we host and our deeper human natures for time and energy, and I think we're currently losing pretty badly.  To stop losing, I think we need to learn how it works.

We can explore this by looking at the institutions' code.  We've already discussed modern institutional code in previous posts, but modern institutional code all still relies on language to be interpreted by people who carry it out.  I hypothesize that this means that language must be a reflection of a lower-level institutional code, just as python interpreters are written in C, which compiles to assembly.  So I suggest that there was some primordial code that was the basis for primordial institutions, and the elaboration of that code gave rise to distinctly human behaviors.

So what *must* a primordial institution look like to fulfill the properties of a self-propagating life-form? On the most fundamental level, we can see that it must obey laws like the conservation of energy in order to exist in physical reality.  It also must have mechanisms to sense things in the environment from which it might acquire energy, and trigger procedures which increase the probability of acquiring that energy.  It must have a semi-permeable boundary with the environment which allows entry of new units conditional upon what it senses about the object or environment, or upon internal state.  It must have a mechanism for storing information.  In the case of physical life, it deals with atomic units, and those units are recombined with chemical bonds.  Those bonds ultimately increase the internal energy of the system, as is necessary for the system to grow and propagate. It must also have the capacity to replicate itself.  Not just the code, but the whole system.  The code along with the physical manifestation of the code.

In "Energy and the Evolution of Life" by Ronald F Fox, he explores the primitive thermodynamic Urobouros that must have allowed the construction of molecules through polymerization which allowed auto-catalysis.  Fox describes what in what these days is called a dissipative system, in which energy flows into a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, driving the system away from equilibrium.  In the case of a system in contact with a thermal reservoir, the equilibrium state is minimum free energy.  Driving away from that would mean either an increase in internal energy or an increase in entropy--life or death.  Since we're describing institutions as living, we should look at dynamics in which they're successfully converting that free energy into internal energy.  In the case of physical life, this is done by creating a mechanism for that free energy to activate monomers, which can then polymerize.

In the case of institutions, these processes are happening with humans rather than molecules.  We're used by the institution to "sense" things.  This is clear when we do something like report something suspicious to the police.  Just like a sense receptor takes the infinite complex dynamics of a stimulus and extracts information along a finite set of dimensions, we abstract our experience into a type, or membership into a set.  A robbery, burglary, theft, etc.  Depending on the type it is processed in a certain way.  It's also the case when we file a birth certificate, or trigger any "event"-based procedure within an institution, including a transaction.  Nowadays there are also automated triggers, which hints at the fact that non-humans could always fulfill some of these roles, (e.g. dogs).  In the case of a subscription, the process can be fully automated, however the initial subscription still requires a human to be in the loop in all cases I'm aware of.  When we enter into contracts, I would suggest that indicates an increase of internal energy.  A contract indicates actions to be done in the future -> work to be done -> potential work -> potential energy.  These agreements are bonds and store potential energy much like chemical bonds.

In the modern day, the most obvious ways that institutional code rears its head is through business processes and law.  But while law allowed us to build civilizations, language allows us to build towns, perhaps even cities, and allowed us to interpret law in a consistent enough way to sustain the eventual civilization-building efforts.

Language operates on a lower level from institutional code, and the mechanisms by which it mediates constraint of behavior are less explicit.  Viewed through this lens, things that have eluded explanation from an evolutionary perspective may have a new explanation.  Perhaps art and music don't really serve a purpose to us as individuals, or even as groups of individuals.  Perhaps rather than looking at the way art and music benefit us, we need to look at how they benefit our primordial institutions.

So what does a primordial institution look like?  By looking at modern day institutional code, we can see what the organizing principles of an institution are.  An in-depth look at documents like national constitutions and corporate charters would likely reveal insight, but from a quick analysis, What stood out is that each document defined the identity of the group, roles as well as conditions for membership in those roles.  Another prominent feature was events, and certain procedures that should or should not be followed in the case of those events.  There were some cases in which existing procedures were instructed to be modified when a member of a certain role was involved (e.g. a member of the legislature should not be arrested except for X, Y, or Z when legislature is in session).  Another feature was obligations and limitations on collection and distribution of resources from some members to other members.  Another interesting feature was granting or denying permission to create certain kinds of modifications to the code, as well as defining procedures for modifying the code, those procedures being defined as a series of steps that members of certain roles can take.  A notable property also required are mechanisms for incentivizing these processes to be carried out.  There are also lots of references to existing concepts like objects and actions which have required interpretation by courts.  For instance, what comprises a "militia" is up for debate.  It's only by specifying how these interpretations are to occur that the relevant code is fleshed out enough to become tangible and turn into physical causality.

We've put quite a few constraints on what properties a primordial code would have.  Let's list them out:

• A set of roles which a human can fulfill, as well as constraints for membership in those roles

  • One of those roles may be "member", establishing a boundary between internal and external

  • A set of objects which belong to categories with some process for determining category membership within the code

  • A set of processes which can be constrained depending on the involvement of various roles

  • Events which trigger those processes

  • The combination of event + process into a sort of "sensor" which allows information to flow into the institution

  • A mechanism for creating new processes

  • A mechanism for inhibiting the creation of processes with certain characteristics

  • Processes for identifying sources of potential energy

  • A conversion of that potential energy into increased internal energy in the institution

  • A metabolism of the potential energy defined by the institutional bonds into processes which increase the probability of acquiring more energy

  • Processes for incentivizing processes to be executed according to the code and disincentivizing incorrect behaviors, as well as sources of energy allocated for the purpose

  • Processes by which individual humans, or groups of humans bonded into a functional group can in turn bond with another human or group to create a larger structure

  • Process to increase the state of excitation of individual humans or groups of humans to allow the previous process to occur.

These constraints require us to define a lot of things.  First and foremost would be roles and processes.

Let's first address roles.  One of the most important role definitions would be that of member / non-member.  This would be critical for defining the boundary between internal and external.  We can imagine this could have been communicated in any number of non-linguisitic ways.  In a small tribe, this could be communicated by simply recognition, while larger clans might need to communicate this with their clothing or otherwise.  However more roles are needed than this for an institution because it does not provide any differentiation between members upon which these processes can differentiate.

Terrence Deacon in "The Symbolic Species, suggests that human pair-bonding through marriage, moving against previous polyamorous behavior of other primates such as bonobos was the impetus for symbolic reasoning which led to language.  Barbara Smuts, in this paper posits that sexual relationships are a primary organizing structure among primates, with an in-depth exploration of male-dominated versus female-dominated primate groups, providing compelling evidence that this is to some extent socially enforced.  She suggests that early human males cooperated to dominate females, and with the dawn of agriculture and animal husbandry, men were able to deprive women of resources where previously they had been able to sustain their own survival.  A recent analysis of a GPT model with a unique approach to exploring its embedding space found that there was significant sexual content while attempting to explore the "centroid", or basically finding the least specific things.  Some of that content specifically expressed violence toward women.

All of this is to say that there's good evidence that sexual roles were among the first roles defined in primordial institutions, if not the first.  In our modern institutional codes, we see that there are explicit definitions of membership.  In primordial institutions, if sexual roles were indeed playing a prominent role, we would expect their codes to define membership into those roles.  We can see this clearly in the case of coming-of-age rituals that were common across societies.

We will delve into the rest in the next post.