In the recent article, ‘Networked Minds’ Require Fundamentally New Kind of Economics, we learn that scientists have discovered the existence of “networked minds”, a concept overlapping my concept of “communal minds”. Jacques Barzun covered some important regions of this territory in the 1950s with his book, The House of Intellect and others were very tentatively exploring this territory at least as early as St Paul with his vague references to something he called “The Body of Christ,” the perfect man which is Christ and which is all of us. According to Jacob Neusner—see Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity, the sages who founded modern Judaism in the century or so after Christianity came to dominance in the Roman Empire were very concerned with the ways in which our feelings lead us into social ties, into communities. I discuss these matters in my essays, Intelligence vs. Intellect and Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?, and in a greater context in my book which is available for free downloading: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being.
The first paragraph of the article, ‘Networked Minds’ Require Fundamentally New Kind of Economics, is:
In their computer simulations of human evolution, scientists at ETH Zurich find the emergence of the “homo socialis” with “other-regarding” preferences. The results explain some intriguing findings in experimental economics and call for a new economic theory of “networked minds”.
Later in the article, we can read about the core findings:
Prof. Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich, who coordinated the study, adds: “Compared to conventional models for the evolution of social cooperation, we have distinguished between the actual behavior—cooperation or not—and an inherited character trait, describing the degree of other-regarding preferences, which we call the friendliness.” The actual behavior considers not only the own advantage (“payoff”), but also gives a weight to the payoff of the interaction partners depending on the individual friendliness. For the “homo economicus”, the weight is zero. The friendliness spreads from one generation to the next according to natural selection. This is merely based on the own payoff, but mutations happen.
For most parameter combinations, the model predicts the evolution of a payoff-maximizing “homo economicus” with selfish preferences, as assumed by a great share of the economic literature. Very surprisingly, however, biological selection may create a “homo socialis” with other-regarding preferences, namely if offsprings tend to stay close to their parents. In such a case, clusters of friendly people, who are “conditionally cooperative”, may evolve over time.
If an unconditionally cooperative individual is born by chance, it may be exploited by everyone and not leave any offspring. However, if born in a favorable, conditionally cooperative environment, it may trigger cascade-like transitions to cooperative behavior, such that other-regarding behavior pays off. Consequently, a “homo socialis” spreads.
As I understand matters, they reasoned that cooperative individuals could come to some sort of dominance in a society so long as selection allowed `other-regarding’ individuals to congregate in dense enough populations and one possible way for that to happen is for children to stay near parents. With strong families, a society can depend much upon the commons and can be something of a welfare society because of lessened danger of being taken advantage of by free-riders. From strong families and the other-regarding behavior natural to genetically related creatures, networks of trust can be built to do business in efficient and friendly ways and to accomplish many other goods such as caring for the disabled without families and to help to educate all future citizens and not just your own children.
The viewpoint in the design and analysis of the research seems to me to start from the modern view of human beings as being autonomous and then to try to correct that view. Thus it is that their model of social man is a networked individual rather than a creature with both individual being and social being as is true in my ways of thinking as well as in the discourse of some others with some ties to the ages prior to modernity.
Yet, there is something of the nature of networks in our communal being and there is also much that is good in modernity though it tends to be, consistent with the modern view of human beings, clusters of good thought and good art and good actions connected by loose networks rather than by a coherent narrative of the meaning of it all. In any case, the networking of individuals gets at only part of human communal being but it’s a true part just as genes are an important foundational part of human being and it’s only when scientistic thinkers use words, or even imply words, such as `just’ or `only’ that genetic thinking threatens our understanding of our human being and, in fact, all of created or contingent being. As Pope Benedict XVI said in 2008:
Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man.
It was this quote that inspired the title, and partly the spirit, of my book: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. Research done in genetics and sociobiology and biochemistry and social networks can help us to achieve this “more exact understanding of human being,” but it needs to be brought into a coherent narrative which gives meaning to it all, which narrative would be the core of a civilization.