Zion: Some Assembly Required

Speaker 1

Nathaniel Gibbons is a writer, entrepreneur and tech worker. He has degrees in math from the University of Richmond, Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, and Economics from the University of Michigan. Nathaniel operates Difficult Run, a blog about politics, policy, and philosophy, and The Loose Canon, a blog about science fiction. He also writes for Times and Seasons, First Things Real Clear Religion, Meridian, and Utah Politico Hub. He helped found a mobile software development studio in twenty eleven that was sold in twenty fifteen in his day job He is Director of Client Solutions for a Boutique Software Development Consultancy. He lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, with his wife and two children. I just want to personally thank Nathaniel for coming and for some of his insights into the differences between or so the relationship between science and religion, which I borrowed from heavily in some of my prior talks. So thanks for coming, Nathaniel.

Nathaniel Givens

All right. Well, so glad to be here. We had some really great talks already, but unfortunately regression to the mean is a real thing. And now it’s my turn.

Nathaniel Givens

So, when I was writing my proposal, I went with the generic Title, Zion is Super Organism. I came up with a better title later, but I didn’t know if I could really change it, so now it’s the subtitle. So we’ve got Zion, some assembly required.

Nathaniel Givens

Alright, I’m going to start out with some actual scripture here. I know this is familiar, but I think it’s a good place to get started. So these are what I think are the two best descriptions of Zion from Mormon scripture. The first is, and the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness, and there was no poor among them.

Nathaniel Givens

The second is a little more diffuse. You notice in the reference there that I’m grabbing from verse 4 and then skipping all the way ahead to verse 27. But I think they go together. I think it’s okay. So it says, I am the same which have taken the Zion of Enoch into mine own bosom. I say unto you, be one. And if ye are not one, ye are not mine.

Nathaniel Givens

So, the conclusions that I draw from there are that we have two primary attributes of a design society or a Zion community, and those are unity and altruism. Unity, I think, is pretty clear from the B1. Altruism might not be as clear, but I think it’s pretty safe to go from There were no poor among them, too. There was some altruism going on there.

Nathaniel Givens

All right, so we are under obligation, as Mormons, to build Zion. We don’t really know what it looks like. I just went through our two attributes. They’re kind of generic, right? Be unified. Oh, okay, great. We’ll go be unified. Thanks. That’s great. That’s not a blueprint, right? Um that’s that’s that’s a mission statement, maybe if you’re lucky. So uh so we’re in trouble, right? How are we going to go about building something if you don’t really know what it looks like?

Nathaniel Givens

And now here I’m going to return to Mormon scripture again, um, because it’s not the first time that that has happened. And this is going to be in the section I’m going to call Tools, Not Blueprints. So we’re going to read a little bit from Building Nephi’s ship. The Lord spake unto me, saying, Thou shalt construct a ship after the manner which I shall show thee. I’m not going to read the whole thing. This is pretty familiar for most of you.

Nathaniel Givens

The point of this is that rather than ask for a blueprint, what Nephi said is, okay, show me where to go build the tools. Now you might look at verse 9 and it says, You know, after the manner which thou hast shown unto me. So there’s this idea that Nephi has had some vision, right? He knows something about what he’s building a boat. He’s got a general idea of what a boat looks like. But if you actually read the whole chapter in context, I think it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have anything like a complete or a total description of the project. So he doesn’t really have blueprints. But he says, let’s go get tools. This is a general pattern.

Nathaniel Givens

A couple more verses. We’ve got this idea of being led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which you’re going to do. We’ve got this idea of precept upon precept, here a little, and there a little. And finally, this kind of strong verse, dispute not, because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith. Clearly some of these are controversial in terms of the definition of faith. My only point here is to say that when you’re looking at Mormon Scripture, we do have this idea of get started and then figure it out. That’s what I’m saying.

Nathaniel Givens

And so we have this idea of tools versus blueprints, and I just want to talk about that a little bit to point out that blueprints are very top-down. They’re centralized, right? The idea is that you have one plan. And they’re inflexible, right? The blueprints tell you how to build a specific house. Not a bunch of houses, not different houses, but a specific house.

Nathaniel Givens

Tools are very bottom-up. They’re decentralized in the sense that you can hand a lot of tools out to a lot of different people and they can work on a lot of different things at the same time. And they’re flexible in the sense that with one set of tools, you can build an almost infinite different variety of houses. Whereas with one blueprint, you build one house. So, this is just something to keep in mind. I’m going to be returning to this idea later.

Nathaniel Givens

Now, this is the part of my slides where I had to take 15 slides out. Because I got really excited about quantum mechanics and what I call the ontological spectrum, and I was going to go on this awesome tangent, and it was going to be fantastic. And I just didn’t have time. So instead, I’m just going to go skirt over this very, very quickly and suggest that some of the new findings from systems complexity theory, kind of the same name or different name for the same idea. Also, chaos theory was kind of the older name. Some of the ideas from this emerging interdisciplinary field are going to be relevant here.

Nathaniel Givens

I have that quote from, it’s not Read Admiral Grace Hopper, sorry, that’s Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, my mistake. She has this fantastic quote where she says, Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems. The point of that quote is really to suggest that, yeah, there might actually be something to this field that is new. there might actually be the possibility of some tools, some new ways of looking at human societies and cultures that were not available previously So maybe, you know, when the saints kept trying to build Zion in the nineteenth century, there’s a reason they failed. Perhaps they didn’t have the right tools. That might ra raise the question of well, Enoch probably didn’t have a lot of complexity theory too. I’m treating the scriptural account as historical. I’m just gonna not deal with that right now. That’s a flaw. I’ve pointed it out.

Nathaniel Givens

All right, so the central topics of systems and complexity theory would be things like self-regulation, self-organization, networks, adaptive Systems, that’s when your system is made up of lots of little agents that have their own opinions and change, like people, and this concept of emergence. So, this is my 15 slides in one.

Nathaniel Givens

Now we’re going to keep going, and we’re going to talk about superorganisms, because I promised superorganisms. So there will be superorganisms.

Nathaniel Givens

So here are, first the definition of superorganisms. A superorganism is an organism made of organisms. I heard you liked organisms, so I put some organisms in your organisms. The individual organisms within the superorganism specialize. A This is going to turn out to be really, really important. And we’ll go through some examples pretty quickly. The individual organisms can act together as a whole through this concept of distributed intelligence. So I’ll come back to that a little bit as well.

Nathaniel Givens

Um and superorganisms as a whole tend to exhibit homeostasis and emergence. Homeostasis is just the idea that there are certain uh considerate variables that the superorganism cares about, and it has uh factors in place that let it Stay within the range that it likes. So, one would be temperature. And an example is: your body is a superorganism, we’ll talk about that in a second, and it has ways of regulating its own internal temperature, maintaining homeostasis.

Nathaniel Givens

The other is emergence. The classic example of emergence are things like a termite mound. The idea there is that you got these little termites, they’re the little agents in the superorganism that is the colony, and you would never be able to look at an individual termite and say, that guy’s going to build a mound. So it’s because of their interactions together that they build something that’s not reducible to the individual parts. That’s emergence. So the two most important traits are emergence and homeostasis. So, let’s.

Nathaniel Givens

Oh, and sorry, some ben. I’m gonna get to examples, I promise. First of all, some benefits.

Nathaniel Givens

So, members of superorganisms are ultra-social for the purposes of the next. 11 minutes and 15 seconds. Ultra-social and superorganism are basically the same thing. They just are used in different fields. So this allows hundreds or thousands of organisms. To live together, to cooperate, to divide labor, and I boldly specialize because that’s the moneymaker. That’s the point.

Nathaniel Givens

We have this quote from Matt Ridley: he says: the division of labor is what makes a body, again, that’s a type of superorganism, worth inventing. And that is because when you allow people to specialize, people or agents, whatever, they create more for the entire superorganism to enjoy than if every single part of the superorganism was trying to do every single thing. That’s why you make them.

Nathaniel Givens

Now, there are some costs. I’m going to phrase the costs in economic terms just because that’s my background. The first one is coordination problems.

Nathaniel Givens

So we want the individuals within the superorganism to work together, but there’s no central guidance. A superorganism doesn’t have a single executive control center that says you do that, you do that, whatever. We always portray them as if they did in movies, right? Because you’ve got super organisms in movies. It’s things like the Borg from Star Trek, right? And inevitably they end up creating usually a queen because we like ant colonies and ant colonies have queens. or beehives, they always create this one voice of the collective that kind of gives directions. That’s defeats the point. The whole point of a superorganism is that you don’t have a central voice. You don’t have the one command and control center. But somehow, without that, you still have to get all the bits and pieces of the superorganism to cooperate. Somehow, you have to get your stomach and your small intestines to work together and play nicely, right? But you think your brain is going to be the central command center, but the whole point is that it’s not. That’s actually regulated through hormones, which are distributed throughout the body. Long digression. Coordination problems are tough.

Nathaniel Givens

Even harder than that is the prisoner’s dilemma, but luckily they’re a little simpler to explain. The prisoner’s dilemma is the name of a famous game theory experiment. I won’t go into it if you don’t recognize it. The whole point. Is that you have to convince the individuals to sacrifice for the group?

Nathaniel Givens

Going back to the body as an example again, you have to convince some of your cells to die when it’s their turn to die. Because if they don’t, you get this thing we call cancer, right? And that doesn’t make a lot of sense, evolutionarily speaking, because all the cells in your body have their own genome, the same genome as the rest of you usually. They have their own desire to reproduce. And so you have to convince them, you really would like to, you know, keep making more copies of yourself, but please just die quietly so that the body can, you know. Do what it’s supposed to do.

Nathaniel Givens

Same thing, right? If an intruder comes into a beehive, you’ve got to convince some of the bees to go and kill the intruder. Well, they’re going to die too. Please do it anyways. That doesn’t make sense, right? You can’t normally get creatures to do that.

Nathaniel Givens

However, and this is the point, when these obstacles are overcome, when you can accomplish that, what do you have? Unity and altruism. Which we said were the key defining characteristics of Zion. So it looks like a superorganism might be a way of thinking about how to get there. Because if you can get over these obstacles, that’s what you get.

Nathaniel Givens

So here come the examples, and I’m going to go through a little quickly to make sure that I fit within the time that I’ve got. The one we hear about all the time are ant colonies and beehives, and then I’ve just got some quotes here from Matt Ridley. Where he’s really emphasizing, yeah, you can think of the entire colony as a body, basically. I’ll read the last part of the last quote. I think that’s the best. He says, and colonies are born, grow large, reproduce, and die, just like bodies. If you actually look at ant colonies or various types, they have life cycles. The colony as a whole has a life cycle. That’s why you refer to the colony as a whole as an organism made up of organisms.

Nathaniel Givens

Some more, we’ve got slime molds. I love slime molds, they’re so awesome. Really quickly, slime molds usually they’re just like amoeba basically on their own, just doing their own thing in the environment. But when times get tough, they start sending out this chemical that says, guys, let’s get together. And all these little amiibos, basically, that usually live on their own, they come together and they make, I kid you not, a slug. It’s a little, like about the size of a pellet of rice, and they start crawling around. Now, at that point, you have a superorganism. Instead of being distributed, they all come together and they crawl around. And when they find a place that they like, they kind of turn on their end and they grow up to a stalk and they create a spore at the end and they spread out kind of like a dandelion. Well, about 20% of them die and don’t get to reproduce because of that, and the other 80% actually get a chance at finding a better life. And so that’s why, again, it’s like a superorganism that you have to get that altruism.

Nathaniel Givens

And the last one would be your body. And again, I’ll just read the last quote there. Your body is only a whole because of elaborate mechanisms to suppress mutiny. It’s in constant tension. And cancer is the big example of that. Cancer is what happens when those mechanisms fail.

Nathaniel Givens

So, humans are ultrasocial. That’s important to know. This is a quote from Jonathan Haidt. We have two here. He points out that human societies are ultrasocial. They are superorganisms. And he also points out that human beings are the giraffes of altruism. These are both going to be important.

Nathaniel Givens

However, human ultra-sociality is broken, and this is really important. So he says, We humans have a dual nature. We are selfish primates who also long to be part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. And then he has this longer quote about religion and the role that it plays, concluding with: Human nature is a complex mix of preparation for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism. We’re ultrasocial, but we’re broken. We’re defective.

Nathaniel Givens

Now, what would happen if we were perfectly ultrasocial? So this is a thought experiment. It’s not mine. It’s from Donald Simmons. And so he says, imagines if humans always moved to a deserted island when they got married. There are obviously ways in which this would be an awesome idea. But the ways that are relevant are that if that happens, then there’s no chance for infidelity, and there’s no competing requests from other family members.

Nathaniel Givens

So, genetically, you’re going to perfectly align the incentives of the spouses. So, now imagine if this continued again and again for hundreds and then thousands of generations. And the question is: what kind of relationship Would the spouses have in this idyllic setting where there’s no competing other incentives? Everything is perfectly aligned. So what happens?

Nathaniel Givens

Here’s what happens. There would be no falling in love because there would be no alternative mates to choose among, and falling in love would be a huge waste. You would literally love your mate as yourself, but that’s the point. You don’t really love yourself, except metaphorically. You are yourself. The two of you would be, as far as evolution is concerned, one flesh, and your relationship would be governed by mindless physiology. You might feel pain if you observed your mate cut herself. But all the feelings we have about our mates that make a relationship so wonderful when it is working well and so painful when it is not. Would never evolve. And to go back to the thought experiment, even if a species like us had them when they took up this way of life, they would be selected out. as surely as the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish are selected out because they would be all cost and no benefit.

Nathaniel Givens

So the fact that our ultra-sociality is broken turns out to be not a bug, but a feature. Because if we were just created perfectly ultra-social, I’m going to say created through natural selection and evolution, because that makes sense. So, if we had been evolved to be perfectly ultra-social, what do we get? We get ants. Do you want to be an ant? I don’t want to be an ant. Oh, and here’s another quick one.

Nathaniel Givens

Insects lack empathy. They don’t need it because their genetic interests are so closely aligned. He’s talking about insects that live in colonies and hives. There’s no reason for them to have empathy because they have perfectly aligned interests. So, if we were perfectly ultra-social, we would have perfect unity and perfect altruism. That’s Zion, as long as you don’t mind a Zion that has no love, empathy, or individualism. Maybe not the best Zion.

Nathaniel Givens

So, this brings to mind, and these are I’m winding down towards my end, this idea of opposition in all things. And I’m not going to read the scripture because, again, I think it’s pretty familiar, but the idea is we tend to understand this pretty intuitively at an individual level. Person by person, we have to be able to feel pain to feel joy, etc. We get that. What I’m saying is that’s not just true at an individual level, it’s also true at the social level. We have to be broken as individuals in order to be able to grow. We have to be broken as a society in order to be able to grow. These are just a couple of quotes that show how this works again more on an individual level.

Nathaniel Givens

There’s this idea that embodiment is difficult by design. The point here, by the way, is that the people I’m quoting here are all atheist scientists. So I’m not quoting religious thinkers who are like, Yes, let’s get on board with Mormonism. These are people from very far outside of the Mormon tradition who’ve come to, in this particular case, Agreement on this, right? So we’ve got Franz DeWaal in The Bonobo and The Atheist, who said morality would be superfluous if we were universally nice. I’m going to skip the rest of the quote for time. Then we have Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman in a book about the psychology of killing in combat called On Killing.

Nathaniel Givens

And he makes a similar observation, saying the force of darkness and destruction within us is balanced with the force of light. And love for our fellow men. To ignore one is to ignore the other. We cannot know the light if we do not acknowledge the dark. We cannot know life if we do not acknowledge death.

Nathaniel Givens

And then uh finally this is Carl Malantes. He’s not a scientist. This is just his personal account as a as um going through some pretty horrific combat in Vietnam. Um but I really like this idea that evil floats all around us, good floats all around us too. We humans make evil and good concrete. You know, we take the potentiality and we make it concrete.

Nathaniel Givens

Now the reason I went through these three slides again is because we understand at an individual level how this is true. What I’m saying is that it’s true at the social level. Brokenness generates growth at the individual level, but also at the social level. There’s a reason Zion is hard to build. It has to be hard to build because if it were easy to build, We get the version of Zion with no love, no empathy, and no individualism.

Nathaniel Givens

So, altruism and unity alone are not enough. I won’t have time to explain these very much, but the idea I have in mind is that we want something like mindful altruism and we want something like heterogeneous unity.

Nathaniel Givens

For mindful altruism, what I’m thinking is this idea that we’re going to be giving as though the other is the self, but not giving to another that is literally. part of the self. Your organs share resources with each other, but it’s not sharing like when you share with your wife, with your friend, with your children, right? You are conscious that you are giving to another person. That’s what I have in mind as mindful altruism. As opposed to when the worker ant brings home some food for the colony, that’s not mindful. That’s no more mindful than your small intestine picking up resources from your last meal. There’s no mindfulness there.

Nathaniel Givens

And then the second thing is this idea of heterogeneous unity, and I think this one is really, really, really essential. And that is the ability to find unity on core issues despite tolerating divergence on other issues. I think the single greatest impediment towards the practical design project has been the idea that we all think We need to figure out the perfect plan. And once we’ve got the perfect plan, once we’re all in agreement, once we have total unity, then we’ll build Zion backwards. You’ve got to start building it first, tolerating a lot of differences along the way, and simply finding unity on a few core key issues. And so that is my talk about how to look at design as a superorganism.