文章探讨物种作为超有机体的相关内容。指出物种是生殖隔离的种群，其特性使其成为超有机体的良好示例，但在将其作为其他超有机体的直觉泵时需谨慎。同时提到人类及其他群体存在的问题，以及不同情况下超有机体的差异等。

🦘物种是生殖隔离的种群，其自我复制能力完全自给自足，该抽象概念适用于宏观动植物，有助于理解超有机体间的相互作用。

🌐物种间界限因生殖隔离而清晰明确，物种间的竞争动态自然易考虑，对物种应用‘意向立场’时，即为繁殖。

⚠️将物种作为其他超有机体如国家、公司等的直觉泵时应谨慎，因为它们之间的边界、竞争方式及目标等存在差异。

💡水平分化对将代理模型推广到更大系统很必要，物种的某种水平分化重要且强大，我们对‘超有机体相互作用’的直觉应根据所考虑的超有机体与物种的相似程度进行调整。

Published on October 18, 2024 7:49 AM GMT

A species is a reproductively isolated population. In essence, it consists of organisms which can only breed with each other, so its ability to self-replicate is entirely self-contained. In practice, the abstraction only applies well to macroflora and macrofauna, which is still enough to inform our intuitions of super-organismal interaction.

Interspecific interactions can frequently be modeled by considering the relevant species as agents in their own right. Agents motivated by self-sustention to acquire resources, preserve the health of their subagents, and bargain or compete with others on the same playing field as themselves. Parasitism, predation, pollination—all organismal interactions generalizable to super-organismal interactions.

Optimization of the genome does not occur at the level of the organism, nor does it occur at the level of the tribe. It occurs on the level of the genome, and selects for genes which encode traits which are more fit. From this perspective, it makes sense for "species" to be a natural abstraction. Yet, I claim there are properties which species have that make them particularly nice examples of super-organisms in action. Namely:

Boundaries between species are clear and well-defined, due to reproductive isolation;Competitive dynamics between species are natural to consider, rather than having to move up or down a vertical hierarchy;The "intentional stance", when applied to species, is simple: reproduction.

However, it is precisely because species have such nice properties that we should be incredibly cautious when using them as intuition pumps for other kinds of super-organisms, such as nation-states, companies, or egregores. For instance:

Boundaries between nation-states and companies are relatively straightforward to define (determined by citizenship or residency and employment, respectively). Boundaries between egregores are . . . complicated, to say the least.^[1]Company competition is generally modelable with agent-agent dynamics, and so is nation-state competition. But the act of "merging" (via acquisition, immigration, etc.) is available to them in a way that it is not to species. (Again, egregores are complicated . . .)The goal of a company is to maximize shareholder value. The goal of a nation-state is . . . to provide value to its citizens? The "goal" of an egregore is ostensibly to self-perpetuate and . . . fullfill whichever values it wants to fulfill.^[2]

These "issues" are downstream from horizontal boundaries between other super-organisms we want to consider being less strong than the divides between idealized species. While Schelling was able to develop doctines of mutually-assured destruction for Soviet-American relations, many other nation-state interactions are heavily mediated by immigration and economic intertwinement. It makes less sense to separate China and America than it does to separate foxes and rabbits.

Don't species run into the same issues as well? Humans are all members of one species, and we manage to have absurd amounts of intraspecial conflict. Similarly, tribal dynamics in various populations are often net negative for the population as a whole. Why shall we uphold species as the canonical referent for superorganisms?

Species are self-sustaining and isolated. The platonic ideal of a species would not only be reproductively isolated, but also resource isolated, in that the only use for the resources which organisms of a species would need to thrive were ones which were unusable for any other purpose. Horizontal differentiation is necessary to generalize agent modeling to systems larger than ourselves, and species possess a kind of horizontal differentiation which is important and powerful.

A corollary of this observation is that insofar as our intuitions for "superorganismal interaction" are based on species-to-species interaction, they should be tuned to the extent to which the superorganisms we have in mind are similar to species. AI-human interaction in worlds where AIs have completely different hardware substrates to humans are notably distinct from ones in which humans have high-bandwidth implants and absurd cognitive enhancement, so they can engage in more symbiotic relationships.

I would be interested in fleshing out these ideas more rigorously, either in the form of case studies or via a debate. If you are interested, feel free to reach out. 

 

1. ^{^}

   One way to establish a boundary between two categories is to define properties which apply to some class of objects which could be sorted into one of the two buckets. But what is the "class of objects" which egregores encompass?! Shall we define a "unit meme" now? 

2. ^{^}

   I'm aware I'm not fully doing justice to egregores here. I still include them as an example of a "superorganism" because they do describe something incredibly powerful. There is a phenomenon where individuals acting in service of an ideology manage to collectively contravene their individual preferences in service of that ideology, and this is but one of the things egregores are useful for describing. 

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