 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 Cannon, 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 2011 that was sold in 2015. 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 the relationship between science and religion, which I borrowed from heavily in some of my prior talks. Thanks for coming, Nathaniel. All right. Well, so glad to be here. We have some really great talks already, but unfortunately regression to the mean is a real thing, and now it's my turn. So when I wrote, it was right in my proposal. I went with a 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. All right. 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. The second is a little more diffuse. You notice in the reference there that I'm grabbing from verse four 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 my own bosom. I say unto you, be one, and if you are not one, you are not mine. So the conclusions that I draw from there are that we have two primary attributes of a Zion society or a Zion community, and those are unity and altruism. Unity I think is pretty clear from the be one. Altruism might not be as clear, but I think it's pretty safe to go from there were no poor among them to there were some altruism going on there. 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. Okay, great. We'll go be unified. Thanks. That's great. That's not a blueprint, right? That's a mission statement maybe if you're lucky. 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? And now here I'm going to return to Mormon scripture again because it's not the first time that that has happened, and this is going to be in this 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's begging me saying thou shalt construct a ship after the manner which I shall show thee. I'm not going to read the whole thing. It is pretty familiar for most of you. 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 nine and it says, you know, after the manner which thou has shown unto me. So there's this idea that Nephi has had some vision, right? He knows something about what he's building about. 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, 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, here a little, and there a little. And finally this kind of strong dispute not because you see not for you 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. 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. Tools are very bottom up and 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 in almost an 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. 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 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. 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 when the saints kept trying to build Zion in the 19th century there's a reason they failed, perhaps they didn't have the right tools. That might raise the question of will Enoch probably didn't have a lot of complexity theory too, treating the scriptural account as historical. I'm just going to not deal with that right now. Just, that's a flaw, I've pointed it out. 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. Now we're gonna keep going and we're gonna talk about super organisms, because I promised super organisms. So there will be super organisms. So here are, first the definition of super organisms. A super organism is an organism made of organisms. I heard you liked organisms so I put some organisms in your organisms. The individual organisms within the super organisms specialize, this is gonna 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. I'll come back to that a little bit as well. And super organisms as a whole tend to exhibit homeostasis and emergence. Homeostasis is just the idea that there are certain considerate variables that the super organism cares about and it has 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 super organism. We'll talk about that in a second. And it has ways of regulating its own internal temperature, maintaining homeostasis. 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 super organism that is the colony, and you would never be able to look at an individual termite and say that guy's gonna build a mound, right? 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, oh sorry, I'm gonna get to examples, I promise. First of all, some benefits. So members of super organisms are ultra social for the purposes of the next 11 minutes and 15 seconds. Ultra social and super organism 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 bolded specialized because that's the money maker. That's the point. We have this quote from Matt Ridley. He says, the division of labor is what makes a body, again, that's a type of super organism worth inventing. And that is because when you allow people to specialize, people or agents, whatever, they create more for the entire super organism to enjoy than if every single part of the super organism was trying to do every single thing. That's why you make them. Now there's some costs. I'm gonna phrase the costs in economic terms just because that's my background. The first one is coordination problems. So we want the individuals in the super organism to work together, but there's no central guidance. A super organism 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 aunt colonies and aunt colonies have queens or beehives. They always create this one voice of the collective that kind of gives directions. That defeats the point. The whole point of a super organism 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 super organism 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 gonna 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. Even harder than that is the prisoner's dilemma, but luckily they're a little simpler to explain. The idea, 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. 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. 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 keep making more copies of yourself but please just die quietly so that the body can do what it's supposed to do. Same thing, if an intruder comes into a beehive, you gotta convince some of the bees to go and kill the intruder. Well, they're gonna die too. Please do it anyways. That doesn't make sense, right? You can't normally get creatures to do that. 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 super organism might be a way of thinking about how to get there. Because if you can get over these obstacles, that's what you get. So here come the examples and I'm gonna 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. 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 amoebas 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 super organism. 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 sport 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 super organism that you have to get that altruism. And the last one would be your body. And again, I'll just read the last quote there. Your body is only a hole 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. So humans are ultra-social. That's important to know. This is a quote from Jonathan Haight. We have two here. He points out that human societies are ultra-social. They are super organisms. And he also points out that human beings are the giraffes of altruism. These are both gonna be important. 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 ultra-social, but we're broken. We're defective. Now, what would happen if we were perfectly ultra-social? So this is a thought experiment. It's not mine. It's from Donald Simmons. And so he says, imagine 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, right? So genetically, you're gonna perfectly align the incentives of the spouses, right? 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? 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. 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. Insects lack empathy. They don't need it because their genetic interests are so closely. 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. So this brings to mind, and I'm winding out towards my end, this idea of opposition in all things. And I'm not gonna 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, yeah, feel pain, to feel joy, et cetera. 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. 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 Frans de Waal in the Bonobo and the atheists who said morality would be superfluous if we were universally nice. I'm gonna 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. 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. And then finally, this is Carl Molantes. He's not a scientist. This is just his personal account as I'm going through some pretty horrific combat in Vietnam. 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. We take the potentiality and we make it concrete. 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'd get the version of Zion with no love, no empathy, and no individualism. 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. 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. 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. 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 Zion 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 gotta 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 Zion as a super organism.