Immortality through the transformation of functional similarity over time

According to the theory of constructed emotion, an instance of an emotion such as fear is a member of a category. No two members of that category are identical in any particular way except their functional similarity. For example, in one instance of fear, you might shut your eyes tight and freeze in place; in another instance of fear, you might widen your eyes and run away. These two instances of fear are both “fear” not because of any physical similarity between them but because they both have some kind of abstract functional similarity related to anticipating some forthcoming negative event.

Just as there’s no single central example of an instance of fear, there’s no single fear category either. The brain constructs the category it’s using in the moment as it needs it, and it doesn’t construct the same category twice:

In the TCE, population thinking extends to categories and not just their occurrences. A category is a group of instances that are similar enough to serve a function and guide allostasis and action in a specific context. A category is relational, situated, and ad hoc—constructed in the brain as a momentary, contextualized dynamic event. In other words, a category is something you do, not something you have.

So the functional similarity that unites all members of a category of fear is not constant over time. If you compare an instance of fear A with an instance of fear B, you’ll see that they both have some functional similarity, but if you compare the instance of fear B with an instance of fear C, you’ll see that the functional similarity between A and B is not the same functional similarity between B and C.

Words play an important role in the construction of categories. According to the above linked paper, “A word is an abstract feature that allows a brain to create abstract, functional similarities that transcend differences in sensory and motor features.” For example, when we point at two very different instances of an emotion and call them both “fear”, this prompts the listener to seek, or perhaps construct, functional similarities between the two instances.

Words are themselves examples of instances that change their functional similarity over time. The word “sandwich”, for example, went from referring to a sandy market town to a political title to a food item. If, for the sake of simplicity, you think of a word as changing meaning over time in series of discrete steps, then each step is connected by a functional similarity, but the functional similarity that connects one step to the next is not the same functional similarity that connects the next step to the one after it.

Conceptts also change like this. The word “bright” goes from referring to a visual phenomenon to describing many other things, like a bright sound, a bright taste, or a bright mind, none of which necessarily have any single unifying functional similarity with each other. The ability to transform concepts like this may help to explain why butterflies can usefully learn from their histories as caterpillars despite occupying different environmental niches.

As functional similarity changes over time, each change in the category makes local sense, but over time, the category preserves nothing in particular. If a thousand years from now, the word “sandwich” refers to, say, a part of a space station, then this is not a sign that anything has gone wrong. There are no concrete attachments holding the meaning of the word in place, only a committment to a highly abstract process of transformation.

Evolution also behaves like this. In each generation, the parent mostly reproduces itself in the child, but over many generations, the offspring can be extremely different from the ancestors. No particular part of the organims’s form or even DNA is necessarily preserved over multiple generations. If it was, then the species would struggle to survive, being committed to something unhelpful.

Which brings me to the question: Why do organisms age and die while the economy doesn’t? One possibility is that organisms have a target morphology that they’re attached to, while the economy usually floats free. In fact, the economy doesn’t have any attachments at all. All it wants to do is be a model of relative scarcities, a highly abstract goal that says nothing about any concrete particulars. To accomplish this goal, the economy needs to be willing to discard any particular pattern when the relative scarcities no longer support them. To maintain its most abstract goals, the economy must be willing to give up any of its more concrete goals—any particular patterns of allocation and specialization, etc.

Any particular change the economy undergoes—any specific change in the pattern of relative prices—probably looks like the minimal change necessary to maintain the overall pattern of the economy against changing environmental conditions. But over time, there is no part of the pattern that the economy tries to preserve, so there’s nothing that ossifies. When something isn’t working anymore, the economy changes it. So it might be that this lack of concrete attachments is what allows the economy to live forever.