Amerika

People want a generalized word for the approach that eschews the ego and social group in favor of looking at end results in reality. That approach forces us to clarify our intentions beyond method toward achievable goals, and this refines our thinking.

Those who dislike this want the opposite goal, which is to remove some methods from the table so people think in terms of the remaining permitted methods, but this makes people unable to connect to reality or intention, so you end up with directionless amblers like under Communism.

It turns out that selectionism, or the process of trying variations to see which are compatible with all factors of the total whole, is inherent to nature at every level:

Darwinism, or selectionism as the approach is more generally known, provides an account of the origins of complexity that does not entail principles that directly impose complexity (Richerson & R. Boyd, p. 361). Instead, complexity is a possible—although not inevitable—outcome of the repeated action of lower-order processes. As a general approach, the potential range of selectionism extends far beyond evolutionary biology.

A selection process consists of three interdependent phases—variation, selection, and retention.

• Variation provides the raw material upon which selection operates. It is the source of whatever novelty arises from repeated cycles of the selection process. Selection acts only on already existing variants.
• Selection leads, potentially, to complexity when some event acting on the population of variants favors (or disfavors) one variant over another. Selection confers to the process the illusion of purpose when the selecting contingencies remain constant or change slowly over time. Selection processes are not directed in a teleological sense. The future does not pull the present toward itself; instead, the past pushes the present into the future. The trajectory of selection depends utterly on the relative constancy of the selecting contingencies and the population of variants.
• Retention is the third phase of a selection process. Retention permits selected variants to persist long enough for them to contribute to the variation upon which future selections act. Without retention, selections cannot accumulate and even the possibility of complexity is precluded.

Even more, this even extends to the states of matter — patterns — themselves in a Platonic riff where the most logical prevail over the last, increasing logicality:

Quantum Darwinism describes the proliferation, in the environment, of multiple records of selected states of a quantum system. It explains how the fragility of a state of a single quantum system can lead to the classical robustness of states of their correlated multitude; shows how effective `wave-packet collapse’ arises as a result of proliferation throughout the environment of imprints of the states of quantum system; and provides a framework for the derivation of Born’s rule, which relates probability of detecting states to their amplitude.

Humanists oppose selectionism because it creates hierarchy and therefore obliterates the drive toward equality, but in the long calculus, selectionism best describes how our minds work: pick the best overall answer and stick with it until a refinement comes along.

Tags: adaptation, Idiocracy, natural selection, quantum darwinism, selection, selectionism, variation