Sociology

It seems inevitable after the fact. With an entire planet functioning as one great feedback loop, creating an abundant variety of life, there was bound to come a species whose individuals could encompass a feedback loop entirely in themselves. It started with brains that had the capacity to communicate in non-symbolic ways. Eventually, these brains caught onto rudimentary tools. Then finally brains became big enough and complex enough to internalize the feedback loop and create symbols.

The key point to understand here is that for consciousness to bloom it was never enough for a creature to react to another creature by exhibiting instinctive or conditioned behaviors. The interaction also needed to exist fully in the creature’s own imagination. That is, the creature had to become more than just itself. It had to also become that with which it wished to communicate. At the moment cognitive self-awareness first came to an Earth creature, that feedback loop created imagination and the capacity to communicate symbolically. Then, a new feedback loop could be ignited between one creature and another, and from that loop would emerge true consciousness.

There is no psychology, then, without sociology. All minds are born in the feedback loop that is symbolic interaction. There is no solitary human being without there first being two. And insofar as thinking is a conversation with oneself, there does always seem to be at least two inside one’s skull, even when it appears there is only one.

The great sociologist Carl Couch demonstrated that the foundation of human life is cooperation. Cooperation emerges from the feedback loop between two human minds. You anticipate what I’m going to do, but I’m anticipating what you’re anticipating I’m going to do, so you’re anticipating what I’m anticipating you’re anticipating I’m going to do, and so on. Sometimes, in the plunging regress, we stand and stare at each other, as when two people stand at a door, each waiting for the other to open it. But most of the time, we move as one unit and make something happen that’s greater than the sum of what we could accomplish separately. One very important example of this is when adult humans cooperate with the objective of bringing their own offspring into full consciousness.

And with the emergence of human consciousness, the cosmic feedback loop is closed. For modern physics teaches us that the fundamental level of reality is changed by our observation of it.

And so this does seem to be the governing principle of the universe: one great loop consisting of loops consisting of loops consisting of loops… Or, since the loops are always progressing upwards or downwards, perhaps a better image is that of spirals consisting of spirals consisting of spirals… going on into infinity whether you zoom in or out of the picture.

Grandpappy always liked to talk about this governing principle, actually, although I’ll admit He never spoke of it in such terms. But consider for a moment that the ultimate expression of the governing principle in humanity, and perhaps in the cosmos, is cooperation. Cooperation is defined by sociology as the act of two human beings deeply anticipating one another’s desires and intentions and using those insights to act as a single unit. But isn’t that the same thing Grandpappy talked about when He said that all the rules and proclamations of the prophets boiled down to "whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them"? I doubt it’s any coincidence that this was the same sentiment expressed by Confucius 500 years earlier as he espoused the same governing principal. (Grandpappy was a gentleman, AND a scholar!) Still, Grandpappy, Confucius, and just about every other spiritual thinker throughout human history, really, were more comfortable calling that governing principle something other than "feedback loops".

They all called it Love.