Act III MMM Ch. 21

MMM Across Life Itself (Including the Bits Without Brains)

The evolutionary and civilisational arc

The reason MMM is the most meta process we can observe, not just a recipe, is that it does not stop at the edge of human skin. It runs in things without brains. It runs in things without nervous systems. It runs in some things that, on a generous definition, are barely alive. What changes from one rung of the ladder to the next is not the loop but its resolution.

A microbe measures with chemistry. A plant measures with light and time. A mammal measures with a nervous system and somatic feeling. We measure with all of those plus language, instrument, ritual, and one another. Each layer adds bandwidth. Each layer is the prior loop running faster, with more memory, holding more model.

Key moves

  • Single-cell life runs MMM at the molecular level: gradient sensing, regulatory networks, expression, adaptation.
  • Multicellular life adds coordinated measurement (sensors), distributed modelling (signalling), and organised manifestation (movement, growth).
  • Animals with nervous systems compress and accelerate the loop dramatically, allowing model updates within a single life.
  • Humans add symbolic acceleration: language and culture let measurement, models, and manifestations be shared, stored, and reused across generations.
  • Civilisations are recursive MMM loops running on top of biological MMM loops running on top of cellular MMM loops. The pattern repeats with new substrate at each level.
  • “Evolution” as a ladder is the wrong picture. It is a branching tree of variations, each branch running its own MMM loop in its own register. We are one branch.

A bridge: where the wisdom traditions sit

Read this way, it becomes hard to ignore that wisdom traditions across cultures appear to encode MMM-shaped regularities tuned for human life: disciplines of attention (measurement), ontologies and stories (model), and ritual, ethics, and practice (manifestation). They were doing applied MMM with the data and tools they had. The next chapter looks at that directly.

Where this touches lived life

  • The intuition that “we are part of nature” gets cashed out here as a literal claim about shared loop structure across scales.
  • The intuition that “humans are different” also survives. Symbolic acceleration is a real and consequential difference, not a romantic exaggeration.
  • Watching a child learn is watching biological MMM and symbolic MMM braid into one another in real time. It is also why it is so disarming.

What we’re not claiming

  • Not that all life is “trying” to grow in complexity. Most lineages get more, less, or weirdly more-and-less complex over time. The loop runs; the direction is not preordained.
  • Not that complexity is the same as virtue. A complex system can be magnificent or monstrous.
  • Not that we have a clean theory of how new substrate layers (symbolic, cultural, technological) emerge. The fact that they do is observable. The mechanism is partly described.

Influences & Further Reading

  1. Lynn Margulis On the Origin of Mitosing Cells (1967)

    Endosymbiosis as evolutionary MMM: a detected difference leads to a new cellular architecture leads to a radically new form of life, the eukaryote.

  2. Jablonka & Lamb Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005)

    Four inheritance systems (genetic, epigenetic, behavioural, symbolic) as stacked layers of MMM loop capacity added over evolutionary time.

  3. Terrence Deacon Incomplete Nature (2011)

    Teleodynamics: the condition under which something strives toward a goal and corrects deviations. The most rigorous account of how purposiveness emerges from matter.

  4. Stuart Kauffman The Origins of Order (1993)

    Self-organisation at the edge of chaos provides the ordered landscape that evolution searches. Natural selection alone cannot explain biological order.

  5. Daniel Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

    Natural selection as universal acid: design can emerge from unintelligent cumulative processes. The philosophical framing for extending MMM to all life.

  6. W. Ross Ashby An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956)

    Law of requisite variety: a controller needs as much internal variety as the system it controls; the loop must match the complexity of what it regulates.

  7. Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species (1859)

    The foundational text: the MMM loop running without a brain, across geological time, through descent with modification and natural selection.

  8. Maynard Smith & Szathmary The Major Transitions in Evolution (1995)

    Each major transition is a new way of encoding and transmitting information: evolution as stacked MMM layers, each more compressed than the last.

  9. Odling-Smee, Laland & Feldman Niche Construction (2003)

    Organisms do not just adapt to environments, they build them; the Manifest step feeds back into Measure across generations.