Defining A Nested Boundary Space For, and the Agents Within, Techno & Biospheres

The Expanse | Part 4

Returning to the Nest

Having a means of mapping the world around us is important. No map and you run the risk of getting lost indefinitely, taking a wrong turn and ending up somewhere dangerous or worse still, driving headfirst off a jagged cliff. Maps can tell you where you are; maps can show you where to go next. Plots, displayed in some sort of systematised format, can even elaborate on where you have been in the past. Maps show the relation between different features, details essential to understand those features and how it all fits into the wider landscape. Distance can be measured from maps, routes planned, exploration enabled. To me, the global space we exist within - the biosphere - as well as the universal space that our space is nested within - the unisphere - are both demarcated spaces which house features that, where possible, could and should be mapped. Mapping leads to a clearer picture of our surroundings. In this case our surroundings are reality, and life's place within it is what we shall be exploring.

If we take the idea that space and object generation seem to be fundamentally linked¹ we gain the confidence to peer around the conceptual cornerstones into equally as conceptual spaces. In the hopes of seeing where certain objects sit in these sometimes dark alleyways and tiny niches we begin to make out how these objects sit in relation to one another, and in what ways hypothetical future objects may develop across multiple unique contextual landscapes. One way to explore a relation between objects and spatial structure, and how this looks across various individual yet interconnected structural spaces, is to imagine these spaces as collections of non-uniform “spheres”. Why? Well I opened Part 2 talking about Nested Circles, and how they have been a feature of the nature of reality since time immemorial, just like we, as a species, have been obsessed with them since our ancestors were burning logs in caves. Spheres are the next evolution of circles - two-dimensions become three. But imagining things in three-dimensions is hard at the best of times. Thus, whilst I think spherical forms are a good cognitive tool to help imagine the spaces that we will be exploring, to first get a grip on the structural relation between the spaces themselves, as well as between the various spaces and the objects that exist within them, we can visually grab ahold of and play with such spherical spaces if we imagine instead these spheres as a system of Nested Circles. We have come full circle.²

In Part 2 we briefly touched upon a model of reality that was not 100% Aristotelian-esque but did incorporate philosophical structure regarding levels and substance, hierarchy of “movers” and an element of fundamental intelligence that cannot simply be ignored. We looked at both physical and non-physical spatial demarcation (e.g. biomes, lithospheres and tropospheres vs morphogenetic, transcriptional and linguistic spaces), and imagined the biospherical space and the totality of space our unisphere sits within. We only imagined it on a surface-level, of course. But even just thinking about something can be beneficial in getting further towards understanding it on a deeper rung. Your ideational pores open, making you more susceptible to new ideas about the world and your place within it. That is all this Nested Circles idea is: another way of framing the world. On a side note, it would do you good to remember that not all frames last forever, nor are they needed forever. From scaffolding to zimmer frames, as teachers we learn that we build frameworks only so that we can remove them once students understand what it is we are trying to frame. Frames become obsolete, especially when we want (or need) to change the picture. All that is to say, only use this world model to frame an understanding for as long as you have to. Or do not use it at all. It is only there in the off chance it supports a few of you in seeing the world from a different angle, a different point of observation, a new perspective. Ramble over, now we shall take this adapted heuristic model onwards, keeping it close by our side as we brave the open waters of the The Expanse, flashlight in hand, looking for the reflection off curious eyes just below the surface. 

Nested Circles (Visual)

These circles, which we can also imagine as spheres, are simply ways of thinking about spaces in a more categorizable sense, I guess becoming more of a heuristic than a model. It serves as a cognitive shortcut to enable thinking in terms of a greater scale, both from the bottom→up and the top→down. Starting from the bottom, it imagines how life (specifically, in this example, human life) organises and interacts with its biosphere in terms of causes and effects. Then, integrating an Aristotelian-lens of hierarchical top-down action³ we can shift our panorama to the outermost boundaries and work our way back in, imagining how the unisphere is demarcated, and how it is the very fabric, the very substance of causal structure felt throughout solar and galactic system spaces, all the way down into the biospherical space life inhabits.

The main components of the Nested Circles (from out-to-in) include: the unisphere - the outermost boundary of what is observationally possible to conceive, the sogalsphere - the second outermost boundary delineating the combinatorial space of solar and galaxy-based systems, and the biosphere - the inner large circle, the space in which our ideas of life exists within. We can further use this spacial categorisation to denote the underlying organisational structure of us humans within the biospherical space. Nested within the biosphere is a triple-venn formation, with each overlapping circle representing a key function of contemporary human existence: society - sociosphere (S), politics - politisphere ( P) and technology - technosphere (T). The structure of these miniature components are a take on the tried and tested “three-circles model” used to delineate and conceptualise different forms of organisational structure, and this sits within the outer boundaries which themselves are based on the observations of modern science⁴ and ancient philosophical perspectives.⁵ In this case we are looking at human-based systems, integrated with information and technological networks, nested within natural and other larger biological systems like the “Gaia-hypothesis”⁶, which themselves are nested within larger spatial systems themselves as we scale up and out. And the scaling is the part to grasp here.

It would be fair to ask, if you have been reading this series since the start: what the f*** does any of this have to do with artificial lifeforms and that weird Expanse you keep going on about? I mean, whilst I would ask you politely to calm down a bit, you would be fair in questioning me like this. I would answer by first off saying that, in thinking about such notions like artificial lifeforms, I believe it is imperative to first see reality through a certain observational lens. In this case a lens shaded with spaces and objects. Once the cognitive slides are slotted into place, then and only then can we begin to extrapolate further about other abstract spaces - where artificial life may reside. We must first even the playing fields and come at this ideation process from a similar vantage point, before we allow the inevitable and necessary diversity of thought to flow on through, wash over us and carry us to where we need to be.

This nested set of circles, then - which I like to also imagine in a three-dimensional sense as spheres because of the objects assumedly moving around three-dimensionally within them - is an “easier” way to build a mental model around how different spaces within our reality interconnect with one another. By understanding how spaces interconnect we can begin to understand how to begin understanding how objects also interconnect. For example, if we are to just take our biosphere from the Nested Circles and zoom in on it, we would notice that within each of the three inner-circles, inherently overlapping all of the human-based spaces of causal structure (S, P & T) are even smaller, more fractal structures and spaces. Imagine this in the following way:

Marketspheres (the small white circles) represent resource-rich pockets of capital that sit like gemstones and diamonds within society, politics, technology and mixtures of all three. These marketspheres sit and wait to be tapped into by us humans, and soon the precious vein is tapped the capital and resources get syphoned off for a host of net-positive and net-negative, local and global reasons (which are sadly often at odds with the sustainable continuation of our biosphere). These marketspheres are formed within and find themselves flowing through variedly-paced spaces like econstreams (coloured grey) that punctuate all the human-centric and even bio-centric spheres. Econstreams are upstream of marketspheres as for a market to exist there needs to be some economical structure to support it.⁷ Whilst it is not my intention to discuss this world model in the context of geo-political observations in this series⁸ I present this as one example of how spaces exist within spaces that exist within spaces; Nested Circles all the way down. And I also use it to bring us back to a topic teased in Part 2, but left open-ended until now.

We circle back to hyper-objects, as it is within these abstract integrated spaces where one possible hyper-object sits and occupies some leg room. If you have not guessed already, I am talking about the economy. Zooming into these Nested Circles we get a sense of the weird spatial-temporal niche this object inhabits - although niche may be the wrong word to use as whilst the economy sits within the overlapping, inner spaces of human organisation, it is yet positioned in such a way that it effects and relates to almost all of our human action, and maintains a position from which it has exponential relations to other objects throughout the sociosphere, the politisphere, the technosphere and the entire biosphere in general. Remember relations are what objectify hyper-objects. And if this schematic is anything to go by, even on a surface level we can see how interrelated, thus interconnected, the economy is, and thus we can consider it a hyper-object. This then becomes an interesting case-study to take forward. The case being one involving highly-related and interconnected objects existing in obscure places. If we take a hyper-object like the economy and see that it is at play across all spaces within our immediate reality, essentially out of our control as much as we are within its machinations, then this has implications for how we can begin to imagine observing other complex, hyper-like objects in other weird, obscure yet constantly evolving spaces. Into the Expanse we row.

(Not Quite Aristotelian) Entities

Moving between these spheres, navigating the demarcated spaces (e.g. morphogenetic and linguistic, biophysical, artificial) are multiple cognispheres. Imagine smaller marbles suspended in viscous liquid, moving around a fish tank separated into smaller internal spaces depending on what that marble is and what it wants or needs to do. This represents human cognition, individual and collective. We could easily try to include all complex objects like flora and fauna in the cognisphere definition but we have to be anthropocentric at some level because we are the only biological lifeform that appears capable of a) producing natural computations that result in us experiencing consciousness, qualia, sentience, ciência - whatever you want to call it - at least to the extent that we choose to deliberately alter our surrounding environment beyond reasonable constraints and b) mastering technology to the extent that we love to spend vast amounts of time and resources attempting to build other lifeforms of potentially high intelligence, like quantum computing and artificial intelligence. We have already explored how objects exist in obscure spaces, but to really get a sense of this existence we must explore the most complex object easily observable: the human.

The fact you are sitting there reading this, I am sitting here writing this, and all around us other humans go about daily lives, driving cars, looking at phones and computers, creating art and playing instruments, ruminating on big philosophical questions, sitting at the cusp of scientific breakthroughs, it is all astonishing and is due to our immense complexity as an object. Such objectification of life will appear front and centre in the next article in this series, but until then just imagine cognispheres as the representation of the space of human cognition, individual and collective. Whilst I try to refrain from being as anthropocentric as possible in my work, following the second order cybernetic principle of autobiographical observation, avoiding it may be fool's errand. In this case, atleast, a little anthropocentrism may also be somewhat beneficial to our observation. Hear me out.

Like bands of hungry animals roaming the anthropocentric Serengeti, up to six distinct categories of human organisations exist, with more cropping up and chopping and changing sporadically as time goes on. These structural forms of human organisation move around the social, political and technological spaces strewn across the biosphere, acting like individual entities trying to survive in a landscape where they are competing for resources, space and attention with other entities. Thinking of these distinct categories as “singular” entities helps heuristically, but they are more than what any one person can represent themselves.⁹ These entities are more akin to structural forms of human organisation that move around the social, political and technological spaces like elephants looking for a watering hole or a lion looking for its next prey; survival-based symbioses. But we take out the Serengeti and put this on a geo-political scale instead because we are talking about us humans here, far from a regular animal of the plains, and we suddenly realise these entities are the actors, on a global scale, who sit atop the Game of Power, monopolise force, control weapon systems like nuclear arsenals capable of mass destruction and are generally the perpetrators of contemporaneous war and destruction. Paradoxically, they are also the global entities that provide stability, infrastructure, health care systems, benefits to those unable to work, and a host of other essential ingredients for making human life much more comfortable and survivable. It is never black and white. Grey areas exist for a reason. Picking the top six most prevalent of these entities to our current global situation is based on this paradoxical influence on everyday life. Entities, for now, thus include (in no particular order): the state, hyper-agent, God, network, egregore, and the private (sovereign) individual.¹⁰

Within the machinations of the global spatial system these entities own a disproportionate share of the ability to effect change in their surrounding environment.¹¹ Unfortunately, I do not have the space nor scope in this article to get into the various dynamics that these entities are an integral part of across the overlapping social, political and technological spaces within the biosphere. Instead, the reason for me illustrating Nested Circles and the concept of such a categorisation of entities like those above is three-fold:

First I wanted to demonstrate how objects can exist across all spaces, such as those spaces included in our biosphere. It was a deliberate choice to focus on the biosphere in this case, because the objects we will begin to look at in the succeeding articles will also develop within spaces within the biosphere.¹² This leads us to the second reason why I wanted to demonstrate the very real nature of objects in our shared space: some objects develop into highly complex, perhaps even hyper-versions of themselves; entities, whilst arguably not hyper-objects per say, demonstrate how objects within global spaces can become akin to a “Primary Mover”.¹³ Once positioned at such a level within the human-based spheres of influence in our biosphere, these Primary Movers are able to disproportionately affect and change their local environment and, in some cases, the global environment too. And all of this action is generated from within one or more of the three inner spheres: the sociosphere, the politisphere and the technosphere, bringing us to the third and final reason why I wanted to mention these Entities and the Nested Circles Model in the first place: objects-come-entities akin to Primary Movers inhabit these spaces and develop within them, using the unique structure of each space to fuel its own strategic movement and action.¹⁴ This is as true for the sociosphere as it is the technosphere. And, when we zoom in on the technosphere, we notice something very interesting indeed. Not only does the technosphere house physical space, where these human entities navigate and extract and provide resources, but it also houses another type of space, one that sits in that infamous grey area between the physical and non-physical. That space is the techno-digital space, it is what I have been referring to as the Expanse. By witnessing how objects can develop in the physical space contained within the biosphere, we may begin to notice how objects can also develop within the non-physical space contained within the completely fabricated yet murky techno-digital space, which sits within the wider-rimmed technosphere. Only after we observe our own objective development in these spaces can we hope to observe other object development in other spaces, and who knows what artificial Entities may be awaiting an opportunity to bubble to the surface.

1. See Part 1. Discussed in further detail in Part 5 - Disassembling Assembly Theory.

2. No pun intended.

3. In the sense of the “Unmoved-Mover”.

4. Such as observations which look to map our universal space (which includes our solar system, other multiplanetary systems and other observable galaxies)

5. Like using Aristotle as a base to build upon - just like philosopher-scientists have done for thousands of years.

6. Gaian in the Lovelockeian and Volkian sense of the Earth - our biosphere - being one large integrated organismic system.

7. For example: the health and dynamics of the economy directly affect how certain markets operate, the landscape of economic policy and decision-making directly affects the environment that a market functions within, economic indicators like unemployment rates, CPI and industrial production influence market behaviour and economic prosperity (or lack thereof) affects consumer behaviour (like spending) within markets.

8. It will be a focus of future stand-alone work instead.

9. Whilst this may be obvious with structures like the state, or networks, it is not implicitly obvious with, say, structures like a hyper-agent, who equally needs a tight-knit band of advisors, managers and a labour force around them.

10.  These categorisations are adapted from Balaji Srinivasan’s (2022) “Network-State” governance framework. They have been further outlined these in my article “Bruteforcin’ Our Way to Harmony”.

11.  I mean “elite” the way theoretical historical social scientist Peter Turchin does in his work Ages of Discord, where he explains the negative correlation between historical “elite overproduction” and “societal wellbeing” using the framework of structural demographic theory (Turchin, 2016). Elite family lineages (which belong to the hyper-agent Entity category) affect the sociosphere to the point where they construct structures around themselves which become embedded into social systems, which when broken can disrupt or cause a lot of disorder and chaos within that social system, such as in modern day United States, or the pre-French Revolution, or all the way back to the grandiose halls of the Roman Empire.

12. But not limited to within our biosphere, as objects like planets, stars, asteroids, blackholes etc exist within the sogalsphere and we can only begin to image what objects might exist at the periphery of our unisphere…

13.  This is a play on Aristotle’s “Prime Mover” which he labelled as the primary substance moving everything in the universe - calling it God. Now, I am not saying these human-based organisational structures are equivalent to a “God” - but it is undeniable that, when we look at history - modern and ancient - it quickly becomes apparent that these Entities have, in many instances, wielded the power of Gods, albeit with the underlying folly of humans. I am not saying these Entities are the substance of existence, but in many historical and contemporary events, they have the power to remove substance from existence, hence their allocation as “Primary Movers” in this context.

14.  Another example of an Entity is the classic state. I mean this in the fundamental Weberian sense: a group of people who possess a legitimate and effective monopoly of force in a given territory (Fukayama, 2004). States span the globe. According to the US Department of State there are 197 states, a figure made astounding when we hear from the United Nations who say that there are around 195 nations or countries in the biosphere. This means there are more recognised states in the world than recognised countries… Anyway, framed in these terms it quickly becomes apparent how much the state model propagates across the biosphere, dominating most spaces to some degree. Getting into the history of stateness at this time would be beyond the scope of this work, but not beyond the scope of future work. In the meantime, for a holistic understanding of stateness, I recommend: F. Fukuyama, State Building (2004); S. Chayes, Thieves of State (2015); B. Srinivasan, The Network-State (2022) & anything by J. C. Scott.