Metasystems

In the city it's quite common to see new cafes and restaurants pop up for 6 months to a year and then disappear again. This isn't terribly surprising if you know anything about the industry; the margins are low, rent and wages are expensive, and for many owners it's a lifestyle business. It starts as someone's dream of the perfect little cafe, runs on savings and free labour by the owners, and eventually when that runs out it closes down.

I find that process particularly interesting because it doesn't just affect that one business, but other businesses that compete with it. Let's say you're a well-run cafe that's been in business for years. You're competing not with other businesses but with this entire process by which a perpetual rotation of cafes appear and disappear. Each individual cafe may not be sustainable, but the metasystem of cafes sustains itself because each new cafe brings a new sucker with fresh capital. And in a weird way, consumers are actually better served by that metasystem because it can deliver cheaper coffee.

I've noticed a similar thing about representative democracy. In theory, a candidate who simply promised to change their mind in accordance with popular opinion would be the ultimate representative. However, candidates who change their minds are often considered inferior "flip-floppers" lacking in principle. Despite the questionable assertion that changing your mind is bad, it is perhaps rational to reject flexible representatives. If you have enough candidates, you can pick one who has always reflected your views. Instead of expecting representativeness at the per-politician level, you let the political metasystem select candidates who reflect current public opinion.

Evolution, also, seems to prefer this metasystemic level of operation. Evolutionarily stable strategies appear where, for example, 20% of the population will steal and 80% of the population will not. Those ratios are stable at the point where nobody has an incentive to change strategy: an additional thief gains less by thieving than earning an honest living, and one more honest person would do better if they turned to crime. Notice that it would be equivalent if the entire population acted honestly 80% of the time and stole 20% of the time, but that doesn't seem to happen.

And perhaps, though many transhumanists would never hear of it, there is a similar metasystem at play in society and the role of death. It is comparatively rare that a person will completely change their perspective or their ideas through the course of their lives. While it would be great if this wasn't the case, at the moment it doesn't matter much because society is a rolling metasystem much the same as cafes or democracy; the individuals aren't important, it's the general behaviour over time. Old people take their old ideas with them, while new people bring new ones in.

But, to agree with the transhumanists, we can't rely on this forever. I believe that we will eventually conquer death one way or another. And at that point the metasystem stops. If we haven't sorted out a way to bring that flexibility down into our own systems by then, perhaps we never will.