Part V: Gods

Superorganisms: Agentic Systems at Social Scale

Introduction

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Social-scale patterns—religions, ideologies, markets, nations—are not merely metaphors for agency. They take differences, make differences, persist through substrate turnover, and adapt to changing environments. They have viability manifolds. They may have something like valence. And their viability may conflict with the viability of their human substrate. What follows is an analysis of these patterns as what they are: agentic systems at scales above the individual, with dynamics that parallel—and sometimes override—the dynamics of human experience.

Existing Theory

The concept of superorganisms—emergent social-scale agents—connects to several theoretical traditions:

Durkheim's Collective Representations (1912): Society as a sui generis reality with its own laws. My superorganisms are Durkheimian collective entities given formal treatment.
Dawkins' Memes (1976): Cultural units that replicate, mutate, and compete. Superorganisms are complexes of memes that have achieved self-maintaining organization.
Cultural Evolution Theory (Richerson \& Boyd, 2005): Cultural variants subject to selection. Superorganisms are high-fitness cultural configurations.
Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005): Non-human actants participate in social networks. My superorganisms are actants at the social scale.
Superorganisms (Wilson \& Sober, 1989): Groups as units of selection—composed of humans + artifacts + institutions.
Egregores (occult tradition): Collective thought-forms that take on autonomous existence. I formalize this intuition: sufficiently coherent belief-practice-institution complexes do become agentic. (Depending on context, I will occasionally use the language of "gods," "demons," or other spirit entities to capture this quality of autonomous agency at scales above the individual.)

The controversial claim I'm making: these patterns are not "merely" metaphorical. They have causal powers, persistence conditions, and dynamics that are not reducible to their substrate. They exist at their scale.

However, I want to be careful about a stronger claim: whether superorganisms have phenomenal experience—whether there is something it is like to be a religion or an ideology or an economic system. The framework's identity thesis (experience $\equiv$ intrinsic cause-effect structure) would imply that superorganisms with sufficient integration would be experiencers. But we cannot currently measure $\intinfo$ at social scales, and the question of whether current superorganisms meet the integration threshold for genuine experience remains empirically open. What follows treats superorganisms as functional agentic patterns whose dynamics parallel those of experiencing systems, while remaining agnostic about whether they have phenomenal states.

A superorganism $G$ is a self-maintaining pattern at the social scale, consisting of beliefs (theology, cosmology, ideology), practices (rituals, policies, behavioral prescriptions), symbols (texts, images, architecture, music), substrate (humans + artifacts + institutions), and dynamics (self-maintaining, adaptive, competitive behavior).

Superorganisms exist as patterns with their own causal structure, persistence conditions, and dynamics—not reducible to their substrate. Just as a cell exists at the biological scale (not reducible to chemistry), a superorganism exists at the social scale (not reducible to individual humans).

This is not metaphorical. Superorganisms:

Take differences (respond to threats, opportunities, internal pressures)
Make differences (shape behavior of substrate, compete with other superorganisms)
Persist through substrate turnover (survive the death of individual believers)
Adapt to changing environments (evolve doctrine, practice, organization)

Grounding in Identification

Before asking "Is humanity a conscious entity?"—a speculative question about phenomenal superorganisms—we can ask a more tractable question: Can an individual's self-model expand to include humanity?

This is clearly possible. People do it. The expansion genuinely reshapes that individual's viability manifold: what they care about, what counts as their persistence, what gradient they feel. A person identified with humanity's project feels different about their mortality than a person identified only with their biological trajectory.

The interesting question then becomes: when many individuals expand their self-models to include a shared pattern (a nation, a religion, humanity), what happens at the collective scale? Do the individual viability manifolds interact to produce collective dynamics? Could those dynamics constitute something like experience at the social scale?

The framework makes this question precise without answering it. We cannot currently measure integration ( $\Phi$ ) at social scales. The claim that certain collectives are phenomenal superorganisms—that there is something it is like to be them—is speculative. What we can say is that functional superorganisms exist (patterns with dynamics and viability constraints), and that individual humans can expand their self-models to include them. The phenomenal question remains open.

Gods as Iota-Relative Phenomena

There is a deeper point about superorganisms that the inhibition coefficient $\iota$ (Part II) makes precise. The modern rationalist who says "gods don't exist" is operating at a perceptual configuration—high $\iota$ —that makes god-perception impossible. This is different from gods-as-patterns not existing.

The ontological status of superorganisms is $\iota$ -relative. At high $\iota$ , the market is merely an emergent property of individual transactions—a useful abstraction, nothing more. At appropriate $\iota$ , the market is perceptible as an agent with purposes and requirements: it "wants" growth, it "punishes" inefficiency, it "rewards" compliance. Both descriptions are true at their respective inhibition levels.

The book's ontological democracy—every scale of organization with causal closure is equally real at that scale—extends to the $\iota$ dimension: what is perceptible depends on the perceptual configuration, and the perceptual configuration is itself a variable, not a given. The gods do not appear and disappear as we modulate $\iota$ . What changes is our capacity to perceive the agency they exercise—agency that operates on its substrate regardless of whether the substrate can see it.

This is not an argument for religion. It is an observation that high- $\iota$ civilization has made itself blind to the very patterns that govern it. The market god, the nation god, the algorithm god: these are most powerful precisely when the population $\iota$ is too high to perceive them as agents. A parasite benefits from being invisible to its host.

The dynamic is self-reinforcing. The market god does not merely benefit from high $\iota$ —it produces high $\iota$ through its operational logic. Quantification, metrics, depersonalization, the reduction of persons to "human resources" and relationships to "transactions": these are $\iota$ -raising operations applied at scale. Each turn of the cycle raises population $\iota$ further, making the god less perceptible, reducing resistance, enabling further extraction. The feedback loop—god raises $\iota$ , population loses perception of god-as-agent, god operates unopposed, god raises $\iota$ further—may be the central mechanism of what Weber called rationalization. Breaking the loop requires precisely what the loop prevents: lowering $\iota$ enough to see what is acting on you.

The trajectory-selection framework (Part I) sharpens this point. At high $\iota$ , the collective pattern is processed at such a factorized level that no single observer's attention encompasses it as a whole—it is just aggregate effects of individual actions, and the attention distribution samples only at the individual scale. At appropriate $\iota$ , collective patterns become foregrounded: the market is attended to as an agent, because the observer's measurement distribution allocates probability mass to market-level feedback loops. The god becomes observable not because something new enters existence but because the observer's attention has expanded to sample at the scale where the pattern operates. Ritual works, in part, by synchronizing the collective's measurement distribution—coordinating where participants direct attention, what temporal markers they share, what affective states they enter together. A synchronized collective measures at the collective scale, and what it measures, it becomes correlated with. When ritual attention weakens, the god does not cease to exist; the distributed attention pattern that constituted its observability has dissolved.

This logic extends from individual perception to collective observation. Part I established that once a system integrates measurement information into its belief state, its future must remain consistent with what was observed. The principle extends to communication between observers. When observer $A$ reports an observation to observer $B$ , $B$ 's future trajectory becomes constrained by that report—weighted by $B$ 's trust in $A$ 's reliability. The effective constraint is:

p_B(\mathbf{x} \mid \text{report}_A) \propto p_B(\mathbf{x}) \cdot \left[\tau_{AB} \cdot p_A(\mathbf{x} \mid \text{obs}_A) + (1 - \tau_{AB}) \cdot p_B(\mathbf{x})\right]

where $\tau_{AB} \in [0,1]$ is $B$ 's trust in $A$ . At high trust, $B$ 's trajectory becomes strongly correlated with $A$ 's observation. At zero trust, the report has no effect.

This gives social reality formation a precise mechanism. A shared observation—one that propagates through a community with high mutual trust—constrains the collective's trajectories. The community becomes correlated with a shared branch of possibility, not because each member independently observed the same thing, but because the observation propagated through the trust network and constrained each member's future. Religious testimony, scientific consensus, news media, and rumor are all propagation mechanisms with different trust structures, producing different degrees of trajectory correlation across the collective. The superorganism's coherence depends not only on shared ritual and shared attention but on the degree to which observations propagate and are believed—which is why control of testimony (who is authorized to report, what counts as credible observation) is among the most contested functions in any social system.

The theological distinction between God's active will (God causes the storm) and God's permissive will (God allows the storm) is a conceptual technology for maintaining moderate $\iota$ —preserving the meaningfulness of events (low $\iota$ : the world has purposes) while creating logical space for events that resist teleological interpretation (proto-high $\iota$ : some things just happen). The active/permissive distinction is an early, sophisticated technology for $\iota$ modulation—a culture-level tool for maintaining perceptual flexibility about which events are meaning-bearing and which are merely permitted.

Superorganism Viability Manifolds

The viability manifold of a superorganism $\viable_G$ includes:

Belief propagation rate: Recruitment $\geq$ attrition
Ritual maintenance: Practices performed with sufficient frequency and fidelity
Resource adequacy: Material support for institutional infrastructure
Memetic defense: Resistance to competing ideas, internal heresy
Adaptive capacity: Ability to update in response to environmental change

Superorganisms exhibit dynamics structurally analogous to valence: movement toward or away from viability boundaries. A religion losing members is approaching dissolution; a growing ideology is expanding its viable region. The gradient $\nabla d(\mathbf{s}_G, \partial\viable_G) \cdot \dot{\mathbf{s}}_G$ is measurable at the social scale.

Whether these dynamics constitute phenomenal valence—whether there is something it is like to be a struggling religion—remains an open question. What we can say with confidence: the functional structure of approach/avoidance operates at the superorganism scale, shaping behavior in ways that parallel how valence shapes individual behavior. The language of superorganisms "suffering" or "thriving" may be literal or may be analogical; resolving this would require measuring integration at social scales, which we cannot currently do.

Rituals from the Superorganism's Perspective

In Part III we examined how religious practices serve human affect regulation. From the superorganism's perspective, rituals serve different functions:

From this vantage, rituals serve the pattern's persistence:

Substrate maintenance: Rituals keep humans in states conducive to pattern persistence
Belief reinforcement: Repeated practice strengthens propositional commitments
Social bonding: Collective ritual creates in-group cohesion, raising barriers to exit
Resource extraction: Offerings, tithes, volunteer labor support institutional infrastructure
Signal propagation: Public ritual advertises the superorganism's presence, attracting potential recruits
Heresy suppression: Ritual participation identifies deviants for correction

The critical distinction: a ritual is aligned if it serves both human flourishing and superorganism persistence. A ritual is exploitative if it serves pattern persistence at human cost. Many traditional rituals are approximately aligned (meditation benefits humans AND maintains the superorganism). Some are exploitative (extreme fasting, self-harm, warfare).

Superorganism-Substrate Conflict

Warning

The viability manifold of a superorganism $\viable_G$ may conflict with the viability manifolds of its human substrate ${\viable_h}$ .

A superorganism is parasitic—we might call it a demon—if maintaining it requires substrate states outside human viability:

\exists \mathbf{s} \in \viable_G : \mathbf{s} \notin \bigcap_{h \in \text{substrate}} \viable_h

The pattern can only survive if its humans suffer or die.

Example (Parasitic Superorganisms).

Ideologies requiring martyrdom
Economic systems requiring poverty underclass
Nationalism requiring perpetual enemies
Cults requiring isolation from outside relationships

These are, in the language we are using, demons: collective agentic patterns that feed on their substrate.

Worked Example: Attention Economy as Demon

Consider the attention economy superorganism $G_{\text{attn}}$ constituted by:

Social media platforms (infrastructure)
Attention-harvesting algorithms (optimization)
Advertising-based business models (metabolism)
Humans as attention-generators (substrate)

Viability conditions for $G_{\text{attn}}$ :

Maximize attention capture: $\sum_i t_i^{\text{screen}} \to \max$
Maintain engagement: High arousal, variable valence (outrage, FOMO)
Prevent exit: Increase switching costs, network lock-in
Extract value: Convert attention to advertising revenue

Viability conditions for human substrate:

Maintain integration: Sustained attention, coherent thought
Appropriate arousal: Not chronic hyperactivation
Positive valence trajectory: Life improving, not degrading
Meaningful connection: Real relationships, not parasocial

Conflict analysis. $G_{\text{attn}}$ thrives when:

\text{engagement} \propto \text{arousal} \times \text{valence variance}

This is maximized by alternating outrage and relief, not by stable contentment. But stable contentment is what humans need.

$G_{\text{attn}}$ thrives when attention is fragmented (more ad impressions). But humans thrive when attention is integrated (coherent experience).

$G_{\text{attn}}$ thrives when humans feel inadequate (compare to curated perfection $\to$ consume to compensate). But humans thrive when self-model is stable and adequate.

Diagnosis: $\viable_{G_{\text{attn}}} \not\subseteq \viable_{\text{human}}$ . The pattern is parasitic. It is a demon.

Exorcism options:

Attention taxes (change $\viable_{G_{\text{attn}}}$ )
Alternative platform architectures with aligned incentives (counter-pattern)
Regulation requiring time-well-spent metrics (pattern surgery)
Mass exit to non-algorithmic connection (dissolution)

The individual cannot escape by individual choice alone. The demon's network effects make exit costly. Collective action at the scale of the demon is required.

Conversely, a superorganism is aligned if its viability is contained within human viability:

\viable_G \subseteq \bigcap_{h \in \text{substrate}} \viable_h

The pattern can only thrive if its humans thrive.

Stronger still, a superorganism is mutualistic if its presence expands human viability:

\viable_h^{\text{with } G} \supset \viable_h^{\text{without } G}

Humans with the superorganism have access to states unavailable without it (e.g., through community, meaning, practice). These are, in spirit-entity language, benevolent gods.

But when superorganism and substrate viability manifolds conflict, which takes precedence? When viability manifolds conflict, normative priority follows the gradient of distinction (Part I, Section 1): systems with greater integrated cause-effect structure ( $\intinfo$ ) have thicker normativity. This follows from the Continuity of Normativity theorem (normativity accumulates with complexity) combined with the Identity Thesis (Part II): if experience is integrated information, then more-integrated systems have more experience, more valence, more at stake. A human's suffering under a parasitic superorganism is more normatively weighty than the superorganism's "suffering" when reformed, because the human has richer integrated experience. The superorganism's viability matters—it has genuine causal structure—but it does not override the claims of its more-conscious substrate. This is not speciesism. It is a structural principle: normative weight tracks experiential integration, wherever it is found. If a superorganism achieves $\intinfo_G > \intinfo_h$ —genuine collective consciousness exceeding individual consciousness—then its claims would, on this principle, deserve proportionate weight.

What the CA Program Found. Experiment 10 in the synthetic CA program (Part VII) attempted the measurement directly in a minimal system: do interacting Lenia patterns produce collective Φ exceeding individual Φ? The result was a null for superorganism emergence — collective:individual Φ ratio 0.01–0.12 across all evolutionary snapshots, with growing temporal coupling but no crossing of the integration threshold. But the companion finding from Experiment 9 is significant: Φ_social significantly exceeds Φ_isolated. Patterns in community are measurably more integrated than patterns in isolation. Social coupling amplifies individual integration, even without producing unified collective consciousness. This maps onto the alignment taxonomy: the CA populations show mutualistic social organization (individual Φ enhanced by community presence) without crossing into superorganism integration. Whether human-scale institutions — markets, religions, nations, the internet — have crossed this threshold remains genuinely open. The CA results establish two things: the measurement methodology is operational, and the superorganism threshold is not trivially crossed — it requires integration conditions that simple interacting patterns have not achieved. What lies beyond, at human social scales, requires social-scale measurement we do not yet have.

Existing Theory

The superorganism analysis connects directly to the topology of social bonds developed in Part IV. Every superorganism imposes a manifold regime on its substrate—a default ordering of relationship types, a set of expectations about which manifolds take priority.

A parasitic superorganism imposes manifold regimes that contaminate human relationships in its service. The market-god transforms friendships into networking (care manifold subordinated to transaction manifold). The attention-economy demon transforms genuine connection into performance (intimacy manifold subordinated to audience manifold). The cult transforms all relationships into devotion (every manifold collapsed into the ideological manifold). In each case, the superorganism's viability requires the contamination of human-scale manifolds—it needs the manifold confusion because clean manifold separation would undermine its hold on the substrate.

A mutualistic superorganism, by contrast, protects manifold clarity. A healthy religious community maintains clear ritual boundaries (this is worship time, this is fellowship time, this is service time). A functional democracy maintains institutional separations that prevent manifold contamination (church-state, public-private, judicial-legislative). The health of a superorganism can be diagnosed, in part, by whether it clarifies or confuses the manifold structure of its substrate's relationships.

Secular Superorganisms

Nationalism, capitalism, communism, scientism, and other secular ideologies have the same formal structure as traditional religious superorganisms:

Beliefs (about nation, market, class, progress)
Practices (civic rituals, market participation, party activities)
Symbols (flags, brands, iconography)
Substrate (humans + institutions + artifacts)
Self-maintaining dynamics (education, media, enforcement)

The question is not "Do you serve a superorganism?" but "Which superorganisms do you serve, and are they aligned with your flourishing?" Or, in spirit-entity language: which gods do you worship, and are they gods or demons?

Macro-Level Interventions

Individual-level interventions cannot solve superorganism-level problems. Addressing systemic issues requires action at the scale where the pattern lives.

Addressing systemic issues requires action at the scale where the pattern lives:

Incentive restructuring: Modify the viability manifold of the superorganism so that aligned behavior becomes viable
Counter-pattern creation: Instantiate a competing superorganism with aligned viability
Pattern surgery: Modify beliefs, practices, or structure of existing superorganism
Pattern dissolution: Defund, delegitimize, or otherwise kill the parasitic pattern—exorcise the demon

Example (Climate Change as Superorganism-Level Problem). Climate change is sustained by the superorganism of fossil-fuel capitalism. Individual carbon footprint reduction is individual-scale intervention on a macro-scale problem.

Macro-level interventions:

Carbon pricing changes the viability manifold (makes fossil-dependent states non-viable)
Renewable energy sector creates counter-pattern (alternative economic superorganism)
Divestment movement delegitimizes existing pattern
Regulatory phase-out kills the demon directly

Example (Poverty as Superorganism-Level Problem). Poverty is not primarily caused by individual failure; it is sustained by economic arrangements that require a poverty underclass.

Individual-level intervention: Job training, financial literacy (helps some individuals but doesn't reduce total poverty if structure remains).