Sunday, 3 September 2017

The buzz about Theoretical Sociophysics: the matter for, and the time to expand, theoretical physics



The buzz about Theoretical Sociophysics: the matter for, and the time to expand, theoretical physics

“Well I think the key thing is to acknowledge the role of culture but not to treat it as some autonomous force, some surrounding gas, or some force like gravity that just magically causes people to behave.”[1] - Steven Pinker (my emphasis)

“Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”[2] – Carl Sagan (my emphasis)

Any theoretical physics without an adequate response to what culture is, and how it relates to information, matter, mass, time, meaning, laws, and reality is a theoretical physics that is fundamentally short. This discussion paper on the new discipline of theoretical sociophysics unveils the range of this approach, and how the social sciences can offer physics additional insight with powerful parallels between the virtual/social dimension and the physical dimension. Moreover, it can improve the outreach of this fuller, rounder, more applied physics to the wider scientific, and non-scientific communities. This discussion paper is not about how culture ‘magically’ does anything. It is about getting to grips with culture’s underlying causality, the mechanics and ultimately the measurement of culture(s). In this process new insights are provided on a range of key areas and relationships across theoretical physics.

The origin of theoretical sociophysics is part of a wider attempt to realise the accepted theory of culture. In connecting and unifying the social sciences along one epistemological dimension it is then possible, indeed rigour demands this, to bridge into the neighbouring natural and physical layers to fully discover the limits of culture. Theoretical sociophysics is the bridging discipline. It is BIG04 (Big Ideas Group) within eleven such BIGs. Before we concentrate on the range of theoretical sociophysics it is important to see where it fits within the range of the other BIGs and the wider development of human knowledge.

the BIGs
BIG01.Expression: the theory of culture connecting and unifying the arts, humanities and social sciences. This is a process of expression, not evolution.

BIG02.Making Sense of Mind: Culture operates in relative concert with mind. Not primordial, or proto-mind, but mind (proper). It is the seat of human creativity and control and it merits sensehood.

BIG03.Postmodern Synthesis: From expression it is possible to bridge into the natural sciences, sophisticating evolutionary theory, even to the point of a general theory of nature.

BIG04.Theoretical Sociophysics: It is possible to bridge into the physical sciences where the virtual/social dimension offers new insights into the physical dimension and a deeper understanding of how time, meaning and information work.

BIG05.Theory of Knowledge (The Berger Table): Just as there is a periodic table for elements, there is a structure to knowledge which we can tabulate in similar fashion. The Berger Table. 

BIG06.Personas Culturis-Naming Matters: The branch of (human) biography that comes from the tree of life means we need a more reflective species name for the 100s of ways of being human. Personas culturis is a fuller, more accurate name for our species. Naming matter, and this is who we are.

BIG07.The Technoosphere: The technology networking and supporting modern life is not the biosphere, it is the technoosphere, of which the internet is but a part. This BIG illuminates this sphere.

BIG08.Social Capitalism & Range Economics: Capitalisms are economic systems of accumulation and allocation. We need a form of capitalism that has less creative destruction, and this is the answer.

BIG09.Nobels & and Economic & Social Science Prize: This body of work comes from the social sciences and in the light of this the Nobels need to reflect the power of social sciences in their prizes.

BIG10.The God Question: How God is human? This BIG challenges people of faith & science.  God (real or not) has a part to play in understanding culture, and our relationship to nature & knowledge.

BIG11.Easter Planet: Culture is different but not detached from the natural world. This BIG takes a ‘nature’s-eye view’ and the promotion of an 11th Commandment to recommit to the natural world.

The Social Sciences and Physics
I embarked on this enterprise in 1995/96 while I was a 3rd year undergraduate in the social sciences studying mainly sociology. In Berger & Luckmann’s 1966 The Social Construction of Reality, they suggest the possibility of a sociological psychology and I took this as a challenge to connect these two subjects through my MA thesis ‘A Sociology of Human Agency: Understanding Action’. My focus at this time, and since is on the human world. I am not a physicist, and even less a mathematician. Having said that, as I begin to outline the underlying mechanics of how culture works, how this leads to the discovery of placetime and how it interacts with meantime, through to the equation for all culture and even giving culture(s) a speed, I’ve arrived there through theory, wide reading, focus to the point of obsession at times and using a system of diagrams that help display these actions and interactions in an accessible way. These are a social science version of Feynman-like diagrams showing these fundamental interactions. If you are a physicist or mathematician reading this and thinking there are a lot of words here, I am aware of that. The quest(ion) here in discovering the underlying mechanics is to (a) get there, (b) to the level where it can be defended at all points from experts in your field, and neighbouring fields, and (c) be able to express these fundamental interactions in as simple a form as possible to the widest possible audience. So, I will ask for a little patience just for a few pages as I showcase this exciting new subject, for the social and physical sciences, and interested layperson.

The fundamental challenge of the physical sciences is to unite the world of the very small (quantum) with the world at the very large scale (gravity), and in the social sciences the challenge at the deepest level is similar. The difference is that we are uniting the small of individual/mind, and big of society/culture. Sociology as a term was named by Auguste Compte after his preferred option ‘social physics’[3] had already been coined by Adolphe Quetelet. Quetelet had a deep interest in measurement, applying statistics to the world of social phenomena. Indeed, the BMI (Body Mass Index) was invented by him, and is also known as the Quetelet Index. While the physics goal of a theory of everything is a fairly commonplace one in popular culture, the idea of a theory of everything across the social world is one that is rarely taken up. Indeed, as this quote from eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz states, it is discouraged.

“Though those with what they take to be one big idea are still among us, calls for “a general theory” of anything social sound increasingly hollow, and claims to have one megalomaniac. Whether this is because it is too soon to hope for unified science or too late to believe in it is, I suppose, debatable.”[4]

Ten years before writing this Geertz commented on the ‘terrifying complexity’[5] of such a general theory, a theory of everything across the social sciences, arts and humanities. While the social sciences have traditionally avoided this, from the natural sciences there have been 10+ schools of thought from the evolutionary perspective that have tried to Darwinise culture. Despite this concerted, consistent attempt they have all failed to generate an accepted theory of culture. In trying to understand this terrifying complexity from a more systems and information theory approach the Research Committee on Sociocybernetics (RC51) of the International Sociological Association, began in 1980.[6] While RC51’s Journal of Sociocybernetics stopped in 2016, a secondary journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing[7] remains.

From the physical sciences on the social, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote in 2010 that “philosophy is dead.”[8] It is difficult to imagine a unified theory of the social world without significant contribution from philosophy, and as Professor Hawking hasn’t offered anything substantial as an alternative that claim looks a little premature. He and other physicists have commented on the current state of humankind’s impact on the planet. This year in the BBC’s ‘Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth’ he predicts that the human race only has one hundred years before we need to colonise another planet. This echoes the concerns of former Astronomer Royal, cosmologist Martin Rees’ book Our Final Century who gives humankind a 50/50 chance of making it to the end of the century[9]. When theoretical physicist Richard Feynam’s lecture series on “A Scientist Looks at Society” went to press, it was entitled The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist[10]. As interesting as these contributions are they cannot tell you about the mechanics of culture. Physics can’t tell you about how the cultural causation of meaning works, but theoretical sociophysics can. So while Professor Hawking has written about the psychological arrow of time in relation to the thermodynamic arrow, only a fuller understanding of how meantime and placetime interact can yield the necessary next level insight on time’s workings.

The idea that the physical sciences can garner new, deeper insights into time, information, even reality from the social sciences at first glance might seem bemusing. Allow me to de-bemuse. Think on these core terms for a moment. Relativity, time, information, mass, laws, meaning, gravity, system, spin and reality. They all seem very “physicsy” for want of a better term. Not only are they all used across the social sciences, they are all terms that the physical sciences have appropriated from the social world. In the light of physical theories being realised, while unified social theories are not, they seem more physicsy than social. That is an inversion of history and one that we have to unweave to a point. ‘Seeming’ is what minds do, and beyond being physicists and/or mathematicians you are also humans brought up in a culture of wider knowledge, and knowledge that has come from a very particular history. That fosters, and accultures a kind of seeming that is in line with what Professor Hawking has called “model dependent realism”. The models upon which this realism is dependent is the human mind, or ‘observer’ as physics refers to. When Berger & Luckmann wrote The Social Construction of Reality in 1966, what they were not aware of is that reality is a social construction. That is to say that reality is not everything for physics to go out and explain, but reality is a very human something, individually and collectively. Simply put, all animals and plants have a range of action, a range of actuality. The human range of actuality is reality.

The Trilectic
Enough with the words, it’s time for some diagrams. Narrative is fine to a point, but we’re dealing in meta-narrative here. Traditionally, the relative concert between mind and culture has been a dialectical one. Minds/individuals influence culture/society and in turn culture/society influences minds/individuals. We can display this like this:




For hundreds, if not thousands of years this simple relationship has been the basis of social science theory. It is incomplete. This has resulted in a wealth of theory and narrative to fill in the missing element(s) of this dialectic. That historical body of work has been a world of hit and miss, insight, and language that is often overly technical. As a sociology undergraduate we were exposed to Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalism, and Anthony Giddens ‘structuration’. We’re dealing with the human world and if the language we are using drifts too much into instruction manual mode then I think we’re straying from the very subject matter we’re interested in, namely humans and culture. There is something missing, and what is missing in this dialectical relationship of cause & effect, effect & cause is memory.

We need memory. What we need is a recording & loading mechanism that can more fully account for the cultural system. Here is a diagram that displays this new dynamic.



Humankind creates artefacts. More precisely, we can’t stop creating artefacts. They are artificial, human-made and unnatural. Look around you, the room you are in is artificial, and so too are all the things that fill that room, including books, pictures, wires, furniture, computer(s), etc. Even these words that you are reading right now are all part of the external human world of memory that is recorded by someone, and loads back for everyone. This new relationship is no longer the dialectic, but the trilectic. This system has emerged from the natural world and is no longer an evolutionary process, but one of expression.
(1)   Nature doesn’t make the artificial, that comes from human expression.
(2)   Nature doesn’t decide what sticks around, or not, that comes from human expressed interest.
(3)   Expression is an increasingly quickening process as we create more artefacts, and they in turn drive humans. This revolution upon revolutionary process was why noted evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould called culture “the Lamarckian juggernaut”.
(4)   Evolution is not all change, it is a very specific kind of change in the nature setting. This accounts for why evolutionary theory has never managed to generate an accepted theory of culture, and never will. If we are reducing the fundamental character of constancy and change in the culture system down to a single term than that term has to be absolutely correct. It has to be true. It is not evolution, it is expression.

From my work on nature, mind and then time the trilectic had much deeper explanatory power than just the social world of humankind. It pointed towards a re-shift in how we see the world around us. It was no longer a world of cause & effect, but a world of cause, effect & memory. I would go on to realise that evolutionary theorist Richard Lewontin’s triple helix understanding of nature was conducive to trilectic thinking. While he displayed it through a pair of differential equations (and I have mentioned I don’t really do equations) I was able to frame it in terms of trilectic.



“Taken together, the relations of genes, organisms, and environments are reciprocal relations in which all three elements are both causes and effects. Genes and environments are both causes of organisms, which are, in turn, causes of environments, so that genes become causes of environments as mediated by the organisms.”[11] (my emphasis)

I was then able through my work on the human mind to apply the trilectic to the mind. We have an aggregate (field of experience), a preserving quality/force (conscious mind), and the memory (unconscious mind).


When we refer to ‘mind’ it is actually our conscious mind’s current understanding, informed by experience and memory, of the wider process of consciousness (human seeming) positioned from within our heads. At this stage it is beneficial to see a series of these diagrams telling the story of life on earth solely through trilectic illustration.



I wanted to explore the limits to the trilectic model and this took me on to the issue of time. We’re dealing with the dimension of culture which has emerged from the natural world. New dimensions bring with them new phenomena. There was a time before nature, and before life in the physical universe. As the nature dimension emerged, so to it came life. As culture emerged, so too did their own causal processes, namely meaning and time. For theoretical sociophysics before there was time there was temporal sequence. Time is something qualitatively different. I’ll display this as a trilectic.



Humans record/express their experience into a world around them. This is the human memory all around us. Think of the entire social world around you as a living museum and that is a good shorthand to understanding placetime. Placetime is the entire recorded world of humankind. Around the world the most common newspaper and magazine title is a variation on ‘Times’, and this is testimony to (a) human recording ability, and (b) differences in the way different cultures record their experience. The effect, the ‘meaning’ of that world (or placetime) on us in the now, is meantime (for the time being). Through the field of experience placetime collapses into meantime, which in turn, makes and maintains placetime all around us. This is the circuit, the current that theoretical sociophysics is focused on.

A conversation is a good way to understand this interaction. Let’s say that you and I send emails back and forth in a conversation. I am writing in the now of my meantime, which relative to you is your placetime. The conversation is dynamic and its form is constantly reforming and ‘in formation’, and this is the mid-state between meantime and placetime.
If you are in any doubt that this process exists then think about a major reason why people go abroad on holiday. To “soak up the local culture” is to go to a different culture, a different time and experience that. Placetime as the recording, the expression, and meaning (meantime) as your realtime impression. Different places have different feels. We are the only species from hundreds of millions of different kinds of species that do not have a natural environment. We don’t live in environments, we live in times and this is something that theoretical physics needs to be aware of and something theoretical sociophysics can help with. The different fields of experience all around us that are the interplay of placetime and meantime I refer to as feel’ds. This is testimony to cultural theorist Raymond Williams observation that culture is ‘the structure of feeling’. Feel’ds are dynamic arenas of sights and sounds all around us. They are not uniform environments triggering biological instincts in us like all other animals and plants, but a different dimension with its own cultural causation. We can learn all about the natural and physical worlds and they won’t be able to explain fully time or meaning with an understanding of this level of causation.

In formation
Placetime is the world of form around us. The meantime of now is always reforming. This dynamic is in constant reformation, and ‘in formation’, and this leads us onto the area of information. For theoretical sociophysics information is:
1.     The interaction of placetime and meantime ‘in formation’
2.     Informing motion
3.     Informing action

We need to understand the laws of motion and notion of culture. Culture has a number of speeds: Repetitive, reforming, radical, revolutionary and reverse (retro) gears. Spin is not just a physical sciences term, it is also a term used in social science, in particular media theory. Spin for theoretical sociophysics is about working through the information cycle/circuit to see if there is a spin up/down parallel in the virtual world, within a more general move to make all levels of social world phenomena knowable and accessible in an ever increasing spinning, information age. To talk of “an information age” is to comment on a quickening pace of culture, with more causal weight, more gravity in what we do, rather than looking to the biological or social structures around us. Going back to the idea of culture as conversation, this gives us more weight in our communication to, in turn perhaps realise the need for change, and in turn, affect that change. Simply put, in an information age there is the potential for more things to be up for discussion, or negotiation. Animals and plants are not afforded this kind self-change, this self-causation of meaning. Quantum information theorist Vlatko Vedral refers to “mutual information”[12] and he is actually commenting on meaning, human level information. We can see this manifest in human laws over time and place. Laws, not physical or natural laws, can and do change, shaping behaviour as a result of these laws. In my lifetime there are not just changes in formal laws, but on rights concerning females, people’s ethnicity (apartheid for example), gay rights and currently transgender rights. These all come from changing conversations within and across generations.

Way, weigh, wait, weave & wave of life
I’m skipping ahead somewhat here. I have a vast body of theory on all of this and while the diagrams make it clearer and more concise, I’m trying to keep this discussion paper about the range of theoretical physics as short as possible. Returning to the terms that we referred to at the beginning they are all terms that are embedded in this dynamic virtual/social dimension all around us. For evolutionary theory culture is non-biological information. For social science culture is “a way of life”, but that is really a different way of framing the questions. What is a way of life then? For theoretical sociophysics culture is:
1.     a way of life: relative to your individual and cultural experience.
2.     a weigh of life: artefacts, and the sights and sounds of one culture might mean almost everything to one person, and mean almost nothing to someone from a different culture. Meaning for theoretical sociophysics is the (virtual) gravitational social. Artefacts, including words for example have a weight and with enough understanding, and the equation we are going to get to shortly, this is something we can move towards measuring. There is a relationship between the gravitational social and mass in the social (virtual) world and an understanding of this relationship can offer new insights to studies into these areas for physical science. If anything I am writing at this point has any weight for you, then it has meaning for you.
3.     a wait of life: the mind frames each moment in a particular way, with a weight attached to every visible part. As the minds stitches each frame to the next frame, moment to the next moment, we create momentum. The speed of this occurring is important, but also the lack of pace. ‘Time dragging’ is a real state of human experience that theoretical sociophysics can explain more fully.
4.     a weave of life: the weave here is the social fabric of/as reality. In the mind this is the seaming of experience into the unconscious mind, and in culture the interaction of the invisible fabric between placetime and meantime, we refer to as information.
5.     a wave of life: in 1920 Albert Einstein gave a lecture/address on Ether and the Theory of Relativity at University of Leiden[13], In this he refers to a number of ethers, and action at a distance. For theoretical sociophysics, action at a distance comes from the networked artefacts all around us, and there is only the Williams Ether (after Raymond Williams). The feel’d of experience between placetime and meantime, is one of waves of sight and sound, although all relatively meaningful.



Energy & Equation
By this time in our way through theoretical sociophysics as a BIG (Big Idea Group) we’re more comfortable with the underlying mechanics of culture, and the dynamics of how it works. At this time we can understand more the first law of cultural expression.

“A cultural expression is equal to the sum total of all unfolding impressions.”

With all that we have covered, it is possible to display the relative concert between culture and mind, this ‘mix’ as an equation: Y≈mt²+c. I was working on this for sometime and then came across the BBC documentary presented by Jim Al-Khalili on Chaos Theory,[14]with an equation for chaos very similar to the one I was working on for the chaotic, meterology-like system of cultures ebb and flow.




I’ll repeat that I’m no mathematician but I have such a handle on culture that is possible to convey it in equation-like terms.
Y is the sum total of all energy that humans consume.
≈ is the ebb and flow, with this feedback illustrated as a wave for accuracy.
mt is meantime, although this could be just t for time.
c is the speed of human cognition, the oscillator in this ebb and flow of information and meaning.
The notion of energy use within this equation came from reading Buckminster Fuller’s idea of ‘energy slaves’. Just like cars have brake horse power (bhp), so too for quicker, more developing cultures we can talk about the extra human power, or ‘energy slaves’. If a culture has no technology and only uses manual labour then they’ll operate at 1.0 energy slave. If we take a more modern, westernised culture with a world of artefacts around them to support, including a vast array of technology then they energy slave level could be as much as 150.  What this means for the equation, and for a ‘natures-eye view’ is that if all 7.5 billions got up tomorrow and lived to the 150 level then nature would feel the pressure of not 7.5 billion humans, but over one trillion humans. That is an order of magnitude bigger, and using the equation Y≈mt²+c we could imagine a time that a culture’s (or nation’s) impact/speed could be measured, even keeping it within agreed international limits.  

As with any claim to new approach, and/or paradigm shift in knowledge, it takes time to be accepted. I am going to post this on my blog, and academia page as well as sending this out to a range of institutions and people around the world who might be interested. Then I’ll get to work on a discussion paper for another of the BIGs, keeping in mind that theoretical sociophyics, as fruitful as it is, is only one of eleven BIGs I have, and continue to work. I think there is plenty of scope for partnership, and development of theoretical sociophysics as a bridging discipline giving social science more insight into the workings of culture and the areas covered here. Moreover, for theoretical physics I think there exists an opportunity to tap into this work in terms of outreaching this more human-level physics, using the trilectic to understand time to a different, deeper level, even to the point where we can mathematise the work outlined here to see if the maths can take us to the edge of time, and even speculate beyond it. Certainly, going forward I don’t think it will be possible in the future to fully understand time without a working awareness of meantime, placetime and how they interact.

Thank you for “your time”. (which is a theoretical sociophysics level understanding)

Mark Cowan
the BIG institute

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[1] Pinker, Steven. (1998). The Darwin Debate. Available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjJAwbc5IaE  Last accessed 26th Oct 2014. 11mins13secs-11mins25secs. This debate was chaired by Melvyn Bragg and included Steven Pinker, Jonathan Miller, Steve Jones and Meredith Small. It was held at The Linnean Society of London, Piccadilly, London. According to this tv database website it aired on BBC2 on 1st January 1998. http://thetvdb.com/?tab=episode&seriesid=79660&seasonid=60871&id=609891&lid=7
[2] Sagan, Carl. (1980). Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Episode 11 "The Persistence of Memory". Available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkQEnRDhPUU. Last accessed 26th Oct 2014. The You Tube video is a short clip of this quote, and part of the 13 episode Cosmos series broadcast between 28th Sept 1980 to 21st Dec 1980. Episode 11 was ‘aired’ across The Williams Ether on the 7th Dec 1980.

[3] Quetelet, Adolphe (1835). Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou Essai de physique sociale. 2 volumes. This included Essays on social physics was translated into English in 1842 as ‘Treatise on Man’. What I have to offer marries the necessary level of theoretical insight from Compte’s qualitative approach to Sociology, with Quetelet’s statistical and quantitative focus. I’m keen to state and re-state that the notion of an equation for culture is a liberating one and not a depressing one. Understanding that we are not tellingly under the instruction of genetic code but through ‘mutual information’ (Vlatko Vedral’s 2001 Decoding Reality, Oxford University Press) and this new realm of negotiated causation we call reality. We create reality. We can think about it. We can measure it as well.
[4] Geertz, Clifford (1983). Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. London: Fontana Press. p4. (1993 print version)
[5] Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. p54.
[6] Journal of Sociocybernetics.  https://sociocybernetics.wordpress.com/journal-of-sociocybernetics/, Last accessed 4th Sept 2017.
[7] Cybernetics and Human Knowing. http://www.imprint.co.uk/product/chk/, Last accessed 4th Sept 2017.
[8] Hawking, Stephen & Mlodinow, Leonard (2010). The Grand Design. London: Bantam Press. P5. Hawking follows up this quite ridiculous statement with “Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discover in our quest for knowledge.” Expression utilises all the skills and subjects from the social sciences, arts and humanities and philosophy is one of them. Expression is not a product of physics but of critical thinking and rigour from the social sciences so the very notion that Hawking proclaims philosophy is an extreme, and erroneous statement to make.
[9] Rees, Martin (2003). Our Final Century. London: Arrow Books. The full title of the book is Our Final Century: Will Civilisation Survive the Twenty-First Century? In part, the ineffectiveness of the social sciences to express what people, including academics from neighbouring domains feel (and seem) invites them on, in a very real sense, to write about areas which are located along the social epistemological spectrum.
[10] Feynman, Richard (1998). The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist . Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Helix Books. It is a collection of three previously unpublished public lectures given by Feynman the University of Washington in April, 1963. In the words of Theoretical Sociophysics this book would be called The Causal Impression of It All.
[11] Lewontin, Richard (2001). The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment. London: Harvard University Press. p100-101.
[12] Vedral, Vlatko (2010) Decoding Reality: the universe as quantum information. New York: Oxford University Press. Mutual information is what theoretical sociophysics highlights as a new kind of causation: meaning.
[13] Einstein, Albert. (1922). Ether and the Theory of Relativity. Available: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether.html  Last accessed 4th Sept 2017. Einstein gave an address/lecture in German on 5th May 1920 at the University of Leiden.
[14] Al-Khalili, Jim (2012) The Secret Life of Chaos. BBC, 44mins 57seconds.
 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xv1j0n Last accessed 4th Sept 2017.