The One and the Many or What can Sociology Learn from Physics

Ever since its beginnings in the 19th Century sociology has been concerned with the problem of the one and the many. In other words, how can individuals be integrated into society. How can one community arise from many individuals? This was not a new problem. Long before, political philosophers such as Grotius, Hobbes. Locke, and Rousseau attempted to solve this problem. For Western democracies, the answer was the social contract. Hobbes argued that the many isolated individuals, who in a state of nature were inescapably involved in a war of all against all, decide, on the basis their naturally endowed rationality, to lay down their weapons and submit to a central authority. So arose the Leviathan, or society. The individuals remained fundamentally isolated and free, since if the central authority was not strong enough to guarantee peace, it could be deposed. For Rousseau on the contrary, the individual must be completely integrated into society which becomes then not a sum of individuals, but a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts,  the “general will.” This problem was then taken up by the new science of sociology which defined itself as the study of those social structures, organizations, and institutions into which individuals were taken up, transformed into citizens, or professions such as carpenter, baker, engineer, businessperson, politician, etc. The individual became a “person” (mask) that was socially constructed. As Shakespeare said, and as modern sociological role theory assumes, social existence is role-playing. The world is a stage and all individuals are but mere actors playing the roles society puts at their disposal. This solution seems to leave out the individuals who were there first, that is, before they learned to put on masks and play roles. Who are the individuals if personal identity is through and through a social construction and it is impossible to find an individual who is not somehow already “socialized,” completely alone and so to speak “in the wild?”

What does this have to do with quantum mechanics? Does not contemporary physics face a similar problem of the one and the many: On the one side there are particles, isolated points, hard and material. And on the other side there are fields, waves, or some kind of plastic common substance that seems to be able to account for all phenomena without reference to particles.  The particle seems to have suffered a similar fate as the individual. Originally considered the basic building blocks of reality, both social and material, that from which all activities arise, both the particle and the individual have become a product of the forces that bind them together with others into a “community.” Luhmann even goes so far as to ban individuals from society, which is a system made up of communications and not of individual human beings. The debate in physics is still raging, just as in sociology. Are there particles, or fields, or both, or neither? If matter is fundamentally a field and not a perhaps infinite number of individual particles, which are somehow bound together, we have a very different vision of reality and of what we are made of than has traditionally been supposed. If neither society nor nature are made up of individuals, but of fields or relations, then we may still need to talk about individuals who are related, but they are nothing outside of these relations. The individual is no longer the beginning of social or natural order, but a way in which nature and society configure themselves and create order. Perhaps the question of the one and the many is not the right question. We do not need to start from individual things, whether individual human beings or particles and then try to figure out how and why they enter into relations with one another in such a way that order arises from chaos. We could just as well ask how and why order uses such things and whether it really needs them. Many new theoretical projects in physics are moving in this direction. In sociology there are also endeavors to simply drop the typically modern Western individualism that lies at the heart of the problem of the one and the many. Of course, people are not “vibrating strings” – or maybe they are…

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Why Sustainability is Not a Value

The concept of “sustainability” comes from forestry and refers primarily to resource management. The forest should be used in such a way that it can continue to be used for a long period of time. To cut down all the trees, something that has happened many times already in history with catastrophic consequences, would not be sustainable. 

In ecology, the concept of sustainability refers to the relations of human beings to their natural environment, that is, to the “ecosystem”. What is important in this context is the stability of the ecosystem, which should not be endangered by reckless exploitation of resources. This definition of sustainability is based in systems theory. An organism is a closed system that should interact with its enviornment in such a way that it can remain viable and ensure its survival. The implication, much as in forestry, is that the resources in the environment which the organism needs in order to live are to be used  in such a way that they are not depleted. The environment must remain the stabile and not change too much. Otherwise, the viablity of the organism is threatened. Here again, the emphasis is on stabililty and preventing changes. Whether an organism intends to act in such a way that the einvironment remains stabile, or does so by accident, or doesn’t do it all and eventually dies off is another matter. To say that sustainability is a value and a norm means that the environment should not change, or that it is somehow “wrong” to change the environment or even to let the environment be changed by other factors than one’s own actions. The value that sustainabilty signifies is stability. To act sustainably is therefore to do everything one can in order to ensure that the ecosystem remains stabile and does not change.

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The Moral Machine

In 2016 a group of scientists at MIT created an online platform to gather information about how people would decide what the outcomes of the actions of autonomous, automated systems “ought” to be. Although there were different scenarios, the most famous is the self-driving car that in the face of an imminent accident had to “decide” who should be run over and killed and who should be spared. Since it was matter of making decisions about what ought to be done in a case that led to harms, this was called a “moral” machine. The “machine” part comes from the fact that the automatic system was to be programmed in advance, which choice to make, that is, the choice was no longer “free” as would be the case when a human driver made the decision, but was determined by the programmer, who then bore the moral responsibility.

More interesting than the results of this experiment (see http://moralmachine.mit.edu/) are the assumptions it makes. One important assumption is that there are no accidents, that is, the fact that someone will be killed in an “accident” is not accidental, but a determined outcome of programming. Not just anything could happen, but only certain things could happen, and among these the choice was to be made in advance so that what does happen, happens “mechanically.” The second important assumption is that the future is no longer open and the present no longer free. Usually, we assume that the past is certain, the present is free, that is, we can decide in the present moment what to do, and the future, that is, the consequences of our actions, is open. We don’t know what the future brings. The future is contingent. This age-old temporal scheme is placed in question by the moral machine. The idea is that data analytics is able to know what will happen in the future and on the basis of this knowledge interventions in the present can be made that will influence, indeed, determine which future options will be realized. This is called datafication. Datafication is 1) the process by which all present states of the world are turned into data creating thereby a virtual double of reality, 2) subjecting this data to descriptive, predictive, preventive, and prescriptive analytics so that the effects of all possible variables can be simulated and on the basis of data-based projections of what will happen, interventions in the present can be made to influence future outcomes. Datafication is the basis of intelligent, autonomous, automated systems, such as self-driving cars, but also personalized medicine, learning analytics in education, business intelligence in the private sector, and much more. This is what makes the moral machine interesting. It is a parable of the digital age and poses central questions about what it means to live in a datafied world.

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Datafication – Or Why we Should Learn to Love our Robots

If there is one word that describes today’s world then perhaps it is the word “digital.” Everything is somehow digital or influenced by the digital. And if there is one concept that explains what digital means, it is “transformation,” since the digital changes everything. But what is digital transformation? Here again, I offer one word that could summarize (almost) everything that can be understood in terms of digital transformation: “datafication.”

Datafication has to do with data. This is obvious. However important data may be, what is more important is what is done with the data, the ways in which the data is handled. This can be called analytics. This sounds a lot like big data analytics or business analytics, and datafication is indeed related to these practices. But the idea behind datafication goes further and encompasses more than big data or business analytics. Interestingly, the idea behind datafication is not new and not even originally digital. When NASA built its space capsules, they did not just build one, but always two. One they sent into space and the other stayed on earth. The idea was that when a problem occurred in space, engineers on earth could attempt to replicate the problem with the model and after finding the best solution, tell the astronauts what they should do. This makes sense, since in space there was not an extensive team of experts nor opportunities available to try this or that solution to see what happens.

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Can Networks be Virtuous?

This is about ethics. Ethics tells us what we ought to do. It is based on the distinction between what we really do, the “is” and what we should do, the “ought.” If everybody did what they should, then we wouldn’t need ethics. But let’s face it, people don’t do what they ought to do. Why not? Has ethics failed? Are people inherently immoral? And if so, what good does it do to keep telling them that they should do otherwise? Despite enormous efforts for centuries, ethics seems to be a futile enterprise divorced from reality. One answer to the apparent futility of ethics is to say that people do not do what they ought to do, but what they are. If people do the right thing, that’s not because of ethics, or because of being told what they ought to do. It’s because that is simply what they are. There is no “ought.” There is only what “is.” In other words, you shall know them by their actions – and not by their proclaimed or hidden motives. But what are people? What should we be reading from their actions?

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