The Self-Organizing Social Mind

In The Self-Organizing Social Mind, John Bolender proposes a newexplanation for the forms of social relations. He argues that the core of social-relationalcognition exhibits beauty -- in the physicist's sense of the word, associated with symmetry.Bolender describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition, which account for theresulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and the breaking of thosesymmetries. He further describes the symmetries of the four fundamental social relations as orderedin a nested series akin to what one finds in the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetrybreaking organizes the neural activity generating the cognitive models that structure our socialrelationships.Bolender's primary claim is that there exists a social patterngenerator analogous to the central pattern generators associated with locomotion in many animalspecies. Spontaneous symmetry breaking structures the activity of the social pattern generator justas it does in central pattern generators.Bolender's hypothesis that relationalcognition results from self-organization is entirely novel, distinct from other theories thatdescribe sociality in terms of evolution or environment. It presents a picture of social-relationalcognition as resembling something inorganic. In doing so it reveals deep connections amongcognition, biology, and the inorganic world. One can go too far, he acknowledges, in taking a solelydynamical view of the mind; the mind's innate functional complexity must be due to naturalselection. But this does not mean that every simple mental feature is the result of naturalselection. By noting a descending symmetry subgroup chain at the core of relational cognition,Bolender takes the first step in an important investigation.