A Body’s POP might focus on any number of things. For example, the Clade, Mack’s Tower of Gears, has the POP of designing precision gears. Alongside other Clades involved in other engine-related pursuits, Mack’s Clade joins the Square Torque Tribe, whose POP is developing car engines. The engine Tribe is part of the Land Missile League, whose POP is creating racing cars, which belongs to the Speedway Alliance with a POP focused on motorsport competition – a wonderful way to extract novelty for the Cult’s membership. Like the emergent complexity of assembled biology, “division of labor” focuses the interests and preferences of our membership from the granular ground-floor (Clades / Spheres) to the heights of high-concepts (Alliances / Federations). Furthermore, like any Cult member who may belong to multiple Bodies, any Body may join multiple higher-order Bodies. For instance, the gear Clade is not limited to contributing their innovations solely to the car engine Tribe – they may also belong to other Tribes with other common pursuits, such as the Titanium Skeleton Tower Tribe, specializing in building robotic chassis. Although Community Spheres are necessarily limited in their affiliations to their Community, even Communities themselves are encouraged to join any number of Cities, and Cities to Federations.
Individual members do not belong to, say, a League or Federation directly. Instead, members may only belong to a Sphere or Clade. It is the Clade that belongs to the Tribe, and only a Tribe that might belong to a League, etc. When deciding the direction of a City’s POP (HOC), for instance, those contributing Community’s act as independent bodies (LOB), each with their own sovereign view of the issue, voting in the City’s neural-democracy as a single voice – the way a cell acts as an individual, despite being comprised of many parts. For individual members who fall within the scope of that City, they do not directly weigh in on those changes to the City’s POP, but instead, add their voice to their Sphere, which combines with the other Spheres in their Community to become their singular Community voice – the actual voice that weighs in on the City’s POP. How that voice is constructed at each level of complexity is determined by the organization of that level – Communities do not follow some preset standard for how the many voices of their Spheres become the single voice of their Community. Instead, each does it on their own terms, the way emergent complexity transforms irreducible noise into a reducible signal. The changes to the City’s POP will affect the Community, which affects the Sphere. How that chain of effects – City to Community to Sphere – will be specifically experienced by each individual Sphere, and its membership, is what each member will be voting on, not the actual changes to the City’s POP. This hierarchical paradigm (HOC / LOB), reflecting biological emergence and its concept of option space, is particularly geared for a neural-democracy, and its ability to aggregate the flexible positions of individuals into a single point-of-view. Although Clades and Tribes may use any form of government they wish, all emergent structures beyond these first two levels, join the Cult’s framework of a neural-democracy to aggregate the positions of each emergent body within its level of complexity. Furthermore, when an issue arises at these higher levels, those lower levels operate as neural-democratic Bodies.
For example, should the Speedway Alliance decide to alter its POP to include a previously unqualified class of competitors for its motocross events – a new generation of androids – different LOBs (Clades, Tribes, and Leagues) of the motorsport Alliance will be affected to different degrees, and therefore, their voices will have different levels of effect on the ultimate decision to include the androids. Take Mack’s gear Clade, for instance. Despite being a Tower (hierarchy) Clade belonging to a Square (anarchy) Tribe, the gear Clade operates within a neural-democratic framework for the purposes of weighing in on this issue, meaning that each member votes as an individual, and not beholden to the Clade’s leader – Mack. Mack may influence their vote through argument and persuasion, but not direct manipulation, as Mack will never know how each individual member voted. Even if the member swears that they voted the way Mack told them to, Mack cannot confirm this, due to the nature of our neural-democracy, and the secrecy of, not only the ballot, but also, the tally. The only thing Mack will know for certain is when the measure passed.
As Mack’s gears are not used in motorcycles, the Clade’s voice would not apply to the production of those vehicles for the androids, but as their gears are used by the Titanium Skeleton Tower Tribe for the androids’ robotic bodies, they would have a voice, albeit limited to the scope of how their contributions – those gears – might be used or misused. The Clade may vote against the idea on the grounds that their gears are too difficult to produce to be “wasted” on the androids, who are likely to sustain repeated damage during competition. They may alternatively vote for the proposal, believing their gears are up to the challenge, and by proving their value, would increase demand for their product. The weight of the gear Clade’s neural-democratic vote would reflect the fact that their impact on the overall decision is minor. However, a League whose POP is attracting audiences for the Alliance’s competitions would have a significant weight attached to their vote, as it is the spectators who will ultimately evaluate the value of this change.
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