Epilogue. Beating Death, Sometimes “You can’t beat death but / you can beat death in life, sometimes.” (Charles Bukowski, “The Laughing Heart”) In Tractate Avot,1 a Jewish sage by the name of Akavia ben Mahalalel suggests that we should keep in mind three things: 1. “From where you came,” 2. “To where you are going,” and 3. “before Whom you will have to give an account and a reckoning.” Answering the first question (“From where did you come?”), he says, “From a putrid drop” (i.e. a drop of sperm). Answering the second question (i.e. “And to where are you going?”), he says, “To a place of dust, worms, and maggots.” The Jewish sage reminds us that the miracle of life, as expressed in the existence of a whole human being, emerges from a drop of sperm and will finally end inmaximum entropy, as predicted by the second law of ther- modynamics. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The lesson taught by the sage is that our arrogance and self-importance must be qualified. All human beings, whether kings or beggars, originated from the same source and are heading toward the same end. No one is a superman and in the world to come, we will all be responsible for giving “an account” of our deeds. 1 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Mishnah/Seder_Nezikin/Tractate_Avot/Chapter_3/1. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 165 license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Neuman, How Small Social Systems Work, The Frontiers Collection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82238-5 166 Epilogue. Beating Death, Sometimes Interestingly, the sage attributes our misbehavior to our misunderstanding of who we are: cognate beings who originated from matter and are heading back to a lower-level organization of matter. The need for modesty implied by this lesson is important but so is the understanding that being alive means being able to maintain a functional and organizational whole. This is a chal- lenge not only because an annihilating force always lies at our doorstep, striving to return us to our origin, but also because “learning order” seems to be a challenge in an irreversible world where going back in time is impos- sible. Learning is impossible for a being living in a continuous present. To learn, we must go back in time. At the opening of this book, I proposed that our existence is cognitive no less than it is physical because without a mind capable of registering the past and forming abstract representations, existence is impossible. However, I have also argued that our existence is social no less than it is physical and cognitive and that the formation of flexible and adaptive representations and the ability to respond flexibly and creatively in real time is what underlies the existence of small social systems. My main argument was that a small number of “cog- nitive particles” may hold different perspectives that, when compared and integrated, may have a huge benefit. It is our in-built differences in perspec- tive and our ability to somehow resolve these non-converging perspectives which create the magical sauce of small social systems from soccer teams to families. As suggested by Charles Bukowski in his poem “The Laughing Heart,” (Bukowski, 1996) we can’t beat death but we can beat death in life, sometimes. When a soccer team is playing beautifully, forming complex, dynamic configurations of order, it is an example of the way we beat death in life, sometimes. When Scott Hamilton’s quartet2 beautifully improvises, it is another instance of the way in which we may sometimes beat death in life. When a functioning family is caring for its members, from infants to grandparents, life has the upper hand. These instances emphasize the impor- tance of small social systems that have been overlooked, misunderstood, and compartmentalized into specific niches of academic disciplines. In between the socialist family of nations and Ayn Rand’s form of extreme individualism, there seems to be a level of analysis that deserves careful consideration, a level where a constructive resolution is formed between the understanding that we are all unique and the understanding that we are never alone. 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMFfXqt2VZo&list=WL&index=21. References Alemi, M. (2020). The amazing journey of reason: From DNA to artificial intelligence. Springer. Aleta, A., & Moreno, Y. (2019). Multilayer networks in a nutshell. Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, 10(1), 45–62. Alexander, C. (2002). The nature of order: The process of creating life. Taylor & Francis. Ashby, W. R. (1991). Requisite variety and its implications for the control of complex systems. In G. J. Klir (Ed.), Facets of systems science (pp. 405–417). Springer. Atlan, H., & Cohen, I. R. (1998). Immune information, self-organization and meaning. International Immunology, 10(6), 711–717. Bakhtin, M. M. (1990). In M. Holquist & V. Liapunov (Eds.), Art and answer- ability: Early philosophical essays (Vol. 9). University of Texas Press. Bateson, G. (1972/2000). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press. BBC. (2014). Brazil “cracked up” during Tuesday’s stunning 7–1 World Cup semi- final defeat by Germany, according to victorious coach Joachim Low. BBC Sport, July 9. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/28222946 Ben-Jacob, E., Becker, I., Shapira, Y., & Levine, H. (2004). Bacterial linguistic communication and social intelligence. Trends in Microbiology, 12(8), 366–372. Bennett, C. H., & Landauer, R. (1985). The fundamental physical limits of computation. Scientific American, 253(1), 48–57. Billig, M. (1987). Arguing and thinking: A rhetorical approach to social psychology. Cambridge University Press. Bukowski, C. (1996). The laughing heart. Black Sparrow Press. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 167 license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Neuman, How Small Social Systems Work, The Frontiers Collection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82238-5 168 References Borges, J. L. (2018). The garden of forking paths. Penguin. Bransen, L., & Van Haaren, J. (2020). Player chemistry: Striving for a perfectly balanced soccer team. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.01712. Brontë, E. (1847/2020). Wuthering Heights. Oxford University Press. Cohen, I. R. (2000). Tending Adam’s garden: Evolving the cognitive immune self . Academic. Cohen, I. R. (2016). Updating Darwin: Information and entropy drive the evolution of life. F1000Research, 5, 2808. Collins, J., Howe, K., & Nachman, B. (2018). Anomaly detection for resonant new physics with machine learning. Physical Review Letters, 121(24), 241803. Conant, R. C., & Ross Ashby, W. (1970). Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. International Journal of Systems Science, 1(2), 89–97. Conway, M. A., Loveday, C., & Cole, S. N. (2016). The remembering–imagining system. Memory Studies, 9(3), 256–265. Danesi, M. (2004). Messages, signs, and meanings: A basic textbook in semiotics and communication (Vol. 1). Canadian Scholars’ Press. Darwin, C. (1859/2010). The origin of species: A variorum text.Universityof Pennsylvania Press. Davies, P. C., & Walker, S. I. (2016). The hidden simplicity of biology. Reports on Progress in Physics, 79(10), 102601. Dumas, A. (1844/2007). The three musketeers.Dover. Farzadfard, F., Gharaei, N., Higashikuni, Y., Jung, G., Cao, J., & Lu, T. K. (2019). Single-nucleotide-resolution computing and memory in living cells. Molecular Cell, 75(4), 769–780. Fortuny, J., & Corominas-Murtra, B. (2013). On the origin of ambiguity in efficient communication. Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 22(3), 249–267. Fredkin, E., & Toffoli, T. (1982). Conservative logic. International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 21(3–4), 219–253. Friedgut, E., & Bourgain, J. (1999). Sharp thresholds of graph properties, and the k-sat problem. Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 12(4), 1017–1054. Fu,X.,Kato,S.,Long,J.,Mattingly,H.H.,He,C.,Vural,D.C.,Zucker,S. W., & Emonet, T. (2018). Spatial self-organization resolves conflicts between individuality and collective migration. Nature Communications, 9(1), 1–12. Galton, F. (1889). Natural inheritance. Macmillan. Gigerenzer, G. (1997). Bounded rationality: Models of fast and frugal inference. Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, 133(2/2), 201–218. Gladwell, M. (2013). David and Goliath: Underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants. Little, Brown. Hardison, O. B. (1960). The dramatic triad in “Hamlet.” Studies in Philology, 57 (2), 144–164. Harries-Jones, P. (1995). A recursive vision: Ecological understanding and Gregory Bateson. University of Toronto Press. Harries-Jones, P. (2016). Upside-down gods: Gregory Bateson’s world of difference. Fordham University Press. References 169 Hartmann, A. K., & Weigt, M. (2005). Phase transitions in combinatorial optimiza- tion problems.Wiley. Hemingway, E. (1970/2013). Islands in the stream.RandomHouse. Hemmo, M., & Shenker, O. R. (2012). The road to Maxwell’s demon: Conceptual foundations of statistical mechanics. Cambridge University Press. Hiraide, T. (2014). The guest cat.Picador. Holmes, L. (2016). Resolution of missing incidents. In K. Shalev Greene & L. Alys (Eds.), Missing persons: A handbook of research (pp. 234–242). Routledge. Jaglom, H. (1992). The independent filmmaker. In J. E. Squire (Ed.), The movie business book (2nd ed., pp. 49–59). Simon & Schuster. Jaynes, E. T. (1957). Information theory and statistical mechanics. Physical Review, 106 (4), 620–630. Jaynes E. T. (1996/2003). Probability theory: The logic of science.Cambridge University Press. Keim, N. C., Paulsen, J. D., Zeravcic, Z., Sastry, S., & Nagel, S. R. (2019). Memory formation in matter. Reviews of Modern Physics,91(3), 035002. Komikova, M. (2020). The biggest bluff . Penguin. Kurt, W. (2015). Using Bayes’ factor to build a Voight-Kampff test! Count Bayesie, May 5. https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/2/27/building-a-bayesian-voi ght-kampff-test Lan, G., & Tu, Y.