I’ve joked in the past that you only have to ask the question “Why?” five times about anything to arrive at an existential question.

What I meant by this is that five levels of causation is enough to get to some kind of ultimate existential question like, “Why is the universe here?” But I think there’s actually a richer sense in which the statement is true: Many “why” questions quickly trace back to a question about the “existence”—or better, the prevalence or ubiquity—of some structure within a system, an existential question even if not an ultimate one of probable philosophical interest.

As a basic example, if I want to ask why a given person or group of people is the way that they are, I quickly arrive a set of cultural, religious, and legal structures. My next “why” question might be something like, “Why does this structure exist?” Existential questions seem relevant to me at the moment as I think about a next phase in my career: What are the career options that are available to me? Why do these options exist widely and not others?

So what does it take for something to exist? Is there a general template for the answer to an existential question? The evolutionary template suggests itself, which suggests that a thing exists because:

• There was a survival/selection logic/dynamic/objective governing the birth/death or eminence/suppression of any given “candidate entity” playing a given role within a system.
• There was a generative process giving rise to candidates with some kind of distribution
• Allowing for path-dependent effects, the thing that exists is just candidate spit out by the generative process that maximizes the objective of the selection filter.

Perhaps there’s some kind of thermodynamic/statistical argument that can generalize this template, but I’m content with this as it is for now. To apply the template to the realm of human social structures, we need to fill in some blanks. To start, what are the dominant survival/selection dynamics?

In answering this question, we probably need to grapple with the notion of the “efficient market,” which almost asserts itself as an answer to the question. The efficient market hypothesis says that markets will be efficient. What does this mean?

Let’s put the matter in the following terms: When an opportunity to increase overall social welfare (as defined by some collection of utility functions) surfaces, this opportunity represents an inefficiency until it is realized. An efficient market will move around capital of all kinds in order to close this inefficiency, thus maximizing social welfare.

Taken as a claim about the allocation of human, financial, intellectual, (spiritual?) capital, the efficient market hypothesis seems to say a lot about the first-order logic which filters and shapes the existence of social structures in modern society. And while the efficient market hypothesis is certainly not true in some strict sense about whether the market can ever be beaten, it certainly seems to be true in the sense that much of modern society is shaped by an impulse to maximize market-level objective functions.

Leaving that as it is, we have so far abstracted out a pattern of causation, and then identified an instance of this pattern in the context of human social structures. One value of doing this abstraction is that we can perform problem solving with respect to the abstracted pattern, without being overly biased by the details of near-mode thinking. So let’s proceed in this vein.

Given that the cause of our problem is existential—in the sense that it originates from a particular structure/dynamic/etc. being predominant instead of our desired structure/dynamic/etc.—how can we operate on our causal model to solve the problem?

It would seem that there are several possibilities:

1. We can generate new candidates to compete head-to-head with the incumbent. This is a two-headed monster of dual-optimization. We need to ensure that our candidate is better than the incumbent w.r.t. the survival objective while still doing service to the objective implied by our original problem statement.
2. Perhaps we can reframe the survival objective—reveal that there is actually a deeper survival objective than was readily apparent at first, which could be more aligned with our objectives or generally help with 1; this is a variant of the first approach.
3. Perhaps we can actively tamper with the survival logic of the system.
4. Generalizing this, perhaps we can trace back through the causation chain to find a deeper existential cause and operate there.

Let’s do it.

Head-to-head competition. Recently, when I’ve thought about “what I want to do next in my life,” I’m thinking in terms of option 1. This option is similar to the notion of an “Ikigai,” but taking as a pallet of options not just the set of “jobs that are out there” but also a broader set of yet to be realized organizational structures.

For instance, can we find ways of distributing the ownership of the network effects and economies of scale—whose centralized ownership currently entrenches major corporations within the sweet spot of the marketplace—so that smaller entities could be on an even footing?

Reframing/Tampering. But we could also go in a different direction, by asking something like something like “Why is the efficient market hypothesis even (approximately) true?”

Unless I’m mistaken, this is not an existential question. It’s answer is simply “because people need money.”

For the majority of people, pursuing sources of income is compulsory. Thus, any selection dynamics which might influence what these people do, how they organize, and what structures they create, are mostly but a perturbative effect on top of the core driving principle of economic vitality.

What would it take to break this hierarchy? To enable other principles to serve as the first order selection filters which mediate the existence of social structures? Well, you perhaps could just… give people money.

Uh oh… Is there a deeper selection filter which says that countries/planets which offer citizens UBI will not exist? A question for another time, but it does provide a segue to the last appraoch:

Moving down the chain. Why is my social network full of junk? This is an existential question with its own survival logic and generative processes. We can’t easily tamper with the survival logic or out-compete the incumbents. But can we take a look at why a social network with such dynamics is itself predominant? This is another existence question. What possibilities lie here?