ability to create even more complex concepts through the melding of multiple metaphors, as presented by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner in The Way We Think. The cognitive mechanism of induction allows for the creation of new concepts subject to derivations and pragmatic matching with experience. At the apex of cognitive facilities, the full use of logic allows for the development of reflexive thought, where thought is its own object.

The aesthetic need is closely related to the cognitive need; perhaps it is best conceived as a blending of cognitive and emotional contexts. We have suggested that this need reflects the emergence of trust as the central ingredient of social order. Conceptually, we would characterize such a blending as art; but in this representation we seek to differentiate among artistic genre. At the individual level, a person may seek aesthetic fulfillment through personal adornment. Clothing represents the extension of personal adornment to external devices; somewhat like a mechanism that satisfies the aesthetic appetite. In the context of larger groups, fashion enters the picture. It elicits an aesthetic response at a social level. For the larger, more structured group grounded in emotional connectivity, grace transcends fashion; it instills enhanced emotional bonding to the group. In its current incarnation, we look to art not just to satisfy the emotional aspect of aesthetic fulfillment, but the cognitive aspect as well. This blending we’ll represent as elegance.

The apex of the cognition-based needs is termed self-actualization. Throughout recorded history, from cave paintings to magnificent social structures, we can trace a trail through the enhanced facilities of the mind. First, people evoked expressions derived from their sensori-motor experience. As they developed the capability for metaphoric understanding, expressions gave way to meaning; a metaphorical rather than literal interpretation of the world, a concept at the center of Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species. This was the precursor to discourses: a means to record and distribute the subtle nuances of policy throughout a distributed group. It also provides the means to convey this policy across time as well as space. The emotional basis of larger groups derived from the ability to use narratives to manipulate emotional states, as represented by the ode, which encompasses poetry and scriptures. And, in the current preeminent characterization of self-actualization, we suggest the use of language in the form of rhetoric as its most appropriate illustration.

We share a reading of Abraham Maslow’s A Psychology of Being and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature that establishes a separate, higher need beyond self-actualization; that of transcendence. Transcendence is typically portrayed as the need to extend beyond oneself. We suggest that this description can be refined to encompass the drive to impact the environment so as to allow the subordinate needs to be addressed. The illustration of this need across the variety of grouping mechanisms employed by humans is in fact an expression of the underlying mechanism leading to the respective groups. The individual and family expand through exploration. The extension to groups beyond the family is grounded in the concept of union, the discovery of mechanisms conducive of expansion through mimesis. Further search leads to the myth, stories of creation and existence, looking beyond the observable events of the natural world. Building upon this preternatural causality, people then constructed complex models of social order in the form of religious theology. And, finally the species arrived at what we would perceive today to be the frontier of social evolution; the construction of social systems strongly rooted in the physical world and aimed at natural governance.

Based on these characteristics of the evolution of social ecosystems, it is interesting to now attempt to devise a model of such systems; a model formulated along the lines of first a qualitative, and perhaps then a quantitative specification that we might use within computer systems as an illustration of the workings of a complex social interaction system. From this model,

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