# Philosophy Mondays: Human Nature and Multiscale Analysis

**Published by:** [Continuations](https://continuations.com/)
**Published on:** 2026-08-17
**Categories:** pm, multiscale, progress, human-nature
**URL:** https://continuations.com/philosophy-mondays-human-nature-and-multiscale-analysis

## Content

Today’s post is an interlude in the Universal Moral Core series to discuss human nature. Given how much philosophical and other writing centers on different ideas of human nature, including the endless nature versus nurture debate, this aside obviously isn’t meant to be some kind of definitive treatment. Rather I want to set out an argument about the importance of multiscale analysis that appears all too often absent from human nature discussions and is central to making moral progress. We are embodied beings by necessity. All life, including future artificial super intelligences, must exist on a substrate. In this regard I am a materialist, which I should point out entirely leaves open such possibilities as all of us being connected at some deeper level such as the quantum fields. With the materialist premise, obviously our bodies impact our thinking and our behavior because that is where it takes place. We experience this all the time, such as being more irritable after not having slept well. As such, the idea that we are entirely culturally determined flies in the face of our own experience. But the converse idea, that our biology dictates our behaviors is equally wrong. This is the fallacy of biological determinism. Unlike other species, we have multiple mechanisms for transcending our biology. For instance, we have the capability of self reflection using language: I am irritable today because I didn’t sleep well – I can fix this by napping or by taking a deep breath. We also have the power of knowledge to modify our own biology. We take medication all the time to escape the determinism of biology – in the past minor infections killed people routinely, today we have antibiotics to treat these. As importantly, we use the power of knowledge to make biological differences less relevant (and in many cases downright irrelevant). Raw physical strength is less and less required in most jobs as humans control machines instead. Arguments of the type “x is human nature and hence society needs to be organized as y” should therefore be deeply suspect. Instead of trying to win a debate on the direction of determinism we will only make progress once we acknowledge that humans exist inside a multiscale system in which different scales interact with each other and causality runs in both directions. Our biology impacts our culture and our culture impacts our biology. Both are dynamic and evolving. Technological progress makes possible new forms of interaction by expanding the space of the possible. I contain multitudes. Walt Whitman’s famous poetic declaration applies to all of us. We have the capacity to be selfish but also to be altruistic. Different cultures will bring out more of one and less of the other. The real beauty now is that we have enough history and enough knowledge to be able to reason about the interplay. We have clear examples of the failure of attempts to enforce pervasive altruism (e.g. state communism), as well as of letting selfishness trump everything (e.g. late stage capitalism). The extremes may appear intellectually appealing as simpler but they produce dysfunctional trajectories. I want to provide an important analogy from physics. How does a molecule of water (H2O) behave? We can’t answer this question based on the “nature” of the molecule alone. It has many different capabilities and which one of them is realized depends on whether it is part of a liquid, solid or gas. Conversely we cannot analyze and predict the transition of a material between phases without understanding what the material is made of. For instance, some molecules don’t allow for a liquid phase at ambient pressure and materials made of them turn straight from a solid into a gas when heated. Multiscale analysis, as in the interaction between different scales, is central to both technological and moral progress. So far this modality has been severely underdeveloped because of the historical division of labor between different disciplines. For instance, the separation between biologists and political scientists has held back progress tremendously. A concrete example is our ongoing difficulty in reconciling the “selfish gene” theories of natural selection with the observation of group effects on the allocation of resources. Thankfully there is now work tackling this, such as a recent paper on “Natural selection at multiple scales” (thanks to Erik Hoel for pointing me to this). In this regard I am highly optimistic that we are entering an era of great progress for two reasons. First, with more researchers working outside of traditional academia they can throw off the strictures of departmental boundaries. Second, artificial intelligences have access to all of human knowledge, far outstripping what any one human can keep in their mind. And these two factors interact: at least for now it is far easier for researchers outside of traditional academia to leverage AI capabilities (we are seeing this effect on display in math at the moment). So my plea today is: let’s leave behind simplistic notions of unidirectional determinism and embrace multiscale analysis. As we dig in we will uncover that some systems are "bottom-heavy," others are "top-heavy," while the most interesting systems, such as human societies, will turn out to have many scales of function. This will unlock tremendous scientific, technological and moral progress.

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