📄 social science

Symbolic feedback in social coordination: A cognition-based control-theoretic framework

This paper proposes a control-theoretic framework modeling shared symbolic systems as a supra-individual feedback loop that regulates social coordination by dynamically aligning individual cognitive models with collective norms through mechanisms analogous to proportional, derivative, and integral control, thereby explaining the stability of diverse social structures including religious institutions without requiring cognitive uniformity.

Original authors: Ehud Ahissar

Published 2026-10-23

📖 6 min read🧠 Deep dive

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Ehud Ahissar

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

Human societies are vast collections of individuals, each with their own private thoughts, goals, and limited view of the world. Yet, for a society to survive, these separate minds must somehow align their actions to function as a coherent whole. This is a fundamental puzzle in the study of how groups work: how do millions of people, who cannot possibly know everything about each other, coordinate their behavior without constant chaos? For decades, scientists have understood that individuals act like small control systems, constantly adjusting their actions based on what they see around them. However, this local adjustment is not enough to keep a large group stable. When populations grow, simple observation and personal agreements break down, leaving the group vulnerable to misunderstanding and conflict. The question remains: what invisible structure allows a society to hold itself together, ensuring that everyone's internal expectations match the reality of the group?

A new theoretical framework proposed by Ehud Ahissar at the Weizmann Institute of Science suggests that the answer lies in the way humans use symbols to communicate. Ahissar argues that human coordination relies on a specific type of feedback loop that connects individual minds to a shared, population-wide state of symbols. This idea builds on a recent model of the human brain that distinguishes between two different ways we interact with the world. The first is a continuous, analog connection between our brains and the physical environment, where we constantly adjust our movements based on sensory feedback. The second is a digital, structured connection between brains, mediated by language, rituals, and written rules. While the first type of interaction keeps an individual safe and functional, the second type creates a shared space of meaning that exists only when people communicate with one another. This shared space is not located in any single person's head; it is a collective reality that emerges from the group's interaction.

The paper proposes that this shared symbolic space acts as a massive control system for society. In this view, individuals constantly send out signals—through speech, writing, or adherence to rules—that update the group's shared understanding of norms and expectations. At the same time, this shared understanding feeds back to regulate the internal models of every individual. When a person hears a rule or sees a social norm, they adjust their own beliefs and predictions to match the group. This creates a closed loop where the group shapes the individual, and the individual, in turn, shapes the group. The stability of the society depends on how well these internal models align with the shared symbolic state. If the gap between what individuals expect and what the group represents becomes too wide, coordination fails. If the gap is kept small, the society remains stable, even though no two people think exactly alike.

Ahissar identifies two distinct ways this regulation happens, which function like different types of control mechanisms. The first is overt control, which involves public rules, laws, and visible punishments. When someone breaks a rule, the group reacts with sanctions that push them back toward the norm. This is similar to a system that corrects errors after they happen. The second is covert control, which operates through internalized expectations. Through rituals, stories, and moral teachings, individuals learn to monitor themselves. They feel guilt or anticipate judgment even when no one is watching. This acts like a system that predicts errors before they occur, allowing people to adjust their behavior early. The most effective societies, the paper suggests, use both methods together, creating a robust system that can handle large numbers of people without collapsing.

The paper uses religious systems as a primary example of how this architecture works in practice. Religious traditions provide a stable set of symbols, narratives, and rules that persist across generations, acting as a fixed reference point for the group. These systems integrate both overt enforcement, such as community penalties for breaking commandments, and covert monitoring, such as the belief that a divine authority is always watching. This combination allows religious groups to maintain coordination over vast distances and large populations where direct supervision is impossible. The concept of God, in this framework, is not treated as a metaphysical being but as a symbolic representation of the entire feedback loop. It serves as a unified authority that compresses the complex, distributed nature of social expectations into a single, understandable source of judgment. By believing in this unified authority, individuals can treat the group's norms as a stable, coherent reality, which strengthens their own internal alignment with the group.

This perspective offers a new way to understand how societies evolve and change. It suggests that the stability of a civilization depends not just on its resources or political institutions, but on the stability of its shared symbolic structures. When these structures become too rigid, the society cannot adapt to change; when they become too weak or fragmented, the group loses its ability to coordinate. The paper suggests that even in secular societies, where religious authority may have faded, the same control architecture persists. Legal systems, bureaucratic rules, and scientific consensus take on the role of the shared symbolic state, providing the reference points that keep internal models aligned. The concept of a divine authority is simply one historical implementation of a broader mechanism that allows human groups to function as coordinated wholes.

Ultimately, the research proposes that the persistence of complex human societies relies on this continuous cycle of symbolic exchange. Individuals contribute to a shared digital world of meaning, and that world, in turn, regulates their private thoughts and actions. This creates a level of coordination that is greater than the sum of its parts, allowing millions of autonomous minds to act in concert. The framework does not claim to prove that these systems are perfect or that they explain every aspect of human behavior. Instead, it offers a structured way to think about how shared symbols actively participate in regulating social order. By viewing religion, institutions, and secular norms as components of a single control system, the paper provides a unified language for understanding how human groups achieve the stability necessary for survival. The findings suggest that the key to social cohesion lies in the delicate balance between the freedom of individual thought and the binding power of shared symbolic representation.

Technical Summary: Symbolic Feedback in Social Coordination

Problem Statement
The central problem addressed is how large human societies maintain coordination among vast numbers of cognitively autonomous individuals who possess only locally informed beliefs, expectations, and goals. While individual cognition is inherently bounded and operates on partial information (Simon, 1957), societal stability requires a convergence of these distributed internal models. Without a regulatory structure, individually rational choices often fail to produce collectively beneficial outcomes, leading to coordination breakdown (Axelrod, 1984; Hardin, 1968). Existing frameworks often treat social structures as dependent on individual intentional states (Searle, 1995) or as extensions of individual cognition (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), but fail to fully explain how a supra-individual regulatory layer emerges to stabilize large-scale alignment without requiring cognitive uniformity.

Methodology and Theoretical Framework
The paper proposes a control-theoretic framework grounded in the recently developed BWBB architecture (Ahissar, Polani, & Ahissar, 2025). This architecture distinguishes between two coupled cognitive domains:

The BW-domain (Brain-World): Governs analog, continuous sensorimotor interactions with the physical environment. Regulation here is local, relying on continuous feedback loops to maintain stability relative to an individual's goals.
The BB-domain (Brain-Brain): Governs digitally structured communication (language, ritual, writing) between agents. This domain operates through discrete, socially recognized symbolic structures rather than continuous analog signals.

The core methodological contribution is modeling the BB-domain not merely as a communication channel, but as a supra-individual dynamical system. The paper formalizes this system as a closed feedback loop where:

State Variables: $S(t)$ represents the population-level state of shared digital representations (norms, rules, schemas). $M_i(t)$ represents the internal model of individual agent $i$ .
Feedback Mechanisms: Individuals contribute signals $I_i(t)$ $I_{i} (t)$ to update $S(t)$ $S (t)$ . In turn, $S(t)$ $S (t)$ feeds back constraints to individuals via two complementary channels:
- Overt Feedback ( $O_i$ ): Analogous to proportional control, involving explicit sanctions, institutional rules, and public enforcement that correct deviations from the norm.
- Covert Feedback ( $C_i$ ): Analogous to derivative control, involving internalized expectations, anticipatory monitoring, and self-regulation (e.g., guilt or shame) that corrects behavior before overt deviation occurs.
Coordination Error ( $E(t)$ ): Defined as the conditional variance of internal models $[M_i(t)]$ relative to the shared state $S(t)$ . The system's goal is to minimize $E(t)$ to maintain bounded variation and social coherence.

Key Contributions

Formalization of the BB-domain as a Control System: The paper provides a mathematical and conceptual formalization of shared symbolic systems as a population-level control architecture. It posits that societal coordination is achieved not by aligning individual brains directly, but by aligning internal models to a shared, digitally mediated symbolic state.
Integration of Overt and Covert Regulation: The framework explicitly maps social regulatory mechanisms to control-theoretic analogs. It demonstrates how overt enforcement (proportional) and internalized anticipation (derivative) work in tandem to reduce coordination error, with long-term societal outcomes acting as an integral-like feedback term.
Reinterpretation of Religious Systems and the Concept of God: The paper analyzes religious systems as historically persistent implementations of this control architecture. It proposes that the concept of God functions as a "representational closure" of the societal feedback loop. God is interpreted not as a metaphysical entity, but as a symbolic encoding of the integrative wholeness of the BB-domain—a unified evaluative authority that compresses the complexity of distributed social monitoring into a cognitively tractable form. This representation strengthens the covert feedback channel by ensuring anticipatory monitoring persists even in the absence of human observers.
Distinction from Existing Social Theories: The framework departs from Searle's status-function theory by treating the BB-domain as a dynamical system whose regulatory properties cannot be reduced to individual intentionality. It also shifts the focus of extended cognition from the extension of mind to the regulation of populations through shared states.

Results and Analysis
The analysis suggests that population-level stability requires a regime where the BB-domain state $S(t)$ is persistent enough to provide stable reference values but flexible enough to allow for adaptation.

Religious Stability: Religious traditions are shown to stabilize $S(t)$ by encoding norms in discrete symbolic forms (texts, rituals) and integrating overt and covert feedback. The representation of an omniscient authority (God) ensures that the covert feedback channel remains active, reducing coordination error across large, heterogeneous populations.
Secularization as Reconfiguration: The framework interprets secularization not as the disappearance of the control architecture, but as a reconfiguration of the BB-domain where the integrative representation shifts from religious authority to secular institutions (law, bureaucracy, science).
Stability Conditions: The model predicts that systems with strong, dual-channel feedback (both overt and covert) will exhibit lower coordination error and greater resilience. Conversely, systems where symbolic authority is fragmented or weakly internalized will experience increased variance in internal models and potential coordination failure.

Significance and Claims
The paper claims to provide a common theoretical language for analyzing religion, institutions, and secular systems as mechanisms of social coordination. Its primary significance lies in reframing supra-individual cognition not as an extension of individual minds, but as a control structure that stabilizes coordination across populations.

The author modestly frames this work as a conceptual and formal model rather than a complete empirical theory. The paper asserts that the proposed variables (e.g., coordination error, feedback strength) require further operationalization and experimental testing. It does not claim to prove the existence of a metaphysical deity but argues that the functional role of the "God" concept in human societies is to represent the integrative closure of the societal feedback loop, thereby enabling the stability of complex human coordination. The framework suggests that the persistence of human societies depends as much on the stability of these symbolic structures (the BB-domain) as on material resources or institutional design.

Technical Summary: Symbolic Feedback in Social Coordination

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