This book proposes a new explanation for the forms of social relations. It argues that the core of social-relational cognition exhibits beauty—in the physicist’s sense of the word, associated with symmetry. The book describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition that account for the resulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and the breaking of those symmetries. It further describes the symmetries of the four fundamental social relations as ordered in a nested series akin to what one finds in the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetry brea ... More

This book proposes a new explanation for the forms of social relations. It argues that the core of social-relational cognition exhibits beauty—in the physicist’s sense of the word, associated with symmetry. The book describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition that account for the resulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and the breaking of those symmetries. It further describes the symmetries of the four fundamental social relations as ordered in a nested series akin to what one finds in the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetry breaking organizes the neural activity generating the cognitive models which structure our social relationships. The book’s primary claim is that there exists a social pattern generator analogous to the central pattern generators associated with locomotion in many animal species. Spontaneous symmetry breaking structures the activity of the social pattern generator just as it does in central pattern generators. The book’s hypothesis that relational cognition results from self-organization is entirely novel, distinct from other theories, which describe sociality in terms of evolution or environment. It presents a picture of social-relational cognition as resembling something inorganic. In doing so, the hypothesis reveals deep connections among cognition, biology, and the inorganic world. One can go too far, the book acknowledges, in taking a solely dynamical view of the mind; the mind’s innate functional complexity must be due to natural selection. But this does not mean that every simple mental feature is the result of natural selection.