@fdrake

But then something happens when a variable in the system can relate to that cycle by, to paraphrase Csal, by 'reflexively taking it's own parameters as a variable that can be acted upon': so humans will cultivate food so that we don't have to deal with - or at least minimize the impact of - cycles of food scarcity and die out like wolves with too few deer to prey on. This is the shift from the 'in-itself' to the 'for-itself', where the implicit becomes explicit and is acted upon as such. And this almost invariably alters the behavior of the system, which is why, I think, the two descriptions of the 'X’wunda trade system' (quoted by Csal) are not equivalent: something will qualitatively change if the system itself 'approaches itself' in Friedman's way. — StreetlightX

So first: yeah, the system will be changed if it relates to itself a system.

Quick example, from here. (In this case the system becoming self-aware would have negative effects, but of course with different examples it could have positive effects. Either way though, a qualitative change.)

The author is taking about gri-gri, a subsaharan belief/magic system which purports to make individuals immune to gunfire.

Gri-gri comes in many forms – ointment, powder, necklaces – but all promise immunity to weaponry. It doesn’t work on individuals, of course, although it’s supposed to. Very little can go grain-for-grain with black powder and pyrodex. It does work on communities: it makes them bullet proof.
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The economists Nathan Nunn and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra wrote a paper analyzing the social effects of gri-gri: Why Being Wrong Can Be Right: Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs [...]

The paper argues that gri-gri encourages resistance on a mass scale. Beforehand, given a mix of brave and cowardly, only a small percentage of a village would fight back. If you want to have any hope of surviving, then you need everyone to fight back. Gri-gri lowers the perceived costs of said resistance, i.e. no reason to fear guns when the bullets can’t hurt you. Now everyone fights, hence, gri-gri‘s positive benefits. Moreover: since more people are fighting, each gri-gri participant also raises the marginal utility of the others (it’s better to fight together). And, since there are highly specific requirements for using the powder (if you break a certain moral code it doesn’t work), gri-gri also probably cuts down on non-war related crimes. Take group-level selection: the belief in and use of gri-gri will thus allow any given village to out-compete one without gri-gri. After a time, these will either be replaced by gri-gri adherents (hence spreading it geographically), or they’ll adopt gri-gri themselves (also spreading it).

So despite gri-gri appearing 'irrational', its adoption by a group is eminently rational. So why not keep the real rational benefits, but drop the irrational veneer?

"[imagine that] the state sends a researcher into the village. “We’re sorry,” he says. “We were so stupid to mock you. We totally understand why you do this thing. Let’s explain to you what’s actually going on, now that we have an economic translation.”

The researcher explains that, in fact, gri-gri doesn’t work for the individual, but it has the net-positive effect of saving the community. “Give up these childish illusions, yet maintain the overall function of the system,” he exhorts. A villager, clearly stupid, asks: “So it works?” The man smiles at these whimsical locals. “Oh, no,” he sighs. “You will surely die. But in the long run it’s a positive adaptation at the group level.”

No one would fight, of course. The effect only comes from the individual. If he doesn’t think he can survive a bullet, then it’s hard to see how you’re going to make him fight. “But people fight better in groups, don’t you see?” stammers the exasperated researcher. That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s also no revelation. I trust that at least a couple of those villagers have brawled before. “Fighting six guys alone vs. fighting six guys with your friends” is a fast lesson with obvious application. Still didn’t make them go to war before the introduction of gri-gri. If that didn’t work, why do you think “time for some #gametheory” will convince anyone?

So I agree, but the question of whether the two descriptions of the X'Wunda are equivalent is another thing entirely. I mean in one sense it's obvious they're not equivalent, otherwise they would be the same description. But do they both describe the same thing?

My mistake was to differentiate between the 'in-itself' and the 'for-itself', when the germane Hegelian distinction would be the one between the 'in-itself' and the 'for-us' ( that is, 'for us rational observers observing the system'.)

Importantly, for Hegel, the in-itself and the for-us are the same thing. It's not a matter of noumenal core and phenomenal presentation, but of acting and knowing. The noumenal/phenomenal distinction cast things in terms of a transcendental knower who reaches out toward (hidden noumenal) being. (You could also conceptualize it as a knower not reaching toward, but being affected by, the diffracted rays of a noumenon.)

Hegel, as you know, holds instead that knowing is itself a type of acting (and so also a type of being). Any given type of knowing will unfold, over time, as a series of actions. In doing so it will create a pattern observable to a different, meta-level, knower.

But it's not as though the description of the meta-knower is 'true' while the experience of the object-level knower is false. The patterns the meta-knower observes are themselves driven by the internal logic of the object level-knower. If the object-level knower spoke the meta-language, it would not act the same way, and the object-level (as it existed) would disappear.

So the idea would be: there is indeed a hidden order - a rational in-itself - to how things unfold. It's not a projection by us. It's already there, as long as there's someone to look. But for that order to be there (were someone to look), the order itself has to be 'looking' at something different.

In short: Both descriptions of the X'wunda example are correct, and both refer to the same thing. You can't reduce one to the other, because in reducing the object-level to the meta-level rational one, you lose the object-level altogether. If you don't have the object-level, the meta-level description doesn't refer to anything.( this is why hegel's so concerned with pointing out that the truth is the process as a whole, not simply the result)

And then my broader idea (I guess kind of Schellingian?) is that 'nature' itself 'knows' in some way, and that that knowledge drives it to act as it does. The way in which nature knows is itself (in part) those patterns and parameters we observe, but that it can't itself know those patterns (otherwise it'd be a human.) It knows something else, so to speak.

I suppose, then, we both agree that it's a matter of emergence, though I'm not sure we're thinking of how that happens in the same way (though maybe we are.)