Questions listed in the request for proposals: I would number the strongest points of contact with the RFP as 1G, 3F, 4BCG, 5B, 6A and 7D. Let’s take these in order.
1G) Insights from religious and spiritual traditions: This multi-layer approach reinforces:
the importance of the noble-passions as expressed in sustained commitments [9] to be: a healthy person and/or fit competitor, a good companion and/or mentor, a dedicated spouse and/or parent, a resourceful citizen and/or manager, a faithful parishioner and/or chaplain, and a competent professional and/or scholar;
the idea of living words as idea-codes with much the same capacity for supporting life as do living molecular codes; and
the humility of organisms as fallible in a multi-layer community whose scope exceeds their own capacities, whether or not that community has self-assembled or been put together by some other force greater than themselves.
3F) Cultivating the enjoyment of virtue: The joy of buffering the correlations explicitly listed above as noble-passions, as well as recognition of actions which do not serve in this way, is a way that the sciences can get behind perceptions which will indeed foster “upward spirals” of well-being.
4B) Beyond self-reports: One of our two proposed strategies is to examine the use of communication via public datastreams (like those made available by Twitter) to examine their relationship with other multi-layer measurements of community well-being.
4C) Key predictors of well-being: In addition to looking at how our attention-slice (self-reporting) measure and our data-stream method correlate, we propose to examine their correlation with the Gallup-Healthways 5 self-reporting measure and with regional free-energy per capita measures made available e.g. by Google.
4G) The dynamics of well-being: As discussed above, a long-term goal of exploring these measures is to tie them to informed policy decisions in the years ahead as we struggle to move toward long-term sustainability in a changing world.
5B) Concepts across cultures: We propose exploring data streams which are increasingly international. Perhaps more importantly, our task-layer multiplicity concepts have roots developed not just across cultures or species but across dynamical physical systems of all sorts. In other words, there’s a fair chance that they could be adapted to work in looking at activity on exoplanets as well.
6A) What concepts do people employ: Concept choice (as one might infer from subsequent applications of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm) can be crucial. Our proposal makes contact with this in two ways. First, as mentioned above, the concept of sub-system correlation-nurturing has deep physical roots and we think healing (or sanative) potential to the extent that it is a place where science and religion can work together. Secondly, the science of model-selection itself is one that we have long experience, and to the extent that we get data to work with we promise to do a good job in putting it to use.
7D) Freedom and well-being: A key element of task layer-multiplicity as a community order-parameter [11] is informed task-layer diversity. The person most-informed to their ability to nurture subsystem-correlations is likely to be the individual who is taking on the tasks. Hence we predict that freedom to make informed-choices in this sense will be strongly correlated with community health.