“Whereas we think we are talking to each other, we are all simply connecting our bodies into a massive network, creating a massive DNA calculator, with hosts and endpoints consisting of carbon and flesh. The human species in the post-information society is a Turing state- machine capable of either turning on or off the screen. Communication on the macro scale becomes the number of screens transmitting light at any given time. It is a modality of code consisting of blinking UV and visible light emanating from the surface of terrestrial earth.

The input data either stimulates the cortical nervous action of turning on a screen or not. The earth pulses at varied rates, possibly radiating at some strange cosmic level a gaia morse-code linking schuman resonance to galactic exchange between Urantia/Earth and her surrounding celestial spheres. Humanity as a whole becomes a massive empirical experiement in systems analysis, an Einthoven fantasy. What ideas, images, and events trigger the most ebullient patterns of UV splashing emitted from the surface of earth outwards towards the cosmos? Thus the shortening and dampening of words and phrases towards being images and signs analytically flashed across millions of screens occurs as a facilitator, easing and enabling more flashing of screens as the earth uses humanity as path towards cosmic connectivity.

Post-information society wages an imperial war against the present, for the psychological focus attuned through focusing attention to the present moment, what is to be observed through hearing and sight clears the cognitive space relished by multinational market interests craving to insert their laboratory-designed mass produced branded self sculptures. Without time, there is no need for accumulation. Accumulation is a temporal-anxiety effect, and hence the endgame technology, the death of event and time is the destruction of the system from which its myth unfolded from”  http://www.chadscoville.com/post/450781965/3-15-10-tetralocks

Related posts:

1. Notes from TED
2. Convergence

Proof: our mind sets out to modify our environment in particular ways (i.e. set goals); then we act in ways consistent with that intention; more often than chance, our environment changes in those intended ways (i.e. goals are achieved).

This is a form of entanglement — spooky action at a distance — between our minds and the environment (which includes other minds), but we usually dismiss this as trivial, not very spooky. On the other hand, we know that quantum entanglement exists and it seems spooky to us because we have no mechanism to explain it.

We also observe that there are quantum effects in the basic architecture of the brain (nanotubules) and wonder if these are somehow the “ghost in the machine” of consciousness. But this could be just a red herring. Perhaps quantum effects matter to consciousness, perhaps they don’t. Still quantum effects are part of the human experience in some sense — and so are biological, chemical, social, psychodynamic, etc. Each of these realms involve entanglement of their own variety. Chemically, there are bonds. Biologically there is autopoiesis and function. Psychodynamically, there is empathy. Socially, there is community. And so on.

In our quest to limit explanations to single realms, perhaps we are ignoring Einstein’s advice about simplifying as much as possible, but no simpler.  What if more than one — maybe even all? — realms (levels) of a system are required to fully explain the phenomena we wonder about….

Related posts:

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3. Teaching Metacognition to 7th Graders

Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research

Global Consciousness Project

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What’s interesting about possibility-space is that tomorrow’s Adjacent Possible depends on the actions and choices we make today; it’s not symmetric and it’s nonlinear.  Certain actions generate more future possibilities than others.  In my experience, those actions tend to be the cooperative ones, ones that produce network effects: financial, social and otherwise.

Due to our evolutionary heritage, having come from a resource-constrained world, we may be predisposed to see the more competitive actions which tend to shrink the Adjacent Possible.  Whether or not this is a bias or an actual state of affairs, much of our thinking is based on scarcity, so we are drawn to actions that become self-limiting.

Here’s how I visualize the Adjacent Possible, and it has profound consequences for how I think and live my own life:

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2. Coherence
3. The Process

But I have to be prepared to be more confused — and question more assumptions than I intended to — because chances are my new random placement on the landscape is initially lower than the local maximum I was on prior.  This part is scary.  People around me don’t understand what I’m saying initially because I necessarily need new words, new language, to describe the new landscape.

And rather than start totally afresh with a new lexicon, I notice it’s more productive (personally and in communication) to overload old terms and let them slowly blend into their new meanings.  We all resist the strain, especially those who did not sign up for the jump through hyperspace.  They use the hill-climbing techniques that incrementally achieve higher ground (logical deduction, reductionism) in order to deny that we are in new territory at all and “prove” every new claim as false.  But unless we eliminate most or all of our old assumptions and embrace the new ones, these techniques will always yield inconsistency.

Thus, it seems like a good idea to resist the urge to bring to in the heavy logical artillery until it’s clear we are on the upslope.  In practice what this means is adding more novelty — but not as much as last time.  This is the Boltzmann technique of simulated annealing: start with a high degree of heat/randomness and turn it down slowly, all the while pounding away with the tools of logic and reduction.

What I mean by Science 2.0 is an intentional (and methodological) injection of novelty into the scientific method.  This is the beginning of a series of posts on the hows and whys of such activity.  I hope you will join in constructively and creatively.

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Lee Smolin claims that AP is bad and favors a Cosmological Natural Selection view instead (on grounds of falsifiability).  I believe this is a false dichotomy and that they are really one and the same.  Here’s why:

1. Normally natural selection requires some form of “replication” or it’s not actually natural selection.   But replication is not needed if you start with an infinity of heterogeneous universes.  In other words replication is simulated via the anthropic lens over the life-supporting subset of all possible universes.
2. Replication is a red herring anyway since it presupposes time (or at least well-ordered events).
3. I conjecture that the distribution of universes is unimportant, as long as all possible universes are represented in the multiverse (i.e. the distribution can be random).

It’s worth noting that this is a purely a metaphysical/logical argument and says nothing about specific physics or cosmologies.  One of the things that makes it hard to see why this is true from reading the Smolin/Susskind debate is that they bounce between the logical argument and various proposed, unimportant details (like whether black holes are the replication mechanism in question or not).

More importantly though, we hear scientists call one another “unscientific” whenever they propose an hypothesis that is unfalsifiable.  Here’s why I think that’s problematic:

• Ever since Popper, science has been obsessed with falsifiability, which is really about assuring consistency.
• Godel proved that there are true statements that cannot be proved.
• More specifically he unpacked “truth” into completeness + consistency and showed that we can’t have both simultaneously.
• Due to extant complexity (let alone potential infinity) completeness is out the window.
• If science is only concerned with consistency, then it’s a pointless endeavor; I can sit here all day and generate tautologies that are neither interesting nor useful.
• If science is about truth, then there needs to be a way of expanding the set of discovered tautologies along the completeness dimension as well.
• There are at least three formal logical systems which do that without sacrificing consistency: deduction, induction and abduction.
• Only deduction is formally falsifiable.
• But science relies on induction and many other forms of evidence too (statistical reasoning, clinical trials, simulation, storytelling, etc); this is the “democracy” Smolin himself referrs to in his TED talk.
• The structure of the Anthropic Principle is abduction.  So is the structure of Occam’s Razor.  And depending on who you believe Bayesian inference is either induction or abduction.
• Conjecture: Newton’s Calculus is a formalism based on abduction.
• Conjecture: strong emergence (aka novel emergence) is fundamentally abduction.  This may be why science has such a hard time with it.
• Conjecture: natural selection is fundamentally emergence/abduction.  This may be why Creationists have such a hard time with it.

There is no one true definition of what constitutes “Science.”  We hear reference to the so-called Scientific Method.  Ultimately, the holy Scientific Method is whatever scientists as a whole do; no more and no less.  To say otherwise is ad hominem.  Now I’m not claiming that ad hominem argument shouldn’t be counted as scientific evidence, but anyone who bows before Popper would.  The irony there is that ad hominem is a form of Bayesian inference.  And if you’re keeping score, that means that anyone who claims that you are being unscientific if you don’t forsake all unfalsifiable idols, is themselves committing the sin of inconsistency.  Which by their own logic means they are unscientific too.

To which I respectfully submit, their pants are on fire, hanging from a telephone wire.  And that’s a scientific fact.

Related posts:

1. The Process
2. Science 2.0
3. Non-Dualism

“Extensive research has shown that people tend to lead either from their head or their heart. Unless we make a conscious choice to achieve the appropriate balance, we tend to do what comes naturally and solve the problem from within our comfort zone” (from the Decision Education Foundation)

Those of us on the analytical side of the spectrum often completely discount feelings in making decisions. But it’s worth noting that the Decision Education Foundation (DEF) was founded by Stanford professors who pioneered the science of decision analysis and whose work spawned an entire consulting industry that helps companies make billion dollar decisions. DEF is adamant about the importance of using both head and heart:

Using your heart means taking into account what you really care about, which often includes the effect on other people and retaining their respect and trust. It means listening to your emotions and intuition. If you have taken your heart into account in the appropriate way, a decision feels right.

Those on the other side of the spectrum often feel overwhelmed or scared by any sort of analysis.  They shoot from the hip all the time, justifying this approach by falsely believing that analysis somehow ruins or blocks their ability to tap into their keen intuition.

Both extremes of the spectrum are simply ego-protecting rationalizations that lead people to make bad decisions.

If you find this pedantic and obvious, consider the following: Do you think you are a better than average decision maker (like most people think of themselves)? Do you believe you are a great decision maker?

Were you ever taught in school or at home how to make a good decision or to even know what goes into making a good decision? Given that there is a whole science and industry of decision making, do you think you can possibly compare in skill to someone who has been formally trained?

Over the course the course of your lifetime, how many thousands of decisions (big and small) impact your health, wealth and happiness? No matter how good you think you are at making decisions, don’t you think you could benefit from at least a little formal training?

As a poker player, entrepreneur and investor, I spend a good portion of my life making decisions that directly and immediately impact my finances. And I was never taught the principles of good decision making that DEF teaches. I’ve had to learn what I know from hard knocks and self-directed study.  I wish it were different, that I had learned about decision science school.

Would it it surprise you to know that outside of DEF there is not one non-profit teaching the general public what’s been learned by the decision analysis community over the last 30 years? And it’s not like it’s hard to learn: DEF focuses on middle-school students! Actually they concluded after methodical testing that that’s where it needs to be taught for a person to learn the habits for life.

This is the same conclusion that Self Enhancement, Inc. has come to after 30 years of working with disadvantaged youth in their after school programs. In fact, SEI won’t accept a new student beyond middle school age because in their experience it becomes a lot tougher to make an impact.

While it’s too late for you become a good decision maker, don’t you think you owe it to your children to make sure they learn how? Just kidding, it’s never too late :-) But it is 90% habit and only 10% conceptual. Following a methodology is key to learning a new habit.

I learned about DEF when Annie Duke asked me to play in a poker fundraiser from them (she serves on the Board of Directors). As soon as I saw their tagline (“Better decisions, better lives”) I knew I had to support them. If you feel similarly, I want to hear from you in the blog comments, and if you have any ideas at all on how to support the mission, how to improve the message, questions about or how you can support your local schools in decision education, I especially want to hear from you.

And if you are somehow still skeptical about how learning more about science of decision making can directly improve your own life, check out Annie’s kick-ass talk from The Feast this past October.

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1. Decision Education Foundation
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If you grew up like me you were brought up in a culture based on a dualist metaphysics, one that asserts that there is an objective reality outside of ourselves (whatever “we” are) and that we know about it indirectly through our senses and conscious reasoning.  This is the basis of the Western traditions of science, liberal arts and symbolic systems (such as mathematics and human language).  Essentially anything that can be studied is part of this metaphysics.  Gödel showed us that this metaphysics will never lead to complete knowing, though everyone agrees we can continually refine our knowledge and thereby at least asymptotically approach enlightenment.

Descartes proved to us that each of us individually do indeed exist, and he tried to argue further that the universe as we perceive it — however imperfectly — does indeed exist too.  But before you drink too deeply from the Cartesian well, keep in mind that his argument for an external reality depended on the existence of a benevolent God, one that would not deceive us with such an elaborate ruse as to make the world seem so real when it wasn’t.  His whole argument after cogito ergo sum is logically flawed.

There are other metaphysics that assert reality is entirely subjective, that there is no reality outside of ourselves.  This of course begs the question of who “we” are such that reality can exist or not outside of us.  But to even ask this question is to miss the point.  Knowledge is direct, we “experience” it; and if we have no expectation, no attachment, no judgement, then we can truly understand.  Anytime we engage in the act of thinking, we break from our direct, immediate, complete knowledge of who we are and knowledge of everything there is to know.  This of course is the metaphysics of Zen Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern traditions.

I am in danger of losing anyone reading this if I don’t immediately disavow this second way of knowing in favor of the first.  There are many who consider themselves intelligent — whose very self-image is based on intelligence — who will be saying to themselves right now that experience without thought is all well and good as a tool for getting to insight.  But ultimately insight (and knowledge and knowing) requires thought.  And in particular it requires thought that is self-consistent, which is to say rational and logical.  The worst things in the world to such a person are logical inconsistency and paradox.  There are fundamental laws at work, not just about the universe but also about knowing.  These believers will invoke the trinity of Occam, Bayes and Popper, but they forsake the word of Gödel: you can choose consistency, or you can choose completeness, but you can’t have both.

For those of us who have already cast ourselves out of the garden of completeness, all I can say is that it is never too late to reconsider how seriously we take all this cogitation.  I mean after all, what’s the harm in exploration as long as we always have our very capable minds to help us navigate?  With this in mind, I have begun to reconsider certain assumptions.  And for those of you who recall my very first post, the willingness to do so was the only rule that I imposed on myself and insisted of those who wish to engage.

Because we all have different experiences in life, we each have a different internal “language” with which we receive truth and gain understanding.  Those of us who come from the Western tradition — which is to say anyone who thinks of themselves as a thinker — we are in need of more practice in letting go of the map and experiencing the terrain directly.

Have you ever noticed that when someone speaks deep truth (no matter what “language” they are speaking) you get a sense of deep resonance that is beyond words and conscious thought?  I certainly do.  And another thing I notice about these experiences is that they only happen when I stop engaging my analytical mind to critique or compare what the person is saying to what I already “know”.

If we cling to faulty assumptions in the face of truth we feel discord of some form (anger, embarrassment, indignity, righteousness, etc).  But I view this as really another form of recognition of the truth before us.  It’s a sort of allergic reaction to the invading memes that would damage our internal edifices, the faulty assumptions that protect our egos and our ideas of who we are.  To embrace the truth often means a level of change we are not yet willing to undertake, and which we may never be willing to undertake.  In the face of such high stakes, we rationalize away the truth in order to preserve internal consistency and harmony.

As an experiment to illustrate this point, consider your immediate gut reactions to the following statements one at a time:

1. “There are ways of knowing that are beyond science, beyond analytical thought, and they are crucial for you to engage in if you wish to get past your limited understanding of the universe.”
2. “Think about that one thing you know with all your being to be true.  Got it?  Well, it’s not true. You believe in a falsehood, a convenient fiction that you use to deny the veracity of your deepest fears.”

Is it possible to not have a negative reaction to at least one of these two statements?  Most people would say no.  If you are comfortable with both statements, congratulations, you have broken free of the shackles of narrow-mindedness that bind most of the world.

If you are like me, you have no trouble at all with Statement 2, but feel at some level that Statement 1 is new-age horseshit, at best an opiate for the masses but at worst a very dangerous conceit.  So let’s take a deep breath and use this as an opportunity to explore what’s causing the negative emotion so that we can challenge those assumptions and thereby learn.

My reaction to Statement 1 is based on the denial of the value of my personal identity as a thoughtful, analytical, intelligent person, one that doesn’t do things that are irrational.  If Statement 1 is true, then my life is less valuable than I had presumed, perhaps even valueless.  Man that would suck.  If I take Statement 1 to be true then I will be forced to change who I am in order to once again feel as valuable.  I might even be forced to participate in a seance and other freaky and totally pointless activities.  Not gonna happen, I don’t have that kind of time to waste.  I could be making the world a better place or at least pursuing my own happiness.

Sounds a bit silly when I type it out.  After all, what’s the point in making the world a better place if we’re all dead anyway (on average a true statement if you are a stats geek).  And as for happiness, I know most of the literature, and I have to admit, as happy as I am there are some proven paths to happiness that I have yet to fully explore and they fit squarely in the experiential, non-analytical sectors of life.  So what could be the harm in turning off the analytical mind a bit more and experiencing without judging?  At worst maybe I’ll be a bit happier, and at best maybe I will become more effective at making the world a better place. But is this direct experience actually valid from an ontological perspective?

Even within the Western analytic tradition there are themes of experiential knowing.  Psychologists now speak (very analytically of course) about the state of Flow.  In Flow, we are so thoroughly engaged in the task at hand and so perfectly in sync that our experience of time changes dramatically.  We are able to achieve extraordinary performance, effortlessly and without thinking.  Gladwell popularized this concept in Blink, claiming that the vast parallel processing power of the human brain and nervous system for useful cognition is largely untapped (or masked) when we focus on conscious reasoning.  To tap into the full potential of the mind, we need to apply techniques to short-circuit our conscious thought processes.

Every professional athlete, musician and performance artist is familiar with Flow/Blink, and you’ve no doubt experienced it many times yourself.  For me, it’s usually been when engaged in a sport where there is little time to think (like ping-pong, volleyball or snowboarding).  In the mental realm, I have been able achieve leaps in performance and rely heavily on on my “blinking” ability — whether it be playing poker, brainstorming, writing, or just interacting in a positive way with those around me — by orchestrating a Flow state.

I’m still learning what best puts me into Flow, but it seems to be some combination of prolonged intense concentration, mild sleep deprivation and small amounts of psychoactive substances like caffeine, modafinil, marijuana, or alcohol (though I must say that too much substance, or combining it, always kills the flow for me).  Recently I’ve found that adding in physical movement or music also help trigger Flow.  On this last front, while most people would say “what took you so long,” it’s worth pointing out that every person is unique in terms of what works for them.  For instance, what most people refer to as meditation (i.e. eyes closed, absolute stillness of body and mind) doesn’t do much for me.  My mind somehow responds better to hyper stimulation than tranquility.

Early in life, learning is mostly the process of of creating new structure out of noise.  As our adult minds form, this structure creation that was once crucial in our learning process becomes a beast of burden and we lose our mental plasticity.  To counteract this imbalance we must consciously re-integrate those activities that we had no trouble jumping into as a child.  The challenge is not to let our egos and silly notions of personal identity get in the way of our beginner mind.  Ken Robinson makes this point as well as anyone I’ve encountered, and I invite you to sit back and enjoy for the next 20 minutes with your own beginner mind:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As for me, I’m off to my favorite yoga studio to participate in kirtan and tap into some good communal vibes.  Maybe I’ll even hit the Buddha along the way.

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From The Chaos Point. Reproduced with permission from the author.

In a convergence of a different sort, many of these threads which all come together and interrelate in my own mind, came together in various conversations and talks within the last 15 hours.  And while it’s impossible to explain this all in details, it’s really exciting to find other people who are on the same wavelength and have thought a lot harder on each of the pieces than I have.  Just to give you a taste, here are the human players in this personal convergence and how they relate to the above themes:

Kevin Carpenter: Heard him first talk at LA Idea Project on the concept of Convergence and how it’s critically different than Kurzweilian Singularity and much more similar to Superorganism.  Ran into him again at a party last night and he was excited to have given more cogent shape to his thinking in this area.

Steve Omohundro: I went to check out the H+ Summit this morning and he was speaking matter-of-factly on so many areas of interest and dropping research-backed evidence to support all of this pontification.  While the details aren’t in this slide presentation, you should glance through it anyway, especially if you have been intrigued at all about things that I’ve written about.

Dan Miler: Spoke right after Omohundro on cellular automata and simulation, and the metaphor/paradigm of digital physics.  He highlighted several projects by other people which are shedding light on deep universal structure, including the work of Alex Lamb.  Lamb has built the first (as far as I know) cellular automata system based on irregular latices (i.e. arbitrary network structures).  Just like in Conway’s Game of Life — the most well-known cellular automaton — there emerge persistent dynamic patterns similar to gliders:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are more examples from the Jellyfish system.

What intrigues me most about this is that the brain is a nonregular lattice (by definition all networks are).  Neuronal firing patterns are (that is to say, cognition is) computationally isomorphic to cellular automata on nonregular lattices.  The jellyfish patterns seen in Lamb’s simulations are exactly what I would imagine to exist in the brain.  These would be the semi-autonomous interacting — sometimes cooperating, sometimes conflicting — agents that Omohundro refers to as being the basis of all cognition/intelligence.  It’s exactly what Minsky was referring to in Society of Mind, and what Palombo referred to in The Emergent Ego.  It’s also the basis of crowd wisdom or collective intelligence.

Which leads us back to Convergence.  As we learn more about the nature of cognition, intelligence and thought (both conscious and unconscious), I believe we will recognize ever more clearly how there is new sentience emerging, not alongside human beings (though that is surely happening as well), but rather at the level above human beings and their technological spawn.

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1. Superfoo
2. Focusing on "Autonomy"
3. Response to "Superorganism Considered Harmful"

If you liked this, check out these posts:

• Behavioral Economics with Dan Ariely
• Management 2.0
• Executive Compensation
• World’s Most Ambitious Crowdsource
• My Favorite TED Talks of TED 2009

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