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:

Related posts:

1. Troubling Statistics
2. Coherence
3. The Secret

Now lets assume there is some process for picking out universes from the multiverse.  Since there’s no time in the multiverse, the process has no beginning and no end.  It’s like a computer program, but it’s infinitely complex.  Let’s call it The Process.

If The Process is infinitely complex and has no beginning and no end, what can we know about it?  We know that it picks some universes but not others, which effectively creates an “in group” (all those that are picked) and an “out group” (all those that are not).  Of course, both sets are infinite and still have no structure.  But note that all the universes in one group or the other now stand in relation to one another.  That is, they share the property of “in-ness” or “out-ness”, and between the two groups there’s the relationship of “different”.

The Process further divides these sub-multiverses in unknown ways, and this sorting creates other relationships between universes.  You can visualize a network of universes with the connections representing these relationships.  The network is infinite, and if you consider any subset of the network, it’s also infinite.  But these subnetworks are no longer arbitrary, they are networks themselves and networks have structure.  And since a subnetwork by definition shares the same connection relationships as the original network it is a “sub” of, the subnetwork is structurally similar to the network itself.  That is, the network is self-similar, which in mathematical terms means it’s fractal.  Of course this fractal we are talking about is infinite, and so wherever you start, it’s turtles all the way down, and all the way up.

Notice that the process of identifying subnetworks does something interesting, it creates an asymmetry that wasn’t distinguishable before.  For any network N, if you choose a subnetwork, n, then N “contains” n but not vice versa.  This containment relationship can viewed as a network where the connections are arrows, meaning they have directionality, N –> n.  You may have noticed that we just went from talking about a network of universes to a network of networks (of universes), but that’s okay.  Remember the multiverse is infinitely infinite, and we’re just chatting about some arbitrary aspects of it.  There’s lots of other aspects we could talk about instead, but it’s starting to get interesting here, so let’s continue….

Somewhere in the fractal multiverse network of networks described by The Process there is a subnetwork (actually an infinite number of them) where the structure is like this: each universe is connected to by only one other universe but connects to an infinite number.  Let’s call this structure, Time, and note that there are an infinity of subnetworks of the network which have this Time structure.  Unless stated otherwise, I’ll be talking from now on about networks with Time structure.

Remember though, the multiverse itself has no structure; The Process overlays structure on top of it and thereby allows us to know about things like Time.

Now let’s start using the words network, system, particle, entity, agent and universe interchangeably, so we can say things like “time network”, “temporal system”, “particles over time”, and “A causes B” to refer to roughly the same thing.  I realize that by overloading these terms I’m jacking into (and hopefully hijacking) your intuition about what these words mean, but that’s my intent.  Hopefully you’ll continue playing along by my rules and try not to project what you already know onto this alternative cosmology.

When we use the words network, system, particle, entity and agent, you might wonder whether we are talking about a universe or a multiverse.  The answer is Yes.   Remember, the multiverse is infinitely infinite and self-similar, so in some sense we can say it contains itself.  We have a hard time with infinity so this concept is mind-boggling, but if you follow the logic, hopefully you’ll accept this paradox as true.  So lets just use the word universe from now on and forget about multiverses.  And to not get confused, let’s refer to what we used to think of as the Universe as the known universe instead.  The known universe is where you live (or more precisely where you think you live) along with everyone and everything you know about or can imagine.

The known universe is expanding the more you learn about it.  The known universe is temporal.  And as we know from Einstein, it must therefore also be spatial — remember it’s not space and time but rather the spacetime continuum.  The known universe consists of particles (i.e. matter) and therefore — also thanks to Einstein — it consists of energy.  Time, space, matter and energy here may or may not be totally in sync with our intuitions of them, but just suppose they are the same thing and that our intuition is slightly biased by our particular experiences in life and could use adjustment.

We haven’t really talked explicitly about laws of nature, fundamental constants, invariant equations or even mathematics.  And I kinda jumped the gun when bringing Einstein into the equation (so to speak).  But it’s really hard to follow a line of thought without some sort of logical paradigm, some structure of thought.  In the end it doesn’t really matter what I’m saying, what you’re hearing, or whether any of this is “true”.  I’m just telling you a story, and hopefully it’s amusing enough for you to finish reading.

Originally we talked about The Process, which is infinitely complex and which describes all sorts of possible realities.  The known universe is one of those possibilities, one in which we see structure and patterns, order and complexity all around us.  Somewhere “out there” there may be portions of the multiverse (whoops, I said I wasn’t going to use that term anymore, sorry) where it’s still appears, unstructured and thus unknowable.  But let’s come back to the known universe and the “knowable” universe.

Because of the fact that we are here in the known universe thinking and talking about it, and not in some unknown or unknowable part, the non-random patterns that we see may look to us like universal laws (E=mc^2, the second law of thermodynamics, etc.)  Well, we know that even these laws are not truly universal, they apply to only certain scopes.   For example, “relativistic but not classical or quantum realms”, or “closed systems but not open systems.”  String theorists are looking for universal laws, but so far none have been found.  But let’s just grant them that they will eventually find some (or one).  How would we be able to distinguish between a true Law and just a pattern that is very very persistent over all known scopes?

How about we stop using the word “law” and instead replace it with the word “principle” to suggest that it may really just be a pattern that we see in the known universe.  And as the known universe expands via our increase in knowledge/understanding/awareness, we might find exceptions to the pattern.  After all, that’s what’s happened to every “law” ever considered in the history of science so far, and why should that pattern stop?  (Sorry, my paradox detector just went off, let me reset it….)

Coming back to principles, there’s one that emerged from the last few paragraphs, did you notice it?  Cosmologists call it the Anthropic Principle, which is the notion that the universe appears ordered in the particular way that it does with these nifty laws and constants because of the very cosmic coincidence that we are here observing it!  In other words, we live (and can only live) in the known universe, by definition.  And we wouldn’t be “here” and able to “notice” anything if we were in some unknowable part.  That’s a pretty trippy concept, but one that many physicists take very seriously.  It’s the same kind of argument as for why we haven’t been contacted by aliens yet: there’s a decent chance we are the most advanced intelligence out there and we’ll have to wait for others to catch up so we can communicate.  It’s also the reason that your keys are always in the last place you look.

Remember the Anthropic Principle because it’s really useful.  It has the same logical structure as Darwinian evolution and other “emergent” phenomena.  Is this Generalized Anthropic Principal (GAP) a universal/fundamental one?  Who knows.  Probably not.  We anthropic agents are so self-absorbed.

Another principle that emerges from our cosmology is Coherence.  Because of The Process, birds of a feather flock together.  Actually, The Process defines which birds are of which feather, so this is a tautology, though it’s fun to think of it as “like attracts like”.  But we know that really it’s just co-incidence: the birds exist at the same Time.  Using the analogy of birds, we can ask whether these coincident birds are different birds or the same bird.  But it’s a silly question because the answer is Yes.  Think of quantum coherence, if you like.

Now let’s say we are talking about particles and not birds, and instead of Coherence we’ll say Gravity.  Isn’t it the same thing?  We talk about stars and planets and other astral bodies as if they were coherent entities, but If there were no gravity, would those entities exist?  Or let’s talk about the Cooperation of the cells in your body; without it, would you exist?  We’ve all heard about the “law of attraction” from The Secret, isn’t it the same thing?  You imagine the future you want, and that acts as a beacon guiding you in every decision you make, every micro-decision, every unconscious action until at some point you find yourself living in the future you imagined.  Coherence, cooperation, attraction, unity.  Same thing.

Here’s a secret: there is no Process.  Or if you prefer, The Process is completely random.  Yet that doesn’t change anything I’ve said above.  Think of it this way: in an infinite series of random numbers, all patterns appear eventually, right?  So “somewhere” in the infinite randomness, The Process “produces” the structure I’ve been talking about.  Or maybe the fact that we’re anthropically talking about it produces the structure.  We are The Process.  Or more generally, we humans are part of The Process.  The Process is the universe.

Related posts:

1. Why Falsifiability is Insufficient for Scientific Reasoning
2. Notes from TED
3. Synthesis of Complexity Theory

First off, I know that this may not make sense to most people.  The relationships implied by proximity, color, dimension, etc are not totally accurate.  The problem is, I’ve reached the limit of my personal ability to create a good visualization.  So I’m throwing this out there half-baked hoping that the crowd (that’s you) will help bring this together in a more coherent way.

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have great design skills.  If you don’t, then at the least you can ask probing questions to suss out the sources of confusion, which will then feed into the redesign process.

A more detailed explication of these concepts can be found by drilling down through this roadmap.

Relatedly, I have been creating a taxonomy of “emergent network properties” that is definitely half-baked but has been useful for organizing my own thoughts:

The spreadsheet is editable here if you want to extend or refine it.  I’m open to any and all interpretations and ideas in these areas, would love to hear your thoughts.

Related posts:

1. Complex Systems Concept Summary
2. Generalized Evolutionary Theory
3. A Theory of Scalability

Kafka gave us The Metamorphosis.  We have the power to realize our own humility.  Being wrong is irrelevant if you learn from your mistakes and prevent systemic risk from such errors.  How can we be so content with our wisdom if we continually ignore this vital lesson.  As Wikipedia suggests, some people mistakenly dismiss The Zeitgeist Movement of being similar to Socialism, which could not be more wrong.  Emergent systems are the building block of The Zeitgest Movement, while socialism tends to ignore incentives between the group and the individual.  Most “losers” of history tend to argue that their system of beliefs wasn’t implemented correctly.  But they are right!  Thomas Sowell suggests that WHO is making the decision is the most important aspect of any system.  I urge you to skim this excellent summary of the book.

Zeitgest Movement is a school of thought that grounds itself in its humility and focuses on learning and technology to achieve a kind of Truthocracy I’ve been posting about.  The Zeitgesters are working to create a system for continual improvement where the incentives of the individual are aligned with those of the group.  Where the decision maker is in a continual iterative effort to harvest every drop of wisdom from the group prior to making the decision.  Let’s not be naive though – we have to be honest and humble in this pursuit and continually strive to improve the knowledge gathering algorithms.  We must also beware of students bluffing their way to teaching.

“The Internet was not the first technology to disrupt a few business models. From the printing press to the player piano, one generation is always calling the next a pirate”.  The aim of copyright law was to aid in learning by BALANCING the rights of the authors and readers (teachers and students).    Balance between the copyright and copyleft is the key.  Removing the obstacles for a balanced use of the rational and creative sides of the brain is the trick to achieving flow:
“Alice Flaherty argues that creativity is due to a balance of frontal and temporal lobe activity. In other words the trick is not, in fact, to get out of your “left brain” and into your right, but to increase activity in the right hemisphere (or reduce activity in the left) so it matches the activity on the other side.” Source

Awareness  vs “Bewareness” is the eternal and internal battle of the present imagination and past “experience”.  Our goal then must be to reduce obstacles to balance to create flow in all systems.

Rafe was here more than 2 years ago:
“- Cooperators and defectors co-exist
- “Cooperators survive in clusters”
- “Cooperators can invade defectors when starting from a small cluster”
- One interesting dynamic occurs when two self-sustaining “walker” sub-populations collide into a “big bang” of cooperation which largely takes over the population.”"

So it is very reasonable that I would have never learned this or learned it years from now if i didn’t start Googling my hypotheses.  Ultimately the resource focus of Zeitgest will revolve around the speed of learning, which resides within you – your own willingness to learn, teach, and stay humble.

Please watch the Zeitgeist Addendum, and RIP: Remix Manifesto

Then facebook and twitter it (buy a copyleft t-shirt to spread the word and create more balance).  You can’t have big bang without them.

Related posts:

1. Notes from TED
2. Decision Education Foundation
3. Peanut Butter and “Culture Jamming” Sandwich

As far as I can understand it, there is a new field of research looking at whether evolutionary game theory (EGT) can help explain major societal shifts. One article looks at the sudden appearance of communal architecture projects in Andes mountain societies (in the second and third millenia B.C.E.) that previously had few permanent buildings. These new constructions appear to be built for use by the entire community, and their construction clearly required large-scale cooperation. Using a combination of EGT and historical arguments, the authors posit that the labor for these projects was not coerced. Rather, the chiefs of these societies were able to mobilize cooperation by enforcing norms of fairness and justice. In their words:

Cooperation does not magically emerge. However, when the appropriate conditions are met, cooperation becomes the adaptive choice of people assessing the costs and benefits of participating in specialized versus nonspecialized labor, loss of autonomy, gain in material wealth and nonmaterial benefits, and degree to which the production and redistribution process is “fair.”

While all cooperative systems are vulnerable to “free-riders”, who attempt to receive benefits without contributing, the authors argue that the combined mechanisms of punishment and group selection (see this post) were sufficient to overcome this difficulty.

I’m excited to see this field taking off in so many different directions, and I’m looking forward to see what new intersections develop!

Related posts:

1. Game Theory and Military Planning
2. Generalized Evolutionary Theory
3. Human Cultural Transformation Triggered by Dense Populations

If you like the theme of “Social Entrepreneurship, Systems Thinking and Complexity” — and I know that you do because that’s what this blog talks about a lot of the time — then you may want to attend (or even submit a paper/talk abstract to) the eponymously named conference at Adelphi University in New York (April 30 – May 2, 2010).  Hope to see you there!

hat tip: Jerri Chou: @jchou

Related posts:

1. Social Entrepreneurship Tax Credit
2. The Quandaries of Quantifying Complexity
3. Economics Must Reflect Complexity

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.

Related posts:

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

Hypothesis: Vaccination is something that is good at the societal level but bad at the individual level.  That is, it is a tragedy of the commons.  You want all your neighbors to get vaccinated so they don’t pass on the germs to you, but there is enough risk from the vaccination process (at least for certain ones) that you’d rather not do it yourself.

The mathematics of the commons tragedies suggests that there are two ways out.   One is to change the payout/incentive structure, in other words, make the vaccine’s less risky to the individual, or at least change the perception of the individual risk (as the Wired article suggests).  The problem with manipulating perception is, what if you’re wrong?  The marketplace of ideas can be efficient, crowd wisdom can be greater than individual understanding.  And even in the cases it’s not, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain alive.

The good news is there’s another way out.  Just as with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, you can iterate.

What would this mean in the case of vaccines?  It would mean that as a society we must recognize that if we “play the game” enough times we will find that not vaccinating as a whole leads to poorer outcomes to the the individual.  That means YOU.  And thus it becomes recognized that taking the “I’m not going to vaccinate” stance is immoral, or at least unacceptable.  Sure there will be “defectors”, just as there are people who don’t vote.  But those who don’t vaccinate — just like those who don’t vote — do so quietly.  They don’t shout it from the rooftops or let their neighbors know.  And sometimes they even lie and say that they did vote when they really didn’t….

The level of defection is inversely proportional to the level of transparency — the less your neighbor can find out about your behavior, the more likely you are to defect.  Thus, we solve the dilemma by making public the record of everyone who vaccinates, along with their address.  Those not on the record are assumed to be defectors.

Related posts:

1. Game Theory and Military Planning
2. Should You Use Sunscreen?
3. Dangerous Ideas

The basic result is that overconfidence is beneficial in proportion to two factors: (1) the size of the payoff relative to the cost to play and (2) uncertainty about competitor capabilities.  There are two optimal strategies for a population, overconfidence (which minimizes unclaimed resources) and underconfidence (which minimizes conflict costs).  Unbiased self-perception is always dominated by these strategies. However, an overconfident person can successfully invade an underconfident population while the reverse is not true.  So overconfidence is the stable solution.

The direct implication is that resources get destroyed.  It is optimal for an individual to be overconfident, but then he ends up fighting with other overconfident individuals, which imposes costs.  If you think about it for a minute, this is a pretty important fundamental problem.  All of the big societal decisions we face have potentially big payoffs (or avoidance of costs), but it’s really unclear who has the best expertise to make a recommendation.  So we get a bunch of “experts” telling us they are absolutely right.

Note that if it is public knowledge how “good” someone is, the “overconfidence premium” goes to zero.  This is why forcing experts to make public predictions is so important.  Then you can figure out how good they really are.

Related posts:

1. Game Theory and Military Planning
2. If Rafe Were In Charge: Major Medical Edition
3. What Obama Needs to Do

The old philosophical theory says that reason is conscious, can fit the world directly, is universal (we all think the same way), is dispassionate (emotions get in the way of reason), is literal (no metaphor or framing in reason), works by logic, is abstract (not physical) and functions to serve our interests. Language on this view is neutral and can directly fit, or not fit, reality.

The scientific research in neuroscience and cognitive science has shown that most reason is unconscious. Since we think with our brains, reason cannot directly fit the world. Emotion is necessary for rational thought; if you cannot feel emotion, you will not know what to want or how anyone else would react to your actions. Rational decisions depend on emotion. Empathy with others has a physical basis, and as much as self-interest, empathy lies behind reason.

This is part of a brilliant article by cognitive science and linguistics pioneer, George Lakoff (emphasis mine).  His argument about what needs to be done to right the health care reform ship — and more generally in his administration — is to stop denying the above reality and craft a communications strategy that will achieve the (undeniably logical) goals:

As for language, the term “public option” is boring. Yes, it is public, and yes, it is an option, but it does not get to the moral and inspiring idea. Call it the American Plan, because that’s what it really is.

The American Plan. Health care is a patriotic issue. It is what your countrymen are engaged in because Americans care about each other. The right wing understands this well. It’s got conservative veterans at Town Hall meeting shouting things like, “I fought for this country in Vietnam, and I’m fight for it here.” Progressives should be stressing the patriotic nature of having our nation guaranteeing care for our people.

A Health Care Emergency. Americans are suffering and dying because of the failure of insurance company health care. 50 million have no insurance at all, and millions of those who do are denied necessary care or lose their insurance. We can’t wait any longer. It’s an emergency. We have to act now to end the suffering and death.

Doctor-Patient care. This is what the public plan is really about. Call it that. You have said it, buried in PolicySpeak. Use the slogan. Repeat it. Have every spokesperson repeat it.

Coverage is not care. You think you’re insured. You very well may not be, because insurance companies make money by denying you care.

Deny you care… Use the words. That’s what all the paperwork and administrative costs of insurance companies are about – denying you care if they can.

I was a fan of Obama’s unification approach when he was campaigning and was hopeful that his opponents would come around and see this as sincere (which I believe it is). At this point though, that sincerity is being abused by a small, selfish and powerful elite who are not interested in seeing the right to adequate health care universally applied.  And these opponents are masters of the communications strategy Lakoff is suggesting, which is what has been fueling the town hall screamers, tea-baggers and FOX News “pundits”.

It’s impossible to unify with people who are not interested in unification.  And I agree with Lakoff that if the administration adopts the necessary communication strategy to complement its logic and sensibility, it will have a much better chance of getting back support of the conservative public for the goals we should all be unified on.

Related posts:

1. If Rafe Were In Charge: Major Medical Edition
2. Fixing Health Care I: The Uninsured
3. The Link Between Food & Healthcare Reform