“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

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

Here are the slides from his talk. My favorites are 3, 4, 8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38, 53, 66, 68.

Related posts:

1. TED Talk: Chris Abani
2. Response to "Superorganism Considered Harmful"
3. My Favorite TED Talks of 2009

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

Mobile internet in Japan has been years ahead of other countries, so it is reasonable to believe that their interactions are occuring at a much faster pace.  If there’s one trend that’s always been present it is the increase in frequency and abstraction of interactions (aka learning).  Isn’t it possible that we’re witnessing a transformation from the real to the digital world there first? 

1.  All iWant for Xmas is an android (via Marginal Revolution).  Make sure you click on the video
2.  Man Marries Virtual Bride (via Marginal Revolution):

Ultimately we cannot know if we’re a machine or not, it just not optimal to stop either way, but the only way to not be alone (“an expert is someone who knows more and mroe about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing”) is to bring others along with you.  Difference between parallel processing and whatever dr Singularity call the other type.  I’m not there yet.  We are all teacher and students at achieving infinite “flow“.  Our bodies can only get us so far.

Related posts:

1. Complex Links: TED
2. Micro –> Macro –> Micro, etc.

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"

In thinking about these questions, it helps me to remind myself of the difference between evolution and emergence. Evolution happens whenever you have a population of agents with heritable variation and differential reproduction rates. There are at least two types of emergence, both of which can create new types of agents. Various self-reinforcing mechanisms lead to stronger and more stable agency. We may not even recognize the emergence of nascent agents for what they are until said agency (or coherence) becomes strong enough. For instance, many people have a hard time wrapping their head around cultural agency of any form.

Obviously none of us on here have a problem with the concept of non-human agency, but as Alex and Ben collectively point out, cultural agents depend on human agents for their very existence.  Yet as they become more coherent they inevitably come into conflict with human agency (i.e. what’s good for the organization diverges from what’s good for its constituents). This is the fundamental yin-yang dynamic of the creation of new levels of organization and complexity.

It is worthwhile asking what the future holds for humanity. This is what Kevin and I were on about in this whole superorganism and singularity thread:

• Superorganism and Singularity
• Superorganism Considered Harmful
• Response to Superorganism Considered Harmful
• Superorganism as Terminology
• Superfoo
• Focusing on Autonomy
• Going Meta on Autonomy

Summary is:

1. we disagree on whether there will be a single overarching Gaia-esque Super-agent on earth or whether there will just be a rich ecology of many interacting “small s” super-agents with no strong “big S” Super-agent
2. we disagree on how to measure “autonomy” so we can’t come to a consensus on what life will be like for humans
3. we didn’t really dive too deeply into the extent and nature of interaction between human agents and super-agents

This last point is interesting to me since it appears from the evidence that as each new level emerges, several things happen:

• communicative interactions between higher level and lower level agents increases
• level boundaries become less strict so that levels “overlap”
• the amount of co-evolution between the lower-level population and higher-level population — i.e. multilevel evolution — also increases

To make this claim more concrete, compare for instance the difference (in the above regards) between these three dyadic systems:

A) atom –> molecule

B) cellular organism –> multicellular organism

C) human –> corporation

All thoughts, disagreements, questions welcome…

Related posts:

1. Human Cultural Transformation Triggered by Dense Populations
2. Cultural Agency
3. Complex Systems Concept Summary

This highlights an interesting evolutionary tension: as I’ve written before, evolutionary theory tells us that cooperative behaviors are more likely to evolve (biologically speaking) in populations that are dispersed over space rather than densely packed. But I’m beginning to think that cultural evolution may be different enough from biological evolution to require its own body of theory.

Related posts:

1. Comments on Human Cultural Transformation
2. Cultural Agency
3. What is the Best Idea Ever?

How can they both be right? I think they are operating at different levels. Yes, individual agents make their particular planning decisions.  In aggregate, these decisions drive monetary variables like interest rates, exchange rates, liquidity demand, etc.  However, these variables then feed back into the next round of planning decisions.  Moreover, at least some of these plans take into account the effect of the agent’s actions on the monetary variables.  So you get classic chaotic/complex behavior with temporarily stable attractors, perturbations, and establishing new regimes. There may even be aspects of synchronized chaos. I think the monetary variables are the key emergent phenomena here.  They are like “meta prices” that provide a shared signal across just about every modern economic endeavor.

Food for thought.  I’m going to keep this in mind when processing future articles on the economy and see if it helps my thinking.

Related posts:

1. Kevin Gets Acknowledged by a Real Economist
2. Brilliant or Crazy? I Really Don't Know.
3. Emergent Causality