Social Mode

Time equals money is a truism. It is true in the sense that both concepts are simply agreements between people in relation to something else. In the case of time it is an agreement between people about clocks or other cyclic mechanisms and usually in relation to synchronizing activities. In the case of money it is the agreement of credit and debts as representations of trustworthiness. The day, minute, hour, and second are merely efficient conventions we use to compress information about synchronizing our activities in relation to other things. Dollars, cents, bitcoins and notes are all conventions we use to liquidate and exchange trust.

In fact, there’s nothing in human existence that isn’t in this same class of concepts like time and money other than food, water, shelter, sleep and reproduction. All of our cultural conventions and social constructs are, at the root, based upon the need to survive. All of our social existence is derived from a value association network built up to help us obtain the basic necessities of our personal survival. This value association network can become quite complicated and certainly extends beyond our own individual lifespan and influence. We have traditions, works of literature and art, history, religion, politics and so on all due to an extremely complex evolution of learned associative and genetic strategies for survival of our individual genes.

The goal in this essay is not to reduce everything we experience to survival of genes and suggest anthropology, social sciences, psychology and so forth aren’t worth investigation. The various complex systems investigated in all these disciplines exist and emerge as stand alone things to study and figure out. Because politics and economies and social networks actually do exist we must study them and understand their effects and causes. Also we cannot effectively research all the way down from these emergent concepts to the fundamentals for a variety of reasons, not least of which is simply computational irreducibility.

Computation irreducibility, the principal (unproven), suggests the best we are going to be able to do to understand EVERYTHING is just to keep computing and observing. Everything is unfolding in front of us and it’s “ahead” of us in ways that aren’t compressible. This suggests, to me, that our best source of figuring things out is to CREATE. Let things evolve and because we created them we understand exactly what went into them and after we’re dead we will have machines we made that can also understand what went into them.

In a sense there’s only so much behavior (evolution of information) we can observe with the current resources available to us. We need to set forth new creations that evolve in our lifetimes (genetic and computational lifetimes). Let us see if cultures and social structures and politics and money evolve from our creations!

However, until that’s more feasible than it is now we have history and anthropology and sociology….. and yet! While new patterns emerge at various levels of reduction often these emergent patterns will share common abstract structures and behavior. For example, the Fibonacci sequences shows up in a variety of levels of abstract patterns. Another example is that of fractal behavior in economic markets, in the growth of trees and obviously within various computational systems. It is this remarkable phenomenon that leads to my forthcoming hypothesis.

The fundamental aspect of existence is information.

Bits. Bits interacting with bits to form, deform and reform patterns. These patterns able to interpret, reinterpret and replicate. These patterns can be interpreted as networks. Networks, described by bits, made of bits, able to understand streams of bits.

[for understandable examples of this in everyday life think of your computer you’re reading this on. It is made of atoms (bits) and materials like silicon (bits of bits) fashioned into chips and memory banks (a network of bits of bits that process and store bits) that understand programs (bits about other bits) and interact with humans (who type bits from their own networked being [fingers, brains, eyes…]).]

Information has no end and no beginning. It doesn’t need a physical substrate, as in a particular substrate. It becomes the substrate. It substantiates all substrates. Anything and everything that exists follows the structures of pure information and pure computation – our physical world is simply a subset of this pure abstraction.

These high level – or what we call high level – phenomenon like social networks and politics and economies all are phenomena of information and information processing. The theories of Claude Shannon, Kurt Godel, Church, Turing, Chatin, Mandelbrot, Wolfram and so on all show signs that at all levels of “how things work” there is a fundamental information-theoretic basis.

A strange thing is happening nowadays. Well, strange to many who grew up working the land and manipulating the world directly with their own hands… The majority of “advanced” societies are going digital. Digital refers to very clearly not the stuff taken directly from the ground on the earth ( I don’t mean digital in the sense of digital vs. analog… continuous vs. discrete). The economies are 90%+ digital, the majority of the most valuable companies don’t produce physical products, the politics are digital, the dominant mode of communication and social interaction is digital and so forth. It’s almost impossible at this point to think our existence will end up as anything but informatic. But it’s a bit misleading to think we’re moving away from one mode into another. The fact is it’s ALL INFORMATION and we’re just arguing about the representation in physical form of that information.

So what does any of the last set of paragraphs have to do with the opening? Well, everything. Time and money are simply exchanges of information. We will find traces of their basic ideas (synchronization and “trust”) in all sorts of complex information exchanges. Time and money are compressions of information that allow us finite, yet universal computers to do things mostly within our computational lifetime. Time and money are NOT fundamental objects in existence. They are emergent abstractions, that will emerge EVERYTIME sufficiently complex information structures start interacting and assuredly develop associative value networks.

Are they real? Sure.

Should we obsess over them? It all depends on what you, as an information packet, learn to value. If you basic means of survival as the information packet you are depends on the various associations they provide, then yes. If not, then no. Or perhaps very differently than you deal with them today.