Social Mode

Good sunday morning thought cycles about “work”, organization, the big “laws”, theories of all sorts of things. I really like Stuart Kauffman. Not afraid to say “I’m stuck.” and keep working.

The life cycle of a cell is simply amazing. It does work to construct constraints on the release of energy, which does work to construct more constraints on the release of energy, which does work to construct even more constraints on the release of energy, and other kinds of work as well. It builds structure. Cells don’t just carry information. They actually build things until something astonishing happens: a cell completes a closed nexus of work tasks, and builds a copy of itself. Although he didn’t know about cells, Kant spoke about this 230 years ago when he said that an organized being possesses a self-organizing propagating whole that is able to make more of itself. But although cells can do this, that fact is nowhere in our physics. It’s not in our notion of matter, it’s not in our notion of energy, it’s not in our notion of information, and it’s not in our notion of entropy. It’s something else. It has to do with organization, propagation of organization, work, and constraint construction. All of this has to be incorporated into some new theory of organization.

…

We don’t know what Darwinian pre adaptations are going to be, which supplies an arrow of time. The same thing is true in the economy; we can’t say ahead of time what technological innovations are going to happen. Nobody was thinking of the Web 300 years ago. The Romans were using things to lob heavy rocks, but they certainly didn’t have the idea of cruise missiles. So I don’t think we can do it for the biosphere either, or for the econosphere.

…

I can begin to imagine making models of how the universe gets more complex, but at the same time I’m hamstrung by the fact that I don’t see how you can see ahead of time what the variables will be.

…

The same question applies to the economy. How can human beings assemble this increasing diversity and complexity of ways of making a living? Why does it work in the common law? Why does the common law stay a living body of law? There must be some very general conditions about co-evolutionary assembly. Notice that nobody is in charge of the evolution of the common law, the evolution of the biosphere, or the evolution of the econosphere. Somehow, systems get themselves to a position where they can carry out coevolutionary assembly. That question isn’t even on the books, but it’s a profound question; it’s not obvious that it should work at all. So I’m stuck.

From “The Adjacent Possible“, Stuart Kauffman

Unanswered Big Things

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Jun 5
JHB,

I think the killing of Osama Bin Laden changed the world dramatically.

It won’t change terrorism or our world views… yet. OBL was a powerful symbol and the media, politics and academics are going to make sure that the symbol carries a lot of weight and reinforces whatever agenda they want to push.

From oil prices, to futures, to political fortunes, the process of killing and marketing OBL has changed everything.

What if all it does is change the political fortunes of Pres. Obama? isn’t that a big deal?

Perhaps we need to consider different levels of change. Even if all these things I claim are a big deal actually, in the grand scheme, are just small perturbations in the overall arc of the human and Earth story. Perhaps this story has played out thousands / millions of times and its just part of it. No real outlier.

What say you?

RFS

Death of Osama Bin Laden – Changes Everything?!

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May 3
Just watched absolutely fascinating NatGeo Explorer episode, The Moment of Death.

This is a really uncomfortable show to watch. Asks some amazing questions AND unemotionally explores some answers/approaches.

What got me really thinking was listening to the Drs. and researchers who work on this stuff everyday. It’s shocking to many of us who don’t deal with this stuff everyday, but for these researchers, its clinical.

Absolutely fascinating research over hundreds of years. Some really kooky stuff.

There’s a part where this Dr. “MacDougal” attempted to measure the weight of the soul in the 1800s. WHAT??!?

There’s an amazing part involving the air force testing the effects of G on pilots’ brains.

Definitely a much watch, if you can handle it. It’s not for everyone.

The Moment of Death, A Documentary

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Apr 10
“Tripping over Buddha” is an expression about not recognizing the obvious…or important stuff.

“If you were looking for Buddha [or insert subject of VALUE here], you could trip over him and be unaware of whom you had encountered.”

Such a statement can be pejorative or it can be about nothing more than the difficulty in not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Likewise, if we’re looking for a way to understand what the hell is going on in the world and we need some place to start, the recommendation is for you to start with “The Man in the Mirror” (thank you, Michael Jackson). Us. Homo sapiens.

By starting with ‘us’ then there’s a chance that you’ll learn how frustratingly complex organisms we are. For starters, perhaps you’ll be amused that we all
1. sense things that aren’t there (do we really need examples?) and
2. don’t sense things that are there (do we really need examples?)
3. but continually muster outrage, violence, and retribution when we aren’t taken serious about our interpretations of life – from art to asinine and politics to potentates
So, as a starting place for getting to know what makes us tick, what makes us frail and what is the best hope we have of recognizing Buddha [or subject of VALUE here] if we should trip over him (or her), START HERE.

www.g2conline.org/#

This is by far the best site I have ever come across with regards to what’s going on about ‘us’. Yes, great for sorting out the complexity from the hyperbole. No, it can’t be watched and absorbed in a week, or on YouTube. So go look, mess around, add it to your computer’s links, find what you are interested in or just gape at the wonders of it all but do it.

And, if you do, I hope you enjoy it.

But, like the Earl Nightingale once recounted, if you do take the time and effort to examine only a spat of the rules that govern you, in the end you’ll find you’re alone because the effort to grasp even the simple rules was too great a challenge for pretenders. You know, those who claim to be looking for Buddha [or what the hell is going on] but don’t recognize what is there in front of them when it’s encountered.

If you do process what is there and you come away convinced there is something more or better or of greater value, then fine. Now you know some serious empirical stuff you are rejecting and Buddha [or subject of VALUE here] may be right around the corner.
Tripping over Buddha…

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Mar 7
Our society wastes a lot of time crafting clever but completely inaccurate models of the world looking for shortcuts to wealth, fame, power, peace, prosperity, liberty, or whatever…

That strategy can never work. All things that lead to the above goals are computationally irreducible systems.

The most efficient strategy, and here comes the bad news… is to jump in, do stuff* and see what happens.

*stuff = take to the streets, code something, write that book, run the marathon, quit that job, join the peace corps, send the letter, have the talk, etc.

More Efficient to Participate and Experience than to Analyze and Look for a shortcut

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Mar 4
Last night my wife and I ended up seeing The King’s Speech. We set out to watch Black Swan, but it was sold out.

I was disappointed at the time and still am a little bit. The King’s Speech was a fine movie, but when you have a rare baby sitter night you want what you want…

Alas, one facet of The King’s Speech intrigued me quit a bit. How does someone in a position of fame behave when they realize the reality of the facade. Colin Firth brilliantly played a fascinating character without anchors. The scene with Geoffrey Rush sitting in Edward’s throne in Westminster Abbey was the clearest example of this.

“People have carved there names in this chair! I don’t care how many royal assholes…”

A throne with graffiti still used in a coronation ceremony! What could be more anchorless!

Even at the end of the movie, Firth still had this look when he was waiving at the throngs of people “What is all this for?!”

Not sure there is a resolution to this quandary for any of us and certainly not for a monarch in name. Oh, sure, we can all find a justification if we don’t question too hard and profess it out to the world enough….

Other thoughts to follow up on:

Impact of radio/mass broadcasting to politics, power, public policy

Current obsession with Monarchy and America’s own “monarchs in name”

The King’s Speech: Quick Reaction

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Feb 21
UPDATE: I missed SWs blog post. Brilliant!

Early versions of this approach go back nearly 50 years, to the first phase of artificial intelligence research. And incremental progress has been made—notably as tracked for the past 20 years in the annual TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) question answering competition. IBM’s Jeopardy system is very much in this tradition—though with more sophisticated systems engineering, and with special features aimed at the particular (complex) task of competing on Jeopardy.

Wolfram|Alpha is a completely different kind of thing—something much more radical, based on a quite different paradigm. The key point is that Wolfram|Alpha is not dealing with documents, or anything derived from them. Instead, it is dealing directly with raw, precise, computable knowledge. And what’s inside it is not statistical representations of text, but actual representations of knowledge.

Maybe you’ve seen the latest NOVA episode about Watson, the AI machine that played Jeopardy against former champions.

The first blush answer would be: NO.

The linguistics are simply not there yet.

However, if Jeopardy questions were more “computational” vs. linguistic and fact retrivial the answer might be: YES.

Wolfram|Alpha has the raw power to do it, but it lacks the data and linguistic system to do it.

IBM was clever to combine the history of Jeopardy questions with tons of documents. It’s similar, but not the same as, common sense engine from Cyc. It’s not fully computational knowledge. It’s semantic. It’s cleverness comes from the depth of the question training set and the document training set.

It would breakdown quickly if it were seeing questions about facts that had never been printed in a document before. An example would be “How far away will the moon be tomorrow?”

Wolfram|Alpha can answer that! Now, what’s challenging is that there is a much bigger universe of questions that have never been asked than those that have! So Wolfram|Alpha already has far more knowledge. However, its linguistics are not strong enough to clearly demonstrate that AND it will probably never catch up! Because Wolfram|Alpha can answer questions that have never been asked so people will always ask it questions that will trip it up… they will always push the linguistics.

In the end, a combination of Watson, Wolfram|Alpha and Cyc could be very fun indeed!

Perhaps we should hack that up?

Could Wolfram|Alpha Beat IBMs Watson?

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Feb 11
Here’s another article about how the machines will take over and make everything better.

It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn’t even take breaks to play Farmville.

Funny, but seriously…
Who’s to say the evolution of “intelligence” doesn’t involve the evolution of play… in fact in might be necessary.
not quite sure why every contemplation of a super smart singularity future simply involves bigger problems being solved. history doesn’t suggest that’s how it works.

it’s plausible that other systems in the universe have already passed a singularity. and perhaps we’re their little toy. and what they did with their super intelligence was set up an experiment to see how things develop. their own farmville.

it’s also plausible that ever increasing intelligence in the human sense doesn’t amount to squat in the multi verse. Maybe the multi verse just does what it does and intelligence is a side effect that burns out like a super nova… maybe it’s common, maybe it’s rare…

the problem with chasing the singularity is we probably don’t have much control over how things evolve. Can’t say I want the machines to take over or not. I’m pretty sure I won’t know the difference when and if they do, just like I didn’t notice how The Internet changed us and I couldn’t really prepare for it. Other generations could say that about birth control, electricity, the printing press, telescope, the wheel, whatever. Again, things happen. we behave. then occasionally we notice, “Gee, looks like something changed”.

The Singularity Is Near might just mean we amuse ourselves in new ways

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Feb 10
This morning is quite amusing in Austin.

Snow fell. and exposed a severe shortage of knowledge about the world.

I watch a guy pour a small cup of coffee in front of his wheels to help him spin the tires. Severe misunderstanding of the Heat Equation and Phase Transitions. The coffee froze. The car did not escape.

Just now I watched 5 cars spin out on our neighborhood iced over hilly streets. Probably missed the class on the Coefficient of Friction.

Let’s see how many more physics lessons come up today here in Texas!

Snow in Texas or How Badly The Public Misunderstands Physics

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Feb 4
I think the fundamental explanation of everything is going to come down to that.

No more.

and certainly no less.

networks of networks. just the relation of nodes to other nodes to other nodes.

Uncomputable. Never ending. Always changing.

Spacetime = network.

mass ~ energy ~ network

humans ~ network

here’s some stuff to consider:

Networks of the brain

Space as a network

Graph Theory Background

A History Chart

network of tennis pros research paper

Networks of Networks

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Feb 3