tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63560939844288395262024-03-05T05:31:51.386-08:00COMPLEXITY METRICChange increases entropy. The only variable; how fast the Universe falls towards chaos. Determining this rate is the complexity being carried. Complexity exists only to increase disorder.
Evolution is the refinement of a fitness metric.
It is the process of refining a criteria for the measurement of the capacity of a system to maximize its future potential to hold complexity. This metric becomes ever more sophisticated, and can never be predetermined. Evolution is the computation.Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.comBlogger85125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-1115928609043521492019-04-22T18:28:00.001-07:002019-04-22T18:28:35.388-07:00Expect more, demand more: A letter to all humansNext time you are seduced into the idea that computers have evolved at an extraordinary exponential pace, think about what COULD be, what SHOULD be. This morning, I took to the internet to find an application that would automatically classify my photos, would go through them all and tease out their contents (cars, people, friends, family, objects, places, situations, time of day, time of year, etc.), you know, the who what where how why of my images. But nope. No such software exists at the consumer level. Nope.
<br>
<br>My computer (your computer), doesn't have a f-ing clue what you do, what you create, who you are, what you want, where you've been, who you interact with, what characterizes any of the interactions you have with any of it, and it certainly doesn't care or know or have the capacity to do anything about any of what you are or want or could be or create. Nope, your computer doesn't do anything but sequence your typed instructions, you computer sits their dead-dog until you click on a button, or until you type a key.
<br>
<br>All this talk of Artificial Intelligence? None of it is anything but desperate attempts to manipulate you as a consumer. You have been pimped out to the highest bidder, and mostly to tap into the most basic of your desires, to get you to buy pizza or to watch porn or distracting cat videos that make you say "Ahhhhhhh so cute!" or to protect yourself from spying eyes, from the manipulation it is all set up to accomplish.
<br>
<br>Do you understand the "cloud"? Here I will explain. If your data can be stored off site, not on your hard drive, but on banks of hard drives owned by someone else, than any of that data about you and your behavior and the things you've made, all of it is wholly owned by someone other than you and can be sold to others out to get you to send your dollars towards the hands of their clients.
<br>
<br>At least relatively, your computer is getting dumber while the cloud gets "smarter" (gets better at manipulating you).
<br>
<br>Who is at fault? You wont like the answer, but it is you. At fault is your inability to imagine something more powerful from your computer.
<br>
<br>Yes it is your fault. But there is blame to go around. Where you might be too busy doing what you do to have the time to understand how the computer industry is messing with you, the computer industry itself isn't. Silicon Valley tech workers and especially tech entrepreneurs, they know, they are each of them well aware of the situation, and even of how to fix it. It is their inaction their active ignore-ance of the problem that is directly to blame.
<br>
<br>And why do tech companies and tech workers continue to choose consumer manipulation over human-potential? Because its dead cheaper to get you to buy another pizza, than it is to provide the tools that will amplify your efforts.
<br>
<br>But am I asking for too much? Is what I am suggesting, computers that know what you are working on and why, who know how to put it all together and offer you collaborative intelligent predictions and that build out solutions for you and your most potent future? Actually, yes. And it isn't particularly hard to do.
<br>
<br>I am an amateur programmer at best. Yet I have been able to hack together bits and pieces of the foundation of a system that would allow a computer to collaborate powerfully with its user. And I have done this with less than a couple of thousand lines of poorly written code.
<br>
<br>My code isn't magic or profound in any real way. Pretty simple stuff actually. The trick is thinking the problem through. The trick is digging down past all of the particulars and looking instead at the general, the shared, the commonalities. The trick isn't so much providing the most profound answer, but asking a general enough question.
<br>
<br>What is intelligence? What would be required of a computer that would act intelligently in collaboration with you? Well if you look deeply, intelligence is simply the capacity to predict, or more accurately, the fidelity of your predictions. So the problem facing any person wanting to build a computer that is intelligent is to design a system that gets better and better at prediction.
<br>
<br>Getting better and better at prediction presents yet more questions. What are the resources the components of a system that evolves, that gets better and better at anything at all? Turns out the answer is fairly simple, though it requires a bit of thinking, of thinking at a level most of us are not comfortable with, of thinking that goes against the grain of how we like to believe thinking to be. Turns out thinking as a process can be broken down into components that are themselves simple as hell, components that can be combined in simple ways into a system that produces a full spectrum of intelligence, a spectrum upon which any particular instance of intelligence can be found not of some special qualitative magic, but simply as a result of how many of the component parts have been associated to each-other.
<br>
<br>At any rate, the reason we don't have machines that collaborate with us, the reason we don't have machines that get better and better at collaboration, has nothing to do with how difficult it may be to produce them, and has everything to do with the fact that its cheaper to sell us pizza and porn.
<br>
<br>I am begging all of you to expect more, to demand more of the tech industry.
<br>
<br>Randall Lee ReetzRandall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-59466115993528105012018-01-04T14:59:00.001-08:002018-01-04T16:35:18.360-08:00Projection or PredictionMost formal scientific cosmological investigation is preferential to the determination of the earliest events in our universe's history. As we tease away the noise, we illuminate conditions and dynamics ever closer to the moment of origin. The notion, reasonable enough, is that the more robust our knowledge of the earliest conditions, the greater our ability to predict the scope (limits) of all future events.<br />
<br />
Prediction, remember, is the purpose of all intelligence, all science, all knowledge, all structure, and all evolution. So, yes, if one is interested in advancing our power and accuracy of prediction, it is methodologically reasonable to understand the earliest conditions of our nascent universe.<br />
<br />
But somewhere along the scientific way, investigators revealed an interesting attribute of systems, of all systems, the attribute now called "The Second Law" of thermodynamics. What makes the second law interesting and unique is that it predicts the same future for all posible systems. That future is maximal dissipation. The second law says that all systems at all times are moving en mass towards disorder… are falling apart.<br />
<br />
The 2nd Law was discovered by people interested in the flow of heat. Specifically, their interest was the maximal efficiency of steam powered equipment, factories, and transportation. They wanted to get the most production bang for their coal fired steam buck. And what they found was rather frustrating to a factory or train owner. What they found was that all systems no matter how well designed, leak a lot of heat, a lot of potential power, power that would ideally be used by the factory to make carpets, or by the locomotive to pull freight from point A. to point B. To make matters worse, the nature of this leaking of energy problem was such that it was irreversible. Once energy leaked out to the surroundings, any effort to recover it would cost more energy than was lost, lots more.<br />
<br />
Now you might expect that there is something special about factories and locomotives that makes all this leaking energy so big a problem. You might be inclined to hope that leaking thermodynamic energy is specific to man made or artificial systems. You'd be wrong. Second law demanded energy dissipation is as true of natural systems as it is of man made systems. But the real kicker is that 2nd Law dissipation has nothing specific to do with heat or steam or coal, manmade or otherwise, but to all systems and all forms of energy applied in any way and under any conditions. This universality of dissipation became crystal clear in the 1940's when Claude Shannon of the Bell Labs in New Jersey, USA independently discovered the same dissipation dynamics in information and communication while trying to do for the telephone industry what the original thermodynamics investigators had attempted for the steam power industry a century and a half before. Shannon found that trying to shove signals down a wire or through the air resulted inevitably in noise that degraded the original signal and that insuring accuracy or distance in communication was a costly affair where more and more energy must be pumped into the system with less and less of that energy resulting in actually moving that signal from point sender to receiver. The final kicker came a few decades later when it became clear that computation suffered the same dissipative pitfalls as had been earlier discovered in communication and the conversion of power to work.<br />
<br />
OK, so what does any of this 2nd Law stuff have to do with the question I posed at the top of this post, essentially: what is a more effective path towards predictive understanding of a universe, knowing when and how it started or knowing how it will all end?<br />
<br />
Until the 2nd Law, all scientific effort resulted in understandings that started with initial conditions and worked forwards in time. Newton's laws of acceleration are a great example. If you know where and object is and what forces are brought to bear on that object, you can use newton's math to accurately predict that object's position at any time in the future. Einstein's work simply reinforced Newton's laws and provided a more robust contextual understanding of why they worked and when they could be expected not to work. But the 2nd Law is a strange bird indeed. The 2nd law simply doesn't care how a system starts, or what it is made of, or what forces pertain. The 2nd Law focuses our attention on the way systems move into the future, and mostly, on what systems become in the end. That end, on the grandest universal scale is something called "heat death". Heat death isn't really an end, the time doesn't stop, its just that things fall down and fall down, the dissipate and dissipate until less and less becomes posible. The slide into maximal dissipation is what we call an asymptote, it is an end never actually met. An end that in effect keeps ending. The universe is scheduled to become yet more dissipated forever. But the lion's share of that forever will look almost the same from eon to endless eon. The 2nd Law end is an end that never quite ends.<br />
<br />
From a scientific perspective, at least from the perspective of most of the short history of science, the 2nd Law predicted end is absolute and perfectly knowable and absolutely independent on the initial state of our universe or for that matter, of any posible universe. Previous scientific knowledge had settled in on the idea that the future is only predictable to the extent that the past is known, that the laws of the dynamics of the universe are known, and even then, the predicted future becomes fuzzier and fuzzier the deeper one looks. Yes the 2nd Law is strange indeed, flipping prediction end to end, it says that the end state of any universe is absolutely known, and the intractable part is instead the path towards that end. Got it? No, its not an obvious idea to grasp.<br />
<br />
So now lets revisit the original question I asked. Is there any point in the full arch of a universe's life, when what is known of its past is less important than knowledge of its end?<br />
<br />
To answer that question one might want to look not to the beginning or to the end, but to vast middle. In both predictive models, the classical causal model that predicts the future by knowing the past, and the entropic model which says that the past is always just a ramp towards a perfectly knowable end state, it is the middle ground that is the the most intractable. A thermodynamically determined universe is one in which falling down is the determining factor. A thermodynamic universe is one in which the end is absolutely known but the path getting there is not known. In a thermodynamically determined universe, each new moment presents a new set of conditions that must be computed upon in order to make the best posible prediction of the shortest path from that indeterminate here and now to the perfectly determined eventual then and there.<br />
<br />
A universe locked into the 2nd Law dance would seem to be a universe in which the dynamics of change is a dynamics that becomes better and better and understanding its own dynamics. We have come to table this cumulative understanding "evolution". Evolution it would seem, is the process by which a universe becomes better and better at playing the only game a universe can play, and that is the game of getting to the end state as soon as possible. So we must reframe our original question and ask which knowledge is most evolutionarily potent, knowledge of the past or knowledge of the future? Or, in the spirt of my original question, is the situation more complex, more dyanmic, does the answer to the question vary depending on the particular epoch one asks it? Is the past more determinate in an early universe, and the future more determinate in an older universe? The reverse hardly seems reasonable.<br />
<br />
If not, if predictions are more dependent on knowledge of the end than they are of the beginning, and if this is true no matter when in the arch of the lifespan of a universe one asks, what can be said of the value of traditional cosmological formalisms? If evolution is a process by which a universe finds the shortest path from any beginning to its entropic end, how important is knowledge of a causal classical dynamics in the solving of any of the moment to moment shortest path computations that must be eternally computed?<br />
<br />
<br />
… to be continued …Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-16165920257160516662017-11-30T10:17:00.001-08:002017-11-30T10:17:48.347-08:00TEST BLOGTHIS IS A TEST OF THE I NEED A RSS FEED CENTER FOR EXCEPTIONAL IDIOCYRandall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-9727718689133350842013-08-22T14:42:00.002-07:002013-08-22T14:47:17.950-07:00<b>Macro-evolution (not micro-evolution)</b><br />
<br />
1. Any change in any system is THE change that would have resulted in the greatest dissipation.<br />
2. A universe only becomes more dissipated with time. There are no exceptions to this process… it is a one way trip.<br />
<div>
3. This is the only domain independent behavior in any system and in any possible universe.</div>
<div>
4. As things fall down, they sometimes cause other smaller things to fall up, or to land in locally complex arrangements (so long as the energies released are greater than the energies needed to assemble).</div>
<div>
5. Some of these assemblies are structurally stable (resist dissipation). Even more rarely, they are both stable and catalyze faster local dissipation.</div>
<div>
6. As a result, these stable catalyzers result in greater local energy throughput. Think of them as the deepest and steepest canyon that will gather the greatest flow of river water.</div>
<div>
7. This increased flow will have the greatest effect on the future topology of the dissipative landscape.</div>
<div>
8. Complexities that can survive nearest this flow will by necessity need to be even more structurally stable (survive across time despite an extremely corrosive environment), and to do so, they will by necessity have to draw more and more energy through their own system to repair and maintain stability… increasing the rate and density of dissipation at that locality.</div>
<div>
9. Each of these processes are change catalyzers. They increase flux at the local level. They take the universe closer to heat death not by doing anything qualitatively different, but by doing what a universe does, but faster.</div>
<div>
10. We call this process evolution.</div>
<div>
11. Evolution is not teleological. No knowledge of the patterns and structure and behavior of a universe is required. Evolution works in any universe with any set of forces and structures and initial conditions.</div>
<div>
12. Evolution has nothing in particular to do with biology or to any particular system or domain. It is agnostic to domain. They way in which atoms hydrogen and lithium and helium both come into existence and precipitate into proto-star clouds that accrete into stars is no different than ways in which biology evolves. The methods used are the result of the materials and forces and environments at hand and are independent of the overarching reason that dissipative change results in or selects for systems that dissipate more quickly and comprehensively… that get the universe to its "heat death" end state at the highest possible rate.</div>
<div>
13. Darwin described well, the "how" of evolution within the domain of biology. But he couldn't put together the more general "how" of evolution such that the process could be seen stripped of its dependency on one particular domain.</div>
<div>
14. Darwin was correct. But he described evolution at the local or micro-scale. For instance, the Galapagos finch populations he observed felt survival pressure that selected towards beak shapes that made them more and more specialized towards the exploitation of particular seeds and nuts in their environment. Such solutions do indeed favor optimization in what topologists call "local minimums". This is indeed what happens, for the most part, in any evolving system. It is the path of least resistance. But it doesn't explain (or not directly) the way that evolution finds solutions that involve looking outward to non-local opportunities of resource acquisition. Getting good at the local game can very much make you unprepared for the larger game just over the ridge into the next still larger valley. A great beak and excellent nut detection skills, is of no use should the bush you have learned to exploit either go extinct or if the greater environment (especially that environment which is the future) not have much at all to do with that particular kind of nut or for that matter, with nuts of any kind. Specialization causes local advantage, but ultimately, specialization (local optimization) always makes a species less well adapted as a generalist, and thus, less flexible and robust into the future. Optimization always results in extinction.</div>
<div>
15. Any change in any system will be judged by the environment based on the degree with which that change adds or subtracts from that system's capacity to advantageously predict its dissipative future. Evolution filters for prediction because prediction allows an entity to extract greater advantage while using less energy. If the energy in your environment is in nuts, a beak predicts energy access. If you have a way to store the experiences you've had today, you won't have to try every door to find the bathroom tomorrow. Prediction can involve a brain, but it can just as easily and more commonly involve a shape or the presence of an appendage or sensor. A shark's tail predicts the need to move swiftly through water to catch and consume other fish.</div>
<div>
16. Prediction is equivalent to intelligence. And as with beak shape specialization, locally optimized intelligence is ultimately less important evolutionarily than general purpose wide-scope intelligence.</div>
<div>
17. The most general of all predictions/intelligences is the prediction that thermodynamics provides… the eventual and always closer asymptote of total dissipation (heat death). The capacity to make such a prediction (and to pay attention to it) gives humans great potential advantage. But only should we be able to crawl outside of our own evolutionarily acquired set of attention enhancers, such that we can push our interests and motives in the direction of universal dynamics.</div>
<div>
18. Just having the capacity to detect the universal direction of evolution, does not necessarily insure evolutionary advantage. You have to have the means to make it an actionable goal and motive. If we humans can't take action and create advantage from the prediction of heat death we will eventually be as food for some other entity or system that can.</div>
<div>
19. The Zeroth Law of causality: the universe is at all times, changing at the maximum rate possible. There is no holding back, no waiting around, all systems are decaying and dissipating to the full possible extent and speed, given their present context and configuration.</div>
<div>
20. The 2nd law says that total info or energy concentration is reduced as a result of any change in any change in any system (energy applied to a system). It doesn't say anything about why the change that happened was the one of all possible changes that could have happened. And it doesn't say that all systems are changing at their maximal change rate at all times.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Post Script:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Imagine a bunch of atmosphere separated by temp. Top layer is cold, bottom layer is hot. This is an unstable situation as the hot air is less dense, wants to rise above the more dense cold air.<br />
I've just described a typical storm cell.<br />
<br />
Now imagine that some smaller areas of air are moving laterally, and some others are moving up or down. Somewhere in the cell, units of air are moving in almost every direction.<br />
<br />
All units are moving in the direction they are moving because that is the least energy thing to do. They, like all systems, are simply falling down.<br />
<br />
These units compete with each-other in the falling down olympics that is the brewing storm (imbalance). The ones that can reduce the cline between hot and cold air the fastest, are the ones that fall the fastest and thus dominate the falling down in their immediate region. As units less dominant (efficient) motions are absorbed, that part of the storm becomes a larger and larger competitor and its original or combined behavioral dynamics become dominant on a larger and larger scale.<br />
<br />
Eventually, spiral dynamics dominate as they are better at reducing the temperature cline than are other shapes and gas meta-dynamics.<br />
<br />
At each level of scale, each granularity in the system both structurally and temporally falling down is always at its maximal rate for that configuration at that particular moment in time. As changes accrue, the new configuration allows a new maximal rate of dissipation.<br />
<br />
This should be obvious. Change is always motivated by difference. A universe doesn't like difference. Change always follows the fall line, the fastest path to greatest dissipation.<br />
<br />
As a description of dynamics, maximal dissipation rate is only interesting in context to what the brain likes to believe about systems and especially likes to believe about systems that are responsive to human interaction.<br />
<br />
As example, I cite the often repeated "we only use 5% of our brain". This statement is physically and causally false. No system can ever be any faster than it is currently operating at. If it could be running faster, it would be. Full stop. Now, it is possible that a brain sent to Cambridge University will after 8 years of graduate studies, be capable of operating at a higher rate (what ever that means), but that brain would not be the same brain that existed prior to those 8 years of studies.<br />
<br />
It is instructive to periodically remind ourselves of this very important aspect of the causal physical world of which we are a part.</div>
Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-34776228314978630042013-08-22T14:32:00.002-07:002013-08-22T14:38:30.564-07:00SOME BIG QUESTIONS ABOUT EVOLUTION<br /><br /><br /> Q: Before I go to sleep. Explain to me your last post (if you want). I just read up on Ray kurzweil… didn´t know he existed.<br /><br /> A: OK… To the Singularians, and the Transhumanists, Kurzweil is Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna, Confucius, Moses, etc. Kurzweil speaks and writes of the acceleration of the evolution of technology and posits a time, not long from now, when technology evolves at an almost infinite rate… <br /><br /> That moment of infinite acceleration of technological evolution, "the singularity" as he calls it, if taken literally, would herald the beginning of an age where everything is possible and almost instantly available. In ancient religion and philosophy, this "get anything you want at the instant you want it", was called omnipotence. Omnipotence. Completely powerful. Kurzweil reaches this understandably attractive conclusion by projecting forward the current technological acceleration rate (as measured primarily by Moores Law). Moores Law is attributed to Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel corporation who noticed early on that the semiconductor industry was able to put 4 times as many logic gates on a CPU for half the price every 17 months, resulting in the exponential growth of computing power that has fueled the tech and information and communication market expansion that has so defined the last 30 years of the global economy.<br /><br /> Q: Are you done with the explanation? So this type of evolution is what you meant?<br /><br /> A: But Moores Law is a simple result of the square law of the area of a two dimensional surface… divide a rectangle in half on both of its axis and you have 4 times as many internal units. A linear growth in one attribute causes an exponential growth in the result. This only works with computer chips because electrons are really really small and can be caused to run down smaller and smaller wires without changing the result of the logic on a circuit. Long before Moore noticed the trend line, Richard Feynman wrote a great paper called "There's Room At The Bottom" in which he spoke to the fact that information only cares about on and off, yes and no, 1 and 0, and that matter at the atomic and subatomic scale could really hold a lot of the stuff.<br /><br /> The problem is that eventually, after processing information, processing abstractions, you have to make that information do something. Even more than that, as you work up through the easy calculations, you eventually are stuck with computational problems that would stretch the limits of the whole universe even should all of the universe be made into one big computer. And of course, the universe is already a computer, and it is already doing that calculation, that mother of all calculations.<br /><br /> A big deal that has nothing to do with Ray Kurzweil? You must not be a singularian.<br /><br /> Q: You have time to write more science or should I go to sleep??<br /><br /> A: The difference is that Kurzweil is so motivated by his own human centered vision of the future that he forgets that there is but on future of the universe and the only way to effect it is to predict a better path from here to there. The universe doesn't become us. We must become the future or other things will and we will be as food to their efforts.<br /><br /> Who's vision will always have the larger audience? Kurzweil, of course. He feeds our wants and our fears. I feed an abstraction larger than any self or vantage. <br /><br /> My explanation demands we abandon our selves… not likely to happen.<br /><br /> Q: When you say that we must become the future, in what way would that be? Abandon how?<br /><br /> A: Can you have a goal that doesn't directly benefit you? Very few people can.<br /><br /> Q: I thought about this before my beauty sleep and the answer is No. Everything I do benefits me in a certain way. Even helping others with necessity is an advantage to me, emotionally, does that count?<br /><br /> A: What we've got to do and may not be genetically equipped to do, is begin to extend the boundaries of "self" outward to encompass a larger and larger chunk of reality.<br /><br /> Q: And that genetic requirement is some kind of intelligence? And… What is your answer to people that say: "The second law only works in a closed system. We have solar inputs therefor it is not a closed system and order can and has emerged aka life."<br /><br /> A: In a dissipative universe, a universe where EVERY change in ANY system ALWAYS results in the greatest possible dissipation, evolutionary FITNESS is always the configuration that causes the greatest dissipation of the universe. Biology is better at the dissipation game than is most simple chemistry. So biology out-competes chemistry in the race to get the universe to heat death the fastest. Biology makes for a steeper slope from hear to heat death… a shorter path. That is the problem evolution computes.<br /><br /> And notice that these progressively better dissipation schemes… aren't exclusive… but additive and hierarchical. Biology doesn't replace chemistry, it uses it, builds with it, accelerates it.<br /><br /> Q: Knowing all this, what have you done or changed in your life in order to be true to your ideas and believes about the universe? I know your perspective of religion is not the same as your family´s, what else did you give up or drastically changed?<br /><br /> A: That question doesn't really apply to me as I've been working on figuring all of this out since I was 9. I think that figuring out how a universe works is plenty for one person to do in a life time. I'm writing a book describing it all. I'm creating Sam extra-biological system to extend eviction forward at a higher pace than biology allows. I'm passing the baton forward in better shape than when it was handed me. I'm doing what the universe does.<br /><br /> I'll tell you how maximum dissipation is locally competitive… the nuts and bolts of evolutionary fitness. Hint: it isn't survival of the fittest the way most people imagine it.<br /><br /> OK, by having a structure that out-disipates other nearby structures, that causes more energy and materials to be cycled through or because of your structure, you create an environment of such flux, such rapid change, that other structures must either be more dissipative or they will be consumed by you. This is the competitive advantage that dissipation affords. Survival advantage goes to the structures that can cause the greatest energy and material flux, and can do so while maintaining more structural integrity as they do so. And because all structures eventually compete in the dissipation game, continued survival is always dependent on a structure's ability to get better and better at dissipation and to get better and better, faster and faster.<br /><br /> The last component of a comprehensive domain-independent theory of evolution, the one that evaded Darwin, and seems to evade most evolution theorists, is the apparent logical conflict between local competitive advantage and the long-term wide-scope trends in evolution.<br /><br /> Locally, optimization always wins – always out-competes. Darwin's island finches do gain survival advantage by becoming specialists, by matching morphologies to local resource pressures. BUT (or rather, AND), optimization makes one vulnerable to change, the more your beak becomes perfectly matched to one type of nut, the least likely you will survive changes in food availability. In the short term, optimization always wins, always makes an entity more successful, more plentiful, more representative in the population and as a factor in the local environmental dynamics. But in the long run, such trends towards optimization always result in extinction dead ends. Optimization is a reductive process. What drives evolution forward, towards the maximization of dissipation on the largest scales (not local), are the freaks on the outskirts of a population, are the generalists, are the entities who struggle in the local, but are better prepared always to accept and survive into a changing environment (the environment always changes). In evolutionary terms, general-ism is equivalent to knowledge. The more an entity can build an internal representation of the salient aspects of their environment, and the more that representation or map can be refined and made inclusive of and describe all of reality, the greater will be the probability that entity will be able to predict the future. Prediction allows the advantage of efficiency, it allows an entity to ignore all aspects not causal and to put their energies only towards that which is most likely to happen. In the short term, in the local, prediction advantage goes to maps that assume environmental stasis, that imagine the world as never changing. In the long run, in the largest most universal scope, prediction advantage goes to maps that more accurately describe the shape and direction of change.<br /><br /> The "Darwinian Map" describes the sort of local advantage that results in the rich and endlessly varied branching of evolution's extinction history. But the essence of capital "E" Evolution isn't best described by the dominance of evolution's extinction branching, but by the freaks on the sidelines that struggle to compete in the present, in the local, with the optimizers, by being generalists, by optimizing to the largest trend, by being the computation at all moments, of the shortest path from all here and nows to the one there and then.<br /><br /> Think of the generalists as entities who can see or want to see beyond the local horizon. The localists, the optimizers, predict too of course. A Galapagos finch's beak predicts the abundance of certain types of nuts and seeds and insects. But that prediction is eventually false as the environment changes. <br /><br /> And notice the way that this model explains and defines intelligence.Edit<br /><br />So, if you can internalize my theory, you are one of a very few who have ever understood THE process in this or any possible universe. This process is the only domain independent process, and as such is the foundational causal behavior in any system. Be proud.<br /><br /> We are sooooooo lucky to be alive at this exact moment in evolution… the dividing line between blind evolution and self aware evolution.<br /><br /> Q: How does this apply to us as humans and our current lifestyle? You say we are not genetically equipped in order to achieve that kind of knowledge??<br /><br /> A: There are twenty or thirty people on earth who can run close to 28 miles per hour. So if our future required we all run that fast…<br /><br /> However, knowledge changes action. A more accurate map of reality should change behavior in actionable ways. The problem is that evolution has selected against certain types of thinking, and for other types of thinking, and I am afraid that this theory falls very much in the center of the region of thoughts our brains are structured specifically to avoid.<br /><br /> And remember, all we have to do is extend the process… not our selves.<br /><br /> Just remember that there are lots of ways to be a "freak". But only one type of freak is the type that try's to find the shortest path to the most general eventuality. And the only way to do this is to get better and better and knowing what matters.<br /><br /> Q: From what you know about me, do you think I'm a long way of knowing what matters?<br /><br /> A: You are one of the only people I know who bothers to ask. You are probably on the way to being the right type of freak (outlier).<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> Post Script:<br /><br /> I forgot to talk to the boundaries of self as related to questions about practical actions one might take as pertains dissipative evolution theory.<br /><br /> Imagine yourself as a Galapagos Finch. You maximize your personal advantage by having a beak that matches the demands of the local food resources. In the process, it is also most efficient to dump any attributes that don't match local resources exploitation needs. Maybe you don't need a big brain if all you need to do is find the seeds that match your beak. You will as a result, become fabulously wealthy in finch land. Until, that is, the environment evolves out from underneath you and big brained finches do better in the chaos transition that ensues. Ultimately, in fact, the biggest advantage doesn't go to one type of finch or another, but to some genetic path that selects towards the capacity to understand and process a map of the world, the universe they are a part of. The path from finch-ed-ness, to big-brain-ed-ness isn't exactly obvious. Somehow, a succession of generations of finch adaptations must survive, and must survive in the presence and competitive pressure from, the beak-optimizer finches as they live it up in relative luxury.<br /><br /> Even should big-brain-ed-ness provide the shortest path from finch-ness to the most deceptively profound future, no finch in his or her right finch-mind would willingly choose to scrape by on the sidelines of competitive survival. Not at least if big-brain-ed-ness prove to be of little help in competition with the better-beak-ers. Barely surviving on the sidelines, isn't exactly the best self-motivation incentive. So how does one explain long range evolutionary advantages in reference to here and now survival advantage? And, how does one, once aware of the grand evolutionary arch, choose a path or paths that provide long range solutions at the expense of local suffering?<br /><br /> The answer to the first question is that the larger arch of evolution pays little attention to local success schemes and is always more the result of the schemes and structures that maximize dissipation in the whole of the future. So long as survival passes unbroken across the necessary chain of generations, a scheme can influence the future even if it is horribly unsuccessful in any of its iterative incarnations.<br /><br /> One way to achieve success that is in agreement with dissipative evolution theory, is to expand the definition of self. If one thinks of their skin as the boundary of what is and isn't the self, it is hard to be motivated by the larger goals that may for example involve their own demise or the demise of their culture or species. But if one instead thinks of self as including the whole of the universe, or at least, that portion of the universe that will successfully influence a path towards the maximization of entropy, than even plans and changes that marginalize their own corporal self can be imagined wildly successful.<br /><br /> I've previously found better words to describe this thought. This will have to do for now.Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-46280578714695126972013-08-05T13:55:00.000-07:002013-08-05T13:55:21.847-07:00Mountain Lion Close Encounter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCsArf4H3lHeVC6el-GPSUarQoH4nMmNKXmRmnNNhMUdiFtTUOWnqCnI7zF1ijj4X8w3CIkjbZGluKxRtpvsbdX9TPGBQEx5bDujhGosDdzU2TVl5sAtuUqvnBOs5-HG44Q82ukqicpZk/s1600/Mountain+Lion.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCsArf4H3lHeVC6el-GPSUarQoH4nMmNKXmRmnNNhMUdiFtTUOWnqCnI7zF1ijj4X8w3CIkjbZGluKxRtpvsbdX9TPGBQEx5bDujhGosDdzU2TVl5sAtuUqvnBOs5-HG44Q82ukqicpZk/s320/Mountain+Lion.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
This image is stolen from the net. Last night, while camping at Alder Creek Campground above Truckee California, I was about to get up and walk to the camp bathroom, when I heard a strange sound. Next second, a BIG mountain lion walked so close to my tent that it brushed against the fabric. There was a light across the way so there was a perfect silhouette of the monster moving around my tent towards the absurdly thin mosquito netting at my head. I had about a second to decide whether to let him scare me or scare him first. So I made a rather awkward convulsive motion and grunted. He jumped away from the tent and let out a half truncated growl (still very scary) and ran down toward the stream. My third encounter with these solo travelers… a little too close this time.Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-72536990823409298272012-03-11T11:52:00.001-07:002012-03-11T11:59:19.532-07:00What Is This?<div class="mobile-photo">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBlOLhMmS6L5hYj0tbAObEsxwo54mK55YtAPXg7n3fazI1Bh0Kte42XJeZiYqdwj7VADSshymGcsoh3d3zAV9iIEWtAZAXu_jsXCxnwjDclBc9pmvPxDcw6F01xmrzoymz2rURV040JHI/s1600/photo-755869.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718714407120250226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBlOLhMmS6L5hYj0tbAObEsxwo54mK55YtAPXg7n3fazI1Bh0Kte42XJeZiYqdwj7VADSshymGcsoh3d3zAV9iIEWtAZAXu_jsXCxnwjDclBc9pmvPxDcw6F01xmrzoymz2rURV040JHI/s320/photo-755869.JPG" /></a></div>
<div class="mobile-photo">
<br /></div>
<div class="mobile-photo">
I am not a car guy, but this strange european jeep-y thing is beautiful. All function, zero affect. Its what results when you remove the seduction of "cool" from the design process – actual cool.</div>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-29980993491034232772012-03-04T16:27:00.001-08:002012-03-05T16:46:38.720-08:00Science…<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">What is it? What isn't it? Why do humans have such trouble doing it?<br /><br />First lets set the human stage. On the one side, the whole of the cosmos and everything that will, over the impossible dimensions of its future, evolve from it. On the other side, angst. Given this choice, and by living in and being of the cosmos, we are each of us, in every moment, granted this choice – we humans almost always nail our allegiance to angst. Then, to assuage the inevitable guilt and shame that goes with so selfish and inward and lowly a choice, we waste our lives making of our angst an art.<br /><br />We "study" our angst. We acquire advanced language and skills in the numerous areas and fields of angst appeasement. We strive for perfection in inner personal psychology, in bikram yoga, in breathing, in transcendental meditation, in the spiritual arts, in oneness, in brain wave monitored relaxation, in feeling good about our selves, in collective consciousness, in energy awareness, in biographies of our multiple lives, in positive thinking, in the reaching towards a constant ecstatic state, in tantric sex, in drum circles, in mantra driven calmness, in church liturgy, in ancient wisdom, in after-life paradise, in muscle memory, in the feeling arts, in whole foods worship, in feeling from the heart, in the shame of thinking, in altered states, in our unquestionable love for god, etc., etc., etc. More than a third of the shelf space at any bookstore is dedicated to self-help and novels that explore inner healing or some pathway to joy or away from angst.<br /><br />And then there is science. Hidden away in some dark fold of the human tapestry, if you really spend the time to look, there is this other thing, this anti-angst, there is this outward in stead of inward search, there is this willful act to turn ninety degrees away from the trap and threat of angst – there is science.<br /><br />What science most decidedly isn't: test tubes and isolation tables and Xray emitters and lasers and atomic force microscopes and infrared telescopes, etc. It isn't these things and it isn't often the people who use them. I have met too many people with too much experience and expertise on such instruments who couldn't define science to save their souls – who couldn't care less.<br /><br />Science, it seems to me, has nothing to do with the trappings and props with which it is usually associated. No, science is choice. Science is a radical and conscious and constant commitment to ignore the needs and fears and wants that come from within, to ignore our inner experience long enough to see what actually IS – to see the universe outside of our endlessly self-satisfying existential hide-y-hole – a commitment to spend enough time wandering dangerously far away from the warmth of the emotional hearth, long enough to diligently and honestly and selflessly pick away at the actual causal strata from which everything is built, and yes, of which even we were cast.<br /><br />Science is a constant and diligent, moment by moment, reaffirmation of the notion that we are of the universe – and that the Universe is not of us. Science is a striving to remove ourselves from the center so that we might actually be able to form a more clear understanding of how everything that IS came to be.<br /><br />Because science demands a form of selflessness so unnatural to humans, it is arguably the most expensive and rarified of all human endeavors. Those test tubes and electron microscopes and computers and gravity meters are the result of the few people who could think beyond the funhouse mirrors of their inner existential vortex long enough to get a peek under the cosmic hood. After that, after the insights from from which the tools are built have happened, well everyone has access and can use them, and it doesn't much matter what they think of, or understand of, science.<br /><br />It strikes me as important, now and again, to bring science front and center, to hold it in our hands, hot-potato moon-rock precious and rare, to sense the pulse of its danger, if only just long enough to honor those with the emotional tenacity it takes to ignore emotionality long enough to see things for what they actually are.<br /><br />Randall Lee Reetz</span>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-16175905207340976882012-02-04T12:49:00.000-08:002012-02-04T16:00:04.908-08:00A Causal Debunking of the Libertarian Platform<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18px;"><i>Note: The following is an excerpt, a single post, from my end of an ongoing discussion/debate with libertarians (<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/116665417191671711571/posts/Y3tNTpyFHaY" target="_blank">full thread here</a>).</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Infrastructure doesn't scale down to the local level. Its whole-clothe scale is the entire reason for the need for infrastructure and the criteria by which it is categorized. You can't build infrastructure locally. You can't build a nation at the state level. That thing, that special sauce, that essence that determines the difference between nations is exactly that thing that can't be done at a scale below the scale of the whole nation. It doesn't matter how pissed off you are that you can't keep all of your income, that you should have to pay some of it back to the system that made it possible for your money to have value, your anger isn't going to change the causal reality of economics and infrastructure. There is a classic cartoon image in which a person is sitting on the very branch that he is furiously sawing through. The libertarian philosophy is perfectly illustrated by this cartoon. The whole libertarian position is anti-causal. It flips cause and effect to satisfy a childish tantrum of short sighted selfishness.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">I had a friend in Santa Cruz who was obsessed with new age self help fads. We were walking along the ocean one day when she excitedly described a class she was taking at a local continuing education facility. The class was called "Change Your Personality By Changing Your Handwriting". After describing the class exercises, she said, "Oh my, I forgot who I was talking to… why aren't you attacking this whole idea?" I said, "I am thinking, just a second." And then I began… "OK, I've got it. Imagine you are driving your car down the highway and you reach down, tear away the plastic lens in front of the speedometer, grab the red needle, and pull it one way and then the other… what do you suppose will happen to your speed?"</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">And then I attempted to explain the difference between cause and effect. I tried to explain that in any system, each of the attributes of that system are part of a causal network – that some of these attributes are more cause and some more effect. I explained that, underlying any system, there is a hierarchy of influence, a linear cline on which all of the elements are arranged by their relative influence. In the system that is your car, the speedometer falls very much on the effect end of the influence hierarchy. The speedometer measures and reports the speed of the car. But the speedometer doesn't much effect the speed of the car.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">All measurements require a physical linking between the measurer and the system being measured. And yes, measurement always effects the system being measured – the car will in fact change speeds when you drag the speedometer needle one way or the other. But this linking is so heavily weighted towards effect that this backwards linking causality, its effect on the car's speed, would be so slight that you would be hard pressed to build a mechanism sensitive and accurate enough to detect it. That is what makes a speedometer good at reporting. It is designed to be mostly effect and assert very little cause. If you want to cause the car to go faster or slower, the accelerator and break peddles are a far better choice as they were specifically designed to sit at the causal end of the car's cause and effect influence hierarchy.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">While I am sure that it is true that statistical correlations can be found that link personality types with certain handwriting attributes, the link is certainly heavily weighted towards effect and away from cause. While handwriting might indeed loosely reflect personality, the conclusion that personality types are caused by handwriting differences fundamentally ignores all of the actual influences that add up to shape the personality of any individual human. That I would have to explain this fundamental aspect of any system to a grown adult with an IQ well above average says a lot about the causal influence hierarchy within the human brain. This basic "design" flaw results almost always in emotionality that supersedes rationality… the libertarian world view for instance.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">So, yes, lets imagine a full implementation of the emotionally rich, and rationally poor libertarian platform. Without income taxes, you now have 100 dollars in your pocket where you previously had just 70. But without the infrastructure from which your dollars derive value, the infrastructure that 30 dollars in taxes plan, build, and maintain, you might as well not have any money at all. Without a nation-wide, world-leading infrastructure, the effective buying power of your 100 bucks is exactly zilch. Welcome to the Congo.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Randall Lee Reetz</span>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-28226849366331104102012-01-26T14:24:00.000-08:002012-01-26T17:35:59.454-08:00Prediction Schemes: Classicism vs. Non-linear vs. Thermodynamics<br />
Thermodynamics and information theory are often grouped with classical dynamics. This is especially true where theory space is cleaved with quantum dynamics and other quote/unquote "non-deterministic" or "non-linear" theories on one side. But such classifications are problematic for several important reasons. Traditionally, the criteria of inclusion within the rubric "classical" has leaned heavily upon the concept of computation from knowledge of initial conditions. in Newtonian (and Relativistic) dynamics, knowing the initial state of a system allows one to calculate and thus predict the state of that system at any time in the future. Accuracy in prediction, from a classical perspective, is gated only by accuracy of knowledge of the original conditions of that system. Enter now, the strange world of quantum dynamics, where indeterminacy and sensitivity to observation turn classical calculations on their head. Non-clasical systems are systems in which determinism actually works against accuracy of prediction. The more you try to increase your knowledge of the initial conditions of a quantum situation, the less accurately you can predict that system's future. Much is made of the philosophical implications of observer "relativity" in an Einsteinium space/time model, but vantage-sensitivity is absolutely classical – the more you know about the initial conditions, the more accurate will be your relativistic predictions. In the quantum world, knowledge is itself, a cost of business attribute. In the quantum world, knowledge perturbs. In the quantum world, a system that seeks to know itself, is a system that is changed. In the quantum world, there are two types of systems, systems that are statistically perturbed, and systems that are locally perturbed. Meaning, you can measure (observe) aspects of a whole system without messing with that system, but should you want discrete knowledge of individual particles within that system, you must pay the price of a system that is forever thereafter disturbed. It is interesting how closely the empirically observed quantum world mimics the limits Kurt Godel placed on absolute knowledge. OK, let us now contrast thermodynamics, specifically the second law of thermodynamics, against both classical or deterministic dynamics and quantum indeterminacy. If one accepts that purpose of knowledge is prediction, is fidelity of calculation to actual future states, than both classical and non-linear theory are self-limitiing. Classical prediction is hampered by limits to the accuracy of observation of the initial state. Quantum prediction is limited by the way systems are perturbed by measurement, the more you know, the more you must include yourself into to prediction calculations, and the more said act is limited by Godel's caps on self-knowledge. One could say that classical prediction is dependent at base upon naiveté, and that quantum prediction is limited by knowledge itself. But what of the second law? The second law allows for absolute knowledge of the end state, of "heat death" or complete dissipation. Unlike all other forms of theoretical abstraction, the second law is absolutely agnostic to initial condition(s). You can use Newton's laws to look into the immediate future of a gravitationally bound system, but the same laws are meaningless in a system perturbed by other forces. Thermodynamic theory doesn't care what forces or materials are at play, it only cares about difference. In fact, thermodynamics doesn't know for the difference between material and force. The second law says that difference will always be less after any change in any system. The second law says that a change in any system will always result in the greatest possible reduction in difference. And importantly, the second law flips determinism on its head by providing perfect knowledge of the final state and doing so absolutely independent of any knowledge of initial conditions. Well that is certainly interesting, a theory that can predict the ultimate future independent of any past or present configuration, or, for that matter, any knowledge what so ever. What can be said of the quality or quantity of action that can be taken as result of this strange sort of knowledge? If success in competition can be linked to accuracy and capacity to predict, than what can be said of competitive success as a function of range of prediction? Imagine one could make and than order all possible predictions from most immediate to most long term. Comparing short-term against long-term predictions, which have the greatest impact on competitive advantage? If someone came into your office today and said, "I can say with absolute confidence that you will die as an artist in Copenhagen", how would such knowledge effect your future decisions and actions? How would absolute knowledge of your ultimate future effect your behavior? What if we were to compare the influence of such knowledge to short term knowledge of the same certainty? What if that same person came into your office and instead declared, "I have no knowledge of your ultimate fate, but I do know that you will not be able to fall asleep tonight". Would you be more (or less) likely to change or conform your plans or to take action based on short term predictions? There might be a tendency to ignore predictions that are far removed in time. One might reasonably think, "Even if I know that I will become an artist and eventually die in Copenhagen, I have a life to live until then, concentrating on long term eventualities interferes with my ability to successfully negotiate success in the short term, in the here and now. But it might also be reasonable to try to conform local goals to long term eventualities. One might eliminate actions that one feels will make it harder to plot a path towards know eventualities. Or, one might take risks they would not otherwise have taken. If I know I will die in Copenhagen, I might as well go base jumping in the Andes or climb Everest sans bottled oxygen. Surely, the heat death of the universe is an eventuality of much greater philosophical remove. What's more, evolution, as a process, seems to work just fine in the absence of any knowledge of eventualities. Can one make an argument that knowledge of universal eventuality gains its owner any special form of evolutionary advantage? Lets pit two entities against each other, one knows of heat death, the other doesn't. Which has the evolutionary advantage?<br />
<br />
Randall Lee Reetz, January 26, 2012<br />Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-66979515981761141142011-12-22T10:25:00.000-08:002011-12-22T10:26:19.144-08:00Evolution: Refinement vs. PredictionEvolution: The changes that will have the greatest effect on the longest future... and what it takes for those changes to survive the present long enough to make it there.<br />
<br />
That sentence describes evolution better than any attributed to Darwin. The refinement-on-a-scheme process Darwin described is only the metabolism, the power plant, that fuels evolution. "Fitness" in the present is the necessary evil, not the goal of evolution. Evolution is not the struggle for the right beak shape. That kind of refinement-on-a-scheme only gets you the biggest slice of the local pie. Refinement makes for a powerful now, a perquisite for a powerful then, but it is self limiting. Resources spent adapting to the now are resources not available for adaptation to the future. It is ironic to have to utter these words, but evolution isn't about the here and now. No, evolution is about the biggest there and the longest then. If your purpose is to facilitate the future, you are in the prediction business. So let's re-write our definition.<br />
<br />
Evolution: The development and selection of better and better prediction schemes.<br />
<br />
However, a prediction scheme is useless unless it can get you from what works now to what will work then. What ensues, is a tug-of-war, a tight-wire-walk, in which an evolution scheme must support both refinement in the now and prediction of the future. The causal implications are complex. Refinement is antithetical to prediction. While the finch is involved in the struggle for a better beak, the larger sphere of resources, the whole of the universe over the longest spans of the future, go ignored and un-tapped. You might argue that a bird doesn't have the capacity to understand the universe or the concept of resources or the maximization of exploitation to which all evolving systems must ultimately compete, and you would be, after a fashion, correct. That is the magic of evolution, the evolving thing doesn't need to understand the process it is engaged in. So long as there are enough individuals and these individuals are each even just slightly different from each other, selection will direct change towards better and better survival and better and better prediction schemes. Changes that promote survival are the easy part. And yet, even though it often works against survival in the present, the capacity to predict will win in the long run.<br />
<br />
Darwin can't be faulted for not seeing the big picture. He had to lay down the ground work and the groundwork in evolution is survival. Beak shape is an easily to observe population variance in finch morphology. But beak shape variation is no different than leg length variation, or protean variation, or cognitive and behavioral variation. Critics of evolution in general or Darwin argue that he never actually explained "…the origin of species". Implied in that challenge is a description of a process that results in qualitative changes; animals vs. plants for instance. And this is because he chose to explain his theory through the more overt and obvious adaptations that fall into the category of refinement or fitness in the present. The larger picture of evolution must be told as a conflict between refinement and prediction and that would have been an impossible sell to an already suspicious victorian audience.<br />
<br />
Randall Lee ReetzRandall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-19040446430644499832011-12-13T12:03:00.000-08:002011-12-14T15:00:45.307-08:00The 2nd Law: Is Increased Entropy Stochastic (incidental) or Causal (intrinsic)?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"></span></span><br />
Recent science news is dominated by the multi-trillion dollar experimental search for the Higgs boson particle. A definitive observation of the theorized, but illusive, Higgs will finally complete the verification of the Standard Model – the most respected mathematical model of the evolution of our universe, explaining the emergence of each of the known forces and all of the matter we can observe. In the Standard Model, the Higgs is responsible for gravity – surrounding the more pedestrian particles – lending them the property we call "mass". If the Higgs exists, it is important as the causal bridge between the quantum world of the small and the relativistic world of the large. How could a particle that causes gravity be so hard to find? Because it doesn't actually have mass. It is as a result, known as "weakly interacting". It is only when a whole bunch of Higgs get together and surround other particles that mass is detected, and then, only in the surrounded particles. The Higgs binds so tightly to other particles, that it takes an extraordinary amount of energy, to break it free so that its presence can be detected. This is what the "Large Hadron Collider" does – it smashes heavy atomic nucleus (stripped of their electrons) at energies equivalent to those of the first moments after the Big Bang when all of the matter and energy in the entire universe was still smaller than a single star.<br />
<br />
But there is a far more fundamental question. Gravity is a property. It is domain-dependent. It is specific to and belongs to a class of objects of a particular makeup and composition. The existence or nonexistence of the Higgs has no effect upon other properties of the universe like electromagnetism.<br />
<br />
But there is a candidate for a domain-independent attribute of any and all causal systems. This attribute has been labeled the "Causal Entropic Principle" – it is generally discussed within the context of the transfer of heat (at astronomical scales) – within the study of thermodynamics. It is the logical extension of the concept of increased entropy, as first postulated, measured, and later described as the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. But now, a hundred and fifty years after the formalization the laws of thermodynamics (of the phenomena and parameters of the transfer of heat, of the ratio of potential energy and work) correlative investigations in the fields of information, communication, computation, language, energy/mass, logic, and structure have uncovered parallel principles and constraints. It is reasonable now to understand the 2nd Law as a description of a fundamental constraint on any change, in any system, no matter what forces and materials are at play. We now understand the 2nd Law to describe the reduction in the quality (density) of the energy and or structure of the universe (or any part therein) as results any change at all. We have come to understand the 2nd Law as a constraint on the outcome of change in structure, which is to say "information", on its construction, maintenance, and or transfer. This insight has rendered an equivalence between energy and structure in much the same way that Einsteinian Relativity exposed the equivalence between energy and mass.<br />
<br />
There is however a daemon lurking within our understanding of the 2nd Law, a daemon that threatens to undermine our understanding of causality itself, a daemon that, once defined, may provide the basis for an understanding of any self-consistent causal system, including but not exclusive of our own universe and its particular set of properties and behaviors.<br />
<br />
The daemon of the 2nd Law is the daemon of stochastic – is 2nd Law dictated dissipation (entropy) statistical, or is statistics simply a tool we use in the absence of microscopic knowledge? Asked another way, is the reduction in the quality of energy or information that the 2nd Law demands of every action, a property of the universe or is it a property of the measurement or observation of the universe? Is action equivalent to measurement? Is there a measurement or stochastic class of action free of the entropy-increase demanded by the 2nd Law?<br />
<br />
This question is of far greater consequence to the universe and the understanding of the universe than the mechanics of mass as it would describe and thus parameterize ALL action and ALL configuration and the precipitation or evolution of all possible action and configuration. Where the existence of the Higgs Boson may explain the source of mass and gravity in this universe, an understanding of the causal attributes leading to the behavior described by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics might just provide a foundation from which any and all causal systems must precipitate.<br />
<br />
The implications and issues orbiting this problem are many and deep. At stake is an demonstrative understanding of change itself. We tend to think of change as exception. But, can a thing exist without change? If not, what is the difference between data and computation, between thing and abstraction of thing, and profoundly, an answer to the question, can data exist without computation? Can thing exist outside of abstraction of thing?<br />
<br />
In thermodynamics and information theory, an effort is made to distinguish process and stochastic process. Heat is defined as an aggregate property describing the average or holistic state of systems composed so many interacting parts to keep track of all of them individually. Heat is a calculous of sorts, a system of shortcuts that allows mathematics to be employed successfully to determine the gross state of a huge collection of similar parts. There is a tendency then to assume that the laws that describe heat are laws that only apply to aggregate systems where knowledge is incomplete.<br />
<br />
Are there non-stochastic systems? Are there discrete systems or dynamic changes within systems for which the laws of thermodynamics don't apply? Does the Causal Entropic Principle apply if you know and can observe every attribute of, and calculate the exact and complete state of a dynamic system?<br />
<br />
Such questions are more involved than they may seem on first reading. Answering them will expose the very nature of change, independent of domain, illuminating the causal chain that has resulted from full evolutionary lineage of the universe.<br />
<br />
Randall Lee Reetz<br />
<br />
<i>Note: The Causal Entropic Principle isn't a complex concept. It is the simple application of the 2nd Law's demand for increased universal entropy as a result of every change in any system. It says that every action in every system must be that action that causes the largest reduction in the quality of information or energy (the greatest dissipation). It says that a universe has only one possible end state – heat death – and that processes that maximize the rate towards this end state will be evolutionarily favored (selected), simply because entropy-maximizing processes and structures demand a higher throughput of energy and thus end up dominating their respective locality. Such entropy-maximizing schemes are thus more likely to determine the structure and behavior of the event cone stretching off into the future. An obvious extension of this principle is that complexity, or more precisely, the family of complexity that can find, record, and process abstractions that represent the salient aspects (physics) of the (an) universe, will help that complexity better predict the shape and behavior it must assume to maximize its competitive influence upon the future of entropy maximization. The "Causal Entropic Principle" thus represents a logically self-consistant (scientific) replacement for the awkwardly self-centered and causally impossible "anthropomorphic principle" (which lacks a physical or causal explanation and leans heavily on painfully erroneous macroscopic stretching of the quantum electro dynamics). Stretching circular logic to its most obvious and illogical end, the anthropomorphic principle borrows awkwardly and erroneously and ironically form the Heisenberg / Uncertainty Principle by asserting the necessity of "observers" as a precursor to the emergence of complexity. The Causal Entropic Principle explains the production of localized complexity without the need for prior-knowledge, and does so within the bounds of, as a result of, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, by showing that localized complexity can both come into existence as a result of the constant increase in universal entropy, and more specifically, that localized complexity has an evolutionary advantage, and will thus out-compete, less complex structures. In a Causal Entropic Principle universe, intelligence is the expected evolutionary result of competition to reach heat death faster. Falling down is enhanced by a particular class of complexity that can come into existence as a natural result of things falling down. Should one form of such complexity "understand" the universe better than another form, it will have an advantage and will be more likely to influence the shape of complexity in the future. The better a system gets at abstracting the dynamics of its environment the more likely it will be able to eat other systems than be eaten by them. Where the anthropomorphic principle requires an a-priori "observer", the causal entropic principle simply requires the 2nd Law's demand for increased entropy, for things falling down.</i>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-81512065214618289512011-11-17T10:41:00.001-08:002011-11-18T10:03:13.645-08:00The Problem with Darwin…<div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhMJwWJQ0XIgVD6IWqu519MUG1BOCReXRGnM7NVJSKw0_k1fKGQs0XbIeQZLi4zU4EJm36QrwCuO_Jh6V866MBQOBmPM6bsCSVROCAsNbnoZgFvpLsEJlnOmJFwqGiKG0QMrSrBdRKkV8/s1600/Randall_w_Darwin_comp600wd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhMJwWJQ0XIgVD6IWqu519MUG1BOCReXRGnM7NVJSKw0_k1fKGQs0XbIeQZLi4zU4EJm36QrwCuO_Jh6V866MBQOBmPM6bsCSVROCAsNbnoZgFvpLsEJlnOmJFwqGiKG0QMrSrBdRKkV8/s320/Randall_w_Darwin_comp600wd.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ya… how would you look as Darwin?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Darwin Darwin Darwin. Darwin is a problem. It isn't that he was wrong. In fact, it is very very hard to find any kind of mistake in his theory or his supporting data and arguments. What makes Darwin problematic is his myopic assignment of the process of evolution to the domain of biology. In doing so, Darwin has (inadvertently) misled generations of readers, who now confuse biology's "how" in evolution with big "E" Evolution in all domains. Big "E" Evolution is informative because it describes the more general "why" driving the direction of change in ALL domains.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
When understood as a "how", the process of evolution is reduced to orrery – like the awkward clockworks that spin planets and moons around concentric bearings – substituting method where there should be cause. How is always specific to domain, but why, the ultimate why, is general enough to explain all of the how's. Armed with a robust understanding of the big WHY of evolution, one should be able to walk into any domain and predict and then map it's how. Again, it isn't that Darwin's evolution orrery doesn't accurately predict biological patterns of change, or even that Darwin's evolution orrery doesn't accurately abstract the salient causal aspects of biological change, it is that Darwin's how of evolution in biology leads people to the idea that evolution is specific and exclusive to biology, or that one can understand evolution in other domains by overlaying biology's how.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Darwin never generalized the process of evolution. Imagine had Newton and Einstein had not generalized dynamics and motion and that we had, as a result, built all of our machines on the principle that motion was caused by legs and feet.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The people who have come the closest to the generalization of evolution, the thermodynamisists, have never been able to or interested in the development of a generalization of the direction of change and the cause of that direction. I will get back to this absence of generalization in the understanding of evolution but right now will only hint at an explanation… in the aftermath of the all too human race and cultural superiority wars and atrocities, it has been socially dangerous to think of evolution as having a direction as such thoughts can be read as rhetorical arguments for superiority and pre-judgement, the likes of which were used by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and others as justification for mass exterminations and other exclusionary policies. That humans have the proclivity to exploit incomplete knowledge in the pursuit of ridiculous selfishness at absurd scales should be nothing new or noteworthy. But no one would advocate the cessation of the study of chemistry simply because arsenic is a chemical, or the study of high energy physics simply because the atom bomb can be built from such knowledge.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Or would we? Cautionary reactions to the self-superior pogroms that so blighted the 20th century have driven several generations of researchers towards the relativist rhetoric we see most prominently in the post-modernist movement, but which is evident in the works of less irrational and otherwise, empirical scientists like Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins. Both represent an interesting study in overcompensation. In their quest to irradiate the all-to-natural self-superiority that seems to cause humans to erect unfounded tautologies that place humans on top of pre-destined hierarchies, both argue and argue brilliantly, for a flat evolutionary environment in which change happens but without any directionality at all. Again, this is like saying that because metal can be shaped into swards and knives and guns it shouldn't be produced even should we need plows and trains and dynamos and bridges and buildings and printing presses and lab equipment and computers.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Of course, caution is its own form of rhetoric, as potentially dangerous as its more obviously tyrannous cousins.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And, yes! Evolution has a direction. There I said it! Say it with me. You won't be struck down by post-modernist lightning. Trust me. Trust your self. It is more than a little absurd that one would have to argue for direction in a process that explains directionality. They are of course correct in their assertion that evolution isn't pre-determined. Nothing is. Of course. But the "brilliance" of evolution is that it results in a direction without need for prior knowledge, plan, or determination of any kind. To toss this most salient aspect of the evolutionary process simply to make a sociological point seems reckless in the maximum.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Randall Lee Reetz</div>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-1551892898835060002011-05-07T20:16:00.001-07:002011-06-22T15:10:50.314-07:00CausalismThough I have been writing about "causality" for years, I continued to label myself an atheist. I really thought the label fit, but that was before I attended to a few atheism events and talks and found that atheists are not, as I had understood, interested in rational thought. The atheists I have met are simply and aggressively apposed to religion. They have an axe to grind, are pathologically obsessed with, focused upon, and have a general need to work bad juju against – religion. The single minded obsessive combativeness exhibited by the atheists that I have met, seems, well, in a word – religious.<br />
<br />
Of course I will take responsibility for my mistake, my assumption, it is right there in the word: "atheist", a-theist, anti-theist, against theism. And though I am not a believer, my disinterest in belief does not define my self or my thoughts or more specifically, the way I choose to think things through. Nobody who likes the color red describes this preference as anti-green.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div>The word "causality" describes a world view in which every system exists as a hierarchy of cause and effect. Even though dictionaries don't yet list the word – a "causalist" is a person who "believes" that all structure and action is the result of physical causality. That describes my way of thinking perfectly. </div><div><br />
</div><div>I am a causalist!</div><div><br />
</div><div>There, I said it. It is now a word. That is what makes the english language so dynamic and alive. If you need a word. Go out and build one. In this case, anyone who understands the word causal will immediately understand the word causalist. 'Wish I could say the same of my spell checker.</div><div><br />
</div><div>I believe that the universe is what it is and acts like it acts solely as a result of physical properties and the way these properties are effected by and effect each-other. No back doors. No end-arounds. No special cases. No miracles. No exceptions. No preferential treatment. Simple. Expectable. Demonstrable. Regular. I believe that thoughts are built of atoms, not the other way around. That atoms and their properties effect thought but that thoughts can't effect the basic fundamental properties of atoms.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Causality is a description of a system as a hierarchy of the things that influence it. Causality strongly implies an asymmetry between cause and effect. A causal system is a system in which some parts and attributes have more influence over the shape and behavior of that system than do others (which are more effect).</div><div><br />
</div><div>A causalist assumes that all systems exist as the result of a history and that this history defines a linearity of construction – first this happened, then this, and finally this. A causalist assumes that this history of a system, exposes a hierarchy of the energies that were required to built it. The most energetic processes shaped the earliest subsystems, and the most recent additions were laid down in much less energetic environments. This makes for stable structures – strongly associated foundations upon which more delicate subsystems are layered.</div><div><br />
</div><div>And, low and behold, when we pick systems apart, we always find this hierarchical strata of causally deposited layers. Always! No exceptions have ever been found.</div><div><br />
</div><div>The other key aspect to the causalist's cosmology is the fact that earlier systems are more similar and systems added later are more diverse. This means that everything shares and is built upon the same past. So no matter if you have gills or feathers, hands or tentacles, eyes or echo-location – you will all be built of cells and these cells, muscle or neuron, blood cell or phagocyte will all be made of atoms and these atoms helium or hydrogen, led or plutonium will always be made of protons, neutrons and electrons, etc. etc.</div><div><br />
</div><div>A world or universe built up from ever more shared and similar parts is a universe that can be known. It is a stable universe that has expectable patterns that exist within the boundaries of limits defined by their own causally stacked history. Everything shares the same history. Everything is built of the same history. Though the present may look diverse and confusing, further inquiry will always reveal patterns and similarities at base, shared by everything. Exceptions and difference is always an aspect of the surface or most recent manifestations of evolution. The base gets more and more similar the deeper or further back you look.</div><div><br />
</div><div>This regularity is exactly why spiritualists and the religious have always been apposed to science and the causal view of reality. It doesn't allow exceptions. You can't win the race cause you prayed longer or to the right god. You can only win the race if you have the physicality and the emotional drive to run harder than everyone else. There are no exceptions. There are no special cases. There is no favoritism. There is no OZ pulling levers. Nobody and no thing to assuage towards your interests.</div><div><br />
</div><div>We know that adding heat to a gas causes it to expand. We know that compressing a gas causes it to get hotter. We know the exact ratio between heat and pressure or volume. With this ratio we can predict the exact changes that will result when we add energy or change the volume of a given amount of gas. It always works the way the math says it should. But of course the same can not be said for the spiritual arts. In fact. There has never been an event that has been shown to have been effected by prayer or thinking (no matter how concentrated, repeated, or "conscious"). Never once has the temperature of a gas or anything else been effected by anything spiritual or religious. This is not just true of gasses and heat. It is true of everything we can measure. We know the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We understand and have defined the parameters that show why this spectrum is bounded on both the cold and the energetic end. We know how gravity is effected by energy, time and distance. We know how quanta effect other quanta. And in no system, caused by no dynamics, have we ever encountered any behavior that can not be explained by simple causality of the things effecting those systems.</div><div><br />
</div><div>It is easy to see why causality would disturb the anxious. There is no way to play a causal system. No way to gain advantage. No free lunch. No favoritism. No exceptions. No para-normal. No meta-physics. No magic. No luck. Just the awesome beauty and incomprehensible complexity that can't help but happen in a universe this big and this full of energy and stuff with this much time summing into an almost infinite number interactions and the constructs can survive. In a causal universe, you get fit by working out – not by chanting mantras. You live longer by taking care of your body and your mind, not by praying for longevity. You gain advantage in sports, business, romance, academia, and culture, by understanding the causal influences effecting these systems, not by sleeping under a pyramid or praying to a 10 armed blue goddess or a sandal wearing guy nailed to a couple of wood beams. You gain knowledge through measurement and building theories that abstract the greatest domain of measurements – not by listening reverently to some guy in a robe who slickly explains away your loneliness and fear of death with a 24 voice choir and 60 foot pipe organ as backup.</div><div><br />
</div><div>It may in fact be true that the human brain has evolved into a configuration that demands religious and spiritual thoughts and that these thoughts can result in a better sense of well-being and that the resulting sense of inner peace gives rise to physical benefits, but this itself is a causal (if Byzantine) system. But any causal assessment of the human penchant for religious and spiritual thought would certainly give it a low score for effectiveness and a high score for self-delusion. Thoughts that make you feel better aren't necessarily the thoughts that increase your knowledge of yourself or the universe. This rift between reality and what our minds would like reality to be is the single most dangerous side effect of evolving a great big layer of grey matter over the top of our lizard brain within. It is important to remember that the lizard brain, an emotion-to-action processing center, is still very much in charge of everything we do. This is non-negotiable. It is true because of physical wiring, not philosophy. Adding to a sober assessment of our scary neural architecture is the fact that the inner brain, the old brain, the brain in charge, isn't sophisticated enough to understand any of the wonderfully sophisticated products (reason, logic, abstract mapping, systems modeling) our more recently acquired layers are able to compute. Be you Einstein or Leonardo, Shakespeare or Confucius, Newton or Feynman, your inner brain is still as dumb as a lizard, and it, unfortunately, is both blind to your brilliance, and directing the actions you take.<br />
<br />
A causalist isn't as depressed by this seemingly hopeless understanding as one might expect. A causalist just accepts reality and looks for solutions that work with and are informed by it. If humans have great big thinking machines that are hard to hear above the ruckus and clatter of emotions, the challenge is to build cultural solutions that protect and automate higher order knowledge from the vagrancies of low level emotions. The playing field shifts with this shift in perspectives. Instead of looking for solutions within the arena of emotional thought (meditation, mood music, a harmonic convergence, global conciseness, etc.) the cuasalist, looks for solutions outside of the lizard brain, looks for solutions that accept the lizard brain but work to lessen its control over policy and society. A causalist looks to the infrastructure. A causalist has noticed that people act more constructive when their environment takes care of the simple needs of the lizard brain. A causalist has noticed that clean running water at every faucet, enough food, reasonable shelter, and reliable stability make people with the same lizard brain end up acting more like their grey matter ideas and less like a lizard. No amount of prayer or philosophy or yoga will yield the same productivity improvements and cultural growth as a reliable and supportive infrastructure.<br />
<br />
Take the time to look at the statistics that compare a culture's confidence in its infrastructure and its per labor hour productivity or its crime rate. Then try to find a better predictor of a culture's ability to build towards greater and greater progress of knowledge and opportunity. Confidence doesn't build an infrastructure, infrastructure builds confidence. Those of us confident enough to see this hierarchy for what it is must work constantly and vigorously against the grain. We must build the infrastructure that will produce in tomorrow's masses the confidence we are lucky enough to feel today.<br />
<br />
It is way way way cheaper to run clean water and nutritious food into every home than it is to deal with the chaos that ALWAYS results when people must live with the fear of thirst and hunger. Going to church for an hour a week isn't ever going to have the same effect on productivity and stability. Even the religious would surely rather pray for more interesting and complex goals than a bowl of rice and clear water.<br />
<br />
Accepting the weird irrationality of the human thinking and emotional system doesn't mean that you have to be irrational about your acceptance of it or how you choose to go about building towards a better future.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Randall Lee Reetz (a causalist!)</div>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-78538457826136161142011-03-27T13:02:00.000-07:002011-03-27T13:02:37.246-07:00Compression as IntelligenceLet me take a stab at defending compression as equivalent to intelligence.<br />
<br />
Standard string compression (LZW, etc.) works by understanding and then exploiting the sequencing rules that result in the redundancy built into most (all?) languages and communication protocols.<br />
<br />
Compression is necessary in any storage/retrieval/manipulation system for the simple reason that all systems are finite. Any library, any hard drive, any computer memory… all finite. If working with primary in-situ environments was as efficient as working with maps or abstractions we would never have to go through the trouble of making maps or abstracting and filtering and representing.<br />
<br />
It might seem sarcastic even to say it, but a universe is larger than a brain.<br />
<br />
You have however stumbled upon an interesting insight. Where exactly is intelligence? In classic Shannon information theory, and the communication metrics (signal/noise ratio) upon which it is based, information is a duality where data and cypher are interlocked. In this model, you can reduce the size of your content, but only if you increase the size (or capacity) of the cypher. Want to reduce the complexity of the cypher, well you are forced to accept the fact that your content will grow in size or complexity. No free lunch!<br />
<br />
In order to build a more robust cypher, one has to generalize in order find salience (the difference that make a difference) in a greater and greater chunk of the universe. It is one thing to build an data crawler for a single content protocol, quite another to build a domain and protocol independent data crawler. It is one thing to build hash trees based on word or token frequency and quite another to build them based on causal semantics (not how the words are sequenced, but how the concepts they refer to are graphed.<br />
<br />
I think the main trouble you are having with this compression = intelligence concept has to do with a limited mapping of the word "compression".<br />
<br />
Lets say you are driving and need to know which way to turn as you approach a fork in the road. If you are equipped with some sort of mental abstraction of the territory ahead, or on a map, you can choose based on the information encoded into these representations. But what if you didn't? What if you could not build a map, either on paper, or in your head. Then you would be forced to drive up each fork in turn. In fact, had you no abstraction device, you would have to do this continually as you would not be able to remember the first road by the time you took the second.<br />
<br />
What if you had to traverse every road in every city you came to just to decide which road you were meant to take in the first place? What if the universe it self was the best map you could ever build of the universe? Surely you can see that a map is a form of compression.<br />
<br />
But lets say that your brain can never be big enough to build a perfect map of every part of the universe important to you. Lets imagine that the map-building map you build in order to create mental memories of roads and cities is ineffective at building maps of biological knowledge or physics or the names and faces of your friends. You will have to go about building unique map builders for each domain of knowledge important to you. Eventually, every cubic centimeter of your brain will be full of domain-specific map making algorithms. No room for the maps!<br />
<br />
What you need to build sited is a universal map builder. A map builder that works just as well for topological territory as it does for concepts and lists and complex n-dimensional pattern-scapes.<br />
<br />
Do so and you will end up with the ultimate compression algorithm!<br />
<br />
But your point about where the intelligence lies is important. I haven't read the rules for the contest you sight, but if I were to design such a contest, I would insist that the final byte count of each entrants' data also include the byte count of the code necessary to unpack it.<br />
<br />
I realize that even this doesn't go far enough. You are correctly asserting that most of the intelligence is in the human minds that build these compression algorithms in the first place.<br />
<br />
How would you go about designing a contest that correctly or more accurately measures the full complexity of both cypher and the content it interprets?<br />
<br />
But before you do, you should take the time to realize that a compression algorithm becomes a smaller and smaller component of the total complexity metric the more often it is used. How many trillions of trillions of bytes have been trimmed from the global data tree over the lifespan of use of MPEG or JPEG on video and images? Even if you factor in a robust calculation of the quantum wave space inhabited by the humans brains that created these protocols it is plain to see that use continues to diminish the complexity contribution of the cypher no matter how complex.<br />
<br />
Now what do you think?<br />
<br />
Randall Lee ReetzRandall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-84171460510787135612010-09-16T17:10:00.000-07:002010-11-23T13:28:59.811-08:00Evolution: Pendulum Dance Between Laws of ThermodynamicsFor years, I have pursued a purely thermodynamic definition of evolution.<br />
<br />
My reasoning is informed by the observation that change is independent of domain, process, or the physical laws and behaviors upon which a system is based. As the science of thermodynamics has itself matured (evolved), the boundaries of its applicable domain have expanded far beyond its original focus on heat. It is generally accepted that the laws of thermodynamics apply to ANY system in which change occurs, that the laws of thermodynamics are agnostic to energy type or form. Furthermore, scientists studying information/communication independently discovered laws that match almost perfectly, the laws of thermodynamics. This mirroring of domains has thrilled logicians, physicists, mathematicians, and cosmologists who are no more and more convinced that information (configuration) and energy are symmetric with respect to change over time.<br />
<br />
Even conservatively, the implications of this symmetry are nothing short of profound. If true, it suggests that one can, for instance, calculate the amount of information it would take to get a certain mass to the moon and back, and it means that one can calculate how much energy it would take to compute the design a moon rocket. It means that the much vaulted "E" in Einstein's Relativity equation can be exchanged with an "I" for information (with valid results). It means, at some level, that information is relativistic and that gravity works as a metric of information. Same goes for the rules and equations that govern quantum dynamics.<br />
<br />
And this from an eyes-wide-open anti-post modernist!<br />
<br />
At any event, the symmetric relationship between energy and information (at least with regard to change) provides a singular foundation for all of physics, and even perhaps for all of ANY possible physical system (equally applicable to other universes with other rules).<br />
<br />
It would seem that thermodynamics would provide a more than solid base from which to define the process that allows for, limits, and possibly demands the (localized) accumulation of complexity – evolution!<br />
<br />
The Zeroth and First Laws of Thermodynamics work to shape and parameterize action. Given the particular configuration immediately prior they insure that the next action is always and only the set of those possible actions that together will expend the most energy. In colloquial terms, things fall down and things fall down as fast and as completely as is possible. Falling down, is a euphemism for the process of seeking of equilibrium. If the forces attracting two objects is greater than the forces keeping them apart, they will fall together. If the forces keeping them apart is greater than the forces attracting them, they will fall apart. Falling down reduces a system to a more stable state – a state in which less force is pushing because some force was released. Falling down catalyzes the maximum release of energy and results in a configuration of minimum tension.<br />
<br />
The Second Law of thermodynamics dictates that all action results in a degradation of energy, or configurationally speaking, a reduction in density or organizational complexity. Over time the universe becomes cooler, more spread out, and less ordered.<br />
<br />
The falling down dictated by the the zeroth and first law result in particular types of chunking determined by a combination of the materials available and the energy reduced. About a million years after the big bang, the energy and pressures of the big bang had dissipated such that the attractive forces effecting sub-atomic particles were finally stronger than the forces all around them. The result was a precipitation of matter as hydrogen and helium atoms in plasma. After a few hundred million years, the mass in these gasses exerted more attractive energy than the much cooler and less dense universe, and precipitated into clumps that became stars. As the fusion cascade in these first stars radiated their energy out into an expanding and cooling universe, the attractive force of gravity within became greater than the repulsive forces of nuclear reaction and the starts imploded upon themselves with such force as to expel their electrons and precipitate again into all of the other elements. These heavy elements were drawn by gravity again into a second generation of stars and planets of which earth is but one lonely example.<br />
<br />
You will have noticed that each precipitatory event in our cosmological history resulted in a new aggregate class – energy, sub atomic particles, light atoms, stars, heavy atoms, stars and planets, life, sentience, language, culture, science, etc). The first two laws of thermodynamics dictate the way previously created aggregate objects are combined to form new classes of aggregate objects. The second law guarantees as a result of the most contemporary precipitation event, a coincidental lowering of energy/configurational density which allows still weaker forces to cause aggregates in the next precipitatory phase.<br />
<br />
If you still aren't following me, it is probably because I have not been clear about the fact that the lower environmental energy density that is the result of each precipitatory cycle optimizes the resulting environmental conditions to the effects of the next weaker force or the next less stable configuration.<br />
<br />
For instance, the very act of the strong force to create atomic nuclei, lowers the temperature and pressure to such an extent that the weak force and the electromagnetic force can now overcome environmental chaos and cause the formation of atoms in the next precipitatory event.<br />
<br />
This ratcheted dance between the laws of thermodynamics is the why of evolution, and results in the layered grammars that sometimes or at least potentially describe ever greater stacked complexities that led to life and us and what might come as a result of our self same actions as the dance continues.<br />
<br />
Stepping back to the basic foundation of causality, it is important to be re-reminded that a configuration of any kind always represents the maximum allowable complexity. In recent years, much has been made of the black hole cosmologies that define the event horizon as the minimum allowable area on which all of the information within the black hole can be written as a one bit thick surface membrane of a sphere. The actual physical mechanical reason that this black hole event horizon membrane can be described as a lossless "holographic" recording or description or compression of the full contents of the black hole is complex and binds quantum and relativistic physics. Quantum because the energies are so great structure is reduced to the structural granularity of basic quantum bits. Relativistic because at this maximally allowable density everything passing the event horizon has reached the speed of light, freezing time itself… the event horizon effectively holds an informational record of everything that has passed.<br />
<br />
The interesting and I think salient aspect of an event horizon is that is always exactly as big as it needs to be to hold all of the bits that have passed through it. As the black whole attracts and eats up any mass unlucky enough to be within its considerable influence, the event horizon grows by exactly the bits necessary to describe it at the quantum level.<br />
<br />
The cosmological community (including Sir Steven Hawking), was at first shocked by the sublime elegance of this theory and then by the audacious and unavoidable implication that black holes, like everything else, are beholding to the laws of thermodynamics. The theory predicts black hole evaporation! Seems black holes, like everything else, are entropically bound. There is no free lunch. The collapse of matter into a black hole results in a degradation of energy and informational configuration, the self same entropy that demands that heat leak from a steam engine, demands that black holes will evaporate and that eventually, when this rate of evaporation exceeds the rate of stuff falling into it, a black whole will get smaller and ultimately, poof, be gone.<br />
<br />
This is heady stuff. The biggest and baddest things in the universe are limited! But to me, the most profound aspect of this knowledge is not that event horizons can be describes as maximal causal configurations, but that we are shocked by this! All systems are, at each moment, the maximal allowable configuration by which those forces and those materials can be arranged. If they could be arranged any tighter, they would have already collapsed into that configuration.<br />
<br />
To say this is to understand that time is not separable from configuration. As Einstein showed, time is physically dependent upon and bounded by the interaction of mass, distance, energy, and change. Cosmologists use limits to understand the universe. The maximal warpage of space-time caused by a black hole's density effectively flattens the allowable granular complexity of the configurational grammar to binary bits held in the minimally allowable physical embodiment. But, lower energy configurations, configurations like dogs, planets, and the mechanism by which I am attempting to explain this concept, are bounded and limited by the exact same causal rules.<br />
<br />
The difference between a black hole horizon and an idea? Well it has to do with the stacking of grammatical systems (quarks, sub atomic particles, atoms, molecules, proteans, cells, organs, bodies, culture, language, etc.) that allows for complexities greater than the binary bits, the only stuff allowed to pass through an event horizon. But these stacked grammars that allow us to be us are every bit as restricted to the same maximally allowable configuration rule that minimizes the size of a black hole's event horizon. In a system configured by a stacked grammar, the minimum complexity rule is enforced at the transition boundary between each two grammatical layers.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Things fall, but only as fast as the stacked grammars that govern causal reality will allow. This isn't a metaphor, the speed of diffusion, of degradation, of falling down, is always and in all situations, maxed-out. The exact same physical topology that bounds the size of the a black hole event horizon contributes to the causal binding effecting the rate at which any system can change. This is because at the deepest causal layer, all systems are bound by relativity and quantum dynamics. The grammatical layers built successively on top of this lower binding only serve to further influence entropy's relentless race towards heat death.</div><br />
<br />
[to be continued]<br />
<br />
Randall Reetz<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"></span></span>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-62157787890301950042010-09-02T15:18:00.000-07:002010-09-07T10:15:34.491-07:00The Big Arrow: What Matters and Why<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRTzb1QduFnZ2-6JbFytoTuAKpFuAx5odUO6MskhSQCfJxj-mgg2zItfx1b1oBm5jNRNJc6rlMtIIXsmqmE2wMrrNBs-AYHv6PT7_R-96EXC_vigIjmWUZp6ZVs5bJrm8uCXVcbnn4XRk/s1600/CompassMan5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRTzb1QduFnZ2-6JbFytoTuAKpFuAx5odUO6MskhSQCfJxj-mgg2zItfx1b1oBm5jNRNJc6rlMtIIXsmqmE2wMrrNBs-AYHv6PT7_R-96EXC_vigIjmWUZp6ZVs5bJrm8uCXVcbnn4XRk/s400/CompassMan5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</div><div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><ul style="list-style-type: disc;"><li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">hierarchy of influence</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">complexity handling capacity as evolutionary fitness metric</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">decentralized autonomous node computation topology</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">localized least energy optimization vs. topology range-finding and exploration for long range optimization</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">compression as computational grand-attractor</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">causally restricted abstraction space</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">causally calibrated abstraction space</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">self-optimized causal semantics</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">generalize and subsume schemes</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">self optimized stacked grammars</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">causally restricted language</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">universal simulation environment</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">context-optimized language generators</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">context-optimized language interpreters</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">entropy maximization schemes</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">balancing local vs. universal evolution schemes</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">processing economics</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">network nodes vs. software objects</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">networks vs. graphs…</li>
<li style="font: 16.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">generalize and subsume</li>
</ul><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><br />
<div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">These are the concepts that bubble up when I ask myself, What matters? and, What matters the most?". I ask these questions over and over again. Have for some 40 years. You can get by not asking these questions, might even thrive, but only because others not so indifferent, have, do, and will ask.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">What you are, what we all are, what we will become, and what will come after us, is more the result of the thoughts and actions taken by the few individuals, consciously or not, who have honored these questions, and honored them above all others. To be sure, survival, at least in the present and local, is not dependent upon asking the big questions. In fact, as far as the individual is concerned, asking big questions, almost certainly diminishes fitness and reduces the probability of survival.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Much print is devoted to the question of whether and how socially benevolent behavior evolves . How can moral behavior spread through the gene or meme pool when, at the granularity of the individual, moral behavior frequently allows other individuals to take more than their fair share?</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But the same issue is not so controversial or surprising if we shift our focus to competing motivations within a single individual. How do we ever learn to think long-term or wide-focus thoughts when short-term, narrow-focus thoughts are more likely to increase the likelihood of immediate survival?</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Weirder still, there is obviously plenty of evolutionary evidence that wide-focus problem solving has bridged routs to new domains. Aquatic animals have become land animals and vice versa. Single-celled animals have become multi-celled animals (presumably though less intuitively, multi-celled animals have evolved the other way, towards single celled animals). Chemistry has become biology and biology catalyzes chemistry. And unique to our temporal neighborhood, biology has sprouted culture that is well on its way towards sprouting non-biological life… the first "intentional" life!</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But domain-jumping doesn't sit well with traditional views of evolution. Evolutionists tend to study biology from the perspective of a particular environmental constraint or set of stable constraints. Within the (self-imposed) bubble of these artificially bounded steady-state environments, evolution certainly seems to be a process of refinement seeking. In thermodynamics we describe this class of behavior; "seeking the fall line". In your prototypical energy topology, where peaks mean high energy and chaos and valleys equate equilibrium low energy stability, refinement evolution selects for processes that find their way to the nadir of the local-most valley. When sliding down the (local) least-energy fall line, there is but this one possible result.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The problem with refinement (as an explanation of evolution) is that it describes a sub-type of change that is peculiarly adverse to the kinds of novelty and acceleration away from stasis that one actually sees in evolving systems. Refinement in point of fact is the very reverse of sustainable change. Refinement always seeks a limit. Becoming, for instance, the best swimmer in the sea, sort of insures that you are so specialized that you will have a hard time changing into anything else but a swimmer. Refinement sets you up to be stage, environment, ground (the past)… for other things, the things that are more directed towards the forms of evolutionary change that will define the foreground, the action, the object, (the future).</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Limit seeking schemes are schemes in which change decelerates over time. That doesn't sound like a formula that fits the upward accelerating curve of evolution.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">This would be a good time to introduce a term I use all of the time, without which, I believe it is impossible to see evolution for what it really is. The term is "hierarchy of influence". A hierarchy of influence is a cline, a stack, a pyramid, that relates each of the factors effecting a system according to the degree to which each will effect the the behavior, output, eventual state, or direction of the system of which each is a part.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I know it isn't politically correct to suggest that some parts of a system are more important than others, so I will just say that some factors of a system will have a greater effect over the future than will others. A hierarchy of influence is an ontology of sorts, or more accurately, a ranking. On the bottom of the stack, you will have those sub-systems or parts or actors that have an effect on almost everything else in the system, and on top you will have those parts that are more the result of or subservient to the rest of the system. If you aren't comfortable with that order, just flip it over! Either way you map it, hierarchy of influence is a powerful tool for the understanding of systems and change.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">So, let's look at evolutionary systems through the hierarchy of influence lens. Here as before, we can apply this new lens locally or globally. What leads towards success locally is different than what leads to success globally. As the field of view narrows, a hierarchy of influence favors factors that support refinement. Process at larger and longer scopes support influencers that reach out side of current domains, influencers that seek a universal understanding of all domains, of domain in general, of change itself, and finally, of the very reason for change, for and understanding of the end game and how best to get there.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Now lets apply the hierarchy of influence filter to the super-system we've just described, the system composed of both localized hierarchies of influence and universal hierarchies of influence. In any such super-system it should be clear that the local refinement leaning hierarchies will be demoted to the realm of effectors in reference to deep and wide long-range oriented hierarchies of influence.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Ecologists and Population Biologists are keen to point to the fact that most of this earth's biomass comes in the form of single celled animals and plants. Absolutely true. It is also true that most of the mass and energy in our Solar System is rather unimpressively ordered hydrogen, helium and a smattering of lithium. But the future of biology, of complexity, even of mass and energy is much more likely to be sensitive to complex systems than the simple ones upon which they feed.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But before we throw out "refinement" as a category, let me posit a kind of refinement that is a good candidate for the fitness function or filter we see in evolving systems, systems that get better and better and solving more and more diverse problems at a faster and faster rate.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">What if we were to re-cast the concept of refinement to mean the refinement of refinement itself? In stead of refining a particular solution space, we think of refinement in its most general and universal form, a refinement of the definition of refinement. In doing so, we tip the traditional view of evolution on its head. Animals, individuals, species, film of every sort become the environment, the conditions, the topology as background as tool as expendable media for the refinement of the ultimate fitness metric. </div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">I must step in now, interrupt my self, and state the obvious even if the obvious might throw a huge wrench in the logical works of this thesis. </div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The distinction I have been outlining, between refinement and domain jumping suggests or could lead some readers to think that I am suggesting that domain jumping offers some form of escape from the laws of thermodynamics. I have suggested that refinement evolution simply seeks the least energy fall line. No problem here. But by contrasting refinement against domain jumping, the reader might be lead to believe that I am suggesting a way around physics, a free lunch, some sort of evolutionary daemon that does what Maxwell's couldn't. I am not! Only the next action that takes the least energy can happen next.… no exceptions. Period. Domain jumping must therefore, at every moment and in every context, obey the laws of thermodynamics.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Now, it is relatively easy to see how refinement evolution meets these least-energy constraints, but how is it that domain jumping could ever happen? How would any action ever allow ridge-climbing escape from any concave depression in any energy topology?</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Before I continue along this vein of logic, I should probably jump back a pace and clarify what I mean when I say "energy topology". An energy topology is a graphical depiction of the forces acting upon a region of space. Some energy topologies are almost identical to real world space. The undulating surface of the earth under our feet is, at least with regard to gravity, equivalent to the energy topology that restricts motion across its surface. If I am standing on the side of a mountain and moving 1 foot to my left means I will have to haul my body up half a foot vertically, and traversing 1 foot to the right would allow me instead to fall half a foot, than to slope of the ground is a perfect analog of the energy topology with respect to gravity. Left to the whims of time and chance, the energy topology I just described would make it far more likely that I would eventually end up more to my right (lower) than to my left (higher). This is because I would have to use energy to move up the mountain and could actually access energy by moving down the mountain.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Of course there are less obvious energy topologies, energy topologies that do not map to actual terrain. With respect say to choosing a religious belief the energy topology heavily reflects the beliefs already held by one's emendate family, cultural heritage, and other factors. Choice that differs radically from local norms will require lots more energy, than will conforming. If one were to plot the energy topology necessary to choose to become Muslim for instance, a child in a museum family would stand on top of a steep hill, and a child born to a Christian family would stand at the bottom of a deep pit. Energy topologies offer wonderfully obvious illustrations of the forces effecting evolving systems.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Each object or system to be examined acts according to the sum of many energy effectors. Each of these effectors (physical terrain, social obstructions/accelerators, on-board energy reserves and conversion rates, environmentally accessible resources, etc.) can be plotted separately as an energy topology, but causality is the result of the sum of all energy topologies effecting an object of system. To illustrate, lets now combine the above two examples. Lets say that the person on the mountainside, is in the process of plotting their own religious future. To the right the physical mountain rises, to the left it falls into a valley. The person standing there is from the Christian village in the valley below. That person is philosophically attracted to the Muslim faith. But to learn more, they will have to travel up the mountain to a Muslim village a thousand feet higher. In this case, the energy necessary to fulfill their philosophical desire will require them to haul their body up the mountain. And because doing so will also incur the costs associated with going against cultural norms. Obviously, both topologies must be summed in order to compute the likelihood of both possible choices. As I am sure you are realizing, the philosophical leaning of our actor can also be represented by an energy topology. This to must be summed to produce the aggregate energy topology in which our subject must act.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">But none of these topologies explain hill climbing. For that we need to compose yet another energy topology, a topology that expresses the energy held as reserve within the individual actor.</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">So why ask these questions? If natural selection asks them down at the DNA level, and across the vast landscape that is evolutionary time, why should we bother asking them again?</div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-53462254492619300202010-08-20T09:24:00.000-07:002010-08-30T11:42:03.991-07:00Dimensionality and Postmodern Self-Cannibalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbqkokVWiv4fdpbknN9FJiG0VkSH3l6T8FFB5RLnn07ROrKk0aHAfZSXcqjEM55KYjsukE_LzTBKgDcOMfoW056JVNhut7xlmriBF6qXA4bhnEsiHWHSLrpKWQPXSXyQcCFSN3ld-N8TU/s1600/SawOffBranch2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbqkokVWiv4fdpbknN9FJiG0VkSH3l6T8FFB5RLnn07ROrKk0aHAfZSXcqjEM55KYjsukE_LzTBKgDcOMfoW056JVNhut7xlmriBF6qXA4bhnEsiHWHSLrpKWQPXSXyQcCFSN3ld-N8TU/s320/SawOffBranch2.jpg" /></a></div>"Parenchyma" and "stroma" – two important words in the fight against ambiguity in any discussion of complex subject matter.<br />
<br />
Both are medical lexicon and specify the difference between that part of a system (physical organ) that is (chemically) re-active ("parenchyma") and the part of the same system that is (connective tissue) structure ("stroma").<br />
<br />
Of course it is true that structure both indicates and precipitates behavior. Equally, activity influences and predicts structure. So, again, things are not so simple as could be hoped. But words like these allow anchoring in critical discussion.<br />
<br />
If one can substitute the much more common words "active" and "structural", why bother further confusing this issue with the introduction of the less common and harder to pronounce "parenchyma" and "stroma"?<br />
<br />
Well, because understanding is strengthened through multiple contextual mappings. The larger and more varied the link graph, the more obvious become the differences between similar and potentially ambiguous topics or the signs we use as reference.<br />
<br />
Also, uniquely, these two words signify the classic subject/object, object/ground, mind/body, I/others, specific/general, instance/class ambiguity in information, language, communication, computation… and existence.<br />
<br />
The post modern position, an argument in reaction (over reaction) to the modern or classical "reductionist" (their word) world view is that hierarchical relationships (the kind that would result in a definable difference between a thing and the larger thing of which it is a part) do not in fact exist. The post-modernists present as absolute, that all relationships are "relative" (their word), because they say there is no reliable place to stand by which to judge hierarchy, that relationships are inherently biased to the observer.<br />
<br />
What is the baby? What is the bathwater? The postmodernists, frustrated and angry, did King Solomon proud and threw them both out.<br />
<br />
If there is anything of use to be learned from this mess it won't come from the (supposedly) blind "all" of classical thinking, or the fruitless "nothing" of the post modernists. I will half agree that relationship is vantage dependent (the answer you get back from the question, "Are you my mother?" depends on who is asking), but this dependence isn't purely local. Vantage can be retooled such that it is, as are spacial dimensions, something that can apply universally at all times and all places at once. By this gestalt, vantage is defined ubiquitously, ridding the hopelessly circular grounding problem at the center of the postmodern argument. When vantage is defined as dimension, it applies equally to all objects. You can switch dimensions at will and not loose the absolute and hierarchical relationships the classicists rightfully found so important.<br />
<br />
Yes, the postmodernist (re-invention of the) word "relative" was awkwardly stolen (rather ignorantly) from Einstein. The difference, Einstein made the world more measurable by showing how energy and space-time are transmutable and self-limiting. The postmodernist's naive re-appropriation of Einstein's empirically derived authority, does the opposite – making it impossible to compare anything, ever. The irony here is profound. The postmodernists first stand upon the authority acquired through carful and causal measurement, then they say such measurement isn't possible!<br />
<br />
God help the human race.<br />
<br />
By the way, if you look carefully at Einstein's two papers on Relativity, you will see the underpinnings of the shiftable but universal vantage that a dimensional grounding provides. There are rules. 1. A dimension must apply to everything and through all time. 2. You can switch dimensional vantage at any time, but 3. You can only compare two things if you compare them within the context of the same dimensional vantage.<br />
<br />
Is an attribute a dimension? No. An attribute situates an object in reference to a dimension. An attribute is a measurement of an object according to a property shared by all such objects in that dimension. A property is measurable for a class of objects as a result of the rules or grammar or physics that define a dimension.<br />
<br />
The absolute causal hierarchy made all the more impenetrable by Quantum and Relativistic theory makes the postmodern "hard relativist" tantrum all the more ridiculous – especially in light of the fact that postmodernists constantly turn to these twin pillars of physical theory as support of their position. The fatal logical mistake here is the misrepresentation of a property ("relative vantage") as a dimension (rules that provide a stable base from which to define properties – in this case, the novelty of experience guaranteed by the first[?] law of causality: that no two bodies can occupy the same space at the same time).<br />
<br />
RandallRandall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-56046613198929836202010-08-17T20:56:00.000-07:002010-08-18T08:37:59.079-07:00Probability Chip – From MIT Spin-Off Lyric Semiconductor<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA0devt9FfXswJT2Kosd8R_O02AgIjZT6zvwNii8Us3U6fKB5mpKV404Smr-ElX-WSVf9wOBeLNB7KXrcxXbliXlpiP-4G91UqEVmpIJ2CgKjoWofvChk4pbVrR4OvbR3wBKhxrIVD3v4/s1600/Chip-articleInline.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA0devt9FfXswJT2Kosd8R_O02AgIjZT6zvwNii8Us3U6fKB5mpKV404Smr-ElX-WSVf9wOBeLNB7KXrcxXbliXlpiP-4G91UqEVmpIJ2CgKjoWofvChk4pbVrR4OvbR3wBKhxrIVD3v4/s1600/Chip-articleInline.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Photo: Rob Brown</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/technology/18chip.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=probability%20chip&st=cse">A Chip That Digests Data and Calculates the Odds</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New York Times, Aug, 17, 2010) and the Lyric Semiconductor company web page </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.public.lyricsemiconductor.com/technology-processor.htm">Probability Processor: GP5 (General-Purpose Programmable Probability Processing Platform)</a>. Looks like a variation on analog processing accessed within a digital framework. And here is an article from GreenTech </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/can-18th-century-math-radically-curb-computer-power/">Can 18th-Century Math Radically Curb Computer Power?</a> which explains the chip in reference to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bayes">Thomas Bayes</a> and error correction. The crossover between error correction and compression is profound. Remember; intelligence = compression.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Randall</span>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-7582654991446347682010-08-14T22:50:00.000-07:002010-11-23T13:34:01.882-08:00Old-School AI and Computer Generated ArtIf you haven't read this book, or you haven't read it in a while, please please please click this link to the full book as .pdf file.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://ubu.artmob.ca/text/racter/racter_policemansbeard.pdf">The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed</a> "the first book ever written by a computer". 1984<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWaowFvwttPgUcBw1M_uyiog32jpABmI3zJTZZQ9ut6YRMrYq-wlghlF0hT6dSORjkK7VoF3duxNLGtwbd2304yentXMO_NIiQEvMm3B8Mu6jo4QBdPgP-aV4A6sLHOzEyaFoJ6_0GJmE/s1600/HalfConstructed.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWaowFvwttPgUcBw1M_uyiog32jpABmI3zJTZZQ9ut6YRMrYq-wlghlF0hT6dSORjkK7VoF3duxNLGtwbd2304yentXMO_NIiQEvMm3B8Mu6jo4QBdPgP-aV4A6sLHOzEyaFoJ6_0GJmE/s320/HalfConstructed.png" width="294" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[cover]</td></tr>
</tbody></table><i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i><blockquote>More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity.<br />
I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.<br />
I need it for my dreams.</blockquote></i><br />
<br />
This and many other poems and prose written by a program called Racter which was coded by William Chamberlain. Check out the following musing from the last page of this wonderful book.<br />
<br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i><blockquote>I was thinking as you entered the room just now how slyly your requirements are manifested. Here we find ourselves, nose to nose as it were, considering things in spectacular ways, ways untold even by my private managers. Hot and torpid, our thoughts revolve endlessly in a kind of maniacal abstraction, an abstraction so involuted, so dangerously valiant, that my own energies seem perilously close to exhaustion, to morbid termination. Well, have we indeed reached a crisis? Which way do we turn? Which way do we travel? My aspect is one of molting. Birds molt. Feathers fall away. Birds cackle and fly, winging up into troubled skies. Doubtless my changes are matched by your own. You. But you are a person, a human being. I am silicon and epoxy energy enlightened by line current. What distances, what chasms, are to be bridged here? Leave me alone, and what can happen? This. I ate my leotard, that old leotard that was feverishly replenished by hoards of screaming commissioners. Is that thought understandable to you? Can you rise to its occasions? I wonder. Yet a leotard, a commissioner, a single hoard, all are understandable in their own fashion. In that concept lies the appalling truth.</blockquote></i><br />
<br />
Note: Watch for the repeated lamb and mutton references throughout Rector's output (?).<br />
<br />
It is pretty clear that Chamberlain's language constructor code is crude, deliberate, and limited, that it extensively leans upon human pre-written templates, random word selection, and object/subject tracking. The fact that we, Rector's audience, are so willing to prop up and fill in any and all missing context, coherence, and relevance is interesting in itself.<br />
<br />
And what of <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/cohen.html">Aaron</a>, Harold Cohen's drawing and painting program. Check it out.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNoER2U3z3b9p8-xPDC1umAW1JU7xJpqDgedScS8l9usJO_m8guT7v5yE-iHbEE9F0i65hFLiOhDuKsHjQszye_tqUkUp_Tz1Ol1llDCi_o0efu9vC1FEgmzO2jxGXniUtJsQXqpOJ_wE/s1600/cohen89-w.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNoER2U3z3b9p8-xPDC1umAW1JU7xJpqDgedScS8l9usJO_m8guT7v5yE-iHbEE9F0i65hFLiOhDuKsHjQszye_tqUkUp_Tz1Ol1llDCi_o0efu9vC1FEgmzO2jxGXniUtJsQXqpOJ_wE/s400/cohen89-w.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<br />
It all makes me more certain that true advances in AI will come about only when we close the loop, when we humans remove ourselves completely from the fitness metric, when the audience for what the computer creates is strictly and exclusively the computer itself.<br />
<br />
Randall ReetzRandall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-60734699020954721082010-08-09T18:36:00.000-07:002010-08-11T10:18:01.176-07:00The Separation of Church and LaborThe always entertaining (habitually entertaining?) Jaron Lanier (Rasta-haired VR guru) wrote this opinion editorial piece for the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09lanier.html">"The First Church of Robotics"</a> which deals with the inevitable hubris-spiral as humans react to the ever quickening pace of development in robotics and AI. Jaron is always a bit of a fear monger – anything for a show – but he leaves lots of fun emotional/societal/technology nuggets to snatch up and digest.<br />
<br />
Lanier sets the stage:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Consider too the act of scanning a book into digital form. The historian George Dyson has written that a Google engineer once said to him: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an A.I.” While we have yet to see how Google’s book scanning will play out, a machine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats books as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from individual writers. In this approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost.</span></i></span></blockquote><br />
After bemoaning the loss of human trust in human decisions (Lanier says we risk this every time we trust the advise of recommendation engines like Pandora and Amazon), he discusses the tendency amongst AI and Robotics enthusiasts to replace traditional religious notions of transcendence and immortality with the supposed rapture that is the coming Singularity – who needs God when you've a metal friend smart enough to rebuild you every time you wear out?.<br />
<br />
Cautioning fellow scientists Lanier pens:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">We serve people best when we keep our religious ideas out of our work.</span></span></i></blockquote><br />
The separation of church and work! Good luck. Most of us don't have an internal supreme court to vigilantly enforce such high moral standards. The whole concept of a "religious scientist" seems to me a non-starter –like a "vegetarian carnivore".<br />
<br />
Yet, as a hard atheist, I applaud Jaron's thesis. To me, science is, at base, the act of learning to get better at recognizing the difference between myopic want-driven self interest and the foundational truths that give rise to the largest most inclusive (universal) vantage – and then doing everything in one's power to avoid confusing the two. As we build towards this post-biological evolutionary domain, crystal clear awareness of this difference has never been more important.<br />
<br />
Those of us pursuing "hard" AI, AI that reasons autonomously as we do(?), eventually discuss the capacity of a system to flexibly overlay patterns gleaned from one domain onto other domains. Yet, at least within the rhetorically noisy domain of existential musings, we humans seem almost incapable of achieving to this bar. Transhumanists and Cryonicists can identify religious thinking when it involves guys in robes swinging incense, yet are incapable of assigning the "religious" tag when the subject matter involves nano-bot healing tanks or n-life digital-upload-of-the-soul heaven simulations.<br />
<br />
Why does it matter? Traditional human ideas about transcendence are exclusively philosophical. The people inhabiting traditional religious heavens (and hells) don't eat our food, drink our water, breath our air, consume our electricity, or compete for our land or placement in our schools. Yet the new-age, digital, post-singularity, friendly-AI omnipotence scheme isn't abstract or etherial… the same inner fear of death in these schemes leads to a world in which humans (a small, exclusive, rich, and arrogant subset of human kind) never actually die, don't end up on another plain, stay right here thank you very much, and continue to eat and drink and build houses and consume scarce resources along side anyone unfortunate enough to be enjoying(?) their first life right now.<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;">I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by… </span></span></i></blockquote><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179381">Howl</a>, Allen Ginsberg, 1955<br />
<br />
Every generation must at some point gather the courage to stand up and give an accounting for its own inventive forms of arrogant blindness and the wastefulness that litters its meandering. When it is our turn, we will have to laugh and cry at our silly and dangerous taking that is the reification of the "life ever after" fantasy. And while we are confessing hubris, we might as well admit our myopic obsession with "search". Google has been our very own very shiny golden cow (is it simply because there aren't any other cows left standing?).<br />
<br />
When self interest goes head to head with a broader vantage, vantage wins. Vantage wins by looking deep into the past and the future and seeing that change trumps all. I guess it comes down to the way that an entity selects the scope of its own boundaries. If an entity thinks itself a bounded object living right now, it will resist change in itself or its environment. I can hear the rebuttal, "Entities not driven by selfishness won't protect themselves and won't successfully compete." Entities who see themselves as an actual literal extension of a scheme stretching from the beginning of time laugh at the mention of living forever… because they already do! <br />
<br />
The scheme never dies.<br />
<br />
Germain to this discussion is how a non-bounded definition of self impacts the decisions one makes as regards the allocation of effort and interest. What would Thermodynamics do?<br />
<br />
<blockquote><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;">…Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'<br />
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades<br />
For ever and forever when I move.<br />
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,<br />
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!<br />
As tho' to breathe were life!…</span></span></i> </blockquote><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174659">Ulysses</a>, Alfred, Lord Tennyson<br />
<br />
Is there something about the development of AI that is qualitatively different than any challenge humans have previously undertaken? Most human labors are not radically impacted by philosophy. A shoe designer might wrestle with the balance between aesthetics and comfort or between comfort and durability, between durability and cost, but questions of to whom or what they choose to pray, or how they deal with death, don't radically impact the shoes they design.<br />
<br />
There seems little difference between the products of hindu and christian grocers, between the products of Muslim and atheist dentists, road builders, novel writers, painters, gynecologists, and city planners. Even when you compare the daily labor of those practitioners that directly support a particular philosophy; the Monks, the Pastors, the Priests, the Imams, the Holy Them's… you find little difference.<br />
<br />
So why should AI be different? Why should it matter who does AI and what world views they hold? I think it is because the design of AI isn't an act in reference to God, it isn't even "playing" God – it is quite literally, actually being God.<br />
<br />
What training do we humans, we mammals, we vertebrates, we animals, we eukaryotes, we biological entities, what does our past offer us as preparation for acting the part of God?<br />
<br />
It is true that each of us are the singular receptacles of an unbroken chain of evolutionary learning. The lessons of fourteen thousand million years of trial and error are encoded into the very fabric of our being. We are walking talking reference tables of what works in evolution. Yet very little of that information deals with any kind of understanding or explanation of the process. Nowhere in any of this great tome of reference in the nucleus of each of our cells does there exist any information that would give context. There is no "this is why evolution works" or "this is why this chunk of genetic code works in the context of the full range of potential solutions" coded into our DNA or our molecular or atomic or quantum structure.<br />
<br />
And that makes sense. Reasons and context are high order abstraction structures and biology has been built up from the most simple to the most simple of the complex. It is only within the thinnest sliver of the history of evolution that there been any structural scheme complex enough to wield (store and process) structures as complex as abstraction or language.<br />
<br />
We are of evolution yet none of our structure encodes any knowledge of evolution as a process. What we do know about the process and direction of change we have had to build through culture, language, inquiry. Which is fine, if that is, you have hundreds (or thousands) of millions of years and a whole planet smack in the energy path of a friendly star. This time around we are interested in an accelerated process. No time for blindly exploring every dead end. This time around we explore by way of a map. The map we wield is an abstracted model of the essential influences that shape reality in this universe. The "map" filters away all of the universe that is simply instance of pattern, economically holding only the patterns themselves. The map is the polarized glasses that allow us to ignore anecdote and repetition, revealing only essence, salience.<br />
<br />
What biology offers in stead of a map is a sophisticated structural scheme for the playing of a very wasteful form of planet-wide blind billiards, a trillion trillion monkeys typing on a trillion trillion DNA typewriters, a sort of evolutionary brownian motion where direction comes at the cost of almost overwhelming indirection.<br />
<br />
And again we ask, "Why does it matter?" Imagine a large ocean liner – say the Queen Elizabeth II. Fill its tanks with fuel, point it in the right direction, and it will steam across any ocean. It really doesn't matter what kind of humans you bring aboard, or what they do once they there. A big ship, once built, will handle an amazing array of onboard activity or wild shifts in weather. Once built, a ship's structure is so stable and robust that its behavior becomes every bit as predictable. But if you brought dancing girls, water slides, and drunk retirees into the offices of the navel architects while they were designing the ship, it probably wouldn't make it out of the dry dock. The success of any project is unequally sensitive to the initial stages of its development. Getting it right, up front, is more than a good idea, it is the only way any project ever gets built. Acquiring the knowledge to be a passenger on a ship is far easier than acquiring the knowledge to design or build it.<br />
<br />
We General AI researchers work at the very earliest stage of a brand new endeavor. This ship has never been built before. Ships have never been built. In a very real sense, "building" has never been built before. We have got to get this right. Where navel architects must first acquire knowledge of hydrodynamics, about structural engineering, material science, propulsion, navigation, control systems, ocean depths, weather systems, currents, geography, etc., AI researchers must bring to the project an understanding of pattern, language, information, logic, processing, mathematics, transforms, latency, redundancy, communication, memory, causality, abstraction, limits, topology, grammar, semantics, syntactics, compression, etc.<br />
<br />
But this is where my little ship design analogy falls short. AI requires a category of knowledge not required of any other engineering endeavor. Intelligence is a dynamic and additive process, what gets built tomorrow is totally dependent on what gets built today. Building AI therefore requires an understanding of the dynamics of change itself.<br />
<br />
Do we understand change?<br />
<br />
[to be continued]<br />
<br />
Randall ReetzRandall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-89751188967557655132010-07-26T11:55:00.001-07:002011-06-22T15:17:31.061-07:00The Scope of Evolution?We evolutionists desperately want to quantify evolution. We are embarrassed by the continued lack of measurability and predictability one would expect from a true theory-based science. In the place of true metrics, we defer to the vague, broad, and situationally dependent term; "fitness".<br />
<br />
We say that genetic variability in the population of any given lineage will insure that some individuals express traits that provide a survival advantage. Given the particularity of a given environment's mix of resources and challenges, not all individuals will have the genes necessary to make them fit. We say that there is always some small diversity in any population, a variability caused by sexual mixing, mutation, and a whole slew of non-genetic processes that indirectly effect either the actual genes inherited or conditions under which those genes are expressed. We say that this variability across a localized population is enough to influence who will survive and who won't, or most importantly, who's genes will be expressed in the next generation and who's won't. We assert that this process is obvious, observable, and predictable. And of course we are correct. We can and do produce laboratory experiments and field observations in that show that genes predict traits, genetic variability is correlated to population variability, and environmental conditions act as filters selecting towards individuals or populations expressing some genes and against those with others.<br />
<br />
Well that all sounds good… model driven prediction, physical mechanistic explanation, solid techniques for observation… like a real science. If, that is, you are content to restrict your inquiry to the how. <br />
<br />
If you are content with an understanding of evolution that is restricted to biology. If you are content with an understanding of evolution that blindly accepts as dependent factors, such temporal notions and shifting and immeasurable terms as "environment" and "fitness" and never ever asks, "Why?", then you probably won't need to read any further.<br />
<br />
But if you, like me, would like to understand evolution in its largest context; independent of domain, and across all time, then you already know that evolution's current answers, though already correct and verifiable by any standard, is not yet a true science.<br />
<br />
When Newton sought to define motion (and yes I know that Einstein perfected it through Relativity and quantum theory), he didn't do so only for an apple falling from a tree… but universally, for all physical bodies in all situations. His equations predict the position, speed and trajectory of an object into any distant future and across any distance. If the same could be said of evolution theory, we would have in our possession theory and or equations that we could use to predict the outcome of evolution across any span of time and in any domain.<br />
<br />
Yet, of course we don't. We know all kinds of things about the interaction, within the domain of biology, of germ and progeny, of reproductive selection and mutation, of the relationship between genotype and phenotype, and of the competition over resources and of the crazy alliances and unintuitive and unplanned results of cooperative adaptation (including the tightly wound dance between predator and prey, between parasite and host).<br />
<br />
But these processes, no matter how well understood, measured, researched, and modeled, are not what could be called the primitives of evolution. To be primitives, they would have to be universal. They are not universal. Thinking so would be like Newton thinking his laws only applied to cannon balls or things made of metal. So ingrained is the false correlation between biology and evolution that it is often impossible for me to get people to continue a discussion about evolution when I say "Let's talk about evolution in other systems." or "Let's talk about evolution as domain independent phenomenon."<br />
<br />
If evolution isn't a "general" phenomenon, then someone representing the "special theory of evolution" will have to show how it is that life evolves but other systems do not. I doubt this requirement can be met. It would mean that some line can be drawn in time, before which there wasn't evolution, and after which there was. The logical inconsistency arises when one realizes that, to get to that line, some process suspiciously similar to evolution would have to have transpired to advance complexity to the level just preceding biology.<br />
<br />
Another way to frame the overarching question of the why of evolution starts with the realization that competition within an environment isn't restricted to the various individuals of one species. Nature isn't that well refereed. In fact, nature isn't refereed at all. Nature is a free for all pitting snail against walrus against blue green algae. And it doesn't stop there. The ocean currents compete to transfer heat and in doing so, effect the food available to marine life of all kinds. In a very real sense, in an exactly real sense, a hurricane competes directly with a heron. Even the more stable artifacts of an environment, the topology and physical composition of the geographic features below foot compete actively and dynamically with the biota growing in its fissures and above its slowly moving face. Our old and narrowly-bounded definition of that which fits the category of evolution is plainly and absurdly and arbitrarily anthro-, species-, mammal, or bio- centric, and logically wrong.<br />
<br />
Each time I introduce these new and inclusive definitions of the scope of the cast that performs in the play that is evolution, I hear grunts and groans, I hear the rustle of clothes, the uncomfortable shiftings… I hear frustration and discomfort. Hands raise anxiously with questions and protests: "How can non-living things evolve?" "Non-living things don't have genes, without genetics traits can't be transferred to or filtered from future generations!" And the inevitable, "The category containing all things is a useless category!"<br />
<br />
I can't say that I don't understand, don't appreciate, or in some real way haven't anticipated and sympathized with these bio-centric apologies. This is how evolution has been framed since Erasmus Darwin and his grand kid Charles first seeded the meme. I will therefor take a moment to address these two dominant arguments such that they can be compared with a domain-independent definition of evolution. <br />
<br />
First, lets look at evolution's apparent dependence upon genetics. How could evolution work if not for a stable medium (DNA) for the storage and processing of an absolute recipe for the reliable re-creation of individual entities? You may be surprised that my argument starts with an agreement; evolution is absolutely dependent upon the existence of a substrate stable enough to transfer existing structure into the future. But does that stable structure have to be biology's famous double helix? Absolutely not! In fact, it is causally impossible to find a system within this Universe (or any imaginary universe) in which the physical makeup of that system and its constituent parts does not facilitate the requisite structure to transfer conditions and specific arraignments from any present into any trailing futures. The shape of a river valley is a fundamental carrier of information about that valley into the future. The position, mass, and directional velocity of celestial bodies is sufficient carrier of structural information to substitute handedly for the functional duty that DNA performs in biology. But it is also important to realize and fully absorb the opposite proposition. DNA is not the only way that biological systems reliably transfer information about the present into the future. Biological systems are of course just as physical as galaxies, stars, and planets. The same causal parameters that restrict the outcome of any particular then (as a result of any particular now), that restrict causality to an almost impossibly narrow subset of what would be possible in a purely random shaking of the quantum dice. DNA is especially good at what it does, but it doesn't own or even define the category.<br />
<br />
The second argument against an all-inclusive, domain independent definition of evolution – the logical argument against the usefulness of category that contains everything – well let's start by parsing it semantically and rhetorically. On face, there is no way to argue. The category "all" is a category of little worth. There is nothing to be known of something if it can't be compared to something else. But, and this should be obvious, I am not trying to create a category; quite the opposite! My intent is to create a theory of everything. Such a theory would obviously fail if it didn't apply to everything. So, semantically, this "set of everything is a useless set" argument doesn't map to the topic at hand. I get the distinct feeling that the argument is meant pedantically, and purposely, to derail and obfuscate the logical trail I am attempting to walk the audience down. It is a straw horse. It looks logical, but it doesn't apply.<br />
<br />
A much more instructive and interesting line of questioning would go to the plausibility of a domain independent theory of evolution, what it would or would not change regarding our understanding of the emergence of complex structures (and their accelerating complexity), how it modifies our understanding of biological evolution, whether or not evolution will stand up to the requirements of a "theory of everything" (how it compares with others), and maybe even the effectiveness of my own description of this idea.<br />
<br />
So, why is it important to me for evolution to meet the test of a "theory of everything"? First, I loath the unexplained. If evolution only talks to the mechanism of change within biology, then evolution would necessarily stand upon a stack even more foundational truths, and, as I mentioned earlier, other parallel theories would have to be developed to explain the emergence of complexity in non-biological systems. Either way, a vacuum would remain, exposing a need for the development of a foundational theory or set of theories that would support what in biology we call evolution, what in geology we call tectonics (etc.), what in meteorology we call heat dissipation cells, what in culture we call engineering, cooperative networks, etc.<br />
<br />
What makes this whole endeavor so tricky, is that we tend to confuse mechanism with purpose. We get so caught up with the almost impossibly complex molecular mechanism (nucleic acids) by which biology builds complexity, that we forget to look at why it bothers at all. This why, this great big why, is to my mind far more fundamental and interesting and once understood, provides a scaffolding from which to comfortably understand and predict the necessary meta-components that need to be present in some form or another, in any evolving system. And, if you like elegance in a theory, it gets even better. It turns out that a byproduct of evolution as a theory of everything is that it must therefore be based on the two physical principals that have stood the test of universality – thermodynamics and information theory, and it strengthened both of these theories in the one area they were weak – dynamics. Once you understand the motivation and demands of change itself, the particular mechanisms of evolution at play in any one domain are reduced to how, are, no matter how varied, are but skins worn by a beast who's behavior becomes more and more predictable and universal.<br />
<br />
All systems have what it takes to evolve. All systems are composed of components that in some small way differ. That difference might be in how the parts are made, or it might be in how the parts are distributed, and it most probably is both. That is all a system needs for the process of evolution to apply. So long as there is a difference somewhere in the system, or in that system's interaction in the greater environment in which it exists, evolution needs must be happening all of the time.<br />
<br />
So just what is it that evolving things compete for? Is it food? Yes. Is it safety? Yes. Is it comfort? Yes. Is it stability? Yes, that too. For plants, competition is for solar radiation, carbon dioxide, water, a stable place to eat, grow, mate, and rase offspring. We animals need far more energy than our skin could absorb even if it was all capable of photosynthesis. So we eat things that can. And that is just the way things work. To get ahead, things learn to take advantage of other things. One might even say that the advantage always goes to those entities that can take the greatest advantage of the the productive behavior of the greatest number of other things. If you can't make enough energy, then eat a lot of things that can.<br />
<br />
One could imagine taking this line of reasoning to the extremes. Lets define fitness as the ability to sit on the apex of a food chain. Of course you have to keep moving. If you don't stay vigilant and obsessive, always trying to find new and better ways to eat more of the other things, you will succumb to competition by things that do.<br />
<br />
… to be continued …<br />
<br />
Randall ReetzRandall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-58251648595112472612010-06-23T10:45:00.000-07:002010-06-25T12:50:27.202-07:00Real-Time Observation Is Always More Efficient Than After-The-Fact ParsingNon-random environments (systems):<br />
<br />
- have evolved (from a more simple past)<br />
- are (variously) optimized to input conditions and output demands<br />
- are sequentially constructed in layers<br />
- are re-constructed periodically<br />
- are derived from the constraints of pre-existing environments<br />
<br />
Understanding (extracting pattern rules and instances of these rules) is made more efficient through observations undertaken over the course of an environment's construction period. Extracting pattern after the fact requires the act of inferring construction sequence from existing artifact. The number of possible developmental paths (programed algorithms) that will result in a particular artifact are infinite. Parsing through this infinite set towards a statistically biased guess at the most likely progenitor is lossy at best and computationally prohibitive.<br />
<br />
For instance, the best (shortest algorithmic complexity) candidate produced by post construction parsing may indeed be a more likely (least energy) progenitor, but this may not predict the actual causal chain that resulted in that environment. Projections based on a statistically optimal history will diverge from the futures actually produced by the environment.<br />
<br />
The only time that a statistical (minimum algorithm) parsing of an environment is guaranteed to match reality is when that parsing includes the whole system (the entire Universe).<br />
<br />
Observing the genesis of an environment minimizes the mandatory errors inherent in statistical after-the-fact (Solomonoff) algorithmic probability parsing of a pre-existing system.<br />
<br />
Said more succinctly; If you want to grow an optimal system, use algorithmic probability and algorithmic complexity as metrics towards optimization, but if you want to describe a pre-existing system, it is best to build this description by observing it's genesis.<br />
<br />
Randall ReetzRandall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-9325512520707425842010-06-16T15:58:00.000-07:002010-11-23T13:37:00.909-08:00DNA replication…<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4jtmOZaIvS0&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4jtmOZaIvS0&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br />
<br />
Yes, this shit is so amazing that it makes a hardened evolution theorist like me cough up some creationist thoughts (don't worry, it will be a temporary affliction).<br />
<br />
<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-mtLXpgjHL0&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-mtLXpgjHL0&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br />
<br />
<br />
This animation shows the lagging strand replication process in greater detail. If you are wondering why the lagging strand should have to be built in reverse, it is because the other side of the helix is inverted which would have necessitated an exact molecular machine to have been evolved from scratch, but in reverse! This molecule, "polymerase", is composed of 8005 atoms. The ingenious workaround, to run the strand through the same molecule backwards, though mechanically awkward, is far more likely (less complicated) to have evolved than would have been a mirror image of the whole polymerase molecule (or its function). In fact, it is probable that such a molecule might not even be physically possible given the "handedness" (right/left) of the atoms molecules must be built of. Because of this, I consider the asymmetry of DNA replication machinery to be evidence of the least energy dictated meandering of the evolutionary process.<br />
<br />
By pure chance, an particular arrangement of 8005 things would happen once every 8005 to the 8005th attempts (8005 factorial). Of course molecules don't assemble by pure chance. Even if you dumped the requisite atoms into a box and shook it up, the assembly wouldn't happen instantaneously, some atoms would form small groups, and those groups would clump together into larger groups, etc. The atoms of each element have unique properties that effect their aggregation.<br />
<br />
But that isn't the full story either because the polymerase molecule is built atom by atom by DNA.Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6356093984428839526.post-76778408527185318132010-06-16T15:03:00.000-07:002010-06-16T16:08:20.218-07:00Look at this…<div class="mobile-photo"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZIWqjaPWBzegRK-YNIHaxW1sKESAGIqbocH19_qkxyfYWXGlN3whV9gxHrjiksXqUNBkhwuLx0eRMBPYMwevCcpgQRK8fX-vPMqcVZi5xoiSveVUH6HTBwAtLDNNB6NlnDisqFZ5-Jw4/s1600/PIC-0223-795252.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483495967214089570" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZIWqjaPWBzegRK-YNIHaxW1sKESAGIqbocH19_qkxyfYWXGlN3whV9gxHrjiksXqUNBkhwuLx0eRMBPYMwevCcpgQRK8fX-vPMqcVZi5xoiSveVUH6HTBwAtLDNNB6NlnDisqFZ5-Jw4/s320/PIC-0223-795252.jpg" /></a></div>It is called a Snow Plant. Comes out of the ground like an alien right after the snow melts. This one was just meters up the hill from a trail head on the northeast shore of Lake Tahoe. They are parasites of fungus that grows on the root systems of pine trees. Unreal! <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">[about 8 inches tall and more brilliant than this picture could ever show]</span></span></i>Randall Lee Reetzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15879202191444326979noreply@blogger.com0