Devaluing Survival

The goal of evolution is not survival. Rocks survive much better, longer, and more consistently than biological entities. This should be patently obvious. Survival is a tailing of evolution and achieves a level of false importance probably because those of us doing the observation are so short lived and thus value survival above almost everything else.

In biology as in any other system, evolution is not concerned with nor particularly interested in individual instanciations of a scheme. A being is but a carrier of scheme. And even that is unimportant to THE scheme which can only be one thing – the race towards ever faster and more complete degradation of structure and energy.

To this (or any other) universal end, schemes carry competitive advantage simply and only as a function of their ability to "pay attention to", to abstract, the actual physical grammatical causal structure of the universe. And why is this important? Because a scheme will always have a greater effect on the future of the universe if it "knows" more about the future of the universe. Knowing is a compression exercise. Knowing is two things. 1. acquiring a description of the whole system of which one is a part, and 2. the ability to compress that description to its absolute minimum. A system that does these things better than another system has a greater chance of out-competing its rivals and inserting its "knowledge" into future versions of THE (not "its") scheme. To the extent that an entity pays more attention to its survival (or any other self-centered goal) than to THE scheme, is the extent to which another entity will be able to out-compete it.

Darwin was a great man with an even greater idea (his grandfather Erasmus even more so). But neither had the chops or the context to see evolution at a scope larger than individual living entities or the "species" within which they were grouped competing amongst each other over resources. There was very little understanding of the concept "resources" during his lifetime – certainly not at the meta or generalized level made possible by today's understanding of information and thermodynamics and as a result of Einstein's work its liberation of the symmetry that separated energy, time, distance, and matter. However, Darwin's historically forgivable myopia has out lasted its contextual ignorance and seems instead to be a natural attribute or grand attractor of the human mind. His sophomoric views are repeated ad nauseum to this day.

Randall Reetz

Compression as Intelligence (Garbage Out, Brilliance In)

I am convinced that the secret to developing intelligence (in any substrate, including your brain) lies in the percentage of the data coming in that you are willing (or forced) to toss. Lossy compression is the key to intelligence. Of course there is a caveat… you can't just trash anything and everything.

The first line of the book I am writing about evolution: "What matters is what matters, knowing what matters and how to know it matters the most."

I am convinced that evolving systems can only work towards mechanisms that process salience if they are forced to maximize the amount of stuff they can trash.

If you are forced to get rid of 99.999 percent of everything that comes in, well you will have to get good at knowing the difference between needles and hay and you will have to get good at knowing the difference in a hurry. The "needles and hay" metaphor doesn't map well to what I am talking towards. If the system you are dealing with is so unstructured as to fit the haystack metaphor, you really aren't doing anything I would classify as intelligence. If there is nothing of structure in the haystack you are storing than your compression system should already have tossed the whole thing out.

Many techniques for the filtering of essence, for finding pattern, for storing pattern and for storing pattern of pattern have been developed. The most impressive reduce raw input streams and store pattern from the most general to the most specific as hierarchically stratified graphs.

Being forced to reduce data to storage formats that maximize lossy-ness minimizes necessary storage. But that is just a perk. What really gates intelligence is the amount of a complex system (or map thereof) that can be made proximal to immediate processing. Our brains might be big and mighty, but what really matters is how much of the right parts of what is stored can be brought together in one small space for semi-real-time simulations processing. Information, when organized optimally for maximal storage density, will also be information that is ideally organized for localized serialization and simultaneity of processing.

To think, a system has to be able to grab highly compressed pattern hierarchies and move them into superposition on top of each other for near instantaneous comparison. You can't do this with a whole brain's worth of data, no matter how well organized it is.

Lets say you have to store everything you know about every sport you have ever heard of, and you have to do it in a very limited space. You will be forced to build a hierarchy of grammars in which general concepts shared in every sport (opponents, the goal to win, a set of rules and consequences, physical playing geometries, equipment, etc.), with layers of groupings that allow for the similarities between some sports and so on up to the specifics that are are only present in each individual sport. Keep compressing this set. Always compress. Try all day (or all night) for even more compression. Compress until you can't even get to lots of the specifics any more. Keep compressing. Dump the sports you don't care about. Keep on throwing stuff out.

Now lets say I have some sort of morbid sense of humor and I tell you that you are going to have to store everything you encounter and everything you think about, your entire life, in that same database that you have optimized for sports.

You will have to learn to look for the meta-patterns that will allow you to store your first romance in a structure that also allows you to store everything you know about kitchen utensils and geo-politics and the way the Beatles White Album makes you feel when it is windy outside.

The necessity to toss, enforced by limited storage and an obsession to compress will result in domain-blending salience hierarchies. It is why we can find deep similarities between music and geological topologies. It is why we can "think".

For years people have tried to come up with the algorithms of thought. What we need instead is to build into our artificial systems, a very mean and ornery compression task master that forces over time, all of our disparate sensation streams into the same shared graph.

Once you have all of your memories stored within the same graph, by necessity sharing the same meta-pattern, the job of evolving processing algorithms is made that much easier.

An intelligent system will spend most if not all of its time compressing data. We have a tendency to bifurcate the behavior of a mind into storage on the one hand, and processing on the other. I am beginning to think that the thing we call "thinking" and "thought" is exclusively and only a side-effect of constant attempts at compression – that there really isn't anything separate that happens outside of compression. Is this possible?

Randall Reetz

Biology Is Too Slow!

Humans are pumping a lot of energy around. When it comes to energy we don't mess around. We like our energy highly concentrated. We dig it up, refine it, convert it, and pump it through wires or pipes or the air like there is no tomorrow.

Nature is adaptive. Right? Nature finds a way. Right? So where are the animals and plants that suckle upon high power lines, that find their adaptive way into fuel tanks and batteries? Surely they could. Surely the same nature that goes gaga around mid ocean heat vents and can learn to metabolize the worst toxins we can throw into ponds... that good old adaptive nature should find a way to co-evolve with 50 thousand volt transmission lines.

And there are other (new) tits for nature to suckle. I fully expect our air to become less and less transparent to radio transmissions. If we can build devices that can grab radio energy right out of the air.… surely airborne molds and other microorganisms can do so. Are they? Doesn't look like it. What weird life forms would be best suited to radio-metabolism? Plants grab photons in the visible (radiation) band. Photosynthesis (in plants) is a respiratory affair - requiring oxygen and nitrogen for the primary reactions, but they also rely on heavy and rigid structural support to get up into the air where they can maximize their surface interface and solar exposure. Actually, when you think about it, a plant would be more efficient if it spent no energy fighting gravity, and instead laid flat on the surface of the land. Plants must only grow into the air to compete away from shade the shade of other plants and to increase respiration surface area.

Anyway, and this is a bit of an aside, but would there be a way for lighter than air super-colonies of single celled animals to maximize access to radio energy without the need for the heavy structure and vascular transport terrestrial plants employ? Maybe the radio scenario is ludicrous. Surely there is lots of background microwave energy constantly streaming by. Surely radio waves have been around as long as biology has been around. If radio was a good source of energy, nature would have already found a way. Maybe big bang radiation doesn't pack much of a wallop. Is it possible that communication intended radio is more energetic? More localized. Easier to exploit. I can imagine some type of group-dynamic in which individual floating animals or proto-animals learn to orient themselves such that they become a reflective parabola or fresnel lens concentrating radio energy to a focal point where other animals absorb the energy in some sort of symbiotic bio-community. Many other scenarios are conceivable.

Are plants learning to seed near highways to take advantage of air movement and carbon dioxide? There are a million ways in which human activity effects environments in ways that provide energy and stability clines. Surely life is reacting in step.

The pace of culture is so much faster than most organisms can genetically respond. The smallest organisms with the shortest life spans that have the greatest populations spread over the largest geographies are the organisms most likely to take advantage of our frenetic environmental messings.

Are they? Is anyone paying attention?

What is computing?

This is the most important question of our time… yet so rarely asked. Computing technology increasingly shapes every aspect of human behavior, culture, resource use, health, commerce, and governance. A passive stance on the question that effects all other questions is increasingly dangerous to the future of all humans, of life, of evolution itself.

In the 60's we created NASA, an elaborately funded research program to uncover the knowledge and develop the technology to "go to the moon". Yet one would be hard pressed to justify the cost to society of contraptions that do nothing more than take a few people to a near-by rock… almost nothing of the NASA program can be used outside of the narrow focus of getting a few tens of miles off the surface of Earth (at tens of millions of dollars per pound).

Ironically, and inadvertently, the practical mathematics, programming, and computational techniques developed and honed by NASA in the pursuit of its expensive and arguably impractical goals may be the only pertinent contribution to show for the tens of trillions of dollars spend on this ill-concieved and irrational "research" program.

Talk about putting the cart before the horse… akin to building a global library system and book binding before developing a written language.

We are surrounded by lifeless rocks. We didn't need to send a few Air-force test pilots to the moon to figure that out. The practical scope of our chemically propelled rockets hardly avails us to the nearest little frozen or boiling neighbor planets in this corner of this one little Solar System. Ever attempt a phone conversation with 40 min. gaps between utterances?

The interesting stuff in this Universe (at least the small corner we have access to) is right here on our little Earth. It is us… and more than that, it is not so much what we have done, but what we will do and how what we will do effects what other future things will do because we set them into motion. That is our job. In a very real way, we are the first things that understand the job description despite the fact that it has always been there and has always been the same. This understanding should give us a leg up on the process. Should.

There are two kinds of knowledge: the first, historical, the second, developmental. When we go somewhere, we do nothing more than uncover that which already is. Compare this to development, where we create things that never were. In this universe, if there was a force that was prescient in creating one star or planet, that same force must have been prescient in the creation of Earth. We don't have to go to Mars to find the forces that created Earth. And we certainly don't need to send humans over there even if we do want intimate knowledge of a place like Mars.

At any rate, computing is a universal process. Computing is agnostic to domain. You can compute about particle physics and you can compute about knitting. Computing is an abstraction processing medium. Computing is what brains do. Computing is not restricted to the category that is biological minds. Learning how to compute is learning how to discover. The goal becomes the unknown… becomes un-prejudiced developmental discovery. The machinery of pattern matching… of salience… of the perception of essence across domains.

I am obsessed with this biggest "why" of computing. I don't think the computational "why" can be separated from the biggest "why" of existence in general... of evolution… of the march of complexity.

The convergence of thermodynamics (the way action effects energy dissipation) and information science (the relative probabilities of structure and the cost of access, processing and transference) guide my approach to these questions. Least energy laws dictate the evolution of all systems. Computing is evolution. Abstraction systems allow prediction. Prediction grants advantage. Advantage influences the topology of the future. The better a system gets at accurately abstracting it's environment, the more it will influence the future of abstraction systems. Computing is the mechanics of evolution... always has been. Are we designing computing to this understanding of the methodology of complexity handling?

Lets suppose we gave the scientists at NASA a choice. We ask them, "What technology represents a greater potential towards the eventual understanding and even physical exploration of the Universe, rocket engines or computers?", What would be the rational and obvious answer? If we ever hope to get any real distance in this universe it won't be by burning liquid oxygen and kerosene. Most things in this universe are millions of years away even at the speed of light. Rocket engines hardly move at all when compared with even the too-slow speed of light. Getting anywhere in this universe will demand tunneling beneath the restrictions that are space and time… no rocket engine will ever do that for us. I am not an advocate for space exploration, but if I was, I would be pushing computation over rocket propulsion.

It is time to advocate a culture wide push towards the advancement of an ever-expanding understanding of computing. To the extent we succeed, all of the future will be defined by and fueled by our discoveries. If we choose instead to spend our limited and most expensive money towards rockets we had better hope the universe can be understood through the understanding of explosions and destruction and spending long periods of time floating in space. Come on people! Think!

[ more to come… ]