Evolution: 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.
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.
Evolution: The development and selection of better and better prediction schemes.
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.
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.
Randall Lee Reetz
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
The 2nd Law: Is Increased Entropy Stochastic (incidental) or Causal (intrinsic)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Randall Lee Reetz
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.
The Problem with Darwin…
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| Ya… how would you look as Darwin? |
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, caution is its own form of rhetoric, as potentially dangerous as its more obviously tyrannous cousins.
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.
Randall Lee Reetz
The 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
… to be continued …
Randall Reetz
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
… to be continued …
Randall Reetz
Just Where is the Computer that Computes the Universe? (Steven Wolfram's invisible rhetoric)
Do Black Holes warp the universe such that it is self-computable? Kurt Godel famously proved that a computer has to be larger than the problem being computed. This places seemingly fatal constraints on the size of the universe as a computation of itself. Saying as it has become popular to do, that the universe is just one of an infinite set of parallel universe doesn't solve the problem. Even infinities can not be said to be larger than themselves.
TED talk by Stephen Wolfram on the computable universe.
Is it possible that black holes work as Kline bottles for the whole Universe – stretching space-time back around onto itself? If so, it may be possible to circumvent Godel's causal constraints on the computability of the self, as well as the entropic leaking demanded by the second law of thermodynamics. I admit that these questions are not comfortable. They certainly don't result in the kind of ideas I like to entertain. They spawn ideas that seem to be built of need and not logic. They are jokes written to support a punch line.
But something has to give. Either Godel and Turing are wrong, or there is a part of our universe in which they don't apply. There is no other option. If there is a part of the universe not restricted by incompleteness than black holes are obvious candidates if for no other reason than we don't know much about them. I am at once embarrassed by the premise of this thought and excited to talk openly about what is probably the core hiccup in our scientific understanding of the universe. Any other suggestions? At the very least, this problem seems to point to (at least) five options; 1. a deeper understanding of causality will derive Godel and Turning from a deeper causal layer that also has room for super-computable problems. 2. Godel and Turing are dead wrong. 3. the universe is not at all what it seems to be, rendering all of physics mute, and 4. the universe is always in some real way, larger than itself, and 5. evolution IS the computation of the universe, it happens at the only pace allowable by causality, is an intractable program, and can not be altered or reduced, (event cones, the only barriers between parallel simultaneous execution).
I am challenged by the first option, find the second option empirically problematic, am rhetorically repulsed by the third, simply do not know what to do with the fourth, the fifth is where I place my bets but I don't fully understand the implications or the parameters. Personal affinities aside, we had better face the fact that our understanding of the universe is at odds with the universe itself. That we have a set of basic laws that contradict the existence of the universe as a whole is problematic at best. Disturbing.
One of the unknowns that haunt our effort to understand the universe as a system is the ongoing confusion between what we think of as "primary" reality on the one hand and "descriptive" reality on the other. Real or just apparent, it is a distinction that has motivated the clumsily explorations of the "Post-Modern" theoretical movement – it deserves better. I am not so romantic to believe that this dichotomy represents a real qualitative difference between the material and the abstract (made up as it is of the same "real" materials), but this confusion may indeed hint towards a sixth option that, once explained and understood, will obliterate the causal contradictions that have so confused our understanding of the largest of all questions. When a chunk of reality is used as abstraction signifying another part of reality or a part the same reality of which the abstraction is built, does that shift in vantage demand a new physics, a new set of evaluation semantics? What modifications does one have to perform to E = mC^2 when one is computing the physical nature of the equation itself? What new term is to be added to our most basic physical laws such that the causal and the representative can be brought into harmony?
My own view is that the universe, like all systems, like any system, is always in the only configuration it can be in at that time. Wow, that sounds Taoist and I absolutely hate it when attempts at rationality result in assessments that are so easily resonant with emotionally satisfying sentimentality (What the Bleep, and such). But the Second Law clearly points to a maxed out rate as the only possible reading of process at all scales. Computation of anything, including the whole of the universe, is always limping along at the maximum rate dictated by each current configuration. The rate of the process, of the computation, accelerates through time as complexities stack up into self optimized hierarchies of grammar, but the rate is, at each moment, absolutely maxed out.
Are these daft notions chasing silly abstraction-bounded issues or do they point to a real "new [and necessary] kind of science"?
OK, as usual, Mr. Wolfram has expansive dreams – awesomely audacious and attractively resonant notions. Though, from my own perspective, a perspective I will say is more sober and less rhetorical, there are some huge problems that beg to be exposed.
Wolfram's declares: the universe is, at base, computation. Wow, talk about putting the carriage before the horse. That the universe and everything in it is "computing" is hard to dispute. Everywhere there is a difference there will be computation. So long as there is more than one thing, there is a difference. But computation demands stuff. What we call computation is always at base a causal cascade attempting to level an energetic or configurational topology. If you want to call that cascade "computation", well I won't disagree. But no computation can happen unless the running of it diminishes to some extent an energy cline. Computation is slave to the larger more causal activity that is the dissipation of difference. That a universe will result in computation an entirely different assertion.
When Wolfram says that computation exists below the standard model causality that is matter and force, time and space, I am suspicious that he is seeking transcendence, a loophole, access by any means out of the confines of the strictures imposed by physical law. That he is smart and talented and prodigiously effective towards the accomplishment of complex and practical projects does not in itself mean that his musings are not fantastic or monstrous.
Let's play a thought experiment. Let's start from the assumption that Wolfram is correct, that the universe is at base pure computation. His book and this talk hint towards the idea that pure computation running through computational abstraction space, will eventually produce the causality of this universe… and many others. Testing the validity of this assertion is logically impossible. But what we can test is the logical validity of the notion that one could, from the confines of this finite universe, use computation to reach back down to the level of pure computation from which a universe can be made or described. At this level, Turing and Godel both present lock-tight logic showing how Wolfram's assertions are impossible.
In his own examples, Wolfram uses a mountain of human computational space built on billions of years of "computation" (evolution) and technological configurations to make his "simple" programs run. There is NOTHING simple about a program that took a mind like Wolfram's to build (stacked as it is on top of an almost bottomless mountain of causal filtering reaching back to the big bang (or before).
To cover for these logical breaches, Wolfram recites his "computational equivalence" mantra. This is a restating of Alan Turing's notion that a computable problem is computable on any so-called "Turing Complete" computer. But the Turing Machine concept does not contend with the causally important constraint that run-time places on a program. Of course there are non-computable problems. But even within the set of problems that a computer can run and run to completion, there are problems so large that they require billions of times longer to run than the full life cycle of the universe. Problems like these really aren't computable in any practical sense – causality being highly time and location sensitive (isn't that what "causality" means?).
And then there is the parallel processing issue, its potentials and its pitfalls. One might (a universe might), in the course of designing a system that will compute huge programs, decide to break them apart and run sections of the problem on separate machines. Isn't that what nature has done? But there are constraints here as well. Some problems can not be broken apart at all. Some that can, break apart into an unwieldy network constrained by time sensitive links dependent upon fast, wide, and accurate communication channels. if program A needs the result of program B before it can initiate program C but program A only is only relevant for one year and program B takes 2 years to run?
A large percentage of the set of all potential programs, though theoretically run-able on Turing Machines, are not practically run-able given the finite timescales and computational material resource availability. If there is a layer of causality below this universe, and that layer is made of much smaller and much more abundant stuff, than it is conceivable that Godel's strictures on the size of a computer won't conflict with the notion that this Universe could be an example of a Turning Complete computer capable of running the universe as a program.
But Wolfram doesn't stop there. In addition to asserting that a universe is the result of a computation, he says that we humans (and, or, our technology), will be able to write a small program that perfectly computes the universe and that it will be so simple (both as a program and presumably to write it) that we will be able to run it on almost any minimal computer. His cites as example, "rule 30", the fractal equation variation that seems to produce endless variety along an algorithmic theme, as evidence that this universe describing meta-program, is as easy to discover. One has to ask: "Would the running of such a program bud off another universe, or is Wolfram's assertion intentionally restrained to abstraction space?" Given the boldness of his declaration that the universe is a computation, it is reasonable to assume that his statements regarding the discovery of a program that computes a universe is meant in the literal sense. Surely he can talk to the issue of abstraction space vs. causal space, the advantages and constraints of each, and how programs use this difference to compute different types of problems. If he does, he doesn't reveal this understanding to his audience. The distinction between abstraction and causality is slippery and central to the concept of computation.
I am convinced that Stephen Wolfram is so lost in the emotional motivations that push him towards his "computable universe" rhetoric that none of his considerable powers of intellect can save him from the fact that he didn't get the evolution memo. Evolution IS the computation. If it could happen any faster it would have. If he is simply saying that our new understanding of computation will increase the rate and reach of evolution, well then I agree. But if he is saying that our first awkward steps into computation reveal enough of the unknown to expose the God program, the program that will complete all other programs (in a decade), well I can only say that he is nuts.
Stephen is a smart guy. The fact that a mind so capable can overlook, even actively avoid the simple logic that shows terminal flaws in his thesis is yet another reminder of the danger that is hubris. That he never talks to his own motivations, or the potential fallacies upon which his theory depends should be worrisome to anyone listening. I suspect that, like religion, his rhetoric so closely parallels the general human rhetoric, that it will be a rare person who can look behind the curtains and find these logical inconsistencies (no matter how obvious).
I applaud Mr. Wolfram's work. The world is richer as a result. But none of his programming should be taken as guarantee that his theory, at the level of a computational universe is sound.
Randall Reetz
TED talk by Stephen Wolfram on the computable universe.
Is it possible that black holes work as Kline bottles for the whole Universe – stretching space-time back around onto itself? If so, it may be possible to circumvent Godel's causal constraints on the computability of the self, as well as the entropic leaking demanded by the second law of thermodynamics. I admit that these questions are not comfortable. They certainly don't result in the kind of ideas I like to entertain. They spawn ideas that seem to be built of need and not logic. They are jokes written to support a punch line.
But something has to give. Either Godel and Turing are wrong, or there is a part of our universe in which they don't apply. There is no other option. If there is a part of the universe not restricted by incompleteness than black holes are obvious candidates if for no other reason than we don't know much about them. I am at once embarrassed by the premise of this thought and excited to talk openly about what is probably the core hiccup in our scientific understanding of the universe. Any other suggestions? At the very least, this problem seems to point to (at least) five options; 1. a deeper understanding of causality will derive Godel and Turning from a deeper causal layer that also has room for super-computable problems. 2. Godel and Turing are dead wrong. 3. the universe is not at all what it seems to be, rendering all of physics mute, and 4. the universe is always in some real way, larger than itself, and 5. evolution IS the computation of the universe, it happens at the only pace allowable by causality, is an intractable program, and can not be altered or reduced, (event cones, the only barriers between parallel simultaneous execution).
I am challenged by the first option, find the second option empirically problematic, am rhetorically repulsed by the third, simply do not know what to do with the fourth, the fifth is where I place my bets but I don't fully understand the implications or the parameters. Personal affinities aside, we had better face the fact that our understanding of the universe is at odds with the universe itself. That we have a set of basic laws that contradict the existence of the universe as a whole is problematic at best. Disturbing.
One of the unknowns that haunt our effort to understand the universe as a system is the ongoing confusion between what we think of as "primary" reality on the one hand and "descriptive" reality on the other. Real or just apparent, it is a distinction that has motivated the clumsily explorations of the "Post-Modern" theoretical movement – it deserves better. I am not so romantic to believe that this dichotomy represents a real qualitative difference between the material and the abstract (made up as it is of the same "real" materials), but this confusion may indeed hint towards a sixth option that, once explained and understood, will obliterate the causal contradictions that have so confused our understanding of the largest of all questions. When a chunk of reality is used as abstraction signifying another part of reality or a part the same reality of which the abstraction is built, does that shift in vantage demand a new physics, a new set of evaluation semantics? What modifications does one have to perform to E = mC^2 when one is computing the physical nature of the equation itself? What new term is to be added to our most basic physical laws such that the causal and the representative can be brought into harmony?
My own view is that the universe, like all systems, like any system, is always in the only configuration it can be in at that time. Wow, that sounds Taoist and I absolutely hate it when attempts at rationality result in assessments that are so easily resonant with emotionally satisfying sentimentality (What the Bleep, and such). But the Second Law clearly points to a maxed out rate as the only possible reading of process at all scales. Computation of anything, including the whole of the universe, is always limping along at the maximum rate dictated by each current configuration. The rate of the process, of the computation, accelerates through time as complexities stack up into self optimized hierarchies of grammar, but the rate is, at each moment, absolutely maxed out.
Are these daft notions chasing silly abstraction-bounded issues or do they point to a real "new [and necessary] kind of science"?
OK, as usual, Mr. Wolfram has expansive dreams – awesomely audacious and attractively resonant notions. Though, from my own perspective, a perspective I will say is more sober and less rhetorical, there are some huge problems that beg to be exposed.
Wolfram's declares: the universe is, at base, computation. Wow, talk about putting the carriage before the horse. That the universe and everything in it is "computing" is hard to dispute. Everywhere there is a difference there will be computation. So long as there is more than one thing, there is a difference. But computation demands stuff. What we call computation is always at base a causal cascade attempting to level an energetic or configurational topology. If you want to call that cascade "computation", well I won't disagree. But no computation can happen unless the running of it diminishes to some extent an energy cline. Computation is slave to the larger more causal activity that is the dissipation of difference. That a universe will result in computation an entirely different assertion.
When Wolfram says that computation exists below the standard model causality that is matter and force, time and space, I am suspicious that he is seeking transcendence, a loophole, access by any means out of the confines of the strictures imposed by physical law. That he is smart and talented and prodigiously effective towards the accomplishment of complex and practical projects does not in itself mean that his musings are not fantastic or monstrous.
Let's play a thought experiment. Let's start from the assumption that Wolfram is correct, that the universe is at base pure computation. His book and this talk hint towards the idea that pure computation running through computational abstraction space, will eventually produce the causality of this universe… and many others. Testing the validity of this assertion is logically impossible. But what we can test is the logical validity of the notion that one could, from the confines of this finite universe, use computation to reach back down to the level of pure computation from which a universe can be made or described. At this level, Turing and Godel both present lock-tight logic showing how Wolfram's assertions are impossible.
In his own examples, Wolfram uses a mountain of human computational space built on billions of years of "computation" (evolution) and technological configurations to make his "simple" programs run. There is NOTHING simple about a program that took a mind like Wolfram's to build (stacked as it is on top of an almost bottomless mountain of causal filtering reaching back to the big bang (or before).
To cover for these logical breaches, Wolfram recites his "computational equivalence" mantra. This is a restating of Alan Turing's notion that a computable problem is computable on any so-called "Turing Complete" computer. But the Turing Machine concept does not contend with the causally important constraint that run-time places on a program. Of course there are non-computable problems. But even within the set of problems that a computer can run and run to completion, there are problems so large that they require billions of times longer to run than the full life cycle of the universe. Problems like these really aren't computable in any practical sense – causality being highly time and location sensitive (isn't that what "causality" means?).
And then there is the parallel processing issue, its potentials and its pitfalls. One might (a universe might), in the course of designing a system that will compute huge programs, decide to break them apart and run sections of the problem on separate machines. Isn't that what nature has done? But there are constraints here as well. Some problems can not be broken apart at all. Some that can, break apart into an unwieldy network constrained by time sensitive links dependent upon fast, wide, and accurate communication channels. if program A needs the result of program B before it can initiate program C but program A only is only relevant for one year and program B takes 2 years to run?
A large percentage of the set of all potential programs, though theoretically run-able on Turing Machines, are not practically run-able given the finite timescales and computational material resource availability. If there is a layer of causality below this universe, and that layer is made of much smaller and much more abundant stuff, than it is conceivable that Godel's strictures on the size of a computer won't conflict with the notion that this Universe could be an example of a Turning Complete computer capable of running the universe as a program.
But Wolfram doesn't stop there. In addition to asserting that a universe is the result of a computation, he says that we humans (and, or, our technology), will be able to write a small program that perfectly computes the universe and that it will be so simple (both as a program and presumably to write it) that we will be able to run it on almost any minimal computer. His cites as example, "rule 30", the fractal equation variation that seems to produce endless variety along an algorithmic theme, as evidence that this universe describing meta-program, is as easy to discover. One has to ask: "Would the running of such a program bud off another universe, or is Wolfram's assertion intentionally restrained to abstraction space?" Given the boldness of his declaration that the universe is a computation, it is reasonable to assume that his statements regarding the discovery of a program that computes a universe is meant in the literal sense. Surely he can talk to the issue of abstraction space vs. causal space, the advantages and constraints of each, and how programs use this difference to compute different types of problems. If he does, he doesn't reveal this understanding to his audience. The distinction between abstraction and causality is slippery and central to the concept of computation.
I am convinced that Stephen Wolfram is so lost in the emotional motivations that push him towards his "computable universe" rhetoric that none of his considerable powers of intellect can save him from the fact that he didn't get the evolution memo. Evolution IS the computation. If it could happen any faster it would have. If he is simply saying that our new understanding of computation will increase the rate and reach of evolution, well then I agree. But if he is saying that our first awkward steps into computation reveal enough of the unknown to expose the God program, the program that will complete all other programs (in a decade), well I can only say that he is nuts.
Stephen is a smart guy. The fact that a mind so capable can overlook, even actively avoid the simple logic that shows terminal flaws in his thesis is yet another reminder of the danger that is hubris. That he never talks to his own motivations, or the potential fallacies upon which his theory depends should be worrisome to anyone listening. I suspect that, like religion, his rhetoric so closely parallels the general human rhetoric, that it will be a rare person who can look behind the curtains and find these logical inconsistencies (no matter how obvious).
I applaud Mr. Wolfram's work. The world is richer as a result. But none of his programming should be taken as guarantee that his theory, at the level of a computational universe is sound.
Randall Reetz
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
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
Evolution: Optimizing a Definition of Fitness
We think of evolution as a process that optimizes organisms (things) through the filter of fitness. Fitness as means - the species - as end. I have long suspected that this interpretation is wrong-headed, and results in conceptual mistakes that ripple though all of science, blinding us to much that could be understood about the Universe, process, and the basic shape and behavior of reality.
So let's flip it. We'll instead, re-frame evolution as a process that uses things (organisms, species, systems, ideas, etc.) as a means (channel, resource, armature, vehicle) for the optimization of fitness. From this inverted vantage, optimizing the criteria of fitness is the goal – species, nothing more than a convenient means.
It always feels wrong to talk of evolution's "goals". Certainly a universe doesn't start out with a plan or agenda. Things like plans and agendas are only possible within advanced abstraction apparatus like a brain or computer. Universe's start out simple and chaotic. Only chance causal interactions played out amongst a universe sized accumulation of matter and force over ridiculous amounts of time will lead to the types of rare and energy demanding structures that can "think" up things like plans and agendas. So when I talk here of "a process that optimizes", I make use concepts and terms that are more generally associated with self, ideation, and will – with the products of advanced abstraction machinery found in humans and maybe eventually in thinking machines. But what I mean to convey is the direction of a process. That processes have direction and that direction is (or can be) independent of the types of advanced computation necessary for things like planing and intent is in fact, the exact conceptual jump that the idea or discovery of "evolution" demands. Evolution = direction without intent.
The directionality we see in evolving systems (all systems) is blatantly and obviously non-random. Our job then is to understand, explain, and ultimately, exploit this understanding. Because we humans have trouble imagining non-random direction coming from systems without a brain, a soul, an agenda, we are left with a slim set of emotionally acceptable options; anthropomorphizing the universe and evolution, inserting a deity, or simply rejecting evolution (or reality) out of hand. The non-emotional option, the science option, evolution, recovers from this dissonance through the application of inductive logic, physical evidence, and frankly, by simply offering a emotionally dissonant option.
The thesis of this essay is the suggestion that evolution might be agnostic to optimization of species and is instead simply using species as a conduit for the optimization of this thing called fitness. That fitness might in fact be more real, and species, ethereal.
This entire domain is so fraught with potential miss-interpretation. I feel a constant urge to over-explain, to be extra careful, to make sure the reader isn't thinking one thing when I mean something else. For instance I feel a need to define the term "species", especially because I am using it in a more general way than is usually required within the boundaries of its original domain, biology. This is because I am convinced that evolution is a universal process, that it has nothing in particular to do with biology or life, that it happens in all systems, all of the time, an unavoidable aspect of any reality.
So when I write "species" I mean the thing or system that is "evolving" – the animal, the planet, the culture, the idea, the group attitude in line at the post office this morning. And in the context of this essay, I use "species" to mean the thing upon which "fitness" acts (as judge, jury, pimp, or executioner). Species is the thing, fitness the criteria that molds the thing.
But by this definition, species is corporal and measurable, suggesting that fitness is… is what? If we are talking about something, shouldn't we have some way of examining it, measuring it, comparing it, holding it in our hands, flipping it over, squeezing it, spitting it open and looking at its parts? That seems a more reasonable proposition for species than for fitness.
We like to think we can man-handle a thing like species, take it to the lab and do lab things. But maybe that is more illusion than truth. We can dissect a frog, but that particular frog isn't really the species "frog". The species "frog" is an average, a canonical concept, a Platonic solid, a moving target, an arbitrarily bounded collection, a gelatinous arrow through foggy potentialities.
I was in route to show that "fitness" is a real thing, but all I accomplished was a picking away at the real-ness of "species". Maybe that will end up being more helpful anyway. The colloquial image of species, even amongst evolution theorists has always seemed more visceral, more thing-like than fitness. We point to a single nervous animal on the savanna and declare, "that is gazelle". Worse, we often fail to make a semantics distinction between that declaration and the categorical; "gazelle is that". That fitness is a much harder thing to point to, really doesn't mean it is less real, or as I have shown, that real-ness applies to either.
Now that I've reduced both species and fitness to the realm of concept, it should be easier to argue my thesis.
Even at the concept level, "species" is a thorny concept fraught with pedagogy and hubris. It is hard to look at a penguin, a porpoise, or a planet and imagine something more amazing, more evolved than its current form. Which probably goes a long way to explain why we have a natural tendency to overlay onto the concept "species" notions of perfect form, of an apex, a pre-determined goal. But this certainly has less to do with species and more to do with the limits of our cognitive facility. It would be absurd to assume that this particular now is in some way special, that forms are complete and that we just happen to inhabit the planet just at the point when evolution has finally and completely finished its big 14 billion year project.
OK, the apologies have been met out, the slippery territory marked, the standard arguments abutted, the inconsistencies delineated, the usual misinterpretations admitted. These are standard precursors to any serious discussion in the study of evolution and bare witness to both the complexity of the subject and the apparent inability of the brain to readily make sense of its many dimensions.
So why should I want to reorder the relative hierarchy of fitness and species? For one, I have always felt the standard Darwinian definition of evolution to be a bit circular. Wow, before that comment ruins my standing, I had better get to work defending Darwin. I am a "standard model" realist. Darwin got most or all of evolution correct. Especially if you restrict your focus to biology. Darwin is the dude! The positions I detail here are meant as additions, as icing on the cake Darwin baked. But Darwin built his theory around life and his bio-centrist focus on evolution restricts and warps the applicable idea-space it scopes. I always say that Darwin explained the how of evolution with regard to biology, and that I am interested in the why of evolution with regard to all systems.
To restrict the scope of evolution to biology, is to somehow draw a line in the sand between life and not-life, a special sauce within life that categorically separates it from all other systems. I can't find that line. So I am left with the responsibility of understanding and defining evolution as a domain independent attribute of any system or system of systems.
Structurally, all systems are ordered as hierarchical stacks. Each level receives aggregate structures from lower (previously constructed) levels and produces from these, new super-aggragates, that it in turn passes to the next higher level. That this process of aggregate layering is historically dependent is obvious. The non-obvious mapping is to energy. The lowest levels of the hierarchy, the earliest levels, represent high energy processes, energy levels that would rip apart aggregates at higher levels. In this universe, all systems are built upon the aggregation processes laid down in the earliest moments, aggregations that occur at the upper limits of heat and pressure – strings, quarks, sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules. Each corresponding to a matching environmental energy level, an energy level that is cooler and less pressurized than the ones that came before it. The universe gets cooler and more dispersed. Always. The growth of complexity, evolution, is dependent upon this predictable and unavoidable dissipation of energy over time.
Those who would argue that life is special, that evolution is exclusive to it, well they are obligated to draw a definitive boundary between life and everything else, and because life, like everything else, is dependent upon the historical layering of aggregate systems, will have to draw that line historically. They will have to show a moment in time before which there was not life or evolution and after which there was life and evolution.
There are many ways to define life in order that such a line could be drawn. If you say, as most do, that life is that set of systems that incorporate and utilize both R and D Nucleic acids, well there is surely some moment in the past which would accurately delineate those earlier systems which didn't have both RNA and DNA, from the later systems that did. Such a definition is some what arbitrary, but all categorical definitions are. But if you seek instead to hinge your definition of life to the process of evolution, then you are faced with a tautologically intractable problem. Either you must accept the nonsensical proposition that the universe started with RNA/DNA preformed, or the more rational causal proposition that evolution is independent of and proceeded biology, preparing over vast periods of time, the aggregate ingredients necessary for the super-aggregate we call life. If you insist despite this logic, that evolution is a property exclusive to biology, then you are left with the thorny problem of defining aggregation processes happening simultaneous to and independent of biology. Processes that continue to produce atoms, molecules, stars, planets, galaxies, cultures, ideas, sand dunes, ocean currents, etc. And, you must also show how these continuous and omnipresent processes are qualitatively different when they happen outside of systems that use RNA and DNA from those that do. But that isn't enough, you must also show either that no system after biology will ever evolve, of that the entire future of evolution will happen within the confines of biological systems.
The evidence and logic weighs overwhelmingly on the side of life being an arbitrarily bounded category, and evolution defining a process unbounded by domain, history, or complexity. Both of which are difficult concepts for humans to accept. We like to think we belong to a category made exclusive by some secret sauce, some magic that applies in some measure only to life, and which has reached its zenith in the human form or spirit. We like to imagine evolution to be that process that shaped the shapeless gasses of primal soup into the perfect form that we now enjoy. Wow. The ego and hubris drips and pools.
If I may, back to fitness. The above arguments are crafted to shake we humans free of our innate bio/human/self centrism and to show how such hubris works to emphasize contemporary corporal form over timeless ephemeral process, placing a sort of artificial spotlight on species and downgrading the in contrast, fitness. Its only natural. And it is wrong.
The tendency to focus on species is easy to understand. If you are looking at an animal and asking questions about evolution and process it is only natural that the scope of your thinking would be restricted to that animal, that species, that family of life and its struggle to survive. Even when you back your self out to a vantage wide enough to include all of life, the full fan of Linnaean Taxonomy over the full 4.5 billion year crawl, the focus is still thing, still survival, still some sort of cosmic engineering project. It is only when you back all the way out, when you look at all that is, the entire Universe, every moment since the big bang, life and the stuff between, in, and of it, that you might be forced to ask questions big enough to frame the why of evolution.
The why of evolution has to be big enough to comfortably hold all change, all systems, any aggregate and any aggregate chain, not just those that succeed, not just those that are fit, not just things that can be called things… everything! Any process that explains the existence of one system should also be able to explain every other system. Universality, at this depth of scope demands a bigger reason than can be explained by the concept "species". Darwin's big how in biology then becomes a local mapping to a specific domain. It isn't wrong, it just isn't universal. You can know everything about pianos, but won't really understand music until you know enough about enough instruments that you begin to see the formative patterns that unite, from which all instruments are informed.
Species, be it a valid concept at all, must be but a subset, an example, a non-special representative, a member of a perfectly inclusive, and domain independent set. Sets that include everything are not informative as a set. So we look elsewhere. That species, as a label, pointing to the subject of evolution, can equally be applied to any thing, forces us to look elsewhere for that which explains the big why of change. Change must not reside in thing, product, tailings, result, or even detritus. If the big why isn't thing, but has to explain thing, any thing, all things, than the big why must be a process or action or modifier or pressure. Some common attribute of any change regardless of domain. What process is agnostic to domain?
In a word, entropy. In an attempt to determine the maximum work that could be extracted from any source of energy, steam era engineers teased apart the relationship between source and output and found an intriguing and strangely universal leakage. Energy, when used, degrades, diffuses, is no longer as useful or available to the original process. When scientists discovered the same leak, this time with structure, a strange universality began to appear. Energy and information, force and structure, an unexpected symmetry. Then Einstein revealed the exact relationship between energy, time, space, and mass, allowing thermodynamic transforms on all physical terms. Despite initial objections by Stephen Hawking (and others attracted to the notion that nooks and crannies of the universe might provide respite from the second law's rigid causal prescriptions), Leonard Susskind and others have brought both the quantum world of the impossibly small and the black hole world of the impossibly big, together under a shared entropic umbrella. What we are left with, like it or not, is a universal. A universal that is universal to all physical domains and dimensions, regardless of scale. Wow. That doesn't happen very often in nature. That hasn't happened in science. Ever. Significant?
In his 1927 book, The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington, put it this way:
"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
Any theory or assessment of evolution that is not written in response to thermodynamics, information theory, and entropy would seem to be a theory not particularly interested in validity. That the laws of thermodynamics and evolution both direct their unblinking stares upon the domain of change would seem to me an invitation to at least begin to consider the possibility of a concerted union between the two.
[more to come…]
Randall Reetz
So let's flip it. We'll instead, re-frame evolution as a process that uses things (organisms, species, systems, ideas, etc.) as a means (channel, resource, armature, vehicle) for the optimization of fitness. From this inverted vantage, optimizing the criteria of fitness is the goal – species, nothing more than a convenient means.
It always feels wrong to talk of evolution's "goals". Certainly a universe doesn't start out with a plan or agenda. Things like plans and agendas are only possible within advanced abstraction apparatus like a brain or computer. Universe's start out simple and chaotic. Only chance causal interactions played out amongst a universe sized accumulation of matter and force over ridiculous amounts of time will lead to the types of rare and energy demanding structures that can "think" up things like plans and agendas. So when I talk here of "a process that optimizes", I make use concepts and terms that are more generally associated with self, ideation, and will – with the products of advanced abstraction machinery found in humans and maybe eventually in thinking machines. But what I mean to convey is the direction of a process. That processes have direction and that direction is (or can be) independent of the types of advanced computation necessary for things like planing and intent is in fact, the exact conceptual jump that the idea or discovery of "evolution" demands. Evolution = direction without intent.
The directionality we see in evolving systems (all systems) is blatantly and obviously non-random. Our job then is to understand, explain, and ultimately, exploit this understanding. Because we humans have trouble imagining non-random direction coming from systems without a brain, a soul, an agenda, we are left with a slim set of emotionally acceptable options; anthropomorphizing the universe and evolution, inserting a deity, or simply rejecting evolution (or reality) out of hand. The non-emotional option, the science option, evolution, recovers from this dissonance through the application of inductive logic, physical evidence, and frankly, by simply offering a emotionally dissonant option.
The thesis of this essay is the suggestion that evolution might be agnostic to optimization of species and is instead simply using species as a conduit for the optimization of this thing called fitness. That fitness might in fact be more real, and species, ethereal.
This entire domain is so fraught with potential miss-interpretation. I feel a constant urge to over-explain, to be extra careful, to make sure the reader isn't thinking one thing when I mean something else. For instance I feel a need to define the term "species", especially because I am using it in a more general way than is usually required within the boundaries of its original domain, biology. This is because I am convinced that evolution is a universal process, that it has nothing in particular to do with biology or life, that it happens in all systems, all of the time, an unavoidable aspect of any reality.
So when I write "species" I mean the thing or system that is "evolving" – the animal, the planet, the culture, the idea, the group attitude in line at the post office this morning. And in the context of this essay, I use "species" to mean the thing upon which "fitness" acts (as judge, jury, pimp, or executioner). Species is the thing, fitness the criteria that molds the thing.
But by this definition, species is corporal and measurable, suggesting that fitness is… is what? If we are talking about something, shouldn't we have some way of examining it, measuring it, comparing it, holding it in our hands, flipping it over, squeezing it, spitting it open and looking at its parts? That seems a more reasonable proposition for species than for fitness.
We like to think we can man-handle a thing like species, take it to the lab and do lab things. But maybe that is more illusion than truth. We can dissect a frog, but that particular frog isn't really the species "frog". The species "frog" is an average, a canonical concept, a Platonic solid, a moving target, an arbitrarily bounded collection, a gelatinous arrow through foggy potentialities.
I was in route to show that "fitness" is a real thing, but all I accomplished was a picking away at the real-ness of "species". Maybe that will end up being more helpful anyway. The colloquial image of species, even amongst evolution theorists has always seemed more visceral, more thing-like than fitness. We point to a single nervous animal on the savanna and declare, "that is gazelle". Worse, we often fail to make a semantics distinction between that declaration and the categorical; "gazelle is that". That fitness is a much harder thing to point to, really doesn't mean it is less real, or as I have shown, that real-ness applies to either.
Now that I've reduced both species and fitness to the realm of concept, it should be easier to argue my thesis.
Even at the concept level, "species" is a thorny concept fraught with pedagogy and hubris. It is hard to look at a penguin, a porpoise, or a planet and imagine something more amazing, more evolved than its current form. Which probably goes a long way to explain why we have a natural tendency to overlay onto the concept "species" notions of perfect form, of an apex, a pre-determined goal. But this certainly has less to do with species and more to do with the limits of our cognitive facility. It would be absurd to assume that this particular now is in some way special, that forms are complete and that we just happen to inhabit the planet just at the point when evolution has finally and completely finished its big 14 billion year project.
OK, the apologies have been met out, the slippery territory marked, the standard arguments abutted, the inconsistencies delineated, the usual misinterpretations admitted. These are standard precursors to any serious discussion in the study of evolution and bare witness to both the complexity of the subject and the apparent inability of the brain to readily make sense of its many dimensions.
So why should I want to reorder the relative hierarchy of fitness and species? For one, I have always felt the standard Darwinian definition of evolution to be a bit circular. Wow, before that comment ruins my standing, I had better get to work defending Darwin. I am a "standard model" realist. Darwin got most or all of evolution correct. Especially if you restrict your focus to biology. Darwin is the dude! The positions I detail here are meant as additions, as icing on the cake Darwin baked. But Darwin built his theory around life and his bio-centrist focus on evolution restricts and warps the applicable idea-space it scopes. I always say that Darwin explained the how of evolution with regard to biology, and that I am interested in the why of evolution with regard to all systems.
To restrict the scope of evolution to biology, is to somehow draw a line in the sand between life and not-life, a special sauce within life that categorically separates it from all other systems. I can't find that line. So I am left with the responsibility of understanding and defining evolution as a domain independent attribute of any system or system of systems.
Structurally, all systems are ordered as hierarchical stacks. Each level receives aggregate structures from lower (previously constructed) levels and produces from these, new super-aggragates, that it in turn passes to the next higher level. That this process of aggregate layering is historically dependent is obvious. The non-obvious mapping is to energy. The lowest levels of the hierarchy, the earliest levels, represent high energy processes, energy levels that would rip apart aggregates at higher levels. In this universe, all systems are built upon the aggregation processes laid down in the earliest moments, aggregations that occur at the upper limits of heat and pressure – strings, quarks, sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules. Each corresponding to a matching environmental energy level, an energy level that is cooler and less pressurized than the ones that came before it. The universe gets cooler and more dispersed. Always. The growth of complexity, evolution, is dependent upon this predictable and unavoidable dissipation of energy over time.
Those who would argue that life is special, that evolution is exclusive to it, well they are obligated to draw a definitive boundary between life and everything else, and because life, like everything else, is dependent upon the historical layering of aggregate systems, will have to draw that line historically. They will have to show a moment in time before which there was not life or evolution and after which there was life and evolution.
There are many ways to define life in order that such a line could be drawn. If you say, as most do, that life is that set of systems that incorporate and utilize both R and D Nucleic acids, well there is surely some moment in the past which would accurately delineate those earlier systems which didn't have both RNA and DNA, from the later systems that did. Such a definition is some what arbitrary, but all categorical definitions are. But if you seek instead to hinge your definition of life to the process of evolution, then you are faced with a tautologically intractable problem. Either you must accept the nonsensical proposition that the universe started with RNA/DNA preformed, or the more rational causal proposition that evolution is independent of and proceeded biology, preparing over vast periods of time, the aggregate ingredients necessary for the super-aggregate we call life. If you insist despite this logic, that evolution is a property exclusive to biology, then you are left with the thorny problem of defining aggregation processes happening simultaneous to and independent of biology. Processes that continue to produce atoms, molecules, stars, planets, galaxies, cultures, ideas, sand dunes, ocean currents, etc. And, you must also show how these continuous and omnipresent processes are qualitatively different when they happen outside of systems that use RNA and DNA from those that do. But that isn't enough, you must also show either that no system after biology will ever evolve, of that the entire future of evolution will happen within the confines of biological systems.
The evidence and logic weighs overwhelmingly on the side of life being an arbitrarily bounded category, and evolution defining a process unbounded by domain, history, or complexity. Both of which are difficult concepts for humans to accept. We like to think we belong to a category made exclusive by some secret sauce, some magic that applies in some measure only to life, and which has reached its zenith in the human form or spirit. We like to imagine evolution to be that process that shaped the shapeless gasses of primal soup into the perfect form that we now enjoy. Wow. The ego and hubris drips and pools.
If I may, back to fitness. The above arguments are crafted to shake we humans free of our innate bio/human/self centrism and to show how such hubris works to emphasize contemporary corporal form over timeless ephemeral process, placing a sort of artificial spotlight on species and downgrading the in contrast, fitness. Its only natural. And it is wrong.
The tendency to focus on species is easy to understand. If you are looking at an animal and asking questions about evolution and process it is only natural that the scope of your thinking would be restricted to that animal, that species, that family of life and its struggle to survive. Even when you back your self out to a vantage wide enough to include all of life, the full fan of Linnaean Taxonomy over the full 4.5 billion year crawl, the focus is still thing, still survival, still some sort of cosmic engineering project. It is only when you back all the way out, when you look at all that is, the entire Universe, every moment since the big bang, life and the stuff between, in, and of it, that you might be forced to ask questions big enough to frame the why of evolution.
The why of evolution has to be big enough to comfortably hold all change, all systems, any aggregate and any aggregate chain, not just those that succeed, not just those that are fit, not just things that can be called things… everything! Any process that explains the existence of one system should also be able to explain every other system. Universality, at this depth of scope demands a bigger reason than can be explained by the concept "species". Darwin's big how in biology then becomes a local mapping to a specific domain. It isn't wrong, it just isn't universal. You can know everything about pianos, but won't really understand music until you know enough about enough instruments that you begin to see the formative patterns that unite, from which all instruments are informed.
Species, be it a valid concept at all, must be but a subset, an example, a non-special representative, a member of a perfectly inclusive, and domain independent set. Sets that include everything are not informative as a set. So we look elsewhere. That species, as a label, pointing to the subject of evolution, can equally be applied to any thing, forces us to look elsewhere for that which explains the big why of change. Change must not reside in thing, product, tailings, result, or even detritus. If the big why isn't thing, but has to explain thing, any thing, all things, than the big why must be a process or action or modifier or pressure. Some common attribute of any change regardless of domain. What process is agnostic to domain?
In a word, entropy. In an attempt to determine the maximum work that could be extracted from any source of energy, steam era engineers teased apart the relationship between source and output and found an intriguing and strangely universal leakage. Energy, when used, degrades, diffuses, is no longer as useful or available to the original process. When scientists discovered the same leak, this time with structure, a strange universality began to appear. Energy and information, force and structure, an unexpected symmetry. Then Einstein revealed the exact relationship between energy, time, space, and mass, allowing thermodynamic transforms on all physical terms. Despite initial objections by Stephen Hawking (and others attracted to the notion that nooks and crannies of the universe might provide respite from the second law's rigid causal prescriptions), Leonard Susskind and others have brought both the quantum world of the impossibly small and the black hole world of the impossibly big, together under a shared entropic umbrella. What we are left with, like it or not, is a universal. A universal that is universal to all physical domains and dimensions, regardless of scale. Wow. That doesn't happen very often in nature. That hasn't happened in science. Ever. Significant?
In his 1927 book, The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington, put it this way:
"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
Any theory or assessment of evolution that is not written in response to thermodynamics, information theory, and entropy would seem to be a theory not particularly interested in validity. That the laws of thermodynamics and evolution both direct their unblinking stares upon the domain of change would seem to me an invitation to at least begin to consider the possibility of a concerted union between the two.
[more to come…]
Randall Reetz
Cognition Is (and isn't):
What is really going on in cognition, thinking, intelligence, processing?
At base cognition is two things:
1. Physical storage of an abstraction
2. Processing across that abstraction
Key to an understanding of cognition of any kind is persistence. An abstraction must be physical and it must be stable. In this case, stability means, at minimum, the structural resistance necessary to allow processing without that processing undoly changing the data's original order or structural layout.
The causal constraints and limits of both systems, abstraction and processing, must work such that neither prohibits or destroys the other.
Riding on top of this abstraction storage/processing dance is the necessity of a cognition system to be energy agnostic with regard to syntactic mapping. This means that it shouldn't take more energy to store and process the string "I ate my lunch" than it takes to store and process the string, "I ate my house".
Syntactic mapping (abstraction storage) and walking those maps (abstraction processing) must be energy agnostic. The abstraction space must be topologically flat with respect to the energy necessary to both store and process.
Thermodynamically, such a system, allows maximum variability and novelty at minimum cost.
What if's… playing out, at a safe distance, simulations, virtualizations of events and situations which would, in actuality, result in huge and direct consequences, is the great advantage of any abstraction system. A powerful cognition system is one that can propagate endless variations on a theme, and do so at low energy cost.
And yet. And yet… syntactical topological flatness carries its own obvious disadvantages. If it takes no more energy to write and read "I ate my house" than it does to write or process the statement, "I ate my lunch", how does one go about measure validity in an abstraction? How does one store and process the very necessary topological inequality that leads to semantic landscapes… to causal distinction?
The flexibility necessary in an optimal syntactic system, topological flatness, works against the validity mapping that makes semantics topologically rugged, that gives an abstraction syntactic fidelity.
This problem is solved by biology, by mind, though learning. Learning is a physical process. As such it is sensitive to the direction of time. Learning is growth. Growth is directional. Growth is additive. Learning takes aggregate structures from any present and builds super-aggragate structures that can be further aggregated in the next moment.
I will go so far as suggesting that definitions of both evolution and complexity are hinged on the some metric of a system to physically abstract salient aspects of the environment in which it is situated. This abstraction might be as complex as experience stored as memory in mind, and it may be as simple as a shape that maximizes (or minimizes) surface area.
A growth system is a system that can not help but to be organized ontologically. A system that is laid up through time is a system that reflects the hierarchy of influence from which its environment is organized. Think of it this way, the strongest forces effecting an environment will overwhelm and wipe out structures based on less energetic forces. Cosmological evolution provides an easy to understand example. The heat and pressure right after the big bang only allow aggregates based on the most powerful forces. Quarks form first, this lowers the temperature and pressure enough for sub atomic particles, then atoms. Once the heat and pressure is low enough, once the environmental energy is less than the relatively weak electrical bonds of chemistry, molecules can precipitate from the atomic soup. The point is that evolved systems (all systems) are morphological ontologies that accurately abstract the energy histories of the environments from which they evolved. The layered grammars that define the shape and structure (and behavior) of any molecule, reflect the energy epochs from which they were formed. This is learning. It is exactly the same phenomenon that produces any abstraction and processing system. Mind and molecule, at least with regard to structure (data) and processing (environment), are the result of identical process, and as a result, will (statistically) represent the energy ontology that is the environment from which they were formed.
It is for this reason that the ontological structure of any growth system is always and necessarily organized semantically. Regardless of domain, if a system grew into existence, an observer can assume overwhelming semantic relevance that differentiates those things that appeared earlier (causally more energetic) from those things that appeared later (causally less energetic).
This is true of all systems. All systems exhibit semantic contingency as a result of growth. Cognition system's included (but not special). The mind (a mind, any mind), is an evolving system. Intelligence evolves over the life span of an individual in the same way that the proclivity towards intelligence evolves over the life-span of the species (or deeper). Evolving systems can not be expressed as equation. If they could, evolution wouldn't be necessary, wouldn't happen. Math-obsessed people have a tendency to confuse the feeling of the concept of pure abstraction with the causal reality of processing (that allows them to experience this confusion).
Just as important, data is only intelligible, (process-able, representative, model, abstraction) if it is made of parts in a specific and stable arrangement to one another. The zeroith law of computation is that information or data or abstraction must be made of physical parts. The crazies who advocate a "pure math" form of mind or information simply sidestep this most important aspect of information. This is why quantum computing is in reality something completely different than the information-as-ether inclination of the duelists and metaphysics nuts. Where it may indeed be true that the universe (any universe) has to, by principle, be describable, abstract-able by self consistent system of logic, that is not the same what's so ever as the claim that the universe IS (purely and only) math.
Logic is an abstraction. As such it needs a physical realm in which to hold its concepts as parts in steady and constant and particular relation to each-other.
My guess is that we confuse the FEELING of math as ethereal and non-corporal pure-concept with the reality which of course necessitates both a physical REPRESENTATION (in neural memory or on paper or chip or disc) and a set of physical PROCESSING MACHINERY to crawl it and perform transforms on it.
What feels like "pure math" only FEELS like anything because of the physicality that is our brains as copular machinery as they represent and process a very physical entity that IS logic.
We make this mistake all day long. When the only access to reality we have is through our abstraction mechanism, we begin to confuse the theater that is processing with that which is being processed and ultimately with that which that which is being processed represents.
Some of the things the mind (any mind) processes are abstractions, stand-ins for other external objects and processes. Other things the mind processes only and ever exist in the mind. But that doesn't make them any less physical. Alfred Korzybski is famous for declaring truthfully, "The map is not the territory!" But this statement is not logically similar to the false declaration, "The map is not territory!". Abstractions are always and only physical things. The physics of a map, an abstraction system, a language, a grammar, is rarely the same as the physics of the things that map is meant to represent, but the map always obeys and is consistent with some set of physical causal forces and structures built of them.
What one can say is that abstraction systems are either lossy or they aren't useful as abstraction systems. The point of an abstraction is flexibility and processing efficiency. A map of a mountain range could be built out of rocks and made larger than the original it represents. But that would very much defeat the purpose. On the other hand, one is advised to understand that the tradeoff of the flexibility of an effective map is that a great deal of detail has been excluded.
Yet, again and again, we ourselves, as abstraction machines, confuse the all too important difference between representation and what is represented.
Until we get clear on this, any and all attempts at merely squaring up against the problem of machine intelligence will fail.
[more later…]
Randall Reetz
Social Media… Amplifying The Inner Sheep
In the early days of computing, those involved were pioneers, innovators, original thinkers, the super-passionate, driven by curiosity and the purity of adventure. These were a strong people. Proud. And though it sounds precious to say so, the early computing pioneers were not unlike other gritty pioneers in that they enjoyed being out well beyond the known, striding forward where there was no trail, no strength in numbers, no peer support, no mentors, no accepted pattern.
Now? Well now that computers have become ubiquitous, now that everyone has one, uses one like they use a knife and fork, the pioneers have long since been replaced by Plumber Joe, by the middle of the bell curve, by everyman and everywoman and their kids.
The computer industry is market driven! I hate that it has taken me this long to recognize the importance and implications of this now overwhelmingly obvious and simple fact. The diffusion of computers into the daily routine of the entire population has resulted in a dramatic shift in the demand landscape that informs what computing becomes. The market for computing is its users. The user today, the average user, is a whole different animal than the user/creator that defined its early history. Those of us that jumped in early probably resist the idea that what we care about really doesn't matter anymore. Though it might be true that knowledge and a deeply theoretical bases for that knowledge still matters, from a consumer market demand perspective, we grey hairs are simply invisible. The fact that we nerds ever defined a market for anything at all is the more surprising historical footnote. It is a bittersweet realization, that success of our industry would of mean the marginalization of its founders.
In every grade school class I attended there were a few kids (one or two) who were driven by a passion to know, to understand, to create. The rest, well the rest excelled at a completely different set of skills, getting through the day, unnoticed, blending in. The two groups couldn't be more different. The inquisitive few were internally driven. The rest were driven by the outward demands of success as defined by the curve. The inventive minds competed against their own ability to invent. The rest competed amongst themselves over the coveted 60 percentile that would define passing the class.
The computing market is now dominated by that larger part of the human population that defines success as climbing (which ever way possible) on top of the 60 percent of the population (of other social climbers) that makes up the bulk and center of any bell curve. As kids, these were the people who spent most of their time comparing themselves to the kids next to them. Looking over their shoulder at the other kid's test answers. Studying together so that they knew the base line before they got to the actual test. I say "climb to the top" but the word "top" when describing a bell curve does a disservice to the real meaning of averages. What we call the top of a bell curve is really the center of a frequency distribution. Climbing to the top is really a struggle to get into the center. Like fish trying to avoid a shark, there is a natural human tendency away from being alone, away from the vulnerability that is the open water that is original ideas and behavior. As a result, we constantly seek the protection of others. Each of us, as humans, spend a good deal of our energy trying to determine and then contort our behavior to that which best describes the center of normative behavior and attitude.
The similarities between schooling fish and human socialization pressures are profound. But there is one important difference. Where fish seek the center to avoid the teeth and gut of another species, the predator we humans work so hard to avoid is us, is public ridicule, being seen as different, standing out! We are in a very real sense both sheep and the sheep dogs nipping at the the sheep's legs. It is obvious that evolutionary pressures have conspired to build into our brains at least two modes of processing and that they are, at least at times, antagonistic. One is a great big "what if?" simulator, a novelty machine… the other, a social manors restriction system that cautions at the point of pain, behavior the least bit novel or different.
I have traversed the usual nature/nurture, cultural/evolutionary minefields. What I come to is this; traits that exist universally across most cultures and experienced many times within each individual's life, are most probably behaviors that have a significant genetic/physical component... are common regardless of our developmental environment and experience. Humans are obviously capable of profound novelty and abstract pattern analysis. But there is also a pervasive behavioral overlay of social control of which we are simultaneously, willing participant, and victim. What is confounding is the extent to which each system interferes with the function and success of the other… and that they are so diametrically opposed.
With regard to schooling (and herding) behavior, that which we share in common with fish (and sheep), is an indifference to where the school is, in which direction it is moving, and how fast. Under the social threat that triggers schooling, all that matters is that each of us as individuals finds our way as close as possible to the center. Humans will go along with almost any plan so long as social grouping allows us to avoid being seen as different. Obvious examples: Nazi Germany, Slavery in the southern U.S., the Nanking Sex Trade, etc.
As computers have been made "user friendly" and as the cost of ownership has dropped, this center of the bell curve, this mad fight for self-similarity that defines who we are as a species, this reflection and homogenization of the greater us, has become the market for computing. Which makes sense. Diffusion and all. But the whole history of modern computing is so short, just 40 years now, that it is surprising and a bit of a shock to realize finally that from a market perspective, computing is a mature industry. How could an industry just a generation old have transited already from go-it-alone pioneer to "I'm Love'n It" average?
The implications are huge. In particular, this insight brings social media into sharp ironic focus. Social media brings to computing the same access to community monitoring and control that gossip and storytelling brought to the camp fire. It is to computing what cheating off of your neighbor's test is to being a kid. As a person who likes to think of himself as a pioneer, I have reacted in horror, disbelief, and frustration to what has looked like fifteen years of computer industry regression.
If you accept that computers, like minds, are abstraction (language) machines, then it makes sense to wonder to what extent the human brain has suffered the same evolutionary pressure towards social assimilation and at least plausibly, away from innovation and novelty. To what extent is the rarity of the product of profound human creativity a reflection of actual physical and logical limits on and causal costs to creativity itself, and to what extent is the same rarity a product of evolutionary molded physical properties of the brain that conspire to restrict the production of novelty as a result of even greater survival pressure to promote behaviors that honor social cohesion?
If the current overwhelming trend that sees the computer as more of a social monitoring mechanism, and less a creative tool, is a trend that reflects market demand, then the same questions I am asking of the market pressures that shape the machinery of social media must be asked of the cultural pressures that have through evolutionary time shaped the mind. So long as computation is primarily consumed by human beings, both computer and mind will be shaped by the same evolutionary pressures. As technical barriers are overcome, the industry can and does react more fluidly and with higher fidelity to the demands of its consumers.
At which point, the question becomes; Which heaps greater selective pressure on the evolution of computing, the need for tools that stand in for skills the human brain lacks, or the need for tools that amplify our most attention demanding desirers? Can the two co-exist and co-evolve productively? Again, the question is asked practically of computation and at the same time, philosophically or anthropologically of the human brain and the cultural stew in which each is both product and survival pressure.
Where computing used to take its shape from the fecund imagination of computational luminaries, it has of late been lead instead in the pursuit of the lizard brain in all of us, the sub-conscious urges and fears that inform social mediation behavior. The result is all of this social media dribble, the likes of "Twitter", "13 Seconds", "myface and spacebook" [sic], and numerology based pizza ordering "iPhone Apps." What advantages do such time wasters render? Some argue that social media was the logical communication oriented extension of email and personal web sites, that social media greases mechanisms deeply human and "natural". I remain dubious to these claims. I tend to group the brand of communication that social media seems to breed with more negative forms of group behavior like cults, mass hysteria, fundamentalism, and other behaviors unique to group-think.
And what of pop-culture notions like "collective intelligence", "global awakening, and "cultural consciousness" which seem to be born of transcendent utopian notions (not dissimilar to those that feed religion and spirituality). The adherents of these optimisms appear to be blissfully unhindered by the need for causally logical argument or empirical evidence. If our computers have become social monitoring devices (at the expense of facilities that enable creativity), is there a danger that they will further distort our already distorted sense of truth? If a computer "wants" to agree with us more than it wants to accurately calculate a value, then we might already have crossed the threshold into a world where 2 plus 2 really does equal 5 (if the computer says so, it must be true!).
It would be irresponsible for me not to at this point remind myself to question my own rhetorically close topics.
These questions and trends have profound implications to populist concepts we tend to romanticize but rarely examine in detail. Democracy, plural-icy, consensus, society, culture, community, equal rights, individuality, etc. As the computer industry becomes more and more sensitive to consumer demand, its product WILL become a device that does a better and better job at the automation and magnification of human idiosyncratic behavior, of superstition, mythos, hubris, rhetoric, ego, at any and all of the emotional side effects of evolutionary pressures. Forget about the cold indifference of causal truth that has motivated so many sci-fi stories.
The real villain to be feared in any inevitable future is the computer as hubris amplifier.
Computing's new "social media" face might disturb my pioneer sensibilities, but it reflects the satisfaction of common demand. As any market matures it learns to overcome the physical and conceptual obstacles that so plagued it in its earlier years. Unburdened by things like processor speed and storage density, the computer industry was able to pursue directions more in line with human consumptive desire than with the technical or theoretical goals of computer "scientists". Marketeers trump scientists when the saturation of a product becomes universal.
It all makes sense. I am still depressed by the anti-innovation implications of the mass market dumbing down of computing, but at least I understand why it happened, what it means. Knowledge, even depressing knowledge, should open doors, should allow more efficient planning and prediction. But what exactly are the implications when a creative tool is hijacked by a larger urge to avoid at all costs, change and novelty. What happens when the same mass-market demand pressures that cause fads and trends focus their hysterical drive towards homogeneity onto the evolution of a tool originally intended for and idealized for creative exploration? What exactly do you get when you neuter the rebellion right out from underneath Picasso's brush?, When you force Darwin to teach sunday school?
Just what does it mean when our creative medium becomes sensitive to social interaction? Pen and paper never knew anything about the person wielding them, certainly didn't know how the greater society was reacting to what was being written or drawn.
If the average human feels more comfortable doing exactly what everyone else is doing, seeking the center, would much rather copy the answers off of their desk-mate's test than understand the the course content, well then it only makes sense that, we, the royal "we", would use this computing tool in the same way that we use the rest of the stuff in our lives, to help us find the social center and stay there.
It's not just the marketplace that has shifted towards the demographic center. The schooling mentality has crept into and now dominates computing as an industry. Personnel and management which in the early days of computing was awkwardly staffed by engineers and scientists and groupie hobbyists is now as diverse (homogenous?) a mix of humans as you could find in any industry. Even the scientists are cut from a different cloth. It takes a special and rare (crazy) human being to invent an industry from nothing. When avocations become well funded departments at major universities, the graduates are not likely to be as intellectually adventurous (understatement). As any MBA knows, the success of an industry is most sensitive to its ability to understand and predict the demand of its market. Who better to know the center of the consumer bell curve, the average Joe and Jane, than that same Joe and Jane? Joe and Jane Average now dominate the rank and file workers that make up the computer industry. This means administration, it also means sales and marketing, both of which make sense. Less intuitive, is but equally understandable, Joe and Jane Average have taken over the research and design and long range planning arms of the computer industry. Even where it isn't the actual Joe and Jane, it is people who do a kick-ass job of channeling them.
Does market saturation mean the evolution of computing has reached its zenith? I don't think it does. But, once an industry has reached this level of common adoption, the appearance of maturity and stability are hard to shake. Momentum and lock-in take hold. I have tried repeatedly to sell paradigm-busting and architectural re-imaginings of the entire computing paradigm to valley angles and big ticket VC firms only to realize that I wasn't selling to the current market. Try opening a VC pitch with "The problem with the computer industry is…" to a group of thirty-five year old billionaires who each drove to the meeting in custom ordered european super cars. Needless to say, their own rarefied experience makes it hard for them to connect with anything that follows. This is a classic conundrum in the study of evolution. I presume it is a classic conundrum facing evolution itself. Why should a system that is successful in the current environment ever spend any energy on alternative schemes? How could it? It is hard to even come to the question "What could we be doing better?" when surrounded by the luxury of success.
At the same time, it is unlikely (impossible?) that any system, no matter how successful in the present, will long define success in the future. It might even be true that the more successful a scheme, the more likely that scheme will hasten an end to the environment that supported it (through faster and more complete exploitation of available resources). The irony of success!
But we a are smart species. We are capable of having this discussion aren't we? So we might be prepared as well to discuss the inevitability of the end of the current computational scheme. No? To prepare as a result, for the next most likely scheme (or schemes)? Especially those of us who study language, information, computation, complex systems, evolution. Especially an industry that has so advanced the tools and infrastructure of complexity handling. No? Surely we in the computer industry are ideally situated to have a rational vantage from which to see beyond the success of the current scheme? Yet, for the reasons I have already postulated (market homogeneity and success blindness), and others, we seem to be directionless in the larger sense, incapable of the long range and big picture planning that might help us climb out of our little eden and into the larger future that is inevitable and unavoidable. Innovations springing forth from the current industry pale in comparison to those offered up 20, 30, even 40 years ago.
Speaking of which; I just found the resource list for Pattie Maes' "New Paradigms In Human Computer Interaction" class at MIT's Media Lab. These are video clips of speeches and demos of early and not so early computing pioneers showing off their work prescient work. Mind blowing. The future these folks (from places like MIT, Brown, Stanford Research, the Rand Corporation, Xerox PARC, and other institutions), well, it is sooooo much more forward looking than what has become of computing (or how the average computer is used). Everyone would do well to sit down and view or re-view these seminal projects in the context of their surprisingly early introduction.
I have written quite a few essays lambasting what I see as the computing industry's general loosing of its collective way… at the very least, a slowing down of the deep innovation that drove computing's early doers. Even when potentially powerful concepts ("Semantic Computing", "Geo-Tagging", "Augmented Reality", "User-Centered Cloud Computing") are (re-)introduced, their modern implementations are often so flawed and tainted by an obsession to kowtow to market pressures (or just plain lie or fake it) that the result is an insult, a blaspheme of the original concept being hijacked.
Over ten years ago, I gave a talk at Apple titled: "Apple Got Everything It Has For Free, And Sat On Its Ass For Eight Years While The Rest Of The World Caught Up".
Which is true, at least with regard to the Lisa/Macintosh which Xerox PARC handed them (check out the Star System) and the way they just kind of sat on the WISIWG mode-less graphical interaction scheme while other computer companies (Borland and then, reluctantly, Microsoft) eventually aped the same. At the time of my presentation, Apple had wasted its eight year lead extrapolating along the same scheme… a bigger badder WIMP interface, when they could have been introducing paradigm vaulting computational systems (that would put Seattle on another eight year chase).
But from a marketing perspective I couldn't have been more wrong. I have got to keep reminding myself that I no longer represent the market for computers! I wish I did, but I don't. I am an outlier, a small dot on a very long tail, I am pluto or maybe even just some wayward ice and dust comet to the big ordinary inner planets that trace out wonderfully near-circular orbits around the sun. In later presentations, I explained that Apple's critically acclaimed "Think Different" campaign and the elitist mindset from which it was derived, was the reason they had never garnered more than 2 or 3 percent of the computer market. I explained that Bill Gates' "genius" lie not in his profound insight, but in his ability to understand the motivations that drive the average person… namely to never be caught doing something that someone else could question. That means acting the same as everyone else. That means knowing how everyone else is acting. That means social media!
Nobody (other than wacky outliers like me) wants to be compared to iconoclasts like Einstein or Picasso or Gandhi or Gershwin. Very few people really want to "think different". Most people wouldn't be caught dead risking that type of public audacity. You have got to be pretty confident that you have an answer to the dreaded question "Why are you doing that?" to ever DO THAT (individually creative thing) in the first place.
Pioneers know exactly why they do what they do. They are driven by knowing more than others and by the excitement of being somewhere others haven't been… by being very much outside of the ball of fish that others seek as protection.
But if you want to sell a billion computers instead of just a few thousand, then you want to pay attention to the fish in all of us and not to the smiling and sock-less Einstein's on a bike.
But the larger and longer implications of mass market sensitivity are profound. While it is entirely true that paying attention to the center of the cultural bell curve will allow any industry to exploit more of the total available consumption potential, such behavior does not necessarily produce the paradigm jumping disruption upon which long term progress depends. If your Twinkies are selling really well, you might not notice that your customers are all reaching morbid levels of obesity and malnutrition or that the world is crumbling around the climate changing policies upon which your fast food empire is based.
The satisfaction of human center-of-the-fish-school urge is not necessarily the best recipe for success if success means more than short term market exploitation. In the long run, potential and satisfaction are decidedly not the same thing; they are, as a matter of fact, very often mutually antagonistic. Rome comes to mind. What comes to mind when I mention the phrase "dot com" or "mortgage backed securities" or "energy deregulation".
The mass market topology that has driven computing and communication towards a better and better fit with the demands of the largest and most homogenized consumer base the earth has ever witnessed could very likely work against the types of creative motivations that might be necessary to rescue us from the bland and the average, from the inward facing spiral of self-sameness that avarice alone yields. I am increasingly worried that the computer's seemingly endless potential to be warped and molded chameleon-like to perfectly satisfy our most basic evolutionary proclivities, to amplify unhindered, urges made strong against real scarcity in the natural environment, has already so distracted us within our egos and desires that we might not be able to pull our heads out before we get sucked completely down and into our very own John Malkovich-ian portals of endless identity-amplication.
And why does it matter? Because, like it or not, progress in every single field of human endeavor is now predicated on advancements in computation. More profound than anything else science has discovered about nature is that information is information. Information is domain agnostic. Which means that advances in information processing machinery benefit all information dependent fields of inquiry. Which is every field of inquiry! Which also implies that all fields of human inquiry are increasingly sensitive to the subtle ways that any one computational scheme effects information and the scope of information process-able within that scheme.
At any rate, it is alarming (if understandable) to me that the trending in this industry is towards a re-molding of the computer into ego amplifier, pleasure delivery system, truth avoidance device, distraction machine, Tribbles (as in "The Trouble With…"). The more insightful among us may want to place a side bet or two (if only as evolutionary insurance) on more expansive futures. Some of us are not so distracted by the shininess of these machines or by how they are getting better and better at focusing our attention at our own navels, to see futures for computing that are more expansive than the perfect amplification of the very human traits least likely to result in innovation or progress. There is still time (I hope).
Randall Reetz
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