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

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

The Incomputable Heaviness of Knowledge

Is the universe conceivable?  Does scientific knowledge improve our ability to think about the universe?

What happens when our knowledge reaches a level of sophistication such that the  human brain can no longer comfortably hold it, or compute on it?  For thousands of years, scholars have optimistically preached the benefits of knowledge.  Our world is rich and safe as a result.  People live longer, people live in greater personal control over the options they face.  All of this is an obvious result of our hard won understanding of how the universe and its parts actually work.  We arm our engineers with these knowledges and send them out to solve the problems that lead to a more and more desire-mitigated environment.  Wish you weren't hungry, go to the fridge or McDonnalds.  Wish you were somewhere else, get in your car and go there.  Wish you could be social, but your friends are in Prague, call them.  Wish you knew something, look it up on the internet.  Lonely, log in to a dating service and set up a rendezvous. Wish your leg wasn't fractured, go to a doc-in-the-box and get it set and cast.

But what if you want to put it all together?  What if your interests run to integration and consolidation.  What if you want to understand your feelings about parking meters as an ontological stack of hierarchical knowledge built all the way up from the big bang?

Complexity is Self-Limiting… Evolution Says "So What!" But At What Cost?

Complex systems tend towards greater complexity. That is one way, in fact, of defining evolution. But complexity is also self-limiting in obvious and unavoidable ways. What gives?

How, specifically, does an understanding of complexity's natural limits, recast an assessment of where human society is, where it might be going, and what of this potential do our own limitations in understanding complexity and its limits… well, limit?

We tend to gravitate towards a rather cleaned-up image of the future, all stainless steel and gleaming glass, and sexy robots that can't say "no" (puffy clouds, white wings, and lutes?). To be fair, this sparkly and perfect view of the future is something we reserver for "The Future". Excepting for Sunday mornings, we are refreshingly realistic about the process of getting through all of the calendar-able pedestrian futures to the final "The Future"… sometimes even positing an apocalypse or two along the way. Its as though we understand that things of great complexity and stability must be constructed, and that building is a messy and chaotic process, our self-delusion begins and ends with the absolutely fatal assumption that there is some end to the construction process, after which everything will be grand and glorious and perfect in the sense that no major construction will ever again mar the sublime and pristine quite and elegance we have built.

Right. OK.

In light of the magnitude of our self delusion, it seems down right naive to apply the phrase "drink the Cool-Aid"… in some very real sense, we must, each of us, have Cool-Aid factories right smack in the middle of our brains!

The actual future, the sober future, the one we seem hell-bent on ignoring, is a future of greater and greater and more and more constant change. A future we can never get to. A future that will surely go on one day without us. There were after all, a whole bucket-load of futures before we existed, before we declared ourselves the supreme center of everything, the final future. Ultimately, of course, there is a final and absolute future to any system. If you paid attention during your thermodynamics or information science lectures, you know that there will come an ultimate future which can not support any complexity at all.

For now, we will ignore that final future-of-all-futures (heat death)… there are "miles to go before we sleep".

As complexity marches forward and "upward", evolving systems are increasingly characterized by construction and change. A static system, one that can't react to its own constantly increasing experience, is a system that isn't as complex as one that can learn and adjust itself to accumulated knowledge. The romantic vision of a completed and peacefully static future is as laughable as it is understandable.

Some fantasies drive us towards success and influence, and others towards catastrophe and insignificance.

The difference between these two forms of fantasy are, to my mind, the difference between paying attention to the greater reality that is the whole universe (its physical laws, material properties, and configuration), and paying attention instead only to the reality hacked together within our own emotionally contorted and narrowly self-centered minds. The distance that separates the two is probably a good measure of the speed with which nature will replace us with some other form of complexity generating scheme with a more accurate natural mapping of reality to abstraction of reality.

A self-centered and locally weighted perspective is both expectable and self defeating. What works in the short term often gets in the way of what works in the long run. This is one of two oxymoronic misreading of process clouding our understanding of evolution that increasingly threatens our potential as a species. The other (related) self-obfuscation we don't seem to be able to avoid, and central to the thesis of this essay, is the dream-like way we tend to imagine the future as some silicone-enhanced sexed-up version of some glazed-over and romantic version of a past that never was.

What we know, how we comprehend what is around us, is a function of the iterative process of matching the stream of incoming sensation to what we have stored as experience. What comes to be known is always heavily effected by what was known before. Leaning is a local affair. Systems always end up knowing more about the things closest to them. The closest thing to a system is itself! This is a topologically and causally unavoidable fact, leading to difficult to circumnavigate self-centered understandings of the universe around us. I am convinced that evolution ultimately (in the longest run) favors systems that can overcome this local-centrism…though to to this, a system must literally work against itself in the short term. Success in the long run is dependent on the development and protection of genetic structure that frustrates success in the short run. This big-picture learning must be accomplished through the development of an ever more accurate internal analogue (process-able map) representing the most inclusive and location agnostic understanding of the entire universe. This too is an ever receding target, we can chase but never completely capture. Evolution is this back and forth dance between what matters to a system in the hear and now and the capacity to pay attention to, model, and process that which is salient about the entire universe… context in the largest sense.

I don't want to veer too far away from the thread of this essay, but it is important to keep in mind the counter-indicated admixture defined both by the immediate local needs of any given individual and the larger, decidedly non-individual scope of evolution. A decidedly cooperative mixture that is, none the less, achievable exclusively through the lives of and genetic/cultural information carried forward exactly and only by individuals.

In any given population of individuals at any given locality, there exists a range of differences that enable some individuals to make more efficient use of the resources in their surroundings, and some individuals to be better equipped to contend with and exploit the resources of their children's inherited environment. Those better matched to the current environment will out-compete those with a better match to the environment of the future. Ultimately, of course, what matters is the capacity of the entire mélange to both survive in the present and present morphotypes that meet the demands of the future.  The demands of the present vs. those of the future are often at odds with each-other. A successful evolutionary scheme must "waste" a sizable chunk of its structure and energy on strategies that may have no immediate positive effect on fitness (and might in all actuality hinder success in the moment). Maintaining a long range understanding of evolution itself, and our place in it, is the example of this dangerous opposition that best fits the scope of this essay.

It seems obvious to me that the amount a system must "waste" anticipating changes in the future of its environment is inversely relational to the accuracy of its internal mapping of the universe in total. Systems that know nothing of the universe, must produce a great variety of random solutions. A very expensive prospect that best fits very very very simple individuals produced in absurd numbers. Atoms, molecules, single celled organisms.

Understanding the process, "THE" process, evolution, is probably the most salient predictive mechanism an organism might seek to internalize. We seem to have limited capacity as a species to model and abstract and then effectively navigate an abstraction of this "THE PROCESS". Especially when it comes to understanding the limitations and usefulness to "THE PROCESS" of any one scheme, species or individual.

The spirit of this essay isn't Nietzschein pessimism or a catastrophist's Cassandra; "I told you so!". I am an eternal optimist, so these words are intended instead as a wake-up call, and offered up as a Windex Wipe to the foggy lens through which we view reality… in the hope that we use it, adjust our behavior, and rectify the self-defeating distance between what is and what we want to see.

Nature doesn't stand still. Not at least until the very end. Heat death isn't at all like my fantasy of an endless Mediterranean resort vacation. Any system that bets its future on stasis, no matter how advanced, is betting against its longevity or influence on the real future.

I've compiled a list (below) of some of the most obvious side effects that haunt complexity, that push back against its growth. If we illuminate these barriers we might be better equipped to consider ways to get around them, and we might discover something of how systems get better and better at finding cheats in the march towards greater complexity.

For a system to be complex, it must have structure and difference within that structure. A crystal has structure, but its lack of capacity for internal differentiation means it can never be complex. But differentiated structure isn't enough, it has also to have some way of protecting and maintaining that structure, that shape or behavior over time. Shit happens. A complex system must employ some set of mechanisms in a constant fight against entropy. Without which, a system's complexity will be short lived, and short lived complexity isn't very complex at all.

Which brings up an important and much ignored aspect of an evolving system. We have a tendency to over emphasize the moment, the present situation or system. Nature on the other hand doesn't care about the individual or the moment except as a vehicle for the transmission of structure into the future. What matters isn't how complex a system is today, but the potential of a given configuration to influence the greatest complexity in the longest future across the widest expanse of the material universe. Many aspects or measures of complexity cross over between the here and now and the deepest future… but not all and not always.

Back to our list.

1. One way to maintain structure is to build yourself out of stuff of great material integrity – say titanium, stainless steel, or diamond.

2. Another is to adopt a vigilant and obsessive Mr. Fix-It program of self maintenance. Yet another option is to replace yourself with a pristine copy before you dissolve into an entropic heap.

3. A simple cousin of this replacement scheme is playing the numbers game… make sure there are so freak-n many copies of you in the first place that one or two of you make it into the distant future by virtue of the dumb luck of large number.

4. Or, you can choose to live a life of extreme isolation – limit your interaction with other systems and you limit the deleterious effects the second law dictates.

5. Then there is wall building. Wall building is a self-made form of the isolation scheme… instead of finding a place to hide in a pre-existing landscape, dig yourself a tunnel or build yourself a wall or a mote or a shell or a nest or fast legs or wings with which to run away with.

And then there is the problem of resource acquisition. Anything of value to a complex system tends to be reactive. Reactive things are destructive. Installing your self within a reactive environment means you have more access to energy and materials, but it also means you have to spend more energy and structure just to protect yourself from your environment. As your energy demands increase so too does your need to locate yourself closer and closer to more and more reactive and ever changing environments. A cave full of grain is great at first, but as you eat your way through it, its original attractiveness decreases. Better to install yourself at the mouth of a river, next to a mid-ocean vent, or on the floor of a flood plane. As your complexity increases, so to does your appetite for energy and materials. Access means proximity. Proximity to greater and greater concentrations of energy demands protection. Protection is expensive in terms of the self-protective physical structure and its maintenance.

Worse still is the negative feedback that metabolic waste presents. The more you eat, the more you go. The more you go, the harder it is to find food. As complexity increases, guess what happens to the magnitude of this problem and the need therefore to spend more and more energy on waste removal schemes?

The focus of this essay are the aspects of complexity (and complexity's demand for energy and structure) that put counter-productive limits on strategies that would otherwise allow for greater and greater complexity… and how evolving systems find work-arounds. The fact that we are here at all is proof that evolution finds a way.

What interests me is the way increases in complexity puts increased demand on energy and material resources, and how these processes are self-limiting and at the same time actually define the purpose that drives evolution.

In the particular, real systems manifest great creative variety in the fight for the extension of structure and integrity over time. For instance, once brains appear, trickery and guile become the standard approach to wall building. You don't need to go the long and arduous course of developing poison and some specialized hollow teeth through which to deliver it, if you can just tweak your skin coloration or shape to mimic those who have. Or you can become invisible by adopting a color and texture scheme that mimics your less vulnerable or edible surroundings. In essence, trickery schemes are the same as isolation or wall building except the wall you are hiding behind is within the brain of another creature (either it's already there or you build it in your foe's brain through behavioral conditioning).

But here is the rub. No matter which scheme a system adopts in the maintenance of structure… that scheme hardens their structure, making it more difficult and expensive to adapt to an always changing environment. In a very real way, what makes you stronger in the present makes you vulnerable over time.

Example: When Teflon was developed it was obvious to its creators that its extreme inert-ness, its aversion to chemical interaction, would make it an ideal lining for any reaction container (including frying pans and irons). But this same property made it almost impossible to figure out how to affix Teflon to the surface of a container (it took over 10 years to solve this problem).

On the opposite end of the isolation spectrum is metabolism. When a system seeks a means of extracting and drawing energy or structure from its environment, it needs to maximize its reactive interface to that part of its environment that has the most entropic potential. In earth biology, this usually manifests as an active interface to oxygen and or sunlight – both of which are highly corrosive to structure. In order to both exploit the energy of these highly reactive sources, biology has adopted a myriad of selectively self protective (and expensive) mechanisms. Playing with fire is an attractive AND expensive proposition. Simple systems have no option but to hide from highly reactive environments – to dig themselves into deep cracks in the earth. Only a system of great complexity has the structural and behavioral leeway to adopt the complex and selective mechanism necessary to both use and avoid concentrated reactive resources.

As a system becomes more complex it reacts faster to internal and external change. It evolves faster. This is a circular definition of "complexity"… configurations that facilitate faster development of configurations that facilitate faster development of configurations… ad infinitum. The capacity to do things faster always comes at a cost. To mitigate that cost, the system must learn to be efficient and effective in its environment. This means going with the flow. This means fitting in. This means doing what the environment is already doing. This means not fighting the system. To work with a system (instead of against it) means internalizing and abstracting a model of the environment's most salient structures. If you have some knowledge of what a lion will do when you enter a clearing it is sitting within, you have a better chance of surviving the encounter. If you have legs and eyes, your very structure is an acknowledgment of the physical constraints of your environment.

An accurate assessment of this whole concept becomes increasingly complex as we realize how system and environment blend in a co-evolutionary super-system.

In science fiction, the future is presented in one of two ways. Either the world has devolved into some filthy post-appocolyptic entropic mess, or it is a perfectly complete stainless steal and glass uber-infrastruture with everything in its place and everything perfectly maintained. Both projections are impossible, but the hermetically sterile one is the most problematic as it seems to resonate more completely with human emotional projections.

The problem is this; the more complex a system becomes, the faster is its capacity to change, leading to a system that is constantly in flux, constantly reworking itself, constantly under construction. Try to find a day in a modern city devoid of numerous construction cranes marring its skyline. This situation will only become more intense as human society evolves.

Biological systems have learned to accommodate the constancy of change, deterioration, ware and tear, construction, etc., through complex molecular mechanism of growth and repair played out at the (largely microscopic) cellular level. Furthermore, these anti-entropic mechanisms are largely automatic and do not therefore overly burden the larger and more overarching consciousness and behavioral control mechanisms (our mind).

Though humanity has reached a level of complexity that supersedes the capacity of its infrastructure to effectively carry its own complexity demands, we don't seem, as a species to be able to see this problem as systemic.

[more to come…]

Biology Is Too Slow!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are they? Is anyone paying attention?

What is computing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ more to come… ]