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?

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

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

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…]

Motivation [anti-] matters...

Recently, I stumbled across a post to a public online science discussion group. But, it wasn't the subject of the post that interested me. The subject was speculation about the existence of anti-matter galaxies "at the fringes of the universe". What makes this person's post worth commenting upon is the almost immeasurable difference between scientific thinking and non-scientific thinking. So… it's worth an short examination.

First what we think we know about anti-matter:

Every empirically derived model of the universe (standard model included) shows almost no remaining antimatter after just a short percentage of its current age. The same models show an almost 50/50 split at the first moment… and then a quick period of mater-antimatter annihilation resulting in the current matter domination (with a whole mess of residual dark matter and dark energy). Remember, antimatter isn't nether-worldly, it's just matter that is in some fundamental way, symmetrically inverted. An antimatter electron would, for instance, have a positive charge. Thats all. No magic, no otherworldliness, anti-matter is still matter… is every bit "material".

Now the question of rhetoric:

What fascinates me when discussions like this erupt is the "why" that drives the original post. Contrarianism is a cornerstone of Scientific thought. But when the motives driving contrarian ideas are not scientific, you can expect scientists to assign the standard "crackpot" label. Every time I investigate such a claim, every time I ask and get an answer to the question "What drives your interest in making this contrarian claim?", I get an anti-scientific answer. I get an answer that reveals a spiritual world view that necessitates some fundamental strangeness at the base of a "theoretical" framework or "cosmology". The strangeness is necessary to support a "physical" explanation for the meta-physical emotional experiences and needs the contrarian finds personally satisfying. It is endlessly fascinating to me that anti-scientific thinkers seek constantly to justify their emotional-experiential world view atop some sort of awkward and illogical re-imagining of science derived knowledge. In contrast, you will never see a scientist go to spirituality in support of his theory or experimentally derived data set. No scientist has ever or will ever work a verse from the Bible, or a witticism attributed to Buddha, Mohammad, Krishna, Confucius, or L. Ron Hubbard into a proof or theory. The anti-symmetry of these two behaviors is worth a well intentioned pause for thought.

The inward apologetic focus of spirituality is the opposite the outward focus and motivations of science. Science (scientists) are motivated by a desire to understand the universe… as it is… for what it is. A scientist tries all day long to disregard what it feels like to think or want or need, expects that their own personal emotional gestalt is forever slanted by evolutionary selection towards culture, gender, species, and bio-centric mechanisms that are physically embedded and unavoidable. A scientist is motivated to see beyond personal experience to the fabric from which it is derived and of which, perspective is just a tailing, a side effect. It is important here to specify the scientific classification of the self and self-experience. Science is frequently accused of being anti-self. This is the farthest from the truth. To science, the self and subjective experience is every bit as existent as any thing else in this universe. But in the same way that Copernicus re-figured the ontology of the Solar system, placing the Sun in the center and demoting Earth to the less central and less exclusive role of Planet, science views the self and experience as non-special, as one of, as a physical manifestation of order and causality specific to place and time and circumstance. The self, to a scientist is effect. It is weather, not atmosphere. It is concerto not violin. It is road trip, not station wagon.

A scientist says "My mind is flawed. My mind tells me things that it wants to hear. How can I construct methods and means to see the difference between what is and what I experience?" A scientist doesn't seek physical justification for flawed thinking. A scientist just plain expects it, deals with it, looks beyond it. A scientist posits causality at base. Builds an inverted pyramid of causality. At the lowest point in this pyramid, this hierarchy of influence, are the most basic of physical processes. We humans and our thoughts appear high up at the top of this ever expanding pyramid of influence and causality… meaning, what we do and think is much more effect than cause. Scientists expect and accept this. We don't seek means of rearranging the structure that built us to fit our emotional experiential needs. We just look for what is.

So, I have asked the author of the originating post; "What motivates your interest in the existence of anti-matter galaxies?"

Note: A whole slew of fringe (mathematically consistent?) theoretical models have been introduced by legitimate scientists that allow for the existence of contemporary pockets of anti-matter in a matter dominated universe such as ours.  These alternative models (and far crazier ones as well) are introduced to test the validity of more dominant models, as a means of falsifying. But this process of constantly looking for error is motivated by an interest in discovery of the truth about what is. Again, this search for "What Is" is fundamentally different than a search for an explanation or justification for "What I Feel".

Randall

Some background information:

The early universe was opaque to light (for about 300 thousand years). The energies released (that still exist) were generally of a much higher frequency then visible light… gamma radiation. Plus, the universe was too hot and dense (millions of times hotter and denser than the first moment of an atomic bomb detonation) for atoms to form, so photons wouldn't stream past atoms as they do today, and instead interacted with the dense soup of nuclei and electrons. When the universe had expanded and cooled to the point necessary for atoms to form, photons (of all energies) were free to fly unimpeded as they do today… the universe was finally transparent. Then it was another 500 million years before stars were formed and ignited before the first location-specific photons began to flood out into the universe (the stuff we can see with our eyes, telescopes, and directional sensors).

Because of the expansion of the Universe the big bang (matter anti-matter) created gamma rays are now huge radio waves (many meters in wavelength). This is the cosmic background radiation… the hiss on your analog radio and TV.

Now, what an event horizon is, and what one can see, are two very different things. 

It is important to remind our selves that seeing isn't an active process. Seeing is a passive act. Sure, the photons that hit our retina are active, but the only thing active about our eyes is that they react to photons that hit them. We don't "look" out into the cosmos. We passively receive stray photons that were created or reflected off of stuff at some distance (which always translates to some time in the past)… and only photons, which happen to be streaming along exactly in a path that intersects one of our eyes. Our eyes don't suck information in, they just sit and wait for what ever comes their way. The best we can do is point them in a particular direction.

The event horizon is the theoretical spherical limit to how far anything can go within a given period of time from when it was released. Typically when we are talking about an event horizon we are talking about a boundary dictated by the fastest anything can travel in space-time, which is the speed that light travels in a vacuum. Given the fact that this universe began as a singularity (as one point of zero spacial diameter), we are (as is everything) always at the center of that first primordial point. That is the really great, if somewhat confusing, thing about an expanding universe… where ever you are, if you are within this universe, you are at the the exact epicenter of the big bang that started it all.

This rule is true no matter how fast you are going or when you started going that fast. Distance itself is an attribute of space-time and space-time was created by the big bang. There is nothing remotely detectible, like distance (or time for that matter), that is or ever will be, outside of space-time.

Even stranger, if Einstein was correct (and everything we have ever measured seems to say that he was), energy and matter are directly tied to and dependent upon space and time. Add or subtract from any of these four and you directly effect the quantity of at least one of the other three.

The photons that bring us information about things far away (long ago) left a universe that was less and less like the one we live in today the longer ago they were made. The limits to what we will ever be able to "see" no matter how good our telescopes get, are dictated by when the universe became transparent to light. This is when light became directional. There is radiation all around us that isn't directional… or rather it was created before the universe allowed radiation to stream unimpeded in a strait line. This radiation is considered "noise" as it is incoherent (each photon is unrelated to each other photon). In this sense, it is like temperature, you can know things about the average of all of the photons (average wave length and amplitude) but anything you can measure about any one photon is missing any information that would tell us anything about source location.

That is the bugaboo about knowing anything about the very earliest universe. There was a very long period of time right after creation (scientific semantics) that we can never know much about. We can derive quantities as averages, but we can not know anything about specific spacial events or trends. The moment the universe went transparent is a boundary, before which we can only guess at location-specific layout of the universe. For all practical purposes, in this universe, the moment of transparency (the moment the universe got cool enough to allow the formation of atoms) is the only "event horizon" of any interest. This photon transparency horizon (300 thousand years after the big bang) has nothing at all to do with the theorized matter anti-matter annihilation epoch which occurred between about 10^-32 and 10^-12 seconds after the big bang.

Note: It is calculated that the observable matter dominated universe (photons, neutrons, protons and electrons) is the result of a 1 part in 1 billion majority of matter to anti-matter. The statement made earlier to the effect that "electrons are supposed to be positively charged" is complete hooey. Anti-matter is created everywhere in the universe that energies are high enough for fusion (in stars, supernova, and at black hole horizons). Such newly created anti-matter is annihilated the moment it contacts matter and this produces photons in the x-ray spectrum.