It's Saturday AM, so another listen of On the Media. I'm not going to detail all the segments as I did last time I talked about the show. But there was an interesting theme throughout the stories. It starts with the recognition that the internet is the biggest thing to happen to us since sliced bread (or the dawn of agriculture, which is essentially the same thing). Genius aha moment there, right? I mean the ready availability of all of human knowledge by everyone on the planet might have some influence on the course of events </sarcastic hyperbole>.
But what if Bill Joy is right? What if the availability of all this knowledge might be, in the end, a bad thing? Could we do anything to stop it, or is Kurzweil right, and the march forward inevitable?
There are lots of people who will quote statistics and claim certainty for the scales tipping in one direction or the other. My aim isn't so lofty. I just want to find some generalizations that help me better understand my intuitive grasp of the situation. So, if you are a fact-hound, and are looking for definitive points for my position, well, I guess I should save you the trouble. If, on the other hand, you think that we could use some new heuristics to pull a bit more meaning from the chaos, read on.
The book that reminds me most of the ever-accelerating pace of ratcheting progress is James Burke's book, The Axe-Maker's Gift. The point I remember most is that each advance in technology causes new problems that create new necessities (ever ratcheting mother's of invention). This is the basic drive that Kurzweil is pointing out, and the Joy laments. In looking at the pattern of this tendancy, I'd say it looks like the tendancy is more than a human trait. It appear to be a cosmological engine. Prigogine's dissapative structures seem to me to point in this direction, and have some scientific rigor for those who like to scratch that itch (me, I just like looking at the pictures).
So, what's this 10,000 year climax that I talk about then? I think the ratcheting is moving toward some kind of deeply satisfying resolution. The scale of time that we're discussing is so vast that the broad strokes are indiscernable from noise. What is most common is for us to attempt to understand a phenomenon by increasing the magnification. This is somewhat like trying to understand the scene painted in a Seurat by cranking your eyeball up to an electron microscope.
Punctuated equilibrium = Climax? I don't know. Maybe.
If so, the 10,000 year cycle, in my mind, seems to be a pendulum swing between right brain dominance and left-brain dominance (just at a tendancy level). This kind of pendulum swing phenomena happens on a bunch of different levels. Did you know that you usually have only one nostril doing most of the breathing at a given time [search page for nostril], and that it swaps back and forth in with chaotic periodicity? Did you know that you can influence brain states by changing that periodicity intentionally? The sun flips it's magnetic poles every 11 years. The Earth with much more chaotic periodicity.
Okay, I could get a bit crazy here. No need to take everyone through every possibility, but I'll just wrap up with a doozy that seems, intuitively, to be likely: I think that it is possible that the galactic and planetary orbital mechanics work to intentionally create disruptions such as comets and asteroids impacting planets in order to stir things up a bit. That word, intentional, is what will drive most people crazy. The tendancy is to believe that only humans truly exhibit intention. I think that this belief is rooted in an amazingly profound misunderstanding of the word. TEND, to be directed, to drift toward [update: a friend pointed me to Whitehead's notion of "subjective aim" which leads to the notion of "importance"] [update #2, looking through collective intelligence leads, found this photo comparison of a neuron and a simulation of an early galaxy -- really cool!]
I recently spoke on a panel at the World Future Society. One of my co-panelists was Jose L. Cordeiro. He made a claim during the panel which I've heard many times, but which suddenly sounded ridiculous. "The brain is the most complex structure in the known universe." Yeah? What about a meter-long molecule that not only builds brains, but builds in the supporting infrastructure that allows the brain to thrive, including basic instructions and capacities to self-propel and gather nutrients necessary to further it's survival? Is DNA accidental or intentional? Sure, at some point, the bootstrapping process allows the brain to start taking over the biological functions. But what about in the moment of conception when all that is happening is amazingly complex chemistry. And then, once the fertilized cell starts to divide, the new cells "know" how to differentiate into different components, etc., etc. One can see, with the complexity of the process, and the overwhelming rate of success, why one might be tempted to believe that there is an omniscient overseer running the show. The counter argument, that our human minds just can't comprehend the vastness of four-billion years, and how much randomness can build up into apparent intentionality over time just doesn't fly for me anymore.
Here's the thing. We like to think that we are the only exceptions in the universe. We don't act like billiard balls, but everything else does. At what point in our development in the womb, or emergence from the womb, does billiard-ballness stop, and intentionality begin?
For those computer programmers who have made it this far, just think about it. You know how hard robust, resilient error correction is. If we compare the development of a human being (from conception through death) to a chain reaction of billiard balls, we can easily see that the trick shot would involve some huge number of dependent interactions. Something like between a million and a trillion billiard balls lined up and making the shot most of the time. Now throw in variations in environment influeces (analogous to putting the billiard table on a boat in rolling seas), and one can see that something besides simple cause and effect is at work. There is error correction at every step along the chain. How is this different from intention? How can one differentiate between very good error correction, and choice?
I don't know that we can. And I think the RESOLUTION (result of intention, and the culmination of climax) of the last 10,000 year cycle is the realization that there isn't a difference. This looks like it could coincide with the year 2012, the singularity, and the next major shift in the magnetic axis of the Earth and the sun.
All chance, or by intention? I know it sounds exceptionally crazy, and completely destroys our sense of the workings of the universe, but don't some of the points made here make you wonder just a bit if maybe our foundational assumptions about what complexity is, and isn't, might benefit from some renewed scrutiny?
Listen to the last story in this morning's On the Media. How does your certainty that I'm crazy relate to the certainty of one economic commentator that all the others are wrong?
Hi David,
I stumbled across your blog by the usual forgotten chain of surf clicks. Of the posts I have read so far, this one seemed most in line with what I have been writing about in VISION 3000. You mention the desire "to find some generalizations that help me better understand my intuitive grasp of the situation." Yes, complexity management is at the heart of it, isn't it? We have only so much attention space to allocate to grasping reality. ... Or do we? My experience has been one of periodic expansions, but -- so what? The river is always bigger than the "opposablemind." We need to always reach for something beyond that calls us. My first stab at setting out such meta-generalizations may offer an interesting model. See the Transformation Model www.emergingvisionmedia.com
and also various chapters in VISION 3000, available at the same site.
The style may be old-school book medium, but what it lacks in postmodern anarchic sparkle it makes up for in integrated focus. For example, it is the need for resolving some of the kinds of questions you so intelligently raise that led me to interpose a new wave of evolution (vMEME) between postmodern Green and integral Yellow that I call transformational Golden Olive. There is an intuitive grasp, then there is a progressively more disciplined search for understanding of that intuition. Only then do the cognitive lines of development achieve degrees of integration.
I believe the media/knowledge deluge first drives us crazy, then provides the means for our healing, see Chapter 7 Media Development. What Joy and Kurzweil each say is not wrong but incomplete, as is also true of my vision. It is, like everything, an unfolding process, a Prigoginic self-organizing something.
We need better vision to make our way through this period of transition. I like the way you point out the lack of self-referential relativity in the 'scientific' ego: that everything but us acts like billiard balls. Yet clearly, if we are truely scientific, truely awake, there is much more going on than piles of rushing molecules (that are really just concepts that we made up to explain the flow of the river). Perhaps we notice that "intention" and "chance" are also word/concepts. One points at the eddy along the bank and says there that's chance; another points at the rapid flow in the middle and says there that's intention.
On a final note, I rather like email better than squeezing my words into this little comment box, but then, I'm a bit of a primitive and email is not public in the same way as blogspace. ...
Posted by: Michael Aschenbach | October 25, 2006 at 07:25 AM