If you ever want to get an idea of what
real genius is listen to the presentation by Stephan Wolfram I've
linked below. And if you haven't already, get his book “A New Kind
of Science.” You probably won't understand all of it; I know I
certainly didn't, especially when it came to all of the proofs he
provides with the full explorations of some of the many simple rules
he posits. It takes more math than only getting through Algebra II,
as I have, to have the tools necessary, and I suspect that, even with
more advanced tools at your disposal, it's still a stretch.
Still, the sheer depth and breadth of
what he took on to get this book written is astonishing. I can
remember very clearly how humbled I felt looking at what someone with
truly serious intellectual chops could do with a mind toy I only had
deep feelings about. And of course, in this I am referring to
“Cellular Automata.”
Back in the early to mid eighties, you
see, even after two years at Green River Community college as a
transfer student intending to major in English and Communications,
and completing another two year program at Highline Community College
to get an Associate in Science degree in Data Process, I was still of
the mind that I was going to be a writer of fiction. I say “even
after” because I did a year at Boeing by this time as a “COBOL”
mainframe programmer because an income was required, and I had a
facility for programming. The problem was I hated it; especially as
it was formalized (understandably) within the Boeing bureaucracy.
While I was applying myself quite
doggedly to be better at fiction (without much success), a part of me
was still fascinated by the process of conditional iteration. And
when IBM, as well as the Tandy Corporation, came out with the first
truly commercial personal computers, I was able to indulge my self in
exploring what such machines could do. And as the graphical
possibilities were the most immediately apparent, I went with the
Tandy 2000; one of the very first color PC's to hit the market.
Let me just say, if there is a better
incentive to get a person motivated to delve into the intricacies of
both the hardware, and software, of a personal computer, than
creating conditional structures to create interesting patterns on a
screen, I am certainly not aware of it. And no where was this more
established than with the community surrounding “Cellular
Automata.” Starting with the game of life, and its myriad
variations, “core wars,” and most especially the truly amazing
Mandelbrot routine that was first published in Scientific American.
When I saw that first depiction on the
magazine's cover of what you could create by arbitrarily assigning
colors to count groups of an iterative calculation (involving an
imaginary number, as well as the X,Y coordinates of the pixel array)
that took the results of each run as the input of the next, and where
another arbitrary limit was set to indicate that it was going towards
infinity, so that the color black would be used, I was blown away.
The hours I poured away into coding, and waiting for those first
CPU's to crank out results, would have done any rabid gamer, or
programmer, of today quite proud.
I mention all of this as a way to
emphasize how getting a visceral feeling for the power of conditional
iteration was established in me at the very beginning of the PC
revolution. The interesting thing here, as I finally came to
understand that I was nowhere near ready to write fiction yet, was
that educating myself in all things PC would not only provide me an
new income source, it would lead me not so much into considering
complexity itself, as to trying integrate my love of words, with
process, expression, and what meaning itself was; and this against
the backdrop of the mess that our social processes have become, and
the lack of meaning each of us seems to have the more complicated our
social operating system became.
When Mr. Wolfram's book finally came
out in 2003 I was already several years along in the overt expression
of my critique of our current economic system, and the need for an
alternative. The Old Softy Concerns web site had been running for
nearly 3 years by then and I was just beginning to understand the
need for a formalized philosophical foundation to support the change
in sensibility that I felt was part and parcel of not only the mind
set this alternative was meant to satisfy, but for which a holistic,
systems view of the cosmos demanded. In this, it is safe to say, his
book had a big influence.
What interests me now, though, in
looking back, is not only the commonality of what is in Cosmolosophy
and what is in “A New Kind of Science,” but what is different.
To review, Cosmolosophy posits that the
entirety is an inconceivably big, iterative, question answer engine.
The simple primitives involved here are the elemental embrace (or
love) and mind. These are expressed in an infinite array of vectors
of association which I like to call “Reality Ray Tracing.” The
idea here is that each answer is simply the creation of the next
question, and in this context, the question revolves around the nexus
of “what does it mean,” “what did it mean,” and “what will
it mean.”
The primitives come into the mix as,
first, the need to interact and exchange, and second, the need to
objectify in the first place. Time, of course, is expressed as the
various vectors of association, Space is the tension field
automatically created by having objects, and objects the result of
meaning applied to an interaction interpreted from a singular frame
of reference. In this, as a consequence, is the inherent requirement
of meaning processing systems, which are then able to make choices
based on those meanings. From this as well then comes the layering
upon layer of abstraction that formalizes structure of whatever
complexity you care to contemplate.
Mr. Wolfram's tenets of “Computational
Equivalency,” “Computational Irreducibility,” as well as an
iterative model based on simple rules, certainly doesn't contradict
anything in Cosmolosophy, even if it may only be tangentially
supportive of it at best. What I do think is an important
distinction, however, is where the emphasis is placed.
Mr. Wolfram is primarily concerned with
establishing that complexity does not require complex explanation;
whether that be unbelievably complex mathematical models that can
never quite seem to balance the macro with the micro, or just as
unbelievably absurd intelligent agencies in control of all aspects of
life, save the choices we make, and yet only too willing to punish us
for those choices in a realm far beyond the consequences endured in
the here and now.
His emphasis allows for “free will”
but sees no specialness in the human species. “Meaning processing
systems,” in his view are an aspect of complexity that any simple
computational system can achieve, and he may well be right. The fine
line here is where a “reasoning engine” ends and a self aware
intelligence, that can imagine, empathize, and routinely benefit from
the intuitive leap, begins. Ray Kurtzwiel, another genius way beyond
my pay scale, has been way too enthusiastic in embracing the
inevitability of bridging that fine line; not to mention blithely
ignoring what the consequences may be to for the rest of us along the
way.
It seems to me that “choice” in the
current human sense is a truly breath taking aspect of what one might
expect from a natural system; especially if one allows that such
systems start from very simple rules. Cosmolosophy is an attempt to
provide a basis for appreciating what are the important aspects in
those simple rules that we need to apply in balance if we wish to
preserve human choice, and the kind of structure that makes better
human choices possible.
My hope, in presenting this contrast,
is that not only will Cosmolosophy become more understandable, but
that the reader will take away a new appreciation of the importance
of finding a better social operating system.
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