Some time back I was engaged in a rather wide-ranging discussion/argument on Transhumanism and the Singularity (“rapture for nerds”). One of the tropes through which we danced was the idea that big changes in life—societal and biological—are somehow synchronized. Somewhere along the way I used the phrase “the ragged edge of the future,” and it stuck with me.

I’m thinking about it, still. Or rather percolating on it.

Six unrelated faces of this high-dimensional thought-doodad seem to be:

• Who says the future happens to everybody? Oddly enough — and contrary to many folks’ understanding of biological evolution — the origins of new species are not generally accompanied by the replacement of ancestors. Yet the analogy often drawn between large-scale evolutionary dynamics and social dynamics often seems to depend on this assumption of “succession”, of replacement of inferiors by superiors. Note, though, that there are still bacteria, amoebae, and other “primitive” organisms that supposedly are “inferior” to “higher” ones. The fact that they’re still here, chugging along, and outnumber “higher” organisms by many orders of magnitude should be kept in mind. Does your typical Extropian futurist understand that there might still be peasants and mill-workers, farmers and politicians, doctors and rocket scientists still, even after their fuzzy never-ending “singularity”? I dunno.
• Sloppy punctuation: oft-misunderstood facts about punctuated equilibrium, revolutions and the like. Generally, I’m thinking here about how the lay understanding of Gould and Eldredge’s notion of punctuated equlibria seems to be misshapen by some assumptions that aren’t in the original framing. Folks—especially those who invoke it as a metaphor for social transformation and other sorts of general large-scale transformations—seem to think the Burgess Shale was a kindof flash-illuminated snapshot, happening instantaneously and universally. That is, that all of a sudden everything changed overnight, everywhere. It’s often dangerous when a strict scientific notion with a specific meaning is used as a loose metaphor, as with the foolish equation of “punctuated equilibrium” with “revolution”, and sad and stupid when it’s done wrong. A list of some of the frequent errors and misunderstandings regarding PE are available at talk.origins.
• The irreversible “arrow of complexity” There is apparently a trend in increasing complexity in biological evolutionary history. This is another metaphor oft bandied about regarding the coming time of extraordinary change: we’re about to leap to a new level of complex social life, it’s said, caused by all this new technology we have. My hesitation about this optimistic take on life is, frankly, the overwhelmingly intense flavor of hubris it carries.

  First, the inherence of the “arrow” of complexity should be treated with some caution and skepticism. Try a little thought experiment: Colonize Mars, taking humans and any ten other species you like. If they remain completely isolated from Earth, what do you think will happen to the “complexity” of the colonists’ post-human descendants over the next few million years? You think the inherent drive towards greater complexity will lead these humans to evolve into some post-human godlike intelligence? I suspect rather that they and their ten other companion species will diversify to compete for the ecological niches available, which is to say, most of them. So if I were you, I’d worry about counting on any kind of “complexity momentum” in near-future social evolution.

  Might it be, rather, that what drives increasing complexity is that ecological niches at “lower” levels are filled up and locked tight by the extraordinary success of the organisms that inhabit them, and that a sudden increase in organismal complexity is some sort of last-ditch effort to re-write the playing field? Note again that less-complex species seem to be perfectly fit, in that they hang around, seemingly forever. (Dan McShea’s done some work on this, which I hope to revisit; I’ve lost track of it since when we were both at SFI together.)

  Second, you should be skeptical about the benefits of what is perceived as increased complexity. What exactly is inherently better about being a sociable, Internet-using human being than, say a bristlecone pine? I dunno. What’s inherently better about being an modern American, Internet-using guy than, say a Trobriand Islander in the 1400s? Here it seems clearer: dentistry and cars and grocery stores, and a lack of most epidemics, stone-axe wielding enemies, and so forth. Well… and yet: on the atomic war, hectic teaching schedules, bankruptcy, and ubiquitous-estrogen-mimicking-hormones-messing-up-your-body fronts? I dunno.

  To me, this is just a Great Chain of Being argument—the same sort of religious or pseudoreligious discrimination that sets humanity apart from the rest of the world as a special creation of some sort, and sets “modern Western civ” apart from everybody else. Do we sit atop the heap? Are you sure? I dunno.

  I’m not a PoMo relativist, mind you. That would be silly. But somebody has to ask: Does it matter to your model of the world if you integrate yourself into it, instead of standing apart?

• What do you call it when there’s always a revolution? This is more an abstract question, really. Suppose there are big changes that revolutionize life. Social or biological — you pick. Take it as a given. But also suppose that there are many small changes for each bigger one, and that they’re all going concurrently, all the time. How many really small ‘revolutions” does it take to equal the extent of a big one? How many does it take to counteract or mask the effects of the big one? I dunno.
• How efficient we are at information processing? Much is made of the fact that there’s “too much information these days”. Too much for what? First, economies work on the basis of boundedly-rational agents, not the rational all-knowing spirits invoked by traditional economists. Second, people use simple heuristics to manage their daily lives and make decisions, not rational contemplation of all the facts. Third, most people don’t ever even read most news, email, watch most television, or any of the other media stuff we’re “inundated” with — nor need they to make their way in life. We’re awash in information all the time these days, but we don’t pay any more attention than we used to. So what’s the problem? I dunno.

  That said, I’m still wondering what makes people believe that humans process more information than an equivalent pile of any other organism. Aside from stating “that’s not what we mean when we say ‘information’”, nobody’s explained the assumption. I dunno.

• …like the back of your hand? Do we know more than people did long ago? I don’t think so, somehow. What does seem to be different—and interesting—is that people in my great-grandfather’s generation would have known far more about their local geographical region and things done by people closely related to them than I do, whereas I know a lot more about things done far away by people unlike me. Why is this interesting? Does it show a noteworthy trend in cultural history? I dunno.

I’d like to tie these together; they’re definitely related and interconnected. But I’m mulling and acquiring, still. Thus, I would welcome pointers to scholarly work on these subjects.

[Updated links and retrieved from archives, 4/22/07]

I was a tad disingenuous in an earlier post: in the back of my mind, I have always been planning something specific to do with the reverted wilderness acreage we’re buying in the country.

Victorian amateur scientists have always fascinated me. I imagine fondly that someday in the next few months you will find me ensconced at a portable table out in “the back”, wearing my sun hat and glasses, with my WANned iBook and cheap USB microscope, live-blogging pictures of my very own algae, rotifers, seed capsules and suchlike. Better by far, in my technophilic opinion, than a mouldering leather-bound personal journal filed with watercolors of toadstools and calligraphic noodling.

See, I often pine for the days when not just landed gentry but regular folks had microscopes and telescopes and fossil-collecting handbooks and terraria and bred doves and lilies and otherwise learned something first-hand about the real world in their own gardens and town auditoria. The social norm of public scientific inquiry faded long ago, of course, but now I practically despair over it. For example, home-schooling parents are probably the biggest purchasers of microscopes and science training stuff for their kids, but the demographics (and general anti-intellectualism) of the majority of home-school parents don’t encourage me that biological learning is being thoroughly elucidated in these efforts. Most “nature stuff” people do these days pays attention only to the sort of big dramatic cheetah-kills-antelope stuff they’re exposed to on TV: whale-watching, hiking, hunting, birding and the like. They tramp miles through equally interesting but ignored life to go and see the animals, and then tramp back home and sit back down in front of the TV, their boots covered in fascinating stuff on the mat by the door.

Some small part of the reason people don’t “do science” is the cost of equipment and supplies. Yes, a nice gas chromatograph is still rather pricey, and a useful telescope will set you back a few grand. But I spent $30 on my 200x plastic USB microscope (it’s a discontinued toy), and I have this computer just sortof sitting around warming my lap up all the time anyway. So I’m not entirely certain that it’s reason enough ever. Except maybe nuclear physics, and maybe radio astronomy.

Some other part of the reason is supposed to be the difficulty of getting your head around today’s super-specialized scientific knowledge. People (kids) are not trained in science, therefore not qualified to do it. They need somebody to train them in the methods, and show them what they’re supposed to be looking for, and what it means in context. This indicates to many people that science teachers are required, and parents therefore off the hook. But take it from me: I taught botany to wannabe science teachers for three years; you would be frightened or very very sad if you really understood how bad they were at thinking or understanding, let alone teaching about science.

But I think the biggest reason hobbyists don’t do science is that they just don’t know they can. All you really need to do is think and understand the process to be qualified to do it.

By what will be seen to be a very direct path, buying muck and dreaming of sitting in the shade with a microscope and putting it all right here on the Web has reminded me of one of the other projects I’m gearing up for.

A huge and very important chunk of complex systems research consists, in a reduced sense, of thinking about how systems are put together of agents following simple rules. Writing little stories, in other words: “What would happen if people in a market simply traded according to random rules?” and “What would happen if proteins were composed of two types of subunit (hydrophilic and hydrophobic) on a chain constrained to a planar lattice, and you let them wiggle around and ‘fold’? What would you see if you did that? Does it suffice to explain some of what really happens in protein folding?” Of course, before they’re published these what-if questions are prettied up and presented as if the researcher knew all along that they were doing a rational experiment, but because you’re a diligent and faithful reader to have worked your way along this far already, I’m letting you know the Big Secret of Professional Science: we really mostly just try stuff and see what happens.

The science part of complex systems happens in at least three stages. Two of these are: (1) analysis and reframing of stuff that really exists in terms that let you talk about it reasonably using concepts that easily become simple models, and (3) in interpreting the computer simulations you build according to those models to see what they tell you about the real world. The bit in the middle, the (2) that differentiates a lot of complex systems research, is what I refer to as building analogous systems — artificial worlds in which your model of the real world is literally true. So for example, the previous notion about “people in a market trading using random strategies” is in a sense a prospective model of real-world market traders using bounded rationality other weird non-rational stuff we see all the time. The analogous system you can build is the actual running computer program in which little agents representing people trade some tokens representing real market goods and currency according to rules you code as “random” according to your interpretation of the term. The resulting program is not the model: your model is your analysis of the real world, summarized as “perhaps it’s like this” (or hidden in “what if it were like this?”)

The third part, mainly observational but informed by your original modeling effort, basically lies in collecting data in the analogous world and seeing how that may explain or apply to the real one. For example, in collecting a million different protein-folding results in a simulation based on your two-component model of proteins, and then seeing how the statistical distribution of the results might match that seen in nature.

I’m wordy because I’m excited and writing-to-think. All I’m trying to say is this, really: Much of complex systems research is just:

1. Look at what’s around you and frame a model that summarizes what you think you see
2. Write and run a little computer program (an “analogous system”) in which the model is literally true
3. See if the behavior of the analogous system gibes with what you observe.

That’s it.

Point: Complex systems research is easy.

See, the interesting thing about complex systems research—simultaneously the thing that makes the systems interesting, and the field—is that even the analogous systems we build are capable of unexpected and often nigh inexplicable emergent behavior. That’s the point: the model is not tractable by traditional math approaches, so for example a traditional economist would simplify away the stuff that’s emergent because the equations are too hard to solve. But you — you cunning complexologist you — build a simulation based on the model and work around the hard math bit. Yes, maybe even the computer implementation is wild and does weird stuff, but it’s much faster than the real world and so you try it 100,000 times and see what happens.

I harbor secret desires. Many of those I will choose not reveal here, but among the others are: I would like people who are not credentialed union card-holding ivory tower scientists to be able to undertake scientific exploration and investigation personally, collect and manage the observations that will arise, and publish the results in valid peer-reviewed scientific journals (that they can afford).

I think something like the Open Source approach to software development would work, and for exactly the same reasons. I will write about that here in a bit.

In the meantime: almost anybody who knows what it is (and can write code) has written a Game of Life program. Almost everybody who knows what it is (and can write code) has written a Mandelbrot set generator program. The same goes for genetic algorithms, Markov text generators, and innumerable other canonical “chaos and complexity” simulations and algorithms which have been popularized through the years. Yet, recreational or not, these simple programs are exactly the sort of thing that makes complex systems research go.

I’ll bet that at least a dozen of the thousands of people who wrote their own Game of Life (at least those who played with the parameters) encountered phenomena that would have warranted publication in a peer-reviewed journal. And at the same time, I bet that most of the thousands of other people (if only they had been exposed to the work in the context of a community of like-minded collaborators and background information) might have moved on beyond screen-saver diddling and addressed real and serious unanswered scientific questions.

But as amateurs, these folks worked alone and were thus hemmed in by a limited social capital and intellectual context. Their results are forever relegated to recreational status in the “umbra” of science, never published and thus doomed to oblivion. No matter how many interesting “what would happen if…?” and “what does it mean that…?” questions they asked, the answers were for the most part unattainable or unshared.

That’s sad. It’s just as if they lived in the country, went out occasionally and poked around a bit, caught a few butterflies nobody had ever seen before, and not knowing what they had let them go, got bored, and went back in to watch TV.

Working alone, these folks (which I would number in the thousands) remain hobbyists re-creating simple toys. Working together, I think they might become a potent distributed scientific workforce, as powerful and effective as more traditional labs and warranted scientists.

By my argument, you need three tools to do valid complex systems work yourself: One is what you are sitting in front of right now. Another is the mess of meat perched up there at the top of your neck. And the third? Access to other people working on the same thing.

And that’s one thing you can do with muck and the Web that you can’t do with just muck: begin to disintermediate—or enhance and expand—the traditional scientific establishment.

We’ve gone and done it now.

Our latest offer for a house on three acres just north of Chelsea Michigan is likely to be accepted. It’s a nice house, big enough for the family (including my Mom, who’s moving in with us) and some of our stuff. The three acres include the bog-standard development grade-and-grass crap on the front third, but overlooks a hundred acres or so of beautiful low, flat wetland meadow to the south in back.

Of which we are buying two acres.

Barbara has brought her ferociously thorough research attention to bear on this project, and thus we not only have the sale prices of all the other houses in the development, the names and occupations of at least half of the owners, detailed aerial photographs from four sources covering the last five years showing the transformation of the land from working farm into exurban development, a number of government and nonprofit groups’ opinions of the degree of protection and development the place can take, notes on utility coverage, advice from the County on “how to live in the country”, line-of-sight bearings to the wireless internet provider in the area (I did that), and cost-benefit analyses of the various unfinished bits (driveway, decking, water softener), and what the farmer grew on the various bits we’re buying (potatoes and corn). And how much the developer paid for the land and is charging for the construction on it.

We also have a soil map.

See, the lay of the land is what makes it so beautiful and hard to describe, and also a big factor in our decision to pay what is frankly a scary amount for the place. The prospect to the south is (in winter) something like being perched on the shores of a large, dry lake. Of plants. The flats stretch off to the horizon, and the opposite “shore” is occupied only by one timber-framed and distant house. In between, the many maps show some drainage ditches (one of which we’re buying in toto, apparently), and a sinuous line of telephone poles (which oddly also remind me of past visits to waterside towns like Port Clinton or Tampa).

But, as should be obvious from my elision, that’s not water there. As the soil map makes clear, that’s Houghton muck down there in the flat picturesque bits.

Of course, we will like all our neighbors preserve and enhance the natural beauty yadda yadda &c &c. It’s to look at, not do something with; I know that. It’s not like I’m allowed to, say, build a little hobbit house in the back out of strawbale and cob as a studio/office/eccentricity — neither by the deed restrictions nor my wife. But you know, now and then the earnest and diligent exurb conservationist will want to knock down the taller weedier stuff with a riding mower.

And not sink.

Or put a couple of subtle but useful benches out there, whence one can watch the red-tailed hawks and sandhill cranes and white-tailed deer and bluebirds and such doing their thing.

Without sinking.

So now I find I must learn about muck. This, I confess, is not what I expected.

Spend two minutes examining the products in your pantry or grocery store that include corn (maize) products, including corn syrup. Spend another few minutes examining industrial uses (cornstarch packing material, coatings of pharmaceuticals, and so forth). Consider the number of acres of farmland corn planted in the United States; the proportion of hectares of agricultural land worldwide planted with maize; the proportion of biomass consumed by all heterotrophic animals worldwide that is maize. Compare these numbers to the same values a decade and a century ago.

Force yourself to seriously take the stance: The species Zea mays has developed a strategy for dominating and out-performing its natural competitors by directly modifying the behavior of Homo sapiens. Take into account the psychological effects of corn syrup, foods deep-fried in corn oil, and the species’ recent diversification into industrial ethanol production. Take into account the industrial, transportation, social, and medical infrastructure of human society that is devoted to or depends upon Zea mays. Consider what would happen to a 50-acre cornfield if abandoned suddenly, and compare the evolutionary fitness of the plants in the field while being tended vs. the state of abandonment. Consider the reported flavor benefits and health dangers of corn-fed vs. grass-fed beef. Think of farmland as having been scraped clean of many tens of thousands of established organisms per square meter, and re-scraped periodically, so that corn seed and only corn seed may flourish.

It may be useful to read a bit about the coevolutionary dynamics of orchids and insects, and examine the structural engineering involved in the hooked surfaces of burdock and nettle seed cases.

As quickly as possible, change your perspective to the more traditional one: That thousands of years ago, primitive human neo-agronomists discovered the wild grass teosinte and began co-opting it for their settlements. Over several hundred generations of directed breeding, the genetic makeup of the wild plant was twisted into a food crop. Since it was on hand and increasingly standardized by human manipulation, maize plant material came (through a process of technological exaptation) to be used in many diverse applications. Modern genetic agronomy, including transgenic manipulation and other intricate manipulations of the species, has led to the transformation of the original wild plant into a literal tool of Homo sapiens.

Now switch back. Repeat until the notion of “advantage” and “usefulness” begin to be undermined.

Bonus exercises: Undertake the analogous exercise with: tropical houseplants, bamboo, dogs/wolves, the chili pepper. Can the same effect be brought about for books? Light bulbs? Computers?

Computer viruses?