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?