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]