“Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher,” said Aristotle, “and philosophy begins in wonder.” We want to understand, to perceive the larger world beyond our reach. In a fine passage, the naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch describes that impulse:

Both Wordsworth and Thoreau knew that when the light of common day seemed no more than common it was because of something lacking in them, not because of something lacking in it, and what they asked for was eyes to see a universe they knew was worth seeing. For that reason theirs are the best of all attempts to describe what real awareness consists of…that the rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at but the moment when we are capable of seeing it.

In a deep sense the whole, long evolution of intelligence is a gradual expansion of awareness, and of the greater understanding that it brings. Vision itself grew from a dim awareness of the light. Next came eyes, to distinguish shapes and then, as eyes moved close together, depth. With each of those advances, understanding grew, as life forms came to see things they had never seen before. Consciousness expanded our awareness further. It brought another kind of seeing, and with that came still more new revelations. Among them was discovery of the natural laws that led to farming. That transformed our way of life. Farms then spawned cities, with all the ferment and sophisticated feedbacks they produce. They continued to expand our understanding and awareness—this time with science, which spurred a revolution called the machine age.

In each case the same essential process was at work: new awareness led to greater understanding, which then reshaped our world. Today finds us increasing our awareness again, this time through computers and their networks. We draw new insights from their power and precision, and from their ceaseless flows of data. We can also transfer, store, and process data now in quantities and at speeds that once were unthinkable. And in all this we see again more natural laws once hidden from our view—all those ecological patterns and processes that signal yet another transformation.

In Darwinism Evolving, its authors write, “The idea that there is a hidden order now revealed by our massive increase in computative ability produces” a “kind of awe.” This revolution in our understanding of natural process, they say, also leads us “to suspect that we are only nibbling around the edges of deeper dimensions of pattern latent in the natural world.” However far we’ve come, a great deal more lies ahead.

The long term is long. Life on earth has existed for nearly four billion years, and species tend to live for millions. Modern humans bring a new kind of awareness to life but are a mere one hundred thousand years old. We are still babies in evolutionary terms. We have only just opened our eyes. We are just beginning to see.

Tags: Aristotle, Joseph Wood Krutch, pulse

0 comments | Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Antony (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 3.3, from 12 votes

Posted on November 6th, 2006 @ 6:00 am

Cultural feedbacks are remote sensory systems, transmitting information back to us from the larger world. As that data drives our culture, it also flows through our awareness into libraries, databases, and other storehouses—the cultural equivalent of genes. Education draws on those genes; it is a distillation of our feedbacks. While feedbacks bring data to us, education is information we feed forward to the future—in a mirror of the genetic information carried by seedheads—to create a new generation of civilized humans.

Education is cultural reproduction, and just as in sexual reproduction, it carries change. We consciously change our culture in response to new information, new philosophies—as now with our growing insights into natural process and into what those insights mean. As that knowledge filters into grade schools, and is taken up by university programs, an emerging generation then helps carry it forward.

By using the rules that shape biology to also shape our culture, we maintain our best guide to the future. For it unites us to the ongoing process of transformation that is a central fact of life. Like all living systems, human cultures can evolve.

The poet Goethe long ago suggested that when a plant grows, a deep and unchanging pattern shapes the emerging parts, transforming itself from leaves to petals to stamens as they appear. That change, he said, is like the change an insect undergoes in metamorphosis. Writer John Elkington, in his book The Chrysalis Economy, makes a similar case for our situation now. “The global economy,” he says, “is entering a protracted period of…dramatic technological, corporate and market transformation” with strong parallels to “the natural process of metamorphosis.”

Will industrial revolution give way to industrial evolution? We are living through a fundamental change, the rise of a new cultural philosophy. And when philosophy changes, everything changes. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov—a keen entomologist—once said the metamorphosis “from larva to pupa or from pupa to butterfly is not a particularly pleasant process for the subject involved.” Still, it can be rewarding:

There comes for every caterpillar a difficult moment when he begins to feel pervaded by an odd sense of discomfort. It is a tight feeling—here about the neck and elsewhere, and then an unbearable itch…You will ask—what is the feeling of hatching? Oh, no doubt, there is a rush of panic to the head, a thrill of breathless and strange sensation, but then the eyes see, in a flow of sunshine, the butterfly sees the world.

Tags: Chrysalis Economy, cultural feedback, cultural reproduction, education, Goethe, John Elkington, Vladimir Nabokov

0 comments | Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Antony (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 3.6, from 5 votes

Posted on November 5th, 2006 @ 12:00 pm

In the broadest sense, life on earth is adjusting to the entry of conscious deliberation and volition into the system—through the medium of human culture. What that will mean in the next one hundred thousand years is anyone’s guess. Still, the future is not beyond our influence. We may be unable to change ecological process, and precise control of complex systems is not an option. But just how deeply we can affect the birds and trees and other life forms is clear in the environmental havoc we’ve already wreaked with machine age thinking. And to the extent we can cause problems for life, we can also play a beneficial role.

Consciousness and the civil cultures it has wrought are not unnatural. They are a higher level of ecological expression, nature’s grandest experiment so far in social competition and cooperation. But new levels of complexity bring with them the emergence of new qualities. As our shift to an ecological model becomes plausible, this is a key distinction. Primal nature is a useful guide for handling flows of energy and materials, and for certain underlying principles in our basic institutions. But absent the restraints of civil culture, life’s methods can be brutal: anger, fear, dominance, violence, and greed are natural impulses first. Nature’s solution for unemployment is to kill the weak. Civilization is more than just automatic instincts and drives.

In a similar vein, civilization also means more than just letting free markets work. If our most compelling bases for judgment, the cumulative high points of our knowledge, are the needs of five-year economic plans, we are by definition unwise. And contrary to the spin of corporate conservatives, support for the civil institutions of government is not a form of socialism. Free markets are created by people, as are democratic governments. Both are modeled on nature, and neither is meant to “win.” Maintaining a healthy tension between them is consistent with nature’s fondness for balancing impulse and restraint. George Soros, though one of the world’s most aggressive and successful capitalists, notes:

Every society needs some shared values to hold it together. Market values on their own cannot serve that purpose… Markets reduce everything, including human beings (labor) and nature (land), to commodities. We can have a market economy but we cannot have a market society. In addition to markets, society needs institutions to serve such social goals as political freedom and social justice.

Human concerns may be diverse, but we all want a society that provides us with secure and meaningful lives (and better ones for our children, and so on for theirs, for as far into the future as possible). That impulse drives the development of civil communities, and neither markets nor raw nature offers a guide to civil conduct. For that we have philosophers, religious leaders, and now radio talk show hosts. But beyond all of these, for that we have education.

Tags: capitalism, civilization, complexity, consciousness, education, evolution, George Soros, human culture, machine age

1 comment | Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Antony (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 4.5, from 2 votes

Posted on November 4th, 2006 @ 12:00 pm

If there’s an area of immediate concern, it’s not the push to make machines that work like life. It is the effort by radical corporations using machine age ideas to modify existing life. The potential benefits of genetic engineering can’t be argued away. The risks involved are nonetheless great.

Some who promote the genetic revolution hold humanity apart, suggesting there are cases where we can do better than nature. They argue, for example, that nature didn’t invent the wheel. But nature did invent the wheel, through us. That we also invented disco doesn’t mean we are unnatural. As Thomas Edison used to say, “In order to have a lot of good ideas, you have to have a lot of bad ideas.” That is nature’s way, and it should continue to be ours, assuming we can make our cultural feedbacks strong and true. Until then, though, it may be wise to err on the side of caution where huge and powerful corporations with machine age points of view are tinkering with elemental life processes.

Ultimately, the genetic genie is out of its bottle and won’t be stopped. Those who spend their best efforts trying to deny it altogether will just be unprepared to deal with it when it finally comes full force. One suggestion for how to proceed comes from the genome itself. Nature favors genetic stability in some regions, mutability in others, with change allowed in those less crucial to survival. For instance, cell energy conversion is standardized across broad areas of life; it hasn’t changed for billions of years. On the other hand, limb length in mammals varies constantly, even from one individual to the next.

This simple wisdom suggests encouraging pure research while restraining its application where fundamental impacts are likely, a policy that is also in line with nature’s urge to maintain a tension between impulse and restraint. That approach, for instance, would sanction most existing medical procedures but resist germ-line modification, which brings permanent change to the human genome. It would also curb the spread of genetically modified organisms into natural systems around the globe, a practice that changes them inalterably.

Their spread, through industrial farming, is part of a half-smart solution. With the best of intentions we set out fifty years ago to feed the world. The unanticipated outcome was that world population quickly grew to billions more people than industrial farms can continue to support, and that the farms themselves caused major environmental damage. In response to those impacts we are setting off to make that mistake again, now on a new front, by applying the same half-smart logic to genetic modification of crops. This is a classic case of learning the wrong lesson. Artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky tells a story about a dog he had that liked to chase cars. Eventually it was hit by one. In response, the dog continued chasing cars but on a different street.

Tags: food supply, genetic engineering, machine age, Marvin Minsky

0 comments | Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Antony (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 0, from 0 votes

Posted on November 3rd, 2006 @ 3:00 pm

All living things carry information about how they can use energy to stir matter into new forms. Until modern humans came along, though, genomes were the only medium evolution had for storing and transmitting that information. Through the medium of culture, we can now store and transmit complex information genes don’t hold. This has evolutionary impact. The diversity of human interests expands the complexity of information. And culture, just by its existence, also magnifies complexity, since it replicates data so much faster than organic reproduction can, and because its copying fidelity is lower. Computers have accelerated all that. Now scientists aim to up the stakes still further.

Marshall McLuhan once called computers an extraordinary extension of the human nervous system. He may have been too cautious. As science moves to develop computers with minds of their own, cultural evolution could detach from exclusively human wants and needs.

Of self-organizing systems in general, SFI physicist Murray Gell-Mann writes, “Not everything keeps increasing in complexity…Rather, the highest complexity to be found has a tendency to increase.” For some analysts, that insight, joined with progress in robotics, AI, the Web, and now the grid, suggests the means by which some networked meta–life form could arise, one that would absorb and supersede humanity. Is that a real concern?

Our civilization insulates us from the hard edge of ecological process. In this, we’re like those mitochondria that once took residence in the larger cells now feeding and sheltering them. Just as the human body is a kind of civilization for the symbiotic bacteria inhabiting us, our own civilization is a larger body in which we humans live our lives with more security and comfort. It’s conceivable that that system in some distant time might coalesce into a new and larger organism. And in the end it could subsume us, just as we subsume mitochondria. Computers make it at least plausible. The more meaningful question is whether it’s a cause for worry.

From an evolutionary standpoint it is not. Symbiogenesis—in which two or more organisms gradually meld into one—is not a form of capture. Rather, it’s a mutually beneficial partnership that verges into permanence with time. If the partnership doesn’t work, the partners don’t integrate. One need only look at our failing symbiosis with the machine age to see how true that is, as growing numbers of feedbacks now push us not toward further integration but away from it.

There may be near-term problems with robots, or with other artificially intelligent systems. The worst of them are less likely to be grounded in ecological process than in machine age thinking. No one can know for sure, but the odds are that we serve our interest by giving them an evolutionary intelligence (and perhaps—for the long run—by making sure they feed on something we don’t need).

In a footnote to history, it bears noting that Santa Clara County in California—which gave us the Supreme Court case used to create our corporate Frankenstein monsters—is now the home of Silicon Valley, that prolific source of parts and software for a new generation of would-be artificial life forms.

Tags: complexity, data replication, machine age, replication fidelity, silicon valley

0 comments | Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Antony (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 1, from 1 votes

Posted on November 3rd, 2006 @ 6:00 am

New vulnerabilities aren’t the only drawback. Because decentralized data networks like the Web amplify every kind of information, they also enhance the spread of poorly founded rumors and trends. This includes machine age outlooks. In the case at hand, they have globalized an economic system grounded in a partial understanding of reality. In the process they helped carry to every corner of the earth an unsustainable approach to farming and manufacturing.

Given all that, there’s a tendency to blame the messenger. But computers are a tool. Like most tools they can serve in various ways. Even as they are used to harm the natural world, they’re also being used to protect it. Writing for Mother Jones magazine, Walter Truett Anderson outlined that role:

An enormous environmental information system has grown, spreading and connecting around the world. The living Earth is now inseparable from this ever-expanding complex of satellites, transmitters, relay towers, computers, and software. With these devices, people observe the condition of the ozone, speculate on the future of the world’s climate, study tectonic movements deep below the surface, brood over the oceans, track the migrations of wild animals and the changes in forests and deserts. This is technology that doesn’t fit into any simplistic pro vs. con debate. It is neither the malevolent cause of our problems nor their magical solution—just an essential means of acquiring information. And it will play a larger part in bringing greater environmental awareness than the collected works of all the writers and philosophy professors who push deep ecology and bioregionalism.

One thing that computers have always been about is the growth of data, and of the innovation rising from it. By improving and clarifying the information we draw from nature, they deepen our understanding. As communications tools, they accelerate that knowledge through all the wide variety of human interests. As design and manufacturing tools, they accelerate its conversion into innovations. And as marketing and accounting tools, they then accelerate those innovations into general use, with all its impacts on the natural world.

This new loop—of information taken up from nature, massaged through computerized human culture, and then downloaded back to nature—in no way alters ecological process. In fact, it’s where the new biology comes from. But it does increase the rate at which innovations large and small, benign and problematic, are fed into the process. With that has come a rapid increase in complexity, and the speeding up of evolution.

Tags: decentralized networks, impact of the Internet, Walter Truett Anderson

0 comments | Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Antony (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 0, from 0 votes

Posted on November 2nd, 2006 @ 3:00 pm

But there are problems, too. Without computers, the genetic engineering of new and fearsome bioweapons would never have come to pass. Our growing reliance on computers brings other security problems, too, as when companies let outsiders code their software, and in the vulnerabilities of open-source designs. Spam and Trojan horses are pandemic. Crime on the Net is surging, both in frequency and in complexity. According to the London-based computer security firm mi2g, a recent single month saw a record twenty thousand “successful and verifiable” hacker incidents. Internet reach and anonymity help terrorists to organize. Computerized voting booths proliferate while critics point to the inevitability of cyber-tampering. Privacy, a keystone of civil culture, is everywhere under assault by these and other factors, ranging from the cookies in our desktops to the secret codes now printed onto laser color printouts to the electronic tracking chips that will soon be embedded in everything from product packaging to the tires on our cars. Thomas Friedman notes, “Every phone call you make, every bill you charge, every prescription drug you buy, every video you rent, every plane ride you take, every cash machine you use, gets logged somewhere in a computer…and you have no idea when it may come back to haunt you.” Adding to that concern, new laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Patriot Act make it easier for corporations and government agencies to track online activities without our knowledge or consent.

On a related front, as economies and national defense establishments grow dependent on computer webs, the specter of cyberwar looms. Hack attacks are a constant threat. The GPS satellites that guide everything from military ops to commercial shipping, and that set the crucial time stamps for Internet routing, can be knocked out with existing arms. They’re also vulnerable to the new electromagnetic pulse weapons, which emit powerful microwave bursts that burn out electronic circuitry. Virtually all private sector computer systems and most government systems are vulnerable to these “e-pulse” bombs. That’s a special concern in the modern, data-rich battlefield, but it also opens the way for new kinds of terrorist assaults on our highly networked infrastructure. Time was, “infrastructure” meant harbors, airports, factories, and bridges. Today it includes the computer circuits that run everything from telecommunications to nuclear power plant fail-safe systems. There is now a White House special adviser on cyberspace security to address this threat. The Defense and Commerce departments, along with the FBI, also each have “critical infrastructure” boards devoted to cyber security.

Tags: cybercrime, cyberterrorism, cyberwarm, digital millenium copyright act, electromagnetic pulse weapons, patriot act

0 comments | Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Antony (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 4.5, from 2 votes

Posted on November 2nd, 2006 @ 6:00 am

As computers help transform the way we think, they also—through their widespread distribution—help ingrain those new ideas in every facet of our lives. In nanotechnology and materials science, robotics and AI; in complexity theory, the study of ecology, and agriculture; for decentralized energy microgrids and virtual community planning; in industrial ecology and bioeconomic theory; as well as in media, education, and the democratic process—with its voter databases and number-crunching opinion poll analysis, and now electronic voting booths—all have been profoundly affected by, in some cases are little more than elaborations of, computers.

They’re no less involved now in the myriad outputs of our consumer economy. Computers are often instrumental in the research leading to a new product. Then they’re used to design the product. The product is manufactured on a computerized assembly line, promoted over media that use computerized production and transmission systems, and sold to customers who have been targeted through the use of computerized databases. Life cycle analysis computers track the flow of energy and materials into the product, even as computerized checkout and accounting systems track its distribution and sale. And, increasingly, computer chips are embedded in the product itself (by one reckoning, in the U.S. today there are sixty thousand computer chips for every person).

From video games to virtual flight training for pilots, from space programs to all the global positioning and communications and spy satellites they launch, computers are the key. The World Wide Web has become a reality unto itself. With its e-mail, instant messaging, search engines, and proliferating chat rooms, dating services, smart mobs, podcasts, wikis, VoIPs, blogs, vlogs, and evolving artificial life forms; and with sites for buying everything from stocks and bonds to pop tunes to pickup trucks (Web-based commerce is already a $50 billion sector), the Internet has become a new kind of ecosystem. There are Web sites to raise money for politicians and Web sites for the muckrakers who decry them. There are Internet-mediated procedures for conducting lab research or medical operations at a distance. People from all walks of life interact in multiplayer games and through their avatars in virtual worlds. Businesses and schools explore virtual reality conferencing. Grid computing links computing centers or vast numbers of desktops to form virtual supercomputers that analyze global climate, model the complexities of protein folding, or scan huge databases to aid in drug discovery.

Tags: AI, artificial life, blog, computers and elections, computing, electronic voting booths, internet, life cycle analysis, podcast, smart mobs, vlog, wiki, World Wide Web

0 comments | Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Antony (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 0, from 0 votes

Posted on November 1st, 2006 @ 3:00 pm

From nanotechnology to democratic processes and in virtually every field between, the same revolution is under way. Because the new biology affects so many different fields at once, there is no longer any question that it’s significant. So why, then, has it taken this long to make its mark? After all, when Newton codifed classical physics in the late seventeenth century, it very quickly transformed natural science, dynamics, astronomy, and philosophy. The machine age was founded on those principles. Yet though Darwin published his insight into ecological process in 1859, it languished in the scientific cheap seats until the 1980s. Economist Brian Arthur suggests why. As he explains it:

[Philosopher] Daniel Dennett has become famous for saying that the best idea of all time was Darwin’s idea…that Darwin is dangerous. It’s like a universal solvent. Any discipline that tries to contain it, it just eats through the discipline. Be it anthropology, our understanding of economies, our understanding of computer algorithms—the discipline is never the same… This is the theme of the next century. The base reasoning throughout all disciplines is becoming Darwinian. So why wasn’t that true a hundred years ago? How come there wasn’t an enlightenment in the 1900s coming out of Darwin, parallel to the enlightenment coming out of Newton and Descartes? My answer is…Darwin couldn’t be mechanized, could not be reduced to equations. It turns out that way of thinking didn’t really catch on until we got desktop computers. Then we could look at whole patterns evolving. This has meant that in all of the sciences there has been a heavy step back to an organic view. Suddenly we are able to look at highly interactive, coevolving systems directly—not by pencil and paper, but by computer. So what the telescope did for astronomy and what the microscope did for biology…the computer is doing for this ecological metaphor.

Computers have another impact on philosophy, too. When the machine age implanted reductionism into culture, it broke human fields of endeavor into isolated specialties. Ecological thought now seeks to overlay them with interconnecting webs. The Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Santa Fe Institute paterfamilias, says, “We think specialization is necessary and good, but we believe it has to be supplemented with integrative thinking, and that right now there’s an imbalance—that there’s a great need for competent integrative thinking.” And just as computers turned out to be the missing link in the effort to “see” ecological processes, they have also proved instrumental in the cross-disciplinary movement led by SFI. A-Life progenitor Chris Langton describes how: “Physicists speak a different language from economists, and have different bodies of theory,” he says. So too for biologists. “The fact that we all have to speak the same language to get ourselves on the computer has allowed us to compare very different systems. We now have this common linguistic territory, and we’ve found commonality among things we would have thought were different otherwise.”

Tags: Brain Arthur, Charles Darwin, Chris Langton, Isaac Newton, machine age, Murray Gell Mann, nanotechnology

0 comments | Email this to a friend | Add to del.icio.us | Add to digg |
Linkology by Antony (all links are unofficial) | Rights Info

Rating: 3, from 6 votes

Posted on November 1st, 2006 @ 6:00 am