Journal Nyarly's Journal: Philosophy track 23
Idea No. 1: Complexity theory, and self-organizing systems. This is big, and fascinating and slippery. I feel like I don't know the half of the basic premise, but it matches up with a number of ideas that occured to me in vacuo, which is always a good way to get me to latch onto an idea. I'm applying this mainly as it suggests that the contention that there is Order implies that there is an Orderer is false, that Order can arise from very subtle effects in initial conditions (or even just previous conditions.)
Idea No. 2 is that of N degrees of seperation. That everyone in the world can be connected to everyone else by means of some number of association. It's kind of goofy, but what I'm really trying to get at is that every fact of our society is the result of the interrelation of 6 billion people, and that patterns in that interrelation result in every observable charcteristic of anything one might call society.
Really, I don't think #2 works without #1, although I think it's observable on it's own. Every editorial tries to find the reasons behind this or that trend. How often does political conversation turn to cause and effect? And aren't the causes almost always in terms of structures of people? Very rarely do other causes make their way into such discussions. We argue that the rise is sexuality in popular media has to do with, say, the women's liberation movement or pressure from advertisers, rather than spectra of light, new broadcasting technologies, hormonal levels in the atmosphere.
But self-organization explains why we trends and cycles in social situations. Picture the human relation graph as a having a state - a very complicated state, but a single state none the less. I'm not entirely sure what contributes to the state, but I tend to think we all observe parts of it. What else do we mean by "the state of the World?" I do think that human wills influence it, though.
Now, the synthesis completed: Credo that this state is complex, and self-orgnazing (or else it would have either devolved into a simple trend, or collapsed - I tend to think that the threat of nuclear war is one form of collapse that could occur), and so very sensitive to it's previous states. Therefore a single human will, properly informed and acting correctly, could influence the whole state in a significant way. The problem, then, is to determine what actions will lead to what results. I suspect that while the simple answers of political activism, etc. do have an effect, they may not be the most effective. I also suspect that a perfect calculation may be outside of the scope of the human mind (at least mine) and that of modern hardware, but that some set of rules might be deduced. What those rules might be, or the result of their discovery would be, I can't speculate yet.
Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here... (Score:2)
How does Order come out of chaos? That first idea, of Order, without an Orderer only follows if you assume that all initial (i.e. previous) conditions were also Ordered. But they couldn't be really, because to establish Order, you have to indicate that there is such a thing as an absense of it that is also a possibility. If that is a possibility, it has to have happened at least once (we're talking since minus infinity on the time-line), and order cannot generate out of it (or can it... I may be missing something here...) without some outside kind of force putting it back. Hence, I believe in an Orderer.
Your second idea, I totally like and agree on (although it reminds me of an episode of Dark Angel, wherein she says "you're not one of those bull-shit people that are going to tell me that because a butterfly farted in Thailand 30 million years ago, we are here meeting today..."). I think that there are definite patterns and a distinct Order to everything. How else do I get to walk around as the most blessed person on earth every day? There must be some chain reaction of chain reactions to ensure that such is true (or at least has been my entire life). In fact, without such a mapping/strategy/order to everything, I am fairly convinced that everything would fall apart.
Did I miss the boat, or was that what you were talking about?
Re:Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here.. (Score:2)
That first idea, of Order, without an Orderer only follows if you assume that all initial (i.e. previous) conditions were also Ordered.
I'm familiar with the argument you're drawing from, that an infinite regression is impossible. I'm not requiring one. Complexity theory suggests that some disordered configurations can self-order. Consider, for instance, Conway's game of life, where you can randomly fill cells, and while some configurations will devolve to an all-empty state, others will result in non-stable ordered states.
In the other hand, the original source of Order isn't really at issue in what I'm getting at. Since the current state depends on previous ones, and is very sensative to various perturbations, it should be possible for any one person to effect the changes they want to see in the world at large.
There's a story about the Old Man in the Mountain, who rules the world by subtle manipulation. What I'm suggesting is that not only could such a story be true, but anyone could be an Old Person on a Hillock, except we don't know the exact means by which to force a specific change.
As a for instance, consider the phenomenon of terrorism. There are a number of factors that contribute to its inception and its continuance. We can identify and dissect those factors. Can we somehow defuse or ruin them so that terrorism ceases to be? Is there a level of reduction where I can say "Aha! I need but write this letter, say that thing, buy that item, walk this way, recite that incantation, and the roots of terrorism will be poisoned."
Are the sources of continuing phenomena too diffuse for one person to effect? Or can the diffusion be replicated, so that the actions of one (or even two ;) can touch the same basis, and so work towards an end?
I didn't mean to shout my atheism too loundly this time. But the idea of self-ordering, that order can be implicit in the initial conditions of a disordered system rings extraordinarily true with me, so it touches a lot of my own philosophy.
Re:Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here.. (Score:2)
Well, I agree and I disagree with your assertions... The Old Man in the Mountain, eh? I look at that as a sort of sneaky representation of God. And insofar as the New Testament explains, any person, actually, could be a Young Lady in a Lilac House.
I can't remember where it is, but there is this little story in the Bible where someone prays and then an angel shows up to answer the prayer but is days later than expected. The angel was a little busy taking care of some business elsewhere, hence he took some time in getting there. I can't help but wonder, did that guy praying make the angel wrap up his other stuff in haste and then come running over to help this guy to the detriment of other parties?
I was once talking to this guy about a resturaunt here. I thought it was a good idea and even though I wasn't vegan, I like vegetables and I want to support the place, and I was telling that guy he should too, but I also added some information about some unsavory practices of the staff there, and some bad stuff about their money management and the former management's food... The guy cut me off. He asserted that just by saying such things I could be changing something, somewhere, probably in that resturaunt, for the worse. That one conversation with that guy has affected me for years. What you say, or do, or whatever, could, completely inexplicably, have an affect on the whole rest of the world. You never know, so you might as well walk around with as much integrity as you can muster, and spread positive gossip around about all the people surrounding you that you think are swell.
Sometimes conditions are just right for a little thing to bring about a great big change. The American Revolution for example. Britain survived (and put down) numbers of insurrections and rebellions before and after the colonists of the states won their freedom. The timing was right. Such could be the case for terrorism and ending it. All it might take is me saying the right prayer and then a little four year old girl asking her daddy not to go to the cell meeting (yes, this is a bit of an exaggeration), and then the meeting falling apart without the guy there, and the organization falling apart without the meeting, and the entire network of terrorist organizations falling apart without that one organization. Yes, it is unlikely. But it could happen. And I think you're right. In my particular case (given my belief in God) I might be the deciding block for that because I was praying, but then I might be the deciding block because I smiled at the little girl in a coffeeshop. Either way, I am going to be the Young Lady in a Lilac House. I think that one person can make the difference and I might as well live my life praying and acting in such a way as to facilitate it being me who does it.
Now about the incantations... I'm not sure I buy all of that (again, we go back to the butterfly fart in Thailand). But if you do figure something out, by all means let me know.
Re:Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here.. (Score:2)
For want of a nail, eh? I suppose that's one flavor of the interconnectedness I'm thinking of. Another is the situation where I gesture, or comment, and five people hear it, who tell their friends, etc and the pyramid effect distributes my distorted message to the world. Should only take six transferences to tell the whole world, right? And really, it would be a mix of both aspects by which one's influence travels.
I guess my point is that, for this to work, we need some measure of art or engineering with which to wield our influence, so that we don't self-interfere. On some level, I guess I suppose that whatever effect I have towards one outcome, I have contrary effects as well, either because a second action interferes with the first, or because my vibrations reflect and cancel each other out. To really wreak the impact of my will, I need to find a sort of resonant frequency, so that all that exists will throb in time. Or something like that. And finding those resonances in the naive way (by which I imagine a Newtonian determinist's wet dream: complete knowledge of the world and its interactions, so they might be pluck like harpstrings) is beyond human power, necessarily. One would have to know the minds of every other person - it's difficult enough just to know one's own mind.
But, if we could understand well enough the flows of complex history, perhaps we could divert them, much as we can reach into a flow of water and alter it, even without a full understanding of how every molecule of water interacts. So really, I'm talking about dike architecture, not entomoligocial gastronomy.
Re:Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here.. (Score:2)
Two things. First, the six degrees of separation don't really count for information spread because even though through six people you may know everyone else, people don't talk to each other on a regular basis and thus don't really spread the information worldwide. But, there is a world-wide information transfer, and the prospect of learning more about it is really interesting.
Second, I am a social scientist. Specifically, I specialize in neuro-linguistic hacking and trend transfer. Purely hobby of course, and most of my large-scale stuff has focused on the American counter-culture, but it is very similiar to the kind of thing you are talking about being interested in here. There are some things that you could do that might help you with understanding how the world's interactions work... you could design a test. So my question is, how badly do you want to get a grip on this? This test would in one way resemble chain letters and in another way the game telephone. If you really want to see where things go and what they do and how it all works, you can test it.
Here is the proposed test, which you should tweak a whole bunch because I have spent about half a minute thinking about it: Tell all of your friends that you encounter for one week that you are testing the six degrees of separtion. Include a message if you'd like to see how much it gets distorted. Send emails to everyone you can appropriately send emails to in order to get it. Tell people in person. Call people on the phone. Ask them to spread it to everyone they know (and can feasibly ask) for a week. (The feasibly ask disclaimer is so that they don't feel it is a tremendous task and that they have to like ask their boss or something to do it too... we're limiting it to friends just to make the subjects more willing to participate.) I hypothesize that if it is simply a friend network that is being tossed through, there is probably something like 100 degrees of separation worldwide. On the other end here, I could ask a couple of moderatly plugged in people I know (my mom, dad, step-mom and brother are good choices b/c of the vastly different kinds of people they know and the different groups they belong to, in addition to their geographical separation) to be on the lookout for your research. When they get it, I flag you, and you can turn it around to see what kinds of results you got.
Let me know what you think. And if you decide to do it and want to know still more, ask me for some other kinds of tests you could perform (I'm one of those people who can brain-storm like crazy but should never be allowed to implement anything). Think about it very carefully though before you do it, because this is the kind of test that will likely only work once. Of course, you'll have to share your results with me... ;P
Re:Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here.. (Score:2)
Tell me more. Point out research, describe experiments, hold forth on dogmas, present hypotheses!
You'll find that the email supplied to /. is accurate, if you're interested.
Re:Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here.. (Score:2)
Re:Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here.. (Score:1)
I'm terribly sorry. I'd not intended to be anywhere near forward. I shuck email accounts so freely, I forget not everyone can. If you decide I'm not a creepy web stalker, I'll be delighted to continue conversation via email. If not, no offense whatsoever is taken; I'd be content to continue in this journal entry until it's archived - goodness knows nobody seems to read my journal anyway.
Re:Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here.. (Score:2)
I think that the language used to describe it makes it sound like it's something far more mystical than it is, when it fact it's not anything like that.
Take a glass of water at slightly below 0 C (yes, it's possible to have water below 0 C, even though ice is more favorable). As a liquid, it's very disordered. You have molecules moving around every which way, in no particular orientation. And yet we know that eventually, it's going to freeze. How does this happen? Why is that? Well, it's not because of any top-down laws. Sure, we can write equations which can convince us that it should freeze, but there is no script in nature, no director with a bull-horn shouting out "Hey you! Water #48,342,109! You need to reorient yourself around right now and move three nanometers to your left!" Instead, each water molecule examines its local environment and moves based only on what happens in a really surprisingly small area around it. There is no actual outside force driving the water molecules to align as they do. All that happens is that local forces drive change, and that even small local preferences can lead to huge macroscopic orderings.
Another example of self-organized criticality is birds on a telephone wire. Now, sometimes when birds are sitting on a telephone wire, they'll all get up and fly away at the same time. Sometimes this happens because of an outside force--a man shot a gun nearby; they all freaked out and flew away. Other times, it's inexplicable. There's no outside force that could have caused the sudden change in bird behavior. But imagine that the bird thinks like this: "I like sitting on the telephone wire. I'm lazy and I have a good view, so I'll just stay here. But maybe if my neighbor jumps up, it's because he sees some food. If that's the case, I better jump up and try and get some, too." Then you have the case where one bird might rearrange himself, scare his neighbors, and suddenly the whole flock is airborne. Local rules lead to long range order. That's what it's all about.
Substitute "birds" for "day traders" and "sitting on the telephone wire" for "holding onto stocks" and you can see that there's a really broad range of applicability.
Re:Darling, you knew I was going to jump in here.. (Score:1)
However, self-ordering need not be a situation of criticality (although the interaction of criticality and complexity is one that bears further thinking on...and is suggestive as to which Newman paper I ought to read next). For instance, the fact that the birds organize themselves on the wire in a roughly even spacing is a result of self-ordering. Each bird wants to be a certain distance from his fellow, and from the end of the wire, but still in the flock.
Other non-critical examples of self-ordering include the Great Red Spot, and Raisin Bran. Raisin Bran: have you ever noticed that all the raisins wind up at the bottom of the box? There's no rule that the raisins wind up on the bottom, but in a small-scale interaction with the flakes, they will tend towards the bottom. Similar interactions on planetary scale result necessarily (there's some research from UTA that I cannot find at present) in the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
I also tend to suspect that there's an inherent assumption in molecular biology that ammounts to self-order. Essentially that if a bond can occur, it will, eventually.
Re:rail in the U.S. (Score:2)
It's called the principle of ergodicity. It's a stronger statement than "If a bond can occur, it will, eventually." The principle of ergodicity says that things will happen in proportion to its statistical weight. So if something is 1 x 10^-6 probable, and you have 10^6 systems, it'll be happening in one of them on average.
Re:rail in the U.S. (Score:1)
Is that sufficient to validate the interactions that molecular biology concerns itself with? For instance, the recent furor (and Nobel prizes) about "junk" DNA, and its structural role in genetic replication suggests that it's vital that certain bonds be more likely than others - and that their increased probability makes the whole mechanism of a cell work. This is one of those concepts that gives me a extremely annoying "tip of the tongue" feeling. The idea of ergodicity (for the indication of which, I thank you) helps to connect the idea.
Re:rail in the U.S. (Score:2)
Ergodicity says nothing about the rate at which things should happen. Just that they do happen, eventually. The rate of mutations is a kinetic argument, and is going to depend more on the number and probability of your intermediates than on the relative proportion of the two states. It's very difficult to talk about statistical physics with regards to living objects, simply because living objects aren't in equilibrium, so many things that we "know" don't apply to them.
Considering (Score:1)
well yah, I guess there is order to things. ^_^
Re:Considering (Score:1)
Re:Considering (Score:1)
How are disorder and chaos different? Granted I see while disorder is measurable, true chaos is rather binary in that it either is or isn't, but I have an exe file sitting on my HD that proclaims to measure the total entropy of a file (in percents no less!
Err, ok hmm. Now I think I got it. A truly random file would have no signal to it to begin with, hehe. Obviously even a 100% efficient compression scheme is going to leave a file behind which has plenty of order to it, or else there would be little point in the file, hehe. ^_^
Yup! (Score:2)
What you say about a single person being able to change things is certainly true and can be seen in the research Mark has done. However, it is not true that any person can make a difference. Imagine that we have a mapped out network of people (assuming we have a good way to define our edges and what not). Let's take slashdot to be the entire world for purposes of simplicity. Now, there's some people who are going to be very well connected, eg. Fort Knox and CmdrTaco. They can probably make a pretty big difference in the grand scheme of things. Furthermore, removing several of those key people could really end up fragmenting the community into much smaller bits (until new nodes developed, of course). If Fort Knox writes about a new idea he has for moderation in his journal, it'll get heard. On the other hand, imagine that there's some guy with no friends, no foes, no karma writes in his journal, it's very unlikely that anyone will ever see it. So he can't change much at all.
One application of this, for instance, might be to the spread of disease. If you could map out where everyone picks up their common cold from, you might find out that there's some people--like bus drivers or clerks in grocery stores--who infect thousands of people and others who interact so little with others that they have almost no effect. So if you had a new vaccination and you wanted to prevent the spread of some terrible disease, you could vaccinate the people who would do the most harm first, which would slow the spread of the disease far more significantly than just vaccinating people at random. Anyways, like I said, everything I know about this I know from talking to Mark, so read what he writes.
Re:Yup! (Score:1)
Add to "Of Interest" bookmarks. Skimming his pubs now. Interesting...
However, it is not true that any person can make a difference.
See, I'm not sure this is so. Let's say we accept /. as an appropriate model of the world. Consider the situation where an AC posts something so well-written that it's modded up to 5. CmdrTaco or FortKnox, by virtue of their connectedness, are more likely to be exposed to the comment, since it's more likely to be seen by one of their immediate acquantainces (Friends). My contention is that such a comment might be slanted by a savvy AC so that a well connected actor (see how gleefully I assimilate the jargon!) would be strongly influenced. It is partially, in fact, the fact there are regions of greater clustering in a global social network that makes the entire contention stand.
On the other hand, could you point out Dr. Newman's works that have to do with complexity theory and specifically with self-ordering? The other part of this contention is that it's the sensitivity to subtle influences of a social network that makes the idea of a single actor's influence congruent to any single actor's influence.
Re:Yup! (Score:2)
Um, well. Let's see. Mark's a co-author on a book called "The Theory of Critical Phenomena: An Introduction to the Renormalization Group". That's pretty tough going; I don't know what your background is like. The connection between some of the social network stuff and criticality and self-ordering is probably going to be best found in discussions of power-law behavior; you probably want to do a search for "Per Bak" along those lines.
Re:Yup! (Score:1)
I saw that shortly after posting. I think I can fake a "sound undergraduate background in physics and mathematics." On a good day. It sounds like something I might be able to glean tidbits from, even if I won't find enough application to integrate it fully.
Re:Yup! (Score:2)
Re:Yup! (Score:1)
As to a propagator, it's momentum integral for a particle, or something like that. I'm very fuzzy on it, but I think I've heard the term before.
Re:Yup! (Score:2)