Connecting DotsTony Smith

Melbourne Emergence Meetup14 August 2014

Tonight’s Challenge• Tell a story with currently 17 major parts

• each of which should eventually get a lot more than a full length presentation

• Make clear their framing in fundamental principles

• Engage any who may find something that touches them in part, framing or whole

• Wrap it while everyone is still with us

Why bother?• Before I’m gone, hopefully

• Laying it out in summary

• leaving unfinished clues

• Marcia Salner’s challenge

• Towards a “better” world

• Multi generational project

• we’ve only just begun

• Need a “better” road map

• Late in a self-indulgent life

• lived at a fortuitous time in a fortuitous place

• Chatterbox in my head is reward from that journey

• A life well lived is artistic masterpiece too easily lost

• In the here and now we can but leave traces

• Giving thanks to the space, time, energy, matter and other lives that have allowed me to tell my lies on this old and damp ball of rock

• Our systemic servants do not good masters make

Knowledge of Nature• Cosmogenesis in Multiverse

• Physics from Nothing is Hard

• Earth, Sun, Moon, Life

• (pre)historic contingency recursion

• Observing common behaviour

• Learning to look closely

• under reef ledges

• volcanic plains grasslands

Maturing Cosmos

Galaxy

Solar

System

Red

Giant

Type 1a

Supernova

Chaotic

Inflation

Conservative Bubble

Neutron Star

Earth

Vacuum

Sources

Sinks

Producers

Reproducers

Locally

Conservative

Physics

Human

Intellectual

Retreat

from

Centre

Stage

• Purging naive assumptions

• Communicating a feel for the very big, small, fast, slow

• (when $18b road confuses)

• Empty space far from nothing

• expanding or self-producing

• Physics looks highly evolved

• c.f. Lee Smolin

• presented as e.g. at workshop on Philosophy of Complexity, Stellenbosch, Sth Africa, 2007

Think

Act

Global

Local

Victorian Volcanic Plains Grasslands• John Batman 1835: most beautiful sheep pasturage

• Almost destroyed by sheep and superphosphate

• Shown on vegetation maps as uniform pale yellow

• Obscuring its rich detail, rocky rises, orchids, …

Nature of Knowledge• Could defer this to Bill Hall

• Towards a Knowledge Network

• Conversation Piece (1997)

• TransForum

• Pseudoscience Psychology Economics deny agency to co-inhabitants of this planet

• Legal Fictions

• Intellectual Property

• Knowledge encoded in DNA, synapses, muscles guides response to environmental variability (How?)

• Knowledge encoded in deeply recursive grammars offers responses to endless human curiosity (Why?)

• Verbal blindness obscures much from human gaze

• Double-edged sword revealing truth, spreading lies

• Knowing your own kind, territory, movement, needs

• Stories, curation, transformational potential (What if?)

The Human Experiment

• Homo Sapiens do not enjoy special uniqueness

• beyond emergent characteristics coming together

• Science is but one of our significant stepping stones

• Extreme division of labour counterfeits ecosystems

• producing platforms & silos for further exploration

• Alpha male legacies thwart quest for civil society

• Still share planet & cities with many fellow travellers

• Avoid projection and assumption of privilege

• Nature mostly doesn’t care

• Tomorrow is good assumption

• Implications of life extension

• Choosing our exit strategies

• Approaching The Ant Road

• Specialists and generalists

• Why, in general, Life Is Good

• Shit Happens as useful starting philosophy

Selected Cellular Automata• Discrete versus Continuous

• Deterministic does not imply predetermined, allows rerunning

• Many discrete mechanisms in Wolfram: A New Kind of Science 2002

• Principle of Computational Equivalence

• Computational Irreducibility

• Evolving Networks, Tick Tock

• Fredkin Automata, Pattern Breeder

• Game of Life, Generations 345/3/6

Two years running Generations 345/3/6 developing software compressed rendering animation pan & zoom

Near last of 500 seeds run for 100,000+ iterations

produced fresh surprises

Of all early surprises the above demanded getting very serious and naming Hanu

COMFORT FEATURES Generations WMPVNCount range 0-8 0-12(c)Survive 345(8?) 45678(b?c?)Born 3(6?7?8?) 45(9?a?b?c?)1/2 forward movement born 3 born 451/2 toggling side cells born 3 born 4asym ship central cell death not survive 6 not survive 9sym ship central cell death not survive 7 not survive atail/edge clean up not survive 12 not survive (1?)23track without gap stability survive 35 survive 48double track with gap stability survive 34 survive 46gapless double track stability survive 345 survive 468block stability survive 3 survive 5blocked track stability survive 5 survive 8gap stability not born 4 not born 6(7?8?)track toothed edge stability not born 5 not born 8

• Key to Generations 345/3/6 is track-laying engines

• These can occur in 345/3/n through 3458/3678/n

• None of those offered more, so explored new rule super family

• Moore and von Neumann neighbourhoods, so Weighted Moore Plus Von Neumann

• Identified 64 individual rule families as comparable targets

• Many new behaviours found, highlight WMPVN 45678c/459/11

One from http://wmpvn.com/45678xx_45xxxx/c_9_11/images/

Emergence/Systems/ComplexitySupervenience 101

• Emergent organisation constrains the behaviour of component parts

• Math concept of degrees of freedom useful here

• Novel organisation can emerge where there is a gradient to be dissipated

• Stan Salthe’s rule of thumb suggests maximum 50% of gradient can do useful work

• Theory poorly recognised

Invasions of Australia• Alfred Russell Wallace’s line

• Tim Flannery: Future Eaters

• Northern contacts, the Dingo

• Bill Gammage: Greatest Estate

• Bruce Pascoe: Dark Emu

• Sheep and Superphosphate

• Detroit and Hollywood

• The Russians are coming

• The Yellow Peril

No Secrets andNo Need for Secrets

• Chapter originally planned for 1987 iteration on The Prospect of an Informed Age

• No Secrets clearly on track

• No Need now problematic

• Collective courage to move away from censoriousness

• How to live in megacities?

• Institutions don’t scale well

• We act within relationships (later) and communities

• Communities are very supportive within boundaries

• Wider community needs confidence that individual groups are not up to no good

• Challenge to strip judgement calls on individuals and groups back to necessary minimum

• Well regulated supply better than prohibition

• Treat mental illness seriously but never as pretext

Opening Collectives Beyond Democracy

• This is newish, moving target

• Though seen by 1987, only now becoming permissible to say Democracy doesn’t scale

• Open Source Software was a novel approach to collective agency, with strong validation

• Challenge to extend strengths where success judgement call

• Co-working spaces find need for better resource discovery

• Creative Commons, Open Standards, MOOC

• Open Data, Open Geographic Information Systems

• Open Government, Occupy Everywhere, Loomio

• DIY Bio, 3D Printing, Maker Spaces, Mens Sheds

• The Commons, Co-operatives, Crowd Funding

• Co-ordination, Co-operation, Collaboration

• Social Media, Citizen Reporting, Sousveillance

A Tale of Two Streamsc. 1900

Creek Cumbo

• Home 1949-1957

• Couldn’t build on block next door because Moonee Ponds Creek floods kept eroding

• School 1958-1963

• Home and Creek obliterated 1966 for Tullamarine Freeway and Flood Amelioration

♥

• Originally in context of #EWfail and last Federal election

• Now fit Colin’s human-sized

• Cumberland River Holiday Park

• Camp, Bush, Beach

Plans for Melbourne• President of Master Plumbers

• MMBW, Public Works Dept

• Increasing fan of Local Govt

• despite compliance regime

• Hydrology, Public Transport

• Transport Integration Act 2010

• Better use interested public

• Work back from Long Big Pic

WYNDHAM

HUME

MELTON

WHITTLESEA

MITCHELL

Box Hill

Footscray

Broadmeadows

CentralMelbourne

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Contested Values and Growing Pool of Money• Money & me: worst of enemies

• Your time cannot be replaced

• but resupply fairly reliable

• Interests and affections

• 1987 book plan substructure multidimensional value vector easy as scalar for computers

• Triple bottom line accounting

• beauty, belonging, stimulation, caring, relief, novelty, comfort,

• Money as rubber ruler: intrinsic value less volatile

• Collect deep pools, stabilise surface, drain out underneath to irrigate other enterprises, repeat

• Local domination by banking (and “planning”) authorisation for a development to proceed

• Growth imperative, rent seekers, empires in decline

• Re-insurance, hedge funds strive against volatility

• Long term investment with short term performance

Nurturing DiversityIndigenous Culture

is just a starting point

• We occupiers enjoy a life of extraordinary comfort at disproportionate cost to the occupied

• We have more to learn from them than they from us

• Close to Deaths in Custody & Stolen Generation

• More recent studies revisit long-ignored evidence

• Despite well known disadvantages, their cultures retain an attraction, better international recognition

• Paternalist assimilation must not be default choice

Why I am not Agnostic

• Staying open to evidence is fundamental, but doesn’t ignore weight of evidence nor shift burden of proof

• I try to stay rational but am not a Rationalist

• I try to stay humane without becoming a Humanist

• Happy to be Secular, but that is a political position

• Scepticism is appropriate in face of unsupported claims to common sense or obviousness #EWfail

• Better a TransHumanist seeing human as transitional

Turning Hopesinto Expectations

• Self-fulfilling prophecies

• Reincarnation technologies ask more than they answer but we are not likely to give up

• Might we transmit updates to digital souls around Galaxy?

• Science Fiction makes worlds to explore but stays familiar

• Book I identify with in which a gifted ivory playing piece God is broken by Hanuman li Tosh

• Hypothesise for a moment that we can productively limit social interaction to maps: language & media

• Swap familiar biological for Moravec’s rich robotics

• Amount of data needed to represent an individual’s conversational potential may drop precipitously

• Take reincarnation literally: awoken knows it is you

• Question moves: when in life’s story? multiplicity?

• Seeding a proxy first step to viable autonomous heir

Slaughtering Sacred Cows• Some things must stay unsaid

• Common heritage as animal, chordate, reptile, mammal

• Biological imperatives meet behavioural plasticity

• Product of peculiar life history

• Discover/construct who we are

• Expected to know rules without anyone allowed to teach them

• All seen thru coloured glasses

• Issues fuel religious dogma, self-styled do-gooders

• Ending paternalism without destroying safeguards

• Schoolyard and folk wisdom sets ugly expectations

• Entitlement without empathy, adversary legal system

• Ends with disillusioned partner seeking retribution

• Learning, rewards and addiction closely related

• Authoritarianism taught as psychological diagnosis

Exploring PossibilitiesMet Bill McPherson and others 1 June 1982

on first assignment for Computerworld

• Is? and Ought? The two great questions have the same two word answer

• Exploring Possibilities

• also known as PLAY

• Need confident platform from which to explore and for happy returns

• Demographics & social complexification create adolescence to explore personal possibilities

• Are we all adolescent?

“Lets see, I reckon put like walls down here that kids are allowed to graffiti. There’s not a whole lot of other places. Like there’s a few places in the city. Kids have to go all the way into the city. Most of the time when kids go into

the city, older people like try and steal their stuff, like that.”

Questions?