Culture, Complexity and Code
“The truth is rarely in the middle.” Joscha Bach
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The reality that human beings interface with has become more complex.
Here’s one measure.
“There were 5 exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003; now that same amount is created every two days.” Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO
Here’s another: As many as 57 pesticides may be involved in the poisoning of European bees.
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This string of alphabet code concerns our cultural genome and some of the impacts of exponentially accelerating complexity on that genome.
In Too Much of a Good Thing, Dr. Lee Goldman (Columbia) argues that the modern world has reduced the effectiveness of some of our genetic code.
I agree with Dr. Goldman’s premise, and argue: Exponentially accelerating complexity has rendered significant portions of our cultural genome dysfunctional, that is, the coding structures deployed for the cultural organism’s reality / relationship interface.
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The New Natural Selection Tests
Natural selection tests have become more complex for many species. Genetic codes remain on the exam; human culture codes have been added. For example, elephant and dolphin survival are no longer merely a function of their biological genomes, but also a function of the human cultural genome, that is, of moral, legal, monetary and other coding structures.
Intro 1.
The onslaught of inputs — people, technology, sugar, carbon, waste, domesticated animals, 10,000 etceteras — entering geo, eco, bio, cultural and tech networks — is unprecedented. This flood of inputs: complexifies the relationships and interactions in each network; complexifies the relationships and interactions among the networks; and increases, exponentially, the complexity of the whole system.
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On earth, variation is fundamental: genomes, cultures, technology, etc. Variation is also a strategy for: immune systems, militaries, venture capitalists, Crayola crayons, etc.
I’m generating thought-structure variation, symbotype speciation . . .
working the room with a big picture orientation, trying to use this knowledge construct:
“We need scarcely add that the contemplation in natural science of a wider domain than the actual leads to a far better understanding of the actual.” Sir Arthur Eddington — The Nature of the Physical World
The multiple intro sections here are an attempt to provide some context from the wide domains of physics and evolution; domains that are, in part, the study of what information-in-relationship has been doing over time.
Intro 2. Repeating Patterns Over Time
One way to describe complex systems is to cite their four main components: Variation; Interaction; Selection; Repeat.
The earth is a complex system fueled by a well-positioned heat source in the sky.
Reality Handle
To facilitate big picture communication, I’m describing reality as information-in-relationship. It’s an incomplete handle, a language-coded approximation; it omits time, etc.
Using that handle, atoms, molecules, trees, giraffes, computers, etc., are variant structures of information-in-relationship that interact at various scales.
A tree is an information-in-relationship structure that has relationship interactions with other composite information structures, insects, water, etc.
Internally, information structures often include component structures, sub-structures that process information in a specialized manner. For example, a human being is comprised of kidneys, eyes, eyelashes, nerves, ears, etc. A tribal social structure is comprised of people who have different abilities, that is, they can process information in a specialized manner that contributes to the survival and well being of the tribe.
(When we take an aspirin, we’re adding a specialized information processor to the body’s complex systems.)
Trees, giraffes and molecules adhere to the four components of complex systems. They vary. They interact. They undergo selection.
When variant structures of information-in-relationship interact with other structures, they process the information generated by those relationship interactions.
“Any final state contains information about the system’s initial state and about what has happened to it since. So, the motion of any physical system, because it obeys definite laws, can be regarded as information processing.” physicist David Deutsch
Motion: information processing. Veritable Wowness.
Relationship interactions yield information processing, that is, physical consequences. Relationship interactions generally alter the informational content of structures, even if only minutely.
Here’s a really crude example: river information flowing over rock information is a relationship interaction that changes the informational content of the river, the rock, the delta and …
Sometimes this endless information processing is creative, generating original variation, new aggregate structures of information-in-relationship.
Creativity, or the generative process, is a repeating pattern.
Across evolutionary history, this process has generated whole new networks, adding biological, cultural and technological networks on top of the geological network. (The ecological network too, which I’m lazily describing as the interface between the biological and geological networks.)
This pattern of generative variation repeats within the new networks. Variant constructs of information-in-relationship are created — new genes, species, nations, cars, legal codes, computers, software codes, etc.
Another repeating pattern: Often, the newly sired aggregate information structures are more complex and able to process a larger quantity of information.
These increases in structural complexity and information processing capacity repeat in bio, cultural and tech networks.
The Chinese government is more complex and processes more information than the governmental structure of a hunter-gatherer tribe. A cell phone does the same relative to a landline phone; a human being does the same relative to an amoeba; quantum computers can process exponentially more information than an abacus.
Another repeating pattern: The ongoing evolution of information processing occasionally generates new aggregate structures that are themselves capable of functioning as “constructors.”
“Constructor” is a term taken from David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto’s new physics theory: The Constructor Theory of Information.
Dr. Deutsch writes in 2012: “Very few such transformations happen spontaneously; that is to say, almost all require a constructor, which I shall define as anything that can cause transformations in physical systems without undergoing any net change in its ability to do so.”
Genes can construct variant biological forms; humans can construct variant cultural and technological structures of information-in-relationship, and now, per our vast gains in knowledge (which is also a constructor) humans can construct variant biological forms as well. 3-D printers can process information to construct wrenches, organs, etc.
Intro 3.
Acknowledging Bits of Our Mutual Context from the Dark Side; Hope Added.
Context 1.
Killing is a manner of processing information that destroys other aggregate structures of information-in-relationship. Killing is, sometimes, vital for the homeostasis of a system; sometimes it destabilizes a system.
Killing can describe more than the elimination of biological information structures; it also describes the destruction of thought and technological structures as well.
“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.” Charles Darwin
Killing is part of the day for the aggregate information structures called humans.
My meals will partly consist of murdered plants and animals.
My nation may kill people in other nations or political structures.
My species will extinct other species.
My bacteria will wage deep bowel battles for colonic supremacy.
My macrophages will devour millions of red blood cells a second.
My immune system will kill pathogens.
Killing is one manner of selection, a selection technology of sorts.
When faced with survival stress conditions, some species of bacteria will engage in suicide bombing. Upon processing the information of their particular environs, the bodies of some colony members produce chemical weapons and explode. The chemicals are: lethal to rivals, not to colony members.
Context 2.
Presently, humans are transforming the sky into a lethal gas chamber. If unabated, the sky will recruit the oceans to generate a gas more deadly than cyanide gas: hydrogen sulfide.
Hydrogen sulfide will be gathered by the wind, and downwind cities, lungs of toddlers, mothers, fathers, cats and dogs, birds and bunnies, frogs and foxes, will be paralyzed unto death.
The margins of selection are tight, impersonal and brutally enforced.
From a wider-domain perspective, this beyond-tragic potentiality is an expression of a physics phenomenon exhibited in non-equilibrium systems. That phenomenon has been alphabet-coded as self-organized criticality.
Context 3.
Self-organized criticality is part of the when-not-if physics repertoire of non-equilibrium systems (systems in constant flux).
Periodically, the component dominoes in non-equilibrium systems become self-aligned in a manner that yields a large event. These large events can cause a rapid and extensive restructuring of the system, creating a new set of relationships, sometimes alphabet-coded as collapse.
Meteor hits, mass extinctions, abrupt climate change, supervolcano eruptions, world wars, stock market crashes, Rwandan and American Indian genocides, Arab Springs, famines, plagues, are examples of self-organized criticality.
The margins of selection are tight, impersonal and brutally enforced.
Context 4.
Like love, friendship, cooperation, kindness and compassion; murder, rape, genocide, war, cannibalism are human apps on file, part of our species repertory for reality interface. I think these potential behaviors are biological apps that have been selected . . . for processing / navigating various situations of reality interface.
These dark apps may be deployed during episodes of self-organized criticality.
Context 5.
“Knowledge is a constructor.” David Deutsch
Knowledge can forestall self-organized criticality.
One can send a bomb-laden rocket to alter the trajectory of a meteor; one can build a fire to prevent death by exposure.
Intro 4 (last one)
Redomaining
Redomaining is “ … the expressing of a given purpose in a different set of components …” Brian Arthur The Nature of Technology
Here are some examples: agriculture redomained food procurement from hunting and gathering;
alphabet code redomained writing from pictograph code;
electricity redomained power generation from steam power;
democracy redomained government from monarchy;
eukaryote cells redomained biotech from prokaryote cells.
On another level, redomaining is a word, a specific structure of alphabet code that distills or collapses a relationship pattern that repeats over evolutionary history. In this case, the symbols of alphabet code represent information processing that yields an original and significant restructuring of information-in-relationship.
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Culture, Complexity & Code (part 2)
“The most fundamental phenomenon of the universe is relationship.” Jonas Salk — Anatomy of Reality
“The story of human intelligence starts with a universe that is capable of encoding information.” Ray Kurzweil — How to Create a Mind
Code:
Is a constructor.
Is an information-processing technology.
Functions as a relationship-interface mechanism for structures in biological, cultural & technological networks.
As noted software code writer Charles Simonyi says: “Software is distilled complexity …”
Code is distilled relationship-infrastructure information.
Codes collapse quantum potentiality into smaller basins of possibilities and sometimes render an explicit distillation for how to process a relationship interaction, e.g., the rapid reaction to a snake in the grass.
Coding structures, or collections of code — genetic, alphabet, etiquette, software — are information-processing technologies that function as apps for structures.
Below are some examples of network coding structures.
Biological Genome: genetic, epigenetic.
Human Cultural Genome: moral, religious, math, legal, monetary, etiquette, language spoken, chirped, barked, clicked, etc. (patterned-sound code), language written (pictograph, alphabet codes); language signed (hand-shaped code).
Technological Genome: software.
Code is physics efficacious in these networks, organizing and processing relationship information in structures: species, religions, nations, corporations, computation applications.
(Note that all those structures are computation structures, nouns engaged in some form of the fundamental verb thing: information processing.)
In the grand dance of reality, of information-in-relationship, biological cultural and technological network coding structures interact and feedback on one another, constantly undergoing multi-level selection.
Here’s an example of how coding structures could feed back one another: software code speeds up information processing which accelerates the development of a math code as mathematicians from all over the world share information. Software code accelerates the development of math code that accelerates the advent of a new vaccine that impacts language code (new words to describe the science, etc.). The vaccine impacts genetic code (saves lives). The “miraculous” saving of a child can impact religious code, amendments may be added for that more readily embrace the domain of science. The new vaccine also impacts legal and monetary codes. Later, several children saved by the vaccine’s timely development become genius software code writers.
Codes and coding structures are information-in-relationship architectures that adhere to the pattern of complex systems: variation, interaction, selection, repeat.
Survival: A Function of Information Processing
I contend that passing selection tests is largely a function of processing complex network relationship information with sufficient reach, sufficient speed, accuracy and power.
Processing information is the essential action that physical systems in bio, cultural & tech networks do to retain and/or augment their structural integrity.
Some examples are: a gazelle processing flight from a lioness; an immune system processing pathogenic invaders; a sports team processing how to defeat its rivals; a nation state processing the development of an atomic bomb before its rivals; a culture processing its newly complex relationships with the atmosphere, carbon, methane, energy generation, agriculture, transportation, etc.
Codes can greatly augment information processing.
Drunk drivers? Well, for starters, legal codes helped create the structure that is the police department. Next, a police officer doesn’t need to call a community meeting about how to process a drunk driver, i.e., legal codes accelerate that information processing. Legal codes prescribe (distill and weight) the processing of relationship information generated by humans interfacing with alcohol and motorized vehicles. The code yields physical action / consequences. (Yes, legal code is not the only coding structure involved.)
Inaccurate code, or code with limited reach — genetic, legal, software — can greatly impede information processing, thereby reducing a structure’s ability to pass its selection tests.
Again, coding structures are information-processing technology that function as apps.
For example, religion is a coding structure originally generated by hunter-gatherers. Religion is, in part, an app for processing cultural information. The religious app gets uploaded, downloaded; religious apps has large numbers of users who deploy it with varying fidelity.
Funeral, wedding, sacrifice, infidels? Cue the religious app, codes that help delineate the how-to, how to structure / navigate / process that relationship information. Bad hunts, floods, disease, sadness? Cue the religious app to access the spirits for an explanation and amelioration of said events. (Adhering to a consistent pattern in evolution, integration, the spirits have been integrated over time and became the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent app: god.)
From-here-on-out . . .
Subject: Our cultural genome. The cultural coding structures we use.
And: How complexity impacts their efficacy, their reach, speed, accuracy and power, effects their ability to process complex information, that is, relationship information in and across geo, eco, bio, cultural and tech networks, and importantly, across time.
Complexity
“I define complexity as having more parts and more functional relationships between those parts.” Raymond Neubauer — Evolution and the Emergent Self
As previously stated, complexity is accelerating exponentially, largely driven by exponentially accruing knowledge.
We’ve added roughly 5.5 billion people from 1916 to 2016.
Increasing numbers of us wield chemicals, cars, trucks, plastics, add jets, radar fishing, bulldozers and chainsaws in the forests (instead of stone axes), and myriad other tech.
Here’s are current manner of reality interface:
Unprecedented numbers wielding unprecedented technology yielding an unprecedented reach in and across all networks, and across time, yielding unprecedented, accruing and disruptive relationships in networks (positive and negative).
As stated earlier, our ever-new environs are: unprecedented complexity.
Re network disruption: bee colony collapse; huge additions of nitrogen and phosphorus into the oceans; carbon, sugar, antibiotic, industrial chemical and assault weaponry proliferation; hormone disruption; antibiotic resistant bacteria; obesity; coral reef death; etc.
Complexity brings a thousand-cuts on networks, some big, some small. And yes, in the form of accruing knowledge, complexity also brings some stitches for cuts old and new, some healing.
Complexity and Code Efficacy:
Complexity increases can erode the efficacy of code (relationship infrastructure) over time. That is, some of the codes become inadequate for generating functional relationships, e.g., varying percentages of religious code; 1898 legal code; 1998 software code; 1298 moral, English language and etiquette codes; some rhino genetic code, etc.
Check out the following behaviors and imagine how they’d play out with our current culture codes:
“In the European Middle Ages, sexual activity too was less discreet. People were publicly naked more often, and couples took only perfunctory measures to keep their coitus private. Prostitutes offered their services openly; in many English towns, the red-light district was called Gropecunt Lane. Men would discuss their sexual exploits with their children . . .” Steven Pinker — The Better Angels of Our Nature
Culture, Complexity and Code: Historical Dimension
Thousands of years ago, accruing knowledge generated a new food app: farming. This redomaining of food procurement contributed to the construction of a vastly more complex (redomained, aggregated) social structure, aptly distilled by English alphabet code as: agriculture. Relatively concurrent with the development of this new social structure, cultural coding evolution occurred. In other words, there was a redomaining of our cultural genome.
In the grand and profound transition from simple hunter-gatherer social structures of say 50 people, to the exponentially more complex information-in-relationship architecture of social structures populated with 100,00 people, creative information processors invented alphabet, legal, etiquette and monetary coding structures. These coding structures were added to the primitive (less complex) cultural genome of hunter-gatherers. These innovative information-processing technologies for culture — culture apps — augmented our ability to process the increased informational content of culture.
In addition, these revolutionary coding structures aided in building the cultural structure. The new coding structures were used in the construction of constitutions, courts, banks, books, government institutions and policies, etc., that, in turn, provided a degree of homeostasis for the social structure. For example, legal code and its enforcement is one-part immune system, checking at least some cultural pathogens at the gate, mitigating others; and yes, sometimes censoring or impeding variation.
The invention of new cultural coding technology in the agricultural era resembles a recent coding invention in the technological network — software code. Software code aids us in processing information with GRASP (greater reach, accuracy, speed, power). Software code helps us organize complex information to build new aggregate information structures: Twitter; Facebook; robots, satellites, self-driving & self-flying machines, apps, etc. Software code is used to construct new nouns, new aggregate structures of information-in-relationship that can verb in a new manner, that is, process more information faster, often by way of algorithms.
Mathematical Code Evolution
Let’s add some relatively recent evolution of mathematical code: geometry to equations to algorithms.
As I learned in a talk by complexity scientist Brian Arthur, algorithmic math code has significantly more applications than equation math code. That is, algorithmic code has greater reach than equation code.
A Dominant Culture Code
Presently, we’re using a thousands-of-years-old culture code, an equation math code, to calibrate network relationship-value information: monetary code. Humans-using-monetary-code is a dominant cultural information-processing mechanism.
How’s that working out in our ever-more complex environs? It’s snowing in Vietnam.
Verily, this information-processing mechanism lacks the ability to process information across the networks and time with GRASP. For example, $5 = 5lbs of X is equation math code that externalizes far too many complex and continuously dynamic relationships. For the new and accelerating levels of complexity, algorithmic code processed by computers (quantum and otherwise) has exponentially more reach than humans using monetary code.
Monetary code is a dominant code in the world cultural genome, as are legal and religious codes.
Again, these coding structures are nouns that verb, that is, they’re culture-tech for processing cultural information, and in a fractal world, similar to genes and immune systems that function as bio-tech for processing biological information.
“A technology can only be pressed so far before it runs into some limitation.” Brian Arthur — The Nature of Technology
I’m arguing that the information-processing capacity of humans using monetary code has reached its technological limitations. And that this limitation applies to other parts of our cultural genome: legal, religious, moral, etc., coding structures.
Increasingly, the coding structures that comprise our cultural genome have been overrun by exponentially accelerating complexity.
It ain’t rocket science. If your culture has deadly relationships with the sky and ocean, your cultural genome sucks.
We need the reach of algorithmic code.
We need to redomain our cultural genome so we can better interface with accruing complexity and its myriad consequences.
For the survival of biological structures and civilization, I think we need to redomain how we-as-cells in the cultural organism calibrate complex relationship-value information . . . by transitioning from monetary code to software code.
Here’s a somewhat imprecise, but close enough metaphor re processing information with greater reach, speed, accuracy and power:
Software code is to monetary code as alphabet code was to pictograph code.
Respectfully, I contend that our current cultural genome — the moral, religious, legal, monetary and etiquette codes culture uses to interface with reality — can’t process — all the new relationship information generated by exponentially accelerating complexity. Our cultural genome resembles a biological genome that fails to process, or ignores, numerous relationship interactions in its environs . . . rendering it unlikely to pass its natural selection tests.
Respectfully, I contend that both our biological and cultural genomes need the support of a pan-cultural technological genome, a digital neocortex (Ray Kurzweil’s phrase) for world culture that better aligns the vast diversity of anthropic selection with natural selection.
Respectfully, I submit that we consciously move our species further along the eusocial spectrum, aiding us in the generation of a more integrated world superorganism. (Please see postscript re eusocial species.)
We’ve been integrating and aggregating human cultures (often brutally), for thousands of years, with less knowledge. As I learned in Robert Wright’s Nonzero, the Logic of Human Destiny, at one point in our cultural evolution we had roughly 200,000 separate political entities: tribes, chiefdoms, etc. Today we have less than 200 nation states. That’s integration. As others have said, software code and the internet are, in part, the construction of a nervous system for a more integrated world culture.
Respectfully, I submit that monetary code is an archaic culture app for calibrating relationship-value information, an increasingly weak technology / coding mechanism for generating functional relationships across the networks and time. The efficacy of humans using monetary code technology for ascribing, prioritizing relationship-value has decreased due to complexity gains.
Respectfully, I submit that the cultural information processing structure, humans using monetary code, needs to be augmented, and ultimately replaced, by new variations of cultural coding structures, new aggregate information processing structures comprised of software code, quantum computers, ubiquitous network sensors that compile big data collected from an internet of things and from an internet of key relationships in geo, eco, bio networks (rivers, soils, plankton, fish populations), culture, and more.
Software code also provides the hope of a pan-cultural technology that can do an end run around the increasingly archaic and dysfunctional structure can create virtual nations that by-pass archaic nation state coding mechanisms for reality interface.
Respectfully, I submit that monetary code should be retired to the museum of cultural evolution as a once vital and important cultural technology that was deployed for the computation and ordering of relationship-value information . . . in exponentially less complex and less knowledgeable eras.
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Postscript Re: Eusocials
There are only 3 species of mammals that organize themselves in the relatively new and unusual (evolutionarily) form of social organization called eusocial: two species of moles, and humans.
Ants, bees and termites are highly successful eusocial species of insects. They dominate the insect world in terms of biomass.
Eusocials defend a nest; they raise their offspring in social structures that include multiple generations. And importantly, eusocial species specialize.
For survival — insect or human — members of eusocial species perform specific information processing tasks. Some are workers, some are warriors, queens, doctors, trash handlers, etc. Like the specialized information processing of the heart, liver, colon, brain, bones and toenails, etc., eusocials integrate their specialized information processing abilities for the survival and well being of the larger whole.
Post Postscript: Since writing this, I’ve given up that we’ll be able to forestall collapse.
