Rhythms, Music and Cooperative Intelligence
Our noun-centric language generates a bias in many that the word balance implies a state that is unchanging. That something that is inanimate is in balance. Search Unsplash for ‘balance’:
But from a verb-centric frame of reference, balance is a process. Everything that is alive is in movement. To be in balance is to keep something the same while in movement within an environment.
This movement is driven by a multitude of opposing forces, both originating from the self or from the environment. It is a complex process that evolution has been fine-tuning for billions of years.
Physicists have known for over a century that all reality is a process. What we perceive as things are nothing but recurring patterns in processes. Our language, as David Bohm has hypothesized, limits how we perceive reality.
George Orwell wrote “Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought.” The culprit as to why there is an increasing lack of meaning in modern society is due to the language that evolved since the industrial revolution.
We are nothing bug cogs in the giant machinery of civilization. Cogs that when worn out are replaced by new cogs. The purpose of this machinery is to remake our world into one that can be controlled but is obviously not in balance.
Even Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, despite its emphasis on feedback, was driven by a notion of control. Wiener’s contribution to Electrical Engineering was the establishment of a new way of using electricity not just for power but also for control.
But what is control without balance? Control may be an unsustainable temporary balance. IA short-term action that may compromise long-term goals.
Goodhart’s law states that when we define a measure so as to control a system, that measure often replaces the original mission of the system. Too often, our noun-centric language seeks those few things to control and as a result, our efforts control a proxy and not the actual.
Today’s civilization measure for progress is GDP growth. This has not made people any happier or slowed down the destruction of the planet. Yet, we are mindlessly stuck in this inexorable path toward extinction.
In a reality of inexhaustible complexity, we must have models with, as Ashby has coined, requisite variety. edge.org/response-detai…
This cannot be achieved using static models, but only can be done using enactive models that are in tune with the world. To model the world, one must emphasize processes of agility and not models of stasis.
There are two cognitive aspects about homo sapiens that are fundamentally different from the great apes. The first is the inclination for shared intentionality and the second is the ability to coordinate through music.
Music is a verb-centric language. Musical notation captures not only sequence but simultaneity. There is an open-endedness that can be expressed at every moment in time. These are all made coherent in multiple layers of durations in time.
Music is so fundamental to human cognition in that it is one of the last things people with Alzheimer’s forget. Perhaps that’s because a song is not just a thing. It is something that is experienced and lived.
Brain rhythms offer a clue as to how mammals might perform abduction. This is extremely promising!
In Brain Waves, Scientists See Neurons Juggle Possible Futures | Quanta Magazine
This reminds me of time slicing. But it’s also fascinating how the brain performs all kinds of transformations so as to do things simultaneously.
The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations
Unlike computers that have natural constructs for partitioning and encapsulation information, brains appear to do this in hybrid ways.
General intelligence cannot do multi-tasking in the rigid and siloed manner of computers. It must do it in a way that each silo must partially leak information into another silo.
In most models of cognition that are framed as a dynamical system, this partitioning is glossed over. The partitioning of information is accounted for as emergent phenomena.
But biology doesn’t work like dynamical systems. They are actually real physical artifacts that ensure the partitioning of systems. Cells are partitioned away from other cells through a cell wall. Different parts of a cell are partitioned from other parts.
Partitioning isn’t an emergent phenomenon that occurs only due to dynamics. Rather, partition happens through the use of previously invented structures (i.e. lipids, nucleotides, proteins).
The parts already have their own identities and mechanisms for composition. It is not a homogenous soup where parts rediscover new ways to interact. Rather it is a heterogeneous soup where many types have pre-defined ways of interaction.
The flaw in many biological and neuroscience models is that there is a false belief that we can rely on the power of analytic mathematics (the kind that originates from calculus) to formulate our system.
Stephen Wolfram 2 decades ago wrote his book ‘A New Kind of Science’ inspired by the counterfactual argument of how science would be different if computers were invented before calculus.
Unfortunately, too many scientists are unaware of this argument. The only tools that they have in their arsenal are what is known as ‘real analysis’ in mathematics. So science is conducted as if the only tool was a hammer.
The thinkers that are positioned with a strong understanding of both mathematical physics and computer science will likely develop the strongest models of biology and neuroscience. The rest can ignore this to their own peril.
