[ExI] Is this Extropic?

[Bryan Bishop]

On Saturday 05 July 2008, Amara Graps wrote:
> Thanks for the pointer.. believe me that I'm doing everything I can
> to make sure that I provide the kind of environment to support and
> stimulate creativity in my own child (yet unborn!)

I'm still recovering from my experiences in public education. I haven't 
yet figured out how to exactly verbalize in entirety how ridiculous it 
was, and others do it much better than I have yet figured out how to:
	http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

> btw, has anyone noticed that Kevin Kelly is making extensive use of
> the word: "extropic" these days?

Kevin Kelly is a groupie anyway. :-) Whole Earth Magazine and such.

> "Where the linear crosses the exponential"
> http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/07/where_the_linea.php

I was just thinking about a topic that he brings up:

> All extropic  systems -- economy, nature and technology -- are
> governed by self-accelerating feedback cycles. Like compounding
> interest, or virtuous circles, they are powered by increasing
> returns. Success breeds success. There is a long tail of incremental
> build up and then as they keep doubling every cycle, they explode out
> of invisibility into significance. Extropic systems can also collapse
> in the same self-accelerating way, one subtraction triggering many
> other subtractions, so in a vicious cycle the whole system implodes.
> Our view of the future is warped and blinded by these exponential
> curves.

I was toying around with some fundamental problems again when I came to 
the conclusion that separation processes suck. The fact that our 
machines and systems require a certain percent purity of material input 
means that there's this dependency on material resources which ends up 
causing difficulties, in terms of acquisition and in terms of 
processing, etc. etc. How does the biosphere do it? It has this very 
massive long tail of bacterial and minimal prokaryotic processes that 
carry out photosynthesis for the capture of photons into hydrocarbons, 
and then those other processes that bring new elements and materials 
into the biosphere from solid rock, such as the trillions of bacteria 
living under the crust of the planet's surface. In truth it's much more 
than a few trillion, I've seen estimates that the number of organisms 
living in solid rock is in fact greater than the number living on the 
other side of the surface (starward). I would doubt that it's greater 
than the number living in the oceans. Anyway, because of this very long 
tail, we're able to enjoy heavily selected material resources, it's how 
we have agriculture and it's how we can accumulate necessary dietary 
substenance, or in if you want to be more quantificious there's the 
nutritional requirements that are packaged for the IV patients that are 
on life support in hospitals, which is much more detailed and accurate 
than just blindly shoving food down your throat (also more chemically 
accurate). So, the fact that the we have to process specific material 
inputs, which can in fact vary over a wide range, basically renders us 
dependent on that long tail of biological processes. That's simply not 
a good system design because you don't have that guarantee of 
stability. I put some thought into this and realized that the function 
looks sigmoid. There's the nearly exponential concavity going up, but 
then a plateau as the long tail (more like a large surface batting at 
food) consumes the available resources; it's here why I went back to 
check my archives to go looking for Jef's email regarding the possibly 
staggard, fractal look of the universe. I was going to see if the 
concepts involved would match up and make sense for the functionality 
of being able to use those plateaus as springboards to the greater 
fractal element at the larger scale. The typical hierarchical spiell: 
planet, star system, star cluster, arm, galaxy, galaxy cluster, 
supercluster, filament, etc. This would, in effect, necessitate a 
cyclic competent approach to matter/energy/information processing that 
would seem like a nomadic "gearing up" for transitions to the larger 
fractal context (perhaps the perceived oil crisis, as many call it, is 
an example of a planetary plateau due to the weird choices we made 
regarding social structure and material distributivity etc.). In 
essence this is KK's self-accelerating feedback cycles (the plateauing 
cycles). His application is a little less specific (plateau-jumping for 
material resources), but probably valid.

> But while progress runs on exponential curves, our individual lives
> proceed in a linear fashion. We live day by day by day. While we

This, of course, doesn't have to be the case. The main reason why our 
lives are so linear is because of the nature of our neurons with more 
dendrites than axons, only ten fingers while our eyes receive so much 
information. The way we can do this is getting information out of the 
brain that is "unused" or dissipative (like when writing, all of the 
grammatical percepts you generate but leave unmentioned or 
unimplemented), which is an application of brain implant technology, 
which, as you know, would generate overhead and heat, re: extropy, 
entropy, thermodynamics and processes and such.

> might think time flies as we age, it really trickles out steadily.

Meh, flow of time?

> Ditto for civilizations. In linear time, the future is a loss. But
> because human minds and societies can improve things over time, and
> compound that improvement in virtuous circles, the future in this
> dimension is a gain. Therefore long-term thinking entails the
> confluence of the linear and the exponential. The linear march of our
> time intersects the cascading rise and fall of numerous
> self-amplifying exponential forces. Generations, too, proceed in a

I don't understand how my augmentation to the linear process of human 
life would change KK's comments here. 

> linear sequence. They advance steadily one after another while pushed
> by the compounding cycles of exponential change.

Generations in a linear sequence?

Generation 1: 2 people
Generation 2: 4 people ... doesn't look linear.

Of course, it didn't look like that in the beginning, since that's 
assuming the single unified ancestor hypothesis, which is unexamined in 
light of the parallel emergence hypotheses etc. So it's more like 
generation 1, N, generation 2, 2^n, with some dead and other variables 
floating around the place.

> Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what
> long-term thinking should be about. For each generation and for each

The only linear rate that I see discussed is that of a person's 
autobiographical "central core" or 'self' etc., and I don't see how 
that has to remain linear. In terms of the plateauing resources and the 
hierarchical levels as being linear, there's certain applications of 
computer science and graph theory for the elucidation of Hamiltonian 
paths into linear sequences and some linear sequences back into graphs 
(this is why you are able to see visual graphs on a computer screen -- 
it's all a straight line of binary on the computer in the first place). 
Except now imagine a more functional interpretation rather than just 
fancy visuals. :-)

> issue that equation of intersection will be different. Sometimes the
> immediate needs of the now will dominate, and the discount rate will
> favor the present. For example, the chronic use of childhood vaccines
> and antibiotics may prove to have long-term downsides, but their
> value to present generations is so great that we agree to send the
> cost to the future. Descending generations will have to pay the price

Ah, perhaps he means generation 1 -> generation 2 -> and thus it is 
linear. However, there's not one giant clock detailing one generation 
after another, and it's not ticking like that, and really there are 
multiple generations at once. It's kind of like the taxonomic problem 
in biology with species, but in terms of generations it's just a silly 
calendar-based separation methodology that only allows broad 
generalizations that may or may not be helpful overall.

> -- or to solve the problem by inventing better medicines using
> exponentially better knowledge and resources. Other times future
> generations will be so enhanced by the later exponential growth begun
> in a small immediate gain that we raise the discount rate. For

Generations as the product at the plateau? Is that a useful formulation?

> A timeline of where we expect these cost/benefit/risk-thresholds to
> fall in each sector of our civilization, or a field map of places we
> can see where our linear lives cross exponential change -- either
> would be very handy to have.

I'd avoid the cost/benefit/risk-thresholds in terms of segmentation and 
sectoring; but a map of technologies for the exponential evolutionary 
influence to seep into otherwise linear, stale processes, is an 
interesting plan, and I submit that the SKDB system (or whatever we 
call it) is the right tool for that job (societal engineering / mapping 
and for the proposals of evolutionary approaches to different 
problems), but as to the validity of a map or ontology for describing 
it all? I think that's still suspect.

- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/