[Paleopsych] Eshel, Joel, Paul, and Pavel--not to mention Ted and Greg
HowlBloom at aol.com
HowlBloom at aol.com
Sun Sep 4 04:29:35 UTC 2005
Very good thinking. Below is the basic search pattern that I see in life
forms from bacteria to humans.
I have a question. Is this search pattern mirrored in inaminate
evolution--in the 10 billion years of cosmic evolution that occurred before life began?
Is there an anolog or precursor to this pattern in the evolution of
inanimate matter. Howard
everyone is insecure. insecurity is one of the things that keeps us attached
to each other and to society. Uncertainty and the nervous sense that we’d
better get a quick reality check is one of the prime movers of the group
brain. insecurity is so basic to life that even ants and bacteria get insecure.
they need to rub up against each other for reassurance over and over and over
again. chimps too. They dash out of the group for an adventure, get
insecure as hell, dash back, and when they plunge into the warmth of the crowd and
rub up against as many of their sisters or brothers as it takes to calm them
down, they accomplish something more than mere self-comfort. They give a bit
of information on the territory they’ve just explored. Each does a little
antenna-and-scouting work for the crowd. Each gets a little from the antenna
work of her insecure sisters who’ve dashed out ebulliently to explore, then
have gotten the shivers and come back to share their experience and get some
much needed warmth. Even when we move into strange emotional territory, we
need to dash back and share it with a friend to make sure we’re sane and to get
reassurance. In the process we reveal a bit of emotional exploration to the
friend. Ever wonder about why one of the largest churches in the history of
mankind was able to make such an enormous business out of confession? There
are some things so shameful we can’t even talk about them with our friends.
So who’s in the business of listening to what we don’t dare tell a soul? Not
only listening and affirming us, but absolving us to boot? Yes, the good
old Catholic Church. Our insecurities keep us together as an information
processing engine. Our restlessness keeps us going off in new directions so we’
ll have something to share. Every time we panic and run to talk to a friend
we are providing new stuff for the data cruncher of society to munch. so
what's true of chimps and ants and microbes is gonna be true for you and me.
In a message dated 9/2/2005 11:00:57 AM Eastern Standard Time,
obi.fox at gmail.com writes:
Howl,
while I fundamentally agree with your position, my present fascination with
the neurophysiology of the biological mechanism leads me to suggest that it
may not be the function of "search" itself which will lead to the answer you
seek - but rather that of the manner in which it is mitigated and modified by
the function of avoidance. As my grandfather (dean of physics at Columbia
for 30 yrs) taught me in my youth - one will never fully understand the
qualities of attraction unless you are able to account for the factor of repulsion
as well.
When you look at much of the present research in neurophysiology a pattern
begins to appear in which "search" is the primary S/R response of the biomass.
It is a pretty straight-forward, target oriented, response of distance
reduction. The patterns or "strategies" only emerge when you factor in the
manner in which the braking mechanism (avoidance sequences) operate simultaneously
and change/redirect the movement and orientation.
The third factor in the equation, which is usually overlooked, is the role
of proximity - particularly in relation to avoidance/repulsion. I strongly
suspect that this combination (repulsion/proximity) is the factor which
Tsallis's equation takes into account.
As I am not a physicist (just a philosopher with a fascination with the
behavioral mechanism) I can't give you much more than this clue. I am, however,
reasonably sure that it is the critical factor in the movement and
orientation of sentient organisms and strongly suspect it is, as you suggest, a
reflection of the underlying physical laws of the universe.
cheers
OBi Fox
On 8/31/05, _HowlBloom at aol.com_ (mailto:HowlBloom at aol.com)
<_HowlBloom at aol.com_ (mailto:HowlBloom at aol.com) > wrote:
Pavel, Joel, Paul, and Eshel—
See if I've understood the following article correctly.
In this cosmos things don't follow the sort of random spread of
probabilities Ludwig Boltzmann believed in. Instead, old patterns jump from one level to
another, showing up in new news.
To understand the size and nature of the jumps, we have to understand
something even deeper—the search strategies with which the cosmos explores what
Stuart Kaufman calls "possibility space".
The key quote from the article below is this one: "if physicists can
adequately understand the details of this 'exploring behaviour', they should be
able to predict values of q from first principles ".
Now please bear with me. What I've been digging into for many decades is
the manner in which the cosmos feels out her possibilities—the search
strategies of nature. So have Eshel Ben-Jacob, Paul Werbos, Pavel Kurakin, and Joel
Isaacson.
Pavel and I, in our paper "Conversation (dialog) model of quantum
transitions" (arXiv.org) suggest that we may find applications all up and down the
scale of nature to one search strategy in particular, that used by a cloud of
20,000 smart particles—bees.
Power laws help us move from the human-scale to the very big. They help us
understand how patterns visible on one scale—the scale of the spiral of water
that flushes your toilet, for example, can be scaled up to hurricanes, to
vortex of the Red Spot on the surface of Jupiter, to hurricanes on Jupiter the
size of thirty earths, and to the spirals of billions of stars called
galaxies. Power laws or their equivalent also allow us to predict that if we give
the cosmos another six or seven billion years, the spirals from your toilet
will show up in swirls of multitudes of galaxies—they will show up in today's
potato-shaped, still-embryonic galaxy clusters.
Power laws can be used in forward or reverse. In addition to going from the
small to the very big, they can help us move from the human-scale to the
very small. Power laws help us understand how the swirl in your bathtub shows
up in the swizzles of electrons twisting through a channel on a
superconductor.
On the level of life, we can see search patterns at work, search patterns in
Dennis Bray's clusters of receptors on a cell wall, search patterns in Eshel
Ben-Jacobs multi-trillion-member bacterial colonies, search patterns in Tom
Seeley's colonies of bees, search patterns in E.O. Wilson's colonies of ants,
and search patterns in colonies of termites. We can see search patterns in
the motions of birds, and in the way these patterns have been modeled
mathematically in Floys (mathematically-generated flocks of carnivorous Boids—see
_http://www.aridolan.com/ofiles/JavaFloys.html_
(http://www.aridolan.com/ofiles/JavaFloys.html) ). We can see search patterns in Martha Sherwood's vampire
bats, and search patterns in the areas of my fieldwork--human cultural fads and
fashions and the multi-generational search patterns of art, religion,
ideology, world-views, and science.
If search patterns are the key to understanding the factor q, if they are
the key to comprehending the magic factor that scales things up and down in
giant, discontinuous leaps, then let's by all means take search patterns at the
scale of life and apply them like hell.
That's exactly what Pavel Kurakin and I have done in our paper. And it's
what I've done in much of my work, including in a book that's been growing in
the Bloom computer for fifteen years-- A Universe In Search Of Herself—The
Case of the Curious Cosmos.
Now the question is this. Have I misinterpreted the material below? And
even if I've mangled it utterly, could an understanding of search patterns at
one scale in the cosmos echo the patterns at other levels big and small? If
the search patterns of life are reflected in the inanimate cosmos, do the
search patterns of life in turn reflect the search patterns of the particles and
processes of which they are made? And do the search patterns of an organism
reflect the search patterns of her flock, her tribe, her culture, and of the
total team of biomass?
To what extent are competing search patterns a part of the cosmic process?
Did competing search patterns only show up 3.85 billion years ago with the
advent of life (assuming that the advent of life on earth took place at the
same time as the advent of life—if there is any—elsewhere in the universe)?
Are the gaps between competing search patterns also big ones, with their own
chasms and jumps spaced out by their own mysterious q?
Biomass has been probing this planet for 3.85 billion years now, and we are
the fingers with which she feels out her possibilities. But we are also the
fingers through which social clusters of protons 13.7 billion years old feel
out their future. Is q related to the discipline of a probing strategy?
Retrieved August 31, 2005, from the World Wide Web
_http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18725141.700_
(http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18725141.700) NewScientist.com * HOME * |NEWS * |EXPLORE BY
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Click to Print Entropy: The new order * 27 August 2005 * From New Scientist
Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. * Mark Buchanan CONSTANTINO
TSALLIS has a single equation written on the blackboard in his office. It looks
like one of the most famous equations in physics, but look more closely and
it's a little bit different, decorated with some extra symbols and warped into
a peculiar new form. Tsallis, based at the Brazilian Centre for Research
in Physics, Rio de Janeiro, is excited to have created this new equation. And
no wonder: his unassuming arrangement of symbols has stimulated hundreds of
researchers to publish more than a thousand papers in the past decade,
describing strange patterns in fluid flows, in magnetic fields issuing from the sun
and in the subatomic debris created in particle accelerators. But there is
something even more remarkable about Tsallis's equation: it came to him in a
daydream. In 1985, in a classroom in Mexico City, Tsallis was listening as a
colleague explained something to a student. On the chalkboard they had
written a very ordinary algebraic expression, pq, representing some number p
raised to the power q In Tsallis's line of work - describing the collective
properties of large numbers of particles - the letter "p" usually stands for
probability: the probability that a particle will have a particular velocity, say.
Tsallis stared at the formula from a distance and his mind drifted off.
"There were these pqs all over the board," he recalls, "and it suddenly came to my
mind - like a flash - that with powers of probabilities one might do some
unusual but possibly quite interesting physics." The physics involved may be
more than quite interesting, however. The standard means of describing the
collective properties of large numbers of particles - known as statistical
mechanics - has been hugely successful for more than a century, but it has also
been rather limited in its scope: you can only apply it to a narrow range of
systems. Now, with an insight plucked out of thin air, Tsallis may have changed
all that. Developed in the 19th century, statistical mechanics enabled
physicists to overcome an imposing problem. Ordinary materials such as water,
iron or glass are made of myriad atoms. But since it is impossible to calculate
in perfect detail how every individual atom or molecule will move, it seems
as if it might never be possible to understand the behaviour of such
substances at the atomic level. The solution, as first suggested by the Austrian
physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, lay in giving up hope of perfect understanding and
working with probabilities instead. Boltzmann argued that knowing the
probabilities for the particles to be in any of their various possible configurations
would enable someone to work out the overall properties of the system. Going
one step further, he also made a bold and insightful guess about these
probabilities - that any of the many conceivable configurations for the particles
would be equally probable. Deeper beauty Boltzmann's idea works, and has
enabled physicists to make mathematical models of thousands of real materials,
from simple crystals to superconductors. But his work also has a deeper
beauty. For a start, it reflects the fact that many quantities in nature - such as
the velocities of molecules in a gas - follow "normal" statistics. That is,
they are closely grouped around the average value, with a "bell curve"
distribution. The theory also explains why, if left to their own devices, systems
tend to get disorganised. Boltzmann argued that any system that can be in
several different configurations is most likely to be in the more spread out and
disorganised condition. Air molecules in a box, for example, can gather
neatly in a corner, but are more likely to fill the space evenly. That's because
there are overwhelmingly more arrangements of the particles that will produce
the spread out, jumbled state than arrangements that will concentrate the
molecules in a corner. This way of thinking led to the famous notion of entropy
- a measure of the amount of disorder in a system. In its most elegant
formulation, Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, which was later developed
mathematically by the American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, asserts that, under
many conditions, a physical system will act so as to maximise its entropy. And
yet Boltzmann and Gibbs's statistical mechanics doesn't explain everything:
a great swathe of nature eludes its grasp entirely. Boltzmann's guess about
equal probabilities only works for systems that have settled down to
equilibrium, enjoying, for example, the same temperature throughout. The theory fails
in any system where destabilising external sources of energy are at work,
such as the haphazard motion of turbulent fluids or the fluctuating energies of
cosmic rays. These systems don't follow normal statistics, but another
pattern instead. If you repeatedly measure the difference in fluid velocity at two
distinct points in a turbulent fluid, for instance, the probability of
finding a particular velocity difference is roughly proportional to the amount of
that difference raised to the power of some exponent. This pattern is known
as a "power law", and such patterns turn up in many other areas of physics,
from the distribution of energies of cosmic rays to the fluctuations of river
levels or wind speeds over a desert. Because ordinary statistical mechanics
doesn't explain power laws, their atomic-level origins remain largely
mysterious, which is why many physicists find Tsallis's mathematics so enticing. In
Mexico City, coming out of his reverie, Tsallis wrote up some notes on his
idea, and soon came to a formula that looked something like the standard
formula for the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy - but with a subtle difference. If he set q
to 1 in the formula - so that pq became the probability p - the new formula
reduced to the old one. But if q was not equal to 1, it made the formula
produce something else. This led Tsallis to a new definition of entropy. He
called it q entropy. Back then, Tsallis had no idea what q might actually
signify, but the way this new entropy worked mathematically suggested he might be on
to something. In particular, the power-law pattern tumbles out of the theory
quite naturally. Over the past decade, researchers have shown that Tsallis's
mathematics seem to describe power-law behaviour accurately in a wide range
of phenomena, from fluid turbulence to the debris created in the collisions
of high-energy particles. But while the idea of maximising q entropy seems to
work empirically, allowing people to fit their data to power-law curves and
come up with a value of q for individual systems, it has also landed Tsallis
in some hot water. The new mathematics seems to work, yet no one knows what
the q entropy really represents, or why any physical system should maximise it.
Degrees of chaos And for this reason, many physicists remain sceptical, or
worse. "I have to say that I don't buy it at all," says physicist Cosma
Shalizi of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who criticises the
mathematical foundations of Tsallis's approach. As he points out, the usual Boltzmann
procedure for maximising the entropy in statistical mechanics assumes a fixed
value for the average energy of a system, a natural idea. But to make things
work out within the Tsallis framework, researchers have to fix the value of
another quantity - a "generalised" energy - that has no clear physical
interpretation. "I have yet to encounter anyone," says Shalizi, "who can explain why
this should be natural." To his critics, Tsallis's success is little more
than sleight of hand: the equation may simply provide a convenient way to
generate power laws, which researchers can then fit to data by choosing the right
value of q "My impression," says Guido Caldarelli of La Sapienza University
in Rome, "is that the method really just fits data by adjusting a parameter.
I'm not yet convinced there's new physics here." Physicist Peter Grassberger
of the University of Wuppertal in Germany goes further. "It is all nonsense,"
he says. "It has led to no new predictions, nor is it based on rational
arguments." The problem is that most work applying Tsallis's ideas has simply
chosen a value of q to make the theory fit empirical data, without tying q to
the real dynamics of the system in any deeper way: there's nothing to show
why these dynamics depart from Boltzmann's picture of equal probabilities.
Tsallis, who is now at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, acknowledges this
is a limitation, but suggests that a more fundamental explanation is already
on its way. Power laws, he argues, should tend to arise in "weakly chaotic"
systems. In this kind of system, small perturbations might not be enough to
alter the arrangement of molecules. As a result, the system won't "explore"
all possible configurations over time. In a properly chaotic system, on the
other hand, even tiny perturbations will keep sending the system into new
configurations, allowing it to explore all its states as required for Boltzmann
statistics. Tsallis argues that if physicists can adequately understand the
details of this "exploring behaviour", they should be able to predict values
of q from first principles . In particular, he proposes, some as yet unknown
single parameter - closely akin to q - should describe the degree of chaos in
any system. Working out its value by studying a system's basic dynamics would
then let physicists predict the value of q that then emerges in its
statistics. Other theoretical work seems to support this possibility. For example,
in a paper soon to appear in Physical Review E, physicist Alberto Robledo of
the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City has examined
several classic models that physicists have used to explore the phenomenon of
chaos. What makes these models useful is that they can be tuned to be more or
less chaotic - and so used to explore the transition from one kind of
behaviour to another. Using these model systems, Robledo has been able to carry out
Tsallis's prescription, deriving a value of q just from studying the system's
fundamental dynamics. That value of q then reproduces intricate power-law
properties for these systems at the threshold of chaos. "This work shows that q
can be deduced from first principles," Tsallis says. While Robledo has
tackled theoretical issues, other researchers have made the same point with real
observations. In a paper just published, Leonard Burlaga and Adolfo Vinas at
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, study fluctuations
in the properties of the solar wind - the stream of charged particles that
flows outward from the sun - and show that they conform to Tsallis's ideas. They
have found that the dynamics of the solar wind, as seen in changes in its
velocity and magnetic field strength, display weak chaos of the type envisioned
by Tsallis. Burlaga and Vinas have also found that the fluctuations of the
magnetic field follow power laws that fit Tsallis's framework with q set to
1.75 (Physica A, vol 356, p 275). The chance that a more comprehensive
formulation of Tsallis's q entropy might eventually be found intrigues physicist
Ezequiel Cohen of the Rockefeller University in New York City. "I think a good
part of the establishment takes an unfair position towards Tsallis's work,"
he says. "The critique that all he does is 'curve fitting' is, in my opinion,
misplaced." Cohen has also started building his own work on Tsallis's
foundations. Two years ago, with Christian Beck of Queen Mary, University of
London, he proposed an idea known as "superstatistics" that would incorporate the
statistics of both Boltzmann and Tsallis within a larger framework. In
this work they revisited the limitation of Boltzmann's statistical mechanics.
Boltzmann's models cannot cope with any system in which external forces churn
up differences such as variations in temperature. A particle moving through
such a system would experience many temperatures for short periods and its
fluctuations would reflect an average of the ordinary Boltzmann statistics for
all those different temperatures. Cohen and Beck showed that such averaged
statistics, emerging out of the messy non-uniformity of real systems, take the
very same form as Tsallis statistics, and lead to power laws. In one striking
example, Beck showed how the distribution of the energies of cosmic rays could
emerge from random fluctuations in the temperature of the hot matter where
they were originally created. Cohen thinks that, if nothing else, Tsallis's
powers of probabilities have served to reawaken physicists to fundamental
questions they have never quite answered. After all Boltzmann's idea, though
successful, was also based on a guess; Albert Einstein disliked Boltzmann's
arbitrary assumption of "equal probabilities" and insisted that a proper theory
of matter had to rest on a deep understanding of the real dynamics of
particles. That understanding still eludes us, but Tsallis may have taken us
closer. It is possible that, in his mysterious q entropy, Tsallis has discovered
a kind of entropy just as useful as Boltzmann's and especially suited to the
real-world systems in which the traditional theory fails. "Tsallis made the
first attempt to go beyond Boltzmann," says Cohen. The door is now open for
others to follow. Close this window Printed on Thu Sep 01 01:17:25 BST 2005
----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the
21st Century
Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University;
Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
_www.howardbloom.net_ (http://www.howardbloom.net/)
_www.bigbangtango.net_ (http://www.bigbangtango.net/)
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic
of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The
Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society,
Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International
Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for
Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see:
_www.paleopsych.org_ (http://www.paleopsych.org/)
for two chapters from
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History,
see _www.howardbloom.net/lucifer _ (http://www.howardbloom.net/lucifer)
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big
Bang to the 21st Century, see _www.howardbloom.net _
(http://www.howardbloom.net/)
_______________________________________________
paleopsych mailing list
_paleopsych at paleopsych.org _ (mailto:paleopsych at paleopsych.org)
_http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych_
(http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych)
----------
Howard Bloom
Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of
History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the
21st Century
Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University;
Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
www.howardbloom.net
www.bigbangtango.net
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic
of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The
Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American
Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society,
Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International
Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for
Accelerating Change ; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.
For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see:
www.paleopsych.org
for two chapters from
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History,
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big
Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net
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