Kevin Kelly
Out of Control, Kevin Kelly
An interesting, slightly dated look at the future of technology from Kevin Kelly. Published in 1994, it has good reason to be lagging behind, and although it’s somewhat optimistic predictions haven’t fully propagated, for all I know they seem to still be accurate of the sorts of things that are out there, just starting to happen on the fringes of technology and computer science. A fun read, the kind that makes you wonder what you’re doing building dumb little websites when there’s fun shit like evolutionary computing happening…
We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves Norbert Weiner, 20
Patterns of cells, surely. Cells made up of patterns of DNA, made up of patterns of nucleotides, made up of patterns of molecules, made up of patterns of atoms, made up of various electrons, protons, and neutrons, of which protons and neutrons are in turn made up of something, we don’t quite exactly know yet. And that’s just jumping down the rabbit hole at the cellular level – skipping larger human subsystems. And you can go from individual up as well, to an immediate peer group, then local, regional, national, global… Where does the line get drawn? To us it’s at the individual level. To ants and bees it’s very likely above that level, colony or hive. Makes you wonder whether there are any organisms that can feel and understand and manipulate the workings of different sub-organisms within themselves?
Much more likely, says [Daniel] Dennett, is that “meaning emerges from distributed interaction of lots of little things, no one of which can mean a damn thing.” A whole bunch of decentralized modules produce raw and often contradictory parts – a possible word here, a speculative word there. “But out of the mess, not entirely coordinated, in fact largely competitive, what emerges is a speech act.” 43
I like this notion. I’ve always felt that the aggregation of everything in the world creates all the meaning, as opposed to some god creating all meaning in the world. Pantheism, I don’t exactly know what to call it. But it’s the only spiritual idea that really sticks for me, that makes me wide-eyed in contemplation of what the world really is.
“To think is to act, and to act is to think,” said Heinz von Foerster, gadfly of the 1950s cybernetic movement. “There is no life without movement.” 49
Left on its own, without a direct link to “outside,” a brainy network takes its own machinations as reality. A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. 52
And here I am sitting on my ass, writing about a book I read. Sometimes I wish I’d actually do something big, but it hasn’t quite happened yet.
When reduced to essentials, life is very close to a computational function. For a number of years, Ed Fredkin, a maverick thinker once associated with MIT, has been spinning out a heretical theory that the universe is a computer. Not metaphorically like a computer, but that matter and energy are forms of information processing of the same general class as the type of information processing that goes on inside a Macintosh. Fredkin disbelieves in the solidity of atoms and says flatly that “the most concrete thing in the world is information.” 107
Going back to the first quote, it just depends on where you draw the lines. From far above, absolutely. When you bring the line down to an individual level that individual acts absolutely nothing like a computer, but its constituent parts (the nucleic acids) do. Drop it down to their level, and they don’t, but here I lost out because I really have no idea what levels are below them and how they work.
Where does self come from? The perplexing answer suggested by cybernetics is: it emerges from itself. It cannot appear any other way. Brian Goodwin, an evolutionary biologist, told reporter Roger Lewin, “The organism is the cause and effect of itself, its own intrinsic order and organization. Natural selection isn’t the cause of organism. Genes don’t cause organisms. There are no causes of organisms. Organisms are self causing agencies.” Self, therefore, is an auto-conspired form. It emerges to transcend itself, just as a long snake swallowing its own ail because Uroborus, the mythical loop. 124
This also resonates at a spiritual level for me. Up along with meaning emerging from small distributed parts it’s always something that’s sort of sat right behind my actual conscious thoughts, me being able to sit there and know it’s back there but never pull it out and twist it around to think about it. It’s the spirit. That the sum of the parts is somehow greater than the parts themselves. Divide me out into carbon and whatever other atoms and I’m no longer me, I’ve lost my self/identity/soul whatever. Not that I ever physically possessed anything other than those atoms. But in concert they made me more than just themselves, and that’s tremendous.
Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve out machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living. 165
John Perry Barlow, 184.
Teilhard de Chardin, 201
There are many reasons to create. But what we create is always a world. I believe we may be unable to create anything less. We can create hurriedly, in fragments, in thumbnail sketches, and streams of consciousness, but always we are filling in an unfinished world of out own. […] In essence, every creative act is no more or less than the reenactment of the Creation. 236
Or, we may be very surprised to find that nothing unifies the selection criteria. It may be that any highly evolved form is beautiful. We find beauty in all biological creatures, although individual people have individual favorites. My suspicion is that the beauty of nature resides in the process of getting there by evolution and by the important fact that the form must work biologically as a whole. 276
This is a tremendous notion.
Ethology, study of animal behavior, 323
Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more – it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow – this is what evolution is. Theodosius Dobzhansky, 363
Where other people see the hand of God, we see evolution. Bob Crosby, 363
Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley 364
Postdarwinism suggests that other forces are at work in evolution in the long run. These lawful mechanisms of change reorganize life into new fitnesses. These unseen dynamics extend the Library in which natural selection may operate. These deepened evolution need not be any more mystical that natural selection is. Think of each dynamic – symbiosis, directed mutation, saltataionism, self-organization – as a mechanism that will foster evolutionary innovation over the long term in complement to Darwin’s ruthless selection. 371
This is the first place that I’ve ever heard that there may be more to it than just Darwin. I figure that we as humans really don’t know anything all of our science is just crude approximation of whatever forces actually permeate the universe, good enough to do cool shit like fly airplanes and make computers, but bad enough to make us dangerously overestimate our merits as a race of beings. But although I haven’t taken that many biology courses, I’m surprised that the notion of post-darwinism hasn’t popped up for me sooner.
Hall found some directed variations so complex they required the mutation of two genes simultaneously. He called that “the improbable stacked on top of the highly unlikely.” 375
Walter Fontana, coproducing (lap game) mathematical functions 395. The idea of a set of functions interacting with each other in such a way that there is no clear, direct causation from one to the next, but they’re all tied together. Self organizing. Some system just pops into existence from any number of parts. A -> B -> C -> A. Everything depends on the next thing. I can’t find much on the web about Fontana, but he’s a part of an eponymous lab at Harvard, so he must be doing all right.
“If you write something about this,” Kauffman says softly, “make sure you say that this is only something crazy that people are thinking about. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if somehow there are laws that make laws that make laws, so that the universe is, in John Wheeler’s words, something that is looking in at itself!? The universe posts its own rules and emerges out of a self-consistent thing. Maybe that’s not impossible, this notion that quarks and gluons and atoms and elementary particles have invented the laws by which they transform one another.” 398
Yep, that’s fascinating too. God is everything somehow working together to what end nobody has any idea.
Are the laws of the universe evolvable? If the laws governing the universe arose from within the universe, might they be susceptible to the forces of self-adjustment? Perhaps the very foundational laws upholding all sensible laws are in flex. Are we playing in a game where all the rules are constantly being rewritten? 460