A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe. It is intended to be the 21st century successor to the ancient worldviews of Materialism and Idealism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's also a Theory – of – Everything that covers, not just matter & energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.
Post 135.July 1, 2024
Synchrony : Small World Networks
Holism and Evolution in Computing & Consciousness
A moderate amount of randomness and a few non-local short-cuts make the small-world system more flexible than the regular one, and more integrated. Strogatz compares the human brain to a small world system : ". . . for the tangle of neurons in the brain, . . . grids and lattices were clearly in-appropriate. A better model of the geometry would incorporate a looser, more relaxed kind of structure, a hodge-podge of order and randomness, with clustered local connections and haphazard global ones." In computer programming⁵, a system with a few shortcuts, instead of central control, has been proven to be a more efficient form of collective communication. All of those small-world features work together to bind the separate parts into a whole system. In his 1926 book, Holism and Evolution, Jan Smuts defined “holism” as a "fundamental factor operative towards the creation of wholes in the universe"⁶. A “fundamental factor” in science could also be called a “universal principle” in philosophy.
The hypothetical Big Bang of astrophysics, seems to be a case of formless Potential⁷ being converted into Actual things. But scientists have to assume that Energy & Matter pre-existed the Big Beginning in some manner. So, they imagine a prim-ordial field of unformed (not-yet real) stuff, labeled Plasma⁸. Then over time that potential nothingness evolved into the formal things we know today. For example the astronomical galaxies, such as our own Milky Way, are aggregations of stars & dust that are interconnected by gravity into a whirling clump that, when viewed in telescopes, appears to be a thing in itself : a singular system. Similarly, all other macro-scale physical objects are ultimately clouds of sub-atomic bits of matter bound into wholes by invisible forces.
When isolated, those invisible particles follow independent trajectories of their own. But when collated by binding forces, they settle into predictable orbits around the center of gravity of the system as a whole : atoms. Yet, at larger scales, billions of galaxies of particles clump together into the more complex forms that we see around us, such as molecules, mountains, trees, and people. Each of which can be treated as a singular object. Likewise, in the human brain, individual cells are mind-less, but when properly synchronized they somehow transform matter into mind, physical interactions into metaphysical cognition. Strogatz uses an ant colony as an illustration of Collective Cognition⁹ : "Individually, no ant knows what the colony is supposed to be doing, but together, they act like they have a mind." He goes on to surmise, "we seem to have stumbled upon a universal pattern of complexity. Disparate networks show the same tendencies : short chains, high clusering, and scale-free link dispositions." And that synchron-izing pattern seems to have reached its epitome in the marvelous human mind, where computation is transformed into Consciousness.
5. Evolutionary Programs The complexity of some design problems necess-itated a novel approach to line-item computing. Some-times called “digital Darwin-ism, these programs mimic the trial & error methods of natural evolution. Such programs make use of the creativity of random mutations, and the precision of selective criteria to mimic the power of evolution to progress along unpredictable paths toward solutions that are well-adapted to particular conditions.
6. Holistic Principle : Smuts defined Holism as “the ultimate synthetic, ordering, organizing, regulative activity in the universe which accounts for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it, from the atom and the physic-chemical structures, through the cell and organisms, through Mind in animals, to Personality in man.”
7. Potential : Aristotle defined Potential, as the power to become real — a currently unrealized ability, i.e. not yet real.
8. Big Bang Plasma : “The Big Bang theory suggests that quark-gluon plasma filled the Universe before the creation of other matter that we know today.” Note that Quarks and Gluons are hypothetical elementary entities that are not directly observable, but are necessary to make the theory seem plausible. https://medium.com/@thisscience1/quarks-have-never-been-observed-d24db26742cc
9. Collective Computation “Collective computation is the processing of information by complex adaptive systems to generate inferences in order to solve adaptive problems.” https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9709348
End of Blog Post 135
SYNC
How Order Emerges From Chaos
Steven Strogatz
American Mathematician
“Chaos is not formless . . . Chaos has an essence, a quality that never changes.”
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