Tunable Properties

While slashdot-reading (a certain stylized depth and breadth of research) about quantum dot nanotechnology ^google, I came across the phrase "tunable properties" ^google.

This age we are fast approaching promises to reach into our assumptions of the natural world and morph things into new forms and functions. Platonic forms and aristocratic hierarchies have been vehemently challenged in early days of postmodernism, but only in the realm of ethical principles. Challenging Greek classicists has been a religious or ideological affair, and the manifestations in physical space were mostly the human domain of (social) clustering and missions. The early days of postmodernism were about changing our minds.

The near future will move the revolution out of the playpen of mind altering and onto the base elements and technological phenomenon of our natural world. Previously your ideas had to change in order to continue existing in a group, in the future your ideas will have to change to continue existing in the environment.

Platonic forms. Tunable properties. Are yours?

Happy versus Right

Puzzle #1 A number of wise people have observed that, given the choice between being happy and being right, most people will choose being right. Why is this to be expected?

(this was an assignment in my graduate level Advanced Systems class, and my answer is below)

P: Humans are {organisms}.
(an assembly of organs that influence each other in such a way that they function as a more or less stable whole and have properties of life.)

P: Organisms have {performance boundaries}.
(temperature, weight loads)

P: The {environment surrounding an organism} presents space that offers conditions within and without the organism's performance boundaries.
(molten rock, alpine meadow, climate controlled hotel room, international space station sleeping quarters, sauna)

P: Environments within the organism's performance boundaries are synonymous with {safe}.
(environment: average tropical temperature, organism: humans)

P: Environments outside the organism's performance boundaries are synonymous with {unsafe}.
(environment: molten lava rock, organism: humans)

P: Humans have an {internal representation} of outside environment.
( propositional language )

P-1: When propositional language evaluates the environment surrounding an organism as within its performance boundaries and the actual environment is outside the organism's performance boundaries the propositional language statement itself is evaluated as false.

P-2: When propositional language evaluates the environment surrounding an organism as outside its performance boundaries and the actual environment is within the organism's performance boundaries the propositional language statement itself is evaluated as false.

P: P-1 statement on this page is synonymous with unsafe.

P: Unsafe propositional language and unsafe environment are not both physically immediate forms of unsafe.

P: Unsafe propositional language is safe if used and unsafe if implemented.

P: Humans have an internal representation of the caveats of language evaluation in which survival is associated with safe propositional statements.

P: Humans know that being right is an important safety concern with internal representation.

P: One could be happy and also not be using internal representation to find environments that are truly safe.

P: Happiness in the above case is associated with not surviving.

P: Being right is associated with surviving in the above case.

The Giant AI Series: Why I embraced Cloud Computing

I'm soon to deprecate lancemiller.org. I'm embracing cloud computing totally. Having my own domain, and writing anomalous and unique PHP for it was probably the hip thing to do in the years between 1995 and 2005. Now the street cred associated with running one's own website is often a negative type, due to the millions of spam web URL's out there with useless or malicious intent.

With Gmail, Blogspot, Picasa, and Youtube there is more I can accomplish than with even the best solitary server side hacking style. Even if I managed to write my own equivalence to Google's Ajax powered apps, I would not be plugged inside their platform.

Plugged inside their platform is not just a strange lust to belong to a corporate infrastructure. It has to do with survival through unanticipated calamities. In such scenarios, the resilience of an informational mega-enterprise may fair better than other social constructs. The value of the Google aggregation of data would likely marshal the social resources of know-how and economics for saving it. Also, the economy of scale would work in Google''s favor. All those bits are cheaper to store in mass. Beyond the survival of calamities or turmoil, having my data reside within this system allows my data to be part of a giant informational restructuring process. This recursive process is sure to create new intellectual phenomenon beyond the capacities of one human or group of humans.

I'd like to have helped that along with my little bits of information.

Supporting and supplemental documents:
The Future is Cloudy by Robert X. Cringely.
A Cloudbook for the Cloud by Kevin Kelly.

Change is good

I am writing this for anyone who can read it. I am writing it for humans who can decode these symbols into meaning, and also for the multitude of bots that crawl the web parsing web pages looking for statistical occurrences of words in association with one another. The bots think a lot like you, e.g. if they see "hello world, I have this plain little web page viagra viagra viagra viagra that is about me" they know something suspicious is afoot.

I am not here to talk about web pages, but about us. By "us" I mean anyone that can read this web page.

Note what happened in the last two paragraphs. A filter was created ( a.k.a. a qualification ), and anything that passed through the filter was labeled. The processing, or rhetorical device, created a special class of cognitive beings. You are in this class, and there are many living things that are not.

This rhetorical device is one real instance of evolution. We "web page readers" are an exclusive class who can social network on the web, give each other paying jobs as a result ( and the pay buys food, water, and social prestige things that also function as evolutionary filters), or in very many instances mate and have offspring. That type of baby definitely came into being filtered through the first two paragraphs in my blog entry.

Human evolution is ...... I am not going to finish that statement. The statement makes a mistake of tense. "Is" should be "was". Hopefully you have seen a puddle of water that recently melted from ice (there are some humans who haven't seen this). You know it just melted, because some little bits of ice are still part of the spot of water. But you do not know the melting process exactly as it happened, including the original shape of the ice.

Like the ice changing its shape as it turns to water, we don't know the original shape of "human", nor the exact posture and way of being that was "human" along the way. The term is equifinality -there are many possible routes to our current configuration.

Human evolution has some of faster-legs-will-survive components to it. This is where we are like all in the biological realm. The entities with the better functioning parts, resulting in better functioning whole self, exploiting a niche in the surrounding environment to secure energy sources for ourselves -those entities survive to the next second in the timeline.

In the last 5,000 years the faster-legs component has taken on far less of a role. As an example, Tamerlane was not able to walk, but was leader of thousands and conquered/exterminated huge cities. He was physiologically inferior to the millions he subjugated. When you ask how Tamerlane could be is when you start exploring evolution that happens as a result of culture.

Evolution through culture is an even harder past tense to discern than physiological evolution. Right now there are people mingling and mating as a result of being in microtribes that exist in virtual worlds online, recently there was a love-triangle of NASA astronauts that got international press. My great-great-grandfather was an Irish immigrant raised with his brother in an orphanage in New York City. He and his brother fled the orphanage, with my ancestor working on the railroads and marrying a Cherokee and the brother becoming a stock trader who had a mansion in New York and San Francisco.

Babies are coming out of these processes. Then those babies are going to mutate the culture even more (e.g. James Brown and Henry Ford).

The trend in the last 5,000 years has been towards less adaptation in relation to nature, and more adaptation to the symbolic and cognitive. The gods have even changed their residence -once they inhabited every local tree and stone and now more likely are "sky gods". The sky gods are Allah and Yahweh, out away from all the daily mundane often leading their warriors on an abstract faith-based agenda on Earth. Lots of todays babies have come out of these warrior's progress, with whole portions of the planet having little or no people outside this class of family religion.

This process of filtering humanity's next generation based on symbolic and cognitive artifacts poses a dilemma for humanists. Remember the ice to water melting process, and how if you encounter it at 5:00PM you do not know exactly what it looked like at 3:00PM? Humanists worship the sanctity of humans at 3:00PM, are calling the current status at 5:00PM an outcome of social injustice, and would ideally like 6:00PM to see us progressing to something like what 3:00PM was.

The humanists are just another particular filter imposed on the present, a meta-aware systems intervention or systems disruption. The filter has little ability to deliver on producing a less exclusive society, it is merely another construct of exclusion -a church of contempt for the process that is ever more prevalent.

That process is change, and it is has no leader or cruel demagogue. It will be more fair, democratic and brilliant than what you or I could have designed with our best intentions.

Hopefully, see you in that future.

Supporting and supplemental documents:
Industrial Evolution
By BENJAMIN M. FRIEDMAN
Does natural selection favor the rise of capitalist economies?


Out of Control
Chapter 18 THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE
by Kevin Kelly


Searching for Similar Diagnosis Through DNA (new communities emerging from genetic mutations)
By AMY HARMON

Progress towards the self-sufficient community, the empowered sub-state group.

History was made on December 9, 2007. A template, model, and archetype of social innovation occurred, enabled by a novel moral framework.

The circumstances were horrifying and certainly unwanted by those who made the leap forward. The event was an intentional mass murdering spree by a forgettable loner who targeted the church services of New Life Church. The church had armed security personnel. Not corporate, and not state sponsored, but volunteer members of the congregation. One of the guards, a woman by the name of Jeanne Assam, confronted the murderer and shot him several times. The murderer died from a self-inflicted gun shot.

Portions of Jeanne Assam's account were published in the Denver Post: here

"I give the credit to God, and I mean that. I say that very humbly. God was with me, and the whole time I was behind cover — this has gotta be God — because of the firepower he had versus what I had was God," Assam said. "And I did not run away. I did not think for a minute to run away. I just knew that I was given the assignment to end this before it got too, too much worse. I just prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide me. I just said, 'Holy Spirit, be with me.' My hands weren't even shaking."

Police officials praised Jeanne Assam's actions at a news conference, calling her "a real hero”. Pastor Brady Boyd said during a televised news conference that “a hundred” people might have been shot if Ms. Assam, the security guard, had not stopped the gunman as he entered the church after shooting people in the parking lot.

Positive and progressive milestones of this series of events:
1 ) A group bounded by morality and spirituality ( a church ) condoned and intentionally pursued armed security.
2) This was not gun use along the lines of "Wild West" anarchy, but deliberate and designed rules in which only certain people are allowed to carry guns and provide security response. New Life Church did not condone a simplistic pro-gun stance.
3) A member of the spiritual group fired a weapon in the church, at a murderer.
4) The church leadership endorsed the security action.
5) Representatives of the state, the government police apparatus, endorsed and praised the security action.
6) The security guard was a woman.
7) Pacifism is not hardwired to the sacred, and violence is not absolutely associated with the criminal. The intent, and the choice of targets, determines the murderer and the hero.

This qualifies as social progress because sub-state actors owned the process of security. "Security" was not given its usual untouchable status, and assigned to government or corporate henchmen who do it more to pay their bills while having little solidarity with those they "police". Security was by the subculture, for the subculture.

The last decades of the 20th century have seen the rise of power in sub state groups, and even more rhetoric that either endorses or condemns the trend. Many proponents initially assumed the sub state beneficiaries of the trend would be peasant, indigenous, and communistic class groupings. The trend is proving to be even more egalitarian, with post-nationalism and post-mono-culturalism favoring and fitting perfectly the bourgeoise members of organized religions. As the state collapses in its ability to win wars or provide meaningful services, a new landscape of terror and opportunity will emerge. The groups with mobility or means to change, bounded by a functional moral code but practicing no moral absolutism, access to new technology, and an ability to "mash-up" traditions into novel designs; these will have a chance for a better day as others die in the heat or at the hands of new social terrors.

For further reading on the fall of the State, and rise of communities, please see Security: Power To The People by John Robb.

More instances of Christian subculture countering the criminal subculture: God Tube and Crime Fighting, http://www.youtube.com/kccrimefighter.

Note on author's lifestyle in relation to the content of this post: Lives in inner city Seattle, does not own a gun and most likely would never want to. The author of this blog is not religious. New Life Church is associated with suburbia and use of guns are usually associated with guns rights advocates. The author is neither suburban nor an NRA supporter.

---

From:   John Robb
Subject: Re: Inspired by Brave New War
Date: December 12, 2007 7:03:52 AM PST
To:   lance@lancemiller.org
Reply-To:   John Robb
Lance,

Well done!  Definitely on target.

JR