I'm watching a presentation by David Krakauer at the Santa Fe Institute. They do complexity theory, and he gives a good lecture.
These pictures are screenshots of his presentation. I'm keeping them here for my own notes, because I thought there was some pretty deep stuff in here.
First -- noise is essential to the system, because, as written here, it allows for the exploration of all possible states. How else are you going to optimize?? Noise delineates the operation-space.
Next, he gives us a picture of what I would refer to as a Lévy flight, but which simply be called "foraging behavior"; it's where you take a semi-random approach to exploring your environment, whether it's a field of blackberries or the information-space of artistic production. Artists do this throughout their career, where they spend a lot of time exploring -places, ideas, themes and then an abrupt and explosive execution of work that seems to crystallize out of all their recent experience. So the exploratory Lévy flight graph is paired with a more tightly integrated graph, the execution graph.
Then he tells us that neurons are doing the same thing when we think, and especially when we make decisions.
But this is where shit got crazy for me. Not only do our brains do this, but we as organisms in the larger superorganism of society are doing it also.
He's saying that society is a circuitboard, where each of our relationships with each other creates a network of information flows, complete with bottlenecks and critical junctures, and evolving in real-time as it tries to optimize the flow of information. He is visualizing, and schematizing, the noosphere in action.
And then the needle drops, and you remember why you like watching people like David Krakauer and places like the Sante Fe Institute: He calls these relationships "social circuits" and says we can predict the individual behaviors in the group: duration of a fight, who will fight who, who needs to be removed from the group for the fight to stop...
As we develop more sophisticated sensor networks, we will accumulate more and more data on bigger and bigger groups, and learn how to integrate that data into more complex network graphs like these.
And then we'll be able to predict adoption or rejection of social movements, of occupying military forces, of environmental regulations...
The private sector will have a half-assed understanding, yet sell it to all of us via third party business consultants who eat hype-flakes for breakfast, and we'll buy it all and use it and let it take over our lives, disrupt our hormones and dissolve our social fabric, even though it doesn't work (think AI today), while governments will be years ahead, using it to gently manipulate its population into maintaining a society that disproportionately redistributes its resources to the already rich and powerful. The only way to respond is to get familiar in advance, and so thanks to people like this, we are. That is, if we're paying attention at all.
If you're looking for more insights into the future, you can listen to David Krakauer, and a whole bunch of other thought-provoking, future-proofing professionals, on the behind the scenes marketing material called Science Fact vs Science Fiction, for the science fiction series Raised By Wolves on HBO (Season 2). They cover the topics of Robots, Space Travel, Human Engineering, Synthetic Biology, Metamaterials, AI, and Cosmology.
Notes:
Collective Computing and Learning from Nature
David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute at the Foresight Intelligent Cooperation Group, Sep 2021
What was really the secret behind Van Gogh's success?
(Exploration and exploitation lead to "hot streaks")
Sep 2021, phys.org
Chaotic Lévy walks are a good strategy for animals
Sep 2020, phys.org
Pedestrians at crosswalks found to follow the Lévy walk process
Apr 2019, phys.org
Musical melodies obey same laws as foraging animals
Jan 2016, phys.org
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