A Flipped View of Problems

A Flipped View of Problems

Sometimes, when you move far enough away from an issue, you can see it differently.  One time this happened was when I worked in aerospace, and I was on a flight home from a business trip.  Flying at 35,000 feet at night I felt “removed” from everything.  I wrote in my journal, and an idea emerged.

It seems that many (and perhaps all) problems contain the seeds of their own solution.  If you look deep enough into a problem, you will find clues.  At least these will tell you what not to do.  Knowing a problem well insures that you will not solve the wrong problem.  A really good problem will contain more than just some clues.  It literally contains a solution.  This problem will speak to the problem-solver and announce, “You can do this!”

Thus, there can develop between the problem and the problem-solver a relationship.  There are times that this relationship can be quite intimate.  In fact that is the key to the flipped view.

In the flipped view, the universe is populated by entities we call “problems”.  These entities are just floating around the universe, waiting to be solved.  What does a problem need in order for it to progress to solution?  It needs an “intelligent entity” to which it may attach itself.  When this attachment happens, then the problem has a chance to be solved.

So, you could ask, “Who is the agent behind a problem’s solution?”  In the flipped view, it is the “problem” that is riding the “intelligent entity”, much as a cowboy might ride a horse.

In the flipped view, I picture a kind of marriage happening between problem and solver.  Lucky is the problem that hitches itself to a capable solver.  That solver has intelligence and skills.  That solver is dedicated to solving a problem.  And, in a somewhat poetic sense, that solver loves his or her problem.

All this time while we humans self-aggrandize ourselves as God’s greatest creation, God is smiling at God’s best tool for moving a universe packed with problems into an ever more transformed state.  God is smiling because solved problems are satisfied on completing their eons long journeys.

The Three Essences, Kurzweil Reimagined

May 1, 2010 to May 6, 2010

Bob Fiske

The Three Essences, Kurzweil Reimagined

I see the world in ways that are natural for me, yet unnatural for others.  It’s a sad story.  It’s a story of sacrifice, and ripping away of things we cherish.  Maybe.  It might not feel like that in the end because we might embrace it without reservation.

Essence One: Environ-mentalism.  This is a restructuring of human cognitive and social characteristics with the aim of permitting human beings to coexist in harmony with the global natural environment.

Essence Two: Species-purpose.  This refers to a reorientation of meaning and purpose away from self-gratification, family-gratification¸ regional-gratification and national-gratification, and toward global awareness that the parts must serve a higher-order, all-encompassing design.

Essence Three: Dying-accept.  This transformation asserts that one way of living is no better or worse than another way of living.  There is nothing wrong with pain, suffering, hunger, illness, aging or dying since they are all states of being completely alive.  This essence seeks a state of consciousness in which individual human experience reduces to trivial importance in light of the demands of Essences One and Two.

These essences forecast a redefinition of the constructs by which we assign value.  Some of our most cherished notions will be sacrificed in favor of the welfare of the total human genome.  Indeed, they will be sacrificed in favor of the welfare of the total terrestrial genome and the total bank of phenotypic characteristics that those genes produce in living entities.  In other words, preservation of diversity will overrule individual success.  This has always been life’s (nature’s) biological agenda.  Now—because of our numbers and our intellectual dominance—humanity will necessarily take ownership of nature’s agenda.

New values imply new currencies.  Already this is happening in the techno-sphere.  Here is a TED talk by Jesse Schell called “When Games Invade Real Life” (http://www.ted.com/talks/jesse_schell_when_games_invade_real_life.html).

This way of thinking allows me to view Kurzweil’s “singularity hypothesis” in new ways.  If the ultimately intelligent computer emerges (along with its incomprehensible artificial intelligence), it will take ownership of nature’s agenda and the development of Grand Design.  It would create the new currencies.  These currencies would take birth as expressions of a point system with such a complex underlying algorithm that humans would not be capable of understanding it and would require computers to even access it.

Already we see the early stages of this in complexities of the tax code and investment instruments.  At any rate, using the singularity’s algorithmic point system, the post-singularity AI would have the means to positively motivate human behavior, shape human values and engage in diversity-promoting husbandry.

Nature’s Brains, Part 6

July 8, 2012

Bob Fiske

Nature’s Brains, Part 6

(Note: I invite you to read Part 5 before you dive into this part.)

It’s time to wrap this up.  Have I convinced you that brains are obsolete?  Probably not.  That’s OK, because I am not perfectly convinced, either.  However, I do suspect that they may be.

Let’s reexamine the idea of species survival.  Many people—including some biologists—equate survival with competition.  In layperson’s lingo survival amounts to “survival of the fittest”.  Even those trained in genetics might say that a unique gene (or complex of genes) confers a “survival advantage”, meaning that individuals endowed with this advantage will be more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation than individuals lacking the genetic trait(s).

What this amounts to is that more competitive individuals or species, because of “superior adaptability” will out-reproduce other individuals/species in the race to acquire resources, meet physical needs and produce offspring that also produce offspring.  Understood this way, human beings would be judged as the most competitive species, and largely due to the human brain.

If I stopped there, then you would miss the other crucial half of the picture.  The “competitive half-picture” conveys the image of nature as a producer of Olympic gold medalists that can beat out other contenders.  However, that is a simple human notion.  Nature has been in this business too long to aim so low.

The truth is, I believe, that nature’s brilliance can be summed up in a simple word: harmony.

While it is true that the natural world does create species rivalries, it is of much greater significance that species coexist.  It’s not hard to see.  Walking in the neighborhood in the summer I notice that every bush is laced with spider webs.  The plants don’t simply tolerate these invaders, they make them a comfortable home.

Go into any forest.  You are standing within a well-balanced system in which plants, animals, insects, worms and fungi each contribute in species-unique ways to the overall health of the biome.  By the way, one reference uses another interesting word: communities.  Biomes are notable as communities hosting a diversity of species.

Even in extremes of inter-species competition, nature manages to maintain harmony.  For example, swarms of locusts (immense concentrations of juvenile grasshoppers) can consume plant life rapidly in areas of thousands of square kilometers.  In their wake locust swarms leave no living thing.  This appears to be extreme competition, but it is more than that.  Grasshopper populations die off, and plant communities grow anew.  Nature restores balance by means of a time-based cycle.

The human brain appears to play by its own rules.  As a competitor it is unsurpassed.  The problem is that, in achieving its competitive advantage, the human brain has brushed aside nature’s tendencies to create coexistence.  Competition may be hard, and Homo sapiens may be the winner.  But one thing is certain: winning is easy when measured against nature’s ability to weave communities that maintain harmony among species.

Some people do understand this.  Farmers specializing in permaculture strive to create interactive plant, animal and insect communities that produce food, retain water, create shade and sun, grow flowers and constrain pests.  Their goal is to grow food in the manner that nature grows forests, with multiple species coexisting.  The knowledge of how to emulate nature exists.  It is not mainstream knowledge, but it exists.

That knowledge is not enough.  The human brain has painted itself into a corner because we are well on our way to nine billion individuals.  Most species have constraints that keep their populations in check.  Prey have predators, and predators have a limited supply of prey.  They are subject to limitations in territory or key resources.  The human brain, though, has invented methods to defeat every limitation that governs unbridled growth in other species.  Our population goes in one direction only: up.

In the end, I suspect that nature’s way will ultimately triumph.  The human brain is on course to exhaust every last resource it can.  In doing so, it will end the supremacy of the human species.  It will also take down many, many species by disrupting the finely tuned harmony that nature has woven.  Because of the human brain’s competitive and simplistic behavior, the world will undergo yet another massive extinction event.

Like the crops that were devastated by locusts, nature will re-emerge.  It will continue its process of creating species that both compete and coexist in balanced communities.  And it will never again produce a species with an over-competitive, non-harmonizing brain like the one encased in the skulls of Homo sapiens.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE FIRST PART

Nature’s Brains, Part 5

July 8, 2012

Bob Fiske

Nature’s Brains, Part 5

(Note: I invite you to read Part 4 before you dive into this part.)

If you have followed this essay so far, you might have thought I was doing a term paper for a biology class.  You could be excused, for you did not know the question that motivated it.  But it’s not a term paper, it’s an editorial.  You might say this is a bio-political opinion piece.

Now here is where I’m going to look pretty dumb.  An editorial author is supposed to have a single, solid opinion.  I don’t.  I haven’t made up my mind yet.  It’s because of the question I asked.

A question popped into my mind as I “observed” the inner workings of the feeding sparrow’s marvelous little brain, as I recognized that brains are useful and that nature has kept improving their designs, that, in the human brain we see both the splendor and drawbacks of advanced brain design, and that, from nature’s point of view, the drawbacks are a supremely serious problem.

And this question entered my mind.  “Are brains obsolete?”  Is nature done experimenting with brains?  That’s the question.

Here, in a nutshell, is my ambivalence on the issue.  The human brain has supplanted nature.  Or: the human brain appears to think and act like it has replaced nature.  Or: perhaps the human brain will, in fact, displace nature in determining the future of all life on the planet.  Or: probably not, nature will win and will phase out brains.

One might reply, “Phase out brains?  It could never happen!”  Want to bet?  We have evidence of other design solutions that were edited out of nature’s animal catalogue.  For instance, the dinosaurs.  Although dinosaur fossils have been found spanning a variety of sizes, for this discussion we want to focus on the most obvious group, the giants whose body masses were on the order of several metric tons.  They are no more.  That design was phased out.

Dinosaurs had a nice, long reign of over an eighth of a billion years.  Another grand animal design is represented by the trilobite group that inhabited earth’s early oceans for over a quarter of a billion years.  They, too, are no more.  So, it is possible that successful animal designs can enjoy popularity and still end up as throwaways in the genetic scrap heap.

OK, let’s back up a step.  Is nature a thing that is capable of making decisions?  Can nature phase out brains?  I want to be clear: talking about nature as if it is an entity that deliberately chooses which species to include or omit in a catalogue is merely a verbal shorthand.  While that shorthand makes it possible to express sentences using fewer words, I would not want you to become confused by it.

Therefore, to clear up any misunderstanding, I will place a small definition on the table.  Nature is a system of rules for structuring matter.  It turns out that this rule-base is huge, as is the number and type of forms it is capable of producing.  Nature does not think, nor does it plan.  And yet, as psychiatrist Allen Wheelis poetically argued, nature appears to “progress”.  Using verbal shorthand once again, I would say that it is possible to see in nature’s progress innumerable experiments in which forms have been tried out.

Certainly, in the arena of life, the “trying out” of forms (living designs, genotype/phenotype combinations) has a dynamic nature.  By dynamic, I mean that experiments can be performed using biological building blocks, and when the experiment is over those bio-molecules can be recycled into other organisms.  It’s like having a whiteboard or a computer hard drive that can be written and rewritten upon many, many times.

So, simply because the human brain is the most adept brain to be written onto nature’s slate is no guarantee of anything.  That genetic information can be wiped clean, and the raw materials can be assembled to make other designs.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO PART 6