Greetings love-hogs,
Here are some further musings on Louis' luscious love-lab.
Yummy quotes:
"In the midst of creating forms, love creates a form that melts all forms." - Rumi
"One coincidence is worth a thousands appointments." - Arabic tradition
On the way home I spoke of this book and it's questing for how life keeps creating itself.
I feel all of these "laws" relate wonderfully to improvisation, which is really more of a life form than an art form...
Chapter 24: THE NINE
LAWS OF GOD from Out of Control
by Kevin Kelly (circa 1988)
Out of nothing, nature makes something.
First there is hard rock planet; then there is life, lots of it.
First barren hills; then brooks with fish and cattails and red-winged
blackbirds. First an acorn; then an oak tree forest.
I'd like to be able to do that. First a hunk of metal; then a
robot. First some wires; then a mind. First some old genes; then a dinosaur.
How do you make something from nothing? Although nature knows this
trick, we haven't learned much just by watching her. We have learned more by
our failures in creating complexity and by combining these lessons with small
successes in imitating and understanding natural systems. So from the frontiers
of computer science, and the edges of biological research, and the odd corners
of interdisciplinary experimentation, I have compiled The Nine Laws of God
governing the incubation of somethings from nothing:
Distribute being
Control from the bottom up
Cultivate increasing returns
Grow by chunking
Maximize the fringes
Honor your errors
Pursue no optima; have multiple goals
Seek persistent disequilibrium
Change changes itself.
These nine laws are the organizing principles that can be found
operating in systems as diverse as biological evolution and SimCity. Of course
I am not suggesting that they are the only laws needed to make something from
nothing; but out of the many observations accumulating in the science of
complexity, these principles are the broadest, crispest, and most
representative generalities. I believe that one can go pretty far as a god
while sticking to these nine rules.
Distribute
being. The spirit of a beehive, the behavior of an economy, the thinking
of a supercomputer, and the life in me are distributed over a multitude of
smaller units (which themselves may be distributed). When the sum of the parts
can add up to more than the parts, then that extra being (that something from
nothing) is distributed among the parts. Whenever we find something from nothing,
we find it arising from a field of many interacting smaller pieces. All the
mysteries we find most interesting -- life, intelligence, evolution -- are
found in the soil of large distributed systems.
Control
from the bottom up. When everything is connected to everything in a
distributed network, everything happens at once. When everything happens at
once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority.
Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts
done locally in parallel, and not from a central command. A mob can steer
itself, and in the territory of rapid, massive, and heterogeneous change, only
a mob can steer. To get something from nothing, control must rest at the bottom
within simplicity.
Cultivate
increasing returns. Each time you use an idea, a language, or a skill you
strengthen it, reinforce it, and make it more likely to be used again. That's
known as positive feedback or snowballing. Success breeds success. In the
Gospels, this principle of social dynamics is known as "To those who have,
more will be given." Anything which alters its environment to increase
production of itself is playing the game of increasing returns. And all large,
sustaining systems play the game. The law operates in economics, biology,
computer science, and human psychology. Life on Earth alters Earth to beget
more life. Confidence builds confidence. Order generates more order. Them that
has, gets.
Grow by
chunking. The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with
a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex
organization -- such as intelligence or a market economy -- without growing it,
inevitably lead to failure. To assemble a prairie takes time -- even if you
have all the pieces. Time is needed to let each part test itself against all
the others. Complexity is created, then, by assembling it incrementally from
simple modules that can operate independently.
Maximize
the fringes. In heterogeneity is creation of the world. A uniform entity must
adapt to the world by occasional earth-shattering revolutions, one of which is
sure to kill it. A diverse heterogeneous entity, on the other hand, can adapt
to the world in a thousand daily minirevolutions, staying in a state of permanent,
but never fatal, churning. Diversity favors remote borders, the outskirts,
hidden corners, moments of chaos, and isolated clusters. In economic,
ecological, evolutionary, and institutional models, a healthy fringe speeds
adaptation, increases resilience, and is almost always the source of
innovations.
Honor
your errors. A trick will only work for a while, until everyone else is doing
it. To advance from the ordinary requires a new game, or a new territory. But
the process of going outside the conventional method, game, or territory is
indistinguishable from error. Even the most brilliant act of human genius, in
the final analysis, is an act of trial and error. "To be an Error and to
be Cast out is a part of God's Design," wrote the visionary poet William
Blake. Error, whether random or deliberate, must become an integral part of any
process of creation. Evolution can be thought of as systematic error
management.
Pursue
no optima; have multiple goals. Simple machines can be efficient, but complex
adaptive machinery cannot be. A complicated structure has many masters and none
of them can be served exclusively. Rather than strive for optimization of any
function, a large system can only survive by "satisficing" (making
"good enough") a multitude of functions. For instance, an adaptive
system must trade off between exploiting a known path of success (optimizing a
current strategy), or diverting resources to exploring new paths (thereby
wasting energy trying less efficient methods). So vast are the mingled drives
in any complex entity that it is impossible to unravel the actual causes of its
survival. Survival is a many-pointed goal. Most living organisms are so
many-pointed they are blunt variations that happen to work, rather than precise
renditions of proteins, genes, and organs. In creating something from nothing,
forget elegance; if it works, it's beautiful.
Seek
persistent disequilibrium. Neither constancy nor relentless change will
support a creation. A good creation, like good jazz, must balance the stable
formula with frequent out-of-kilter notes. Equilibrium is death. Yet unless a
system stabilizes to an equilibrium point, it is no better than an explosion
and just as soon dead. A Nothing, then, is both equilibrium and disequilibrium.
A Something is persistent disequilibrium -- a continuous state of surfing
forever on the edge between never stopping but never falling. Homing in on that
liquid threshold is the still mysterious holy grail of creation and the quest
of all amateur gods.
Change
changes itself. Change can be structured. This is what large complex systems do:
they coordinate change. When extremely large systems are built up out of
complicated systems, then each system begins to influence and ultimately change
the organizations of other systems. That is, if the rules of the game are
composed from the bottom up, then it is likely that interacting forces at the
bottom level will alter the rules of the game as it progresses. Over time, the
rules for change get changed themselves. Evolution -- as used in everyday
speech -- is about how an entity is changed over time. Deeper evolution -- as
it might be formally defined -- is about how the rules for changing entities
over time change over time. To get the most out of nothing, you need to have self-changing
rules.
These nine principles underpin the awesome
workings of prairies, flamingoes, cedar forests, eyeballs, natural selection in
geological time, and the unfolding of a baby elephant from a tiny seed of
elephant sperm and egg.
These same principles of bio-logic are now being implanted in
computer chips, electronic communication networks, robot modules,
pharmaceutical searches, software design, and corporate management, in order
that these artificial systems may overcome their own complexity.
When the Technos is enlivened by Bios we get artifacts that can
adapt, learn, and evolve. When our technology adapts, learns, and evolves then
we will have a neo-biological civilization.
All complex things taken together form an unbroken continuum
between the extremes of stark clockwork gears and ornate natural wilderness.
The hallmark of the industrial age has been its exaltation of mechanical
design. The hallmark of a neo-biological civilization is that it returns the
designs of its creations toward the organic, again. But unlike earlier human
societies that relied on found biological solutions -- herbal medicines, animal
proteins, natural dyes, and the like -- neo-biological culture welds engineered
technology and unrestrained nature until the two become indistinguishable, as
unimaginable as that may first seem.
The intensely biological nature of the coming culture derives from
five influences:
Despite the increasing technization of our world, organic life --
both wild and domesticated -- will continue to be the prime infrastructure of
human experience on the global scale.
Machines will become more biological in character.
Technological networks will make human culture even more
ecological and evolutionary.
Engineered biology and biotechnology will eclipse the importance
of mechanical technology.
Biological ways will be revered as ideal ways.
In the coming neo-biological era, all that we both rely on and
fear will be more born than made. We now have computer viruses, neural networks,
Biosphere 2, gene therapy, and smart cards -- all humanly constructed artifacts
that bind mechanical and biological processes. Future bionic hybrids will be
more confusing, more pervasive, and more powerful. I imagine there might be a
world of mutating buildings, living silicon polymers, software programs
evolving offline, adaptable cars, rooms stuffed with coevolutionary furniture,
gnatbots for cleaning, manufactured biological viruses that cure your
illnesses, neural jacks, cyborgian body parts, designer food crops, simulated
personalities, and a vast ecology of computing devices in constant flux.
The river of life -- at least its liquid logic -- flows through it
all.
We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk
of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology, and bring it
also under its reign of constant evolution, perpetual novelty, and an agenda
out of our control. Even without the control we must surrender, a
neo-biological technology is far more rewarding than a world of clocks, gears,
and predictable simplicity.
As complex as things are today, everything will be more complex
tomorrow. The scientists and projects reported here have been concerned with
harnessing the laws of design so that order can emerge from chaos, so that
organized complexity can be kept from unraveling into unorganized
complications, and so that something can be made from nothing.
