Humanity is much more than the sum of humans by Tommaso Bolognesi

Tommaso,

Thank you for a very well written and fascinating essay. I agree with you that the idea that our universe could have emerged from a computer program is quite intriguing: it resonates with Max Tegmark's thesis that the universe is nothing more than an abstract (mathematical) structure, that when "seen" from the inside acquires the emergent property of physicality. Have you ever looked at the work of Bruno Marchal of Université Libre de Bruxelles, and of other like-minded thinkers that hang around the Google Group "Everything List"? You might find it interesting.

Good luck in the contest!

Marc

P.S. Thank you for the comments you left on my essay's forum: I have answered you there.

Hi Tommaso,

Excellent thought provoking essay.

I like: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) The appearance of the human phenomenon marks the point at which the fabric of the universe achieves the ability to reflect itself.

I question: DNA as software. I personally think DNA crosses the threshold between quantum phenomena and the classical world. Wolfram has done good work... but more insight is needed and perhaps a breakthrough is needed on his cellular life theories.

I like very much Tommy's conclusion: The next stop for humanity, to answer your question, is Superlife.

Sounds good to me.

Wishing you the best,

Don Limuti

Hi Tommaso,

You have a very original style! And I'm glad to see Chaitin's book mentioned; I've just read the shortened paper version of his metabiology, but I think they're very interesting ideas. Your connection to cellular automata is also interesting. It would be great if it were possible to make substantive predictions or decisions based on this kind of model.

Best wishes,

Daniel

Hi Tommaso,

I just did a very quick read through of your essay (the dead line approaches :-( ) and like it very much. Part of the reason is there are *some* points of connection with things in my essay (your discussion of complex systems which has some connection with the unknown unknowns or "black swan events" of Taleb I talked about in my essay, but as you noticed not in as much detail as was maybe "promised" in the introduction). You go into much more depth on the issue of complexity as well as connecting to computation [As a side note my main area of work is field theory so I tend to view things in terms of scattering amplitudes, Feynman diagrams, path integral etc. You as a computational expert frame things in terms of computability, or the automata of S. Wolfram. If a football player -- either US football or the football played by everyone else -- were to write an essay about steering the future it would probably involve lessons learned from playing sports. In fact my HS physics teachers was also the HS football coach (this is often the case especially in small schools in the US) and most of his examples involved football].

Oh I also liked the literary device of presenting these ideas as a discussion between you and your nephew (and Alice via Skype). And also the idea of the ant-hill (and to a greater degree human societies being more than just the simple sum of their parts -- i.e. some emergent complexity. In fact if one looks at individual humans with their hosts of bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, symbiotic organism(useful and malicious) any individual is more than a sum of their parts. Anyway sorry I had to rush through the reading of your excellent essay, but I hope to give it a more through read later.

Best,

Doug

Hi Douglas,

we had already an exchange in your thread (it is hard to keep track of everything here!). Thanks for reading my essay, and for your comments. I just react to one of them, appearing in square brackets [...]. Often is has been observed that descriptions of the universe, across history, have been influenced by the current technology - from the clockwork universe of Pascal, Newton, Leibnitz, to the computing universe of our times, and this of course invites some skepticism about such technology-biased views. However, while computers are certainly the representative technology of the last few decades, the notions of algorithm and computation are much older (by millenia). The computational universe conjecture (Zuse, Fredkin, Wolfram, Lloyd and others), in its boldest form, claims that the universe is discrete (spacetime being a giant causal set - as also suggested by the Causal Set Programme physicists - Bombelli, Sorkin, Rideout, Henson, etc.) that is animated algorithmically. When mentioning `software` as the engine that fuels everything by algorithmic steps, the idea is not to provide a metaphor based on one`s area of expertise (like a football coach would do), but to provide the actual, infinitely accurate description of everything (if, ontologically, the universe is discrete and finite, albeit possibly growing unboundedly, infinite accuracy is conceivable). God created only Natural numbers; men invented the Reals.

In the dialogue among Tomas, Tommy and Alice (no Bob around), I`ve illustrated how the views by Wolfram, Chaitin and Tononi (to pick three representative scientists) can fit under a rather unifying picture of three diverse components of our universe: Prelife, Life, and Thought (using Teilhard`s terminology). The unifying factors are: discreteness and algorithmic evolution.

Differential equations, fields, path integrals, and all the tools of continuous mathematics, are extremely powerful for providing approximated descriptions of physical reality, and any computation-oriented account of the world must eventually be able to replicate the results obtained by them (as the Causal Set people are well aware of).

A crucial argument here (to make a long story short) is the typing monkeys: their output is a messy universe of characters, too messy to look like ours. But if you feed this digital mess to a universal Turing machine (i.e., you take it as a program), then the output you get is a mix of order and disorder (Levin`s distribution) that resembles what we see around us.

Best regards

Tommaso

PS - I know that the deadline is approaching. I did rate your essay, a few days ago, after commenting. You write that you hope to find more time to give a more thorough reading to my work. If this means that you have not yet rated it, please do. Rating here is definitely a complex system. I`ve been for a long time in the top 15, but a couple of days ago, probably due to a malicious antipodal butterfly, I jumped to around rank 30 in one shot, which looks strange to me under both a continuous and a discrete mathematical viewpoint.

Hi Tommaso,

No I already did rate you essay, I just apologize that I did not have a chance to read in more detail since there are many different themes at play. But in any case I did read enough it understand this was a very good essay and so I rated it accordingly. My statement was just to say that I might not have completely gotten all the deep details from your essay which has several levels.

Again good luck with the contest.

Best,

Doug

Hi Tommaso,

I liked the concept of the benefits that may be derived by modelling different groups and institutions as cellular automata, but I wonder how this would be accomplished. Nevertheless, it is certainly an important idea to explore, and it, along with many of the other ideas you discuss in your essay have added to the richness of this forum.

I have rated your essay with these points in mind.

Warmly,

Aaron

One of the most interesting and enjoyable essays in the contest, Tommaso. It was fascinating to consider this question through the lens of Chardin, Chaitin, Wolfram, and Tononi.

I agree that the operations of physics can probably be thought of as a form of information processing. The idea of developing into a broader collective form of consciousness is very appealing.

I do think we may be in more control of our collective destiny that you seem to suggest. Complex adaptive systems like society, as you say, do exhibit order at some levels. Just as we may be able to predict and alter the climate without being able to control the weather, we may be able to shape our social evolution without being able to determine the specific fate of each individual.

Well done, in any case. Good luck in the contest!

Best,

Robert de Neufville

I seem to get logged out every time I write more than a short comment...

Dear Tommaso,

Marvellous essay! It's a literary work; it's amusing; it expounds the complexity viewpoint very well. I think this is a top essay.

However I don't buy the complexity viewpoint - I will post more about this later.

Regards,

Lorraine

Dear Tommaso,

Re "I don't buy the complexity viewpoint":

As you know, in my essay I claim that there are at least 3 invalid assumptions underlying the ideas of physics (and that these perverse and unenlightened ideas about the nature of reality underlie the attitudes that are destroying our planet).

Well, another invalid assumption of Wolfram, Chaitin, and physics in general, is that numbers just exist, no explanations necessary. This is a Platonic viewpoint.

But I think that there is no Platonic realm - this universe is all there is. So given that restriction, what are the numbers that are found when fundamental reality is measured; what does this mean about the nature of reality? I think that there is necessarily a physical reality behind numbers (as I try to explain in my 2013 essay): I contend that numbers are (what I call) hidden information category self-relationships. I think the information category/information relationship way of looking at things is a better pointer to the nature of reality than e.g. the cellular automata viewpoint.

I contend that information is indistinguishable from/identical to physical reality; and that information is subjective experience. So, at the foundations of reality, information is subjective experience of e.g. information categories like mass and charge. I also contend that the physical outcomes of "free will" can only be represented as the creation of new (usually temporary) "rules", where law-of-nature rules are information category relationships. I contend that the views of Wolfram and Chaitin etc. imply that the universe is a very dull place, where nothing truly new ever happens: the "truly new" being new "rules".

Best wishes,

Lorraine

Hi Tommaso,

Very nice essay. I ran your Mathematica code and it looks like a fine random number generator, could you perhaps explain what is going on step by step? It is intriguing.

- Hector

Hector,

I'm glad that you ran the code. You are the first... It looks indeed like a random number generator. More specifically, it creates a random permutation of the first n integers on-the-fly. At each step the code takes a pair (pi(n), pos), where pi(n) is an n-tuple representing the current permutation of the first n integers, and pos is an index between 1 and n. The step creates a new pair (pi`(n+1), pos`), where pi`(n+1) is a permutation of the first (n+1) integers obtained from pi(n) by inserting integer (n+1) at position pos, and pos` is the number found at position pos of tuple pi(n). The computation is started from tuple pi(2) = (1, 2) and pos = 2.

You can trace the evolution of variable pos (like you do when tracing the dynamics of a Turing Machine head on the tape), or look at the whole permutation pi(n) (seen as a function from range (1..n) to itself), and you get the `foggy` picture of white noise, or deterministic chaos.

I found this minimal deterministic code while experimenting with algorithms for building causal sets by using permutations - an idea originally suggested by Alex Lamb, alternative to the stochastic, `sprinkling` technique used by the Causal Set Programme people (Rideout, Sorkin, ...).