Dear Colin,

Thanks for reading and commenting. Having now read your fine essay, I note the following: You start off prioritizing the problems, showing, if nothing else, that some people worry about anything--even the "death of the universe". You then focus on current issues such as the mal-distribution of wealth.

Your entropy analysis of hot versus cold economy, and the entropic effect of capital concentration is very nicely done. You then use Maxwell's demon to analyze the problem. As you noted, I use "free energy" to analyze the same problem. I think we arrive at similar conclusions. I very much like the attention you pay to "tyranny of the majority". While you note the "influence" of wealth on political systems, I tend to view the entangled nature of government and crony capitalism as one thing.

You then get into the meat of your analysis based on Jaynes. [Note-my 2013 essay had a page of endnotes devoted to Jaynes.] Your example on page 3 is simply masterful, although it requires considerable study to make sense of it. A helluva lot of information in a 4 x 5 table! [Also like your 'players'-Bob, Carol, Ted, Alice--and Kenny (who hasn't been seen since the last election).]

Your summary on page 4 is excellent, despite that the numbers in your example are far from transparent (the consequence of having only nine pages to solve the future of humanity.)

Please note that the distribution says nothing about the freedom of the citizens, only how big a slice of the pie they get. Your treatment of "democratic tyranny" as fascism, and your observation of its inherent instability is very interesting. Your conclusion is also graphically stated--five lifetimes, and your comparison of how short this is by contrasting it with 1664.

Your epilogue (poor Kenny!) nicely captures Ted's machinations to slowly change the weighting over time. I'm sure you were not referring to, for example, GE, which owned the MSNBC/Obama network and paid no taxes.

It's very hard to extract the information from tables, so perhaps a Mathematica-type topology could make things more graphic.

I did not understand whether the ideas underlying this essay are your own, or adapted from your reference [1]. In any case it is a masterful essay, and deserves expansion beyond nine pages. I hope you do very well in the essay contest.

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Edwin,

Thanks for your kind comments. Jaynes' influence is there with the entropy, but the idea of a Maxwell demon likely comes from recently studying some discarded ideas of Walther Nernst relating to the third law of thermodynamics and cosmology.

It is reassuring that both our approaches converge on the same outcome.

Best regards,

Colin

Edwin,

The premise I would take issue with is that money=energy. This system certainly treats it as such, but the fact is that it is an obligation, a contract, a debt. Yet because it functions within this system as value, we naturally edit out the process by which it gains that value and so think of it as intrinsic, not representative. The result being that we now have a system primarily designed to create notational wealth, often at the expense of real value, as we atomize our culture and burn though all physical resources.

It is the nature of knowledge to make connections, but sometimes we need to keep the differences in mind as well.

Regards,

John M

    John,

    Thanks for commenting. I think you are mistaken that money can be only interpreted one way. Sort of like saying that I can only interpret you as an FQXi participant. You also train horses, and perform other functions. Any one of your many possible interpretations can be valid in the proper context. I have read a number of your comments here, and I've read (about 5 years ago) "The Creature from Jeckle Island" and felt like I understood the operation of the Fed (to some degree), but the fact is that I can expend energy or I can spend money to achieve the same result, and in that sense, money is just abstract energy, whatever else it might be. And that allows me to treat it as I did using statistical thermodynamics. It is a valid approach, but that does not exclude other interpretations.

    I'm looking forward to reading your essay and will probably have more to say when I do.

    Best regards,

    Edwin Eugene Klingman

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    • Post #14

    Hi, Edwin,

    I have read your essay, and, as last year, am not up to the math you use, but think I get the drift philosophically. It seems to me that the issues of humanity steering the future are philosophical, but it is good to see analogies being made from different directions as you do for those who get the math. Your summary in plain ol' English, with which I am in almost total agreement, tells me that in general I got the point of your math examples. I especially appreciate your insistence that individual freedom cannot be divorced from individual decision-making. Tyranny can be measured by the level of theft of decision-making by the government from we, the people.

    My "almost" above refers to your comments on page 9 to an "educational fund" to replace welfare. Would not that be replacing one welfare with another? As a friend of mine used to say, public education is welfare education. When we had free-market education, which began to be taken over by government thanks to Horace Mann (got his inspiration from Prussia in the early 1800's, probably the most militarisic nation in the world at the time), we had the most well-educated population in the world. Now, thanks to govt control, look at us. Parents love their children, govt bureaucracies do not.

    So I think that if we would readjust to a free-market education system, the problem of welfare would begin to disappear. Families, churches, and other ngo's would take on both the education and the welfare problem. I do not see that happening without a major spiritual renewal in the American churches, leading to a restoration of the Biblical form of limited government with which we were blessed 1776-89 - the Declaration and Constitution - of, by, and for the people in which the people were sovereign over the government.

    So the steering of the future is, I think, even more than philosophical, a spiritual problem, as outlined in my essay. Who is God? It will be either the real God or it will be a monster civil government, not under the law and grace of God.

    Best wishes, Earle

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      • Post #15

      John, what a master piece! Unfortunately only few souls on Earth can understand you fully. I am one of the few who fully understand the full extend of your idea, because I also embeds thermodynamics as the heart of my KQID( KoGuan Quantum InfoDynamics). Of course at KQID, it is not only about heat/energy flows but also information flows as Shakespearian meme-actorIΨ(CTE)) as the wave function of consciousness, time and energy acting in relativistic Ψ(iτLx,y,z, Lm) hologram Multiverse. Rather than Gaussian bell curve, I would propose the hokey stick curve as the hybrid of your two classes scenario. Most people are equally rich and free unchained from human as well as nature's handcuffs with few extremely rewarded and rich individuals who do works that are breaking and removing those chains that chain us. You correctly made the point that an absolute equality is simply impossible. No energy no flow, and no flow no work. No gradient no flows. Your opening statement is powerful and to the point. You wrote: " How Should Humanity Steer the Future? By allowing maximum individual freedom to pursue dreams and expand horizons. History has shown that humanity works best when freedom is maximized; in fact, the purpose of instituting governments is to maximize individual freedom." Yes, we need a system to maximize freedoms. In mine, I advocated Xuan Yuan Aanti-entropic Operating System 2.0. Yes remarkably we share the same view. I incorporated Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu (around 400B.C)who advocated for-self philosophy and advocated the individual six freedoms and life enjoyment fully here and now:

      Allow the ear to hear what it likes, ~~Do~~

      the eye to see what it likes, ~~Re~~

      the nose to smell what it likes, ~~Mi~~

      the mouth to say what it likes, ~~Fa~~

      the body to enjoy the comforts it likes to have, ~~Sol~~

      and the mind to do what it likes. ~~La~~

      Yes similar to but even more individualistic than that of Epicurus as well as Jefferson. Yes, Chinese believes in and enjoys individual freedoms just like everyone else.

      I rated your essay the highest score that you deserve.

      Best wishes,

      Leo KoGuan

      John, what a master piece! Unfortunately only few souls on Earth can understand you fully. I am one of the few who fully understand the full extend of your idea, because I also embeds thermodynamics as the heart of my KQID( KoGuan Quantum InfoDynamics). Of course at KQID, it is not only about heat/energy flows but also information flows as Shakespearian meme-actorIΨ(CTE)) as the wave function of consciousness, time and energy acting in relativistic Ψ(iτLx,y,z, Lm) hologram Multiverse. Rather than Gaussian bell curve, I would propose the hokey stick curve as the hybrid of your two classes scenario. Most people are equally rich and free unchained from human as well as nature's handcuffs with few extremely rewarded and rich individuals who do works that are breaking and removing those chains that chain us. You correctly made the point that an absolute equality is simply impossible. No energy no flow, and no flow no work. No gradient no flows. Your opening statement is powerful and to the point. You wrote: " How Should Humanity Steer the Future? By allowing maximum individual freedom to pursue dreams and expand horizons. History has shown that humanity works best when freedom is maximized; in fact, the purpose of instituting governments is to maximize individual freedom." Yes, we need a system to maximize freedoms. In mine, I advocated Xuan Yuan Aanti-entropic Operating System 2.0. Yes remarkably we share the same view. I incorporated Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu (around 400B.C)who advocated for-self philosophy and advocated the individual six freedoms and life enjoyment fully here and now:

      Allow the ear to hear what it likes, ~~Do~~

      the eye to see what it likes, ~~Re~~

      the nose to smell what it likes, ~~Mi~~

      the mouth to say what it likes, ~~Fa~~

      the body to enjoy the comforts it likes to have, ~~Sol~~

      and the mind to do what it likes. ~~La~~

      Yes similar to but even more individualistic than that of Epicurus as well as Jefferson. Yes, Chinese believes in and enjoys individual freedoms just like everyone else.

      I rated your essay the highest score that you deserve.

      Best wishes,

      Leo KoGuan

        Edwin,

        It's not that it doesn't very much function as an effective form of energy in economic transactions, but that when we overlook the basis of its value, a wholistically functioning and prosperous economy and simply collectively think of it as an abstract property which allows us a portion of the wealth being generated, we end up with the situation we have today, where the end function of the economy becomes to create and collect as many of these notational obligations as possible, even to the significant and obvious detriment of the underlaying economy on which they are based. The reason asset values only seem to go up, even though the larger economy seems weak isn't because they are increasing in value, but because the value of investment dollars is effectively decreasing. I can tell you, these horses are not bigger, or faster than they used to be, but their prices seem to keep going up, as with lots of other things, from the stock market to high end real estate. Yes inflation is muted in the general economy, but that's because the 1% and the rest of us live in somewhat separate economies. It just goes to show, those at the top really are not as smart as they think they are.

        Regards,

        John

        This issue fits in well with Armin Shirazi's entry. Given the extent to which wrong doing in the financial sector is not punished, regulation is ignored and all problems are solved with more credit. It is somewhat obvious this will only lead to a bigger blow up, but those running the show simply do not have the necessary perspective to do anything more than service their own narrow self interests and so undercut the basis of their power.

        Regards,

        John

        Dear Edwin,

        I find te idea to use the fundamental ideas of thermodynamics to describe humanity and the dynamics of money/energy quite original, and very appropriate for this type of contest. A pleasurable essay.

        You end up concentrating on specific US political issues, in the second part of the text, but some of the problems you mention have rather general validity, and, for example, affect also our society and politicians in Italy.

        With respect to the case of two unequal classes - fig. p. 5,right, yielding a non null dE - I was wondering whether this always creates a large gap between extreme richness and extreme poverty, or a mitigated variant is possible by which both figures are somewhat acceptable, e.g. more rich vs. slightly less rich. In other words, what are the parameters responsible for the width of the gap between the two values of the peaks?

        Given the limited space, you do not expand much about the issue of stability with respect to nonlinear systems [Shultz and Melsa 1967]. Because stability is a requisite, you make it a basic goal. But I tend to support the idea that the instability of the human, non linear system is what makes it creative and unpredictable in its evolution, with emergent phenomena occurring all the time and making our history unique (and hard to steer!).

        Do you see these two viewpoints as mutually exclusive?

        Thank you and best regards

        Tommaso

          Dear John,

          I still have not studied your essay, but from your comments I believe that I largely agree with you. I'm glad you see that it can function as an effective form of energy. I was not attempting to solve all the problems associated with money and banking, but to prove that the goal of "equality", taken seriously and at face value is impossible, and the actuality leads to two-class structure, the controllers and the controlled. Note that, for example, this is independent of inflation. In the "equal ideal", the wealth per citizen is E/N and it does not matter how big E (the total money supply) is. So in that sense it is scale independent, or insensitive to inflation. One sjould read my essay as an analysis of policies that are being sold today, not as a treatise on the nature and problems of our monetary system. I have a more limited goal in these nine pages.

          Thanks also for the heads up on Shirazi's paper. I read it earlier, and was impressed with it. Another piece of the big picture.

          Best,

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Hi Earle,

          I appreciate your comments, and I think you got the message without the math. It's a pretty simplistic analysis, but so is thermodynamics, and it describes reality quite well in many appropriate situations.

          The part you are concerned with, the "educational fund" was thrown in as a hint as to how I would try to design a better system. There was no space to really get the idea across (nor is there in a comment.) The idea is that government takes our money and uses it to bribe voters and power-brokers and does so ineffectively, with education as an afterthought, while those pursuing their own education go "deeper in debt" as Tennessee Ernie used to sing. They "owe their soul to the company store", while the company store, academia in this case, and teachers unions, does quite well.

          I agree with you about the history of education and about the desirability of "free market education." And although I did not spell it out, there is no requirement that the money come from government. I grew up with an excellent Carnegie library. There is no reason, in my plan, that the money paying for study should come only from government. The wealthy, for the most part, try to accomplish goals. Let's say I am a billionaire and desire for more people to understand XYZ. I can prepare courses on XYZ and pay people to master them. But this is not confined to the wealthy. If, say, many average people feel that, for instance, the Constitution is not being taught, they can support this cause with donations, etc., a form of crowd-sourcing. The point is that our system is inverted. It's hard work to learn, and one should not have to do the work and simultaneously go deeply into debt, when the results should benefit us all.

          But to do proper justice to that idea takes far more than nine pages. Nevertheless the communications technology required to make such a system work is evolving nicely.

          My best regards and thanks again for your fine essay.

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Dear Leo,

          Good to see you back this year. I'm so glad you got the basic points and agree with them. You are an example of what I consider the best approach; you have earned enough wealth and are using your own money and your own judgment to contribute to the improvement of society, untarnished by pathological need for power or practical need to buy votes. I commend you. I will study your essay and comment there.

          My best regards,

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Dear Tommaso,

          Thanks for your comment. I'm glad you found it pleasurable. Yes, I think the thermodynamic analysis applies everywhere, even if my examples were US-based.

          As for the case of two unequal classes, you are correct that there is no physical law demanding a large gap between the two classes. Just always seems to work out that way. Armin Shirazi's essay deals with this problem in a way that I find very believable, which is to study the nature of those who aspire to the controlling class.

          Your last paragraph addresses complexities that I tried to suppress in my simplified analysis. My major goal was to show that "equality" as a serious goal is misleading at best, fraudulent at worst, and that this aspect needs to be understood. How to make the best of our real situation is the topic of this essay contest, and many excellent ideas abound.

          I suspect the last part you are addressing, by referring to nonlinearity, is the Wolfram automata/Game of Life observation that with a change in one cell or automaton, as you say, "an avalanche of modification causally spreads across the space-time diagram." No, I do not find the two viewpoints exclusive. In fact, I find it supportive of the system of maximum freedom, and most likely to result in stability, as it is most likely to address threats to existence as they arise.

          I also find your attempt to "provide some formal foundations to Teilhard de Chardin" admirable. I have felt, for 50 years, that his view of reality is the most complete. (Which of course is not to say that he has all the details right, only the big picture.) And as Kokosar noted on your page,

          "A stone has a soul... but a very small one."

          My first FQXi essay, Fundamental Physics of Consciousness is compatible with this (somewhat pan-psychic) perspective.

          Your essay has a delightful structure, and Tommy comes off looking quite good in it! And the key point you made:

          "Self-modifying code may be an elegant idea, but if you equate the program with the data structure, thus to the physical universe, you end up with a piece of code is big and complex as the universe itself."

          There's considerable discussion in the comments on the link above, so I will summarize by saying that I distinguish between consciousness-- defined as awareness plus volition -- and intelligence, which adds logical structure. When these aspects of reality are not distinguished, things can become even more confusing.

          I find the fact that more physicists are recognizing that understanding the world requires that we try to understand how consciousness fits to be a very positive sign. My book "Gene Man's World" provides a more complete picture.

          Thanks again for reading and commenting

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Edwin,

          I think we both agree total equality would be a big flatline on the economic heart monitor. That said, the larger picture will always be fluctuations around the medium. Some big, some small. All the money in the world doesn't change the laws of nature.

          Regards,

          John

          "the larger picture will always be fluctuations around the medium."

          Thermodynamically well stated, John.

          Thanks for the clarifying of your education idea. I think that could be a very helpful part of the solution. In effect that is what parental "ownership" of education is. They pay for their children to get educated. As you indicate, the money can come from any non-governmental source.

          I have a friend in New Hampshire, Alan Schaeffer, who is running an organization called Network for Educational Opportunity (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alan-schaeffer/9/a84/828 http://www.networkforeducation.org/ ), which receives grants from businesses and other places to be given to students who want to get educated outside the corrupt govt ed system. The gifts to NEO are totally tax deductible, and Supreme Court approved. The opposition is doing every thing it can to scuttle the project. But the NH legislature has bought into it.

          Edwin,

          Convection as well. Storms, vortices, earthquakes, plate tectonics, subduction, solids, liquids, gases, etc. all have their analogies in human actions. We exist on the surface of this planet and that's what explains the processes on it. We are just molecules bouncing around in the medium.

          Regards,

          John

          I'm not sure there is any such thing as Free Energy. Based upon what I have seen so far, every form of energy is connected throughout the Universe. So all energy has broad consequences to consider; to include tertiary effects.

          So too, do Ideologists and Realists have their works providing broadly considered impacts, providing the equivalent of the Butterfly Effect.

          I like your concept of modeling social systems with control theory; where constraints of validity are identified.

          For any sustainable system of any kind, Entropy involving the kinds of systems modeled, must be overcome to maintain viability. A heat pump of sorts must infuse a continuous transformation of energy to compensate for losses.

          For there to be growth, more than just the energy to compensate for Entropy must be provided. In information processing, this may or may not involve energy depending upon the systems considered.

          Is this fundamentally in line with your thinking?