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?

    Particle physicists like to set hbar=c=k=1 that makes everything in terms of energy. It seems you have another such application. But what constant are you setting =1?

    RE: the growing extremes of wealth and income between rich and poor:

    First "equality" is a term that has been changing definition - which so you mean? Your mentioned Obama so I presume you mean the "equality of outcome" definition. Let me expand. The Declaration of Independence motioned equality and meant equality before God that allowed slavery. Lincoln changed the definition to mean "equality of opportunity". This allowed growth and some mitigation of the extreme of wealth - there was a middle, an upper middle, a lower middle, etc. classes. Around the time of the creation of the Federal Reserve, the politicians wanted to expand government. This effort brought about the thought of FDR of "equality of outcome" and Keynesian doctrine. Starting about the time of Kennedy, this idea and welfare, redistribution of wealth, etc. started to be acted upon for real. Some of these essays have noted a change in American politics that seems to have begun around 1970. See Income inequality graph from wikipedia . Note: (1) the time of the trend change around 1970, (2) the change in trend occurred with the middle class and the poor to their detriment, (3) the rich trend remained the same, and (4) conclude the income inequality gap and the gap your refer to is widening because to the middle class is being eliminated and the poor are suffering more. This trend occurred just after the social justice stuff started in high gear. Could the social justice initiative be responsible for the increasing gap?

    Equality of opportunity mitigates the extremes. Stabilization produces stagnation. This suggests the gap is a result of the trend to stabilization - The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor and the middle class is gone. Do we see this in Briton?

    But equality of opportunity implies some will fail. People seem unwilling to allow failure. I think this is the crux of this "equalities" issue.

    You then suggest the "equality" (of outcome) is impossible in the long term to which I agree. The society collapses.

    Money (purchasing power) also has a supply/demand variable. Should this be accounted?

    Doesn't your Eqs. 1-3 have an equipartition assumption? I would think this to be untrue for a wealth distribution.

    "paying people to learn". If done by a government program, then it will be a total failure. My experience includes finding trained solderers for an electronics line. Local to me was a governmet sponsored program to (re)train people for jobs in electronics. The people skills were so bad, we found ourselves having to un-train them so the people could be retrained. The people were not the problem, the government training was. Or, our solution was to hire and train ourselves.

      Dear James,

      Recently I've seen the reality of "heat" questioned, and also the physical reality of "temperature" questioned, so I guess it's fair game to question the reality of "free energy". But I find these thermodynamic concepts to be quite useful for understanding what's going on. Nor do I doubt that there are tertiary effects of energy transfers.

      Thanks for your comment about modeling social systems with control theory and identifying constraints.

      I agree that entropy is a major factor in particle-based systems, but as humans exhibit anti-entropic tendencies based on both learning and on free will, I'm not quite sure what the best approach to entropy is here. Note that Colin Walker's comments above and his essay uses entropy-based analysis that somewhat parallels my free-energy-based analysis.

      I believe your statements are fundamentally aligned with my thinking. As I note several places, the application of thermodynamics to 10^10 humans requires some drastic simplifications, and while I believe the approach I take is valid, it's hard to identify exactly where the limits are and how entropy should be brought into the picture. For example, in your essay you mention "releasing intellectual energy as fire builds around fuel." While this is a meaningful statement in some sense, it is difficult to see how to incorporate this "energy" in a thermodynamic analysis. I like that you also note: "I can tear apart anything that anyone claims..." but the goal should be to see if there's any value to the claims.

      Thanks for reading and commenting on my essay,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

      Hi John,

      Since scale factors depend upon the units, it probably makes sense to simply set the unit as one dollar. As for the meaning of "equality" as proposed by progressives, they generally refer to "equality of outcome", while never getting too specific. I attempt to show (what should be obvious) that absolute equality is both impossible, misleading, even fraudulent, and if the claim is persisted in, then one should suspect it to be a smokescreen behind which a two-class structure is being planned.

      Before the corrupt current system began grinding things to a halt, there was considerable economic mobility. Those with little or no wealth could acquire wealth, while earned or inherited wealth could be lost. There was no "too big to fail". We agree that equality of outcomes is impossible in the long term. Supply/demand would not seem to make much sense in such a situation.

      I agree that people seem unwilling to allow failure. As failure is an error signal from a control theory perspective, that means that this crucial information is not available for purposes of correcting the error. Not good...

      Equipartition is not implied or assumed in equation (1). It is assumed in the "equal" distributions.

      As I discussed with Earle Fox above, I'm not proposing a government program to pay people to learn, rather a reinvention of our economic system based on major changes. It may have been a mistake to even mention it in only one page, but I wanted to convey the idea that there are alternatives. I would not design a government program to do anything, as government bureaucracies are the closest thing to eternal life we have on this earth.

      My point in the essay was to show why "equality of outcome" is impossible, even absurd. This does NOT tell us what the best way to shape the distributions to reduce the spread of inequality. That is a much tougher problem.

      Thanks for reading and commenting on my essay.

      With best regards,

      Edwin Eugene Klingman

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      • Post #33

      Dear Edwin,

      I feel ashamed because I cannot easily pay you back your kind quotations you picked up from my essay. The clear political message of your new essay is certainly appealing in particular in the USA where energy and human values are seemingly measured in Dollars.

      Let me merely tell you that your nice analogy caused me to reiterate two questions:

      - Aren't energy and money (not debts) in their original meaning always positive?

      - Don't notions like equivalence and equivalence classes deserve clarification?

      I see the latter question related to set theory.

      Kindest regards,

      Eckard

        Dear Eckard,

        I was not hoping to trade kind quotes. I just enjoyed your essay and hoped that you would read mine and give me feedback. You have done so.

        In the sense that you have been pursuing 'positive', I think that is a valid statement, since you have eliminated debt. Money is positive and energy, even when it represents a decrease, is actually a positive flow of energy away from some situation to another one. Binding energy is typically considered negative, but that would depend upon where one defines zero energy I suppose.

        A mathematician would probably want to examine some aspects of equivalence or equivalence classes, but a physicist looks more for a working proposition, and my proposition was that I can expend energy to accomplish a goal or I can spend money to accomplish the same goal, and in that sense they are equivalent.

        Is the analysis valid? I think it is sufficiently so to justify the conclusion that "equality" is not a real goal, but a smokescreen behind which a two-class society is being setup.

        You may think that money is the be-all and end-all of American life, but I think that freedom holds that honor, and money is in someways simply abstract freedom. I have lived through periods of very little money and also had some profitable years, and I felt freer to pursue my goals when I had money. In Silicon Valley the saying was: Money is just a way of keeping score. (Don't take that too seriously.)

        There are many ways to moralize, but I tend not to moralize about money. It's a fact of life, just as is energy. Being alive means that one MUST expend energy, and that is often tiring. It is less tiring if one can spend money to achieve the desired results.

        Thanks for reading my essay and commenting. I've fallen behind in the number of essays I planned to read, and hopefully will catch up later this week.

        My best regards,

        Edwin Eugene Klingman

        Hi Edwin,

        I think your approach to the essay question is very original and is both relevant and related to physics.A really clever idea.

        Slight quibble, you live in a liberal democracy but even there I do not think the role of the government is to maximize freedom. Homosexuality and abortion are two issues where government has not maximized freedom of choice. In Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to drive in other countries there are strict dress codes.In many countries prostitution is outlawed. In NZ sex work is not outlawed and sex workers are tax payers.In many countries drugs are outlawed but not in the Netherlands. It seems to me government is more about making and amending local and national Law than maximizing freedom.

        The essay does have a very USA perspective. I like the pay to learn solution. Though it doesn't sound too different from student loans available in the UK and NZ already. Good summary. I really wish I understood more of the arguments you have made. I'm trying to read lots of essays, I really could do with spending more time with it. Nevertheless I like the idea of what you have done here.

        Good luck. Georgina

          I should really have said 'pay for learning', not 'pay to learn' (which is what happens at the moment of course).

          Dear Georgina,

          Thank you very much for your comments. I'm glad you appreciated the idea.

          Of course you are correct about the actual nature of many of today's governments. Whereas the US formed a government with a Constitution and a purpose, most of today's governments evolved from tribes, Kings, sultans, and revolutions, etc. But even so you note that there many local variations, and comparison between these tells us which work better.

          There is no easy way to perfect our governments, but I've tried to show that "equality" is a false goal and thermodynamically impossible.

          I did not have room to develop the "pay for learning" idea, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and hope to expand on it in the future. As I noted, the key techniques to automate payments and accounting are coming into existence, and I think the other details can be worked through.

          I will read your essay and comment. Thanks again.

          Best regards,

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

          Humanity uses the goods and services provided by the mechanistic infrastructure of civilization as well as what nature provides. Natural forces control the operation of this infrastructure. Physical energy flow does the work as prescribe by thermodynamics. Humanity can only steer how this temporary infrastructure goes in the future is only they understand this reality as it will then help them to make sound decisions.

            Dear Edwin,

            Good to see you around. I was beginning to worry.

            You identify neatly the dilemma of all political economies namely: "If no one controls more energy than anyone else, the free energy, used for accomplishing goals, vanishes." In the reverse case one gets a lords versus serfs kind of system.

            Instead of assuming equality let us assume instead that things/humans are inherently unequal: in the sense that they are specialized i.e. they will create inequality out of any initial condition/equality (in the words of Schultz and Melsa, "if we are to know anything about a system, we must first know that it is stable."). This then is like assuming that entropy (the informational or the thermodynamic) is by definition the quantum/constant in operation i.e. the "individual" or "uncertainty" by which inequality is measured.

            The value of this approach is that we will get a naturally FRACTAL scale of needs or of work which is at once macro scale valid and YET micros scale valid. This is what I see to be the quantum gravity notion--namely the observer or measuring instrument is essentially the isolated/isolating system i.e. the "universe" or "universal constant" by which and to which its own measurement results and hence any effort at steering is to be applied.

            Isn't it in fact how nature works? A single cell in your body probably sees you as some climate or forces of nature; the same way you see the universal gravitation constant, speed of light etc! There is no absolute scale.

            Thank you for the thermodynamics angle. I myself take a more involved approach to the thermodynamics model. Your candid comment is most welcome.

            wishing you the best.

            Chidi

              Edwin, two points that immediately jumped out at me when I read your paper:

              1. Money very much does NOT represent energy in reality, since it is an irrational, subjective, centrally controlled illusion. I think you would have been far better off to use the idea of needs/resources as your second axis, if you wanted to have your ideas apply to reality.

              2. In think your graphs are sideways from what you might have intended? At least on some of them. If not, I really misunderstood them. Also, the "conservative" curve you've drawn doesn't represent the actual conservative approach that we currently have in our resource/needs distribution system (the "economy" if you eliminate the idea ridiculous idea of numbers/money from the concept of economy, and simply use the term to refer to real things that are valued by individuals as ways to help them do what they need to do, as represented by your idea of energy in the system). The current approach to resource distribution is a single curve with just a few individuals having most of the resources at the top (or bottom) and most of the individuals having very little resources at the bottom (or top), and the middle having a middling amount of resources. The way you've shown it, the middle have the most resources/energy, which clearly isn't the case in human society right now.

              Ultimately, of course, it's not about quantity, but about quality. The goal isn't equality of any one specific thing (even energy). I, as someone who lives in resource poverty right not, don't need MORE resources, I need BETTER resources, and I need the SPECIFIC KINDS of resources that work for my own, unique purposes, for attaining the goals I have in life. This is crucial, because evolution/biology has created a situation where our needs are diverse, resource-wise. And they are probably diverse enough for each individual to have ALL of the specific kinds of things, at high enough quality, we need to be as healthy and productive as we want to be. Or at least pretty close to that ideal. Or at least far closer than most folks ever imagine! (Though I agree that the graph, at that point, would be a typical bell curve, if you're only measuring quantitatively, with the middle volume of individuals having the most resources, but this would represent real equality, in the politically progressive sense, and it would mean a stable state, in the conservative sense, as well, since everyone would have what they subjectively most valued/needed, unrelated to the more objective measurement of the energy involved in that value. (In other words, what I, as a mouse, need might require very little energy, while what you, as an elephant, need might take a whole lot of energy, yet we'd both be totally satisfied with what we had, because we'd have the specific kinds of things, at a high enough level of quality, for what we aimed to do in life, which is what real equality is all about: subjective fulfillment.)

              And yes, it's very clear that when some large portion of human society finally chooses to focus our energy/production/resources on taking good care of ourselves (in the global sense), we will indeed have truly created a global civilization, as you suggest when you say that "the decision to establish a poverty level or absolute threshold, below which no human should fall, marks the beginning of civilization". I call this, at least casually, a planet ready to procreate with the rest of the universe. :-) And freedom is indeed a crucial element of taking good care of ourselves, as we need to be free to take what we need to input into our bodies, and find outlets for what we need to output, so that we can be our best possible selves, and serve the world as effectively as possible, given our unique genes and environment.

                Dear Denis,

                I believe we are in agreement. My essay tends to consider the ability to do work as energy, and this would include the use of the mechanistic infrastructure, which is part of our 'wealth'.

                Thanks for reading my essay. I will read yours soon.

                Edwin Eugene Klingman