The Search for Truth

Confusion arises from the internal conflict between what you perceive the world to present itself as and what you intuitively understand it to be. Initially the gap between what man understood the world to be and what it actually was was quite large, superstition reigned and people were largely confused as to the inner goings on of the entire process. Over time the process complexified, building upon previously attained knowledge as best as they collectively could and assembling it into a more complex structure which would provide greater benefit to larger numbers of people.

Yet the fundamental scism remains, and the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. Will we ever reach a break-even point in our knowledge, where we understand so much that we see an ultimate end to what we all unconsciousnessly and collectively been trying to attain, with only a dim or sometimes absent understanding of some overlying, ultimate goal?

As I stated in my previous post on what I would consider to be intuitive smooth exponential growth of progress as an epiphenomenon of the smoothly accelerating rate of change, reality has shown progress to follow a sawtooth pattern of periodic setbacks where despite accelerating change, overlying progress is disrupted by outside factors. Richard Dawkins described the “sawtooth” pattern of biological evolution in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, as evidence that the epiphenomenon of progress does not exhibit a smoothly exponential effect at all, but only emergent exponential pattern disrupted periodically by temporary setbacks. But over time more and more progressive enhancements are preserved, the result of which, in biological evolution, is mammals, who usurped the earth after the fall of the dinosaurs. Brains had inadvertently triumphed over brawn, as the maximize-energy-towards-growth pattern of the simply conceived, tiny baby dinosaur who would continue to grow for the rest of his life was replaced by the complexly conceived placental mammal, which fed off its mother like a paracite in order to develop progressively larger brains. Or at least, progressively larger brains were one branch of the evolutionary tree of placental mammals, and one which coincidentally lead to a solution of a much bigger problem biological evolution by natural selection had been coping with throughout its entirety, namely that it was a blind process with very primitive mechanisms for conveying and utilizing past discoveries. It inadvertently came up with a past discovery conveying and comprehending mechanism, human consciousness, which soon took over the duty that only genes and behavioral mimicry had held alone for billions of years, and directed it in a manner which put the previous process to shame.

I reject the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress and instead advocate exponential and epiphenomnological view. I belive that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation, but rather that the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting in rational self-interest with no concept of what the final, modern result would be or what their contemporaries’ actions lead to.

However, I believe the sawtooth pattern is converging. The haphazard zigzagging has been following a trend. Lots of blind stumbling in the dark, emerging from random walks across patterns of matter and energy have ultimately resulted in the society we know, love, and cherish today. The pattern continues to converge as the mechanisms of change lock themselves into an exponential upward ramping, and has started changing society in such a way that it is scarcely able to comprehend.

Slowly human knowledge, which was initially so far from the truth, in the 20/20 hindsight of modern, scientific understanding of the universe, is converging upon the truth. Ontology, the study of reality itself, and epistemology, the study of knowledge, have converged into a new type of ontology, the graph structure of information relationships which defines the Semantic Web. With the advent of Semantic MediaWiki, the semantic relationships which define the web of human knowledge will be continually revised by forces dedicated to the construction and preservation of a complete web of human knowledge. The amount of data mining that can be performed on this web, particularly by extremely intelligent data mining experts such as the ones who work at Google, is a virtually limitless resource which has only begun to be tapped.  The natural limit of the kinds of associations that can be made, based on the structure of the universe, is the truth.

Progress as a universal epiphenomenon – Part 3: The Universe Itself

Okay, so, I know what you’re wondering: sure, progress in evolution and human society is great, but how the hell does that make progress a universal epiphenomenon.

Well, sadly, I don’t have a good answer for you. It’s just a conjecture. And about all I can respond with is highly theoretical stuff which will likely be proven wrong in the future. Or maybe it’s right, who knows? But to me: it fits the pattern, and that’s what I consider important.

Okay, so, let me introduce you to Dr. Lee Smolin:

Yes, there he is, chilling in his chair at Harvard.

Okay, so who the hell is he?

Well, you may or may not have heard of string theory. Lee Smolin has been working on a different theory called Loop Quantum Gravity. He just put out a book called “The Trouble With Physics” where he argues that physics has entered something of a post-modern age where the limits of experimental verifiability have been exceeded. Initially Smolin worked under the assumption that string theory and loop quantum gravity were both approximations of some underlying theory, but lately he has changed his mind and this book is the result.

For those of you who aren’t aware, scientists still don’t know how gravity works, at least in the world of the very small where the rules of quantum mechanics apply, the realm of the Planck scale. Einstein came up with a description of how it works on large systems, which says that gravity is essentially a warping of spacetime itself. But for now, scientists have been unable to find a way to work Einstein’s theory of relativity into the small scales where the laws of quantum mechanics operate. So while Einstein’s theory explains how gravity works, it doesn’t come close to explaining what gravity actually is. Only a theory of quantum gravitation can do that, and for now, we don’t have one. String theory is one explanation. Loop Quantum Gravity is another.

What does Loop Quantum Gravity say about gravity? (Certainly something, it’s in the title after all!) Well, one important aspect leads to one of Smolin’s hypotheses. At a certain critical density, say, that achieved at the center of a black hole, gravity becomes repulsive. When this happens, what you get is a new universe… spacetime crunches down to an infinitessimally small point, then the repulsive force of gravity causes this infinitesimally small super-dense bit of spacetime to explode, the result of which is a new universe with a slightly altered set of physics from the original. It’s a big bang, but one powered by the repulsive power of gravity, a “quantum bounce.”

This leads to an idea Smolin calls fecund universes. Rather than the universe being a once off sort of thing, universes themselves have been evolving over time. A black hole forms in a parent universe, and a fecund universe with slightly different physics is the result, and in turn, black holes form in this fecund universe, leading to another generation of fecund universes. What naturally follows is that the universes with the most descendants are the ones who have rules that are most conducive to forming black holes. Does this sound kind of like what happens in biology with natural selection: a naturally-originating consequence of a set of events results in progressive evolution, in this case, towards better black hole formation?

If this sort of cosmological evolution really exists, are we just the lucky by-products of it, or do we have some larger role to fulfill in the universe? Even if they were to accept Smolin’s hypothesis, existentialists and post-modernists will certainly say the former: we have no purpose, there is no universal progress metric, and we’re just the accidental offspring of a set of universes which has become progressively more adept at the art of making black holes.

I believe we’re something more, and I believe the two progress metrics I previously defined are resultant from the emergent process of the progressive evolution of physical law itself. This evokes what’s known as the weak anthropic principle, namely that the reason our universe and the physical law by which it operates seems so conducive to life is that there have been countless universes in the past that weren’t. We happened to luck out, and had our universe not been conducive to life, we wouldn’t have been here to care.

If a progressive pattern exists, just where is it taking us? Well, right now futurists forsee an event which they have labeled The Singularity occuring sometime in the next few decades. After The Singularity, humans will have produced technologies that outperform humans themselves in all aspects. After this happens, humans will be obsolete and the human age will have ended.

“The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs.”

– Nikola Tesla

Progress as a universal epiphenomenon – Part 2: Biology

One of the most basic premises of evolutionary biology is that evolution by natural selection is not in any way a goal-directed process. Species result from a set of survivors, and what emerges as a natural consequence are characteristics which best suit the environment.

However, ethologist Richard Dawkins, in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, describes several cases where he sees value-laden progress in evolution. The primary example is in predator/prey relationships, which form a sort of feedback loop in the evolutionary process. Prey must get better at escaping, and predators must get better at hunting. Those who don’t parish as they find themselves outcompeted by their more adept counterparts.

Another such feedback loop is sexual selection. When a trait becomes in any linked to the reproduction process, it explodes on an evolutionary timescale. This is one hypothesis as to why human intelligence exploded: intelligence became sexually desirable. The best singers, the best dancers, the best speakers, and the best hunters became the most desirable members of society.

There are other ways in which evolution is progressive which don’t rely on feedback loops. Richard Dawkins describes them as “watershed events.” The foremost of these is sexual reproduction itself, which really gave birth to the true concept of species as we know it, namely as a group where the indivduals naturally mate with each other. Sexual reproduction created the gene pool, which if plotted over time gives way to the branching structure of speciation which eventually lead to humanity, among countless other endpoints. Where asexual production was more akin to a diffuse cloud, sexual reproduction forms a splitering river, to borrow a symbol from Dawkins. There are several theories as to why sexual reproduction emerged, one of which is as a defense against parasites. While the reasons why sexually reproducing organisms were the fittest for their environment may not be known, but the end result of this adaptation certainlly is.

Similar watershed events occur earlier on the evolutinary timescale. One of these was the advent of the eukaryotic cell which underlies all animal, plant, fungus, and protist life on this planet. Other such splits include the advent of the Moneran cell, the likely split where Archaea diverged from viruses, and the most important watershed event of all: the divergence of the common ancestor from all life on earth, the progenote, from the primitive life systems which came before it.

It’s amazing, in 20/20 hindsight, to plot the progression of biological evolution and see the sorts of problems were naturally solved by each of these watershed events. As evolution by natural selection favors those individuals most adept at living enough to reproduce, and successfully doing so, there are two routes to optimize for: fast reproducers who don’t live long, or slower reproducers with substantially longer lifespans. The progenote and its descendants most similar to itself favor the former path in a graduating scale in which eukaryotes have continued to employ a progressive path in which species have become increasingly optimized at living longer as opposed to producing large numbers of offspring.

Another split occurs at sexual reproduction. The gene pool affords the ability for descendants of a common ancestor who are similar enough to share adaptations they’ve discovered, at the cost of remaing substantially more stable in their configuration. This limits the rate at which they can adapt, but also means that they can leverage adaptations that may have been lost to all but a few members of the group when they are needed again.

The brawn vs. brain dichotomy can be seen in the reptile/mammal split. Dinosaurs were genetically geared to start small but keep growing, with growth being the primary cause to which their energies were directed. Mammals, on the other hand, found ways to allow their descendants to develop for longer periods of time, culminating in placental mammals whose offspring developed internally. This provided a way for offspring to grow amazingly elaborate structures as they fueled themselves with energy from their parents. In mammals, it was the brain, and not size, that energy would be directed at.

These watershed events allowed the evolutionary system to explore increasingly elaborate and complex designs, culminating in man. The human brain remains biology’s greatest mystery, rivaled only perhaps by the origin of all life on earth. However, while there are several theories about how life originated, there are no comprehensive theories of the human brain’s operation as a whole. While most biologists will see man as merely one of innumerable strategies life attempted over the course of history, we represent a creature which went through a series of progressive tunings and happened to be the products of a fortuitous evolutionary feedback loop which lead to the human brain. Of all the brain architectures nature explored, ours does its job, namely that of thinking, the best.

In humans, nature found a platform where evolution would be driven by information, not by genetics. Many consider the evolution of information inside of the human system to be evolving in a way similar to natural selection, a hypothesis which underlies the protoscience of memetics, and many consider a natural selection-like model to be one of the main processes underlying consciousness, including philosopher Daniel Dennett and computer scientist Donald Knuth. In this way human societal and cultural evolution can be seen as extensions of biological evolution, employing similar methods but with a substantially more refined approach. Humans create the sorts of feedback loops which I described above naturally through their collective action, and it’s out of these feedback loops that immense progress has been made.

Life explored innumerable approaches in evolutionary history. Many of these were aimless fluxuation around the basic design of the common ancestor. But naturally, progressive approaches emerged. Thus progress is an epiphenomenon of biological evolution; invariably, given enough time, a progressive element will emerge, lest all life be destroyed.