Unified, but not grand

A recent article in the European Physical Journal explains how the behavior of  a complex dynamical system could be explained by the superposition of simpler underlying systems. The work hypothesizes that special relativity and quantum-mechanical dynamics are mathematically identical to two interlocked processes operating at different energy levels.

Grand unification theories have been directionless for decades, attempting the impossible – some spawning particles and others energy fields, to plug the holes in improbable theories. They have been inventing strings, membranes and other such constructs, that would make a dress-maker blush but with little advancement in fundamental knowledge. The notion that complexity can be explained by superposition of simpler processes have been with us for decades as well, but that sounded too simplistic for the pretending geniuses behind ivy walls.

Simpler explanations to complex phenomena will always dominate even though it may not be sufficiently robust to prop up the ego of Nobel seekers.

Parasitic evolution

Recent research from Vanderbilt University demonstrating that microbes in the gut of animals can substantially influence selection and thus evolution, is interesting. It implies that the outcome of evolution is based on a constrained optimization taking into account the characteristics and needs of multiple organisms in a single matrix. The interesting question is what dominates the process and how it has shaped evolutionary history.

Single cell organisms, amazingly robust and extremely flexible, have been dominating the Earth ever since they arrived, possibly hitching a ride on an asteroid. They shaped the environment to suit them and fundamentally changed the course of the blue planet. They meticulously designed carriers for them to survive in harsh conditions and thrive invisibly. Nothing less could have been expected of a species that travelled through interstellar space, billions of years ago.

Their hosts, complex and customized carrying boxes for this remarkable species are left with sheer astonishment as they study these superior biological entities.

Excess power

A recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience replicates the process of daydreaming in a computer simulation. It is a reminder that the most important asset of humanity – 7 billion brains – is significantly underutilized. An evolutionary quirk endowed humans with a massive organ that finds itself with little to do most of the time. It can control and operate the most sophisticated robot on Earth with less than 10% of the available power. The rest, is simply wasted – and out of sheer frustration, it ventures into daydreaming and night dreaming.

Humans have been attempting to use excess computing power in interesting ways. The Internet finally connected islands of processing power but the use of available excess computing power in the network is still in its infancy. Computing power, however, is a trivial resource compared to brain power – that remains largely disconnected and wasted. Productivity of modern societies is likely highly correlated with its ability to connect brains and use wasted brain power to solve complex and interesting problems.

A technology, akin to the Internet, able to connect brains and utilize the available excess capacity, is needed for humans to take the next step. This is a societal problem – something that the “singularity” peddling technocrats are ill-equipped to understand.

A measure of goodness

As the world, fully segmented into countries, religions and belief systems, fight to prove and disprove, it is interesting to think about a measure of goodness. Here, actions clearly matter more than words, for the latter is costless. A good person contributes to the wealth of humanity to such an extent that optimization of the system will require the protection and nourishment of that entity at almost any cost. Goodness, then, is about understanding the universe, its interconnectedness and its ability to solve the future and forget the past. It is about shedding the pretense, capturing the thoughts of beautiful minds and extending them. It is about shunning meaningless fights and challenging apparently meaningful present.

Goodness is indeed rare – it is not about wealth, intelligence, status or strength. It is all about beautiful thoughts that connect constrained ideas for the benefit of all. It is not about showcasing own self, but rather appreciating the random ones. It is not about winning at any cost, but rather assuring that victory has meaning. It is not process but content and it is not status but contribution. It is the ability to see the whole and not manufacture the details of the components. It is not running for the meaningless destinations but crawling to the beacons of enigma. It is, indeed, about beautiful thoughts – with fading but powerful examples, such as Einstein and Gandhi – and as a precious few look back in such bewilderment that they could find minds of such inexplicable depth and capabilities, they hang their heads in shame.

How does one measure goodness, then? With asymmetric pay-off to the individual, most rational and ordinary men and women will shun choices of implementing goodness at her own cost. She will be forced to optimize with harsh constraints on her own tactical life, with a programmatic and irreversible end. Could ordinary humans be good enough? Would they put yet another brick in the wall of humanity? Would they extend the knowledge handed down from generations or would they simply give up?

The value of society is the sum total of its goodness – a metric that is clear to those who want to optimize and less so to others.

Wild mouse

Recent research from Northwestern University shows that removal of a single gene from a biological entity can substantially affect behavior. In this specific study, the removal of a gene, TAAR4, from a mouse, rendered it incapable of smelling the urine of the predator cat and avoid them. The team from NU hypothesizes that the gene provides a level of senisitivity to smell in evolved systems, such as humans, helping them avoid rotten foods. Even complex systems, thus, are precariously balanced by the presence of few "apps" for survival.

Even human, a marvel of nature, may be vulnarebale to specialized systems without back-ups. Mice, with a smilar structure, show signifcant vulnerability to the alteration of a single gene in a similar gene pool. Natural designs, thus, have been risky experiments - assuming high confidence of performance in critical systems. The design of an aircraft in this fashion, will substantially increase the probability of failure in every flight. The question is why nature would partake in such risky designs. Clearly, redundancy is costly and if the evolutionary design is part of a game with winner takes all result, then it makes sense to enter risky designs to the competition. With no limits on entries to the evolution competition, it is dominant for nature to push a plethora of efficient but risky designs.

Contemporary bilogical systems, winners of past high stake games, may be ill-equipped to win again in changing regimes.

Entropy driven evolution

Although many explanations exist for the origin of life – mostly from traditional religions, the most robust scientific explanation is the one driven by entropy. A singular direction of time coupled with unambiguously increasing entropy in the universe, point to life as a mechanism that accelerates entropy. Those wondering why a group of complex chemicals will get together and act in unnatural ways, could consider the existence of a simple objective function as the maximization of entropy from available means. In other words, life is the most efficient way to accelerate entropy given a chemical condition.

Evolution, then, could be explained in the same vein. If more complex life forms increase entropy at faster rates, then, there should be a natural push toward the creation of such life. Simpler life, should lead to more complex ones and this is fundamental to evolution. However, from a system perspective, if such a transformation leads to aggregate loss in entropy creation – either due to volumetric loss of simpler life or constraints placed on them by evolving complex ones, then, evolution can lead to suboptimal performance. Since the physics of entropy cannot be refuted, it has to be that complex life is fully capable of compensating for any loss of entropy creation from entities they evolved from. The evolution of the brain, a highly inefficient organ, in mammals, certainly fits the bill.

Evolution, may be better explained by physics, as a process that accelerates the entropy of the universe

Single City

A recent study from the Santa Fe Institute shows that cities are excellent systems – they are efficient social reactors and networks. As they grow, they make larger and denser social webs available to each participant, without any additional effort from the individual. The study does not suggest any diseconomies to scale and maximum limits.

Conceptually, then, the larger a city is, the better. This implies that the best design for humanity is to establish a single city that houses all of the World’s population – about 7 billion currently. To reduce extra-terrestrial risks from such a concentration, perhaps a second city can be established, at a location diametrically opposite to the first one. The second city, a mirror image of the first, could be left vacant for emergency use only. With distributed 3D printing, conventional manufacturing can be eliminated. Power production can be designed at mega scale with concentrating solar and wind farms away from the city, with efficient transmission back. Vertical farming may allow food production in close proximity. Excess power production may ultimately eliminate the need for farming, with instant conversion of power to food or direct consumption of energy instead of food.

With a single city design, most of the World can be returned to its original state. Such a system will have higher diversity and associated flexibility to mend itself after shocks.

Predictive scans

A recent study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health shows that brain scans before and immediately after the initiation of a treatment hold valuable information to predict efficacy. Both the discovery and the practice of medicine, still, largely depend on trial and error. Multi-factorial complex responses of the biological system to CNS therapies have resulted in significant noise in the collected behavioral data – creating havoc both in R&D and in healthcare providers, not to mention the payers. The process of inventing and applying medicines for mental health seem fully antiquated in the presence of available technologies.

Pharmaceutical R&D and healthcare, albeit being technologically advanced in certain dimensions, have been lagging in the analysis of available information. PET scans, an old technology, show brain activity in highly analyzable matrix, providing an almost instantaneous path to measure efficacy of a drug. Such scans may also provide a method to determine optimal dose, something that researchers were forced to ignore. The 7 billion specimens of humans across the world show such genetic diversity that it seems unlikely that popping a standardized amount of the NCE within standardized time intervals, will be optimal treatment.

It is time both R&D and the practice of medicine embraced the tools of analytics – something boring engineers have been accustomed to for many decades and it has resulted in handsome returns.

Democratic network

Recent research from the City University of Hong Kong and the School of Management, at Beijing Normal University, shows that the click stream is not dominated by a few hubs – but rather smaller and relatively unknown websites could have significant influence on network traffic. The basic notion of scale – still a dominant theme of strategy for consulting firms and business schools alike - has been irrelevant for over two decades. Somehow, the PowerPoint gurus of corporate board rooms, have been a bit slow in recognizing it. And, they have been successfully draining shareholder value in fees and escaping before the owners are able to recognize the scheme.

Two basic ideas – content is important and people are not stupid – have escaped many. The “hubs” - some perfecting algorithms through neural nets trained to seek cat videos and others spawning cloud capacity like escaping water from the Amazon, may have missed the mark. Scale does help you but it is not a life saver. Content is more important and increasingly content is inversely correlated with scale. As the knowledge content of society increases, business models based on legacy ideas and those frozen in time – either mesmerized by monopoly profits or just sheer ignorance, are bound to fail. Such enterprises, akin to autocratic regimes with little understanding of optimal polices, are now run by people who have lost touch with reality. As they yahoo themselves to mediocrity, some demanding physical presence at the workplace and others counting earnings per share – apparently believing it is the most important metric, there is life beneath.

Democracy – a concept that never fails to bring the best possible outcomes – will continue to dominate networks, societies and the universe.

Complex stability

Recent research from the University of Southampton shows a mechanism that self-stabilizes complex systems – such as the Earth’s environment. When the system and its participants are affected, a control system emerges to stabilize the environment. This has implications for many different systems including the financial markets and large companies.

If the financial system is akin to a self equilibrating complex system, that would mean that it is more likely to mend itself after shocks. This means that there is a strong mean reversion in asset prices after shocks. This will challenge the assumption that asset prices follow random walk and this may cast doubts on the efficient market hypothesis. Similarly, predictions of the demise of large and complex companies are premature as unknown mechanisms appear to sustain them and their participants even though most do not demonstrate competitive advantages outside monopoly power.

In general, it appears that the higher the complexity of a system, the more likely that it nourishes self-equilibrating control systems that kick in after shocks. Complexity could be a valuable survival trait for inefficient and naturally unstable systems.

Mathematical language

Recent research from the University of Texas demonstrates how Markov logic chains could be used to assign a probability of “closeness” of a word or phrase to a paraphrase. This appears to finally break the shackles of determinism and prescriptive rules in natural language processing. Decades of lull in artificial intelligence could be attributed to those trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. Chess and Jeopardy have given certain technologies respect they do not deserve. More importantly, research in that direction holds everything back. It is unclear if computer scientists will ever accept that intelligence is not rules based.

Intelligence, however, is not rules based. Engineers with traditional training find it hard to move away from this concept just as the business students who were given antiquated methods to determine the value of something, fail to consider alternatives. This is a significant failure of the education system that appears to favor the past and discount the future. Why else would we have people in venerable companies stuffing rules into hardware in an attempt to beat a human or business students who adorn spreadsheets with numbers neatly adding up, down and sideways as if it means something. Language is a good example of chaotic outcomes that start with simple patterns. Incremental addition of random noise renders it completely incomprehensible to those with linear brain waves.

If the education systems are not able to catch up with the present, we may be fast approaching a regime in which education has negative value.

Fast decisions

Recent research from the Laboratory of Behavioral Ecology and Evolution at Seoul National University demonstrates that birds, specifically magpies, make fast decisions based on human gaze. Clearly, selection advantages have provided them with the ability to both collect and process information from human gaze efficiently. Although the human gaze, on the surface, appears to be a binary phenomenon – present or absent, it is possible that the birds may be using finer details of the available information in the decision processes.

If the speed of decision-making is a skill that is passed on from generation to generation, then, it should point to observable differences in the bird brain. If the skill has been improving over time, then, it is unlikely that it is an acquired skill. If the structure of the brain, indeed, is changing, it is interesting to think about what is happening in the case of humans. The speed of decisions was critical early in human evolution but it seems less important now. If evolution did select for speed, then the current crop of humans are thrust into an unfamiliar environment. Excluding certain war situations, video games and financial trading (that is largely taken up by computers), the quality of decisions is more important than the speed of making them. In other words, the magpie that is able to discern finer shades of human gaze by analysis may ultimately win the game. 

Trigger happy Homo-sapiens may have been successful in eliminating slower Neanderthals but one has to wonder if this is another evolutionary quirk, that resulted in sub-optimal outcomes.

Stress-less belief

Research from the University of Oxford, recently reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology demonstrates that “the belief in science,” increases with stress. In trials where subjects were known to be stressed in the experimental group compared to the control, they found that the stressed group are more likely to agree with seemingly innocuous statements such as “the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge.” This points to the general observation that it is “belief” that acts as the stress reducer. An equal number of people may be using “the belief in religion” in a similar vein.

This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Early days of homo-sapiens were not pretty – animals and cannibals were hunting them down and stress was the primary attribute of living. One had to believe to survive, for without it, everything looked bleak. Burdened with a powerful organ, an evolutionary quirk, humans could look forward and see a worse tomorrow. The uncertainty was constant and they were completely ill-equipped to survive in the environment they were afforded. The elements reduced them to less than a few thousand – before inexplicable luck launched them higher from near extinction.

Stress has been with humans ever since. And survival, thus, selection depends much on how to reduce stress. Belief has become a critical defense mechanism in this battle. They started believing in inanimate objects that resembled something. As society developed, they moved onto legends and stories – that will someday morph into organized religion. Then, science arrived – with similar but potentially superior constructs that could explain what is observed. It slowly ate into the market share of the dominant provider of belief – religion. Science, however, could never appeal to the masses as belief is not about explaining the present - it is more about obscuring the future. The inability of science to give meaning to ignorance will likely hold it back for ever.

Believe to reduce stress – it does not matter what one believes in.

Technology lift

A recent study from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras argues that making cheap tablets available to millions in India may lift them out of poverty. This is a path worth pursuing as poverty is fundamentally driven by lack of access to information and capital. The competence and even desire can be shown to be uniform across the masses but market failures in information have held nearly 1/3 of the world’s population back and pinned them to incurable poverty. This is a shame for a civilization claiming to have made progress in virtually every dimension but has little to show for it.

Lack of access to information is the worst contemporary societal disease, as it leads to poverty, disease, crime and moral decay. As the leaders of countries across the world clamor to build and enhance physical infrastructure such as roads and bridges, they forget the leverage afforded by improved information infrastructure. The world has already moved on from the need for physical transport to mental engagement. With 3D printing around the corner, the trucks, trains and airplanes that carry physical goods are about to become obsolete. Further, with computer languages and mathematics rendering the world flatter than a pancake, the only advantage remains to be in information and knowledge.

If the IIT hypothesis holds good, then the distribution of millions of tablets across the country at $50 a piece, may usher in a wave of innovation. If the leaders of the country are serious about making a difference, here is a golden opportunity to run an experiment that cost nearly nothing. But then, one can never underestimate bureaucratic friction, corruption and sheer incompetence in policymaking, in a country, vastly famous for it.

The goal

What is the goal of an individual? With 7 billion people around the world with little genetic diversity but with a wide variation in perspectives, that include sex, country, language, religion, physique and science, the question is what one should attempt to optimize. In a zero order society such as ours where optimization is always local, it is a good thought experiment.

The problem presented, then, is related to the probability that humanity will pull itself to the next stage. It seems unlikely – diseases have to be cured, the environment has to be mended, happiness has to be restored, art and philosophy have to triumph over prescriptive engineering and science, money has to be abandoned, knowledge has to become the primary currency of transaction and meritocracy has to prevail. Yes, it seems unlikely, but many attempted to achieve much less in the past.

What is the goal for an individual in the precious amount of time she is afforded? Could she try to change the system, society and the culture that envelopes her – or should she simply drift away to obscurity, complying? Should she look around, see what others do not see, make others cannot make and progress thoughts, others cannot have?  Should she redefine who she is and in the process change humanity bottoms up? Should she challenge the status-quo or accept the preprogrammed outcomes? Should she become successful and then change the world or fail attempting early? Should she broker thoughts across time and space to connect and then disconnect?

What is the goal of an individual? Is it comprehensible?