My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of existential philosophers that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas.… Read the rest

Continuing on with this theme of an ethics of emergence, can we formulate something interesting that does better than just assert that freedom and coordination are inherent virtues in this new scheme? And what does that mean anyway in the dirty details? We certainly see natural, emergent systems that exhibit tight regulatory control where stability, equilibrium, and homeostasis prevent dissipation, like those hoped-for fascist organismic states. There is not much free about these lower level systems, but we think that though they are necessary they are insufficient for the higher-order challenges of a statistically uncertain world. And that uncertainty is what drives the emergence of control systems in the first place. The control breaks out at some level, though, in a kind of teleomatic inspiration, and applies stochastic exploration of the adaptive landscape. Freedom then arises as an additional control level, emergent itself.

We also have this lurking possibility that emergent systems may not be explainable in the same manner that we have come to expect scientific theories to work. Being highly contingent they can only be explained in specificity about their contingent emergence, not by these elegant little explanatory theories that we have now in fields like physics. Stephen Wolfram, and the Santa Fe Institute folks as well, investigated this idea but it has remained inconclusive in its predictive power so far, though that may be changing.

There is an interesting alternative application for deep learning models and, more generally, the application of enormous simulation systems: when emergent complexity is daunting, use simulation to uncover the spectrum of relationships that govern complex system behavior.

Can we apply that to this ethics or virtue system and gain insights from it?… Read the rest