Author Archives: Marco Barnig

Free Energy Rate Density and STEM Compression

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A metric to characterize the complexity of physical, biological and cultural systems in the universe has been proposed by Eric Chaisson. It is called Free Energy Rate Density (FERD). The Evo Devo Universe Community is looking for researchers to collaborate on investigating FERD and its larger human implications.

Birds have higher energy rate densities, compared to humans, probably because they operate in 3 dimensions.

An idea that the most complex of the universe’s extant systems at any time  use progressively less space, time, energy and matter to create the next level of complexity in their evolutionary development has been advocated by John Smart. The concept is called STEM compression (formerly MEST compression).

A list of links to websites dealing with FERD and STEM is shown hereafter :

Big History and ChronoZoom

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Last update : July 17, 2013
Big History is a field of historical study that examines history on large scales across long time frames through a multidisciplinary approach, to understand the integrated history of the cosmos, earth, life, and humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods. Big History evolved from interdisciplinary studies in the mid-20th century, some of the first efforts were Cosmic Evolution at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University and Universal History in the Soviet Union.

An International Big History Association (IBHA) was founded in 2010. The same year, Walter Alvarez and Roland Saekow from the department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley, developed ChronoZoom, an online program that visualizes time on the broadest possible scale from the Big Bang to the present day. A beta version of ChromoZoom 2 in HTML5 was released in March 2012 by Outercurve Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports open-source software.

In 2011, Bill Gates and David Christian started The Big History Project to enable the global teaching of big history. Seven schools have been selected for the initial classroom pilot phase of the project. IBHA is one of the partners of the project. Educators can register to participate in the beta program of the Big History Project. At the TED talks in March 2011, David Christian narrated a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes.

Macquaire University has launched a Big History Institute as part of the Big History Project. Big History is teached since 1994 at the University of Amsterdam by Fred Spier.

A list of links to great websites illustrating different epochs (particulate, galactic, stellar, planetary, chemical, biological, culturel) of the Big History is shown hereafter :

Cybernetics

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Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed is involved in a closed signaling loop and it is relevant to the study of mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. These concepts are studied by other fields such as engineering and biology, but in cybernetics these are abstracted from the context of the individual organism or device.

Cybernetics was defined in the mid 20th century, by Norbert Wiener as the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. It grew out from Claude Shannon’s information theory, which was designed to optimize the transfer of information through communication channels.

Cybernetics is related to System Dynamics, an approach to understand the behaviour of complex systems over time, and to Teleology.

Cybernetics is sometimes used as a generic term, which serves as an umbrella for many systems-related scientific fields.

Metasystem Transition

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A metasystem transition is the emergence, through evolution, of a higher level of organization or control. The concept of metasystem transition was introduced by the cybernetician Valentin Turchin in his 1977 book The Phenomenon of Science, and developed among others by Francis Heylighen in the Principia Cybernetica Project.

The classical sequence of metasystem transitions in the history of animal evolution, from the origin of animate life to sapient culture, has been defined by Valentin Turchin  :

  1. Control of Position = Motion
  2. Control of Motion = Irritability
  3. Control of Irritability = Reflex
  4. Control of Reflex = Association
  5. Control of Association = Thought
  6. Control of Thought = Culture

Principia Mathematica and Principia Cybernetica

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Principia commonly refers to Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a work in three books by Sir Isaac Newton, first published 5 July 1687. The Principia is considered as one of the most important works in the history of science.

The Principia Mathematica (PM) is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. PM is an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic.

The Principia Cybernetica Project is an attempt by a group of researchers to build a complete and consistent system of philosophy. Principia Cybernetica tries to tackle age-old philosophical questions with the help of the most recent cybernetic theories and technologies. Principia Cybernetica Web is one of the oldest, best organized, and largest, fully connected hypertexts on the Net. It contains over 2000 web pages (nodes), numerous papers, and even complete books.

The Principia Cybernetica Project was conceived by Valentin Turchin. With the help of Cliff Joslyn and Francis Heylighen, the first public activities started in 1989. An FTP server went online in March 1993 at the Free University of Brussels , followed a few months later by an hypertext server, which turned out to be the first one in Belgium.

The specific goals for the Principia Cybernetica Project are :

  • Collaboration
  • Constructivity
  • Active
  • Semantic Representations and Analysis
  • Consensus
  • Multiple Representational Forms
  • Flexibility
  • Publication
  • Multi-Dimensionality

Moore’s Law and other eponymous laws

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Moore’s law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his paper Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,  published in the Electronics Magazine, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965. His prediction has proven to be very accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.

In 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that the law cannot be sustained indefinitely, because transistors will reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels.

A list of more eponymous laws (named after a person) is provided at Wikipedia.

MIT CCI (Center for Collective Intelligence)

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Last update : August 6, 2013

The MIT CCI (Center for Collective Intelligence) brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies, especially the Internet, are changing the way people work together. The goal of their research is to understand how to take advantage of the new possibilities offered by systems like Google, Wikipedia and Innocentive.

Their basic question is : How can people and computers be connected so that, collectively, they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before ?

The MIT CCI was launched on October 13, 2006. Thomas W. Malone, Director of the Center, stated during the official launch that time has come to make collective intelligence a topic of serious academic study. The MIT CCI does four types of research :

  1. collecting examples or case studies
  2. create new examples to advance the state of the art and to learn new design principles
  3. do systematic studies and experiments
  4. develop new theories to help tie all these things together

The hope of the MIT CCI is that in the long run the research work done will help to understand new and better ways to organize businesses, to conduct science, to run governments, and, perhaps most importantly, to help solve the problems we face as society and as a planet.

A list of research projects is shown hereafter :

 

Global Brain Metaphor

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Last update : August 6, 2013

Global Brain

Global Brain Project

The global brain is a metaphor for the worldwide intelligent network formed by all the individuals of this planet, together with the information and communication technologies that connect them into a self-organizing whole. Although the underlying ideas are much older, the term was coined in 1982 by Peter Russell in his book The Global Brain.

The first peer-refereed article on the subject was written by Gottfried Mayer-Kress and Cathleen Barczys in 1995. The first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen in 1996. Francis Heylighen reviewed the history of the concept and its usage, he distinguished four perspectives  :

  • organicism
  • encyclopedism
  • emergentism
  • evolutionary cybernetics

These perspectives now appear to come together into a single conception.

Global Brain Group and Institute

In 1996, Francis Heylighen and Ben Goertzel founded the Global Brain Group, a discussion forum grouping most of the researchers that had been working on the subject to further investigate this phenomenon. The group organized the first international conference on the topic in 2001. In January 2012, the Global Brain Institute (GBI) was founded at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel to develop a mathematical theory of the brainlike propagation of information across the Internet. The GBI grew out of the Global Brain Group and the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition research group (ECCO).

The following list provides links to further informations about the global brain :

Social music-making applications

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Smule Products

A social music network, connecting users across the globe through music and enabling people to uniquely express themselves, has been created by Smule, a company founded in 2008 by Jeff Smith and Ge Wang.

The products of Smule for Apple iOS devices are :

In December 1, 2011, Smule acquired Khush, an intelligent music app developer and creator of popular apps, Songify and LaDiDa™.

On October 3, 2012, during an Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar at the Standford’s Entrepreneurship Corner, co-founders Ge Wang and Jeff Smith, shared how their passion for music and technology discovered its full voice in the founding of Smule, whose applications seek to liberate the musician in everyone. Wang emphasized how technology should enable human connection and reaction, and Smith shared insights on the mobile space and the importance of product focus.

See the video of this lecture, a Startup in Harmony.

Free Software and Open Source Software

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Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy.

GNU logo

The free software movement was started in 1983 by computer scientist Richard M. Stallman, when he launched a project called GNU, which stands for “GNU is Not UNIX”, to provide a replacement for the UNIX operating system. Then in 1985, Stallman started the Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization with the mission of advocating and educating on behalf of computer users around the world.

In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of open source. Nearly all open source software is free software. The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values.

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

Read the statement of Richard Stallman “Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software”.