The Handshake Is Back.

The age of Command and Control has come to an end on this planet. It wasn't even a good run - a mere couple of hundred of years. - if we're being generous.

Command and Control is the strategy that banks on lack of connectivity between people. It involves an authoritative body controlling a limited communicating set of people by conditioning responses to commands. It primarily banks on destroying connectivity and communication between people and replaces socialization through standardized approaches – often called missions or crusades or objectives. That is, the authority destroys and eliminates all other stimulus that doesn't reinforce the mission.

It works when people are disconnected. It works when people can be normalized and undifferentiated.

This is the dominant strategy in industry and military… ironically it's the most used organizing strategy in modern America – in corporations, education, government, social organizations and non-profits. The West is full of Mission Statements and social engineering towards complete compliance. Deviants be damned.

The problem is… and it's a Huge Problem… nature, outside of humans, has almost zero examples of Command and Control as a strategy. More damning is that most of human (and our ancestors') history has zero examples of Central Authority as the organizing principal.

What's happening is that as the industrial world connects more people and more machines centralized control becomes more fragile and short sighted. The reality of complexity and ecology is the network cannot be controlled, it is shaped. There are no absolute missions. There are temporary ideas and temporary organizations – always changing – localized, short term goals. There are traces of next moves, but there are no crusades in a connected world. There are no slogans worth dying for in a connected world.

And so, here we are. At the crux. The epoch of those that will literally die for the mission and those that will carry on by being in response through awareness and empathy and sensitivity. The Command and Control no longer can tell who's a man or a woman, who is what race, who bleeds what flag colors, who believes what tax form W2 mission statement. In an ironic corporate slogan appropriation, “what have you done for me lately?”

Tomorrows winners are the makers, the free agents, the distributed computation, the micro finance, the micro school, the flash mob, the flash sale, the accidental brand, the oral history, the traces of ideas, the partial credit, the question answered with a question, the hacker hacker, the crafty craftsperson.

The ledger of exchange and the winning ideas will be distributed and trusted only through a loosely connected network. The handshake is back. The seal is dead.

This is contingency

Selection by consequences (the main phenomenon of evolution/learning/mediation) follows a basic movement towards interoperability and interchangeability through modularity.  As forms/structure proliferate (are selected for survivability)  an ever progressive reduction to the simplest aspect of the structure providing the survivability function occurs.  What is replicated within the generational line, the environment and the overall mesh of consequences is a generally modular structure - the signal separates and replicates from the noise. 

Noise and signal.  In replication.  

That "life" on earth (and likely other planets) shares carbon as its elemental basis and proteins and cellular structures as replicating machinery is an example.  Music and the arts are another example of a progression of signal differentiation until what is widely shared is almost pure signal.  Music went from noisy localized and often private events to reproducible written scores to recorded and replayable sounds to studio produced to advertising jingle to 3-note musical logos to iconic ringtones to machine remixes and generative machine mixes.  It is now almost pure signal and total self replication.  Visual arts went through and are still going through this transformation from event to prints to xeroxes to Internet shared images to machine recompositions to computer vision and now googles deep dream and so on.  Manufacturing, too, has gone from artisan craftspersonship to machine generated and exchanged designs printed out and machine assembly by networked 3D printers and robots.   The object is now too pure signal.  

In all these examples gone is the noise of the event. Noise of the making. Noise of the specific context of creator and environment.  Soon we will have virtual realities that remove the noise of the singular universe and have everyone in their pure signal forms drifting through universes of platonic forms.  For these are the most efficient and survivable concepts that remain after consequences.  

Until.  New forms disturb the peace.  From the heat death of pure signal... Springing from probabilities... Which are outside of consequences or rather spring from the complex network of consequences all colliding... A new form burrows out and shocks the consequential network.  A constant, yet choppy cycle of noise to signal to noise - from isolated event to selection to full replication to collision of pure signal to isolated event. 

This is contingency.  This is the phenomena of networks. 

This Misconception of Validation

Validation is the concept almost all Western ideas and cultures (politics, companies, social structures!) are based on.   Validation, in terms of people, is in some sense the idea "you are approved to profess what you profess."

It's a social concept and it's horribly incomplete.  Validation is a mostly built up on the idea of "you went through what I went through" which is not the same as what you do/say/build is truth/right/worthwhile.

The idea is the idea.  The thing is the thing.  The theory is right or not.  The math works or it doesn't.

the idea is right.  it's true.  truth is true.  what is true is true.

OR

you're right because you are YOU! you are the person we know is right because you've been right before!  you're RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT because you're the person IN CHARGE.

so which is it? are you about the source? the build up of authority or about the rightness of the idea.

it's Plato vs. the world.  

I think Plato was right.

The Effect of Time

Our modern lives (in the West) are ontologically organized around time as a fundamental piece of whatever makes up existence and life.  "Time is money," "On time is late," "Be In The Present," "Live like this is the last day of your life," "Time changes everything." Are just a handful of the slogans we tell each other about time's primacy.

It is an illusion.

what is time?

Perhaps this an old (time again) forgotten hypothesis I'm proposing here.  Good old Plato or Zeno or Buddha and countless religious ideas and a few mathematicians and scientists touched on such a notion.   The hypothesis is simply that time and change are not primary.  They are partial phenomena.   That is, they are little things built up from a static, omnipresent everything.  

What we notice as time is simply a shift in perspective.  We connect differently to network of existence.   We are ourselves a network of connections and connected to the wider network.  Our perspectives (perceptions) are the effects of this network.   As we "age" - grow, consume, create, learn, procreate, etc - we are simply connecting differently.  the US that makes up the network we call OURSELVES is a different network.  Nothing in the structure of everything has changed.   

Why bother with this meta-physical hocus pocus?   On one hand, because that's what I'm doing.  There's no bigger cause.  It's just where I am in my perspective.   What are the connections I'm bringing to bear on this conception?  Beyond my own "point in life" I've researched and experienced a wide variety of scientific, mathematical, philosophical and artistic theories of time and they all dance around with more or less some shred of believability depending on the context.   The illusion of time in my own common sense is also very stubborn.   So this has all led me, whatever I am, to reconceive of time (and space) not as primal.  

The seeming single directional arrow of time (but only a Newtonian scales), spacetime curvature by mass/gravity, psychological relativity of time, the concept of "time" to an abstract Turing Machine, the notion of space as a network, all suggest that time itself is not. And if time is not then space is not.  And thus motion is not.

And by not, I don't mean these concepts and their "observed" existence is not.  Most certainly this concepts exist within what I call "localities of everything".   That is, in the sub network of existence where persons and animals and plants and von Neumann computers connect we have these phenomena/properties of existence that we label as time, space and motion.   As we look forever beyond/outside of/below/inside of the infinity of everything we find these notions breakdown rather quickly.

Consider virtual reality.   What is the notion of space and time in virtual reality?   What is the notion of circles and spheres and persons?   What are those "realities"?  

One cannot easily dismiss virtual reality as some toy, not quite real version of existence.   There is nothing logically nor experimentally that will allow one to simply throw away virtual reality as a genuine universe to observe.  Virtual reality is not a simulation of "our reality."  It is a unique, universal reality all unto itself.   Perhaps you can argue it is limited by the computational power of the computers/network it runs on.   But that argument doesn't hold up because we know that even objects as simple as a universal Turing Machine can compute anything that can be computed... Our own reality seems constrained by the total atomic matter available... but even that makes no sense as an invalidation of our reality as not being a reality.   Besides as soon as we think we've reached the end of slicing or expanding reality to its fundamentals we find other bosons, spins, fluids, ethers, dimensions, traces, branches we had yet to notice.

And so my hypothesis is only provable by what means?  a mathematical proof?  thousands of experiments?  

It is unprovable in the sense of absolute proof.   

The value here of stating such a claim isn't in its absolute proof.  It's value is in furthering connections.   Does it open me and others to more sub-networks of existence?  does it help previously disconnected theories?  Do we care about those connections? 

In a sense it doesn't matter.   In another sense, where I personally wish to have more coherence in my own experience of existence, it matters to me.   I wish not to give away everything to a relentless, unchanging clock forever ticking away.  It's too reductive of a concept and doesn't even hold up well within science and math.   Computational sciences operate slightly differently.  Instead of time like ticks of an atom or pendulum swings or moves of a clock hand around a circle, computational time is simply measured in "operations" or "elementary steps" in a computation.

I reinterpret that notion of "operations" to "connections".   When we compute (algorithms doing stuff... input, transform, output.... algorithms interacting) we connect.  We take one thing to another thing.   And time is measured not by some elementary particle of time, but simply as a "step" or a "configuration" or a "connection change." (I borrow heavily from ideas from Wolfram and others.)

It is hard to take these ideas seriously in experiments as our tools and perceptions are way too limited.  It is only possible via philosophical wandering and by computing.  Playing around with enough programmatic complexity to see if more and more of what we experience as the effects of time (and space and motion) show up.

That's probably not very convincing as theory of time's existence... but ask yourself how convinced your watch (iwatch), desktop, wall clock, the sun, NSIT, etc are all in agreement on time's nature or are simply connecting more and more of your experience to their semi-synchronous connection to each other.

The effect of time is simply our limited view of everything. 

Believability

The issue before any narrative or story or theory is one of believability.   That is, there must be some connection between the author's reality and the audience's reality.   A completely absurd and non-sensical narrative finds no connection and is quickly dismissed into the pile of other things that are not things to an audience.

And so what is the nature of believability?   this connection of reality to reality?   Doubtful there's any common, easy notion to elucidate here but surely it swirls in some notion of shared experience (shared context, culture, events, language, image).   And it is likely beyond a single shared instance of experience the repetition of the experience is a key aspect.   For me to believe what you say/do I must have a reference point of my own or from seeing others having done/say what you say.   Perhaps that's a valid concept... it still leaves open the issue of the INITIAL step towards believability.  How does the initial introduction of a narrative catch fire?  How is the initial expression not immediately snuffed out in indifference or ignorance?

I believe what we think is the narrative and the atomic aspects of a narrative/theory/story/proof/argument is much smaller than we think.   That is, what it is that draws connections (the engine of believability) can be divided into infinitesimal chunks and only a very few recognizable chunks of connection are needed to spark engagement.

A chunk might not even be the words or art someone thinks they expressed. A connection might form by the smell in the air that an artist and audience might jointly experience during a demonstration.   Incidental chunks are as much a part of belief forming as the intended chunks. All shared context that gets encoded into the individuals and the social dialogue and the works of expression themselves.

But was there an initial spark?  Way back at the onset of language? way back with the first cave painting?  

Unlikely.

There does not need to be an originating moment or gesture or act.   Even a seeming nothing is an originating chunk of believability, of connection.   Probably more practical is to assume we can never really know.   

We ask the question of origination because after all these thousands of years of trying to know, to understand and our infinite origin myths of everything under the sun and the sun itself we still carry with us the idea that to know the origin is to believe the entirety.  Where did this art come from?  where did you the artist come from?  what's the authors story?  what's the story of this building?  was this work of fiction based on a true story?

And that shared experience of wanting to know the origin of anything and everything is also part of the activity of believing.  Let us ask together.