I first ran across Hidden Forces while listening to the interview with Ray Monk about philosophical mathematics. Monk’s narration on the work of Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and Gödel is excellent – by far one of the clearest and easiest to grasp. It was learning about these paradigms and paradoxes of mathematics via Hofstadter’s famous book which led me to start this website.

Oh!? you believe in conspiracy?… What are you, a conspiracy theorist of some kind? Well, I am certainly not a conspiracy ‘theorist’ … When people take that position I have to laugh… because I feel sorry for them, they obviously never read a history book. Because anyone who knows anything about history knows that it’s built on conspiracies — from one end to the other. Conspiracy is the engine of history! Every major event in history, when you examine it, has come to pass largely as a result of at least one, and in many cases many conspiracies. And it goes on today.

Autocosmocracy – a form of society in which the political relations between its members, without the aide of any hierarchical institution, continually gives rise to a self-organized society. A continuously existing society without a higher power structure; a system where authority lies in the absolute freedom of the individual. All members are autonomous agents.

The world of the biologist is filled with organisms which are self-organized. In the natural sciences there are numerous phenomena in which order arises out of agents acting autonomously. Is not man himself a biological creature in the physical world?

Imagine a hypothetical situation where the form of civilization is an autocosmocracy — all individuals completely autonomous, bound by no institution. I would postulate that inevitably, after a certain number of generations, the civilization would form groups due to scarcity; and that these distinct groups will form their own government. These new groups will throw away the autocosmocratic forms and create novel political frameworks in order to achieve various goals. For instance, there is great dominating strength in having a mass of brutish men who will obey all commands unquestioningly. In other words, in an initial state of complete freedom and liberty, humans will group and band together. It can be shown mathematically that this will be the equilibrium state. Those individuals who fail to join a group will be out competed or destroyed by those who do join a group.

A similar situation occurs in the distributed cryptocurrency mining networks. This system, which is initially distributed with all individual miners acting autonomously, inevitably transforms into a network of groups due to competition and scarcity. So the natural question arises: how to prevent the formation of such groups in the presence of scarcity? Or is it a better question to ask how to eliminate scarcity?

In terms of Plato’s cave of shadows, it would be a society in which all members are able to discover the source of the shadows. All members would exist as philosopher kings.

The solution, not without its own disadvantages, would be to create and migrate all users to a decentralized social media network. I think this would be possible with Namecoin in combination with WordPress (think BuddyPress) where all users would have their own local servers or rent machines with services like Heroku, Namecheap, Openshift, Amazon EC2, etc.. The process should be simple:

1. User rents machine on Heroku, Namecheap, Openshift, etc…
2. Install WordPress on this machine
3. Add WordPress social network plugin
4. Create Namecoin domain
5. Create user profile
6. Publish posts, socialize and message friends

Here are some current examples/ideas of people creating and implementing P2P social networks:

Diaspora – Working version of a private decentralized social network

Synereo; visit their blog to keep up with their progress.

The Pandora. P2P Social Network

Vole: Peer-to-peer social web

Masques: an invisible social network

Samsara Social Network

Kálmán Graffi

Student’s brilliant idea: A peer-to-peer social network

PeerSoN: Privacy-Preserving P2P Social Networks

He explains the levels of learning and how the animal mind can “learn about learning” and “think about thinking”; concerning humans – they can reach a third and possibly fourth level in this learning recursion hierarchy. He discusses this in the context of various subjects: anthropology, psychology, evolution, information, ecology, cybernetics and epistomoglogy in general.

He emphasizes that western science should adjust the way it thinks about relationship and form and discusses how these are relavant to the study of matter and energy. He questions the western conception of mammalian emotions, aesthetics, and the ego-self. On several occasions I found myself with the desire to re-read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Both books I think contain some overlap in their treatment of information and the mind. Overall, Bateson was an incredible thinker and you will improve your intellect by reading this collection of work.

Future By Design

Paradise or Oblivion

An insightful speech from Mr. Jacque Fresco has caused me to wonder about our society and its future. I think he identifies the issues, but I can we fix them?

With regards to a resource based economy, I think we should be careful with how much we change and how quickly. We don’t want to “throw out the baby with the bath water” as the saying goes. In other words, there are numerous highly productive structures which exist today, along with detrimental ones. There is much we can do to restructure various institutions to achieve many of the goals listed in the Venus Project. For example, there is nothing that requires corporations and governments to be hierarchically organized. That form of structure existed before I was born and even before my father. Why do we still follow it? I once read a book, suggested by John Bogle, called Servant Leadership, by Robert K. Greenleaf; in this book, Greenleaf puts forward ideas which reshape the structure of corporations and other institutions.

Anyway, just watch the talk and see what you think.

UPDATE: The Venus Project – The Choice is Ours

The book (really an academic paper) is an analysis based on various data which have survived the ravages of time. It looks at cycles which occurred in various regions and times in the past, including Rome, France, England, and Russia. It shows how time after time humans progress, only to regress. And this “dis-integration” may be caused by either biological constraints and/or existing political structures. There also appears to be characteristic times which tend to correspond to successive generations or every other generation. And this wave or cyclical behavior is inherent in the complex system of homo-sapiens — being a social animal who spends 20+ years acquiring the knowledge and skills of ancestors.

I can only wish that more quantitative data were available to study ancient humans; ironically it is the “dis-integrative” phases of growth where data, observations, and history are destroyed and lost forever. Perhaps the next “integrative” phase of societal growth is a function of how much information is preserved from the previous “integrative” phase (think about Library of Alexandria). Formulaic conclusions based upon detailed and consistent data extending to the remote reaches of the past may forever be lost. Sometimes this data can be cleverly reconstructed (see here). Most of the time the data can not be obtained and this should serve to emphasize the importance of preserving the Noosphere for the sake of future societies.