# 14

[Don Stockbauer]

yet more

[Don Stockbauer]

If at first you don't succeed, give up. Don't make a durned fool out of yourself.

[Don Stockbauer]

Murphy's Laws are nothing more than a set of convenient excuses.

[Don Stockbauer]

Optimistic civilizations survive.

[Don Stockbauer]

Never go without sleep too long.

[Don Stockbauer]

Hang on to your wife.

- The Guess Who

[Don Stockbauer]

Baby in my drink.

[Don Stockbauer]

Never pester someone to communicate with you. You'll just drive them away.

[Don Stockbauer]

There was a BC cartoon , BC fixes-up his raft which he sails out to the horizon and then disappears , headed to the people beyond the horizon and he puts the message on it "have you people gone extinct , or do you just not want to talk to me anymore " . So he sets the raft sailing and it goes over the horizon , and a day goes by , a week goes by, a year goes by, 10 years go by. That pretty much sums up
what happens when two people quit communicating.

[Don Stockbauer]

Donated platelets today ; usually doesn't hurt much but today it did.

[Don Stockbauer]

Wanna see something psychedelic?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6c1BThu95d8

[Don Stockbauer]

Paradigm shifts happen automatically.

The best things in life are free.

[Don Stockbauer]

Isn't it nice to have relatives who don't talk to you for 20 or 30 years in a row?

[Don Stockbauer]

If you could prove that the communication system of humans and their machines has the form of a neural network, wouldn't that be most of the way to proving the global brain? It would probably be far easier to prove that than to directly prove the global brain. Do the various things we can do with messages such as delete them , read them , copy them , archive them , refuse to answer them give the system the form of a neural network?

[Don Stockbauer]

Do you think that a Clarkian sufficiently advanced technology could press all mathematical theoretical results into immediate practical use? Or maybe not immediate , but real quick?

[Don Stockbauer]

Did you hear what they said about the general systems thinker? "Jack of all trades, and a master of them all."

[Don Stockbauer]

Is the global brain created from the same self organizing principles as those which turn an acorn into an oak tree?

[Don Stockbauer]

Doesn't it seem that the primary way people communicate nowadays is to refuse to answer messages?

[Don Stockbauer]

Do you think that our computing machinery will ever take on a life of their own or will they always be merely humanity's tools forming a symbiosis with us and that they will be in effect nothing different in
principle than a screwdriver.

[Don Stockbauer]

Note from Charles Babbage's teacher to his mother:

"Charles has extreme problems finishing an assigned project."

[Don Stockbauer]

Colleagues,
 
I dug up a post below from 4.5+ years ago.  In response, I thought I’d share this passage from the book From Eros to Gaia by Freeman Dyson:
 
"Family is older than the human species, work is younger, friendship is about as old as we are. It is friendship that marks us as human. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote an essay comparing human beings with termites. Termites build nests as elaborate and as well designed as our cathedrals. Every termite nest is an architectural wonder, with arches, vaults, galleries, ventilators, storerooms, and nurseries. But no single termite carries the architectural plan in her head. The build of the nest is a collective process. Each termite rolls little balls of mud and sticks them onto other little balls rolled by her neighbors. Out of this collective rolling and sticking the cathedral grows. Thomas is saying that human societies grow in the same fashion. Instead of rolling mud balls we play with words. Instead of sticking mud balls together to make arches, we stick words together to make conversations. Instead of piling arch upon arch to make a nest, we pile conversation upon conversation to make a culture. Just as no single termite knows how to build a nest, no single human knows how to build a culture. A single termite alone cannot survive, and a single human being alone is not human. Termite societies are glued together with mud and saliva; human societies are glued together with conversation and friendship. Conversation is the natural and characteristic activity of human beings. Friendship is the milieu within which we function."
 
How old is the Earth again?  😊
 
Best,
Chad
 
Chad T. Green, MPA, PMP
Research Office
Loudoun County Public Schools
21000 Education Court

Ashburn, VA 20148
Voice: 571-252-1486
Fax: 571-252-1575
 
From: owner-...@listserv.vub.ac.be <owner-...@listserv.vub.ac.be> On Behalf Of Francis Heylighen
Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2015 7:13 AM
To: gbr...@listserv.vub.ac.be
Cc: Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group <evol...@listserv.vub.ac.be>
Subject: RE: FuturICT Blog: THE SELF-ORGANIZING SOCIETY - Taking the future in our hands
 
Thanks for sharing.
 
The author bases his argument for a "bottom-up way" on the principle of locality. How does this principle align with the assertion below posted to this list on January 16th (call for papers): "The intelligence of this [Global Brain] system is collective and distributed: it is not localized in any particular individual, organization or computer system"?
 
That is the classic property of self-organization, which can be defined as the emergence of global order out of local interactions. Simply put, agents within a complex adaptive system initially interact locally (i.e. with their immediate neighbors). The interactions eventually result in mutual adaptation or coordination. This pattern of coordination then typically spreads out from neighbor to neighbor across the whole system until all agents are coordinated.
 
Once the global coordination has settled, it is no longer under the control of any agent or local group of agents, as it can only be significantly altered if large groups of agents collectively drive it into a different direction. (Alternatively, it can change if a local variation suddenly discovers a more efficient regime, which then similar spreads exponentially across the collective. But this is not really a process that can be "controlled". )
 
The emergent pattern of coordination is therefore distributed over all the agents and their local interactions. It acts as a distributed intelligence guiding the agents' actions towards the more synergetic and less conflictual outcomes....
 
For more info:
 
Heylighen, F. (2001). The science of self-organization and adaptivity. The Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, 5(3), 253-280.
http://cleamc11.vub.ac.be/papers/EOLSS-Self-Organiz.pdf

Heylighen, F. (2008). Complexity and Self-organization. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Eds. MJ Bates & MN Maack Taylor & Francis. Retrieved from http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/ELIS-complexity.pdf

Heylighen, F. (2013). Self-organization in Communicating Groups: the emergence of coordination, shared references and collective intelligence. In À. Massip-Bonet & A. Bastardas-Boada (Eds.), Complexity Perspectives on Language, Communication and Society (pp. 117-149). Berlin, Germany: Springer. Retrieved from http://pcp.vub.ac.be/Papers/Barcelona-LanguageSO.pdf
 
--

Francis Heylighen     
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html

[Don Stockbauer]

Perhaps people who refuse to talk to you are doing you just as much a service as those who do.

[Don Stockbauer]

People say I don't see any evidence for the global brain , just look around you , everything seems normal. The global brain is formed from ordinary things . From communications. Every time you send an email , or an smail, or you listen to the radio or watch TV , send a telegraph , or smoke signals , or use semaphores, read a newspaper , search the web , on and on and on. That's the global brain.

[Don Stockbauer]

Shiny happy people laughing
Meet me in the crowd, people, people
Throw your love around, love me, love me
Take it into town, happy, happy
Put it in the ground where the flowers grow
Gold and silver shine
Shiny happy people holding hands
Shiny happy people holding hands
Shiny happy people laughing

[Don Stockbauer]

Why write to people? you could be doing something useful with your time.

[Don Stockbauer]

It's "people say that they themselves don't see any evidence of the globalbrain" not that "I Stockbauer don't see any evidence of the global brain", what is it about our language that allows such ambiguities? Does it help advance civilization or retard it?

Is it the same as even if our civilization becomes supremely advanced we will always have to put up with such nuisances as the Epimenides paradox, and grass burrs, and diseases, and politics.

[Don Stockbauer]

Is it possible that the global brain will be the most efficient possible configuration for planet Earth?

[Don Stockbauer]

The best way to punish your conversational opponent is to quit communicating with them.

[Don Stockbauer]

The irony of the global brain is that it can lock in without the individual participants realizing it.

[Don Stockbauer]

If somebody decides to cut off communication with you as punishment the worst thing you can do is to complain about it because then they know their method is working.

[Don Stockbauer]

So we're going to put our missiles under AI control. that's pretty neat . so some programmer in Fort Dix makes a mistake and we're all dead.

[Don Stockbauer]

How are the AI missiles going to be controlled?

"Alexa, destroy the world."

[Don Stockbauer]

Oh wait , that was a big mistake; they control themselves.

[Don Stockbauer]

Why can't the missiles put themselves under AI control?

[Don Stockbauer]

I thought that we were working on beating them all into plowshares rather than put them under AI control?

[Don Stockbauer]

Haven't we created a wonderful system where people are afraid to say or write things for fear of the entire earth being able to read them?

[Don Stockbauer]

Everybody go watch the movie "Dark Star" where the nuclear weapons gain sentience.

[Don Stockbauer]

And intelligence.

[Don Stockbauer]

I just found another use for my iPhone; I killed a scorpion with it.

[Don Stockbauer]

Aren't people that clam up when there's a problem with another person wonderful in that they ensure the problem will never be resolved?

[Don Stockbauer]

You're on an American Air Force Base . All the planes takeoff at once. what happened ? their AI programming told them to attack an enemy Air Force base within Russia . how can planes be enemies of one another?

[Don Stockbauer]

Maybe the AI will help us more efficiently destroy each other and then we can return the planet back to the bacteria.

[Don Stockbauer]

I wonder why R.E.M didn't like their song "Shiny, Happy People", because isn't that the way the entire world should be going?

[Don Stockbauer]

Doesn't alt.fan.hofstadter deserve to have somebody better than me posting here?

[Don Stockbauer]

Are your mind, consciousness, free will, etc. etc., merely tools for you to use?

[Don Stockbauer]

Does the concept of "tool" extend far beyond any of us could possibly imagine?

[Don Stockbauer]

Is your mind a tool? Can we define a tool as something used to accomplish our will?

[Don Stockbauer]

Things are really getting complex, aren't they?

[Don Stockbauer]

For Clarke's first two laws it seems like he's playing with the definition of the word impossible , we must remember that impossible is time dependent in that what's impossible now may very well be possible for an advanced technology.

[Don Stockbauer]

And his third law says advanced civilizations look magical to primitive ones.

[Don Stockbauer]

One of the best cartoons I ever saw was the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz driving a tractor.

[Don Stockbauer]

The moon is plainly visible from here right now.

I wonder how many statements there are altogether?

it can't be infinity , you can't have a physical infinity, but is a statement physical ? how many different dialogs can you have ? how many sentences can you have ?

this is sentence number one
this is sentence number two
this is sentence number three
and so on

[Don Stockbauer]

The moon is pretty fat looking right now .

Gibbous us this day, our daily bread.

[Don Stockbauer]

Ideas are created in individual minds, and then spread via the global brain.

[Don Stockbauer]

What's the most effective tool in human communication?Refusing to communicate with your conversational opponent.

[Don Stockbauer]

In the movie Forbidden Planet the Krell could control their machinery with their minds, so did their mind become a tool?

A year or so ago my niece was telling me about someone had developed a system whereby a person just by thinking about something could make it actually come true, unfortunately I don't remember the details. Seems like it was MIT.

[Don Stockbauer]

This is the way the world ends , not with a bang but a whimsy.

[Don Stockbauer]

If you could set a fixed camera up at the great Sandunes of Colorado and take say one image per day for hundreds of years you would see the waves of sand lapping up into the mountains just like waves on the beach . well that would be pretty hard to do but I would really like to see a simulation of it someday.

[Don Stockbauer]

I think what it was it was like you thought of characters and there was equipment to read your brain waves and then it would take those brain waves patterns and convert them into characters on a computer display . I think that's what it was . I think MIT did it . it wasn't like you know you thought about our galaxy rotating in the opposite direction and then it would happen.

[Don Stockbauer]

Are you a tool? Do you have a job?

[Don Stockbauer]

CS/Gibbous us/Gibbous/

[Don Stockbauer]

If there's a Director of National Intelligence, is there also a Director of National Stupidity?

Is it possible for a nation to have intelligence? Isn't intelligence more down at the individual level?

[Don Stockbauer]

The only way to win is to not play.

[Don Stockbauer]

Why do people watch national and international politics?wouldn't just watching soap operas be better?

[Don Stockbauer]

Why do they call all this spy gathered stuff intelligence? Isn't intelligence used for achieving comfortable survival?

[Don Stockbauer]

For every message there's an equal and opposite message.

[Don Stockbauer]

I have made it a personal challenge to quit writing everyone so much as in the past few days it caused problems and the effect is people are writing me less and less . of course , this very email should not have been written according to my new plan.

Is that Hofstadterian, or not?

[Don Stockbauer]

This is not a pipe.

As an exercise to the reader, list everything else that it's not.

[Don Stockbauer]

Don't you think that instead of telling people what you will do you should just do it?

[Don Stockbauer]

do you think that as our technology rises higher and higher that there will be some mysterious effect of governance falling out of the technology instead of it being considered separate and called politics?

[Don Stockbauer]

How do you distinguish our present politics from a soap opera?

[Don Stockbauer]

The preferred method nowadays for handling problems is to say and do nothing.

[Don Stockbauer]

There are two very powerful factors shaping the world currently; one is that the Earth is being configured into the global brain, and two, the fact that a human interaction is either a game or has the form of a game.

[Don Stockbauer]

do you think that our president civilization is advancing like an endlessly rising canon?

[Don Stockbauer]

That should be present, not president .If I knew how to correct these posts I would. that is , not in this manner but to correct the actual post. Probably can't do it with google groups as you can barely do anything with Google groups.

[Don Stockbauer]

The meek shall inherit the earth.

[Don Stockbauer]

We have to be so careful when we educate our children. For instance , when I would read a book to my nephew I'd point to a tree and tell him that's a duck. Then I'd point to a cat and I tell him that's a pumpkin. He's 37 years old now and still in first grade.

[Don Stockbauer]

All in all you're just systems combining to form a metasystem via metasystem transition.

[Don Stockbauer]

Can you herd cats? Sure. Just get a cat-tle prod.

[Don Stockbauer]

What do Hofstadter and Bourbaki have in common?

[Don Stockbauer]

I think people are so suspicious nowadays that if you do texting or online dating or so forth it's hard to see how it any of it works . anybody can be anything to anyone. we were talking yesterday about how it would be nice if the whole system crashed and we had to go back to face-to-face meetings.
a few months ago I had a pretty bad upset with an AT&T store employee . I got to thinking later when you go in they pull up your profile so if you give them trouble they could have a little corner of the screen that says "this guy (or gal) is trouble , have the security guard put his or her hand on their gun the whole time he or she is here." And the nice thing about it is that information is there at every store globally for all future time and you can never get it changed . There's the real 1984.

[Don Stockbauer]

Why is the global brain so hard to believe? It's merely a scaling up of the human brain.

[Don Stockbauer]

Godel, Escher, Bach was required reading at the Academy.

[Don Stockbauer]

Captain Picard time travels from his time several centuries in the future to our time. He was asked, "What's your salary in the future , Captain Picard?" He answered:

"We have no salaries in the future. By birthright, we're given all we need to live. Beyond that, we're given access to the entire workings of our entire civilization, which is beyond your wildest imagination."

Socialism is totally evil, right?????