From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Wed Sep 29 1999 - 14:02:03 MDT
Dear Extropes,
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com) wrote: Tue, 28 Sep 1999
>I love it! So bees evolve aesthetic preferences to mate with
>other bees, and then flowers evolve to conform to bees'
>aesthetic preferences to increase pollination, and then humans
>evolve to find flowers aesthetic so as to select good foraging
>grounds. Thus transmitting a set of aesthetic preferences
>*from* bees *to* humans *across an intervening species*.
I saw the direction that this thread was heading (adaptive
art) and I love it!
Thanks for a most enjoyable mail-list-read during the last week.
Eliezer and Eric were discussing a set of aesthetic preferences,
transmitting and evolving across intervening species.
How about taking that concept to a full circle? We can say that for
some (people, species, etc.), the more "evolving" the process is,
the more "beautiful" it is. And so aesthetic attraction begets
reproduction, and so on.
For me, adaptivity and evolution is quite aesthetically pleasing
(e.g. artistically beautiful). Life, one of the most "adaptive"
processes around, is wet, spontaneous, chaotic, vibrant, surprising.
In my environment, I find most appealing those things that have an
"organic" and "alive" quality.
So if we were to design our future environment, how might we do it?
I say "grow it" and let the adaptive processes figure it out. I
think that the result would be not only quite functional but
aesthetically pleasing, as well.
We can look at the processes that bring about our "emergent order
environment" and notice some common threads. I find these common
threads in Minds and Free Markets,in additon to Ecologies/Evolution.
(These common threads are perhaps well-known by now. I put this list
together about 10 years ago, and someday, I may finish my paper for
Extropy about it.).
Common Threads in Emergent Order Systems
* The order that emerges is unplanned and unpredictable.
* Millions of things are operating under a simple set of
rules while operating in unique local conditions.
* The rules evolve.
* The elements/individuals involved don't have to have
knowledge or understanding of the whole system.
* The systems regulate themselves by feedback loops.
* The systems are as much _processes_ as they are _systems_
because they are continuously adapting to the fluctuations
produced by the environment and as a result,
matter/life/information is created and destroyed.
* The systems are irreversible.
* Intervention and attempts to control the systems will
fail.
A process that follows the above elements is a nonlinear and
dissipative process that links microscopic behavior with macroscopic
behavior into an unpredictable (and I think beautiful) form.
Mathematically/Dynamically, the system might be characterized in
phase space by a strange attractor. Philosophically, this process
means that we have a world that is interconnected, unpredictable, but
with a subtle order present. Even what appears on the surface as
disordered contains a high degree of implicit correlation. Sometimes
the below-the-surface-correlation can be triggered, and it emerges
to shape the system.
So I think that to design our future environent, start with
something that has these above elements, and then let it grow!
An example of the emergent order from such elements is urban
evolution. In 1980, Prigogine, used a variation of the logistic
(survival) equation to characterize an urban region in terms of
economic functions located at places called "cities" (this model is
described in _From Being to Becoming_, Freeman). The economic
functions were dependent on the populations, and he had a feedback
loop in which the functions and populations depended on population
increase and competition from other rival production elements. What
resulted were "clusters" (cities) in a land area that looks very
much like our urbanization today. And it was the result of many
agents operating under similar constraints and pursuing their own
goals.
Another example of beautiful adaptibility that we may be able to use
in designing our future environment are plants like the skunk
cabbage. Why? Because it is a warm-blooded plant (to a limited
extent) and very adaptible.
I started thinking about plant-engineering and warm-blooded plants
in our future human space settlements after reading a wonderful
article by Freeman Dyson. In November 1997, Freeman Dyson wrote an
article for _The Atlantic Monthly_ magazine called "Warm-Blooded
Plants and Freeze-Dried Fish" about searching for life, space
exploration, and human space settlements. He said that for about two
weeks, the skunk cabbage maintains a warm temperature by rapidly
metabolizing starch stored inside the part of its anatomy known as
the spadix. The spadix is supposedly warm enough to melt snow around
it. The evolutionary advantage of warm-bloodedness to the plant is
probably that it attracts small beetles or other insects that linger
in the spadix and pollinate the flowers. The spadix is not a
greenhouse, and the supply of starch is not sufficient to maintain a
warm temperature year-round. However, in more extreme environemnts,
the adaptibility could be pushed.
Dyson writes:
"Plants could grow greenhouses (so far the idea remains a
theory) just as turtles s grow shell. These plants could
keep warm by the light from a distant Sun and conserve the
oxygen that they produce by photosynthesis. The greenhouse
would consist of a thick skin providing thermal
insulation, with small transparent windows to admit
sunlight. Outside the skin would be an array of simple
lenses, focusing sunlight through the windows into the
interior. The windows would have to be small, to limit the
loss of heat from outward radiation. The plant would also
need deep roots, to tap water and nutrients from warmer
layers underground. Inside the greenhouse the plant could
grow leaves and flowers in an oxygen-containing habitat
where aerobic microbes and animals might also live. Groups
of greenhouses could grow together to form extended
habitats for other species of plants and animals. An
attendant community of microbes and fungi might help the
plants to extract nutrients from the local ice or soil.
Pores in the outer skin of the greenhouse might open to
admit carbon dioxide from the atmosphere outside, with
miniature airlocks and cold traps to keep losses of oxygen
and water to a minimum."
Neat, huh?
Finally, to end this dynamically-evolving note, I will say that my
intellectual/emotional divisions between art and science are not
sharp. In fact the boundaries for me are fuzzy and the two areas in
my real world overlap each other alot. I quite agree with E. Shaun
Russell's comment:
>That is the beauty of our future: one day, science will
>be so like art, and art so like science, that it will be
>impossible and superfluous to distinguish one from the
>other.
Thanks for the fun thread!
Amara
********************************************************************
Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"Trust in the Universe, but tie up your camels first."
(adaptation of a Sufi proverb)
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