Complexity: the Law vs Nature

During the past week two events took place, independent of each other yet connected in a more profound sense.

First came the release of a report by Dr Graeme Pearman and the Climate Adaptation Science and Policy Initiative at the University of Melbourne. Evidence of Accelerated Climate Change warns that the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are too conservative. More comprehensive data from both polar regions show that an ice-free Arctic Ocean might not occur between 2050 to 2100 but much earlier. Rises in sea levels have also been underestimated.

On Friday Professor Justice Michael Kirby, one of Australia's seven High Court judges and a strong defender of human rights, gave a lecture, Fundamental Human Rights and Religious Apostasy. His main example was the case of a woman in Malaysia who wanted to leave her original religion Islam and now become registered as a Christian. Being a Muslim country eventually the High Court there decided against her, pointing out that although the constitution guarantees religious freedom, for an individual to choose leaving Islam was not permissible. Clearly, the notion of freedom of choice was not part of the wider interpretation when starting from the concept of religious freedom.

The evidence of climate change rides on an increasingly comprehensive picture emerging from the ongoing analysis of a multitude of data. The more information we have the more accurate our perception can be. Despite the opposition from so many quarters the urgency to act locally and globally becomes more and more pressing. The world of our grand children will be vastly different from what the human race has become used to, but at the very least the data necessary for a productive response are accessible.

Compare that to the situation in a religion-dominated society, where on one hand the few judicial parameters are visible but on the other do not encompass the far more complex mind set programmed by its belief system. For a Westerner the conclusion reached by the majority of the Malaysian High Court judges (two Muslims ruled against the appellant and one Christian decided in her favour) seems extraordinary, but such is the effect of a diffuse and pervasive mental landscape that almost anything is possible when an overriding compulsion demands it.

Much has been written and proclaimed in the context of human rights. Religious freedom is usually interpreted as the right to practise some belief, but rarely does that include the freedom from religion. A belief prospers when supported by an ideology, spiritual or secular, and no matter what its source has a profound effect on the cognitive processes under its guise.

Whether a challenge confronts an individual, a society, or an entire planet, productive solutions cannot be found if the steps taken have to rely on obscure and ill-defined notions.

There is a chance some societies will manage to live with the effects of climate change, possibly even ameliorate them, because their conceptualisations are mostly situated in the real. Yet there are also other demographics where ideas are far more convoluted.

A hint of what is to come can be seen in the tables shown on Demographic orientations. The figures for average life spans, infant mortality, and educational standards from around the world are relatable to the influence a belief system exerts upon the respective population. Right now there are hundreds of millions of people confined to their inner mental prisons where even under the current conditions they barely manage to survive, if at all. Now imagine what happens when rising sea levels, scarcity of water, and dislocation of food productions interfere with the already precarious existence of all those masses.

We will be able to watch the process over the coming years.

Teaching blindness

Is it possible to teach blindness? You bet.

Case 1. The other day I bought a piece of software which came in a number of files, altogether several hundred megabytes large. There were problems with downloading so I asked to pay the extra charge for a CD burn and shipping after the software itself was already paid for. That's when the trouble started. Their website didn't allow for ordering the burn for that version, and naturally I didn't want to order - and pay for - the whole thing again. I am still involved in trying to explain the situation so that I may get an answer that makes sense in terms of what their system allows a customer to do.

Case 2. While working on the OtoomCM computer program there was the need to save certain screen areas for later reference as the program was running. The bitmap file format suited fine, but for several reasons I had to write and slightly modify the bitmap-file producing function myself. The way Microsoft designed this function is a case study in obscurantism, and so I hunted around the internet for some hint on how the reading of pixels is actually accomplished. There were dozens upon dozens of web pages offering advice about the use of the MS function per se, essentially useless because the parameters make that rather obvious anyway. Yet not a single one explained the weird system used by Windows. It took many frustrating hours trying to figure out how they did it.

Case 3. In various discussion groups I tried to explain my use of the word 'functionality', its understanding essential for an understanding of the Otoom model itself. Although I abided strictly by the definition Webster's, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Macquarie Dictionary offered, I couldn't get through to certain people because they stuck to the more specific meaning developed later by researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence and others. Using the general meaning common in the English language just didn't work with them.

Case 4. In an article submitted to a journal I was criticised for not dealing with a number of hypotheses that seek to explain in various ways how the mind works. None of them had proven useful, and therefore wasting precious space on things that do not apply seemed futile. Still, those conceptualisations were so ingrained in the minds of the reviewers that stepping outside their bounds was just too much to ask.

What do those cases have in common?

There is a mindset trained to process a given template and not more. Such a mind had never been given the opportunity to deconstruct a scenario in terms of its inherent elements, so that a reassembled version could be applied to the purpose at hand. If that template happened to be appropriate the information was processed, but anything even slightly outside such a norm constituted a challenge. Since the challenge cannot be taken up the situation is not responded to and a constructive outcome proves elusive.

For many decades pupils and students have been faced with a fundamentally different teaching method, one that is "outcome based" and "holistic" rather than concentrating on schematically organising one's thoughts. Information is presented in chunks, and those chunks are interpreted and reinterpreted without giving the learning mind the chance to understand the underlying bits and pieces.

The result is the mind's inability to reorganise an overall concept to suit the moment, and so university lecturers have to teach new students basic maths while education departments focus first and foremost on sociology and social justice rather than on literacy and numeracy, turning schools into "quasi-sociology departments". Of course sociology and social justice are important, but how can you properly evaluate an event if the capacity to critically evaluate its components is missing?

In programming the current development platforms enable the quick and easy assembly of functions - just drag the icon into your form and it's done. Nothing wrong with that, except there is now a whole generation of programmers who simply don't know what stands behind those functions and what's more, don't even see the need to understand their finer points.

Academic journals have settled into well-trodden paths of endlessly repetitive concepts, with no freedom to step beyond the rut no matter how promising such an escape could be.

And simple questions about payment methods turn into a frustrating cycle of emails that in no time escalate into ridiculous complications.

A corollary to the above would be the inability of people to appreciate the detailed mapping out of results as a confirmation of one's message. How can they if the functional detail of a concept had never been the subject of their mental processes to begin with? I strongly suspect this flaw played a considerable role in the evaluation of my thesis at Griffith University.

No wonder that in the UK synthetic phonics is reintroduced into the classroom, and in Australia the government has recognised the serious problem of many graduates being incompetent in basic science, math or history.

Under Otoom the inherent pattern of a given cognitive process - whatever its representative nature - gives rise to further complexes. If those patterns are insufficient or too coarse, the resultant applicability of the complexes will suffer too.

It is high time the post-modernist and feminist habits of mindless chunking are given the flick.

Globalisation and the disappearance of skills

The migration of industries and their associated expertise from the developed world to newcomers such as China and India is not a new phenomenon and has been amply commented upon by now.

Related issues about flawed goods that had to be recalled at great cost (think of Mattel and their toys) and price dumping due to the sheer opportunity offered have also made themselves felt. Only recently the European Union saw fit to take measures against China's state-sponsored undercutting of steel prices. The latter's steel output is massive, the product is often of lesser quality and sold below production costs with significant consequences in the EU.

Under the economic perspective there are two extreme views; one advocates a completely open trade with no restrictions across borders, on the other end are the import restrictions which in effect constitute trade barriers and lead to the isolation of old.

I leave economics to the economists, but it is an interesting exercise to consider the situation in terms of Otoom.

There we have systems within systems, defined by their respective complexity, connectivity, and number of functional elements. These can be circumscribed as functionalities with respect to the exhibited dynamics.

We can also identify conceptual intersections; that is to say properties of the participating elements which, when compared with their respective counterparts in a neighbouring domain, allow their degree of complexity to be compared with each other. If information travels from a domain of high complexity to one of a lower kind, many associations get pared away and the result in the target area has become poorer. Should the movement occur in the other direction, further associations (now made possible due to the target's higher complexity) get added to the data but are in no direct relationship to the contingencies at the source. For example, a project designed by first-world scientists runs aground in a third-world region because it cannot be properly instantiated there. Or, an utterance by a child is turned into a sophisticated concept by adults.

In functional terms 'system' can be transposed into 'economy', 'data' become 'goods', and 'functional elements' are now 'human activities' in a society. Nevertheless, in terms of the underlying meanings the relationships still hold.

Another feature of such systems are their interdependency. Although a subsystem can be identified as a separate entity, it cannot exist in isolation from the rest of its domain. A steel mill for example may be unique, but without adequate transport, energy supply, and a suitably trained work force it won't function. Transport cannot exist without roads and rail, needs fuel or electricity, another work force, and so on and so on.

The overall quality of a subsystem (defined under the terms mentioned above - complexity, connectivity, etc) therefore relies on comparable characteristics of its neighbours. A breakdown in them anywhere transmits its effects across the network.

Everything in life has a cost, and the maintenance of subsystems is no exception. Hence the training of a work force, industrial standards to be upheld, health and welfare, the availability of education and the quality of life in general, they all come at a cost met by the system overall. Goods from developing countries are cheap because in those economies the costs expended upon the population are lower too. Lower costs means less variance, lower quality overall, and gets translated into an output that now competes with similar products in the importing First World. So much so that entire industries have disappeared in the West, and with them the related skills and self-sufficiency.

To let go of the manufacture of garments for instance may not have a catastrophic effect in a place like the EU or Australia, but it does mean that the stakes have now been raised in the context of international competitiveness. If the entire system (ie, Australia) is capable of up-skilling its work force such that more sophisticated output takes the place of garments, all is well and good. In terms of interdependent systems - at any scale - two potential problems arise at that point.

One, should the other domain (for example, China) experience difficulties, the availability of its products becomes affected and therefore influences everyone else who has come to rely on its supply. And Two, should Australia's work force contain sections that cannot be readily trained upwards, we witness the emergence of niches living outside the required standard. Instituting assistance programs for those demographics may or may not work.

From a system's point of view, and considering the costs carried by a system in order to maintain its standards as well as the aspect of interdependency, the solution would be to peg the tariffs on imports to the relativity identifiable in terms of those respective standards.

In other words, if the overall costs of a given product in a high-complexity region is x, and its counterpart in a region of low-complexity is x minus a, where a represents the difference between the costs born by the higher and the lower region, then the tariff at the border to the high-complexity region will be a pro rata. It is not an arbitrary tariff, but a value arrived at by positing the respective societal costs next to each other.

As far as systems are concerned, such values are not artificial because they reflect the very real difference between standards, and they would not be destructive to either side because they are based on existent dynamics, according to which, after all, either system functions.

As such pro rata tariffs are nothing new. Whether applied to the specific usage of shipping tugs for example or the supply of information by State Public Sector Agencies, a basic cost is adjusted according to the conditions at the time. The above merely represents an extension of the concept applied to the wider system.

Given the sheer magnitude of emerging economies and the costly challenges faced by everyone in today's world (just consider climate change and political altercations), the time may not be far off when these considerations are no longer idle musings but will have become a necessity.

Ghosts

Have you ever seen a ghost?

Try as I might, I never have. But I know others who did, and quite possibly the lack of a similar experience prevents me from getting too caught up with those stories.

Despite such distance I don't know of anyone who has 'seen' Richard III or Napoleon or Beethoven. Those second-hand tales involved friends and relatives, but the question can be raised nevertheless: why are the perceptions always about familiar figures, someone already known to the person in some way or form?

As a prerequisite there would be the ambience of the moment. A bit of mystery, some irregularity of the setting, the predisposition of the witness inviting the unusual - but all within strict bounds.

Deconstructing the scenario we find a particularly configured mindset and its counterpart, the surrounding atmosphere. This functional template, this recipe if you will, can be applied to other situations not normally associated with the 'supernatural'. The effect is similar in principle, that is to say an affirmation of what has been expected found in the perceptive result.

An astral shape confirms one's knowledge of history (general or personal), fits satisfactorily into the moment, and reinforces the cognitive processes leading up to that point. On a more mundane level the stance of a person relates to what is already known about them, does not unseat one's expectation, and confirms what one thinks would have happened anyway.

I remember something that took place a long time ago. A birthday party was held in my honour and when it came to leave a driver was waiting to take me away. As I was getting into the car it began to move immediately with the door still half open. A small boy came running to shake my hand but the crowd pushed and he was hit by the door. Nothing serious, we were hardly moving and looking back the boy seemed fine. Still, we didn't stop, no-one bothered with the child and with everybody waving good-bye their body language did not relate to the mishap at all. Why?

There was the festive event, the guest of honour. There was the show of goodwill, all the gestures produced to underline its intent. An accident occurred, too small to shift the seat of common perceptions. Under the circumstances I was not expected to halt the proceedings, a series of events requiring their start, middle, and end. Stopping the car would have stalled the closure as well.

Again, a functional template acted out according to plan. A diversion would have changed the frame, rendered the entire episode unfulfilling for all concerned. And so we drove off.

Observe society and a whole set of such scripts become visible. From revolutionary upheavals to elections to weddings to passing-out parades to the morning coffee, they all follow a pre-defined direction that everyone follows.

Because that's the point: regardless of the joy or the anger on offer, it seems the familiarity of the outcome is more important than the sensations along the way.

We are not automatons, so we keep telling ourselves. Yet in a very profound sense the evidence says otherwise. In classical Greek tragedy the players are being pushed towards their inevitable demise, an end everyone foresees and so expects. This includes the hero, but such is the path its very profundity does not allow the slightest diversion. To turn away would make a mockery of the noble mind, and only when in tears do we truly understand greatness.

How sad.

You precious!

Last year the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change listed a series of costs associated with a change in weather patterns.

Established forms of behaviour are labeled ‘progression locks’ under the Otoom mind model, and they exist not only in our mental processes but can be found in any system, from the biological to the mechanical.

To modify a function costs. In eco-systems the effects are self-regulating; with human affairs outside resources are brought in to compensate for the loss. In the case of climate change much will have to give.

Recently the Queensland government commissioned a study of the effects of peak oil, the results of which were announced in the Courier Mail under the headline End of the Oil Age is near.

In that context David Room of Global Public Media interviewed Andrew McNamara, member for Hervey Bay, Queensland.

The study concentrated on the economics of a region suddenly confronted with diminishing resources of a very fundamental nature. In Australia peak oil has already occurred, but at the moment its economy, integrated with the rest of the world, has largely escaped the more profound responses from a system that is in the process of undergoing a major shift.

Although the price of oil is rising, there are considerable buffers around the world to ensure that so far life can go on as usual - more or less. But this will change.

From Otoom’s point of view there are aspects which go beyond the obvious such as transport, tourism, the price of goods in general.

The last 50 years have given the West an unparalleled opportunity to indulge in whims that at other times and in other places would not even have been considered, let alone carried out. Entire generations have come to believe in the absoluteness of their habits, living in a cocoon of assumed security about their peccadilloes.

Those habits have been sustained through the availability of plenty, its most basic driver cheap oil. What happens when the floor suddenly gives way?

Our thoughts are more than their open manifestations in word and gesture; they also exist in the form of subliminal trains, carrying their particles of perception around our minds behind the conscious stage. The effects are no less important.

Imagine what will happen when there simply is no time to send a group of counsellors to a school because the children there have lost their pet rabbit. What will happen when a mother’s indignation of not having her daughter included in class falls on deaf ears. When everybody is too busy to listen to a moral campaigner who rails against our young looking at naked humans.

What degree of priority will be given to the issue of shiny hair, cascading around the shoulders of the goddess, and what will be the value of designer sunglasses to meet life’s daily challenges?

An entire industry has grown around the need to find one’s true self, an exercise in interpretation and reinterpretation of noble trivia. Position your limbs just so and the world’s problems are solved. What price narcissism then?

A system that haplessly rushes to the aid of the selfish bore starved social skills to the bone - who needs manners when the pieces are picked up by an army of aides driven by their own need for self-fulfillment in the face of stupidity.

How will those demographics of the world fare when their traditional benefactors have other things on their minds, when their own preoccupation with religion and sectarian identity leaves them open to nature’s games and nobody cares anymore. When their demands for cultural sensitivity as a precondition for aid have become meaningless.

What will happen to a village when there is no outsider who digs a hole for them to find water? What will happen to the little kid who can’t get his hair style any more?

I mean, who on earth can live like that??

Tradition, tradition

In a few days from now the book On the origin of Mind will be available on the Otoom website as an e-book.
The work deals with many areas - science, philosophy, and religion. No matter what the focus however, the framework is a scientific one. This means that assertions are based on observation, analysis, and conclusion. Results are repeatable and falsifiable.
They are also new and radical in the sense that so far no-one has come up with a similarly comprehensive and harmonious description of cognitive processes. Various sections on the Otoom website give a hint of that, but here are all the details.
That raises certain questions, particularly under more traditional auspices.
The familiar path of new scientific discoveries has been from the workbench to the notes to an academic journal. There it is peer-reviewed and if passed goes into publication for all the world to see.
Clearly, this case is different. There has been the 'workbench' of course (the people of this world, existing research, and the computer programming environment), there are the notes, but there are only a few papers in circulation and what's more, none of them provide the overall basis.
For that to be accomplished it needs a book to begin with. Many theories have been advanced over the centuries, with some proving more, others less tenacious. On many occasions the reader needs to reset their conceptualisation of how things are, so ten, twenty, even thirty pages are not enough to explain it all. But book publishers shy away from taking on something about which there had been no preceding awareness. Gleick's Chaos may have been new to many people but the journal articles came long before. And, once published, the book became a huge success.
In addition anything new invites scepticism; that is healthy. It also means the author needs to supply the data and references in abundance so that someone else can indeed follow the path from beginning to end. If there is a mistake it can be handled formally, and if there isn't that also becomes clear.
Here are the figures for the book: Part I (13 chapters, 269 pages, 527 references), Part II (6 chapters, 149 pages, 441 references), Bibliography (61 pages), Index (11 pages, 2-column); total including table of contents, appendix, glossary, overview (25 sections, 520 pages, 970 references).
As for the computer programs OtoomCM and OWorm the figures are: OtoomCM (330 tests), OWorm (320 basic test runs, 560 evaluation test runs); total (1210 tests). OMo runs just as an example of what the system can do.
Such volume would already be a barrier for many. Who has the time to go through all that? Still, the data are there for the taking.
When it comes to peer reviews, the idea is to enable an evaluation by outsiders. They are usually three experts from the field, plus the odd editor or two. Once passed, the paper gets published and hence is seen by many. Nevertheless, there is a pre-existing authority that says, "Read this; it has value". What if the reviewers do not see eye to eye with the material? Let's say already existing frameworks intrude upon their perspectives and the material is judged according to other approaches already done. If those happened to have failed (which is the case when it comes to the workings of the mind) the reviewers' own cognitive space is already pre-loaded with irrelevant data. Semioticians would have a field-day teasing apart the connections between the symbols of one and those of the other.
Just consider the seemingly endless list of papers surrounding the hypotheses categorised variously under such labels as connectionism, dynamicism, etc etc, and read Stevan Harnad's paper Minds, Machines and Searle 2: What's Right and Wrong About the Chinese Room Argument.
Editors of journals want their product to be taken seriously; nothing wrong with that. However, over the years their position has been enhanced by such pressures as 'publish or perish', which forces most academics into a rather servile relationship with the journals. See what Ronald Stamper, a semiotician, has to say about that situation in the footnote to his Stumbling across a "Soft Mathematics"? while Exploring some Issues of Organisation, Law and Metaphysics.
Soon On the origin of Mind can be downloaded from the website by all and read, reviewed, analysed, critiqued and criticised by anyone to their hearts’ content. In the end, that’s how it should be.

Why attack a fortress?

Ask yourself: why did armies in the Middle Ages insist on attacking a fortress and bloody their heads?
Why not occupy the land and establish yourself there? Having land but not a fortress can still give you food, but a fortress without land is just a hulk of stone. (Ah, I hear you say, if you have the fortress you also own the land. - Really?)
On that same note, why storm a palace - are they such a magnet to a hopeful resident?
Now shift to the present, and consider democracy. What is the difference, if not having several factions under the same roof. You can see the attraction: no more sieges, no more conquests. It must be more than a love for heavy oak and shiny candelabras. Or perhaps not, judging by the opulence of today's chambers.
Maybe the occupiers had become more hospitable, or maybe they had lost the will to maintain their solitude at all costs. If that is so, democracy only works within circles of the accommodating.
For let us not get stuck on the trivial. The map shows many nations that have borrowed the word 'democracy' for aesthetic purposes, because their actual governance is anything but.
"He protesteth too much" can be seen from many directions; true democracy does not need the extra ink on the stationery.
Must you storm the palace? Can't live nearby? Then the Democratic Republic of... is for you. The compatriots are waiting.
But there's the rub. Peasants do not form societies, just as ants in the forest are lost without their queen.
A Head needs careful nurturing in a crib, a cocoon away from the battle. In good time there might be a colony, then a state, and a while later still the court is looking for a home. The cocoon moves to its new premises. And nothing has changed.
The cycle continues. Shielded from the adversities of common life the Head plans and plots, but out there, in the dusty streets suitably distant from the manicured lawns of the Residence, they struggle.
Time for another change? Don't bother with the palace, you only get your hands dirty.
Instead settle for something of your own. See the home as something where you are, rather than where you want to be. Slums do it all the time.
There is only one problem. In due course life has to be managed, and managed well. For this it needs well-developed facilities, solid things that work.
They also have value - and so back to the palace.