Bootstrapping Complexity
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BOOTSTRAPPING COMPLEXITY learning from self-organizing systems in nature and technology - a remix of Kevin Kellyʼs book “Out of Control” (1994) by Andreas Lloyd 2009 Distributed with permission under a Creative Commons license Introduction 3 Hive mind 6 Machines with an attitude 23 Assembling complexity 38 Co-evolution 47 The natural flux 63 The emergence of control 78 Closed systems 91 Artificial evolution 107 An open universe 128 The butterfly sleeps 142 Epilogue: Nine Laws of God 153 Text rights: Kevin Kelly: “Out of Control”, 1994, all rights reserved - used with kind permission. Full text available at http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ Wikipedia: “Cybernetics”, as of september 2009 - some rights reserved (BY-SA) Full text available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics Photo rights: The Blue Marble, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Image by Reto Stöckli (land surface, shallow water, clouds). Enhancements by Robert Simmon (ocean color, compositing, 3D globes, animation). Data and technical support: MODIS Land Group; MODIS Science Data Support Team; MODIS Atmosphere Group; MODIS Ocean Group Additional data: USGS EROS Data Center (topography); USGS Terrestrial Remote Sensing Flagstaff Field Center (Antarctica); Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (city lights). http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/ Ecosphere, Statico - some rights reserved (BY-NC-SA). http://www.flickr.com/photos/ statico/143803777/ 2 Introduction “Good morning, self-organizing systems!” The cheerful speaker smiled with a polished ease and adjusted his tie. "I am indeed very happy to find the Office of Naval Research joining with the Armour Research Foundation in organizing this conference on what I personally consider an exceedingly important topic, and at such a well-chosen time." It was a spring day in early May, 1959. Four hundred men from an astoundingly diverse group of scientific backgrounds had gathered in Chicago for what promised to be an electrifying meeting. Almost every major branch of science was represented: psychology, linguistics, engineering, embryology, physics, information theory, mathematics, astronomy, and social sciences. No one could remember a conference before this where so many top scientists in different fields were about to spend two days talking about one thing. Certainly there had never been a large meeting about this particular one thing. It was a topic that only a young country flush with success and confident of its role in the world would even think about: self-organizing systems -- how organization bootstraps itself to life. Bootstrapping! It was the American dream put into an equation. "The choice of time is particularly significant in my personal life, too," the speaker continued. "For the last nine months the Department of Defense of the United States of America has been in the throes of an organizational effort which shows reasonably clearly that we are still a long way from understanding what makes a self-organizing system." Hearty chuckles from the early morning crowd just settling into their seats. At the podium Dr. Joachim Weyl, Research Director of the Office of Naval Research, beamed. The conference he hosted was a public rendezvous of scientists who had been convening in smaller meetings since 1942. These intimate, invitation-only gatherings were organized by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and became known as the Macy Conferences. In the spirit of wartime urgency, the small gatherings were interdisciplinary, elite, and emphasized thinking big. Among the several dozen visionaries invited over the nine years of the conference were Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Lawrence Frank, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, and Arturo Rosenblueth. This stellar congregation later became known as the cybernetic group for the perspective they pioneered -- cybernetics, the art and science of control. As has been noted by many writers, cybernetics derives from the Greek for "steersman" -- a pilot that steers a ship. In order to steer the ship, the pilot is constantly dependent on constant feedback. The ship and its sails, the wind and waves affecting it can be seen as a whole, closed self-sustaining system, of which the pilot is a vital part. Just as the pilot is dependent on the ship, the ship is dependent on the pilot actively steering to avoid sinking the ship. In short, cybernetics is the study of the functions and processes of systems which participate in circular, causal chains that move from action to sensing to comparison with desired goal, and again to action. As cybernetician Louis Kauffman has defined it, "cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves." The term Cybernetics became widespread because of Norbert Wiener’s book "Cybernetics", first published in 1948. The sub-title of the book was "control and communication in the animal and machine". This was important because it connects control (actions taken in hope of achieving goals) 3 with communication (connection and information flow between the actor and the environment). The sub-title thus contains two central points. One: that effective action requires communication. Two: that both animals (biological systems) and machines (non-biological or "artificial" systems) can operate according to cybernetic principles - an explicit recognition that both living and non-living systems can have purpose. Some beginnings are inconspicuous; this one wasn't. From the very first Macy Conference, the participants could imagine the alien vista they were opening. Despite their veteran science background and natural skepticism, they saw immediately that this new view would change their life's work. Anthropologist Margaret Mead recalled she was so excited by the ideas set loose in the first meeting that "I did not notice that I had broken one of my teeth until the Conference was over." The core group consisted of key thinkers in biology, social science, and what we would now call computer science, although this group were only beginning to invent the concept of computers at the time. Their chief achievement was to articulate a language of control and design that worked for biology, social sciences, and computers. Much of the brilliance of these conferences came by the then unconventional approach of rigorously considering living things as machines and machines as living things. Von Neumann quantitatively compared the speed of brain neurons and the speed of vacuum tubes, boldly implying the two could be compared. Wiener reviewed the history of machine automata segueing into human anatomy. Rosenblueth, the doctor, saw homeostatic circuits in the body and in cells. What brought all of these thinkers together was a shared quest for understanding what makes a self- organizing system. Fundamentally, these thinkers sought to find out how to make something out of nothing. Nature does this every day: First there is hard rock planet; then there is life, lots of it. First barren hills; then brooks with fish and cattails and red-winged blackbirds. First an acorn; then an oak tree forest. Bootstrapping systems that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves. How do you make something from nothing? Although nature knows this trick, we haven't learned much just by watching her. We need to make our own mistakes through our own experiments. Unfortunately, the cybernetic group lacked the funding and computing technology necessary to model and test their theories. Unable to find answers, they spent their efforts preparing an agenda for questions. So in spite of its bold and fresh ideas, which sparked a breakthroughs in a wide range of disciplines, the field of cybernetics itself soon withered away. By the late 1970s, cybernetics as an academic discipline had all but died out, partly due to lack of funding, partly due to the lack of computers powerful enough to model the complexity of self-organizing systems. In the fabric of knowledge we call science, there was a rent here, a hole. It was only once computing technology had matured enough to make cybernetic experiments feasible that this hole could be bridged. And by then, the original cybernetic group had passed on, leaving their field to be filled by young enthusiasts not burdened by wise old men. This book is an exploration of the heritage of the cybernetic group present at that conference in 1959 as it has been carried on by an unlikely group of young, ambitious scientists studying chaos, complexity, artificial life, subsumption architecture, artificial evolution, simulations, ecosystems, and bionic machines. All of these scientists across such diverse fields have found a common framework for their questions in cybernetics as they have continued the quest to understand what makes a self-organizing system. But even though cybernetics pervades every part of this book, references to the original cybernetic group and their work will be few and far between. Particularly since this new generation of scientists have come into cybernetics on their own, unencumbered by an academic tradition, they rarely describe their work in cybernetic terms. 4 These new cyberneticians are extracting the logical principle of both life and machines, and applying each to the task of building extremely complex systems, thus conjuring up contraptions that are at once both made and alive. In these efforts to create complex mechanical things, again and again they return to nature for directions. They have learned more by their failures in creating complexity and by combining these lessons with small successes in imitating and understanding natural systems than the original cybernetic group could have hoped for. And in doing so, they are fulfilling the notion first presented in the Whole Earth Catalog, itself inspired by the original cybernetics group: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” As this book will show, these experiments are stretching the meanings of "mechanical" and "life" to the point where all complicated things can be perceived as machines, and all self-sustaining machines can be perceived as alive.