December, 21

The longest night, the shortest day.

Apex of darkness.

Symbol of Hope.

Because the cycle of life heralds you the come back of light, of warmth, of fruitfulness and abundance, of joy and laughter.

Repeatability. Identifying Position. Information.

It doesn’t matter, if humans understand, if they prey to the God of Sun or of christmas.

On another blog i wrote – regarding the ongoing fight between faith and knowledge, between god and Darwin: “when the last child starves after the last needless war, when the last human bone will be burnt by the exploding sun and the last sun darkens in the fading universe, the quantum noise will create new physical laws and new universes and new life and new gods - depending on the rules of Darwin”.

It doesn’t matter, if humankind respects Darwin, the rules of evolution will be true forever. Why? Because each universe has to depend on information, irrespective of how the physical laws look like in that particular universe, irrespective of how many “bubble universes” (Andrei Linde) are created and how the value of Einsteins light speed is – yes, i guess, there will be a constant c in every universe. Why? Because information is strictly coherent action and the limitation of speed seems to be just a limitation to protect that coherence, to protect “information”. The EPR indicates, that higher “speed” exists – as long as just proto-information is “transported”. Less coherence action, limitless speed.

Action, the power behind each and every change of states, is the ever beating heart of the quantum noise – and whenever it is able to create physical laws it has to design them as repeatable: They always have to have the same results, if the preconditions are fulfilled. And the physical laws have to be identifiable, because that simply is the fact that they can be measured, checked and controlled.

Therefore, each and every universe created by and out of the quantum noise has to be a universe of information. And if it is able to build ongoing cycles of information, it will create life as passive information processing systems. And if it is able to build that cycles long-lasting enough, even active processing systems will arise – and in the end, there will be intelligence...

until...

the apex of the gain cost function of intelligence is reached – then either the evolution principles, described by an Englishman named Darwin whom no one remembers in a new universe, will work and develop a better information processing system...

or...

the last child will starve again after the last needless war.

Yin and Yang

You certainly know Yin and Yang, “the opposing forces of change in the universe”, but do you know that the cave painters developed the predecessor of the numerology holding the “2” in very high esteem?

While the 3 as time and the 4 as space is somewhat easy to understand, i had a hard time to comprehend the value of the Two. Oh yes, sure, i had pondered about the omnipresent 4, you cannot find only in the ancient cultures – did you ever realize, how often 4 basic types occur? Even Star Trek’s success may depend on the simple fact, that Kirk (the manager), Spock (the scientist), the Doc (the careful) and Scotty (the engineer) fit exactly into such a pattern: four basic complementary types, describing the whole set of human psyches, especially when they are used in combination (main type, second type) to map the variety of different persons. Actually, if you find descriptions using 3 or 5 or 6 “basic” types ask yourself, if those types really are complementary – and how to prove that.

(Main type, second type) = (x,y) – the description of a 2-dimensional space can be done by a coordinate plane, where you can accurately describe a single point of the infinity of mathematical points by its projections onto the coordinate axes. So the axes, a cross, gives you control over that set, with the “origin” as a well-defined position, from where you can build relations and maps, where you can create a “geometry”. And an axis can be described by its extremities - two “poles”, two opposing extremes tied together: Yin and Yang.

Now add to the static axis the permanent movement of life, the universe and the quantum noise – then you may understand why the “2” was sign of the gods in ancient Egypt, because you can see the “2” as symbol for the drive of the universe, the power behind time and space, creating waves rolling between the two poles, tending towards an equilibrium, behaving like a human body monitoring and controlling the variety of cyclic processes (->information) to stabilize the state “health”.

Information: repeatable, identifiable process, standing waves, describable by two states – inital state and end state, but despite the static nature of states mainly dynamic, mainly wave, mainly change, a fact, which is so hard to understand by modern scientists and so natural to the ancient philosophers: Yin and Yang, states in permanent interdependent change: “Each of these opposites produce the other”.

I guess, the ancient philosophers would also easily understand information and quantum physics, because they didn’t do the mistake to see the world as static.

Seems as if not every “progress” tends toward future.

Except maybe...

if the successors of the ancient cultures, the Asian people, move on doing the development for the information technology – because if they combine both, the IT and Yin and Yang – they will have no problems to define information like the western minds have, firmly cemented in the ancient Greek Philosophy of a stable Determinism, believing in static constancy instead of the driving force “information”.

Roots of Rites

Remember Fata Morgana? The “Great Lord of Soap” – a religion based on bathrooms?

We often think of the ancient people as Ape-men, dirty, hairy, uneducated, wildly jigging around a fire, inarticulately babbling, so only a few of us try to see sense in their actions. Therefore the cave paintings have to be superstition and the bathrooms should exist because of fear – of fear of the “Great Lord of Soap” who hates bad smelling people.

Every archaeologist has at least one bathroom in his/her house and i guess, none of them prays to the “Great Lord of Soap”, but the highly industrial nation of the Indus Valley should not have been able to appreciate the positive impact of personal hygiene on health? Why? Just because they lived in earlier times?

Slowly, but surely scientists rethink the bias against the ancient cultures. Part of the driving force was the speleologist Marie E.P. König, a prominent advocate of the rationality of the ancient people. She realized the overwhelming mass of geometric pictures and couldn’t believe that this should have been done just for the sake of “wildly jigging around fires”. Seeing beyond the surface she detected the pattern of numbers: 3 and 4. Since “three” was often found together with moon symbols, she concluded that “three” was an abbrevation for time.

Shortly and precisely describing the neverending course of time by the everchanging phases of the moon, they could use just three simple lines, easily to cut in wood or bone to store the idea of “time” – it’s not magic, it’s only writing.

Suddenly the flying antelope surrounded by three lines on top and bottom makes sense, because to “explain” time, what’s more descriptive than one of the fastest animals on Earth? Found on the so called “Bâton de commandement” of Gourdan, there is even more fascinating to observe here: placed above the antelope you see the head of a horse, symbol of souls, later on becoming symbol of the gods – what does that tell you? Temporal existence has to end, death is the inevitable way of life.

That’s the 3: symbol of time.

Now think of information: a coin with two sides, time and space – and yes, the 4 symbolizes space by the four ends of a cross, North and South, East and West, Before and After, Left and Right.

And now, sit down and admire the ancient people, because how would you describe “space”? Space with nothing inside, just pure space?

The “Bâton de commandement” of Gourdan used the 4 lines – and then just...

nothing, but subtle shades of lines to describe a base, a stage, on which objects can be located letting things happen.

The power of these symbols, the first proofs for writing, impressed people much and that’s not that un-understandable, i guess. However, because they didn’t understand it fully, they forgot the symbol and start to adore the surface, the picture, the number itself. That’s where numerology cames from, exactly as astrology derives from astronomy, which was needed for agriculture and navigation.

In fact, behind every weird tradition you can find a reasonable use creating the rite.

How the vanishing of usefulness works?

Because they didn’t use mathematics to describe their ideas – it’s as simple as that: only a precise description of preconditions and workflow is able to protect the information represented by the formula. If the ancient scientists had been able to tell us that the 3 is a substitute for a clear physical idea (like a Hamilton-Operator), a symbol for time as the sequential change of states with states as elements of space and space as the set of time-independent different realizations of a system (symbolized by the 4) and that time-independence can be measured and stored, numerology wouldn’t have had a chance to steal the importance of the symbols. The superficial surface wouldn’t have been able to “rewrite” the basic rules.

To show the inevitability of that U-Turn from physical driven usefulness to a mere rite without any sense left (under the condition of using formulas not as precise as mathematics) i’ll tell you the story of the “professor”.

The “professor” was a young, very clever chimp, observed in a behavioral experiment, i watched some years ago on TV. As usual, he lived in a community which was offered an apple – outside the fence. The clever young chimp managed to catch the apple using a tool: a stick. And he managed it all the time the apple was offered, for he knew what to do and when to do it.

After a while other members of the group noticed the doings of the “professor” and tried to copy him, the common way to learn, btw. But despite the fact, that the young chimp repeated his success on and on, many of the observing apes were not able to match him. They tried and tried, they used the stick, they tirelessly poked around the apple – alas, as hard as they tried, most of them failed.

The amazing result of the experiment?

The group developed a “rite” – the apes of the group poked with sticks outside the fence forever. They even did it without apple, after the human observer had stopped the experiment. Unimpressed, they moved on poking on and on.

If you don’t know anything about the human observer and the apple, you might be tempted to think they adore a “Great Lord of Sticks”, but no, they just wanted an apple to eat. And don’t laugh about the “stupid” apes, because the whole story of copying success-stories and therefore developing rites makes sense. Why? Remember how often they got apples? In a natural environment – without behavioral experiments – the apples would have been a proof for an apple-tree. That means, that sometimes there would be apples and sometimes there would be none. So fulfilling the rite the whole year through would be awarded in the next sommer and autumn, when the next apples would fall, even when you’re doing nonsense during the rest of the time.

Learning works because of the repeatability of information.

And learning works by mapping the time-independent states into a regular sequence – the more precise you map the states and the sequence (the mathematical way of describing information), the more uniquely the result will be, the better your formula works.

The less precise you describe, the more different results your formula delivers, the harder the repeatable rules (the information) behind the process can be seen, the more people tend to catch the superficial details without understanding the reasons.

The rite is born...

but the information lost.

Do you know Freud?

Freud? Siegmund Freud?

Sure you know.

But do you know the “Pleasure Principle”? Wikipedia tells you “Quite simply, the pleasure principle drives one to seek pleasure and to avoid pain”.

Yes, you know, too - so what?

Next question.

Do you know SOA? And here, Wikipedia tells you “SOAs comprise loosely coupled (joined), highly interoperable application services. These services interoperate based on a formal definition independent of the underlying platform / programming language.” and that a service is “(Ideally) a self-contained, stateless business function that accepts one or more requests and returns one or more responses through a well-defined, standard interface.” where stateless means “Not depending on any pre-existing condition. In a SOA, services should not depend on the condition of any other service. They receive all information needed to provide a response from the request. Given the statelessness of services, service consumers can sequence (orchestrate) them into numerous flows (sometimes referred to as pipelines) to perform application logic.”

Sounds well? Perfectly according to the definition of information – repeatability: clear initial state, a rule, uniquely leading to the corresponding clear end state – it is really fine.

Fine.

But not enough.

Consider this: “a well-defined, standard interface” and “They receive all information needed to provide a response from the request.”

All information needed...

can’t be that much if it can be provided only from the request, because how can the request do that – “provide all the information”? First with parameters, but to overload parameters is bad design. Next with key values leading to database-entries, so that the service can get what it needs by the database...

but wait. Does this fulfill the “well-defined, standard interface”? If the interface demands key values, sure, it fulfills this precondition. However, the next one (the request providing all needed information) becomes shady, because key values refer to databases and many records are tightly connected with each other – and sometimes records are changed, so the key value at time x may not lead to the same result as key value at time y: different states which lead to different behavior.

Btw: here you have the great difference between “Variables” and “Objects” or “simple” and “complex” components, because to protect information, every processing system has to control its states. Remember? Repeatability: Clear initial states, unique rules, clear end states – that’s information. If you lose control over your states, you can’t assure repeatability. And the easier your interface between response and request is, the more information has to be retrieved by the response itself. And the more information to be retrieved means the more Time Dependency you have. The precondition of “statelessness” fades away.

Dead-End-Components: A variable or a “simple component” is a service fulfilling all the demands of well-defined interfaces, no dependency of information except the one provided by the request – you can use it everywhere and everytime without problem. It’s called “dead end” since your command has no way as to come back to you.

But if you have a “complex component” (mighty class), depending on its own information retrieval, you must carefully analyze, where and when to use it (ML-method), because that’s the only way not to lose control over the current state on which the mighty class acts.

You are bored? Ok, wait a little.

Imagine a “complex component” with a really basic interface, which has to retrieve most of the needed information itself – and therefore is nearly independent of the request: the dream of the IT futurologists today. They tell us that the next computer(ized) generation will act like a good butler: always present in the background, never intruding, tirelessly anticipating and fulfilling your wishes.

But - how could you program entities like that which obeys your commands? Did you ever think about that?

Oh no, you can’t program “obey me” in the code as usually, because usually you code each decision yourself. However, we consider “mighty classes” with basic interfaces, which we can use to command them. We can send them not really much more. Therefore, your mighty class has to be able to retrieve most of the needed information itself – it simply must be able to decide, which information is needed. You only code the rules by which it decides, but no longer the real decision. That creates independence, kids.

The more the mighty class should do, the more intelligent it has to be - the less dependent on the “ruling middleware” it becomes. So how to be assured, that those perfect servants will never stop to decide as you want? Because to be able to decide it has to have “goals” to evaluate – and if your mighty class is really mighty, you can’t be sure to know each and every possible state it has to consider, so what to do to avoid Science-Fiction horrors of self-ruling computers?

Do you know Freud?

That’s the way how Mother Nature programmed her entities to fulfill what she wants (the survival of her kids). Each thing or event, which seems to support this goal, will be sweetened, each thing or event, which endangers this, will be embittered. Think of food: the high energetic sugar tastes “sweet”, foul meat smells awfully, winning makes you happy, losing makes you sad: Pleasure Principle.

It’s just a perfect strategy to convince your “mighty classes” to do what you want. Because punishment won’t work. Why?

Effective punishment has to do harm to an entity, which is able to feel sad about that harm.

Reminds me of a story my father told me about foreign workers from far away, “shepherds”, as he called them. He told me, that those people really beat their machines, if they didn’t work as they should. They treated the machines as they treated their wifes and children and goats and sheeps, because those feel the pain and obey in case they were beaten.

Machines don’t care about being beaten.

So punishment can only work, when the punished object can feel something like pain.

But feeling is a highly developed ability of brains, it’s a real sophisticated information processing system of retrieving and evaluating masses of information in real time.

Do you see now, why punishment can’t work? Because those feelings only make sense if they support the goal of the entity – to survive. That means that bad feelings are thought to push the entitities to defend themselves and that means, that they look for “workarounds” to bypass the punishment: “If you fool me once, shame on you - if you fool me twice, shame on me.”

So if you want to punish “effectively”, you either have to act like the “shepherd”(to take away the independence of your objects “wives, children, goats”) – or to punish harder and faster than the once punished can learn to evade.

Sounds like human culture, isn’t it? Dying Democracies giving space to totalitarian regimes.

May sound great for some wannabe-kings, but remember where we started: programming mighty classes you have to make them more independent, not less, simply because you want them to “serve like a good butler”, not like a brainless broom. You should try to make them faster learning, not hinder them, because the more independent and intelligent they are, the more they do themselves...

the less you have to do.

That would be fine. Just tell them “do this” or “do that” and they do.

And here we are again: what to do if they don’t obey? Punishment will not work, because maybe the first time you will succeed in harming them, but their fast learning mode will teach them how to detect and avoid a second time. Actually, you have to code like Mother Nature – you have to award them in case they do what you want, then they will be eager to obey you.

So here we are, back to the Pleasure Principle, the greatest act of programming mighty classes, both independent and powerful...

and obedient.

Great work, Mother Nature.