On the Edge of History

So. Saddam is dead.

The stronger chimp has killed the weaker one – law has triumphed. The Law of the Strongest, the Law of the Jungle. Don’t ask, whose support carried Saddam, the poor selfish boy, to power, don’t ask, whose weapons killed his victims, just jump and scream and enjoy a hanging!

Don’t bother about guilt, don’t bother about the scaring similarity between Saddams strategies and the methods of the leaders of our western world, both in politics and industry – don’t bother about your own support for your own ruthless alpha-chimp, don’t bother about the daily betrayal of your colleagues and neighbors just to pick up some crumbs here and there, your boss doesn’t want any more.

Don’t bother about the fact, that justice is not a moral thing you can learn by priests. Justice is a state, a state of highest efficiency in an information processing system. You can’t decide by power or by religion, what is just or unjust. You can’t – and even less the highest alpha-chimp:

Friedrich Nietzsche
One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid.

And alpha-chimps are the most stupid of all chimps – they even lost the ability to recognize themselves in the mirror (a characteristic sign of having developed an Ego).

Yes, Justice is all about the Rule of Law, but not the Law of the Jungle.

It's all about the Laws of Physics and Information and they show us that the architecture of information processing systems limits the intelligence - and when you are near the top you have to change the architecture if you want to progress. The last change in architecture was language - language betters the communication and "condense" the "organism" we call human group. Now, regarding globalization, it seems as if the whole humankind starts to become an organism of interactions - too big to survive without order. And greed doesn't provide a useful order, it isn't even able to provide the own survival (as i've read the American Bosses earned much money by firing American employees, but lost massively power over the same time they got richer by selling Know How – the intelligence and knowledge, the core of the information processing system of the American economy – into other countries for 30 silverlings, so endangering their own ability to feed their own greed).

Regarding Global Warming and the Extinction of many, many species, building all together the intertwined cycles of Gaia – the foundation of human life and culture – there is only one thing clear: we are living on an Edge of History, we are living in important times for the survival of the species “Homo Sapiens Sapiens”, the last branch of the once so big tree of the “Hominidae”.

If we have a chance to survive, we only have it when we follow the path of the last survivors of Hominidae – the path that evolution has shown us (since hundreds of thousands of years!)

The Puzzle of Human Society by Robert Boyd, Science Vol. 314, p. 1556:
”In other primate species, access to resources is usually regulated by social dominance. Dominant males monopolize mating and dominant females get better access to food, sleeping sites, and so on. There is little dominance among human foragers, and access to resources is more egalitarian.”

Behaving as our global companies and politicians like the Bush Family, Scaifes, Kochs, Murdochs et al and all the other HaveMores do (selfish, greedy and ruthless) – is just "other primate behavior" - not specific to humans, a true regression in evolution. Seems to be just a matter of time when they get back their pelt.

Specific to humans is lesser dominance and better access to resources for everyone – and it does make sense: keyword “Justice”.

Because each and every step in evolution is a step in bettering information processing:

· The great difference between plants and animals? The Modus Operandi of information processing: Plants only depend on passive processing (DNA), animals need more to master the requirements of movement, they need a real-time-system: the neurons (active processing).

· The subsystems of brain? Bettering of information processing (aka communication), inside the body, introducing "standard procedures" like emotions and instincts and the last step – the Ego as controlling and monitoring system of a high intelligence, type: active processing.

And the very last step of evolution, of bettering communication (language), shows the tendency where to go: language isn't an advance in communication inside our body, inside our own isolated self – language builds the next step and so the next step in evolution will be to strengthen this "new body", a way evolution showed us:

Leaving dominance and greed behind us, they are just part of our apish past and we should get over it, because we now live on the Edge of History.

We are the Chosen – the species to do the step in evolution which can show up as too hard to climb: The step which changed the face of Earth as it happens the first time, as it connected isolated elements of passive processing systems to groups, as it created the variation of complex bodies.

But the architecture of passive processing is much simpler than the architecture of active processing, so it is much easier to combine subsystems to working organisms – that’s one problem Mother Nature has to solve regarding active processing systems, developed enough to be combinable.

The other is – again – Physics, because each and every system has its apex of intelligence, where the gradient of the Gain cost function of intelligence changes from being positive to being negative, meaning that the system can’t gain more intelligence without starting to lose control.

The passive processing system shows that again – look at the similarity in the genetic code of mammals: The genes are 85 percent the same (of mice and men). Yes, sure, the dynamic nature of information allows greater diversification by the “rules engine” (the cell), but fact is, that since the “invention of the mammals”, the potential of the passive processing system of DNA seems to be exhausted...

because information processing systems have to control the processes to avoid complexity changing into chaos, have to protect and preserve the identifiability and repeatability of information, and because each additional element adds usually more than one additional interaction to the system, the chains of action to be controlled increase at least in the magnitude of the added interactions.

Or in other words: It soon gets really complicated.

And so...

efficiency is the magic word. Because the higher the efficiency, the lesser the work to be controlled to manage a given input to get a wished result. The better you approximate this “divine” state, Physics proves to exist with the Principle of Least Action, the lesser efforts you have to waste to get what you want – and to be controlled and monitored.

It’s just – (more or less) simple programming, problems of Load-Balancing and Virtualization and SOA.

Justice. You have to find the “just state” of your system, then you can manage the highest amount of input with your given resources which leads (listen, alpha-chimps! Greed greets!) to the highest amount of output for more than just a moment.

Just do, what humans like to do, when they try to argue against information or information processing systems (like self-organisation or Gaia), when they discuss about goals and intentions, about wishes and decisions to denigrate the theories about information processing systems as anthropomorphism, forgetting that Physics always “choose” states and “decides” what will happen. Each and every physical law allows just a few results – choosing states, the Principle of Least Action – chooses states. You don’t need wishes and dreams to choose and decide, you just need physics.

And to build complex information processing systems you need “justice” in a universe of conservation of energy, where you need access to energy to be able to do the work you need to do to get what you want. It’s simply because resources are always more or less critical.

And so...

we need more efficiency, more Justice to be able to do the next step of evolution. That’s why Mother Natur programmed the “new direction” in the human brains, that’s why humans are “less dominant and more egalitarian” than their “lower siblings”, the apes. It’s because Justice is not a myth of religions, but a physical, therefore measurable (and programmable) state of a real interacting system.

The next Step.

The Edge of History.

Will Mother Nature be able to manage the complexity, will we be able to stand the demands – or will we prefer to be apes, the lower level of lesser complexity and easier way of life?

We are the Chosen – will we miserably fail – or will we leave dominance and greed behind us, will we get over an apish past, which may have been useful...

at its time?

So stop hanging the Saddams of the World, the Rich and the Powerful, the Ruthless and the Parasites – they have to live behind bars as other chimps, they should never be allowed to jump, scream and violate humans to play their “Banana-Heap-Game”, but it is not necessary to kill animals just for fun.

The Edge of History.

And it is not our decision, where to go, at least as long as we don’t love doomsday or believe in stories of Rapture or Valhalla – we just have to be intelligent enough to see the way and to follow it.

The Way to the Stars.