Deutsch: "it is not living matter but knowledge-bearing [information encoding] matter that is physically special. Within one universe it looks irregular; across universes it has a regular structure, like a crystal in the mulitverse." [Fabric of Reality, p. 190]
Consider the putative strategy 'rigorously truthful.' I want to talk about the prospects for this strategy in today's networked information economy, out of which has emerged a robust physical substrate that is something new under the sun. The play of strategies is an information processing game. Information processing is a physical process. What can we learn about the prospects of the rigorously truthful strategy as it courses through this new physical information processing substrate?
We are masters at drawing conclusions from incomplete information. We are constantly observing the world and then making predictions and drawing conclusions about it. We never have enough information to completely justify the conclusions we draw. Being able to act on guesses and hunches, and act confidently when the information we have points somewhere but does not constitute a proof is a big part of what makes human beings such a successful species.
But this ability comes at a heavy price, which is that we easily fool ourselves. We fool ourselves individually and en masse. The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. We are also easily fooled by others. Lying persists as a strategy because it is so effective. It is, after all, only because we are built to come to conclusions from incomplete information that we are so vulnerable to lies.
Our basic stance has to be one of trust, for if we required proof of everything, we would never believe anything. Without the ability to trust, we would be solitary animals. For the rigorously truthful community to survive, therefore, there must be mechanisms of correction, to resolve disputes and reconcile differences of opinion. Such mechanisms require that errors be uncovered and new solutions to intractable problems be allowed to replace older ones.
The rigorously truthful community shares the optimistic belief that as a society we can practice such correctives, enabling widespread trust, out of which will continue to emerge progressively more powerful non-zero-sum dynamics. [cf. Wright, Nonzero p. 5]
paraphrasing Smolin, The Trouble with Physics 299-301; see also.
So what kind of correctives does this community practice? I paraphrase Professor Smolin's description. Conceive of this description as an articulation of the local rules characterizing the behavior of individual actors iterating on existing physical substrates (the game boards of game theory). It is an algorithm, a program, which must be “run” on physical information processing substrates. And keep in mind the main idea, which is that the networked information society is a wonderful and entirely new kind of game board, potentially highly conducive to the success of the rigorously truthful algorithm.
Rigorously Truthful
By which I mean, the community defined and maintained by adherence to the following shared ethic, as rigorously as possible, at every juncture:
If an issue can be decided by people of good faith, applying rational argument to publicly available evidence, then it must be regarded as so decided.
When we are forced to reach a consensus by the evidence, we should do so.
If, on the other hand, rational argument from the publicly available evidence does not succeed in bringing people of good faith to agreement on an issue, society must allow and even encourage people to draw diverse conclusions.
i.e., Until the evidence forces consensus, we should encourage a wide diversity of viewpoints, which will prevent us from getting stuck in intellectual traps for too long.
Let us examine some of the implications of these two tenets:
We agree to argue rationally, and in good faith, from shared evidence, to whatever degree of shared conclusions are warranted. Consider:
The collecting, cataloging, and sharing of evidence is vastly more efficient (and egalitarian) than ever before in human history. Quoting Professor Benkler (The Wealth of Networks):
We are seeing the emergence of filtering, accreditation, and synthesis mechanisms as part of network behavior. These rely on clustering of communities of interest and association ... but offer tremendous redundancy of paths for expression and accreditation. These practices leave no single point of failure for discourse: no single point where observations can be squelched or attention commanded – by fiat or with the application of money. Because of these emerging systems, the networked information economy is solving the information overload and discourse fragmentation concerns without introducing the distortions of the mass-media model. Peer production ... is providing some of the most important functionalities of the media. These efforts provide a watchdog, a source of salient observations regarding matters of public concern, and a platform for discussing the alternatives open to a polity. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 271-72]
In the networked information environment, everyone is free to observe, report, question, and debate, not only in principle, but in actual capability.... We are witnessing a fundamental change in how individuals can interact ... and experience their role as citizens. Ideal citizens ... are now participants in a conversation. [Agendas] thus can be rooted in the life and experience of individual participants in a society – in their observations, experiences, and obsessions. The network allows all citizens to change their relationship to the public sphere. They no longer need to be consumers and passive spectators. They can become creators and primary subjects. It is in this sense that the Internet democratizes. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 272]
The networked public sphere provides an effective nonmarket alternative for intake, filtering, and synthesis outside the market-based mass media. This nonmarket alternative can attenuate the influence over the public sphere that can be achieved through control over, or purchase of control over, the mass media. It offers a substantially broader capture basin to be filtered, synthesized, and made part of polity-wide discourse. The nested structure of clusters of communities of interest, typified by steadily increasing visibility of superstar nodes, allows for both the filtering and salience to climb up the hierarchy of clusters, but offers sufficient redundant paths and interlinking to avoid the creation of a small set of points of control where power can be either directly exercised or bought. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 260]
While there is enormous diversity on the Internet, there are also mechanisms and practices that generate a common set of themes, concerns, and public knowledge around which a public sphere can emerge. Any given site is likely to be within a very small number of clicks away from a site that is visible from a very large number of other sites, and these form a backbone of common materials, observations, and concerns. ... Users self-organize to filter the universe of information that is generated in the network. This self-organization includes a number of highly salient sites that provide a core of common social and cultural experiences and knowledge that can provide the basis for a common public sphere, rather than a fragmented one. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks 256].
Benkler uses the 'backbone' metaphor repeatedly:
Sites cluster around communities of interest .... In each of these clusters, the pattern of some high visibility nodes continues, but as the clusters become small enough, many more of the sites are moderately linked to each other in the cluster. Through this pattern, the network seems to be forming into an attention backbone. [WN p. 12]
[A]s the clusters get small enough, the obscurity of sites participating in the cluster diminishes, while the visibility of the superstars remains high, forming a filtering and transmission backbone for universal intake and local filtering. [WN p. 248]
... a thematically defined navigational backbone. [WN p. 250]
Th[e] body of literature on network science suggests a model for how order has emerged on the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the blogosphere. The networked public sphere allows hundreds of millions of people to publish whatever and whenever they please without disintegrating into an unusable cacophony, as the first-generation critics argued, and it filters and focuses attention without re-creating the highly concentrated model of the mass media that concerned the second-generation critique. .... Individuals and individual organizations cluster around topical, organizational, or other common features. At a sufficiently fine-grained degree of clustering, a substantial proportion of the clustered sites are moderately connected, and each can therefore be a point of intake that will effectively transmit observations or opinions within and among the users of that topical or interest-based cluster. Because even in small clusters the distribution of links still has a long tail, these smaller clusters still include high-visibility nodes. These relatively high-visibility nodes can serve as points of transfer to larger clusters, acting as an attention backbone that transmits information among clusters.... The small-worlds phenomenon means that individual users who travel a small number of different links from similar starting points within a cluster cover large portions of the Web and can find diverse sites. By then linking to them on their own web sites, or giving them to others by e-mail or blog post, sites provide multiple redundant paths open to many users to and from most statements on the Web.... The result is an ordered system of intake, filtering, and synthesis that can in theory emerge in networks generally, and empirically has been shown to have emerged on the Web. [WN p. 253-54]
Benkler was big on multiple redundancy, it seems (as am I)
This is what I mean by a new substrate for information processing. How else does this help the rigorously truthful community members to keep their agreement to argue rationally, and in good faith, from shared evidence, to whatever degree of shared conclusions are warranted?
physical remoteness promotes calm discourse
as does time remoteness, which enables (along with the enabling technologies) rich, hyperlinked multimedia communications
there exists in the world, now, a self-organizing, massively distributed collective that can enforce rationality and expose bad faith
Back to paraphrising Professor Smolin:
Each individual is free to develop his or her own conclusions from the evidence. But each individual is also required to put forward arguments for those conclusions for the consideration of the whole community. These arguments must be rational and based on evidence available to all members. The evidence, the means by which the evidence was obtained, and the logic of the arguments used to deduce conclusions from the evidence must be shared and open to examination by all members.
The ability of individuals to deduce reliable conclusions from the shared evidence is based on the mastery of tools and procedures developed over many years. They are taught because experience has shown that they often lead to reliable results. Every individual trained in such a craft should be deeply aware of the capacity for error and self-delusion. [cf. Taleb, The Black Swan; Fooled by Randomness]
At the same time, each member of the rigorously truthful community recognizes that the eventual goal is to establish consensus. A consensus may emerge quickly, or it may take some time. The ultimate judges are future members of the community, at a time sufficiently far in the future that they can better evaluate the evidence objectively. While an idea set may temporarily succeed in gathering adherents, no program, claim, or point of view can succeed in the long run unless it produces sufficient evidence to persuade the skeptics.
Membership in the rigorously truthful community is open to any sentient being, including all human beings. Considerations of status, age, gender, substrate, or any other personal characteristic may not play a role in the consideration of an individual's evidence and arguments, and may not limit a member's access to the means of dissemination of evidence, argument, and information.
While orthodoxies may become established here and there, the community recognizes that contrary opinions and idea sets are necessary for the community's continued health. The rigorously truthful community by definition is open to the future, leaving room for novelty and surprise. Members understand that the future will bring surprises, in the form of new discoveries and new crises to be overcome. Rather than placing faith in their present knowledge, members invest their hopes and expectations for the future in future generations, by passing along to them the ethical precepts and tools of thinking, individual and collective, that will enable them to overcome and take advantage of circumstances that are beyond the present powers of imagination.
[paraphrasing Smolin, The Trouble with Physics 301-05].
The rigorously truthful community stands in contrast to other communities, in which members come to agreement because they want to be liked or seen as brilliant by others, or because everyone they know thinks the same thing, or because they like to be on the winning team. Conventionally, most people have been tempted to agree with other people for motives such as these.
Members of the rigorously truthful community, at least the human members, are not entirely immune from these motives either. Adherence to the shared ethic is never perfect, so there is always room for improvement in the strategy. The task of formulating the rigorously truthful strategy may therefore never be finished. [Open to the future, I leave the question open.]
[paraphrasing Smolin, The Trouble with Physics 305].
But how much market share can it gain? Can it gain the upper hand and become the winner-take-effectively-all dominant strategy? Ice-9 the playing field?
Benkler stops short of the claim that the Internet inherently liberates:
[M]y claims on behalf of the networked information economy as a platform for the public sphere are not based on general claims about human nature, the meaning of liberal discourse, context-independent efficiency, or the benevolent nature of the technology we happen to have stumbled across at the end of the twentieth century. They are instead based on, and depend on the continued accuracy of, a description of the economics of fabrication of computers and network connections, and a description of the dynamics of linking in a network of connected nodes. As such, my claim is not that the Internet inherently liberates. I do not claim that commons-based production of information, knowledge, and culture will win out by some irresistible progressive force.
That is what makes the study of the political economy of information, knowledge, and culture in the networked environment directly relevant to policy. The literature on network topology suggests that, as long as there are widely distributed capabilities to publish, link, and advise others about what to read and link to, networks enable intrinsic processes that allow substantial ordering of the information. The pattern of information flow in such a network is more resistant to the application of control or influence than was the mass-media model.
But things can change. Google could become so powerful on the desktop, in the e-mail utility, and on the Web, that it will effectively become a supernode that will indeed raise the prospect of the reemergence of a mass-media model. Then the politics of search engines, as Lucas Introna and Helen Nissenbaum called it, become central.
The zeal to curb peer-to-peer file sharing of movies and music could lead to a substantial redesign of computing equipment and networks, to a degree that would make it harder for end users to exchange information of their own making. Understanding what we will lose if such changes indeed warp the topology of the network, and through it the basic structure of the networked public sphere, is precisely the object of this book as a whole.
[Benkler, WN pp. 260-61]
Bob Wright argues for such a force, an arrow of directionality to biological evolution and human history; a ladder of cultural evolution; a logic of human destiny. [Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.]
[Y]ou can capture history's basic trajectory by reference to a core pattern: New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential – that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. ... [o]n balance, over the long run, non-zero-sum situations produce more positive sums than negative sums, and more mutual benefit than parasitism. As a result, people become embedded in larger and richer webs of interdependence.... In short, both organic and human history involve the playing of ever-more-numerous, ever-larger, and ever-more-elaborate non-zero-sum games. It is the accumulation of these games – game upon game upon game – that constitutes the growth in biological and social complexity....
I like to refer to this accumulation as an accumulation of non-zero-sumness. Non-zero-sumness is a kind of potential – a potential for overall gain, or for overall loss, depending on how the game is played. ... Non-zero-sumness, I'll argue, is something whose ongoing growth and ongoing fulfillment define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web. ... Globalization, it seems to me, has been in the cards not just since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life. The current age, in which relations among nations grow more non-zero-sum year by year, is the natural outgrowth of several billion years of unfolding non-zero-sum logic.
[Nonzero pp. 5-7]
Anyway, the question of whether history's basic arrow will on balance make us freer or less free, will make our lives better or worse, is one I'll defer for now. I do think that in some respects history's basic direction makes human beings morally better, and will continue to do so. But that isn't the immediate point. The immediate point ... is that if we leave morality aside and talk about the objectively observable features of social reality, the direction of history is unmistakable. When you look beneath the roiled surface of human events, beyond the comings and goings of particular regimes, beyond the lives and deaths of the “great men” who have strutted on the stage of history, you see an arrow beginning tens of thousands of years ago and continuing to the present. And, looking ahead, you see where it is pointing.
Kurzweil: The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating. (Singularity p. 3).
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