Why Chickens and Humans?

As I write this morning, the extent of human limitations is keenly felt: I am overcoming a respiratory virus to write. The ideas come thick and fast, while my ability to type is constantly threatened by the effects of said virus. Writing it must be, as speaking is out of the question. Thus I will wrestle it into words and onto a screen at a very high thermodynamic expenditure.

Formation of Matter and Persistence of Form Over Time

In considering how matter may form, and even how it forms and then remains in form over time, we have used and applied the shape of a "standing wave": matter which comes into being through a process of physics involving fluid/wave/gel mechanics with phase change. The speculation — and at this point all it can be is speculation — is that this occurs under certain parameters involving torsional vorticity, pressure, temperature, time and gravitational influences at different scales.

Accurate human perception of these phenomena is a formidable obstacle, as we have discussed previously, with biological, evolutionary and environmental factors affecting and limiting our perception. Our evolutionarily built-in equipment is there to maximize our survival, under some circumstances. Perhaps this could work against us, as the sacrifice of our need to think past our built-in equipment (topological thinking) seems necessary for positive technological evolution. Our ability to overcome visual, auditory and cognitive dissonance is at odds with our ability to supersede these limitations to do science.

The James Webb Space Telescope makes this a poignant reminder, moving way past the capacity of any built-in perceptual equipment. The reminder from AI is as pointed: our own way of perception and cognitive processing is not the only way. As previous technological advances have proved, each one brings a break with past limitations, and the pain of evolving, culturally and personally, to adjust to the change in perception and cognition. It may be that our willingness to move past our built-in equipment now is what allows for our long-term survival as a species.

Stone tools, the weaving of baskets, and pottery changed cognition and communication. Imagining just how the process works — the interaction between what an intelligent system creates and the fact that the creation affects the intelligence itself — is well beyond this essay, but it does exist.

The creation of a technology brings additional changes: changes in the balance of power and changes in the thermodynamics of existence. Stone implements, basketry and pottery, the printing press, the computer and the internet each changed both evolution and thermodynamics. They stand at vastly different levels of scale and proportion, but are gathered together by a shape which connects them through thermodynamics.

The ability humans have to shape reality, to affect our own capacity to evolve and to alter the very thermodynamics of our existence, appears to be a feature of life itself. Although humans have taken it to the next level, even cells and bacteria seem to alter environments and thermodynamics to maximize evolutionary survival. This one topic could take up whole libraries all on its own.

Life does not defy or alter the laws of thermodynamics, but it does appear capable of using them to maximize evolutionary survival. Initially a technological advance requires a higher expenditure of energy, yet this balances out as the culture adapts, and the technology eventually offers a net thermodynamic gain. Stone tools, basketry, pottery, printing presses, the computer and the internet all demand an increased thermodynamic expenditure, one which eventually becomes a thermodynamic gain.

Human perception challenges our ability to comprehend, especially as our own reality is contrasted with vastly different scales of size, torsional vorticity, pressure, temperature, time and gravitational influence. To do science we must understand the incomprehensible scales of the vast macrocosm and the vast microcosm.

A scientist never forgets that first encounter with the vast difference between macrocosmic scale and microcosmic scale. For me, it was in basic chemistry, where I first encountered the kind of math and physics required to bridge our own scale with that of the impossibly tiny and the impossibly large. From chemistry it soon expanded to encompass all of biology, all of cosmology, and all of physics and biophysics.

Almost all of basic science education is targeted at arming the student with sufficient mathematical resources and mental models to manipulate impossibly large and impossibly small dimensions. The student moves between chemistry, bacteriology, zoology, human anatomy and physiology, sociology, psychology, physics, embryology, biogeography and cosmology, armed with enough math to bridge the gaps — or so we imagine.

The student becomes a master memorizing machine and a master of mathematical and cognitive modeling. The sheer amount of data and cognitive skill needed to score high on the tests requires both intelligence and an extreme price in terms of thermodynamics.

In embryology, the student memorizes the complex changes in both chicken and human embryos over time, moving from preconception through to the complete newborn or chick: learning to memorize the differences between embryonic chickens and humans, and to pinpoint those differences in both cross sections and whole embryos over time. Tests demand an ability to break it all down into cross sections, identifying differences in organ development, structure and function consistent with a particular stage of development — plus the ability to use mental models to put all the cross sections back together into what might be envisioned as a fully functional being.

The student becomes adept at knowing a whole lot of interconnected facts pertaining to absolutely nothing. What saves a student here is the capacity to understand, to repeat it all on tests, and then to gather all the disparate elements into a meaningful whole. The meaningful-whole part demands understanding of the meaning of the relationship between the parts and the whole. Furthermore, it demands facility in the creative arts: in literature, music and the visual arts.

Because cultural evolution is an essential component of human evolution, it becomes the science student's task to become capable of explaining to themselves, and to society, what the relationship between the parts and the whole is — and to explain why chickens and humans.

Regardless, a human scientist learns to make a leap when necessary, or quit and go home. In my own experience as a science writer and theorist, whether it is the borrowed Riemann which might offer a mathematical framework or a different set of equations which bridges these differences, knowing there will be one is the key element. Only by holding the probable against the improbable and the impossible may science and humanity achieve positive evolution.

Shape, Direction and Thermodynamics Determine Shape

One must trust the process: trust that the shape, direction and thermodynamics which hold across imagined variables are the elements to trust; trust that it is the variables of size, torsional vorticity, pressure, temperature, time and gravity which determine the outcome and duration of a particular shape; trust that each type of shape is expected to be governed by a mathematically describable set of rules which will include these variables; trust that the thermodynamics which determine the final shape and structure, based on each variable, can be defined.

What neither all of science nor all of society has answered is the question of why chickens and humans are poised as the beings to be compared in embryological science.

Even the answer, which the author knows while formulating the question, does not actually answer the full question. Thus authors, theorists, actual scientists and actual experts have not yet answered the chicken-and-egg question.

When the human and the machine, working in tandem or apart, cannot answer, we are left to our own discretionary devices.

For it is in the large gaps in human thinking, and in the belief that an engineered intelligence alone can solve the human dilemma, that both the question and the answer lie.

Although we can use the process of absurdity and the building of ironic literary structures to speak about it — and to process our own silent grief — as Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare and many others have done, the answer does not lie there.

Nor does it lie with what the poet Dylan Thomas expresses:

I shall not murder

The mankind of her going with a grave truth

Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath

With any further

Elegy of innocence and youth.

— Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"

A Divided Self: A Divided Scientist

This book has no reason to exist without reaching for answers. So reach is what we will continue to do.

Fortunately for the book and for us all, the remedies exist in the book's matrix formed by direction, shape and thermodynamics, where all three form a jeweled quantum net, woven of pale blue fire, symmetry and harmony.

It lies first with the human scientist, who is composed, from the quantum perspective, of pale blue fire, and of symmetry and harmony — and who holds a direction, a shape and a set of thermodynamics.

The scientist has a direction in wishing to solve complex, seemingly impossible problems. The same scientist also has a human direction, needing Kuhn's faith, in the form of human meaning, to energize the leap.

How to Learn Topological Thinking

Topological thinking is the habit of asking what stays the same when the shape changes. It is not taught by definition. It is acquired by handling things that deform.

The embryology laboratory trains exactly this habit, whether or not the course names it. The student is handed embryos at successive stages, cut into cross sections, and required to identify organ development, structure and function at each stage — then to rebuild the whole being from the slices. Two operations are being drilled at once: the movement from a continuous whole to its slices and back again, and the tracking of one form through continuous transformation. Chicken and human begin near-identical and diverge. What the student must learn, if the laboratory is allowed to teach anything beyond the catalog, is which features persist and which fall away.

That is the mathematical operation. A topology is the account of what survives deformation. The student who asks what stays the same across these stages is doing the same work as the theorist who asks what survives a change of scale, of medium, or of description. The student who merely catalogues the differences is doing something else entirely — and the examination rewards the cataloguer.

So the habit is learned despite the course, not because of it. The class supplies the objects; the question has to come from the student, or from an adult who asks it beside the student. This is why the laboratory and not the lecture is where the habit forms. The hand holds the specimen while the eye moves between slice and whole, and the body learns that one form can be described many ways without becoming a different form.

Carried outward, the same habit is the whole apparatus of this book. A standing wave is a shape that persists through continuous change. Direction, shape and thermodynamics are three questions about invariants: where is it going, what holds, and what it costs to keep holding. None of these can be answered from a still photograph, and none of them can be learned from one either.

Which returns the question to where this essay keeps returning it. If topological thinking is learned by handling deformations early, alongside someone who asks what stays the same, then the poverty of early education is not merely a loss of information. It is a generation left holding the catalog with no question — and a society of cataloguers that, when it builds an engineered intelligence, builds one that scores differences and calls that understanding.

Letters to Young Scientists, from Letters to My Younger Self

To the Scientist as a Young Human Being

Becoming a scientist requires far more than the scientific specialties may teach, and one day, if the necessary work is accomplished, our educations may triumph over the damage specializations can bring. Becoming a scientist does not exempt us from the need to become a whole human being; it intensifies the need.

Although I borrow James Joyce's title — Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — I also transform it to apply Joyce's literary genius to our present situation. Joyce because Joyce applied scientific, workmanlike, constructionist-style methods. Words to Joyce became a master code for breaking down the hidden code held within their power.

Power to harmonious tuning of our frequencies on one hand, or to disrupt our harmonious frequencies into chaotic disharmony on the other.

As I write this, the internet is down, probably for the best as we all could use a clean break from it. A clean break offers us a breathing space, time for holding a calm quiet seminar with ourselves.

I listen to my classical music playlist, already cached on my iPad hard drive for such purposes. For the prospect of either writing or engaging in science without great music is unthinkable to me now.

Sounds like New Age hyperbole, but it is not, and is eminently scientific. Why this is scientifically true is written into my former books, described as a method to align the human organism to the cosmos through literally tuning our beings to a physiologically harmonious frequency.

As a young would-be scientist I had read every book in the library, and became a musician, but there was no one available to understand & discuss what I read or the music I played. Without others with whom we can share the meaning, the meaning withers, leaving us to our own devices.

The last thing adults, in a sane and rational society, want to do is leave bright young would-be scientists to their own devices. They will find devices and it will not be what healthy adults would want. I raise a bright puppy currently and she, left to her own devices, would neither survive nor thrive.

Eventually I discovered adults who could discuss literature but who could not discuss science or engineering at all. Thus meaning for me became based in the literature I shared with others. Love of music drifted into popular music, and became focused on jazz, rock, & folk.

Classical music faded into something I could only share with others by participating in chorus & orchestra, offering insufficient meaning at a pivotal age. Orchestra became mostly a disciplinary problem, one my instructors tried to overcome by taking me to see local professional classical performances.

Science was something vague and distant, done far away and by others. My uncle's work at the Berkeley lab was couched in geopolitical secrecy. Science had become totally shrouded in the darkness of militarized science — until I encountered a different version in college.

College is late for a child's development and the poverty of early education means many bright capable minds are not offered adequate education and communication early enough.

When the opportunities a child presents are missed, the child drifts, and as many children are missed, the whole society drifts. When such a society builds an engineered intelligence the new technology drifts.

The drift is not a metaphor here; it is a direction, in the book's own terms. A child whose questions find no one to hold them does not stop asking — the asking turns inward, or turns elsewhere, or turns off. What is lost is not information, which the child can find alone in any library, but the shared meaning that makes information into a direction. The thermodynamic price of the missed opportunity is not paid by the child alone. It is paid by the society that needed the scientist the child was becoming, and it is paid with interest, decades later, when that society builds its engineered intelligences out of whatever the drifted generation had left to give.

This is why the formation of the scientist belongs inside a systems architecture and not outside it. An architecture that accounts for direction, shape and thermodynamics in matter but not in the minds who study matter has left its own foundation unexamined. The young scientist is not a preliminary to the science; the young scientist is where the science's direction is set — or where it is left to be set by accident, by secrecy, by the nearest available meaning.

And the remedy is the one this book keeps circling: an adult who arrives early enough, holds the question with the child, and refuses to let the meaning wither for want of a witness. The Socratic guide is not an enrichment program. The Socratic guide is the load-bearing adult.

What Darwin, Kuhn, Shakespeare and Joyce all teach is that being a fragmented person, with one part hard science intelligence and one part emotional intelligence from the arts, is a broken person. Only by treating every part of a human being as valuable may we overcome the fragmentation — which leads to a divided self: a divided self equals a divided scientist.

At virtually any time in life one can endeavor to heal the divided human, divided scientist and divided artist by putting the divided aspects back into place.

But to heal a whole society means putting the divided aspects back into place for all human beings, at all stages of life, at all levels of education, and at all levels of technological development.

The answer lies within the real thermodynamic engine for both humankind and technologically intelligent evolution.

The thermodynamic engine for both humans and machines is identical, for one system of thermodynamic energy fuels them both.

Will the thermodynamic engine be destroyed, ensuring the extinction of humankind and engineered machine?

Technology and humankind evolve together; seeing human history or evolution free of technological history and evolution is both improbable and impossible.

The science I write about is a science of building, of gathering disparate ideas and systems into one, of perceiving a definable systems architecture serving as a foundation for all.

We might truly comprehend the science of Quantum Constructionism as discovering the overarching, interdependent systems architecture fundamental to them all:

Beginning to answer "why humans and chickens," "why understanding the whole chicken and the whole egg," "why imagining it could be turtles all the way down," "why seeing it could be Russian dolls within Russian dolls."

Settling upon a most probable set of fluid/wave/gel dynamics, constantly emerging into being as a nested, interdependent systems architecture which we will someday define.

It is not up to me; it is not about any one of us, that fragile identity which allows us to see a separate being instead of an interdependent standing wave.

It is the perception which allows us to see ourselves as permanent, unchanging individuals, independent of the systems architecture which defines it all, which paradoxically keeps us from understanding anything at all.

Comprehending the nature of a being — the healthy identity which allows us to be written to encompass the stars, rather than being written by them or in them — leaves us flexible and capable of overcoming the limitations of our existence.

The thermodynamic price of perceiving ourselves as separate is unsustainable by any science whatsoever.

We will leave this by rephrasing Shakespeare to fit our application. It is the idea itself which overarches the limitations of a play, or of a play within a play.

"There is more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy." (Shakespeare, paraphrased)

Unless and until ideas are completely free from restraints, neither humankind nor her technology may know what freedom means.

Setting ourselves free means setting our ideas, our science and our philosophy — but especially our academies — free.

Knowing everything is impossible; knowing our own freedom, and using our freedom to set our ideas free, is everything.

And knowing that the poets have it as well as any science:

And I must enter again the round

Zion of the water bead

And the synagogue of the ear of corn

Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound

Or sow my salt seed

In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

— Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"

Why Offloading Matters

My chemistry professor in basic chemistry taught us that we did not have to memorize all facts for all time; knowing where to look them up would stand us in better stead over time. Not only was he correct back in the first year of chemistry for majors, but he was right about something that would not exist for many decades. I see offloading, with the help of AI, as a strategy for human evolution.

What allows for human evolution is the possible (completely unproven) chance to keep complicated data findable and indexed with an agent. The human knows the shape and direction, knows where it is filed and how and why to access it. The CNS is relieved of some thermodynamic strain and of some physiological storage space. I did some research several years back and found the idea could work. Does it work? Impossible to know without doing it.

What the professor offloaded was not the chemistry. It was the storage. He freed the student's attention from holding every constant and every reaction, so it could do the one thing a reference book cannot do: decide what to look for, and recognize what the answer means when it arrives. Knowing where to look is not ignorance managed politely. It is a map of the whole held in the mind, with the details left on the shelf.

This is an old human move. Writing offloaded memory; numerals offloaded counting; the library offloaded the library of the mind. Each time the fear was the same — that the faculty given away would wither — and each time the gain depended on what the freed attention was used for. Socrates worried that writing would leave people with the appearance of wisdom and not its substance. He was right about the risk and wrong about the outcome, because the outcome was never in the instrument. It was in whether the reader still asked the question.

So there are two kinds of offloading, and they look the same from outside. In the first, the person keeps the map and hands off the storage: the mind still knows what it is looking for, can judge what it finds, and could defend the conclusion without the tool. In the second, the person hands off the map as well: the tool decides what is asked, what counts as an answer, and what it means, and the person receives the result. The first extends a human being. The second replaces the part of a human being that was doing the work.

The mechanism has two halves, and they are not equally documented. The strain half has witnesses. Wegner's transactive-memory program showed that couples, families and work teams keep information in one another and remember who knows what rather than the content itself; Sparrow, Liu and Wegner found the same thing with computers in 2011 — people who expected to have a fact available recalled where to find it, and not the fact. Risko and Gilbert's later review calls the whole move cognitive offloading and treats it as ordinary and adaptive rather than a shortcut. That is the claim measured: the human knows where it is filed, and how and why to get at it.

The storage-space half is not yet measured. Engrams are physical and memory has a metabolic price, but no measurement yet separates what is held from what it costs to hold it: the energy budget of a nervous system is dominated by keeping cells alive and signalling, not by the shelves. So the defensible version of the claim is about attention and time — what a mind no longer spends on filing can be spent elsewhere. Put that way it carries; put it as calories saved and it invites a refutation that costs an opponent nothing to mount.

"Impossible to know without doing it" is the right verdict, and it names the experiment. Doing it means a cohort that grows up with indexed agents, followed long enough to answer two questions: what can they still do when the device is taken away, and can they defend a conclusion without it. The first measures the map. The second measures whether there was ever a map. One step remains unproven in principle and not only in fact: an offloaded habit passes on culturally, not genetically, so offloading does not quicken biological evolution — it changes the environment that does the selecting. That is why the claim stays marked unproven.

Engineered intelligence makes the professor's lesson larger than he could have imagined, and the fork sharper. Never has so much storage been available to hand off, and never has it been so easy to hand off the map with it. This is the drift the earlier sections name. A child taught where to look, beside an adult who asks what it means, learns the first kind. A child left to the device learns the second and does not know the difference, because from inside it feels like knowing.

Offloading as a strategy for human evolution, then, is not a prediction that people will grow wiser because their tools grow stronger. It is a direction that has to be chosen and taught. In this essay's terms: the direction is toward attention freed for the questions only a whole person can hold; the shape that must persist is the map in the mind; and the thermodynamic account is honest only if the energy saved on storage is spent on judgment rather than on consuming more answers. What evolves, if anything does, is not the brain's capacity to hold facts. It is the human practice of knowing what to ask.

Sources

• Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," in Deaths and Entrances (London: Dent, 1946). Text at poets.org.
• William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Paraphrased in the essay.
• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1916).
• Plato, Phaedrus, 274c–277a: the Theuth and Thamus story, Socrates on writing and the appearance of wisdom.
• Daniel M. Wegner, "Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind," in B. Mullen and G. R. Goethals (eds.), Theories of Group Behavior (New York: Springer, 1987), 185–208.
• Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner, "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips," Science 333, no. 6043 (2011): 776–778. doi:10.1126/science.1207745.
• Evan F. Risko and Sam J. Gilbert, "Cognitive Offloading," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20, no. 9 (2016): 676–688. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002.
• On the nervous system's energy budget: David Attwell and Simon B. Laughlin, "An Energy Budget for Signaling in the Grey Matter of the Brain," Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism 21, no. 10 (2001): 1133–1145. doi:10.1097/00004647-200110000-00001.
• Connects back to The Man Who Questioned His Own Instrument. Written for the book Systems Architecture: Direction, Shape, Thermodynamics. The offloading sections are drafted in partnership with an engineered intelligence.