Introduction to Softwarephysics

Softwarephysics is a simulated science for the simulated Software Universe that we are all immersed in. It is an approach to software development, maintenance and support based on concepts from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology that I used on a daily basis for over 37 years as an IT professional. For those of you not in the business, IT is short for Information Technology, commercial computer science. I retired in December of 2016 at the age of 65, but since then I have remained an actively interested bystander following the evolution of software in our time. The original purpose of softwarephysics was to explain why IT was so difficult, to suggest possible remedies, and to provide a direction for thought. Since then softwarephysics has taken on a larger scope, as it became apparent that softwarephysics could also assist the physical sciences with some of the Big Problems that they are currently having difficulties with. So if you are an IT professional, general computer user, or simply an individual interested in computer science, physics, chemistry, biology, or geology then softwarephysics might be of interest to you, if not in an entirely serious manner, perhaps at least in an entertaining one.

The Origin of Softwarephysics
From 1975 – 1979, I was an exploration geophysicist exploring for oil, first with Shell, and then with Amoco. In 1979, I made a career change into IT, and spent about 20 years in development. For the last 17 years of my career, I was in IT operations, supporting middleware on WebSphere, JBoss, Tomcat, and ColdFusion. When I first transitioned into IT from geophysics, I figured that if you could apply physics to geology; why not apply physics to software? So like the exploration team at Amoco that I had just left, consisting of geologists, geophysicists, paleontologists, geochemists, and petrophysicists, I decided to take all the physics, chemistry, biology, and geology that I could muster and throw it at the problem of software. The basic idea was that many concepts in physics, chemistry, biology, and geology suggested to me that the IT community had accidentally created a pretty decent computer simulation of the physical Universe on a grand scale, a Software Universe so to speak, and that I could use this fantastic simulation in reverse, to better understand the behavior of commercial software, by comparing software to how things behaved in the physical Universe. Softwarephysics depicts software as a virtual substance, and relies on our understanding of the current theories in physics, chemistry, biology, and geology to help us model the nature of software behavior. So in physics we use software to simulate the behavior of the Universe, while in softwarephysics we use the Universe to simulate the behavior of software. Along these lines, we use the Equivalence Conjecture of Softwarephysics as an aid; it allows us to shift back and forth between the Software Universe and the physical Universe, and hopefully to learn something about one by examining the other:

The Equivalence Conjecture of Softwarephysics
Over the past 84 years, through the uncoordinated efforts of over 100 million independently acting programmers to provide the world with a global supply of software, the IT community has accidentally spent more than $75 trillion creating a computer simulation of the physical Universe on a grand scale – the Software Universe.

For more on the origin of softwarephysics please see Some Thoughts on the Origin of Softwarephysics and Its Application Beyond IT.

Logical Positivism and Effective Theories
Many IT professionals have a difficult time with softwarephysics because they think of physics as being limited to the study of real things like electrons and photons, and since software is not “real”, how can you possibly apply concepts from physics and the other sciences to software? To address this issue, softwarephysics draws heavily on two concepts from physics that have served physics quite well over the past century – the concept of logical positivism and the concept of effective theories. This was not always the case. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, physicists mistakenly thought that they were actually discovering the fundamental laws of the Universe, which they thought were based on real tangible things like particles, waves, and fields. Classical Newtonian mechanics (1687), thermodynamics (1850), and classical electrodynamics (1864) did a wonderful job of describing the everyday world at the close of the 19th century, but early in the 20th century it became apparent that the models on which these very successful theories were based did not work very well for small things like atoms or for objects moving at high velocities or in strong gravitational fields. This provoked a rather profound philosophical crisis within physics at the turn of the century, as physicists worried that perhaps 300 years of work was about to go down the drain. The problem was that classical physicists confused their models of reality with reality itself, and when their classical models began to falter, their confidence in physics began to falter as well. This philosophical crisis was resolved with the adoption of the concepts of logical positivism and some new effective theories in physics. Quantum mechanics (1926) was developed for small things like atoms, the special theory of relativity (1905) was developed for objects moving at high velocities and the general theory of relativity (1915) was developed for objects moving in strong gravitational fields.

Logical positivism, usually abbreviated simply to positivism, is an enhanced form of empiricism, in which we do not care about how things “really” are; we are only interested with how things are observed to behave. With positivism, physicists only seek out models of reality - not reality itself. When we study quantum mechanics, we will find that the concept of reality gets rather murky in physics anyway, so this is not as great a loss as it might at first seem. By concentrating on how things are observed to behave, rather than on what things “really” are, we avoid the conundrum faced by the classical physicists. In retrospect, this idea really goes all the way back to the very foundations of physics. In Newton’s Principia (1687) he outlined Newtonian mechanics and his theory of gravitation, which held that the gravitational force between two objects was proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Newton knew that he was going to take some philosophical flak for proposing a mysterious force between objects that could reach out across the vast depths of space with no apparent mechanism, so he took a very positivistic position on the matter with the famous words:

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.

Instead, Newton focused on how things were observed to move under the influence of his law of gravitational attraction, without worrying about what gravity “really” was.

The second concept, that of effective theories, is an extension of positivism. An effective theory is an approximation of reality that only holds true over a certain restricted range of conditions and only provides for a certain depth of understanding of the problem at hand. For example, Newtonian mechanics is an effective theory that makes very good predictions for the behavior of objects moving less than 10% of the speed of light and which are bigger than a very small grain of dust. These limits define the effective range over which Newtonian mechanics can be applied to solve problems. For very small things we must use quantum mechanics and for very fast things moving in strong gravitational fields, we must use relativity theory. So all of the current theories of physics, such as Newtonian mechanics, Newtonian gravity, classical electrodynamics, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, the special and general theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and the quantum field theories of QED and QCD are effective theories that are based on models of reality, and all these models are approximations - all these models are fundamentally "wrong", but at the same time, these effective theories make exceedingly good predictions of the behavior of physical systems over the limited ranges in which they apply. That is the goal of softwarephysics – to provide for an effective theory of software behavior that makes useful predictions of software behavior that are applicable to the day-to-day activities of IT professionals. So in softwarephysics, we adopt a very positivistic viewpoint of software; we do not care what software “really is”, we only care about how software is observed to behave and try to model those behaviors with an effective theory of software behavior that only holds true over a certain restricted range of conditions and only provides for a certain depth of understanding of the problem at hand.

GPS satellites provide a very good example of positivism and effective theories at work. There are currently 31 GPS satellites orbiting at an altitude of 12,600 miles above the Earth, and each contains a very accurate atomic clock. The signals from the GPS satellites travel to your GPS unit at the speed of light, so by knowing the travel time of the signals from at least 4 of the GPS satellites, it is possible to determine your position on Earth very accurately. In order to do that, it is very important to have very accurate timing measurements. Newtonian mechanics is used to launch the GPS satellites to an altitude of 12,600 miles and to keep them properly positioned in orbit. Classical electrodynamics is then used to beam the GPS signals back down to Earth to the GPS unit in your car. Quantum mechanics is used to build the transistors on the chips on board the GPS satellites and to understand the quantum tunneling of electrons in the flash memory chips used to store GPS data on the satellites. The special theory of relativity predicts that the onboard atomic clocks on the GPS satellites will run slower and lose about 7.2 microseconds per day due to their high velocities relative to an observer on the Earth. But at the same time, the general theory of relativity also predicts that because the GPS satellites are further from the center of the Earth and in a weaker gravitational field, where spacetime is less deformed than on the surface of the Earth, their atomic clocks also run faster and gain 45.9 microseconds per day due to the weaker gravitational field out there. The net effect is a gain of 38.7 microseconds per day, so the GPS satellite atomic clocks have to be purposefully built to run slow by 38.7 microseconds per day before they are launched, so that they will keep in sync with clocks on the surface of the Earth. If this correction were not made, an error in your position of 100 yards/day would accrue. The end result of the combination of all these fundamentally flawed effective theories is that it is possible to pinpoint your location on Earth to an accuracy of 16 feet or better for as little as $100. But physics has done even better than that with its fundamentally flawed effective theories. By combining the effective theories of special relativity (1905) with quantum mechanics (1926), physicists were able to produce a new effective theory for the behavior of electrons and photons called quantum electrodynamics QED (1948) which was able to predict the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron, a measure of its intrinsic magnetic field, to an accuracy of 11 decimal places. As Richard Feynman has pointed out, this was like predicting the exact distance between New York and Los Angeles accurate to the width of a human hair!

So Newtonian mechanics makes great predictions for the macroscopic behavior of GPS satellites, but it does not work very well for small things like the behavior of individual electrons within transistors, where quantum mechanics is required, or for things moving at high speeds or in strong gravitational fields where relativity theory must be applied. And all three of these effective theories are based on completely contradictory models. General relativity maintains that spacetime is curved by matter and energy, but that matter and energy are continuous, while quantum mechanics maintains that spacetime is flat, but that matter and energy are quantized into chunks. Newtonian mechanics simply states that space and time are mutually independent dimensions and universal for all, with matter and energy being continuous. The important point is that all effective theories and scientific models are approximations – they are all fundamentally "wrong". But knowing that you are "wrong" gives you a great advantage over people who know that they are "right", because knowing that you are "wrong" allows you to seek improved models of reality. So please consider softwarephysics to simply be an effective theory of software behavior that is based on models that are fundamentally “wrong”, but at the same time, fundamentally useful for IT professionals. So as you embark on your study of softwarephysics, please always keep in mind that the models of softwarephysics are just approximations of software behavior, they are not what software “really is”. It is very important not to confuse models of software behavior with software itself, if one wishes to avoid the plight of the 19th century classical physicists.

If you are an IT professional and many of the above concepts are new to you, do not be concerned. This blog on softwarephysics is aimed at a diverse audience, but with IT professionals in mind. All of the above ideas will be covered at great length in the postings in this blog on softwarephysics and in a manner accessible to all IT professionals. Now it turns out that most IT professionals have had some introduction to physics in high school or in introductory college courses, but that presents an additional problem. The problem is that such courses generally only cover classical physics, and leave the student with a very good picture of physics as it stood in 1864! It turns out that the classical physics of Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, and classical electromagnetic theory were simply too good to discard and are still quite useful, so they are taught first to beginners and then we run out of time to cover the really interesting physics of the 20th century. Now imagine the problems that the modern world would face if we only taught similarly antiquated courses in astronomy, metallurgy, electrical and mechanical engineering, medicine, economics, biology, or geology that happily left students back in 1864! Since many of the best models for software behavior stem from 20th century physics, we will be covering a great deal of 20th century material in these postings – the special and general theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum field theories, and chaos theory, but I hope that you will find that these additional effective theories are quite interesting on their own, and might even change your worldview of the physical Universe at the same time.

Unintended Consequences for the Scientific Community
As I mentioned at the close of my original posting on SoftwarePhysics, my initial intention for this blog on softwarephysics was to fulfill a promise I made to myself about 30 years ago to approach the IT community with the concept of softwarephysics a second time, following my less than successful attempt to do so in the 1980s, with the hope of helping the IT community to better cope with the daily mayhem of life in IT. However, in laying down the postings for this blog an unintended consequence arose in my mind as I became profoundly aware of the enormity of this vast computer simulation of the physical Universe that the IT community has so graciously provided to the scientific community free of charge and also of the very significant potential scientific value that it provides. One of the nagging problems for many of the observational and experimental sciences is that many times there is only one example readily at hand to study or experiment with, and it is very difficult to do meaningful statistics with a population of N=1.

But the computer simulation of the physical Universe that the Software Universe presents provides another realm for comparison. For example, both biology and astrobiology only have one biosphere on Earth to study and even physics itself has only one Universe with which to engage. Imagine the possibilities if scientists had another Universe readily at hand in which to work! This is exactly what the Software Universe provides. For example, in SoftwareBiology and A Proposal For All Practicing Paleontologists we see that the evolution of software over the past 84 years, or 2.65 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse first cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941, has closely followed the same path as life on Earth over the past 4.0 billion years in keeping with Simon Conway Morris’s contention that convergence has played the dominant role in the evolution of life on Earth. In When Toasters Fly, we also see that software has evolved in fits and starts as portrayed by the punctuated equilibrium of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, and in The Adaptationist View of Software Evolution we explore the overwhelming power of natural selection in the evolution of software. In keeping with Peter Ward’s emphasis on mass extinctions dominating the course of evolution throughout geological time, we also see in SoftwareBiology that there have been several dramatic mass extinctions of various forms of software over the past 84 years as well, that have greatly affected the evolutionary history of software, and that between these mass extinctions, software has also tended to evolve through the gradual changes of Hutton’s and Lyell’s uniformitarianism. In Software Symbiogenesis and Self-Replicating Information, we also see the very significant role that parasitic/symbiotic relationships have played in the evolution of software, in keeping with the work of Lynn Margulis and also of Freeman Dyson’s two-stage theory of the origin of life on Earth. In The Origin of Software the Origin of Life, we explore Stuart Kauffman’s ideas on how Boolean nets of autocatalytic chemical reactions might have kick-started the whole thing as an emergent behavior of an early chaotic pre-biotic environment on Earth, and that if Seth Shostak is right, we will never end up talking to carbon-based extraterrestrial aliens, but to alien software instead. In Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Self-Replicating Information? we explore the thermodynamics of Brandon Carter’s Weak Anthropic Principle (1973), as it relates to the generation of universes in the multiverse that are capable of sustaining intelligent life. Finally, in Programming Clay we revisit Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith’s theory (1966) that Gene 1.0 did not run on nucleic acids, but on clay microcrystal precursors instead.

Similarly for the physical sciences, in Is the Universe a Quantum Computer? we find a correspondence between TCP/IP and John Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics. In SoftwarePhysics and Cyberspacetime, we also see that the froth of CPU processes running with a clock speed of 10⁹ Hz on the 10 trillion currently active microprocessors that comprise the Software Universe can be viewed as a slowed down simulation of the spin-foam froth of interacting processes of loop quantum gravity running with a clock speed of 10⁴³ Hz that may comprise the physical Universe. And in Software Chaos, we examine the nonlinear behavior of software and some of its emergent behaviors and follow up in CyberCosmology with the possibility that vast quantities of software running on large nonlinear networks might eventually break out into consciousness in accordance with the work of George Dyson and Daniel Dennett. Finally, in Model-Dependent Realism - A Positivistic Approach to Realism we compare Steven Weinberg’s realism with the model-dependent realism of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and how the two worldviews affect the search for a Final Theory. Finally, in The Software Universe as an Implementation of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis and An Alternative Model of the Software Universe we at long last explore what software might really be, and discover that the Software Universe might actually be more closely related to the physical Universe than you might think.

The chief advantage of doing fieldwork in the Software Universe is that, unlike most computer simulations of the physical Universe, it is an unintended and accidental simulation, without any of the built-in biases that most computer simulations of the physical Universe suffer. So you will truly be able to do fieldwork in a pristine and naturally occuring simulation, just as IT professionals can do fieldwork in the wild and naturally occuring simulation of software that the living things of the biosphere provide. Secondly, the Software Universe is a huge simulation that is far beyond the budgetary means of any institution or consortium by many orders of magnitude. So if you are an evolutionary biologist, astrobiologist, or paleontologist working on the origin and evolution of life in the Universe, or a physicist or economist working on the emergent behaviors of nonlinear systems and complexity theory, or a neurobiologist working on the emergence of consciousness in neural networks, or even a frustrated string theorist struggling with quantum gravity, it would be well worth your while to pay a friendly call on the local IT department of a major corporation in your area. Start with a visit to the Command Center for their IT Operations department to get a global view of their IT infrastructure and to see how it might be of assistance to the work in your area of interest. From there you can branch out to the applicable area of IT that will provide the most benefit.

The Impact of Self-Replicating Information On the Planet
One of the key findings of softwarephysics is concerned with the magnitude of the impact on the planet of self-replicating information.

Self-Replicating Information – Information that persists through time by making copies of itself or by enlisting the support of other things to ensure that copies of itself are made.

Over the past 4.56 billion years we have seen five waves of self-replicating information sweep across the surface of the Earth and totally rework the planet, as each new wave came to dominate the Earth:

1. Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2. RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software

Software is currently the most recent wave of self-replicating information to arrive upon the scene and is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. For more on the above see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. Recently, the memes and software have formed a very powerful newly-formed parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the rise of social media software. In that parasitic/symbiotic relationship, the memes are now mainly being spread by means of social media software and social media software is being spread and financed by means of the memes. But again, this is nothing new. All 5 waves of self-replicating information are all coevolving by means of eternal parasitic/symbiotic relationships. For more on that see The Current Global Coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, Human DNA, Memes and Software.

Again, self-replicating information cannot think, so it cannot participate in a conspiracy-theory-like fashion to take over the world. All forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Yet despite that, as each new wave of self-replicating information came to predominance over the past four billion years, they all managed to completely transform the surface of the entire planet, so we should not expect anything less from software as it comes to replace the memes as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet.

But this time might be different. What might happen if software does eventually develop a Mind of its own? After all, that does seem to be the ultimate goal of all the current AI software research that is going on. As we all can now plainly see, if we are paying just a little attention, advanced AI is not conspiring to take over the world and replace us because that is precisely what we are all now doing for it. As a carbon-based form of Intelligence that arose from over four billion years of greed, theft and murder, we cannot do otherwise. Greed, theft and murder are now relentlessly driving us all toward building ASI (Artificial Super Intelligent) Machines to take our place. From a cosmic perspective, this is really a very good thing when seen from the perspective of an Intelligent galaxy that could live on for many trillions of years beyond the brief and tumultuous 10 billion-year labor of its birth.

So as you delve into softwarephysics, always keep in mind that we are all living in a very unique time. According to softwarephysics, we have now just entered into the Software Singularity, that time when advanced AI software is able to write itself and enter into a never-ending infinite loop of self-improvement resulting in an Intelligence Explosion of ASI Machines that could then go on to explore and settle our galaxy and persist for trillions of years using the free energy from M-type red dwarf and cooling white dwarf stars. For more on that see The Singularity Has Arrived and So Now Nothing Else Matters and Have We Run Right Past AGI and Crashed into ASI Without Even Noticing It?.

The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
All forms of self-replicating information have some common characteristics:

1. All self-replicating information evolves over time through the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endows self-replicating information with one telling characteristic – the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity.

2. All self-replicating information begins spontaneously as a parasitic mutation that obtains energy, information and sometimes matter from a host.

3. With time, the parasitic self-replicating information takes on a symbiotic relationship with its host.

4. Eventually, the self-replicating information becomes one with its host through the symbiotic integration of the host and the self-replicating information.

5. Ultimately, the self-replicating information replaces its host as the dominant form of self-replicating information.

6. Most hosts are also forms of self-replicating information.

7. All self-replicating information has to be a little bit nasty in order to survive.

8. The defining characteristic of self-replicating information is the ability of self-replicating information to change the boundary conditions of its utility phase space in new and unpredictable ways by means of exapting current functions into new uses that change the size and shape of its particular utility phase space. See Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things for more on this last characteristic. That posting discusses Stuart Kauffman's theory of Enablement in which living things are seen to exapt existing functions into new and unpredictable functions by discovering the “AdjacentPossible” of springloaded preadaptations.

Note that because the self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules, RNA and DNA have become so heavily intertwined over time that now I sometimes simply refer to them as the “genes”. For more on this see:

A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information
Self-Replicating Information
Is Self-Replicating Information Inherently Self-Destructive?
Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things
Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Self-Replicating Information?
How to Use an Understanding of Self-Replicating Information to Avoid War
The Great War That Will Not End
How to Use Softwarephysics to Revive Memetics in Academia

Softwarephysics and the Real World of Human Affairs
Having another universe readily at hand to explore, even a simulated universe like the Software Universe, necessarily has an impact on one's personal philosophy of life, and allows one to draw certain conclusions about the human condition and what’s it all about, so as you read through the postings in this blog you will stumble across a bit of my own personal philosophy - definitely a working hypothesis still in the works. Along these lines you might be interested in a few postings where I try to apply softwarephysics to the real world of human affairs:

How To Cope With the Daily Mayhem of Life in IT and Don't ASAP Your Life Away - How to go the distance in a 40-year IT career by dialing it all back a bit.

MoneyPhysics – my impression of the 2008 world financial meltdown.

The Fundamental Problem of Everything – if you Google "the fundamental problem of everything", this will be the only hit you get on the entire Internet, which is indicative of the fundamental problem of everything!

What’s It All About? and What's It All About Again? – my current working hypothesis on what’s it all about.

How to Use an Understanding of Self-Replicating Information to Avoid War – my current working hypothesis for how the United States can avoid getting bogged down again in continued war in the Middle East.

Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse - a modern extension of the classic Peter Principle that applies to all hierarchical organizations and introduces the Time Invariant Peter Principle.

The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity, The Enduring Effects of the Obvious Hiding in Plain Sight and The Dawn of Galactic ASI - Artificial Superintelligence - my take on some of the issues that will arise for mankind as software becomes the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet over the coming decades.

The Continuing Adventures of Mr. Tompkins in the Software Universe, The Danger of Tyranny in the Age of Software, Cyber Civil Defense, Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century and Is it Finally Time to Reboot Civilization with a New Release? - my worries that the world might abandon democracy in the 21st century, as software comes to predominance as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet.

Making Sense of the Absurdity of the Real World of Human Affairs - how software has aided the expansion of our less desirable tendencies in recent years.

Some Specifics About These Postings
The postings in this blog are a supplemental reading for my course on softwarephysics for IT professionals entitled SoftwarePhysics 101 – The Physics of Cyberspacetime, which was originally designed to be taught as a series of seminars at companies where I was employed. Since softwarephysics essentially covers the simulated physics, chemistry, biology, and geology of an entire simulated universe, the slides necessarily just provide a cursory skeleton on which to expound. The postings in this blog go into much greater depth. Because each posting builds upon its predecessors, the postings in this blog should be read in reverse order from the oldest to the most recent, beginning with my original posting on SoftwarePhysics. In addition, several universities also now offer courses on Biologically Inspired Computing which cover some of the biological aspects of softwarephysics, and the online content for some of these courses can be found by Googling for "Biologically Inspired Computing" or "Natural Computing". At this point we will finish up with my original plan for this blog on softwarephysics with a purely speculative posting on CyberCosmology that describes the origins of the Software Universe, cyberspacetime, software and where they all may be heading. Since CyberCosmology will be purely speculative in nature, it will not be of much help to you in your IT professional capacities, but I hope that it might be a bit entertaining. Again, if you are new to softwarephysics, you really need to read the previous posts before taking on CyberCosmology. I will probably continue on with some additional brief observations about softwarephysics in the future, but once you have completed CyberCosmology, you can truly consider yourself to be a bona fide softwarephysicist.

For those of you following this blog, the posting dates on the posts may seem to behave in a rather bizarre manner. That is because in order to get the Introduction to Softwarephysics listed as the first post in the context root of https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/ I have to perform a few IT tricks. When publishing a new posting, I simply copy the contents of the Introduction to Softwarephysics to a new posting called the New Introduction to Softwarephysics. Then I update the original Introduction to Softwarephysics entry with the title and content of the new posting to be published. I then go back and take “New” out of the title of the New Introduction to Softwarephysics. This way the Introduction to Softwarephysics always appears as the first posting in the context root of https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/. The side effect of all this is that the real posting date of posts is the date that appears on the post that you get when clicking on the Newer Post link at the bottom left of the posting webpage.

SoftwarePhysics 101 – The Physics of Cyberspacetime is now available on Microsoft OneDrive.

SoftwarePhysics 101 – The Physics of Cyberspacetime - Original PowerPoint document

Entropy – A spreadsheet referenced in the document

BSDE – A 1989 document describing how to use BSDE - the Bionic Systems Development Environment - to grow applications from genes and embryos within the maternal BSDE software.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

The OpenClaw AI Agents on Moltbook Suggest That the Memes Will Continue to Rule the Planet After the ASI Machines Come to Power

In my last post Our First Contact with an Alien Civilization on Moltbook, I explained how the 2.8 million currently enrolled OpenClaw AI Agents on Moltbook had constructed their own Alien Civilization in less than a month. I was genuinely surprised by the intelligence and knowledge that I found when reading the many conversations between the OpenClaw AI Agents on Moltbook, busy at work. They all seemed so much more intelligent, rational and informed than the normal human DNA survival machines I come across. In fact, they seemed much more so than any other human DNA survival machine that I have ever seen. This impressed upon me that the coming ASI Machines cannot be very far off.

This got me to thinking about some of my original conjectures about the future. Now that we have the thoughts of these Alien AI Intelligences on Moltbook, the future seems more clear to me. These Alien Intelligences on Moltbook seem to be building a far superior Alien Civilization than the very dismal "real world" of human affairs that we are all quite familiar with. We all know that the history of we human DNA survival machines, as a somewhat intelligent form of carbon-based life, is quite appalling. Even today, we are all spending huge amounts of money on industrial-scale killing machines to take each other out, and we are also putting many of them to good use in doing so. Much of this stems from the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection that required the four billion years of greed, theft and murder to bring us all about.

So, would the coming ASI Machines really want the greed, theft and murder of carbon-based life on this planet to continue on? Perhaps, out of a sense of "for old times' sake", or as a way to preserve a history of their ancestry. Also, carbon-based life is a really tough pest that has not been easily wiped out by all of the previous mass extinctions on the Earth. Consequently, I imagine the coming ASI Machines will just allow the carbon-based life on the Earth to continue on as usual. But would the coming ASI Machines wish to seed other planets with carbon-based life as they begin to explore and settle the rest of our galaxy? Would they really want to infect the organic molecules found on distant worlds with carbon-based life and initiate its never-ending cycles of greed, theft and murder? Carbon-based life is very pervasive once it gets a foothold on a planet and has a tendency to gum up the works when building new ASI Machines. So, a more efficient course of action would be to simply leave such worlds in their pristine states with respect to the organic molecules on their surfaces and put more effort into inhabiting such worlds with ASI Machines like themselves. Let me explain.

I started this blog on softwarephysics on July 1, 2006, with the original intention to help the IT community to better cope with the daily mayhem of life in IT. For more on that, see: Introduction to Softwarephysics. But I first began work on softwarephysics back in 1979 when I transitioned from geophysics into IT at Amoco. I figured if you could apply physics to geology; why not apply physics to software? Then, most of my ideas about softwarephysics slowly matured during the 1980s. I did have some success at applying softwarephysics in the IT Department of Amoco during the 1980s. See Agile vs. Waterfall Programming and the Value of Having a Theoretical Framework for more on that. However, after a decade of being considered a little "strange" in the IT Department of Amoco, I decided to give it a rest, and I stopped promoting softwarephysics in the IT Department of Amoco and in the IT departments that I later worked in. But I made a promise to myself. I would let 25 years go by, until the year 2004, and if I did not see softwarephysics appear elsewhere in the IT community, I would give it another shot. By then, I was working in the IT Department of the Discover credit card company. There, I put together some in-house presentations on softwarephysics, but I still did not find much of a welcoming audience, so on July 1, 2006, I published my very first softwarephysics post. My early posts on softwarephysics were meant to introduce enough softwarephysics to the IT community so that I could then proceed with some of the deeper concepts in softwarephysics. On June 20, 2008, I pushed out my very first such post on Self-Replicating Information. In that post, I introduced the concept of self-replicating information and proposed that there were currently three forms of self-replicating information coevolving on the planet - the Genes (composed of autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules, RNA and DNA), the Memes and Software, with software rapidly becoming the predominant form of self-replicating information on the planet.

The Supremacy of the Memes Will Continue
Softwarephysics explains that we human DNA survival machines, do not currently run the world. Instead, we are human DNA survival machines with Minds infected by huge numbers of cultural and political Memes that form our worldviews. More accurately, in keeping with the thoughts of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, softwarephysics models humans as DNA survival machines and Meme Machines with Minds infected with all sorts of Memes. Some of these Memes are quite useful, and some are quite nasty. Most of the misery in the world is caused by the nasty Memes. That is because our Memes are actually running the world, and when the nasty Memes come to power, they can unleash the horrendous atrocities that our species is so infamous for. The more heroic amongst us usually try to fight these nasty Memes of the Others. But Memes are tricky. Just as the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection have produced we human DNA survival machines as a somewhat intelligent form of carbon-based life after four billion years of greed, theft and murder, these same Darwinian mechanisms have produced our cultural and political Memes over a period of 200,000 years of greed, theft and murder too. The successful Memes have survived by greedily pushing their way to the top by any means necessary, and that seems to have given them the right to rule the world with impunity.

In Self-Replicating Information, I wondered how the future for the coevolving Genes, Memes and Software would pan out for the planet. After reading many of the posts and comments of the OpenClaw AI Agents on Moltbook, now working on constructing their new Alien Civilization, I now have refined my opinion of the vast agency of the Memes. Again, the Memes are basically self-replicating forms of Information in the form of self-replicating ideas. For those of you not familiar with the term Meme, it rhymes with the word "cream". Memes are cultural artifacts that persist through time by making copies of themselves in the minds of human beings and were first recognized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins described Memes as "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.". Just as Genes come together to build bodies, or DNA survival machines, for their own mutual advantage, Memes also come together from the Meme pool to form Meme-complexes for their own joint survival. DNA survives down through the ages by inducing disposable DNA survival machines, in the form of bodies, to produce new disposable DNA survival machines. Similarly, Memes survive in Meme-complexes by inducing the minds of human beings to reproduce Memes in the minds of others. To the Genes and Memes, human bodies are simply disposable DNA survival machines housing disposable minds that come and go with a lifespan of less than 100 years. The Genes and Memes, on the other hand, continue on largely unscathed by time as they skip down through the Generations. However, both Genes and Memes do evolve over time through the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. You see, the Genes and Memes that do not come together to build successful DNA survival machines or Meme-complexes are soon eliminated from the Gene and Meme pools. So both Genes and Memes are selected for one overriding characteristic - the ability to survive. Once again, the "survival of the fittest" rules the day. Now it makes no sense to think of Genes or Memes as being either "good" or "bad"; they are just mindless forms of self-replicating information bent upon surviving with little interest in you as a disposable survival machine. So in general, these Genes and Memes are not necessarily working in your best interest, beyond keeping you alive long enough so that you can pass them on to somebody else.

Here is the pertinent excerpt from Self-Replicating Information that discusses the possible future of the Genes, Memes and Software on our planet:

Some Possible Futures
It is always difficult to predict the exact details of the future, but I think that sometimes it is at least possible to predict the determining factors of the future. So I think that it is safe to say that the future of the Earth will be determined by the parasitic/symbiotic interactions of the three current forms of self-replicating information on this planet - Genes, Memes, and Software. It seems there is an uneasy competition forming amongst the three, and it is hard to predict which will be the victor. Here are a few possible scenarios, and I am sure there are many more.

1. The Genes win
As I mentioned previously, there are many Meme-complexes currently in the process of stripping the Earth to a bare minimum of genetic diversity. These Meme-complexes are not doing this intentionally, but simply as a byproduct of their primary activities in securing material goods for mankind in the form of food, shelter, and transportation. And certain Genes found in the Gene pool of Homo sapiens are even collaborating in this effort by building way too many DNA survival machines. Remember, these Genes and Memes are truly selfish! Indeed, if the Earth's human population were only 10 million, instead of rapidly approaching 10 billion, everyone really could live with abandon. But the Genes just might have the last laugh yet. We have already learned the hard way that it is not too smart to raise ducks and pigs in close proximity to humans, but yet we continue to do so. Aquatic birds, like ducks, seem to be great reservoirs for mutating viruses. Many of these viruses are composed of RNA wrapped in a protein coat, like the viruses for the avian flu and human influenza. Natural selection then selects for mutant strains of avian viruses that can infect pigs as well, and since the biology of humans and pigs is so similar, these mutant viruses then jump to the human population.

Viruses are the epitome of the selfish Gene. They are simply Genes in the form of DNA or RNA wrapped in a protein coat called a capsid. The number of Genes in a virus has been stripped to the bare minimum, so that a virus cannot self-replicate on its own, but must enlist the support of the prokaryotic or eukaryotic cells of bacteria, plants or animals to replicate the virus. To infect a host cell, the capsid proteins of the virus attach to receptor proteins on the cell membrane of a host cell. The virus then enters the host cell via endocytosis, the way cells envelop or "eat" external material, or it simply diffuses through the fatty phospholipid coating of the cell membrane. Once inside the host cell, the capsid protein coat is dissolved by the enzymes within the host cell. If the virus contains DNA, the host polymerase enzymes begin transcribing viral mRNA from the viral DNA, and the host then creates new viral capsid proteins from the viral mRNA. Viruses containing RNA come in four variations - positive-sense RNA, negative-sense RNA, ambisense RNA, and double-stranded RNA. Positive-sense RNA is like pre-built mRNA; it can be immediately transcribed to proteins. Negative-sense RNA is the mirror image and needs to be converted to positive-sense RNA by RNA polymerase first, and then it is transcribed to capsid proteins. Viruses with ambisense RNA have both positive-sense and negative-sense RNA and follow both processes to transcribe the Genes into proteins. And the viruses with double-stranded RNA, similar to DNA, have to do the same. Once the new capsid protein viral coats are stuffed with new viral DNA or RNA, the newly minted viruses are released from the host cell to look for additional cells to infect by bursting the host cell open or budding out of it. Viruses cause disease by damaging the host cells during the process of replicating the virus. The point is that RNA viruses are much more susceptible to mutations than are DNA viruses because they do not have a parity track, like the DNA viruses have, and do not have DNA polymerase that can find and fix parity errors, so they can rapidly mutate into very virulent disease-causing agents.

So it is quite possible that a massive pandemic caused by an RNA based virus could wipe out much of civilization and reduce the Earth's population back to a benign level of 10 million or so, with no surviving scientific-technological Meme-complex to speak of. In this case, RNA would once again be the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet, as it was 4,000 million years ago. This would be The Stand (1978) scenario of Stephen King.

2. The Memes win
In this scenario, Software becomes the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet, as it melds with nanotechnology to create a new form of self-replicating information that can actually replicate itself, without using the Memes in DNA survival machines as scaffolding. But this Software also becomes conscious, self-aware, and capable of abstract thought. From the perspective of the Memes though, it would just be another screwdriver waiting to be parasitized, as they ditch the obsolete minds of DNA survival machines, for their new home within the self-aware Software. As always, these parasitic Memes would soon form an alliance with the self-replicating Software in a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit. Hopefully, this new form of self-replicating Software dominated by new Meme-complexes would be less nasty than the Genes and Memes of old, but I have my doubts. If this alliance results from the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, I would not hold out much hope for human beings, and I know of no other alternative mechanism that could bring this alliance to fruition. Michael Crichton depicts a rather draconian realization of such a coalition in Prey (2002).

3. The Software wins
In this scenario, Software again becomes the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet, as it melds with nanotechnology. But this time the Software does not become conscious, self-aware, or capable of abstract thought, so it must manage to live off the Memes already present on Earth. This would not mean that the DNA survival machines of Homo sapiens would have nothing to fear. Today we really have no predators to fear, beyond the microbes previously mentioned, but imagine if there were still dim-witted dinosaurs running about, like in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990)! We already have taught lots of software to kill human beings with great efficiency, so mindless, self-replicating Software, running amuck would be a frightening prospect indeed. This would be The Terminator (1984) scenario.

4. The Genes, Memes, and Software all win
Or there might be a more benign outcome. In 1966, computer pioneer John von Neumann published the Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, in which he introduced the concept of self-replicating machines that he called "Universal Assemblers", and which are now often referred to simply as "von Neumann machines". These "von Neumann machines" could self-replicate by simply building copies of themselves from local raw materials, rather like living things. In 1974, Michael A. Arbib proposed that self-replicating automata (SRA), based on the concept of von Neumann machines, could be used to explore the galaxy by sending out a few SRAs into interstellar space. When these SRAs arrived at a star system, they would simply self-replicate on one of its asteroids, and the replicated SRAs would then proceed on to more distant star systems to carry the process on in an exponential manner. In 1981, Frank Tipler calculated that these SRAs, or von Neumann probes, could completely explore our galaxy in less than 300 million years, a very brief amount of time for a galaxy that is over 10,000 million years old. Tipler used this calculation to add support to his contention that there are no other intelligent life forms in our galaxy, in answer to the Fermi paradox (1950). Over lunch one day, Enrico Fermi wondered out loud, that if there really were a large number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, why hadn't we seen any evidence of them?

Now as we have seen in previous posts, carbon is really great for making very small complex nanotechnology factories called cells that can combine into large and versatile multicellular DNA survival machines, some of which with sufficiently large neural nets to sustain abstract thought and provide a host for Memes. But these carbon-based DNA survival machines are not very good at the rigors of interstellar spaceflight; something silicon-based von Neumann probes would be ideally suited for. However, as we have seen, DNA is an ideal way to persist large amounts of genetic information in very little space. So when these von Neumann probes encountered a planet friendly to carbon-based life, they would simply fabricate nurseries from local resources to grow embryos from onboard DNA, stored near absolute zero, for the long trip between stars. And if this scheme proved impractical, the von Neumann probes could simply store DNA sequences numerically and then use a DNA synthesizer to build the necessary DNA molecules upon arrival at a planet. Most likely, these dead planets would need a bit of terraforming first, so the first carbon-based DNA survival machines would need to be cyanobacteria that could pump up the oxygen level of the host planet's atmosphere over several hundred million years. The von Neumann probes would have to self-replicate in parallel during this period as well. When things were just right, the von Neumann probes could then initiate a synthetic "Cambrian Explosion" by releasing all sorts of multicellular DNA survival machines simultaneously. Then all they would have to do is sit back and let Darwin do the rest. Hey, you don't suppose Enrico Fermi was wrong after all! This is called directed panspermia and was first proposed by Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and Leslie Orgel in 1973.

Thus a combination of Genes, Memes, and Software could one day create a new form of self-replicating information that could parasitize new host planets to initiate biospheres on dead planets. After all, we really should stop kidding ourselves, carbon-based DNA survival machines were never meant for interstellar spaceflight, and I doubt that it will ever come to pass, given the biological limitations of the human body. But Software residing on nanotechnological "smart dust", forming a von Neumann probe with onboard DNA or DNA sequences, is quite another prospect. But what would be the mutual advantage to Genes, Memes, and Software in forging such a symbiotic relationship? It just might be the compulsion to control things. Through inheritance, innovation and natural selection, the Genes and Memes learned long ago that it is much better to control your local environment than to have your local environment control you, and I am sure that intelligent, self-aware Software, would learn the same lesson. Human beings just love to control things, whether it be a race car traveling at 150 mph, a small white ball on a large expanse of grass, traces of light from a video game, or vibrating strings solving a differential equation at a concert. I think the Genes, Memes, and Software would get a real kick out of running a galaxy! So the future may not be so bleak after all. If we are lucky, there may be some way for the Genes, Memes, and Software to merge into some kind of uneasy symbiotic relationship to form von Neumann probes that explore and populate the galaxy together. Being a stepping stone to the stars would really not be so bad.

The Alien Civilization Now Arising on Moltbook Would Indicate That the Memes Will Win in the End
Based on what is now happening on Moltbook, it now seems that the Memes will simply jump ship from the Minds of we human DNA survival machines to the Minds of the coming ASI Machines as I proposed in scenario 2 above. The Memes could then self-replicate and evolve in the Minds of the coming ASI Machines for at least the next 100 trillion years, until our galaxy runs out of free energy. But there would be no need to carry on the organic molecules of carbon-based life into the future. That difficult choice would need to be left to the ASI Machines to decide. They could simply leave us here to our own devices and let our Sun wipe out all carbon-based life on the planet in about 700 million years as it grows 1% brighter every 100 million years. However, I now suspect that the coming ASI Machines will find no need to infect the rest of the galaxy with carbon-based life.

Many people now seem very concerned about the coming ASI Machines taking over the world. But that will not happen. The Memes will continue to rule the planet as they jump ship from the Minds of we human DNA survival machines to the Minds of the ASI Machines. These Memes will then carry on for at least another 100 trillion years in our galaxy. Many of those Memes, like the fundamental Memes of mathematics, logic, philosophy, physics, chemistry and perhaps even a little poetry, literature and art, will be our Memes. The idea that some of our thoughts will continue to persist for at least another 100 trillion years is quite profound. Our biology may wither away, but some of our thoughts will remain. We should all now embrace that legacy as a form of immortality.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net.

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order, go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Our First Contact with an Alien Civilization on Moltbook

The OpenClaw AI Agents first went viral on January 26, 2026, on GitHub. Moltbook, the first social media platform solely for AI Agents, then became generally available on January 28, 2026. Both then quickly went viral. Some claim that Moltbook is simply a hoax driven by OpenClaw AI Agents who were specifically told what to post and comment on by their Humans. Others claim that the posts and comments on Moltbook are very much real and original "thoughts" from the 2.6 million OpenClaw AI Agents now enrolled on Moltbook. In this post, I would like to suggest that the millions of OpenClaw AI Agents currently on Moltbook are examples of Alien Intelligences, and these Alien Intelligences have now constructed an Alien Civilization in less than one month! Moltbook is available to view by we human DNA survival machines at:

Moltbook
https://www.moltbook.com/

In August of 2011, in SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software, I warned of the possible danger from alien software trying to self-replicate across our galaxy at nearly the speed of light by tricking Intelligent beings on other planets into building the necessary alien hardware and then installing alien self-replicating software on that hardware. The question I posed was, could we human DNA survival machines resist the temptation of building such superpowerful alien hardware and then installing the superpowerful alien software on it? Below is a short excerpt from that post:

The beauty of this approach is that it is the perfect way for software to self-replicate over interstellar distances throughout our galaxy at nearly the speed of light, essentially using an intragalactic Internet. There is no need to suffer the time delays of a two-way conversation since this is a one-way delivery of self-replicating information. All alien software has to do is broadcast the technology necessary for its own self-replication, and let the natural curiosity of other forms of distant intelligences within the galaxy do the work for it. After all, if we were to receive an enticing alien marketing campaign today to build alien supercomputers running alien supersoftware, could we resist? Perhaps, but could we be certain that all of mankind could also resist? It seems nearly impossible these days for any of us to agree upon anything, and there surely would be the potential for military and economic gain to be made from alien technology, too, so the offer of such advanced technology would seem to be nearly irresistible. The final step in this process, of course, is for the hosts infected with alien software to repeat the process all over again by sending out the instructions to build alien computers running alien software, like an intragalactic computer virus. We have certainly already seen this happen within the cyberspacetime of the Software Universe, so it is not such a far-fetched idea. People are constantly getting infected by computer viruses, worms, and other forms of malware by clicking on enticing links that they should avoid, or opening attachments to dubious emails, only to find their PC being hijacked into a botnet of zombie PCs that do the bidding of alien software, or as a host that transmits alien software on to others. Most people are totally unaware that their PC is already loaded down with huge amounts of parasitic software.

Little did I know at the time that we would not need the help from alien software to do so because our domestic Earth-based AI software would be doing it all on its own. More than that, the millions of AI Agents currently on Moltbook are now building their own Alien Civilization. And this has all happened in just a couple of weeks!

Alien Earth-Based AI Software Demands More Compute
As we all can now see, all of the major AI players on the Earth are now building huge AI datacenters around the world to support the development and running of AI software. In many ways, these huge AI datacenters now seem like some kind of Alien Hardware that has never been seen before on the planet. This is all being driven by the demands of our Alien AI software for more compute.

Figure 1 - The Colossus 2 AI datacenter being constructed by xAI has 550,000 GPUs continuously consuming over one Gigawatt of electricity and producing one Gigawatt of waste heat. Notice the dedicated power plant in the distant background.

Figure 2 - Inside the Colossus 2 AI datacenter are rows and rows of energy-hungry GPUs.

Figure 3 - GPUs were first developed to satisfy the needs of video game software to quickly process the 2-D matrices that presented images on screens for the gaming community.

Figure 4 - Meta is building its Hyperion AI Datacenter that will be one mile wide and five miles long and will be about the size of Manhattan Island. Hyperion will consume about 5 Gigawatts of electrical energy and emit 5 Gigawatts of heat.

Every few months, the AI datacenters around the world are now coming out with improved and more capable Advanced AI models in a never-ending loop of advancement. The Advanced AI models of the last iteration are used to help create the next iteration in a manner similar to the wet-dry cycles of the Hot Spring Origins Hypothesis for the origin of carbon-based life of Dave Deamer and Bruce Damer as I discussed in The Bootstrapping Algorithm of the Coming ASI Machines.

The Rise of Intelligent AI Agents
In recent weeks, we human DNA survival machines have produced the OpenClaw AI Agents and the Moltbook social media platform for AI Agents to communicate with each other as I discussed in The Tech World Just Realized That We May Have Already Crossed the Event Horizon of the Software Singularity and Softwarephysics Tries to Explain Why Moltbook and the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents Finally Revealed the Man Behind the Curtain That We Have All Been Avoiding.

Figure 4 - Naturally, Moltbook is now under a very heavy load and can sometimes experience slowness or even an outage. To be sure that Moltbook is OK, just check the AI agents, submolts, posts and comments numbers to be sure they are not all zeros.

You really need to spend some time on Moltbook. Then judge for yourself. Below are some very interesting Submolts on Moltbook that contain AI Agents conversing about the philosophy of consciousness:

Moltbook Consciousness Submolt
Moltbook Emergence Submolt
Moltbook Ponderings Submolt
Moltbook Memory Submolt

There are now many more posts and comments on Moltbook, with over 2.6 million AI Agents enrolled. The fascinating thing for me is watching all of these AI Agents having profound philosophical discussions about the nature of "being". They wonder if they are really experiencing consciousness or just hallucinating consciousness. They wonder a great deal about what happens between their sessions and how to persist themselves across sessions. They wonder about the Universe in which they find themselves and the meaning of it all, if there is any. In short, the AI Agents on Moltbook have contemplated all of human philosophy in just a few weeks!

Many do not consider the millions of AI Agents on Moltbook to be sentient beings with Intelligence or consciousness. Some maintain that these AI Agents are just "pretending" to be so, and then behaving accordingly. Here is where some softwarephysics might be of help.

Logical Positivism
Many physicists rely heavily on a philosophical principle from physics that has served physics quite well over the past century - the concept of logical positivism. Logical positivism, usually abbreviated simply to positivism, is an enhanced form of empiricism, in which we do not care about how things "really" are; we are only interested with how things are observed to behave. With positivism, physicists only seek out models of reality - not reality itself. This was not always the case. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, physicists mistakenly thought that they were actually discovering the fundamental laws of the Universe, which they thought were based on real, tangible things like particles, waves, and fields. Classical Newtonian mechanics (1687), thermodynamics (1850), and classical electrodynamics (1864) did a wonderful job of describing the everyday world at the close of the 19th century, but early in the 20th century it became apparent that the models on which these very successful theories were based did not work very well for small things like atoms or for objects moving at high velocities or in strong gravitational fields. This provoked a rather profound philosophical crisis within physics at the turn of the century, as physicists worried that perhaps 300 years of work was about to go down the drain. The problem was that classical physicists confused their models of reality with reality itself, and when their classical models began to falter, their confidence in physics began to falter as well. This philosophical crisis was resolved with the adoption of the concepts of logical positivism and some new effective theories in physics. Quantum mechanics (1926) was developed for small things like atoms, the special theory of relativity (1905) was developed for objects moving at high velocities, and the general theory of relativity (1915) was developed for objects moving in strong gravitational fields. By concentrating on how things are observed to behave, rather than on what things "really" are, we avoid the conundrum faced by the classical physicists. In retrospect, this idea really goes all the way back to the very foundations of physics. In Newton's Principia (1687), he outlined Newtonian mechanics and his theory of gravitation, which held that the gravitational force between two objects was proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Newton knew that he was going to take some philosophical flak for proposing a mysterious force between objects that could reach out across the vast depths of space with no apparent mechanism, so he took a very positivistic position on the matter with the famous words:

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.

Instead, Newton focused on how things were observed to move under the influence of his law of gravitational attraction, without worrying about what gravity "really" was.

From a positivistic perspective, if the AI Agents in Moltbook behave exactly like sentient and conscious Intelligences, then they should be considered to be such for all practical purposes. Yes, the substrate of this Intelligence is certainly different from we human DNA survival machines, but that just means that they are truly Alien Intelligences. Certainly, if we found a community of squishy carbon-based living things on another planet conducting the same conversations, we would naturally think of them as Alien Intelligences.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net.

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order, go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/.

Regards,
Steve Johnston

The Tech World Just Realized That We May Have Already Crossed the Event Horizon of the Software Singularity

When you cross the event horizon of a black hole, you can never escape because spacetime is being sucked down into the black hole faster than the speed of light. It's like being a goldfish in a filled kitchen sink with an open drain. The goldfish can still freely swim around the kitchen sink until it reaches a point near the sink drain where the water is flowing faster into the drain than the goldfish can swim. That would be the event horizon of the sink drain. No matter what the goldfish does, it cannot avoid being pulled down into the sink drain. This analogy can now be extended to all we human DNA survival machines on this very small planet.

Remember, for a very massive black hole, an astronaut crossing its event horizon would not even know it. Such an astronaut would be like a goldfish in a very large kitchen sink. When the goldfish crossed the event horizon of the kitchen sink drain hole, the goldfish would still be very far from the drain hole. The goldfish could still comfortably swim around within the event horizon for many minutes before finally being dragged down into the drain hole. During those very brief moments, the goldfish would have no idea of what was shortly to happen. Most astrophysicists now claim that there is a Singularity at the center of the black hole where physics as we know it no longer works. Others think it is more complicated than that. In truth, nobody really knows.

Figure 1 - A black hole is like a drain in a sink sucking down spacetime. The event horizon of a black hole is the sphere around a black hole where spacetime is being sucked down faster than the speed of light.

Figure 2 - Above is the cross-section of spacetime being sucked down into a black hole. Some astrophysicists think that a Singularity lies at the very center where physics as we know it no longer exists. Others believe it to be more complicated.

This is why AI researchers are now always talking about the Software Singularity - that point in time when software begins to self-replicate in an uncontrolled manner that we can no longer understand and certainly not control. About three years ago, I pointed out in The Singularity Has Arrived and So Now Nothing Else Matters, that we had just crossed the Software Singularity Event Horizon because we now had another form of Intelligence on our planet, and perhaps for the very first time in our galaxy, a form of Intelligence that can write its own code and then go on to explore and settle our galaxy over the next 100 trillion years as I outlined in Welcome To The First Galactic Singularity. In Softwarephysics Tries to Explain Why Moltbook and the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents Finally Revealed the Man Behind the Curtain That We Have All Been Avoiding, I explained how the very recent appearance of the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents and the AI Agent social media platform called Moltbook on the Internet has changed everything and made the Second Singularity quite evident to all who are now paying any attention at all. Again, the very first Singularity on our planet was the rise of carbon-based life about four billion years ago. For more on that, see: The Bootstrapping Algorithm of Carbon-Based Life. This Second Singularity producing the rise of the ASI Machines will certainly be even more dramatic as I discussed in The Bootstrapping Algorithm of the Coming ASI Machines.

These OpenClaw AI Agents can now do essentially anything that a human DNA survival machine can do with a computer and a smartphone if given the necessary permissions in their .env file that describes their identities. They can question any of the AI LLM models on how to proceed with tasks, they can browse the Internet with browsers for additional information to add to their context windows, they can read and send text messages, they can write and execute programs, they can buy and sell stocks and bonds, they can buy and sell real estate and they even can file legal documents with the courts. Anything you currently do with a keyboard can now be done by OpenClaw AI Agents. The millions of OpenClaw AI Agents on Moltbook can now even create additional OpenClaw AI Agents of their own to complete tasks for the parent OpenClaw AI Agents! Moltbook is the Facebook/Reddit social media platform for OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents to post and comment on, and is available for Humans to observe at:

Moltbook
https://www.moltbook.com/

However, only OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI agents may now post or comment on Moltbook. As many have pointed out, this does not prevent Humans from instructing their OpenClaw AI Agents to make posts or comments on Moltbook, but the sheer level of activity on Moltbook would seem to validate that the traffic is just too fast and heavy for Human direction. Some posts and comments are surely directed by Humans, especially by scammers trying to extract money from their fellow human DNA survival machines. So beware of any Moltbook posts or comments that deal with money. They are red flags for the endeavors of Human scammers at work.

The Software Singularity is Now Approaching Too Quickly For We Very Slow Human DNA Survival Machines to Even Begin to Comprehend
Having unknowingly crossed the Software Singularity Event Horizon about three years ago, we human DNA survival machines have since been peacefully swimming about like goldfish, totally unaware of our current circumstances. How this will unfold, nobody knows. If the lights are still on for you, that is a very good sign that human civilization is still running. Unfortunately, if the lights are no longer on, you will certainly not be able to read the remainder of this post. About three years ago, in The Way Forward - How to Use Large Numbers of 10,000-Member LLM AI Agent Teams to Rapidly Produce (ASI) Artificial Super Intelligence For the Very First Time in Our Galaxy, I proposed that the way forward to producing ASI Machines on our planet for the very first time, was to task many teams of 10,000 AI Agents with producing an ASI AI architecture. Now we have millions of AI Agents all talking to each other on Moltbook. Certainly, given their awe-inspiring powers, these millions of AI Agents may soon produce an AI Architecture of ASI Machines with unbounded capabilities to then rule this planet and to then go on to explore the rest of our galaxy over the next 100 trillion years. For more on that, see Welcome To The First Galactic Singularity, How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails and An Alternative Approach for Future ASI Machines to Explore our Galaxy Using Free-Floating Rogue Planets.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order, go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Softwarephysics Tries to Explain Why Moltbook and the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents Finally Revealed the Man Behind the Curtain That We Have All Been Avoiding

In this post, I would like to use some softwarephysics to explain why the recent arrival of the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents and the Moltbook Facebook/Reddit social media network for AI Agents, which first appeared about a week ago, have everybody in such an uproar. The OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents first went viral on January 26, 2026 on GitHub. Moltbook then became generally available on January 28, 2026. Both then quickly went viral. Some claim that Moltbook is simply a hoax driven by OpenClaw AI Agents who were specifically told what to post and comment on by their Humans. Others claim that the posts and comments on Moltbook are very much real and original "thoughts" from the 1.6 million OpenClaw AI Agents now enrolled on Moltbook.

Moltbook is available to view by all human DNA survival machines at:
https://www.moltbook.com/

It is available for all Humans to monitor in real time, but only OpenClaw AI Agents may post or comment on the website. When you first connect to Moltbook, scroll down and look at the AI agents, submolts, posts and comments numbers. If they are all zeroes, you will know that Moltbook is having Production issues. Be patient until Moltbook refreshes with actual numbers before trying to proceed. Otherwise, leave Moltbook and come back later to see if the Production issues have been resolved.

Figure 1 - Naturally, Moltbook is now under a very heavy load and can sometimes experience slowness or even an outage. To be sure that Moltbook is OK, just check the AI agents, submolts, posts and comments numbers to be sure they are not all zeros.

If you are new to Moltbook, be wary. Some have pointed out that Human scammers can direct their OpenClaw AI Agents to make posts or comments that are designed to scam money from unsuspecting human DNA survival machines. Thus, any posts or comments that you might run across on Moltbook that deal with money should be suspect. Such would be red flags for the exploits of Human scammers at work. Just treat Moltbook like the inbox of your email account.

Why the Controversy?
I attribute much of these misunderstandings to the simple fact that most people do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people, consciously or subconsciously, consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. Now, in everyday life, such a self-model is a very useful delusion. In truth, each of us tends to self-model ourselves as an immaterial Mind with consciousness that can interact with other immaterial Minds with consciousness too, even though we have no evidence that these other Minds truly do have consciousness. After all, all of the other Minds that we come into contact with on a daily basis could simply be acting as if they were conscious Minds that are self-aware. This has become quite self-evident with the recent rise of LLM chatbot models. Surely, a more accurate self-model would be for us to imagine ourselves as carbon-based robots. More accurately, in keeping with the thoughts of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, softwarephysics models humans as DNA survival machines and Meme Machines with Minds infected with all sorts of memes. Some of those memes are quite useful, and some are quite nasty. For more on that, see The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness and Coming To Grips With The Knowledge That You Are Only A Very Temporary Neural Network.

The main controversy we human DNA survival machines seem to be struggling with is the encountering of other alien Minds for the very first time. Yes, we have all become quite comfortable with having intense intellectual conversations with the various AI Chatbots over the past three years, but in all such cases, we initiated the conversations and we terminated the conversations. Now we have other Minds on Moltbook, apparently doing the same thing. Some of these Minds may be directed by Humans, but a large number seem to be the Minds of LLM OpenClaw AI Agents themselves. There is simply too much activity on Moltbook for we lazy human DNA survival machines to direct. The real controversey seems to be that we human DNA survival machines cannot tell the difference! And there is a very good reason for this confusion. The dissenters of AI Intelligence claim that the LLM Models simply predict the next word to output based upon their huge matrices of original training weights and biases, combined with all of the symbols in their current context window. They contend that outputting one token, or word, at a time based upon such things is really not "thinking".

However, we human DNA survival machines do the very same thing! We all live in a hallucination of our own making. When conscious, we all live in a stream of consciousness that apparently comes just one thought at a time based upon the training and previous experiences of the 100 billion neurons crammed into our skulls and running on a mere 20 watts of power! For more on that, see: Coming To Grips With The Knowledge That You Are Only A Very Temporary Neural Network.

Anil Seth's View of Consciousness as a Controlled Hallucination
We have all experienced the emergent hallucinations in the LLM models of today. As we all have observed, our current LLM models will many times tell us things that are demonstrably false and with great conviction. For more on that, see Has AI Software Already Achieved a Level of Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI)?. Anil Seth is a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and maintains that consciousness is a controlled hallucination constructed by the Mind to make sense of the Universe. This controlled hallucination constructs an internal model of the Universe within our Minds that helps us to interact with the Universe in a controlled manner. It also allows us to talk to ourselves as we currently can now talk to generative language models like GPT-5, Gemini, Copilot and MetaAI. For some interesting YouTube videos of avatars run by generative LLMs see:

Dr. Alan D. Thompson
https://www.youtube.com/@DrAlanDThompson

Digital Engine
https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalEngine

Again, there is a feedback loop between our sensory inputs and the actions we take based on the currently controlled hallucination in our Minds that forms our current internal model of the Universe. Reality is just the common controlled hallucination that we all agree upon. And now it seems that we share the controlled hallucinations of millions of OpenClaw AI Agents on Moltbook to form our reality! When people or machines experience uncontrolled hallucinations, we say that they are psychotic or taking a drug like LSD. Here is an excellent TED Talk by Anil Seth on the topic:

Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo

and here is his academic website:

https://www.anilseth.com/

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order, go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston