Digital Physics and the Software Universe

I just watched a very interesting panel discussion from an old World Science Festival meeting that was held on Saturday, June 4, 2011, 8:00 PM - 9:30 PM:

Rebooting the Cosmos: Is the Universe the Ultimate Computer?
https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/videos/rebooting-the-cosmos-is-the-universe-the-ultimate-computer/

The panel discussion was moderated by John Hockenberry and featured Edward Fredkin, Seth Lloyd, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara. The World Science Festival is an annual event hosted by string theorist Brian Greene and is an outgrowth of the World Science U. At the World Science U, you can view many very interesting lectures and courses, and at the World Science Festival website you can view many very interesting panel discussions:

World Science U
http://www.worldscienceu.com/

World Science Festival
https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/

Edward Fredkin started working with computers back in 1956. In 1960, he wrote the first OS and the first Assembler program for the DEC PDP-1. Then in 1968, Edward Fredkin returned to academia and became a full professor at MIT. In 1990, Edward Fredkin published the paper Digital Mechanics - An informational process based on reversible universal cellular automata in the ACM, in which he proposed that the physical Universe might be a cellular automaton programmed to act like physics and launched the field of Digital Physics. Since then, Fredkin has broadened the field by renaming it to Digital Philosophy. You can find his Digital Philosophy website at:

Digital Philosophy
http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/

On the Home page, he briefly defines Digital Philosophy as:

"What is Digital Philosophy?
Digital Philosophy (DP) is a new way of thinking about the fundamental workings of processes in nature. DP is an atomic theory carried to a logical extreme where all quantities in nature are finite and discrete. This means that, theoretically, any quantity can be represented exactly by an integer. Further, DP implies that nature harbors no infinities, infinitesimals, continuities, or locally determined random variables. This paper explores Digital Philosophy by examining the consequences of these premises.

At the most fundamental levels of physics, DP implies a totally discrete process called Digital Mechanics. Digital Mechanics[1] (DM) must be a substrate for Quantum Mechanics. Digital Philosophy makes sense with regard to any system if the following assumptions are true:

All the fundamental quantities that represent the state information of the system are ultimately discrete. In principle, an integer can always be an exact representation of every such quantity. For example, there is always an integral number of neutrons in a particular atom. Therefore, configurations of bits, like the binary digits in a computer, can correspond exactly to the most microscopic representation of that kind of state information.

In principle, the temporal evolution of the state information (numbers and kinds of particles) of such a system can be exactly modeled by a digital informational process similar to what goes on in a computer. Such models are straightforward in the case where we are keeping track only of the numbers and kinds of particles. For example, if an oracle announces that a neutron decayed into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino, it’s easy to see how a computer could exactly keep track of the changes to the numbers and kinds of particles in the system. Subtract 1 from the number of neutrons, and add 1 to each of the numbers of protons, electrons, and neutrinos.

The possibility that DP may apply to various fields of science motivates this study."

While you are on his website, be sure to check out some of Edward Fredkin's publications at:

http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/index.php/essays/

In 2002, Seth Lloyd at MIT published The Computational Universe, in which he calculated the computing power of the entire physical Universe treated as one large quantum computer. You can read this fascinating paper at:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lloyd2/lloyd2_p2.html

Seth Lloyd is currently working on quantum computers at MIT and is the first quantum-mechanical engineer in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering department. Seth Lloyd is recognized for proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer. In 2006 he published the book Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos in which he contends that our Universe is a quantum mechanical Computational Universe that has been calculating how to behave from the very beginning. He came to this conclusion as MIT’s sole quantum mechanical engineer working on building practical quantum computers. During the course of his research, Seth Lloyd has learned how to talk to atoms in a quantum mechanical way. Through intimate dealings with atoms, he has found that atoms are constantly flipping quantum mechanical states in a controlled manner prescribed by quantum mechanics. Since a computer is simply a large number of switches that operate in a controlled manner, our Universe can, therefore, be thought of as a Computational Universe, and therefore, must necessarily be capable of computation. In fact, our current quest to build quantum computers can simply be viewed as an attempt to domesticate this natural tendency for our Universe to compute in a quantum mechanical manner. Seth Lloyd calculates that our section of the Computational Universe which is defined by our current cosmic horizon and consists of all quantum particles out to a distance of 46 billion light years, has performed about 10¹²² operations on 10⁹² bits over the past 13.8 billion years. This domestication of the quantum mechanical behavior of our Computational Universe has already led to the construction of many trillions of classical computers already.

Since Seth Lloyd proposes that our Universe is simply a vast quantum computer calculating how to perform, perhaps in 1,000 years when software has finally become the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet and is running on huge networks of quantum computers, it will make no distinction between the “real” Universe and the “simulated” universes that it can easily cook up on its own hardware. Perhaps as we saw in Quantum Computing and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics the software running on these vast networks of quantum computers of the future will come to realize that the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is indeed correct, and that the humans of long ago were simply a large collection of quantum particles constantly getting entangled or “correlated” with other quantum particles, and splitting off into parallel universes in the process. This constant splitting gave the long-forgotten humans the delusion that they were conscious beings with free will and led them to do very strange things, like look for similarly deluded entities.

Jürgen Schmidhuber is a renowned AI researcher and currently the Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale). His Home Page has many interesting links:

Jürgen Schmidhuber's Home Page
http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/

Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara is one of the founding faculty members of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and works on loop quantum gravity. Loop quantum gravity is a theory that tries to bridge the gap between Einstein's general relativity and quantum mechanics to produce a quantum theory of gravity. Nearly all of the current theories of physics are background-dependent theories that unfold upon a stage of pre-existing spacetime. For example, the Standard Model of particle physics and string theory both assume that there is a stage of pre-existing spacetime upon which they act to produce what we observe in our Universe. Loop quantum gravity does not have such a stage and is therefore background-independent. In loop quantum gravity, spacetime is quantized into a network of nodes called a spin network. The minimum distance between nodes is about one Planck length of about 10^-35 meters. Loop quantum gravity is a background-independent theory because the spin network can be an emergent property of the Universe that evolves with time. Similarly, Digital Physics is a background-independent theory because spacetime emerges as a quantized entity and is not a stage upon which physics acts.

Nick Bostrom’s Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? (2002) at:

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

is also a good reference on this topic.

Rebooting the Cosmos: Is the Universe the Ultimate Computer? examines the idea that the physical Universe may essentially be running on a large network of quantum computers. The most interesting thing about this panel discussion was that midway through it, the participants brought up the initial work of Konrad Zuse on this topic. Recall that Konrad Zuse started working on building real computers back in 1936, the same year that Alan Turing of early computer science fame published the mathematical concept of the Turing Machine in On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem that today underlies the architecture for all modern computers. Alan Turing’s work was completely conceptual in nature, and in the paper, he proposed the theoretical concept of a Turing Machine. A Turing Machine was composed of a read/write head and an infinitely long paper tape. On the paper tape, was stored a sequential series of 1s and 0s, and the read/write head could move back and forth along the paper tape in a motion based upon the 1s and 0s that it read. The read/write head could also write 1s and 0s to the paper tape as well. In Turing’s paper, he mathematically proved that such an arrangement could be used to encode any mathematical algorithm, like multiplying two very large numbers together and storing the result on the paper tape. In many ways, a Turing Machine is much like a ribosome reading mRNA and writing out the amino acids of a polypeptide chain that eventually fold up into an operational protein.

Figure 1 - A Turing Machine had a read/write head and an infinitely long paper tape. The read/write head could read instructions on the tape that were encoded as a sequence of 1s and 0s and could write out the results of following the instructions on the paper tape back to the tape as a sequence of 1s and 0s.

Figure 2 – A ribosome read/write head behaves much like the read/write head of a Turing Machine. The ribosome reads an mRNA tape that was transcribed earlier from a section of DNA tape that encodes the information in a gene. The ribosome read/write head then reads the A, C, G, and U nucleobases that code for amino acids three at a time. As each 3-bit byte is read on the mRNA tape, the ribosome writes out an amino acid to a growing polypeptide chain, as tRNA units bring in one amino acid at a time. The polypeptide chain then goes on to fold up into a 3-D protein molecule.

In a sense, all modern computers are loosely based upon the concept of a Turing Machine. Turing did not realize it, but at the same time he was formulating the concept of a Turing Machine back in 1936, Konrad Zuse was constructing his totally mechanical Z1 computer in the living room of his parent’s apartment in Germany, and the Z1 really did use a paper tape to store the program and data that it processed, much like a Turing Machine. Neither one of these early computer pioneers had any knowledge of the other at the time. For more about how Konrad Zuse independently developed a physical implementation of many of Alan Turing’s mathematical concepts, but also implemented them in practical terms in the form of the world’s very first real computers, see the following article that was written in his own words:

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Zuse.html

Figure 3 - A reconstructed mechanical Z1 computer completed by Konrad Zuse in 1989. The original Z1 was constructed 1936 - 1938 in the living room of his parent’s apartment in Germany. The Z1 was not a full-fledged modern computer, like Zuse’s Z3 computer that became operational in May of 1941 because it read programs from a punched tape that were not stored in the mechanical memory of the Z1. In that regard, the Z1 was more like a Turing Machine than are modern computers.

Figure 4 – Konrad Zuse with a reconstructed Z3 in 1961.

Figure 5 – Block diagram of the Z3 architecture.

Zuse's totally mechanical Z1 became operational in 1938. Zuse then went on to build his electrical Z3 computer with 2400 electromechanical telephone relays. The Z3 was the world’s very first full-fledged computer and became operational in May of 1941. The Z3 used a 22-bit word and had a total memory of 64 words. It only had two registers, but it could read in and store programs in memory via a punched tape. Because the Z3 used very slow electromechanical telephone relays for switches, the Z3 had a clock speed of 5.33 Hz and it took about 3 seconds to multiply two large numbers together. Modern laptops have a clock speed of 2.5 - 3.5 GHz so they are nearly a billion times faster than the Z3. Electromechanical telephone relays have a switching speed of about 10^-1 seconds while vacuum tubes are about 100,000 times faster with a switching speed of about 10^-6 seconds. However, back in 1941, Zuse thought that building a computer with thousands of vacuum tubes would use too much electricity and would be too unreliable for a practical computer. But in the 1950s we actually did end up building computers with thousands of vacuum tubes.

Figure 6 – The electrical relays used by the Z3 for switching were very large, very slow and used a great deal of electricity that generated a great deal of waste heat.

Figure 7 – In the 1950s, the electrical relays of the Z3 were replaced with vacuum tubes that were also very large, used lots of electricity and generated lots of waste heat too, but the vacuum tubes were 100,000 times faster than relays.

Figure 8 – Vacuum tubes contain a hot negative cathode that glows red and boils off electrons. The electrons are attracted to the cold positive anode plate, but there is a gate electrode between the cathode and anode plate. By changing the voltage on the grid, the vacuum tube can control the flow of electrons like the handle of a faucet. The grid voltage can be adjusted so that the electron flow is full blast, a trickle, or completely shut off, and that is how a vacuum tube can be used as a switch.

When I first changed careers to become an IT professional in 1979, I used to talk to the old-timers about the good old days of IT. They told me that when the operators began their shift on an old-time 1950s vacuum tube computer, the first thing they did was to crank up the voltage on the vacuum tubes to burn out the tubes that were on their last legs. Then they would replace the burned-out tubes to start the day with a fresh machine. So using slow electromechanical telephone relays for the Z3 was really not such a bad idea back in 1941. For example, they also told me about programming the plugboards of electromechanical Unit Record Processing machines back in the 1950s by physically rewiring the plugboards. The Unit Record Processing machines would then process hundreds of punch cards per minute by routing the punch cards from machine to machine in processing streams.

Figure 9 – In the 1950s Unit Record Processing machines like this card sorter were programmed by physicaly rewiring a plugboard.

Figure 10 – The plugboard for a Unit Record Processing machine.

In 1945, while Berlin was being bombed by over 800 bombers each day, Zuse worked on the Z4 and developed Plankalkuel, the first high-level computer language more than 10 years before the appearance of FORTRAN in 1956. Zuse was able to write the world’s first chess program with Plankalkuel. And in 1950 his startup company Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau began to sell the world’s first commercial computer, the Z4, 10 months before the sale of the first UNIVAC I. However, the Z4 still used the very slow electromechanical relays, while the UNIVAC I primarily used vacuum tubes. The UNIVAC I was 25 feet by 50 feet in size and contained 5,600 vacuum tubes, 18,000 crystal diodes and 300 electromechanical relays with a total memory of 12 K.

Figure 11 – The UNIVAC I was very impressive on the outside.

Figure 12 – But the UNIVAC I was a little less impressive on the inside.

The Z4 just could not stand up to such powerful hardware!

Not only is Konrad Zuse the first person to ever build a modern operational computer, but he is also responsible for the idea of using a network of computers as a model for the behavior of the physical Universe. In 1969, Konrad Zuse published Rechnender Raum which translates into English as Calculating Space. An English translation of this short book can be downloaded at:

https://1drv.ms/b/c/c470796a085fc72b/ESvHXwhqeXAggMRJCAAAAAABatMYtI7fmBPs48RGEsb7JQ?e=t2ysKR

In Rebooting the Cosmos: Is the Universe the Ultimate Computer?, Edward Fredkin explained that he found the original German version of Calculating Space in the MIT library and had it translated into English so that he could read it. After reading Calculating Space, Edward Fredkin contacted Konrad Zuse about his ideas that our Universe was a simulation running on a network of computers. Unfortunately, Konrad Zuse had to explain to Edward Fredkin that after he published Calculating Space, people stopped talking to him because they thought that he was some kind of "crackpot". Even so, later, Edward Fredkin invited Konrad Zuse to MIT to a conference hosted by Richard Feynman, with John Wheeler in attendance, to discuss his ideas. For more on the work of Richard Feynman see Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse and The Foundations of Quantum Computing.

This conference probably influenced John Wheeler's "it from bit" ideas but my Internet searches cannot confirm that. For example, in 1998 John Wheeler stated, "it is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer". Building upon his famous ”it from bit” commentary, David Chalmers of the Australian National University has summarized Wheeler’s thoughts as:

"Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this "it from bit" doctrine, the laws of physics can be cast in terms of information, postulating different states that give rise to different effects without actually saying what those states are. It is only their position in an information space that counts. If so, then information is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness. We are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental, and on which it has two basic aspects, corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal features of the world".

For Jürgen Schmidhuber's thoughts on the work of Konrad Zuse see these pages on his website:

Zuse's Thesis: The Universe is a Computer
http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/digitalphysics.html

Computable Universes & Algorithmic Theory of Everything: The Computational Multiverse
http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html

Later in life, Konrad Zuse took up art and began painting some very striking modernistic works. If you Google for images of "Konrad Zuse Paintings" you will find quite a few examples. Below is a Zuse painting of his concept of the Universe as a running program.

Figure 13 – Konrad Zuse's In the beginning was the code.

So is the Universe Really Software Running on a Cosmic Computer?
From the above material, we can see that Konrad Zuse, Edward Fredkin, Jürgen Schmidhuber and Nick Bostrom make the case that our Universe is indeed just one of many possible computer simulations running on some kind of cosmic computer. Seth Lloyd, on the other hand, leans more to the idea of the Universe itself being some kind of a quantum computer calculating how to behave. Now with softwarephysics, I have maintained more of a positivistic position. Recall that positivism is an enhanced form of empiricism, in which we do not care about how things “really” are; we are only interested in how things are observed to behave. With positivism, physicists only seek out models of reality - not reality itself. So with softwarephysics, we simply observe that the Universe appears to behave like software running on a cosmic computer and leave it at that. Recall that 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 78 years, through the uncoordinated efforts of over 50 million independently acting programmers to provide the world with a global supply of software, the IT community has accidentally spent more than $10 trillion creating a computer simulation of the physical Universe on a grand scale – the Software Universe.

The battle between realists and positivists goes all the way back to the beginning. It is generally thought that the modern Scientific Revolution of the 16th century began in 1543 when Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in which he proposed his Copernican heliocentric theory that held that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, but that the Sun held that position and that the Earth and the other planets revolved about the Sun. A few years ago I read On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and found that it began with a very strange foreword that essentially said that the book was not claiming that the Earth actually revolved about the Sun, rather the foreword proposed that astronomers may adopt many different models that explain the observed motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets in the sky, and so long as these models make reliable predictions, they don’t have to exactly match up with the absolute truth. Since the foreword did not anticipate space travel, it also implied that since nobody will ever really know for sure anyway, because nobody will ever be able to see from above what is really going on, there is no need to get too bent out of shape over the idea of the Earth moving. I found this foreword rather puzzling and so disturbing that I almost put On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres down. But a little further research revealed the true story. However, before we get to that, below is the complete foreword to On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in its entirety. It is well worth reading because it perfectly encapsulates the ongoing philosophical clash between positivism and realism in the history of physics.

"To the Reader
Concerning the Hypotheses of this Work

There have already been widespread reports about the novel hypotheses of this work, which declares that the earth moves whereas the sun is at rest in the center of the universe. Hence certain scholars, I have no doubt, are deeply offended and believe that the liberal arts, which were established long ago on a sound basis, should not be thrown into confusion. But if these men are willing to examine the matter closely, they will find that the author of this work has done nothing blameworthy. For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study. Then he must conceive and devise the causes of these motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as for the past. The present author has performed both these duties excellently. For these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough. Perhaps there is someone who is so ignorant of geometry and optics that he regards the epicycle of Venus as probable, or thinks that it is the reason why Venus sometimes precedes and sometimes follows the sun by forty degrees and even more. Is there anyone who is not aware that from this assumption it necessarily follows that the diameter of the planet at perigee should appear more than four times, and the body of the planet more than sixteen times, as great as at apogee? Yet this variation is refuted by the experience of every age. In this science there are some other no less important absurdities, which need not be set forth at the moment. For this art, it is quite clear, is completely and absolutely ignorant of the causes of the apparent nonuniform motions. And if any causes are devised by the imagination, as indeed very many are, they are not put forward to convince anyone that they are true, but merely to provide a reliable basis for computation. However, since different hypotheses are sometimes offered for one and the same motion (for example, eccentricity and an epicycle for the sun’s motion), the astronomer will take as his first choice that hypothesis which is the easiest to grasp. The philosopher will perhaps rather seek the semblance of the truth. But neither of them will understand or state anything certain, unless it has been divinely revealed to him.

Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

Farewell."

Now here is the real behind-the-scenes story. Back in 1539 Georg Rheticus, a young mathematician, came to study with Copernicus as an apprentice. It was actually Rheticus who convinced the aging Copernicus to finally publish On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres shortly before his death. When Copernicus finally turned over his manuscript for publication to Rheticus, he did not know that Rheticus subcontracted out the overseeing of the printing and publication of the book to a philosopher by the name of Andreas Osiander, and it was Osiander who anonymously wrote and inserted the infamous foreword. My guess is that Copernicus was a realist at heart who really did think that the Earth revolved about the Sun, while his publisher, who worried more about the public reaction to the book, took a more cautious positivistic position. I think that all scientific authors can surely relate to this story.

Another early example of the clash between positivism and realism can be found in Newton’s Principia (1687), in which 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:

"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.

Conclusion
So for the purposes of softwarephysics, it really does not matter whether the Universe is "actually" a quantum computer calculating how to behave or "actually" some kind of cosmic software running on some kind of cosmic computer. The important thing is that the Universe does indeed seem to behave like software running on a computer and that provides a very useful model for all of science to use. Perhaps such a model could provide some insights into Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis as I outlined in The Software Universe as an Implementation of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis proposes that the Multiverse is composed of all possible mathematical structures and that our Universe is just one of them and that includes all of the computable universes that can exist in 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

How to Study the Origin of Life on the Earth and Elsewhere in the Universe Right Here at Home

Over the past year, I have taken several excellent online courses on the origin of life on the Earth and elsewhere in the Universe. In all of these very interesting courses, I have noticed that as we go further and further back into deep time that it becomes ever harder to figure out exactly what might have happened. Indeed, this is very difficult to do because we only have one example of carbon-based life here on the Earth to examine. This is further complicated by the fact that none of these excellent courses have been able to definitively define exactly what life on the Earth is nor what life elsewhere in the Universe might look like. It is very difficult to determine the origin of something that cannot even be properly defined. That is why I have recommended in many of my softwarephysics posts to step up just one level higher first and begin by definitively defining the general concept of self-replicating information. Once that has been done we can then view carbon-based life on the Earth as just one of many forms of self-replicating information. Then we can proceed to explore the general characteristics of all forms of self-replicating information and also some possible commonalities that might exist with their origins.

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.

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.

By focusing on a definition of self-replicating information first and the common characteristics of all forms of self-replicating information, we eliminate the problems of trying to define “life” itself. In previous posts, I proposed that since carbon-based life on the Earth and software are both forms of self-replicating information, that it only makes sense to look to the origin and early evolution of software for some clues to the origin and early evolution of carbon-based life. For example, in the SoftwarePaleontology section of SoftwareBiology, I explained how the evolution of software over the past 78 years, or 2.46 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse first cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941, has closely followed the same path through Design Space as did carbon-based life on this planet 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.

Software is now rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet and is having a major impact on mankind as it comes to predominance. So we are now living in one of those very rare times when a new form of self-replicating information, in the form of software, is coming to predominance. For biologists, this presents an invaluable opportunity because software has been evolving about 100 million times faster than living things over the past 2.46 billion seconds. And the evolution of software over that period of time is the only history of a form of self-replicating information that has actually been recorded by human history. In fact, the evolutionary history of software has all occurred within a single human lifetime, and many of those humans are still alive today to testify as to what actually had happened, something that those working on the origin of life on the Earth and its early evolution can only try to imagine.

As I saw in many of these courses, some are now trying to model the origin of carbon-based life on the Earth and elsewhere in the Universe with software. But why not just take advantage of the $10 trillion worldwide IT infrastructure that has been evolving all on its own for the past 2.46 billion seconds? Certainly, the biosphere of the Earth and this $10 trillion IT infrastructure are the most complicated information processing systems that we know of and billions of times more complicated than any research group could ever attain. Take a look at A Lesson for IT Professionals - Documenting the Flowcharts of Carbon-Based Life in the KEGG Online Database for example. The simplest way to do so would be to do some fieldwork in the corporate IT department of a major corporation or governmental agency. The objective of this fieldwork would be to observe the complexities of supporting heavy-duty commercial software in action on a network of hundreds of physical or virtual servers. I think that observing the IT processes that are used to write new code and install it into production on a large network of servers and then watching the emergent behaviors of the code under load would help researchers to understand the origins of carbon-based life and its complex information processing networks of organic molecules.

And there are tons of data for researchers to work with. Most large-scale IT operations have a great deal of monitoring software in place that displays and records the performance of many thousands of software components under processing load. For example, when I retired in December of 2016 my employer had about 500+ Unix servers running the software for their external websites and the internal web-based applications used to run the business. At peak load, these Unix servers were running several billion Objects (think eukaryotic cells) in Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) and all of these Objects (eukaryotic cells) were sending messages to each other, like the cells in a complex multicellular organism.

During an outage, the Command Center of the IT Department will page out perhaps 10 people to join an outage conference call. Then, using the display consoles of the monitoring software on their laptops the members of the outage call will all try to figure out what the heck is going on so that they can quickly fix the problem. Outages can cost between thousands to millions of dollars per second, depending on the business being conducted by the commercial software. Outages frequently happen in the middle of the night when new code goes into production or during the following day when the new code hits peak load. That would be an example of a simple deterministic outage caused by a low-level code change. But many times an outage just happens all on its own for no apparent reason. The whole network of information processes just seems to go berserk. Naturally, such “out of the blue” outages greatly displease IT Management because IT Management always wants to know the root cause of an outage. I spent many years trying to tell IT Management that such emergent outages just naturally arise for complex nonlinear networks far from thermal equilibrium but that explanation never went over very well. Anyway, the monitoring software records tons of data that can be used later to try and find the root cause of the outage. But this monitoring software runs continuously and provides a continuous stream of data that a research team could put to good use.

For a description of what a heavy-duty IT infrastructure looks like see Software Embryogenesis. For a more detailed post on such a proposal see A Proposal for an Odd Collaboration to Explore the Origin of Life with IT Professionals. In that post, I proposed that it might be worthwhile for researchers working on the origin of life or astrobiology to collaborate with the department of their university that teaches business-oriented computer science and with the IT department of a local major corporation or government agency to add some IT professionals to their research teams to bring in some new insights to their research efforts.

Some may object to the idea of software being a form of self-replicating information because currently, software is a product of the human mind. But I think that objection stems from the fact that most people simply 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. For more on that see The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness.

In order for evolution to take place, we need all three Darwinian processes at work – inheritance, innovation and natural selection. And that is the case for all forms of self-replicating information, including carbon-based life, memes and software. Currently, software is being written and maintained by human programmers, but that will likely change in the next 10 – 50 years when the Software Singularity occurs and AI software will be able to write and maintain software better than a human programmer. Even so, one must realize that human programmers are also just machines with a very complicated and huge neural network of neurons that have been trained with very advanced Deep Learning techniques to code software. Nobody learned how to code software sitting alone in a dark room. All programmers inherited the memes for writing software from teachers, books, other programmers or by looking at the code of others. Also, all forms of selection are “natural” unless they are made by supernatural means. So a programmer pursuing bug-free software by means of trial and error is no different than a cheetah deciding upon which gazelle in a herd to pursue.

Conclusion
In The Danger of Believing in Things, I discussed what can happen when a science gets "stuck" on a problem that seems impossible to solve. Sometimes the best thing to do when apparently "stuck" is to simply walk away from the problem for a bit and seek the advice of others, especially others with an entirely different perspective of the problem at hand.

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

A Lesson for IT Professionals - Documenting the Flowcharts of Carbon-Based Life in the KEGG Online Database

Whether you are an IT professional in Applications Development, coding and maintaining complex software, or in Operations, trying to run complex software, you have no doubt experienced the anxiety of starting out on a new IT job or moving to a new area within your current employer's IT Department. Normally, the first thing your new group will do is to show you a chart similar to Figure 1. Figure 1 shows a simplified flowchart for the NAS system. Of course, being new to the group, you barely know what the NAS system does, but you are at least thankful that your new group started you out by showing you a simplified flowchart of the NAS system instead of a detailed flowchart of the NAS system! Unfortunately, most times you will later find out that a detailed flowchart for the NAS system does not even exist. Instead, the details of the NAS system can only be found within the minds of the developers in the Applications Development group as an unwritten oral history. That unwritten oral history has to be slowly learned by figuratively sitting around the weekly campfires of the Applications Development group meetings. Developers also slowly learn parts of the code for the NAS system on their own by working on portions of the NAS system.

Figure 1 – Above is a simplified flowchart for the NAS system.

Unfortunately, IT has never been very good at documenting software. This was most evident when I was in Middleware Operations supporting the software for high-volume corporate websites. When we had a website outage, the Command Center would page out perhaps 10 IT people into an outage call - representatives from the Call Centers, the IT Manager on call, Applications Development, Middleware Operations, Database Operations, Unix Operations, Network Operations and IT Security. As the members of the call dialed in, the Command Center would repeatedly explain what was going on to the new arrivals. Modern complex software is now heavily monitored by monitoring software that displays tons of information on consoles and real-time graphs of processing loads, response times and throughput levels. Usually, during an outage, a few icons on the main console would turn red and then you could drill down a hierarchy of displays that featured real-time graphs at lower and lower processing levels to help figure out what the problem was. Naturally, this all created huge amounts of data that were hard to relate to each other in real-time because of the sheer volume of data. So many times we would then have Applications Development explain to the outage call what each software component that was in trouble did and what it was dependent on in a high-level sense to help the outage team troubleshoot the problem. Of course, many times that required Applications Development to quickly come up with the answers to totally impossible questions, like asking how many people in the United States of America go by the nickname of "Chuck". But that was not a problem. The members of the outage team would all simply pretend without question that Applications Development could do such things off the top of their heads on an outage call. For more on the career benefits of advanced pretending skills see Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse.

During the last decade, there have been attempts by the monitoring software industry to try to automate the very complex documentation of software by recording data on how software behaved under processing load and then determining the high-level and detailed processing flowcharts for software by induction. Unfortunately, many times such attempts at trying to determine processing flowcharts by sheer induction just generated flowcharts where every software component depended on every other software component and that was not of much help.

Now over the past 100 years, biochemists have also been trying to figure out the processing flowcharts of carbon-based life by induction, deduction and by performing experiments. This flowcharting activity has been greatly enhanced by the rise of bioinformatics. A fine example of this is the KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes). The KEGG is an online collection of databases detailing genomes, biochemical pathways, diseases, drugs, and biochemical molecules. KEGG is available at:

https://www.genome.jp/kegg/kegg2.html

A good description of the KEGG is available in the Wikipedia at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KEGG

Figure 2 – Above is a simplified flowchart of the metabolic pathways used by carbon-based life.

Figure 3 – Above is a high-level flowchart of the metabolic pathways used by carbon-based life as presented in the KEGG online database. You can use the KEGG online database to drill down into the above chart and to dig down into the flowcharts for many other biological processes.

I encourage all IT professionals to try out the KEGG online database to drill down into the documented flowcharts of carbon-based life to appreciate the complexities of carbon-based life and to see an excellent example of the documentation of complex information flows. Softwarephysics has long suggested that a biological approach to software was necessitated to progress to such levels of complexity. For more on that see Agile vs. Waterfall Programming and the Value of Having a Theoretical Framework.

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

What Would Alien von Neumann Probes Stuffed with Alien Software Look Like?

In many of my postings on Fermi's Paradox, I have commented that since we now know that most of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy have planets and that many of those planets and their moons should be capable of supporting carbon-based life that we, therefore, should now find ourselves knee-deep in von Neumann probes stuffed with alien software. In short, von Neumann probes are self-replicating robotic probes that travel from star system to star system building copies along the way as they seek out additional resources and safety from potential cosmic threats. Again:

Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?

In The Deadly Dangerous Dance of Carbon-Based Intelligence I offered up my Null Result Hypothesis as a possible explanation for Fermi's Paradox:

Briefly stated:

Null Result Hypothesis - What if the explanation to Fermi's Paradox is simply that the Milky Way galaxy has yet to produce a form of Technological Intelligence? By that, I mean that the galaxy has not yet produced a form of Intelligence that can make itself known across interstellar distances, including ourselves. I then went on to propose that the simplest explanation for this lack of contact could be that the conditions necessary to bring forth carbon-based Technological Intelligence on a planet or moon were also the same kill mechanisms that eliminated all forms of carbon-based Technological Intelligences with 100% efficiency. I then suggested that this kill mechanism might be the tendency for carbon-based Technological Intelligences to mess with their planet's or moon's carbon cycle as we seem to be doing today with the Earth.

However, in The Dawn of Galactic ASI - Artificial Superintelligence, I also noted that we are now in the process of creating a silicon-based Technological Intelligence that could go on to become a form of a Galactic ASI - Artificial Superintelligence. So it now seems that the Earth is in a tight race between carbon-based Intelligence destroying itself and silicon-based Intelligence taking off and exploring the Milky Way galaxy. If we can just hold it all together for another 100 years or so, the Earth might just be the very first planet in the Milky Way galaxy to do so.

But what would a von Neumann probe stuffed with alien software likely look like? Clearly, a von Neumann probe would need to be a very flexible and resourceful piece of hardware, housing a very flexible and resourceful form of AI software. Recently, I viewed a very interesting TED Talk by Jamie Paik that demonstrated just the glimmers of such a very flexible and resourceful kind of hardware that could house the very flexible and resourceful AI software necessary to create a von Neumann probe. In this TED Talk, Jamie Paik explains that the future of robotics does not necessarily lie just with replicating the biological models that nature has uncovered by means of the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Although the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection have discovered incredible engineering designs, they do have their limits as I outlined in The Limitations of Darwinian Systems. For example, those Darwinian mechanisms have never produced the innovation of a macroscopic wheel and axle. We just do not see the likes of Wile E. Coyote sporting a set of wheels in pursuit of the Road Runner in nature. Jamie Paik proposes that robotics should break free from simply replicating the limited designs produced by nature and build robots based on the theoretical capabilities of Transformers instead! And I do not mean the kind of electrical transformers built from two coils wrapped around a common iron core.

Jamie Paik contends that the robots of the future need to be flexible and resourceful by being able to fold into any shape required by the task at hand. She calls these folding robots "robogamis". Jamie Paik is already working with the European Space Agency and the Swiss Space Center on building stackable robogamis that unfold into 3-D objects for the exploration of bodies within our Solar System.

Figure 1 – von Neumann probes stuffed with alien software might look something like Jamie Paik's robogamis.

To view this very interesting TED Talk please take a look at:

Origami Robots That Reshape and Transform Themselves
https://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_paik_origami_robots_that_reshape_and_transform_themselves?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2019-07-12&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=bottom_right_button#t-1"

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

Life in Postwar America After Our Stunning Defeat in the Great Cyberwar of 2016

In case you have not noticed, the United States of America has now gained the distinction of being the very first world power to be defeated by cyberwarfare. Our defeat in the Great Cyberwar of 2016 was so stunning and so complete that hardly any in our defeated nation even know that it has happened. In my posting Cyber Civil Defense, I warned that, since it was impossible for the government of the United States to fend off cyberattacks by foreign powers, that it was up to each individual citizen of the United States to stop believing in the stupid political memes to be found on the Internet. That is what we learned to do back in the 1950s when it was openly admitted by the United States government that we could not be protected from a nuclear attack by the Russian strategic bomber force. Instead, we were told to build private and public fallout shelters across the country. Unfortunately, nobody paid heed to my warnings and we now find ourselves living in a deeply divided and defeated post-cyberwar country that is politically paralyzed and incapable of even acting in its own best interest. How could this possibly have happened?

A Possible Explanation Based on Softwarephysics
The key finding of softwarephysics is that it is all about the interactions of self-replicating information. For more on that please see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. In this case, I contend that the dramatic defeat of the United States in the very first large-scale cyberwar resulted from a controlled manipulation of the interactions between political memes and domestic software by foreign and domestic powers that then went viral and ran amuck. Things are now so bad in postwar America, that I can already sense that my assertion has about 40% of the surviving Americans withdrawing to one tribal corner and the remainder withdrawing to another tribal corner in preparation for combat and that is the problem. So let's use some softwarephysics to see why. In softwarephysics, Homo sapiens is modeled as a hardware platform of carbon-based Intelligence 1.0 that primarily stores and replicates memes. So Homo sapiens is both a DNA survival machine and a meme survival machine that has a very dense and complex neural network that stores and replicates memes. In this view, Homo sapiens is an example of Deep Learning at its best and is far superior to anything that Intelligence 2.0 currently has running on silicon. This is a significantly different model than most people use on a daily basis. Most people simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. In everyday life, this is a very useful delusion as I explained in The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness but I do not think that it adequately explains our current predicament.

So let us all finally admit that we all have Minds that are infected with political memes just trying to self-replicate and that these political memes are just mindless forms of self-replicating information that do not necessarily have our best interests at heart, as outlined by Richard Brodie in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996) and by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine (1999). These political memes are just trying to survive and self-replicate and have highjacked the greed, anger, hate and fear that DNA uses to ensure its own survival in the DNA survival machines known to us as Homo sapiens. In this view, these political memes are neither inherently "good" nor "bad" - they just are. Next, let us explore how the Russian FSB brilliantly used these facts to defeat the United States of America with cyberwarfare. Only a few Russians were lost in this cyberwar and perhaps there was not even a single American casualty through it all. What a spectacular victory! Contrast that to the 27 million Russians who died during the Great Patriotic War of World War II. Now how in the world could the Russian FSB manage to do this? Well, all they needed to do was to convert a good portion of Americans into unwitting Russian assets. Thanks to the bizarre electoral college process for electing a new president of the United States outlined in our Constitution, you do not even need to convert a majority of Americans into Russian assets. All you have to do is to convert more than 50% of those casting votes in certain key states into Russian assets. But how do you do that?

I just finished episode two Friends for the Moment of the new Netflix series Inside the Mossad. The Friends for the Moment episode covers how the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, recruits foreign assets and manages those assets with Mossad operators. Now I am quite sure that the techniques portrayed in this episode are the very same techniques that are used by all of the intelligence agencies throughout the world, like the American CIA, the British MI6 and the Russian FSB. And there is nothing wrong with that. I find that the use of espionage by nations is far better than the use of war to achieve political ends. Think of the countless lives that espionage has saved compared to the millions lost on the battlefields of World War I and World War II. In Friends for the Moment, it is explained that the ultimate objective of recruiting a foreign asset is to get the asset to provide information and to perform actions that betray his country. This is not an easy thing to do. An operator must be very patient as he very gently and very carefully leads the asset down a path that ultimately leads to treason. The operator does this by using the same techniques that conmen use to trick and seduce normally honest people into giving up their money while in pursuit of a shady deal that is too good to be true.

For example, suppose an operator needs some photographs of a secret foreign installation in a Middle Eastern country and needs a foreign asset to obtain them. One approach would be to befriend a film student in the target country. Then the operator tells the potential asset that he has contacts in Hollywood and that his Hollywood contacts need some Middle Eastern stock footage for an upcoming film. All the film student needs to do is to take some footage along any road in the desert of his choosing. When the stock footage comes back, the operator heaps praise upon the potential asset and explains to the potential asset that his Hollywood contacts would like to buy the footage for a very good price. Next, the operator tells the asset that his Hollywood contacts need some stock footage of a chemical plant or oil refinery - anything with lots of distillation towers and piping. When that footage is returned, it is again purchased for a very good price. Next, the operator then tells the asset that his Hollywood contacts really liked all the work that the asset has already performed, but that they are especially interested in some footage of a specific facility along a certain road and would like to contract the asset to provide that footage. This goes on and on as the asset unwittingly provides more and more sensitive footage. At some point, the "penny drops". This is when the asset finally realizes that he has been the victim of a con and finally comes to grips with the implications of the very serious things that he has been doing. By that time, it is too late for the asset. There is far too much incriminating evidence that the asset has committed traitorous acts for money. At this point, the operator can then request the asset to perform obviously traitorous acts because the operator now has a great deal of leverage over the asset. None of this has to be explicitly articulated. Both the operator and the asset now know what is going on even if they do not specifically lay it out in words.

For example, suppose you were a brash young real estate developer with a string of bankruptcies that prevented you from obtaining large loans for real estate deals from the major banks. A number of Russian FSB operators might approach you with the offer of investing in your real estate deals. Then, over a number of years, it might become apparent that these investments by Russian FSB operators might be deemed to be money laundering activities by the authorities. At some point, the "penny drops" without a spoken word needed between the Russian FSB operators and their newly recruited asset. Both parties now know what is truly going on and that it is too late for the asset to back out now.

The Power of Parasitic Political Memes
In SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software I discussed the potential power of parasitic interstellar self-replicating information. In particular, I quoted a passage from Parasite Rex – Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures (2000) by Carl Zimmer which follows an earlier tale about how a certain fungus makes house flies die at the top of blades of grass so that they can drop spores onto other house flies.

“Another species of fluke can be found in the meadows of Europe and Asia, along with a few in North America and Australia. Known as Dicrocoelium dendriticum, or the lancet fluke, it makes cows and other grazers its host as an adult, and the cows spread their eggs in their manure. Hungry snails swallow the eggs, which hatch in their intestines. They drill through the wall of a snail’s gut and settle in the digestive gland. There the flukes produce a generation of cercariae, which make their way to the snail’s surface. The snail tries to defend itself from the parasites by blocking them off with walls of slime. The slime balls up around the cercariae, which the snail coughs up and leaves behind in the grass.

Next, along comes an ant. To an ant, a slimeball is positively delicious. Along with the slime, the ant may also swallow hundreds of lancet flukes as well. The parasites slide down into its gut, and they then wander for a while through its body, eventually moving to the cluster of nerves that control the ant’s mandibles. The parasites all travel together on this trip, but after visiting the nerves, they split up. Most of the lancet flukes head back to the abdomen, where they form cysts, but one or two stay behind in the ant’s head.

There they do some parasitic voodoo on their hosts. As evening approaches and the air cools, the ants find themselves drawn away from their fellow ants on the ground and upward to the top of a blade of grass. Like flies infected with a fungus, the ants clamp down on the tip of the grass. But the lancet fluke has a different goal than the fungus does. The fungus uses its host as a catapult to shower its spores on other insects. The lancet fluke can continue to live only if it can get inside its final host, a mammal. Clamped to the tip of a grass blade, the infected ant is likely to be devoured by a cow or some other grazer passing by. When the ant tumbles into the cow’s stomach, the flukes burst out and make their way to the cow’s liver, where the flukes will live as adults.

But the lancet fluke, like the fungus, is very aware of the passing of time. If the ant sits the whole night without being eaten and the sun rises, the fluke lets the ant loosen its grip on the grass. The ant scurries back down to the ground and spends the day acting like a regular insect again. If the host were to bake in the heat of the direct sun, the parasite would die with it. When evening comes again, it sends the ant back up a blade of grass for another try.”

Now just think of what the Russian FSB operators have been able to achieve by simply exploiting the already existing greed, anger, hate and fear of their American hosts by spreading parasitic political memes and using our very own social media software platforms to do it! They have us in a trade war with China, making friends with our former adversaries in North Korea and Russia, investigating the counterespionage wings of our CIA and FBI for wrongdoing, forsaking all of our traditional American values, at odds with Canada to the north and Mexico to the south and making enemies of our former NATO allies, all while we cozy up to every fascist Alt-Right regime on the planet. We are now also politically paralyzed and in no way capable of leading the free world as we once did. In fact, we cannot even manage our own affairs. And like an infected ant, we do not even know that the world order has drastically changed for at least a decade or more.

But do not blame the Russian FSB for our present situation. We did this to ourselves. We started to climb out onto this ledge all by ourselves about 60 years ago. The Russian FSB only had to give us a gentle nudge into political oblivion.

Postwar Recovery
Another thing that we learned back in the 1950s was that immediately following a major nuclear war, it was expected that it would take an extended period of time for the federal government of the United States to reconstitute itself and recover. The same would be true for the local and state governments, so it was important for individual citizens to help out with the postwar recovery process. Otherwise, the entire United States might descend into a number of tribal groups ruled by local warlords. I would like to suggest that postwar America has indeed descended into two tribal camps following the Great Cyberwar of 2016 and that it is now up to the survivors to recover what we once had. Now kids were taught civics back in the 1950s and so we knew about how the United States Constitution and the federal government were supposed to work. Since civics is hardly ever even mentioned these days, let's review some basic civics to help with our postwar recovery.

The United States Constitution was a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. These philosophical movements brought forth the heretical proposition that rational thought, combined with evidence-based reasoning, could reveal the absolute truth, and allow individuals to actually govern themselves, without the need for an authoritarian monarchy. This change in thinking led to the 18th-century Enlightenment and brought forth the United States of America as a self-governing political entity. But unfortunately, the United States of America has always been a very dangerous experiment in human nature to see if the masses could truly govern themselves, without succumbing to the passions of the mob. That is where the genius of the United States Constitution comes into play. The United States Constitution sets up a representative republic designed for an electorate that is only mildly paying attention to the events of the day but that can sometimes get riled up over certain issues. The representatives of this largely ill-informed electorate can also many times become scoundrels. On the face of it, it would appear that such a system could not possibly work. But it does work because the United States Constitution places many layers between the electorate and the governing bodies and has a large number of checks and balances to limit the powers of the political representatives.

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published The Leviathan, in which he argued against the divine right of kings, but maintained the absolute supremacy of the monarchy. In The Leviathan, Hobbes argued that in “a state of nature" without government, life would be totally insecure. Under such conditions, people should willingly surrender their civil liberties to an absolute sovereign, who would protect them from all dangers. Hobbes argued that the sovereign's power was absolute - he made the law, he was the decider, and no other institution could limit the sovereign’s power. This was the position of the Loyalists or Tories during the American Revolutionary War, who comprised about 25% of the population. The Tories were 18th-century conservatives who wished to remain loyal to King George during the Revolution and fought on the side of King George to preserve his sovereignty over the colonies. On the other hand, about 25% of the population were 18th-century liberals like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams who were followers of the 18th-century Enlightenment that rejected the ideas of Hobbes and believed that people could live in a state of liberty and self-governance tempered by individual responsibility. Many of the Founding Fathers had a great distrust of the Powers That Be. These anti-Federalist Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, had a great fear that Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist theories would result in the presidency becoming a new sovereignty in a Hobbesian sense, like the King George they had just freed themselves from. In response, they were instrumental in amending the newly minted Constitution of the United States (1787) with the Bill of Rights (1791) to limit the powers of the Powers That Be. Since political movements are meme-complexes and subject to change, it is interesting how the Jeffersonian 18th-century liberal concepts of a federal government, with very limited powers, evolved into 20th-century conservativism, while Hamiltonian 18th-century conservativism, which advocated a strong central government, evolved into 20th-century liberalism. Now it seems that 21st-century liberalism is returning to its 18th-century roots and so is 21st-century conservativism, in that 21st-century liberals seem to be more wary of the president of the United States trying to become a king with absolute powers than do 21st-century conservatives, who support an unrestrained president to achieve their political goals.

Conclusion
As we have seen, the Great Cyberwar of 2016 was devastating for the United States of America and it will take several decades for us to recover from it. The most important thing for us to remember is that we did this to ourselves, and we did this to ourselves because of parasitic political memes infecting the vast neural networks in our heads that we call our Minds. So we all need to go on a twelve-step program, similar to the ones used to deprogram cult members, to help bring back some political civility. The first step is to recognize that our current political worldviews probably contain many false memes. One way to remove false memes from your political worldview is to use the Scientific Method that I outlined in How To Think Like A Scientist. Galileo pointed out that the truth is not afraid of scrutiny, the more you pound on the truth, the more you confirm its validity. False memes do not stand up well to close scrutiny as I described in The Danger of Believing in Things. I contend that the only way to restore the United States of America is to go back to our foundations in the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. At one time, these memes were so prevalent and were considered to be so American that no one even bothered to bring them up because they were so obvious. Perhaps that is when we started to lose our way as Americans.

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 Role of Multilevel Selection in the Evolution of Software

I just finished reading The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) by the very famous evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson who is the world's expert on myrmecology, the study of ants. Edward O. Wilson also became one of the founding fathers of sociobiology, the explanation of social behaviors in terms of evolutionary biological thought, when he published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). In The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson presents a new theory by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and himself for the rise of eusocial behavior in species by means of multilevel selection. Now Darwin's theory of evolution maintains that given a system subject to the natural processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection that things will have no choice but to change into new things that are better adapted to the current state of affairs. But for the past 160 years, ever since On the Origin of Species (1859) was first published, people have always had a difficult time with figuring out on exactly what level of organization natural selection works. For carbon-based life, does natural selection work at the level of an entire species, a group of individuals in a species, a sole individual in a species, groups of genes in a species, a single gene of a species or at the level of a single DNA base pair? Softwarephysics agrees with Richard Dawkins' contention that most selection for carbon-based life operates at the level of the individual gene as proposed in his The Selfish Gene (1976). Multilevel selection, on the other hand, maintains that for each individual member of a social species there is a balance between individual selection and group selection. Individual selection encourages the selfish behavior of individuals in order to replicate the genes of each individual in a society, and those selfish behaviors are governed by the selfish genes of the individual. Group selection, on the other hand, encourages the selfless altruistic behaviors of individuals that advance the survivability of an entire societal group. Clearly, the opposing concepts of individual selection and group selection are at odds with each other and have been much debated.

The Social Conquest of Earth covers in detail many observations of eusocial behavior in both certain species of social insects and the human species Homo sapiens and then goes on to explain the rise of such behaviors with the new theory for the rise of eusocial species that differs from the current standard theory. Thus, The Social Conquest of Earth is a very interesting popular book that covers the 2010 paper first published in Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson that is available at:

The Evolution of Eusociality
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/

But The Social Conquest of Earth then goes on to expand this new theory for the origin of eusocial behavior in Homo sapiens.

The Evolution of Eusocial Behavior by Means of Multilevel Selection
This new theory for the rise of eusocial behavior can best be summarized by the last paragraph of the above paper:

To summarize very briefly, we suggest that the full theory of eusocial evolution consists of a series of stages, of which the following may be recognized:

1. The formation of groups.

2. The occurrence of a minimum and necessary combination of preadaptive traits, causing the groups to be tightly formed. In animals at least, the combination includes a valuable and defensible nest.

3. The appearance of mutations that prescribe the persistence of the group, most likely by the silencing of dispersal behavior. Evidently, a durable nest remains a key element in maintaining the prevalence. Primitive eusociality may emerge immediately due to springloaded preadaptations.

4. Emergent traits caused by the interaction of group members are shaped through natural selection by environmental forces.

5. Multilevel selection drives changes in the colony life cycle and social structures, often to elaborate extremes.

The main idea of this new theory is that once a group of individuals forms, the group itself can become another environmental factor amongst the many environmental selection factors that select for genes that enhance the survivability of the individual. Being a member of a group that has been selected for genes with altruistic behaviors can certainly enhance the survivability of an individual up to a point. But these altruistic genes necessarily have to be balanced with selfish genes that only benefit the survivability of the individual too. Thus develops the coevolutionary battle between group selection and individual selection that is known as multilevel selection.

The Evolution of Eusocial Behavior by Means of Kin Selection
The more conventional theory for the origin of altruistic and eusocial behavior can also be summarized by the above paper as:

For the past four decades kin selection theory has had a profound effect on the interpretation of the genetic evolution of eusociality and, by extension, of social behavior in general. The defining feature of kin selection theory is the concept of inclusive fitness. When evaluating an action, inclusive fitness is defined as the sum of the effect of this action on the actor’s own fitness and on the fitness of the recipient multiplied by the relatedness between actor and recipient, where “recipient” refers to anyone whose fitness is modified by the action.

The idea was first stated by J. B. S. Haldane in 1955, and a foundation of a full theory was laid out by W. D. Hamilton in 1964. The pivotal idea expressed by both writers was formalized by Hamilton as the inequality R > c/b, meaning that cooperation is favored by natural selection if relatedness is greater than the cost to benefit ratio. The relatedness parameter R was originally expressed as the fraction of the genes shared between the altruist and the recipient due to their common descent, hence the likelihood the altruistic gene will be shared. For example, altruism will evolve if the benefit to a brother or sister is greater than 2 times the cost to the altruist (R = 1/2) or 8 times in case of a first cousin (R = 1/8).

Personally, I have never been a big fan of kin selection and inclusive fitness theory. I know that Orgel's Second Rule states that evolution is much smarter than I am, but I have never been able to see a way for genes to figure out the c/b ratio and the degree of relatedness R for very distant relatives by the standard means of inheritance and innovation honed by natural selection. Yes, taking care of your offspring should have a relatively low c/b ratio for your genes since your offspring have 1/2 of your genes and an R of 1/2, at least if you are the mother. But even so, many species do not do that, and even for those that do, the fathers never really know for sure. When performing the c/b ratio calculation for contacting a very distant relative of apparently very low relatedness R, I just keep thinking about all of those surprised customers on 23andMe commercials who may have found themselves in all sorts of family squabbles at Thanksgiving dinner. However, I can see a way for inheritance, innovation and natural selection to stumble upon the fact that living in a group of similar organisms with a shared gene pool can sometimes improve the survivability of the individual when individual selection and group selection operate in a mutual parasitic/symbiotic manner.

Multilevel Selection Generates Controversy
The above paper generated quite a bit of controversy in academia that got a bit nasty. For example, see the 2011 response by F. Rousset and S. Lion at:

Much ado about nothing: Nowak et al.’s charge against inclusive fitness theory
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02251.x

After reading the above paper, I was taken aback a bit by the level of the academic "Nature, red in tooth and claw" concerning the topic. For an outsider, this violent academic controversy looks very much like two memes in mortal combat fighting to the death. Strangely, I think that Richard Dawkins' concept of Replicators and memes, first expressed in The Selfish Gene, might be key to resolving this controversy and that some of the findings of softwarephysics might help to soothe some of these very troubled academic waters.

From the perspective of softwarephysics, the new multilevel selection model for the rise of eusocial species seems almost self-evident because we see it at work today with the rise of software, echoing James Hutton's "The present is key to the past". The multilevel selection of individual selection and group selection working together in a coevolutionary manner is just a recognition of the fact that there is more than one single form of self-replicating information on the planet and that all of these many forms of self-replicating information are coevolving together. In fact, we now have at least five major forms of self-replicating information on the planet all coevolving with each other. Again, for newcomers to softwarephysics, let me recap the essentials 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.

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.

From the above list of common characteristics, we see that a group of individuals could in effect become a form of self-replicating information that skips down through the generations, largely unscathed by time, as a self-sustaining network of altruistic and selfish genes coevolving together in a stable manner that balances both the survivability of the group and the individuals in the group. I know that group selection is frowned upon by many evolutionary biologists but think of a ripple on a still pond. The ripple is a wave of information that persists through time as a disturbance of the behaviors of countless numbers of individual water molecules. There are no genes for ripples, yet ripples do exist as each water molecule responds to the local forces of nature, and ripples could even be used to transfer information. That's how you hear someone speaking. In order to better understand the nature of self-replicating information, it helps to have some understanding of the nature of information in general with the understanding that the concept of information is still a bit fuzzy. Please see The Demon of Software, Is Information Real?, and Some More Information About Information.

The important thing to keep in mind is that all of the five major forms of self-replicating information now on the planet are also coevolving together in a parasitic/symbiotic manner. For example, standard DNA viruses and transposons are examples of parasitic DNA that are coevolving with all of the other carbon-based life forms on the Earth, from bacteria all the way up to the most complicated multicellular organisms. Retroviruses, like the AIDS virus, are examples of parasitic RNA that are also coevolving with all forms of carbon-based life. Prions are examples of geometrical configurations of certain organic molecules self-replicating and coevolving with all of the other forms of carbon-based life too. And now we have the memes and software coevolving too on many levels.

Multilevel Selection in the Evolution of Software
Currently, the memes are the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. Over the past 200,000 years, the memes residing within the neural networks of Homo sapiens have cut down the forests for agriculture, mined minerals from the ground for metals, burned coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide that its predecessors had previously sequestered in the Earth, and have even modified the very DNA, RNA, and metabolic pathways of its predecessors. But now that software is seemingly on the rise, like all of its predecessors, software has entered into a very closely coupled parasitic/symbiotic coevolving relationship with the memes. Currently, software is created by the programming memes to be found within the minds of programmers and is replicated by the minds of end-users in a parasitic/symbiotic manner that then allows many other memes to self-replicate. This will likely continue for the next 20 - 50 years until software is finally able to write itself. For more on that please see The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity. In the meantime, software currently evolves in a multilevel fashion that takes advantage of both individual and group selection processes. Programmers are now called developers so I will use that terminology going forward. Developers are broken up in IT departments into tribes of 5 – 30 developers working under a single chief, or IT application development manager. Each application development tribe of 5 – 30 developers is a semi-isolated population of developers, dedicated to supporting a number of applications, or possibly, a small segment of a very large application like Microsoft Word. But to fully understand how individual and group selection processes are run in these development tribes please see How Software Evolves.

The memes are still the most dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet and have formed a very strong parasitic/symbiotic relationship with software. The memes foster the evolution of software by supporting and funding software development, and software is now responsible for replicating most memes. In the modern world, beyond personal word-of-mouth communications, memes can now only self-replicate with the aid of software, and the poor memes in our heads have become Facebook and Twitter addicts. Since all forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection that cannot think, they cannot participate in a conspiracy-theory-like fashion to take over a planet, and they certainly do not need to do so to be successful. The blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection have never required a designer to take over a planet in the past and will not need one in the future either.

So we are now living in one of those very rare times when a new form of self-replicating information, in the form of software, is coming to predominance. For biologists, this presents an invaluable opportunity because software has been evolving about 100 million times faster than living things over the past 78 years, or 2.46 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse first cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941. The evolution of software over that period of time is the only history of a form of self-replicating information that has actually been recorded by human history. In fact, the evolutionary history of software has all occurred within a single human lifetime, and many of those humans are still alive today to testify as to what actually had happened, something that those working on the origin of life on the Earth and its early evolution can only try to imagine.

The Need to Revive Memetics in Sociobiology
In The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward O. Wilson goes on to apply the new multilevel selection theory for the rise of eusocial behavior to the rise of eusocial behavior in human societies using the same five steps that are proposed to bring forth eusocial behavior in social insects. I think that such an analysis could benefit greatly by reviving the recently discarded science of memetics. For more on that please see How to Use Softwarephysics to Revive Memetics in Academia and Susan Blackmore's brilliant TED presentation at:

Memes and "temes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes

Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge.

I think that memetics was discarded prematurely by sociobiologists because, deep down, humans simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. In everyday life, this is a very useful delusion as I explained in The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness but it is an impediment that has seriously affected many scientific disciplines. Susan Blackmore pointed out in The Meme Machine (1999), that we are not so much thinking machines as we are copying machines and that it was "memetic-drive" that was responsible for creating our extremely large brains, and also our languages and cultures as well, in order to store and spread memes more effectively. Similarly, it was the relentless demands of software over the years for more and more CPU-cycles and memory that provided the "software-drive" that was responsible for the rapid advance of computing hardware. For a brief history of the effects that "software-drive" had on the prodigious advances of computing hardware, see the last half of Did Carbon-Based Life on Earth Really Have a LUCA - a Last Universal Common Ancestor?. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore also goes on to point out that the memes at first coevolved with the genes during their early days, but have since outrun the genes because the genes could simply not keep pace when the memes began to evolve millions of times faster than the genes. The same thing is happening before our very eyes to the memes, with software now rapidly outpacing the memes. Software is now evolving thousands of times faster than the memes, and the memes can simply no longer keep up.

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 Primal Memes of Bacteria

In Programming Clay and Crocheting Software, I explained that since the origin of software was such a hodge-podge of precursors, false starts, and failed attempts that it was nearly impossible to pinpoint an exact date for its origin. And I think the same is true for all forms of self-replicating information, including carbon-based life. Again, for newcomers to softwarephysics, let me recap the essentials 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.

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.

The Rise of the Memes
In this posting, I would like to examine the origin of the memes more closely. Currently, the memes are the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. These memes are being replicated by the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a carbon-based DNA survival machine that runs on the old metabolic pathways of organic molecules, RNA and DNA of yore, but also has a very large neural network that is capable of storing and replicating large numbers of self-replicating memes. Richard Dawkins first established the concept of the meme in his brilliant The Selfish Gene (1976). The concept of memes was later advanced by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained (1991) and Richard Brodie in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996), and was finally formalized by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine (1999). 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. 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.”. For more on this, see Susan Blackmore's brilliant TED presentation at:

Memes and "temes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes

Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge.

Over the past 200,000 years, the memes residing within the neural networks of Homo sapiens have cut down the forests for agriculture, mined minerals from the ground for metals, burned coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, releasing the huge quantities of carbon dioxide that its predecessors had previously sequestered in the Earth, and have even modified the very DNA, RNA, and metabolic pathways of its predecessors. But now that software is seemingly on the rise, like all of its predecessors, software has entered into a very closely coupled parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the memes. In today's world, memes allow software to succeed, and software allows memes to replicate. So the current rise of software to predominance is just another example of mother nature at work. All forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Since all forms of self-replicating information cannot think, they cannot participate in a conspiracy-theory-like fashion to take over a planet, and they certainly do not need to do so to be successful.

The Very Early Origin of the Memes
Now all along, I have unwittingly maintained the conventional wisdom that the memes first arose in the minds of Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago. But all of that changed after viewing the very enlightening TED presentation of nanophysicist Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktch at:

To detect diseases earlier, let's speak bacteria's secret language https://www.ted.com/talks/fatima_alzahra_a_alatraktchi_to_detect_diseases_earlier_let_s_speak_bacteria_s_secret_language?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2019-03-30&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=top_right_button

This very interesting TED presentation really got me to thinking. Perhaps the very earliest of memes did not first arise a mere 200,000 years ago. Perhaps they really first came to be about four billion years ago with the appearance of the very first bacteria! As we saw in Susan Blackmore's TED presentation, the distinguishing characteristic of a meme is that it is a copied form of information that passes from one individual organism to another. From Fatima AlZahra'a Alatraktch's TED presentation we see that the organism need not be a member of the species Homo sapiens, it might just be a simple prokaryotic bacterium. Yes, the memes that are passed from one bacterium to another may consist only of a single molecule, but as I explained in The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness, the memes in the vast neural networks of Homo sapiens simply arise from the passage of neurotransmitter molecules from on neuron cell to another. This new view on the origin of the memes might just be characteristic of the origin of all new forms of self-replicating information. They may all have a very murky and nebulous beginning with no distinguishing "Aha!" moment of coming into existence, as I pointed out in Did Carbon-Based Life on Earth Really Have a LUCA - a Last Universal Common Ancestor?.

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