Beyond dissipative structures and lossy methods to integrative and lossless ones

One new way of looking at things helps, but the emerging methods on the Internet are mostly independent efforts. And, those are uncoordinated except by a continuous barrage of “information” shouted, whispered and diffusing through many channels. We need more than a click bait “second law”, but a new way to openly, losslessly, verifiably, audit-ably share knowledge on, and inside, the Internet.

That jig-jaggy pathway is simply the consequence of many independent sources and forces, including some internal energy and power sources. Trace and record the precise path in 3D and, over time, the character and behavior of the sources will emerge. But it will not be complete, unless you face and understand the large sources themselves.

I watched before Ilya Prigogine got his Nobel prize for “systems far from equilibrium”. But that was 50 years ago. And the “game” has changed a lot. Modeling biological and complex physical systems then by recording “all the data possible” was just emerging as a science. Not half a century later, the human species is just barely breaking the rigid silos and making soft ones.

Follow that path by clicking toward https://physics.aps.org/articles/v17/182. You will see the competing interests and methods of many groups as you try to simply find the source of this article. Many groups and individuals want a piece of the pie. A bit of the energy. A part of the spoils. A bit of the fame and fortune from any new idea or method.

I spent quite a bit of time studying “termite society”, “ant society”, “herds and colonies and societies”. The most complex things are not just living things, but societies or collections of mixtures of societies. And some, no human has a life long enough to gather and process the necessary data to get a complete snapshot, let alone a digital twin that holds up to the ravages of groups each tearing each other apart.
A “biological cell” is not “extracting energy from its environment”. It is meeting new immersive environments, gathering and combining things into new combinations.

Prigogine is gone, but you ought to go look carefully at what Dilip Kondepudi and Prigogine did and what Dilip has been trying to tell people for the decades since. It was NOT just one person getting the prize, but many independent “biological cells”, “living systems”, communities, societies.

Now we have to integrate AIs (assistive intelligences is my hope). And too narrow a view that it is “all about thermodynamics and computable systems” will just jerk (3rd time derivative of the motion) the path again. A few million humans and their AIs working on “thermodynamics in living systems” seems nice. But, it you do not prepare for the effort, and know where you are going, most of the energy will be wasted. Almost all of it ultimately comes to nothing.

I have lots of knowledge to guide me. Beyond “jerks” (3rd) are snap (4th), crackle (5th), pop (6th) time derivatives of the motion. And those are not enough, without algorithms and machine learning that are reaching towards “all”. Without the whole of knowledge now, most information and knowledge and lives are wasted.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation