…in which I discuss taking notes, Earth observation, weather control, planetary endemism, cognitive astrobiology, new origins of life papers, peers vs. analogues, conceptual déjà vu, a book about Max Weber, and formal and material civilization…

The View from Oregon – 48

Friday 04 October 2019

Dear Friends,

I have often emphasized the importance of taking notes, and, in taking notes, writing down every scrap of thought that comes to mind. Time and again my experience has been that, once an apparently simple idea is written down, when developed the simplest ideas often require the most extended exposition, so that their exposition steadily grows in scope the more one thinks them through. When writing down a simple idea, I usually find that, for purposes of exposition, I have to give a lot of background in order to frame the idea for my reader, so that the reader is able to see the idea in the same light as I have seen it, and so understand why it is that I find a given simple idea to be so interesting. Moreover, because simple ideas are often connected to other simple ideas, its exposition not only requires the filling in of the background, but it also involves the rippling outward of the idea to where it contacts other ideas.

And so it was this past week that I started taking notes for a blog post with the tentative title, “From Earth Observation to Planetary Intervention” (or, alternatively, “From Earth Observation to Planetary Management”). What I would like to do in such an essay is to consider the minimal necessary spacefaring program for an advanced industrialized civilization that chooses to remain uniquely associated with its homeworld (i.e., tightly coupled to its homeworld). We have learned, since the Space Age began, how crucial our orbiting satellite assets are to the ongoing functions of our technological world. Having become accustomed to satellite photography and GPS, we would feel blind if we were deprived of our Earth observation assets.

But for a technological civilization to sustain itself beyond the initial efflorescence of industrial development, it will require not only the observation of its homeworld, but the management of its homeworld. In the spirit of homeworld management, I was chatting online recently with a Twitter acquaintance (if there is such a thing), and he said during our exchange, “…allow the high energy photons to rain down on Earth and us and increase the number of lower energy infra red ones radiated out into space without messing up the weather… that is possibly the answer and is certainly the natural Kardashev progression. But I believe that there is a missing Kardashev level at the bottom—we are hitting it now, where we have to control the weather.” (This is edited together from a disjointed chat conversation, and is taken out of context, so please be charitable in interpreting this.) Of course, control of the weather is an old futurist dream that has been with us at least as long as flying cars and maximized abundance. My response was that it’s better to let Earth be Earth and take human activities to artificial settlements where we can control the conditions without trying to control something as complex as Earth’s climate.

The reason I quote this, though, is to get at the need to manage our homeworld if we are going to remain on it for anything more than the brief history we have enjoyed to date. So this is the simple idea to which I thought of giving a brief exposition in a short blog post, but as I began to take notes I realized that there is an enormous amount of background that needs to be filled in, and that background is primarily all the assumptions that we have about living on Earth (or which any organism exemplifying planetary endemism would have regarding its homeworld): our cognitive geocentrism, of which we are scarcely aware. Really, doing justice to this idea would mean unwinding and unpacking the evolutionary psychology of a being of planetary endemism (Pauli Laine has called this implicit discipline “cognitive astrobiology,” which I have appropriated for my own purposes and used, though Laine has since adopted David Dunér’s term astrocognition, which I don’t like nearly as much as cognitive astrobiology).

Now, this suggests an interesting counter-factual (at least, counter-factual for our solar system), and that would be a being not bound by the parameters of cognitive planetary endemism. If astrochemical processes in the vicinity of a star (or some other source of energy, which might be the accretion disk of a black hole, or high level radiation from some cosmological source like a magnetar or pulsar, etc.) could result in the evolution of life that does not naturally occur at the bottom of a gravity well or on the surface of a planet or a moon, but in outer space, then such a being, if it evolved toward consciousness and intelligence, would possess a radically different evolutionary psychology.

Larry Niven dreamed up a radically different evolutionary context in his novel The Integral Trees, in which life is not characterized by planetary endemism. There must be other possibilities that we have not yet imagined. High on my list would be comets, as we know that complex organic chemistry occurs in cometary tails (cf. “Prebiotic chemicals—amino acid and phosphorus—in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko”—a paper brought to my attention by Christoph Lahtz). I have also tried to imagine other possible cosmological contexts for astrochemistry in which planetary endemism would play less of a role than that which it plays in the terrestrial biosphere, but I don’t have the background in physics to do justice to this.

In addition to learning about the above cited paper on astrochemisty in comet tails, a lot of other papers in astrochemistry have recently appeared, e.g., “Low-mass nitrogen-, oxygen-bearing, and aromatic compounds in Enceladean ice grains” and a long article in the online magazine Quanta, “Origin-of-Life Study Points to Chemical Chimeras, Not RNA.” All of this material (including a great many papers that I have not cited above) have been a real inspiration for me for the re-working of my Milan material into a presentation on origins of life for next summer’s NoR-CEL conference.

Speaking of which, and speaking of outlining ideas and discovering how quickly they grow in scope, this past week I began writing a systematic outline for my NoR-CEL material, and even in its fragmentary form it runs to more than three pages—more than enough material for a book, if developed in appropriate depth of detail, and far more than could be put into a one hour talk. So here, too, I am going to have to be selective in presenting my origins of life material. However, I will presumably be talking to a small audience, but an audience well versed in origins of life knowledge, so here I won’t have to fill in so much background material. I should be able to start at a pretty high level of exposition and develop it in its strangest and most unexpected ways.

I am still searching for the best (clearest and most intuitively accessible) language for the exposition of my Milan and NoR-CEL material. When I first was working on this I used the phrase “low resolution identity” to express the use of umbrella concepts that bring under them concepts of emergent complexity that are usually considered to be clearly distinct, but which are unified under a more comprehensive concept. By the time I delivered by Milan material in Milan most of my formulations were in terms of “peer emergent complexities.” Sometimes this works quite well, and is probably more intuitively accessible than speaking in terms of “low resolution identity.” However, sometimes it doesn’t work as well.

As a subtle point of language, I realized that, in some contexts, it would probably be better to speak in terms of “intelligence analogues” and “civilization analogues” than “peer intelligence” and “peer civilization.” Indeed, the two phrases mean different things if carefully parsed, and what I really want to express is “intelligence analogue” (something that can be substituted for intelligence and which is in some contexts functionally equivalent to intelligence, but which isn’t intelligence as we know it on Earth) rather than “peer intelligence” (a peer being possessing intelligence on a level with our intelligence—to get the right sense with this terminology I would need to use “intelligence peer,” which is workable, but it strikes me as a bit awkward).

The development of the concepts is more important than the language, but clear and intuitively accessible language makes it possible to communicate the concepts more rapidly and to make otherwise novel and unfamiliar ideas seem immediately familiar, as though one had heard them before—like a kind of conceptual déjà vu.

Almost as quickly as I transcribe my notebooks into wordprocessing files, I fill more pages of my notebooks. I have pages of notes elaborating my Milan material, and now pages on my NoR-CEL material, pages on Earth observation and its relationship to the overview effect, pages of notes on my developing taxonomy for intelligences that I mentioned in my previous newsletter, and pages of notes for my “Big History for ETI” project (mentioned in newsletter 44). In regard to the latter, which would be a long presentation on arriving at non-anthropocentric formulations of big history, I came up with the perfect peroration which would be something like the equivalent of a tent revival for historians, in which I would paint the task of history as being one of cosmological importance.

This latter idea goes back to the origins of my Milan material, which essentially emerged during by trip to the Balearic Islands in September 2018, and my subsequent elaboration of a changed perspective on the role of emergent complexity in the universe. None of this, however, is yet in a sufficient finished state that I can begin to write about it here. While I now have a killer peroration, I still have all the hard work of the exposition of the material that can lead up to the peroration and make it comprehensible, much less exciting (though I do indeed find it exciting).

As more fuel for the fire of my current excitement about historiography, I mentioned in my previous newsletter that I had found a lot of interesting books at Powell’s the previous week. One of these books was Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods, by Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter. I’ve been reading the final chapter of this book, “Duration and Rationalization: Fernand Braudel and Max Weber,” by Guenther Roth. As Braudel and the Annales school is more familiar to me than Weber’s ouvre, this has proved to be a valuable survey of Weber’s work from an historiographical perspective—and this is exactly what I needed.

Guenther Roth made me aware that the original French title of Braudel’s influential work translated into English as Civilization and Capitalism was Civilisation Matérielle, Économie et Capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe. Just knowing this (which I should have noticed years ago), knowing that Braudel was theorizing material civilization, changes my perspective on that work, and I would now like to compare the French text to the English text to see how much of Braudel’s implicit conception of civilization got lost in translation. And appealing to the ancient philosophical distinction between the material and the formal, Braudel’s use of material civilization implies that there is also a conception of formal civilization, and that this conception of formal civilization was, if not excluded from the Annales school and their analysis of history, at least passed over mostly in silence.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—When I had to greatly reduce my income due to the change in my employment, just for amusement I subscribed to some online jobs board. I don’t even remember what it was that I initially subscribed to, but once I had subscribed I started getting multiple emails per day from a half dozen different companies that seem to act as de facto employment agencies. One of them was Nexxt, and Nexxt was the only one that gave me an opportunity to upload a tongue-in-cheek resume I had written.

In my resume I said that my objective (filling in a blank on the resume template) is, “To read and to write and to think about difficult problems without any restriction, and with sufficient resources at hand to make such reading, writing, and thinking productive.” This is honest, but it is tongue-in-cheek because no one puts a statement like this in a resume. Since I like to see what I’ve written read, I uploaded my resume, and after that I received an email from Nexxt that offered me a “free critique” of my resume.

I clicked on the link, which took me to a document purporting to be this free critique. It said, in part: “Unfortunately, your existing resume gives the impression that you are a ‘doer’ and not an ‘achiever.’ Too many of your job descriptions are task-based and not results-based—telling what you did, rather than illustrating what you achieved.” It goes on in this vein for several paragraphs. I suspect that the letter is algorithmically constructed to pull out some sentence from an uploaded resume, and make it look like some human being had actually read it by quoting from the resume and following the quote by a canned and ambiguous critique (written as vaguely as a horoscope). In any case, all of this was the lead up to a sales pitch. It turns out (unsurprisingly) that all these online job boards are trying to sell you shit you don’t need. They said that they would re-write my resume professionally for $229.00. Needless to say, I won’t be taking them up on this offer.

Links:
https://geopolicraticus.tumblr.com/post/124346903487/cognitive-astrobiology-and-the-overview-effect
https://www.lu.se/lucat/user/bb1c07a6768437df3b0a911eb6da903d
https://geopolicraticus.tumblr.com/post/145072986942/the-arc-of-cognitive-astrobiology-is-long-but-it
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/2/5/e1600285.full.pdf
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/489/4/5231/5573821
https://www.quantamagazine.org/origin-of-life-study-points-to-chemical-chimeras-not-rna-20190916/
https://mailchi.mp/71c11b3f3298/the-view-from-oregon-44