Sunday, June 27, 2010

balance vs. symmetry

Social movements that systematically deny the importance of a balance between subsystem correlation layers associated with consensus (iv), belief (v), and observation (vi) generally become politically totalitarian. This is true of movements which elevate enterprise (iv) over the greater good (vi) and vice versa, as well as those which assume that religion (v) reigns supreme.

By compressing three independent "ways to wiggle" (degrees of freedom) down to a smaller number, they provide a structure for occupancy by organisms evolved in a neolithic setting that's degenerate in the same way that electron states around an atom might acquire energy degeneracy in the absence of a magnetic field.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

attention-slice status-updates

The "never-negative" quantity mutual information (a special case of KL-divergence, which also underpins measures of perceived rarity, available work, and species diversity) can be broken down across subsystem boundaries. This allows one to experimentally define constrained multiplicities for all sorts of layered complex systems.

This project examines the multiplicity of correlation-layers looking inward and outward with respect to three physical boundary types of special interest to (at least some) metazoans on earth, namely: skin, family and culture. In particular, average niche-network layer-multiplicity (NNLM) characterizes the breadth of niche-responsibility carried by individual organisms, while NNLM center-of-mass Mcm characterizes the correlation breadth of the community in which they live.

The foregoing can help define robust ad-hoc measures of community health with deep roots in the mathematical, physical, and biological sciences. Objectively monitoring the state of communities via these measures is a future challenge, to which input from individuals in those communities will likely be important. Individual attention-slice status-updates, using social media now accessible via mobile-communications across the globe, can help bring these multi-scale inputs on-line today.