Playing the scales: Regenerating Reliability

The rules change when you change scale. Little kids can do things that adults can't. Ants can do amazing things that humans can't. A little go cart can turn on a dime. A battleship is famous for being very slow to turn.

As our little business grew and eventually became a big business, we constantly had to learn new rules. Just about every time we started to get a handle on how to operate, we found that our existing techniques didn't work well anymore because we were bigger.

I became fascinated with just what things change when you change scale and what things stay the same. It helped develop a huge appreciation for how nature evolved critters of different sizes, and why they ended up with the body styles they have.

When we delve even deeper, past physiology and down into the underlying physics, a recurring pattern starts to show. It seems to me that at the lowest level of existence I can currently fathom, life starts out digital. It exists in a very noisy environment so it's first priority is to repair itself and make reliable copies of itself. As its population grows, the sum of many life units creates flows and capacities that function in analog form. Eventually some of the analog functions become stable and robust and complicated enough that they find ways to repair and copy themselves. Their organization has become digital.

The new level of digital units become very stable and successful and therefore proliferate. The huge quantity of them once again creates analog functions at a new scale. They also become building blocks that combine in ever more complicated ways. Eventually some of those functions learn to repair themselves and make copies, becoming digital, robust and prolific.

In this context, the term "digital" means a limited number of stable states.
Protons, electrons, neutrons seem to be digital. Next scale up is atoms. Perhaps the next scale up is biological cells. Then stable groups of cells that function as one unit (like animals or plants).

Persona masks and the big social brain

Yesterday, Ian was showing me a toy robot that had a mask for a face. He made a statement similar to "The mask IS the brain". That rang a bell deep inside me that is still resonating. It connected some dots that helps form a picture of the human condition.

We are all wearing masks. We selectively show only small parts of our selves to others. We wear different masks in different situations, and when dealing with different people.

We are all neurons in the big social brain. In a brain, each neuron connects to many others via synapses. The intelligence in the brain is in the weights that are assigned to each synapse. Each mask we wear when dealing with other people is a collection of weighted synapses. Just like a neuron, we each have thousands of those synapses. We have been growing the big social brain ever since we first learned to communicate selectively.

What makes humans so different from other critters is the extent that we communicate. That is what drives innovation; so much so that communication (our social interaction) has become the dominant force in our evolution. It has shaped our brains and parts of our body (such as our larynx). It has become less important how fit the individual is, and more important how fit the big social brain is.

Recently the social brain has had explosive growth in connectivity. Internet, cell phones and automated communications (like Google crawlers) are making the big brain millions of times more intelligent than ever before in history. This has to have incredible outcomes that are hard for us little neurons to fathom.

Hang in there. The next few decades are likely to be the most exciting in history.