Or maybe not, as «Nature is red in tooth and claw».
But what have people been doing for the last 200,000 years? And in particular what have they been doing for the 194,000 that precede historical record? Early civilization dates back to 6000 years ago, the invention of agriculture to 10,000. So you want me to believe that for the whole paleo-mesolithic periods people wasn’t able to organize themselves in something more complex than hunter-gatherer bands with a dozen members? With nothing better to do than chip stones? Man, it’s a whole lotta time. (Oh shit, or was that in the Pleistocene?)
And then, what happened? Is language involved? Beliefs? Or is it just this?
Ok, I was just a little frustrated… I’m just that ignorant.
I was just kidding, but there is indeed a certain familiarity between noodles and strings. String theory is almost incomprehensible for most people, but theists (or pastafarians) and materialists alike can enjoy the extra simple explanations provided by the flashy PBS Nova series The Elegant Universe, hosted by the Columbia physicist Brian Greene and now online for your perusal.
Physicists often use the term elegant to describe a solution to a problem that is as powerful as it is simple. It’s a solution which cuts to the heart of an important problem with such clarity that it almost leaves no doubt that the solution is either right or at least on the right track. And string theory is just that kind of solution. It provides the first way of putting quantum mechanics and general relativity together — that is, merging the laws of the small and the laws of the large — and it does it in such a sleek manner that it is quite breathtaking. And the term elegant really describes that kind of solution. (Greene)
At the beginning it is a bit trivial (Newton, Einstein, Bohring) but then it gets to the point. Or not? Anyway string theory (and Witten’sM-theory in particular) aims to explain it all, so give it a try, it’s important.
Update: i wasn’t so original in proposing this parallelism, from the official FSM website:
One of the most exciting developments in fundamental physics in the last twenty years has been the development of so-called “String Theory.” In String Theory, all fundamental sub-atomic particles are visualized and described mathematically as microscopic vibrating strings. Although as yet unproven, many physicists believe that String Theory has the potential to become the long-sought “Theory of Everything,” through which the fundamental physical nature of all matter and forces will become understood.
Obviously String Theory IS correct, although misnamed (a secular humanist conspiracy perhaps?). As NOODLE Theory clearly unambiguously reveals, He has created the fundamental subatomic particles that form all matter in this universe in His own quivering image! You, me, the Earth, the stars…everything in the universe…are all built of trillions of tiny jiggling noodles, microscopic copies of our Divine Saucy Maker. Truly He is everywhere and in all things!
Boy-oh-Boyardi and Ramen!“
–Steve Lawrence, PhD
And:
A delightfully ironic rebuttal of ID by reductio absurdum hurrah!!! To my mind the real strength (and this leads me to believe in the literal truth of Pastafarianism) is its implicit prediction of super-string (or more accurately noodle) theory, where we before us a divine image of the great ones influence on our cosmos manifest in its true glory. I look forward to the time (surely imminent) when great minds like Ed Witten will succeed in unifying noodle theory with the “meatbally/pasta source” aspect of the larger scale universe often referred to as general relativity.
I bow down before his noodly appendages
- N. Hodges PhD
Ok, the inspiration for this post stems from the cult classic Snow Crash (Stephenson, 1992), so most of you may have already encountered this stuff.
It goes like this, more or less:
The Sumerians developed a set of rules and regulations called me that encompassed every aspect of life, belief, technology, behaviour and human conditions. They were early code, memes codified for human perusal and to pass themselves on. It was an attempt to neurolinguistically program a whole population. They were of utmost social importance and every aspect of Sumerian social life was regulated by them. E.g. the baker was required to go to the temple (where the scripts, or whatever they were [Klein, 1997; Emelianov, 2003], were placed in the custody of the god Enki, inventor of civilization) and obtain a me (a meme, or more properly a set of memes) for bakery. That particular me included instruction on how, when, where to perform his craft.
Worship, state, sex, every aspect of Sumerian life were treated similarly.
The gods of their mythology waged wars in order to conquer and possess the most me, stealing them from each other. The god (king?) with the most me was then able to aggregate (we’re talking politically, but those guys weren’t for the separation of church and state) a larger number of Sumers under his or her aegis.
Inanna, owning 50 ME’s, reminds Ningirsu from Gudea Cylinders: she is a deity of war to whom her father Enlil gives 50 ME’s. It is curious that Inanna of the Old Sumerian texts has a sufficient number of ME’s to win and unite neighbouring countries. Such state of affairs contradicts sharply the data of later written hymns in which Inanna complains about the shortage of ME’s and even takes them from her father («Enki and the World Order», «Inanna and Enki»). Also we do not find here any mention of travels with ME’s or journeys for them. (Emelianov, 2003)
One could infer that me were the weapons of mass destructions of their age, when communication was practically inexistent and regression to a primitive life very easy, if the hinges of social life cracked.
Now, we can say that the Sumerians were a totally different culture from those of today (we’re talking about 3/4000 years BCE), that their social interactions were embryonic although rigidly codified, or we can say that nothing has really changed at all…
Studies are trickling out on the fauna of early Cambrian, as you certainly know (Gould, 1989) fossil sediments in shale deposits (such as the Burgess Shale in British Columbia and the Maotianshan Shale in China) are the evidence that in early cambrian a lot of animal phyla (that is body plans) evolved and extinguished themselves, we’re now left with about fourty phyla, four among the arthropods, but the shale fossils are the evidence of tens of unfortunate or unfit ones.
With suggestive names such as Hallucigenia (above, that baffled scholars for decades) or the fierce predator Anomalocaris those guys were eating each other and creating the first real predatory food chain.
The example of the Maotianshan Shale indicates that the burst of anatomical innovations (new body plans) that characterizes the early Cambrian also was accompanied by the rapid development of new feeding strategies and by an unprecedented expansion of ecological interactions (prey-predator relationships).
Cone snails shells, in particular the Conus textile exhibit patterns similar to those of cellular automata (Wolfram, 1982-1988). Their cells secrete pigments when stimulated from the neighbour, provoking a chain reaction and a form of equilibrium that looks like it’s based on a mathematical rule.
Oh, some of them are deadly poisonous, like the Cigarette cone, it leaves you just the time to smoke a last one. So don’t pick ‘em up while they’re alive.
This PDF document is a Joint Economic committee study on the development of nanotechnologies and their possible wayward drift. One possible bad outcome of technological singularities (Vinge, 1993) is a massive nanotech Von Neumann replicator locust invasion, the so called Grey Goo. This doesn’t necessarily requires complexity-emerging AI but it’s surely a complexity-emergence problem. Read it to see how the leading war-waging nation anticipates the Armageddon.
While i’m here i’ll throw in a bunch of videos from last year’s Singularity Summit.
1988 docudrama about “the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter”. It was created by Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos. Features interviews with Doug Hofstadter and Dan Dennett. Dennett also stars as himself.
In order to study bowerbird courtship (an instance of extended phenotype) researchers at the University of Maryland built a fembot.
We wanted to control the signals given by females during courtship,” said Borgia, who has been studying the bowerbird for 22 years. “Females have fewer moves than the male in courtship, so we could realistically duplicate the female’s behavior with a mechanical bird.”
and
The feathered robot was so accurate in its movements that more than one male attempted to mate with the fembot, but it took several years to refine the fembot into her current svelte size. “Our prototype was a big, healthy girl, because she was radio-controlled and had a lot of machinery hidden in her gut, ” Patricelli said. “We switched to wires, which slimmed her down a lot.”
Bowerbirds are a staple of memetics, aesthetics and evolutionary biology. Males decorate their nests with flashy objects, and arrange these items in a specific way to create a beautiful display, in order to convince females to mate with them. I, for one, welcome our new robotic bowerbirds.
A couple of essays by Bryan Bruns about open source and nanotech. Here and here. They’re seven years old, but still an interesting read.
For something newer, an upcoming conference by Christine Peterson at Penguicon (that opens today) (via the Foresight institute).
Open Source-style Security for the Whole Physical World
Christine Peterson, Bruce Schneier
One of the biggest problems society faces this century is the security/privacy/freedom issue. It’s already being screwed up in DC, and nanotech will make this worse. The answer may be “Open Source Physical Security”, that is, open-source style security principles extended to physical space. How do we do this? It’s up to us to figure this out and then implement. (Who else could?)
We don’t want security by obscurity in gray goo, isn’t it?
A rapid prototyping machine which can reproduce its own parts… Questioning the use of mommy.
Ok, it’s still in an embryonic phase but at least it is cheap and open source (or free hardware, since it’s GPLed). The detailed plans are available on this site with lots of videos here.
