[FRIAM] Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

[Marcus Daniels]

With viruses, there is the possibility of gene overlaps where the same sequence codes for multiple proteins.   I’m not aware of any effort to use this to design (compress) instruction sets for synthetic systems (e.g. digital computers).   The experience of being out-of-phase with a conversation has the same gist.   Maybe you’ll learn something, but it wasn’t what was intended.    It’s fanciful, but suppose one reading frame was the benign program and the other was the secret Bitcoin miner (or whatever).    Like homomorphic encryption, but in plain sight.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Date: Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 10:15 AM
To: "friam at redfish.com" <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

Glen,

I very much agree that questions of a formality-informality spectrum will weave
itself throughout the work. It seems to me that the informality ought to provide a
place for birds to make a nest, a bellybutton for lint to collect, and a place for
rust to never sleep. To my mind, it is not necessarily the formality that chokes
development. Rather, I think of formality purely as description and one among
many valid and possibly incongruous descriptions. Here is a place that I would
again emphasize Rota's take on eidetic variation. For Rota, the eidetic
variation includes all of the counterfactuals, contradictions, and messiness
that we develop/uncover as we vary in our minds an object of interest. It is
not necessary that we cut away babies from bath waters, but rather recognize
that the concepts are complex. I believe that the development of a concept can
especially choke when we fail to recognize that a concepts formal description
has a combinatorial explosion. A good example is a way the concept of random
number can be used, ironically enough, informally to mean a number I can name.

When in a conversation the concept of the random number is invoked, it evokes for
me a complex. I can sense within a single complex: frequentist randomness and Chaitin
randomness and even an ephemeral feeling/non-symbolic experience. Comparison of
these complexes with others provides the opportunity for new pivots and jumping-off
points, for the serendipity of missed connections and false juxtapositions. There was
something of this in my experience listening to the podcasters. At times I thought
that one had completely missed the other's point, but really I had missed the point,
namely that the discussion was not about a point. They were in play, constructing
common complexes and variations which they could share.

When I compare or attempt to describe my sense of this in terms of varieties
and free module constructions, I am not saying that concepts are these things.
I am appealing to varieties (say) in terms of its conceptual content. If we found
that the language was flexible enough to do calculations, well that would be a
pleasant though unintentional corollary.

Jon
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