[FRIAM] hot time in town tonight

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Excellent points! I was thinking mostly about the coefficients. But of course there's no reason the functions can't also evolve. I suppose classifying apocalypsing into categories begs us to ask what society does, what it's for, what its consequences are.  Going back to the idea that some non-human animals form [proto]societies, it seems to me like the social animals have mechanisms to modulate their rate of evolution ... like a software solution to a hardware limitation. If we imagine we're living in a simulation, then society might simply be a way to *sample* the space of possible organizations faster, to try out more ways of doing things. You set things up, run it forward, if it sucks, wipe and start over. But there are different *kinds* of wipe, different distributions to sample, and different run-up/boosting methods to use to target a sub-region. A type violation sounds like an edge case. If the functions do have fungible or *-order Markovian dynamic signatures, then society could do a semi-wipe to eliminate dead-end ephemerides like neoliberalism without eliminating more structured forms. While an apocalypse for Wall Street and rent-seeking would percolate out a LOT of pain and death, it may leave a kind of cauterized lesion from which other forms might grow.


On 9/22/20 1:30 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> The relatively high-level composition functions might involve, say, actions of the government, and the relatively low-level the functioning of a calcium pump.   Counting those functions that involve humans as distinct from other material or forms of life is arbitrary but if all those functions became un-callable due to typing considerations,  then that's one way to define an apocalypse:  Everyone is dead.   If the economy collapses completely, or it becomes impossible to feed most people, that might also reasonably be labeled an apocalypse.  (Simply tabulating what is human-involved means tracking the dynamics of things:  Unwinding the stack of those compositions and doing attribution, that is hard by itself.)   One could do broader attribution to count other species, like with the Chicxulub impactor.   I was thinking more on the boundary of extinction when those that have the awareness to fight or flight do so, and that is an indicator of their general fitness.
> 
> On the other hand, if there are variations in the number of highly-correlated deep compositions versus less-correlated deep compositions, that seems more in the realm of politics.   Serious but not apocalyptic. 


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