Economic Devastation

[st0at]

the error is you dismiss an omniscient perfectly objective being, while accepting an immortal Invisible Hand

The error you make is humanist. That man could defeat the inviolable Invisible Hand is the impossible goal of all humanist religions that have names such as Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Totalitarianism, Corporatism, etc.. Enjoy the futility (and mega-death of the deviation error from fitness due to top-down control).

[thaaanos]

the error is you dismiss an omniscient perfectly objective being, while accepting an immortal Invisible Hand

The error you make is humanist. That man could defeat the inviolable Invisible Hand is the impossible goal of all humanist religions that have names such as Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Totalitarianism, etc.. Enjoy the futility (and mega-death of the deviation error from fitness due to top-down control).

Man? You described a being not a Man. No man can hold those properties, but an AI is a whole different matter.
While AI-Central Planning is within the realm of possibilities, The invisible Hand is fiction, and true, a fiction can never be defeated.

[st0at]

the error is you dismiss an omniscient perfectly objective being, while accepting an immortal Invisible Hand

The error you make is humanist. That man could defeat the inviolable Invisible Hand is the impossible goal of all humanist religions that have names such as Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Totalitarianism, etc.. Enjoy the futility (and mega-death of the deviation error from fitness due to top-down control).

Man? You described a being not a Man. No man can hold those properties, but an AI is a whole different matter.
While AI-Central Planning is within the realm of possibilities, The invisible Hand is fiction, and true, a fiction can never be defeated.

This has already been refuted (by Lindsey Lamport and other Byzantine fault tolerance researchers) because the speed-of-life is not infinite, thus no perspective can be a total ordering. Or stated another way, due to the delay of propagation of information there will exist a plurality of arbitrary perspectives none of which are a total ordering.

Sorry. It is impossible to argue with that truth.

But my pragmatism is, damn the torpedoes and cover thy eyes, ears, and logic. Buy the dips with your student lunch allowance!

[thaaanos]

the error is you dismiss an omniscient perfectly objective being, while accepting an immortal Invisible Hand

The error you make is humanist. That man could defeat the inviolable Invisible Hand is the impossible goal of all humanist religions that have names such as Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Totalitarianism, etc.. Enjoy the futility (and mega-death of the deviation error from fitness due to top-down control).

Man? You described a being not a Man. No man can hold those properties, but an AI is a whole different matter.
While AI-Central Planning is within the realm of possibilities, The invisible Hand is fiction, and true, a fiction can never be defeated.

This has already been refuted (by Lindsey Lamport and other Byzantine fault tolerance researchers) because the speed-of-life is not infinite, thus no perspective can be a total ordering. Or stated another way, due to the delay of propagation of information there will exist a plurality of arbitrary perspectives none of which are a total ordering.

Sorry. It is impossible to argue with that truth.

But my pragmatism is, damn the torpedoes and cover thy eyes, ears, and logic. Buy the dips with your student lunch allowance!

The Invisible Hand and Free market is simply an algorithm to walk towards an equilibrium, A Central Planner algorithm simply tries to compute where that equilibrium is. As communication and analytical tech improve those 2 algorithms will converge making the whole debate useless.
Do you think that in a dawning vast network of economic actors, they and not decision bots will make the calls? Will they not exchange info? in effect creating a vast decentralized Central Planner?

Problem is both are wrong seeking an equilibrium that is dynamic and ever changing. One should imo seek the point with minimal distance (cost) from wherever the equilibrium might appear.

The ordering problem and the relativistic reality are no problem just cluster the damn perceptions and work with statistics, no need to be realtime or be precise, if you are off by an hour or a day or miss a few perceptions it wouldn't be that bad.

A K-server problem over a K-means clustering of perceived equilibria, as long as the clusters trajectory (maybe use a Kalman filter) can be anticipated we can solve K-server optimaly.  If clusters teleport all bets are off and nothing can help there, that cost will be unavoidable no matter your strategy.

Hell I don't see the reason for all that IT and AI and cryptos if the goal is not to solve the problem of Optimal Resource Allocation at least partially or even supervised

[st0at]

thaanos now you are articulating why the Invisible Hand never dies, that is the entropy of the Universe is unbounded because otherwise the speed-of-light would be infinite (and then we could not exist in the first place because the past and future would collapse into an infinitesimal point).

Everyone is a top-down controller of something, but nothing is in control of everything.

Folks don't limit your thought process to one perspective of an artifact of the Invisible Hand. It is never standing still and if it has moved on, you need to move on too in order to see the new economic opportunities.

[thaaanos]

thaanos now you are articulating why the Invisible Hand never dies, that is the entropy of the Universe is unbounded because otherwise the speed-of-light would be infinite (and then we could not exist in the first place because the past and future would collapse into an infinitesimal point).

Everyone is a top-down controller of something, but nothing is in control of everything.

Folks don't limit your thought process to one perspective of an artifact of the Invisible Hand. It is never standing still and if it has moved on, you need to move on too in order to see the new economic opportunities.

To all intends and purposes on modeling economic activity the Concept of Invisible Hand as a stabilizing force is dead. In other domains where actors do not have awareness of such a force it can still be Invisible. The fact however that we found out about the Invisible Hand actually negates it's power. The moment we saw it, the economic Universe had instantly disappeared and be was replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

Think of it this way, the moment we understood Newtonian dynamics not long after they were rendered obsolete and unable to meet our needs, Heck you cannot deploy GPS without taking into account of Relativity.

[TPTB_need_war]

thaanos now you are articulating why the Invisible Hand never dies, that is the entropy of the Universe is unbounded because otherwise the speed-of-light would be infinite (and then we could not exist in the first place because the past and future would collapse into an infinitesimal point).

Everyone is a top-down controller of something, but nothing is in control of everything.

Folks don't limit your thought process to one perspective of an artifact of the Invisible Hand. It is never standing still and if it has moved on, you need to move on too in order to see the new economic opportunities.

To all intends and purposes on modeling economic activity the Concept of Invisible Hand as a stabilizing force is dead. In other domains where actors do not have awareness of such a force it can still be Invisible. The fact however that we found out about the Invisible Hand actually negates it's power. The moment we saw it, the economic Universe had instantly disappeared and be was replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

Think of it this way, the moment we understood Newtonian dynamics not long after they were rendered obsolete and unable to meet our needs, Heck you cannot deploy GPS without taking into account of Relativity.

The Invisible Hand by definition exists outside any perception of it. It is the universal trend of entropy to maximum (unbounded) in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which even Einstein stated was the most fundamental law.

[thaaanos]

thaanos now you are articulating why the Invisible Hand never dies, that is the entropy of the Universe is unbounded because otherwise the speed-of-light would be infinite (and then we could not exist in the first place because the past and future would collapse into an infinitesimal point).

Everyone is a top-down controller of something, but nothing is in control of everything.

Folks don't limit your thought process to one perspective of an artifact of the Invisible Hand. It is never standing still and if it has moved on, you need to move on too in order to see the new economic opportunities.

To all intends and purposes on modeling economic activity the Concept of Invisible Hand as a stabilizing force is dead. In other domains where actors do not have awareness of such a force it can still be Invisible. The fact however that we found out about the Invisible Hand actually negates it's power. The moment we saw it, the economic Universe had instantly disappeared and be was replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

Think of it this way, the moment we understood Newtonian dynamics not long after they were rendered obsolete and unable to meet our needs, Heck you cannot deploy GPS without taking into account of Relativity.

The Invisible Hand by definition exists outside any perception of it. It is the universal trend of entropy to maximum (unbounded) in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which even Einstein stated was the most fundamental law.

Its not a question of existence it is a question of applicability. You can't apply Invisible Hand to model actors that know and understand its mechanics.
Essentially the actors by understanding the invisible hand, they model it. So that model cannot now model said actors, you need a meta-model. It is an incompleteness argument really.

This is why I think that an AI, serving as metamodel can really be used to model economy. It may understand us if and only if we don't understand it.

[STT]

By observing we alter the results.  Thing is the FED thinks it can manipulate the economy successfully and so change natural events but I believe they are ultimately merely going to observe a return to the mean despite their best efforts.      I think we follow highly predictable patterns even after all our changes through the years we remain basically the same in human activity though it might be as complex as a fractal the economy does still follow the same principals laid down hundreds of years ago which wasnt our invention really just conclusions on the natural flow of business etc.
Apologies if I misunderstood the point and I understand humans can defy gravity but they dont stop it being a consistent force and I think economies follow similar practise

[thaaanos]

By observing we alter the results.  Thing is the FED thinks it can manipulate the economy successfully and so change natural events but I believe they are ultimately merely going to observe a return to the mean despite their best efforts.      I think we follow highly predictable patterns even after all our changes through the years we remain basically the same in human activity though it might be as complex as a fractal the economy does still follow the same principals laid down hundreds of years ago which wasnt our invention really just conclusions on the natural flow of business etc.
Apologies if I misunderstood the point and I understand humans can defy gravity but they dont stop it being a consistent force and I think economies follow similar practise

In this case it's not merely observation but also action based on the observations.
As for prediction it is the power of statistics you get a multitude of actors each behaving in a complex way but overall their actions cancel each other out and only a "dominant" behaviour remains.
But it can work both ways I guess, a simple rule-set when combined with enough actors can behave chaotic and inexplicable to the ruleset (which can be held as an argument that even if you model actors you cant model the overall system). But I am pretty confident that when you add feedback as in the case of actor's awareness of the system they operate, nonlinear behaviour emerges and that is something imho statistics can't help you with. You have to determine the stability of the system with the added handicap that it evolves and its stability parameters may change by direct action from the actors.

To sum up even if present Theory may explain the past accurately you cannot expect it to predict the future.

[CoinCube]

Its not a question of existence it is a question of applicability. You can't apply Invisible Hand to model actors that know and understand its mechanics.

Essentially the actors by understanding the invisible hand, they model it. So that model cannot now model said actors, you need a meta-model. It is an incompleteness argument really.

This is why I think that an AI, serving as metamodel can really be used to model economy. It may understand us if and only if we don't understand it.

Your argument is that once economic actors become aware of an economic model that can predict behavior they move to take advantage of this new information thus altering behavior and invalidating the model.

This is not always true. If the existing system distributes resources optimally accurate modeling may not open any arbitrage opportunities. Alternatively profits may come from identifying and circumventing market barriers that are inhibiting and preventing a walk towards equilibrium. In this event accurate modeling may result in actors that walk ever faster towards equilibrium.

If AI progresses to the point where it can model and predict human economics it would rapidly replace humans as primary economic decision makers. However, rather then a single central AI I suspect you would see multiple AI's managing the economics of corporations and even households. The artificial intelligences would presumably not be able to fully model the behavior of other AI's due to processing power limitations. Thus equilibrium would again be obtained by a multitude of actors (this time artificial) working towards their individual goals and walking towards  equilibrium as if guided by an invisible hand.

  

[TPTB_need_war]

If AI progresses to the point where it can model and predict human economics it would rapidly replace humans as primary economic decision makers. However, rather then a single central AI I suspect you would see multiple AI's managing the economics of corporations and even households. The artificial intelligences would presumably not be able to fully model the behavior of other AI's due to processing power limitations. Thus equilibrium would again be obtained by a multitude of actors (this time artificial) working towards their individual goals and walking towards  equilibrium as if guided by an invisible hand.

The impossibility of a top-down omniscience was already proved:

This has already been refuted (by Lindsey Lamport and other Byzantine fault tolerance researchers) because the speed-of-life is not infinite, thus no perspective can be a total ordering. Or stated another way, due to the delay of propagation of information there will exist a plurality of arbitrary perspectives none of which are a total ordering.

Sorry. It is impossible to argue with that truth.

But my pragmatism is, damn the torpedoes and cover thy eyes, ears, and logic. Buy the dips with your student lunch allowance!

It doesn't matter how observers alter their environment, because they can never alter ALL OF IT because the speed-of-light is not infinite.

thaaanos can chase his tail with unbounded failed attempts to obfuscate that inviolable fundamental fact.

Only the Invisible Hand of the trend of entropy to maxium (because time can't be reversed, thermodynamic processes are irreversible) is in control. The entropic force is fundamental. Even gravity has recently been shown to derive from it.

[thaaanos]

Its not a question of existence it is a question of applicability. You can't apply Invisible Hand to model actors that know and understand its mechanics.

Essentially the actors by understanding the invisible hand, they model it. So that model cannot now model said actors, you need a meta-model. It is an incompleteness argument really.

This is why I think that an AI, serving as metamodel can really be used to model economy. It may understand us if and only if we don't understand it.

Your argument is that once economic actors become aware of an economic model that can predict behavior they move to take advantage of this new information thus altering behavior and invalidating the model.

Yes

This is not always true. If the existing system distributes resources optimally accurate modeling may not open any arbitrage opportunities. Alternatively profits may come from identifying and circumventing market barriers that are inhibiting and preventing a walk towards equilibrium. In this event accurate modeling may result in actors that walk ever faster towards equilibrium.

So asymptotically this process will ultimately lead to actors that reach equilibrium in a single step, ergo Central Planner, and no more walking by Invisible hand.
If you don't accept this then you accept that the model can't work as in case 1

If AI progresses to the point where it can model and predict human economics it would rapidly replace humans as primary economic decision makers. However, rather then a single central AI I suspect you would see multiple AI's managing the economics of corporations and even households. The artificial intelligences would presumably not be able to fully model the behavior of other AI's due to processing power limitations. Thus equilibrium would again be obtained by a multitude of actors (this time artificial) working towards their individual goals and walking towards  equilibrium as if guided by an invisible hand.

This is a path that will most likely be taken before AI models human economics starting from shop bots, or trading agents. But there is an inflexion point. Up to this point AI will be simple following the wishes of the actor and understood by it but still susceptible to gaming it, so the hand may have its bot helpers for faster convergence, but will not be "Invisible". However after the inflection  point where we cant understand AI but they us, the strategy AI will choose cannot be determined, Agents may choose to disregard a local search for equilibrium and opt to distributedly compute an optimum equilibrium

If we reach that inflection point however is open to debate.

The impossibility of a top-down omniscience was already proved:

This has already been refuted (by Lindsey Lamport and other Byzantine fault tolerance researchers) because the speed-of-life is not infinite, thus no perspective can be a total ordering. Or stated another way, due to the delay of propagation of information there will exist a plurality of arbitrary perspectives none of which are a total ordering.

Sorry. It is impossible to argue with that truth.

But my pragmatism is, damn the torpedoes and cover thy eyes, ears, and logic. Buy the dips with your student lunch allowance!

It doesn't matter how observers alter their environment, because they can never alter ALL OF IT because the speed-of-light is not infinite.

thaaanos can chase his tail with unbounded failed attempts to obfuscate that inviolable fundamental fact.

Only the Invisible Hand of the trend of entropy to maxium (because time can't be reversed, thermodynamic processes are irreversible) is in control. The entropic force is fundamental. Even gravity has recently been shown to derive from it.

Well Life and Intelligence and Human societies run contrary to thermodynamics, we are not mere physical processes that anneal into a single state of thermodynamic equilibrium. We are aware, we can compute, we can perceive the multiple equilibria that are available, and we can actively choose to steer towards this or that. We don't do it by changing the environment but only by changing our Initial conditions (our information, strategy, etc). So in effect we keep resetting the thermodynamic process every time we get new intel

interesting article here http://evonomics.com/from-atoms-to-people-to-economies/ and its book which is in my to read list http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TT1VLAO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

...But begetting information is not easy. Our universe struggles to do so. Our ability to beget information, and to produce the items, infrastructures, and institutions we associate with prosperity, requires us to battle the steady march toward disorder that characterizes our universe and which troubled Boltzmann. To battle disorder and allow information to grow, our universe has a few tricks up its sleeve. These tricks involve out-of-equilibrium systems, the accumulation of information in solids, and the ability of matter to compute. Together these three mechanisms contribute to the growth of information in small islands or pockets where information can grow and hide, like the pocket we call our planet.

So it is the accumulation of information and of our ability to process information that define an arrow of growth encompassing the physical, the biological, the social, and the economic, and which extends from the origin of the universe to our modern economy. It is the growth of information that unifies the emergence of life with the growth of economies, and the emergence of complexity with the origins of wealth...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cXe8w62_ow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuM-AtDjuxg

[CoinCube]

Your argument is that once economic actors become aware of an economic model that can predict behavior they move to take advantage of this new information thus altering behavior and invalidating the model.

Yes

This is not always true. If the existing system distributes resources optimally accurate modeling may not open any arbitrage opportunities. Alternatively profits may come from identifying and circumventing market barriers that are inhibiting and preventing a walk towards equilibrium. In this event accurate modeling may result in actors that walk ever faster towards equilibrium.

So asymptotically this process will ultimately lead to actors that reach equilibrium in a single step, ergo Central Planner, and no more walking by Invisible hand. If you don't accept this then you accept that the model can't work as in case 1

If AI progresses to the point where it can model and predict human economics it would rapidly replace humans as primary economic decision makers. However, rather then a single central AI I suspect you would see multiple AI's managing the economics of corporations and even households. The artificial intelligences would presumably not be able to fully model the behavior of other AI's due to processing power limitations. Thus equilibrium would again be obtained by a multitude of actors (this time artificial) working towards their individual goals and walking towards equilibrium as if guided by an invisible hand.

This is a path that will most likely be taken before AI models human economics starting from shop bots, or trading agents. But there is an inflexion point. Up to this point AI will be simple following the wishes of the actor and understood by it but still susceptible to gaming it, so the hand may have its bot helpers for faster convergence, but will not be "Invisible". However after the inflection point where we cant understand AI but they us, the strategy AI will choose cannot be determined, Agents may choose to disregard a local search for equilibrium and opt to distributedly compute an optimum equilibrium.

If we reach that inflection point however is open to debate.

Hmm an interesting argument. However, I think you are glossing over complexity introduced by AI agents themselves.
While it may be eventually possible for AI to accurately model and predict unaugmented human behavior. Those same AI is will have difficulties predicting the behavior of agents operating at higher levels of complexity.

AI's will have difficulties modeling the behavior of humans using competing AIs for guidance. Furthermore AI's may be unable to model the behavior of autonomous members of their own kind. In such a scenario base human economics may indeed become a museum piece easily calculated, and predicted. However, the real action would simply rise up the economy to where the technological progress and innovation were occurring. The invisible hand would not cease but would simply scale up and apply to the society formed by complex interacting artificial intelligence's.

This discussion brings to mind one of my favorite science fiction series: The Golden Oecumene by by John C. Wright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Oecumene

Without giving too much away the books center around a conflict between distinct branches of humanity. In one branch humans have subjected AI to serve human needs and structured their society around a centralized AI answerable to human leadership. In the other branch humans and AI coexist in a voluntary anarchistic society. Highly recommended reading for anyone who enjoys science fiction.

[TPTB_need_war]

Well Life and Intelligence and Human societies run contrary to thermodynamics...

...But begetting information is not easy. Our universe struggles to do so. Our ability to beget information, and to produce the items, infrastructures, and institutions we associate with prosperity, requires us to battle the steady march toward disorder that characterizes our universe and which troubled Boltzmann. To battle disorder and allow information to grow, our universe has a few tricks up its sleeve. These tricks involve out-of-equilibrium systems, the accumulation of information in solids, and the ability of matter to compute. Together these three mechanisms contribute to the growth of information in small islands or pockets where information can grow and hide, like the pocket we call our planet.

So it is the accumulation of information and of our ability to process information that define an arrow of growth encompassing the physical, the biological, the social, and the economic, and which extends from the origin of the universe to our modern economy. It is the growth of information that unifies the emergence of life with the growth of economies, and the emergence of complexity with the origins of wealth...

This is the essence of the debate I was having with professor JorgeStolfi (which I had to put on temporary hold bcz I am so busy on my software project, I had PM'ed him saying I was sleepless, incoherent, ill, and regretted opening the debate when I wasn't capable).

The key is to understand that when a human creates order, he destroys some Coasian barrier to knowledge and via the social network increases the degrees-of-freedom in society thus leading to higher entropy.

I alluded to these processes in the ~2010/11 essay I wrote which is linked in the OP of this thread, and also the Information is Alive! essay I wrote in 2012.

This is why I am now hyper focused on social networking and crypto currency, no longer anonymity. Anonymity fosters barriers thus potentially decreasing entropy.

[CoinCube]

This is the essence of the debate I was having with professor JorgeStolfi (which I had to put on temporary hold).

We previously engaged in a similar debate. I cleaned it up and copied the highlights below.

Life is concerned not with entropy but with energy. Entropy is simply a tool life uses to climb to higher levels of order and potential energy.

You got that transposed. Life is concerned with information content (otherwise nothing exists! figure that one out) and energy is simply a constraint (friction) that life uses to create entropy. Without friction, all information would collapse into an infinitesimal point in spacetime and poof everything would cease to exist.

Entropy is not an agnostic soup from which order rises. Nothing in the universe is absolute everything is relative. Generalized, global efficiency is the maximizing of entropy. Over the longer term systems self-organize (anneal) to prioritize global efficiency by elimination Cosaian barriers.

Life is a dissipative structure. It is a structure that achieves a reproducible state operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment in which it exchanges energy and matter. By coupling its existence to reactions that increase the entropy of the universe life is able to swim upstream against the tide of entropy.

Life is an unsustainable internal order that will continue as long as it is able to defend frictional barriers against the more efficient external possibility of non life. Thus life is consistent with entropy and is a temporary local order that exhibits higher potential energy. These local increases in order are logistic meaning that due to Coase's theory grow in an S curve exponentially, stagnate then tend to disintegrate, as eventually the mechanism which is propping up the internal inefficiency succumbs to the external universal entropic force.

this really needs to wait for when I might have the time to write an essay or series of essays or more formally develop some mathematical arguments.

Life prioritizes entropy because entropy is the antithesis of a uniform (i.e. static) distribution and non-existence. This can not be refuted. But it is sufficiently abstract that you and most others can't see that concretely unless it is spelled out very carefully. I don't have spare time to do it justice right now.

Energy is conserved. It is dead. It only is useful because entropy is created along the way. Period. With only energy and no friction, everything would collapse into a completely static environment. Friction and entropy are intimately related and I need to develop that argument more formally.

[TPTB_need_war]

If we consider each lifeform in isolation, then a lifeform appears to be dissipative because energy is input and order is increased in the form of aggregating chemical structures (which comprise the body of that lifeform) that comprise higher energy states than their decompositions.

But that doesn't describe life (as distinct from lifeform) at all. These highly ordered lifeforms are interacting to create the much higher information system of evolution. Each lifeform alone is insignificant to anything on any significant scale, yet evolution has given human society the information content to travel across the solar system in outer space. No single lifeform could have attained that entropy/capability (read on...).

Entropy is not some vague concept. It has a precise mathematical definition which is the sum of the logarithmic relation of the number and probability of the possible configurations (a.k.a. states) in the system, i.e. it is measure of the granularity and uniformness of possibilities in the system, i.e. the availability to fitness (to receive work) of the system.  Mankind could not have achieved such amazing feats without a much larger scope of capability states and more distributed probabilities within that scope. In other words, if all lifeforms were capable of doing only one thing, mankind can't accomplish many things. If lifeforms can't interact to form higher information content, then their input to evolution can be lost and the information content decreases.

If you only focus on the biological lifeforms, you miss the entropic force. Biological lifeforms considered only physically and in isolation from the network effects (and memory of evolution) is just a zero sum game if without the entropic relationship. It is akin to focusing only on the actors of the system and treating the interaction of lifeforms (not in the physical but in the informational and evolutionary memory perspective) here on earth as a closed thermodynamic system.Thermodynamics tells us that entropy depends not only on the net flow of energy but also the work dissipated external to the system. The information content of evolution is orthogonal to the physical work done on earth, so all the energy being input is also being dissipated out of the open information system of evolution.

Considering only lifeforms is as silly as saying the entropy of a software program doesn't increase as its Kolmogorov complexity increases. it is irrelevant that the physical manifestation of that knowledge is highly ordered in the physical world where it is stored or represented. The information content has increased. Any one claims there isn't an interaction between that information content and the real physical world is loony and denies the obvious.

Edit: what is interesting to me is how information content increases as the physical thermodynamics becomes more and more indirectly coupled to the system of the information content. One typically thinks of entropy as decay or decomposition but this process is coincident with an increase in information capacity as the potential number of independent states is greater the less mass/inertia is involved. Again if Professor Stolfi only wants to count atoms, then there is nothing for us to talk about. To argue that the information content of software or evolution doesn't interact with the physical realm doesn't make any sense to me. To argue that information content is bounded by atoms of the lifeforms doesn't make any sense as well, and probably if I take some time to formalize it I will be able to. Heading this direction will likely lead to some unifying discoveries in Physics such as the recent discovery that gravity can be shown mathematically to emerge from the entropic force.

Imagine if life was perfect and without chance. Life would be deterministic and could be modeled with an algorithm, then failure couldn't exist, everything would be known in advance, and thus there could be no change that wasn't predictable, i.e. real change wouldn't exist and the universe would be static. Life requires imperfection and unbounded diversity, else life doesn't exist and isn't alive. Equality and perfection are the ambition of the insane who probably don't realize they must destroy life to reach their goal.

Thus the theory that it would be impossible to predict what computers would contemplate is nonsense because the input entropy of the models of the brain will always be finite and deterministic from the time the input entropy is varied.

Pseudo-random number generators are deterministic from the time the seed is changed. Even dynamically capturing entropy from the changing content of the internet would be deterministic from each moment of capture to the next, and the model of capture would be lacking diversity and static (only modified by a human).

The 160 IQ genius Microsoft founder Paul Allen refers to this as “specialized knowledge” in The Complexity Brake, yet he thinks the brain is finite because he apparently didn't consider that every finite human brain is unique; thus systemic creative thought possesses dynamic unbounded entropy.

Ray Kurzweil responded that the human genome (DNA) has a finite information content, and claimed that humans possess a canonical brain which is differentiated by what is learned from the environment during each human lifetime.

Since the portion of the human genome pertaining to the brain has an entropy in the millions or billions, each human brain is potentially at least one-in-a-million or one-in-a-billion unique. Notwithstanding that uniqueness, if human evolution was entirely encoded in a finite genome, then it would be mathematically possible for a plurality of humans to have identical brains at some point in time as the brain forms before differentiation from non-identical learning environments. However, the brain is learning and exposed to the environment as it is forming in the womb, thus there is never a point in time where the brain was entirely structured from only the information in the DNA.

Thus evolution is not just an encoding from the environment to the genome, rather a continuous interaction between the ongoing environment and the genome. Thus for computers to obtain the same entropy of the collective human brainpower, they would need to be human reproducing, contributing to genome and interacting with the environment in the ways humans do. Even if computers could do this, the technological singularity would not occur, because the computers would be equivalent to adding more humans to the population.

The implication is that the creativity of humankind is enhanced as the human population grows. And culling the population to increase average IQ would reduce human creativity. Resilient systems don't have low entropy.

Claude Shannon showed us that the capacity for information content is equivalent to the entropy of a system. As elucidated above, the entropy of our universe is inseparable from life, thus information is alive.

[jugador]

What mostly concerns me is Europe.

Europe is predominantly retirees (low or negative birth rates exacerbate this), that own various european country bonds via their retirement plans. If interest rates go up, the bond values decline, and their retirement is toast. The politics is to appease subconscious denial, which is why you see Merkel talking tough and simultaneously making gradual steps towards centralized printing and fiscal controls. The savers want to penalize the non-savers, under some illusion that they can convert the non-savers, but they don’t accept culpability for causing the problem with a collectivist form of saving. If the collectivist non-savers were converted to collectivist savers, then who would borrow? Illogical.

[romero121]

I can't imagine that Europe is face such a situation. Also these days most people from European countries started adopting bitcoin.
Coincube has done a good work of creating such a topic even before the crisis has started. He has predicted and observed much
about the market scenarios. Anyhow my prediction is bitcoin also grows only along with the growth of the world countries which
are facing a great distraction in economy.

[TPTB_need_war]

I can't imagine that Europe is face such a situation. Also these days most people from European countries started adopting bitcoin.
Coincube has done a good work of creating such a topic even before the crisis has started. He has predicted and observed much
about the market scenarios. Anyhow my prediction is bitcoin also grows only along with the growth of the world countries which
are facing a great distraction in economy.

Excuse me. I predicted that not CoinCube:

I will be the first to admit I needed a week to fully absorb the following works of AnonyMint.

The Rise of Knowledge
Understand Everything Fundamentally

I wrote in that essay which was widely published at several sites on the internet in 2010:

Europe will not disintegrate
Goldman Sachs conquers Europe

(source: independent.co.uk)

Coase’s theorem says that an inefficient internal order will continue for as long as there remains an unavoidable frictional barrier insulating it from the more efficient external possibilities. The fundamental reason the EU crisis will not result in a disintegration of the union, at least not until its people significantly abandon collectivism, is that organisms which are unable to comprehend the mechanism by which they are consuming resources faster than their ecosystem can replenish, thus are unable to stop the mechanism before they perish. So the implosion of the friction and thus the order only occurs when they perish, because they will continue to repeat the mechanism which they do not understand to be a cause of their suffering. This can be verified in a petri dish, as an organism will reproduce until it consumes all of its food or oxygen. Due to the lack of a pre-frontal cortex, it is unable to comprehend the connection of reproduction to unsustainability. Unfortunately, even though humans have a pre-frontal cortex, they do not comprehend that debt, insurance, bonds, fractional reserve money, and centralized governance, cause the demand (and thus production) of resources to be overconcentrated in sectors of the ecosystem that create a less productive future. In the next section, I will explain that these financialization mechanisms cause collective failure and thus demand ever increasing centralization (i.e. “too big to fail”), because from their inception they all pool capital. Thus they are always collectivism.

    “It amazes that otherwise bright people can’t understand the simple concept that economic collapse doesn’t convert collectivists into anarchists.”

Thus the people are blind to the mechanism which is enslaving them and reducing their prosperity. Thus, since they will not change the mechanism, centralization of governance will grow stronger from the current financial crisis, and will diminish only when the involved organisms perish. Entropy is continuously culling the center of the bell curve so that knowledge can advance. I make no political judgment when I state factually that these mega-death cullings take many forms, e.g. abortions kill 42 million annually, it is reasonable to assume birth control probably more than that, some statistics claim that governments and wars have killed a couple 100 million in the past century, totalitarianism (the political end of pooling resources) kills millions, drugs and medications probably kill millions, cancer rates are double in the ‘developed’ world (the countries with financialization), and arguably GMO food may add to that. I am not making a political judgment on reproduction, rather to state the fact that actuarial economics are constrained and politically intractable without a sufficient population of youth. And as will be explained with the entropic force, it is the antithesis of knowledge formation, to a have uniform (replicated) social action.

    “Currency wars are like [...] slap wars, trade wars is where the knives come out.”

        “Currency wars > trade wars > hot wars.”

Europe is predominantly retirees (low or negative birth rates exacerbate this), that own various european country bonds via their retirement plans. If interest rates go up, the bond values decline, and their retirement is toast. The politics is to appease subconscious denial, which is why you see Merkel talking tough and simultaneously making gradual steps towards centralized printing and fiscal controls. The savers want to penalize the non-savers, under some illusion that they can convert the non-savers, but they don’t accept culpability for causing the problem with a collectivist form of saving. If the collectivist non-savers were converted to collectivist savers, then who would borrow? Illogical.

Thus, the savers are blind to the fact they too are collectivists. Productive europeans (e.g. Germans) want to have a fixed interest rate return by loaning money to less productive sectors who can buy their exports. Now they want to deny they are subconsciously in support of money printing, because they also don’t want their fixed income to disintegrate (even though it will be debased either way). Due to the psychological phenomenon of ‘false attribution error’ (i.e. blaming the stone that one tripped on, a form of cognitive dissonance), they want to be the victim who will spank and control the bad PIIGS, via increased centralized control. Neither the savers nor the borrowers are the victim, they all are collectivists and being culled by the entropic force. Note, Germany’s debt ratio is as bad as the USA and Canada.

Fiscal centralization to come next (link explains how), with copious money printing and centralized rationing (i.e. austerity and/or price controls). The recent health care legislation in the USA, is price controls and rationing. The only prosperous fix for health care, was to eliminate insurance a priori so that individuals could maximize and individualize their preparations for aging. I will explain that pooled savings, i.e. insurance, is collectivism and thus automatically wasted.

My outlook is optimistic, in that those who understand how to avoid collectivism, facilitate maximum knowledge formation and efficiency of market fitness, will prosper and (they and their offspring will) survive entropic culling.

Please give proper credit and attribution.