Farm News 11-25-07

Sunday morning, after chores,30°

It's been a busy week and I haven't written much.

Barn News

Hooray! I gave away two cats, Four-ten, Shotgun's daughter, and another as yet unnamed Shotgun daughter, both Calicoes.

Interfaces

William Calvin has proposed quite a few interesting ideas, but I am most taken with his Darwin Machine. A Darwin Machine is a set of patterns, and a mechanism for replicating those patterns. Calvin proposes four more requirements, but I've written about those before. The set of all the genes on earth, along with their ability to replicate themselves, constitutes the Darwin Machine with which we are the most familiar: Life. Life has come up with a set of collections of genes called species, and some of those species are endowed with an Immune System which in itself forms a Darwin Machine. It has been proposed that the set of Human Ideas, along with Humans, who replicate them, form a Darwin Machine. I have proposed that the set of lines of code in Open Source Software form a Darwin Machine.

One of the interesting features of this line of thinking is that all these Darwin Machines, the Immune System, Human Ideas, and Open Source Software, all intersect in Life. The Immune Systems of humans, Human Ideas, and Open Source Software all rely on humans for replication. That does not mean, though, that there has to be any hocus-pocus anywhere in the collection of Darwin Machines. We can observe and predict the behavior of the set of Human Ideas and the set of Open Source Software code without recourse to anything in human intelligence other than to say that humans act as the replicators for the two sets of patterns, no more than we are required to bring in the operations of our own intelligence in describing the operation of our Immune System.

Darwin Machines create complexity. They replicate, making tiny errors occasionally, and, if a copy with the right kind of error comes along, it is replicated more than other patterns of its type. Very quickly patterns will evolve which tend to combine with other patterns to form a super-pattern, a species, which improves the rate of replication of all the individual patterns which define it. The patterns will rapidly fill the environment in which they exist and, after that, constantly improve upon the density of their occupation of that environment. They increase the density by creating the best possible fits between species and environmental niches, creating such complexity in the process that it is hard to describe the organization of species without retreating to some idea of an Intelligent Designer, or, in the case of Open Source Software, Intelligent Programmer.

Open Source Software has yet to produce a species, a program, which can become aware of the existence of an Intelligent Programmer, or have any way to utilize that awareness. Human Ideas, on the other hand, has produced a species called Memetics which might be said to be aware of the Intelligent Programmer and might find ways to utilize the awareness.

I keep thinking all the above would come together and make sense if I would just smoke some good pot some evening.

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