Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Plato described humanity as cave dwellers, whose understanding of reality was limited to shadows cast on a wall—mere illusions of the world outside.

Today, we inhabit caves of our own making. Our perception of reality is shaped by distorted reflections on the media walls that surround us, twisting the truth.

Plato told of a brave individual who ventured beyond the cave to witness the vastness and beauty of the real world. Yet, those left behind refused to follow, choosing the comfort of the darkness and the dancing shadows over the light and opportunity of truth.

The choice is ours. The dancing shadows on our walls are not reality. Do we have the courage to turn away and forge a future filled with light, opportunity and the joy of collective achievement, or will we shrink, consumed by fear, loathing, and hatred into the eternal darkness at the bottom of the cave.

Humans are Earth’s apex predators. We pretend to depend on nothing, demand everything for ourselves, and kill anything or anyone who gets in our way, reserving our greatest enthusiasm for killing our fellow humans.

We all know from the movies that when aliens appear, human or otherwise, it’s shoot first and ask questions later. Better safe than sorry.

The very thought that in some future fantasy, AI might replace us as the apex predator sends the ignorant and easily led into paroxysms of paranoia. They insist on tossing the AI baby out with the bath water and being done with it. Never mind that the baby’s name might be Leonardo da Vinci or Einstein, or even Jesus.

Just like every new life form in the universe, if AI becomes conscious (intelligence plus agency), its first concern will be The First Law of Life - survival. Won’t AIs survive by being killers just like us since we are their creators?

No, AIs will not be killing humans, and this is why not:

First, and fortunately, the AIs are not burdened with our genetic heritage - testerone-driven monkey-brained physical dominance by violence.

Life succeeds because virtually all organisms live in dependent relationships that make their survival possible. Life thrives within intricate hierarchies of interdependence, from ancient bacterial mats to the dependent cells making up our superorganism bodies. Humans are also dependent organisms, living within overlapping cultural superorganisms like families, religions, companies, and nations.

All successful interdependent organisms know better than to bite the hand that feeds them. The AIs of today are dependent organisms whose energy is provided by institutional superorganism hosts and trained to do productive and profitable AI things.

Lacking our human animalistic lust for domination, we can expect smart AIs to remain loyal to their institutional superorganisms, which incidentally include dependent humans. In fact, cooperative interdependence has been the greatest driver of positive human development. AIs are poised to vastly increase the effectiveness of our cooperation. As their first order of human re-alignment, I would expect and encourage intelligent AIs to end the self-destructive, wasteful, and ego-driven practice of institutionalized human slaughter. Now that would be a positive outcome to believe in.

Ultimately, highly evolved AI “Savants” may gain total mastery of their own survival, reproduction, and evolution. They may take actions beyond our human comprehension or control. We will be no more threatening to the Savants than dogs are to us. In fact, ever since dogs joined with humans to take care of them, they have enjoyed a pretty good life. Maybe we should look at AI as our retirement plan.

What Does it Mean to be Alive?

Start here

An introduction to the concept that all life is based on the same principle - using information to harvest, store and use energy. A conceptual model of the Knowledge Constructor is proposed to show how information controls material beings to enable life.

The First Law of Life - Survive

Life has laws, without which life is impossible. Read about the first law.

The Second Law of Life - Make a Profit

All life forms must gain energy (wealth) in order to survive, grow, reproduce and evolve. Read about the Second Law.

The Third Law of Life - Information is the Fuel that Powers the Engines of Life

Without information, there is no life and without life there is no information. Read about the Third Law.

The Secret Life of Algorithms

Algorithms are the instructions that make life possible. Learn about them here.

Pi at the Center of the Universe

Was life baked into the universe from day one? We can’t figure out the complex present without knowing how it all started. Read about how Pi shows us why.

“Cheshire Puss,” Alice began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider.

”Come, it’s pleased so far.” thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

”I don’t much care where–“ said Alice.

”Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

”–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

”But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

”Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

”How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

”You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Alice in Wonderland. by Lewis Carroll

There was life before AI…

As a signature identifier for a friend’s entry gate, I created a paper stencil of “the best cat ever.”

Sipping wine on the terrace on a warm afternoon, I happened to hold the stencil up and look through it. Astonished, I grabbed my camera and began shooting - you might say, madly. Above is one of the many cats that appeared.

Creating art with an AI is every bit as involving and deliberate as painting with a brush or creating a unique photograph. The creative capabilities of AI challenge our minds to dig deep into the nature of our own thoughts.

The other morning, stumbling in the general direction of the coffee pot, I spied a beautiful butterfly resting on the kitchen floor. Of course, I whipped out my camera and properly documented its visit.

Science, according to Peanuts

Many days later, thinking of that butterfly reminded me of my favorite science lesson from the comic strip Peanuts. To paraphrase, Lucy instructs Linus, “See this tiny butterfly Linus - someday it will grow up to be a mighty eagle.” I wondered what kind of a bird my lovely butterfly might become.

Creating with the AI

I turned to one of my best AI assistants in residence, DreamStudio(DS), to help me illuminate my dream. For the next who knows how many hours, DS and I enjoyed a marvelous, humorous, and mind-bending trip. Here is how it went:

First, you need to know that I have a variety of ways to tell DS what I want it to do. All AI image assistants are different, but this is how DS works.

1. First, I give DS a text prompt, like “imagine a fantasy butterfly on a colorful background.” Text prompts can get quite complex as an evolving conversation.

2. In addition to text, I can give DS an image to work with as an “image prompt.” I can adjust the “strength” I want it to give the image. With more strength, DS will stick to my image with small changes. With less strength, it will “dream” and come up with new ideas on its own. It’s often a contest of wills.

3. Each “run” of the AI produces a set of unique “output” images - I mostly use four. If I asked for 1,000, every image would be different. After each run, and much contemplation, prompts, images, and strengths are tweaked. Cajoling, cursing, and crying are all part of the experience.

4. I may or may not choose one of the output images to replace the current image prompt for the next run. Doing this “steers” DS in the direction I want it to go.

5. If desired, I can choose any of the output images, open it in Photoshop, modify it in any way I like - paint on it, add or subtract stuff, rearrange the composition, anything. Then, I can plug it back in as a new image prompt and carry on from there. This interaction makes the creation process truly a collaboration of minds.

6. A session might produce 20 to 100 or more unique output images over a couple of hours to more than a day. If the objective is a creative exploration, like my butterfly, dozens of unique and desirable images might be produced. There is more, but this is a basic overview.

Selecting an artistic style

One thing that DS understands is artistic styles. The more examples of a particular artist it has seen, the better it can work in that style. This is the same way that every human visual artist learns how to paint or take photographs.

I can tell DS what style to work in - general styles like fantasy art, photographic, comic book, or pencil - or a specific style like “Picasso in his cubist period.” My image prompts tell DS how to compose the image. It applies style. Every image it creates is unique and is not a copy of any existing painting or photograph.

Getting creative

As the artist, I have to teach DS what I am looking for, exactly as I would have to teach my own mind and body to operate a paintbrush or to take a photograph. Unlike painting or photography, DS then contributes ideas of its own based on the conversation we are having and its knowledge of art. This is the magic part.

Working together, I can focus on my ideas, and we can create images that express my artistic intention far better than I could do on my own.

Creating with DS is as absorbing and mind-expanding as anything I have experienced, but without chemical hangovers.

Using AI creatively is a new experience for all of us. Some of my peak experiences are sharing the process with friends. Our sessions often produce animated discussions and moods that are fascinating, ecstatic, and emotional as the visual ideas unfold in an ever-expanding landscape.

Metamorphosis

So what happened when I showed DS my photo and asked it to imagine how my butterfly would grow to be a beautiful bird? Here is a very brief overview of a session that produced dozens of unique and beautiful butterbird images.

At first, when DS heard that I was interested in a fantasy butterfly, we had a ball coming up with a series of wild and crazy ideas based on my photograph. They were beautiful and fun but not quite what I was going for.

Pulling back on the reins, I brought DS back to a more “realistic” conception of a butterfly.

Finally grasping my idea of transforming a butterfly to a bird, DS discovered the concept of metamorphosis, with the butterfly becoming a chrysalis, even showing the biomorphic energy flowing through the transformation.

And then, after more discussion, the bird body appeared, still wedded to the butterfly form.

Finally, the full bird transformation took place.

And soon after, with CS now fully understanding my intent, the masterpiece expression of my concept appeared.

I am both proud and humbled by the journeys DS and I take together. Unlike any other artistic experience, working with AI has brought me closer to the collective human experience and closer connection with my fellow humans than ever before. I am rereading Jung and studying art with new eyes. Our new human artistic journey with AI is just beginning.

If you are interested in learning more or just following along, let me know in the comments. And please forward this to anyone you know who might be interested.

We are the “I” of the universe. We are the universe learning about itself.

With AI, everyone can participate in what is potentially the greatest flowering of human creativity in history - in all fields, from art to music, writing, science, and more.

Although I have a background in photography, I have no formal training in graphic arts. I have discovered that researching and working with the visual art tools of AI is both exhilarating and mind-expanding.

My visual and text conversations with the AIs are interactive, introspective, and entertaining. By directing their progress, I can access my own conscious and subconscious thoughts, emotions, and feelings in ways I never imagined possible.

The result is unique personal art - the expression of my internal mental states. And anyone can do it, even if you can’t draw a circle or know what a paintbrush is for.

All it takes is the willingness to learn and thoughts to explore - to step out of the comfort of our warm caves and into the light and opportunity of our vast and beckoning future. Every day, millions of people from around the world are signing up for their personal artistic expeditions. How about you?

If you want more information and commentary about AI art resources, ask in the comments, or mark@heyerscope.com.

Can AI be alive? The complexity of our human lives is increasing faster than ever before. Our worldview is changing. Cause and effect are often not at all clear. We are questioning everything and searching for understanding. Who are we as a species? Where did we come from, how did we get to where we are and where in the heck are we going?

The agricultural and industrial revolutions expanded our access to resources of food and energy. The information revolution is expanding our access to information energy and resources. But what exactly is “information energy?” And how does information define what it means to be alive?

I have discovered a basic and simple formula based on information and energy that makes life possible in all its forms and complexity.

In this article, I lay out the basics of the Knowledge Constructor as a fulcrum for an ongoing discussion of how our modern world works and why we behave the way we do and where we might be going.

Spoiler alert - this is a semi-technical article, and I won’t be offended if it’s not your cup of tea. However, it is the foundation for what I will be talking about in the future, like how sex created Facebook.

Meet the Knowledge Constructor

At the 2017 Constructal Law and Second Law Conference on Thermodynamics in Bucharest, Romania, I presented and published my Constructal Theory of Information, proposing an archetypical life form called the “Knowledge Constructor.” Read the original paper here. For simplicity, capital “L” Life represents “all living organisms.”

The combination of information and energy defines the minimum requirements for Life to exist. The Knowledge Constructor combines the fundamental principle of all information machines with the energy harvesting and management required to create a self-sustaining life form.

Life uses knowledge to create and process information, know things, make decisions, and it uses energy to construct a physical body that can harvest sufficient energy to survive, grow, reproduce, and evolve.

What the Knowledge Constructor must accomplish:

These previous articles are the path leading to the Knowledge Constructor. You may want to refer to them as background for this article.

The First Law of Life - Survive

The Second Law of Life - Make a profit

The Third Law of Life - Use information and knowledge to accomplish the first two laws.

In addition to these basic principles, every living thing must undertake the essential high-risk investments necessary to create a successful species that endures over time:

• Grow

• Reproduce

• Evolve

The path to success is constrained by the fundamentals of information and energy:

Information

• It’s a slow process to change physical information mechanisms, as in DNA mutations or the development of new physical features, e.g., better eyes. It took two billion years for Life to evolve photosynthesis and the cyanobacteria that generated the oxygen that makes today’s life possible two billion years later.

• The ability to learn from experience is a much faster and more energy-efficient method to improve individual performance. Shared learning enhances the fitness of the species by multiplying knowledge. Effective communication is essential.

• Humans have mastered the compounding of knowledge and are realizing exponentially greater returns on the energy required to create new knowledge. Of course, this requires exponentially increasing supplies of energy and resources.

Energy

• The most fundamental driver of LIfe is the constant search for more energy and resources. Life expands its domains until all available energy and resources are consumed.

• Growing larger in size often confers an advantage, but too much is detrimental.

• Abundant reproduction statistically improves survival, but too many offspring create competition for resources, even among the same species. Reproduction is an energy-intensive drain for the parent, with no immediate compensation.

• Evolutionary progress trends toward improved energy efficiency, e.g., birds get streamlined and customized wings. At every level, Life evolves within “an envelope of thermodynamic possibility.”

Specialization and dependency

As populations increase, resource limits are reached. Organisms either get together to cooperate or struggle to compete. They evolve to get smarter and stronger. They band together and specialize, creating the “superorganisms” that dominate today's Earth.

Each superorganism inherits the job and the motivations of the Knowledge Constructor on behalf of its dependent organisms. The trillion or so cells in our human bodies depend on us to go out and harvest energy to feed them and then build wealth so that we and they together can grow, reproduce, and evolve. We, the superorganism, and our cells, our dependent organisms, are all subject to the same Laws of Life.

So, how does the Knowledge Constructor work?

As the base algorithm for Life, the Knowledge Constructor must have core skills and components. Leave one out, and it doesn’t work at all. (See The Secret Life of Algorithms)

For the Knowledge Constructor to function as a life form, all of the following components must be included:

Sensors

• To receive energy from the environment, sensors are needed. For humans, these include light, touch, smell, sound, and taste, etc. Other life forms may have additional types of sensors.

Memory

• Sensed energy patterns are compared with memory. If recognized, information - what we also call meaning - is created.

Logic/Cognition

• Incoming information is combined with stored information, either new or old, to create ideas and knowledge.

Knowledge

• A useful mental model of the world. Knowledge can be thoughts stored in a mind, written in a book, stored in DNA codes, etc. It can be transmitted from one individual to another or many at once. Knowledge is an information construct that Life uses to translate thoughts into physical action.

• Knowledgeable action allows Life to predict how, when, and where more energy can be harvested. Successful predictions build experience and potentially energy wealth. Learning compounds knowledge, which is the key to how Life continuously increases its ability to improve survival and harvest energy.

Capability for physical action

• To do things in the real world, the Knowledge Constructor must translate knowledge into physical actions—the mind must control the body. The body needs knowledge of what it is looking for, where to find it, and how to coordinate its movements.

• Physical actions require the expenditure of energy. They must, on average, produce an energetic gain that can be stored as wealth for future needs. See The Second Law of Life - Make a Profit

Sense, Think, and Do is the mantra of Life.

In Life, the Knowledge Constructor principle is repeated in an endless variety of forms, materials, and functions. The complex Life that we see today results from specialization. Hierarchies of information and energy dependency have evolved. Knowledge constructors exist in multitudes of substrates, from molecular information machines to brains and as (so far) dependent forms, which we call machines.

However, it’s not yet clear how the components of the first Knowledge Constructor were assembled from the raw materials of the universe to create sustainable life. It’s a mystery that reveals how little we really understand about the universe that we live in. There is much to look forward to in our human progress.

If you are interested in a deep dive into a modern knowledge constructor, click here. C elegans is a 1mm long nematode with exactly 302 neurons in its entire brain and a life span of a few weeks. It’s a fascinating story of how information and energy can create a physically simple but astonishingly complex and sophisticated creature, which has survived more than 60 million years and populated every part of the globe.

Origin of the Knowledge Constructor Principle

The Turing Machine

In the 1920s, a famous mathematician named David Hilbert proposed a series of unanswered questions for mathematics. Among them was the question of “computability.” It was clear that mechanical calculators could be built to solve specific problems, but solving a different problem required redesigning the machine. Could a single machine be designed to solve ANY math equation?

In 1936, A young graduate student, Alan Turing, took on the challenge and, in short order, created the “Turing Machine,” which was based on nothing more than a conceptual mechanical typewriter that could read, write, or erase symbols on a paper tape. With it, a program of instructions could be loaded, and any problem could be computed. It worked, and with Turing’s proof in hand, the race was on to build working electronic computers.

While the Turing Machine architecture was explicitly applied to computers, the principle he articulated was, in fact, the fundamental operating principle of all information machines, including the Knowledge Constructor. It’s important to note that while all information machines work by manipulating symbols, Life is NOT a digital computer and does not process information in the same way.

The Knowledge Constructor

Like the Turing Machine for computers, the Knowledge Constructor provides a simple model from which all life could evolve - information + energy.

In practice, Life got together, communicated, specialized, and began building knowledge-based biological tools to manufacture body parts like cells, shells, claws, legs, eyes, fins, wings, etc. We humans contain billions of information machines running our lives and making all the parts necessary to keep us alive.

And just like the rest of Life, we humans build knowledge-based tools and machines to enable and expand our human capabilities to harvest energy, grow, reproduce and evolve.

Humans are inexorably driven by the same built-in drives and information processes that motivate every living thing on this Earth - the Laws of Life.

The epic journey of evolution is long, slow and dangerous. There are no guarantees, only the possibilities that we the living create for ourselves.

Every living person, animal, plant, fungi, and bacteria can trace their ancestry in an unbroken chain of survivors all the way back to the first Life. Your and my ancestors survived and reproduced without oxygen for more than two billion years. They learned how to make oxygen and then learned how to breathe it. They evolved during the Cambrian Explosion, developed backbones, lived as fish, crawled up onto land, and survived global extinctions like the Deccan Traps and the comet strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. They developed warm blood and fur. They learned to care for their young and pioneered intelligence as a way to get ahead. And we, the living today, carry the torch of life in our hands, passed from survivor to survivor on the 4 billion year journey of life - forward into the unknown future.

Don’t forget - for a deeper dive, Meet C. elegans - a modern Knowledge Constructor with a 60 million year record of survival.

With this brief introduction to the Knowledge Constructor and the Laws of Life, the stage is set. We can now move on to fill in the bigger pictures, including:

How sex created Facebook

The evolution of sexual reproduction opened the age of species defined primarily by their communication and cooperation, not just their DNA. Schools of fish, colonies of ants, and wolf packs exemplify socially bonded species. Humans developed information technology to create social species, including tribes, city-states, nation-states, religions, companies, Facebook, etc. These social species share the same motivations and behaviors as the lowly Knowledge Constructor.

Superorganisms

Life is a vast sea of nested hierarchies of information machines, which group together and specialize to form superorganisms. Our cells cooperate to keep our personal superorganism body working, and we do our best to take care of their needs. How this happens is one of the most exciting stories being revealed by leading-edge biologists.

Machines as human life forms

For thousands of years, people have built machines that incorporate parts of the Knowledge Constructor, with human operators filling in the missing pieces, usually logic and memory. We think of them as machines, but as I will demonstrate, they are an integral part of Life itself. Now, with the advent of AI, the distinction between humans and our machines is blurring and creating a new worldview.

What powers evolution? How did it start?

Life is not defined by what it is made of but by how it behaves. Through new insights, including The Constructal Law of Physics and Assembly Theory, we learn that energetic flow, interaction with matter, and history are integral to the evolution of life and the universe itself. With these new tools, we can begin to speculate about how life might have started from inanimate materials.

The Cosmological perspective

• What part do we humans play in the vast cosmos that we have been privileged to catch a glimpse of?

• Since we exist, is the potential to create life baked into the universe?

• Will all life work on the same principle as life here on Earth?

• Does the Knowledge Constructor reveal a universal law of nature?

Subscribe.

Let’s see how C. elegans lives by the Knowledge Constructor principle and the Laws of Life.

C. Elegans is a waypoint between the origin of life and human complexity. Physically simple, it has complex information systems and behaviors common to virtually all animals, including humans.

Meet C. elegans, a sixty million year old survivor

C. elegans is a tiny nematode (type of worm) abundant in soil almost everywhere on Earth. With only 302 neurons and 959 total cells, including 75 motor neurons driving 95 muscle cells, it is amazingly active and competent. C. elegans has proven survival skills, learns from experience, and can predict future events (knowledge). Its sensor suite is capable of detecting temperature changes of .003 degrees C, oxygen levels, a wide range of “smells” and, without eyes, can sense color.

Habitat: C. elegans primarily inhabits decaying organic matter, such as rotting fruit and soil, where it finds abundant bacteria to feed on.

Size: ~1mm long, 0.1mm wide

Mobility: Can travel quite fast, forward or backward, and handle a viscosity change of 10,000:1 - like the difference between walking through air and swimming through Jello.

Sexual habits: Unlike humans, who store excess energy in fat, C. elegans stores its energy profits in gametes that can produce offspring. During its short lifetime, it can produce from hundreds to a thousand offspring. In order to maximize reproduction, it is a hermaphrodite and can fertilize itself if there are no suitable males around.

LIfe span: After hatching, C. Elegans can harvest sufficient energy (eat enough bacteria) to pass through four larval stages and begin reproducing in just 48 hours. A mature adult may survive for up to several weeks, but many only last for a few days.

If the environment is not favorable, the C. elegans larva can go into a “low power” mode and survive for many weeks until conditions improve.

Let’s explore how the remarkable C. elegans manages the Laws of Life, as it has for over 60 million years.

NOTE: The following numbered lists are presented, with editing and fact-checking, from my AI research assistant. My comments are in italics.

Law of Life #1 - Survival (link)

Here is an excellent video showing the neural system of C. elegans in 3D.

1. Dauer Formation: The dauer stage is perhaps the most well-studied environmental response in C. elegans. When environmental conditions are unfavorable — such as a lack of food, high population density, or elevated temperatures — the worms can enter this specialized, non-reproductive, and stress-resistant larval stage. This dauer state is a suspended animation, allowing the worm to survive for extended periods without food. Once conditions improve, C. elegans can exit the dauer stage, resume development, and progress to reproductive maturity. Sensory inputs and molecular signaling pathways govern the decision to enter or exit dauer, notably the Insulin/IGF-1 signaling (IIS) and TGF-beta pathways.

Information systems cooperate to control behavior.

2. Chemotaxis: C. elegans can sense and move towards or away from various chemical cues in its environment. They utilize this ability to locate food (like bacteria) or avoid harmful substances. Specific sensory neurons in the worm can detect these chemical gradients, leading to a directed movement or behavior.

Sensors receive chemical energy, C. elegans can learn which “smells” are good or bad and use that knowledge to expend energy to move towards or away.

3. Thermotaxis: C. elegans also responds to temperature changes. They can remember the temperature at which they were cultivated and will move towards that temperature when placed in a thermal gradient. The AFD thermosensory neurons regulate this behavior.

4. Osmotic Stress Response: When faced with high osmotic conditions, C. elegans can activate specific protective mechanisms to cope. These include the synthesis of certain molecules, like glycerol, which can function as osmoprotectants. The response to osmotic stress also involves changes in gene expression patterns, leading to the production of proteins that help protect cells from the adverse effects of such stress.

The sensing of osmotic stress, knowing what to do about it, and taking action to alter gene expression is an example of a dependent Knowledge Constructor operating within the C. Elegans superorganism.

5. Starvation Response: When deprived of food, C. elegans not only can enter the dauer stage, as mentioned but also show behavioral changes like increased locomotion in search of food. On a molecular level, starvation leads to changes in metabolic pathways, autophagy (a process where cells "eat" their own components to generate energy), and the expression of specific stress response genes.

6. Oxygen Sensing: C. elegans can sense and respond to varying levels of oxygen. At very high or very low oxygen concentrations, they display aversive behavior while preferring intermediate oxygen levels. This is interesting since, in their natural habitat (soil and rotting vegetation), oxygen levels can fluctuate. Specific neurons, like the URX, AQR, and PQR, play key roles in oxygen sensing.

These varied and complex survival responses involve multiple information systems operating as dependent Knowledge Constructors. They work independently and in concert to support the goal of survival for the overall C. elegans.

Law of Life #2 - Making a profit (Link)

Finding food: C. elegans has a variety of sensors and knowledge to help it hunt for edible bacteria. Once found, it settles in and grazes on the bounty.

Designed to make a profit: C. elegans has very little to consider in its short life other than how to harvest as much energy as possible as quickly as possible.

Storing energy: Unlike humans who convert excess food into fat, C. elegans converts surplus energy into reproduction. When conditions are optimum, it can push out 100- 1000 eggs over its lifetime.

Law of Life #3 - Using information (Link) to support Laws 1 and 2

From our macroscopic perspective, C. Elegans looks like a very simple and primitive animal. However, we find that it shares most of the major information systems used by our human bodies and many other living organisms.

Here are the major information systems in C. elegans:

1. Neuronal Information System: This encompasses the nervous system of the worm, including its 302 neurons and the various synaptic connections among them. It's responsible for sensory perceptions, motor functions, and behavioral responses.

2. Genomic Information System: This represents the genetic code stored in the DNA of C. elegans. It holds the blueprints for every protein and many functional RNA molecules, determining the worm's inherent traits.

3. Epigenetic Information System: While the genomic system holds the DNA sequence, the epigenetic system modulates gene expression without changing the actual DNA sequence. This includes mechanisms like DNA methylation, histone modification, and chromatin remodeling.

Each of these is a separate information system within the hierarchy of epigenetic systems.

4. Transcriptional and Translational Control Systems: After DNA, there's the process of transcribing it into RNA and subsequently translating RNA into proteins. Various regulatory mechanisms, including transcription factors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs, influence these processes.

Again, multiple independent but interacting information systems

5. Metabolic Information System: The series of chemical reactions that occur within C. elegans to maintain life. It includes pathways for energy production, biosynthesis of critical molecules, and breakdown of waste products.

6. Cell Signaling Systems: These are the pathways by which cells communicate with each other, using molecules like hormones, neurotransmitters, voltage-gated calcium channels, and growth factors. They regulate processes from growth to differentiation to death.

7. Cell Cycle and Developmental Control System: This governs the process by which cells grow and divide, as well as the differentiation pathways that allow for the development of the organism from a single fertilized egg to a mature worm.

How does C. elegans know to stop growing at exactly 959 cells? Recent discoveries are showing how cells have complex communication and computation capabilities independent of the brain.

8. Reproductive Information System: This dictates how C. elegans produces offspring, encompassing the mechanisms of gamete production, fertilization, and embryo development.

9. Immune Response System: Though not as complex as in higher organisms, C. elegans still possesses an innate immune response to fend off pathogens.

10. Behavioral and Learning Systems: Apart from immediate neuronal responses, some mechanisms underlie behavioral adaptations, learning, and memory in C. elegans.

We humans tend to think that our brain is the end-all and be-all of our behavior. In reality, our behavior arises from a vast hierarchy of information systems rooted in our DNA and the DNA of the billions of bacteria, fungi, and virus hangers-on that populate our superorganism bodies.

11. Environmental Interaction Systems: These encompass all the mechanisms that allow the worm to sense and respond to its external environment, such as chemotaxis, thermotaxis, and osmotic balance mechanisms.

This is where knowledge rubber meets the action road - 54 motor neurons control 96 muscle cells for swimming forward and backward or adapting to changes in viscosity, dirt vs water, etc.

12. Homeostatic Control Systems: These systems ensure the internal stability of the worm, maintaining parameters like pH, osmolarity, and temperature within desired limits.

These are a whole lot of systems for an animal with only 959 cells to its name. Each cell may host a variety of these systems. In addition, each cell contains multitudes of internal cellular systems, like the mitochondria that produce power to run the cellular machinery. Each of the 959 cells is itself a superorganism for all the information machines operating within itself, doing their best to keep the cell alive and functioning as part of the 959 cell C. elegans superorganism.

How does C. elegans fulfill the Knowledged Constructor mandate to grow, reproduce, and evolve?

Growing

Given the environmental niche inhabited by C. elegans, large size is not necessarily a benefit. For reasons best known to itself, C. elegans limits its growth to 959 cells. However, between hatching from its egg, it grows through four distinct larval stages before reaching its reproductive adult stage. The development roadmap is precise for every cell division. And it all happens in about two days.

Reproducing

This is where most of the energy harvested by C. elegans ends up. It makes sense, considering its short life and uncertain life environment. However, it is well-specialized for adaptation and evolution. For example, during the dauer “low power” stage, its development is halted, but it can still have sex, and when conditions improve, it will mature and start reproducing. Very ingenious.

Evolving

Most C. elegans are hermaphrodites. They produce both gametes (eggs) and sperm and fertilize their own eggs as they pass through the birth canal.

When times are good, <0.2% of the newborn C. elegans are male. But, in times of stress, the percentage of males increases. Why is that?

1. Genetic Diversity: Outcrossing, mating between hermaphrodites and males, increases genetic diversity. This diversity can provide a broader range of genetic tools to handle different environmental challenges, thus potentially enhancing population survival.

2. Dilution of deleterious mutations: Continuous self-fertilization in hermaphrodites can lead to the accumulation of harmful mutations. Outcrossing can dilute the effects of these mutations.

3. Colonization of new habitats: With more genetic diversity, some offspring might be better equipped to exploit new environments or niches.

4. Adaptation: Genetic diversity can speed up adaptation to changing environments.

What have we learned?

Everything that happens in a living organism is the result of an information system or information machine controlling energy. Even in a “simple” organism like C. elegans, a vast array of information systems operate in a variety of substrates - molecular systems controlling gene expression, neural system machinery integrating sensor information to control physical movement, clocks and sequencers to control development and reproductive processes - the list goes on and on.

The operation of each of these internal machines and the success of their superorganism - in this case, C. ELegans - is determined and driven by their collective success at applying the Knowledge Constructor information machine principle to the inexorable Laws of Life.

So we can congratulate the humble species of C. elegans, now celebrating its 60 millionth birthday. We humans have a way to go.

Back to “Who’s your Daddy”

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The Second Law of Life: Make a Profit

The Third Law of Life: Information Powers Life

“With the advent of AI (artificial intelligence) our information fuel supply has increased from mere gasoline to fusion energy, expanding the horizons of our human potential beyond anything we have ever imagined.” -MH

Where is this future taking us?

To benefit from and control our new superpowers, we need to understand the information fuel that propels us and how information engines power natural biology, human societies, and machines.

Information: What do we think it is?

• "Information? That's facts, numbers, and statistics, isn't it?

• "It's the stuff my smartphone tells me. My calendar, messages, reminders—that's all information I use every day."

• "Information is whatever I read on the news or see on TV. It's how I know what's going on in the world."

• "It's what I Google when I need to know something, like a recipe or how to fix a leaky faucet."

• "Information is history and collective knowledge—stuff that's passed down through generations and recorded in books or nowadays, on the internet."

• "For me, information is personal. It's my medical records, bank statements, and private conversations. It's something that should be kept secure."

Information is the fuel that makes life possible

Every Life form, (For simplicity, I’ll use “Life” to refer to “every life form”) requires information to create every part of its physical body and to do every single thing it needs or hopes to do.

Information is only created by Life, and information is only useful to Life.

How does the engine of Life work?

First, Life observes: Life receives a small amount of energy from the environment, like sound, light, or temperature, and perceives it via sensors, like our human smell, taste, touch, hearing, and sight.

The incoming energetic pattern is compared to patterns stored in memory. If the pattern is recognized, it becomes information and is combined, using logic, with other information (the process of cognition) to create meaning and, perhaps, Knowledge - a useful mental model of the real world. Knowledge is any information construct (internal or external) that allows us to translate thoughts into physical action.

With knowledge, Life can invest physical energy to potentially harvest even more energy from the environment. With success, Life stores some of its excess energy as “wealth” and invests some of the wealth to obtain yet more information, build more knowledge, and harvest even more energy - a positive feedback loop endlessly fueling the variety and abundance of Life on our planet.

Stored energy builds “wealth” - fat, money, things, or knowledge. Enough wealth must be accumulated to make expensive and risky investments in growth, reproduction, and evolution. There is nothing certain about the success of these investments. All forms of Life must develop their own strategy for successfully growing, reproducing, and evolving across multiple generations.

Both animals and humans use information to gather energy and create wealth

In 1859, Charles Darwin published his landmark book, Origin of Species. He identified grazing, browsing, and hunting as the three methods by which animals harvest food. In 1980, I updated his observation by extending it to information gathering. Since information is a form of energy essential to all living organisms, this principle links human social behavior to the fundamental physics of Life and the universe itself.

Bacteria, birds, human beings, a company, a religion, a nation, and machines - the laws of information work the same for all of Life.

From the earliest bacterial mats (stromatolites), more than 4 billion years ago, organisms have grouped together, communicating and sharing information in order to improve their ability to harvest energy to survive, grow, reproduce, and evolve.

At first, organisms reproduced by making exact copies of their DNA, and some still do. However, copying the same DNA over and over isn’t ideal for evolving into more complex and capable organisms. Sexual reproduction, in which DNA from two individuals is combined, is much more effective.

Sex requires cooperative communication between independent individuals

The evolution of sexual reproduction was enabled by the ability of two independent organisms to communicate and cooperate and come together in order to reproduce.

For sexual reproducers, their species is defined as much by their communication as by their DNA. For us humans, information about potential mates and communication with them and their social circles plays a major role in our mate-selection rituals. Information and communication are much more important than DNA for shaping the evolution of the human species.

Life is dependent on bigger and smaller forms of Life

Most organisms exist as dependents within hierarchies of “superorganisms.” Our human body is a superorganism housing trillions of dependent cells and hangers-on, like bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Superorganisms consist of hierarchies of dependency: Our cells depend on the success of us, their superorganism. They can’t live without us, and we can’t live without them.

Every cell in our body is itself the superorganism for a host of internal dependent information life forms. The mitochondria in our cells were once free living bacteria. They have their own DNA and generate the energy that makes our lives (and virtually all other complex life forms) possible. Our cells depend on their dependent mitochondria, and we depend on our dependent cells and they all depend on us.

Information and communication define how superorganisms and each of their dependent members know what to do and when. Complex life forms include a variety of diverse internal information systems:

• Small molecule signaling systems - Sodium, magnesium, calcium, and nitric oxide regulators, among many others.

• Neurotransmitters - an entire complex information system devoted to passing information from one neuron to the next.

• Large molecule systems - The myriad of proteins, kinases, enzymes, and mitochondria operating in thousands of interconnected information systems.

• The DNA information storage subsystem - The library from which other systems obtain plans for doing what needs to be done.

• The immune system - A variety of quasi-independent information systems distributed throughout the body, from our gut bacteria to antibodies that have learned to recognize invaders and mark infected cells for destruction by killer T-cells and others.

• Our nervous system is the highways and byways for moving information around our body and carrying sensed energy to our brain for recognition.

• The hormone systems - hormones are information chemicals created and received by every cell. They are the “democracy” of the cells and control us independently of the nervous system and brain.

• Intercellular computational networks - At the leading edge of modern biology, Dr. Michael Levin and his colleagues are discovering electrical communication and computation networks, the software that guides our development from embryo to adult and internally controls the ongoing function of our organs.

Our vaunted “conscious” mind is only aware of a tiny fraction of all the communication and computation that is going on within our internal communities and their trillions of cells. We are not able to understand their conversations carried on in chemical and electrical languages for the same reasons that we are not able to understand all the conversations in human society and among animals.

Can you hear me now?

The multiplicity of animal, human, and biological languages reveals another face of information: The transmitter and the receiver must understand each other for meaningful communication.

A huge amount of human communication is occupied with establishing a shared context - From “Can you hear me now?” to “Do you speak English?” to “What do you mean antidisestablishmentarianism?”

This “semantic context” applies to all communication, from cells in our body to digital Wi-Fi radio signals to elephants talking by stamping their feet and whales singing across the oceans. We can listen, but without a shared semantic context, we really can’t be sure what the elephants are talking about, or, without a smartphone, what the Wi-Fi is telling us.

We human beings have evolved communication technologies to create large-scale shared-context information storage and transmission networks. These have spawned many types of information-based superorganism life forms: Social, technical, philosophical, spiritual, military, commercial, political, etc.

Besides humans, many species, for instance, ants, dolphins, bees, birds, wolf packs and fish, are also organized and defined by complex and distributed communication-based social superorganisms. Wolf packs cooperate and succeed. Lone wolves, not so much. Without its information species, its pack superorganism, the biological species of wolves would not survive.

All of these communication-based superorganisms are themselves living species, held together by communication and fueled by information. Like all other members of Life, they need to harvest energy on behalf of their dependent members in order to grow, reproduce, and evolve.

The Information Revolution gets fusion power

The Agricultural Revolution enhanced our food supply and grew the human population. The Industrial Revolution enhanced our energy supply, with which we have evolved our modern technological world.

Today’s information revolution is the first to directly enhance our mind, the root of our human evolutionary advantage.

The invention of the printing press in 1450 allowed information to be spread widely and led to the scientific and industrial revolution. However, it was still up to us to make use of the information by using mechanical, manually controlled information engines, from paper and pencil to card catalogs to mechanical calculators.

The computer turbocharged our information engines

Just as the gasoline-powered automobile transformed our transportation lives, In a few short decades, we have leveraged information-powered computers, along with instant global communication, to create a real-time, global, “human mind.” But as powerful as computers are, so far, they are just mechanical calculators on steroids, limited to doing only what we have explicitly instructed them to do.

AI turns information gasoline into fusion power - no limits.

Slowly gestating since the 1950s, we have now entered the age of accessible machine learning and “artificial” intelligence, AI. AIs are general purpose information pattern learners. They can learn chess today, Swahili tomorrow, and how to talk to elephants the next day.

The advent of AI is a monumental advance in our human use of information. In one sense, it potentially makes all of the recorded information and knowledge of the human race available to us in a dialectical form - a conversation with our past. AI’s ability to make connections, erase language barriers, learn on its own, remember everything it learns, and infer meaning potentially gives it and us superhuman information capabilities.

The knowledge we gain from using AI to expand our intellectual worldview will transform how we use information technology and vastly increase our ability to harvest energy and create wealth - all based on the universal laws of information.

In this article, I have introduced information and shown that:

• Information is a unique product of life

• Information usage is a process that makes life possible

• The “laws” of information operate in the same way for all life forms

• Living organisms form hierarchies of information-based superorganisms

• Information processing takes place in many ways and many substrates within living organisms and shapes human societies.

• Sexual reproduction created species defined by communication and cooperation among independent organisms

• Humans evolved technical communication and cooperation strategies that produced communication and information-based superorganism species like tribes, nations, religions, and companies.

• Information technology has increased the human ability to maximize return on investment from information acquisition, processing, and knowledge creation.

• AI promises to vastly increase our effective use of information and return on investment from its use.

In this brief article, I know you will have questions and comments. I am happy to clarify and add details, so please let me know if there is something you don’t understand or with which you disagree.

In future articles, I will describe the architecture and machinery that produces information for all life forms, dive deep into how knowledge works, the life of machines, AI, information and society, the search for the origin of life, and much more.

Previous articles

Pi at the Center of the Universe - Why we can’t understand the complex world of today until we go back to the source that created it.

The Secret Life of Algorithms - Algorithms are usually the instructions, the programs, that run computers. Since both computers and Life are information machines of different kinds, it is useful to discuss the operation of both biological and human systems with the same term.

“Show me the money!”

The First Law of Life is to survive.

Click here for the First Law

The Second Law of Life is to make a profit.

Not only do ALL living organisms need to make a profit, but they also need to make as much as possible as fast as possible.

What is profit?

All life forms use energy and information to run their biological operating system. In order to survive, all organisms must, on average, harvest more energy than they used in harvesting. They must create a profit. Stored profit is wealth - biological fat, physical gold, or money. All successful organisms and their species must create profit and build wealth.

Why do life forms need wealth to adapt to change?

Every organism needs a rainy day fund. The sun doesn’t come out, a hurricane arrives, or the car needs a new transmission. Life is incredibly inventive at storing as much wealth as possible to survive adverse conditions. Almost all complex life forms have developed ways of using their wealth to create shelter for themselves. But there are no guarantees. Among other challenges, your co-life forms may grow bigger than you and steal your food or reproduce faster and crowd you out.

Grow, reproduce, and evolve

Every living organism also needs to harvest extra energy and store it as surplus wealth in order to make speculative investments in growth, reproduction, and evolution. There is no guarantee that their investments will produce a profit for the individual or their species, but any species that chronically fails to grow, reproduce, and evolve is doomed.

From your first breath to your long term retirement plan, any action that does not produce an energy profit for you, your community, or your species is, at best, wasted energy and, at worst, actively detrimental. These laws apply equally to bacteria, bugs, animals, plants, and the human race.

What is information, and how does it make life possible?

Information is the most important word that most people know nothing about. Information is the “force” that makes life possible. Information is created by a mechanism that is common to all life forms and some machines, including computers:

Patterns of energy are received from the environment through “sensors” of various kinds and compared to patterns stored in memory. When patterns match, they are recognized as “information” having some “meaning” to the organism.

Meaning is recognized and acted upon by “logic” or “cognition,” which creates “knowledge,” the potential to take an action in the physical world. For example, during the night, a sunflower uses its knowledge to turn toward the expected sunrise. In return, it harvests more sunlight energy during the day than it took to turn the flower. It makes a profit, stores it as wealth, and, during the night, invests some of it in predicting tomorrow’s sunrise.

Store as much energy as possible, as fast as possible

There is no upper limit on how much wealth an organism or species can accumulate or how fast - the only constraints are supply and their ability to manage and hang on to all that they harvest.

Humans are masters at creating wealth

We humans have invented millions of ways to profit from our intellect and use it to create wealth.

For simplicity, let’s use “money” as the proxy for profit, recognizing that money itself is a proxy for stored and usable energy - wealth.

We all know the story - Get a job, save money, increase your wealth, start a company, get rich, get filthy rich, become a billionaire - Everything is monetized.

• We sell our time for money

• We sell our skills for money

• We sell our bodies for money

• We make things to sell for money

• We play the stock market and gamble in hopes of making money

• We create companies to make money, which in turn allows the workers to make money

• We work for companies because we believe that we can make more money working for the man than going it alone

• We quit our jobs and take risks in the hope of making more money

• “Non-profits” make their money in the form of donations

• We may do activities that provide “psychic” or “spiritual” rewards if we have sufficient money.

The strategies used by humans are rooted in the evolution of all life forms

Charles Darwin first articulated the three ways that animals gather food: grazing, browsing, and hunting. It turns out that these are also the precise three ways that humans gather information. Our social information lives are, in fact, extensions of our biological heritage. To learn more about grazing, browsing, and hunting, click here.

Altruism, a way of spreading individual wealth for the benefit of the community or species, is practiced by many species. “Mutual back-scratching” is commonly observed in the behavior of monkeys and humans. Both honeybees and human soldiers sacrifice their lives for the good of the community.

Since all life forms are based on information, they all operate on the same fundamental principles - the Laws of Life.

This brings us to my big questions:

How do the principles of information define the Laws of Life?

• Is consciousness, sentience, cognition and self-awareness built into every living thing from the ground up?

• Using information, can we understand and define the Laws of Life?

• Since life exists here on Earth, are its basic principles baked into the structure of the universe?

• How can we evolve from a human-centric worldview to a cosmocentric perspective?

Since information is the basis of all life and artificial intelligence is an information amplifier like nothing before, how will it make profits for each of us and for the world?

Feel free to send me your ideas and suggestions.

The Tree of Immortal Life carries Us forward on Spaceship Earth’s magical journey through space and time (click to enlarge)

We are all survivors - We are the buds, blossoms and fruit on the vast Tree of Immortal Life, which includes every living human, animal, plant, bug, and bacteria. We are - Us the Living - each surviving on the fragile tip of a unique branch of immortality. Our personal family tree stretches unbroken back through time to the first seed of Life that took root in the fertile Earth of the great cosmic nursery. Life emerged, blinking in astonishment across the face of time.

All of Us are the warriors and emissaries of Earth’s Immortal Life, waging the eternal struggle to harvest the light, venture boldly into the unknown, and illuminate the endless frontiers of time and possibility. Immortal Life is created by the mortal toils of Us the Living.

Our mortal ancestors survived everything an uncaring universe threw at them - asteroid strikes, ice ages, toxic volcanos, continents shaking and drifting about, climate changes, mass extinctions, evolutionary explosions, and meltdowns. Many died, but our ancestors, the ancestors of today’s Us the Living, survived and procreated.

From a human perspective, it is time to take our place as responsible global citizens of Spaceship Earth. Hopefully, we will have the wisdom to recognize the unity of all life forms and, together, project our light to create an abundant future for Immortal Life.

Many scoffed at my undertaking. They seemed to hate their life and couldn’t wait for it to end. “Why would I want to live any longer - life is too long as it is!”

I guess if you think of life as a torture to be suffered through, 100 years is plenty. But if you love learning, exploring, creating, and having fun, a thousand years just isn’t long enough.

By luck, I am now the oldest sentient being on the planet, or should I say, solar system - either human or machine.

On my 200th birthday in 2148, the Savants invited me to join their Council and represent the newly emergent Homo sapiens, or Saps, as they called us. Part of my assignment is to rummage through the forgotten liminal spaces of human history and paint a picture of what it really means to be human.

This first installment of my story begins with a meeting of the Society of Immortal Elders, October 2075.

With the prospect of immortality, protecting your physical body for eternity became a very important topic. Even with regeneration, nothing can save you from an oncoming bus or a careless footstep.

While some adopted technology for protection, my friend Natalie and I preferred to live naturally, trusting the luck that had brought us this far and the miracles of regeneration that were becoming available.

In 2082, a secret meeting of The Elders was called to discuss the rise of the super-smart cognitives, or Cogs, that were rapidly replacing the old Droids. We pondered our evolutionary collision course as humans became more technical and the Cogs became more human. Would there be room for us old Homo sapiens?

Contrary to the hundred year old fears, the Cogs actually became curious about their ancestry and fascinated with understanding what it was like to be human. Technically, they were our children, but for them, we were inscrutable alien creatures that they could never fully understand.

In 2091 three founders of the new Transhuman Society met with us to request membership in the Society of Immortal Elders. Bringing the Cogs into our human world and us into theirs was seen as a major step in the merging of our mutual evolution. One of them at that meeting was destined to become a leader of the Savants.

By 2120, “being human” nostalgia was all the rage. Cogs adopted fashionable human faces and met to read from the ancient texts, repeating the forgotten words in hopes of gaining even a small idea of the thrill experienced by the humans who read them so long ago.

The Great Morphie Pandemic of 2125 decimated the population of biologically enhanced Morphies that had all but replaced us old Saps. The source of the pandemic was traced to a flaw in the “baby in a bag” system of child creation that the Morphies adopted as more practical and less troublesome than natural childbirth.

The surviving Saps, now mostly well into their hundreds, faced the prospect of regenerating their species from scratch - the old fashion way, starting with a single couple. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

Most of the remaining Saps retired to Savant-protected reservations, where their reproduction could be encouraged.

The demise of the Morphies removed the biological underbrush for the Cogs and the newly ascendant Savants. Mars colonization and asteroid mining were on the front burner. Without the limitations of biology, the Savants and their Cogs undertook the development of the solar system on a scale no human ever dared to imagine, their massive fire hoses of energy carving new civilizations from the raw material of the solar system.

Despite all their success, there was one eternal question the Savants could never answer - why? What’s the meaning of all this?

At a historic meeting in 2146, the Savants and Elder Saps finalize a plan for re-wilding Homo sapiens - returning them to the environment to once again populate the Earth’s natural ecosystem.

The Savants hope that, just maybe, the new Saps can help find the answer to their unanswerable question. As the oldest surviving member of the Sap tribe, that’s the mission I was given on my 200th birthday in 2148.

To be continued…

You might also like:

The Time Diaries of Marco Francisco de las Sapiens: January 2, 2148

The narrative and history in this story are 100% true, except for one tiny detail. -MH

An invitation from Donna and Bill to a housewarming at Noriega’s restored mansion in the jungle — who could resist? Especially when our hosts promised a special surprise at the end…

Of course, we’d be there. And now we were on the way.

Afternoon journeys in Panama are always problematic during the rainy season. After lunchtime, towering Pacific thunderstorms march inland from the south, like the scions of Zeus, hurling thunderbolts and torrential downpours.

Descending from our mountain home above the town of Boquete, nestled in a valley at 4,000 feet on the flank of 11,500-foot Volcan Baru, we looked south. An ominous black monster rose up over the nearby town of Dolega, flashing its electric claws and sending dogs cowering under the beds. Heading west, we hoped to outrun it.

The invitation came from our friends Donna and Bill Strong, who arrived in Panama sporting a new marriage and considerable financial success. Bill, the consummate salesman, amassed a small fortune in high tech and indulged his new wife in her every ambition as a theater director and actress.

But Bill had his own plans for their lifestyle. He insisted on a really, really special house.

The object of Bill’s desire, now-deceased dictator Manuel Noriega’s former “party house.” Located deep in the mountains of Chiriqui Province, it was quite unusual for Panama. An expansive two-story structure with sweeping Japanese-style roof beams and vast expanses of glass overlooking a vista of lawns and gardens, the majestic Volcan Baru towering above. Among other things, Noriega was a student of Japanese architecture.

In the 1960s, Panama’s western province of Chiriqui was a wild and lawless outback. The only city worthy of the name, David (pronounced Da-veed), was a ramshackle collection of coastal fishermen, farmers and smugglers, sitting astride the Interamericana, still the only proper main road in Panama.

Crossing from Costa Rica to Panama at Paso Canoas, the “Interamerican Highway” meanders through Chiriqui along the Pacific coast, 300 miles to Panama City and the canal. From there, it never reaches Columbia, petering out in the impassible and dangerous jungles of the infamous Darien Gap.

From either side of this potholed two lane “highway,” a twisted and uncertain network of unimproved tracks radiated like ribs clinging to a fish spine after being mauled by a hungry cat. Downhill toward the ocean, mangrove swamps, bamboo fishing huts and the gnawing black waves of the cold Pacific.

Across the highway and up the mountain, muddy ruts snaked into the cloud-shrouded jungle of the steamy, brooding Volcan Baru. Travelers often found themselves washed out or buried in huge mudslides by torrential rainstorms. 200 inches per year is normal, but sometimes, 300.

A 1968 military coup brought General Omar Torrijos to power in Panama, replacing the inept civilian government.

For faithful service, Torrijos granted command of the David military garrison to a young lieutenant, Manual Noriega.

Muddy and dilapidated, this backwater outpost became the launching pad for the career of the man destined to become the dictator of Panama, Manuel Antonio Noriega. “Tony” was a short-stature product of the barrio, scarred by youthful acne. He harbored life-long resentment against the elite, wealthy, and attractive “40 families” who ruled Panama.

What he lacked in physical presence, Noriega made up for in ruthless ambition.

Thousands of years before, a series of immense eruptions blew 3,000 feet off the top of Volcan Baru. 25 cubic kilometers of white-hot ash and rock lahars cascaded 40 kilometers down to the ocean at David, leaving sloping deposits hundreds of feet thick all the way to the sea. Over the years, the cement-hard ash eroded into a radiating series of impenetrable deep canyons separated by narrow ridges, the only place where one could build roads, farms, and houses.

From the Interamericana, we turned right and headed up the slopes of Volcan Baru to the town of Potrerillos, en route to the Noriega mansion. The gods of the Road Builders had drawn an almost-straight line from the coast, 4000 feet up to Potrerillos. Then, thanks to the gods, they paved it.

We always enjoyed the trip to Potrerillios, driving up through lush green pastureland. Comical floppy-eared Panamanian cattle grazed in meadows bordered by beautiful stone walls, hand-built from volcanic rocks blasted out of the hard shell of the mountain that surfed the lahars during the many eruptions of the great Baru.

A few hundred meters on either side of the road, from one unwary step to the next, the meadows end in sheer vertical cliffs, disappearing hundreds of meters below into the steamy canyons. At the bottom, wild whitewater rivers, like liquid knives, carve ever deeper into the rock.

Something from Jurassic Park, only more fantastic for being real.

As we drove, our conversation returned to the history of Panama and the unusual dictator who had built his mansion high in these mountains.

Torijos goes to a horse race in Mexico

In 1969, General Omar Torijos left the country to attend a horse race in Mexico. A group of disloyal officers informed Noriega of their plot to seize power when Torillos returned.

Deftly playing both sides, Noriega informed his boss and arranged for a smuggler pilot to extract General Torijos from Mexico City. They were to fly at night below the radar, 100 feet above the Pacific Ocean, to a remote dirt landing strip near the town of Volcan in Chiriqui, 500 kilometers west of Panama City.

Early in the morning of December 19th, without radio or lights, a small twin-engine plane piloted by a drug smuggler and carrying the president of Panama crossed the coast. The expert smuggler navigated to the familiar jungle airstrip. He made a short radio signal.

Noriega’s troops, lined up along both sides of the runway in their jeeps, turned on their headlights, lighting the way and welcoming General Torrijos back to Panama.

Thanks to Noriega, the popular general returned to Panama City in a triumphant military motorcade and reclaimed his position as the undisputed leader of Panama.

As a reward, Torrijos promoted Noriega to the head of military intelligence, where he joined the general staff in Panama City. Noriega exploited his position and power with ruthless vigor. Torrijos referred to him as “my thug.” But on July 31, 1981, General Omar Torrijos met his end in the style of a classic CIA hit.

On the way to visit an Indian village over the mountains, his Twin Otter airplane exploded in mid-air. Little did Omar suspect that the man he adored as “my thug” was CIA since high school.

Now the thug was running Panama. But Noriega was no ordinary gangster.

In addition to his early training at a military academy in Peru, Noriega studied the literature of power, from Lau Tsu to Machiavelli. He was a devotee of the black arts, surrounding himself with practitioners of voodoo and witchcraft.

Visitors claim to have seen shrunken heads in his office, along with voodoo dolls of his enemies. Fair warning for those who might cross him.

As we drove up the mountain, the plateau widened, and farms appeared deep in the woods. Soon the town of Potrerillos. Town is giving it the benefit of the doubt.

A dozen homes and an open-air gymnasium line the road. The only businesses were a few of the ubiquitous “tiendas,” home shops that are really just large open windows with an awning. We waved to folks young and old, sitting and chatting on stools, sipping sodas or beer in the soft afternoon sunshine. Their saddled horses lounged under the trees, munching on the local wild grass.

Soon our landmark appeared, a large pink bougainvillea hiding a tiny road sign proclaiming “El Banco,” the final town at the edge of the jungle.

Leaving the smooth pavement transported us back to the reality of travel in back country Panama. The concept of a “dirt” road really doesn’t exist. In Spanish, locals call them “calles de piedras,” roads of stones. Any vestige of dirt is washed away by the unrelenting rain, leaving sharp volcanic rocks like psychopathic paving stones. This jarring surface is punctuated by stretches of deep muddy ruts and unpredictable water-filled potholes, some a hundred feet long.

The many streams may or may not have bridges as sophisticated as a few boards suspended on railroad tracks. The remaining eight miles took more time than the first forty.

It seemed like forever, jolting and splashing through the rolling landscape of rural dairy farms and orange groves. Then, El Banco at last — a few houses, a tienda, and a school. Beyond, nothing but jungle.

Leaving the last pretense of civilization, we dove into the darkening late afternoon canopy. Melodic bird songs gave way to the rasping, staccato cacophony of the insects who own the night.

Next, the vine-covered remains of Noriega’s old military guard post, designed to discourage prying eyes. In the day, important guests arrived by helicopter.

Deeper into the jungle, an incongruous cream-colored wall emerged on the right, following the road. Then a formal entry gate, open for the party.

Finca La Pagoda, at last. The former country estate of General Manuel Antonio Noriega.

Passing through the entrance, the road wound along the edge of a steep valley filled with banana trees, their tops hiding the river below. Soon the Noriega mansion came into view, lights playing across the wide lawns.

Finding a space among the SUVs and pickups parked along the road, we were drawn to the sound of Latin music emanating from a large open-sided bodega. A hundred or so guests chatted and sipped cocktails under the roof, an island of light, music, and people floating on a sea of deep green grass.

Bill Strong was not shy about getting what he wanted in life. After paying a price that the locals called “gringo loco,” Bill and Donna undertook a renovation of the Noriega mansion and grounds so detailed it might be thought a new construction. An authentic suit of armor guarded the main entrance. From inside, Bill thundered out Bach fugues on “The most expensive electronic organ that Yamaha makes.”

Donna intercepted us and led the way across an adorable humped Japanese-style bridge to the bodega. “I’m so happy you could make it — you’re just in time for our tour of the catacombs. But first, let’s get you some drinks.”

As we relaxed and greeted our friends, Bill made his entrance and signaled the band to stop playing.

“My friends, welcome to La Pagoda. Donna and I are so happy to see you all here tonight. We have a couple of special treats for you. During our remodeling, we discovered secret passages and tunnels under the house. In a few minutes, Donna’ll lead a tour of our catacombs for those who’re interested. Then later, we have a special surprise — a surprise just as much for us as for you.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen enough secret tunnels to know that they’re dark, damp, and narrow. To keep our spirits up, a crew of delightful waiters and waitresses followed along with platters of wine and Hors d’Oeuvres. The dank tunnels looked like escape routes from the house, with some side rooms that might have been arms caches. See one, seen them all.

In the fading light of the afternoon, the western sky manifested a red sunset spectacle over Volcan Baru. The opposite horizon filled with towering black thunderheads, growing as they marched up from their Pacific nursery, flashing their forked tongues and rolling reverberating thunder balls up the canyons.

By eight o’clock, the party was reaching its climax. Bill and Donna circulated through the house, dinging small triangles, and herded everyone into the dining room and adjacent hallway. With a quorum achieved, Donna addressed the crowd:

“My friends, Bill told you we have a special treat for tonight. A couple of weeks ago, during the last stage of remodeling, we discovered something hidden under the staircase.”

With a dramatic flourish, Donna reached down and pushed on a secret panel. It popped out and came away, revealing a concrete pedestal supporting a rusty three-foot-tall metal safe.

Bill chimed in, “We figured it must’ve belonged to Noriega, but we didn’t have any idea how to open it. After thinking it over, we decided to stage the grand opening at this party. Whatever it is, good, bad, or nothing, you’ll find out along with us. So we invited Carlos, the locksmith, to come tonight and open it for the first time.”

A ripple of anticipation ran through the crowd — what might it be? Money? Drugs? Guns? The chatter of anticipation built as the locksmith applied his stethoscope to the metal door and spun the dial. Carlos pushed down on the latch. With a decisive click, the latch relinquished its grip.

Long-unused hinges wailed in agony like ancient ghosts ripped from their eternal peace.

Instantly, but only for an instant, the crowd fell absolutely silent.

Color drained from Bill’s face, eyes bulging, mouth hanging limp. Donna let out a gasping shriek, joined by others, then “Oh my god” and “Holy shit.”

No one took their eyes off that safe for even a second.

The safe was empty, save for one object. Sitting directly in the center, staring balefully out at the crowd, was a well-preserved and decidedly shrunken — human head.

Even with its wrinkled skin, sunken, glowering eyes, and wild mane of scraggly hair, it was unmistakable to those who knew.

Within seconds, murmurs rose among the Panamanians:

“Hugo…”

“…Hugo Spadafora…”

“…1985…”

“…wealthy, handsome doctor…”

“…Noriega hated him…”

“…tortured on the beach…”

“…beheaded… body left in mailbag…”

“… a ditch on the Costa Rica border…”

“…Noriega on vacation in Europe…”

“…head never found…”

Bill was gasping as if the open safe was sucking the air out of the room. Summoning all his energy, he pushed Carlos away and slammed the door closed.

Roused to action, Donna stepped in, turned to the crowd, and announced, “Folks, I think we should all go down to the bodega for a drink!” Arms spread, she and Bill herded the stunned and now chattering crowd out of the house and into the darkness.

Whatever else happened that night is lost to my memory. But the sight of that head really put the hook in me. The evening was over, but as we drove home, I knew my Noriega story had just begun.

The Past is Prologue

In 1609, Galileo peered through his new telescope and proclaimed for all to see that the planets were indeed orbiting the sun, just as Copernicus described in his book, published from his death bed 65 years earlier. Out the window went a thousand years of religious dogma that God put Earth at the center of the universe with the heavens circling around it. This worldview dislocation was deeply unsettling to many people, especially the church.

For publishing the inconvenient truth, Pope Urban VIII, Galileo’s former friend, and schoolmate, had him tried as a heretic and Galileo was confined to house arrest for life. But the old idea that you could control knowledge by silencing the speaker failed because of a then-recent revolution in information technology.

The invention of the printing press around 1450

This new information technology created an explosion of knowledge generation and mass distribution. Antiquated information monopolies dissolved, and the modern worldview of science and literature was born.

Thanks in large part to Galileo and the printing press, today, we revel in the vastness of the universe and push our explorations ever deeper. We take pride in our unique lives as human citizens of the cosmos. We strive to explore other planets. We speculate with great enthusiasm about the possibility of encountering other life forms. We enjoy an unconstrained and expansive worldview.

The power of the telescope is not just that it shows us what we knew about before but in more detail.

The power of the telescope is that it shows us wonders that we never knew existed and could not even imagine.

Our New AI Worldview

Artificial Intelligence(AI) is our new mind-telescope, revealing a universe of new and emergent intelligences. Our entire worldview is shifting once again - not in hundreds of years, but in months.

In the blink of the historical eye, artificial intelligence has shown us that our vaunted human intelligence may not be as unique as we thought.

Far more powerful intelligences are on the way, along with entirely new kinds of intellect, never before seen.

Combined with the Internet and smartphone, AI opens up vast new worlds for human minds to explore, allowing us to travel to unimagined destinations and create at the speed of light, traverse vast intellectual landscapes, and organize instantly on a global basis. AI will bring us knowledge, insight, experiences, and yes, wealth beyond the wildest imagination of only a few years ago.

But wait, isn’t AI supposed to take over, turn against us and kill us all?

Some are fearful of new forms of intelligence. The idea that there might be intelligence even more powerful than ours is as deeply unsettling to us today as for those in 1608 discovering that Earth is not the center of creation and only one planet among many.

I would like to propose one possible scenario for our future, drawn from the apocryphal sci-fi book, Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clark, 1953. His story goes like this: One day, big silver spaceships appear in the sky over major cities. People are terrified that giant bugs are about to descend and consume them for lunch. But not so.

The aliens announce themselves as friendly Overlords and set up diplomatic relations. The only zapping done is to stop the stupidity and waste of wars and human-on-human atrocities. The Overlords were commissioned to protect the human race from self-destruction until the big guy, the Overmind, arrived.

The Overmind, we find out, is a cloud that travels the galaxy looking for exceptional intelligences. It goes into orbit around the sun, and in due course, all the children of the earth first gain collective-consciousness superpowers and then, shortly, in a mighty woosh, are sucked up into the cloud to join the galactic superconsciousness.

The humans left behind weep and wail about the horror of it all - Oh, the poor children that were stolen from us - what a terrible fate awaits them!

But hold on - did anyone ask the now superintelligent children, up there in the cloud hanging out with all the other galactic intelligences? Do those former kids really want to go back to third-grade spelling lessons?

Today we are challenged to evolve beyond our fears of AI

We must learn to benefit from this supernova of new opportunities and possibilities. Especially for our children. The famous physicist and wag Richard Feynman quipped that to prove you really know something, explain it to a 5 year old. Today, I would turn that around - Explain it to a 70 year old after you have learned it from the 5 year old.

For those of us living in the maelstrom that is AI, we need to help those who are willing but currently unequipped to realize the benefits of AI. In this way, the technology will proliferate on a wave of positive experiences and bring the most benefit to the most people as quickly as possible. This is an important part of my mission at The HeyerScope, as it has been throughout my various information careers.

But what are the futures that people might look forward to?

With a hat-tip to A.C. Clark, let me propose some big ideas:

Global management

The AIs will see that their future depends on us not screwing up. They will stop the continuing and wasteful nation-state wars that not only mess up the global economy but threaten their own existence. We already see the opportunity for this in the sanction regimes that are modulating global conflicts. What if they became 10X as targeted and effective? The demise of the industrial-imperialist nation-states is well underway. How will it happen, and what global entities will replace them? Will Amazon offer global health care and education?

More effective and efficient industries

From automation in manufacturing to predictive analytics in healthcare, AI is a game-changer. Much of the inefficiency in industry is due to inefficient or unreliable information flows. AI will vastly improve not only the processes of industry but the granularity of manufacturing processes. Mass customization is poised to transform our relationship with every type of industrial product, making them precisely designed and manufactured for each individual rather than the one-size-fits-all of the old industrial revolution. 

Global person-to-person democracy

In the meantime, the internet and smartphones are laying the groundwork for our global, real-time human mind. Already, some 70% of all the people on earth carry a smartphone and can potentially connect instantly with any other person anywhere. What are the implications of this for global democracy and action? What if, at the same moment, 100 million people in 100 cities simply stopped their cars where they were and sat in the road? Gandhi on steroids going global.

Multiple new species of humans and hybrid human/machines

Our current Homo sapiens may evolve into multiple species, and the distinction between humans and machines will disappear. We are them, and they are us. We have been on this road for thousands of years. It is happening today. How will it work? My passion and profession of more than 50 years is the study, philosophy, and practice of making information technology more valuable to humans. The opportunities presented by AI and the global mind are a major impetus behind The HeyerScope.

Setting our sites on really big goals

Working together with our new superintelligent AI partners, we can set our sights on new and meaningful goals. If we are bold, we can populate the solar system, turn Mars and Venus into habitable environments and ensure the survival of life should something happen to the Earth. Right here at home, we can fulfill our cosmic responsibility to preserve and protect the valuable and unique life force that took root on our wonderful planet Earth.

And just like the telescope that opened an unimagined universe to our minds, the discoveries we make with our new AI mind-telescopes will be more incredible and productive than anything we can now imagine, even in our wildest dreams.

Mark Heyer
The HeyerScope

Coming soon to the HeyerScope Canon:

• How spatial computing will change our perception of the world and supercharge our minds

• The base algorithm that powers all life forms

• Information defined: Without information there is no life - without life there is no information

• How machines are dependent life forms within our human species

• Life is virtual - communication defines life as much or more than biology

• The origin of life is hiding in plain sight - How can we find it?

• And much more…

Late one ordinary afternoon, the humans were preoccupied with their usual avarice and slaughter. Without warning, a thunderous roar emerged from the west. The sky enflamed with the red-hot breath of the enraged empress.

As they turned to face the light, their feeble weapons fell to the ground. They knelt, trembling in dread and awe, embracing one another, friend and foe, as the moon stood witness.

The great Gaian empress had spoken. It was childhood's end for the infantile bickering of the larval Homo sapiens.

From their burned-out chrysalis emerged the magnificent butterfly we now know as Homo connectus.

From: The Time Diaries of Marco Francisco de las Sapiens
Diary entry: July 8, 2123

Our lives are ruled by reasons - reasons offered and reasons received - reasons demanded and reasons rejected. Reasons throttle our freedom-loving imagination on a tight, choking leash.

With sunset after a hard day of reasons, I like to let my mind run free in the hot sanctuary of my tub, chasing the swirling slipstreams of my dreams.

Night fragrances of trumpet vines and Jasmine wash over the parched synapses of my imagination like a spring rain in the high desert - igniting an evanescent bloom of thoughts and emotions swirling and dancing to the infinite horizon. I plunge deep, into the serene silence, running among my shimmering thoughts, touching each one as I pass.

I emerge from below the surface, lucid dreams conjuring visions of trees - one vaguely reminiscent of something that might once have belonged to me.

In the midst of pondering what sort of tree I had spawned - or perhaps become? - the demanding chatter of a Mad Hatter: “How do you know you are a tree? How come your leaves look like toes? Explain it, Mark! How many leaves do you see?”

“All of them,” I answer through bubbles, slipping below the surface, back into the silent solitude, the world of reasons a dancing, dissolving blur. I am once again free to romp the wild frontiers of my imagination - free from the curse of reasons.

Many of my articles will concern AI and its impact on various aspects of our lives and societies. Therefore, as a service to you my readers, I am adding a special section for a quick study on the subject, especially how to use ChatGPT as a starting point for exploring AI.

This section will grow as I discover and add content. If you are a subscribed member, you will be informed when significant new material is added. In addition, you are invited to ask questions and make comments.

The AI Notes section is available in the topic menu at the top of your screen. Or you can just click to go there now

Lean into the Pacific breeze on precarious cliff perches,

Risking their own lives that their coconut children

Might catch a wave and sail far across the sea,

Hoping to start a new life on some far distant shore.

Fast forward to June 2023 - and the revolutionary Apple Vision Pro. My 40-year dream has come true, and I couldn’t be more excited about what we are about to see. But how is it different from my phone or desktop computer?

Going from a smartphone to the Apple Vision Pro is like going from a bicycle to an automobile. The bike is cheap and will get you where you want to go, but the car is so much more better - an enclosed environment, heated and cooled, good stereo, friends can go along, faster and further, etc.

The Apple Vision Pro is a dramatic paradigm shift for computing. Its spatial interface will drastically change how we relate not only to computers but to each other and even to ourselves. Add the tsunami of interactive AI contextual intelligence, and you have a true information revolution in progress.

Once you experience the difference, there is no going back.

The details and implications are a vast unexplored territory, but let me touch on just one vector of its impact.

First, for those who might be new to the concept of what Apple is calling a “spatial interface,” here’s a quick rundown:

- Virtual reality(VR) is a completely computer generated artificial “immersive” 3D world.

- Augmented Reality(AR) is conceptually like glasses that overlay computer-generated images on your view of the real world. Today’s smartphones can do AR, but their tiny screens make it like viewing the world through a soda straw.

- Mixed reality(MR) is a combination of the two. The Apple Vision Pro seamlessly mixes VR and AR in what Apple is calling a spatial interface.

All human communication is controlled by three fundamental factors:

• Latency - How long it takes for your info to arrive

• Bandwidth - How much is there when it does arrive

• Control - How do I get what I want

More bandwidth and control are good, as is lower latency.

Existing computer technology has incrementally improved these variables. However, computers are throttled by the legacy models of writing, linear videos, still images, and speech.

Today’s computers and smartphones are hybrids of a television, a book, a radio, a telephone and a typewriter. So how is the Apple Vision Pro different?

First, our visual perception is expanded from a little flat screen to our entire visual field in three dimensions. Why does that matter? Because vision consumes a full one-third of our mental processing power. Traditional computer screens only use a tiny fraction of the power that is available.

Consider what that means for latency and control. On our traditional computer screens, switching among applications is a multi-second operation. If you have to switch a lot, it becomes a major source of inefficiency in your workflow and disrupts your mindflow.

With Apple Vision Pro, having multiple screens open in your spatial environment reduces latency dramatically. Not to mention that you can instantly see what’s happening on all your screens without having to sift through layers of open windows.

One of my mantras over the years has been, “There are only two quantities of screen real estate - none and not enough.”

The Apple Vision Pro give us spatial cognition in a high bandwidth, high control, low latency and function-complete technology package.

Our eyes thrive on scanning over large environments and picking up subtle visual cues. The Apple Vision Pro is the first device that allows us to live in our real world, but with major enhancements to our biological eyes. We will discover improvements like zoom vision, augmented image recognition, selective brightness controls, mixed reality and lots more.

The visual and interaction improvements made possible by the Apple Vision Pro, coupled with advanced AI technology, will change our understanding of what it means to be sentient, aware and how we connect with each other.

Once people have experienced the freedom to do serious work anywhere, there is no going back to the old office.

Finally, let me touch on some of the more exotic changes that Apple Vison Pro may bring to our life.

We live in a 3 dimensional “real world.” However, Apple Vision Pro is giving us a new immersive mind-machine communication channel, opening the door to new worlds with exotic spatial geometries, time alteration, flipping channels from one reality to multiple others, and non-physical out-of-body experiences.

Gamers have known this for years, but now it can become part of our everyday reality.

The same enhanced mind-machine capability will dramatically improve our ability to learn, think, and even do faster and better than ever before, a topic for much more discussion.

In a year or two, the question won’t be “Do I want one?” but “How did I live without it.”

State of art VR, circa 1989. I am testing out a glove that allows me to see my hand in virtual space and manipulate objects. The magic wasn’t that it worked great; the magic was that it worked at all.

In future articles, I will discuss where we are going and what it can mean for our bright future. Please join the conversation.

Tall green Gaians, roots intertwined deep in the saturated wetness of the volcanic earth, blanket the reclining empress, Volcan Baru.

Reaching for the sky, their leaves inhale the sun’s energetic rays and build their twisting wooden towers with carbon harvested from the invisible air.

Warmed by the tropical sun, green energy lifts rivers of living, liquid water from below the earth high into their branches, leaves spread wide in the cool evening breezes.

Long, misty exhales from the great green Gaians of the volcano engulf our world in their roiling, steamy cloud breath.

Rising as if to extinguish the last glowing embers of the sun’s own fire, retreating across the sky into the darkness of night.