The Radicalism of Modernity

A friend pointed me to this wonderful physics video. I've only watched the first few minutes so far - the whole thing is almost five hours long! It looks like it will be a delightfully informative five hours! Already at the beginning, from 4:00 to 5:00, a fundamental concept of physics is presented. If we want to get to the fundamental, essential laws of nature, we should take as a starting point an isolated, clean, pure state, a vacuum. I have the impression that the video will be showing us a state that is even cleaner and purer than a vacuum! But I want to head in a different direction.

The Copernican revolution shifted the center of the universe, the perspective from which we can access the essential laws of nature, from the earth to the sun. Giordano Bruno was more profoundly revolutionary: he proposed that the universe does not have a center!

I would like to propose a similar scientific revolution. The center being debated by Ptolemy and Copernicus and Bruno is a location in space. The starting point that Richard Behiel is referring to in the video is not a location in space but a state of matter, in particular a state of absence of matter. From a vacuum, the fundamental, essential laws of nature become apparent. Purity reveals essence. I want to argue that purity is not any particular state. It is true that some situations have a kind of purity that allows clearer revelations of natural law. But there are very many such pure situations, each revealing their own particular species of natural law. There is no uniquely pure situation, no uniquely essential natural law.

I first understood this from reading the book Elementary Excitations in Solids by David Pines. The pure situation here is a crystal, a regular arrangement of atoms. In a crystal, the sorts of elementary particles one finds are different from those found in a vacuum. The most basic such particle is a phonon, the quantum unit of a sound wave. There is no sound in a vacuum!

Our starting points for causal analyses are very diverse. If my automobile engine is mis-firing and I want to understand why, to trace the causal chain back to the big bang through the supernovas that created the metal atoms that condensed to form the earth from which the ore was extracted to allow the casting of the engine block that is mis-firing... however accurate this analysis might be, its complexity is not likely to point me to the need to replace the spark plugs! Instead, the pure state that I should start with would be a properly functioning engine. I can then look at how a disruption to that pure state, e.g. fouled spark plugs, can lead to observed effects like mis-firing.

Physics is the cornerstone scientific discipline, and science is the cornerstone discipline of modern times. The idea that an isolated clean state is the purity on which our analyses should be founded, this is the radicalism that becomes translated onto the political plane. The French Revolution is the paradigm case. The calendar and the units of measure were restructured from rational principles, cut off from tradition. The isolated clean starting point is remote from the tangled web of our immediate experience. We have prioritized what is distant over what is near.

This is not a sustainable approach to managing the world. What we neglect inevitably declines. If that decline really matters, we will generally pick up the pain signal, turn our attention to the decline, and take corrective action. But if we have a strong bias, if we are wearing blinkers that restrict our analyses to remote perspectives, our lack of attention can allow the decline to intensify to the point where it becomes much more difficult to correct.

We can think of earth as just one planet among many: this is a perspective that prioritizes the remote. From this perspective, what happens on earth is not very important. If we think of earth as our home, as our life support system, then what happens on earth is not so remote. It becomes important to look for ways to correct any declines we might observe; it becomes important to pay attention to any possible declines.

A physics-based approach to healthcare is also problematic. We can think of human functioning as some kind of swirling bag of chemicals. A human being is very far from the clean pure state of a vacuum! We can try to understand a disease as a pattern of biochemical reactions, but just to understand health as a pattern of biochemical reactions is already a challenge that is beyond our forseeable grasp. But we can shift our perspective to health as itself a pure state, and study the natural laws that are revealed from that perspective. It's not that the biochemical perspective is wrong - my point is that the biochemical perspective is not uniquely right. There are many sorts of pure states, each providing a perspective that can reveal natural laws specific to it.

Looking at Jupiter through a telescope, one can see its moons orbiting around it. Jupiter and its moons form an orbital system. It is natural to take Jupiter as the center of the universe when studying the orbits of its moons. In just this way, the pure system which can be disrupted, the effects of whose disruptions we can observe: what we should see as a pure system will depend on the problems that we are encountering. If we can remain sensitive to problems and able to shift perspectives so we can analyze problems relative to a normal functioning, where that relationship connects to our ability to respond, then our analyses can empower us to steer away from disaster.

Computing Sustainability

What does it mean for an activity to be sustainable? Just that it can be continued for a long time!

There are many facets to be unpacked here. What's a long time? If my guitar has good sustain, it means that I can play a note and hold it for maybe ten seconds. When looking at the sustainability of fossil fuel combustion, the time horizon is more in the zone of a century.

What is going to put a stop to the activity? The vibrating string on my guitar just diminishes gradually and then goes silent. Looking at the nuclear weapons strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, the main concern about its sustainability is the possibility of global nuclear annihilation. Looking at the whaling industry, the main concern is the extinction of whales of whatever species.

There are two aspects to the cessation of the activity. We might rely on that activity, and so we will suffer when the activity stops. If the activity stops because the activity has caused enough of a disaster that it is no longer possible to continue the activity, we may well suffer directly from that disaster.

What puts a stop to an activity might not be a consequence of the activity. I like to go hiking through the vacant lots on the hillside to the north of our house. Around here the vacant lots are getting developed quite rapidly. In a few years, I will no longer be able to hike through those lots. My hiking activity is not sustainable, but not as any consequence of the hiking itself.

What's the scope of the activity? Lots of people might be doing the same sort of thing. Or other people might be doing something similar. Fossil fuel combustion is an activity with a rich scope. I drive my car a few hours a week to shop, meet friends, etc. This activity of me driving my car, that has negligible impact on the global environment. But around the world, billions of people are similarly driving their cars a few hours a week. The total impact of everybody driving, that is considerable. And then fossil fuel combustion also includes coal and gas burning power plants, ocean freighters, jet airliners, gas powered residential furnaces, oil fueled industrial boilers, etc. When I consider the sustainability of my driving habits, it makes sense to see this activity as an instance of a larger pattern, and to think about the sustainability of the larger pattern. It's not like everyone else is going to stop driving just so I can continue!

To decide how sustainable an activity is, that involves predicting the future. My hiking is not sustainable because those vacant lots will be developed. But that is my prediction of the future! Maybe those lots won't get developed!

Long term sustainability of activities embedded in complex systems: this sort of puzzle is really unsolvable in any definitive way. It might seem clear enough that, between the depletion of fossil fuel resources and the climate consequences of CO2 emissions, our driving habits are not sustainable in the long run. But maybe fusion power will come to the rescue, with electric vehicles taking over, and we can continue our happy motoring lifestyle. Some sort of scenario analysis needs to be brought in. To know what the future will look like is impossible. But we can more practically sketch out some manageable number of scenarios, combinations of gross features of our ways of living. Looking at the sustainability of whatever activity, we can evaluate that against each scenario. The answer will be relative to the scenario.

Digital electronic computing is a vast and diverse activity in the world these days. How sustainable is it? What might put a stop to it? Probably some amount of computing will continue for a long time, if only at a small scale. But, could the dominance of computing in our society be toppled? How could that happen?

One plausible future scenario is that climate change continues as people continue to burn fossil fuels as long as possible. People stop large scale burning of fossil fuels because climate change destroys our industrial capabilities. Could we continue computing if lose the industrial capability for mining coal etc.? An aspect of computing that is not so visible is the way digital electronic microchips are made. This involves massive technological investment. We will only be able to make computers, and hence be able to compute, if our industrial and technological capabilities are maintained at quite a high level. Certainly if there is just a blip for a few years, computers are quite durable so there needn't be an interruption in our computing capability. But if chip manufacture fails for decades, the impact will be massive.

The unsustainability of computing due to the collapse of our industrial capability, this can be like the unsustainability of my hiking because the vacant lots got developed. My hiking is no causal factor in the development of the vacant lots. Similarly, the collapse of industrial capability could be a result of factors entirely different than computing, e.g. fossil fuel combustion and climate change. But it could also be that computing contributes to its own demise.

Computing could cause its own demise quite directly. We are already seeing the pollution of the web from all kinds of computationally created dangers. Spam, misinformation, fraud, viruses, fishing... the list is constantly growing. The web could get to be so dangerous that usage declines dramatically. The economics of chip manufacturing requires huge volume in order to amortize the huge investment in design and process development. If the demand for hardware declines, the unit cost will rise, further reducing the volume. This can become a vicious cycle that could have massive impact.

A less direct causal path, whereby computing contributes to its own demise, is where computing weakens society, and the weakened society can no longer adequately support the computational infrastructure. A very simple example would be how people lose the ability to do mathematics without digital electronic support, and thus lose the capability to debug software. A more complex example would be where the political polarization driven by misinformation in social media etc. leads to the destruction of universities so there are no more engineers to maintain chip manufacturing facilities. A yet more complex example would be where that political polarization prevents effective response to climate change, which leads to the collapse of our industrial capabilities, including chip manufacturing.

Whether any of these rather wild scenarios could come to pass... Yogi Berra had it right: nothing is harder to predict than the future!

Narrowing the Range

Here is a new piece in 53edo. This is another attempt to create a kleisma traversal. Yesterday I posted a first attempt, whose score did not look like a kleisma traversal. I looked back at the code, and it sure looks like the system had been initialized to a kleisma traversal. So the most likely thing would be that I jostled the system at too high a temperature which erased the kleisma traversal, and then as I brought the temperature down a different structure spontaneously emerged.

To test this hypothesis, I used the same rhythmic structure and the same initialization of pitch values, but just set the temperature near the phase transition and jostled the system at that relatively cool temperature.

Here is a score of the piece. The 32 varying repetitions have been folded on top of each other. The vertical axis is the pitch classes, ordered by minor thirds. I.e. each row is the pitch class one minor third above the pitch class below it. This score looks exactly like a kleisma traversal. There is a gradual ramp from the beginning of each 80 second measure, moving up 6 minor thirds, which then wraps over to the beginning of the next measure but a perfect fifth higher. There is a whole band of pitch classes that is absent: a kleisma traversal has no business visiting all the pitch classes of the tuning. It just needs to follow a path to the tempered out comma, in this case the kleisma.

This brings up another facet of the puzzle of yesterday's piece. This piece did cover all the pitch classes. It looked a bit like a schisma traversal, but that shouldn't cover all the pitch classes either. So I suspect the structure that emerged was some kind of compound comma traversal. I have code to initialize a system with a pattern like that... but how to detect it once it has emerged... I don't know quite how to do that!

Here is another score for the piece, but with the rows reordered so now each row is a perfect fifth above the row below it. There is no helical structure here at all: the dense regions don't connect to form any sort of path. This shows that the piece is not any kind of schisma traversal.

Bug or Feature?

Here is a new piece in 53edo. My intent was for this to be a traversal of the kleisma comma, repeated 32 times with variations. I'm not too sure what I actually got!

The idea behind the thermodynamic approach I use in my software is that order can emerge spontaneously. I use unusual tunings; my hope is that this kind of spontaneous order can reveal some of the potential of these tunings. There is one significant challenge though: is the order that can be discovered in the output something that I introduced accidentally, or is is truly spontaneous?

I often do introduce a simple structure into the system I am simulating, and try to preserve that order. In these cases, I just hope that the variations will reveal additional order around that structure. In the piece here, I initialized the system with a traversal of the kleisma comma along one axis of the system. The variations can then emerge in the other dimensions.

I use various types of graphs or scores in trying to see what sort of order might be present in the output. The graph above is a simple score for the piece. Time is on the horizontal axis, in seconds. Pitch class is on the vertical axis: the pitches in the piece are all folded into a single octave, so the vertical axis runs from 0 to 52. The graph looks a bit like a coarsely woven fabric. Since the topology of the system is 32 repetitions of an 80 second measure, folding all the repetitions together might make the order more clear:

It's clear that the measures share some sort of structure, but it's not so clear what the order is. There is a vague sort of staircase structure, so it looks a bit like a comma traversal. It's pretty surprising that almost all the pitch classes are present. A simple comma traversal doesn't need so many pitch classes!

The kleisma comma is dominated by minor thirds. Six minor thirds is very close to a perfect fifth, and in 53edo they are exactly the same (modulo octaves). So I had the idea of shuffling the pitch classes. This graph has the same rows as the previous graph, but instead of ordering the pitch classes in a sort of chromatic way, just climbing microstep by microstep, in these graph each row is a pitch class a minor third above the pitch class below it. Horizontal stripes appear in this graph, with a period of about 6 rows. These are the perfect fifths. But if this was a kleisma traversal, there should just be a few stripes that angle very slightly so they change height by 6 rows from one side to the other; the right side of this graph wraps over to the left side, so the traversal should look like a helix. This graph has a strongly helical shape, but it is very steep. I don't think I ended up with a kleisma traversal! But all those stripes of a perfect fifth...

Here the rows are ordered so each row is a perfect fifth above the row immediately below it. There are about six stripes that gradually rise from left to right, wrapping to the next stripe to form a helix. Ah, this looks like a traversal of the schisma. With a schisma, eight perfect fifths plus a major third bring one back to the starting point (again, modulo octaves).

My intent was to produce a traversal of the kleisma, but I got instead a traversal of the schisma. I need to go back to my code... did I bungle the initialization? Or maybe I jostled too much, the initialization got erased, and the schisma traversal emerged spontaneously. Either way, when I listen to the piece, it sounds pretty good to my ears!

1/6-Comma Meantone

Here is a new piece in 55edo. 55edo is very close to 1/6-comma meantone, a tuning used in the classical music period. Meantone tunings in general, and 55edo in particular, temper out the syntonic comma. This piece is based on a traversal of the syntonic comma. Each traversal lasts about 43 seconds; the entire piece consists of 64 traversals.

I initialized the system with 64 repetitions of a simple traversal. I started the thermodynamic simulation at a relatively high temperature, and then gradually reduced the temperature until a phase transition, a peak in the heat capacity, was detected. The piece is a snapshot of the system at the phase transition.

The diagram above is a folded score. All the pitches have been folded into a single octave of 55 equal steps in the vertical dimension. The 64 repetitions across the duration of the piece have been folded into a 43 second span in the horizontal dimension. The staircase appearance of the folded score shows that the comma traversal structure was maintained through the thermodynamic jostling process.

Bot vs. Bot

We live in a revolutionary time! One huge component of the revolution is computer technology, on which the internet is built, on which social media are built, on which political manipulation of people's perceptions is enabled. Political power is all about the ability to steer the behavior of people. Enforcing obedience with threats is a very inefficient way to steer behavior. To surround people with a story that motivates people to behave as one wishes, that is far more effective. And now the technology is in place to provide that capability.

Control over the story is always the fundamental political battle. What changes is the technology. How do people learn the stories through which they make sense of their world? It's not that the struggle over the story is anything new. Sometimes, though, the story can be trapped. Some group manages to take control of the story, to use control of the story to maintain that control. Whatever struggle is possible, that has to go underground. Centuries can go by, where any sort of deviation from the approved doctrine is subject to the most severe penalties. It's a form of societal suspended animation. It's quite risky, too, because such a rigid structure cannot respond effectively to external threats.

Is our present revolution one where rigidity is melting away, or where rigidity is setting in? Probably we have not quite reached that fork in the road. We seem to be more in a metastable situation, where we might fall one way or another, but we have not yet fallen. How might we work to maintain social vitality, to keep multiple stories in play, to cultivate sensitivity and responsiveness?

One approach is through some kind of central regulation. The various social media platforms already embody centralized power. Platforms can be required to, perhaps, balance coverage of opposing views, for example.

I suspect that central regulation can't work. Power corrupts! We need a distributed approach!

Fight bots with bots! That's my idea! Yeah, we are being inundated with a tsunami of misinformation. We need a counter-tsunami!

I don't know enough about the patterns of social media, viral memes etc., to be able to elaborate this idea in any real detail. But the basic elements are simple enough. The basic pattern we seem to be falling into is roughly: 1) hate mesmerizes people; 2) hate divides people; 3) divided, mesmerized people are disempowered; 4) disempowered people can easily be exploited. To counter this pattern, we need bots that dissolve the bond of mesmerization, bots that bring people together, bots that empower people.

Bots are simply social media agents. They can post messages, reply to messages, and react to messages. Bots can also work in teams, and also cooperated with human teams. Bots are inevitably a bit stupid, but their great virtue is their low cost. The scale of the problem is huge. How many bots are active now on social media, spawning all sorts of hate-filled misinformation... they're cheap! The folks playing these games have deep pockets! The only way to fight this battle effectively is to counter with a force of similar magnitude.

One fundamental component of the battle is to understand the terrain. One function of a bot army is scouting. Stories are introduced and spread on very many different internet platforms. How exactly users discover these platforms... there must be many ways. I am an old guy and so I am very out of touch with what's really happening. I know a lot of on-line games also function as social media platforms. Surely bots play on-line games too, and as artificial intelligence technology advances, they will get harder and harder to distinguish from human players. And anyway the bots don't have to be too good at fooling people. If they are just acting as spies, they can pick up a bit of information here and a bit there. The objective is to discover trends early.

Once any sort of hate-inducing misinformation meme is discovered to be spreading, a variety of counteractions can be triggered. Alternate stories can be introduced, the more accurate the better. Existing stories that counter the misinformation can be given positive reactions, or reshared. The social media platforms will amplify whatever is getting a lot of activity, so simply creating a lot of activity related to alternate stories will tend to quash the misinformation.

New media are almost always destabilizing. We just need to learn to manage what we have unleashed!

Paving a Road

Here is a new piece in 99edo. Since I added an interval similarity score to my software, I am exercising its other various capabilities to see how they work with the new score. Today I have incorporated a scale into the system.

The non-standard Tonnetz diagram above shows the scale I have devised. This diagram shows intervals of 5:4 vertically and 7:4 horizontally. Intervals of 3:2, perfect fifths, are not shown in the diagram.

This scale includes 37 of the 99 pitch classes. Maybe it should be called a subset rather than a scale! How conventional terminology should properly be applied in this kind of unconventional context, I sure don't know enough to have a useful opinion! I'll call it a scale, because it has many properties of a conventional scale like a diatonic scale: it is built from a chain of repeated intervals, it circulates, and it supports comma traversals.

The generating interval for this scale is 16 steps of 99edo, which does not correspond to any very fundamental just-tuned interval; 28:25 looks like the simplest. The circulating quality can be observed in the diagram. A key change in one direction would remove the 0 pitch class and add the 97 pitch class; the other direction removes the 81 pitch class and adds the 83.

This scale supports traversal of a family of commas, formed by combinations of two primitive commas. A comma traversal appears on the diagram as a path from a cell labeled 0 to another cell labeled 0. Since the diagram does not include perfect fifths, a little imagination is required! I have highlighted a cell labeled 58. This is a perfect fifth above the 0 pitch class. One can imagine a third dimension for this diagram, with the next layer above the one shown having a 0 cell right above the 58 cell. So a path from a 0 cell to another 0 cell can be formed from a path from a 0 cell to a 58 cell, just adding one more step of a perfect fifth to climb up to the 0 cell in the next layer.

The short path from a 0 cell to another 0 cell in this diagram corresponds to traversing the comma 3136:3125. There is a path from a 0 cell to a 58 cell directly above it; this corresponds to traversing the comma 393216:390625. These primitive commas can be combined to make paths from the other 0 cells to the 58 cell, corresponding to the commas 2401:2400 and 6144:6125.

This piece has 81 measures, each about 40 seconds long, arranged in a 9x9 matrix. I initialized the system so each measure traversed the comma 6144:6125. I started the thermodynamic simulation with the temperature set moderately high and then gradually lowered it until a phase transition was detected. My intention was that with the constraint of the scale, the initialization, and the moderate starting temperature, the structure of 81 comma traversals would be maintained. But I don't really hear the traversal, nor do I see it when I analyze the score!

So, here is yet another piece in 99edo! From the prior run, I know the temperature of the phase transition. So I initialized the system in the same way, but just set the temperature at the phase transition and let it run a while. With luck, there was enough jostling to create interesting variations, but not too much so the traversal structure could be maintained.

I made a folded score for this second version, where the 81 measures have all been superimposed. This should make clear the general pattern. And indeed, the traversal structure is very clear here. With any luck, it will be apparent to the ear, too!