The coevolution of human, animal and machine

 

Computer data storage capacity (space) and CPU speed (time)
is out-pacing software development to the extent that rather 
sloppy software is being written which is wasteful of space-time. 

Moore's Law addresses this increase in spatio-temporal bandwidth.

Parkinson's Law addresses the fact that an increased bandwidth
will be exploited (regardless of the quality of that exploitation).

McLuhan's Tetrad describes the resulting "reversal" from the
increased bandwidth in terms its over-exploitation or 
over-modulation leading to negative feedback. 

Bremermann's Limit seems to describe the ultimate limit of 
Moore's Law as a physical limitation.

CISC, or "complex instruction set" CPUs have evolved into RISC
or "reduced instruction set" CPUs in much the same sense that
human's have off-loaded the hard-wired behaviours of the animals
into "languages" or "software".  

Animals complex behaviour seems largely more instinctive than 
learned when compared with humans. Their behaviours seem more
like CISC processors in that most (not all) of them are hardwired.

Humans though, seem to begin with a minimal but unique basis of 
hardwired functions which, much like an RISC opset allow 
for offloading much of human behaviour into "memetic software" 
which it picks up from birth and society via many different 
language channels.

The physical means by which "language" is encoded are many
and these I will refer to as "language channels". Non-verbal forms 
of languages like touch, smell, sight or body-language, have 
different communicative capacities and dimensions. 

Some of these language channels are rather orthogonal at times. 
For instance, "reading" is visually transmitted language but
while looking at a painting is also visual, it does not convey
the same behaviours of a language channel such as "speech".

But, what we can "say" about a painting is converted into 
speech so that in a sense, the visual language channel is
overlapped with the "speech" language channel to the extent
that we feel satisfied that the information communicated
be a verbal language matches the information communicated
by a visual language. In this sense the language channels
may at times be non-orthogonal.

One might compare the "evolution" of RISC from CISC 
computer processors with the evolution of humans from 
animals in terms of the preoccupation of humans with
extending it's spatio-temporal bandwidth of communications
relegating hardwired behaviours to adaptive ones that are
programmable via socially derived software. 

In this sense humans are more space-time efficient in 
terms of "hardware" or genetics, but in terms of their 
behaviours, they tend to be much less economical with 
that luxury of additional space-time, than animals.
Their behaviours are always tending towards increasing
the height of the roof (increasing the maximum entropy), 
rather than in terms of efficient use of a fixed and 
finite maximum number of dimensions of some closed 
system (decreasing entropy), but a compromise between
these extrema is always in effect.

This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the market economy
where the "roof" is increased in terms of inflation, 
and wasteful uses of resources are promoted by speculation,
while at the same time, the efficient use of limited resources 
must be promoted via regulatory actions of government
interventions to prevent the "virtual reality" of rapid
growth from becoming too confused with the "reality"
of bandwidth limitations on production and delivery
(the communications of commodities).

If Bremermann's Limit indicates some ultimate height of 
that roof, then mankind will ultimately have to cease its 
imperialistic evolution and settle into a final 
time-invariant state of being "sophisticated animals" ?
 
Society and Culture both, download their "wetware" memes 
into the individuals. While Society is more concerned 
with laws, Culture is more concerned with freedoms.

A Society is bound together under a "legal logic" constraining
freedoms, while a Culture is bound together by a certain
superposition or distribution of probabilities for 
specific language channels which we might call a "memetic space"
or "memetic spectrum". But in a complete picture combining
Society and Culture, the term "memetic space-time" is more
appropriate, in the same sense that quantum theory hybridizes
spatial (particle-like) and temporal (wave-like) concepts.

It might be said that societies evolve lineraly but cultures 
mutate parallely. Where it can be said of a society that it 
is "progressive", implying temporal change, such a term does 
not seem to apply to cultures which are often footed on 
time-invariant "traditions". 

Cultures change more slowly and 'spatially' in the sense that 
they are influenced mutagenically, incorporating by inffusion 
of new 'states' from possible states and cultures may change 
more quickly in terms of superpositions and hybridizations of 
existing states within it's largely closed system. The history
of a culture is more analogical than causual. It's history
records itself in terms of metaphoric prose such as in religious
documents and quasi-fictional literature.

Society's changes are more sequential, 'causual' and linear 
in the sense  of its developmenting infrastuctures, like laws 
and technologies in the course of progress. The 'logic' of a
society's changes are documented in a causual history of that
society.

"Memetic Algorithms" seem to try and address this cohabitation
of societal constraints with various cultural memetic spaces
and so memetic algorithms has much in common with quantum physics 
and relativity theory in terms of hybridization and spatial-temporal
constraints in a communications theoretic (cybernetic) sense.