Considering a Polytopia - The notes
Project: Polytopia

Note the first: regarding Intelligence in CI

As an initial view consider the idea that a Polytopia is a conceptual framework for eliciting intelligent emergent behavior.
Educing an emergent intelligent behavior is the fundamental of a Polytopia.
As an initial view consider the idea that a Polytopia can be regarded as the moving front of newly emergent collective robustness of intelligence strengthening distributed opportunities of creative activities.


“The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds, but a diversity of views of the world.”

Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1820



The personal:

Allow me to start this essay with a very personal note, a moment of synchronicity that just happened.
Whilst I was in the process of trying to wrap this essay into a coherent whole, I remembered that many years ago I had studied the works of the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna was very important to me as an introduction to the concept of emptiness or non-inherent existence, particularly because in his most important work the “Mūlamadhyamakakārikā” he tried (and without much success it appears) to deny the absolutist positions that so many cherish. In fact I will go as far as stating that the kind of epistemic critical reasoning that Nagarjuna brought to bear on the human thought processes is so deep that it may have escaped even the apparent ‘pure’ critical reason of Kant.
The thoughts of Nagarjuna coalesced in my mind for many years and meshed with Wittgenstein’s and others to provide a view I hold, namely, that all views are interdependent and inherently ambiguous.
Now, it so happened that yesterday I came across a fascinating picture that held my attention for an intense while, it came courtesy of flickr and the uninterrupted infoflow of the hyperconnected dataverse.



The photo is titled:“1000 Buddhas are not enough” and made me shiver for an instant, for here was a photo and a title that represented a fundamental aspect of my perspective concerning the Polytopia project and its inter-subjective evolutionary correlated vision of the collective intelligence.

What’s the connection?

The correlation is uncomplicated, it points to the fact that many of the most complex and important ideas generated by the human mind across eons of thought have been high jacked into oversimplification and by extension absolutism.
And though I am in principle in favor of simplicity of explication and presentation I stand firm against oversimplification, for oversimplification leads the mind into a belief of understanding, a belief which by its very power of apparent simplicity results in stagnation and monolithic thought.
Witness the modern use of certain terms such as “ human capital” or “emotional resource “ or “attention economy”, all high jacked in the name of a non-existent mass media comprehension. I mention these because of my interest in collective intelligence and the manner by which I view the concepts of intelligence and collective.
It goes without saying that I concur with the title of the picture, completely. A 1000 Buddhas, a million Buddhas or for that matter an infinity of Buddhas is not enough! In fact it is not Buddhas that we need.
We need (if need is the appropriate term ) a comprehensive understanding of our collective intelligence, an application of said comprehension and a critical disassociation from our initial conditions as a species into a posthuman realization of our evolving potentials.

Please bear with me, as this is a work in progress trying to elucidate the complexity of the transit reality we are passing through at present.




"I’m drunk and you’re insane. Who’s going to lead us home?"
Rumi

Re-describing the conceptual presentation of collaborative intelligence in Polytopia as a playground of engagement.

It is my view that Collective Intelligence (CI’), though widely used, is a concept that is, for lack of a better description, misunderstood and probably misapplied, primarily because of the inadequacy of the term intelligence.
Intelligence is a very difficult concept to come to terms with, especially since our tendency to oversimplify language constructs pushes us towards a mode of monolithic thought, a regularity or normalization.
In many ways the term intelligence is not unlike the term culture, both are very broad terms referring to an increasingly expanding field of research, exploration and development.
In both cases the question of time need be inserted into the understanding of the concept for it to be coherent. Intelligence and culture are concepts that contain different levels of coherency, and to my eyes operate in a fashion that is similar to the fractal perspective. It is my view that intelligence is fundamentally Rhizomatic, and indeed so is culture, as is art.

note: The context in which the following definitions will be presented is that of the collective mind.
The collective mind context reflects the interaction of specific minds (individuals).
The interaction of individual minds is assumed (for the purpose of this context) to be consistent across all platforms of human existence/behavior and all platforms of communication.
In the context of the collective intelligence, an individual is assumed to be an agency, aware and conscious, intelligent and independent within the constraints of the material universe.



Step 1- Intelligence (context of usage is the collective)

Intelligence is generally defined as a capacity or capability, specifically intelligence is mostly regarded as the human talent to attain, through understanding, knowledge and models of the world and use them creatively to solve different problems and deal effectively with unforeseen state of affairs.
Moreover Intelligence has been defined as “.. not a single, unitary ability, but rather a composite of several functions. The term denotes that combination of abilities required for survival and advancement within a particular culture.” A. Anastasi

Or “…adjustment or adaptation of the individual to his total environment, or limited aspects thereof …the capacity to reorganize one’s behavior patterns so as to act more effectively and more appropriately in novel situations …the ability to learn …the extent to which a person is educable …the ability to carry on abstract thinking …the effective use of concepts and symbols in dealing with a problem to be solved …” W. Freeman
(For an extensive list of definitions see here )



“Intelligence is very much a two-edged sword, Captain-Doctor. It is useful only up to a point. It interferes with the business of living. Life, and intelligence, do not mix very well. They are not at all closely related, as you childishly assume.”
(Alternate Minds: Excerpts from Sterling’s Swarm )


I submit that intelligence in the context of a collective is neither a capability nor a capacity and also not an adaptive trait, but a recurrent unified flow and ordering of impressions of continuity in all things, a procedure for our repetitive re-orientation in the abstract space of potentialities.

Intelligence might be said to be (a process within) an evolutionary path of increasing disentanglement of representations from the urgent senses, the enlargement of an ever more complex mind happening.

Intelligence is essentially a term describing a reading of forms into meanings, a reading recognizing an entering into partnership with the world, a collaboration of conscious activity.
Intelligence need be looked at as a process of inter-subjective cross-dimensional activity defining a framework with no particular direction.
I understand that the above may seem somewhat obscure, allow me then an illustration.

Imagine a dancer, flowing gracefully to the rhythm of an ephemeral ambient music, which you do not hear. Our dancer represents an exploratory motion in a space and a time, tracing potential moves, retreating, emerging again, swirling, and turning upon itself, gyrating to its own pulse. What the dancer is performing is actually a complex probing of potential paths of actuation, where the actuation is the motion itself. The motion in turn repositions the dancer in the space-time continuum, altering her perception of the flow. The repositioning in this regard can be seen as the redrawing of the inner map, the body in relation to its space-time orientation. If we were to take this visual representation and eliminate the core component (the dancer) and extend the paths of motion in a multidimensional space, we would now have a ‘ virtual map’ of the dancer’s orientation.
This virtual map symbolizes the abstract application of intelligence at time T in space S.

Intelligence can be said to be a process then, a continuous process of orientation and re-orientation, an iterative, recursive, restructuring of the very meaning it is applied to. Put differently, intelligence is the term applied to the reading of coordinates of implications when applied to a particular context. Moreover since intelligence is always in motion, by definition it will disturb the silhouette of the context in which and to which it is applied. That in fact is the meaning of open ended (ness), for by eliminating the conceptual rigidity of the context, intelligence (by its very motion), opens, as it were, the context to fresh paths of potentialities.




From this perspective we may say that intelligence is the active ingredient in innovation and creativity, in whatever field of human endeavor it is applied.

If we accept that intelligence is the process of orientation in the phase space of possibilities and the phase space we will now relate to is the field of potentialities of meanings (or semantics), we can now state the following:

Intelligence is said to be the dynamic process of recursivity, by which the defined territory or context confinement is being smoothened and redefined/redescribed.

The process of intelligence is both fractal (resonating across scales of contexts) and scalable (can be applied across scales and dimensions).

Moreover, given that the process of intelligence implies a continuous and fluid motion, within a given but indefinite semantic space, intelligence can be defined as the engine of meaning creation and meaning application. In this case the comprehension and understanding resulting from the application of the process of intelligence will always occur later than the actual re-description (implying a delayed reaction between intelligence and comprehension-tbd).


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to be continued shortly

Wed, Jul 15, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: superorganism, collective intelligence,Rhizomatics, polytopia,Intelligence
Sent to project: Polytopia

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