Chapter 22: Network: Cooperation and bonding

Synopsis

The combination of gravitation and quantum mechanics creates vast numbers of elementary particles which are effectively small intelligent creatures able to communicate and bond with one another to form more capable communities. An atom like oxygen comprises about 200 particles, a cell trillions of atoms and I am a gigantic cooperatives of about 50 trillion cells which have all worked together to keep me alive for more than 80 years. Only a fraction of them may be original. We are tiny compared to planets, stars and galaxies although our atoms are the same size as theirs. Communication binds us together and the same is true at all scales. Galaxies, the largest objects in the Universe, are bound by gravitation. Hadrons like the proton, the smallest composite entities, comprise quarks (fermions) bound by gluons (bosons). The same pattern is repeated everywhere we look.

Contents

22.1: From action to love



22.2: Senses, brains and muscles: living networks



22.3: Communities, theologies, religions and politics



22.4: The physical networks of the world






22.1: From action to love

Our story began with the definition of God developed by Aquinas who, following Aristotle, defined God as pure act: actus purus. Now I wish to develop the model proposed here in sufficient detail to clearly identify the simple divine initial singularity with the complex Universe within it. For this I turn from actus purus to another equally ancient but more personal definition of divinity: God is love. The key to love is communication, meeting and understanding. In an evolutionary environment a primary motivation for communication is to assist survival. This covers the spectrum from love through symbiotic cooperation and trading to predation.

Now that we have endowed the fledgling Universe with particles, spacetime and gravitation, I wish to follow the complexification of the Universe from there to the present working with observable classical networks modelling everyday communication, love and bonding in Minkowski space.

The basic role of classical networks is to carry information and other goods through space and time. Since we can now identify physical and biological materials at the molecular and atomic level, we have been able to identify ancient trade routes by studying the movement of valuable and durable items around the world over tens of thousands of years.

The modern era of transport and trade began with beasts of burden and sailing vessels and is now built around fossil fuelled vehicles and electronic communications. The scientific study of the communication of information began with the invention telegraphy. The basic problem is to send signals over long distance communication channels without them being corrupted by noise. The solution of this problem is the theory of communication described in Chapter 19: Quantization: the mathematical theory of communication. Computers implement the codecs necessary to apply Shannon's theory of error control and handle the details of routing and connection between individual users.

Every network is an assembly of sources and channels. There is no theoretical limit to the number of sources that can be connected, a network feature we call scale invariance. Nor is there any limit to the type of information that can be transmitted since all information is embodied in some material form.

Global shipping networks connect almost everybody with physically embodied information from love letters to shiploads of iron ore. Pipelines carry fluids, electrical networks carry power and electronic networks like wireless, telephony and the internet connect most of the population of the world and may eventually connect everybody.

The scale invariance of classical networks means that they are useful models for everything from the simplest logical structures to the transfinite layers of the Universe described in Chapter 23: Matter and spirit and subsequent chapters which deal with control, theology, knowledge, physics and the political consequences of living in a divine Universe.

22.2: Senses, brains and muscles: living networks

We connect through the internet and other telecommunications mainly by sight and sound, which includes writing and all sorts of imagery. Our immediate communications with one another are mediated by our five senses, touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste, and the spectrum of modes of our action and sensation ranges from pure love and support to violence and injury, even murder.

All of these modes of communication have roots deep in our evolutionary past. We share our chemical senses of smell and taste with creatures as far back as single celled bacteria that can sense attractive and repulsive chemical environments and move toward or away from them. As more complex creatures evolved, so the spectrum of sensations and abilities expanded.

As multicellular creatures became more complex, they also developed the power of proprioception necessary to manage their internal processes. Much of this is mediated chemically at the cellular level in both plants and animals

One of the disadvantages of membership in the living community is that we are all in different ways food and other resources for one another. This has led to the development of mechanisms for defence and predation ranging from our internal molecular immune system, the evolution of poisons and offensive chemical sprays, and the development of muscles and nerves, teeth, claws and defensive armour, not to mention deceptive colouring and behaviour all of which involve communication by close contact. At the community and national levels we develop polices forces and armies and a considerable fraction of scientific research in physics, chemistry, biology and psychology is devoted to the development of weapons and defences.

The design of all these systems is controlled by the need for error free communication and the limits on activity placed by cybernetics, very much in the same way as telecommunication systems are controlled. We understand that this information is implicitly built into living systems by the selective processes of evolution because we only see systems that work. We find that healthy sight, hearing and other modes of sensation approach the quantum mechanical limits on their functionality.

From an abstract point of view, every living creature is a very complex network of interactions beginning at the molecular level in single cells and increasing in complexity with networks of molecular intercellular communication in multicellular creatures. Larger scale physical organs and networks take care of the collection and distribution of oxygen, food and information to all the cells in a complex body through networks of blood vessels, lymph systems and nerves.

These systems in living bodies serve us as paradigms for the effective management of large communities of people. Although the ancients thought that our intelligence is the product of an immaterial intellect which was part of a spiritual soul, there can now be no doubt that our brain is the seat of all our intelligence, emotion and culture. Recent extensive studies have revealed much more detail in the anatomy of our brains. It seems likely that our brains are more complex than the internet in its present state, and more intelligent. Carissa Wong (2024): Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

22.3: Communities, theologies, religions and politics

My main interest here is in theology and religion. Since our modern species Homo sapiens evolved some 300 thousand years ago, we have spread around the planet to all inhabitable regions and developed a vast array of languages and cultures. Many human groups evolved in isolation for tens of thousands of years and remained largely ignorant of one another.

In the last ten thousand years or so these diverse cultures have gradually been connected through travel, empire building, and marine navigation, much of it predatory. History records countless instances of people with guns and horses enslaving, pillaging, raping and murdering people whose only defences have been spears, bows and arrows. Warlords seeking hegemony have gradually expanded their powers to large empires so that the immense diversity of the ancient world has been boiled down to a few major religions and political alliances. In a peaceful world which supports everybody this tendency might be reversed, causing an explosion in variety and creativity.

Despite our diversity we remain one species on one planet and it is clear that many of our difference are based on arbitrary entrenched ideologies that set us against one another. The unity of our global habitat and the scientific unity that arises from knowledge of this unity could be exploited to deal with our global problems of resource distribution if we could harmonize our political and theological pictures of our condition. War and arbitrary flight from reality are exceedingly wasteful both in terms of lives and capital destroyed and opportunities missed through the self serving blindness.

The first step toward the solution proposed here is exploitation of our scientific understanding of the world. A key to this approach is the shared theory of everything I call scientific theology based on the nature of our world and ourselves. The key to this theology, as ancient religions have long recognized, may be summed up in three terms: faith, that is shared knowledge based on reality rather than dreams; hope, that is a shared vision of a realistically possible futures; and charity, that is sharing our energy to realize our hope.

Global electronic communication seem likely to promote this development. Once technical knowledge and the mass production of the necessary physical components became possible, the global network has grown with extraordinary speed. It has been a chain reaction analogous to the explosive growth of populations of locusts, mice and rabbits that occur when conditions are favourable.

Other common features of evolution have also grown with networks. They have provided new fields for predation, deception, advertisement, profit making, spying, and government control of populations. These tendencies have led to immune responses like encryption and legislation to protect privacy and enable victims to get justice and recompense.

As has occurred many times before in gold rushes and other social paradigm changes, government and the law have been to a large extent left behind. By enabling the rapid propagation of information and giving voice to those who have previously been silent however, we can expect the gradual diminution of the initial advantages gained by first occupiers of this new space.

If the approach taken on this site is anywhere near correct, we have seen the Universe grown from zero entropy to its current enormous complexity through an evolutionary process wrought by the action of an initially blind omnipotent power controlled only by the constraint that contradictions cannot exist. The elimination of social contradictions is an obvious and profitable task.

We can learn about the control of large populations of autonomous individuals from study of our own bodies. Going deeper, we see how quantum mechanics has tamed the chaos of uncontrolled noise to bring us a beautiful world. All the political and theological answers we need have already been developed in the evolutionary creation of biological organisms many times more complex than the administrative problems currently facing us.

The economist Thomas Piketty sees that despite a multitude of ups and downs, human freedom and welfare are gradually increasing. I see this as an implicit feature of our divine world. The increase of entropy is equivalent of the decrease of energy per state which is tantamount to the more equitable division of wealth. In other words, since the big bang (or equivalent) the world has become gentler. The idea that nature is red in tooth and claw that inspires so many of the warmongers among us is false, as the scientific study of evolution demonstrate. Thomas Piketty (2022): A Brief History of Equality

22.4: The natural networks of the world

The Earth itself has a large number of network processes, some carrying huge mounts of matter and energy. The biggest of these are the drifting continents ocean currents, driven by winds and temperature and salinity gradients. The Earth has changed greatly over its four billion year history. The planets are believed to have formed from material left over in the mass of gas that was gravitationally compressed to form the Sun.

The shapes and position of the continental masses is continually changing, which in turn influences the oceans, mountains and rivers. Ice ages have come and gone and done much to sculpt the landscape. At present the oceans are absorbing much of the heat that has been added to the planet by our release of carbon dioxide and methane. The warming water expands and sea levels rise. This in turn influences winds, which influence ocean currents which serve to move vast amounts of heat around the planet. Changing ocean temperatures in turn influence the migration of most forms of marine life.

The original atmosphere comprised gases that did not condense into the main body of the earth. Life appears to have begun soon after the planet formed. Photosynthesis was discovered about three billion years ago and began to add oxygen to the atmosphere. This was difficult for anaerobic organisms but enabled oxygen breathers to grow bigger and generate more energy. At the heart of evolution lies adaptation and survival.

Copyright:

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Notes and references

Further reading

Books

Piketty (2022), Thomas, A Brief History of Equality, Harvard UP 2022 ' The world's leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations.'  Amazon   back

Links

Carissa Wong (2024), Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail, ' Researchers have mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail. The resulting cell atlas, which was described today in Science1 and is available online, reveals new patterns of connections between brain cells called neurons, as well as cells that wrap around themselves to form knots, and pairs of neurons that are almost mirror images of each other. The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. “How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?” Slivers of brain The brain fragment was taken from a 45-year-old woman when she underwent surgery to treat her epilepsy. It came from the cortex, a part of the brain involved in learning, problem-solving and processing sensory signals. The sample was immersed in preservatives and stained with heavy metals to make the cells easier to see. Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues then cut the sample into around 5,000 slices — each just 34 nanometres thick — that could be imaged using electron microscopes. back