[Fis] Cultural Acceleration?

Thu Jun 11 17:05:16 CEST 2020

Dear All,

An excellent book by César A. Hidalgo titled *Why Information Grows: The
Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies* encapsulates the process of
info-autopoiesis. The following is a synopsis of the book:

What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a
few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on
institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's
anti disciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic
growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural
sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth
of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of
order.

At first glance, the universe seems hostile to order. Thermodynamics
dictates that over time, order-or information-disappears. Whispers vanish
in the wind just like the beauty of swirling cigarette smoke collapses into
disorderly clouds. But thermodynamics also has loopholes that promote the
growth of information in pockets. Although cities are all pockets where
information grows, they are not all the same. For every Silicon Valley,
Tokyo, and Paris, there are dozens of places with economies that accomplish
little more than pulling rocks out of the ground. So, why does the US
economy outstrip Brazil's, and Brazil's that of Chad? Why did the
technology corridor along Boston's Route 128 languish while Silicon Valley
blossomed? In each case, the key is how people, firms, and the networks
they form make use of information.

Seen from Hidalgo's vantage, economies become distributed computers, made
of networks of people, and the problem of economic development becomes the
problem of making these computers more powerful. By uncovering the
mechanisms that enable the growth of information in nature and society, Why
Information Grows lays bare the origins of physical order and economic
growth. Situated at the nexus of information theory, physics, sociology,
and economics, this book propounds a new theory of how economies can do not
just more things, but more interesting things.

I highly recommend it.

Kind regards,

Jaime

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 7:42 AM Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
wrote:

> Thanks for the comment, Howard. What you say may relate to the further
> points below.
>
> *2. Inherent competitive nature of social communicative
> interrelationships. *The clear constraints in the sociotype quantitative
> distributions, to which the “econophysics” of the Planckian Distribution
> Equation (PDE) may be applied, represent an extra argument for considering
> our communicative interactions as immersed in an “attention economy”. This
> seems to widely apply to the world of culture as well. Current approaches
> to the decay of scientific and cultural items are pointing in a similar
> direction, and this suggests that there might be a universal law of decay
> presumably based on a generalized competition stemming from the
> optimization of individual cognitive resources. The limited sociotype,
> actually our most important cognitive reserve, symbolizes the extent of
> such individual limitation.
> *4. Emergence of differentiated generations*. The historical
> differentiation of generations ultimately relates to the imprinting of
> values, tastes, and styles of thinking taking place during youth and early
> adulthood along the ontogenetic development of the individual. Mostly
> produced out from two basic relational dimensions of the sociotype –
> friends and colleagues – this imprinting introduces a strong bias in the
> maintenance, decay, and replacement of cultural items. Each cohort would be
> attracted towards the new vision, tastes, and fashions upheld by the own
> generation.
>
> *6. As the economy grows, the past recedes. *The decay of cultural
> elements has been accelerated, and biased, with preference for much faster
> discarding the items of the previous generations, the contents of the
> received world. Factually, “doubling generations” become “halving
> generations,” systematically pruning the previous cultural legacy which
> already contains in itself the remains of previously decimated legacies.
> Like competing for writing on a vanishing palimpsest: each ascending
> generation brings its own new contents and relegates more and more of the
> distant past to oblivion, to increasingly outdated text books, archives,
> museums, etc. “As the economy grows, the past recedes”.
>
> And finally, along the Fourth Industrial Revolution – the so called
> Information Age – the GDP has been doubling on a global word scale, and far
> more than tripling in some countries. And this is compounded with dramatic
> changes in new communication media and new interconnected systems of
> worldwide extension. What are the consequences? Let us leave this as an
> open question—only stating the formidable ignorance of the own cultural
> past in the ascending generations.
>
>  Best wishes--Pedro
>
>
> El 09/06/2020 a las 4:09, Howard Bloom escribió:
>
> culture provides an extension to individual memory.
>
> cullture and the technologies that carl sagan calls extracranial storage,
> from writing and paintings to computer files.
>
> which means that we have added tens of  zettabytes of data to human
> memory in just the last few years.
>
> with warmth and oomph--howard
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
> <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
> To: Krassimir Markov <markov at foibg.com> <markov at foibg.com>; 'fis'
> <fis at listas.unizar.es> <fis at listas.unizar.es>
> Sent: Mon, Jun 8, 2020 8:09 am
> Subject: Re: [Fis] Cultural Acceleration?
>
> Thanks Krassimir for your interest. This other link should work (free
> access for 50 days):
>
> https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1bBBC14z5HxIgJ
>
> Below I have included two of the paper's Concluding Comments. Seemingly,
> very few authors have explored the limits of cognition. According to Booker
> (2004) and Yates (1988) it is one of the weakest points of our whole
> scientific system. Factically, how do we transcend the limits of our
> individual capabilities? What collective tricks --or surrogates-- have we
> developed?
>
> *3. Cognitive limitation and forgetfulness underlie cultural dynamics.*
> Maintenance, decay, and replacement of cultural items are necessarily
> linked to forgetfulness and to the limited cognitive capability of
> individuals. As intuited by J.L. Borges (1944), there cannot be an
> unlimited capability for individual memory. The term *cognit*, crafted by
> J. Fuster (2003), is proposed in order to visualize an order of magnitude
> for such individual capability. What could be the average global cognits
> maintained by an educated individual? What kinds of cognits are needed to
> navigate in a cultural niche, or to follow a particular way of life? How
> could this cognitive limitation relate to the evolution and renewal of
> cultures?
> *5. A new, astonishing fact in the succession of generations. *With the
> industrial revolution, a threshold was crossed regarding the “adjacent
> possible” and an exponential course was ignited for the economy, creating a
> higher number of new material and mental structures that have continued
> multiplying on an exponential basis. Each passing generation has been able
> to substantially and systematically increase the whole contents of its
> material world, adding up an entire new world to the received one. But the
> sheer amount of new habits necessary for social life in industrial and
> postindustrial societies has forced individuals to generationally absorb an
> almost duplicate amount of cultural presences, of cognits, in their inner
> mental spaces.
> Best wishes
> --Pedro
>
> El 04/06/2020 a las 23:55, Krassimir Markov escribió:
>
> Dear Pedro and Jaime,
> Thank you for the interesting links.
> Unfortunately, the paper "SOCIOTYPE AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION ...” is not in
> open access and I could not read it.
> If it is possible to send me a copy I shall be very grateful.
> Friendly greetings
> Krassimir
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 04, 2020 12:33 PM
> *To:* 'fis' <fis at listas.unizar.es>
> *Subject:* [Fis] Cultural Acceleration?
>
> Dear FIS Friends,
> Jorge Navarro and me have just published a paper entitled "SOCIOTYPE AND
> CULTURAL EVOLUTION : The acceleration of cultural change alongside
> industrial revolutions"
> The link is this: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2020.104170
> And the Abstract is below.
> It contains a series of hypothesis that can be useful for our discussions.
> I will post some of them in next days. Also Howard Bloom has published in
> the same Special Issue of BioSystems (Evolutionary Dynamics of Social
> Systems) a very intriguing essay on "biopolitics", about the bacterial
> roots of the new autocracies. More will follow...
> *Abstract: The present work explores, from the vantage point of the
> sociotype, the dramatic acceleration of cultural change alongside the
> successive industrial revolutions, particularly in the ongoing information**
> era. **Developed within the **genotype-phenotype-sociotype* *conceptual
> triad, the sociotype** means the average social environment that is
> adaptively demanded by the “social brain” of each individual.** For there
> is a regularity of social interaction, centered on social bonding and
> talking time, which has been developed as an adaptive trait, evolutionarily
> rooted, related to the substantial size increase of human groups. A
> quantitative approach to the sociotype basic traits shows fundamental
> competitive interrelationships taking place within an overall “attention
> economy.” Approaching these figures via the Planckian Distribution
> Equation, they can be connected with many other competitive processes
> taking place in the biological, economic, and cultural realms. Concerning
> culture, the cognitive limits of the individual, which we consider
> commensurate with the sociotype general limitations, impose by themselves a
> strict boundary on the cultural items effectively handled by each
> individual, fostering the overall competition and decay. Further, the
> emergence of differentiated generations with ample discrepancy in styles of
> life, social aspirations, and dominant technologies would represent a
> systematic bias in the competition and replacement of cultural items.
> Intriguingly, the cultural acceleration detected in modern societies
> alongside the successive industrial revolutions, with an ostensible climax
> in the ongoing fourth industrial revolution –the information era– might be
> itself a paradoxical consequence of the sociotype’s dynamic constancy.*
> Best regards--Pedro
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.eshttp://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
>
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> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.eshttp://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
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>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.eshttp://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
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-- 
Jaime F. Cárdenas-García, PhD, PE
JFCardenasGarcia at gmail.com
(240) 498-7556 (cell)
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