Roger F Malina Aug 23 2024
The sentences in this text have been adopted from page 63 and 64 of Steven Johnson’s book “Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software” 2001 Scribner publisers. No Ai has been used in this version, yet (except for alerts for misspellings).
“In computer simulations of slime mold behavior, there are two key variables, two elements that you can alter in your interaction with the simulation:
1) the number of slime mold cells (e.g. people) in the system
2) the physical ad temporal of the pheromone trail left behind by each cell (person) as it crawls across the screen (life)
We like to call this “leaving traces with intention”. Sometimes this is called ‘publication’ or “dissemination of ideas” or legacy building through objects to leave traces for your descendants.
Within human moulds, the framing concept of “reputation management” can be useful: whose mind are you trying to change ? ( hiring manager ?) and what methods can you use to change it/them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_management :
Reputation is a social construct based on the opinion other people hold about a person or thing. Before the internet was developed, consumers wanting to learn about a company had fewer options. They had access to resources such as the Yellow Pages, but mostly relied on word-of-mouth. A company’s reputation depended on personal experience.
If you have to find a job, leave traves through different molds than if you are trying to educate your children.
As we design the next 6 years of the ArtSciLab ,and the proposed Center for Emergence Studies, it is perhaps time to figure out how to leave traces to achieve our missions/visions.
“You can have long trails of mold that take minutes to evaporate.
Or short ones that disappear within seconds.
“Because slime moulds collectively decide to aggregate based on their encounters with pheromone trails, altering the two variables above can have a massive impact on the system.
Maturana and Varela called this ‘auto-poesis’ but there are many other terms that describe sudden changes in a complex system. Water changes states unpredictably from ice to water to steam to plasma.
“Keep the trails (publication systems) short and the cells few and the slime molds will steadfastly refuse to come together.
The screen will look like a busy galaxy of shooting stars, with no larger or longer shapes emerging.
But turn up the duration of the trails (archiving) and the number of agents ( publications from blogs to podcasts to to books) and at a certain clearly defined point/instant/location a cluster of cells will suddenly form.
The system has entered a phase transition ( eg meme, fashion) moving from one discrete state to another ( jeans to slacks) based on the “organized complexity’ of the slime mold cells.
This is often not gradual but sudden, as though a tap had been opened slowly or quickly.
In 2010 Yvan Tina, Oscar Olsson and a team of ants launched a podcast platform called “creative disturbance’ : https://creativedisturbance.org/index.php/about/
At the time serious people didn’t podcast much; now it is de rigeure.
During the pandemic, Creative Disturbance ceased molding.
Now in 2024 it has been launched under the Texas hat of Evan Acuna. You can find it for now at: https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/2024/02/29/creative-disturbance-2/
Creative Disturbance leaves pheromone traces of lab members via podcasts, sonic or otherwise, blogs, white papers, academic articles. We are looking for suggestions on how to leave trace in Virtual and Augmented reality systems of moulds.
We would like to detect the emergence of the next technology after A.I. All suggestions welcome.
The white paper on the complexity of distributed cognition is relevant to this thinking:
THE COMPLEXITY OF DISTRIBUTED COGNITION: CONCEPTS, ARTIFACTS, AND PEOPLE
As is https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/2019/10/08/esports-cyberathlete-development-ecd-an-annotated-bibliography/ on how computer games can be designed to leave /germs in the players’ minds:
Our efforts aims to:
(1) Promote positive values obtained from participating on an Esports team;
a. Investigate the enhanced cognitive abilities through the strategically-complex gameplay of Esports
b. Investigate the positive social developments that occur in and out of the Esports environment
(2) Focus on relieving the stigmatized universe of Esports concerning gender stereotypes and effects on intellectual performance;
a. Our research aims to increase overall inclusivity among various demographics and how its benefits are not discriminatory towards any gender
(3) Help to integrate the skills learned by the Esports players into their lives during and after their Esports careers;
a. Analysis of cognitive skills acquired by gamers during their gameplay, how such skills can generally transfer to real-world application, and to increase their executive longevity.
We underestimate the emerging changes in human nature due to many humans spending so much time on line, sometimes called ‘hybrid”.
So as we go forward into the forests of the next 7 years, lets learn from slime moulds, ants, brains, cities and software to make the world a better place.
Please send additions to this text to roger f malina at rmalina@alum.mit.edu.
But let’s not use genetic engineering to redesign slime molds.