I agree, glen, than a criterion has to be stated. (I will avoid even the term
“objective function”, because that starts to cross over into motivational
framings, and away from the simple conditions-of-possibility framing).
I am sure, sure, that Seibert and Rees think the only admissible frame for this
discussion is one that originates in values (in the canonical sense of the
term), and it is the worst kind of heathenism to try to divorce the discussion
from those, but that is one reason I want to avoid taking on their whole frame.
The criteria that interest me are things like persistent inhabitation of Earth
by reflectively-aware things like people, which plan and can discover and mine
resources, create ecological impacts etc., without creating such a chaotic
surface environment that further “interesting” emergent organizations, and even
the things that give them those powers, get undermined by the constant chaos.
I like a sort of parable of the cyanobacteria to make the idea more specific
with an analogy, even though I know we don’t know enough about the history of
the cyanobacteria to judge whether this parable reflects history. So think of
it as the kind of “stylized facts” economists trot out.
Once upon a time there was no life anywhere on earth that had the capability to
split water to create O2. Life was whatever it was, but a lot of it was
probably pretty stable. The 1Ga before the rise of oxygen (which is later than
the time I am referring to) is known by the biogeochemists as “the boring
billion”.
Growing out of various capabilities that were being used for other things
(oxidation of metals or H2S, cytochromes of a few kinds, electron transport
chains, pigments, etc.), a group learns how to pull electrons not off of minor
solutes in the medium, but OUT OF THE GD SOLVENT! Holy shit. It was really
hard, but suddenly there is a living to be made from just light and water.
That one innovation somehow qualitatively changes what the biosphere can in
principle do.
I want the above to stand as a kind of analogy to what Vonnegut in Galapagos
keeps harping on as humans “big brains”. I don’t know exactly what I want to
refer to — reflective awareness, plan-making, communication, having hands,
encephalization in the hominids — whatever. But something that causes one
species to suddenly become a singleton, qualitatively distinct in some
consequential thing from everybody else that currently is or that ever had been
before.
So then for the cyanos, the counterfactual question is: what if they gained the
capability of splitting water, but what if tolerating O2 had turned out to be
something that molecular biology could never get to? What would that
combination entail for the surface of the world and everything in it? There
are short-term descriptive versions of the question. One of the possibilities
is that the dynamic of dissolved Fe in oceans as a reservoir, O2 production, Fe
buffering that keeps O2 toxicity low for a while, ultimate depletion of the Fe
buffer as it all gets oxidized and precipitated, and then very sudden change in
O2 activity because the buffer was, well, functioning as a buffer; it creates
nonlinear thresholding responses. Then when O2 soars, everybody dies off,
including the cyanos, the O2 production goes way down, and things go back to
looking more like they were in the boring billion while the reservoirs slowly
refill. But Jeez, oxygenic photosynthesis is such a drug that if it isn’t
totally lost, you can’t keep whoever has it from using it. And the cycle
starts over.
That is one of the stories of where banded iron came from. I believe it is not
settled whether it is the right one. It’s a great story for making allegories,
though. And there are lots of plague/crash dynamics that have the same central
organizing motifs.
Of course, in the Vonnegut big-brains analogy, we come up with the capability
to have these big impacts. The criterion for “what number”, and “what palette
of technologies” would be: is there some threshold at which ongoing human
inhabitation with that technology doesn’t lead to wild swinging and a broadly
chaotic condition for much of the surface biota?
That is just the short-term descriptive criterion.
Why would I focus on stability or ongoing inhabitation? Back to the allegory
story, with more stuff I don’t know whether is true.
Suppose O2 tolerance had been too hard, and the surface had just remained
caught up in cycles ever few tens to hundreds of thousands of years, more or
less everywhere except the deep see and subsurface that were to some extent
insulated? Would the cyanos ever have become part of anything bigger and more
complex in its aggregation? Putting aside the fact that all those things, as
we know them now, (eukaryotes, multicellular organisms, etc.) benefit from the
O2 tolerance of the members that made them, we can ask, if not them, could
_anything_ complex have arisen in an environment of large constant sweeps? One
possibility would be that O2 synthesis would be lost and not rediscovered. But
it can be hard to totally lose something that, if conditions stabilize even a
little, gets such huge evolutionary rewards for being activated.
And for the human system, if the future is all chaos all the time, what options
might be foreclosed? If, unlike Galapagos, we don’t lose the big brains,
because the rewards are too grate to using them if things quiet down anywhere
by enough, then does their intermittent marauding cut off possibilities for
invention?
It is in that general drift that knowing about limited activity as a condition
for some kind of stability is motivated.
Eric
On Jan 25, 2022, at 1:50 PM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, OK. But the question still stands: Necessary for what objective?
The Siebert & Rees paper talks about shared values like "socially just ecological sustainability",
"salvage civilization", "one-earth living", etc. And each one of their criticisms in section
3 also assume some values. So, I'm guessing it's something like their objective that we're assuming as our
objective. And anything that does not target that objective isn't put into the kitty of things we'll evaluate as
possible or impossible. (E.g. the second-earth idea where we abandon this earth as a husk is not part of the
conversation.)
I don't see how we can prune the combinatorial explosion of [im]possible
outcomes without deciding some kind of objective at the start, even if it's
super vague like a Gaia-ish homeostatic health of the biosphere.
On 1/25/22 06:39, David Eric Smith wrote:
To say this is a value question is fair, glen, given my shorthands of language.
However, I would like to split apart questions of “who wants what” from
questions of “what can or cannot happen under what conditions, irrespective of
what anybody wants”. In principle we have ways to get at the latter question;
we often do worse in getting any resolution out of the former. Maybe there is
something basic in this? Our notion of truth is that on any properly-posed
question, there should only be one durable answer. Whereas in the area of
desires, we think it is either inescapable, or for many also desirable (a
self-referential value judgment) that different answers coexist indefinitely.
Eric
On Jan 25, 2022, at 8:02 AM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
Necessary for what, though? We need the shared value(s) before we can ask what response
we'd get from the convergence on something that might be necessary to adhere to that
value. Is the shared value that biology on this planet should be preserved and the thing
we need to do is impossible? Or perhaps the shared value that all "lower forms of
life" were simply stepping stones to the human organism, but to preserve the human
organism is impossible? Etc.
As Jon likes to ask: What are we optimizing? If we can't agree on that, then
the responses to impossibilities will be as diverse as the values that underlie
those impossibilities. And, if that's the case, then we're back to the
clustering/homogenizing we see in any aspect of pop culture.
On 1/24/22 17:21, David Eric Smith wrote:
In a real situation where we decided something was necessary that we believed
there was no way to do, somehow I feel like the same movie doesn’t become the
response. Something else does. What is that?
On 1/24/22 17:34, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Before I launch into a diatribe about why the hell we can't agree to basic,
never mind interesting things:
