Organic Design (2002)

Legacy: This article describes a concept that has been superseded in the course of ongoing development on the Organic Design wiki. Please do not develop this any further or base work on this concept, this is only useful for a historic record of work done. You may find a link to the currently used concept or function in this article, if not you can contact the author to find out what has taken the place of this legacy item.

The content of this article requires cleaning up to meet OD's quality standards. Check the wiki best practices for guidelines on improving article and categorisation quality.

Introduction

There's so many aspects to this project that the introduction can really only cover the most key points explaining generally what it is. First I should discuss how Organic Design, Our Documents and the Open Platform fit together, as there seems to be some confusion arising with respect to this.

The Open Platform is a group created by Milan Holzapfel. It was realised early on that many of the principles being developed for the Organic Design network architecture were already refined enough to be adapted for use in actual people networks. Furthermore it was realised that for the Organic Design network to come to fruition at all, some users and projects working in accord with its principles (ultimately the Taoist principle of change) are a necessary part of its development. The Open Platform is this group of groups aligned to the common principle.

The Our Documents project is a software application which will allow the synergy of the Open Platform to be extended further toward the Organic Design network making the transition easier. This will also make the synergy of the Open Platform groups stronger. Our Documents was started as a project-management web-application two years ago by me, but was put on the back burner in favour of a more intense development phase on the Organic Design network architecture. That intense development phase is still in progress, but fortunately Rob Popovic has come to the rescue of Our Documents and is developing it to fit in precisely between the current needs of the Open Platform groups and the goal of moving into the Organic Design network.

The purpose of this project is to create a content and project management infrastructure which inherently supports the Taoist principles. These principles allow all projects within to be sustainable and mutually beneficial, as well as allowing the project as a whole to grow in accord with the environment instead of fighting it. Tao is the way all things in the Universe become, change and interact. It shows that nothing is unknown, irrational or unscientific. But luckily everything is something and not nothing!

The alignment these projects share starts with their common nodal view of the groups, people, roles, resources and documents within them as well as all the relationships between them. Everything which has to be specifically dealt with in some way either by people or processes is represented by named nodes. Together all the nodes form a single whole nodal network.

The names Organic Design, Our Documents and Open Platform are the names of the nodes that represent these projects in the network. The names themselves are unimportant, they are merely there to allow people and processes to refer to and relate to these nodes if they need to. Eventually, the members of all nodes will together determine the name, look and content connected with their nodes. Node names are discussed in more detail later.

A Notion is a node which represents an idea like a movie, a project, a group or a company. An Essence is a node representing an actual instance of a notion. Every Essence has a Notion to which it is permanently associated, although it can deviate in behaviour from its Notion as much as its members wish it to throughout time. A Notion is a collection of nodes representing the resources, relationships, goals and processes which together allow its Essences to asses their states and maintain optimal courses toward their goals.

But how do they decide what path to their goals are most optimal? Most machines are in the dark in nearly all their decision making processes; they must decide how much stock to order, the best path to route information through, how long to cache some data, the best source for a certain record etc. But they can't make those decisions any better than we can; just a lot faster! Just like us, they have no way to obtain the information upon which they could make a well informed decision.

Process-Notions in the network are collections of decisions (like when's, while's and if's). Decisions can be made in response to energy in time (energy is usually of cyclic nature) or in response to a specific state (a more causal bias). Cycles become more useful as more decisions are made in response to them. At the same time, processes which exhibit more decisions based on the energy cycles build up more accurate information on the overall spectrum of cycles. Because all nodes are related by the way they effect the whole network (in terms of the energy spectrum), the network can apply change in the most optimal and mutually beneficial way. Processes can be seen going through phases of operation in response to related information and to the energy flowing in-from and out-to their environment.

The interface to the network offers a means for non-technically-minded people to relate to information and processes at a conceptual level. The network has the ability to convert Notion or Essence into standard symbolic logic or spoken language, so the language barrier between computers and humans, and humans speaking different languages, is much less of an obstacle in the network. Potentially a written version of the network language could be devised based on a small set of geometric symbols which would reduce language barriers outside the network.

The Philosophy

Why Tao? The way things work should be understandable, and things that are understood properly should yield understandable descriptions. Taoism's description of reality is deeper than a simple investigation of the relationships between observable objects. Taoism also explains the internal world of thought and decision, and yet is both logically and intuitively understandable. Ways of looking at the world which include feelings and other conscious issues are generally assumed not to be capable of the necessary rigor required by the exact sciences. There have never been strong enough formal languages available within which to describe the Taoist principles until only very recently in its long history, however it is a very mature philosophy and is complete. Because it's complete, a formal description is possible and that's one of the goals of this document; to define an XML-Schema of Tao and a development path for an implementation of Tao as a modern communications infrastructure.

According to Taoist philosophy, the Tao, or Way is a single method in accord with which all things in the Universe change. In the past there had always been sages, saints or shaman to seek guidance from when one had wandered too far from this Way. But in modern times, things have changed a lot due to industry and technology. These new things allow decisions and actions of men to continue and spread like never before. Now in the middle of the information age, huge "machines" in the forms of corporations, cultural-memes and information-super-highways have gained inertia of their own, but the guiding principles available to us are not available to them. These machines are now responsible for more change in the World than any individual people, or even any corporation. It has become vitally important for these systems to have access to guidance which is holistically beneficial.

I Ching

The Chinese classic I Ching (The book of changes) is the book this project is mainly concerned with, because it is based on a group of symbols which are the closest thing that Taoism has to a formal system. The book is used rather than read in the normal sense. With practice, using the book allows one to make decisions in accord with Tao and is a practice called divination. The book is structured around sixty four symbols called the hexagrams. In Chinese the specific study of the meaning and structure of these symbols is called Pa Kua. The hexagrams are composed of six horizontal lines stacked one upon the other, which are each either whole or broken in the middle.

When reading the meanings of the hexagrams and their changes from the book, one can see that there is a system related to their structure which has allowed these meanings to be derived. Meaning is not merely an arbitrary assignment to the symbols as they are in the alphabet or in modern symbolic logics. A great deal of information about the structure and meaning is described in the Ten Wings – the detailed discussions at then end of the book, most of which is attributed to Confucius, Kong Fu Zi, 551-479BC, and some even older still. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of information missing which makes it difficult to understand the deeper implications of the hexagrams when taken in an active context (the way they interact with one another to form processes).

I should briefly note that I'm not implying here that the Pa Kua are the only symbols like this, for instance the original Hebrew alphabet also has deep roots relating their structure and meaning. But all documentation I've found on them in that context are even more cryptic than the Ten Wings, like for example the Sefer Yetzirah. Strangely enough, there seem to be no modern systems which operate this way, even though the biological system as well as our own methods of thought employ a symbolic layer over geometric foundations.

For these symbols (the bagua) to change and interact together according to their structure without arbitrary assignment of meaning, their environment of space and energy needs to be modelled.

Development & Deployment

Tao is a way or direction rather than a destination. Success is not dependent on the ideal goal of the conceptual network, rather it is dependent on constant tuning of direction. The overall goal is composed of many sub-goals, some of these can be developed at the same time now, others need to wait for various other sub-goals to reach certain critical phases first.

The Physics

Physics?! Why do we need to talk about physics? Usually concepts belonging to a particular discipline are defined in terms of the axioms and rules of that discipline. But those axioms and rules are concepts too, how can those be described? They can't be described with a symbolic logic because concepts are still required to define the meanings of the symbols. In the end we have to ask where meaning itself comes from, and how can we create an environment in which it can manifest?

The network is a distributed computational space, all nodes offer both spatial and temporal (processing ability) resource to the network, and these resources are combined into a continuum. Usually the spatial (storage) resource is seen as a continuous space, and the processing resource is seen from within the network as an overall external processing potential available to the network. In this project, the temporal resource is combined with the spatial to form a proper space-time continuum allowing information within to exhibit potential for change by virtue of its geometric structure.

The Directions

Both Taoism and modern physics show us that there are fundamentally two principles at work in the Universe, energy and matter, and that at a still more fundamental level, these two are merely aspects of the same unified creative force. Due to this, every system can be understood in terms of its material structure or its energy spectrum, but both are equally as valid, and as subjective as each other. This means that every system of change no matter how conceptually sophisticated always exhibits two fundamentally different approaches to its description and analysis.

Energy is cyclic, the force of unceasing change and has an expansive effect. Matter is inert and only undergoes change due to energy, it is contractive when in a space exhibiting ambient energy. The two principles interact leading to variation in density and variation in the spectrum throughout the "material". These variations are harmonically separated; over time waves which are not harmonically related interfere leading to division of energy in the spectrum. The presence of this harmonic separation in space and time has been amply recorded at all scales; intergalactic, stellar, planetary and right down to the relative masses and energies of the atoms and subatomic particles. The two forces allow localised structure to form in layers of scale separated by many orders of magnitude of emptiness. The structure which forms is in space-time meaning that they involve cyclic motion over a well-defined localised area of the spectrum due to the harmonic separation being temporal as well as spatial (eg. Orbital configurations of matter changing state cyclically).

At every scale, there are "surfaces" of equilibrium where the two forces balance, in these areas the infinitesimal energy fluctuations (the divided energy remaining from the non-harmonically related waves) become dominant features in a new kind of layer. These states of equilibrium are just a "moment" from the perspective of the layer they appear in, but from the perspective of the fluctuation, such an infinitesimal moment is a lifetime. This harmonic separation allows all levels to exhibit causality together in the same overall space-time continuum and ultimately sharing the same energy, but without conflict; the vast effects of causality emerging over large amounts of time from our perspective is just an infinitesimal flicker as far as the galaxy is concerned, its only the large-scale statistical truths formed by millions of suns and planets over millions of years that are significant features of the galaxies perspective.

The Subjective

These surface layers are the beginning of subjective view and can only exist in such equilibria. As such, all subjective views inherently share the perspective of the inward (down) and outward (up) directions in addition to what ever other spatial degrees of freedom they may exhibit in their reality. Also, because the structures on which these surfaces form are themselves persistent in space and time, they must undergo cyclic structural change, giving rise to cycles in the ambient energy available to the surface layer. The distinction of up and down, density and cyclic energy is what's needed to allow the subjective to increase in complexity. The subjective view also comes with two other inherent directions; within and beyond. But these will be best left until after the way of the symbols and meaning have been discussed.

It was mentioned above that every system could be understood in terms of its material structure or its energy spectrum. The same is true for our localised structures in each layer, whether they be planets or pi-mesons. The whole space-time or any layer or volume can be looked at as a continuous system of force, or as an empty container of objects exhibiting forces between each other. Of course if we choose to try and explain everything with just one view we'll run into incompleteness in our description because both ways have different strengths and weaknesses in what aspects of a space they can describe effectively. For example, classical physics which uses the objects and relationships description heavily needs to try and understand the forces between the objects in terms of many other infinitesimal objects in the next layer down in scale.

The layers don't mean anything in terms of continuous energy in spectrum, but from the subjective view of objects and relationships between them, the layers form the hierarchy of meaning which gives rise to high-level conceptual structure. From the subjective view, up becomes the goal as it is the direction to potential and opportunity, whereas downward is to be avoided being low and potentially "dangerous" in that it can become inescapable due to lacking energy and opportunity.

Tangled Hierarchy

In traditional physics, the perspective of objects being seen to change over time, and information propagating outward over time is considered to be a fundamental axiom. This view can also be described as assuming the observer or experimental apparatus to be constant while the objects under analysis are changing. Relativity shows us that this perspective is valid, but if any of the change in the observed turned out to be due to the observation process, then relativity would agree that such a perspective would not yield the simplest results.

In fact Taoism teaches us that the energy of the spectrum and the matter in space changing over time are two aspects of the same information. And this means that causality over time is sharing its informational state with energy over spectrum. In mathematical terms this is a tangled hierarchy, where the state of each depends on the other in ever-decreasing circles. Trying to describe the relationships between observed objects from an independent passive perspective yields all the infinite sums composing our mathematical constants, the infinite re-normalisation problems and singularities in physics and the recursive complexity of biology.

Science & Observation

Scientific experiments are actually just an extension of mans own senses, but scientists tend to believe that the apparatus can be designed to a high enough precision that it does not significantly affect the results. Only Quantum Mechanics has realised the inherent problems with this approach, and its still causing confusion after more than seventy years!

The material structure of the apparatus determines the possibility space directly, and then the flow of energy through the system determines the state over time. Not realising the importance of the relationship between structure and the possibility space is the source of confusion in experiments like the double slit or the EPR paradox. By changing the parameters being measured in an experiment, channels of potential energy are being opened and closed and otherwise adjusted; and it's this potential, which is locked into the material structure of the apparatus, that determines the possible states which can occur when energy is available to the system.

The Symbols

It is not the goal of this project to replicate the process of evolution by attempting to formulate means for these symbols to form in the space and evolve complex conceptual structure. Rather it would be most productive and practical for now to construct the symbols and processes based on them manually. It is important to have a clear line of reasoning as to how the symbols could have formed from nothing, and that from the perspective of the network they should be formally derivable from nothing, but we can start from something using the eight Pa Kua as our guide.

So lets assume for now that the notion of geometric symbols exists and they can be instantiated into the space to form larger structures of meaning and other processes. Now that we know in general how the physics of the symbols and the distributed space-time work, we can investigate this conceptual level and go back to the physics level again later in the formal definition.

The Architecture

Usually processes are created to perform tasks and make decisions with the intention of reaching some objective goal, defined as some subset of all possible states the process could be in. The process is to obtain information on the current state and work out a method of reducing the distance to the desired state.

Usually the desired state is a minority state compared to the entire possibility space and will be a location from which it requires little energy to move to a variety of other states. On the other hand, most states in the space will not require energy to reach, and will in fact exhibit a strong flow toward lesser states; states which require a great deal of energy to leave. Such a possibility space can be viewed as a hilly terrain where the lateral directions represent the degrees of freedom; the different parameters the system can adjust, and the altitude represents the potential energy of the location.

Because of the shared surface described in the physics, the general tendency is always toward the lesser states. This is entropy, the tendency from order to disorder and creates the basic distinction between high and low as superior and inferior. This is what "Heaven and Earth determine the directions" means, its not an assumption, it's the foundations of more refined meaning, but based on the geometry of energy and matter, which are named Heaven and Earth in Taoism.

Organic & Entropic

As described above, there are always two ways for information to represent the current state of a system, and these two ways come with their own methods of determining the best path up to the goal. We can call these two paths, the organic and entropic.

The organic bases its decisions on the cyclic energy and plots its path by adjusting change to fit in best with these cycles. Whenever decisions are made in accord with these cycles, energy is reinforcing them still further. Increase in efficiency of this way is achieved by accumulating more accurate spectral information of the whole.

The entropic method is the conversion of energy and resource into the changing of the environment to suit the path, and changing the object to become more capable of continuing along the chosen path uninterrupted. Increase in efficiency for this way comes from storing and statistically analysing as much observed information as possible to base decisions on.

Both methods are essential because the organic way is toward order, piece and harmony, and the entropic way leads to diversity and innovation (variety is the spice of life, and necessity is the mother of all invention). Although both ways are essential, so is maintaining a balance between them. Too much of one and chaos and waste are the result, too much of the other and its stasis; life but no change.

It was discussed above that systems could be seen as traversing their possibility spaces in search of optimal locations of high potential; the subspaces or islands in the space they call goals. The energy topology has been mapped onto a sphere because all points in the space share the perspective of a common attractor downward and a common tendency upward. The sphere depicted has two degrees of freedom, but in reality systems can have many degrees of freedom.

The Spectral Domain

In reality, the balance between the two methods is difficult to achieve because the holistic spectral information is not available, especially to computer-oriented processes. In this distributed space-time, the balance is inherent because the symbols used to construct all information and processes are themselves composed of both domains; a nodal objects and relationships information fragment as well as a fragment of the holistic spectral information.

What this actually means is that all decision-making processes and even information in the network can all be dealt with in terms of energy.

Todo

• The two views of each layer (state/change), nodal (discrete structure w relationships) and wave energy distributed over spatial dimensions so far we've discussed the waves (physics), but information and process is the nodal view the nodal view has to be from the perspective of a node

Nodes and growth (organism), conceptual addressing, one tree Optimisation, spatial/temporal bias

• Geometric symbols: the lateral connections and the within/beyond (vertical) connections
• The vertical connections, abstraction layers, emergence and complexity etc

The Network

How can we expect to precisely define concepts and expect computers to understand them when we don't even have a properly defined method of communicating with each other! Spoken languages are fine for social purposes, but for effectively communicating concepts, concepts must be understood.

Todo

• Higher concepts, process phases, in-terms-of-energy, energy conservation and optimisation concepts, navigation, context-dependent/independent, in/out & within/beyond
• Protocol – propagation of notion and persistence

Distributed Computational Spaces

A distributed computational space is a kind of network where all the nodes form a large shared storage-space into which tasks can be placed to await processing. When nodes are not busy doing their own things, they process tasks requiring attention in the space at random. Applications are broken up into hundreds of smaller tasks and inserted into the shared space. In this way there is no wasted processing potential, allowing computers in the network to be less powerful but at the same time being able to handle more complex processing tasks.

Currently distributed spaces are being extensively used, but only in a very client-server kind of way, where a single large processing project can be broken up and processed simultaneously by thousands or millions of clients willing to offer their support. But the processing power of these shared spaces is not available for general use by the client-nodes. A successful example of this kind of application of a distributed-space is the SETI at home project. Information from outer-space received by the Aracebo radio-telescope array is broken up daily into about a quarter of a million small units which are mathematically analysed for patterns by about three million home-users PC's. It's a very simple computer program which processes the units when the computer isn't being used, and can be installed by anyone with an Internet connection.

Distributed spaces are inherently a very efficient means of applying resources to tasks, because all nodes can work in their own time supplying what they can when they can. Another increase in efficiency compared to other resource-sharing models is the absence of message-passing between nodes. In most shared computational models, a lot of resource is consumed in the collaboration process itself, but in a distributed space there is no such communication, in fact no information need be known about the total network or the nodes composing it.

Biological Spaces

The kind of space in which change takes place in biological cells is very similar to a distributed computational space in the way that tasks are processed at random without the need for an overall organisation scheme. In cells, information and processes also come into contact in a random way called brownian motion and overall orderliness emerges over time.

The main difference is that in a distributed space, the items awaiting processing are lists of instructions written in various forms of symbolic logic, whereas in a cell, the information and processes are all composed of proteins which are sequences of amino acid molecules. The processes in cells are called enzymes and there's no equivalent of a microprocessor which reads them and treats them as lists of instructions to be acted upon.

It is the geometric structure of the enzymes which determine what they do and what other proteins or enzymes they can interact with. The enzymes have potential energy locked into their structure which is released when other molecules to which they are receptive bind to them allowing the potential energy to be converted to change.

This is where the geometric symbols mentioned in the introduction come into play. This project uses a distributed computational space in which information can contain potential energy by virtue of its structure just like proteins in a cell. This way of looking at the network and its content is the physical aspect mentioned above, which sees the network as a dynamic physical system which consumes time resource in its quest for global network equilibrium.

Notion & Instance

In the same way that many proteins together determine the overall purpose of an enzyme, so simple informational structures can be connected together to form complex concepts in the network. Looking at the network in terms of concepts is the conceptual aspect mentioned above and is the interface part of the network concerning searching and creation of concepts.

Since concepts are structures which are defined by the way they change in the space, there needs to be a way of representing concepts within the network statically so they can be stored in the space without undergoing change. When they are needed, a dynamic copy can be created at the appropriate location from its representation. The names given to these two forms of concept in this project are Notion and Essence, for static and dynamic respectively. In the biological space, enzymes are represented statically in the form of DNA and a specific enzyme called polymerase accepts bits of DNA and creates the proteins they represent. Since the space of this project also has static representations which require creation of their dynamic counterparts it will also need a polymerase concept.

Notion Evolution

• Archetype/prototype feedback loop

Network Addressing

All networks must have an addressing scheme, a way of uniquely identifying resources in the network so they can be referred to or manipulated. The Internet uses an addressing scheme called IP in which every node exhibits a unique four digit number separated by dots. IP addresses aren't much good for remembering or associating any useful information to and they aren't consistent either, so another addressing method was later added called DNS which allows people to refer to network nodes by Domain Names like google.com. In the Internet, DNS is like the addressing scheme of the conceptual aspect of this network, and IP is like that of the physical aspect.

The DNS method is also insufficient however, because we still need search-engines to help us find anything we don't already know the address of. Search engines consume a massive portion of the available resource of the Internet and will become a major bottleneck before much longer as the Internet keeps growing ever faster. Even using powerful search engines for finding information we can never look through all the results, and there's always the feeling that we might have missed some of the best results. Perhaps they haven't been indexed optimally or maybe we could have thought of a better search query.

This network already has a symbolic way of representing the concepts it contains, so it seems a natural solution to use this as the overall addressing method. The representations are defined from general to specific, so that the general definition of a concept represents the "place" in the network within which all more specific aspects of that concept exist. This removes the need for search-engines altogether. There is no analogous method to this within symbolic logic since there is no relationship between the lists of instructions composing the processes and their conceptual meaning.

On the Internet one can also navigate information by following hyperlinks. This network also has an analogous concept-navigation method which is the relationships between objects composing the concepts. Every place in the logical network has paths leading away to all its related concepts. Some paths lead beyond to concepts of which the current place is a component, and others lead within to its own components. Other paths lead away laterally in all sorts of directions to other arbitrarily related concepts.

Interface

• Concept navigation and creation
• Interface aspects (notion/essence, actual/informational)

Compatability

• Mapping to symbolic logic
• Mapping to real-world (projects and groups, feedback and state-synchronisation)

Business and employment

The current business model is such that companies form for the purpose of their own profit and compete for the biggest share of the market by advertising. This is not the morally correct model, because mass manipulation and corruption are inevitable given enough time.

In this network, there is essentially no distinction between a business and any other group of processes which has formed in the ways described above. The only technical difference is that if some particular processes involve real-world products rather than being purely informational or applicational, then some of the objects and relationships defined will be reflected by real documents, business entities and employees. These real-world aspects of a project are managed by the network flow in the same way as all other aspects – real world business is a natural extension of project growth.

People being be paid for applying their expertise to a project is also a natural extension, because money is simply a specific kind of resource which can flow in response to supply and demand just like any other.

Development Path

The core is the nodal representation of resources and processes and their states and relationships. This persistent nodal structure sits on a p2p layer formed by all nodes. So spaces on different p2p layers are mutually exclusive, although many clients can be written over the same space (eg. Language bindings). So the client requires persistence and synchronisation of the nodal structure over its p2p method.

Other content is referred to by nodes, or generated by nodes which can be stored in one or many external resources. (notions and essences of resources like FTP, FS, SQL etc)

Connections (relationships) are either context dependent or independent. The context independent relationships are effectively the defining relations of a node, its notion which is within-ward. The context-dependent relations

These two forms of relations allow referencing and reuse, functions

The context-dependent relations define the scope of permissions. The context-dependent relationship from the root of a node leads to within to private self, the independent starts from absolute root (tao) as usual.

The top-n opinions of structure or content are listed as anonymous options. These can be given names (because the option was instantiated as a node by the interface, the node obviously created in accord with a notion representing it, so its not just a local node). Also, the local opinion can be manually set to the opinion of any other group or user. The scope of an opinions is the same is the scope of the node it applies to ie. the context-dependent nodes within.

Old Introduction

This document concerns the ideal goal of implementing Tao as a formal communications infrastructure. It is not required for the reader to have any knowledge of Taoist philosophy or to have any beliefs one way or the other, because the whole concept is self-contained with no assumptions and everything discussed is logically related.

As will be shown in this document, the result is a nodal network architecture which includes spectral information (energy cycles) about the global energy state of the network as well as the usual local, content specific information. The interaction between the principles is modelled as a distributed computational space within which information undergoes change in accord with its structure allowing geometric symbols of meaning to emerge. These symbols are the "conceptual atoms" used in the network for informational storage and universal communication.

Heaven & Earth

• Diagram - Ringing on the square wave
• Wave/particle confusion... In Taoism these two aspects found in everything are called Heaven and Earth.

As waves of energy, (and matter as energy locked in as potential) or as nodes or objects with connections to each other through which energy travels, for example particles exerting forces upon one another.

They're just ways of interpreting the information when observing or manipulating it; as matter in space or as energy in spectrum. Information is synonymous with matter in the context of matter, energy, space and time. It's all information, but it's the method of analysis that places it in the energy or matter category. The diagram above shows that different aspects of the context treat the information differently; effects in the domain of energy such as the amount radiated is dependent on frequency, and so is treating the information as a collection of cycles, and radiated as such.

Neither way is more fundamental than the other, every set of objects exposed to energy will undergo change according to both ways. Often too much resource and knowledge is dedicated to the objective domain because most decisions are made by computers which have not been programmed to share spectral information.

If there's too much inefficiency, it's because not enough information is being dedicated to the spectral side, the remedy is to observe changes in terms of energy cycles. The more processes base their decisions on the cyclic information, the less energy is wasted in fighting the external tendencies of relevant parameters and the more potential for parallel processing.

The Directions

Usually systems are created to perform tasks and make decisions with the intention of reaching some objective goal, defined as some subset of all possible states the system could be in. The process is to obtain information on the current state and work out a method of reducing the distance to the desired state.

Usually the desired state is a minority state compared to the entire possibility space and will be a location from which it requires little energy to move to a variety of other states. On the other hand, most states in the space will not require energy to reach, and will in fact exhibit a strong flow toward lesser states; states which require a great deal of energy to leave. Such a possibility space can be viewed as a hilly terrain where the lateral directions represent the degrees of freedom; the different parameters the system can adjust, and the altitude represents the potential energy of the location.

All observed change consumes energy which reduces potential, so the general tendency is always toward the lesser states. This is entropy, the tendency from order to disorder and creates the basic distinction between high and low as superior and inferior. This is what "Heaven and Earth determine the directions" means, its not an assumption, it's the foundations of more refined meaning, but based on the geometry of energy and matter, Heaven and Earth.

As described above, there are always two ways for information to represent the current state of a system, and these two ways come with their own methods of determining the best path up to the goal. We can call these two paths, the organic and entropic.

The organic bases its decisions on the cyclic information and plots its path by adjusting change to fit in best with these cycles. Whenever decisions are made in accord with these cycles, energy is reinforcing them still further.

The entropic method is the conversion of energy and resource into the changing of the environment to suit the path, and changing the object to become more capable of continuing along the chosen path uninterrupted.

Both methods are essential because the organic way is toward order, piece and harmony, and the entropic way leads to diversity and innovation (variety is the space of life, and necessity is the mother of all invention). Although both ways are essential, so is maintaining a balance between them. Too much of one and its chaos, waste and too much of the other and its stasis; life but no change.

Physics

Tao is the law of change and applies to all things which change. They say that Tao is actually nothing because all things change in accord with the same unchanging Tao and it therefore can't be any thing. Because it isn't any thing and it doesn't change it therefore doesn't occupy any space or time and takes no information to represent it.

This may seem very abstract, but its exactly the same as quantum physics discovering that all matter and energy are subject to the laws determined by the quantum vacuum; the closest we can get to nothing in reality.

There is a close correlation between information and matter, and therefore between a computational space and the space-time continuum of reality. The two aspects each have their own geometric representation of the space.

• Show diagram (wave topology with islands)

It was discussed above that systems could be seen as traversing their possibility spaces in search of optimal locations of high potential; the subspaces or islands in the space they call goals. The energy topology has been mapped onto a sphere because all points in the space share the perspective of a common attractor downward and a common tendency upward. The sphere depicted has two degrees of freedom, but in reality systems can have many degrees of freedom.

• Show diagram (nodal lattice version of topology)
• The other perspective is of connected objects (discussed further in section 2)
• Explain within (splitting/joining, 2x3,3x2) – the geometry of the to ways
• Energy spectrum is related to in/out somehow
• Islands of firm lead to change of subjective (damage, dangerous)

Reuse & Optimisation

• Humans and computers suffer from the reuse problem
• Spatial and temporal

Consider a particular resource in every day life such as transport. Reuse is the idea that all transport systems should share all their statistics, schedules and knowledge so that all can work more optimally together. The material processes (making and maintaining and driving vehicles) is made more efficient by sharing knowledge and using the same components. The temporal processes are made more efficient by observing and reinforcing energy cycles in time; the optimal schedule fitting in with demand, but also all levels of demand reinforce the cycles by being more flexible about timing.

Information & energy

• Change and energy
• The role of cycles
• The solution to reuse and optimisation is in the one energy domain

Language & Communication

• Both humans and computers need to adjust their means of communication toward concept representation
• How can we expect to precisely define concepts and expect computers to understand them when we don't even have a properly defined method of communicating with each other! Spoken languages are fine for social purposes, but for effectively communicating concepts, concepts must be understood.

Organisation & Sustainability

• Mainly a human concern
• The document shows that all changing things have two directions in common (a degree of freedom); entropic & organic

Open

• democracy

Decisions & Processes

• Consequences, reasons. Conflict, lateral and vertical
• Informed decisions – why have we avoided this?
• The competitive model, lamda evolving to pi
• The problems with creating a holistic layer
• Communication, language, networks, holistic and 2 domains

Yin & Yang

• Spectral/data & ontology of them
• Tangle, state and change, notion and essence
• Wave/particle, rate of change & uncertainty and their ontological conclusion
• Then ontology of tangled hierarchy and infinity in observation (of relations) as a result
• Could there really be something observation does that we're not seeing?
• One spectral – all the one everywhere, what's its form? What effect does it have?
• When one thing needs to be done many times in many places, it needs access to holistic properties
  • Maybe not for the simplest things, but for routing, storage/retrieval, speech rec., optimisation
  • And the worst question of all; what parameters need to be considered when making a decision
• All disciplines need to use the two, and because one of them is the same for all, the interface needs to be consistent

Geometric Language

• Symbols
• Obj & relations refine with dynamic range
• The way structures' affect context determines meaning
  • The meaning of an object is defined by the kinds of objects it can relate to, and the role it plays in those relationships
• The hexagrams

Project Overview

Information technology in the most general sense involves the flow and manipulation of information, so the general structure of the project is a network architecture which manages this flow, and offers interfaces for finding and manipulating this information.

Currently information fits into two categories which are more or less mutually exclusive; program and data. The Taoist way of thinking also exhibits two general aspects of the whole which they call Heaven and Earth. The Taoist Heaven and Earth have a far more precise interaction than in the West, Heaven is the domain of thoughts, ideas and potential, and Earth is that of visible material manifestations of these ideas. The Taoist Heaven and Earth are not mutually exclusive, in fact they are complimentary aspects of a unified whole.

This project exhibits these same two aspects of the network called the conceptual (Heaven) aspect and the physical (Earth) aspect. The conceptual aspect is the interfaces to finding, creating and manipulating information, and the physical aspect manages process execution (information change) and information flow and distribution.

Tangled Hierarchy

In traditional physics, the perspective of objects being seen to change over time, and information propagating outward over time is considered to be a fundamental axiom. This view can also be described as assuming the observer or experimental apparatus to be constant while the objects under analysis are changing. Relativity shows us that this perspective is valid, but if any of the change in the observed turned out to be due to the observation process, then relativity would agree that such a perspective would not yield the simplest results.

In fact Taoism teaches us that the energy of the spectrum and the matter in space changing over time are two aspects of the same information. And this means that causality over time is sharing its informational state with energy over spectrum. In mathematical terms this is a tangled hierarchy, where the state of each depends on the other in ever-decreasing circles. Trying to describe the relationships between observed objects from an independent passive perspective yields all the infinite sums composing our mathematical constants, the infinite re-normalisation problems and singularities in physics and the recursive complexity of biology.

Distributed Computational Spaces

A distributed computational space is a kind of network where all the nodes form a large shared storage-space into which tasks can be placed to await processing. When nodes are not busy doing their own things, they process tasks requiring attention in the space at random. Applications are broken up into hundreds of smaller tasks and inserted into the shared space. In this way there is no wasted processing potential, allowing computers in the network to be less powerful but at the same time being able to handle more complex processing tasks.

Currently distributed spaces are being extensively used, but only in a very client-server kind of way, where a single large processing project can be broken up and processed simultaneously by thousands or millions of clients willing to offer their support. But the processing power of these shared spaces is not available for general use by the client-nodes. A successful example of this kind of application of a distributed-space is the SETI at home project. Information from outer-space received by the Aracebo radio-telescope array is broken up daily into about a quarter of a million small units which are mathematically analysed for patterns by about three million home-users PC's. It's a very simple computer program which processes the units when the computer isn't being used, and can be installed by anyone with an Internet connection.

Distributed spaces are inherently a very efficient means of applying resources to tasks, because all nodes can work in their own time supplying what they can when they can. Another increase in efficiency compared to other resource-sharing models is the absence of message-passing between nodes. In most shared computational models, a lot of resource is consumed in the collaboration process itself, but in a distributed space there is no such communication, in fact no information need be known about the total network or the nodes composing it.

Biological Spaces

The kind of space in which change takes place in biological cells is very similar to a distributed computational space in the way that tasks are processed at random without the need for an overall organisation scheme. In cells, information and processes also come into contact in a random way called brownian motion and overall orderliness emerges over time.

The main difference is that in a distributed space, the items awaiting processing are lists of instructions written in various forms of symbolic logic, whereas in a cell, the information and processes are all composed of proteins which are sequences of amino acid molecules. The processes in cells are called enzymes and there's no equivalent of a microprocessor which reads them and treats them as lists of instructions to be acted upon.

It is the geometric structure of the enzymes which determine what they do and what other proteins or enzymes they can interact with. The enzymes have potential energy locked into their structure which is released when other molecules to which they are receptive bind to them allowing the potential energy to be converted to change.

This is where the geometric symbols mentioned in the introduction come into play. This project uses a distributed computational space in which information can contain potential energy by virtue of its structure just like proteins in a cell. This way of looking at the network and its content is the physical aspect mentioned above, which sees the network as a dynamic physical system which consumes time resource in its quest for global network equilibrium.

Notion & Essence

In the same way that many proteins together determine the overall purpose of an enzyme, so simple informational structures can be connected together to form complex concepts in the network. Looking at the network in terms of concepts is the conceptual aspect mentioned above and is the interface part of the network concerning searching and creation of concepts.

Since concepts are structures which are defined by the way they change in the space, there needs to be a way of representing concepts within the network statically so they can be stored in the space without undergoing change. When they are needed, a dynamic copy can be created at the appropriate location from its representation. The names given to these two forms of concept in this project are Notion and Essence, for static and dynamic respectively. In the biological space, enzymes are represented statically in the form of DNA and a specific enzyme called polymerase accepts bits of DNA and creates the proteins they represent. Since the space of this project also has static representations which require creation of their dynamic counterparts it will also need a polymerase concept.

Notion Evolution

• Archetype/prototype feedback loop

Network Addressing

All networks must have an addressing scheme, a way of uniquely identifying resources in the network so they can be referred to or manipulated. The Internet uses an addressing scheme called IP in which every node exhibits a unique four digit number separated by dots. IP addresses aren't much good for remembering or associating any useful information to and they aren't consistent either, so another addressing method was later added called DNS which allows people to refer to network nodes by Domain Names like google.com. In the Internet, DNS is like the addressing scheme of the conceptual aspect of this network, and IP is like that of the physical aspect.

The DNS method is also insufficient however, because we still need search-engines to help us find anything we don't already know the address of. Search engines consume a massive portion of the available resource of the Internet and will become a major bottleneck before much longer as the Internet keeps growing ever faster. Even using powerful search engines for finding information we can never look through all the results, and there's always the feeling that we might have missed some of the best results. Perhaps they haven't been indexed optimally or maybe we could have thought of a better search query.

This network already has a symbolic way of representing the concepts it contains, so it seems a natural solution to use this as the overall addressing method. The representations are defined from general to specific, so that the general definition of a concept represents the "place" in the network within which all more specific aspects of that concept exist. This removes the need for search-engines altogether. There is no analogous method to this within symbolic logic since there is no relationship between the lists of instructions composing the processes and their conceptual meaning.

On the Internet one can also navigate information by following hyperlinks. This network also has an analogous concept-navigation method which is the relationships between objects composing the concepts. Every place in the logical network has paths leading away to all its related concepts. Some paths lead beyond to concepts of which the current place is a component, and others lead within to its own components. Other paths lead away laterally in all sorts of directions to other arbitrarily related concepts.

Interface & Usage

...rendering the interface of the current concept so that the user can interact with it. The idea of a single standard interface does not apply to this project, instead each logical node exhibits a current concept including all aspects of meaning, process, input and output.

Project and Groups

In this network, groups of like-minded people can automatically form and everyone is always at the leading edge of their desired field right from the start. Any new ideas automatically extend the relevant areas of knowledge. All processes which form in the system are being created by the expertise of thousands, and all these experts can focus just on their own areas of skill and interest and nothing more. Skills, creativity and reward are conceptually higher forms of resource which can flow around the network in response to supply and demand just like any other resource. Although the general aspects of any context will not vary much, the specifics will exhibit a great deal of variation according to culture, personality demographic and geography etc. People can always see the various specific paths leading from any general concept and can see how popular different directions are and for what reasons there has been the demand for more than one way. If people have reason to believe a better way of handling a specific area of a concept exists, they can define new directions which then become an option for others.

Concept growth depends on popularity because all concepts require the basic resources of space and time from the physical layer to manifest and grow, but its up to the people as to which concepts their available space and time will be offered to.

Membership and Sponsorship

• Project growth
• Problems with selling – conversion of energy instead

Sustainability

All kinds of real-world resources such as building materials, transport or labour can be included in the optimal network flow in the same way as skills, business-entities or money described above. This allows real-world resources to be managed in the most optimal possible way reducing the possibility of surplus demand to a minimum. In the current profit-oriented model, resource consumption is actually pushed as high as possible in as many areas as possible because consumption and turnover go hand in hand.

In the cases where the demand does still outweigh the supply, the proposed solutions are handled by thousands of experts in a holistically beneficial and people-oriented way rather than a profit-oriented way. Solutions naturally flow towards an increase in resource sharing and alternative ideas in preference to depletion of natural resources.

Also how reuse allows more flexibility – allowing more people to be more specific and have more opportunities

Background concepts

Statistical truths

When information isn't directly available for a particular parameter, we can formulate a prediction of its future values based on accumulated data on how its changed in the past. For many kinds of data this is a very accurate method of gaining information about it.

There can be two reasons why we can't directly access information; epistemological limitations, or ontological limitations. The first is when the information exists, but we have no means of accessing it, or the means by which we can access it may distort it. The ontological limitation is when the information doesn't actually exist in its own right, it can only be derived from other information.

An example of an ontological limitation is potential energy...

Notion (Archetype & Prototype)

• Archetypes (higher structures of meaning forming from statistical truth)
• Prototypes (maybe use cylinder animals from gardenfors)

In this project, the archetypal world is the a viewable tree of concepts which evolve through feedback and are used as prototypes. So they have been named Notions, and archetype and prototype describe directions of notion relative to the whole.

• Contractive notion is archetype (many notions "in the field" feed back to define the overall opinion of the notion)
• Expansive notion is prototype (The one notion being used as the prototype for all requirements it can satisfy)

Notion & Essence

• Explain relation to space-time, one-many and feedback (1:1000000 & 1000s,1000t diagram)
• Actual energy is converted to potential in creating an essence of a notion, and then the essence then converts this potential energy into information in accord with its structure.
• Explain relation to class and instance (the organic version of class and instance)

Potential Energy

• Energy is one of those things that can't be directly measured, only its affects on other things can be observed.

Conceptual Structure

• The material structure of the apparatus is its conceptual aspect

In the network, everything also changes according to the same principle, so information can also exhibit potential energy by virtue of its structure just like matter. In the same way that the material structure of an apparatus in reality defines its conceptual aspect, so informational structures connected to form larger structures are how concepts are designed in the network.

Static representations and dynamic counterparts, polymerase (+not trying to re-create biology, just using some of its aspects as a model; also that biology has no trend toward simplicity)

Science

Scientific experiments exhibit the same Heaven/Man/Earth model because they are actually just an extension of mans own senses, but science chooses only to acknowledge the Earth layer in the belief that the apparatus can be designed to a high precision which does not affect the results significantly. Only Quantum Mechanics has realised the inherent problems with this approach, and its still causing confusion after more than seventy years!

The material structure of the apparatus determines the possibility space directly, and then the flow of energy through the system determines the state over time. Not realising the importance of the relationship between structure and the possibility space is the source of confusion in experiments like the double slit or the EPR paradox. By changing the parameters being measured in an experiment, channels of potential energy are being opened and closed and otherwise adjusted; and it's this potential, which is locked into the material structure of the apparatus, that determines the possible states which can occur when energy is available to the system.

Quality & Quantity

If both sides exhibit exactly the same amount of information (the description is balanced) then it is perfectly symmetrical and the very simple recursive seed which is responsible for the complimentary structure of the two domains emerges.

Discussion Topics

• All groups aim to expand their resource, this is done via discussion which gains resource from membership and sponsorship.
• Use combat analogy example from notebook (may 2003-1)

Also the definite notions and lexicons way; that if one discusses principles in the name of their group, then there are mutually beneficial phrases allowing feedback between notion and new adjusted essence as well as the receptive (external/listening) group to gain further insight into the application of the principle.

Taoism & Knowledge

This big picture which emerges in a discipline usually only after a great deal of time is the most important aspect, because its this view which connects it to the other disciplines. The specifics are useful only for furthering the discipline, not using it; like the objects of an API. Taoism allows that perspective to grow first; general to specific. But ensures that the general picture that forms is in accord with the general perspective of all others.

Business and employment

The current business model is such that companies form for the purpose of their own profit and compete for the biggest share of the market by advertising. This is not the morally correct model, because mass manipulation and corruption are inevitable given enough time.

In this network, there is essentially no distinction between a business and any other group of processes which has formed in the ways described above. The only technical difference is that if some particular processes involve real-world products rather than being purely informational or applicational, then some of the objects and relationships defined will be reflected by real documents, business entities and employees. These real-world aspects of a project are managed by the network flow in the same way as all other aspects – real world business is a natural extension of project growth.

People being be paid for applying their expertise to a project is also a natural extension, because money is simply a specific kind of resource which can flow in response to supply and demand just like any other.

Democracy

Another kind of extension of network concepts into the real world is in the context of decision making. Rather than having the decisions for groups of people being handled by government officials behind closed doors, a more ethical method would be for the thousands of specialists to form their options together in the same way as a project can form...

Enlightenment

Enlightenment is seeing through the principle the same way one would normally see through their eyes. That seems like such an impossibly difficult thing to do, but in fact it's just totally going with "the flow", which means having complete faith that there's nothing wrong in it, with it, from it etc "There's nothing to fear in Tao".

We can attain that faith by practising it, or by learning it. It's always right there, it's that thing you can follow any time, if not for the fear of really letting go. Also, the fact that it's got no fear in it shouldn't be just about the loosing of the fear, but also about anticipation of a state with no fear.

Also, you don't have to be extremely disciplined in any way, just reasonably disciplined in all ways. For example, the fact of smoking marijuana or cigarettes won't stop you from getting there, but being there will probably stop you smoking.

It is the undivided state, which from the knowledge perspective (the view of all others but not self since it is undivided and no longer subjective). That state can be reached through experience as well as through knowledge. How through knowledge? Well that comes down to the question "why is it hard to be undivided?" The reason it's so hard is that every concept that exists, does so only by virtue of its attractive force because that's how it gained space-time in the first place.

If we can see the thoughts for what they are, they loose their attractive force – or, we move our perspective (position in the tree of knowledge) to a new qualitative location which has less matching force with the old structures.

The Formal Definition

The overall aim here is to end up with an XML document type definition (DTD) covering enough details to begin writing language bindings from. Also a number of structures inside the network must exist within the network when it forms; interfaces, polymerase, conventions etc; also the DTD, and bindings must be representable as concepts prior to formation as well.

Yang & Yin

Tao cannot itself be directly defined, because as will be seen later it's technically nothing. The only way to faithfully represent it would be by using no information at all; but that's not much use to a machine which has no awareness.

Even though we can't define Tao itself, we can define the next closest things; Yang and Yin. These two are found in everything that changes, only Tao itself is more fundamental and does not change. Contrary to popular opinion in both the east and the west, the interactions of Yang and Yin are precisely definable.

These two principles go under different names depending on the context, for example in Taoism they can be Heaven and Earth, and within each of these they are Light & Dark, and Firm & Yielding. Their relation to one another is often confusing to the western mind, for instance here are some western examples of them; Wave & particle, energy & matter, potential & actual, ideal & material, creation & evolution. In some of those examples the two obviously belong together and can't be separate even if the interaction is confusing, but others like creation & evolution appear to be mutually exclusive concepts. This is not the case however, the reality of the situation is that every concept has its compliment and treating one side as more fundamental than the other always implies false assumption.

Maclaurin's Theorem

If a real-valued function is infinitely differentiable in an open neighbourhood of the origin, then f(x) can be approximated locally as a sum of f(0) and an initial segment of the series of terms of the form fn(x)=f(n)(0).xn/n!

An initial segment is an approximation, but the infinite sum is exact; two different descriptions of the same truth, one orthogonal to the other.

Ensembles

Michael J. W. Hall wrote a paper in 2000 showing that the uncertainty principle had geometric foundations and applied to generic ensembles which are shown to be more ontologically fundamental than either quantum phase space models or discrete and continuous spaces. Entropy is shown to be of geometric roots also, being proportional to the exponential of the ensemble volume)

The ensemble is more fundamental than space or time. Treating the ensemble as a vertical description is the temporal nature of reality, treating it as horizontal is the spatial and material.