Introduction to Protospace

“We create our tools, and they create us”

someone…

As we move towards more linked and sophisticated interactions between divergent sources, we need stronger tools with which to use and think. The electronic spreadsheet, for example, allowed people to visualize and model data and decisions which were unthinkable to those used to getting their reports in thick stacks of computer printouts. Once the spreadsheet was introduced, it became a tool for many new forms of thinking, and people are naturally inclined to lay out information in terms of rows and columns, and the ability to use formulas into to express relationships.

Certain kinds of problems fit well into the cells of a spreadsheet. However, there are many issues which do not fit. It is not possible to assign a predefined “cell” to the following:

ProtoSpace

ProtoSpace is a software-based environment which can be used to model autocatalytic spaces. Autocatalytic spaces have the property that they start out with very simple initial conditions, a primordium containing very little stuff and very little void. The stuff and the void co-evolve over time, and the space expands. The creation of new stuff has the effect of cocreating a more void, subject to the constraints of the space. The space pulls itself into existence by the energy of the vacuum. The designer of a ProtoSpace is largely focused on the autocatalytic effects of this energy of the vacuum. Rather than focusing on what is, the designer is focused on the latent energy of the vacuum pulling the space into existence. The ProtoSpace can thus be described as spaces which discover themselves.

ProtoSpaces can nested, in the sense that a space can appear as just a blob within a larger space. This allows scale-free representations of the intrinsics that apply across spaces of vastly different scales. For example, if we were to create a ProtoSpace for health called HealthSpace, it may have many embedded spaces, from the human species, to global population, to nations, to communities, to families, to a person, to an immune system, to an organ, to a cell, to the gene. Each of these characteristic scales has its own space, but they are also connected by patterns which span two or more characteristic scales. For example, the pattern of IDENTITY applies to all of the above mentioned, in the sense of the identity of an immune system, the identity of a cell, or of a gene. This could lead to the discovery of another pattern, DISIDENTITY, which may have influence over multiple characteristic scales. ProtoSpaces may be ouroboric,[1] in which the smallest scale loops back to the largest, for example, the gene is connected to evolution of the species, and the quark is connected to the evolution of the cosmos.

Cascades are triggered by intrinsics operating over multiple scales, over spaces and their evolutionary time. Thus, one could refer to the cascading effect DISIDENTITY of over the immune system (autoimmune disease), community (loss of sense of community), and cancer (loss of a cell’s sense of self). A link between stuff in ProtoSpaces of different scale is called a Fractalink, which can be viewed as a scale-free notion of the hyperlink developed by Ted Nelson in Xanadu, Douglas Engelbart in NLS, and Tim Berners-Lee in the World Wide Web.

ProtoSpace is a kind of extension of hypertext thinking (now nearly 60 years old) by applying notions of scale-free networks, fractals, recursion, autocatalysis, self-organization, computer simulation, visualization, experimental philosophy, and many other innovations.

The Ontology of the Void

Since a prototype coevolves with the stuff in it, the properties of the void which pull it into existence are critical. Since there is initially no stuff in the void, it is difficult to discuss it using words from the language of things. The energy of the vacuum is a driving force in the mechanism by which a space discovers itself.

We define two terms to describe this way of knowing and creating:

Imagine a team of Martians trying to understand how a television set works. They pull out a tube, and discover a squealing sound, so they categorize that as the “anti-squeal” tube. They work around to other components, discovering what goes wrong when they disable the component, discovering all the modes of failure of the television set. But how the TV works escapes them, because they are only looking at how it fails. If, however, they were to discover a circuit diagram, they would eventually be able to discover the patterns of components, and how they work. Their way of understanding based on failure is the malgnostic view. Their way of understanding based on interpreting the schematic is the benegnostic view. The basic pattern they use: “what is the problem and how do we fix it” drives the malgnostic energy of the vacuum, and their knowledge space fills with how the TV fails. If they use a different pattern, based on patterns of operation of the components, the energy of the vacuum creates the benegnostic space. Thus, the choice of patterns by which we understand the evolutionary space becomes a major factor in understanding that space.

This is evident in our current health care system. The UMLS system from NIH lists about 1.2 million terms for how to be sick. A primary tool for genetic researchers is to knock out a gene and see what happens, leading to such conclusions as, “The loss of this gene causes a loss of speech ability.” The encyclopedia of world problems lists 30,000 world problems. Brain researchers study what happens when certain parts of the brain are damaged.

These are all malgnostic perspectives, and they have their place. If I have a broken TV set, I want the repairman to know how to fix it and not try to reengineer the whole TV set from a holistic perspective. Similarly, if I have a disease, I want my physician to know everything possible about the treatment of that disease.

However, these malgnostic perspectives apply to a limited number of cases, and they are easily carried by fear of the pathological extreme. Someone with a headache worries about the one in a million chance of having a serious problem, and this fear then drives the need for an MRI instead of “take two aspirins and call me in the morning.” The very long, unlikely tail of the probability of failure ability wags the dog of very likely, simple circumstances. As we discover more and more extreme modes of failure, their sensationalistic value drives the “normal” far out of proportion to their risk.

[1] From the Greek and Egyptian mythological representations of an animal eating its own tail – the ouroborous… see Rees, Martin Just Six Numbers

[2] Murray Gell-Mann pointed out to me that these terms were mixing Latin and Greek, however, he couldn’t suggest a better alternative, so I’ve stuck with them.