Homogeneity on one fractal level is required for heterogeneity on another. For instance, imagine a parking lot filled with rows and rows of the same exact make and model of a car all painted the same color. On the parking lot level, there is a lack of diversity, but on the car parts level, a large number of diverse parts are required to build the vehicle. Now imagine multiple parking lots, where each lot has only a single type of car of the same color parked in them, but where the type and color vary across the collection of lots. Walk through a single lot and it looks to be lacking diversity. However, look at the parking lots from a satellite and tell me if what you see is an abundance of diversity or a lack of it. It is difficult to mathematically quantify the level of diversity in this situation without some knowledge of fractals and complexity theory.
Transform these parking lots of cars into people and the satellites into social/legacy media…and social turmoil commences.
There is a cultural memetic war pitting (nationalism, isolationism, homogeneity) against (globalism, free trade, and heterogeneity) and I think both sides of this war fail to understand that the existence of homogeneous collections of nouns rely on the existence of heterogeneous collections of nouns (and visa versa).
In order to break down this cultural war in the context of complexity theory, let me first discuss one of my favorite chapters of my favorite book. In the chapter named “Prelude…Ant Fuge” of the book “Godel Escher Bach”, Douglas Hofstadter opens with an image of the letters “MU” which when pronounced, represents the Japanese word meaning “nothing”. More specifically, “MU” represents a certain kind of nothing found in singularities. It is pseudo-mathematically represented as “0⁰=1”, which, when I wave my hands in the air like a magician means both everything and nothing simultaneously. Don’t think too much about it, because I am not trying to prove some crank mathematical number theory of everything. Rather I am introducing the concept that weird contradictions exist in mathematics. Anyway, the “MU” drawing in the book has deeper complexity than just being 2 letters. Each stroke of the letter is actually made up of words itself. And each stroke of those words are made of words as well. Only an image will do this justice.
OK. So in the chapter itself is a story about a fabled ant eater who becomes friends with a sentient ant colony named Aunt Hillary who communicates with Mr. Ant Eater using complex patterns of ants on the ground. The ants, while walking around doing their normal ant tasks actually spell out the words that Aunt Hillary wishes to communicate. Each ant itself is no friend of Mr. Ant Eater, since he enjoys eating them. However, Aunt Hillary doesn’t mind if Mr. Ant Eater eats some of her ants, because sometimes they get sick and are unable to properly spell out the words she is trying to communicate. This story is hilarious and reminds me of how brains are composed of non-sentient brain cells through which consciousness emerges.
The reason I invoke the spirit of Hofstadter in talking about the culture war is that (globalism, free trade, heterogeneity) can not exist without a form of (nationalism, restricted trade, homogeneity), just like the diverse consciousnesses of Aunt Hillary & Mr. Ant Eater do not exist without the genetically non-diverse colony of ants or for Mr. Ant Eater, brain cells. Even the most ardent open borders evangelist would restrict membership to their activist organization to only those who believe in open borders. Therein lies the evermore popularized “contradiction of tolerance”. My intuition leads me to hypothesize that the “contradiction of tolerance” is an instantiation of the class of contradictions that Godel pointed out to in his incompleteness theorem. Intolerance is required to generate enough stability to allow for a higher level tolerance to emerge!
For a lab in my favorite graduate course, Biologically Inspired Computation, we coded up cellular automata and classified the various simulations into categories. The high entropy automata came in 3 classes: the dead automata, the simple repeating automota (homogeneity), and the completely chaotic automota (heterogeneity). The low entropy automata was the most interesting and came from a balanced mixture of the heterogenius class and the homogenius class. When combined correctly it formed an emergent and transcendent structure.
If a culture nation completely homogenizes, then diversity is extinguished like a class 1 or class 2 automata. Zoom out of a class IV automata and it begins looking like a class 1 as well. Cultural diversity on a global scale requires cultural homogeneity on a local scale. The primary argument among the left and right is at what level of organization should the homo/hetero boundary be found at. How far up the chain of command in society should dissenting opinions be tolerated. A country can’t simultaneously be in a war and not in a war at the same time. Convergence and homogeneity is required for a noun to act holistically. At what level should convergence happen? At what level should divergence happen. This is where the combatants of the cultural and memetic wars disagree most fervently.
Nationalists intuitively grasp that genetic mixing is a direct but slower reflection of memetic mixing. Some see genetic mixing as a cause of illness, but others only see it as a sign of potential illness due to the cultural incompatibility that usually accompanies it. They posit that land boundaries are what primarily determines both culture and genetics. Despite the internet, social norms are determined by the people who physically coexist in the same space. American Nationalists state that people from South and Central American countries do not share the same cultural values required to build a liberty and freedom loving society.
However, globalists posit that every human is capable of learning how to operate in a global society. They state that every human individual can keep their personal identity and liberty while integrating with a globally homogeneous society. A person’s state of origin does not dictate what type of person they can become in the future. They see nationalism as hate against other cultures and genetic populations. Why can’t the nationalists see that humans can adapt and learn to be a productive member of a global human society? “Those nationalists must be incapable of learning themselves”.
Ironically, the success of humanity requires engaging in balanced thought about both of the ideologies of the cultural combatants. Swing too far towards localism and channels of communication close down, transnational economic transactions gets blocked, and extremism can run rampant. Welcome to North Korea!!! Swing to far in the other direction and society gets turned into an oppressive globalized homogeneity of boring mediocrity while becoming vulnerable to an outside invasion by a culture which is stronger due to its differing localized homogeneity that allows it to specialize and conquer (welcome to the Democrat’s epic political loss of 2016).
My recommendation is not to take to twitter ranting about the evils of the other side. Rather it is to play with cellular automota and other simple expressions of complexity to visualize low dimensional models of both of the aforementioned political outcomes in a primordial form. The only rational thing to do is observe both sides of the current culture war and integrate them into a more fractal like organization of society where neither nationalism nor globalism become too dominant. Also, sometimes think about the metaphorical paper upon which 0⁰ is writ.
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