Category Archives: planet earth

WHAT IS LIFE? … If life is ‘More,’ ‘much more’ …

Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch

Changelog: Febr 9, 2025 – Febr 9, 2025

Email: info@uffmm.org

TRANSLATION: The following text is a translation from a German version into English. For the translation I am using the software @chatGPT4o with manual modifications.

CONTENT TREE

This text is part of the TOPIC Philosophy of Science.

CONTEXT


This is a direct continuation of the preceding texts

  1.  “WHAT IS LIFE? WHAT ROLE DO WE PLAY? IST THERE A FUTURE?”
  2.  “WHAT IS LIFE? … DEMOCRACY – CITIZENS”
  3. WHAT IS LIFE? … PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

INTRODUCTION

In the preceding texts, the ‘framework’ has been outlined within which the following texts on the topic “What is life? …” will unfold. A special position is taken by the text on ‘philosophy,’ as it highlights the ‘perspective’ in which we find ourselves when we begin to think about ourselves and the surrounding world—and then also to ‘write’ about it. As a reminder of the philosophical perspective, here is the last section as a quote:

“Ultimately, ‘philosophy’ is a ‘total phenomenon’ that manifests itself in the interplay of many people in everyday life, is experienceable, and can only take shape here, in process form. ‘Truth,’ as the ‘hard core’ of any reality-related thinking, can therefore always be found only as a ‘part’ of a process in which the active interconnections significantly contribute to the ‘truth of a matter.’ Truth is therefore never ‘self-evident,’ never ‘simple,’ never ‘free of cost’; truth is a ‘precious substance’ that requires every effort to be ‘gained,’ and its state is a ‘fleeting’ one, as the ‘world’ within which truth can be ‘worked out’ continuously changes as a world. A major factor in this constant change is life itself: the ‘existence of life’ is only possible within an ‘ongoing process’ in which ‘energy’ can make ‘emergent images’ appear—images that are not created for ‘rest’ but for a ‘becoming,’ whose ultimate goal still appears in many ways ‘open’: Life can indeed—partially—destroy itself or—partially—empower itself. Somewhere in the midst of this, we find ourselves. The current year ‘2025’ is actually of little significance in this regard.”

WHAT IS LIFE? … If life is ‘More,’ ‘much more’ …

In the first text of this project, “What is Life,” much has already been said under the label ‘EARTH@WORK. Cradle of Humankind’—in principle, everything that can and must be said about a ‘new perspective’ on the ‘phenomenon of life’ in light of modern scientific and philosophical insights. As a reminder, here is the text:

“The existence [of planet Earth] was in fact the prerequisite for biological life as we know it today to have developed the way we have come to understand it. Only in recent years have we begun to grasp how the known ‘biological life’ (Nature 2) could have ‘evolved’ from ‘non-biological life’ (Nature 1). Upon deeper analysis, one can recognize not only the ‘commonality’ in the material used but also the ‘novel extensions’ that distinguish the ‘biological’ from the ‘non-biological.’ Instead of turning this ‘novelty’ into an opposition, as human thought has traditionally done (e.g., ‘matter’ versus ‘spirit,’ ‘matter’ versus ‘mind’), one can also understand it as a ‘manifestation’ of something ‘more fundamental,’ as an ‘emergence’ of new properties that, in turn, point to characteristics inherent in the ‘foundation of everything’—namely, in ‘energy’—which only become apparent when increasingly complex structures are formed. This novel interpretation is inspired by findings from modern physics, particularly quantum physics in conjunction with astrophysics. All of this suggests that Einstein’s classical equation (1905) e=mc² should be interpreted more broadly than has been customary so far (abbreviated: Plus(e=mc²)).”

This brief text will now be further expanded to make more visible the drama hinted at by the convergence of many new insights. Some may find these perspectives ‘threatening,’ while others may see them as the ‘long-awaited liberation’ from ‘false images’ that have so far rather ‘obscured’ our real possible future.

Different Contexts

If we see an ‘apple’ in isolation, this apple, with its shapes and colors, appears somehow ‘indeterminate’ by itself. But if we ‘experience’ that an apple can be ‘eaten,’ taste it, feel its effect on our body, then the apple becomes ‘part of a context.’ And if we also happen to ‘know’ something about its composition and its possible effects on our body, then the ‘image of experience’ expands into an ‘image of knowledge,’ forming a ‘context of experience and knowledge’ within us—one that pulls the apple out of its ‘initial indeterminacy.’ As part of such a context, the apple is ‘more’ than before.

The same applies to a ‘chair’: on its own, it has a shape, colors, and surface characteristics, but nothing more. If we experience that this chair is placed in a ‘room’ along with other ‘pieces of furniture,’ that we can ‘sit on a chair,’ that we can move it within the room, then an experienced image of a larger whole emerges—one in which the chair is a part with specific properties that distinguish it from other pieces of furniture. If we then also know that furniture appears in ‘rooms,’ which are parts of ‘houses,’ another rather complex ‘context of experience and knowledge’ forms within us—again making the individual chair ‘more’ than before.

We can apply this kind of thinking to many objects in everyday life. In fact, there is no single object that exists entirely on its own. This is particularly evident in ‘biological objects’ such as animals, plants, and insects.

Let’s take ourselves—humans—as an example. If we let our gaze wander from the spot where each of us is right now, across the entire country, the whole continent, even the entire sphere of our planet, we find that today (2025), humans are almost everywhere. In the standard form of men and women, there is hardly an environment where humans do not live. These environments can be very simple or densely packed with towering buildings, machines, and people in tight spaces. Once we broaden our perspective like this, it becomes clear that we humans are also ‘part of something’: both of the geographical environment we inhabit and of a vast biological community.

In everyday life, we usually only encounter a few others—sometimes a few hundred, in special cases even a few thousand—but through available knowledge, we can infer that we are billions. Again, it is the ‘context of experience and knowledge’ that places us in a larger framework, in which we are clearly ‘part of something greater.’ Here, too, the context represents something ‘more’ compared to ourselves as an individual person, as a single citizen, as a lone human being.

Time, Time Slices, …

If we can experience and think about the things around us—including ourselves—within the ‘format’ of ‘contexts,’ then it is only a small step to noticing the phenomenon of ‘change.’ In the place where we are right now, in the ‘now,’ in the ‘present moment,’ there is no change; everything is as it is. But as soon as the ‘current moment’ is followed by a ‘new moment,’ and then more and more new moments come ‘one after another,’ we inevitably begin to notice ‘changes’: things change, everything in this world changes; there is nothing that does not change!

In ‘individual experience,’ it may happen that, for several moments, we do not ‘perceive anything’ with our eyes, ears, sense of smell, or other senses. This is possible because our body’s sensory organs perceive the world only very roughly. However, with the methods of modern science, which can look ‘infinitely small’ and ‘infinitely large,’ we ‘know’ that, for example, our approximately 37 trillion (10¹²) body cells are highly active at every moment—exchanging ‘messages,’ ‘materials,’ repairing themselves, replacing dead cells with new ones, and so on. Thus, our own body is exposed to a veritable ‘storm of change’ at every moment without us being able to perceive it. The same applies to the realm of ‘microbes,’ the smallest living organisms that we cannot see, yet exist by the billions—not only ‘around us’ but also colonizing our skin and remaining in constant activity. Additionally, the materials that make up the buildings around us are constantly undergoing transformation. Over the years, these materials ‘age’ to the point where they can no longer fulfill their intended function; bridges, for example, can collapse—as we have unfortunately witnessed.

In general, we can only speak of ‘change’ if we can distinguish a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ and compare the many properties of a ‘moment before’ with those of a ‘moment after.’ In the realm of our ‘sensory perception,’ there is always only a ‘now’—no ‘before’ and ‘after.’ However, through the function of ‘memory’ working together with the ability to ‘store’ current events, our ‘brain’ possesses the remarkable ability to ‘quasi-store’ moments to a certain extent. Additionally, it can compare ‘various stored moments’ with a current sensory perception based on specific criteria. If there are ‘differences’ between the ‘current sensory perception’ and the previously ‘stored moments,’ our brain ‘notifies us’—we ‘notice’ the change.

This phenomenon of ‘perceived change’ forms the basis for our ‘experience of time.’ Humans have always relied on ‘external events’ to help categorize perceived changes within a broader framework (day-night cycles, seasons, various star constellations, timekeeping devices like various ‘clocks’ … supported by time records and, later, calendars). However, the ability to experience change remains fundamental to us.

Reflecting on all of this, one can formulate the concept of a ‘time slice’: If we imagine a ‘time segment’—which can be of any length (nanoseconds, seconds, hours, years, …)—and consider all locations on our planet, along with everything present in those locations, as a single ‘state,’ then repeating this process for each subsequent time segment creates a ‘sequence’ or ‘series’ of ‘time slices.’ Within this framework, every change occurring anywhere within a state manifests with its ‘effects’ in one of the following time slices. Depending on the ‘thickness of the time slice,’ these effects appear in the ‘immediately following slice’ or much later. In this model, nothing is lost. Depending on its ‘granularity,’ the model can be ‘highly precise’ or ‘very coarse.’ For instance, population statistics in a German municipality are only recorded once a year, on the last day of the year. If this data were collected weekly, the individual parameters (births, deaths, immigration, emigration, …) would vary significantly.

In the transition from one time slice to the next, every change has an impact—including everything that every individual person does. However, we must distinguish between immediate effects (e.g., a young person attending school regularly) and ‘long-term outcomes’ (e.g., a school diploma, acquired competencies, …), which do not manifest as direct, observable change events. The acquisition of experiences, knowledge, and skills affects the ‘inner structure’ of a person by building ‘various cognitive structures’ that enable the individual to ‘plan, decide, and act’ in new ways. This internal ‘structural development’ of a person is not directly observable, yet it can significantly influence the ‘quality of behavior.’

Time Slices of Life on Planet Earth

It was already mentioned that the ‘thickness of a time slice’ affects which events can be observed. This is related to the fact that we have come to know many ‘different types of change’ on planet Earth. Processes in the sky and in nature generally seem to take ‘longer,’ whereas the effects of specific mechanical actions occur rather ‘quickly,’ and changes to the Earth’s surface take thousands, many thousands, or even millions of years.

Here, the focus is on the major developmental steps of (biological) life on planet Earth. We ourselves—as Homo sapiens—are part of this development, and it may be interesting to explore whether our ‘participation in the great web of life’ reveals perspectives that we cannot practically perceive in the ‘everyday life’ of an individual, even though these perspectives might be of great significance to each of us.

The selection of ‘key events’ in the development of life on Earth naturally depends heavily on the ‘prior knowledge’ with which one approaches the task. Here, I have selected only those points that are found in nearly all major publications. The given time points, ‘from which’ these events are recognized, are inherently ‘imprecise,’ as both the ‘complexity’ of the events and the challenges of ‘temporal determination’ prevent greater accuracy even today. The following key events have been selected:

  • Molecular Evolution (from ~3.9 billion years ago)
  • Prokaryotic Cells (from ~3.5 billion years ago)
  • Great Oxygenation Event (from ~2.5 billion years ago)
  • Eukaryotic Cells (from ~1.5 billion years ago)
  • Multicellular Life (from ~600 million years ago)
  • Emergence of the Homo Genus (from ~2.5 million years ago)
  • Emergence of Homo sapiens (from ~300,000 years ago)
  • Emergence of Artificial Intelligence (from ~21st century)

I was then interested in calculating the time gaps between these events. For this calculation, only the starting points of the key events were used, as no precise date can be reliably determined for their later progression. The following table was derived:

  • Molecular Evolution to Prokaryotic Cells: 400 million years
  • Prokaryotic Cells to the Great Oxygenation Event: 1 billion years
  • Great Oxygenation Event to Eukaryotic Cells: 1 billion years
  • Eukaryotic Cells to Multicellular Life: 900 million years
  • Multicellular Life to the Emergence of the Homo Genus: 597.5 million years
  • Homo Genus to Homo sapiens: 2.2 million years
  • Homo sapiens to Artificial Intelligence: 297,900 years

Next, I converted these time intervals into ‘percentage shares of the total time’ of 3.9 billion years. This resulted in the following table:

  • Molecular Evolution to Prokaryotic Cells: 400 million years = 10.26%
  • Prokaryotic Cells to the Great Oxygenation Event: 1 billion years = 25.64%
  • Great Oxygenation Event to Eukaryotic Cells: 1 billion years = 25.64%
  • Eukaryotic Cells to Multicellular Life: 900 million years = 23.08%
  • Multicellular Life to the Emergence of the Homo Genus: 597.5 million years = 15.32%
  • Homo Genus to Homo sapiens: 2.2 million years = 0.056%
  • Homo sapiens to Artificial Intelligence: 297,900 years = 0.0076%

With these numbers, one can examine whether these data points on a timeline reveal any notable characteristics. Of course, purely mathematically, there are many options for what to look for. My initial interest was simply to determine whether there could be a mathematically defined curve that significantly correlates with these data points.

After numerous tests with different estimation functions (see explanations in the appendix), the logistic (S-curve) function emerged as the one that, by its design, best represents the dynamics of the real data regarding the development of biological systems.

For this estimation function, the data points “Molecular Evolution” and “Emergence of AI” were excluded, as they do not directly belong to the development of biological systems in the narrower sense. This resulted in the following data points as the basis for finding an estimation function:

0  Molecular Evolution to Prokaryotes          4.000000e+08 (NOT INCLUDED)
1  Prokaryotes to Great Oxygenation Event      1.000000e+09
2  Oxygenation Event to Eukaryotes             1.000000e+09
3  Eukaryotes to Multicellular Organisms       9.000000e+08
4  Multicellular Organisms to Homo             5.975000e+08
5  Homo to Homo sapiens                        2.200000e+06
6  Homo sapiens to AI                          2.979000e+05 (NOT INCLUDED)

For the selected events, the corresponding cumulative time values were:

0  0.400000
1  1.400000
2  2.400000
3  3.300000
4  3.897500
5  3.899700
6  3.899998

Based on these values, the prediction for the next “significant” event in the development of biological systems resulted in a time of 4.0468 billion years (our present is at 3.899998 billion years). This means that, under a conservative estimate, the next structural event is expected to occur in approximately 146.8 million years. However, it is also not entirely unlikely that it could happen in about 100 million years instead.

The curve reflects the “historical process” that classical biological systems have produced up to Homo sapiens using their previous means. However, with the emergence of the Homo genus—and especially with the life form Homo sapiens—completely new properties come into play. Within the subpopulation of Homo sapiens, there exists a life form that, through its cognitive dimension and new symbolic communication, can generate much faster and more complex foundations for action.

Thus, it cannot be ruled out that the next significant evolutionary event might occur well before 148 million years or even before 100 million years.

This working hypothesis is further reinforced by the fact that Homo sapiens, after approximately 300,000 years, has now developed machines that can be programmed. These machines can already provide substantial assistance in tasks that exceed the cognitive processing capacity of an individual human brain in navigating our complex world.

Although machines, as non-biological systems, lack an intrinsic developmental basis like biological systems, in the format of co-evolution, life on Earth could very likely accelerate its further development with the support of such programmable machines.

Being Human, Responsibility, and Emotions

With the recent context expansion regarding the possible role of humans in the global development process, many interesting perspectives emerge. However, none of them are particularly comfortable for us as humans. Instead, they are rather unsettling, as they reveal that our self-sufficiency with ourselves—almost comparable to a form of global narcissism—not only alienates us from ourselves, but also leads us, as a product of the planet’s entire living system, to progressively destroy that very life system in increasingly sensitive ways.

It seems that most people do not realize what they are doing, or, if they do suspect it, they push it aside, because the bigger picture appears too distant from their current individual sense of purpose.

This last point is crucial: How can responsibility for global life be understood by individual human beings, let alone be practically implemented? How are people, who currently live 60–120 years, supposed to concern themselves with a development that extends millions or even more years into the future?

The question of responsibility is further complicated by a structural characteristic of modern Homo sapiens: A fundamental trait of humans is that their cognitive dimension (knowledge, thinking, reasoning…) is almost entirely controlled by a wide range of emotions. Even in the year 2025, there are an enormous number of worldviews embedded in people’s minds that have little or nothing to do with reality, yet they seem to be emotionally cemented.

The handling of emotions appears to be a major blind spot:

  • Where is this truly being trained?
  • Where is it being comprehensively researched and integrated into everyday life?
  • Where is it accessible to everyone?

All these questions ultimately touch on our fundamental self-conception as humans. If we take this new perspective seriously, then we must rethink and deepen our understanding of what it truly means to be human within such a vast all-encompassing process.

And yes, it seems this will not be possible unless we develop ourselves physically and mentally to a much greater extent.

The current ethics, with its strict “prohibition on human transformation,” could, in light of the enormous challenges we face, lead to the exact opposite of its intended goal: Not the preservation of humanity, but rather its destruction.

It is becoming evident that “better technology” may only emerge if life itself, and in particular, we humans, undergo dramatic further development.

End of the Dualism ‘Non-Biological’ vs. ‘Biological’?

Up to this point in our considerations, we have spoken in the conventional way when discussing “life” (biological systems) and, separately, the Earth system with all its “non-biological” components.

This distinction between “biological” and “non-biological” is deeply embedded in the consciousness of at least European culture and all those cultures that have been strongly influenced by it.

Naturally, it is no coincidence that the distinction between “living matter” (biological systems) and “non-living matter” was recognized and used very early on. Ultimately, this was because “living matter” exhibited properties that could not be observed in “non-living matter.” This distinction has remained in place to this day.

Equipped with today’s knowledge, however, we can not only question this ancient dualism—we can actually overcome it.

The starting point for this conceptual bridge can be found on the biological side, in the fact that the first simple cells, the prokaryotes, are made up of molecules, which in turn consist of atoms, which in turn consist of… and so on. This hierarchy of components has no lower limit.

What is clear, however, is that a prokaryotic cell, the earliest form of life on planet Earth, is—in terms of its building material—entirely composed of the same material as all non-biological systems. This material is ultimately the universal building block from which the entire universe is made.

This is illustrated in the following image:

For non-living matter, Einstein (1905) formulated the equation e = mc², demonstrating that there is a specific equivalence between the mass m of an observable material and the theoretical concept of energy e (which is not directly observable). If a certain amount of energy is applied to a certain mass, accelerating it to a specific velocity, mass and energy become interchangeable. This means that one can derive mass from energy e, and conversely, extract energy e from mass m.

This formula has proven valid to this day.

But what does this equation mean for matter in a biological state? Biological structures do not need to be accelerated in order to exist biologically. However, in addition to the energy contained in their material components, they must continuously absorb energy to construct, maintain, and modify their specialized material structures. Additionally, biological matter has the ability to self-replicate.

Within this self-replication, a semiotic process takes place—one that later, in the symbolic communication of highly complex organisms, particularly in Homo sapiens, became the foundation of an entirely new and highly efficient communication system between biological entities.

The Semiotic Structure of Life

The semiotic structure in the context of reproduction can be (simplified) as follows:

  • One type of molecule (M1) interacts with another molecule (M2) as if the elements of M1 were control commands for M2.
  • Through this interaction, M2 triggers chemical processes, which in turn lead to the construction of new molecules (M3).
  • The elements of M1, which act like control commands, behave similarly to “signs” in semiotic theory.
  • The molecules M3, produced by M2, can be understood semiotically as the “meaning” of M1—while M2 represents the “meaning relationship” between M1 and M3.

Not only the human brain operates with such semiotic structures, but every modern computer possesses them as well. This suggests that it may represent a universal structure.

Does Biological Matter Reveal Hidden Properties of Energy?

If we accept these considerations, then biological matter appears to differ from non-biological matter in the following aspects:

  • Biological matter possesses the ability to arrange non-biological matter in such a way that functional relationships emerge between individual non-biological elements (atoms, molecules).
  • These relationships can be interpreted as semiotic structures: Non-biological elements function “in context” (!) as “signs”, as “dynamic meaning relationships”, and as “meanings” themselves.

This raises an important question:
To what extent should the “additional properties” exhibited by biological matter be understood not only as “emergent properties” but also as manifestations of fundamental properties of energy itself?

Since energy e itself cannot be directly observed, only its effects can be studied. This leaves science with a choice:

  1. It can continue to adhere to the traditional perspective derived from Einstein’s 1905 formula e = mc²—but this means accepting that the most complex properties of the universe remain unexplained.
  2. Or, science can expand its perspective to include non-living matter in the form of biological systems, thereby integrating biological processes into the study of fundamental physics.

Biological systems cannot be explained without energy. However, their threefold structure

  • Matter as “objects,”
  • Matter as a “meta-level,”
  • Matter as an “actor”

suggests that energy itself may possess far more internal properties than previously assumed.

Is this reluctance to reconsider energy’s role merely the result of a “false intellectual pride”? A refusal to admit that “in matter itself,” something confronts us that is far more than just “non-living matter”?

And yet, the observer—the knower—is exactly that: “matter in the form of biological systems” with properties that far exceed anything physics has been willing to account for so far.

And what about emotions?

  • Throughout this discussion, emotions have barely been mentioned.
  • What if energy is also responsible for this complex domain?

Maybe we all—philosophers, scientists, and beyond—need to go back to the start.
Maybe we need to learn to tell the story of life on this planet and the true meaning of being human in a completely new way.

After all, we have nothing to lose.
All our previous narratives are far from adequate.
And the potential future is, without a doubt, far more exciting, fascinating, and rich than anything that has been told so far…

APPENDIX

With the support of ChatGPT-4o, I tested a wide range of estimation functions (e.g., power function, inverted power function, exponential function, hyperbolic function, Gompertz function, logistic function, summed power function, each with different variations). As a result, the logistic (S-curve) function proved to be the one that best fit the real data values and allowed for a conservative estimate for the future, which appears reasonably plausible and could be slightly refined if necessary. However, given the many open parameters for the future, a conservative estimate seems to be the best approach: a certain direction can be recognized, but there remains room for unexpected events.

The following Python program was executed using the development environment Python 3.12.3 64-bit with Qt 5.15.13 and PyQt5 5.15.10 on Linux 6.8.0-52-generic (x86_64). (For Spyder, see: Spyder-IDE.org)

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Created on Mon Feb 10 07:25:38 2025

@author: gerd (supported by chatGPT4o)
"""
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.optimize import curve_fit

# Daten für die Tabelle
data = {
    "Phase": [
        "Molekulare Evolution zu Prokaryoten",
        "Prokaryoten zum Großen Sauerstoffereignis",
        "Sauerstoffereignis zu Eukaryoten",
        "Eukaryoten zu Vielzellern",
        "Vielzeller zu Homo",
        "Homo zu Homo sapiens",
        "Homo sapiens zu KI"
    ],
    "Dauer (Jahre)": [
        400e6,
        1e9,
        1e9,
        900e6,
        597.5e6,
        2.2e6,
        297900
    ]
}

# Gesamtzeit der Entwicklung des Lebens (ca. 3,9 Mrd. Jahre)
total_time = 3.9e9

# DataFrame erstellen
df = pd.DataFrame(data)

# Berechnung des prozentualen Anteils
df["% Anteil an Gesamtzeit"] = (df["Dauer (Jahre)"] / total_time) * 100

# Berechnung der kumulativen Zeit
df["Kumulative Zeit (Mrd. Jahre)"] = (df["Dauer (Jahre)"].cumsum()) / 1e9

# Extrahieren der relevanten kumulativen Zeitintervalle (Differenzen der biologischen Phasen)
relevant_intervals = df["Kumulative Zeit (Mrd. Jahre)"].iloc[1:6].diff().dropna().values

# Definieren der Zeitindices für die relevanten Intervalle
interval_steps = np.arange(len(relevant_intervals))



# Sicherstellen, dass x_cumulative_fit korrekt definiert ist
x_cumulative_fit = np.arange(1, 6)  # Index für biologische Phasen 1 bis 5
y_cumulative_fit = df["Kumulative Zeit (Mrd. Jahre)"].iloc[1:6].values  # Die zugehörigen Zeiten

# Logistische Funktion (Sigmoid-Funktion) definieren
def logistic_fit(x, L, x0, k):
    return L / (1 + np.exp(-k * (x - x0)))  # Standardisierte S-Kurve

# Curve Fitting für die kumulierte Zeitreihe mit der logistischen Funktion
params_logistic, _ = curve_fit(
    logistic_fit,
    x_cumulative_fit,
    y_cumulative_fit,
    p0=[max(y_cumulative_fit), np.median(x_cumulative_fit), 1],  # Startwerte
    maxfev=2000  # Mehr Iterationen für stabilere Konvergenz
)

# Prognose des nächsten kumulierten Zeitpunkts mit der logistischen Funktion
predicted_cumulative_logistic = logistic_fit(len(x_cumulative_fit) + 1, *params_logistic)

# Fit-Kurve für die Visualisierung der logistischen Anpassung
x_fit_time_logistic = np.linspace(1, len(x_cumulative_fit) + 1, 100)
y_fit_time_logistic = logistic_fit(x_fit_time_logistic, *params_logistic)

# Visualisierung der logistischen Anpassung an die kumulierte Zeitreihe
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))
plt.scatter(x_cumulative_fit, y_cumulative_fit, color='blue', label="Real Data Points")
plt.plot(x_fit_time_logistic, y_fit_time_logistic, 'r-', label="Logistic Fit (S-Curve)")
plt.axvline(len(x_cumulative_fit) + 1, color='r', linestyle='--', label="Next Forecast Point")
plt.scatter(len(x_cumulative_fit) + 1, predicted_cumulative_logistic, color='red', label=f"Forecast: {predicted_cumulative_logistic:.3f} Bn Years")

# Titel und Achsenbeschriftungen
plt.title("Logistic (S-Curve) Fit on Cumulative Evolutionary Time")
plt.xlabel("Evolutionary Phase Index")
plt.ylabel("Cumulative Time (Billion Years)")
plt.legend()
plt.grid(True)
plt.show()

# Neues t_next basierend auf der logistischen Anpassung
predicted_cumulative_logistic

Out[109]: 4.04682980616636 (Prognosewert)

Talking about the world

This text is part of the text “Rebooting Humanity”

(The German Version can be found HERE)

Author No. 1 (Gerd Doeben-Henisch)

Contact: info@uffmm.org

(Start: June 5, 2024, Last change: June 7, 2024)

Starting Point

A ‘text’ shall be written that speaks about the world, including all living beings, with ‘humans’ as the authors in the first instance. So far, we know of no cases where animals or plants write texts themselves: their view of life. We only know of humans who write from ‘their human perspective’ about life, animals, and plants. Much can be criticized about this approach. Upon further reflection, one might even realize that ‘humans writing about other humans and themselves’ is not so trivial either. Even humans writing ‘about themselves’ is prone to errors, can go completely ‘awry,’ can be entirely ‘wrong,’ which raises the question of what is ‘true’ or ‘false.’ Therefore, we should spend some thoughts on how we humans can talk about the world and ourselves in a way that gives us a chance not just to ‘fantasize,’ but to grasp something that is ‘real,’ something that describes what truly characterizes us as humans, as living beings, as inhabitants of this planet… but then the question pops up again, what is ‘real’? Are we caught in a cycle of questions with answers, where the answers themselves are again questions upon closer inspection?

First Steps

Life on Planet Earth

At the start of writing, we assume that there is a ‘Planet Earth’ and on this planet there is something we call ‘life,’ and we humans—belonging to the species Homo sapiens—are part of it.

Language

We also assume that we humans have the ability to communicate with each other using sounds. These sounds, which we use for communication, we call here ‘speech sounds’ to indicate that the totality of sounds for communication forms a ‘system’ which we ultimately call ‘language.’

Meaning

Since we humans on this planet can use completely different sounds for the ‘same objects’ in the same situation, it suggests that the ‘meaning’ of speech sounds is not firmly tied to the speech sounds themselves, but somehow has to do with what happens ‘in our minds.’ Unfortunately, we cannot look ‘into our minds.’ It seems a lot happens there, but this happening in the mind is ‘invisible.’ Nevertheless, in ‘everyday life,’ we experience that we can ‘agree’ with others whether it is currently ‘raining’ or if it smells ‘bad’ or if there is a trash bin on the sidewalk blocking the way, etc. So somehow, the ‘happenings in the mind’ seem to have certain ‘agreements’ among different people, so that not only I see something specific, but the other person does too, and we can even use the same speech sounds for it. And since a program like chatGPT can translate my German speech sounds, e.g., into English speech sounds, I can see that another person who does not speak German, instead of my word ‘Mülltonne,’ uses the word ‘trash bin’ and then nods in agreement: ‘Yes, there is a trash bin.’ Would that be a case for a ‘true statement’?

Changes and Memories

Since we experience daily how everyday life constantly ‘changes,’ we know that something that just found agreement may no longer find it the next moment because the trash bin is no longer there. We can only notice these changes because we have something called ‘memory’: we can remember that just now at a specific place there was a trash bin, but now it’s not. Or is this memory just an illusion? Can I trust my memory? If now everyone else says there was no trash bin, but I remember there was, what does that mean?

Concrete Body

Yes, and then my body: time and again I need to drink something, eat something, I’m not arbitrarily fast, I need some space, … my body is something very concrete, with all sorts of ‘sensations,’ ‘needs,’ a specific ‘shape,’ … and it changes over time: it grows, it ages, it can become sick, … is it like a ‘machine’?

Galaxies of Cells

Today we know that our human body resembles less a ‘machine’ and more a ‘galaxy of cells.’ Our body has about 37 trillion (10¹²) body cells with another 100 trillion cells in the gut that are vital for our digestive system, and these cells together form the ‘body system.’ The truly incomprehensible thing is that these approximately 140 trillion cells are each completely autonomous living beings, with everything needed for life. And if you know how difficult it is for us as humans to maintain cooperation among just five people over a long period, then you can at least begin to appreciate what it means that 140 trillion beings manage to communicate and coordinate actions every second—over many years, even decades—so that the masterpiece ‘human body’ exists and functions.

Origin as a Question

And since there is no ‘commander’ who constantly tells all the cells what to do, this ‘miracle of the human system’ expands further into the dimension of where the concept comes from that enables this ‘super-galaxy of cells’ to be as they are. How does this work? How did it arise?

Looking Behind Phenomena

In the further course, it will be important to gradually penetrate the ‘surface of everyday phenomena’ starting from everyday life, to make visible those structures that are ‘behind the phenomena,’ those structures that hold everything together and at the same time constantly move, change everything.

Fundamental Dimension of Time

All this implies the phenomenon ‘time’ as a basic category of all reality. Without time, there is also no ‘truth’…

[1] Specialists in brain research will of course raise their hand right away, and will want to say that they can indeed ‘look into the head’ by now, but let’s wait and see what this ‘looking into the head’ entails.

[2] If we assume for the number of stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, with an estimated 100 – 400 billion stars that there are 200 billion, then our body system would correspond to the scope of 700 galaxies in the format of the Milky Way, one cell for one star.

[3] Various disciplines of natural sciences, especially certainly evolutionary biology, have illuminated many aspects of this mega-wonder partially over the last approx. 150 years. One can marvel at the physical view of our universe, but compared to the super-galaxies of life on Planet Earth, the physical universe seems downright ‘boring’… Don’t worry: ultimately, both are interconnected: one explains the other…”

Telling Stories

Fragments of Everyday Life—Without Context

We constantly talk about something: the food, the weather, the traffic, shopping prices, daily news, politics, the boss, colleagues, sports events, music, … mostly, these are ‘fragments’ from the larger whole that we call ‘everyday life’. People in one of the many crisis regions on this planet, especially those in natural disasters or even in war…, live concretely in a completely different world, a world of survival and death.

These fragments in the midst of life are concrete, concern us, but they do not tell a story by themselves about where they come from (bombs, rain, heat,…), why they occur, how they are connected with other fragments. The rain that pours down is a single event at a specific place at a specific time. The bridge that must be closed because it is too old does not reveal from itself why this particular bridge, why now, why couldn’t this be ‘foreseen’? The people who are ‘too many’ in a country or also ‘too few’: Why is that? Could this have been foreseen? What can we do? What should we do?

The stream of individual events hits us, more or less powerfully, perhaps even simply as ‘noise’: we are so accustomed to it that we no longer even perceive certain events. But these events as such do not tell a ‘story about themselves’; they just happen, seemingly irresistibly; some say ‘It’s fate’.

Need for Meaning

It is notable that we humans still try to give the whole a ‘meaning’, to seek an ‘explanation’ for why things are the way they are. And everyday life shows that we have a lot of ‘imagination’ concerning possible ‘connections’ or ’causes’. Looking back into the past, we often smile at the various attempts at explanation by our ancestors: as long as nothing was known about the details of our bodies and about life in general, any story was possible. In our time, with science established for about 150 years, there are still many millions of people (possibly billions?) who know nothing about science and are willing to believe almost any story just because another person tells this story convincingly.

Liberation from the Moment through Words

Because of this ability, with the ‘power of imagination’ to pack things one experiences into a ‘story’ that suggests ‘possible connections’, through which events gain a ‘conceptual sense’, a person can try to ‘liberate’ themselves from the apparent ‘absoluteness of the moment’ in a certain way: an event that can be placed into a ‘context’ loses its ‘absoluteness’. Just by this kind of narrative, the experiencing person gains a bit of ‘power’: in narrating a connection, the narrator can make the experience ‘a matter’ over which they can ‘dispose’ as they see fit. This ‘power through the word’ can alleviate the ‘fear’ that an event can trigger. This has permeated the history of humanity from the beginning, as far as archaeological evidence allows.

Perhaps it is not wrong to first identify humans not as ‘hunters and gatherers’ or as ‘farmers’ but as ‘those who tell stories’.

[1] Such a magic word in Greek philosophy was the concept of ‘breath’ (Greek “pneuma”). The breath not only characterized the individually living but was also generalized to a life principle of everything that connected both body, soul, and spirit as well as permeated the entire universe. In the light of today’s knowledge, this ‘explanation’ could no longer be told, but about 2300 years ago, this belief was a certain ‘intellectual standard’ among all intellectuals, the prevailing ‘worldview’; it was ‘believed’. Anyone who thought differently was outside this ‘language game’.

Organization of an Order

Thinking Creates Relationships

As soon as one can ‘name’ individual events, things, processes, properties of things, and more through ‘language’, it is evident that humans have the ability to not only ‘name’ using language but to embed the ‘named’ through ‘arrangement of words in linguistic expression’ into ‘conceived relationships’, thereby connecting the individually named items not in isolation but in thought with others. This fundamental human ability to ‘think relationships in one’s mind’, which cannot be ‘seen’ but can indeed be ‘thought’ [1], is of course not limited to single events or a single relationship. Ultimately, we humans can make ‘everything’ a subject, and we can ‘think’ any ‘possible relationship’ in our minds; there are no fundamental restrictions here.

Stories as a Natural Force

Not only history is full of examples, but also our present day. Today, despite the incredible successes of modern science, almost universally, the wildest stories with ‘purely thought relationships’ are being told and immediately believed through all channels worldwide, which should give us pause. Our fundamental characteristic, that we can tell stories to break the absoluteness of the moment, obviously has the character of a ‘natural force’, deeply rooted within us, that we cannot ‘eradicate’; we might be able to ‘tame’ it, perhaps ‘cultivate’ it, but we cannot stop it. It is an ‘elemental characteristic’ of our thinking, that is: of our brain in the body.

Thought and Verified

The experience that we, the storytellers, can name events and arrange them into relationships—and ultimately without limit—may indeed lead to chaos if the narrated network of relationships is ultimately ‘purely thought’, without any real reference to the ‘real world around us’, but it is also our greatest asset. With it, humans can not only fundamentally free themselves from the apparent absoluteness of the present, but we can also create starting points with the telling of stories, ‘initially just thought relationships’, which we can then concretely ‘verify’ in our everyday lives.

A System of Order

When someone randomly sees another person who looks very different from what they are used to, all sorts of ‘assumptions’ automatically form in each person about what kind of person this might be. If one stops at these assumptions, these wild guesses can ‘populate the head’ and the ‘world in the head’ gets populated with ‘potentially evil people’; eventually, they might simply become ‘evil’. However, if one makes contact with the other, they might find that the person is actually nice, interesting, funny, or the like. The ‘assumptions in the head’ then transform into ‘concrete experiences’ that differ from what was initially thought. ‘Assumptions’ combined with ‘verification’ can thus lead to the formation of ‘reality-near ideas of relationships’. This gives a person the chance to transform their ‘spontaneous network of thought relationships’, which can be wrong—and usually are—into a ‘verified network of relationships’. Since ultimately the thought relationships as a network provide us with a ‘system of order’ in which everyday things are embedded, it appears desirable to work with as many ‘verified thought relationships’ as possible.

[1] The breath of the person opposite me, which for the Greeks connected my counterpart with the life force of the universe, which in turn is also connected with the spirit and the soul…

Hypotheses and Science

Challenge: Methodically Organized Guessing

The ability to think of possible relationships, and to articulate them through language, is innate [1], but the ‘use’ of this ability in everyday life, for example, to match thought relationships with the reality of everyday life, this ‘matching’/’verifying’ is not innate. We can do it, but we don’t have to. Therefore, it is interesting to realize that since the first appearance of Homo sapiens on this planet [2], 99.95% of the time has passed until the establishment of organized modern science about 150 years ago. This can be seen as an indication that the transition from ‘free guessing’ to ‘methodically organized systematic guessing’ must have been anything but easy. And if today still a large part of people—despite schooling and even higher education—[3] tend to lean towards ‘free guessing’ and struggle with organized verification, then there seems to be a not easy threshold that a person must overcome—and must continually overcome—to transition from ‘free’ to ‘methodically organized’ guessing.[4]

Starting Point for Science

The transition from everyday thinking to ‘scientific thinking’ is fluid. The generation of ‘thought relationships’ in conjunction with language, due to our ability of creativity/imagination, is ultimately also the starting point of science. While in everyday thinking we tend to spontaneously and pragmatically ‘verify’ ‘spontaneously thought relationships’, ‘science’ attempts to organize such verifications ‘systematically’ to then accept such ‘positively verified guesses’ as ’empirically verified guesses’ until proven otherwise as ‘conditionally true’. Instead of ‘guesses’, science likes to speak of ‘hypotheses’ or ‘working hypotheses’, but they remain ‘guesses’ through the power of our thinking and through the power of our imagination.[5]

[1] This means that the genetic information underlying the development of our bodies is designed so that our body with its brain is constructed during the growth phase in such a way that we have precisely this ability to ‘think of relationships’. It is interesting again to ask how it is possible that from a single cell about 13 trillion body cells (the approximately 100 trillion bacteria in the gut come ‘from outside’) can develop in such a way that they create the ‘impression of a human’ that we know.

[2] According to current knowledge, about 300,000 years ago in East Africa and North Africa, from where Homo sapiens then explored and conquered the entire world (there were still remnants of other human forms that had been there longer).

[3] I am not aware of representative empirical studies on how many people in a population tend to do this.

[4] Considering that we humans as the life form Homo sapiens only appeared on this planet after about 3.8 billion years, the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens make up roughly 0.008% of the total time since there has been life on planet Earth. Thus, not only are we as Homo sapiens a very late ‘product’ of the life process, but the ability to ‘systematically verify hypotheses’ also appears ‘very late’ in our Homo sapiens life process. Viewed across the entire life span, this ability seems to be extremely valuable, which is indeed true considering the incredible insights we as Homo sapiens have been able to gain with this form of thinking. The question is how we deal with this knowledge. This behavior of using systematically verified knowledge is not innate too.

[5] The ability of ‘imagination’ is not the opposite of ‘knowledge’, but is something completely different. ‘Imagination’ is a trait that ‘shows’ itself the moment we start to think, perhaps even in the fact ‘that’ we think at all. Since we can in principle think about ‘everything’ that is ‘accessible’ to our thinking, imagination is a factor that helps to ‘select’ what we think. In this respect, imagination is pre-posed to thinking.

HMI Analysis for the CM:MI paradigm. Part 2. Problem and Vision

Integrating Engineering and the Human Factor (info@uffmm.org)
eJournal uffmm.org ISSN 2567-6458, February 27-March 16, 2021,
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

Last change: March 16, 2021 (minor corrections)

HISTORY

As described in the uffmm eJournal  the wider context of this software project is an integrated  engineering theory called Distributed Actor-Actor Interaction [DAAI] further extended to the Collective Man-Machine Intelligence [CM:MI] paradigm.  This document is part of the Case Studies section.

HMI ANALYSIS, Part 2: Problem & Vision

Context

This text is preceded by the following texts:

Introduction

Before one starts the HMI analysis  some stakeholder  — in our case are the users stakeholder as well as  users in one role —  have to present some given situation — classifiable as a ‘problem’ — to depart from and a vision as the envisioned goal to be realized.

Here we give a short description of the problem for the CM:MI paradigm and the vision, what should be gained.

Problem: Mankind on the Planet Earth

In this project  the mankind  on the planet earth is  understood as the primary problem. ‘Mankind’ is seen here  as the  life form called homo sapiens. Based on the findings of biological evolution one can state that the homo sapiens has — besides many other wonderful capabilities — at least two extraordinary capabilities:

Outside to Inside

The whole body with the brain is  able to convert continuously body-external  events into internal, neural events. And  the brain inside the body receives many events inside the body as external events too. Thus in the brain we can observe a mixup of body-external (outside 1) and body-internal events (outside 2), realized as set of billions of neural processes, highly interrelated.  Most of these neural processes are unconscious, a small part is conscious. Nevertheless  these unconscious and conscious events are  neurally interrelated. This overall conversion from outside 1 and outside 2 into neural processes  can be seen as a mapping. As we know today from biology, psychology and brain sciences this mapping is not a 1-1 mapping. The brain does all the time a kind of filtering — mostly unconscious — sorting out only those events which are judged by the brain to be important. Furthermore the brain is time-slicing all its sensory inputs, storing these time-slices (called ‘memories’), whereby these time-slices again are no 1-1 copies. The storing of time-sclices is a complex (unconscious) process with many kinds of operations like structuring, associating, abstracting, evaluating, and more. From this one can deduce that the content of an individual brain and the surrounding reality of the own body as well as the world outside the own body can be highly different. All kinds of perceived and stored neural events which can be or can become conscious are  here called conscious cognitive substrates or cognitive objects.

Inside to Outside (to Inside)

Generally it is known that the homo sapiens can produce with its body events which have some impact on the world outside the body.  One kind of such events is the production of all kinds of movements, including gestures, running, grasping with hands, painting, writing as well as sounds by his voice. What is of special interest here are forms of communications between different humans, and even more specially those communications enabled by the spoken sounds of a language as well as the written signs of a language. Spoken sounds as well as written signs are here called expressions associated with a known language. Expressions as such have no meaning (A non-speaker of a language L can hear or see expressions of the language L but he/she/x  never will understand anything). But as everyday experience shows nearly every child  starts very soon to learn which kinds of expressions belong to a language and with what kinds of shared experiences they can be associated. This learning is related to many complex neural processes which map expressions internally onto — conscious and unconscious — cognitive objects (including expressions!). This mapping builds up an internal  meaning function from expressions into cognitive objects and vice versa. Because expressions have a dual face (being internal neural structures as well as being body-outside events by conversions from the inside to body-outside) it is possible that a homo sapiens  can transmit its internal encoding of cognitive objects into expressions from his  inside to the outside and thereby another homo sapiens can perceive the produced outside expression and  can map this outside expression into an intern expression. As far as the meaning function of of the receiving homo sapiens  is sufficiently similar to the meaning function of  the sending homo sapiens there exists some probability that the receiving homo sapiens can activate from its memory cognitive objects which have some similarity with those of  the sending  homo sapiens.

Although we know today of different kinds of animals having some form of language, there is no species known which is with regard to language comparable to  the homo sapiens. This explains to a large extend why the homo sapiens population was able to cooperate in a way, which not only can include many persons but also can stretch through long periods of time and  can include highly complex cognitive objects and associated behavior.

Negative Complexity

In 2006 I introduced the term negative complexity in my writings to describe the fact that in the world surrounding an individual person there is an amount of language-encoded meaning available which is beyond the capacity of an  individual brain to be processed. Thus whatever kind of experience or knowledge is accumulated in libraries and data bases, if the negative complexity is higher and higher than this knowledge can no longer help individual persons, whole groups, whole populations in a constructive usage of all this. What happens is that the intended well structured ‘sound’ of knowledge is turned into a noisy environment which crashes all kinds of intended structures into nothing or badly deformed somethings.

Entangled Humans

From Quantum Mechanics we know the idea of entangled states. But we must not dig into quantum mechanics to find other phenomena which manifest entangled states. Look around in your everyday world. There exist many occasions where a human person is acting in a situation, but the bodily separateness is a fake. While sitting before a laptop in a room the person is communicating within an online session with other persons. And depending from the  social role and the  membership in some social institution and being part of some project this person will talk, perceive, feel, decide etc. with regard to the known rules of these social environments which are  represented as cognitive objects in its brain. Thus by knowledge, by cognition, the individual person is in its situation completely entangled with other persons which know from these roles and rules  and following thereby  in their behavior these rules too. Sitting with the body in a certain physical location somewhere on the planet does not matter in this moment. The primary reality is this cognitive space in the brains of the participating persons.

If you continue looking around in your everyday world you will probably detect that the everyday world is full of different kinds of  cognitively induced entangled states of persons. These internalized structures are functioning like protocols, like scripts, like rules in a game, telling everybody what is expected from him/her/x, and to that extend, that people adhere to such internalized protocols, the daily life has some structure, has some stability, enables planning of behavior where cooperation between different persons  is necessary. In a cognitively enabled entangled state the individual person becomes a member of something greater, becoming a super person. Entangled persons can do things which usually are not possible as long you are working as a pure individual person.[1]

Entangled Humans and Negative Complexity

Although entangled human persons can principally enable more complex events, structures,  processes, engineering, cultural work than single persons, human entanglement is still limited by the brain capacities as well as by the limits of normal communication. Increasing the amount of meaning relevant artifacts or increasing the velocity of communication events makes things even more worse. There are objective limits for human processing, which can run into negative complexity.

Future is not Waiting

The term ‘future‘ is cognitively empty: there exists nowhere an object which can  be called ‘future’. What we have is some local actual presence (the Now), which the body is turning into internal representations of some kind (becoming the Past), but something like a future does not exist, nowhere. Our knowledge about the future is radically zero.

Nevertheless, because our bodies are part of a physical world (planet, solar system, …) and our entangled scientific work has identified some regularities of this physical world which can be bused for some predictions what could happen with some probability as assumed states where our clocks are showing a different time stamp. But because there are many processes running in parallel, composed of billions of parameters which can be tuned in many directions, a really good forecast is not simple and depends from so many presuppositions.

Since the appearance of homo sapiens some hundred thousands years ago in Africa the homo sapiens became a game changer which makes all computations nearly impossible. Not in the beginning of the appearance of the homo sapiens, but in the course of time homo sapiens enlarged its number, improved its skills in more and more areas, and meanwhile we know, that homo sapiens indeed has started to crash more and more  the conditions of its own life. And principally thinking points out, that homo sapiens could even crash more than only planet earth. Every exemplar of a homo sapiens has a built-in freedom which allows every time to decide to behave in a different way (although in everyday life we are mostly following some protocols). And this built-in freedom is guided by actual knowledge, by emotions, and by available resources. The same child can become a great musician, a great mathematician, a philosopher, a great political leader, an engineer, … but giving the child no resources, depriving it from important social contexts,  giving it the wrong knowledge, it can not manifest its freedom in full richness. As human population we need the best out of all children.

Because  the processing of the planet, the solar system etc.  is going on, we are in need of good forecasts of possible futures, beyond our classical concepts of sharing knowledge. This is where our vision enters.

VISION: DEVELOPING TOGETHER POSSIBLE FUTURES

To find possible and reliable shapes of possible futures we have to exploit all experiences, all knowledge, all ideas, all kinds of creativity by using maximal diversity. Because present knowledge can be false — as history tells us –, we should not rule out all those ideas, which seem to be too crazy at a first glance. Real innovations are always different to what we are used to at that time. Thus the following text is a first rough outline of the vision:

  1. Find a format
  2. which allows any kinds of people
  3. for any kind of given problem
  4. with at least one vision of a possible improvement
  5. together
  6. to search and to find a path leading from the given problem (Now) to the envisioned improved state (future).
  7. For all needed communication any kind of  everyday language should be enough.
  8. As needed this everyday language should be extendable with special expressions.
  9. These considerations about possible paths into the wanted envisioned future state should continuously be supported  by appropriate automatic simulations of such a path.
  10. These simulations should include automatic evaluations based on the given envisioned state.
  11. As far as possible adaptive algorithms should be available to support the search, finding and identification of the best cases (referenced by the visions)  within human planning.

REFERENCES or COMMENTS

[1] One of the most common entangled state in daily life is the usage of normal language! A normal language L works only because the rules of usage of this language L are shared by all speaker-hearer of this language, and these rules are explicit cognitive structures (not necessarily conscious, mostly unconscious!).

Continuation

Yes, it will happen 🙂 Here.