Theory of Control - (3)

This is in continuation of my April 13 attempt to summarize my Convoluted Theory of Control.

Precedents to this article include Depression, Depression - Addendum, Theory of Control - (1), Nomino Patri, Theory of Control - (2), and AIs, Sad Songs, and Control (if you are so inclined to wallow in abstract pseudo emotional philosophy.)

Previous section headings in the Theory of Control - (1) post are pretty indicative of its content - "The Mechanism of Free Will", "Aggregation of Will into History", "Control - the Chaos Factor" and, "The Convoluted Theory of Control". Theory of Control - (2) covered "The Determinism Theorists" and "THe Contradiction Paradigm". Today, in part 3 of 4, we continue with "Control - Power and Motivation", "Power - Ellipsoids of Influence", "Heisenberg, Chaos, and the Anthropic Principles", "The Mess and the Hope" and "The Story So Far".

As I have said earlier... a state of depression is often a creative state for me... and right now, admittedly, I am pretty down and out. So here goes nothing...

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Control - Power and Motivation

The primary motivation for control is of course, survival. Each organism will attempt to affect its environment in such a way as to improve its survival chances, or the chance that it can reproduce. Or the organism will simply attempt to achieve a state/ status of privilege over others competing with it in a socio-economic context. In a nutshell, the primary motivation for control is one of ensuring the longevity/ reproduction/ health/ happiness of the self.

Of course, us humans have complicated this, as we have complicated all else.

We are probably the only species where tyranny is a historical truth of such huge proportions. The dominance of a father (or an alpha male) within a family unit can be seen in animals and humans both, take for instance a pride of lions, a tribe of apes, a flock of birds or a pack of dogs. But tyranny that subjugates entire tribes - hundreds/ thousands/ millions - to the whim of an individual (samples being Napoleon or Hitler) is unique to humans.

This is probably because we are capable of greater intellect and organization, therefore allowing for more efficient tyranny. Hitler didn't have to physically beat every German and Austrian and Pole in a no holds barred death-match to win dominance over them. Think about it - Tarzan had to rip three or four rib-cages before he became the dominant male in his tribe. You just can't do that a thousand times over to win a nation (exception: Attila the Hun)

So... our higher levels of mind and consciousness allow for more abstract forms of dominance, more attuned to context and circumstance. We possess more varieties of 'Power' than brute strength. Take the cliched high-school. The jock dominates the sports arena. The archetypal geek with glasses excels at math. The well-built, smart talking dumbass on the other hand might show the geek up in a 'real-world' marketing job.

I used a word there - 'power' - which is a very important term, birthed in the concept of control. Power (latent or otherwise) is simply your capacity to control. Each of the three persons above, the jock, the geek, and the smartass, all possess power of different varieties. And therefore they can control the event histories they are affecting in different ways - not just to varying degrees.

With this abstraction in the ways in which our ability to control is manifested, comes abstraction and amplification of our control ambitions.

We want to control the fate of whole nations, whole societies for a variety of reasons. Maybe to ensure that our ideology endures. Maybe to ensure that our ethnic group/ tribe is the dominant one. Or to simply fulfil some deep seated Freudian urge to be the alpha male. (All three true for Hitler and Napoleon)

We want to control our economies. Our imagination grasps more of economics than merely putting our daily bread on our plate. A chimp for instance will only seek to control his 'economy' by scaring competitors from other tribes away from the termite-hill he is foraging. Agriculture, manufacturing industries, supply chains, distribution systems, markets, infrastructure, the concept of money as a means to exchange, stock markets etc. can be looked at as our sophisticated equivalents to the 'use stick and growl' approach the chimp employs. In other words, he establishes control over the means of production and the produce, ensuring that the food supply is unrestricted.

We attempt to control our own minds. I doubt if any other species in the biosphere indulges to such an extent in counseling or psychotropic drugs (alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and other drugs included). The primary reason for that being our abstract urge to attain 'happiness' in life. (I digress, but what is happiness if not a state where all your Maslow hierarchy needs are satisfied?)

We want to control our environment. The poor chimp will probably break a few boughs off a tree to shelter himself from the rain. We run a whole industry for weather prediction - and we even had ambitions to do weather control in the cold war era, thereby spawning much science fiction. (Of course, our actual hopes to control the weather have had a major setback in the form of the chaos theory). But we do control our environment as never before in the history of history. We dam rivers, we cut forests, and we poke holes in the ozone...

But in the end all of our quests for power, for control, whether as a species or as nations or as tribes or individuals are rooted in the survival instinct. What makes things interesting of course, is the varieties of power, our sheer numbers, and chaos.

Power - Ellipsoids of Influence

This is where things get hairy. Therefore, to avoid any heckling, let's use a complicated analogy.

The universe they say (or some of the fabled 'they' say, as of today) is run by four fundamental forces. The gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak nuclear force. Each flavor follows a certain law, although the laws are forever in, er, flux. The inverse square law for the first two for instance - I don't know, or care to know the equivalent for the other two because somewhere in there is a 'loss of symmetry' my pseudo-physicist mind cannot digest. But I digress again...

So, each kind of power a human being possesses has a certain potency and a certain, shall we say, sphere of influence (due nods to Mr. Covey, although for the physical forces I understand its more an ellipsoid of influence). So yeah, lets use the term 'ellipsoids of influence' for the sake of compliance with copyright laws should any be applicable.

You cannot exert control over economic issues without economic power - unless you use brute strength and start a war you say? You can't mount a war without economic power either. It is your economic power that allows for martial strength. You cannot control your mind without intellect and emotional power. You cannot control the opinion of the masses without the power of effective expression. And you certainly cannot win a wrestling match without physical power. And all these forms of power, with their ellipsoids of influence exist on separate planes - each of these planes intersecting at some point to create the hodgepodge that is the universe.

Heisenberg, Chaos and the Anthropic principles

Here is some less-pseudo stuff that also needs to be incorporated in the CTOC.

The modern chaos theory, the one with all the Lorentz attractors and non-linear equations and fractals and the like that befuddle me, can be summarized for a pseudo-scientist such as me in a very simple statement. You have a chance no better than that of an icicle in Dante's hell if you want to predict the future state of any system accurately. You can come close, in the same ballpark maybe, but not closer. And not all systems are going to inherently obey equations describing their behavior.

Now, the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle is another long-time favorite of mine. You cannot measure any physical property beyond a certain level of certainty, because your measuring apparatus is inevitably going to alter what it is measuring. (Or, in stuffy mechanics terms, at a time you can either be certain of a particle's location or velocity).

Then there is the anthropic principle, developed to discuss whether humanity is in fact special in the general universal scheme of things. (quoted from Wikipedia) - The three primary versions of the principle, as stated by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler (1986), are:

Weak anthropic principle (WAP): "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so."

Strong anthropic principle (SAP): "The Universe must have those properties which allow life to develop within it at some stage in its history."

Final anthropic principle (FAP): "Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out."

(Please Google to read about all this in detail - that's what I do.)

The Mess, and the Hope

So here we are then. Too many agents exerting will, will manifested as control - the ability to control measured by power. Power of many varieties, each capable of different kinds of influence. And Chaos. But there is also a silver lining; approximation.

Take gravitational models for instance. Technically, to predict the position and velocity of any particle in the universe, you will have to take the initial state of the universe, and calculate the position of not just that particle but every other particle that it could possibly have interacted with, directly or indirectly (infinite times removed). So to predict absolutely accurately where, with respect to the Sun, the Earth will be in 242 days, you will have to build a model of the proto-universe and take it from there...

But because of the inverse-square law, faraway stars and planets don't matter to you. Besides, so long as you know the initial conditions in the immediate vicinity of the Earth to a certain degree, and you assume that no external factors (say, visiting comets and asteroids) interfere with the event history, you can predict the position reasonably well. So instead of building a model of the proto-universe, you build a model of the galaxy - or to be really crude, of the solar system. Also, you don't try to start at the big bang or t = 0 (a simple equation that itself may cause huge controversy). You can start at t = today and calculate the position for t = today + 242.

So, yeah... you can predict, and therefore proceed to control the position of the Earth 242 days from now. (Arguably of course, humanity hasn't yet discovered a way to shift the orbit of a planet - even a puny one like our home - but we're still learning, aren't we?) Here's the catch; you did a tradeoff. You assumed and approximated away your accuracy, to achieve... power.

The Story So Far

Succinct, summarizing observations:

1. The universe contains life, and as such is an arena suited to the birth and proliferation of intelligent, evolving, reproducing, life.


2. Free will is a property of all living things, and the aggregation of the will of every creature living in the universe, and the constraints - inevitabilities and impossibilities - of the physical universe contribute to the event history that is the universe.


3. Free will, choice, leads to expressions of power. Power is a measure of how and to what extent the 'agent of will' can affect event histories around it. Prediction is of course the prerequisite for intelligent control. Knowledge is, as they say, power.


4. Humanity as a species, whether or not by inherent design, has acquired a position of prime importance in the event history of a nitrogen-rich globe orbiting a mid-sized yellow star floating in an obscure region of an insignificant galaxy.


5. Human beings strive to possess the power to control themselves and the universe around them. While this started as a manifestation of the primal survival instinct, it has since taken on more abstract forms.


6. The sheer volume of data that will have to be processed and subjected to computation so as to arrive at a reasonably accurate description of the sprawling event history that is the universe immediately precludes overall prediction and control.


7. By extension, you have to take any prediction and control of any sub-systems in the universe with a fist of salt, because everything affects everything - almost.


8. Further, given the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the unpredictable behavior of non-linear systems, and the complete unaligned randomness in the ways in which agents of will behave in the universe as an arena, control, to an absolute degree of certainty is impossible.


9. This applies not only to the physical systems of the universe, but also the social, economic, political, psychological and evolutionary systems in it, as not only do the fundamental principles apply more or less to all of them, there are also too many variables in each one.


10. The way out in all this is approximation and assumption. Which is to say we trade off our zest for accuracy and precision, to improve our effectiveness.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how our world runs - or is run. Whether God plays dice with the world or not, we certainly do. We get over our inability to predict and control the behavior of angry mobs and deploy riot control using tear gas and batons. In other words, we accept the risk of beating up some innocent people, or exerting excessive force so as to be assured of control. We get over our inability to predict economic behavior and use short-term (annual, ten year or century spanning) statistics as the basis for market investment. In other words, we accept short-term market crashes so as to allow for economic growth. We accept psychotropic drugs as a means to alleviate depression in the short term, although it may not permanently control the problem or make us 'happy'.

And is there a better way to live? Is the convoluted theory of control recommending a better way to control the universe and our selves? Yes, and no. No, if you are talking about mundane control. Yes, if you are talking about abstract control. It wouldn't be convoluted otherwise now, would it?

(to be concluded...)