The algorithm is an important tool for the MitM for two reasons
- Its workings do not depend on context or viewpoint
- The algorithm is beyond dispute
While the algorithm may or may not solve the problem at hand, the algorithm itself cannot be faulty. You just design the next algorithm using lessons learned from the previous try.
In pragmatic foresight, things move dissectively downward towards fundamental mathematical physics, their basic properties and laws. The domain thus revealed is meaningless, its fundamental laws controlling a vast but inaccessible arena. Down there in the sanctuary, no human voices may be heard.
Up in the institution, things are different. Invoking a rich system of meaning and interpretation, humans explain themselves to themselves in terms of what they believe and wish. It is a world suspended in space by the divine chatter of human voices. Paths through the communication traffic are always circular, and not dissective. Circle power deals with meaning until the energy supply runs out.
The explanation of the right now on the basis of natural law, the fundamental laws of physics and chance, involves a congeries of computational schemes, algorithms, specialized programming languages, techniques for numerical integration, huge canned programs for modular modeling, computer graphics, interpolation methods, computer-theoretic shortcuts and strenuous efforts to convert the data of dynamic simulation into coherent patterns.
The vector always faces this dilemma. Without the triple concepts (algorithms, symbols, information), natural law knowledge points nowhere; but with the triple concepts in place, the laws are no longer simple. Intelligence is necessary to construct the inferential staircase, scrutable to natural law. Complexity is transferred from theories to facts and back again to theories. Ultimately, things are as they are for no better reason than they are what they are.
The fundamental natural laws, radically simple, describe the primordial soup from which the world’s complexity ultimately arises. Theories of change may always be expressed in terms of the conservation laws. Where there is conservation, there is symmetry and coherency. The fundamental laws of physics achieve their effect by aligning with symmetry. Natural law exhibit a shapeliness of mathematical form and a compactness of expression that itself cannot be improved in favor of anything shapelier or more compact. Natural laws capture the world’s patterns by capturing the play of its symmetries.
At the conceptual basement, the vector’s bedrock sanctuary from which he need not further retreat, no further explanation is possible. No one has to account for their complexity. Natural laws are incompressible and so short they may be handled by computer. At the same time they are material, however, they must be complete, explaining everything that is complex. That is why they are useful.
To investigate the future, the MitM takes existing reality of right now as the starting point. The present is always coherent and complete and, accordingly, can be described in mathematical physics. Then, using the transfer function of reality operating on the present instant, time is moved forward in discrete steps respecting the laws of conservation. Recursion then takes the now for its ride into the future on the back of this algorithm according to the script of imposed disturbances. This exercise investigates a single future path possibility. Investigations are then done, always starting from the right now, for a different selection of imposed disturbances. This cycle is continued until the tracks through the future of interest have reached the designer’s specified stop rule. This is pragmatic foresight to the standards of transparency and objectivity.
Scrutable connectivity – the construction of the inferential staircase leading from the laws of physics to the world which lies about us – irreplaceable. No claim is made that the scrutable connectivity to natural law is beyond all errors. What is claimed is that its objectivity is so very much better than subjectivity for seeking goals.
To the producers, complexity is subject to a principle of conservation, much like angular momentum. Complexity has to be either in the immediate material configuration or in the laws governing its formation and interaction. In this way, complexity is connected to a form of intelligence – intrinsically connected to natural law. Transparency is a member of the class of functions that submit themselves to the authority of an algorithm.
The triple concepts of algorithm, information and symbol lie at the prime mover of reality. An algorithm is an abstract instrument of coordination, supplying procedural means to various ends – residing in a world beyond time. Almost any institution can execute an algorithm and so come to command some form of intelligence. What is an institution but a social organization that has undertaken the execution of complicated algorithms.
Complexity and design are connected and intelligence and complexity are connected. A design is the physical overflow of intelligence itself, its trace in matter. An algorithm is an ambidextrous artifact, residing at the heart of both human intelligence and intelligence amplification. Algorithms are instruments that convey information.
An algorithm creates a world. This world is entirely accessible, its laws perfectly lucid, and the processes that they describe entirely subservient to the laws that describe them. An algorithm is a scheme for the manipulation of symbols and an instrument for conveying information. Information is a general fungible commodity that can be shipped, organized, displayed, routed, stored, manipulated, disbursed, bought, sold and exchanged. An algorithm is an effective procedure to get something done in a finite number of discrete steps. It is a prescription for action.
The world the algorithm makes possible is retrograde in its nature to the designer’s world of mathematical physics. Algorithms are human artifacts. Its elements are symbols and not quarks. The world that emerges from this description is indifferent to human desires.
An algorithm is a finite procedure written in a fixed symbolic vocabulary, governed by precise instructions, moving in discrete steps, whose execution requires no insight, cleverness, intuition, intelligence or perspicuity, and that sooner or later comes to an end. Pragmatic foreseeability, design, is the product of executing algorithms of matchless power, elegance, concision and reliability.
An algorithm is an alien entity in this world, discrete, finite, moving crabwise through its appointed steps and forever bearing the mark of its human creator. In executing algorithms, time loses its pliant seamlessness and moves forward in finite, jerky, integral steps.
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