Presentation to Melbourne Emergence Meetup 12 February 2019 with run of mostly shortish video clips and interspersed stills consolidated into a single external 18:44 video.

1. Tony Smith
Melbourne Emergence Meetup
14 February 2019
Codifying Commonalities

2. Too Funny for Words
Abstractions, Category Errors,
Epistemic Cuts
Life on an Active Planet The Two-edged Sword
Multiple Paths to Emergence
Constraints and
Degrees of Freedom
Birds and Others Interweb to Facebook
Better than Out of Control
Information,
Maps and Territories
Urban Hydrology out of Sight
Going Down with
the Egg Basket
Self-organising, Adaptive
(was: Here Now Succession
Process Traces Time Causation? or
Dynamic encodings in condensed matter)
Codification and
Communication
Exploiting a
Dissipating Gradient:
creaming, trickle down
Dystopian Utopias and
Science Fiction
Towards Healthy
General Knowledge
The Inside View:
knowing when you're dreaming
Verbal Blindness
Accepting Cosmological
Responsibility

3. Tonight’s updates 3-2-1
1. David Graeber's book has provided a basis for an initially omitted 20th
"chapter" on the mess standard assumptions about the human project are
getting us into. (Inserting chapter 18: Going Down with the Egg Basket.)
2. Further developing the hierarchy of coding levels has brought focus onto
ribosomes with conserved functionality from before life's last common
(cellular) ancestor.
3. While Gregory Bateson rightly points out that information systems are
driven by difference, a summer interrogating natural systems in neutral
territory has illuminated a need to focus more on commonalities.

4. 1. Valentine’s Day opener of a pair of affectionate Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos.
2. With sea breeze opposing river flow, feather’s movements appeared intentional.
3. Wood Ducklings, one older than other five, in their standard two parent family.
4. Black Ducklings looking for single mother, mostly drowned out by Reed Warblers.
5. More conventional single parent Black Duck family.
6. Snail Art reminding their are limits to video and marking end of duckling videos.
7. Swallows in and out of nest six days before hour long recording from tripod.
Welcome Swallows show how finely tuned chemistry is to enable such a lifestyle.
8. Sight to keep birds and humans on their toes. Black Ducks actively monitor them.
9. Reed Warbler adding its tweet to the chorus.
10. Wood Ducks flying (and Black Ducks swimming) to reflective estuary for evening.
11. Wood Ducks go back to grazing after stampede and mass staring.*
12. Family of Pacific Gulls and small flock of Silver Gulls at nearby Jamieson Creek.
13. Flock of Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos in “self”(bird)-sown Cypress.
14. Visiting flock of 10 departing in opposite direction to more frequently visiting pair.
15. Male Gang Gang Cockatoos harvesting berries from vine near track to Jebbs Pool.
16. “Squawker” was soundtrack of summer, learning to be a Magpie from alpha male.
17. Currawongs heard always but seen rarely except up the hill, this on The Brothers.
*Following discussion about ducks staring at people:
“Walking back past the playground and counting
ducks, as you do, several times a day, I reconfirmed a
new record total of 48 Wood Ducks (plus two Black
Ducks) when something focused the Wood Ducks and
they stampeded, like sheep away from a passing train,
in perfect synchrony towards the track, pulling up even
more suddenly than they started, all in a line and
staring. Only trouble was I needed to back away far
enough to get them all in the iPhone's field of view, by
which time they had started to drift back to grazing.”
Commonalities not Differences
Originally presented as 17 slides, these have been consolidated into a single video.

5. Commonalities not Differences
After The War (1939-45) most who fought and most of the Baby
Boomers conceived on their return rejected authoritarianism and
the very idea of military solutions, but the financial “elite” did not
go away and was more than willing to develop and deploy the
unthinkable weaponry of Mutually Assured Destruction while
promoting an ethic that placed preserving their exploitative
ideology ahead of continuation of civilisation. That same faction
remain wilfully ignorant of the intrinsic value of what as far as we
know may be the only planet with metazoan-level life, sharable
knowledge, or technological capabilities for space exploration.
In the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union was
repackaged as anointment of Global Neoliberal Capitalism as the
only conceivable way to organise human affairs, several major
social subsystems have found opportunities to avoid effective
scrutiny or to even avoid responding to any articulated challenges:
• Military Industrial Complex General Eisenhower warned about
• Indiscriminate industrial killing for food and fibre profitability
• School systems and media made white collar work aspirational
• Nuclear families load expectations on parents and isolate kids
• Legislatures, lawyers and police ensure expansion of criminality
• “Elite”, bankers and economists fake growth by counting more
When human atoms are knit into an organisation in which they
are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but
as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw
material is flesh and blood.
—Pioneer cybernetics theorist Norbert Weiner in
The Human Use of Human Beings published 1950, revised 1954
Us us us us and Them them them them
And after all we’re only ordinary men (…)
With with with with, without
And who’ll deny that’s what the fighting’s all about
—Wright and Waters, Pink Floyd
from the album Dark Side of the Moon 1973
The interaction between (interacting components) of mind
is triggered by difference, and difference is a nonsubstantial
phenomenon not located in space or time; difference is related to
negentropy and entropy rather than to energy.
—Pioneer systems theorist Gregory Bateson in
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity first published 1979
The circles of privilege we enjoy, the lines in the sand we draw
behind our own heels, are being challenged by a desire to embrace
the other. It’s becoming more rewarding to look at commonalities.

6. Here Now Succession Process
Traces Time Causation?
had to become
Dynamic encodings in condensed matter
(maintaining interesting isolates
through cosmological timescales)
now simplified to
Self-organising, Adaptive
ultimately covering all of the above
Track-edge vegetation
Cumberland River

7. Self-organising, Adaptive
Ribosomes

8. Last October under “maintaining interesting isolates through cosmological
timescales” I made introductory points about Ribosomes as the base level
Ribosomes are fundamental to life as we know it
Molecular assemblage translating RNA to protein
Ribosomal RNA molecules + ribosomal proteins
Functionality highly conserved across all life forms
DNA added longer term replicable code stability
Nucleus role eukaryotic ribosomes divergence
Coupled with ATP intracellular energy transport
R/DNA as genetic code requires dynamic context
Viruses depend on appropriating cellular dynamics
Enzymes are short proteins which act as catalysts
Self-organising, Adaptive
(was: Here Now Succession
Process Traces Time Causation? or
Dynamic encodings in condensed matter)
Billions of years
Ribosomes
(R/DNA coding for proteins)
Metabolic autopoesis
Stromatolites
Hundreds of millions
Neuronal networks
Mycorrhizal networks
(Forest knowledge sharing)
Ecosystems
Some millions
Tens of thousands
Millenia
Decades
Song birds et al
Human language
Procedural instruction
Story telling
Written language
Computer programming

9. 3D-printed model of a ribosome
(photo credit: Steve Jurvetson via Flickr)
Found in Dylani Lewis’s blog post
https://dyanilewis.com/2014/09/16/ribosomes-unlocking-
the-secrets-to-your-cellular-protein-factories/
about an interview she recorded with Nobel laureate
Ada Yonath for University of Melbourne’s Up Close
https://upclose.unimelb.edu.au/episode/315-ribosomes-
unlocking-secrets-your-cellular-protein-factories
The ribosome as a missing
link in the evolution of life
Meredith Root-Bernstein & Robert Root-Bernstein
Journal of Theoretical Biology 367 (2015) 130–158
“Highlights”
• Hypothesise that ribosome was self-replicating
intermediate between compositional or RNA-
world and cellular life.
• rRNA contains genetic information encoding
self-replication machinery: all 20 tRNAs and
active sites of key ribosomal proteins.
• Statistical analyses demonstrate rRNA-encodings
are very unlikely to have occurred by chance.
• Contradicts view of rRNA as purely structural
suggesting instead that rRNA, mRNA and tRNA
had common ribosomal ancestor.
• Suggest that DNA and cells evolved to protect
and optimise pre-existing ribosome functions.
Paper available via:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S0022519314006778
Bill does “not think that the ribosome ever evolved
from an entity that stood alone in its own right.
“Much more likely that it evolved in a complex
melange of macromolecules where some components
had some capacity for approximate autocatalysis (…),
and that was also collectively autocatalytic”

10. Going Down with the Egg Basket

11. Going Down with the Egg Basket

12. This* is what I had in mind when I first began using the phrase
“structural violence”—structures that could only be created and
maintained by the threat of violence, even if in their ordinary,
day-to-day workings, no actual physical violence need take place.
If one reflects on the matter, the same can be said of most
phenomena that are ordinarily referred to as “structural
violence” in the literature—racism, sexism, class privilege—even if
their actual mode of operation is infinitely more complex.
Here I was probably inspired most by my readings in feminist
literature, which often does speak of structural violence in this
way.
—David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules
*refers to his immediately preceding apocryphal story of a warrior
tribe subjugating peaceful farmers.
Graeber is a cultural anthropologist, anarchist activist, veteran of
Occupy Wall Street, and award-winning author.
The book stitches together prior essays with a strong introduction
and raises the lack of distinction between “play” and “rules” in
most languages and a human need for certainty and uncertainty.
Going Down with the Egg Basket
should put a Complex Systems
theory wrapper around Graeber’s
wealth of data, with emphasis on
the emergence of entities which
get established within gradients
of words and money, gathering
influence and resources for their
own unexamined purposes.

13. Miscellany
The Great Silence tries the standard Analytic Philosophy tactic
of appearing exhaustive but still manages to totally miss the
combinatorial argument’s escape from the Copernican veto by
giving every macro scale entity a distinctive history. Book uses
Karen & Poul Anderson’s notion of “sophont”.
Presenting update of Urban Hydrology Out of Sight to
Spotswood-South Kingsville Residents Association next week.
Have booked trip to Mud Island Saturday, 2nd March, the first
that has come up in two years, which should provide stimulus
for Nepean Bay Bar.

14. Suggestions! Questions?