This document provides an introduction and overview to a proposed book on the topic of "Supervenience" which will explore how emergent minds and money can seize power over matter. It outlines 19 potential chapter topics and serves as a "where I'm at" for sharing the author's work in complex systems and emergence. Short sections give insights on various related concepts including multiple paths to emergence, the roles of order and chaos, constraints and degrees of freedom, the inside view, urban hydrology, birds and music, language as a tool and its limitations, dystopian utopias, and accepting cosmological responsibility.

1. SUPERVENIENCE
how emergent minds and money
seize power over matter
a preliminary exploration
Tony Smith
Melbourne Emergence Meetup
9 August 2018

2. RetrievingtinnyswampedatHentyReef,Marnego,bywalkingweighteddownacrossthebottom.
DrawnbyRicciJohnVicenti15/1/1963–31/3/1982,aboriginalblackdeathincustody,fosterbrother.
TheGadubanudwhocaredfortheOtwaycoastweredispersedtohelpLatrobeputalightatCape.
WemeetonthelandoftheWurundjeriandpayourrespectstoElderspast,presentandemerging.
the land was invaded
and people who weren’t here were killed
Myron Lysenko
Cumberland River Poet
1 August 2016

3. This is a first step towards a needed “book”
on Supervenience that will briefly introduce
nineteen candidate “chapters” in quest of
early input into the eventual structure.
It will tie together a few earlier topics from
Melbourne Emergence, though far from all,
and go beyond.
It is in part a “where I’m up to” on complex
systems and emergence that has motivated
the more recent half of my life and needs to
be better shared.
SUPERVENIENCE
how emergent minds and money
seize power over matter

4. Too Funny for Words
Australian Fur Seal
Entertaining Diver
Henty Reef, Marengo

5. Too Funny for Words
Sharing a story
with occasional
reference to
mathematical
concepts aiming to
convince you that
cultural reliance on
words and numbers
both facilitates and
impedes our
experience of the
world and our
capacity to act.
Words oversimplify.
Words can underpin
inflated expectations.
Numbers more so.
Cognitive dissonance.
Humorous surprises.
Story-based cultures.
Surprise definitive of
complex Emergence.
Plenty to laugh about.

6. Multiple Paths to Emergence

7. Multiple Paths to Emergence
To study Emergence is to look at
things which could not have
reasonably been predicted based
on prior knowledge but which
can subsequently be seen to be
clearly within bounds.
Major mechanisms include:
•synergistic/symbiotic pairings,
•larger population organisation,
•formation of persistent patterns
within a dissipating gradient.

8. Better than Out of Control

9. Better than Out of Control
Kevin Kelly’s 1993 book
was the first popular
account of growing interest
in Complex Systems.
Misconceptions about the
roles of emergent Order
and Chaos motivated an
unproductive search for a
boundary between,
obscuring the possibility
that they are partners in
creating the universe that
begat life and us.

10. Here Now Succession Process
Traces Time Causation?
Track-edge vegetation
Cumberland River

11. Here Now Succession Process
Traces Time Causation?
While we make productive use of
treating time as a dimension,
this may have been overplayed in
ideas like the Block Universe.
We live in the here and now,
though life developed pattern
recognition based on traces that
persist in condensed matter
which DNA and neuronal
networks dynamically encode.

12. Towards Healthy
General Knowledge
Brimbank Park

13. Towards Healthy
General Knowledge
The amount of accessible knowledge is
growing rapidly. It is way beyond an
individual to be across most fields.
We need to respect others’ areas of focus.
We and they also need knowledge grounded
on foundations that stand scrutiny.
I might have wider and deeper knowledge
across the broad sweep of sciences, but only
fragments about popular entertainments.

14. Abstractions, Category Errors,
Epistemic Cuts
Kosciusko Range
approaching Corryong
on road from Albury

15. Abstractions, Category Errors,
Epistemic Cuts
Thoughts about something, not even
detailed descriptions, can do no more
than represent that thing incompletely.
Thinking is assisted by recognising what
kind of thing you are thinking about and
not accepting a contestable placement.
Laws governing behaviour emerge with
the entities concerned, enabling focus to
be kept without spurious back reference.

16. Constraints and
Degrees of Freedom
UNDERGROUND
LOOP
FLINDERS
STREET-VIADUCT
UPFIELD
LINE
SYDENHAM LINE
BROADMEADOWS
LINE
MELBOURNE-MURRAY
RIVER
SOUTH
KENSINGTON-WEST
FOO
DOCKLANDS
MELBOURNE
KENSINGTON
NORTH
MELBOURNE
WEST
MELBOURNE
CITY OF
MELBOURNE
J J
Holland
Park
Eades
Park
North Melbourne
Recreation
Reserve
SOUTH
KENSINGTON
STATION
NORTH
MELBOURNE
STATION
Map Projection: Transverse Mercator
Horizontal Datum: GDA 1994
Grid: GDA 1994 MGA Zone 55o Date: 15/05/2017
WEST GATE TUNNEL PROJECT
PROJECT BOUNDARY
Sheet 24 of 31 WDA-WDP-LFWD-0024Data Source:
WDA & CPBJH
0 70 140 210 28035
Metres
Legend
Project Boundary
Proposed Road Alignment
Proposed Other Structures
Property Boundary
Melbourne
Laverton
North
Yarraville
The unfairly maligned West Melbourne lagoon was a salt
lake refreshed by flood waters from the Chain of Ponds
that were modified to form lower Moonee Ponds Creek.

17. Constraints and
Degrees of Freedom
Concepts which are formalised in
mathematics sometimes provide insights
into worldly behaviour.
Too much choice can be as inhibiting as too
little. Given a blank slate, identifying
external constraints can help discover a
productive path.
Mathematically, adding constraints
correspondingly reduces degrees of freedom.
This translates well to physics and to life.
Seek sweet spot.

18. Information,
Maps and Territories

19. Information,
Maps and Territories
Late modernity is so obsessed with
information technologies that even
serious scientists have proposed that
the world is built on information.
More productive to see information
as useful abstraction while allowing
usual philosophical disclaimers.
Don’t confuse maps with territories.
Treat the patient, not the clipboard.

20. Codification and
Communication
St. Kilda Pride March
during lead up to
2015 election

21. Codification and
Communication
Our proliferation of coding
systems are one more variant
on an old trick for collecting
and using knowledge, preceded
by DNA and neuronal nets.
Lynne Kelly explained
monumental transition in oral
memory methods needed to
support agriculture.
Bill Hall explained post literate
growth with climatic impact.

22. The Inside View
knowing when you're dreaming

23. Science is casting off its behaviourist
blinkers in important areas but still
averse to doing a lot with subjective
accounts of mental processes.
So for now we are stuck examining
our singular experiences informed
only by general worldly awareness.
Noting our own transitions to and
from sleep and dreams may help.
The Inside View
knowing when you're dreaming

24. Life on an Active Planet
Australian
Reed Warbler
Cumberland River

25. Life on an Active Planet
The idea that ‘Life’ should be
defined at the component level
is challenged by suggestions of
seeing it as whole.
The biosphere interacts with
other planetary systems:
tectonic, cryonic, hydrological,
atmospheric, orbital.
Across many millennia humans
have sought separate validation,
denying interdependence,
ignoring others.

26. Birds and Others
Early arrivals for
Musical Interpretation
at Qdos, Lorne

27. Birds and Others
Tim Low in Where Song Began asks re the
Lyrebird as model for the first songbirds:
“How could evolution create the best
musicians first, with thousands of
younger lineages producing simpler and
weaker sounds?”
The answer requires us to abandon the
notion of microevolution as progressive
and accept that most innovation comes
from deletions. The overriding need of
thousands of songbirds was to distinguish
their kind from others.

28. Urban Hydrology out of Sight
Stony Creek diversions
right via Anderson Road
left via Kororoit Street

29. Urban Hydrology out of Sight
Endless recent water, coastal
and waterways policy
development has brought
deeper understanding of the
complexity of urban systems.
Such things rarely penetrate
public awareness because
they are hidden from view
beneath ground or water.
Often the maps and other
records can’t prevent the
need to dig to see.

30. Exploit Dissipating Gradient
creaming, trickle down

31. Exploit Dissipating Gradient
creaming, trickle down
Stan Salthe’s rule of thumb says you
can use no more than half of any
dissipating gradient you tap into.
The flow of words in and from our
minds is effectively uncoupled from
energy and material flows,
powering emergence of rules and
regulations.
Similarly flows of money/debt can
be creamed by those close to them.

32. Verbal Blindness
Woodlands Park
Five Mile Creek
North Essendon

33. Verbal Blindness
Sensory systems evolve to
meet the needs and
opportunities of a niche.
As humans became more
dependent on mapping
perceptions into words we
lost immediacy and breadth.
We became convinced that
our way was the only/best
way no matter how far
astray that lead us.

34. The Two-edged Sword

35. The Two-edged Sword
Human language has proved to be a tool of
unprecedented power for understanding
and collaboratively changing the world,
and at accelerating pace.
But it has proved to be even more efficient
at spreading nonsense and mischief, yet
abysmally inadequate at spreading
corrections.
Rhetorical performance too often
overwhelms its capabilities for analysis,
negotiation and independent verification.

36. Interweb to FacebookFirst and for
a long time only
post to Facebook

37. Interweb to Facebook
Are we becoming even more dependent on
digital information and communications
technologies than we have been on words?
Interweb fit the dream behind our Public
Information Communications and Access
(PICA) System effort of the early 1980s,
later Conversation Piece and TransForum.
Facebook is as close as we have got, great
for digital photos but weak at curation.

38. Dystopian Utopias
and Science Fiction
Closed mouth of Aire River
Gadubanud massacre site

39. Dystopian Utopias
and Science Fiction
Perfection is the enemy of good.
Imagine there's no heaven.
Your Utopia won't be my Utopia.
The idea that we are on a one way
march of progress is as dangerous
as any. Yes there can be win-win
moves, but accelerating into the
unknown is not recommended.
Science fiction has become a great
testing ground for failed utopias,
even while absolving itself from
inconvenient trappings of reality.

40. Accepting Cosmological
Responsibility
Full Moon

41. Accepting Cosmological
Responsibility
There is no persuasive evidence that
we are not the first space-capable
society in our light cone, or beyond.
We have developed an aspiration to
know all that can be encoded in our
media, collectively not individually.
So we must assume that we are the
metaverse’s best hope of knowing
itself and try harder not to stuff up.

42. Suggestions! Questions?