5. applications

These models might provide integrative measures of social patterns already of interest, like division of responsibility between large and small gamete metazoans, and quantitative comparison of the extent and nature of community cultural-correlations from one species to another or from one time to another for a given species. If center-of-mass multiplicity correlates with other measures of health in human communities, it could be especially important for going beyond single-layer measures, like gross domestic product and body count, for taking quantitative account of family and culture when assessing the impact of policy changes and disasters on a given community.

There are immediate as well as abiding practical possibilities here. Available resources, as well as the preservation of task layer-diversity, means that individual-humans are fallible in that their capabilities will either span only a part of the correlation-hierarchy that underlies human social-systems today, or be spread quite thin across all six layers. This is also true, in spite of our evolutionary attraction to social-hierarchies, about the vision of any given leader or demagogue.

Regardless as the ordered-energy available per-capita\cite{Chaisson04} decreases (with either increasing population or energy-costs), we might expect the 6-layer structure of our social-systems to experience pressure to deconstruct. The demagogues of communism and fascism in the last century, as well as the demagogues of religious-fundamentalism today, are evidence of pressure to toss out one layer or another of our social-organization. Data with which to track, and concepts with which to communicate, about these pressures and their effects will be important if we want to give human social-systems on earth a chance to do their best in a friendly planetary-environment whose lifetime is finite.

intelligent machines

Although an ability to answer questions like a human ala the Turing test is a non-trivial accomplishment, a more substantive life-test for machines may be their task layer-multipicity i.e. their knack for buffering subsystem-correlations that look in & out from their own boundaries of (e.g. of skin, family & culture or their robot analogs). What's the task-layer multiplicity of your cell-phone today?

If we take a closer look, of course, metazoan skins are 1 (molecule edge), 2 (cell wall), 3 (organ boundary) and hence 4 symmetry-breaks beyond the atomic-soup in our planetary surface-layer, while robots and viruses are simply large molecule-assemblies and hence little more than 1 symmetry-break from the soup. This difference between ourselves and machines will remain even if the latter (as stand-alone ``organisms") have a high task layer-multiplicity.

Thus we can think of both viruses and robots as molecular spinoffs of life on earth, the former having drawn benefit from information about the world around contained in molecule-codes, and the latter having drawn benefit from information contained by idea-codes. These are non-trivial advantages.

The fact that in neither case are they ``built from the ground up" with living cells does not mean that they can't benefit from information on subsystem-correlations provided by living cells. Moreover, in places e.g. away from earth's surface that are hostile to living cells they can serve as an important exploratory extension.

Taken alone robots and viruses are thus structurally-shallower excitations. Just as earth-life separated from its home planet may no longer have the fall back (at least historically) to earth-surface chemistry and the sun's diurnal rhythm, so robots and viruses when injured don't have innate cellular repair-mechanisms to give them new life in an earth-like environment. Of course this does not prevent us from trying to build for them analog mechanisms, perhaps even appropriate to other environments, to do just that. 

truth in advertising

In addition to providing a window on the long-term activity-focus in a given community, dot clouds as in Fig. \ref{Fig2} may help track the short-term effect of electronic media on the attention focus of a human community if real-time data is available e.g. via an electronic network. Related to this question is the use in electronic media of hooks to subconscious modules (like hunger, fear & status-seeking) in the targeted population. If the effect of such hooks can be documented, the case for pointing out when they are being used might help temper their mis-use.

task-layer diversification

When task-diversity is maximized by random simplex point-picking, Mcm ≈ 6 but Mgeom ≈ 4.26 i.e. everyone need not contribute on all layers. This may help us address the ``urgent question" posed in the late 19th century by Émile Durkheim in his dissertation on workplace divisions of labor\cite{Durkheim1893}, whether to choose roundedness or specialization, by saying ``if possible explore roundedness, but specialize when that works better for you". This is consistent with subsequent trends away from rigid divisions of labor (e.g. based on heritage and gender) at home as well as at work.

The physiological division of labor between large and small gamete metazoans in reproductive roles shows that task-layer diversity may not always be adaptive. However communities with higher free-energy per capita and electronic information-flow seem to be moving away from cultural role-divisions. Fig. \ref{Fig3} illustrates by comparing R and Mgeom of a 6-layer model with task-diversity maximized by random simplex point-picking (larger plus) with the same quantities for a ``yin-yang" community (smaller plus) in which half of the organisms each buffer subsystem correlations directed only inward, or only outward, from skin, family & culture. 

Related references:

• • Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee (2000) Rare earth: Why complex life is uncommon in the universe (Copernicus, New York).

  • Eric J. Chaisson (2004) "Complexity: An Energetics Agenda", Complexity 9, pp 14-21.

• Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. of De la division du travail social : étude sur l'organisation des sociétés supérieures (1893) by W. D. Halls, intro. Lewis A. Coser. New York: Free Press, 1997, pp. 39, 60, 108.