Big Graph of Mud

An opening brain-dump on graph minds

This is part of the Graph Minds Notebook series

I got an unexpectedly strong response to the series kickoff post last week. A bunch of people commented, emailed, or tweeted to say they were very excited for this series, and several shared interesting and useful links and pointers. I suspect I’ve struck some sort of important nerve in the zeitgeist. The idea of graph minds, I think, plugs a hole in a larger space where things like individual intelligence, AI, and organization theory are well covered, but the idea of specific embodiments of hive minds (like Borg cubes) is not as well-developed as a paradigm.

We’re going to try something a little different with this series, in the spirit of the “studio” in the name of the newsletter. I am going to try and write it as a sort of working-in-public evolving notebook. And I say we because I’m going to try and include you guys in the thought process as much as possible. So please continue sharing links and thoughts. I will also set up some structured participation opportunities at some point, once I figure out good rules of engagement, but I won’t be going nuts with that. Tempting though the idea is, this series won’t be a full-blown “graph mind thinking about graph minds” meta thing, but there’ll be a subplot of that. It won’t be enough for all of us to form a Borg cube, but it should give us all a taste of a light mind-meld. A Borg subcube perhaps.

And since a big part of a mind meld is getting thought processes to merge more than thought products, I’ll have to open-source my own to some extent for this series.

My personal process for thinking through stuff is to switch (leap? spark?) back and forth between stream of consciousness writing of publication-intent prose, and unstructured free-form discovery thinking on paper, whiteboards, and both digital and physical notebooks.

The defining feature is probably that there is no “middle” to it. I don’t do outlines, modular building blocks, or structured editorial “passes.” For complex topics that I stay on for months or years, I do some mediocre progressive summarization, but unlike 15-20 years ago, I’m not religiously disciplined about it (sorry Tiago), and mostly trust my first brain and third brain (aka twitter aka what I called a “social metabrain” in my Jan 13, 2017 newsletter, Your Passport to the Metabrain) rather than my increasingly messy, post-apocalyptic second brain.

The content is what you’d expect if you’ve been following my writing: diagrams, lists, tables, 2x2s, allegorical maps, and so forth. Making this “process” public in a meaningfully faithful way, without turning it into a kind of misleading fiction a la “reality TV,” should be an interesting challenge.

So instead of finished essays, I’ll share outtakes and cleaned-up raw material as I think the topic through. Not too raw — It will be a somewhat stylized and at least partially performative, but hopefully in a way that retains the spirit of the private version (as in, some things I’d normally just think through in my head, I’ll try to write down and make legible).

If the whole exercise lands somewhere interesting, then I might try to write a polished essay covering the main big ideas. But if any of you feel like you’re running ahead of my thinking and want to try and beat me to the punch, go right ahead. If you can arrive at a better synthesis than I can, and especially if you can arrive at it faster, have at it. I’m always happy to just jump to the new bleeding edge.

Think of this as a sort of textual hackathon to arrive at a usefully elegant synthetic account of graph minds; one that might point the way to construction recipes.

So for this first outtake (or “commit” into the shared repo of the hackathon), let me share the current snapshot of my Roam page on the topic. Feel free to cut and paste this into your own digital notebook as a “fork” to start working with, if you want to follow along more closely. I may or may not open up my own page, but feel free to send me informal “pull requests” too if you think I’m missing an important piece of the puzzle.

I used to do 2d mind-maps a lot more in the past (Scapple), but lately I’ve found the simplification to multi-level lists doesn’t really lose much, so Roam lists are a good way for me to just dump all my initial thoughts in the discovery phase (as much discovery of my own unexamined thinking as external). Proper mind maps help a little later.

This is not in any sense an outline or a sequence or a prioritized thing. It is an attempt at comprehensive capture of every angle I can think of, casting the widest possible initial discovery net. A sort of “clear as mud but covers the ground” artifact. I call such documents “big graph of mud” after the idea of “big ball of mud” in computer architecture.

I have pages like this for many topics, and I’ve cleaned this up to be more coherent and clean than most.

The next step will harder — identifying the 20% subset on which to start building a satisfying account of the big graph of mud.

Venkat’s Graph Minds Roam Page, 5/20/22 snapshot

• Benchmark real examples -- how would these be ranked in "graph mind sophistication level"

  • Industrial corporation with specialization (Ortega "mass mind")

  • QAnon type movements

  • Traditional "compound" cults

  • Notionally egalitarian collectives/communes

  • Indian caste system

  • Robert Allen Collective invention settings (BCMIN thread)

  • DAOs, or even just sufficiently active discords

  • Github projects (esp large ones with lots of forks/PRs)

  • Mind-machine collabs like Sougwen Chung robot-human art

  • Parties, raves, music concerts (from symphony to rock to raga)

  • The "scientific community" (Todd M. comment)

  • The economy perhaps? Or a specific high volume market like stocks?

• Intellectual history

  • Sociology

    • Durkheim, mechanical vs. organic solidarity

    • Religious, military, and secular solidarity hacks

      • How to break down individual egos?

    • Gesellschaft/Gemeinschaft

    • Assabiyah, exit/voice

    • Org theory, metaphors of org (Morgan)

    • Hannah Arendt sovereignty vs. freedom distinction

    • Slavery and serfdom as extended body of coercive power

    • Emic vs etic

    • Benedict Andersen Imagined Communities

  • Psychology

    • Ego vs. superego

    • Surrender and ego dissolution

    • Identity formation and destruction

    • Empirical tacks

      • Finishing each other's sentences

      • Predictive processing in intersubjectivity

    • Reality distortion fields

    • Mind control/brainwashing

    • Collective unconscious/Jungian angle

  • Culture

    • Nisbett: Geography of Thought

    • Darmok effects?

    • Does Chinese language induce stronger graph minds?

    • Old example of Arabic musayara vs. Israeli dissent based discourse

    • Improv, more general Huizenga play element of culture

    • Narratives and grand narratives, folkways, Sapiens type stuff

  • Esoterica

    • Egregore approach to graph minds, strengths/weaknesses

    • Collective genres of meditative traditions (eg shaman-guided group ayahuasca)

    • Transhumanism

• Failure modes

  • Capture

    • Charismatic capture -- frame control

    • Bureaucratic capture -- process control

    • Mob capture -- vibe control

  • Temporal failures

    • Finite time blow-up

    • Rapid decay

    • Gradual decay

• Fiction examples

  • Borg -- canonical example

  • Asimov's Gaia

  • Ramez Naam Nexus

  • Ursula Le Guin world-building

    • "To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return"

  • The matrix in Matrix

    • Is Zion the real matrix?

  • Harry Potter

    • Voldemort b2b connection

    • The pensieve

  • Collective consciousness thing in Schismatrix

  • Sense8 type things

  • From Nathan Acks: Peter Hamilton Night Dawn trilogy Edenists

  • Eureka episode with neurally linked dreaming

• Biological reference points

  • Eusocial insects, caste systems in ants and bees

    • From sasha: "Also as a beekeeper, know a bit about “swarm” behaviour. One wrong idea is that a bee is a  stupid automaton. That is not correct. Thy are individuals as well as a group mind."

  • Broad spectrum of sociobiology -- E. O. Wilson stuff

  • Uncanny twin mind connection?

  • Locusts vs. grasshoppers. Individual/collective polymorphic species.

• Metaphors and conceptual models

  • Hobbes Leviathan, Purusa Sukta, Spencer's "Social Organism"

  • Haraway model of chtulhucene

  • Lovelock's Gaia, tangled bank theories

  • Systems theory/cybernetics guys

    • Ashby variety stuff

    • Autopoiesis/Maturana-Varela stuff

    • Holographic principles/Senge

  • Carse infinite games

  • Game-theoretic, team-theoretic, and info-structure (Witsenhausen) models of graph models

    • Could you just write down a big stochastic PDE for a graph mind?

    • Is this PDE well-posed enough for “psychohistory”?

    • Is “psychohistory” the biography of a graph mind?

• Technology

  • Obvious: language, visual signaling (clothing, built environment)

  • Old: writing, printing, radio... exoskeletal media

  • Modern: digital intimate-extension media (phone, social media)

  • New: brain-to-brain and identity integrated media

  • Nootropics with socially salient, ego-dissolving attributes

    • Truth drugs? Other techniques to disarm ego resistance?

  • Brain scanning technologies and biofeedback

  • AI

    • Deep learning: merging deep learning models

    • GOFAI -- Multiagent systems in G. Weiss sense, my PhD sense

    • Minsky "society of mind" approach

    • Dennett multiple drafts model, but in graph mind

    • Old Bonabeau approach to swarm theory

    • Old Wolpert COINs approach

  • "Big Data" -- to what extent is graph minding reduce to data/memory sharing?

  • Robots -- heterogeneous human-machine graph minds

  • Stubs: Games, VR, AR...

  • Blockchain... but what's the graph-mind angle on it besides DAOs?

• Attributes

  • Minimum scale: 2? 8? 150? Is there a maximum scale?

  • Degree of integration -- from legible org structure to entangled wave function

  • Bandwidth: talking drums, music, speech, brain interfaces...

  • Organization: network, hierarchical, rhizomatic vs. arborescent minds? Smooth vs. striated minds?

  • Temporality/persistence: 1 night rave vs. 1000 year religious tradition

  • Intensity, sustainability...

  • Alignment level -- can hive minds be internally adversarial?

    • "Feral neuron" model from Kevin Simler Neurons Gone Wild post

  • Synchronization

  • Embodiment... bodies, buildings, books...

  • Levels: from shared vibe to full-blown distributed computing... can the key dimensions be reduced to a single scale like Kardashev?

  • Computation link... graph minds should be Turing complete... is there a hierarchy leading up to network computing? Is a sentiment contagion field a graph mind? A trending topic on Twitter? A hashtag?

  • Environment: graph minds form under stress perhaps?

• Subjectivity

  • "What is it like to be in a graph mind" (cf Nagel bats thing)

  • Shared consensual hallucination? Normalcy? Uncanny?

  • The "ordinary" experience -- we just project individuality into collectivity

  • Extraordinary -- conscious sense of ego dissolving into/crystalizing out of, graph minds

  • Deep into each other’s OODA loops? Shared situation awareness?

  • "Borg from the outside, LinkedIn from the inside"

  • Assimilative Experience (AX) like UX

    • Borg episodes where being a drone feels like being in an uncanny but "ordinary" sim of sorts

    • From outside you look jacked into a matrix with cables, from the inside, it feels "normal"

    • To what extent is AX simply the feeling of having a "role" to play?

    • To what extent is it an aesthetic of participation? (ritual etc)

    • "Bistromathics" from HHG -- inside of computer feels like a bistro

  • Does memory feel like your own or a shared one (cf: Harry Potter pensieve)

• Hypotheses/Paradoxes etc

  • Graph minds sound collective, but social reality is increasingly divergentist

  • Individual mind cannot biologically tolerate assimilation type phenomena for long?

  • Is a graph the right topological structure to use here? What kind? Scale-free?

  • What's the "boundary" of a hive mind?

  • Stock and flow properties -- Ship of Theseus graph minds?

  • Can a core few physical substrate dimensions be identified? Like bits/joule level?

  • Is this just distributed computing?