Mathematics As a Tool For Survival

Doron Shadmi Magnum Force is the 1973 sequel to the 1971 Dirty Harry film, starring Clint Eastwood returning as maverick cop Harry Callahan. In that film he fights against a group of young cops that kill criminals without give them the chance for fair trail. Harry, although he despises the bureaucracy of the authorities, does not agree with the attitude of killing criminals, because he believes that "friend" or "enemy" dichotomy, which kills its "enemies" without a fair trail, is a direct path for a leaving hell on earth, as can be seen in most of the totalitarian regimes. Anyone that supports the democratic system says: "I disagree with you, but I'll do my best in order to give you the chance to air your view". In my opinion we are in a crucial turning point of mankind's history, which forces us to find the balance between our ethical and formal logical skills, in order to survive the power of our current and future technologies. As we have seen above, a "friend"\"enemy" (black\white) reasoning is not strong enough for that goal, especially if the enemies are of our own kind. SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific project and one of its researchers, called Prof. Frank Drake, developed an equation in an attempt to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy with which we might come into contact. Most of the parameters of this equation are related to physical values, but there is one parameter, called L, which measures the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space. There can be a lot of reasons of why L has a final value, but in our case the reason can be simply self-destruction of some civilization, that did not do anything in order to develop the balance between its ethical and logical\technological abilities, after it achieved the technological power to destroy itself. In other words, we have to do our best in order to avoid the final value of L because of the reasons mentioned above.

The general name for balancing tools is called Evolutionary Ethics, which enables complex systems to survive their non-trivial complexity. Evolutionary Ethics is not limited to any particular complex civilization, because it is based on the very essence of the concept of Complexity, and researches its abilities to survive and be developed under uncertain conditions. Let us briefly describe the Evolutionary Ethics Model (EEM). EEM's fundamental level is represented here by half circles, where each half circle has no internal complexity:

EEM's "friend"\"enemy" viewpoint is developed at the moment that at least two half circles are combined into a higher level of complexity, which enables it to distinguish between internal and external environments, and gives the reason to protect the internal complexity from potential external attacks:

The next combined levels are resulted by finer internal complexities, which enable complex systems to be developed beyond EEM's "friend"\"enemy" viewpoint and enrich their interactions with the external environment. But finer structures are more sensitive to potential internal damage, and as a result they easily find themselves using EEM's "friend"\"enemy" viewpoints, in order to protect their complexity:

The ideal complex system is a one ecosystem that has no external potential enemies:

But we must not forget that a complex system is a result of many levels of combined elements, where Distinction skills are essential to its own survival. In that case there is always the possibility that such an ecosystem may collapsed into its fundamental building-blocks, if it loses its ability to save and develop its complexity. By using EEM we can see that there is no general agreement about Ethics between the cultures of our civilization, but on the same time there is the scientific method of exact sciences, which is not limited to any particular culture of our civilization. As a result our civilization developed powerful technologies that nowadays have the actual power to destroy our civilization, exactly because there is no agreement about Ethics (EEM was not developed in our civilization). The language that gives the scientific method its power is the language of Mathematics, and if we wish to develop EEM we have to move beyond the truth\false classical reasoning and get Uncertainty and Redundancy as challenges for complexity developments and not as a "white noise" that has to be eliminated, in order to discover the mechanical "if A then B" linearonly reasoning. EEM language minimal aim is to reduce the abilities of scientists to develop technologies for self mass destruction, something that the current mathematics easily enables because of Ethics\Logics dichotomy.