CROSSING THE ADAPTIVE LANDSCAPE
EPISODE 10 MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller
On the off chance that the state of the environment encompassing us is it steady or turbulent this has an affect on our development technique. In steady situations, we usually manage to concentrate on getting better at what we’re doing. Be that as it may, in turbulent situations, we got to attempt more exploratory advancement endeavors.
From the beginning of his career, the music of Ornette Coleman and he's approach to chord progression and harmonies was always far more yielding and flexible than other Bebop players; he was obviously hearing and listening something that other players were not grasping as well as showing no interest in predetermined chorus structures. He was happy to play “ in the cracks” of the scale which made some of his contemporaries think he was playing Out Of Tune. Thanks to his example jazz music widened its options in the late 1950s and early 60s and became less indebted to the American Songbook repertoire and the rules of Rhythm and harmony.
The Melodies may seem simple, but his sense of harmony was complex. When he first learn to play the saxophone - an alto he first got when he was 14- he had not yet understood that, because of transposition between the instruments, a C in a piano was an A on a saxophone. He's been quoted a saying that he developed lifelong suspicion of the rules of music notation and Harmony.
Mr. Coleman believed that all people had their own tonal centers. “I’ve learned that everyone has their own moveable C,” he said to the writer Michael Jarrett in 1995; he identified this as “Do,” the start of anyone singing or playing a “do-re-mi” major-scale sequence. During the same interview he said he had always wanted musicians to play with him “on a multiple level.”
“I don’t want them to follow me,” he explained. “I want them to follow themselves, but to be with me.”
More expansive and abstract than John Coltrane. He was seen as a native avant-gardist, personifying the American independent will as much as any artist of the last century. His own music, embodied a new type of highly informed folk song: deceptively simple melodies with an intuitive, collective musical language and without preconceived chord sequences.
A handful of records for the Atlantic label at the beginning of his career — “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” “Change of the Century” and “This Is Our Music” — pushed through skepticism, ridicule and condescension to be recognized as some of the greatest albums in jazz history . Not a lot of people these days will skip any playlist with his early songs like “Una Muy Bonita” and “Lonely Woman”.
ORNETTE COLEMAN AND THE FITNESS LANDSCAPE
Envision a flat piece of paper and with an arrangement of the natural and artificial physical features, so in this case it’s gonna be characterized by pyramids and the desert. The idea here is that the position of the X and Y axis more or less represents a plan of action or and idea designed to achieve a major or overall aim, a strategy. Imagine there’s a small ecosystem of hipster cats, the choice being between a Egyptian Mau or a Abysinian cat and the shape of the Z represent the sum of all of the feedbacks of the actual environment, a feedback loop is the equivalent of a vicious or virtuous circle — something that accelerates or decelerates a trend. A positive feedback accelerates a trend in which you find yourself that lead to a particularly level of adaptive fitness, whereas a negative feedback decelerates it.
If you are on a high Z then what you are doing, your organizing strategy is fit will survive and reproduce. If you have a very low z, if you find yourself on a desert or negative Z then it’s not fit and won’t reproduce. Over the course of time some cats that are fit will continue to exist and continue to evolve and some others who’re not will go eventually extinct.
So for example if you were to imagine a fitness landscape that represented a desert, there are few pyramids, one with a black cat, one with an Abysinian Cat. Use some Egyptian cutouts of pyramids to decorate in black or royal blue and gold. Gold balloons and streamers would be perfect, along with gold partyware! hieroglyphics and hang them on the walls. Think of things you’d see in the desert — palm trees,sand, camels…
The idea is that the combination between all the aspects of those two different kind of cats, size of the ears, the habit to run fast, to eat more, the coloration and feedback loops are the characteristics that end up defining what is the location in the pyramid that they occupy.
In particular on this landscape the strategy of being a small ear all Egyptian Mau has a very negative fitness. It’s a desert. The Egyptian Mau is gentle and reserved. He loves his people and desires attention and affection from them but is wary of others. Early, continuing socialization is essential with this sensitive and sometimes shy cat. If you put a bunch of randomly selective cats in this environment and allow evolution to occur what will end up happening is that you’d end up having some black cats, some dark cats ocupying those pyramids ad you will have no Egyptian Mau.
CLEOPATRA’S FAVORITE CAT
If we shift the population and turn into a place that is in across the river , of course being a black cat or Abysinian cat (If you’re pining for a sweet, gentle lap cat, the Abyssinian likely isn’t a good match for your home) starts to make you sticking out as opposed to blend in and the more you’re becoming a Egyptian Mau the more likely you’re not going to be identified and hunted so what it ends up happening is that there’s a new pyramid full of Egyptian Mau and the other pyramids where there was an advantage being an Abyssinian cat have shrunk and in fact become deserted so the population will slowly die or move somewhere else.
You have a couple of simple the forces or properties that stimulate growth, development, or change within a system or process.
1 Topology of the landscape: where are the pyramids, where is the desert and how the landscape changes
2 Given time any evolutionary population of cats will find its way to highest pyramids and out of the badlands and deserts.
The general notion that comes out of this abstraction in which software providing generic functionality can be selectively changed
A) Pyramid Building/Climbing:
One attempts to find a pyramid and starts climbing upwards. So if I’m on the lookout and I notice that there’s an elevation to my right and a depression to my left then what I do is I turn right and start climbing the pyramid.
In this strategy there’s a number of things, typically of the same kind that happen about getting good at being Egyptian Mau and climbing pyramids. They do not ride camels, they create good quality mummies, they share their food with the dead, write hieroglyphics, marry their sisters and build pyramids. On the one hand is a strategy on the other hand is a talent, a meta strategy or a capacity to have strategies. Quite simply, a meta-strategy is a plan centered on the way you go about your own planning, so one thing becomes optimized for pyramid climbing.
Now if you are on a landscape that is characterized by one monumental structure with a square or triangular base and sloping sides that meet in a point at the top, especially one built of stone. One not only becomes pyramid climber but in fact one must make the best or most effective use of pyramid climbing. Like Jordan Greenhall says
(…) an example of that might be when you have and environment say like the great moderation in the west since the 80s, in fact since WWII where the conditions in the environment were such that they became more and more normalized and you had a concentration of certain strategies that being to build on themselves
That means now going Harvard Business cpyramid, go to Goldman sachs, become a partner in goldman sachs, have a private jet and you win
pyramid climbing in western civilization par excellence (…)
If there’s a new pyramid that comes into sight, typically without visible agent or apparent cause, the simple fact that everyone is trying to climb itself becomes part of the environment you’re in. So no longer you’re just struggling against nature, you’re now struggling against other organisms that are part of the environment that are struggling against nature.
In effect the pyramid gets harder to climb. To be adaptive to that pyramid becomes a niche, a comfortable or suitable position in life so that’s why the organizing strategy has to become optimized for pyramid climbing. But what that means if you’re not being able to keep up the pace of being adapted to the pyramid, the niche is overcrowded, it becomes a pyramidal scheme; A pyramid scheme (commonly known as pyramid scams) is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products or services. As recruiting multiplies, recruiting becomes quickly impossible, and most members are unable to profit; as such, pyramid schemes are unsustainable then for you at least the pyramid is becoming flatter and flatter
By transforming natural selection pressures, niche construction generates feedback in evolution, on a scale hitherto underestimated, and in a manner that alters the evolutionary dynamic. We’ve generated circumstances where desert crossing has been largely selected against. The native capacity to explore new environments and not being too good at it or effective in your environment has largely being extinguished and anyone that has that a basic habit has had a rough time with it.
A number of evolutionary changes are necessary for exploitation of a new niche; these change the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment. corresponding to the requirements of the original niche to a phenotype corresponding to the requirements of the new niche. There are a number of intermediate stages between the terminal states of the particular evolutionary pathway, where the particular intermediate links, transition forms, will probably exhibit suboptimal organizing strategy from the viewpoint of both the old and new niches.
Because all the inhabitants of this particular area will not find themselves in the original conditions for a long time, their hypothetically worse competitiveness will not be a detriment. However, in some types of the formation of new and distinct species in the course of evolution, the newly formed idea are in contact with the original idea and, in this case, the reduced competitiveness of its members can be detrimental.
The first factor is the multidimensionality of the actual adaptive landscape. While the landscape to which we are accustomed, the pyramid is three-dimensional, the adaptive landscape is actually multidimensional and each of these dimensions corresponds to one set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment.
B) Crossing the Valley
Each of the pyramids corresponds to a potential niche. Some of the pyramids are occupied (exploited niches), while others are empty. In order for the members of a certain people to move from one pyramid to another, i.e. in order for them to use a new idea, they must be able to first “climb down” from their adaptive pyramid and overcome the desert in the adaptive landscape, i.e. they must survive with a suboptimal composite of characteristics or traits, from the viewpoint of fitness for a great many generations
To cross the desert means for some time to go down in, the condition of being physically fit and healthy, and go down in the ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. You’re going from a location of fitness 5 down to a location of fitness minus 2 down the pyramid, not up, and the crossing may be some significant dessert. This is called the adaptive landscape but what happens is that as you’re doing that you may discover another pyramid and it may be a higher pyramid. This is why you do it. There’s no reason to undergo desert crossing if there isn’t anything else out there.
But it requires a great deal of endurance or effort. Most organisms die in the dessert during the adaptive crossing and in particular if you find yourself optimized for pyramid climbing you’ll tend to not even want to try to engage in crossing the desert. You’re not very good a t it so you will probably die.
In contrast, others are more radical and adventurous in spirit, and they can be seen as “valley crossers”. They may be less skilled technically, but they tend to have strong intuition — the ability to spot hidden assumptions and to look at familiar topics in totally new ways.
The point of desert crossing serves a two-fold purpose.
1 There might be bigger pyramids out there
2 The pyramid you are climbing on may change (often because the strategies going on) the watering hole can become dry, the oil well may be tapped
Too many hill climbers, and you end up sooner or later with lots of them stuck on every square centimeter each defending their own territory. We then suffers from a lack of enough valley crossers able to strike out from those intellectually tidy positions to explore further away and find higher peaks.
If you’re very good at niche construction what you end up doing is building a pyramid and then you climb it and you stay on top of it. Jazz, Rock and Roll, and music in general are reverting to only undertaking hill climbing. Many have never thought much about valley crossing in the first place.
Something Else!!!!: The Music of Ornette Coleman was a collection of short melody sketches, nearly always in a major key, that sounded a lot like old children’s songs or, in pieces like “Turnaround” and “When Will the Blues Leave?,” great blues riffs. With the help of Don Cherry on trumpet.
Closer to the model of Charlie Parker, he organized his band to act like a single organism with multiple hearts operating on his own sense of time, he raced and flagged and played his own blues riffs, diatonic runs and plump notes. He made one more record for Contemporary, “Tomorrow Is the Question!,” with Percy Heath and Red Mitchell on bass, Shelly Manne on drums and, worthy of attention, no piano. The lack of a pianist to play root chords would describe the distinctive nature of his music for a long time.
“The Shape of Jazz to Come” was the first great Coleman band; the record’s swing and harmonic freedom, its intuitive communication and its ease with nonstandard ways of playing jazz made it a classic.
OUR OWN PRIVATE IDAHO
What this means is that we put ourselves on a circumstance where we may in fact be causing ourselves to lose our capacity to cross the adaptive valley. We are extinguishing from our environment the feedback loops and the signals, the gesture, action, or sounds that were used to convey information and indicate and train for desert crossing capacity because in fact you have been able to make the niche so perfect for you that the better you are at niche construction, pyramid climbing and pyramid construction that we actually have generated the condition of us not being able to cross desert.
Maybe one way to get around this is that maybe one could go about creating a niche that generated rich nimbleness and fluidity in both desert crossing and pyramid climbing. Basically training us to be meta responsive to what otherwise would be happening in the natural environment. And we’v e seen this in anthropology. Meta means about the thing itself. It’s seeing the thing from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing, like being self-aware.
2. A term used in mmo meaning the Most Effective Tactic Available. It’s basically what works in a game regardless of what you wish would work.
RITES OF PASSAGE
A rite of passage is a ceremony of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society. The crucible of being an adult are in fact simulations of desert crossings, of being ale to endure the adaptive desert or being able to respond on your own so that you can then bring that into the welding of the community.
New methods and ideas are central to survival, and successful innovation requires both hill climbing and valley crossing. It is critical for us to figure out a way to continue to invest in areas that have breakthrough potential. The Music Industry has collectively been very effective at getting to the top of their pyramid. But the industry is in big trouble now because they have completely missed on out the discovery of new, better pyramids. It’s a challenging process to manage in good times, and probably even more difficult now.
There’s a difference between a short term broadcast golden age (but doom to collapse) form of niche construction and something else which uses our ability to do, experience and use the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills and the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world to put us not only in alignment with the natural even flow of creative evolution but in fact does so at a higher level and it generates something that is optimized for being adaptive itself.
