High-Dimensional Foraging
Me in 2018: Spaceship Earth is in fact a story of a brave crew risking much to explore a strange new territory. But the space we explore is more cultural than physical. … The industrial era … moved us into new uncharted cultural territory. … resulted in large and rapid changes to our culture and social organization. … often entangled with externalities, coordination failures, and other reasons to doubt their net value. So humanity continues to venture out into new untried and risky cultural spaces, via changes to cultural conditions with which we don’t have much experience, and which thus risk disaster and destruction. The good crew of Spaceship Earth should carefully weigh these risks when considering where and how fast to venture. (More)
Me in 2023: space of dimension D=1024, plus one time dimension. … have almost no interiors; they are almost all surface … atoms couple much more strongly to photons … most atom bonding comes from nearly right angle covalent bonds. Which if they form via random accretion creates molecules in the shape of spatial random walks. … Rigid structures require short loops in the network of bonds, and for high D these seem unlikely to form due to random meetings of atoms … molecular bond loops are typically quite long. … allow a lot of wiggling and reshaping along short stretches, and only resist deformations only on relatively large scales. … on the smallest scales natural objects should be liquids, not solids nor metals. … connectivity should be global … [Not clear] how to construct non-crazy-huge machines and signal processing devices …
Its density falls in [cosmological] time much like it does in low D, but its distances increase far more slowly. … hard to see anything very far. … hard to have a comprehensive view of everything in all directions, and also very hard to see very far in any one direction, even if you focus all of your attention there. … nearly impossible for the target to see such a missile coming or to block its arrival. But any extended object probably does not know very well the locations or orientations of its many parts, nor is it even well informed about most of the other objects which it directly touches. … Civilizations should also be able to expand in space at a very rapid t^(D-1) speed. … only attractive forces are of much use. (More)
I’ve struggled to get people see more clearly the issues and risks of humanity living in and exploring a vast high dimensional space of possible cultures. But I just realized that these issues might be similar to those of creatures foraging in high-dimensional physical spaces. So in this post I’ll return to my prior analysis of high-D life, and retreat a bit from some of my prior assumptions, to focus more on how to forage there.
So, consider a high dimensional (D in 10 to 1000) universe where a low density material is made out of ball-and-stick-type atoms connected into in twisty floppy low-dimensional-link networks, networks which are mostly connected on global scales. I won’t say how exactly these atoms work, but they bond to each other and interact with light and gravity much as do our atoms.
Even though it seems quite hard to create machines out of such materials, I assume that in such a vast universe natural selection eventually finds a way. And so creatures, and even packs of them, made of such material forage in it for “food” that gives them negentropy to drive their engines, and material to make their bodies. (Maybe “food” is atoms that can add more covalent bonds if carefully twisted to be more compact.)
I assume the material of this universe, shaped into those floppy networks, has a complex hard-to-predict fractal geography, as does the food within it. As food once eaten takes a long time to refresh (if ever), creatures can’t get enough food by staying in one place, and so must continually search for food.
Because of the low density, high dimension, and unpredictability of motion, such creatures can’t use light to usefully see much besides the material they are at, or to communicate across material gaps. But they can communicate over modest distances via sound in the material, and can collect and share maps of the topology of the material connections between the places they have been.
Creatures who just randomly travel this network searching for food, backtracking when they reach dead-ends, face high risks of running out of food and dying. A better strategy is to use the fact that the high dimensionality allows ropes connecting creatures to be quite short and cheap, even when they cross enormous volumes of space and material. So creatures who can’t find local food can use these short ropes to move to where food is plentiful. And creatures who are near plentiful food, but worry that it might run out, can pay others to scout elsewhere for new food bonanzas.
Thus when physically searching a high dimensional space for rare hiding food, there are big scale and coordination gains from collecting a network of ropes that connect creatures, allowing newly found food opportunities to be shared by all.
Now let’s make an analogy to a species or civilization exploring a high dimensional space of possible cultures. Such a civilization can gain by having diverse subcultures that explore very different parts of the total space, yet can talk to each other. Members can switch to more successful subcultures as those are identified. The most successful subcultures might subsidize some to explore the rest of culture space.
If conformity pressures instead induce members to all join one dominant subculture, that may come at a great cost to future adaptiveness, even if they all initially joined the most adaptive available subculture. And that seems to be happening in our world today. A global monoculture is pulling in most of the world, slowing exploration of the rest of culture space. And so when our main culture more clearly drifts into maladaption, there won’t be many good options then for members to switch to.
Robin, this is a powerful and thought-provoking piece. The metaphor of "high-dimensional foraging" is a compelling way to frame the immense challenge of navigating cultural evolution.
From my perspective as a systems engineer, your "high-dimensional space" looks like what I'd call a Constraint Landscape—a complex terrain of possibilities shaped by physical, economic, and informational realities. In this view, a culture isn't so much a path we find through foraging, but an emergent pattern that successfully satisfies thousands of these constraints all at once.
This reframing helps diagnose why the "monoculture" is so dangerous. It becomes a system that powerfully reinforces its own rules, getting stuck in one part of the landscape—like a species trapped in a nutrient-rich but dead-end canyon. It optimizes for its own short-term stability at the expense of the diversity needed for long-term adaptation.
This leads me to think the real task isn't to find one final, stable culture, but rather a resilient capacity generating new, viable cultures—an ecology of them, constantly adapting to a shifting landscape.
This raises a final question. You frame this as a search for an adaptive culture. But perhaps values like justice, dignity, and human flourishing aren't the goal of the search, but are themselves fundamental constraints to emerging cultures? Any cultural pattern that fails to satisfy these deep human needs will ultimately prove unviable, no matter how "adaptive" it appears in the short term. They are a key part of the terrain we're all navigating.
Thanks for mapping this territory. It's a conversation we desperately need to be having.
It seems that both sides of the analogy take for granted the willingness to subsidize “scouting” of new part of dimensional or cultural space.
In practice, I think this scouting mechanic has been very hard to subsidize and implement. Some combination of risk aversion, time discounting, and in-group bias, means that usually excess resources are not put towards meaningful exploration. There is also a problem that current cultural hierarchies tend to be built on assumptions (technologically or culturally) that would be undermined by meaningfully new discovery, further deincentivizing discovery (e.g. Copernicus and Church, U.S. gov’t and lab leak theory).
Have you considered mechanisms that can solve this in practice?