After the dog got me up an hour or so too early I was endeavoring to sleep again. The effort was partially successful. I did sleep, some, on and off. In between the poor quality naps I was engaged in higher quality, semi-conscious reflection on the digitalization of life on earth.
I began with the octopus. A fascinating creature, the octopus: It has 8 semi-independent appendages each of which has a continuous range of motion. That is so unlike our appendages which can move in only a few, well-defined patterns. The octopus did not become the model for future biological development. The fishes took on that role instead.
Why? The octopus is an intelligent problem solver with the capacity to leverage the supportive forces of the surrounding sea to travel, to forage, to hide and more specifically to grasp by curling around any object, to open shells by redistributing fluid pressure, to swim by a kind of flying, to obscure vision and alter perception -- most of which are abilities neither we nor our digitally equipped relatives possess.
Well, "lever" may be a poor metaphor derived from our overwhelmingly digital biology. Fingers are and will always be levers; tentacles and suckers are something different.
This morning I proposed that a large part of the reason for the dominance of the descendents of the fishes is to be found in fingers: digits literally. This can not be the full explanation because crabs were also not the model for the future of life and crabs are as digital as we are in design; no continuously curving tentacles for them either. I only say digits are a part of what happened and an important part.
One must take a moment to speak carefully. Fishes do not have fingers. A fish does have the anatomical structures from which a finger can be developed, eventually, as life expands across the margins of the seas. Digitalization might have been an accident resulting from other bits of actual reality which determined who was successful in the tidepools and on the beaches. Even if it were accidental it was highly successful. In actual reality both the dominant species and the pervasive technologies are strongly digital.
I turned then to the history of mathematics, leapfrogging hundreds of millenia to adopt a completely different perspective. I illustrated to rise of digitalization from simple tokenization used to represent the results of counting to the rise of general purpose electronic computers: from the I, III, V, X, L of ancient government bureaucrats, through Egyptian engineers calculating fractions as half + fifth + thirteenth, through Babylonian astronomers combining minute divisions of a cycle with the second minute division to create degrees, to Indian mathematicians repurposing the null, the no fingers sign, to fully formalize a recursive representation of numbers large and small. This "place system" was so successful that in modern English its symbols are actually called "fingers": "digits".
But how long these changes took! Even equipped with a brain capable of abstracting such esoteric concepts, humans took centuries and centuries of centuries to create and utilize the stronger and stronger digitalization of our experience of life.
And I have omitted so much! Even just this morning in my half dreaming state I touched on the slide rule, an analogue device to support digital computation, and alluded to the development of the electronic computer, and told the story of a teenaged boy who was singularly unimpressed with my presentation on the binary representation of integers.
After millenia of brillant thinkers working out the conceptual framework, this 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101 binary representation can today be grasped by such a person! Not mature (.0) and male (.00) and yet not a complete zero (.001) who has been partially educated (.001011) and is therefore something (but not everything) which the octopus can not be.