On the Laws of Immortality (of the Virtual Sort)

On the Laws of Immortality (of the Virtual Sort).

I'm wondering whether we need to have an educational course that anticipates a "religious - technological future that presumes virtual immortality." See, reference to Tipler's Physics of Immortality below.  I have no idea what to call this course.  The course would be built on anticipating fundamental technological breakthroughs aimed at the ultimate teleology or Omega Point and would try to figure out their consequences in terms of the law.  This isn't about patent law or innovations--the best course for that is at the Law School at Stanford University.  This is a course that would bring back Aristotle's causa of teleology so that Ethics and Politics could be discussed in relation to the causae of Form (mathematical and visual technologies), Efficient (the material implementation of such breakthroughs from the micro to the macro) and the Substantive (the uniqueness of breakthrough).  Permit me an example.

Yesterday, I was speaking with a young friend who sells computers by day and plans film-making at night.  His next project is a 15 minute short on "How to become a Roman Emperor."  He tells me that there is a breakthrough that has occurred that will require ALL ELECTRONIC equipment to be redone.  The fundamental breakthrough will enable a mobile phone to carry 1,000 terrabytes of memory. And it will mean that a lot of programming to make things "compact" will become unnecessary.  Maybe we won't need any programming language at all, and maybe a lot of processes we take for granted to check, validate and verify our electronic memories will become obsolete.

Now, what kind of universe of legal discourse would that innovation imply?

This technology will be out within 4 or 5 years.

Reference:  Tipler, F.T.  (2000) The Physics of Immortality.  All the fundamental breakthroughs according to Tipler (who was a top rated physicist until he published this CRAZY book that makes him look looney--but I think it's just a great example of taking a rather simple idea very seriously), will be about achieving an Omega Point (Theilhard de Chardin's idea back in the 1930's) that everything in life will be resurrected.  Now, resurrection in a physics sense is a White Hole where an infinitude of memories can be played back.  Tipler describes the evolution of the universe from black hole singularity to white hole resurrection.  To get to a white hole, all the energy of the universe will be used to store all events.  It's a CRAZY idea because it is an ultimate teleology and modern science does not like teleology at all.

Mapping Ebola Event Risk by Postulating a Financial Markets Ontology

Mapping Ebola Event Risk by Postulating a Financial Markets Ontology.

1.  As we said last time, correlation is not causation.  This is an important distinction in science.  If we wish to do science in law and finance, then using a Category Theory approach, we should translate our statements made of legal and financial terms into SCIENTIFIC PROPOSITIONS that adhere to at least a FIRST ORDER LOGIC.  Translated into this first order logic, we can check our premises and inspect our deductions and inferences for their weaknesses and soundness.  If you would like to know what scientific language would look like, you can turn to Spivak's A Category Theory for Scientists (Old Version) 2013-14 which is freely available on the Web.  In brief, theories and models within theories are written in propositional form using "arrow-language", thus, f:A-->B, where f designates the name of the arrow between A and B.  If you trace Spivak's work who is at MIT, you'll note that he wrote a paper together with Robert E. Kent on "Ologs", which are basically "ontological statements" of real processes.  Robert E. Kent (who's affiliation to any academic institution appears non-existent) has written on the INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH which is a version of Category Theory that is translated for use among people who work and play in the area of INSTITUTIONAL THEORY.  As far as I can tell with my almost total ignorance of the field, the first successful transplantation of a fundamental device from Category Theory into Institutional Theory was by Dimaggio & Powell in their extremely well-cited paper (over 27,000 citations so far) on "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields" (1983) see Jistor.  They used the concept of isomorphism which in Category Theory means f:A->B and g:B->A, so that the morphisms f and g which represent "processes" link the two objects A and B in a manner such that the objects are isomorphic, that is, that A and B are unique up to isomorphism.  Even if you don't quite understand what this "definition" means, you should understand that isomorphism is the way Category Theorists think about "equivalence."  It is all process driven.  

2.  Now Robert E. Kent's work on the Institutional Approach is part of a blossoming field called ONTOLOGIES.  An ontology is simply a model of real processes involving people and machines, especially computational devices that can be linked.  The link between Category Theory and Ontology goes back to a prescient genius named Goguen who was at the University of California San Diego.  His paper on "A Categorical Manifesto" 1991 is a must read.  And the paper co-authored with Burstal on:  INSTITUTIONS:  ABSTRACT MODEL THEORY FOR SPECIFICATION AND PROGRAMMING (1992).  This paper lays out a fantastic theory of institutions that is rigged according to category theory formalities.  Now how do these theories relate to the Ebola versus Financial Charts above?

3.  Well, the point is that it is genuinely difficult to understand what the above charts MEAN unless we have some kind of FINANCIAL MARKET ONTOLOGY buzzing away in the back of our minds.  That ontology would need to be made explicit in order for us to have an explicit understanding of the EVENT RISK that Ebola (as an event) poses onto the minds of financial traders.

4.  To do that which is required in 3 may seem very complicated indeed!  But I don't think so.  We will examine that space--the space of financial market ontology--in further blogs.      

Let's Get Rid of Causation in Finance.

This chart comes from Zerohedge today.  It makes me laugh.  Is the world one?  That is, it is so interconnected in terms of web-based and email connections, that messages from the market manipulators instantaneously infects our own wet-ware so that we unconsciously push buttons that amplify particular messages in the noosphere?  "Correlation is not causation" so says Zerohedge repeating the mantra that distinguishes the knee-jerk Palovian-Skinnerian stimulus-response reductionism of our poor little brain from the rationality and decision-making processes of the game-theoretic monsters that can crunch big data until a particular solution fits the circumstances just inside the horizon of noncomputability (NP-Hard problems).  The best papers still in this area where SPIRITUALITY meets PHYSICS are by Emilie Nother -- Einstein's tutor in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and lovely well-loved teacher who only wanted to teach but the idiotic German Universities could not even give her a proper teaching post.  In the long run of a future history, Germany in the late 19th and 20th centuries will be castigated not only for Nazism but also because its chauvinistic attitude against women--and Noether will be remembered far into the future, farther than when people forget about Hitler.  When Noether died, Einstein wrote something to the effect that she had discovered the first spiritual law of physics.  There are a couple Noether Theorems, but the one FINANCE THEORETICIANS SHOULD PAY ATTENTION TO but do not is the one that allows one to move from an energy conservation law to dimensional space.  How she moves from correlation-covariance is very similar to what the finance theorists from Bachelier to Miller tried with almost brute force.  Basically, Noether moves from correlation through covariance using symmetries. Symmetries as we know in the early to first half of the 20th century is the algebra of group theory, and allegedly, our standard model is based in the ideal on our methods developed in group theory.  Group theory to me looks like it depends on identity, associativity and invertibility (reversal).  I was studying this area for a while back in 2006-07, and then imagine my delight and surprise to find a theory that could encompass and ground group theory using only identity and associativity!  That is, why study Group Theory when Category Theory could do all of group theory and go even much farther?

So now we can come back to the two graphs above.  How do we compare them?  You might say, "Do a correlation analysis and determine the variance."  OK. Then you can do the "co-variance analysis" and come up with a number you can compare against other co-variances.  But this assumes a standard deviation metric underneath, in other words, a normal distribution.  As everyone knows in finance except the crazy financial regulators, there is no such animal in the de facto.  "Volatility" is not a good measure.  What would be a much measure would be a fractal dimension a la Mandelbrot.  If we got use to a Mandelbrotian measure, we'd have a much better feel for the "jitteriness" and "emotionality" of prices, and very importantly, we'd have much better metrics and therefore, a better language to gauge and communicate our intimations and observations of what's actually going on.

To realize these intuitions, I believe we have to build from the ground up, and link the above charts to particular geometries, and to talk about them properly, we would need a new vocabulary that would allow us to make comparisons between the charts and the contexts that surround them in an absolutely precise way.

While we would never say Chart 1 causes Chart 2 or vice versa, we could say without any problem that Chart 1 is isomorphic to Chart 2, and then we would be forced to make explicit exactly WHAT THE PROCESS that makes the isomorphism up.  If we could do that, we would not ever again bother with the concept of "causation" in finance.       

A Category Theory of Financial Instruments and Financial Institutions -  A Fundamental Ontology of Law and Finance

-Draft Abstract-

In an early paper examining the regulation of private placement memorandum (PPM) regulation, we found that there are in general two approaches to financial regulations: (1) the regulation of the behaviours of the financial institution; and (2) regulation of the financial instruments.  PPMs are interesting financial instruments since they sit in-between two extremes of financial regulatory types: (1) purely private form of financial intermediation (that is, at the extreme, we have bilateral financial contracts) and (2) highly ritualized guidance on what can be communicated in the raising of capital (that is, prospectus-type regulations) stemming from the Securities Act of 1933 and Securities Exchange At of 1934.  The unnatural divide between the regulation of financial institutions and the regulation of financial instruments has played itself out in terms regulations which aim at adjusting the incentives relating to particular types of businesses within a financial institutional framework.  In general, the play out has been a border conflict between banking regulations and capital market regulations.  This is not to say that any particular jurisdiction uses one type of financial regulation exclusively to the exclusion of the other, but rather there is a combination or admixture of financial regulations, that in total, ascribe to one general tendency or the other.  Recall the legal theorists who attempted to justify financial regulations on the basis that “Law Matters”, stating in particular that law matters in that it set outs the initial permit or license to practice a certain form of business.  As we shall see, if we apply certain fundamental risk and return models, which the financial industry itself uses to measure its own financial instruments, we can distinguish different sorts of businesses according to these risk and return financial instrument components.  Thus, from an extreme financial institutional perspective, which applies financial theory to its own institutional design, behaviours and assessment of behaviours, financial instrument theory applies laws to accomplish the institution’s particular objectives and the discipline and guidance therefore are simple financial theory models of risk and return, which captures the market definition of money.  From the institutional perspective apply financial theory, an institution is simply a financial instrument with certain risk and return characteristics.  Thus, financial institutions regarding themselves as financial instruments are constrained by the “rules of the game” of finance, which are basically arbitrage (“the law of one price”) which forever use laws such as contracts, and every other sort of law and regulation, as merely instrumental.  There are researchers who assert that there should be a legal theory of finance and use legal ideas to promote the logical priority of law to finance. There is no argument with this thesis if we add the distinction that law is the context in which finance exists.  However, it is not entirely plausible to say that finance exists because of law, nor is it plausible to assert that law is absolutely necessary for finance to exist in the world.  In any case, the purpose of this paper is not to adjust or determine where the horse and carriage can become one or the other—we believe that is actually an obvious distinction--but rather to understand if possible the system, model or ecology in which law and finance co-exist.  As a theoretical approach, we shall combine the financial instrument view and the financial institutional view into one totality, and call that totality, a law and finance ontology.  Our view, which is slightly complicated because of the distinctness of disciplines and variety of sub-disciplines involved in law and finance, is to start with the simplest ideal financial instrument and then to ask ourselves what would happen to that financial instrument in the real world of law and finance.

This model of moving from a well-defined financial instrument (which is the particular in the Aristotelian sense of a genus-specie category or more modernly, the event) to how this financial instrument operates in the real world (the generalized reality of abstract continuity) is in effect a study of the reality of finance given a legal context in the form of a mapping or under a mapping technology.