People have always had a real problem with believing the
stories we make up for ourselves, that consciousness presents to us as
fact. What makes sense of it is understanding that the material processes of
nature are one reality, that we don't "see", and the reality we each do "see" is
our own creative substitute for the world of nature. Our various cultural worlds
of agreements on how to live, our "maps" for life, are having real trouble
keeping up with the wilderness of big changes in our other reality, that we just
don't see, the material processes of nature that we have to adapt to.
A compact way to say it is that this split between our two realities is now
driving the world mad, as it grows wider, for three fairly obvious reasons:
What I found is a new scientific method for finding nature's true stories of change and locate where we are in her stories. It does NOT do the cultural work of understanding the true stories of what's happening to us. It only lets you see them, and ask better questions about what they might mean to us, so people's new stories can better fit the changing reality of how to live on earth.
Two of the most widely believed principles of "how to get along" that once worked in the past but are now rapidly undoing our chances of survival as a complex society enjoying a verdant earth are:
Where this challenge to us comes to an "end", if we learn
to reconnect our stories with the natural world we live in, is with a world
culture that keeps creatively changing. Cultures and economies would continue to
experiment with new ways to live and use the earth, ...but in balance with our
capabilities and nature's. All we'd loose in restraining our hyper creativity is
demanding ever more from ourselves and the earth till we "lose it" both mentally
and physically.
History seems to show that lots of other complex societies have fallen prey to
this same trap and not survived it.
- see also: What Wandering Minds Need to Know, read the Natural Economies posts here, or search my site for discussions, like on the part of this that Keynes noticed.
11/28/09 - physical science applications Physics of Happening - general introduction to methods Natural Systems Science
It can be confusing to ask unfamiliar questions, discover new subjects to discuss. As with learning a new language, even if everyone has the exact same personal experiences to refer it may take a while to see how to. I only say that because the ideas are unconventional enough that referring to things simply in my way seems very unclear when read with conventional expectations.
A good part of that comes from my interest in uncontrolled systems, and the need for new language to make up for the deficit created by science having been mainly built around the study of controlled systems. Systems with their own independent organization (a business or organism or anything like that) can't be controlled by their environmental pressures, as those pressures are relatively very simple and the internal organization of self-organized and self-animating systems tend to be quite complex, complex beyond representation in fact. We say the environmental pressures are of "inadequate variety" to control the internal designs and behavior, so I call them “uncontrolled”.
I represent uncontrolled systems almost simplistically, though, with a single measure traced over time. It's a simple technique for referring to their natural development phases and and successions (like forest successions or other things). It's recognizing that series of changing forms of organization that uncontrolled systems go through that has seemed most helpful in perceiving their reality. Still, this is somewhat "new language" and in writing I often “think to myself” I’m mentioning these things as I write, but people may miss the hints along the way, or I forget to put them in. So, it's good to ask why I seem to be saying something that makes no sense, if that arises. I do understand models quite well, for example, and people naturally assume in discussing science that the subject is models. A great many of the questions I ask are about the things being left out of our models, though, so look for that. So, here’s an outline of the strategy I use, clipped from a letter.
I start from observing change over time, looking for the processes that need to develop to fulfill the necessity of continuity in beginnings and endings. Continuity of developmental change (flowing change) is implied by the conservation laws, and finding how nature does it is the trick.
The changing continuity (flows) of events that connect the stages of beginnings and endings is where its most exposed
When progressive systems alter what allowed them to develop they change again,
those natural boundaries of developmental change and narrowing of options that may accompany them, are the things to watch for.
Remember, our ideas about nature depend on our inventing general understandings, but nature does not operate with generalities.
Everything in nature happens in particular, as individualities.
There would naturally be individual differences in how anyone views events, both because individual events are different and because and individual views are then themselves separate events... So.. to understand things in general you need to be open to multiple views.
The study here, though, starts from and leads back to the study of individual events.
Because I’m trying to locate the physical processes that nature is using, I don’t go straight off to collecting data for making my own model to use in place of nature’s systems.
I start with “looking around” for regular proportional change, which means finding trends with implied derivatives either all positive or all negative (i.e. like growth or decay).
Linking together the processes that display them, with transition processes to connect them in succession, is what is guided by the energy continuity implied by the conservation laws.
So my information about an observed process starts as a range of possible paths of continuity, like having upper and lower bounds beyond which things couldn’t work.
For example, asking if you change one thing how fast can others adapt, and along what signal pathway would that communication occur.
If response times are necessarily finite, you can ask if you can see evidence of the limits of response to more complex issues approaching, just the same as asking if you can get ever more from a resource that displays what looks like a classical depletion curve.
It’s an empirical use of physics that starts from evidence of localized growth or decay,
It implies the presence of uncontrolled systems in some local complex environment, and the beginning or ending of energy flows, often all being confirmable [as if watching nature taking “a sip” from a gradient.?]
When such systems are looked at statistically they may or may not have recognizable statistical predictability
They are cases where nature is most often not using a statistical model herself, but using a process of conserved (accumulative) change that necessarily has to develop in successions to follow the conservation laws, and do so in an unmapped environment.
Such systems may follow each other’s trails, and things, but appear largely to have no programs (hence ‘uncontrolled’). They appear to exploit their opportunities and are altered by exhausting them.
So, in summary, my approach is to
first locate uncontrolled systems, and ask the boundary questions I can define,
building an understanding by looking around to see what is changing together,
and then looking for how it’s feedbacks work and what will trigger them to change,