Why ? ¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸

a general “map” of the natural successions of complex systems , helping you locate what animates emerging processes and events.

how nature works, going back and forth between diverging and converging developments.

"¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸" the standard envelope of energy events and how they develop and decay, the essential life cycle of innovation in nature

Use it as simple & solid framework, for connecting your own observations of accumulative change, to give you insight into developing systems of natural organization around you.

The rise and fall of new organization in nature - requires building self-contained systems for using energy, that change form as a whole repeatedly, during the succession of stages in coming and going. That makes "¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸" the universal story, and when you look for what "the plot" is you find natural environmental systems, their narratives and your relationships and roles in them.

It's everything's story of beginning and ending. It points to the parts of nature which are changing by accumulative development. It helps you find either loosely or tightly organized systematic "change machines" and "storms of events", and anticipate their further changes. As runs of innovation they are not pre-designed, but display active processes that have some means of exploring the possibilities of their environments.

So they are constrained, but develop on their own locally and are essentially "uncontrolled" and "unprecedented". However much they are guided or uncontrolled by their own environments, they mostly point to change in the natural world completely out of human control. Their stories are generally about unprecedented change that people both don't control and also have no meaning for yet, "new stuff", that may take work to find meaning for.

The threads of their stories are found in their path finding behavior, like the cascades of change that characterize social movements, emerging technologies or ecologies, explosions of creativity that eventually do or don't find a stable niche. The parts tend to display some kind exploratory search behavior and a way to translate local discovery into whole cascades of change. They display ways of finding new opportunities and developing group responses for adapting to what each other find. One catch, of course, is they don't tell their story to you unless you're doing some creative searching of your own.

One of many hints is to look for how effects distribute in a community of things, fluidity in relationships, as if sharing stresses or innovations in the liquid ways found in economic markets. Natural systems generally work through a combination of animating processes and passive parts, distributed in complex environments, and share with economies many of the same kinds of processes that allow them to work as a whole. Wherever you find "liquidity" it seems very likely you'll also find a natural system fueled by some sort of creative search by its parts. 9/24/09 3/3/10 3/7/11
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"¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸" is also The "life story" of all things that develop by accumulative processes, and following the "story line" helps you find where they are, how they work, and understand them.

It helps you distinguish their local individual realities from constructed theory and argument about them. 9/07/23

9/04/11 I believe a good explanation needs to lead you to better questions. That's the original passion and power of science,

My approach is designed as a question finding method,
particularly for the kinds of questions that will always be well beyond the reach of scientific laws to solve,
on the uncontrolled side of nature, the world of individual complex systems.

Explanations can do either, 1) help you see the world beyond the explanation, or 2) represent the world with the explanation, as being simplistic. Try making two lists. One each for things explained those two ways, and consider the difference between the subjects concerned and what those two opposite kinds of explanation are used for.

What keeps people from agreeing on what “reality” is most of all is our habit of thinking reality is the sense we make of our information (something we invent), rather than the things we don’t invent that our information is about. Locating things in the environment that are self-organizing and so clearly not in your head is one approach to separating the imaginary world of ideas from the one we’re observing. That’s easiest for me by identifying things that all grow as a unit and by watching their basic natural system “life story” of developments (¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸). When you identify natural systems that way it’s fairly obvious they’re not in your mind because they both take care of themselves and have multiple scales of organization that are daunting to even classify let alone define and explain…

Equations represent complex behaviors with simple rules. They can be used to eliminate questions and represent a lively world as lifeless. They can also be used to help you see where real systems are taking on a life of their own, by contrast. Use them to raise questions about the uncontrolled distributed organisms of nature developing throughout your environment, using hints from theory and nurturing your capacity for surprise,

Finding Continuity in Change points to a system of change:
As you notice events around you, and find one of the 5 kinds of accumulative rates of change, it implies you'll probably be able to find a developing network of relationships doing it. You find the pattern in evidence you can verify, as a sequence of similar connected steps preceding and following, a continuity. Then you learn from it what to look for more widely in the environment producing the continuity. Discovering the system producing the continuity helps you understand how to interact with it, and to prepare for the switch to the next kind of accumulative change in the sequence to be triggered in the natural lifecycle of events.

0.... 1

....6
(Building up - Building down) - Maintaining - (Breaking up - Breaking down)

3/18 It's a general learning map, to organize observations about natural learning systems, using physics to ask better questions not make representational models. It's for all levels of sophistication, learning about individual environmental systems, connecting their developmental change with their internal networks of adaptive and creative processes. It is represented as a curve tracing some regular measure of development over time.

Observing a continuity of successive changes (flowing progression) is what initially validates the physical continuity, and points to where to find emerging environmental organization in the process networks causing it. It allows you to see the path of a system's life cycle of changes as a whole, from inside and out, beginning to end, as an individual organizational 'event' in its environment. A complex process carries it's design information in the state of organization of the process itself, and so it's development is its learning process.

It makes the common kinds of change involving local system organizational development more available to study from any perspective, interest or historical or physical science.

1- 3/14/09 3/18 Learning to cook you might as well start with a soufflé... The real point of learning to understand distributed systems and their environments from a view of their developmental states, is to become able to switch back and forth mentally between an inside and outside perspective of them. An electric spark or an individual human life or a social network all start from a small seed of new organization, that "punctuates the equilibrium", first developing explosively to then transform into a stable design and remain stable at its peak of vitality for a relatively long period before it then declines.

This is an unusually broad feature of how systems rooted in physical phenomena are organized and behave, and the origins of the method are in an advance in the general physics of ecology. Understanding it has real potential to become a common thread for connecting all the natural and historic sciences and subjects with a common frame of reference, to link all their individual frames of reference. I need help though, finding a way out of a trap. I need ideas for how I might discuss these threads of connection between the many fields of science, without stimulating defensive reactions as if interfering with their self-sufficient languages or being mistaken as a non-scientist. The sciences seem to have efficient 'gatekeeper' stereotypes that quickly exclude anyone not sharing their common culture, and so pointing out a thread of connection in their common physical world is being treated as 'alien'. As the work has very significantly improved it quality, the quality of reactions continues to be just about the same, defensive. It's really an invitation to make interdisciplinary thinking a reality.

The the sequential map for the general sequence of accumulative change in distributed systems of any scale identifies the principle continuity of an extremely broad general 'species' of system individual. It provides a way to connect the history of developmental phases with its changing organization internally and changing relationships with its environment, joining what's happening inside and out, beginning to end. Each view can richly inform the others as to "what's really happening". Connecting those time and organization views of the individual whole system as one "creature" or "network cell" coupled with an environment, are key to seeing them as a whole, learning to think them through from their beginning to end, going back and forth between thinking about their internal and external relationships. The inside view of things normally seen from outside is like learning to see from another person's view of the world, and offers dramatic improvement in understanding what you have seen of that person looking at them from the outside. Similarly learning to have an outside view of things normally seen from inside, as learning to see human culture as our organism, sharing an environment with others and bumping into their reactions, it's both thrilling as well as quite useful to understanding any aspect of history.

That last one, learning to see what you are part of from the outside may sound improbable at first, as it means temporarily putting aside the subjective point of view we all naturally start with. Learning to see the emergence of modern human civilization as a singular event and whole system, starts with the beginning of continual economic growth at the end of the "dark ages", take us to its present apparent end, and on to a lasting new form, or not. The growth is nature's way of beginning things that have organizational continuity is the key observation. You get a new kind of understanding from studying these distributed networks of inside and outside relations and a combined whole, even if in a most sketchy way.

It's a kind of insight that would help us see the invention of wealth as different from money, and really about the vitality and stability of this place we call home, as a whole. 'Infinite vitality' is just a burn-out! In our culture we mostly see wealth as money, the markers themselves, and ignore how money is just a number with no value at all except as a share of healthy complex distributed physical economies. That realization seems to be part of what we need to cure us of valuing the otherwise empty information tokens, that have no value except as shares how human and environmental services work well together. We confuse the $ information with the reality of the vital community of resources is the problem, so seeing us as somewhere on the path of the universal development process ¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸ helps us think about our choices in relation to the physical reality. Everyone is part of, but no one is ever the owner of, or responsible for creating, how a whole environment works well together. We just play a part and each have a role in caring for the profit that originates from the whole. The 'usury' that violates that is not the *size* of interest charged for using someone else's money, but simply whether whatever interest is charged is *used to increase the lending*, putting money into the economy to take exponentially more out, until it fails.

Distributed systems are the creative element of nature, where growth comes from. The continuity of the development processes helps you learn about how one stage sets the scene for the next stage, and therefore also about what is necessary as a foundation for each stage to progress. It starts with an environment full of complementary differences ripe for a seed of organization to take off, and climaxes with that instability either becoming resolved in a stable new form, or not.

Humans learning about them tends to ignore the environmental contribution, as humans tend to think of things only in their own cultural terms. We've been leaving it to the environment to finish what we begin. No creation of lasting value is made unless the designs are finished too, and in taking over the whole planet there is not enough of nature left to clean up after us any more.

If you build a building you could keep building till it collapsed, and are forced to stop building up walls to put on the roof. Putting on a roof stops you from continuing to add floors, but without a roof it's not a good building. That's the 'quandary' of economics. As a 'house' and home for mankind, we're building toward collapse and have no roof yet, and need one. The resources being wastefully burned up for the one, could be better used for the other. We need a roof.

What's most "illogical" about natural systems is that they change their designs by continuous progressions, like growth, maturation, break-down and decay. To study them you break their changes down in your mind by their characteristic developmental phases. Progressions of environmental measures identify what is changing together and how the organization of systems change as flowing processes as diagrammed in Chapters.htm and Pages.htm. Any individual system will display its own individual versions, having the same succession of continuities. The reason to use "development over time" as the common language of systems, rather than their designs, is that their designs are changing continuously from beginning to end, so any one design is a snapshot of a moment in the evolution of the system. In their change over time every system is a whole succession from beginning to end, a variation on the same.