Reading Nature’s Signals

On: ClimateConcern@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 4:30 PM
Subject: Re: [CCG] Sources: what are the most unbiased sources for climate info??

Richard Foy had replied to my comment saying:
In my opinion this is the best post I have seen in a long time.
Richard

–
I had written 6/29/2009:

I think asking for facts to answer whether the facts we’re getting are reliable is sort of an unreliable approach.    It’s better to ask what can we know for sure when we don’t know much and our facts seem unreliable.

I think what’s going to change the thrust of the science will be realizing we’ve been asking the wrong question all along.   There are also a variety of emerging discoveries in the physics and behavior of the climate system, but that’s not the big one.     I see extensive misunderstanding of the basic complex system issues.  

We represent systems composed of learning parts using controlled operators on controlled variables, for example.  Part of what that does is point us to the wrong questions.     

The real question is not how we can eliminate the human drivers of climate change as we continue compound economic growth.    The real question is what systems will be destabilized to put an end to economic growth.    All persistent growth systems come to an end by destabilizing something, ranging from a small cybernetic switch to whole system collapse.    We’re not asking what will do that for the economies yet.    At the moment given the strong global consensus to never end growth it seems that catastrophic collapse of the economic system as a whole along with many ecologies is where we’re headed.

We pay so remarkably little attention to the design and development of natural systems we seem to have no clue how to even ask appropriate answerable questions about them.

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸

–In a longer post to TheGreatChange Lorna had asked:
What is this list about? Attacking science or solving environmental problems? And if you do the former, how can you address the latter?

–I responded:

Lorna, There are serious problems with the design of the scientific method. The problem is not with what it has found, but what the design of the method prevents you from looking for. One simple example it the learning processes of distributed systems. That’s what we’re in trouble with. Growth would appear to be the principle learning process of complex system organization and development. It is not yet included in the subjects of modern science, though. That’s apparently because growth is self-animating and uniquely individual, not externally controlled by either universal or local laws, but developing opportunistically within the laws. As a scientific community we’re being pressed to take over control of natural systems all over the planet and because we represent everything in the universe with control theory, we seem to have not the first idea how uncontrolled growth systems manage to work at all.

pfh

–Lorna challenged back:

I don’t understand what you mean by: “learning processes of distributed systems”. You need to explain and defend your statement about what Growth is (”principle learning process….”). You need to defend your claim that there are no external controls on growth (how about starvation? lack of energy or resources or space?). What is the “control theory” you refer to, where is it operative, who is in charge, control over what? Etc. etc.

What is “the design of the scientific method”? It isn’t a blueprint or a document but a process. What does it prevent us from looking for? Things that we don’t know are there? Science allows us to look for anything but there needs to be a reason to look in the first place.

Lorna

–which gave me the chance to say:

Good you asked. Most people leave me hanging as to what they need amplified. Briefly then,

- “learning processes of distributed systems” - Learning can be thought of as the accumulation of information, and in a physical system the information of the system is embodied in the physical form, like a tornado, or the ion channel that allows a spark discharge, or the body of an organism. The accumulation of the information content embodied in the individual system develops with the growth of the system. There are learning/development phases that help you understand what kinds of learning is being done in each phase, and help you know what to look for. The information in a system is in the system itself, and you don’t download it, or represent it with a formula or anything. You take a diagnostic approach and watch as the system develops to observe thresholds of stabilization and destabilization and things.

- Growth is “principle learning process” - The thing that fools most people seems to be thinking that a growth curve is only a shape of a sequence of measures. They seem to see the connection between the curve of the measures and the equations that can be made to represent them, but they seem quite unaware of the complex system that invariably underlies the changes that produce the data. What is happening inside the system, the changing networks of cyclic incremental change that tend to act as a whole, is the creation of the changes that are exhibited in measures reflected in the growth curve.

- Defend your claim that there are no external controls on growth (how about starvation?) - I don’t actually make that specific claim. I know there are lots of very real boundary limits for lots of things, and that outside interference will interfere with anything. I’m talking about the paths of development that can occur within, and independent of, the boundaries. Individual paths of development basically come from the active learning processes of systems, what they do internally that amounts to a kind of environmental exploration. Within your living room you have a certain amount of free movement independent of the boundaries, and learning to dance with a partner or writing a book are two of the paths of learning and personal growth one can engage in there.

The elaborate flocking of birds, or the evolution of technologies along uniquely individualistic paths are more typical good examples of complex systems of organized behavior that could have turned out all kinds of ways within the bounds of the local environment, but we got Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and their antics. Both turned out to be quite skillful in riding the bucking bronco of the technology market, but they also together “sucked all the air out of the room” and only started getting a little competition from open source designs later and now all being upstaged by silly technology and social network monopolies. Where it goes is still an open question. These are exploratory processes following opportunistic pathways, not controlled and predetermined by outside forces. You can tell because outside the system envelope defined by its loops, anything where being “in the loop” matters, the environment has utterly no comparable variety of design or structure.

- “control theory” is what you derive from controlled experiments to determine what variables control others. Most people don’t refer to it that way, but just as “science”. Since I’m talking about a theory of uncontrolled (locally developing) systems, I attempt to point to the difference between the two scientific ways to use information.

- “the design of the scientific method”? - look it up, or ask a more detailed question, a method of developing rules for prediction

- What does it prevent us from looking for? - As a method for developing rules of prediction it only provides for ways to look for rules of prediction. In part that’s because it’s assumed that predictions are statistical rules needing a large class of individual behaviors, and are undefinable for single individual behaviors, which is what I study. Studying individual behaviors not only exposes purely emergent forms, but also helps you identify when an individual system has stopped following the rules you have for it, two in a long list of uses. The usual evidence I look for is of organizational beginnings or endings, seen as changes in derivative continuity in the experience curve of some whole system measure. It’s a diagnostic technique to help signal me that new organization in relationships is developing and where to look for them.

Why not browse my site and find one or two interesting things to also ask good questions about.

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸
NY NY www.synapse9.com

Today Stan replied “Nice.” and Nick “A nice perspective”. It’s something I’ve been trying to say in a way that avoided the pitfalls for many years actually.

Anselmo had said yesterday: I think the dispute on “natural” vs. “artificial” is not just mere semantics, as you [Nick] appear to perceive it. Why? let me explain this with an historical example: think of physics at the time of Galieo Galilei. If you possibly have read the “dialogo sui massimi sistemi…”, you may have noticed that the word “impetus” was used in several ways, meaning velocity, force, impulse , acceleration, work, energy…. There are pages and pages in this seminal half literary, half scientific work where three disputants do not come into agreement on anything just because each one of them uses the same word meaning something different (often even switching between meanings within a same exposure or statement). Newton and Leibnitz got us out of void disputes by developing and formulating the proper mathematical frame, that made evident “impetus” was too a fuzzy concept, that needed to be split up in several well distinct, mathematically defined concepts. We all know what a revolution in physical science this kicked off.

And Stan on 6/15: This making explicit and crisp is exactly one of the problems OUR culture has created. The world and everything in it is to some degree vague, but our technological models are all as fully explicit as possible. Fuzzy logic is just beginning to be used in computation, but I think not much in science and technology. Note that one could argue that it is the crispness of meanings in or culture that has led us badly astray from the natural world, and is an important part of the ‘artificial’. Re the meaning of words, I have argued that the meaning of words like ‘impetus’ is in fact vague, and can be intuited from what one might call the ‘intersection’ of all the explicit definitions.

to which I replied : I’d agree with Stan in part, that there is error in making science overly explicit. Anselmo’s example, though, is also excellent in bringing out how science prospers from finding something that can be stated clearly within a larger confusing debate. So, my compromise is that “scientists should also check the bath water for babies”.

In the discussion of “impetus” Anselmo mentions, perhaps how Newton and Leibnitz reduced it to “force” represented by equations found a very useful part, but reduced the subject too far. We did in fact end up reducing science to a concern about externally imposed force as the only possible impetus for change. What is lost as a driving force of change is local systemic development and learning that many kinds of systems display. Those are what allows self-organization and self-animation.

So, I think that seems like a rather big omission, at least for the forces of change people are actually most affected by and interested inŠ One of the things you can say clearly about learning systems is that their learning is accumulative, and *not* ‘logical’, and so does *not* follow equations. It seems to identify a new kind of ‘fuzz’ we really must reattach to our equations to make them passably useful for navigating a complexly learning world .

Kathryn McCallum had said on 6/9, I am interested in this idea of communicating the “systematic tendency to overestimate human knowledge and control…predicated on the premise of predictability” as discussed very eloquently by my friend Kate Rigby in the attached essay.

Kathryn,

Coming back to this, I’d entirely agree that humanity is part of nature, and just feels alienated because our minds confuse us so much. We’ve been trying to force nature into the shape of our thinking rather than work with nature, so I thingk discussing it as a switch from dominion to negotiation is quite appropriate.

I think the key to our reconnecting with nature, though, is being able to see *how* and has to do with recovering our ability to distinguish between our artificial worlds and the real one. I think lots of people have the desire, but just not the technique. To me it’s clear that being confused about what is real and what is not is “in our minds”, and so an emergent property of our gift for abstract thinking. That would make it thousands of years old, but to also say that at least some basic ways of reconnecting with nature are then possible.

One starting point is with your observation that “we can predict”, but that it fools us. We can only predict based on regularities of the past, is the catch, and nature can also be very irregular. How to have foresight about approaching “irregularities” is a large part of what my work is about. Some people call rule changing events “black swans” because they spoil our predictions. If you consider nature’s developmental processes as themselves “rule changing events”, you can watch as their regularities directly stimulate the irregularities they invariably end in. Watching changes develop doesn’t make rare things predictable, of course, but gives you excellent hints on where, when and for what kinds of rule changing events to look for.

To generate the questions that help you find them I use the typical developmental life path for individual systems, (¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸). There is a sequence of six such rule changing events (if “black swans” is what you call them or not) in the path from beginning to end for all developmental processes. There may be other kinds of rule changes and systems, but the physics seems to say this model is useful for raising questions about the organizational innovations that originate changes in direction for systems of regular accumulation, such as growth systems.

It seems each period of irreversible developmental change (life phase) begins and ends with one. If you look for them, you won’t find them in your model of the past, though. They’re predictable exceptions to the regularities of one’s models, or “failures of the past” if you like. The catch is you have to look beyond the model to find them developing, out into the distributed processes of the physical system. You then use your certainty that change is coming to help gather clear evidence of when, where and how.

How I figured that out is by observing that change as a physical process involves physically distributed systems, that can’t possibly be in my head, and so can’t possibly be a matter of relations between the categories in my head either! Organizational innovations in physical systems are nowhere to be found in our categories except in our questions about the world around us.

Growth begins with some free resource for which there is no competition but is an end. That takes you to where…. you need to negotiate, and to become a partner of the things around you! I’m sure you’d agree it’s definitely not all bad to have that happen!

pfh

….follow the money!

Eric Rimmerhad said on 6/11:
“Thanks Peter – I do like your second paragraph – though there is a catch. The UK and the US and many more relatively low-birth-rate countries cannot live within the food-production capacity of the land they live in!”

To Peter Salonius’s statement on 6/11:
‘That said, there certainly is sentiment suggesting that food aid — offered to populations that have overshot the food production capacity of the land they live on – should not be lavished on people until they institute well defined programs that WILL begin to decrease their numbers toward levels that can be supported/sustained by the productive capacity of their OWN LAND.’

and
Ashok Agrwaal responding to my comment on 6/15
I find this brief analysis by Phil Henshaw far more meaningful than reams of speculative stuff churned out by Americans in general. 

to my reply on 6/13 was:

Eric, Right, and the way to measure that “unaccountable” footprint on the land far away from the user is the trick, that I think I figured out.   It’s using the statistical principle that most dollars can’t have way below average impact, so unless you can show it, consider your spending to have average impacts.     
 
I think the math works out more or less like the image I had when reading the fashion magazine yesterday at the doctor’s office.   There was a full page image of exquisite beauty surrounding a sea side South Hampton palace, and what popped into my mind was “an acre of undisturbed bliss in a square mile of total destruction”.     There are 640 acres in a sq mile and maybe it takes a million dollar income to have one of those places.  
 
The world energy intensity of money =6000btu/$ fairly uniformly around the world.   With a 1M$  income your energy use would about equal to 2.3 acres of high performance PV solar collectors, a reasonable measure of the highest intensity mono-culture buildable.   Then there’s the guesswork.    What is the average renewable productivity of the total of disturbed land?      If you counted all the clear cut forest, all the paved and plowed land, the scraped ocean floors and the deserts of overgrazed arid pasture, and had to take a proportional share of those… then *maybe* your share of all the unproductive waste land would pull down the average productivity of your land use to 1/250th of the highest possible efficiency use.    Then you have 1 acre of bliss would be being supported by 1 square mile of destruction.
 
Phil Henshaw      ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
NY NY     www.synapse9.com

Emily Spence had sent me a PNAS paper on the “Tipping elements in the earth’s climate system” and “Is Economic Growth a Delusion” by Steven Stoll

Emily, Thanks much again.   The PNAS paper on tipping elements, though as good as I’ve seen from established scientists, is still a bit flimsy relative to what you could say if you were to consider the evolving physical systems as developmental processes with organization of their own rather than as mathematical models.   Models just don’t have many of the behaviors that natural systems do, using controlled variable theory to represent distributed uncontrolled systems with independently changing and reacting parts…   Their definition of ‘tipping point’ shows an effort to address the subject, but ends up being a reiteration of the belief which was what got us in trouble, the idea that nature is an equation.    I wish these kinds of people would talk to me!!  

The strong empirical evidence of the type of hazardous tipping point approaching is persistent growth of whatever system you’re discussing.  That is primary evidence the system will create conditions to destabilize its own growth process.    That principle is not understandable until you think of systems as physical things having their own development and behavior, though, rather than equations, because equations have no independent parts and do not destabilize themselves.   Only physical systems do.    Considered as physical things you can realize why any growth system is a ‘machine’ for multiplying changes in the environment that will create conditions that upset itself.   

Economic growth then, both is and is not a delusion.    Every kind of organized system begins with it, and then the growth process upsets itself in one of a variety of possible ways.    Whether small things might alter how the growth system upsets itself, to either form a mature and sustainable system or to collapse in a pile of dust (or various ways around and in-between) is the question.    It’s not certain at that point of upset whether small things could tip the evolution of the system in different directions, but that is the usual time those possibilities open up if they are going to.   That’s when such windows of opportunity for redirecting the system appear.  

It’s a little like how space craft are guided using gravitation neutral points, called Lagrange points where the pull of gravity in different directions cancels out, making changes of orbital direction at those points very easy.     L1 and L2 are the famous ones [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point].   For the evolution of systems, the point where a growth system destabilizes itself is where many of the bonds between the parts that define the system are broken.   That makes the parts free to reorganize, at that ‘tipping moment’ for reorganization when the rules of the system are partly suspended.    The big one we are now at or near, of course, is the destabilization of the whole growth mechanism  of modern civilization.   It’s been steadily working itself up to this point of profound uncertainty, by steadily bigger and faster steps of change, for at least 500 years, and maybe a 1000.    Modern civilization is, in my view, what grew out of the Roman empire once ‘the dust settled’ from its failure.   Here’s a digest of the whole system  development curves I think help put that into context. http://www.synapse9.com/issues/World-eff_grow.pdf

Steven Stoll is accurately summarizing what I, Herman Daly, Bill McKibben, and James Gustav Speth all see as some of the symptoms of the deeper problem that our point in history represents.    I also see a couple levels more, into both the problems and the solutions.   There is a vastly superior way than what they recommend to respond to this tipping moment when physical exponential growth has ended, and culturally we find ourselves with no other plan.     What they recommend is to keep capitalism the way it is, but just make it a zero sum game.    In cultural terms that becomes a pure and simple plan to institute feudalism, due to the increasingly intense internal competition and conflict due to the parts of the system continuing to try to multiply.    I don’t recommend it.   It requires someone to have absolute power to make it stable, and I’m not ready for King Herman, king Bill or king Gustav.    It would be both ill-mannered and definitely not work as intended.  

Our entire problem with the earth is believing that we were “given” our powers of magical thinking to have dominion over the earth.   That’s the fools notion we need to get rid of.     On a planet that works only because independent things take care of themselves, it’s a mistake.     Trying to control uncontrolled systems just doesn’t work, anyway, no matter how hopeful the intent.     The other choice seems to be for people to be shown why now is the time to switch from using our wealth to multiply our own wealth for amassing ever growing privilege and power.   The alternative is to spend the same earnings on *something else* of value.    That switch in the purpose of having returns on investments, to *use them for doing good with rather than taking more* , would make money flow to what people VALUE (other than limitless self enrichment), and all the sustainability projects that deserve it would get the funding instead of money going into pumping up ever higher stakes games of using up the earth…    Well, or at least that’s what it sure looks like to me!! 

Best,

Phil Henshaw      ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
NY NY     www.synapse9.com

Yesterday Eric Rimmer, on the sustainability slide show discussion, had replied to my comment about the problem with using I=PAT for the “chicken and egg” problems of overshoot relating the problem of population vs. wealth. He said: Thank you. Phil. Interesting thoughts, though I can’t detect what you suggest we should DO?

Eric,
Well, I’ve been thinking about that too… Because the way natural systems steer their development is by using their operating surplus to redirect their development, we should get Barack to realize his mistake of saying it’s OK to spend all our effort and surpluses to get back to using up the earth’s resources ever faster again. That’s unequivocally what we’re doing when both government policy and stimulus are to rekindle the use of investment for maximizing the growth of investment. It’s a policy to maximize the exponential rate at which we add to the physical overhead the earth has to support . It follows the model of the past that, before ~1960 , generally resulted in making wealth more available and cheaper, but now does not do that.

Now the tables are turned and compound expansion is making real wealth less available and physically more expensive. What we need is to continually simplify and improve technology *to conserve resources by reducing the real cost of the system*. The standard investment growth plan results in causing the markets to make choices for the opposite purpose. It’s going to happen too, if we just let nature crunch the system the hard way and only a simple society survives. Avoiding that would mean voluntarily ending the limitless use of investments to enrich investors. Ther’d have to be some reason the investor or the community would choose to use the same earnings for something sustainable.

There’s more than a little there to think here, of course. The hard fact is that the arithmetic of diminishing returns says *after a point more investment means less good*, and that conflicts with many of our popular values. The question to keep coming back to is “How can we follow nature’s strategy of completing things as our limit to growth?”, rather than let all we’ve built fail for our not being up to the challenge. Letting things fail does work too, of course. It might be a better choice than accept a whole bundle of cheats that will just, again, just make the next crisis that much bigger. To reduce the whole physical system overhead the system surplus would need to find what is most valued and practical and steer clear of the money pumping that replaces perfectly good things with others that are actually ever more impractical.

For my own choices I’m partly spending what I have on finding a sustainable career. My old career as an architect collapsed partly because the whole economy wanted ever uselessly fancier and bigger stuff, paid for with ever less believable promises, and collapsed because of that. To support what I want to sustain in smaller ways I happened to decided to cut back on some charities, the hard sell ones, and get daily delivery of the NY Times again. The Times is such a good broad spectrum information resource, and I really don’t want it to go away.

Does that help?

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸

….
My prior comment to which he responded was:

Eric,
Yes, that’s what “the math” says, to limit both population and wealth. The question is whether to do that “steering” system with “self-constraint” or by “imposed control”. People have come to that impasse over and over, it seems to me, because we know almost nothing about how people or natural systems develop self-control and are justly bothered by what we do know about the workability of imposed controls. We keep having to ask whether to use the solution we don’t understand how to use, or the one we know won’t work…. What I keep looking at and pointing to are the examples nature offers of systems that show remarkable self-control, all over the place. The sciences just don’t seem to be studying or discussing how they work, or how to apply the same principles elsewhere, so that’s my theory of why we don’t know what to do.

How natural systems develop self-control looks to me to be the same way they grow. They take a portion of their product and use it as a resource for *building onto the process*. As new parts take new directions and old parts atrophy, the change direction. That is true steering, not outside control. It’s the system’s surplus that seems to be the natural resource for changing the system’s directions. I think it seems to be a tremendously versatile strategy.

It raises lots of new questions, of course, and that can seem slow going sometimes because you’re then no longer in a world of automatic answers. The population debate has been very repetitive for centuries apparently, though. If we keep asking the same questions in about the same way it seems likely it will just lead to the same inadequate answers.

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸

Lawrence Espy and Bill Reese similarly replied to Steve Solmony that the model of population growth limited by the natural carrying capacity of the earth was too general, and that Russ Hopfenberg’s article on population carrying capacity and “genetic feedback”. My reply to them precedes my earlier reply to Steve.

Lawrence had pointed out that ‘carrying capacity’ has many diverse natural system and artificial system parts, that evolve very differently and those differences need to be considered and were not. Bill similarly pointed out that many ecologists do not see “carrying capacity” as a particularly useful term as the ecosystem (the species’ environment) is constantly changing its ‘productivity’ and is never a fixed target. All agree as he says, with the basic premise that civilization’s whole shaky house of cards will come tumbling down if we are unable to maintain the constant throughput of resources necessary. That being quite in doubt I offered the following:

—
Tuesday 6/2/09
Lawrence & Bill,

I think the way to tie the two kinds of potentials, the natural and artificial “carrying capacity” limits of the earth is using the experience curves that indicate our own ability to leverage more of both these potentials. That ability increased for centuries and is now decreasing, so there was a peak somewhere. You can’t just talk about it in generalities, as I think Bill’s comment points out, so discussion should not overlook the micro-scale meaning of more general system “capacity” or “responsiveness” concepts, but for the whole earth the experience curves we can now draw seem to tell a dramatic story about when we went past that point of the earth’s peak responsiveness to us.

That point of diminishing returns for a growth curve is the inflection or neutral point (¸¸.o´ ¯), where the second derivative goes from increasing to decreasing, and marks a major transition in the life of any whole system. It locates the point in time when increasing investment in expanding the system begins to result in diminishing opportunity and increasing costs and complications instead. Before that increasing investment produced multiplying returns of ever greater quality at ever lower cost, throughout the preceding extended history of the growth process.

That’s a profound moment of changing direction, the end of a several hundred year long experience for modern economies, and a key piece of information about when a system should change what it is investing in. It’s a “carrying capacity” metric that is much easier to mathematically define too, and definitive for when a system should reverse its development directions. It’s also of much more consequence to know of that point when the compound growth of the system ends, it’s “limit of growth” than to know the ultimate asymptote of the same curve which is the whole system “carrying capacity”. The limit of compound growth comes first, is one reason. The main reason is it’s the clear moment of exceeding the earth’s capacity for the system’s growth without coming in conflict with its limits.

I think once people acknowledge the concept we’ll find that all the history curves show it, as with the end of exponential growth in real wages in ~1970 [http://www.synapse9.com/issues/WWatch2009-econ-3.jpg]. There’s also the whole eruption of ever larger and more urgent environmental crises, and lots of other things of that type. I think the point at which growth actually collided with its limits was really ~1960. Naturally, from what we now know, our economies should have started their turn to self-sufficiency a good bit before then,… but we weren’t conscious.

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸
NY NY www.synapse9.com

—
Monday 6/1/09
Steven,

I think the “genetic feedback” theory seems to be just that organisms that destroy their environments don’t prosper, which is true. Still it’s an overstatement to say “It has been demonstrated that” it “is the mechanism by which species achieve ecological balance.” The other main mechanism for achieving balance in systems is for the parts to be responsive, not unresponsive, to each other and to the conflicts that develop as they grow and collide with each other and each other’s interests. That internal responsiveness is demonstrated in how none of our organs normally behave like cancers, for example. So, the default mechanism of achieving balance may be for the parts of an organism to act like cancers and result in death. Internal responsiveness as a way of achieving balance could be seen as the normal mechanism.

True, the former is much the sense of the old neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, where survival is an accident of competitive struggle between systems bent on causing each other’s demise. True also, that the more natural evidence based theory of evolution, employing learning and response by the parts, is slow in being accepted. The more natural theory acknowledges that individuals of all species are observed to actively learn about their environments and that this learning allows them to be responsive to conflict and avoid it, and succeed as a result. You see that active learning in the constant foraging and risk avoidance of most organisms, for example.

Lots of kinds of growth systems, profit seeking mechanisms of a sort, become self-stabilizing by responding to the approach of conflict as being unprofitable, I guess you could say. They “do the math” as it were. Our civilization’s destructive conflict with nature is at the very least “unprofitable” in that sense, and if we were being sensible we’d avoid the growing conflicts rather than blunder along clinging to denials in place of watching the real profit indicators for continuing a futile struggle.

That other growth systems without central controls seem to respond to those signals just fine, is just a mystery of nature as an “most everywhere learning system”. That’s the evidence it seems. I think systems without brains manage to learn more easily than we do is the question. They don’t have artificial worlds in their minds to clutter the signals coming from the real world. People tend to think the world is what they know and then go to lengths to ignore how the real and artificial worlds increasingly differ. That’s not being responsive, and it does invite but not necessitate nature’s default solution for achieving balance.

Best,

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸¸
NY NY www.synapse9.com

In my journals I have page after page of large and small ideas, research ideas, notes to myself, and occasionally share them. Here’s one from today.

– The philosopher’s puzzle of whether a tree that falls in the woods makes a sound, posits that someone walking in the woods discovers a fallen tree, and wonders whether it had made a sound when it fell. It presents it as a general question about unanswerable questions.

One could ask the same question in an answerable way by turning it around. You could equally ask the greater question of whether a fallen tree ever contained the breath of life. The breath of life is equally or perhaps even more elusive than the thundering crash of a falling tree, a sound that leaves no visible mark. The past life that built the tree is equally invisible, but evident in the layer upon layer of the tree’s construction, and in the upturned root mass, and the deep leaf compost all around it, the hole in the canopy above. That way the unanswerable question can take you on a path of exploration by which the “formal realities” of the mind (at a loss without information) and the “physical realities” of the world can be connected, with confidence that is confirmable by others and extendable. Such connections between formal and physical realities are not threatened at all by ‘seeds of doubt’ and being left open to question, as they themselves are the products of open questioning. They may change, but they’re made stronger by discovering the unexpected, not weaker.

The puzzle is not about whether all questions about reality are answerable as some clearly are and some are not. It’s more about whether reality has any independent existence from our information, and if not, do we need to take reality to be what someone else says it is. Asking the question the right way the answer is clearly, yes, information and things are constructed independently, and no, you need to decide what to believe yourself, and can often confirm for yourself what others say. How the puzzle is posed makes it seem as if it’s about whether the unanswerable questions if life give you a sound basis for sweeping metaphysical proofs. One can always find unanswerable questions, but it’s the task of science and language to connect the formal worlds in our minds with the physical realities we are all part of. Unanswerable questions might in special circumstances prove something quite useful, but where there is neither a use or an answer it’s quite possible that they don’t prove much at all, and you might as well continue on with other things. ;- )

Brad mentioned Catton’s theory of response to overpopulation as “We much learn to live in harmony with natural systems…”, which is true enough, but in the details talks about human values and not about how nature physically works. It’s a major “red flag” to talk about solving physical system problems in terms of human values. Our values are what we should use to motivate our learning how the systems work, but not actually what will change them!

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Brad,
One of the interesting “red flags” contained in the traditional theories of growth limits is that they present the physical processes involved “following a theory”, when in fact theories are only persuasive to people, and nature uses a rather different method… Natural systems are only going to be guided by their own increments of accumulation, and the counter increments those end up triggering. The huge error we keep making is thinking that reducing our use of things being overused is the solution, but fail to see what happens to the savings we make that way, that become the multipliers of things we’re paying no attention to. If interested in a more complete statement of that see The Efficiency Mistake…

When the increments of change get progressively larger what you can be as sure of as gravity is “something” in the environment will come along to upset that! Humans generally don’t think to look for it, that’s all. It’s not that the growth of good things is bad, but that you need to ask what will bring it to an end, and see the good in that too. In a world of increase you just start listing ALL the things that add to the increments, and the struggle with the real dilemma. The real dilemma comes down to promoting human welfare without linking it to human self-restraint.

If we don’t *link self-restraint* and *the feeding our desires* for charitable aid, money growth, new technology, improving productivity, leisure activity, healthcare, great monuments and artifacts, travel, etc. etc., then the ‘theories’ of the counter culture are just so much philosophizing without effect. So to construct the “counter system” we need to construct the “counter increments”, know how and why the aid, and the money, and the technology, and everything else would be good to stop adding to. Almost none of the “counter culture” people are even talk about that, do they?

I mention our crossing the EROI Line of Sustainability (degrading our resources as it multiplies their costs ) as one inescapable physical boundary to definitely avoid, that I think we seem to have already begun to cross. See Crossing the Line of Sustainability It’s a little ‘scientific” in approach, so I need help is getting the idea out other ways too. The problem is not just population growth, but ALL factors that persistently add to our uses of the earth (see list above)…