physics of happening

September 16, 2006

RE: mixed up solutions…

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 7:37 pm
9/3/06 
Eric & all,
David’s sense of urgency is becoming more widespread, and I certainly think both quite rational and important, but still missing the required change in target.   We need to avoid multiplying the failure the last 50 years of environmentalism has produced.   It’s not wrong.   It just didn’t work.   To keep what I’m saying both clear and accurate, just say the problem is speed.   Our society is designed to accelerate change, perpetually, and the natural crisis you’d expect are starting to blow up faster than we can name them.  
People are lousy at coming to clear consensus decisions on big complicated matters, and it’s imperative we do so faster and faster to keep up with the impacts of exponential growth.   The real problem is all the crises coming at once, an entirely predictable consequence of designing a system to have them come explosively faster.   The answer is to unplug it.   Hopelessly dreamy?   Hardly.   Every living thing that survives it’s initial growth spurt does the trick, nearly all with grace and beauty, often becoming something wonderfully new.  I think it’s clearly done from the inside since there’s nothing else in control.    Still, for us, it means learning a little about steering natural systems, and science has not really quite admitted they exist yet.   For some reason we just can’t find the formulas they follow…!   Yea, the whole situation does put us at a little disadvantage, including that it’s too late to head off lots of the disasters on the way.
If you think of humanity as a ship at sea, with a huge wave of environmental consequences about to break over our heads, my proposed fairly drastic financial measure, unplugging the financial accelerator, would have the effect of trimming but maintaining sails and turning the ship into the wave, hoping we don’t capsize as we ride it out.     Humanity is all together in this, but does anyone dare to ask the question?
… Can we communicate that there’s a little contradiction in the phrase ’steady growth’ ?     The fact that the closest straight line approximation to any exponential is a vertical line starting at the present is not a trivial matter for anyone required to walk the path.   Do you know what to do?
to save you wandering my site:
http://www.synapse9.com/prpr1.htm  
http://www.synapse9.com/prpr2.htm 
Much more discussion is certainly warranted…
Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

what we can do to help

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 7:31 pm

9/1/06

Eric & all,
The way I look at it, the old idea of population climax was based on the expectation that as people gained competence they’d act in their own interests.   It’s failing because large communities of people didn’t gain competence.   The last 4 trillion in foreign development aid (1) essentially didn’t work.    Putting it in as cartoonish and graphic a way as I can without being quite incorrect, foreign aid put a lot wealth in the hands of friendly businessmen to spend in NY and Paris, and gave the poor peoples it was intended for handouts so they could multiply without learning anything.
What I’m saying is that a major cause of poverty in the ‘developing’ world seems to be the kind of help we’ve been giving.  Pushing just a little over the edge with the spin, we’ve acted as if the only thing missing from poor countries was rich people.   What I think we need to do is directly buy things from poor people instead, not give things to them, or at the very least have the recipients of our giving intended to help poor communities, spend it strictly on buying the products they produce.    Then THEY choose how to spend their earnings.   That generally gives a much larger gift than the price.   There are lots of cultural fit and other issues too, of course, and no pure magic to be found, but discovering our great mistakes, and there are others, is the first thing we can do to help I think.  
Make any sense?
1)Ken Weimar, Director of Development, KickStart International 

—–
[p.s. please add the private address below to the list, I prefer it for correspondence over the office address that accidentally got onto the original list]

Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

mixed up solutions…

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 7:27 pm
9/1/06
Eric & all,
It’s good to feel one’s way along, with new things particularly.    The modern world sort of requires that you get rid of that old fashioned idea though…    People end up acting in bigger and bigger ways, not looking at the effects.   One of the things that I like most about Eric’s observations is that conservation isn’t important if it’s clearing a wider path for the problem, mindless growth.   
Some see it as particularly deflating to find fault with what feels best to us, but then don’t learn the basic principle, it’s not the feelings, it’s the whole effect.   To me, finding unusually big reasons to be sharply and deeply pessimistic about our world, is also a great reason for optimism.   Most signs point to mankind being at an intellectual dead end, having conquered nature without a clue as to what to do with it.   So, we must be missing something.   Finding surprising ways in which our best intentions are consistently backwards might be a start.

Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

Re: Your article in ECO

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 7:11 pm
9/13/06
Damian,
Not sure if this will get to you.   I’m an American, so some of what you had to say about the European philosophy of complexity went right over my head.   In my philosophy of knowledge the fact that I’m “out of the loop” with regard to some of the things you were saying, is both an observation about philosophical disconnects I observed while reading, and an observation physical loops of conversation that I can observe you are part of, and know I am not part of.
If you were to take the above principle, and extend it, you’d see that the mistakes of modern science in trying to represent nature with simple equations is just a mistake, not a fault of learning from observation.   You might say  representing nature with simple equations is a BIG mistake, perhaps, and be entirely correct in the sense of what big mistakes will result in… but, to me, it’s just a mistake.    I have a different, fairly successful, way of correcting that mistake, that also does directly open toward the kind of Husserlian vision you rightly single out as refreshing and inspiring.
I began making headway when I began to look at what ‘approximation’ leaves out.  It leaves out all the connecting processes, for example, those ‘messy bits’, which on closer inspection all turn out to be unstable processes.   The magic of nature is in it’s instabilities.    I’m actually less interested in nature’s statistics, it’s what’s really happening that I find intriguing.    But it’s not the use of approximation that leaves out that dance of time, it’s the representation of nature with approximation that kills the patient.    So I crafted a method of looking directly at what approximation  ignores.    
I’m definitely a theoretician, but my method also definitely relies on careful direct observation.   That’s where the music is!

Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

RE: what’s the consensus on overshoot?

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 7:07 pm

9/9/06
Steve,

Yea! you’re absolutely right on the whole thing, except why it is that nature has so profoundly tricked the whole species into an aggressive plan for self-destruction. It’s beyond awesome. Apparently humans ARE that stupid, but I don’t believe nature is that mean. I can’t help but notice how fucking pregnant we are!

I think the evolution of personal character is inconsistent with the dead end of general societal collapse. Foolish perhaps, but I think the overlords who deserved the punishment are all dead. Most of the time in nature when the old gives way, it gives way to something else, like molting or composting or something. Yes, the powers-that-be are committed to holding it all in, denying change whatever comes, and your right to see the odds of abortion or still birth as high, but as mighty as they are, that’s just their opinion! :,)

Cheers

Phil

RE: internalism…& things missing from approximation

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 7:00 pm

9/5/06
Stan
> Phil –
> >Stan,
> >> Phil - Replying (to your kind remarks)
> >>
> >> >Stan,
> >> >Would you say that opportunity is the principal cause
> >> >of causal
> >> >loops?, and so the principal interest of an internalist
> >> >perspective, whereas
> >> >opportunity is largely invisible to an externalist
> >> >perspective and so usually ignored?
> >> That’s one way of putting some of it, yes. But it relies on
> >> external knowledge in the sense that we know that
> >> continued branching
> >> as a result of choices in a material system reduces with
> >> each choice
> >> the remaining possibilities.
>>
> >Hard to be sure what you’re describing. Our ‘external
> >models’ often
> >include an imaginary set of possibilities that depend on
> >things that
> >have not happened, a ‘phase space’ of expectations
> >with uncertainty.
> >That’s a projective construct and may not correspond
> >to any actual
> >thing. From a inside experience the array of branching
> >possibilities
> >we can imagine from the outside first presents as
> >something like
> >curiosity and then exploration. Right?
> From the inside, there would, I think, not appear to be
> fewer choices after much branching, true. However, from what
> we know externally of developing sysems, the amount of
> information that can be held in a material system is finite,
> and if the system doesn’t (and a material system can’t)
> discard some info, then each further choice is a refinement
> on previous choices, and this has to move onto an asymptote
> of info shipped on with time in any finite system.I think the information theory model of volumetric measures of information, i.e. the minimal length of the string to have the requisite variety to describe or specify one of a set of alternates, is… basically… wrong. As an idea it definitely has traction for designing computers, but it fails to account for why it presents information as a one dimensional subject. I think that comes out in considering the translation problem. You can’t really specify how much data is required to translate from one to another because they’re build on different concepts. Every translator struggles with that, except for computer theorists, for whom, conveniently, every language uses the same concepts.

I don’t disagree that there is such a thing as expanding and narrowing paths of learning, or that the quantitative metaphor fits approximately if you take the structure of your information container for granted, but I think the reason new states or organization are invented, species, philosophies, technologies, organisms, is that perfecting something is a natural consequence of inventing some larger idea.

Now if the king is upset that his armies refuse to go conquer more distant lands to add to his wealth, and want to settle down with the best they’ve gathered from several, he can stomp around, but the army is what makes the decision. It’s not necessarily that they couldn’t handle it. It could be just that the found something that works, and that turning inward diverts the creativity from expansion to perfection. Maybe perfection has more information content potential than expansion, certainly different kinds.

> >Sometimes this discussion turns depending on whether
> >you’re talking
> >about things or their explanations, though. I often mix it all up.
> >It’s quite tricky to arrange the language to distinguish
> >between the
> >four, inside v. outside, explaining v. experiencing, but
> they’re hugely
> >different, or make it 8 or is it more if you add images v.
> >things…
> Agreed. Yes. I try to keep my talk, when I can, to be
> about models and theories, but internalism is a break from
> that. I think, lacking a logic of vagueness, we can’t really
> get a model of the internal experience. It’s a challenge. If
> our mechanistic discourses could handle such stuff as
> complexity, it wouldn’t, I suppose, be a current problem.
> >> >I had a nice long conversation on FRIAM with
> >> >Nicholas Thompson on
> >> >the meaning of homing systems in nature, and their
> >> >taxonomies, ending in
> >> >proposing it as a natural scale of consciousness. To
> >> >summarize what I
> >> >got out of it, thermostats have loops, and so an interior,
> >> >but only a
> >> >one dimensional awareness of the world. Natural systems
> >> >with various
> >> >levels of homeostasis have internal worlds of greater
> >> >complexity and
> >> >evident multi-dimensional awareness and responses to their
> >> >environments. Mammals, consider a mouse strategically
> >> >scurrying for
> >> >it’s hole and apparently homing to an abstract image,
> >> >all have
> >> >precognition on various rather high levels.
> >> OK.
> >> >Nick initially seemed concerned with whether considering a
> >> >thermostat
>> >to have any measure of consciousness would mean human
>> >experience was no longer unique.
>> >Well, I don’t think ‘human experience’ can be really unique
>> >since it is scattered about partout. As well, if we 
>> >have some
>> >property, then the evolutionary viewpoint requires that
>> >our ancestors
>> >had its precursors — all the way back. Ergo, a tornado
>> >has some fleeting, very vague intentionality!

> >Two issues. Referring to things v. explanations changes the
> >issues to be addressed. When talking about ‘things’ terms
> >refer outside the
> >language and are designed to usefully link to physical
> >characters, as
> >with taxonomy. e.g. to talk about the ‘intentions’ of physical
> >tornados you’d need to have a taxonomic scale of
> >intentionality.
> The best I’ve come up with so far is: {teleomaty
> {teleonomy {teleology}}}, or {propensity {function
>{purpose}}}

> >On mine, because it’s ranks states rather than degrees,
> >tornados don’t
> >make it on the scale. ‘Intention’ was actually the word Nick
> >attributed to thermostats, treating it as a property of
> >degrees as you
> >do, and I pointed out, as you seem inclined, that that was
> >quite a stretch
> >considering the word’s most common usage. To me ‘intent’
> >involves a
> >focused mental image, not just a direction of drift, and
> >altering that
> >concept far enough to include thermostats (or tornados)|
> >would do damage
> >to my other uses of the term.
> I have, re the above, also tried, {{intentinality}} ->
> {intentionality} -> intentionality, to show the developmental
> refinement involved here. Tornadoes can only have a vague
> {{intentionality}} or propensity. You see, if one is to be a
> materialist, then it is necessary to find material precursors
> if we take an evolutionary perspective. I do, however,
> appreciate yor reluctance here. It does, given our general
> perspective, seem to be quite a stretch!

I don’t follow your parenthesis or alternate spellings schemes. If I get your meaning anyway, that being a ‘materialist’ means that physical qualities have no origin, I probably don’t agree. A souffle’ has ‘eggness’ but an egg does not have souffle’ness, and in either case the ‘ness’ suffix indicates a perceptual quality not a physical property. Because we definitely do think more in terms of perceptual qualities than physical properties I choose to us the latter as an aid in drawing otherwise arbitrary lines in the middle of perceptual continuities to reduce the chaos in my thinking!

> >If you refer to tornados as being
> >’explanations’ constructed of your personal associations,
> >e.g. having inherited ‘properties’ from you that you may
> >not be able to point to,
> >then they might well have intention in the usual sense.
> A curious(ly interesting) viewpoint! It is true that
> teleomaty is a generalization of teleology, if that’s what
> you mean. So, of course this is a model being constructed by
> me nia the process of generalization.

Well, I think what I mean is that normal human cognition mixes closely corresponding images of things with imaginary associations, and how we feel about them, quite freely, i.e. magical thinking that grounds all perception in our personal emotional dramas. (thought evolved from emotion I think) That brings up my original sense of the value of the ‘fuzziness’ of reality, that it’s only the vague and confusing parts of awareness that we haven’t overwritten with our normal magical thinking… It’s like learning not to trust foveal vision and relying more on peripheral vision.

> >> >What’s the way around that?… perhaps watching the
> >> >fuzzy bits in the natural connections, the indelible unique
> >> >emergence of things.
> >> Paying attention to intuition.
> >well, paying attention has *always* helped…

> >I remember when I seemed to have a real brain and could
> > watch my own
> >thoughts grow, reaching out like little branching root
> >systems, drawing
> >on associations from all kinds of recesses, and trying to
> >keep my mind
> >quiet enough to identify what the smallest possible thought
> >was. What
> >I seemed to find was that every one was stubbornly whole. I
> >seemed to
> >be somewhat good at it but had no success at all when I
> >tried to just
> >think half a thought… :)

> I understand this with emotions rather than thoughts.
> In dreams I have emotions NEVER experienced in ‘real life’,
> totally unique and whole. There seem to be a never ending
> variety of them, all ‘unused’.

One of the folks on Pianka’s list called me to tell me about his theory of sleep and learning, that learning began as a tandem work of waking and sleeping functions, accumulation and reprocessing, linear and gestalt, when and what. Interesting idea, but all he had to show was a plausible but very thin essay from 1969. Apparently he’s been cornering people to talk about it ever since then! I thought I was bad off! Still, it’s a good idea. Does it strike you in any way?

Phil
> STAN
> >Phil
> >> STAN

> >> >I think once people can observe them it naturally becomes
> >> >exhausting
> >> >to try to fake them…, making a stimulating natural bond
> >> >between mind and
> >> >reality!
> >> >… anyway, that’s one of the main things I see missing from
> >> >approximation… :,)
> >>>

September 10, 2006

RE: the next bigger fish!

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 6:13 pm

Stan,
Yes. He replied with a compliment and then today sent out the emails of 20 people who responded imaginatively to that article on him. I’ll let you know if anything develops.

Phil Henshaw

————-
Stan wrote:

Phil — I concur with you completely.  Is this Pianka, Eric Pianka the ecologist?

STAN
Phil wrote:
>Dr. Pianka, A friend sent me a notice on your good work.
>They may call you Dr. Doom, but they’d call me Dr.
>Ridiculous! Your clarity
>on what’s happening is superb and your point that
>conservation in a
>growth environment is a waste is completely correct.
>I like to draw
>attention to a very bizarre and hopeful twist! fyi
>There are four
>paragraphs below. Thanks for your work,
Phil Henshaw
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>a hidden door

>At the center of our problem with the uncontrolled 600
>year growth of man on earth is something both far
>worse than most anyone yet suspects, and
>quite mysteriously wonderful. From the solid-as-a-rock
>view of what I think is the outstanding offering for a
>physical model of natural systems (my own private brand),
>modern man seems to have accidentally built civilization
>according to the natural systems design for a bomb. Our
>growth mechanism is absolutely unbounded, with no
>means of climax except ripping what it works with apart.
>That’s what makes a ‘good’ explosion! What makes it the
>coolest dilemma imaginable, keeping it from being a
>perfect non-starter, is that the situation is both genuinely
>hopeless, and full of possibilities, because of what the
>model says is nature’s only possible fix! It would appear
>this whole extended crisis is about our being given the
>chance to be reborn as a new species. Very handy, you
>might say, since clearly almost nothing else at this
>point would do much good! No result is guaranteed, of
>course, and our actual odds may be terrible. Being
>transformed into something else is often highly risky
>business. Still I thing the logic of the fold in potential
>space is excellent (the network of self-reinforcements that
>could propagate) and we do stand some reasonable chance
>of being a “punctuated equilibrium”, i.e., something that
>shoots for infinity and makes it to someplace a lot better.
>What flips the switch would seem to be nothing much, then
>later look overwhelmingly impossible, and still later like
>something easily forgotten as we move on. The first part
>is simple, shock, dismay and wonder at why all the smart
>people would have designed civilization to irreparably blow
> up in our faces. It may be weird, but it’s unavoidably true
>when you check it out. The second part is a seemingly
>innocent choice of people with any money in the bank,
>mostly you and me and people like us, to spend their
>financial earnings.
>That innocent looking choice would unplug the primary
> means of exponential concentration of wealth and the
>exponential driver of the physical economy, letting it
>become responsive. It redefines capitalism to make it
>distributive. Yep, economics involves lots of details, and
>change is always experimental. The key is understanding
>what happens to the speed of change if we don’t. Because
>exponentials get profoundly suddenly steeper as they
>progress, failing to get off the growth curve will result in
>rates of change so big, fast and complicated that people
>will become physiologically disconnected from reality, in
>the midst of trying to make a flurry of important decisions,
>…sort of like now. The natural climax of successful
>capitalism is systemic collapse from confusion and lots of
>measures suggest, to me anyway, that the long wave
>disordering now taking place is uniquely unprecedented.
>Completely ridiculous?? no? I’d love to go over it with
>you in more detail.  Could we be about to watch a new
>big fish flop around and try to figure it’s new world?

>Regards, Phil Re:
>http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/eric.html
>http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4143416.html
>
>

RE: Hawking’s view of future

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 6:08 pm

8/27/06
Stan
> Phil –
> >Stan,
> >> Phil –
> >> >Stan,
…..
> >> >PH: Or… accumulating and then pealing off in sheets like the
> >> >community bulletin boards on campus.
> >>The pealing off would obviate the information overload. No.
> >
> >Well, except for the bales of urgent notices that never got
> >pinned up
> >in the first place, just sent directly to the dump without a glance,
> >what I call the ‘dark matter’ of awareness, a pattern of system
> >failure. Learning how to turn the book to the only page you actually
> >need to read, or snatch only the one piece of junk mail from
> >the pile with the perfect gift ideas is what counts these days!
> SS: A great gift if you’ve got it!

Hey, why don’t we hand that out for Christmas! It would make the perfect unusual gift for the sophisticated person who has everything else!

……..
> >My way is using the basic 5 step ????.?? ? `?.???? thing.
> >[1??.?? 2.??? 3??? 4? `?. 5?.?? ]
> >I’d say the crossover between maturity and
> >decline is the subtle moment when the stabilizers begin to fail and
> >disordering begins to multiply (the start of step 4).
> SS: This seems to be, in biological systems, a result of
> the per unit mass energy flow having dropped too low for the
> required work of healing.

I thought biologically it had to do with the basic accumulative
structure of systems, that they’re not remade from scratch like new organisms all the time, but repaired, and that no repair is as good as new. There may be measures that indicate when the balance of the effects of that tip or something. Is that what you’re talking about?

……. Maybe it’s meaningful
> >> >to say that
> >> >then the macro-economy would follow micro-economic rules.
> >> >In any case,
> >> >the intent is to have the whole economy run as if it were
> >> >a business
> >> >instead of as a mania.
> >> SS: This, then would require social engineering of some kind,
> >> involving some institutions not avaialable for politictal
> >> footballing, but regulated technocatically instead.
> >
> >Well, I think, knowledge, supported but unregulated.
> >People actually have very sophisticated systems
> >concepts built into normal intelligence, and an
> >appetite for having things make sense. They just
> >don’t know quite what to associate them with in the world
> >around them. For example, I think it’ll become
> >apparent to the world as a whole that
> >the ’smart’ people built civilization according to the
> >natural system model of a bomb, more or less accidentally.
> >Realizing there’s a really gross design flaw causing
> >it to blow up in our faces, that any child will be able
> >to understand, will have other effects. Perhaps people
> >will then get the idea it would be better to think for themselves…?
> SS: Well, I don’t think that future generations will be
> foremost in their minds!

Not automatically, but people do hold rather precious their own heroic images of themselves… No? Their relation to God, their honor and ideals, their great causes, the importance of feeling righteous and respected, trusted, their pride as protector of their mates and children. If it becomes obvious that you have to lie about all that to keep a needless old habit…, I think the needless old habit might cave.

> >One case in point is the universal principles for ’steering’
> >anything
> >reasonably predictable. I happened to spend a couple days canoeing,
> >and was teaching my son how to do it, which gave him pride and
> >confidence. Everyone who steers things knows that making mid-course
> >corrections early in a divergence allows you to make small
> >and graceful
> >adjustments to stay on course, and making them late
> >inevitably produces
> >big, miscalculated and dangerous ones. The problem with the
> >future is
> >we don’t know how to read ahead on the curves, not that we
> >don’t know
> >to steer.
> SS: Actually this is a major scale hierarchy issue –
> the problem of swatting the fly. It has subleties I haven’t
> realized yet. It’s about acceleration limits with scale.
> Your example is nice one. Very good. Semi drivers have to
> train for this apparently, and big ship captains too. Their
> intuitions ought to be consulted.

Big ships are really cool. Knowing how to steer is not automatic, but everyone has the experience and understands the concept. The thermostat can register only the set point, or it can read the rate of approach to it, or it can combine a reading of that rate of approach with the history of  esponsiveness of the system in the past, giving you: control
of the scale, 1st & 2nd derivatives. Makes it smooth. For  teering complex systems I don’t think people need theories so much as just reasonably reliable curves for them to respond to, each in their own way.

> >No doubt that’s partly because politicians perpetually zoom from one
> >end of the response range to the other, insisting “there is
> >no curve, there is no curve” until disaster approaches and panic sets

> >in. That lets them blame their opponents for it and take credit for
> >saving the day with some horribly mangled response. People know the
‘rocket
> >science’ part already I think, but are largely just getting bad
> >information. They’d do better with the raw data than the
> >self-serving analysis. The wisdom of democracy is that you have
> >a guidance team that can potentially think creatively about
> >problems from every side. They may mostly just need help
> >learning how to read ahead on the curves.
> This works OK when time is unlimited.

Well reading public sentiments and attitudes is not like reading prose, but it has huge and dramatic force, events filtered through the mold of national character, flashing the fierce allegiance and collective disgust, responses to perceived slights and threats and errors of style. Where that stuff seems to exist and how it seems to move and change is
in the common conversation. It’s continually evolving, the product of the intimate public sharing known as private conversation. Everybody talks to everybody intimately, and so all secrets are shared in the code of little smiles and gestures. It’s so cool. And *when* that larger conversation is well informed, things that are out of line with the shared values, if the attitudes of a leader don’t fit that moment’s mold, it’s picked up very quickly, the essence of steering.

The images people have are indeed heavily manipulated, and it does not ‘control’ anyone’s individual behavior, but I think some relevant truth from everyone gets through. People may have all sorts of big and little bad habits, probably enjoy some risky behavior, but I don’t think they share a common value desiring whiplash. The common wisdom is caught in a trap now, thinking that constant proportional change is stable, and
that turns off the steering….

> STAN
> >
> >
> >Phil
> >> STAN
> >….
> >> >Phil
> >> >>
> >> >> >Phil
> >> >> >> STAN
> >> >> >> >
> >> >> >> >Phil
> >> >> >> >> STAN
> >> >> >> >> >
> >> >> >> >> >
> >> >> >> >> >Phil
> >> >> >> >> >> STAN
> >> >> >> >> >> >
> >> >> >> >> >> >
> >> >> >> >> >> >Cheers,
> >> >> >> >> >> >
> >> >> >> >> >> >
> >> >> >> >> >> >
> >> >> >> >> >> >Phil Henshaw ????.?? ? `?.????
> >> >> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> >>
> >> >> >> >>
> >> >> >>
> >> >> >>
> >> >> >>
> >> >> >>
> >> >>
> >> >>
> >> >>
> >> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
>
>
>
>
>

RE: one legged elephants and other impossibilities…

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 6:06 pm

8/27/06
Aleks,
> phil henshaw wrote:
> > Does it matter if the next great depression
> > knocks out 50% of all value for 50 years
> > instead of just 20% for 10?
> It depends on how revolutionary you are.
> If you want this monetary conception of
> the world to go away for good, you’d prefer
> a really big depression. A small depression,
> on the other hand, would keep the monetary
> economics around for a while longer.There’s something reactionary about your ‘revolutionary’. Just being angry at a system and taking satisfaction in it’s failures isn’t likely to provide it a path to some higher level of evolution. I think that’s particularly the case for things like money systems that fail because of working too well, their excesses. It’s going to be really hard to stomp them out by just stomping on them. They’ll just regrow in new places. The better fix for an unmanageable vehicle that keeps running off the road is to invent breaks and a steering wheel, no? Then maybe it’ll take us places other than the next greater disappointment.

> > Absolutely. It’s so strange that the
> > people who get interested in semantics
> > seem to make all words mutually defined
> > instead of connected to the features of
> > the world from which they were built!!

> Words is all they have. You can’t put features in Microsoft Word.

You use ‘features’ to mean what helps you identify ‘things-out-there’ in the world, that need to be referred to as existing outside the bounds of our information about them?

> > My whole cohort of 20 million visionaries tried opting out.
> > It didn’t work.
> Hmm, can you be more specific?

The 60’s revolution. We were very serious and had inspired visionary leaders popping out all over the place to paint pictures of an entirely new world. It was a global truth and joy ‘movement’, a ‘counter-culture’ of love and genius that we mistook for our right. We thought we could just choose which way we wanted to live and took it upon ourselves to do so. That didn’t work. It was a huge and strong force for change but was missing some of the essentials for transforming the human reality. One is that we were not able to replicate much of any part of the magic. It was an ephemeral burst of new passions and ideas that couldn’t be built on. We didn’t pay attention to forming the words for it, for one important thing, and it was all wrapped up with free sex and drugs. Another was survival. The economic environment is entirely controlled by what someone will buy, and we didn’t have much to sell, except the poetry of the music. We just wanted to give everything away so it wasn’t economically viable. What we thought was a permanent change in the world turns out to have been a possibly nice, but passing, vision no one could understand without having been there.

> > The last statement is the familiar one.
> > The tricky part is whether the ‘events’
> > that are fundamental are something you
> > point to, that remain undefined except
> > for telling others your way of locating them.
> > Is that how you see it?
> Events pretty much have to be representable
> in a formal way. When you have a record of
> them taking place, they’re data. When you don’t,
> they’re predictions.

I see events as either data points, or as complete successions of growth and decay processes that constitute the entire coming and going of a natural distributed system. The latter I call ‘whole events’ [¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸]. When recording events to be represented as single points I prefer to call them ‘measures’ (any act of measurement being a ‘whole event’ in its own right). If you have a lot of measures you can sometimes discern evidence of ‘whole events’ of a larger scale. That is a kind of ‘prediction’ that if you look out in the world for possible confirming evidence that you’ll find the type you’re looking for. It mostly works for finding things in the data that exist as independent real things in the world.

> > What interests me about your work, and
> > the similarity I see to Bob Ulanowicz’s, is
> > that it has the potential to be used as a
> > physical system identification tool of
> > immense power, finding the strengths of
> > relations that go beyond statistics. You’d
> > have to teach the tools what
> > to look for, of course.
> Right… Before one can apply these tools,
> you have to define features and events/objects.
> The tools can sometimes provide
> suggestions on what kind of features would
> be beneficial, or when the existing features
> are insufficient. But the tools don’t yet come
> up with a base conceptualization, nor with
> the problem you’d be trying to solve.

well, that’s what my interest in a mathematical definition of derivative continuity for finite sequences, and other shapes, is about. They’re really great identification features for autonomous physical systems and their emerging structural changes.

> Tomorrow I leave to Slovenia for a month. My
> email connection will be a
> bit sporadic. But have a good time!

That’s great you’re getting away! Maybe you’ll get in some mountains, as well as family and friends? Have a great trip.

> Aleks
Phil

RE: What do we do now?

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 5:59 pm

9/9/06
Kitty,
From my view there are lots of things you could point out to him. He probably understands that there’s a limit to any one thing. You can also have too much of any ‘good’ thing. An endless explosion of ‘good’ is the most sure way of getting you there. Everything begins with growth, but things that end with it end in sudden disarray. Any of those examples I gave of natural systems that get in trouble with growth essentially do the same thing, keep multiplying what’s ‘good’ until it overwhelms their internal or external relationships.

One of the common descriptions of the phenomenon is the ‘Fairy Tale’ about “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. Do you see any sign of our having unleashed a run-away phantom producing wealth for us, and now going totally out of control?? The most stunning thing about this is that the endless multiplication of ‘wealth’ is the world consensus plan of all the ’smart’ people. Clearly nature is throwing us a major curve, turning our ingenuity against us in a profound way, and we should be
both in awe of what’s happening as well as angry and active in
questioning everything about it.

One of the signs that something different is going on today than in prior times is that the incomes of working Americans leveled off 35 years ago, with high end incomes continuing to multiply as before. That’s very different from how the economy grew before. Note that 1970 is also about the time when sensitive people noticed we were beginning to collide with the environmental limits of the earth! Part of my interpretation is that some parts of the economy have been more successful in shedding the complications of the growth conflicts than others. The details are complicated partly because any system is complicated, but also because the complications brought on by our growth collisions with each other and natural limits on a small earth are a little like turbulence. They’re explosions of complication from unexpected places that’ll never be explained. Mostly we just call it overload and wave it off. That’s part of why we’re so slow to respond to global warming and things. The new complications of living on earth are still there, though, doing their job of slowing the system down, starting from the bottom up it seems…. Maybe the top just lifts off and floats away by itself, finding some other universe where its
principles actually apply…? I’m sure they’d like that, but expect something else will happen.

What can we do? I have a simply defined procedural proposal, that also has significant complications. It could be called the ‘SR feedback switch’. All that means is to switch off the automatic growth driver of global finance resulting from investors ‘R’einvesting their returns (in businesses obligated to produce more) instead of choosing to ‘S’pend them. Seeing that as a solution follows from interpreting the problem as being that source of otherwise endless exploding feedback of
competition. It’s rather elemental cybernetic steering (i.e., meaning no more than ‘when going too fast ease back on the throttle’) but seems beyond ‘rocket science’ level economics. No economist I know of has done anything but laugh at. Another proposal is NDR, or ‘negative discount rate’. That’s something proposed by other people, with similar responses from the establishment whose oddly warped thinking is
the cause of the problem… I also don’t understand it well enough to interpret. It is supposed to have the same global effect, though. I think the tour bus is way off the map. We’ll have to see what happens.

I hope you could follow this. Would be glad to clarify. Thanks for your great questions Kitty

Phil

————

To Phil, Bruce, Eric, and the group,

[Kitty] I know an individual who’s an historical scholar (especially of Medievalism) as well as much influenced by Carlo Cipolla’s lectures and writings (pre- and post-industrial society, Berkeley, ’70s) — so he’s knowledgeable and articulate about life up to the Industrial Revolution but particularly how we’ve benefited from it. And his contention is
that life is so much better (i.e., easier) now that this alone renders ‘doom-ism’ null and void. (While to me this is pitting apples vs. oranges.) So when we discuss the inability of many organisims to adapt to changing geophysical environments (and their extinction), his argument is that humans clearly possess this ability, “just look around you,” he says with a flourish. His contention is that our ‘ingenuity’ — our ability to cool the air around us, avoid the contagion of polio, fly to the great cathedrals of Europe… — is the scale of our intraplanetary ’success’.

So one very real element we’re dealing with here is the determination of man to see technology, medical science, and the luxury of convenience as a cloak of security against an overpopulating planet — the tendency to view this scenario as “but I have gained!” Intrinsically, I agree with Eric — that our arrogance can’t (mathematically) go on — that we have
hit critical mass. The overriding question is: At what point do
individuals recognize that we are in a habitat that’s bigger than our air-conditioners?

I received an e-mail the other day from a group member, saying “…but what can we do about it?” Ans: Persevere by articulating a platform (and quickly) and getting the informed word out. I watched Eric’s “Infowars” interview — and it’s pretty hard to twist his words into abject fatalism when he talks about setting-up his granddaughters’ college funds… We do have hope — all of us. Let’s work on a platform, shall we?

Kitty

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