physics of happening

9/6/06
Great extra questions Bruce,
> Phil,
> Concerning growth systems that killed themselves, why
> not just look at a few major corporations (which are in
> essence, growth systems) and see what happened to them?
> Anyone remember Montgomery Ward? Where are they now? Like most classic American businesses it grew quite large and then stabilized, became a ‘cash cow’ for feeding investments in other things, and by the time it’s owners recognized the shape of threatening new competition it was too stuck in old habits and couldn’t adapt. It had to be broken up for parts.

> How about General Motors (”What’s good for General
> Motors is good for the USA”)? How are they doing now?
GM is a more modern company. My sense is that it’s been remaking itself about every 20 years, more or less successfully. Modern businesses try to encourage new ventures within their own organizations, trying to remain ‘forever young’. That’s very hard to do when whole industries
come and go ever more rapidly with continuously multiplying amounts of money feeding into investments to replace everything doing the production… (That’s one of the weirdest one’s to me! You wouldn’t want to stop change, but it’s worse to endlessly accelerate it.)

> Let’s go back further to the East India Company or the
> Hudson Bay Company. What’s happened to them?
I’m sure there are great books on each. It’s always a compelling story of visionary people doing great things that turn out not to be so useful anymore down the road. Time passes them bye.

> Look at Ford, IBM, or a host of other companies that
> made up the Dow Jones industrials just 50 years ago.
> Most of them are gone or in deep trouble.
There are a number of the giants companies that are struggling, and a number that are adapting to become more versatile and creative.

> Or, perhpas look at dynasties the once ruled the earth
> (or some significant portion of it): Persia, Rome, Greece,
> Egypt, Babylonia, the Norse Vikings, the Ottoman Empire,
> Spain, England, China (which is the only one on the ascent
> again at this point), etc. They all had their day in the sun,
> and where are they now?
Come and gone… It certainly is curious why each of these long stable ways of living seemed to loose interest and vanish. Good modern examples of this that are just a little more dramatic, but the same thing I think, are the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the sudden collapse of the NYC crimewave. In both cases it strongly appears that the social cultures turned off to their former way of life and let it just fall to pieces.

> Will any of those suffice for your purposes? If not,
> let’s all try again.
Well, actually, you picked wonderful examples, but not a one that had to do with failure caused by uncontrolled growth (from growing competition, yes, but not from its own growth). A couple from history would include the Biblical reference to a Tower of Babel and multiplying languages and the California gold rush disasters.

Phil
> Bruce Barnbaum

Joop,
Well I guess it means getting used to the question. It really is hard
not to take familiar things for granted. There are lots and lots of
things which get into trouble from uncontrolled growth. I thought I’d
get more of a response. Growth in most systems begins as a run-away
process, like fire, and a sign of lacking either external or internal
limits is something that grows so fast that it blows itself out, kills
its host or rips apart and stops functioning. It’s also called
‘overshoot’.

‘Good’ bombs are designed to consume all their explosive, and bad bombs
scatter their parts before the ignition is complete. Some of the ones
I made as a kid were that way. Sometimes when you strike a match it
starts off with a bang that blows the match out. There are lots of
species, generally in what’s called the ‘r-selected’ group, that
multiply furiously, like locusts and grasshoppers, way beyond
sustainable population limits, as a general practice. They die back in
the extreme, rest a little and try getting to infinity again, and again.

There’s the growth of human populations among people who don’t have a
habit of learning, who see their self interest in having large families,
expediting it to make them more secure. They multiply toward the point
of making their lives quite insecure for exploding numbers of reasons
when they hit the wall of confusion and disorder at the end. There’s
also cancer and all the other diseases that kill their host by
uncontrolled growth. Cancer isn’t smart. It’s only definition of
good is multiplication, which is bad for it.

Generally the economists and businessmen of the last couple centuries
have thought there would be no limit to economic growth because the
earth and our imaginations were thought to be limitless, and so our only
definition of good became multiplying wealth. I’m one of what seems to
be a considerable majority of global systems thinkers who expect the
limits of economic growth to be exceedingly hazardous for us. Why the
people driving the growth toward overshoot and collapse, some of the
most aggressive learners on the planet, are not aware of what’s
happening seems to have to do with competitive advantage. They’re
absorbed in a game, and there’s no one to tell them how it ends.
With a global consensus on where to draw the line, and there is one, we
could change that, but it’s not likely to happen.

You could add to the list lots of other things. It’s a very broad
phenomenon. Anything that ‘gets out of control’ generally can be
traced back to excessive multiplication of what was originally well
ordered and stable. Party’s get out of control sometimes, for example,
as to arguments. Some people, well probably most people some times
anyway, get pleasure out of skirting the edge of control and ‘playing
dangerous’. One thing I’ve never figured out is where chain letters
go. They multiply explosively, but there must be some sort of message
that builds up as they spread that ‘this is not real’ and they probably
collapse abruptly and vanish at their largest point of expansion.

Growth is also the process by which everything that becomes stable gets
its start. Things that are going to end up reaching and holding a
higher level of development do something different. Finding that
difference is really the question. We need to find useful and
practical ways to enable self-control for things that are vital to us
and seem to be heading beyond.

Does that help?

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
explorations: www.synapse9.com

>From: Joop van de Swaluw
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 7:19 AM
To: pfh@synapse9.com
Subject: Grow.

Hello Phil,
Interesting question. But I don’t fully understand what you mean. There
are many systems which can determine the rates of growth. Your bank will
tell you how your capital will grow, the same as insurance companies do.
But they really don’t care about if your money will grow; they only want
your money to re-invest again so the bank can profit from your money.
The Pentagon expected that only 1000 soldiers would die in Irak, now the
total is 3000+. By the birth of your son son you were told that he
would become 6+ feet tall but he only managed to grow 5 feet 8 inches
tall. There are many other examples to mention, but I don’t know what
you really mean! All the best Joop.

>>
from Phil to Pianka group,
Can anyone offer other examples of growth systems that get into trouble
from being unable to control their own limits? People don’t seem to
understand how the best of intentions lead human systems to overshoot,
so looking at natural ones might help us understand the problem.

Here’s an interesting one that can’t be studied in detail. It was a
long time ago and this is all the data there is, a plankton species
transition that went through overshoot and partial collapse 4 or 5 times
as it evolved from one to the other…!
http://www.synapse9.com/G.tumida.pdf

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… :,)
> >> >
> >> >Nick:
> http://www.clarku.edu/departments/biology/facu> lty/facultybio.
>
> >
> >>
> >>Phil Henshaw
> >>explorations: www.synapse9.com
>

Martin,
> Hey Phil,
> Phil Henshaw wrote:
> > Martin,
> >> Hey Phil,
> >>
> >> If I understand you correctly, I think you’re very right. The
> >> information we have about the world is behavior and appearances,
> >> and for most interesting things the mechanism is completely hidden
> >> from us. We
> >> can observe inputs and outputs, but not the source code.
> >> We can see
> >> fuel go in and motion come out, but can’t see the engine,
> >> let alone
> >> anything else.
> >
> > The trickiest piece is proving in a comprehendable and
> > comprehensive
> > way that anything has any actual inside structure, largely
> > invisible
> > from the outside.
>
> Well, I’d argue something slightly different. We need a
> model of what’s
> going on inside, but that’s not the same as recovering what’s
> actually
> going on inside. In fact, a high level model may be more useful and
> important than a low level one. For example, I can come up with the
> concept of pressure, temperature and volume for a gas without
> discovering molecules. I can do all kinds of useful and interesting
> things knowing only about pressure, temperature and volume, like make
> air conditioners and refrigerators, and have no idea whether gas is
> continuous or made of molecules.
>
> As another example, there tends to be more traffic on the
> roads during
> morning and evening rush hour. This is an emergent phenomenon, and
> would be hard to prove starting from a wiring diagram of the human
> brain, plus whatever else about the environment you’d need to know.
>
> So I don’t see the job so much as recovering the actual
> structure that’s
> inside, but discovering regularities in the observables.

Well, that’s what people have always done, of course, not bothered with
the details that are hard or impossible to consider and made up
something else that serves a current purpose. I call it
‘approximation’, and it’s what science is mostly made of. It can be
extremely useful. There are also times when overlooking the fuzzy or
unavailable bits actually does matter and approximations don’t help.
One example would be a passive system, behaving in response to external
controls, which is highly sensitive to initial conditions. Another is
a natural system that isn’t passive and has an independent internal
behavior and design. That includes living things, and many other kinds
of growth systems. There are several kinds of good proof.

Where you have an active system with an interior, the loops of
relationships it’s built from are especially hard to see, inherently
hidden as a consequence of only directly connecting to themselves,
internally. They also tend to be too complicated, immeasurable and
intermittent and original to figure out by indirect means. That also
makes them ‘approximately’ non-existent if that’s how you choose to
interpret the hopelessness of your data on them. That a great many
things highly important to us in the world are systems with active
interior behavior and design is not yet something physics seems quite
willing to admit, which makes it even more difficult to study them.
Still, you can prove it by watching them build. Of course, we’ve also
been told never to study individual things, since whatever they do
that’s interesting doesn’t apply anyway.

I’m coming at this from having focused on trying to understand what
approximation leaves out. I found quite a lot, including that closely
watching things that grow will usually expose classic individually
unique developmental processes. There’s only one place to say that’s
happening, i.e. inside. Approximation helped show me where to look,
but only when I looked for what was left out and missing…

There’s obviously more to this, but the point is that the first step in
learning about something deeply hidden is not building a model that
looks familiar. It’s figuring out how to watch the detailed workings of
what you presently can’t see.

Phil
> - Martin

Stan,

Approximation sweeps away ‘fuzziness’, and one thing your and my conceptions are completely consistent on is “any system during its development moves from being more vague to becoming more definitely embodied”. There are issues in differentiating descriptive, explanatory, and organizational/behavioral ‘fuzziness’, but it’s those “fuzzy bits” that are the main thing approximation sweeps away. But studying the ‘fuzziness’ is central to finding the half of the universe that physics missed. My analytical approach interprets it as evidence of the transitional systems which frequently can be found to have periods of implied derivative continuity in their measures, displaying some of their evolving internal dynamic structures. That’s what I’ve been carefully studying for the last many years, but now mostly play with the wordings for to find some way to communicate.Your grasp of the links to other fuzzy ways of thinking about the subject (it’s history and citations) is far superior to mine, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to ask you some questions about it shortly. When the research wave called ‘fuzzy logic’ hit, for example, I never thought it interesting because it seemed to be further interpreting the world as a set of fixed rules with a universal noise machine attached. Maybe I should look closer at that and other approaches. Remember, I’m with Einstein and don’t think God rolls dice. God lets things develop on their own from the inside, but that’s different from making changes without processes or causation.

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
explorations: www.synapse9.com