physics of happening

December 27, 2006

Ishmael

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 12:18 am

to JB 12/22/06 w/ minor ed.

JB,

I’m writing you from south Florida between trips into the Everglades and out on the Keys. It’s fascinating how many ecosystems you can fit in a small place when you really try! The weather has been cloudy by very pleasant, 80 deg., warm sun & rains that don’t get you wet, no crouds!, lots of beauty, and we have a simply marvelous place to stay. More later.

I mostly want to thank you for getting me to read a little more ‘useless pop psychology’… Of course, now that I’m at least up to the point where he defines his natural laws of competition I’m really wondering why you or someone else didn’t mention Ishmael to me before, too. Didn’t you notice that this approach to the subject, the use of natural laws of how to live that are readily read from the physical world but missing from the popular discussion of [how the world works], is precisely what I’ve been so patiently exploring and talking about for the last, yep, count-em, 30 years??

[Quinn is remarkably clear and accruate on some of the functional perceptions he identifies, but] one of the fasinating and informative things about the book is how Quinn makes the same mistake all the other great thinkers focusing on the subject I know of make, like Al Gore & the environmentalists generally, Bernard Lietaer & E.F.Schumacher leading the financial visionary group utopians, etc. They all note that humans are guided by moral principles and assume that the problem is not having the right ones, forgetting that it’s our conception of moral principles itself that is ‘infected with this little ‘bug’ of ours.

As I see it, the real problem is that we don’t periodically check our moral principles against the shifting sands of physical reality, that we hold our sacred ‘ideals’ above all else. The better foundation is that sea of meaningless grey stuff in which we’re bobbing around…and we should occasionally check the [physical] meaning of what [we think] ‘good’ is.

What I found back in 76 was a really cool larger set of principles of evolution and behavioral choice that have been missing, and that can extend thinking well beyond the immediate core issue of what man will deside is ‘enough’. I’m not sure what terminology Quinn will finally settle on (since I’m only on p129), or if the ‘e’ word will even appear, but that’s the common point on which we agree entirely.

Natural systems that survive tend to know what’s enough from within themselves, and don’t need to be beaten down by experience and forced to contend with woeful inadequacy and opressive disparity as the people of our culture are so inclined to. Of course, Quinn also doesn’t deal with all the many many counter examples to his statement of the problem, but [if you] hold that in reserve and give him the benefit of the doubt [then] it’s a very lucid telling of how we have been living by a profoundly false story for centuries.

I think there are two steps to consider a little further upstream from where Quinn and most others call the beginning of the problem. One is the set of a-moral principles of what is physically possible for evolving systems (the all-system absolute limits of growth, etc). The other is the series of events that caused the creative center of human culture to become so misguided. Both are great subjects for productively entertaining exploration, and there’s lots to say on them.

In a nutshell the first has to do with the ‘internalities’ of growth (rather than the ‘externalities’ that distract so many), and where you would naturally need to draw the line and declare ‘enough’ for one’s own survival. Without self-constraint the limit of growth is confusion, as we can see coming for the growth world quite clearly now.

The second has to do with how our species got things mixed up in the first place, and begins, I think, with the change in perception at 60k, the Cro-Magnon dawn of conceptual thinking [a tell-tale sign of which is the cave paintings which render the animals but show the humans as stick figures]. That’s when images and the meanings we overlayed on them (our own construction of artificial worlds in our brains to guide us) became more compelling and began to conceal the actual features of reality. That marks, for me, when the ’story’ became dominant and reality lost out.

What I think then happened at roughly 10k is that the leading creative community happened to have one or a series of rulers who used highly abusive measures to rigidly control their flock, essentially tortured them into subservience. Driven by despiration to avoid the pain people [could have convinced themselves that] simply having a self (being a ‘captive’ of the natural separation from the world anything built from the inside has) was proof that we and all other things in nature should be subserviant to the ‘lord’, and, if we behaved ourselves, we could share in the ‘lord’s’ generosity to obedient underlings. Driven by traumatic stress to commit the mortal sin of subjugating our own selves to an abuser forms the [heritable trap of thinking everything should be controlled that I think we’re all taught as ‘the way things are’] and that we need to free ourselves from.

So, that’s about my limit for a warm sunny morning! Is there any of what’s new to you here that connects with your reading of Quinn or your own suspicions? We’re back in NYC tomorrow and will be in touch.

Cheers!

–

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
e-mail: id@synapse9.com
explorations: ”http://synapse9.com

December 26, 2006

yet another test model

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 11:43 pm

posted to FRIAM 12/16/05 We definitely need better models of complex system events. Here’s another, to help imagine growth as a spontaneous evolutionary process, as if an organizational ‘fire’ that begins with a ’spark’ of change.

It’s obvious enough that growth systems produce rapid change in complex systems without a template or discrete determinants from the outside, but growth is often so smooth, fast, and ’sure footed’ that it’s hard to imagine it as evolutionary. Maybe this alternate model helps, by

telling the story of a complex system step change by growth as if in QM notation ‘before||after’, with the period between the marks consisting of an evolving internal process discovering its place in an unknown

world. It starts with the generally unobservable ‘earth shaking boom’

of an unstable pattern of change forming that will multiply dramatically, zooming to a point of discovering it’s own limits and a ‘big wow’ as the future comes into its view, to perhaps then be transformed by that reversal in the environmental responses into a sustainable system.

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` *ahhh*`–
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` x
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` x
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` x
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` x
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` *w`O`w*
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `m
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `o
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `o
` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `z
` ` ` `–`*boom* 

before | B o o m, Z o o m, W o w, Ahhh– | after 

something clicks, takes off, discovers it’s place, and settles in

During the ‘zoom’ the environment appears limitless from the perspective of the growth cell, and in the ‘ahhh–’ the stabilization of new form becomes satisfying by resolving the start-up cell’s unstable contradictions. Humanity’s institutional rules that the ‘zoom’ is never to be allowed to stop…. seem to be a natural misunderstanding coming from our being swept up in a vast change in reality.

It’s good to note that in living systems what comes ‘after’ is often unequivocally the best part.

Phil Henshaw ¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
e-mail: id@synapse9.com
explorations: www.synapse9.com

 

December 2, 2006

surprises in the works I think

Filed under: mail log — admin @ 6:44 am
to AIA C.O.T.E. Forum  12/01/06
 

All,
I’m really delighted to be among a group of idealists, and to hear the frustration with the efforts that fall short and the failure of many people to reach high enough in setting their goals.  We definitely need more of that, for all the reasons of our not doing enough, and also for a special reason.  I think we’re getting huge help in changing the world from Mother Nature, and we should probably consider, seriously, the need at some point to ramp up faster than expected in delivering coherent ideas and methods to others. 
 

Sometimes things collapse of their own contradictions, like the Soviet Union, and the NeoCon revenge.  I think what the sustainability movement sees as unassailable enemies, like the economic forces of endless selfish growth, could more or less abruptly loose their credibility and collapse around us.  There are lots and lots of signs, things like the large amount of ‘red’ money going into buying ‘green’ design. It’s easy to think it’s all for show, but it’s also because the people who run exploitive businesses see the writing on the wall and feel real guilty about their involvement. I find signs of deep change all over, including things like a neat study I threw together a couple weeks ago on the use of the word ’sustainability’ in the NY Times over the past 10 years.  It displays a ‘popcorn’ like series of 15 intense flurries of reports, I think mostly displaying people pushing the conceptual limits in a new subject, each lasting 2-5 months,  that seems to average out as a underlying long term exponential growth trend. [http://www.synapse9.com/SustainabilityNYT.htm]
 

All living things begin with exponential growth but it is practically the most unsustainable thing any living system does.  Some of you probably know that the best straight line mathematical approximation of a growth curve is a vertical line drawn at whatever time you ask the question.  In one way or another growth always hits a wall. The world professional consensus that explosive consumption growth can continue forever, on the other hand, displays an absolutely remarkable degree of general misunderstanding.  What happens in nature that lets living systems survive their growth phase? It’s rather obviously that at the turning point the growth mechanisms give way and are replaced by sustainable ones.  It’s natural.
 

You’d be quite right to say human culture is not at all ready for it! It would be a total surprise.  There’s little doubt, though, the world is at the 500 year turning point in the growth of modern civilization, and the pressing choices to either change or destroy what we care about seem to be showing up all over.
 

Going back to the discussion of the past day or so, I do also think that one of the little ‘pacts with the devil’ the sustainability movement has made is inviting people into it who measure their values with numbers. Measures, to me, have no values at all and are quite useless unless they draw your attention to the things being measured.  The positive side is that people who represent things with numbers are exactly the people we need to teach how to read the world in all it’s living complexity.  They may have come to it for other reasons, but having them show up asking for help because of the product ’sustainability’ has to offer is very interesting.  I think the idealists should really welcome them and try to learn how to communicate, and that LEED and similar holistic thinking tools with good hooks are a great help for doing so! 
 

pfh