Reading Nature’s Signals

A friend in an environmental discussion group proposed his favorite list of hopeful, but quite unproven technology solutions for the energy crisis, making the usual false assumption that the problem is a lack of energy resources. That causes the further error of not considering what consequences the solution would have… if it worked.

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All,
There’s a rather interesting “Catch 22” in trusting hopeful but unproven technological fixes. They raise a promise you can’t check out the consequences of. The usual hidden consequence is the problem. Even if they work wonderfully to solve the problem they are targeted to solve, then they expand the economy and multiply all our other problems…

Have you ever thought about that ‘feedback’ issue before? The solutions for economic growth constraints invariably extend or accelerate the growth of the economy and ALL its other multiplying impacts and complications for the environment and society at the same time. You fix one problem and it triggers a torrent of others.

“My theory” for why that’s easy to miss is that people are just not taught how to think about complex systems that behave as wholes, though we rely on them extensively and they’re all around us. It’s not a subject in school. We’re not taught that nature is “alive” (full of things that take care of themselves) and how to watch the way they work. Instead we’re taught that everything is determined by being controlled by something else, and to ignore subjects that can’t be explained that way. Natural systems work by the development of networks of independent but complementary parts, i.e. not a deterministic process at all. As a result our whole culture is missing the basic terminology for it.

The question was asked by Sue Charman on the UK Finance Lab, How do we start predicting ecosystem decline and if business is capable of changing?
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Well, one way is to begin to use more scientific ways to measure the net effect of things. There are some rather major problems with “sustainability arithmetic” you might call it.
People tend to mix statements of social values and the numbers they use in a way that is very forgiving for whatever purpose intended. I don’t exaggerate. For one familiar example, people count their own personal waste items as their environmental impacts, the number of plastic bags they use or their efficiency in cooking and cleaning, running the AC, etc. When the scale of their environmental impacts is hardly related to their personal wastes.
What personal impacts are directly related to is the scale of their personal income, and everyone is making every effort to increase it. Big income big demand on the resources of the earth. Whether they cut back on one thing or another they’re still going to spend or invest all their income. In a market economy every dollar tends to have equal effect, each representing average resource use for the service provided. The simplest starting point for estimating the total is ~6000btu/$, the global use of fuels to produce total GDP.
Using that principle correctly as we do in our paper on EROI for Wind Farms to measure the total impact of whole business systems, what you find is even the world professional standard for adding up the totals of things, Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCA) is off by 500% due to a similar social value error. LCA measures only the impacts of the technology used… and not of the business operations, services, commerce, people, etc.
Having accurate measures for resource use for different things will then let you make legitimate comparisons and value judgments relative to the resources the earth has left. Then of course, to get to the question asked, you can assess the risk on individual businesses for whether pushing up the price of diminishing resources will prevent some industries that once used them from continuing to operate. That’s one half of the limit question we really need to get a handle on.
The second half is asking, once we use up the affordable supplies of important resources, how are we going to operate an economy without them while looking for some affordable substitute? That’s the one that the Peak Oil people have been projecting and seeing a very bumpy downward staircase of oil supply contractions over the next 20 years. We have no substitute for oil really, and its affordable supplies do appear to be running out as we speak whether you consider the probably underestimated costs of responding to climate change or not.
The real problem to me, though, is that time lag between running out of affordable stuff and finding an affordable substitute. The sole guiding principle of finance is to use the genius of the markets to use up all affordable resources at ever faster rates, assuming that bigger supplies of cheaper resources are around the corner. For 60+ years we’ve been looking around the corner,… and still don’t see them coming. What the rule of finance does not consider is the “precautionary principle” of asking what’s next. I think financial balance sheets need to be required to begin showing a reasonable estimate of “what’s next ?”.

I was pointed to Michael Herman’s Open Space World, and his introduction to his Open Space group learning methods. We exchanged a couple emails and it occurred to me there’s a simple way to combine his and my learning process models, his using the four organizational dimensions of purposes, actions, stories & structures and mine as the dimension of natural progress in time.

Michael,

Thanks, that was a good intro. Might this be a cool way to link our models??

Treating time as a fifth dimension of organization (how your four dimensions of purposes, actions, stories & structures add up), and mapped as the sequence of observable changes in the form of energy flows that correspond to essential stages of successful eventful learning.

If these two models refer to broad teachable patterns of the same physical reality, they must connect something like this I think.
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The narrative: After groping in the dark to find a starting point for your education, learning can expand itself, taking off by leaps and bounds, until changes of scale present unexpected choices of kind, to overreach or adapt, presenting a natural point of changing values. The added value of using knowledge to expand knowledge changes to added value in perfecting knowledge, finding a way to integrate with a new environment full of others, all now meeting the same new challenge of finding new values on changing scale. It’s the same for personal, community or societal affairs, at limits to growth the new task is to simplify and perfect your way of fitting together with others, reducing complications rather than adding to them, being born into a new body, experiencing a change of form and coming together as a whole.

Because it takes time to develop energy systems, and they need “a little push” at changes in direction, these become the basic “evolutionary clicks of time” for organizational learning: germination, development, integration. They’re three quite different forms of productive energy use, and needed in sequence, to create wholes that approach perfection.

That’s not easy to imagine, especially for a creature accustomed to using information as its guide, that set up all its information models, resources and systems without any plan for a “change of values” toward becoming whole. That evolutionary “click” at the peak of one’s power is in part losing interest in the quest for power. So… some unfamiliar kind of intuition and method is needed, like groping in the dark again, but this time with partners.
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For reference, this way of linking the internal organization of a system to how it changes form over time is also the subject of a web page for scientists I did a couple years ago. With PICS (Projecting Images of Complex Systems) I was suggesting ways to discover elements organization or learning strategies found in one natural system to experiment with in others.

Geo Mobus’ post on his blog “Question Everything”, on “Where is the Economy Going” left little to question but that the choices for the physical economic system we’ve called home for a couple centuries is either down or faster down. It does seem true enough, comparing the beliefs that led us to our present global impasse, and deep denial of how different the present physical world really is from those beliefs. But there are also other questions. This is a response to the ideas of “GaryA” and “Florifulgurator” yesterday, about other things to do than cling to our dead end.
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Good questions…. The idea of a “mass sea change of some kind”, a religion that’s not a religion…”immersion rather than separation with nature” is something that could be curiously hidden in plain sight.

It might be a matter of becoming part of nature’s intelligence as a physical act, as a way to overcome our flawed mental constructs of how nature works. Immersion seems to help, but is easily derailed by the our habit of converting the physical subjects studied into theories, and so losing sight of the originals. That only seems avoided by leaving your theories incomplete, and finding a way to retain the questions you wouldn’t have had time to explore, the openings to unexplored paths in the road map.

You see the other solutions to the growth problem demonstrated all the time that way. They’re in the deep mystery of the natural systems that grow explosively to a point at which they change form, and mature to perfection instead of ripping themselves to pieces or disrupting and depleting their environments. The catch is not that how they do it can’t be studied well enough to imitate. It’s needing to keep the open questions as you go, and getting lost if you strip them away to make things more explicable. If you can maintain your contact with and curiosity about the physical subjects themselves in that way, not reducing them to images, one can watch where the net energy goes that gives natural systems their self-steering capability.

You’d need to find a community of people curious about the possibility of looking to the physical world for the “true religion” and for not finding it in just a more ethereal images. You could say it’s in “the unending meditation” of “being here” if that softens the jolt a bit. It seems to involve separating our information and cultural realities from the independent realities of their physical subjects, in order to fully enjoy the richness of useful questions nature’s physical intelligence raises, and to give our rich mental experience a more reliable connection.

That double step of separating our mental realities from our physical ones, leading to a better way to connect them, makes most everyone I know turn and run, though… That’s a bit of a problem. It’s the subject I write about though, and find a minute growing audience for.

http://www.synapse9.com/pub/ModLearnChange.pdf
http://www.synapse9.com/drafts/StimAsConstraint.pdf
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/12/15/throwing-our-energy-at-impossible-dreams

I had pointed my friend Steve Kurtz to my physics theorem, the Law of Continuity, showing why the conservation of energy implies physical systems need a “little push” from other events on a smaller scales of organization to begin or end. His good question gave me an opportunity to explain that, and a bit more of what the theorem is really about. He replied “Excellent explanation. Thanks”

His first comment was: “I’m not up on the math. But a seed contains stored, embodied solar sourced energy. So I don’t see any mystery there. The mystery (to me) is the life propulsion…the apparent will to live and expand niches, and replicate. My reply (with minor edits) was:

Steve,

Well, yes, a seed relies on a source of “fossil fuel”, like an infant relies on its mother as a source of food until born and fire relies on a spark and a computer needs someone to turn it on… etc. Self-animation requires initiation, a little push. What the math in that theorem shows is that the math describing any system event has to be missing that little push from the beginning and end of the description. It’s something like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. For physical processes to begin or end takes behaviors beyond the scale of representation of the system.

The hard part for people to understand seems to be that if small events are needed to initiate large ones, a “butterfly effect” of some kind, there must be something quite special about the environment in which long chains of larger events begin with one flutter of a butterfly wing. Any other flutter seems to have quickly dissipating and not amplifying effects. The environment needs to be “ready”, “primed” or “crossing a threshold” for a small coincident initiating event to do its work. It’s two conditions at the same time at different scales of organization, a dyad of cooperating large and small scale organizations that does it. I learn about them by watching them.

It’s one of the ways nature needs to work with independent parts rather than with set relationships. Explanations generally rely on set interrelationships and can’t have independent parts is one problem. I think that could be the main reason we can’t rationalize complex systems, that natural physical systems, by needing to have independent parts, violate our explanatory method…

So I use a coping strategy, studying the explanations that are necessarily temporary (growth and decay). Those necessarily lead to “questions” that allow and require departing from what is explained to search around beyond it for new connections. That seems to be somewhat like how natural systems manage to make connections between independent scales and systems too. It also frees you of some subjectivity to come to an end of what can be explained, and then need to begin a new search and rethink what you’re looking for.

Phil

Andy Revkin had asked the question on Twitter:

Revkin
Thomas Edison, with energy breakthroughs, “invented the 20th century.” Who’ll invent the 21st? http://shar.es/m8ziQ #energy #innovation

The way nature engineers her highly dramatic smooth changes in complex systems, her “punctuated equilibria”, is to begin with explosive reorganization and energy flows.

The “catch” is that initial spurt is also their end, producing nothing lasting… *unless* the reverse cycle leading toward the resolution of all those multiplying loose ends kicks in, called “maturation”.

So, if Edison invented the 20th century, the author of our explosion as it were, “Who will invent the 21st century”? It’s already quite clear, and already done. It just hasn’t taken hold yet. It was Keynes, actually, in more or less a footnote that was widely misinterpreted. He called it “the widow’s cruse”, defining the crystal clear and necessary steps a market economy must take to avoid destroying itself financially when approaching the operating limits of the earth.

Everyone who first considers doing what is quite physically necessary finds it “unthinkable” is one reason we’re in danger of not carefully looking into it, and failing as a global system. It would be unquestionably a huge relief, and assure our future comfort and security…two very positive things we could get to like,… IF we could just get over the shock of dealing with physical realities we hoped we’d never have to!

Blog entries linking Keynes’ ideas about general systems ecology with current issues. fyi http://synapse9.com/blog/category/natural-economy/

It’s to end the automatic use of any successful promise for financially profitable returns to multiply future promises for profitable returns. The problem is that money driven process of multiplying promises for what we can do with the earth, and compelling attempts to deliver them, is naturally destabilizing for physical systems.

There was a recent No-Growth convention, that notably omitted discussion of this most obvious of institutions that causes our impacts on the earth to multiply. My comment on the report, and notes Andy Revkin asked for on the same subject, how to truly stabilize money, are below.

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Comment to NEF blog on - Reporting back from the Steady-State Economy Conference

So, what I don’t understand is why at these things there’s never anyone mentioning the need to end the promise of limitlessly multiplying money, quite the most obvious of all the impossible drivers of growth and our impacts on the earth.

Keynes, in his General Theory, pointed out the one non-disruptive way to end the growth of money, savings and debt as the physical economy reached its physical limits of environmental impacts. People always seemed just run and hide when Ken Boulding or I have raised the subject, though, as if people still live in fear of questioning the right of powerful people and institutions to have their idle money endlessly multiply.

That we try to stabilize it, rather than find a peaceful end to it, is the error. It’s inherently destabilizing of any economy working as a physical system and being driven to its breaking point. We should do what Keynes recommended, turn all investment funds into endowments, so their earnings are spent on more useful things than multiplying our burden on the earth.

See also:
- http://synapse9.com/blog/2010/04/01/keynes-widows-cruse-compulsive-capitalism-v-natural-growth/
And other things in the Natural-Economy group of blog entries:
- http://synapse9.com/blog/category/natural-economy/

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Notes prepared for Andy Revkin on Keynes’ “Widow’s Cruse” concept:

Here are a link from the blog entry on the “Widow’s Cruse” (‘cruse’ means “cup” in the King James Bible) that my comment pointed to a footnote to an essay on natural climax, and a reference to the Wikipedia entry, a couple paragraphs down under the history section.

Anyone new to the subject needs a little guidance around the pitfalls at first. It certainly has been discussed by economists as a “curse”, and they have widely spread misunderstanding of it, except for Ken Boulding it seems. What Keynes was referring to was a magical “inexhaustible cup” of oil that Elijah gave to an old widow to relieve her of the burden of feeding him during his stay with her,.. weird! Hidden in that is the secret formula for making free market financial systems sustainable at the limits to quantitative economic expansion.

In Keynes’ General Theory, chapter 16 heading III and IV, the way he says:
“Thus for a society such as we have supposed, the position of equilibrium [steady state], under conditions of laissez-faire, will be one in which employment is low enough and the general standard of life sufficiently miserable to bring [the rate of] savings to zero.” [i.e. no physical expansion & no net returns to allow financial expansion]

“The only alternative position of equilibrium would be given by a situation in which a stock of [financial] capital sufficiently great to have a marginal efficiency [and savings rate] of zero also represents an amount of [financial] wealth sufficiently great to satiate to the full the aggregate desire on the part of the public make provision for the future [by increasing savings], even with full employment …” [ending savings accumulation because people have “enough money” ]

“For a little reflection will show what enormous social changes would result from a gradual disappearance of a rate of return on accumulated wealth [end of compounding investment returns]. A man would still be free to accumulate his earned income with a view to spending it at a later date. But his accumulation [of wealth without work] would not grow.

It’s really high school math, with the only catch being visualizing the earth as finite. The way to draw the model is with two economies, 1) a goods and services economy in which money circulates internally (a working bucket) and 2) a financial economy (a savings bucket) being used to put surplus money in at selected places in the main economy to stimulate growth, and take a % more than that out. That works fine so long as there is steady growth in the working economy, so putting ever more money in the right places creates enough extra for the finance economy to keep taking a % more out. The savings accumulate exponentially as the returns keep being added to savings, and kept from the working economy unless in exchange for a promise of greater returns.

When attempts to stimulate growth start multiplying conflicts in the economy and environment instead [overinvestment], it creates conditions “sufficiently miserable” that the working economy can’t produce real multiplying returns. Then the whole economy can only be kept stable if the rents provided to the financial economy for the use of money stop being accumulated as savings, at the same time. That’s what obligates anyone at that time to spend their “unearned” financial income to bring an end to the otherwise automatic accumulation of capital extracted from the working economy. It’s in their own interests for preserving their own accumulated capital, in the interests of the system as a whole, and of the right of employees to be able to save for their own needs from their earned income.

There’s been a fascinating discussion on the Monbiot Discussions of the Biblical model of nature as controlled by an authoritarian master, given to humans for us to “be fruitful and multiply” our “dominion” over and “domesticate” (both English words from the same Latin and older roots), and so treat as part of our household and subject our ever increasing control. … I liked this reply I made to Lila on the subject.

Lila,
But isn’t the biblical admonition precisely to treat the world as our servant, and to “domesticate” everything as fast as humanly possible, AS IF following an instruction from a profit maximizing ruler (calling himself God) speaking to his domestics? The mystery is why we believed it in the first place and clung to it for thousands of years…, given how completely that story contradicts the visible evidence that nature works by things taking care of themselves and finding ways to complement and fit together.

The emotional problem humans have is what’s hard to peg down, whether it’s just being so easily seduced by self-importance or what. The clear evidence is that we DO define economic stability as our economy’s rate of exponential expansion, and are all admonished to follow the Biblical model in fact, and be good domestics serving those in power by becoming ever more productive in advancing their aim of taking every more control of everything in sight, and get showered with gifts for it.

That we don’t see where those growing gifts come from (AND even most “greens” are really not curious about the fairly easily traced connections) is the puzzle. The only satisfying explanation I’ve come to is that consciousness presents our cultural roles AS reality, and we fail to recognize that consciousness is actually a cultural reconstruction of what our senses tell us, following our culture’s traditional models.

It does seem to fit, doesn’t it? That our cultural ideal is still to behave like the domestics of some dead kings from impossibly long ago.. to get showered with approval from all around.

phil

In comments on a discussion of “economics as if people and the earth mattered” in a NEF blog post Clever thinking about how we think, Dave Chester offered a concise statement on the scinetific method of reasoning, concluding:

The most famous saying which fails this test is “I think therefore I Exist” (Descarte). Better to claim that because I exist I can think.

++ I’ve edited the first line in my response, not having quite read to the end of his remark, saying:

[Yes] the phrase attributed to Descarte seems to omit whether [] the word “think” is referring to [the physical processes of thought], or the logic. They certainly exist in rather different senses at least, since the physical process doesn’t work by logic and the logic can’t work anything unless the person uses the physical processes at their mind’s disposal.

I think that distinction solves the “mind/body problem”. Mind can only be pointed to with explanations and body can’t be explained except by being pointed to physically. Try doing otherwise!

Drinking a glass of water or extending a handshake, for example, are quite easy to do but impossible to explain. Conversely, theories are generally based on some logic that seems easy to explain, but there’s not theory that anyone can possibly “do”. All we can actually do to imitate theory is act it out by engaging in physical processes the theory can’t explain… right?

I think we need both. Or at least I guess that’s my theory.

++ and then realizing I needed to replace “But” with “Yes” above… I commented:

Oops… I just noticed your summation “Better to claim that because I exist I can think” is just a simpler way to say what I added.

That “what we think of things isn’t what they are” is an important step, though, toward learning the habit of [pointing] to things as being themselves rather than [referring to them] as being our explanations.

phil

There’s been a lively exchange on GRIST around “Who’s to blame for the Gulf oil gusher?”

MimiK on 10 JUN 2010 8:59AM said:

EVERYONE: This whole issue, and ALL the comments, are all stuck on the same problem: the gap between what we THINK about what we are doing what we are actually DOING.

There is a LOT of theory from a lot of corners, from Buddhism to cognitive brain science to social psychology and more, that each in their own way come to the same conclusion: Human beings have enormous difficulty seeing clearly and truthfully how we are actually acting in life.

We do three things — all of us, every human brain — that make us all LOUSY at the “blame game.” First, we all have a blind spot in the brain that does not see how we are actually acting. Second, there is a gap between what we say about how we are acting and how we are acting — a tendency to believe our own press rather than look clearly and bravely at what we are actually doing. Third, the human brain always UNDER estimates how tragic something is.

So, if you’re going to play the blame game, play it with awareness of our common human brain handicaps: blindspot to how we are actually acting; gap between our words and our actual actions; and chronic underestimation of tragedy. …. Take it from there, people.

I replied: 

@MimiK There’s another dimension to our common cognitive blind spots that helps too. That’s the observable gap between the systems of our thinking and the systems of the physical world…

Consciousness tends to equate reality with the systems of our thinking and so greatly over simplifies and looses track of what the natural systems “explained” may be doing. I’ve written a few things on it from a natural science of systems view, as an inherent hazard of explanation. Once we have explanations for something we tend to think of the natural world as if operating BY our explanations. Of course, it never did or will, so we need to think of explanation as just a coping strategy and remain open to the real mysteries of any subject addressed.

I also approach that by having a list of natural processes that seem to have constant explanation, but usually represent complex systems that are in the process of becoming something else. Basically it’s the four types of accumulative growth systems, recognized from their characteristic feedbacks, (++, -+, +-, –) = (¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸). They may look regular but indicate complex processes that are turning into something else.

fyi: more at www.synapse9.com or “What Wandering minds need to know” or “Models Learning Change”