(those special machines of nature and how they record their accumulative learning)

- an archive - for new work see SIGNALS or PUBLICATIONS

If you're a researcher interested in visiting, to work in my library, I have great collection of books on numerous related fields.    include  eds. 3/22/01 3/9/04,05,06,07,08,09, 1/21/10 1/23 2/6 7/5 11/28 1/14/11 4/11 10/11 06/15 (note other ed. dates indicate revisions of history of paragraphs or sections are)  (P.F. Henshaw is the pen name of Jessie Henshaw) 

An "earther" Cartoon Collection..:-)		There's unquestionably something wrong with a world society expecting to push the talents of its people and the resources of the earth, our cultural resilience and her ecological resilience,  to absorb regularly multiplying scales of new challenge and change.   It naturally gets out of scale with reality. It gets out if scale by being a continuation of the path we've been on, but now pushing everyone and everything to create and adapt to ever greater change even as it becomes unmanageable.   So it now increasingly pushes people and cultures to acts of desperation.   It's part of our whole culture, though, and is driven relentlessly by compound investing, the financial principle followed for seeking prosperity everywhere in the world, now escalating the challenges and risks.
	For a fairly simple reason it becomes a trap, because the people leading society don't discover the illogic of it, because they don't feel the illogic of it.   Increasing productivity by leaps and bounds had always been our ideal of "good".   It is perhaps the most unquestioned belief of modern man.   To have THAT become a serious threat is deeply unexpected.   So only the people who can feel the counter-intuitive changes in the realities, (feel intuitively that the "logic" of the system has become "illogical"), are able to then maintain a motivation to search for the evidence to discover the real root of our emerging conflict with our own ideals. the root of our emerging conflict ...  with our own ideals. jlh 12/15/12   From Blog Post

Emotionally proofreading your logical models - a way to look at what this is all about

I've written several short "what this site is about" essays, you'll find in various places elsewhere.  They all attempt to introduce a way to begin studying the eventful lives of the individually organized and behaving systems of nature, our many kinds of animated companions with which we share the environment .    It's naturally quite hard to understand what's happening inside a visibly eventful social group, for example, though we may be intensely aware of its presence.   That also applies to much of the eventfulness of history in general, that life is a place where "things happen" and often for relatively invisible and apparently local causes.   Any natural system is defined by its own internal loops of relationships, is a way to state that as a problem, so for an observer, the working parts of any animated system start off being largely invisible.    From 6/29/12 Blog Post

One very powerful technique for probing the organization of eventful and self-organizing cultural or economic systems is one I've rarely mentioned.    Maybe it's the one I should lead with, though.   It's a way of using your two natural modes of thought, intuitive and rational, to "proof read" each other's work.  It allows your feelings to read and inform your reasoning and vis-a-vis.

The effect of learning how to do that is to create "theories with feelings", and "feelings that make sense",  something that is some individuals achieve on their own, but is rarely if ever taught as a practical technique.  It's very valuable for connecting your naturally "reductionist" explanatory thinking with your "holistic" intuitive and experiential thinking.

Finding the emotional content in our logic driven world and the logical content in our feelings

It helps overcome the problem that explanations are powerful tools but completely lack the responsiveness to their environments that intuitive feelings about things bring out.  Similarly, emotional realizations maybe responsive to vastly complex sets of relationships, but it's rare that people can derive their more practically useful logical elements, what I sometimes call "cybernetic body parts" that I look for to use in explanatory models of self-organizing systems.

A business plan to use its profits to create ever more profitable businesses, the "universal" business plan in our economy, describes a logical model for an exceedingly complex interaction with an environment that is missing from the model.   To use your intuitive "right brain" awareness of  real world experience to better understand the "left brain" model, you might think of business investment as planting seeds for growing more seeds to plant.

That adds to the seemingly isolated abstract model, use money to make money, a door to your rich personal awareness of changing relationships and life experiences related to the planting of things to grow.  It opens up the complex issues of both  their success in and responses from the host culture in which they are planted.

Business investment is more than just planting seeds to then harvest a crop of seeds, generating a surplus, like farming.  In creating businesses and the communities dependent on them, it's more like giving birth to new long lived organisms, so perhaps more like parenting than like farming.  In either case, the natural "stewardship" issues regarding the host ecology and the niche being used within it are simply missing from the financial business plan.

Both farming and parenting work in relation to their host somewhat like getting some fertile host pregnant, planting something to grow in it, to tap its fruitfulness.  When considerded as either parenting or farming, ancient experience readily tells us that just getting the host ever more pregnant is not a workable plan.

That unworkable plan the logical model offers, though, represents itself as your quick route to ever expanding self-importance.   Any teenager can tell you it's as much a suicide mission for your future as anything else.   Many times people just are not in a position to ask those kinds of questions, and will just never "put two and two together", particularly when questioning the relatively blind choices they make that seem to be most fulfilling.

Maybe it's one's ability to trust oneself to at least be an honest broker for one's self, that allows the two sides of your mind to prompt each other to ask the appropriate but sensitive personal questions the other is blind to.   Letting your feelings poke at the blind spots in your reasoning or your reasoning poke at the blind spots in your feelings is a lot easier to take than from someone, anyone, else.

Other levels of compassion, empathy, observation and reasoning are needed too, to emotionally support yourself or others when discovering blind spots have led to grave errors and so grave disappointments, and the need to find some silver lining for relief. For the standard business plan, the dark side of that blind spot is realizing that what may a person's very most fulfilling life experience has been, or is rapidly becoming, much more like a cancer of the generosity of their host than a celebration.

The silver lining for that one is easy to point to, and if taken to heart tends to be "the best is yet to come", as a distinct reality.   When we open up to our wider experience of life it's that moment when we stop being self-involved and discover how to be responsive to the larger world around us that is essentially the beginning of life.

That's readily observable in nature, for organisms, communities and cultures of all kinds which have long productive lives after their end of growth.   It's generlly clear in hindsight that those long fulfilling lives, creating and exercising their own discovered roles as participants in their host environment, are far more important than the brief explosive and formative beginning of life in their initial growth.

You don't normally get those sorts of insights into your the wider relationships actually implied by the bare bones business model.   Our whole world economy is organized around that elemental financial business model, without any apparent awareness of the complex wider relationships that come with it.

It seems you only get an awareness of what a logical plan really means in your life if you have some mental technique for putting the logical model into an emotionally meaningful context.

 

The scientific subject here is A verifiable method for finding information missing from our theories. ( & discovering the fascinating details of how real relationships truly develop & change) In a phrase, what's always missing from our theories is how nature puts together the continuity of change*.    That is verified by following pointers to apparent gaps in our information that nature must somehow be connecting, and successfully finding what's missing.    It's often no more complex than asking when things started and when they'll finish, maybe beginning with observing complex events occurring with remarkable simplicity, like growth. *except the other reason... the real difficulty people have distinguishing between our cultural realities that explain things to us and anything physically independent of them... seeing our beliefs as stories of our own design that are often missing the best parts of the real stories of nature is part of what looking for the missing continuities of change helps expose. As things change from "small" to "big" the whole way they can change changes.  It changes their form both internally and externally... Rather oddly, science doesn't generally recognize that most obvious of "natural laws of change" because the subjects of science must all be defined and so only concern "data".  Natural change concerns subjects of the physical world that had not previously been possible to define (SEA).   This conceptual "can't get there from here" problem begins a quite long search for how to "wrap one's mind around" the odd true relation between the reality we each we create for ourselves as what we "see" in our minds, consciousness, and the reality of nature we are looking at as we make up our own. 10/17/11

The mysterious source of the designs of natural systems seems to have at least been located, and found in the accumulative organization created by their active parts, that leave the arrangement of their inactive parts behind as the design.  That seems to be the "genetic code" of spontaneous self-organization.   So, what amounts learning by the parts of systems that manage themselves, is what shapes the self-managing communities of nature, including organisms and economies of many kinds.  This observation, well enough confirmed, rather conflicts with the common model of modern science, though.   That traditional approach treats the designs of nature as the rules that science finds in the organization of the inactive parts, or just equations approximating their measures, overlooking the accumulative learning of their communities of active parts that created and continue to alter the arrangement.  They wouldn't fit an equation.   The active parts of nature have been represented, instead, as the mathematical operators of our equations, as being determined by the design rather than as the source of the design.   That's seems to be why science makes it look like everything can be controlled.  The approach doesn't fit the observed natural world, but joining the two views is a real challenge.   Help or relevant references of any kind would be appreciated. Effectively omitting the self-managing systems of society and nature from our management plan for the earth, and their active learning as the "glue" that shapes and binds their parts, creates extreme contradictions in the plan.    So, traditional rules are in deeper question than one would expect.  It's reading nature's signals to see what our learning systems are learning,..  about how they are finding to use our world, is what will tell us, how to survive in community with them as our partners.

Contents

_____________

Reading Hints...

Try just browsing for something interesting, there are lots of starting places...

Short General Introductions

What's so different here?   ~3/28/09

Systems Theory is not really the subject...  but rediscovering a lost art of observation

It's not even "science" in a way, as science is a theory of how nature is controlled
and this is about how to explore the uncontrolled systems in nature.  
Learning is an uncontrolled system, for example, both for us and for nature.

It's learning about the real mysteries of how ordinary things work using observation to help find better questions about them.
(aided by some innovative physics and systems theory)

Understanding what problems are unsolvable solves amazing problems is part of it.
Studying the flows of change exposes distinctly temporary systems, pointing to what cannot continue.
Foresight then comes from asking the hard questions about what will upset them and how they will change.
 Then you can far better predict their tipping points, as their fortunes change by changing their own environments,
to discover the unusual richly beautiful worlds of accumulating and upsetting local designs
 in the spaces "between the laws of averages"
where individuality develops.

It's a way to learn about how what persists in nature develops from what is temporary
 as complex natural relationships develop,
finding their complementary connections.
Perhaps that lets you become part of and make much better responses to them
during an age of stumbling over ever bigger mistakes,
trusting failed habits of the past and bad advice,
Finally catching up on the loads of "back home work" on the story of life
we never turned in when we were younger.

8/30/10 This site and my own explorations are about switching one's orientation toward reality.  It starts with recognizing our common habits of explaining things use images we fabricate in our minds to substitute for the real subjects of the world, a kind of short circuiting.  The alternative is to use our images to help show us where reality is different from our mental picture.   That orients you to being an explorer of the real thing beyond what you can imagine.    It's "counter intuitive" in our culture to consider physical reality to be what we find beyond explanation, but other than being quite factual, the benefit is that there is so very much of it otherwise going neglected.  

Science has mostly taken the opposite approach, though, trying to find the features of the world that could be turned into rules of explanation, often explicitly claiming that by explaining more and more we'd eventually explain everything.    It becomes a truly false objective, to consistently avoid studying the things beyond explanation, like how natural systems work with so many individually uncontrolled learning and evolving parts.   Needing rules for things means neglecting to study how things take care of themselves, one of the most notable features of nature.   The sure sign of the gap is that the universal process by which organized systems develop, growth, is not a recognized subject of physical science, and evidence of an extreme blind spot.   That growth is an environmental learning process seems to be why deterministic science has neglected studying it.  

So, it takes a real admission of a kind, just to study what we naturally can't explain about the world.   It means admitting that conscious explanations or "knowledge" is a kind of fiction that leaves out more than it explains in practical fact.  Our explanations themselves are all human inventions, and they don't match the physical reality very well when you check.    It implies that physical reality is located primarily in what we don't understand, and in what we find inexplicable about the world.   It seems to suggest knowledge in general would be much more valuable if treated as questions rather than conclusions, and that may be our mistake...  

2/12/10 Appreciating how uncontrolled systems make up their own rules as they go is about closely watching them, identifying large and small cells of climate and economic processes and personal or ecological relationships as they develop and change form, like storms, technologies and our friendship circles and the balances of nature around us.    There are their tipping points, approaching dead ends and emerging new forms to identify.    What usually marks their irreversible change, as opposed to incidental change, are the patterns of successively bigger or smaller steps of change.  Those are what indicate developing or dissipating environmental systems, the enduring structures of nature.

One develops mental models of them, but mostly as questions about what's changing on its own.   It would help scientists to see what complex systems in an environment might be modeled, too, and when the real system has or is about to change form and models of it will need to be changed.    It's about raising better questions, considering natural systems as changing by accumulating new features as information in their physical designs, as organizational learning processes themselves, made possible by watching their conserved change accumulate .   How to tell the ones that are persistent and for which organizational change is strictly accumulative and permanent is one of the important steps. 

Considering natural systems as processes of accumulating organization engaged in learning about their environments allows you to view them as controlled by how they explore their environments and what they discover, instead of as controlled an observer's rules of prediction.   A mouse explores its environment its way, to find food.   A business explores its environment its way, to discover markets.  A teenager does to find who there is to hang out with.   Each is forms a network regular connections, the environmental relationship itself, that serves as a platform for finding new ones, establishing a presence in the environment and a way of growing and responding to growth limits.    Sometimes an observer can see what they are about to discover, letting them anticipate what to do then.   The same stages of development and variety of outcomes for new personal relationships can be seen in the life story of more complex environmental systems like businesses or cultures.

Such new networks of environmental relationships are "special machines", things that change form as they find room to take off, and change form again when they run out of room.  That's their growth phase and maturation phase for systems that will persist beyond their own initial growth.    Normal models and theories fail to suggest how such natural systems continually change as they interact with their changing environments.   Natural systems have distributed parts, and tend to change everywhere at once, often in seemingly coordinated ways and without controls.   Sometimes they just "go zoom" in some fantastically orchestrated way, for no apparent outside cause at all.   They're individually "eventful".  Their biggest changes in form come when they discover something and take off, and then when their limits trigger them to either stabilize or run down.   "Simple machines" don't do those sorts of things.    "Simple machines" is all people and theory can define, though.   So this is about getting "simple machines" to point at nature's "special machines", as better questions about them, helping an observer to see their features and learn to tell when they're changing.

One thing that points to them is their succession of progressive development trends, and reading them as narratives of their organizational processes.   Identifying a local development trend lets you associate it with everything working together as a whole to produce it, to recognize what's happening in total, and as changes progress from one direction of development to another.  It's whole system learning from beginning to end.   So there's the art of observation and the general approach and other topics.    The rigorous scientific "hook" making it a new scientific method is building the narrative around the sequence of developments required  by the conservation of energy for the physical continuity of energy flows.   The form of the narrative is derived from the Law of Continuity, which opens up a useful new approach to general physics of change, consistent with thermodynamics but not with some of its more common interpretations.    Other physicists are still generally hesitant.   The problem is how to treat scientific information, whether as well defined representations of nature or also for referring to physical things we can't define.    It's a mysterious philosophical conundrum, with a long history.   Learning to separately discuss physical realities we can only point to, not confusing them with the information we point with...  looks like the trick.   

Please do ask if things are not clear.   If I say things that seem to conflict with your beliefs, ask why I might suggest it, or if I was just misspeaking for your way or reading it.   Sometimes I'm trying to suggest a range of possibilities, sometimes I'm omitting something that should have been mentioned.   Let me know.   We definitely have a lot to sort out in many ways.

Mathematical models are not prone to change by local developmental processes as natural systems do, though, and don't offer a way to explain things that change in different ways everywhere at once either.    What this approach does is raise questions about when and how individual systems will change their behavior in the future and lead to discovering the new models that will be necessary to make new sense of them.   It's "raw science" not "finished science", for beginning or advanced research into any subject of change.    It's also a way to open our minds and learn how to follow nature's actual processes, rather than just follow the kinds of simple (and lifeless) explanations for them our thinking can build and make sense of, and maybe... let us end our clumsy effort to control nature by attempting to make her follow our explanations too.   There's lots of things you can follow and understand, that you can't really explain, and that's often enough to show how to adapt to or avoid them.

A useful theory of environmental systems isn't about answers, but pointing to where you should look to find them, only hinting enough at the answer you'll find there to begin the search.    Where this approach began was with noticing odd things like how all experiments misbehave a little, and how economies are designed to let everyone put money into the common pot, to then take ever more out, with no end in sight...    Along the way it takes discovering how to identify whole systems by connecting all the dots that grow together, like all the cells in a body and all the local features of the environmental niche it grows in and builds around itself.

People often respond "I don't understand", but that is neither a question, nor an answer.   Just add "yet" if you don't see how to proceed.  Your questions about your environment are needed for this to work.   The best source of "connected dots" is not your theory, but noticing developing change as it happens.   That is invariably a sign of a whole network of developing relationships.    Try asking "where did things start" and "how are they going".   Ask "what's happening" and by "looking around" at everything your issue touches learn to see it as a whole.   Ask "where are the flows" or the "eruptions of change" that connect things.    Natural systems doesn't make our kind of sense, true, so we need to learn theirs.   If you get stuck break your thought pattern, try flipping a question around, to ask it in some entertaining backwards way, perhaps, then retrace.    The story here is about an exploratory physics of uncontrolled systems that any field or level of interest could make use of, discovering how to discover the naturally developing environmental relationships all around us.   It's about "the track" that people often refer to with phrases like their life or work being "on track" or the country going "off track".   This approach lets you ask "whose track" and "what track".    It allows open minded explorers to enrich their view and knowledge of the locally developing features of changing environments.       

Natural environmental systems generally have "variable organization".  Nature's physical systems are simply not sets of fixed rules, though having theoretical rules can help you make guesses, see what is behaving differently, and explore it.    Physical systems develop from the collective behavior of independently acting and adapting parts.  They come to act together as a whole through by all acting opportunistically in complementary ways, with "the system" as their special environment.    Organisms are that kind of special environment for their cells, as cultures are for their populations, storms are for their individual currents, and technologies are for their many closely fitting complementary parts.   What's good for the horseshoe is good for the horse...    All have that same basic organic design, lots of independently different parts working in concert.   You can recognize these wholes, and explore their internal relationships, using questions raised by watching their individual stages of developmental change.   Tracking things with any regular measure that reflects the whole will do, energy, money, size or resources, displaying the basic turning points of a life and hinting at others.   

Natural systems are illusive too, because people have some bad mental habits.   The most frequent is ask the wrong questions by confusing our mental images and related cultural issues with the physical world of environments.   They're mostly all but totally different and unrelated.    The problem comes from tending to mistake our own information for the physical thing referred to.    A first step in "learning how to think" then, might be to study how to separate what you "see" from what you're "looking at".  One of those is in your mind and the other isn't, one built of your values and intuitions the other physical interactions.   Becoming aware of the chains of connection in an environment is by recognizing that regularly accumulating physical changes are not in your mind, and do not need any explanation to be connected to each other somehow.   Then discover that they have continuities that identify them as parts of natural processes you couldn't possibly have dreamed up.   You slowly learn to confidently point to them, and discover why it's never possible to define them.    When you look inside a living organism you can never find what makes it alive, for example.   That's mysterious because living things are distributed systems of independently acting parts, and most of the "real action" at any moment is guaranteed to be somewhere other than where you look!    

If that makes you say "cool!", you're on your way.   Otherwise, "look around", something will surprise you.    One hazard of using scientific models for representing natural systems composed of independently learning and responding parts like environments and economies have,  is that models have no independently learning and responding parts.   They are built using variables representing measurements of categories connected in fixed equations.    As such they don't contain any representation of the real working parts of their own subject matter.   This means that scientific models make particularly ineffective operating instruction manuals.   They may be good at predicting but are not designed for steering.    It never mattered much before, when environmental science was mostly just descriptive, but now that we have to run things we find all our "operating manuals" are untested.    Even economic theory was used largely for explanations rather than operating instructions, and never had to actually work before.    Now that we have to start thinking of using scientific models to steer all kinds of local and global environmental systems through their collisions with each other, the issue of whether systems of independently behaving parts can be controlled like our models of them matters a great deal.     My approach uses a model of simple scientific questions anyone could ask, rather than predictions, presented as if anyone could be doing their own original scientific research, directly observing their own environment, relationships and experiences.  

The basic question is "What can you know for sure when you don't know very much?", and finding that the answer to that becomes a better leading question.   Where it leads is to questions arising from the classic story line, "the beginning to end", and digging up the unique threads to be found along anything's path of "magical levitation" that sustains it and it's relationships.   So this approach creates a story written in anyone's own language, knit together with some simple principles of continuity in change, for use in discovering your own questions about things changing around you.   Sometimes it reveals surprising and helpful realities that have been 'hidden in sight', like the link between rules and environments, and how they reflect local systems of relationships.   The key is learning to connect the continuity of irreversible changes in scale with resulting changes in kind with the stages of natural development.   They help you see what kind of change to look for having occurred in the past, and is sure to be coming.  

1. Growth,                  3. Stability,             5. Decay.   
   2. Integration,                   4. Disintegration,

0 Initiation 123456 Termination

The top sustainability issue in the world today
Efficiency is being used for sustaining growth not the earth,
Popular attention is being diverted from the real moral and practical issues,
...how to end the need for growth.

What are Natural Complex Systems? 

__________

 Particle, Atom, Molecule, Organelle, Cell, Organ, Body,

Community, Economy,  Population,

Ecology, Life, Planet, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe

The Continuities of nature arise with the local development of

Multi-scale Networks of physical relationships 

Acting as a Cell with an internal Medium of Exchange

And local Marketplace to internally Link its Hubs,

Which are themselves smaller scale networks containing their own Hives of activity

Surrounding their own Mediums of Exchange,

Cells on their own scale. that develop regularities as "Local Laws" of "Their Nature",

Small Universes with original design and behavior,

Linked together by sharing mediums of exchange with others, as part of larger scale networks,

Whole Physical Economies composed of independently behaving parts,

That we may refer to as features of our information. 

Complex systems work by themselves, sometimes predictable, but determined by how their processes develop locally.  There are two realities, the physical world and our mental world of human ideas, to be taken as dance partners rather than as enemies, denying neither their freedom, and avoiding the denial that is major trouble for both.  At the scale of growth systems, at least, natural systems  require diversity in their constituent parts and reserves of resources in their environments.   Those that grow also come to require stability.  Their creative hearts are the hives of network activity that form their cells, like the village that creates the reason for a train stop and the reason for the roads leading there.  Those hives of activity on any scale are where creative events develop to propagate like seed on the larger network scales, the process of emerging features that for a whole system "punctuates the equilibrium".     

Bob Ulanowicz has  recently published a theorem on the need for diversity in natural systems (1) concluding "all complex systems, including our monetary and financial one, become structurally instable whenever efficiency is overemphasized at the expense of diversity and interconnectivity".   What drives systems to overspecialize, though, and develop their strengths until they become weaknesses, is a broader issue.    An example of this I’ve been studying is why people advocating sustainability are attracted to using efficiency as a growth resource, though that ultimately creates instability as its end.  It appears that it used to have the opposite effect, and we got used to that.   When we were small and the earth was big, growth stimulated by efficiency used to make resources more plentiful and cheaper.   The economic theory of the last two centuries, then, built up around that assumption.   Now the opposite is true, growth makes resources more scarce and expensive.    If you look at the ‘green’ literature, these days, you find that fatal solution for sustainability (sadly...) is really all people talk about…

There are perhaps many misconceptions that lead our society to reduce diversity, for profit, till systems become unstable.  I once devised a general solution to the monetary part of the problem I called “general allocation theory”.   I found it hard to discuss with people.   The barrier seemed to be the need to discuss economic systems as individual organisms of a sort, "creatura" as Gregory Bateson would have called them, like self-organizing social or business networks as well weather systems and organisms, each with their own individual behaviors.   The still dominant "paradigm" of nature for science is that there are no independent systems, and everything that happens is determined by it's environment and error, so writing other better versions of that and other papers also received the same total lack of interest.   The preference is for representing systems with a set of rules of control.   

The natural systems approach is radically different in that systems are considered as individual self-organizations that originate by growth and development, and are full of different scales of independent internal activity, like what we observe.    Links on a network, for example, exist to connect these ‘hives’ of complex system activity, like the road and rail networks that connect homes, towns and cities, or the blood stream branches that connect cells and organs.   In economies there are the supply and product chains feeding into goods and service markets that link the individual hives of activity that individual businesses are.   It's a really good "telescope", something you can reliably find your way with, providing a great way to begin making sense of natural systems by looking for their mediums of exchange of different scale, through which their hives of organization connect.

1) Quantifying sustainability: Resilience, efficiency and the return of information theory 
Ulanowicz, R.E. / Goerner, S.J. / Lietaer, B. / Gomez, R. , Ecological Complexity, 6 (1), p.27-36, Mar 2009 
 

   2/7/09 2/12 jlh   

Physics of Natural Open Systems *def note           0 1 2 3  4 56

The space between the deterministic laws where nature develops animated systems
Explanatory principles, for locating and exploring their design and behavior, 
and a way to unify the languages of science around the natural world subjects they address in common

The problem of understanding natural systems is that they observably change organization and behave by smoothly flowing processes, which are seen changing everywhere at once all the time to do it...    That's not like an equation.    I found a very productive new kind of diagnostic physics for monitoring their organizational development processes, greatly aided by finding them to normally develop as locally evolving autonomous networks.  The great advantage of the approach is that it allows me to separately study nature's own complex processes and the theories we need to help us predict and characterize them.   Recognizing those differences is the source of the most productive questions that method generates.

Understanding comes from studying them as whole internalized networks of relationships, much as if individual organisms with energy resource throughputs.   They exhibit periods of stable organizational development that go through a natural succession of changing types, typically producing inflection points in the empirical curves reflecting measures of their processes where they transition.   That way the method builds on a combination of basic principles of mathematical continuity, the physics of energy conservation and empirical study of the natural successions of organizational development processes.  ed 6/12/13

              Introductions to General Theory and Applications

• Emergence of Natural Systems as Complex Distributed Learning Processes

• The Art of Observation

• Network Science & General Systems Theory,

• Natural Economics & Growth

• Microclimates
   

• Publication list  research papers

• Other people & Influences to 2009

• An unhidden pattern of events - the initial theory

                     Intro Essays & quick links

• Complex Systems Science - 1/18/10 Encyclopedia of the Earth article

• A Natural Systems Science Process 9/17/08  Using the conservation of change to
     discover the divergent & convergent workings of change!

• A Natural Systems Science Theory 5/16/07..09/08/07 02/19/08 a General Behavioral
     Economics, a Unified Physics of Open Systems  

• Bump on a Curve ¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸  Notepad (for the cycle of life's great transformative changes & events)
     for  non-scientists who happen to watch what goes on 4/07

• Observing Systems
     a new reaching summary, in 22 short subjects -from the view of  6/06

                   The physical science origin

• Physics of Happening...  an archive from the 80's & 90's of the research studies that led to the analytical techniques, theory & tools for this method of studying natural systems as self-organizing events evolving over time.
   

• Earlier work:  In the 70's I was doing a small research projects on spontaneously developing energy transport systems in homes, air currents, and found I needed to invent new concepts for how to explain their evolution, as unique, individual, emergent systems of organization (of great beauty and power) for moving energy that spontaneously changed form...  like "life".   That new set of concepts became a new form of physics, for studying self-organizing systems of all kinds, as individual cells of organization that had a development life-cycle

   .  

  While such sorts of "viral" processes are generally associated with all self-organizing systems, and are exceedingly common, telling intriguing and important stories for us, but also largely hidden from a deterministic world view.   So somewhat like a new way of seeing, it takes time to develop a skill with the method.  Locally self-organizing systems are not following an external set of rules, such as the "lens" of determinism is designed to look for.   So... my physics becomes a method of using theory to illuminate nature rather than to reduce nature to theory!    ;-)  ed 6/12/13

The Emergence of Natural Systems, 
by Uncontrolled Complex Learning of, by, and for  Distributed Natural Processes
 05? 07/04/06 5/26/07 2/2/08 3/3/08 1/7/11 4/14

...Using physics tools as a naturalist would, for studying how physical processes develop by themselves,

a study of individually occurring systems, their internal networks,
their life histories, their current and future organizational development processes, as the natural subjects of science.

1/29/09 11/28 4/14/11  Note: My first successful expression of this idea was in old unpublished early paper called "An Unhidden Pattern of Events",  the same "canonical development trajectory" was also described by Stan Salthe as a universal thermodynamic process in his 2005 Energy and Semiotics.    This common succession of events in the continuity of " development and decay" as the "life cycle of natural systems" provides an outline, or a 'crib sheet' if you will.  You use it as a framework for filling in the details in the "Chapters - In the whole story of individual lives and events"  that any individual case of natural system development and decay will be found to exhibit, as necessary to satisfy the law of emergence and continuity, for energy using events and processes to begin and end.    Below is one introduction to my approach, expanding on the scientific method to discover nature's "other theories", the innate languages of organization that develop within natural systems,  and how that makes many new kinds of scientific discoveries possible.  It would also seem to offer a more deeply grounded understanding of the realities surrounding us and with in us.    The following two short discussions are still useful, but "in a nut shell" might work too.

Recent Research Papers

1.  11/08/08 1/6/09  The general subjects of dissipative systems and complexity is are not really new, and really vast.   What's new here is the recognition that individual systems that begin and end do not need to be approximated by deterministic models in order to explore their changing local organization and developmental behaviors.   Determinism is a restrictive assumption of the physical sciences, based apparently on the guess that because some things can be determined from other things, therefore nothing has independent learning or behavior.   This is about learning how to study systems with clearly independent learning and behavior as a naturalist would, but using the tools of physics to identify the learning processes of the complex systems they contain and are the environments they interact with.

The starting point for applying the physics of change to natural systems (i.e. use deterministic principles to raise useful questions for understanding non-deterministic phenomena) is with the universal limitations for natural processes implied by the conservation laws.   These are 1) energy budgets for any closed boundary (2011-2)  and 2) the necessity for processes of multiple scales of organization for energy flows to begin or end (.    That conclusion comes from the old problem that when theory implies infinite field density, rates of energy flow or accelerations, the real implication is of another scale of organization.  A theorem expands the conservation laws into a general  that identifies natural necessities and limits of developmental processes, and opens a new way to explore causation.

To apply the continuity & divergence principle to complex systems research one uses the principle backwards from the normal procedures of physics.   It becomes a diagnostic tool for exploratory learning, that helps locate and identify the 'little bangs' and 'big booms' of locally emergent developmental processes.  Development in a process, say an ionization cascade in a spark or other growth phenomenon is called 'learning' because it is not guided by rules or a map, but takes place by local exploratory interaction with an environment.  That successes in that tend to be exposed by how they multiply provides a guide to where successful strategies within the system are developing.    It leads to a diagnostic approach to physical systems and change rather than a representational approach.   Work on the method was begun in the late 1970's and now is collected here, with methods and applications discussed in "a physics of happening" section.

From an information theory view, a diagnostic approach to physics treats the physical system as a unique individual "in-physico" model of itself...   The empirical signs of organizational change point to the physical phenomena within and around it, which are together considered to be the full complete and true representation of the system, in the physical thing itself.   Then one explores it's features and shapes to inform one's questions about it.   A 'theory' that may develop for it is considered to fit the physical thing's shapes like 'a glove' fits (or does not fit) to 'a hand'.    It's an approach of trying to understand individual things that nature has already built, by developing better questions about the process by which they developed.  It then leads to questions about what new conditions it will confront and need to respond to as it develops further.  The conserved property of derivative continuity allows one to do that by connecting inflection points in its learning curves with the internal network of its system of relationships, their learning processes, and the environment they are responding to.  

Typically there is a switch in the kind of development between a starting period of discovering expanding opportunity for self-referencing change in relation to the conditions the emerging system is coming from, without limits, to responding to and integrating with the limits of a larger environment it is emerging into.   The system development alters its original conditions of development and other independent things in  the environment often independently respond.

 "How can you see there's a process when your information about it is 'between the dots' ?"  

2. 11/08/08 1/6/09 It's in the continuity of the dots.   Unfortunately, partly because of the many years of representing learning systems as following other kinds of abstract deterministic rules, there are a lot of 'tricks' of reasoning to unlearn.  One of the key ones is about reading beyond one's data.  The rule of the physical sciences has been that science must only consider the information it has as representing reality.   Physical systems, though, still exist in-between the times when you have information about them.   Here the gaps in your data are treated as questions, not exclusions, and a continuity of change is what your probing of the environment is seeking to uncover.  It's proof by discovery, not prediction.   That's very different.

3/3/08   Every 4 year old child knows that frogs jump because you poke them.  It would be nice if the philosophy of science did not still rely on that idea of causal determinism.   The idea that careful description of how actions of one kind produce effects of another is sufficient 'natural cause' for how we determine our own effects is perfectly sound.   That we say our models of deterministic prediction are also invisibly 'embedded' in the universe as the direct causes of nature is not.   The truth of course, is it's the frog that jumps, not your finger.    Looking at the time lags between stimuli and response, you can actually prove that the jumping of a frog is a local complex system learning process.   

A natural systems approach has to do with watching very closely as the 'frog jumps' to observe  how that learning process develops, and identify the emerging organizational networks that are instrumental in the frog's behavior.  It's not about designing an 'artificial frog' as normal control oriented science would be.  It's about discovering how to read the internal processes of the real frog.    There are a number of important discoveries about the true sources of eventfulness and organization in nature to be made, including how a lot of it is 'hidden in sight', disguised by our own unthinking categories.    I have a collection of basic principles:

Lists of Key Principles for understanding Natural Systems
Common Sense - Basic Theory - Systems Thinking - Research Methods  12/07

My main collection of analytical work on studying the continuity of change to raise key questions about the evolving systems of change is  a Physics of Happening.   I built the collection of studies in the late 80's and in the 90's, and have been trying to find the right words to explain it ever since.   To me, looking at historical records for when, where and how developmental processes changed direction is an obvious short-cut for finding the physical systems involved.   I closely observe time traces to see what's happening, focusing particularly on where events begin and end.  Where continuities begin and end the growth & decay of the internal networks of relationships that do it is very exposed.     Physics has looked at nature and asked what universal rules are being followed.   This approach looks to see what local rules are being developed.    Certainly it may look a little strange to study individual things rather than large classes of similar ones, but it's a key to understanding the physical world.   This intro has been rewritten many of times, the following are some short topics that didn't get erased....

Notable achievements?  There's a list of what I consider important results, but the most valuable for our steering the earth are various methods of measuring whole system strain and impacts.   In  well connected economies money does actually quantitatively measure physical energy use for example.  Money is a 'marker', yes, of potential energy, because spending an average dollar consumes an average amount of the total energy in global competitive markets with energy price liquidity.   This has a gigantic implication for economics in that most of our long range economic planning assumes the opposite, failing to count the 'fat tail' of the impact distribution of spending.   Using the $shadow principle to compare the measurable and unmeasurable portions of the impacts of commerce shows a typical undercount of a factor of 10.  

The property of infinitely smooth progression in mathematics is called 'derivative continuity'. It is one of the most fundamental and useful properties of mathematical functions.   Physical systems often display a similar but less well defined property, call it 'flow', or 'natural continuity'.   It characterizes the physical processes in which change takes a process of change, and so is 'conserved' in the same way energy can not be created or destroyed, only transferred by a process.   It's the main property of nature that formulas attempt to emulate, and the main reason equations are useful.   Energy is among the few properties of nature that is universal and conserved.    Most properties of systems of organization are not, except... the continuity of their changing.   That's very useful.    The natural continuity of flows is more complex than equations, continually changing as the underlying complex systems continually change.  For example one section of a curve might have all derivatives positive and a following section of the curve having all derivatives negative.   That suggests looking for underlying systems and how they switch from growth to decay. 

The intent is not aimed at writing a formula. You might use a formula as a way to see how the natural system diverges from it, though.  The intent is to understand how the instrumental systems develop and interact.    Reading shifts in the continuity in natural flows is a big help.   It's an approach that works with any field of science, astrophysics or political science, ecology or economics.   Each would use it to study the continuity of change of the properties they are interested in for the systems they are interested in.   Making it possible to have a common empirical reference to the qualitative subjects of interest  greatly helps in 'getting the problem right', whatever analytical method you then use.    One promising method is to us network science , starting with mapping networks of internal sets of  working parts of whole complex natural systems, and then reading their learning curves for their whole system environmental experience.. 

My sample studies  use various mathematical tools in a diagnostic fashion, to expose otherwise hidden details of  physical system flows and the implied system developments they reflect.   One of these is called "derivative reconstruction" (DR) that uses the mathematical definition of derivatives in reverse,  to "reconnect the dots" and sensitively reconstruct the probable dynamics of underlying system by filtering the spurious higher derivative fluctuation.  Another constructs a "dynamic mean" (DM) by stripping fluctuations and reconstructing the simplest curve shape representing their norm.  They produce differentiable natural functions by interpolation.   It doesn't always, but often exposes otherwise invisible developmental changes and forces excellent new questions.  To assume that a series of dots represents a single continuous process is tricky, of course, and there are some statistical tests like the step variance test (SV) to rule out random walk and a noise suppression sensitivity test (NSS) to gage the scale of non-random fluctuation.   Another of the methods used is called "curvature scale space" (CSS) which originated in the field of computer vision.   It uses repeated smoothing of shapes to distinguish and define those features of shape which are the most robust (slowest to disappear with suppression).  Basically you look for where processes begin and end and try to figure out what is beginning and ending.

There is no practical barrier to these new methods having wide and immediately useful application in numerous fields.   There is a conceptual barrier though.   It's not the Western cultural habit to think of time as a process.  We tend to think of it as a location, and so equations with time as a variable as describing a system that itself does not change over time.   The evidence is that all natural systems continually change over time, and that the main events causing change in systems are 'tipping points' at which systems 'out of balance' end up disrupting themselves in some fashion.  Ordinary thinking hides that from us.

The Art of Observation

12/28/08 1/24/09 1/27 1/20/10 There are two things required for learning how things in nature work on their own.   One is observing them without thinking, so your mind records some marks of the original behavior in a highly faithful way.  The second is exploratory.   Exploration is a matter of finding threads of connection and following them, and for natural systems, then letting the connections "grow on you" giving you "new ways of thinking" to check out.    What you're looking for is ways nature thinks differently from the way you do, paradoxically, so you can "be of two minds" about them.    It's becomes a way of connecting the dots that raises useful questions you never thought of before prompting further observation. 

That, in a nut shell, is what "science" is, with one key difference.   This is about discovering how individual systems discover their own rules rather that all compelled to follow preexisting universal rules.   One way to tell if it's working is whether you find paths of discovery that lead you on, little "yellow brick roads" in nature, taking you beyond your prior imagining.   That also helps you tell if you're just making things up or really discovering the nature of what you are looking at.   That's an endless hazard because of the human tendency to interpret consciousness as reality, instead of our own personalized cultural image.    Observation is pure research.    Then, you hope your way of asking better questions gives you a way to talk to others who have done the same thing, in their own different way, so you can constructively trade notes.  

Figure:  The diagram is of 1) how seeing a tree leaves a direct imprint on the retina of an observer's eye, 2) in who invents in their mind an image of a whole system through which energy and materials flow like a tree, along with an image of how it is connected in the cycles of nature.   Is the diagram to be found anywhere in nature?    No, of course not.   It's imaginary..   Is it may also be useful for helping the observer ask better questions about the real tree and it's environment, that others may understand as well.   Possibly...  --

Why people seem to know so very little about how the intricately organized things of nature take care of themselves gives the appearance that humans have not learned much from our time watching to see how things around us work.   Our normal rule for explanations is self-consistency, that every piece of information is determined by some other piece of information, and nothing in it has any independent behavior.  The better question would be, if some things in the world seem controlled like that, why isn't everything?   Asked another way, it might be, why do people almost never ask that question?    That there do indeed seem to be at least some things that take care of themselves, but we hardly ever ask how, seems to be a possible reason why we have such mixed success in taking care of ourselves...   It comes down to our habit of treating the *things* we see as the *information* we have about them.   Things may actually talk back, and information never will.   Seeing them as information we then interpret the things of the natural world in terms of our explanations.  The inadequacy of that is not only how explanations are never going to talk back, and the things being explained very well could.   All the connections in an explanation are also things we added ourselves, not things that came from what we're explaining.    What we use to connect the pieces of information to make explanations stick together are the cultural and emotional values we attach to the information.   In our minds we don't see physical things as connected by the physical systems they are composed of, but by the value laden constructs we attach to the information we have in our minds.   We tend to equate the real world with a kind of "dream world", our own artificial representation of it.   How we see things as being organized is as we organize our own thoughts and values.  We don't see them as organized by the natural processes that produced what we see.   What a true observer needs to overcome is this naturally artificial naive viewpoint, that the things of the world are the images we have of them.  It's often not easy, but there are lots of little flaws in the 'magic' of how we disguise the world as information you can learn to trust, leaving openings to the real world where you discover connections rather than fill in explanations.    

Observing is a process of letting the intricate beauties and designs of nature seep into one's awareness without imposing your own cultural values or explanations on them, to remain free to discovering their own connections.  When later attaching ones own values to them, then it is to something of substance rather than to nothing of substance.   Otherwise observation tends to be just a fascination with your own values.  Often where you make your first discoveries of nature's connections is noticing how things act as a "whole".  It's the best indication of the existence and design of uncontrolled systems, that they have complex scattered connections that act as one.   The easiest place to see it is in any organism, or culture, or burst of chemical energy, locating the system by how its set of scattered parts erupts in growth as one.   What you soon find is that what makes them whole, and gives them their ability to act as one, is what I call "ESP" (equal stress principle).  Things that act as a whole tend to evenly distribute their own stresses internally.   Seeing this can be easy for some things, but quite hard particularly for things we only know from other people's explanations.   Explanations don't do well with uncontrolled parts.   It can be a lot easier with things that need no explanation or come naturally and are beyond explanation, that we know intimately and so can closely observe without bias.    Truthful observation is not a "one shot deal" but an accumulation of them.   It's like building compost in the soil of an organic garden.   It's a matter of letting one's own mind accumulate a rich compost of the unaltered features imported directly from the "value free" physical systems of nature, letting your mind become imprinted by them as the first step.  

A painter needs paint, and a good observer needs to let their 'paints' accumulate in nature's own colors.   Not taking that approach, but seeing things as the information about them we connect in our own subjective way, our observations then tend to represent the world as lifeless and formless.   Things become "just explanations", given meaning only by the values we attach to them.   We miss all the natural meanings they have that way.   What we then "see" is our own poor awareness of how other things work on their own.   Then in everything we see we find mainly reflections of ourselves and little of the natural world's own connections.   It's an 'inadequate' view of our extraordinary rich intertwined and living world with its many kinds and scales of organized and complex individual parts.   Whether it's the health and prosperity of a tree, of a storm the size of a planet, or of a personal friendship or community of relationships getting into trouble and painfully hard to understand, the beginning of becoming truly a part of it's future is truthful observation.

I have lots of accumulated notes on observation technique scattered all over these pages.  I've been learning how to express it better, which of course means nearly everything here is also a little "out of date" and in need of "fixing" a little.   So, poke around...and see what you'd use and what you'd fix.

Network Science     
....what happens when things connect!  05/24/07.. 09/09/07

Watch this space....   The NetSci conference in NY in May 07.  The ability to convey highly complex system information and understand the evolution of systems from it is advancing to a useful tool very rapidly.   Great Displays from Manuel Lima's Visual Complexity.   My most recent technical notes on linking Net Sci and Natural Systems Theory (*def note*) with Complex Systems engineering.. PICS.htm

• One of the things that causes the 'power law' distribution of organization in emergent systems appears to be the elaboration and refinement that occurs in how they grow and develop.  

• One of the ways of understanding how networks are embedded into the complex systems which produce them is hat all the nodes are actually 'hives' of activity in the larger system when looked at at a different scale.  

• To understand what it means that people are connected by 5 degrees of separation and web pages by 19 is helps to consider how close connection of this kind has a simultaneous reverse property of great isolation and independence.   What the difference between 5 and 19 means is that information is divided into many many more separate worlds, the flip side of the astonishment we all feel when finding out that all our very separate worlds are also quite closely connected.

The tools for displaying these structures and relationships are so good, and the complex system decisions people need to make so pressing, that there clearly should be an office of complex information display in every branch of government.   You can't ask the question till you can see the problem.   Think of the difference if we could look at comprehendible maps of the real evolving complex relations between communities in Iraq or your own city!    It's clearly possible now.  Think of the difference if we could map ecologies in depth and display their connections in a visually compelling and analytically rigorous way.  It's clearly possible now.

General Systems Theory
....a grand event in systems thinking that didn't survive, 05?  07/04/06

General Systems Theory, was one of several great attempts to make a science of the study of natural systems.  The more popular but still unproven one today goes by the name 'Complexity'.   GST originated as a major interdisciplinary effort in the 1940's, Von Bertalanffy, Boulding, Ashby, Miller, Forrester and others, and seemed to loose direction and turn into other things in the late 1980's & 90's.  The language of general systems theory as it developed, is problematic as science and quite short on generally useful results.    Still, it is full of insights into the nature of the problem. 

The successor organization which retains little of the original form keeps a web site with a genealogy diagram of systems thinking (http://www.iigss.net/gPICT.pdf).  Basically, 'holism' became 'cybernetics' and with several layers of complexity became 'general systems theory'.   I've had recent long and productive correspondence with Don McNeil about the origins and 'death' of pure systems thinking, and what might be salvageable.  I thought it might be of some research interest sometime, and asked if I put it up on the web that I show it as copy righted. My two 1985 papers for SGSR and some other things are now online too.

All natural systems are an interplay between active and passive components, for example. There's the plant and the soil, the cell and the blood stream, the speaker and listener, the industry and the pools of resources from which it draws and to which it contributes. Nature is also structured as a unity of opposites, things and the mediums through which they communicate with each other, for one example. These and many other insights into nature are mystical in their power, but also overwhelming in their grandeur while failing the test of having practical use.  It left those who studied it relatively less to say than it first appeared they would have.   

~10/2011 Our modern culture developed was with following rules for a small scale economy to grow as fast as it could, in a very big world.  Our rules haven't changed but our world has.   Today we're seeing the world's resource markets responding as a group, unable to recover from more frequent and larger supply shocks, and permanently increasing the floor level price of natural resources.  It's a sign that the markets searching the world for more stuff are learning that nature is running out of expanding supplies.   A good introduction to that is my article, A defining moment for investing in Sustainability, in New European Economy.   It's also important to have a simple way to understand the deep problem, in a nut shell, Why it's natural to find reality confusing? 

What's going right?

People are slowly, but very slowly, noticing that "sustainability" is more than convincing people to live morally and efficiently.  We also need to correct some accounting errors caused by economists, following the lead of physics, describing the world without its active learning parts...    So it's the hidden impacts of how we use money not the easily checked and recorded ones that we've been omitting from our plan.   Not surprisingly, that's the great majority.   It does also mean that some policies to reduce visible impacts do so my increased the hidden ones, and it will take a culture change to correct that.  You start by discovering the evidence together to learn from. System Energy Assessment (SEA)

The 30 years of work on exploring the lack of connection between how the natural world works by itself, and the models human thinking makes up for itself to represent it continues.   "Physics principles for naturalists" is one way to put it, a way to keep your thinking straight and connected to its complex environmental system subjects.  What seems to be an actually 10,000 year or longer addiction to use improving productivity to solve all problems seems to have made us more productive than our planet can sustain, so our ignorance of that allows a large variety of critical moral issues to go unquestioned.

(2011) "Nurturing cash cows or crash cows?"  and  "simple facts... and hard memes"