Principles of Natural Systems - Key Methods

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PR-method

Methods

12/12/07

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PR-method

There’s a large challenge involved.   Some new methods of thinking

You could use scientific methods, but science has no method for referring to things of complexity beyond it's methods...   It's a problem.   Science also describes a world behaving according to universal laws, and all of natures processes develop and operate differently depending on local circumstance.   That's a problem too.

You can take a common sense view quite a ways, since common sense does indeed have ways of referring to things beyond our ability to describe or define, and can recognize individual events as having individual development.    Then, though, as you discover how very different the functional behavior of natural systems is  from how we've thought the world worked, you begin to really wonder what's happening....   The evidence seems most consistent with much of our common thinking being about a magical world composed only of our own meanings, quite missing how our world works.

Going deep into  how natural systems work takes you through a somewhat risky but wonderful experience of rediscovering how everything really works.    You don't abandon the  'magical world' of common thinking, you learn to  'see through' it.   Some say the way to learn to cook is to start with a soufflé', because after that, everything else is a 'piece of cake'.    So the first method to try for exploring natural systems is using the time-lags between events to locate where responses are creative reinterpretations of stimuli, rather than deterministic consequences of them.   If after the stimulus the response waits around for a while, it's not deterministic, and you can usually confirm that by discovering how the response locally and independently develops.

My main message might be,
Take what I’m saying, smash it to bits & then reuse the pieces your own way. 

In the strange world of how nature actually works, that’s approximately what we always do, and how the mind is designed to function.   The way to understand that is by realizing that the reader and the listener always have the last word.   They make up every last bit of what they think a speaker or writer has said.   The meanings we create in our own minds come from what makes sense to ourselves, from our own point of view and experience, but being unaware of that, we decide what we imagined we heard is what the other person has said!.   Form close observation you can tell what people think has to be independent of what they hear or read, and quite different, but there’s no good way to check.

It’s good to see and understand that, why our perennial experience is of ‘talking to ourselves’, because we literally are the only ones that hear our own meanings.  Everyone else makes up their own.    What proves it are the time lags.   Your thoughts develop on your own time, and the means of transfer, the symbols or noises, physically contain no meanings whatever.  That  locates the creative gap.   The actual physical process is like a creative handshake, where everything that you pass to or receive from someone else is completely reinvented.

We do sometimes feel we experience words as a direct meaning transfer, but watch closely.  Watching closely you can tell that occurs as a synchrony of independent creative processes.   It’s all right there, hidden in sight, how things really work that we’re hardly aware of.

7/25/07

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PR-method

So, you start by looking for one of three things
        -- a time lag between stimulus and response, indicating independent response
        -- a growth or decay curve, indicating beginning or end of accumulative change
        -- an organizational change with no evidence of how it occurred

LOCATION: Perhaps your subject is a cultural change in a community and you have a way of locating it by police precinct, or maybe it’s a disease outbreak and it can be traced by air sampling.   Then you draw a line around it’s location, maybe as an inner and outer boundary of the intense part and the fringes.   Then you might go around that perimeter and turn it from a rule driven line to an observation shaped line, drawn to show the boundary within which signature behaviors tend to be self-reinforcing or to dissipate.  What it represents is a zone of ‘dark matter’ in which relationships and self-referencing and so very hard to explore, but where you can tell something else is living.

PROCESS SEQUENCE: Trace the history if interior networks from  to find the alternating feedbacks between changing in relation to origin (1,4) and changing in relation to destination (2,3).   Look for the inflection points where nothing is changing but the system’s whole way of changing.  It’s like a kind of road map to change where all the pointers lead you off the road

EVOLVING INTERNAL NETWORK: Study the network for cybernetic body parts to use in learning more about the  complex system.

12/18/07

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PR-method

4D Natural Sustainable Design

Sustainable design cycles:

-- Searching the environment of all stakeholders to discover a problem definition
-- Integrating work of different kinds for solving it, and reviewing what’s left out
-- Focusing on details to take further

-- Comparing whole system measures, targets, compensations

12/03/07

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CAUTIONS:

·         All plans backfire, you can plan on it

·         All directions of progress lead to their own   end, you can choose between limits of constraint or freedom

·         When you relieve congestion to promote growth you also promote more congestion

·         All natural organization needs growth to begin but growth always upsets its own mechanism