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6| This is an archived discussion page of mostly 2008 and earlier views of "the physics of happening", and the new scientific methods I developed for studying self-organization in nature generally. jlh 10/2013 |
Archived Intro Essays - I. II. III. IV. V. VI.
Because growth is nature's process of building
energy using systems,
a smart person or computer observing signs of growth asks:
"What's building?"
If they're honest what they find is:
"Gee,
what causes change in nature and in the stories we make up are *remarkably*
different!!"
A "Bifurcation" of
Scientific Methods to study nature using a "dual plane reality"
11/2011,
with "invented theory" and "physical systems" occupying two separate worlds
In searching nature for behaviors that could be represented with equations, modern science made a fateful choice. The choice was to not study the variety of eventful systems of nature that continually develop new organization as they go, like growth systems that act as processes of adaptive organizational construction. If one's only experience is with natural behaviors described as following equations it can be difficult to imagine how change could occur by flowing organizational development everywhere within the system at once.
That kind of behavior "beyond simple rules" that equations would be inherently unable to define is remarkably common actually. Once you're accustomed to looking for them such "organic" change is found, to the limits of observation, as bursts of emerging organizational construction responsible for building all physical processes for using energy. So this becomes a study of how energy systems, as working units of nature, grow and change organically.
The original take off point for this work, my original observation, was that the local eventfulness of natural systems was quite different from equations, how flames flicker and viral technologies spread, and things like that. Such phenomena displayed creative bursts of clearly local, original and rapidly sequenced organizational development, changing energy transport mechanisms as a construction process. The simplest form is that of growth systems of various kinds and scales that elaborate an internal design as they emerge from their own environments.
Flowing organizational change spontaneously occurring within dynamic complex systems is utterly unlike the behavior of deterministic equations with added noise, however complex. It seemed particularly suspicious that such constantly changing organizational processes were so commonly visible and important in nature, reliably found occurring as part of energy events of all scales, and that there was no chapter of any physics book discussing them. As instrumental as they are in individual events, physics seemed to simply consider them as "things not following equations" and so not the subject of physics.
So 30+ years later, it leads is to this record of some of the technical experiments, and elsewhere my voluminous notes in search of a language for it, a few published papers, extended correspondence and blog posts. A more concise name than "the physics of happening", though, might be a "dual plane reality", a scientific method built on connecting separate cognitive an physical realities, a bit like Robert Rosen proposed. The material of one is centrally reasoned information in a human mind, and of the other is distributed chains of energy systems in an open environment.
So the two worlds are not made to work like each other at all. We need them to successfully interact with each other, but they're of quite different in behavior and construction. Information is a record in our minds of a response from a physical system. The theory in one's mind that information implies may be either a mental representation of the subject or a question about what information is missing for understanding the subject. That choice involves switching back and forth between having a cognitive and a natural world subject of interest. So going back and forth between the two realities becomes a tool for exploring and enriching one's understanding of physical systems as we build and adjust our mental models of them.
The usefulness of treating science as an active process of switching the subject of your attention between those two planes of reality, between our mental models we define and the physical things we find undefined, seems not to have been formally defined as a model of critical thinking in science before. I think our common habits of thinking include this general technique innately, though. In traditional informal thinking it's very normal to consider a word like "apple" to refer to either or both the thing in your hand and the idea in your mind. Some part of that common dual reality view separating the reality in our minds we make up for ourselves has been easy to lose track of.
The benefit is having a way of thinking that is both free in one's mind, but also grounded in things not of one's own imagination. Science seems to have come to define reality as its own theories, though, and self-definition allows no way to discover one's own self-consistent mistakes. I end up thinking of the relationship as an overlay, not unlike using my mental tracing paper of reasoning with lots of questions for partly recognized physical things. It treats perception as a possible mental map of a physical world of things that behave by themselves, just like one sees around you when you are just learning about them.
Then the question is how to distinguish between the two realities in other circumstances. One can tell actual tracing paper from the things sketched on it partly because it wrinkles and smells like paper. The tracing paper of thought can be recognized by all sorts of properties that physical systems don't have too. Our thinking's source of energy is our own motivations and the reasoning we use is noticeably responding to signals from our own feelings and experiences... etc.
Natural systems that display either regular or new behaviors, like storms or organisms, or economies, tend to have individual histories and organization that is deeply hidden within their internal processes. The main difference in the kind of observation and guesswork needed for understanding them is to look at them as indeed behaving by themselves. You're not looking for what rules they follow, but for signals indicating how they work or are changing. As change proceeds more and more rapidly it's likely to correspond to bursts of new relationships forming within them, and when those internal parts may be most exposed to view. So with experience it becomes easier and easier to recognize things behaving by themselves that are not parts of our consciousness but nature's, defined by their own internal workings naturally hidden from view. JLH 11/13/11 ;-)
So it ends up being not a science of what rules nature is following,
but one of discovering what ones she's changing...
. . . . .
. . . . .
The
development and decay of
conserved
processes of change,
marking where to look for the "seeds" and "explosions" of emerging change
and raising key questions
about the feedback networks of system organization developing,
and
exposing them as exploring environmental pathways.
Leading
to Foresight about what they'll run into and how they will themselves be changed
by it.
A view not available from hindsight, theories or models since
emergent systems are complex local processes for the
environments in which they occur.
What you gain
by watching for both the expected and unexpected turns in organizational
development
key answers and an individual mental model of each individual process as a whole
filling in
the chapters of
the whole story of its turns in cybernetic structure. 06/08
05/09
( i.e. a very valuable adjunct for guiding the use of virtually any kind of behavioral model )
a.k.a.
Physics
for Open Systems, Systems Ecology, Local Developmental Processes, Empirical
Cybernetics, Physical Systems Economy... etc. ;-)
Note: This section of my web is mostly about the technical methods. See Main Site for other things. There seems to be some lag between my learning how to describe things and updating them old attempts, judge for yourself & ask questions
... Closely observing local growth and decay processes helps reveal their internal network 'germs' of organization as the 'atoms' of nature. What appears to us to be responsible for growth and decay are internalized network cells, or 'circles', of relationships. The trick is to shape your picture of them to the physical thing, rather than try to find the picture of them that 'is' the physical thing. That doesn't work. The physical thing is much too complicated to picture in more than one way. The main way, of course, is that what you can picture a little is the behavior and what one can hardly see at all is the opportunities it is exploring in its environment. The most reliable part you can picture seems to be the continuities that signal it's developing stability or change.
... Individual complex systems are the connecting parts through which larger and smaller scales of behavior interact. It's how, when our molecular fields interact in touch, the message gets passed along from one complex of parts acting as a whole to another, from field to particle to molecule to membrane to cell to tissue to organ and bone to brain and back, that we then recognize as the warmth of a familiar hand and its grasp. These accumulations of events along almost inconceivable scales of organization emerge from their environments by starting small. They all develop with a two step, starting and completing, with continuity in-between. When completed cells of organization interact it's by using their environments as mediums of exchange, where they deposit what they're done with and pick up what they work with. Their form and pathways develop as they explore using variation at the fringe of their designs as their 'high speed' evolutionary design method.
... A related discovery by the larger scientific community is now being made. We need to intervene to save the earth, and the disciplines all use different kinds of models and they all omit nature's individual path making systems, each using their own rules for what averaged measurements of them did in the past...! The scientific disciplines all need to refer to the same physical systems as a requirement for collaborating for the sustainability of the earth. That means learning to point to physical systems as physical things themselves rather only our explanations for them. Yes, weathermen refer to individual storms, and ecologists to outbreaks of invasive species, but that does appear to help people see the consequences of using niche opportunities as unlimited resources until they have to throw up their hands after tragically colliding with other things.
... An applied complex systems theory needs to become a real theory of discovery with our changing physical systems as the common subject. It's also a necessity for engaging with other stakeholder groups to relate to the physical world of individual system networks with significantly independent local development behavior. It seems no longer a fantasy, the unification of the sciences needs to develop around a functional understanding of the individual complex systems of nature, offering something of an exciting new world. Given that all disciplinary learning processes, being emergent systems themselves, when would I guess the mid-point in that learning 'S' curve would come? In my system that would indicate making it to the 'home stretch' and heading to a high plateau of refinement. Oh gosh, so hard to guess the path of things just begun. Say, 20 to 50 or 100 years maybe? Maybe it depends on things like tiring of looking for good excuses and discovering the thrill of finding a whole new way of connecting with life by learning to look through our mistakes.
... The networks within individual systems are hidden by their very organization, being built around closed loops. They also have various degrees of independent behavior. That means a disciplined exploratory process is needed to identify and engage with them. They turn out to go through a variety of very predictable changes that give them general long range predictability that can be made useful as a guide to what to be watching for. The cycle of independent processes is that they begin and end beginning with multiplying to then either stabilize or destabilize. For hidden systems you wouldn't even know to look without some reason to explore. You watch the directions of change, how they're changing, what process is doing that and how that process is making a path in its environment, and what that path will run into. Reasons to explore are beginnings and endings (¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸), and the expanding and shrinking network cells within them. An exploration method using physics principles of continuity as a question generating tool helps explore where their designs change and so what to look for. As you find how they work it gives you choices for how to engage with them. It also locates what seems to be the real reason mathematics is useful for modeling nature, the continuity of organizational development that individual developmental processes seem to require. ed 11/07 5/23/08
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... Discovering this particular method for how to study what happens inside emerging systems began with a curiosity about 'eventfulness'. That led to closely examining the complex organized systems of nature that have continuity that begins and ends. I watched indoor air current networks, spontaneous evolving climatic energy transfer systems, as they developed from scratch and migrated from one form to another through each day. In general an easy place to find individual emergent systems is wherever there are lag times between cause and effect, the time needed for local response systems to independently develop. Beginning and ending turns out to require nature to invent whole new systems, and you can watch if you ask the right questions.
... Even after study, how systems work may be hard to imagine without attributing magical properties, but careful exploration also uncovers layer upon layer of clearly physical progressions connecting their change over time. That's the same observation that Darwin made, an accumulating succession of events. Darwin's guess as to how that works needs updating I think, but the clear evidence of accumulative processes in both evolution and in growth system emergence seem to convincingly expose 'addition' as the central natural behavior of our amazing world. As I see it, beginning is the emergence of a learning process, that explores a limited network of opportunities, rather than a deterministic echo of distant events with no independent local behavior. Any number of different kinds of learning aids (models and things) may be helpful, so long as learning about the physical thing is their common reference.
... Today the key finding appears to be that many natural systems climax their period of 'run-away' growth at a level of maximum freedom and adaptability. Stabilizing with freedom of movement, as many systems do, is a clear indication ending growth by some means other than meeting maximum environmental constraint. It had long been assumed that all natural systems climaxed at a point of maximum constraint, controlled by their environments rather than altered inside. That went along with the long held assumption that natural systems generally originated from remote forces rather than local self-organization. The apparent information source that independent systems use to stop growing short of engaging in resource 'wars' with each other at their resource limits is sensing environmental diminishing returns. Diminishing returns is a true long range forecasting measure indicating the approach of terminal limits for resource using processes, and a warning that multiplying investment in them may lead to systemic failure.
... Perhaps it's laziness, liking the rough edges of things, or just being unsure how, but I haven't gotten around to fixing and weeding out and upgrading much of my old and less successful work here. This site remains a kind of semi-organized accumulation of good & bad, updated & outdated, bits of experiment. That may be valuable instead of misleading if you see part of the fun of the enormous challenges ahead as taking part in questioning the path we are on. Going on a trip and having to get out and push when the car runs out of gas is nobody's idea of fun, and so it's often valuable if the job of questioning the road you're on is more widely shared. Scientists doing fundamental research like nothing more than to question their direction of inquiry, a main attraction of the 'game'. Curiously all people on earth, actually, are now having to become part of teams doing original fundamental research on the shifting natural systems of our lives. It's both opportune and important, to share the path finding and questioning game of that discovery process. Perhaps the scattered remains here of my own free thinking approach will seem hard to take when you're not a participant. My apologies, then. Still, I've tried to leave around some indication of the fun I've had as well, and though it may not be adequate, to also explain something of how I think. Judge for yourself.
jlh 11/06 12/27/06 5/5/07 12/29/07 02/03/08 2/17/08
- One Starting Point -
8/6/06 11/6/06 I had a productive original question. Why is nature missing abrupt transitions? It turns out to be because of the developmental processes that cause change. Nature isn't an image that can flit from one state to another without any work, and much of our thinking about nature fails to take into account that basic difference between images and reality. That change takes a process of changing means that complex natural systems develop from relatively hidden local loops of opportunistic events, by a growth process (
), and that most anything exhibiting growth (
.... The secret is in the data we discard, the information that approximated rules treat as useless, the transitions between the gaps between rules, and managing somehow to make some sense of it....
It's often very hard to identify what's what in nature. There are just too many things taking place with overlapping causes and results. It's a problem. Coherent individual whole systems do co-exist, overlap and intermingle, like the mingled systems of ecologies, or the untraceable cross fertilization of ideas in a new school of thought, but more than you'd think can be localized and individually identified by their characteristic dynamics of change. It's displayed in the shapes of their curves of change over time. They include storms, sparks, our own reflexes and thoughts, social movements, the growth to failure of great plagues and misguided civilizations, cosmic explosions and life. It's a group of phenomena that includes everything in the macroscopic world that begins and ends. It's surprising, but I think reasonably simple to demonstrate, that the growth of complex systems is the source of everything that is eventful around and within us. Do they have any meaning independent of human questions and beliefs? I'll stretch a lot of words but 'meaning' seems clearly to be an internal property of the minds that create it and the communities that share it, though no doubt it's meaningful to say there's quite a bit of reality we're missing.
Eventually most open natural systems may all be classed as 'living' things, with or without 'minds', because their organization arises by a local unguided development process and the animation of their behavior is internal. Life used to be a simple rigid category. When you develop a continuous scale to replace a rigid category, a lot of relationships become visible that weren't there before. What becomes obvious in my opinion is that the biggest difference between living and non-living systems is having an original interior design and behavior. Lots and lots of things fit that description. What deterministic science has been missing about them is that they're not just unpredictable, they're all also out of control. We can't find what controls them because they're not controlled, but opportunistic. Of course, I am bending perfectly good English words a little to accommodate new realities, and it's good to remember that. Our observation methods have not been picking up the plentiful evidence importantly because they're designed to throw that data away....
The data problem also comes from the inherent stripping of connections involved in making any measurement. It's impossible to measure a loop of relationships, and the emergence of new systems is a process of 'sticky' loops that accumulate new structures opportunistically. It's more than a little confusing, and science is heavily invested in finding how everything is controlled, so we've ignored the things that are out of control. Quite interestingly, it's a huge part of the world. They're arguably the main part of what interests us. They're not only the part that's whimsical, inventive and spontaneous, delightful and dangerous, but also the complex, independent as well as much of what's reliable, everything that begins and ends, i.e. most everything. What we've been taught by science are the rules by which some things can be predicted, with the expectation that all aspects of nature would eventually be found to follow rules. What we're discovering is that it was an illusion. It's a useful one for some purposes, but the rules of science depend directly on locally opportunistic processes, not the reverse. This work is about how to trace them, and some of things to expect. There's much more to it, what would appear to be original new universes of relationships inside each one. They're definitely there but hard to explore unless you're able to watch them quite closely. That produces a kind of role reversal for science, since the people able to watch events most closely are the people involved with them. Scientists can maybe make tools for exposing what's going on within the 'conspiracies' of nature making our lives eventful, but the participants have to do the actual original behavioral science. We're made from and immersed in them in uncountable ways, and learning to read data for clues to 'what's happening' rather than taking someone else's 'rules for what should be', produces a highly satisfying, starkly different, image of the world.
evidence points
to evolving
loops
inside, & questions of
transformation
one evolutionary
model fits them all
emergent systems organized around mediums of free exchange, places with stuff left
lying around
I. II. III. IV. V. VI.My use of he term 'physics' here may seem misplaced to some. It's not about the rules nature follows as much as the rules that might help us to see where the hidden loops of nature actually flow. The main one is 'watch them develop'. Maybe other familiar parts of physics begin to show in the rigor needed to justify treating separate data points as being connected by shapes, to define a new default hypothesis for shape, and the various interesting structural and behavioral taxonomies. You'll probably also note that as a method of recognizing 'the other half of the universe', the 'rule connecting' half as contrasted to the 'rule following' one, it rather incomplete. It's a discovery that follows, like most of the discoveries of physics, from finding clear evidence of something missing. If the rules are all separated by gaps, what connects them?
Here's a short list of growth indicators which are likely to be false positives.
1) all measurement devices, light meters for example, have
2) the measures of many things are filtered through many layers of interceding processes. If you look for the beginning and ending of light
3) there are various kinds of purely mechanical cascades which don't develop around the evolution of any sort of history dependent system. The question is whether the events at any stage could have as easily occurred at any other time, without the accumulation of the events preceding them. A cascade of dominos, for example, may seem to take on a life of its own
4) when interpreting data, connecting dots with a continuous curve or any rule for one, turns any transition from one steady state to another
5) there are many varieties of secondary effects that require you to trace back upstream for kinds of complex growth system events they reflect. The example that came to mind was measuring the rate at which theater goers arrive at the theater. For every show there will be apparent growth and decay curves in the arrival rate, reflecting the distribution of choices people made in deciding when to leave home, but having no actual influence on each other. The only remote connection is the sense of excitement about the show, a real community phenomenon with a real but very different growth and decay dynamic. With a hot show folks will get there earlier because of the expectation of crowds, but that won't have to do with when other people actually arrive.I think there are probably other good rules of thumb for false positive evidence of emerging complex systems. Send me one worth posting here and I'll give you $10.
Foreword:
4/22/00, 4/7/01,11/8/01,1/5/02, 3/9/04, 12/19/04, 7/22/05, 3/11/06 This site is perhaps a small baby step but has three purposes, discussing general theory, case studies, and scientific methods concerning the phenomenon of local growth systems and their uniquely evolving inner worlds of relationships. The observational method concerns how to put a timeline under a mathematical microscope and identify developmental turning points in locally emergent structures and processes. The theory concerns the consequent new understanding of nature, establishing useful global principles, and evolving the methods and models of physics. The case studies bring the technique and theory together and inform both.
The subject area is the rapidly evolving organization of event processes of all scales and kinds, sparks, ecological shifts, solar storms, earth quakes, heart beats, weather, epidemics, social change, life, etc., for any of these one can read any consistent measure over time, and draw an informative single story line within an epic tale. You look for growth and decay and their phases of transition, for the loosely connected distribution of parts that act as a whole. One of the first things you see is a mix of what seem to be continuous flows of discontinuous events, a tentative regularity of complete accidents. Growth is the transition between discontinuity and continuity in nature, the development of the physical property of organizational continuity, that makes describing nature with mathematical functions useful. Math behaves a little like nature in that it is meaningful to imagine filling in new points in-between your data points so that each short sequence telegraphs where the whole series is going, the property of flow. That's the property of functions that was invented with calculus. On close inspection all continuous physical flows are actually found to be granular, with emergent organization at a larger scale coming into focus as you imagine there might be points in-between. Nature rarely builds machines like we do, with fixed structures, but assembles working parts ad hock from whatever is currently lying around. It's quite amazing that it works at all, but seems to work extraordinarily well.
The beginning and end of smooth flows are the periods when emergent organization is being built up and dismantled, and when it is most directly exposed to view. Time traces are only one dimensional and do not provide very good descriptions of the processes they reflect, but they do provide good markers, exposing when and where locally emergent organization and disorganization is occurring. The set sequence is a four part series of cascades. I call them Inflation (compound growth), Integration (climax/stabilization), Disintegration (destabilization) and Decay, the phases of rapid system evolution. They typically represent billions of molecules going through a collective process of reorganization without outside influence. The designs of natural systems are always built locally and are never transferred from elsewhere. The basic four phases of their development are also the minimum necessary set of simple continuous progressions forming a "bump on a curve" (¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸) . They're to be found absolutely everywhere.
This study of locally emergent natural systems does not conflict with any empirical finding of traditional physics. Physics is not about causation, and this is. It's a matter of looking at the same world using different sets of questions. Modern physics looks for fixed mathematical relationships between idealized measures, and has found many. This approach to studying the structures of local happenings accepts that they are individually unique throughout and quite beyond full description. Some useful information comes from learning how to watch them closely.
It's the perennial dance of nature. What we find is that she does not actually 'follow' rules, but always makes them fresh, over and over again as she goes. To observe it you first find a beginning or ending continuity and watch closely as the pieces come together or fall apart. It's made easier with some technique. (continued)
Collaboration: 3/11/06
One normal fact of collaborative research is that each of the disciplines and other communities involved develop and apply their own models, terms and methods for the common subject. Slowly now I think everyone is recognizing that the 'Rosetta stones' are the cohesive physical systems of nature (when we can find them) that each approach looks at from a different perspective in a different way. Joining different perspectives on the common complex subject, is highly useful. Speaking about them in different languages is rather confusing, but we cope.
The basic formula for success is for everyone to be talking about the same physical thing, even if using different languages, i.e. system identification comes 1st. One option is to accept the lead of the most articulate person in the group. The hazard there is that he or she is likely to describe the physical system we're looking at as a model residing in his or her own mind...since that's how people think, leaving everyone else out of the loop in discussing it.
One of the ways to assure everyone is looking at different aspects of the same subject is by identifying the physical subject with data, and instead of first using the data for a statistical model, first use it to refer back to the larger whole system beyond the data in the physical world. Then everyone can link up with the same thing using their own data, perhaps, and different perspectives.
What data to use for that is perhaps a sorting and culling process, since the evidence of larger systems is in all sorts of things. The one I've focused on, and developed some potentially good theory and technique for, is tracing system growth phases in time-series data. Complex systems are noticeable because they begin and end (have finite duration) and in those transitions exhibit a continuity of organizational development (growth curves) and then a continuity of systemic responses (homeostasis) in maturity. The fact that strings of data points can often be treated as differentiable curves reflecting the physical and organizational continuity of a larger system is the trick. It's a physical property with mathematical landmarks that can identify the same physical subject from many perspectives. If anyone sees ways to make these methods more accessible I'd naturally like to hear it.
Return to Methods and Applications for - The Physics of Happening jlh 10/1/13