In a nut shell,
Why is it natural to find reality confusing?
5/20/11 A simple place to start is with how easy it is to become confused if you define the complex world within and around us as your beliefs. Beliefs and cognitive structures, made of feelings and logic, combining information with personal and cultural values. That's very different from how physical world is organized and operates, by complex processes that use organization and energy to connect their parts, rather than theory. So it's naturally confusing when people define that complex physical world in terms of their rationalizations... obviously, but we do it all the time and seem not to have matured to the point of being able to tell the difference between imagined and observed realities. That's a craft most people don't seem to realize needs to be learned to keep things straight.
To get your own beliefs to fit the independent natural forms of the physical world we within us and around us, we'd need to suspend belief often enough, and let them drift toward a comfortable fit with the natural world you are experiencing, and specifically NOT define the reality of your experience as a mental construct. It's not so hard to do, but takes some learning to tell when you're not. I'm not sure it's the only way, but a very productive one is to closely watch things of nature over which you can confidently say neither you nor anyone else could have control.
The most fruitful category of things like that seems to be the working units of nature that are organized and animated from the inside, that outside forces can only disrupt perhaps, but behave by their own internal complex organization. The easiest starting point for learning to watch how things work from their inside and out of your control is watching them start up, their growth process by which they emerge and new system individuals. Organisms, cultures, businesses, economies, ecologies, storms, and lots of other stuff, all are identifiable as cells of internal energetic organization, "alien beings" of a sort in that they're alien to how we work internally ourselves.
Being out of both an observer's and their own environment's control, having behavior purely of their own, the way to think about them is to teach your mind to give in to them. You let your curiosity yield to their shapes and behaviors, hoping they teach you what they are up to. It's like the mystery of watching your own children to try to discover what makes them tick, or the inexplicable way your office environment works, as well as for understanding the dynamics of economies and communities and things, or the weather. As you get the knack, the "communication channel" from "alien being" to mental picture becomes fairly fluid, and you find you're no longer looking at a world made only of your own self-images.
As you get to a point where your mind gives in entirely, and just drops its preconceptions to simply open up to trust what it is observing, you come to realizations "Ah ha!!! I see how that works!", time an again, and find that confirmable by the mutual observations of others.
where
you find our world
4/25/11
For
people to deal with natural systems they first need to locate them, and then
refer to them in nature as their subjects of discussion, rather than to their
beliefs about the natural world as their subject, making nature the subject not
debate. Natural systems are energetic networks that work
by themselves, using energy to grow out of their own environments by their
own self-organizing growth process. Because they develop by
themselves, their organization is inside them, where it is mostly not
observable. So the trick is to read the implications of the
fairly sketchy information available. The discipline is then
not to just find the best answers for your questions you can, but to find
questions for which you can have clear and confident answers. Much
more progress is made that way.
So there's "method to the madness" of reading the animated behavior of natural systems. Their internal organization is their version of natural laws, the mechanisms of how they work, and a language that is naturally foreign to an outside observer. You slowly build up an understanding with observation and reasoning. If the system is a business or a social culture, one might 1) propose a change of state that might occur for it, good or bad, 2) think of what events might interrupt the current state 3) to initiate a self-reinforcing process that would then 4) change to become a self-limiting process, and 5) lead to the establishment of the new end state, to complete the change.
That's a simplified model of "emergence", or “punctuated equilibrium”, for environmental systems, first getting things started and then getting them finished. Any project you do, even just making dinner, has to begin with getting things started and end by getting them finished, defining a "punctuated equilibrium", and what you pay attention to is what creates the necessary sequence of events.
People get into trouble with believing the stories we make up for ourselves, that consciousness presents to us as fact. If we get attached to our stories we find it hard to change them as new facts have to be added, because it's embarrassing. To change that we'd need to stop being embarrassed about asking the "dumb questions" about things left unexplained. Our hesitancy to question "the story" of the hour or day seems to be what allows a world of interesting and caring people, as individuals, to develop so many ideologies that so sharply conflict with each other and with nature of our world we live in. It's quite hard to get to the truth when people are embarrassed to mention it, so be become socially committed to lots of convicting stories.
What let's people ask obvious questions without embarrassment is mostly internal, but obviously made worse by social pressure or simple questions avoided for embarrassment becoming increasingly embarrassing. What helps makes sense of why important truths can be naturally embarrassing is realizing we have "two realities", both material and mental worlds that operate quite differently, though our minds effectively try to hide the depth of our ignorance about the complex natural world from us. That leaves us trying to explain nature as revolving around our minds, a constant source of great embarrassment, I think.
Our perceptions work by our thoughts and feelings, but nature
works by continuities we don't see. They clearly work differently
from how we think though, so both are quite real. Healing that
separation seems to begin with seeing it as an active learning process of
remaking our "maps" for life as being what makes them true. Just as
our social patterns are constantly changing, so are the material processes of
nature. If we don't notice when they are diverging then everything
we think we know starts being only self-justifying and so untrue.
So... A compact way to say what's happening is that this split between our two realities,
having been neglected, is growing ever wider and now
to the point of driving the world mad, for three fairly obvious reasons:
What I found is a new scientific method for closely watching what I don't know about nature's true stories, watching them change. It helps a learning process to see what you're missing, but doesn't do the cultural work of understanding what change in nature and ourselves means to us. It only lets you see things happening that evidently are being overlooked. If you're not embarrassed by the natural world behaving differently from our explanations, seeing it raises good questions about it might mean to us, so people's new stories can better fit the changing reality of how to live on earth.
Two of the most widely believed principles of "how to get along" that once worked in the past but are now rapidly undoing our chances of survival as a complex society on a verdant earth are:
Where does that leave us? With questions that
we shouldn't be embarrassed to ask. Where this challenge
to us comes to an "end" is with a world
culture that keeps creatively changing, if it survives, but it might not given
the circumstance of extreme overshoot. Cultures and economies would
continue to experiment with new ways to live and use the earth, ...but in
balance with our capabilities and nature's. Otherwise, continuing to go ever
further out of balance, human culture would unavoidably "lose it" both mentally
and physically.
History seems to show that lots of other complex societies have fallen prey to
this same trap and not survived.
- see also: What Wandering Minds Need to Know, read the Natural Economies posts here, or search my site for discussions, like on the part of this that Keynes noticed.
11/28/09 - physical science applications Physics of Happening - general introduction to methods Natural Systems Science
It can be confusing to ask unfamiliar questions, discover new subjects to discuss. As with learning a new language, even if everyone has the exact same personal experiences to refer it may take a while to see how to. I only say that because the ideas are unconventional enough that referring to things simply in my way seems very unclear when read with conventional expectations.
A good part of that comes from my interest in uncontrolled systems, and the need for new language to make up for the deficit created by science having been mainly built around the study of controlled systems. Systems with their own independent organization (a business or organism or anything like that) can't be controlled by their environmental pressures, as those pressures are relatively very simple and the internal organization of self-organized and self-animating systems tend to be quite complex, complex beyond representation in fact. We say the environmental pressures are of "inadequate variety" to control the internal designs and behavior, so I call them “uncontrolled”.
I represent uncontrolled systems almost simplistically, though, with a single measure traced over time. It's a simple technique for referring to their natural development phases and and successions (like forest successions or other things). It's recognizing that series of changing forms of organization that uncontrolled systems go through that has seemed most helpful in perceiving their reality. Still, this is somewhat "new language" and in writing I often “think to myself” I’m mentioning these things as I write, but people may miss the hints along the way, or I forget to put them in. So, it's good to ask why I seem to be saying something that makes no sense, if that arises. I do understand models quite well, for example, and people naturally assume in discussing science that the subject is models. A great many of the questions I ask are about the things being left out of our models, though, so look for that. So, here’s an outline of the strategy I use, clipped from a letter.
I start from observing change over time, looking for the processes that need to develop to fulfill the necessity of continuity in beginnings and endings. Continuity of developmental change (flowing change) is implied by the conservation laws, and finding how nature does it is the trick.
The changing continuity (flows) of events that connect the stages of beginnings and endings is where its most exposed
When progressive systems alter what allowed them to develop they change again,
those natural boundaries of developmental change and narrowing of options that may accompany them, are the things to watch for.
Remember, our ideas about nature depend on our inventing general understandings, but nature does not operate with generalities.
Everything in nature happens in particular, as individualities.
There would naturally be individual differences in how anyone views events, both because individual events are different and because and individual views are then themselves separate events... So.. to understand things in general you need to be open to multiple views.
The study here, though, starts from and leads back to the study of individual events.
Because I’m trying to locate the physical processes that nature is using, I don’t go straight off to collecting data for making my own model to use in place of nature’s systems.
I start with “looking around” for regular proportional change, which means finding trends with implied derivatives either all positive or all negative (i.e. like growth or decay).
Linking together the processes that display them, with transition processes to connect them in succession, is what is guided by the energy continuity implied by the conservation laws.
So my information about an observed process starts as a range of possible paths of continuity, like having upper and lower bounds beyond which things couldn’t work.
For example, asking if you change one thing how fast can others adapt, and along what signal pathway would that communication occur.
If response times are necessarily finite, you can ask if you can see evidence of the limits of response to more complex issues approaching, just the same as asking if you can get ever more from a resource that displays what looks like a classical depletion curve.
It’s an empirical use of physics that starts from evidence of localized growth or decay,
It implies the presence of uncontrolled systems in some local complex environment, and the beginning or ending of energy flows, often all being confirmable [as if watching nature taking “a sip” from a gradient.?]
When such systems are looked at statistically they may or may not have recognizable statistical predictability
They are cases where nature is most often not using a statistical model herself, but using a process of conserved (accumulative) change that necessarily has to develop in successions to follow the conservation laws, and do so in an unmapped environment.
Such systems may follow each other’s trails, and things, but appear largely to have no programs (hence ‘uncontrolled’). They appear to exploit their opportunities and are altered by exhausting them.
So, in summary, my approach is to
first locate uncontrolled systems, and ask the boundary questions I can define,
building an understanding by looking around to see what is changing together,
and then looking for how it’s feedbacks work and what will trigger them to change,