Principles of Natural Systems - Thinking

Natural Systems Thinking

12/09/07

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PR-think

I’m not removing the understanding that ‘proof’ always ends up meaning that “I just can’t think of anything else”.   I’m just trying to remove the ideas that anything we arrive at can be a complete proof.

Reality can not be captured in the mind, just explored.

[Finding the shapes of growth and decay in your data of change probably locates organizational processes beyond the your information that would be unusually productive explore.]

11/21/07

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PR-think

“Whatever worked before will work some more”… [WWB WWSM] [the fundamental theorem of science] is wrong enough to cause the collapse of complex societies.

11/12/07

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PR-think

The Q is how do you point at things with behaviors of their own?  How do you ‘point at anything’?   It’s not by definitions, it’s by engaging with other things, a ‘half a handshake’/  A homing device that is looking for a reply.

10/13/07

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PR-think

If time ‘stopped’ everything would instantly vanish.   [Everything exists as a process of change, and nothing else.  It’s all process.] 

9/17/07

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PR-think

Watch instrumental causes and opportunities for individual events, not static measures of classes that  miss everything the happens

9/12/07

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PR-think

The natural flow of change, the physical unfolding that constantly mystifies us, sometimes suggests permanence and other times great gaps of uncertainty.  

 Even when we see the flow sometimes it suggests a series of ‘freeze frames’ of organization, with no clear transition from one to the next. 

 It’s usually our minds that provide the image of things being fixed, with nature in a constant state of rich discovery.

9/06/07

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PR-think

So it’s probably obvious, but we need to give up our war with nature, our obsession with control and all it hides from us, [our illusion that the physical world is made from information just because that’s what all our thoughts are made of.]  

[The ‘feel good’ part of that is we get to go home to the real world, to find our own nature, instead of being tied up in confusion, constantly having to explain why were so separated from our natures.]

[we need to return to wondering why our information does not match what we see happening all around us, to see the holes in the ‘Swiss cheese’ of our explanations as filled with natural systems developed independently in an open environment and have their own behavior that only careful observation can begin to suggest]

9/06/07

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PR-think

‘Decision makers’ quite often pay little attention to the details of what they’re deciding.  That’ where they fall back on the self-organizing behavior of the things the decisions impact to figure themselves out. 

Nobody asks for the service, directs the service or really understands that it [comes with a whole package of extras and] is taking place unless they are persistent careful observers of how things really work.

A sip of coffee doesn’t require us to think about how to swallow or digest any more or less than turning a car key requires you to think about how electric field cascades operate or giving someone a job requires you to know how they actually do it.

9/01/07

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PR-think

A coherent and consistent story that seems to fit the evidence [of change & order] better than the others

8/09/07

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PR-think

‘connecting the dots’ is the art & science of thinking & seeing beyond your information. 

Reality is kind of a ‘dark matter’ because the physical things don’t exist in the form of information, and all that people can easily see. [Like in that old movie, seeing a void in the fog to find evidence the ‘invisible man’]

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stripping a world of it’s things, and substituting information, is like replacing a star with it’s sparkle.

8/08/07

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PR-think

The ‘white matter’ of the nature is it’s information, that we can capture and hold in our minds makes it visible.   The ‘dark matter’ is it’s systems, naturally invisible to us because they are independent things that can’t be physically copied and installed as imaged in our minds. 

That people could do with a pure diet of ‘white matter’ and nothing else, at least for satisfying our minds, seems evident.  Nature simply can’t do things that way, [just doesn’t have an information mapping device in it’s kit], and so by ignoring the work and play of exploring the dark matter all around us, we end up missing quite a lot.

[it’s a way to connect the white matter of information, we can reduce to a form we can hold in our minds, with the ‘dark matter’ of nature’s own functional organization which, because it is not composed of information, we can can’t.

8/06/07

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PR-think

The continual conjecture that completely lifeless projected images are the ‘cause’ of the vibrant living things from which they were projected, It’s not that information isn’t the cause of our knowing anything about the living parts of the universe.  It’s just that we so persistently overplay it that we loose most of it’s real potential to connect us with the universe of living things.

We attribute causation to the thing we control, the image of the thing in the world that is out of our control.

8/01/07

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PR-think

Beware the main error or science though, assuming that local choices are made with global knowledge, just because that’s the way WE are best able to predict local choices.  That’s never how local choices are actually made.

8/01/07

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PR-think

That we search for ways to see nature as behaving the way we do, following an old pattern, doing what we’re told, it doesn’t mean she ever does things that way.

9/26/07

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PR-think

Because in science, formulas don’t have environments.  

[Science is an information structure and nature is a physical structure.   They’re built differently, only there are special reasons we can’t clearly see the difference.   We can get information structures into our brains, but not physical ones, and as soon as someone translates a physical structure into information it looses it’s complex physicality, the ongoing process from which it came, it’s interaction with its environment and it’s continual process of change.   That’s a lot to loose!]

9/10/07

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PR-think

The universe can be thought of as a universal structure of rules with time as a variable in them.   You could also think of time as a universal process, with various independent structures evolving in it [out of the remains of the past].    [The latter fits the data better, change as a continual unfolding of locally original and independent inventions, following no formula but they discover.]