Responding to a Teacher with a website of teaching tools (appended below).

2nd Post to FRIAM following yesterday’s post (1st follows) re: Stewart Kauffman’s ”Reinventing the sacred” lecture

So, partly prompted by how it seemed Kauffman got there. There’s a particularly curious “hiding place” for nature’s accumulative individuality and complex behavior within an otherwise “deterministic” universe obeying universal natural laws…

Between the laws,… a “hiding place” for nature’s vitality!

It’s the somewhat deceptive meaning of “uncertainty”. If you prove an uncertainty for some outcome it means that actual events will “at most” do one thing, and “at least” do another. That’s “information” about a probability of behavior, not a specification for individual behaviors. Continue reading Between the laws? →

Dan Bloom had commented:

” I SEE NO WAY OUT FROM THIS MESS. but it won’t hit the fan until 200, 400 more years…. until then, maybe until 2100 at least, we will muddle along….and the climate tsunami, when it hits, it won’t hit all at once, like in Thailand, it will hit the beach here slowly, over a period of maybe 10 to 100 years… “

Dan,

Hi, I hate to be the one to tell you, but the point of vanishing returns for multiplying our use of the earth has been crossed. I think we’ll be very lucky to stabilize for decades. There seem to be several environmental collapses underway, as majestically developmental but irreversible as they are.

Our bets on what we could accomplish have completely fallen apart. The ’snag’ the economies ran into does not seem to be some mysterious malfunction brought about by everyone doing their expert jobs suddenly screwing up all at once, or even greed…!!

The whole purpose of the system both when it does and doesn’t work is greed.   So that’s not the event now occurring.

No, we ran into the earth with a bang!

… given the main design principle for building our system as expanding as fast as humanly possible till we run into something to stop it. Continue reading When do we hit the limits of the earth? →

The math I use is a little different, diagnostic math not deterministic math.   The theory is a little different, too, about how to look beyond representational theory.  One identifies natural systems as complex organizational developments, working as a whole.    But your “big idea” that the universe is doing what life is doing, fits very well. Continue reading Multilevel selection in evolution – Devo-evo? →

Re: Letters to Science in response to the paper by Tim Searchinger of Princeton and R. A. Houghton of Woods Hole et. all. in February.   It surprised the scientific world by documenting the oversights in calculating the environmental impacts of bio-fuels.

Biofuel production consumes food resources and produce added CO2.   It happens by causing the conversion of productive ecologies into farms.    These letters clarify some of the issues that were left unclear in their paper, but still leave big things out]

Letter to Science,

The 10/17/08 letters in Science by Vinod Khosla and reply by Tim Searchinger and R. A. Houghton do clarify some to the complicated measurement problems regarding the environmental impacts of bio-fuels on food production. Both seem to miss the largest of the growing strains on the food production resources of the earth. The real culprits are urbanization and economic growth, of course. Continue reading Biofuel impacts on food →

Anselmo,

How evolution seems to have alternated in majestic cycles in developing the oxygen atmosphere is indeed a wonderful thing to discover.   I expect that theory of how the banded Iron formations in Proterozoic rocks might have been caused will hold up.

To put it in the larger context, the cycles you speak of from 1.8 to 2.5 billion years ago preceded the history of complex animal life that began with the Cambrian explosion ~550 million years ago.     Below is a chart from a full professional study (in Paleobiology) of ocean biodiversity (not bio-mass) that followed.

It shows two main periods, 250 million years of irregularly steady diversity of primitive animal life, a sharp dip and then 250 million years of exploding diversity of modern animal life…  which we in our stupidity are putting a great big dent in!

Continue reading The tail is capable of wagging the dog →

Dirk & O2,

Thanks for that outline of fuel use per person for different modes of transportation. The defect of both that method and mine is the effort needed to estimate what’s being left out. What I think people need is a list of impacts something like the one you provided, but that is easyier, inclusive and comparable.

People just want a direct easy way to compare choices, not spend all their time trying to understand unexplained units of measure and wondering what is left out. For example, using the cost of shipping to calculate fuel use might leave out the subsidies for the transit system that go into it, yes, but that’s fairly easy to factor in. Continue reading Measuring energy use the easier & more accurate way…. →

Peter,

Your amazement that we don’t see belief in Gaia as a living thing and a more immediate great ‘religious’ experience to choose may make more sense than you realize. There is a big gulf of separation between people who see the integrity and mystery of whole individual systems and those who still hold the wide belief that nature is ‘lifeless’ and controlled by math, rulers or ‘spirits’.

That is the belief our culture evolved with, though. Believing that individual whole systems of any kind exist actually conflicts with that basic inherited belief in determinism, and really does depart from the endless debates over which ruler is the real one as if debating over angels on the head of a pin. Continue reading A sense of a physical religion in Gaia →

To NPR, as we watch it all collapse

It’s high time you started asking that. Lots of people have studied it. Consider it as a recurrent “tripping point”. To look at one piece at a time it helps to “assume away” ALL the “usual suspects”.

Say you assume the earth has infinite resources, people have limitless good will and make no glaring errors of personal responsibility or arithmetic…, etc. Say people are only limited by not having limitless ability to understand and adapt to increasingly complex things. Continue reading What makes our life support system so fragile…? →