How’s this, for cracking “the mind wall”…??
(the supreme arrogance of treating knowledge as reality)
I’ve been showing people interesting ways to make use the difference between our mental and physical worlds for many years. Here’s another. If it hits an important principle, or suggests any way you might use it, I’d be glad to know and to see if I can adjust my language to fit your idea.
The natural end of “low hanging fruit” is “falling off the ladder”, a universal trap at the natural limits of reach, where rising risks meet declining energy to respond to them (if your plan is to keep climbing).
(as increasing your control of the unknown exposes environmental hazards naturally first omitted from any model)
The natural limit of "low hanging fruit", meeting the rising risks at the limits of reach, with declining ability to respond to them
Intellectuals in particular, have had difficulty accepting we can be quite certain of finding some things in the unknown, like the dual reality confronted in any observer’s mind, as it finds its world works differently than they think.
2. Marc Calabria is a researcher at the CATO Institute who emphasizes as discussed on the PBS Newshour 11/24, the importance of addressing the stubborn structural causes (being widely ignored) of the growing inequity and instability, that are no one’s fault.
I quite agree with where each starts, and then draw the picture showing how our situation displays a direct conflict with nature, and a puzzle for how to apply the universal solution for ourselves.
Recognizing the natural mechanics of growth economies that would give us leverage and choice in the outcome.
Putting it together "From Scratch" from two different starting points.
Uroboros is the symbol of a system that consumes itself, either literally or symbolically. There are many kinds of feedback processes you could liken to a serpent eating its own tail. The compost from one generation of plants nourishes the next, for example, so the new generation is partly consuming the decay of the last generation, the “tail” of the cycle of growth and decay.
You definitely would not call plants growing in their own compost “self-cannibalistic”. Consuming ones’ own living parts, however, is quite an apt description of what happens at the natural limits of a growth system that ends its growth only because it exhausts its free resources. In economies the more competitive parts may then find nothing more interesting left to consume other than their own system’s weaker or less familiar living parts… (discussion contued at end)
The authors of “The Story of Stuff” published a nice little update called “The Story of Broke”, about the vast sums of money the government spends on subsidizing private business…. This sequel “Part II (the end of broke)” was first posted in a comment, on how the still bigger story of broke, debt piling on top of debt, both was missing from the list of now overwhelming government costs, and has a … very natural end. Government debt provides guaranteed growing returns, whether the economy grows or not. Lenders take government interest payments and add them to what they lend back, multiplying their lending and returns. It builds up, slowly at first then explosively, as the world’s debt burden
grows on little but the good faith and credit of government guarantees.
You’ve heard of government debt called a “safe haven”. It’s where investors put money to be “safely assured of ever multiplying returns” when they can’t find even better growing returns elsewhere. Where that debt spiral comes from and goes to has been a subject of many have tried to explain. The view Keynes came to, that I think is the most clear headed of all, outlines the necessities for surviving a debt spiral for a market economy. Nature would surely not shape her facts of life on earth for our approval, but most people react to the facts of life for surviving debt spirals as if to reject nature’s requirements as “socially unacceptable”, … apparently not seeing Keynes’ elegantly clear logic. So this is written in the story telling style of Free Range Studio in their Story of Stuff. —
The End of Broke, the True Whole Story of Debt!
The BIGGER “Story of Broke” is one that starts quite small, but is designed to actually keep growing ever bigger. As it does so it also casts its own vote in the story of business influence in government and demand for subsidies and preferential services, persuading government that’s the way to get money to pay its ever growing debt! It’s the story of how a small amount of debt naturally grows relentlessly big, with no natural end other than either creditors spending it or both government finance and economic collapse.
Drowning in the spiral of dreams
The whole story of debt is a very very simple little thing. It’s that some of us earn by $units and others by $%’s… and by providing guaranteed returns to lenders, in an economy you can actually earn by $%’s till the economy collapses. What seems like a totally innocent “little difference” in measurement, between units and ratios, makes AN INFINITE DIFFERENCE over time in life. Some people have called it “our misunderstanding of the exponential curve”, others simply call it “greed”. The problem with this kind of greed is how very addictive it is and that it grows explosively, making a “little greed” become SO.. GREEDY, with its promise to multiply the rewards of greed forever. Continue reading the Story of Broke – Part II (the end of broke)→
The first learning steps beyond the impasse, on a new path.
Well, shutting down the world for repairs would be conceptually neat, but does not seem to use the path finding mechanisms that nature typically uses. She offers myriad examples of how run-away growth systems can change by maturing to become stable self-managing ecologies. That’s what we need to do, and learn how to mimic, that our culture knows little about, importantly because science has avoided studying the opportunistic learning of natural systems all but entirely.
I know this approach is problematic for someone accustomed to representing systems with equations. Real ecosystems are niche making learning and development processes, though, largely involved in “rule making” not “rule following” . The far better conceptual models for them are of collective learning and environmental development. Collective learning and development systems can cling to one systematic behavior while it is useful, and the break from it to find and cling to another model, when that is opportune, because the parts are actively learning as they go. Continue reading Can we shut down the system for repairs?→
The WNYC radio program On The Media, with Brook Gladstone and Bob Garfield is always insightful, and this week addressed The Personal Impact of the Web, and how the internet is changing human culture & society. There has been some question whether the dramatic changes in how people think and behave are good or bad, or just “change” that older generations feel left out of…
Of course it’s “all of the above”, and I added the following as a comment regarding how in an information age, social networks naturally tend to create their own realities to live in, with the consequence of becoming detached from the changes in the natural world occurring around them…
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"Cyberboy" learning that nature is now the network?
Bob & Brooke, Your ideas about how the internet is changing us are insightful and entertaining as always, but honestly, you’re missing the physics of it. The “internet generation” somewhat corresponds to the “productivity people”, the driving force of economic activity and growth around the world, and the internet is a major productivity tool, allowing us to control more and more with less and less awareness of it. Continue reading Does living in social networks change how we think??→
It’s easy to notice that our society is enjoying the great benefits of “an information age”,
..but also suffering from lots of “bad information”.
I remember the first day I heard what the future internet would be like, I think it was in the summer of 1978. My immediate response was that it would quickly drown in misinformation. It has not happened quite the way I expected, as a “massive database pollution” of facts that could not be checked disconnected from their origins.
What has polluted the information network that way is torrential storms of unfounded beliefs, seeming to threaten our whole complex society.
I think we need a “spiritual” solution, the spirit of the hunt for our own errors and for what realities connect disparate views and beliefs. Another name for it as an “information disease” is a “multiplication of languages”. Disparate belief systems come from social networks, only unhealthy when they become increasingly disconnected with each other and the natural world subjects their beliefs are about. All of us can make a list of groups that increasingly define reality in terms of their own social religion, the “fiscal conservatives” and “radicalized Islam” for example. Continue reading Dogged by confused realities… the spirit of the hunt?→
This is a comment on The Concept of “Animal Spirits” is a Red Herring, a June 27, 2011 blog post, by the blogger “Lord Keynes”, on exploring what Keynes really meant by people needing the urge to act, as well as a rational expectation…
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Thanks for helping clarify the original meaning of “animal spirits” and helping bring out “the real J.M. Keynes”. I agree:
Keynes uses “animal spirits” in the sense of “a spontaneous [human] urge to action rather than inaction.”
The sense in which his use and Descartes’, as
“the fiery particles of the blood”
are consistent is seen when observing that both would be referring to how people need to be aroused and have inspiration to act, i.e. to make emotional leaps in decision making, and not just form rational expectations.
That is indeed quite different from our having to be subjective in forming expectations with uncertainties. As you say “The concept of “animal spirits” as used by Keynes is not even necessary to the modern subjective expectations theory. “ But then that is the subject you discuss, and seem to drop the question of what Keynes really thought was important about the need for “animal spirits” to allow people to act.
A related puzzle for understanding “the real J.M. Keynes” is his mysterious Chapter 16 of The General Theory. It’s his concluding chapter to his grand theory of how to stabilize growth. He oddly spends the whole chapter on the natural limits of his own model, however. Continue reading Urges, arousal, and Keynes’ “animal spirits”→
Having sex is the one thing Mother Nature knows best. She is subtle and patient, and simply loves it. She takes deposits of “true seed” or sometimes of “magic multiplying juice” and returns multiplied bounties in return.
Making love to Mother Nature produces new generations, variations on things to produce new seed, to then perhaps deposit within her womb to return multiplied again. Those deposits of seed or magic juice get her pregnant, in actual fact. It’s what’s going on virtually anywhere you see her womb swelling all out of proportion, as if to burst.
Her womb does then burst, no illusions, with her new offspring. There is no such thing as being “half pregnant”, “having sex without consequences”, or for man’s worst habit, investing in nature to multiply her returns and not having responsibility for the pregnancy involved.
The gestation after sex gives her new children to release, to enrich the lives of her older children, who found having sex with her a delight and whose seed she returns multiplied. It’s her one promise, to be fruitful and to multiply the seed planted within her, while making only one simple request:
If you plant your seed in me, I will bear your children and they can plant their seed in me too. It’s a promise and I will keep it. But I need you and your offspring to stick around, to care for your generations and for me. Will you care for them? Will you care for me, and give me rest? It’s all I ask for these gifts. – m.n.
The origin of this post, fyi, was a truly exciting insight, in the 1970’s as I started developing my new scientific methods for studying the organization of natural of systems. I discovered how to recognize the eruption of new forms of organization in nature. It’s a locally distributed process of contagious development, that people tend not to notice at all, or to call “growth” for the superficial changes in scale it is also associated with.
It was quite exciting, to find that one could identify individual instances of nature’s general process of invention, from the self-patterned erupting changes identifying its internal and external relationships producing transformative changes in design. You need to look for where there’s a distributed “falling together”, not a “pushing together”. I had some training in improvisation that gave me a window of insight on how to open my perceptions up to observing it in the world around me.
As it became easier and easier to identify, I began finding strong evidence of these “bursts of self-organization” seeming to be the “glue” of all transient organization and design in nature! Then the question switched, to wondering: “Why in the world don’t other people see it??”. Our modern world happens to be organized around sustaining its own ever more expansive self-organization… seen in our minds, as being a “constant”. For more on the story, fyi, also see “a World SDG“, a proposed whole system balancing plan, using the first true scientific measure of sustainability 4/14/14 jlh :-)
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How to escape the mental traps causing mankind to destroy its own future and much of our living planet, is not so hard…
…but takes exceptional willingness to discover how nature works that you might have been missing. It takes learning to observe nature making new sense of things by herself, i.e. real change .
Watching organized change develop in ways that clearly can’t be following human rules or theories, and so intricate they could never be fully explained, frees a mind to drop its assumptions and attempts explain. It lets you just study and marvel at what you find, giving you fresh ideas unpolluted with the self-serving social conventions people mostly live by, that are the problem.
Watching nature work, beyond the limits of theory, builds fresh awareness, letting us put our own perception in perspective, to see and correct our misconceptions. Continue reading My most disturbing finding→
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
