Posted to FRIAM 1/27/07

So I didn’t get takers on the question of what internal limits to growth apply when there are no external limits. It’s sort of a trick question. My approach to the answer has to do with the difference between physical and theoretical systems.

Mostly we think about physical systems as if they behaved like theoretical ones but theories are infinitely malleable and have no inherent limits, internal or external. They’re just projections of rules and natural limits are discoveries of changes in the rules, not extensions. Continue reading The internal limits riddle →

posted to AIA COTE forum 1/20/07

Steering feedback systems is tricky…

Anyone who has changed jobs and had to move investment accounts is familiar with the temptation to buy funds that are high, and just about to fall, and get rid of ones that are low, and just about to rise. Emotional first impressions are generally not a good guide for complex systems, and can cause us to make consistently bad choices.

We have problems of this kind in the design of the sustainability movement I think. Conservation is good, living simply is good, inventing cool things and making room for others is good, and doing these so our world can continually increase its consumption by steady small percents is a total disaster.

Continue reading Buy High Sell Low →

Posted to AIA COTE forum 1/11/07

A great old oak that’s been the center of it’s neighborhood for decades, home to wild life and children’s play, a long labor for leaf raking and thing of beauty in every season, began it’s life with exponential growth that was equally splendid in its transformative magic even if also quite brief and left it quite small. A tree’s period of explosive growth and change ends about when it has it’s first two leaves, before it knows what branches are, or a trunk, or seasons, while it’s skin is still shiny, before it’s had a life.

The question is what would you say to a young little shoot who thought that this was quite unacceptable, and was inconsolable about the apparent fact it’s explosive growth was ending and it could imagine nothing of interest that could ever happen to it again. The idea of seasonal growth was like a vulgarity to it and completely unthinkable. What would you say to persuade it to take a sustainable path?

After trying and failing to set it straight again and again, would y Continue reading What do you tell a tree? →

Posted to the AIA Committee on the Environment Forum 1/6/07

…… It violates normality… but isn’t the more remarkable thingourrelative national silence about the whole torrent of authentic new evidence of rapid change in the climate ? No one anywhere seems to be up in arms about it, when beating the lag times is EVERYTHING in having any real impact on the eventual heating of the globe!Its a lot like another curious disconnect, that has been raised time and again but has always been pushed aside for ‘more immediate concerns’.

When you’re multiplying your consumption, doing it more efficiently doesn’t really change anything. That’s been brought up time an again during the 40 years I’ve been watching the environmental movement. It just dies as a topic of discussion, even though it actually does directly invalidate the dominant conservation centered approach to saving the world’s environments. Continue reading 70 degrees in New York today…! →

to JB 12/22/06 w/ minor ed.

JB,

I’m writing you from south Florida between trips into the Everglades and out on the Keys. It’s fascinating how many ecosystems you can fit in a small place when you really try! The weather has been cloudy by very pleasant, 80 deg., warm sun & rains that don’t get you wet, no crouds!, lots of beauty, and we have a simply marvelous place to stay. More later.

I mostly want to thank you for getting me to read a little more ‘useless pop psychology’… Of course, now that I’m at least up to the point where he defines his natural laws of competition I’m really wondering why you or someone else didn’t mention Ishmael to me before, too. Didn’t you notice that this approach to the subject, the use of natural laws of how to live that are readily read from the physical world but missing from the popular discussion of [how the world works], is precisely what I’ve been so patiently exploring and talking about for the last, yep, count-em, 30 years?? Continue reading Daniel Quin’s Ishmael →

posted to FRIAM 12/16/05

We definitely need better models of complex system events. Here’s another, to help imagine growth as a spontaneous evolutionary process, as if an organizational ‘fire’ that begins with a ’spark’ of change.

It’s obvious enough that growth systems produce rapid change in complex systems without a template or discrete determinants from the outside, but growth is often so smooth, fast, and ’sure footed’ that it’s hard to imagine it as evolutionary. Maybe this alternate model helps, by

telling the story of a complex system step change by growth as if in QM notation ‘before||after’, with the period between the marks consisting of an evolving internal process discovering its place in an unknown

world. It starts with the generally unobservable ‘earth shaking boom’

of an unstable pattern of change forming that will multiply dramatically, zooming to a point of discovering it’s own limits and a ‘big wow’ as the future comes into its view, to perhaps then be transformed by that reversal in the environmental responses into a sustainable system.

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` *ahhh*`–

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` x

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` x

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` x

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` x

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` *w`O`w*

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `m

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `o

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `o

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `z

` ` ` `–`*boom*

before | B o o m, Z o o m, W o w, Ahhh– | after

something clicks, takes off, discovers it’s place, and settles in

During the ‘zoom’ the environment appears limitless from the perspective of the growth cell, and in the ‘ahhh–’ the stabilization of new form becomes satisfying by resolving the start-up cell’s unstable contradictions. Humanity’s institutional rules that the ‘zoom’ is never to be allowed to stop…. seem to be a natural misunderstanding coming from our being swept up in a vast change in reality.

It’s good to note that in living systems what comes ‘after’ is often unequivocally the best part.

Phil Henshaw ¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

e-mail: id@synapse9.com

explorations: www.synapse9.com

to AIA C.O.T.E. Forum 12/01/06

All,

I’m really delighted to be among a group of idealists, and to hear the frustration with the efforts that fall short and the failure of many people to reach high enough in setting their goals. We definitely need more of that, for all the reasons of our not doing enough, and also for a special reason. I think we’re getting huge help in changing the world from Mother Nature, and we should probably consider, seriously, the need at some point to ramp up faster than expected in delivering coherent ideas and methods to others.

Sometimes things collapse of their own contradictions, like the Soviet Union, and the NeoCon revenge. I think what the sustainability movement sees as unassailable enemies, like the economic forces of endless selfish growth, could more or less abruptly loose their credibility and collapse around us. There are lots and lots of signs, things like the large amount of ‘red’ money going into buying ‘green’ design. It’s easy to think it’s all for show, but it’s also because the people who run exploitive businesses see the writing on the wall and feel real guilty about their involvement.

Continue reading Surprises in the works I think →

To: ‘overpopulation@googlegroups.com’
Subject: RE: We are saved!
All,
Doespopulation collapse solve population explosion? I call that quandary the game of intellectual ‘pin the needle’, arguing by extremes that are all off the chart. You see it all the time, like the Republican abhorrence of taxes because 100% taxation would slow down the economy. It’s amazingly seductive, apparently because people are so heavily influenced by fear, and lots of people who should know better are shameless in exploiting it. Continue reading We are saved! →

Bob,

Perhaps if you thought of each kind of intelligence as a different language, only capable of receiving and interpreting certain kinds of nature’s phrases, you’d get the meaning of ‘cultural’ that I intended.  There’s women’s intelligence, for example, often quite different from men’s.  They may not be so hot on controlling things as men are, or even care about the kinds of devious schemes we dream up to bend the world to our will, but boy! wouldn’t we all live impoverished lives without their different way of seeing things, their fundamentally different intelligence? Continue reading Can ‘intelligence’ have an impact? →