Category Archives: Scientific theory

among best, Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Research & Measures, Scientific theory

SEA – energy accounting “far more holes than cheese”

Emmeline, at ethicalcorp.com was looking for recent innovation in sustainability to review for recognition.  In a short email exchange she persuaded me to try to find a simple explanation again, for my recent radical discovery.  It’s that our information on the scale of energy demands that business place on the economy is “far more holes than cheese“.    See also

Are the holes in your map helping you read the territory?
Self-organization as “niche making”

 

On 3/7/12 I replied,

Thanks very much for your nice reply.    If you care to consider it for recognition, last fall I published a long paper on the evidence of a true 80% hole in our information on business end product energy use and CO2, sorely needing attention.

We don’t have information on what supply chain people and business are doing, because they don’t record it or don’t pass it up the chain.

The study identifies a deep structural problem in what we know about complex business supply chain networks.   We don’t have information on what supply chain people or businesses are doing, because they don’t record or report it up the chain.

In a contrarian way that large gap in our information is exactly what gets missed by a “focus on transparency and clarity and measurement, being more accurate”.   It has to do with estimating known kinds of impacts that go unmeasured for lack of information.  It’s only due to the nature of outsourced business services having evident impacts that are individually untraceable, and so provide no data to count. Continue reading SEA – energy accounting “far more holes than cheese” →

among best, Mail & Comment, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory

Kin and Kind – Some learning in progress?

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“Kin and Kind” is an article in the Mar 5 New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, on the remarkable career of E.O. Wilson and his quest to explain apparent “altruism” in animal behavior.  The reigning explanation for evolution is pure competition, and he’s beginning to think there must be more to it, asking “…is goodness an adaptive trait?”   I note that the very first ecologist to study complex ecological behavior, S.A. Forbes, had much the same way of raising the question, in 1887.

The question, possibly, is not how mutations affect behavior, but our having not looked squarely at what is common to the behaviors of life that are so successful.

__________

for The Mail,

E.O. Wilson is remarkable among scientists for being willing to question his own dogma.  Where the article ends is with his next seeming breach of scientific etiquette, his now beginning to ask if “goodness is an adaptive trait”.

Very surprisingly, that is where the very first scientist to study complex organization in ecologies, S.A. Forbes actually began.    In 1887, in “The Lake as a Microcosm”, Forbes observed that somehow networks of many species evolved to respect each other enough to not make food chains highly unstable, as they would be if their competition had winners. Continue reading Kin and Kind – Some learning in progress? →

Natural Economy, Natural systems, Scientific theory

Designed for a different kind of planet

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on Linkedin – Global Foresight – Future of Western Civilization.

Nicholas Beecroft • I’d like to invite you to take a look at an emerging series of interviews with inspirational Leaders at the evolutionary edge of our culture

Phil Henshaw • Would you like a real discussion of how and why our economies became designed for a different kind of planet than the one we live on?

Nicholas Beecroft • Yes, go on, Phil……

Phil Henshaw • Well, it presses the credulity of intellectuals more than informal thinkers. There’s a very interesting property of informal language, that the same words readily refer to either the objects of nature that are their subjects, or to the cultural meanings people have for them, that the words raise in their minds. For example “apple” is easily considered the “thing in your hand you might eat” and the “idea in your mind of giving one to the teacher this morning”.

Normal language is about real things, the economy about abstract $’s

Continue reading Designed for a different kind of planet →

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory

Could “reality math” help the AAAS??

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The theme of the AAAS meetings next week in Vancouver is “Flattening the World: Building the Global Knowledge Society”.

Reality math combines the information we do have, with what definably remains missing from our view.

There’s a method of “reality math” that allows “whole system accounting“, to combine both what we know and what we can know is missing. That’s possible for systems defined by energy conservation.  Failing to include what’s visibly missing from our data, often how energy is being used by systems that act as wholes, seems responsible for much of why our global solutions are not working, but create even more problems.

With all our information, “new math” is still needed for
what goes on within natural systems still remaining in the dark.

The following is a comment on society president Nina Fedoroff’s editoral in Science about it: The Global Knowledge Society.   I certainly agree that global networking potentially allows global problem solving, but… There are “very large holes” in our information.  The general “Natural Systems Theory” behind this view is a versatile scientific method, based on using the implications of the conservation of energy to locate and help study the wealth of complex natural organization hidden within the eventful systems by which our world works.

Continue reading Could “reality math” help the AAAS?? →

among best, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory

Are the holes in your map helping you read the territory?

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This is an exchange with Frits Smeets on Azimuth, John Baez’s wide ranging mathematical physics blog.   The original topic is the 12/13/11 “What’s up with the solar transition“, and why isn’t it happening when seeming so “logical” to so many.

See Also:

SEA Energy Accounting: far more holes than cheese 3/9/12

– Self-organization as “niche making” 3/25/12

– Principles for detecting and responding to system overload 9/4/12

– How mismeasures steer us wrong 10/26/12

The basic problem is that systems that are highly organized as cells of complex relationships and work by themselves, like the great proliferation of systems that develop by growth, the working relationships between their internal parts is untraceable.  So other parts of the universe “out of the loop”.

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In a world of systems leaving us “out of the loop”
an observer’s view is riddled with holes,
like Swiss Cheese!

The exchange starts on that topic, and in the last two entries turns to the deeper problem of why the natural holes in our information about nature are missing from the physicists notion of a world describable by equations, or “phase space”.     fyi, you might browse at the start and read carefully toward the end.

Holes in our information for things built from the inside. (Oh gee, never thought of organization as something different from enumeration.... )

Continue reading Are the holes in your map helping you read the territory? →

among best, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory

“Organizational Rigidity” as a natural limit of growth

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From a Pharaoh hardening his heart to confused children refusing to budge… complexly organized systems pushed to their limits often display emergent rigidity.

Things that develop their organization by new parts being added  to existing ones, develop accumulative designs that become harder to change over time.   It leads to organizational rigidity, that can either be seen as inhibiting change or enabling structure.   These are aspects of the systems physics of self-organization.

Accumulative designs become harder to change over time

Crystallization works by replicating a pattern from a starting pattern, that remains the origin of the pattern throughout the process, like the process that creates snow flakes of a single design.   It’s similar with road systems, that as you add connecting roads it becomes both unnecessary to add more and harder to change the established network.

Even with advanced computers the world financial system gets built around trusted expectations, leaving a rigid imprint of past thinking in our models for the future. If it becomes unmanageable and overwhelmed by floods of new kinds of information the models don’t contain, the system is not designed to make any response.

At the limits of Lucy’s organizational abilities, confusion reigned

Organizational rigidity is natural, and develops in any system built by accumulation.   A bureaucracy may be built to be very efficient and resourceful, for example, in responding to the original scale and kinds of demands.  It’s initial designs may have been highly versatile for the variety of problems it started with.  It naturally becomes mired in inefficiency at some natural point of piling on ever increasing demands of new kinds.

Continue reading “Organizational Rigidity” as a natural limit of growth →

among best, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory

the Heart of it “from scratch”, from two systemic views

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The heart of the problem “From Scratch”
from two systemic views.

1. Yaneer Bar-Yam is president of the New England Complex Systems Institute and Highlights the scientific research supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement.

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.

Continue reading the Heart of it “from scratch”, from two systemic views →

For teachers, Natural Economy, Scientific theory

Keynes saw through his fears… by facing them.

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An OP-Ed in today’s Sunday Review section of the NY Times, by Sylvia Nasar, Keynes: The Sunny Economist missed the real source of Keynes ability to see silver linings where most others saw failure.   Keynes faced economic failures having studied how nature uses the end of one thing to begin another.

He saw sunshine by seeing through the darkness,

not by denying it.

Sylvia,

It’s fun to play up myths, but yours would be spoiled by the reality of a strange intellect like J M Keynes.    In order to see the “sunny side” of things Keynes unabashedly faced the deepest darkness behind what ailed the economy.   He smashed or poked holes in the darkness he saw, as a way to find the light, rather than by clinging blindly to some faith in optimism, as you suggest, a kind of sunny silliness.

Starry Night
To be alive in nature is itself, a world of bright light in a vast darkness

You have not read Chapter 16 of The General Theory.    It’s quite obvious.   You’re in good company, of course, as virtually no one has.    In Chapter 16 Keynes steps right into and through the deepest darkness, the end of the road for his own growth theory.    Of course, there is also an extremely sunny side too, but if you don’t face the “darkness” of the natural facts at hand, you won’t see it. Continue reading Keynes saw through his fears… by facing them. →

among best, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory, What to do

Can we shut down the system for repairs?

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My response to George Mobus’ last reply to me, got a little long, so I only posted the first few paragraphs as a comment on his discussion of “The Goal – Episode I: The Basic Requirements”
++++++++++

Can we shut down the system for repairs?

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? →

For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Scientific theory

How natural system bankruptcy works.

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Bankruptcy occurs…

when a system becomes unable to supply its own needs, and gets cut off from former supplies.    So, it’s a system that may seem to be working fine, but drifts over the line of profitability, and is abruptly rejected by its environment.

…when systems can’t generate “net-energy”

resource productivity * societal productivity < 1.0

From beginning to end environmental systems need to produce some minimal margin of excess resources as profit, to maintain cushions for everything.  Otherwise their parts will not have time to respond to shortages and their environmental connections break down.

Becoming both more costly to supply and more costly to run, to the limits of profitability, causes system bankruptcy, as it did for Rome.   Rome wasted resources on making its high society richer throughout its decline, as if that would reverse its resource depletion.

… disillusionment occurs and systems break into parts, to end their lives.

Continue reading How natural system bankruptcy works. →