Tag Archives: Natural language

Earth Day – And Where We Are

Response to Fast-Growing World Confusion & Conflict
Earth Day Apr 22, 2023 – LinkedIn – Please repost if it needs to be said

In the past, we thought we could overlook the mysterious growing variety of world crises. They grew in scale as we developed, seemingly better able to overcome them. However, none continued for as long or expanded as rapidly as the one racing ahead of us today!

Keynes solidly predicted it, as have many others, but others didn’t believe it. I’ve also closely studied its physics and emerging self-organization for four decades in detail and general pattern. I had the tools and saw the very leading edge. Then I saw how growth systems multiply their scale and complexity, approaching explosive rates of change in how fast they expand, reorganize, and require their parts to adapt and reorganize their relationships. That’s the killer; what many of us now feel happening.

It comes directly from our very most immature of all possible economic plans, endless exploding unsustainable growth. Compound growth is a fast, quick start to a new life, a *pre-birth* process of not fully formed designs. We can see and feel the strains of its rising peak of internal and external pressures everywhere around us. That it’s happening to all of us at once is “the signal” that things can and must change.

Usually, self-animating growth systems in nature gracefully resolve the crises that force them to respond to change or to fail. They change what motivates them, their “purpose,” from multiplying designs to steering them toward or away from what they’re running into. It’s a sound, tried, and true strategy, if a bit counterintuitive for new lives that have only followed a fixed rule for so long.

The civilizations most successful at growing their power seem all to have succumbed to it, though. People easily become socially fixated on endlessly multiplying the power of their profitable concepts. It’s cutting that “umbilical cord” attaching us to the false hope of limitless growth that could convince us now that responding to life is our world’s best chance at life. We need to “appreciate the signal,” though.

WE SEE THE MAJOR RISING THREATS ALL OVER THE PLANET TODAY. That’s our signal. It’s to “back off, look out, and take care,” the most fundamental rule of STEERING. To survive, all new systems need to learn how to steer. All systems that survive growth are examples of the range of strategies that work.

It’s risky, like life, but even if the world has a bad slump, perhaps as inexperienced pilots make mistakes, the world getting the signal would largely assure keeping our world cultures intact. Going through a “Tower of Bable” or “dark age” type collapse would not. We would need a kind global “Marshall Plan” to help the world’s talents for organizing things, keep those talents, and put them to work on a new plan, caring for each other and making things work for and all around our fabulous new world.

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JLH – The world is on the move, but following the rule of growth that got us here, now causing crises, is not the path to our future. As all new life must,
it’s time to back away from the edge and learn to steer.

Natural Pattern Languages

key organizational elements for the working relationships of complex systems
ideas of complex relationships that fit the reality

We care because of the new bridge it creates between human ideas and the working organization of complex working systems we make, use and need to respond to of all kinds, an emerging broad advance in understanding complex system organization design.  The idea of pattern language, invented by Christopher Alexander for architectural design in the 70’s, actually started blossoming some time ago, it a most surprising place, in the creation of complex design concepts for computer programming known as “object oriented design”.

As it continues to expand and mature it is becoming a wonderfully versatile method for sharing and recording expert understandings of “how relationships work”, with application to almost any fields.   It became the basis of modern computer programming, as “object oriented design“, with each object fulfilling a “pattern of relationships” that connects with others.   For me… its a language I can begin to use to translate my research on natural system designs into, into “JPL” (aka Jessie’s Pattern Language), for subjects such as how natural systems transition from “type-r” to “type-K” behaviors (a subject underlying much of the discussion on RNS of complex system successions,life stages and cycles,”dual paradigm views”, “organizational stage models”, as observable patterns of organized change in relationships).

The reason it works for “object oriented” programming and “natural systems science” and in other areas too, appear to be the same.   Pattern languages let people use their considerable natural understanding of complex relationships, like “home” “friends” “communication” “trust” “patience” etc. to open our eyes to similarly complex working relationships and meanings of complex systems elsewhere too, as “designs”.  The standard “design pattern” of pattern languages connects human relationship concepts to working organizational relationships of behavioral systems  of ANY kind.  That seems to be why the design model that Alexander invented turns out to be so adaptable to our needs in our now overwhelmingly complex new world…!   ;-)   I can see it readily becoming applied to breaking down the silos of separation between knowledge disciplines, too, the so called “blind men and the elephant problem”, something just completely unimaginable in reality today.

Pattern Languages are for

1. identifying key organizational elements in systems of complex relationships, found in nature or in design practice,

2. communicating design elements for complexly organized systems or illuminating them in existing natural or manmade ones.

3. using the design pattern to refer back to the original natural forms and contexts from which it originated or is used to represent.

Two natural system design patterns, (for example):

Moving with the Flow

Sometimes you watch the people, sometimes their flows.   The flows are roles in larger scale systems of group motion, forming as people avoid interference, but can confine them till they find an opening too.   Markets flows form paths and break from them as new paths are found, often flocking in chase of a wave of anticipation, or uncertainty moving leaderless floods.   Those are puzzling, since there may be no news the contagious change in direction, but systemic change generally usually has a real cause.    Flocks of birds appear to do it just for fun though.

 

 

Alternating roles that Fit

Both natural and human designed complex  organizations have independent parts that create emergent properties by fitting multiple roles.  Day and night, male and female, work and relaxation, pencil and paper, cup and liquid, all the amazing polarities that produce reliable results because of how they fit their multiple roles, quite unlike any set of fixed rules could ever do.  The trick is only physical parts and their relationships can do that, and a pattern language those relationships provide a way to develop concepts for understanding the working parts.

 

 

There are many types of Natural Pattern Languages, generally depending on the organizational medium (material and environment)

  • Social organization pattern languages
  • Natural system pattern languages
  • Architectural and Urban design pattern languages
  • Cultural pattern languages
  • Abstract Scientific pattern languages
  • Educational pattern languages
  • Computer knowledge design pattern languages
  • Commons & community design pattern languages
  • Economic pattern languages
  • Movie making pattern languages
  • Organizing pattern languages
  • … etc.

 

There are three uses of the term “pattern language”,

1. As the collection of design elements and patterns used to design or describe working complex systems

2. As an the organizational language of an individual design project describing its working relationships as a whole

3. As a property of an individual complex system, consisting of the working relationships between its parts and its environment, that might be view from various perspectives to recognize different elements.

 So they’re simple conceptual models designed as versatile tools for engaging our minds with the actual working organization and relationships of natural and designed complexly organized parts of our world. So they come in those two basic forms, as Design Patterns one uses to guide the implementation of some plan or as Natural Patterns used to help people understand how designs can fit in with natural organizations.

 

Pattern Language sites

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jlh

The fit with Alexander – and clearer escape from our traps

Our oil addiction, like all addictions, became a physical trap, and shaped our ways of life to fit its temporary needs.

Needing to consume ever more of the remaining affordable oil supplies also has pollution effects that will permanently disrupt the earth’s climate.

We do it to achieve an evidently false image of “economic stability”.

The design of our environment, our spaces and uses, will change adaptively as some parts of what we built find new lasting uses and others don’t.  Christopher Alexander is an architect whose “Pattern Language” explores how the natural processes of reshaping the spaces we live in over time has created urban spaces perfectly fitting their use as a form of natural environmental design.

The patterns of space as an image of their uses

One can discover how we fell into the trap of dependence on an ever growing use of oil with no future.  That won’t quickly change the world we built around it though.  As we respond, the natural forces and our responsive thinking will reshape our space, likely leading us to follow nature’s paths to finding opportunity and harmony. Continue reading The fit with Alexander – and clearer escape from our traps