{"id":511,"date":"2011-08-02T19:32:01","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T23:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=511"},"modified":"2013-09-11T09:47:53","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T14:47:53","slug":"return-to-a-world-that-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/return-to-a-world-that-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Return to a world that works? Learn to steer!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jay Hanson’s post to <\/span>EconCritique@yahoogroups.com<\/span><\/a> that “<\/span>Economics is rotten at the center: The “Math\/Logic Paradigm.<\/strong>” was passed on to me. \u00a0 He basically found that economics is a social construct, of ideals that can’t be discovered in nature, and prompted this [edited] reply.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jay, \u00a0\u00a0I like how you aim at finding the conceptual errors.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s a good clue that problematic assumptions are neither possible to prove or disprove, suggesting they are just social constructs or definitions, rather than principles of nature discovered by observation.<\/p>\n

A still greater fault may be found in our expectation that the world follows our abstract models at all. \u00a0That nature would follow our social ideals itself seems to be a pure social construct unsupported by observation. \u00a0 Our beliefs we construct of our own abstract ideals are quite unable to articulate many features of how the systems of nature work, so it\u2019s a mystery we haven\u2019t acknowledged it.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The art of steering, timing the world for the moment to act<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/p>\n

Most systems in nature are populated with actively learning parts\u2026 which do the exploratory hunting and dodging you see organisms doing that creates, cultures that hold their populations together, and allows networks to form for businesses or politics, etc. \u00a0 \u00a0Environmental search and adaptation by the smallest units of natural systems appears to be source of emerging design and behavior for net-energy systems generally.<\/p>\n

That makes it a rather glaring oversight that scientific abstract models in particular are built as if to treat nature as following deterministic rules, of our own invention, which notably lack such parts. \u00a0 \u00a0It confirms that our way of representing nature is more the product of social agreements than of sincerely trying to shape our thinking to the forms of nature.<\/p>\n

If the ultimate subject of our social constructs is other social values, rather than fitting the forms of nature, it leaves us blind to the world we live in. \u00a0 It leaves our social constructs without any means of adjusting to change in the world around us.<\/p>\n

We all know the big one there, how the world changed from responding as an infinite source to responding as an inadequate source. \u00a0 Our culture hasn’t responded to that at all. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0It displays a profound learning deficit and mental handicap, a blindness to the reality we don’t make up for ourselves.<\/p>\n

The best direct evidence I see of that is how people are trying to live by the social constructs of the past in our changed world of the present. \u00a0 Everyone is\u00a0going to the limits of their resources and talents to get the world to act infinite again. \u00a0 \u00a0It seems to be the\u00a0main thing energizing the social and political movements, as well as the regulatory, finance, business and technology communities too.<\/p>\n

Going to ever greater lengths to make old rules apply to a new situation just gets us deeper and deeper in trouble, of course, actively driving our society toward extinction. To improve our societal steering we\u2019d need to acknowledge that reality is not our social construct but our relation with nature.<\/p>\n

As the handicap appears to be a profound blindness, as for Helen Keller, the first two steps to better steering are: <\/strong><\/p>\n

1) slow down and <\/strong><\/p>\n

2) learn to grope around in the world we\u2019re finding our way in.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Where might you start? \u00a0 I’d start with the easy way to connect the world of money to the world of nature, and go from there.<\/p>\n

The main role of money in nature is our use of it to communicate requests between people for providing physical goods and services. \u00a0 You’d think economists might have thought of that, but how nature and money are connected isn’t the question they ask.<\/p>\n

As how we pass on requests for\u00a0physical uses of nature from each other, money is \u201cinformation\u201d that people use to manage the physical world. \u00a0 Thinking of it that way also lets me switch back and forth from considering money\/economic\u00a0questions and physical\/natural world\u00a0questions.<\/p>\n

The big advantage is making it easy to understand the feedback pressure in the other direction, the resistance put up by the natural world to our mounting requests for services from it.<\/p>\n

see: \u00a0\u00a0A decisive moment for Investing in Sustainability<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Phil<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jay Hanson’s post to EconCritique@yahoogroups.com that “Economics is rotten at the center: The “Math\/Logic Paradigm.” was passed on to me. \u00a0 He basically found that economics is a social construct, of ideals that can’t be discovered in nature, and prompted this [edited] reply. Jay, \u00a0\u00a0I like how you aim at finding the conceptual errors.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s … Continue reading Return to a world that works? Learn to steer!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-econn","category-whattodo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2497,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/2497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}