physics of happening

Anselmo & all,
I think it’s very relevant to consider the accumulating adverse genetic change due to human intervention.  The principal process of evolution is not yet well understood yet though.  “Punctuated equilibrium” requires a mechanism for relatively rapid change of the whole genome rather than a selective drift of individual genes, and as yet there are no testable hypotheses for how that would work.   I think Tim Beardsley’s use of the terms ‘divergence’ and ‘degeneration’, applying general terms to specialized things, does not accurately characterize what they refer to, and so are easily misunderstood.    I’d prefer to use genetic ‘pollution’, some of which is human caused, though that’s not a perfect term either.    There’s no question that it is occurring, of course, in that lots of people who would not be reproducing for either biological or economic ’fitness’ reasons remain in the gene pool.    Many of our healthcare and economic interventions effectively reverse our natural genetic handicaps with overriding social values.   

One interesting point is that that may well directly cause an increase in genetic complexity (‘pollution’) and real economic burdens to absorb, like increased healthcare costs, how it matters to the ‘genetic health’ of the species may be complex.     Our usual interpretations many not apply, though.     The statistical Darwinian model, on which nearly all discussion of genetic change is based, actually fails to explain some of the key evidence and seems to have no actual physical mechanism by which to operate (probabilities don’t describe individual couplings, for example).    It’s our metaphor of convenience, though, so we have been using it to organize our discussion of the evidence, but need to be open to other possibilities .     

Take for example, the enormous variation in the kinds of domestic pets.   It provides dramatic evidence of extreme genetic adaptation to induced environmental change (breeding selection), but no species change is induced, as far as I know.    So genome organization is evidently highly flexible and also highly stable.    What that provides is crystal clear evidence of genetic homeostasis for species design, something that the standard statistical model relies on being completely absent.      That’s a particularly good reason to remain open minded, along with it generally being good to openly question the mechanisms you theorize as you look at new kinds of evidence.     

So, we do see human interventions inducing a variety of accumulating genetic change, much of it seeming deleterious without societal intervention.   That may itself be a new form of genome for us to live with though.     Sustaining that increased variety in the genome may also make synergies leading to larger organizational change more likely, at the same time it seems to make individual outcomes more often harmful.     Do we *want* to become a whole new species?    Lacking any testable science for what influences that, or what it would mean to us, you either call upon ‘fate’ to decide, or just hope and trust that our genetic resilience will hold…   It might well also be a new kind of systemic influence like global warming, and likely to trigger all kinds of instabilities we have very little understanding of at all.  

The principle that progressive trends have mechanisms that will upset themselves as their imbalances collide with other things in their environments still holds.  It identifies another grand experiment on ourselves with our having no way of identifying the dangers.   There are many kinds of physical progressions at play, and the ones the standard model of evolution gives us to imagine are mostly either not happening or not the ones that would matter.   

Finding evidence that is strong enough to upset our comfort with what we think we have neatly explained is may be the one unqualified good.

Phil Henshaw  

Re: Subject: Thougths From the “onelife” site
From: Anselmo Pedroni
Sent: Saturday, July 05, 2008 4:23 AM

Hi!  It appears that there are others around with similar concerns on a nasty combination of overshoot /dieoff and genetic degeneration issues.
Amongst other sites dealing with that problem, I found this one:  http://www.onelife.com/evolve/degen.html:

 O2 post: Mauro,

That’s an excellent question.   What you want is the ‘accumulative’ total effect, of the ‘choice’ being made, if what you want is to give people ways to decide what choices are better than others.    The way you’re starting is just the right way,  thinking it through far enough to begin to see the real complications.     For me that leads to seeing the need for ways to simplify.   What you want is to get the whole picture right, not just use up your energy fully detailing the first part of it you start with.

I don’t know of any effectively permanent carbon sinks other than the natural accumulation of carbon on the sea bed.   The 2-300 year residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is so much longer than active most biomass sinks that I wouldn’t really count them at all.    That greatly simplifies the calculation!    Greatly simplifying the calculation also corrects for the strong tendency people have of spending time looking for offsets to excuse increasing their basic carbon production.    That time and creative effort is better applied elsewhere I think, like to trying to understand why everyone is saving energy but energy consumption still multiplies…      

The biomass issue that really caught me by surprise last year was figuring out that even the long term biomass carbon sinks consume land in a non-renewable way!     That is a hidden but very major impact.     Using forests to accumulate biomass does work, but only as land is set aside for new forests in perpetuity, and the resource for that is quite limited.    To get a sense of scale, sequestering carbon with trees at the rate that normal spending produces CO2 you’d need to set aside new forest land at a rate (very roughly) of an acre for every $200k of GDP.   For a small business with ten employees, that might mean obtaining and planting 10 acres a year, forever.    The kick back, of course, is that this sort of thing is exactly where the world food crisis came from.    There are all kinds of ways in which development permanently consumes food production resources, and we really need them.

No matter what the price is, food demand is going up and resources for food production are going down.    That’s what really let the speculators in to run up the price.     I think the take home message is that all these big reactions coming at once indicates nature is simply gagging on our proposed new relationship with her as a whole.    In any new relationship being overly immature and aggressive in your approach brings on severe rejections, and observing sever rejections is a ‘sign’ of having missed all the earlier signs.    We could learn about that as the natural way. 

maurocordella@virgilio.it
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 5:58 AM
To: o2mailinglist@yahoogroups.com
Subject: co2eq lifespan

I was discussing about biomass carbon sink “ability” but I have a doubt in my mind I propose you.- consider any supply chain which is time
and space oriented (i.e. the life cycle of any process evolving in
space and time)
- several stages of the process are likely to
contribute to GHG emissions.
- a period of time of years, decades or
centuries may occur between the earliest and the latest stages.
- in order to quantify the kgCOeq2 emitted during the life cycle of the
process, should people take into account that GHGs have different life time in atmosphere (so that an emission occurring in the latest stages could “replace” an “older” emission)? or we have to consider all the GHGs emission regardless their actual release time (simply adding all the emission occurring in the earliest and latsest stages)?

Brian,

Yea, most people think it’s a problem of attitude, but there are great examples of where that’s clearly not the case. The environmental movement, for example, makes the same mistake time after time of treating niche opportunities as unlimited resources. The important part is not to say they have a ‘bad attitude’. The error is not one of attitude. The important thing to note it that it’s the exact same error they are trying to correct. It’s error that the business and finance interests are making in massively misjudging the limits of the earth’s easy resources. The greens like the developers tend to think that every resource we have not yet exhausted is unlimited, like wind and solar and all that. That insight is the useful and helpful lesson of ethanol, that it was a good niche opportunity thought of as an unlimited resource up until it triggered the world food crisis. What we’re dealing with is a major conceptual misunderstanding of the problem.

If you don’t want to “plan for failure” as you say, then you should pull yourself up short and figure out why nearly everyone with that attitude actually is planning for failure. Almost no one thinks things through. Almost all planning is done to just push the problem a little ways ahead, hoping it will go away. That worked when we had not hit the limits of the earth. Now just pushing the problem ahead a bit just pushes it to where it will be worse when we get to it again. In order to think things through we need to understand them from beginning to end, ¸¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸¸ , and that’ll teach you how nature starts everything with explosions of creativity to see if they will learn how to stabilize, or lets them collapse of their own feeble accord if they don’t.

The real solutions to our two main uncontrolled growth problems, population and wealth, are both stubbornly in conflict with our self-images of what ‘good’ means, the stuff we cling to in our minds. Those ‘functional fixations’ throw us into deep conflict with a changing world. To me the real solution to both is *not* getting the right ideas into our minds. It’s to learn a way to see *through* our ideas so we can watch the real world, see them in overlay. Otherwise we only look *at* our ideas and let them hide the world from us. If we see both we don’t have to give up the things that are precious to us, including our attitudes, and can successfully navigate a place that we’ve mostly lost contact with too.

Does that make any sense?

Best,

Phil Henshaw

“it’s not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say”

———-

Hi Phil,

What differentiates humans from animals is our capacity to conceptualise in abstract terms and to plan for the future, and then to act on those plans with a view to realising them. To me the problem is one of “attitude”. My personal experience is that our plans are self fulfilling. Winners plan to succeed, and losers plan to fail. I am personally not predisposed to plan for failure. To me that is not a constructive use of my time and energy. My personal predisposition is to want to co-operate with my fellow humans with the objective of furthering our mutual interests. To me there is no purpose to be served in contemplating the end of the world. That is not the attitude of a healthy mind.

Kind Regards,

Brian Bloom

From 5/29/08

Jack,

I think there are so many disconnects between what formulas describe and what they’re used for, once you see it, you’ll wonder why we have not noticed the defect in thinking of ‘everything’ in terms of formulas right from the start.  How we’ve made use of formulas has never been to actually follow them.  Their best use is always as learning tools.  That’s how we test them too, but then seem to ignore how critically important the learning process is to making them work. 

Take the problem of sitting at dinner and picking up a glass of water to drink.  We have a ‘formula’ for where the glass should be, at the upper right of the place.  We have to look at the actual environment, though, in which we are attempting to use the formula, to not make a complete mess of the operation as a rule.  The formula does not give you a useful location for the glass, but a useful start to reaching out for it.   Similarly you could ask how it would work to shake someone’s hand if all you had was a statistical representation of where the other person’s hand sould be.  You’d simply never get a good firm handshake out of it even if waving your hand around in the ’statistical phase space’ of your model eventually resulted in your hand bumping into the other person’s hand.

That very traditional relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (i.e. science and engineering) has been traditionally ignored by the theorists it seems…    The theory guys like to think that they were the ‘priests’ of knowledge or something, with invented abstractions being somehow superior to direct learning experience…   The truth seems to be that theory comes from, and is only useful as an extension of, the learning methods of practice, and has no inherent value at all.

The tricky places are where there’s no theory, where nature is inventing whole new ways of behaving that only learning experience will expose at all.  It’s those, along with a practical way of organizing historical data, I’m mostly talking about with my ‘bump on a curve’ model for questions to ask about what’s ‘happening’ in developmental change… (¸¸.•´ ¯ `•.¸¸)   I describe one example as a metaphor for others in the first 3 paragraphs of my main web page.

Does that help?

Best,

Phil Henshaw  

What’s not here yet is your post!    As long as it does not become a burden you can login as ‘guest’ with ‘user’ as the password.  Please only post in the ‘guest’ category, clicking a radio button on the right of the edit window.

Hi folks,

….this week’s global run on credit seems like a casebook example of how a natural system failure to provide growing physical returns on investment would effect financial commitments for growing financial returns. The naturally conflict.

One thing we can do is watch it closely, so others may learn from our experience. Because systemic collapse is a big physical process in a big physical system, displaying all-together new kinds of rapidly spreading behaviors, watch for that. If you see that sort of thing perhaps you’ll ‘believe your eyes and ears’ and not feel the observations were ‘planted’ in your imagination somehow. Remember what things seemed to mean before and after and make note of it.

—
I’ve been using the mismatch between our unlimited economic expectations and their certain disappointment as a way to learn about natural systems, and how they fool us, for about 30 years. It remains a rich and engaging subject. In June I sent out my first ’system collision
warning’ ever, initially in a post to the AIA environment forum. I said I thought the surprise discovery by the ethanol investors in May, that ethanol couldn’t have the land they wanted (to begin the shift of the world economy to carbon neutral energy sources) because milk producers raised the price, signaled the tip of the growth system’s
physical collision with the earth we’ve all been waiting for, ‘the big crunch’. The same kind of ‘fish-tailing’ in the steering mechanisms of the world economy which that appeared to set off in the energy markets also seems clear in the more rapid, large scale, and indecisive maneuvering this week by financial institutions. I read it as signaling the onset of systemic turbulence.

Just because growth expectations are fulfilled, even for hundreds of years, doesn’t mean it’s not certain that natural systems will fail to fulfill them, and so our financial design that requires growth for it’s own stability is a mistake. If this week’s threatened global financial collapse is just a warning, well, then do take it as a warning.

Phil Henshaw
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
explorations: www.synapse9.com

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.  
One categorical divide for the types of inherent internal limits to growth for physical systems uses the two categories, stabilization and failure.   Stabilization results, broadly, from diverting the positive feedbacks before they become disruptive, and failure from not doing so.   Some physical systems have some choice in the matter, and for others it’s pretty automatic.  
If you don’t see the possibility you don’t have the choice, of course, and we’re trained to substitute models for physical systems in our explanations for things, and therefore tend not to see the possibility.  I think learning to be aware of what’s inherently different about physical and theoretical systems takes patient attention to the discrepancies, using theory to guide you to an fresh exploration of the world rather than as a substitute that hides the real world…   Certainly living in theories can be both fun and productive, but it’s also missing some essential things.
I hope it’s not too painful to watch me struggling with the words for this.  Often enough I just get frustrated, but I think this bit may have it fairly straight.   Ring any bells for you?
Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Posted to COTE Forum 1/27/07
 

Jodi,
Well, not compounding your returns has the same sort of Catch 22 that doing great sustainable design and having the profits go to pumping up the world’s appetites does.   You need to build a broader reason fordoing the right thing.   For sustainable design we definitely do still need to learn how to live in a sustainable world, even if we don’t have one, and it has to make business sense.   On the first level we just need to respond to the contradictions involved, rather than avoid them.   Once there’s a critical mass of people who see that finance has to be different in a sustainable world, then you can think of how it’ll work for the community as a whole.   Up until then spending your returns is a leadership choice that puts you at a competitive disadvantage, unless you consider getting real in your own head and having a little extra money to use for steering the world a fairly good trade.   For me it’s a good trade partly because I figure I won’t stop work as long as I’m able because I enjoy it and will probably be able to.   That’s not the case for some people.   
What the effect would be when everyone spends their returns means describing speculative models of economics, and that gets a little unwieldy.   This is the central switch of money, and flipping it would have huge effects.   Reinvesting returns is the primary means of concentrating wealth and power, though it’s a ruse to say the money wouldn’t be used creatively if it was not in their hands.   If that money flow just simply reversed by people making individual choices, money would distribute and lower the bottom of the ladder, flow more to service rather than control.   Surprising change would continue but not be increasingly disruptive, with competition staying high but not continually intensifying, etc.   
Most people click ‘next’ on that sentence where you talk about what happens when the people in charge give up a large part of what puts them in charge. . .   Well, once the people with money, virtually everyone now, realize that the world is a physical place and people can’t handle ever more complicated decisions they’ll consider it.   One option is for people to keep their money invested, but not to multiply, and keep their toys, comforts and fun with their friends, and join everyone else in trying out a new game.   The primary alternative is to push the earth to crisis and have most everyone loose their money and toys, and a lot of the fun with their friends.   The trick as far as I can tell is convincing large numbers of people that we live in a physical world where decision making lag times really matter when your plan is to make bigger decisions ever faster, as sort of the crowning touch on all the other ways we’re undermining our own life supports and the earth. 
A lot of work would have to go into designing where to draw the financial line, but just the principle of spending returns on investment would not interfere with the barter and distribution functions of investment, business or consumer markets.   It would just affect individuals and their choice of whether to use their returns to multiply their returns or use them to express other values.   
It’s also the purpose of growth in living systems to make new living things.   We’d be letting go of the exponential part and allowing our world’s 600 year growth spurt to produce something new and lasting (other than a big mess).   It would give our long history of growth a real purpose.   I hope that satisfies some of your curiosity.   There would definitely be a lot that the institutional people would have to sort through fairly thoroughly, that most individuals only need to understand in principle.   The question is whether the sustainability movement wants to raise the issue, because our creativity is serving mixed purposes and that’s uncomfortable.   We hand out points for lots of other improbable things.   We could invent some points for this too!
Cheers,
Phil
—–Original Message—–
Phil,
There’s something I can start to grasp. . .  and do. 
Tell me more about the investments and how to a) make that happen and b) how that effects long-term personal goals such as retirement and college for your kids.   Right now we are investing and using the profits to further invest in order to have a nest egg for a (hopefully) long and content life.   Do these ideas work together?   
Jodi Smits Anderson
Architect, LEED AP
Collins Scoville Architects, P.  C.     —–Original Message—–
From: Phil Henshaw
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 2:06 PM
To: COTE Forum
Subject: RE: Then what about the schemaic design of sustainability?
Jodi,
Having a better idea of how the functional issue I’m raising is being missed is very helpful.   Thanks for responding.   There’s really no way to know how to answer silence, and anyone’s gut reaction does not need to be carefully reasoned to be helpful for adjusting carefully reasoned views.   To answer what you asked first.   I’ve done quite a bit in the direct development of sustainable design methods, and just living simply.   I’m also an architect detailing a $100M LEED silver building.   I’m also doing the one thing that would make our economic system sustainable, spending all the interest on my investments.   
It’s usually just a phone call, have the returns returned to you so they don’t multiply.   If we don’t do that we won’t be confronting one of the things that guarantees that our world is unsustainable, it’s growth imperative.   I don’t expect designers who know their own business and care about the earth to necessarily also understand the details of how natural feedback systems work.   If you’re working within a system that is veering ever further out of balance, and can’t smell a rat, though, we have no business thinking we can show others how to live on earth.   
If you trace the enormous (to borrow from Ross Perot) ’sucking sound’ you always find surrounding big money, you find it comes from the money practice of using the profit to multiply the investments.   That way they get to have huge piles of money and hire us and our sustainability banner, to serve their purposes.   We should be outraged, but most of us are just so delighted to be highly rewarded for what we love and do best, (hearing it as support for *our* purposes unfortunately) we just ignore what the people paying us are doing with their profits from our work.   They’re smiling very nicely and using the profit to continually multiplying the very appetites we’re trying to tame. 
I’m not sure how I stumbled onto what seems to be a very clear and understanding of this, and still find it very hard to convey.   It has something to do with switching my thinking to be about a physical world rather than an imaginary world.   There’s something in our culture that teaches us to treat the world as if it were imaginary, and to treat our images as if they were an accurate representation of the world.   Images are nice, but. . .   there are things missing. 
Phil
………………………………
Phil,
First, if anyone thought that choosing any particular “track” would lock them into that path forever, no one would make any decision to take any step onto any track.   We are at least starting to see people who think longer term than they ever have before when they build a building or choose a light fixture.   Many people are becoming used to thinking about recycling (at least) when buying all the consumer crap they don’t need.   It may be the wrong track, but it is at least a step toward understanding of the right track.   And we are not locked into any choice (until, of course, it is entirely too late for any choice to matter anymore).   
Second, I really appreciate the discussion that we need to reassess our growth/sprawl/efficiency, etc.   But I also feel that you are preaching to the choir AND denying reality.   We on this list, for the most part, agree a paradigm shift is needed.   There - that part of the conversation can be completed.   The reality is that we cannot convince the entire population of the world to change their goals from continued growth to continued sustainability by swapping words on this limited web list.   
Tell us what you are doing (doing, not saying) to show people the need for this shift and to help them achieve it.   I’ll sign on and set up the same shows/lectures/tours here in Albany to get the word out.   
I’ll beat the drum to the masses and teach them steps to take to improve.   I will not help them decide to never build again - I am an architect and I truly feel that schools and hospitals and libraries are perhaps the necessary evils of growth that I can actually support - and personally need in order to have the career that I love.   
What are you, personally, doing that is working and making a difference.   I guess I’m really American (though I often wish to deny it) in that I am a do-er and need to know what steps I can take.   Show me what to do and I will do it, and by doing it I will teach others to do the same.   
Jodi Smits Anderson
Architect, LEED AP
Collins Scoville Architects, P.  C.  —–Original Message—–
From: Phil Henshaw
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2007 9:32 AM
To: COTE Forum
Subject: Then what about the schematic design of sustainability?
 Say we’re in the schematic design phase of sustainability.   If these early phases are where you get on the right or wrong track, and making corrections later gets ever more impossible, are we on the right track?   Is what we’re doing making the earth sustainable?    What if the schematic design for sustainability included giving points for property investors choosing not to devote their profits to the perpetual growth of profiting from the earth?   Would that address something that’s missing in our formula?   
 –
 Phil Henshaw                    ¸¸¸¸.  •´ ¯ `•.  ¸¸¸¸
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

posted to AIA COTE forum 1/20/07

Steering feedback systems is tricky…