Jessie Henshaw...   on natural systems

(those special machines of nature and how they record their accumulative learning)

- an archive - for new work see SIGNALS or PUBLICATIONS


This page is a little dated, too long to keep up to date or rework, an archive of work going back to 1978, but mostly from the 1990s and 2000s up to 2011, covering the history of my research aimed at finding a practical language for the natural patterns of complex natural organizational growth and change. You might start exploring my old work browsing the intro's below from the Favorite Intros and General Readings, or go to the main Contents of Personal and Research topics, or find a laugh in my collection of "earther" cartoons.  My main physics research from the 80s and 90s is in a large collection of studies called The Physics of Happening. ̶̶̶  Please give credit where normally due.  ̶̶̶   email questions to id+at+synapse9.com

If you're a researcher interested in visiting, to work in my library, I have great collection of books on numerous related fields.    include  eds. 3/22/01 3/9/04,05,06,07,08,09, 1/21/10 1/23 2/6 7/5 11/28 1/14/11 4/11 10/11 06/15 (note other ed. dates indicate revisions of history of paragraphs or sections are)  (P.F. Henshaw is the pen name of Jessie Henshaw) 



 
An "earther" Cartoon Collection..:-)
 

There's unquestionably something wrong with a world society expecting to push the talents of its people and the resources of the earth, our cultural resilience and her ecological resilience,  to absorb regularly multiplying scales of new challenge and change.   It naturally gets out of scale with reality.

It gets out if scale by being a continuation of the path we've been on, but now pushing everyone and everything to create and adapt to ever greater change even as it becomes unmanageable.   So it now increasingly pushes people and cultures to acts of desperation.   It's part of our whole culture, though, and is driven relentlessly by compound investing, the financial principle followed for seeking prosperity everywhere in the world, now escalating the challenges and risks.

 

 

For a fairly simple reason it becomes a trap, because the people leading society don't discover the illogic of it, because they don't feel the illogic of it.   Increasing productivity by leaps and bounds had always been our ideal of "good".   It is perhaps the most unquestioned belief of modern man.  

To have THAT become a serious threat is deeply unexpected.   So only the people who can feel the counter-intuitive changes in the realities, (feel intuitively that the "logic" of the system has become "illogical"), are able to then maintain a motivation to search for the evidence to discover the real root of our emerging conflict with our own ideals.

the root of our emerging conflict ...  with our own ideals.

jlh 12/15/12   From Blog Post

 

 

 

Emotionally proofreading your logical models - a way to look at what this is all about

I've written several short "what this site is about" essays, you'll find in various places elsewhere.  They all attempt to introduce a way to begin studying the eventful lives of the individually organized and behaving systems of nature, our many kinds of animated companions with which we share the environment .    It's naturally quite hard to understand what's happening inside a visibly eventful social group, for example, though we may be intensely aware of its presence.   That also applies to much of the eventfulness of history in general, that life is a place where "things happen" and often for relatively invisible and apparently local causes.   Any natural system is defined by its own internal loops of relationships, is a way to state that as a problem, so for an observer, the working parts of any animated system start off being largely invisible.    From 6/29/12 Blog Post

One very powerful technique for probing the organization of eventful and self-organizing cultural or economic systems is one I've rarely mentioned.    Maybe it's the one I should lead with, though.   It's a way of using your two natural modes of thought, intuitive and rational, to "proof read" each other's work.  It allows your feelings to read and inform your reasoning and vis-a-vis.

The effect of learning how to do that is to create "theories with feelings", and "feelings that make sense",  something that is some individuals achieve on their own, but is rarely if ever taught as a practical technique.  It's very valuable for connecting your naturally "reductionist" explanatory thinking with your "holistic" intuitive and experiential thinking.

Finding the emotional content in our logic driven world and the logical content in our feelings

It helps overcome the problem that explanations are powerful tools but completely lack the responsiveness to their environments that intuitive feelings about things bring out.  Similarly, emotional realizations maybe responsive to vastly complex sets of relationships, but it's rare that people can derive their more practically useful logical elements, what I sometimes call "cybernetic body parts" that I look for to use in explanatory models of self-organizing systems.

A business plan to use its profits to create ever more profitable businesses, the "universal" business plan in our economy, describes a logical model for an exceedingly complex interaction with an environment that is missing from the model.   To use your intuitive "right brain" awareness of  real world experience to better understand the "left brain" model, you might think of business investment as planting seeds for growing more seeds to plant.

That adds to the seemingly isolated abstract model, use money to make money, a door to your rich personal awareness of changing relationships and life experiences related to the planting of things to grow.  It opens up the complex issues of both  their success in and responses from the host culture in which they are planted.

Business investment is more than just planting seeds to then harvest a crop of seeds, generating a surplus, like farming.  In creating businesses and the communities dependent on them, it's more like giving birth to new long lived organisms, so perhaps more like parenting than like farming.  In either case, the natural "stewardship" issues regarding the host ecology and the niche being used within it are simply missing from the financial business plan.

Both farming and parenting work in relation to their host somewhat like getting some fertile host pregnant, planting something to grow in it, to tap its fruitfulness.  When considerded as either parenting or farming, ancient experience readily tells us that just getting the host ever more pregnant is not a workable plan.

That unworkable plan the logical model offers, though, represents itself as your quick route to ever expanding self-importance.   Any teenager can tell you it's as much a suicide mission for your future as anything else.   Many times people just are not in a position to ask those kinds of questions, and will just never "put two and two together", particularly when questioning the relatively blind choices they make that seem to be most fulfilling.

Maybe it's one's ability to trust oneself to at least be an honest broker for one's self, that allows the two sides of your mind to prompt each other to ask the appropriate but sensitive personal questions the other is blind to.   Letting your feelings poke at the blind spots in your reasoning or your reasoning poke at the blind spots in your feelings is a lot easier to take than from someone, anyone, else.

Other levels of compassion, empathy, observation and reasoning are needed too, to emotionally support yourself or others when discovering blind spots have led to grave errors and so grave disappointments, and the need to find some silver lining for relief. For the standard business plan, the dark side of that blind spot is realizing that what may a person's very most fulfilling life experience has been, or is rapidly becoming, much more like a cancer of the generosity of their host than a celebration.

The silver lining for that one is easy to point to, and if taken to heart tends to be "the best is yet to come", as a distinct reality.   When we open up to our wider experience of life it's that moment when we stop being self-involved and discover how to be responsive to the larger world around us that is essentially the beginning of life.

That's readily observable in nature, for organisms, communities and cultures of all kinds which have long productive lives after their end of growth.   It's generlly clear in hindsight that those long fulfilling lives, creating and exercising their own discovered roles as participants in their host environment, are far more important than the brief explosive and formative beginning of life in their initial growth.

You don't normally get those sorts of insights into your the wider relationships actually implied by the bare bones business model.   Our whole world economy is organized around that elemental financial business model, without any apparent awareness of the complex wider relationships that come with it.

It seems you only get an awareness of what a logical plan really means in your life if you have some mental technique for putting the logical model into an emotionally meaningful context.

 

The scientific subject here is
A verifiable method for finding information missing from our theories
.
( & discovering the fascinating details of how real relationships truly develop & change)

In a phrase, what's always missing from our theories is how nature puts together the continuity of change*.    That is verified by following pointers to apparent gaps in our information that nature must somehow be connecting, and successfully finding what's missing.    It's often no more complex than asking when things started and when they'll finish, maybe beginning with observing complex events occurring with remarkable simplicity, like growth.

*except the other reason... the real difficulty people have distinguishing between our cultural realities that explain things to us and anything physically independent of them... seeing our beliefs as stories of our own design that are often missing the best parts of the real stories of nature is part of what looking for the missing continuities of change helps expose.

As things change from "small" to "big" the whole way they can change changes.  It changes their form both internally and externally...
Rather oddly, science doesn't generally recognize that most obvious of "natural laws of change" because the subjects of science must all be defined and so only concern "data".  Natural change concerns subjects of the physical world that had not previously been possible to define (SEA).  
This conceptual "can't get there from here" problem begins a quite long search for how to "wrap one's mind around" the odd true relation between the reality we each we create for ourselves as what we "see" in our minds, consciousness, and the reality of nature we are looking at as we make up our own. 10/17/11

The mysterious source of the designs of natural systems

seems to have at least been located, and found in the accumulative organization created by their active parts,
that leave the arrangement of their inactive parts behind as the design. 

That seems to be the "genetic code" of spontaneous self-organization.   So, what amounts learning by the parts of systems that manage themselves, is what shapes the self-managing communities of nature, including organisms and economies of many kinds. 

This observation, well enough confirmed, rather conflicts with the common model of modern science, though.   That traditional approach treats the designs of nature as the rules that science finds in the organization of the inactive parts, or just equations approximating their measures, overlooking the accumulative learning of their communities of active parts that created and continue to alter the arrangement. 

They wouldn't fit an equation.   The active parts of nature have been represented, instead, as the mathematical operators of our equations, as being determined by the design rather than as the source of the design.   That's seems to be why science makes it look like everything can be controlled.  The approach doesn't fit the observed natural world, but joining the two views is a real challenge.   Help or relevant references of any kind would be appreciated.

Effectively omitting the self-managing systems of society and nature from our management plan for the earth, and their active learning as the "glue" that shapes and binds their parts, creates extreme contradictions in the plan.    So, traditional rules are in deeper question than one would expect. 

It's reading nature's signals to see what our learning systems are learning,..  about how they are finding to use our world, is what will tell us, how to survive in community with them as our partners.

 

Complexity - (in natural systems seen working as a whole)

 

accumulating complementary relationships allowing them to work simply, or to fail.   

To see the organization of natural systems takes effort, closely watching how nature does it, carefully watching for how things can be identified as working as a whole and changing as a whole.  A culture or economy internally communicates how all its members change their behavior at once, for example.    A building is built as a collection of complementary parts that work as a whole, and are completed as a whole by "finishing touches", as are business presentations, or the preparations for dinner.  They're all examples of natural self-organization, by a process of finding and fitting parts together, in phases, starting from a beginning and leading to a completion.    It's the complementarities of new parts for the existing arrangements that becomes a method of self-assembly.   Developing systems work by accumulatively linking their complementary shapes and functions; wastes to resources, liquids caught by cups, savings to investments, etc., building on the kinds of opposites that connect for the whole, like the growth of organisms too.  

Change over time in natural systems occurs everywhere at once, which does not confuse nature in the least.   That it often occurs in observably organized ways, like following smooth "growth curves" is remarkable, and a useful tool for discovering the common origin and its temporary systematic processes being exhibited.    It seems inexplicable.   One of the most useful things to discover is what parts it really are inherently inexplicable, having to do with behaviors naturally hidden from view.   It means that predicting how they'll behave necessitates watching how they behave.  

Studying the rich complexity of nature's most beautiful processes also enriches your appreciation of life.  The economic value is more for having early warnings of change in the natural organization of things, letting you adapt your models and expectations, and helps fill other important gaps in your information.    (continued5/12/2010, 5/22

Science hasn't studied what animates individual systems, as they assemble their own complex processes.    Equations represent nature as the predictions we can make.   However useful that describes the world as a lot of inanimate objects in controlled relationships, only animated by our own laws and equations of prediction, made to seem deterministic for our own purpose in describing what we are able to determine. continued

Deep Change in Reality  - The Reversing Productivity of Productivity...

How improving productivity always reliably made thing cheaper and easier to do, is ending.   It naturally ends as any direction of progress does, if taken to its limit.   Now we see our "productivities" coming into costly conflict with each other and the environment, making everything more costly and complicated, the exact opposite of what we expect.   It reverses an expectation humans have had for how to solve problems that appears to be much older than recorded history, as all of human evolution is a record of great leaps of increasing productivity, using less to get more.   Becoming productive in cooperating with our environment rather than conquering it, no longer "productive", is a very big change in thinking for us.

Continuing our old model of "productivity" would make economies completely unworkable, so very costly to operate that they would become unprofitable, and have to cease working.    We're seeing a large scale version of how many ancient skilled "problem solving" societies of the past created problems for themselves they couldn't solve and environments that would no longer support them.  

Even "downsizing" is hazardous, as economies develop by accumulative design (growth) and so "the new" frequently relies structurally on not changing the old.   A growth system's design becomes a barrier to its own radical reorganization, causing decline to result in shedding whole formerly integrated sectors at a time, and so "growing together" but slimming down by "breaking apart", growth as "lifting all boats" to become "musical chairs" as the natural response to pushing the limits.  

That using productivity to grow the economy would at a point rapidly reverse it's value to the economy, has been clearly visible approaching for more than a century now.   It can also help us turn our attention to the right subjects.   #1 Sustainability Issue Today... 

For philosophers, it points to a fascinating case of a Type III error, trusting the wrong model and accepting the wrong questions it keeps giving us. For philosophers, it points to a fascinating case of a Type III error, trusting the wrong model and accepting the wrong questions it keeps giving us. We have been treating nature as the models we make from the information we collect. We haven't been watching, for changes in how the systems of our environment naturally work by themselves. So it has left us "in the dark" just because natural systems that work by themselves also change by themselves, not reporting to us how.    [posted on RNS 1/24/12]

 

 

 

 


Contents

 

(Prior to work at the UN contributing to a commons approach, 2012-14,
and prior to taking a pattern language approach 2015)

_____________

Short Introductory Essays

Short Subjects

Life

 

Research Discussion

 

The Top Sustainability Issue in the World Today

 

.... That all the world expects our footprint to get
smaller by expanding it more efficiently...

Scientific Theory & Methods

Physics of Natural Open Systems

Reference

 

 

   


___________________________

 

bio

2014

 

- Two Important Earlier Papers  -
 

1.  Models Learning Change Mar 2010
- systems physics for anticipating limits & costs of delayed response -

Nature remarkably gives each organism "its own mind", so their learning and responses count as much or more for their success than the forces imposed on them.   This graph shows 5 choices for when to respond to an approaching natural limit.   Given a natural "learning rate" for how to respond, when to respond becomes very important.  That's like timing when to start an easy turn when driving or canoeing.  The craft's ability to turn is critical to estimate as it "learns" a new direction, or else the turn will be too sharp to manage.  The success of natural growth systems or human relationships, businesses, or economies all require responding to the approach of limits to growth, in time for the system to comfortably adapt and reach them a peak of vitality, rather than at a peak of exhaustion.   ...


(click to enlarge)

The principle is rather simple, though the discussion in the research paper is a bit complex, sorry. Once you learn that your real learning task is to watch your own environment to notice when and how timely responses to approaching change really matter.

Delayed response to approaching natural limits risks exhausting your options and losing control, just like delayed response in turning a corner when driving.   In home economic terms, growth is like nature being pregnant and giving birth to a new living thing, that will need care to survive.  So endless growth as a plan, asks nature to exhaust herself giving birth, and abandon us with no budget for a home or child care.

 

2. Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) Nov 2011
- how to count your responsibility for untraceable energy uses -

The self-managing services we employ when paying for both consumer goods and services and to operate businesses, are statistically hidden from view.  They don't report how they work, and so there is no data to use for them to include in counting up the energy demands of business and purchases as environmental costs.   It turns out the energy uses hidden from view, for lack of data on them, are commonly 80% of verifiable totals, and have been left out of the study of how economies can be made sustainable.   Among many other problems, for example, the impacts of the (self-managing) services paid for that have ever growing energy demands, are not considered in making models of business sustainability. 

   
 Tweets - Shoudaknown -

@politifact re:#FLdebate You might fact check if any of them showed an understand of why the economy is not behaving as anyone expects? 1/24/2012

@politifact Why the economy doesn't behave as expected includes how crazy what we expect is, that it should grow forever with no difficulty. 1/24/2012

@politifact An odder belief is I=PAT, that technology efficiency that first multiplied impacts will reverse them too! synapse9.com/home.htm#ish1 1/24/2012

See Archive for others

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
© 1995-2012 reproduction, review and quotation encouraged with attribution.  

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Try just browsing for something interesting, there are lots of starting places...

Please do ask questions about things that are not clear.   I apparently switch perspectives sometimes, without giving readers warning.   I'd like to know were I should have inserted a footnote to explain.    Like the "six wise men and the elephant",  I may imagine you see the whole when I jump around referring to various seemingly unconnected parts.

 If some one said "Local systems explore their environments for opportunities and develop individual organization and behavior"   would you guess it meant a) natural systems all have conscious thoughts??... b) they are ruled by spirits??...
or c) they develop and respond individually along natural local paths? ...
                                


Short General Introductions


What's so different here?   ~3/28/09

Systems Theory is not really the subject...  but rediscovering a lost art of observation

Science is all about observation, of course, but almost exclusively focused on observations about how things of the physical world are externally controlled, using controlled experiments, for example.

The problem with that, of course, is that it makes learning how to observe the things of our world that choose their own paths, and are significantly self-controlled, into a lost art. 

I say "lost art" because our common languages are filled with terms for how people, our cultures and communities, and other kinds of organisms of all sorts of nature actively explore and steer their own paths in their worlds.   After you learn to look for it you find it's a fairly common property of natural systems.  For centuries it has been represented as something that happens nowhere in nature except in the minds of the one self-conscious species.  That's just a bit of an exaggeration.    It takes effort and a playful approach to demystify it, but it's just a wonderful lost art in the end. 1/8/10

It's not even "science" in a way, as science is a theory of how nature is controlled
and this is about how to explore the uncontrolled systems in nature.  
Learning is an uncontrolled system, for example, both for us and for nature.

It's learning about the real mysteries of how ordinary things work using observation to help find better questions about them.
(aided by some innovative physics and systems theory)

Understanding what problems are unsolvable solves amazing problems is part of it.
Studying the flows of change exposes distinctly temporary systems, pointing to what cannot continue.
Foresight then comes from asking the hard questions about what will upset them and how they will change.
 
Then you can far better predict their tipping points, as their fortunes change by changing their own environments,
to discover the unusual richly beautiful worlds of accumulating and upsetting local designs
 in the spaces "between the laws of averages"
where individuality develops.

It's a way to learn about how what persists in nature develops from what is temporary
 as complex natural relationships develop,
finding their complementary connections.
Perhaps that lets you become part of and make much better responses to them
during an age of stumbling over ever bigger mistakes,
trusting failed habits of the past and bad advice,
Finally catching up on the loads of "back home work" on the story of life
we never turned in when we were younger.

Information actually controls nothing but our predictions, but it's become popular to redefine nature as being what we can predict.
What leads you to understanding something
about the worlds of nature we completely rely on taking care of themselves,
is not prediction however, but using the same information to help you ask better questions
about what must remain unexplained.
~3/28/09


8/30/10 This site and my own explorations are about switching one's orientation toward reality.  It starts with recognizing our common habits of explaining things use images we fabricate in our minds to substitute for the real subjects of the world, a kind of short circuiting.  The alternative is to use our images to help show us where reality is different from our mental picture.   That orients you to being an explorer of the real thing beyond what you can imagine.    It's "counter intuitive" in our culture to consider physical reality to be what we find beyond explanation, but other than being quite factual, the benefit is that there is so very much of it otherwise going neglected.  

Science has mostly taken the opposite approach, though, trying to find the features of the world that could be turned into rules of explanation, often explicitly claiming that by explaining more and more we'd eventually explain everything.    It becomes a truly false objective, to consistently avoid studying the things beyond explanation, like how natural systems work with so many individually uncontrolled learning and evolving parts.   Needing rules for things means neglecting to study how things take care of themselves, one of the most notable features of nature.   The sure sign of the gap is that the universal process by which organized systems develop, growth, is not a recognized subject of physical science, and evidence of an extreme blind spot.   That growth is an environmental learning process seems to be why deterministic science has neglected studying it.  

So, it takes a real admission of a kind, just to study what we naturally can't explain about the world.   It means admitting that conscious explanations or "knowledge" is a kind of fiction that leaves out more than it explains in practical fact.  Our explanations themselves are all human inventions, and they don't match the physical reality very well when you check.    It implies that physical reality is located primarily in what we don't understand, and in what we find inexplicable about the world.   It seems to suggest knowledge in general would be much more valuable if treated as questions rather than conclusions, and that may be our mistake...  


2/12/10 Appreciating how uncontrolled systems make up their own rules as they go is about closely watching them, identifying large and small cells of climate and economic processes and personal or ecological relationships as they develop and change form, like storms, technologies and our friendship circles and the balances of nature around us.    There are their tipping points, approaching dead ends and emerging new forms to identify.    What usually marks their irreversible change, as opposed to incidental change, are the patterns of successively bigger or smaller steps of change.  Those are what indicate developing or dissipating environmental systems, the enduring structures of nature.

One develops mental models of them, but mostly as questions about what's changing on its own.   It would help scientists to see what complex systems in an environment might be modeled, too, and when the real system has or is about to change form and models of it will need to be changed.    It's about raising better questions, considering natural systems as changing by accumulating new features as information in their physical designs, as organizational learning processes themselves, made possible by watching their conserved change accumulate .   How to tell the ones that are persistent and for which organizational change is strictly accumulative and permanent is one of the important steps. 

Considering natural systems as processes of accumulating organization engaged in learning about their environments allows you to view them as controlled by how they explore their environments and what they discover, instead of as controlled an observer's rules of prediction.   A mouse explores its environment its way, to find food.   A business explores its environment its way, to discover markets.  A teenager does to find who there is to hang out with.   Each is forms a network regular connections, the environmental relationship itself, that serves as a platform for finding new ones, establishing a presence in the environment and a way of growing and responding to growth limits.    Sometimes an observer can see what they are about to discover, letting them anticipate what to do then.   The same stages of development and variety of outcomes for new personal relationships can be seen in the life story of more complex environmental systems like businesses or cultures.

Such new networks of environmental relationships are "special machines", things that change form as they find room to take off, and change form again when they run out of room.  That's their growth phase and maturation phase for systems that will persist beyond their own initial growth.    Normal models and theories fail to suggest how such natural systems continually change as they interact with their changing environments.   Natural systems have distributed parts, and tend to change everywhere at once, often in seemingly coordinated ways and without controls.   Sometimes they just "go zoom" in some fantastically orchestrated way, for no apparent outside cause at all.   They're individually "eventful".  Their biggest changes in form come when they discover something and take off, and then when their limits trigger them to either stabilize or run down.   "Simple machines" don't do those sorts of things.    "Simple machines" is all people and theory can define, though.   So this is about getting "simple machines" to point at nature's "special machines", as better questions about them, helping an observer to see their features and learn to tell when they're changing.

One thing that points to them is their succession of progressive development trends, and reading them as narratives of their organizational processes.   Identifying a local development trend lets you associate it with everything working together as a whole to produce it, to recognize what's happening in total, and as changes progress from one direction of development to another.  It's whole system learning from beginning to end.   So there's the art of observation and the general approach and other topics  The rigorous scientific "hook" making it a new scientific method is building the narrative around the sequence of developments required  by the conservation of energy for the physical continuity of energy flows.   The form of the narrative is derived from the Law of Continuity, which opens up a useful new approach to general physics of change, consistent with thermodynamics but not with some of its more common interpretations.    Other physicists are still generally hesitant.   The problem is how to treat scientific information, whether as well defined representations of nature or also for referring to physical things we can't define.    It's a mysterious philosophical conundrum, with a long history.   Learning to separately discuss physical realities we can only point to, not confusing them with the information we point with...  looks like the trick.   

One interesting question today is how to truthfully explain, like "outgrowing our britches", why humans chose to out grow our freedom on the earth, to maximize our constraint from environmental conflict with the earth and each other.   If the physical measures show that 50 or more years ago there was a turning point toward growing constraint and conflicts, as everyone took ever more space, material and control of everything else,  why do we still act as if everyone taking more space, materials and control over everything else is the solution?   -  It would be good to answer that.   It seems we're following that path like a machine, or as if we were sleep walking, not as would conscious humans. 1/23/10 2/6
Another question, from a very old version "Does all change Evolve?" also takes you to the bottom of this long document so, if you like, you can then scroll up instead. 3/22/01

Please do ask if things are not clear.   If I say things that seem to conflict with your beliefs, ask why I might suggest it, or if I was just misspeaking for your way or reading it.   Sometimes I'm trying to suggest a range of possibilities, sometimes I'm omitting something that should have been mentioned.   Let me know.   We definitely have a lot to sort out in many ways.


The problem with systems

....4/10/09 05/20 6/17 7/9 is that people don't recognize the vastly complex natural machines by which the world works.   Natural systems don't operate by our explanations, and how they do operate is as yet quite inexplicable to us.    Natural systems arise from their environments by local development, which is one inexplicable thing about them, and operate without instructions or controls, using processes occurring differently everywhere at once.    "Seeing" things is to make sense of them, so No Wonder we don't see them!   We can begin to though.   It takes learning some strategic ways of reading beyond your information, and discover the implied processes of sweeping change we are caught up in.   The key to foresight with them is recognizing the kinds of progressions that end by upsetting the regularities they display (growth | integration | disintegration | decay), so you can learn to watch them to learn about change in natural system relationships has or is about to happen.    It's another way to read the fingerprints of nature's transformations.     Traditional scientific theory is mainly used to build predictable models that interpret nature's stable behaviors of the past, not to read nature's instabilities for clues to her changing complex organized forms.   

Mathematical models are not prone to change by local developmental processes as natural systems do, though, and don't offer a way to explain things that change in different ways everywhere at once either.    What this approach does is raise questions about when and how individual systems will change their behavior in the future and lead to discovering the new models that will be necessary to make new sense of them.   It's "raw science" not "finished science", for beginning or advanced research into any subject of change.    It's also a way to open our minds and learn how to follow nature's actual processes, rather than just follow the kinds of simple (and lifeless) explanations for them our thinking can build and make sense of, and maybe... let us end our clumsy effort to control nature by attempting to make her follow our explanations too.   There's lots of things you can follow and understand, that you can't really explain, and that's often enough to show how to adapt to or avoid them.

A useful theory of environmental systems isn't about answers, but pointing to where you should look to find them, only hinting enough at the answer you'll find there to begin the search.    Where this approach began was with noticing odd things like how all experiments misbehave a little, and how economies are designed to let everyone put money into the common pot, to then take ever more out, with no end in sight...    Along the way it takes discovering how to identify whole systems by connecting all the dots that grow together, like all the cells in a body and all the local features of the environmental niche it grows in and builds around itself.

People often respond "I don't understand", but that is neither a question, nor an answer.   Just add "yet" if you don't see how to proceed.  Your questions about your environment are needed for this to work.   The best source of "connected dots" is not your theory, but noticing developing change as it happens.   That is invariably a sign of a whole network of developing relationships.    Try asking "where did things start" and "how are they going".   Ask "what's happening" and by "looking around" at everything your issue touches learn to see it as a whole.   Ask "where are the flows" or the "eruptions of change" that connect things.    Natural systems doesn't make our kind of sense, true, so we need to learn theirs.   If you get stuck break your thought pattern, try flipping a question around, to ask it in some entertaining backwards way, perhaps, then retrace.    The story here is about an exploratory physics of uncontrolled systems that any field or level of interest could make use of, discovering how to discover the naturally developing environmental relationships all around us.   It's about "the track" that people often refer to with phrases like their life or work being "on track" or the country going "off track".   This approach lets you ask "whose track" and "what track".    It allows open minded explorers to enrich their view and knowledge of the locally developing features of changing environments.       

Natural environmental systems generally have "variable organization".  Nature's physical systems are simply not sets of fixed rules, though having theoretical rules can help you make guesses, see what is behaving differently, and explore it.    Physical systems develop from the collective behavior of independently acting and adapting parts.  They come to act together as a whole through by all acting opportunistically in complementary ways, with "the system" as their special environment.    Organisms are that kind of special environment for their cells, as cultures are for their populations, storms are for their individual currents, and technologies are for their many closely fitting complementary parts.   What's good for the horseshoe is good for the horse...    All have that same basic organic design, lots of independently different parts working in concert.   You can recognize these wholes, and explore their internal relationships, using questions raised by watching their individual stages of developmental change.   Tracking things with any regular measure that reflects the whole will do, energy, money, size or resources, displaying the basic turning points of a life and hinting at others.   

Natural systems are illusive too, because people have some bad mental habits.   The most frequent is ask the wrong questions by confusing our mental images and related cultural issues with the physical world of environments.   They're mostly all but totally different and unrelated.    The problem comes from tending to mistake our own information for the physical thing referred to.    A first step in "learning how to think" then, might be to study how to separate what you "see" from what you're "looking at".  One of those is in your mind and the other isn't, one built of your values and intuitions the other physical interactions.   Becoming aware of the chains of connection in an environment is by recognizing that regularly accumulating physical changes are not in your mind, and do not need any explanation to be connected to each other somehow.   Then discover that they have continuities that identify them as parts of natural processes you couldn't possibly have dreamed up.   You slowly learn to confidently point to them, and discover why it's never possible to define them.    When you look inside a living organism you can never find what makes it alive, for example.   That's mysterious because living things are distributed systems of independently acting parts, and most of the "real action" at any moment is guaranteed to be somewhere other than where you look!    

If that makes you say "cool!", you're on your way.   Otherwise, "look around", something will surprise you.    One hazard of using scientific models for representing natural systems composed of independently learning and responding parts like environments and economies have,  is that models have no independently learning and responding parts.   They are built using variables representing measurements of categories connected in fixed equations.    As such they don't contain any representation of the real working parts of their own subject matter.   This means that scientific models make particularly ineffective operating instruction manuals.   They may be good at predicting but are not designed for steering.    It never mattered much before, when environmental science was mostly just descriptive, but now that we have to run things we find all our "operating manuals" are untested.    Even economic theory was used largely for explanations rather than operating instructions, and never had to actually work before.    Now that we have to start thinking of using scientific models to steer all kinds of local and global environmental systems through their collisions with each other, the issue of whether systems of independently behaving parts can be controlled like our models of them matters a great deal.     My approach uses a model of simple scientific questions anyone could ask, rather than predictions, presented as if anyone could be doing their own original scientific research, directly observing their own environment, relationships and experiences.  

The basic question is "What can you know for sure when you don't know very much?", and finding that the answer to that becomes a better leading question.   Where it leads is to questions arising from the classic story line, "the beginning to end", and digging up the unique threads to be found along anything's path of "magical levitation" that sustains it and it's relationships.   So this approach creates a story written in anyone's own language, knit together with some simple principles of continuity in change, for use in discovering your own questions about things changing around you.   Sometimes it reveals surprising and helpful realities that have been 'hidden in sight', like the link between rules and environments, and how they reflect local systems of relationships.   The key is learning to connect the continuity of irreversible changes in scale with resulting changes in kind with the stages of natural development.   They help you see what kind of change to look for having occurred in the past, and is sure to be coming.  

1. Growth,                  3. Stability,             5. Decay.   
   2. Integration,                   4. Disintegration,

0 Initiation 123456 Termination

 




The top sustainability issue in the world today
Efficiency is being used for sustaining growth not the earth,
Popular attention is being diverted from the real moral and practical issues,
...how to end the need for growth.

The problem with our concept of I = P • A • T is that it's really I = P • A • T• S

a linear equation missing the hidden 'S' for productivity STIMULUS, the main purpose people use efficiencies for

making P • A = f (T, E) reflecting

how People use Technology to consume Environment for making Affluence and more People

 

9/2/10 The curves at the left demonstrate the oddly ignored 150 year old observation of Stanley Jevons, that improving efficiency results in accelerating resource use.   He first noticed it in how improving efficiency for steam engines used up coal faster.   The problem is we mostly use efficiencies to simplify our tasks and so make resource use more profitable, to become more affluent.   The "secret" of how it works is that the particular efficiencies we choose to invest in are the very ones that for a small cost have the effect of simplifying a whole system of parts, often with improved technology.   That causes an increased productivity of the whole greater than the decreased needs of the more efficient part.   That's called growth, the redesign of production systems so they can use and consume more.    To achieve the opposite effect and be responsive to our strains on the environment we'd need to bring growth to an end, rather than accelerate it with more efficiency...   We've let ourselves be misled, in part, and stumbled into a natural misunderstanding much like early doctors who applied leaches to remove a patient's "bad blood".   By believing that sort of myth for too long we're now slipping into grave danger of creating  development we'll soon be unable to either maintain or replace, and a physical system bankruptcy of a lasting kind.  (...continued.)

Talk outline,     Draft paper "Stimulus as Constraint"

 


 

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."   Martin Luther King Jr.

Those able to see these errors need to be employed in helping guide the change.  We need to fix this, and other fatal errors still part of our thinking.     please help  

Lists of other top  systems theory issues  and  sustainability issues  - synapse9.com

Some quite simple answers for complex problems... (by finding  the right question) 11/13/10

Economics What kind of balance sheet does business need?   Many economists like Herman Daly and Graciela Chichilnisky have noted that
Energy

How business energy use is counted misses ~80% of the energy being used.   Curiously what's counted is energy uses for which there are traceable receipts, and the ancient habit is to ignore the untraceable energy uses for business costs that don't provide energy receipts.   The true scale is found by assuming the average amount of untraceable energy will be about the average global energy use per dollar,... presto... the missing 80%.   It's remarkable, and it does check out!   It means revising worldwide impact assessment methods, like for CO2, rethinking where our impacts come from, and making quite different energy choices as we see the more accurate picture of what produces our energy problem!   -- DollarShadow notes  Whole system energy measurement

Wealth

Free market economies can reduce our burden on the earth by following the natural succession from quantitative to qualitative growth.   To change from doing more to do it better and better follows the example of other natural systems that end growth at a peak of vitality rather than a peak of exhaustion.  Our doing that involves changing the use of profits from multiplying the scale of business to improving the quality of our relationships with nature and each other.   The intellectually interesting part, first noticed by Keynes, is that nature actually provides no other option.   For individuals, the natural limit to growth would otherwise be the speed at which they can keep up with making ever more complex and conflicted decisions.   What we need to see quickly is the need to give it the attention now so it gets done right.    -- Natural Economies essay  Search this site for other links to it

A Complex World

Escaping old assumptions... in a changing world   Traditional ideologies that work well can efficiently organize a society, but become dangerous traps when they stop working.   To escape one has to learn to trust your own observation again, recognizing conflicting evidence without judging it until you put the pieces together.  The important new observations won't make sense in the old social and cultural language...   Growth is supposed to solve all problems, for example, not multiply them.  So following the old beliefs, our society acts as if problems caused by growth like climate change, can be solved by more growth.   Money has to multiply, but the earth can't, is a good observation to make.   Find the meaning later when you can.   We live in a world becoming numbingly complex for everyone is another Too Complex to keep track  Wandering Minds  Models Learning Change

How to slow it down

Resource efficiency improves cost and availability... accelerating uses and depletion.   It's actually a 150 year old and very easily confirmed observation that economic growth and resource use are accelerated by people adopting productive efficiencies.  That theory fit's the observation.    Sustainability policy blindly and tragically ignores the main stimulus effect of productive efficiency.    As the economy actually works, the ratio of stimulus to reduction is 2.5:1, a world average effect for saving of 1 gal. of gas of creating new uses consuming 2.5 gal. -- #1 issue in sustainability,   "Stimulus for Constraint"

Impacts on the earth = Population  Affluence • Technology costs  Stimulus (effect of improved technique)  

• • • • better questions don't end the task of finding what to do, but give you a more solid place to begin • • • •

 




 

 

What are Natural Complex Systems? 

__________

 Particle, Atom, Molecule, Organelle, Cell, Organ, Body,

Community, Economy,  Population,

Ecology, Life, Planet, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe


The Continuities of nature arise with the local development of

Multi-scale Networks of physical relationships 

Acting as a Cell with an internal Medium of Exchange

And local Marketplace to internally Link its Hubs,

Which are themselves smaller scale networks containing their own Hives of activity

Surrounding their own Mediums of Exchange,

Cells on their own scale. that develop regularities as "Local Laws" of "Their Nature",

Small Universes with original design and behavior,

Linked together by sharing mediums of exchange with others, as part of larger scale networks,

Whole Physical Economies composed of independently behaving parts,

That we may refer to as features of our information. 

 

Complex systems work by themselves, sometimes predictable, but determined by how their processes develop locally.  There are two realities, the physical world and our mental world of human ideas, to be taken as dance partners rather than as enemies, denying neither their freedom, and avoiding the denial that is major trouble for both.  At the scale of growth systems, at least, natural systems  require diversity in their constituent parts and reserves of resources in their environments.   Those that grow also come to require stability.  Their creative hearts are the hives of network activity that form their cells, like the village that creates the reason for a train stop and the reason for the roads leading there.  Those hives of activity on any scale are where creative events develop to propagate like seed on the larger network scales, the process of emerging features that for a whole system "punctuates the equilibrium".     

 

Bob Ulanowicz has  recently published a theorem on the need for diversity in natural systems (1) concluding "all complex systems, including our monetary and financial one, become structurally instable whenever efficiency is overemphasized at the expense of diversity and interconnectivity".   What drives systems to overspecialize, though, and develop their strengths until they become weaknesses, is a broader issue.    An example of this I’ve been studying is why people advocating sustainability are attracted to using efficiency as a growth resource, though that ultimately creates instability as its end.  It appears that it used to have the opposite effect, and we got used to that.   When we were small and the earth was big, growth stimulated by efficiency used to make resources more plentiful and cheaper.   The economic theory of the last two centuries, then, built up around that assumption.   Now the opposite is true, growth makes resources more scarce and expensive.    If you look at the ‘green’ literature, these days, you find that fatal solution for sustainability (sadly...) is really all people talk about…

 

There are perhaps many misconceptions that lead our society to reduce diversity, for profit, till systems become unstable.  I once devised a general solution to the monetary part of the problem I called “general allocation theory”.   I found it hard to discuss with people.   The barrier seemed to be the need to discuss economic systems as individual organisms of a sort, "creatura" as Gregory Bateson would have called them, like self-organizing social or business networks as well weather systems and organisms, each with their own individual behaviors.   The still dominant "paradigm" of nature for science is that there are no independent systems, and everything that happens is determined by it's environment and error, so writing other better versions of that and other papers also received the same total lack of interest.   The preference is for representing systems with a set of rules of control.   

 

The natural systems approach is radically different in that systems are considered as individual self-organizations that originate by growth and development, and are full of different scales of independent internal activity, like what we observe.    Links on a network, for example, exist to connect these ‘hives’ of complex system activity, like the road and rail networks that connect homes, towns and cities, or the blood stream branches that connect cells and organs.   In economies there are the supply and product chains feeding into goods and service markets that link the individual hives of activity that individual businesses are.   It's a really good "telescope", something you can reliably find your way with, providing a great way to begin making sense of natural systems by looking for their mediums of exchange of different scale, through which their hives of organization connect.

 

1) Quantifying sustainability: Resilience, efficiency and the return of information theory 
Ulanowicz, R.E. / Goerner, S.J. / Lietaer, B. / Gomez, R. , Ecological Complexity, 6 (1), p.27-36, Mar 2009 
 

   2/7/09 2/12 jlh   



Physics of Natural Open Systems *def note           0 1 2 3  4 56

The space between the deterministic laws where nature develops animated systems
Explanatory principles
, for locating and exploring their design and behavior, 
and a way
to unify the languages of science around the natural world subjects they address in common

The problem of understanding natural systems is that they observably change organization and behave by smoothly flowing processes, which are seen changing everywhere at once all the time to do it...    That's not like an equation.    I found a very productive new kind of diagnostic physics for monitoring their organizational development processes, greatly aided by finding them to normally develop as locally evolving autonomous networks.  The great advantage of the approach is that it allows me to separately study nature's own complex processes and the theories we need to help us predict and characterize them.   Recognizing those differences is the source of the most productive questions that method generates.

Understanding comes from studying them as whole internalized networks of relationships, much as if individual organisms with energy resource throughputs.   They exhibit periods of stable organizational development that go through a natural succession of changing types, typically producing inflection points in the empirical curves reflecting measures of their processes where they transition.   That way the method builds on a combination of basic principles of mathematical continuity, the physics of energy conservation and empirical study of the natural successions of organizational development processes.  ed 6/12/13

              Introductions to General Theory and Applications

                     Intro Essays & quick links

                   The physical science origin

  • Physics of Happening...  an archive from the 80's & 90's of the research studies that led to the analytical techniques, theory & tools for this method of studying natural systems as self-organizing events evolving over time.
     

  • Earlier workIn the 70's I was doing a small research projects on spontaneously developing energy transport systems in homes, air currents, and found I needed to invent new concepts for how to explain their evolution, as unique, individual, emergent systems of organization (of great beauty and power) for moving energy that spontaneously changed form...  like "life".   That new set of concepts became a new form of physics, for studying self-organizing systems of all kinds, as individual cells of organization that had a development life-cycle

     .  

    While such sorts of "viral" processes are generally associated with all self-organizing systems, and are exceedingly common, telling intriguing and important stories for us, but also largely hidden from a deterministic world view.   So somewhat like a new way of seeing, it takes time to develop a skill with the method.  Locally self-organizing systems are not following an external set of rules, such as the "lens" of determinism is designed to look for.   So... my physics becomes a method of using theory to illuminate nature rather than to reduce nature to theory!    ;-)  ed 6/12/13


The Emergence of Natural Systems, 
by Uncontrolled Complex Learning
of, by, and for  Distributed Natural Processes
 05? 07/04/06 5/26/07 2/2/08 3/3/08 1/7/11 4/14

...Using physics tools as a naturalist would, for studying how physical processes develop by themselves,

a study of individually occurring systems, their internal networks,
their life histories, their current and future organizational development processes, as the natural subjects of science.

1/29/09 11/28 4/14/11  Note: My first successful expression of this idea was in old unpublished early paper called "An Unhidden Pattern of Events",  the same "canonical development trajectory" was also described by Stan Salthe as a universal thermodynamic process in his 2005 Energy and Semiotics.    This common succession of events in the continuity of " development and decay" as the "life cycle of natural systems" provides an outline, or a 'crib sheet' if you will.  You use it as a framework for filling in the details in the "Chapters - In the whole story of individual lives and events"  that any individual case of natural system development and decay will be found to exhibit, as necessary to satisfy the law of emergence and continuity, for energy using events and processes to begin and end.    Below is one introduction to my approach, expanding on the scientific method to discover nature's "other theories", the innate languages of organization that develop within natural systems,  and how that makes many new kinds of scientific discoveries possible.  It would also seem to offer a more deeply grounded understanding of the realities surrounding us and with in us.    The following two short discussions are still useful, but "in a nut shell" might work too.

Recent Research Papers

     
2011-3 A decisive moment for Investing in Sustainability - A discussion of the turn of events represented by global resource demand apparently exceeding supply on a long term basis, and the way that upsets all the "natural laws" of economics... accepted for New European Economy
2011-2  The Curious use of Stimulus for Constraint - A study of the odd general use of growth stimulus for slowing growth impacts... to explore a method for looking at natural systems from inside and out, and defining useful energy budgets for their evolutionary processes accepted for E:CO
2011-1  System Energy Assessment (SEA) - How to define whole individual complex environmental systems, as physical subjects of science, fixing a ~500% error in carbon and energy impact measures form not accounting for businesses as whole working systems, for Sustainability
2010-3  Models Learning Change  - Methods for identifying irreversible organizational development processes to anticipate new models for natural system change - for Cosmos & History pdf copy
2010-1  Complex Systems  -History & open Issues for the broad spectrum of complex systems science theories and application methods - for the Encyclopedia of the Earth pdf copy
2008-2 Life’s hidden resources for learning - Discussion of how systems with learning parts differ from systems with controlled parts, in Cosmos & History special issue on "What is Life"
2008-1 A General Law of Emergence and Continuity in Change  - a mathematical physics theorem that identifies the place of complex systems in maintaining the continuity of natural events
1999-1 Features of derivative continuity in shape - Methods for identifying emerging continuity of systems from time series data, for a special issue on invariants in pattern recognition, IJPRAI,

1.  11/08/08 1/6/09  The general subjects of dissipative systems and complexity is are not really new, and really vast.   What's new here is the recognition that individual systems that begin and end do not need to be approximated by deterministic models in order to explore their changing local organization and developmental behaviors.   Determinism is a restrictive assumption of the physical sciences, based apparently on the guess that because some things can be determined from other things, therefore nothing has independent learning or behavior.   This is about learning how to study systems with clearly independent learning and behavior as a naturalist would, but using the tools of physics to identify the learning processes of the complex systems they contain and are the environments they interact with.

The starting point for applying the physics of change to natural systems (i.e. use deterministic principles to raise useful questions for understanding non-deterministic phenomena) is with the universal limitations for natural processes implied by the conservation laws.   These are 1) energy budgets for any closed boundary (2011-2)  and 2) the necessity for processes of multiple scales of organization for energy flows to begin or end (.    That conclusion comes from the old problem that when theory implies infinite field density, rates of energy flow or accelerations, the real implication is of another scale of organization.  A theorem expands the conservation laws into a general  that identifies natural necessities and limits of developmental processes, and opens a new way to explore causation.

To apply the continuity & divergence principle to complex systems research one uses the principle backwards from the normal procedures of physics.   It becomes a diagnostic tool for exploratory learning, that helps locate and identify the 'little bangs' and 'big booms' of locally emergent developmental processes.  Development in a process, say an ionization cascade in a spark or other growth phenomenon is called 'learning' because it is not guided by rules or a map, but takes place by local exploratory interaction with an environment.  That successes in that tend to be exposed by how they multiply provides a guide to where successful strategies within the system are developing.    It leads to a diagnostic approach to physical systems and change rather than a representational approach.   Work on the method was begun in the late 1970's and now is collected here, with methods and applications discussed in "a physics of happening" section.

From an information theory view, a diagnostic approach to physics treats the physical system as a unique individual "in-physico" model of itself...   The empirical signs of organizational change point to the physical phenomena within and around it, which are together considered to be the full complete and true representation of the system, in the physical thing itself.   Then one explores it's features and shapes to inform one's questions about it.   A 'theory' that may develop for it is considered to fit the physical thing's shapes like 'a glove' fits (or does not fit) to 'a hand'.    It's an approach of trying to understand individual things that nature has already built, by developing better questions about the process by which they developed.  It then leads to questions about what new conditions it will confront and need to respond to as it develops further.  The conserved property of derivative continuity allows one to do that by connecting inflection points in its learning curves with the internal network of its system of relationships, their learning processes, and the environment they are responding to.  

Typically there is a switch in the kind of development between a starting period of discovering expanding opportunity for self-referencing change in relation to the conditions the emerging system is coming from, without limits, to responding to and integrating with the limits of a larger environment it is emerging into.   The system development alters its original conditions of development and other independent things in  the environment often independently respond.


 "How can you see there's a process when your information about it is 'between the dots' ?"  

2. 11/08/08 1/6/09 It's in the continuity of the dots.   Unfortunately, partly because of the many years of representing learning systems as following other kinds of abstract deterministic rules, there are a lot of 'tricks' of reasoning to unlearn.  One of the key ones is about reading beyond one's data.  The rule of the physical sciences has been that science must only consider the information it has as representing reality.   Physical systems, though, still exist in-between the times when you have information about them.   Here the gaps in your data are treated as questions, not exclusions, and a continuity of change is what your probing of the environment is seeking to uncover.  It's proof by discovery, not prediction.   That's very different.

3/3/08   Every 4 year old child knows that frogs jump because you poke them.  It would be nice if the philosophy of science did not still rely on that idea of causal determinism.   The idea that careful description of how actions of one kind produce effects of another is sufficient 'natural cause' for how we determine our own effects is perfectly sound.   That we say our models of deterministic prediction are also invisibly 'embedded' in the universe as the direct causes of nature is not.   The truth of course, is it's the frog that jumps, not your finger.    Looking at the time lags between stimuli and response, you can actually prove that the jumping of a frog is a local complex system learning process.   

A natural systems approach has to do with watching very closely as the 'frog jumps' to observe  how that learning process develops, and identify the emerging organizational networks that are instrumental in the frog's behavior.  It's not about designing an 'artificial frog' as normal control oriented science would be.  It's about discovering how to read the internal processes of the real frog.    There are a number of important discoveries about the true sources of eventfulness and organization in nature to be made, including how a lot of it is 'hidden in sight', disguised by our own unthinking categories.    I have a collection of basic principles:

Lists of Key Principles for understanding Natural Systems
Common Sense - Basic Theory - Systems Thinking - Research Methods  12/07

My main collection of analytical work on studying the continuity of change to raise key questions about the evolving systems of change is  a Physics of Happening.   I built the collection of studies in the late 80's and in the 90's, and have been trying to find the right words to explain it ever since.   To me, looking at historical records for when, where and how developmental processes changed direction is an obvious short-cut for finding the physical systems involved.   I closely observe time traces to see what's happening, focusing particularly on where events begin and end.  Where continuities begin and end the growth & decay of the internal networks of relationships that do it is very exposed.     Physics has looked at nature and asked what universal rules are being followed.   This approach looks to see what local rules are being developed.    Certainly it may look a little strange to study individual things rather than large classes of similar ones, but it's a key to understanding the physical world.   This intro has been rewritten many of times, the following are some short topics that didn't get erased....

Notable achievements?  There's a list of what I consider important results, but the most valuable for our steering the earth are various methods of measuring whole system strain and impacts.   In  well connected economies money does actually quantitatively measure physical energy use for example.  Money is a 'marker', yes, of potential energy, because spending an average dollar consumes an average amount of the total energy in global competitive markets with energy price liquidity.   This has a gigantic implication for economics in that most of our long range economic planning assumes the opposite, failing to count the 'fat tail' of the impact distribution of spending.   Using the $shadow principle to compare the measurable and unmeasurable portions of the impacts of commerce shows a typical undercount of a factor of 10.  

The property of infinitely smooth progression in mathematics is called 'derivative continuity'. It is one of the most fundamental and useful properties of mathematical functions.   Physical systems often display a similar but less well defined property, call it 'flow', or 'natural continuity'.   It characterizes the physical processes in which change takes a process of change, and so is 'conserved' in the same way energy can not be created or destroyed, only transferred by a process.   It's the main property of nature that formulas attempt to emulate, and the main reason equations are useful.   Energy is among the few properties of nature that is universal and conserved.    Most properties of systems of organization are not, except... the continuity of their changing.   That's very useful.    The natural continuity of flows is more complex than equations, continually changing as the underlying complex systems continually change.  For example one section of a curve might have all derivatives positive and a following section of the curve having all derivatives negative.   That suggests looking for underlying systems and how they switch from growth to decay. 

The intent is not aimed at writing a formula. You might use a formula as a way to see how the natural system diverges from it, though.  The intent is to understand how the instrumental systems develop and interact.    Reading shifts in the continuity in natural flows is a big help.   It's an approach that works with any field of science, astrophysics or political science, ecology or economics.   Each would use it to study the continuity of change of the properties they are interested in for the systems they are interested in.   Making it possible to have a common empirical reference to the qualitative subjects of interest  greatly helps in 'getting the problem right', whatever analytical method you then use.    One promising method is to us network science , starting with mapping networks of internal sets of  working parts of whole complex natural systems, and then reading their learning curves for their whole system environmental experience.. 

My sample studies  use various mathematical tools in a diagnostic fashion, to expose otherwise hidden details of  physical system flows and the implied system developments they reflect.   One of these is called "derivative reconstruction" (DR) that uses the mathematical definition of derivatives in reverse,  to "reconnect the dots" and sensitively reconstruct the probable dynamics of underlying system by filtering the spurious higher derivative fluctuation.  Another constructs a "dynamic mean" (DM) by stripping fluctuations and reconstructing the simplest curve shape representing their norm.  They produce differentiable natural functions by interpolation.   It doesn't always, but often exposes otherwise invisible developmental changes and forces excellent new questions.  To assume that a series of dots represents a single continuous process is tricky, of course, and there are some statistical tests like the step variance test (SV) to rule out random walk and a noise suppression sensitivity test (NSS) to gage the scale of non-random fluctuation.   Another of the methods used is called "curvature scale space" (CSS) which originated in the field of computer vision.   It uses repeated smoothing of shapes to distinguish and define those features of shape which are the most robust (slowest to disappear with suppression).  Basically you look for where processes begin and end and try to figure out what is beginning and ending.

There is no practical barrier to these new methods having wide and immediately useful application in numerous fields.   There is a conceptual barrier though.   It's not the Western cultural habit to think of time as a process.  We tend to think of it as a location, and so equations with time as a variable as describing a system that itself does not change over time.   The evidence is that all natural systems continually change over time, and that the main events causing change in systems are 'tipping points' at which systems 'out of balance' end up disrupting themselves in some fashion.  Ordinary thinking hides that from us.

The Art of Observation

12/28/08 1/24/09 1/27 1/20/10 There are two things required for learning how things in nature work on their own.   One is observing them without thinking, so your mind records some marks of the original behavior in a highly faithful way.  The second is exploratory.   Exploration is a matter of finding threads of connection and following them, and for natural systems, then letting the connections "grow on you" giving you "new ways of thinking" to check out.    What you're looking for is ways nature thinks differently from the way you do, paradoxically, so you can "be of two minds" about them.    It's becomes a way of connecting the dots that raises useful questions you never thought of before prompting further observation. 

That, in a nut shell, is what "science" is, with one key difference.   This is about discovering how individual systems discover their own rules rather that all compelled to follow preexisting universal rules.   One way to tell if it's working is whether you find paths of discovery that lead you on, little "yellow brick roads" in nature, taking you beyond your prior imagining.   That also helps you tell if you're just making things up or really discovering the nature of what you are looking at.   That's an endless hazard because of the human tendency to interpret consciousness as reality, instead of our own personalized cultural image.    Observation is pure research.    Then, you hope your way of asking better questions gives you a way to talk to others who have done the same thing, in their own different way, so you can constructively trade notes.  

Figure:  The diagram is of 1) how seeing a tree leaves a direct imprint on the retina of an observer's eye, 2) in who invents in their mind an image of a whole system through which energy and materials flow like a tree, along with an image of how it is connected in the cycles of nature.   Is the diagram to be found anywhere in nature?    No, of course not.   It's imaginary..   Is it may also be useful for helping the observer ask better questions about the real tree and it's environment, that others may understand as well.   Possibly...  --

Why people seem to know so very little about how the intricately organized things of nature take care of themselves gives the appearance that humans have not learned much from our time watching to see how things around us work.   Our normal rule for explanations is self-consistency, that every piece of information is determined by some other piece of information, and nothing in it has any independent behavior.  The better question would be, if some things in the world seem controlled like that, why isn't everything?   Asked another way, it might be, why do people almost never ask that question?    That there do indeed seem to be at least some things that take care of themselves, but we hardly ever ask how, seems to be a possible reason why we have such mixed success in taking care of ourselves...   It comes down to our habit of treating the *things* we see as the *information* we have about them.   Things may actually talk back, and information never will.   Seeing them as information we then interpret the things of the natural world in terms of our explanations.  The inadequacy of that is not only how explanations are never going to talk back, and the things being explained very well could.   All the connections in an explanation are also things we added ourselves, not things that came from what we're explaining.    What we use to connect the pieces of information to make explanations stick together are the cultural and emotional values we attach to the information.   In our minds we don't see physical things as connected by the physical systems they are composed of, but by the value laden constructs we attach to the information we have in our minds.   We tend to equate the real world with a kind of "dream world", our own artificial representation of it.   How we see things as being organized is as we organize our own thoughts and values.  We don't see them as organized by the natural processes that produced what we see.   What a true observer needs to overcome is this naturally artificial naive viewpoint, that the things of the world are the images we have of them.  It's often not easy, but there are lots of little flaws in the 'magic' of how we disguise the world as information you can learn to trust, leaving openings to the real world where you discover connections rather than fill in explanations.    

Observing is a process of letting the intricate beauties and designs of nature seep into one's awareness without imposing your own cultural values or explanations on them, to remain free to discovering their own connections.  When later attaching ones own values to them, then it is to something of substance rather than to nothing of substance.   Otherwise observation tends to be just a fascination with your own values.  Often where you make your first discoveries of nature's connections is noticing how things act as a "whole".  It's the best indication of the existence and design of uncontrolled systems, that they have complex scattered connections that act as one.   The easiest place to see it is in any organism, or culture, or burst of chemical energy, locating the system by how its set of scattered parts erupts in growth as one.   What you soon find is that what makes them whole, and gives them their ability to act as one, is what I call "ESP" (equal stress principle).  Things that act as a whole tend to evenly distribute their own stresses internally.   Seeing this can be easy for some things, but quite hard particularly for things we only know from other people's explanations.   Explanations don't do well with uncontrolled parts.   It can be a lot easier with things that need no explanation or come naturally and are beyond explanation, that we know intimately and so can closely observe without bias.    Truthful observation is not a "one shot deal" but an accumulation of them.   It's like building compost in the soil of an organic garden.   It's a matter of letting one's own mind accumulate a rich compost of the unaltered features imported directly from the "value free" physical systems of nature, letting your mind become imprinted by them as the first step.  

A painter needs paint, and a good observer needs to let their 'paints' accumulate in nature's own colors.   Not taking that approach, but seeing things as the information about them we connect in our own subjective way, our observations then tend to represent the world as lifeless and formless.   Things become "just explanations", given meaning only by the values we attach to them.   We miss all the natural meanings they have that way.   What we then "see" is our own poor awareness of how other things work on their own.   Then in everything we see we find mainly reflections of ourselves and little of the natural world's own connections.   It's an 'inadequate' view of our extraordinary rich intertwined and living world with its many kinds and scales of organized and complex individual parts.   Whether it's the health and prosperity of a tree, of a storm the size of a planet, or of a personal friendship or community of relationships getting into trouble and painfully hard to understand, the beginning of becoming truly a part of it's future is truthful observation.

I have lots of accumulated notes on observation technique scattered all over these pages.  I've been learning how to express it better, which of course means nearly everything here is also a little "out of date" and in need of "fixing" a little.   So, poke around...and see what you'd use and what you'd fix.

Network Science     
....what happens when things connect! 
05/24/07.. 09/09/07

Watch this space....   The NetSci conference in NY in May 07.  The ability to convey highly complex system information and understand the evolution of systems from it is advancing to a useful tool very rapidly.   Great Displays from Manuel Lima's Visual Complexity.   My most recent technical notes on linking Net Sci and Natural Systems Theory (*def note*) with Complex Systems engineering.. PICS.htm

  • One of the things that causes the 'power law' distribution of organization in emergent systems appears to be the elaboration and refinement that occurs in how they grow and develop.  

  • One of the ways of understanding how networks are embedded into the complex systems which produce them is hat all the nodes are actually 'hives' of activity in the larger system when looked at at a different scale.  

  • To understand what it means that people are connected by 5 degrees of separation and web pages by 19 is helps to consider how close connection of this kind has a simultaneous reverse property of great isolation and independence.   What the difference between 5 and 19 means is that information is divided into many many more separate worlds, the flip side of the astonishment we all feel when finding out that all our very separate worlds are also quite closely connected.

The tools for displaying these structures and relationships are so good, and the complex system decisions people need to make so pressing, that there clearly should be an office of complex information display in every branch of government.   You can't ask the question till you can see the problem.   Think of the difference if we could look at comprehendible maps of the real evolving complex relations between communities in Iraq or your own city!    It's clearly possible now.  Think of the difference if we could map ecologies in depth and display their connections in a visually compelling and analytically rigorous way.  It's clearly possible now.

General Systems Theory
....a grand event in systems thinking that didn't survive, 05?  07/04/06

General Systems Theory, was one of several great attempts to make a science of the study of natural systems.  The more popular but still unproven one today goes by the name 'Complexity'.   GST originated as a major interdisciplinary effort in the 1940's, Von Bertalanffy, Boulding, Ashby, Miller, Forrester and others, and seemed to loose direction and turn into other things in the late 1980's & 90's.  The language of general systems theory as it developed, is problematic as science and quite short on generally useful results.    Still, it is full of insights into the nature of the problem. 

The successor organization which retains little of the original form keeps a web site with a genealogy diagram of systems thinking (http://www.iigss.net/gPICT.pdf).  Basically, 'holism' became 'cybernetics' and with several layers of complexity became 'general systems theory'.   I've had recent long and productive correspondence with Don McNeil about the origins and 'death' of pure systems thinking, and what might be salvageable.  I thought it might be of some research interest sometime, and asked if I put it up on the web that I show it as copy righted. My two 1985 papers for SGSR and some other things are now online too.

All natural systems are an interplay between active and passive components, for example. There's the plant and the soil, the cell and the blood stream, the speaker and listener, the industry and the pools of resources from which it draws and to which it contributes. Nature is also structured as a unity of opposites, things and the mediums through which they communicate with each other, for one example. These and many other insights into nature are mystical in their power, but also overwhelming in their grandeur while failing the test of having practical use.  It left those who studied it relatively less to say than it first appeared they would have.   

The 'Physics of happening' is a general science of systems based on close empirical study of the same physical subjects as GST. I did a quick study of the GST citation rates for the terms 'general systems' and 'general systems theory' on Google Scholar from the 1930's to the present.    The measures show a combination of effects, but tell an interesting story.   There's been a continued explosion of the use of GS and a hint of climax and decline in the original use of  GST.   It's just a very fast stucy I haven't been able to follow up.    ed 6/23/06

Natural System Economies - compulsive capitalism v. natural growth
...(it's about what you do with profits!)  05?  07/04/06  08/25/08 3/31/10

Keynes was a misunderstood systems ecologist too... and there's a trail of evidence that he discovered the secret of how natural systems switch from multiplying complex designs to refining simple solutions, he gave the strange name "the widow's cruse" after a bible story about the gift of an inexhaustible cup (I Kings 17:8–16). His proposal makes no real sense to anyone, unless, you consider our "crisis of capitalism" as a growth ecology creating insurmountable internal problems for itself at natural limits and needing to switch to nature's usual solution for that.

The general conservation equation for auto-catalytic growth compares the resource for making products (P) and the saving from it for developing the process (S).   If the linked markets for it's "work" and "investment" grow and stabilize together, then the system stays in balance as it develops.     In an economy that occurs when the returns added to savings (S*r) and spending from savings (S*s) match the increase in products (P*p).  

(When physical limits cause product growth to stop, p = 0

THEN stable change over time requires

EITHER:   r = 0  and an end to average positive returns on investment   

OR:  r - s = 0  so the comfortable positive returns are spent on purposes other than multiplying returns

SO:   both    S1 = S0 + S0 (r - s)   and     S1/P1 = S0/P0 )

That’s Keynes “widow’s cruse” idea for turning the economies into an “inexhaustible cup” with a lasting sustainability plan, to spend enough of the seed money on something useful for the system to stabilize it.     It’s not about stabilizing growth but stabilizing a healthy economy without growth, treating it as a natural living system switching to maturation, sacrificing the practice of limitless growing investment and concentrating wealth.   It would be a big cultural change for us, but once it’s realized why it was always going to be physically necessary…, as at the end of growth there is no other healthy economy option …   there are ways to provide quick systemic relief.  

It's also an application of "new physics", using scientific models to refer to and assist in studying complex physical systems that remain undefined.  That's an approach that avoids representing nature as the conceptual model used, and allows connecting different languages of interpretation through their references connecting aspects of the same physical things.

Physical systems that operate by themselves in relatively passive environments develop by auto-catalytic growth from a seed process of some kind, generally animated by their own self-organizing parts.   The whole system develops by treating some of its products as operating surpluses, and using them to build the process.    That multiplies its scale and the surpluses until the erupting internal and external environmental imbalances disrupt or exhaust it, or trigger a switch to maintaining the surpluses and adapting to the new environments by  completing and perfecting the design its operations.  


The normal way to multiply wealth is to invest in something that makes a profit and add the profit to your investments so both your investments and profits multiply exponentially.   That's the familiar compound investment function of using something that was built to build more, using success to leverage growing success.   Every organized system in nature actually begins with a relatively 'long habit' of doing that, but then changes.   The change happens at a point of diminishing returns, a declining net productivity for investment (declining success in multiplying) at some point.   What businessmen normally do when that happens in a single business is divert the returns for the business away from reinvestment, doing something else with them.   It turns their business into a sustainable "cash cow" to support other interests or help build compounding investment in other things.  

When diminishing returns occur for an economy as a whole its seen as meeting natural resistance, in steeper learning curves, shortages causing higher prices and erupting internal and external conflicts, throughout the whole system at once.  Nature is sending the same signal for the system as a whole that peak development in an individual business indicates, that increasing investment is decreasingly productive.    It then decreases the productivity of investment to continue multiplying investment, heading toward a point of whole system climax where the productivity of investment comes to zero.  It could not get there, of course, since zero return financial systems would not be stable.   

To maximize the natural capital and its positive rate of returns would then result from investment returns being diverted and freely spent on non-investment interests, treating the economy as a whole as a "cash cow".   Stabilizing that way leaves an ample pool of investment to maintain or update outmoded parts of the economy, while maximizing rates of return and dispersing wealth to extend prosperity throughout the whole system.   As for a single business, it's just responding to the environmental signal in the way providing the best total return.

Why that strategy does work for natural systems and does not work for people is that people continue multiplying their own investments as the whole system runs into resistance.   The resulting zero sum game at the end of growth then becomes an accumulation of conflicts more than an accumulation of wealth.   The technical solution J M Keynes called "the widow's cruse" is for those with surplus funds to spend them as they would with the proceeds of a cash cow business.   How to organize it is less clear, but the requirement is quite clear.   It would also have the unusual effect of decentralizing wealth as part of the whole system response to approaching sustainable climax.   

What you see now is the opposite in terms of our "natural capital".  As the net productivity of investment in the earth (new wealth minus new impacts) decreases, the concentration of wealth has been increasing too.   That is the opposite effect of making the opposite response.   Ending growth by maximizing total returns then, creates an economy that is stable, vibrant and changing, at the beginning of a long a productive life of stability, just not exploding.  When you look at successful organisms throughout nature they all make that same discovery, that the turning point from growth toward stability is the beginning, not the end of 'the good life'.  

There are a great many 'relief valves' for the forces and pressures in our economic system, and it once had a marvelous stability.   Our great wealth comes from the interaction of a lot of talented people trying to make things work, connecting with each other through free open markets.   There are dangers, though, in pushing it too far.   Relying on ever more complex ways to accelerate the use of diminishing resources, robbing them from people who can't keep up and otherwise pushing everyone's interests into conflict, creates instability that is irreversible except by collapse.   Expectations for growing financial returns from diminishing physical returns are guaranteed to be disappointed.   You get cascading failures of expectation.  

Just following "productivity growth" to it's logical end amounts to making ever bigger decisions about the future ever faster, leading to a certainty of making ever bigger and longer lasting mistakes.   You can see them growing all around us, like global warming.   The hurried 'solutions' contain many of the same mistakes too, like offering 'alternative' resources to only find them just used to continually leverage all others, repeating the same 'fault' being blamed on fossil fuels.    Why people don't openly wonder if we're making some mistake, given nearly everyone's good will and the dramatic evidence we're making the problem worse is a puzzle.  It's clearly that multiplying our solutions is multiplying our problems, though, once you ask. 

It is in the nature of exponential growth to bring about the unforeseen, of ever larger scale, at an ever faster pace.  Growth for us has been very rewarding for around 600 hundred years.   Slow accumulation, using success to build on success over the long haul, has produced a very dramatic change in the promise of human history.   Past performance, as they say, is no guarantee of future returns though.   That's especially the case in humanity's clear diminishing net returns on investing in the earth.  The benefit/cost ratio is simply not what it was.    In order for the economy to climax the amount of investment needs to climax.   That's possible either at a healthy high level or after collapsing and returning human culture to a new era of feudalism.    It only depends on how persistent we are at compounding our errors.  

There are a variety of other possibilities, but those two are the achievable extremes.   There are also other issues we need to think all the way through, like population and entitlements, all the bad habits of being a successful small organism with apparently unlimited resources.   The financial system correction would have investors 'spend' their 'unearned income' so that their investments didn't multiply, relying on savings from earned income to maintain the investment pool.  It would be come self-reinforcing as investors recognized anyone who 'cheated' to get ahead of them as a cheater.   You could call it a change in the "prudent man rule".  

Some significant community of investors would only need to change their own personal habits that way, and object to doing business with others who didn't.    --    A basic model of money flow that describes the choices for financial growth on a finite planet is discussed in General Allocation Theory.   An further description of the dimensions of the problem and solution are in The One real option.. natural climax  and the science of natural economies as learning systems Hidden Life.  6/23/06 9/10/06 08/26/08

Microclimates

Air Current Networks. The origin of my work on scientific methods and natural systems of change was a careful study of evolving air current patterns in buildings, originally begun as a research in building climate and architectural design.  It led to discovering a large number of unusual undocumented air current structures and patterns, and the simple observation that air flow is an amazing designer of new forms in profuse variety with clearly no directing formulas involved, all in the complete absence of 'noise' and entirely out of control.   Natural air currents in confined spaces are constantly evolving complex history-dependent structures beginning with growth, "with nothing there but molecules".

Invention.   One of the unusual air current structures observed has the effect of eliminating turbulence near a  surface where turbulence would otherwise normally develop, potentially improving the efficiency of heat exchangers.  The portion of a working fluid having made contact with the heat transfer surface can be extracted without allowing it to mix with the unheated portions.    Some of my work on patents using this trick is available.   If you're at all interested you should speak with me and possibly use me as a consultant, to make sure you understand the particulars necessary for making it work.

Current Writing and Research Issues

~10/2011 Our modern culture developed was with following rules for a small scale economy to grow as fast as it could, in a very big world.  Our rules haven't changed but our world has.   Today we're seeing the world's resource markets responding as a group, unable to recover from more frequent and larger supply shocks, and permanently increasing the floor level price of natural resources.  It's a sign that the markets searching the world for more stuff are learning that nature is running out of expanding supplies.   A good introduction to that is my article, A defining moment for investing in Sustainability, in New European Economy.   It's also important to have a simple way to understand the deep problem, in a nut shell, Why it's natural to find reality confusing

What's going right?

People are slowly, but very slowly, noticing that "sustainability" is more than convincing people to live morally and efficiently.  We also need to correct some accounting errors caused by economists, following the lead of physics, describing the world without its active learning parts...    So it's the hidden impacts of how we use money not the easily checked and recorded ones that we've been omitting from our plan.   Not surprisingly, that's the great majority.   It does also mean that some policies to reduce visible impacts do so my increased the hidden ones, and it will take a culture change to correct that.  You start by discovering the evidence together to learn from. System Energy Assessment (SEA)

The 30 years of work on exploring the lack of connection between how the natural world works by itself, and the models human thinking makes up for itself to represent it continues.   "Physics principles for naturalists" is one way to put it, a way to keep your thinking straight and connected to its complex environmental system subjects.  What seems to be an actually 10,000 year or longer addiction to use improving productivity to solve all problems seems to have made us more productive than our planet can sustain, so our ignorance of that allows a large variety of critical moral issues to go unquestioned.

(2011) "Nurturing cash cows or crash cows?"  and  "simple facts... and hard memes"  

*Reading Nature's Signals is my blog, see the sidebar for collections of posts on different topics.

 
 


 

Odd Notes - most of what I write starts with scattered scraps of paper, and there's a pile...
I'd like to find some web tool that could allow random browsing and record comments on a collection of separate notes ..

- 8/08/10 The fact that you can't know something unless you want to is good cover for those who don't want to, and little deceptions grow into big ones in a culture organized around endless growth.

-7/6/10 Ants seem to rub antenna just the way people shake hands, i.e. quite expertly and without thinking about it, for mutual recognition of complex relationships...   Wow!   Those simplest of gestures between animate beings, mutual homing of independent systems, a smile, a kiss, responsiveness without analysis, a dance with a partner experienced as becoming one.   I don't think it'll ever quite make rational sense, or be possible to program for inanimate beings.   Is there a difference between a "squeeze" and a "hug" ?   Yes, most definitely.

- 4/29/10 There's something odd... about God apparently not having studied ecology, when telling his most capable creature to work like a slave to control ever more of its environment, not realizing he had made nature thrive by things taking care of themselves and staying out of each other's way.   Equally odd is that we believed that story of a world with no individual parts. 

- 2/16/10 You can't inflate a pile of dust.  You can't get a perfect image of a person to talk.  Information and things have different dimensionality in a much more stubborn way than information can express, despite the ease with which our conscious minds refer to themselves as the real thing.

- 2/16/10 Just because you're underwater doesn't make you a fish.   Men got a little carried away with carrying the water, always filling the tub, now burst, with everything along with the water carriers now deep under water.   Need something new to do.   It happens.

- 2/16/10 So where did the thong that the first weapons were made with come from, tying the stone tool to the wood shaft?  Was it from the woman's amulet around her neck everyone so long admired, or the way she tied her hair?  Or did it come from the sling discovered one day when both ends of a piece of gut were tied to the kill and it freed the hands to put it over the shoulder?   Those original "string theories" probably all came at once, the way technology radiates, along with knotting and weaving.  The Venus figurines mostly seem garbed in fancy threads...  Were those the first killer app's of technology, 20k, 100k or 200k years ago?

- 2/16/10 Statistics generally come long after the fact, accumulating many beginnings and endings and he silence of being over and done.   Leading statistics come in many styles but the highest confidence one with potential to let you join in or nip off what's happening is emerging continuity of proportional change.

Some things to fix?:

  • What if we read the meaning of "fiduciary duty" as written?  It's unqualified, and where it matters would hold those accountable to the interests of others and not support misleading acts or speech?  One might argue that an obligation to not be misleading defines a more truthful measure of "the whole truth" than is actually used in court.   Maybe it could be used there too...

  • What if all software came with a command line window.... where typing a command name runs it and adding a "?" explains it's normal uses and where to find it on the menus?

  • What if politicians tried to impress people with better information about their world rather than promises they can't fulfill?

  • What if online adds a narrow check box bar at the bottom, with one click for Truthful? Y, N  Helpful Y, N?

  • What if Google let you choose what bias to use, the Kids view, the Women's view, the Scientist's view, your Tailored view... a Neutral view...??
     

Concept & Comment:   .....little essays 
(see my blog for some comments, posts & letters worth recording, and  article & forum list)

 

Odd Facts 

- 8/10 The one practical way to stop adding our burden on the earth is to stop adding the profits from it to the principle for expanding our investments in it, as you do with any successful project to end its expanding on itself to its role in the world as you complete it.
- 02/10
The true energy source of the future is learning to get along with nature, as learning the system has always been the real source of energy.
- 06/09  How nature builds things is generally illogical because building up physical system connections uses complementary parts that link through their differences, unlike how logic connects through equalities.    As for building a house, neither foundation or roof look at all like a place to live, though they're start and end to making one.
- 06/09
What we perceive is a simple culturally reinterpreted mental image of physical things being looked at of quite different kinds and much greater complexity, explorable but not fully comprehendible in any part.
- 06/09
Models that imply approaching instability mark systems that won't continue, and times when new form will emerge.
- 06/09
Being constructive a matter of logic, but using complementary things that make different sense to link into wholes.   Foundations can't be lived in and look NOTHING like a house, nor does a roof or even walls really, but a house without them is unlivable.
- 02/09
A telescope may not look much like a universe...{but lets you see one)
- 10/08
Environmental systems don't follow the past but diverge from the present, on continuous branching paths of accumulative change (making ways  to watch where they're going and see the complications they're running into)
- 7/08 If you find yourself having to fix ever bigger problems, you're fixing the wrong problem...  (and the real solutions maybe just look ridiculous)
- 5/08 A main issue now is how the parts of growth systems as they run into natural limits all run into each other, in conflict - 2/08 All kinds of natural systems are little worlds, having internal design and behavior of their own
- 7/08 "The media" refers to form of conversation that seeks the "passionate assertion of the opposing point of view" for entertainment, not any form of successive exploration and validation of anything. 
2/08 If you see as pattern of continuous divergence, there's a little multiplier inside.. and then you need to decide if you should try to: a) turn it off,  b) get out of it's way, or c) let it go to it's own level of comfort to become a partner in your world.
- 2/08
Absorbing CO2 produced by average spending w/ trees, add ~1acre of mature forest per $150,000


- 12/10

Some philosophy in a phrase: 7/14/06... 12/09/10

... It doesn't need to spoil the music to know it's just vibrations on a string.

... To enjoy the trip and avoid the trees, watch your path, not your past.

... The Lion sleeps a lot and the eagle soars, but this other top predator on earth is so busy busy busy.

... When it's appropriate to say "Oops", putting off the face saving might be a lot more planet saving!
... It's that the circle remains open that there is any place to connect

... Discovering things that just can't make sense prove you both must be

... What knowledge seems to be good for is reaching for reality, not being reality

... What actually matters is the gracefully possible

... the "gold" rule: Trusting that gold can forever multiply is a perfectly fatal rule.

... Life benefits from the Zen art of finding you always have the right tool already in hand

... If you don't look up, you won't see the horizon, nor hear of the path that leads to and beyond

... It's not the truth that sets you free, it's the true questions that take you there

... it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding what's interesting in what they say

... again, the truer model is the one you look through, not the one you look at!

... every good idea seems to need a little fixing

... When multiplying things until there's trouble, it's not what  we're paying attention to that misbehaves!

... the problem with deciding who's right is that everyone is, from a different point of view

... one reward for facing hard truths is finding a place for your deep values

... things that absolutely can't be avoided must be on your path, and good for SOMETHING !   

... government doesn't cause interference.   It’s interference that causes government.   It  simplifies government to face approaching realities, and complicates everything to chase them after they're gone.

... finding what science has been missing makes the Earth boundless, unexplored and mysterious again.

... a funny thing about how science has studied 'emergence', searching for the rules for what does not follow them,  and ignoring the individual processes by which it develops.

... Faith is having permission to go do it your self

... "Free Will" is a simple gift, the necessity of choosing to engage in exploring to find new choices

... If you choose to hate your enemies and not learn from them, you've lost the battle.

... I  whisper in the ear of God day after day, hoping he gets the message



Personal Bio  - Jessie Henshaw

Jessie Henshaw is a not so retired 63 year old woman, who went back to full time work on her science when it became possible, living in New York and  writing as "Mother Nature" in her journal online research journal Reading Nature's Signals and as Shoudaknown on Twitter.  "P. F. Henshaw" is pen name used on some published papers.

- 03/08 8/10 11/10  4/12/11 7/4  9/7/11

Every way to tell the real story gives a narrative that leaves things out, and that's one way to tell it's real.   It's a reader pausing to wonder about those gaps that directs their attention to the larger world of unmentioned things that made up the reality for its subject, and makes the telling  about a real life rather than the characterizations either the teller or reader might use to fix their own images of things.

This nice old sketch is from the late 70's, when I was doing my early experiments and study of how uncontrolled natural systems work.    I've changed since then, both inside and out, needing to more or less start over with my life and relationships about again and again.   I still share the same sensibilities I shared with my earliest friends, but kept finding them not fitting in.  

My start..........
ed. May 2000

I was born in December 1946 and grew up in Hamilton NY, a small college town (then 1300 in the village and college each) in hilly central New York dairy farming country, Chenango county.   My dad was the head of the Colgate physics department.   At the family dinner table physics wasn't considered a fit topic of conversation, particularly at Sunday dinners.   Dinners were family time.  My mom ran the household, often made her own and my sister's clothing, and the whole family pitched in on the garden. 

My sister, brother and I, as well as my mom and dad, regularly had three meals a day together at the family table.  At lunch my dad walked down the hill from the college as my sister, brother and I walking home from school, and had a simple meal together.   The family followed an easy going version of the classic "American chore machine" model, having regular daily and seasonal chores.
We regularly went to church, mostly to participate in the community, and have various other community activities.  It still left the kids plenty of time to go out and find things to do with neighborhood friends.   

My dad and I also spent endless hours talking about what you could observe in natural phenomena of all kinds, in the garden, looking out the window or walking around, exploring how the world worked.   We also did various projects up in his physics lab or in our workshop in the basement at home.   He was quite a skillful teacher and taught me a lot of physics without any math when I was little, just showing me how to observe explanatory principles in natural events.  That seems to be where I first caught an interest in how nature and our explanations for things as being different things, and each prone to change by themselves in different ways.

For a kid with freedom the big event of course was being 'out', roaming the village and surroundings with neighborhood friends, getting together on our bikes for games at different playing fields, gathering at the great swimming holes, using each other's back yards as familiar battle grounds for long standing pea shooter wars and games of 'capture the flag' that would go on until we were dodging the bats in near pitch darkness.   We also roamed the local fields and hills, building both tree forts and woods encampments, spending a lot of time around the creek that ran behind our house.       I think my favorite place of all time was the clump of big old willow trees along the creek called Fallen Timbers.  That's where the great old trunks had leaned over on each other to form various bunkers, ladders and bridges like in a real jungle, with which my friends and I could play Robin Hood or Peter Pan.

Our property had a big lawn and my mom kept a number of flower gardens, and we had big vegetable gardens too, maybe 50x25.  We also had wild areas out back bordering the fields and stream, a small section of woods, a bog, meadow and some wild rose and other brambles.  It became my extraordinary privilege to become the wild gardener of them for a few decades, up until my mom stopped being able to care for the house and we gave up the property to a local doctor and his young children, in about 1996.   In a way that wild area behind our house was my home, almost like a miniature version of where I now live, with Ft Tryon Park in Manhattan, down the street from  my apartment today.  There I find much the same kind of enjoyment of a mingling of carefully tended and rather wild nature.

For college I went to St. Lawrence university in northern New York, which had a good physics department and let me play football, and spend weekends in the art studio.  I thought to do graduate work in math or physics,  and did some post-graduate work in mathematics at Stony Brook and then Columbia, but somehow the questions were starting to seem uninteresting.  After college I shared an apartment in Brooklyn with friends with my bedroom like an art studio, painting a lot.   I ended up experimenting with a night school course in architecture, and found it curiously like physics in having a serious interest in 'form' as being central to design, and went to the Univ. of Pa in Architecture in 1971. 

In the 70's,  after graduating from Penn, stimulated by a wonderful upbringing and education as well as daring new ways of thinking from the 60's, I traveled and ended up in Denver, deciding to learn to be a builder as my "post-doc" project for becoming an architect.    In-between things I took a graduation gift and assembled a portable micro-climate lab, and traveled around Colorado and New Mexico studying how the indoor climates of both conventional and solar houses worked.  Practically the first day out I began to discover all kinds undocumented natural phenomena, different kinds of "organized molecular motion" that I had never heard of and was unable to see how they'd work.  Physicists just don't tend to study the world as a naturalist does, just going to look to see what's there.  

It lead me to discovering a set a beautiful explanatory principles for the design process of nature's animated systems, that has been my work since.  It's been my work, that is, except for somehow making a living, which I often had trouble doing.   What I found was disturbing.   The simple principles of natural system design assume that nature's systems work by themselves, and our society's understanding of physical world is that everything is controlled by something else, a totally different idea.   What I found seemed to confirm and reinforce many my culture's sensibilities, while deeply conflicting with its explanations. 

So... it confused everyone I tried to explain it to.   So as I got established enough with a new group of researchers or activists to start showing the details of what I found I would lose their interest and respect, having what seemed like my whole life fall apart again and again.  Still, there is something deeply wrong with traditional explanations, and because I seemed to be pointing right to it, and having any fun was having a great deal of fun, I kept pulling thing back together and trying a new tack.  

After Denver fell apart I managed to recuperate at home and then get back to New York, and overcome the dent in my resume of taking 10 years after grad school to get my first job in architecture.   I worked in offices all over the city, and in the 90's and 0's actually did do some arguably fine work.   I was married from 1986 to 1994, and my son Jonathan is now 23 and out of college.   It once seemed my relationship with him was my easiest duty and greatest pleasure, giving him as much as I could of the enormous freedom and fascination with the world around us that had been my privilege to enjoy.   But things happen, that you don't understand.  


Learning Experiences

11/2010 7/2011 A human mind can be a dangerous thing, for how it presents what the world as a reflection of ourselves.   It causes us to perceive that everyone else in the world happens to live in the world of our own imagining.  When people don't know to or can't check to discover how each other's minds construct the world differently, we can expect other people, or even the natural world, to know things about us and their roles in our lives that they just don't.   That's one a hundred insights in to the complex nature of perception and behavior that came out of probably my most fruitful intellectual relationship. 

That relationship was my extended conversation with my high school friend John Blackmore, who lived five doors down the block, and who had wide interests in psychology, philosophy, and the general scope of life.  He became a social scientist and policy analyst on criminology, who continued to bring me many connections between those perspectives about the social and perceptual phenomena I also explored from my physical systems view.  We shared an apartment in Brooklyn and a community of friends developed from there that grew still surround him when he passed away from a long illness recently.

Architecture school strenuously pushed my imagination, and I found I had the very good fortune of being there the last two years of Lou Kahn's life.  He was a true source of widening vision, the way he would always see the world as undiscovered.   Many of his inspiring messages stuck with me, like the need to search for the form of each design in "reading book zero".  I also had a remarkable experience of studying dance with a Guerdjieff inspired improvisational dance group, called "Group Motion". 

Those combined with the powerful effect of being, immersed in a creative community for the first time, after only being surrounded by sciences all my life, was tremendously energizing.    It left me inspired by the open world that school is supposed to show you, and by the end of school, truly ready to begin.

The sketch above is by Terri A Storer, done in 1976, from my Denver 'heydays'.   She was one of my four women who were important spiritual guides for me in the 60';s and 70's, and each changed who I was.    I really could not have gotten anywhere at all without them.    Johnny, Gerry and Chantal were the others.   When Terri did the sketch I we were living in a big old "tumbledown" house, rented with a group of friends for $100 a month, and had all my strange solar experiments on the lawn.  In Denver I found connections to the west coast and Oregon "appropriate technology" community, the precursor to what later became known as sustainable design. 

I took my research and writings around to conferences and wrote some for RAIN magazine, edited by Tom Bender a visionary and graduate of Penn architecture.   That whole vision of how to save the planet, also inspiringly conveyed by brilliant thinking of Bucky Fuller, in the end turned out to be what I started finding deep flaws in and was a repeated cause of my being socially and professionally ostracized in years later.

One of my other sources of vision about natural form would seem to have been Kenneth Boulding, the economist..  He was my dad's best friend when they were junior professors together.  I say "would seem to have been" because we hardly talked, but I followed in his footsteps somehow.   I didn't even really know what his work was when I saw him come and go at the house or heard stories about him, because he made a splash wherever he went.   I didn't know what a visionary man he was, not until the 1980's when I began writing research papers for the General Systems research society he co-founded.  

I must have picked up his questions "over the transom" somehow, because my dad and I never discussed systems theory and I never studied it, until after I wrote my own general theory of natural systems, just by piecing together all my own observations in 1979, and finding my questions so relevant when I discovered the organization he led a few years later.  Ken also was the one to point me to J.M. Keynes, and the cler evidence that Keynes was a systems ecologist with far reaching insights well beyond what his work has been taken for.

While I've published various papers over the years, my main work as been exploratory research on methods of identifying independently organized natural learning systems and discovering their surprises.   It's been a large technical task involving new math and software design, and being unable to share them with others and leading to the failure of my best and most complete efforts in about 2001.    I think after 10 submittals, of the plankton paper, I failed to find a single reviewer to even respond to the very clear question being raised, the clear evidence of evolutionary change following growth curves, indicating an additional mode of evolution.   After that I stopped every effort in disillusionment, as I had with other broad failures with other communities in 1980, 88 and 96 and 2002.  In 2004 is started thinking I could just do it for fun, and not for any real purpose, and that would be OK.  I slowly started writing down some notes again. 

In 2005 the sustainability movement emerged as a social force and  I recognized the signs of the approaching economic failure, following the expected pattern of changes of a new scale and kind, that would exceed our ability to respond.    I started buying books, lots of them, and expanding my correspondence, searching for any hint of others having found the thread of insight into natural systems, and the series of questions that helps you discover how they inventing new rules to follow for themselves.  Everyone just had their own theory for them though, about how nature works following their rules, in effect.   It built up to another disaster.   Still, starting to intentionally steal other people's questions greatly expanded my thinking and ability to discuss things from multiple points of view.  I also reconnected with Stan Salthe, who had presented papers at the same meeting of SGSR in 85, and been my hotel roommate, and we proceeded to have a wonderful long correspondence.  

So having fun putting pieces of different people's ideas together, buying lots used books online and going to conferences on hopeful solutions, helped me invent lots of language experiments for discussing it.   Still, I found it exceedingly difficult, and painful, to perceive the mounting unmanageable dimensions of it.   No one was interested in understanding the basic requirement for relieving the demand for growth at the limits of growth, along the lines Keynes' proposals had confirmed.   My learning was succeeding in the sense of being very personally satisfying, broader and more complete, but I was still quite unable to find an approach anyone would respond to or see how to put anything on paper again.  It took I think three years of only being able to write "odd notes" on loose scraps of paper before I could get back to finding subjects I could see how to write anything longer about.

The intellectual start came out of the seeds of thinking Stan helped push me to, discovering the theme of systems being steered by the learning of their parts.  It actually came from reading "The Pond as a Microcosm", the seminal paper of my great grandfather's, Stephen A. Forbes, the very early ecologist.    That resulted eventually in my papers for Cosmos and History that Stan encouraged.    The rest of the world wanted things served up only in their own language following their own assumptions, so I was still mostly at a loss, and desperately looking for what everyone's common language could possibly be,...    Everyone's expanding interest in sustainability seemed like it might not lead to whole community rejection of my work again, but it fairly directly did.  As usual, it was as soon as people began to understand what I was talking about, and see the implications of learning to trust what nature is visibly doing over one's preferred theory, for telling you how nature works.


2008 to present

Jul 2011 From the view of June 2008 when I was 61, I had made these basic discoveries 30 years before, and they still remained problematic for sharing with others.  It seemed to be What happened to wreck my life.   That description needs updating, but I was in deep pain from finding my rather wonderful discoveries to be antithetical to the whole culture around me.   My experience was confusion about why my whole world would seem to prefer to be quite dishonest with itself, clinging to its flawed cultural beliefs when they so clearly differed with fairly simple observation.  

I don't blame people for being themselves, or for having grown up within the same culture and its mistaken beliefs that I used to trust too.  It still did feel like a real breach of personal trust to have the people all around me not respond, as if it was my mistake to discover a need to overcome our society's false thinking.   There became no way I could "have a life" being treated as if I was actively opposing everyone I worked with and cared about at every step.   So I just became desperate to escape.   Having spent a lifetime studying how nature changes form, and my being desperate to discard an old one.    I just let my revulsion for the circumstance tear my emotions from it and, quite without a plan started grasping at threads, for whatever offered comfort and delight.  I found it as those threads led me to what had previously been a very hidden world for me, becoming a woman, and then a wonderful sense of relief.   

Becoming a woman from the inside is a bit different from taking on appearances, but how would an observer know?   You might not, but it gives me a real life, put together piece by piece, that I tremendously enjoy and lets me continue to carefully study the world around me.  It also lets me enjoy people simply as people, without prejudice or feeling that I'm obligated by the beliefs of the wider culture, or need to conform to things I know are mistaken.   It seems to be a true escape for me, that both gives me a rich life and freedom from the oppressive experience I'd been having.

This was the fifth time I had found my life falling apart for much the same reason, causing the people I tried to communicate with to burn bridges and avoid me instead.    People clearly heard what I said, though, and heard it as being clear headed and sensible, but also that it didn't fit their cultural expectation.   One of these deep issues is our cultural faith in being more productive for creating resources to replace depleting ones.   That's the long popular idea of sustainable development.   In so many ways it's very clear that productivity only accelerates depletion of all our resources, ...is the problem.  

I was finding that our culture lacked the mental tools, the perspective, to even have an interest in that kind of insight.   To notice the errors in one's imaginary world requires curiosity about how to stretch your ideas to fit nature, and be alert to where they differ.  All I was getting back from others when I pointed things like that out  was the opposite.  They tried finding creative excuses for the faulty reasoning exposed till they found one that worked, seeming to only remember the intrusion of my having mentioned them.  It was very traumatic to clearly see that pattern being repeated over and over.

At that time the economy had begun racing toward its financial collapse that would occur in the fall.    I was seemingly at the peak of my career as an architect, having completed the detailing and coordination for a U.S. Federal Courthouse building.   But I was also running into conflict with employers, one after another, whose deals seemed interfered with by my apply my skills as an architect, seeing the real solutions to problems an architect is legally obligated to solve.   I'd also just spent a couple years doing a very heavy outreach to the systems and environmental science and policy research communities, going to a number of scientific conferences.  It was tremendously rewarding it finding how well my approach fit with all these leading edges of research, impressing everyone with my ability to understand the issues they raised, but then failed entirely as the scientists I needed to work with found no reason to learn how I understood their problems. 

So while I found the academic approaches let me be highly conversant, their "silos" ultimately made them unwilling to discuss any of the questions I raised.   I was also just sick at heart about my whole ethical culture community completely rejecting my rather clear insights into what real sustainability would need to look like.   Money directly conveys our instructions, all over the world, for the impacts our goods caused.   That only a small fraction of those are visible, but still need to be counted, just violently conflicted with what seems to be an "out of sight out of mind" belief in our culture that we have no responsibility if you don't see it. 

I could see I needed a different life!  I needed one that would let me continue my study from an uncompromised view, and to have it be for fun as it started.   I didn't know what would happen, by just acting on my feelings of abandonment just let go of all the forces rejecting me, instead of clinging to them.  I was disgusted and deeply bored with whole stupid situation, with my whole enlightened community seeming to be willfully incompetent in their response to how our natural world was changing, and my being shut out of simple warm contact with nearly everyone.  If I just lived for joy, instead for steering people away from their own deep habits and beliefs, maybe my deeper purposes might eventually come out.  

There will be other ways to say it sometime perhaps, but when life puts you in a desperate circumstance sometimes you don't know where the clarity you find comes from.  Womanhood was a whole world I'd always been curious about, of course, but as most men I had found inexplicable and confusing.   In the past I'd always thought women dressed for how it would affect the feelings of men, for example, making the fundamental error of thinking my observations were the reasons for how the world around me worked.   It didn't occur to me till a certain moment that women might actually dress in such diverse and stylish ways just for the pleasure of expressing their own feelings.   So that whole world seemed mysterious and dark, the other "polarity", until it didn't.  

There was about a month when a couple offhanded comments by women I barely knew, started to keep running through my mind.  They were among the threads that wove themselves into a fresh new world, unconnected with the tragedies of my past.   That it also allowed me a more full and clear view of the world around me too, made it the perfect refuge.  

I ordered and received a simple black skirt in the mail, delivered at the office, and got off the train a couple stops before home and walked down to the river path where no one else would be, and exchanged the skirt for the pants.  I was kind of nervous but it felt like such an enormous burden removed, I just never looked back.  I walked for a mile or so, taking the long way along the river back to my neighborhood, avoiding people's glances along the way, until I came to the benches at the church on Bennett and chatted with people.  As I sat I tucked in the skirt look like I was wearing shorts, as if that would keep them from seeing it.   I then waited and waited till everyone else had left before getting up to walk up the hill home, still having no idea what their faces would say if I stood up and had to face them.   I've had lots of hesitations and doubts, but the thrill of it and fresh outlooks of every morning have easily overcome them.  

Now three years later it's still not looking so good for making my scientific work useful.   It's just what I do.  It's both needed by my world and for myself to have a retirement plan.   Now I just do for the pleasure of it, I have so little hope otherwise.    Very steadily my emotions, and my body as well, had spontaneously changed and developed, as I explored living as a woman.   Until this past winter I was just enjoying the "newness" and growth of the experience.   In that time I also lost a good bit of weight to look good, and then overcome with delight to find evidence the sensations I was experiencing didn't lie, and I was growing modest but pretty breasts.    What else could an inexperienced woman possibly find more pleasing!

I was also very surprised by how very warmly people I met frequently treated me, and I made more and more good neighborhood friends.   I approached it all with "girlish joy", often going to bed with a troubled heart at night but waking early with fresh clear visions and delight at the prospect of the next day.  I was curious about new kinds of intimate relationships, of course, but I'm still not perhaps ready for that, perhaps just most enjoying living life as a novice in transition, like a pre-teen unsure what to become.   

Since January I've finally started regularly wearing make-up, and now like starting the day with it.  I've also given up controlling how I walk most of the time, letting my hips take their new natural tilt and movement, and enjoying more and more the feeling of being a woman.   I didn't quite notice my complete reorientation coming, though, but from noticing I was getting treated differently, and needed to figure out why that was.    I got a flurry of the kind of classic unwanted attention a woman gets, that I had not actually received till then.   It caused me to take notice and realize how important it had become to me to be addressed as a woman, and to BE a woman to others, and not just to myself.  Before May I had just enjoyed it for myself, and not bothered anyone about however they saw me!   

So that's my story.   It lets me "have a life", one that I really enjoy, and to keep doing the work I love just for the love of it.   As I negotiate the steps to full recognition, and get a new name, the biggest reward seems to be fining my new voice as a woman, like being sympathetic and warm with the men in my life.    and able to speak from a woman's view.   It's not everything, but I just love that.

Some portraits

    

 

Life, Tools, Arts & What interests me

Odd Notes
One of my main habits is writhing myself margin notes on little scraps of paper, on all sorts of subjects.  What I have published are in my OddNotes directory .  A sample is my May 2009 hand written notes and selected transcriptions

Desktop Photo Collection
(go to web albums for large images formatted normal & wide) (F11 to view full screen)..

NYCity & Florida

Flora & Country

Interesting fantasy stories by a young writer (Jonathan H. - at 11)

A question concerning the nature of change, ... 3/22/01

I used to paint some, this in from about 1985, called 'ManOnEarth'


Tools and things

10/2000 to 7/02/06 Natural science has long been my actual main work, which I've supported with architectural design.  Occasionally both have been worth all the trouble it takes to do them well.   I’m presently responsible for finishing the public spaces design and detailing all of a $110 million US courthouse for Jackson Mississippi.   Other recent architectural work includes significant roles in the design of  New York's  Bronx Botanic Garden visitor's center, Science, Industry & Business public library (SIBL), the Grand Central terminal renovation, reconstructing St. Agnes cathedral, renovating the Metropolitan club, Jewish Theological Seminary, the Coney Island Steeplechase Ball Park,  Grand Rapids Public Library, Niagara Gorge visitor center, SOPAC in South Orange and other projects. Now I'm working at H3, back with old friends.   It's good work, and nice to have clients that expect enough to make it fun.    I first changed to architecture when physics didn't satisfy my interest in arts and human values, and was then brought back to physics when my study of abstract form in air currents led to finding the curiously obvious unnoticed patterns of locally emergent systems, an opening to the great questions and contradictions of science and nature.

My major work is on the physics of natural learning systems, called a physics of happening.   I think my two principle contributions are a reliable method of  identifying emergent natural systems, and using the tools of physics backwards to study them.   I use the same mathematical and logical tools as physics, but to detect and watch events develop in the things themselves, carefully exploring autonomous and unstable systems rather than making simplified models of them.    In the case of natural learning systems it seems all models are simplistic.

I've always loved a good shop and tools, with large and small piles of sawdust and metal shavings. Now I just use a computer (well,.. and occasionally get to fix things).  I also write a little.  I guess, other than my guiding loves,  my greatest pleasure when I was young was skiing and as an adult the endless hours of reading to my son and guiding him and his friends in new experience.  

Software tools, AutoLisp is the text programming language of AutoCAD, a widely used graphical database for engineering, manufacturing and design.  Macro is a library of general purpose drawing utilities and productivity tools. Curve is the library of analytical tools used in derivative reconstruction.   I'm trying to convert to R but it's slow doing it by myself with lots of other things to do too, so it probably won't happen till I get some help.  The AutoCAD platform is missing many valuable statistical tools but also does things that simply can't be done in conventional statistical packages, like record the history of one's successive treatments of a data set, or use data sets with irregular time lines as variables in data equations....


A question

ed 3/22/01  ...any physical event, a wink or a collapsing star,  is a chain of natural events combining a myriad of others spanning a tremendous range of scales, propagating multiplying effects in flowing patterns, taking time and development to proceed.  Mathematics isn't what is happening, though that's one of the best tools we have for describing it.  The scientific name for it is 'local emergence'  [well, not the Santa Fe variety, ed.2/06].   It's so much a part of events might we also just call it  'change', or 'happening'?

Does all change Evolve?

Take the formation of a crystal. It begins small, around some seed, and proceeds at an increasing speed as the crystallization fringe expands, first more and then less rapidly, until it approaches its natural limit. Then there's a crystal, a new steady state, the result of a swelling and waning pattern of history dependent events, a flow. This same general acceleration and climaxing sequence is evident in complex successions of innumerable kinds, and may be present in change universally.   Some of its parts are always strictly local in origin and action.   Everything that happens seems to happen that very same way, so why's it a mystery?

These chains of events follow a strict sequence, speeding up and then slowing down.   They absolutely never start in the middle, with slowing down for example, but always start at the beginning of the succession and end at the natural succession's end.  No matter what you do you can't get either a physical or intellectual model of a process of change to work properly without the tell-tale these little start-up and shut-down sequences that mark its departure from a past form and a final arrival at a new one.

Scientific tools can partly test the question by allowing us to take direct measures of change to see if transitional curves, developing rates, are to be found connecting steady states. Such growth rate curves are a sign of history dependent processes and locally developing causation.  It is not so much whether a sequence of measurements fits a growth equation. It's whether there's any process at all connecting the end points of change. What is commonly found connecting steady states are the ever-present logistic ('S') curves, frequently regular, but non-steady state, smooth transitional progressions connecting changes in kind.

Logistic curves are unusually pervasive in the measures of transitional events of every scale and duration. They occur precisely during the time intervals where fundamental change is occurring, where the past and future formulas do not apply, and where it is especially hard to describe what's going on. This coincidence is a marvel of nature that goes relatively unnoticed in the body of science. I don't believe there is a chapter in any physics text simply called 'change', 'happening' or its equivalent. We work around it all the time, but never really address the subject. The question is, what do those easily observable orderly in-between periods represent?

Are they the evidence of evolving systems, exploding and fading successions of events too complex for us to yet understand, the smooth and silent workings of radical transformation, the pervasively evident but completely mysterious way it all works?

continued


jlh