The Principal
Principle of Cybernetics -
If worried about making a turn, take
your foot off the gas
If worried something you're building might collapse, stop adding to it.
Natural
systems are
"production vehicles", physical things that begin their development using an
internal accelerator, like self-investment, and exist in environments with other
physical things. Too make any turn, like becoming sustainable or
turning to avoid hitting other things, they also need a responsive decelerator.
We designed and operate our economy to work without one, like a rocket, designed
only to accelerate. To learn to steer it with our values it is first
necessary to find its natural decelerator, a hidden thing to us like a "curled
up dimension" you might say, and learn to use it.
Phil Henshaw
id @ synapse9.com 2/22/06 4/12/06 5/2/06
12/23/08 9/27/09
Q1.
When you're going too fast and the
signals tell you going faster is the only choice, do you have a choice?
- You start by finding why the signals are inappropriately directing you
to the accelerator, and then divert the fuel being used for that to other
more useful things. You might spend it on finishing rather than
starting up ever bigger projects, or to put on the brakes so you can turn to
avoid collisions, etc. That principle applies quite broadly.
- For some reason when people explain physical things with "theory",
though, the physical things disappear from view, and are then turned into
cultural objects. That could be the core of the problem.
Various perennial physical features, like the accelerators of our production
vehicles, are completely omitted, giving us explanations we like but only
work for "the usual situation". Our inability to change is like
an addiction, endlessly defended by our having explained away the bottle.
12/23/08 Note: The
following needs an edit, the focus below is on how any process that raises
unavoidable questions upsets the past...
When
change displays exponential growth it is most often caused by the presence of
a complex system of growth processes exploring it's environment and being
unconstrained by it. The simple fact is eruptions of
anything will end, so
you look for the signals it and what to then do.
All
growth systems change their own world, and it results in upsetting their own growth
process. That occurs from changing the internal and external
balances of all they connect with. For example, running
faster
reaches a limit of letting you run even faster.
The arithmetic of scale, speed, and acceleration of change is called
"derivatives". Growth, ALL derivatives multiplying, is nature's most
powerful eruption of organization and energy releasing change. The
middle point on the curve looks like the least eventful, but marks the most
dramatic change in the process, a
"change of life" point
where
its whole way of change changes. There's a shower of switching
relations that recoil and transform a
growth process into its final form. The full range of outcomes is from
either perfecting it to scattering its parts. Learning
systems have some choice in how and what happens. The
planning questions are: "How will the system and environment respond?", and
"Will growth, produce something lasting or not?".
Learning keeps what it discovers
from experience instead of being unchanged by experience.
For learning systems the end of growth is the beginning of a new journey, one
that needs to be discovered. It's a process of completing their
organization, treating growth as a job to be finished rather than as a job to
begin any more. Letting it go to a point where it has to be
abandoned and the learning of growth lost, is the question.
Nature displays many kinds of learning and non-learning systems, and humans
still have a lot to learn... In the case of modern
civilization, whether our growing uses of the earth will produce something
lasting is in doubt, because we're overshooting the limits of many of
our essential resources, including overwhelming our own intellectual resources
with urgency and complexity.
Cybernetics is the science/art of "steering", how
systems can be designed for self-control. Few if any other
approaches have presented it as a process of "reading signals", and engaging in
a learning process. That's a major omission from traditional cybernetics
and systems theory in general. Ultimately the reason appears to be
the usual representation of the universe as a pattern of information in our
minds, rather than as a physical environment we can explore for hints and from which we seek responses.
Until recently the theory of designing controls was missing the possibility of
undefined signals. The SASO software engineers and others now
recognize that. The end of growth is perhaps the most
unprecedented event for any system, alien from its experience and a "break from the past".
It demands an original response. That seems to be the 'secret' of life.
You come up with that original response or go away.
The
need to read unprecedented signals is a certainty. At the
signal to end growth, there's a simple trick for when & how to do it, and good
assurance that continued growth would result in a general loss of control.
It's generally the intuitively obvious principle, 'just don't overdo it',
with a more specific meaning in relation to the physical mechanisms of complex
system feedback. Still, we actually do it casually and
automatically for all kinds of choices that are within our familiar experience.
Where we
have trouble is with things that are out of scale, for which we follow rules
rather than experience. So... what you have to learn about is the
larger meaning of a small group of general principles you know perfectly well on familiar scales,
and that still do apply
elsewhere too.
To transform growth into something lasting
(i.e. whole system learning rather than whole system blowout) you need
to sense 'enough', and switch the use of surpluses from
investment in expansion to investment in stability and connection with other
things. Teaching the global economic growth system how to stabilize
without degrading the earth will turn
civilization into the new
kind self-controlled living thing, like one might dream of but both very
familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
It would also be a means of survival where our survival seems directly
threatened. It appears that showing the smart money of the world
how to do what we know by heart in our personal lives is a complete necessity to keep
technology and our burdens on the earth from
going even more seriously out of control. After about 500 years of exponential growth
it's clear the taking growth opportunities are having the reverse of the prior
effect of multiplying opportunity for all. It's
multiplying conflict and complications instead, and an original response is
needed. If we level off we might continue evolving
culturally and economically at near our present size and speed as a stable and
sustainable culture for a long time. Continuing to explosively accelerate
our rate of expansion and change, and its burdens on the earth, will leave
us confused by the blur of emergencies and cause us to make a complete mess of
our one greatest chance so far to make a rich home on earth.
As a
model one can use the common business plan a new relationship with its
environment. Or if you prefer think of it as approaching a new personal
relationship. In either case 'investment' has much the same meaning. Growth
in the relationship is produced by finding and reinvesting the positive
responses from past investments, the secret of growth. Then as in many family
businesses, when the returns are enough they are get used for something else.
Those returns come from the natural systems beyond your ultimate control, like the fish for the fisherman.
The key is coming to a point where you can envision the new relationship as a
whole, and know what's "enough" to serve the larger needs.
For customary large business's there is no point of 'enough'
whatever only "more", and profits are always
plowed back into whatever gives an expectation of multiplying returns. The transition to stability comes
either at
a point of failure and collapse or the choice to preserve what was built, diverting
surpluses from driving growth ever harder and faster. The
alternative is to ease back and use the surpluses to finish things and integrate
the new order with its larger communities of relationships. Simply stated, the principle
of growth is "reinvest the returns" and the principle of stability is, "at
your choice, spend the returns". The reason a lack of
self-control over growth can result in chaos is simply that the multiplying
demands on your environment and your own lagging responses will
result in great cascades of errors. Like we saw in 2008, for
example.
If you throw a party there is always that
early period in the evening when you
wonder if it will ever get going at all! Almost always there's a point
where it magically picks up and starts getting lively. Still, you don't want
that reverberating positive feedback of little interpersonal thrills to continue
stimulating everyone until things get
too wild and go out of control. People are bound to
have many different preferences for their style of approaching the limits of excitement.
Some
will be very conservative, and some outrageous and experimental.
Each makes the exact same judgment of self-control, however, carefully watching
and perhaps guiding events toward their preferred safe distance from the
fine line between rich play and disaster. All the indicators
for that are to find your "point of diminishing returns" .
The accelerating
complex evolution of modern technology and culture that began in the early
Renaissance has given us modern styles, wealth, ideas and science. That no
one apparently noticed we were operating
without an understanding of self-control,... is practically beyond belief.
It's the clearest possible evidence of our deep incompetence in life, and just
our dumb luck in having gotten this far. What reason could we possibly
have to set about to destroy ourselves with our own success?!
There is no such reason, but that's exactly what we're in the process of doing.
The reason seems to be that at that natural "point of diminishing returns"
for responses from our environment over which we have no control whatever,
nature switches the profit signals, to
making increases in whole system opportunity follow from the decreases in
investment, easing back... So basing our thinking on what worked in
the past we're caught in trap of self-exhaustion. That's a
further subject of the "learning curve" approach to cybernetic steering.
It would appear we've just being completely fooled by a rather simple trick of nature. Why we missed
it is an absorbing question, but not the most important one given what I always
used to call "the likely
approaching catastrophes". Now we're
experiencing one of the worst and there are worse to come. We
need to make the best of the situation by simply, making the best of the
situation, think about our stewardship and the place nature made for us. The principal
of self-control is
that it's the simple things that count, not the jazzy and ever more complicated
ones. Yea, "simple things" are also a little bigger
challenge than we're used to... ;-) considering just how much of our world
it looks like we need to redesign. We'll look at things fresh,
treating what we have as a valuable resource, and there are sure to be many
detours and surprises along the way!
pfh
Physics of Happening