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The discussion focuses on the “natural systems paradigm” of science. It expands on the scientific method to correct a major omission. The scientific method was never designed to study the self-organizing systems of nature in their natural form.
Natural systems could only be studied as abstract models invented by scientists, based on equations built around recorded observations. The lack of observations for how natural systems work internally is the problem. As for another person’s life or mind, you simply can’t tell how things that work by themselves are organized and operated from their own insides. Nature abounds with such systems, but the lack of data on how they work has forced science to simply ignore them as a subject of study.
My approach rests on using observation to first locate natural systems by how they work as a whole, and then investigate their stages of evolution from beginning to end.
It’s both serious physics and richly informed “story telling” using natural language and the universal themes of beginnings and ends of change. It uses the principle of energy conservation as the common natural limit for all energy using processes, as a way to explore natural systems and events. The “epidemiological” device used is that of a “dual reality”, treating words like “apple” to refer to both the thing and the idea of apple. That allows discussion to refer to *both* subjects defined by nature and those of abstract definition in our minds (the world of nature and the world of intellect) as “hand and glove”, to consider how one’s mental and physical worlds fit.
So it’s not about “data and equations” so much, as about observed “whole units of organization” found in nature (individual systems). Studying how self-organized systems behave as a whole is the only way to tell how the behaviors of their parts are adding up, as abstract theories simply have no source of data for their interior workings.
Posts on current issues are mostly from a view of general principles,
…so old posts are often not out of date for learning more about what is going on behind the scenes when observing environmental events, (though may be need an edit).
Nature’s working parts are not “facts” but self-defining physical systems, objects of nature that exist independent of our facts. They work by themselves, where they are, in ways that are far too complex and to holistic for us to define with abstract rules.
You don’t need to know quite how systems work, where how they work as a whole is simple enough to understand by itself.
Natural systems one can clearly identify as individual “things” are generally found to have developed by an energy using growth process, from some “seed” or other “germ of organization”. Each then develops by growing in its own environment, usually in a unique local way. Biological organisms are energy using systems that mostly develop by growth from a seed. Thinking of all natural systems from how they work as a whole, as if like “organisms” that work by themselves, living out a natural life, is one convenient way.
So I study “storms” as locally developing systems for moving heat, for example, rather than as following rules of deterministic processes. My study of the physics of change over time directed me to discover a proof that this was a necessary perspective, if “seemingly deterministic” processes were also “to actually satisfy the conservation of energy” from their beginning to end. [drtheory.pdf]
The familiar paradigm of modern science, so far, does not recognize the existence of self-managing systems in nature. It’s only subject of science is “our systems” of mathematical relations, ones we invent to explain the data we collect. So my work also had to become an exploration of the role of science in shaping our thinking, as the earth and other physical systems of everyone’s great direct concern, turn out not to be directly studied by science.
So what I actually study are how individual organisms, storms or cultures, etc., develop by their own process of accumulation, using energy, to produce autonomously organized individual systems in nature. Their “cellular design” (having different sets of internal and external relationships) comes from how they develop.
It’s observed as a burst of self-organization as a new pattern of energy use expands in its environment. It’s been a struggle to get “deterministic thinkers” to consider “opportunistic processes”, though. So the chance to organize and present my rather well founded theoretical/empirical approach has been put off for decades, actually. I keep trying to use “English” but also am clearly not yet finding a language for conveying it.
It’s not that “physics is wrong” but rather that it takes a different approach, looking at the parts of nature that can be successfully described as following universal rules. I study the parts of nature that can be successfully described as following locally developing rules. The two sets of explanatory principle can and do work together, and expand our awareness of what’s happening within and around us.
Most of the posts from my old blog have been moved here, with a quick edit or two for some in the process. There’s lots of good stuff going all the way back to 2006. My research archive is Synapse9.com, the work of P.F. Henshaw (my pen name).
ed: Feb 2012
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