Unity in diversity - the universal problem

If we're going to have a useful discussion on solving our most important common problems, we need to understand the concept of "unity in diversity" at more than a basic level.

I want to stress two features of this design problem of "unity in diversity" as I'm using that term:

• The design problem is very wide-spread. There are instances everywhere in space, time, and scale.
• The processes and principles behind this are not just a little similar, or even very similar - they are identical.

First - the problem is very wide spread, across space, time, and scale.

• Our bodies have muscle tissue, nerve tissue, bone, blood, etc. - each with different jobs to do.
• Companies may have marketing, engineering, and manufacturing departments, each with different orientations and vocabularies.
• Families may have very young, young, middle-age, older, and very old members, each with very different interests and needs and vocabularies.
• A university may have different departments - such as "engineering" and "literature" and "athletics", with very different orientations, priorities, needs, and vocabularies.
• A hospital may have departments, specialties, and sub-specialties - such as medicine versus surgery, emergency medicine, emergency pediatric medicine, emergency pediatric respiratory medicine, etc. -- each with different interests, needs, orientations, and vocabularies.
• Our cells, internally, are not uniform but have specialized subsections for energy production, protein production, effectively library services (DNA), etc. These are all specialized with different structures, orientations, and functions.
• Our planet is not uniform but is divided, somewhat contentiously and fluidly, into "nations" which don't line up exactly with "cultures" or "continents." These may very specifically speak different languages and have different values, needs, and aspirations.
• There are often "classes" of society with differnt values, needs, and use of language, even if it appears at first glance to be "the same language."
• There is, literally, "no end to this." If we look upwards and outwards, it seems that the visible universe is divided into solar-systems surrounding stars, and the stars are clumped in to galaxies, and the galaxies are clumped into clusers.
• If we look at the internet and the world of weblogs and interest groups (the "blogosphere") researchers have found that it too has differentiated and clumped into subgroups that mostly talk within themselves, not across groups. (See Lada Adamic's work.)
• If we look at a high-school cafeteria, sometimes the breakup into groups, cliques, etc. is obvious.
• If we look at our cities, there are "neighborhoods" with local flavors that may be very different from each other.
• Our very concepts of life and knowledge have somewhat dynamic boundaries put into them breaking one world into different "fields of knowledge" with specialized vocabularies and interests and persistent identities.
  

This tendency to break apart a homogeneous population and turn it into specialized sub-groups is everywhere. This is a very basic physical process that always tends to happen.

If you don't believe me, ask any Dean, Director, parent, school-principal, general manager, mayor, governor, president or king. As soon as you get a large group of people together they tend to break apart into "warring factions." over the smallest things. And these people will also confirm that this problem is not just wide-spread and one that absorbs a lot of their time and attention, but is one that has a dramatic, often fatal impact on the survival of the collective enterprise - from productivity to creativity to agility. Everything gets wrecked by this breaking up into silos. So, yes, there is a lot of interest in ways to counteract that tendency, and in design patterns that are "reusable" and can be plugged into your own problem situation.

What's not yet shared, however, is the realization that these problems don't just span space, but they span scale and time. These are all, mathematically, the same problem - and it is the central problem everyone on earth has a vested interest in getting solved right now, if just to "fix" their own little corner that has gone wrong and spends more time fighting itself than it does getting useful chores done.

Without destroying the benefits of specialization, and without homogenizing everyone into "the Borg", how do we overlay something else additional on top of those specialties so that they all also have a common identity, a shared component, and can, when we need to, act as one? That's the engineering design question. What works? What has ever worked?

Second, the processes and principles behind this are not just a little similar, or even very similar - they are identical.

The good news, then, is that anything we can learn about this process in one "field", say sociology, is immediately helpful in understanding another "field", such as "developmental biology", if (and only if) we can distinguish the universal aspects from the accidental local implementation details.

The physical laws and principles behind this tendency to break up into self-sustaining clusters come to us from "control system engineering", not physics or chemistry.

There are only a few stable and simple ways to make a self-sustaining control loop, with certain parts we will always find. More on this tomorrow. We know this can work because we're sitting here reading this, and our bodies are made of trillions of cells that are differentiated and yet integrated. There is a solution to this design problem. We need to understand it better.

If every level and instance of this problem has its own low-resolution sense and view and picture of this problem, limited by the very small size of their receiver, mathematically, we can still assemble all of those low-resolution pictures and process them using "image processing" techniques to come up with a single, high-resolution image of the design issue. That's where I'm going with this, phrased as an "image processing" problem. There are very powerful muscles to do that, if we can rotate this problem around and get it over to those muscles.
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Looking ahead , in the next few days I'll bring this back to the question of "immune systems" and the defenders of the faith, or at least, defenders of certain specialized substructures that life has rearranged itself into. There are some fascinating problems caused by the difference in scale between "members" and "the whole."

For example, in our own bodies, to function, we want our cells to be specialized into very specific functions and grouped into tissues and organs, and we want blood cells to be good blood cells, not sloppy blood cells. There are standards! Deviations must be rooted out!

But we also don't want "bone" cells to attack "blood cells" as if they were foreign invaders and enemies.

Now, this is a challenging problem, because we love our cells but, like loved birds like parakeets, they are still, well, to put it crudely, bird brains. PhD's have trouble understanding differences between cells - how are single-celled cells supposed to make a better job of it? (And, the astounding reality is that they do!)

Something really, really important is going on here. Somehow, a collection of dim-witted cells (relatively speaking) has managed, between them, to be collectively bright. This may be something some of us could use. How do they do that! Can we use the same principle to become collectively bright?

It's as if they don't have a brain cell between them. Actually, that's because they don't. They're too small to have "a brain". So, huh. How do we craft a design so that low-IQ cells, making only local observations, will correctly tell "good guys" from "bad guys" quickly and reliably - when the concept "good" and "bad" are actually not even meaningful at that level, but are concepts from a higher level of existence, at the organism level?

This kind of cross-level exchange of wisdom, and the relationship between the police of the immune system and the "immune system as a whole" is where we need to go to understand how things work, and therefore, how it can break, and therefore, if we have a broken one, how to fix it.