Coherence and my weblog

So, I'm considering dumping all my weblogs into some organizer like Brainstorm and rearranging them to cleaner subject areas.

The problem is, the areas are all connected. So, the best I can do is to build a pyramid of increasingly detailed descriptions from different viewpoints that work their way down to the same underlying structure.

Clearly, at least five viewpoints I need are : religion, business/commerce, and life-science, artificial life/advance computer science, and government, in addition to "clinical health" and the incredibly misunderstood concept of "public health". That's seven. Big job. Maybe enough to triangulate.

My core concept is that there are underlying themes that tie together all these disciplines that have grown apart and largely stopped talking to each other or reading each other's literature. The specialization and differentiating aspects of Life have gotten ahead of the reintegration aspects of Life, and we have a massive "silo" problem, socially.

And, worse than just distinct areas, the field actively repulse each other. I get flak from public health for even being willing to talk about corporations in a positive sense -- obviously, to some, business and corporations are "the enemy." Of course, that cuts both ways, and many corporations consider public health to be public enemy number one, always going on about global warming or 20% of the population that's easy plague fodder, or the damn environment or something, as if jobs don't matter too. As if health care will somehow "support itself" in the absence of employment. Ask Detroit how that's working out.

So, yes - corporations, government, and religion are all potentially corruptible -- but that's a social problem to be addressed, like landing a human on the moon, not a fatal flaw to be accepted as given. Any "body" with life force in it is potentially corruptible. So what? The goal of health and public health is to overcome that corrupting influence on the individual and population levels respectively. And, in my model, the population level has a "life of its own", so there is a real living entity, "the public", with its own high-level health, largely independent of the lives and health(s) of all the individuals within it. And, ditto, corporations have a "life of their own" that is largely independent of the people who make up the corporation, and which can go on despite turnover of the individuals. As, of course, does your body - which has a life of its own above and beyond that of the individual cells that make it up and come and go invisibly to you, in "healing" processes.

So, we cannot stop decay and thermodynamics from disassembly processes, but we can counter those with even stronger regeneration and rejuvenation and re-construction processes, and that's what "health" in the larger sense is about. The "events" of disease or accident are really only distractions - the core question is what the underlying structures and processes are that lead to healing which is strong enough to overcome the inevitable simultaneous decay.

One form of decay is parasitic invasion from outside by things at a smaller scale (microbes: viruses, bacteria, tapeworms, etc.) Another form is parasitism by "macrobes" -- namely, being eaten by each other, or by lions, or by other corporations, or governments, or religions, for lunch. We all fact this exact same problem, on every scale of LIFE, from cellular to governments and nation-states and global corporations and very rich people and religions.

It is one of the few universal truths that is "scale invariant" which is great, because everyone has a vested interest in solving this. (...or a greedy interest in solving it first.)

This gets to the question of immune systems. You can't "heal" something at any scale if you can't tell whether it is broken or not, and you can't tell whether some process "belongs" or not. These turn out to be very hard but crucial problems. Nothing will scatter energy faster than a loss of "identity" or "core values" or "integrity", and these are the stakes that lead to all out, back-to-the-wall win-or-die-trying battles for "survival" of "us", or "our way of life" or "what we believe in" or "what we stand for" or "what this company is about."

So, in many posts, I develop the idea of s-loops or "sloops" - which seem to me to caputre the basic building block of every form of life on every scale. I define this new term of mine, "s-loop" as a self-aware, self-protecting, goal-seeking feedback loop. It follows almost instantly from the lack of "constants" in the world, that an s-loop's first job is pretty much guaranteed to be surrounding itself with supportive subordinate s-loops. So, the concept of the founder of a company has to embody itself in supportive roles and relationships of new hires.

When that process isn't strong enough to hold the center, it becomes a"corrupt", or in a human body, "cancerous." The job of clinical health on a single-person level, and public health on a nation-scale level, is to prevent that corruption from getting out of hand in the first place, because once it is out of hand, it is, well, out of hand.

So, prevention upstream of where corruption occurs then follows as being the core strategy of both types of health preservation. Repair of cancer or disease or corruption may be very large business, but is a distracting set of events from the core processes that need to be made stronger to avoid failure in the first place.

And, even though academics with very limited bandwidth and years to apply it have broken LIFE into ever smaller specialty areas, we, as humans or corporations or cultures or religions or nation states must live in every one of them simultaneously. We therefore have a different problem than academics face. We can't pick which world to live in and focus on. This simultaneity is the dominant feature of our lives, and the complexity first to be removed in academic discourse "within" a "field." So, alas, that discourse becomes quickly irrelevant to our "system level" issues.

But, hey, we (at any scale of "we") also lack enough bandwidth to encompass the problems generated by hundreds of "us" at that same scale interacting, let alone larger scale interactions that are simply beyond our mental capacity to even see, let alone grasp. We can't win that way, ever. What can we do besides despair?

There may be an answer in the magic of "recursion." Recursive functions are wonderful things that act on themselves to produce themselves in an infinite loop. Fractals are recursive, and infinite complexity can be generated with a trivial rule, repeated recursively forever.

So, a single "recursive" simple object can be infinitely complex on multiple "levels" simultaneously, and still simple enough to write down the generating function on a 3x5 file-card. Perhaps, if we write our equations and do our math using recursive structures as the primitive elements, instead of "numbers" we will be able to say something useful, or develop a way to measure, model, and deal with the hierarchically fractal world we live in.

Ken Wilbur refers to such infinite fractal chains of scale-invariant symmetry as "halons" and has written about them, although in a somewhat hard to access way. For our part, let's assume that maybe we can summarize, simplify, and describe some key properties of the complex hierarchy of a body, or corporation, or nation or culture in such a hierarchical-but-trivial math.

Is there something we can say about that without exploding our brains? Actually, a lot has been written and studied about "small-world" models with exactly that fractal complexity, and why the internet, for example is one, and how such models are remarkably robust against damage from noise or faulty components.

Still, there is something about "life" that leans forward expectantly and desires or wants to move into the future. Life is, in some subtle but real sense, "pulled" forward by its own perception of a better road ahead. Life is driven by anticipation, occasionally fulfilled. That seems important, and not very obviously a feature of a set of recursive mathematical functions.

Well, the key thing here is that the levels of the hierarchy of life have to "work together" for the whole thing to succeed and be sustainable. A cell that takes on the human body will be located, marked for execution, and executed. A terrorist that takes on a culture will similarly be attacked. A rogue department chairman who tries to exploit the company for his own gain at its expense will be located and eliminated, or should be.

Can it work? Apparently - I don't have a sense that my body's cells are busily engaged in a battle to see who is the "top cell" and who gets to "own all the ATP" and "order the other cells around. There is no Rambo-neuron in the brain that all other neurons bow down to and serve -- there is only an emergent being, an sloop, that encompasses all the neurons, but is still above and beyond them with an independent life of its own.

How that "life of its own" comes about is the key question here, far beyond "life-sciences." Entrepreneurs are creating new large-scale life-forms every day, bereft of a general principle that encompasses both them and biological organisms. LIFE evolves simultaneously on every level at once, - genes, individuals, species, biospheres.

So, this blog is about how private health, corporate health, health of the earth's biosphere (Our environment), and national health can not only co-exist, but can become mutually compatible. It is not about "which one will win" because the definition of "win" requires that everyone on every level continue to exist, and the term "win", at least as used in the USA lately, seems to imply "winner takes all and the loser is eaten for lunch" an a cannibalism approach to corporate survival and even national survival.

The USA's official strategic policy declares the USA to be number one and asserts a right to persist and defend that by unilaterally attacking any other country that even dares to think about possibly someday being strong enough to challenge us if they wanted to, whether they do or not. The unspoken assumption is that life is defined by a "winner eaters the loser for lunch" approach and algorithm.

The problem with that concept, aside from polarizing and forcing every other single country on the planet to start trying to figure out how to get rid of the USA before they themselves are eaten by this predator, is that this concept is not consistent with the nature of the rest of Life. It is, alas, a self-fulfilling prophecy, that, once stated, is hard to retract and tends to generate exactly what it feared, thereby self-justifying itself - it is, in other words, an s-loop itself, a concept fighting to stay alive and build itself an army of supporting s-loops. It distorts perceptions, to eliminate contrary evidence and emphasize positive evidence. It wants to live.

But, in life, there is no "top neuron". There is no "top body cell". The only template and pattern we have for success in the long term isn't based on "winner kills off the loser" and isn't a zero-sum game at all. The local dry-cleaner doesn't depend for survival on killing off all other businesses in the area, including those who produce delivery vehicles or building materials or solvents or cash-registers.

So, there's the problem. We want and need higher-level s-loops to be strong enough to organize lower-level life forces productively, but not exploitively. The force must be strong enough locally to overcome decay and ensure survival, but not so strong that it simply becomes destructive decay on a whole higher social level.

The key thing to realize is that, on these levels, "individuals" is a very misleading concept. Corporations, cultures, religions, and natures can do something that human bodies cannot do, so we keep forgetting it -- they can "merge".

While lions and tigers and bears can "win" and "lose", or "eat" and "be eaten", the verb "merge" is not relevant. Yet, at a species level, say, wolves and deer get along just fine - the wolves eat the weakest deer, strengthening the deep species, and both species win. Already this is not familiar.

It seems to me really important to get the concept "merge" into active discourse. Without it, yes, maybe our only remaining choices are to "win" or to "lose", to "eat" or "be eaten." There is, however, a third choice, merging, which was pointed out to us by our bodies as a solution.

This is the kind of discussion that I think it will take to get past local ideas of winning and losing, of labor versus management, or individual health versus corporate health, or corporate health versus national health, or "this religion" versus "that religion." If we seek solutions that pit levels of the hierarchy of life against each other, it seems to me, the structure will surely collapse, or be far weaker than someone who figures out how to get all the levels aligned in a supportive and mutually reinforcing way. (recursively)

Such structures can suddenly be capable of great performance, and of importing great amounts of energy and "wealth", which then greatly increases the chances of local decay and instability and corruption of power by power itself.

But that equation has a solution, of a healthy body, and my sitting here with my ten trillion cells is evidence of it. That's the only stable, sustainable definition of "health", and it isn't something we can "insure" or cover for 2/3 of "people" or 1 percent of "nations" or 1 percent of corporations. Either we solve it all, for everyone at every level, simultaneously, or it will collapse along that axis.

That requires coming to grips with this concept of "merging" and all the stories, narratives, and anxiety we have about a similar-looking concept of "being eaten" or "being assimilated." There's where the work is required, to disentangle those two concepts. Life is not "the BORG."

Well, it's time to stop with all this analysis and "go to work." Sigh. Till tomorrow, if the markets don't crash today....

Oh, sidebar - "recursion is the one case where dealing with more of life at once doesn't cause the solution to explode, and in fact, improves resolution and simplifies the model. If we can get readings from every different level and combine them, we can figure out what's universal and what's local noise and artifacts, and boil the model down to a few core key elements. In that sense, more is less and, unlike the typical PhD thesis, we should be EXPANDING our horizon and being MORE inclusive when doing this analysis, not less. The goal isn't to describe infinite detail - but to distill all of it down to a very small, very simple set of equations that are capable of generating all that complex detail if applied to themselves recursively.

So, no, I don't feel bad at trying to encompass way more than a federal grant or thesis advisor would recommend for "a paper" or a "research study." The simplicity I am seeking for those who know the math, is Laplacian simplicity, not Newtonian simplicity. ' As a metaphor, I want the average temperature of the world, and adding more numbers doesn't make the answer any harder, it only makes it more accurate and reliable. The details all wash out and go away, so there's no loss in adding them. I'm not trying to "draw" or even "sketch" the fractal, which is infinite - only to nail down the fractal dimension and generating function, which fits on a 3x5 file card with white space left over. Or, adding more extreme data points doesn't make the line you get from linear-regression curve-fitting any more complicated - it only makes the line a better fit. (Obviously I feel defensive about this.)

Wade