(above - picture of the road home, from this site. )
(third part of a series of posts) - I'm trying to reduce 8000 words to 250 here and still get to my answer to the New Scientist's question of "What's the point of Religion?" Maybe the shortest answer is simply in terms of bandwidth and signal theory. There are concepts that are larger than any individual human brain and don't fit in linear symbol string text, so what does the evolving planet use (a) to perceive those and (b) to store and persist those?
Again, I'm trying to explain a model for religion with terms that scientists would recognize.
So far I've mentioned concepts that Science has inherited without adequate scrutiny that need to be re-examined. One of these is the idea that humans are magically special and different from other natural phenomena, so that "social science" is somehow different from "the natural sciences".
Another idea left over from history is the idea that mankind is God's greatest creation, beyond which there has been and never will be any life in this universe that is greater. The term "God" has been removed from that thought by Science, but the rest persists -- in direct violation of the Cosmological Principle that asserts that here and now isn't special, and which, like Occhams razor, is one way to generate hypothesized models to test first.
So, let's break that constraint, which has no basis in either theory or fact. Let's start by assuming that Evolution is occurring on many levels simultaneously, whether that's easy for humans to grasp or to model or not. Further, let's assume that some of what's evolving is superior to human beings -- that humans are not evolution's endpoint, by a long, long way. We are not the top, and not the end-point. That's the Cosmological Principle. We are not at the middle of the universe - same principle.
OK, but then follow that logic, oh Scientists, and take it where it goes.
I'll assert without proof that there are important things that individual human brains are too small to grasp, period. The burden of proof is on the contrary assumption that the world is so simple that bright individual humans, in less than 100 years time, can even learn the terminology, let alone understand the concepts.
And, similarly, I'll assert that there are things that take 500 years of continuous observation to detect that, again, no individual human is going to ever "see".
If these were radio signals we wanted to pick up, with very low wavelengths and long time-constants (compared to human biological clocks, but not to the time scale of the Earth), we would go, OK, and build a receiver/detector that was very large and would remain in place for 500 years. No big deal, if our society was one that undertook such projects.
Generally, society is more short-term focused, as are individuals, so Evolution has instead created meta-beings, persisting structures that last hundreds or thousands of years, to do such sensing and observing and remembering and learning and storing of that kind of information that humans can not and will never personally grasp.
That's the kind of thing that "organized religion" may be good for. We have very few very-long-term structures on Earth, composed of humans, that could serve to pick up the long-wavelength information about this universe we might need to know. Nations are one other contender, but they are too fluid and come and go too quickly, and are focused on short-term issues. Large Global Corporations are perhaps a great long-term solution going forward, but we don't have globe-spanning corporations that go backwards a thousand years -- except these "organized religions".
It is a frustration of many that religion "changes so slowly" -- but, from a pure signal theory point of view, it takes precisely something that only changes slowly to detect and pick up the long-wavelength signals.
Are such signals there? Following Drake's Other Law, yes, surely they are.
Will we discover new, previously unsuspected phenomena if we look at those wavelengths over time? Again, by Drakes Other Law, yes, surely we will. (These "laws", like Occham's Razor, aren't proven, just helpful guidelines for where to dig first.)
Are there other similar phenomena we can use to do a sanity check that our thinking here is not totally off-base? Yes, read any book on large-scale phenomena and how large scale things are not simply larger versions of small-scale things. One example I recall was the amazement people who didn't know Drake's Law had when they built the first Supertankers and one day one of them, on a perfectly calm day with a flat sea, started moving and ripped apart its dock.
This is the first time people realized that the ocean waves "came that size". Waves with wavelengths of half a mile were treated by small ships as just "swells" or not even noticed at all. It took a ship that long to be rocked by a wave that long. In hindsight, we should have fully expected it, by the Cosmological Principle. There is no reason signals and waves around us should abruptly cut-off at the scale of human beings and only exist to one side of that point.
Throughout history, organized religions were the storehouse of "wisdom" - which was largely definable as simply long-wavelength knowledge -- something that it took 100 years to pick up and finally see for sure was there, because it sure wasn't visible or obvious locally to individuals. Then this long-term "wisdom" stuff had to be distilled into local operating rules, so that it was effectively possible for dumb, short-range humans to benefit from smart, long-range understanding. Organized, large-scale, thousands of humans over hundreds of years "religion" served, and still does serve, as that signal detector and transformer for us.
Well, maybe not for "us". Maybe, for Earth. Individual humans weren't very interested in having their short-term impulses controlled by long-term social wisdom a thousand years ago, and still aren't interested in that, not seeing the point, and not grasping how that works.
Today, our society rejects anything over 30 years old as being "irrelevant." Hmmm. We seem to be regressing, or asserting, implicitly, that there are no long-wavelength lessons we should be "learning from history". That is an unsupportable, and invalid Scientific hypothesis - that everything that matters to us is "news".
Surely yes news matters. So does "olds". All wavelengths matter, until proven otherwise.
Right now Earth is busily evolving social structures the size of Microsoft and Haliburton and GE and other globe-spanning corporations. We weren't asked permission for those, and those may be less "human creations" and more "natural evolution's creations." They are way larger than individuals, act like legal "persons", have civil and constitutional "rights", take actions, absorb energy, and are made up of DNA in complex arrangements and hierarchical structures. By all our textbook definitions, corporations are "alive."
The only reason we don't like to think of them as "alive" is the threat to our myth that humans are God's///blind-evolution's greatest creation. Well, not any more, apparently, by Science's own rules and laws and logic.
And, in point of fact, many humans have noted that, in the USA at least, an unspoken coup has taken place and Congress has a new mandate now, to make a nation "of corporations, by corporations, for corporations". The only "economy" that matters now and is reported in the press and Wall Street JOurnal is the corporate economy, than separated from human-level economy a few decades ago, and now are at odds. Good news for one is generally viewed as bad news for the other, although there is some "leakage" between the two.
But, as humans, we've already "lost" the planet, before we even knew there was a fight for control of it going on. A new species has arisen, Corporations, and it has taken over, and we, being fragmented and tiny-thinkers, either didn't see it, or can't see it if we try.
Still, Corporations should treasure Organized Long-Term Old Religions, because there is no other repository of long-term wisdom they can turn to for advice about what LIFE is like at that SCALE of organized activity. Or, like most teenagers, corporations can simply "Not see" what those old fogies around them are so bent out of shape about, and go off to rediscover the lessons of life the hard way, and wrap the family car around a tree as they find out that "oh, ice is slippery!"
Meanwhile, Scientists, you can go back to sleep, because this is happening without your assistance or brilliant assistance, and is already beyond your ability to model simplified versions of, let alone grasp. LIFE will evolve despite you.
It's magnificent to behold unfolding. Probably the same thing is happening on ten trillion other planets simultaneously, evolving and unfolding into a LIFE form shape so far beyond our ability to grasp we don't even have words to describe it.
We're still back here arguing about whether it is "genes" or "species" evolve, and not looking out the window or reading the paper where the answer is apparent. Right now, "corporations" are evolving and spreading and taking over the Earth's evolving re-structuring process.
It's a little uncomfortable where corporate life forms run unexpectedly into existing religious life-forms, as in the Mideast. Some clashes will occur, but there is no need for "survival of the fittest" -- because at the corporate level, "merger into a larger ONE" is also an option that battling tigers never had.
Already, new pathways to evolution are open, like that. The past is a poor guide to the future, in that regard. Darwin didn't even speculate on what shape evolution would take once corporation sized living entities had the ability to clone and merge and have tele-presence.
The good news, for religion, is that as corporations get to live longer, they will "grow up", as do humans, and begin to realize that some of that stuff their parents was spouting actually matters and applies to them: Things, dammit, have consequences. Who knew? Why didn't someone tell me!!??
So, global warming and the collapsing biosphere should be a wake-up call. Corporations can see, or could see, on scales humans never will, so they should start to grasp this, maybe faster than people can.
Well, if they can utilize their internal resources. If a corporation behaves like a huge exoskeleton for a few dudes at the top, it will be stuck and limited by human cognition. If it can accept "Theory Y" and open itself up to internal flow, it can get way past that binding constraint and evolve to something much smarter than the smartest human.
We better see if we can't catalyze that process. We can't "beat" corporations anymore, they already are here to stay. They don't have intrinsic "morality" at that scale, yet -- ie, they are too new to have absorbed long-term (> 1000 year) lessons about what works and what doesn't.
We need as scientists and religious folks to accelerate that learning curve for corporate-scale entities somehow, because we're in the back seat of the family car the kids are about to wrap around some tree.
If someone has a great idea how to do that, let me know. I just trace all the wiring back and point to where the problem is.
Still, it's interesting. If you dig into it, the Toyota Production System and "lean" approach actually does spend a great deal of time removing the internal barriers inside a corporate structure to the flow of information, so that the "aperture synthesis" can take effect, making the whole organization a learning machine with a capacity far greater than "management".
That model seems to be extremely successful. So, maybe there's hope.
( a self-assembling tower crane from howstuffworks.com )
My public health buddies sometimes seem to want to disown me for being willing to hop into bed with corporations, instead of viewing them as the scourge of the earth and something to be fought off and destroyed in a noble losing battle.
I flip it around and say our job in public health (this weblog) is to figure out how to help corporate life forms SUCCEED beyond their wildest dreams, and learn to SEE better -- because they'll SEE the things we're trying to tell them on their own then. And that seems to be the only way to reach them, is through simulation models or real-life experiences that let them find this out for themselves.
I prefer simulators for learning about consequences and limits and to avoid plane crashes over practicing extreme maneuvers with a real plane. We need better long-term, long-wavelength LIFE simulators for corporations to learn from -- multiplayer games on a corporate level that, like the WHOPPER in the movie "War Games", will finally realize -- hmm, curious game, the only way to win "GLOBAL WAR" is not to play the game.
Corporations aren't Darwinian lower life forms that can only "win" or "lose" -- they can actually "merge". That's our way out of this mess. It's not a zero-sum game anymore.
And, corporations do not have to be "the BORG", life-sucking stultifying wretched places to suffer and "work". In fact, a corporation that squeezes individuality out of people is self-defeating, as it reduces the complexity of its own internal ecosystem, and makes itself dumb along some new axis, some new base you could have been covering for it.
So, "bright" corporations exult in "unity in diversity". It's a great model. It's the only good working model. It's not "Am I me OR am I a corporation employee?" In the optimal solution, you're BOTH simultaneously but not in the degenerate solution, in the multiplicative solution.
Each of those identities makes the OTHER identity richer and more satisfying.
That kind of corporation, one can imagine, will have way more success at "innovation" and have way higher morale than one without that feature.
The problem corporate CEO's struggle with is how to maintain "control" in an open-system and prevent it from simply descending into chaos once they stop "running things with a firm hand" from above. Like "angular momentum", the "forces" that emerge to take "control" in an open system are invisible and not at all intuitive to the human animal.
We've seen examples and know that it can work and does work, though. The trick is how to convert a dumb, dull, life-sucking corporate exo-body into a fit, thriving, exciting life-energy supplying exo-body. That's a win-win for the economy, for the workers, for the stockholders, and for everyone except a few top "officers" of the company who become less important in the greater scheme of things and can be expected to fight back against losing or not getting their $250,000,000 perks for their "leadership".
Again, here, the concept of "emergent leadership" needs to be fleshed out, so that even the employees know what it is they are asking for. It's not a question of changing WHO gets to sit in the "top seat" and "run the company." -- in open control, no ONE person runs the company. EVERYONE collectively, in a single unified emergent entity, runs the company.
That is NOT the same as everyone having a "vote" in corporate decisions. The difference is subtle but crucial. The difference is a herd of people versus a TEAM. Again, this is an area humans have little intuition on, and have a hard time seeing, except perhaps when they see a sports team or band "get it together" for a few moments and the experience is astoundingly rewarding -- we resonate to that frequency. We are hard-wired to LOVE that frequency and that experience. Employees who have ever been in a work situation where it "clicks" into a true TEAM never want to work anywhere else again.
But, most CEO's, even if they wanted to, don't know how to navigate from "HERE" to "THERE", so it does little good for stockholders to demand that they do so. The mental models we were taught in school don't even include the "THERE" I'm talking about.
So, let me whirl it by one more time on this way too long post. It's not the employees who run the company in this model, and it's not the CEO, and it's not labor, and it's not management, and it's not some sort of vote sharing between them. NO ONE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL is in charge. And EVERYONE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL is not in charge (chaos or Communism).
Nothing on an individual level is in charge. The "in charge" part is no longer located ANYWHERE on the "individual" level plane. The "in charge" part has moved up the hierarchy of being to the EMERGENT plane above the "individual level" that we crudely and vaguely try to tag with the word "team" or "synergy" or "emergent" without really grasping well.
The CORPORATION becomes a living being in its own right, above and beyond the living-ness of the individuals within it, and the CORPORATE-level BEING runs the company. That's the model. If you can't grab hold of and work with "emergence", this model makes no sense at all and keeps mis-resolving itself into chaos or communism or the Borg.
This century, for the first time in the history of the Earth, we finally have the computer power we need to model "emergence". This is just crucial. This is "where it is at". This is our escape route from the mess we've made of this planet and the forces we've already set into motion that are coming back to haunt us.
This isn't "kum bay yah" touchy feely stuff. You watch a great sports team (like Michigan CAN too be, someday!) and it's no "accident" when they win. They "have it together."
That's what we need to aspire to, as families, communities, corporations, nations, and the planet - to "have our act together", to get to that overarching UNITY that embraces and loves DIVERSITY instead of suffocating it, because it spins out into a higher dimension where that unity becomes possible.
We know this can work. Our human bodies are living proof that ten trillion cells can form one "body" and each have a life better than what they had before.
99.9 percent of us WIN in that strategy, and the few people at the top might think they've lost millions of dollars (or billions, or trillions), but money ain't much good if the planet implodes, guys. You can't spend it anywhere if everyone else is dead.
The total value of stored wealth goes to ZERO if everyone else dies, regardless what number of dollars or gold bars it is made up of. Wealth is, at its core, access to future social resources and if there isn't a future society, that adds up to zero.
The way to maximize wealth from here, or rich people, is to maximize the future society that you now own a piece of. Think long-term. You can't even spend a trillion dollars short term anyway. "Emergent unity above diversity" is the only key that's been shown to work here.
We don't NEED TO take each other's stuff, because the pie CAN stop shrinking and start growing again, through emergent Life.
Mathematically, this is a relationship thing. The "inner product" of two vectors a and b is written
For "real" angles, the cosine function varies between zero and one, so the best you can ever end up with that product equaling is when the two are perfectly aligned, and you get a value of a times b.
For other angles, mistakenly called "imaginary" and related to that strange thing the square root of minus one, cosine is not bounded, and can grow without limit. Any two things, with the right relationship, if you move into that dimension, can have a product larger than any number you'd like it to be. And a company formed of people oriented like that can have a value larger than any number you'd like it to be. It's all about getting relationships off the "real plane" and to having a component in this other dimension, which is very real as well, but a little harder to point to from here, except by example. It's emergent. It's synergism.
It's simply a "complex exponential", as is any simple growth curve. That's pretty solid ground. It's a pure feedback equation where growth is proportional to size already, with the "complex" additional part adding the zing. That's what we need more of. More zing. The curve is a pretty helix-shape, which is kind of interesting - and, like a "screw", by twisting it THIS way, it moves THAT way at right angles to the way you are twisting it. That's important, because we don't have other tools to make the work piece move in that other dimension.
And, you can crank it out like you can a bridge, through solid engineering, once you get the right math understood correctly. We finally have the computer power to solve those equations. There is hope.
Wade
math reference links:
The beautiful exponential spiral - see the bottom left graph in the section
complex exponential dynamics (fractals)
Complex exponential map (not instantly helpful but animated and pretty).
Complex exponential - Nice interactive live graphics from MIT's open-courseware
Self-assembling tower crane:
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