Showing posts with label a-life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a-life. Show all posts
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
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
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
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Reflections on Human evolution
Nicholas Wade's piece in this weeks Science Times is titled "Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally." (NYTimes.com, 6/26/07).
He begins:
This is not surprising to me, and fits my model. I had described before what I saw as four levels of disagreement that any self-aware, self-protective, self-healing feedback loop, or "s-loop", has to deal with. These are disagreements about
That much (two levels) is generally recognized. (cite - paper from MIT). Even the US Army Leadership Doctrine allows and encourages raising facts that challenge the mental model being used at headquarters, as startling as that seems, because they have realized that too many losses were occurring due to wrong mental models of the situation on the ground. But that concept has not gone gently into the night, and is widely misunderstood and resisted.
Similarly, The Toyota Way or "lean manufacturing" is designed to mercilessly force errors to be surfaced, despite human reluctance and resistance at all levels to discuss "dirty laundry" or "defects" or "errors" or "waste", from employees on the front lines to top management. Face-saving cover-up is the norm in many if not most industries, and is what Toyota has realized is the single thing that damages long-term corporate survival and prosperity the most.
Challenges to what I call the third level, or goals, are even less well tolerated by the existing order and administrative hierarchy or power elite or whatever you call it when people do it, versus machines. The system or s-loops "goal" is pretty tightly protected and defended and not changed lightly. Employees in theory Y enlightened companies can challenge the mental model, but not question the goal of the corporate entity. Military personnel can challenge the mental model, but not the goal of the military. This is becoming "sacred" turf, or, with people, tightly held turf. Again, we have an order of magnitude, or factor of ten times as much emotion raised about challenges on this level as on the second level of frameworks.
Finally, what I call the fourth level of any s-loop is "identity". Goals spring from identity, which is the hierarchical glue that plugs this s-loop into the next larger or higher s-loop that it is part of and belongs to, in several different meanings of the word "belongs to." Any s-loop will be part, at any time, of some larger s-loop. This membership defines who "we" are and what "we" stand for and defend as sacred, and defines our goals locally. It defines what is "us" and what is "not us" so we know what to defend and what to resist or, in some cases, attack.
Challenging identity is another factor of ten more emotional, and harder to do. People tend to fix and lock-down their identity, their goals, and their world-views and defend them to the death, regardless how arbitrarily and unconsciously they were inherited or selected in the first place.
And the question of "evolution" hits at that fourth level, for many people, whether religious or scientific, in equally emotional ways and triggers responses with "religious zeal" among people who define themselves as part of the "science" body and among those who define themselves as part of some "religious" body. Now we're talking "sacred", and "heresy" -- at the "burn the witch!" or "kill the heretic!" level.
Well, I find myself loving both camps, as if I had a parent who was Science and another who was Religion, who are currently "separated" and not living together, and who fight a lot lately, calling each other ugly names and throwing things. It's not pretty.
Still, it seems to me that human life on Earth is at a risky place, where we have the technology to kill ourselves off many different ways, but not the wisdom to manage that technology wisely. And, of all the issues that affect the health of the public, that seems to be central to me, and almost a core issue of what "Public Health" needs to address.
Most of those battles between groups fit into my model of "s-loops" just trying to survive, in a massively-parallel, multi-level soup. Some battles are over boring material resources, such as water, but more and more battles are being fought over the four levels of being - over differences in data, mental frameworks or paradigms, goals, and, most of all, identity.
Who are we, and what are we doing here and why? Those turn out to be questions that are ripping us apart and holding us together, and generating much of the fighting. So we cannot avoid looking at them if we're going to bring this baby through the white water and into peaceful waters beyond.
That said, I can get back to Nicholas Wade's article that triggered this reflection, namely, findings from geneticists that our DNA is continuing to evolve even today. So what? Why is this newsworthy? Is there something we can learn from this that we didn't realize before?
I think so.
First, we can see evidence that evolution represents a closed feedback process these days, perhaps more rapidly than ever before so far as human beings are concerned. Our DNA, at least our children's DNA, appears to be somewhat plastic and responsive, in very short order, to changes in the local environment. That's what Nicholas Wade says. But, we also know that much of the local environment these days is the "built environment", the context that we humans, based on our existing DNA, have constructed for each other to live in or with.
In fact, for most people, the built environment now dominates everything else. We spend far more time being "pressured" by school, jobs, corporations, laws, taxes, pollution, careers, social norms, terrorist threats, and loud stereo's than we do coping with "nature" per se. And these are all things we have built for ourselves.
We are living in our own wake, with good aspects and bad aspects. We inherit culture and high-speed Internet, but we also live in our own sewage. We live in our planet's climate, but we are now large enough to affect that climate.
The point is, it's a closed loop. Most people would agree with that. There is feedback. Again, most people would agree, leaving out those who deny that evolution has or is occurring because that violates their mental model and identity. On this point I'm going with the science, because it's overwhelming and I need conclusions that yield action plans, and because I don't believe at all that evolution in any way discounts God. If anything, it's a more impressive universe and more awe-inspiring if it's not just static, but dynamic.
Having now offended half the religious readers, let me give equal time to offending the scientists.
First, I agree with Stephen Jay Gould that evolution is multi-level, with each having an independent contribution. There are vertical feedback loops, so the "either/or" question becomes a meaningless distinction. Yes, we have genes evolving. Yes we have species evolving. Yes each has pressures at its own level that are mostly independent in the short run.
But, here I'll turn a corner and say that the evolution is of s-loops, not of DNA. And that suddenly means that "corporations" and "nations" and "religions" and "cultures" are just one more kind of life of this planet, that needs to be in the complete ecological picture.
In fact, lately, the evolution of humans seems to have taken quite a turn and is dominated by the evolution of corporations, with their typical nested-hierarchy shapes, being both DNA and more than DNA, being both many people, and more than many people.
Corporations are a new species on the evolutionary stage, and they are becoming the dominant world-reshaping species. This is a rather important observation if we're trying to make sense of what's going on and where it's headed and, if it's broken, where to fix it.
So, we don't just have species co-evolving in a tight feedback loop with DNA and genes -- that's an incomplete model. We have species co-evolving with genes co-evolving with corporations co-evolving with cultures co-evolving with religions, with each one of those providing part of the context for the next step in evolution of each other part. Each part of that equation provides part of the "evolutionary pressure" on each other part. And the parts are all connected if we stand back far enough, so that each part is providing evolutionary pressure ultimately on itself.
In parallel. Simultaneously. Irrevocably interlocked bidirectionally.
This is not a situation that can be understood without using "feedback loops", to put it mildly.
But, the big question is still to come. Are these just "feedback paths", yawn, or are some of these actually s-loops -- self-aware, self-repairing, self-defending, self-extending goal-seeking control feedback loops?
Because, the behavior is extremely different - as different as a hot, muggy, sultry summer afternoon, and one with a tornado. Same air, same moisture, same laws of physics and condensation, but one is a closed feedback loop that feeds and holds itself together, and one is not. I'm not saying that a tornado is "alive", but I am saying that a tornado is "MAWBA",
or "Might As Well Be Alive" in terms of some predictions about future behaviors that are otherwise startling and catch us off-guard.
So, I've made a model of the world that includes what we see in the microscope and what we see in the newspaper at the same time. It's a model of nested s-loops, fighting more or less blindly to survive and sustain their four-levels of being. It's a model where s-loops can merge and join forces, instead of just "winning or losing", and where a handful or a trillion s-loops can pool their identity and form a larger, multi-cellular "being" with an independent, higher-level s-loop, consciousness, awareness, self-protectiveness, etc. (for example, us.)
Again, none of this says one word either way about the existence of God or the "true nature" of what a human being is. It focuses on vertically symmetric, scale-invariant primitive building blocks of s-loops, regardless what material or non-material substrate those operate within or across. That's something that supercomputers can model relatively easily -- the kind of thing that artificial life researchers do on a daily basis, except with a different "payload" or "generating kernel" or "seed" to the process of evolution.
Assuming this is a scale-independent control-loop process, we don't need our microscopes to understand it. We can look out the window. We can watch people form a company, a corporation, that takes on a meta-independent life of its own, and the company can then become self-sustaining, self-repairing, have an identity and a goal and a vision, and can in fact turn on and fire the founding partners because it doesn't need them anymore. It has been born, or radiated or emitted or generated or somehow launched.
This phase-transition should be something that can be mathematically simulated, but I don't know anyone who has done that yet. (Nobel prize waiting for someone!)
If we're looking for how to stabilize or improve relationships between people, or management and labor, or government and citizens, or corporations and "competitors", or between "nation states" or between "religions", it all can be illuminated by understanding what these relatively s-loops can do in the way of "merger" that preserves core values while generating an even higher substrate or vessel in which "life of its own" can be placed by God, or emerge, or whatever it is that happens there.
Something happens there. Something important that we don't fully click to yet.
I think its the key to resolving world chaos and should be looked at more fully. IF we can solve that one, we can catalyze the process and complete the birth process for a planet-sized life-form that's trying to emerge here, held back by our own concepts of life and our role in it.
Let me be clear about one thing. This is not a "reductionist" effort to say that all life on earth is "just" a bunch of atoms or s-loops. I'm at the opposite end. But I'm the first to say that if our bodies have a substrate of atoms, then we should know something about what laws and rules constrain what you can do with atoms, because "we" have to live with gravity and physical injury due to momentum and energy and other physical stuff. Similarly, if we, human spirits, live in or on or above or attached somehow to a substrate that is, above atoms, composed of s-loops, then we would we wise to understand what physical laws constrain those as well, and understand how they can be injured, and how to repair them when they break.
That's not saying that humans are "just" atoms or humans are "just" s-loops. My whole premise is that something miraculous happens in the upward emergent phase transitions that we haven't even begun to grasp yet. Stay tuned.
As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said
He begins:
Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.Before looking at that, we need to pause to reflect. There seem to be few topics that set off so many trip-wires and third-rail emotions as the question of evolution.
People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.
This is not surprising to me, and fits my model. I had described before what I saw as four levels of disagreement that any self-aware, self-protective, self-healing feedback loop, or "s-loop", has to deal with. These are disagreements about
- Data
- Mental model or frame used to make sense of data
- Goal of all activity (often externally provided)
- Identity (which of this stuff is "me" and which is "other"?)
That much (two levels) is generally recognized. (cite - paper from MIT). Even the US Army Leadership Doctrine allows and encourages raising facts that challenge the mental model being used at headquarters, as startling as that seems, because they have realized that too many losses were occurring due to wrong mental models of the situation on the ground. But that concept has not gone gently into the night, and is widely misunderstood and resisted.
Similarly, The Toyota Way or "lean manufacturing" is designed to mercilessly force errors to be surfaced, despite human reluctance and resistance at all levels to discuss "dirty laundry" or "defects" or "errors" or "waste", from employees on the front lines to top management. Face-saving cover-up is the norm in many if not most industries, and is what Toyota has realized is the single thing that damages long-term corporate survival and prosperity the most.
Challenges to what I call the third level, or goals, are even less well tolerated by the existing order and administrative hierarchy or power elite or whatever you call it when people do it, versus machines. The system or s-loops "goal" is pretty tightly protected and defended and not changed lightly. Employees in theory Y enlightened companies can challenge the mental model, but not question the goal of the corporate entity. Military personnel can challenge the mental model, but not the goal of the military. This is becoming "sacred" turf, or, with people, tightly held turf. Again, we have an order of magnitude, or factor of ten times as much emotion raised about challenges on this level as on the second level of frameworks.
Finally, what I call the fourth level of any s-loop is "identity". Goals spring from identity, which is the hierarchical glue that plugs this s-loop into the next larger or higher s-loop that it is part of and belongs to, in several different meanings of the word "belongs to." Any s-loop will be part, at any time, of some larger s-loop. This membership defines who "we" are and what "we" stand for and defend as sacred, and defines our goals locally. It defines what is "us" and what is "not us" so we know what to defend and what to resist or, in some cases, attack.
Challenging identity is another factor of ten more emotional, and harder to do. People tend to fix and lock-down their identity, their goals, and their world-views and defend them to the death, regardless how arbitrarily and unconsciously they were inherited or selected in the first place.
And the question of "evolution" hits at that fourth level, for many people, whether religious or scientific, in equally emotional ways and triggers responses with "religious zeal" among people who define themselves as part of the "science" body and among those who define themselves as part of some "religious" body. Now we're talking "sacred", and "heresy" -- at the "burn the witch!" or "kill the heretic!" level.
Well, I find myself loving both camps, as if I had a parent who was Science and another who was Religion, who are currently "separated" and not living together, and who fight a lot lately, calling each other ugly names and throwing things. It's not pretty.
Still, it seems to me that human life on Earth is at a risky place, where we have the technology to kill ourselves off many different ways, but not the wisdom to manage that technology wisely. And, of all the issues that affect the health of the public, that seems to be central to me, and almost a core issue of what "Public Health" needs to address.
Most of those battles between groups fit into my model of "s-loops" just trying to survive, in a massively-parallel, multi-level soup. Some battles are over boring material resources, such as water, but more and more battles are being fought over the four levels of being - over differences in data, mental frameworks or paradigms, goals, and, most of all, identity.
Who are we, and what are we doing here and why? Those turn out to be questions that are ripping us apart and holding us together, and generating much of the fighting. So we cannot avoid looking at them if we're going to bring this baby through the white water and into peaceful waters beyond.
That said, I can get back to Nicholas Wade's article that triggered this reflection, namely, findings from geneticists that our DNA is continuing to evolve even today. So what? Why is this newsworthy? Is there something we can learn from this that we didn't realize before?
I think so.
First, we can see evidence that evolution represents a closed feedback process these days, perhaps more rapidly than ever before so far as human beings are concerned. Our DNA, at least our children's DNA, appears to be somewhat plastic and responsive, in very short order, to changes in the local environment. That's what Nicholas Wade says. But, we also know that much of the local environment these days is the "built environment", the context that we humans, based on our existing DNA, have constructed for each other to live in or with.
In fact, for most people, the built environment now dominates everything else. We spend far more time being "pressured" by school, jobs, corporations, laws, taxes, pollution, careers, social norms, terrorist threats, and loud stereo's than we do coping with "nature" per se. And these are all things we have built for ourselves.
We are living in our own wake, with good aspects and bad aspects. We inherit culture and high-speed Internet, but we also live in our own sewage. We live in our planet's climate, but we are now large enough to affect that climate.
The point is, it's a closed loop. Most people would agree with that. There is feedback. Again, most people would agree, leaving out those who deny that evolution has or is occurring because that violates their mental model and identity. On this point I'm going with the science, because it's overwhelming and I need conclusions that yield action plans, and because I don't believe at all that evolution in any way discounts God. If anything, it's a more impressive universe and more awe-inspiring if it's not just static, but dynamic.
Having now offended half the religious readers, let me give equal time to offending the scientists.
First, I agree with Stephen Jay Gould that evolution is multi-level, with each having an independent contribution. There are vertical feedback loops, so the "either/or" question becomes a meaningless distinction. Yes, we have genes evolving. Yes we have species evolving. Yes each has pressures at its own level that are mostly independent in the short run.
But, here I'll turn a corner and say that the evolution is of s-loops, not of DNA. And that suddenly means that "corporations" and "nations" and "religions" and "cultures" are just one more kind of life of this planet, that needs to be in the complete ecological picture.
In fact, lately, the evolution of humans seems to have taken quite a turn and is dominated by the evolution of corporations, with their typical nested-hierarchy shapes, being both DNA and more than DNA, being both many people, and more than many people.
Corporations are a new species on the evolutionary stage, and they are becoming the dominant world-reshaping species. This is a rather important observation if we're trying to make sense of what's going on and where it's headed and, if it's broken, where to fix it.
So, we don't just have species co-evolving in a tight feedback loop with DNA and genes -- that's an incomplete model. We have species co-evolving with genes co-evolving with corporations co-evolving with cultures co-evolving with religions, with each one of those providing part of the context for the next step in evolution of each other part. Each part of that equation provides part of the "evolutionary pressure" on each other part. And the parts are all connected if we stand back far enough, so that each part is providing evolutionary pressure ultimately on itself.
In parallel. Simultaneously. Irrevocably interlocked bidirectionally.
This is not a situation that can be understood without using "feedback loops", to put it mildly.
But, the big question is still to come. Are these just "feedback paths", yawn, or are some of these actually s-loops -- self-aware, self-repairing, self-defending, self-extending goal-seeking control feedback loops?
Because, the behavior is extremely different - as different as a hot, muggy, sultry summer afternoon, and one with a tornado. Same air, same moisture, same laws of physics and condensation, but one is a closed feedback loop that feeds and holds itself together, and one is not. I'm not saying that a tornado is "alive", but I am saying that a tornado is "MAWBA",
or "Might As Well Be Alive" in terms of some predictions about future behaviors that are otherwise startling and catch us off-guard.
So, I've made a model of the world that includes what we see in the microscope and what we see in the newspaper at the same time. It's a model of nested s-loops, fighting more or less blindly to survive and sustain their four-levels of being. It's a model where s-loops can merge and join forces, instead of just "winning or losing", and where a handful or a trillion s-loops can pool their identity and form a larger, multi-cellular "being" with an independent, higher-level s-loop, consciousness, awareness, self-protectiveness, etc. (for example, us.)
Again, none of this says one word either way about the existence of God or the "true nature" of what a human being is. It focuses on vertically symmetric, scale-invariant primitive building blocks of s-loops, regardless what material or non-material substrate those operate within or across. That's something that supercomputers can model relatively easily -- the kind of thing that artificial life researchers do on a daily basis, except with a different "payload" or "generating kernel" or "seed" to the process of evolution.
The one really critical new thing here is the idea that dumb feedback pathways can undergo a phase-transition and become self-sustaining, self-defending, self-aware, terra-forming active agents on their own accord, existing semi-independently of the smaller agents that make them up.This is the observed phenomenon where, effectively, after the pixels have formed a coherent image (whatever that means), the image realizes it exists and "takes on a life of its own" and pulls up the scaffolding used to create it and now starts telling the pixels what to do in order to keep itself alive. ( or if you prefer, to keep itself sustained, or s-loopy, or soliton-izing, or some persisting verb.)
Assuming this is a scale-independent control-loop process, we don't need our microscopes to understand it. We can look out the window. We can watch people form a company, a corporation, that takes on a meta-independent life of its own, and the company can then become self-sustaining, self-repairing, have an identity and a goal and a vision, and can in fact turn on and fire the founding partners because it doesn't need them anymore. It has been born, or radiated or emitted or generated or somehow launched.
This phase-transition should be something that can be mathematically simulated, but I don't know anyone who has done that yet. (Nobel prize waiting for someone!)
If we're looking for how to stabilize or improve relationships between people, or management and labor, or government and citizens, or corporations and "competitors", or between "nation states" or between "religions", it all can be illuminated by understanding what these relatively s-loops can do in the way of "merger" that preserves core values while generating an even higher substrate or vessel in which "life of its own" can be placed by God, or emerge, or whatever it is that happens there.
Something happens there. Something important that we don't fully click to yet.
I think its the key to resolving world chaos and should be looked at more fully. IF we can solve that one, we can catalyze the process and complete the birth process for a planet-sized life-form that's trying to emerge here, held back by our own concepts of life and our role in it.
Let me be clear about one thing. This is not a "reductionist" effort to say that all life on earth is "just" a bunch of atoms or s-loops. I'm at the opposite end. But I'm the first to say that if our bodies have a substrate of atoms, then we should know something about what laws and rules constrain what you can do with atoms, because "we" have to live with gravity and physical injury due to momentum and energy and other physical stuff. Similarly, if we, human spirits, live in or on or above or attached somehow to a substrate that is, above atoms, composed of s-loops, then we would we wise to understand what physical laws constrain those as well, and understand how they can be injured, and how to repair them when they break.
That's not saying that humans are "just" atoms or humans are "just" s-loops. My whole premise is that something miraculous happens in the upward emergent phase transitions that we haven't even begun to grasp yet. Stay tuned.
As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said
We shall not cease from explorationWade
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Causal Loop Diagrams, stories, and macrobes
One standard tool of Systems Dynamics is the Causal Loop Diagram. This tool is explained at great length in MIT Professor John Sterman's text "Business Dynamics", but a short explanation is given by Daniel Kim in "Guidelines for Drawing Causal Loop Diagrams."
(John Sterman had a paper in the March, 2006 issue of AJPH on "Learning From Evidence in a Complex World", so he's finally been given "judicial notice" by Public Health. Always a good start.)
Kim begins:
I haven't been able to get away for a few weeks for intensive training in Vensim or Causal loop diagrams, but they are certainly referred to in the professional literature as being a strong basis around which to bring many different interest groups together and reach a better common undertanding than would be possible without even turning on the simulator.The old adage "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every-thing begins to look like a nail" can also apply to language. If our language is linear and static, we will tend to view and interact with our world as if it were linear and static. Taking a complex, dynamic, and circular world and linearizing it into a set of snapshots may make things seem simpler, but we may totally misread the very reality we were seeking to understand. ...
Articulating Reality
Causal loop diagrams provide a language for articulating our understanding of the dynamic, interconnected nature of our world. We can think of them as sentences which are constructed by linking together key variables and indicating the causal relationships between them. By stringing together several loops, we can create a coherent story about a particular problem or issue. [emphasis added]
Still, it appears to me, a relative newbie, that Causal Loop diagrams still suffer from the concept that feedback comes in only two flavors - "positive" and "negative", not the full multidimensional spectrum I described in recent posts for "self-aware, goal-seeking, feedback control loops." Thus, on web sites such as Pegasus Communications, we see the classic "two" kinds of loops, those labeled with an "R" for "REINFORCING" and those labeled with a "B" for "BALANCING" (or "negative" feedback reducing difference from some fixed goal state.) See also Mindtools' description of CLD's with somewhat clearer diagrams.
Here, I fear, the power of the ability to turn on the computer and have it crunch through ranges of estimated parameters short-circuits the process I would recommend -- namely, putting the CLD up on the wall, standing back a few paces, and looking amid all the N-factorial combinations of N "loops" for a few "self-aware, self-protective, self-repairing, goal-seeking, feedback-mediated control loops."
At the risk of hitting a lot of hot-buttons, let me say that these, in my mind, constitute a kind of proto-life, which is to say that they are active agents that "might as well be alive" because they satisfy the usual definitions of "life", which is to say that they:
- Consume energy
- are self-repairing
- adapt to their environments
- are self-aware
- seek something akin to homeostasis when disturbed
- resist being shut down or shut off
- are capable of learning and becoming smarter
So, once again, I bring in the hand and water faucet picture, and the person-driving car picture, to illustrate the number of different stages that a single "control loop" can pass through and draw together into synchronous action.
Aside: The fact that the action is synchronized is all the difference in the world, as that is the difference between a laser-beam and incoherent light, where one cuts steel and the other is a little bright to look at. Most of our real-world measurements, unless we are into Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), discard "phase" information and absolute time as "irrelevant." VLBI can work even if the telescopes in different countries are not connected physically, if a very accurate record is kept of each signal and the records synthetically reconnected in virtual space inside a computer. But it does require recording not just "amplitude" or "power" but also the phase component of the signal at each antenna -- information we normally discard.Another example with some smaller feedback loops that compete for our attention is the "story telling feedback loop" picture I put up yesterday, again repeated below. Don't try to dig into the details. Just notice that there is a big loop that covers most of the diagram, surrounding the light blue bar -- and that is the main, persistent, "I am a person" kind of loop. Then there is also a smaller loop with a shorter lifetime managing incoming visual input at the lower right, and two competing permanent-fixture loops at the left -- One driven by higher levels reaching downward and trying to raise this person's goals; the other driven by the person's frustration limit and protection against overheating basically, which tries to lower the goals again until they are achievable.
The big Y-shaped array of "dishes" that Jodie Foster was using to listen to the stars with in the movie "Contact" was a VLBI, where the spacing between the dishes, which are on railroad tracks, could be altered to focus on different wavelengths of incoming signals.
It requires reflection, and explicitly asking the question, to realize which loops are self-aware and self-repairing if damaged.
Consciousness certainly keeps shutting down every night, but it recovers the next morning, usually. The visual system has many small loops that leap into action when triggered, then go back to sleep. If we lost them we'd be essentially blind in a sea of unfiltered noise.
Aside: I'm not sure about the loop I drew in the upper right, where the person's actions are echoed back to them, with various lagtimes, by different parts of the environment. Maybe that's just the classic, passive, "environment" that's envisioned by epidemiology -- with the same intelligence and adaptiveness as a canyon's walls. Or, maybe the world develops its own set of ruts and habits around reacting to you, as an irritant is surrounded by pearl inside an oyster, and those prove to be so useful that they are endowed with self-aware, self-sustaining, independent status to keep an eye on you and provide very fast feedback, as if you'd touched a stove, when you try to harm the world. That's a sort of meta-sociological question touching on guardian processes, for some other day.
Cutting to the chase: Hypothesis: Because self-aware, self-repairing agents survive noise and damage that will disrupt other, dumb, passive, accidental "loops", they will tend to end up dominating the landscape -- even if they don't reproduce or form support alliances. But, they will tend to form support alliances too.
Similar hypothesis I put forward a month or so ago: Because organizations tend to find and fix small-scale, non-complex problems, if we assume problems arise due to noise at every level in some equal amount, then the large-scale, "complex" ones will end up dominating the landscape, because those are the ones that keep getting put off and not addressed or fixed.
Synthesis of those two: In any long-lived multi-level complex adaptive system, large-scale, complex, active, self-aware, self-repairing control loops will end up dominating the landscape and being the primary shaping force.
And, sad corollary: Until we build scientific tools that can glance at a picture like M.C. Escher's Waterfall, and "see" at a glance "where" it is "broken", we will continue to be plagued by these large scale active agents.
We are, in fact,most likely swimming in a sea of semi-alive "macrobes" -- a concept probably as distressing as Pasteur's "germ theory" that had a sea of "microbes" swimming inside us. They would certainly be as "alive" and as annoying as viruses, and if they were not well, we would feel it, being, as it were, inside the "whale".
Of course, before going into anaphylactic shock at the idea of macrobes, I should point out that you already are familiar with some of them, as a big "yawn." Those would include persistent, self-aware, self-repairing, energy consuming, possibly self-extending macro-agents known as "families", "corporations", "cultures", "religions", and "nation-states." If the Gaia theory is correct, it would also include the Earth as a whole. If religions are even partly correct about some big issues, it continues at scales much larger than the Earth. However, the larger such an agent would be, the more slowly changing it would be, and at some point we could locally treat it as "fixed" or a "constant" for planning daily activities.
So, if sociologists, and even untrained civilians recognize that corporations and countries exist, what's the big deal here? What contribution to our collective wisdom am I suggesting this framework brings to the table?
Again, the most important point I'm making has three parts:
Hey everyone strugling with methodologies for feedback and multilevel systems in Public Health! Control System Engineering already solved that! Read the Literature!
and
Hey everyone in Control System Engineering! You have some potential new clients over here in Public Health!
Finally this one: Children! Stop fighting!
Public HealtH? stop picking on corporations -- the healthy ones hold your planet together right now. And the diseased ones need your insight and techniques to be healed -- once you master multi-level organism healing techniques. And, Hey, CEO's? :Please stop kicking Public Health in the shins -- they're trying to keep your workforce alive and healthy and productive, and besides they're closer than anyone to understanding The Toyota Way in terms of a health multilevel organism. Religion please stop picking on Science, and vice versa!
And, everyone, there's a big qualitative difference between a "distal factor" and the big toe on your other foot, so before you bite down .... oh, never mind. You'll find out soon enough!
By this model, there really only is one multi-level life form occupying this planet, and while it is the job of clinical medicine to heal people at the 1-body level, it is the larger distinct job of "Public Health" to deal with disharmony at any level -- between cells and cells, people and people, cultures and cultures, nations and nations, corporations vs. corporations, departments vs. departments, silo versus silo within hospitals, etc.
Because all that will persist is actually connected through all those loose-couplings (amplified by compounding feedback loops over long times), in a "control" or "regulatory system" sense, it's all only ONE body. We share parts of it, or levels of it. But it's hard to have your own foot have gangrene and not be affected by it, sooner or later.
The biggest problem right now is that the healers of society cannot easily see the feedback loop connections and evaluate the strength of each link and of phase-locked groups of links. That's the missing toolset. And that already exists, but indexed in a different literature where public health seldom treads. Now, with the new competency (2006) for MPH students from the ASPH, the focus on "systems thinking" will lead us there. The March 2006 AJPH is a start, but our work is cut out for us.
It puts a kind of different light and torque on things if we assume there is only one Body here, with many pieces and parts, that we're trying to heal and make right. It won't do to fix most of the body but leave a tooth or limb infected -- that'll turn around and bite "us".
If every level and pair of levels had different rules, this would be a huge problem, probably intractable. BUT, if every level and pair of levels has the SAME set of rules in "control space", then instead of many levels being harder to "solve", suddenly many levels becomes more hints and easier to fix. We have one equation and one unknown and 50 clues, not 50 equations with 50 unknowns and no clue.
That's WAY BETTER. Just align the fragmentary knowledge of the control structures of each level on a mental transparency, then put them on top of each other at the same scale and orientation, and look through the whole set, and all the clues will line up and reveal the full picture that applies at every level, even though we only have a little bit of it right now on each of those levels.
The prospect is compelling. It's a win-win-win solution, and we might just be able to get every field to give up 1% of its budget to work on this single problem that is relevant to working out more details in that field, for every field. It could be politically acceptable. It might fly.
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Treading on heresy, I discount those who discount the idea that the internet and electronically mediated corporations could become "alive" or might as well be alive, because skeptics have no proven, calibrated tools which to detect e-life, or a-life, looking from the bottom up. What does it look like to a cell to be part of a human body? How does it change the cell's life? Not very much on a moment by moment basis, for sure.
You'd think those same skeptics would argue that a human body is "just cells" and there is no larger animating life (such as us) that emerges from or inhabits that active system of cells. Given that single example of multilevel-multicellularism, what possible basis is there for arguing it does NOT exist on other scales? Pure human vanity and remnants of the desire for humans to be the center of the universe and the greatest creation of God or nature are emotion not reasons.
I think the burden of proof should be the other way. What shows that we are NOT already part of a larger effectively-alive structure?
Science, please, not legend, should guide the exploration of "life". This is a rather critical question with very profound implications that most people find uncomfortable and inconvenient. We need to look at it more deeply. It is far more important than global warming.