God is here now, ready to help us -- a reason for Hope!

As a Scientist I believe in GOD, and a GOD who is right here ready to help us all if we simply turn and tune in and ask for help.   There, I said it, and put my career in Science on the line.

But, I put the word GOD in all capitals because I'm using that word in an uncommon sense, and need to keep reminding my readers that I am doing that.   In today's language,  I am talking about God-2.0,  a new version of God, like a new, improved version of a video game or App.   And there, I said it, so now I have also offended and outraged most Religious communities.

I'm losing friends and "Likes" and followers pretty fast here.    But I press onward, undaunted.

I want to address this post to the people who made it this far in reading it -- those who are willing to believe that our context, our universe on Earth,   is alive, awake, aware of us,  and at least partially responsive to our behaviors, actions, and words.   Maybe it's not Jupiter, or Thor, or some old white guy with a long beard on a throne in the sky, but there is definitely something going on here that rises above simply nature or even a larger term "Nature". 

And this is important because whatever is going on here, I believe,  interacts with us heavily in everything we do and to ignore it is to completely misunderstand why some things we do fail and why others succeed,  and to miss out on opportunities to succeed with way less effort and much greater impact in our daily lives.     We are immersed in and swimming in a sea of "tough love" -- it is not our servant to tap into and order about like some Genie in a bottle or some mystical loving parent, though it can "come through for us" and give us things that we would never achieve unaided.  It also is "tough" because there are some facts, rules, guidelines, restrictions on what sort of things we can get assistance on. 

We have to live by its rules, not expect it to live by ours.  This is no different from learning to live with the Law of Gravity -- it just is a fact we can like, hate, believe in, deny it, but regardless it will "rule" our lives all the same.    We all understand Gravity.   There is no "magic" involved,  just higher mathematics which, fortunately, we can be content to let other people understand.  This is just the way things are.   It is no big deal.    We can adjust to it and live with it.

So we all accept that there are things-like-Gravity,   part of the structural design of the world we live in, that we just have to live with.   A good question, and one that we never really articulate and ask out loud in school is

"How many more things like Gravity are there that we need to know about?"

Very much like the "Artificial Life" that I described in my last post here,  the definition of the term keeps changing as we learn more and more,  as it should.  After all we started with a very weak notion of what Artificial Life could be, and it truly needed updating over time.

Sadly,  just suggesting that we raise the question of whether we have this concept,  the meaning of the word "God" as correct and nuanced as possible, and as helpfully defined as possible,  raises a firestorm of heated outrage from all sides - Science, Religion,  and Atheism!   It is discouraging and I must digress for a moment to reflect upon why that is.

In fact, this digression takes up the rest of this post and I have to defer what I was actually trying to point to to my next post in order to keep this reasonably short and coherent.

Over the last 5000 years, as society has evolved, we learned more about the world around us. We added new concepts to our thinking, and refined old ones.   That is a normal and natural process,  which continues at a dizzying pace today, and we need more of it. 

It seems there are three distinct kinds of "facts" that behave quite differently when we try to update them in our minds and in society.  

There are neutral facts that no one cares if we change;  there are socially-connected facts that rock the boat somewhat if changed, but in a tolerable way;  and there are deeply-rooted-beliefs that set the boat on fire and overturn it if changed, and which trigger violent response, even death,  if even challenged, let alone changed.

No one ever seems to mention this or teach it, but it's a very useful distinction to learn.

So long as Scientists retreated from society and focused on neutral facts, like "momentum" they could play happily and no one really noticed or cared, unless maybe a cool documentary on the Discovery Channel came along to share.  Most of the so-called STEM subjects are in this category, and it is also termed "hard science" ,  a misnomer if there ever was one.

Socially-connected-facts are things like Psychology or Sociology or Economics or, surprise,  Geology and Astronomy.    Groups of people have set up camp around certain exact meanings of these facts,  and become agitated if someone rocks the boat.   The camps take on shape and names and become things like the "Chicago School of Economics".    Groups argue often heatedly about who has the better understanding and meaning of the same words.  But in general no one actually dies.

Deeply-rooted-beliefs, as I mentioned above, set the boat on fire and capsize it if challenged or changed.   Not just small camps, but entire nations or cultures argue heatedly over who is right and often are quite willing to go to war, killing or being killed in great numbers, to protect their own understanding of certain words and concepts.    Protestants go to war with Catholics in Ireland.  Sunni Muslims go to war with Shiites in most of the Middle East.   Christian Crusaders invade and attack all of Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages.    Scientists like Galileo, suggesting the Earth is not in fact the center of the solar system,  risked death if they did not recant.

But these deeply-rooted-beliefs are not just about religion, or culture, or the role of women in society, or differences between races and racial identity.    So called Scientists also become emotionally attached to and even ardent defenders of certain understandings.    Revolutions and changes in "paradigms" such as Quantum Mechanics,  Plate Tectonics, or the nature of "disease" ( invisible tiny organisms living inside us? Really?!!!) were fiercely denounced and resisted and proponents of new ideas excluded from funding or mocked and shunned.

Heck, even the guy Ignaz Semmelweis who realized that women were dying in childbirth in the hospital because surgeons were not washing their hands, and tried to tell them that,  was driven out of practice and put in a mental institution where he quickly died. 

There are things that some people do not want to hear.

Anyway,  where all this was going is that the subject of the nature of GOD is one of those live-wire, hot-button topics that typically causes much heat and no light to emerge from a discussion or attempt to study and grasp the kernel of truth out of the shell of attached meanings of old.

I've spent most of my life believing that there is, indeed, something, some kernel of Truth that matters to me,   buried in and tangled up inside this bundle of meanings attached to the word GOD.  Yes, most of the simplistic meanings are just laughable and can be dismissed out of hand.  There is no dude in a white robe sitting on a throne running or ruining our lives.

But on the other hand, there are some aspects of reality that are as important as the Law of Gravity,  but equally invisible, that still change the outcome of what we try to do as surely as they change the trajectory of a ball we throw upwards.

It is just plain wrong not to try to investigate, in a clear-headed, skeptical but curious manner,  what those structural laws and design features of the world around us might be.  In my book, that is precisely what Science is all about and we should not be deterred by skulls on stakes and big signs that say "Forbidden territory -- all hope abandon ye who enter here!"

Heck with that.  Let's go see what is over there on the other side of the police tape.

To be continued in my next post!

Surviving pandemic flu - Herd Immunity revisited

Are there psychosocial ways to protect yourself from the flu? Given the stakes here, it seems irresponsible not to investigate this method of protecting our lives.

Let me state clearly a research question that I realize borders on heresy, that touches profound social and religious emotional content and can lead to heated disputes:

Hypothesis: There are psychosocial actions we can take, that we are not currently taking, that will substantially reduce morbidity and mortality from any epidemic of infectious agents, including pandemic flu.

Given the emotional and controversial nature of this research question, we need to establish a framework and set of ground rules immediately, to withstand the emotional riptides that will tend to distract us or defeat us from a systematic investigation.

Item one - do we really NEED to look at this question? Aren't current precautions adequate?

No, current precautions are a good idea, but are not all we can do.

Avoiding exposure to the agent of a pandemic is close to impossible for those of us who have to work for a living, and who don't live self-sufficient lives on remote islands with everyone else we care about on the island as well, with no imported goods at all.

It is likely that the drugs on the market will be at best partially effective, if that. In any case the drugs will almost certainly only provide symptomatic relief, since it takes 6 months or longer to develop a successful vaccine. Even then, that vaccine would be very expensive and hard to obtain, unless you are very rich and very well-connected, which most of us are not.

So, regardless, we know that

• some fraction of us will end up being exposed to the infectious agent,
• some fraction of those exposed will end up being infected, and
• some fraction of those infected will die.

Classical epidemiology is concerned with reducing the first term in this equation, the odds of being exposed and infected, by use of hygiene and limiting the travel of those who are infectious.

Classic epidemiology assumes that the "susceptibility", or odds of getting sick, given that you have been exposed, is simply a fixed fact of life, a "given" that we have no control over.

That assumption is now proving to be false, which is good news! We do in fact have some control over how susceptible people are to infectious agents, given the same level of exposure. The amount of stress a person is under, for example, affects how susceptible they are. So does the degree of fatigue. Other psychological and even social factors can come into play to reduce the odds we will "get" a disease we are exposed to.

(Literature references will be forthcoming)

OK, so then we have to ask whether we are simply passive sheep, where each of us has some degree of those protective psychological and social factors as "given", or whether we can individually and / or collectively improve our odds of survival by systematically changing those psychological and social factors in our lives.

These factors almost certainly have at least components that take a long lead time to change, so this is a largely proactive question. Most of the things we can change are not things we can wait to the last minute to see if we are exposed, and then change. If we're going to decide to change them, we need to start now, so that by the time we need this beneficial protection, it has had a chance to swing into place and take root in our lives.

Let's start with a literature review of the factors that some research has shown are effective in some cases, and then I want to take an intellectual leap and generalize from those and discuss what kind of new model of human health would make those factors "obvious", and what other factors that model suggests as well. (This journey will take many posts, so let's get started.)

Where the evidence is weak or non-existent, this approach should suggest some very specific research questions that could be done to nail-down whether this effect is present or not, and if present, how strong it is.

That doesn't mean we can't start our investigation by combing historical literature, including that going back thousands of years, for any hard-won social knowledge or even allegations of this kind of effect in action.

Of course, in all of recorded history, humans have taken all kinds of steps to ward off disease, most of which involved attempting to appease various deities, or influence the gods to go somewhere else and pass over our own houses. Various methods of trying to influence the outcomes , some quite creative, are documented in the sacred writings of each religion.

The single axis or dimension that seems to be emerging from research today involves the degree of social connectivity a person has, and the direction of the effect is that higher social connectivity is very strongly associated with better outcomes and lower death rates when people are exposed to the same risk factors.

The mechanism for this effect is highly controversial. Some of the effect is surely related to the fact that people who are well connected have access to greater resources to deal with any problem. Some of the effect is undoubtedly due to a selection process, where those who are already good survivors have, among other things, made strong social connections.

In my own thinking, there should be, in principle, some very important variables related to the existence and strength of closed regulatory feedback loops between a person and other persons and groups that the person "belongs to." People might articulate this as simply having a strong or close relationship with some other person, but, mathematically, the bidirectional causal and regulatory feedback loop seems a very likely place to look for causal pathways to changes in physiology.

Cutting through all this -- does it help to have strong relationships with other people? Yes, it certainly appears to help. The number and the depth of the relationships seems to matter, as well as the nature of the relationship. Some groups we belong to, which means we are on their mailing list, and other groups we belong to, which means that very membership changes our concept of who we are and the meaning of our lives, and changes our behavior. It's far more likely that the latter kind of strong bond to a group is going to have more impact on our health than the weak bond of simply "belonging" to a list-server's list of members.

Does it help to have a support group and supportive friends? Well, yes, it does, not too surprisingly.

Does it help to love others, to love nature, and to love God? Again, measuring these variables and what they mean is a problem, but, yes, an increase in the "love" factor is clearly strongly associated with better outcomes. Again, the direction(s) of the causality is not instantly clear.

Without any additional research, cutting through all that, it appears that what helps is being well connected socially, meaning that one has an active social life and is vitally concerned with and involved in a co-nurturing and co-supportive relationship with other humans.

This type of effect is documented by, say, doctor Dean Ornish in his book "Love & Survival - 8 pathways to intimacy and health."

There are thousands of ways to try to define "love" and "intimacy", but the aspect of both that seems to me most fruitful for study is the breakdown of walls between two or more people so that a larger entity, a meta-being, is effectively created, or synthesized, or simulated or whatever it is. It is not a question of whether I am near you, or touch you, or live with you, or have sex with you -- it is a question of whether it is increasingly hard, over time to tell where you stop and I begin. Are our core identities becoming so co-mingled that we effectively have stopped being two "beings" and started being one "being" which sort of occupies two "bodies."?

I have to note at this point some research done on cells, which I think is relevant. Researchers found ( I'll get the reference) that a cell with damaged DNA, that left to itself would die, could in fact continue to live and even operate normally if it was surrounded by healthy cells that the cell in question could sort of lean on and draw support from. The cell, in fact, was capable of getting by with a little help from its friends.

Restating the hypotheses here, before taking a break in posting - we have this.

Restated hypothesis: viruses and bacteria that attempt to infiltrate and infect a human have a harder time doing that, and cause less damage and less death, if the human is part of a multi-human meta-being with strong bonds between the humans.

In other words, the hypothesis is that we can, effectively become sources of spiritual strength and buffers for each other, that translates, in a very real physiological sense, into very measurable improved medical outcomes in a variety of areas, at least one of which is increased resistance to infection and another of which is increased survival, even if infected.

These effects should be quantifiable, and observable. If they are strong enough to be socially relevant, we shoudn't even need statistics to see the effects, although we'd want to use solid statistical methods to be sure we weren't simply fooling ourselves with distorted perception from wishful thinking.

Let me state my own bias immediately -- I believe there are such effects, that they are very strong, and that we are missing a huge piece of our armor against pandemics if we don't systematically take advantage of this effect as both a personal and a national policy.

I also believe that there are technological ways to use the web and computers to help us detect, align, focus, amplify, and improve these effects by a factor of 100 or more. I'm talking here about a next generation of "social networking" tools that is less about exchanging messages with a network of friends and more about systematically deepening mutually supportive living relationships with a network of friends.

We can now find, see, and track each other, and exchange messages and thoughts and even moods planet-wide. Now, the next step, the next generation, is to utilize that level of capacity to build the next level, one of strong, real, living, vital relationships.

It is in a way a grand experiment in artificial life, or meta-life. What happens if the individual humans now figure out how to merge spiritually into larger living organisms?

Here's a thought though -- IF that kind of merging DOES have a protective effect against death from pandemics, then there will be strong evolutionary advantage to such meta-forms, and, effectively, a pruning from the world of those humans who did NOT elect to participate in such larger life forms.

In my mind, there is sufficient evidence that such an effect might occur to put some time and effort into looking at this much more closely and pondering what it means. If the coming pandemics, and there will be more than one, are evolution's "rinse cycle", what kind of humans will they be rinsing off, and what kind of humans will remain and survive after the pandemics have come and gone?

That's a question we need to be looking at with some urgency. The mortality from pandemics may not be "value-neutral."

Along those lines, and again searching recorded history for any possible examples of effects, the black plague in the middle ages in Europe was followed by the Renaissance. We can't rule out there being a causal relationship, where the plague selectively removed humans who were, in some sense, dead wood, and left humans who were, in some sense, more vital and alive. This kind of event might provide us insight into what kinds of non-neutral impacts pandemics have, or might have, or could have.

While the data's being analyzed, however, I'd suggest putting more energy into increasing your own honest and intimate social connectedness, and less energy into attempted solutions involving drugs, or involving trying to acquire so much wealth that you don't "need" other people. If humans are transitioning to a "multi-cellular" state, that ship is getting ready to leave soon, and it might be the better part of wisdom to be on it.
( Image from "divergent learner" in Second Life virtual reality world, via Flickr ).

=====
afterthought -
Because LIFE is intrinsically hierarchical, and unbreakably interconnected, we'd really like to find solutions to problems that are win-win-win solutions -- that is, solutions that help EVERY level of the multi-level organism, not just one level at the expense of others.

So, for example, on the national scale, we can reject immediately proposed policies that help "labor" at the expense of "management", or that help corporations at the expense of humans, or that help corporations at the expense of the entire government. These are all win-lose type policies, and clearly sub-optimal.

An example of a win-win-win solution for example, would be something more like a Toyota, or other company that tapped into the emergent power that comes from interconnecting the workers and management and customers into a mutually-supportive network that feels each other's pain and shares's each other's successes, and otherwise has linked fates.

Not too surprisingly, very high-performance teams, and very high-quality teams, and very high productivity teams, all seem to share this quality of a merged sense of identity, shared success, and overflowing power and energy. They are typically extremely rewarding places to work, pay very high salaries and wages, have very high retention, and are simply fun to be at and something people actually look forward to going to in the morning, not someplace that one has to "go home from to get any work done." They are, in short ultra-competitive, and just as Toyota has displaced General Motors, this type of organizational structure will selectively and differentially surivive where others fail and evolve into the dominant form, regardless what one thinks of it or whatever political label one assigns to it.

It's simply a stronger evolutionary model, and it survives where other forms fail, in exactly the same way that multicellular life (such as ourselves) turns out to be a winner over single-cellular life, regardless how large and wise and wonderful said single-cell might be.

Networks of tightly collaborating agents, or computers, or people, are "unbounded upwards" and able to go where fragmented, isolated, competitive structures cannot travel. That's just the way it is.

This goes along with the idea that all "state-variables" or crucial model variables are "holons", or scale-invariant fractally symmetric shapes. Two prime examples are "health" and "wealth".
Something that actually improves "HEALTH", properly accounted for all distant and lagged effects, will be found to improve the health of EVERY level of the hierarchy. Toyota's health also translates into employee health and into national health for Japan, and spreads into health of all Toyota's supplies. Ditto Wealth.

Beware of proposed solutions or policies that emphasize the "health" or "wealth" of one group "at the expense of" others. This is typically a flawed accounting of all the lagged effects, and efforts to boost corporate productivity on the backs of and at the expense of employees will end up back-firing and making things worse. Ditto for public health -- there are not actual solutions that make employees healthy at the expense of the corporations that employ them, there are only transient states that will decay to reveal a final state worse than the first.

It makes no sense to seek other than win-win solutions. Properly accounted for, they are the best we can do.










Wade

Guanxi, social capital, relationships, and health, wealth

INTRODUCTION

If we don't understand the nature of life, we can't possibly reason correctly about the "health" property of it, let alone reason about finding cost-effective interventions to improve or sustain it.

The nature of life is not obvious. I believe we have it all wrong, and as a direct consequence of this we have flawed personal behaviors, corporate behaviors, and a flawed national policy and system of "health care." Until this error is fixed, our efforts to improve "health" will simply fail in baffling ways.

Where did we go wrong?

THE OLD MODEL OF LIFE

Biology 101 teaches us, and we absorb deeply, this model:

1. LIMIT: All life is made of one or more biological cells.
2. LIMIT: Cells are blobs of protoplasm surrounded by distinct walls that clearly separate the inside from the outside. Only cells that touch each other in a more-or-less fixed shape can form "higher" life forms.
3. LIMIT: Although humans and "higher" organisms are both made of cells and have an independent life of their own, even larger colonies or collections of higher life forms cannot and do not form even "higher" life forms with a life of its own.
4. LIMIT: Life can only arise from other life and be "passed on".
   
5. LIMIT: The algebra of living things only includes division -- one living thing can divide to form two living things, but two or more living things don't re-assemble into one living thing. (A notable exception is sperm and egg, which are each separately alive and yet reassemble into a single life form.)
   
6. LIMIT: all life forms die.
   

Although every one of these rules or limits or statements has "exceptions", the model is treated as if it is "essentially correct" and not questioned very much. I will challenge it much more strongly right now, stepping on the toes of tradition and religious faith in the process.

I will propose a much more general model of life that reduces to the above model in the the special case of looking at biological life on the surface of the earth today.


MY NEW MODEL OF LIFE

1. All life is based on processes that have at least one closed feedback loop which is self-aware and self-protective. There is not limit to the special case of biology. A computer network, a family, a corporation, a culture, a nation all are "life-forms" with such loops. One very important class of living entity is called a "relationship" between people. Another class of living entity is the relationship between cells in "an organ" or "a body system", such as the heart or the circulatory system or the digestive system. These are independently alive.
2. A living entity has fuzzy edges which extend outwards, possibly across great distances with gaps in between, to anything else that forms part of its closed regulatory feedback loops.
3. Essentially all living entities are in the middle of a hierarchy of life, encompassing smaller life-forms below, and comprising parts of higher life-forms above, simultaneously. Each "level" has a "life" (closed feedback regulatory loop) of its own, and there are also some loops (lives) which span multiple levels.
4. Life can be created on-the-fly, systematically, on purpose. It is not that hard to create new life. We do it all the time. Various aspects of life can also be extinguished on the fly. It is not that hard to damage or kill life forms. A Life-form becomes "dead" when its primary closed loop no longer functions.
5. Any number of living things can combine, and often are already weekly combined, into larger life-forms with separate independent lives of their own.
6. There is no reason a life form has to die.

So what? WHAT DOES THAT CHANGE?

First, if we recognize that people, corporations, and nations are all linked together into a huge multi-level life form, then we realize that it is not possible to have one part of this "healthy" while another part of it is "unhealthy." We are, basically, all chained to each other and our fates our linked.

Corporations are life-forms, as are nations, but they are not "separate" entities from "people."

It is true, for example that there is a "personal economy" and a "corporate economy" that have separate lives and interests in the very short run, but it is also true but unrecognized that there is a longer-time-span linkage between the two so that destruction of the personal economy in an effort to improve the corporate economy is simply self-defeating and self-destructive.

This means that it is nonsensical for "Public Health" to see corporations as "an enemy". Any solution that deals with personal or family health will collapse if the local economy collapses. Jobs are as important as medicine for personal sustainable health.

Similarly, it makes no sense for corporations to try to build a vibrant economy on the backs of and at the expense of people and the environment -- because, ultimately, they ARE people and if the people or environment are destroyed, the corporate entities and economies will die off as well. It won't work for corporations to try to become computer-based and get rid of all people, for reasons I'll get to later.

Similarly, people do not have "clean edges" where there is "my" health and "your" health. Every day scientists find deeper ways in which the health of "your neighbors" and "your friends" and "your friends' friends" contribute to and often even determine "your" health and "your" behavior. A cell with damaged DNA can go on functioning if it is surrounded by healthy cells that it interacts with strongly. The same is true for people.

"Our" health is not somehow contained within the boundaries of our skin. Things can go wrong with our health that are outside that boundary, and things can go right with our health that are outside that boundary. This is a cruicial fact!

It has been shown that, for an 60 year old American, making a new friend has a stronger impact on their survival rate and than dealing with smoking, drinking, exercise, and nutrition. This should not come as a surprise, with the new model of biology and life.


WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL HEALTH CARE POLICY?


I think it is evident that a set of interventions that improved interpersonal relationships ( life forms) would have more of a beneficial effect on our lives, morale, and "physical health" than most other interventions we can imagine (such as reduced drug costs or new insurance mechanisms.)

In other words, humans are part of a meta-biologicial ecosystem where the health of the relationship-entities sea that we swim in determines, effectively, the health of the protoplasm units we wear (our bodies.)

Similarly, in the business world, the sea of relationship-entities ("guanxi" or "social capital") is as important, or more important, than the individual roles and positions people have in determining the "health" of corporations and the regional and national economy.

Even on the departmental or work-team level, the relationship-sea, the ecology of life forms that occur "between" people is as important, or more important, than individual "skills and experience" in determining successful perception of direction and accomplishment of objectives.


CONCLUSIONS / RECOMMENDATIONS

Any strategy for personal health, corporate success, or a thriving national economy is doomed to failure unless it attends to the needs of the inter-entity life-form community as well.

"Relationships" are not just something that people "are" or "do" -- they are independent living entities that must be nurtured and which have their own "health care" needs and interests.

This is a much stronger mental model that can direct the attention and focus of policy in ways that will be much more successful at building a sustainable world than the old model.

Wade

A different model of what's wrong

Mental concepts or models of life are ways of throwing out most information to focus on a few bits that seem more important to insight than all the others. Different models give different answers to questions such as

• What's wrong?
• Why doesn't this work?
• Where is it broken?
• Where should we intervene?
• If we intervene there, should we push or pull?
• If we did that, what effect would we expect to see and when?

It's miserably cold and rainy out, with snow coming this way, so I'm staying inside this morning and working on something more abstract, while I eat breakfast -- such as what a model of the nature of Life and Evolution would suggest is "the problem" in our economy.

Might as well, nothing else seems to be working, and the models used by the government seem to change daily. Meanwhile, they argue over what it will take to stop GM going bankrupt, which again depends on what you think is wrong. Different camps point to:

• too many government regulations
• too few government regulations
• health care costs
• unions -who make unreasonable demands
• management - which makes unreasonable demands
• consumers - who make unreasonable demands
  
• "the economy"
• Housing and mortgage defaults
• Nuclear above-ground testing
• Ozone
• Godzilla
• Unfair competition from larger companies
• Unfair competition from smaller companies
• Hedge funds and banks
• tree-huggers
• commies and socialists
• liberals or conservatives
• lawyers
• dentists
• side-effects of anti-depression meds
• Not enough team collaboration and consultation
• Too much team collaboration and consultation
• Too much decentralization
• Too little decentralization
• Alien invasions, UFO's, and demon possession
• breakdown in the moral fiber of our nation
• God's punishment for [ pick your sin and sinner ]
  

Given that range of diverse opinions about what is "obviously" "the cause" of the current problems in the industry, it seems there is room for one more.

You don't have to "buy" this - just consider it as yet one more possible model, and see where it leads. In particular, see if it leads to an idea we haven't tried yet that seems affordable and that won't interfere with other initiatives underway.

So, my new model of the day looks at the nature of Life - which is clearly and unambiguously organized in a kind of hierarchical and overlapping fashion. Cells are alive, but cells form multicellular thingies that are themselves alive in a whole different way, such as cats and dogs and people and you.

Individual instances of any type of thing collectively form "a species", which itself has many properties of living things, including being the abstract object that really evolves over time. (Individuals don't evolve, at least very much in terms of DNA arrangement, once they are born.)

There is a running argument in biology as to whether genes evolve, and animals are a side effect, or animals evolve, and genes are a side effect, or species evolve, and both genes and individual animals are side-effects.

In my model, they are all evolving, in inter-related but partly independent fashions.

The key feature of this particular multi-level model of life is that each level of Life has its own, largely independent, existence and rules of life and Life. Each level can forget, most of the time (but not all the time) that the other levels exist at all.

You can forget that your body is made of cells, unless your behavior, such as consuming some chemical, affects how the cells work, and then suddenly it matters and un-becomes invisible.

Similarly, management of a company, say GM, or of a country, say the US, lives in its own world with its own rules, and can easily forget that the cell-equivalent (workers / citizens / "consumers") matter -- until some behavior suddenly damages them (or bankrupts them) and they become un-invisible to "the economy".

These actors,however, are all still "people". Just as there are living structures smaller than "people" (such as cells), there seem to be (by this model) living structures that are larger than people, namely corporations and nations.

Smaller, in this sense, means things that make up something, and larger means, things made up of something.

But, our bodies are not "just" a pile of chemicals, or ten trillion cells - they have unique features that only make sense at a person level - such as going to the dentist. Much of "our" lives we spend dealing with issues "mortgage refinancing" that simply have no equivalent at the cellular or atomic level. If we could talk to our cells, it would be a very short and frustrating conversation, pretty much what one gets when management and labor sit down together.

So, let's assume for the moment that Corporations (with a capital C) are themselves life-forms that are dimly aware of their environment, dimly aware of the people who make them up, and yet exist independently (mostly) doing their own things that are similarly unintelligible to us.

We have, in other words, created a new level of multicellular life, called Corporations, which have their own life of struggling with each other, their own rules, and their own economy that is often entirely decoupled from the economy individual humans live in.

What has changed, in a baffling way to these corporations then, is that the health of "the consumer" has suddenly changed. Before this level was a reliable source of income or labor and as invisible as illegal immigrants to our food-processing company stockholders, and now, suddenly, the problems of individual humans have intersected the problems of the corporate world.

The US government is struggling to fix the problems of corporate life forms, because, at their scale, these are the only ones that matter or are even visible. Corporate life forms are trying to stay afloat by laying off 20% or more of their workers, because that always used to work, but it doesn't any more, not once EVERYONE is doing the same thing at once.

Intersecting all this is the confusion and confounding of "management" of a company and the company or industry itself. If there is no such thing as a corporate life form, other than an extension and echo of the top manager, then the company and the leader are the same thing.

However, most of our corporations and industries exist and continue to function even though the top management may be dysfunctional or absent entirely, or entirely engaged in internal power struggles. The plane continues, for a while to fly, even though the crew is having a huge fistfight.

So one thing we need to distinguish, when possible, is the survival of the current pilot and crew, versus the survival of the airplane. In many cases, the two seem to have diverged, and the crew is more interested in stripping the plane and bailing out than in saving the plane.

But the question here is where "the problem" is. Where is this whole multi-level system of cells, humans, corporations, and government breaking down?

This gets to the crux of the matter. Is it the humans at the top who are blind to any world except their own, a fact that is obvious from below but invisible from up there? Or is it that the higher life form, the corporation or nation, is insufficiently well formed to understand how important its constituent people are to its own existence?

In other words, assuming that most of what we see at a national level is a struggle of corporations and Corporate life forms, do they grasp that trying to survive at 'the expense of" their own cells is a losing strategy?

There is a lot of evidence that this fact is not evident. Congress is obsessed with trying to bail out or save the Corporate life forms, at the expense of the individual composite cells (ie, us.)

It is not surprising that humans at the top of such corporations or government become blind to the realities of cellular-level life. This is no longer where they operate.

If corporations are an independent living species, then the problem we face is that this level entity is too stupid to realize what it depends on.

And the solution that suggests is to make corporations more, not less, capable -- if that can be done in such a way that they don't destroy the entire planet that they also rely on in the process.

In other words, imagine that Corporations are "mostly alive", and "dimly aware" of what depends on what, and what part of individual humans and the earth's ecosphere they rely on to survive, which used to be invisible before there were so many Corporations sucking so much out of us and the planet.

Then, an intervention point, in that model, if we could find it, would be to make the Corporation brighter at perceiving long-range, long-term consequences of decisions IT makes, where the humans in it are mostly just there for show, acting as if they are making the decisions, kind of the way humans think they are making decisions that their bodies and brains made minutes earlier, as MRI studies now show.

This gets to the core question of how emergent, synthetic, multi-level life forms perceive the world, and learn about it, including what is connected to what.

Surely the basic laws of cybernetics apply to such learning. Things that have immediate consequences are easier to learn. Things with distant or delayed consequences take longer to learn.

The model says we're struggling with the wrong thing, trying to figure out WHO should be the humans at "the top" of meta-organisms that don't really rely on "the top" for leadership or guidance any more. The thinly veiled secret of those at the top is that they are also clueless and not in control of what's going on, despite their massive marketing effort to persuade everyone that they are just crucial and should be paid massive sums for their invaluable contributions.

We should take some time, remove the individual humans from the equation, and look at how the overall system is organized, and self-organizing to perceive the world around it and to improve its own ability to perceive and act and make alliances and adapt. Such seeing has to extend downward to humans and cells and plants and the ecosystem, as well as upwards to nations and planetary composite life forms that Corporations are themselves cells within.

This seems abstract, but it may be very real. It is certainly outside the normal box!

A few points in closing.

One is the key assumption that collections of things do not just have 'emergent properties", but that the emergent properties themselves take on a persistent, self-perpetuating "life of their own" that no longer depends directly on the collection of things that initially made it. Life has, in some sense, like an electromagnetic wave, been radiated outwards and no longer depends on the existence of the broadcast antenna. In fact, the corporate entity may turn on its founding fathers and expel them and go off its own direction, and often does.

The huge mental barrier to this concept is the idea we have of "life" being a property of collections of cells that are touching in a more or less fixed arrangement, although even that breaks down if one includes blood and white blood cells, etc.

To "see" or visualize the type of "life" I'm talking about, you may need to just follow the feedback loops and see what aspects of things are self-regulating, self-perpetuation, self-repairing, self-defending, DESPITE the efforts to go a different way by the employees ,management, stockholders, regulators, etc.

It is, ultimately, not DNA or proteins or genes, but the existence of these abstract "feedback control loops" that seem to be the universal property that defines something that behaves as if it were "alive". If we look at it from that point of view, this includes all biological life, but now includes as well ecosystems, the planet, corporations, major religions, etc. as living things.

This would also suggest that the key aspects of information transfer, the web and Google, for example, are at the core of the thinking neurons of this meta-being that has taken shape, or is taking shape around us even now.

That in turn suggests that the place to look for successful new product innovations for Google or Web-3 systems is beyond collaboration into synthesis of smaller-scale living units, something akin to "teams" but way beyond them, as well as synthesis of dyads of people that have a life beyond that of each of the two separately.

What structure, system, framework, boost, database, service, etc. would catalyze the emergence of such multi-human life forms, detect them, make a space that nourishes them and makes them bright enough to surround us safely instead of destructively?

That may be the question some people should be asking. That may be the gap. It's not just a question of groupware and collaboration and working-together, or of fixing 'broken" relationships or marriages. It's a question of what the positive side is, what levels of emergent life we can make with and out of our interactions with each other.

What kind of network service would detect and facilitate the closure and stability of such closed, feedback loops between individual agents -- the substrate of Life itself?

NOW you're talking "market share" and pent-up demand.

Wade

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

Even more on "What's the point of Religion"

(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 and computed as magnitude of a times magnitude of B times the "cosine" of the angle between them (their relationship to each other.).

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


4-D projections halfway down the page and also pictures of the complex "sine" curve showing that it does head off to infinity and is no longer trapped between zero and one.




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:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/tower-crane4.htm