The benefits of depression - on a social scale

Individual depression may have a benefit to the herd. If so, it may be hard-wired into our genes nd our social structures that reflect our genes as a preserved trait, and that changes how to treat it.

All organisms and organizations need immune systems to detect invaders or parts of themselves that have gone astray, so they can be marked for removal and eliminated.

In the body, one troublesome situation is that some cells or pathogens may get off into a corner, or inside a bone, or up against a steel plate, where they are hard to be evaluated and attacked, so they multiply. Another may be that they no longer recognize the authority of the body, and go off on their own doing something else. But, evolution has come up with one clever solution to this problem - namely, apoptosis or "cell suicide."

If a cell is removed from active, productive, working connection with the body, it is programmed to kill itself. It doesn't need to be found by the body's police force - it finds itself. No castle or moat or steel wall or bone can protect it, because the destruct system is already built in.

It may be than that evolution has similarly built in an "auto-braking" system into human physiology, so that, when a human becomes disconnected from productive interaction with the social body, the human slows to a stop and then shuts himself down.

This results in resources flowing primarily to social members still able to act energetically and confidently. Over time, those who care about interactions with the social body end up dominating the scene. (sources of "altruism"?).

But, what's that model say about treatment of depression?

First, it says that depression is a symptom, not a cause - and so treating depression with drugs to "cure it", while immediately helpful personally, from the social body's perspective is a bad idea -- in that it means that socially discordant individuals will continue to act badly and absorb energy and resources, and, if left unchecked in large scale, eventually the social body will die from a loss of cohesion and trying to carry the burden of all this non-productive tissue.

Second, it would mean that "depression" is not, in fact, a pathology - it is a very healthy normal response of a subsystem of the social body to a disconnection event. From a social point of view, it's good. In fact, the whole terrorist "problem" and the corruption "problem" could be viewed as precisely a breakdown in such a system: people who have turned against the social body should, many people would assert, self-destruct so we don't have to go to the very hard work of trying to destroy them ourselves. That would be very efficient if they'd just get really really depressed, then suicidal. It would be way more efficient than trying to locate them in caves somewhere on earth.

But, it brings to focus a different problem. If we use that model, then why is it that we now are looking at 20 or 30% of the US population that is depressed? And, have all these people broken the connection with the social body, or did the social body break the connection with them, or both in some sort of vicious circle? It may be that the cost of health care is rising because the body of the public is, in fact, becoming unwell. And, again, this may be a symptom not a cause, and masking it with drugs would be "quackery" - treating symptoms while the disease grows worse.

Well, the work of Robert Putnam ("Bowling Alone") and the Duke study (mentioned in myprior post on depression) would seem to indicate that connections are, in fact, deteriorating and rather rapidly. That begs the question of why this is happening, or how.

One possible hypothesis would be that the culture of materialism and self-centeredness, sustained and amplified by television, is causing people one by one to abandon their concern for society and become increasingly self-oriented, which is triggering the hard-wired fatigue and depression responses. The trend towards "Me first" or "Only me, forget you, Jack" is evident and widely discussed in the media.

Another possible hypothesis is that, collectively, whole groups of people, such as the rich or middle class, have turned their backs on and abandoned the poor, the 45 million without health coverage, the jobless, etc. This could cut both ways, both by making the ones cut-off from social life become increasingly depressed or anxious, and by making those who are doing the cutting-off also depressed, because they are losing the other end of the social connection.

In other words, class-ism and racism ultimately do as much harm to the holder of the destructive bigotry as to the group on the receiving end -- it just takes longer. That would predict that even some of the very rich - say Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, would end up extraordinarily unhappy. That's not proof, but it illustrates the point. Britney lost custody of her children to get what? Another drink?

There is a long literature on the harmful effects on the rich and powerful of exploiting, or neglecting the poor and the [apparently] powerless. By this herd model, the powerless actually have their own protection built into the DNA of the powerful, where it can and will be triggered as the powerful cut ties to the powerless.

This is certainly a core lesson of many religions of the world. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The model seems to say that no "enforcement by an angry God" is necessary in fact - that the downstream result of the action of discrimination and superiority culture, both individually and overall, follows automatically from the action, and returns the favor, with interest.

So, if we boost the world, it will echo with amplification, and we will be boosted, and that becomes a self-climbing loop or spiral. If we cut off the links to the world, the world cuts off its links to us, which, surprisingly, we needed to continue to exist. If we actively exploit the outside world (think sub-prime mortgages) it will come back tremendously amplified and damage those who thought they could "get away with it."

This would imply that the same feedback mechanism and pattern might be true for cells, for individuals, for companies, and for entire nations or cultures.

For a company-sized organism, though, I've discussed the need for the "horizontal loop", the living feedback that Toyota calls "pull" that connects the company to the customers. Breaking this loop, as Comcast is described to be doing by many customers in today's Washington Post, may appear in the short run to be "working" and making more money than caring what customers think, but this model says that the resentment and social response is just building up steam and ultimately will come back with amplification.

It's a fairly simple model, but it seems to explain a lot of what we see going on around us. These "scale-invariant" patterns seem important to investigate to see if they hold up under more rigorous investigation. If so, we have some public policy and public health decisions we may want to rethink.

Religion and commerce (the Toyota Way) suggest the model, and system dynamics simulations show that some feedback with delay and amplification like this may be very hard to detect coming until it is too late. As with the Georges Bank model we ran in class, as the sustainable limit is passed and use turns into abuse, the fishing just seems to get better and better and the catch keeps rising as the fishermen build more boats until one day it is exhausted and it's simply over. We've depleted it entirely. The rising exponential plummets to zero.

There are almost no blatant clues this is happening. You have to understand what is going on to "see" it and realize it.

But it's up to Science now to take that suggested model and design careful experiments to test whether this is just an interesting analogy or the handle to some basic principle like gravity that we need to pay attention to. If the NIH or Business Roundtable won't fund it, maybe the John Templeton foundation will. Maybe a business "depression" bears more than a passing resemblance to a larger version of an individual "depresison."

Actually, MIT's John Sterman in his 1000 page textbook "Business Dynamics" lays out exactly how trying to push a company to grow too fast results in an apparent speed-up of profits, followed by a drop or crash, depending on exactly how it went. That implies that the villains of the corporate growth story are the stockholders themselves, from venture capitalists who demand 37% growth per year, to e-traders who chase the smallest fraction of a percent of a rate, punishing any CEO who pauses for breath or needed consolidation.

It also is a lesson for China, one that it is increasingly realizing, that growing too fast can be as much of a problem as not growing fast enough. Living things have natural growth rates, and we don't gain by trying to push them to do unnatural acts.

There's nothing wrong with wealth and prosperity, but vastly unequal and unjust accumulation of wealth by taking it instead of earning it does seem to lead to a "correction" that undoes all of the apparent progress and then some. Short-term greed is a very expensive pleasure, for it quickly becomes the long-run, and the bills come due. Without a deep keel, a culture and a social ethic that can hold off that temptation to maximize short-term gains, we can easily be led astray.

It's time to fund that research and let the data speak for itself. A reasonable search for counter-examples and contrary evidence is required. All models are wrong but some models are useful - so maybe this has merit regardless.

Model-induced blindness, FEMA, and Systemantics

[ Published in my other weblog 8/31/06. Still relevant today ]

It's a year since Katrina made it obvious that people watching CNN knew more about what was going on top government officials.

We have to ask how that is even possible. It defies our intuition, although not our experience, which is interesting.

While the "blame-game" remains in high-gear, Systems Thinking leads us to discount the obvious "bad people" and look for deeper root-causes in the social structure. FEMA Director Brown has been replaced, but the systems problems are harder to see and may still be there.

How would we know?

Some systems features come with the territory, such as problems getting coherent action across 6 or more layers of a hierarchical structure. Each layer has its own intrinsic variables and a world view that is quite distinct from that of the layers above or below. The result is that communication across levels that appears easy is actually quite hard, although the miscommunications may be hard to detect locally. The same words play into different mental models of the world, and convey different meanings.

This is not a problem that is fixed by simply getting everyone radios with compatible frequencies. A discussion in depth of this problem can be found on the weblog Fifteen Charlie.

Or, on the health care front, this type of problem is not resolved by everyone agreeing to use messages all formatted to the same governmental standard, such as HL7, so they are "interoperable." The telephone was already "compatible" in that manner, but it didn't help New Orleans. To change the outcomes, we need to realize that there are no "technical problems", only socio-technical problems, and the "socio-" part cannot be a last-minute add-on optional feature.

So, from President Bush's point of view, policies were followed, money was launched, their work is done. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job..." Six to ten levels away, where the money or benefits or even rescue from rooftops was not underway, these actions looked feeble and inept, disconnected from reality. And today, a year later, much of New Orleans still remains as it was a year ago, although many of the fund have now been fully expended.

John Gall, a University of Michigan emeritus physician, in his marvelous book Systemantics (1986) , captures the essence, as he calls it of "How systems really work and how they fail." An introduction to this book can be found here on wikipedia, and some of the key rules revealed, such as "A system is no better than its sensory organs" and "To those within a system, outside reality tends to pale and disappear." He goes on to describe the inversion of "input" and "output" and gives this example:

"A Giant program to Conquer Cancer is begun. At the end of five years, cancer has not been conquered, but one thousand research papers have been published. In addition, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled "you and the War against Cancer" have been distributed. Those publications will absolutely be regarded as Output rather than Input. "

His book is a real gem, an easy read, and worth re-reading at least once a month.

Meanwhile, New Orleans remains a visible and tragic reminder of what an open-loop, top-down control model produces in practice. Without sensory feedback making the return journey from the eye to the brain, the hand is as likely to end up in the flame as on the handle of the frying pan. I'd says this "cybernetics 101" property of a control loop is what Steven Covey in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People calls a principle, a law of nature, that you can like or dislike, but you can't get around.

Unfortunately for all of us, it is precisely when high-stress disasters occur that these upwards communication channels close up entirely, as New Orleans discovered. Almost every factor there is conspires to close the lines:

* Top brass, fearing blame, close ranks

* Top brass, under stress, fall back on previously successful behaviors of ignoring small stuff and focusing on the top one or two priority issues. In a huge, multilevel organization, this means every problem from level 3 down is totally ignored.

* The most important information, that which challenges preconceived notions and the assumptions of the plan in hand, is what is ignored the most at the top. They are trying to focus on working the plan, not questioning the plan. Efforts to challenge facts are viewed as enemy action, not as helpful feedback from sensory organs. In worst cases, the messengers are killed to resolve the conflict between inputs and mental model.

I'm working on a white-paper on the issue of how upwards channels shut down during disasters and how that could influence disaster preparedness competencies. Contact me if you're interested in reviewing it.

And, voila. A president who is unaware of what every CNN viewer knows. Auto companies that can't understand how anyone could have foreseen rising gasoline prices, or competition from China.

These are very strong systems forces, that can totally overwhelm huge numbers of very bright and well intentioned people. These are the types of problems we need to be able to recognize and solve, or they will simply keep on occuring.

How frequent are such problems? Well, if problems occur randomly at all levels, and if humans typically only ever see and fix the non-systems problems, then there will be an ever growing sludge of unattended system problems. The percentage of all problems that are systems problems will keep on growing. A good guess, perhaps somewhat waggish, is that, if such problems have never been addressed, then they almost certainly dominate current behavior of the organization in question. The longer the organization has been functioning, and the larger it is, the larger the percentage of problems will be unrealized and unresolved systems problems. The US government is probably almost a limit point, and probably over 99% of it is dominated by such problems, as the others have all been fixed.

The fact that we don't recognize these as problems is what Systems Thinking attempts to address. Our "systems problem" detectors are broken is what it is.

Take the analogy to the detection of pulsars, intensely bright flashing objects in the radio frequency spectrum, virtual strobe lights in the night sky to a radio telescope, outshined only by the sun and the galactic center. These were missed entirely for years, because "everyone knew" that there were no important signals at high-frequencies, that this was just noise, and the noise was filtered out before doing any analysis of the sensory input.

It took a female graduate student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, one not caught up in the shared myth, to challenge that assumption, remove the filter, and just look at what was there with open eyes.

Systems problems are similar. They are everywhere around us, but we use statistics all based on Sir R. A. Fisher's work and the General Linear Model, or even multilevel models that are still linear, (as Dr. Ana Diez-Roux at the University of Michigan points out in the Annual Reviews of Public Health, 2000, Volume 21, pages 171-192.), and that assume, at their core, that there is no feedback. The key assumption, generally unspoken, and often unrealized, is that there is a causal end of "independent variables", some set of paths, and a terminal end of "dependent variables." Feedback or reciprocal causality is often noted in passing, but, lacking a recognized way to cope with it, most public health papers then try to proceed without it. Or, since the feedback is "small", it is considered insignificant - a mistake similar to looking at a beaker of air and denying the possibility of the existence of "hurricanes", which rely critically on such tiny effects, almost infinitely compounded, to exist and grow.

So, without meteorological feedback effects, Katrina would never have existed in the first place.
It invalidates the model if the output feeds back into the input, with feedback, which, of course, almost every social system we care about does: love, war, communication, relationships, terrorism ("He hit me back first!"), the economy, the stock market, the housing market, etc.

So, we don't see such "distal causality", not because it's not there, but because we've short-circuited it out of the equations before we even turn on the computer.

I'd suggest it's time for someone to remove that filter, analyze how to do statistics on feedback-dominated regulatory control loops, and let us see what's really out there. Odds are, as with the night sky, we will be very surprised by the answer.

========

In his new book "The Eighth Habit - From Effectiveness to Greatness", Steven Covey separates out and focuses on problems, including organizational blindness, that result from attempting to use the old paradigm, the industrial machine model, instead of the new paradigm - the Knowledge Worker model.

In the old model, workers are treated like machines - replaceable, better without an independent mind or spirit, needing firm management or a good whip hand to keep them from goofing off. In particular, only those in positions of authority should take initiative and decide what should be done. The model creates a self-fulfilling world.

The alternative he presents is the empowered knowledge worker, who has initiative, a "voice", heart, spirit, and an active role including taking personal responsibility for seeing that the job gets done, and done well. This expectation also creates a self-fulfilling world that latches, but in a far more productive state, and one that requires far less day to day management of "bad employees".

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:

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.

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.

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.

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"?)

The levels are successively less questioned and more strongly and emotionally defended if the survival of that level as it is currently constituted is challenged. We talked a lot about "high-reliability" systems and the realization that often the problems were not due to data being wrong, but due to the whole mental model of what is going on that the data feed being wrong. -- and how emotional people, especially superiors, can instantly be if their framework is questioned.

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 exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Wade

Walter Derzko's Smart Economy - innovation, entrepreneurship

Walter Derzko has a weblog Smart Economy which is worth checking out. I put a permanent link in to it and stole his photo from his profile to put at the left here.

His weblog is subtitled:

A Forum for discussing emerging smart discoveries and emerging technologies with built-in intelligence or embedded smarts. The Smart Future is already here, just the last page hasn't been written yet! Every advance brings benefits as well as intrusions. Have your say !! Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

And he describes himself this way:

I'm a futurist and business development consultant interested in emerging smart technologies, scenario planning, and opportunity recognition and lateral thinking

And a current activity:

[C]ollecting materials for a new certificate program that I will be teaching on Entrepreneurship and Innovation this Fall at the University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies...

He seems a very high-energy, 3 espresso person, with a Boing-Boing scan of the horizon for new things that might be interesting.

...

.Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare" - old Japanese proverb

......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." - H. Mumford Jones

"Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought." A. Einstein

"Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are showstoppers..." Walter Derzko

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

His Welcome page starts this way

Welcome to this discussion Forum on the Smart Economy-where you can discuss the impacts of new emerging smart technologies-technologies that have built-in intelligence or smarts. I'll be posting examples of new and emerging smart technologies at least once a day.

The Smart Economy is quietly booming !

People have tried to label the post-industrial economy in many ways: the Knowledge economy, the information economy, the Internet economy, the bio economy, etc. One denominator that they all have in common is that smart objects play an increasingly influential role- hence what I call the “Smart Economy”

My Comments

There's no question that many "things" that used to be "dumb" are becoming "smart", in the sense that they are developing a little more robust awareness of their own surroundings and showing adaptive response to that in real-time.

That is the same kind of behavior I've been describing for "feedback control loops", that I'm increasingly thinking are a good candidate for the building block of Life, even more so than DNA, because the "song" is the same even if the loop is implemented in silicon or water-levels in a glass or any other medium.

Well, so here's a thought along those lines. If self-aware, goal-seeking feedback control loops are taken as the basic primitive unit of "life" -- the atom from which everything else that's alive is built -- then we should be noticing that the world around us is being flooded with new protoLife at an accelerating rate.

These loops, as I've described them, will have a natural tendency to be "self-organizing" and "self-assembling", in order to work more stably and survive (always a goal) and to thrive. Also, sooner or later I suspect that, like teenagers and Science, intelligence discovers that it's not as intelligent as it thought once, and even that it can't even tell what it's doing wrong without outside independent perspective. (We're trapped by the problem Godel noted -- there is no way we can assess our own blind spots.)

And so, we have to find "friends" to hang out with and spot for each other and compare notes.

In other words, both what Derzko calls "smarts" and what I'm terming "proto-life" are naturally self-organizing but moreover tend to reach out and try to organize on the next higher level as well, seeking out peers to work together with.

So, OK, I have a background in Computer Science as well as Information Technology (IT) (two very different fields by the way) and this issue is interesting to both. First, from Computer Science's point of view - this whole thing is a huge connectionist computational device that is working out some problem and carrying out some process. Aspects of that can be simulated and we can rush ahead and predict some possible alternative outcomes and what determines which of those outcomes will occur. That may suggest social action in some way.

Second, like it or not, this whole thing we're assembling, or finding ourselves in the middle of the assembly plant for, is importantly a hybrid beastie -- part DNA, part Silicon, and a lot of "control loops."

It's also hybrid across scales -- part genes trying to make new genes, part people trying to make new people, part organizations trying to Terra-form a world for them to thrive in, part nations trying to Terra-form the planet to suit their own growth needs.

And it's also hybrid across species -- our "human" bodies, when we look inside them, are actually, well, kind of micro-societies of a lot of different organisms. If we killed off everything except the human body, we'd probably die too. We need all these intestinal bacteria to protect us and to digest food properly.

And, most of the time, all these hybrids get along fine. There are probably millions or billions of kinds of bacteria, and only 100 or so don't get along well with us, and most of that is because they are themselves making mistakes or getting infected by viruses.

Academic fields and people keep trying to divide the beast apart into different pieces as if the pieces existed independently of each other, which they don't. In the end, you can't separate personal health from population health, and as our antibiotics run out of steam and TB and AIDS and other pathogens return, we'll all pay for the billions of people who we've neglected to care for, who we perceive as "them" and "not us".

You can't separate corporate health from personal and community health and they should be allies, not mortal enemies, in any rational, stable, sustainable solution. Yet we see Public Health often attacking corporations as if they were the devil incarnate, and corporations acting as if "people were the problem" and if only there were no people, business would boom. Well, looking around southeast Michigan as the Big-Three auto industry fades and lays off more and more people, I don't see personal health getting suddenly much better, as if a huge burden had been removed from the people, now that GM and Ford are "letting up." I see things getting worse.

And, you can no longer separate the use of computers and "smart" components from the growth of all of that beast. I keep laughing at all these books on Toyota and The Toyota Way, that emphasize people, people, people. Yes, it's true, and I have been the first to go on too long about it, we shouldn't dream of "systems so perfect that no one needs to be good." But, on the other hand, we shouldn't try to "be good" and think that will remove the need for systems to manage the details a planetary-scale organism. We need both.

Toyota does have an amazing culture. Yes. They also have amazing robots. Let's not forget that little thing. For interpersonal communication, and overcoming secrecy and failure-hiding, having a visual system with bright colors and an "andon cord" is GREAT -- way better than nothing. But, if you shut off all the computers, Toyota would shut down too.

In fact, yesterday, in my second last slide, I show a "double helix" of human / DNA based life, and IT/computer based proto-life, growing up like Morning Glories around the guiding trellis of the hierarchy of organizational control levels.

There's only one planet here, guys. There's only one human race. We're all in the same lifeboat, us, corporations, people, our genes, our nations -- and it gets worse, not better, if we kill each other off or try to pretend each other doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

Once again, I'll reemphasize these key points:

1) If we don't solve everything, we haven't solved anything.

2) That's not as hard as it looks, extrapolating upwards, because those are the wrong variables to use to deal with everything, and we need to come down from above to find the intrinsic, easy variables and easy equations to manage with and plan around. There's a second easy place to work at the top end. (see the diagrams in Scale and Scope Creep)

3) Regardless, if we use symmetrical constructs that are scale-invariant, the whole "everything" collapses into a few vertical constructs - the ones Ken Wilber calls "halons". We can reduce even an infinite series of terms that have a constant relationship to the neighboring term into the final sum, without having to look at every one or do an infinite amount of work.

Example for the brave : we can determine the sum 1+1/2+1/4+1/8 +1/16 .... without having to add them all up, once we see the pattern. Well, someone can. That has to use ideas from "limits" and "Taylor series", and "infinite series" stuff. ( if you care the sum = 2, and any series shaped like 1 + r +r*r + r*r*r etc. converges on a sum = 1/(1-r) , and in our case r = (1/2) so the sum is 1 over (1/2) which, yes I'll do it for you, "2".

The point is that certain kinds of infinite series collapse nicely, mathematically, into a single value or a single relationship. Symmetrical ones tremendously reduce the complexity of the problem, or, in computer science terms, the "order of the algorithm", often changing an impossibly hard problem to an easy problem. (for them.) That's why I'm always going on so excitedly when I find some way to find a symmetry in the problem.

Second digression. Symmetry is incredibly powerful. Science asserts that the laws of physics are symmetrical, that is, don't change, regardless what time you start your clock, or whether your lab is facing north or west, or whether your lab is here or in another galaxy. There are symmetries over time, angle, and position. Big deal you might say. The big deal is that from that alone you (well, very smart "they") can conclude that therefore, energy, angular momentum, and momentum must be conserved quantities. Again, you may say "big deal" but knowing that is most of physics. So, if I'm arguing that there is also a symmetry over "scale", that would probably mean there's another constant waiting for someone to do equivalent math. If that's your thing, go for it. I think all the equations you need are in Mechanics by Landau and Lifshitz, Pergammon press, 1960, chapter 2, on "Conservation Laws". If you don't understand what a "Lagrangian" is, don't go there. It would almost seem as if the evolution of complexity and integration at ever larger scales would have something akin to "momentum" and would be a thing that would continue at a given rate unless an outside force acted on it to accelerate it (faster, slower, or change in direction.) I'm too rusty to do the math myself. I'm sure there's someone who could glance at this and go, "oh, yeah" and write down the answer.


So, I'd add to Derzko's notes on all the pieces becoming smarter, that this is "turtles all the way" upwards as well as downwards. Not only are the pieces becoming smarter, but all the aggregate beings (like corporations and nations) are becoming smarter too.

The pivotal question that determines whether we will all die here shortly, is whether they are becoming wiser.

Because they sure are becoming stronger and ever more capable of devising ingenious new methods to kill each other. Even our bombs are becoming "smart". Smart is not good enough.

Smart without "wise" is worse, not better.

And, to a very large extend, "wise" means that we have expanded our horizons, in time, distance, and scale, and can see the "big picture." We stop "sub-optimizing" and chasing false flashes of prosperity or success that only look that way locally, and, seen from a better perspective, are large-scale disasters and lose-lose strategies.

It would be great if the smartness happens fast enough that we stop destroying the lifeboat Earth and expand our horizons enough to see that the toe we're about to bite is attached to a foot that is attached to a leg that is attached to a body that is ... oopsie ... our own body. This isn't some kum-ba-ya, let's all sing and be brothers soft stuff -- this is very real connections on a deterministic level.

We're all "one" whether we like it or not, even with those idiots in Marketing. Even with Lawyers. Even with people of different skin color. Even with corporations and corporate executives, or labor and labor organizers. Even with capitalists and communists and socialists and Christians and Muslims. Even with machines. It's a very small world, and dense with feedback loops. Everything is impacting everything else. We need a theory of everything that cuts through all that and gives us some stable guidance amid the change.

The "loose couplings" between us, amplified by feedback loops, turn out to be "tight couplings" after all, when we trace them out.

But, big can be easier. We can't predict water molecule motion well, even with quantum mechanics, but we can predict "water" well enough to build plumbing. Up is down.

So, it's time to really think about "Theories of everything" that include more than subatomic particles and string theory and quarks or whatever is in that pot these days.

"Everything" is what you see when you look out the window. We know more than nothing about it. We need to get together, pool our notes, and see what they add up to. We need to get to know who "we" are, and realize that the bond is even tighter than "brothers." We actually are each other.

We can like it or hate it, work with it or against it, but I think the math holds up under scrutiny.

We're going to have to accept that even sufficient money does not give us the "freedom" to not have to learn how to get along with other people, cultures, and nations.

It would really help if we'd stop shooting holes in each other's ends of the lifeboat, as if their sinking would "help" us. Yeah, we'd be "higher" than them at last ... for a few seconds.

As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Wade