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

Systems Thinking and the emergence of new Life

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.

I'd like to suggest, as others have, that the process of exploration is more a spiral or helix than a circle, and we, individually and collectively, may go through multiple cycles of coming back to where we were, except that now it's "different" than the last time we were "here."

There is a motion, very much akin to an actual mechanical screw, in which we apply a rotational force or motion, but the result is a much harder to achieve motion in a wholly different direction.

As I sometimes do, I was rereading Practical Challenges of Systems Thinking and Modeling in Public Health this morning, seeing if the article had changed in meaning since I last read it [ Trochim WM, Calebra DA, Milstein B, Gallagher RS, Leischow SJ, American Journal of Public Health, March 2006, V96, No. 3]. Most of those people are at Cornell, in fact, in my old stomping ground, MVR Hall. Bobby Milstein is at the CDC, and Scott Leischow at NCI.

As one of my favorite philosophers, Charles Schulz's dog Snoopy, noted one day:

Did you ever notice
that if you think about a problem at 2 AM
and then again at noon the next day
you get two different answers?

Anyway, I got a different answer I wanted to share.

Still reverberating from my post on the Ten Lessons from Physics yesterday, I realized there is another candidate for important lessons in reducing complexity to a manageable level from physics that may be relevant to "Systems Thinking."

I already described yesterday how immensely complex interactions at one level, such as gas molecules, can get reduced to a few very simple but aggregate-scale concepts on the next level, such as "pressure, volume, and temperature", that are meaningless words on the individual molecule's level. In between those scales there was a forbidden zone, computationally intractable from either end.

Near the first easy end, only a few things only occasionally interacting, we have some room to actually compute the motions of several planets or billiard balls - much to the dismay of students of introductory physics.

What I can bring home from my foray into physics, however, is the news that there is also an easy zone at the other end - the end of immense numbers and immense interaction.

There is a continuum actually, and a sort of "continuous paradigm shift" as you go from the first easy end (few things, little interaction) to the other easy end (huge number of things and interactions) and that is in "what goes away."

At the lower easy end, the interactions go away, and we think in terms of "objects", mostly, that have properties, such as position and velocity.

At the upper easy end, it is the objects that go away, and we think in terms of persistent interactions that have self-energy and properties. This "regime" is the one that most of the visible universe inhabits, except for some relatively cold rocks (planets). It is the world of plasma, of high-energy physics, of stars, of the huge interactions at the centers of galaxies.

This is akin to the near-field, mid-field, and far-field of a radiating antenna - the math is relatively easy at either very near the antenna, or very far from the antenna - it's only at intermediate distances away that things become totally strange and slippery. I discussed that issue before.

In any case, we have here a two-dimensional entity, not a one-dimensional one, so it is now capable of being non-transitive and forming what Hofsteader called "a strange loop", akin to M.C. Escher's waterfalls or staircases. As the number of actors and intensity of interactions increases, one dimension, objects, diminishes in importance, the other dimension, interactions, increase in importance, until we reach the limit point, mathematically, and physically, where the initial objects simply drop out of the equation entirely and we are left only with the persistent interactions - which, voila, close the loop, the snake bites its tail, and these persistent interactions become the "objects" for the next level of existence and we start our next turn
around the greater helix of Life.

It's a smooth transition, easily modeled, not a "leap". It only looks like a leap if we go across the screw threads, not along them.

So, the meaning of "an entity" is really only locally defined, in an asymptotic way.. well below its level, the concept or entity is too large to be perceived, as "temperature" is to a molecule or "admission to Harvard" is to one of our body's cells. Then, as we think about sliding up to larger and larger scales, this concept has very strong meaning and dominates the local equations in the local time frame at the local scale, and then, as we keep on going, it goes away again forever, as does our problem starting our car on January 12th in terms of international relations.

OK, nice metaphor, but how is it useful? Do we have a name for these "persistent interactions"?

Aha! In physics, one type of persistent interaction is a "soliton". I'll skip the details, but these are waves that don't die out as they travel, but just keep on going. Fascinating.

What I do want to suggest for these persistent interactions is, at one scale, the idea of self-aware regulatory feedback loops. This concept is applicable at any scale, size, or time-frame and seems to be invariant and a core building block of life. Cells do it. The endocrine system does it. People do it. Corporations do it. Nations do it. Ecosystems do it. Policy makes and lawyers actively work on "regulations" that are, one realizes, actually supposed to be part of an on-going dance and regulatory feedback loop. Hospitals and doctors and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid do this dance. The fact that there is a dance is the constant, and it's a very specific kind of dance that Control System Engineers know very well, and have tools to deal with.

I've gone on at great length in my recent MPH Capstone presentation at Johns Hopkins about these loops, and the fact that a closed, regulatory feedback loop is a qualitatively different animal than a "network" of interactions or a "web" of interactions or some Systems Dynamics Causal Loop Diagram. The loop has several properties that are very distinct from what is sloppily called "feedback":

• The loop persists over time.
• The loop is self-aware and can tell "itself" from "other" and do repairs, that is it has some kind of rudimentary immune system and damage repair system.
• To accomplish stability in a changing world, and overcome the problems Godel pointed out, the loop probably has formed alliances with other loops, either horizontally (peer loops) or vertically (management loops) where "you tell me if I'm losing it without realizing it and I'll do the same for you."
• The goal of the regulatory process has to include stability and survival, yes, but on top of that there is some goal, or direction, or "intent", and that goal may, in fact, be set by other loops (management) or peers (norms) or the surrounding context (tissue), or distant context (the pituitary gland).

Such loops will consequently differentially survive and persist, and end up dominating the landscape. They will tend to survive and persist best, if they are compatible with the larger scale activity that is going on, of course - if they are "aligned" with larger and larger contexts - but in Life this is a bidirectional game and the larger context goals may still be in flux and controllable by the lower level actors - until we get "phase lock" in that vertical dimension, the image finds a home and latches into place, and the whole entity is now stable on multiple levels at once. A solution has been found. Life, at a whole new level, has emerged.

Such loops are also exquisitely powerful in a computational sense. It's a long story, but closed feedback loops are IIR and open feedback loops are FIR, and IIR is infinitely more powerful than FIR. I'll get back to that tomorrow. In any case, no Control System Engineer would even imaging using an "open-loop" system if a "closed-loop regulatory feedback control system" were available. You get much better performance, stability, cost, robustness, response-time, tunability, etc. with closed-loop systems.

So, where's that get us? It's time to head off to my day job. Let's lash this down.

Of all the possible, N-factorial loops on causal loop diagrams, or in physical reality of the whole hierarchy of self-organizing Life, which includes people and corporations and nations, the winners will be the relatively persistent closed feedback loops. These will form, in many real senses, meta-life, or actors in their own rights with their own agendas and local worlds and local reference frames in which they are important and most of the rest of life is reduced to "an environment" in which they swim.

This "meta-life" will emerge at ever higher and higher organizational levels.

If you want to tweak, or tune, or improve the behavior and outcomes of any of these local entities (cells, the pancreas, the endocrine system, a person, a team, a corporation, the tobacco industy, the auto industry, a whole culture or nation or broken nation or proto-nation), then this model suggests focusing on finding a way to nudge it towards this stable and viable condition. "Nudge" means find existing proto-regulatory feedback loops that are almost closed, and close them. This pushes the whole "holon" (Ken Wilber's word) towards a stable attractor, a hold-fast, a sort of resonant notch or Lagrange point, where it can exist consistently with Life above and Life below it efficiently and effectively.

This is consistent with the focus on "microsystems" of the Institute of Medicine's Crossing the Quality Chasm, but goes beyond that and suggests a type of completion or stabilization of an actual meta-life process is the key variable to a sustainable intervention. It suggests what to look for, what to measure, and how to tweak it, and a fundamental principle of physics that supports that type of intervention as being principle-based.

It's also consistent with Senge's Presence and Stephen Covey's "8th habit" and focuses on the use of local feedback processes to bring about a change in a person or small team or an entire corporation that needs "restructuring" to return to an innovative, agile, productive state.

And it's consistent with my previous posts that Public Health, by its own logic, has to embrace improving the performance of corporations as well as populations of people, because both types of meta-life interact strongly, and, as many people in southeast Michigan are aware, if the corporate health is not well, the employee lives will not be well either. These do not need to be in conflict, and should be totally consistent objectives from both sides.

Neat. We should try simulating this and see how it behaves. We need to know how to measure such things, how to parametrize them, how to reverse engineer the underlying simple model from observable features, and how to nudge the various mathematical poles in the control-world towards the correct quadrant and tell (with p<0.01) whether our intervention is working or not - or, more precisely, we need to navigate and steer the intervention, in a minute-by-minute short-scale piloting fashion, around the rocks and to completion and need this compass to recover our direction after each swerve to avoid some obstacle or seize some favorable wind.

The Sixth Discipline for Learning Organizations

There are some things common to the diverse fields of medicine, public health, business, religion, science, and the military.

• They all tackle problems which result in "success" or "failure" in a changing world.
• Failure can cost property, lives, or even entire nations and cultures.
  
• "Success" depends on how well they can detect failure and adapt to it.
• They all have bright people, but really operate more at the organizational level
  
• Adaptation depends on how good the organization is at seeing and learning.

So, a book like Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline - The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization is very important to us all, and impacts us on many fronts.

Senge points out an extremely pivotal insight: there are two different kinds of complexity, and most of what we do is focused on the wrong one.

He describes "detail complexity", which is the type we are familiar with, where there are thousands or even millions of details to be kept track of and managed. That one we're pretty good at, with the help of computers.

But then he goes on (on page 71 of the 2006 revision):

But there is a second type of complexity. The second type is dynamic complexity, situations where the cause and effect are subtle, and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity...

When the same action has dramatically different effects in the short run and the long, there is dynamic complexity. When an action has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in a different part of the system, there is dynamic complexity. When obvious interventions produce non-obvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity.

He adds

"The real leverage in most management situations lie in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity."

This understanding comes from "system thinking" and that, in turn "starts with understanding a simple concept called feedback."

Of course, to say feedback is "simple" is misleading. The impact of feedback is wildly subtle, counter-intuitive, perplexing, and paradoxical to most of us. Some simply refuse to accept the concept at all because it overturns so many cherished notions of how the world works and how things "should" be.

Senge goes on, echoing many others and American Indian culture, "Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines."

The point is that when people or things form a causal loop, where each thing influences the next one down the chain, and the chain is closed, then all our notions of "causality" are thrown out the window. Every actor in that loop is both the cause and the prisoner of the effects of the entire loop. In many ways, the shape of the loop becomes the dominant "cause" of what unfolds, far more so than the people caught up within it.

Senge describes a person filling a glass of water. As seen by a person, their hand is controlling the level of water in the glass, and adjusting it as the glass fills. A perfectly valid alternative description is that the level of the water in the glass is controlling the hand, causing the hand to close the faucet as the level reaches the right place.

Both descriptions are partially correct. The hand affects the water level, and the water level, in turn affects the hand. There is a feedback loop in place. Both are "causes" and both are "effects," and "which came first" is an irrelevant question.

It is the intrinsic property of complex systems to be dense with such feedback loops between the people inside them, making everyone a cause and everyone a trapped recipient of effects.

This means bad news and good news.

The bad news is that, if the output of "the system" is wrong, then the blame should be shared among everyone in the system, not just the last person to touch something that failed.

The good news is that every person in the system therefore also has the opportunity to change the flows and impact the system's output. In conflict situations, either party has the ability to increase the tension or decrease the tension.

In fact, in most conflict situations, the whole reason for the conflict in the first place is that there are feedback loops that are reflecting each sides actions into later behaviors by the other side, which are misinterpreted as new "actions", not "reactions."

Thus, in 2006, when Hezbollah forces in Syria reacted to Israel's capture of many of their own, they captured two Israeli soldiers in return. However, Israel saw this not as a reaction, but as a new "unprovoked action", which therefore demanded a new massive "reaction" and counter strike - a 34 day assault by Israel. The counter strike, in turn, was perceived by Hezbollah as a new "unprovoked attack", and the cycle simply continues to feed itself.

This is a classic no-win situation, where each side downplays the value of lives of the other side, and feels that the loss of one of their own should be responded to by killing two of the "others",
in order to "get even" and also "be even." By that flawed match, the conflict spirals out of control because there will never be an "even" situation.

On a smaller scale, within organizations, the same phenomenon occurs - but generally without actual explosives and death. The vast majority of conflicts can actually be traced back to people, or teams, or departments, or divisions, or managers blaming others for behavior that is simply the downstream result of their own earlier behavior, reflected and sometimes amplified through the structure of "the system" of feedback loops and lags. Similarly, management and labor can get into the same endless loop of conflict over "getting even" for behaviors that are the result of their own, forgotten, earlier actions.

In a bizarre sort of hallucinogenic dance, at all levels from personal to national, we are fighting demons that are simply the delayed reflections of our own earlier behavior, which we fail to recognize and blame instead on the "others" being "bad."

Senge mentioned the problem with dynamic complexity over space and over time, but he missed the third dimension, namely, over scale, or location in the hierarchy of life. Actions or interventions may look very different, ranging from great to wretched, as we rotate the lenses in our microscope stage and view different time-horizons, different space-horizons, and different perspectives from the bottom of the organization to the top.

Worse, actors in one place who perceive, at their location, time, and scale that their own actions are "good" may be completely baffled by hostile responses coming from actors at other locations, times, or level who are only responding to the "terrible" thing being done to them by that obviously uncaring and bad person somewhere else. And, of course, this would mean that those people responding with hostility must be "bad people" and need to be fired, neutralized, or killed, depending on the context of the conflict.

Dennis Severance describes the same kind of error being made by a mythical management in the book Making I/T Work. That management tries to impose an an enterprise-wide computer system, runs into "hostility", tries to "deal with" the "opponents" by firing them, and then is blind-sided when the computer system, "out of the blue, with no notice", fails to operate as intended, and they can't grasp why no one ever warned them of problems. The fact that those who raised these issues at the start were fired for their "hostility" is completely lost. This is a very common problem across industries.

These problems are not, as they might seem, problems of perception, but are actually problems of the intrinsic properties of systems. The people in these systems are all well-intended, doing "good jobs" locally, and yet, like M.C. Escher's pictures, taken together form an impossible loop that simply can't operate.

The variables that depend on the horizon of space, time, or scale are the keys here, and are as surprising as seeing an object that is red close up turn to look green when you back up several steps. This seems "impossible". Actually, New Scientist published a marvelous picture a month ago that, if viewed close up, was Albert Einstein, but if you backed up across the room, changed into Marilyn Monroe.

( Hybrid images: Now you see them…

• 31 March 2007
• NewScientist.com
• Gregory T. Huang )
  

These system effects are much more prevalent than people realize, and are the things that are "to blame" for most of the conflict and corporate dysfunction and national conflict around us.

It is clear to me, and I'd say to Peter Senge, that these effects need to be somehow made visible and accessible to everyone, at every level, from every country, so that we can get enough comprehension for people to see that, in Walt Kelly's Pogo's words, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Of course, many scientists, working a small scales, would have a hard time accepting wisdom from theologians, working at large scales, who see different pictures in the same world. Biomedical researchers, used to looking down the microscope for the cause of problems, are not prone to look out the window instead, and even less to consider that their own scientific culture could be implicated in producing the conditions that produced the cancer that they are now working to "cure".

Still, the logic of Senge's arguments is sound. "All" that is required is for people to stop blaming others for all the pain and recognize that the others are just as good people and are just as trapped in the pain, and, in any case, as with Jimmy Buffet in Margaritaville, they might realize that, yes, maybe, they themselves might be partly to blame.

If this looks remarkably like the basic golden rule of most religions ("Do unto others what you would have them do unto you") that's because it is. Other really annoying commandments like "Forgive us our sins as we forgive others" also come readily to mind.

Like the "Marilyn Einstein" photo, reality is multi-scaled, and the scientists have the fine-detail or high-frequency detail right, and the religions may be wrong on details but have the long-wavelength, larger picture right.

All of this should be something that can be animated, simulated, and taught in K-12 school, as well as in continuing education. And it should be.

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