Comment on Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life

Evolving since John Holland's "genetic algorithms" in 1975, there is a solid literature in "Artificial Life" which goes well beyond "artificial intelligence". Search on "Chris Langton", "Symposium on Artificial Life", and "Santa Fe Institute." The work stirs deep anxiety and overt hostility from many and tends to remain low visibility.

Treading on heresy, I discount those who discount the idea that the internet and electronically mediated corporations could become "alive" or might as well be alive, because skeptics have no proven, calibrated tools which to detect e-life, or a-life, looking from the bottom up. What does it look like to a cell to be part of a human body? How does it change the cell's life? Not very much on a moment by moment basis, for sure.

You'd think those same skeptics would argue that a human body is "just cells" and there is no larger animating life (such as us) that emerges from or inhabits that active system of cells. Given that single example of multilevel-multicellularism, what possible basis is there for arguing it does NOT exist on other scales? Pure human vanity and remnants of the desire for humans to be the center of the universe and the greatest creation of God or nature are emotion not reasons.

I think the burden of proof should be the other way. What shows that we are NOT already part of a larger effectively-alive structure?

Science, please, not legend, should guide the exploration of "life". This is a rather critical question with very profound implications that most people find uncomfortable and inconvenient. We need to look at it more deeply. It is far more important than global warming.

No man is an island

December 5, 2008
New York Times

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says

By PAM BELLUCK

How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all.

And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood.

So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought.

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”

In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

The researchers analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others — spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and co-workers — from 1983 to 2003.

“It’s extremely important and interesting work,” said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton, who was not involved in the study. Several social scientists and economists praised the data and analysis, but raised possible limitations.

Publish Post

... (see NYT or BMJ for the rest)

yep. Humans are not solitary animals, and our spirits are not contained within our one body, at least effectively not so, however this is managed. For practical purposes we ARE each other.

This is not just arguing about words. If we are so interconnected that a change in your life produces a change in my body's hormone levels, how is that different from your heart and your own adrenal gland? Connected is connected, if they influence each other, whether our puny math can easily "see" how that connection operates or not. Heck, we can't see how gravity operates either, but we accept that gravity is real.

And so is the fact that we are not really many bodies -- we are one spirit sort of distributed out across many bodies, like a TV image and pixels. The image is not the pixels, but it is, but it isn't.

We lack good words for these simpler concepts, and so discussion of the actual nature of composite and hierarchical, diffusely coupled life is difficult.

And that thing that seems to "take on a life of its own" ?? Why don't we stop pretending and just admit that it does exist and it does have a life of its own, even though we so often kill it?

Life is not contained just within each living "thing", but fills the spaces between us as well, on every scale, letting us effectively become "one", while staying apart, at the same time.

"Love" is not a fantasy - it is science that has the catching up to do here on the very nature of life itself, especially the connectionist, diffuse forms of life.

If you think about it you realize that an image is not "just a collection of pixels", because a heap of those colored dots would have no image at all. It is the arrangement with respect to each other, the inter-relationships, that stores the image, not the pixels.

It is the same with the nature of life, or a tornado. Life is a transient, a set of relationships, briefly, between smaller living things and larger living things, at the same time. Our entire educational system focuses on the pixels, not on the image, and we've carefully been graduating bigger and brighter pixels and wondering why things are still falling apart. It's the working together thing that we've neglected that turns out to be the "baby", and the rest of it, including individuals, is the "bath water".

This is a hugely unpopular and inconvenient notion, instantly attacked by the wealthy as some scheme to remove their money. It has nothing to do with money. It has to do with realizing that our personal and national wealth consists of relationships, of "social capital". We've neglected this, and no amount of cash bailout of institutions will make up for it until we wake up and fix the actual problem.

Quoting the song Suzanne, sung by Judy Collins, from memory:

But when He saw that only drowning men could see Him, He said "All men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them!"

See also my prior post "Are you my mommy? What shape am I anyway?"

For Whom the Bell Tolls

by John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

The end of our exploring (T. S. Eliot)
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.

This also has very strong implications for policy. If we are all effectively one body, then the idea that the "rich" can get sufficiently far "above" the "poor" to be free of their plight is bogus. It can never work. The US can't operate with 20% of the population of the US totally neglected, or with 5.7 billion people in the world starving. This has "National Security" and "Homeland Security" and long-term strategic direction implications for all nations, if true.

We best put more energy into finding out if it is true, and stop wishing gravity would just "go away" because the political and social structures we've built, and the stories we tell ourselves about "how things are" have a serious built-in fatal flaw the way they stand, idolizing the individual and ignoring "all of us", and thinking that could ever possibly end well. For anyone.

Wade

A different model of what's wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few points in closing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wade

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

(above - picture of the road home, from this site. )

(third part of a series of posts) - I'm trying to reduce 8000 words to 250 here and still get to my answer to the New Scientist's question of "What's the point of Religion?" Maybe the shortest answer is simply in terms of bandwidth and signal theory. There are concepts that are larger than any individual human brain and don't fit in linear symbol string text, so what does the evolving planet use (a) to perceive those and (b) to store and persist those?

Again, I'm trying to explain a model for religion with terms that scientists would recognize.

So far I've mentioned concepts that Science has inherited without adequate scrutiny that need to be re-examined. One of these is the idea that humans are magically special and different from other natural phenomena, so that "social science" is somehow different from "the natural sciences".

Another idea left over from history is the idea that mankind is God's greatest creation, beyond which there has been and never will be any life in this universe that is greater. The term "God" has been removed from that thought by Science, but the rest persists -- in direct violation of the Cosmological Principle that asserts that here and now isn't special, and which, like Occhams razor, is one way to generate hypothesized models to test first.

So, let's break that constraint, which has no basis in either theory or fact. Let's start by assuming that Evolution is occurring on many levels simultaneously, whether that's easy for humans to grasp or to model or not. Further, let's assume that some of what's evolving is superior to human beings -- that humans are not evolution's endpoint, by a long, long way. We are not the top, and not the end-point. That's the Cosmological Principle. We are not at the middle of the universe - same principle.

OK, but then follow that logic, oh Scientists, and take it where it goes.

I'll assert without proof that there are important things that individual human brains are too small to grasp, period. The burden of proof is on the contrary assumption that the world is so simple that bright individual humans, in less than 100 years time, can even learn the terminology, let alone understand the concepts.

And, similarly, I'll assert that there are things that take 500 years of continuous observation to detect that, again, no individual human is going to ever "see".

If these were radio signals we wanted to pick up, with very low wavelengths and long time-constants (compared to human biological clocks, but not to the time scale of the Earth), we would go, OK, and build a receiver/detector that was very large and would remain in place for 500 years. No big deal, if our society was one that undertook such projects.

Generally, society is more short-term focused, as are individuals, so Evolution has instead created meta-beings, persisting structures that last hundreds or thousands of years, to do such sensing and observing and remembering and learning and storing of that kind of information that humans can not and will never personally grasp.

That's the kind of thing that "organized religion" may be good for. We have very few very-long-term structures on Earth, composed of humans, that could serve to pick up the long-wavelength information about this universe we might need to know. Nations are one other contender, but they are too fluid and come and go too quickly, and are focused on short-term issues. Large Global Corporations are perhaps a great long-term solution going forward, but we don't have globe-spanning corporations that go backwards a thousand years -- except these "organized religions".

It is a frustration of many that religion "changes so slowly" -- but, from a pure signal theory point of view, it takes precisely something that only changes slowly to detect and pick up the long-wavelength signals.

Are such signals there? Following Drake's Other Law, yes, surely they are.
Will we discover new, previously unsuspected phenomena if we look at those wavelengths over time? Again, by Drakes Other Law, yes, surely we will. (These "laws", like Occham's Razor, aren't proven, just helpful guidelines for where to dig first.)

Are there other similar phenomena we can use to do a sanity check that our thinking here is not totally off-base? Yes, read any book on large-scale phenomena and how large scale things are not simply larger versions of small-scale things. One example I recall was the amazement people who didn't know Drake's Law had when they built the first Supertankers and one day one of them, on a perfectly calm day with a flat sea, started moving and ripped apart its dock.

This is the first time people realized that the ocean waves "came that size". Waves with wavelengths of half a mile were treated by small ships as just "swells" or not even noticed at all. It took a ship that long to be rocked by a wave that long. In hindsight, we should have fully expected it, by the Cosmological Principle. There is no reason signals and waves around us should abruptly cut-off at the scale of human beings and only exist to one side of that point.

Throughout history, organized religions were the storehouse of "wisdom" - which was largely definable as simply long-wavelength knowledge -- something that it took 100 years to pick up and finally see for sure was there, because it sure wasn't visible or obvious locally to individuals. Then this long-term "wisdom" stuff had to be distilled into local operating rules, so that it was effectively possible for dumb, short-range humans to benefit from smart, long-range understanding. Organized, large-scale, thousands of humans over hundreds of years "religion" served, and still does serve, as that signal detector and transformer for us.

Well, maybe not for "us". Maybe, for Earth. Individual humans weren't very interested in having their short-term impulses controlled by long-term social wisdom a thousand years ago, and still aren't interested in that, not seeing the point, and not grasping how that works.

Today, our society rejects anything over 30 years old as being "irrelevant." Hmmm. We seem to be regressing, or asserting, implicitly, that there are no long-wavelength lessons we should be "learning from history". That is an unsupportable, and invalid Scientific hypothesis - that everything that matters to us is "news".

Surely yes news matters. So does "olds". All wavelengths matter, until proven otherwise.

Right now Earth is busily evolving social structures the size of Microsoft and Haliburton and GE and other globe-spanning corporations. We weren't asked permission for those, and those may be less "human creations" and more "natural evolution's creations." They are way larger than individuals, act like legal "persons", have civil and constitutional "rights", take actions, absorb energy, and are made up of DNA in complex arrangements and hierarchical structures. By all our textbook definitions, corporations are "alive."

The only reason we don't like to think of them as "alive" is the threat to our myth that humans are God's///blind-evolution's greatest creation. Well, not any more, apparently, by Science's own rules and laws and logic.

And, in point of fact, many humans have noted that, in the USA at least, an unspoken coup has taken place and Congress has a new mandate now, to make a nation "of corporations, by corporations, for corporations". The only "economy" that matters now and is reported in the press and Wall Street JOurnal is the corporate economy, than separated from human-level economy a few decades ago, and now are at odds. Good news for one is generally viewed as bad news for the other, although there is some "leakage" between the two.

But, as humans, we've already "lost" the planet, before we even knew there was a fight for control of it going on. A new species has arisen, Corporations, and it has taken over, and we, being fragmented and tiny-thinkers, either didn't see it, or can't see it if we try.

Still, Corporations should treasure Organized Long-Term Old Religions, because there is no other repository of long-term wisdom they can turn to for advice about what LIFE is like at that SCALE of organized activity. Or, like most teenagers, corporations can simply "Not see" what those old fogies around them are so bent out of shape about, and go off to rediscover the lessons of life the hard way, and wrap the family car around a tree as they find out that "oh, ice is slippery!"

Meanwhile, Scientists, you can go back to sleep, because this is happening without your assistance or brilliant assistance, and is already beyond your ability to model simplified versions of, let alone grasp. LIFE will evolve despite you.

It's magnificent to behold unfolding. Probably the same thing is happening on ten trillion other planets simultaneously, evolving and unfolding into a LIFE form shape so far beyond our ability to grasp we don't even have words to describe it.

We're still back here arguing about whether it is "genes" or "species" evolve, and not looking out the window or reading the paper where the answer is apparent. Right now, "corporations" are evolving and spreading and taking over the Earth's evolving re-structuring process.

It's a little uncomfortable where corporate life forms run unexpectedly into existing religious life-forms, as in the Mideast. Some clashes will occur, but there is no need for "survival of the fittest" -- because at the corporate level, "merger into a larger ONE" is also an option that battling tigers never had.

Already, new pathways to evolution are open, like that. The past is a poor guide to the future, in that regard. Darwin didn't even speculate on what shape evolution would take once corporation sized living entities had the ability to clone and merge and have tele-presence.

The good news, for religion, is that as corporations get to live longer, they will "grow up", as do humans, and begin to realize that some of that stuff their parents was spouting actually matters and applies to them: Things, dammit, have consequences. Who knew? Why didn't someone tell me!!??

So, global warming and the collapsing biosphere should be a wake-up call. Corporations can see, or could see, on scales humans never will, so they should start to grasp this, maybe faster than people can.

Well, if they can utilize their internal resources. If a corporation behaves like a huge exoskeleton for a few dudes at the top, it will be stuck and limited by human cognition. If it can accept "Theory Y" and open itself up to internal flow, it can get way past that binding constraint and evolve to something much smarter than the smartest human.

We better see if we can't catalyze that process. We can't "beat" corporations anymore, they already are here to stay. They don't have intrinsic "morality" at that scale, yet -- ie, they are too new to have absorbed long-term (> 1000 year) lessons about what works and what doesn't.

We need as scientists and religious folks to accelerate that learning curve for corporate-scale entities somehow, because we're in the back seat of the family car the kids are about to wrap around some tree.

If someone has a great idea how to do that, let me know. I just trace all the wiring back and point to where the problem is.

Still, it's interesting. If you dig into it, the Toyota Production System and "lean" approach actually does spend a great deal of time removing the internal barriers inside a corporate structure to the flow of information, so that the "aperture synthesis" can take effect, making the whole organization a learning machine with a capacity far greater than "management".

That model seems to be extremely successful. So, maybe there's hope.



( a self-assembling tower crane from howstuffworks.com )

My public health buddies sometimes seem to want to disown me for being willing to hop into bed with corporations, instead of viewing them as the scourge of the earth and something to be fought off and destroyed in a noble losing battle.

I flip it around and say our job in public health (this weblog) is to figure out how to help corporate life forms SUCCEED beyond their wildest dreams, and learn to SEE better -- because they'll SEE the things we're trying to tell them on their own then. And that seems to be the only way to reach them, is through simulation models or real-life experiences that let them find this out for themselves.

I prefer simulators for learning about consequences and limits and to avoid plane crashes over practicing extreme maneuvers with a real plane. We need better long-term, long-wavelength LIFE simulators for corporations to learn from -- multiplayer games on a corporate level that, like the WHOPPER in the movie "War Games", will finally realize -- hmm, curious game, the only way to win "GLOBAL WAR" is not to play the game.

Corporations aren't Darwinian lower life forms that can only "win" or "lose" -- they can actually "merge". That's our way out of this mess. It's not a zero-sum game anymore.

And, corporations do not have to be "the BORG", life-sucking stultifying wretched places to suffer and "work". In fact, a corporation that squeezes individuality out of people is self-defeating, as it reduces the complexity of its own internal ecosystem, and makes itself dumb along some new axis, some new base you could have been covering for it.

So, "bright" corporations exult in "unity in diversity". It's a great model. It's the only good working model. It's not "Am I me OR am I a corporation employee?" In the optimal solution, you're BOTH simultaneously but not in the degenerate solution, in the multiplicative solution.
Each of those identities makes the OTHER identity richer and more satisfying.

That kind of corporation, one can imagine, will have way more success at "innovation" and have way higher morale than one without that feature.

The problem corporate CEO's struggle with is how to maintain "control" in an open-system and prevent it from simply descending into chaos once they stop "running things with a firm hand" from above. Like "angular momentum", the "forces" that emerge to take "control" in an open system are invisible and not at all intuitive to the human animal.

We've seen examples and know that it can work and does work, though. The trick is how to convert a dumb, dull, life-sucking corporate exo-body into a fit, thriving, exciting life-energy supplying exo-body. That's a win-win for the economy, for the workers, for the stockholders, and for everyone except a few top "officers" of the company who become less important in the greater scheme of things and can be expected to fight back against losing or not getting their $250,000,000 perks for their "leadership".

Again, here, the concept of "emergent leadership" needs to be fleshed out, so that even the employees know what it is they are asking for. It's not a question of changing WHO gets to sit in the "top seat" and "run the company." -- in open control, no ONE person runs the company. EVERYONE collectively, in a single unified emergent entity, runs the company.

That is NOT the same as everyone having a "vote" in corporate decisions. The difference is subtle but crucial. The difference is a herd of people versus a TEAM. Again, this is an area humans have little intuition on, and have a hard time seeing, except perhaps when they see a sports team or band "get it together" for a few moments and the experience is astoundingly rewarding -- we resonate to that frequency. We are hard-wired to LOVE that frequency and that experience. Employees who have ever been in a work situation where it "clicks" into a true TEAM never want to work anywhere else again.

But, most CEO's, even if they wanted to, don't know how to navigate from "HERE" to "THERE", so it does little good for stockholders to demand that they do so. The mental models we were taught in school don't even include the "THERE" I'm talking about.

So, let me whirl it by one more time on this way too long post. It's not the employees who run the company in this model, and it's not the CEO, and it's not labor, and it's not management, and it's not some sort of vote sharing between them. NO ONE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL is in charge. And EVERYONE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL is not in charge (chaos or Communism).
Nothing on an individual level is in charge. The "in charge" part is no longer located ANYWHERE on the "individual" level plane. The "in charge" part has moved up the hierarchy of being to the EMERGENT plane above the "individual level" that we crudely and vaguely try to tag with the word "team" or "synergy" or "emergent" without really grasping well.

The CORPORATION becomes a living being in its own right, above and beyond the living-ness of the individuals within it, and the CORPORATE-level BEING runs the company. That's the model. If you can't grab hold of and work with "emergence", this model makes no sense at all and keeps mis-resolving itself into chaos or communism or the Borg.

This century, for the first time in the history of the Earth, we finally have the computer power we need to model "emergence". This is just crucial. This is "where it is at". This is our escape route from the mess we've made of this planet and the forces we've already set into motion that are coming back to haunt us.

This isn't "kum bay yah" touchy feely stuff. You watch a great sports team (like Michigan CAN too be, someday!) and it's no "accident" when they win. They "have it together."

That's what we need to aspire to, as families, communities, corporations, nations, and the planet - to "have our act together", to get to that overarching UNITY that embraces and loves DIVERSITY instead of suffocating it, because it spins out into a higher dimension where that unity becomes possible.

We know this can work. Our human bodies are living proof that ten trillion cells can form one "body" and each have a life better than what they had before.

99.9 percent of us WIN in that strategy, and the few people at the top might think they've lost millions of dollars (or billions, or trillions), but money ain't much good if the planet implodes, guys. You can't spend it anywhere if everyone else is dead.

The total value of stored wealth goes to ZERO if everyone else dies, regardless what number of dollars or gold bars it is made up of. Wealth is, at its core, access to future social resources and if there isn't a future society, that adds up to zero.

The way to maximize wealth from here, or rich people, is to maximize the future society that you now own a piece of. Think long-term. You can't even spend a trillion dollars short term anyway. "Emergent unity above diversity" is the only key that's been shown to work here.

We don't NEED TO take each other's stuff, because the pie CAN stop shrinking and start growing again, through emergent Life.

Mathematically, this is a relationship thing. The "inner product" of two vectors a and b is written and computed as magnitude of a times magnitude of B times the "cosine" of the angle between them (their relationship to each other.).

For "real" angles, the cosine function varies between zero and one, so the best you can ever end up with that product equaling is when the two are perfectly aligned, and you get a value of a times b.

For other angles, mistakenly called "imaginary" and related to that strange thing the square root of minus one, cosine is not bounded, and can grow without limit. Any two things, with the right relationship, if you move into that dimension, can have a product larger than any number you'd like it to be. And a company formed of people oriented like that can have a value larger than any number you'd like it to be. It's all about getting relationships off the "real plane" and to having a component in this other dimension, which is very real as well, but a little harder to point to from here, except by example. It's emergent. It's synergism.

It's simply a "complex exponential", as is any simple growth curve. That's pretty solid ground. It's a pure feedback equation where growth is proportional to size already, with the "complex" additional part adding the zing. That's what we need more of. More zing. The curve is a pretty helix-shape, which is kind of interesting - and, like a "screw", by twisting it THIS way, it moves THAT way at right angles to the way you are twisting it. That's important, because we don't have other tools to make the work piece move in that other dimension.

And, you can crank it out like you can a bridge, through solid engineering, once you get the right math understood correctly. We finally have the computer power to solve those equations. There is hope.

Wade

math reference links:

The beautiful exponential spiral - see the bottom left graph in the section


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




complex exponential dynamics (fractals)

Complex exponential map (not instantly helpful but animated and pretty).

Complex exponential - Nice interactive live graphics from MIT's open-courseware

Self-assembling tower crane:

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

Systems explanations for student behavior

I'm continuing to reflect on why students appear to be changing their behavior, when the teachers assert that they (teachers) did not change what they (teachers) were doing.

When the people in a system are still doing what they were doing before, but the result changes, it suggests that some emergent system-level feature has changed -- probably one that no one even knew was there.

It doesn't take very much of a twist or warp to the world, if it is universal, to end up with an M.C. Escher world where the parts still appear to be just fine, and yet the whole has become broken. These two pictures by Escher illustrate that. The stairs in the picture above, and the flow of water in the waterfall are both clearly impossible loops - and yet, it is difficult if not impossible for the unaided eye to directly SEE what is wrong and where.



The problem is that no one thing is wrong very much, and our eyes are used to a little noise which we "squelch" to silent -- a strategy that works fine if the discrepancies are random, chaotic "noise". This leaves an opening in our perceptions, a gap, a blind-spot, that Escher brings home to us. It is, as Douglas Hofstadter pointed out in Godel,Escher, and Bach, a "strange loop" and one of the properties is this "non-transitive" property that we, as humans, are just not hard-wired to grasp, regardless how much we try.

So, I illustrated the exact same thing with the "non-transitive dice" here recently, where just because A beats B, and B beats C, you cannot conclude that A will beat C. Or if stairstep 1 is lower than two, and two is lower than three, you can no longer be sure that this means that #1 is lower than #3.

So, when we run into this very common situation in life, we are unable to process it and the outcome of our thinking is, as they say, "undetermined." It feels so wrong. It can't be right. So, we force it to fit, like stuffing too much in a suitcase, and just sort of ignore the parts that stick out the edges by common agreement to be silent about such things, because "that's just the way things are." Every time it comes into our heads we can see it, briefly, and are totally surprised yet one more time -- and then as soon as we let go it evaporates again so our total net learning curve is zero. It is, alas, to paraphrase Dave Barry's description of Labrador Retrievers' reaction to being asked if they want to go for a walk. "Walk? Wow! What an idea! This is GREAT! Who would have thought of this!?!"

And, when we are faced with more than two items to chose from, whether it's sports teams or jobs or dates or mates or candidates for jobs or elections, we all "know" that there "MUST" be a "BEST" one, and all that remains is for us to "FIND" it. We vote. We use weighted voting. We use some some of the squared voting. We use weighted sums of squares. We are just so convinced that there has to be a "best" without considering the reality that only certain kinds of things have a "best", and those things are boringly predictable single-dimensional things that are "transitive" in the way we are measuring them.

We are used to "height" being one such thing, and usually, in the real world, it is. In Einstein's world of general relativity however, once space is "curved", this is no longer true. How much you have to climb to get from point A to point B depends on your path. In fact, in a bicyclist's dream come true, there may be in fact a "downhill" path all the way from point A to point B.

Hofstatder illustrates this property with Bach's musical chords as well, where the perceived pitch keeps on "going up" with each successive chord until, surprise, it has come back to the place where it started, all the while getting, to our ears, higher and higher.

We shake our heads, like a wet dog, to forget this clearly "wrong" result again. This must be a computational error, or too much to drink. We must have dropped a decimal point or something. This can't be right! (but it is.)

Well, where am I going with all this preamble? I'm going back to the question of what happened to the students, and my original question in my first post of "What have we done to our children?" that assumes, if it got done, and we had control of the schools, then we did it whether we intended to or not.

The change in our behavior as educators did not have to be huge to change the net result. In fact, the change in our behavior could be imperceptible to us, or as mathematicians say, "of measure zero" -- a fancy way of saying that it's there, but safe to ignore.

So, let's pick a different hypothesis or explanation to try out -- suppose the pressures of cost-effectiveness, "analytical thinking", and other such things, over time, have in fact warped the whole system just enough that "things" that used to work and produce result "A" no longer work. We haven't changed what we do, but the result has changed.

This is precisely the sort of thing I described in my favorite Snoopy cartoon, where he says in his profound and simple way -

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

Same input - different output, and whatever changed is totally invisible from inside the system.

Well, hmm. So, life is not quite as simple as we would prefer it to be. Rats!

Our youth, our students, our children are, however, exquisitely sensitive to context and, despite their rebellious nature, tend to take on shape based on the actual context they are in. If that shape has changed (still to be verified), then the context probably did change, even if we didn't notice it change from our vantage point inside the "system."

And, from personal observations, I agree with the students, even though the middle area is fuzzy and won't lie flat, and has parts sticking out the edge of the suitcase. If I talk to doctors, they are sincere, caring people, but doctors-in-context-as-a-whole, viewed from the outside patient viewpoint, have become uncaring, indifferent, almost irrelevant, and certainly detached almost entirely from the reality we, as patients, experience. They think they are "accessible" but have stopped hearing patient's describe the roadblocks "the system" has put in between them and patients. They live in some sort of mythical world, giving out advice that may have worked 20 years ago, but is disconnected from life as we live it today -- and then blame patients for being "non-compliant" with the advice that seems so great to them and so irrelevant and bizarre, to the point of not even being worth being challenged, to us.

And, they don't really like challenges. And, if challenged, they say "Well, there's nothing we can do about that. We tried. We're still tryiing. But that's just the way things are. That's someone else's job."

Their advice is like a financial analyst's advice - "To get ahead, just put $200 a week into savings and don't touch it, and watch it grow!" or "Just make a budget and live with it!" or a time-planner's advice: "Just figure out what you have to do over the next week, make slots for the time, allocate the time, and just live with it!" or a wellness consultant "Just eat less, exercise more, and eat the right food, and take an hour off in the middle of the day to commune with nature and relax, let go of that stress!" or a child-development specialist "Just be sure to remind your children to do their homework, and provide them a quiet work space without distractions or noise to work in."

Hello, reality to consultant? Hello? Who exactly are you talking to?

And, I fear, the same is true for education. Courses that may have made sense in one world have stayed the same while the world changed, and the course content is no longer aligned with the real world as experienced by the students. Or, the expectation of the professor or Attending physician faculty member is hopelessly out of date and no longer aligned with the larger overall picture and reward system that the students have experienced and been shaped by all their lives.

"Shut up and put up with it, there's nothing you can to that will make it better, but a lot you can do to make it worse for everyone!" is the message their behavior indicates they have received consistently throughout their lives. Like the Hemoglobin A1C test for diabetes, which reveals the last several months blood sugar level regardless where it is today, the conditioned behavior of the students speaks volumes to what the school system is actually teaching them to be.

In this model, it is not the students who have changed so much as the educational system that has changed. Maybe, over-extended teachers at all ages, and over-extended parents have simply rewarded "shut up and don't cause trouble" as the best they can hope for or strive for anymore, and the students, being good students, have learned their "place" in "the system."

In the book Complications, Atul Gawande, MD, discusses in one chapter the taboo and impolite question of when good doctors "go bad", or how many years it can take to do something effective by other doctors, who keep on seeing incidents that raise red flags about one doctor who has "lost it". The same is true for some college professors, especially those with tenure, as I've experienced personally - who almost have to murder some Dean's child in class to actually get noticed by a system that is either effectively blind, or effectively dysfunctional at taking action to repair itself -- which, at the receiving end, amount to the same thing.

These problems are "of measure zero" to the high-up people who run things, it seems. Their behavior, from the outside, is identical to what you'd get if they didn't care to what pain their system is causing.

I pick those words carefully, because the reality is often even more baffling - the people "on top" do care, a lot, but do not, as they perceive the world, "run things." In fact, they find their hands tied at every step and every turn, and their initiatives resisted and rejected by the same "system."

So, it turns out, no one is running the system any more.

But, if you try to change "the system" it fights back, as John Gall points out so well in his profound and hilarious book "Systemantics." So, something is running the system. But what?

It turns out that "the system" is now running itself.

As systems tend to do, the system, once our creation and slave, has now become the master, and is dictating what everyone in it, including those at "the top", is now allowed to do. We didn't even realize that systems could do that, but it seems increasingly clear that they can, and do.

I gave a very simple illustration of this before, in "Controlled by the Blue Gozinta", showing how simply filling a glass with water sets up a feedback loop that actually is in control, as it becomes as correct to say the water level is controlling the hand as that the hand is controlling the water level.

But our educational system has gone into the state I call "M.A.W.B.A" - for "Might As Well Be Alive". It acts like it is alive, with a mind of its own. It offends many people's sense of what "life" is to call it alive, but it follows all the rules my Biology 101 textbook uses to define "life", except for having DNA.

So, we should accept that unexpected result at face value and say, ok, our ideas about what "life" is are out of date. Apparently "systems" can become "alive" when our backs are turned. We stir the coffee in the cup and get a nice vortex or whirlpool in the middle, and then, to our shock, the coffee says "Thanks for the jump start, Joe!", spits out the spoon, and starts maintaining the whirlpool on its own. This kind of "life" or "MAWBA" seems to be just waiting around for an excuse to join the game.

It's as if we don't have to "create life" -- it's already out there waiting to be born as soon as we make a suitable vessel for it. Wow.

That's kind of interesting. You can get that with"solitons" or waves that once started, just keep on running forever, but they are passive and remain in their non-linear matrix. These MAWBA life-forms can get up, walk over to the wall socket, examine the situation, rip apart the blender, connect the cord to themselves and plug themselves in and start drawing power.

Corporations are MAWBA. Our Educational System is MAWBA. Our Healthcare System is MAWBA. The teachers and doctors didn't change what they were doing. The administrators didn't change, but the emergent system changed, came alive, and took over running things, thank you. Neither the teachers, no administrators, nor doctors, nor students, nor patients are in charge any more. It's the movie Terminator's premise - "Skynet has be come self-aware, and taken over, and shut us out."

These days, maybe Northwest Airline's ability to control it's number of canceled flights is MAWBA, or GM's ability to control its own direction and future, or the Mideast situation are all MAWBA, and no one, no person, no group of people, is in charge any more, while everyone is blaming everyone else, thinking this must surely be "caused" by some bad people somewhere, because what other explanation is there?

Indeed. That is the question, isn't it.

If you find it more comfortable to say it's not "alive", but can still fit into that model that it has perception, uses energy, adapts to its environment, and even starts tinkering with its environment to adapt the environment to it, great. Come up with some other word for that behavior that is not what I associate with non-living things. It is self-aware and self-protective. And it is a lot larger than we are as individuals.

That kind of changes what sort of interventions into health care or education or politics might work. This is way beyond "feedback" or "reciprocal determinism" or even "system dynamics". This is a whole new ballgame, a whole new way of looking at "Life Science."

Maybe this model, however bizarre, has better predictive value than our old models.

It seems to me to be worth checking out, because we're not getting too far with the old ones.

So, if something "acts like it has a mind of its own", maybe we should accept that at face value for the moment, regardless how bizarre it is, and ask "OK, then, suppose it did have a mind of its own. What would our next step be then?"

I need to reflect on that. Maybe the answer is simply: "Try to make contact with it. Maybe we can negotiate a different solution that works better for both of us." I certainly wouldn't rush in with guns blazing. Lack of visibility may cut both ways. It may be as unaware of us as we are of it.

I think it was Lewis Thomas (MD) who noted that if our body's cells could manage to talk to "us", the consciousness in here sharing the space with them, that there would be very little in common to talk about. We worry about taxes, acceptance to college, the War, elections, interpersonal relationships, job security. Cells have no equivalents.

My own observation, or contribution to that discussion is this: we actually do have one thing in common, at any level or scale: the nature of control itself. Every level of life that becomes self-aware wants to repair itself and survive. To do those things it has to, above all, maintain order, but it has to be dynamic order, not rigidity like an ordered crystal of salt. Dynamic order and adaptability to changes in the environment are keys to survival. That means, when the world changes, when the "cheese moves", this news has to make it up to the top, somehow, and adjust the prior strategy. This is a basic problem of cybernetics, and is true at every level.

So, we can talk about that issue with any system. What's the best way to maintain order, and still be flexible and capable of learning and adapating? We all face that problem.

In fact, we all seem to face it in the same context -- as part of a greater chain of being, with "us" being just some small bit-player in something much larger than us that's going on, was going on before we got here, and will still be going on after we leave.

We are a nested hierarchy of systems of systems. That is also a common problem for us all, at any level. Our freedom of action is constrained by that reality. How do we cope, align with larger priorities, and still get our own work done? That's the core question we share.

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