real cause; money multiplies, earth doesn't

Money will multiply as long as there are profits, because people with money multiply their own profits that way.   As JM Keynes among others pointed out, when real productivity approaches limits, multiplying money will drive profits to zero.    Driving profits to zero triggers waves of collapse, providing a means for our responding to our limits on earth.  

 

It takes a little exploration to lead people to just how the present waves of money collapse are directly related to declines in the profitability of the earth, but that’s a major contributor and the first cause.   Correcting the various immediate causes won’t fix that first cause.   None of the other causes would have mattered if profits were still multiplying dramatically as compounding money needs to remain stable.

 

Do yourself a favor, read my own or other peoples’ writings on it to find better questions for yourself.    Explorers starve or get buried by avalanches for reading to pass judgment.    You can come up with open questions in a blink, so don’t turn any page without finding one.

 

Best,

Phil Henshaw                                                                 ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

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212-795-4844 680 Ft.Washington Ave NY NY 10040 pfh@synapse9.com

"it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding the interest in what they say"

 

Now I've grown up!

It may appear that everything I've ever said before was foolish... or at least from a different point of view. I still perhaps have some leftover habits from when I, like lots of other people, thought that showing other people how they were wrong might interest them in finding if I was right, and then look for a common understanding. I assumed I would someday find people whose sincerity in that way would be unquestionable. I thought I grew up with people like that. Well, lots of people's sincerity is genuine, but fragile in directions that mine may be strong in, and strong in directions where my own may be weak.

I'm still working on the same thing, reconnecting the mental and the physical. The human dream world is what we think makes us who we are, but we also have the chance and the ability to move on from where it has taken us. It need not be a farewell at all, of course, and connecting with reality certainly need not be the draconian kind of'dealing with reality' that it is often portrayed as. Well… paying attention to what’s happening in the small and large events swirling around you is good work, and will definitely have payback.

Phil

Overshoot self-correction to collapse in the S&P 500 Mar-Aug 07

What's it look like to you?

 

The price swings in the S&P 500 over the last 4 months seem to display the natural complex system self-controls of the financial system 'fishtailing' to the point of failure.   I've been talking about seeing that in the decision making about future energy sources as well.    I think this type of systemic failure is generally the consequence of pushing self-correction mechanisms beyond their response limits.   Trying to respond to each other too little and too late amplifies and leads to all failing at once.    I don't know how to measure that directly, but observe the same system physics operating as in many other dynamic disordering cascades like the onset of turbulence in flows, and draw the conclusion from that.   

 

[in case you notice, I label the downward overshoots as occurring at the top of the cycle, as they should be, because the overshoots are in the rates of change] 

Link to latest quote: http://channels.netscape.com/pf/chart_quote.jsp?TickerSymbols=%24INX&time=6&ctype=hloc

 

In response you want to think of it as stabilizing the pumps that are going out of control.   You want to relieve the pressures by turning off the pumps, and really hope someone takes a whole systems point of view toward seeing what's next.

smaller image - http://www.synapse9.com/issues/S&PmovementsAug07-Sm.jpg

larger image - http://www.synapse9.com/issues/S&PmovementsAug07-L.jpg




Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040                      
tel: 212-795-4844                
e-mail: id@synapse9.com         
explorations: www.synapse9.com   

whether successfully averted for the moment or not, ...

Hi folks,

 

...this week's global run on credit seems like a casebook example of how a natural system failure to provide growing physical returns on investment would effect financial commitments for endlessly growing financial returns.      The naturally conflict.

 

One thing we can do is watch it closely, so others may learn from our experience.   Because systemic collapse is a big physical process in a big physical system, displaying all-together new kinds of rapidly spreading behaviors, watch for that.   If you see that sort of thing perhaps you'll 'believe your eyes and ears' and not feel the observations were 'planted' in your imagination somehow.   Remember what things seemed to mean before and after and make note of it.

 

---

I've been using the mismatch between our unlimited economic expectations and their certain disappointment as a way to learn about natural systems and how they fool us for about 30 years.   It's remains a rich and engaging subject.   In June I sent out my first 'system collision warning' ever, initially in a post to the AIA environment forum.    I said I thought the surprise discovery by the ethanol investors in May, that ethanol couldn't have the land they wanted because milk producers raised the price, signaled the tip of the growth system's physical collision with the earth we've all been waiting for, 'the big crunch'.    The same kind of 'fishtailing' in the steering mechanisms of the world economic system I observed then in the energy markets also seems clear in the rapid, large scale, and indecisive maneuvering this week by financial institutions.

 

Just because growth expectations are fulfilled, even for hundreds of years, doesn't mean it's not certain that natural systems will fail them, and so our financial design that requires growth for it's own stability is a mistake.   If this week's threatened global financial collapse is just a warning, well, then do take it as a warning.

 

 

Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040                      
tel: 212-795-4844                
e-mail: id@synapse9.com         
explorations: www.synapse9.com   

 

RE: internalism...& things missing from approximation

Stan,
Approximation sweeps away 'fuzziness', and one thing your and my conceptions are completely consistent on is "any system during its development moves from being more vague to becoming more definitely embodied". There are issues in differentiating descriptive, explanatory, and organizational/behavioral 'fuzziness', but it's those "fuzzy bits" that are the main thing approximation sweeps away. But studying the 'fuzziness' is central to finding the half of the universe that physics missed.

My analytical approach interprets it as evidence of the transitional systems which frequently can be found to have periods of implied derivative continuity in their measures, displaying some of their evolving internal dynamic structures. That's what I've been carefully studying for the last many years, but now mostly play with the wordings for to find some way to communicate.

Your grasp of the links to other fuzzy ways of thinking about the subject (it's history and citations) is far superior to mine, and hopefully I'll get a chance to ask you some questions about it shortly. When the research wave called 'fuzzy logic' hit, for example, I never thought it interesting because it seemed to be further interpreting the world as a set of fixed rules with a universal noise machine attached. Maybe I should look closer at that and other approaches. Remember, I'm with Einstein and don't think God rolls dice. God lets things develop on their own from the inside, but that's different from making changes without processes or causation.

Another thing we'd totally agree on is the unique individuality of events, and a third is "As a system hardens into senescence via the accumulation of information to the point of overload, it becomes unable to marshal the requisite variety needed to survive perturbations, and gets recycled". What is specifically meant by some of this remains "fuzzy" to me, to be more fully detailed by reference to the real shapes of things to be observed in their natural stages.

Would you say that opportunity is the principal cause of causal loops?, and so the principal interest of an internalist perspective, whereas opportunity is largely invisible to an externalist perspective and so usually ignored?

I had a nice long conversation on FRIAM with Nicholas Thompson on the meaning of homing systems in nature, and their taxonomies, ending in proposing it as a natural scale of consciousness. To summarize what I got out of it, thermostats have loops, and so an interior, but only a one dimensional awareness of the world. Natural systems with various levels of homeostasis have internal worlds of greater complexity and evident multi-dimensional awareness and responses to their environments. Mammals, consider a mouse strategically scurrying for it's hole and apparently homing to an abstract image, all have precognition on various rather high levels.

Nick initially seemed concerned with whether considering a thermostat to have any measure of consciousness would mean human experience was no longer unique. Part of the idea as it developed, is that having a taxonomic scale of emergent levels for consciousness meant there might be great distances between its ends and branches. fyi I think human consciousness is different in several ways, even if most of the difference traditionally seen comes from the externalist point of view that only humans have anything inside at all.

That somewhat extreme and faulty notion may be, itself, a pointer to one of the things so different about human consciousness. Our mental worlds are so very rich and complete, and compelling, they hardly need any support in reality whatever, i.e. we're able to be self-deceived in profound ways. What's the way around that?... perhaps watching the fuzzy bits in the natural connections, the indelible unique emergence of things. I think once people can observe them it naturally becomes exhausting to try to fake them..., making a stimulating natural bond between mind and reality!

... anyway, that's one of the main things I see missing from approximation... :,)

'dice' or 'approximation', does it matter?

I've been meaning to do some new digging on Einstein's enigmatic complaint. In a recent program on Channel 13 (I think, but I can't locate it now) a recognized physicist portrayed Einstein as unable to accept uncertainty in nature, and that view seems to be becoming one of the prevalent understandings of the issue (see Wiki link below). On the face of it, since Einstein was a founder of statistical physics, it seems unlikely. "God doesn't roll dice", is about something else. One of the things I finally found today to expose the deeper issue was Niels Bohr's long, polite, emphatic last-word on the subject (Bohr 1949). Bohr says that what Einstein objected to in QM was the elimination of causality and continuity.

"Yet, a certain difference in attitude and outlook remained, since, with his mastery for coordinating apparently contrasting experience without abandoning continuity and causality, Einstein was perhaps more reluctant to renounce such ideals than someone for whom renunciation in this respect appeared to be the only way open to proceed with the immediate task."

Curiously, the violations of theory or nature expected by both sides in this long debate don't seem to have turned up in the many decades of argument and experiment. QM works fine, so apparently the bizarre way in which QM treats physical events as occurring without taking any time or involving any process, i.e. abstractly following rules in the complete absence of any means for doing so, doesn't matter. Both Einstein's (impossible) and Bohr's (necessary) views on the matter seem to have been simply wrong.

I guess my preference is the conservative approach. If it doesn't matter whether the disconnects of nature expressed by our best tool are physical or informational, there's no need to argue about it (i.e. within the 'shut up and calculate' school of thinking). The matter is far from settled, I realize, since provocative proofs like those of Bell's hypothesis seem to support the idea that QM's weirdness is physically real. That real weirdness still appears to be entirely contained, and to not violate causality and continuity anywhere other that within QM, however.

Where I think it may ultimately matter is in encouraging the idea generally that nature functions as a set of abstract rules without processes, rather than through incompletely understood physical processes which our rules approximate. I think whether you interpret nature is physical or informational on a macro scale probably matters a lot. The two models at least appear functionally different and need to be looked at.

The central problem I see with interpreting physical events as a function of rules is that those rules need to either refer to definable things, or to have a player. I don't think either of those is demonstrable as a generality, and the opposite is much more the usual appearance of the problem.

Is there anywhere it would really matter, one way or another?

------------- Niels Bohr 1949 Discussion with Einstein on epistemological problems in atomic physics. http://minerva.tau.ac.il/physics/bsc/3/3144/bohr.pdf

------------- Wiki link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein "Einstein never rejected probabilistic techniques and thinking, in and of themselves. Einstein himself was a great statistician, [19] using statistical analysis in his works on Brownian motion and photoelectricity and in papers published before 1905; Einstein had even discovered Gibbs ensembles. According to the majority of physicists, however, he believed that indeterminism constituted a criteria for strong objection to a physical theory."

Calculus for History Majors

As we discover the huge role complex natural systems have in change of all kinds, we’re finding that evolving systems are our environment, the whole context and much of the shape of history.   It’s high time history majors learned about the best method available for reading their changes.   A most curious and revealing thing about complex systems is that the first evidence of emergent change is often a display of the physical property that corresponds to the central mathematical idea of calculus, continuity.   In a mathematical function you can define a slope, and the same is true of almost any real change in complex systems.    Complex systems evolve through progressions, and applying a logic like that of calculus to measures of change over time shows you where the progressions emerge from the noise and when they shift.   It reveals a great deal about the nature of a system because it provides direct evidence of it’s creative behavior as a whole.  

 

That has never been the reason for teaching calculus, but it should be.   The usual reason for teaching calculus is to give students their first (after 9^th grade geometry) emersion experience in rigorous mathematical thinking.    For history majors a little taste of that would give insight into the history of ideas, but it would give them little of use for understanding the world around them.   Natural systems are not snapped together out of perfectly fitting parts like a mathematical proof is.   They go through periods of eventful and uneventful change, well, like the history of civilizations, climates, ecologies, languages and life in general do.   The basic partly mathematical question is when can you look at a series of dots, and call it a curve?    When can you say change has shape?    If it has shape, it likely involves a complex system, and you can read the dynamics of the shape to identify change in the system’s internal structures.   There is no single test, of course, since no series of dots gives a definitive description of anything, especially not a complex system.   It’s a kind of forensic exercise, finding shapes in the data, and clues in the shape that can validate them, often taking special note of periods of growth or decay, isolating the central continuity by reading through the noise and fluctuations, to find the consistent progressions that hold up to scrutiny..    

 

In a sense what historians will be doing with a tool like this is original systems-physics research on the subjects in which they are immersed, since natural systems are essentially locally original worlds of internal physical relationships, unique separate universes.   Some complex natural systems might be amenable to mathematical description, but surely not most.    What they’re more amenable to is story telling, which can be very usefully grounded in fact by directly reading the shapes of their evolutionary events, using the underlying ideas of calculus.   It’s just calculus reshaped a little for exploring things beyond mathematics in the new world.