[FRIAM] a cautious hello?

[Phil]

friam,
I had an amazing experience in and around Santa Fe and up the front
range one year, but I hadn't any idea I was studying how complex systems
evolved.   I was a bored carpenter with too much education and didn't
mind quitting work for a few months at a time to do stuff.   I'd minored
in landscape and micro-climates at Penn where I went to study
Architecture in the strange and wonderful world of Lou Kahn.  I went
into architecture because the math and physics that had kept me
interested in college just seemed too cold, and architecture was still
about form, and analysis, and had all these amazing harmonies...
Anyway, while thinking to finish my education doing some hands-on
building I decided if I was going to end up doing solar design I should
go see how they worked.   

I set up a portable microclimate lab, a 24 point chart recorder for air
flow and temperature, and kept records of events and traced air currents
with smoke tracers.  I did 24 hour studies of several buildings and
wrote a little about them.  The fun part was watching the details of how
the air currents and their networks evolved and swung around from east
to west like a spider molting and growing legs during the day, and
settling into whole different patterns at night.  I found a couple
really surprising air current phenomena and built test cells reproducing
them.  The lasting effect was that I was immersed in a complex world of
intricate form that evolved in place as I watched it, that was
completely undocumented.  Natural air currents are much more inventive
than the ones in the lab.  I had utterly no theory to test or even
consider, just this amazing jungle of intricate structures.  And then
the test cells to remake these special forms only succeeded when I
arranged the parts for causation to work backwards...

They say fluid flow is deterministic.  But what's obvious when you watch
form spontaneously evolve is that the conditions in which it develops
may be determined from outside, but the forms themselves evolve from
their insides in a way that could not possibly be transmitted from
elsewhere, that they grow.  That was in 77-78 and it occurred to me
(over the following several years) that other things grow from an
interior network of loop relationships, and that the easiest way to find
them is by recognizing growth curves in time-sequence measures.   So,...
I've been watching, all kinds of stuff, and have no simple explanation.


One feature of complex systems I've noticed, which applies more to the
kinds people are concerned with, the social, ecological, economic &
biological systems, is that the loops of relationships pass through
links of open exchange.  These are the open mediums like the blood
stream, markets, the air, ponds, landscapes, store shelves etc.  These
seem to be quite central to the workings of living things, where choice
and opportunity are the real connectors rather than force and pressure.
Maybe that difference in organizational form, systems structured around
choice and opportunity, is itself a better definition for what a living
system is.  

The hardest thing about thinking is seeing things fresh, keeping your
mind from jumping in like an over affectionate puppy and thrusting your
old ideas in your face in every new situation.  Maybe I'd recommend
everyone find some field of interest where having any theory at all is
more or less out of the question.  Unfortunately when separated from the
ideas that make us feel safe, one often feels quite uncomfortable.  It's
a problem.  There's a world problem, relating all of this, that makes me
venture out here though, into a world of people where I don't feel quite
safe.  I've actually built some useful interface and analytical software
(basic & AutoLisp), but I don't have your incredible facility for
playing with rules, to the point of making swarms of rules that appear
to have emergent organization somewhat similar to nature.   'Simple
rules' is not how I think of nature as working at all.  I see the
systems as the players, not something outside them playing with rules.
Rules and opportunities are both images of connections, though.  Maybe
they're kinds of mirror images.  I don't know.   

The problem that's motivating me to bring this where I may have a hard
time myself, is that mankind seems to have unshakeable confidence, even
Al Gore(!), that expanding the complexity of our life support system
ever more rapidly forever is a good thing.   It doesn't work for my
systems at all.   It's positively dangerous.   Is it possible you guys
are looking into that problem with your systems?

One of the old Greeks, Zeno, had a lot of paradoxes having to do with
infinity and the confusing problems it creates.  As a group I believe
they're all solved by simply observing that you need a new model at
every change in natural scale.  Physics has found that to be true in
practice, over and over.   Do you think mankind can just change its
model and keep exploding the earth?  ...or is there a practical problem?




Phil Henshaw                       ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
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e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
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