[FRIAM] health care logistics

[David Eric Smith]

Glen, I owed you an answer to this, but my ability to frame what I think is a question is poor enough, that I couldn’t pick it up.

I guess, for me, some pertinent questions in no particular order are:

1. Actual history: when the various phases of the invention of oxygenic photosynthesis came into existence, how much was really driven to extinction, and how much was just marginalized?  And when?  If there was a long period of banded-iron formation with episodic blooms and busts of the oxygen producers, along with everybody else, those may have been disruptive enough to drive some things extinct, but transient enough that much was left alive.  As (supposing this is even the right historical framing), slowly over time, molecular mechanisms of coping with oxygen were developed, and oxygenation started to become enough more “part of a system” that its level could increase and persist for longer periods, how did that change the extinction/marginalization allocation?  There are still plenty of places on Earth today that are not actively oxygenated, though there are fewer any more, near the surface, where the electron transport systems are not importantly affected by the presence of oxygenating activities and related metabolisms elsewhere.

2. For gaining the capability of reflective thought, imaginative planning, and simulation preparatory to choice — whatever one might want to invoke to set apart a new major capability of “thinking matter” within the larger domain of “living matter” — what would even be the proper use of such analogies to suggest framings?  Is an unstable capability to be thinking matter more of an extinction problem than a stable one?  If there is a stable future for thinking matter, does it entail displacing, marginalizing, or extinguishing other large systems currently in the biosphere, or would it simply augment them and fit into interstices or newly-created roles alongside them?  Because I am a metazoan, a vertebrate, a mammal, etc., there is a new role for “being a healthy liver cell” that comes into existence for a few pounds of cells in me, which didn’t obviously require the extinction of anyone in the microbial world, though it does require defenses against some of them, telling them there are places they can’t go and things they can’t have.  Doug Erwin has been a good person to remind us that the notion of the “empty niche” is largely a fallacy: many of what we regard as niches in the extant biosphere were brought into existence by evolutionary transitions, and didn’t involve any kind of “competition” to fill them before they were filled.  Creating and filling were two descriptors for the same set of events.  

Whether there is any frame that contributes to understanding, and what that should look like, are what I am after at the moment.

Thanks,

Eric


> On Jan 26, 2022, at 10:49 AM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Excellent, as usual. Thanks for donating that work to the list! Seriously. I know it's actual work.
> 
> If I try to concisely reword what I read, the objective is: a monotonically increasing progression of complexity (maybe "plectic organization") absent the freezing out of prior stages of that progression.
> 
> The counterfactual story for the photosynthesis freezing out the prior stage(s) is, if I understand you, the kind of thing that targets the outer bound of the space of possible trajectories. And just inside that boundary *might* be trajectories that contain both the self-reflective pockets/brains and the "chaos" of the stew. I.e. just enough pockets/brains to maintain their lineage, but not enough to freeze out the prior stew, including the cyanos.
> 
> I want to stop there because I suspect you'll object to the idea of avoiding the staging completely. Your last couple paragraphs seem to say something like artificial life (what life could have been). And any given trajectory inside the space bounded by that (dead, fully [dis]ordered) whole earth buffered cycling is expected to have freezing stages along its progression. But it's the higher order characterization of those trajectories that determines the *shape* of that boundary. It's a question to you, though. Should we talk about the minimum set of pockets/brains such that the "chaos" and the pocket/brain organization can both maintain? Or do we have to admit that freezing out of prior stages will always happen?
> 
> 
> On 1/25/22 14:45, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> I agree, glen, than a criterion has to be stated.  (I will avoid even the term “objective function”, because that starts to cross over into motivational framings, and away from the simple conditions-of-possibility framing).
>> I am sure, sure, that Seibert and Rees think the only admissible frame for this discussion is one that originates in values (in the canonical sense of the term), and it is the worst kind of heathenism to try to divorce the discussion from those, but that is one reason I want to avoid taking on their whole frame.
>> The criteria that interest me are things like persistent inhabitation of Earth by reflectively-aware things like people, which plan and can discover and mine resources, create ecological impacts etc., without creating such a chaotic surface environment that further “interesting” emergent organizations, and even the things that give them those powers, get undermined by the constant chaos.
>> I like a sort of parable of the cyanobacteria to make the idea more specific with an analogy, even though I know we don’t know enough about the history of the cyanobacteria to judge whether this parable reflects history.  So think of it as the kind of “stylized facts” economists trot out.
>> Once upon a time there was no life anywhere on earth that had the capability to split water to create O2.  Life was whatever it was, but a lot of it was probably pretty stable.  The 1Ga before the rise of oxygen (which is later than the time I am referring to) is known by the biogeochemists as “the boring billion”.
>> Growing out of various capabilities that were being used for other things (oxidation of metals or H2S, cytochromes of a few kinds, electron transport chains, pigments, etc.), a group learns how to pull electrons not off of minor solutes in the medium, but OUT OF THE GD SOLVENT!  Holy shit.  It was really hard, but suddenly there is a living to be made from just light and water.  That one innovation somehow qualitatively changes what the biosphere can in principle do.
>> I want the above to stand as a kind of analogy to what Vonnegut in Galapagos keeps harping on as humans “big brains”.  I don’t know exactly what I want to refer to — reflective awareness, plan-making, communication, having hands, encephalization in the hominids — whatever.  But something that causes one species to suddenly become a singleton, qualitatively distinct in some consequential thing from everybody else that currently is or that ever had been before.
>> So then for the cyanos, the counterfactual question is: what if they gained the capability of splitting water, but what if tolerating O2 had turned out to be something that molecular biology could never get to?  What would that combination entail for the surface of the world and everything in it?  There are short-term descriptive versions of the question.  One of the possibilities is that the dynamic of dissolved Fe in oceans as a reservoir, O2 production, Fe buffering that keeps O2 toxicity low for a while, ultimate depletion of the Fe buffer as it all gets oxidized and precipitated, and then very sudden change in O2 activity because the buffer was, well, functioning as a buffer; it creates nonlinear thresholding responses.  Then when O2 soars, everybody dies off, including the cyanos, the O2 production goes way down, and things go back to looking more like they were in the boring billion while the reservoirs slowly refill.  But Jeez, oxygenic photosynthesis is such a drug that if it isn’t totally lost, you can’t keep whoever has it from using it.  And the cycle starts over.
>> That is one of the stories of where banded iron came from.  I believe it is not settled whether it is the right one.  It’s a great story for making allegories, though.  And there are lots of plague/crash dynamics that have the same central organizing motifs.
>> Of course, in the Vonnegut big-brains analogy, we come up with the capability to have these big impacts.  The criterion for “what number”, and “what palette of technologies” would be: is there some threshold at which ongoing human inhabitation with that technology doesn’t lead to wild swinging and a broadly chaotic condition for much of the surface biota?
>> That is just the short-term descriptive criterion.
>> Why would I focus on stability or ongoing inhabitation?  Back to the allegory story, with more stuff I don’t know whether is true.
>> Suppose O2 tolerance had been too hard, and the surface had just remained caught up in cycles ever few tens to hundreds of thousands of years, more or less everywhere except the deep see and subsurface that were to some extent insulated?  Would the cyanos ever have become part of anything bigger and more complex in its aggregation?  Putting aside the fact that all those things, as we know them now, (eukaryotes, multicellular organisms, etc.)  benefit from the O2 tolerance of the members that made them, we can ask, if not them, could _anything_ complex have arisen in an environment of large constant sweeps?  One possibility would be that O2 synthesis would be lost and not rediscovered.  But it can be hard to totally lose something that, if conditions stabilize even a little, gets such huge evolutionary rewards for being activated.
>> And for the human system, if the future is all chaos all the time, what options might be foreclosed?  If, unlike Galapagos, we don’t lose the big brains, because the rewards are too grate to using them if things quiet down anywhere by enough, then does their intermittent marauding cut off possibilities for invention?
>> It is in that general drift that knowing about limited activity as a condition for some kind of stability is motivated.
>> Eric
>>> On Jan 25, 2022, at 1:50 PM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Well, OK. But the question still stands: Necessary for what objective?
>>> 
>>> The Siebert & Rees paper talks about shared values like "socially just ecological sustainability", "salvage civilization", "one-earth living", etc. And each one of their criticisms in section 3 also assume some values. So, I'm guessing it's something like their objective that we're assuming as our objective. And anything that does not target that objective isn't put into the kitty of things we'll evaluate as possible or impossible. (E.g. the second-earth idea where we abandon this earth as a husk is not part of the conversation.)
>>> I don't see how we can prune the combinatorial explosion of [im]possible outcomes without deciding some kind of objective at the start, even if it's super vague like a Gaia-ish homeostatic health of the biosphere.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 1/25/22 06:39, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>>> To say this is a value question is fair, glen, given my shorthands of language.
>>>> However, I would like to split apart questions of “who wants what” from questions of “what can or cannot happen under what conditions, irrespective of what anybody wants”.  In principle we have ways to get at the latter question; we often do worse in getting any resolution out of the former.  Maybe there is something basic in this?  Our notion of truth is that on any properly-posed question, there should only be one durable answer.  Whereas in the area of desires, we think it is either inescapable, or for many also desirable (a self-referential value judgment) that different answers coexist indefinitely.
>>>> Eric
>>>>> On Jan 25, 2022, at 8:02 AM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Necessary for what, though? We need the shared value(s) before we can ask what response we'd get from the convergence on something that might be necessary to adhere to that value. Is the shared value that biology on this planet should be preserved and the thing we need to do is impossible? Or perhaps the shared value that all "lower forms of life" were simply stepping stones to the human organism, but to preserve the human organism is impossible? Etc.
>>>>> 
>>>>> As Jon likes to ask: What are we optimizing? If we can't agree on that, then the responses to impossibilities will be as diverse as the values that underlie those impossibilities. And, if that's the case, then we're back to the clustering/homogenizing we see in any aspect of pop culture.
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 1/24/22 17:21, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>>>>> In a real situation where we decided something was necessary that we believed there was no way to do, somehow I feel like the same movie doesn’t become the response.  Something else does.  What is that?
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 1/24/22 17:34, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>>> Before I launch into a diatribe about why the hell we can't agree to basic, never mind interesting things:
> 
> 
> -- 
> glen
> Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
> 
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