[FRIAM] health care logistics

[Steve Smith]

And thanks to both of you for this fuzzy-thread that runs through a lot 
of your discussions here.  I don't feel intellectually (or focusly) 
capable of parsing everything here offered out to the fringe/fray at the 
edge of the implicative network offered.  Not even a spanning-tree of it 
most of the time (like when someone like Glen points out that something 
I twig to has already been run through here before).

I've recently been collecting myriad perspectives on both *archical 
structures and the implied dynamics (form-function duals) especially in 
the ideational space of the "aether" of possibility (in Kauffman's 
broader sense of adjacent possibles), as well as a generalized concept 
of "what means consciousness?" and all of the edge/corner cases we tend 
to deliberately trim in our linear/reductionist style.    Glen's 
invocation of "those of us (without) a central nervous system) align 
with these interests around both Jellies/Medusazoa and Molluscs (both 
Cephalapoda and those without a *central* nervous system).   I recently 
read an article (reference lost) on the ideation that Octopoda actually 
exhibit a *multiple* consciousness roughly situated/distributed in their 
limbs/pods and as peers to the more "central" nerve/nervous system.

Anyway... mumble,  Carry on... and thanks again.

- Steve

On 3/7/22 9:09 AM, glen wrote:
> Very nice! Thank you. And please don't think you owe any responses 
> whatsoever. Fora like these are a *pastime*, engaged for fun, though 
> I'll admit to the occasional professional clue provided by the 
> diaspora. But know that your contributions are valued.
>
> It sounds to me like you're making a 2 pronged plea for a focus on a) 
> progression of complexity and b) downward causation. Sorry for any 
> rhetorical violence that may represent. For (a), does the [ahem] 
> emergence of higher orders (whether physiological or "mental") 
> preclude the maintenance or evolution of the lower orders? Or perhaps 
> does it innervate/perfuse the space of possibilities, causing a bloom 
> of the lower order? For (b) do the higher orders fold back on the 
> lower orders ... a kind of forcing structure, crispifying constraints 
> or perhaps even facilitate new drivers (like the hospitable lumen of 
> our gut biome)?
>
> Even if I'm wrong and simply can't grok your position, the above setup 
> is hard enough to validate/falsify against biology, much less 
> expanding up into whatever biology is necessary for psychology. But I 
> can say that my ham-handed insistence on pluralist "mentation" is 
> driven by a fear that higher orders do preclude the emergence of 
> *other* higher orders. I guess this is why modal and paraconsistent 
> logic(s) are interesting. Including one type of consequence relation 
> in your logic can preempt ways of thinking that would be accessible if 
> you used a different consequence relation.
>
> But how that inter-high-order dynamic affects the low-order system 
> upon which it's built is baffling. I'm a fan of Gerald Edelman's early 
> writing on neuronal networks, as well as Hayek et al's "connectionism" 
> because it feels like they're targeting something broader than 
> algorithmic computation, however badly they fail to get there. And I'm 
> a fan of things like the embodied mind for the same reason. There's an 
> open-endedness to framing higher order mentation that way ... that the 
> organized goo inside our skin provides a *robust* and neutral computer 
> upon which the higher order computation can remain stable in spite of 
> changes to that computer. I suppose this is the root of my panpsychist 
> tendencies. It's too arrogant to assume that only those of us with 
> central nervous systems can think and feel.
>
> How to productively use this in the context of counterfactuals, life 
> as it could be, and sustainability rhetoric, is unclear. But it's 
> definitely a respite from the typical vernacular, colored by 
> inflammatory tokens as it is. Thanks again.
>
> On 3/5/22 04:06, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> 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:
>
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