Relations

“the scientific term chaos refers to an underlying interconnectedness that exists in apparently random events.” Briggs and Peat explain: “Chaos science focuses on hidden patterns, nuance, the sensitivity of things, and the rules for how the unpredictable leads to the new”(Briggs & Peat, 1999, p.2).

In Seven Life Lessons of CHAOS, John Briggs and F. David Peat unfold seven lessons for embracing some of the deeper insights of chaos theory in our daily lives:

• Be Creative: engage with chaos to find imaginative new solutions and live more dynamically.
• Use Butterfly Power: let chaos grow local efforts into global results
• Go with the Flow: use chaos to work collectively with others
• Explore What’s Between: discover life’s rich subtleties and avoid the traps of stereotypes
• See the Art of the World: appreciate the beauty of life’s chaos
• Live Within Time: utilize time’s hidden depths
• Rejoin the Whole: realize our fractal connectedness to each other and the world.

Due to radical interconnectivity, systemic interactions and feedback loops, causality is more often than not circular rather than linear. Effects become causes and causes are the effects of other systems dynamics.

One of the defining properties of complex dynamic systems is that they are fundamentally unpredictable and uncontrollable (beyond controlled laboratory conditions). Uncertainty and ambiguity are therefore fundamental characteristics of our lives and the natural world, including human culture, society and our economic systems.

Our goal should be to better understand the underlying dynamics in order to facilitate the emergence of positive or desirable properties — emerging through the qualities of relationships in the system and the quality of information that flows through the system. We have to befriend uncertainty and ambiguity because they are here to stay.

More often than not, certainty is not an option. We are invited to ‘live the questions more deeply’, to pay attention to the wisdom of many minds and diverse points of view, and to continue the conversation about whether we are still on the appropriate path. We are encouraged into relationship and deeper listening, so that we can stop being at war with ourselves and with the planet.

Fritjof Capra

I should also add that artists often think, maybe not so much in terms of relationships, but in terms of patterns. When you think about the arts, whether it's the visual arts, or the performing arts, or music, it's all about patterns. A melody is a pattern, you know, a dance performance, performance in a choreography, is a certain pattern. The plot in the novel is a certain pattern of relationships. So artists focus very much on patterns.

the arts can be of tremendous help today, especially also, because the arts don't analyze patterns in a rational, scientific way. They represent patterns in an emotional way. And so the emotional dimension that comes with the arts, it's very important, because today, if we want to persuade people, to change lives and act differently in the world, rational arguments often don't make it. But if you can get to them emotionally, you have an additional means. And there again, the arts can be very helpful.

...

At the edge of science, there's always the unknown. There's always mystery, no matter how much we progress, we always come up against the unknown. There is a very beautiful saying by Blaise Pascal, who was one of the leaders of the scientific revolution in the 17th century in France, mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. And Pascal said, knowledge is like a sphere. And the surface is the border to the unknown, as we increase knowledge, so the surface increases, so the border to the unknown becomes larger and larger too.

Fritjof Capra: Yes, I think my way of thinking about this is to say that most of the phenomena we study in our environment are phenomena that have to do with life. So, you know, when we go out into nature and observe various patterns and processes, whether it's, you know, plants or you know, ecosystems or, you know, animals or social systems, it all has to do with life and you know the derivatives of say economics management, health care and so on, in the human realm, it all has to do with life and life has evolved in such a way that human evolution and the evolution of other living systems have happened in a process of coevolution, of mutually dependent coevolution.

And so, human beings have developed a very great sensitivity toward life. And, for example, you know, recently, experiments have shown that people who are sick and were in hospitals get well much faster, when they are exposed to nature, even just having the hospital bed by the window and looking out into a garden is therapeutic. And so, we have co-evolved with nature, and we have many ways of communicating with nature, communicating with life, including ways that are not at all understood by science. Another part of that is the fact that living systems are highly nonlinear. And the current version of systems thinking is very essentially informed by complexity theory, which is a mathematics that is nonlinear and for the first time has allowed us to model and describe nonlinear systems, mathematically, but, non-linearity is very difficult to understand with our rational mind, because our thinking and speaking and writing necessarily needs to be linear. And so, approaches like meditation, or trance, or ritual, or again, artistic approaches to understand living nature, are extremely valuable, because our subconscious is nonlinear, and can deal with the non-linearity and can communicate with the non-linearity of living nature, often much better than our rational consciousness.

Daniel Wahl

positive x negative emergence the world is always more than the sum of its parts, and this is the unpredictable emergent property of the complex dynamic system

But it doesn't mean that like I've heard people saying emergence will save save us. The nonsensical statement, the negative emergent, like climate change, is a negative, emergent property of the Earth's system based on anthropogenic genic carbon emissions. But if we find patterns of drawing down carbon into the soil and into standing biomass and into our products and materials, and we shift our material culture to make it the driver of carbon drawdown in the next century, then we're more likely to have an emergent system property that brings us back into balance and back into a climate regime that is closer to the Holocene and relatively stable climate that has allowed human civilization to evolve over the last 10,000 years.

Dance with the paradox

we have limits to predict and control - systems are not rigid.

• Dancing with systems - Donella Meadows 12 reccomendations of how to work creatively with systems and there you can really see the step beyond the cybernetics hard systems
• get the beat of the system,
• dance with the system,
• do Aikido with the system,
• acupuncture nodal interventions,

donellameadows.org

https://hackernoon.com/donella-meadows-recommendations-for-how-to-dance-with-and-intervene-in-systems-92ace21743fb?source=post_page-----d9198b1a198d--------------------------------

https://donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/

Leverage points are not intuitive.

Places to Intervene in a System (in increasing order of effectiveness) less to more leverage:

9. Constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards) > bijv the faucet difficult to open,“ambient air quality standards", “allowed annual forest trees cuts.” Corporations adjust parameters such as wage rates and product prices, with an eye on the level in their profit bathtub—the bottom line. Parameters are the points of least lever- age on my list of interventions. Diddling with the details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Stabilising flows (buffers, etc)

8. Regulating negative feedback loops > Negative feedback loops are ubiquitous in systems. Any negative feedback loop needs a goal (the thermostat setting), a monitoring and signaling device to detect excursions from the goal (the thermostat), and a response mechanism (the furnace and/or air conditioner, fans, heat pipes, fuel, etc.). A complex system usually has numerous negative feedback loops that it can bring into play, so it can self-correct under different conditions and impacts. (“emergency” response mechanisms) . The “strength” of a negative loop—its ability to keep its appointed stock at or near its goal—depends on the combination of all its parameters and links—the accuracy and rapidity of monitoring, the quickness and power of response, the directness and size of corrective flows. Sometimes there are leverage points here ( anti-trust laws, truth-in-advertising laws, attempts to internalize costs (such as pollution taxes), the removal of perverse subsidies, and other ways to level market playing fields.

The strength of a negative feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too.

Here are some examples of strengthening negative feedback controls to improve a system’s self-correcting abilities:

• preventive medicine, exercise, and good nutrition to bolster the body’s ability to fight disease;
• integrated pest management to encourage natural predators of crop pests;
• the Freedom of Information Act to reduce government secrecy;
• monitoring systems to report on environmental damage;
• protection of whistleblowers;
• impact fees, pollution taxes, and performance bonds to recapture the externalized public costs of private benefits.

7. Driving positive feedback loops > A negative feedback loop is self-correcting; a positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing.

The most interesting behavior that rapidly turning positive loops can trigger is chaos. This wild, unpredictable, unreplicable, and yet bounded behavior happens when a system starts changing much, much faster than its negative loops can react to it. For example, if you keep raising the capital growth rate in the world model, eventually you get to a point where one tiny increase more will shift the economy from exponential growth to oscillation. Another nudge upward gives the oscillation a double beat. And just the tiniest further nudge sends it into chaos.

6. Material flows and nodes of material intersection

5. Information flows ->

Suppose any public or private official who made the decision to invest in a nuclear power plant got the waste from that plant stored on his/her lawn. Suppose (this is an old one) that the politicians who declare war were required to spend that war in the front lines

4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints)

3. The distribution of power over the rules of the system > Power over the rules is real power. It forces nations into positive loops “racing to the bottom,” competing with each other to weaken environmental and social safeguards in order to attract investment and trade. It’s a recipe for unleashing “success to the successful” loops, until they generate enormous accumulations of power and huge centralized planning systems that will destroy themselves, just as the Soviet Union destroyed itself, and for similar systemic reasons.

The most stunning thing living systems and social systems can do is to change themselves utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors. In biological systems that power is called evolution. In human society it’s called technical advance or social revolution. In systems lingo, it’s called self-organization.

The power of self-organization seems so wondrous that we tend to regard it as mysterious, miraculous, manna from heaven.

Self-organization means changing any aspect of a system lower on this list: adding completely new physical structures, such as brains or wings or computers; adding new negative or positive loops: making new rules. The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience.

A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself. The human immune system has the power to develop new responses to (some kinds of ) insults it has never before encountered. The human brain can take in new information and pop out completely new thoughts

rules for self-organization. These rules basically govern how, where, and what the system can add onto or subtract from itself under what conditions.

cultures, are the store of behavioral repertoires, accumulated over not billions, but hundreds of thousands of years. They are a stock out of which social evolution can arise. Unfortunately, people appreciate the precious evolutionary potential of cultures even less than they understand the preciousness of every genetic variation in the world’s ground squirrels. I guess that’s because one aspect of almost every culture is the belief in the utter superiority of that culture.

Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning. Cuts back resilience. Any system, biological, economic, or social, that becomes so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.

2. The goals of the system - Survival, resilience, differentiation, evolution are system-level goals.

1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system—its goals, power structure, rules, its culture—arises. > Paradigms are the sources of systems.

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. 7 In a nutshell,

1. you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm,
2. you keep speaking louder and with assurance from the new one,
3. you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power.
4. You don’t waste time with reactionaries;
5. rather you work with active change agents
6. and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment.

Carol Sanford regenerative language

Cosmology: Thomas Hertog

De kosmos evolueert, de realiteit wordt gevormd door waarneming, het universum is participatief - niet objectief, de oorsprong van de tijd en het verband tussen het leven op aarde en de wetten van de kosmos zijn de diepste mysteries. We zitten bovendien middenin een kosmologische revolutie die de blik op het universum en onszelf net zo op zijn kop zet als Copernicus of Newton deden.

   https://youtu.be/7Vto1j4KQPs?t=1440

  new version of the self a sort of the future of the self a way of thinking about the self ... about porosity and post-organism network thinking...

 Merlin Sheldrake

       24:11

I think that these Notions of individuality which are ultimately fictions because they disregard and pretend away all of the ways that we are inextricably embedded within fluxes and flows and processes that make up the living world and the illusion of separation has led us into great trouble... an important way to frame this examination of individuality because there are good reasons to try and find um other perspectives here ...

we are always engaged in symbiotic relations we might think about the microbes that live in and on us and without which we couldn't grow and behave as we do, but we might also think about all the other organisms that don't share a body with us but that we depend on either by consuming their bodies or in the ways that they produce things that we need like the oxygen produced by photosynthetic creatures.