Question Everything

The Truth Party?

In a World That Could Probably Never Be

What if our politicians told the truth? And I don't mean the truth that they believe is the truth, I mean the real truth. Of course what counts as truth is a little slippery to be sure. I'm not talking about ultimate truth as one finds in logic and mathematics. I'm talking about the truth regarding the best evidence science can provide about how the world works, what is happening, and what is likely to happen in the near future if we continue on the path we are on.

The immediate and most likely right answer is that they would be soundly tromped at the polls. They wouldn't stand a chance in hell in today's political climate. They couldn't even get nominated. People don't want the truth because the truth is that their world is going away and who wants to hear that from the person they want to elect to solve their problems?

Truth is a tricky concept. It is impossible to distinguish the truth of a matter when all one has to go on is a set of differing opinions. Then one is compelled to choose that opinion that sounds most likely to be the case to their way of thinking. In other words, what sounds most like what one already believes, then that must be the truth. Evidence need not apply.

Looking at two or three of the most important issues of our time, the ones that will have the greatest negative impact on every human being on this planet, provides exquisite examples of just how poorly people deal with the truth. For the last three hundred years human beings have been burning carbon-based fuels to power their cultures at an exponentially increasing rate, that is until recently. Burning carbon-based fuels produces carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, that has changed the energy balance equation on the Earth allowing the buildup of heat in the atmosphere and oceans. Global warming, as it is called, is causing major shifts in the climate cycles already and promises more and worse to come in the near future. Meanwhile the very burning of these fuels is depleting them from our reserves, which are fixed and finite. We are now approaching a point at which we can no longer extract these fuels at an energy cost that leaves a net gain sufficient to power our machines. So we burn the fuels up producing climate disruptions, have less to work with as time goes on, and have, in essence, painted ourselves into a corner. Our modern technological society cannot function without the energy flow and we cannot adapt to the future climate shifts without more energy. Aren't we brilliant?

On top of all of that, and indeed amplifying the problems, is the continuing growing population. We will have more mouths to feed but less fossil fuel to produce that food. We will need greater food security but the climate shifts are likely to wipe out large portions of what are now our most fertile farm lands.

There are many more derivative problems that stem from these primary ones. And all of this is known to science. The evidence is in. It is clear. It is irrefutable except by ignorant arguments. And still the vast majority of people do not want to hear this. In a way you can't blame them. Here is the truth that some hapless politician with good intentions might state:

Folks, the truth is that maybe 90% of you and your children are going to die prematurely after suffering various forms of privation over the next several decades. Sorry to have to tell you this. And I'm also sorry to say I have no solutions to offer, because, frankly, we have created an unsolvable predicament. But I would like your vote anyway.

Vote for me, Cassandra is my top political advisor.

The job of a truth-teller is a lot like that of an oncologist who has to tell a patient that they have six months to live so they had better get their affairs in order. The patient had hoped the oncologist could cure them and they will undoubtedly go through the stages of grief, disbelief, denial, anger, etc. But eventually the patient generally comes to accept the inevitable once they understand that it is inevitable. And they get on with putting their affairs in order.

Real leaders, if there were any, would be like the oncologist. They would tell humanity the truth about its future prospects and suggest they start to order their affairs in preparation for the end. Why? Because when each of us dies (an inevitable fact) we leave others behind to carry on. And we want to impart something of value to those who survive us even if it is just some bits of life wisdom we've acquired. We Homo sapiens, as a species, will also be leaving others behind. They will still be Homo sapiens, but with any luck they will be those with much stronger sapience qualities than the average person today. They will be the seeds for a new evolved human.

The other thing the leaders in a Party of Truth could do is lead the preparation of a hospice for humanity. Death is inevitable but we have learned how to make it far less painful than in days of old. Leaders who truly understood what is happening and what is about to happen would be working toward making the transition as painless as humanly possible. Instead what we actually have are people who will lie to us right up to the end, probably believing they are avoiding panic. What we children don't know won't hurt us.

Actually, I don't think there is any world leader today who fully grasps the significance of the energy crisis and global warming or the population problem. The majority are still stuck thinking that what we are facing is a “financial” crisis, and if we could just fix that... Most Republicans rightly grasp that if global warming is real then fixing it means stopping burning carbon which would put an end to our technological society. Ergo they must deny global warming. Similarly they realize that fossil fuels are essential to the economy and so they must ‘believe’ that there is more oil in the ground and we just need to drill-baby-drill. Meanwhile Democrats want desperately to believe that alternative energies will produce a new, green, and prosperous economy. All we need to do, in their world view, is substitute alternative sources for fossil fuels and, voila, problem solved. It is a pity that none of them took a basic physics course that included the laws of thermodynamics. But, look, after all, they are more often lawyers and political science majors. They can't be expected to understand technical details.

All of our so-called leaders and would-be leaders are more in denial than the common man in the street who has never even heard of peak oil. They know the truth on some superficial level, I suspect, but refuse to let their thoughts go to the logical conclusions. They cannot let go of the past and refuse to face the future. They hold the title of “leader” but are not leaders. They are not even followers. They are just “do-whatever-it-takes-to-survive” skin-occupiers holding on for dear life and praying that the end won't come on their watch.

Who looks good to you in the 2012 presidential election? Barrack Obama - Mr. empty rhetoric? Newt Gingrich - Mr. I must know what I'm talking about because I have a PhD? Rick Perry - I can't even find words to express my disdain for that character. Who? What about congress seats? Who do we pick to represent us in congress? What about governors, state congresses, mayors, city councils? Do any of them know truth? Do they speak it?

No. To them ‘realpolitik’ is reality. It doesn't matter what the physical truth of the matter is. All that matters is that they get campaign donations and get (re)elected. After all, its a job.

Let me confess that I am so completely disgusted with politicians of every stripe (though most so with Republicans for what they have become). While Democrats pay lip service to wanting science to inform their decisions, they still take neoclassical economics as a science. The environmentalist movement was largely undermined by liberal sentiments misusing environmental science to argue their cases. Everyone from both ends of the ideological spectrum believe that a healthy economy is one that is growing (in GDP) and producing more material goods for consumption. They both belive that the financial economy is real and necessary even if the liberals rail against bankers taking home obscene lucre. There is not a one among them, as far as I can tell, who is capable of taking a big step backward and take in the whole system. Come voting day I will be choosing “None of the above”.

If you still think the political system can work and want a party that stands for the truth, start one. Create a Truth Party and develop a platform. Here is a model you might start with. Let me know how it goes.

What is the Solution to All Problems?

Evolution

This is not a facetious question. Nor a vacuous answer.

I am quite serious when I say that I believe universal evolution is now and has always been the way the Universe solves problems. Let me lay out my arguments.

To begin I suppose I should say what characterizes the nature of a problem. There is what might be called a human-centric perspective and then what I would call the Universe's perspective. In the end, I will argue, they are actually one in the same. But let me start with the familiar perspective of what constitutes a problem for humans.

A problem can be said to exist when a human wants something in particular and there does not appear to be an immediate means for obtaining that something. If you are hungry and want to eat but there is no food around then you have a problem. If you want to travel a long distance to get from where you are, at point A, to get to where you want to be, at point B, and you have no conveyance available, then you have a problem. If you want a computer program that will provide you with information but the program doesn't exist, then you have a problem. In all cases we recognize that human wants and needs motivate the existence of problems. Human intentions to fulfill those wants and needs by “solving” the problem, and then applying our human intelligence to doing so, is what makes us the unique animals that we are. To be sure, other animals do run into problems and work out solutions of sorts. What makes humans unique is the much greater scope and variety of situations that constitute problems to be solved. And, our amazing capacity to invent and devise artifacts that help in producing solutions to problems does set us apart qualitatively as well as quantitatively from our animal predecessors and relatives.

A human-centric problem seems to arise from our human desires and intentions coming into seeming conflict with our environmental situation. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, for example, early humans wanted to eat while at the same time becoming very proficient at killing off the game in central Africa (with a nudge from changing climate to boot). What to do? Go looking for new game in distant areas (this happened not once but several times to different species in the human lineage). But there were physical barriers to overcome. Climate variations from the African homeland made it necessary to invent and wear clothing and tame fire. Problem solved. New game was found in Europe and Asia.

On the surface it might seem like human will and intelligence were put to the task of solving a problem (or many) and found the solution. But is this really the story, or the end of the story? The archeological evidence argues that humans didn't so much invent solutions as they discovered them. Various stone “technologies” evolved over long periods. They showed signs of remaining stable in form for long stretches and then when conditions changed, undergoing modifications followed by rapid spreading of the “improved” versions. The pattern of change over time in stone tools resembles the pattern of change in species of various genera over time, as demonstrated in the fossil record.

What about more modern kinds of problems? Take heavier-than-air flight as an example. Humans had been looking at and admiring the flight of birds and insects for who knows how long. Humans were driven by several synergistic desires. One was to gain a vantage point of the world from on high. It really is very clever of humans to imagine what it must be like to look down on their world from above — to see the world as the gods must have. It was also clear that birds could get from one place to another much faster because they need not deal with obstructions found on the surface of the Earth. Travel would obviously be much faster if one could fly. Our exploratory nature, our inquisitiveness, our desire to do something better and faster all combined to cause many men, over the centuries, to explore possible ways to achieve flight. Many took the obvious approach and attempted to emulate bird flight (see: Ornithopter). From centuries of crude to refined experiments humans discovered the principles of airfoils slowly and often painfully. The Wright brothers did not invent airfoils out of their own minds. The knowledge and experience they needed was already there. What they did was to put several pieces together in just the right formula. Others were doing similar work elsewhere and might have easily beat the Wrights to the punch.

What humans do, in solving problems, is to discover how to put things together such that the composite comes closer and closer to achieving a desired end. Invention is more a process of trial and error than most people realize. But what about the desires themselves? Surely that is a unique quality of the human mind. Human desires and the impediments to achieving them are the source of problems so why shouldn't we see problem existence in a human-centric way? Well, as it happens, humans have those desires because evolution (biological) created a creature that has a tremendous ability to see how things can fit together to gain an advantage, like a lever (affordance). Long-time readers may have an idea of where I stand on the notion that evolution has a trajectory in the sense of always driving systems toward higher complexity and organization as long as usable energy is available. Human, are just the Universe's way of solving the problem of raising to the next level of organization!

Auto-Organization and Emergence

The term “self-organization” is used a lot in the evolution and complex systems literature. I actually don't like it much. The ‘self’ part connotes intention of the cognitive sort, which I feel ends up putting a somewhat mysterious aura around the whole idea. In fact the idea that aggregates of components in an unformed system (one that is yet to evolve) can interact in ways that end up having structure and form is not mysterious at all. I prefer the term “auto-organization”; the sentiment is the same. When components are first brought together into an essentially bounded volume, if they have interaction capacities and there is energy available to drive those interactions they will naturally combine into various structures that are then tested for stability by interactions with other forming structures. The ones having the greatest stability of formation win the competition and dominate the internal organization.

Once a population of stable structures arise they then interact with one another more to form yet higher level structures, the properties of which (behavior as well as form) could not have been predicted just from taking an inventory of all of these structures and their individual properties. This is what we call emergence. A new level of order emerges from a lower level. Quarks auto-organize to produce subatomic particles. These, in turn interact to form atoms and they interact to produce chemistry! Under the right conditions with the right chemicals present (and, as always the flow of usable energy) from chemistry emerges life - cells. And from cells emerge organisms of greater complexity.

Universal evolution is the on-going process of auto-organizing entities interacting both competitively and cooperatively as the collection explores design space (I got my inspiration for this from Dan Dennett's treatment in, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, but Dennett was basically summarizing the views of a number of evolutionists). Some combinations and interactions are favored by environmental conditions (like selection). And from the mix emerges new relations and possibilities. What we see in this process is not only the relationships between cooperation and competition, but between exploration and exploitation. Every system that is undergoing energy flow is pushed to explore new possibilities. The stable, favored relations will seek to exploit their functions but with energy constantly pumped in, some of that exploitation will be sacrificed just to see if there are some as-yet unrealized combinations that could do a better job. Systems undergoing energy flux (as well as material flux) will never remain the same. Genetic mutations are just one of many examples of energetic disruptions of something that has already proven it can work providing an opportunity to explore new regions of design space.

The Universe may have come into being in a mighty explosion (the Big Bang). At first it was comprised of almost pure energy that condensed into particle-like objects (like quarks) as the expanding stuff cooled. More complex particles auto-organized into atoms. Meanwhile the force of gravity pulled great masses of these particle (primarily hydrogen and some helium) into denser clouds and eventually into hot globs that would become stars. Gravity provided the means for forming bounded component aggregates. The fusion of some of these particles was just the auto-organization that took place in the hearts of stars and what emerged were heavier particles (atoms of heavier elements). Those, in turn, interacted in new ways as they were blown out into space. Chemistry was born. Supernovae produced really heavy atoms that would, again under the influence of gravity, clump to form planets and planetary-star systems. The laws of thermodynamics, especially the Second Law, would ensure that energy would flow from the concentrations in stars around and through the planetary systems providing abundance of chemically-usable energy in the form of light. Eventually, from this configuration of nature, life arose, more than likely quite often in the Universe, and still newer levels of organization and complexity emerged; new properties and new possibilities to explore design space. Biological (i.e., neo-Darwinian) evolution became the focus of activity from that point on. Life evolved to eventually produce brains, and eventually brains emerged that could construct internal models of increasingly larger parts of the Universe. And those brains produced artifacts to help continue the process of exploring design space while still exploiting the energies already found.

Brains as a New Evolutionary Medium

The human brain is almost unbelievable! Within a rather small volume of space and time, neurons form complex associations that do a pretty good job of representing other objects and relations and dynamics from the environments of those brains. Those brains are bound to the biological imperative, of course. They still need to make the containing organism eat and eliminate wastes and these are powerfully compelling influences that had to be hard coded into the neural structures at a very basic level. The brain has to hold off the more negative aspects of the Second Law — entropy. Biological evolution ensures that those basic drives are conserved in every brain no matter how big and flexible it might be.

But biological evolution discovered a really great way to organize neural tissue so as to gain a maximum amount of flexibility in terms of what can be encoded into the neural structures. This is the cerebral cortex (actually cortical structures in general have highly flexible encoding capabilities). And evolution's newest layer of cortex, the neocortex in mammals, is possibly infinitely flexible in terms of combinatorial representations. Now, when the cortex is then organized as in the human brain, with a representation competency like no other, along with a hierarchical control structure (executive functions, planning, and judgment in the prefrontal lobes, action selection in the posterior-frontal, association formation and sensory processing in the mid and posterior cortex) the brains of humans has achieved the ability to form models of the world as it finds it that allow it to project into the future as well as remember the past.

But it may come as a surprise to most people who are unfamiliar with how neurons work and encode engrams in their synaptic connections that the way the brain forms these models is by evolution! Neurons are, perhaps, the greatest example of nearly infinitely auto-organizing components we know of. The majority of the wiring in the neocortex is driven by exploration and experience-based selection of stable connections. Those connections, and the engrams encoded, endure because the sensory experience of the world outside the head provides the selection criteria that favor veridical representations and disfavors (usually) non-veridical ones.

And what do you know(?), those representations of objects and relations and dynamics in the world outside the head interact with one another in unpredicted (and unpredictable) ways because the neural nets are so flexible and reconfigurable with minimum energy. So it is that humans continue to explore design space but now in their own brains. We have imagination. That imagination is part of what makes us so good at affordance. It allows us to visualize solutions to perceived problems. In us the Universe has found itself with one of the most efficient ways to continue to explore design space without moving a lot of mass around, expending a lot of energy doing so. What an invention the human brain has been!

Unfortunately, every gain also has a cost. The human brain may be a penultimate design space explorer, a virtual design space explorer of sorts, but that advantage doesn't come free of charge. Indeed the very capacity to imagine future possibilities also includes the capacity to imagine impossible pasts, presents, and futures. Its what we get from being so mentally flexible without some kind of constraint that regulates the way our imaginations produce fantasies. Or rather, without regulation on our conviction-holding system (our beliefs) that allows us to hold as true things which really couldn't be. The real problem here is that we have a tendency to act on our beliefs. We make decisions largely driven by our beliefs and their underlying intuitions and judgments. And those decisions and actions have gotten us into a lot of trouble. As our discovery of greater technologies have proceeded we have gained greater physical power and we have used that power based on our erroneous beliefs. The needed regulation mechanism was starting to emerge in Homo sapiens but got outrun by our emerging command over powerful energy sources. It never caught up. Today most humans have great imaginations, affordance, and a set of firmly held beliefs that don't necessarily correspond with reality. That is the price we are paying for having been the Universe's way of efficiently trying new possibilities.

This brings us back to the whole notion of problems and solutions. We humans have been happily exploring design space without much regard for the consequences. We now have marvelous means of transportation that are simultaneously eating up our reserves of fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere and oceans with excess carbon dioxide. We'll run out of energy and right when we are going to need all we can get to adapt to radical climate change. Now that is what I call a difficult problem (some people prefer to call seemingly unsolvable problems predicaments)! There are others, related in many ways. And no one seems to know how to solve them.

And that brings me back to evolution. It always has been and always will be the solver of problems. The problem is really how to continue exploring design space, how to increase organization and complexity in manageable ways so as to allow the emergence of yet new things with new properties. Human brains along with their artifactual products, and especially that mind augmenter, the computer, have formed the ultimate level of organization on the face of the Earth. They did it by exploiting the stored high-powered energy resources in fossil fuels. And, unfortunately, they did not use that resource to invest in finding sustainable alternatives that can be constructed in time to make a difference. Nor did they use their superior intellects to regulate their own numbers or how physical wealth got distributed around. And so, as a little piece of the Universe that reflects the Universe and recursively reflects upon the Universe, we are in a real predicament. Perhaps this set of problems cannot be solved in the sense that our species, Homo sapiens will survive into the future. But there is really nothing new about that option. Evolution will find a way for some new level of order to emerge. There is still lots of potential energy flowing from our star, Sol. There is no reason to believe that life will be completely wiped off of the planet even if there is a major decline in biodiversity as a side effect of humans exploring design space.

As I have written here many times, my money is on the further biological evolution of that little imagination/belief regulator mechanism I mentioned above. All of my investigations, including some very recent developments in neuroscience, point to the idea that our brains are poised for the next step by what may turn out to be very minor adjustments in some of the prefrontal cortex circuits, especially in the fronto-polar patch known as Brodmann Area 10. Ordinarily I am not a betting man. But I will bet that human evolution is not finished. Neither biological evolution nor mental evolution are stoppable as long as energy flows. Our genus may take a bit of a setback in the collapse of technological civilization and an evolutionary bottleneck, but so what? This is just part of how evolution works from time to time (on a cosmic scale!) Sentience will recover on Earth, one way or another. You can take that to the bank!

Is There Hope?

There is Always Hope

If that write-in campaign that some readers suggested a while back were to work, and I was elected president, I would hire my gym buddy (ellipticals) Rudy to walk behind me whispering in my ear, “Remember, thou art mortal!” He does his best to keep me humble and this is a good thing. One of his most common complaints about this blog, and my writing, is that I usually finish my doom-and-gloom scenarios without a last message of hope. Rudy has read many of the peak oil, collapse, and other end of civilization as we know it (EOCAWKI) books and he notes that every other author generally ends their work with something like, “...if only the powers that be would wake up and take action, we could fix these problems”, or “...if you do such and thus, you will be one of the survivors.” Essentially the modus operandi is to leave people with the hope that something could be done (and the authors often provide the solutions, if only...).

To quote Rudy, “You got to leave them with hope!” OK Rudy here is my leaving them with hope.

Hope for What?

The mainstream hope is for what is called “business as usual” or BAU. Let's face it, BAU is killing this planet (or at very least leading to the sixth great extinction event). Should we really hope that our American way of life is not only non-negotiable (as per Dick Cheney) but really deserves to be saved? If a new miraculous energy production method were found (imagine nuclear fusion in a football sized reactor able to power 10,000 homes!) and we managed to bring it up to scale in time to avoid the worst shocks of fossil fuel peaking, would the Ecos be better off? In truth, would humanity be better off, in the long run? Consider that such a miraculous power source could be used to scrub CO₂ from the atmosphere. That would be great, wouldn't it? But also consider that such a power source would allow us humans to grow in numbers and consumption of natural resources even more. Would that be good? Also, all of that energy consumed in work (making our lives “better”) would add to the heat load of the planet directly. We wouldn't be faced with global warming due to the greenhouse effect, but by directly injecting heat into the atmosphere from all of our machines and abodes. Somehow the Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to win no matter what!

Hope for BAU is hope for not being inconvenienced in this lifetime. Little else. It is not hope for the future of humanity.

Perhaps, then, we should hope to save the bulk of the current population. Perhaps we can discover genetic modifications to food plants and biofuel plants that can at least provide us with the basic needs of our species (living in non-tropic climes) so that even if we all end up poorer, we will be able to survive and live reasonable lives. We might miss our TVs and cable, our NASCAR Sundays and our Big Macs. But we will be able to keep the population stable and learn how to live within our physical means. The only problem is that we are still breeding and producing hungry mouths to feed. Even if everyone lived at a much reduced consumption level there are still far too many of us to live off of real-time solar energy resources alone. We would all end up far poorer than most people can imagine unless they've been to Somalia.

Hope for saving the population is hope for far more pain and suffering than can be imagined.

Well, what about hope for humanity in the form of at least saving some portion of the species so that our kind can go on? Surely some remnants of Homo sapiens can survive and be ready to produce a new civilization based on different principles. We can surely hold out hope that our species will survive whatever future traumas await us. Indeed some remnant must survive. Only if it is composed of the average humans from our current population they will likely just behave like humans do now. They will make all the same mistakes our current clever but unwise species have made. Homo sapiens are adaptive and a surviving population chosen, more or less randomly, from the current population would simply continue to act as we have acted, selfishly and with no understanding of the larger scope consequences of our local, short-term actions. As adaptable as our species is, I suspect that given the same opportunities (finding energy sources, say) they would simply replicate the same mistakes we have made as a species with cleverness.

Hope for saving a remnant of the current species is hope that we will make the same mistakes all over again.

But, hope for the genus, that is different. I have hope that some form of Homo does, in fact, survive and adapt to the future world. I just don't think it should be sapiens. Sapiens, after all, are not really particularly sapient! At least the average member of our species does not appear to have a sufficient level of sapience to have a more global scope of understanding^*. They do not really grasp the systemic nature of our world to the point of understanding the global and long-term consequences of their local current actions. Why they don't is perfectly understandable. We evolved in a world where that grasp was not really necessary. We are what we are. But, unfortunately, we are also extremely clever beasts who have so altered the physical world (serious geologists want to call this period the Anthropocene to recognize the geological consequences of the existence of human beings) that we have created an environment that demands exactly that kind of scope in thinking in order to adapt to the environment. In other words we have created the very conditions that contribute to the selection of necessary traits for greater sapience! We have created the selection forces that will work against sapiens and for a more sapient species in the future.

Hope for the genus is hope that we can become better beings.

My hope is that we current beings will be just sapient enough to recognize the ways of evolution. Even in our population of mere average sapiens there are variations in the gene pool that produce much greater sapience in a few individuals. If we were to ensure the survival of those individuals through the coming turmoil (as best we could - no guarantees!) then the future generations of humans would be starting from a higher baseline of sapience and would, I suspect, be more likely to manage adaptation to the new world. And, more importantly, our descendents would be positioned to make better choices in that future world because their capacity to acquire wisdom will be much greater, on average, than is the case presently for the extant population.

There is hope that a distant future form of humanity will survive and even thrive. I have this hope because we less sapient but very clever humans have come to understand how evolution works and can produce seeming improvements in the capabilities of animals. We have come to understand the genetic basis for inheritance of traits and even how to read the genes relative to the particulars of those traits (though this ability is very new and needs development). We have the understanding of how selection of traits works and how to bootstrap selection of a particular trait (as when we do animal breeding).

I have no illusions that our species will adopt an explicit policy for identifying and favoring the few high sapient members of our populations. That would be entertaining a false hope in light of the ample evidence that we are unable to adopt such thinking. As I write this I am imagining all of the people who are going nuts screaming “eugenics, eugenics, evil!” The average brain is unable to rise high enough to get the perspective of what is happening. I accept that, though it does cause me anguish. No my real hope is that somehow those super-sapient individuals will self-recognize and seek out one another's company to form social networks and communities that can and will survive and adapt. My guess is that the super-sapient already surmise the need and intuit the actions. I am only supplying a voice to that implicit judgment.

So there is the hope I have and leave you with. If you suspect that some young person is not just bright, but also has the seeds of higher sapience then encourage them to learn all that they can (particularly systems science!) about the world and what is really happening. Teach them about resilience and adaptability. If they are truly sapient they will learn without much prompting. Help them to meet and associate with other high sapient individuals. Be sapient enough to recognize our own short comings and do not claim greater sapience for yourself (an old Chinese proverb says that if you think you are wise, then you are not!) Above all, have hope that the super-sapient among us will be the ones building a brave new world.

There, now maybe Rudy will stop complaining that I don't leave folks with hope!

---

^* My suggestion is that we call our current species Homo calidus, meaning “Man the clever”. We are extremely clever, but not wise, it would appear.

Is Occupy Wall Street a Testament to the Need for Systems Thinking?

Systemic Problems

A few days ago I stopped by the Occupy Tacoma site to chat with a few of the protesters. I have also talked with a few occupiers from Olympia who I know personally. I understand their backgrounds and motivations and I think they were clearly expressing their thoughts and those of other occupiers. The two groups have different kinds of participants (the Olympia site is infiltrated by a larger number of homeless people, but they are in the 99% too!) Nevertheless I heard similar stories from both groups.

When you drive by one of their sites you will see many different signs posted, each with a different message. The reason they are taking so much flack about their lack of a consistent, uniform message is that the press and just about everyone else are looking for some simple sound bite to latch onto. They want a simple demand that they can think they understand. Instead they have to deal with a diversity of demands, complaints, and issues that seem complicated and disjoint. What they fail to recognize is that all of these issues are, in fact, part of a larger picture. They appear disjoint because those observing the OWS phenomenon do not think systemically. These issues are joined and the OWS crowds recognize this implicitly. That is what keeps them going, cooperating on their protests even as different people bring different complaints to the effort. They sense that their common issue is, as I noted in my blog of Oct. 9th, Occupy Home Street that things are going horribly wrong for the lives of the vast majority of people (the focus is on the middle class in the USA, but they expressed a sense of solidarity with people around the world who are actively revolting against tyranny). But I also heard a common theme in all of the various complaints. They sense that all of these issues are connected in a deep way. They come from the system, not just individuals being bad guys.

In the US the focus is on the 1%ers. The occupiers see the wealthiest, in cahoots with the politicos, running an effective oligarchy in what is supposed to be a land of opportunity for all. They are protesting this oligarchy that declares wars with impunity, that bails out the rich bankers who knew they were not playing by the rules of common sense but fails to bail out the underwater homeowners who thought they were playing by the rules of a consumeristic society (I am not letting off the hook those who went foolishly into more debt then they had reason to believe they could service; but the point is why should one group get saved just because they are rich?). They are rightly complaining that the rich oligarchs are diminishing their lives and those of the other 99%. But they have the missed the real underlying cause. They tend to believe that their actions (or some actions) will somehow reverse the trend of the rich getting richer and that things will pretty much go back to the way they thought they were before; at least the way that the average American can earn a decent wage and live in a decent abode.

Every System Has a Driver

And it isn't ideology.

The system in question is the global economic system that has been increasingly based on consumption of goods and services and a capitalistic method for aggregating investments. The former represents a shift from a societal sense of scarcity, husbanding resources, and thrift to one of abundance and growth. The latter started out as a means of funding the development of productive businesses that could sustain the prior societal understanding. Businesses that served the needs of building productive tools (like plows and harnesses) or serving productive needs (like horse shoeing) could only be started by aggregating enough capital (money) to purchase the necessary components and pay the workers. Borrowing from banks and selling stocks started out as ways to do this aggregation. Those who loaned the capital expected to earn some profit from their taking a risk and when the businesses did well enough investors/lenders did profit from the use of their capital. As long as everyone was satisfied with profit margins that could be applied to savings (and future investment) at a reasonable rate, this system worked very well. But, perhaps too well.

Somewhere around the end of WWII we started to see a shift in perceptions. We started to see the growth of a belief that capitalism was the engine that produced increasingly abundant wealth, especially niceties like fancier cars and bigger houses. For a while middle class workers were garnering wages that grew. Companies were making more profits and growing. And investors were making huge profits without doing much in the way of working. President John F. Kennedy famously said that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”, expressing the optimism that the American economic system was producing wealth for all. The sentiment became that as the wealthy investors got even wealthier that was good for everyone. A smaller slice of a growing pie is still more pie. Then came the high technology boom and the rise of the get-rich-quick entrepreneur. This was the changing American dream. It was no longer enough that every hardworking citizen would have a chance to establish a modest, but livable home and have a few simple appliances. People saw other people get more. And they wanted more for themselves. The economic system evolved such that we are no longer citizens, we are consumers. And that means of everything; food, stylish clothing and cars, bigger houses, even education and information (so-called, but what is sold on Fox News and most mainstream media can hardly be called information!). We are even consumers of political posturing.

The belief that capitalism and free markets was the driving force that led to the abundance of wealth is stuck in our collective consciousness. We've even sold this belief to essentially every other nation, regardless of their professed political system. Most people sincerely believe that capitalism is responsible for what we have. The reason, I think, is simple. Most people never take enough physics to grasp the relationship between energy and work. But the truth is that capitalism just happened to be at the right place at the right time. I won't deny that it facilitated what came next. But it was not the driver, not the final cause, as it were. There is, rather, a more subtle driving force that would have produced essentially the same effects under any political system. And that is the simple fact that humans are biologically programmed to consume as much energy as they can get their hands on. Or, more appropriately, get control of. Humans have a unique ability to find ways to harness power for their own uses. All that is necessary is that there exists a concentration of power (energy) that can be discovered and we will find ways to exploit it. Nature abhors a steep gradient it seems (Second Law of Thermodynamics - the entropy version).

The growth of economic activity and wealth has always tracked right behind the discovery of new forms of energy at higher concentrations of power. Fossil fuels, and especially petroleum, was just the latest naturally occurring concentration of energy (fossil sunlight), and very high powered energy at that. And the oil-based economy started to take off during the later part of the 19 century. With the advent of diesel engines (for trains and ships) and powerful aircraft jet engines, the fossil fuel age came into full swing. Electricity produced from coal-powered turbine/generators rounded out the power portfolio that produced the potential for growth. By the middle of the 20^th century the economic engine fueled by fossil fuels was in high gear. Every nation that had access to abundant fossil fuels, regardless of their economic model, became richer. It is still a puzzle why this didn't occur in the middle east but all of those nations seemed content to sell their oil to the western world and use the money to buy luxuries. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the west, particularly the US had already been investing in oil refineries and had gone through the learning curve before oil was discovered in places like Saudi Arabia. Even the former USSR was on a track to producing more wealth from their oil reserves, until the economic/military race with the west forced them to dismantle what they had and break up into independent (supposedly) countries. Their oil business suffered from the dismantling, not so much from being communistic. It has since started to make a resurgence, but it may be that their reserves are not as great as needed to make a great comeback.

The fundamental economic driver is the combination of biological mandate to consume energy and the availability of said energy. It matters much less what kind of economic theory or model you adopt or believe you have (like us believing we have free markets!). All that matters is humans have access to energy sources and they will then figure out how to exploit that energy to exploit other natural resources. It has always been thus since the first hominids evolved.

All of the rest of the economic system, regardless of what you call it, is the emergence of organization from the flow of energy and the cleverness of humans to exploit that flow. Our current system has gotten so complex and abstract that it is nearly impossible for anyone to actually understand what is going on. But the clue is that when there are problems arising in so many different facets of a system then you can guess the real causes lay deep at the heart of the system.

Energy Flow Decline and the Collapse of Complex Societies

Joseph Tainter has it right. In The Collapse of Complex Societies he developed the thesis that societies try to solve problems by increasing complexity. But complexity has costs associated with it that are sometimes hidden from the normal accounting. These hidden costs often show up as new problems and the societal response is to increase complexity yet more. And increasing complexity follows a law of diminishing returns^*. At some point the next unit of complexity has a much greater cost than what it was supposed to fix. That is when things start to break down.

Lately Tainter is speaking to the relationship between problems, complexity, development, and energy flow. He recognizes that it is energy flow that allows humans to attempt solutions to problems. And it is energy flow that is needed to maintain the structures developed. He speaks to the historical patterns of civilizations, fueled mostly from real-time solar flows (i.e., agriculture), growing to a point where the energetic cost of shipping food into the core became too high. The civilizations could not sustain themselves but also could not recognize what was really happening.

Tainter and several other social scientists, are using systems thinking and analysis to see this pattern in all of the collapses. There is invariably a proximal cause or two that everyone can see, such as the invasion by barbarians or climate change, and that everyone concludes is THE cause. But now we are seeing that the real underlying cause of collapse is the decline in energy flow that was needed to sustain the complex organization that had evolved over time and many generations.

Today we are a global civilization even if we still recognize borders between nations. Our commerce is global in scope and is fueled by prodigious amounts of fossil fuel energy. Our agriculture is totally dependent on fossil fuels (the Green Revolution) for growing and delivering the food. Every home in the developed world depends on heating and cooking from advanced power sources like natural gas and electricity (only some of which is produced by nuclear or hydro power). We need powerful transportation vehicles to get us to and from work. Our system is completely and irreversibly dependent of fossil fuels. And guess what is diminishing^**?

Our global society is in the beginning stages of collapse. The wealthy sense this even if they can't put their fingers on what is wrong. They are more motivated than ever to try to aggregate all of the paper wealth they can. I do think most of them believe that their efforts to create paper wealth are on a par with manufacturing, for example, in helping to lift all boats. I suspect some of them feel totally justified in taking home huge bonuses as they attempt to build a hedge for themselves against what seems to be a sinking boat. They are working on their life rafts after all. This is a normal human proclivity and you, dear readers, and I, and all of the occupiers would probably do something similar if we were in a position to do so. None of us has transcended our biology and all of us will do what we can to protect ourselves when we sense the impending loss of the system that gave us our sense of well being. Of course I support their demand that what wealth there is being created now should be more equitably distributed. But it has to be real wealth, not the phony money created by Wall Street gamblers and fractional reserve banking. I continue to urge that real jobs can be created for many of the unemployed in a modern version of the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp) where the goal is to restore depleted soils for organic agriculture under the permaculture methodologies. So what if these are government jobs. And so what if the rich are taxed heavily to fund it. That would go a long way to doing something worthwhile, investing in real infrastructure. And it would provide incomes for many currently unemployed (it could also be a way to reabsorb the military personnel coming back, at long last, from our foreign adventures.) A program like this could help alleviate the inherent conflict that is boiling up and it would slow down the collapse somewhat.

The occupiers give us a more realistic measure of the nature of the problem we face. They see the many aspects of the situation and sense that those various aspects are all related to one another. They intuitively understand that all of the various problems are systemic in nature but they just don't go deep enough into that system's drive. What the bankers do, what the politicians do, and what the OWSers do, they are all reactions to the systemic collapse that we are experiencing. The problems we will all face soon will be from our ignorance of the root cause and a belief that we need to do something that will protect our positions. If we believe we could have things back the way we believe they were then we will take radical actions against whatever proximal cause we think we see. People will come to blows as they blame some other group for what is actually happening to everyone. Even the richest will find they can't use their paper assets as food. They won't even buy food. The tide is going out. All boats are lowering. And many of them have sprung leaks and are already sinking. Those in the sinking boats are going to soon try to commandeer the ones that still seem seaworthy. It is coming.

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^* In my systems science book I describe this in greater detail. It turns out that increasing complexity can, and often does lead to collapse, but it can also lead to reorganization and increases in hierarchical control structures that actually simplify things at the operational level. Thus some societies evolve into seemingly more complex ones, but are organized differently (more hierarchically) to avoid the increasing costs and diminishing returns. Human societies have a harder time doing this because humans are more autonomous agents who invariably fail to do as they are expected. Contrast the organization of a state vs. that of an army. The latter kinds of organizations work because the humans are operating under much stricter discipline rules. The problem with humans in general is that they are not wise enough to grasp the benefit of disciplining themselves to cooperate. Hence, complexity tends to result in collapse vs. reorganization and success.

^** We have already reached the peak of oil extraction rates and this can be expected to have an impact on the extraction of coal and natural gas as well. It is already having negative impacts on agricultural photosynthesis and will soon cause the diminishment of food production. A related problem is that the energy costs of obtaining the next increment of energy from fossil fuels is rising. The energy return on energy investment (EROI) is declining faster than the decline in extraction rates. This is the principle driver in rising oil costs. Net energy per capita has likely been in decline since the late 1970s. Aggregate net energy may soon follow even while the population continues to expand, even if at a slower rate.