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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

From Carbon-Flame Chemistry In Micro-Gravity Chemical Combustion .. To .. Social Combustion?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Rather interesting video here, on chemical combustion flames in microgravity.

Biggest conclusion?

It's actually delivered by the final image, of gridlocked automobile fleets - displaying inefficient 'burning' of human options & ingenuity.

That's an example of looming macro-level interactions overwhelming the utility of further micro-level observations. Once said that way, the relationships between local & global scales of observation reduce to repetitive instances of over-analyzing limited data (i.e., the limited data set which a prior scale of perspective restricted us to; aka prior paradigms).

Once cultural utilization patterns for carbon-combustion are evaluated, the whole concept of the personal combustion engine & personal automobile suddenly seems largely obsolete. Relegated to a fully integrated footnote of history, as surely as mitochondria are in the evolving cellular biology of eukaryotes.

[With a bit of imagination, one can imagine early eukaryote teenage cells, burning carbon trails around circular niches ... spewing a trail of half-oxidized reactants. That is, until they selected to become smoother components in bigger "race vehicles."]

Why aren't humans bored with & abandoning the very concept of massive cars powered by sooty combustion - and moving on to smoother, nearly invisible symbiosis of a largely automated, fuel-cell process with evolving human culture?

Well, it's partly a question of how such selection proceeds. There's an old saying that slow selection of fewer absolute requirements ... produces faster, more extended processes & whole systems (coordination)? And such selection produces orders of magnitude more options too? Hmmm. That's what component tuning, process tuning and whole system tuning are all about. It always takes time. That's all.

Yet if slow is smooth & smooth is cheaper/faster/bigger in the end ... why aren't we applying that lesson to coordination of every social process, not just to personally, physically going in circles in cars? Or boats? Or even planes & spaceships? Not to mention public policy.

So much of what we do ends up reminiscent of moths circling flames. We just slowly - even if not always smoothly - move on to more abstract flames to circle. And, every such circle we invent is just optional fuel for yet more scalable analogies. Ignorance is bliss and options irritant? The majority actually invert that ... or we wouldn't still be here.

And speaking of here. Where are we, in the USA, in 2013? Socially spiraling a dimming, recessionary light, instead of reaching for bigger options. Why aren't we moving on ... even faster?  Has silent majority suddenly switched parties, and voted for blissful ignorance instead of American ingenuity?

Forget chemical combustion, oxidation, flames, fiat and currency for a moment.

We as a people are insisting that we're running out of scalable options? And we're doing so just when orders of magnitude more options just appeared?

If gravity is a gradient in space-time fields, then evolution is a gradient in every dimension of coordination-catalyst fields?

What gravitational pull is slowing our social combustion, and creating jerks instead of slow, smooth, rapid adjustment in new dimensions of cultural evolution?

Is that a raw fear of unknown options that we're detecting in the 1%? Is that why they're trying to sequester an entire nation's past, current and future fiat? Simply a fear of losing control, and letting our expanding fiat explore unknown options?

Forget elementary Watson. It's scalable fundamentals, FDR!

It's no longer fear of fear itself that we have to fear. That's micro fear. Our new fear is macro, and not yet diluted by distributed perception. It's a concentrated fear that our fraction NOT fearful of fear itself may leave the economic nest, and explore the unknown. Distributed options, concentrated fear. That's an old taboo in cowardly economists, denying the quantum tunnels that link convertible costs, gains, options and fears.

Face it. System pathology exists at every system scale. Some parents would rather drown their kids than face their fear of imagining them wandering exposed & dangerously free of protective apron strings. At another scale, an emerging class of people would, collectively rather strangle the Middle Class than let them risk exploring evolving options or, worse yet, actually change everything? Examined personally, that class of micro brains doesn't even perceive their emerging macro-level strangling behavior.

So which flame are we as a people gonna circle? Are we marching too long to the tune of the same old, micro drummer (forget any distant ones)? By doing so, are we just keeping ourselves from more slowly, more smoothly, more quickly circling a more distant form of social combustion?

Our culture could get a big bang out of that, sans individual perception. Gotta circle back to that thought.

Here's the question. Can ~75million micro pairs of old-flames retain their spark, while also coordinating macro activity patterns into one, co-existing cultural-flame?  You know, local micro-unions coordinated into a more perfect macro-union, much of it existing outside local perceptual bounds, and hence aligned only through cleverly arranged, Automatic Stabilizers?

Cultural-flame evolution in micro-intelligence social combustion? It's a burning question. One we're doing everything to avoid collectively circling.

If YOU stand out in an economic burner, you can get a better paradigm. 

Therefore, if EVERYONE in Swamp Webegoners is above prior average, we'll ALL have a better paradigm? 

Actually, yes. Yet only on 1 out of a million smoothly coordinated paths! [It all depends on which metaphors are artistically mixed. Adaptive ones, or maladaptive ones. Naturally, it's our collective selection to make.] We can have some of our micro and macro paradigms & circle them too - but only after selectively exploring enough options. After all, some micro-slow can be smooth, and selectively-smooth is macro-fast. What are we waiting for?







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