Passing thought on Health, Peace, Governance, and "some assembly required" ( work in process )

 

 

Probably the most fascinating aspect of Life is the way that various smaller units, like cells, which have a life of their own,  come together into larger units,  like tissues and organs and then entire bodies with have their own life of their own but on a whole higher level. 

Then people form loose larger collectives, like relationships and families and villages and nation-states and corporations, and sports teams and religions, etc.    Some of which work and some not so much.

These days the question of how to make a "government" level meta-unit atop people, let alone a state and federal one,  let alone a planetary one is front page news.     It's sad that we know the principles and the CAD-CAM programs to design and build bridges and skyscrapers that do the job and don't fall down, but we are almost clueless about how to make governments, including nested stack type hierarchies, that do the job and don't collapse under loading.

We have to wonder if there are very general principles that apply to all assemblies of agents that can lead to larger agents, etc., without bounds, in which the cells or people retain the maximum freedom of action to cope with local situations, and yet the overall entity has persistent sustainable coherence.    This is what the Baha'is call "Unity with Diversity". 

On those lines, at every level, from cells to organs to people to governments and economies, we glibly use the term "health" as a descriptor, even though we are very close to clueless about what "health" means, in a mathematical or systems model way, or what "peace" means among larger meta-entities like countries but sometimes a family. 

We recognize when stuff is clearly broken, from arms to respiration, and most Western medicine is about disease and disorder care,  not really "health" care.    Once we get up to zero, functioning without conflict, we lose track of which way is up to "Thriving" and settle for "not fighting".

This is a really important concept to not really understand.    We can measure the "GDP" , Gross Domestic Product of our economy, the sum of all financial transactions, but clearly while GDP can be going up, the quality of "life" can be going down, so it is a poor indicator to guide policy.

What would be better?  Maybe something more akin to health, such as Gross Social Capital, a measure of the "health" of all the links and loops of relationships and trust and friendship in a society, which one would think would lead to thriving economically ( as did Fukayama? the economist )

Sadly, on the government scale,  attempts to assemble people in a coordinated fashion have led to great visions followed by wretched execution,  often literally.    Socialism, Communism, Capitalism all seem to be bridges that collapse under loading.  The worst of them all,  Star Trek's "The Borg" is a nightmare in total loss of personal freedom and other values.

But when we look for insight or ideas to nature,  we notice that the human body doesn't have a single super-cell that tells the other cells what to do.   The human brain's vision system has subsystems that track color and shape and texture and scale, etc.,  but there is no master central place where all these are assembled. 

So there clearly are ways to accomplish governANCE without governMENT.

The weak spots in human governance are in fact the MEN part, that seem unable to handle the intoxication of power and wealth and privilege without losing track of why they exist in the first place.

It's easy to model hierarchical power and submission structures, especially authoritarian ones, as dominance/submission between pairs of people,  but it's harder to visualize and describe how leaderless systems ( like the body or the vision system ) accomplish governance,  synchronized persistent mutually supportive control feedback regulatory system loops,  without governMEN(t).

I think if we truly understood "Health" we would understand what is needed.

We just don't really have names for those structures yet.

In fact, in say termite nests,  the control structures are entirely invisible.   Ditto in companies like the components of MIT's beer distribution game -- the outcomes are governed by feedback loops, not people, and the loops are invisible.   Aside from tools like Vensim we don't even know how to draw them. The keys are in the dynamic structures and we only draw static pictures which lack even the simplest equivalent of momentum and angular momentum that determine outcomes of the simplest billiard-ball type interactions, let alone ongoing goal-seeking relationships.

Even in computing we call them "entity-relation" diagrams, then draw the entities and mention the relationships, because we don't know how to even sketch a relationship.

It seems like it would be easier to build governments and physical health and healthy families and corporate health and healthy communities and planets if we knew more about this "health" thing instead of pretending that we did.   There's no evident reason that it is any more "magic" to build a governing structure, an operating system for the country or planet, than it is "magic" to design a bridge that doesn't  fall down.  We just need to learn what's involved, which might involve spending some money on such R&D even if it meant spending a little less on ICBM's and nuclear weapons which supposedly, have the same objective -- protecting what we have so it can flourish.

In some ways the polarization of the country today is akin to anaphylactic shock or an auto-immune disorder.

Incidentally, building "control systems" is something I discuss at great lengths in other posts, and my favorite such book "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" by Franklin, et al, 9th ed., the text for graduate courses in mundane "Control System Theory" which has never been ported over to government, i mean, governANCE systems.

But a very very brief look at "control" and the flow of  "control", which is even more amazing than electricity flowing through solid copper, is here: https://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/06/third-kind-of-feedback-discovered.html

Why Journal?

 One of the things I did at Parke-Davis as their imaging guru led to my US Patent on assembling fragments of an image into a larger mosaic that had both depth and wide field of view.

(Patents. US Patent 5613013 - R. Wade Schuette, 18-March-1997 "Glass Patterns in Image Alignment and Analysis". Keywords: image registration, image alignment )

This work has, in my mind, some profound implications that are not instantly obvious, but that are directly relevant to the question "Why Journal?"  and "What do you mean, 'Journal'?".

I realize using the word "profound" sounds arrogant but by it I really do mean that they are both broadly applicable in many different circumstances and contexts, and deep, in a sort of pixel-depth way, where each pixel is itself an entire image, of which each pixel in turn is an entire image, etc. in a fractal multi-level tree shape,  ie,mathematically, a 'tensor'.      Einstein once said that everything important in physics can be ( and perhaps must be ) represented as a tensor.  More on that below.

In any case, one of the departments needed images of cross sections of blood vessels and important biological processes required both a wide field of view and a very high resolution ( depth ) of detail, and no single image contained both as you had to pick one or the other for the microscope lens setting, so what they needed to see was a montage, a mosaic, an assembled collection of images,which meant they had to be "registered", ie,  overlapped, and the overlapping was not obvious because each separate image might be distorted slightly,  from a different angle, with a slightly different rotation, etc.  You couldn't just lay them side by side and voila, a larger image. 

And the biology did not have built in reference points,so that, aha,  this point in this image clearly corresponds to that point in that image, so slide them over a little more, and tip this one 2 degrees clockwise,  etc.

 So keep that conceptual problem in mind and consider this picture of the "Very Large Array",  famous from Sagan's story "Contact".

What is going on here?  Why all the different telescopes?  That's a long story about the law that say the resolution of any lens or dish on any direction in the resolved image ( map ) of the sky is exactly the wavelength you are using divided by the diameter of the dish in that direction.  Turns out you don't need the middle, mostly.   So what you have above is "aperture synthesis" where a number of smaller sensors are used to make a number of smaller "images" which are centrally assembled into a much better larger image.

Sound like a familiar problem?

It is not obvious from the picture of the dishes that all the signals need to be transported to a central site which has a supercomputer that does this "assembly" which is a very complex operation, and like my cross-section of a blood vessel,  needs to "align and register" the different smaller images which are taken from critically slightly different angles.     

That's especially important if the dishes are located on opposite sides of the Earth to get an 8000 mile baseline, and the signals are recorded on tape and shipped to a central site for "processing".   The exact relative location, angle of view, field of view, and absolute time of the observations all need to be preserved and used for this "assembly" into a synthetic aperture the size of the Earth.

Or, observations taken at opposite sides of the Earth's orbit, with a diameter of 1 earth orbit, taken at different times.  Etc.

So, in your head now two different situations where smaller fragments of a larger synthetic "image" need to be aligned and registered and assembled. 

Radio astronomy was held back for years in its early development by thinking that if one telescope ( itself an array of smaller antennas often ) looked long enough that the signals could be combined to remove noise and get arbitrary depth and resolution ( separation of two nearby features into two features not one blurry feature. )     Finally Ron Bracewell realized, ( what we knew as "Bracewell's Law" ) that this time combining ( assembling over time ) process didn't work, in fact couldn't work.  You needed that diameter which meant you needed to assemble fragments taken from what I will provocatively call the most diverse viewpoints possible.   You need many fragments from many diverse viewpoints in space and time and focal depth, and then you need a super-complicated algorithm to "assemble" them,  not just lay out on a table and side them until the edges matched.   

Each "image" or observations was inseparably linked to a "context" ,   location in space,location in time, pointing angle, rotation around the central point of view, depth of field selected, f-stop or width of view,  filters in place to enhance or suppress some frequencies,  etc. And you need to adjust  ("correct" ?) each image for that context in order to assemble them properly.   You cannot just lay them out on a table and "average" them.   

But the assembling of the fragments is critical to getting the most information possible and synthesizing a super-scale observing telescope.

So -- now consider you as an observer, as a sensing element,  making observations on different days at different times, in often very different moods and contexts.   Like the microscope or telescope or any camera, you have many different "settings" --  f-stop, field of view,  depth of view, rotation angle, viewpoint, color sensitivity, filters, etc.     You are free to pick any of those, but the physical fact is like,  (unlike the 3-lens cell phone cameras ) you must PICK.   You have to pick SOME depth of field, is it all in focus or is something highlighted and the background out of focus.  Etc.

You therefore make "an observation" of the world. 

But have you considered the mathematical process of how you,, how anyone, how society,  now combines or assembles those fragments of "observation plus context" into a larger, more valid, better scientific synthetic observation of the world?

Is the best you can do to just observe the world, like throwiing spaghetti on the wall,and see what images are vivid and stick with you over time, and let the others decay away?

Or is there value in the concept of "scrap-booking",   preserving the snapshot fragments and going back and looking at them again, later,  possibly WITH another person, and remembering when that was taken, both sliding back in time from your current context to a historical perspective of what life was like then?

One of my most memorable Charles Schulz "Snoopy" cartoons, Snoopy is laying atop his doghouse and says: "Have you ever noticed  / that if you think about something at 2 AM / and then again at noon the next day / you get two different answers?"

 Talk about profound.  Humans are subject to the same laws as telescopes -- what we see often is critically affected by our context, let alone our settings ( ie, "mood",  "framing",  who we are with, etc. )

What we snapshot and record is just one a a billion possible observations we could have made at that second, we could have focused on, as our brain can slide silently from considering our shoelace is untied to considering global thermonuclear war each occupying a single field-of-view. 

Are we doing a good job of "assembling" what we observe into a larger, better, bigger picture that removes the noise and artifacts and reveals what is actually going on larger than our own tiny context-dependent senses perceives at that time?

Thus "journaling"or "scrap-booking" what is "obvious" to us at any time, despite it being "obvious", realizing that tomorrow with different settings something else will be "obvious" what what is "clear" to us right now will no longer be clear from that viewpoint in space and time.    In fact, before we "realize" stuff it is not obvious,  then when we get an aha moment it is obvious, and then, most often, a week later it is no longer obvious.   

In fact, most of life is "volatile" --  the obviousness of what is true will be gone tomorrow. We will have the memory, but the memory is somewhat dehydrated, not nearly as vivid and actionable as it was yesterday.

When an article is published, a thought, in the New York Times,  it generates often thousands of "responses".  Sometimes responses to the responses.    But the thoughts are laid out end to end in a string of text.   We could do better.

In fact, like after a plane crash,  we could conceptually have a space frame and as each piece is collected we could rotate, translate, unbend, and try to position that fragment on the larger space frame so that when we are done we have an entire airplane and it is now "obvious" that there was an outward going explosion right here by seat #42 B.    Etc. Whatever the assembled "synthetic aperture" reveals that would never have been obvious walking through a warehouse of unassembled pieces.

We walk through life like walking through that warehouse,  and Journaling  / scrapbooking is akin to a way we can, over time,  mix, match, rotate, mesh, merge each day's intense experience and what is "obvious"  over time, into actual "wisdom" and "understanding" of what is "really" going on over your lifetime, over the lifetimes of all of us.

Laying our memories out in a long string over time is only step one of the process of "journaling". That may capture a fragment of our Life.

It's the reassembling over days, weeks, years, a lifetime of such fragments into a larger valid "obviousness" that is important.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTA2buWlNyM

Alan Jackson, Remember When

 We, as a society, conceptually, can do way way more with fragments of experience than manage to rotate and transform ourselves at brief instances into each other's moccasins and lives and "Oh, I see what you mean and what you are going through."  I "see your viewpoint" ( context ).