Evolution: Manchinekind

My latest post in my blog “globvilla” worth checking out:

Evolution: Manchinekind

Icons: System States

I had a very interesting discussion regarding Aristotlean Drama, Linear Programming and Transactional Analysis today and it lead me to reevaluate my own thoughts on these concepts.

First I reevaluated my thoughts on States:

Aristotlean Drama is simple because it only involves the state of one character following a linear path.

However, when you begin to think about the outcomes for two characters the dynamic becomes tabular which brings us to game theory and the famous prisoner’s dilemma and game theory payoff matrixes:

However, it immediately becomes apparent that the Prisoner’s Dilemma does not account for all of the States.

Here we have the States of Transactional Analysis, however this state model is not complete either.

Even with a pentad the States are incomplete.  This is where my epiphany came in.  There has to be a begin state and an end state.

Now with a heptad, we have all seven States and a complete tabular model.

However, we are learning tabular models are not adequate.  We are learning network models are necessary.  And network models require an alternate portrayal.

Here we have a network presentation of the seven States.  And each of these States have seven states of their own.  There is no magic here.  The correlation to the week I do not think is coincidental, but cultural, however I do not think that astronomical phenomena have any causation.

Related Link:

• Social Psychology: Escaping the Prisoner’s Dilemma

ImpliCity and ExpliCity: Part 2

The 20th Century Organization:

i. Implicit 1984: Explicit Brave New World

ii. Implicit Psychopathy: Explicit Humanity

iii. Implicit Fraternity: Explicit Sorority

1. Management – Implicit Slavery: Explicit Liberation

2. Accounts – Implicit Scarcity: Explicit Abundance

3. Schedule – Implicit Death: Explicit Life

4. Facility – Implicit Prison: Explicit Palace

5. Policy – Implicit Moralizing: Explicit Neutrality

6. Procedure – Implicit Stereotyping: Explicit Individuality

7. Transaction – Implicit Purchase: Explicit Sale

Anarchy: Building Business Around Life

I have been having some very interesting conflicts between my business model and conventional business models these days. And the result has been an increase in my resolve to live according to my model.

I have been building my business around my life and the lives of those I choose to help in this world instead of building my life around business. The result is I am seeing the people I help making real progress in becoming independent and self-sustaining individuals with a deep concern for the welfare of those around them.

I have been called undisciplined, unprofessional, unfocused and many other things, however I realize that the real difference is my vision and mission as an individual and as a business person. I am truly putting people first and that scares the 20th century thinkers I come up against. And my life and business are both growing in a way that people want to come on board.

You look at the American economy and it is a failure.  Capitalists are in denial.  Every political concept does not deliver.  Maybe it is time for something new.

Today I read about the United We Serve initiative by President Obama and I feel I am on the right track as a servant leader and a servant business here in Canada.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/United-We-Serve/

Longfellow: A Psalm of Life

A Psalm of Life

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
“Life is but an empty dream!”
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
“Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act to each to-morrow
Finds us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,–act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
Learn to labor and to wait.

Robert Frost: Birches

“Earth’s the right place for love”

Is your user in a pathless wood or swinging on birches?  — relationary

Birches

by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows–
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree~
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Bureaucracy: Legalism versus Integrity

I discovered a great deal about identity today.

I went to the passport office to renew my Canadian passport.

I was treated very politely and given the necessary form.

I filled it out accurately and completely. Went to the passport officer and presented form, new photos and current passport. She opens the passport and looks at the photo page and says, “This passport is invalid.”

I reply, “I worked in the United States for one year using that passport, the TN1 visa is still inside.”

She says, “You didn’t sign the passport. It’s invalid.”

I think to myself, “I could take the passport outside, sign it and come back in.  In fact, I could take the passport and sign it right in front of her.  There was never a requirement for a witness; it could have been signed by anyone. This policy is retarded.”

She asks me for additional identification. I don’t have a driver’s license because I sold my car and decided I would use public transit. I offer my Social Insurance Card, but the signature has been rubbed off. I offer my birth certificate, but it has no signature. I offer my provincial health card, but it has no signature. I offer my credit card, my debit card and my library card.  I consider my Movie Village card because the signature is laminated.

She takes everything to her manager. She comes back and gives me a slip of paper. “This is the address of the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission. They are on the far side of the city. Have them provide you with a photo ID with your signature and fax me a copy.”

I tell her, “I don’t drink.”

She replies, “You don’t have to.”

I jump on a bus and I go across town. I give the MLCC all the same ID that I gave the passport officer. They have me sign a form and in five minutes I have a photo ID with my signature.  Because the signature pad is electronic and does not provide visual feedback as I am writing I find the first name and last name of my signature overlap.  Maybe it is designed to emulate your signature when you are blind drunk.  I’m over 40 and for the first time I have a card that explicitly states I can legally drink alcohol.

I travel all the way back across town to the passport office. I explain that the passport officer required me to provide another piece of identification. I am directed to a special officer. She makes a photocopy of the MLCC photo ID with signature and says, “Thank you, that’s it.”

Can you explain to me what was achieved by my going to the MLCC which cost me an additional $25 when you include bus fare, which couldn’t have been achieved by me simply signing my passport?

I protected one bureaucrat’s legalism by exploiting another bureaucrat’s legalism.  And the bureaucracy doubled its money.

I will have a renewed passport in two weeks.

They call themselves “public servants”, so why is the public required to jump through mindless hoops to make them appear vigilant?

We do these unnecessary and costly things bureaucrats tell us because we are not willing to sacrifice the greater cost of preserving our integrity and the integrity of policy.

Consequently, the bureaucrat keeps her job, politicians maintain the illusion of governance and we all lose.  Time, money, value.

Will my passport protect me and the global community?  Yes.

Did I also perform a mindless ritual?  Yes.

I believe that a healthy society is regulated by public servants.  However mindless observance of regulations by public servants fails both the public and the policy makers.

Anyone who tells you to violate your integrity to preserve theirs has none.  All they are doing is seeking a bigger piece of the pie at your expense.  It’s a measure of bargaining not morality.

Robert Frost: Life

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
– Robert Frost

Jared Diamond: Societal Collapse

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Jared Diamond: System Collapse“, posted with vodpod

If you listen carefully to what Jared Diamond is saying in the TED video above, he is describing not a five part, but a six part power curve into a systemic singularity. This has been one of the core themes of discussion of this blog.  We all seem to be too close to our problems to see the commonality.  The interrogatives come into play here:

1. Goals
2. People
3. Functions
4. Forms
5. Times
6. Distances

Times and Distances being the basis on which the higher orders are built.

When we look at the recent economic “crisis” we see 300 trillion in currency circulating and roughly 1 trillion to 2 trillion shifting suddenly and unexpectedly.  We witnessed a systemic collapse, a singularity, a tipping point, a power curve, an exponential change, a phase transition or whatever label you want to call it.  These have been happening everywhere since Time and Distance began in different contexts and orders both in human and non-human systems.

What Jared Diamond and other alarmists are implying is that human society is now a system approaching its final singularity in this century on this planet.  We are implying that today we are experiencing a less than one percent crisis on a power curve into a singularity.  How many more iterations will the global system withstand?  Will humanity make the step into space successfully before we experience a global dark age?  How will the six or more factors in the power curve play out?

The truth to me appears to be that power curves whether they play out or not result in either a systemic climax or anti-climax followed by a systemic collapse.  Would it not be better if we experienced a systemic climax that led to us expanding into the solar system?

Systemic collapse seems to be the fashion of this generation.  Every generation looks with fascination at its own youth, maturition, reproduction and acceleration into mortality.  Some die early, some die late, but all die.  It is an irrevocable law of nature.  It is not about self-interest.  It is about what self-interest is defined as.

Related Posts:

Beyond the Singularity

Servitas and Libertas

Physics: Observer as a State

At Home In The Universe is a landmark piece of thinking by Stuart Kauffman from the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, Canada.  Stuart through the application of Boolean networks, chaos theory, biology and biochemistry makes a profound hypothesis:  Life is a higher level of order achieved though a natural phase change.  In otherwords, the “observer” that Einstein kept out of his equations belongs there as every living thing exists as another state in the equation.  The observer is part of the cosmic system.

There were two things that I considered a crucial flaw in Stuarts work.  First, he talked about a three state system:

1. The chaotic state
2. The edge of chaotic state
3. The ordered state

but he always looked at it as a two state system with the edge of chaotic state balancing on the singularity of the phase change between chaos and order.

This slavishness to a Boolean networks keeps him from seeing another, what I consider, obvious possibility.  Stuart’s light bulb metaphor should have trinary bulbs not binary bulbs–a trinary network.  Like a gas, liquid and solid–the three states of matter– there is a chaotic, ordered and inert state with life residing in the ordered state between two phase transitions (I wonder about how chaos theory would explain the plasma state).

I don’t know if his use of Boolean rules ever provided for this possibility.  It would have resolved many of the challenges he faced and documented in his book.

The second thing I wondered about is he regarded a tightly coupled system as chaotic and a loosely coupled system as ordered.  The logic seems backwards to me.  Is not a solid tightly coupled and orderly and a gaseous system loosely coupled and chaotic?  I will have to delve more deeply into the concepts of chaos theory before I agree.

As a final thought, we could take the six interrogatives and turn them into a new equation:

L * E = O * M * c ^ 2

Where L is Logic, E is Energy, O is Observer, M is Mass and c is the distance (d) light travels over time (t).

Logic would be defined as the rules that correctly describe the cosmic system.  Einstein referred to this logic as “The Old One”.  My hypothesis is our understanding of these rules, the logic of the observer, is a state as well.