necsi conference

[Phil Henshaw-2]

Great, but there's a huge missing piece.   I see no recognition that
growth systems themselves actually represent real physical near-living
*things* on their way to becoming something else.  A growth system is
not a string of dots, a curve on a page, it's a spiral network of loops
in the world, that thread through the dots on the page.  

A growth system's interior network of loops has a rolling instability of
organizational development, that *always* turns into something else.
That's what growth is for.   There are internal speed-lag bumps, you
might call them, that get resolved or produce turbulence.   You don't
get that from reading measures of change, until you've spent a lot of
time reading the progressions of loops.   I see a recognition of that
inside perspective in the discussion yet.  

The amazing breadth of the misunderstanding is clearly displayed in the
global professional consensus that prosperity can be maintained with a
'stable system' of growth.  As soon as you restate that as a plan for
perpetual exploding complexity in our personal lives and their impacts
on the earth, the disconnect becomes apparent.  Maintaining a stable
system of growth is a perfect formula for general system failure caused
by complications you're not thinking about.  

If you look at the science I think it was quite obvious a hundred years
ago, and that's when we should have begun the transition away from
institutionalized compound growth stimulus...   With only 500 years of
3.5% growth you get a productivity enhancement of about 30 million.
Maybe you'd think that's something we could work with..., no?, if we
could still remember what it was for, I guess. :),

fyi a little more at http://www.synapse9.com/ObservingSystems.pdf &

 

> Hi Phil. Actually there's been quite a bit on growth, from
> cancer to the corporation to countries, not that I mean to
> imply any semantic parallels here (: There may or may not be
> computational or mathematical models to a greater or lesser
> degree. I think this is because so many of the presentations
> are domain driven to show a new approach and solution to the
> domain problem that "complexity thinking"--as many seem to
> say around here--offers. Representation of the problem and
> the solution varies.
>
> Mike
>
>
>
>
>
> >>> "Phil Henshaw" <sy at synapse9.com> 06/29/06 10:49 PM >>>
> Thanks,   There certainly seems to be a lot going on; 32
> major speakers
> and 320 papers in 16 sessions!  
>
> I searched the NECSI site for the subject of 'growth' and
> found 44 pages.  There was no mention of NECSI's growth
> itself, though that might
> have been interesting.   All but 7 hits were NECSI06 conference
> abstracts.  Only one clearly referred to dynamic system
> growth as involving changes in the organization of the
> system...  Everyone seems to assume growth refers to the
> shape of a curve, and not what's
> happening inside the thing producing the curve.  
>
> That seems remarkable given that a) growth curves are most
> commonly evidence of internal loops in local processes that
> are emerging as a system, and b) almost anything we can
> interpret as a natural system
> traceably comes into being by growth.  
>
> Shouldn't we use the curves to help point us toward what
> they're coming from?
>
>
>
>
>
>  
> > I'm at the NECSI conference in Boston this week and recommend
> > a look at the program web page with links to abstracts and
> > papers, http://www.necsi.org/community/wiki/index.php/ICCS06.
> > Extremely interesting variety of presentations.
> >
> > Mike
> >
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>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>