Really appreciate your engagement, and your trying to understand the thesis (helped me a lot in trying to be ever more precise in formulation etc). Kindest regards.
OK. But anthills don't degrow. They grow, then exist at some particular scale, then end. So what can we learn that will sort our problems rather than us coming to a similar end?
I keep thinking that one gets a break from entropy at the beginning of development of a system...there is the growth phase, then the mature phase, then the end. What is the pattern of dissipation over the life of a system?
Exactly. What we can learn, for example, is that we should not focus on green energy transition (only making things worse) but only focus on reduction of energy use, which is only possible by reduction of complexity of the system (which takes very little energy but is extremely difficult to get right).
Re: your 2nd point: if you take example of an organism's life-cycle, again: the dissipative pattern sits not at the organisms level, but at the hosting system's level. The ecosystem dissipates energy more efficiently through all these individual lifecycles, like the eddies in turbulent water. My body is an eddy in the hosting ecosystem. Specific locality in time and space of these 'cycles' are emergent sweetspots/paths of least resistance within the uberfractals nonlinearly dissipating dynamic.
I don't think many people are going to want to understand this principle...if the point of the universe is to simply dissipate energy so that it can go back to the dissipated energy state from which it originated, it's not got much sales potential. That is sort of a joke, but sort of not. As a geologist, I totally accept that the planet has a limited lifetime because the sun will burn out eventually and, without an external energy source, the earth has no future. Evolution is a bit of a nicer story because people can put twists on that suggest humans have some higher standing in the evolutionary race. But a story which is life-agnostic, i.e. in which the only relevance of living organisms is to dissipate energy, doesn't have much interest for humans, as well as being pretty difficult for many to logically get to. Not to say that your insight isn't significant, but I'm not sure it is going to help get to any sort of transition.
I would have to say that it seems intuitive to me that we need to reduce energy use rather than add complexity with a 'green energy' (no such thing) transition. I think quite a lot of people are seeing that the degree of complexity we have reached is unsustainable although most have no good way to vocalise it and there is no incentive at a leadership level to change. Nor is there incentive from a historic perspective - we have been on the growth curve forever, literally in human terms. I think a more useful story might be one around organisms growing and then maintaining a relative stasis (before dying out, but leave that bit out...) because then one could convince people that we need to move into the stasis period. Not that that would be popular either!
You don't think that organisms made up of cells behave differently from ecosystems made up of different entities? There is no similar evolutionary driver for ecosystems to be self-propagating as organisms, I think. And organisms do not have a perpetual growth driver because of the physiological constraints of living tissue. I guess ecosystems have physiological constraints in terms of the conditions under which they live, but they are more like resource constraints than physiological constraints??? What I'm trying to get at here is whether the things that you are trying to compare with one another are actually similar enough at base to be compared. Do they have the same types of constraints? Physiological limits e.g. animals that are simply too big to move in order to get the food they need, seem somewhat different from resource limits. I get the comparison of economy with ecosystem much more than with ant or ant hill. But I see your point that all have different fractal levels.
Yes differently but only concerning the type of dominant transactional infrastructure at that scale.
Underlying dynamic is the same (at least that is what I perceive as my epiphany on nonlinear maximization of entropy production, which can only be recognized by looking through these mental, artificial boundaries and see the whole picture as a single fractal). I've tried to explain this in more detail in another publication (One of the biggest misunderstandings in science):
Principe of Entropy Production Maximization is badly understood and still not recognized as universally valid as 2nd law of thermodynamics itself, but I think it is the fundamental common denominator between the weather-systems, living systems, economic systems, etc, and makes you think of all these as just one system. I put out a paper on this principle here:
I am not disagreeing with anything you say, I am just trying to provide a lens at a higher abstraction level because I think it makes everything look the same, hoping it provides a better understanding of what is fundamentally going on, so we can fix root causes not symptoms.
I am still struggling with why you would consider an economic system parallel to a weather system or a living system. An economic system is a human construct. If we consider the economic system to be the sum total of human interactions with their environment then it might be parallel. But economic systems don't tend to encompass all human interactions, just a given subset.
1. because they are all essentially dissipative systems, but just use different kinds of dissipative infrastructure (organic, technological, thermodynamic, etc). That allows for comparative analysis, diagnostics and more effective policy-interventions. One can easily 'translate' the ant-hill or a bee-hive into a local economic system, right? We can learn from nonlinear equilibria in nature to clean up the mess from our linear economic models (I mean linear opposed to nonlinear, not opposed to the meaningless 'circular' concept).
2. because it is a step towards taking away our mental, aritificial boundaries around them and look at the earth system as one single dissipative system. Our current exponentially grown, globalized, high tech economy with its damaging effects, can then be recognized as essentially a tornado-like event within this earth system, at its peak.
Our 'economy system' is getting now fully experiencing the negative feedbackloops of 'ecosystems' (birdflu-outbreaks, soil degradation, etc etc) and the climate-system. It is a single metabolism, but currently with many qualitative changes.
If you introduce a fertilizer in the forest for anthills and they grow twice as big, it is not because 'ants want to do that'. In analogy, the current crisis is not caused by 'people always wanting to take more', but because changes in the dissipative infrastructure allow them to take more. So there is no difference between eco-/econ system. Au contraire, everything is a single system, a single, dynamic fractal.
I am convinced that only if one looks at everything as a single system, with a single driver for its dynamics, one can understand it.
I am not sure that there is a valid comparison between an organism (human) and a colony (ant hill) and an ecosystem (economy or plant/animal system). All of them do go through a progression of youth to maturity to senescence. Organism controlled by cellular factors driven by genetics. Ant hill by death of queen, which is cellular at one level but behavioural at another. Ecosystem through use of resources or external change. None of these 'degrow', they end. Hmmm...
Also, according to evolutionary concepts ants 'want' more ants. Humans 'want' more humans. Organisms replicate to increase their own numbers - there are built in physiological/behavioural mechanisms driving replication because if there aren't such mechanisms, the species dies out. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Equity and non-growth would seem to be in direct opposition to a whole lot of evolutionary forces!
Yes that is the consensus, but these 'want more' dynamics are actually converging dynamics towards some sweet-spot in between their fractally higher optimizing dynamics (local forest ecosystem in case of ant-hill) and fractally lower optimizing dynamics (ants etc). That principle holds for 'the forest' as well, and for 'the ant' itself as well. Growth is not an individual dynamic, but a systemically emergent behavior. Actually, 'the ant' does not exist, 'the ant-hill' does not exist, 'the forest' does not exist: it is one single complex, fractally dynamic system. We humans tend to zoom in at some intuitively convenient level (so-called Markov-blanket), but the fractal dynamic does not care about these mental boundaries. And that also holds for 'the economy'..
And then there is this book "Collapse of complex societies"... so yes 'Hmmm' ;)
I am not sure I understand the question “Why do economies” grow beyond the simplistic answer that when you combine people continually wanting more/better good services, with the inclusion of population growth in the more, economies must grow by definition if they comprise the production and consumption of goods and services. If people want less, then the natural state of the economy will be to shrink. I think questions about “economies” are often backwards because they try to take the people out of the question (and describe the ‘system’ mathematically) while economies are actually all about people. In contrast to ecosystems, which may relate to people, but don’t by necessity.
Thank you Jane. Actually I don't think it is in contrast, so I am trying to find the common denominator between ecosystems and economic systems. An ant-hill grows as well (up to some saturation point), for example, but not because 'ants want more/better'. So why does the ant-hill grow? Why does your body grow (up to some pt)? Just like ants and your bodily cells, where all surfing the wave of the same systemic undercurrent, which optimizes up to some sat-point.
If we understand why the ant-hill grows, or anything in ecosystems, we can better understand and redefine what it is that actually grows in the economy (GDP is just symptomatic). Which in turn holds the key to what we would like to degrow, in order to reach equity-levels within our normative framework again. Make sense?
In other words: homeostasis (micro to macro dynamics)
Love your explorations here- my father was the editor for the international Complexity Digest, professor at Santa Fe Institute, one of those mad scientists. Anyway, i think what you are writing about here is great.. I’ve been a dynamic systems nut my whole adult life (once i found my own way to it), and wrote an article on complexity/non-linear dynamics in childbirth.. I’m a midwife, so pretty tied up with emergent states/far-from-equilibrium stuff. Now part of the core committee of Degrowth Aotearoa/NZ. Keep me posted with your work. Sahra
In childbirth?? Ah found it, will definitely read it!
So great that you are on this committee, bridging the gap already ;)
Your father a 'mad' prof at SFI, that period and spot was instrumental for complexity sciences, must have been fascinating, nut or notyetnut..! Martijn
https://entropometrics.com has a link on the Contact page to my LinkedIn profile (also visible for non-members, I read you try to avoid social media accounts, very wise), where I am most active. Will get back on your childbirth-piece!
I want to understand this more deeply. Thanks for sharing
I'm going to be pondering on the concept of everything simply being a trip back to entropy for some time!
Really appreciate your engagement, and your trying to understand the thesis (helped me a lot in trying to be ever more precise in formulation etc). Kindest regards.
OK. But anthills don't degrow. They grow, then exist at some particular scale, then end. So what can we learn that will sort our problems rather than us coming to a similar end?
I keep thinking that one gets a break from entropy at the beginning of development of a system...there is the growth phase, then the mature phase, then the end. What is the pattern of dissipation over the life of a system?
Exactly. What we can learn, for example, is that we should not focus on green energy transition (only making things worse) but only focus on reduction of energy use, which is only possible by reduction of complexity of the system (which takes very little energy but is extremely difficult to get right).
Re: your 2nd point: if you take example of an organism's life-cycle, again: the dissipative pattern sits not at the organisms level, but at the hosting system's level. The ecosystem dissipates energy more efficiently through all these individual lifecycles, like the eddies in turbulent water. My body is an eddy in the hosting ecosystem. Specific locality in time and space of these 'cycles' are emergent sweetspots/paths of least resistance within the uberfractals nonlinearly dissipating dynamic.
I don't think many people are going to want to understand this principle...if the point of the universe is to simply dissipate energy so that it can go back to the dissipated energy state from which it originated, it's not got much sales potential. That is sort of a joke, but sort of not. As a geologist, I totally accept that the planet has a limited lifetime because the sun will burn out eventually and, without an external energy source, the earth has no future. Evolution is a bit of a nicer story because people can put twists on that suggest humans have some higher standing in the evolutionary race. But a story which is life-agnostic, i.e. in which the only relevance of living organisms is to dissipate energy, doesn't have much interest for humans, as well as being pretty difficult for many to logically get to. Not to say that your insight isn't significant, but I'm not sure it is going to help get to any sort of transition.
I would have to say that it seems intuitive to me that we need to reduce energy use rather than add complexity with a 'green energy' (no such thing) transition. I think quite a lot of people are seeing that the degree of complexity we have reached is unsustainable although most have no good way to vocalise it and there is no incentive at a leadership level to change. Nor is there incentive from a historic perspective - we have been on the growth curve forever, literally in human terms. I think a more useful story might be one around organisms growing and then maintaining a relative stasis (before dying out, but leave that bit out...) because then one could convince people that we need to move into the stasis period. Not that that would be popular either!
True that, well said! Thank you.
Perhaps 'healthy ageing' might provide for a viable narrative.
Just to check, what definition of “economy” are you using in your arguments?
Just the default supply/demand dynamics, monetary policy, financial markets, I guess, up to Jevon's paradox.
What the avg PhD curriculum tells you.
Still trying to understand the medium document - I put a comment there.
Thanks. i will go read the papers before I reply.
BTW I really really don't like that Wanaka tree!! Emblem of tourism stupidity.
You don't think that organisms made up of cells behave differently from ecosystems made up of different entities? There is no similar evolutionary driver for ecosystems to be self-propagating as organisms, I think. And organisms do not have a perpetual growth driver because of the physiological constraints of living tissue. I guess ecosystems have physiological constraints in terms of the conditions under which they live, but they are more like resource constraints than physiological constraints??? What I'm trying to get at here is whether the things that you are trying to compare with one another are actually similar enough at base to be compared. Do they have the same types of constraints? Physiological limits e.g. animals that are simply too big to move in order to get the food they need, seem somewhat different from resource limits. I get the comparison of economy with ecosystem much more than with ant or ant hill. But I see your point that all have different fractal levels.
Yes differently but only concerning the type of dominant transactional infrastructure at that scale.
Underlying dynamic is the same (at least that is what I perceive as my epiphany on nonlinear maximization of entropy production, which can only be recognized by looking through these mental, artificial boundaries and see the whole picture as a single fractal). I've tried to explain this in more detail in another publication (One of the biggest misunderstandings in science):
https://medium.com/@EntropoMetrics/one-of-the-biggest-misunderstandings-in-science-531b22e57ac8
Principe of Entropy Production Maximization is badly understood and still not recognized as universally valid as 2nd law of thermodynamics itself, but I think it is the fundamental common denominator between the weather-systems, living systems, economic systems, etc, and makes you think of all these as just one system. I put out a paper on this principle here:
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202103.0110/v1
I am not disagreeing with anything you say, I am just trying to provide a lens at a higher abstraction level because I think it makes everything look the same, hoping it provides a better understanding of what is fundamentally going on, so we can fix root causes not symptoms.
I am still struggling with why you would consider an economic system parallel to a weather system or a living system. An economic system is a human construct. If we consider the economic system to be the sum total of human interactions with their environment then it might be parallel. But economic systems don't tend to encompass all human interactions, just a given subset.
1. because they are all essentially dissipative systems, but just use different kinds of dissipative infrastructure (organic, technological, thermodynamic, etc). That allows for comparative analysis, diagnostics and more effective policy-interventions. One can easily 'translate' the ant-hill or a bee-hive into a local economic system, right? We can learn from nonlinear equilibria in nature to clean up the mess from our linear economic models (I mean linear opposed to nonlinear, not opposed to the meaningless 'circular' concept).
2. because it is a step towards taking away our mental, aritificial boundaries around them and look at the earth system as one single dissipative system. Our current exponentially grown, globalized, high tech economy with its damaging effects, can then be recognized as essentially a tornado-like event within this earth system, at its peak.
Our 'economy system' is getting now fully experiencing the negative feedbackloops of 'ecosystems' (birdflu-outbreaks, soil degradation, etc etc) and the climate-system. It is a single metabolism, but currently with many qualitative changes.
If you introduce a fertilizer in the forest for anthills and they grow twice as big, it is not because 'ants want to do that'. In analogy, the current crisis is not caused by 'people always wanting to take more', but because changes in the dissipative infrastructure allow them to take more. So there is no difference between eco-/econ system. Au contraire, everything is a single system, a single, dynamic fractal.
I am convinced that only if one looks at everything as a single system, with a single driver for its dynamics, one can understand it.
I am not sure that there is a valid comparison between an organism (human) and a colony (ant hill) and an ecosystem (economy or plant/animal system). All of them do go through a progression of youth to maturity to senescence. Organism controlled by cellular factors driven by genetics. Ant hill by death of queen, which is cellular at one level but behavioural at another. Ecosystem through use of resources or external change. None of these 'degrow', they end. Hmmm...
Also, according to evolutionary concepts ants 'want' more ants. Humans 'want' more humans. Organisms replicate to increase their own numbers - there are built in physiological/behavioural mechanisms driving replication because if there aren't such mechanisms, the species dies out. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Equity and non-growth would seem to be in direct opposition to a whole lot of evolutionary forces!
Yes that is the consensus, but these 'want more' dynamics are actually converging dynamics towards some sweet-spot in between their fractally higher optimizing dynamics (local forest ecosystem in case of ant-hill) and fractally lower optimizing dynamics (ants etc). That principle holds for 'the forest' as well, and for 'the ant' itself as well. Growth is not an individual dynamic, but a systemically emergent behavior. Actually, 'the ant' does not exist, 'the ant-hill' does not exist, 'the forest' does not exist: it is one single complex, fractally dynamic system. We humans tend to zoom in at some intuitively convenient level (so-called Markov-blanket), but the fractal dynamic does not care about these mental boundaries. And that also holds for 'the economy'..
And then there is this book "Collapse of complex societies"... so yes 'Hmmm' ;)
I am not sure I understand the question “Why do economies” grow beyond the simplistic answer that when you combine people continually wanting more/better good services, with the inclusion of population growth in the more, economies must grow by definition if they comprise the production and consumption of goods and services. If people want less, then the natural state of the economy will be to shrink. I think questions about “economies” are often backwards because they try to take the people out of the question (and describe the ‘system’ mathematically) while economies are actually all about people. In contrast to ecosystems, which may relate to people, but don’t by necessity.
Thank you Jane. Actually I don't think it is in contrast, so I am trying to find the common denominator between ecosystems and economic systems. An ant-hill grows as well (up to some saturation point), for example, but not because 'ants want more/better'. So why does the ant-hill grow? Why does your body grow (up to some pt)? Just like ants and your bodily cells, where all surfing the wave of the same systemic undercurrent, which optimizes up to some sat-point.
If we understand why the ant-hill grows, or anything in ecosystems, we can better understand and redefine what it is that actually grows in the economy (GDP is just symptomatic). Which in turn holds the key to what we would like to degrow, in order to reach equity-levels within our normative framework again. Make sense?
In other words: homeostasis (micro to macro dynamics)
Love your explorations here- my father was the editor for the international Complexity Digest, professor at Santa Fe Institute, one of those mad scientists. Anyway, i think what you are writing about here is great.. I’ve been a dynamic systems nut my whole adult life (once i found my own way to it), and wrote an article on complexity/non-linear dynamics in childbirth.. I’m a midwife, so pretty tied up with emergent states/far-from-equilibrium stuff. Now part of the core committee of Degrowth Aotearoa/NZ. Keep me posted with your work. Sahra
In childbirth?? Ah found it, will definitely read it!
So great that you are on this committee, bridging the gap already ;)
Your father a 'mad' prof at SFI, that period and spot was instrumental for complexity sciences, must have been fascinating, nut or notyetnut..! Martijn
ha you make me laugh! yes to all you say. where do i find out more about your background Martijn?
https://entropometrics.com has a link on the Contact page to my LinkedIn profile (also visible for non-members, I read you try to avoid social media accounts, very wise), where I am most active. Will get back on your childbirth-piece!