Just change “may well” to “will” to apply your analytical powers correctly. Humanity has the intelligence to collectively design and implement ever-more destructive uses of fire, but has only theoretical capacity for enforcing ultrasocial restraint.
Corporations at the helm, humanity is burning its way to civilizational collapse - the evidence is too voluminous and stark to permit hedging or softening.
What a wonderful summary! Essential discussion in the community garden as we grapple to understand the need for an urgent cultural override. The Maximum Power Principle (Lotka, Odum, Pinkerton) has driven evolution and succession - but humans have made it an artform, a Masterclass in Destructive Dissipation and Global Domination. Enabled by language, tool making, high fidelity cultural transmission, flexible large-scale cooperation with belief in global (flawed) Human Stories, “cleverness” (cf. wisdom), imagination and the capacity to ask “why?” and “what if?”, we have harvested energy flux at unprecedented levels to paint ourselves into tighter corners and dig ourselves into deeper holes. Thanks Bill!
….”Modern humans have created a mind-numbingly complex, rapidly changing world-system of overlapping cultural and biophysical sub-systems whose unpredictable behaviour constantly challenges our limited cognitive capacities. No one and no human institution is remotely capable of gaining control;”….
Greek root of entropy (“a turning toward” or “transformation”) aligns beautifully with the second law describing the direction of transformation—toward states with more possible micro-configurations. Do we not wish an increase in the possible?
I'm not sure we do. A functioning micro-chip (or computer, or cell-phone, etc.) is a negentropic, highly organized and very specific non-random (non-probable) ordering of its constituent atoms and molecules. Throw it into a blender and it will be reduced to any one of a vast number of 'more possible' micro-configurations, but none of these more randomly assorted (high entropy) distributions of atoms and molecules will have any useful function.
Looking at the opposite, to create one of these we throw the evolutionary climatic maximum into the blender to create this interface and have to close the loop due to its toxicity. Nature is not only the observable interactions but an evolutionary blue print to adaptability with vastly more processing power than we give it credit for all of which has coevolved to offer opportunity in all aspects of the life cycle.
So we are creating non species transferable interactions and isn’t this part of the problem? the sense that we need this method of interaction which is negatively impacting all others in its creation and reabsorption is in itself creating a closed loop not an open interactive one.
Thanks for this very clear summary of Nature's laws and finite limits. I think that Mother Earth changed the yellow lights to red lights and presented MTI humanity with a cease and desist order for breaking her laws probably about 20 years ago, but, unfortunately, most of our species just cannot hear her. I think that most of Homo sapiens transformed to what Bill Catton called "Homo colossus" sometime before the end of the last century.
Just change “may well” to “will” to apply your analytical powers correctly. Humanity has the intelligence to collectively design and implement ever-more destructive uses of fire, but has only theoretical capacity for enforcing ultrasocial restraint.
Corporations at the helm, humanity is burning its way to civilizational collapse - the evidence is too voluminous and stark to permit hedging or softening.
What a wonderful summary! Essential discussion in the community garden as we grapple to understand the need for an urgent cultural override. The Maximum Power Principle (Lotka, Odum, Pinkerton) has driven evolution and succession - but humans have made it an artform, a Masterclass in Destructive Dissipation and Global Domination. Enabled by language, tool making, high fidelity cultural transmission, flexible large-scale cooperation with belief in global (flawed) Human Stories, “cleverness” (cf. wisdom), imagination and the capacity to ask “why?” and “what if?”, we have harvested energy flux at unprecedented levels to paint ourselves into tighter corners and dig ourselves into deeper holes. Thanks Bill!
Thanks for a detailed but very understandable summary which all readers can use to share your message.
Encouraging and much appreciated!
Perhaps, homo sapiens has never actually been particularly sapiens. Not at a species level, at least. It is, indeed, a misnomer.
Bill thanks for this dose of reality
….”Modern humans have created a mind-numbingly complex, rapidly changing world-system of overlapping cultural and biophysical sub-systems whose unpredictable behaviour constantly challenges our limited cognitive capacities. No one and no human institution is remotely capable of gaining control;”….
You might have over looked the below possibility.
https://lite.evernote.com/note/ee411e1c-c69e-5e16-c340-c6d87c523fec
https://lite.evernote.com/note/ee411e1c-c69e-5e16-c340-c6d87c523fec
As Jefferson Starship knew:
"Nothing's forever".
And even earlier, Shakespeare wrote: "...the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind." (The Tempest)
Greek root of entropy (“a turning toward” or “transformation”) aligns beautifully with the second law describing the direction of transformation—toward states with more possible micro-configurations. Do we not wish an increase in the possible?
Hmm...
I'm not sure we do. A functioning micro-chip (or computer, or cell-phone, etc.) is a negentropic, highly organized and very specific non-random (non-probable) ordering of its constituent atoms and molecules. Throw it into a blender and it will be reduced to any one of a vast number of 'more possible' micro-configurations, but none of these more randomly assorted (high entropy) distributions of atoms and molecules will have any useful function.
Looking at the opposite, to create one of these we throw the evolutionary climatic maximum into the blender to create this interface and have to close the loop due to its toxicity. Nature is not only the observable interactions but an evolutionary blue print to adaptability with vastly more processing power than we give it credit for all of which has coevolved to offer opportunity in all aspects of the life cycle.
https://bioticregulation.substack.com/p/on-natures-complexity-and-human-morality
This was an interesting discussion on this related topic.
So we are creating non species transferable interactions and isn’t this part of the problem? the sense that we need this method of interaction which is negatively impacting all others in its creation and reabsorption is in itself creating a closed loop not an open interactive one.
Thanks for this very clear summary of Nature's laws and finite limits. I think that Mother Earth changed the yellow lights to red lights and presented MTI humanity with a cease and desist order for breaking her laws probably about 20 years ago, but, unfortunately, most of our species just cannot hear her. I think that most of Homo sapiens transformed to what Bill Catton called "Homo colossus" sometime before the end of the last century.
HH Sapiens would be a great name for our species (reading Nabokov it's a great way to be a dissipative strutture).
It has been said that when the gods created humans, a chance. was taken. Intelligence may not be a survival charcteristic.
Amen