This is your brain on regeneration - excellent interview with Gregory Landua of Terra Genesis

Kevin Kelly's "Nine Laws of God" from his book "Out of Control"

This is from the book "Out of Control" By Kevin Kelly - 

These principles and his approach are another language of "systems thinking" applied to economics and business - which we in Green Economy Think Tank community in the framing of "biomimicry for finance." 

Kelly wrote:

"First there is hard rock planet; then there is life, lots of it. First barren hills; then brooks with fish and cattails and red-winged blackbirds. First an acorn; then an oak tree forest.

I'd like to be able to do that. First a hunk of metal; then a robot. First some wires; then a mind. First some old genes; then a dinosaur.

"How do you make something from nothing? Although nature knows this trick, we haven't learned much just by watching her. We have learned more by our failures in creating complexity and by combining these lessons with small successes in imitating and understanding natural systems. So from the frontiers of computer science, and the edges of biological research, and the odd corners of interdisciplinary experimentation, I have compiled The Nine Laws of God governing the incubation of somethings from nothing:

• Distribute being
• Control from the bottom up
• Cultivate increasing returns
• Grow by chunking
• Maximize the fringes
• Honor your errors
• Pursue no optima; have multiple goals
• Seek persistent disequilibrium
• Change changes itself.

"These nine laws are the organizing principles that can be found operating in systems as diverse as biological evolution and SimCity. Of course I am not suggesting that they are the only laws needed to make something from nothing; but out of the many observations accumulating in the science of complexity, these principles are the broadest, crispest, and most representative generalities. I believe that one can go pretty far as a god while sticking to these nine rules."

"Distribute being. The spirit of a beehive, the behavior of an economy, the thinking of a supercomputer, and the life in me are distributed over a multitude of smaller units (which themselves may be distributed). When the sum of the parts can add up to more than the parts, then that extra being (that something from nothing) is distributed among the parts. Whenever we find something from nothing, we find it arising from a field of many interacting smaller pieces. All the mysteries we find most interesting -- life, intelligence, evolution -- are found in the soil of large distributed systems."

"Control from the bottom up. When everything is connected to everything in a distributed network, everything happens at once. When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command. A mob can steer itself, and in the territory of rapid, massive, and heterogeneous change, only a mob can steer. To get something from nothing, control must rest at the bottom within simplicity."

"Cultivate increasing returns. Each time you use an idea, a language, or a skill you strengthen it, reinforce it, and make it more likely to be used again. That's known as positive feedback or snowballing. Success breeds success. In the Gospels, this principle of social dynamics is known as "To those who have, more will be given." Anything which alters its environment to increase production of itself is playing the game of increasing returns. And all large, sustaining systems play the game. The law operates in economics, biology, computer science, and human psychology. Life on Earth alters Earth to beget more life. Confidence builds confidence. Order generates more order. Them that has, gets."

"Grow by chunking. The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization -- such as intelligence or a market economy -- without growing it, inevitably lead to failure. To assemble a prairie takes time -- even if you have all the pieces. Time is needed to let each part test itself against all the others. Complexity is created, then, by assembling it incrementally from simple modules that can operate independently."

"Maximize the fringes. In heterogeneity is creation of the world. A uniform entity must adapt to the world by occasional earth-shattering revolutions, one of which is sure to kill it. A diverse heterogeneous entity, on the other hand, can adapt to the world in a thousand daily minirevolutions, staying in a state of permanent, but never fatal, churning. Diversity favors remote borders, the outskirts, hidden corners, moments of chaos, and isolated clusters. In economic, ecological, evolutionary, and institutional models, a healthy fringe speeds adaptation, increases resilience, and is almost always the source of innovations."

"Honor your errors. A trick will only work for a while, until everyone else is doing it. To advance from the ordinary requires a new game, or a new territory. But the process of going outside the conventional method, game, or territory is indistinguishable from error. Even the most brilliant act of human genius, in the final analysis, is an act of trial and error. "To be an Error and to be Cast out is a part of God's Design," wrote the visionary poet William Blake. Error, whether random or deliberate, must become an integral part of any process of creation. Evolution can be thought of as systematic error management."

"Pursue no optima; have multiple goals. Simple machines can be efficient, but complex adaptive machinery cannot be. A complicated structure has many masters and none of them can be served exclusively. Rather than strive for optimization of any function, a large system can only survive by "satisficing" (making "good enough") a multitude of functions. For instance, an adaptive system must trade off between exploiting a known path of success (optimizing a current strategy), or diverting resources to exploring new paths (thereby wasting energy trying less efficient methods). So vast are the mingled drives in any complex entity that it is impossible to unravel the actual causes of its survival. Survival is a many-pointed goal. Most living organisms are so many-pointed they are blunt variations that happen to work, rather than precise renditions of proteins, genes, and organs. In creating something from nothing, forget elegance; if it works, it's beautiful."

"Seek persistent disequilibrium. Neither constancy nor relentless change will support a creation. A good creation, like good jazz, must balance the stable formula with frequent out-of-kilter notes. Equilibrium is death. Yet unless a system stabilizes to an equilibrium point, it is no better than an explosion and just as soon dead. A Nothing, then, is both equilibrium and disequilibrium. A Something is persistent disequilibrium -- a continuous state of surfing forever on the edge between never stopping but never falling. Homing in on that liquid threshold is the still mysterious holy grail of creation and the quest of all amateur gods."

"Change changes itself. Change can be structured. This is what large complex systems do: they coordinate change. When extremely large systems are built up out of complicated systems, then each system begins to influence and ultimately change the organizations of other systems. That is, if the rules of the game are composed from the bottom up, then it is likely that interacting forces at the bottom level will alter the rules of the game as it progresses. Over time, the rules for change get changed themselves. Evolution -- as used in everyday speech -- is about how an entity is changed over time. Deeper evolution -- as it might be formally defined -- is about how the rules for changing entities over time change over time. To get the most out of nothing, you need to have self-changing rules."

Emergence of a new world and a new human, reflections from a futurist in 1993, applies today.

“The emergence of a new world and a new human. We are on the edge of the most extraordinary shifts in the history of the planet, and they are affecting everything—economics, agriculture, health care, the legal system, ecology, banking. We are seeing how every set of legacy systems we have is fundamentally flawed and now imploding. And what it’s all producing is a vacuum. What’s more, the principles underpinning these systems have the embedded incentives that encourage the behavior creating the implosions. We need to address, in every area, the structural aspects of values. The present economic system is changing, for example—from one where there is no consideration other than profit, to one of larger social structure and integrity. This stuff is not of the future. It’s fundamental to who we are and where we live now.”  - John Petersen Futurist, Philosopher

Evolution out of the Pirate Economy into the economy for the 100%!

Below is an excerpt of Bucky Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, thought provoking, indeed.

"This is the essence of human evolution upon Spaceship Earth. If the present planting of humanity upon Spaceship Earth cannot comprehend this inexorable process and discipline itself to serve exclusively that function of metaphysical mastering of the physical it will be discontinued, and it's potential mission in universe will be carried on by the metaphysically endowed capabilities of other beings on other spaceship planets of the universe."

"The Great Pirates did run the world. They were the first and last to do so. They were world men, and they ran the world with ruthless and brilliant pragmatism based on the mis-seemingly 'fundamental' information of their scientifically specialized servants. First came their Royal Society scientific servants, with their 'Great' Second Law of thermodynamics, whose 'entropy' showed that every energy machine kept losing energy and eventually 'ran down.' In their pre-speed-of-light-measurement misconceptioning of an omni-simultaneous - 'instant universe' - that universe, as an energy machine was thought, also to be 'running down.' And thus the energy wealth and life support were erroneously thought to be in continuous depletion - originating the misconception of 'spending.'"

"Next came Thomas Malthus, professor of political economics of the Great Pirate's East India Company who said that man was multiplying himself at a geometrical rate rate and that food was multiplying i=only at an arithmetical rate. And lastly, thirty five years later, came the G.P.'s biological specialist servant, Charles Darwin, who, explaining his theory of animate evolution, said that survival was only for the fittest."

"Quite clearly to the Great Pirates it was a scientific fact that not only was there not enough to go around but apparently not enough to go around for even 1 percent of humanity to live at a satisfactorily-sustaining standard of living. And because of entropy the inadequacy would always increase. Hence, said the G.P.'s survival was obviously a cruel and almost hopeless battle. They rand the world on the basis that these Malthusian-Darwinian entropy concepts were absolute scientific laws, for that was what their scientifically respected, intellectual slave specialists had told them."

"Then we have the great pragmatic ideologist Marx running into that entropic-Malthusian-Darwinian information and saying, 'Well, the workers who produce things are the fittest because they are the only ones who know how to physically produce and therefore they ought to be the ones who survive.' That was the beginning of the great 'class warfare.' All of the ideologies range somewhere between the Great Pirates and the Marxists. But all of them assume there is not enough to go around. And that's been the rationalized working hypothesis of all the great sovereign claims to great areas of the Earth. Because of their respective exclusivities, all the class warfare ideologies have become extinct. Why? Because science now finds there can be ample for all, but only if the sovereign fences are completely removed. The basic you-or-me-not-enough-for-both ergo, some-one-must-die tenets of the class warfaring are extinct."

Worthy of reflection, and inspires new approaches to the current narrative of excess, waste, scarcity and greed. While he did not account for population growth, global warming, the gyres of endless plastic, etc. he highlights some repositioning of our memes toward making humanity work toward the goal of all systems to serve 100% of humanity based on possibilities of abundance in his earlier book, Ideas and Integrities where he states

"The entire world's industrial resources are now preoccupied in serving only 44 per cent of humanity with the advancing standards of living exclusively provided by the world's progressively enlarging and integrating industrial networks. Making the world's totally available resources serve one hundred percent of an exploding population may only be accomplished by a boldly accelerated design evolution which adequately increases present over-all performance per units of invested resources. This is a task of radical technical innovation rather than political rationalization. It is a task that can only be accomplished by the world's architects, inventors and scientist-artists."

Interview with me on Bob Pritchard

I was recently interviewed on the radio surrounding my views of Sustainable, Responsible and Impact Investing in the current environment - and you can hear it here starting at minute 17:45 https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/96778/the-iphone-turns-10

The essence of money - wisdom of the ancients alive!