Self Organization

Universe not caused by outside other as laws, influences or "Super".

Ignoring as response: threat to power and control. Behaviorism

Implications for education

Representational systems

N.nets map reality

Maps of maps: signs as one to one with objects in space location.

Maps in the neocortex of map codes in the lower brains. Symbols with time location and time binding.

Sensation as map of objects in single layers. Awareness and recognition. semantics, meaning and labels as "odor" brain. "God named the animals etc."

Emotion as maps of resonance of outcomes of competitive alternatives in lateral nets of reptilian brain. Is cognition! Training the Animal!

Words and thought as maps of code which can be used to code: Third Eye

Sharing and connection: virtual skull! Self organization of words and chaos in path with similar outcome.

step backwards in intelligence.

In 1991, I read in a book from the Seltzer Library that "Culture is Biologically impossible because neural networks in all living systems and especially human brains are self organizing". Given my background in the Arts and long time association with Asian and especially Buddhist Philosophy, it made perfect sense to me. What didn't make sense is why the scientific community had not said a word about this even to this date. The consequences of this finding, which can be called a law of nature, for education which relies on Behaviorism's operand conditioning theories is devastating: all this research has been made invalid in its foundation and interpretation of living systems as nothing but machines with no consciousness! The behaviorists and educators had turned the human activity of sharing and acknowledging the successful representation of reality by another into mechanical "reward"! Praise and good feelings of connection became mechanical procedures of reward and punishment! But then science has proved that smoking is addictive and dangerous at best. So what if science proved that the use of certain disproved theories would result in a Hugh movement by a large portion of our culture away from being a part of culture. In fact resulting in this population forming anti-cultural groups that are more a threat to governing in the United States that any Communist Red menace ever was. I wrote letters to educators and agencies that worked with these "Gangs" and was told that it had nothing to do with their work!

I have started this lecture by sharing my feelings, but I will represent the scientific method as a brilliant new step in the evolution of human culture. I see the application of the information I am presenting here as supporting change in individuals and culture.

SO WHAT? This is a description of "Buddha nature" that is self originating and creativity. But here self organization is fundamental and following others or tradition is the later stage of development. Then the contrast between Asian and European culture becomes clearer by seeing the context. In European Judaic Christian traditions, self organization was expected [being an individual] so religion [especially Christian] emphasized group process as the balance, whereas in Asia Group process as defined by Confucian structures was expected, so the individualism of Buddha nature was the balance!

Outline for classes:

18.7 Self organization and impossibility of Culture: God as creator, Buddha as Self originating. Neural nets in biological systems must be self organizing. Supervision, teaching and consequently culture are biologically impossible from the simple point of view that one can do something that will cause or automatically produce change in another.

Consciousness as procedure: Objects resolve into a final state that is experienced as awareness when they are "attached to" process and procedures of self other interaction and evaluation of the actions outcomes. Thus awareness could be called time dependant action - movement start states. The neural nets as a digital fractal sundial can be a metaphor for consciousness: The inner states that learn to respond to an input by projecting the result as a shadow on a surface, yet can from the same pattern project a different result at a different time, measured in discrete quanta, is the experience of consciousness. This means that the awareness of a complete environment is like the single digits displayed in response to our focus on some environment. This "response" is constructed from the learning that has previously taken place, and is constructed into the structure of the fractal sundial. Information as procedures involving the person and their environment is the sundial's inner structure and what we call the "self" is the light and the experience of the result. As the phase angle of the activating light changes, so does the resulting answer. Consciousness is the experience of this totality of possible solutions contained in the sundial as well as the particular questioning intent and "thought" response as the shadow. This metaphor relates to n.nets in this way: each layer of the digital sundial interrupts the incoming light, and passes it on to the next layer. Another and perhaps clearer metaphor is of  a hologram. The hologram is made of interference patterns in the phase space, and if these interference patterns are to be found as cycles in the time domain, then the resulting objects would be procedures. That is procedures encoded by encoding the steps by connections with a coherent cycle. The output would be reconstructed by the same coherent cycle. This would be a direct involvement of the cosmos in consciousness. This level of process would be cycle dependant, whereas human consciousness is cycle independent. Thus this may be more our emotional animal consciousness and the sundial as more a metaphor of the single pattern human shared brain consciousness. Thus the transform from an analogue to a digital sundial may refer to language. Humans becoming the light or God like may be the freedom we have in doing procedures at any time independent of cycles and "natural” motivation. This is the distributed system, as any angle is accessible by any human, and each angle produces a different orientation to "reality" as distributed work - specialties.

>The point is that each moment of awareness is constructed of a set of ready to go procedures completely available for employment. Humans feel they must decide or think of action, but this is a secondary process analogues to changing the phase angle of the input light on the metaphorical sundial. As I will explain later, thinking is also a perception process, and not independent of total life systems as often modeled by those who see humans as some independently superior creature "above" the animals. The awareness of our surrounding space has pre-calculated components that we "take for granted", namely: front / back, left / right, and up / down. Our consciousness then "locates" objects in terms of these dimensions. This process of location is called a zero dimension cognitive process. Connecting or defining a single weighted relationship between one or more one objects and one or more separate other object is a one dimension cognitive process. Defining connections between sets of one dimensional relationships is a two dimension cognitive process which produces a surface with attractive basins and repulsion highs. Defining a geometry to these two dimensional surfaces is a three dimensional process. An example would be the mobiuse strip relationship between what is seen as our male and female side. Our cognitive processes are pre-calculated within the same congruent dimensions in the visual and/or social spaces. Since these "spaces" are "there" we accept them as reality even though they may have predefined attractive basins built in as preferences and so called heredity. In social spaces mapped from a global frame of reference:  1. the front is the sign and the back the constellation. 2. The sides are the male / female gender persona "charts". 3. The moons and planetary nodes are the up / down - higher / lower rankings. They relate to the chakras or environmental quality levels when combined with the dimensions of the planets.  a. zero to .5 dimension is to keep or control the "place" or location or label. Autocratic. Sun/moon. Touch and smell? b. One dimension is to control the ranking relationship of better / worse. Peer group? Mars. hearing? c. Two dimension is to control the interactions and procedures - data communication flow. competition? Family structures? Jupiter. "reptilian - predator" vision? d. Three dimension is to control the participation? resonance? Social and cultural structures. Saturn. Depth vision? e. four dimension is to control the global points or geometry / framework resulting in control of the forces / intensities / peace - stress? Religious structures? Rotations, stretch etc of coordinate surfaces? f. Four or five dimension is to control the emergence organic structure? Evolution? spiritual?   historical? Change of structures? Neptune. Attractor patterns / full dimensional catastrophe structure?

At the root of self originating Mind is a connection with the whole evolutional history of our biosphere and with all life and processes including physical cycles. The push toward diversity of species that is implied in the use of the term "self originating" does not imply a disconnection or isolation from a whole, but a process of co evolution: all species developing together from a single source and containing this single changing source that is the "cosmos". Greater diversity, far from being a disconnecting event, and only happen in a environment of greater interdependence. My readings indicate that many others who had similar enlightenment experiences report a new consciousness of the connectedness of all life and beyond. My scientific cultural training Citra 1958, which points to an evolution by random processes, disconnected from other life and lifeless matter, seemed to totally contradict these experiences. This contradiction still exists as the psychiatric frame of reference which labels this as merely a grandiose feeling – remembrance of the "real womb". If I had my experience in 1980, I might have studied general systems theory of self originating evolutional and information systems, But the available writings at that time were the "mystical" works of Ospensky, Tibetan Buddhism, and Judaic Kabala. In 1967 I started to study the system of connections traditionally labeled "Astrology", but not as a passive system of "influences", but as an active process of development where the physical cycles are incorporated and used by life processes as information indexes by which to build time binding structures. In this book I am ignoring the obvious scientific objection to even the possibility of any global - cosmic awareness abilities in cells or cellular structures, and am focusing on the paradigms implied in any cultures Astrology, Religion, and parapsychology. First: Human consciousness is a mapping of the entire ecosystem onto one collective human psychic life as the Zodiac of animals, insects, and plants. This implies that human personality is fragmented and interconnected. Second: Each species contains a complete map of the entire ecosystem, split into self and other, that coevolves from a single source simultaneously in all species. This touches on the religious ideas of gods and spirit present in all cultures. My system models human phenomena such as language, learning, psychology, sociology, religion, Mind, and a beginning of a physical - medical model connected by acupuncture daily cycles.

Self organizing universe: self organizing systems have fluctuations. They take in free energy and give off entropy: entropy as disorganization is Shit and piss. At equilibrium points of dawn spring, shit or large intestine [ Taurus in tauran age was spring] and the kidney function separates the good from the bad as sunset - fall [as fruit and dead leaves] . This is the 12th hex; which is an easy association, but does this include large intestine? or is LI related to 11th hex? Cap. as earth is related to yin, then the cycle is anticlockwise as signs. Does this relate to an evolutional past as these information structures were developed when our ancestors were nocturnal competing in a reptilian dominated ecosystem?

The attitude of science is to find out what problems exist, what are their causes and how to fix the problem, not to use what they know to enslave others! This was the attitude of the Roman empire and for me not what a real spiritual person would do or think: "You are the sheep and I am the shepherd!" That is the attitude of a beginner in the spiritual path who ends up starting a cult!

When we see that we are human we see that we can create our own videos by using the cameras and sound recorders and computer that is our neo-cortex! But we can also share the videos made by other humans!

In this metaphor of mind the planets are like many different speeds of the video recorders and dubbing - mixing procedures.

2. Dissipative Structures: Autopoiesis

Nothing in excess. Inscription carved on the temple of Apollo at Delphi

Spontaneous structuration

The examples used in the preceding chapter to demonstrate the spontaneous formation of hydrodynamic structures (turbulent flow and Benard cells) were characterized by outside imposition of the energy penetration by means of water pressure and heating of the liquid, respectively. The emergent structures represent the manner in which the system copes with increased energy and mass penetration. Of much greater interest, however, are those physical-chemical reaction systems which themselves maintain energy and matter penetration by way of exchange with the environment and which give rise to the self-organization of globally stable structures over extended periods of time. These structures are the dissipative structures in the narrow sense of the word. They have been called that way because they maintain continuous entropy production and dissipate the accruing entropy. They emerge from dissipative self-organization, in contrast to conservative self-organization which uses the static (attracting or repelling) forces in the system itself.

The most frequently cited example for a dissipative structure is the so-called Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, discovered 1958 and named for its Russian investigators (Zhabotinsky, 1974). It involves the oxidation of malonic acid by bromate in a sulphuric acid solution and in the presence of cerium (or also iron or manganese) ions. If certain conditions are met, concentric or rotating spiral waves may be observed which lead to interference patterns (see Fig. 2). In this and similar reaction systems pulsations of great regularity may be observed which may last for many hours, so that one also speaks of "chemical clocks". Or there are periodical bursts of sudden chemical activity which, as "chemical vectors", may prefer certain spatial directions, or the welling-up of concentric chemical waves and other dynamic phenomena which sometimes become even more spectacular by the play of bright colours by which they are accompanied.

For the spontaneous formation of such structures in chemical reaction systems, a "generalized" thermodynamics by Glansdorff and Prigogine (1971) stipulates precise conditions. They include openness with respect to the exchange of energy and matter with the environment, far from equilibrium conditions and auto- or crosscatalytic steps in the reaction chain. The last point means that certain molecules participate in reactions in which they are necessary for the formation of molecules of their own kind (autocatalysis), or first for the formation of molecules of an intermediate kind and subsequently of their own kind (crosscatalysis). The result is a type of behaviour which is called non-linear and which is characterized by runaway processes. In technological cybernetics, such a behaviour is called positive feedback--a deviation from a given reference value is not eliminated, but increases. The global population explosion and other growth factors in the human contemporary world are examples for autocatalytic non-linearities. In our case, however, they are not scary, but constitute an essential factor in the creative act of gestalt formation.

Dissipative structures exhibit two different types of behaviour: near their equilibrium, order is destroyed (as it is in isolated systems), but far from equilibrium, order is maintained or emerges beyond instability thresholds. The latter type of behaviour is called coherent behaviour. As long as dissipative structures exist, they produce entropy. However, this entropy does not accumulate in the system but is part of a continuous energy exchange with the environment. It is not the statistical measure of the entropy share in the total energy of the system at a given moment that characterizes a dissipative structure, but the dynamic measure of the rate of entropy production and of the exchange with the environment--in other words, the intensity of energy penetration and conversion.

Whereas free energy and new reaction participants are imported, entropy and reaction end products are exported--we find here the metabolism of a system in its simplest manifestation. With the help of this energy and matter exchange with the environment, the system maintains its inner non-equilibrium, and the non-equilibrium, in turn, maintains the exchange processes. One may think of the image of a person who stumbles, loses his equilibrium and can only avoid falling on his nose by continuing to stumble forward. A dissipative structure continuously renews itself and maintains a particular dynamic regime, a globally stable space-time structure. It seems to be interested solely in its own integrity and self-renewal.

There is a remarkable parallel to a new theory of subatomic particles which has been founded by Geoffrey Chew (1968) in Berkeley and which is also called the "bootstrap model". It is based on pure process thinking and considers the so-called "hadrons" (which include, in particular, the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus) as temporarily stable configurations which result from the interaction of processes. Hadrons may transform themselves into each other and help other hadrons in their transformations. They may appear as composite particles, constituents of other particles, or binding forces. The actually unfolding process chains and the resulting process webs are unpredictable, but they obey certain rules. These rules are based on a single fundamental principle, self-consistency. Whatever comes into being has to be consistent with itself and with everything else. A reduction of physical reality to basic building blocks or even to basic laws is not possible according to this concept which is in full development. As we shall see later, the open evolution of the macrocosmos, too, may be understood as being based on nothing else but self-consistency.

A hierarchy of characteristic system aspects

By its very nature, a system cannot be described by the sum of single properties. However, it is possible to make significant distinctions by looking at certain aspects of the whole system. The most essential system aspects include the following ones which, in the order in which they are enumerated, also form a hierarchy in ascending order.

With respect to its relations with the environment, a system is called open that maintains exchange with its environment--especially exchange of matter, energy and information--and that is open toward the new and unexpected (toward novelty, as we shall call it later). Systems without exchange with their environment are called isolated. An exchange with the environment can be maintained by the system itself only when its internal state is in nonequilibrium; otherwise, the processes would die down.

The (logical) organization of a system refers to the characteristic pattern in which processes are linked in the system. It may be represented by a flow scheme. Of particular importance is cyclical (closed circular) process organization which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 10. The dissipative systems which interest us here in the first line are organized in hypercycles, as Manfred Eigen called this particular organization.

A hypercycle is a closed circle of transformatory or catalytic processes in which one or more participants act as autocatalysts. The above-mentioned Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, for example, may be represented as a hypercycle formed by the intermediary products X, Y, Z (see Fig. 3). In order to maintain a specific sense of rotation--in Fig. 3 in a clockwise sense--there has to be nonequilibrium. The "inner" process circle renews itself continuously and, as a whole, acts like a catalyst which transforms starting products into end products.

Another important aspect of system organization concerns the arrangement of processes at one or more levels. Among multilevel systems, hierarchic systems are of particular importance. In such systems, each level includes all lower levels--there are systems within systems within systems... within the total system in question. As will be shown in later chapters, evolution leads to differentiation in multilevel, hierarchic systems.

/Fractals and scales!!

The function of a system embraces the total characteristics of its processes, including the relations with the environment and the system organization, but beyond that the kinetics of the individual processes also and their interaction. The logical scheme of relations appears here in the framework of time.

The function of autopoiesis (from the Greek for "self-production") occupies a special place. It has been introduced in the early 1970s by the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana and has been further developed by him in collaboration with Francisco Varela and Ricardo Uribe. A system is autopoietic when its function is primarily geared to self-renewal. A biological cell, for example, is autopoietic in its balanced self-renewal through the interplay of anabolic and catabolic reaction chains; over longer periods, it does not consist of the same molecules. An autopoietic system refers in the first line to itself and is therefore also called self-referential. In contrast, an allopoietic system, such as a machine, refers to a function given from outside, such as the production of a specific output.

The structure of a system has long been understood primarily in terms of its spatial structure. In connection with dynamic systems, however, the notion of a space-time structure is of importance, or in other words a structure given in a particular moment of time which represents not only the spatial arrangements, but also the kinetics effective in this moment at each spatial point. Such a space-time structure includes the function of the system, and thus also its organization and its relations with the environment. The co-operative principle of dissipative self-organization becomes manifest in the spatio-temporal order of interactive processes--in the space-time structure. It is the disssipative structure which is responsible for ordering the processes in such a way that there is balance between generation and degeneration, that the autocatalytic self-reproduction in the system does not blow it up into pieces and keeps it imprisoned in its own tread-mill.

A time sequence of space-time structures yields the total system dynamics. It may be organized from outside the system, such as in the case of a machine operated from without, or it may be self-organizing. In self-organization, as has already been mentioned, conservative and dissipative modes may be distinguished. Conservative self-organization may lead to static or dynamic (steady-state) equilibrium systems; an example for the latter class is the solar system with its rotating planets. In this book, we are primarily interested in dissipative self-organization.

These hierarchically ordered, six system aspects may be summarized so as

From "Self Organizing Systems:"

Overcoming reductionism

From every-day experience we know what happens if we open a water tap. At first, the water jet is smooth, perfectly round and transparent; the physicist calls this laminar flow. But if we open the tap further and thereby increase the water pressure, this image changes abruptly at a certain point. The water jet forms strands and presents itself in a dynamic structure which somehow conveys the impression of being "muscular". This is the typical appearance of turbulent flow which remains unchanged for a while and, if the tap is opened even wider, changes over abruptly to other, similar structures. The beautiful regularity of the laminar jet, which almost seemed to stand still, is destroyed and disorder seems to rule.

But appearances betray truth. It is precisely in turbulent flow that a higher degree of order rules. Whereas in laminar flow the movement of the individual water molecules follow a random statistical law, turbulent flow groups them together in powerful streams which, in their overall effect, permit an increase of throughflow.