My World of “Ought to Be”
by Timothy Wilken, MD










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Wednesday, October 23, 2002
 

Elsewhere this morning on SynEARTH see: Necessary Evil and Survival Requires Synergy


More Reader Reactions

 
Chris Lucas responds to Synergic Efficiency

 
Hey Chris,
 
 
Do we really need 30 different kinds of toilet paper.
Chris: If 30 preferences exist then yes ! After all we are trying to maximise the quality of life of everyone, not some mythical 'average' person. That does not mean we need useless products, but who is to decide what they are if not the actual 'customer' ? What we don't need is the endless advertising and branding we have today which is only necessary due to imagined need to compete to meet 'sales targets' and to 'make a living'. Can't recall how you envisaged the necessities of life being provided in your synergic society however (if you have covered that in any detail).
My original paper was about increasing organizational effiency. Thirty preferences in toilet paper is a luxury that an energy poor humanity may not be able to indulge. I argued that it was theoretically possible to gain 10 to 100 orders of magnitude in energy effiency. That possibility requires working together and making efficient choices. Some have argued that today every modern human has 1000 slaves waiting on him/her night and day in energy equivalence. Once we have burned all the fossil fuels. A task we will accomplish in less than two hundred years the free ride is over. I am just hopeful we won't be wiping our backside with a corn cob.

but once that design is found only the best product should be manufactured.
Chris: By whom ? One of the problems of monopolies is that such 'state' (or corporate) controlled processes rapid degenerate into inertia driven bureaucracies, hence we probably need many different (non-competing) manufacturing facilities (each small enough to change production adaptively - being responsive to customers). Thus diversity of product is a natural feature of the process and not a problem to be avoided as long as we avoid overproduction and production for the sake of it.
Decision is synergic organization is desseminated. This is possible with use of synergic consensus and synergic veto. The mechanism is well explained in ORTEGRITY. On a larger scale it is called Synocracy. Anyone interested in the design of toilet paper can join the design jury. By design every member of the community has the right to participate in the process. I expect a large diversity in the design process. And if community wants some options they can have them. But all actions have consequences. Energy consequences. And, if we seek efficiency we will have to act responsibly.

Now let us examine the most successful living system. The human body. We don't find 12 different kinds of hearts in 12 different people. They all have the same heart at least in terms of design.
Chris: But different creatures do have different hearts... And people are far more different in interests than animals are in heart function !
There would be different tools for different functions. I am talking different tools for for the same function. If we can have a competition not 1000 different products to serve one function, but rather a competition of 1000 different designs to serve that function, selected down by consensus to 10 prototypes, custom built and tested with one winner that then gets manufactured by the best builder, how much energy might we save?

This is a misunderstanding of the synergic veto. The only basis for a synergic veto is to prevent someone from losing.
Chris: O.K., but stopping people doing something assumes that they would think that they would lose. It is of course all negotiable, it was just the coercive overtones I was commenting upon ;- )
There is no coercion in synergic organization. All decision is by synergic consensus.

I think we may be talking about apples and oranges. I envision  a continuous design competition to create an ever changing state of art solution to various problems. The best solutions--those that solve the problem the most elegantly, i.e. ergometric fit, efficiency, beauty, etc. etc.. would win.
Chris: But we cannot do this in isolation like some external God, all products need to be developed coevolutionarily, i.e. we try them out in the real world, not design them on paper and impose the result on everyone. Hence diversity is really only the practical solution. Those that don't work people won't reuse or reorder. There seems to be an authoritarian undercurrent here that suggests 'someone' will tell me what I can or cannot create, which goes against all my instincts of freedom and self-actualisation...
Again, there is no authority. Decision is distributed within the whole system. One of the most powerful features of synergic organization is (( MORE FOR LESS)) This is what Buckminster Fuller called DYMAXION design. I am just project along the lines of these design principles. As a biologist, I am just examing living systems to learn how they do it.

I expect in the future there will be little need for automobiles. But as an example, let us imagine that the Ortegrity of all humanity would have various automobiles based again on function. There might be two person commuters, family station wagons, pick-up trucks, twenty-passenger buses, etc., etc., but just one state of the art model for each function.
Chris: At a possible result of the old East Germany... a very bleak society. I for one would not like to live in a world of identikit houses, identikit TVs etc. Creativity must be an essential part of a synergic society, synergy doesn't come from putting together two identikit items (or people) but from free mix and match coming up with new possibilities. This doesn't mean we can't be more efficient, we can but we don't necessarily need to standardise so much to do so.
I expect we will discover that our designers will find many ways to produce beautiful solutions to our problems with a wide variety of structures and colors and materials that will still result in enormous efficiency. I am not the Emperor of Synergy World. In fact no one is or ever can be.

I would agree with you that the process is very dynamic. But some tools i.e. a hammer or screwdriver haven't changed much in thousands of years. My continuing search for the ideal tools, upgraded whenever design is proven in prototype is a very dynamic process.
Chris: There may well be simple items that are 'ideal' but in terms of our wider lifestyles I don't envisage any two people behaving the same (although some of what I will do may be common to person A, and some other things with person B, my daily mix will not match anyone overall (or a statistical average !). Such dynamics must reflect a distributed adaptation process (i.e. a population of local dynamics) rather that any centralised process (which in cybernetic terms does not have the 'Requisite Variety' to control such a process).
Yes, I agree there will be some significant differences. But, we humans have very similar needs in terms of air, water, nutrition, shelter, safety, love and meaning. If we work together to meet this needs we will discover enormous opportunity for efficiency.
 
Thanks for responding.
 
Timothy
 


Chris Lucas responds to Synergic Containment

 
Hey Chris,
 
You wrote:
Hi Tmothy,

Thanks for the comments, there is much to do to get close to the position you outline, but every little helps us along the way ;-)
HOPI ELDERS: "We are the people, we have been waiting for."
Tim wrote: Life Trust Guardians and Synergic Containment Officers are not the police, they are synergists. They will be well educated and trained. They will understand the powerful tools they use and the consequence of both the use and missuse of those tools.
Chris: See what I mean about saints ? Despite our best intentions the world is a big place and we would need many Guardians, plus (crucially) someone to train them. I'm only too aware of the disagreements than humans can get into over even trivial matters in education, so expecting such a lot is I think optimistic. Of course if you are thinking long term (hundreds of years) then maybe this is possible - if humanity lasts than long ;-) Recall that most of us here had been around several decades before we gained what wisdom we now have, these Guardians would have to be younger - can we realistically expect such wisdom from our impetuous future youth ? It seems biologically implausible, but maybe I'm too pessimistic ;-)
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am finishing up a book on Understanding Human Intelligence. I am also writing a companion book in parallel that is a short course for teaching humans how to maximize their intelligence and stablize in the Synergic Mode of thinking. I honestly believe this will be the shortcut we need to a synergic society.
Tim wrote: Finding the near truth is all we can hope for. But good men and women doing their best with humility, humour, common sense, love and compassion should do a much better than what passes for justice today.
Chris: True enough, pragmatically there is as you say considerable scope for improvement without even scratching the surface of any 'absolute' truth !
Amen! Amen!
Tim wrote: The Synergic Guardians are just as responsible for keeping someone in too long and releasing someone too early. I think this can be dealt with using the Circles of Safety.
Chris: Yes, a sort of fuzzy 'tentative' trust I suppose, that makes sense, it is roughly how we treat other people anyway ;-)        
Thanks for reading and writing ...
 
Timothy

 

5:59:26 AM    


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