by John Brodix Merryman Jr.
How many people understand feedback loops?
When you do something that has a benefit, the inclination is to do it again. Then again.
Hold a microphone up to the speaker and the shriek goes parabolic.
Those are feedback loops.
They are not only pervasive, but foundational to reality.
The signals your mind picks out of the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with prior knowledge, building on it, like rings of a tree.
If we didn’t, our thought processes would break down into disconnected confusion.
Though they do flip from positive to negative consequences. The groove becomes a rut. Like drug addiction.
Even ponzi schemes are a form of feedback loop, as those in the initial stages get the positive, while those coming along later get the negative.
While large numbers of people getting caught up in these dynamics can be a real mess, it is the basis of societies. What we do for others, that comes back to us. The Golden Rule.
So the question is, why isn’t this something impressed into our minds from the time we are children?
It is because human civilization is a product of the flow of time and this linear sequence is how we are taught to understand reality. Cause and effect.
The problem is this is a mental construct.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so it is our sense of time that it is the present moving past to future, but the reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy.
Cause becomes effect.
The energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
So the present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As it is the digestive system processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there is this mental focus on the information, while what does the watching seems formless, other than focusing on what it senses.
Just as energy is only defined in terms of how it manifests.
Looking at this linear vision of reality, it seems humanity should be asking where it is leading us, as the problems are building in every direction.
This might be a good time to examine those underlaying dynamics, the feedback loops, the essential circularity and reciprocity of reality.
Consider how much the concept of efficiency drives society. Doing more with less. Yet peak efficiency would be when we can do everything with nothing. The loops going to infinity.
While this might seem impossible, in current practice it is just trading credits and debts, than any creative act. Which is what the financial markets refer to as derivatives.
What is known in horse racing as parimutual wagering. Simply having lots of other people willing to take the other side of the bet, rather than being directly invested in the horses competing. In fact, some of the house profits go to supporting those horses.
Yet what happens when it is the entire world economy that is the horse race? Then the financial tail is wagging the economic dog.
To a market economy, money is the medium. To a capitalist economy, money is the message. One is a tool, the other is a god.
Feedback loops, spiraling ever inward.
Hurricanes are feedback loops, drawing up the energy and moisture from the ocean.
In fact, galaxies are as well. The black hole is the eye of the storm.
So how might this define human behavior?
For one thing, there is another side of the equation. All the noise and excess energy that is not absorbed is traded around. One man’s trash, is another man’s treasure.
Not only does structure swirl into galaxies, but light radiates away. As those storms spread all that moisture back out across the areas where they don’t have access to more energy to keep building. The down side of the cycle. Entropy is when the system loses more energy than it gains.
The light you see reflected off the surfaces around you, are the frequencies not absorbed by them.
All this energy is traded around. Like we get light from galaxies billions of lightyears away, as they get light from ours.
So structure is this process of synchronization, everything on the same wavelength, functioning as one. The node. Which is centripetal. All swirling into one entity, from galaxies as the biggest objects in existence, to making something, as function and opportunity coalesces, shedding excess.
Then the essence of the network, context, ecosystem, is harmonization. Everything balancing out across infinity.
Black holes and black body radiation.
As multicellular organisms, our nervous system coalesces all the activities of the cells and organs into one fairly coherent entity. Along with the circulation system to sustain harmony across this internal ecosystem of cells and organs.
In that states function as social super organisms, government works as the nervous system. While money and banking function as blood and the circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as government needs to sustain the entire society and not just be used to accumulate power for those at the top, that it needs to be a public utility. We have not yet come to understand the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player in those markets and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers to the banks. Like the heart telling the hands and feet to go suck dirt, as it is keeping the blood for itself.
Since this system is used to siphon value out of society, rather than allocate it where it would be most productive and healthy, it becomes a feedback loop, of wealth and power leveraging ever more wealth and power.
The immediate problem is how to store all this value. While we might think of money as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, the fact is that is a social contract, between the holder and the rest of society.
As a contract, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side.
While the field of Economics refers to money as both medium of exchange and store of value, these are not completely interchangeable.
In your body, blood is the medium, while fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over who has the biggest lots.
As a medium, you own money like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body. It doesn’t have your picture on it, you don’t hold the copyrights and, most importantly, are not directly responsible for its value, like a personal check.
Much of social and economic activity is designed to generate debt, as a way to store the illusion of wealth. For instance, young people taking on large amounts of debt in order to join this ponzi scheme, when they are the future of society and it would be wiser to invest in their growth.
That the puppets in Washington seem best at creating enormous amounts of public debt and the financial sector needs this debt to grow metastatically, is not coincidence. “The real money is in bonds.”
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
So what can government, as the nervous system of the state, do about this?
Well, for one thing, Russia and China have effectively gone back to private government, with Putin and Xi as respective CEO’s. Basically to keep their oligarchs in check and ours at bay. That is why our puppet masters and their swarms of flying monkeys hate them so much.
As the West seems to be breaking down, while the rest of the world, having been pushed into the corner and forced to work together in ways they would have not otherwise, is rising, how are we to come to our senses?
Every culture, civilization, society, needs some core sense of identity in order to coalesce into that larger entity. The grain of sand at the center of the pearl. The totem at the center of the village. For the West, monotheism, that divine father figure, has served as that guiding light. Yet it has not stopped this slide into greed and anarchy.
To the Ancients, gods were metaphors. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. At this stage of intellectual evolution, monotheism was monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Basically a metaphor for the tribal societies in which humanity originated.
Through the intermediation of Christianity and Islam, the Jewish tribal deity became the locus of Western culture.
What set it apart was that instead of a figurative symbol, the social rules became the idealization of the spirit. God as the Word.
Yet rules are tools that enable a society to function, like language.
There needs to be some degree of flexibility, or the feedback loops start to kick in and everything becomes about the Rules and those setting them. Which is a basic dilemma in life. The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement. The young pushing the boundaries set by the old. Liberals versus conservatives.
Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.
Christianity originated as a schism in Judaism, between those questioning these boundaries and those enforcing them. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
It was then received outside of Judaism as a metaphor for rebirth, as other cultures were dealing with similar conflicts. Zeus not giving way to Dionysus. The origins of the Trinity go to fertility rites. The young god born in the spring to the old sky god and earth mother. Oestre was the Anglo Saxon fertility goddess.
Though when Constantine co-opted Christianity as the state religion of Rome, it was for the monotheism, not the renewal, as he was bringing the sides of the Empire together and burying any reminders of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules.
So the Catholic Church became the Sadducees, the holders of priestly prerogatives and the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings. The cycling of the new becoming the old.
The problem of modern monotheism, the Catholic “all-knowing absolute,” is that ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives forming that locus of any culture are ideals.
The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.
Morality is not absolute, as it couldn’t be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero.
Morals are those codes, habits, beliefs, relationships, etc. that enable a healthy and functional society. “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” Reciprocity. Feedback.
While cultures tend to treat good and bad as that cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, as it is the function of culture to coalesce society into that larger super organism, in the broader reality they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.
As pointed out, good things can have negative consequences, when they are overdone and our cognitive abilities are far more a consequence of dealing with the problems, than basking in the pleasures. Learning is that feedback between nature and nurture.
Throughout much of social evolution, learning was largely dictated in terms of one’s immediate surroundings. Parents, teachers, the local community, friends. That larger world certainly imposed itself in many ways, but still often mediated by those local enviroments.
Now the current generation is growing up in the Information Age, where networks of relationships are going global. While we have been building up to this steadily, through books, newspapers, television, this gradual process has now gone parabolic.
The effect is going to be an earthquake in human culture and the societies that still must function locally.
The reset button is going to be pushed in a big way.
So what is the basic social construct, that provides the basis of human experience? That, like our genetics, is the hardware on which this social programing runs.
As I’ve pointed out a number of issues, foundational to our current paradigm, might be deserving of further examination, it does raise the question of why they haven’t been considered previously.
One would think, given all the centuries of theological and philosophical debate, it would have been observed that ideals are not absolutes. Or that the concept of gods originated as metaphors. Or why finance is allowed to dissolve into a metastatic economic and social cancer.
Which goes to the basic physics of being these versatile little herd creatures, where our cognitive functions arose as a survival mechanism. Much as some species are evolved to hide, or run fast, or generate toxins.
We analyse our environment, in order to repond to it. Given we have to survive the short term, in order to deal with the long term, there is this tendency to fix problems as they arise, than really dig too far into causes.
The effect has been patches over the tears in the previous patches, going back to the dawn of history.
As members of a group, success is a function of advancing the motivations of that group, not questioning them. Yet this tends to promote the more rigid and/or opportunistic members of the group. Then the larger the group, the more this effect is magnified.
The larger the crowd, the lower the common denominators.
So we do coalesce around very simplistic ideas. Such as that father figure deity as the arbiter of all of reality. Or that these community tokens referred to as money are to be collected and stored as a form of safety, even to the degree of destroying the very community giving them value.
Yet now we seem to be on the edge of the abyss, as the resulting feedback loops kick into overdrive. Such as the most wealthy mostly concerned with becoming the one at the very top and ever more rigidly controlling the society on which that wealth is based, as it collapses, rather than fixing it.
Or that Israel has become such a vortex at the center of Western culture, that the entire Western establishment allows itself to be sucked into it. Even to the extent that modern Israel is one more sacrifice to the tribal god and Bibi Netanyahu’s ego.
What if all those genius tech bros and financial wunderkinds actually looked outside their particular bubbles, would they understand the eye of this particular storm has become the recreation of an Iron Age tribal temple?
When the centrifugal and centripetal elements of a star become unstable and it explodes/implodes, it is called going “Nova.”
That the music festival engulfed in the attack precipitating this meltdown was called Nova, is cosmic.
There are forces far greater than those billionaires pulling the strings and whether you want to call them gods or nature, or just the basic sentient impulses flowing through the biologically vital surface of this little orb in space, they do express patterns and we are following them.
Look at your body. Consider your emotions and thoughts. You follow patterns and seek outcomes. What does this larger biological dynamic drive toward?
Possibly a global organism? With humanity as its central nervous system?
Yet obviously then, not how humanity currently acts, as an egocentric cancer, out to destroy this larger global organism, to feed its own insecurities and temper tantrums.
The evident purpose of any healthy nervous system is the health and long term viability of the entire organism. Sensory feedback between circumstances and reactions, than just mental wheelspinning.
When the premises are flawed, all the “Shut up and calculate” is garbage in, garbage out.
So as a nervous system, it would function more like an octopus, more evenly distributed across the entire system, with the center as more a meeting point, than focus. Multipolarity.
While the current delusions of past grandeur might be gripping the West, some backhanded credit has to be given, to having driven the rest of the world into a corner, where they have started to work together in ways they never would have otherwise. Feedback.
The cultures might be thousands of years old, but the biology is billions and the physics is eternal.
We are cells in the process.