Mike:
I hear that there's a growing movement in the US, taking a
clue from places such as Uganda, that says, "It's demons that are
making things bad. We just have to exorcise and cast out the demons
and, at least where we've done that, the Kingdom will rule."
Ah, but of course.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Spencer" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 3:46 AM
Subject: [Futurework] Re: Empires on the Edge of Chaos
>
>
>> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24874.htm
>
> I somehow overlooked this.
>
> Ed wrote:
>
>> So, while I agree with Ferguson that when an empire (nation,
>> economy, whatever) is ready to collapse, almost anything can bring
>> it down. Yet I would put far more emphasis than he has on the long
>> process that brings the empire to the threshold of collapse.
>
> Ferguson refers to Brian Arthur and others at the Santa Fe Institute,
> also the sometime home of Stuart Kauffmann, (whom I quoted in an
> earlier post.)
>
> Applying the notions of complexity, both sudden"collapse" and gradual
> approach to a threshold are subsumed in one concept. Complex systems
> don't stay exactly the same (as, say, simple equilibria do) but they
> stay kinda sorta the same, viz. they have attractors, pathways of
> evolution that are, overall, stable under many perturbations.
>
> But another characteristic (after stability) is cataclysmic rather
> than gradual or linear shift of the attractor to a completely
> different region of the phase space in which the "complex system"
> model of the real system is described. Stable stable wobble stable
> stable ho-hum stable twitch..... catastrophe. Only the nature of
> complexity is such that there are just too many variables and too many
> relations between them for anybody to know or track the "important" or
> "meaningful" ones.
>
> So the right (or rather, wrong) state of the system has to exist, an
> excursion into a "normal" and still meta-stable region, followed by
> something that changes just the wrong elements of the system. The
> result isn't a "collapse" in abstract terms, just a relocation in
> phase space. Of course, for people trying to sell widgets or simpley
> find lunch, it's a collapse.
>
> Ho hum. It's all so complicated. I just can't be as hard as that,
> can it? I hear that there's a growing movement in the US, taking a
> clue from places such as Uganda, that says, "It's demons that are
> making things bad. We just have to exorcise and cast out the demons
> and, at least where we've done that, the Kingdom will rule." Jeez,
> and *I* was accusing the *economists* of reducing eveything to a
> function of a single variable. But golly, that sure makes it all nice
> and uncomplicated, doesn't it? All you need are good old-fashioned
> virtues like courage and perseverance and obedience.
>
>
> - Mike
>
> --
> Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
> /V\
> [email protected] /( )\
> http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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