Why is the Universe Lumpy?

[Therese Fitzpatrick]

Thanks, David, I am very glad you shared your thinking.  And I quite
like the bicycle/balance metaphor.  Thanks.


On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 09:30:30 -0700, David Swedlow
<david at metastorming.com> wrote:
> I have intuited that the lumpiness of the universe is a function of the
> action of consciousness, which essentially is the tendancy to find balance.
>
> I put pieces together myself, but I recognize that they are not mine, just
> as relativity did not belong to Einstein. As such, I made a bet with
> myself that I could google it and find this idea already out in the world.
> Here is the link that I came up with. I have skimmed it sufficiently to
> know that it corresponds to what I was thinking, but goes in more depth
> than I had originally.
>
> There are some very interesting implications with this realization. The
> first is, you must start the game at the beginning. Balancing is first
> learned by learning to manipulate your appendages and organs (mouth, eyes,
> etc.) to achieve worthwhile goals. Eventually, you learn to manipulate
> through space via physical balance. A few years later, you start learning
> how to balance emotional states. Then mental/cognitive states. There isn't
> too much new about what I've said so far. It get's interesting when we
> notice that organism's do this together. We re-learn the balancing aspects
> from another perspective as parents, and as teachers, etc. Learning to
> teach other's to balance (notice, they would do it on their own, we're
> just accelerating the process with skillful facilitation).
>
> In this way, Open Space Technology is increadibly advanced balancing.
> There are many lessons that I would expect to hear about learning to get
> out of the way of the process to let it happen (as I mentioned in my
> previous email). Without consciousness, we simply react to the situation.
> This results in apparent stasis. When all members of a group are acting in
> their own self interest, then the group gets to a certain level of
> sophisticated group behavior, and then it stagnates (by outside
> appearances). What is actually happening is the build-up to a state-
> change, just as when water goes from water to steam. The energy of the
> group increases but the water isn't boiling yet. You can even get
> interesting and complex behavior (hexagonal cells) before the water starts
> boiling under certain conditions. When the water is hot enough, when there
> is enough energy in the system, it boils. This happens on it's own. (Just
> let it happen). With the addition of consciousness, the energy can be
> harnessed for self-useful purposes (metabolism). This is what life does.
> It learns to balance. The earth is a complex ecosystem (GAIA), because
> life continually finds balance. With this simple definition of
> consciousness (consciousness = balance), we can see that balance happens
> all the way up and down the great chain of being. That means that atoms
> and molecules have a kind of consciousness, as do galaxies and
> superclusters. With energy flowing through the system, matter creates an
> equilibrium state in which certain things happen, like people and
> societies.
>
> Open Space is the way in which the human species organism (the group
> organism of humans) is learning to metabolise the energy that is flowing
> through the system. It's a natural process.
>
> The analog case, and the one that is very instructive for me, is learning
> to ride a bicycle. I didn't look at this case very closely when I was a
> kid, I just got on and did it. But as an adult, when I was teaching my son
> to ride, I noticed something interesting. His first inclination, when he
> went out of balance, was to turn the "wrong" direction. I tried to imagine
> why this was, and it seemed obvious. To him, it feels like the ground is
> trying to suck him down, and he is resisting that pull by turning away
> from the fall. But, in order to balance, you must turn into the fall!
> Turning into, not away from, the disequilibrium is the way to return to
> equilibrium. Another reason that this is so hard to grasp initially is
> that to the child, watching someone else ride a bike looks like it is just
> a matter of keeping the bicycle upright, and so, when the bicycle starts
> to lean, the temptation is to lean the other direction to get back to
> uprightness. We think balance means a static state of remaning upright, in
> actuality, it is a dynamic situation in which we return to uprightness.
> Once you start to fall, you aren't out of balance until you finish
> falling. You can come to within inches of the ground, and if you can turn
> sharply enough to return to equilibrium, you are in balance. And falling
> is no big deal either (well, except the skinned knee). Just get back on
> and try again.
>
> Here is the thing though, as the situations get more complex, we put
> safety mechanisms in place to allow people to learn the art of balance
> safely; training wheels. The problem is, if we never take the training
> wheels off, the lesson is never learned. And, here is the critical piece,
> if the training wheels are left in place, the rider is essentially
> crippled because they can't maneuver as nimbly as a rider without training
> wheels.
>
> This metaphor works at the society level as well. Civilization gets very
> complex, and the risk of failure for some activities becomes fatal, so we
> make sure to have safety mechanisms in place so that people learn (like
> laws). But again, the organism (life) wishes to find ways to push the
> system into equilibrium in order to learn to balance. It happens from moss
> to ecosystems. But if the laws become absolute, then the training wheels
> are never removed, and in some ways we are crippled. This happens in
> organizations which become hide-bound by their policies (schools in the US
> are very good examples). And the solutions that we come up with are
> exactly like the one my son came up with, lean in the wrong direction.
> Schools lean toward increasingly tight stricture (they move the training
> wheels out further so that the bike can't fall over), but the school
> system is really moving at a fast speed now, and training wheels are no
> longer appropriate, but dangerous!! It is hard to learn this lesson, and
> the school system may actually have to fall down and scrape it's knees (it
> may even get a concussion if it's not wearing a helmet).
>
> This is only a metaphor, but you can see the power of it. Let's take it
> another step. The political system is in a current state of intense
> disequilibrium. Conservatives believe, in general, that we should weld the
> training wheels on for life, and make sure they are reinforced so they
> can't break. Liberals, in general, think that we need to remove the
> training wheels to allow the system to do it's own thing.
>
> Both ways are right, and both are wrong. The issue is balance. We need the
> training wheels up to the point that we've mastered balance in an
> activity, and then we need to remove them slowly (or run alongside to
> catch them if they fall). But we don't want to just remove the training
> wheels altogether too early, or the reaction may be further shyness about
> trying again. This isn't intended to be an endorsement or criticism of one
> side or the other, we need both, and they need to work together to find
> interesting solutions to our increasingly complex problems. Note: we need
> BOTH parties to have balance.
>
> Conservatives tend to operate with a "protect the innocent and free the
> mature" mentality, while liberals tend toward a "liberate the youth, but
> keep a watch on the powerful." These look like they are diametrically
> opposed to one another from a certain perspective. And guess what, they
> ARE! Just as right and left are diametrically opposed to one another when
> one is sitting on a bicycle. You need both right and left to have balance.
> Try to eliminate or handicap one, and you'll go sprawling to the concrete
> as sure I'm standing here.
>
> - David Swedlow
>
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--
Warmly,
Therese Fitzpatrick

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