I don't know how many of you are math nerds on here (I know at least a couple are!) but I found an interesting article dealing with complex systems and how people are learning to predict the approach of phase transitions in systems. This theory has been applied to the measure the stability of ecosystems, a person's mental health (in those with biopolar and depressive disorders, economics, and climate.
Article is here: _https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151117-natures-critical-warning-system/
[quote author= the juicy bits]Crawford “Buzz” Holling, an eminent Canadian theoretical ecologist, had begun reminiscing about a celebrated explanation of insect outbreaks that he and two collaborators had developed in 1978. They showed that in a mathematical model of an evolving forest ecosystem, when conditions were just right, it was possible for a small change in these conditions to touch off a sudden explosion of tree-killing insects, as happens every few decades in eastern Canadian and American spruce and fir forests. But there was one aspect of the model that Holling said he had never understood: Before an outbreak, when insects were still scarce but the model forest was drifting toward its tipping point, the insect population would start to vary more and more erratically from one place to another across the forest.
Sitting across the table was William “Buz” Brock, a mathematical economist specializing in dynamical systems at Madison. Brock knew right away why the variance in the insect population had increased near the brink of an outbreak. He whipped out a yellow legal pad, and, over a couple of bottles of wine, explained critical slowing down to his ecologist companions. Carpenter said he realized “immediately” that the phenomenon could serve as an ecological warning signal. It turned out the German ecologist Christian Wissel had made the same point 20 years earlier, but hardly anyone had noticed. “The work that we started doing after that 2003 conversation has really spawned a growth industry in ecology,” Carpenter said.
Peter Lake’s food web has two stable states, known in math lingo as “attractors.” In one possible state, the lake is laced with algae, and largemouth bass are scarce. This gives minnows the run of the place. They devour the water fleas (enabling the algae to flourish) as well as most newly hatched bass. The feedback loop reinforces the state of the lake, correcting for small fluctuations away from equilibrium. When, for instance, disease afflicts the minnows, the resulting flea surplus allows their numbers to quickly bounce back.
But Peter Lake is also stable when it is clear and full of bass. In this alternative state, predation is high, so minnow numbers are curbed; this allows water fleas to thrive (which suppresses algae) and bass hatchlings to reach maturity. Once again, the ecosystem is driven by a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
In a simplified diagram of the ecosystem’s possible states, the two stable states form the upper and lower sections of an S-shaped curve. {The referenced diagram is a javascript on the site that shows how bass fish numbers affect the dynamics of the complex system.} If the ecosystem drifts away from this curve, it quickly returns to it, staying anchored to either the upper or the lower state depending on which feedback loop dominates its dynamics. Over time the ecosystem may wander horizontally along the curve, swept by a current of outside influences, toward one of the hairpin bends — a tipping point. When Carpenter and his crew increased the lake’s bass population, the ecosystem drifted from the bottom left part of the S-curve toward the first bend. As it approached this tipping point, the feedback loop that favored minnows started to lose its dominance over the competing feedback loop that favored bass. The effects nearly canceled each other out. Consequently, when disease and other random disturbances pushed the species’ populations away from the curve, the ecosystem took much longer to restabilize than before. This is critical slowing down. The slowdown allows disturbances to the ecosystem to accumulate, which is why, in Holling’s model, the variance in insect numbers increases near the brink of an outbreak. And when Carpenter and his team counted minnows in 60 traps each day, the variance in the minnow counts also increased as the tipping point of the critical transition approached.
Peter Lake’s food web is now anchored to the top of the S curve. Removing enough bass to propel the system to its left tipping point and restore it to its minnow-dominated state would probably only be possible using a ruthless and indiscriminate fish poison. “No one likes that approach,” Pace said. Anyway, it isn’t necessary. For the new Peter Lake experiment, the dominance of bass or minnows is irrelevant.
Critical slowing down has to be actionable to be useful in preventing real-world catastrophes. Two years ago, Carpenter and his crew began gradually enriching Peter Lake with nutrients to drive it to the brink of a different critical transition: the onset of an algae bloom. When they became statistically confident that they had measured critical slowing down in pH and algae levels, they stopped enriching the lake, and waited to see whether the algae bloom would happen anyway or if the researchers’ response to the signal allowed the lake to return to normal. “I can definitely say that you get very strong critical-slowing-down indicators from algae blooms, and I can also say we had some success in halting them,” Carpenter said, stressing that the findings have not yet been peer-reviewed.
Eventually, he said, ecosystem managers with limited resources might use measurements of critical slowing down to compare the relative well-being of different lakes, triaging them into healthy, deteriorating and doomed categories and concentrating their efforts where they can make the most difference.[/quote]
The types of systems described most often are complex adaptive systems.
[quote author= Wiki sez]A Complex adaptive system is a 'complex macroscopic collection' of relatively 'similar and partially connected micro-structures' – formed in order to adapt to the changing environment, and increase its survivability as a macro-structure.[1][2][3]
They are complex in that they are dynamic networks of interactions, and their relationships are not aggregations of the individual static entities. They are adaptive in that the individual and collective behavior mutate and self-organize corresponding to the change-initiating micro-event or collection of events.[1][2][/quote]
A part of me wonders how to describe the universe in terms of system theory. We have a lot of examples of descriptions from Grurdjieff and the C's. I definitely feel like parts of it do resemble a complex adaptive system, since groups of people interact together to build a sort of collective reality that may be more discrete in nature than materialistic interpretations of multiverse theory tend to suspect. I am thinking of course in terms of timelines geared toward the macroscopic quantum collapses of the wave, i.e., earth being destroyed utterly, earth bumbling along still inhabited with STS humans, earth beginning to recover from global ponerogenesis due to cosmic intervention and the work of STO candidates there, earth so hunkey-dory no violent cosmic intervention is necessary.
[quote author=C session November 7 2015:]Q: (L) In other words, it was very very close at that point to have taken a different timeline?
A: Yes
Q: (L) And that was the timeline to destruction?
A: Yes
Q: (Andromeda) It was almost like a hotspot over the period of time where almost everything, every day was a different potential, ya know? Whether different choices were made or not...
A: The chaos created was a clue.
Q: (Galatea) The chaos created as a clue to the source, or what?
(L) To the fact that it was a splitting reality point.[/quote]
Laura has previously described "ourselves in the future" as an attractor around which the information of reality coalesces. A microscopic example of this could be a virus, in which some information from a higher density of reality manifests by assembling the base nucleotides and proteins from the ambient information of the biosphere via a sort of quantum tunneling. As beings with greater receivership capacity, a lot more of that information can come through than through simple 1 and 2 D materials. Since any individual in our reality has free will to choose between STS or STO, it stands that at any given point there are multiple attractors in a person's future. One per future in which the individual in question can fire information back into the past. It's also possible that these many past-communicating future versions can speak to one another as well, depending on the exact nature of the higher densities. Perhaps further up it all just dissolves into the 2 primal though forms of being and non-being (STS and STO). Maybe buried therein is the reason Laura and co. make contact with a different "person" every session.
In the session before the quoted session, Galatea brings up the question of strange animals or window-fallers being seen by pets around their house. This was the session prior to Laura discussing the splitting timelines and the associated chaos. I wonder if her bringing it up was in part motivated by concerns over more recent window faller activity at the chateau?
I'm just trying to find ways to use this understanding of critical slowing in systems to perhaps use phenomena like windowfaller activity, freaky weather manifestations of 4D "battles", and so on to keep an eye on reality transitions? I honestly don't know where to start in terms of how to quantify that. But to me at least it feels a bit rewarding using math and abstract systems to unify our understanding of a variety of phenomena.
A person's work on themselves I think can also resemble an adaptive system between multiple attractors (such as those of the magnetic center and the various i's of the body or emotions). Applying this to our own lives, we can learn to even see in advance the type of feedback loops our i's can generate with the reality around us by carefully monitoring our discipline levels, variations in fidelity to how we spend our time, etc. Perhaps this is why an offense against their development or the school (to use G's terms) are more easily forgiven in a newbie than in a veteran. Such behavior in the latter would show substantial deterioration in their ability to handle little i's, when their magnetic center or higher emotional center should be more active. Increasingly levels of incorrect thinking about things (and slowing rates of return to correct thinking) can also be used to determine if someone's beginning to disintegrate as well, probably.
I'm going to stop rambling now. The article I found just made me look at things in a wholly different (yet unchanged) way. :D
Article is here: _https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151117-natures-critical-warning-system/
[quote author= the juicy bits]Crawford “Buzz” Holling, an eminent Canadian theoretical ecologist, had begun reminiscing about a celebrated explanation of insect outbreaks that he and two collaborators had developed in 1978. They showed that in a mathematical model of an evolving forest ecosystem, when conditions were just right, it was possible for a small change in these conditions to touch off a sudden explosion of tree-killing insects, as happens every few decades in eastern Canadian and American spruce and fir forests. But there was one aspect of the model that Holling said he had never understood: Before an outbreak, when insects were still scarce but the model forest was drifting toward its tipping point, the insect population would start to vary more and more erratically from one place to another across the forest.
Sitting across the table was William “Buz” Brock, a mathematical economist specializing in dynamical systems at Madison. Brock knew right away why the variance in the insect population had increased near the brink of an outbreak. He whipped out a yellow legal pad, and, over a couple of bottles of wine, explained critical slowing down to his ecologist companions. Carpenter said he realized “immediately” that the phenomenon could serve as an ecological warning signal. It turned out the German ecologist Christian Wissel had made the same point 20 years earlier, but hardly anyone had noticed. “The work that we started doing after that 2003 conversation has really spawned a growth industry in ecology,” Carpenter said.
Peter Lake’s food web has two stable states, known in math lingo as “attractors.” In one possible state, the lake is laced with algae, and largemouth bass are scarce. This gives minnows the run of the place. They devour the water fleas (enabling the algae to flourish) as well as most newly hatched bass. The feedback loop reinforces the state of the lake, correcting for small fluctuations away from equilibrium. When, for instance, disease afflicts the minnows, the resulting flea surplus allows their numbers to quickly bounce back.
But Peter Lake is also stable when it is clear and full of bass. In this alternative state, predation is high, so minnow numbers are curbed; this allows water fleas to thrive (which suppresses algae) and bass hatchlings to reach maturity. Once again, the ecosystem is driven by a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
In a simplified diagram of the ecosystem’s possible states, the two stable states form the upper and lower sections of an S-shaped curve. {The referenced diagram is a javascript on the site that shows how bass fish numbers affect the dynamics of the complex system.} If the ecosystem drifts away from this curve, it quickly returns to it, staying anchored to either the upper or the lower state depending on which feedback loop dominates its dynamics. Over time the ecosystem may wander horizontally along the curve, swept by a current of outside influences, toward one of the hairpin bends — a tipping point. When Carpenter and his crew increased the lake’s bass population, the ecosystem drifted from the bottom left part of the S-curve toward the first bend. As it approached this tipping point, the feedback loop that favored minnows started to lose its dominance over the competing feedback loop that favored bass. The effects nearly canceled each other out. Consequently, when disease and other random disturbances pushed the species’ populations away from the curve, the ecosystem took much longer to restabilize than before. This is critical slowing down. The slowdown allows disturbances to the ecosystem to accumulate, which is why, in Holling’s model, the variance in insect numbers increases near the brink of an outbreak. And when Carpenter and his team counted minnows in 60 traps each day, the variance in the minnow counts also increased as the tipping point of the critical transition approached.
Peter Lake’s food web is now anchored to the top of the S curve. Removing enough bass to propel the system to its left tipping point and restore it to its minnow-dominated state would probably only be possible using a ruthless and indiscriminate fish poison. “No one likes that approach,” Pace said. Anyway, it isn’t necessary. For the new Peter Lake experiment, the dominance of bass or minnows is irrelevant.
Critical slowing down has to be actionable to be useful in preventing real-world catastrophes. Two years ago, Carpenter and his crew began gradually enriching Peter Lake with nutrients to drive it to the brink of a different critical transition: the onset of an algae bloom. When they became statistically confident that they had measured critical slowing down in pH and algae levels, they stopped enriching the lake, and waited to see whether the algae bloom would happen anyway or if the researchers’ response to the signal allowed the lake to return to normal. “I can definitely say that you get very strong critical-slowing-down indicators from algae blooms, and I can also say we had some success in halting them,” Carpenter said, stressing that the findings have not yet been peer-reviewed.
Eventually, he said, ecosystem managers with limited resources might use measurements of critical slowing down to compare the relative well-being of different lakes, triaging them into healthy, deteriorating and doomed categories and concentrating their efforts where they can make the most difference.[/quote]
The types of systems described most often are complex adaptive systems.
[quote author= Wiki sez]A Complex adaptive system is a 'complex macroscopic collection' of relatively 'similar and partially connected micro-structures' – formed in order to adapt to the changing environment, and increase its survivability as a macro-structure.[1][2][3]
They are complex in that they are dynamic networks of interactions, and their relationships are not aggregations of the individual static entities. They are adaptive in that the individual and collective behavior mutate and self-organize corresponding to the change-initiating micro-event or collection of events.[1][2][/quote]
A part of me wonders how to describe the universe in terms of system theory. We have a lot of examples of descriptions from Grurdjieff and the C's. I definitely feel like parts of it do resemble a complex adaptive system, since groups of people interact together to build a sort of collective reality that may be more discrete in nature than materialistic interpretations of multiverse theory tend to suspect. I am thinking of course in terms of timelines geared toward the macroscopic quantum collapses of the wave, i.e., earth being destroyed utterly, earth bumbling along still inhabited with STS humans, earth beginning to recover from global ponerogenesis due to cosmic intervention and the work of STO candidates there, earth so hunkey-dory no violent cosmic intervention is necessary.
[quote author=C session November 7 2015:]Q: (L) In other words, it was very very close at that point to have taken a different timeline?
A: Yes
Q: (L) And that was the timeline to destruction?
A: Yes
Q: (Andromeda) It was almost like a hotspot over the period of time where almost everything, every day was a different potential, ya know? Whether different choices were made or not...
A: The chaos created was a clue.
Q: (Galatea) The chaos created as a clue to the source, or what?
(L) To the fact that it was a splitting reality point.[/quote]
Laura has previously described "ourselves in the future" as an attractor around which the information of reality coalesces. A microscopic example of this could be a virus, in which some information from a higher density of reality manifests by assembling the base nucleotides and proteins from the ambient information of the biosphere via a sort of quantum tunneling. As beings with greater receivership capacity, a lot more of that information can come through than through simple 1 and 2 D materials. Since any individual in our reality has free will to choose between STS or STO, it stands that at any given point there are multiple attractors in a person's future. One per future in which the individual in question can fire information back into the past. It's also possible that these many past-communicating future versions can speak to one another as well, depending on the exact nature of the higher densities. Perhaps further up it all just dissolves into the 2 primal though forms of being and non-being (STS and STO). Maybe buried therein is the reason Laura and co. make contact with a different "person" every session.
In the session before the quoted session, Galatea brings up the question of strange animals or window-fallers being seen by pets around their house. This was the session prior to Laura discussing the splitting timelines and the associated chaos. I wonder if her bringing it up was in part motivated by concerns over more recent window faller activity at the chateau?
I'm just trying to find ways to use this understanding of critical slowing in systems to perhaps use phenomena like windowfaller activity, freaky weather manifestations of 4D "battles", and so on to keep an eye on reality transitions? I honestly don't know where to start in terms of how to quantify that. But to me at least it feels a bit rewarding using math and abstract systems to unify our understanding of a variety of phenomena.
A person's work on themselves I think can also resemble an adaptive system between multiple attractors (such as those of the magnetic center and the various i's of the body or emotions). Applying this to our own lives, we can learn to even see in advance the type of feedback loops our i's can generate with the reality around us by carefully monitoring our discipline levels, variations in fidelity to how we spend our time, etc. Perhaps this is why an offense against their development or the school (to use G's terms) are more easily forgiven in a newbie than in a veteran. Such behavior in the latter would show substantial deterioration in their ability to handle little i's, when their magnetic center or higher emotional center should be more active. Increasingly levels of incorrect thinking about things (and slowing rates of return to correct thinking) can also be used to determine if someone's beginning to disintegrate as well, probably.
I'm going to stop rambling now. The article I found just made me look at things in a wholly different (yet unchanged) way. :D
