More basics

FEEDBACK
To continue with the basis of systems theory, there are two more concepts that are indispensible: feedback and hierarchy, both of which are obvious but are ignored all too often with disastrous results.
A Touch of Reality
Before continuing I'm interrupting the flow after having just watched the BBC News Review of 2005, when two events were shown which are highly relevant to this blog's purpose. First was the bombing of the London Transport system by what appears to have been suicide bombers. The review showed with stark clarity the utterly insane manner in which we behave to one another. In a comparison with some other events the sheer numbers and the range of devastation don't look so large, but it seemed to me to have as great an impact as the U.S. experiences in 2002 in the sense of bewilderment and alarm that human beings can act with such utter lack of consideration of the devastation and death performed in cold blood. And all because of a clash of belief systems. Where does such insanity start, and what is going on in the minds of the killers, which ever side they come from? A brief reflection of the train of events related to this and other bombings show very clearly that they are not isolated acts: they are always part of a process, a series of actions and reactions that go back a long way. And they are always done by people and groups who claim to be justified and often enough use identical authorities - God etc - to prove the other wrong. The history of Europe is full of this - the Thirty Years War which turned everything upside down. This was a war due, at least in part, to the conflict between Catholicism and the Reformation forces of Lutherism and Calvinism each proclaiming that their version of the teachings of Jesus Christ was the correct one. A not dissimilar struggle - at least in principle - is the the modern confict between the Sunni and Shia sects of the Muslim world, each claiming to be the true authority.

Water Depletion and Sinking Land
Item 2. Mexico City is sinking in parts by about 3 cms per year, due to the massive reduction in the aquafer beneath the city and with the size of the population increasing by the day this will increase rather than decrease. Doing the arithmetic shows an dwcrease of 30 cms or more every 10 years. There are very significant places like this scattered around the globe in addition to the ever increasing changes in water levels in the major fresh water lakes and this can only increase as the population rises.




The first is an example of violence due to clashes of belief systems: the second is occurring because we have not yet found a way to control populations especially in the undeveloped countries.
Both are due to the actions of humans, and there are many other examples, the total of which is truly alarming. This is the kind of thing that eventually convinced me of the need to change this trajectory, which cannot be done without a far higher level of understanding by the majority of the world populations. This in turn depends on making the necessary information available in more accessible ways than we usually employ. It's a safe bet that any-
one reading this can think of plenty of examples, but don't fully understand just how it all happens.


Back to Basics
How do you know when your actions are the correct ones? Clearly the effects of those actions should tell you all you need to know. If the action was appropriate it will confirm that your perception of the problem was accurate and your response was correct.So the principle is that information of the consequences of your actions is indispensible in finding your way around your world and without it you could continue actions which could have disastrous effects. This applies to all systems and it's virtually impossible to imagine a system of any kind being able to survive for long with-
out feedback.
Some simple examples. When driving a car your ability to keep to the correct side of the road depends on you knowing what happens when you turn the steering wheel. I wouldn't recommend experiment-
ing to prove it unless you have an urge to find out what happens if you were to close your eyes and eliminate feedback. No doubt you would quickly be faced with the consequences of the absence of feedback - if you were in any condition to know anything.

More sophisticated, but just as instructive is knowing how your thermostat works. The feedback here is from the temperature of the room to the heating device, depending on how it is set. Below the set temperature it switches on: above it switches off. Again - very simple but indispensible if you have such a system, and to repeat the principle: the output of the heater can only maintain a steady temperature if the results of the output are sensed and cut off the output when a desired level has been reached.
Incidentally, one of the first mechanical examples which was devised was the Watt steam engine and its twin-balled governor, and this was one of the pioneering feedback devices 200+ years ago

Talk of a governor suggests that the purpose of the feedback is to enable a degree of control over any system involved, and in fact that is so. An important feature is that it is automatic: it does
not depend on external intervention for it to work and the benefits of this can be seen in biological systems which could not function without some measure of automatic feedback. There are so many events happpening in our surroundings that it would be absol-
tely impossible to pay attention to all of them at the same time. So, if you are climbing stairs you need more oxygen, your heart will have to beat more quickly and you will need to breathe more rapidly and deeply to supply it and there are many other functions that have to change rapidly so that you will be able to continue climbing. If this depended on taking the decisions to change all these functions you would never get them done. In an emergency you would be dead before you could start thinking: doing it automatic-
ally is the only possible way to survive.

There is, however, a catch. There has to be a controller which sets the levels of the various functions outside the system itself, such as setting the temperature at which the feedback shuts down the heater. There are unsuspected ways in which this principle operates at the higher biological levels such as humans
which I shall deal with in more detail later.

Now for the problem of hierarchy. This is a real bone of contention
in many ways, from denial that there should be hierarchies of any kind, to those who say that one of the fundamental aspects of ex-
istence is hierarchy and the battles between these contestants is legendary.

Well what is it anyway? It refers to the fact that if there are
collections of anything there needs to be some kind of organised relations between them that enables them to maintain their identity
because otherwise they will just be a collection. And we know that relations are at least as important as the items that are related.
If we were to take all the items that make up human beings, slap them on the table and try to make a human being, we wouldn't even be able to get started: it is the manner in which they relate to one another that makes the identity. But it goes further than that.
Take a cell in, say, the liver, or any other organ. The proper function of the organ is determined by the way whole collections of cells work together in an integrated way: the individual cells cannot organise the manner in which the organ works as a whole. That is the function of the organ. In other words there is a higher level of control of the organ as a whole to which the act-
ivities of the cells are subordinated without which it would be simply a collection of cells. From that simple example it is obvious that some kind of hierarchical control system is a critical factor in the way it works. And stepping up a notch or two the same thing applies to the subordination of the organs to the control of the body as a whole.

Take our use of glucose as a very basic need for all organisms. We
humans have a very sophisticated system for getting glucose in various forms, liquid or solid, into our bodies, breaking down the substances of which glucose is a vital part, transporting it to all our cells, getting it through the cell membrane, using it in the cells to provide energy and dealing with the left overs from its breakdown. The process is very complicated and it is still clearly known still, eighty odd years after the discovery of insulin and the role of the pancreas. So here we have specialised cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, the secretion of this into the circulation by the organ (pancreas0. But the output must be controlled by the body as a whole - including the brain - and this is a fine example of systems theory at work for if this process did not function according to the rules I introduced ealier this extremely complicated system would break down and glucose would not reach the tissues.
No matter what level of functioning of any organised system we look at, the same basic rules apply, and as we go through increasingly complex of layer on layer the consequences of ignoring the rules will, whether consciously or unconsciously, cause increasing dysfunction leading to total destruction. From molecules to minds to collections of countries in the U.N. they must all operate according to the rules. These are not rules we invent: they have been discovered over the centuries and we ignore them at our peril - which is exactly what is going on at every level throughout the world. And it is the reason for my doing this blog and whatever else I can in the hope that it will arouse the anger of enough people to do whatever they can do, in their particular circumstances, to change things.

Having gone through most of the necessary basics, I shall begin to deal with the details of how they apply in our lives and hopefully what we can do about them. And from no on the blogs will be more regular and possibly more interesting.