Thoughts on Microbes, Macrobes, and possession

This post is pretty "far out" in the xenobiology world.  You've been warned.

One of the first laws of Cosmology that we learned about in a class of the same name is that "We're not special."       This is to be taken as the basic given truth, and any deviation from this requires a substantial burden of proof.

So, for example,   we can assume that the Earth is NOT at the center of the universe, or at the very edge. It's not at the center of the Galaxy or the very edge. It's not at the center of the solar system (with the sun going around it), or at the very edge.

Our sun, for another example, is neither the largest star nor the smallest one, but a ho-hum one in the middle.

For a thought experiment, to see where it goes,  I've been pondering applying the same rule to human beings, on several levels.

Humans are certainly not the smallest thing on the earth, nor the largest.

There are two areas where the basic cosmological princple leads to surprising results, at odds with our everyday anecdotal assumptions about life.   The two are related to each other.

Intelligence
The first deals with intelligence.   While many people would be willing to accept that there may be brighter and wiser life-forms somewhere in the universe,   and would add on the side that we're setting the bar pretty low if we judge humans by what's on the TV news,     there would be a lot more resistance to the idea that we're not even the brightest life form on earth.

More on that in a minute.  Still, the basic cosmological principle would suggest that maybe we need to be looking around a little harder for brighter life forms than us, even here on earth.  The principle doesn't PROVE anything, it just suggests it, by the way.

Composition

The second area where we get a surprising result from such an innocent looking basic assumption has to do with how life-forms of various magnitudes and scales and compositions inter-relate to each other.

Pasteur and others ran into a solid wall of opposition and ridicule when they suggested that there were tiny life forms, too small to see directly with human eyes,  some of which actually lived inside our bodies, and which had a lot to do with how we felt and disease and even death.   The idea of vaccination against such invisible tiny invaders was resisted and ridiculed as well.

It just violated our sense of who we were to imagine we had been, as if a planet,  "colonized."

It came as more of a surprise, after great efforts to "kill off" all the colonizing beasts, to realize that some of these beasts were not parasites at all (all take and no give) but were actually symbiotes (some give and take) and in fact, some of them, such as intestinal flora,  were actually a necessary PART of our own bodies.

In fact, our bodies, that we had previously thought to be monolithic,  turned out to be comprised of billions of "cells" -- many of which were "our own",   many of which had parts, such as mitochondria, that clearly came from somewhere else and took up permanent residence inside "us",   and some of which, such as intestinal and skin biota,  were so much a part of "us" and "our bodies" that killing them off would damage our own health.

We were, in fact, "many in one",   having a unity of being riding on top of a great diversity of types of life of smaller size than "our body".   Our bodies were not what we thought they were.

What the Cosmological principle suggests -- exfections.

The Cosmological princple suggests, however, that humans are NOT to be assumed to be at the top of the hierarchy of living things.   

There are things that are much smaller than us that are in some ways intimately connected to us, affect our health and behavior, and are sometimes transient and called "infections".

Similarly, the principle suggests that there should equally well be things that are LARGER than us that are,  similarly, intimately connected to us, affect our health and behavior, and are sometimes transient, in which case I'd call them, "ex-fections" (versus in-fections).

The last decade of study in population health and psychosocial factors does reveal that "our health", the health of "our bodies" depends to a large extent on the health of the people around us.  Our happiness depends on the happiness of our friends, and even their friends, even friends unknown to us.    Our opinions and beliefs can be very accurately predicted by ignoring "us" and looking entirely at our friends and environment instead. 

So,  we are reasonbably comfortable with the idea that our beliefs control our actions, and that our beliefs are significantly kept alive by our friends and peer-group,  but we're not automatically ready to agree that beliefs are, in their own right,  life forms that are themselves alive.

Maybe they are, is one suggestion from the Cosmological principle applied to this problem. Maybe beliefs do in fact take on and have "a life of their own" -- as do "fads".    Maybe such transient externally-based beliefs can be correctly described as "exfections" -- more on this in a minute.

Beliefs are only a modest stretch, because we can still maintain the ideal (often a comfortable illusion) that we are free at any time to over-ride our beliefs, or update them with new data, and therefore we retain complete control of the situation, so in that sense beliefs are something WE HOLD, not something that hold us.

However, there is substantial anecdotal wisdom, not accepted at face value by Western Science today,  that there are also truly LIVING external larger forces that can, from time to time,  take us into their grip and over-ride what WE want to do with whatever it is THEY want to do.     Perhaps even boring things like the White House Office of Communications would fall into this category, or Tobacco companies, or Alcohol companies, -- groups that very consciously and explicitly make decisions and take actions to totally override whatever it was we were going to do and wanted to do, and replace it with what THEY want us to do instead. (eg, buy a product, idea, candidate,  agenda,  war,  etc.)

It is a slight stretch, but not much of one, to determine that on a population level,  these groups do take over the will of humans and twist it to whatever they want it to be instead.   They are one type of exfection, but one created by ourselves. In that sense they are larger than us, (City Hall),  but not a leap of mystical faith to accept.

There are other larger beings and forces that social wisdom has described, and in particular I want to ponder for a moment whatever grain of truth there might be in the concept of "demon possession" and "states of sin"as well as guardian angels" and "states of grace".     For thousands of years mankind has had the sense that there is something to this kind of exo-possession of our behavior,   with various embellishments and details and total florid theologies built around them.  

I want to cut through all the fancy details and just get to the core question -- is it scientifically POSSIBLE that, as the cosmological principle applied to life would suggest, there ARE larger life forms here on earth that we have trouble seeing with our own eyes (ala microbes) that CAN and sometimes DO connect to us in a strong and powerful way to alter our behavior for their own purposes?

Is SOMETHING going on that humans have detected,   and ascribed to angels or demons for lack of any better theoretical basis on which to hang the observations?

Do "things" or "forces" sometimes take control of people,  against the will of the people, and cause or force them to carry out actions that the people would not, if left to themselves, do?  Beyond peer group pressure,  beyond corporate and political manipulation -- are there ALSO actual living things, as alive as bacteria,  that can engulf and sway us but that are hard for us to detect directly?

Again, this is an extremely volatile and charged concept, because it touches many emotional issues as well as the deepest one, our sense of our own identity, as strongly as Koch and Pasteur did with the "germ theory" of disease.   (Versus "God made him sick.")

And there are even microbes that affect behavior.  There is a microbe that only reproduces in cats, but that lives in rodents.    When the microbe needs to or wants to reproduce, it takes over the behavior of the rat or mouse and causes it to actually seek out a cat so it can be eaten.

So, there is a fully scientific niche here for a living entity,   non-human,  larger than a human or many humans,  that is capable of super-colonizing humans in a Star Trek "Borg" sort of way and entraining the humans to behave in certain ways that the humans would not do on their own -- perhaps even in ways that seem to make sense to the humans at the moment, as the rat going to its death by the cat make sense to the rat,  but that would not make sense when not so super-colonized.

Sidebar:

We know humans can be strongly influenced by groups much larger than themselves, to the point where they will willingly sacrifice their own lives for something conceptualized at the time as "patriotism" or "defending their family" or "the religious cause".   We know they can be bamboozled and led into group beliefs by extensive marketing that persuades them that "smoking tobacco" is a cool thing that everyone does and is not really harmful ,  or that "drinking alcohol is a cool thing that everyone does except antisocial nerds and not really harmful",  etc., and these imposed artificial beliefs can take on the appearance of deeply held personal beliefs.     The beliefs become impervious to data showing that these are actually harmful activities and there is such a thing as an entire society that is not culturally addicted to smoking,  or drinking.    Most people today can finally conceive of a world with out smoking (that took 80 years),  but they still can't conceive of a world without drinking -- it has become so deeply embedded into habits and traditions and seems from inside the belief to be the only true way to be social.  It's clear to drinkers that those who don't drink must be anti-social or "have something wrong with them." -- just as it was in 1960 that those men who didn't smoke must have something wrong with them.

The fact should stand out that it is not just "individuals" who become addicted to tobacco -- it is entire sub-cultures and cultures that become addicted to it.

The USA and New Zealand, to take two examples, right now have largely broken the artifically imposed addiction to tobacco, but are still very deep into a self-justifying addiction to alcohol and alcohol-mediated activities as the ONLY socially acceptable way to behave.   As one who doesn't drink, it is a substantial burden to socialize with people who take immediate offense that I won't consume alcohol along with them.   I've heard from others that failure to consume alcohol with management can be not only a deal-breaker with Japanese, but cause termination of employment as well for being "anti-social"   --- where "alcohol purchase and consumption" has infiltrated so deeply into the social DNA that it appears to be part of the social being itself, the way tobacco once was.

It is to many people simply inconceivable now that there could be a world without routine alcohol consumption.

Another culturally imposed activity for many people is TV-watching.  They similarly cannot conceive of a world without TV.  The TV is on from morning tonight in their houses.  They have dominated the culture to the point where it's hard to find a hallway or waiting area or restaurant that doesn't have a TV set on and broadcasting,  whether anyone is "watching" or not.       To suggest "silence" would be better to these people is like rejecting an offered cigarette -- a type of anti-social, who let you in, behavior. Clearly, something must be wrong with your genome if you don't prefer to have the TV on as background wallpaper even when you're not watching it "actively" (if there is such a verb.).

It's only a passing tangent for me to take a swipe at the un-natural and artifically induced addictions of some societies to tobacco,  alcohol, and television,  or these days, to televised violence.   I'm not attempting in this post to tackle those social behaviors, only to note that imposed behavioral patterns are all around us, every day, and we, as human beings and human cultures, are prone to be viewed as cattle or sheep or prey to the entities that use such addiction to transfer our time and wealth to their purses to sustain their existence and the "life of their own" that they seem to have.

The question I DO want to raise, however, is how many MORE attitudes, beliefs, world-views, and behaviors are we all engaging in that seem NOW,  so natural, so normal, so much part of our own DNA that we've forgotten that these were actually not always here, and were externally imposed or, like a cold or tapeworms,  "caught" from outside and now we can't shake them.

For one example that I DO want to address -- is the type of management style that McGregor called "Theory X",  featured so well in the cartoon strip Dilbert,   actually an ex-fection of this type?   Is this an externally acquired blindness and stupidity syndrome instead of a natural behavior of human managers?  Is it something they pass on to each other, or more accurately, like a BORG that they bring in new recruits and fresh blood to be exfected with, ("trained in"),  to provide the new tissue for this exobeing to use for its own flesh and blood?


The rest of society has been so acclimatized to this behavior style that, like the cartoon Dilbert, we are amazed at and laugh at it that anyone could be so stupid, and then go on about our daily lives while the office behavior continues unabashed,  destroying our employees, our companies, our stockholder wealth,  our economy, and our entire civilization as it is caught in the rip-tide of things being dragged into this dark black-hole in sensibility space.

I think part of the reason it is hard to fight this syndrome off, is that it has gotten "under the skin" and taken on the coloration and behavior of something that is "part of us" and "normal natural behavior" and to be opposed to it (or drinking or smoking or TV violence) is to be tarred as being "abnormal" and "anti-social". We've confused this transient behavior with "us" -- which, for humans, seems rather easy to do.

And,   like TV-violence addiction or smoking or drinking,  there is a certain pleasure that is associated with abusing employees under the patriotic flag of Theory X,   a pleasure that would be lost if the behavior were given up.     In management,   there is not only pleasure, but a self-fulfilling sense of "perks" that come with being a manager that are also quite nice to have,  and that have been sold as contingent upon being a GOOD manager, which means being TOUGH AS NAILS, firm, unyielding,  able to suppress dissent, etc.  so those are viewed as virtues, and anyone who claims otherwise is some sort of infection that needs to be killed off instantly lest it spread.

But, again, the reason I pick on this is that the tenacity and sticking-power of this Employee-Abusing-Syndrome (Dilbertesqe, theory X management) may be partly attributed to the perks and power, but I think it goes far deeper, into BORG territory,  I think it is derived from the whole belief system effectively being alive in its own right, and using a fraction of the energy and life force it sucks out of employees and companies and stockholders to simply sustain itself and defend itself against all perceived attacks, and to counter-attack those who would pull back the mask and turn on the lights.

Whether it is actually alive, in a technical sense, or simply "might as well be alive" -- it satisfies the conditions introductory biology books ascribe to life .  It sucks out energy,  has a sense of self, uses the energy to grow and expand and to repel threats, and adapts to changes in its environment.

IT is also a purely artificial construct, and not at all required in the architecture of a "business" entity.  In fact, theory X behavior is massively destructive of wealth and progress.     It is certainly one of the major roadblocks to changes in culture, such as introduction of an Electronic Health Record,  because that would make explicit much of the invisible implicit abuse which has been going on.

There will be others who argue that smoking, drinking, TV-violence, and employee-abuse dont' really harm anyone and should be left alone, and the critics and dissenters should be silenced as enemies of "free choice".

That focuses the question directly on the core question this whole blog post addresses.  IS this actually a free-choice of those who partake in it,  or is it an IMPOSED compulsion by an external agency, one that might-as-well-be-alive?

test one

New York Times
November 21, 2006
George Johnson

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book “The God Delusion” is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

Control loops and macrobes

(originally posted in Perspectives in Public Health on June 13, 2007 here)
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/06/causal-loop-diagrams-stories-and.html


One standard tool of Systems Dynamics is the Causal Loop Diagram. This tool is explained at great length in MIT Professor John Sterman's text "Business Dynamics", but a short explanation is given by Daniel Kim in "Guidelines for Drawing Causal Loop Diagrams."
(John Sterman had a paper in the March, 2006 issue of AJPH on "Learning From Evidence in a Complex World", so he's finally been given "judicial notice" by Public Health. Always a good start.)

Kim begins:

The old adage "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every-thing begins to look like a nail" can also apply to language. If our language is linear and static, we will tend to view and interact with our world as if it were linear and static. Taking a complex, dynamic, and circular world and linearizing it into a set of snapshots may make things seem simpler, but we may totally misread the very reality we were seeking to understand. ...
Articulating Reality
Causal loop diagrams provide a language for articulating our understanding of the dynamic, interconnected nature of our world. We can think of them as sentences which are constructed by linking together key variables and indicating the causal relationships between them. By stringing together several loops, we can create a coherent story about a particular problem or issue. [emphasis added]

I haven't been able to get away for a few weeks for intensive training in Vensim or Causal loop diagrams, but they are certainly referred to in the professional literature as being a strong basis around which to bring many different interest groups together and reach a better common undertanding than would be possible without even turning on the simulator.

Still, it appears to me, a relative newbie, that Causal Loop diagrams still suffer from the concept that feedback comes in only two flavors - "positive" and "negative", not the full multidimensional spectrum I described in recent posts for "self-aware, goal-seeking, feedback control loops." Thus, on web sites such as Pegasus Communications, we see the classic "two" kinds of loops, those labeled with an "R" for "REINFORCING" and those labeled with a "B" for "BALANCING" (or "negative" feedback reducing difference from some fixed goal state.) See also Mindtools' description of CLD's with somewhat clearer diagrams.

Here, I fear, the power of the ability to turn on the computer and have it crunch through ranges of estimated parameters short-circuits the process I would recommend -- namely, putting the CLD up on the wall, standing back a few paces, and looking amid all the N-factorial combinations of N "loops" for a few "self-aware, self-protective, self-repairing, goal-seeking, feedback-mediated control loops."

At the risk of hitting a lot of hot-buttons, let me say that these, in my mind, constitute a kind of proto-life, which is to say that they are active agents that "might as well be alive" because they satisfy the usual definitions of "life", which is to say that they:

• Consume energy
• are self-repairing
• adapt to their environments
• are self-aware
• seek something akin to homeostasis when disturbed
• resist being shut down or shut off
• are capable of learning and becoming smarter

BUT, because the entities I'm describing are creatures of the "control" domain, what flows in their equivalent of "veins" or "neurons" is control information and in particular real-time, real-world phase-lock signals. And, as I've emphasized, control information can easily jump from one medium to another, so it's tricky to track it down and "see" it the first time, although once you "see" it, like most visual patterns, you can keep on seeing it.

So, once again, I bring in the hand and water faucet picture, and the person-driving car picture, to illustrate the number of different stages that a single "control loop" can pass through and draw together into synchronous action.

Aside: The fact that the action is synchronized is all the difference in the world, as that is the difference between a laser-beam and incoherent light, where one cuts steel and the other is a little bright to look at. Most of our real-world measurements, unless we are into Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), discard "phase" information and absolute time as "irrelevant." VLBI can work even if the telescopes in different countries are not connected physically, if a very accurate record is kept of each signal and the records synthetically reconnected in virtual space inside a computer. But it does require recording not just "amplitude" or "power" but also the phase component of the signal at each antenna -- information we normally discard.

The big Y-shaped array of "dishes" that Jodie Foster was using to listen to the stars with in the movie "Contact" was a VLBI, where the spacing between the dishes, which are on railroad tracks, could be altered to focus on different wavelengths of incoming signals.

Another example with some smaller feedback loops that compete for our attention is the "story telling feedback loop" picture I put up yesterday, again repeated below. Don't try to dig into the details. Just notice that there is a big loop that covers most of the diagram, surrounding the light blue bar -- and that is the main, persistent, "I am a person" kind of loop. Then there is also a smaller loop with a shorter lifetime managing incoming visual input at the lower right, and two competing permanent-fixture loops at the left -- One driven by higher levels reaching downward and trying to raise this person's goals; the other driven by the person's frustration limit and protection against overheating basically, which tries to lower the goals again until they are achievable.


It requires reflection, and explicitly asking the question, to realize which loops are self-aware and self-repairing if damaged.

Consciousness certainly keeps shutting down every night, but it recovers the next morning, usually. The visual system has many small loops that leap into action when triggered, then go back to sleep. If we lost them we'd be essentially blind in a sea of unfiltered noise.

Aside: I'm not sure about the loop I drew in the upper right, where the person's actions are echoed back to them, with various lagtimes, by different parts of the environment. Maybe that's just the classic, passive, "environment" that's envisioned by epidemiology -- with the same intelligence and adaptiveness as a canyon's walls. Or, maybe the world develops its own set of ruts and habits around reacting to you, as an irritant is surrounded by pearl inside an oyster, and those prove to be so useful that they are endowed with self-aware, self-sustaining, independent status to keep an eye on you and provide very fast feedback, as if you'd touched a stove, when you try to harm the world. That's a sort of meta-sociological question touching on guardian processes, for some other day.

Cutting to the chase: Hypothesis: Because self-aware, self-repairing agents survive noise and damage that will disrupt other, dumb, passive, accidental "loops", they will tend to end up dominating the landscape -- even if they don't reproduce or form support alliances. But, they will tend to form support alliances too.

Similar hypothesis I put forward a month or so ago: Because organizations tend to find and fix small-scale, non-complex problems, if we assume problems arise due to noise at every level in some equal amount, then the large-scale, "complex" ones will end up dominating the landscape, because those are the ones that keep getting put off and not addressed or fixed.

Synthesis of those two: In any long-lived multi-level complex adaptive system, large-scale, complex, active, self-aware, self-repairing control loops will end up dominating the landscape and being the primary shaping force.

And, sad corollary: Until we build scientific tools that can glance at a picture like M.C. Escher's Waterfall, and "see" at a glance "where" it is "broken", we will continue to be plagued by these large scale active agents.

We are, in fact,most likely swimming in a sea of semi-alive "macrobes" -- a concept probably as distressing as Pasteur's "germ theory" that had a sea of "microbes" swimming inside us. They would certainly be as "alive" and as annoying as viruses, and if they were not well, we would feel it, being, as it were, inside the "whale".

Of course, before going into anaphylactic shock at the idea of macrobes, I should point out that you already are familiar with some of them, as a big "yawn." Those would include persistent, self-aware, self-repairing, energy consuming, possibly self-extending macro-agents known as "families", "corporations", "cultures", "religions", and "nation-states." If the Gaia theory is correct, it would also include the Earth as a whole. If religions are even partly correct about some big issues, it continues at scales much larger than the Earth. However, the larger such an agent would be, the more slowly changing it would be, and at some point we could locally treat it as "fixed" or a "constant" for planning daily activities.

So, if sociologists, and even untrained civilians recognize that corporations and countries exist, what's the big deal here? What contribution to our collective wisdom am I suggesting this framework brings to the table?

Again, the most important point I'm making has three parts:

Hey everyone strugling with methodologies for feedback and multilevel systems in Public Health! Control System Engineering already solved that! Read the Literature!

and

Hey everyone in Control System Engineering! You have some potential new clients over here in Public Health!

Finally this one: Children! Stop fighting!

Public HealtH? stop picking on corporations -- the healthy ones hold your planet together right now. And the diseased ones need your insight and techniques to be healed -- once you master multi-level organism healing techniques. And, Hey, CEO's? :Please stop kicking Public Health in the shins -- they're trying to keep your workforce alive and healthy and productive, and besides they're closer than anyone to understanding The Toyota Way in terms of a health multilevel organism. Religion please stop picking on Science, and vice versa!

And, everyone, there's a big qualitative difference between a "distal factor" and the big toe on your other foot, so before you bite down .... oh, never mind. You'll find out soon enough!

By this model, there really only is one multi-level life form occupying this planet, and while it is the job of clinical medicine to heal people at the 1-body level, it is the larger distinct job of "Public Health" to deal with disharmony at any level -- between cells and cells, people and people, cultures and cultures, nations and nations, corporations vs. corporations, departments vs. departments, silo versus silo within hospitals, etc.

Because all that will persist is actually connected through all those loose-couplings (amplified by compounding feedback loops over long times), in a "control" or "regulatory system" sense, it's all only ONE body. We share parts of it, or levels of it. But it's hard to have your own foot have gangrene and not be affected by it, sooner or later.

The biggest problem right now is that the healers of society cannot easily see the feedback loop connections and evaluate the strength of each link and of phase-locked groups of links. That's the missing toolset. And that already exists, but indexed in a different literature where public health seldom treads. Now, with the new competency (2006) for MPH students from the ASPH, the focus on "systems thinking" will lead us there. The March 2006 AJPH is a start, but our work is cut out for us.

It puts a kind of different light and torque on things if we assume there is only one Body here, with many pieces and parts, that we're trying to heal and make right. It won't do to fix most of the body but leave a tooth or limb infected -- that'll turn around and bite "us".

If every level and pair of levels had different rules, this would be a huge problem, probably intractable. BUT, if every level and pair of levels has the SAME set of rules in "control space", then instead of many levels being harder to "solve", suddenly many levels becomes more hints and easier to fix. We have one equation and one unknown and 50 clues, not 50 equations with 50 unknowns and no clue.

That's WAY BETTER. Just align the fragmentary knowledge of the control structures of each level on a mental transparency, then put them on top of each other at the same scale and orientation, and look through the whole set, and all the clues will line up and reveal the full picture that applies at every level, even though we only have a little bit of it right now on each of those levels.

The prospect is compelling. It's a win-win-win solution, and we might just be able to get every field to give up 1% of its budget to work on this single problem that is relevant to working out more details in that field, for every field. It could be politically acceptable. It might fly.

Public health , business, jobs, and profit

All of my theoretical models lead to the same conclusion - the field of "public health" cannot really do their job well until the needs and interests and realities of multi-human meta-organisms are included as well.

In English, that means that we ARE what we are PART OF, which is increasingly clear in public health studies of the impact of social connectivity on physical and mental health.

But it also means that the internal life of corporations, cultures, and nations, as well as the entity called "the public", are all very real systems that behave as if they were separate biological goal-seeking, energy-consuming, adaptive, reactive, self-protective organisms.

It also means that it just doesn't make any sense to evaluate the impact of different interventions in the health of people without, at the same time, evaluating the impact on jobs, employment, and the health of corporations and business and the business community.

The physical health of people in a community or nation is very directly influenced by the "health" of the community or national economy. If the economy or businesses crash, it will show up "under the skin" very rapidly.

The failure of many in public health to have a wholistic approach that includes BOTH people AND corporations reduces the credibility of public health. If there is one lesson "systems thinking" teaches, it is that the word "OR" is vastly over-used. We shouldn't be thinking that EITHER we can serve people OR the public - we need to lead the way in serving BOTH. And, similarly, we need to get corporations realizing that they can't survive if the workforce they draw on, and customer base they need in this country collapse. We need each other. We are each other, in some very real ways, and our respective "health" depends on each other in a feedback loop, either for better or worse.

Similarly, it makes no sense to me that "Republicans" should be fighting for the interests of "business" and "Democrats" for the interests of the "people" - because there is only one, multi-leveled complex life-form on this planet, which includes "cells", "people", "corporations", "cultures", and "nations."

We are all in the same lifeboat. At this point if the people all die off, so do the corporations. If the corporations all died off, so would almost all the people. Get over it.

If we're upset that corporate or national planners don't include "human factors" in their planning, we shoudn't also assume it's because they refuse to -- it is, in my experience, more that they are clueless as to how to do that.

If public health wants to change that equation and interaction, great, pick up that heavy burden and figure out how to include humans in the equations and not make them indescribably difficult to solve. If corporations can get better bottom-line performance by doing better planning including more of reality in the plans, they'll do it, but someone has to show them how that would work and make a convincing case that it does work.

That gets down to that messy problem of "profit." As the Ross School of Business here in Michigan says "Non-profit is a tax strategy, not a business strategy."

Or, as one sister from Trinity Health Care's catholic leadership put it, "No margin, no mission."

Health is intimately tied to growth and life which are intimately tied to "wealth."
That component sub-systems decay and die is a given; what's up for grabs is whether there's a balancing source of regeneration and growth, which requires that actions result, ultimately, in absorbing more energy than is spent in getting there.

In other words, in the larger accounting scheme of life, public health interventions have to "pay off" or they will simply "die off." This is a schitzohrenia that both clinical health and public health seem to have - the idea that making money is intrinsically bad or a dirty concept.

Yes, obsession with short-range, stupid strategies to make money at the expense of life, health, and stability are indeed stupid. On the other hand, there is no such thing as a long-range strategy of losing money each year.

The most important distinction is that wealth, and health, are not zero sum, and are based heavily on interactions across levels of the MAWBA beastie.

Health can, in fact, be created out of thin air.
Wealth can, in fact, be created out of thin air.
BOTH of these, health and wealth, cross-support each other.
Being "rich" and "dead" is not a winning strategy.
Some balance is required.

Public health has an opportunity to teach the principles of SUSTAINABLE GROWTH, which means sustainable rates of return on investment. Business owners hate that venture capital firms and stockholders expect them to operate to maximize profit this quarter, at over 27% a year annual rate, but to keep operating in the long run.
Those are incompatible goals. With the exception of discovering gold or the equivalent, healthy businesses probably grow at 10% or less, maybe as low as 2% per year. If public health would show CEO's how to keep stockholders from jumping ship if the companies invested more internally in people and showed such "small" profits, the CEO's would love public health. Everyone knows this is an absurd demand that's killing off healthy, stable business as "not up to par."

These problems cause each other. People are stressed out because the businesses they work for are stressed out. Businesses are stressed out because they don't know how to tap the healthy creative power of people at a sustainable rate. They are different views of the very same, multi-level, MAWBA problem.

If 30% of the humans died or were seriously put out of commission for 2 months by something like avian flu, at least 30% of the corporations would crash and burn as well, because they are riding very close to the line on being as short-staffed as they can be right now. The crash would cascade, as suppliers of key components failed. The interests of public health and "big business" align when it comes to stopping global pandemics.

This fact is maybe less visible because of the invisiblity of the details of the roles of people on "the bottom" in keeping corporations operating. My guess is, after the last round of layoffs, that more than half the large corporations in the US are vulnerable to crashing and burning if 30% of their Information Technology staff were to abruptly be incapacitated on the same day. All meta-life involves a constant battle between natural collapse and regenerative efforts, which may "look like" nothing is going on and all is "well." Remove those people who are holding everything together, and it will suddenly become apparent that maybe they were doing something after all.

Other areas of "infrastructure" are similar. We have huge reliance on armies of people doing low-visibility or invisible jobs, without which the wheels of commerce would cease turning in a cross-cascade, house-of-cards type collapse.

It is a mistake to think that pulling out the "safety net" has "worked." It hasn't been tested on a full-scale pandemic yet. The effect of having almost 50 million people in the US without health coverage will have the same effect as having a basement filled with gasoline-soaked rags would have on a small house fire. These are things you really do NOT want to give a running start on you.

Multilevel Architectures - boon or bane?

Marsden Bloise once described life as having a "curiously laminated quality."

Life on earth does have levels, and they have important mathematical consequences.

In fact, the multi-level model is one we find reasonably familiar and can live with. We structure our corporations and government to have layers and levels, with people one "one level" reporting to people on "a higher level."

Not only are there levels, there are gaps between the layers. It is almost like a quantum mechanical model, where there are legal levels and forbidden zones.

In the world of large-scale enterprise computing, there are officially levels (see the OSI model), where there is a hardware level, a messaging level, an application level, etc. The goal of each level is to function so well that it essentially becomes a perfectly flat, stable platform or metric on which the higher levels can be built. A perfect level "goes away" and "falls out" of the equations.

So, in the best world, when nothing is going wrong, an application such as Microsoft Word can say "save this file!" and, behold, it happens. The application doesn't need to concern itself about the details of what brand disk-drive is in the computer, or how may empty slots of what size are there, or how to chain them together and break up the document into chunks that size for storage and retrieval later.

Or, in business, workers and "the boss" or the next level of management up have a functioning gap between them. The boss doesn't really want to know the details of how something happens, and only wants a simplified, almost cartoon-level sketch, and mostly cares, yes or no, did that happen. The employees see all the details and prefer the boss not "micromanage". The employees have little idea what the boss does all day - so long as reasonable work tasks come down the pike in reasonable order, it's good. The boss has little idea of the complexity of many tasks, or the pains that have to be taken to accomplish them.

On the upside, this makes "management" even possible, because otherwise the world would rapidly become way too complex for anyone to ever comprehend, and the largest business would probably be something like 200 people.

And, if perfectly managed, lower level computer "infrastructure", like plumbing or electrical wiring, should be completely invisible. The thousand upgrades a day, putting in new hardware, swapping out old networks, installing new security patches, upgrading the database or operating system, should all be done "seamlessly" and at most result in a slight slowing down of normal response time.

One downside of this is that it is very easy for the upper levels to mistake the perception with reality. The classic problem in preventive maintenance is that, if perfectly done, all problems are seen coming in advance, headed off, and so "nothing ever breaks" -- and consequently upper management, at the next budget crunch, decides they can lay off the maintenance department because, who needs them, nothing ever breaks! So, they do, and only later discover what it was that the department did.

A second downside is that upper management is shielded from details by multiple layers of oversimplified sketches to the extent that they mistakenly believe that the tasks people at the front, or on the bottom, are actually easy to do, or even trivial. Consequently, it follows that the people doing them are really only one step above morons, and also that failure to do the tasks must be due to not only incompetence, but bad attitudes, because anyone can see the work is trivial.

Thus we have what I call "wicked-II" (wicked two) problems - where the tasks may be enormously difficult, but from above or outside they appear to be simple or trivial.

The immediate consequence of those misperceptions then are that management may decide, in its infinite wisdom, to undertake some new task, or "put in" a new computer system that, from their very limited depth model, should be "easy." First, they seriously lowball the associated work and costs. Then, they interpret reports of trouble from below as being obviously due to incompetence, laziness, or, worse enemy action that demands instant retaliation and disciplining or firing the idiots who resist. Management says "I don't want to hear about problems! Don't tell me you can't do that!" That directive appears to be successful, as complaints drop to zero, until the whole project finally crashes on the rocks the employees were trying to warn management about when they got fired. Management blames the employees for failing to do what they were told to do. And everyone loses.

This model of operation appears to be the norm, and enormously easy to slip into, even if management is trying hard not to. It is what "safety cultures" and "high reliability organizations" have to try to overcome in order to work.

So, we also expect to find, throughout history, a vague awareness of this type of problem and hard-won advice on some benchmarks to avoid falling into that same pitfall in the future - advice typically ignored as old wives tales, so the future generations end up rediscovering the world of hard knocks.

In some ways, this is like the brain-body dichotomy, where our conscious selves are able to think deep thoughts, like what movie to go to, and be generally unaware of all the hard work going on in the body below synthsizing enzymes, digesting food, managing pathogen invasions, etc. It is all too easy, not seeing those details, to take "the body" for granted and neglect or abuse it. And, as with management, complaints can be suppressed and we can continue on deep into fatigue and exhaustion because of higher goals, until some physiological system that was trying to warn us finally collapses. (Recall the old rule of thumb - the time to furl your mainsail is the first time it occurs to you that maybe you should furl your mainsail. Those who forget it as the wind picks up rediscover it after their mast snaps or the boat overturns.)

Similarly, "upper" levels of society are reminded in all religious literature to "remember the poor" and take care of the powerless "below" them. This advice is often neglected for short run gain and long-run disaster.

Similarly, "upper" structures, such as corporations, can easily forget that their existence depends on the lower level existence of a healthy workforce and community, and a stable ecology and climate. Again, industry can take actions for short term gain that undermine the workforce health or environmental stability, with long term catastrophic results. It's very easy to do, and very easy to suppress complaints.

Similarly, "upper" levels of the military, or civilian government, can suppress dissent and ride roughshod over the key needs and observations of their own staff, often without realizing they are doing it. The result is being surrounded by "yes men", being cut off from reality into a fantasy shell, and making terrible mistakes that end up being catastrophic.

The problems listed above are all the "same" problem mathematically. Interlevel communication and the tradeoff between "invisibility / detail hiding" and constant needs that have to be met remains an open problem.