The New World Model as a Layered System

Layered Systems is the name of an area of system theory. These are my own assertions for the levels (layers) of the New World Model.

Here are some more assertions. They need to be merged with the above and made into a cohesive theory.

The missing piece for me right now is net venation. I am keenly interested it developing a mathematical model for the green leaf that can also be applied to neighborhoods. (Tall Order). I need to study L-systems and space-filling algorithms. To my knowledge, no one has combined transportation and fractals or Iterative Function Systems yet. I propose to derive a transit network from a set of attractors, existing roadways, and landscape features.

Exercises (as in Transportation application)

[Computing the basins of attraction over a network of roads is a well defined algorithm. need reference. inro.ca. ].

1. Needs to be Adaptive. What features of the landscape must be factored in? (i.e What influences the resulting venation?)

2. As in #1, How could an existing subway or other infrastructure be factored in to the solution?

3. Given the adaptive algorithm, what does it produce over a completely flat featureless landscape, ad various transportation grids?


The Life of the Cosmos

Excerpts from THE LIFE of the COSMOS, by Lee Smolin, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Part 3 The Organization of the Cosmos

Chapter 11. What is Life?
... It them seems that our life is situated inside a nested hierarchy of self-organized systems that begin with our local ecologies and extend upwards at least to the galaxy. Each of these levels are non-equilibrium systems that owe their existence to processes of self-organization, that in turn, are driven by cycles of energy and materials in the level above them. It is then tempting to ask if this extends further up than the galaxy. Must there be a non-equilibrium system inside of which sits our galaxy? Is there a sense in which the universe as a whole could be a non-equilibrium, self-organized system?
Chapter 12. The Cosmology of an Interesting Universe
One Reason why self-organized systems are often critical systems is that the process of self-organization is hierarchical. This is because the process by which the components of a system become interrelated through the formation of cycles can, once it is begun, repeat itself on a larger scale. This, the system formed by the original components(,) become the components in still a larger system. In a sufficiently complex system ones finds many layers of organization, each of which is tied together by the cycles and interrelationships that characterize stable self-organized systems. In the most complex system we know -- the biosphere -- there are at least eight such levels of organization: the organelles of cells; the cells; the organs of a body; a plant or animal; a community of like organisms; a local ecosystem; a larger system such as a continent or ocean; and the biosphere as a whole. There are similarly many such levels in human society. Thus, a city has many interlocking levels of organization, which are reflected in the many scales over which its life may be viewed.

And from Page 5: Because we cannot invent what we cannot conceive, the construction of a new theory must involve, or perhaps be preceded by, attempts to imagine the outcome.


Passioura: Properties of Layered Systems

Excerpts from Accountability, Philosophy and Plant Physiology, J. B. Passioura, Search, Vol. 10 No. 10, October, 1979:
  1. Each level has its own language, concepts, and principles.
  2. Discovery at a given level is stimulated by thinking of adjacent levels.
  3. Interaction between levels is not symmetric: a higher level requires all lower levels in order to operate effectively, but not vice versa.
  4. Higher levels result from constraints being imposed on lower levels.
  5. A constraint is expressed in the language of the higher level.
This article criticizes the way grant-funded research misses getting into both the significance and the understanding at phenomena across the discrete levels of plant physiology - from the community, to whole plant, organ, tissue, cell, organelle, membrane, molecular levels. The author claims that it is important to think in terms of at least 3 [adjacent] levels at once, not just focus on one.

I think that these same arguments apply to transportation, etc. --jm


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