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.
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A1. To some degree, the collection of entities at one level need to
cooperate and communicate with the level that they constitute.
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A2. Every entity needs to communicate with every smaller entity that
constitutes it.
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A3. Two levels can be folded together if there is just entity on each of the
levels.
Examples: A town consisting of one community could call itself a town or
a community. A small nation might consist of only one region, etc.
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A4. Most adjacent continents, nations, regions, areas, towns, and
communities are interconnected.
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A5. Each level of the world has a unique combination of cultural and
administrative aspects. [Examples leading to full description].
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A6. Each entity should determine how it meets its special and basic needs
and how it delivers and pays for appropriate services.
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A7. People love Place Names.
Each dwelling and apartment should have a name and/or number.
Every business already has a name.
All villages and neighborhoods should name themselves.
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A9. Distinct human culture may be concentrated within a single area, or it may
span multiple regions, even nations.
Here are some more assertions. They need to be merged with the above
and made into a cohesive theory.
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A10. A given entity connects all the entities contained in the next lower
level. Conversely, every entity has only one 'parent'.
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A11. Each level has threads (filaments) that interconnect with others of the
same level.
In other words, the tree structure is augmented
with interconnections among adjacent entities.
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A12. Every entity has a boundary. Space outside the boundary not a part of
any other entity on that level belongs to the parent.
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A13. The model is a nested set of patterns. Abstractly, some patterns
may be similar from one level to the next, but by nature, the patterns
at each level are [salient/relevant to that level] due to changes in
scale.
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A14. Each entity is free to express all patterns that apply to it.
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A15. In the case of a singularity (local folding of two or more levels into
one level) patterns will be merged, not dropped.
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:
- Each level has its own language, concepts, and principles.
- Discovery at a given level is stimulated by thinking of adjacent levels.
- Interaction between levels is not symmetric: a higher level requires all lower levels in order to operate effectively, but not vice versa.
- Higher levels result from constraints being imposed on lower levels.
- 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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