A catalyst for self-organization.
I believe that individuals can form teams around big problem solutions using only the shared imagination within the team. External forces or the sum of all energy outside the team may initially overwhelm the individual trajectories or the individual potential for delivering solutions dispersed around the problem that do not converge to diminish the problem to a
manageable size. Problems of manageable size from problems of unbounded complexity and intractable difficulty explicitly describes what an existentialist labels 'being from nothingness' . Structure emerges from simply integrating over a region of maximum disorder.
From thermodynamics, a system in maximum disorder or maximum entropy has no free energy. The
momentum of all particles
dissipates through collisions and the difference in potential energy vanishes as the entire system reaches a uniform temperature with all particles at rest. But notice that such a closed system was never of much interest anyway except on a final exam in thermodynamics. Our senses remind us everyday that open systems interacting with other open systems present compelling opportunities for each individual.
Calories in the package of potato chips are potential energy for snack time. Carbohydrates, oil and salt in stomach acid feed our cells. The entire ensemble of digestive processes solve a problem together; converting products of biology into energy. This ensemble of animal digestive solutions self-organized over time through
heritable, encoded symbol strings message passing though the gene pool. This process seems removed from the dry physics of thermodynamics when you dismiss solutions from science which provide simple evidence that humans developed thermodynamics to solve all the problems that directed effort in other fields missed. Thermodynamics sweeps all the little pieces together that were left out of the critical calculations.
At the end of the calculation, a thermodynamic summary clears away the debris left from every missed estimate of expected behavior. Models predict behavior. Behavior represents the sum of all actions and reactions. Actions and reactions, reduced to specific direct or inferred measurements of position, momentum, energy, mass and all other physical properties can be managed as populations with statistical or
probabilistic behaviors. A center of gravity will move or stay put from the motion of a rotating object even though every particle of the object is in motion. The model of physical structures which includes the notion of a center of gravity or an ideal point in a four valued Cartesian description transforms a football's trajectory in the air into a parabola's with minor
fluctuations. The parabola is not a physical object but simply a trajectory from a kicker, a ball and gravity. The development and delivery of the football from culture and the development and delivery of the kicker from biology came together to solve a specific problem. The problem; testing one football team against another team of sufficiently equal capability to produce an entertaining experience from an exchange of energy producing good feelings in the players and the spectators.
The good feelings at the football field emerged from the exchange of energy. The physical phenominon of feeling is called a neural correlate of consciousness. According to Francis Crick, part of self-organized team that solved for a useful model of DNA, spent his time after this accomplishment producing a model for vision and eventually consciousness. Cricks recommendation for a model includes a specific measure of specific types of energy states in the brain. One ensemble of electrical, chemical and biological features corresponds to "seeing the color red", a universal ability of nominal human consciousness.
A feeling of anxiety whether weak or strong has a distinct numeric value across a large population of humans which is very tightly grouped over time and across most individuals tested. The diffusion of the neural correlates of anxiety into regions or sub-populations which marked differences from the norm does not happen.
The stimulus for a particular anxiety state happens first. A car ahead of me on the freeway suddenly hits the brakes and decelerates rapidly. A call to my broker brings me bad news. The smell of smoke wakes me up. Each of these events depending on my previous learning and experience will put all conscious humans neural correlate of anxiety. The duration will vary as the quickest thinkers invoke sufficient cognition with sufficiently short delay.
An experienced driver will brake to stay between the car ahead and the car behind. A novice may break too fast miss the bumper in front only to cause a collision in the rear. An experienced mechanic will keep the brake system in top shape. A drunk will miss everything but somehow escape all damage. Each individual experiences an identical brain state as the initial condition. The routine behavior that results depends on history and learning.
An athlete has muscle memory. The practice field is not for conditioning of the muscles alone but for the habituation of specific and carefully controlled ensemble of behaviors. A design review is not called to teach basic skills in design to the novice. Specific behaviors or specific patterns of behavior are studied for variation of outputs. Skipping a complex step has an immediate upside in time saved. Skipping a step that has never been skipped before in a series of steps is risky and demands experimentation or modeling.
The model most likely exists in various ways in the minds of the design community. Although a conventional self delusion drives the collection of vast quantities of trivial nonsense, leaving data uncollected when the norm is obsessive collection of data demands experimentation. Many routine behaviors may be run poorly or in haste such that at least one historical and habitual behavior is omitted. In a later step of the process the missing data may destroy careful predictions of future behavior. However, most data exists in a particular way that almost certainly guarantees nominal results no matter what.
Measurements on a population shows a mean and variance about the mean or the measurement results becomes useless trivia. Searching for a symbol or a data value with prior knowledge of data rate, phase relation of a symbol to a period, the units of amplitude and other characteristics of the symbol representation generates results of a certain type. For a large population and with sufficient quality of measurement method, results integrated over time form certain distributions. The variation in rate of production or absorption and the variation in the variation in the rate over time suggest standard models for understanding past trajectories taken, trajectories possible and ranges of trajectories predicted in the future from knowledge of current or initial conditions.
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics takes the black box of classic or equilibrium thermodynamics and adds a simple model change. Although many state transitions are vastly more likely than all others, most state transitions are not instantaneous. I cannot stand in Times Square at midnight on New Years Eve and catch a flight to Austin before the stroke of midnight. Although this transition in state if physically possible for an Air Force pilot with a fighter jet warmed up on the flight deck of a waiting carrier, my access to Southwest Airlines or Continental on-line booking does not get me a solution to this change of state.
The rate of change in the rate of change is greater for the pilot with his jet than for me and my checked luggage. This fluctuation in travel time could result from another change in state from war to peace which removes the preferred mode of travel from the Airman but consistently gets me to Austin with plenty of peanut fuel for energy. This local difference has modes or regions of energy exchange that are randomly turned on and off. Everyone with plans to fly this year in North America cannot show up on the Wednesday before the third Thursday in November at an airline ticket counter and fly the same day or the same week. Time, specifically the irreversible nature of time which 'causes' an ordering of passengers in space and time divides the problem of airplane travel into manageable chunks or regions of distinct energy exchange with resulting fluctuations in response.
An airplane in a thunderstorm burns more fuel than an airplane in clear weather. Some flights are canceled and each leg of a flight has a variation from re-routing and load balancing. We accommodate these variations based upon our experience and learning from history.
The first time I experienced a delay in arrival I worried that I would miss my connection. The reason that this is an exception is that the entire system understands the routine sources for individual delay and models butts in seats to minimize effects across a population. In proportion, a medium growing to large segment of the traveling public feels a delay in the system response. Local weather effects are contained by the elasticity of neighboring regions. Planes are re-routed to alternative airports and the spare bandwidth of the system dynamically adjusts.
This process for moving passengers is not static. Of all human culture, airline culture evolved rapidly across a significant portion of the earth's traveling humans. I book online and travel without tickets since the airlines and the travel services keep my information networked. I work from a shared plan that keeps my intentions stored under change control. I need to get to San Jose on Tuesday and get back to Austin through Phoenix to touch base with the part of my development team. Thanks to self-organizing structures like the airline industry, I can plan and execute my travel with minimum work.
The individual behaviors and the individual capabilities supporting airline travel did not come from charitable support. Airline pilots do not depend on Church basement soup kitchens to fly planes for the glory of god in this god less nation. Airline pilots form unions that negotiate large scale economic results for airline pilots. Pilots never complain as every public school teachers often do that the pure love of flying compensates for the privation from poor pilot salaries. Pilots are not more important than garbage collectors or high school English teachers; they just negotiate more effectively. Self organizing behavior for premium wages works well for a population of nearly uniform historical learning from the military. My tax dollars train military pilots who go on to fly for Southwest Airlines. I did not need to draw this system on my whiteboard. Herb Kehleher at Southwest Airlines did not need to invent the entire system. I plug in to a self-organized module called air travel.
The equation for this system exists only for non-equilibrium thermodynamic models. The variations and fluctuations support the emergence of structure from less structure or no structure at all. Being from nothingness happens constantly in non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
