Tetworld Links
|
Spaceship Earth Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. Our nearest starÐour energy-supplying mother-ship, the SunÐis ninety-two million miles away, and the nearest star is one hundred thousand times further away. It takes approximately four and one third years for light to get to us from the next nearest energy supply ship star. That is the kind of space-distanced pattern we are flying. Our little Spaceship Earth is right now travelling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the around the sun and is also spinning axially, which, at the latitude of Washington, D. C., adds approximately one thousand miles per hour to our motion. Each minute we both spin at one hundred miles and zip in orbit at one thousand miles. That is a whole lot of spin and zip. When we launch our rocketed space capsules at fifteen thousand miles an hour, that additional acceleration speed we give the rocket to attain its own orbit around our speeding Spaceship Earth is only one-fourth greater than the speed of our big planetary spaceship.Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship. And our spaceship is so superbly designed as to be able to keep life regenerating on board despite the phenomenon, entropy, by which all local physical systems lose energy. So we have to obtain our biological life-regenerating energy from another spaceshipÐthe sun. Our sun is flying in company with us, within the vast reaches of the Galactic system, at just the right distance to give us enough radiation to keep us alive, yet not close enough to burn us up. And the whole scheme of Spaceship Earth and its live passengers is so superbly designed that the Van Allen belts, which we didn’t even know we had until yesterday, filter the sun and other star radiation which as it impinges upon our spherical ramparts is so concentrated that if we went nakedly outside the Van Allen belts it would kill us. Our Spaceship Earth’s designed infusion of that radiant energy of the stars is processed in such a way that you and I can carry on safely. You and I can go out and take a sunbath, but are unable to take in enough energy through our skins to keep alive. So part of the invention of the Spaceship Earth and its biological life-sustaining is that the vegetation on the land and the algae in the sea, employing photosynthesis, are designed to impound the life-regenerating energy for us to adequate amount. But we can’t eat all the vegetation. As a matter of fact, we can eat very little of it. We can’t eat the bark nor wood of the trees nor the grasses. But insects can eat these, and there are many other animals and creatures that can. We get the energy relayed to us by taking the milk and meat from the animals. The animals can eat the vegetation, and there are a few of the fruits and tender vegetation petals and seeds that we can eat. We have learned to cultivate more of those botanical edibles by genetical inbreeding. That we are endowed with such intuitive and intellectual capabilities as that of discovering the genes and the R.N.A. and D.N.A. and other fundamental principles governing the fundamental design controls of life systems as well as of nuclear energy and chemical structuring is part of the extraordinary design of the Spaceship Earth, its equipment, passengers, and internal support systems. It is therefore paradoxical but strategically explicable, as we shall see, that up to now we have been mis-using, abusing, and polluting this extraordinary chemical energy-interchanging system for successfully regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship. One of the interesting things to me about our spaceship is that it is a mechanical vehicle, just as is an automobile. If you own an automobile, you realize that you must put oil and gas into it, and you must put water in the radiator and take care of the car as a whole. You begin to develop quite a little thermodynamic sense. You know that you’re either going to have to keep the machine in good order or it’s going to be in trouble and fail to function. We have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total. Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. I think it’s very significant that there is no instruction book for successfully operating our ship. In view of the infinite attention to all other details displayed by our ship, it must be taken as deliberate and purposeful that an instruction book was omitted. Lack of instruction has forced us to find that there are two kinds of berries-red berries that will kill us and red berries that will nourish us. And we had to find out ways of telling which-was-which red berry before we ate it or otherwise we would die. So we were forced, because of a lack of an instruction book, to use our intellect, which is our supreme faculty, to devise scientific experimental procedures and to interpret effectively the significance of the experimental findings. Thus, because the instruction manual was missing we are learning how we safely can anticipate the consequences of an increasing number of alternative ways of extending our satisfactory survival and growth-both physical and metaphysical. Quite clearly, all of life as designed and born is utterly helpless at the moment of birth. The human child stays helpless longer than does the young of any other species. Apparently it is part of the invention "man" that he is meant to be utterly helpless through certain anthropological phases and that, when he begins to be able to get on a little better, he is meant to discover some of the physical leverage-multiplying principles inherent in universe as well as the many nonobvious resources around him which will further compoundingly multiply his knowledge-regenerating and life-fostering advantages. I would say that designed into this Spaceship Earth’s total wealth was a big safety factor which allowed man to be very ignorant for a long time until he had amassed enough experiences from which to extract progressively the system of generalized principles governing the increases of energy managing advantages over environment. The designed omission of the instruction book on how to operate and maintain Spaceship Earth and its complex life-supporting and regenerating systems has forced man to discover retrospectively just what his most important forward capabilities are. His intellect had to discover itself. Intellect in turn had to compound the facts of his experience. Comprehensive reviews of the compounded facts of experiences by intellect brought forth awareness of the generalized principles underlying all special and only superficially-sensed experiences. Objective employment of those generalized principles in rearranging the physical resources of environment seems to be leading to humanity’s eventually total success and readiness to cope with far vaster problems of universe. To comprehend this total scheme we note that long ago a man went through the woods, as you may have done, and I certainly have, trying to find the shortest way through the woods in a given direction. He found trees fallen across his path. He climbed over those crisscrossed trees and suddenly found himself poised on a tree that was slowly teetering. It happened to be lying across another great tree, and the other end of the tree on which he found himself teetering lay under a third great fallen tree. As he teetered he saw the third big tree lifting. It seemed impossible to him. He went over and tried using his own muscles to lift that great tree. He couldn’t budge it. Then he climbed back atop the first smaller tree, purposefully teetering it, and surely enough it again elevated the larger tree. I’m certain that the first man who found such a tree thought that it was a magic tree, and may have dragged it home and erected it as man’s first totem. It was probably a long time before he learned that any stout tree would do, and thus extracted the concept of the generalized principle of leverage out of all his earlier successive special-case experiences with such accidental discoveries. Only as he learned to generalize fundamental principles of physical universe did man learn to use his intellect effectively. Once man comprehended that any tree would serve as a lever his intellectual advantages accelerated. Man freed of special-case superstition by intellect has had his survival potentials multiplied millions fold. By virtue of the leverage principles in gears, pulleys, transistors, and so forth, it is literally possible to do more with less in a multitude of physio-chemical ways. Possibly it was this intellectual augmentation of humanity’s survival and success through the metaphysical perception of generalized principles which may be objectively employed that Christ was trying to teach in the obscurely told story of the loaves and the fishes.
General Systems Theory How may we use our intellectual capability to higher advantage? Our muscle is very meager as compared to the muscles of many animals. Our integral muscles are as nothing compared to the power of a tornado or the atom bomb which society contrived-in fear-out of the intellect’s fearless discoveries of generalized principles governing the fundamental energy behaviors of physical universe.In organizing our grand strategy we must first discover where we are now; that is, what our present navigational position in the universal scheme of evolution is. To begin our position-fixing aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or utterly essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us to carry on despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and spoilable, they have been adequate only up to this critical moment. This cushion-for-error of humanity’s survival and growth up to now was apparently provided just as a bird inside of the egg is provided with liquid nutriment to develop it to a certain point. But then by design the nutriment is exhausted at just the time when the chick is large enough to be able to locomote on its own legs. And so as the chick pecks at the shell seeking more nutriment it inadvertently breaks open the shell. Stepping forth from its initial sanctuary, the young bird must now forage on its own legs and wings to discover the next phase of its regenerative sustenance. My own picture of humanity today finds us just about to step out from amongst the pieces of our just one-second-ago broken eggshell. Our innocent, trial-and-error-sustaining nutriment is exhausted. We are faced with an entirely new relationship to the universe. We are going to have to spread our wings of intellect and fly or perish; that is, we must dare immediately to fly by the generalized principles governing universe and not by the ground rules of yesterday’s superstitious and erroneously conditioned reflexes. And as we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to reemploy our innate drive for comprehensive understanding. The architects and planners, particularly the planners, though rated as specialists, have a little wider focus than do the other professions. Also as human beings they often battle the narrow views of specialists-in particular, their patrons-the politicians, and the financial and other legal, but no longer comprehensively effective, heirs to the great pirates’-now only ghostlyÐprerogatives. At least the planners are allowed to look at all of Philadelphia, and not just to peek through a hole at one house or through one door at one room in that house. So I think it’s appropriate that we assume the role of planners and begin to do the largest scale comprehensive thinking of which we are capable. We begin by eschewing the role of specialists who deal only in parts. Becoming deliberately expansive instead of contractive, we ask, "How do we think in terms of wholes?" If it is true that the bigger the thinking becomes the more lastingly effective it is, we must ask, "How big can we think?" One of the modern tools of high intellectual advantage is the development of what is called general systems theory. Employing it we begin to think of the largest and most comprehensive systems, and try to do so scientifically. We start by inventorying all the important, known variables that are operative in the problem. But if we don’t really know how big "big" is, we may not start big enough, and are thus likely to leave unknown, but critical, variables outside the system which will continue to plague us. Interaction of the unknown variables inside and outside the arbitrarily chosen limits of the system are probably going to generate misleading or outrightly wrong answers. If we are to be effective, we are going to have to think in both the biggest and most minutely-incisive ways permitted by intellect and by the information thus far won through experience. Can we think of, and state adequately and incisively, what we mean by universe? For universe is, inferentially, the biggest system. If we could start with universe, we would automatically avoid leaving out any strategically critical variables. We find no record as yet of man having successfully defined the universe-scientifically and comprehensively-to include the nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping, micro-macro, always and everywhere transforming, physical and metaphysical, omni-complementary but nonidentical events. Man has failed thus far, as a specialist, to define the microcosmic limits of divisibility of the nucleus of the atom, but, epochally, as accomplished by Einstein, has been able to define successfully the physical universe but not the metaphysical universe; nor has he, as yet, defined total universe itself as combining both the physical and metaphysical. The scientist was able to define physical universe by virtue of the experimentally-verified discovery that energy can neither be created nor lost and, therefore, that energy is conserved and is therefore finite. That means it is equatable. Einstein successfully equated the physical universe as E = Mc2. His definition was only a hypothetical venture until fission proved it to be true. The physical universe of associative and disassociative energy was found to be a closed, but nonsimultaneously occurring, system-its separately occurring events being mathematically measurable; i.e., weighable and equatable. But the finite physical universe did not include the metaphysical weightless experiences of universe. All the unweighables, such as any and all our thoughts and all the abstract mathematics, are weightless. The metaphysical aspects of universe have been thought by the physical scientists to defy "closed system’s" analysis. I have found, however, as we shall soon witness, that total universe including both its physical and metaphysical behaviors and aspects are scientifically definable. Einstein and others have spoken exclusively about the physical department of universe in words which may be integrated and digested as the aggregate of nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping, nonidentical, but always complementary, omni-transforming, and weighable energy events. Eddington defines science as "the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of experience." Einstein and many other first-rank scientists noted that science is concerned exclusively with "facts of experience." Holding to the scientists’ experiences as all important, I define universe, including both the physical and metaphysical, as follows: The universe is the aggregate of all of humanity’s consciously-apprehended and communicated experience with the nonsimultaneous, nonidentical, and only partially overlapping, always complementary, weighable and unweighable, ever omni-transforming, event sequences. Each experience begins and ends-ergo, is finite. Because our apprehending is packaged, both physically and metaphysically, into time increments of alternate awakeness and asleepness as well as into separate finite conceptions such as the discrete energy quanta and the atomic nucleus components of the fundamental physical discontinuity, all experiences are finite. Physical experiments have found no solids, no continuous surfaces or linesÐonly discontinuous constellations of individual events. An aggregate of finites is finite. Therefore, universe as experientially defined, including both the physical and metaphysical, is finite. It is therefore possible to initiate our general systems formulation at the all inclusive level of universe whereby no strategic variables will be omitted. There is an operational grand strategy of General Systems Analysis that proceeds from here. It is played somewhat like the game of "Twenty Questions," but G. S. A. is more efficient-that is, is more economicalÐ in reaching its answers. It is the same procedural strategy that is used by the computer to weed out al1 the wrong answers until only the right answer is left. Having adequately defined the whole system we may proceed to subdivide progressively. This is accomplished through progressive division into two partsÐone of which, by definition, could not contain the answer-and discarding of the sterile part. Each progressively-retained live part is called a "bit" because of its being produced by the progressive binary "yes" or "no" bi-section of the previously residual live part. The magnitude of such weeding operations is determined by the number of successive bits necessary to isolate the answer. How many "bi-secting bits" does it take to get rid of all the irrelevancies and leave in lucid isolation that specific information you are seeking? We find that the first subdividing of the concept of universe-bit oneÐis into what we call a system. A system subdivides universe into all the universe outside the system (macrocosm) and all the rest of the universe which is inside the system (microcosm) with the exception of the minor fraction of universe which constitutes the system itself. The system divides universe not only into macrocosm and microcosm but also coincidentally into typical conceptual and nonconceptual aspects of universe-that is, an overlappingly-associable consideration, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, all the nonassociable, nonoverlappingly-considerable, nonsimultaneously-transforming events of nonsynchronizable disparate wave frequency rate ranges. A thought is a system, and is inherently conceptual-though often only dimly and confusedly conceptual at the moment of first awareness of the as yet only vaguely describable thinking activity. Because total universe is nonsimultaneous it is not conceptual. Conceptuality is produced by isolation, such as in the instance of one single, static picture held out from a moving-picture film’s continuity, or scenario. Universe is an evolutionary-process scenario without beginning or end, because the shown part is continually transformed chemically into fresh film and reexposed to the ever self-reorganizing process of latest thought realizations which must continually introduce new significance into the freshly written description of the ever-transforming events before splicing the film in again for its next projection phase. Heisenberg’s principle of "indeterminism" which recognized the experimental discovery that the act of measuring always alters that which was being measured turns experience into a continuous and never-repeatable evolutionary scenario. One picture of the scenario about the caterpillar phase does not communicate its transformation into the butterfly phase, etc. The question, "I wonder what is outside the outside-of-universe?" is a request for a single picture description of a scenario of transformations and is an inherently invalid question. It is the same as looking at a dictionary and saying, ’"Which word is the dictionary?" It is a meaningless question. It is characteristic of "all" thinkingÐof all system’s conceptioning-that all the lines of thought interrelationships must return cyclically upon themselves in a plurality of directions, as do various great circles around spheres. Thus may we interrelatedly comprehend the constellation-or system-of experiences under consideration. Thus may we comprehend how the special-case economy demonstrated by the particular system considered also discloses the generalized law of energy conservation of physical universe. To hit a duck in flight a hunter does not fire his gun at the bird where the gunner sees him but ahead of the bird, so that the bird and the bullet will meet each other at a point not in line between the gunner and the bird at time of firing. Gravity and wind also pull the bullet in two different directions which altogether impart a mild corkscrew trajectory to the bullet. Two airplanes in nighttime dogfights of World War II firing at each other with tracer bullets and photographed by a third plane show clearly the corkscrew trajectories as one hits the other. Einstein and Reiman, the Hindu mathematician, gave the name geodesic lines to these curvilinear and most economical lines of interrelationship between two independently moving~events"Ðthe events in this case being the two airplanes. A great circle is a line formed on a sphere’s surface by a plane going through the sphere’s centre. Lesser circles are formed on the surfaces of spheres by planes cutting through spheres but not passing through the sphere’s centre. When a lesser circle is superimposed on a great circle it cuts across the latter at two points, A and B. It is a shorter distance between A and B on the great circle’s shortest arc than it is on the lesser circle’s shortest arc. Great circles are geodesic lines because they provide the most economical (energy, effort) distances between any two points on a spherical system’s surface; therefore, nature, which always employs only the most economical realizations, must use those great circles which, unlike spiral lines, always return upon themselves in the most economical manner. All the system’s paths must be topologically and circularly interrelated for conceptually definitive, locally transformable, polyhedronal understanding to be attained in our spontaneous-ergo, most economical- geodesicly structured thoughts. Thinking itself consists of self-disciplined dismissal of both the macrocosmic and microcosmic irrelevancies which leaves only the lucidly-relevant considerations. The macrocosmic irrelevancies are all the events too large and too infrequent to be synchronizably tuneable in any possible way with our consideration (a beautiful word meaning putting stars together). The microcosmic irrelevancies are all the events which are obviously too small and too frequent to be differentially resolved in any way or to be synchronizably-tuneable within the lucidly-relevant wave-frequency limits of the system we are considering. How many stages of dismissal of irrelevancies does it take-that is, proceeding from "universe" as I defined it, how many bits does it take-lucidly to isolate all the geodesic interrelations of all the "star" identities in the constellation under consideration? The answer is the formula (redo in finished text) where N is the number of stars in the thought-discerned constellation of focal point entities comprising the problem. "Comprehension" means identifying all the most uniquely economical inter-relationships of the focal point entities involved. We may say then that: Comprehension = ( ) This is the way in which thought processes operate with mathematical logic. The mathematics involved consist of topology, combined with vectorial geometry, which combination I call "synergetics"-which word I will define while clarifying its use. By questioning many audiences, I have discovered that only about one in three hundred are familiar with synergy. The word is obviously not a popular word. Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s separate parts or any subassembly of the system’s parts. There is nothing in the chemistry of a toenail that predicts the existence of a human being. I once asked an audience of the National Honors Society in chemistry, "How many of you are familiar with the word, synergy?" and all hands went up. Synergy is the essence of chemistry. The tensile strength of chrome-nickel-steel, which is approximately 350,000 pounds per square inch, is 100,OOO P.S.I. greater than the sum of the tensile strengths of each of all its alloyed together, component, metallic elements. Here is a "chain" that is 50 per cent stronger than the sum of the strengths of all its links. We think popularly only in the terms of a chain being no stronger than its weakest link, which concept fails to consider, for instance, the case of an endlessly interlinked chain of atomically self-renewing links of omni-equal strength or of an omni-directionally interlinked chain matrix of ever renewed atomic links in which one broken link would be, only momentarily, a local cavern within the whole mass having no weakening effect on the whole, for every link within the matrix is a high frequency, recurring, break-and-make restructuring of the system. Since synergy is the only word in our language meaning behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of their parts, it is clear that society does not think there are behaviors of whole systems unpredicted by their separate parts. This means that society’s formally-accredited thoughts and ways of accrediting others are grossly inadequate in comprehending the nonconceptual qualities of the scenario "universal evolution." There is nothing about an electron alone that forecasts the proton, nor is there anything about the Earth or the Moon that forecasts the co-existence of the Sun. The solar system is synergetic-unpredicted by its separate parts. But the interplay of Sun as supply ship of Earth and the Moon’s gravitationally produced tidal pulsations on Earth all interact to produce the biosphere’s chemical conditions which permit but do not cause the regeneration of life on Spaceship Earth. This is all synergetic. There is nothing about the gases given off respiratorily by Earth’s green vegetation that predicts that those gases will be essential to the life support of all mammals aboard Spaceship Earth, and nothing about the mammals that predicts that the gases which they give off respiratorily are essential to the support of the vegetation aboard our Spaceship Earth. Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic. Summarizing synergetically I may conclude that since my experimental interrogation of more than one hundred audiences all around the world has shown that less than one in three hundred university students has ever heard of the word synergy, and since it is the only word that has that meaning it is obvious that the world has not thought there are any behaviors of whole systems unpredictable by their parts. This is partially the consequence of over-specialization and of leaving the business of the whole to the old pirates to be visibly conducted by their stooges, the feudal kings or local politicians. There is a corollary of synergy which says that the known behavior of the whole and the known behavior of a minimum of known parts often makes possible the discovery of the values of the remaining parts as does the known sum of the angles of a triangle plus the known behavior of three of its six parts make possible evaluating the others. Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations. It was discovered and developed by the mathematician Euler. He discovered that all patterns can be reduced to three prime conceptual characteristics: to lines; points where two lines cross or the same line crosses itself; and areas, bound by lines. He found that there is a constant relative abundance of these three fundamentally unique and no further reducible aspects of all patterning P + A = L + 2 This reads: the number of points plus the number of areas always equals the number of lines plus the number constant two. There are times when one area happens to coincide with others. When the faces of polyhedra coincide illusionarily the congruently hidden faces must be accounted arithmetically in formula.
Synergy We will now tackle our present world problems with the family of powerful thought tools: topology, geodesics, synergetics, general systems theory, and the computer’s operational "bitting." To insure our inclusion of all the variables with which we must eventually deal, we will always start synergetically with universe -now that universe is defined and thus provides us with the master containment. We will then state our unique problem and divest ourselves progressively and definitively of all the micromacro irrelevancies. Are humans necessary? Are there experiential clues that human intellect has an integral function in regenerative universe as has gravity? How can Earthians fulfill their function and thus avoid extinction as unfit? To start with, we will now progressively subdivide universe and isolate the thinkable concept by bits through progressively dismissing residual irrelevancies. Our first isolated bit is the system, which at maximum is the starry macrocosmic and at minimum the atomic nucleus; the second bit reduces the macrocosmic limit to that of the galactic nebula; the third bit separates out cosmic radiation, gravity and the solar system; and the fourth bit isolates the cosmic radiation, gravity, sun, its energized, life-bearing Spaceship Earth, together WITH the Earth’s Moon as the most prominent components of the life regeneration on Spaceship Earth. I would like to inventory rapidly the system variables which I find to be by far the most powerful in the consideration of our present life-regenerating evolution aboard our spaceship as it is continually refueled radiationally by the Sun and other cosmic radiation. Thus we may, by due process, suddenly and excitingly discover why we are here alive in universe and identify ourselves as presently operating here, aboard our spaceship, and situated aboard its spherical deck at, for example, Washington, D. C., on the North American continent, thinking effectively regarding the relevant contemporary and local experiences germane to the solution of humanity’s successful and happy survival aboard our planet. We may thus discover not only what needs to be done in a fundamental way but also we may discover how it may be accomplished by our own directly-seized initiative, undertaken and sustained without any further authority than that of our function in universe, where the most ideal is the most realistically practical. Thus we may avoid all the heretofore frustrating factors of uninspired patron guidance of our work such as the patron’s supine concessions to the nonsynergetical thinking, and therefore ignorantly conditioned reflexes, of the least well advised of the potential mass customers. Typical of the subsidiary problems within the whole human survival problem, whose ramifications now go beyond the prerogatives of planners and must be solved, is the problem of pollution in general-pollution not only of our air and water but also of the information stored in our brains. We will soon have to rename our planet "Poluto." In respect to our planet’s life sustaining atmosphere we find that, yes, we do have technically feasible ways of precipitating the fumes, and after this we say, "But it costs too much." There are also ways of desalinating sea water, and we say, "But it costs too much." This too narrow treatment of the problem never faces the inexorably-evolving and solution-insistent problem of what it will cost when we don’t have the air and water with which to survive. It takes months to starve to death, weeks to thirst to death, but only minutes to suffocate. We cannot survive without water for the length of time it takes to produce and install desalinization equipment adequate to supply, for instance, all of New York City. A sustained, and often threatened, water shortage in New York City could mean death for millions of humans. Each time the threat passes the old statement "it costs too much" again blocks realization of the desalinization capability. Anybody who has been in Washington (and approximately everyone else everywhere today) is familiar with governmental budgeting and with the modes of developing public recognition of problems and of bringing about official determination to do something about solutions. In the end, the problems are rarely solved, not because we don’t know how but because it is discovered either that it is said by those in authority that "it costs too much" or that when we identify the fundamental factors of the environmental problemsÐand laws are enacted to cope incisively with those factors that there are no funds presently known to be available with which to implement the law. There comes a money bill a year later for implementation and with it the political criteria of assessing wealth by which the previous year’s bill would now seemingly "cost too much." So compromises follow compromises. Frequently, nothing but political promises or under-budgeted solutions result. The original legislation partially stills the demands. The pressures on the politicians are lowered, and the lack of implementation is expeditiously shrugged off because of seemingly more pressing, seemingly higher priority, new demands for the money. The most pressing of those demands is for war, for which the politicians suddenly accredit weaponry acquisitions and military tasks costing many times their previously asserted concepts of what we can afford. Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have-nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots." The adequately macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive solutions to any and all vital problems never cost too much. The production of heretofore nonexistent production tools and industrial networks of harnessed energy to do more work does not cost anything but human time which is refunded in time gained minutes after the inanimate machinery goes to work. Nothing is spent. Potential wealth has become real wealth. As it is cliched "in the end" problem solutions always cost the least if paid for adequately at outset of the vital problem’s recognition. Being vital, the problems are evolutionary, inexorable, and ultimately unavoidable by humanity. The constantly put-off or under-met costs and society’s official bumbling of them clearly prove that man does not know at present what wealth is nor how much of whatever it may be is progressively available to him. We have now flushed out a major variable in our general systems problem of man aboard Spaceship Earth. The question ’What is wealth?" commands our prime consideration. The Wall Sheet Journal reported the September-October 1967 deliberations of the International Monetary Fund held at Rio De Janeiro, BraziI. Many years and millions of dollars were spent maneuvering for and assembling this monetary convention, and the net result was the weak opinion that it would soon be time to consider doing something about money. The convention felt our international balance of payments and its gold demand system to be inadequate. They decided that the old pirate’s gold was still irreplaceable but that after a few years they might have to introduce some new "gimmick" to augment the gold as an international monetary base. At present there is about seventy billion dollars of mined gold known to exist on board our Spaceship Earth. A little more than half of it-about forty billion-is classified as being "monetary"; that is, it exists in the forms of various national coinages or in the form of officially banked gold bullion bars. The remaining thirty billion is in private metallic hordes, jewelry, gold teeth, etc. Since banks have no money of their own and only our deposits on which they earn "interest," bank wealth or money consists only of accrued bank income. Income represents an average return of 5 per cent on capital invested. We may assume therefore from an estimate of the world’s annual gross product that the capital assets, in the form of industrial production, on board our Spaceship Earth are at present worth in excess of a quadrillion dollars. The world’s total of seventy billion dollars in gold represents only three one-thousandths of I per cent of the value of the world’s organized industrial production resources. The gold supply is so negligible as to make it pure voodoo to attempt to valve the world’s economic evolution traffic through the gold-sized needle’s "eye." Gold was used for trading by the Great Pirates in lieu of any good faith whatsoeverÐ and in lieu of any mutual literacy, scientific knowledge, intelligence, or scientific and technical know-how on both sides of the trading. Gold trading assumed universal rascality to exist. Yet the realization of the planners’ earnest conceptioning and feasible work on behalf of the ill-fated 60 per cent of humanity are entirely frustrated by this kind of nonsense. We therefore proceed ever more earnestly with our general systems analysis of the problems of human survival, with the premise that at present neither the world’s political officials nor its bankers know what wealth is. In organizing our thoughts to discover and clarify what wealth is we also will attempt to establish an effective means to develop immediate working procedures for solution of such big problems. I have tried out the following intellectual filtering procedure with both multi-thousand general public audiences and with audiences of only a hundred or so advanced scholars and have never experienced disagreement with my progression of residual conclusions. I proceed as follows: I am going to make a series of analytical statements to you, and if anyone disagrees with me on any statement we will discard that statement. Only those of all my statements which remain 100 per cent unprotected will we rate as being acceptable to all of us. First, I say, "No matter what you think wealth may be and no matter how much you have of it, you cannot alter one iota of yesterday." No protest? We’ve learned some lessons. We can say that wealth is irreversible in evolutionary processes. Is there anyone who disagrees with any of my statements thus farÐabout what wealth is or is not? Good-no disagreement-we will go on. Now, I’m going to have a man in a shipwreck. He’s rated as a very rich man, worth over a billion dollars by all of society’s accredited conceptions of real wealth. He has taken with him on his voyage all his stocks and bonds, all his property deeds, all his checkbooks, and, to play it safe, has brought along a lot of diamonds and gold bullion. The ship burns and sinks, and there are no lifeboats, for they, too, have burned. If our billionaire holds on to his gold, he’s going to sink a little faster than the others. So I would say he hadn’t much left either of now or tomorrow in which to articulate his wealth, and since wealth cannot work backwardly his kind of wealth is vitally powerless. It is really a worthless pile of chips of an arbitrary game which we are playing and does not correspond to the accounting processes of our real universe’s evolutionary transactions. Obviously the catastrophied billionaire’s kind of wealth has no control over either yesterday, now, or tomorrow. He can’t extend his life with that kind of wealth unless he can persuade the one passenger who has a life-jacket to yield that only means of extending one life in exchange for one crazy moment’s sense of possession of all the billionaire’s sovereign-powers-backed legal tender, all of which the catastrophy-disillusioned and only moments earlier "powerfully rich" and now desperately helpless man would thankfully trade for the physical means of extending the years of his life; or of his wife. It is also worth remembering that the validity of what our reputedly rich man in the shipwreck had in those real estate equities went back only to the validity "in the eyes of God" of the original muscle, cunning, and weapons-established-sovereign-claimed lands and their subsequent legal re-deedings as "legal" properties protected by the moral-or-no, weapons-enforced laws of the sovereign nations and their subsequent abstraction into limited-liability-corporation equities printed on paper stocks and bonds. The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect’s function in universe. I now go on to speculate that I think that what we all really mean by wealth is as follows: "Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives." Is there any disagreement? Well, having first disposed of what wealth is not we now have produced a culled-out statement that roughly contains somewhere within it a precise definition of what wealth is. Now we can account wealth more precisely as the number of forward days for a specific number of people we are physically prepared to sustain at a physically stated time and space liberating level of metabolic and metaphysical regeneration. We are getting sharper. Inasmuch as we now are learning more intimately about our Spaceship Earth and its radiation supply ship Sun on the one hand and on the other its Moon acting as the Earth’s gravitationally pulsing "alternator" which together constitute the prime generator and regenerator of our life supporting system, I must observe also that we’re not going to sustain life at all except by our successful impoundment of more of the Sun’s radiant energy aboard our spaceship than we are losing from Earth in the energies of radiation or outwardly rocketed physical matter. We could burn up the Spaceship Earth itself to provide energy, but that would give us very little future. Our space vehicle is similar to a human child. It is an increasing aggregate of physical and metaphysical processes in contradistinction to a withering, decomposing corpse. It is obvious that the real wealth of life aboard our planet is a forwardly-operative, metabolic, and intellectual regenerating system. Quite clearly we have vast amounts of income wealth as Sun radiation and Moon gravity to implement our forward success. Wherefore living only on our energy savings by burning up the fossil fuels which took billions of years to impound from the Sun or living on our capital by burning up our Earth’s atoms is lethally ignorant and also utterly irresponsible to our coming generations and their forward days. Our children and their children are our future days. If we do not comprehend and realize our potential ability to support all life forever we are cosmicly bankrupt. Having identified the ignorance of society regarding its wealth capabilities to be a major factor in the frustration of effective planning and having roughly identified the meaning of wealth to which everyone can realistically subscribe, and intending later to sharpen its identity, we will now tackle the next phase of humanity’s total survival, prosperity, happiness, and regenerative inspiration with the problem-solving power of General Systems Theory as combined with both computer strategy-which is known as cybernetics-and with synergetics -the latter consisting of the solving of problems by starting with known behaviors of whole systems plus the known behaviors of some of the systems’ parts, which advantageous information makes possible the discovery of other parts of the system and their respective behaviors, as for instance in geometry the known sum-180 degrees-of a triangle’s angles, plus the known behavior of any two sides and their included angle and vice versa, enables the discovery and use of the precise values of the other three parts. Synergetics discloses that wealth, which represents our ability to deal successfully with our forward energetic regeneration and provide increased degrees of freedom of initiation and noninterfering actions, breaks down cybernetically into two main parts: physical energy and metaphysical know-how. Physical energy in turn divides into two interchangeable phases: associative and disassociativeÐenergy associative as matter and energy disassociative as radiation. Stating first that physical universe is all energy and symbolizing energy by E, Einstein formulated his famous equation E = M (matter’s mass, explained in the terms of C2Ðspeed of an omni-directional [radiant] surface wave’s expansion, unfettered, in a vacuum). Energy as matter and energy as radiation, as Einstein had generalized hypothetically, were explicitly proven by fission to be interchangeable covariants. Physicists also have discovered experimentally that energy can neither be exhausted nor originated. Energy is finite and infinitely conserved. This experimentally proven realization of some prime facts of physical universe contradicts the thoughts of cosmologists, cosmogonists, and society’s economics expressed before the speed of light was measured at the beginning of the twentieth century. I came to Harvard University in the beginning of the century-just before World War I. At that time, it was as yet the consensus of scholarly thinking that because the universe itself was seemingly a system it, too, must be subject to entropy, by which every (local) system was found experimentally to be continually losing energy. Hence, the universe itself was thought to be losing energy. This indicated that the universe was "running down," at which time evolution would abandon its abnormal energetic behavior and all would return to Newton’s norm of "at rest." This being so, it was also assumed that all those who expended energy were recklessly speeding the end. This was the basis of yesterday’s conservatism. All who expended energy in bringing about further evolutionary changes were to be abhorred. They were to be known as reckless spenders. All this was assumed to be true before experiments at the beginning of the twentieth century gave scientists knowledge of the speed of light and of radiation in general. Thus, we suddenly discovered it took eight minutes for the light to get to us from the sun, two and one-half years from the next nearest star beyond the sun, and many years for it to reach us from other stars. We learned only two-thirds of a century ago that many stars we considered as instantly there had burned out thousands of years ago. Universe is not simultaneous. Then Einstein, Planck, and other leading scientists said, "We’re going to have to reassess and redefine the physical universe.- They defined the physical universe as "an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformation events." And they then said: "We must discover what it is we see when we observe new life forming. It could be that when energy disassociates here it always may be reassociating somewhere else." And that in all subsequent experimentation proved to be the case. The scientists found that the energy redistributions always added up to 100 per cent. The scientists then formulated a new description of the physical universe which they called the new "law of conservation of energy," which said that "physical experiments disclose that energy can neither be created nor lost.. Energy is not only conserved but it is also finite. It is a closed system. The universe is a mammoth perpetual motion process. We then see that the part of our wealth which is physical energy is conserved. It cannot be exhausted, cannot be spent, which means exhausted. We realize that the word "spending" is now scientifically meaningless and is therefore obsolete. I referred earlier to man’s discovery of the lever. Having used levers for millenniums, man thought of taking a series of bucket-ended levers and of inserting the nonbucket end of each lever perpendicularly into a shaftÐarranged one after another like spokes around a wheel. He mounted that shaft in bearings, put it under a waterfall, and let gravity fill each bucket in turn and then pull each filled bucket toward the center of the planet Earth, thus progressively rotating all the levers and making the wheel and its shaft rotate with great power. Then man connected this revolving shaft by pulley belts to other pulleys on other shafts which drove machines to do many metabolically-regenerating tasks in a way unmatchable by man’s muscle power alone. Man thus began for the first time to really employ his intellect in the most important way. He discovered how to use energy as matter in the form of levers, shafts, gear trains, and dams, and how to take advantage of and use the energy as Sun radiation which vaporized and elevated water as atmospheric cloud, allowing it then to be precipitated and pulled back toward the center of the spherical Earth from the spherical mantle of clouds in the form of water molecules collected in droplets. From this moment of comprehending energy circuits, and thenceforth, man’s really important function in universe was his intellection, which taught him to intercept and redirect local energy patternings in universe and thus to reorganize and shunt those flow patterns so that they would impinge on levers to increase humanity’s capabilities to do the manifold tasks leading directly and indirectly toward humanity’s forward metabolic regeneration. What we now have demonstrated metaphysically is that every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth. We find experimentally, regarding the metaphysical phenomenon, intellect, which we call know-how, that every time we employ and test our intellectual know-how by experimental rearrangement of physical energy interactions (either associated as mass or disassociated as radiation, free energy) we always learn more. The know-how can only increase. Very interesting. Now we have carefully examined and experimented with the two basic constituents of wealth-the physical and the metaphysical. Sum-totally, we find that the physical constituent of wealth-energy-cannot decrease and that the metaphysical constituent-know-how-can only increase. This is to say that everytime we use our wealth it increases. This is to say that, countering entropy, wealth can only increase. Whereas entropy is increasing disorder evoked by dispersion of energy, wealth locally is increased order-that is to say, the increasingly orderly concentration of physical power in our ever-expanding locally explored and comprehended universe by the metaphysical capability of man, as informed by repeated experiences from which he happens in an unscheduled manner to progressively distill the ever-increasing inventory of omni-interrelated and omni-interaccommodative generalized principles found to be operative in all the special-case experiences. Irreversible wealth is the so far attained effective magnitude of our physically organized ordering of the use of those generalized principles. Wealth is anti-entropy at a most exquisite degree of concentration. The difference between mind and brain is that brain deals only with memorized, subjective, special-case experiences and objective experiments, while mind extracts and employs the generalized principles and integrates and interrelates their effective employment. Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical. Wealth is the product of the progressive mastery of matter by mind, and is specifically accountable in forward man-days of established metabolic regeneration advantages spelt out in hours of life for specific numbers of individuals released from formerly prescribed entropy-preoccupying tasks for their respectively individual yet inherently co-operative elective investment in further anti-entropic effectiveness. Because our wealth is continually multiplying in vast degree unbeknownst and unacknowledged formally by human society, our economic accounting systems are unrealistically identifying wealth only as matter and are entering know-how on the books only as salary liabilities; therefore, all that we are discovering mutually here regarding the true nature of wealth comes as a complete surprise to world societyÐto both communism and to capitalism alike. Both social co-operation and individual enterprise interact to produce increasing wealth, all unrecognized by ignorantly assumed lethally competitive systems. All our formal accounting is anti-synergetic, depreciative, and entropic mortgagization, meaning death by inversally compounding interest. Wealth as anti-entropy developes compound interest through synergy, which growth is as yet entirely unaccounted anywhere around Earth in any of its political economic systems. We give an intrinsic value to the material. To this we add the costs of manufacturing which include energy, labor, overhead, and profit. We then start depreciating this figure assuming swift obsolescence of the value of the product. With the exception of small royalties, which are usually avoided, no value is given for the inventiveness or for the synergistic value given by one product to another by virtue of their complementarity as team components whose teamwork produces results of enormous advantage, as for instance do the invention of alloyed drill bits of oil rigs bring petroleum from nonuse to use. As a consequence of true wealth’s unaccounted, inexorably synergistic multiplication of ever-increasing numbers of humanity’s ever-increasing forward days, in this century alone we have gone from less than I per cent of humanity being able to survive in any important kind of health and comfort to 44 per cent of humanity surviving at a standard of living unexperienced or undreamed of before. This utterly unpredicted synergistic success occurred within only two-thirds of a century despite continually decreasing metallic resources per each world person. It happened without being consciously and specifically attempted by any government or business. It also happened only as a consequence of man’s inadvertently becoming equipped synergistically to do progressively more with less. As we have learned, synergy is the only word in our language which identifies the meaning for which it stands. Since the word is unknown to the average public, as I have already pointed out, it is not at all surprising that synergy has not been included in the economic accounting of our wealth transactions or in assessing our common wealth capabilities. The synergetic aspect of industry’s doing ever more work with ever less investment of time and energy per each unit of performance of each and every function of the weapons carriers of the sea, air, and outer space has never been formally accounted as a capital gain of land-situated society. The synergistic effectiveness of a world-around integrated industrial process is inherently vastly greater than the confined synergistic effect of sovereignly operating separate systems. Ergo, only complete world desovereignization can permit the realization of an all humanity high standard support. But the scientific facts are that simple tools that make complex tools are synergetically augmented by progressively more effective and previously unpredicted chemical elements alloying. The whole history of world industrialization demonstrates constantly surprising new capabilities resulting from various synergetic interactions amongst both the family of ninety-two regenerative and the trans-uranium members of the uniquely-behaving chemical elements family. Complex environmental evolution is synergetically produced by the biologicals and their tools as well as by the great inanimate physiological complex of events such as earthquakes and storms which have constant challenging effect upon the individual biological inventiveness wherein both the challenges and the cause are regenerative. Our common wealth is also multiplied in further degree by experimentally-derived information which is both multiplying and integrating the wealth advantage at an exponential rate. The synergetic effect upon the rate of growth of our incipient world common wealth augmentation has been entirely overlooked throughout all the accounting systems of all the ideologically-divergent political systems. Our wealth is inherently common wealth and our common wealth can only increase, and it is increasing at a constantly self-accelerating synergetic rate. However, we inadvertently dip into our real, unaccountedly fabulous wealth in a very meager way only when our political leaders become scared enough by the challenge of an impressively threatening enemy. Then only do socialism and capitalism alike find that they have to afford whatever they need. The only limitation in the realization of further wealth is that production engineers must be able to envision and reduce to design and practice the production-multiplying steps to be taken, which progressive envisioning depends both on the individual and on the experimentally proven, but as yet untapped, state of the pertinent metaphysical arts, as well as upon the range of resources strategically available at the time and in particular upon the inventory of as yet unemployed but relevant inventions. In respect to physical resources, until recently man had assumed that he could produce his buildings, machinery, and other products only out of the known materials. From time to time in the past, scientists discovered new alloys which changed the production engineering prospects. But now in the aerospace technology man has developed his metaphysical capabilities to so advanced a degree that he is evolving utterly unique materials "on order." Those new materials satisfy the prespecified physical behavior characteristics which transcend those of any substance previously known to exist anywhere in the universe. Thus, the re-entry nose-cones of the man-launched and rocketed satellites were developed. Synergy is of the essence. Only under the stresses of total social emergencies as thus far demonstrated by man do the effectively adequate alternative technical strategies synergetically emerge. Here we witness mind over matter and humanity’s escape from the limitations of his exclusive identity only with some sovereignized circumscribed geographical locality. To go to Chapters 7 & 8 (8 is the last chapter of the book) Go to the links section and click on "Go to Chapters 7 & *".
|