top Tao is like down Tao

©2009 Hougaard Malan

small Tao beauty Tao

 

SOMETIMES SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

Perhaps no variable brings the problems of being alive so vividly and clearly before the analyst's eye as does size. The elephant is afflicted with the problems of bigness; the shrew, with those of smallness. But for each, there is an optimum size. The elephant would not be better off if he were much smaller, nor would the shrew be relieved by being much bigger. We may say that each is addicted to the size that is.
There are purely physical problems of bigness or smallness, problems that affect the solar system, the bridge, and the wristwatch. But in addition to these, there are problems special to aggregates of living matter, whether these be single creatures or whole cities.
Let us first look at the physical. Problems of mechanical instability arise because, for example, the forces of gravity do not follow the same quantitative regularities as those of cohesion. A large clod of earth is easier to break by dropping it on the ground than is a small one. The glacier grows and therefore, partly melting and partly breaking, must begin a changed existence in the form of avalanches, smaller units that must fall off the larger matrix. Conversely, even in the physical universe, the very small may become unstable because the relation between surface area and weight is nonlinear. We break up any material which we wish to dissolve because the smaller pieces have a greater ratio of surface to volume and will therefore give more access to the solvent. The larger lumps will be the last to disappear. And so on.

 

To carry these thoughts over into the more complex world of living things, a fable may be offered:

THE TALE OF THE POLYPLOID HORSE

They say the Nobel people are still embarrassed when anybody mentions polyploid horses. Anyhow, Dr. P. U. Posif, the great Erewhonian geneticist, got his prize in the late 1980s for jiggling with the DNA of the common cart horse (Equus caballus). It was said that he made a great contribution to the then new science of transportology. At any rate, he got his prize for creating - no other word would be good enough for a piece of applied science so nearly usurping the role of deity - creating, I say, a horse precisely twice the size of the ordinary Clydesdale. It was twice as long, twice as high, and twice as thick. It was a polyploid, with four times the usual number of chromosomes.
P.U. Posif always claimed that there was a time, when this wonderful animal was still a colt, when it was able to stand on its four legs. A wonderful it must have been! But anyhow, by the time the horse was shown to the public and recorded with all the communicational devices of modern civilization, the horse was not doing any standing. In a word, it was too heavy. It weighed, of course, eight times as much as a normal Clydesdale.
For a public showing and for the media, Dr. Posif always insisted on turning off the hoses that were continuously necessary to keep the beast at normal mammalian temperature. But we were always afraid that the innermost parts would begin to cook. After all, the poor beast's skin and dermal fat were twice as thick as normal, and it surface area was only four times that of a normal horse, so it didn't cool properly.
Every morning, the horse had to be raised to its feet with the aid of a small crane and hung in a sort of box on wheels, in which it was suspended on springs, adjusted to take half its weigh off its legs.
Dr. Posif used to claim that the animal was outstandingly intelligent. It had, of course, eight times as much brain (by weight) as any other horse, but I could never see that it was concerned with any questions more complex than those which interest other horses. I had very little free time, what with one thing and another - always panting, partly to keep cool and partly to oxygenate its eight-times body. Its windpipe, after all, had only four times the normal area of cross section.
And then there was eating. Somehow it had to eat, every day, eight times the amount that would satisfy a normal horse and had to push all that food down an esophagus only four times the caliber of the normal. The blood vessels, too, were reduced in relative size, and this made circulation more difficult and put extra strain on the heart.
A sad beast.

The fable shows what inevitably happens when two or more variables, whose curves are discrepant, interact. That is what produces the interaction between change and tolerance. For instance, gradual growth in a population, whether of automobiles or of people, has no perceptible effect upon a transportation system until suddenly the threshold of tolerance is passed and the traffic jams. The changing of one variable exposes a critical value of the other.
Of all such cases, the best known today is the behavior of fissionable material in the atom bomb. The uranium occurs in nature and is continually undergoing fission, but no explosion occurs because no chain reaction is established. Each atom, as it breaks, gives off neutrons that, that if they hit another uranium atom, may cause fission, but many neutrons are merely lost. Unless the lump of uranium is of critical size, an average of less than one neutron from each fission will break another atom, and the chain will dwindle. If the lump is made bigger, a larger fraction of the neutrons will hit uranium atoms to cause fission. The process will then achieve positive exponential gain and become an explosion.
In the case of the imaginary horse, length, surface area, and volume (or mass) become discrepant because their curves of increase have mutually nonlinear characteristics. Surface varies as the square of length, volume varies as the cube of length, and surface varies as the 2/3 power of volume.
For the horse (and for all real creatures), the matter becomes more serious because to remain alive, many internal motions must be maintained. There is an internal logistics of blood, food, oxygen, and excretory products and a logistics of information in the form of neural and hormonal messages.
The harbor porpoise, which is about three feet long, with a jacket of blubber about one inch thick and a surface area of about six square feet, has a known heat budget that balances comfortably in Arctic waters. The heat budget of a big whale, which is about ten times the length of the porpoise (i.e. 1,000 times the volume and 100 times the surface), with a blubber jacket nearly twelve inches thick, is totally mysterious. Presumably, they have a superior logistic system moving blood through the dorsal fins and tail flukes, where all cetaceans get rid of heat.
The fact of growth adds another order of complexity to the problems of bigness in living things. Will growth alter the proportions of the organism? These problems of the limitation of growth are met in very different ways by different creatures.
A simple case is that of the palms, which do not adjust their girth to compensate for their height. An oak tree with growing tissue (cambium) between its wood, and its bark grows in length and width throughout its life. But a coconut palm, whose only growing tissue is the apex of the trunk (the so-called millionaire's salad, which can only be got at the price of killing the palm), simply gets taller and taller, with some slow increase of the bole at its base. For this organism, the limitation of height is simply a normal part of its adaptation of a niche. The sheer mechanical instability of excessive height without compensation in girth provides its normal way of death.
Many plants avoid (or solve?) these problems of the limitation of growth by linking their life-span to the calendar or to their own reproductive cycle. Annuals start a new generation each year, and plants like the so-called century plant (yucca) may live many years but, like the salmon, inevitably die when they reproduce. Except for multiple branching within the flowering head, the yucca makes no branches. The branching influorescence itself is its terminal stem; when that has completed its function, the plant dies. Its death is normal to its way of life.
Among some higher animals, growth is controlled. The creature reaches a size or age or stage at which growth simply stops (i.e., is stopped by chemical or other messages within the organization of the creature). The cells, under control, cease to grow and divide. When controls no longer operate (by failure to generate the message or failure to receive it), the result is cancer. Where do such messages originate, what triggers their sending, and in what presumably chemical code are these messages immanent? What controls the nearly perfect external bilateral symmetry of the mammalian body? We have remarkably
little knowledge of the message system that controls growth. There must be a whole interlocking system as yet scarcely studied.

the Places of Tao

The Dhaulagiri (8167 m., western Himalaya, Nepal) South Face represents perhaps the greatest unsolved climbing problem, and may be impossible. From the base of the wall to the summit there is a difference of about 4000 m. with a slope ranging from 50° to 90° on ice, with difficulty from M5 to M7+. In particolar the band of rocks which runs across the whole wall at 7200 m. is considered virtually impossible.

The best attempt on this wall has been done by Tomaz Humar in 1999:

Climbing till the band of rocks Humar was forced to traverse to reach the southest crest.

Tribute to Tao: Stanley Kubrick

Childwickbury Green Manor

Hertfordshire, England

Tao: second quantum leap

first quantum leap

the Paths of Complex Tao

To reach to the point that you do not know,

you need to take the road you do not know.

S. Giovanni della Croce

In the absence of paradigms for complexity, resulting in the impossibility to define methodologies for description and calculating/computing in replacement/integration of the previous used by classic science, Edgar Morin has proposed somepaths to complexity, or better to complexities, as - naturally - the same complexity is complex.

Morin states that the complexity shows as difficulty and uncertainty and not as clarity and answer typical of the paradigms of classical science. The problem is therefore to understand if it is possible to challenge of uncertainty and complexity.

Today, the biological and physical sciences are characterized by a crisis of the simple explanation, and then what appeared to be the residues of the human sciences such as uncertainty and disorder are part of the problem of scientific knowledge.

The complexity is an obstacle, a challenge. It seems negative or regressive because it involves the reintegration of the uncertainty in a knowledge that was going towards the conquest of absolute certainty, absolute that is no longer possible.

Morin introduces some typical characteristics of complexity:

• the problem of contradiction

Morin indicates in Niels Bohr the author of the most logic braking of science. Formulating the Complementarity Principle in the Copenaghen interpretation of the quantum duality probability wave/particle for the first time in history of science with the classic aristotelian logic of or/or introducing with spectacular theoretical and experimental results the logic of and/and, moving from a single logic to a dialogic, that is accepting that two independent and dual logics coexist at the same time.

• the logic limitation

After the proof of the Gödel incompleteness theorems and the development of Tarski logic it became obvious that no system of explanation can explained itself completely by itself.

•   the meta-complexus

It is not possible to approach the complexity through a single and preliminary definition but it is necessary to follow different paths, so different that one might wonder if there are many and different complexities. All the various complexities such as wires are woven together to form the unity of the texture of complexity. So we arrive at complexus of complexus, namely that core of the complexity in which the various complexities encounter.

• the multi-dimensional thinking

The positive aspect that comes from complexity is the nedd of a multidimensional and dialogic thinking, where in the latter two logics, two natures are connected in a unity without thereby dissolve the duality in unity. The notion of dialogic is not a concept that avoids the logical and empirical constraints but is likely to face difficulties, to fight with the real.

La challenge of complexity makes us give up forever the myth of the total universe clarification, encouraging us to continue the adventure of knowledge which is a dialogue with the universe.

The aim of our knowledge is not to close but to open the dialogue with the universe. The Method of Complexity requires us to think without never closing the concepts. The complexity is just the conjunction of concepts that are fighting each other, cohabit with the complexity and conflict trying to keep from falling inside.

The complexity also leads to think in organizational form, that is to understand how the organization does not result in a few laws but, on the contrary, needs a highly developed thought.

The paths indicated by Morin that lead to the challenge of complexity are:

THE PATH OF IRREDUCIBILITY OF RANDOMNESS AND DISORDER

randomness and disorder are inevitably present in the universe and play an active role in its evolution, but we are not able to resolve the uncertainty caused by the notions of disorder and randomness. The same randomness is not sure to be an accident, or an accidental event of which that the causes are unknown.

THE OVERCOMING OF THE LIMITS WHICH ELIMINATED THE SINGULARITY, THE LOCALITY AND THE TEMPORALITY

it is not possible to delete the singular and the local using the universal. Indeed, it is necessary to connect these concepts, for example in contemporary biology the species are no longer considered as a framework within which the individual is a singular case. In contrast, every living species is considered as a singularity that produces singularity within the most diverse physical-chemical organizations that exist. We must connect the singular, the local and the universal

THE PATH OF COMPLICATION

this problem arised when it was realized that the biological and social phenomena had a infinite number  of interactions and di interazioni e inter-feedbacks.

COMPLEMENTARITY BETWEEN ORDER, DISORDER ANDORGANIZATION

comes into play the concept deployed by Von Foerster “Order fron Noise”: from a disordered motion may arise from organized phenomena.

THE PATH OF ORGANIZATION

the organization determines a system from different elements. Is a unit and at the same time a multiplicity unitas multiplex: it should not dissolve the multiple in the one, nor the one in the multiple. A system is something more and something less of the sum of its parts. Something more because brings out more of the qualities that would not exist without the organization, something less because this organization imposes some constraints that limit some of the potential found in the individual parts. The qualities that emerge, exercis feedback on the individual parts and may stimulate and express their full potential. For example, culture, language or education are properties that can only be a matter of social totality and, in turn, feedbacking on different parts of the society, allow the development of mind and intelligence of individuals.

HOLOGRAMATIC PRINCIPLE AND RECURSIVE ORGANIZATION

in the field of complexity emerges the hologramatic principle: not only the part is in everything, but everything is in the part. In trying to understand the phenomenon one must go from the parts to the whole and from the whole to the parts by adopting a non-linear and circular explanation. The hologram is a physical image that has the quality that each point contains almost all the information of the whole, such as criminal law, the fact that every cell of an organism contains the genetic information of the whole organism.

The hologramatic principle should be connected to the recursive organization principle: a recursive process is a process in which the products and effects are at the same time causes and producers of what that produce them. The idea of recursion is therefore a breaking idea with the of linear idea of cause/effect, product/producer, structure/superstructure;for example the reproduction produces individuals that produce the reproductive cycle.

THE CRISIS OF CLARITY AND OF THE SEPARATION IN THE EXPLANATION

there is a break with the idea that truth is given by the clarity of ideas. The truth is also evident in the ambiguity and in the apparent confusion. It is no longer possible to make a boundary between science and non science, between subject and object, between organism and environment as occured previously for experimental science: it took a subject, extracted it from its context and placed it in an artificial environment, then modified it and checked its modifications.

In addition not to isolate a self-organizing system from its environment, it is necessary to connect this system to its environment, or to obtain a self-eco-organization. The concept of autonomy implies that a system is both open and closed (the result of an operation of the system still falls within the boundaries of the system). This type of system has to maintain its individuality and originality.

THE RETURN OF THE OBSERVER

it is not possible to eliminate the observer from the observations that are made. Always keeping in mind the hologramatic principle, the observer is in the society, but the society is also in the observer. Therefore the observer has to integrate himself into its observation and in its conception and should try to understand its socioculturalhic et nunc. Principio di integrazione dell’osservatore: regardless of the theory and whatever its content, must account that the observer is part of it: 

"... whatever the theory, and whatever its content, it must account of what makes it possible to produce the theory itself. If in any case is unable to account for this, it must also know that the problem is posed."

Immortal Dialogues of Tao: Have you ever considered ... Willard ... any real freedoms?

WILLARD "It smelled like slow death in there, malaria, nightmares. This was the end of the river allright."

COLONEL KURTZ "Where are you from Willard ?
WILLARD "I'm from Ohio, sir."
KURTZ "Were you born there ?"
WILLARD "Yes, sir."
KURTZ "Whereabouts ?"
WILLARD "Toledo, sir."
KURTZ "How far were you from the river ?"
WILLARD "The Ohio river, sir?"
KURTZ "Uh Uh..."
WILLARD "About 200 miles."
KURTZ "I went down that river when I was a kid. There's a place in the river...I can't remember... Must have been a gardenia plantation at one time. All wild and overgrown now, but about five miles you'd think that heaven just fell on the earth in the form of gardenias...
Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Freedoms - from the opinions of others... Even the opinions of yourself.
They say why..., Willard, why they wanted to terminate my command ?"
WILLARD "I was sent on a classified mission, sir."
KURTZ "Ain't no longer classified, is it? What did they tell you ?"
WILLARD "They told me that you had gone totally insane and that your methods were unsound."
KURTZ "Are my methods unsound?"
WILLARD "I don't see any method at all, sir."
KURTZ "I expected someone like you. What did you expect?"
Willard only shakes his head
KURTZ "Are you an assassin?"
WILLARD "I'm a soldier."
KURTZ "You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill."