VI. Earth Life Emergence: Developmental Stages of Life, Mind & Self

3. A Planetary Physiology

Historians, architects and scholars have often advised that civilizations, especially in urban settings, seem in their material circulations and skeletal infrastructure to take on the likeness of a developing anatomy, metabolism and nervous system of an organism. As the intensifying human presence converges over and is compressed by spherical earth, a further evolutionary phase of nested emergence appears as a superorganic, planetary entity. Its composite mental component able to achieve such a perspective was reviewed earlier in Part II, Mindkind, and additional personal qualities will covered in later sections.

International Workshop on Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems. http://videolectures.net/ccss09_zurich. Held June 8-12, 2009, chaired by Dirk Helbing, a posting of talks by 26 leading theorists, all men, such as Guido Caldarelli, Didier Sornette, Frank Schweitzer, Luciano Pietronero and Shlomo Havlin, which offer many nonlinear insights into underlying, endemic forces at work in the recent global economic convulsions. The quote is from Eugene Stanley’s presentation "Economic Fluctuations and Statistical Physics."

Two unifying principles that underlie much of the finance analysis we will present are scale invariance and universality. Scale invariance is a property not about algebraic equations but rather about functional equations, which have as their solutions not numbers but rather functional forms - power laws. The key idea of universality is that the identical set of “scaling laws” hold across diverse markets, and over diverse time periods.

Adjali, Iqbal and Stephen Appleby. The Multifractal Structure of Human Population Distribution. Tate, Nicholas and Peter Atkinson, eds. Modelling Scale in Geographical Information Science. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2001. Self-similar, scale-invariant patterns underlie demographic population patterns.

Albeverio, Sergio, et al, eds. The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems. Berlin: Springer, 2008. European geographers seem to be more attuned to view human social assemblies – towns, cities, metropolis – as evident manifestations in dynamic time and geometric space of universal nonlinear phenomena. This volume from a conference in Switzerland contains a variety of applied examples of such principles found everywhere else in nature to our own cohabitation. Exemplary papers are The Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Systems of Cities and Innovation Processes by Denise Pumain, Fractal Geometry for Measuring and Modelling Urban Patterns, Pierre Frankhauser, and Juval Portugali’s A Structural-Cognitive Approach to Urban Simulation Models.

Applying the idea of self-organization leads to introducing a fractal order parameter for studying the emergent fractal order in urban patterns. The presentation of these quantitative results will be completed by some reflections about how planning concepts based on fractal geometry may help to manage more efficiently urban sprawl. (Frankhauser 213)

A central insight that emerges from this project/adaptation is that cities, like languages, are dual self-organizing systems: The city as a whole is a complex self-organizing system, and each of the many agents operating in the city is a complex self-organizing system by itself too. (Portugali 365)

Allen, Peter. Cities and Regions as Self-Organizing Systems. Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1997. A pioneer theorist of social complexity reviews dynamical, emergent systems, their occurence in urban environments and transportation patterns and how an awareness of such properties can lead to more viable cities and towns. Allen’s work, with many colleagues, is an example of how the presence of independent, endemic processes which once found can then be intentionally applied to create a better society.

Alvarez-Ramirez, J., et al. Fractality and Time Correlation in Contemporary War. Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. 34/4, 2007. Even the chaos and carnage of the Iraq madness, (not even a ‘war’ because who is fighting who and why shifts daily) can be seen to take on a mathematical basis. However might we altogether discover this greater Galilean dimension as a natural scripture that if mindfully read altogether could teach us peace.

To address these questions, we have studied the 2003–2006 Iraq war. Evidence of fractal scale-invariance is found in the density distribution of military and civilian deaths, which present heavy-tails modeled as fractal power laws. On the other hand, by using detrended fluctuation analysis, our results suggests that daily attacks are time correlated, meaning that an attack is not fully independent from the attacks in previous days. While military fatalities showed a correlation behavior similar to that observed for attacks, civilian fatalities showed a different correlation behavior: if one consider civilian fatalities for time scales within 31 days, the sequence is unpredictable (uncorrelated). However, for time scales larger than 31 days, the sequence of daily civilian fatalities is correlated with correlation behavior similar to that for the daily attack sequence.

Arthur, W. Brian, et al, eds. The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. The application of nonlinear science to market commerce exhibits a common dynamics driven by positive feedback.

Bar Yam, Yaneer. Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization. www.necsi.org/Civilization. Systems scientist Bar Yam provides a unique application of complexity and network theories to the structural course of human history. By these insights, human persons can now be perceived in the midst of an epic transformation into a potentially salutary, globally interconnected, superorganic society.

Our complex social environment is consistent with identifying global human civilization as an organism capable of complex behavior that protects its components (us) and which should be capable of responding effectively to complex environmental demands. (1) What is generally not recognized is that the relationship between collective global behavior and the internal structure of human civilization can be characterized through mathematical concepts that apply to all complex systems. (1)

Bar Yam, Yaneer. Dynamics of Complex Systems. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. After 800 pages of an accessible theoretical basis, the course of history is seen to be guided by constant self-organizing dynamics as it spirals and emerges from an individual level to a superorganic phase. At its origin a human person was more complex than society. But human population has now so increased and migrated that composite humankind has become more complex than its constituents. But within this global unity a creative reciprocity is again seen to enhance personal liberty and welfare.

In the context of considering human civilization as an organism in relation to individuals, we should revisit the traditional conflict between individual and collective good and rights. This philosophical and practical conflict manifested itself in the conflict between democracy and communism. It was assumed that communism represented an ideology of the collective while democracy represented an ideology of the individual. If we accept the transition to a complex organism, we may consider this conflict to be resolved, not in favor of one or the other, but rather in favor of a third category - an emergent collective formed out of diverse individuals. (822)

Barthelemy, Marc, et al. Velocity and Hierarchical Spread of Epidemic Outbreaks in Scale-Free Networks. Physical Review Letters. 92/178701, 2004. The spread of viral and infectious diseases based on a frequency of human contacts is found to take on a charateristic invariant topology. Learning this mathematical basis can then help inform containment strategies.

Batty, Michael. Cellular Automata and Urban Simulation. Environment and Planning B. 28/2, 2001. How this approach to complex systems can help model the development and viability of cities.

CA models of spatial complexity are used to advance understanding of general complex adaptive systems alongside similar models in the natural sciences. (164) Cities are fine examples of complex emergent systems. From local-scale interactions such as individual movement habits, the geomarketing strategies of retail establishments, social biases, and residential and lifestyle choices…aggregate patterns often emerge apparently independently of the dynamics driving the individual components of the system. Urban systems also display many traits common to complex systems in the biological, physical and chemical worlds. (165)

Batty, Michael. Cities and Complexity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Over a decade of analysis and simulation by the British urban planner of the growth and structure of human settlements via cellular automata, network science and nonlinear systems theory is here collected and summarized. As a result, cities are found to possess a mathematical basis as far-from-equilibrium, hierarchical, self-organized systems in a critical state between order and chaos. Of course we all pretty much know this. A large advance in understanding how such universal formative dynamics can apply from neighborhoods and congregations to a large urban metropolis such as London. See also a recent synopsis by the author in Science (319/769, 2008) on The Size, Scale, and Shape of Cities.

The fractal city is a recurrent theme throughout this book in that we argue….that the signature of urban dynamics is scaling – self-similarity and order on all scales, the hallmark of fractal geometry. (14)

Batty, Michael and Paul Longley. Fractal Cities. New York: Academic Press, 1994. A pervasive self-organized geometry is found to repetitively apply across many similar scales from neighborhoods to a metropolis.

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