Lost in Delusion

We’re in trouble! Yeap, we know that (not that many people actually care) but we have entered a time where we could, in the worst case, see most of the spices on the planet disappear, including ourselves.

We have global warming which threatens to raise sea level and cause the extinction of many life forms on the planet. We have environmental destruction as we clear away forest after forest and pollute the rest of the planet with toxic waste. We have problems with our resources where we could start to run low on things we need to keep us going such a metals and oil.  We have problems with our financial system with the failure to fix the last recession (the “fixes” implement will problem make the next recession even worse). We have population pressures as well just to top it off.

Yet with all these serious problems and serious threats to our planet and even to our very existence what do we see as popular solutions? Spend more money! Everyone should live the life style of the people in the Amazon cos they live a happy and healthy life style! Everyone live in a little garden where they spend their lives tending the plants with no technology! Or have a “love” economy where we just all have to share our “love”. Or even; the rainbow dolphin will save us as the age of Aquarius starts (or something like that)!

I find this odd. It suggests to me not only a failure to see the problem but also a failure for basic survival instincts to click in as people get lost in delusion with no idea of reality!

We have a serious physical world problem that we have created. A physical problem that has to do with the real physical environment; with real physical resources. We have created it as a by-product of current socioeconomic system; the one that has brought us so many good things also bring with it the seed of our own destruction! We will not fix this through throwing money at (i.e. do the same thing that cause the problem), no by relying on an idealised view of humans (we should all love each other!) nor by hoping for some kind of deus ex machina.

We made these problem and we need to solve them. We can do that through understanding the problem and through building up an alternative but we have to do that through understanding nature and not through dilutions.

We can understand nature through observations, testing and the application of logic and then implementing things that we can show work. We propose such approach in EOS. We propose a system based on how the real world works; an emulation of nature that works with nature and not against nature. A system that we aim to test so we build on what we can demonstrate will work. A sustainable system that doesn’t use money.

Quick update

Here's just a quick update of what we have going on at the moment. EOS has expanded with new members and new activity on the forum We have also have some organisations interested in joining the technate. EOS now has some access to some land but we need to sort out a few legal things before we can start using it. Also, on the hydroponic from I have had some good growth. And lastly, we have in motion a plan to start training / education, perhaps next year.

Plants growing nicely in the lab window

New Hydroponic System

This is my new hydroponic system.  That I got a new pump last year second hand which has a bit more power than my last pump.  Also, I have a number of small buckets which it can connect and disconnect instead of one large bucket as last year.  This makes the system a bit more modular or have I can extend this next year.

Smaller buckets

The new pump

The timer used to start the pump twice a day

A review of "Plan B" by Lester R. Brown

This book I feel starts off well.  He gives a good overview and presentation of the problems that we face, although he does seem to concentrate on the symptoms such as population pressure and water supply.  However he does seem to give some indication of understanding the core of the problem.  In the chapter on water supply he does point out exponential growth.   

Why are we in this problem?  If we live within the carrying capacity of the earth we would not have problems with water supply, we would not have population pressure.  These symptoms result from the fact that we have started pushing ourselves beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth because we live in a system that must constantly grow exponentially, precisely like the lily pond example in the book.

The book then goes on to look at a solution but a solution that aims to fix symptoms not core problem.  He goes on to talk about improving energy efficiency.  Fine, we need to do that but in a system that expands exponentially how long will it take even with the energy efficiency to end up back where we started?  This can go for many of the other measures proposed; necessary but not sufficient.  Whether we talk about designing cities for people or new manufacturing methods but unless we deal with exponential growth we achieve nothing in the end.

Understand the world in anthropomorphic terms

I am going to start with what might appear as dogmatic statements but I do have a reasoning behind these:

1. People have a very wrong, intuitive, understanding of how the world works.
2. Nature does not care.

People have a very wrong, intuitive, understanding of how the world works

Hunter gather; the type of society we have evolved to live in.

Gaia

Essentially, human beings have evolved as hunter gathers, living in small communities.  We have evolved a number of characteristic behaviours that help us lived in such groups.  We understand each other in emotional terms; “love”, “hate”, “hope” etc., the dictionary has many words that help us to describe the emotional state and motivations of other people.   We project ourselves outwards as we try to understand others (and then get surprised when people do things we would not do)

To a limited degree, this intuitive understanding of other people helps us understand the world around us.  We project our human understanding into the world around us and understand the world in anthropomorphic terms; “Jack Frost”, “Death”, “spirits”, “wights”, The Earth goddess Gaia etc., mythology has many examples of creatures that we create to explain the world around us.  Extending this idea further we end up with religion were we explain the world around us as “divine will”.  Yet, we have it wrong when trying to understand the world in such terms because …

Nature does not care

Animals inflict suffering on other animals; nature doesn't care! (photo: jeffrey sohn)

We tend to have this impression of nature as a “caring and loving mother” (because we do care), and use other anthropomorphic understandings of the world.  We see mother nature as nurturing us (an example of our anthropomorphic understanding of the world) .  Yet, if we were to go out and explore the world we can see that nature does not care.  Animals inflict suffering and harm on other animals, cats torment their prey, diseases inflict suffering.  Perhaps you have to live in a survival situation to understand how little nature cares; make a mistake and you can die. We have a recent example of how nature doesn't care in the nuclear accident in Japan.

Building a future world

This understanding of the world causes us many problems.  In a way, the problems we have today result from a lack of understanding of how nature works; as if we see ourselves as something special and exempt from laws of nature.  I also see this same problem reoccurring when people talk about solutions to our current problem.  

Essentially we have to deal with the real world.  We have physical resources, energy and physical needs.  We need to manage these within the limits that nature provides.  To do so, we have to understand nature not in anthropomorphic terms of “mother nature” but as a real physical system and work with nature. 

However, instead of working with nature, I see people proposing solutions based on our erroneous anthropomorphic understanding of the world.  So we get things like “we need a love economy” or a “gift economy”. 

Instead, EOS proposes a different way of dealing with this; treat people as people and nature as nature.  Let people deal with each other in our anthropomorphic terms which works so well when dealing with human relationships but when it comes to dealing with the physical world we use an approach based in how nature actually works not in our emotional anthropomorphic understanding of the world. 

So, on one side we have communities of people managing their own affairs on the other side we have people with the knowledge and skills and understanding of the natural world to manage the natural systems in this world.

The Latest Energy Credit Simulator

I have finished the latest Energy Credit simulator and run some basic tests and I have assembled at all in at package. I have uploaded the sim to the EOS file site in a zip format but only members can access that area. I will look at making it more public if I can.

The zip file contains:

EnergyCredit Sim.jar

The main jar file. If you run this from the command line you would get lots of text output otherwise you will get two file dialogue windows. In the first, navigate to an select the setup file. In the second, navigate to and select the results file.

EnergyCredit simulator.pdf

This file describes the format of the input files for the simulator.

Three directories

Each directory contains the setup files for a simulation. Run the jar file, navigate to one of these directories and load in the setup file.

This represents, as far as I’m aware, the only attempt to scientifically research an alternative, energy based, resource allocation system to our current, money based, socioeconomic system.

The Design

EOS aims to propose an alternative, moneyless, socioeconomic system to our current system through the application of science to society.  Basically, we can take the word "engineering" as meaning the "application of science".  So essentially, we aim to engineer society.

An engineering project begins with a "customer specification", which describe something about the end result but not really how will we should achieve that.  It becomes the engineers jobs to translate that vague customer specification into a solid implementation in a number of steps.  We often begin with developing prototypes and after testing out a number of prototypes we move on to what we call a top level design document.  The top level design document specifies in a bit more detail how we should achieve the end result.  We can then progress to a more detailed design document which describes in more detail the implementation.  We then go into implementation where we actually built what the customer originally desired, or as close as we can practically get.

The design process doesn't necessary follow the above linear path.  As we learn more we can go back to earlier stages and redo things so the designed becomes a circular process.  It is easier to correct mistakes in the earlier phase of design than to correct mistakes in the implementation so we should spend some time on getting the design right.

In EOS, we have a vision of a future, sustainable, moneyless world around civilisation.  That forms our customer specification.  We then see around this planet a number of groups exploring similar visions.  Effectively, all these groups are exploring different prototypes so we have moved on to the top level design for a proposal of an alternative socioeconomic system.  We simply call our design "The Design" and we have worked on it over the last five or six years.  I have been putting all our work together and am now produced a draft document that covers most of the aspects of our design.  I have now send it around to a number of people to review.  We still have more work to do but it feels like we're heading towards something that we could start testing; heading towards a moneyless society.