Technology, Neural Network & the Need for Systems Thinking - Alan Booker | Discover More Podcast

technology is an intentional patterning of information material and energy to allow an organism to successfully adapt to its surrounding environment by the way that also means that there are other organisms on this planet that have technologies [Music] congratulations on choosing curiosity over complacency let's get this started the guest of honor this week is alan booker ellen is a founder of the institute of integrated regenerative design currently acts as his executive director and lead instructor he is a creator of the integrated regenerative design framework and the bio-compatible design standards he of course is also a fellow student of life who embodies endless curiosities with a degree in electrical engineering and formal permaculture design certification alan has over 30 years of experiences in engineering and 20 years in sustainable and regenerative design however this is just a tip of his experiential expert with hundreds of nights spent in the field ellen also teaches wilderness survival tracking bird language primitive fire making and wild crafting as a result of studying herbal medicine for nearly 20 years alan also emphasizes how the proper use of real food and nourishing herbs can help build and rebuild a foundation for lasting health in short i need ellen as my partner on any camping trips or wilderness related activities moving forward some of his notable life experiences include 40 years of practicing and instructing various martial arts being a trained classical pianist and composer and leads many other national cross-organizational training ellen currently resides in alabama dedicating his life to reimagining the regenerative health and permaculture landscape in america and international level you can connect with ellen on linkedin at ellenbooker e-o-o-k-e-r and visit the official website for institute of integrated regenerative design at i2rd.co you can check out all the upcoming projects which includes this forthcoming college textbook observation for design which teaches the practical skills of observation for professional designers and many more on his website helen welcome to the show hello and thank you for having me so for someone listening in of your really rich and vast life whether it's personal life professional life or you're intersecting a diverging interest i could imagine some people asking like how can i deal with all these things i want to do i have all these diversing interests of all these things pulling me into different directions and to that of course i would say the themes that i'm sensing from your introductions of saying yes to the right opportunities but also saying no to many that's distracting and pulling your energies in a negative way in addition to the theme of seeking discomfort and endless curiosity so what do you think about this well when people ask me how i managed to get a lot done i think i tell them my my first secret is i do not have a television i i'm very mindful about the fact that you know i have a limited amount of time and so i'm i'm trying to figure out how to avoid things that basically just have me in a passive non-thinking you know consuming mode and i'm a little more mindful about how to use my life energy to engage and be active and creative yeah we sort of touched about offline talks about a lot of the things that society does not talk about is energy allocations or energy management people only talk about time or resources or money but i do think that what dictates all those things are energy how we allocate it how we reallocate it how we preserve it so why do you think that being mindful in life especially facing certain dilemma or professional pivotal points what do you think being mindful in life really really matters into how you look at your energy yeah it's it's become a little bit of a cliche these days but it um a particular thought but it was shared with me when i was much younger and it hit me which was talking to somebody who was a kind of a life coach and coached executives and so forth he was talking about having them go off and do um sort of a annual retreat to think about what they wanted to do and to sort of prioritize over the next year the next five years in the next 10 years and he'd been doing that for quite some good time and he said that what he realized after having worked with a good number of executives was they tended to drastically overestimate what they could get done in one year and drastically underestimate what they could get done in 10 years and i found that to be very very true you know it's being mindful about how you're spending your energy but also um being willing to play the long game with that and realize that some of the larger things that you may want to accomplish that are going to be the most meaningful and the most uh lasting are probably going to be multi-year and possibly even multi-decade pursuits they're going to be things that unfold and deepen over time and so you can't have the fast food mentality um if you if you want to do uh things that i think really build and are lasting and are deep and transformative yeah so as a veteran one thing the army that we should talk about is you always want to seek out the path of least resistance however when you're going through a hostile or hostage environment and conditions that is very much true because you don't want to sprint into with a formation into a reign of fire so to speak but i think in life often times we should tackle the path of most resistance because it's in those pain teachers and quote unquote suffering and down seasons of life i think we grow the most so in that sense go back to what you just said earlier not thinking life navigating life in this non-thinking way how would you define what critical thinking is there is a certain level of what i would call metacognition that goes into the process right it's when we think about it we are mammals with very large brains and that means physiologically our brain uses a huge amount of energy if you start looking at like you know our our energy load metabolically from our body our brain takes a huge amount of energy and as a result um a survival mechanism that we have is looking for cheats and shortcuts to allow us to get by without expending you know an undue amount of mental energy for everything and we have a lot of social shortcuts for that we have a lot of other survival shortcuts for that the way our brain operates and um it makes an awful lot of sense when you are surviving around the edge you just can't quite get enough calories to be able to feed that big brain and keep it moving but that's not a problem that most americans have these days so we have this tendency to um if we just go on autopilot to let our brain fall back into it with you know ruts and and um thinking shortcuts and modes of thinking that are familiar that don't take much energy that don't take much thought literally because it's a survival instinct our body has over time and so it takes a little bit of what i would call metacognition that that thinking about how you're thinking thinking about how you're engaging with life stepping back a little bit and looking at it and being very deliberate about you know how am i going to um what am i what am i doing am i am i just sitting and being passive and letting life just go by in in a receiving only mode or am i thinking about what i want to do where i want to go and making that conscious effort to move into you know directing your own path instead of just letting life happen to you almost yeah i agree i think the best definition i've heard about critical thinking is thinking about thinking and as you said metacognitively you want to be aware of your thoughts your emotions different triggers different stimuli so you don't have to react through life which is what a lot of people do without some sort of a mindfulness practices i had a mathematics professor in a graduate math course that was a russian mathematician and he would get talking about the whole cognitive process of mathematics and one day he said he said you know that good mathematicians actually think in analogies but the great mathematicians see the analogies between the analogies and so he was he was directly looking at how metacognition and the ability to see what i call isomorphisms which is you know iso means the same and morph means shape it's um we think we tend to think in schema we tend to look at and create mental maps of things this is how we build understanding you know shallow understanding often times is procedure i know how to you know do a thing just by pushing the buttons and making it happen i've memorized the procedure but that doesn't entail a lot of understanding deeper understanding of a thing involves going in digging in and building a mental map or a schema of how it works where you understand how the parts interrelate how their dynamics are and so forth and once you do the work of building one mental map what you start realizing is that the world tends to have a lot of other maps of a very similar shape natural systems for example tend to operate off of a few basic generative rules and so forth so when you've learned one part of the map then a lot of times you'll find that you can go over and you start trying to learn a new part of the map you always whoa this looks very familiar and you can use that isomorphism where this the patterning that you've already learned you can take it and apply it into a new situation and realize that by learning how it differs slightly that you can very quickly um move into a pretty good understanding of that new thing and so one of the things i've seen from a lot of my teachers that are really good at an area in depth is all of them very different topics have all said start in learning a complex difficult thing start with one thing first so when i started learning tracking my tracking instructors said go track one animal and learn it learn it really really well learn its patterns its energy so where you can see what it's doing right when i started studying herbal medicine the herbalist that i was working with said learn one plant very very well learn everything about it spend a year with it because if you go in the door and be like oh well i got you know we'll start learning 50 different herbs then you're scattered all over the place but if you go in and you learn about the map of say one or dandelion you pick dandelion which is an amazing herbal medicine most people have no idea that it has so many different medicinal and health properties to it you can spend a year with that plant and you can learn and you can create this very deep map of how it you know what it is and this personality and how it works and so forth well then when you go to your second herb guess what it goes so much faster because you'll start seeing as isomorphisms and then your third goes even faster and you'll find that you can reach a level of competency deep competency much faster that way um than if you tried studying a dozen all at the same time and um you know that same pattern seems to pop up uh in a lot of fields of learning go deep and learn one map and then use your understanding of that map because you're going to see that it pops up over and over and over again you know and i think that's that's been very good advice for how to gain mastery in a topic um without um getting frustrated yeah that reminds me of the donkey fable right the story of don't be a donkey like there is a donkey and the donkey is grappling with hunger and thirst and there's a carrot to the donkey's left side and there's a pond to the donkey's right side but then the donkey end up dying of thirst and hunger because donkey just kept going back and forth as oh i want the carrot in the water what donkey should have done is get the carrot and then go to the pond and of course as you said we are the mammals with the largest brains we're not donkeys however what would you say to people that's under so much pressure immense pressure in this day and age everything's about instant gratification everything's about showcasing what you've done because correct me if i'm wrong the theme and the thread i'm sensing from what you just said is we need to slow down to tap into that mastery right to really get deep into it and then you can hop defense or change your lanes so if you have any thoughts about how can we slow down in the society where we glorify fasting or hastening up or fastening up everything yeah i think just to put it maybe pretty succinctly it's been my experience that if you chase instant gratification that pretty much everything you're going to grab a hold of is pretty hollow and shallow that there's a market especially in western culture for instant gratification and a lot of people out there trying to sell you something that you know will come off as as instant and those things tend to be pretty cheap and they they tend to leave you immediately looking for the next bit of instant gratification it's it's kind of a if you if you get into a habit of of just chasing instant gratification i think you just kind of get uh into the habit of um well a friend of mine and i joke about the internet being full of shiny squirrels um squirrels of course you know like you know chasing squirrels but also ooh shiny um and so you can waste your life chasing shiny squirrels you'll never catch and this this whole thing of just you know instant gratification and shallow engagement with thing after thing after thing is something that our modern culture and our modern technologies have enabled you can chase an infinite number of shiny swirls on the internet um and they'll be people who are trying to monetize you as you do so and therefore they'll actually design the experience to be addictive right and so in some ways we have people who've grown up in this meleu of the internet in which you have phds in psychology out there figuring out how to make this process of chasing the shiny squirrels addictive and then you wonder why in the world it is that with a set of technologies that are already a bit addictive at the same moment that they are also um allow for a shallow engagement across you know a wide breadth right you can engage across a huge breath very shallowly very very quickly and they make it very easy to dance across the surface you wonder why you know people kind of wake up and go whoa what's going on well it's it's because a lot of that engages with the way that the human mind works a lot of our lower limbic system responses and so forth to stimuli were really developed to keep us alive on uh in a natural setting especially like say in you know the african serengeti where there are hundreds 100 species that can kill you and so there are things that our brain does like orienting to novelty well if you're on the landscape and something new pops up you better pay attention to it because it might kill you or eat you so our brain has a very deep built-in survival instinct to orient a novelty and so we can absolutely stimulate that um as part of you know building a an interface on a cell phone or a on you know any of the internet apps or whatever and um set that up so that we are stimulating that and keeping you engaged almost reflexively you aren't thinking about it anymore you are just continue engagement and yes the people who are creating interfaces to facebook and instagram and twitter and so forth they know about this and they use that it's the way they keep their audience engaged and so what they're doing is they're actively keeping people engaged in what i would call shallow intermediate experiences and when i say intermediated i mean that they are keeping that person stuck in a mode where there's a technology filter between them in real life you know there's a fundamental difference between watching 100 youtube videos about climbing a mountain and going out and climbing the mountain yourself right um and yes youtube's another one of those interfaces where boy they've got it dialed in you know if you let yourself get sucked into the youtube vortex you can you know sort of emerge three hours later going what just happened you know what did i just do and it's a reason for that it it is working with your psychology so if you're not being conscious of that and how these platforms are actively exploiting you um in order to make money quite honestly then you can get sucked into that and um wake up a little bit later and and and wonder why everything that you've been doing feels shallow yeah it's interesting because i've heard this a lot of people have qualms and they talk a smack about algorithms like oh it's an algorithm's fault and a tech friend of mine said this so eloquently he said algorithms are just encoded opinions at the same time to your points that is still under the container of the specific design that is meant to contain and confine and maintain your attention right because attention is the biggest commodity nowadays and i was talking to a friend about meta data and metadata farming about how for example for dating apps if it's tinder hinge bumble any third parties can legally purchase your metadata like your zip code or locations of course not sensitive data but based on that you can purchase a zip code for 150 based on some of your communication on the bumble app or any dating apps and based on that they can extract and create ways to monetize that accordingly and as you said it's not a it's a very lopsided competition because on the consumer's point of view we are not equipped even if your phd even if your doctorate of psychology even if you are highly educated you cannot compete with the highest level of town and pull and resources and technology so that's very interesting i've worked one of the one of the pieces in my background is when i got out and um and graduated from engineering school was that i started working on this thing that was brand new called the internet um that's that kind of dates me a little bit you know when i first connected it to the thing it wasn't actually called the internet was called arpanet so for some of the if you have older listeners they that may that made it was back in the 1980s the first time i actually connected and i got out with you know and started working on uh digital telecommunication and what now is called cloud computing and so i actually have quite a deep background in understanding how that technology works and the data mining to me is very very interesting i've been in the room when we've had people from the big tech companies like microsoft and google and so forth and they are promoting their ai platforms um and the tools that they have for deep data mining it's interesting because what will happen is i mean i i i had a conversation with a group of of their engineers including one of the engineering managers of one of these big companies i won't name them directly but um i was listening to everything they were talking about and i said well it's you know hold on a second i have a question right said i can purchase these tools i can use them for all these different kinds of data mining activities and they probably said yes absolutely and i said well okay um i can see immediately how i could purchase this data and that data and i can data mine i could de-anonymize these people by using this deep learning and i can determine all these things about them and so forth how do i get prior informed consent from all these people do you know to do that with their data right to mine and extract their data and then to leverage that against them right what do you feel is your ethical responsibility to human beings that you're creating tools and selling them that let people do this you know what they said they said wow nobody's ever asked us that question before which i found really fascinating i was like well okay what's your answer and they were like we don't know okay what i can tell you is that um we've gotten to that point and i know this is a whole different conversation i just want to kind of surface it because i think it's an important conversation for us as human beings to have right um a week ago i was on one computer in a private browsing window on youtube looking up a video that i needed to see on vitrified clay pipes for a regenerative project i'm working on and the reason i was looking at that is because in a particular application we were trying not to have microplastics and mesoplastic contamination going into the environment right and it's like well what can we use well in this particular case vitrified clay pipe is a natural material that will naturally biodegrade and not have these things so i'm looking at that what was interesting is given the search i did on youtube one of the things that popped up with clay was pottery clay right so i got some videos suggested on potting wheels and throwing pottery right so i'm on youtube not logged in i don't even have a youtube account right on a computer in a separate browser that i use for everything else and then about once a week i do get on my facebook um and look at on my phone on an app so a different device right facebook so now we're talking meta not google okay and 10 minutes later i'm looking on that because i'm part of several groups that post events and so forth regenerative design events and so forth guess what i see in the advertising stream on facebook 10 minutes later clay pipes clay throwing clay um you know throwing clay pottery never seen it before on my facebook news feed of a very carefully curated facebook news news feed i don't post on facebook any personal information i just use it because there's groups and so forth and here we are i'm sitting here even me with the expertise i have in digital telecommunications having to stop and try to figure out how an advertiser pulled viewing information off of a non-logged in youtube video from google associated it with probably one email address that cross-associated with the email address i used for facebook and then somehow went over and pushed advertising into meta you know met a company um facebook app on a completely different device right and this is this is the kind of data mining that is happening in ubiquitous and i'm sure the story surprises no one right but um it asks for me having done this and worked in this space now for over three decades you know what does this mean to us as human beings what does it mean that we now are living in a situation in which we have these algorithms some of these algorithms are intentionally programmed and some are used machine learning to actually derive an algorithm that uses machine learning artificial intelligence to basically automatically train towards the goal okay with both of those things but both of those things are now watching everything we do gathering huge amounts of data and metadata about us and cross-correlating it and cross-correlating it very interestingly to extract information oftentimes we don't even know about ourselves which is fascinating to me the last story i'll tell on this whole thing was about um the a couple years ago a father calling um calling target and being irate with them because they were mailing his 16 year old daughter uh information about um being pregnant like advertisements for expectant mothers right and um he's like my my daughter is 16 why are you sending her this you know stuff on um uh for expectant mothers and so on and so forth and his daughter actually realized what was going on and came in and said um dad sorry but i gotta tell you something that's how he found out his daughter was pregnant so here we have target knowing something about a 16 year old uh that uh the parents don't even know so to me it asks a lot of very interesting questions about how we as a culture and society deal with this emerging phenomena and how we deal with the fact that we have created companies where their legal obligation is to maximize shareholder profit and then we've given them these tools and that there is very little ethical constraint on how they're using those tools provided that they maximize shareholder profit what is what is that doing to us as a culture what is it doing to us as individual human beings what is that doing to humans and their psychological health and their resilience as a human being all these things i think are fascinating questions to me the things i think about because i kind of you know have a lot of time spent in the telecommunications and internet industry yeah i really like to also urge the listeners to take a moment and just like i said utilize critical thinking and just examine some of your current technological applications in your own life because what ellen just alluded to is these large corp and tech companies have the ability to extract paper trails on a digital meta level without the permission of the holders who are leaving these paper trolls behind but on a more positive note maybe it's not positive but if you were to purchase a flight ticket to anywhere right if you were to open up an income needle tab on the side and you do a price comparison within i would say five to ten minutes however long it takes for machine learning to encode that metadata across the servers you will see immediately a price reduction on the incognito page versus on google chrome or fox whatever that may be so that's a very simple manifestations of what allen alluded to and of course he is an expert on this topic so alan i want to stay on this train uh yeah i was just gonna make a comment to me it's very interesting is this is that you know when you start looking at this uh it's it's really easy when you start thinking about you know metadata and so forth to go looking for the bad guy to go look for the you know the um the person who's trying to uh you know figure out how to be evil uh and and make money by by doing all these things in reality what you find is that there's a lot of people who in their particular you know area like the folks if you go talk to folks at youtube you can talk to the folks at uh at meta or whatever they are in their space thinking wow we're producing really beautiful powerful tools to enable people and it can be challenging to get them to back up a couple steps and say wait what you are doing is actually part of a much wider ecosystem that that ecosystem when you take it as a whole it exhibits emergent properties that were never intended by the individual you know the individual companies for example and it's when you put a profit motive on it and then you allow for it to iterate that is for different companies to look at and realize how they can interact you're going to get emergent properties that is things you never expected and you probably wouldn't have predicted if you went and looked at the individual pc parts and so yes i do have some um ethical questions for people who are working in data mining and so on and so forth i think they need to be addressed but i also realized that uh there are folks that they they went into the tech industry they went into creating some of these platforms with genuinely uh good intentions of helping people and then i think sometimes later they kind of wake up and go whoa wait a minute the the we've built a part of a much larger ecosystem that has a life of its own that has emergent properties some of which are good and some of which are maybe neutral and some of which are problematic and because they're all emergent there's no one person or group that has the capability of addressing them they uh they come out from the interplay between a lot of different um a lot of different components yeah it's also a cultural effect because when we look at the totality or the monstrosity of a culture it's very overwhelming and daunting but when you start dissecting that oh culture is comprised of individual pieces of decision makers and this is the same thing for systematic level for governments when we think about the government what does that mean is it the president is it the judicial branch is it the congress but the government's also comprised of individual decision makers that create this collective entity and like you said i think it's really important for people to discern and separate so it's not overwhelming for us and at the same time like you said i do believe that technology is beautiful but when it's such a powerful advancement in only 20 years that's nothing right in terms of a timeline i think we do have to once again utilize critical thinking and examine these technological implications in our lives and what does it mean to us and that's what the nuances are just asking one more question and just get your gears moving we don't have all the answers but hopefully through these conversations people can have more talking points or thinking points so to that point i want to stay in this train for a little bit longer ellen i think your background is fascinating and not to compare you with steve jobs but he was the first mainstream innovator that combined and married liberal arts and technology for you you're similarly marrying liberal not liberal arts you're marrying technology and nature and holistic health right in these mile long introduction i shared earlier you have a lot of experiences in herbal medicine and holistic health permaculture sustainability how do you see yourself fitting in in this fascinating intersection between technology because technology is always going to be prevalent more so it's becoming more and more pervasive more and more ubiquitous right so the nature components the sustainability component are shrinking as we move forward on a societal level so how do you see yourself fitting in into this very complex puzzle i think i've got to address a couple of like different piece parts to get to an answer the first thing is how do we define technology and when i teach the integrated return to design material one of the things i ask that because we're talking about talking to technologists and people who are designing technologies what is technology technology is an intentional patterning of information material and energy to allow an organism to successfully adapt to its surrounding environment let me say that again because it's kind of a lot that technology the way i define it by the way that also means that there are other organisms on this planet that have technologies so think about it for a minute we like to think technology is just a human thing but no a technology is an intentional patterning of energy material or information that an organism uses to enable it to better interface with and interact with its environment um language is a technology we're using the technology of language right now um but you could look at it and a squirrel has a technology of a squirrel's nest to allow it to uh you know to survive and to have a place to rear chime and so forth that's a it's a piece of squirrel technology and so um human beings have always had technology it is that um our culture and the way our cultures are uh is is um created has basically led us down a series of paths of inquiry to create deeper knowledge and understanding of certain ways in which nature works that have allowed us to create increasingly more elaborate technologies and interestingly because technologies are something that we use to interface between us and the natural world they've also had a tendency as we become ever more elaborate we've been we've seemed to almost cocoon ourselves in our technology and have this technological bubble around us that isolates us from direct unintermediated contact with the rest of the natural world um for and that has a lot of profound implications um for how we as a biological organism exist and how we as a social biological organism exist so i gotta back up and ask another question what is culture then yeah culture in the way i think about it is a set of shared metaphors and narratives that a group of people hold that allow them to share enough of a worldview that they can relate to each other in a way that allows them to have a cooperative existence allows them to work together have a social organization have coherence and as a result actually achieve things that no individual by themselves could achieve so the idea of culture the purpose of culture is to connect human beings together into groups that have a form of social cohesion so that cohesive cooperative action can emerge and so as we've gone forward in our cultures have gone different cultures emerge and exist in different parts of the world and in different people groups around the world one of the things that's happened is that a particular set of viewpoints stories narratives metaphors have emerged that have been um kind of colonizing metaphors and um colonizing what i mean by that is they have a tendency to go out and overpower and displace other ways of being other ways of thinking and one of those is based around a very fundamental metaphor of nature as machine um that came out of well started all the way back with plato i won't get into all this it's something i actually unpack again when i teach in detail because it's critical to understand this we can't understand how we're creating technology today why our technologies are creating the trouble they are and how to how to like go in a different direction until we dig all the way down to the bottom of this and the reason is our framing metaphors are framing stories that create the way that we investigate think about talk about tell stories about the world that frames what technologies we actually create what do we you know what do we create what do we not create um what do we prioritize and so forth we have to come all the way down to it we realize that we've gotten that the modern world with its scientific worldview what we call scientism has emerged out of something that came out of western civilization starting with plato and coming all the way down but really started to get steam uh with around the time of rene descartes and isaac newton what's now become called the cartesian newtonian paradigm the cartesian coming from the latinization of renegade cart's name and of course newton being store isaac newton um with this idea of nature is a machine that the universe is a machine and we like that as human beings because it lets us take and simplify reality down to something that's a little more manageable right so the modern reduction of science started to grow out of this idea coming from descartes and um newton that the way to ask questions about the universe we're in was to see ourselves as a disembodied intelligence that um could objectively look at the universe and i think you know we could get into whether objective is possible actually it's not but we could stand back and objectively look at the universe and ask questions about it and then okay if you can do that well how do we ask questions oh well we we're going to model it in our brain as a machine and the way that you understand the machine if it's complicated is you take it apart into sub-assemblies and you study the sub-assembly right if that's too complicated take it down into even smaller parts and then eventually if you understand all the pc parts then you understand the machine that's the theory right that and that works for simple machines and it even works for what we would call technically complicated machines like a car it's a complicated machine right and for a long time this was the model that we used for inquiry scientific inquiry about the universe model biology as a machine model human behavior as a machine modeled societies as machines that are complicated but still understandable by studying the reductive parts so what we would call a reductionist system of inquiry and for a long time our technologies were built on that and our and much of our science was built on that there were individual scientists that came along and tried to challenge that as the underlying metaphor nature as machine because they felt that that was not the right way of going but they basically got marginalized because it turned out that nature's machine was a metaphor that drove reductionist inquiry and it made a huge amount of progress and understanding certain parts of the universe if there are parts of the universe that it turns out you can learn a lot about by looking at it reductively but this completely marginalized many other ways of knowing ways of being in other non-western cultures that took the view that the universe was complex not just complicated but complex and so what's the difference between complicated and complex um well as i said with a complicated thing you can actually understand it like a car you can understand a car by breaking it down into a sub-assemblies and if the car if the if the fuel injection system is too complicated you can even like get down and study the components of it until you can understand it and when you get done you can have a pretty good understanding of how the car works okay so the theory was well if that's the case then we should be able to take a um bacteria and do the same thing right the bacteria is just a complicated machine that has parts and you can go all the way down well it turns out that there's something fundamentally different about life than a machine have you ever seen a machine actually like build itself not yet like actually go out and gather everything it needs and then like put itself together and assemble itself and then um continue to regenerate and repair itself as it operates no there's actually some very fundamental characteristics of this regenerative system we call life that are fundamentally different than machine um there is this thing in uh when we start talking about uh life system processes one of the attributes is what's called autophilesis which basically means self-making that we say that life um basically exists a living organism exists within a boundary of its own creation and self-organizes self-builds self-replicates self-regenerates inside of that boundary in order to do that complicated doesn't actually work you actually have to have an a very complex network of interrelationships that are non-linear dynamic and when you get to non-linear dynamic networks of interrelationships happening at the scale we're talking about it stops being complicated and it goes into the realm of being complex which means that it's behavior is no longer predictable yeah it may stay within certain bounds and envelopes at certain times but it starts to be to to give you all these complex behaviors emergent behaviors that aren't at all predictable based upon analyzing the components when you put you put the components back together and let them all interrelate now all sorts of behaviors emerge that you never would have guessed that by just looking at the components in other words the reductionist method of inquiry lets us learn a lot but it gives us a very skewed view of reality because it only looks at the parts that are understandable with reductionist inquiry in other words it understands the thing by taking it apart not by putting it together and watching the whole process and watching the emergent properties and life is like that it's the reason that life can be regenerative right a machine is degenerative your car will run down it will you know it won't last forever it won't repair itself it will degenerate and eventually you'll need a new car well it turns out jeans don't work that way at all there's this thing called epistasis it turns out that if gene number one is close to gene number two it will behave completely differently than if it's not close to gene number two and there's all these complex emergent behaviors whereby it's almost like some of the things that we've talked about that are genetic code so to speak again there's the machine metaphor it's like a computer rights genetic code okay um it's like um it is it is encoding of information in a recipe book but what ends up happening is the way it actually gets expressed in the real world is dynamic and it interac interrelates with what's going on it interrelates with the environment interrelates with what the other parts of the genome are doing certain parts of the genome actually change how other parts of the genome express themselves there's this complex network and it turns out that the dynamics of genetics is actually only understood by understanding the dynamics of the interrelationships between the genes and not the genes and if that interrelationship changes over time it's a dynamic adaptive emergent network that changes over time and so now there's immersion feels like epigenetics right and so forth where we understand that what we used to model in evolutionary biology as this simple machine and that the only way evolutionary adaptation occurred was through random mutations and then natural selection through who who lived and who died right like you know fitness for the environment well now we know it's completely just a silly idea um it still happens of course but that that is the only um driver of evolutionary adaptation is completely silly but what happened was there was this period of over 100 years for evolutionary inquiry you know inquiry into the process of evolution and genetics were um actively um [Music] what's the best word for it it was actively held from moving forward because it held the metaphor and it kept on trying to push its interpretation of what was going on into that model and so i think one of the things that's starting to happen in our understanding of science and our understanding of how to design our technologies going forward is that we're having to move past this dead machine metaphor and understand that yes there are things that aren't machines but then life is actually not it does not meet any of the definition to the machine it actually has a whole different dynamic in terms of process and so forth and interestingly to me talking about regenerative design and helping people think about how we're going to design our next generation of technology to be regenerative instead of degenerative if we try to design our technologies based upon the machine metaphor that's been the predominant technological metaphor for the last couple hundred years they will by definition be degenerative and the only model we have for creating regenerative net generation technologies are these complex rich emergent systems that life is showing us how to do yeah absolutely i mean there is definitely a lot there and but just some show notes for the listeners is epigenetics is the concept that your dna expression changes based on the interactions with the environment without changing the underlying genome and it's extremely powerful because for individuals who go through traumatic experiences speaking from a clinical perspective it's that's why i don't like the term overcoming trauma overcoming anxiety or depression because they are part of your epigenetic expressions and based on how you integrate and process those trauma they become who you are on a truly molecular level so for anyone that's interested in this topic i would urge just to do some more research around epigenetics so i do want to stay on this train of regenerative versus degenerative training for a bit since that is your bread and butter and of course let me let me throw it because your your point of epigenetics is is really it's important i've been um listing in on something that jeremy lent the author and philosopher has been doing on deep transformation and he uses uh to me what's a great example of this and he talks about grasshoppers and locusts right and he asks the question what's the difference between a grasshopper and a locust and the answer is that there are a number of many species of grasshopper but a locust is a grasshopper what happens is grasshoppers are solitary um organisms that you know wander around munching on vegetation and feeding what happens is certain species of locusts when the environmental conditions change and they sense a high stress environment they actually undergo a genetic expression transformation notice their genome did not change the genes didn't change nothing changed what happens is that they have this genome and the network the organization in the network and how it's expressing adapts and all of a sudden they go from being these solitary creatures to swarming together in huge um locust storms and going on the whole idea of a plague of locusts right it's the same exact genetic individual they even physiologically change their genotype changes their colorations can change they can change physically and everything else they can go through this locus swarming phase and when the conditions change those exact same grasshoppers that became part of the locust swarm can go back to being normal grass normal grasshoppers and that is the way that genetic expression changes this happens in plants this happens in animals um it happens in bacteria we know that like you know bacteria actually have very complex mechanisms for like being able to signal each other and when there's enough of them to all get together it's called quorum sensing they send out chemical signals saying hey here i am here i am here right they're listening to other chemical signals from other bacteria when enough of them all get together in one place they realize hey there's enough of us here for us to all like cooperate and they'll like change their whole way of being they'll create biofilms like when they were individuals they would all be off individually and then when enough of them get together oh we can create a biofilm and help protect each other and they will and they'll create a biofilm quorum citizen right and so these complex things are what we're talking about and um they are how life has become so resilient so adaptive and so forth um something that machines typically aren't they you know and it is interesting though what's happening now is again since i you know i i am very aware of like the cloud computing side of things we're actually starting to see some of this understanding of how life adaptive systems operate some of those ideas are now working their way into how software operates and we're starting to actually see ideas being experimented with on the cutting edge of computer science about how adaptive programming could use some of the same dynamics that life uses in order that computer programs instead of being complicated systems can be truly adaptive systems and be able to express resilience and self-healing and so forth uh can you elaborate more also yeah so um machine learning is there's a whole there's a whole bunch of interesting questions that have pop that pop up you know when i was doing my undergrad degree in electrical engineering one of the things that i did was uh a senior project in um artificial intelligence in the form of neural networks it was very formative back then because we were still you know nowhere near where we are today but um you know we were still figuring out how to to train neural networks um and for people who aren't familiar with the neural network what it basically is is this idea of well um we've had a really hard time trying to like program a normal quote normal computer to do things like recognize images it's a very hard task and so can we figure out a way of mimicking um the way that living organisms with neurons create networks of neurons all connected together can we mimic that and um like get a result that's similar to life and so one of the early ways of doing that was what was called a neural network you would simulate a bunch of neurons being connected into multiple layers and when i was starting to work with it was the first time where they were really doing what was called hidden layers where you had like an input layer where you put the stimulus into neurons on one end almost like you put nerve sensory nerve impulses into your neurons you know on one side of your brain they would propagate through multiple layers and then the output you would have outputs coming out the other side and you would read out the output and the whole idea was we could basically say well we want this neural network to be able to recognize the fact that it's looking at a human face what we'll do is we'll train it we'll let it we'll show up pictures of a lot of human faces and then we will train it saying yep and we'll it's what's called a training set this is the human faces it's not a human face we'll train it and we'll keep on training it until all of the interconnections between all the neurons get to the point where they have a high degree of reliability when you show it a human face that they all all these signals propagate and on the output you get an answer that says yes and if you show it not a human face that you'll put that in there and then it'll propagate through on the output you'll get an answer to snow and just like human beings it's not 100 right we can be mistaken we can glance at something and think it's human face because it just it has all the you know and then realize when you double take that it's not right so we can be fooled and of course we're much better at it than the neural networks are but that's what a neural network is right and so what we were doing then was attempting to take and use this you know complex adaptive network model uh to create what was called an artificial intelligence that is well biologically biological organisms do this with organic neurons in the brain can we do that artificially can we in the beginning we were doing it just by like simulating with math it was a mathematical simulation of a lot of neurons and for those who are there in my generation that are a bit geeky yes it was all in fortran a computer language called fortran and so we were sitting there simulating this thing and we would realize yeah we can do this we can train a neural network and then we can run the simulation and we can actually get better results than we would get by trying to like sit down and program if then statements right if you've ever been in computer programming okay well if you tell the computer if this then do that and then otherwise do this and you know do this calculation and so on and so forth but it turned out that a lot of the machine learning stuff that we take for granted today that can do you know machine vision and so forth guess what it's using it's using these kinds of artificial intelligence things that are um instead of being what we would call sequential you know uh turing machining logic if then kinds of um you know flow charty things you can fall in a flow chart we're actually taking learning artificial intelligence certain parts of that are taking completely different approaches to attempting to solve problems and i'm simplifying a lot here just to get past it really fast because there are a lot of other methods in artificial intelligence besides neural networks but that's just one example to give you an idea of what we're saying here yeah it's really interesting i want to uh revisit a topic you mentioned in passing earlier we talked about grasshoppers their behaviors changes becomes more aggro based on their environment feedback likewise that's similar to group flow right and also humans exhibit similar behavior a very concrete example that i think people would appreciate is that the mob effect or the mob phenomenon what that means is on an individual level and on a psychological emotional level a lot of people who are maybe more passive more meek may not exhibit any aggro or any sort of aggressive behaviors however under a sportsing event right a lot of hooligans quote-unquote british soccer football culture or in the us for a lot of riots or mobbing when those individuals meet and passive individuals becoming this group flow states that actually exhibit completely different human behaviors people who've never ever exhibited aggressive behaviors now they were more prone and more naturally exhibit such behaviors based on their environmental and it's extremely fascinating and epigenetics applies to both positive and both negative aspects and i want to go back to the systems and dynamic and complexity of that and of course your trait is in systematic thinking or complex dynamic systems the way you talk about everything comes through on the website you talked about the biggest deficit in the current system since with your neural networks and machine learning we're talking about it has to be interconnected right interconnectivity matters so on that level you talk about the current systems are piece wise smart but whole system stupid can you elaborate more on that when you go into reductionist inquiry you say to yourself oh well the way we learn about the thing is by studying the parts and so you create universities so that people study the parts i'm gonna major in mechanical engineering or chemical engineering or electrical engineering or petroleum engineering or right and it's like okay so you go in and you study the whole system but through a particular very narrow lens and it allows for yes reductionist inquiry and in uh inquiring a way that will teach you a lot about the pc parts but at the expense of thinking about the whole system dynamic but then the problem is a you study like that and so you are trained in your professional education to take that view of the world and then to make matters worse we throw you out into the work environment and we you stay like that oh you are a civil engineer therefore your you think only in this silo right so when i'm working on let's say a large-scale project with civil engineers where we're trying to repair a landscape we're talking maybe many many square miles um you know they their training in school is not to think about the wild hydrology thing about the ecology to think about how what they're doing impacts all these other fields they're told your objective when there's a big rain event is to make certain that it doesn't flood right and since they're only thinking about that it's like well obviously the solution to that problem is to pipe all the water away as fast as possible right let's just get it out of here let's de-water and that was for a long time the default that you see and you go into a lot of cities and you can see this is exactly what was built into many cities in the 50s 60s 70s 80s even into the 1990s um you know big huge stormwater pipes and open you know concrete culverts and everything else it's like just get the water out of here as quickly as possible well that has profound implications in a lot of other fields it was an expedient and you know solution to just not having things flood during a storm event but it was a solution whereby the civil engineers only talked to other civil engineers and they did not understand all of the implications that this would create they did not understand that that your infrastructure you're putting in is actually part of a very complex large system and it will change the dynamics of that system and it will interact in all these other ways you don't expect in other words because it's part of a living system putting it in there will affect the dynamics of the living system and as a result you will get emergent behaviors from your stormwater management system that you never thought about as a matter of fact because you designed it without thinking about those interactions it's what you would get when an intelligent person some people are brilliant i've worked with some brilliant civil engineers for example right it's what you would get when they are thinking in what we call a silo it's like i am thinking only about this right if that were the only dimension that you were trying to solve it would be p so it's piecewise smart it's it's a smart solution if that were actually the only thing that you were trying to work with but it's whole system stupid not because the person isn't brilliant who designed it because they they are some of them are really really smart it's because we trained them in a world view in which we told them in order to get the job done as quickly as possible with the least amount of work possible to ignore everything else and ignore those complexities and therefore we and we do that over and over again right the electrical engineers are off doing that the architects are off doing their piece and this created profoundly degenerative outcomes right it's like i go in and i see boy we have to we have to completely change the way all the civil engineering is done here because what it's done is it's dehydrated the landscape we're key hiding the dehydrating landscape the whole biosphere is collapsing it's desertifying now right as it's desertifying we're actually now getting uh less plant cover on the soil the soil is now becoming erosive because the plant roots aren't going to hold it we get a big storm event now you're getting huge amounts of silt and topsoil running away with it right and it's being carried away with it is all of these chemicals that the agricultural folks are doing because they're thinking their own silo right it's being carried down and pushed into our streams and waters now we have um you know nutrient overloads in our in our streams and in our rivers and that's causing ecolo ecological you know chaos in our streams and waters and then of course all that collects and where i am in my watershed it all goes down the mississippi river and out into the gulf of mexico and now you have this big huge dead zone right off of the mouth of the gulf of mexico that's an emergent result of all these other things going on that you know that you did and nobody was thinking about that because they were thinking piecewise not whole systems but what's interesting to me is when you start thinking in whole systems just like if you don't think in whole systems you can create things that are degenerative when you do think in whole systems you start to see how what you are designing can actually have mental beneficial interrelationships with other parts of the system whereby what you are designing benefits the other parts of the system and just as importantly you benefit from them now we can partner with living systems and come much closer to being regenerative that is have things that really work so that's that's kind of i guess maybe the short form of it yeah i think i find the relationship between simple rules and complex roles very fascinating yeah because i know for example what i mea

2022-05-29 20:09

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