John michael greer: an old kind of science cellular automata

1/19/14

The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Science
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The Archdruid Report
Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

W EDNES DA Y , DEC EMB ER 18, 2013

An Old Kind of Science
The attempt to conquer nature—in less metaphorical terms, to render
the nonhuman world completely transparent to the human intellect and
just as completely subject to the human will—was industrial
civilization’s defining project. It’s hard to think of any aspect of
culture in the modern industrial West that hasn’t been subordinated
to the conquest of nature, and the imminent failure of that project
thus marks a watershed in our cultural life as well as our history.
I’ve talked here already at some length about the ways that modern
religious life was made subservient to the great war against nature,
and we’ve explored some of the changes that will likely take place as
a religious sensibility that seeks salvation from nature gives way to a
different sensibility that sees nature as something to celebrate, not
to escape. A similar analysis could be applied to any other aspect of
modern culture you care to name, but there are other things I plan to
discuss on this blog, so those topics will have to wait for someone
else to tackle them. Still, there’s one more detail that deserves
wrapping up before we leave the discussion of the end of progress,
and that’s the future of science.

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Since 1605, when Sir Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning
sketched out the first rough draft of modern scientific practice, the
collection of activities we now call science has been deeply entangled
with the fantasy of conquering nature. That phrase “the collection of
activities we now call science” is as unavoidable here as it is
awkward, because science as we now know it didn’t exist at that
time, and the word “science” had a different meaning in Bacon’s era
than it does today. Back then, it meant any organized body of
knowledge; people in the 17th century could thus describe theology as
“the queen of the sciences,” as their ancestors had done for most of
a thousand years, without any sense of absurdity. The word
“scientist” didn’t come along until the mid-19th century, long after
“science” had something like its modern meaning; much before then,
it would have sounded as silly as “learningist” or “knowledgist,”
which is roughly what it would have meant, too.
To Francis Bacon, though, the knowledge and learning that counted
was the kind that would enable human beings to control nature. His
successors in the early scientific revolution, the men who founded the
Royal Society and its equivalents in other European countries, shared
the same vision. The Royal Society’s motto, Nullius in Verba
(“nothing in words”), signified its rejection of literary and other
humanistic studies in favor of the quest for knowledge of, and power
over, the nonhuman world.The crucial breakthrough—the leap to
quantification—was a done deal before the Royal Society was founded
in 1661; when Galileo thought of defining speed as a measurable
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html

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About JMG
John Michael Greer is the Grand
Archdruid of the Ancient Order of
Druids in America and the author of
more than thirty books on a wide
range of subjects, including peak oil
and the future of industrial society.
He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old
red brick mill town in the north
central Appalachians, with his wife
Sara.

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quantity rather than a quality, he kickstarted an extraordinary
revolution in human thought.
Quantitative measurement, experimental testing, and public
circulation of the results of research: those were the core innovations
that made modern science possible. The dream of conquering nature,
though, was what made modern science the focus of so large a
fraction of the Western world’s energies and ambitions over the last
three hundred years. The role of the myth wasn’t minor, or
accidental; I would argue, in fact, that nothing like modern science
would have emerged at all if the craving for mastery over the
nonhuman world hadn’t caught fire in the collective imagination of
the Western world.
I mentioned last week that Carl Sagan devoted a passage in the book
version of Cosmos to wondering why the Greeks and Romans didn’t
have a scientific revolution of their own. The reason was actually
quite simple. The Greeks and Romans, even when their own age of
reason had reached its zenith of intellectual arrogance, never
imagined that the rest of the universe could be made subordinate to
human beings. Believers in the traditional religions of the time saw
the universe as the property of gods who delighted in punishing
human arrogance; believers in the rationalist philosophies that partly
supplanted those traditional religions rewrote the same concept in
naturalistic terms, and saw the cosmos as the enduring reality to
whose laws and processes mortals had to adapt themselves or suffer.
What we now think of as science was, in Greek and Roman times, a
branch of philosophy, and it was practiced primarily to evoke feelings
of wonder and awe at a cosmos in which human beings had their own
proper and far from exalted place.
It took the emergence of a new religious sensibility, one that saw the
material universe as a trap from which humanity had to extricate
itself, to make the conquest of nature thinkable as a human goal. To
the Christians of the Middle Ages, the world, the flesh, and the devil
were the three obnoxious realities from which religion promised to
save humanity. To believers in progress in the post-Christian west,
the idea that the world was in some sense the enemy of the Christian
believer, to be conquered by faith in Christ, easily morphed into the
idea that the same world was the enemy of humanity, to be conquered
in a very different sense by faith in progress empowered by science
and technology.
The overwhelming power that science and technology gave to the civil
religion of progress, though, was made possible by the fantastic
energy surplus provided by cheap and highly concentrated fossil fuels.
That’s the unmentioned reality behind all that pompous drivel about
humanity’s dominion over nature: we figured out how to break into
planetary reserves of fossil sunlight laid down over half a billion years
of geological time, burnt through most of it in three centuries of
thoughtless extravagance, and credited the resulting boom to our own
supposed greatness. Lacking that treasure of concentrated energy,
which humanity did nothing to create, the dream of conquering nature
might never have gotten traction at all; as the modern western
world’s age of reason dawned, there were other ideologies and
nascent civil religions in the running to replace Christianity, and it
was only the immense economic and military payoffs made possible by
a fossil-fueled industrial revolution that allowed the civil religion of
progress to elbow aside the competition and rise to its present

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Peak Oil Books by JMG
Readers of this blog might also like
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Decline and Fall

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dominance.
As fossil fuel reserves deplete at an ever more rapid pace, and have
to be replaced by more costly and less abundant substitutes, the most
basic precondition for faith in progress is going away. These days,
ongoing development in a handful of fields has to be balanced against
stagnation in most others and, more crucially still, against an
accelerating curve of economic decline that is making the products of
science and technology increasingly inaccessible to those outside the
narrowing circle of the well-to-do. It’s indicative that while the media
babbles about the latest strides in space tourism for the very rich,
rural counties across the United States are letting their roads revert
to gravel because the price of asphalt has soared so high that the
funds to pay for paving simply aren’t there any more.
In that contrast, the shape of our future comes into sight. As the
torrents of cheap energy that powered industrial society’s heyday slow
to a trickle, the arrangements that once put the products of science
and technology in ordinary households are coming apart. That’s not a
fast process, or a straightforward one; different technologies are
being affected at different rates, so that (for example) plenty of
Americans who can’t afford health care or heating fuel in the winter
still have cell phones and internet access; still, as the struggle to
maintain fossil fuel production consumes a growing fraction of the
industrial world’s resources and capital, more and more of what used
to count as a normal lifestyle in the industrial world is becoming less
and less accessible to more and more people. In the process, the
collective consensus that once directed prestige and funds to
scientific research is slowly trickling away.

Forthcoming in March -- now
available for preorder.

Green Wizardry

That will almost certainly mean the end of institutional science as it
presently exists. It need not mean the end of science, and a weighty
volume published to much fanfare and even more incomprehension a
little more than a decade ago may just point to a way ahead.
I’m not sure how many of my readers were paying attention when
archetypal computer geek Stephen Wolfram published his 1,264-page
opus A New Kind of Science back in 2002. In the 1980s, Wolfram
published a series of papers about the behavior of cellular automata—
computer programs that produce visual patterns based on a set of
very simple rules. Then the papers stopped appearing, but rumors
spread through odd corners of the computer science world that he was
working on some vast project along the same lines. The rumors
proved to be true; the vast project, the book just named, appeared
on bookstore shelves all over the country; reviews covered the entire
spectrum from rapturous praise to condemnation, though most of
them also gave the distinct impression that their authors really didn’t
quite understand what Wolfram was talking about. Shortly thereafter,
the entire affair was elbowed out of the headlines by something else,
and Wolfram’s book sank back out of public view—though I
understand that it’s still much read in those rarefied academic circles
in which cellular automata are objects of high importance.

Not the Future We Ordered:
Peak Oil, Psychology, and the
Myth of Progress

Wolfram’s book, though, was not aimed at rarefied academic circles.
It was trying to communicate a discovery that, so Wolfram believed,
has the potential to revolutionize a great many fields of science,
philosophy, and culture. Whether he was right is a complex issue—I
tend to think he’s on to something of huge importance, for reasons
I’ll explain in a bit—but it’s actually less important than the method

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that he used to get there. With a clarity unfortunately rare in the
sciences these days, he spelled out the key to his method early on in
his book:
In our everyday experience with computers, the programs that
we encounter are normally set up to perform very definite tasks.
But the key idea I had nearly twenty years ago—and that
eventually led to the whole new kind of science in this book—was
to ask what happens if one instead just looks at simple
arbitrarily chosen programs, created without any specific task in
mind. How do such programs typically behave? (Wolfram 2002, p.
23)
Notice the distinction here. Ordinarily, computer programs are
designed to obey some human desire, whether that desire involves
editing a document, sending an email, viewing pictures of people with
their clothes off, snooping on people who are viewing pictures of
people with their clothes off, or what have you. That’s the heritage of
science as a quest for power over nature: like all other machines,
computers are there to do what human beings tell them to do, and so
computer science tends to focus on finding ways to make computers
do more things that human beings want them to do.
That same logic pervades many fields of contemporary science. The
central role of experiment in scientific practice tends to foster that,
by directing attention away from what whole systems do when they’re
left alone, and toward what they do when experimenters tinker with
them. Too often, the result is that scientists end up studying the
effects of their own manipulations to the exclusion of anything else.
Consider Skinnerian behaviorism, an immensely detailed theory that
can successfully predict the behavior of rats in the wholly arbitrary
setting of a Skinner box and essentially nothing else!
The alternative is to observe whole systems on their own terms—to
study what they do, not in response to a controlled experimental
stimulus, but in response to the normal interplay between their
internal dynamics and the environment around them. That’s what
Wolfram did. He ran cellular automata, not to try to make them do
this thing or that, but to understand the internal logic that determines
what they do when left to themselves. What he discovered, to
summarize well over a thousand pages of text in a brief phrase, is
that cellular automata with extremely simple operating rules are
capable of generating patterns as complex, richly textured, and
blended of apparent order and apparent randomness, as the world of
nature itself. Wolfram explains the relevance of that discovery:

Free delivery worldwide on this
title.

The Blood of the Earth: An Essay
on Magic and Peak Oil

After Oil: SF Visions of a PostPetroleum World

Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic
new idea that rules based on mathematical equations could be
used to describe the natural world. My purpose in this book is to
initiate another such transformation, and to introduce a new
kind of science that is based on the much more general types of
rules that can be embodied in simple computer programs.
(Wolfram 2002, p. 1)

One crucial point here, to my mind, is the recognition that
mathematical equations in science are simply models used to
approximate natural processes. There’s been an enormous amount of
confusion around that point, going all the way back to the ancient
Pythagoreans, whose discoveries of the mathematical structures
within musical tones, the movement of the planets, and the like led
them to postulate that numbers comprised the arche, the enduring

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reality of which the changing world of our experience is but a
transitory reflection.
This confusion between the model and the thing modeled, between
the symbol and the symbolized, is pandemic in modern thinking.
Consider all the handwaving around the way that light seems to
behave like a particle when subjected to one set of experiments, and
like a wave when put through a different set. Plenty of people who
should know better treat this as a paradox, when it’s nothing of the
kind. Light isn’t a wave or a particle, any more than the elephant
investigated by the blind men in the famous story is a wall, a pillar, a
rope, or what have you; “particle” and “wave” are models derived
from human sensory experience that we apply to fit our minds around
some aspects of the way that light behaves, and that’s all they are.
They’re useful, in other words, rather than true.
Thus mathematical equations provide one set of models that can be
used to fit our minds around some of the ways the universe behaves.
Wolfram’s discovery is that another set of models can be derived
from very simple rule-based processes of the kind that make cellular
automata work. This additional set of models makes sense of
features of the universe that mathematical models don’t handle well—
for example, the generation of complexity from very simple initial
rules and conditions. The effectiveness of Wolfram’s models doesn’t
show that the universe is composed of cellular automata, any more
than the effectiveness of mathematical models shows that the
Pythagoreans were right and the cosmos is actually made out of
numbers. Rather, cellular automata and mathematical equations
relate to nature the way that particles and waves relate to light: two
sets of mental models that allow the brains of some far from
omniscient social primates to make sense of the behavior of different
aspects of a phenomenon complex enough to transcend all models.
It requires an unfashionable degree of intellectual modesty to accept
that the map is not the territory, that the scientific model is merely a
representation of some aspects of the reality it tries to describe. It
takes even more of the same unpopular quality to back off a bit from
trying to understand nature by trying to force it to jump through
hoops, in the manner of too much contemporary experimentation, and
turn more attention instead to the systematic observation of what
whole systems do on their own terms, in their own normal
environments, along the lines of Wolfram’s work. Still, I’d like to
suggest that both those steps are crucial to any attempt to keep
science going as a living tradition in a future when the attempt to
conquer nature will have ended in nature’s unconditional victory.

Stories from The Archdruid Report's
2012 peak oil fiction competition

The Wealth of Nature:
Economics as if Survival
Mattered

The Ecotechnic Future:
Envisioning a Post-Peak World

A huge proportion of the failures of our age, after all, unfold precisely
from the inability of most modern thinkers to pay attention to what
actually happens when that conflicts with cherished fantasies of
human entitlement and importance. It’s because so much modern
economic thought fixates on what people would like to believe about
money and the exchange of wealth, rather than paying attention to
what happens in the real world that includes these things, that
predictions by economists generally amount to bad jokes at society’s
expense; it’s because next to nobody thinks through the implications
of the laws of thermodynamics, the power laws that apply to fossil
fuel deposits, and the energy cost of extracting energy from any
source, that so much meretricious twaddle about “limitless new
energy resources” gets splashed around so freely by people who ought

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to know better. For that matter, the ever-popular claim that we’re all
going to die by some arbitrary date in the near future, and therefore
don’t have to change the way we’re living now, gets what
justification it has from a consistent refusal on the part of believers
to check their prophecies of imminent doom against relevant
scientific findings, on the one hand, or the last three thousand years
of failed apocalyptic predictions on the other.
The sort of science that Wolfram has proposed offers one way out of
that overfamiliar trap. Ironically, his “new kind of science” is in one
sense a very old kind of science. Long before Sir Francis Bacon set
pen to paper and began to sketch out a vision of scientific progress
centered on the attempt to subject the entire universe to the human
will and intellect, many of the activities we now call science were
already being practiced in a range of formal and informal ways, and
both of the characteristics I’ve highlighted above—a recognition that
scientific models are simply human mental approximations of nature,
and a focus on systematic observation of what actually happens—were
far more often than not central to the way these activities were done
in earlier ages.
The old Pythagoreans themselves got their mathematical knowledge
by the same kind of careful attention to the way numbers behave that
Wolfram applied two and a half millennia later to simple computer
programs, just as Charles Darwin worked his way to the theory of
evolution by patiently studying the way living things vary from
generation to generation, and the founders of ecology laid the
foundations of a science of whole systems by systematically observing
how living things behave in their own natural settings. That’s very
often how revolutions in scientific fundamentals get started, and
whether Wolfram’s particular approach is as revolutionary as he
believes—I’m inclined to think that it is, though I’m not a specialist in
the field—I’ve come to think that a general revision of science, a
“Great Instauration” as Sir Francis Bacon called it, will be one of the
great tasks of the age that follows ours.

The Long Descent: A User's
Guide to the End of the
Industrial Age

Posted by John Michael Greer at 5:24 PM
+11 Recommend this on Google

137 comments:
Joel said...
I just got my PhD in materials science this month.
I'm looking forward to starting my career, but doubts about the
mainstream worldview made it tough to find motivation to
finish.
As I've begun networking, I've noticed that society isn't as
confident as it was when incumbent scientists were starting
their careers, and a lot of the places that are hiring look like
bad bets to me. I don't want to have a bubble collapse under
me.
I also get a vague sense that a lot of opportunities are opening
up, not necessarily for employment, but for good science to be
done. It was good to read some of your thoughts on the matter;
I'll need to work through this topic thoroughly as time goes on.

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12/18/13, 5:58 PM
Andy Brown said...
As always, a very thought provoking essay. I've long noted that
people who are trained in modern medicine often understand a
good deal about certain pathologies, but have no understanding
whatsoever of human health and wellbeing. I think your essay
here helps me understand some of that. Health is the kind of
system that our assertive science can't really understand - (for
reasons you lay out in your post) - but pathologies are often
quite a bit simpler and, of course, often respond to blunt
meddling on the part of experimenters and doctors. Your
perspective helps me to understand something that has been a
mystery to me - namely why modern medicine is utterly
obsessed with sickness and pathology and utterly indifferent to
health.
12/18/13, 6:10 PM
makedoanmend said...
I can accept with no qualms that humankind has been on a sort
of quest to tame nature and often try to eradicate it or remake
nature in some human-centric form. But I also think there has
been (and I'm not going to explain myself well) a concerted
attempt by humankind to destroy the human animal, and that
this attempt seems to be again gathering steam lately.
It's been quite obvious that certain sects, like the communists,
had a deeply held distain for humanity; as humanity didn't
measure up to some unspecified ideal. However, neo-capitalist
ideology, especially in its current purist form, seems to be
driving to the same conclusion these days. It's very evident in
the UK just now. I'm just wondering if you think humanity's
dislike of humans is a manifestation of the desire to conquer
nature or is it just human nature asserting itself as the limits
of nature confront 7 billion people jostling for the same
resources? Or is this dislike of humanity a symptom of both the
desire to conquer nature but also a dawning realisation that
while we can do much damage, and exterminate many other
creatures, we are finally meeting a cosmic sized but delimiting
nature that might not just be too tameable afterall?
There was a conference recently in Edinburgh, Scotland whose
sole topic was how society could privatise nature and turn all
natural features, like the air we breath, into cash generating
streams of income. Such as deep desire to commodify
everything these days seems to be the final push to conquer
nature and to also loudly declare a dislike of ourselves.
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-12-06/at-theedinburgh-forums-on-natural-capital-and-natural-commons#
12/18/13, 6:25 PM
Richard Larson said...
There could be some simple logic to explain why a computer
software program would have tendencies. A pattern in electricty
influenced by some universal motion. As mentioned, a pattern
in human use. There could even be more and less viscosity in

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sequences. Lots of influneces or combinations, that could lead
to its own tendencies. Does this mean it sentient?
Don't believe spending time on any of these types of patterns is
going to be profitable post carbon. It will be in the category of
space vacations and money. Interesting nonetheless.
12/18/13, 6:42 PM
Tom Bannister said...
Thank you once again for another thoughtful descriptive piece
about one of the, 'headaches' of our time. (I don't think its a
headache, I'm just describing the reaction I usually get
whenever I point out that a description of a thing is not actually
the thing itself).
I think you mentioned this a couple of posts ago but this is a
BIG problem in the legal profession at the moment. Lawyers,
academics etc are often very unnerved and uncomfortable
whenever you mention that a law is not a piece of concrete (is a
piece of concrete actually a piece of concrete? lol), but a verbal,
social, cultural description. The reaction is usually, but if we
didn't have that there would be CHOAS!!! I do occasionally try
and bring up a broader philosophical point in my law lectures.
Some of the students clearly get it. Often sadly the lectures
don't. (and I'm at one of the more liberal/wacko/progressive
law schools in New Zealand- Waikato.
At least with law everyone is at least forced to admit that law is
essentially a value judgement. The Science people I come
across are by and large far worse. They pretend that there is
'science' 'pure' and 'objective' and free of bias! and then there is
'everything else' which ought to be more like 'science'.
Anyway, thanks for allowing me to do a bit of ranting. It does
make me ponder though very carefully the various strategies
that could be used to gradually unhinge people from the strict
rationalist 'scientific' materialist world-view. (if that's even
possible at all in some cases)
12/18/13, 6:47 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Hi JMG,
Quote: "The central role of experiment in scientific practice
tends to foster that, by directing attention away from what
whole systems do when they’re left alone, and toward what they
do when experimenters tinker with them."
The above quote sums up the image / acceptance problem of
alternative agricultural techniques such as organics and
permaculture. It is simply that critics fixate so much on
explaining or criticising the interactions that they are unable to
observe the whole. They simply don't (or can't, or refuse to) see
it. The techniques encourage complexity, when industrial
agriculture - which is supported by many scientists - is a move
towards a simpler system.


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Those critiques drive me bananas too, because those
techniques simply work.
As an example, I don't know what the specific interactions are
between comfrey / borage and a citrus tree. I've just observed
that on the ground it actually works and both the trees and herb
are better for those interactions.
I always find it curious that both scientists (and economists
too, for that matter) are happy to make pronouncements
without consideration of the facts on the ground with which
they operate in. It is just weird.
By the way, it is 40 Celsius (104F) here today and about a third
of the country is in a heatwave. Such an event is not unusual,
but the sheer size and extent of it is a couple of weeks earlier
than previous years. Tidy work, everyone.
Regards
Chris
12/18/13, 7:07 PM
bryant said...
Bravo, excellent essay!
My daughter sums it up thusly:
In theory, theory and practice are the same... in practice,
they're not.
12/18/13, 7:13 PM
Ruben said...
Your note that models can be useful without being true
reminded me of Boids, a computer model of bird flocking
behaviour. The author found that three rules—Separation,
Alignment, Cohesion—could create flocking behaviour.
It was immediately clear to me that humans have such simple
rules for the pro-environmental behaviours I was studying,
things like recycling and conservation.
But even though these simple rules can create a bird simulator,
scientists aren't actually clear that is how flocking is controlled.
As I understand it, the great speed with which changes pass
through the flock means that telepathy, for example, is still in
serious, if somewhat fringe, consideration.

12/18/13, 7:56 PM
My donkey said...
just a typo (missing word):
"One crucial point here, to my mind, is the recognition that
mathematical equations in science are simply models used to

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natural processes."
12/18/13, 8:02 PM
Stephen said...
I think you might be over stating the role of religion when
explain why the Roman Empire never had an industrial
revolution. As a slave society instead of a guild society the
Romans never had the technical skill and craftsmanship to build
the necessary machinery and instruments except for a few rare
wonders. There was also much less literacy than the high
medieval period and no printing press to spread new ideas. In
there mines mills there do seem to of tried to use the
technology available to make them as profitable as possible.
12/18/13, 8:20 PM
Richard Green said...
Hi John,
You use of the past tense in the first sentence stunned me. I
guess it is one thing to accept that we are in collapse, but
something very different to realize that industrial civilization
really should be thought of as something in the past.

12/18/13, 8:22 PM
Doc said...
Well written once again. As a scietist, i am constantly
questioning the sources of the knowledge we use - too many of
these sources seem to have taken Einstein at his word when he
said that 'Imagination is more important than knowledge'; they
proceeded to make up their facts.
The new hot issue seems to be the activity of the science
publisher Elsevier, which is withdrawing valid anti-GMO articles
based on thoughts from a new editor that used to work for
Monsanto. I guess revisionist history can be complemented by
revisionist science - the only thing lost is the truth.
12/18/13, 8:28 PM
Thijs Goverde said...
Eeeeh! Gotta take exception to your caricature of Skinnerian
Behaviourism. I know Burrhus Skinner is everyone's favourite
bogeyman, but operant conditioning works pretty well, even
with yuman beans outside Skinner boxes. It is applied daily by
psychologists the world over with very good results (and also,
methinks, by marketing experts with very bad, though
effective, results).
12/18/13, 8:46 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Joel, good. Materials science is potentially very useful in a
salvage society, since it can be used to understand the behavior
of secondhand materials as well -- still, you're right about being
wary of bubbles.

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Andy, bingo. These days in the US, mainstream medical
practitioners no longer talk about "healing" or "curing" -- the
model now is "health management," which means they keep you
sick but functioning, so that getting well doesn't interfere with
the income stream.
Makedo, it's quite simple, really. Human nature is also part of
nature, and it's human nature that these efforts are aimed at
conquering.
Richard, none of that has anything to do with what Wolfram
was discussing; I'm sorry I didn't succeed in making that clear.
He was talking about the behavior of simple rule-based
systems, which need not be run on electronic computers at all.
As for sentience, er, where did you get that from?
Tom, by all means rant. I wasn't aware that the same problem
was infesting law, but I'm not surprised.
Cherokee, exactly. The question "does X work?" is logically prior
to the question "why does X work?" -- and one of the core logical
fallacies of modern scientific thought is the insistence that if
the cause isn't known, the effect can't happen.
Bryant, an excellent summary.
Ruben, I'd take it further than that. We can't know why birds
flock. All we can do is generate models that more or less
imitate flocking behavior.
Stephen, yes, that was Sagan's theory. Like so many of Sagan's
speculations, it doesn't really hold water -- the US was a slave
society at the time of our industrial revolution, for example.
Richard, good. You might consider contemplating the phrase
"progress is over."
Doc, good gods. That's unusually corrupt even for modern
science.
Thijs, Skinnerian behaviorism is an effective tool for short
term manipulation of living things in controlled settings -- that
is to say, another expression of the will to power that pervades
contemporary science. As a tool for understanding, it's
contemptible -- and I've read a good many critiques of the
claims that its effects are lasting, or really that effective in the
real world.
12/18/13, 9:04 PM
Thijs Goverde said...
I don't know that I'm all that impressed by the critiques you've
read, as I know people who actually do use behaviourial therapy
to effectively create lasting and positive results in a noncontrolled setting.
Are you certain your dismissal of behaviorism's effectiveness
doesn't stem from that contempt you mentioned?

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12/18/13, 9:13 PM
August Johnson said...
JMG - Re: Knowing that the model isn't reality. I'm reminded of
when astronomers used the model of Crystal Spheres carrying
the Moon, Planets Sun and Stars. They clearly knew (and said
so) that reality wasn't that way but it was the best model they
had to describe how the movements worked. Now, today in
Physics with Quarks (six flavors; up, down, strange, charm,
bottom, and top), Gluons, and so on, it seems that the model
has been totally and unconditionally accepted as the reality.
Sounds more like porn!
12/18/13, 9:27 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
When I read Peter Watson's "The Modern Mind: An intellectual
history of the 20th Century," one of the things that struck me
was that not only was science involved in the project of
conquering nature, but that science was in the project of
conquering other fields of knowledge, something that scientists
themselves would acknowledge wryly in passing. For example,
my undergraduate adviser in Geology once remarked, somewhat
derisively, that "psychology is trying very hard to be a science,
and one of these days, it will get there." I later dated one
psychologist and married another, and decided that "one of
these days" had arrived; research psychology is indeed a
science as other scientists understand it.
The same thing has happened to anthropology, although the
cultural anthropologists are resisting, much to the dismay of
the archeologists and physical anthropologists, who wholeheartedly embrace being scientists, and is moving through
sociology. Economics would be next, except, as you noted,
there is too much wishful thinking going on in that field to
make it a science as the scientists themselves understand it.
Of course, any conquest would be resisted. Watson described
one such effort by the French philosophers, who decided to
combat the materialism of the German and Anglophone
scientists by turning to their own materialism. Instead of
following Darwin, they turned to two of the other great minds of
the 19th Century, Marx and Freud, to combat Scientism. Too
bad, as Watson remarked, that Marx and Freud were wrong.
You probably wouldn't be surprised by this development. As
you've noted, anti-religions accept the premises of their
intellectual adversaries, but invert their values. The French
were no different in developing their own materialism instead
of trying to build a spiritual alternative. Then again, I don't find
Anouilh's ennui expressed as Existentialism very comforting, so
maybe it's for the best they didn't try.
12/18/13, 9:31 PM
Joseph Nemeth said...
I'm really struggling with this post.
At root, the issue here is this: what is science for?

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I fully agree that modern science is about the conquest of
nature. If we abandon that course, then what, exactly, is the
point of science?
As you note, the very high civilizations of the Romans, the
Greeks, the Chinese, the Mayans, etc. didn't have what we call
"science." It wasn't because they weren't smart enough. It was
because they didn't see the point. They didn't see the point
because they weren't out to conquer nature.
Does science have any other real purpose?
There's a common belief that science begets technology begets
power and wealth and material comfort. It's a somewhat
sketchy belief at best, and grows even murkier as both science
and technology rise on the curve of diminishing returns.
Whatever truth the belief had in the past, it will certainly have
less truth in the future.
There's a common belief that science begets a deeper and truer
understanding of the universe, and that this is a good thing.
The second is debatable -- the first is simply nonsense. A little
over a century ago, space had three dimensions, the universe
was infinite in extent and filled with "luminiferous ether,"
atomic nuclei were indivisible, and time was absolute. Space
now has between four and ten dimensions, the universe is
expanding from a primordial Big Bang and is filled with a sea of
virtual particles and invisible "dark" matter and energy, atomic
nuclei are decidedly divisible, and time is as stretchy as a
rubber-band. I've recently read of a new theory that our spacetime is some kind of holographic projection arising from a
lower-dimensional universe with perhaps as little as one "real"
dimension.
How many left-handed quarks can dance on the head of a pin?
Absent a drive to conquer nature, with diminishing practical
returns on investment in science, and with every new theory
winging off into Alice's Wonderland, what is the point of
science?
Observation of nature as-it-is, yes. No problem with that -- it's
valuable. The Romans, Greeks, and Chinese did that. So did
Ugg, the caveman. So do nematodes.
But science? I don't feel the case has been made.
12/18/13, 10:24 PM
Tom Bannister said...
-Joseph Nemeth
What's the point in the science if its not about conquering
nature? Well of course science is really only a methodology, a
method of inquiry. The direction you put on that will of course
depend on your existing values. Scientific method is already
being used to investigate, say different methods of sustainable
farming or renewable energy or alternative healing practice. So

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there you go. Someone using scientific method can have any
number of agendas.
12/18/13, 11:30 PM
41fa48c8-550a-11e3-b48c-000bcdcb2996 said...
Joseph - the purpose of science needs a little elaboration. Do
you really think quantum field theorists believe that predicting
the Higgs boson will grant them power over nature? They know
perfectly well that theoretical physics at the sub-sub-nuclear
scale has no practical relevance. You have to build a 30km long
accelerator to even watch the things as they self-destruct.
When Einstein published E=mc^2, he didn't think it had any
earthly application. Not enough was known at the time about
the nucleus to suggest otherwise. In fact one of Einstein's other
papers in that year had finally given convincing evidence that
atoms actually exist, so it was too early to think about what
might happen if someone came along and started splitting
them.
My point is that motivations can vary a lot, but most great
scientists are driven by intense curiosity and a desire to figure
out some of Nature's secrets. Is that conquest? I don't know.
However, there is no doubt that the reason scientists have
been given great resources by governments is because
governments think they need to do so to either conquer
someone/something or to avoid being that someone.
12/19/13, 12:20 AM
zmejuka-alexey said...
John Michael,
I have a good background in mathematics and computer science
and IMO you overestimate the importance of that book.
The cellular automats are arbitrary mathematical models, which
are studied on their own in many details. One just takes some
arbitrary axioms ( or rules in the automats) and study the
mathematical universe that results from them.
The problem with arbitrary mathematical models is that they
are unrelated to nature. In contrast, physical laws are
mathematical models carefully constructed so that their
behaviour resembled the behaviour of nature.
As for the larger subject touched in your post, I agree that
some transformation of the way science is done will happen.
Though IMO it will likely go to more practical direction, it will be
just a method that allows to produce results with practical
significance. In contrast to modern, costly and highly
specialized science it should be cheap.
Collideres, Mars trips or DNA decoding are unlikely to be
present in that list. On the other hand vaccination,
thermodynamics for steam engines, electromagnetism for long
distance communication are high on my list of surviving

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scientific fields. They are cheap and give high value to the
practioners.
And almost forgot, military science! It also gives immense
concurent advantage to the society that preserves it. For
example, basic gun or even machine gun technology is easy to
preserve and can be reproduced without fossil fuels.
Best regards
Alexey
12/19/13, 2:04 AM
Richard Larson said...
I don't know. Reread the blog and I still get these thoughts out
of your description of Wolfgram's work. Didn't read that book,
but my idea has a flow of something, maybe energy, maybe
other things, outside influences for sure, that create patterns,
tendencies, thoughts, maybe has the same influence on humans
as it does, um, everything. Like fighting nature, and all that
entails, going against these flows is a losing battle.
Perhaps even the behaviour of this rule-based system (not a
computer program as I typed, but could still be included in the
everything) is influenced by these forces. Creates a behaviour,
but not sentient? A question not just for you, and like my
comment last week, anyone else reading, to hold the thought,
type an answer, whatever. Even though risky, that was my
point, and it was just a thought. :-)

12/19/13, 2:21 AM
Christian Herring said...
Hey!
Your last few posts make me wonder whether you have ever
read Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn - it touches on many of the
issues you've discussed recently, including the secular
mythologies that have led mankind to assume that it 'owns'
nature, and should therefore conquer it. I would highly
recommend it as a book, though I don't personally agree with
absolutely everything it claims, particularly regarding the
'solutions' it offers to the present state of affairs. Nonetheless,
if you haven't read it, I think it would be worth a weekend to do
so. Let me know what you think!
12/19/13, 3:23 AM
Odin's Raven said...
It seems the Greeks were here ahead of us.
Their Talos and ours stops working when the flow of oleaginous
ichor is disrupted.
Absent the needs of Europa, the skill of Daedalus and the laws
of Zeus, can there be a telos for Talos?
The scientific spells of the modern Medea may persuade him

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that he has eternal life and can rewrite the laws engraven on
his brazen back; and lead to similar destruction.
Talos
12/19/13, 3:36 AM
Phil Harris said...
JMG
I'm glad you picked out 'pompous drivel'. But it has a lot of hard
political and social calculation behind it. History of the Royal
Society is worth strolling through on their website - illustrates
your points about window dressing. (I like the new President;
open-necked shirt and pullover). That sharp guy Charles II who
was brought up away from home - his dad having had his
crowned 'divinely ordained' head chopped off - was onto it in a
flash.
Science got increasingly useful in a competitive world; e.g.
physics and bombs when geopolitical structures feared being
'trumped' by somebody else's technological innovation. And
nuclear power was going to trump fossil fuels. GMOs and DNA
manipulation would be a new agricultural and medical
revolution.
One trouble with exponential growth is that it gets dreadfully
extravagant in its final two doublings. In a highly geared fossilfuelled society 'Science' like everything else becomes horribly
extravagant - and for most purposes a 'promise' rather than an
immediately useful utility - and those really sharp guys are
going to cut off big lumps if they can't see an immediate use,
perhaps leaving a large bet or two on the table for luck. The
'project' is in the process of being redefined by simple rules.
'Discovery' is going to mean what we want it to mean, with a bit
of bread and circuses thrown in?
I think you are saying that society/self-generated virtual reality
is one way of living inside our heads, including entertaining and
negotiating with the gods we create there? By definition some
of it is bound, as you imply, to get a bit out of touch when
paved roads are at a premium?
Yes, I agree if I read you right, 'reductionist science' reductio ad
absurdum is ludicrous.
best
Phil H
12/19/13, 4:24 AM
Yupped said...
On a day to day basis, I try to live through my senses,
observation, felt experience and common sense. The more I
bring a conceptual layer of ideas and measurement to my
experience, the less in touch with reality I am. Sometimes this
is a good thing, but it wouldn't be sensible to only relate to life
through concepts and measurements. So maybe the scientific
method should just be one tool in the toolbox? A couple of
recent experiences to illustrate:

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Although I'm not a scientist, I have spent the last few years
working with academic researchers on a large computer science
project. In observing scientists in action there did seem to be a
tendency to cling to ideas and suppositions, often in the face of
mounting contrary evidence from testing and analysis. This
seemed especially true the more hat funding and professional
reputation was on the line. This particular research project
went on 5 years. Common sense intuition could tell what the
results were going to be after 12 months. We took another 48
months to fully test and document that same early insight. This
seemed a little pointless to me, but seemed just fine to the
scientists who believed that since the early idea was now
proven with data it could now be considered true and worthy of
publication. Until then it was just a fluffy-headed hypothesis.
In a related vein, my wife has been working on solving some
health problems that have plagued her for years. She has finally
done it with herbs and diet, after many unsuccessful traditional
medical interventions including a couple of surgeries. Basically,
she got in touch with her own body, consulted a naturopath,
followed her experience and intuition, adjusted her diet and
went with what worked. She recently met with her old doctor
who said that this sounded fine but was not something she was
trained in and because she wasn't trained in it she couldn't
really comment - she was a little offended that the healing
hadn't come from textbook medical science.
12/19/13, 4:24 AM
Unknown said...
Excellent essay. I believe you have misinterpreted the motto of
the Royal Society, however. 'Nullius' is in the genitive case: the
phrase means literally "on no one's words", i.e., "On the
authority of no man." It could be paraphrased, "Don't believe
anything just because someone says it."
12/19/13, 4:26 AM
M said...
Thank you for another illuminating essay. As someone involved
on a citizen level with helping our small river town plan its
future, it's mind boggling and somewhat frustrating how many
times the kind of thinking you describe here serves to inhibit
imagining any kind of future other than the one people have
already burnished in their minds, the one that follows the law of
perpetual progress. For one example, apparently, every human
being is born with a set of keys to a vehicle (grossly oversize
for the task) to transport themselves about in for the duration
of their lives. And it goes onward and downward from there.
12/19/13, 5:38 AM
Yossi said...
Joseph Nemeth.
Does science have to have a point? Surely the problems begin
when it needs to have a point and then begets technology. Why
isn't natural curiosity sufficient?
Unfortunately scientists need money and only seem to be able

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to get it by working for organisations that demand technology.
Scientist with a private income like Newton, and nowadays
James Lovelock seem to be rare.
12/19/13, 6:07 AM
Just Because said...
I'll jump in on the thread of comments about Behaviorism. It
can be a worthwhile theory in a narrow sense (getting your kids
to ask nicely for things instead of whining and pitching a fit),
but does not work well as a big theory. That is, it has a place
within a larger systems theory to help understand behavior at
an individual level, but isn't very helpful when trying to
cope/adapt to a larger system that is not under one's control.
12/19/13, 6:11 AM
Marc L Bernstein said...
James Howard Kunstler has used the term "technotriumphalism" to mean the assertion that humanity's problems
can invariably be solved by the use of technology. One could
expand that concept to include conceptual and mathematical
problem solving. One would then get "conceptual-mathematicaltechnical-triumphalism". This is what we often encounter in the
scientific world today. An extreme example of such a view is
the singularity hypothesis of Ray Kurzweil.
What is often missing from "conceptual-mathematicaltechnical-triumphalism" is a combination of ecological thinking
and humility, and sometimes full systems thought as you've
mentioned.
I would venture a guess that even as industrial civilization
declines, those who maintain a belief in the inevitability of
human progress will continue to assert that all is not lost and
that a new major technological discovery is waiting just around
the corner.
Personally I hope that something genuinely revolutionary does
come out of Kurzweil's singularity institute
[http://singularityu.org/]
I suspect that nothing will be found to overcome the mistakes
that humanity is currently making with respect to sound
ecological principles, and that a major societal collapse is very
likely during this century.
Observational science, based upon empirical observation,
statistics and elementary pattern recognition may well survive
the coming collapse.
Science based on the notion that nature can be subdued is
probably going to take a severe blow.
12/19/13, 6:24 AM
41fa48c8-550a-11e3-b48c-000bcdcb2996 said...
Joseph - you are misrepresenting current knowledge, which can
never be complete. Just because there are a wide range of

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speculations about the dimensionality of space-time does not
mean we know less than a century ago. For example, if there
are "extra dimensions" beyond "3+1", they must be "small", i.e.
space is approximately "3+1" but may have some extra
dimensions that are curled up very small so you can only see
them at very small length scales (=high energy).
So in other words, "3+1" is a very good approximation to the
higher dimensional theories, just as Newton's gravity is a very
good approximation to General Relativity. Similarly, classical
mechanics is a very good approximation to quantum mechanics
unless you (again) look at small length scales.
It's not useful to make out that knowledge has not advanced
when it clearly has advanced. Anything can be ridiculed by
misrepresenting it.
12/19/13, 6:24 AM
sgage said...
Speaking of The Religion of Progress, and its handmaiden
Modern Science, here is a rant (albeit a thoughtful one) about
TED/TED-ism by Benjamin Bratton. He is far from declaring the
End of Progress, and seems to 'believe in' Science, but the piece
is an amusing read. Especially if, like me, you find TED talks to
be glib, over-simplified, feel-good presentations. Or as Bratton
calls them, "middlebrow megachurch infotainment".
http://www.bratton.info/projects/talks/we-need-to-talkabout-ted/
12/19/13, 6:45 AM
Adam Funderburk said...
Great post, JMG!
In the mental health world there is a definite drive to “be more
scientific”, particularly amongst psychiatrists and
psychologists. “Evidence-based” practice gets funded, and
using “research-based” techniques is becoming the norm in
order to receive third-party (insurance) compensation (It’s
funny that insurance providers are the ones with the biggest
say in what is “evidence-based”). Irving Yalom, a famous
psychologist and group moderator, commented that “the
scientific quantifiability of [mental health] data was directly
correlated with its triviality”.
As a mental health counselor, I have observed that the best
practitioners, no matter what their specific degree or title, act
as artisans or craftspeople; they understand the concrete
principles of their job, but there is also an artistry and a
respect for the unquantifiable aspects of the relationship that
makes for good psychotherapy. Carl Rogers, considered the
father of humanistic, client-centered psychology, described the
three core conditions for effective therapy: genuineness,
unconditional positive regard, and empathetic understanding.
These conditions are widely accepted, and their results welldocumented. A meta-study of research articles strongly
supports the view that the strength of the therapeutic
relationship is the greatest factor in successful therapy, and
Carl Roger’s core conditions are all about the relationship. The

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short of it is that they work. The thing that frustrates the more
“scientific-minded” researchers (and not a few of my
professors) is that they aren’t sure exactly why the core
conditions work, and they can’t quantify them “properly” for
“real research”. Even my professors, when we came to Carl
Rogers, would encourage us to be genuine, accepting, and
empathetic, but wouldn’t really explain how to do that (there
aren’t many quantifiable techniques for being a kind, genuine,
empathetic person) and wouldn’t really mention it again (As a
funny side note, we spent more time with Skinner – a lot more
“data” to talk about, and some “concrete” mental models to
discuss).
12/19/13, 6:48 AM
Chris Travers said...
Great post, once again. It reminds me very much of
Heisenberg's repetitive argument that data does not imply
theory. In the end, we must accept that the map is not the
territory, but is in fact a representation of territory we cannot
even see or really visit.
This religion of progress must come crashing down. It is already
under tremendous strain. The only thing that is sustaining it
currently is its own inertia and there is little chance of it doing
anything other than coming crashing down again.
12/19/13, 6:57 AM
William Church said...
Very interesting John. I enjoyed this essay very much. I have a
couple things I'll toss into the mix.
One is that the conquering of nature is one way of looking at
science. But some of what you write of is, as I am sure you
know, engineering and not science. At some point the
distinction can get subtle as I know all too well. But one of the
driving motivations of many engineers, including myself, is not
necessarily to conquer nature as it is to build things.
There is a drive in so many of us to design, build, and operate
tools, machines, buildings, etc. I suspect many of us would
have been carpenters and blacksmiths and wheelwrights stone
masons and whathaveyou not too many centuries ago. I would
wonder if this drive to be, for want of a better term, craftsmen
is not an inheritance from our long history where the ability to
manufacture a useful tool could be a huge advantage in tough
survival situations.
There was a high price that was paid when the engineering
profession allowed its highest degree to be changed from a Dr
of Engineering to a Doctor of Philosophy. The difference is
subtle and at the same time massive. If the future holds what
you describe then I would not be a bit surprised to see that
switch reversed.
And ~that~ would be my offering for today. That the difference
between a Doctor of Engineering and a Doctor of Philosophy in
~whatever~ Engineering is also the difference in what would be

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useful in the future you describe versus what fits into the
economy of today.
Best wishes to you over the holidays Brother.
Will
12/19/13, 7:31 AM
ed boyle said...
I finished reading the 5 volume German history of technology
and the summation of ideas at the end seems to be pertinent to
the discussion.
Technology is what practical people do when trying to get things
done. Later others make up rules to explain what is going on
inside the system (Maxwell's equations, etc.). These
explanations help to further develop the higher level
technology. Eventually technologists are way beyond scientific
theories in their own world of practical problems(high level
elctronics, etc.) developing a parallel science of equal value
with all sorts of engineering rules. Engineering is not just
applied science. Technologists are groping to get newer, better,
faster or just different effects from materials and mostly as
long as it works theory of why does not matter but they have
learned that as tech has developed faster and faster that they
have to make their own theoretical knowledge base to
accelerate the process. Still, all that matters is results.
Scientists can stay in ivory towers (see aristotle and quantum
theorists) if they want but an engineer has to live in the real
world.
To pay due respect to a common set of internet acquaintances I
would like to say that The Oil Drum was therefore so important
for building a basis for resource shortage concept as engineers
are reality based and when empty talk runs out (economists
explanations of reality) and scientists are out in left field doing
their own fantasy thing that engineers do the heavy lifting
turning a good idea into a useful product. Almost anything can
be true, cool but not neccessarily marketable, profitable,
acceptable, financable, etc. Peak oil was this idea from the
TOD crowd.
Our limits are now defined more and more by CO2 output of
cars, low energy consumption electrical devices, recyclability.
This recalls to me all those 70s green ideas you'Ve discussed
and the alternative agronomy nowadays.
Reality(and resulting theory thereof, e.g. religion or science) is
relative to who we are, what we need, where(and when) we
live(local environment). Without fossil fuels our current
scientific theory would not have come about as it is mere
explanation of what was happening in the world of high energy
technology in scientific theory about physics, electricity, etc.
Most of chemistry started with getting color dyes and
pharmaceuticals from coal tars in 19th century germany.
If we stopped science(attempts at explanation of current
observable tech) before we had access to coal we would have

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stayed with wood based coals then steel making would have
remained primitive and also our scientific instruments as well
and electrics and chmeicals and pharma would be nonexistent
as well as faster than horse travel and telecoms.
In short you can only explain what you see and can test.
Everything else is speculation. This is why moderns consider
themselves above religion as religion is based on "myth" or
childlike "just-so- stories". Mapping the universe, DNS, etc.
needs massive fossil fuel reserves. Ignorance was bliss for us
earlier primitives and the modern sleep of reason breeds
Frankenstein monsters.
If Siddha powers are real then in trance one can perhaps
perceive the double ohelix or chemical structures in one's own
body but utilize this on an industrial scale - no way. Perhaps
bilocation and other such miracles of Jesus but not for the
masses. "Don't try this at home" is valid for the hi-tech here.
The future of science is like the man moon landing hoax
theories. Future generations will refuse to believe what they
don't see. This is why the bible belt has such pulling power in
their anti science bias. Intuitive reality is what an emotional
animal - primate with brain or not- likes and a story book
religion fits that better than ten thousand page discourse over
the nature of nature.
12/19/13, 8:15 AM
Karl said...
Here are two links that deal with the topics raised this week
and as part of the theme of war on nature if people are
interested in further reading. I remember debating holism (high
school debate) way back in the late 1980s but I don't specifically
remember Goldsmith although he did write a book about it in
92.

Whatever happened to ecology? by Edward Goldsmith · July 1,
2002
The science of Ecology has been taken over by the cult of
scientific reductionism and has become a weapon in the war on
the living world being waged by industrial man.
http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/753/whatever-happened-toecology/
Is science a religion?
by Edward Goldsmith · February 1, 1975
Scientists are functionally the priests of our industrial society.
It is only they who are capable of mobilising, for our purposes,
the limitless powers of Science, of acting thereby as the
intermediaries in our relationship with this new and formidable
deity.
http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/881/is-science-a-religion/


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12/19/13, 8:41 AM
Kyoto Motors said...
“The alternative is to observe whole systems on their own
terms—to study what they do, not in response to a controlled
experimental stimulus, but in response to the normal interplay
between their internal dynamics and the environment around
them.”
I’d like to think that this is what climate science is all about,
which is, after all, the study of how our attempts to conquer
Nature have failed – having altered some significant aspect of
natural weather systems… or so the theory goes. The challenge
has always been to separate geological age-scaled patterns
from mere industrial/ historical patterns. Our computer based
mathematical tools have proved to be limited for sure, but the
general theme that comes from climate science does provide
something of an antidote to the ambitious hubris of the day…
unless you climb aboard the bandwagon where advocates of
planetary-scaled cooling interventions gather!
By the way, I have sorely missed participating in this weekly
forum of late, but have just been so short on time… I have read
with great interest every post, and just want to extend my
continued gratitude, along with the season’s greeting of
warmth, health and happiness to you and your loved ones.
Cheers!
Maclean

12/19/13, 8:52 AM
David Rhodes said...
Indeed, Wolfram and yourself are contrarians of the same cloth.
When describing him, one journalist started with an encounter
between the Dalai Lama and a group of Hell's Angels, and how
those alien beings make sense if you realize how much they
love their bikes. Wolfram really loves his cellular automata. Is it
fair to say that you really love morphological thinking?
In his physicist way, Wolfram is advocating for it too. One
needs to explore all possible patterns of behavior, and also to
be able to recognize them in new contexts. On this note I'd like
to recommend a gorgeous Coursera course called Model
Thinking by Scott Page (just finishing now unfortunately). He
really drives home the point that "all models are wrong," but at
the same time shows their use with dozens of practical
examples, and shows that one can be systematic and precise
about it all.
I like how you've motivated how we can be systematic without
being Baconian. Beyond the flaws of unnatural experimentation,
there are the practical dangers of attempting to "subject the
entire universe to human intellect". Intellectually, we get
farther by working on a more humble scale.
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Robo said...
It seems to me that Wolfram's cellular automata might be one
way of modeling fractal self-similarity in nature ... whereby
essential behaviors or characteristics of energy, particles,
substances or organisms are reflected and multiplied into
complex patterns that recur on a systemic or cosmic scale.
As you point out, human mathematics and science attempt to
describe and predict these patterns, which we then declare to
be absolute laws rather than the high probability tendencies
that they really are.
12/19/13, 9:02 AM
librarian@play said...
"different technologies are being affected at different rates, so
that (for example) plenty of Americans who can’t afford health
care or heating fuel in the winter still have cell phones and
internet access"
An interesting cultural convergence: The rise over the past 2
decades or so of "affordable luxuries", such as specialty coffees
or craft beers or artisanal foods, which has been driven by
marketers' accurate identification of the need to express taste
and take comfort in even small things.
The same faculties that enable us to mistake the model for the
reality it represents also enable us to live with the dissonance
of not having affordable health care, yet having easy and
seemingly affordable access to Tibetan yak's milk cheese that
pairs nicely with a glass of cask porter.
12/19/13, 9:06 AM
Kyoto Motors said...
@ Josheph Nameth
You may be entering the realm of semantics (?)… I think much
of what we call science, the institution, will be up for debate as
to whether it can justify itself/ pay for itself, etc. For better or
for worse (mostly for better, in the very practical sense of
shedding extravagancies like space programs – though on a
sentimental level, for worse…but I digress). An example of an
old science may be exactly what you’re talking about: observing
nature/ working with nature – like a good gardener, or parent!
The benefits being self-evident. As you say, no problem with
that.
At the same time, maintaining modest technologies and
systems – to whatever extent we can – may rely on some degree
of practical understanding of post-Bacon scientific principles,
like Newtonian physics, Copernican astronomy, and
Mendeleevian chemistry. Never mind that nuclear radiation,
being what it is, will necessitate that we maintain an
understanding of its effects for a long time to come!
12/19/13, 9:14 AM
Justin Wade said...
@Andy Brown

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I am a computer science/programmer guy, but I have spent my
career writing scientific applications, the bulk of it in medical
science/biotech.
To your point, I (and many on the inside that I know) believe
that modern medicine is akin to alchemy.
The way medical science has been done for over a century, and
this is the research on which all the knowledge is built, is
fundamentally flawed. What they do is to start a biological
process, stop it, then mount whatever is there on a slide. They
do this for a bunch of processes and piece together a movie out
of these slides, then derive a story.
The problem is that, as per this post, living tissue is not
functioning according to what you see at any time, but as a
function of the network of cell and protein signalling as it
occurs in real time over a duration. To continue with the movie
analogy, the equivalent would be to splice together 1 second
clips of video from different movies into an hour long film, and
then to build a body of knowledge about film based on that.
This is fundamentally why the lack of reproduce-ability in
experiments is so widespread, the research keeps turning up
very badly stitched together data. The fundamental limitation
has been one part technology, one part ideology.
We have technology now that allows researchers to take
snapshots of a single sample throughout its process and to
analyze those snapshots as one continuous process. The
ideological fallacy is an inability to consider a biological system
and its behaviors with emergent processes that are not strictly
a function of what any of the single pieces are doing at a given
time. Incidentally, the same is true of genetic expression.
Recent research has found that mutation is a relatively common
event, but what causes problems is what is going on in the
network of DNA rather than a single
replication/division/apoptosis.
The last point to consider is that disease classification is a
model, not real. Its a heuristic for putting similar
manifestations into a category. When you look at how tissues
behave, no two instances of disease or cancer are exactly alike.
There are patterns of perturbations in signalling and response
that are unique to every individual.
12/19/13, 9:28 AM
Justin Wade said...
@JMG,
Well, if man is not really divisible from nature, and I take this
to be true - the line dividing man from nature is a figment of
our collective imagination - then could one credibly restate the
program to render nature transparent and under human control
as the program to render mankind transparent and under
human control?
Let's not forget that the enlightened thinkers brought the
practice of slavery back after a thousand years of taboo, and

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here we are now, where people are increasingly finding they are
ensnared in debt traps that keep them essentially functioning
as indentured servants for most of their lives.
12/19/13, 9:32 AM
Odin's Raven said...
Worried about running out of cheap oil? Not buying snake oil or
shale oil?
Fear not! Soon, real soon, you'll be able to enjoy the benefits of
patented perpetual motion brought to you by the incomparable
technical ingenuity and marketing chutzpah of America's finest
developers.
Algal Oil
12/19/13, 10:09 AM
SLClaire said...
JMG, thank you for this article. I think this is what I am trying
to do with my practice of dialoguing with my garden. At any
rate I will think deeply about what you've written as I am
working out my garden design for next year.
I wrote up what my garden told me this year in my latest blog
post, for anyone who might be interested.
What my garden told me
12/19/13, 10:21 AM
Thijs, nah, a set of practical techniques can have an absurd
theoretical justification and still work. When I was in college, I
knew several professors who had been ardent Skinnerians
during the heyday of the movement -- one of them had built a
Skinner box for his infant son in order to do experiments on the
kid -- and, having recanted, were able to describe in detail the
failings in Skinner's methods. My response to the critiques was
certainly shaped by their discussions.
August, exactly! One of the big points of contention between
Galileo and the Catholic church was that the Church insisted
that mathematical models of celestial phenomena needed to be
treated purely as models, while Galileo insisted that his model
was the literal truth about the heavens.
Pinku, oh, granted. Thing is, it's simplistic to claim that Marx
and Freud were wrong -- or, for that matter, that Darwin is
right. All three offer models of the universe of human
experience, which are applicable to certain phenomena and
inapplicable to others. The triumphalism that insists that a
theory is true because it happened to win out over the others is
a real barrier to understanding.
Joseph, good. You're grappling with the issues involved here. I'd
point out that classical logic went through the same crisis of
faith -- if the whole world can't be explained by logic, what is
logic good for? -- and the answer turned out to be that, first,

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it's a very useful tool for solving certain kinds of problems, and
second, learning and practicing it has positive effects on those
who do it. Just as practicing a martial art, say, has value even
if you never get into a serious hand-to-hand fight outside of the
dojo, practicing logic -- or science -- is a healthy discipline for
the mind.
Alexey, I think you've missed Wolfram's central point, which is
that arbitrary systems with very simple rules very readily mimic
core aspects of nature even when the systems haven't been
designed to mimic nature. Of course Wolfram's models aren't
models of specific mathematical processes -- but neither are
the various branches of pure mathematics, and yet those
provide the models through which physical scientists pick and
choose to find analogues to natural processes.
Richard, it's subtler than that. Take an absurdly simple set of
rules for turning squares black or white in a grid, set it up
under the right conditions, and processes analogous to growth,
evolution, crystallization, etc. emerge spontaneously from the
interactions of the whole system. Nothing flows into it -- the
system itself, despite its apparently mindless simplicity,
becomes a generator of astonishing complexity.
Christian, yes, I read it a couple of years after it first came
out. I have to say I wasn't impressed -- it seemed simplistic to
me.
Raven, "a telos for Talos" wins you today's gold star. Good!
Phil, bingo. There are times when I'd like to translate reductio
ad absurdum as "reductionism always ends in absurdity."
Yupped, exactly. Science has become a prisoner of its own
relative success, and more to the point, of the personal
advantage of its practitioners. That's common enough in human
institutions, of course, just as it's common for such institutions
to keep on proclaiming their own infallibility in the face of a
growing body of evidence to the contrary.
Unknown, fair enough -- I'll always accept a grammatical
correction.
M, I see that sort of thing all the time. I've come to think that
the lag time between when an ideology stops working and when
its believers finally notice that it's stopped working is one of
the least recognized and most important factors in history.
12/19/13, 11:03 AM
zmejuka-alexey said...
John Michael, you are partly right that I miss Wolfram's central
point. I don't think that cellular automats can mimic core
aspects of nature from PRACTICAL point of view.
I'll try to clarify. If I take physical theory of optics, melt some
sand and apply some brain work and hand polishing I can
construct a telescope or glasses. Telescope is hugely helpful for
the military, glasses for the eldery. Notice that without the

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theory of optics I am unable by trial and error construct such
complicated objects, though the technology is bronze age
maximum.
For me this is the core value of science: ability to make very
useful things, that cannot be done without deep theoretical
understanding of nature.
May be I lack imagination, but I don't see how the output of
cellular automats theory can be applied to construct anything
usefull. Going to absurdity: How one can construct glasses using
cellular automats?
As for other aspects, I agree with you. Behavior of cellular
automats can resemble that of nature, but it is not of any
practical importance.
Thank you for the answer, analyzing it, I found that my attitude
toward science changed to more engineering approach.
Best regards
Alexey
12/19/13, 11:57 AM
JP said...
Wolfram simply noticed that life has a fractal aspect, I think.
Life deployed in time, that is.
You see this in gardens all the time. Fractal patterns interfering
with each other over time. You just pull out the fractal patterns
you don't want there.
JMG notes:
"The alternative is to observe whole systems on their own
terms—to study what they do, not in response to a controlled
experimental stimulus, but in response to the normal interplay
between their internal dynamics and the environment around
them. That’s what Wolfram did. He ran cellular automata, not
to try to make them do this thing or that, but to understand the
internal logic that determines what they do when left to
themselves."
And this is precisely what the cellular automata of the "reach
toward infinite space" did when applied to humanity and
millions of years of stored sunlight.
It created the civilization of the West.
In any event, I'm more interested in the issue of mirror
symmetry because I haven't really figured that one out yet.
I think it's just as important as Wolfram's cellular automata.
12/19/13, 12:10 PM
thrig said...

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Engineered systems may also evolve curious complications—for
example, the Internet now mostly consists of little-endian
devices talking to one another via mostly big-endian network
protocols. In other words, something like:
Imagine a vast number of villages, with paths between them,
these paths being used by runners to exchange messages. The
villagers all speak the same language--English, Klingon,
whatever, the language is not important. What is important is
that for any message exchanged between the villages, it must
be written down, and must be written down with the letters of
the words reversed: "good day" is written "doog yad", and then
a runner delivers that message to the next village. Therein, the
translator Olef Byteswapson reads the message, "doog yad",
and announces to his village that the other village has said
"good day". They all agree that this is so, and send back the
reply--"dna doog yad ot uoy sa llew"--and then a runner carries
this reply to the original village. Therein, the counterpart to
Olef, another byte swapper, reads the message, and announces
to her village the reply thus previously stated. And so it goes.
How did this state of affairs come to be? Well, back in the day,
"doog yad" was the actual language, as spoken between the few
big castles and towers of the land. There were also some little
villages, but they did not speak with anyone, at least not yet,
and they spoke using the "good day" form. Now eventually the
towers and castles went away, or anyways became much less
important, while the little villages multiplied, and yet the same
tradition of speaking in the manner of the big castles and
towers carried on, at least when exchanging messages between
places.
12/19/13, 12:46 PM
Curiosity is one valid reason for continuing to do science. I
have no problem with that. In that sense, doing science can be
viewed as something like art, or at least recreation.
That also places science back in the realm of wonder, since the
use of the scientific method isn't intended to yield anything but
beautiful (human) abstractions based on nature. Like forms in
poetry, there are rules, and your abstractions have to follow the
rules, or they stray from "science" into "fantasy." But both
science and fantasy are then on a more-or-less equal footing,
following different rules. We can argue whether the sonnet (one
set of rules) is better than the heroic ballad (a different set of
rules), but it's an aesthetic argument.
It raises the question of how much human resource we're going
to devote to this. Perhaps quite a lot. In post-Renaissance
Europe, a great deal of human resource was devoted to the
arts: sculpture, painting, music, poetry. Most civilizations have
been very fond of entirely impractical (but imposing and
beautiful) architecture. Science can certainly fit as art. It's
certainly beautiful to the educated mind.
12/19/13, 12:55 PM


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sgage said...
@ Karl,
Thank you very much for posting the links to those Goldsmith
articles - very interesting thoughts! And lots of good
references. Lots of food for thought for this ecologist...

12/19/13, 1:35 PM
Just Because, that is, it's a workable tool for exercising control
in limited contexts, but it's not an effective tool for
understanding whole systems. I can see that.
Marc, well, I'd like to think you're right about Kurzweil's outfit,
but I tend to think that an organization founded to pursue a
religious fantasy decked out in SF drag is unlikely to accomplish
much.
Sgage, excellent! "Middlebrow megachurch infotainment" is a
brilliant coinage; clearly I have to catch up with this guy's
writings.
Adam, exactly. Who cares that Freudian methods all but
eliminated hysteria, which was once an extremely common and
damaging mental illness -- we can't quantify it, so it must not
work!
Chris, the thing that has to happen is that enough people need
to start challenging the myth of progress in public. I'm trying to
contribute to that, but it takes many voices.
Will, engineering has a long and lively history ahead of it -- as
long as there are practical problems to be solved, there'll be a
need for engineering techniques. I'd point out, though, that
Roman and Chinese engineers (among many others)
accomplished impressive technical feats without any sense that
they were in the business of conquering nature; doubtless the
engineers of future ecotechnic societies, as they tighten the
screws on renewable-energy technologies we can't even imagine
yet, will be equally free of the delusion that nature exists so
humanity can tell it what to do.
Ed, and that's exactly why -- or one of the reasons why -- I'm so
concerned about making sure that science survives as a living
tradition. If people still know how to ask nature questions and
get replicable answers, it's less likely that the achievements of
the present age will turn into the fairy tales of the far future.
Karl, excellent! Many thanks for the links.
Kyoto, and a happy solstice to you, too! To my mind, the
problem with the current climate debate is precisely that
nobody's interested in asking what actually happens -- a subject
about which paleoclimatology has a lot to say -- because the
answers to that question advance nobody's agenda.
David, yes, that's fair enough -- it makes sense of things to me

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that other forms of thinking don't. I suspect the reason I find
Wolfram's work fascinating is that his cellular automata are
morphologically equivalent to a great many other things in
nature, and can be understood in similar ways.
Robo, Wolfram got there well ahead of you. Fractal selfsimilarity is one of the things that cellular automata readily
produce; they also produce chaotic phenomena, and most
interesting of all, they produce complex systems that combine
chaotic behavior and order in ways remarkably reminiscent of
phenomena in nature.
Librarian, a fascinating point!
12/19/13, 1:43 PM
@41fa - I wasn't intending to ridicule science.
My point was that it doesn't generate a coherent, consistent
picture over time. If I were to phrase it mathematically, I would
say that science does not demonstrate globally convergent
behavior. It is, at best, locally convergent within a particular
historical and social milieu.
Thomas Kuhn explored this in considerable length in his
Structure of Scientific Revolutions and various other essays,
and it was most pithily stated by Max Planck's quip that "science
progresses one funeral at a time."
I perfectly understand that the scientific picture is incomplete,
and always will be, and that's fine. But it is a matter of faith -specifically, faith in progress -- that science is leading in any
particular direction, such as "toward a deeper and truer
understanding" of the universe. I brought up the profound
difference between 19th century cosmology and 21st century
cosmology as one illustration of this.
You say you believe that we know more now than we did in the
past, but I would respond (as in the old Lone Ranger joke),
"Who 'we', white man?"
I suspect that *I* know a bit more about celestial mechanics
than your average iron-age Druid. I'm pretty sure he knew a lot
more about pretty much everything else relevant to his world,
tied together as a more-or-less coherent whole in something
not unlike the Renaissance ideal of mastery of all knowledge.
All I can say about most subjects is, "Well, I'm sure someone
knows the answer to that." We may have a larger volume of
"knowledge," but is it really knowledge if it isn't known by
anyone? Or if it is so fragmented that nothing fits with anything
else? I would argue that this represent less knowledge, not
more.
12/19/13, 1:43 PM
Justin Wade said...
Alexey,

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You should check out evolutionary algorithms and their
applications to engineering problems.
Also, see the work of Reginald Cahill in physics, in some of his
research he used a neural network to model/predict an
iterative, recursive function that intentionally has noise at each
iteration/generation of the function. The neural network
'learned' how to predict this function by modelling space and
time, that is a dimensional search space to predict the noise
and its range and a linear time to track the sequence of
generations.
Sometimes it may not seem to be so, but it is. Science and
logic don't always play nice.
12/19/13, 1:50 PM
jt said...
I think many things in this post are conceptually seriously
wrong. For example:
"Thus mathematical equations provide one set of models that
can be used to fit our minds around some of the ways the
universe behaves. Wolfram’s discovery is that another set of
models can be derived from very simple rule-based processes of
the kind that make cellular automata work. This additional set
of models makes sense of features of the universe that
mathematical models don’t handle well"
But Wolfram's models are also mathematical. There is no
conceptual difference between "mathematical equations" and
"Wolfram's models".
Wolfram didn't invent cellular automata. They were made
famous by Conway's game of life in 1970.
"It requires an unfashionable degree of intellectual modesty to
accept that the map is not the territory, that the scientific
model is merely a representation of some aspects of the reality
it tries to describe. "
I think all people who do research in natural sciences know and
simply take it for granted that the "model" and "reality"
(whatever the definitions of these words) are different things.
For example Wigner's article "unreasonable effectiveness of
mathematics in natural sciences" is very well known.
Finally it can be argued that scietific revolution happened
already 2000 years ago. It was just "forgotten" (or destroyed),
see Lucio Russo: The forgotten revolution.
12/19/13, 1:58 PM
@JMG -- There's another good use for science: part of a healthy
lifestyle, like getting enough fiber. :-)
I'm not sure I'll buy that. I've not noticed that scientists are
particularly happier or better-balanced than other people. They

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get depressed, divorced, drunk, and suicidal right along with
everyone else. As the institutions of science crumble and they
start losing their livelihoods, I'm not at all sure that science will
do for them what philosophy did for Boethius.
Of course, the scientific method is extremely useful for solving
certain kinds of problems. But what kinds? Primarily, practical
problems in the natural world.
That takes us back to the faith that science begets technology
begets comfort. But I think the causality is reversed.
A practical problem inspires us to seek solutions that resolve
the problem and bring comfort. One class of solutions contains
technological solutions. Seeking a technological solution to a
practical problem then inspires use of the scientific method to
help create the technology.
This is, however, something that humans have always done. I
have a hard time believing that Archimedes didn't use some
form of the scientific method when he was building devices for
his hometown of Syracuse. The Egyptians would have used this
kind of science to build pyramids. The proto-Celts would have
used this kind of science to erect megaliths.
This is fundamentally different from the desacralizing,
conquest-oriented science of Francis Bacon, which is the thing
we do that wasn't done by the Romans, et. al.
For this latter kind of science, we now have art, and fiber. And
conquering nature. Is there anything else?
12/19/13, 2:38 PM
Enrique said...
John Michael,
One of the thoughts that came back to me as I was reading this
essay was the vague sense of unease that I felt in many of my
social sciences classes at university. It seemed to me even back
then that there was a serious disconnect between the
theoretical models that were being taught by many of my
professors and the way things actually work in real life.
I have also long believed that one of the reasons why politics
are so dysfunctional both in the USA and the EU is because so
much of political and bureaucratic decision making is based on
what I call “ideological thinking”, that is to say thinking based
on theoretical and abstract models of how things should work
which are based in turn on a particular set of ingrained
ideological biases rather than on how the world actually works.
A good example of this in action has been the disastrous
consequences of trying to put neo-liberal economic policies and
neo-conservative foreign policies into action. Far too many
politicians, bureaucrats and judges seem to live in an ivory
tower, and have no idea how things work in the real world
outside the bubble they live in and don’t have to deal with the
real world consequences of their decisions. This is one of the
major reasons why Obamacare turned out to be such a fiasco.

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The other is all the corrupt bargains that Obama, Pelosi, etc
had to make to get that particular monstrosity passed.
As for your and Andy’s exchange about the so-called healthcare
system, that is why Charles Hugh Smith insists on calling it the
sick-care system, and I think he entirely correct.
12/19/13, 3:32 PM
Enrique said...
Alexey,
The biggest problem with automatic weapons and modern
firearms in the Long Descent is that you have to be able to
produce parts consistently to very high tolerances and levels of
precision. That sort of thing is very difficult to do without the
kind of elaborate infrastructure possible in a fossil fueled
industrial economy. Still, given the importance of weaponry and
military defense, especially given the rising tide of violence and
disorder that the breakdown of the modern world will produce, I
would imagine this will be a very high priority for national
governments, warlords and the like.
I don’t expect firearms to go away entirely, but it’s a good
question what the highest feasible level of firearms technology
will be in an ecotechnic society. Will it be automatic weapons,
bolt-action rifles, rifled muskets or flintlocks? Societies that
retain or can re-discover the ability to make assault rifles and
machine guns could have a decisive military advantage over
those that can only make bolt-action rifles, muskets or
crossbows. Incidentally, Russia could have a major head start in
this category since its modern firearms like the AK series
assault rifles and PK series machine guns are simple, rugged
and very reliable. That’s one thing I have long respected about
Russian weapons designers. They develop weapons that are
competitive on the world arms market and effective on the
battlefield, but are designed to be simple, cheap and easy to
maintain and operate. This is true whether we are talking about
the T-34 tank, the AK-47 rifle or Sukhoi fighter jets.
I recall we had an extended discussion thread on this very
subject a while back on the Archdruid Report, but can’t
remember which essays. Leo also has some good discussions on
this subject on his blog A Melburnians Response to Overshoot,
which I highly recommend.
http://amelburniansresponsetoovershoot.blogspot.com/
12/19/13, 3:36 PM
Darren Urquhart said...
(off topic)
Meanwhile, in Australia a black swan event is unfolding.
http://youtu.be/YCat9UXhZpU?t=11s
12/19/13, 3:50 PM
Hi JMG,

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Thanks. The other baffling yet obvious question that is
overlooked is: "Is X of higher quality than Y?". If I was really
being cheeky, I'd also suggest that this question can be
rephrased as: "Is it in our collective interests that X be done?"
Science seems incapable of addressing (or perhaps unwilling to
address) these issues and it appears to me that society as an
entirety also overlooks them.
An example of the above quandary (well a quandary for me
anyway) is comparison of industrially produced food versus
organically produced. Obviously they are substitute products,
but issues such as quality seem to be largely ignored even at
the expense of people’s health.
This is on my mind because I'm picking sun ripened
strawberries most days now. Yum! Most purchased strawberries
are usually picked green and then gas ripened so that they can
travel distances. This means that they usually have little to no
flavour (little to no sugars), despite the fact that they look like
strawberries.
Most techno geeks (and I'm a self-confessed plant, soil and
water geek!) would rather see investment in Internet
technology than see high quality food available more widely.
Regards
Chris
12/19/13, 4:00 PM
Hi JMG,
As an interesting aside. I just happened yesterday to pass by a
poster for a conference in 2014:
Marxism conference in Melbourne 2014
Tried, failed, yet the idea keeps coming back - just like a
zombie and to about the same effect.
You're good. The poster gave me a weird goose bump feeling of
recognition. It is quite sad that we can't seem to learn from
history.
Respect.
Chris
12/19/13, 4:16 PM
Hi Joseph,
Ugg the caveman and nematodes! hehe!


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Well done.
Chris
12/19/13, 4:25 PM
Hi JMG,
One last thought for today. The heat has kept me inside the
house.
Quote: "understand the internal logic that determines what they
do when left to themselves."
Yeah, this is exactly the process that I follow here when trying
to provide optimal conditions for the living systems (chooks,
bees, fruit trees, vegetables, herbs and wildlife). Following this
methodology is easier and less work really than tinkering with
the systems all of the time. It is just slower and requires more
resources.
The bees are a really good example. I've set them up and just
observe what they do and try to get a feel for their cycles - if
left to their own devices in optimal conditions (they're pretty
happy at the moment with all of the flowers here).
Most of the advice and books for bees is geared towards
maximum / efficient production. Very little advice and practice
is geared towards resiliency of the colony. It is little wonder
that colony collapse disorder is so widespread. Such a moniker
is really another name for: water stress, food stress, predators,
disease, environmental stress and finally my favourite relocation stress. It is hardly any wonder why bees have such a
hard time of it across the planet!
Regards
Chris
12/19/13, 5:44 PM
dragonfly said...
So, I've had some actual hands-on experience with cellular
automata. Fascinating stuff.
Some years ago, I embarked on an interactive art project, a
major component of which was the simulation of waves moving
on the surface of a body of water.
It turns out that cellular automata is rather well-suited to this
end. The math is simple, and requires no calculus, to my
continuing amazement. Further, the simulation exhibited
realistic refraction and reflection of waves, which confounded
me for the longest time, given that the underlying model knows
*nothing* of such phenomena. I didn't program it to do that !
Two things that really stuck with me from that project are how
very simple rules can give rise to amazingly complex, beautiful,

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