Wheel of knowledge (WoL&K)
SURCE: Cosmos & History
MODELS LEARNING CHANGE:
CONNECTING THEORETICAL MODELS TO THE NATURAL WORLD OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS
Philip F. Henshaw
Abstract:
We live in a complex world, made more complex for us by the difficulty of distinguishing between our cultural expectations for how things work and the physical systems we interact with. The environmental systems of nature and the economy are often hard to recognize and constantly change, having behaviors independent of what people think about them. So our rules for systems we come to trust can become highly misleading without notice. That seems to have happened to us, evident in how people still project models of economic growth into the future, and already missing the turning point of timely response to erupting strains, fairly clearly around a century ago. That makes it valuable to know how the laws of physics provide some simple boundary conditions for responding to change in environmental systems, and knowing when you should. Learning to identify natural systems change and how to respond starts with learning to distinguish between physical systems, as one of our independent realities, and our worlds of information and belief as another. Once you can distinguish our information from its physical subjects you can compare the difference, and plan for change. Telling them apart can be a challenge, however, requiring attention to their distinctly different kinds of energy use, organization and natural limits. Environmental systems often change with their actively learning parts too, for another reason watching them change is more important than having theories of how they worked in the past.
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A useful way to find and track change in physical systems is found in how the conservation laws require energy flow and energy transfer processes to begin and end. They need a continuity that can be identified in recorded measures, made useful by raising key questions about irreversible changes precipitated by regular changes in scale. It builds a new bridge of methodology between theoretical and physical systems, introducing a new kind of empirical research.
Keywords: Scientific method, mathematical modeling, physical systems, models, learning,
developmental processes, change, foresight
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Internally a throughput system needs positive net energy, and always have more ‘energy producing’ than ‘energy consuming’ processes. At the environmental boundary a system needs to satisfy the basic laws of energy conservation and entropy, but also the law of development. Some of the energy crossing the boundary needs to be used to build the process moving the energy across the boundary, not shortcuts. You know the budget needs these components and that the energy flows need to have continuity as a matter of principle, before knowing how any part of things works (Equation 1). It serves as a starting set of questions treating any event as a map for carefully examining the necessary working parts of the working processes it is part of.
=> Ein = Edevl + Eoper + Eloss and Edevl > Eoper (1)
Complex systems develop as individual things, emerging from their individual environment as their ‘factory’, and not as duplicates of a class of things. Sometimes it matters more than others, but if the exercise is to distinguish between the physical system and your ideas of it, it always matters. That makes the universal laws of physics the most completely secure starting point for studying them. What you can still know about the life cycle of any energy using system emerging from its own environment, built from scratch, is that it has a life cycle, an energy budget, uses energy from its own processes to build and later dismantle itself, Edevl. How that works is what takes learning to think in new ways. Edevl has several parts,
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Figure 5. A system model as a continuous chain of local processes. Six punctuating smaller scale events and five periods of regular proportional change. Showing one possible naming convention for the natural sequence of developmental processes (Henshaw1985, Salthe 1993)
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http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/index
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