Morphological Flows and Sustainable Growth/Introduction
Morphological Flows and Sustainable Growth
Introduction
We are brought up as object oriented thinkers, typically emphasizing objects deemed important in the short time-span of one's life. Go to school, go to church, get a job, make money, buy a house, get married, have kids, grandkids. These are all objects, objectives, goals, static states formed by social consensus. In school you study subjects, but what does math have to do with English composition, what does basketball have to do with chemistry, home economics with astronomy, social studies with physics? All appear to be a series of random subjects somehow cobbled together by some anonymous school board. Yet another forged rendition of social consensus setting up a stage where you and whole bunch of other people that you may or may not know play assigned roles that may or may not have anything to do with one another. There is no big picture rendered in any shape or form, no essential truth that binds the pieces. You are but an object following objectives set forth by social consensus. Then if you are lucky you'll go to college. And instead of getting the big picture, you are forced to go the other way, specialize in yet smaller subsets of reality. And as you go on you would be further and further specialized as prescribed by the leaders of your specialty, and as promised you'll get a top job in your field. You may become an expert on history of 16th century Italian art, or an expert on gamma radiation signature of Quasars, or an expert in constitutional law and reproductive ethics, or oil shale geology, or bio-molecular chemistry, computer generated animation, rabbinical studies, thyroid oncology, film and stage set design, childhood education.
Do you get the picture? Where is the big picture? Wasn't philosophy supposed to render the big picture? Isn't philosophy supposed to be the love of truth? Well, philosophy seems to be equally specialized, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, art, economics, governance? Thousand different truths, all unrelated? Do you get the picture? There is no big picture!
Well all of that is about to change. We are going to render the big picture, an Evolutionary Philosophy. We are going to map where we came from, in factual, corroborated detail. We are going to map how energy coalesces to create shape in a continuum of hierarchical complexity called Morphological Flows. Starting at the beginning of everything, we are going to see elementary particles in the cosmos bind to form atoms, how atoms bind to form molecules, how organic molecules on earth bind to create bio-molecular constituents of cells. That we call material morphogenesis. Then we'll follow biological evolution and map the tree of life. We are going to follow the branches of the tree from cells to reptiles to mammals until it reaches us. That we call biotic morphogenesis. Then we'll follow our evolution, how we have evolved to form the societies and cultures that you see around us, yes we will map our evolutionary history. That we call social morphogenesis. Together, material morphogenesis, biotic morphogenesis and our social morphogenesis will render the big picture. We will see how morphological flows create existence, of every thing in our space-time bubble, including us, in a continuum.
All of that is academically interesting, woopdidoo. You may even get college credit for it, make mom proud. But for us, the morphological flow model is but a tool to tackle the next section of this e-book: Sustainable Growth. You see in the past hundred years we have endured two world wars, a cold war, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear weapons). Now we are dealing with religious philosophies of Islam and Christianity that can't wait for Armageddon, and are arranging things to get it. If we look at the history of civilization: the Mesopotamians, Persians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Caliphates, Ottomans, Colonialists, they all crumbled just to rebuild back again, or not at all. Not a single one was sustainable, not a one, in the history of civilization. Now we are dealing with proliferation of weapons of extinction, global climate change, mass extinction of species, so the existential question becomes, can we survive? Is there a sane manner with which we can achieve sustainable growth?
To answer that question we need one hell of an analytical tool. A tool that can look at big patterns, a tool that can penetrate human behavior, a tool that can analyze existential flows in grand scales. The Morphological Flow Model provides just that.
Let me give you a quick example: being sexual with your spouse, being happy that your basketball team won, and finishing your project on time have everything to do with one another; they are psychological behavioral aspects that you exhibit in accordance with the physiological makeup of your brain. It is called evolutionary psychology and you'll learn about that in chapter 8 (really, you'll learn where these circuits are located in your noggin). There you'll find out why people buy giant cars and why politicians kiss babies, the subconscious tricks that ad agencies use to sell you crap and politicians use to get your vote. You'll learn about the stuff that people do without even knowing that they were doing it, or that these behaviors are even related, let alone explained.
Here's another dandy, did you now that religion predates civilization, that religion as early as 30000 years ago tried to explain the place of man in the universe, bore governance, was and is a glue in social cohesion. Did you know that religion is uniquely adept at constituting moral, ethical and legal frameworks for social conduct. And did you know that religion routinely tauts itself at being universal and able to render divinity, and routinely sucks at both. You'll learn all about that in chapter 9.
Or, what we touched upon earlier, what does religion have to do with science, plant growth with differential equations, cooking with astronomy, law with genetics? By the time you are a flow oriented thinker the answers will be obvious, these are aspects of us trying to understand us. The big picture is the morphological flows and we see it (all be it dimly) and are a part of it and try to survive in it and in doing so we cook and learn about the stars and planets, grow plants and do calculations, and build and sell, and conquer and vanquish; and prey, especially when all else fails prey.
Morphological Flows provide an incredible analytical model because they are real. The Flow model lets you deconstruct any morphology into its constituent makeup. It allows you to extrapolate the future of any morphology based on evolutionary patterns. This is precisely the tool that we need in trying to answer the question: is there such a thing as sustainable growth, or are we to crumble just like every civilization that preceded us.
There are answers. Read on.
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PS. 1- This e-book is not necessarily linear. If hard science puts you to sleep, no one will sue you in the world court for skipping to the human interest chapters, e.g. chapter 8. Having said that, there is a lot to be gained by knowing that you and I and everything else has had the same genesis point, in fact our entire space-time bubble is a subset of the genesis point. And no, God is not a bearded white dude with his picture in the Sistine Chapel.
2- This is an e-course as well. You can take tests online and get credit. It is in the accreditation process (these things take time, a lot of time as it turns out). I'll have the process described in the e-course section as soon as it is fleshed out.