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I gave Tad a comment about 48 hours ago telling him that I think he may have hit upon a useful metaphor. He hasn't printed the comment yet, so maybe he thinks it is too stupid to print or is so blindingly intelligent that he wants to pirate it for his own use...or maybe he is just busy and hasn't checked his blog.
If I could, I would just copy the comment and paste it here. But, instead, I will try to reconstruct it.
First up, the whole issue of thinking in analogies. Some people believe analogies are the ONLY way we can think. Barrett, in her book on Emotions, admits that the stories she will tell are not entirely consistent with all of the facts, but she is going to use them anyway because we have to start somewhere and analogies are the best place we know of to start. Robert Sapolsky, who contributed a blurb to the jacket of Barrett's book, says in his new book describing the best and the worst of human behavior, says he is adopting the old-fashioned 'triune brain' theory which Barrett rejects, even though he admits there are problems with it, because it greatly facilitates his storytelling.
So the straw in the soda can story was not entirely wrong, but it wasn't right enough to be very useful to us today. The thermodynamics story from physics is right enough to be useful to us today, but may not be the whole story. At George Mobus' blog, I posted this question almost 3 months ago:
'George
If your professional role permits it, I would appreciate your reaction to Nora Bateson's proposal to separate engineering complex systems from biological complex systems.
https://norabateson.wordpress.com/2015/ ... -progress/Thanks....Don Stewart'
George said he is real busy in his new job at Springer, but would get back to me. He said he met Nora at a meeting in Europe. Maybe I will hear from George, and maybe not. At any rate, the question of whether mechanical analogies apply to biological systems is a serious one.
I turned the Nora Bateson question around and asked Tad if biological analogies may not be the best way to understand combinations of biology and physics, such as the economy.
At the heart of being human is the electron cascade. Our mitochondria, which is a captured microbe which has been shorn of most of its DNA and sequestered inside our cells, controls oxidation inside the cell. The electrical forces are acting over angstrom distances, and so are extremely powerful and dangerous. Many people think that dysregulation of the mitochondria, and thus of the electron cascade, is what getting old is all about...free radical damage.
We can make an analogy between the cell and the economy by observing that both involve carbon electrons. We can also make an analogy between the biological role played by the mitochondria and the role played by the economy or culture in human society. We can analogize that just as malfunctioning mitochondria result in death, a malfunctioning economy or culture may result in the collapse of the particular culture...in our case, the industrial economy built on hydrocarbons.
If you look at the things which can go wrong in a human, the list suggests things which can go wrong in an economy or culture. For example, the wear and tear on the cells as trillions of powerful electrons have cascaded through it might be thought of as analogous to John Michael Greer's notion of catabolic collapse. The build-up of pollution might be thought of as analogous to the lesions which block arteries. The inventiveness and innovation of humans might be thought of as analogous to the Default Network which (subconsciously) considers and selects from a wide variety of possibilities.
Let me digress a little on the Default Network. A few years ago I heard a health psychologist speak despairingly of the Default Network. It was just evidence that the mind was confused and unfocused. But in the last decade or so we have come to realize the central importance of the Default Network...the constant bubbling up of possibilities. As a footnote, the Rumination Cycle, where we continually ruminate about some slight we received or some piece of bad luck is still seen as a really destructive thing, but we now separate it from the Default. The word Default would likely never have been used if the people making the discoveries had understood its importance.
So where does that leave us? We are still not sure what to do with complex systems. Some people (Dmitry Orlov, for example) say flatly that humans cannot control complex systems and so just accept that they are going to turn out however they turn out and you as an individual will just have to deal with it. Other people like Nora Bateson thinks humans, individually and as a group, do have influence on complex systems. On good days I side with Nora, on bad days with Dmitry.
If we are able to imagine a complex system involving both the physics of producing work using hydrocarbons in a complex economy and culture which are behaving in response to many forces not very well described by physics, then can we make useful predictions about it? If we compare the efficiency of the electron cascade inside a cell with the efficiency of turning crude oil in the ground into movement across the landscape in a car or truck, it is like day and night. The cell is very efficient, while the human organized work is very inefficient. So that is observation #1. But observation #2 is that, since the current way of doing things is so inefficient, there is a lot of opportunity for improvement. Observation #3 is that the most sophisticated energy system we know, the cell, is still absolutely dependent on physics. Mitochondria do not 'make' energy'.
While we are waiting for some Isaac Newton or the founders of Quantum Physics to put all this into some Theory of Everything, my conclusion is that the ETP model is the best insight we have. It is certainly not perfect. But it does look at both the physics of hydrocarbon production as well as the economic production enabled by the hydrocarbon products.
A few days ago I posted some charts showing the makeup of several samples of conventional oil and also of light-tight oil. My conclusion from looking at the charts was that the light-tight oils were not producing the same percentage of useful transportation fuels as the conventional fields. Nobody challenged my conclusion. If my conclusion is correct, then Tad Patzek is also correct that, per barrel processed, we are experiencing an erosion of ability to do work. Which may be an important factor in explaining the explosion of debt around the world. Which debt may come back to haunt us in the form of another round of financial collapse.
While you like to claim that a barrel is a barrel, it is easy to mix up gallons of diesel or gasoline produced with the question of how many gallons of input had to be processed to get the output. Physics limitations arise mostly because of the processing, much as overburden in a surface mining operation is a serious limitation.
Don Stewart