This blog is where I have chosen to publish a theory I have been working on for several years. I call it Boundary Theory and it describes how life, the behaviour of living things and complex systems arise from the fundamental energy flows of the natural world.
Having spent a lot of time thinking about our society and its problems I have ultimately found myself returning to issues of energy. Somewhere along the line I gleaned the idea that our Earth and all of its phenomena can be best understood through the lens of energy flows. Since then I have begun to feel that our sciences are severely fragmented and haphazard and will remain so until they accept what should be obvious – all life and matter – and hence the behaviour of all complex systems – are the products of the dynamics of energy flows through space-time.
I have come to see the Earth as a zone (protected by a boundary) which fundamentally represents an energetic status quo – as astronomers have sometimes phrased it – the Earth is neither to hot nor too cold but is – like baby bear’s porridge – just right. From this perspective I have concluded that the fundamental causes of all social, behavioural and environmental problems lie in the discordance created by a society that uses and pollutes very high energies in a terrestrial system that is fundamentally a low energy system. In other words – our problems stem from the fact that modern society is a high energy regime because it gathers, concentrates and emits energy at levels well above the natural threshold of terrestrial and biological systems (which are low energy systems).
What intrigues me most about the ideas I have developed are the implications for reinterpreting a great deal about our own species – homo sapiens. I find that our behaviour is attributable to the fact that our brains are the most energy hungry biological tissue in the known universe. I have noted that simple and complex human behaviour makes much more sense when viewed from the lens of energy conservation as well as the associated phenomena of energy flows – patterning. I will explain this at length in the following posts and pages. For now I want to end this introduction with a couple of observations and and a couple of intriguing questions.
Two observations that have guided the development of my thoughts are these:
Whilst teaching a class of intermediate students one day I was struggling to maintain a calm environment – the students where chatty, joking, fidgeting, laughing and generally physically agitated. I noticed that the temperature of the room was quite high and moved to open all the high windows upon which the temperature dropped quite significantly to slightly cooler than comfortable because of a cold draft. Immediately following this temperature shift the whole class became quiet and physically very calm – this effect was overwhelmingly obvious. Strangely the subject of the lesson was atomic structure so I immediately noticed the similarity between the student’s physical behaviour and the response of atoms and molecules to heat and cold. As molecules and atoms cool they become sluggish and so are able to clump together thus becoming stiller – the students showed me exactly the same behaviour that atoms and molecules would display in response to cooling.
The second observation is of how a behaviour common to humans and all animals exactly mirrors that of flows of energy in water, air and other mediums. Have you ever seen a lovely garden or park in which, despite the presence of proper tiled or cobbled pathways around it’s perimeter, there are worn trails in the grass following the shortest routes between exit and entrance ways? It appears that any prescribed path which can be easily circumvented will be in favour of the shortest routes. This phenomena is easy to recognize in the movement of water and air which will simply take the most direct route towards their goal. We know water can not be asked to follow a course because it is inanimate however our society is permeated with ideas and expectations that humans will take more energy expensive pathways than simply the easiest ones. We then have to create systems of knowledge and management practices to explain and address the many forms of shortcut taking that arises as a consequence. As a discipline education has long been informed by the idea that education is a kind of moral challenge by which the inferior were sorted from the ones who could suffer the trials of learning most valiantly. However it turns out that the human brain’s phenomenal capacity for learning can be most fully realized through fun, ease and excitement whilst being severely limited by processes that require great expense of energy. I will go on to detail how I believe human behaviour is truly governed by energy conservation principles later in these posts. I think that such insights could go a long way to creating much more human friendly and safe cities and communities and could inform a reinterpretation of human psychology and psychological illness.
Here then are my two questions:
1.) Can human spiritualitys and religions be reinterpreted as the knowledge of the subtle energy flows that give rise to life and the means to cultivate these flows rather than destabilize them? I think so and will explain why in this blog. If this is the case another question then arises – what really is energy? Does it or could it have a spiritual or even a conscious component – do the seeds of consciousness lie in energy flows? From a pragmatic perspective where else did consciousness come from?
2.) Given the size of the human brain could any human history other than the one that has led to the current global state of affairs have been possible? I think the answer is no but this leads me to the real enigma. Jame’s Lovelock’s Gaia Theory posits a global terrestrial system in which species and climate interact to maintain and regulate an optimum environment for life. Lovelock calls the union of life and climate Gaia and shows that it seems to demonstrate some type of regulative and responsive intelligence. However Lovelock himself sees humans as the spanner in the works – the great conscious wreckers of an otherwise perfectly subconsciously regulated system. The problem with this for me is that the Earth produced us as well yet if it did what does this mean?
From an energetic perspective any species with a brain as large and hungry as ours (it uses fully 1/3 of the energy we consume) could not have followed any trajectory but the one we have followed through history. Although it seems like a long time 100,000 years is next to no time as far as species are concerned so it is quite correct to say that we literally arrived and started burning things – modern humans dug to oil within a geological nanosecond of our arrival on the planet. Our brain size made this inevitable which is also the reason it is unlikely any extraterrestrial species as intelligent as us survived for very long on their home planet. The most likely scenario for intelligent extra terrestrials is that their descendants are now living in the ruins of an energy crashed society that has burnt all its easy resources and is now trading defunct cellphones as ancestral heirlooms. A read of Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse” shows that the apparent differences between human culture are only an illusion created by the different historical moments that all cultures ascended the high energy consumption pathway to create what we call civilisations. Once the resources – trees – where burnt off and exhausted all human civilisations met the same fate – collapse. Modern society just happens to have found the mother load of energy resources – oil so our tangent is higher and further. We also have further to fall. The thing is I can’t see the Gaia system making such a massive mistake as this and that thought led me to a possibility that deeply intrigues me.
Humans arose from the evolution of mammals. Mammals came to dominance because they thrived in cooler conditions than the reptiles could. The planet was cooling and had been for the last billion or so years of its 4 billion life span. Although I have to confirm this I believe the planet was cooling to the extent that it had entered severe glacial periods because for the last 3 billion years plant and animal life had been sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. Can you see where I am going here? It’s kind of shocking yet it makes simple sense. After 3 billion years the plant and animal life that had been utterly rampant and had spread from pole to pole had reduced the CO2 content of our atmosphere from over 1500 ppm to less than 300ppm (parts per million) and because of this the Earth trended towards becoming a giant snowball. However the very conditions of cold created by the great de-carbonization gave rise to a life form that thrives in cold – mammals – the earth’s cold survival crew and that species produces the biggest brained species ever in the natural kingdom (I am refering to brain/body ratio here for which humans hold the record seconded by shrews). this big brained species then does something in complete accordance with Lovelock’s Gaia theory. Within the evolutionary blink of an eye it digs straight to all the buried carbon and begins returning it to the atmosphere.
For me this was at first a breathtaking and shocking idea but it now has completely reshaped the way I interpret human behaviour. The earth deliberately produced us with huge energy addicted brains because, in the proximity of all that oil, it somehow knew we would find it and burn it. The earth produced humans to re-carbonize the atmosphere knowing quite well the havoc we would reek upon the way. My second question then is simply – could this be true? Everything I now know about human history and see in our species’ behaviour leads me to believe this is the case.
I hope you will read my following posts and pages to see what I am saying, make your own mind up and challenge me or share your comments and thoughts along the way.
Regards,
Adrian Tyler
Auckland, New Zealand.
July 17th, 2011