- “What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster, the orchid to the primrose, both of them to me, and me to you?” - Gregory Bateson
- "A new type of thinking is essential if we are to survive and move toward higher levels." - Albert Einstein
- "Schelling’s insight was that emergence involves new limits (constraints)." - Arran Gare, “The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization” (131)
- "First there is the apparent paradox that hierarchical systems both limit freedom and give more freedom at the same time." - Howard Pattee, Hierarchy Theory
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| Coral outcrop on Flynn Reef, Australia |
In this article I want to continue to challenge our assumptions and develop our perspective on the notion of hierarchy by shifting it to one that derives from the study of ecological and complex systems. Why are hierarchical systems important? Because it is through such systems that we are able to integrate (contextualize, interpret, constrain, regulate, harness, organize) the features of our environment, relate them to one another, and impose necessary constraints on a system. This is important because without constraints social and environmental systems quickly senesce and collapse. Through a hierarchical perspective we can easily see why system change is more effective than individual behavioral changes, and we can also see how agency and normativity enter into the world (see Terrence Deacon’s autogen model). Stanley Salthe, the author of "Development and Evolution" suggests that if we want to model nature, we need to understand nested hierarchical systems. Without adequate models to work with, environmental polices will not be as effective as they need to be to address contemporary environmental problems. In this article we will see how the relationships and structures, within our lives and priorities, influence us and the world we live in. Critically, we have the ability, the responsibility, to shape these. Some of the many kinds of hierarchical relationships mentioned in this post will include: structure, organization, scale, specification, synthesis, integration, synergy, ecology, energy, development, evolution, semiosis, and policy. Similar processes can be used to describe them such that once you see the interactions within one, you can often see them mirrored in others as well. I'd like to turn to hierarchy as it relates to systems ecology and policy, taking an integrative view from a higher level so we can see that these (historical)-semiosic (meaningful) processes are generated through constraints and synergies operative at multiple levels, and these in turn have implications for all levels of society.
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| Anchorage's climate action plan |
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| A topo-phylogeny in "Animal Life" |
One thing I find fascinating is the discussion on teleology that writers like Stanley Salthe, John Deely, Robert Rosen, Peter Corning, Arran Gare, Terrence Deacon, and Robert Ulanowicz turn to. "Inevitably," Ulanowicz writes, "the rehabilitation of formal, and especially final, causalities will elicit strong, but misdirected criticism from those who abhor teleology in biology." Nonetheless, final causality may be critical to addressing societal dynamics and our relationship with the environment. The ability of hierarchical systems in ecological relationships to entrain lower levels illustrates a kind of final causality that we need to address in the context of climate change policies. If we understand these dynamics it becomes more clear in which ways our actions, at all scales, either support or undermine other processes within our environment. With that understanding we can be better prepared to chart a course into the future. The incorporation of a living cosmology, where organically developing processes are fundamental, is a radical but necessary departure from our current understanding. Ulanowicz writes that if one wishes to understand living systems "one must abandon the assumptions of closure, determinism, universality, reversibility and atomism and replace them by the ideas of openness, contingency, granularity, historicity and organicism, respectively." There's a lot of potential in that replacement. What if we understood the contingency of economics? Or the organic nature of society? How would this shape policy, public planning, and research priorities?
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| Hierarchies can display fractal qualities |
In “The System of Interpretance, Naturalizing Meaning as Finality”, Salthe writes: “Subsumption connects closely to finality. In a subsumptive hierarchy, lower integrative levels subsume all higher ones, while higher ones simultaneously contextualize (integrate) all the lower ones under their own rules. An organism, city, ecosystem, or storm system are good examples of integrated systems. In particular, the storm, by being embodied at no higher than the physico-chemical levels, is more vaguely embodied than are systems at higher integrative levels like organisms. Macroscopic particularity and precision increase as we ascend to higher integrative levels. ...Thus, we ourselves, materially, are states or configurations of lower level entities – cells, macromolecules, electrons, and so on. But these are not us. We are integrating them under our own organizational rules. In an internalist sense we could be said to be the integrative experience itself, in the process of intending/entraining/attending to that experience.” ...Note that our current situation today in regard to global health, depending as it does on our ability to integrate (contextualize, interpret, constrain, regulate, harness, organize) lower hierarchical levels, is marked by the general breakdown of these very processes.
"We are in the world and the world is in us" (Whitehead, Modes of Thought)
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| Ptolemaic pyramid of embedded semiosis |
“There has been a decay of interest in any form of knowledge other than how to control things and people in order to increase profits. People have come to define and identify themselves almost completely through what they consume. And if people see themselves primarily as consumers, then what they are most interested in is getting more money and getting more for their money. Such an identity is inimical to facing up to the broader problems of society and humanity and the means to do so. ...How can this trend be reversed? By conceiving humans as part of nature and without reducing people to instruments. Freedom, it could be argued, is the condition for people being able to participate in the formation of, and augmenting the life of, humanity and the rest of nature.” I think the point being advanced is not that consumption is the particular issue (as a process per se), rather, it is the near complete identification of humans as 'consumption maximizers'. This, when instead we should be viewing ourselves as members of a greater community of ecological hierarchies.
(Ethics, Philosophy, and the Environment, 2018)
Robert Rosen, in Anticipatory Systems, argued "that an anticipatory behavior is one in which a change of state in the present occurs as a function of some predicted future state". This future state is a final cause, catalyzed through semiotic constraints in hierarchical order. Salthe observed "constraints from the higher level not only help to select the lower level-trajectory but also pull it into its future at the same time. Top-down causality is a form of final causality." So what is the future state, the telos of life, we are being pulled into? It is the adjacent possible, opening up new levels of freedom that have not yet been realized. It is the capacity for greater anticipation and greater capacity to respond to what is anticipated. It is the freedom to live out our stories, and take responsibility for ourselves and our communities. As Rutger Bregman says, "We need to move to a much more hopeful vision of human nature because, otherwise, you can’t do any of these things. You become a cynic and a political change becomes impossible... Right now we’ve designed so many of our institutions — our schools, our prisons, our democracy — around the idea that people are fundamentally selfish. The American republic, is based on the idea that people are selfish. [It’s] the Thomas Hobbes worldview."
Peter Corning points out that this "relates to the traditional distinctions between parts and wholes, individuals and groups, even “self-interest” and the “public interest” in political theory. There has been a growing appreciation of the fact that evolution is a multi-leveled, hierarchical (some prefer Arthur Koestler’s less authoritarian-sounding term “holarchical”) process, where new principles, and emergent new capabilities, arise at each new “level” of organization in nature." In his version of a bioeconomics paradigm a key aspect "is the concept of a multi-leveled hierarchy of causation, from the physical environment to the most inclusive political entities, including several levels of emergent biological and social “wholes” which are at once partially-independent and interdependent, and where complex processes of both “upward” and “downward” causation are continuously at work." Stigmergy, a form of semiosis, can generate and support hierarchy, in fact it is a common way hierarchy is created from the bottom up among social species, while, at the same time, emergent constraints kick in and exert top-down causality. We can intervene in both processes as “holons” (Koestler's term). Whereas Sartre sought petrification, a realization of “holism” is a better telos for life.
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| Land Resource Hierarchy |
Structure is Agency, and structural information theory
Alexander Wendt writes that "Outside biology the idea of cell consciousness has been taken seriously by some eminent philosophers, most notably Whitehead, who conceptualized the individual as a "society" of elementary conscious units, and also Schrödinger, who saw the individual as a "republic of cells" the consciousness of which is not separable from the universe as a whole. So why then is our experience unitary rather than a cacophony of squawking cells? The qualitative answer would be that organisms are hierarchically structured such that it is only a dominant monad which experiences the whole." He explains this through quantum physics, "that monad is a superposition entangled non-locally with all the other cells in the organism, and as such is not separable from them. So when it decoheres into experiences, what it is instantiating is the consciousness of a collective, not that of a single cell. As a social scientist I can't help but take pleasure in the fact that this argument suggests a "pan-social" ontology." (Quantum Mind and Social Science 280) As opposed to Hobbes classical view of the state of nature, where humans are separable machines in conflict with one another, for Wendt (and Paavo Pylkkänen) we are not completely separable, and cooperation is the default starting point. Cooperation is precisely what we should expect. The challenge is to explain deviations from cooperation, or breakdowns and therefore conflict, rather than the other way around. (173) One need not accept the majority of David Bohm's views to see this perspective has similarities to the evolutionary transitions theory of John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry.
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| Hierarchical, fractal, dissipative, holon |
But maybe, instead of distinguishing between structure and agency, these notions really refer to a single process. An agency emerges from the dynamic structure composed of various parts in synergistic relationships, constraining each other toward a common end. Similarly, Gare described how Robert Rosen’s later work "can be seen as dealing with multiple, co-extensive processes operating on much the same scale and so are not simply in hierarchical order, but are components of each other while not being reducible to each other." (Gare 2019) This "dynamical object" (Peirce), or dynamical process of semiosis, sounds similar to the hypothesized quantum dynamics described by Barad and Wendt. It was just this line of thinking that lead Alexander Wendt, in his chapter "The State as an Organism", to suppose that superorganisms composed of numerous individuals also have collective agency. In fact, all social configurations, from family and friends to nation and globe, are agentic to the degree permitted by the complexity of their constituent enabling constraints. Now returning to the context of creating an effective policy (like a CAP for example), the challenge is structuring it such that the constraints it imposes, which emerge from its hierarchical design and its ability to integrate with existing structures, make it an effective agent for creating the desired conditions. In the case of a CAP, the desired conditions, the telos, is the promotion of environmental health.
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| Adaptive Resource Management |
1) Diagram current social and ecosystem dynamics. Pay special attention to identifying the system constraints. These are what will reveal the global structure and integrative levels. They have priority in all considerations and direct our attention when we seek to manage the system.
2) Identify how policy interventions are intended to address system dynamics by responding to ecological constraints, by either adding or removing social constraints, or by increasing system integrity by adding new feedback processes to improve our responsiveness to change.
3) Take stock of what we have that’s working and can be encouraged, where gaps remain to be filled, and where possible alternative methods can be proposed and tried as we move into an increasingly climate and carbon constrained world.
4) Find new relationships and leverage points between ecosystem dynamics and social structures, and whether existing resources can be redirected to more urgent ends.
The first questions we can ask are: In order of preference, what solutions do we want to see? What is preventing action to address these? This is an iterative process. At each step in the process we can do one of three things. We can either take action (legal approach, federal intervention, etc.), take no action and conclude that the constraints involved are in fact insurmountable, or we can look deeper to see if the constraints are decomposeable into two or more separate constraints, then ask if these lower level constraints are resolvable in some way (if not, the process begins again). Because most constraints are decomposeable there almost always exist several possible pathways, but these do tend to become increasingly unlikely "long shot" scenarios. In these cases it is preferable to re-examine the original goal and preferred method of approach.
If we determine a goal is impossible to achieve, as originally formulated, either due to overwhelming constraints, policies that fail to constrain polluters, or activism that isn't sufficient to overcome institutional inertia, then we should take a wider view of the system we seek to change and explore alternative paths that have systemic impacts on global emissions. In other words, where the direct approach to reducing waste emissions via enforcing existing polices fails, an indirect approach may have more success. These can include imposing some form of carbon pricing, supporting other legal avenues (Juliana v. US), reducing demand for oil industry products (by aggressively promoting efficiency and clean energy), and increasing education and outreach to expand the scope of what is politically possible. The systemic approach can be promoted by using "adaptive resource management" as described by McLoughlin and Thoms to help streamline objectives within and across all governance levels and incorporate multiple interlinked adaptive management cycles. In environmental practice, adaptive management is about systematically trying different actions to achieve a desired outcome, using our knowledge to select the best available strategy, laying out the assumptions behind how that strategy will work, then determining if the assumptions hold true and if we need to change interventions to respond to new or different information.
Postscripts
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| Tom Abel's transformity pyramid |
When it comes to the perpetrators of environmental harm, not everyone is equally to blame. Some carry a far greater portion than the rest, and others may carry none at all. So it should come as no surprise that the biggest culprits, the fossil fuel corporations, will try to pass the buck, displacing their responsibility as producers and marketers of unhealthy things and ideas and instead shame overly-indulgent consumers. This is because, if we all share equally in the blame, and if we can be convinced to seek only individual solutions, then they can continue with business as usual, and the structures and organizations within society that have enabled and protected these agents of environmental harm will remain intact thereby preserving them whole. This process is called "responsibilization”, and we need to call it out wherever and whenever it occurs. The IPCC needs to recognize this far better than they currently do, because this is what embedding the social sciences in climate policy really means. It means identifying the hierarchical structures and organizations within society that have enabled and protected the agents of environmental harm. (See also Fig. 2 and 9 from the IPBES report.) As David Victor wrote: "The IPCC has engaged only a narrow slice of social-sciences disciplines... But if the panel engages the fields on their own terms it will find how societies organize, how individuals and groups perceive threats and respond to catastrophic stresses, and how collective action works best." The intersection between climate science and the social sciences can identify the best intervention strategies and policy recommendations, and these are likely to be only too obvious in hindsight. The current policy environment is carefully engineered to allow resource exploitation and wealth inequality. It didn’t appear overnight, but has been decades in the making, and is continually reproduced. Furthermore, it is not simply amorphous, but rather displays the integrated hierarchical nature that is characteristic of all complex structures. This is what has allowed it to endure. The environmental movement would be strengthened if it engaged these dynamics with greater focus and opposed them with a hierarchy based on ecological health, not personal wealth.
Guenther, Genevieve. Who Is the We in “We Are Causing Climate Change? (2019)
Victor, David. Climate change: Embed the social sciences in climate policy (2015)
Kochland
The Kochs used their tremendous influence to shape the structure of public policy and inflate their personal wealth at the expense of the health and prosperity of people and planet. Like ripples in a pond, the changes they made have propagated outward affecting all aspects of society and culture in America. It's an exercise in "what if" counterfactual thinking to imagine how much better things could've gone had they been prevented from distorting public policy toward their own ends. They cast doubt on the institutions of science and weakened any regulation that threatened their profits. In hindsight, where was the best opportunity to intervene and prevent all this? These were all acts of destruction that presaged the physical deterioration of ecosystem health we are witnessing today. Just as life is built upon systems and structures of biological organization, so is society. The organismic parallels are everywhere. Our social structures likewise form a superorganism with an agency of it's own, and this agentic character of society can be constructed to promote the general health and welfare of the entire biotic community, or it can be distorted into a cancerous growth that destroys the organism upon which it depends.
Mayer, Jane. “Kochland” Examines the Koch Brothers’ Early, Crucial Role in Climate-Change Denial (2019)
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| Figure 3. Fractal Social Organization |
Fractal organizations are a class of bio-inspired distributed hierarchical architectures in which control and feedback information are allowed to flow independently of the position the participating nodes have in the system hierarchy. "In Figure 3, the Fractal Social Organization (FSO) layers include individuals, smart houses, hospitals and inter-facilities of care. The same triangle-shaped pattern of the Service-oriented Community (SoC) repeats itself at each scale. ...the spontaneous emergence of a hierarchical and modular organization characterized by structured complexity and a fractal nature. We conjecture that the concepts presented in this paper may be used to capture the complexity of traditional organizations that address vital services of our societies including, for example care, crisis management, goods and energy distribution, and civil protection. In the long run, should our conjecture prove correct, this may help in fulfilling the visions of smarter organizations." As Nafeez Ahmed wrote "Macro structures in the global civilisational system emerge from the patterns of behaviour that occur at sub-systemic (regional and national) and micro (individual) scales. In turn, those macro structures constrain and configure those patterns."
De Florio, Vincenzo. Models and Concepts for Socio-Technical Complex Systems: Towards Fractal Social Organizations (2013)
Normative Grounds for Ecosystem Management
Commenter “tekelili” writes: “As an ecologist, I think we need to be able to speak in normative terms, but with rigor. For example, physicians have no problem with normativity. Death is bad. Sickness is bad. These are things with clear biological markers and they can be diagnosed and treated (well not death, but that is an outcome to avoided). But there is strong resistance from evolutionary biologists and some ecologists for anything that remotely hints at normativity (teleology), even if that normativity has a physical basis. When we turn to ecological systems, I constantly hear terms like "degraded" or "ecological collapse" or "restoration" bandied about. These are normative terms, but they are often based on subjective evaluation. Strict neo-Darwinism has its own teleology, but a remarkably nihilistic one. No single outcome is better or worse than any other. This is not a grounds on which to manage ecosystems. Nor do I think our current subjective management decisions are coherent. We may have near term goals, but no sense of what is "good" for ecosystems or our interactions with them in the long run. That is why I am willing and even desire that we speak about teleology in biological systems, but that we do so based on a coherent, testable physical theory.”
In order to promote environmental health and open up the adjacent possible, indeed, in order to realize our telos within a “hierarchitectonic” of holism, I agree that we would need rigorous normative grounds on which to manage ecosystems. It is challenging to bring definitions of life, information, entropy, etc. under a coherent conceptual scheme, and whether that ends up looking something like the Maximum Power Principle or not, the task is unavoidable. Examples of people who have pursued projects related to this would include: Schrodinger “What is Life?”, Ilya Prigogine “Order Out of Chaos”, James J Kay “A nonequilibrium thermodynamic framework for discussing ecosystem integrity”, Stanley Salthe “Purpose in Nature”, Dorian Sagan and Eric Schneider “Into the Cool”, Terrence Deacon “Incomplete Nature”, and Jeremy England “Spontaneous fine-tuning to environment in many-species chemical reaction networks”.
Source: MIT professor proposes a thermodynamic explanation for the origins of life
Systems Innovation is a "community-powered platform for the application of systems and complexity theory towards the development of innovative new solutions to complex social, economic, technical and environmental challenges." This organization created a 14 part video series on “Systems Ecology". The episode on ecological emergence is particularly good, and can be useful in informing our approach to addressing environmental policies. As the intro to the series says "Some of the main theories and models that constitute systems ecology include energetics and thermodynamics, emergence, hierarchy, and feedback loops. An ecosystem is what emerges out of the interaction of many different biotic and abiotic elements on different levels. With systems ecology we're interested in what happens when we put things together, the processes that emerge on different levels as we build them up. Macro level emergent processes and structures feedback to both enable and constrain the micro level constituent components."
Systems Ecology 5: Ecological Emergence (video)
Ecology is, in many ways, the science around which the future will be built. Jesper Hoffmeyer proposed the "ecosemiotic interaction structure" as a new integrative level. (Beyond Mechanism 162) This simple graphic of ecological emergence illustrates several important organizing principles. Our society is like a single organism, where each individual person is like a cell. No one specifically controls the cells, but each is sustained by their combined efforts to support the integrity of the organism of which they form a part. Another feature, not specifically remarked upon but which bears mentioning, is rates of change. As organizational complexity increases, how does this affect rates of change? In general, larger structures with more moving parts react more slowly, while smaller parts, such as cells react faster. The good thing about the currently distributed network of environmentally concerned actors is that this form of organizational structure helps to avoid disengagement, apathy, and lack of responsibility. But individuals also need an ecological paradigm for action that includes a theory of integrative levels. Without that they won't understand how goals and policies interrelate across all domains of life. This part is particularly important: "Macro level emergent processes and structures feedback to both enable and constrain the micro level constituent components." If we understood these dynamics, then we would have greater knowledge concerning what we can do, and what we cannot do. We might more clearly see what we should pursue, and what we should avoid. In order to shift intransigent political and economic institutions we need to move quickly, with coordination, aligned at narrow targets (preferably the system levers), and informed by the ecological perspective. We need to think in terms of integrative levels, share a broad consensus on what that looks like, and let it enter into all our deliberations. There's a lot of good work being done already, but this levels "scaffolding" would buttress those efforts and ground them on a firmer foundation.
Integrative Levels
"The process of emergence creates new levels of organization, new structures that have some integrity to their parts or within which some new process takes place, thus creating their own distinct patterns. This new level then feeds back to shape and constrain the components. On the local level we get the emergence of some process, but for that process to take place there needs to be an enabling structure. That structure then defines some order to the system and the components must differentiate their state to perform the various structural and functional roles required. This need for the high levels to constrain and control the lower levels in order to enable higher level processes creates a complex dynamic between the micro and macro levels as they become interdependent on each other. This is most evident from the way the human body as a whole regulates every local component of itself to enable global processes such as respiration and digestion to take place effectively. This is a micro to macro to micro feedback loop through the many different emergent levels from the cells to the tissues to organs and all the way up to the entire organism." This video provides a very good description of processes of emergence, integrative levels, structure, agency, feedback, and enabling constraints.
Source: Emergence Theory 6: Integrative Levels (video)
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| "Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore" |
There are numerous examples of integrative thinking within Buddhism and other traditions within Eastern Philosophy. Thich Nhat Hanh provided a new translation of the Heart Sutra which displays this well. As he says, "Thay used the phrase, ‘The Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,’ because in the mantra there is the expression pāragate which means ‘gone over to the other shore, the shore of wisdom’.” The other shore represents a new integrative level. There are other interpretations of the Heart Sutra, that it is about emptiness for example, and there is a long tradition of exegesis affirming this. Famously the Cheng-kuan lun says:
“The Great Sage preached the Law of Emptiness
In order to free men from all [personal] views.
If one still holds the view that Emptiness exists,
Such a person the Buddhas will not transform.”
Another interpretation is that the sutra is about interbeing, which is also a central concept. Note for instance that Thich Nhat Hanh's translation repeatedly says that there is nothing that is a separate self entity. Interbeing is about integration, and moreover synthesis. And so from this view the sutra is about the development of thought toward greater integration. This harkens back to the speculative philosophical tradition of Schelling and, more recently, Whitehead. Zen also de-emphasizes analytic thinking in favor of moving toward a non-conceptual level of understanding. This level may be said to be that "other shore". Jane Loevinger once said “people can understand thinking at their own level or at levels below their own, but not at levels above their own.” It's a paradigmatically different view.
Feng Youlan also describes integrative levels in his books on the history of Chinese Philosophy, and he references a Zen parable: “Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters." Or as Laozi wrote, “There was a beginning of the universe which may be called the mother of the universe. He who has found the mother (Tao) and thereby understands her sons (things), and having understood the sons, still keeps to its mother, will be free from danger throughout his lifetime." Another common saying is that "samsara is nirvana". If life is samsara, that's the first level, the second level is nirvana, but only when you "rise yet another step over the top of the hundred-foot bamboo" will you see that samsara is nirvana. This is the paradoxical "attainment of non-attainment", the third level of integration/synthesis. Within Taoism, it is the "knowledge of no-knowledge" as Youlan describes (p113-117 of A Short History of Chinese Philosophy). As the Heart Sutra says, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”
Architecture
The influence of architecture has not escaped Arran Gare's notice. In his papers and recent book on ecological civilization Gare cites Christopher Alexander, author of the famous "A Pattern Language" and his concept of a "feel for the whole" in relation to architecture - we are essentially designing the structure of our ecosystem, which is the next hierarchical level above individual/group/species. As such, architecture has a strong influence, not only on the physical arrangement of society, but also the nature of social interactions and the mental health of its members. In an article by Tanzil Shafique, the author notes that “the way we build and organize our cities can help or hinder social connection". The built environment can either enable or constrain potential interaction. Winston Churchill observed that "we shape the buildings and then the buildings shape us". Architects and planners produce urban landscapes that influence our mental landscape. If these are contributing to an epidemic of loneliness, then design can be an important tool in response to it. Consider the creation of Zi Ye's “Puppy Society,” which connects a pet with multiple owners. The dogs are housed in a shared facility where the owners come to pet the dog. It's just one example, but how else can design address social epidemiology and other systemic problems?
Emergy Society: Howard Odum and Tom Abel
David MacLeod wrote: “One of my very favorite systems thinkers was Howard T. Odum. I am quite excited about a new blog, A Prosperous Way Down (Our civilization can thrive in a future where we live with less), dedicated to his work, and edited by his daughter, Mary Odum. Today I want to pull a couple of quotes from an article titled “Whatever Happened to Hierarchies in Ecology.” Mary Odum wrote: "Scientific theories are arguably derived from world views rather than vice versa. Thus, Ecology now emphasizes growth and competition among populations rather than limits and succession leading to cooperation, with less of an emphasis on balance and holism. Kingsland (2005) suggests that Ecology has diverged, with two messages to offer: "one in keeping with American ideas about progress and the other subversive. The clash between these two view-points made it necessary to think more deeply about the extent to which ecology can or should be human-centered. This question in turn relates to the problem of how we view ourselves in relation to the environment, whether we are outsiders and disturbers or intrinsic parts of a system, whose health depends on our cooperation." Odum continues: "Tom Abel’s Transformity pyramid depicts the representation of human society as it ideally rests upon its natural resource basis. Due to nonrenewable energy inputs to society over the last two centuries, however, the reality is far different. What would our current global industrial society look like in a qualitative representation using pyramids?
Both biosemiotics and emergy promise to unite some foundational issues in physics and biology, and the two approaches share a number of subjects that bear close resemblance to one another: Peirce's notion of the "taking on of habits" and emergy as "energy memory", the incorporation of significance/purposiveness in semiotics and the final causality of entropy in thermodynamics (Salthe's focus), a central concern with defining information (Terrence Deacon), integrative levels (in a semiotic web or scaffold, per Jesper Hoffmeyer) and a hierarchy functioning by means of constraints, downward causation, feedback processes, and energy transformations. As Salthe wrote: "The thermodynamic need to specify work implies semiotics, and energy quality is inherently semiotic. Work requires information."
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| Source: Charlie Hall |
Tim Winton wrote a paper that outlines a cosmology incorporating some of these essential features, and illustrates his concepts well (like fig.7). But how do we move down from theory into more specific application. As I see it, we need 1) a fairly comprehensive "emergy network analysis" to visualize energy and material flows within society and 2) a map of the corresponding ecosemiotic processes (feedbacks) to allow the significance of these flows to inform society, policy choices, and individual behaviors. As for an emergy analysis, there's so many ways to do this, and I really like what Tom Abel has done. It would also be interesting to try and adapt the diagrams produced by LLNL for emergy analysis (though I don't know how). As for using an analysis to inform policy choices, I have in mind the various attempts to conform society to planetary boundaries through action plans, particularly the "climate action plans" (CAPs) that many communities are developing to zero out their carbon debts and adapt to changing conditions. Has anyone incorporated emergy and it's hierarchical structure into a local CAP? Or is there a general template that would allow this to be done?
Mary Odum writes: "Emergy synthesis is a biophysical approach to measuring human activities that considers the indirect and direct contributions of ecological processes using equivalents of solar energy rather than monetary metrics to consider differences in quality of energy. It approaches valuation from a donor-based or supply side independent of the more usual economic demand-based approach that is dependent on subjective values of willingness to pay." As system complexity increases this can become more challenging. But since systems ecology is a biophysical science, it is possible, at least in broad strokes. We can begin with simple model systems for calculating emergy, incorporating feedbacks and constraints. A low resolution picture should emerge that can identify areas of greatest concern, and we can move on from there. These can be conducted to evaluate alternative policy decisions. Emergy is a very useful physical application of hierarchy theory, but to realize it’s greater potential outside a strictly materialist cosmology, it needs to be situated within semiotics and speculative philosophy.
Stanley Salthe writes: “Odum’s energy quality calculus is inherently semiotic. Each step in the dissipation of energy requires the deployment of information embodied in material arrangements that prevent a gradient’s instantaneous dissipation. Here, the ‘meaning’ of high quality energy dissipation would be the development and support of some particular complex systems, and this meaning is reflected back to all prior energy dissipations (including abiotic ones) from the same basic gradient that helped to raise its quality. So we see that thermodynamics has itself been semiotic in nature. These considerations lead us to final causality... Light arriving upon the earth is delayed in its reradiation into space by being captured in configurations—mountains, eddies, organisms—and guided by informational arrangements derived from various evolutionary processes (cosmic, organic, cultural) and/or events. History institutes particulars—all acting as local configurations of constraints on entropy production, imposing various degrees of friction upon its dissipation. This institution of frictions is the major physical effect of evolutionary (historical)-semiosic (meaningful) processes.”
"Howard Odum, Mark Brown, and others have argued that economics must take into account the environmental energies required to manufacture something and the fact that different types of energies have different qualities. For example, a kilojoule of electricity has value to society beyond its ability to simply heat water and hence more value than a kilojoule of coal, because of its special properties and because it takes about three heat units of coal in a power plant to produce one unit of electricity, the rest more or less of necessity being released into the air and water. Likewise a kilojoule of sugar fixed by a plant has more value than a kilojoule of the sunlight that made it and so on. Odum has generated the idea of embodied energy or more explicitly emergy (with an m, as in energy memory, a concept analogous to the embodied labor, or total energy required to make, in a manufactured item) as a term to reflect the various qualities of energy. Odum and his student Mark Brown have developed an extensive accounting scheme to measure this and to compute the quantities of emergy required to make, or cause to happen, many things. Transformity is a word used to evaluate the different qualities of different types of energy. ...the idea is tremendously appealing to us, and the comprehensiveness essential in our view... Perhaps someday there will be a label on your breakfast cereal that gives, in addition to calories and sodium per serving, an assessment of the fuel and solar energy required to make it as well as the soil and biodiversity loss, maybe all summarized in terms of emergy."
Hall, Charles. "Energy and the Wealth of Nations" 2018 (p443-444)
[The same text appears in the 2011 edition of this book on p354]
Holistic Energy: An EROEI viewpoint
"How deep should the probing in the supply chain of the tools being used to generate energy go? For example, if steel is being used to drill for oil or construct a nuclear power plant, should the energy input of the steel be taken into account? Should the energy input into building the factory being used to construct the steel be taken into account and amortized? Should the energy input of the roads which are used to ferry the goods be taken into account? What about the energy used to cook the steelworkers' breakfasts? These are complex questions evading simple answers. A full accounting would require considerations of opportunity costs and comparing total energy expenditures in the presence and absence of this economic activity. What is considered necessary to reach the minimum threshold of sustainability? What is considered the minimum value necessary for technological progress and a society supporting high art?" [1] Jay Hanson offers some potential implications that would follow from these considerations: "If total per capita energy expenditures have been increasing since the late 1980s, this could mark the beginning of the end of capitalism and market politics. Decades of declining “net energy” would result in decades of declining economic activity and require an alternative method for distributing goods and services. But since our market system and present way of distributing goods and services wastes enormous amounts of natural resources and is fantastically inefficient, gigantic resource savings are possible."
A carbon tax is designed to leverage market forces to reduce energy use overall (given that the majority is still derived from fossil fuels) and reflects policy recommendations by climate scientists like James Hansen and Katherine Hayhoe who have modeled the effects of GHG emissions, the social and environmental costs of carbon. Of course climate science is a physical earth science, so it should be merged with the version of economics that is informed by biophysical systems. Ecological economists like Charlie Hall and Howard Odum consider not just climate science, but also use other metrics with implications for policy recommendations, such as EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). Ultimately, as Odum would say, we must ask how many joules of solar energy is required to sustain our ecological system, of which our society is only a part. The answer will tell us whether we have overdrawn from our ecological account (according to "Earth Overshoot Day" we are well into debt). Of course, there may be no benefit in advancing multiple policy approaches, taking a "one step at a time" approach with a simple carbon tax is pragmatic. However there are connections here that are worth considering. Is declining EROEI in the oil and gas industry relevant in this context? If so, how does it impact not only our energy future, but the realm of the "politically possible" in terms of the long term success of an increasing carbon tax? The global perspective roots our policy not just in politics, but systems ecology and natural science. We need to know on what timescale we have to reach net zero GHG emissions that stands the best chance of minimizing impacts to levels at which we can still adapt (however that is determined). And, at current levels of fossil fuel use, when will EROEI fall to dangerous levels? It would be very bad if the combined effects of these trends blindside us.
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| Odum model of a human |
"Howard Odum described an “energy transformation hierarchy.” Many joules of sunlight, for example, are required to make one joule of organic matter, because energy is lost in the transition to the more concentrated, higher quality form of organic material. This process repeats at each hierarchical level. Accordingly, fossil fuels are simply stored solar energy, collected over millions of years. The fact that we rely on the consumption of a resource that took millions of years to create to fund our complex civilization is a sure sign that we have overshot our habitat’s capacity. Though fossil fuel agriculture feels like increased productivity, it really represents system degradation. Humanity needs to understand a simple lesson here: each level in the energy hierarchy cannot exceed the support it receives from the levels below, or it will collapse."
Weyler, Rex. Real wealth: Howard T. Odum’s energy economics (2017)
The development of Odum's energy hierarchy concept was later influenced by David Scienceman in 1986 when the term “embodied energy” was abandoned and replaced with "emergy". Scienceman's work displays a decisively reductive approach which may not recognize important qualitative differences that emerge at successive integrative levels in the energy/information hierarchy. His introduction of portmanteau terminology may have had the unfortunate result of alienating the rest of the scientific community rather than promoting greater cross-disciplinary dialogue and obscuring the important earlier work in systems ecology that focused on the perspective of integrative levels (from complex systems), which is a unifying framework for holistic environmental policies. This can be seen not only in ecological energy hierarchies (Odum), but also through the approach of "adaptive resource management" (McLoughlin and Thoms).
"The approach of unitas multiplex brings order or inventory to the well-stocked shop and thus unifies the complex of human knowledge of nature. It further ensures that such a unification is in a form that will be useful in providing for the “well-being” of human kind. Correspondingly, H.T. Odum’s Energy Systems Language is both an approach for ordering a wealth of scientific understanding as well as an implement for the “design of human society with its natural environment for the benefit of both”. H.T. Odum came to a general science of energy quality, that is ‘emergy’. Emergy, to paraphrase H.T. Odum and E.C. Odum, is a tabulation of the energy of one type required directly and indirectly to make a service or product. Indeed, it was from tabulating emergy flows that H.T. Odum discovered what he called the “maximum empower principle”, which he proposes as a guideline for selecting policy: “Choose alternatives that maximize empower intake and use”. H.T. Odum’s proposal that political decisions be based on considerations of their consequences for the flow of emergy (i.e., empower) brings together what Leibniz called the “kingdom of wisdom” and the “kingdom of power”. Leibniz conceived these domains of human activity as permeating each other so that “the maximum in the kingdom of power, and the best in the kingdom of wisdom, take place together”.
Maud, Sholto and Dino Cevolatti. Realising the Enlightenment: H.T. Odum’s Energy Systems Language qua G.W.v Leibniz’s Characteristica Universalis (2003)
“David Holmgren, co-originator of the Permaculture concept places significant weight on the emergy methodology for evaluating human technologies, settlements, and the viability of conventional and ‘alternative’ energy resources. ...In the long term, it would be helpful to establish an Emergy Foundation or something similar among those networking for sustainability to promote research and information on emergy-based sustainability indices, emergy simulation models, and evaluations of policy, technologies, resource futures, and settlement design. Only when, as a society, we truly understand the quantitative reality of qualitative energy flows through all the myriad pathways of our complex natural and socio-economic environment, will we be able to make the right decisions needed for a sustainable human future."
Maud, Sholto. Where to with ‘emergy’ literacy? (2005)
Understanding how matter and energy flows within ecosystems is the central focus of a lot of planning around addressing the co-occurring crises in global climate, species loss, pollution, waste, etc. If you don't have a framework for understanding these, you are left with developing solutions that are approximations. Some of these, such as permaculture, are very good. Studies that attempt to synthesize large bodies of scientific evidence, such as the planetary boundaries work of Johan Rockstrom, are important for offering clearer support, but while they offer a picture of our world, they don't clearly show the best points of intervention to effect positive changes.
In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the entire planet is one large "dissipative system". Energy enters the global system, flows within it, reacts with materials, and eventually dissipates from the surface. The particular flows and patterns that we see emerge in natural ecosystems are the result of the specific constraints within complex systems that are placed on energy. Odum's "energy hierarchy" is an attempt to model and understand the operation of these constraints and represent them quantitatively as "emergy". Now, in using the term "constraints", I have in mind the way this term is used within the biosemiotic community, which recognizes a connection between energy, information, and meaning-making (see Salthe, Hoffmeyer, Deacon, etc.). Here, constraints are understood to both limit freedom and give more freedom at the same time, and this, I'd argue, is also what we see in Odum's energy hierarchy. Emergy is, in this sense, a measurement of semiosic processes.
We need to improve our understanding of these via systems modeling and simulation. Climate models are some of the most complicated modeling projects undertaken and have progressed from early models over a century ago, which still achieved some surprisingly accurate results, through the current simulations operating on supercomputers which incorporate some of the latest developments in computer programming, artificial intelligence, and deep learning. Emergy, as a means to quantify constraints on energy dissipation (semiosic processes) is connected to climate dynamics, which also quantifies constraints on energy dissipation. The only difference between them is the scope and scale of analysis. Climate models focus on the atmospheric system at a fairly large physical and temporal scale. Emergy models look at specific ecosystem parts and their interactions. But the similarities between both models suggest that in theory a comprehensive simulation could incorporate all thermodynamic processes within the entire Earth system.
A comparative geophysical energy modeling project needs to begin in earnest, if it hasn't already. Is there a review and assessment of all current methodologies? This might include the work of researchers over the last 50 years of global studies and the more recent work of people like Johan Rockstrom and Charles Hall. As yet incompletely explored connections with biosemiotics will become clearer as we understand the interactions between energy, nature, and society. Growing momentum for change, expressed in contemporary movements such as Extinction Rebellion and Deep Adaptation that seek to create an ecological civilization, is bringing greater focus to further develop the tools for sustainability, and integrate them into our analyses and decision making processes. A simulation of global thermodynamics is challenging. A rough sketch is possible though, and clarity is easier by limiting scope to a few economic sectors over a limited scale then piecing these together to see what emerges, using existing data to test model predictions.
Thermodynamics of Quality and Principle of Maximum Ordinality
Giannantoni has created a thermodynamics of quality (ToQ) framework that embraces the traditional laws of thermodynamics grounded in Newton’s math while adding significant features which, as he writes, "represent an explicit tribute to Prof. Odum, because the original concept is already seminally present in his well-known rules of emergy algebra". Odum's set of rules described how energy transformations interact to define the energy power of a whole system from knowledge of the parts, the most striking feature of which was that it was nonconservative, meaning that the whole could be more than the sum of its parts. Giannantoni's new ToQ includes meta-mechanical forms of energy that depend on quality of organization rather than quantity of matter. His more general version of the Maximum Em-Power Principle states that "every system tends to maximize its ordinality, including that of the surrounding habitat" and his concept of “Emerging Solutions” suggests we: (1) Think in generative terms when designing any new practical application; (2) Make decisions in respect of those solutions which are “emerging” from the physical behavior of the system; and (3) Adopt consequential actions for favoring the specific “emerging behavior” of the system that appears to be decisively capable of improving our design.
Giannantoni is far more radical than most people would appreciate. He wrote: “There are processes, in Nature, which cannot be considered as being pure mechanisms”. In other words, you cannot reduce emergent qualities to an equation, which we know through the common phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". The whole is of course something different and new; you don't get a frog by looking only at the various organs that the frog contains, and so on. However, this is still the dominant "mechanistic" view of things. So what is it about Giannantoni's approach that makes it different from the reductive approaches to subjectivity, normativity, aesthetics, etc. that we often see? He replaces the mechanistic view with a systemic view of things, and his "maximum ordinality principle" provides a possibility for understanding the conditions under which transformations and emergent properties occur. Once we can recognize, understand, and to some extent predict these conditions, it allows us to make informed choices regarding solutions that address contemporary problems in many areas, including environmental policies, medicine, and economics. So here's how to think of it: he's not reducing emergent properties to an equation, he's using new principles and better equations for a more holistic understanding of emergent properties. Is this a good idea? I'll let the results of this work speak for itself. I suspect there will be numerous advantages here for promoting a holistic perspective.
Fairbanks will be developing a "climate action plan" that will necessarily involve choosing between a lot of future scenarios. Which do we select? How do we rank our options? Can Giannantoni's work can shed light on these difficult, but very important questions? His paper from the proceedings of the 9th Emergy Conference (2016), outlined a "radically new perspective to modern science". That's a big claim, so it would be surprising if he set that aside now, all things being equal. I'd like to know if some of his research in regard to Smart Grids has been simulated or applied in a test environment, or if he has specific policy recommendations. A capable programmer could develop software to crunch his formulas. Maybe even make it a game like "SimCity" (Ordinal City?), just to play with the variables and see what comes up, which solutions the model selects. If the "ordinal benefits" he describes are real, so would be the savings.
Giannantoni, Corrado. The “Emerging Quality” of Self-Organizing Systems, When Modeled According to the Maximum Ordinality Principle, Offers a Radically New Perspective to Modern Science (2017)
Giannantoni, C. The Relevance of Emerging Solutions for Thinking, Decision Making and Acting. The case of Smart Grids (2014)
Giannantoni, C. Mathematics for generative processes: Living and non-living systems (2006)
Giannantoni, C. The Maximum Em-Power Principle as the basis for Thermodynamics of Quality. (2002)
Giannantoni, C. La Leggerezza della Qualità. [Lightness of Quality] (2007)
Giannantoni, C. L’Ascendenza della Qualità. [Ascendancy of Quality] (2008)
Adolphson, Donald. Corrado Giannantoni: A Modern-day Newton (2008)
Thermoeconomics
Peter Corning: "Living systems must adhere to the first and only law (so far) of “thermoeconomics”, namely, that the energetic benefits (the energy made available to the system to do work) must outweigh the costs required for capturing and utilizing it. From the very origins of life, energy capture and metabolism has played a key role. As biological complexity has increased over time, the work required to obtain and use energy to sustain the system has increased correspondingly. Indeed, improvements in bioenergetic technologies represent a major theme in evolutionary history and, in every case, involved synergistic phenomena." As he wrote: "The natural world provides many examples of a third type of energetic efficiency, namely, adaptations to minimize the absolute quantity of energy used in meeting various biological needs. These adaptations range from shelter building to hibernation, heat sharing, nest-sharing, physiological adaptations (like fur, feathers, subcutaneous fat layers, etc.) and many others. ...Physics is highly relevant to biology, but its explanatory arsenal can deal only with a part of the multi-leveled, multi-faceted causal hierarchy that is found in living systems. We see thermoeconomics as being fully consistent with Darwinian evolutionary principles, and we believe that this alternative approach will bear much fruit." However, in Holistic Darwinism, Corning cautions: "energy must be viewed as only one input to the survival enterprise... [and] the benefits can only be weighed in terms of externally defined human values... it cannot be treated as an economic common denominator". (357-58) While the biosemitic community might look deeper than energy, and see fundamental constraints as the common denominator that give rise to both normative and material processes, I know of no one studying the economics of enabling constraints. Such a broad inquiry could be difficult to manage. The narrower investigation into thermoeconomics is manageable enough, if not comprehensive.
Our altered planetary carbon cycle is a geoengineering experiment being conducted without anyone's explicit consent. In response to this all manner of geoengineering proposals to counteract and rectify the resulting imbalance have been proposed. Those generally greeted with approval include permaculture and, for example, Bren Smith's "GreenWave", while many forms of solar radiation management are viewed disapprovingly. But no matter how you look at it, the mere scale of human activity makes our interactions with planetary systems highly consequential regardless of our intention or awareness of that fact. Today there are many disciplines that seek to provide some perspective on these interactions, these include Earth systems engineering and management and HT Odum's early work in what later became ecological engineering, where his focus was to design societal services such that they benefit society and nature. This in turn may be seen within the broader discipline of systems ecology.
The challenges presented by this way of seeing the world have occupied the entire careers of many people, not the least of all because of the many branching paths one may pursue while looking for fruitful points of investigation. One of these is energetics-econophysics-thermoeconomics, which is related to social physics (see Alex Pentland). Here, if we view the proper work of systems ecology to be that of determining an operating space for nature and social interactions to occur, then thermoeconomics appears to be a promising paradigmatic approach. One might say that, after all, if climate change is indeed global heating as a result of a growth oriented economy, then thermoeconomics would seem to be among the most direct approaches to addressing it.
Corning, Peter. Synergistic Selection: A bioeconomic theory of complexity in evolution (2018)
Corning, Peter. Thermoeconomics: Beyond the Second Law (2002)
P2P Foundation. Thermoeconomics (2016)
Berry, Stephen. Recycling, Thermodynamics, and Environmental Thrift (1972) [with additional selections]
Valero, Antonio. Thermoeconomics as a conceptual basis for energy-ecological analysis (1998)
Cardullo, Mario and Manhong Liu. Global Thermoeconomics (2017)
The Energy Hierarchy and Permaculture
In Energy and Permaculture (1994), and later expanded upon in "Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability" (2002), David Holmgren wrote that the work of ecologist Howard Odum provided a theoretical framework and conceptual tool which was critical in the development of the permaculture concept. These points for sustainable systems allowed plenty of scope for higher human values and co-operative approaches:
1. develop storages of high-quality energy
2. feed back work from the storages to increase inflows
3. recycle materials as needed
4. organize control mechanisms that keep the system adapted and stable
5. set up exchanges with other systems to supply special energy needs, and
6. contribute useful work to the surrounding environmental systems that help maintain favorable conditions, e.g.. micro-organisms' contribution to global climate regulation or mountain forests' contribution to rainfall.
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| Energy Transformation Hierarchy |
Lovisa Sundin writes: “Any “system”, is simultaneously a part and a whole – equally dependent participants in a higher-order relation and self-contained entities themselves. We may dub a recognizably multi-levelled tendency “arborization”, and horizontal interaction across such systems “reticulation”. And so what crystallizes in this arborizing brew, when left to seethe, is an underwater coral reef of interlocking hierarchies, not entirely decomposable (but nearly so) and teeming with desire to self-complicate. ...The most important insight carried by hierarchy theory is that the continuum between simple systems and complex systems – between rocks and organisms – makes ontology applicable to them all.” Arthur Koestler coined the term “holon” from the Greek “hol” meaning whole and “on” meaning part. A holon is something which is simultaneously a whole relative to its constituent parts, and a part relative to some larger whole.”
Jeremy Sherman writes "The sustained interaction between entities becomes itself a higher-level entity." This is a simpler version of something Peter Corning wrote: "complex living systems represent a multi-leveled, multi-faceted hierarchy of synergistic effects that has evolved over several billion years". Corning has much more to say about this, but it appears that at every level in a hierarchy we can see the driving influence of synergy and synergistic selection; at each level of a hierarchy different "synergies" are at work that create the upper level. Another familiar representation of hierarchies is that of taxonomic classification systems, and the evolutionary transitions of John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, in his paper "The Major Transitions in Evolution". Hierarchical structures are also part and parcel with Walter Benesch’s outline of continuum logic levels. Stanley Salthe outlined both “General Rules of the Scalar Hierarchy (I-IX)“ and “General Rules of the Specification Hierarchy (I-XIV)“. He introduced the notion of the triadic, where there is a focus on 1) the system as both a whole above the levels below and 2) a part belonging to another level above, 3) not forgetting the level of the structure itself in between. A separate and unrelated outline was created by Arthur Koestler.
General Rules of the Scalar Hierarchy (abstracted from Salthe 1993)
I. The system of scalar levels continues without bound in both directions away from a focal level. It is an essentially synchronic structure, allowing representation of process and events but not of change.
II. Nestedness. Entities at different scalar levels are parts and whole, every entity being part of a larger one and also having parts within itself. (In a command hierarchy, higher-level entities metaphorically contain the bodies of subordinates within them because of the scope of their interests and power.)
III. Nontransitivity of effects across levels. Relationships between entities at different scalar levels are indirect in the sense that as a rule they do not interact; rather, they provide mutual constraints – it is a system of extensional constraint relations. Hence, dynamics at different levels are screened off from one another, with descriptive variables necessarily representing a single level only, while the values of nonrecursive constants will have been derived from dynamics at other levels. The system is not completely decomposable into isolated levels, because of these constraints. Yet everything is not connected up to everything else, and this allows us to model a contextualized autonomy. Indeed, perturbations across levels are frequent enough so that actuality is heterarchical, even though based on a hierarchical reality.
IV. Functional heterarchy. Occasional interactions do occur between levels as perturbations. Those coming from below require a process of amplification – consider the example of cancer, where (the descendants of) a single cell may eventually dominate the life of a metazoan. This is because no single lower-level entity as such can directly affect the higher-level entity in which it is embedded as a part. The system is asymmetrical in this respect because a larger-scale fluctuation would completely if indirectly, dominate all lower-scale systems simultaneously.
V. The further apart two levels are, the weaker are the continuing constraints they mutually impose, or the less frequently do they perturb each other. But perturbations generated from fluctuations at more distant levels tend to be more intense (because the system is not used to them) than those from closer levels, in those rare instances when they do occur.
VI. Processes at different scales change direction, cycle, or go to completion at different rates (have different rate constants), with lower-scale ones behaving faster and having smaller relaxation times than higher-scale ones (which, however, can travel at greater absolute speeds). A consequence of this is that larger-scale entities have moments (cogent moments) that endure for absolutely a longer time than do those of lower-scale entities.
VII. While many forms and processes are isomorphic across levels (like many laws of nature), every level would be expected to have some unique characteristics. This tends to ontologically isolate processes and entities at different levels.
VIII. The basic triadic system. In describing a system of parts and wholes, three levels are minimally needed in order to preserve the complexity, because in this case the description cannot plausibly be reduced to a single favored level without losing essential veridical features. This kind of reduction is always possible, if not always desirable, in a two-level scalar description.
IX. The scalar hierarchy can be used in “objective” discourses because it is strictly metric and nonvaluational.
General Rules of the Specification Hierarchy (abstracted from Salthe 1993)
I. Logical transitivity. The most central trait of this hierarchy is that relations between integrative levels are fully transitive – e.g., I am a mammal every bit as much as I am human.
II. Integration. In the more obvious sense, social systems must continue to obey the laws of physics, and psychological phenomena cannot escape being rooted in biological constraints. Less obvious, but equally important, physical phenomena will be regulated, controlled, and harnessed by psychological states.
III. Any entity may be located at different integrative levels, depending upon where the analysis is pitched, because every entity has more general (e.g., formal, systemic, or physical) properties and more particular (highly specified) ones (e.g., geographic, social, or psychological). Integrative levels are layers of increasingly specific constraints simultaneously in effect. Some systems (e.g., humans) appear to us to be subject to more such constraints and some (e.g., icicles) to fewer.
IV. The system is Hegelian in that, beginning in the innermost class, a semiotic/logical order of implication from the innermost level parallels a system of intensional constraint relations leading to conceptual subordination of the outermost levels to the innermost (a kind of finality). Beginning with the outermost class, it is also a system of nested classes of degree of specification representing emergent orders.
V. The logical priority of specificity. The presence of a higher integrative level implies the presence of lower, more general levels, not the reverse. The system privileges the most highly specified states, and these are its root in values as well.
VI. Because relations between levels in the system are transitive, there is no need for more than two levels at a time to be represented in models.
VII. Development. Because a two-level system is unstable, it will change so as to privilege one of the levels. Systems acquire their integrative levels developmentally – that is, by way of a knowable (predictable) sequence of developmental stages.
VIII. Each stage is broached by a qualitative jump and so represents an emergence of the next level.
IX. Epigenesis. Development is epigenetic, so that the stages cannot be scrambled and must follow a particular sequence.
X. Individuation. The canonical sequence is always from the more general (or vague) to the more specific (or definite). This is the historical primacy of generality (Baer’s law).
XI. The sequence of stages is irreversible in any material system. It is here that the system connects with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
XII. Development is generative; it traverses a gradually narrowing field of potentialities, only one of which has a high propensity for being accessed at a given stage by mediation of arrangements of constraints, including those that are characteristic of the stage reached. These potentialities can lead off in various alternative directions, which are not infinite in number at any stage (e.g., they are not possibilities, but potentialities proper), and are fewer in number the later the stage reached.
XIII. The most highly specified state is always related to the observer in one way or another, sometimes as an eschatological goal. Therefore the system is characterized by a subjective relationship of the observer to the innermost level.
XIV. The system of integrative levels reflects the categorial reach of some observer, extending from the most general types relevant to some classification to the most specific (highly specified). It is therefore truncated below by an outermost level and above by the innermost.
Salthe, Stanley. Development and Evolution (1993)
Salthe, Stanley. Energy and Semiotics: The Second Law and the Origin of Life (2005)
Pattee, Howard. Hierarchy theory: The challenge of complex systems (1973)
Koestler, Arthur. The Ghost in the Machine (1968)
Koestler, Arthur. Janus (1978)
Rosen, Robert. Anticipatory Systems (1985)
Ulanowicz, Robert. Ecology, the Ascendant Perspective (1997)
Corning, Peter. Holistic Darwinism (2005)
Eldredge, Niles. Evolutionary Theory: A Hierarchical Perspective (2016)
Gare, Arran. The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization (2016)
Gare, Arran. Biosemiosis and Causation: Defending Biosemiotics Through Rosen’s Theoretical Biology (2019)
Wendt, Alexander. Quantum Mind and Social Science (2015)
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)
Kleineberg, Michael. Integrative Levels (2017) Knowledge Organization 44(5): 349-379.
McLoughlin, Craig and Martin Thoms. Integrative learning for practicing adaptive resource management (2015)
Systems Innovation. Sustainability (documentary video) (2019)
Odum, Howard. Energy, Ecology, & Economics (1974)
Odum, Howard. Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy (2007)
Odum, Howard. Emergy Evaluation (1998)
Tilley, David. Howard T. Odum’s contribution to the laws of energy (2004)
International Society for the Advancement of Emergy Research (ISAER)
Emergy Systems website (maintained by Mark Brown)
Winton, Tim. The Meaning of Planetary Civilisation: Integral Rational Spirituality and the Semiotic Universe. (2004)
Foster, John Bellamy and Paul Burkett. Value Isn’t Everything (2018)
Foster, John Bellamy. What strategy for an ecological ‘great transition’? (2015)
Maud, Sholto and Dino Cevolatti. Realising the Enlightenment: H.T. Odum’s Energy Systems Language qua G.W.v Leibniz’s Characteristica Universalis (2003)
Maud, Sholto. Where to with ‘emergy’ literacy? (2005)
Brown, MT and HT Odum. Emergy Analysis perspectives of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (1993)
De Florio, Vincenzo. Models and Concepts for Socio-Technical Complex Systems: Towards Fractal Social Organizations (2013)
Weyler, Rex. Real wealth: Howard T. Odum’s energy economics (2017)
Holmgren, David. Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability (2002)
