Systems Engineering — Aspiring to thinking like God.
A suggested bridge between Science, and Religion
Background
A challenge was put to me recently, by an author I have a lot of respect for, but with whom I don’t always agree with; John Griswold.
He asked what I meant, when I talk about “Earth energy”, I responded by saying it was a Systems Engineering abstraction; something we use to bundle together lower level concepts with the purporse of discussing at higher levels of abstraction.
This is the same levels of abstraction we use to define higher and lower levels of software tools. Software which uses graphical user interfaces like windows, bundles together functionality carried out at the lower levels by DOS commands and machine code, giving us the power to do in windows what it would take armies of experts to do with DOS commands or machine code scripts.
I could have referred to an earlier article I’d done, explaining it was the Joules on Earth which are put to use, as clarified in the main image of that piece:
In that story I characterise Earth energy as something contributed to by nature, generally detracted from by the current working mode of humanity.
But in the context of our discussion, I guessed rightly or wrongly that John’s intention was to question or challenge my knowledge of what we were talking about, which was the energy handling of trees, and their energy function on Earth.
Fundamentally, we were disagreeing on the need for degrowth. John’s view aligns with what seems to me to be the view of the popular majority, that reduction is needed, whilst my argument is no reduction is needed, in fact we will benefit by further growth, on the special condition that all is solar powered, a side of which by itself will remove all of the burden of “Bullshit Industry”, which is another Systems Engineering abstraction coined in another story:
Bullshit Industry
Is Your Business or Job, Bullshit Industry? Here’s how to tell.
eric-bott.medium.com
The function of trees, and all things accepting solar energy is fundamental to our understanding of energy, it seems to me, and I often use them as a kind of reference system, showing us how we also must handle energy.
I liken the current status of our species as being something like a tree shoot at the point it begins to sprout leaves, and starts to conduct solar energy to Earth. Humanity is in the process of sprouting the human equivalent of leaves all over Earth in the form of solar farms.
John is a wood worker, and I’d already challenged him over his knowledge of trees (Sorry John, I should have known better).
John’s argument (Correct me if I am wrong John) is that the tree conducts no energy to Earth, it simply stores energy during its life in the form of carbohydrates, which is released to Earth at the end of its life.
My argument from a Systems Engineering point of view is that there has to be more to that story; even a moderate sized adult tree is exposed to many hundreds of kilowatt hours (KWh) of solar energy, every day of its life, often for hundreds of years. That has to add up to many MWh absorbed in its lifetime, assuming nature has given the tree reasonable ability to capture energy, which is obviously needed by all of life. Only a tiny fraction of that energy remains within the material of the tree at end of life, as we might test in the end by burning the tree, so it has to be somehow conducted to Earth.
I see no logical reason why the tree would not conduct energy to Earth via nutrients which are emitted by its roots, after the formation of Leaves. This would be the same mechanism as the tree uses to extract energy from Earth initially in order to grow to the point where it forms leaves, with the only difference being that after the leaves are formed, the energy flow simply changes direction from Earth, upwards (negative, as that is in the opposite direction of the energy of the sun), to positive, flowing in the same direction as the energy of the sun to Earth.
Way I see it, pretty much all non-radiated paths of energy flow are like pipes, or electrical conductors. In their simplest form, these paths are bidirectional, allowing the energy carrying medium to flow in either direction. Why would this be any different for the nutrients in a tree?
What scientific evidence is there to show that this is not the case? Who would profit from the results of such a study? I argue no-one specific; knowledge of it is something beneficial to the whole of humanity in general, no particular tribe, certainly not divisive profit driven extraction industries who fund most energy research. So such research probably doesn’t exist, due as always to the profit driven use of Occam’s razor, though I am always open to anyone with information or logical argument which says otherwise.
So, posed with his question, rather than answer it with the detailed technical reasoning given above, I opted to explain to John simply that the Earth Energy I mean is a formal Systems Engineering abstraction.
This is an acknowledgement that the term is not cut and dried, it is something general awareness of is still being developed, and encouraged by yours truly. The diagram I used to illustrate energy flows itself is an abstraction. There is no single distinct mechanism carrying out the functions illustrated there, it is the result of a very large sum of things, including the “Human energy” meant by Nikola Tesla, in his infamous paper of 1900:
Systems Engineering Abstraction and Religion
There are those who flatly discount religion, and anything that sounds remotely religious, arguing somehow that science tells us religion is all wrong.
On the other hand there are those who dispute science and technology on religious grounds, and yet more who dispute both science and religion, they just dispute.
Most folk attempting to separate science from religion claim it has always been that way since the “Enlightenment”.
But we can see there have been many great scientific thinkers who were religious. Probably the best known example is Albert Einstein.
So it isn’t quite true that the division between science and religion has been cut and dried since the “Enlightenment”.
I’ve talked about the enlightenment previously, and believe more firmly than ever now that it was all about profit.
That was when science, at least part of it, seems to have developed a need to become profit driven, perhaps around the origin of the first big pharma companies.
The reason I say this is that we can see right now how the driver of profit impacts all information, and is actually detrimental to all human development, and even all of life.
Every profit driven media platform we can shake a stick at can be shown to be deceptive, if not downright lying, because division and deception is what is needed to be able to make profits. Fundamentally, profit is a mechanism of shifting wealth from one party to the other, usually from the weaker to the stronger.
If both parties had exactly the same views and experience of all information, and the same power to exert scarcity on the other side, no profitable deal could ever be struck, as neither party would agree to transfer some of their wealth to the other.
So profit requires deception.
Censorship, for example, is deception, and Metcalfe’s law shows us censorship of any kind is never in the public interest. Quite the opposite. And if a profit driven algo learns that profits are increased by demoting certain things in feeds, for example, then these things will be demoted.
At the very least the platform will deploy algos which are designed only to increase profits, as it has to, to compete with what it sees are rival platforms, therefore will promote clickbait divisive scaremongering and sensationalist material far more readily than other more calmly logical technical discussions, like maybe this one, which I would argue are the solutions, not the emotional screamings of those seeking to improve their own financial positions (Again, profit driven).
So we see very few problems actually being sorted out at profit, only made worse, ending in atrocities like the Christchurch massacre, the Ukraine war, and global nuclear annihilation, if we let it, whilst we steadily deplete the Energy of Earth throughout, so if we don’t end by nuclear war, we end by destruction of our survivable environment.
From the simplest seemingly innocent examples of advertising, saying only the positives about things to sell to us, to now the most egregious, devious lies of history; mind-warping propaganda literally costs the lives of millions.
Obviously profit is a problem. A massive problem threatening the future of all of life, no less, because it is unsustainable from an energy point of view.
But that sounds religious, and if we are strictly scientific, or even just anti-religious, then we have to argue it isn’t the case that the pursuit of profit is any kind of problem, because that would be agreeing with religion, adding weight to the un-scientifc argument that there might be something in religion, right?
And when we do the systems analysis, linking all of the dependencies betwen the main stakeholders and actors; us, nature, the Earth, and the Sun, energy, creation, destruction, the Biosphere, the stored energies of Earth, our handling and representation of it by money, capital, debt, and money issuance, we finally trace it all to an unsustainable, species extinguishing Grand Energy Ponzi, and we can’t help noticing just how many times we see things around this which sound religious.
By just looking at this systems analysis, it looks like we really are at the end of days.
With this simple logic, we have to conclude that all of this presents overwhelming evidence that religion somehow had it right, all along.
Scientific Speculation on the Origins of Religion
With the above realised, we might start asking questions like “How did they know, these gods of various religions?” How could they possibly have known these things that we are only now beginning to evolve to understand?
And we might conclude that they’ve seen it before.
It looks remarkably like they existed, physically, and maybe even still do.
Then, realising how wrong we’ve been about a lot of our perceptions, we might start to look again at history, especially where it is disputed.
The currently profit-driven accepted scientific explanation of the origin of the Pyramids, for example, is that humanity created them, around 4000 years ago, whilst all over the walls inside we see paintings which describe supernatural beings and read stories of how these beings came about by supernatural processes, things we know nothing of now, like reincarnation, and communicating with the dead. This is before we even talk about the actually technically impossible Engineering of the Pyramids, by the technologies we know of today. There we see astronomic precision mathematical and handling of literally mountains of prodigious blocks of stone in ways we can still only dream of, and still we pass that off as done with hand-tools and armies of slaves.
I can testify to that impossibility as a once legally defined technical “Expert”, and having personally been in and toured the pyramids; they were not built by any technology we currently know of.
Graham Hancock, and many others dispute the accepted narrative, suggesting the pyramids were built much earlier. Related conclusions which make perfect logical sense to me include that there were extraterrestrial visitors who actually created us, with some possible involvement in the creation also of the pyramids. This explains many of the unknowns we currently have around the human Genome, as well as the obvious questions around the technology of the pyramids, and ancient Egyptian culture in general; such as the reason why cocaine and other recreational drugs were found in the remains of some ancient Egyptian people, and many other questions.
Now add to that the many other obviously contrived and disputed points around the foundations of science, and we start to see a pattern, of where the pursuit of profit has shaped our perceptions of things, removing us from reality which is often logically much simpler, despite instruments of science supposedly to be used to assist getting to the truth by simplifying things, such as Occam’s razor, to “cut through the bullshit”, when we look with an expert eye, we might realise Occam’s razor itself is a profit driven instrument, only used if it assists towards increasing profit.
So in my opinion, if we already have a reasonably strong technical background, and we don’t understand the jargon, or can’t follow the logic of a specialist argument through to conclusion, it isn’t because we don’t have the brainpower to aspire to understanding the logic of the intellectual giants creating indusputible unprovable hypotheses, it is probably just ego / profit driven bullshit.
Apologies for my apparent scorn towards what seems to me to be willful ignorance of reality, but I think we need to have this, to put it in its correct place; dark history.
This goes also for the conventional study of economics, which of course is profit driven, and in the end is just another “science”, the science of money. Like any profit driven science, it has become detached from reality, and is moving way off, on a tangent, with its own derivatives of unintelligible language, it seems to me.
The effect of that when it is realised, is the devaluation of money in markets.
As we are seeing, money is devaluing, because it no longer represents actual product.
The vital product I keep talking about being ignored is solar energy product, donated to us from the sun, put to use by us, but still not reflected by issue of money; “Kardashev Money” is probably the key to the final lock of turning around, from everything bad, to everything good. This is the point at which the energy flow through humanity truly changes, from negative to positive, like in the tree, freeing us up to grow as a species with no impediment to our individual creativity, contributing to the whole:
Conclusion
I haven’t found this subject easy to write about. The way I’ve described things here seems kind of round-about to me, not direct, so my apologies for that.
But the conclusion is this:
Why wouldn’t each religion just be a higher layer of abstraction, created to communicate concepts which we were yet to evolve to, for us to be able to understand?
Our levels of perception, in a way, have progressed through successive layers of abstraction in all subjects, as I explained earlier using the example of software. The study of all of these layers as a System, is what we call Systems Engineering. Systems Engineering also has a concept of studying itself; “Meta-modeling”. This is the modeling of the methodology of Systems Engineering. A model itself, in the form of a diagram or otherwise is an abstraction.
Why wouldn’t religions just be meta-models of the systems of humanity, created by “Gods”?
Acceptance of something like this seems to me to be a necessary step, towards truly understanding the current global energy problem, and the only solution to it.
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Credits: John Griswold, for making me think deeper about this. I hope you are well John, I wish you all the best.
