Feedback

By Romana Annette  11/17/2008

I had what I consider to be an epiphany last year.   Suddenly, after years of incubation, I had a vision that all the views of reality we have been taught, including my own, were wrong.  I have come to think that our inclination to clearly separate animate and inanimate realities, as well as our inclination to put human beings at the top of all hierarchies, has actually been dangerous.  Reality is both real and illusory.  All experiences are real to a certain extent, but our tendencies to dismiss many parts of reality as irrelevant to our experience creates an illusion of independence and separateness.
Many relationships are biological.  Close to half the genetic information in and on our bodies does not even belong to us.  We have evolved symbiotic relationships with bacteria and other microorganisms, without which we cannot survive.  We have major ecological relationships, since we live in a biosphere that supplies air and nutrition for us.  And, we have relationships with a lot of information, which is given to us by a variety of feedback mechanisms.

I am a Process Theologian and Philosopher.  Since I have Asperger’s Syndrome, I tend to analyze reality more objectively, than subjectively.  Theists consider Process Theology to be a liberal doctrine; however, I consider Process Theology to be a conservative doctrine, since it is more rigorous than standard theology.  Also, Process Theology allows me to avoid many of the paradoxes which I really detest.

I claim that all reality, including human reality, is driven by feedback, some of which can be quite subtle.  This feedback is also hierarchical, but not from the top-down, as is pushed by human society, but a natural hierarchy from the bottom-up.  Figuring out how this all works has been a goal of philosophy for thousands of years.  It has always been difficult to derive subjective faith and hope from an apparently cruel and mindless set of processes that exhibit constant creation followed by perishing.
Yet, even though people may have good intentions, I claim that all attempts to impose order from above, especially by introducing philosophically incorrect notions of God, produce models that are crueler and more mindless than the natural models.

Feedback can come in many forms.  It can be visual (light waves) or auditory (sound waves).  It can be driven by other forms of energy flow, such as electricity.  In electrical amplification devices, it can be part of a signal sent into an amplifier for controlled signal enhancement.  In public address systems, feedback can often become annoying screeching, when an amplifier reaches an explosive avalanche.
Reaction to feedback can be influenced by other feedback, such as historical precedence or experience.   For lifeforms, reaction to feedback can be influenced by hormones and other chemicals.  In such cases, feedback is no longer a command, but a lure that can trigger responses based on whim rather than logic.

Physics is all about the study of the bottom-up feedback of our physical hierarchy.  No one currently knows what lies next below the known bottom (quarks), which is why scientists keep building ever more powerful particle accelerators.  There could be several more layers of sub-particles, or there could just be oscillating strings.  It is important to go down as far as possible, because this information is needed to define basic relationships that affect everything higher up.  One should not be surprised, however, to find that all realities float on a sea of eternal chaos, where such realities are just temporary abodes.  Other philosophers warn that one might only encounter other realities deep within our structures, such entire universes, and so forth.
Feedback leads to relationships, and these relationships communicate all the way up the chains to living things, including us.

It is necessary to touch upon entities and mystery.  Entities are any processes or collections of processes that are distinct enough to be given a classification identifier, or even a name.  Quarks are entities, but it would be impractical to give them individual names.  Structures (made of collections of other entities) can also be entities, and even abstract concepts can be entities, but abstract concepts cannot be real actualities.  Based on this reasoning, atoms, molecules, people, stars, galaxies, and even whole universes would qualify as entities.
Abstractions allow for symbolic shorthand; however, while many animals have the capability for some abstract reasoning, only human beings have the mental processing power to make abstractions a common part of life. 
Mystery is about any part of reality that we currently cannot know, and about any abstractions we cannot envision.  Some even deny that such lack of knowledge is relevant, but such assertions just confound all attempts to understand reality.
Mystery extends infinitesimally small and infinitely large.  The large is concerned with our Universe and with what we cannot see beyond its light-event-horizon.  This likely includes the existence of other universes and higher dimensions, which make philosophical sense, but are currently unprovable.  The shear size of the large would seem to diminish its feedback locally.
In a bottom-up hierarchy, the mystery of the small that we cannot see becomes important, because it affects everything higher up.  This is why religions such as Buddhism stress the importance of our innermost feelings, and disregard external influences.  It is interesting that we often envision ourselves being in the middle, between scales of the large and the small.

There is a lack of symmetry in all the feedback.  Our universe does not seem to contain any naturally occurring anti-particles.  This is fortunate, since reality would collapse if it were totally symmetrical.  When physicists speak symmetry, they are talking about observed and theoretical relationships between the wide range of existent particles of energy and matter.
Time for the feedback is one-way: from the past to the future.  While it can be quite relevant for past events to influence future events, there are no useful models in which future events influence past events.  It should be noted that Process Philosophy does allow for some feedback from the future, but only for intervals of a few seconds to a few minutes.  Much of this logic is bound up in the uncertainty afforded by Quantum Mechanics.

Particles of matter and energy react in fields to establish relationships.  Fields are invisible, only showing up in relation to the presence of matter and energy.  Fields must be very elementary, since all matter and energy seems to depend on the presence of fields.  One can ask whether particles of matter and energy have any identity of their own, except in the way that fields define them.  It is almost as if fields are the actual source of natural laws.  Fields are therefore pertinent to innermost mystery.
Fields themselves are likely hierarchical.  Philosophically, fields can be said to be the ground of creation.  Fields can be subjectively interpreted, such as having a historical relevance and being a knowledge base.  Fields can be said to determine what works and what does not work, based upon a kind of physical organic evolution, which is similar to, but not the same as, the evolution of organic molecules.  Workability and feasibility are topics of the Anthropic Principle, which I will touch upon later.

In order for particles of matter and energy to interact, they must know about the presence of each other.  There has to be feedback, in the form of important particles being exchanged back and forth.  The known feedback is divided into the four basic forces: the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity; however, there might be other types of feedback too.  These forces are all asymmetrical, especially gravity.  Gravity is the only force that is accumulative beyond atomic levels, and it is also the only force that is equivalent to acceleration.
Depending on the circumstances, the strength of feedback could range from that of a command to that of a lure.  In subatomic settings, feedback could be considered to be a command, while in larger, more subjective settings, feedback could be considered to be a lure or suggestion that does not have to be absolutely obeyed.

In current physical models, quarks combine in triplets to form protons and neutrons.  Gluons establish feedback between protons and neutrons.  Photons allow electrons to establish feedback between neutrons and protons to make atoms.  Much of the matter in the Universe is composed of these simpler components.  Without an observer, objective components can only be described with nouns and transitive verbs, but as a subjective observer, I can say that it is staggering that there might be at least 10⁸⁰ protons in the universe.

One could ask why there have to be so many small parts?  At atomic and subatomic levels, classical mechanics does not hold, since a kind of symmetry would develop that would cause everything to collapse.  Quantum Mechanics maintains a different symmetry involving quantum states, where all feedback follows probabilistic wave equations, which allow a diverse range of particles of matter and energy to work together.  Wave equations work best when there are enormously large numbers of constituents.

The tiniest components of reality have some choice, how to react to feedback, that follow laws of probability.  No one knows how this happens.  These components could be subject to unseen feedback from fields, from higher dimensions, or other universes, or the components could contain infinitesimal traces of subjectivity.  One of the major philosophical questions is how a mindless, inanimate reality can give rise to an animate reality filled with subjectivity?  The answer could be relative to individual time frames, since our realities zip by at high speed, while larger realities move at a snail’s pace.

It can seem like a quantum leap from objective atoms to subjective human beings.  One must remember that, as human beings, we have an observational bias.  We tend only want to know about things that we can see or measure; anything else often seems unknown to us.  One problem is that we tend to consider our underlying reality to be stateless; that is, we ignore all the quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons, atoms, molecules, cells, and so forth.  The underlying structure of reality is not really stateless, but is constantly performing intricate maneuvers.  If a person were actually able to watch the dance of a single electron, he or she might see it do boring repetition for years, and suddenly jump halfway across the Universe for an instant.

A next step upward arrives at molecules, which are compounds created by combining separate atoms.  There are two concepts of organic: structures arrived at from an evolution of natural components and physical laws, and specific molecules composed primarily of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon.  There are, of course, gray areas where it can be difficult to tell the difference between inorganic and organic structures.
The organic molecules classified as DNA and RNA are important to all life on Earth, since they are the constituents of all life, as we know it.  Still, these molecules themselves obey all the physical laws of reality; therefore, they certainly maintain all the bottom-up relationships that have been previously discussed.
At first glance, DNA and RNA do not look that special in relation to other organic molecules.  However, DNA and RNA can form complex (mostly) right-handed helical sequences that can replicate and can establish relationships between micro and macro structures.  These molecules strike a fine balance: they are stable enough to create living things, but they are also unstable enough to allow living things to evolve.

What are the features that distinguish living things from non-living things?  Living things require a supportive, stable environment, in which they can exhibit an action time-scale that is far more rapid than that of their surroundings.  Being alive is all about energy flow.  While it is basically chemical energy, it ends up being electrical in nature, since all chemical energy is ultimately electrical energy.  It is the control of this electrical energy that allows all living things to lead subjective lives that lack clear predictability.

On Earth, cells are the basic unit of life.  Living cells are not trivial, since they have had four billion years of evolution in their history.  Living cells delineate the maximum size for a single unit of life; all higher lifeforms are composed of single cells.  Again, this is a bottom-up approach.
Living cells represent emergent qualities not originally present in their inanimate components.  In turn, collections of related cells develop together to create organisms, which derive another emergent identity not originally present in the individual cells.  Organisms have had 550 million years of evolution on Earth.  Hostile conditions on the primeval Earth made organisms wait a long time for their chance to flourish.
The number of components pieces necessary for life to exist is staggering.  For a 150-pound human being, more atoms (about 7*10²⁷) are required than there are stars in the Universe (about 10²¹).  The number of cells in a human body is far more difficult to calculate; estimates can vary from 10*10¹² to 100*10¹².

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle is a measure of our reality in terms of a series of dimensionless constants.  These constants seem to be fine-tuned to a staggering number of decimal places.  That is, if any of these constants were to be tweaked too much, our reality would end up being physically impossible.  Assumptions can also be derived from these constants, which determine the possible distributions of various entities, including habitable planets and intelligent life.
These assumptions are highly teleological, based strongly on human bias and an insistence that all life, including that of human beings, is extremely special.  This is also a top-down approach to reality.  This approach is unwieldy, since it seems to require the existence of an omnipotent, but separate God at the top.
Our reality is so incomprehensible that it scarcely seems to be the work of a master craftsman.  Our reality looks like it was designed by a committee, which is equivalent to saying it is the result of organic evolution operating in response to feedback.  This does not preclude the presence of God; in fact, it makes God even more important, because God ends up with a vested interest in all processes.  However, a God of Process is not the same as a theistic God, since a God of Process is essential to supply continuity and feedback, not to rule or dominate.

Despite the philosophical problems generated by the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, one conclusion turns out to be true: our physical reality is the only way it can be, based upon all the natural laws and constraints.

In a teleological model, all of reality is secondary and subservient to the needs of human beings.  We are at the top, so we get to appropriate everything farther down for out own purposes.  This creates destructive feedback which can endanger our very existence.
In a bottom-up model, every component becomes important for entities higher up.  Therefore, the existence of lower entities has meaning, because it is part of and important to the whole.  Organic lifeforms have been mostly prospering on Earth for the last 550 million years.  There has been a lot of creation and perishing going on; however, based on what we see happening today, endless instances of life came and went that considered their lives to be individually important.  This implies some basic measure of faith, since prehistoric creatures (apparently) did not constantly get depressed and commit suicide.

Unlike in the past, modern reconstructions of prehistoric life, especially that of dinosaurs, show complex communities, punctuated by display, sexuality, social striving, child-rearing, and so forth.  There was even some advanced intelligence, but apparently no intelligence as advanced as for human beings.  Even dinosaurs that were clearly lacking in intelligence prospered.

Process Philosophers have looked to living organisms for clues how life worked in the past.  This is usually characterized as instinct, but then instinct has to be defined.  Classical Darwinists often claim that this all arises strictly from each organism’s genetic code, but neo-post-modern Darwinists, such as myself, think there is even more going on.  As we observe living things, including other human beings, it seems obvious that all seem to know things that they are not consciously aware of or even to know things that they should not .  All living things seem to be the recipients of extra information from some kind of feedback.
Subjective feedback, added to all the layers of natural feedback, is often referred to as Objective Immortality.  It could account for the fact that many feel they are in touch with past lives.  It would also explain how a bunch of related cells can come together to create a temporary organism that imagines itself to be an independent self, when in actuality its subjective contribution to a larger reality is far more important than its ability to perpetuate itself.

Extra awareness has long been claimed for certain individuals.  Some psychics claim to see dead people, and Biblical prophets often claimed to talk to God.  Our brains developed great processing power about 200,000 years ago.  However, not everyone seems to benefit, since some of us are autistic and have interface problems.  Due to my affliction with Asperger’s Syndrome, I could not even have written this essay more than five years ago.
Surprisingly, the United States military has corroborated many of my assertions.  The military learned that 4% of fighter pilots are responsible for 40% of all kills.  Apparently, many pilots have an extra-awareness of what is going on in the sky around them that cannot be accounted for by instrumentation or simple dexterity.  The military also made the conclusion that everyone possessed some degree of extra-awareness, so their goal is to learn how to teach such skills to everyone.

Many will probably view the content of the last paragraphs as more than outrageous.  I have documented what I now sense to be actual reality.  I admit that I do not like top-down systems, and that such ordering has always placed me at a disadvantage as an autistic person.  A comment was recently made that it seemed obvious why I was attracted to Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Christ churches, since such congregational institutions have a natural disdain for the potential abuses of top-down authority.

The evolution of human intelligence has been difficult to figure out.  Our brains reached their current size about 200,000 years ago, but it was not until about 50,000 years ago that we invented art and music.  Even later, about 5,000 years ago, we invented written language and permanent settlements, which is often referred to as an explosive development of intelligence.  This was not about processing power, but about what those things human beings chose to think about.  Was this strange timeline due to extra evolutionary nuances in our brains, or a structuring what would be referred to a conscious part of our brains versus the subconscious part?
There has been speculation that our processing power was originally developed to deal with a lot of complex social relationships.  There were a lot of subjective features in primitive societies too, such as art, music, tool and weapon development, and adornment, but these were basically just embellishments, not advanced abstractions like those associated with written language and symbol processing.
Feedback mechanisms that have been in place for a long time can be almost ritualistic.  It is not clear why something that works so well can suddenly shift, especially if it leads to the sudden development of abstract reasoning.  What happened, if it was not about innate intelligence?  Even with intelligence and the presence of technical visionaries, the Roman Empire did not usher in an Industrial Age; that had to wait until the eighteenth century.  Possibility in and of itself did not lead to implementation.

Gorillas and chimpanzees can learn to use symbolic language; however, they only learn this from human beings, since no members of any of their troops seem to have thought of such a thing as yet.  This is why extra-terrestrials are often given credit for human development, but could such events have been sufficient to change human psyches?  More likely, some local human tribe made innovations that spread through feedback, either in the form of cultural diffusion or even parallelism.

Biological evolution and human societies might benefit from a form of feedback called parallelism.  This is the assertion that once something is learned or developed in one population, it might appear in a separate population with no physical connection.  Throughout geologic time, parallelism has been quite common in evolution.  Separate species have often evolved to look alike.  Eyes have evolved more than forty times from an approximately similar set of genes.  Biologists have repeatedly been surprised to learn that genes that perform a specific function in another species lie present but dormant in our own species.
Human evolution and culture has had evidence of parallelism.  Cultural idiosyncrasies, such as the Red Clay variation, often seemed to have spread throughout a larger area than was possible through basic dispersion.  Currently, there has been concern that Folsom spear points keep showing in apparently unrelated locations.  However, giving aliens from outer space credit really just substitutes a natural feedback system with an unnatural feedback system.

Process Philosophy has always had trouble defining the origin of all the faith and hope necessary to give meaning to our lives.  I believe that pertinent feedback is the source of all faith and hope.  The organic nature of all reality has a great deal of inertia that induces all the component processes to keep going. If people want to call this God, that may be an appropriate explanation.  Still, such faith and hope remains relative to the way things are, and cannot be an absolute measure of anything, or supply any ultimate meaning.  There is a disturbing conclusion in all this: human beings just have more processing power to access feedback, but real intelligence might be totally different.
Feedback is great, but the processing power of our minds gives us access to too much information, which leads to subjective excess.  This is why there are warnings for people to slow down and practice more contemplation.  Sometimes, this might be a matter of life and death, if we do not heed important warnings.  Developing some extra-awareness about what is happening around us can end up saving our lives.  In top-down hierarchies, many questions about fate keep popping up that never have any good answers, such as how come God is always saving some people in accidents, but letting others die?  In bottom-up hierarchies, the question becomes how come some people hear God’s warnings, but others do not?  Top-down hierarchies have endless quests to assign blame, while bottom-up hierarchies can find no one to blame.

I believe that all top-down hierarchies are artificial and unstable.  Eventually, all top-down hierarchies will collapse.  We see this in the current financial crisis, where an inordinate amount of power was vested in CEO’s at the top.  These CEO’s all seem to be verbally articulate and understand subjective communication, but they seem to be totally ignorant of all the objective processes that they are supposed to be tracking.  In modern lay-off cycles, there has been a tendency to keep people with all the desired communication skills, but to eliminate all the less verbally articulate analysts and technical workers.
I went through this.  I was laid-off off in 2002 and retired in 2003.  I see this as a kind of purging that takes place in top-down hierarchies.  Bottom-up hierarchies can create nearly infinite diversity, but top-down hierarchies always seek to control or eliminate diversity.  Religious institutions that place God and/or a prophet at the top of all hierarchies often develop an irrational fear of diversity.  Instead of conservatism being objectively based, and liberalism being subjectively based, the new conservatives practice a kind of right-wing liberalism.  They become ideological tyrants who label any kind of opposition as liberalism.

As a final point, I will state that there is a reason why realities such as universes are not top-down in their structure.  Our universe is billions of years old, and it might go on for trillions of more years.  Any universe based on a top-down structure would have collapsed long ago.  We can place human beings at the center of all creation, but that will not prevent us from going extinct.  The fossil record indicates that extinctions are always accompanied by a loss of diversity.  This means that the more our top-down institutions work to reduce the diversity around us, the more they hasten the extinction of our species.