Centralized / Decentralized

Centralized / Decentralized ... Cause / Effect

Humans claim sentience. I don't dispute the claim: I only add that sentience must be a spectrum, and that we can't possibly know how "left" or "right" we are on the spectrum (left or right as in statistical limits). Are we toward its beginning? or toward "the end"? (Does such a spectrum even have an end? does it even have a beginning?)

Recently some humans share the claim of self-awareness with a couple of other mammals: the chimp, the orangutan. Note: we're all mammals. All bilaterally symmetrical. All vertabrates. We all have a top and a bottom. We all have a face at the top end. It's not surprising that we should associate self-awareness and sentience with having a bilaterally symmetrical face: and at the top end.
pk loves to point out that we have a "face" at the other end too. On women it's called "ass" or "pussy." (link temp. down)Humans are social: though some males and a very few females are loners. Chimps too are social. Orangutans ... uh ... on occasion: all the adults males are loners. (I suggest you leave them alone: unless you want to see some exquisite violence: exercised against you!)

Social, self-aware, sentient humans have a trick: they generalize. And they have a social trick: they grab generalizations made by somebody smart, and apply them: stupidly.

For example:
Newton was very smart. He figured out some characteristics of gravity. He figured out lots of things. Newton never said he had figured out everything. On the contrary, he said he had picked up a couple of pretty shells from along a vast shore.That's all right: the group tells the lie for him: we can figure out anything. It's not that we have this and that fragment of knowledge; no, no: we have knowledge. God has knowledge. the church, the state has knowledge. experts, the university has knowledge.If I hit you in the head with a stone ax, you might fall down. I see myself as the cause of your falling down. I generalize: I cause things. My generalization is stolen by the group: we cause things. the generalization becomes fuzzy: we cause all things.Uh, no, wait: we cause all good things; all bad things are caused by the enemy.We group together. Now and then the group follows together a decision of some individual. Let's all go beat up on the rooster who's down in his luck, has lost a few feathers. Let's kill him.
We centralize, we form a hierarchy. It works! We form a fearsome efficiency. We worship centralization, hierarchy, efficiency.

Now we do something that makes this individual think that our self-awareness, our sentience (our hierarchy and our efficiency), are definitely on the beginner's side of things: we made flawed generalizations about centralization: the universe must be caused! the universe must be centrally caused! the universe must be hierarchically caused!

Looking at a problem we truck in assumptions about centralization, about cause. We impose hierarchies whether they're there or not.
I always get a kick on sports shows, the commentator says, "There's the first lady, leading the cheers": where some president's wife is more likely to be behind the crowd in the clapping. The network does not get a flood of raspberries: we swallow the flagrant imposition.We sometimes have a true perception, but inevitably spoil it: what was wrong with the Soviet was Stalin; then we think: the solution would be Nixon.

I can imagine cavemen making these errors. They too were sentient, had faces, had a top and a bottom. But they weren't over-organized within an inch of their lives the way all modern kleptocrats are. We escape the church, but fall into the school. we escape Stalin, but fall under Bush.

If we consider the universe we'll find centers: lots of them: billions and trillions. Our earth is the center of our earth moon system. Our sun is the center of the solar system. But there are hundreds of billions of suns: just in this galaxy. Cells have centers: the nucleus. Atoms have centers: the nucleus. The galaxy itself seems to have something like a center.
(Always though beware: does it really? or are we polluting our perception with our prejudice? are we over-reifying our model?)

But consider the universe. We can't see it; we can only see light generated by nearby stars and that light reflecting from other matter. We have to try to conceive it, we have to try to model it. Look at some of the models developed by big astronomy teams. Is there a center? Is there anything like a center? Is center an appropriate concept for the universe? Beware of imposing order on one system by inappropriate analogy with order from a different system.

Does the universe modeled, in any of the models, "look" hierarchical? Where's its "top"? (And where is "north"?) Does the model look like it has a boss? a president? a god? It would be foolish to assume that it doesn't just because we don't see one, it would be foolish to assume that it does: just because we're encouraged to see things that way.

But the universe is too big, too unknown. There are lots of things nearer to hand that we can also look at. Check out a model of a nice big fat organic molecule.
more coming

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These thoughts fit with a number of pk projects. First I post this draft at my IonaArc blog, but the materials are destined for InfoAll.org and for the Thinking Tools and Society sections at .

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Nam myoho renge kyo: the universal law of cause and effect
Sure there are causes, sure there are effects: many kinds: not all centralized, not all direct, not all top down: not at all as simple as billiards.
But trust the group to get all generalizations wrong.