User:JessieHenshaw
Jessie has been doing advanced research on the organization and behavior of individual uncontrolled viral systems and other uncontrolled emergent organization in nature for over 30 years. Her innovative work is developing a new science of natural systems, as a practical new general scientific method.
Her method uses physics principles as diagnostic tools, not for representing but for investigating complex natural systems as objects of the environment, ones that develop individually by their own self-organizing growth and perhaps maturation. That includes all complex forms of life such as, organisms, ecologies, cultures, communities, languages, technologies, weather, etc. Such systems are uniquely the product of an initial seed of local organization and the individual process by which it develops in its environment.
Jessie has published important papers, under the pen name "P.F. Henshaw", though many of her best discoveries aren’t well understood by others yet. She lives in New York City, has a B.S. in physics from St. Lawrence University, an MFA in environmental design from the Univ. of Pennsylvania (under her former name "Philip"), and a quite substantial accumulated body of useful original research.
Research Archive – http://synapse9.com/ Blog: Reading Nature’s Signals – http://synapse9.com/signals Publication & Resources – http://synapse9.com/phpub.htm Consulting Services – http://synapse9.com/HDS.htm
To study natural systems one considers them as self-defining, by the organization of their parts, located within their unique self-defined boundary of interconnection, having developed by their unique self-organizing process. There are no lasting formulas for the rules that complex systems sometimes seem to follow, except perhaps that those temporary rules will end up being broken, by a rather predictable succession of accumulating and dissipating processes one tries to find and understand. To make that useful you still look for "formulas", where nature has created highly complex organization that appears to work very simply. Then you can begin to ask questions about when that state of complex order will change and why.
The most common reason for systems to break their own rules is changing scale, either getting too big for their prior internal working to work, or too small. Then the resilience of the former design disappears, and something has to change. That most often occurs when the rule the system is following is for either repeated expansion (growth) or contraction (decay) in the system itself. Growth and decay are nature's mechanisms of beginning and ending systems, and precipitate change in the system at their natural limits.
This approach is unusual, then, for actually abandoning the idea that nature follows scientific theories. It instead uses theory as a tool for exploring how nature works by itself. So the interest is less in imitating nature, and more in exploring nature, seeking "high fidelity" data and patterns to help raise leading questions about individual behaviors, rather than consistent data for making statistical predictions for defined classes of behaviors.
The conventional scientific method uses numerical data and rules to represent nature, and cannot actually even refer to "things" of nature in their natural form, except reduced to numbers. Particularly for subjects like economics, where all the parts of an economy are actively engaged in learning new ways of working together, it is just more accurate to represent the system as a learning process, rather than a set of fixed rules as with an equation.
What does not change are the more basic elements of science, such as that science is always a matter of discovering questions you can answer with high confidence.
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