It seems obvious that y'all don't "unplug" on the weekends. Do I have an antiquated conception of a healthy work-life balance? Anyway, the idea that natural subsystems don't consume more than they give back is just wrong ... maybe so ill-formed it's not even wrong. There's some hint of the naturalness fallacy. There's some over-simplified model of consumption and recycling. Etc. In every system (natural or not, whatever "not natural" might mean), each ... uh ... "species" will take whatever it can get, gorge itself to become fat and lazy, reproduce until all they can see to the horizon are their babies. Etc. What stops this from happening is some other species (or collection of species).
And, for sure, animals can be complex enough such that what stops it from happening sometimes are intra-individual patterns of self-destruction (maybe e.g. autoimmune disorders). We could resort to physics and talk about the interstitial spaces between species (at all scales) is entropy; you can fill the space up with species like some space-filling curve. But we don't need all that rigor. We can simply say there's always some infinitesimal interstitial space that isn't filled ... if only temporarily as species die and get replaced. If there is something we might call "natural", it is that space-filling impetus; the generative principle that all models are always wrong. Sure, humans (and other large apes) might be a bit different in the sense that our generality/universality allows for *more* intra-individual, self-destructive tendencies. But we haven't yet seen that play out. Up to now, our generality has allowed us to don and doff overly-simplified models of the world that are just complex enough to work, but not complex enough to be True. More complex, but still overly simple, models try to account for "externalities", the "consuming and giving back" y'all are referring to. But the map is not the territory. Models are, by definition, not going to give back what they consume. What we need is model-free governance. On 1/19/25 9:47 AM, steve smith wrote:
The idea that "natural ecosystems do not consume more than they give back" is an example, however, of my maunderings on the "TANNSTAFFL" paradox. Circular/toroidal economies do seem to be less wasteful (in some sense) but Life exists situated in gradients and while it's signature trick is to export entropy from it's immediate context, it *exports* it, not *avoids* it? It seems as if this is all about defining "systems boundaries" which of course may be a contradiction in terms (or a tautology?).
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