Sustainability: The matter of time horizon and semantic closure

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a v a i l a b l e a t w w w. s c i e n c e d i r e c t . c o m

w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / e c o l e c o n

ANALYSIS

Sustainability: The matter of time horizon and semantic closure Horacio Velasco 88 Dr. Lazcano Street, Diliman 1103, Quezon City, Philippines

AR TIC LE I N FO

ABS TR ACT

Article history:

It is argued that the time horizon of consideration in our present efforts at sustainability is

Received 29 October 2006

not the correct time horizon. Implementation of the correct time horizon is revealed to

Received in revised form

require a bi-level control mode that has been termed semantic closure in theoretical biology.

22 March 2007

Daly's institutions for a steady-state economy are disclosed to afford the necessary

Accepted 1 May 2007

semantic closure. However, it is required that those institutions be switched from a steady-

Available online 27 June 2007

state mode of operation to a peculiar pulsing mode of operation according to seminal calculations by Dyson if true sustainability is to be attained.

Keywords:

© 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Sustainability Semantic closure Time horizon

1 Time horizon is obviously of paramount importance when one is concerned to achieve sustainability. It is therefore fair to ask if the time horizon of consideration in attempts at sustainability is the proper time horizon. In this regard, it is probably fair to say that the quotations to follow below from Cohen (1995: 232, 280–281) describe the characteristic time horizons commonly meant in efforts at sustainability. To quote Cohen: If a definition refers to a number of people that can be sustained into the indefinite future, it signals that this definition is not being used in practice, because the indefinite future cannot be measured now; it is simply unknowable.…

Is Cohen correct when he advises us that “human carrying capacity [read: sustainability] makes most sense when it refers to a well-defined and limited time horizon?” In other words, is the indefinite future to be constructed, piecemeal, through the temporally myopic concerns of each generation possible to the human species? Mounting evidence about the increasingly perilous state of the planet argues that this is not the correct way to construct the future. For example, Rees has been so persuaded by the available evidence as to have written a recent book estimating the chances of humanity's surviving the twenty-first century at only about 50%. The book is transparently entitled, Our Final Century.

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In the long term, technology can change the definition of resources, converting what was useless rock to a valuable resource… When it makes any sense at all, human carrying capacity makes most sense when it refers to a well-defined and limited time horizon.…

That constructing the future piecemeal is not the way to do it is vigorously impressed upon us by Georgescu-Roegen (1979: 96) as follows:

The concept of indefinite sustainability is a phantasm, a diversion from the difficult problems of today and the coming century.

The claim that standard economics is not concerned ‘with very long-run projections, but rather with the more immediate future,’ is another means of avoiding the main

E-mail address: [email protected]. 0921-8009/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.05.016

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issue that would incriminate the standard position. The problem of resources is not confined to the ‘foreseeable future,’ as many writers also insist, but concerns the entire future.… If the standard position concerns only what will happen to natural resources ‘in the immediate future’ of this moment of the twentieth century, then all the din about how the market mechanism (especially that moulded on standard assumptions) can save us from ecological catastrophes is utterly idle. But if the claim is that exponential growth can prevail not only in our immediate future but also in any ‘immediate future’ in the future, then the claim acquires a factual, nonparochial significance. What then does Georgescu-Roegen mean by “the entire future” when he prescribes it as the proper time horizon of consideration for sustainability at its most basic level of resource use? Implicit in Georgescu-Roegen's answer is the finitude of resources available to us, as finite beings, at any given time. This is a sound assumption because of the operation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This fundamental law of nature decrees that conversions of matter and energy from one form to another (at which time they can be modulated with information to yield man-made capital that yields desired services), while they do not destroy matter or energy, do progressively destroy the capacity of both matter (Pagels, 1982: 102) or energy to engage in further conversions because of their dissipation or dispersion by friction (in the main) and other processes. The rate and scale (i.e., per capita rate) of conversions, of course, determine, along with pollutive and environmental constraints, how long matter and energy may continue to participate in conversions. Recycling will not, in the ultimate analysis, offset the inevitable outcome, at any constant rate and scale of conversion, however small, of universal dissipation of matter and energy into a state of irretrievable uselessness (called thermodynamic equilibrium) pointed to by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is because the very process of recycling itself expends resources (according to the rate and scale of recycling!) that will themselves have to be recycled, and so on, in an unending and self-defeating regress. This is the reason why Cohen's caution in one of the quotes above about technology possibly yielding resources from sources that formerly had not been sources (pollution, say; or perhaps, mineral dispersions in common rock) is, at best, the provision (at any constant rate of use) of dwindling resources, not exponentially increasing resources. Given the finite amount of resources available to us at any given time, Georgescu-Roegen (1979: 101–102) argues his answer by first rejecting the accepted practice in standard economics of distributing exhaustible resources, over time, “so that the sum of discounted future utilities [read: satisfactions] must be a maximum.” What this means he illustrates with the following example: [C]onsider a population of three individuals, one of whom will die each day. If they possess among them six daily rations, they should distribute them in time by discounting the future only according to the probability of survival. This yields the distribution 3, 2, 1, not 2, 2, 2. As we see, the saying ‘let's eat, drink, and be merry today because tomorrow we may die’ makes sense, but only because humans are mortals.

For such entities as a nation and more especially, mankind, that happen to be “quasi-immortal”, however, the discounting procedure described above “is wrong from any viewpoint. There is no reason why such an entity will not experience the same needs at all times.” Accordingly, if discounting is to be dispensed with in the inter-generational distribution of resources for a potentially quasi-immortal entity, the problem then becomes, “analytically”, the spreading of resources “evenly in time, which in the case of an infinite time horizon” means, paradoxically enough, “that each year a null amount of resources should be consumed.” To get past this “analytical impasse”, what needs to be done then is to secure “the maximum ‘amount of life’, measured in man × years, which is tantamount to obtaining the longest life span for the human species.” Precisely a way of securing the maximum life span for the human species has apparently been afforded us by Dyson (1979a).

3 Dyson has shown that it is possible to work with even a finite amount of resources and make that amount last for virtually, if not actually, an infinite time horizon. The key is to vary the schedule of resource mobilization so that it is not at a constant rate. Rather, you want resource mobilization to proceed at a non-constant rate by observing a pulsing mode. More precisely, if resource mobilization could be periodically suspended altogether by human society going into stasis, in the manner of seeds or spores, as encoded initial conditions or boundary constraints for particular dynamics, in equilibrium or nonresource dissipating structures, such as crystals (or other seed-spore analogues); and if the periods of stasis (alternating with periods of activity) were to be allowed to lengthen without bound, then Dyson showed that even finite energy resources could suffice for literally eternity. For example, Dyson was able to show that solar output for a mere 8 h would suffice to sustain a population of beings of the same order of magnitude that presently subsists on this planet literally, forever, if only energy mattered. Of course, however, it is not only energy that matters. Matter matters too; and it is thought that matter decays. More precisely, it is thought that protons decay. Still, “the average time required for a proton to decay” has been estimated at anywhere from 1028 to as much as 1080 years. The lower figure corresponds to a time span that is a billion billion times longer than the present age of the universe. The qualification “average” means, however, that if the average time for a proton to decay were 1032 years, for example, then you might expect one or two protons to decay in your body over your lifetime (Davies, 1994: 93). Accordingly, while the life span we may expect for our species from limited resources may not literally be eternity, it can be virtually that. Moreover, the quality of life afforded by such limited resources need have no upper limit. Although the amount of information society has to work with must be bounded at any given time because of limited resources to maintain that information in material structures and limited resources which such information might modulate, the quality of

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mental and physical experiences possible from such a state of affairs is without upper bound precisely because there is a distinction between quality and quantity (Davies, 1994: 109– 112, 116–118). Precisely such a distinction between quality and quantity has been implied by Boulding (Daly, 1996: 67–68), who has urged that, since it is from the capital stock of the economy from which we derive satisfactions, not from the additions to it (production) or the subtractions from it (consumption), the object of economic policy should be, not to maximize production or consumption, but rather to minimize it! Subtle new developments in this line of inquiry were precipitated in 1999 when Krauss and Starkman sent Dyson a paper purporting to show that Dyson got it wrong in his 1979 paper when he concluded that indefinite qualitative evolution of human society was possible. Through an exchange of calculations between the two parties, it was revealed that both parties could be right (Dyson, 2001): Dyson would be right if the universe were fundamentally continuous or analog in character and Krauss and Starkman would be right if the universe were fundamentally discrete or digital in character. As Dyson pointed out, however, the accelerating expansion of the universe into infinity as revealed by the latest cosmological evidence renders the universe more and more analog with the passage of time. Still, Dyson posed the results of his debate with Krauss and Starkman to the scientific community at Edge.org to elicit clarifying responses and the response he got from Smolin, showed that, while Dyson is fundamentally correct, the situation is far more subtle than Dyson imagined it to be. The gist of Smolin's response is that recent developments in the field of quantum gravity indicate that the universe is probably fundamentally discrete in character. However, this does not imply that it is therefore digital in character. This is because information in the universe may still be coded in such a way that it cannot “be represented digitally by any computer that could be built inside the universe.” This could very well be the case if information in the universe is, as quantum gravity suggests, coded topologically and combinatorially. What this means then is that, unlike digital coding in which “all the possible states of memory are equally accessible,” with combinatorial coding what happens is that “the time required to store or retrieve information depends very strongly on the state in which the information is coded.” That is, unlike digital coding, there are context specificities involved with information processing using combinatorial coding. If so, the implication for Dyson's work of such a state of affairs was articulated by Smolin as follows: [I]f information can be stored in the topology of a system, then the system can be cooled or expanded arbitrarily without degrading the information. At the very least, if the universe has non-trivial topology, on either the large or small scale, there are possibilities for storage of combinatorial information where the discreteness of the states are maintained for arbitrarily low energies. At worst life will be able to survive by coding itself into the quantum geometry of space itself. Thus, it appears that Dyson's calculations may be upheld even in a fundamentally discrete universe expanding in an

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accelerating manner into infinity if combinatorial–topological coding is in effect in the universe. That this might indeed be the case at small spatial scales, at least, is suggested by Smolin when he cites the hypothesis of Kauffman. Kauffman thinks that the information which instructs genes to turn on or off (which behavior is extremely important to and contextspecific in embryological development) “may be partially coded in the knotting of DNA molecules” (these are Smolin's words). Kauffman has been led to this conclusion because of “the existence of enzymes which change the topology of the folding of the DNA molecules” (again, Smolin's words). (Topology refers to qualitative connectivity without regard to quantitative measure.) Even if combinatorial–topological coding were not in effect in the universe, however, Dyson's pulsing mode thermodynamics would still purchase sustainability considerably greater than steady-state thermodynamics.

4 The lesson of Georgescu-Roegen's arguments and their realization by Dyson's calculations are that if we are interested in sustainability, then we cannot be instructed by time spans responsive only to our myopic concerns as finite beings, individually or in the aggregate—myopic concerns that are shaped and maintained by the market or price system (Perrings, 1987: 139–140). Rather, the time span that must instruct us must also address the imperatives of indefinite species survival at the most fundamental level of resource availability to the limit permitted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In accordance with the nonlinearity attending the inevitable qualitative transformations (GeorgescuRoegen, 1971: 101–103) of resources, over time, decreed by the Second Law, the time span involved cannot be built up piecemeal through the autonomous, myopic resource mobilizations of each generation. Rather, because the whole is more than the sum of the parts (this is precisely what nonlinearity implies), the resource mobilization of each generation must be instructed by the demands, in effect, of the entire series of generations that Dyson's calculations show is possible. Clearly, special cultural interventions will be necessary if we are to rise above our individual and collective temporal myopia. Fortunately, just such cultural interventions have apparently been afforded us by Daly through his institutions for a steady-state economy (SSE). By a SSE, Daly means an economy that does not grow (i.e., increase its production or consumption) but rather develops (i.e., improves the quality of the capital stock), in much the same way as the Earth does not grow but develops (Daly, 1996: 31). The minimal institutions for a SSE include (Daly, 1977: 50–75) one for controlling resource inflow into the economy (i.e., quantitative, macrolevel boundary constraints on resource availability within which the market may allocate resources at the micro-level); one for controlling population growth (i.e., macro-level, quantitative limits to population growth within which individual families at the micro-level may determine the number of their children according to their circumstances); and one for controlling income spread (i.e., by imposing maximum and minimum limits on income [Daly, 1996: 212]).

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5 The details of these institutions are better left to Daly's incomparable prose. What needs to be impressed here is that those institutions display a bi-level control mode (as suggested by the parenthetical elaborations provided above) plainly described by Daly to the following effect: “they provide the necessary social control with a minimum sacrifice of personal freedom” by providing “macrostability [i.e., top-down, global control] while affording microvariability [i.e., bottom-up, local control].” This union of top-down and bottom-up control that the SSE institutions would afford has been termed semantic closure in theoretical biology by Pattee (1997, 1995, 1973) and has been identified as the feature of complexity in the living domain that distinguishes that complexity from complexity in the non-living domain (Cottam et al., 2004). Semantic closure developed and evolved from the measurement process in physics (Pattee, 1995: 13). This is the process in which the laws of physics come into actual contact with the universe (Pattee, 1995: 11, 15). Prior to the measurement process, the laws of physics are so general of application that they find no particular application (Stewart, 1995: 157). They are effectively divorced from the universe until the measurement process transpires (Prigogine, 1996: 157). This measurement process involves the complementation of subject and object systems, which systems may themselves be concurrently formed during the measurement process itself as the emergent, stabilized consequences of instabilities (Prigogine, 1996: 151, 179). Subject and object systems are complementary in the sense of logical irreducibility to one another. Subject systems (which may be generally interpreted as boundary conditions and more complicated boundary constraints) select particular dynamics described by the physical law operative in and describing the object system dynamics. In order to be able to do this, however, the subject system must elude the description of the physical law operative in the object system. This is not to say that the subject system is incapable of submitting to such description; it is only to say that, if one insists on such a unified description of a reduced single system, then another subject system will be required to actualize the unified system within a more complex, complementary or cooperative dialectical system through the measurement process (Pattee, 2001: 15). The measurement process, therefore, through its evolutionary descendant of semantic closure in sufficiently complex structures, affords us, through the contingency it affords through boundary constraints, the possibility of exercising genuine ethical choice undetermined by physical, and more generally, natural law. The fact that subject systems exercise selective control in the propagation of the dynamics in object systems may therefore be seen to be, in a sense, a macro-level control on the micro-level control exerted by the object system. Thus, we already see a bi-level control mode emerge with the measurement process. A bi-level control mode implies hierarchical control. Such hierarchical control acts “as a collective constraint or rule” (Pattee, 1969: p. 3) and has a natural affinity to life because such control insulates life from the disruptive vagaries of the environment. The insulation transpires

because, the better the hierarchical control, then the more selective it becomes in propagating particular details of the complementary micro-level dynamics while ignoring all others. In so doing, the hierarchical control leaves the dialectical system of which it is a part less hostage to environmental perturbations of those dynamical details it ignores and indeed affords those dynamical details a more stable environment for expression. “For example, a good stoplight system does not measure all the dynamical details of the traffic, but only the minimum amount of information about the time and direction of cars…” The dynamical details it ignores then become available for the use and instruction of the individual drivers so that they can most effectively adjust to the imposed macro-level constraint according to their particular circumstances (Pattee, 1969: 4). Reciprocally, the complex behaviors of the drivers enormously augment the simple information contained in the macro-level constraint of the stoplight. The fact that the subject system in the measurement process exercises selective discrimination over the dynamics of the object system argues that the propagation of the dialectical system in such selective discrimination fosters may be accurately interpreted as both a switch function (Pattee, 1973: 131) and as the communication of a message (Pattee, 1969: 5). The switch transpires when the subject system, in effect, creates a context-specific model of the dynamics in the object system through its selective action. How such a switch function may, in the abstract, generate indefinite evolution, has been described by Pattee (1973: 140) thus: [W]e associate the origin of switching behavior with singularities in a continuous dynamical system and the significance or interpretation of switching behavior as a dynamical ‘folding’ process… This interpretive dynamical mode may itself exhibit singularities that generate a new level of discrete description, and so this process may be repeated, producing a hierarchy of discrete symbolic levels interfacing on the lower generative side as singularities of a continuous matrix and on the upper generative side as constraints within a larger dynamical system. The foregoing dialectic described, in the abstract, appears to map nicely upon the endosymbiotic evolution of complexity in the biosphere propounded by Margulis. This endosymbiotic evolution argues that all the multicellular complexity in the biosphere has been built up from the symbiotic assimilation of formerly free-living bacteria in ever more complex structures. Dawkins (1995: 52) informs us that this endosymbiotic theory for the evolution of complexity in the biosphere is now almost universally accepted by biologists. He describes that evolution as follows: Each one of us is a community of a hundred million million mutually dependent eukaryotic cells. Each one of those cells is a community of thousands of specially tamed bacteria, entirely enclosed within the cell… A single animal or plant is a vast community of communities, packed in interacting layers, like a rain forest. As for a rain forest itself, it is a community seething with perhaps ten million species of organisms, every individual member of every species being itself a community of communities of domesticated bacteria.

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That the selective discrimination by subject systems of the dynamical details in object systems also corresponds to the communication of a message also follows because a message (in this case, that symbolized by the propagated dialectic) can only emerge when extraneous, microscopic details are ignored. (Consider your ability to communicate if you had to consult a grammar book every time you had to compose a sentence.) Hence, the entirely apropos reference to the complementation of subject and object systems that have exceeded a certain threshold of complexity as semantic closure. Such a threshold of complexity was disclosed by a seminal study in 1948 by von Neumann (Pattee, 1995: 10–11). Von Neumann pointed out that if complexity is to indefinitely evolve, then it cannot be below a certain threshold of complexity. If it were below the threshold, complexity could then only degenerate, over time. Rather, complexity must exceed the threshold through complementation of dynamics with symbolic description with these peculiar characteristics: the description must be both capable of being transmitted or copied, syntactically, without interpretation, and interpreted, semantically, to control construction (Pattee, 1997: 71; Casti, 1994: 221–223). This complementation of symbolic instruction and dynamics (i.e., semantic closure) was first achieved by the cell (Pattee, 1982: 339) through its complementation of genetic instructions (i.e., symbolic description) for linear strings of amino acids and the subsequent nonlinear dynamical folding (i.e., dynamics) of linear amino acid strings into functional, three-dimensional proteins. Significantly, von Neumann's analysis preceded the actual discovery of the replication process of the cell and that replication process conformed to von Neumann's analysis exactly—with one revealing difference: the syntactic transmission of information (corresponding to the copying of genetic information) occurs prior to the interpretation of information (corresponding to genetic translation) in the cell whereas in von Neumann's analysis the order of these steps is reversed. This difference, of course, corresponds to the intrusion of contingency in the actual world (indeterminate, stochastic boundary constraints) upon von Neumann's abstract analysis. What semantic closure adds to von Neumann's analysis is an elucidation of the nature of the symbolic descriptions involved. In von Neumann's analysis, the symbolic description consisted of computer programs (hence, the reference to the product of von Neumann's abstract analysis as a von Neumann machine). In semantic closure, the symbolic description consists of boundary constraints. For example, as already adverted to above, genes only specify the linear sequence of amino acids in a protein. How this linear sequence folds in three-dimensional space to confer the specific functional properties of proteins is left unspecified by the gene and is rather left to the contrivance of selfassembly by nonlinear dynamics that resists explicit prior specification in the vast preponderance of cases due to its complexity. Concerning symbols (represented in this case by genes) in semantic closure relationships, Pattee has written (1995: 15): “[S]ymbols must be viewed as belonging to the general category of initial conditions, which also includes boundary

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conditions and constraints. Ordinary initial conditions are without regularity, but symbols are special collections of constraints that allow us to describe symbolic behavior by rules.” That the semantic closure first achieved by the cell need not be confined to the cell is plainly articulated by Pattee (1982: 339) thus: “At higher evolutionary levels, the products of genes can become symbol tokens themselves within semantically closed epigenetic loops.” Certainly, among those who do not appreciate the subtle distinctions semantic closure makes are the neo-Darwinians. For example, Dawkins (1995: 20) has written: “The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike. Apart from differences of jargon, the pages of a molecular biology manual might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.” In other words, the neo-Darwinians imagine that information content regardless of the quality of the material substrate upon which the information is imprinted is all that matters. This is a non-trivial mistake. In economics, a similar belief leads to the neoclassical or mainstream economist's creed (Daly, 1996: 76–77) that manmade capital (i.e., technological ingenuity) may substitute for natural capital (i.e., natural resources). As Costanza (1981: 141) has remarked, such a belief amounts to a belief in Maxwell's demon in a business suit. (Maxwell's demon is a hypothetical entity of molecular dimensions conjured up by the Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, precisely to theoretically investigate whether intelligence of sufficient effectual discrimination may overcome the inevitable degradation of resources that the Second Law of Thermodynamics asserts must transpire, over time, at any constant, finite rate of use.) This demon is, currently, still exorcized from physics. Those who believe, otherwise, may easily put their belief to a test by simply cutting themselves from resource inflows from the environment and pitting their “pure intelligence” against the degradation of the finite resources at their disposal. Certainly, semantic closure does not endorse this demon. As Pattee (1988: 70) makes explicit, the relationship between symbolic description and dynamics (“matter” or “material” in the context of Pattee's explanation) is as follows: … (1) [W]e can simulate everything [at least, approximately] by universal symbol systems, (2) we can realize universal symbol systems with material constructions, and (3) we can realize endless types of structures and behaviors by symbolic constraints on matter. But we must also accept the fundamental impossibility: we cannot realize material systems with symbols alone. Von Neumann, unlike the neo-Darwinians, was certainly not unaware of the bearing of the qualitative aspects of the material substrate upon which information is to be imprinted. Thus, von Neumann wrote (Pattee, 2001: 7): ‘By axiomatizing automata in this manner one has thrown half the problem out of the window, and it may be the more important half. One has resigned oneself not to explain how these parts are made up of real things, specifically, how these parts are made up of actual elementary particles, or even of higher chemical mole-

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cules. One does not ask the most intriguing, exciting, and important question of why these molecules or aggregates which in nature really occur in these [cellular] parts are the sort of things they are, why they are essentially very large molecules in some cases but large aggregates in other cases, why they always lie in a range beginning at a few microns and ending at a few decimeter. This is a very peculiar range for an elementary object, since it is, even on a linear scale, at least five powers of ten away from the sizes of really elementary entities.’ Because of the inability of the neo-Darwinians to appreciate the subtle argument semantic closure makes that genes are not computer programs but rather boundary constraints, they have been misled into supposing that the unit of selection in natural selection is the gene. This is a mistake. It is the “semantic loop” (including extended loops in epigenesis) of the symbolic boundary constraints and their complementary nonlinear dynamics that is the unit of selection. It is this loop that defines “the ‘self’ in self replication” (Pattee, 1982: 334). The implication of this assertion, as we shall see in the next section, is that life, for it to be sustained, must actively work to see to it that the restrictive boundary constraints compatible with its existence continue to prevail.

6 Daly and Cobb Jr. (1989: 21) have characterized the neoclassical, mainstream economics that governs the resource mobilization practices of this planet as an “ideology of death.” The notion of semantic closure discussed in the previous section shows that they are precisely correct in their characterization: neoclassical economics is concerned primarily to further the bottom-up control exerted by the market. Thus, even in neoclassical economics' measure to account for the collective insult of environmental degradation wrought by private market activity, local, bottom-up, micro-level (Daly, 1996: 45–46) control is favored: cost–benefit analysis with truncated time horizons to exclude uncertainty, thereby reducing economics to a spurious pseudo-dynamics propped up by “ceteris paribus conditions” (Mirowski, 1990, 290) and unencumbered by consideration of contingent boundary constraints. Global, top-down, macrolevel control is not considered. Such top-down control, however, simply cannot be avoided if life is to be sustained: for the top-down control would correspond, at the least, to boundary constraints (Matsuno, 2004) of the extremely restrictive nature compatible with life. As Lovelock (1991) has argued with great persuasion, were it not for the activities of bacteria, over billions of years, acting, on a planetary (and therefore, eventually biospheric) scale, to preserve the inordinately exclusive boundary constraints compatible with life, life would have long ceased to exist on this planet. More precisely, as Lovelock (1991: 21–22, 79–83, 95–101, 130) points out, a lifeless planet evolving according to the laws of physics and chemistry alone would quickly move towards equilibrium conditions in which all possible chemical reactions capable of taking place from micro-level interactions had taken place. For example, two gases, such as oxygen and

methane, that react with one another, could not be expected to indefinitely co-exist in the atmosphere of a lifeless planet. Rather, such a planet would have its atmosphere dominated by equilibrium gases of a generally unreactive nature, such as carbon dioxide (which is in fact the case for Mars and Venus). Yet, on the Earth, we observe oxygen and methane co-existing with one another and carbon dioxide present only in trace amounts. This argues the presence of processes on this planet maintaining non-equilibrium conditions—Life. Lovelock elaborates his argument as follows: He notes that life on Earth is composed of cells. Those cells are enclosed in membranes that, while “essential and irreplaceable”, are also “the most fragile and vulnerable part of an organism.” As Lovelock instructs us, while it may take high temperatures (such as is to be obtained in cooking in an oven) to break the bonds of atoms, the “tenuous, soap-bubble-like forces holding together the cell membrane are weak enough to be broken by no more than even hot or cold weather.” Accordingly, for life to persist on Earth, conditions must be kept at that restrictive range of, say, “temperature, salinity, acidity, redox potential, water availability” compatible with the integrity of the cell membrane. Since life has managed to survive for nearly 4 billion years on this planet, it is highly improbable that the restrictive range of conditions compatible with its continued existence (through compatibility with the cell membrane) can have obtained solely by chance. Life, simply through its reactive activities, to the prevailing environmental conditions, must have intervened. This intervention was primarily effected through the activities of bacteria beginning in the Archean eon, spanning 3.7 to 2.5 billion years ago. Often, these bacteria (contrary to the assurance by the neo-Darwinians that life is primarily organized according to competitive self-interest) acted together, simply from the coordinative effects of chemical signals (from chemicals released from their activities as a strongly interacting group), as cooperative communities of bacterial mats on lagoons or as communities on rocky substrates that were being transformed into structures called stromatolites (some of them as big as houses). Such bacterial communities continue to be found today. Through their sheer numbers and the fact that they operate at shallow thermodynamic gradients, permitting them to subsist on widely dispersed, abundant, low grade resources, bacteria continue to be primarily responsible for maintaining the conditions of this planet hospitable to life. For example, without the hydrogen sequestering action of bacteria that derive their metabolic energies from the synthesis of hydrogen sulphide; and without the oxygen released by photosynthesizing bacteria that combine with available atmospheric hydrogen to form water, hydrogen released from the reaction of water (in the presence of carbon dioxide) with rocks would, in a period of 1 or 2 billion years, have caused all the water in the oceans to have effectively evaporated through eventual escape of hydrogen into space. Predictably, because of their erroneous notion of the unit of selection being the gene, it has been the neo-Darwinians, according to Lovelock (1991: 29, 62, 92–96) who have been the most vigorous objectors to his contention of the planet as a virtual superorganism. Lovelock writes: “In his second book, The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins tries to show that

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Gaia [Lovelock's term for the planetary superorganism he conceives] could never exist because there is no way for the genes to express themselves on a planetary scale.” As Lovelock argues, however, genes “can speak to the planet” through the mediation of the cell membrane: the necessity of keeping the cell membranes intact requires that the biochemistry selected for propagation by genes and which reciprocally elaborate the genetic instructions to a level of complexity beyond their own must, on pain of extinction, produce metabolites and other products of cellular activity that induce planetary conditions to be compatible with the integrity of the cell membrane. Top-down control, therefore, simply cannot be dispensed with if macrostable conditions within which we can exercise microvariable control over extensive periods of time is to be possible. This is recognized as much by Tipler (1994: x–xi) when he writes: “taking biology into account allows us to do the physics of the far future.” Tipler's point is that, without the extremely restrictive boundary constraints compatible with life selecting for admissible solutions to the laws of physics, nonlinear, chaotic effects would render the solutions to those laws computationally impossible. The significance to neoclassical economics of this instruction from Tipler reposes on the fact that the founders of neoclassical economics explicitly founded their discipline by patterning it after the branch of physics called classical or Newtonian mechanics. As one of those founders explicitly stated (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971: 318–319), their ambition was to establish economics as the ‘mechanics of utility and selfinterest.’ Yet, as already mentioned, economists, in effective rejection of Tipler's instruction, are not inclined to impose top-down control over the market. To return to Daly's SSE institutions, apart from the semantically closed macrostability and the microvariability characteristic of life that they afford, additional incentives for their use is that they have “the ability to tighten constraints gradually and to begin from existing initial conditions rather than unrealistically assuming a clean slate.” Regarding how tight those constraints must eventually be, Daly tells us that they are to be sufficiently tight so as to leave considerable environmental slack. That is, the load the economy imposes on the environment must be far below the maximum the environment can sustain. In this way, we maximize the margin for error in our actions and our controls do not have to be as “rigorous, finely tuned, and microoriented” as they otherwise would have to be as we approached the maximum carrying capacity of the environment. In other words, the constraints are to be tightened sufficiently so as to conform to Boulding's prescription stated above of minimizing the scale of the economy by minimizing production or consumption. To implement Dyson's calculations (supposing the necessary technical developments to effect stasis have already been accomplished) and achieve true sustainability, all that is necessary is to have those calculations instruct the operation of Daly's SSE institution for controlling resource inflow into the economy, thus switching it from a steady-state mode of operations to the peculiar pulsing mode of operations indicated by Dyson's calculations. As to when that switch should actually transpire, it should probably do so, following Kardashev's nomenclature for

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civilizations (Dyson, 1979b: 212), when we have developed technologies (apart from stasis technology) corresponding to a Type II civilization. Such a civilization has, at its macro-level control, the total power generated by a star. (Such a civilization might also conceivably opt for a black hole, instead, as its power generator as the gravitational collapse of masses fed into a black hole releases considerably more energy than stellar nuclear reactions.) The other two types of civilizations in Kardashev's scheme are the Type I civilization and the Type III civilization. A Type I civilization has, in its macro-level control, the entire resources of a planet while a Type III civilization has macro-level control over the resources of a galaxy. A factor of the order of ten billion separates these civilization types in terms of size and power. According to Dyson, we have not yet reached Type I status on this planet but shall probably do so in several centuries time—provided, of course, that ecological catastrophe does not overtake us. Such a transition, according to Dyson (1979b: 228–231), will, unless technological developments permit otherwise, almost certainly require solar power technology. Such a technology may be either biological or physical in nature; or perhaps a combination of both. Dyson certainly favors biological solar technology. He envisions genetically altered trees that grow more slowly than natural trees because, apart from the trees' own necessities, the cells of these trees manufacture our necessities as well—such things as “pure alcohol or octane or whatever other chemical we find convenient.” (The trees would then pump these chemicals through their genetically modified root system into our nonorganic pipe systems.) Assuming an “overall efficiency of 0.5%” in “the conversion of sunlight to chemical fuel” (which is “comparable with the efficiency of growth in natural forests”), then Dyson calculated that world energy consumption in 1980 “could be supplied by growing fuel plantations on about 10% of the land area. In the humid tropics, less land would be needed for the same output of fuel.” Biological solar power technology, Dyson cautions, might well take centuries to develop because of the necessity of deciphering ecological relations that will have to be respected. Indeed, he concedes that the “programming and breeding of artificial trees” might, as a result of ecological niceties, “always remain an art rather than a science.” He is quite hospitable to such a prospect, however, counting it as one more reason in favor of biological solar technology. To help in the transition to biological solar power technology and perhaps, to complement it, as well, Dyson also counsels the use of appropriate physical solar power technology. One such is a system developed by Taylor. In Taylor's system, “large ponds enclosed by dikes” would be dug up, covered with transparent plastic air mattresses”, and allowed to accumulate heat from the sun that would then be “insulated against cooling winds and evaporation.” This heat would then become available in “summer and winter” for conversion by “commercially available” and “simple heat engines” into electricity or chemical fuels. Of course, they could also be used as a direct source for domestic heating. At 5% conversion efficiency, Taylor's system could, Dyson calculated, supply the energy derived by the world in 1980 from “oil, gas, and uranium” by covering “with ponds and plastic about 1% of the land of the planet.” An additional

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charm of Taylor's system, apart from its low cost, is the complete decentralization of power systems it would afford: the system is cost-effective for units of a hundred families. “There is no advantage in going to larger centralized units.” The resort to both physical and biological technology will probably be even more relevant in our transition to a Type II civilization. As Dyson (1979b: 233–233) points out, the solar system “is divided rather sharply into two zones: an inner zone close to the sun, where sunlight is abundant and water scarce; and an outer zone away from the sun, where water is abundant and sunlight scarce.” The earth, being at the boundary of both zones, has abundant water and sunshine. Perhaps, this is “the reason why life arose on earth.” Cautioning that “the costs of space operations” must be reduced by a factor of a hundred or a thousand before our expansion into the rest of the solar system is to be practicable, Dyson envisions tat the inner solar system will be colonized by physical technology led by robots, especially, self-replicating robots, whereas the outer solar system will be colonized by biological technology, in the form of genetically modified organisms capable of subsisting in vacuum, thus logically extending the evolution of life on this planet from water to air to vacuum (Dyson, 1979b: 233–235). The danger Dyson sees from such a strategy of expansion is that we end up with a clade of non-interbreeding species in which social cohesion, at least as mediated by existing social institutions, becomes impossible. That there is reason for hope that the appropriate social institutions could be contrived is suggested by economics' principle of comparative advantage. This principle tells us, in effect, why it is better to cooperate than to compete, at least as regards the consumption of commodities: the principle tells that even if one party is superior in the production of all commodities produced in common with another inferior party, then it would still repay for the two parties to cooperate and trade in commodities if the superior party concentrated on those commodities for which its superiority (comparative advantage) is greatest and the inferior party concentrated on those commodities for which its inferiority (comparative advantage) is least. In this way, both parties maximize their consumption of commodities. Another reason for optimism is endosymbiotic evolution itself in which genetically diverse entities have been able to find common cause to cooperate. Indeed, the principle of comparative advantage may be an “existence theorem” indicating that the extension of endosymbiotic evolution into the cultural sphere is not at all impossible. The transition to a Type II civilization from a Type 1 civilization could, at a “modest” growth rate of 1% annually, be expected in 2500 years time, Dyson instructs us. Such a modest growth rate or even more modest ones should probably be encouraged: the Second Law of Thermodynamics teaches us that resource use efficiency improves as resource use rate declines, achieving 100% efficiency at infinitesimal rates of use. It is precisely because of the torrid pace of resource use displayed by our species (e.g., we are consuming fossil fuels at least 100,000 times faster than they were generated by Nature) that the planetary climate has been dangerously destabilized and that the planetary biota has sustained a scale of extinction on par with the previous five great extinction episodes experienced by this planet over geological time scales.

In turn, the rate of resource use by our species has been so profligate because (Georgescu-Roegen, 1981: 196), among other things, the indefinite future does not instruct that resource use: future generations are not able to bid for resources. Accordingly, the “demand price” for resources is ruinously (literally so) low. The only remedy for this state of affairs, Georgescu-Roegen instructs us, is the imposition off quantitative boundary constraints on resources use. Such quantitative boundary constraints are precisely what Daly's SSE institutions and Dyson's calculations afford. What we want to do is to employ Daly's SSE institutions to slow down the rate of growth by imposing the necessary topdown, macro-level control as a proxy for the market bids of future generations so that thermodynamic inefficiencies manifesting themselves as social and environmental disruptions are avoided. What matters it, after all, if we take 2500, 5000, or even 10, 000 years to reach Type II status when the time horizon available to us, in this star system, after reaching such status and switching to a pulsing mode economy is (barring truly lethal thermodynamic fluctuations, such as stellar gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, or even pandemics) virtually infinity. Such truly lethal thermodynamic fluctuations are also the reason why we want to achieve Type II status first before switching to a pulsing mode economy: we want to maximize surplus resources with which we have to work with in seeding other star systems with colonies as a buffer to species or clade extinction. A more precise appreciation of what may be indicated in our attempt to slow down growth to reach Type II status is afforded us by Johnson (2002) through his model of the phases of development, with particular attention to how collective structure in such development responds to environmental change. Johnson's model showed that the phases of development include a “formative stage”, a “co-operational stage”, and a “condensed stage”. The formative stage is characterized by, among other things, locally and globally chaotic agent behavior; uncorrelated and sub-optimal system performance; robustness against disruptions from environmental change. The co-operational stage is characterized by locally chaotic but globally predictable agent behavior; increased system performance from both correlated and uncorrelated agent behavior; robustness to disruptions from environmental change. The condensed stage is characterized by locally and globally predictable agent behavior; maximum system performance from maximally correlated agent behavior; extreme vulnerability to even minimal environmental change. Following Johnson's model, the control we wish to exert on growth through Daly's institutions would seem to correspond to maintaining development at the co-operational stage. In such a stage, a compromise is struck between investments in research and development and resources deployed for production towards immediate consumption. In resonance with this prescription, Johnson suggests that, in the absence of infinite resources, an intentional reversion to the co-operational stage might be in order to avoid the loss of resources in the “bust” phase of development attaching to the condensed stage. An additional benefit of working towards achieving Type II status for those concerned with the ecological health of the planet is the probable salutary effects of such transition upon conditions on earth: industrial operations in the inner zone should be able to provide for all of earth's necessities, thus

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permitting the planet to become a “garden planet” in which natural ecosystems flourish and industrial operations are at a minimum or even absent.

7 Semantic closure, through its epigenetic loops, has operated to preserve the conditions compatible with life on this planet. Within the resulting macrostable conditions of the planet, semantic closure, in concert with natural selection, has, through, endosymbiotic evolution, increased the complexity of life. If this evolution is to indefinitely continue, however, the Second Law of Thermodynamics demands that the resource use driving and maintaining life must observe a pulsing mode. Efforts towards this accommodation have been effected by natural selection and semantic closure through such modes of existence as seeds and spores. The calculations of Dyson, however, explicitly require that the pulsations be more selective than what non-cognitive semantic closure can manage. Fortunately, cognition has evolved on this planet. All that remains for that cognition to do, then, is to accomplish the necessary selections, through the appropriate semantic closure relationships binding the present and the indefinite future and effected through the appropriate social institutions guided by Dyson's pulsing mode thermodynamics. More precisely, the selections required of the appropriate semantic loops require that the whole (the entire sequence of generations possible to a species at the limit of thermodynamic possibility) instruct the behavior of the parts (the generations within the sequence; and by derivation, the members of each generation). Contrary to Cohen, it is not the case that “human carrying capacity makes most sense when it refers to a well-defined and limited time horizon”; or that “[t]he concept of indefinite sustainability is a phantasm, a diversion from the difficult problems of today and the coming century.” On the contrary, “indefinite sustainability” is the very essence of the problem and the inescapable requirement of any solution to the problem. If we are to transcend our condition as finite beings (through selection of quality over quantity), then we have no choice but to participate in the full realization of the potential of our species over a virtual, if not an actual, infinity of Time. Only then can we distinguish what is merely pressing from what truly matters.

Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the help of Howard Pattee in clarifying for me, through various electronic correspondences, many subtleties of his concept of semantic closure, as well for providing me all his relevant papers on the subject. Pattee is not to be held accountable for any erroneous application, on my part, of his concept of semantic closure to the problem of sustainable development.

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