Meta-Biomimicry

I like how L. Margulis talks about symbiosis as living together of organisms from different species for a prolonged period of time.

So, how does symbiosis happen? How can this be applied in a human world (society)?

How could helpfulness spread in society?

I added sub-questions also on the worlds of bacterias.

Well, by blindly copying the world of jungle, we'll get jungle. Blindly copying nature we would not be truly innovating, so, meta-biomimicriously, I'd think it would make sense using nature's examples as inspiration for thinking by analogy and heuristics, not as the final answer. If we'd go purely the bio-mimicry way, we'd end up with airplanes that flap their wings, and ships that wag their tails.

Regarding the "General Principles" -- how general? At the deepest levels of nature, there are the laws of physics, that we can't escape from, they are just there as given: they tell us what's possible in this world, and neither life nor us with our computers had tried out all the possibilities that those general laws permit. (It's a good question.)

// So, how does symbiosis happen?

From what I understand, it happens as coincidental helpfulness that develops into a mutually beneficial relationship, and occurs in nature sporadically as the probability distributions of needs and capabilities match up like in trade relationships: e.g., plover bird cleans alligator teeth, and gets to eat pieces of food between the teeth (a natural trade!), and certain barriers of trust are achieved either consciously or subconsciously evolved over time. A fun example of symbiosis between dolphins and humans: cooperative fishing. So, symbiosis is a phenomenon of a world or market of multiple players rather than a design decision.

In a sense, trade is a kind of evolved symbiosis, and humanity already uses the idea, and even automates it through advanced market order matching engines. We're having a problem not "how to do symbiosis", but "how to make trade maximally flexible and fair", and I know no examples in nature of that except, perhaps the organism blood, that serves as a market of nutrients and metabolites, with trillions of cells exchanging resources, but the trade orders do not exist there, and it's more like valleys and rivers, with some neuro-hormonal regulation. Corpus callosum could be thought of as a kind of neural signals exchange between left and right hemisphere, coordinating the participation of left and right hemisphere to form a single mind, and interestingly, East and West seem go a similar route through China-US decoupling the supply chains. (Why would left and right hemisphere would need a mediator to do their thing? (one being logical, another artistic) Perhaps because different modes of operation requires different "political system," and then a mediator (a specialized market, like corpus callosum) to integrate their results. Did we bio-mimic, or re-invented this ourselves?

After all, it's not how the solution was found (via bio-mimic or not), but how good the solution is. Answering a question of how to redesign world's markets to make more "coincidental mutual helpfulness" happen, may be an important question.

Good category to think and link ideas further :)

Lynn Twist inspires me to think about Plenty-Thinking: there's enough for everyone vs some people will be left behind..

From "Symbiotic Earth" movie, I noticed the following:

• Interdependence

• Wholeness

• Feedback Loops

• Leaps

• Recycling (everything is reused)

[Mindey], how could I discover and organise Living Systems principles into a list of four as you did for MRSGREN idea?

[Ruta], well, I'm not sure there's a recipe how exactly. As Stephen Wolfram says, some things just need to go through entire computation (i.e., or entire evolution of thought process) to arrive at insights, and there are no shortcuts. That said, I've provided a rundown of how I thought, when commenting on MRSGREN. I'm sure you can do something similar.

From Mansoor Vakili writing, I noticed the following behaviours of Living Systems:

• Chaos and Randomness

• Self-Organisation

• Fractals (a pattern repeats on all levels of a system and forms a network, as a whole)

• Networks (higher level goals inform lower level goals; and as intelligence)

• Minimum effort (complex systems with simple equations)

And the following Patterns of Living Systems:

• Simplicity

• Flexibility

• Quality

• Interdependency

"Systems thinking is about relationships such as integrative, intuitive, holistic, connectedness; values such as conservation, cooperation, quality, partnership, flexibility, observant, asset management; and state of mind such as being observant, positive, forgiving, tolerant, peaceful, hopefulness and practicing unconditional love." ~ Mansoor Vakili