Syston Boundaries and SIOS
"Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries or distinctions of race"
Chapter 104
Danged Furriners from Lunnon
In the earlier years of my life I lived in a tiny village
in the English countryside. It was an area with its own strong local dialect
and traditions. Public transport was very limited -- one bus a fortnight came
to take people to market day at the nearest market town.
In a sense the village was very isolated, and its inhabitants sometimes had
isolated outlooks. I remember one old local, born and brought up in the
village, complaining about the bad effects of visitors from the outside world.
"They danged furriners comes down yere from Lunnon and ruins
everythun", he said.
I recently looked up a map and measured the distance from this village to the
despised London and its malevolent visiting 'foreigners'. It was 40 kilometres.
Yes, a mere 25 miles away from Tower Bridge in the heart of London.
Now, of course, the perimeter fence of one of London's airports backs up right
against the village houses. The new generation of locals, many of whom were
'foreign migrants' themselves from 30 km away a generation ago, complain about
being overrun by city folk from the sprawling 'new town' 15 km away, built
beyond the London 'Green Belt' to house some of the overflow from the capital.
And who can blame them, or say they are acting unreasonably? Their way of life
is under attack.
Here, in a microcosm, is a picture which is repeated all over the world, at
every sort of scale. The essence of the picture is the boundary of a syston --
what we might call the 'syston skin'.
The Skin Game
The skin is said to be the largest organ in the human body.
Far from being a simple impermeable covering, it is a marvel of complexity,
responsible for such vital functions as temperature regulation, food storage,
and a host of sensory input/output functions. And it can have great decorative
value!
The skin is the very obvious human-individual syston boundary. In the model we
are building, every syston will have a skin, and the properties of this skin
will be fundamental in determining the behaviour of the syston.
First You Dress Like Them
My grandfather once gave me this advice: "If you want
to get on with people, first you should dress like them; then you should talk
like them". Everybody will be able to recall situations at work, in
business, or in clubs where this advice was good advice. I remember reading an
article about business overtures to the founder of a huge British electronics
retail chain, a man who had been brought up in humble circumstances in the East
End of London.
The tycoon was suspicious, rejecting all emissaries, until one arrived who
swore ferociously in good End End style. The two got on together immediately.
"He talks my kind of language" was the tycoon's comment.
Why is the man with a pony-tail and wearing an open-necked checked shirt not
taken seriously at board-room levels? He 'doesn't fit'. He's not wearing the
expected de facto 'uniform'.
This is another way of saying that he is not putting out the right visual
signals to identify himself as a member of the current group.
The Immune System
Human beings have highly-developed immune systems.
Possession of an immune system is a characteristic shared, according to Lyall
Watson [1980], with all vertebrates, from the humble hagfish up. In fact, he
regards this feature, and its accompanying feature of being able to recognize
individuals, as basic to the concept of 'self-awareness' in a creature.
As we go on we will come up against instance after instance of immune systems,
operating in systons at every level. Although in humans many of these immune
functions are not actually in the skin, in our general model we can place these
immune functions just under the syston skins and regard them as part of the
protective/selective/sensory functions of the syston boundaries. We can then go
on to extrapolate and generalize these skin functions for all systons. But
first we should mark our position with a formal Proposition:
This Proposition is, of course, closely related to
Proposition 103E, which stated that 'All systons continually seek to monitor
and define their boundaries'. But now we are at the stage of looking at the
operations which go on at the syston skins, and how they are carried out.
As usual, we can start with an example based on the human idiosyston, that of
transplant rejection mechanisms.
A Feeling of Rejection . . .
Just as a member of a human group is very quick at
recognizing an 'outsider', someone who does not 'fit' into the group, so is the
human body capable of picking up intruding 'foreigners'. And the body possesses
an incredibly complex and extensive series of mechanisms to do this, the extent
of which is only now being seriously explored.
Of course we all know about the white cells in the blood which pick up
intruding 'germs' and destroy them (usually by eating them). The idea of
'inoculation' against diseases with a weakened or killed strain, to build up
'antibodies' against a future attack by the full disease, goes back to the
English doctor Lister, over a century ago. Lister noticed that milkmaids who
had had a dose of a mild disease, cowpox, were protected against attack by its
far more virulent relative, smallpox.
In modern times we have had the onslaught of AIDS, the Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome, now known to be caused by a virus (or viruses) which directly
affects the body's immune systems and make them less effective against the
waves of potential invaders continually washing up against the walls of our
idiosystons.
As well as the invaders from without, the immune system is also set up to deal
with the infiltrators from within -- previously 'loyal' cells which have gone
'bad' through poisoning or some other reason, and have started to misbehave.
Cancer. Slowly the realization is growing that the dreaded afflictions called
cancer are not 'caused' simply by attack by organisms or pollutants or
radioactive substances. Instead it seems that one, or a combination, of these
or other factors is sometimes able to make particular immune systems less
effective in their routine work of detecting and neutralizing 'rogue' cells.
Even today, with notable advances in treatments available,
cancers are the cause of many deaths -- the idiosyston breaks down and ceases
to exist. An interesting area, which we will dwell more on later, is the
'holistic' approach to health, the idea that the smooth functioning of the
idiosyston as a whole is important to individual health. Here we will just
highlight an implication of this, which is that the concept of 'rogue cells' as
the focus of cancers is too simplified for accuracy; instead, as when a metal
structure is overstressed, these places are just the points where the
overstress finally becomes visible.
The recent advances in transplanting organs from one person into another have
been based on a better understanding of why transplants are rejected, or how
the immune systems operate. The rejection-suppression drugs used are able to
reduce the body's ability to recognize and reject tissues from another person.
Clearly these recognition abilities have a strong genetic basis, as they
scarcely operate in transfers between genetically identical twins.
The downside to rejection-suppression drugs is that invading disease organisms,
as well, may not be rejected as they should. Hence the need for a transplant
patient to be shielded from exposure to such diseases as much as possible in
the early stages.
There is another area where normal rejection mechanisms need to be suppressed,
and this is not a recent development, but one going back almost a hundred
million years into the past.
Giving Baby a Good Start
Human beings are, of course, members of a highly-evolved
animal group, the mammals. Mammals are animals which produce milk for their
young. Most mammals are placental mammals, where the newly-fertilized and
developing egg cell in the female attaches itself to the womb lining and grows
a structure called the Placenta. Through the placenta the growing embryo
continuously receives a stream of nutrients and services (such as removal of
waste products), right through from the time when the placenta is first formed,
up until birth, when the placenta ceases operating and is itself expelled (the
'afterbirth').
Animals which produce eggs, such as the birds, and those primitive Australian
mammals the Platypus and the Echidna, clearly do not form placentas. Nor do
other lower animals which give live birth, like the Bobtail Goanna, one of the
many Australian lizards.
When you look at it, the mechanisms evolved to produce placentas are really
quite unique in animal physiology. The fertilized egg in a female is
genetically a mixture from both its parents, and in the ordinary course of
events would be recognized as a foreign invader by its mother's body and
rejected. Instead it is not only accepted by the womb wall, but is actually
hooked in to function as part of the mother's physiological system, sharing a
supply of blood and other body fluids.
Moreover, experience with artificial insemination in cattle and with in-vitro
fertilization in humans shows that there is no requirement for even some of the
mother's genes to be present in the attaching embryo. It seems that any womb
from a member of the same species will do, perhaps even a womb from a related
species. And the possibility has been raised that a working placenta may be
formed if an embryo is attached to a tissue within a male of the right species.
Not Only Interesting -- Useful Also
This excursion into studies of animal physiology has been
undertaken for a purpose. As we progress in this book, we will find that there
are analogues to the body's immune systems operating and forming essential
parts of other systons, systons at every level.
As already mentioned, one of the approaches used in Matrix Thinking is to
generalize experience from one syston and see how it is applicable to other
systons throughout the matrix. In what follows, we will often be able to
recognize immune systems operating in the different areas we look at. In some
instances we will be able to recognize the operation of placenta-analogues,
especially when we look at how systons reproduce in Chapter 110, on syston
budding and merger.
The SIOS Concept
In what follows, we will find example after example of how
important it is for a syston's immune system to function 'correctly' if the
syston is to remain 'healthy'. Because the immune system is really a sort of
selective filter arrangement, letting some things in and blocking others, it is
really a matter of observation as to whether the filtering is correct -- is the
syston working well? And will it continue to operate as well, in the future, or
is it in the process of falling back?
It seems to me that a common feature of many systons is that their immune
systems reject more than they might do, if the longer-term good of the systons
was considered. We call this reaction by different terms for different systons
-- racial and sexual discrimination, bigotry, vested interests, chauvinism,
selfishness.
We need a term to generalize this feature for any syston. I will use the
acronym SIOS, for Syston Immune Overreaction Syndrome. We can mark the
situation with a Proposition.
Now here is a Proposition which, for once, is undoubtedly
true. But it is a bit of a cop-out. Logically, it is only saying that something
which is overdone is overdone, it doesn't tell us when that point is reached.
For the moment, it may be best just to accept the possibility that a syston
feature which we will call SIOS can exist, and try and bring out more about its
nature and effects from looking at real circumstances.
The reader will have noticed that most of the usual attitudes classed within
SIOS have a negative tone -- discrimination, bigotry, selfishness. But we
started off from the view that SIOS was a manifestation of an immune system, a
desirable and perhaps vital part of a syston's makeup. So where do we draw the
line?
Well, as always with Matrix Thinking, there is no line -- there are only a
number of weak and fuzzy tracers, each one based on a different underlying
assumption. Each assumption may have the basis that some particular action will
be to the good of the syston, at a given period. Alter the action, the period,
or your definition of 'good', and the tracers will move too.
Something to Work With ...
The danger in trying to work with a situation like this is
that if you are uncertain as to how to make a decision, you may bog down in
doubts and make no decision, and that can be the worst decision of all. So I
will will put forward another Proposition, to provide at least a working basis.
Unlike the previous one, this a real Proposition. I do not know whether it is
valid or not. I think it at least merits some trying-on for size, in the
situations we will encounter later in the book.
The suggestion is that the basic function of what corresponds to an immune
system in human systons is to hold the syston together, to enable it to retain
its identity as a functioning entity. But, like eating more than you need,
because you need to eat anyway and it is hard to know when enough is really
enough, the immune mechanisms can be overdone, leading to SIOS. So the dividing
line comes where you are doing more than the minimum necessary to achieve the
main purpose.
Clearly this Proposition, if
accepted as valid, has far-reaching implications over every aspect of human
society -- migration, foreign loans, federal/state control, business financing,
everything. An underlying assumption of it is that foreshadowed in Proposition
102B, that society contains a substance called infocap, and that this substance
generates its own dividends which bankroll human activies. The implication is
that the more infocap you have, the better.
This does give a natural lead-in to halting, for the moment, consideration of
systons, and looking a little deeper into the other major component of the
Matrix -- into infocap.
To look at the structure of the book:
Contents and Foreword
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