 Hello and welcome, everyone. This is Active Inference Gas Stream number 66.1 on December 6th, 2023. Today, we are very excited and honored to have a presentation and discussion with Adrian Bajon. First in this session, Susan Hasty is going to provide some slides and context. Adrian will provide a talk and we'll have a discussion on through the hour. And then Susan and I will stay on the live stream. So if you have any comments or questions, please feel free to write them. So thank you both for joining and Susan to you. Thank you, Daniel. And, and I'm so excited. And thank you so much for affording this opportunity. Dr. Bajon, I thought that we would actually begin. I wanted to introduce you and as I was thinking about it, I could spend probably the entire time just going over all the citations and awards that you've received. So I thought that what I really wanted to share was something that is not necessarily in the public domain. I wanted to really dig into the significance of the Constructo Law and the difference it's made not only for, I think, the world, which most people don't appreciate, I think. And also the significance is made for me. It's definitely changing paradigms across the globe. This, of course, is Adrian's many, many publications and as many citations. I think there's 90,000 citations of his work alone to date. But what I'd like for the audience to really take away is really thinking about life in a new paradigm and how the Constructo Law can inform us of how to think about a difference in not only just what is life, but also what is power and what is evolution and change. And I'll give you a good example of where we will talk about a flow paradigm or flow architecture. And in thinking about architecture, one idea that still permeates society and I think holds back progressive, how we think about hierarchy. And Adrian's books has definitely informed me to think very differently. We still think about hierarchy like we built them in pyramids 4,500 years ago, where we housed dead people. And so this actually has the potential to change that and to really think differently. One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that scientists from around the globe have been coming together for over 14 years annually and presenting their findings and how they've taken this and spread it into every domain imaginable. This was actually a doctor, Dr. Lucia, who I believe is in Italy. He shared with me just last night in talking about it and how he's actually taken the Constructo Law and made innovations in research in cancer. And I thought his quote was just so powerful in terms of how we think differently about reality by really understanding and going very deep and contemplating how the Constructo Law is so significant. And what I think is what I've discovered and uncovered is that it's actually spread far beyond the halls of academia. And I'm going to make a bold prediction because we're going to be talking about predictions. And I'm going to predict that Dr. Bajane will be awarded the Nobel Prize because it's not just the citations of his work. But when we look at and you go deep, you're going to find that people are using the Constructo Law. For example, this one academic paper has already had many, many citations in and of itself. It's being talked about in terms of religion and in terms of indigenous societies. It's impacted architectures in how airports and how structures are being made. And for me personally, I'm not coming out of academia, but reading it and understanding the Constructo Law really has given me an incredible awe and appreciation for science. It's actually given me a new appreciation for life. And so here's just a few of the ways that chat GTP just put together. Here is how it's already spawned new ways of thinking about every area of application and innovation. And so what we're going to be talking about today is really focused on Adrienne's books that are accessible to people like me. I mean, I would not have been able to dig into the many, many publications and receive the depth of understanding of it without reading these books. And I actually called them the essence of strategic thinking because we think about prediction. We are thinking about how we're strategically going to move forward. So today we're going to focus on the physics of life. And Adrienne has agreed to give us another chance. So we may not be able to cover all the many questions that have come through our forum, but we will be digging into them after we'll dig into some of them that come in on the chat today. And then we will also be exploring them in a future session. So with that, I'll turn it over to you, Adrienne. And I look forward to this. And I hope the audience really enjoys this and is inspired as I've been. Yeah, thank you, Susan and Daniel for the invitation to speak to your audience. Of course, I'm very grateful and humbled by the introduction. I saw that in order to get a discussion going, it would help if I show you a few concepts, black on white. And the slides I happen to have at my disposal are from a very brief lecture I gave at the 13th Constructed Law Conference in Turin, Italy just two months ago. It was a lecture about vascular flow structures, but the meat of the presentation is about how to predict the design evolution. Vascular is in fact a good title for the subject that interests your audience, namely how the brain works. The brain is eminently a vascular architecture. It is predictable from the Constructed Law in many ways, in many respects. So, okay, and so I start my presentation first of all with the definition of the meaning of the words. I'm a professor meaning I teach students how to think and how to question themselves and how to display humility when hearing ideas. And so the meaning of the word vascular from Latin is something that looks like vessels conveying blood or lymph. This is a design, an architecture that speaks of flow, which means movement and hierarchy, which as you'll see very soon is one kind of drawing. And now the word design should not scare anybody who is in love with science. Design is poo-pooed in physics. It shouldn't be because it really means drawing. It came into English from French, the French got it from the Italians, the Zeno. It really means a sign, an image that conveys a message. And here I have juxtaposed two versions of the same drawing as river delta in the human lung to drive the point that the drawing unites the animate with the inanimate. And when the drawing does that, it means that the phenomenon that the drawing represents belongs to nature, not to a particular compartment in science or a particular department on the university campus. The drawing unites. And that is, if there is one single message from my introduction here, it is that. Another thing about what I'm showing you is that natural things are physical. They are observable, visible, palpable, measurable and movable. They are common sense. They are not jargon. I speak of drawings, of architecture, of images. Natural things have configuration, shape, structure, rhythm. They have flow. And their mother is the fact that they have freedom to change. That means they have freedom to evolve. And about the, let's call it, the freedom to evolve comes from the fact that these things are moving. They are moving because they are set in motion by flow architectures that function as engines. Most of these engines are natural. Only a few of them are human-made. In any case, every single such engine is driven by one kind of energy source. You can think about the sun driving the movement of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is a globe-size engine. The engine produces power and the power drives movement. And while the movement is the source of another phenomenon, which is called dissipation or friction, because the mover has to get the environment out of the way. The environment, the niche, does not get out of the way unless it is pushed. And in the rectangular box, I show the engine driven by an energy source. The work or power produced by the engine and then the fact that in the green breaks or interfaces between mover and environment are dissipating the power. So if you sum up these white fat arrows, the energy input from the energy source is dumped 100% into the environment. But in the meantime, inside the box, because of flow architecture, something was moved from one spot, one place to another. That phenomenon is called locomotion. It could be animal, it could be vehicular, it could be, well, oceanic current and all the other things we know about. So the bottom line is that nature is movement with low architecture that really unites the geophysical with the biological, with the social organization, which is emotion. These are images that change over time. They are not still art. You can think of them as movies, many, many movies running at the same time, at the same time, but every single one having the same plot. The plot is that the movie has direction, meaning the changes have a directionality to them. And I recognize this, published it first in 1996, several times. Then it's called the Construct the Law of Evolution in Nature, or meaning the announcement that, hey, listen, it's the design in nature, stupid. It's been overlooked in everywhere, physics, aerodynamics, but not in engineering, which is my background. So I wrote that for a flow system to persist in time, and that's the definition of the life state. It must evolve with freedom, such that it provides greater access. I illustrate that with three drawings from the evolution of a river based on the flow of a laboratory. From time to time, the architecture flows more and more easily because of erosion. But at every point in time, the river basin is a tree. The Construct the Law announces, probably screaming from the rooftops, that there is a direction of nature that points toward the future. And that if you know this statement, if you run it through the wheels of your mind, you have the ability to anticipate the so-called future. To continue, again, because I teach the importance of knowing the meaning of the words, and the importance of using common sense terminology, here is what we mean by evolution. The sequence of changes in flow configuration in time. Freedom, freedom is not some intangible. It is actual physical features that allow a system to change, and freedom can be measured. In design, freedom is measured in terms of the number of degrees of freedom, the number of ways in which you can change something. Freedom can also be measured in terms of the effect of increasing this number of degrees of freedom has on the performance, on the ability of the mover to move more easily. You can think of it as a straightjacketing, the flow of a river. Well, that river will flow less fast, meaning slower, and not as far as a river that's not straightjacketed. In fact, the river that's straightjacketed has a personality of its own to revolt and remove the obstacles out of the way. The fallen tree log, the levees at New Orleans, the history of Earth is that. It is about removing obstacles in order to secure greater freedom for what moves. And this evolutionary design, as I just illustrated, facilitates access, access to flow in areas, volume, volumes, and that, of course, includes society. Now, access, I check the dictionary, although I shouldn't have to because I come from a Latin-based language. It means the action of coming toward or near something. It's called some accesus accedere in Latin. It is a word available in English. And this movement, naturally, by itself, untouched, tends toward an architecture that's multi-scale. It's called hierarchy, or arboricent, if you will. It is a drawing that distinguishes itself through a few large channels cohabitating with many small channels. In fact, they're moving the same stuff, and they're moving it in harmony. The few are not exploiting the many. The many are not revolving against the few. They're all flowing together in order to facilitate flow over the entire available space. And this configuration springs out of nowhere. It is nature itself. My beginning in this line of thinking was in, actually, it was before 1996. The problem that got my publishing going is here on the left. Left-hand corner. It was the question of how to shape a rectangular space that generates heat. How to shape it so that the generated heat current exits with the greatest ease. That means it is rejected by a rectangle that is the least hot, meaning with the smallest temperature difference between itself and the ambient. In other words, I gave myself one degree of freedom, which is the shape of the rectangle. A shape that varied from square to shallow rectangle. The answer to my question was the rectangle in the middle, which is not to shallow, not to square. But that was the click, because from freedom to change something, I discovered one drawing. Before this exercise, when I posed the problem of how to shape it, not knowing the answer, I did not have a drawing. And you see, in predicting evolution, the thinking begins with a blank page. It is the most honest kind of beginning, meaning the least biased way in which to start posing questions. That beginning has a chapter with a blank page called, the chapter is called, I don't know. You see, I don't know. But I discovered this, and the rest is history. In the year 2000, I wrote the first full-length book about the multitude of examples of this type, ranging from geophysics, river basins, lightning and everything, snowflakes to physiology, breathing, blood circulation, ejaculation. All these things are in accord with the construct of law. And then since then, I've shown a few other things that I will illustrate. But the most important message from this beginning is that in science, quite often, the first question is overlooked. And the first question should be, what is the phenomenon? Meaning, what are we talking about? And in the case of design and nature, the phenomenon is, meaning the elephant in the room, is the evolution of flow configuration. It could be the room, it could be the field or the ocean. In other words, ocean, in other words, nature itself. So that phenomenon is changed with direction, also known as the passing of time. Now, getting closer to the subject of interest, these hierarchical architectures can be simple or complex. Here I have two drawings of the same kind of flow. It is a flow that connects one point with many, many points on a circle. If I, in the first disk design on the left, the maker of the design had a very large number of degrees of freedom. They are called L and Phi and Gamma and Beta and X. Look, and that took three years to do in the course of doctoral thesis. It's called the perfect design. And then on the right, one example that was done a lot faster by recognizing very few degrees of freedom called capital L. And on the next slide, the performance of these two designs, the perfect, shown as black dot and the cheaper one with white squares. That performance plotted with this lower case F, which is a number proportional to the flow resistance between the center and the perimeter. And on the abscissa, the capital N is the number of points on the perimeter, which means that migrating to the right, the design is more complex. You see here that the two drawings are, in fact, they may look different, even though they are both point-to-circle trees. But their performance is quite similar, quite similar. In other words, a simpler and cheaper design will do, you see. In other words, the maker of the design does not waste time. The maker of the design is wiser than the one that polishes a, what was this, sort of, that gills the lily, you see. And that leads to another way to organize the presentation, which is that if you polish something ad infinitum, you are not creating nothing. So perfection is the enemy of evolution. This is a dictum from Voltaire originally. It happens to be true from the point of view of the constructed law. In fact, I discovered it, but I also discovered the first discoverer in this case, Voltaire, because I'm a fan of the history of good ideas. And here's how the enemy of evolution, if you know it, benefits us. The movement of people on the surface of the earth is hierarchical. We don't move around tracing the grid on the surface of the city. We congregate, we gather, we collect ourselves to one point of attraction. Use your imagination, you know, public square. And then at the end of the event, we migrate outward to the area as a circular river delta. And in so doing, we organize our society hierarchically. Here's an even better example of how it is going, because you see in the previous drawing, which is as simple as possible, this city block does not show the smallest alleys and the cul-de-sacs and the lawns across which people walk. But here in the drawing of the Atlanta airport, we see the walking. This is on the left side, vertically along the concourses. The vehicle, there's only one train shown as a black line. By the way, once again, the slow and the fast are carrying the same flow, meaning the same crowd of people. Access is provided from any gate to any other gate. And the figure of merit or the performance of the whole, I'm talking about the whole flow system, which is rectangular, can be measured in several ways. One of them is the average travel time between one gate and all the other gates. So keep that in mind, travel time averaged over the area. That's the measure of performance. The movement is with two speeds, fast along the train, slower, perpendicular to the train. And one of us is this capital letter Q. And the territory has a fixed size because area costs money, but a variable shape, a variable ratio of H divided by L. It is possible to show, almost on the back of an envelope, how the average travel time depends on the shape. Time is on the ordinate, the shape is on the abscissa. And you see here a bucket-shaped curve, which has a minimum, shown as an empty circle. The shape at that location is called H divided by L optimum. And the time is minimum in that particular design. The discovery, meaning to put physics at the disposal of all that, is that a little bit of imperfection, meaning travel time that's just slightly longer than the smallest imaginable, gives the designer a significant bandwidth of freedom. Freedom to choose a shape that's comparable with the mathematically best shape, but not exactly the same. In fact, the person who is in doubt with this kind of secret will not spend time on financing this particular sculpture to the point of identifying the absolute best. So imperfection, where the freedom, the freedom of choosing and then moving on, is the matter of diversity in nature. Diversity happens from this freedom, not to fall in love with the absolute best. And there are people in several domains, including biology, who would talk about nature makes mistakes. No, nature doesn't make mistakes. Nature simply doesn't have time to focus on financing itself. What works is kept. That is the slogan that I think comes closer to how nature works. One aspect of movement, geophysical, biological, and also human is the so-called logistics S curve. Anything that spreads freely on an area or in a volume, it spreads not only in space. You can imagine the milk spilled on the kitchen floor. It spreads in time. And the invaded territory, which in these rising curves is indicated in the vertical direction, this invaded territory grows in S curve fashion. It grows slow, fast, slow. And the reason for that, by the way, here are a few more examples that are relevant to what I'm going to show you next. These are actual measurements. Every single curve is an S curve. On the left is the power production in the United States as an S curve that is up to 10 years ago. On the right are the total miles driven in the U.S. per year. And at the very bottom are the movers themselves, meaning the world population. That is also an S curve, which is already hitting the ceiling. I remember when I was another graduate in 1970, the rage was about the fact that there's a population explosion and the end of oil and lots of other things of this kind. Well, as I said at the beginning, humility plays a role in science. It's much, much more useful for the thinker to start with. I'm not so sure. Let me look into it. Even if I believed these things, it's very important that I am the first to question them. And the reason why the S curve should be an S and it is predictable is this. Anything that spreads, again, the milk on the kitchen floor, initially it invades the territory as something that moves fast and far and narrow, like a finger. And once the finger hits the wall, the milk spreads laterally. I call these two phases of the occupation by using words from the military, invasion and then consolidation. It's always this way. Well, but as you can see in the lower right-hand corner, the invasion invades the area at an accelerating rate and consolidation continues at a decelerating rate. And so these two arcs are spliced together, obviously naturally, and together they make up the S curve. So this is the prediction. Where does the hierarchy come in? The hierarchy is an add-on, meaning the next slide, which I don't have, which is that things that spread on a surface spread in arboricin fashion, not as a single needle, as in this particular example. And the tree spreads the stuff even faster than what I illustrated here. In other words, something that spreads as a tree will have an S that is taller during its viral intermezzo, you see. And so let's see. That's basically the preparatory material for showing us who we are. The movement, this is an image of human movement today. It is primarily due to aviation. We all move on the globe from any point to any other point imaginable. Those who originate from, let's say, diametrically opposed points necessarily will have to flow through the heart of this vascular architecture. The heart is where this architecture was born, which was Europe and North America. And that is where the architecture has grown the most, which is why it is in deep red right now. And so the movement is hierarchical. The physics of movement is that to move more, you must burn more fuel. So the burning of fuel on the globe must be hierarchical, meaning I'm looking at this image and I read the movement. Another Adrian reads the burning of fuel. And as you'll see next, the burning of fuel is in fact proportional to the wealth available on the globe. As in, have money will travel. And also in the next slide, I'll show you that increasing hand-in-hand with wealth and fuel use and movement is freedom. And this is the final slide. On the left-hand side, these are the facts. These are data. People today like to pray in a church of data and data. Well, here's data. These are the facts. Those dots show that every group on the globe falls on the diagonal between energy use and annual wealth, which means that what is annual use of energy in physics, in engineering, is just another language in which to tell the story of hierarchical distribution of wealth on the globe, meaning that economics and physics are two sides of the same coin, meaning two ways in which to describe the same drawing. And the drawing is hierarchical. All these dots are racing upward along the diagonal because as everybody knows, every government reports annually its increase in GDP in wealth. Well, the government doesn't brag about the increase in the burning of fuel, which of course means that no country is going to cut down its consumption of fuel. And on the right-hand side, in other words, the red arrow, the direction of the bicyclists in the peloton and to the front is the future. On the right-hand side, the same data with annual energy use this time on the ordnet. And on the abscissa, the competitiveness with regard to economic freedom. The arrow that points toward the future is the same as on the left-hand side. The dots are the same as on the left-hand side. And they tell the story of a world that another peloton of bicyclists that are racing upward, even though most governments don't know it. The evolution of the society of the globe is toward not only greater movement, easier movement, but also greater freedom. And that takes me to the slide that Susan showed you. The mother, if I were to say the mother of nature, is in this direction from freedom of change as possible, from change, evolution as possible. And from evolution, the nature that we are and which surrounds us has become possible as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Susan, would you like to provide a first reflection or direction here? Well, before it evaporates, you were shaking your head so much, Dan. I want to see what's alive for you. I wrote down many things. I have many questions to ask, but please feel free to ask one first, and I'll prepare it. Okay. What really stood out for me, and I'm slightly prejudiced because I've been going through the physics of life, so that's the semi-ideas are captured in that. But what really stands out for me, Adrian, is I'm seeing the system as object and structure as a verb. No, structures are known. Structure comes from the same word as, well, has the same origin as the word strewn, strewn meaning spread, spread in this case on a page or on a canvas. It's a drawing. It's a drawing with a message streaming out of it. So structure is a verb. Clearly, most of this is now in the languages of the Indo-Europeans tend to have both, they could be both noun and verb. That is a feature of this group of languages. But I don't think it's limited to the Indo-European. The point is that, yes, I applaud everybody's interest in the meaning of the words, because quite frankly, we are surrounded where we're actually drowning in jargon. Jargon is a good term. It applies to locker room discussion, a language that's understood only by 20 people, all of them men, you see. It's just like any department of physics. Oops, sorry, I didn't mean to put it that way. But you get the idea. The object here, which is why I continue to praise Galileo Galilei and Da Vinci and these people. The object is to make these ideas that are accessible to everybody. It doesn't mean to dilute them or to dumb them. Not at all. It means to display humility and to speak in a way, not only to speak but to make drawings that open the eyes of people. I'm fortunate because as a professor I have this freedom to, in fact, I just lectured today the freedom to make drawings, the freedom to, yes, to tell a joke every once in a while, maybe a self-deprecating joke. The point is that the flow of science, the flow of science benefits from, first of all, modesty but also the ability to ask questions and to question the idea but to question the speaker, including yourself. So let me do that now. And help me understand where I'm confused because I guess when I say the structure is verb, I'm thinking about how we're talking about configuration and reconfiguration and how the drawing actually turns into a movie that I can get my head around. And specifically where I'm grappling with this and it's opening doors is how to think about using the constructor law. The difference specifically between the tree structure, which to me is shape and the S-curve and that is time. So when I'm thinking about reconfiguration help me understand when I'm thinking about movement and flow and the configuration architecture, how is that informing me? Well, where am I? Well, okay. A hierarchical drawing like the river basin has many, many shapes. The biggest is the shape of the page. Inside of it there's the shape of the angle between two tributaries. The drawing is full of such angles. Those angles are all different. But at the same time they're all similar because they're all kind of close to 75 degrees or 50 degrees. So you have shapes galore if that is what interests you. Others are interested in lengths. Well, there are many channels and the lengths are themselves hierarchical. Some are longer, others are shorter. The more of these, let's call them shapes and lengths the more complex the drawing is. And complex, you have to be very careful with this word is one that places the discussion closer to the locker room meaning the jargon because it hides these elements that I was enumerating. Complex, the word itself means twisted together. And if I use that word I declare defeat, not victory, you see. If it's twisted together, I cannot even wish myself good luck because there is no luck. In any case, I know what it means. And to me, a word like that is an invitation to question the word, to question the speaker, to ask myself what is the drawing that's complex. If you ask this question, the drawing is not that complex because if you can make it, it is not twisted together, you see. It is twisted together meaning like one of these truly fractal drawings when you cannot draw it, you see. So on and on, look, we can let's say slice the orange here and small slices but we're wasting our time if we do that. The point is that to answer you, the words that we use are very useful but they also tend to separate us to keep us apart if we do not agree on their meaning. And that's why I interjected and I added some imagery to the words that you're speaking. And by the way, structure, same origin as strewn, well, that's where the S-curve phenomenon is. The spreading is S-curve, it's growth, also known as growth. The collecting is also S-curve, which is also growth. During the reaping of a harvest, the flow of the grain from the area where the silo is a stream that grows slow, fast, slow. The direction of the flow is not the phenomenon. The history of the flow is the phenomenon and it is called the S-curve. Also known as the logistics S-curve or the logistics curve. And I can tell you the history of that if you're interested. The point is that logistics from military was the word, yeah, they call logistics, the flow of material, food, not just ammunition, but mobile hospitals and the infirmaries and all these things that are flowing and moving behind the troops. And there's a great quote from Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte. He said, amateurs, he was talking about generals, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics, logistics. And that was Napoleon. The quote is even better now because of the English language as belonging to General Omar Bradley who used it without crediting Napoleon. So, but in any case, these are two very important figures who knew which end is up. Think about it, highly successful because you see today in the conflicts that are raging, it's not about what goes on, meaning not only what goes on on the front, it is about the logistics where the power of the society behind the military activity. This is extremely important to learn from every news item today. Well, thank you. I'll give a reflection and connect just a few areas of flow that I think really speak to some of the points. So, the key reflection is nature is not broken by department. It's not broken or mistaken in any way and that is radically different than many organizational structures including in learning and education. And so that's a big question mark and a big open space and then there was some pictures and some words and some symbols but that's a starting place that's perennial. I thought of two kind of flows evoked in your description. The first was drawing with a ballpoint pen on the page and the ink as it diffuses through the paper and about how there's a trace and then you could imagine filling the channels of the paper and different properties of the paper and just about how the act of drawing is and why the line fixes at a certain point. That's the S curve has flowed to its flow. It dries, solvent is gone. So, you can go into more detail but just in that act and then another one perhaps more in a informational space is the jargon and the jargon can be piercing but it can be a grappling hook to go 100 miles out and get really specific. I'm talking about theta sub delta of figure four of your 2012 paper and that can go all the way down and then there's that second phase of expansion. It's not just about throwing needles it's about throwing the needle to the wall that was your engineered setting and then if it makes contact then there's the secondary phase that's the actual overture and the initial precision technical detail is a first contact if even that and again that gives science education and praxis I think a real challenge and opportunity. I think you hit the nail on the head three times real hard and it's the same nail even though every time it made an issue the difference cream but that is in fact very accurate and it happens just a second and it does happen the way that you profess it does happen even after it hits the wall in all your examples because happening is nature itself. Let's say the campus divided into departments they don't talk to each other is unnatural. It's unnatural. These barriers have been disregarded by clear thinkers all the time. The ones who have made progress or contributions are the professors or researchers that had this innate ability to scale fences and jump over them or to get drunk and step off the curb and fall on the street. These are the people who made the history of science they are called polymaths and we have them, I know even here at Duke I know the few who are this way they are my friends and we are too busy to start a revolution but the future is the way you sketched it it will continue to be one of the filling in the spaces or rediscovering or repeating what others have done in a sketchy fashion or maybe throwing a jargon word out there or perhaps as a joke or even more effective as a non-PC joke and then the people say aha, aha and in the beginning this act this spark you described makes roots and fills the space because a good idea is like food for the hungry it attracts participants it attracts students it attracts disciples, followers second generation teachers or artists and I'll come back to your first example when you started speaking I saw immediately the history of painting the first thing that Da Vinci and these people Michelangelo did was to make a very fast pencil sketch something that only they recognized because it was already in their minds and today with all this instrumentation people are discovering as traces of graffiti on the canvas that had been covered much later with various colors over and over again yes, that's the way nature really works and nature is also the brain itself let's face it, there's no other architecture that works except the one that gets crudely in my exposition here Susan, do you want to give a kind of closing question or comment while we have Adrienne? I'm going to begin with a blank slate I'm available a little longer if you have food for the hungry here I'll ask a question from the live chat Upcycle Club writes a question to Professor Bijan what are the biggest unanswered questions or areas of exploration within constructal theory that you hope future researchers will investigate I've been kicking this ball for almost 40 years not in the direction of discovering the biggest that need to be discovered or explored but out of curiosity today as you saw in Susan's presentation there's a world movement it's populated primarily by younger people who are in fact competing with me clearly I'm not at the start of my career but they are beginning and in fact quite creative and productive my own new work is about asking questions about this field that have not been asked or answered the constructal law has not been refuted by anyone in its already four decades nobody so I decided to question it myself to say listen, what was that word let me prove it wrong but there's this word from Karl Popper falsification let me falsify this so I'm looking for phenomena that first viewing seemed to contradict the constructal law yes because I have the talent of looking around and I keep my eyes open yes when there's a heavy downpour and the rain falls on dirt obviously the river basin is born but the river channels flow with cataracts they develop a periodic sequence of little pools interspaced with many waterfalls cataracts yes the river is putting the brakes on itself yes it's a contradiction of the constructal law right so I questioned it and I published it and I discovered in the course of proving the constructal law wrong the constructal law is right the water that flows in that periodic fashion flows faster than in the textbook of water flowing uniformly and steadily down an incline along an incline plane and the reason why the interrupted flow is faster is there is nothing more perfect for the flow of water than to fall without friction to fall over a dam so the water the water and the erodible soil have in themselves this tendency called freedom to facilitate access and I yes I was excited not to prove myself right I was actually trying to find the limited applicability of this concept and in this case I did not find it and I'm continuing this sort of I'm the okay in the same room on both you know profit and a get fly I'm trying to prove prove Adrian wrong okay and it's exciting but I'm a I'm an audience of one I talked to my wife and she knows where I'm coming from and all of it is worth worth laughing in fact but if we don't laugh we have no future frankly so just to kind of wrap up the I think I read the paper you're talking about but I remember something about the eddies and and that kind of brought me back to what Daniel's question was about as far as how we break free these silos and how does that how does that form and also I think that also speaks to maybe the second session that we can hold which is about the freedom because we really that is of itself that's a topic that is just so rich I'm happy to mention the eddies because that was an earlier example of my questioning this principle people all over view turbulence especially in the applied world turbulence is something bad something that increases friction yes yes something that's not as good as a smooth flow called laminar flow the one with the smooth streamlines and this is what you see in the textbook yeah turbulence this complicated thing eddies rubbing and meh well you know what turbulent flow is constructed as well because compared with laminar turbulent flow answers the question of what really flows what flows is not the fluid what flows is the movement across the fluid meaning the movement from the flash to the slow in other words the mixing the mixing is known in physics as the transfer of momentum that is what's facilitated by this sudden change in the drawing from smooth layers to things that appear to be complicated by the way they're not complicated I did predict the sizes of these eddies and their speeds and their hierarchies the eddies are basically these trees the trees that I drew like the trees of a river basin but the river basin that becomes this turbulent pool is a tree the channels of which are embedded in the same fluid which is the pool and every channel is unstable and becomes curved and it rolls over the tree that I just sketched becomes a bouquet bouquet of broken branches that continue to roll that continue to roll filling the space but you can see their birth in the little speech that I gave in any case there is a hierarchy of eddies in every so called turbulent flow field now the doctrine of turbulence research is not like what I just spoke it is about a uniform distribution over the field over the pool of eddies of various sizes as if there are these fruits of various sizes all thrown into a pot mixed around with the chocolate sauce that is not what turbulence is turbulence is a broken tree structure the branches of which keep rolling embedded in each other and that so called mixture is the one that vehicles the movement of movement across the volume without it without it there would be no turbulence there would be no life on earth everything would be stagnant cool of I don't know what a layer of no life another layer of no life in other words no mixing so mixing we know this from other stories of science and history mixing is in fact the mother of not only life you get species from from events of encounter or meeting and new species from interbreeding and so on so without mixing there is nothing on earth nothing so one final question that speaks back to your slide on nothing moves unless it's pushed yeah that's right that's the plan is to explain that yeah a peasant knows that the horses needed don't feed only a cart and I come back to the news of the day the the logistics the ability to move things the ability to power things this is this is the most important because society itself is alive because of the of the power that it the society produces and not the power by the way something else that people don't realize is spent as soon as it is produced it is spent and destroyed as soon as it is made and that is called movement or life life means to destroy the power that is available to you you don't have to look at today's advanced society look at any animal the movement of the animal is the physical movie of how the useful energy that is embodied in the food is being destroyed no food no animal movement simple as that no food and no engine which is the animal itself that means death not life death and these are basic facts of physics you don't need an education whatever anthropology yeah you could use an education in veterinary medicine that's where you get this much broader picture of who we are thank you Adrian we really appreciated it hope to talk to you another time alright thank you thank you for the opportunity to get to know each other thank you yes thank you so much very insightful thank you well Susan I have many random remarks to share would you like to share anything go ahead and of course what's going on in the chat yeah alright I'll read a few traveling fast and slow that reminded me of thinking fast and slow and then in the airport there was the fast backbone and the slow walking on the edges but in terms of thinking fast and slow actually the fast part is on the edges of the biological organism with the reflexes and the reactivity and the slower part is the backbone so it's like kind of the same but different the other piece was he said that the first question is often overlooked like what phenomena are we looking at what's the system of interest and then that made me think about like biomechanics like an elbow moving and so in the physics textbook or in an example it's like well there's a weight on the end of a stiff rod and it's set up but that's kind of the last mile phenomena of the arm is a broader phenomena and so you still may want to have that very reduced disciplinary model it's small it's useful it can give insight and so on it's just part of a bigger tapestry about that phenomena and that's a different starting point for the conversation and the collaboration on that topic that's not disciplinary so the entry point of the real system and the entry and returning point is by definition the broader conversation than the kind of terminal scientific artifact which as we discussed that's kind of the narrow but far as opposed to the broader and kind of softer but more space and closing yes and actually that brings up when you think about phenomenon I almost want to go to what is the context but phenomenon is actually what is flowing so when we kind of pull that in as far as the fast and the slow how much and a lot of times by injecting that you're actually putting turbulence into a conversation which if somebody is associating turbulence with conflict then they might be actually distorting it distorting the freedom of what can emerge and so this comes back to the invasion acceleration they spoke about and then the consolidation is the deceleration yeah a few points on that first I think a question I'd love to learn more about is like trends are not monotonic so just because things have been a certain way for the last 50 or 100 years doesn't even mean the sign is going to be the same so I'd be interested to see how that kind of change comes into play but I'm thinking about cars engine there's parts where the laminar flow is the desirable trade for transfer and then there's parts where mixing like liquid and gas and thermal mixing is more important and they simply are not the functional they play complementary functional roles it's literally like fast and slow and there's never a reason why especially considered apart from a specific system it basically can't be said which of those tendencies are you know how to compare them which is why you know we were looking at a two-dimensional shape with the rectangle there was only one degree of freedom which was the ratio so that reflects I think having a simple we had to capture that yeah capture that yeah this actually so if we were to translate this and bring in some active inference you know what's kind of coming alive for me in this is the difference between exploitation and exploitation yeah like he showed a parabola with a ball rolling to the bottom of the hill and then there was kind of a zone of tolerance like within 10% of the y-axis and so it was a pretty shallow bowl wide bowl so there was a lot of play that would keep it within a 10% tolerance on the y now to persistently that all the ball needs to know is the slope of which direction it should head given that it's already knowing that it's within this zone of controllability which is how all bodies are everyone has been part of an unbroken chain of blood sugar regulation so the evolutionary and the developmental prior is that the physiological state is already in the zone of control just a directional issue to head towards the bottom of the bowl but you can't stop X change you can't stop climate from changing you can't stop physiology from changing that's not to say you can't de-risk and think about real consequences of action but just taking it at the most narrow technical sense of change through time and evolution all things are changing there's no point in trying to halt change and it's a simpler actionable heuristic for the ball on the ball bottom of the bowl which way is the free energy flowing yep, patholeast resistance and this kind of comes back to the phenomenon of how do we predict and in fact I would suggest let me share my screen because for those people listening I just yeah, do you see it? so yeah, I mean just putting that being able, I constantly go back to and reread this while in fact the reason I said I'm going back to a clean slate because it was like whenever I have the opportunity to speak with Adrian he puts something out there and I'm like what I thought I was reading into it that's kind of going to the phenomenon of exploration and seeing what's out there how are we perceiving the world and then how do we switch to exploitation and when I'm saying exploitation I'm talking about how do we move from being in the world to how do we move to remaking the world or changing doing what he talked about originally is how do we construct the world around us for our niche construction actually he does reference niche construction in the book and so how do we do that so that we're using the least amount of necessary energy because I think that one question that I had which I think would be a topic for a future conversation is how do we know when we are violating the construct a law and this ties back to the belief update I'd like to connect a few of the words you have on this slide to the act of ontology as we explore all the time that's how we begin that bi-directional conversation the finite size system that is a thing system of interest it's a thing it's the blanket and the internal states of the particular partition the particle the thing itself to persist in time non-equilibrium steady state or a similar phrasing talking about the path of least action of the stationary state or the attractor or the trajectory or the path of that thing so we're talking about the same kind of system of interest and then evolve with freedom as we heard these terms are plain and so evolve being changed through time notably not taking on the kind of intergenerational connotation of evolution some people like in biology would say something like well evolution happens between generations and development but here time evolution is being used more generally freedom was described in terms of degrees of freedom statistics and we could also think about rule-based degrees of freedom as affordances as the knobs that can be changed those are the degrees of freedom on that interface and then to the last piece providing easier and greater access to what flows here I think to the recent gas stream 63.1 that discussed the philosophical status of material and information flows and more logistics yes and then of course the the joke I guess was like the logistic curve but it's like logistic and logistics and then what status to accord to material flows and informational flows in integrated auto poetic mortal computational systems where there's a weaving of like the blood flow of the brain and the ion flow and the nutrients and there's an informational flow semantic flow that is not strictly described by the material architecture now to pull back to okay so put that in the frame of reference in terms of one thing he said that was like blew my mind was it's not the what is flowing when he was referencing what is flowing and I'm you know and so what you just said where I'm going with this and if this if tell me if this is where you're thinking is epistemic and pragmatic value so what is flowing me once we can calculate that and he also gave a calculation for degrees of freedom nice these are great directions all just go to a different angle I thought it was I loved his recurrent connection with drawing and art and about the sketches that are being discovered behind paintings that's like deeper blankets of the painting deeper levels of historical meaning and cross cross referencing like oh this one is signed at an earlier day in the letter so we know that they were speaking with this person so it's like deeper in space and time and causality and then even artists like Kandinsky would go through many iterations and many sketches on even non-representational or post-representational everyone to think about the kind of art that's not like a landscape but the painting was then synesthetic auditory and so that kind of brings together not to resolve but for the beauty of the snapshot the noun structure and the dynamics to structure as a verb and as a process and like the fact that you can't disentangle or drop one or the other prioritize one or the other they're literally snapshots of the movie yes yes and it's kind of tie that back to you know the path of least action and and but it reminds me of a saying correct me correct correct me if I'm not getting this correct but you know the difference between the saying goes is the difference between an average artist and a expert or a master artist is knowing when to paint the last paint strike that's cool it reminds me of I would have written a shorter letter if I had more time like there's these kind of are they intuitive or are they counterintuitive because it's knowing what not to do and when you do it yeah yes yes and this yeah this that's a great way to wrap that up yeah because it comes back to the path of least resistance and the freedom and so often times the affordances people don't understand that they're actually pushing too hard or over designing and how do we use the construct a law and active inference to to his point I mean it's like power is spent as soon as it's produced I'll make a few more contact points with active inference one question I have is like where's the observer we've explored a lot this year with Chris Fields' course and the quantum information sciences and so on about the role of the observer so should we think of these flow processes as only or actually occurring on the material substrate if so where is the space for the observer or the poly computing of Mike Levin so that's one open question and then I think another important touch point is like notions of hierarchy which you return to and there was like a very unconventional hierarchy represented with people's diffusion from city blocks like smaller and bigger parties getting going to and leaving at different times and then the diffusion maps across the city and so it's like that's one representation he kind of contrasted that flow hierarchy with like a pyramid type representation maybe you mentioned this and then that made me think about two ways that we see the hierarchical models and active inference one of them that are different than both the pyramid and the city blocks one of them is the spatial enclosure nested blankets nested models that are enclosing each other not just diffusing into the same city and then another is the metacognitive with the work of Sam Vetsmith et al in live stream 28 with the hierarchical model representing metacognitive layers so between the pyramid the city streets the enclosure and the minds that one symbol bridges us already such that it puts the brunt of the question on what to do and how to do it yeah yeah a lot of semesters to explore that's exciting so to wrap up and to capture is there any other questions not that we have to answer them now but if you can just kind of read off any other questions that might have shown up in the live chat I'll capture those and we can start kind of a repository of what showed up today and that way we can use it to explore further yeah we will continue the kind of series and the curating of questions I'll just read one mills 8102 wrote what are the factors or conditions that afford the restructuring of a flow system does it always require the imposition of sufficient demand on that system to change does it take a crisis and then one question I have is where are perception and action do you have any last comments or thoughts on head spinning wow great thank you Susan and thank you thank you very well till next time