Enneagram strategies

This page describes the organizational forces that limit change. It explains how to overcome them when necessary.

This page uses an example to illustrate how:

A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence.
A program approach can ensure strategic alignment.

This page uses the example of HP's printer organization freeing itself from its organizational constraints to sell a printer targeted at the IBM pc user.
The constraints are described.
The techniques to overcome them are implied.

We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the African savanna. As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend them. So this web frame explores significant real world complex adaptive systems (CAS): Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and retirement savings of the working class. The assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched. The US nation was built from two divergent political views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also reflects the development of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall Street into a position of power, while the middle and working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions helped hide the shift. Most US health care is still operating the way cars built in the 1940s did. Geisinger is an example of better solution. But transforming the whole network is a challenge. And public health investment has proved far more beneficial. Helping our children learn to be effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have created a robust but deeply flawed education system. Better alternatives have emerged. Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our good ideas to become a second genetic material. The emergence of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent development; It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It outlines the items we see as key to the system and why. Example systems frame
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these systems can have disastrous consequences for their human managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage CAS, Dorner recommends use of: Effective iterative planning and Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he reviews. Complexity catastrophes
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to date and explains how the two systems can coexist most effectively. Adaptive ecology
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and energy goals. US vds alignment
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their successful strategy used the credibility of conservative religious leaders to: Demonstrate religious issues with the New Deal. Integrate the corporate elite and evangelicals. Use the power of corporate advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American people to view the US as historically religious and the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious socialism. Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham. Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower. Add religious elements to mainstream American symbols: money, pledge; Push for prayer in public school Push Congress to promote prayer Make elections more about religious positions. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Strategy is the art of the possible. But it also depends on persistence. Inventing Christian America
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt. Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation: Junk bonds, Derivative deregulation, CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud, Financial network deregulation, Financial network consolidation, Short term incentives Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged. The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some. Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics. He sees the result being a rigged system. Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched. Financial WMD
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic alignment of the American justice system. The result he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to extract profits and leave the victim deflated. Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the: activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes, prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are: Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to win. Aligned justice
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of staff. Mechanics of power
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and libertarianism. Libertarianism
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs. He promotes strategies that help OKR success: Focus, Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance reviews, and provides illustrative success stories. Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's view that employees are adaptive and will respond to what they see being measured. He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Doerr's architecture is tailored for the startups KPCB invests in. It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all CAS. Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the association to planning. Startup PDCA
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take hold. While the French revolution had many driving forces including famine and oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured that thoughtful leaders were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the crisis. Voltaire's disruptive network
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges during the enlightenment. It was a poem encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a humanist book hunter. Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the foundation of the modern world. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms are discussed. Constraining happiness
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of web services to explore Ada Lovelace's ideas about thinking machines and poetic science. He highlights the value of computer augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to fulfill the process. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and collaboration are discussed. Arts technology & intelligence
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on the hard problem of consciousness. During the journey he describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the potential and challenges of associative neural networks. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling evolved conscious animals. It will be seen that Haikonen's neural architecture, Smiley's Copycat architecture and molecular biology's intracellular architecture leverage the same associative properties. Associatively integrated robots
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior developments that have been successfully implemented. Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS). Developing ideas
A government sanctioned monopoly supported the construction of a superorganism American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). Within this Bell Labs was at the center of three networks: The evolving global scientific network. The Bell telephone network. And The military industrial network deploying 'fire and missile control' systems. Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation engine. They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent opposition and enable the creation and growth of new ideas. Once the monopoly was dismantled, AT&T disrupted. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are discussed. Strategic innovation
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of BREXIT is summarized. His ideas are then framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory and reviewed. BREXIT
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are monopolists that trade workers for technology. Monopolies that he argues should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle class. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS). While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts with relevant CAS history and theory. Monopoly job killers
The IPO of Netscape is defined as the key emergent event of the New Economy by Michael Mandel. Following the summary of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. New economy
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy. It was enabled by the experience of Keynes and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard, the necessity of improving the situation between the wars and the opportunity created by the catastrophe of the Second World War. He describes how it was planned and developed. How it emerged from the summit. And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy. Like all plans there are mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as best it could. And then Conway describes the period after Bretton Woods collapsed. He explains what followed and also compares the relative performance of the various periods before during and after Bretton Woods. Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS) theory. Conway's book illustrates the rule making and infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier. He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and against the development and deployment of the system. And The Summit provides a key piece of the history of our global economic CAS. Bretton woods
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008 housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential mortgage value delivery system (VDS) by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst. Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. Housing amplifiers
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives system. Das describes the components of the value delivery system and the key transactions. He demonstrates how the system interacted with emerging economies expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted. Derivative systems
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as creditors are willing to continue lending. They illustrate different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the eighteenth century administrations of England and France. The US embodies two different political and economic systems which approach the national debt differently: Taxes to support a sinking fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in: Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social programs; Starting with Hamilton, Lincoln & Chase, Wilson, FDR; Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison, Reagan, George W. Bush (Gingrich); Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US government does. They argue that the conflicting sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in the middle' with a future problem. And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the future. They conclude the question is still political. They hope it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed explanations. They ask who is willing to push all the coming risk onto individuals. Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery system, key CAS features are highlighted. National debt
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second industrial revolution were the foundation for American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people into difficult rural America built a population base which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets, Clothes in department stores; that supported increasing productivity and standard of living. The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities; terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow the economy. Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of: Communications and advertising Credit and finance Public health and the health care network Health insurance Education Social and welfare services Counter intuitively the constraints introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2 provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970 creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post war America. Subsequently the rate of growth was limited until the shift of women into the workplace and the full networking of voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were muted by the narrow reach of the technologies. The development of Big Data, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth, but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of the middle class. Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. American growth
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of money based on the attractive features of precious metals. He compares the potential for government edicts to create money but sees them as lacking. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts. Government backed promissory notes are analogous to: Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy transaction intermediates and Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in supporting survival and replication in the currently accessible niches. Emergence of money
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth? To do this he replaces traditional economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an economy is a system in equilibrium, with complexity economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex adaptive system (CAS). He introduces Sugerscape to illustrate an economic CAS model in action. And then he explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics, Agents, Networks, Emergence, and Evolution. Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to the economy to build wealth. He explains how design spaces map strategies to instances of physical and social technologies. And he identifies the interactors and selection mechanism of economic evolution. This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition of wealth. In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance, & Politics & Policy. Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we leverage. Economic complexity
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land and labor to work it including slaves. He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages and the ways found to mobilize industrial labor. Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected. Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when the US civil war blocked access to the major production nodes in the American Deep South the CAS began adapting. Beckert describes the global reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation states. Beckert explains how other countries responded by copying the colonial strategies and creating the opportunities for future armed conflict among the original colonialists and the new upstarts. Completing the adaptive shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in the colonized global south and how over time they joined the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing nodes and creating the current global CAS dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers, spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each other on cost. Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of disconnected peasant farmers, pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over time: of military force, global transportation and communication networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows, models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and evolved amplifiers. The emergent system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of extended phenotypic alignment. Globalization from cotton
The structure and problems of the US health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The network: Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without. The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network. The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous levels of: salt, sugar, cigarettes, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, costly education, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters; Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress, amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome collapse; Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies. This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development, provision, reimbursement and payment. Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees. Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to. As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is: Costly and inefficient Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies. Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR products deep within the hospital systems. Is maintained, and kept in alignment, by massive network effects across the: Hospital platform based sub-networks connecting to Physician networks Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA narrow network legislation Hospital clinical supply and food production networks Medical school and academic research network and NIH Global transportation network Public health networks Health care IT supply network Health care
Deaton describes the wellbeing of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public health strategies and the effect of growth in material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of aid. Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The situation he describes is complex including powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The biosphere, Politics, Economics, Philosophy and Health care. Improving wellbeing
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations of the major problems afflicting US health care as of 2006. Problems of US health care
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC. After an overview of the business, they describe how a calamity unfolding around them supported building a vision of a better US health care network. And they explain: How they planned out the transformation, Leveraging an effective governance structure, Using a strategy to gain buy in, Enabling reengineering at the clinician patient interface. Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic & hot spot care; to help the patients and help the physicians. Geisinger's leverage of biologics. Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience. Where Geisinger is headed next. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them. We frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. E2E insured quality care
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader and son who know that the current health care network interacts with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that caused his father's death. But he is confident that these problem perceptions can be changed. Once that occurs he asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated, collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their patients. The supporting technology infrastructure will be made highly interoperable. All that will reduce medical errors and make care more cost effective. Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them. We frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory including synergistic examples of these systems in operation. The health care network is built out of emergent human agents. All agents must model the signals they perceive to represent and respond to them. Pinker explains how this occurs. Sapolsky explains why fear and hierarchy are so significant. He includes details of Josh Green's research on morality and death. Charles Ferguson highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives. Bad medical models
US healthcare is ripe for disruption. Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that technologies are emerging which will support low cost business models that will undermine the current network. Applying complex adaptive system (CAS) theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist these progressive forces. Disrupting health care
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent improvement in quality in medicine by organizing to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists. With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates the effects of complexity and how to organize to cope with it. Following the short review RSS additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within the network of US health care, contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping his various examples and reviewing facets of complex failures. Complexity checklists
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on 1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects' lives significantly affected their longevity. Looking broadly across each subject's: Personality, Education, Parental impacts, Energy levels, Partnering, Careers, Religion, Social networks, Gender, Impact from war and trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways, which each individual could be seen to select and travel along. Some paths led to the traveler having a long life. Others were problematic. The models imply that the US approach to health and wellness should focus more on supporting the development and selection of beneficial pathways. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. The pathways are most applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support necessary to make and leverage choices they make. Striving to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network, starved of resources. Promoting longevity
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping with aging and death. He introduces the lack of focus on aging and death in traditional medicine. And goes on to show how technology has amplified this stress point. He illustrates the traditional possibility of the independent self, living fully while aging with the support of the extended family. Central planning responded to the technological and societal changes with poorly designed infrastructure and funding. But Gawande then contrasts the power of bottom up innovations created by experts responding to their own family situations and belief systems. Gawande then explores in depth the challenges that unfold currently as we age and become infirm. He notes that the world is following the US path. As such it will have to understand the dilemma of integrating medical treatment and hospice strategies. He notes that all parties involved need courage to cope. He proposes medicine must aim to assure well being. At that point all doctors will practice palliative care. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death, evolution, cooperation and adaptations to new technologies are discussed. Agent death
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles mosquitoes and Plasmodium. 250 - 500 million people are infected each year with malaria and one million die. Malaria
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution of medical science. Medical science events
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies that generate complexity within systems. They do this through a focus on modularity. Modular designed systems
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer company IBM. Compartmented systems
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer software design. Object based systems
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for creating modular software. He concludes that abstract data types and inheritence make object orientation a superior methodology for software construction. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy to the use of objects. Software construction
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred. Tools
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the World. He highlights: A list of preconditions resulting in Additional niche capture & more free time Building a network to interconnect memes processes & tools which Enabling inter-generational transfers Innovations that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil fuels Memetic trading networks
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man building cultures and later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a change of approach. He: Explores creativity: how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter gatherer, enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the evening around the campfire. He notes the power of fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing signature of aesthetic surprise. Looks at the current limitations of the humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect. Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and culture: Ultimate causes viewed through art, & music The bedrock of: Ape senses and emotions, Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied by humanities, & Exponential change in science and technology. How the breakthrough from our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat, supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory & language. Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution. The impact on human nature. Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are destroying. Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes, exploration, irony, and considers the potential for a third enlightenment, supported by cooperative action of humanities and science Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory: The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework for representing the cultural CAS while Wilson's desire to integrate the humanities and science gains support from viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS. Evening campfire rituals
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the economy. They argue it has generated exponential growth. This has been due to innovation. It has created a huge bounty of additional wealth. But the wealth is spread unevenly across society. They look at the short and long term implications of the innovation bounty and spread and the possible future of technology. Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the perspective of CAS theory. Brilliant technologies
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles. He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative, Khan: Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity. The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework. Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education; Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network? Education versus guilds
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The Triple Package is summarized. Their ideas are then framed by CAS theory and reviewed. What drives success
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings. Warrior groups
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory highlights the value of evolutionary testing of the food chain. Natural systems
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can take hold. Various social insects have developed strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable available niches. Like humans they invest in specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped competitors. Insect superorganisms
Computational theory of the mind and evolutionary psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by natural selection 'building out' specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs we call the mind. He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from psychology regarding: The visual system - an example of natural selections solutions to the sensory challenges of inverse modeling of our environment; Intensions - where he highlights the challenges of hunter gatherers - making sense of the objects they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war. These conclusions allow him to understand the development and maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor, Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life. Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved amplifiers: Globalization, Cliodynamics, The green revolution and resource bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints. The implications are discussed. Computationally adapted mind
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span: conception, infantile puberty, girlhood, juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in how emotions are processed by women compared to men. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and behavioral CAS. Evolved female brain
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of adaptive flows he outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for scientific research on behavior. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured to successfully enter niches we now occupy. CAS behavior
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time: A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist Events are only partially ordered. The present is localized The difference between past and future is not foundational. It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations evolve together with events, not things Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge: Our familiar time emerges Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty Directionality of time is real but perspectival. The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field. With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions Emergence of time
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries. Now it is finally being characterized scientifically. That required a transformation of approach. Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access. In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma. Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness. He describes the research methods. He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity. He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole. He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses. The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined. Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed. Conscious access
Reading and writing present a conundrum. The reader's brain contains neural networks tuned to reading. With imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean? Dehaene explains the importance of education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia. But he notes the reading networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved. And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing reading and culture. He explains the cultural engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that enable and constrain reading and culture. Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural complex adaptive system (CAS) are related. We review his explanations in CAS terms and use his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge. Evolved reading
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions. In particular he explains how: Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. Receptor indirection
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific investigation of meditation's impact on the brain. They introduce the book by describing their experiences with meditation, science and the research establishment, their friendship, how meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to back them up. Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds work. They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern tradition of exploring and altering the mind. Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at Harvard. Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of consciousness. It took over twenty years for scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align with this model. Much of the prior experimental data had to be abandoned. They introduce meditation's impact on the amygdala responding to pain and stress. They look at the changes in: Stress Compassion Attention Self-awareness; and the potential for use of mediation in psychiatry. And they warn of the occurrence of dark nights. They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters, starting with Mingyur Rinpoche, and detect meditation altering traits. Finally they discuss the potential benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it broadly to a busy America. Meditating neurons
Tara Brach was worried from a young age that there was something terribly wrong with her: she like many others felt unworthy. She responded by developing Radical Acceptance. Brach then explains the steps in applying it: pause, greet what happens next with unconditional friendliness; allowing us to: Initially attend to the sensations of our body, Accept the wanting self and discover its source of boundless love. Welcome fear with a widening attention, accept the pain of death and become free. Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves and others. Focus on our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed, towards ourselves. Extend observing this goodness in everyone. This enables the use of loving-kindness. Leverage friendships to understand more about our shared nature and strengthen Radical Acceptance. Realize our Buddha nature. Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic code and machinery. It provides an analog of the Buddhist presence. Compassionate CAS
Enneagram strategies
Antonio Damasio argues that ancient & fundamental homeostatic processes, built into behaviors and updated by evolution have resulted in the emergence of nervous systems and feelings. These feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general systems supporting enteric operation, are later ubiquitously integrated into the 'images' built by the minds of higher animals including humans. Damasio highlights the separate development of the body frame in the building of minds. Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the end-to-end integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers hard problem of consciousness. Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the cultural creative process, linking culture to homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the development of tools to improve our lives. But the results of the creative process have added stresses to our lives. Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Each of the [super]organisms discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems: Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns well with CAS theory. Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS examples. Emergence of feelings
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent van Gogh in Arles. Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven to create, and successfully invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and especially portraits. Vincent worked hard to allow artists like him-self to innovate. But Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis. Nemeczek also provides a brief history of Vincent's life. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Vincent creates
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse and eventual recovery. Elton stresses the serendipitous nature of his emergence as a musician. He describes the contributions of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's sister, and her mother Ivy; who formed his early childhood proximate environment which prepared him for a job in entertainment: he developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs; entering a network based around Dick James Music. And he almost got married. DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the food. A first album supported touring and the formation of a band. A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an overnight sensation. And during this period of time Elton's testosterone level ramped. Life changed dramatically. Stardom provided many rewards but there were still life's problems to deal with. Elton was befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated. His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly in hotels between concerts. His hair abandoned him. But he was saved by the challenge of transforming the collapsed Watford football club. He retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life. Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints, Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he hopes will bring him happiness: trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying Renata. He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio. Problems stress him. He is frightened by a cancer scare, AIDS, inspired by Ryan White, angered by the Sun, and saddened at breaking Renata's heart. But he was there for Ryan White's final days. And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton about his string of addictions. Elton finally agreed he had a problem. He went to rehab, stopped hating himself, gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other people. It seemed the higher force was supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all; they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni was murdered. Princess Diana died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral. He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina Turner. While his new records sold well he found himself in debt and terminated the management relationship with John Reid Enterprises. Elton and Bernie improved their situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with his seminal influence: Leon Russell. Elton and David became parents of two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate mother and network in California. They quietly get married when the UK allows. Elton's mum remains difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many at the funeral recall her fun side with him. Being parents increases the long-term stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys. But Elton needs to go out with a bang! And everyone helps. Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details of the creative process from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. My song
Richard Feynman outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story. Richard's personality encouraged him to patiently seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and practice through building and fixing radios. Leonardo's life inspired him to try innovation, which he concluded was hard. He played with the emotion in communications, a skill which he used later at Caltech. And he made a game of avoiding following orders at MIT. Working during the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and practice. Feynman enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton, where the successful approach to science was just like his. His approach was based on patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for qualitative exploration. Overtime he added experimental techniques. He would test the assertions in articles with amusing investigations; with his mind aligned by feelings of joy. Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized. He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being taught at Princeton to his current pick. In his summer recess he explored biology. Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his creativity. And his practical orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway, supported his desire for choices and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural pursuits. Being mostly self-taught, he developed different approaches to problems than the standard strategies provided by mass education. Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father. But are they very different? While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about the implications of the European war. After a friend enlisted he decided to dedicate his summer holiday to helping the war effort. Feynman got involved in the Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the physics of the project, him on Niels Bohr; but was freed from them by Von Neumann. The records & reports of the project were kept in filing cabinets. Richard explored the weaknesses of the locks and safes deployed to secure these secrets. Just after the war he was called up by the draft board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally unfit. After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell. He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on fun. He enjoyed knowing about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate and approximate a value the fastest. Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much fun for Richard. So he used the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet beautiful women. Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque frequenting one, and later ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he drank with to sleep with him. Richard reflects on various times when he made government officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape; Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech. Both institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making, but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste of time and he saw risks in a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech and stay there. Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in Japan. Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little Japanese. Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse effectively, but stops when he finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his individualism. Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics. He felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the latest details, fearful that he could not cope; as the community worked to understand the laws of beta decay. But Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity premise. Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of reports. Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang discussed a failure and a theory to explain it. Richard felt terrified and could not understand what they said. His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student having fun, read every line and equation of their paper; he would understand it. And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what was happening and what still seemed conflicted. He reported his ideas back to the community. After Richard returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay. Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply describing the details of beta decay. He had identified the workings of a fundamental law. Years later he was awarded the Nobel prize for physics. He was conflicted about the prize and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip, where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese ambassador. Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling it on a digital computer. He explored hallucinations and the reality of experiences. Richard lobbies for integrity in science. In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science, Richard was quirky. He would tease those who asked for his help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to their part of the agreement. And he paid no attention to the logistical details of planning. He loved percussion, playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success. He eventually discovered art could be fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying mathematical beauty of the physical world. He had a great art teacher. But he discovered although he could eventually draw well he did not understand art. Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful, who were interested in integrating art and science, did not understand either subject. He found the situation was similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects made him angry and disturbed, so he avoided participating in them. It seemed ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing culture to the physicists! He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil. He gets involved in the California public school text book selection process which he concluded was totally broken, but also reveals how his father provided him with a vision of how our world works, inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical theory. Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported his creative development from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Richard draws
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the accumulation of small advantageous changes. Accumulating small changes
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and the emergence of agents. Autonomous emergence
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition. Constraint based phenomena

Primary Navigation

In this page we:

Introduce some current problems of complexity for humanity
Explain how to use the site.

There are two main starting points:

The example systems frame and
The presentation frame.
And then there is how we use the site.

The site uses lots of click through. That's so that you can see the underlying principles that are contributing to the system being discussed. We hope that as you internalize and reflect on the principles the system should appear in a new light. At this site clicking is good!

Opportunities

This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents. It highlights the constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A proposal that does not conform is wrong.

John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented.

Theory

We are products of complexity, but our evolution has focused our understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the African savanna. As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend them. So this web frame explores significant real world complex adaptive systems (CAS):

Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and retirement savings of the working class. The assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched.
The US nation was built from two divergent political views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also reflects the development of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall Street into a position of power, while the middle and working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions helped hide the shift.
Most US health care is still operating the way cars built in the 1940s did. Geisinger is an example of better solution. But transforming the whole network is a challenge. And public health investment has proved far more beneficial.
Helping our children learn to be effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have created a robust but deeply flawed education system. Better alternatives have emerged.
Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our good ideas to become a second genetic material.
The emergence of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent development;

It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.

Examples

This page presents a search result list covering each linked region of rob's strategy studio.

Search

Rob's Strategy Studio aims to celebrate and illuminate complex adaptive systems (CAS) just as an art studio does art.

By way of introduction it notes the complex interactions that led to the partnership that discovered the DNA double helix and genetic code.

The page introduces the RSS vision 'I act, therefore I think' approach and the RSS mission.

It describes how many key aspects of the world are CAS including businesses.

Finally the page explains each of the framed pictures displayed at the studio including the other aspects explored in this vision frame.

Vision

This page introduces the programs that the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF) develops and uses to deploy Rob's Strategy Studio (RSS).
The programs are structured to obey complex adaptive system (CAS) principles. That allows AWF to experiment and examine the effects.
A production program generates the web pages.
A testing system tests the production program. It uses a framework to support the test programs. This is AWF's agent programming framework as described in the agent-based programming presentation.
An example of the other AWF agent-based programs that are also described in the frame is the virtual robot.
Finally a strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats assessment is presented.

Perl

This page introduces a series of asymmetries which encourage different strategic approaches.
The differences found in business, sexual selection, gamete structure, as well as in chess encourage escalations in the interactions.
And yet the systems including these asymmetries can be quite stable.

Asymmetries

This web frame includes a set of presentations about complex adaptive systems (CAS)

Presentations

Enneagram strategies

Summary

The influence of childhood on behavior is significant. Enneagrams define personality types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast, Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of childhood driven wounds.

The Enneagram becomes a tool to enable interested people to transform from the emotionally wounded base, hidden within the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence.

Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear. In response each of us adopts an induced Basic Desire of the type. But as we develop the inner observer, it will support presence and undermine the identification that supports the armor of the type.

The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type armor:

Triadic self revealing: Instinctive, feeling, thinking; childhood needs that became significant wounds
Social style groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for managing inner conflict
Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for defending childhood wounds

Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual distortions reflected in the interests of the variants.

The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development: unhealthy, average, healthy, liberation; including their current center of gravity, steriotypical social role, wake-up call, leaden rule, red flag, and direction of integration and disintegration.

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family and social life. Emergent evolved amplifers can be constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies.

The Wisdom Of The Enneagram

In Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson's book 'The Wisdom Of The Enneagram' they describe strategies selected and deployed by children to cope with living in families. These are reflected in our personalities, but they stress we have an essence which is much more than these personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:

Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming

types. But typically our awareness is dominated by our personality. They are sure the Enneagram can help us see how the types are holding us back from seeing the essence. Staying relaxed as we are impacted by everyday pressures allows us to respond more thoughtfully and effectively, rather than stereotypically.

Riso and Hudson explain the development of psychology that defines nine Enneagram personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:

Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming

types - which become central parts of our adult strategies:

Problem-solver (6 wing) likes observation combined with organization and detail. Drawn to technical subjects: engineering, science, philosophy, inventing, repair work; being cooperative, disciplined, and persistent. Can combine innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. It operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
with business savvy. When descend to average are interested in theories, technology, facts, details. Enjoy dissecting problems to see how they work. Attention directed to things, not people. Argumentative and defensive in their views. Aggressive and actively antagonize people who disagree. In the average range, attempt to gain independence and separation by reducing their needs. In the unhealthy range they can become eccentric shut-ins, avoiding social contact, but isolation leads to distorted thinking and delusional ideas, and can become paranoid.

Loyalist (Deer) -tt- committed, security oriented, reliable, hardworking, responsible; but defensive, evasive and highly anxious is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge.
. Identifies with the deer's basic desire, compensating for its basic fear. Often cautious and indecisive, but can be reactive, defiant and rebellious. Have problems with self-doubt and suspicion. At best they are internally stable, self-confident, and self-reliant, courageously supporting the weak and powerless. Under
stress
is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels. Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight. As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate. A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance. The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis.
- The short term response to the stressor
- long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues. Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in. Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status. It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition. Sustained stress:
- During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.
- Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness.
disintegrates to peacock.

Defender (5 wing) is attracted to complex bodies of knowledge, have great powers of concentration but narrow focus. When descend to average are independent and serious, may be loners gaining skeptical reassurance from systems and beliefs, and seeing the world as dangerous. They are aggressive and reactive, blaming & scapegoating perceived threats to their security.

The Enneagram asserts that self-knowledge is vital to help the ego includes:

Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious

Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness

Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:

Consciousness
Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious

Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.

stay grounded. Otherwise the ego assumes it is far more developed than it actually is.

Riso and Hudson assert the Enneagram can be transformational based on exploring:

Presence - awareness and
mindfulness
is an active meditative state of non-doing, attentively seeking each 'present moment' with one's body and mind 'being' at rest and so cultivating awareness, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn. Some traditions define it as observing when the mind wanders. Others use it to refer to the floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting, explain Goleman & Davidson. The thinking mind usually spends a lot of time relating to the future and past which Kabat-Zinn argues limits its ability to become fully aware of the present. In times of stress those thoughts are so overpowering that they crowd out awareness and appreciation of the present. Mindfulness shifts attention to calming internal feelings. It allows review and prioritization of thoughts as they are recognized. Major attitude based pillars of successful mindfulness are: impartial to judging, patience, a beginner's mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance of seeing things the way they are and letting go. An awareness of the body's state can be built with tools including: inquiry, naming; from Yogi's attention to:
- Breathing - which is a proxy for the environmental situation and through its rhythms is a model of our emotional state. Attention to breathing reminds people to feel their bodies too. Belly breathing is particularly relaxing.
- Sitting - erect with head, neck and back aligned vertically. Then attend to breathing moving back to it each time you observe the mind has wandered. When the body becomes uncomfortable, direct attention to the discomfort, observe and welcome it.
- Experience our body - rather than model, judge or hate it relative to an ideal - with a body scan.
- Hatha yoga - very slow stretching and strengthening exercises with moment-to-moment awareness supports being in your body.
- Walking meditation - Intentionally attend to the immediate experience of walking.
, supplied by Being
Practice of self-observation which builds self-knowledge, supplied by the individual
Understanding what one's experiences mean, supplied by the Enneagram: Triadic Self shows what each type wanted in childhood, Social Style it adopts to get its needs met, Coping Style used to defend against loss and disappointment, Instinctual variants (which Riso and Hudson add to the Enneagram framework) show which basic instinct was most distorted by childhood & so what preoccupation and behaviors will predominate across any type, dynamics of
personality
describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:
- Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
- Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
- Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
- Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
- Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming
change from the awareness of our level of development's center of gravity and directions of integration and disintegration;

Riso and Hudson suggest that when we experience our Basic Fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
, it drives us to respond with our type strategies. Children reflect the

This page discusses the potential of the vast state space which supports the emergence of complex adaptive systems (CAS). Kauffman describes the mechanism by which the system expands across the space.

environment in which they developed is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
. If our parents are unable to support our needs, or are made stressed and anxious by the qualities their children are expressing, the children will also become anxious and unhappy. This becomes reflected in the child feeling certain elements they need are missing and conclude there is something wrong with them, which emerges as a key anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge.
: the basic fear, which is a gap that interferes with experiencing our Essence. The personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:

Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming

strategies form to protect the gaps from further harm. The fear is different for each type:

As a compensation for the basic fear, a Basic Desire is induced:

To have integrity, which deteriorates into critical perfectionism
To be loved, which deteriorates into the need to be needed
To be valuable, which deteriorates into chasing success
To be oneself, which deteriorates into self-indulgence
To be competent, which deteriorates into useless specialization
To be secure, which deteriorates into an attachment to beliefs
To be happy is an emotion which functions to mobilize the mind to seek capabilities and resources that support Darwinian fitness. Today happiness is associated with Epicurean ideas that were rediscovered during the renaissance and promoted by Thomas Jefferson. But natural selection has 'designed' happiness to support hunter-gatherer fitness in the African savanna. It is assessed: Relative to other's situations, Based on small gains or losses relative to one's current situation; and so what makes us [un-]happy and our responses can seem a counter-productive treadmill. For Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in the savanna there were many ways for losses to undermine fitness and so losses still make us very unhappy. Smoking, drinking and excessive eating were not significant and so don't make us unhappy even though they impact longevity. , which deteriorates into frenetic escapism
To protect oneself, which deteriorates into constant fighting
To be at peace, which deteriorates into stubborn neglect

Riso and Hudson assert our personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:

Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming

develops most powerfully around the essence's greatest childhood wounds includes different types of stressor: No mother, Unsupportive mother, paternal deprivation, Childhood poverty, [Observing ]violence, Natural disasters, Bullying; which impact development and produce adult problems.

The adversities are stressful and alter stress physiology producing children and adults with elevated: Glucocorticoids, CRH and ACTH, Sympathetic nervous system activity. Early stress permanently impacts the brains ability to control glucocorticoid secretion. The more stressors experienced and the less protective factors, the less likely it is that the child will cope and become a resilient adult. The stressors expand the size and activity of the amygdala helping it ignore prefrontal cortex constraints. And they degrade the dopamine network through impacts to the development of the mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoids depleting dopamine.
The problems include attachment issues and adults with: depression (dopamine depletion and lowered thresholds making adult stressors more influential), anxiety, substance abuse (dopamine depletion, excessive adult exposure to glucocorticoids increasing drug craving & poorly developed frontal cortex), impaired cognitive abilities especially frontocortical with impaired hippocampal-dependent learning, impaired impulse control (amygdala), impaired emotional control, antisocial behavior and violence, relationships that replicate the childhood adversities. Abused children who develop PTSD show decreased hippocampal volume. Glucocorticoids decrease hippocampal production of BDNF. Childhood poverty impacts development of the corpus callosum & ensures by kindergarten, poor marshmallow test performance. Childhood poverty increases impacts from environmental stressors: Toxins, Liquor stores instead of fresh food markets, No transport infrastructure, Limited jobs in the immediate vicinity, Little access to low cost capital, Low positions in all social hierarchies.

, and reflects shifting our identity from the true self to a protective shell. But it is hard to transform back to the essence since it means feeling are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:

As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time

the pain emerged as a mental experience, Damasio asserts, constructed by the mind using mapping structures and events provided by nervous systems. But feeling pain is supported by older biological functions that support homeostasis. These capabilities reflect the organism's underlying emotive processes that respond to wounds: antibacterial and analgesic chemical deployment, flinching and evading actions; that occur in organisms without nervous systems. Later in evolution, after organisms with nervous systems were able to map non-neural events, the components of this complex response were 'imageable'. Today, a wound induced by an internal disease is reported by old, unmyelinated C nerve fibers. A wound created by an external cut is signalled by evolutionarily recent myelinated fibers that result in a sharp well-localized report, that initially flows to the dorsal root ganglia, then to the spinal cord, where the signals are mixed within the dorsal and ventral horns, and then are transmitted to the brain stem nuclei, thalamus and cerebral cortex. The pain of a cut is located, but it is also felt through an emotive response that stops us in our tracks. Pain amplifies the aggression response of people by interoceptive signalling of brain regions providing social emotions including the PAG projecting to the amygdala; making aggressive people more so and less aggressive people less so. Fear of pain is a significant contributor to female anxiety. Pain is the main reason people visit the ED in the US. Pain is mediated by the thalamus and nucleus accumbens, unless undermined by sleep deprivation.
of our self-abandonment. They stress that the Essence is not destroyed in the traumas of childhood. Even though we fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
and resist opening the protective covering, if we trust the process our true nature is released.

Awareness, can allow us to detect our use of type strategies and see behind them. By slowing down we can respond more objectively to the focus of attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness. It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness.
. It will require accepting the wounds, and induced fears and desires, that exist. That will allow us to respond more insightfully. Instead of responding blindly to a feeling are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:

As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time

: irritation, boredom, loneliness, depression is a debilitating episodic state of extreme sadness, typically beginning in late teens or early twenties. This is accompanied by a lack of energy and emotion, which is facilitated by genetic predisposition - for example genes coding for relatively low serotonin levels, estrogen sensitive CREB-1 gene which increases women's incidence of depression at puberty; and an accumulation of traumatic events. There is a significant risk of suicide: depression is involved in 50% of the 43,000 suicides in the US, and 15% of people with depression commit suicide. Depression is the primary cause of disability with about 20 million Americans impacted by depression at any time. There is evidence of shifts in the sleep/wake cycle in affected individuals (Dec 2015). The affected person will experience a pathological sense of loss of control, prolonged sadness with feelings of hopelessness, helplessness & worthlessness, irritability, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, and inability to experience pleasure. Michael Pollan concludes depression is fear of the past. It affects 12% of men and 20% of women. It appears to be associated with androgen deprivation therapy treatment for prostate cancer (Apr 2016). Chronic stress depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine, biasing humans towards depression. Depression easily leads to following unhealthy pathways: drinking, overeating; which increase the risk of heart disease. It has been associated with an aging related B12 deficiency (Sep 2016). During depression, stress mediates inhibition of dopamine signalling. Both depression and stress activate the adrenal glands' release of cortisol, which will, over the long term, impact the PFC. There is an association between depression and additional brain regions: Enlarged & more active amygdala, Hippocampal dendrite and spine number reductions & in longer bouts hippocampal volume reductions and memory problems, Dorsal raphe nucleus linked to loneliness, Defective functioning of the hypothalamus undermining appetite and sex drive, Abnormalities of the ACC. Mayberg notes ACC area 25: serotonin transporters are particularly active in depressed people and lower the serotonin in area 25 impacting the emotion circuit it hubs, inducing bodily sensations that patients can't place or consciously do anything about; and right anterior insula: which normally generates emotions from internal feelings instead feel dead inside; are critical in depression. Childhood adversity can increase depression risk by linking recollections of uncontrollable situations to overgeneralizations that life will always be terrible and uncontrollable. Sufferers of mild autism often develop depression. Treatments include: CBT which works well for cases with below average activity of the right anterior insula (mild and moderate depression), UMHS depression management, deep-brain stimulation of the anterior insula to slow firing of area 25. Drug treatments are required for cases with above average activity of the right anterior insula. As of 2010 drug treatments: SSRIs (Prozac), MAO, monoamine reuptake inhibitors; take weeks to facilitate a response & many patients do not respond to the first drug applied, often prolonging the agony. By 2018, Kandel notes, Ketamine is being tested as a short term treatment, as it acts much faster, reversing the effect of cortisol in stimulating glutamate signalling, and because it reverses the atrophy induced by chronic stress. Genomic predictions of which treatment will be effective have not been possible because: Not all clinical depressions are the same, a standard definition of drug response is difficult;; we can reflect on the temporary nature of feelings. Instead of blindly accepting habitualized responses allow higher organisms: humans, rats, flies; to perform important behaviors automatically, without involvement of consciousness. Habits are adaptive, being promoted by the release of dopamine into the PFC and striatum, generating a feeling of pleasure and conditioning us. As the dopamine detaches from the synaptic receptors in the PFC and striatum the motivation to perform the behavior subsides. If the dopamine remains at the synapse for an extended period, because it is not removed as occurs when cocaine is present, or when too much dopamine is generated, the habit can become an addiction. , we can be aware of actioning them and suffer less. Riso and Hudson aim to observe and, without judgment and criticism, let go. We will become more relaxed allowing space for our essence. The inner observer counters identification, where we identify with an idea: strength, empathy, peacefulness, spontaneity; we think is necessary to achieve the Basic Desire, which sustains the types. As we observe, the present, we will feel new possibilities for ourselves, but will become anxious is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge.
. Growth will require iterating around between observation, added possibilities and accepting anxiety. Growth results in 'presence' that reveals what else in us is blocking further growth.

For Riso and Hudson, presence is the key: experiencing the here and now, accepting impressions of our internal and external

environment without judgment or emotional reaction, observing the stream of thoughts and feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:

As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time

without becoming attached to any of them, interacting with life from inner stillness instead of anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge.
, participating in the moment.

Identification is a Freudian psychoanalytic defined defense that unconsciously leads a child to think, feel and behave as if the characteristics of a model person, typically a parent, belong to the child. The identification becomes part of the stable personality. The child typically gains the models perceived strengths or weaknesses. Often a child identifies more with their parent of the same sex, but they can imitate attributes of either parent. And as their social circle expands they can add other models. Feedback reinforces the identification. Sex-typing and development of the superego are derived from identification during the preschool years.
of the types:

Enneagram triadic self

People struggle to stay centered as unified selves. Instead the unity is divided into triads which reflect the issues and defenses built by the ego includes:

Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious

Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness

Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:

Consciousness
Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious

Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.

. The triads reveal what we wanted as children and how we now control our awareness and limit ourselves:

Horney's social style groupings

Riso and Hudson see Karen Horney's Freudian includes:

Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious

Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness

Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:

Consciousness
Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious

Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.

grouping of Enneagram types as describing type strategies for solving inner conflict. The groupings indicate how each person will cope when they don't get what they want, revealing how our personalities describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:

Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming

defend against loss and disappointment. She identifies:

Enneagram's coping styles

When a person does not get what the want, they cope by using their personality type to defend against loss and disappointment:

Positive Outlook group includes types 2 'You have a problem and I can help,' 7 'there may be a problem but I am fine,' and 9 'I do not think there is a problem' - respond to conflict and difficulty by adopting a positive attitude, reframing disappointments in a positive way, and they help others to feel good to keep themselves feeling good too. They don't like to view the dark side of themselves and struggle to balance their own and other people's needs.
Competency group includes types 1 'we can solve this like mature adults,' 3 'there is an efficient solutions-we must work on it,' 5 'there are hidden issues here - I will think about this' - cope with conflict by putting aside personal feelings and aiming to be objective, effective and competent. They found their families constraining and struggle with the confines of structures and systems.
Reactive group includes types 4 'I feel hurt, and I need to express myself,' 6 'I feel pressured and I must let off some steam,' 8 'I am angry about this and you will hear about it' - react emotionally are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism.
to conflicts and problems and struggle with trusting and distrust are evolved responses to sham emotions. During a friendship where no sham emotions have been detected trust will build up.
others. They look for an emotional response from others that mirrors their own concern. If they don't or can't express their
feelings
are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
they become resentful and vindictive.

Each of the Enneagram types has two wings: 9 has 8 and 1 wings; and three instinctual variants. Each person is viewed as having a type and one wing.

The Enneagram's instinctual variants

Riso and Hudson explain that the three basic instincts can become distorted in childhood, resulting in preoccupations and problem behaviors across all the personality types. The instinctual variants indicate which instinct has been distorted. There are three variants:

The Enneagram's levels of development

The personality types include conflicting traits which are expressed during healthy, average and unhealthy mental and emotional are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism.
levels of development. For Riso and Hudson these levels are a measure of how connected we are with our true nature, based on freedom & awareness. Experiencing serenity, vitality, and engagement with the real world, rather than our delusions (where we define ourselves through identification with our types), in the midst of difficulties indicates becoming more healthy.

In the average levels, people function and are judged normal by others, but they identify with their ego includes:

Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious

Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness

Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:

Consciousness
Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious

Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.

, and as they descend become more ego-centric, focusing activities on its maintenance. This drives them to manipulate the self and others and induces interpersonal conflict. Descending from the healthy to the average levels generates a wake-up call clue that is type dependent:

Feeling a sense of personal obligation to fix everything themselves
Believing that they must go out to others to win them over
Beginning to drive themselves for status and attention
Holding on to and intensifying feelings through the imagination
Withdrawing from reality into concepts and mental worlds
Becoming dependent on something outside the self for guidance
Feeling that something better is available somewhere else
Feeling that they must push and struggle to make things happen
Outwardly accommodating themselves to others.

Once in the average range, we feel the need to conform to a certain way and want others to conform as well. We become more dependent on our type's coping mechanisms. We become fixated on achieving our Basic Desire through those mechanisms, and we adopt a stereotypical Social Role. These roles are type dependent:

As the eagle descends to average they define themselves as the educator
As the helper descends to average they see themselves as the special friend
As the peacock becomes insecure they work to be noticed by being the best
As they become insecure panthers insist on being special and putting their stamp on everything
As they become more insecure, owls struggle to relate to people except as an expert.
Average deers are stalwarts.
Average monkeys are aiming to pump energy and excitement into a situation.
As the lion descends to average they become the strong and impregnable one
As the peacemaker becomes insecure they see their special role as being Nobody Special

This role is used to encourage other people to support our ego includes:

Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious

Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness

Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:

Consciousness
Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious

Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.

we attempt to manipulate them in type dependent ways:

By correcting them - insisting that others share our standards
By finding out others' needs and desires, to develop dependencies
By charming others, and adopting whatever image will "help"
By being temperamental and making others walk on eggshells
By staying preoccupied and detaching emotionally from others
By complaining - and by testing others' commitments to us
By distracting others - and by insisting that others meet their demands
By dominating others - and by demanding that others do as they say
By "checking out" and passive-aggressively resisting others

Riso and Hudson explain that when manipulating our

environment fails to meet our average goals, we intensify the coercion, becoming more aggressive, forcing our views on others covertly or overtly. At the bottom of the average range they note our application of the Leaden Rule: Do unto others what you most fear having done to you; of each type:

Eagles point out evil, corruption and defectiveness in others.
Helpers make others feel unworthy of their love, generosity or attention.
Peacocks make others feel valueless by treating them arrogantly or contemptuously.
Panthers treat people disdainfully: nobodies without significance
Owls make others feel helpless, incompetent, stupid and incapable.
Deers undermine the support system of others, aiming to isolate them in some way
Monkeys cause pain and make others feel deprived in some way
Lions make others feel that they will be harmed or controlled by their belligerent and intimidating threats
Peacemakers make others feel they have lost connection, tuning out people.

Riso & Hudson assert that before we descend down to the unhealthy level we experience a Red Flag fear, which signals an imminent crisis:

Their ideals are actually wrong and counterproductive
They are driving friends and loved ones away
They are failing, their claims are empty and fraudulent
They are ruining their lives and wasting their opportunities
They are never going to find a place in the world or with people
Their own actions have harmed their security
Their activities are bringing them pain and unhappiness
That others are turning against them and will retaliate
They will be forced by reality to deal with their problems

Unhealthy levels manifest highly dysfunctional traits of the type, and the sufferer appears constricted to adopt the aberrant strategies of the type. In comparison the healthy levels include an ability to reflect in the moment and respond with our best behaviors. Riso and Hudson assert that when we descend into the average levels we become out of touch with reality, undermining our ability to make balanced assessments of the situation and to stop our ego includes:

Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious

Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness

Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:

Consciousness
Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious

Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.

from sending forth an avalanche of angst. And the unhealthy levels leave us totally trapped using destructive patterns.

When a person becomes unhealthy the instincts transform into their opposite. Primarily:

Self-preservation variants become obsessive about health and food, or let themselves go.
Social variants become antisocial, fear and distrust others and cannot get along socially.
Sexual variants lose focus and find their attention scattered. They may become promiscuous, or become fearful of intimacy and avoid it intently.

Riso and Hudson assert that we should develop our internal resources to block problems from destroying us, and reduce the recovery time when troubles happen.

Riso and Hudson explain a person's level of development has a center of gravity that shifts slowly, and a person can move rapidly up or down the levels around that center. But we see ourselves in the healthy range in an idealized self-image, to protect our ego includes:

Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious

Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness

Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:

Consciousness
Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious

Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.

. So they assert we must start by identifying our current center of gravity and type.

The center of gravity will not descend into the unhealthy level without an additional shock:

A major crisis - loss of a job, medical or financial catastrophe, divorce or death of a spouse.
Unhealthy patterns were established during childhood, limiting their ability to build healthy coping skills. When conditions become very challenging they are forced to fall back on these childhood coping skills.

The healthy levels represent people who appear well balanced, high-functioning and mature. But they can still use the ego includes:

Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious

Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness

Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:

Consciousness
Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious

Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.

to compensate for their basic desires and basic fears. Indeed, shaped by these aspects, they actively build upon their self-image, helping others and so practicing beneficial actions.

Riso and Hudson explain that when we no longer identify with our ego includes:

Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious

Repression - is a defensive mechanism for keeping socially unacceptable desires: children's sexual and aggressive needs; traumatic memories and painful emotions from entering consciousness

Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:

Consciousness
Adaptive (preconscious) unconscious

Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.

, we reach the level of liberation. For this to last they argue the ego must be restored to its natural balance and functioning. At this point the person has:

Riso and Hudson stress that we should be able to feel are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:

As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time

an emotion are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism.
without acting it out is according to Damasio, a process including a collection of actions: release of specific chemicals in sites of the CNS or their transport, by neural signalling to varied regions of the nervous system and body. Endocrine glands are signalled and produce molecules capable of altering body function; altering viscera, that changes the homeostatic state of the organism, and may change the spontaneous feelings too. A cascade of spontaneous homeostatic changes: metabolism, nervous system, immune response, mind builds 'images'; becomes an ensemble of actions each represented in the mind, summarized as a provoked feeling. Attention to the feelings varies depending on the current state of the mind. Emotive responses are generated non consciously by specific nuclei in the brain:

Hypothalamic nuclei
PAG
Amygdala nuclei and nucleus accumbens; each nuclei activated by particular streams of signals, from the senses or memory, enabling responses to vast numbers of sensations, objects and circumstances with drives, motivations and emotions.

.

Riso and Hudson note that the detailed review of each type highlights signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance. In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively. A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form. Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell. Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state. Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals. Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich. Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors. In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation. To be credible signals must be hard to fake. To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient. To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy.
: wake-up calls, social roles and Red Flags; that allow introspection to identify what is currently happening in our level of development. The directions of integration and disintegration help in recognizing progress and regression, a psychoanalytic defense, involves reverting to an earlier pattern of behavior. Trivers notes sick children are likely to obtain more of their parents' resources. He asserts this process can be manipulated by children acting younger than they really are, inducing an arms race between deception and ability to detect deception. Adults have practiced regression as children, and so are more nuanced. in our development.

Direction of Integration provides objective markers of our growth. It requires conscious choice. Riso and Hudson assert that letting go of our personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:

Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming

's baggage will result in growth, as a healing of the psychic wounds. The qualities we need will become more available to us. Each enneagram type has a link to a type that is its direction towards more wholeness - but they note it is a mistake to try and act like, copy the actions of, the integration type since that just adds more baggage:

Integrates to 7. Riso and Hudson write that as eagles realize they are not their
superego
includes:
- Id - which he felt seeks pleasure and avoids pain and includes the instinctual unconscious
- Ego - is concerned with perception, reasoning, planning of actions, and includes:
- Superego - is a specialized motivational flow of long-term strategies associated with altruism, normative behavior, and group interests. The ethical & moral aspects of the mind including: conscience; There is intrapsychic conflict. The mind overall benefits from adaptations that enable strategic tradeoffs.
, replace judgement with discernment is noticing that objects have different qualities, but does not overload the object with any emotional reaction to these, according to Riso and Hudson.
, and accept anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend. When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. Anger is mostly experienced as a rapid wave that then quickly dissipates. When it is repressed, for example by a strong moral sense (superego), it can sustain, inducing long term stress.
as a valuable short term emotion are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal. The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus. The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement. The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions. Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals. Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful. Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna. Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism.
, their interest in learning extends to open-mindedness, curiosity, joy and enthusiasm - the attributes of a healthy monkey.
Integrates to 4. As helpers learn to recognize and accept their
feelings
are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
and stop censoring them, helpers start feeling like healthy panthers.
Integrates to 6. As peacocks learn to commit to others and to goals that reach beyond themselves their focus shifts to developing something worthy. They gain increased self-esteem and in cooperating with others build courage and authenticity. They no longer need to dazzle, and their communications become direct and sincere.
Integrates to 1. As a panther works to let go of their fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful. The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger. There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala. Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart. The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario. And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault. Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships. The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna. This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier.
of being ordinary, and express themself, for example through music is a complex emergent capability supported by sexual selection and generating pleasure. It transforms the sensing of epiphenomena: Contour, Rhythm, Tempo, Timbre; to induce salient representations: Harmony, Key, Loudness, Melody, Meter, Pitch, and perceptions: Reverberation - echo; which allow musicians: Elton John, Elvis Presley; to show their fitness: superior coordination, creativity, adolescent leadership, stamina; true for birds and humans. Levitin showed that listening to music causes a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: auditory cortex, frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, and finally the mesolimbic system, culminating in the nucleus accumbens. And he found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout the session. He argues music mimics some of the features of language and conveys some of the same emotions. The brain regions pulse with the beat and predict the next one. As the music is heard it is modeled and generates dopamine rewards for matching each beat and noting creative jokes in the rhythm. The cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized.
, they will be self-disciplined and regularly practice like a healthy eagle.
Integrates to 8. Riso and Hudson argue that as owls build awareness of their physical bodies their instincts are empowered, by strong
feelings
are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits. These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula. Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience. Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism. They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles. Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience. Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints. Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
- As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
- As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
- As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time
of vitality, to support
Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents. These software agents are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined.

action. It also generates anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge.
as they worry about undermining their
Computational theory of the mind and evolutionary psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by natural selection 'building out' specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs we call the mind.

He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from psychology regarding: The visual system - an example of natural selections solutions to the sensory challenges of inverse modeling of our environment; Intensions - where he highlights the challenges of hunter gatherers - making sense of the objects they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.

These conclusions allow him to understand the development and maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor, Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.

Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved amplifiers: Globalization, Cliodynamics, The green revolution and resource bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints. The implications are discussed.

mind, but persistence allows sorrow to dissipate the anxiety as the owl becomes aware of the long mental isolation. Joining the world allows owls to apply their strategic expertise and perform like healthy lions, displaying strength, willpower and confidence.
Integrates to 9. Riso and Hudson suggest deer integrate as they focus on their feelings, becoming grounded in their bodies and balanced in their instincts. As they begin to feel more open they can start to appreciate the bonds they share with all humans. They must avoid clinging to people or comforting ruts, or their anxieties is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge.
will not dissipate.
Integrates to 5. If monkeys learn to slow down and quiet their minds chatter, they integrate and discover new things about themselves and their
This page discusses the potential of the vast state space which supports the emergence of complex adaptive systems (CAS). Kauffman describes the mechanism by which the system expands across the space.

environment. This improves their creativity and productivity is the efficiency with which an agent's selected strategy converts the inputs to an action into the resulting outputs. It is a complex capability of agents. It will depend on the agent having: time, motivation, focus, appropriate skills; the coherence of the participating collaborators, and a beneficial environment including the contribution of: standardization of inputs and outputs, infrastructure and evolutionary amplifiers.
. Slowing down allows them to recognize what activities will be valuable to them, reducing, or making tolerable, their anxiety about making the wrong choice.
Integrates to 2. As lions begin to let go of their personality type's identified need for: self-protection, armor, and keeping their guard up; they automatically get intouch with their vulnerability and hurt. The discovered pleasure of caring about people, like healthy 2s, tells them they are making progress. And slipping back to the average type strategies now feels limiting.
Integrates to 3. Riso and Hudson suggest peacemakers integrate as they learn to recognize they have value and work to develop themselves. To do this they must stay motivated. As they become more aware of reality they see more possibilities for
To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible. Being sensitive to environmental signals agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their competitors.

flexibility.

Direction of Disintegration indicates, once our unconscious motivations and

The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of adaptive flows he outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for scientific research on behavior.

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured to successfully enter niches we now occupy.

behaviors are pushed to the limit, what behaviors will manifest, and what qualities we most need to integrate. Each enneagram type has a link to a type that is its direction of disintegration. This means that under long term stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels. Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight. As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate. A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance. The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis.

The short term response to the stressor

activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response. The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated. The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail. In order for the body to destroy bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area. The induced inflammation signals the brain to activate the insula and through it the ACC. But when the stressor is

long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues. Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in. Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status. It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition. Sustained stress:

Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment!
Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala.

Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful.
BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning.

Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory. Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala. And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces. Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers. A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand. The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds.
Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression.
Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive. It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.
Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017)

During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.
Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness.

we may mistakenly identify our type as that linked by the disintegration because we chronically act out many average and unhealthy characteristics of that type:

Additionally, the instinctual variants disintegrate to their unhealthy aspects: self-preservation, social, sexual;

CAS implications

This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

Evolution provides mechanisms to support the development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
of different strategies within each

This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena. Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the emergence of equilibrium and autonomous entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution to operate broadening the adjacent possible. Key research is reviewed.

emergent

This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organism. The strategies ensure different approaches are used to expand the adjacent possible at the edge of chaos provides an explanation for the apparently random period between water droplets falling from a tap. Typically the model of the system is poor and so the data captured about the system looks unpredictable - chaotic. With a better model the system's operation can be explained with standard physical principles. Hence chaos as defined here is different from complexity. . A framework that allows for each strategy is initially deployed according to a

Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions. The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed.

schematic

This page looks at schematic structures and their uses. It discusses a number of examples:

Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity.
Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them.
Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations.
Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models.

As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan.

Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals.
Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings.
These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples.

plan. Proximate environmental signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance. In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively. A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form. Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell. Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state. Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals. Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich. Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors. In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation. To be credible signals must be hard to fake. To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient. To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy.
then drive development in each new instance of the organism to generate some subset of the strategies. For humans the process leverages birth and childhood, where differences in our parents and their coping strategies provide the environmental signals to support the new

Computational theory of the mind and evolutionary psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by natural selection 'building out' specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs we call the mind.

He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from psychology regarding: The visual system - an example of natural selections solutions to the sensory challenges of inverse modeling of our environment; Intensions - where he highlights the challenges of hunter gatherers - making sense of the objects they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.

These conclusions allow him to understand the development and maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor, Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.

Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved amplifiers: Globalization, Cliodynamics, The green revolution and resource bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints. The implications are discussed.

mind's strategic differentiation leveraging neural plasticity refers to lasting changes to the brain that occur throughout the life span of the organism. Many aspects of the brain can be altered into adulthood. Almost anything in the nervous system can change in response to sustained stimulus. And in a different environment the changes will often reverse. The changes include:

The strength of dendritic input alters due to genetic, neural and hormonal signals

Hebb notes that memories require strengthening of preexisting synapses. Glutamate responsive neurons' post synaptic dendritic spines have two types of receptor: non-NMDA and NMDA. NMDA channels are responsible for this strengthening mechanism. LTP then occurs to prolong the increase in excitability of the synapse.
The LTP operation results in calcium diffusion which triggers new spine formation in adjacent parts of the dendrite. Eventually that can stimulate dentrite growth enabling more neurons to connect.
Short term stress promotes hippocampal LTP.
Sustained stress promotes:

Hippocampal & frontal cortex LTD & suppresses LTP. Subsequent reductions in NCAM then reduce dendrite and synapse density.
Amygdala LTP and suppresses LTD boosting fear conditioning. It increases BDNF levels and expands dendrites in the BLA.

Depression and anxiety reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number by reducing BDNF.

The axon's conditions for

Initiating an action potential.

Progesterone boosts GABA-ergic neurons response to GABA decreasing the excitability of other neurons over a period of hours.

Duration of a neuron's refractory period. Testosterone shortens the refractory period of amygdala and amygdala target neurons over a period of hours.

Synaptic connections being constantly removed and recreated
Synapses being created or destroyed. Stimulation generates additional dendritic spines which become associated with a nearby axon terminal and within weeks a synapse forms. The synapse then contributes calcium diffusion through LTP triggering more spine formation. When dendritic spines recede synapses disappear.
Cortical maps change to reflect alterations in the inputs and outputs from the body.
Birth of brain cells in many areas of adult brains: the hippocampus (where 3% are replaced each month) and olfactory bulb and lesser amounts in the cortex.
Restructuring after brain damage including axonal plasticity. Distant rerouting of axons is observed but no mechanism has been identified yet.
Vision is plastic in predators, where the eyes are moved during final development. Dehaene argues for neuronal recycling supporting reading.

.

Pinker

explains how the mind works, providing details of the emergent mechanisms supporting strategic differentiation in humans. But in conflict with these details he asserts the evidence of twin studies show little influence of parents on their family's personalities.

Sapolsky

describes our best and worst behaviors, exploring how they occur. He notes twin studies are complex.

Distortions may equate to changes in the proximate

environment, which affected the strategies that were most competitive and were thus captured, and associated with the situations by

This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

evolution, over

Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is used to augment Turchins findings.

repeated cliodynamic cycles.

Tara Brach

Tara Brach was worried from a young age that there was something terribly wrong with her: she like many others felt unworthy. She responded by developing Radical Acceptance. Brach then explains the steps in applying it: pause, greet what happens next with unconditional friendliness; allowing us to:

Initially attend to the sensations of our body,
Accept the wanting self and discover its source of boundless love.
Welcome fear with a widening attention, accept the pain of death and become free.
Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves and others.
Focus on our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed, towards ourselves. Extend observing this goodness in everyone. This enables the use of loving-kindness.
Leverage friendships to understand more about our shared nature and strengthen Radical Acceptance.
Realize our Buddha nature.

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic code and machinery. It provides an analog of the Buddhist presence.

notes the self is an object is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli. But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker. Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. Mathematicians view anything that can be defined and used in deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs as an object. These mathematical objects can be values of variables, allowing them to be used in formulas.
constructed by the

mind. Any

This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organism is encased in a

Barriers are particular types of constraints on flows. They can enforce separation of a network of agents allowing evolution to build diversity. Examples of different types of barriers: physical barriers, chemical molecules can form membranes, probability based, cell membranes can include controllable channels, eukaryotes leverage membranes, symbiosis, human emotions, chess, business; and their effects are described.

barrier that is the boundary between its self and the external

environment. But she follows Buddhist ideas that the self is a mental barrier to being one with nature. Deacon

Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition.

shows that the

This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell. The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed.

organism develops from an autogen which only transiently encloses in a ratchet. And

complexity theory views each

Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents. These software agents are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined.

agent as obtaining state from a schema instance of a shared

Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions. The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed.

schematic database.

Brach's Radical Acceptance means clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart according to Tara Brach. It is the art of engaging fully in this world. Because it stops the heart from shutting out: the feared aspects of our identity, and our feelings of separation; Radical Acceptance dismantles the foundations of the trance of unworthiness. There are two interdependent aspects: seeing clearly (mindfulness) and holding our experience with compassion. Radical acceptance is enabled by a pause. Whatever comes to attention next is greeted with unconditional friendliness.
provides a process for reaching presence.

Human development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
binds genetically specified cellular structures with

environmentally driven structures, during childhood and adolescence. Humans can only experience the 'real world' indirectly, through the various

The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's schematic operators and Samuel modeling together support the indirect recording of past successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn how to succeed in the proximate environment.

models that

This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

evolution has developed. Males and

The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span: conception, infantile puberty, girlhood, juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in how emotions are processed by women compared to men.

Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and behavioral CAS.

females develop differently based on evolved goals. This undermines the asexual development fear framework Riso and Hudson propose.

The strategic aspect of the genetic development of the

mind's simulation of the adjacent possible, has provided different approaches that can be selected to build a representation of the proximate environment:

Monkeys select a tool based representation - which is fast to represent - but is in conflict with the network representation of the owl. They present a happy exterior but, as Mary Ann Tyson asserts, are sneaky.
Owls select a network based representation of the proximate environment. This requires searching for consistency, making the development of the representation costly.
This page describes the consequences of the asymmetries caused by genotypic traits creating a phenotypic signal in males and selection activity in the female - sexual selection.
The impact of this asymmetry is to create a powerful alternative to natural selection with sexual selection's leverage of positive returns. The mechanisms are described.

Peacocks strive to represent status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. , assuming they will eventually be rewarded:

For a child who develops is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
the achiever strategy, achievement is assumed to be what parents are demanding. With enough evidence of success it is assumed by the child that its parents, or their substitute, must finally respond to the child with commitment, affection and acceptance. But why would that be the case?
This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS). The mechanism and its emergence are discussed.

Evolution captures strategies for effective survival and reproduction in a competition with other
Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents. These software agents are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined.

agents. From this perspective achievement is a useful strategy, and its genetic enablers will be retained. But there is little evolutionary benefit to actualizing the driving need.

Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations that developed during human's long hunter-gatherer past, living on the African savanna. Its implications are described in The Adapted Mind. Subsequent studies of the effects of selection on the human genome show significant changes due to our more recent history as well.
can help explain the development of the types:

The helper and peacemaker whose social intelligence is, according to Barkow, the product of selection for success in social competition: leveraging our relative ability to predict and influence the behavior of potential rivals for resources, present and potential allies, possible mates, and close kin, requiring that we develop elaborate internal representations of others.
strategies leverage being one of us to compete for resources for survival and reproduction
The individualist whose strategic approach limits the
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition.

constraints and leverage of
This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent.

extended phenotypic alignment; Barkow's social stratification hypothesis 1 may not apply to all human beings.
The investigator whose independence and interest in histories (systems) were beneficial to discovering better ways to comprehend and leverage situations.
The loyalist is conscientious but prone to panic is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards. Anxiety disorders are now seen as a related cluster, including PTSD, panic attacks, and phobias. Major anxiety, is typically episodic, correlated with increased activity in the amygdala, results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density. Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women. Women are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety. Louann Brizendine concludes this helps prepare mothers, so they are ready to protect their children. Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future. Sufferers of mild autism often develop anxiety disorders. Treatments for anxiety differ. 50 to 70% of people with generalized anxiety respond to drugs increasing serotonin concentrations, where there is relief from symptoms: worry, guilt; linked to depression, which are treated with SSRIs (Prozac). Cognitive anxiety (extreme for worries and anxious thoughts) is also helped by yoga. But many fear-related disorders respond better to psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, and intensive CBT. Tara Brach notes that genuine freedom from fear is enabled by taking refuge.
. This strategy supports both:

Participation within a hierarchy, even with limited social intelligence, following the
dominant
signals the power to hurt a rival. Maynard Smith & Parker explain that in group situations females compete for food and males compete for females. Maleness is a huge factor for violence. Fighting to the death is costly for all participants so instead they indicate:
- Size and weapons to demonstrate who will win. Males who are, or look like, better fighters: Large heads, Big men, Height; gain in dominance.
- Political acumen to demonstrate they won't be pushed around and have the support of other powerful groups. Dominant males push other rivals aside and gain interest of females, enabling themselves to replicate more. Being a signal its authenticity can be challenged and so must be defended to remain credible. Hotheads leverage the doomsday machine to constrain rational challenges. Bands and cultures leverage honor. Youth and lack of resources reduce the power of rivals' political constraints.
and high status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. individuals, who can otherwise be difficult: challenger; gaining support of a:

Parent,

Mate - loyalist is attractive for pairing,

Leader aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. John Adair developed a leadership methodology based on the three-circles model.
defending the loyalist against otherwise dominant rivals, and within a band, fighting enemies - where numbers count.

Identifying is a Freudian psychoanalytic defined defense that unconsciously leads a child to think, feel and behave as if the characteristics of a model person, typically a parent, belong to the child. The identification becomes part of the stable personality. The child typically gains the models perceived strengths or weaknesses. Often a child identifies more with their parent of the same sex, but they can imitate attributes of either parent. And as their social circle expands they can add other models. Feedback reinforces the identification. Sex-typing and development of the superego are derived from identification during the preschool years.
with complex knowledge, supported by individualist wing, enabling intellectualization is a psychoanalytic defense, where the facts of a situation are acknowledged, but the emotional content is kept separate, avoiding disadvantageous displays of pleasure or anger.
and escape from
This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent.

phenotypic alignment's
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are sustained. The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition.

constraints.

The achiever conforms to Barkow's social stratification strategy to build long-term access to resources and the means of production.
This page describes the consequences of the asymmetries caused by genotypic traits creating a phenotypic signal in males and selection activity in the female - sexual selection.
The impact of this asymmetry is to create a powerful alternative to natural selection with sexual selection's leverage of positive returns. The mechanisms are described.

Sexual selection is a particularly powerful
This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race. At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent. The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics.

evolved amplifier used by achievers.
The enthusiast uses social intelligence: fun is an emotion which functions to mobilize the mind to seek capabilities and resources that support Darwinian fitness. Today happiness is associated with Epicurean ideas that were rediscovered during the renaissance and promoted by Thomas Jefferson. But natural selection has 'designed' happiness to support hunter-gatherer fitness in the African savanna. It is assessed: Relative to other's situations, Based on small gains or losses relative to one's current situation; and so what makes us [un-]happy and our responses can seem a counter-productive treadmill. For Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in the savanna there were many ways for losses to undermine fitness and so losses still make us very unhappy. Smoking, drinking and excessive eating were not significant and so don't make us unhappy even though they impact longevity. , spontaneity, versatility, sneakiness, driving others to achieve their goals; to build friendships, results, and admirers within the band. They also make, gather and expertly use
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.

tools.

The Wisdom Of The Enneagram promotes awareness of how personality describes the operation of the mind from the perspective of psychological models and tests based on them. Early 'Western' models of personality resulted in a simple segmentation noting the tension between: individual desires and group needs, and developing models and performing actions. Dualistic 'Eastern' philosophies promote the legitimacy of an essence which Riso & Hudson argue is hidden within a shell of personality types and is only reached by developing presence. The logic of a coherent essence is in conflict with the evolved nature of emotions outlined by Pinker. Terman's studies of personality identified types which Friedman and Martin link to healthy and unhealthy pathways. Current psychiatric models highlight at least five key aspects:

Extroversion-introversion - whether the person gains mental dynamism from socializing or retiring
Neuroticism-stability - does a person worry or are they calm and self-satisfied
Agreeableness-antagonism - is a person courteous & trusting or rude and suspicious
Conscientiousness-un-directedness - is a person careful or careless
Openness-non-openness - are they daring or conforming

depends on the

environment in which a child develops is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
and how it uses those strategies as an adult.

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Politics, Economics & Evolutionary Psychology

Business Physics
Nature and nurture drive the business eco-system
Human nature
Emerging structure and dynamic forces of adaptation

integrating quality appropriate for each market

This page looks at schematic structures and their uses. It discusses a number of examples:

Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity.
Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them.
Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations.
Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models.

Strategy | Design |

This page uses an example to illustrate how:

A business can gain focus from targeting key customers,
Business planning activities performed by the whole organization can build awareness, empowerment and coherence.
A program approach can ensure strategic alignment.

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