Annotated image-rich presentation of material selected for Exploiting a Dissipating Gradient component of Supervenience Project, with supporting focus on flow aggregation and natural resistance to rapid equilibrating. References Geoffery West's Scale, Donna Haraway's Chthulucene, David Graeber's structural violence, and 20 years earlier Conversation Piece.

1. Dissipating Gradients & Sinks
Tony Smith
Melbourne Emergence Meetup
11 April 2019
SUPERVENIENCE
how emergent minds and money seize power over matter

2. Cover pic is April 2011 view southwest from Mount Kororoit scoria volcano across the Werribee Plains component of Victorian Volcanic Plains grasslands, a land form
produced by both the flow of volcanic lava and of water run off into Nairm, currently aka Port Phillip Bay. Pic taken preparatory to establishment of Kororoit Institute.
Dissipating Gradients & Sinks
At this stage of the Supervenience project, this presentation is built around a tour of selected exemplars of emergence within dissipating gradients, and
of distribution and regathering of fluid flows. It also considers an essential corollary: how separations are grown and maintained in seeming conflict
with the universal physical tendency towards equilibrium. This page and most picture identification were added after the presentation on the night.
On this old and damp ball of rock, one
source outflow dominates: solar
radiation whereby we intercept one part
in two billion of the sun's thermonuclear
generation, parts thereof energising a
range of planetary and life processes.
Over billions of years, those processes
have shaped the planetary crust, its
continents, oceans and atmosphere; and
left traces within them from which clues
about the past can be revealed, and an
accumulated fraction of the chemical
storage of energy by photosynthesis can
be drawn down. Just about everything
else that has and will emerge is
increasing the dissipation of those
secondary flow gradients. Stan Salthe
has a rule of thumb that no more than
half the gradient being dissipated can be
diverted to activation of an emergent
process. Often it is much less.
Emergence of novel dynamic forms which draw on and
increase dissipation of a gradient are one of three high
level kinds of emergence identified in another chapter/
presentation, the other two being bulk behaviour of
large populations and synergistic partnerships between
diverse components. Such dissipation has been
primarily analysed in terms of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, a statistical law which is often
described as having more general applicability than
other laws of physics, as well as being cited as a key
determinant of the direction of time. While also
suggesting an always now perspective on time, the
Supervenience book/project is centrally about
extending the understanding of dissipation into the
domains of minds and money, i.e. information flow.
Sufficient gradients to allow emergence of novel forms
as accelerators of their dissipation arise through
interception of strong source outflows, adjacency of
bulk materials with a strong differential in some
property, or strong aggregation of component flows
towards attractor basins.
The surviving diversity of life ensures that residual
gradients are dissipated down to the smallest scale. To
extract a living from dead wood, termites must call on the
chemical processing armoury of their symbiotic gut
bacteria. Concurrently, grazing and predation accumulate
the energetic chemical essence of tinier forms into ever
larger characters. Between the more explicitly fluid
domains of oceans and atmosphere, there are unending
processes which similarly distribute or regather the action,
most intricately at and near their interfaces with landforms,
within which most fluidity operates on incomparably
longer timescales. As vital as it may be to the chemistry of
life, the polarity of water molecules also facilitates a
regathering into bulk liquid which does not discriminate
between the prior journeys of those molecules. Our
energised atmosphere is able to gather vapour droplets
until it needs to let them fall, again in a diversity of bulk
forms, and ultimately onto landforms with a diversity of
catchment basins that gather run off from natural
landscapes (or stormwater from urban imperviousness)
into trickles and floods.

3. Too Funny for Words
Abstractions, Category Errors,
Epistemic Cuts
Life on an Active Planet The Two-edged Sword
Multiple Paths to Emergence
Constraints and
Degrees of Freedom
Birds and Others Interweb to Facebook
Better than Out of Control
Information,
Maps and Territories
Urban Hydrology out of Sight
Going Down with
the Egg Basket
Self-organising, Adaptive
Codification and
Communication
Exploiting a
Dissipating Gradient:
creaming, trickle down
Dystopian Utopias and
Science Fiction
Towards Healthy
General Knowledge
The Inside View:
knowing when you're dreaming
Verbal Blindness
Accepting Cosmological
Responsibility

4. On a clear day
It’s all solar
Photosynthesis
Weather systems
Gathering flows
and Retention
and Grazing
and Harvesting
and Channeling
Scale invariance
Flow constraints
Fractal dimension
Energy networks
Empty containers
Urban criticality
and Audience
and Mobility
and Services
and Ephemerality
Conversations
Legal fictions
Standardisation
Plumbing depths
Pools of money
Empty from below
View from Teddy’s Lookout, Lorne, of notably clear water adjacent often pictured section of Great Ocean Road.

5. On this old and damp ball of rock,
one source outflow dominates:
solar radiation
whereby we intercept
one part in two billion
of the sun’s
thermonuclear generation,
parts thereof energising a range
of planetary and life processes.

6. Life’s invention of photosynthesis transformed the planet and now drives green plant shoots to seek sunlight.

8. Sunlight also powers the evaporation of water and differential land heating driving winds and weather.

10. Frame from short video grab recorded while waiting under platform shelter for storm to pass.

11. The smallest catchments
aggregate intense rain
into brief flows
whose dissipation
reshapes the landscape
over geological time.

12. Second attempts at ford and bridge with histories of flood and access losses, Cumberland River, Great Ocean Road

13. Lake Hume, River Murray, through bus window (all 4)

14. Upper Murray Valley (2) Snowy Mountains (2)

15. Flow dissipation in the Grampians (and next)

17. Horsham Weir, Wimmera River (all)

18. Irrigation canals, Kyabram (top 2)
Hand operable Swing Bridge over Thompson River
Sale Common Conservation Reserve ▼
Loy Yang Power Station

20. MillStream,Stellenbosch,WesternCape▲
MillRace,DightsFalls,Fairfield,Victoria▼
Pics courtesy Kevin Balaam

21. Kleiber’s Law is a statistical observation that the energy
consumption of an animal is proportionate to the ¾
power of its weight which Geoffrey West shows means an
animal’s metabolic rate is proportionate to the -¼ power.
West identifies this being due to a need for fluidic
circulation to reach all parts via a space filling network:
the tentacles of the network have to extend everywhere
throughout the system it is serving.
(W)hatever the geometry and topology of the network
is, it must service all biologically active subunits of the
organism or subsystem.
Space filling is simply the statement that the capillaries,
which are the [invariant] terminal units or last branch
of the network, have to service every cell in our body so
as to efficiently supply each of them with sufficient
blood and oxygen.
West’s other objective in Scale is to identify analogous
relationships in the data for cities and companies.
The circulation of water, energy, materials, information
and money have clear potential in that regard.

22. Succession at View Point bomb site
three years on from Wye River fire
Geotech intervention
Separation Creek
Dairy herds across western Otways
View inland from Glenaire lookout
All that milk flows to Allansford

23. Petroleum transmission
Spotswood
Electrical transmission
NE Link Option C Eltham
Petroleum storage
Yarraville
Electrical generation
Newport

24. Freight containerisation
invokes two level aggregation
From the flow of containers
especially in Australian conditions
an empty container aggregation industry
with a very different dynamic emerges
Swanston Dock
West Melbourne

25. Off Teddy’s Lookout, Lorne
Yarraville (top 2)
Webb Dock
Port Melbourne

26. Urban criticality
from various angles

27. Population

28. Transport

29. Rally for Elijah
6 pm 28 July 2017

30. Ephemerality
of built form

31. Coastal erosion, Marengo
Coastal erosion
Indented Head
Spring tide
former Railway Coal Canal
Darling Murray

32. Donna Haraway
proposes the Anthropocene and even the Holocene should be considered as geological transitions rather
than epochs and that an open ended period predicated on surviving human participation in the life world
longer term could be called the Chthulucene with a nod to a necessary interplay of many tentacles.
Conversation Piece
Tony Smith, April 1997
In coming rounds, she who can converse the most effectively wins.
The purpose of Conversation Piece is to “look at the totality of conversation in the novel context of the Internet so as to see what is likely to emerge.”
• Introductory Summary
• Conversation and Communication
• Judging the Communications Decency Act
• Forms of Conversation
• Conversations on the Internet
• On Consciousness
• Production and Emergence
• Most(,) Effective Conversations
• Metamorphosis
Conversation Piece was written in the popular expectation that our first non-human conversation partners
were more likely to be digital computer software than extra terrestrials nor other extant animal species.
“Forms of Conversation” concludes:
Through their training and work, lawyers are inducted into a belief in the special status of the law itself.
Sufficient of them follow a path into politics to ensure that legislatures keep producing laws which
attempt to deal with anything and everything we might ever encounter. While the checks and balances in
the system can obstruct such evils as the Communications Decency Act, they totally fail to turn the tide of
legal expansionism into more and more areas of everyday human activity.
Maybe we are being over optimistic or just simplistic, but there is a growing counter-tide of opinion that
the speed and nature of the changes flowing from the Internet and related technologies may continue to
outrun the lawyers. This may be possible if money truly speaks louder than words, as there are vast
commercial interests lining up behind the technologies. It may also be assisted by some tough challenges
to foundational premises of the legal system such as jurisdictions and one that is the prime suspect of this
piece–personal responsibility.
Santiago Castro
answering a Quora question asserts “the cognitive abilities of bottlenose dolphins may exceed ours in some
aspects”, especially social linguistic communication, but not in others, especially fine motor skills.

33. This* is what I had in mind when I first began using the phrase
“structural violence”—structures that could only be created and
maintained by the threat of violence, even if in their ordinary,
day-to-day workings, no actual physical violence need take place.
If one reflects on the matter, the same can be said of most
phenomena that are ordinarily referred to as “structural
violence” in the literature—racism, sexism, class privilege—even
if their actual mode of operation is infinitely more complex.
Here I was probably inspired most by my readings in feminist
literature, which often does speak of structural violence in this
way.
—David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules
*refers to his immediately preceding apocryphal story of a warrior
tribe subjugating peaceful farmers.
Graeber is a cultural anthropologist, anarchist activist, veteran of
Occupy Wall Street, and award-winning author.
The book stitches together prior essays with a strong introduction
and raises the lack of distinction between “play” and “rules” in
most languages and a human need for certainty and uncertainty.

34. Zig zag signature of human engineering
Upper Stony Creek
target for Imagine Your Creek project
to create more attractive public space
to complement newly expanded
Sunshine/Joan Kirner Hospital

35. Stacks equilibrating don’t deter human visitors
Twelve Apostles
Port Campbell N P
Loch Ard Gorge (above & left)
Bay of Islands (this)

36. Magnificent Maryborough Station
Rail junction for gold & wheat fields
Welcome Stranger gold nugget
Closed then reopened as end of line

37. Unlike our precious water storages, pools of money are hollow underneath.

38. Suggestions! Questions?