Summary of research

This is a multi-disciplinary work presented in a multi-media form. The book is a print version of a Ph.D. thesis that uses visuals, topologic animations, and text, to express multi-disciplinary research findings about a generic phenomenon, and to introduce two new modelling methods.

These respond to a confusing gap, known in many fields, and which interdisciplinary research, ‘advanced’ models, and complex, integrative, or unifying frameworks do not address effectively, according to the theoretical literature. Yet, it is not acknowledged in the applied sciences that inform technology, practice, policies, and common culture, as well as our actions

How do we stop counter-productive effects?
What does 'not going too far' mean? How to know ‘where’ to stop?

Many practical problems are spiralling out of hand: for example chronic medical syndromes that are ‘not well understood’ and involve acute phases; ‘human pressure’ (ecologic, economic, overpopulation); ‘stress adaptation’ (societal, in ageing and childhood, or climate related). Spreading consumption of land/body resources for ‘survival’, wasting, and fragmentation or scattering all affect the planet, our and other species, health and sanity, starting with children’s basic soundness.

 We develop theoretical frameworks and best practices, but they drive counter-productive, ‘negative’, ‘hidden’ or side effects, with great variation, in both practice and knowledge. These effects have increasingly direct implications for daily life behaviour, including having to 'keep up' with their consequences, the need for always more 'solutions', and extreme survival behaviours. Very simply, ‘it all goes too far’, and both natural and human sciences are plagued with this, manifesting as our global or 'fundamental problems'... more of them, more complex, and increasingly puzzling. Turning to highly specialised information, interdisciplinary research, multi-factorial, systemic, complex or ‘advanced’ models, the new perspectives run into intractable problems that have uncanny mathematical or logical similarity, such as fragmentation (scattering) or inversion, and their solutions are similar. They are also strangely reminiscent of concerns also found in archaic history, about crises, boundaries, right and left, ground, water, the ‘dark side’… These problems are generic, time and field-independent, and still unresolved. There still is no consensus on how to understand them, and they leave a common question: 

How do we prevent the counter-productive effects, avoid ‘going too far’ — ’where’ do we stop?

This work offers a fresh view of this ‘where’, by modelling its properties geometrically as those of a topologic 'deployment'. This view came from an experimental investigation of medical low-grade chronic syndromes that result in flaring states, and a theoretical generalist study. The book presents findings through a widely distributed range of topics and describes a common basis to these problems, in the modelling parameters that we use for both representation and action. These result in models with important and proven usefulness, but also in these built-in problems.

 The research generated two modelling methods:

(1) ‘Perspectival mapping’ classifies general perspectives, and their distortions, using their abstract key words, numbers of categories or types, and geometric icons that are part of the theoretical communication styles. It allows translating and interpreting works done in one field into the language of another. Thus, one often realises that the fundamental principles inferred,  as well as the empirical findings are essentially the same, although the applied fields and specific expressions are different. The complex or detailed explanations appear unrelated, yet have common semantic and geometric characteristics. This method brings out a problem of inversion in the transfer of knowledge and techniques (or practices) between natural sciences and the human domain, involving anthropomorphism, physicalism, and different ways of valuing and evaluating evidence, and which leads to a global auto-reinforcing.

(2) The second method, ‘nexial topology’, is proposed to fill the gap left by interdisciplinary frameworks, ‘advanced’ models (e.g. developmental, evolutionary, progressive, expansive, inductive…) and 'new approaches' intégrative, unitive, holistic, multi-factorial, or complex. It allows to understand this inverting transfer of knowledge or practice between physical and human domains in terms of symmetry, explaining the auto-reinforcement that results. A notion of ‘deployment’ is introduced: a kind of concurrent evolution-devolution or unfolding-enfolding of apparent opposites or complements. The ‘deployment’ (the term is defined in the text) of representations and actions, together with that of built-in problems of ‘redeployment’  (e.g. degenerations and distortions related to growth), is predictable generically, in geometric terms by imaging simple properties of topologic ‘orienting’ and 'boundary' phenomena. This non-mathematical, non-algorithmic imaging method is not realistic or naturalistic, and so allows to 'gauge' globally (independently of timing or specific context) ‘whence’ situations come and ‘where’ they are going, without necessarily requiring to differentiate origin from end. This is useful when effects and solutions turn into compounding causes.

This method has another advantage: it can also serve as a non-localised and non-timed  modelling, by using a property of approaching boundary (as opposed to reaching), or near-critical  behaviour (as opposed to risking a critical state in the future, or passing an instability stage, or a singularity that reshapes a landscape). With this, one gains the ability to evade problems that come with valuing (especially clashes of irreconcilable perspective) and, instead, to gauge a deploying situation, even if no quantitative or qualitative observation can be made or has been gathered, and sensory or instrumental information detect no early indicators of rising danger. Understanding how the deployment ‘presents’ geometrically (rather than ‘represent’ the real or natural situation) permits to see how to stop it from ‘going too far’ and thus not raise counter-productive effects, as well as also evade problems that come with valuing (especially clashes of irreconcilable perspective).

Our 'new approaches' and advanced general perspectives tend to  see potentials, possibles, futures, latent capacities, etc.,  but  therefore also, simultaneously, to make them  practical impossibilities 'just yet' or 'here and now', placing the promise of achieved result later or elsewhere. These views in perspective bring built-in intellectual paradoxes related to time or space, induction or causality. Bypassing them, this method can give access to some ‘basic’ options that do not involve this nor redeployments, ways of 'doing something about it' (whatever the specific 'it' is) without creating new problems to solve. However, current culture systematically ignores them systematically, considering them invalid, unjustifiable by reason (e.g. chance), or uneconomical. The book mentions several of these neglected 'basic means' as related to health.

In another area, for example, ‘green hand’ work is performed mostly by volunteers (who are assumed to have decent living conditions). It could be re-valued economically, and become ‘green hand jobs’ (different from 'green energy' technology or factory jobs) of the sort that many children and some adults crave: outdoors, providing sufficient vitamin D and physical activity, peacefully happy reducing the stress from high human pressure (urban, and financial), restoring land and soils that badly need it, or caring for wildlife, rehabilitating human bodies to ‘wild’ or animal life and its physical adaptability.

 Keywords: low-grade chronic syndrome, dose-related effect, health ecology, practice                                   applied  topology, critical, boundary, surface, counter-productive effects, situation,                       representation, model, theory, assumption, cognitive modes, knowledge,                                       interdisciplinary approach, integral, unitive, complex frameworks, multi-factorial                            wasting, consumption, fragmentation, degeneration, development, evolution, survival