Love Makes The World Go Round : The Synenergy Story [MT106]
David Noel
<davidn@aoi.com.au>
Ben Franklin Centre for Theoretical Research
PO Box 27, Subiaco, WA 6008, Australia.
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
And men below, and saints above
--Sir Walter Scott, 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'
The Third Leg
To be able to stand freely and in a stable way on its own, a piece of furniture needs at least
three legs. So far, in our examination of the makeup of the Matrix which forms our model of
human society, we have distinguished two basic elements, Infocap (MT102) and Systons (MT103). Now we move
on to the third and last element.
I have tried to build up an image of infocap as the substance, the material part, of operations
and actions involving human society. Similarly, the concept of systons has been put forward
as representing the entities which are the initiators, proponents, or receivers of these actions.
To complete the model, a third element is needed, one which represents both what may be
described as 'energy transfers' occurring in the actions, and also a sort of 'potential energy'
functioning as a glue holding the systons together.
Clearly this element, for which I will be using the name 'synenergy', is a much less tangible
concept than the ones used for the first two elements. Even so, I hope to demonstrate that its
existence is 'real', real in the sense that it forms a logical and essential part of a model which
can accurately describe what we regard as the 'real world'.
For this third element of Synenergy I will be using the
following symbol:
Fig. 106.1 The Synenergy symbol
This symbol, with its curling 'antennas' and lower symmetry, perhaps has more of an
organic look than the symbols used for infocap and systons. And it is in the nature of
synenergy, as I envisage it, to be more organic, more of the nature of a 'life force' in the Matrix
-- perhaps less easy to quantify than the other two elements, but nevertheless still amenable
to the same process of generalization and rule--formation as the others.
For the moment we will not try to define Synenergy too closely. But a number of examples
may help. Examples include communications, both telecommunications and all sorts of
human speech and writing and symbolism, payments and all sorts of money transfers and some
elements of asset transfers, together with a whole group of psychological entities such as pair-bonding,
team spirit, and other feelings -- manifestations which can be generalized as 'love'.
In a way, synenergy can be regarded as the flow of infocap between systons.
There is another way of looking at the nature of synenergy, one based on an analysis
technique called 'Dimensional Analysis'. This is an interesting topic, but not one basic to
the ideas presented here.
Readers may refer to a standard source on Dimensional Analysis if they wish. But at this point,
we need dwell only on two important implications of this type of analysis.
Convertibility
One of the underlying assumptions in the dimensional analysis of synenergy is that all
forms of it are of the same basic nature. It is as if we are talking about apples and pears,
pineapples and kiwifruit; all can be regarded as forms of fruit, all are parts of plants.
But when we come to talk about apples and gravity, or speed and anxiety, we are talking
about things of a basically different nature.
Dimensional analysis would say that the dimensions of apples and gravity are quite
different. In the sense used in this technique, 'dimensions' does not have the ordinary sense
at all, but refers to the possession of a set of basic attributes. In the usual analysis, these
attributes are length, time, and mass.
On the other hand, the dimensions of apples and pears will be the same, as far as this
technique is concerned. And an important implication of this is that it is always possible, either
in theory or in practice, to convert an item with a given dimensional structure into another item
with the same structure.
In the example we have just used, it would suggest that it is theoretically possible to convert
pears into apples. And in actual fact, the Chinese have already done this, many centuries ago.
The resulting fruit, these days called a nashi fruit, may look just like an apple, even though a
close genetic analysis would reveal it is actually a pear.
As far as synenergy is concerned, the implication is that any form of synenergy is, in
principle, convertible into another form.
Proposition 106A***. All forms of synenergy are theoretically capable of interconversion
There is actually a word for this process, when it relates to certain types of synenergy in
human society. We call it 'sublimation'.
There is a further derivation. If synenergy basically consists of a flow of infocap, its
dimensional structure can be represented as that of infocap divided by time. In other words,
if we can find units for infocap, a value for synenergy will be given in number of infocap units
moving in unit time.
A useful comparison is with electricity, where everyone is familiar with the term kilowatt.
A kilowatt is a measure of power, which has the dimensions of energy per unit time, so that
a kilowatt is equivalent to one kilojoule per second. Of course a kilojoule is a measure of
energy, we may find a food described as having "200 kilojoules per 100 gram portion".
So synenergy is to infocap, as power is to energy. We may as well mark this with a formal
proposition:
Proposition 106B*. Synenergy has the units of infocap flow per unit time
The dimensional structure also implies that types of infocap are interconvertible, just as
for synenergy:
Proposition 106C***. All forms of infocap are theoretically capable of interconversion
There is nothing particularly controversial in all this. All forms of energy have the same
dimensions, and we are very familiar with the conversion of one form of energy into another,
such as rotational energy turning into heat in an electric drill bit, or chemical energy turning
into electrical energy in a car battery.
Conservation and Other Properties
There is another dimensional property we are familiar with. Entities with the same
dimensional structure normally have the same general properties. One such property is called
conservation.
In this sense, conservation means whether the entity can be created and destroyed or not.
In the familiar world, energy is conserved. One form of energy may be converted into another,
but can't be created from nothing, nor can it be destroyed. Sometimes it is hard to work out
where the energy went to, but proper measurements will always reveal its destination and the
fact that the total energy is unchanged.
Mass is another entity which we usually regard as conserved. In fact the famous Einstein
equation describes how mass may be converted into energy, and vice versa, so this is not
strictly true. Even so, in the atomic reactions where the equation applies, the total of mass plus
energy is conserved.
Other scientific entities are not conserved. One such is 'entropy', essentially a measure
of the randomness, or perhaps the degree of structuring of a body. The entropy of the Universe
as a whole is supposed to be continually increasing as it "runs down".
As it happens, entropy has the same dimensions as information, in the scientific sense. And
in Matrix Thinking, information is just one form of infocap. This leads naturally to the next
proposition:
Proposition 106D**. Neither infocap nor synenergy are conserved
This is a simple and obvious feature of the real world, for which readers will be able to
supply many examples from their own experience. Nevertheless, its generality is not generally
appreciated. We will often see the implications of this proposition appearing elsewhere in this suite of articles.
Love Makes the World Go Round
Any satisfactory theory of how human society operates will need to address the question
of motivation, the question of What Makes Things Happen. It seems to me reasonable that if
all these motivational forces can be lumped together under one heading, that heading can be
called synenergy.
Proposition 106E***. Synenergy flow is the major need and desire of all human-based
systons
Think about it. The need for money and the desire for love, attention, and interaction with
others are acknowledged as fundamental forces in human life. All these things have been
classed together here under the heading of synenergy. I have suggested that synenergy is more
or less the 'life force' of systons, and that its essence is the transfer of infocap.
But don't think about it too much. Instead, treat it as a true working proposition, and see
how well the implications of this proposition lead to a valid model of society, as we move on
to develop this model in the rest of this work. The proposition doesn't actually need to have
an established logical justification, it only needs to give a good basis for analyzing the world
-- or at least a better one than anything else around so far.
Time to Relax
This is only the sixth article in the suite, and already we have got through all the basic theoretical stuff, everything is downhill from now on. But watch out for a few crevasses on the
way down.
So we can move on now (MT107), to look at how the different parts of a syston fit together and work
together -- and how it can break down if this doesn't happen .
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Go to the "Matrix Thinking: How Society Works" Home Page
Versions 1.0-1.2, printed editions (Matrix Thinking Book I, BFC Press, Australia, 1992-1997)
Version 2.0, 2004, PDFs etc on World Wide Web (http://www.aoi.com.au/matrix/MT.htm)
Version 3.0, 2014 Jul 6-23, Reworked from chapter 106 of "Matrix Thinking" as one article in a suite on the World Wide Web.
