The Universe as it works
This section is possibly the most difficult one of all to understand. But it is worth attempting to, as it is important. I had great difficulty deciding how I was going to explain what is a very complex area, but here goes.
We saw that everything is based around Aggregates. Aggregates are classes of things which exist in both the physical world and the spiritual world. Thus a heart is an aggregate that has both physical existence and has sets of functions to work it.
Each aggregate is composed of other aggregates. So a heart is a collection of cells. And a cell is a collection of molecules [to simplify things a bit]. If the ‘thing’ can work on its own – is an autonomous entity - it is an aggregate. So if we take something physical apart and can keep a part of it going with appropriate ‘nutrients’ it is an aggregate. We can work as an employee of a company [aggregate] and a human being [lower level aggregate]. Note that the reverse is not true. If we take a thing apart, and remove its sub-aggregates, it may ‘die’. The company will die without its employees, the human being will die without its heart.
As we form each aggregate it acquires extra function, sometimes a lot of function, sometimes only a small number of functions. We as a human being have acquired all the functions I have shown in the Model – Perception, Emotion, Memory recall and learning, along with Creativity and Imagination, Reasoning, the Will, the 5 senses and the Nervous system. The autonomic system by contrast is not strictly speaking ‘ours’ although I have shown it on the diagram for convenience sake, the functions here belong to our organs – sub-aggregates of us.
So the Aggregate that is us as a human being actually has very few functions. All the rest of the functions belong to the other Aggregates of which we are composed physically.
So now we need to look at each Aggregate as a unit. Every Aggregate is a system. A ‘self contained’ unit with functions that interacts with other systems. In the example above, we have two Aggregates 1 and 2, with different functions. Each aggregate only knows of the ‘world’ outside itself by the Events, that affect it. Whatever ‘perception’ system it possesses will pick up on the ‘outside’ world from these events that bombard it all the time. Our stomach ‘perceives’ only food and drink as events under normal circumstances, but if someone punches us in the stomach, that event will simply be registered as a threat to its existence. Human beings, on the other hand, can perceive any number of events – threats and opportunities. To any aggregate that is how the external world seems – a threat or an opportunity.
What you should be able to see, therefore is that an event is just the output from something else’s function. An event for one aggregate is an output to another aggregate. The stomach registers ‘pain’ when hit, but from then on it knows nothing of what happens next, only our mind gets the ‘pain’ signal as an event and tries to do something about it.
Because every object is a self contained thing, all it will know is that it is getting a call to act – DO SOMETHING – and so it may or may not react depending on its state.
All physical things at every level of aggregation from massive to tiny are organised this way. It doesn’t matter whether they have a ‘brain’. They act as aggregates. Livers, hearts, cells, trees, tree cells, leaves, flowers, flower petals, horses, dogs, doggy hearts, doggy claws, doggy brains, doggy hairs, eyes, noses, intestines, carbon atoms, big companies, little companies, governments, countries, tribes, herds, flocks, swarms, shoals, crowds, colonies, armies, pods, carbon dioxide molecules … everything. All react to events, all have functions in place to do this, some functions are there to handle threats, some functions are there to handle opportunities
And every aggregate has ‘Will’, because the Will controls what transaction and thus what functions come next. We have Will but so does every aggregate. The Will is like a transaction scheduler. It receives information about what has happened – the external event – and it decides what needs to be done. The command and control function. Sometimes it will execute a sequence of functions – a transaction which it has had from ‘birth’ so a set of predefined functions that it can simply execute from its store of transactions. But some aggregates can also ‘learn’. They use their perceptions to try to build predictive models of what to do when they suddenly encounter a new ‘event’. Our immune system learns. Pods learn. Flocks of birds learn. Governments sadly, do not learn [sorry a joke … or maybe not].
So we have to imagine an event hits our aggregate. It searches through its learnt and inherited transactions to see if it has ever encountered this event before. If it has, the transaction is ‘executed’ so the functions are gone through in the correct sequence [see function dependencies] and an output is produced which may serve to trigger other Aggregates.
The football crowd see a goal scored [event]. The crowd surges forward and roars with approval [transaction]. The goalie hears the massive roar [event] and in despair bursts into tears [transaction] . His wife sees him [event] and rushes onto the pitch with a box of Kleenex [transaction]. The pinball effect, except of course the pinball never stops, because there is no hole for it to go into, the world and the universe is just a massive never ending chain of event, transaction, event, transaction, event transaction… on and on into eternity.