A couple of typos, a few quibbles, but mostly just when-I-read-this I'm thinking... stuff that may have zero value or interest, but maybe some prattle will be of interest. The convergence with what I've been thinking is almost surprising, but we're standing on much the same shoulders, so seeing much the same thing.

1-8 'Then in Part 3 we examined three four archetype models...' three or four?

1-17 'Arguably, a modern, technologically-enabled, culturally diverse society is the most complex artifact that humans have created...' To merely quibble, 'humans have created' is overstating our agency in creating the dissipative utility monster we live in, were created by, and serve. I don't imagine a bunch of elites sitting around a smoke-filled cave saying, 'hey guys, let start an agricultural revolution and create/build empires with temples for you guys and palaces for my guys'. We are riding a whirlwind, a dynamic that no human created nor understands. There are smoke-filled rooms, but I don't think those in them are actually running the show, though they may believe they are and convince most others they are. When descent comes will they take responsibility? Will the public blame them and end up fighting to see who inherits the rubble because they choose to?

1-19 'The global HSS is a complex adaptive and evolvable system to be sure...' I'm chronically unsure, so while the current HSS is potentially a CAES, sometimes it looks more like a thunderhead or metastasizing cancer that is very much maximizing power, but not evolving. Adaptive, as in perusing the short-term contingencies of profit/growth while blobbing about the globe consuming its life-support system, but not being selected for long-term if as subsystem we consume the body we metastasize in. But potentially we are 'a most promising species' and as Lovelock notes, perhaps 'eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism'. And as a fedeist, it is the source of mine too.

1-25 'Many people both lay people and specialists from multiple disciplines are rapidly coming to the conclusion that mankind is in the process of harming the Ecos.' This point is foundational and I just copy it here as I may want to share this idea at some point. I want it to be true. Many of the 'educated' will agree that it most certainly is. Unfortunately, to be numerate, I wonder 'how many', and my evidenced-based best guess is some fraction of a percent at this time are not 'Anthropocene enthusiasts' to such an extent that they can no longer serve the BAU system. But that could change virtually overnight. Many people you know, no doubt, but of the teaming billions, less than one percent. Closer to 0.01% actually. Many when pressed may admit that humans are causing 'harm' depending on how the question is asked, maybe 99%, but to actually do something more than buying a Tesla as their next car to help imagine they are saving the world is not implied.

Page 2, I'm singing along, maybe out of tune, but nothing to add.

3-1 'It has taken thousands of years of experience to begin to accumulate an understanding sufficient to consider systems engineering project to realize a new social contract and social structure that could achieve a sustainable society.' Just another quote to consider, needs to be put 'out there' somehow.

3-30 .'We could lose everything that constitutes what we have come to accept as normal society...' Yes, but what we accept as normal is what has become normalized, which has involved normalizing what doesn't and can't work long-term. About four thousand years ago, total human population maybe 35 million, most humans were living within some level of agriculturally empowered empire-building society whether on a chiefdom, city-state, or state level of unsustainable overcomplexity. We transitioned from sustainable bands to living in unsustainable empires about then. Empire-building, and the culture of empire-building, has been normalized, but is, from the POV of our prior ancestors going back millions of years, profoundly abnormal. We are now 'humans of NIHM', perhaps not different in kind from Calhoun's rats of NIHM. Can humans live long-term in complex society? Most of the evidence [Past Lives of Humans] suggests not. We regionally pulse into overshoot/overcomplexity. The Hopi traditionalists and a few others may still live outside the global growth hegemon (Hubbert's 'monetary culture'), but there is one remnant of a complex society, the Tairona, who have not been subsumed and is the only state-level complex society to not have been. They appear to have been managing a complex society (civilization) for the last 1,100 years as Tairona Phase 3, who may have learned from their prior two failures something about how to manage CAES-HSS. This makes them of potentially high interest if we would consider learning from them. [The Kogi Project: Can we learn about real solutions from these people?]

4-21 'The presumption might be that all we need to design are ‘interventions’ that would mitigate, correct, or otherwise replace faulty functions in the current social system....' Yes, the assumption is that current social systems are not a dysfunctional expression of empire-building monetary culture that produces increasingly dysfunctional individuals over 8-12 generations. Maybe we need to think in terms of what works for we primates and then iterate towards more complexity while being prepared to step back to what works long-term.

4-25 'However, intervention is not a real option...' Intervention in existing complex societies is not if 99 percent of citizens oppose the intervention (such as Jack envisions), but if 0.1 percent self-select into the intervention/design change, then they could self-organized, perhaps with guidance, and form (by 'voting with their feet') new complex societies that embody the change provided the change actually works per Nature and systems principles. Patterns that demonstrably work can be replicated. For example, one design envisions people living in communities of band-size having birth control technology. The Mothers of a watershed management unit (WMU), one from each of maybe a hundred communities, meet once a year with population biologists and systems ecologists to decide on the number of births in the coming year that will increase, decrease, or hold the population steady based on the environmental productivity of the watershed. Once that number is agreed to, simple math determines how many, if any, births each community can be allotted. The mother who represents the community's mothers and would-be mothers, returns to their community of domiciles and says, 'OK, this year we get two babies' and the Mothers work out the details as humans have been doing in small groups of trusted, kindred others for hundreds of millennia. Obviously the people living in New York City or any other current nation-state/city couldn't do this, but if some, maybe as many as 0.1% of global population, did and were willing to relocate, such a renorming of human behavior is a real option that could even become a real solution for posterity.

Page 5, yes, multiple levels of dysfunction is the given.

6-12 'The first question our analysis needs to ask is: Can there be, or should there be, a purpose served by humanity that supports the Ecos and its long-term sustainability as a living system?' H.T. thought so and so we need to 'by our service be our biosphere's handmaiden anew.' Our purpose will be to maximize system empower, to which I want to add 'long-term' as cancer does the MPP thing too and is selected for, but only for a time, meaning it is not evolvable. Destroy the supra-system and you will not be selected for. So one way to state the purpose of life is: 'to be selected for as subsystem as the millennia pass' and serving the supra-system is the Dao. In the watershed I live in 80 percent of the upper watershed would be Nature's, no human usage within, and over the next 500 years it would revert to old-growth temperate rainforest. Humans may claim up to 20 percent of the salmon run which would likely increase over the next 500 years, and people would work to increase the rate of nature restorancy even if they did not benefit directly in the short term. As the centuries passed, the Mothers might decide to increase the population or decrease it to allow per capita wealth to increase. BAU humans could, technology enabled, take virtually the entire salmon run and cut all the forest down on segmented lots every 40-60 years as they are now, but if limits are part of the design, we ecolate (systems science literate) humans could avoid BAU outcomes and prosper long-term. We are not going to reform the BAU monetary culture into its opposite.

7-28 'The problem with the current political process...' Pre Great Acceleration the political process of nation-state building was dominate and lead to two world wars, but has since been dominated by the economic growth subsystem. Theoretically, as the economic subsystem weakens, the political could come to manage it, but in a recent moment of clarity I realized that all political policy and decision making is relentlessly humancentric in the current humanocracy, and that this selects for failure. The governance subsystem needs to be 'a model for survival in that it molds individual behaviour into a plan of actions or avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources. In this manner the individual and society at large must both carry the burden of great responsibilities which, in the Kogi view, extend not only to their society but to the whole of mankind'.

The governance subsystem must be naturcentric, serving Gaia, Aluna, Nature, the Ecos above short-term self interests of hubris-man. To simultaneously redesign the political and economic subsystems, I vote for a naturocracy, after which I won't get a vote.

8-5 '– in effect a new kind of constitution needs to be drawn up based on systems principles...' So you can't blame me for trying to write one to be suggestive.

8-25 'Classical economics required that human beings are rational decision makers...' As Paul Chefurka convincingly notes, we are rationalizing animals at best.

9-21 'it is the lack of adequate wisdom learning that is at the root of poor decision making in the modern society...' Agriculture (and some tech, e.g. wagons/chariots, boats) allows group size to exceed 150 which selects for hierarchy, which selects for the male atavism of dominance. The whole dynamic of empire-building selects for patriarchy which likely accounts for  the spread of Indo-European culture by conquest. Alpha-males do not excel in wisdom learning. My WMU design, one of many possible, selects for a de facto matriarchy because that is what the last 3+ million years seem to have been selecting for, and there isn't a feminist ideological bone in my body. I did read Ashley Montagu on the natural superiority of women, and can accept what is obviously evidence based. I recently argued this point on biological/functional grounds with a woman claiming equality and easily won, but that doesn't make me superior. The Kogi society may appear to be male dominated, but is a 'de facto matriarchy' as the women have more important things to do and have veto powers. The men tend to be the observational ecologists who wander far and 'listen to Nature', and to the women whom they view as closer, by nature, to Mother.

11-7 'The agricultural revolution was the first time...' With a few exceptions such as wild grain and game harvesting in the Fertile Crescent that supported hunter-gatherer congregations large enough to build monuments at Göbekli Tepe and support an empire of belief, but more local to me is that red cedar canoe technology enabled permanent communities along the Pacific Northwest to prosper and support chiefdom level complex society. But about 3-4 thousand years ago villages became fortresses due to the development of Viking-like cultures using war canoes able to hold up to 60 warriors each to raid, rape, enslave, loot, and otherwise ravage coastal settlements that had accumulated wealth for the taking. Initially, for thousands of years, all peoples may have gotten along, but if just one tribe discovers the pay-offs of conquest as enabled by canoe tech which are then selected for, normalized, and spread, then the dynamics of the system change. Empire-building arose among tech enabled hunter-gatherers. Even Aleutian islanders enabled by baidarka kayak tech went as far south as California to commit genocide on a weaker coastal tribe. They no doubt stopped at Coos Bay and traded peaceably when that was what worked. Technology changes the rules of the game and what works is selected for, if only for a time. Design is based on defining rules that select for sustainable outcome. If empire-building works, you will get pathology.

13-35 'Put simply, humans can’t trust money, prices, most institutions, and especially other humans in the modern conundrum.'  Trust may be key to understanding the failure of complex societies >150. With size comes a decrease in the number of repeat interactions between any two people. If too low, then 'cheaters' tend to win and cheating is selected for with loss of trust. In band-sized groups with frequent repeat interactions, cheaters don't do well and may be put to death. In small communities people don't lock their doors and they can trust the others with their life. In modern society the number of people someone trusts, including family members, approaches zero. See Copykittens and Trust.

14-22 'This is what can be accomplished with the application of systems science and the language of systems.' That is my best guess.

14-25 'If we were starting from scratch, what kind of social system would we design?' My starting point is that agriculture, or technology such as red cedar canoes, allows wealth to accumulate in fixed locations, settlements, that is 'for the taking'. This leads to today's world which in 1985 David Suzuki did a series about called A Planet for the Taking. As Joseph Campbell notes, early agrarian society mythology was goddess based and mostly matriarchal. Most Aborigine cultures were matriarchal as observed. But wealth for the taking eventually selects for conquest and empire-building with cultures like the Indo-European being selected for in recent times (8K years). First design a HSS that disallows successful conquest. Expect conquest will happen, but there can be no long-term pay-off. Otherwise pathology is selected for with the BAU overpulsing outcome we are repeating.

15-20 'related members, numbering up to around 150 to 200 individuals of all ages.' The numbers in group sizes that work are of special interest to me. Bands typically ranged from 5 to 85 as observed 'in the wild'. The pre-Euro population of Coos Bay, before disease preceded settlers was about 2,000 and there were 50 settlements around the rich resources of the bay/estuary. Some may have been 150 to 200 for a time, but that's on the far edge of the Bell curve average. Here 40 was average which is perhaps closer to what works optimally. Hutterite communites split into 'daughter' communities when their population hits about 250. At 125 the daughter communities are just below Dunbar's number and are tolerable for a time, but growth soon increases stressors and the community again splits them which works as long as new farmlands can be acquired. For an optimum community size, I'm thinking 20-60 range. 'In the wild' bands over 85, even in resource rich areas like Coos Bay that could have supported communities sizes in the hundreds were not selected for. Small settlements also didn't attract the raiders far to the north though when Lewis and Clark reached the mouth of the Columbia, they noted some slaves from this area were present. The locals were not empire-builders apart from which humans select for band-sized groupings, which, however, are easy prey for even chiefdom level empire-builders. Without empire-building, communities can be optimally sized.

16-3 'crowded man is not one of simple adaptation. It is one of accumulating mental stress and the emergence of bad behavior.' This is Calhoun's 'behavioral sink' that any design for a viable civilization, complex society, needs to address. My design renormalizes not raising children in high density urban areas. Again, many other designs can be tested, but in mine children are raised in outlying areas close to Nature in small communities and may visit urban areas up to 13 times a year for up to 7 days. Couples living in a city who procreate, with the Mother's blessing, move back to a band-sized community, likely to include grandparent services, before birth as that would be the understood norm of the 'tribe'. Jack can suggest other designs that might work.

21-26 'Furthermore, implicit in this line of argument, we seek to design the HSS so that it benefits the planet.' Exactly. We need to understand the dynamic, the planet and our HSS, and learn to live properly with it. Understanding is more than analysis; it is foundationally an act of love. We need to love and understand this Earth, our supra-system and the subsystems 'we' are inclusive of, the cosmos and quantum. I'm reading Haydn Washington's book he kindly sent me, 'A Sense of Wonder Towards Nature: Healing the Planet through Belonging'. I'm preferring 'connection' but same thing, and love is connection, a recognition of belonging. Eileen Crist is also iterating towards this, and I keep coming back to 'love and understanding' as essential, not one or the other, but and/both, which includes the 'religion' thing, however problematic psuedo-religion may be. Your idea or emphasis on the 'evolvable' is foundational. Otherwise we'll design a civilization that is a benign tumor on Ecos that doesn't evolve, which is what Orwell so chillingly envisioned. To be a lifeform we can't be or become a dissipative structure however impressive for a time, even if it is sustainable. We could 'perfect' empire such that it persists, but it would be a dissipative structure that failed to evolve 'into forms most beautiful and most wonderful' that we designers cannot possibly envision. We can define 'the rules of the game' that select for CAES, maybe, if we listen to Nature.  

22-7 'It may be the case that once humans have helped restore balanced ecosystems that there would not be much needed in the way of management of the non human systems.' One story I made up is about the Galactic Park Ranger assigned to Earth. She was still feeling bad about missing the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous. She had just returned from a short 100K year vacation to behold what some formerly naked apes had done. She quickly dispenses some humanicide to control the infestation. How did she not foresee this happening? In trouble again, likely to be reassigned.... We need to evolve to fill this job opening and meet the enemy head on. We can if we can learn to just say no to BAU short-termism and to our egoic love of error, ignorance, and illusion (e.g. Self) by iterating towards becoming ecolate and otherwise 'getting right with Mother'.

22-13 'Mining operations extract mineral resources.' At risk of annoying, I often end sentences like this with 'for a time' as in the long view we need to note that all mining, including groundwater drawdown or only 99% recycling, is unsustainable. And then what? 'Seek out the condition now that will come anyway.'

22-19 'social system that must learn to live off of the real-time flow of solar energy primarily through a greatly reduced energy consuming agriculture'. I was trained to be an agronomist but realized that without fossil fuel inputs we need to transition to low intensity agriculture (e.g. Kogi) that is less productive even than empire-driven slave/serf/peasant/wage-slave/animal labor empowered agroecosystems. My design ends empire-building that selects for the life of commoner toil no one wants to go back to. People view with horror going back to a population of a mere 500 million, but actually, without overseers cracking whips or wage slaves in a monetary culture driven to work, we need to think about Chefurka's 35 million. But being an optimist, I've envisioned 42 million humans eventually living as Earth Agents [Odum] on an Abundant Earth [Crist]. I could be wrong, as usual, but you may be one of only a few who finds 'only' 42 million thinkable. Most would castrate me with 'a dull aluminum spoon' for wanting to kill 99.5% of humans and their livestock and pets. I'm optimistic, but it could take a few millennia for humans to evolve as 'handmaidens' to be so prosperous as to support a population of 42 million functional humans and perhaps send forth AI to explore this Cosmos that lies all undiscovered about us. A tech enabled fish might make it to the top of Everest, but they will never live there.

22-25 'will need to revert completely to, say, a Middle Age feudal form.' The feudal system was enabled on the God's Mandate narrative the priests told and were well compensated for telling (aka the Divine Rights of Kings narrative). We need to revert much further back, pre-empire-building on back to pre-belief-based ideological empire-building.

23-2 'in a society that does not demand as much electric power as our current western ones do (indeed, hardly any at all), and if solar panels in the future can be simplified and built primarily from recycled materials, it is conceivable that some form of direct solar energy might be viable.' You are singing my song again. To preserve maybe one personal LED light source per person, wearable in one's hat or present in one's pocket, and, dreaming on, perhaps some low-power information technology (e.g. mp3 player), I dare to hope for up to 50 Wh/day/person (40-60 Wh/day/person) from some source, which could be in-stream micro-hydro distributed for community use, but if the local Federation annex had a small library of the book things, that would work. And I have a hat with some solar PV that could provide even a nomad with 50 Wh/day. Being a nomad with a Federation 'smartbook' that graduates of the Federation Academy of Evidence and Reason get, whose content I could occasionally update when I visited the embassy, would make me a happy camper.

23-12 'The emphasis has to be on the notion of “necessaries.”' My mother was not educated much by our schooling system, but like Mark Twain, she did not allow her schooling to interfere with her education. Her meme for posterity (she was Depression era) is, 'people don't know their needs from their wants.' which was her frequent summing up of what she was observing among us products of the consumer society. As a teenager I took a focused, sustained interest in learning to distinguish 'needs' from 'wants', and doing so helped make me the useless misfit I am today, who failed to serve the Empire with proper Anthropocene enthusiasm.

23-30 'The kind of economy being suggested does not mean ‘subsistence,’ or constant toil just to stay alive...' Jack doesn't get this. It's three megacities or 'subsistence farmers' as degraded remnant population of the worst sort, e.g. the Kogi, our elder brothers, we being crazed 5-year-olds with machetes and cars laying waste to a planet.

24-28 'In fact, nothing like our current concept of markets (e.g. financial, labor, real estate, etc.) can exist in a CAES-based HSS.' Just about everybody on the planet doesn't get this.

25-4 'essentials that cannot be obtained locally within a module.' aka my 'watershed management unit', maybe 25K WMUs globally.

26-21 'We use this principle to suggest that the fundamental basis of economic activity is free energy itself.' Right again, so Odum fanboy that I seem to be, trade between WMUs is based on emdollar environmental accounting or whatever we call it....

27-28 'As mentioned above, emergy is a measure of the amount of energy' And the Emergy Society is thinking to stop talking about 'emergy' and switch to 'solar footprint' to communicate with students.

28-3 'Essentially this is similar to Karl Marx’s and David Ricardo’s “labor theory of value"' which reminds me of my political science professor who presented Marx's labor theory of value and marveled at how idiotic it was. I was at the bask of the class as usual thinking, yes, idiotic as you present it, but so far as I can tell Marx wasn't an idiot. So after a couple of hours in the library I met with the professor during office hours. To his credit he thanked me for pointing out his errors (perhaps he had been misinformed) and when no one else was giving an acceptable answer to one of his questions he started pointing my way and asking me what I thought. Ah, the good old days.

31-13 'The purpose of surpluses (when the occur)...' when they occur?

31-22 I recall a recent story of a tourist going to the most remote of Polynesian islands, population of about 80, and no one locked their doors. The bigger island nearby had a population of 250 and they had to lock their doors and someone served as police official. I consider 150 maximum with <80 to make for better neighbors. We have a bias towards normalizing large numbers that makes living in the number we do seem normal.

35-21 'the population distributed among nations might need an additional level of coordination that could be described as a federation' Okay, change 'nations' to 'WMUs' and 'would need a United Federation of Watersheds' and I could have written this.

36-13 'This will be a true democracy.' Them's fight'n words, pardner, if you don't know what 'true' democracy is. I once wrote 'democratic meritocracy', and will overlook the indiscretion, but 'true democracy' would be going too far down the road to Orwellian political-speak. I'd go with 'This will be a form of democratic control system that may work in that...' and I'd have to define 'democratic' as it means whatever any wordsmith wants it to. I'm thinking of moving to the People's Democratic Republic of Korea because I obviously don't live in a true democracy.

36-15 'Democracy as currently understood...' is the best form of governance with the exception of all the others and I agree that democracy is the best way to decide matters of preference. What color and architectural style should the Federation Embassy be? Everyone gets a vote. What's the carrying capacity of our watershed given the level of per capita consumption we just voted on? No one gets a vote. In a naturocracy, after preference is factored in, on any issue that matters, no one gets a vote other than Nature who 'has all the answers' [H.T. again].

37-14 'Let us call this concept sapiocracy...' Okay, this is the 'democratic meritocracy' I've considered if I get to define 'merit' as wisdom, but I'm iterating towards the 'de facto matriarchy' of our ancestors and the Kogi. Coming up with 'best guess policies' and proposals requires lots of sapience, data, and hard work. 'There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of Not Knowing.' --Donella Meadows  For such, a sapiocracy works. But after a consensus of best guess thinking is achieved, there is the higher sapience of intuition. On the whole, women, those who are not dysfunctional humans of NIMH, have a higher investment in posterity and perhaps sense of long-termism on an intuitional level, such that if a policy is proposed, with stated uncertainties as always, when at some point it comes down to pure guessing as to what might work, and if the Mothers have concerns that don't go away, then that's grounds for going back to the drawing board and maybe gathering more data or otherwise considering the possibility that one might be wrong. The Mothers may actually be better aligned with Aluna, Nature, or Ecos who actually is our Mother. So if the Mothers don't think my design for a viable civilization will work, I will listen, perhaps after a long walk in the forest while I endeavor to better listen to and get right with Mother, before endeavoring to listen to a community's Mothers who really do think of the seventh generation and of Mother Nature who will support them.

Who knows that he does not know is the highest;

Who (pretends to) know what he does not know is sick-minded.

And who recognizes sick-mindedness as sick-mindedness is not sick-minded.

The Sage is not sick-minded.

Because he recognizes sick-mindedness as sick mindedness,

Therefore he is not sick-minded.