SELF-PERPETUATING SYSTEMS AND HOW THEY'RE ALL SIMILAR
Theoretical post
I'm sure if you've been here for longer than a week, you understand the basic reasoning and concepts behind natural selection, the free market, military success, and so on. For the longest time now I've had this feeling that there is some very similar underlying process at here, but all of the existing definitions for selection processes like this are overspecialized for their particular field, and generally lack applicability to other types of systems. So I decided to have a go at it myself.
I define a SELF PERPETUATING SYSTEM to be any pattern, function, whatever, that takes some variables about the real world and changes them in a way that affects the existence of the system itself. See pictures for reasoning. The goal is to arrive at the shared underlying process of real life selection processes like competition, natural selection, survival etc. Then we can see what kinds of other things we can apply this to.
I included some examples of how given systems can be analyzed like this. Of course there can be systems made of systems and systems inside systems, which is why for any particular application you need to come up with a seperate architecture.
I'm sure there are things I'm overlooking right now, but it seems like this model can be used to describe a lot of things - individual survival, group natural selection, the success of businesses, etc.
If you can get people to think about certain things this way, it makes much clearer how the notions of natural selection, market forces and so on apply to many situations outside the usual fields associated with them. This should make it more difficult for leftards to plead that natural selection doesn't apply to ethnic groups, religions, ideologies and so on.