Dear Ted and all,
By 'coincidence' I yesterday had the following musings arising from the Darwinian/Mathusian fallacy that 'in the absence of external intervention (i.e. 'selection'), life would multiply and diversify exponentially without limit'. This fallacy effectively arises from the assumption of sovereignty in which 'life is animated entirely from within', as if independent of the world it inhabits.
1. 'Excess' isn't eliminated via restriction of 'resource supply'. Excess is prevented by restriction of resource (energy) availability.
2. 'Competition' cannot 'increase' when there is a restriction of resource supply, because as an active process, competition depends on resource supply.
3. Energy cannot be abstracted from space. The spatial distribution of energy sources is key to natural dynamics.
4. No form can be animated entirely from within itself.
5. Nothing extrinsic must be done to stop diversification and multiplication, because constraint is intrinsic.
6. The animating source of all is everywhere, not somewhere discrete and internal. Restraint arises via containment within, not imposed from outside dynamic boundaries.
7. By dislocating insides from outsides, and placing an animating centre within and a opposing force outside organisms and organizations, objective rationality, based on the divisive logic of the excluded middle, produces false dichotomies that not only engender deep paradox but also lie at the heart of profound social, psychological and environmental hurt.
8. Amongst the most profound of these false dichotomies is that between 'free will' and 'determinism', which gives rise to unrealistic notions of 'responsibility' and 'leadership'.
9. It's not having 'free will' that gets us into trouble. It's thinking that we have free will that places our lives in deep conflict with our natural dynamic neighbourhood.
Warmest
Alan
----- Original Message -----
From: ted lumley
To: 'Peter d'Errico' ; 'Steve Newcomb'
Cc: alan rayner ; 'John Flach'
Sent: 15 January 2007 22:15
Subject: p.s. to earlier comments on sovereignty and cognitive models
hi peter, steve, (and alan and john),
a 'p.s.' to my last year's comments on 'sovereignty' (re peter's very-important-in-my-view essay at http://www.umass.edu/legal/derrico/nowyouseeit.html and our western culture's penchant for reducing everything to 'cognitive understanding' terms..
1. sovereignty is a mental belief and/or illusion that the power to create ideas and to drive and direct behaviour can emanate from a local center, as in the interior of a nation or in the interior of a human being or organism. it goes hand-in-hand with the mental belief and/or illusion that closed geometric forms called 'organisms' and/or 'organizations' 'exist independently' of the world dynamic they are included in.
2. by imputing 'sovereignty' to closed geometric forms and by further imputing a central sourcing of idea creation and behavioural drive and direction, the world, ... or rather, that which we impute to be the most important parts of the world, ... become the basis for re-rendering the world dynamic in terms of the assertive, productive behaviours of these sovereign dynamic organismic/organisational forms aka 'causal/productive agents and agencies'.
3. the re-rendering of the world dynamic in terms of so-called 'ANIMATE' sovereign organisms and organizations (nations, corporations and other political-legal defined assertive agents) serves as 'theatre' with a cast of characters that we can impute diverse behavioural characteristics to, in order to make our re-rendering of the world dynamic as elastic as needed to fit most of the salient aspects of our experiencing of the world dynamic. of course, by splitting out the sovereign closed forms and endowing them with independent objecthood as well as 'animate' status, we are left with the 'remainder' of nature that we have... 'divided the sovereign animate organisms/organisations out of', ... that is 'dead' and 'INANIMATE' and exists only as a passive resource to be consumed or manipulated by the sovereign organisms and organisations.
4. because we western thinkers bestowed 'animate status' on individual closed geometric form and imputed to them centers of creative thought and behavioural drive and direction (for which they are fully responsible), we are forced to impute to them as well, moral values, the ability to judge right from wrong, or good from bad, and how to live moral lives. the sense of full internal-central-authority-driven causal responsibility for authoring and actualizing of the sovereign individual's behaviour underpins our western system of laws and justice, rewards and punishment.
5. cognitive science also assumes the 'sovereignty' of closed geometric form animate organisms and seeks to understand the behaviour of these sovereign animate organisms, as if they were '' rather than simplified ways for us to model the world dynamic. thus cognitive science starts its inquiry 'on top' of the notional sovereign animate organism base, forcing it (cognitive science) to explain behaviour of the organism in terms of a central cognitive processing system that reduces inner-outer organism-hostspace dynamics to 'informational input' to be 'processed' by the central cognitive processing system, thus giving a notional precedence to the 'programming' of the central cognitive processing system.
6. the eastern and native understandings of the world dynamic, on the other hand, did not impute sovereign animate existence to closed geometric form organisms and organizations, and in fact found this western re-rendering of the world dynamic in terms of a theatrical cast of animated sovereign characters, to be aberrant and unnatural. in the native worldview, there is no split between the 'animate' and the 'inanimate' because there is no 'inaminate'; i.e. the living hostspace of nature includes everything and excludes nothing. e.g. in the ojibwe belief system, nature is the source of animation and man is included in nature;
To the sun he gave the power to heat and light the earth,
To the earth he gave the power of growth and healing,
To the water he gave purity and renewal,
To the wind he gave music and the breath of life itself,
After these things Kitchi Manitou created human kind. To them he gave the power of dream.
"Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky."
7. moving from western beliefs to native beliefs, one must 'suspend belief in the sovereignty of closed geometric form entities' (organisms/organisations) and restore the source of animation in our understanding of the world to the relational dynamics of the natural hostspace. it is no coincidence that this is the same shift in understanding dynamics as associates in going from particle to wave dynamics; i.e. it is not 'animated particles' that cause wave dynamics, wave dynamics are made visually manifest by the movement of particles. that is, our natural hostspace is energy-field-flow in which particles are secondary, ... local concentrations in the energy-field-flow. there is nothing that enjoys 'sovereign existence', everything is flow. (F. David Peat, physics co-researcher and co-author with David Bohm, wrote 'Blackfoot Physics' as a commentary on how 'indigenous science' was consistent with modern physics (relativity and quantum physics) unlike the popular manner of scientific thinking in our western culture.).
8. animation in the native belief tradition is 'spatial-relational' or 'inner-outer' (relative, dynamical balance-seeking) as in breathing which underscores the dynamical one-ness of the inner and outer worlds. wave dynamics are also spatial-relational or 'inner-outer' in their nature. our experience of being included in inner-outer dynamics comes to us by way of our feeling experience (rather than by visual perception and discernment as is foundational to cognitive processing). that is, the native belief tradition puts (spatial-relational) feeling experience in a natural precedence over visual perception in the development of understanding of the world dynamic and how we relate to it.
9. It is our feeling experience that informs us of our inclusion in a wave dynamical world. As a biker riding within a collection of vehicles, i am aware of how i can let my behaviour be directly guided by the inner-outer feeling experience that induces me to move into the sweetspots in the co-created slipstream. visual perception/discernment and cognitive processing are secondary/supportive to the natural primacy of my inner-outer feeling experience in guiding my movement and the result is self-organizational form that is unplanned but which 'feels right'. no doubt, horses do not need a visual archetype of a 'huddle of horses' hard-wired into their psyches but allow themselves to self-organize into a huddle in cold and inclement weather by way of their inner-outer feeling experience that induces them to move into thermal sweetspots in the thermal flow. cognitive models are 'analytical backfill' to these natural self-organizing (spatial-relational) dynamics that start with the assumption of a 'sovereign cognitive processor' that feeds on 'information' in the form of visual representation, and thus represents a 'simulation' in visual-cognitive terms (animated particle paradigm terms), of what actually transpired by way of relative (inner-outer spatial-relational) feeling experience. thus, the well-known BOIDS simulator http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/ converts a flock of birds into cognitive (sovereign) agents and purports to explain how bird collectives manage to move with such astounding aesthetic coherency by way of their individual cognitive processing based 'steering behaviour' that purportedly uses the visual concepts of 'separation', 'alignment' and 'cohesion'. note that the 'feeling experience' by which collective behaviour can be inductively actualized and shaped as when individuals move into the sweetspots in the slipstream they are co-creating (e.g. the thermal slipstream of the huddling horses) is 'banished' from such feelingless visual constructs, the stuff that cognitive processing is made of.
* * *
the dynamical hostspace of nature we live in is imbued with resonance qualities (wave-dynamical qualities) that are capable of inducing self-organization in dynamical collectives (provided that the individual participants allow themselves to 'go with' their feeling experience' and do not shut down their feeling experience by putting their cognitive processing based on visual concepts into an unnatural primacy).
the natural primacy over inner-outer (spatial-relational or 'wave-dynamical') feeling experience over visual-structure-based cognitive processing is (implicitly) foundational to the native belief tradition. our western belief tradition, on the other hand, has been 'taken over' by our deifying of visual-construct based cognitive processing. as ralph waldo emerson says in 'the method of nature', we have allowed the tool to run away with the workman.
this unnatural inversion, on the part of our western belief tradition, which puts visual perception based cognitive processing into an unnatural primacy over the inductive actualizing and shaping of our experience by way of our relational inner-outer experiencing of the dynamical hostspace we are included in, is the source of massive social dysfunction. western belief paradigm re-rendering of the dynamic of our natural hostspace in terms of the center-driven and directed behaviours of sovereign closed geometric form animate organisms and/or organisations, divides out these sovereign-entity sources of animation leaving a 'remainder' or 'residue' of 'inanimate matter' that is viewed as 'resource' to be consumed by and manipulated by the sovereign animate organisms/organizations and moving us towards the native prophecy (chief seattle etc.) where we (the white western european man) would suffocate in his own excrement. in the native worldview that did not break the world into 'animate' and 'inanimate' parts, nature is seen as in relative and quantum physics, as a dynamical one-ness (energy-field-flow) in which man is an included form. the collective ethic must therefore be to sustain dynamical balancing in this living one-ness (this is the ethic we practice when driving friendly in a heavy traffic flow; i.e. our cognitive plan to get from A to B is subordinated to letting our behaviour serve the sustaining of harmonious traffic flow (this is not something we can achieve by cognitive processing since there are no explicit solutions for individual behaviour in a dynamical space where three or more participants move under one another's simultaneous mutual influence.).
today, our western culture dominated world has a value system that orients to 'production' rather than 'spatial-relational dynamical balance'. our western imputing of 'sovereignty' of closed geometric form entities such as nations, corporations, human individuals, provides the logical basis whereby we can attribute full responsibility for productive (or destructive) behaviour to the sovereign entities. this then provides the basis for a 'rewards' and 'punishment' scheme whereby we can increase the rewards for the most productive sovereign entities (the top of our value hierarchy) and increase the punishment for the most destructive sovereign entities. meanwhile, the dividing of the world into 'animate' and 'inanimate' material bodies is a relative continuum so that 'the more animated bodies' such as 'the most successful (productive) sovereign agents (individuals, and political-legal nations or corporations) tend to commoditize and consume 'the least successful (productive) sovereign agents (individuals and political-legal nations or corporations). those who do not want to buy into this 'consume or be consumed' (dog-eat-dog) social ethic will, by their non-compliance, represent an impedance/disturbance to the production-oriented social dynamic and will in some form or other be 'punished' ('if you're not with us you're against us').
what we have here is a basic division in belief systems, as to whether we should conduct our lives on the basis of inner-outer dynamical balancing with the continuously evolving dynamical space we are included in (native and eastern belief), or whether we should conduct our lives on the basis of a visual-construct based cognitive model of the world in terms of a cast of sovereign animate causal agent 'players' that jointly construct the immediate future from the immediate past. john flach, sidney dekker and pieter stappers explore this issue in the context of 'cognitive science', an excerpt from which follows;
http://www.lusa.lu.se/upload/Trafikflyghogskolan/TR2006-04_ReflectionsonQuantumMechanicsandCognitiveSystems.pdf
Playing Twenty Questions with Nature: 2 Reflections on Quantum Mechanics and Cognitive Systems
What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this hallo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, -- or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood. William James (1890, p. 255).
The failure of "traditional psychology" to address the dynamics of experience noted by William James remains a serious problem, especially for those who hope to apply cognitive science to support operators who are trying to manage complex dynamic systems. The "free water" which the cognitive scientists continue to resolutely overlook is typically the most interesting facet of cognition in the wild. The result is that there is a large gulf between "cognitive science" and "cognitive engineering." Cognitive science tends to be organized around the buckets (laboratory micro-worlds) and the cognitive engineers are left to their own devices for addressing the free flow of behavior in less controlled, natural environments. Cognitive engineers are painfully aware of this gap whenever they look to cognitive science for guidance. Cognitive scientists, however, seem to dismiss the gap attributing it to the messiness and inferiority of "applied" science.
Almost a hundred years after James' warning, Allan Newell (1973) echoed a similar theme in his commentary on empirical research in cognitive psychology titled "You can't play Twenty Questions with nature and win." The common theme is that the parsing of experience that guides research in cognitive science does not capture the "flow" or "dynamics" of experience in the wild outside the laboratory.
While we sympathize with the concerns expressed by James and Newell, we wonder about the nature of the cognitive dynamic that invites scientists to develop "snapshot" images of the process. Why do cognitive scientists continue to ignore the fluid aspects that are central to our experiences of the world? We wonder if this is not exclusively a problem for psychologists, but rather a general problem with how scientists and many other people view the world. The more general nature of this problem can be clearly seen in the tension between a Newtonian (classical mechanics) view of nature and modern perspectives reflected in quantum mechanics. In the classical view of the world, space and time exist independently from an observer. This leads to a natural dichotomy between the world "out there" and the experiences of that world "inside" an observer's mind (e.g., the "real" time on the clock and the "experience" of time). However, modern physicists are beginning to consider the possibility that space and time are not out there, but rather they are intrinsic properties of experience. In some sense, the quantum reality emerges out of the experiencing of that reality.
* * *
as i see it, while john flach et al raise issues concerning 'how to improve the cognitive sciences' (though perhaps as a means, within the established thinking, to wake us up to foundational shortfalls in our established thinking), the problem lies deeper than cognitive science, in our assumptions of sovereignty of 'individual understanding' and i deliberately use 'individual understanding' rather than 'individual mind' (as in 'mind and matter split') since 'understanding' that comes to us in an inner-outer spatial-relational sense of inclusion within the dynamics of our hostspace, as when we let our behaviour by guided by slipping into the sweetspots of the slipstream we are co-creatively shaping, ... is not 'understanding' that is available to an individual cognitive processor. as we 'flap our wings together', we perturb the space we are included in setting up a flow-field that is characterized by spatial-relational resonances (calm regions and turbulent regions like whorls in a river flow that draw logs into the quiet zones within the whorls) and we come to understand that the manner in which we behave RELATIVE TO ONE ANOTHER in a simultaneous mutually influencing manner, co-creatively conditions the dynamical space we share inclusion in, in a manner that transcends anything we can deliberately, as individuals, construct. when we co-create those sweetspots in our collective slipstream, we understand that 'this works' and also that we can learn how to sustain this good feeling of riding in the sweetspots by the manner in which we behave relative to one another. what is being said here is that we are capable of up-shifting from 'particle mode' (the mode of sovereign animate causal agents that construct a group dynamic) to 'wave dynamical mode' (the just-described mode where sustaining a simultaneous mutual influencing behaviour can set up standing wave resonances (sweet spots in the slipstream) that we can occupy, akin to those that the wildgeese co-create in their 'inverted V' flock-flying formation that allow them to fly faster and farther for less expenditure of energy than they could ever achieve in their sovereign individual central-authoring solo performing mode.
the systems sciences recognize that 'complex systems' are innate in nature's dynamics and that, in russell ackoff's terms; "separately infeasible parts can make a feasible whole". for example, individuals might not individually have the thermal insulating and heating capacities to survive a cold winter's night on the exposed slopes of a mountain, but by huddling together they can reduce their inner-outer surface exposure, improving their insulating capability (reducing inside-outward thermal flow by reducing the surface area exposed to the extreme temperature difference (the sum of the surface exposed surface areas of the individual is far greater than the exposed surface area of the collective.) 'huddling' can inductively actualize and shape individual and collective behaviour by way of feeling experience of inclusion within a spatial-relational thermal flow. cognitive modeling can describe it, even though it is a behaviour learned through feeling experience of inclusion in a thermal flow-field that is amenable to co-creatively perturbed so as to induce coherent collective behaviour. the cognitive explanation corresponds to the inclusional learning experience in the manner that the BOIDS simulation corresponds to the inclusional learning experience of the wildgeese that draws them into their inverted V formation, not from 'cogntive knowledge' but from re-actualizing of their shared feeling experience (the sustaining of the co-created/co-sustained sweetspots in the slipstream is too subtle for cognitive modeling since it derives from simultaneous mutual influence.
the nature of 'understanding' is thus split between east and west with our western culture embracing visual-structure based cognitive processing, ... an unnatural precedence remarked upon by henri poincaré, marshall mcluhan and others (mcluhan described it in terms of our preoccupation with visual media as emphasized by the visual-space based printed word and broadcast forms thereof and our commensurate atrophying of our 'acoustic space' inclusional experience).
... end of p.s.....
regards,
ted
