NetDynam 2.0

What practical steps can I take to help Ladies of the Heart establish itself on Facebook?

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How do we depict an outer picture about what results from our untangling an inner representation?





[click thumbnails to enlarge] Source: Abduction and Affordance: A Semiotic View of Cognition; Donald J. Cunningham

comment: Bridges. Figures 2-5 in order of complexity, or, if you will, ‘bit order’. Soon, I’ll round out the quintet with Figure 1. (And circle back to the matrix, the 4-square, to Bateson.) One thing that comes up for me, is how much pressure the conventions of intellectual genre came under during 1980s–the Reagan era–and how this afforded what followed. This period came a little more than a generation after the renaissance of the new left and post-modernism and what I term ‘pragmatic syncretics’ (in the U.S.) So, after the stirrings of, for example, Kenneth Boulding (1956; The Image,) Herbert Marcuse (1964; One Dimensional Man,) Norman O. Brown (1967; Love’s Body,) Gilles Deleuze (1968; Difference & Repetition,) Gregory Bateson (1972; Steps to An Ecology of Mind.) Somehow the network now fits in, and the genre busting seems today much more to breath as it organizes and reconfigures, Although, I suppose one has to pay attention in some narrow or creative way.

Note to self-I have to dig up Maturana’s ideagram showing co-assimilation and take the scanner to The Geometry of Meaning, Arthur M. Young, 1976–the year I started reading philosophy while managing a record store in the back of a book store in Middlebury, Vermont.

Abduction and Affordance: A Semiotic View of Cognition (Cunningham) Abstract: The shortcomings of the dominant information processing models of cognition are outlined, and two alterative models derived from semiotics are presented. In addition, the possibility of incorporating J. J. Gibson’s ecological theory of affordance within the semiotic models is explored as a means of addressing some criticism of the latter models. The semiotic models addressed are J. Deely’s (1983, 1986) sensation-based Umwelt model and U. Eco’s (1976, 1979, 1984) Model Q. The criticism that semiotic models lead to solipsism is dealt with through Gibson’s rejection of perception as based solely on sensation. In his theory of visual perception, Gibson considers the environment to be the surfaces that separate substances from the medium in which animals live. But environments also”afford” things, such as shelter and locomotion. The processes of perceiving affordances and abduction, as described by Deely, allow semiotics to escape solipsism. Five figures are provided. (TJH)

When one puts objectivity in parenthesis, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other.

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comment: system is us	comment: ‘As found in Maturana. . .objectivity or the search for a good argument.’ (I’ll reveal the secondary source of this in a follow-up.)

[click thumbnail to enlarge]

(from Oikos) When one puts objectivity in parenthesis, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other. One of the results is that you look apathetic to people. Now, those who do not live with objectivity in parentheses have a passion for changing the other. So they have this passion and you do not. For example, at the university where I work, people may say, ‘Humberto is not really interested in anything,’ because I don’t have the passion in the same sense that the person that has objectivity without parentheses. And I think that this is the main difficulty. To other people you may seem too tolerant. However, if the others also put objectivity in parentheses , you discover that disagreements can only be solved by entering a domain of co-inspiration, in which things are done together because the participants want to do them. With objectivity in parentheses, it is easy to do things together because one is not denying the other in the process of doing them. Humberto Maturana

H.M. and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The realization of the living.

doability?

All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing.

Varela:

“On the one hand, one can move down a level and study the properties of the components, disregarding their mutual interconnection as a system. On the other hand, one can disregard the detailed structure of the components, treating their behaviour only as contributing to that of a larger unit. … We cannot conceive of components if there is no system from which they are abstracted; and there cannot be a whole unless there are constitutive elements.”

(Lots of fore-running in M&V to ecosociosemio traversing.

This is for you Mike, if you haven’t been dealed in yet. Varela, from 1995:

Francisco Varela (Edge.org): I guess I’ve had only one question all my life. Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn’t cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is a key and eternal question.

As a consequence, I’m interested in the nervous system, cognitive science, and immunology, because they concern the processes that can answer the question of what biological identity is. How can you have some kind of identity that simultaneously allows you to know something, allows cells to configure their own relevant world, the immune system to generate the identity of our body in its own way, and the brain to be the basis for a mind, a cognitive identity? All these mechanisms share a common theme.

I’m perhaps best known for three different kinds of work, which seem disparate to many people but to me run as a unified theme. These are my contributions in conceiving the notion of autopoiesis — self-production — for cellular organization, the enactive view of the nervous system and cognition, and a revising of current ideas about the immune system.

Regarding the subject of biological identity, the main point is that there is an explicit transition from local interactions to the emergence of the “global” property — that is, the virtual self of the cellular whole, in the case of autopoiesis. It’s clear that molecules interact in very specific ways, giving rise to a unity that is the initiation of the self. There is also the transition from nonlife to life. The nervous system operates in a similar way. Neurons have specific interactions through a loop of sensory surfaces and motor surfaces. This dynamic network is the defining state of a cognitive perception domain. I claim that one could apply the same epistemology to thinking about cognitive phenomena and about the immune system and the body: an underlying circular process gives rise to an emergent coherence, and this emergent coherence is what constitutes the self at that level. In my epistemology, the virtual self is evident because it provides a surface for interaction, but it’s not evident if you try to locate it. It’s completely delocalized.

Organisms have to be understood as a mesh of virtual selves. I don’t have one identity, I have a bricolage of various identities. I have a cellular identity, I have an immune identity, I have a cognitive identity, I have various identities that manifest in different modes of interaction. These are my various selves. I’m interested in gaining further insight into how to clarify this notion of transition from the local to the global, and how these various selves come together and apart in the evolutionary dance. In this sense, what I’ve studied, say, in color vision for the nervous system or in immune self-regulation are what Dan Dennett would call “intuition pumps,” to explore the general pattern of the transition from local rules to emergent properties in life. We have at our disposal beautiful examples to play around with, both in terms of empirical results and in terms of mathematics and computer simulations. The immune system is one beautiful, very specific case. But it’s not the entire picture

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This post initiates a series of posts with diagrams and pictures. I have created a new category: Graphic Ethnography for these posts because this is the over-arching conception that was evoked in conjuring up this foray. The intention is to first evoke a moment of the dear perceiver’s consciousness in engagement with the graphics. Then, to see if any response is telling or otherwise related to the missions of ND2.0.

For extra points, some may wonder where connectors could be drawn between some of these and what has already been offered by yurs troolee.

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comment: system diagrams to me are either mechanistic or esoteric. This one is the former. I bet one could map Bion’s Basic Assumptions onto a scheme like this one.

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comment: This was clipped from a picture on Erica Savig’s short lived blog. Check out it’s context.

She wrote in 2007:

These diagrams are based on three-dimensional curves that were established from programmatic organizations, that are then used as boundary conditions for a looping algorithm. Each set of boundary curves represents the programmatic information from the perspective of a retreatant that is focused on advancing either the mind, body or spirit.

What captures my attention here is the beauty, and, whatever a looping algorithim might have to do with a flux of such algorithims.

I’m a member of two other mailing lists which both address the same academic topics: SysFunc and SysFling. One is based in Sydney and was conceived of as being a more local venue for announcing Sydney and even Australia-based meetings, conferences, articles and so on, as well as for fielding the usual questions regarding the analysis of curly clauses. The other is based in Europe and is said to be more formal in its approach to similar concerns for systemicists. However, it is probably fair to say that most subscribers belong to both lists, and that most threads if they get going, get CCed to both lists, thus providing for a lot of overlapping.

Occasionally the beginnings of discussions are limited to one list, and then someone posts a CC to the other list as well. Those who are not members of both lists begin to wonder what is going on, but, as I say, these people are in the minority anyway.

After a recent spate of twin list activity, one of the moderators and keepers of one of these two lists, commented that amalgamation might not be a bad idea – especially in view of the fact that he was hoping to retire from list maintenance activities at the end of the year. Thereafter a slew of posts were made approving of the amalgamation – to the extent that a cry went up to the effect that perhaps any further messages on the topic be limited to those who were nay, rather than yea-sayers on the matter. A short period of silence thereafter seemed to suggest that the vote might be carried unanimously until one lone voice spoke up in favour of keeping both lists – aka nay-saying – providing affiliatory and affinity-related reasons for doing so. In other words, he cited boundary issues of the sub-grouping kind, arguing that each list has evolved their own separate identities. Thereafter, another one or two more timid types also ventured to add their nay against the groundswell of yea-sayers – but no doubt to little avail.

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Controversy has surrounded intimations that U.S. interrogators had availed themselves of psychological research about how extreme techniques of interrogation might be withstood. The research was, in effect, reverse engineered for the opposite purpose. [Timeline] Because U.S> psychologists are members of The American Psychological Association (APA) and the APA has a code of ethics, when the intimations evolved to become probable suspicions about, at least, military psychologists breaking the code of ethics to ’cause harm,’ the APA became embroiled in a huge scandal.

Now and then I’ve checked into this story. On May 8th, a large chunk of emails were leaked. The emails reflect part of the archive of an internal APA task force, (Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security; PEN). [APA FAQ on interrogation]

The task force’s work, soon to be framed by the inadequacy of a 2006 resolution, led up to:

In September 2008, APA’s members passed a resolution stating that psychologists may not work in settings where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the U.S. Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.” The resolution became official APA policy in February 2009. (Wikipedia)

However, between 2005-2008 the APA was embroiled in controversy, much of it having to do with the constituency of professional psychologists who have vested (and lucrative) interests in defense and security affairs. This led to lots of political maneuvering vis a vis the leadership of the APA>

On May 9th, the email archive from May 2005-2006 of the task force was leaked.

Ahhhh. This is of interest with respect to Netdynam’s portfolio. The first substantial email is on page 7 of the leaked compendium. On page 15, Olivia Morehead-Slaughter writes:

1) Who is the client? 2)To whom do we have ethical obligations? It is notable that the answers to these 2 questions may not be the same.

And, as the saying goes, they’re off to the races.

For Netdynam a good case about the circumstances for re-deployment of archives.