Clash of Civilizations or Speciation ?

There is an ongoing discussion about a Clash of Civilizations as  an explanatory model of what is happening on the planet. I was  sent this Wall Street Journal article on the topic authored by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I would suggest that there  is something far more basic going on. There is an active process of speciation happening.

Some contextual  ontology may be useful before we get into the dynamics. The underlying model being applied is one "simple rules generate complex behavior" ala Conway's game of life. What  simple rules can one hypothesize that could show this behavior we are seeing that is being classified as a clash of civilizations. I propose speciation.

With our evolutionary development, both in the physical domain as well as the noosphere, we have created a new level / degree of complexity that we have to contend with / survive in. A certain (significant) proportion of the civilization find that complexity overwhelming. It is adjusting to that complexity by binding to simpler models of the world ( fundamentalism, in religion, philosophy, politics, ethnocentrism, and various other ontologies). This is the beginning of speciation. Can you imagine a person with a universal world view being able to mate with a paragon of ethnocentrism, e.g., a white  supremacist? Over generations, if this continues, you may develop separate species that actually can not mate anymore.

This ontology also explains the rise of fundamentalism ( in religion,  politics, philosophy, ethnocentrism, ...) in the west that the clash model does not. The species bifurcation is happening across the globe, not just in a given ethnicity, "civilization", or philosophy.

The problem of course arises with the level of technology we have achieved. At our current bifurcation point, the diverging sides have  access  to  a destructive power that can eliminate the "aberrant" (from their perspective) emerging species from existence.

Which way this bifurcation goes is the undiscovered country we are now traveling through!

Distinctions, Assumptions, and Categories

In  previous posts there has been some conflation of distinction, assumption, and categorization. To clarify the matter in our minds, Reba and I dialogued about it a while. And what we came to is that

• Distinctions are primal. They have to do with boundaries / edges. They put into foreground that which was part of the background. And part of that process involves perceptions of a boundary between what is put in the foreground and the background. And as Spencer Brown notes in Laws of Form that the reason for making a distinction is for a value.
• Assumptions seem to be about what is distinguished - its attributes, capabilities, implications, ...
• Categorization happens when you have an ecology (group) of distinctions. It is a way of organizing those distinctions into some structure.

Thought I'd put  these peregrinations down before they got lost in the mists of time.

Distinctions and Recursion

Laws of Form talks about the notion of distinctions.

It seems to me it is an issue of recursion. Whatever distinction you make is an assumption about the context we are in. There is a tendency to start with too much beginning framework. We are already far removed from the "first" distinction. As carbon based life forms with  the evolutionary architecture we have, the universe has already made a number of distinctions for us that are often invisible to us. We perceive with senses that provide a particular kind of window into "reality". It is very difficult for us to see that window frame through which  we are looking. And even more, we don't perceive what is not perceptible  through that  window frame of ours.

So given that we are far removed from the first distinction, then we have a problem of recursion. How do we get to that first distinction? I am not sure we can get to that first distinction. It is more like an asymptotic approach. What ever distinctions ( assumptions ) we make, we can go meta to those distinctions and try to uncover what assumptions are built  into those distinctions. And then do that again and again. In some sense, is that not part of our evolutionary journey ? To keep realizing that  whatever distinctions we have made are not absolute and we keep discovering deeper (?) levels of distinctions.  I expect we'll have a great awakening to our own distinctions when we first come across an extra-terrestrial civilization.

Computer languages  like XML are very early attempts to start the recursive process by allowing meta data to guide the interpretation. And in addition to be able to change  the meta data to see the  same source from a different perspective. I expect that we'll make much better multilayered languages. There are general patterns that  XML provides, however the syntax seems to be rather cumbersome.  And part of that it seems to me derives from our limited capacity to handle complexity.