Asymmetry as an Explanatory Structure

 We see many social phenomena that we have names for - mentorship, bias, parenting, corruption, leadership, racism, teaching, oppression, benevolence, bullying, nurturing, ... One can think of asymmetry as a basic underlying structure that allows / facilitates these social behaviors / phenomena. Then, we can model asymmetry and realize that each of these phenomena, rather being binary (present or not), is on a spectrum with more or less asymmetry. And how much does asymmetry contribute to the spectrum of behaviors? Experience with other models indicates that what looks like a very simple underlying structure can generate complex behaviors.

I recently finished a Digital Humanities online course through the Santa Fe Institute. One of the patterns that was mentioned was that parsing the digital corpora for insights led to rather binary analyses of the presence or absence of some attribute, e.g., bias.

My sense is that the field of digital humanities could benefit greatly by starting with a structural hypothesis and then searching the corpora to validate / invalidate that hypothesis. And my sense is that could lead to a much more nuanced, balanced, and causal understanding of the phenomena in question.

Take for example the phenomena of bullying. An hypothesis one could use was that there is an asymmetry between the two (or more) parties involved. This asymmetry could be physical size, social status, follower group size, psycho-social energy, ....  One can then model this asymmetry and see that there is a spectrum to the level of bullying. It is not just a binary yes / no situation. This could then lead to better remediation strategies on a case by case basis.

Note that is approach is based on a systems thinking model that notes the following structure of systems, and of social systems in particular. Events can be part of a pattern which is generated from a systemic structure which in terms of human systems is based on mental models which themselves are generated from a vision / perspective of who / what / where / how / when we are and are part of.

Below the meta crisis

 I have been listening to various conversations about the meta crises we are in. An interesting metaphor I heard from Jordan Hall was that we are on a train on tracks that are leading us straight for a waterfall / cliff. The tracks / train being our biologies, our cultures, and our environment. Other conversations have talked about the meta crises issue from an energy perspective, multi polar traps, biological / evolutionary drivers. What I have not yet heard about is a perspective from a basic time / space perspective.

• Time - each one of us has a certain tempo to our being. As a species, we operate in a certain range of frequencies as far as information processing, sense making, .... go. Our neo paleolithic time frequencies have not kept up with the pace of development of our technologies. In particular, our modern industrial and digital environment.
• Space - we are being of a certain size. We operate, sense reality at that scale. We are mostly sensorily unaware of the micro, meso scopic structures that make our reality possible. Similarly, we are most unaware of the large scale patterns that guide our existence - solar weather, galactic orbit, climate patterns, ...

Some simple thoughts on the weighty matter.

Meta-crisis and Metaphor

 The metaphor / model one uses determines in some measure how one understands and how one tries to resolve an issue. Let us take our situation, the anthropocene. One can look at it as the "reality" trying to form a complex, adaptive structure. Our societies and civilizations are all attempts of this endeavor. So, far they have come and gone. An organism ( super organism ) requires some basic functions such as decision making. Part of this task is relegated to what we call the "neurology" of an organism. When an organism is forming, certain cells migrate / morph into becoming part of the neurology - the modular part of the neurology that makes the "higher" level decision for the organism. Our tribes, societies, civilization have selected certain types of cells (individuals, groups) to be part of the neurology that makes decision for the organism. At this point in our develop, that selection process is inappropriate to the context. The context requires a more caring, systemic, holistic, ... perspective / cells / individuals / groups for good / wise decision making. We don't yet have a way to change the selection / formation process for our super organism to select cells / individuals / groups better suited for our current situation.

Layers, Structure, and Semantics

 Layers of narrative structure:

• Story
• Story as a design object of author
• Genre of stories as possible designs
• Cultures in which such stories aris
• Biologies in which such cultures arise
• Chemistries in which such biologies arise
• Physics in which such chemistries arise

If you accept any layer of the structure as the final layer, the bottom turtle, then that becomes your dogma.

Narratives as evokers:

• what the story evokes in the reader
• what the author intended the story to evoke
• what the culture evoked in the author that is reflected in the story
• what the biology made salient in the culture to create stories to amplify that salience
• what the chemistry allowed the biology to experience
• what the physics allowed the chemistry to form

Layers of semantics:

• story as stopping point (sp) - dogma
• possible story lines as sp - dogma
• possible stories as sp - dogma
• possible cultures as sp - dogma
• possible biologies as sp - dogma
• possible chemistries as sp - dogma
• possible physics as sp - dogma

How does one get beyond these layers, when there is no final turtle in turtles all the way down:

Bathe in infinity -> dogma

Dimensional thinking

I have written a few posts about the notion of spectral thinking, 1, 2, 3. It occurred to me yesterday that that notion may be a bit simplistic. Take, for example, the problem of good and evil / bad. What is good in the short term, may be bad in the long term. What is good for a few may be bad for a larger system. So, in a spectrum there is a line covering the spectrum. However, in the examples above, time, space can also be dimensions that affect the understanding of what is good/bad/evil.

Narrative as psychotechnology

 One can think of a story as a way to manage neurological state. A story can / does change one's state. And it is used as such in everyday life as well as in our mythologies. Part of the issue is how to set up the initial conditions of the receiver so that the story does have a state shift dynamic.

Non-linguistic thinking

 Noticed a pattern in the social sciences. The toolset of the humanities is language and the vocabulary that is available in language. However, reality is far more complex than any language can capture. So, there may be phenomena that are there but they are "invisible" because our languages do not have a word for them. A possible example are Lagrange points. We discovered this phenomenon through mathematics and physics. We have no direct experience of these points. So, if we think of a complex mathematics describing social phenomena, there may be all sorts of phenomena that these maths "show" that we may have no language vocabulary for. However, just as we have not name these points, new names will arise for these patterns.

So, can we begin to be more intentional in thinking beyond a language framework. Perhaps thinking in terms of forces at play, grouping of things, and emergence of features from those forces and groupings. And how scaling modifies the forces and characteristics of a system?