[FRIAM] FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[glen ☣]

OK.  Yes, thanks, that helps.  But I do think you disagree with me, only I may not have made myself clear enough for you to realize we disagree.  I'll interleave in the hopes of making my objections in context.

On 02/24/2017 01:44 PM, Robert Wall wrote:
> The last quote, to me, says that a group acting toward a common goal in, say the way an individual in that group would, does *not *imply that the "symbolic references" used to act rationaly in the world are all in align or even perhaps in synchopation under an fMRI. YES! I can agree with this. And I don't think that I disagreed.

But that's not what I'm saying.  Perhaps you're making what I'm saying much stronger.  Or perhaps what you're saying is entirely different.  I can't tell because you're leaping too far.  I'm only saying that if the stuff that causes our behavior is aligned, we need something _other_ than our behavior to demonstrate that alignment.  I'm trying to focus on the difference between thought and action.  You seem to be conflating that with the difference between individuals and groups.

The thought vs. action dichotomy is critical to my rhetoric about individuals vs. groups.  But it's more fundamental and must be made before (independently) of any rhetoric about individual vs. group.

> And I do even agree with you that there are examples of goups that do act as if with "one mind" and even benevolently.

Again, I don't think I said that.  I don't think even an individual's thoughts matter.  (This is why Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" is useless and annoying to me.)  It's pure nonsense to talk of mind at all.  So, it's nonsense to say that societies act as if with one mind.  But that does not mean they can't be "in the zone", because being in the zone has nothing to do with one's mind.

> Market-oriented co-ops are such a phenomenon, which I discussed in another thread, especially with Marcus who seemed to see these as an bane to society as unmanaged enterprises, which they are not. Perspective is sharpened by exposure.  My company transitionsed to an ESOP, but the intended economic benefit was eventually corrupted by the management team that used this preferred organizational form to basically enrich themselves at the expense of what the ERISA originally intended--cooperative, community-oriented corprorate behavior.  Stakeholders in the welfare of the community. At the grassroots, it was enything but a co-operative.  It was a vehicle to enrich the corporate management. But where it works, it is beautiful.

If you see these co-ops as technological innovations, then I'd argue that their use and ABUSE can both be examples of society being "in the zone".  The same is true of the cell phone and space travel.  It's totally irrelevant whether the co-ops relate to the beliefs, desires, and intentions of the humans involved (if such things exist).  What would matter is the society's beliefs, desires, and intentions (if such exists).  The only stakeholder is society.  The individuals are as expendable as sand, or fossil fuel, or bacteria.

> But I do kind of see where a "meeting of the minds" between us may have been derailed here about what we each mean concerning /being in the zone/" at a level of society.  And I fault myself for this in joining the underlying threaded thoughts late, perhaps, and not being more clear in the distinctions. It has to do with the phrase "as a whole."  I will use market-oriented co-ops again as a useful example to make my point a bit more clear. Cooperatives cannot seem to take root here in this country [e.g., public banks] because of another blocking cultural, Hayekian meme: "a free market under capitalism will save us all." This meme has been forcefully in play for the last thirty-five years with it's high priest being Milton Friedman and the Chicgo School of Economics.  What have been the results?

No worries about joining late or miscomm. or anything.  That's why we're here.  But I disagree about _why_ co-ops can't take root.  A) They have taken root ... at least up here in the PacNW.  But B) any inability to take root has nothing to do with shared ideologies like that from Hayek or whoever.  They fail to take root because of _behavior_, not thought/ideas.

> Which of these memes could be equivalent to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's [and I don't mean to push this guy forward, but only this idea] Optimal Experience at the level of society as a whole: (1) profit-driven coorporatism or (2) community-oriented cooperatism?  First off, I am exclusively talking about the behavioral end that leans toward what is good for society--the whole tribe, such that the tribe benefits in an egalitarian sense. Arguably, as a tribe we are not moving in any such direction. But there are pockets of co-operative behavior like we saw at Standing Rock.  But, what happened?  The pipe got laid anyway and the planet weeps. Your take on "effective altruism" is another example, I think, of how we as a society would rather game the moral landscape to give the illusion of being "for the people." I really do not mean to be so pessimistic and my analysis will hopefully bear this out.

Again in this paragraph, you seem to conflate individuals with groups.  When you say "tribe benefits in an egalitarian sense", I get confused.  Egalitarian at the tribe layer requires similarities between tribes.  And if there are multiple tribes, then society consists of a group of tribes.  I would not want to conflate what's good for a tribe with what's good for the population of tribes.

> What this comes down to is this. To be /in the zone/ at the level of a society as a whole in a similar way as could happen at the level of an individual--such that we would say there is a Flow characterized as an Optimal Experience, we would NOT expect there to be an alignment of symbolic references.  Precisely the opposite, if we are to regard the thoughts of the many philosophers and linguists on this topic to be wise.  What we would expect instead is the _supersession_ of our language-based symbolic references with something akin to Intuition or Empathy ... something beyond words such that wisdom emeges on the scale of a society [and why I use capitalization of those terms]. So far, anyway, I do not see this as being not only possible, but not evident. 

OK.  Again, Csikszentmihalyi's conception is useless to me because we cannot talk about an Optimal Experience in purely action/behavior terms.  And since (P=>Q) is untrustworthy, we can't talk objectively about qualia at all.  That means we can't do it at the individual or collective layers.  Csikszentmihalyi's "zone" is a detrimental fiction.

But we can talk about the actions of a collective or individual, and various measures of those actions (e.g. speed of some repetitive action like applying rivets, or how fast someone talks, or whatever).  As a society, we can talk about technology (not science so much because that implies thoughts/ideas more so than tech).  We can measure things like legal systems and city sizes, etc.

> We have not as a whole or on many individual levels been able to supercede the animal.

Oh, I couldn't disagree more.  We are not only building our environment more (and more intensely and more rapidly) than all the other animals combined, but we regularly demonstrate our ability/facility to quickly return to our core animal states ... and back to our higher/later states at will.  So, we're not merely a new animal that is bound by, restricted to its built environment (cities, airplanes, etc.)  We can walk the entire spectrum, something no other animal can do.

Our actions (not our thoughts) clearly demonstrate how we are distinct from the other animals.

> *Intent *distinguishes the phenomena of /being in the zone/.   *Scale *distinguishes the level of its achievement. To be sure, symbolic references have little to nothing to do with the kind of/being in the zone/ to which I was referring. It's kind of like what Timothy Gallwey was trying to convey in his book /The Inner Game of Tennis/.  Thinking is gone. 

And a final repeat of my disagreement:  If intent is required for your "being in the zone", then we're not talking about the same thing at all.  For me, intent doesn't even exist.  It's only what happens that can be measured and talked about.  So, whether some one or group is in the zone must be measurable by different properties of their actions, one of which might be scale.

Whew!  OK.  Back to work.

-- 
☣ glen