[FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

[Nick Thompson]

Look, Glen.  I may be old.  I may be stupid.  I may be distracted.  I am certainly out of my depth.  This discussion, which fascinates me, is happening at a very inopportune  time for me, so I am admittedly not able to invest as much attention on it as it deserves and I would like.  And the discussion is going very fast, with answers falling all over other answers.   But I am NOT ill-willed or guileful.   And I am certainly not Goebbels. Good LORD!   Try, whatever evidence to the contrary I may seem to present, to assume that I am basically an honest person, and that we share an interest in getting somewhere.  AND -- the hard part -- I recognize that if we ARE to get anywhere, everybody's thinking -- including my own -- is going to have to change. 

 

OK.  So, with all that in mind.  Say again, would you please, what the onion was doing in the discussion.  Just to recap from my point of view, I think the slice of an onion is a cross section.  The notion of a cross-section plays an important role in Holt's Concept of Consciousness, which describes anybody's consciousness as a cross section cut through the world by that person's behavior.  My consciousness is just those features of the world to which I respond.  When we slice an onion the structure revealed says something about BOTH the onion and about us, the slicer.  The cross section differs not only from onion to onion but because of how it was sliced. 

 

Now NONE of this has anything to do with what I mean by "levels" , which invokes an organizational metaphor.  I mean, hierarchical levels.  I suspect it will be almost impossible to talk about complexity without a language that includes hierarchical levels.  Remember, we got into this because I offered a definition of a complex system as a system made up of other systems.  So, on my account, an onion IS a complex system because it is a system of plants, each wrapped around another.  

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2017 1:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

 

 

Hm.  I guess I'll say it at least one more time.  I did NOT offer an onion as a model of complexity.  You're using Goebbles on me, aren't you?  Here:

 

I did NOT offer an onion as a model of complexity.

I did NOT offer an onion as a model of complexity.

I did NOT offer an onion as a model of complexity.

I did NOT offer an onion as a model of complexity.

 

8^)

 

On 06/12/2017 10:48 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> But Glen, if the onion was not a metaphor, then what was it?  How did it become relevant?  A mongoose and a rutabaga are also things that can be "sliced up, analysed..." etc, but you did not mention those.  You did not offer a rutabaga model of complexity; you offered an onion one.  Is there some OTHER  "process of mind" other than metaphor-making that gets you from complexity to onions?

 

 

--

☣ glen

 

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