[FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

[Nick Thompson]

So, Glen, 

What you are calling "levels" I am calling "cross sections"?  

And it is the partial arbitrariness of what one sees in a cross section that makes it less valuable than a layer. 

Have I got that, so far? 

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 3:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language


Sorry.  I didn't mean anything nefarious with the "repeat a lie often enough" thing.

I introduced an onion as an example of a thing, in the real world, that you can look at in terms of levels or layers.  And looking at it in terms of layers produces something different (and presumably more "natural") than looking at it in terms of levels.



On 06/12/2017 12:17 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> 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.  

--
☣ glen

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