[FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

[Nick Thompson]

Steve, 

 

What do you want to call “levels of inclusion”?  What sorts of levels are trophic levels?  

 

What is preventing us from agreeing that complexity is just the inclusion of one system within another?

 

I know it takes a way the magic to be so straightforward, but other than you love of mystery, what is wrong with that definition? 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2017 3:46 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

 

At the risk of another discursion:

I think I just realized what I've been (almost) seeing of value in all this back and forth:

1.	I (and Nick) heard Glen's invocation of the Onion as an attempt to explicate a useful difference between levels and layers in the understanding of Complexity Babble (Talk/Science/Math/???).  I think he meant only to try to distinguish the two from one another and explicate their differences irrespective of the near dead horse we were working over at the time.  I think this might be the totality of the misunderstanding.
2.	I'm always looking for form/function dualities.  In the onion, the form (layers) follows a certain functional/behavioural path (cyclical growth).   I don't even know how to find "levels" in the a *hierarchical* sense or otherwise in an onion... maybe if we look at the cross section (as Glen suggested) and see *strata* (from the source (domain) of geological deposition and erosive or shearing exposure?) and then consider drilling a mine shaft into said strata which is more suggestive of the term "levels"?   

Mumble,

 - Steve

 

On 6/12/17 1:28 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

 
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.  

 

 

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