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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