[FRIAM] Self-awareness and blind spots Was: Self-awareness

[Steve Smith]

Phil - Spot on Phil.  I'm CC:ing a friend (Aku) with whom I often discuss this point (thus I'm leaving the cruft at the bottom). Science's biggest failing (perhaps) is it's (natural) blind spots. When I came to LANL in 1981, the Center for Non-Linear Studies was pretty new and for the most part there was little, if any, study of non-linear systems going on in the world.  This was mainly because of a lack of tools to work with nonlinear systems.   Once (most) scientists got over their fear of computation, many more complex systems could be studied than before.   Like the man looking for his lost keys under the streetlamp even though he dropped them a block away "because the light is better here". "... because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." - Rummy Rummy is the new Rumi? The emerging work in Science studying itself (primarily through studying Citation Networks) offers some hope that we can begin to fill in some of the blind spots.  Our own Marko Rodriguez & friends, for example: http://www2007.org/poster860.php That is not to say (as you seem to here) that we haven't just filled out a huge amount of unexplored territory only to create a similarly huge number of unconsidered regions within that territory. I'm not completely up on your view on this topic but there also seems to be a theme regarding "far from equilibrium systems"?  Is that what you mean by "uncontrolled systems"? carry on!  - Steve Steve, Well, might you also say science is self-organized to be 'robustly' avoiding the subject of uncontrolled systems too?? If something doesn't come to your attention because you're only looking for something else, it could seem to not exist. How do you explain the very large variety of complex systems that take care of themselves somehow, sharing environments with very low specific variety corresponding to their evident highly complex internal designs and internally coordinated behaviors? Phil -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:48 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness Well said Russ. Science as a self-organizing system which is relatively robust and self-healing. Russ Abbott wrote: Richard Feynman said that "Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is." To the extent that it achieves that goal, science works even without individual self-awareness. That's really quite an accomplishment, to have created a way of being in the world that succeeds reasonably well without having to depend on individual subjective honesty. For the most part, if we aren't honest with ourselves and with each other, we all suffer negative consequences. Now that I've written that, it seems to me that "honesty with oneself" is not a bad definition of "self-awareness." Another way of putting it is that self-awareness is what keeps us from fooling ourselves about our subjective experience. Contrast this with Feynman's definition. Science works reasonably well even without individual self-awareness in that it relies on community self-verification. In some ways science is the self-awareness of a community of people about what can be known about the world. Obviously science is not about everything -- in particular inter-personal values. But within its domain I think it does a pretty good job of keeping everyone involved reasonably honest -- and especially keeping the community as a whole reasonably honest. There are failures and detours. But they are usually corrected. I hadn't intended my original post to be about science. It was about the importance of self-awareness when dealing with political and governance issues. But now that we are talking about science it's an interesting comparison. Perhaps that's why science has been so successful. It's a methodology that isn't ultimately dependent on individual human honesty. Can we say that about anything else? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org