Thanks Mike for your comments. First let's begin with what is a system and what is a projection of human understanding on the environment. Projection "systems" are ways that we organize environmental input for the purpose of education and general agreements about what constitutes reality. It's the agreement (the projection) that is the system and not the environment. That agreement changes over time according to our needs.
Those "systems" are between our ears and in our social interactions through seven social domains. 1.) Spirituality & Religion, 2.) Aesthetics & Arts, 3.) Commerce & the Market, 4.) Learning and Education, 5.) Government and Laws, 6.) Science and Libraries [knowledge organization] and 7.) Medicine and Public Health [holistic balance of all of the domains]. These social domains are set in place by the development of the child both peri-natally and in the first few years after birth. It was William Blake who observed that everything we perceived and did was first found in body and then projected on society. The Israeli physicist and somaticist Moshe Feldenkrais wrote about this before he died as did the Gestalt psychologists. Traditional Native thought calls it the seven stone steps. 1. Blood, 2. Love, 3. Purification, 4. Fertility, 5. Blossoming, 6. Charity and 7. Healing. The psychological writings from William James, to Freud and the standard child psychology texts speak of 1.) the God connection to the Mother in the beginning, 2.) the opening of the sensorium and patterns, 3.) the beginning negotiation with the word "no", 4.) the organization of parental learning to educate the negotiation, 5.) the acceptance and dance with outside authority to control the being overwhelmed by learning, 6) the beginnings of generosity through the organization and control of knowledge (walking and talking, etc.) and 7.) the overall health of self control and intellectual understanding as well as organized system's design with others [kinesthetic and emotional health]. Traditional native knowledge, as I was taught, breaks the seven into four choices much in the same way the sensorium goes from seven to four senses. 1. Rhinic and Taste are called Chemical. 2. Kinesthetic, Haptic and Kinetic are called Feelings and sometimes "emotion" together with 3. Aural and 4. Visual. Note the term for lovers, "they have chemistry together" when in fact they have pheromones and their sexuality is much involved with the sense of taste. Traditional knowledge calls the first design the "Four Choices" and they are you choose your God, your relationships, your Work and your Play. My point here is that the "systems" nature are a projection of the organizations of patterns based in perception and organized through negotiation with others to constitute reality. We don't perceive the same worlds or have the same histories but we do negotiate reality and meanings in order to survive together. All systems are of human origin. Systems are the integrated performance of mental maps [deliberate design whether conscious or unconscious]. John Warfield put it this way. "A variety of components appearing in a variety of forms share an attribute: susceptibility to being linked in an overall architectural system. As linkages appear, the architectural system grows rapidly in scale." [Warfield, "A Science of Generic Design, Managing Complexity through System's Design."] Martin Buber located systems design first in the creation of Art: "This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through that person. Not a figment of that person's soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power. What is required is a deed that a person does with their whole being.." [Martin Buber "I/Thou"] System designs are human not nature. They can be evolutionary or conscious but the learning process of the child assumes a growth from unconscious imitation and evolution to conscious analysis, design and practice. The Invisible Hand of the marketplace is not a system but a spook. A ghost in the machine of people unwilling to take responsibility for their unconscious. Here's what one of my teachers said about that: "the purpose of awareness is to separate the ghosts of our unconscious from the perceptions that we feel in the present. That is why we study verbal 'therapy' to bring the scripts that we have from the past into our consciousness so that we can be knowledgeable about the wisdom of our intuition. That is also the reason that we unlock the memories held within the body and our rituals that we hold from our culture. The study of history is the study of the micro-scripts, rituals and movements that we have inherited from our teachers. Instinct often, when examined, turns out to be knowledge taught prior to analysis in the imitative phase of learning whose source is forgotten and ascribed to God or one's past lives." [Elaine Summer, dancer, choreographer, film maker and founder of the somatic discipline called "Kinetic Awareness."] REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 3:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: 2NYTimes.com: Where the Jobs Aren't Ray wrote: > The question of the design of large systems is at the root of it. > I've brought that up several times here to a deafening silence from > everyone. You don't believe it, or you don't understand? Well, Ray, the "design of large systems" is pretty general. What direction do you thing we should take with it? Or prime model for large, complex systems that work -- that work nearly magically -- is biology and the biosphere. But the reticular dynamic system of living things was designed by an evolutionary process red in tooth and claw; "ruthless" if you like to anthropomorphize it; utterly stochastic if you don't. We have way to duplicate the evolutionary process and if we did, it would defy and defeat our purposes; social Darwinism deserves its bad name. The evolutionary process doesn't care about individual organisms, species or biomes. What happens happens and what survives is what is. If we're designing large complex systems for society, we accept (or most of us claim to do so) additional restraints imposed by our notions or human worth, human equality, civility and even kindness. It is, however, noteworthy that human worth, kindness and similar humanistic considerations don't show up in most economic theory and often not in more general policy analyses, which latter often descend, through a sort of economic reductionism, to what mathematicians might call "degenerate" cases, cases in which the single variable of monetary value is the only determining factor. So we have a problem with the practice of designing such systems from the start: capitalism, economics and finance trump moral or humanistic considerations. So what would you like us to go from here? Wisdom, whether that of Native Indian shamans [1], that of Solomon or of other famously wise leaders, remains nonpareil but, first, apparently somewhat in short supply and, as well, inadequate to deal with large complex systems. The best, brightest and, yes, wisest among us can no longer take care of us. That's because wisdom is the expression of intuition -- thinking that occurs below the objective, articulate level of awareness -- that emerges from objective knowledge and reflection. Only in large, complex systems, no single brain can encompass enough of the system for the traditional mechanisms of wisdom to work. Okay, where intuition and wisdom fail, we -- since the enlightenment -- are inclined to turn to theory, hypotheses about the nature of large complex systems in general. We have a number of such theoretical avenues: modeling [2], catastrophe theory [3], complexity theory, self-organizing systems [4], chaos theory [5], adaptive systems [6] among others. All of these have proven to be useful. Why, then, haven't they fixed us up, addressed your concern? Because they've proved useful in particle physics, in fluid dynamics and aeronautics, robotics, weather prediction, at the cost of enormous effort on the part of scientists able to master the math, program the computers, imagine the algorithms and intuit directions for experiment. These systems are composed of atoms, molecules, clouds, data bits -- indiividual elements any one or any million of which are, in themselves, insignificant, dispensible. But economic and social systems -- large, complex systems the elements of which are people, families, voluntary congeries and collocations of people, the abstract entities people engender (sovereign states, money, religions) -- exceed, not just our computing power but, so far at least, our intellectual power to model in a way that takes into account the human, civic, social and experiential aspects of the world. Indeed, I have some fear that the emergence of theoretical success with large, complex systems will lead, sooner or later, to subverting all of those aspects that we would like to preserve. Advertising, propaganda, "public relations" and related trades have, in fact, already exploited the psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science and other achievements of the last 100 years to sell us crap, make us believe foolishness, ignore what's on the ends of our forks, conform to pernicious social paradigms and more. Jeez, Ray, Skinner was a bumbling jerk, Bernays was an anachronistic outlier and Hitler got all distracted and off-message because of his personal demons. And those guys didn't have any good theoretical base for large, complex systems. What are the Next Guys with good theory, good software, correct systems concepts and all that -- what are *they* going to do for us? > The question of the design of large systems is at the root of it. > I've brought that up several times here to a deafening silence from > everyone. So here you go: non-silence. > You don't believe it, or you don't understand? I believe it. What don't we understand? I barely understand the references cited infra. Where do you suggest we go from here? - Mike [1] Pardon me if that's the wrong, or even a politically incorrect, term. Priest? You know what I mean. [2] E.g. "Discrete Event System Specification", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEVS [3] E.g. see ch. 17 of Catastrophe Theory and Its Applications, Tim Poston & Ian Stewart, 1978, Dover Publications. [4] E.g., see The Origins of Order, Stuart Kauffman, 1993, Oxford U. Press. [5] E.g. see Chaotic Dynamics: an introduction, G.L. Baker & J.P. Gollub, 1990, Cambridge U. Press [6] E.g. see Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity , John Holland, 1995, Addison-Wesley -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
