Steve wrote (Feb 8) :
"I think that many people take the idea of "levels"
too far. Rather than use the levels to refer to types
of patterns of value arranged in an evolutionary
hierarchy, they want to talk about a given person as
"on the social level" or "on the intellectual level"
which to me is to misunderstand what the levels are."
I must confess that, from the start, I've found
extremely puzzling the question of "levels" referring
to "types of patterns of values" instead of talking
about given persons (or objects) incorporated into
levels. Not a big deal to discern patterns out of
collections of beings and/or objects, but how does
one manage in actual practice to discern patterns of
values?.
Lately I'm beginning to see a glimmer of light at the
end of the tunnel; this mainly through something
called General Systems Theory. I am expounding
tentatively on that glimmer in the following lines in
the hope that, with the help of welcomed criticism,
my ideas about patterns in the context of MOQ would be
further clarified.
=======
Each day of our lives we go through quite a
number of experiences. On some of these 'we reflect';
reflect with the intention of making sense of them.
Making sense of our experiences means making sense of
(ourselves as embedded in) the external world. We do
this through a number of intellectual processes,
notorious amongst them by self-asking questions
concerning the 'why' the 'what' and the 'how'.
Leaving aside for the time being the 'why'(which
is seldom self-asked), when confronted with some-thing
we may ask ourselves either, 'how' does it do what it
does or 'what' does it do. These give rise to entirely
different types of answers (and different ontologies).
A 'how' question is usually answered by invoking 'a
mechanism', the 'what' question, by invoking 'a
function'.
Allow me a digression into another of my
pedestrian examples. Telephones are part our daily
experiences; reflecting about telephones we may
self-ask 'how' do they work (which is their
mechanism?) or 'what' do they do (what is their
function?). A telephone is a machine; if we understand
its mechanisms we understand the 'how'. But a
telephone is also a gadget to communicate between
ourselves at a distance; this is its function. We can
understand a function without understanding the
mechanisms involved; we don't need to know 'how' it
works in order to talk through them; we can consider
our gadget in terms of what in Systems Theory is
called a "black box".
Thinking of things pertaining to our world not in
terms of mechanisms (the mechanicist world view)but in
terms of functions and black boxes leads us to an
altogether different way of categorizing the many
things of our world. There are a number of ways of
communicating at a distance: e-mails, video clips,
facsimiles, the now obsolete telegraph, the nearly
obsolete hand written letter, etc. etc. Their
mechanisms are entirely different but they perform the
same function. Here enters Systems Theory and puts
them all in the same bag (category) by discerning a
common pattern in the way they function.
A clever fellow called Claude Shannon, who happened
to be working for Bell Telephone Co., about 50 years
ago, did just that and even more. He came out with a
mathematical model which discerned from a
Communication System just a handful of
'Components'(message, transmitter, signal/noise,
channel, receiver). This theoretical model had in its
time a tremendous impact in fields like biology,
semantics, psychology, linguistics. This because,by
shifting attention from the mechanism to the function
and treating components as black boxes, the
transmitter could be a telephone or a sub-culture in a
society or a patient in psychoanalysis or an allergen
in a body. In the language of Systems Theory, Shannon
could be credited for designing a very versatile model
of communication; in the language of MOQ he could be
credited by discerning a pattern: Communication.
Communication was just an example I used to point
out a procedure based on what given systems 'do'. The
same procedure could be followed for say Collection,
the gathering of something together; the gatherers
could be bees, garbage workers, harvesting machines,
etc., etc., Administration, Neural Networking, Tumor
Growth, Cooperativism, Galaxies Â… you name it. Each of
them can be considered as a System, that is a group of
related components that interact to perform a task. A
System is not the pattern, neither the task is the
pattern; I'd say that what conforms the pattern t is
rather the way components interact in a system.
I haven't finished my expounding yet but, so far,
I see no inherent contradiction or incompatibility
between approaching patterns from General Systems
Theory and the conceptualization of patterns in MOQ as
outlined by Steve yesterday:
"I have no problem with the definition of the
intellectual level as
patterns of value recognized as manipulations of
abstract patterns of experience.
These abstract patterns of experience may be referred
to as mental objects and they are manipulated by a
subjectÂ…"
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