A Process Model with a View : Section III (On View)

Posted on January 31, 2010 by

Bonnitta Roy, A Process Model with a View. Presentation for First Integral Theory Conference 2008 at JKF University where it received an honorable mention for academic achievement in integral theory.

In this final section we turn to the third meaning of perspective and the ontological notion of view as distinct from the epistemological notion of perspective.  This is a crucial distinction since view connotes the  a-perspectival realm of being and the currently emerging  Integral – a-perspectival epoch that Gebser describes in his seminal work, The Ever-Present Origin. According to Gebser,  a-perspectival being possesses the peculiar character of the achronon, which is “time-freedom” or “achronicity.” The process model illustrates the achronic nature of the ontological realm by drawing a third axis perpendicular to the axes that prescribe the epistemological plane, whose vertices are labeled “anterior” (the point of the arrow pointing through the back of the page) and “posterior” (the point of the arrow coming directly out of the page) as in the following

The illustration shows the phenomenological arrow of time associated with the epistemological field (and the occasioning of the cognitive). This epistemological arrow of time is responsible for the sense of “now” in a localized “here-and-now”. The achronistic character of the ontological now is captured in some of Ken Wilber’s most poetic writing, as in the following examples:

It is always already undone, you see, and always already over. In the simple feeling of Being, worlds are born and die—they live and dance and sing a while and melt back into oblivion, and nothing ever really happens here in the world of One Taste.  … And I-I will be there, as I-I always have been, to Witness the rise and miraculous fall of my infinite easy Worlds, happening now and forever, now and forever, now and always forever, it seems (2000b, p. 623).

… in that unitary seamless sizzling Now, which is this very moment before you do anything at all, it is, quite simply, over. Which means, it has, quite simply, begun (2006, p. 346).

The ontological now is also exquisitely captured in these lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.    (Quartet 1, Burnt Norton)

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

(Quartet 4, Little Gilding)

 

The feelings expressed in these passages can be found in literature from all over the world. They point to a poignantly spiritual experience that I call an “ontological encounter”, or alternately, the “ontological dimensioning of being.” This “ontological dimensioning of being” is so constitutive of human experience, that it often goes unrecognized. For example, at one time in our lives we do not have the cognition of object constancy. But once we develop to the level of concrete operations, we experience objects as if they had always and already existed. This is a curious and important aspect of human experience – the ability to experience or come to know about something in time and the simultaneous experience of this something having existed for all of time and perhaps for all of time to come. In the ontological dimension, time present, time past, time future are all somehow entangled in a singular ontological encounter.

The process model illustrates this characteristic of the ontological with the vertices “anterior” and “posterior”. The posterior aspect is that which is experienced in time and the anterior aspect is that which is experience as eternally present. It is important to note that while we tend to concretize the ontological dimensioning of reality – a process, a verb, not a noun or thing—by assigning to its anterior aspect the cognitive categories of pre-given existence, this is rather superfluous epistemological content that is added onto the ontological experience, not content that arises within the ontological dimensioning of reality.

The second defining, a-perspectival characteristic of the ontological dimensioning of reality, is it’s a-spatial nature. This is experienced as an opening into, or an opening up of space. Heidegger writes of this as the opening of Being, of alethia, or a new kind of non-epistemological truth, that is “that opening which first grants the possibility of truth”. Similarly Gebser writes of an a-waring “where the world is space-free and time-free” and “the whole becomes transparent” and “the diaphanous becomes truth.”

At its most basic form, the ontological dimension is a capacity for opening, and therefore view can be thought of, fundamentally, as degrees of freedom. View therefore, does not refer to the fullness of perspectival cognosis, but to the opening up or into, the freedom and liberation of gnosis. Alternately, where all the fullness evolving in the epistemological field correspond to the Buddhist notion of vijnana, the experience of gnostic revelation that entails view corresponds to the Buddhist notion of prajna. Finally, we can interpret view and the degrees of freedom in relation to the Dzogchen narrative of the principle of EVAM, where E represents the dynamics of  the opening of “space” to entice and accommodate the creative arisings of VAM, and alternately, VAM represents the dynamics of creating and “filling up” space, and enticing E to further self-liberate as space.

This then, is the real meaning of the Dzogchen admonition to “be mindful of one’s view”, that is to be mindful of the capacity of open-ness and degrees of freedom required to accommodate perceptions and perspectives, actual and cognitive occasions alike,  in a fully open and truly self-liberated view.

 

By giving us a framework to language the difference between perspectives and view, the process model hopes to facilitate further exploration and inquiry into the various types of ontological encounters reported by great spiritual visionaries and tantric yogis; as well as create a framework to design transformative practices through a Process Model with a View that has the capacity to render transparent the categories of mind and nature and engage the whole as

‘being-in-Being’-in becoming.

 

i Note: this presensing correlates with the presencing at the bottom of Otto Scharmer’s U-Process, which requires one to unravel the structures of the self, and access a deeper originary source.

ii Note: this is the level that Gendlin asks individuals to access during his “Focussing” method of inquiry. However, his description of the location of this level is incorrect—the affect and image levels are prior to the body and therefore are not bodily felt feeling. Merleu-Ponty and his followers make the same mistake in their attempt to anchor language phenomenologically as “embodied”. Language is not at its most fundamental level “embodied” but “enfolded” deep within the cognitive occasion.

iii Curiously, this is the same argument that underlies the complex scholastics between Tsonkhapa and Gorampa as described by Sonam Thakchoe in his new book The Two Truths Debate—I as the two Buddhist scholars attempt to explain the difference between conventional mind (relative truth) and Buddha-nature (absolute truth).

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A Process Model with a View Section IIb (The Actual Occasion)

Posted on January 30, 2010 by

Bonnitta Roy, A Process Model with a View.  Presentation for First Integral Theory Conference 2008 at JKF University where it received an honorable mention fo academic achievement in integral theory.

II.b. The Actual Occasion   

Structural Enfoldment and the Holomovement  

  

In this section we explore the question How real are our grand narratives?”  In Integral Spirituality, Wilber veers into Humean idealism in making the following statement: 

Put bluntly, perception, prehension, awareness, consciousness etc., are all 3rd person, monological abstractions with no reality whatsoever. [emphasis mine]. As far as we know, or can know, the manifest world is made of sentient beings with perspectives…” (255). 

This is a post-modern humanistic version of Humean idealism, since Hume’s radically solipsistic stance didn’t even allow for the independent existence of other selves. 

Yet another version of philosophical idealism, is based on the thought of Kant, who studied Hume’s philosophy, and felt he improved it. Kant imagined a really real world “out there” of actual noumenal entities—but said we had virtually no direct access to this noumenal realm. But Kant believed that the laws of numbers and logic were also part of the noumenal, and therefore had great trust in the power of the rational mind to re-present the noumenal realm in symbolic, epistemic ways. The modern version of this view from cognitive science has been called “the correspondence theory” of cognition—that the ur-reality of subjective phenomenon must somehow “map directly” onto the real-reality of an objective world; so that the goal of cognitive science becomes the attempt to describe the “rules of  translation” that might accurately re-present  the actual in the phenomenal.  

The process model does not agree with either version of idealism. The process model does not maintain that all of reality is consensual reality co-created in intersubjective space; nor that all of reality is merely a perceptual illusion of the self, in the Humean sense; nor that there is a boundary between a noumenal world “out there” that we have no access to, except through representational faculties of rational mind.  

In fact, the process model was written to point to a view where there is no sharp cut between self and world, subject and object, body and mind, perceptions and reality, “in here” and “out there”, phenomena and noumena, ur-reality and that which is really real.  

What the process model says, is that we are inextricably part of the “noumenal” or “actual” or “really real”  world through our very being-in-Being (which is, more precisely, always and already a becoming-into-being). This is an ontological view – Kant would have considered it a transcendental knowing—and therefore, even in the Kantian context, would not be expected to have a correspondence to the phenomenological reality. But when he shifted to the epistemological question of “how can we know the world”,  Kant’s notion of the inaccessibility of the noumenal became inextricably entangled with his philosophy. 

From the view of the process model, there is not a separate “world out there” that can or cannot be known; nor a knowing subject “in here” that somehow, some way, must apprehend a world. According to the process model these aspects of “world” and “subject” arise as a cognitive occasion, which is not a person, nor a subject, nor a mind, nor a self or sentient being. According to the process model, and its process philosophy, the cognitive occasion is a duration of a particular kind of enfoldment in a processural field. The dynamics in this processural field is the fundamental nature of reality.  

These dynamics create constellations of enfoldments (and their traces), which endure (and retreat) in the moment-to-moment occasioning of “world”, “subject”, “mind”, etc… but more precisely as experience of enfoldment such that, for conventional experience, self is enfolded inside mind, which is enfolded inside body which is enfolded inside an objective world with other selves. In this narrative, there is no boundary between the “really real” processural field, and the cognitive occasion that arises as certain kind of phase transitions within it. This view is neither idealist nor realist, since there is no longer a dichotomous moral to the story. 

But how real can this meta-narrative be?  

The discerning reader (or the skeptic) will still ask “ Are there actual occasions, other than cognitive occasions, i.e. enfoldments of the processural field that do not share the same conditions of structural enfoldment that prescribe the cognitive occasion?” 

These kind of questions about reality and meta-narratives, do not only plague philosophers. In Copenhagen, 1927, Neils Bohr and Warner Heinsenberg contemplated the implications of quantum mechanics, and while their discussions and opinions on quantum matters subsequently came to be known as “the Copenhagen interpretation”,  but according to the online Stamford encyclopedia, their individual opinions actually varied quite significantly. Heinsenberg concerned himself primarily with epistemic uncertainty, and the limitations of knowledge; whereas Bohr’s more Kantian view, contemplated the relationship between symbolic representations of knowledge (mathematics, linguistic narratives) and the supposed noumenal reality of the world.  

The point they shared, however, was a nagging feeling that quantum mechanics – the implications of which required one to think of “things” as both waves and particles—depended too much on the epistemological operations of scientists, rather than exclusively on the actual physical operations of the objective world, then they cared for. In other words, they suspected that the quantum explanations that physics provides were not a direct portal to the fundamental properties of the actual and the real—the objective world “out there.” 

In 1952, Bohm formally presented an ontological model of quantum theory, which in effect says “what you see is what you get” – a kind of epistemological naivité. So, for example, according to Paavo Pylkkanen,  

Bohm’s interpretation assumes that the electron is both a particle and a wave before measurement. In the measurement we see the particle aspect. The wave aspect guides the particle aspect by giving rise to a new potential, the quantum potential. (161) 

In other words, the implication from quantum theory of the fundamental wave-particle duality of reality, did not disturb Bohm in such a way that it created an epistemological gap between the investigator(subject)  and the (objective) world as it did for Heinsenberg and Bohr. For Heisenberg, this gap—epistemological indeterminanacy—was “in” the subject;  for Bohr, the gap—between  noumena and phenomena—was “in” the world.iii 

Bohm’s vision was that one could close these gaps through a deeper understanding of the system as a whole. His insight was that in order to be coherent, thinking had to come from the view of the whole, which in this case, required one to take the point of view not of the subjective investigator, nor the objective reality (the measurement) but from further back, outside the system as a whole, and think from the kind of processural order that might gives rise to both the investigating subject and the experimental outcome as one coherent “movement”.  As with the process model, this view from the whole, therefore, has to be an ontological view—one of the becoming-into-being of the parts of the system from the whole.  

In the case of the electron, Bohm might say (in lay person’s terms) that both the electron and the investigator are entangled in one coherent state at every juncture in time, yet they are entangled in one state prior to measurement– an indeterminate state– represented by  the wave-particle duality of the electron and the investigator’s epistemological unknowns, and in a subsequent state, they are entangled in a determined state, where both the electron particle-ness and the relevant information has been determined. The indeterminate state is the state of un-actualized potentials, and the determined state is the state of realized actuals. This is the basic “movement” in Bohm’s theory as well as in process philosophy in general.  

According to Bohm, “movement” itself is fundamental to reality. He envisioned a “holomovement” of two processural orders, the one an implicate order, the other an explicate order. In Bohm’s holomovement, the implicate is ordered—that is, has a certain shape or architecture, which he envisioned as being enfolded. The dynamics of his holomovement prescribe the unfoldment of this enfolded order to generate the explicate order—the realm of phenomenal experience and conventional reality. Bohm also maintained that in this process of unfoldment (from the implicate to the explicate) that the informational content of the implicate order (the rules that give it a particular shape)—that this information was in-folded into the explicate order as it unfolded from the holomovement. 

In other words, Bohm creates a scenario where the processes internal to the implicate order govern, in a sense, what unfolds in the explicate order. According to Bohm the implicate is a higher-order reality than the explicate—which led him to the necessity of positing  an entire series of  ever more subtle levels of still-higher implicate orders. 

In their most fundamental aspects, the process model and Bohm’s holomovement are surprisingly similar. Both consider movement or process as fundamental—that reality is fundamentally processural; and the dynamics of enfoldment are the significant features of the process/ movement in each theory. However, the process model completely inverts Bohm’s theory, inviting us to imagine a processural field that has no such boundaries as between implicate or explicate, and does not require an order “outside or beyond” but runs according to its own nature – its processural dynamics  that generate the actual and the real. 

 The process model hypothesizes that the dynamic features of the cognitive occasion must be consistent with the dynamics that give rise to any postulated actual occasion—of whatever nature one imagines that to be, without imputing onto the actual occasion the particular set of conditions of structural order that give rise to cognitive occasions as discussed in the previous section. An actual occasion might be considered to be a truncated path in a cognitive microgeny, or something significantly or even entirely different than the generative patterns of the cognitive. However, the process model hypothesizes that just as in the case with the cognitive occasion, any actual occasioning occurs through phase transitions in the processural field that generate dynamic enfoldments (and their traces).  If these enfoldments are construed as structural shapes of intricate dimensions in the processural field, we arrive at the uncanny coincidence between this process theory and the kinds of enfolded  intra-dimensional shapes that comprise the Calabai-Yau manifold in string theory.   

Calabai-Yau Enfoldment. 

 

With respect to an individual human being, however, in the final analysis, the only “thing” that differences the cognitive from the actual, is that the former imputes (enfolds) the sense of “realness”. I have described elsewhere how this sense of realness arises within the values stream of the microgeny of the cognitive.  (Integral Review Journal, Issue 3, Dec 2006 pp 118-152) 

 In the process model, this processural field itself,  corresponding to Bohm’s implicate order, has no shape, and no epistemological content, therefore no “information content” to somehow “pass on” into its processural descendents. In the process model there is no boundary that separates orders at all—there is only the dynamic processural field, and its phase transitions that create constellations of enfoldments (and their traces).  

Whereas Bohm considered conventional reality as an explicate order that unfolds  from a separate (implicate) order, the process model sees conventional reality (cognitive occasioning) as well as allows for non-cognitive actual occasionings as an enfolding process of the processural field that is the totality.  What these hypothetical non-cognitive actual occasions might be represents new process thinking beyond the scope of this paper that I am currently working through. I hope to demonstrate the possibility that the phase transitions in the processural field that do not fully articulate as cognitive occasions might represent a constellation of dynamic interactions that can be interpreted in terms of what Stuart Kaufman calls a “fitness landscape” and may correlate with Kaufman’s realm of pre-adaptation.  

 

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A Process Model with a View : Section IIa (Processes of the Epistemological Perspectives)

Posted on January 29, 2010 by

Bonnitta Roy, A Process Model with a View.  Presentation for First Integral Theory Conference 2008 at JKF University where it received an honorable mention for academic achievement in integral theory.

Section II : Processes of the Epistemological Perspectives  

 II.a. The Cognitive Occasion   

Cognitive Microgenesis and the Structural Enfoldment of Self  

  

The AQAL matrix is a very convenient tool for identifying the methodologies of inquiry across various domains of knowledge. AQAL analysis has proven to be  remarkably successful approach for incorporating methodological pluralism in one’s work. The first two issues of AQAL Journal are filled with examples of this kind of rigor.  

However, the AQAL matrix is less successful at describing one’s own Being-in-the-world—how the self experiences itself in its own situatedness. For example, although I may be able to feel my mind taking on or switching between different perspectives (first, second, third), I don’t experience my mind or myself as a 4-quadrant matrix splayed out in 4 directions, UL, UR, LL, LR. My most basic attention doesn’t “shift” up, down, right, left, when I take on different perspectives—it doesn’t “move around” in two-dimensional matrix space.  

Rather, I feel I am a core self inside a mind, inside a body inside a world shared with other (core/self/mind/body)s; and I feel that these enfoldments (core/self/mind/body/world) arise and change in time and in space. This enfoldment is the nature of conventional experience and can be represented as follows: 

  (core/self/mind/body/world)/space-time  

Notice that the progression lays down levels of interior-exterior relations, such that the core is felt as a deeper interior than the self, which in turn is felt as a deeper interior than the mind, and so on until we experience a fully “exteriorized” objective world in space-time dimensions. The experience of “other” selves is similarly an “exteriorization” of an internally accessible experience of “self” onto exteriorly appearing/existing agents. How far one goes in assigning “selfhood” to other exterior agents various according to culture and individual, as both human and non-human animals can qualify, as well as inanimate objects in  such as dolls in the case of children, or amulets in the case of  shamanistic projection.  

Notice also that what type of enfoldment determines what kind of experience arises, such that the above sequence is a formula that represents conventional waking reality, but what would the formula for conventional dream state look like? Or for lucid dreaming? There needs to be different formulas for pre-conventional experiences such as the urobic period and the period of primary narcissism; for non-normative states such as autistic, schizophrenic, and neurophysiological rarities where people loose the apperception of time or place, or of having a body or mind. There would be a different formula for the state of “flow” that artists and athletes report; and still different formula for deep meditative states, transpersonal experiences, unity experiences, out-of-body experiences, near-death-experiences, and other experiences of altered states. What would the formula for deep dreamless sleep be? 

The point is, with respect to an experiential center of reality—whether that be a fully realized subject, a pre-subjective surrogate, or a trans-subjective witness—each of these arise through a process of structural enfoldment that lay down progressive layers of interior-exterior relations through whole-part  (one-many) transformations in a space-time dimension. These three conditions, then, the condition of interior-exterior, the condition of whole-part (one-many), and the condition of space-time are the conditions of structural enfoldment under which the experience arises. These conditions can be mapped as a set of perpendicular vertices,  which represents the aspects of interiority-exteriority as the horizontal vertex, and the tendency towards being one (unity) or many (plurality) as the vertical vertex. It is easy to see that this arrangement creates the conditions of the AQAL matrix in which the quadrants are horizontally delimited by the conditions of interiority and exteriority and vertically delimited by the conditions of singular (one) and plural (many). We can imagine these vertices as describing a process field which creates successive structures of enfoldment along the direction of an arrow of time.  

 

  The above diagram then, represents the epistemological field, and the process of structural enfoldment in time, which generates the cognitive occasion. What kinds of structures might these be—and is there any evidence that cognition arises in this way? 

According to neurophysiologist Jason Brown,  cognition arises in just this way, through a process of cognitive microgenesis, in which each stage in the process lays down micro-structures of cognition. The process model reminds us that these structures are enfolded in the epistemological field. Brown micro-stages are described as follows: 

Core  

       >Presence  

  >Affect  

         >Image  

                           >Object(body)Space 

                                  >Object(world) Space 

These “steps” can be summarized as follows: 

Core: The unarticulated core is aspectless.  

Presence: … is the spontaneous potential of a cognition—the simple feeling of being. 

Affect: Cognitions that articulate to affect stage are primordial feelings, like a deep intuitive feeling that has not yet attached itself to an image or word. For example, it is common to wake up from a dream with a clear “feeling” of the dream without being able to ascribe images or words to the dream. For example, instead of being able to say that in the dream “I opened a door,” one would be pressed to say “it was as if there were a door and I opened it.” The affect level “meaning” is clear, but it is only after the fact of awakening that we are required to search for appropriate or sufficient symbolic or linguistic forms for it—and the measure of sufficiency of those attempts can be gauged against the clearly present affect. Affect-level cognitions are not to be confused with “emotions,” which are more complex structures. 

Image: Image stage cognitions are like dreams that have an image form, thinking in pictures or symbolisms or various sorts, and visual hallucinations (pathological or otherwise); images that are not yet associated with or alternately have become dissociated from, the concretizing operation of object perception. 

Object(body)Space: Further articulation of the cognitive process generates the spatial dimensioning of the kinesthetic body and its perceived “dominion”—that of the will (willing my finger to move, for example). 

Object(world)Space: The furthest articulation (or discharge) in Brown’s theory of microgenesis. This is the point where cognition has articulated to object orientation that constitutes a world. 

The Process model adds two crucial steps: 

>Intersubjective Space  

  >Subjective Unification 

Intersubjective Space is the notion of pre-constitutive structures that Sean Hargens describes in his infamous Intersubjective Musings where he writes: 

Intersubjectivity-as-context: the context created by multiple intersubjective structures (i.e. meshworks) which are constitutive of the subject and create the space in which both subjects and objects arise (e.g. physical laws, morphic fields, linguistic, moral cultural, biological, and aesthetic structures). These cultural contexts, backgrounds and practices are nondiscursive and inaccessible via direct experience.  

Subjective Unification is the crucial step in which the self in the process of becoming, concretizes as a unified entity of being – the subject qua ego. 

 We can add these categories to our process diagram as follows: 

 

If instead of focusing on the stages as structures, we adopt a more processural approach, we can further describe the microgeny of cognition as a coherent generative process that undergoes phase transformations in a field of dynamic operators with the following characteristics: 

 1) The dynamic operators are represented by the valences “interior-exterior”  and “one-many”. 

 2)  The duration of the process from core to world, constitutes an arrow of time, and the direction of the process, from core to world, constitutes spatial extension; thus creating a local here-and-now or spatio-temporal dimension. 

3) The transformations from core to unification can be described as phases changes in the generative process as follows:  

1) emergence – the initiation of the cognitive occasion and the “presencing” of sourcei  

2) articulation – the further articulation of the presencing as primordial affectii 

3) withdrawal (of agency) – this is the first real stage toward exteriority, as the central, now articulated presence, withdraws  (or contracts) to become the witness or viewer of images (dreamings) 

4) further withdrawal of agency is simultaneous with the exteriorization as/ of a “body” and with it comes the transformation of primordial presencing as will or drive—which are body-based dynamics 

5) protraction is the phase that creates a fully exteriorized world, and along with it, spatial extension wherein will/drive transform into their exteriorized form, intention. 

6) projection characterizes the “movement” back toward interiority, as the original aspect of interiority is now projected onto/into other fully exteriorized body/objects. This projection  also has the quality of reflection—wherein one’s interiority is reflected into/onto another(s). 

7) the final phase transition is unification where the fully realized subject emerges as the unit of being that stands in for its becoming—and under conventional experiences, henceforward goes on to be the “subject” that navigates experience, rather than the subject that arises as the cognitive occasioning of reality. 

According to Jason Brown, each cognitive occasion is actually a symphony of innumerable “waves” of microgenies and their “traces” back as they return to the core. The core is the well-spring of renewal and source of novelty, while traces that persist in the processural field establish patterns of habit, repetition and stasis that is responsible for the appearance of stability, memory and the duration of the “specious present.” 

Alternately, in purely process terms, we can say that each cognitive occasion arises through the mutual interactions of innumerable phase transitions of varying momentum (representing the stage at which the “outward” movement discharges) and attenuation (representing the traces that persist in the “inward” return) that create an “ecology” of structural enfoldments in a processural field.

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A Process Model with a View : Section I (Three Meanings of Perspective)

Posted on January 28, 2010 by

Bonnitta Roy, A Process Model with a View.  Presentation for First Integral Theory Conference 2008 at JKF University where it received an honorable mention for academic achievement in integral theory.

Section I  

Introduction: Three Meanings of Perspective  

  

As a way to get into the workings of the process model, I want to make the distinction between three meanings of perspective I glean from Wilber’s writing. The first meaning of perspective, relates to perspectives that a subject has – which means they entail a cognitive subject already in existence. Because this meaning pertains to how we know what we know about the world, I like to refer to it as the epistemological perspective, or EP.  This epistemological meaning has two parts:  1) one that corresponds to methodological pluralism, and the kinds of narrative perspectives we adopt during intellectual inquiry that name the eight methodologies, and their indigenous perspectives – phenomenology(inside) and structuralism(outside) the UL subjective domain, cognitive science(inside) neurophysiology(outside) the UR objective domain, hermeneutics(inside) and ethnomethodology(outside) the intersubjective domain, and social autopoeisis(inside) and systems theory(outside) the interobjective domain—and   2) a meaning that corresponds to  the perspectives a subject can take, i.e. a first person, second person, or third person (I/we/its) perspectives.   

A significantly different meaning of the term perspective  in Wilber’s writing is a metaphysical meaning, as when he says that the “kosmos is composed of perspectives all the way up and all the way down.” The metaphysical meaning of perspective, or MP,  appears not to depend upon a knowing subject (aka a human being)—but to be a statement about reality itself. According to Wilber, these are the perspectives that are related holonically, as a result of the process of transcend-and-include.  

The third kind of perspective is fuzzy in Wilber’s writings. It occurs most explicitly in Integral Spirituality, although it has precursors in some of his earlier writings. This is the meaning of perspective that Wilber attempts to correlate or conflate with the Dzogchen meaning of view.  Here Wilber incorporates the concepts of emptiness and form and their non-dual integration, with the notion of emptiness and view-as-perspective and their non-dual integration. 

The deepest Buddhist teachings—Mahamudra and Dzogchen—maintain that the nature of the mind is not in any way different from the forms arising in it. It is not just that there is Emptiness and View, but that Emptiness and View are not two—exactly as the Heart Sutra maintained, when Form now means Forms in the mind, or View: That which is Emptiness is not other than View; that which is View is not other than emptiness. (pg 140) 

The process model, however,  attempts to move from the notion of perspective to the notion of view by making a sharp distinction between the epistemological field through which the categories of knowing arise as perspectives in a cognitive occasion; and the ontological dimension of view which is a-perspectival and of a different sort entirely. According to this understanding, then when Wilber writes 

Therefore, choose your View carefully. And make your View or Framework as comprehensive or integral as possible, because your View—your cognitive system, your co-gnosis, your conceptual understanding, your implicit or explicit Framework—will help determine the very form of your enlightenment. 

The process model sees this as  a crucial category error  that results from conflating (or confusing) the framework of cognition and its epistemological perspectives, with the ontological, a-perspectival aspects of Being. This category error arises when we overlay the static structures of our epistemic framework onto the ontological experience of Being. This ontological experience is an a-perspectival, a-temporal and a-local arising which is addressed in the final section of this paper. The next two sections deal with the epistemic and metaphysical meanings of perspective through adopting and adapting the theories of Jason Brown and microgenesis and David Bohm notion of the holomovement. The process model attempts to describe the same underlying dynamics that generate both the cognitive occasion and the actual occasion, in ways that are consistent with the core of both Brown’s neurophysiology and Bohm’s physics. Fundamentally, these dynamics can be described as generative processes that create conditions of structural enfoldment through interior-exterior “movements” and whole-part transformations. The details of which we now turn.

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Integral Manifesto Pt V(4) The Shape of Human Action/ Shape Shifting Through Time

Posted on May 28, 2009 by

Modeling the Sphere of Human Action provides a compelling way to re-interpret the various constellations of human actions, thought of as cultural stages in the Spiral Dynamics model. Consider the following diagram from http://globalvaluesnetwork.com

Stratified Democracy

The above is an illustration of “Stratified Democracy” and the “emergence of governmental structures over time” based on a quantitative description of the assumed distribution of thinking throughout the world population over time. The descriptions under the heading “political systems and power distribution ratios” can be seen as ranges of geo-social spatial values. From the perspective of this series, each of the “colors” are considered to be “spheres of authority” in the  realm of Human Action. “Purple” for example, while considered by the Globals Values Network,  to be a level in the evolution of cultures, this series considers “purple” to be one of a constellation of forms that constitute the totality of Human Action. Each constellation arises from its own set of geo-social spatial, technological and economic dynamics, and therefore can be seen, when the relative scales of its natural units are plotted in the Sphere of Human Action, to have a unique natural shape. The entire constellation of forms, is evolutionary in the sense of  generating “ecologically adaptive forms” — each subsystem must be both internally adaptive with respect to the three  domains of human action, to maintain its structure, and also have the capacity to adapt into the system that is the whole of Human Action.

We can map these different subsystems as hypothetical shapes in the Sphere of Human Action as follows:

Constellation of Human ActionIt is important to note that what is being portrayed is the relative scale among units — there are no absolute “values” to consider. If we look at the temporal narrative procided by Spiral Dynamics, wherein the arrow of time goes from beige, to purple, red, blue, organe, green and then yellow, you will note that in this particular hypothetical illustration, I have allowed t-units to scale increasingly throughout “time.” This would be consistent with the rise of the types and reach of various technologies, including languages and knowledges, from tool making nomadic families, through the agricultural civilizations, the great civilizations of the Renaissance, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and on to today. Through “time” however, both e-units and g-units are in flux,  with e-units intially out-pacing g-units, until the “orange” phase, where the introduction of representative democracy gives rise to both opening of geo-social space and the industrial revolution enables a  significant redistibution of wealth, creating the middle class. At “green” t-units soar, completely outpacing and therefore supporting mutually re-inforcing forces between -e-units and g-units. This is the period of the digital revolution and information technologies, as well as significant advances in scientific technologies (including medicine), associated with t-units, the emergence of the pluralistic society,  associated with g-units, and the enormous accumulation wealth on a global scale, associated with e-units.

We can map the trajectory of g-units, e-units, and t-units directly onto the diagram of the waves of values in the following manner:

Strat&FlowThis provides us with a hypothetical picture of the relationship between the interaction between the natural units of Human Action, and the various types and reach of the subsytems supported in the Constellation that is the whole of Human Action. Here it is important to note, that g-units fall between beige and blue periods, not because there are fewer forms (there are actually more forms of collectivities) but because greater and greater numbers of people are aggregated into and constrained by collective identities. In earlier periods, “red” seems to be a dominant “form” –having broad reach– but it actually represent a great number of discontinuous tribes and bands of people, each with their own particular “shape” of action, lumped together as a single “meme”. This is an unfortunate error in the values-memes scenario, where lack of understanding about the distinctions between indigenous, nomadic, agricultural, and strongly place-based groups, tribes, bands… has led to a conflation of their uniqueness into a single “type”.

The dotted lines represent a hypothetical future scenario of what might be the case following very recent events. It is a scenario wherein through investment in technologies (rapid rise in t-units) e-units will be able to recover without sacrificing the proliferation of new actor-roles (represented by continual rise in g-units).

What about the normative aspects of the Sphere of Human Action? Consider the following diagram:

res_robIt illustrates how overall “movement” toward the lower right, is associated with periods of increasing “robustness” in Human Action. These are periods where connectivities and loyalties are aggregated and reified, there is a sense of assurance and stability in familiar forms of engagement and exchange, primary cultures become hegemonic and increasingly cooperative at the expense of periferal cultures who experience decreasing opportunities to appear as actors on the global stage. There is a sense of overall coherence and inevitability to the system, a sense that development is in one direction only– along the same trajectory taken by the primary powers. These are the periods in which “global managers” — attempt to optimize their gains. We shall see in later posts, that an over-reliance on optimization resulting from a over-maximized robust system, actually creates the conditions for the system’s eventual demise. On the other hand, overall “movement” toward the upper left is associated with periods of increasing “resilience” — the ability of the system to adapt to shock and surprise, because of its variability. Robust systems are predictable, but resilience systems have more alternative resources to deal with unpredictable events. Transformation towards the upper left– towards increased resilience– entails increased discontinuities, inventiveness, innovation and novelty of forms– associated ecologically with long-term resilience to collapse; yet from a normative standpoint, these are times of uncertainty.

A naturalized evolution of the cultural memes would see the emergence and dynamics between subsystems– spheres of appearances of human action– as part of an overall constellation or ecology of types, which contribute both robust dynamics and resilience dynamics to the Sphere of Human Action. Systems such as Spiral Dynamics emphasize the robustness of the system — based primarily in the absolutely robust notions of mainstream integral theory– and fail to incorporate the equally important– perhaps the more critically important– notion of resilience dynamics. From the standpoint of evolution, whose over-arching dynamics tend toward variation of form, resilience, rather than robustness, can be seen to be the correct evolutionary imperative– not a series of nested sets that sum up to one single optimized form. Indeed,  Buzz Holling, the founder of Resilience Theory, made just this statement: That from the view of evolution, variety, is more important than stability or equilibria.

The supposed “pull” of the teleological imperative in iSD, relies exclusively on the role of top-down, integrating dynamics; and fails to incorporate the crucial roles of bottom-up dynamics that proceed at different scales and are never completely transcended, because they are always operating toward the direction of resilience. This is the most salient feature of the last generation. The exclusive focus on optimization of Human Action (as well as optimization in eco-system management)– forces that, as we shall later define them, are associated with a single type strategy– has led to the conditions of environmental crises, world financial crises, proliferation of terrorist acts, and global instability. The normative desire humans have for rationally coherent, theoretically robust world, carries with it a dire warning: “Be careful what you wish for!”

Finally, we can adopt the principles of the natural units of Human Action, to the many worlds described by James Rosenau, by assigning relative scale values to each of the worlds as summarized in the following table:

geosocial
 economic technological
Insular Local + (-) (-)
Resistant Local (-) (-) (-)
Exclusionary Local + (-) +
Affirmative Local + + +
Affirmative Global (-) + +
Resistant Global + (-)/+  * (-)/+  *
Specialized Global + (-)/+  ** (-)/+  **
Territorial Global (-) (-) +

This table demonstrates that each Rosenau’s worlds, has a particular “shape” in the sphere of human action, if we mapped it according to the relative scales assigned above. For Insular Locals, g-units scale greater than both e -units and t-units; Resistant Locals are “adverse” to growth in any direction; Exclusionary Locals affirm increasing scale in both the geosocial and technological direction, but resist movement in the e-unit direction.;Affirmative Locals are comfortable facilitation all scales of Human Action, they  affirm growth of e-units and t-units and forego scalar increase of g-units… and so on.  If we compare this matrix of worlds with thee diagram illustrating the direction of robustness versus resilience, it is easy to see that the model of the Sphere of Human Action suggests that future scenarios based on the worldview of Affirmative Globals are not sustainable, because although they maximizes the conditions of robustness,they fail the test of resilience. While a futures scenario based on the worldview of either  Exclusionary or Affirmative Locals would be sustainable, because of the resilience that would be provided; but living in a Exclusionary World entails so much discontinuity, that it is probably unimaginable with respect to human nature. We will return to various futures in latter posts of this series.

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Integral Manifesto Pt V(3) The Shape of Human Action/ The Natural Units of Human Action

Posted on May 27, 2009 by

Like Max Plank reasons in Susskind’s imaginary narrative, I began to reason how the three domains of human action — geo-socio spatial, technological, and economic– could be conceptualized as “perfectly related natural units” of human action that could be dynamic operations in a complex system. I also realized that when natural units that are perfectly related are mapped as coordinates, they produce discrete shapes that morph dynamically, as variables are entered into their equation, as in cybernetic modeling. So, for example, the three sides of a right triangle are perfectly related, and therefore, as you vary one or two of the lengths of the sides, the other side(s) vary in a way that preserves the perfect equation: a(squared) times b(squared) = c(squared). I began to sample drawings that represented the shape of human action by scaling the three natural units in 3-dimensional coordinate space as in the following illustration:

shape of action

Questions flowed from envisioning the Shape of Human Action in this way.

  • What were the appropriate scales along the indivudal axes?
  • What is the meaning of increasing distance in the g direction?
  • What does increasing technological scale in the t direction represent?
  • What is happening in the “real” economy, with respect to the whole of human action, as it plots further along the e dimension?

Answering this question, meant assigning both values to the units, as well as meaning to a system whose purpose was to model real-world conditions and actual lived experience. I reaalized that the model had to map the kinds of distinctions and transformational dynamics that authors like Neil Brenner, Saskia Sassen and James Rosenau had written about the emerging epoch, as well as being able to contextualize the partial truths represented by other kinds of models like Spiral Dynamics. In other words, the natural units had to be multi-scalar, their values had to scale for fragmenting dynamics or discontinuities, as well as integrating dynamics or interconnectivities; these natural units had to provide for emerging identities, both upward and downward causalities, and the many worlds described by Rosenau, as well as the cultural levels– re-envisioned as speheres of influence– and their historical emergence as described by Spiral Dynamics. The solution was easy to see in their words; and so I define the natural units of the shape of human action as follows:

g-units scale “up” toward increasing discontinuity (less inter-connectivity)

e-units scale “up” toward increasing aggregation (greater inter-dependency)

t-units scale “up” toward incresing variability (more types, kinds, forms as well as greater reach)

In meaningful terms, increasing the value of g accounts for the opening of geosocial space, the emergence of new identities, the undoing of old connections and ties, the lossening of culturally embedded roles and expectations, the movement of peoples across previously impervious boundaries (both physical, social, and cultural), the shifting of power from the aggregated elites to the discontinuous and uncoordinated populous. From the standpoint of complexity theory, this is the condition for chaos and the emergence of novely. From a normative standing, increasing g-values represents the times when people feel uncertain and at risk of the unknown when more and more individuals “bump into” each other at the level of “raw” encounter, given that the old, familiar ways of characterizing and categorizing people are shattering. Society is perceived to be (and therefore reflexively, is) in a state of epochal flux and flow. In order for individuals to purposefully actualize or even reluctantly accomodate such shifting patterns of identity, the domain of g requires a capacity for forgetfulness and forgiveness, and the ability to begin anew.

On the other hand, increasing the value of e entails the aggregation of various human resources and capitals associated with labor and economies. The aggregation of human resources beginning, as Arendt claimed) with the division of labor inthe family, and the extension of hierachical laboring to communal laboring and finally collective labor, through the creating of inter-dependencies of all types along with powerful abstract mediators (currency, commoditites) that allow capital growth and accumulation at increasing hierarchical scales, from a share economy, to a barter system, to mafia-style commitments, and all levels of exchange economies– commodities, currency, securities. Along with increasing aggregation and interdependence, this domain of e requires a robust network of interconnections to function, so that proper amounts, value and order of exchanges can be adequately traced with sufficient guarantees for reciprocities and reliable “accounting” of events. The domain of e, in other words, requires sufficient capacity for memory and retribution.

In the domain of technology, increasing the value of t-units represents proliferation of technologies, with respect to both diversity of kind, and extent of reach– just as in the metaphor we assigned to technology previously, as the river both widening and branching at the same time. And just as the main channel of the river, current technologies tend to cut deep grooves of habit and stasis in the realm of human action; but also, like the ever-branching arms, technology continually breaks down old routes and breaks into new routes. Eventually arms can become major channels, drawing more and more “water” resulting in old channels drying up and becoming fossil evidence of bygone eras, or silt up until they are completely invisible.Unlike the other two domains, t can increase dynamics in both directions, through openings and the creation of new opportunities, as well as through the proliferation of old form to such extents as to create (temporary) closings. Because of its exploratory, inventive and uncertain nature, the domain of t requires sufficient capacity fo inquiry and exculpation. We can now begin to speak of the dynamics involved in the internal relations of these three domains. Whereas t relates to both  g and e through feedback and feed-forward loops, with the ability to increase and/or diminish momentum in the other domains, g and e themselves  alone might seem to be related as complimentaries , i.e. the more you have of one, the less you have of another– in which case it would make sense just to reduce them to one scale, with rising g-values representing movement in one direction, and rising e-values representing movement in the opposite direction. However, this would be too simplistic a model, since it may be the case (as I will argue in subsequent posts) that in the realm of human action, under certain conditions,  increasing g-values results in a geo-social “fabric” that can accomodate increasing e-values, and alternately, increasing e-values can result in conditions that allow for rapid increase in g-values. In other words, under certain condition, g-dynamics and e-dynamics may be nutually interferring, while under a different set of conditions they might in fact be mutually supporting. The difference in conditions might well turn out to be how technology is engaged as the third dynamic. We can represent these dynamics as a simple flow chart:

Flow Chart­_BG

It is important to recognize that the unit-values are performative, not ostensive units — in other words, the terms and their values represent not some thing but something going on: they are descriptive of activies such as adding or subtracting social ties, investing or liquidating money, connecting to a public utility grid or cutting the power line once and for all and high-tailing it to the backcountry. This willl become even more evident in the later posts on actor-network theory.

With this in mind, we can create logical formulations that represent the internal relations between the natural units as follows:

g=t/e     e=t/g      t=eg

The following are scenarios that give the reader a sense of the internal dynamics of this Sphere of Human Action:

  • As new openings in geo-social space emerge, and individual as sel as collectivies realize more degrees of freedom, technological innovation also increases with new kinds and forms of technologies being developed, and, as a result, economies become more distributed (e-units decrease). According to our formulations above, the conditions for this scenario would be where growth in technological scale lags behind growth in geo-social spatial scale, since for e to decrease where e=t/g, g-units would have to scale faster than t-units. In this case, there are counter-acting dynamics between g and e units.
  • A prolonged period of accumulation of capital in a global economy, along with a proliferation of technologies to support the globalization of finance, results in a “shrinking” worldspace, the hegemony of western economic values and techne, and the marginalization of indigenous peoples and subcultures. If g = t/e, then conditions for this scenario are when technological scale lags behind economic scale. Increasing the reach of technologies to individuals and subgroups, to an extent where t-units succeed in out-scaling e-units, allows for the proligerations of new geo-socio spaces, and the excelleration of new identities arriving onto and the propulsion of subcultures onto the global stage.
  • If t=eg, then the simultaneous growth and redistribution of capital resources (in its widest sense) creates a fertile condition for the exploration and invention of new ways (technes) of being. Alternately, envisioning new ways of being should create the condition in which both geo-social spaces and economic distribution can mutually support each other.

I believe the reader will find each of the above scenarios, accurate depictions of dynamics occuring in the world today.

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Integral Manifesto Pt V(2) The Shape of Human Action/ Working from the Whole: A Process Methodology

Posted on May 25, 2009 by

Books Discussed in this Section

Eugene Gendlin (1997) A Process Model . University of Chicago

Christopher Alexander (2002) The Process of Creating Life (Book Two of The Nature of Order). The Center for Environmental Strucutre, Berkeley, Ca.  and PATTERNLANGUAGE.COM

Loenard Suskind (2006) Cosmic Landscape. Little, Brown & Co.  New York, Boston.

There are quite a number of studies that link aspects of human action with complexity theory. Each of them falls short of what is required of our new paradigm, since they are written from within a single disciplinary forte, and therefore limit themselves to just one of the domains of human action. Most of these attempts focus on economies and economic dynamics, but many are emerging from the social and technological arenas. Each attempt struggles to reconcile the two-fold character of human action — to reconcile the rational, mathematical, and linear aspects we can “collect” from the study of human action, with our non-rational (or irrational), nonlinear, paradoxical natures. For example, a completely robust model of the macroeconomy can be derived from rather conventional analyses and prove to be successful to some extent in predicting economic indicators– but it will fail to predict the outcomes of  real-world socio-political events. Similarly, rather straightforward narratives about technology can me modeled in theoretical terms, but the real-life associations between humans and non-humans always add surprises and unexpected events that do not fit the narrative. Recent trans-disciplinary attempts have begun to treat hybrid systems, such as socio-economic, socio-technological, socio-political economy, and the like. In these instances, more of the territory is brought into the picture, but none have achieved a comprehensive, holistic model. It seems to me that the mistake all of prior efforts share, is their attempt to build the whole by interweaving the parts. Rather, I am attempting to begin from a view of the whole, and to derive the parts. I have started with a basic model representing the whole of Human Action — the three inter-related domains of geo-social space, technology, and economy– a static model that might generate the system and its dynamics, and subsequently, to subsystems and all the relevant features of the particular, right down to what has been hypothesized as the limiting quantum of action– the subject-to-subject encounter.

The process of reasoning from an envisioned whole down to the particulars that are in need of unifying through a holistic theory, is called abduction. Abduction proceeds from a fundamental insight into the nature of the territory that needs explication, accompanied by a holistic vision as to the nature of the goal — in this case, a new paradigm of Human Action.  Abductive reasoning is guided not by conventional logics — although the end product must comply with them– but is steered by a clear, precise, and accurate implicit “gauge” inside the thinker, that continually measures the working out of the details as they proceed to deliminate their part of the whole. For me, felt images are primary material, then a feeling for the process dynamics of their operation, then the logical relations, and finally the evidence comes into play– evidence which conveys both positive and negative feedback as to whether a certain direction one has taken (among options presented) is on the right track– or not.

This process, of working from the whole implicit in one’s insight, toward the deep structures of a system model that “preserves the whole”, and then onto the subsystems and their structures and internal relations, is similar to the creative process Gendlin describes in his exegesis on Process Thinking. Gendlin relates the situation in which the “whole” of the process (the territory, the path, and the goal, as it were) is already implicitly known, and whose explication can be guided by a “bodily felt feeling”, or more precisely, the “felt implicit process” that is directing the explicit work. Gendlin has identified many details of his process thought, including steps such as the emergence of direct referents and felt shift, doubling, crossing, absent context and present context, and slotted rituals– all of which will seem familiar to theorists who have worked this way. Gendlin also defines categories of transition “objects” that bridge the implicit with the explicit. Gendlin’s primary argument says that although the implicit is in some sense “vague” because it is unformed, has not yet been given an explicit shape, it is nonetheless more whole and more precise because it is that against which we measure our working toward an appropriate explicit formulation.

Christopher Alexander describes this same kind of process methodology that works from the whole, with a sense of feeling-logics as its guide, in many different ways and at many different levels throughout his four-volume work The Nature of Order. His way of reflecting on the question of the whole process–”How in practice, can a person keep paying attention to the whole; how can one achieve successful differentiation and structure-enhancing transformations at every step of a living process?”– deeply engages the reader with his very beautiful writing

… wholeness and “deep structure” are enormously difficult to see. Especially in a complex, real-worl case, the task of finding the most structure-enhancing step available is therefore, in practice, extremely hard. Our current modes of perception are not always tuned to seeing whoeness in the world around us; and the exact definition of the structure of wholeness– the system of centers at all scales, with their attendan degrees of life and coherence– is cumbersome and hard to grasp when we try to grasp it by analytical means. yet in order to move forward, and to find aggreement in larger, communal projects, it is imperative that we do have a workable and practical method of seeing wholeness, and assessing the degree to which any proposed next step does increase the life and wholeness of any evolving structure. Otherwise there is no effective way of choosing the next step forward in any given process.

As to how this is to be done, Alexander writes

The living process can therefore be steered, kept on course toward the authentic whole, when the builder [of the model, ie.e the theoretician] consistently uses the emerging feeling of the whole as the origin of his insight, as the guiding light at the end of the tunnel by which he steers. I am suggesting that if the builder [theoretician] at each step of a living process, takes that step which contributes most to the feeling coming from the work, always cnooses that which has the more profound feeling, then this is tantamount– equivalent– to a natural process in which the step-wise forward-moving action is always goverend by the whole.

From which Alexander formulates an essential rule

In any living process, or any process of design or making, the way forward, the next step which is most structure-enhancing, is that step which most intensifies the feeling of the emerging whole.

From my own view of the Whole of Human Action , for all the internal relations (from a structural view) or alternately all the internal dynamics (from a process view) to “preserve the whole”, then there could be no externalized factor, no essential “unknown” that acted as a a kind of disparate part, or coupling mechanism. I therefore began to understand that in this whole system I was envisioning as Human Action, all structures must be co-creative, and all realtional dynamics must be internal to the system. In other words, the system, “Human Action” must operate “enactively” — a term coined by Varela and Thompson whose essential meaning is “to lay down the path by walking.”

This insight in turn, led me to realize that what I might achieve this dynamic and holistic model by representing the three domains of human action (the geo-socio spatial, technological and economic) as natural units of human action that were related to each other as in a perfect ly. Perfect relations are equations that require no outside information to solve their parts. Ohm’s Law (V=IR) for example, prescribes the perfect relations between voltage, resistance, and amperage– and constitutes all the dynamics of electric flow. In a perfect relation, all member-constants vary with each other is specific ways, but their holistic association never varies. Similarly, Einstein’s paradigmatic shift regarding space and time was intuiting their perfect relation, e=mc(squared).

It also began to occur to me that all newly emerging paradigmatic shifts bringing about holistic systems, might require the ability to bring the structural parts into perfect relation through a process methodology. Loenard Susskind wonderfully re-creates just this kind of ability in his imaginary narrative of Max Plank, working on the renormalization of the variables of length, mass and time, into the perfect relation whose pivotal missing link turned out to be not a variable at all, but the Plank constant. I will end this post with Susskind’s tale

Recently I made the most wonderful discovery of a completely new fundamental constant of nature. People are calling it my constant, Plank’s constant. I was sitting in my office thinking to myself: why is it that the fundmanetal constants like the speed of light, Newton’s gravitational constant, and my new constant have such awkward values? The speed of light is 2.99 x 108 meters per second. Newton’s constant is 6.7 x 1011 square meters per second-kilogram. And my constant is even worse, 6.626 x 10-34 kilogram-square meters per second. Why are they always so big or so small? life for a physicist would be so much easier if they were ordinary-size numbers.

Then it hit me! There are three basic units describing length, mass, and time: the meter, the kilogram, and second. There are also three fundamental constants. If I change the units, say, to centimeters, grams, and hours, the numerical values of all three constants will change. For example, the speed of light will get worse. It will become 1.08 x 1014 centimeters per hour. But if I use years for time and light-years for distance, then the speed of light will be exactly one, since light travels one light-year per year. Doesn’t that mean that I can invent some new units and make the three fundamental constants anything I want? I can even find units in which all three fundamental constants are equal to one! That will simplify so many formulas. I’ll call the new units natural units since they’re based on the constants of nature. Maybe, if I’m lucky, people will start calling them Plank units.


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Integral Manifesto Pt V(1) The Shape of Human Action/Tales of Chaos and the Norm

Posted on May 25, 2009 by

Books Discussed in this Section

James Rosenau (2003) Distant Proximities: Dynamics Beyond Globalization, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

“Some observers,” Rosenau notes, “appear to share the recognition that the intellectual tools presently available to probe the pervasive uncertainty underlying our emergent epoch may not be sufficient to the task.”

Where earlier epochs were conceived more in terms of central tendencies and orderly patterns, the present epoch appears to derive its order from contrary trends and episodic patterns. Where the lives of individual and societes once tendend to move along linear and steady trjectories, now the movement seems nonlinear and eradic, with equilibria being momentarily and continuously punctuated by sudden acceleration or directional shifts.

Rosenau’s depiction of this challenge

Never mind that societies are increasingly less cohesive, and boundaries increasingly more porous; never mind that vast numbers of new actors are crowding the world stage; never mind that money moves instantaneously in cyberspace; never mind that the ripple effect of horrific, terrorist actions seem endless; and never mind that the feedback loops generated by societal breakdowns, proliferating actors , and boundary-spanning information are greatly intensifying the complexity of life at the outset of a new century– all such transformative dynamics may complicate the tasks of the analysis, but complexity theory tells us that they are not beyond comprehension, that they can be grasped.

drives his point that for understanding the nature of human action– that it will be necessary to incorporate new intellectual tools and undertake an approach within the framework of complexity theory. However Rosenay himself also cautions that the task of complexity theory is not prediction and control– we should recognize by now that those halycon days are bygone– but offers a heuristic framework which might “provide a basis for grasping and anticipating the general patterns within which specific events occur.”

Complexity theory might enable us to create figure-ground, internal-external, whole-part, and space-temporal references with respect to the various relations inherent in the dynamics of the system of human action, so we might anticipate variable trajectories on a metasystematic level. This is turn might allow us ample degree of freedom and choice in the realm of human affairs.

The story of human action, however, will never me merely a story of chaotic systems and their dynamic criticalities. It is also a consistent dynamic and purposeful effort toward the stable and normative, for the ability to live a coherent and meaningful life. This at first may seem at odds with the analytic approach of complexity theory– yet any adequate theory of human action must be able to bridge the chaotic attractors with our normative needs, keep the meaning-filled ends in sight of the dynamic means, while managing to  incorporate the operation of adaptive creativity and novelty born in chaos, that make such systems resilient to surprise and collapse (even at the expense of coherence an robustness), and simutaneously managing to incorporate the operations of interconnectedness and relatedness in normative systems that maintain their coherence and robustness (and by opposite measure, more vulnerable to surprise and the risk of collapse).

If we are to design such a framework of understanding and meaning, with multiple degrees of freedom– freedom of choice in the realm of human affairs, freedom among adaptive variables, freedom to connect and to unconnect interdependencies, freedom to tune in or to drop out, freedom to design one’s own individual identities, and freedom to adopt collective ones, freedom to participate in creative construction of stabilizing elements and, alternately, their creative destrucction– then we must be prepared not only to adopt novel paradigms of human action, but also be able to work through a cross-paradigmative approach– a challenge taken up in this series.

In such a paradigm, of human action– a paradigm that has the capacity to model the internal and external dynamics that account for the kinds of real world conditions and real life situations that we have been discussing– several crucial factors must be taken into account. At minimum, such a paradigm must be

  • Consistent with a natrualized evolution
  • Consistent with complexity theory
  • Adaptable to rapidly changing circumstances
  • Transfromable to completely new forms
  • Maintain coherence and robustness through change
  • Resilient to collapse inthe face of uncertainty and surprise
  • Incorporate multi-scalar operations
  • Provide for both globalizing and localizing dynamics
  • Guarantee the multiple freedoms mentioned above
  • Provide a way to interpret the past and anticipate future developments
  • Provide a useful conceptual tool for mitigating unfavorbale effects and facilitating favorable events in collective human action.
  • Provide a guide to re-envision normative judgments about collective human action

This is a challenging list. Still, most significantly for our purposes here, this paradigm of human action must act as a litmus test both for the originating inquiry of this series – What is the pivot point around which the local scales to the global? — as well as resonate with the fundamental hypothesis at the center of this series–The subject-to-subject encounter is the limiting quantum of Human Action. It may very well be the case that the second statement correctly answers the first question.

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Integral Manifesto Pt IV(4) Open Sources, Sources of Openings/ The Many Worlds of Geosocial Space

Posted on May 23, 2009 by

Books Discussed in this Section

James Rosenau (2003) Distant Proximities: Dynamics Beyond Globalization, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

The various voices in the previous sections have been developing the notion of multiscalar, multidimensional, as well as multi-directional globalizing forces at play. These forces are accountable for both large scale globalizing effects as well as the emergence of new microscales of openings along with a new generation of hybrid (local-global/ global-local) actors. We are beginning to realize that the global and the local are neither dichotomous terms nor opposite movements, but rather, are interrelated or entangled operations of a single epochal transformation. With forces at play that move simultaneously up, down and across the scales of human action, forces that amass greater interconnectivities and interdependencies while simultaneously shattering their old relationships and redistributing both their contexts and meanings, forces that simultaneously reinforce and challenge the power laws, continually shifting the tides of human agency in a constancy of flows– it is no wonder that the old templates of scalar anlayses no longer fit. One might argue that these old ways of looking at things, based in the hidden assumptions about order, hierarchy and optimization, actually undermine the conditions required for resilient action. This in turn might create a disconnect between the human-action systems and the ecological systems in with which they are entangled, mutually embedded and mutually enfolded. The various voices in the previous section have given us a strong sense of what is to follow; but none has achieved a more comprehensive description of the forces at play than James Rosenau. His insight and analyses are so critical to the understanding needed in the emerging epoch, that he is quoted at length in this section. A thorough understanding of what Rosenau calls “fragmegration” — the simultaneous process of fragmenting and integrating, provides the essential bridge to the further reaches of this manifesto.

Rosenau starts with a spatial oxymoron called “distant proximities” to account for a defining shift in geosocial space in the age of globalization and which highlights the inadequacies of previous terms. Rosenau says his distant proximities is the concept with which to organize the currents of world affairs.

Globalization is bringing peoples closer apart and places further together — John Rennie Short

His hope in this book is to introduce conceptual equipment beyond that of  globalization that can substantially clarify, enrich, and expand our grasp fo the course of events as the twenty-first century unfolds” …

[T]he best way to grasp world affairs today requires viewing them as endless series of distant proximities in which the forces pressing for greater globalization and those inducing greater locatlization interactively play themselves out. To do otherwise, to focus only on globalizing dynamics, ot only on localizing dynamics, is to risk overlooking what makes events unfold as they do.

One of the useful conceptual tools Rosenau gives us is the term “framegration” intended to “suggest the pervasive interaction between fragmenting and integrating dynamics that are unfolding at every scale of life.”

[T]he fragmegration label captures in a single word the large degree to which these rhythms consist of localizing, decentralizing, or fragmenting dynamics that are interactively and causally linked to globalizing, centralizing, and integrating dynamics.

Throughout his book, Rosenau uses informal testimony– anecdotes and statements from participant-observers who document these kinds of events as they unfold today, such as the following two examples:

I use the local and the global as prisms for looking at the same thing… [I]t would be wrong to think that you either work at one or the other, that the two are not constantly interpenetrating each other. … [W]hat we usually call the global, far from being something which, in a systematic fashion, rolls over everything, creating similarity, in fact works through mobilizing particular identities, and so on …

[G]lobalization and localization unite all spatial scales. There is little, and maybe nothing that is global that does not have some sort of a local manifestation. And each local manifestation changes the global context. place centeredness is the amalgam of global change and local identity. Every place reveals itself at a variety of scales. Local perceptions are shaped by global influences, the combination of which process local actions. These in turn are fuelled by local aspirations, many of which are the product of global images and expectations. All these local activities accumulated to create chaotic but global outcomes.

Rosenau also describes the way new identities emerge and collate in geosocial space through the processes of fragmegration, and the way different individuals respond to them, by recombining and redefining their own distant and proximate worlds, and constructing as well as choosing (or refusing) new roles as participant actors within these newly subjectively-relativized regions.

[A]s distant developments become ever more proximate, the emergent epoch enables people to develop new, more flexible constructions of themselves. Their orientations, practices and lives are still shaped by macro structures, but the latter are now more numerous and flexible than in the past, freeing (even forcing) people to shoulder greater autonomy and to evolve new identities and shifting allegiances.

[T]he values, identities, capacities, strategies, and interests of individuals are posited as pervasive variables that, as they vary remain constant, can aggregate into substantial consequences for macro structures and the interaction sequences through which they are linked to their collectivities.

In short, fragmegrative circumstances constitutete “a condition that promotes personal autonomy from socially embedded expectations and opens up the world to exploration and personal experimentation: we can, to an increasing degree, choose who we are … .”

The pace at which and extent to which individuals and collectives are capable and willing to adapt, accommodate, and incorporate new roles through their efforts at recombining aspects of the distant and the proximate, the local and the global, determines what kinds of “world”they come to occupy, the “world” they see themselves in as actors or non-actors — determines whether a local, global, or private world arises as their geo-social spatial reality. This is not to suggest that only imaginaries are at work in creating new social spaces and new actor- roles and new world-scapes. Rosenau identifies eleven modern developments that are catalyzing changes that “increasingly generate multiple equilibria” :

  1. Microelectronic Technologies
    • The rise of network forms of organization– particularly "all channel networks" in which every node can communicate with every other node– is one of the single most important effects of the information revolution for all realms, political, economic, social and military. It means that power is migrating to small, nonstate actors who can organize into sprawling networks more readily than can traditionally hierarchical nation-state actors. It means that conflicts will increasingly be waged by "networks" rather than by "hierarchies". it means that whoever masters the nettwork form stand to gain major advantages in the new epoch. Some actors, such as various terrorists and criminals, may have little difficulty forming highly networked, largely non-hierarchical organizations; but for other actors, such as professional militaries that must continue to uphold hierarchies at their core, the challenge will be to discover how to combine hierarchical and networked designs to increase their agility and flexibility for field operations.
  2. The Skill Revolution
    • [In short, the primacy of the skill revolution has resulted in the global stage becoming more dense with actors.] In earlier epochs, it was occupied mainly by states and their inter-governmental organizations, but in the emergent epoch the cast of characters has multiplied time and time again.
  3. The Organizational Explosion
    • If hierarchically structured states still dominated the course of events and were thereby able to contain and control the vibrant spread of horizontal networks, it is doubtful whether a new epoch would be emerging. For better or for worse– and given the vitality of the drug trade and crime syndicates, sometimes it is for the worse– the ever-greater salience of organizational networks is serving to restructure the underpinnings of world affairs.
  4. The Bifurcation of Global Structures
    • In effect, the bifurcation of global structures nas become institutionalized and, as a result, contributes to the weakening of states… by creating spaces for the formation or consolidation of collectivites in the multi-centric world and, thus, for the activation of individuals who have not previously had an outlet for their global or local orientations. This
  5. The Mobility Upheaval
    • Statistics for every form of travel reveal sharp and continuous growth, and the trend shows no sign of  letting up. Not only is tourism among the world’s largest industries, but the data on business travel also portray a continuing and growing flow of people around the world. And then thee are the migratory flows that are driven largely by a search for employment and involve mostly people from the developing world moving into the industrial and financial centers of the developed world. All of these flows have been facilitated by transportation technologies, particularly the jet aircraft that have– through reduced travel time and lowered airfares– had a profound impact on diverse institutions throughout the world.
  6. The Weakening of States and Territoriality
    • [The] very epoch of the nation-state is near its end. … It may well be that the emergent postnational order proves not to be a system of homogenous units (as with the current system of nation states) but a system based on relations between heterogenous units (some social movements, come interest groups, some professional bodies, some nongovernmental organizations, some armed constabularies, some judicial bodies).
  7. The Decentralization of Governments
    • [The] longer-term and worldwide process whereby authority is undergoing relocation in response to the skill revolution, the organizational explosion, and the mobility upheaval has hastened the decline and decentralization of national governments. In some instances this trend has resulted in vacuums of authority filled by criminal organizations or by undertainties regarding where the rule-making power lies; but more often than not local, provincial, or private authorities move into the vacuum and sustain the processes of governance.
  8. Authority Crises
    • With people increasingly skillful, with states weakened, and with other types of organizations proliferating, governments everyhwere are undergoing authority crises in which traditional conceptions of legitimacy are being replaced by performance criteria of legitimacy, thus fostering bureaucratic disarray, executive-legislative stalemate, and decisional paralysis that, in turn, enhance the readiness of individuals to employ their newly acquired skills on behalf of their perceived self-interests.
  9. Subgroupism
    • Subgroupism arises out of the deep affiliations that people develop toward associations, organizations, and subcultures with which they have been historically, professionally, economically, socially, or politically liked and to which they attach high priority. Subgroupism values te in-group over the out-group.
  10. The Globalization of National Economies
    • In contrast to the tendencies toward decentralization and subgroupism, the dynamics at work in the realm of economics are powerful sources of centralizing tendencies. … [For the most part] economic globalization in the last few decades has resulted in financiers, entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers now being deeply enmeshed in transnational networks that have superceded the traditional political jurisdiction of national scope.
  11. The Proliferation of Independence Issues
    • Whereas the political agenda used to consist of issues that governments could cope with on their own or through interstate bargaining, conventional issues are now being joined by challenges that their very nature do not fall exclusively within the jurisdiction of states and intergovernmental institutions. Six current challenges are illustrative: environmental pollution, currency crisis, the drug trade, terrorism, AIDS, and the flow of refugees.

If we place these phenomenon within our lexicon of human action, we find that six of them are primarily phenomena of geo-social space (bifurcation of global structures, mobility upheaval, weakening of states and territoriality, decentralization of governments, authority crises,  subgroupism)– all factors which tend toward decentralization and the opening of micro-spaces and emergence of new actors moving toward the shattering old connectivities and creating new localized roles; whereas the proliferation of independence issues is a factor of geo-social space where new localized actors emerge and move toward the creatin of  new globalized roles. Similarly, we can map the three factors, microelectronic technologies, the  skill revolution, and organizational explosion onto the technological domain of human action, and note that technologies facilitate movement in both directions– toward integration and globalization as well as fragmentaion and localization. Finally, the phenomenon of the globalization of national economies, is seen to be the defining movement in the economic domain of human action– a movement toward increasing aggregation, connectivity, consolidation, and globalization. These are important registers to remember about the particular dynamics in the three domains of human action– that the geo-social movement is toward opening and discontinuities, whereas the economic movement is toward consolidation and connectivities; while the technological domain remains a "neutral" — yet is a powerful multiplier that can as well  facilitator  or deter movements in either "direction."

The bulk of Rosenau’s book is dedicated to identifying and describing the world-scapes that emerge from these fragmegrative dynamics. Various Local Worlds are distinguished from several types of Global Worlds through the ways in which distances and proximities are conceptualized and placed into the context of one’s life. In Local Worlds, both local (in the contextualized sense) and localized (in the spatial sense) phenomena become "increasingly salient as sources or goals of the attitudes, behavior, or policies of individuals and collectives." In Rosenau’s scheme, differing conditions and varying dynamics in turn give rise to four types of Locals

The Insular Locals are distinguished by an exclusive concern with spatial proximities, with the geographically near-at-hand, with circumstances that can be directly encountered; the Resistant Locals and Exclusionary Locals contextualize proximity and allow for the spatially remote to be near-at-hand, but the Resistant Locals perceive the spatially remote as so threateningly close as to necessitate opposition, whereas the Exclusionary Locals are inclined to avoid the distant proximities they view as becoming too close.

[The fourth Local World] is occupied by persons who are neither isolated nor inclined to retreat in the face of globalizing dynamics. They are, rather, capable of absorbing external encroachments on their own terms without fearing their local world will loose its integrity. Indeed, by adapting the external inputs to local practices and norms without diminishing the distinctive feature of their world, the Affirmative Locals … can contribute to the integrative dimensions of fragmegration as much as they do to its divisive dimension.

In contrast to these Local Worlds, Rosenau describes four Global Worlds, three of which consist of persons “whose thoughts and actions are worldwide in scale and not confined to any territorially bounded space”

One of these is populated by Affirmative Globals, by elites, activists, and ordinary people who share positive inclinations toward the processes of globalization–especially toward those dynamics that foster and sustain a global marketplace– seeing them as moving humankind toward greater integration and prosperity.

In contrast, the Resistant Globals are no less worldwide in the scale of their orientations, but they, like their Local counterparts, regard one or more of the prevailing dynamics that sustain globalization as detrimental to the wel–being of peoples.

Similarly, the Specialized Globals are persons whose territorial orientations are not locally bounded but who are oriented toward only limited issues on the global agenda.

Roseanu alsod describes a fourth Global World, the Territorial Globals, "whose scale of thought and action is large but territorially bounded" and for whom foreign policy officials are the "quintessential examples."

Finally, to complete his inventory or world-scapes, Rosenau adds a brief exegesis of four Private Worlds,– the Alienated Cynics, Alienated Illegals, Circumstantial Passives and Turned-Out Passives– non of which include persons who authentically assume an actor-role in the realm of human action.

As a result of Rosenau’s inventory of the many worlds arising from the dynamics of fragmegration, we are left with the image of a densely overlapping and multi-dimensional, highly complex and multi-scalar, continually shifting field of world-sca;es, of which we are for the most part at a loss to grasp with familiar conceptual tools. How do we then design a future in response to both the positive phenomena we would like to facilitate, and the negative phenomena we would like to mitigate in this shifting field? How do we choose to meet future challenges? With what conceptual tools do we address such empirical complexity? With what normative judgments do we distinguish what are favorable or unfavorable phenomena, when faced with conditions we can neither prestate, much less predict, nor dynamics we can sufficiently model, nor the luxury of conventional wisdom, much less the traditional analytics of scale and the hidden assumptions about human action that have been outdated perhaps for decades now.

As Rosenau writes

The salience of such questions– and the uncertainty they generate– reflects the conviction that we are deeply immersed in an epochal transformation likely to foster a new worldview about the essential nature of human affairs … .

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