From: theory of knowledge society discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Nicholas Lattanzio
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2022 7:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: ToK Complexity Metrics?

I'd like to expand on Gregg's last point there and see what others think. As I strongly agree that we are at that precarious point in evolution and human development where that window into direct/indirect but intentional influencing of our own evolutionary process can be done. I dont think I've seen anyone arguing explicitly against that on this listserv. 

Great discussions, folks.

 

I am slammed right now, so I need to be brief.

 

Brendan, I am a fan of Chaisson’s cosmic evolution in that it gives a nice picture of the evolution of complexity from a natural science/physics perspective. I have corresponded with him quite a bit. He gives a crucial epistemological vantage point for our ontology, but not a holistic one. The free energy rate density flow principle is a great physical-material metric for complexity and, if you know the book cosmic evolution, it aligns very closely. Indeed, here is an alignment between a graphic in his 2001 book Cosmic Evolution, and something I drew a few years earlier (in either 1999 or 2000) as I was playing around with the ToK lens on Big History:

 

Chaisson’s frame is naturalistic-material and although it aligns with the complexity sciences, it does not bring in the complex adaptive systems thinking necessary for a full bridge. Put another way, because it gives a somewhat reductive physicalist causation picture of behavior writ large, it fails to effectively frame I have recently been calling “epistemic functions.” These are the processes that  emerge that generate fundamentally new behavioral patterns of self-organization. In the vision logic of the Tree of Knowledge System, Chaisson’s system fails to “see” why/that Life, Mind, and Culture are different dimensions of complexification (or planes of existence). He was involved in Big History and that is a standard blind spot in that frame. Chaisson also fails to see the Animal-Mental dimension as a clearly identifiable plane of complexification. Thus, the system is blind to the problem of psychology and fails to address the Enlightenment Gap.  

 

Brandon,  I like your connections to genetics, integrated information theory, and MHC. That said, I would not have aligned those exactly in the way you did. The reason is that integrated information theory and aspects of MHC will be present in all complex adaptive systems. I could elaborate on why, but will punt on this issue.

 

The bottom line is that the free energy rate density principle is a great metric for complexity in the Matter dimension.

Then we have bio-epistemic complexification processes as a function of genes, cells, and organisms, giving rise to living behavior patterns or Life.

Then we have psyche-epistemic complexification processes as a function of neuronal nets, animals, and animal groups, giving rise to animal-mental behavioral patterns, or Mind

Then we have human social-epistemic complexification processes as a function of propositions, persons, and cultures giving rise to the human justification-investment-influence patterns, or Culture.

 

From where I am sitting on the bridge of the UTOK System, we are now getting to a place where we can have unique psyche epistemic frames to hold the human subjective perspective on the world (i.e., the iQuad Coin) and generalized scientific behavioral frames that provide a third person onto-epistemological grounding (ToK System). We can bridge the Enlightenment epistemic Gap between psyche and physics and achieve a much more unified approach to knowledge that can then orient toward wisdom in the back half of the 21^st century. That is, with the right frame, we can consciously evolve in ways that were not available to us historically.

 

Last, on Mon 1/31, I will be releasing a UTOKing with Mike Mascolo, where he offers is rich view of psychology, human experience and meaning making, and vision for how we might correct the structure of the academy and move toward a healthier co-active co-construction of reality toward the good. His fundamental frame is that relationships are key and they are key all the way down and all the way up.

Best,
Gregg   

 

 

 

From: theory of knowledge society discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of T.R. Pickerill
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2022 11:25 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: ToK Complexity Metrics?

 

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mmm, measurement and proof, I relate this to someone who can only read sheet music vs a Free Jazz improvisation; when you stop counting you listen to and for relationships, and play, fall, and create.

 

"All you have are your relationships." Tim Pickerill

 

Timothy Rollin Pickerill

Business - http://www.AudioVideoArts.com/

Photography - http://instagram.com/pickerillphotography/

Art - http://www.TR-Pickerill.com/

646-299-4173 (cell)

 

 

On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 11:12 PM michael kazanjian <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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Nicholas:

 

I hope you take this as a compliment or similar remark, not criticism. Your notion that the people are too interested in measurement, sounds like Feynman, who criticized math people as too concerned with "proof."

 

Interesting insight.

 

Michael M. Kazanjian

 

On Thursday, January 20, 2022, 10:03:12 PM CST, Nicholas Lattanzio <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

 

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Yall are too concerned with measuring things IMO. I get it I do from an inquisitive naturalistic perspective, I just don't see what the utility actually is (I mean that very literally, not pejoratively or flippantly). 

 

For example, by definition of MHC (thanks for making it clear what we were even talking about here, took me a few times through the thread to notice the links Zak shared), a higher level of order can only be defined in terms of the next lowest order. With increasing evolutionary sensitivity these orders are only going to become more varied, stratified, and virtually useless independent of each other. They only have use in context of each other, so in that sense I totally see the enactment aspect of this regarding our unique positioning in the evolutionary scale of things (things that have come before us). It very much falls in line with UTOK and probably the metaphysics of most everyone on this listserv, but it doesn't serve a purpose as a measurement. That thing, that onto-epistemogical golden cosmic thread is not adequately reduced to binary (or bimodal) actualizations. If we are to learn anything from this age of measurement it's that we need a better way to be in touch with potential, the unactualized. Enactment does that as the operating ontological process that transcends the being-becoming dialectic.

 

Now if we are looking at efficiency, sure, let's figure out how many bits we need to acheive this or that and strive to encourage that, though that has never not been the case for evolution or reality. We can certainly say that anything could have been done more simply or less simply, but if it's done then it was done exactly the way it needed to be done and that is exactly the information we use to judge the necessary bits in the first place. An electron is an electron is an electron, let's call it one bit. Now it's entangled and in superposition, how many bits is that? Well it would depend on what order of complexity you're talking about, and of course the meaning or implications differ across and within orders, MHC appears to contend that as well, what are we going to do with that information? The we that could do something with that information IS that information as an expression itself of the cosmic golden thread or whatever you want to call it. 

 

I mean I guess this is what people do so maybe that's the whole point, but we can't answer Lee's questions about free energy with it since we would need to use the terms of the order of nature/complexity just below free energy. Any attempt to do that is abstraction at the level of mind and further at culture. Which is the mosquito and which is the iron bull? 

Regards,

Nicholas G. Lattanzio, Psy.D.

 

On Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:05 PM lee simplyquality.org <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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Thanks for all this.

 

My understanding is that:

At 32,000 genes, the carrot genome is a good deal longer than that of humans (somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 genes). 

 

Therefore I am curious about the Life complexity metric of genomic complexity, C.

Is the complexity different from the number of genes in the genome?

If so, how is it measured?

 

Also, I think of entropy as the typically used measure of “disorder” (often interpreted as complexity).

How does entropy compare to free energy as a measure of complexity?

 

Thanks,

 

Lee Beaumont 

 

 

On Jan 20, 2022, at 7:41 PM, Brandon Norgaard <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

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Thanks Brendan.  A few months ago, I gave a presentation at one of your book club events of a table I put together starting from Gregg’s Periodic Table of Behavior (PTB) and added content from his discussion with Jordan Hall and also from some other sources such as the Conscious Evolution podcast.  I just added the content from your first message and I now have the table publicly available for everyone to view and add comments:

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AkQYgE9O3J2GKVwCiBCVCbhVX88-TOrO/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=117491835000953037563&rtpof=true&sd=true

 

I figure something like this could be published officially somewhere, after it’s cleaned up as necessary, giving credit to the parties who created the content.  All I did was put it together into a single table.

 

Regarding the metric of socio-cultural evolution, I’m not sure if MHC is the right one, or at least it seems that is only part of the picture.  I remember the Chomsky Hierarchy also gives a nested hierarchy of symbolic meaning in languages.  Some animals can communicate only at the regular expression level, some at the context-free grammar level, and we humans have recursively enumerable communicative capability.  Also within this we have many levels of complexity of cultural codes, which has some relation to MHC, but there is more to it.  A person can be at a moderate level of MHC with regard to their mental capability while also operating within a highly complex cultural code.  Centuries ago, some people had high MHC while operating within a simpler cultural code than we have now.  I have to figure that it is the complexity of the cultural code that is the real metric here.  Any given cultural code would seem to have some level of MHC baked into it, but I’m thinking that there should be some metric that would be an enhancement of the Chomsky Hierarchy that would measure the complexity of the cultural code itself.  Essentially, this would measure the complexity of language games within a given culture and symbol set (spoken, written, facial expressions, gestures, etc.)  The Chomsky Hierarchy only has recursively enumerable as the top level, but I have to figure there are many subdivisions within that.  Does anyone know who has done work on this?    

 

Brandon

 

From: theory of knowledge society discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Bruce Alderman
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2022 12:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: ToK Complexity Metrics?

 

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The same year Wilber published SES, Henryk Skolimowski published a book arguing that we are at a time between worldviews -- represented as a 'dip' and 'chaotic tangle' between plateaus of dominant worldviews/paradigms -- and proposed the next emergent view will be holistic, participatory, and evolutionary (whatever we name it; some of his prior worldview names are 'Theos' and 'Mechanos').  One of his arguments in the book is that evolution reveals a long trajectory of gradually increasing sensitivity -- of evolving modes, degrees, etc, of prehension, awareness, and 'participation' that entities use to interface with the rest of reality.  And a key idea, somewhat anticipating Wilber's "W-5" turn, is that we need to view this evolution of sensitivity in enactive terms, that evolution demonstrates a wandering but not directionless unfolding of greater, more complex ways that entities participatorily 'enact' their worlds.

 

On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 12:05 PM Nicholas Lattanzio <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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I think Major Histocompatability Complex, which from my understanding are proteins that help the immune system adapt. I believe they measure it in making vaccines, and use a great deal of statistical information to generate probabilistic outcomes. But that's all self-education from articles I read like 2 years ago. I could be totally wrong amd/or they could be talking about something else.

Regards,

Nicholas G. Lattanzio, Psy.D.

 

On Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 1:56 PM Zachary Stein <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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Jim Rutt Show: On Hierarchical Complexity: https://www.jimruttshow.com/zak-stein-4/

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_of_hierarchical_complexity

 

On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 2:27 PM Waldemar Schmidt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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Someone, please clarify (for me) what MHC means. 

 

 

On Jan 20, 2022, at 9:42 AM, Zachary Stein <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

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You're on you something Brendan,  

 

Many thinkers 

  have been on the same scent. 

 

Aside from e.g., Wilber's 

 use of Laszlo et al

 in *Sex, Ecology Spirtuality;* 

 See also, for example, 

  less well known works

  like Elliot Jaques'

  *The Life and Behavior 

    of Living Organisms.*

 

Everyone has been asking: 

 Can the whole of evolution 

  be placed along 

  a single objective axis 

  of directionality? 

 

Multiple, level-specific "measures," 

  yes, ok, *and*

   there are deep structural isomorphisms 

   across/between levels. 

 

Piaget & Co.

  can be read as suggesting 

  that what we call MHC

  (Fischer's Skill Levels)

  are a local manifestation 

  of a cosmic evolutionary process

  occuring at all levels: 

  matter, life, and mind. 

 

Quite a claim. 

 

Problematic, 

  but also illuminating 

  and insightful. 

 

It is to say, 

  aside from space, time, etc

  there is another universally measurable 

  dimension involving (forgive the jargon)   

   *non-abirtary iterations   

    of complex emergence 

    and hierarchical integration*

 

"The many become one, 

 and are increased by one."

  As Whitehead would say. 

 

This is the many stepped 

 "stairway" of evolution

  giving a sense 

  that things are "going somewhere"

    rather than just meandering and 

    arbitrarily enduring through time. 

 

But, of course, 

  even if we accept all that 

  what does it buy us? 

 

Does it buy us what we want?

 

I think it buys a great deal, 

  some of it we want 

 (some of it we don't know what to do with);

  But this second step

  of "who cares/so what?"

  is not trivial.

 

zak

 

On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 10:45 AM Brendan Graham Dempsey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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Hi all, 

 

Have been considering the ToK through the complexification lens and wondering what the specific quantitative metrics might be in each domain of complexification. Each new information system would complexify along its own trajectory, meaning the specific metric used to measure it would be different than the one before. Moreover, each metric would be dependent upon and relate to the ones on which it rests. Here's what I was playing with:

MATTER: Cosmic evolution – energy (metric: free energy rate density, Øm)
LIFE: Biological evolution – genetic information (metric: “physical [genomic] complexity”, C)
MIND: Consciousness evolution – nervous system integration (metric: integrated information, Ø)
CULTURE: Cultural evolution – linguistic justification systems (metric: hierarchical task complexity, MHC)

 

At the level of matter, I think the work of Eric Chaisson on cosmic evolution is helpful, and he uses the free energy rate density (Øm) as his metric.

At the level of life, some preliminary searches yielded genomic complexity (C) as a potential metric, as according to the work of Adami, Ofria, and Collier (2003), but I suspect there is better/more recent work on measuring biological complexity.

At the level of mind, I was wondering whether IIT would be the best fit, which uses the metric of Ø of increasing sentience.

Finally, at the level of culture, I'm intrigued by the potential for the Model of Hierarchical Complexity to measure justification systems and other cultural phenomena.

 

Again, each new metric would map onto the other, such that Øm would increase as C increased as Ø increased as MHC increased. That's a hypothesis, anyway.

 

Perhaps I'm re-inventing the wheel here, so let me know if there's already work that's done this. But I wanted to hear people's perspectives on the prospect of identifying different complexity metrics for each unique level of the stack.

 

Cheers,

Brendan

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