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Sorry to hijack this thread but

Here's a video about Karl Weick's sensemaking, and about the Mitnick (U of Pittsburgh) and Ryan (me as doctoral student) approach to sensemaking oriented towards commitment to action. I developed this idea 10 years ago....

Karl Weick's Sensemaking, and the Mitnick/Ryan Skeptical Believer Model - YouTube

On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 12:31 PM Daniel Popa <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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I want to expand on this, if I may, I want not to bother.

The TOK itself is a system, every atom is a system, the relativity theory explains many systems, the many theories that explain the way the physical world works could also be considered to make up a theoretical system. So everything is a system, and the reality itself is the biggest system including every system that exists. Systems theory. Furthermore, each system interacts with many others simultaneously, in many ways. Each system interacts with the subsystems below and the supersystems above, to put it that way. The main pragmatical problem is that this interaction gets more complex the more interactions there are, and with each new interactio that appears, many others spawn in order to connect to it. This leads to the exponential growth of complexity, which makes it impossible to grasp the accurate actual state of reality and how it works in order to predict very complex events. Maybe that is why psychology cannot predict human behaviour fully just like physical sciences can predict almost every variable that interacts with an apple falling down from a tree. The more variables that interact in order to create an outcome, the more complex it becomes to predict anything about that specific outcome, precisely because of this lack of computational power that Robert stated. Perhaps with a smart enough AI, but definitely not with our primitive brains. Nonetheless, this also depends on the assumption that any amount of matter could be able to process, at least, the amount of complexity that it is made of in itself. If this was true, in order to comprehend the whole reality you would need a machine made of all the matter that exists. Therefore, the single way of doing it would be not to predict anything nor to comprehend anything fully, just enough. Back to topic, the most complex system yet within the TOK tree would be the justification systems, which I believe is the main reason why human behaviour is hard to predict and fully understand, and in order to do it, a whole lot more of computational power is needed (as well as data) in order to make any hard science reliable (that is, p=.01 instead of .05) claims on human behaviour.

First time I speak here, just been reading everything until now, but I thought I could contribute with this.

Daniel.

El sáb, 29 ene 2022 a las 9:27, ryanrc111 (<[log in to unmask]>) escribió:

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hello,

reappearing out of my hiatus. Hello everyone... Im hella busy but happy this listserv is lively. 

i like these comments and concepts in development. 
let's dial back to the beginning of the conversation. 
Start from the most basic question: what are the units and why are these the only useful units of analysis?

Cosmic units. What are cosmic units? what do you mean by cosmic? this is a nondual mashup of physics and metaphysics.... is this unit ITSELF too complex to make sense of?PRove to me you have a "cosmic unit", on the micro level, and we can go from there. 

Wilber attempted to do this. it was his greatest and worst project: holonic units. 

He was correct to focus on this unit problem but was a total failure in proving that holons exist or have any compatibility to mainstream physics in empirical testing. Until Wilberian holons are demonstrated to "exist", it is merely a thought experiment. We know that physical units like quarks and bosons and atoms work quite differently than the "twenty tenets" of holons proposed by wilber.... his dont "Work" because nobody has modeled and tested and verified that they work.  

Biological units. 
Ok, DNA and whatnot... but also species, ecologies, and so forth. 

you would think these are solved problems, but we keep finding out that DNA does NOT work like we once thought; that the "codes" of biology are complex and interactive across multiple levels (epigenetics) and multiple processes (mRNA, DNA, chimera cells, hormonal and enzyme mechanisms that transcend the person or even the individual human body...." 

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE IN TRYING TO SIMPLIFY ALL THAT INTO MORE BASE UNITS, as opposed to going the other way around?
The answer is its "convenient to learners", just wrong.

What are the answers?

Read everything ever published on these topics. 
Oh wait: nobody has that kinda time.... 
So... 
the real truth of this conversation: we are merely theorizing LEARNING MODELS for how to condense the complex reality sufficient to make complex systems accessible to the human deliberative brain, which has a very narrow, small bandwidth and can only manage a small number of variables. 

 

What the web 3 hackers are trying to figure out: how to EXPAND that bandwidth, in the most creative ways possible, so we can show people complex systems in a more realistic manner, closer to how they actually work. 

And the core mechanism for this currently?
Synesthetic learning...

More later

Robert

On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 2:56 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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